Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  The developers kept the games honest also. Nothing led to uncontrollable violence faster than a fleeced worker returning to the card room with the remainder of his crew and the tools they had brought for the purpose from the construction site. Quite apart from work time lost to death and wounds, that sort of incident was certain to get media exposure Downside and might well lead to an end of the arrangement that kept the recreational services operating.

  Even under normal circumstances van Zell rarely used the Strip outside a construction site. Occasionally a woman; always a black. More often, enough gin to hammer the memories out of his mind for a time . . . but never a long time, and the veins that throbbed when he returned to consciousness mimicked the rage he felt when he first saw camera footage of the massacre in which his family died. Now - he had his duty. He had a call to make.

  At each of the twenty off-Moon phones was a line as long as the queues for the most popular prostitutes between the slideways. Van Zell got into the line that looked shortest - it wouldn't be, it never was, but that did not concern him.

  The Afrikaner had learned above all during his exile how to wait. Not only for big things, for the mystical Plan that was as far beyond his comprehension as the Virgin Birth and as much an article of his faith. He had waited for others to move beams so that he could weld them; waited to enter and exit air locks that were a tight fit for a single man; waited to be picked up by spidery “taxis” at the end of shifts, with nothing but the stars and his thoughts for company.

  He always counted the posts of the barbed-wire fence he could see from his stoop, letting his mind play over the gray, weathered surface of the wood against the sere grass and the pale, friendless sky. He was counting them yet again when the Ghanaian before him in line finished his call and left the open-fronted phone booth.

  A Turk from the next line over tried to push in front of van Zell. The Afrikaner braced his arm on the edge of the booth and used his bony elbow to block the interloper. The exchange was without rancor, almost instinctive from the long experience of both men in similar circumstances. They did not speak to one another, but as the Afrikaner slid his ID card into the phone, the Turk was noisily attempting to reclaim his place in the line from which he had jumped.

  Van Zell's card was the standard type which provided data on construction workers all over the solar system. It was attached to his left wrist by a coil of beryllium monomer which would stretch as much as a half meter. The monomer could be broken, but it would be easier to sever the wearer's wrist - and either event would put a warning tick in data retrieved through the card thereafter.

  The card simply accessed the wearer's file. Any medical, economic, employment, or other data loaded into the records system could be brought up as required. Normally a construction company took a full dump from Central Records in Geneva on every worker it employed and then purged its own files when employment terminated, but it was possible for someone to have separate files in a number of computer banks.

  The financial data in van Zell's file at Headquarters Colony showed a credit balance greater than his earnings during a decade of well-paid work in vacuum. It would cover unlimited off-Moon phoning and virtually anything that could be bought here, including the chief of a fair-sized diplomatic mission.

  The Afrikaner began entering the laboriously memorized twenty-one-digit code while the card flexed to him was still being digested with clicks and whirrs within the guts of the phone. He hit the keys solidly with his right index finger, punching each number as if he were trying to drive it out of the pad. Ambient noise, voices of men at the other phones and the cries of those involved in the pursuits of the Strip, thinned and faded as he concentrated on his task.

  The phone clucked happily, and the speaker plate began to echo a pulsating whine which the caller assumed was a ringing signal.

  Off-Moon calls could be placed or received on any phone in Headquarters Colony, but it was general practice to use a dedicated instrument which bypassed the degradation of an internal processing stage. There were banks of public off-Moon phones scattered throughout the colony, though only these by the Transient Barracks were in constant use. Most large offices had a unit on-premises.

  The signal went through optical cables to the bank of microwave antennas on the surface. These beamed the digitally-converted words to one of the trio of communications satellites held with difficulty in lunar orbit. Further switching took place in the satellite, before it shot the message on to a final destination. That could be another Moon colony; Earth or a habitat in Earth orbit; or a mining party in the asteroid belt, so long as their location had been filed and updated with the gigantic data bank at the Shaft in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

  Piet van Zell had no idea of who would be on the other end of his call, nor of where they were located.

  “Yes?” said a voice in heavy English.

  “This is Piet,” replied van Zell in Afrikaans, realizing as he did so that he might be stepping on the other man's side of the conversation. There would be a transmission lag, of course, but only experience would tell him whether it was a matter of seconds or upwards of fifteen minutes.

  “Well, go on, man,” said the other impatiently, having switched to Afrikaans as well.

  Eight to ten seconds of delay. Earth or Earth orbit, then. Not that it mattered. “Everything here is proper,” continued van Zell. “We must direct our partners to go on.”

  The delay this time stemmed from more than the distance of transmission, and there was a note of caution - even fear - in the other speaker's voice when he said, “What is done, is proper, but what is not done - that is proper also, you are telling me?”

  No code or system of scrambling was truly unbreakable. Any form of transposition, however frequently changed within the text of the message, could be read in clear if enough computers were arrayed, crunching numbers until garbage solidified into nuggets of meaning.

