The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  Arms crossed over his chest, eyes closed, to all appearances dead to the world, Trent murmured, "Really?"

  The Friday previous, the Unification Council had adjourned, and Unification Spaceport was filled to overflowing with nearly a quarter of a million humans. The vast majority of them were waiting for semiballistics to take them elsewhere on Earth; a few were waiting for shuttles to Halfway, or other points in near Earth orbit; a few were waiting for SpaceFarer craft to Luna, or Mars, or even the Belt CityStates.

  Trent's hovercab let him off at the passenger station for Manhattan Spaceport South. The gouge for the short flight was bad; CU:6.75. Trent did not mind; United Nations Peace Keeping Force Discretionary Account 1303, userid 42, paid for it under the impression that Trent was a person named Mohammed Vance.

  The southern tip of Manhattan Island makes an excellent spaceport, aside from the fact that it is too far north of the equator. It is immediately adjacent to Capitol City, the nerve center of the United Nations. At the time of its construction, it had had yet another point in its favor; not quite a year previously the enclave of telepaths in that location had been nuked. There was not much left standing at the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island when it was all over with; there was simply nobody left to object when the Unification Council decided to build there.

  The maglev took Trent down several floors to the central lobby. There, just past the point where the maglev ended, and before a half kilometer of service counters for the half dozen companies that spaced out of lower Manhattan, a row of some thirty Network cubicles was arrayed against both walls.

  Trent made his way through the crowds to them, and entered an empty one near the middle of the row, closing the door behind him. Inside, he ignored the room monitor; the odds were vastly in his favor that DataWatch would not poll this particular terminal while Trent was there, and that if they did, the image of a young man with brown eyes and brown hair and high cheekbones would mean nothing to them.

  Seating himself before the pointboard, Trent danced his fingers across its surface. There were MPU jacks for more sophisticated access; Trent didn't bother.

  The phonefield was flat. Sooner than Trent had expected, it flashed a blue connected at him from the bottom right of the field. Trent did not turn on the holocams at his end.

  Tarin Schuyler's face appeared in the field.

  Trent said, "Is she there?"

  Tarin stared into her holocams. "Trent? Is it you?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes, she's here." The woman was clearly disturbed. "She's really upset. What did you do to her?"

  "I didn't give her a chance to say good-bye," said Trent briefly. "She needed sleep. Tell her I'll call from Luna City." Tarin opened her mouth to speak again, and Trent disconnected her.

  He sat quietly in the cubicle for just a moment.

  Like the cab fare, like the price of his passage to Luna, Trent charged the call on Mohammed Vance's private account; to the account of the man who was even now directing the search for him.

  Trent left, and left the door to the cubicle open behind him.

  "Name?" The guard--an ordinary gendarme, not a Peaceforcer--looked at Trent impatiently. The line behind Trent was long, and getting longer with every moment.

  "Vance," said Trent. "Mohammed Vance." He handed the guard his ticket and his passport. The passport didn't identify Trent as a Peaceforcer, or even as a United Nations employee, though the ticket showed itself paid for by the Peace Keeping Force. Less than ideal work, but it was Booker's best; he'd been, as he put it to Trent, "rushed."

  At her terminal, the guard was spending a considerable amount of time processing the ticket. At length, when the line behind Trent began to mutter, she looked up from her terminal, and said, loudly enough for those immediately behind Trent to hear, "I can be even slower about this if I have to." The line quieted. Finally the guard returned to Trent. She gave back Trent's passport and ticket.

  She spent a disconcerting moment studying Trent.

  Had Mick told him the truth, or not? At about this time, the holos she'd taken of Trent should be sitting in a Syndic database, waiting for the morning for some Syndic Lord to look them over.

  Assuming she'd told the truth.

  Trent looked back at the gate guard innocently, trying his best to look harmless and trustworthy.

  "Shuttle Pad Eight," said the guard. She smiled an unpleasant smile at Trent. "Have a nice day."

  Trent smiled back at her. "One seventh of your life," he said politely, "will be spent on Mondays."

  He left without hurrying.

