by Mel Keegan
“Shakedown,” Rodman told him. “I want to make sure the patches and upgrades are good before I let Shapiro hand me some suicidal assignment.”
“But I’m pretty sure it’ll be Velcastra or Borushek,” Hubler added thoughtfully. “We ought to be tracking mines, monitoring deployment. Activating them when a Fleet carrier battle group sticks its nose insystem after the declaration.”
“The declaration,” Marin echoed. “I like the sound of it.”
The days when each colonial republic would declare its sovereignty were racing up, and Travers felt the jump in his pulse. Even then, Chandra Liang was conferencing with his Daku associates in Marak, and the Nine World Commonwealth flags would be flying over Ulrand before this week was out. The Ulrish were still celebrating – they were the first free republic, the site of the first genuine battle, and the first victory.
“Monitoring drones is boring work,” Hubler was saying, “but Shapiro’s paying well, and we could use the downtime.”
From the look on Rodman’s face, she was not so sure. Marin dunked another breadstick and waited for Travers’s coffee to be delivered before he said quietly to Rodman and Hubler, “Has Shapiro briefed you about the Hellgate mission?”
The look on their faces would have curdled milk. “If you can call it a briefing,” Rodman said tartly. “He’s recruiting, looking for volunteers with a death wish. Something about working the wrong side of Hellgate, hunting, and I assume he’s after wreckers.” She shook her head. “Even if Freespacers worked the Drift, wrecking Fleet ships – which they don’t – I wouldn’t sign aboard to hunt them down.”
“Ah.” Travers sat back and regarded Marin speculatively. “That’s not what it’s about, Asako. Not by a long shot. You don’t have the data.” He lifted a brow at Hubler. “Roark?”
The big man lifted both hands as if Travers had him at gunpoint. “The little bit of it I know ain’t my data to share. The man wants it known, he’ll come out and say it himself.”
“Wants what known?” Rodman demanded.
Marin groaned and passed a hand before his eyes. “You remember back on Celeste, the device Henri Belczak’s people had found, and were poking around?”
“Alien tech, older than God, could be unstable, might be a weapon, dates from the same era as the Resalq ruins,” she said slowly.
“Right.” Marin paused and laced his fingers on the table before him. “You must have heard Jazinsky refer to it, on the comm, as Zunshu.”
“Yeah. Some new tech jargon.” Rodman looked from Marin to Travers and back, and then fixed her partner with a glare.
“Zunshu,” Hubler growled. “No, it’s no kind of jargon. It’s a Resalq word, translates out as ‘enemy,’ because they didn’t know what else to call the bastards.”
In fact, what Hubler knew about the Zunshu situation was no more than Mick Vidal would have seen fit to tell him, at the time they were both on the Wastrel, prepping to launch the Orpheus. He knew nothing specific about Lai’a, simply the existence of an enormous, powerful ship which dropped out of nowhere at Ulrand. But Rodman was so deeply ignorant of events, the few hints Shapiro had dropped regarding the Hellgate mission made no sense.
As Hubler spoke, her brows arched at him. “I saw a documentary on CNS about the Resalq war, the fight they lost. They were wiped off the face of the Deep Sky. Zunshu is their word of enemy? Neat. Might help you win a pub quiz. I’ll add it to my store of useless information.”
“Useless?” Marin pushed back his chair. “We’re going up to the bar, Roark. I think it’s time you told her. You need authorization to share data? You got it. Come find us when you’ve said it all.”
The prompt inspired several passionate curses, and Hubler’s face set in grim lines. “Well, shit, thanks, guys. I needed this.”
“Needed what?” Rodman’s voice rose. “Roark, you want to start making sense, or do I yell for a medic?”
With a chuckle, Travers headed for the bar. He threaded his way through the tables toward the big screens where a highlights package of the local aeroball playoffs was punctuated by commercials for the eco-tour flights to the great domes in the El Khouri wasteland. The fragile environments there were protected, nurtured, using cash that had streamed from Shapiro’s department, and local funding raised by the tours.
