by Yoss
I summarized our situation: “In other words, you want more.” We were off to a good start—and he still hadn’t found out that Makrow 34 was a freak just like him, except a thousand times worse. “All right. We might be able to negotiate the collar. A portion of the time, anyway.”
“Give it a break, machine-boy. I’m locked up here, sure, but I’m alive. You ain’t told me what’s so special about this Cetian, but he’s gotta be real, real dangerous.” If I had a genuine throat, I would have gulped. “Don’t tell me there ain’t nothing special about him, either. I ain’t so dumb as I look. Damned if I’ll jump out of the frying pan so as I land in the fire. I don’t know the strength of my own Gaussical power—I was just starting to test it when they nabbed me. In fact, I only learned what it was called right here in this cell, and that there were others like me. You know how the aliens don’t just control human access to their technology but to information, too. The illegal Web is barely a drop in the ocean compared with what they censor from us. Look here, tinman, I’m gonna ask you one question. Yes or no, that’s all. Don’t try pulling one over on me.” His green eyes stared straight into my fake pupils. “If there’s anything kept me alive out there, it was my old friend, intuition. Right now she’s whispering into my ear that this Makrow 34 guy must be more than a match for me, Gaussically speaking. ’Cause he’s gotta be a fucking Gaussical to make you come here looking for me, am I right?”
I nodded, astonished by the soundness of his reasoning. You could tell Vasily had spent a lot of the past three years educating himself. I doubt he’d have been quite so articulate when he first landed in prison. Or so logical.
Fuck it. I told him everything, with all the gory details.
“I knew it.” He half-smiled, shaking his head emphatically. “In that case, sorry, my answer’s still no. I’m no match for a freak like that. If I coulda took care of you pozzies like you say he did, I wouldn’t even be here.”
“But he had help,” I objected, trying to win him over. “I’ll be with you.”
“Oh, right. I forgot about that detail. Best reason for me to refuse. Like the Cetian’s not bad enough already, you want me to take on a Colossaur too? I never liked the things—half gorilla, half armored tank. No thanks. Plus the human, on top of it all. I don’t want to get within a thousand miles of any human crazy enough to shoot at a pozzie and to survive three seconds fighting hand-to-hand with a Colossaur. Even if it was staged.”
I looked down. The nanos were finishing up their task. Hardly any traces remained of the enormous gob of spit. My hopes of finding help were vanishing almost as quickly. I decided to play my last card.
“So they were right about you, Vasily, what they put in your file.” I tried to sound as disillusioned and as rude as possible. “You’re just a coward.”
“Better a poor coward and alive than a rich hero and a corpse,” he replied, unperturbed.
Failure. I stood up. Like Marlowe, if I was defeated, I could at least go get myself killed in style. “Live your long, miserable cowardly life, Vasily. Don’t worry. With or without your help, I’ll catch them in the end, if it takes me a thousand years. I’ll get them all. The Colossaur, whatever its name is. That monster, Makrow 34. And that human rat, Giorgio Weekman.”
Sometimes I think the gods do exist, and at that moment I’d even have sworn that they loved me in particular. Just as I was turning to leave, Vasily stopped me. I saw a touch of astonishment as well as bottomless spite in his eyes.
“Hold on a sec. Did you say Giorgio Weekman? Weekman the smuggler?”
“Yeah. We ID’d him on the video,” I said, going over both of their files in my mind. No, not a hint that the two knew each other—but recorded facts, as complete as they pretend to be, are never more than a pale reflection of reality. A map isn’t the landscape it reflects; a résumé isn’t the person it describes.
“Gimme that gizmo.” Standing up, he reached for the collar. “When do we leave?”
“Right now.” I handed it to him. Sometimes everything falls into place. Could this be the famous “detective’s intuition”? Who could say. “So you know this Weekman fellow? Have any idea where he might be?”
“Do I ever.” Vasily Fernández grabbed the collar and turned it over in his hands a couple of times. Slim hands, long fingers, more like a concert pianist’s than a criminal’s. “What’d you say your name was, pozzie?”
