Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  The tall Afrikaner stood up, brushing his beard free of jewels of water flung there when his goblet was shattered by the Arab's body. The woman across from him wore a look of horrified surmise, her arm raised to ward off an imagined attack by the bloody-handed customer who had been holding the waiter during his final hemorrhage.

  Van Zell glanced down at the Arab again. Dead beyond question. He had spewed up at least a quart of bright blood from his lungs. There was no mistaking the color if you had ever seen the face plate of a pressure suit whose wearer had begun to scream when a joint ruptured his atmosphere into the vacuum.

  And since van Zell had been one of the Afrikaners who emigrated to space when the Republic of South Africa shattered into a dozen black states, he had seen that sort of death many times.

  Theirs was a race with skills and courage, but by the time they were displaced from their homes with nothing but their lives saved, they were loathed as generally by developed states as they were in the third world. Their Dutch ancestors had begun to colonize the southern tip of Africa at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the same time the Bantu-speaking immigrants began to trickle south into what would become the Transvaal.

  Between them, the Dutch and the Bantus - Kaffirs - had virtually exterminated the indigenous peoples, the race that became the Bushmen when their few survivors were driven into the Bush. The victors had fought bloodily over the spoils, as was the way of history; and white had defeated and subjugated black, as was the will of God.

  The forces of Satan had reversed that process, turning the whole world against South Africa and putting automatic rifles in the hands of folk raised only a half step above the apes and other beasts. And now it was clear that God, after a time of testing his people, was ready to reassert his will anew.

  Beaton, the technician from Sky Devon, shuddered back into glassy-eyed function and bent over the waiter's body, oblivious of van Zell. The Englishman had a videochip recorder woven into his right lapel. The unit's thirty subminiature recording lenses used adaptive optics and a microprocessor to create an image almost as sharp as that of an ordinary lens, even if the fabric of which they were a part flexed during recording.

  The technician would make a scientific report on the test, van Zell presumed, but that was no concern of the Afrikaner nor of those who had sent him to observe at this time and place. The tool worked, and van Zell would report that. How it worked was immaterial. His ancestors had not pored over the ballistics and metallurgy of their long muskets before they crushed the Kaffirs at Blood River.

  The big, blond-haired customer bolted for the kitchen with Beaton trailing stiffly in his wake like a mechanical remora. Van Zell turned to the corridor exit. Men at another table had rushed out as soon as the waiter collapsed, without waiting to learn what had happened or why.

  An indeterminate number of strangers stared through the clean panel, freezing the Afrikaner as the preceding events had not.

  Van Zell had been so frightened that the test would fail - so certain that it would fail - that the fears which would usually have gripped him had been subsumed in the greater concern. He could have eaten the meal he'd ordered from the Arab waiter, treating his food and the expensive ambiance to as little notice as he gave the protein rations in plastic tubes, which he was used to. But with the stunning success that weltered in its blood on the floor, everything changed back to normal - or worse.

  Afrikaners like van Zell crewed most orbital construction sites and many of the survey craft that prospected in the asteroid belt - on behalf of other nations and conglomerates in which no Afrikaner had a share. Space had welcomed them when Earth turned her back. Their virtues - courage, self-reliance, and a faith in God to sustain them when the material universe went awry - admirably suited them for their new duties.

  Being stiff-necked and aloof meant that Afrikaners could maintain mental distance in living conditions more crowded man those of third world prisons - while they constructed great volumes and vistas for permanent colonists to inhabit. They were hugely wasteful of any resources that were not in short supply - God had created the universe for them, after all - but equally, they were capable of undergoing the most extreme hardship and privation when need arose.

  And finally their rigidity - the fierce determination to bull ahead despite any counsel or change in circumstances - was about as likely to carry them through a crisis as it was to get them killed. If they were killed, then whoever had employed the victims hired more of their ilk to complete the job.

  But while van Zell was used to crowding, he was not used to strangers. The mass of unfamiliar faces goggling at him through the door was a scene from Hell. He started, momentarily as horrified as any of those who stared past him at the waiter's bloody corpse, but the motion the tall Afrikaner had begun toward the door set the other diners in motion like billiards cannoning from the cue ball.

  The party of Indian diplomats broke apart. Two of the men stayed behind, while the other three streamed after the woman in the sari who strode for the door with a determination that added bulk to her birdlike figure.

  She slapped the emergency exit plate. When the spectators outside kept the door from opening more than a hand's breadth, she hectored them shrilly in a voice whose language was indeterminate but whose scorpion-raining fury drove them back.

  The door sprang wide, and Piet van Zell plunged through it in the wake of the quartet of diplomats.

  Slideways ran in both directions down the main corridors throughout the UN colony. They moved people at the rate of seven kilometers per hour, a rate that could be doubled easily by those who wished to stride along the moving surface.

  The slideways weren't particularly energy efficient, but power was cheap here. A mirror in lunar orbit directed sunlight onto banks of solar cells on the colony's surface, providing a constant and easily-expandable power source no matter where the cells were in relation to true daylight. Once the initial installation had been completed, the only significant cost was that of fuel to maintain the mirror's orbit and attitude against the effects of Earth's gravity.

