In the evening, when it was time to go, Snow felt a bone-deep lethargy. He had not slept much during the afternoon. Each time he had tried to relax after a session of sex, Hirald would do something he could not resist. Her last climax had been so intense that she had cried out and shuddered uncontrollably, and after it she had looked down at herself in surprise and shock. Thereafter she had been eager to repeat the experience. Snow felt sore and drained.
As they walked across the darkened violet sands they had talked little, but one conversation had raised Snow’s suspicions.
“Your hand, how did you lose it?”
“Andronache challenge. It was shredded by a flack shell.”
“How is it now?”
Snow had paused before replying. Did she know?
“What do you mean: how is it? It was amputated. It is no longer there.”
“Yes,” she had said, and no more.
The sun was crossing the horizon and the night asteroids fading out of the sky when they reached the rock-field at the edge of the Thira. With little energy for conversation, Snow set up his day tent and collapsed inside, instantly asleep. When he woke in the latter part of the day it was to discover himself undressed under a blanket, with Hirald lying beside him. She was up on her elbow, her head propped on her hand, studying his face. As soon as she saw that he was awake she handed him a carton of mixed juice. He sat up, the blanket sliding down. She was naked. He drank the juice.
“I’m glad you came along,” he said, and the rest of the day was spent in pleasant activity.
That night they moved deep into the rock field. The following day passed much as the one before.
“I think it fair to tell you I have an implant,” Snow said as he rested after some particularly vigorous activity. “You won’t get pregnant by me, and my semen is little more than water and a few free proteins.”
“Why do you feel it necessary to tell me this?” Hirald asked him.
“As you know, there is a reward out for my testicles, stasis preserved. This is not because Merchant Baris particularly wants me dead. I think it is because he is after my genetic tissue. At the water station the Androche…seduced me.” Snow was uncomfortable with that. “She did it so she could collect my sperm, probably to sell.”
“I know,” Hirald said. Snow looked at her and she went on, “He is after your testicles or other body tissue to provide him with an endless supply of your genetic material.”
Snow considered that. Of course there had to be more to Hirald than he had supposed, but the sex had clouded his thought-processes somewhat.
“It is the next best thing to having your entire living body. I suspect Baris thought it unlikely he could get away with that. He’d never get your entire body off-planet. This way he also corners the market.”
“You know an awful lot about what Baris wants.”
Hirald gazed at him very directly. “How is your hand?”
Snow looked down at the stump. He unclipped the covering and pulled it off. What he exposed was recognizably a hand, though deformed and almost useless. The covering had been cleverly made to conceal it, to make it appear as if the hand was missing.
“It will be no different from its predecessor in about six months. I intended to walk out of one water station without a hand, then into another station with a hand and a new identity.”
“What about your albinism?”
“Skin dye and eye lenses.”
“Of course. You cannot take transplants.”
“No…I think you should explain yourself.”
“The people I work for want the same as Baris: your genome.”
“You’ve had opportunity…”
“No, they want the best option, which is you, willingly. I want you to gate back to Earth with me.”
“Why?”
“You are regenerative. It is the source of your immortality. We know this now. You have known it for more than a thousand years.”
“Still, why?”
“We have managed to keep your secret for the last three hundred years, ever since it was discovered. Ten years ago the knowledge was leaked. Now several organizations know about you, and what you represent: whoever can decode your genome has access to immortality, and through that access to unprecedented wealth and power. That’s why Baris was the first to track you down. There will be others.”
“You work for Earth Central.”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be better just to kill me and destroy my body?”
“Earth Central does not suppress knowledge.” Hirald smiled at him. “You should be old enough to understand the futility of that. It wants the knowledge disseminated so that it doesn’t put power into the hands of the wrong people. It could do immense good. The projections are that in ten years a treatment would become available to make anyone regenerative, within limits.”
“Yet prior to this it kept a lid on things,” Snow said.
“It guarded your privacy. It did not suppress knowledge. Not to seek out knowledge is not the same as suppressing it.”
“Is Earth Central so moral now?” Snow wondered, then could have kicked himself for his stupidity. Of course Earth Central was. Only human beings and other low-grade sentients could become corrupt, and Earth Central was the most powerful AI in the human Polity. Hirald, noting his discom-fiture, did not answer his question.
“Will you come?” she asked him.
Snow was gazing at the wall of the tent as if he could see through it across the rock field. “This requires thought, not instant decisions. Two days should bring us to my home. I’ll consider it.”
Draped in chameleon cloth the hover transport vanished into the surrounding dunes. Inside the transport Jharit shuffled a pack of cards and played a game men like himself had played in similar situations for many centuries. His wife, Jharilla, slept. Trock was cleaning an antique revolver he had picked up at an auction in the last water station. The bullets he had acquired with it were arrayed in neat, soldierly rows on the table before him.
Canard Meck was plugged in, trying to pick up information from the net and the high-speed communications the runcible AI exchanged with its subminds. The call came as a relief to all of them but her—she resented dropping out of that world of perfect logic and pure clarity of thought, back into the sweat-stink of the transport.
