“Have a good leave,” Steward said.
“You’ll leave the ship before I will, I think,” SuTopo said as he put Steward’s passport in his pocket and closed the Velcro flap over it. “I’m supervising the unloading.”
“Sorry,” Steward said, trying hard to raise some genuine sympathy. He swam to the sick bay with Reese, where Cairo stuck a needle in his arm and efficiently removed some blood, then he floated back to his rack and raised the harness webbing.
He closed his eyes. Engine analogs pulsed on the back of his lids. Sleep came in less than a hundred breaths.
*
He slept about seven hours, showered, pulled on his Jack Totem T-shirt, cords, and jeans jacket, and, before he left, checked his messages—he wasn’t going to make that mistake again. There was a garbled message from Fischer, obscured by a lot of clatter and laughter in the background, about a good party at a place called the Time Zero, and nothing else. He floated forward to the personnel tube that led to the Vesta airlock.
His passport had already presumably cleared him through customs, so he pressed his thumb to the plate with the Brighter Suns logo on it and the airlock opened. He stepped in, pressed the button that let the lock mechanism know he was inside, and watched the door behind him hiss shut. Lights ran green above the inner door, it opened, and he floated into a noisy concourse sheathed in dark alloy, where cargo was being moved in vast weightless packets to the sound of blatting warning horns and the muted hiss of control jets.
Steward glanced at the holos that pointed him in the direction of human-occupied Vesta, then pushed off from the airlock door toward a tunnel entrance a hundred meters distant.
As he drifted slowly across, Steward heard a hissing behind and to one side, and saw two men floating toward him. They each wore roomy, dark quilted jackets buttoned up to the throat, and each carried a small hand-held gas jet to help him maneuver in the weightless cavern. One had a hand stuffed in his jacket pocket. They were watching him with mild, uninterested eyes.
They were moving on a collision course, but Steward wasn’t worried—the others could control their movements, and he knew they saw him. But as they drifted closer, he saw that the bulky jackets, though in a civilian style, were the kind worn by military and security people, with interior pockets that could be filled with alloy and ceramic inserts to deflect bullets.
Adrenaline gates surged open and he could feel a shift in his perceptions, in his body, as nerves and mind slammed into overdrive. These people were after him. He could waste time trying to think of a reason, but thinking was pointless in view of the fact that they were already here.
He looked around, scanning the vast room. There was no one near him, and the two men were growing ever closer. He could flail about in hopes of altering his trajectory, but the two jacketed men could alter their course at will, and had the advantage as long as they were in a weightless environment. Steward was going to have to survive the first impact and then get his back against a bulkhead. Then he might stand a chance.
Steward looked back at the two men. They were within ten meters now, and he could tell from their expressions that they knew he was aware of them. Their eyes flickered, calculating trajectories, angles. Steward cocked his arms and legs, waiting. They drifted closer in silent slow motion, unhurried.
He tried to kick the first one, hoping to connect and push them apart, but the man was ready and Steward kicked only air. The other seized his cuff, and then took his hidden hand out of his pocket. His fist was encased in a black zap glove, and Steward could feel panic begin to rise deep inside him. He kicked his foot again and managed to get his cuff free, but he could see the triumphant, tight-lipped smile as the man drifted closer, as he raised his fist and punched out against Steward’s knee.
Laser light burned in Steward’s brain as his every neuron misfired, as he stiffened from the electric shock and air burst from his lungs in a single shrieking exhalation. Tears stung his eyes. He tried to shout, to move, but his body had gone limp as his nerves wailed in shock, and nothing in him would respond save his own rising fear. The two men had seized him now, were drifting with him toward the tunnel.
One of them had a hypo in his hand. He looked at Steward and grinned. “Bye-bye, asshole,” he said. Steward felt the pain of the needle driving through his corduroy jeans into his thigh, and the burn as the drug was injected.
He wanted to ask them why, at the end, but decided not to. He concluded he’d just as soon not know.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Steward panted through a mouth that was swollen and dry. He tried to lick his lips, but there was no moisture there at all. It seemed to him that he could feel his tongue splitting as he moved it. There was a ferocious pain behind his eyes. The nape of his neck felt moist. Cautiously he cracked his eyelids open.
This was, in fact, worse than he anticipated. He was in a metal cube about three meters square, the walls dull silver alloy with dark mottling. One wall featured a door with a slot for food, heavily screened ventilators, and a pair of bright floodlights, also behind screens, that were incapable of being controlled from Steward’s side of the door. He was stretched on a too-short foam mattress encased in a dark plastic cover and lying on the floor. Two blankets were thrown over him. There was no furniture except for a combination sink/toilet. He was naked.
He felt very heavy. This was a high-g room, about one point three, designed to wear him down.
He was probably being monitored. The dryness in his mouth was painful. He juggled the two ideas for a while, wondering whether he cared if they knew he was awake, then decided there was no point in being quiet. He stood carefully, his spine and knees popping. There was a wet area on the plastic mattress cover where he’d sweated out the drug. He saw two round burn marks on the flesh above one knee where the zap glove’s electrodes had hit him. Breathing seemed to take a lot of effort. Maybe the oxygen content of the air had been lowered, again to wear him down. Steward moved to the sink to rinse his mouth.