  Room to store and operate individual vehicles was at a premium where energy was not. In theory, a pair of slide-ways flanked and separated by narrow stationary sidewalks provided for all the direct needs of the colony residents. Emergency vehicles would operate on the sidewalks in the rare instances that became necessary.

  The only problem with the theory came when it was applied to the ambassadors and chiefs of mission who controlled the colony's funding - and thus the funding of the Directorate of Security which would enforce the ban on private vehicles.

  The result was a compromise that worked as badly as such things usually did. Each mission was informally rationed to a pair of vehicles - but there were over a hundred sixty states accredited to the UN. The situation would have been a disaster, even if the rationing had been generally observed and if high officials of the Secretariat refrained from flaunting their status with vehicles of their own.

  There were three open-topped, six-place cars parked outside Le Moulin Rouge; a fourth pulled away as hastily as its batteries could accelerate the direct-current motors in its wheel hubs. The chauffeurs of two of the remaining cars had stowed their wiping rags when the pair of European diners bolted from the restaurant and into their vehicle.

  Van Zell shook himself clear of the spectators as if their touch were foul-smelling rain on his body. His height and grim expression made his path easy, even though the Afrikaner's musculature was by now better suited to weightlessness than it was to even the low gravity of the Moon.

  He had a natural sense of direction, sharpened by a decade of work under conditions where the ability to locate objects in the surrounding sphere might be the margin for survival. Though he had traveled the route only once before - and that in the opposite direction - van Zell strode without hesitation to the southbound lane of the slideway fronting the restaurant. His mind was already reviewing the junctions where the paired monomer belts ended
at square islands and he would choose which of three corridors to follow next.

  Now that van Zell was back in the midst of his task, the feeling of panic disappeared. He could look around him with the detached loathing he would expend on an unpleasant image in a holovision tank.

  The slideways were crowded, and many of the people van Zell stood near were women - polyglot and dressed in various fashions. He had been married once, but that had ended twenty years before, in an ambush of the convoy carrying dependents to Durban and hope of safety. Over three thousand of them, mostly women and children, with a scattering of overage males for defense.

  The women had fought, too, and the older children, just as in the days of the Great Trek . . . but when the guerrillas were done, the lucky whites were those who had died before their bodies were flung back onto the burning trucks.

  Van Zell had been with his unit on the Angolan border when the massacre occurred . . . and when they were withdrawn for counterinsurgency operations, to cover their own dead with mounds of Kaffir flesh, armies crashed southward from Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique in Russian tanks. Guerrillas cannot win a war alone, but in South Africa - as in South Vietnam and Occupied France during earlier generations - irregulars could divert attention from the hostile armies which alone smash other armies.

  Piet van Zell had survived, but the sight of women in large numbers made him uneasy for reasons he was too unimaginative to discover.

  In the central portion of the UN colony, most of the corridor walls were dikes of living rock, hollowed out behind for living areas and cut through for doors. The low intensity of lunar seismic activity made it safe to have foundation, support walls, and overburden all part of the same mass of rock, and the construction equipment available early on in the colony's existence made it the most practical method as well.

  The Transient Barracks were new construction. They had already been moved twice during the colony's short lifespan, each time to the new rim of the expanding colony. Space near the hub was at a premium, particularly because of the difficulty of traveling long distances through the corridors.

  As the slideways rolled van Zell outward in two-hundred-meter segments, his surroundings changed. At first the corridors themselves became wider to make utility service easier and to permit the slideway capacity to be doubled when the load came to require it.

  The support walls were assemblages of titanium girders, processed from lunar ilmenite in huge solar furnaces. Panels of foamed silica, generally beige but sometimes suffused with some other pastel dye, covered them. The construction was superficially identical to that of an orbital habitat, but here the girders were braced to withstand the actual weight of rock rather than the centrifugal stresses that provided pseudogravity for habitats.

  The outermost belt of construction had been developed by the techniques currently in use. Instead of tunneling, the surface was gouged away by a combination of cratering charges and mirror-focused sunlight that exceeded the melting point of the refractory rock. The molten glass was sucked out through heated lines and dumped on a suitable disposal area - often a portion of the site where construction had proceeded further.

  The building went on under vacuum conditions in the open pit, girders and prefabricated panels being muscled into place by men in hard suits. Van Zell had been employed on a section a few years before. It was more difficult work than orbital construction, because the solid base for support machinery did not wholly erase the problems caused by real gravity.

  The sections were spanned by titanium roof trussses, customized during extrusion to match the expected load. Over-engineering was extreme by Downside standards: a collapsing beam, too weak for the stress laid on it, could void the air from additional hectares of the colony as well.

  When the box sections were completed, sealed, and tested, crews backfilled them with rubble from later construction or spoil pits, providing the several meters of lunar rubble that would block cosmic rays as effectively as Earth's kilometers of atmosphere. Even before the internal finish work was done, people would be moving into the new section - desperate to claim the space allotted to them or jumping another's allotment in confidence that it would be years before they could be evicted through the colony's ponderous, multilayered legal system.

