Take them prisoner. Disarm them.
“Yeah. Good plan. And if just one of them decides to be a hero, just one, there’s two-way gunfire and the odds are we’ve got a dead kid. But suppose I disarm them. Then what?”
Leave them behind when we take the elevator.
“And they call Kolya on their comm links and tell him we’re on the way down and which elevator we’re in.”
Oh.
Well, then take them with us.
“Sure. Eight of us packed cheek-to-jowl in one elevator, and me with the only gun. On the way down, a hero just reaches out and grabs one of the kids, and then what?”
No answer to that, of course. And the real truth is that you never get that far, because while you’re standing there at the elevator door, trying to sort all of this out in your head, weighing the upside and downside of every possible course of action, one of Kolya’s thugs just shoots you.
Now, with the Needle in sight, Hlontaa was giving Barraki and Tweezaa a science lecture on how the lasers lit the photo panels on the lift capsule, which provided power for the traction assembly, which walked the lift capsule up the Needle to orbit. Barraki had heard it all before, and Tweezaa wasn’t listening, even to the aGavoosh version, but Hlontaa kept going. Some people love to hear themselves talk. Madame Hlontaa, I noticed, looked about as bored as Barraki and Tweezaa—she’d heard it all before, too.
* * *
The view on the way up to the Upstation is something you just never forget, and looking down at Peezgtaan’s barren, meteor-pocked surface, was a reminder—if you needed one—of how precarious existence was down in the Crack. For the first half hour or so, you could even see the Crack, off in the distance. It didn’t look like much from up here.
Without a Needle, nobody would ever have invested the buckage in eco-forming the Crack, but cheap transit to orbit, coupled with all those handy, exotic mold forms that had lain dormant in the ice down there for a couple million years, made Peezgtaan an economically viable world.
More viable for some than for others, but what’s new about that?
Humans had come here forty years ago, a hundred thousand or so—including my mother and father—in freezer containers, brought in like any other cargo and thawed out to work for the new pharmaceutical conglomerate that was supposed to make everybody rich—great salary packages, great benefits, and bonded repatriation to Earth. Well, you already know how that worked out. So a generation later, there we were.
Why hadn’t relief organizations on Earth stepped up to repatriate us? Because they’d already had their hands full. As bad as things were on Peezgtaan, they were worse on Earth. The Collective-wide crash of ’75 hit Earth harder than most places, when its exports went into freefall and the interest rates on all those Varoki-underwritten developmental loans doubled in about six months. Couple that with back-to-back temperate zone droughts and a fresh-water shortage that had been building for a long time, that everyone figured the shiny new technology would fix but didn’t, and things got pretty crazy for a while. The fresh-water shortage was the worst of it. In some places people killed for a drink of water, and nations went to war over watersheds and aquifers.
All four of the horsemen got in on the act eventually. There were even three or four nuclear exchanges—depending on whether you call a device that about a dozen whacked-out groups claimed credit for, delivered on a freighter to a port city of nine million people, part of a “nuclear exchange” or just an act of terror. I guess by then the distinctions were beginning to lose any meaning. Madness was the uniform of the day—madness and panic and rage.
So helping a hundred thousand folks on Peezgtaan with no ticket home was not exactly high on anyone’s priority list. Just a year earlier, those people had been the lucky ones—travel, money, and adventure is a hard combination to top, so I guess there was probably some jealousy as well. When things went to hell out here, a lot of people back home probably thought, “Serves ’em right, running out on us.”
Maybe the Peezgtaan Humans had been the lucky ones—we’d died by the hundreds, instead of by the millions. The green hills of Earth weren’t as green as they’d once been, and maybe nobody back there gave a damn about what happened to us out here . . . but the Crack wasn’t home. Earth was home, even if most of us alive now had never been there.
