Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  And then, in a single frozen instant, Steward realized how stupid he’d been. He’d accessed the chess problem through a terminal in a hotel room registered in Starbright’s name. If someone had been monitoring, Steward’s name, as one of the few Starbright personnel onstation, would have flashed in bright red letters on the security desk.

  But Charter didn’t do things like that, so far as Steward knew. The place was a sieve—Charter security had been a joke for years, even when Steward had been in the Icehawks. Taler was another matter—they might run Starbright employees through their own security checks in order to make sure the Starbright people working on Taler ships weren’t going to do anything to embarrass them, but they probably wouldn’t bother to monitor suspect chess problems on the off chance that someone they knew would access them. Taler, Steward thought, was safe. And SuTopo probably gave his little speech to every new buck from Starbright.

  Steward began to breathe easier. His misstep had probably gone unnoticed, but on a solid policorp habitat like Vesta it could have been fatal. Starbright wouldn’t be at all happy with an employee who got himself barred from a major policorp, might even send him back to Earth with a nowhere job—recruiting maybe—and black marks all over his file.

  Damn Griffith, Steward thought. He could have got me popped.

  No. Steward corrected himself immediately. I could have got myself popped.

  He reached his cabin, put the spike into his terminal, and randomized it. If somebody’s security was looking at his possessions, he’d be clean.

  He looked up at the walls. Vulvas larger than life winked at him, the porno he hadn’t yet got around to tearing away from his walls. Somehow his relief and anxiety had got mixed up with a craving for tobacco, and his mouth was salivating for it. He clamped down on the desire, tried to concentrate on the vision of himself at liberty inside the insulating blanket of the vacuum. In another fourteen hours he’d be helping to boost the Born toward the Belt, and then no one was going to catch up with him.

  *

  Flames burned in Steward’s mind. Born was accelerating at a steady one point five g as it slammed around Luna, using the moon’s weak gravitational field in a game of snap-the-whip that would send Born cracking beyond Mars, toward the Belt. The engines would continue to burn for another three days, accelerating steadily the entire time.

  If anything were to go wrong, it would most likely be under the stress of the first few hours of a high-g acceleration. For the first critical twelve hours Steward and Reese were both linked to each other and into the engines, the combustion chambers, high-pressure coolant pumps, control surfaces, fuel feeder monitors, backups…graphic analogs of entire systems hung in their minds, flamed in their brains’ sensory centers. Fuel coursed across their tongues, electrons screamed across their vision, the white null sound of fusion roared in their ears.

  Reese took the first four-hour shift with Steward observing, watching the way she gave her precise orders to the vast Starbright engines. Then Steward took the next four hours, Reese standing back, ready to flick the override with a push of her mind and take command if Steward couldn’t handle a situation or acted the wrong way.

  Steward tried to relax in his webbing, to flow with the Zen of the burning analog in his head. Decisions came automatically, easily—his long-term memory seemed to hold the necessary information, and the decisions themselves were simple. Shut off a vernier engine that had jammed full on, compensate for the increasing pitch of the ship by a precise firing of another vernier, inform the attitude computers about the change, monitor the other vernier engines so that the same problem didn’t crop up again…basic stuff that he could almost have performed without any of the training. The Icehawks had given him some time in atmosphere-descent assault-craft simulators, and most of what he’d learned applied here—was simplified, in fact, by the lack of atmosphere and by Luna’s weak gravity. There was a leak in a hydrazine line seal and he shifted hydrazine flow to a backup line. One of the fuel-feeder pumps was running warm and he monitored its temperature frequently.

  Simple as it was, he was relieved when his shift ended. He could feel his jaw muscles unclench and only realized how hard he’d been gripping his webbing only when he began to feel the raw abraded flesh of his palms. He lay back, divorced from the action, watching Reese’s checklist flicker through his mind, happy to let her make the decisions and decide priorities.