  Gate C let onto the landing field proper. The skies had cleared slightly in the forty-five minutes that Trent had been inside the spaceport, and a few twinkling stars could be seen through patchy clouds. Outside, Trent looked for transportation. A nearby holo informed him that a spaceport cab would be by within twenty minutes to ferry him across the vast fields of steelstone to wherever his flight waited.

  "But I'm already late," Trent told the sign. Forty meters away was a groundcar, a long black limousine with dark windows, and a license plate that said U.N. 88. Trent walked to it without pausing, and stopped by the door next to the front left-hand seat. In one smooth motion he popped his briefcase open and withdrew an object that vaguely resembled a tuning fork. He ran the forked end over the door's pressure pad, produced two barely audible beeps, reversed the tool and with the laser in its other end burned out the locklarm.

  He had the door open in less time than the carcomp would have taken to compare his palm print against its authorized list of users. Trent slid inside and closed the door behind him. Some of the people at the ferry terminal were watching the car with vague curiosity.

  The car ran itself from processors located behind an access panel under the center of the front dashboard. Balancing his briefcase on his knees, Trent opened it to its full extension. Fully half of the interior was taken up by a perfectly legal and quite powerful external processor board for his handheld. The other half held an odd assortment of tools; a spot for the handheld, the circuit tracer with a laser at the other end, a small forest of microlectrics equipment, an antistatic package holding, after Booker's payment, five and a half terabytes of RTS; a nearly full reel of fineline, an almost empty strip of room-temperature superconductor, and one watertight squirt gun of excellent construction.

  The car's brain was an ancient Motorola MC-GA24, running Purolator security firmware that was over five years old. Trent sprayed chipglue directly onto the processor, waited while it set and pressed the handheld's interface gently into the still-soft surface of the chipglue. Far less than a second--perhaps a quarter of a million nanoseconds in total--passed while Johnny Johnny reached out and enfolded the processor, stole every data and instruction line in and out of the chip; not five seconds had passed before the car was rolling at an even thirty kph across the landing field toward the line of ships.

  Trent was unable to find Shuttle Pad Eight.

  It was 8:15, and Trent's ship was supposed to leave at 8:15.

  None of the launch pads were numbered.

  Finally Trent stopped the limousine next to the one spaceship that had a person standing in front of it. Thinking back, Trent was almost certain that he had been unable to see inside the limousine, when he had been standing outside of it. He squirmed into the back over the top of the seats, straightened his coat and opened the left rear passenger's door.

  The ship was easily the largest craft within a quarter of a kilometer. Its landing ramp was still down. Trent stepped from the car, and walked over to the person standing in front of the ramp.

  "Hello," said Trent. "Is this Shut ... uhm, Number Eight?"

  By no conceivable stretch of the imagination was the craft in front of him a shuttle.

  The SpaceFarer took a step toward Trent, surveying Trent with cold eyes. His look told Trent that he was the greater of two evils. Any two evils. The name on the shoulder of his gray and green ship's uniform read Lt. Zinth. One of the
largest hand masers Trent had ever seen was holstered at his right hip. Lieutenant Zinth's eyes were exactly level with Trent's. "You're Vance."

  Trent blinked. "Yes. Oh yes of course."

  In meter high letters, bright green against the gray-silver of the ship's hull, it said, The Captain Sir Dominic Flandry. The SpaceFarer nodded. "'Sieur Vance, you are late. Lift-off was scheduled for 20:15 hours Capitol City time. It is now 20:19." He stared evenly at Trent.

  "I couldn't find the ship," Trent explained.

  The SpaceFarer stood staring at Trent. The cold breeze off the ocean tugged at the lapels of his exquisitely tailored ship's uniform. Finally he said, "The ship's launchpad position and name, 'Sieur Vance, are shown on the back of your ticket."

  "Oh." Trent turned the ticket in his hand over and looked at it. He looked back up at Lt. Zinth. "Sorry. I was in such a hurry it didn't occur to me to look. I've never been on a spaceship before, you know. This is all so exciting for me."

