Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  Her eyes met those of her visitor. Neither of them blinked. She was too solid to look small, even seated while the tall man looked down at her. “You know,” she continued, “you wouldn't think there was anybody couldn't hold a job up here, as tight as things are, but he says his painting's the only thing his heart's in.”

  Yates made a grimace of understanding.

  “Yeah,” said the lieutenant. “I wouldn't even mind that so much if he could bring himself to sell one, now and again. Wouldn't be real art, then, I suppose.”

  She shrugged. “Neither here nor there, I suppose. I figure” - she paused - “I'll be talking to you again.”

  “I figure so too,” said Yates, smiling much as the woman had when she joked about the stored corpses. “I'll look forward to that.”

  He thought of something else as he left the office, headed back to his own work, but it would have been the wrong note to interject just now.

  The next time he talked to the patrol lieutenant, however, he'd have to mention the bearded man who'd sat at Ella Bradley's table.

  Because he'd touched his tableware also, and there should have been fingerprints . . . unless he, too, had been protected by lab gel.

  Chapter 7 - DOWNSIDE

  “I tell you, I'm expected,” said Karel Pretorius in growing irritation. The best thing he could say about New York City was simply that it was on Earth; and now the sky had begun to drizzle besides.

  “That's great,” said one of the trio of men in dark suits. “Then I'll let you in. When I'm told to.”

  “Hold this please, sir,” said another of the guards, offering Pretorius a pair of metal tubes T'ed into wire leads. “Yes sir, one in either hand.”

  It was humiliating, but the Afrikaner representative accepted the handgrips. The leads were connected to the box strapped around the guard's waist, and the display screen was tilted up toward his eyes.

  The metal was cold, and its touch permitted Pretorius to imagine that he could feel the electricity being fed into him through the leads. Consciously he knew that was not the case: the current was at ultra-high frequencies and of negligible wattage, just enough to build a charge over the conductive surface of his body.

  Anomalies in that charge lined on the guard's display a picture of everything the Afrikaner wore over his body and anything unusually conductive - metallic - beneath the surface of his flesh. He could probably enter the building with an unnoticed charge of explosive carried up his anus— but its lead azide detonator would show up on the screen.

  Besides, Pretorius doubted that he would be permitted to go to the bathroom alone after he got inside.

  “He's clean,” the guard with the search apparatus said regretfully, but he kept his eyes on the display a moment longer, as if in hope that a weapon would spring into sight as soon as it heard the coast was clear.

  Pretorius released the grips. They flickered in the streetlights as their leads recoiled against the base unit. The fleshy Afrikaner had learned at his first meeting in this building not to carry anything to which the guards might object. They had removed his card case - the microcircuitry within each card might not be what it appeared; and his dictation wand - the meeting was not to be recorded, at least by him; and the trio of writing styluses which he carried.

  The guards were not concerned that the styluses might contain weapons. Rather, they knew that anything with a sharp point was a deadly weapon if rammed into an eye or throat. The guards were not paid to take chances; and they were not concerned about an Afrikaner, though he was spokesman for his people to a world that did not choose to listen.

  While one guard watched Pretorius and another was poring over the research apparatus, the third kept his eyes on the street. He looked nowhere in particular - or rather, he looked everywhere, scanning the vehicles that passed and the patterns their lights drew in puddles, flicking over building fronts and even toward roof lines hidden by mist and distance. There was surveillance equipment more sophisticated than the human eye; but a trained eye can be very useful, and these eyes were coupled by predatory reflexes to the plasma gun the guard held beneath his coat.

  “They say for him to go up,” said the guard with the search apparatus to the one who watched the visitor.

  “Do they?” the guard replied. After a pause that was as deliberately insulting as the gesture with which he opened the door - pushing it with his foot - he thumbed Pretorius into the building.

  The Afrikaner could feel the third guard's eyes brush him as he stepped past. The look made Pretorius' skin shiver as if someone had poured ether down his spine and the evaporating fluid were sucking all the heat out of his body.

  The door opened on to an elevator car, not the ground floor proper, and as soon as the door closed again, the car began to rise. Pretorius was sure that there were controls hidden behind the mirror-finished walls, but touching them would have been foolish - suicidal - even if he were sure of their location.

  Instead he stared perforce at the images of himself which filled a space that could have held a dozen other men as well. He wished he were younger and that he had real hair instead of a synthetic mat color-keyed to the remaining white fringe at the base of his neck.

  And he wished that these men and women, this Club, would recognize that they needed him, instead of treating him like muck on which they would not deign to walk.

  The car stopped. Pretorius assumed he was on the top floor of the ten-story building, but he could not be sure. Only the direction in which the elevator accelerated convinced him that it rose instead of dropping into some armored subbasement beneath the parking garage and the entrance by which the Club members themselves entered.

  Sometimes his imagination confused the sensory loops in his inner ears, so that Pretorius was convinced that he had plunged all the way down to Hell and that he would step out of the elevator into an inferno. That was never literally true.