Perched on a tall stool, Marin was watching the screens. As a bartender drifted closer Travers ordered a couple of lite beers and pulled another stool closer. He glanced back across the lounge to the table where Rodman was intent on Hubler, who was speaking rapidly in undertones, with a lot of emphatic hand gestures. He would be talking about Mick Vidal, and the Orpheus. He would add the little he knew about Mark Sherratt, whom he had met so fleetingly – about the Wastrel ’s true work, and the research that had kept Jazinsky imprisoned in the lab for years now.
The beer was local, and little more than bitter, sparking water. Travers made a face as he tried it, and set the glass down. “Useless information,” he mused.
“Depends on your perspective.” Marin’s eyes were still on the game, but his left hand settled on Travers’s right knee. “For any population close enough to Hellgate to be under threat, it’d be too much information. The only thing you’d get from sharing it would be a mass exodus, and a lot of innocent people would be trampled in the crush.”
“Get out and go where?” Travers frowned at Hubler and Rodman. “Most people out here were born in the Deep Sky, so they don’t have anyplace to go back to, or else they came out here following work –”
“Like my parents.”
“Exactly. They follow the work here because wages and job prospects in the Middle Heavens went to crap decades ago.” Travers tried the beer again. “Push a big population back into the old worlds, and you know what it would be. Economies would collapse under the strain. Mass unemployment, poverty, depression, privation, disease.”
“Prejudice against the migrant population, who’d be termed refugees,” Marin added. “The ghetto structure would come right back as people crowding together, safety in numbers. Kids are born and grow up in the habitation modules. Rafts of the population are selected against in terms of education, so good jobs are impossible to get. Some genius decides you must be educated, employed, or both, to get full citizenship, without which you can’t vote.”
“Fast forward a generation, you’ll have a big population of illiterate labor grades who’re miserable, desperate, ready to fight for their rights … civil war.” Travers sighed. “But they’ll be up against the Army, Fleet, the best Tactical can field. Bloodbath. They’re arrested, sentenced. The razor-wire goes up. Ethnics are locked up for the safety of the legit community, because they’re dangerous. And no one would argue, after the recent bloodshed.”
Marin lifted his glass in a mock salute. “Too much information, Neil. It has the potential to be a far greater disaster than anything the Zunshu automata can cause in the short term. Millions could perish and two, three generations would pay for it. Leave people be, while somebody with the ability to do something actually gets out there and does it. Fast,” he added. “Time enough to push the panic button, start the exodus, if the Hellgate mission turns into a bust.” He paused, brows arching. “Of course, if the mission does go bad, you and I wouldn’t live to see the panic back here. The people with the potential to avert this –”
“Meaning, us. And if Shapiro’s mission is a wipeout, there’ll be nothing left but evacuation, no matter how much it costs. Damn.” Travers took another draught of the beer and looked for the bartender. She was busy with several Freespacers who were half drunk when they wandered into Skye High, and were finishing the job on vodka and mango juice.
“Probably.” Marin swung the stool around, leaned back against the bar and watched Hubler and Rodman. “It all comes down to Lai’a, doesn’t it? If the ship is good enough, it’ll get through. And back.”
“It’s the back part that concerns me.” Travers leaned toward the bartender as she drifted closer. “Make it a
nother Irish coffee,” he decided. “Curtis?”
“Green tea and lime, over ice, with a shot of ginseng.” Marin was still intent on the others. “Damnit, Asako looks mad enough to chew nails.”
She was furious, and Hubler seemed to be taking the brunt of the anger. She marched away from their table, and he was close enough behind her for Travers to hear as he said,
“I told you, Captain, it wasn’t my data to share.”
“You’re not in fleet now,” she reminded him. “You ship with me, you bloody sleep with me, you don’t keep secrets. Get me a tequila.”
“Get your own,” Hubler growled. “And if you had some wild idea I was going to just blab data on the project Mick fucking died for, you’re dead wrong, lady. You were always going to get to know when the time was right, and I’m not the one who decides the time.”
“And they are?” Rodman demanded with angry gestures at Travers and Marin, though she was subsiding as she saw the sense of his argument. “You and Mick. You were close.”
“We were close.” Hubler rapped sharply on the bar. “Hey, any chance of getting any service down here? Make it a vodka”
The Freespacers swung toward him, two women, three men, much closer to drunk than sober. Marin groaned. “Jesus, this is going to turn into a brawl.”