“I am Baris,” said the smiling face from the screen.
Coming straight to the point Jharit said, “You have the information?”
“I have,” Baris confirmed, his smile only slightly less, “and I will be coming to join you for the final chase.”
Jharit and Trock exchanged a look.
“As you wish. You are paying.”
“Yes, I am.” The merchant’s smile was gone now. “Turn on your beacon and I will join you within the hour.”
“How are you getting out here?” Canard Meck asked.
“By AGC of course,” Baris said, turning to look toward her.
“All AGCs are registered. The AI will know where you are.”
Baris flicked his fingers at this, assuming an expression of contempt. “No matter. We will continue from your position to…our destination, in the transport.”
“Very well,” Canard Meck agreed.
Baris waited for something more to be said. When nothing was he blanked the screen with a disappointed moue.
The merchant arrived in a fancy repro Macrojet AGC. He climbed out wearing sand fatigues and followed by two women dressed much the same. One carried a hunting rifle and ammunition belts; the other carried various unidentifiable packages. Baris struck a pose before them. He was a handsome man, but none of the four reacted to this foolish display. They knew that anyone who had reached the merchant’s position was no fool. Jharit and Jharilla looked at him glassy-eyed. Trock inspected the rifle. Canard Meck glanced at one of the women, took in the imbecilic smile, then returned her attention to the merchant.
“Shall we be on our way then?” she said.
<
br /> Baris nodded and, still smiling, clicked his fingers and walked to the transport. The two women followed him, obedient as dogs. The four came after: hounds of a different breed.
Out of the rock field reared the first of the stone buttes, carved by wind-blown sand into something resembling a man-like statue sunk up to its chest in the ground. In the cracks and divisions of its head, mica and quartz glittered like insectile eyes. Snow led the way to the base of the butte where slabs of the same stone lay tilted in the ground.
“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to a sandwich of slabs. With a grinding noise, the top slab pivoted to one side to expose a stair dropping a short distance to the floor of a tunnel. “Welcome to my home.”
“You live in a hole in the ground?” Hirald asked, with a touch of irony.
“Of course not. Follow me.”
As they climbed down, the slab swung back across above them and wall lights clicked on. Hirald noted that the tunnel led under the butte and had already worked things out by the time they reached the chimney and the elevator car. They climbed inside the car and sprawled in plush seats as it hauled them up a chimney cut through the center of the butte.
“This must have taken you some time,” Hirald observed.
“The chimney was already here. I first found it about two hundred years ago. Others had lived here before me, but in rather primitive conditions. I’ve been improving the place ever since.”
The car arrived at its destination and they walked from it into a complex of moisture-locked rooms at the head of the butte.
With a drink in her hand Hirald stood at a polarized panoramic window and gazed out across the rock field for a moment, then returned her attention to the room and its contents. In a glass-fronted case along one wall was a display of weapons dating from the 22nd century, and at the center a sword from some prespace age. Hirald had to wonder where and when Snow had acquired it. She turned from the case as Snow returned to the room, dressed now in loose black trousers and a black, open-necked shirt. The contrast with his white skin and hair and pink eyes gave him the appearance of someone who might have a taste for blood.
“There’s some clothing there for you to use if you like, and the shower. There’s plenty of water here,” he told her.
Hirald nodded, placed her drink on a glass-topped table, and headed back into the rooms Snow had come from. Snow watched her go. She would shower and change and be little fresher than she already was. He had noted with some puzzlement how she never seemed to smell bad, never seemed dirty.
“Whose clothing is this?” Hirald asked from the room beyond.
“My last wife’s,” said Snow.
Hirald came to the door with clothing folded over one arm. She looked at Snow questioningly.
“She killed herself about a century ago,” he said in a flat voice. “Walked out into the desert and burned a hole through her head. I found her before the crab-birds and sand sharks.”
“Why?”
“She grew old and I did not. She hated it.”
Hirald didn’t comment. She went to take her shower, and shortly returned wearing a skin-tight body-suit of translucent blue material, which she did not expect to be wearing for long once Snow saw her in it. He was occupied though—sitting in a swivel chair studying a screen. He was back in his dust robes, terrapin mask hanging open. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at. She saw the hover transport on the sand and the two women pulling a sheet over it. She recognized Merchant Baris and the four hired killers.
“It would seem Baris has found me,” Snow said, his tone cold and flat.
“You know him?”
“Met him once when he was younger. He hasn’t changed much.” He nodded at the screen. “The four with him look an interesting bunch.”
“I met them: the Marsman and the Corporate woman are the leaders—mercenary group,” said Hirald. “What defenses does this place have?”
“None, I never felt the need for them.”
“Are you sure they are coming here?”
“It seems strange that he has chosen this particular rock field on the whole planet. I’ll have to go and settle this.”
“I’ll change,” said Hirald, and hurried back to get her suit. When she returned Snow was gone; when she tried to follow she found the elevator car locked at the bottom of the shaft.