  There were ways of sidestepping the problem. For the Afrikaners using open communications channels, the best choice was to keep the message brief and to provide no key words that could possibly be chosen to pluck their conversation from among the millions of others taking place simultaneously.

  “Yes, yes, all is proper,” van Zell repeated with a note of irritation. If the tall Afrikaner had been imaginative enough to understand what the other speaker feared, he would not have been willing to observe the test the way he had done. “What am I to do now?”

  “Wait,” said the other decisively. Any hope van Zell had that the direction would be amplified ended eight seconds later with an electronic pop and the hum of an open line.

  The Afrikaner agent retrieved his ID card from the bowels of the phone and stepped aside, jostled by the next man in line but not really aware of the fact.

  He was to wait, then. All right. He would eat, first, in one of the restaurants close to the Transient Barracks. He was hungry now that his mind was no longer so involved with his task that it blocked out all the signals his body was sending.

  Sighing to himself - mentally and physically exhausted, but relaxed in a way that he had never achieved through sex - van Zell stepped onto the outward-bound slide way.

  There was violent commotion between the moving strips. One of the Russians who had been arguing earlier burst through the fabric wall of a crib. His broad, gleamingly white body was nude, and the nude body of the boy cradled in his arms looked by contrast even darker than the rich olive it really was.

  Everyone but the company police scattered, partly because of the nerve-shattering sound the Russian was making - a squeal as loud and piercing as that of a boar being gelded. Sikh policemen converged from several directions, drawing their stunners as they moved in.

  The Russian's waist and thighs were covered with blood which had sprayed from the mouth of the boy he carried. The boy's head and limbs dangled like rope ends. The indifference that had been in his doelike Arab eyes before was being covered, like leaves beneath the surface of a freezing pond, by
the glaze of death.

  As stunners crackled behind him, snapping electrically-charged needles into the body of the Russian whom the police thought was a berserk murderer, Piet van Zell wondered whether he should call his off-Moon contact again, he decided not to. This incident was within what had been described to him as the expected parameters of the test.

  And besides, he was very hungry.

  Chapter 4 - ELLA BRADLEY

  Dear God, don't let me get it. . . don't let me get sick ran the litany in Ella Bradley's mind, over and over like a tape loop or a Top-40 song. She couldn't escape the prayerful mantra, like she couldn't escape her memories of what should have been a quiet, mildly celebratory dinner.

  Hell of a way to celebrate turning thirty-five. Watching someone cough his lungs out over the people at the next table, and then . . .

  She shut her eyes as if she could shut out the vision of the waiter with the napkin to his mouth. Of the big man, Yates, reaching for him while orange-bright blood flew and Yates' chair bounced against the nearby table that a sextet of Indians were already fleeing . . .

  Ella Bradley was in the bathroom of her apartment, running a very expensive tub of steaming water while a meter set discreetly beside the shower head clicked off the cost.

  She had no illusions that a hot bath with Dead Sea salts was going to protect her from the disease, although all sorts of curative powers were attributed to the salts a friend had sent her. But the bath would insulate her from the aftershocks of recollection. She hoped.

  She hadn't taken a full bath since she'd gotten here, just quick, careful showers in “budget bags” which lowered the cost because they trapped every molecule for recycling. Tonight the budget bag hanging from the shower door reminded her too much of a body bag - same zipper that closed over your head. . . . She just couldn't handle it.

  She poured a palmful of sea salts into the bath and thrust her hand in, wrist deep, after them. The skin beneath the water reddened immediately, despite the tinted liquid. The water was almost scalding.

  She didn't pull her hand out, but pressed her lips together and held it there. She'd adjust to the temperature that made her hand feel like someone was massaging it with a glove made from a thousand needles - adjust before the water cooled. She was paying for it.

  She clambered onto the tub's rim and thrust both feet in, calf deep, grimacing. Then, slowly, she began to lower herself into the steaming water. Once it stopped hurting, it was going to feel wonderful.

  Still in water so hot that she had to turn slowly, once on her knees, to shut off the tap, she began to shiver. Part reaction, part relaxation: just what she needed, at any price.

  Slowly she sank down until she was sitting on her heels. Her skin reacted with a flare of red wherever the water lapped for the first time; beneath the surface, where she'd adjusted to the heat, the salts made her body seem tinged with green.

  Olive. Olive like the casts of the dead faces she'd seen in the restaurant. Olive and fish-belly white and speckled with bright, arterial blood . . .Ella Bradley slid back in the tub until only the nipples of her breasts and her shoulders were above the surface, and closed her eyes. There was the waiter again, and the big security officer called Yates.

  Sam Yates on his feet surrounded by panicked civilians and pulmonary blood. Sam Yates banging through the kitchen door, from which the smell of burning flesh was wafting . . .

  And then, when she'd followed, the blue-eyed Kabyle girl in shock, the three dead bodies in their pools of blood: one still lying across the stove; one covered in salad that was drenched not in wine-vinegar, but more blood; one more, sprawled behind the door. And the little man from Yates' table, who'd gone with him into the kitchen . . .