  “You're expected sir,” said the attendant - not a guard; the Afrikaner never saw a guard here in the circular hall surrounding the meeting room, though he knew he was the object of eyes and weapons as deadly as those of the men at the street entrance.

  “Yes, yes,” said Pretorius as he left the elevator, careful to keep his voice clear of the irritation he felt at being rebuked by a woman - and a Kaffir besides.

  She had spoken in a neutral tone tinged with an American accent as velvety as the texture of the skin visible beyond the scarlet tights she wore. The threat in the bland words was as glaring as her hair, teeth, and irises, all colored to match the fabric of her costume. The members of the Club expected Karel Pretorius, and if he balked them by twenty seconds because he was daydreaming in their elevator - who knew what they would do to him? If it had not been for the Plan . . .

  But it was for the Plan; and in order to return his people to their home and their destiny, Karel Pretorius would have accepted worse treatment than what the Club metered out to him.

  He walked toward the door that split to admit him, the weight of its lead core carried silently on massive trunnions.

  There were fifteen people at the semicircular table facing the door and the ovoid chair placed for their visitor. Pretorius sat down without needing to be directed. His age and weight made him cautious, but he had no hesitation in gripping the armrest and leaning back against the cushions which he knew monitored everything from his heart rate to the patterns traced by his brain waves.

  He had no need to lie to these people, nothing to conceal from the Club. The position that he espoused openly as spokesman for the Afrikaner nation was the reason that they had come to him.

  “We are not wholly satisfied with the results of the test,” said the man at one end of the table in what Pretorius suspected, despite the electronic deconstruction and rebuilding of the words, was an Oriental accent.

  There were not always the same number of Club members present at these meetings, but the Afrikaner had never seen more than the fifteen who watched him now. They were screened from him -
and possibly from one another - by hologram projections, patterns of shifting light and shade, that made them individual lumps behind an insubstantial curtain.

  Pretorius could have guessed at who some of the members were, despite their camouflage; but he did not really care about their identity. All that mattered was that no member of the Club was a Kaffir.

  And of that there could be no doubt.

  “I don't understand your lack of satisfaction,” said the Afrikaner honestly. A negative remark by his ... patrons, should have frightened him, but this was so unexpected that he could not believe it was seriously meant. “Of course, you have sources of information more precise than those open to me ... but both the public media and my personal informants are in agreement that the test was an unexampled success.”

  One of the Club members wheezed as he or she breathed, but Pretorius could not identify the person through the barrier of disrupted light and sound. For long moments there was nothing else in the room to hear.

  “There was to be a limited number of test units.” said the voice of a woman seated near the center of the table. The dim light made her thin, precise voice a communication from beyond the grave. “No less than three, no more than a dozen.”

  “There were over five hundred,” said the man beside her, needlessly completing the thought and identifying himself as the member who wheezed.

  “The outbreak was nevertheless limited in all important ways,” Pretorius noted, frowning to himself and delivering the opinion slowly so that his brain could check and recheck it to be sure that he was not overlooking some point of crucial significance. “There was no involvement - so far as I have been able to learn -outside the targeted racial category.''

  Perhaps they were concerned that the sheer size of the “disaster” focused world attention on it. But what better source of misdirection could there be than an extinct virus that had attacked Arabs - on the Moon?

  “Why did so many die?” asked the woman who was the voice of death. She ignored Pretorius' statement as completely as if she had not heard it.

  “The test was to be limited mechanically,” said the Afrikaner, reaching up to stroke the goatee that he had shaved off years before, when the hair grew coarse and white, “to one or two rooms in a colony that was itself isolated from the general population.”

  None of them spoke. They were staring at him, he presumed, but even that was uncertain behind their curtains of light.

  “But more important,” Pretorius continued, “the virus was to be self-limiting, to be unable to replicate beyond a fixed number of times no matter how ideal conditions for reproduction may otherwise be. And in this the test was wholly successful. There was an Arab crew member and two Jordanian passengers on the shuttle that docked within ninety minutes of the test release, and none of the three experienced any ill effects.”

  That depended on how you looked at the problem, of course. The passengers had driven straight to the Jordanian mission premises; before, as it turned out, any survivor had reported the events there. One of the new arrivals had made a hysterical call to Security, and the other was still hospitalized - crooning to the wife whose head he'd been cradling when a patrol arrived.

  “Why wasn't it limited to a single room?” said one of the shadow figures harshly. Hands moved, wringing themselves in rage or grief behind the rippling hologram. “How did it get out?”

  The Club had access to all the information gathered by the governments and multinational corporations to which its members belonged. They were not always - not often, Pretorius suspected - the persons in formal control of their organizations. But there is apparent power and real power, and it was the latter that reeked through the layers of armor and obscurity the Club set between itself and its visitor.

  But they did not know what Karel Pretorius knew, because any direct attempt they made to gather information would risk the wider discovery of the truth and possibly their own involvement.