He was very thirsty. He held his mouth to the tap and drank for a long time. The water was flat and tasteless, fresh from the recycler.
Water dripped on his chest as he straightened. He wiped it off with his hand. G dragged at his legs, his spine, his kidneys. Steward moved back to his mattress and began to stretch out, getting the kinks out of his spine, his body. Tried to compose his mind, build his mental armor.
He finished his stretches without interruption. He was feeling better, the headache ebbing.
What the hell, he thought. He pushed the mattress and blankets aside and began to do calisthenics. He could think of little else to do.
About the sixtieth high-g push-up he began to reconsider, but it was too late and he wasn’t going to give his watchers the satisfaction of seeing him give up. So he pumped out another forty, trying hard to keep his form perfect, and then stood up for a few rounds of squat jumps.
“Prisoner Steward.” A toneless male voice that came from behind one of the screens on his door. “Get on your knees, facing away from the door. Put your hands behind your back.”
“In a minute,” Steward said, and continued with his current set.
“Get on your knees.” The voice was as expressionless as before. “Face away from the door. Put your hands behind your back.”
“Nine. Ten.” Steward wondered how many times they’d repeat the instructions before sending in people with zap gloves, decided that this wasn’t the best time to find out. He obeyed instructions and knelt with his hands behind him.
The door opened. From the sound of their boots on the metal floor he sensed at least two guards, maybe three. Hands seized his forearms. He felt a garment being pushed roughly up his arms, dropping onto his back and calves, and then handcuffs closed around his wrists. He tried the handcuffs, found that they were the kind with a solid bar between them instead of a flexible chain.
“Stand up.” The voice was odd, filtered somehow, as if heard over a telephone.
As he stood
he looked at the guards, two men and a woman. The woman stood behind the other two with a zap glove on each hand, gazing at him with butterfly-wing eyes. Each was taller than he was, muscular, stone-faced, dressed in a gray uniform complete with big armored jacket. They were wearing black plastic helmets with face shields lowered. If Steward tried to hit them, all he could do was break his own knuckles. The odd quality of the voice was due to its coming from a speaker on a guard’s belt and originating from a mic inside the helmet.
Before cuffing him they’d pushed a thin cotton robe onto him from behind. One of the men stepped to Steward’s front and drew the robe around him, fastening it with Velcro tabs. Steward looked down at the robe. It was faded blue and had a number and Steward’s name stenciled on it in bright new black letters.
The guard dropped a pair of heelless plastic slippers in front of Steward. Steward stepped into them.
“Turn around,” the guard said.
“I don’t suppose it would help to ask why I’m being held.” Which, Steward knew, would have got him a backhand across the face in two-thirds of the jails in the human sphere. He wanted to find out what their orders were.
“Turn around.” Without a blink. Maybe they’d been told to exercise special care.
Steward turned, felt the guard seize the bar that kept his handcuffs apart. He was going to try to remember every detail of what he saw next.
“Follow.”
The corridor was bare alloy and was lit by fluorescents set into slots in the ceiling. The guards marched Steward past the featureless doors of six other cells—Steward counted each one—and then through an armored security door. Here was a desk with another guard, his helmet off, holding papers that one of Steward’s escort had to sign. Presumably they released Steward into his custody. Beyond him was an elevator door. In order to work it one of the guards had to feed his plastic ID into a slot next to the buttons. The elevator rose four floors. Steward felt lighter as he rose in the massive centrifuge. His knee joints crackled.
The corridor was busier, filled with guards and businesslike, incurious people in civilian clothes. The ceiling and floor were alloy, the walls plastered and painted beige. There were closed doors, each numbered, with electric keyboard combination locks. Signs on the walls warned about security, safety, and procedural matters, and there was a bulletin board with notices pinned to it, the board next to a vidscreen on which notices—possibly the same notices—scrolled continuously.
The escort moved Steward into a large room full of desks and people. Steward noticed a durable carpet on the floor, soundproofing on the ceiling, clutter on the desks. There were murmured conversations and the tapping of console keys. Coffee and soft-drink dispensers were built into the walls. “Stop,” said the man behind Steward, tugging on the crossbar of his handcuffs. Steward came to a halt.
The guard in the lead left the group, moved to a nearby, empty desk. He raised the faceplate of his helmet to talk to a woman at the next desk, who nodded and indicated a man who was standing against the near wall, pushing buttons on a coffee dispenser. The guard moved toward him. When the man turned at the guard’s approach, Steward saw he was of middle height, age about forty, a little puffy around the middle. He was dressed in dark trousers, bulky quilted jacket, light blue shirt. He was going bald on top and his dark hair was cut short. The guard stopped near him and addressed him respectfully. The man sipped his coffee from a foam cup, made a face, and then looked across the room to Steward.
A warning moved up Steward’s spine. The man’s eyes were angry, intelligent, almost savage, cold as the solar wind. I’m going to break you like a twig. That was the message Steward read. It was like looking into the void.