  “I’m going to bed,” he was told at the end of Reese’s second shift. It seemed strange to actually hear anything important through his ears and not the headset. “If anything major comes up, go straight into a shutdown. We can afford any time lost to correct a problem. That feeder pump’s cooled down, but keep an eye on it.”

  Steward raised a hand in the heavy gravity and gave a wave to show he had heard. Reese nodded and moved to a heavily padded elevator chair that moved upward through the bulkhead seal, taking Reese and the gravity monkey on her back to her living quarters. Ladders were too dangerous in high-g—ankles could snap like twigs in the event of a fall.

  In Steward’s mind the flames burned on. He could feel himself tensing again, battling the one and a half g as he clicked through his checklist, waiting for some disaster. He noticed an overloading energy pump on some communication lasers and switched to the backup, then watched for two hours as the checklist produced nothing but green lights, a perfectly stabilized burn leaving Earth and its dozens of shining metal moons well behind…. He began to feel his muscles relaxing, giving way before the heavy g, before his own reduced tensions.

  And then something seemed wrong. He sensed it before he found it on his displays, a fluctuation in the pattern that made him uneasy, a power transient somewhere that lasted only a fraction of a second, but that affected other systems in a pattern like a wave, spreading out as the systems absorbed the transient and acted to automatically stabilize the energy flow…. Steward began to look seriously at the systems affected, trying to see where they were hooked together, what relationship they had with one another. The image of another problem came to his mind, and suddenly the two problems merged. He began to isolate systems, patterns forming and dissolving in his mind, and then he realized the problem.

  The fuel-feeder pump was still overheating, white-hot by now, ready to slag itself and splash lithium slurry over the engine compartment. Somehow the sensor that monitored its temperature had been disabled—melted out by the rising heat, possibly, or most likely defective from the start—and none of the automated systems that were supposed to shut the pump down had been triggered. The melting sensor was sending out spikes through the system, but they hadn’t been large enough to trigger an automated response.

  Steward activated a backup pump and shut the hot one down. That was all it took, a simple command, and the situation created by the two malfunctioning pieces of equipment was over. Someone would later have to don a vac suit and go out into the airless engine spaces to replace the sensor and remove the pump for repairs, but that could wait for the end of the burn, and it was minor compared to the results of the fusion reaction running out of control due to irregularities in its fuel supply.

  For the rest of his watch he didn’t succeed in relaxing at all.

  *

  “I’d say you earned your pay,” Reese said when she returned for her next shift.

  “Thanks.”

  “That kind of intuitional leap is what we’re here for,” Reese mumbled as she webbed herself in. An interface stud was already jacked into her head socket; she had taken command of the engines. “The AIs that Starbright can afford to put into a small boat like this one can’t handle that kind of thinking.”

  “Thanks,” Steward said. Even though he’d removed his headset, garish displays were still blazing in his optical centers. “Can I go to bed now?”

  Reese grinned at him. “Sweet dreams, buck.”

  “Enjoy.”

  After the first three-day burn and a short correction burn partway through the flight, there was litt
le to keep the Starbright personnel busy during the long drift to the Belt save repairing the things that had gone wrong during the long acceleration.

  Once the burn was over, the ship’s centrifuge was started and eighty percent Earth-normal gravity prevailed, a relief from the heavy g of the burn. After three days gravity was increased to Earth normal.

  A few days into the trip there was a coded message for Steward from his bank in Ulan Bator: 1,500 Seven Moons dollars had been deposited to his account. And there was another two-word message from Griffith, sent in the clear. It read, Lucky beginner.

  Steward watched the vid, learned to cook Chinese in the Born’s well-supplied kitchen, and exercised a lot, running through martial-arts drills and building muscle on the compact weight machine. He and Reese often worked out together, sparring in the Born’s small gym, Steward honing his reflexes fighting an opponent who was more than a shadow…. Reese was better than he, faster, making full use of the variable-lattice threads that had been woven through her nerves and brain to give her combat reflex and boosted nerve response. Steward was forced to become subtler in his attacks and learned to make multistrike combinations to draw Reese out of her guard, and even then he usually had to take some punishment before getting through.