“It’s all right, folks,” Travers said levelly. “Just a private argument. No need to get involved. How about I buy this round, and we call it good?” He set down a thick wad of the garish local currency, and with a hand clenched into Hubler’s sleeve, turned him back around. “It’s nobody’s business but Shapiro’s, Rodman. Understand – Roark knows about two percent of what’s really going on. Just enough to give you a shadow of an idea, and make sense of what Shapiro might be talking about. You want to know more, you talk to us, or you talk to Shapiro himself, or Rick Vaurien.”
“I bloody knew Vaurien was up to something!” Rodman swiped the glass out of Hubler’s hand and swallowed the contents untasted. “And as for Barb Jazinsky – I’ve known her too long for her to fool me.” She gave Travers a sidelong look. “We used to hang out on the spacers’ rink, the three of us. Me and Barb and Rafe Byrne, when the Wastrel got into port. We’d play mahjong, get a little blitzed, cruise the Companions and get friendly when something we liked wandered by. I wasn’t long out of Fleet. Rafe was looking for a berth, and Barb was just desperate to get the hell out of the lab for a while, off the job, and away from Rick.”
“Away from Rick?” Travers was astonished. “Why the hell would she want to get away from Rick?”
“Maybe because they were rubbing each other the wrong way,” Rodman said sourly.
“Over what?” Travers began.
“Over you, you idiot,” Rodman told him. “Vaurien was waiting for you, but you just never came home to roost. Years later, him and Barb got it patched up, and she got to work with the great Mark Sherratt. Rafe got the berth he was looking for, flying with Sergei. And me? I got the Harlequin and a whole lot more trouble than I bargained for.”
“You got me,” Hubler muttered, not looking at her.
She appraised him mutely for a moment, and sighed. “Yeah, I did. And I guess I got a good deal. I just didn’t know you were keeping secrets.”
“Not my secrets,” Hubler repeated.
“You said that already.” Rodman leaned both elbows on the bar at Marin’s side. “And I guess you’d guard my secrets the same way?”
He drained his glass and upturned it on the bar. “You know I would, Asako. I just don’t know what you’re being so shitty about.”
“What the man said,” Marin said pointedly. “Some things, Asako, you just don’t tell. Not till the time comes.”
Rodman glared at him with dwindling resolve. “And you and Travers decide when it’s time.”
“Not really,” Marin allowed quietly, “but we know enough to be uncomfortably aware of the truth. There’s not much time left for any of us, and certainly not enough to waste it, pratting around in ignorance.” He was nursing the green tea, watching the game. “You know enough, now, to stay the hell away from the frontier colonies, right?”
Skipping a beat, she backed off a pace and cooled down visibly. “It’s not a design flaw in the new generation colony generators, then.”
“Nope.” Travers slid off the stool and came around behind Marin. “The Resalq never knew what to call them. Zunshu. Enemy. It’s as good as any other word. You want to know more, call Shapiro.”
“I … will.” Rodman set a hand on Hubler’s arm. “Mick Vidal knew all this stuff? He actually took a ship into a Drift storm?”
“Yeah, he did.” Hubler looked away. “That’s where they come from. And he told me, if we ever want to take the fight to them, kick the crap out of them on their turf instead of getting cut up for dog meat on our own homeworlds, then we learn to ride the gravity express, even if the price of knowledge is the lives of a few test pilots.”
“Well … shit,” Rodman whispered.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Hubler’s face was shuttered, bleak. “Mick thought it was worth dying for. Me? I left right after the flight, and because I didn’t stick around, join their flying circus, they didn’t share data. That’s all I know, Asako. I swear to God.”
She was nodding. “I believe you. So, Roark.”
“So.” Hubler took a half-step closer.
“You want we should talk to Shapiro?” Rodman wondered.
The big shoulders twitched in an awkward shrug. “I dunno. Honestly,” Hubler admitted. “I’m guessing Shapiro wants to fly where Mick flew, and I’m not going to lie to you, babe. The thought scares shit out of me.”
Travers tugged up the collar of his jacket as a chill breeze wafted through the bar from the doors, which opened onto the rink. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Roark. Talk to Shapiro. You know he’s recruiting.”