  They needed Pretorius, as a conduit. And they would need his folk in the near future, to step forward while the world reeled in shock - a race loathed equally by all, and therefore equally acceptable to all as the new rulers of Sub-Saharan Africa.

  If there were no government in place to sign concessions, there would be chaos and war among the powers . . . and that was undesirable.

  “The test revealed two misconceptions about the process,” said the Afrikaner, slowly this time so that he could be accurate while reporting matters beyond his normal expertise. He had always been a quick study - that was a major reason he held his position as spokesman - but he was concerned not to say anything that the experts who would dissect his words might think had been meant to mislead.

  “The outer container in which the sample was transported,” Pretorius continued, “had been irradiated and was free of contamination. There was no outbreak of disease on either of the shuttles involved, nor at Transfer Station Two, where the courier passed through.”

  Pretorius was sure there was a spike on the instruments monitoring him when he said that. He also had staged through that transfer station on his way from Florida to Sky Devon. It was only later that he understood the risk he had taken.

  “The inner container, the phial from which the planned release was made,” the Afrikaner said, his accent and years of practice concealing from his listeners any of the emotions that their instruments would nevertheless snatch directly from his nerve impulses. “That appears to have been contaminated. There was an incident in the suit room where the courier is believed to have opened the lead container. The outer container.”

  “That was a failure,” snapped one of the members.

  “Yes, madam,” said Pretorius, “it was a failure - but not a significant one.”

  Had the speaker not been a woman, the Afrikaner might have modified his words. Certainly he would have avoided the patronizing tone which he knew was a mistake even as it sounded in his ears.

  It was not the woman but a man near the left end of the table who sprang to his feet and shouted, “Not significant? Fellows, give me this buffoon for a few hours, so that his successor will know the standard of competence we expect!''

  The accent was pure Oxford, but the features that wavered higher and farther back than the focal plane of the hologram curtain were those of a Saudi prince.

  The outburst frightened Pretorius, but - unlike most of the others in the room - he had faced guns and the probability of torture in the past. “Sirs and mesdames,” he said, calmer in some ways than he had been when he was describing biotechnical events, “my apologies for misspeaking. But the event was a test, and it was clear to you as well as to the principals involved that not all the results were foreseeable.”

  The persons across the curved table were whispering among themselves. Two had risen to touch and remonstrate with the Saudi. Pretorius deliberately looked away from the trio lest he recognize other members of the Club - and be doomed by those recorded spikes of knowledge if his words had not been enough for the purpose.

  “Go on,” said the man who had first addressed the visitor. “You said there had been two misconceptions.”

  “Yes, that is correct,” said the Afrikaner while his peripheral vision caught the movement at the other end of the table. The Saudi and the pair who had mollified him were seating themselves again. “The other and more important error was the belief that the viral strain would replicate itself even under conditions that were less than genetically ideal for it. That is . . .”

  He paused, miming the next phrase with his lips and tongue before he spoke the words aloud. “It was believed that most or all of those who were exposed to the virus would exhibit some symptoms, but that serious effects would be limited to those test units whose DNA contained the specific bundle of genes to which the strain had been tailored.”

  Pretorius had not said “Arabs,” a mistake of phrasing he might have made except for the Saudi's previous outburst. There was no wind but blew some good . . . and there was nothing of r
eal value that came without risk.

  God knew that there was risk enough in this business, for Karel Pretorius and his folk - and for these others as well.

  “In fact,” the Afrikaner continued, “the principals believe that replication - infection - was solely limited to the tissues of the target group. This is an unexpected level of precision, and it had important positive consequences for the . . . planned endeavor.”

  For the Plan. For his folk's trek back to their home, and to more.

  The - possible - Oriental did not speak at once, but the wheezing fat man said, “There would have been fewer deaths then. Instead there were more, many more. Are you” - the head that was a bullet-shaped shadow set necklessly on a haystack-shaped shadow shifted, the eyes looking toward the Saudi prince - “trying to mislead us ... boy?”

  “No sir,” said Pretorius as calmly as if he did not know his mind had flashed an impulse to kill across the monitors. “Because the genetic delay designed into the strain was on the basis of numbers of replications rather than time - which I understand would not have been possible - the fact that the virus spread only when it was certain to kill meant that it did not use itself up within a few minutes of release, as had been intended.”

  There was quiet conversation around the table, scarcely a buzz to the Afrikaner's ears.

  “I should add,” Pretorius said, because it was his nature as well as his duty to be precise, “that the principals themselves are unclear on the matter. Their courier died in an accident before he could transmit the detailed information they had expected.”

  “Committed suicide,” snapped a member who was speaking for the first time. “He knew it had been botched. Botched.”

  “I bow to your greater knowledge,” said the Afrikaner, more in truth than for effect. All that his own sources could tell him was that the technician from Sky Devon had walked out into vacuum without a space suit. His folk had no access to official reports on the matter, but suicide was a probable enough explanation.