  Piet van Zell looked around as the slideways rolled him toward his destination. Panels of raw, press-formed slag. Fabric hangings; generally industrial-grade fiberglass, because not even the paneling had arrived. Occasionally a shopfront that could have been transferred whole from Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysees, a façade of crystal or polished metal - and in front of one such, a worried-looking woman arguing with a trio of men in the orange coveralls of the Bureau of Utilities.

  Why would anyone struggle for a portion of this? Here they were at the sufferance of the air plant, at the sufferance of the bureaucracy - there were no freeholds in the colony; at the sufferance of the heads of state who moved UN Headquarters to the Moon and who could as easily move it back, now that it was clear that anyone with real power, both among the Secretariat staff and the accredited missions, managed to stay on Earth anyway.

  And why would a man balk at any act, any tool, that would regain him the land and open sky God meant him to occupy on Earth?

  The Transient Barracks were at the end of the line - almost beyond it, because though the last segment of slideway was in working condition, the outward-bound two hundred meters immediately previous was static. A team of men in coveralls waited, some of them playing cards, while a party of engineers, architects, and administrative staff wearing the suits and formal scarves of current Downside fashion argued over the problem and the responsibility for it.

  The men and the handful of women trudging past the dead section of slideway glowered at both groups indiscriminately.

  Standing while the track rolled beneath him had been a conscious burden on van Zell. Walking the two hundred meters required real effort - he had spent the previous nine months beyond Mars, assaying planetoids for Mitsubishi. Every time the tall Afrikaner re-experienced gravity, a part of his mind questioned his plan - their Plan - to return to Earth.

  But the body's questions could not compete with the soul's dream, when only that dream made life endurable.

  There was no problem with squatters attempting to fence off portions of the Transient Barracks for their own permanent use. A few of the persons allotted bunk and locker space in the barracks were business visitors, troubleshooters sent to deal with refractory equipment - problems that simply could not be solved by anyone on Earth at the end of a microwave link.

  These white-collar transients themselves gazed with nervous apprehension at the construction workers who filled the majority of the barracks space. Almost all the latter were men who had too little to lose on Earth to keep them there - used to brutal conditions, heavy labor, and sudden death. A squatter who tried to appropriate the bunk area assigned to these men would be removed. His condition when they flung him onto an inbound slideway would be determined not by the force necessary to the purpose but rather by the force it amused the construction workers to use.

  The corridor that dead-ended now between the Transient Barracks had been constructed with an eye toward its use in a decade or two, so there was plenty of room in the passageway for squatters of a type.

  The type that follows men when their families can't.

  The whores and drug dealers, dram shops and card rooms, were an unusual problem here because of the peculiar - and some might have said peculiarly bad - structure of the UN. The attitude taken at most off-Earth construction sites was the same as that of the authorities near a Downside military base: it's going to be there anyway, so keep it under reasonable control - and don't turn down a buck if some entrepreneur offers it to you under the table.

  Most UN member countries would have been perfectly willing to have the fringes of Headquarters Colony policed the same way. Most of the UN budget, however, came from democracies, where there was always someone out
of office and ready to make political hay if his opponents winked at open UN corruption.

  Nobody who had anything to do with getting things done - as opposed to politics - thought that men became saints when they were removed to a construction site in the heavens. On the other hand, nobody volunteered to sign off on an order formally authorizing activities at Headquarters Colony which were illegal, at least on paper, in virtually every UN member country.

  The solution turned out to be ceding UN ownership of the corridor fronting the paired Transient Barracks. It was designated a construction site, under control of the developers until it received final acceptance by the Secretariat's Bureau of Construction.

  Final acceptance came when the barracks were moved outward again - to a new “construction site.” Until then, anyone with a problem about what went on in the corridor could take it up with the developers - who, multinational corporations and private citizens under U.S. (for example), law, could tell the nosy bastard where to stuff his or her problem.

  Van Zell rode the slideway to its terminus, past most of the recreational activity going on between the in- and outbound ways. A pair of men were crying and shouting bitterly at one another in Russian. Each held one hand of a doe-eyed, olive-skinned boy whose expression could be ethereal or ennuied, depending on the angle from which van Zell glimpsed him.

  That was nothing to the Afrikaner, and of no especial interest even to the pair of company police moving toward the altercation: turbaned Sikhs wearing needle stunners and the shoulder patch of their employer, Pacific Architects and Engineers.

  It was not to anyone's advantage that the Strip be run wide open. The Site Monitors - company police - kept a lid on the violence that was endemic at any location where the pleasures of a thousand men were distilled.

  Beyond that obvious need were the inspectors and administrative staff. They checked the women and boys for disease, seeing to the cure of those with simple problems and the deportation of others. Drugs were tested - not for purity, which was the purchasers' problem, but rather for the presence of dangerous additives like the strychnine and powdered rock that raised the dealer's profit margin at the cost of damage to laborers whom the company had brought expensively to the Moon. Liquor was examined to make sure that it was ethanol rather than one of the even more poisonous industrial alcohols, and that it contained only the usual complement of aromatic esters which collapsed human circulatory systems in the name of flavor.