The man nodded again, then moved back to his desk. He picked up a key spike from a box filled with papers that sat on his desk and put it in his pocket. He punched a number on his phone and spoke briefly, then picked up a file folder from his desk and moved toward where Steward waited. “Number twelve,” he said to the guards, and brushed past Steward without looking at him. He had an accent that Steward couldn’t place.
“Turn around,” said the guard behind. Steward shuffled around till he was facing the other way, then let himself be marched down the corridor in the other direction.
He could smell the balding man’s coffee. It made his mouth water.
The balding man took the spike out of his pocket and pushed it into one of the locks on the door. He pressed a code into the keyboard, and electronic bolts shot back. He stepped back from the door, putting the spike back in his pocket.
“Put him in the chair,” he said. Steward’s guard moved him through the door and ordered him to sit.
The chair was black gas-planet plastic, backless, and bolted to the floor. The bar on Steward’s handcuffs was fastened to a metal projection that thrust from the back of the chair.
There was a small desk in front of Steward. The balding man sat behind it. Steward could see LEDs reflected in his eyes, monitoring Steward’s condition through the cuffs and through stress indicators in his voice.
Monitored. Steward tried to bring moisture into his mouth, failed.
He possessed nothing, he knew, but himself. Nothing else could help him. He had no armor, no weapons. He had to build them, somehow.
I have no tactics, he thought. I make existence and the void my tactics. A Zen chant.
I have no castle. The immutable spirit is my castle.
I have no sword. From the state which is above and beyond, from thought, I make my sword.
The universe was hostile; he would therefore, he decided, make his own. He decided to build constellations in his head, remember the stars and the way they were arranged. One by one, until he had heaven in his mind. Scorpius first. He tried to remember how many stars it had, how they were arranged. Antares, M4, M7, just so. All learned in his night navigation classes.
“Leave us,” the balding man said. “I’ll let you know when we’re done.”
The guards left. The alloy door closed behind them. Steward thought of stars as the balding man stared at him in cold silence and sipped his coffee. Steward breathed deliberately, flexed his muscles in the cuffs, testing the limits of his posture. Tried to keep his mind elsewhere, away from the stare he felt on him, away from the metal box that was holding him. Tried not to react when, after a long time filled only with the whispering of the vent, the man finally spoke.
“I’m Colonel Angel,” he said. “I work for the Pulsar Division. And you’re my meat.”
Achernar, thought Steward. At the end of Eridanus.
Wolf 294, he thought. Sheol.
*
Angel was trying to hold his eyes with his stare. Aldebaran, thought Steward. In Orion. Wrong. In Taurus.
“Firstly,” Angel said, “the Procureur has declared your case a matter covered by the Internal Security Code. That means you will be held as long as we feel like holding you, and any records will be under permanent seal. You won’t be talking to anyone, not an attorney, no one. No habeas corpus, no bond. You’ve just disappeared into a pit, and I’m the only man who has the ladder that can get you out.”
Steward looked up at him. From the universe in his head Angel seemed a long way. “I don’t suppose the code authorizes you to tell me exactly what I’ve supposed to have done.”
There was a vein pulsing in Angel’s temple. “Multiple murder, for a start.”
More than one? Steward thought.
“Sabotage. Espionage. Attacks on accredited members of the Power Trade Legation. Minor things like theft and customs avoidance.”
“When am I supposed to have done this, exactly?”
“Nineteen February. This year.”
Steward forced himself to smile. “Got you there. I was someplace else.”
Angel seemed unimpressed. “I suppose you can prove it. Witnesses and everything, right? You never left Ricot.”
“I’ve never been on Ricot. Last February I was in a cryogenic vault in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.�
�� Angel didn’t react.
“That’s on Earth, spacebuck,” Steward said.
“New bodies happen all the time. I can see you’re younger than you’re supposed to be.”
“I don’t have memories of anything that happened after the age of twenty-two. So you’re throwing me in a pit for something I have no memory of committing.” Steward grinned again. “I guess you’ll look pretty silly to the Procureur.”
“Consolidated would be stupid not to give you a new identity after what you did.”
“Consolidated didn’t. That’s my point. My Alpha—that’s the buck you’re after—he died on Ricot in March. Consolidated Systems isn’t interested in me. They didn’t give me a new identity. If I were still working for them, do you think they wouldn’t give me a new name and prints, at least?”
Angel’s expression didn’t change. “Delaying tactics won’t work, Steward,” he said. “Your only hope of getting out of here is to cooperate.”
“Look it up. Get my records out of the hospital.”
“Records can be altered.”
Steward shrugged as far as the handcuffs would let him. The door behind Angel opened and another man came in. Ghostly fingers brushed Steward’s belly at the sight of him, a fear that mutated rapidly to anger. The man was big, bullet-headed, narrow-eyed. Steward recognized him as the one who had hit him with the zap glove when he was arrested. The second man leaned against the back wall without saying anything. He had his hand stuffed in his coat pocket, as if he still had a zap glove on.
I’d like a minute with you, Steward thought. A minute without your glove or jets or whatever technology you’ve got threaded into your nerves. I don’t care if you’ve got twenty kilos on me.
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