  The look on the man's face did not alter. "It is now, 'Sieur Vance, 20:20."

  Trent had never, ever, heard of a ship departing on time from Unification Spaceport. He offered the SpaceFarer his ticket.

  The young man glanced at it. "Deck two, 'Sieur Vance. Seat 13."

  Trent said, "I'm not superstitious."

  The SpaceFarer said quietly, with a glance at the Unification Councilor's limousine that Trent had arrived in, "With all due respect, M. Vance, you are obviously a very powerful downsider. That means nothing aboard the Flandry. The SpaceFarers' Collective is not a part of the United Nations, and you have no authority. Now you will please seat yourself--quickly."

  Trent said to the SpaceFarer, "I'm not afraid of you."

  * * *

  12.

  The passenger bay aboard the Flandry was an afterthought of a converted cargo bay near the center of the ship; on his way up in the lift, while Lieutenant Zinth glared at him, Trent counted four bulkheads between the outer hull and the passenger compartment.

  Zinth palmed open the hatch to the passenger's compartment and Trent stepped through, looking around at the compartment and the passengers on the way to his seat. There were forty or fifty of them, mostly men, speaking mostly in French, already strapped into their acceleration couches for lift.

  Seat 13 was next to seat 14. In seat 14 there was a lovely young lady.

  "Hi," said Trent cheerfully. He strapped himself in, and waited while the seat reclined. He put his briefcase in the safety web under the seat. "I'm Trent the thief. Is there anything I can steal for you?"

  The woman in the seat next to him was young, somewhere in her early twenties. She had dark, sun-streaked brown hair that reached her shoulder blades in one long braid and looked as though it wanted to try for the small of her back. Inquisitive brown eyes and tanned, perfectly flawless skin, what skin was meant to be, complemented this extravagance. She looked up from the handheld she was reading on and looked Trent over coolly. She spoke carefully, with a distinct French accent. "That is not funny."

  "No?" said Trent instantly. "Then how about this?" He tucked his thumbs into the corners of his mouth and stretched his cheeks into a clown face, eyes bugging out, tongue lolling.

  The woman stared blankly at him for a moment and then bit her lip, looking away from him. "No. That is not funny either."

  Trent looked at the woman curiously. He took his fingers out of his mouth and wiped them on his pants. "You know, people almost always at least smile at that one. Is something wrong?"

  "You are late," she said flatly.

  In French, a voice came over the outspeaker and informed the passengers that the craft was in motion. The message was followed almost immediately by a sudden jerk, and then a low rumbling sound, as the port tugs began towing the Flandry into launch position. The acceleration chair Trent sat in vibrated strongly.

  "It wasn't my fault," Trent explained.

  "As you say." The woman turned away from him, to her handheld.

  "So I can't steal anything for you?"

  She looked up from the handheld slowly. She looked Trent over as though she were considering calling for a gendarme. "No," she said at last, "I am afraid not. I am not poor."

  "What's that got to do with it?"

  After a moment's thought, the woman turned her handheld off and put it under her seat in the safety web. "Is this not a Robin Hood procedure? No, wait," she corrected herself, "Robin Hood routine. To steal from the rich, and give to the poor?"

  "Don't be obscene." Trent tried to relax in his chair. "I'm a capitalist. I did have Merry Men once," he said as an afterthought, "but I had to get rid of them. They were gloomy sons of bitches."

  The alert brown eyes studied him. "Oh?"

  "Didn't laugh at my jokes."

  She nodded as though he had said something meaningful. "Why were you late for lift?"

  Her tone of voice was flat, inquisitive. And she was--studying him. Trent paused a second, wondering why the routine was going over so badly.

  Trent said, "Are you sure I was late?"

  "You were late for the flight."

  "People keep telling me that."

  "They held the ship for you."

  "Did they?" asked Trent curiously.

  "Yes."

  "That was nice of them."

  "Why were you late?"

  "It's a long story."

  "Excuse me?"

  "They held me at the gate, and then I got lost," Trent told her.

  "Lost?"

  "I couldn't find the ship."

  "It is a big ship."