“Raymond,” I quickly replied, then went on: “Did you and Weekman ever work together?”
“We were supposed to, pozzie,” he answered thoughtfully. “But that pig son-of-an-alien left me holding the bag. After he stole everything out of it—all my life savings, gone. You think I’m so stupid or so green I didn’t know I’d be falling into a trap by coming to the Burroughs? I came because I didn’t have a choice, Dick Tracy. Too many of the wrong people knew me, all over the Solar System, for me to start over from scratch somewhere else.”
“So we’re in this together?” I held out my hand for him, as I’d seen the detectives in Spillane’s movie collection do when they were making a deal.
But he didn’t take it. Placing the portable anti-Psi generator around his neck, he snapped it shut without hesitation. It made a loud click. I made a mental note of his interesting ability to handle tech gear he’d never seen before. The people who wrote up his file were evidently so frightened by his Gaussical powers that they forgot human beings sometimes have (or learn) more than one skill.
“Yeah, sure. You might say we’re in it together, Raymond,” Vasily sighed, calling me by my name for the first time. He rolled his head a few times as if to get used to the new bauble around his neck. “Now I know how dogs must feel,” he muttered. “But under one condition,” he went on, looking me in the eye. “I don’t care what you do with the Cetian when we meet up with the merry trio. But Weekman, he’s mine. No discussion, or the deal’s off.”
That worried me. “You aren’t thinking of…?” His face told me clearly that he was. “But you’ve never killed anyone, Vasily,” I reminded him, a little astonished to see in living color what I’d read in so many novels: that revenge can push a man to do things no other feelings could.
“I am,” he said grimly. “There’s a first time for everything, ain’t there?” He ran his hand along the collar. “After all, if I’m never really going to be free, thanks to something I never wanted and couldn’t help having, what difference does it make if I have to live in the shadows because of something I’ve been dreaming of doing these past three years?”
I didn’t know what to tell him. I suppose, from a human point of view, he was right. So I changed the subject. “Do you have any clues about where to find Weekman?”
He laughed. “Me have clues? You forget I been stuck inside here for three years. But I got a good idea of where to start looking for clues. I’ve also had three years to think it over. We’ll go see Old Man Slovoban. What he don’t know about underworld business in the Solar System ain’t worth finding out.”
Six
Six thousand miles before approach orbit our escort changed course so as not to blow our cover. A few minutes later we saw the Estrella Rom loom ahead, right where the radar said it should be, blossoming from a blurry, flickering glow into a small ring and finally a large, not quite geometrically correct wheel. It looked so fragile and was spinning so fast on its axis I thought it was a miracle it didn’t go to pieces.
“You’re flying too fast—and why won’t you use the automatic approach system? Don’t forget, my special authorization isn’t valid on Earth,” I reminded Vasily one more time while his hands danced across the controls, working to synchronize our shuttlecraft’s angular momentum with the ramshackle docking bay of this unlikely independent orbital station.
The idea of flying in on a broken-down space jalopy confiscated from a ring of spice smugglers—not a nice new police frigate—was Vasily’s, of course. He said it was the only way we’d meet the mysterious Old Man. From the little he’d told me, th
is guy knew everything about dirty business. Giorgio Weekman’s business in particular. More than likely he had even heard something about Makrow 34. But he wasn’t the sort of guy you could approach in an official capacity, that much was obvious. He didn’t like to connect to the Web either. Our best bet was interviewing him in person, old-school style, on his own turf.
Muhammad coming to the mountain. No surprise there. If the mountain tried coming to Muhammad there’d be a landslide.