  The others worked out, too: Keeping fit was of prime use in surviving high-g burns. But Fischer was more interested in aerobic and muscle-building exercise that would help him in his hobby of mountaineering, Cairo preferred various kinds of gymnastics, and SuTopo ran endless tedious miles on a treadmill, his face expressionless, his motion unvarying. Daily, from ten hundred to eleven hundred, then sometimes again in the evening. It was the only time Steward ever saw him without his pitji. Steward could set his watch by the Captain’s appearance in the gym.

  Fischer was friendly and inquisitive, always wanting to compare Steward’s life on Earth with his own youth in orbit. He wore loud clothes and always opened his mouth wide when he laughed, showing square yellow teeth. His pale Nordic complexion was unsuitable for space; he took carotene supplements to give his face some texture. Cairo was vaguely distant, always preoccupied, always with a squeeze bulb of coffee. SuTopo was less a person than a presence, a calm source of authority, like a reigning monarch.

  Aside from sparring in the gym and the times they were involved on the same job, Steward hardly ever saw Reese, but when he did, the sparring seemed to extend to the rest of their relationship; their speech was always strewn with verbal booby traps, barbs, insinuation…. Despite the fact they worked together, Steward knew very little about her. He knew about SuTopo’s bonsai, Fischer’s interest in mountains, but whatever Reese did when she was by herself was unknown. She was often in her cabin, and when she was, the door was closed. Steward was never invited in. But in spite of the wariness of the relationship, in spite of the fact that he knew very little about her, Steward felt closest to Reese. However cautious they were, however little they knew each other, there was a friendship there, a mutual respect. Steward was careful not to presume on it, to tread on Reese’s privacy. That, he concluded, was what friends did.

  *

  Steward was surprised by how many layers of pornography were on his walls—there seemed to be six or eight—and the process of removing them and repainting the plastic surface was a long one.

  After two weeks in space, he began to regret that he’d taken all the pictures off. Porn would at least have given him something halfway pleasant to think about.

  After four weeks he was happy to have scraped the stuff off. The same pictures day after day would have grown both tedious and frustrating. He began to understand why the previous occupant had kept pasting up new photos.

  Steward thought about SuTopo’s bonsai, Fischer’s picture of Everest. The bonsai trees were representative of what SuTopo wanted, what he longed for—his family, his past, his memories…. Everest, to Fischer, was also an object of desire. Steward wondered what object would serve best in his own quarters, would serve to define his own longings.

  He had no photo of Natalie, no reminders of his previous life. Ashraf had discouraged anything of the sort. He wished he had a picture of her, reminding him of what he’d lost, what he wanted to regain.

  But there was another image that persisted, a video screen, flickering with interference pattern, and behind it, a face, a voice that was his own, a knowledge that was beyond him but that was approaching, coming closer with every second the Born continued its approach to the Belt… the face that was clarifying as Vesta approached, the hollow asteroid where the Alpha had gone in search of Colonel de Prey.

  *

  He called up the computer for its maps and history of Vesta. The amount of data surprised him—there were detailed maps, with recent updates that included such information as major power, water, air, and communications mains, location of environmental seals and security zones, details of security procedures, and local laws. It was far more reminiscent of an Icehawks briefing than a travel brochure, and Steward’s respect for Taler’s intelligence service increased.

  Vesta had been pioneered by Far Ranger, who had first burrowed into the place as part of its mining operation and then turned it into a major Belt habitat. At one time, eighty thousand individuals lived in its interior. That number had been reduced by about a third after the Artifact War, when Brighter Suns was created in the wake of the collapse of the Outward Policorps, and the population was evicted from half the habitat while the Powers were brought in behind a wall of security and biologic shields.