It’s hard to think of any place as home if it’s trying to kill you, and Peezgtaan would kill me or any other Human if it had the chance. So would every other world anyone in the Cottohazz had walked on, except Earth. Where there was native life, the protein chains were poisonous to us, and after a while it got to you. Even Bronstein’s World, the largest Human extra-solar colony world, was having a hard time hanging on to its population. The best and brightest young people wanted to move back to Earth, and who could blame them? On most other worlds the Human enclaves were held in place by poverty as much as anything—poverty and inertia and an occasional dully glowing ember of stubbornness.
Living on an “alien world” sounded pretty romantic and exciting until you’d actually done it for a few years. Then it was just work—hard work.
All those early dreams of colonizing the stars had sort of taken it for granted that a world with life would be one we could sink roots into, one on which we could grow crops we could eat, hunt animals we could eat—if you were into that sort of thing—at least pick berries and nuts and eat them and not die. No such luck.
There’s something very lonely about living in a galaxy that doesn’t want you. In some ways it’s worse than thinking you’re the only ones there.
So there I was out of the Crack, but headed in the opposite direction from Earth, deeper into Varoki space. Akaampta was an “old world,” colonized in the first wave of Varoki expansion over three hundred years ago, and close enough to a garden world, complete with Varoki-compatible proteins, that it hadn’t required any eco-forming. What are the odds? Some guy once said it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart. Boy, ain’t that the truth? Akaampta’s population was in the hundreds of millions now, and it had been politically independent since before Humans joined the Cottohazz.
So we were headed deep into the heart of the Cottohazz, and our first step was the ride up the tapering carbon nanotube Needle—really a bundle of nanotubes, a big vertical cable in permanent synchronous planetary orbit—SPO—over one spot in the equator, but reaching way past the SPO orbit track and tethered to a massive captive asteroid, far enough out it moved at escape velocity and would depart orbit if it weren’t for the mass of the Needle holding it back; the centrifugal force of the asteroid trying to escape orbit held the Needle up and balanced the centripetal force of gravity trying to pull the whole thing down.
It’s very creepy, at least to me, to think of that whole big thing—tethered asteroid, upstation complex, and long carbon nanotube ribbon down to the planetary surface—as a single structure in orbit, but it is. It’s one big thing with its center of mass at the SPO altitude, going round and round, but at the same rotational rate as Peezgtaan does, so it never gets anywhere. As soon as the passenger capsule started up the ribbon, I’d turned to Baraki and said, “We’re in orbit.” Hlonta wanted to argue the point, but he lost. We were in orbit as soon as we became part of the mass of that one big structural system. We just needed to get to a different place in the system to do anything interesting, and at a fairly leisurely 200 klicks an hour, that would take a while. Rockets were an awfully expensive way to get to orbit; elevators are cheap, the ride’s a lot more comfortable, and the view is spectacular.
After about half an hour, we overtook the terminator and Prime’s yellow light momentarily flooded the interior of the compartment, until the windows polarized and damped it back down. By then we could see the shuttle, white and gleaming in reflected light—at first just the brightest star in the sky, but soon a recognizable shape.
From a distance, it looked more like a part from a machine—some sort of gear and axle assembly from a transmission—than
a ship. There was a long, narrow spine—not much more than a communications tube full of power cables and life-support conduits—and everything else was built onto that: fuel tanks and thrusters at the back, spherical command module way up front, couplings for big cargo modules along the spine behind Comm and forward of Drive, and in the middle of the ship, the two big counter-rotating wheels of the warm accommodations. It was so ugly it was beautiful, in a no-bullshit form-follows-function kind of way.
We’d spend the trip in the aft wheel; all the passengers would. Both wheels were over a hundred meters in radius, with the center hollow except for structural members and the access tubes up to the spine. Because of the artificial gravity generated by the centrifugal force of the rotating wheel, “up” was toward the spine and “down” toward the rim. The body of the wheel was about thirty or so meters thick, and the same width. Inside the wheel was divided into six decks, numbered from one, on the outside of the wheel, up to six closest to the spine. Gravity was noticeably weaker on Deck Six—where the luxury suites were—than on Deck One.