“Chill. The orbital ain’t planet Earth, Raymond,” he reminded me in turn, using my name for the second time since we’d met. He hadn’t been exactly communicative during our two days flying from the Burroughs to this terrestrial orbital. He seemed to think spending all his time on the Web, getting up to speed on current affairs, was more urgent than wasting it talking to me. For my part, I worried that even with a couple of police frigates escorting us, he’d stop helping me if I got in his way. The one time I did try, he called me Dick Tracy again. “Anyways, you know your problem ain’t the limits they put on you, it’s the xenophobe crazies. I’m docking manual because we look suspicious enough coming here in a practically brand-new ship. You mighta found something older, more beat-up. Ain’t too many automatic control shuttlecraft—or pilots in their right mind—who’d get anywheres near this piece-of-shit station. Except pigs. Earthling police. I don’t wanna make an old friend feel sorry ’cause he shot me down—especially as it’s been so long since we seen each other.”
I took a long, uneasy look at the clumsy patchwork of junkyard scrap they called a space station and shrugged. There was no sign of a defense system, which didn’t mean there wasn’t one. They could keep antimatter minicannons hidden behind any of those sheets of old metal. Or worse. From what I’d heard, these independent stations had exceptionally effective protective mechanisms.
“I guess they don’t get too many visitors. At any rate, I’m not too crazy about coming to a station that could fall to bits just from docking with it. I really hope they haven’t forgotten you. And let me remind you that everything up to 10,000 miles above the planet’s surface is considered its sovereign territory, under the laws of the Solar System. Besides, can you guarantee that somebody crazy enough to live in a heap like that isn’t also a rabid xenophobe with an itchy trigger finger?” I felt especially satisfied to be able to slip that old Chandlerian slang into my speech. That’s what Marlowe might have said in my shoes.
Vasily didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Docking a shuttlecraft by hand isn’t the sort of thing you can do without giving it your full attention—if you’re a human and organic, not a pozzie with a high-powered computer for a brain.
But I have to hand it to El Ex-Afortunado: he managed it pretty well, even though the anti-Psi collar kept him from using his powers. Especially considering he’d just spent three years imprisoned, unable to handle a shuttlecraft control panel except in simulations. We docked on our fourth attempt, just a few scratches on the hull the worse. Instead of the soft click that a similar maneuver with any normal ship would have caused on the Burroughs, the racket ringing across the cabin sounded more like a meat grinder trying to sing opera, off-key. Under any other circumstances I would have rated it “extremely worrisome,” but one look at Vasily convinced me that, here, this must be the ordinary routine.
The builders and residents of the Estrella Rom apparently had the same careless attitude toward systems maintenance as they did toward space engineering and everything else. I remembered the warning that flashed on-screen before the start of at least half the detective videos Spillane loaned me: The film you are about to see is a reconstruction based on a number of worn copies. They should inscribe that over this whole station, in capital letters.
If anybody on board knows how to read and write, I mean.
“Well, here we are.” Vasily wearily took his hands off the controls and strapped on a cartridge belt so full of ammo it would have embarrassed a professional twentieth-century mafia hit man. I watched him with resentment. He’d insisted on getting back his whole personal artillery stockpile, and when I refused he threatened to trash the deal. I had to give in. But two masers, an infrasonic stun gun, a mini-rocket launcher, a pocket crossbow, and especially his old large-caliber chemical-munition revolver with the laser scope seemed a bit over the top to me. “I hope his damn hypertrophic osteopathy hasn’t done in Slovoban, that old fossil. And I hope the Old Man will understand he has to give us a couple pieces of information if he wants to get to know his great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Follow me and don’t open your mouth any more than you have to. They don’t like guys poking around here asking too many questions.” I was about to say something, but he stopped me with a commanding gesture. “Zip it. The rules here ain’t the Burroughs rules. If you can say there’s any rules at all.”
He was the criminal (or “former” criminal), the one who knew his way around the place, so I kept my mouth shut and followed. But I had a huge pile of questions I was dying to ask. Hypertrophic osteopathy? The only thing I had about it in my data bank was a brief mention of a rare pituitary disease—and no cases of it had been reported since the aliens revolutionized human medical care. Was the Old Man one of those fundamentalist diehards who refused to accept any technology that had non-human origins? And… great-great-great-great-grandchildren? The surprisingly spare information about the Estrella Rom stored in my database said Slovoban was the name of the Romani chieftain who had founded the station, in a drunken stupor or a fit of madness, it was unclear which—but that was ninety-six years ago. Could this mean—?