“For a mission,” Hubler said doubtfully. “For the mission.”
“Purely volunteer,” Marin added. “And we also told you, Confederate agents on Velcastra tried to kill him. Right now, warrants for his arrest will be appearing on CityNet on every world between here and Earth. The charges are light years wide of the mark, but good enough to stand him in front of a military firing squad, if they ever actually got him into custody! You might like to know the Mercury ID’d as an independent when she cruised into Ulrish space.”
At last Rodman chuckled. “Harrison Shapiro just ID’d as a – a Freespacer? Well, damn. There’s hope for us all.”
“There might be, if Shapiro can pull this off.” Travers looked up at the screens as the brilliant colors of aeroball skinsuits replaced the commercials.
“You mean the Colonial Wars?” Rodman hazarded.
“No.” Marin drained his glass and pulled out his wallet. “You’re soon going to be on assignment to wrangle minefields, and by now you know enough about our business to know there’s some new weapon. Fleet can’t possibly know about it. The key colonies are set to make chopped liver of a carrier battle group. Chandra Liang is pulling most of the strings now. Shapiro is in the process of handing the position of puppetmaster to him.”
“And the rest of us,” Hubler said with grim determination, “need to decide which way to jump when the fun starts.” He frowned deeply at Rodman. “We could make a run for Freespace. God knows, we could leave a smoking hole in the ground where Henri Belczak was standing, and make a bid for Celeste! But they’re losing real estate too, remember. Silverlake went the same way as the legit outposts. Fact? It’s getting too dangerous out there.”
“You could also head in,” Marin suggested. “Beg Barb Jazinsky for one last favor, have her reregister the Harlequin as a legit trash hauler, and then get yourselves back into the Middle Heavens, even the Near Sky worlds. You could watch the whole thing on the vidnews. Neil and I have thought about it.”
The arrogance and belligerence had bled away from Asako Rodman now, leaving her entirely human and disquietingly vulnerable. Travers had nev
er seen these qualities about her before, and when she turned to him, looking for perspective, perhaps advice, he spoke honestly. “It’s down to this, Asako. The people who fight for the Deep Sky will come out owning a decent piece of it, when the dust settles. Show them your sterntubes right now, run in either direction, and you’ll come back out here as a common crew. There might even be bad feeling against Freespacers who cut and ran when they were needed the most.”
“Has anybody calculated the chances of survival?” Rodman rasped, as if her teeth were clenched.
“In the Colonial Wars? Damned good,” Marin judged. “Shapiro wouldn’t be handing the reins to Chandra Liang if the key colonies were not perfectly positioned. The shakedown is actually scheduled. It happens when the Chicago gets here. It’s safe to tell you, the battle group will be maneuvered into a commitment to fight at Velcastra, and since you’re about to take an assignment to wrangle the minefields, you already know what the Chicago will be flying into.” He shook his head slowly. “I wouldn’t want to be there.”
“And this other thing, the Zunshu,” Rodman prompted. “Shapiro’s recruiting for a mission. You want to quote me the survival odds?”
“Jazinsky reckons, about forty percent,” Travers said candidly. “Soon as we get Rutherford aboard, we’re headed for the Drift, fast as the Mercury can do it. You want the bald truth? Curtis and I haven’t signed with Shapiro yet.”
“Not till we hear it from Mark Sherratt, and Jazinsky herself,” Marin said softly. “And Lai’a.”
“Who’s Leah?” Rodman wondered, slightly mispronouncing the name.
“Now, that,” Travers said in wry tones, “would be classified.”
“Because the time ain’t right?” Rodman groaned.
“The time, the place, the company.” Travers summoned a faint smile.
They fell silent as the bartender passed a handy to Marin, and he picked up the tab with a thumbprint and a polite smile. “You can fly in convoy with us,” he offered Hubler and Rodman, “see the goods for yourself, decide if you want to buy in. You’ve both served in the Drift, you know the territory.” He glanced at his chrono and stepped away. “As for Neil and myself, we’re on downtime till Shapiro gets hold of the senator. There’s not much on Ulrand to see and do, but we’ve hired a car.”