It was Varoki-built, like every other ship in the Peezgtaan system, but this was one of the newer shuttles that AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar was flying, which meant it was mostly Human-designed. That was good news. Varoki-designed ships fly okay, but the accommodations are pretty lousy—not that Varoki don’t care about comfort; they just don’t have a knack for interior design, so the layouts make everyone—including them—claustrophobic and jumpy, and you’re always cracking a shin or an elbow on some piece of shit housing sticking out where it shouldn’t be. Varoki engineers don’t know Feng Shui from Dim Sum.
One advantage to living on Peezgtaan was you didn’t have to decompress going up the Needle. Spacecraft run on a low-pressure high-oxygen atmospheric mix, very similar to Peezgtaan’s. But the higher up the Needle you get, the less you weigh, and the purser’s staff came around and secured us in our seat harnesses about the time the kids started seeing how high they could jump. Once we got to the top, the seat harnesses became our transport slings, moving us along the magnetic tracks to the air locks and out into Peezgtaan Upstation. Most people have trouble moving around in zero gee, and if you let them try, you just have a mess, so better to relax and let the slings do the work. The staff had given each of us a vomit bag, and a couple of the passengers used them. I kind of enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness—like falling, but without the prospect of a sudden stop.
The last time I’d been up and down the Needle was almost ten years earlier. Upstation looked different now—kind of worn out. Somebody was skimping on maintenance—hopefully not the kind that mattered—and it had that run-down look that made you wonder if anyone gave a damn anymore. There was something else different—the big sign by the passenger in-processing gate read AZ Simki-Traak Trans-Stellar instead of Peezgtaan Planetary Authority, and the staff had AZSTTS (in the aGavoosh alphabet, of course) flashes on their jump suits. Another triumph for private enterprise, and some consultant like Marfoglia had probably cashed a six-figure check for coming up with the idea. Well, everyone’s gotta make a living, and since we were traveling on phony docs, this was actually good news for us—security is always half-assed when the bottom-line meat-heads are in charge.
TEN
I woke up and could hear giggles. I blinked sleepily and looked around. Marfoglia was reading a book, but beyond her Barraki and Tweezaa were sticking their heads up and looking at me, and giggling.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You snore,” Marfoglia answered without looking away from her book.
“Varoki don’t snore?”
“Not like that, they don’t,” she answered, frowning. Barraki whispered something to Tweezaa—probably a translation—and they both giggled again.
“How much longer to burn’s end?” I asked.
Marfoglia looked up at the chronometer on the ceiling—the opposite wall, actually.
“Seventeen minutes.”
“Good.” I yawned, stretched, and scratched my belly. “Let’s talk.”
Our cabin was like any other in the big wheel—well, bigger and nicer than most, but functionally similar. As long as we were accelerating, “down” was toward the ass end of the shuttle, and the back wall of the cabin became the floor. There wasn’t much furniture on it other than the acceleration couches, which the purser’s staff had helped us into back in orbit, when we’d been at zero gee. All four of us had had some experience with weightlessness, but none of us were experts, so you relax and let the purser’s staff move you around and strap you in. Then the long burn started to move us out to the gas giant. Once the burn was done, we’d be weightless again, but the big wheel would start up, and once it got up to revs, “down” would be toward the outside of the wheel, the normal orientation of the furniture secured to the cabin floor.
What would be the floor later was a bare wall right now, except for the furniture permanently affixed to it. There weren’t a lot of unattached things, and no heavy unattached things, in a spacecraft.
I could have gotten used to the whole setup. The cabin made my condo back in the Crack look like a flophouse. There was a decanter of cold water and a drinking glass in secure sockets beside each of our couches, and just the way the light sparkled in the cut glass told me they weren’t just plastic pieces of shit. Personal cut glass water decanters in case we got thirsty during the burn? I’d booked luxury accommodations—because it was Marfoglia’s nickel—but I had no idea luxury accommodations were this . . . luxurious. Of course, when it came to my own experience with interstellar travel, all I had to compare this against was hot bunking with a bunch of bad-smelling Crack Trash grunts in a troop transport.