“Damn you,” she said flatly, smashing her fist against a doorjamb, leaving a fist-shaped dent in the steel. Then she walked back a few paces, turned, ran and leaped into the shaft. The rails pinned to the edge were six meters away. She reached them easily, her hands locking on the polished metal with a thump. Laboriously she began to climb down.
Jharit smiled at his wife and nodded to Trock, who stood beyond her, strapping on body armor. This was the one. They would be rich after this. He examined the narrow-beam laser he held. He would have preferred something with a little more power, but it was essential that the body not be too badly damaged. He turned to Baris as the merchant sent his two women back to the transport.
“We’ll go in spread out. He probably has scanning equipment in the rock field and if there’s an ambush we don’t want him to get too many of us at once.”
Baris smiled and thumbed bullets into his rifle, adjusted the scope. Jharit wondered about him, wondered how good he was. He gave the signal for them to spread out and enter the rock field.
They were coming to kill him. There were no rules, no challenges offered. Snow braced the butt of his pistol against the rock and sighted along it.
“Anything?” Jharit asked over the com.
“Pin cameras,” Jharilla told him. “I burned a couple out, but there have to be more. He knows we’re here.”
“Remember, narrow-beam, we burn too much and there’s no money. A clean kill. A head shot would be nice,” Jharit added.
There was a whooshing sound, a brief scream, static over the com. Jharit hit the ground and moved behind a rock.
“What the hell was that?”
“He’s got a fucking proton weapon. Fucking body armor’s useless!”
Jharit felt a sinking sensation in his gut. They had expected projectile weapons, perhaps a laser.
“Who..?”
There was a pause.
“Trock?”
“Jharilla’s dead.”
Jharit swallowed dryly and edged on into the rock field.
“Position?”
“Don’t know?”
“Meck?”
“Nothing here.”
“Baris?”
There was no reply from the Merchant.
Snow dropped down off the top of the boulder and pulled some of the small but deadly grenades from his belt. Lacking a hand, he used his teeth to twist their tops right around. The dark-skinned one was over to his left, the Marsman over to his right. The others were farther over to the right somewhere. He threw the two spheroids right and left and moved back, then flicked through multiple views on his wrist screen. A lot of the cameras were out, but he pulled up a view of the Marsman. Two detonations. As the Marsman hit the ground he realized he had thrown too far. He flicked through the views again and caught the other stumbling through dust and wreckage, rock splinters imbedded in his face. Ah, so.
Snow moved to his left, checking his screen every few seconds. He halted behind a tilted slab and after checking his screen once more, squatted down and waited. With little regard for his surroundings Trock stumbled out of the falling dust. Snow smiled grimly under his mask and sighted on him, but before he could fire, red agony cut his shoulder. The smell of burning flesh. Snow rolled to one side, came up onto his feet, ran. Rock to one side of him smoked, pinged as it heated. He dived for cover, crawled among broken rock. The firing ceased. Now I’m dead, he thought. His pistol lay in the dust back there somewhere.
“He dropped his weapon, Trock. He’s over to your left. Take him down, I can’t get a sighting on him at the moment.”
Trock spat a broken tooth from his mouth and w
alked in the direction indicated, his antique revolver in his left hand and his laser in his right. This was it. The bastard was dead, or perhaps not. I’ll cut his arms and legs off, the beam should cauterize sufficiently. But Trock did not get time to fire. The figure in dust robes came out of nowhere to drop-kick him in the chest. The body armor absorbed most of the blow, but Trock went over. Before he could rise the figure was above him, a split-fingered blow spearing down. After that Trock saw nothing. Sprawled back he lifted fingers to the bleeding mess behind his broken visor. Then the pain hit and he started screaming.
Snow coughed as quietly as he could, opened his mask and gasped in pain. The burn had started at his shoulder and ended in the middle of his chest, but luckily his dust robes had absorbed most of the heat. A second more and he would have been dead. The pain was crippling. He knew he would not have the energy to withstand another attack like that, nor would he be likely to take any of the others by surprise. His adversary had been stunned by the explosion, angered by injury. Snow edged back through the rock field, his mobility rapidly decreasing. When a shadow fell across him he looked up into the inevitable.
“Why didn’t you take his weapon?” Jharit asked, nodding back toward Trock, who was no longer screaming. He was curled fetal by a rock, a field dressing across his eyes and his body pumped full of self-administered pain-killers.
“No time, no strength…could only get him through his visor,” Snow managed.
Jharit nodded and spoke into his com.
“I have him. Home in on my signal.”
Snow waited for death, but Jharit squatted in the dust, seemingly disinclined to kill him.
“Jharilla was a hell of a woman,” said Jharit, removing a stasis bottle from his belt and pushing it into the sand next to him. “We were married in Viking City twenty years ago.” Jharit pulled a wicked ceramal knife from his boot and held it up before his face. “This is for her you understand. After I’ve taken your testicles and dressed that wound I’ll see to your other injury. I don’t want you to die yet. I have so much to tell you about her, and there is so much I want you to experience. You know she—”
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