The lack of gravity around the central docking bay didn’t surprise me. The Estrella Rom had been constructed (so to speak; “agglomerated” or “amassed” would be more accurate) using the oldest and cheapest design capable of simulating something like gravity: a wheel.
Okay, that was the basic design of the Burroughs, too, but there the similarity ended. The Estrella Rom spun like crazy on its axis to generate enough centrifugal force to keep all the calcium in its inhabitants’ bones from leaching out. No cutting-edge alien tech here. No gravity generators, no variable acceleration zones to facilitate coupling with arriving ships. There’s no way to know whether the designer intended to add those things later on to his gypsy paradise but ran out of funds, or whether he simply didn’t give a damn that the residents of his little world would have to choose between weightlessness and being dizzy all the time.
We passed through an airlock that Yuri Gagarin would have found old-fashioned. The Estrella Rom looked even more makeshift on the inside than it did on the outside. Now hanging on by a metal ring that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bronze Age museum exhibit, now pushing off with one foot from a tin plate on which I could still read the faded letters of an antediluvian earthling soda pop ad, Vasily floated and rebounded with simian agility. If I hadn’t known he’d been locked in an anti-Psi cell for the past three years, I would have assumed he’d spent his whole life leaping like a mountain goat. Jump, rebound, push off—until, as we moved farther from the center, his feet began to be attracted, only weakly at first, by one of the bulkheads.
I imitated him, silently startled to find seams joined with rivets, superglue, solder. I had read of such things only in history surveys. In the Burroughs, as in all the ships that docked there, they only used universal joints and molecular diffusion seams. When I noticed a pair of ancient plates joined with staples and waterproofed with something that looked exactly like a wad of used chewing gum, I decided to stop getting astonished, to avoid short-circuiting my positronic net.
I couldn’t help it, though. The farther Vasily and I went into the labyrinth of passageways and forking paths in the station (it turned out to be much larger on the inside than seemed possible), the looks of the people we passed made the improvised architecture appear almost normal by comparison.
When I first heard this was an independent Romani orbital I may have had the naïve impression that I’d find it full of campfires, mustachi
oed fiddlers with polka-dotted bandannas around their heads and daggers in their belts, barefoot dancers, knife fights, trained bears—who knows what I was expecting. Anything but this outlandish exhibition of space suits, each more worn-out and patched-up than the last (even the best of them would never have passed muster on the Burroughs; some EVA suits didn’t even appear to have oxygen tanks), and almost without exception virtually coated in monograms, stickers, and buttons from every imaginable source, from ancient Russian stamps celebrating the prehistoric Interkosmos program to logos for the ephemeral Asteroidal Republic of Ceres, not to mention flags and national emblems for every country past and present, from New Botswana to the Valles Marineris Federation on Mars.
Everybody carried their helmets dangling carelessly from their belts, or at best in place but with the faceplates raised. All the same, they seemed ready and able to respond in a matter of seconds if the aging and over-patched station hull suffered a loss of structural integrity.
Some casually nodded at Vasily in passing. A pair of guys, one shaved bald and one with dreadlocks floating like a halo around his head, even exchanged a couple of words with him. It sounded like Standard Anglo-Hispano but with an exotic syntax and substandard pronunciation, and half the words weren’t even in my vocabulary. At least, not with the meanings they seemed to give them.
“Hey, gachó, fresh from the tank?”
“Me likes tu tail, Vas, buratino palsie now?”
“Salve, Jor, what kinda cachorros?”
“Tough monga, Vas, take care tu greenshell. The Old Man te espera.”
During a pause I asked him about this curious language and about the second-rate space suits I saw everywhere, almost all of which looked incapable of doing their job.