  "But there was no number."

  The woman said blankly, "Excuse me?"

  Trent said, "It's really a long story." There were approximately fifty people in the passenger's compartment of The Captain Sir Dominic Flandry. Something about the other passengers, a vague air of alertness, made Trent uneasy.

  "Oh." She looked at him curiously. "My name is Melissa; Melissa du Bois."

  The ship's outspeakers came alive and in French told the passengers that they should prepare for acceleration shortly. "Hello, Melissa du Bois," said Trent. "May I have the pleasure of seducing you?"

  Melissa du Bois looked briefly startled, and then actually smiled, dimpling, and looked about sixteen. "No."

  "What?"

  "Perhaps on some other occasion, Trent the thief. It might be--indiscreet, yes? Yes, indiscreet under the present circumstances."

  "Does that mean 'no'?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh."

  "Where are you headed, Trent?"

  "The Moon," said Trent. "Luna. I hear it's lovely this time of year, when the farsiders take their annual baths."

  Melissa lay back in her seat and closed her eyes, as the voice on the intercom began marking off five second increments toward lift-off, starting at sixty and working backward. "I am going to L-5, myself."

  Trent sat slowly upright. "L-5? Spacebase One?"

  The tone of his voice did not penetrate to her, although a man across the aisle looked at Trent oddly. "Yes, L-5. I am going to the training base for PKF Elite at L-5." Her eyes were still closed, her voice quiet and calm. She did not see the look of horror that had descended upon Trent's features.

  Trent opened his mouth twice before the words would come out.

  He said, "You're a Peaceforcer."

  "Yes. I have only been PKF for four years, and I have already qualified for the Elite." She did look over at him then, and smiled at him again. "I think it is the only thing I have ever done that impressed my father. My mother cried when she found out. They are very proud."

  "I'm sure they are." Trent looked around the small cabin, at the healthy, relaxed, alert group of French men and women. "The rest of this group; you're--" he almost strangled on the words "--with them?"

  "Yes. We are the top one twentieth of one percent of all the PKF on Earth." She added, "It surprised us all that you got a seat. We chartered this ship over a month ago. You must have influence; you bumped an officer fr
om the seat you are in."

  The voice on the intercom said softly, "Ten seconds to lift."

  "Oh, no," said Trent. He lay back in the acceleration couch; the webbing came up and embraced him. "Oh my God no."

  Lying flat on his back, he could not see Melissa's expression, but despite her accent he heard the surprise in her voice. "Trent? Are you afraid?"

  "Yes," said Trent. "Very, very much."

  The outspeaker voice said, "We are lifting."

  The Captain Sir Dominic Flandry lifted at just under six gravities; breathing was difficult, and silence was enforced for several minutes.

  Trent was terribly, horribly glad.

  During the approximately four minutes Trent spent lying on his back, weighing nearly six times as much as he was used to, he decided two things.

  The first was that he was never again going to have Booker Jamethon tell a scheduling program that he was a high-ranking Peaceforcer official.

  The second was that in his entire life, without exception, he had never ever felt more stupid.

  At slightly less than one gravity acceleration, with twenty minutes' delay at turnover, the trip to L-5, in Lunar orbit sixty degrees ahead of the Moon, took nearly four and a half hours.

  When the acceleration had died back to just below one gravity, Trent took his briefcase from underneath the couch, opened it a crack, took out his handheld and closed the case again quickly.

  In the seat next to him, Melissa du Bois was watching him curiously.

  He hooked his handheld into the plug in the arm of his seat. A holofield sprang into existence just above it. There was a single gray traceset trode tucked into the arm of the seat along with a single gray earphone, snaked to the seat so that they could not be stolen by people like Trent. Trent hooked up and requested a laser link to the InfoNet Relay Station at Halfway. The ship was still near enough Earth that there was no perceptible delay connecting to the Net; Trent closed his eyes and went Inside.

  ... minimal RF modulation, ship frequencies ... ship business ... scale up into private inskin frequencies; silence ... up again, Peaceforcer Elite monitor bands; silence ...