  Or had the little man pushed through the kitchen door first? Or followed? She couldn't remember.

  Ella Bradley was an anthropologist, a scientist. As she lowered her erect nipples carefully under the surface of the steaming water, she began considering for the first time that her obsession with the horror in Le Moulin Rouge (the right name, that was for sure) might be more than simple, retroactive terror.

  Her mind was trying to collate what she'd seen. Make sense of it. Deduce something from it. Something besides how big the security man was, or how matter-of-fact he'd seemed on the phone, telling someone from Emergency not to “just leave it for the next patrol, okay?” while the little fellow in the bloodied suit slipped by her as she'd paused in the doorway.

  She'd made a fool of herself in that kitchen, asking the big man stupid questions: was he from Security? why was he there? As if she had some right.

  But it had thrown her back to field days, seeing all that blood: massacres in the African bush when you were trying to get the tribes to talk and you couldn't be sure that whites hadn't provoked any particular piece of slaughter - especially in southern Africa, where it took so little. ... So she'd looked at the big white man among all those dead nonwhites she thought of as “indigs,” and remembered the Pretorians.

  She opened her eyes and came up out of the water like a sounding whale. Everybody who'd died in that restaurant had been non-white. Everyone had had a melanin content consistent with that description.

  “No, no, easy now,” she told herself. She was just trying to promise herself that she wasn't going to contract whatever disease this was. And yet, she kept seeing the shocky, blue eyes of the Kabyle girl. The girl who'd survived.

  But survived what? Ella Bradley was remembering the ways she'd brayed at Yates: “fully accredited to the General Secretariat ... the backing of important people ...”

  What an ass she'd made of herself. The man was a fellow American, part of the security contingent. He was a possible ally. More possible than the Russian woman who'd come in on his heels, Yesilkov.

  Back into the water, this time more quickly. “What do you want to ally yourself against?” she asked out loud. Her mind wasn't ready to answer. It was chasing itself: Indians in that restaurant; lots of people, dark, light - nobody else had died yet.

  Or she didn't know about any more deaths yet. “Face it, Bradley, you don't want it to be something you can catch.” She wanted it to be something confined to kitchen help, or something the staff had eaten for breakfast, or even some sort of terrorist attack - lots of these people brought their regional hatreds with them. There was probably some Persian poison at the root of the problem, she postulated hopefully.

  But her mind wouldn't buy it. Officer, I'm an anthropologist. I can't help with the, ah, with those, but perhaps I could talk to the woman who's in shock? That was what she'd said to the Russian, who'd snubbed her with a dismissive smile.

  And then the patrolman who'd been fussing with his diagnostics over one corpse had said something to Yates, and Yates had raised his big hands... big, gory, bloodied hands.

  If this thing was virulent, the security man was going to catch it. If he didn't get sick . . . Ella Bradley was absently arching and relaxing her back now, ducking her nipples in and out of the cooling water. She was going to go see Yates, see how he was feeling; see if he'd realized that everybody in that kitchen who'd died was of the same racial - and cultural - group.

  Everyone. The Kabyle girl they'd oversedated hadn't been affected by the virus. Yet.

  Virus. The diagnosing patrolman had been sure of that. Ella Bradley sat straight up in her bath. She could pull enough strings to see the Kabyle girl, if she dared. She could definitely manage it, though she might have to call down to New York for support. She was here to document, assess, and hopefully predict the adaptive changes certain cultural groups with which she was familiar would undergo. Since those groups included North as well as Central and South African nations, she could make a good case for interviewing the Kabyle.

  If she dared. She stood up in the tub and reached for a towel. If they were dealing with a virus, she'd already been exposed. If they were dealing with some ancient poison that happened to simulate a virus when viewed under a diagnostic trellis, none of these glorifi
ed beat cops were going to even think of checking in that direction.

  Wrapping the towel around her, she stepped regretfully from the tub. She'd check her office's data base, see if anyone else had died in similar circumstances. Then she'd set up an interview with Kabyle girl.

  Then, and only then, was she going to visit Supervisor Sam Yates, from Security's Entry section - if, of course, one or both of them didn't catch the damn bug and die first.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 5 - DATA SEARCH

  Tenting his fingers in a gesture that looked ruminative unless one noticed the tips were white with pressure, Sam Yates stared at the hologram tank in the center of his tiny office. The unit, about the size of a fishbowl mounted waist high on a pedestal of scarred black plastic, fluoresced silently in patterns of changing pastels.

  The security man rotated his chair and poked one of the presets on his desk phone.

  “Yoshimura,” grumbled the speaker plate after a moment.

  “Barney, this is Sam,” Yates said. The fact his call was answered promptly kept him from trying to slap the holotank against the far wall, but the best he could manage in his voice was control - not friendliness. “Is there some sorta problem with that Watch List from Interpol? I was supposed to have it an hour ago.”

  “Gee, Sam,” said the voice of the man in Communications Section. “I think it's been received. Lemme make sure the feed's been sent out. Might be a problem in your hardware, you know.”