  The center of the sprawling hollowed-out section was given to docking bays and ship maintenance, power generation, and various forms of industry, primarily production and refining of metal and crystal. Much of the work, particularly the power production and smelting, had been moved to the surface of the asteroid. There was a large colony of 6,000 second-stage colonists living only in Vesta’s microgravity and involved in industrial production of free-gravity items. The standard human population was concentrated in one area of the colony, living in three vast centrifuges that provided Earthlike gravity.

  Mining was still going on—Vesta was a big asteroid, with a diameter of more than 300 kilometers, and only a small part was occupied. But mining had become secondary to import-export: With half the trade with the Powers funneling through Vesta, the place had become the busiest trading station in the Belt.

  Of the Powers, little was known or said. Access to their areas was strictly controlled through three airlocks: two for personnel, one for goods. Security was tight all over Vesta, every public area was under the supervision of security AIs, and with the wealth that trade with the Powers was providing, Brighter Suns could afford the best in police personnel. Brighter Suns policorporate warriors were the equal of any in human space, and their duties were clear: Everything was secondary to the security and well-being of the Powers and the trade they represented. All internal communications were monitored, and access to outside communication was strictly controlled. There were several layers in the security bureaucracy, but the highest was called the Renseignement General, which meant simply General Information and which made Steward smile, remembering the spy romances of his childhood. The business arm of the RG was the Pulsar Division, an elite counterintelligence unit. The Born’s computer actually had a flow chart of the Pulsar unit’s organization.

  There was another, more shadowy group that handled outside intelligence and industrial espionage. They were called Group Seven. The comp had no organizational charts, no information on them save that of their existence.

  Brighter Suns was a policorp created by other policorps for the express purpose of carrying on commerce with the Powers, controlling access to the aliens so that no new trade war could result. Brighter Suns held sovereignty over no territory other than Vesta—its charter forbade it—but it was one of the wealthiest policorps in existence and had one of the largest trading fleets. There were more Brighter Suns employees off Vesta than on it, occupying trading stations and docking ports througho
ut the rest of human space.

  Colonel de Prey had lived here, Steward knew, in the employ of Brighter Suns. The Alpha had found him and probably killed him, and then had been killed here or later by Curzon. This was a piece of Vesta’s history that had not been picked up by Taler’s computers.

  Steward thought about it all and tried to plan a course of action, then gave up on it. Even with all the information here, there wasn’t enough available about the things he needed to know. He was going to have to begin searching data files on Vesta before he could make any further decisions.

  And Griffith’s scheme? With communications being monitored, it was riskier here than elsewhere. He wasn’t going to start accessing chess programs until the end of the stay here, when it would no longer matter if he were brought under suspicion.

  He didn’t want to be greedy.

  *

  Then came the deceleration burn, lasting another three days, marked by the four-hour shifts split between Reese and Steward that left them both exhausted and floating limp in their webbing, grateful for the return to weightlessness. Steward had been planning to charge off the ship as soon as he could, but he found he didn’t have the strength for it, and floated up to his cabin to go to sleep. Reese followed him, heading for her own quarters. They found SuTopo waiting for them, hanging upside down outside Steward’s cabin door, his pitji still firmly on his head.

  “If you’ll give me your passports,” SuTopo said, “I’ll clear us all through customs.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll also need to report to Cairo to give a blood sample. They’re fanatical about contamination here, and they need samples from all of us before they’ll let anyone onstation.”

  “You’d think they’d just keep my records on file from last time,” Reese muttered.

  Steward’s Starbright passport was a black plastic wafer with the policorporate sigil on it, contained a permanent-lattice thread with his official identification, finger and retinal prints, and any unique medical history that emergency doctors might need to know. Apparently it didn’t have whatever information Brighter Suns needed from his blood. Steward took the passport from his cabin and gave it to SuTopo.