This was nicer.
The big wall screen—which right now was on the temporary ceiling, to encourage everyone to remain supine during the burn—showed the aft external view. It was partly obscured by the rocket flare, but you could see gray dead-looking Peezgtaan, already filling less than half the screen. They were piping in a violin concerto, and it went well with the view.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” I started. “We know somebody wants to . . . well, stop you two from getting home. They’ll know there are four of us—two Human and two Varoki—and there won’t be many travel groupings like that, so we’ll be fairly obvious. What I did was make similar travel reservations on almost every ship leaving the system over the course of the next five weeks. Kolya doesn’t have enough reliable people to put someone on every ship.”
Marfoglia translated for Tweezaa, and then turned to me.
“Won’t Markov know we’re on this ship, once you aren’t—active?”
I nodded.
“Sure. He may even have had eyes at Needledown, but it’s too late for him to do anything about it. Unless he already has somebody on board—which means one of the passengers that came up the Needle with us—we’re in pretty good shape. For now. We’ll have some other issues to deal with later, but right now our biggest concern is someone hired by the assassins, on the shuttle, and interested in hurting us.”
The “other issues” involved Kolya sending a message via the C-lighter’s public data dump to our destination, for dissemination from there. He probably didn’t have anyone on the shuttle, but every scheduled stop we made, our odds went down.
I let Marfoglia translate what I’d said, and watched the kids while she did. They were scared, but interested, too. Tweezaa’s skin coloration was darker than Barraki’s, and the iridescence seemed stronger, so sometimes when the light hit her just right, it was as if she were jewel-encrusted. There was something so serious, and so self-possessed about her, I’d started thinking of her as the Dark Princess.
My two charges—the Dark Princess and Weasel Boy.
“So what we’re going to do,” I went on, “is mingle, and try to find out as much as we can about the other passengers. In particular, we want to know if there were any last-minute changes in travel arrangements. Now, I don’t want to minimize the dange
r, but someone is less likely to make a move against us while we’re actually on the shuttle or the C-lighter.”
“Why?” Barraki asked as Marfoglia translated.
“Well, they can’t get away,” I explained. “Any violence on a spacecraft and they just seal everybody up inside until they get to where they’re going, and then the provosts come in and nobody leaves until they’ve figured everything out. Tough situation to wiggle out of, especially with so many security monitors on board.
“I’m more concerned about the layover in the Seewauk system. We’ll be at Rakanka Highstation for a few days, and it’s a big place—almost a small city—and security won’t be as tight.
He nodded, but he didn’t look completely convinced. Just as well. I didn’t want them thinking there was no danger.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t try something on board,” I went on. “So although we’ll be going out and mixing, I want us all to stay together, always in sight of everyone else. And I’ll be armed.”
Not very well armed, but they didn’t need to know that. No spacecraft line allows anything more powerful than low-velocity slug-throwers—still lethal, of course, but not dangerous to the airtight hull. So it was my old Hawker 10 again. The H&K was in a cargo container someplace—even firing slugs, that cannon was dangerous to delicate things like spaceships. I had a little LeMatt 5mm automatic as a backup, and that was even less powerful than the Hawker. At least I could be fairly sure I wouldn’t be up against anything heavier. Even security personnel—when there are any—don’t carry anything heavier than that, which is why passengers aren’t allowed to carry any body armor at all. Can’t have troublemakers wandering around immune to the security guys, and anything that will punch body armor will let in hard vacuum.
Once we’d finished the maneuvering burn, the big wheels were spinning, and the steward’s crew had reset the cabin furniture—and I’d tipped them—we explored the suite in its new horizontal orientation. It had a sitting room and kitchenette in the middle, one large bedroom to one side, and two smaller ones to the other. The stewards had put Marfoglia’s and my luggage in the big one, the kids’ in the two smaller ones, so the first thing we did was move everything around. The only door to the corridor outside—other than the one in the sitting room—was from one of the smaller bedrooms, so I took that one, Marfoglia the other small one, and the kids bunked together in the master room.
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