He took a deep breath and punched it up on the screen.
The first page was a warning of the penalties—imprisonment, behavior modification therapy, or execution—incurred by anyone of insufficient security grade who read the dossier. Some of the information contained in the file was accessible only to individuals of the highest security grade.
There was a rush of pleasure up Steward’s spine. He smiled. This was going to be good.
The first part was pedestrian stuff, medical history, vital statistics, early biography. The text was filled with endnotes referring him to medical and psychological analyses elsewhere in the dossier, and then the post-Sheol biography scrolled onto the screen.
Steward couldn’t read it fast enough.
The Alpha Steward had held a succession of jobs on Earth after returning from Sheol, none of them successful. He’d had trouble with the law, assault charges mostly. Just before the child was born, Natalie got a job in New Humanity and went into lunar orbit. A year later, still living in space, she had divorced him.
Memory moved through Steward like a long ocean roller: Natalie laughing, tumbling in a long arc across the gravity-free hold of a Ricot-bound freighter, her hair spilling about her face, her green eyes joyful and intent. New Humanity was a gravity-free world, Steward knew, an old second-stage Imagist habitat crawling in a slow orbit about Earth’s moon.
He knew where she was now. It was worth it, if only for that.
He read on.
The Alpha had gone into the security business then, for an outfit called SonnenSystem Elite. They did bodyguard and surveillance work for a number of small corporations that hadn’t achieved nation status and that didn’t have an apparatus for handling their own security and intelligence. The Alpha had been assigned to develop penetration security on behalf of a small cutting-edge company, Sivi Source, a group specializing in implant wetware enabling people to translate from one human or machine language to another. Sivi was a paranoid company—competition on that particular frontier was serious, and not always polite. After a series of well-exploited breakthroughs, Sivi sold out to Consolidated Systems, and its personnel moved into orbit, with the intention of working on the problem of human-Power communication. The Alpha Steward was recruited by the Consolidated Systems security apparatus at that time—apparently he’d made himself invaluable to Sivi by repelling a number of penetration schemes launched by the opposition, and his efficiency in defense of Sivi had caught the eye of Consolidated. They’d bought out his contract with SonnenSystem and taken him to their headquarters on Ricot.
From that point on there had been a slow rise through the Consolidated security hierarchy as the Alpha performed, apparently well, a number of routine tasks. He devised a number of means for keeping the Powers biologically secure. He worked out ways for vetting the large number of foreign nationals that were on Ricot at any given time. He also married a woman named Wandis, who was an engineer specializing in Penrose-tiling crystal growth. She was a recent graduate of the Ricot College, ten years younger than the Alpha.
There was a photo in the dossier. Wandis was blond, short-haired, dark-eyed. There was a scatter of gemstones implanted in a starburst pattern around the left eye. She was smiling, and there was an air of fragility about her.
Steward looked at her, frowned. He had no reaction to the face at all. The Alpha had found someone as far away from Natalie’s type as he could.
Within a few years the Alpha reached high enough in Consolidated Systems to attract the attention of the Brighter Suns hierarchy. De Prey, now a Colonel in the Pulsar Division, recognized his name and photograph in a dossier and set about a recruitment scheme. De Prey himself contributed to the dossier in an outline explaining his plan of recruitment.
Ice touched Steward’s nerves as he saw de Prey’s words. He could hear the Colonel’s voice resonating in his mind as he scanned the page, absorbed every cold, reasoned sentence.
Icehawk recruitment policy was directed at a specific kind of recruit, intelligent enough to be able to think, act, and survive in the absence of his superiors, yet with a cultivated devotion to authority, specifically to the aims and goals of Coherent Light. The Icehawks were not to be mercenaries, soldiers, or assassins, but intelligent warrior fanatics, able to credit no objectives other than those of Coherent Light. Specific attempts were made to recruit rootless individuals, mainly citizens of noncorporate Earth nations, who had received no indoctrination from other policorps, or who had come from backgrounds in which chaos and violence were common, and who might therefore perceive Coherent Light, by contrast, as a force for stability and order. Icehawk indoctrination, rather than concentrating on formal ideological training, substituted instead the cultivation of a religious-military mystique. Zen mysticism, with its concentration on the perception of a vague “truth” at the core of all things, a truth divorced from concepts of moral order, was a useful tool in this indoctrination program.
Steward thought of Dr. Ashraf, remembering the psychologist’s anger at the Zen emphasis in the Icehawks’ training. Here were Ashraf’s ideas, coldly and precisely paraphrased by Colonel de Prey.
The success of this indoctrination is evident on reading the history of the Sheol campaign, in which the Icehawks followed their training to the extent of conducting suicidal attacks on their CL-designated enemies, long after concerns of mere survival would dictate an alternate course of behavior. That the subject Steward broke his training before the others and became the focus of a rebellion against his superiors who were still loyal to CL is less a failure of indoctrination than evidence of another factor in his background. Subject Steward was a survivor of the civil chaos following the failure of Far Jewel’s program in Europe and the deliberate gutting, by Far Jewel, of its own and Europe’s capital and resources.
On Sheol, the subject Steward appears to have reverted to an earlier pattern of behavior, based on survival rather than loyalty. This may be taken as a failure of indoctrination, but under the extreme circumstances of the war on Sheol, indoctrination was bound to fail at one point or another.
Steward snarled. De Prey’s excuses were too elaborate, and unnecessary. His indoctrination had sufficed to kill over ninety percent of his own men.
Though concentration on the ideology of survival served Steward well enough on Sheol, it seems to have been less successful on his return to Earth. It appears that, for Steward at least, a ruthless policy based on survival was inadequate to cope with the stress caused by his sudden lack of status, the demands of his family, the collapse of Coherent Light, the appearance of the Powers, and his own return to his planet of origin in a state of destitution not far removed from that in which he left it. His sense of frustration may well have turned inward, and blaming himself for his misfortunes, he may have destroyed his marriage and his new life in his frustration, and perhaps with the concealed motive of freeing himself from the burden of familial responsibilities.
Drops of sweat were forming on Steward’s forehead. “Callous bastard,” he said. De Prey’s face rose in his mind. Ghost claws tore the image to pieces.
His job with SonnenSystem seems to have been something of a turning point. The subject appears, in the absence of other commitments, to have thrown himself into his work. His work with SonnenSystem was outstanding enough to have attracted the attention of Consolidated Systems security. In accepting their offer of recruitment, the subject Steward may have hoped that a sense of his old commitment and loyalty to Coherent Light would develop. But reports of his work at Consolidated Systems indicate, rather than the new frontier that he may have hoped, a series of uninspiring tasks performed with competence, if not enthusiasm.
Brighter Suns recruitment efforts should focus on the sense of purpose that the subject felt in working for Coherent Light. The recruiter should try to reawaken that commitment, or at least a nostalgia for it. Careful mention of the name of de Prey may serve to make the subject conscious of old allegiances and old friendships….
St
eward laughed at de Prey’s referring to himself in the third person. He thought of the man’s cultivated image, the way he’d presented himself to the Icehawks as someone who was more teacher than commander, a leader devoted to finding ways for his soldiers to excel… and here was the real man revealed in all his chilling vanity, his persona a tool used to manipulate his underlings. There was a bad taste in Steward’s mouth. He read on, and then straightened in surprise at what he read.
Efforts should also be made to determine whether the subject is a vee addict, and whether he resents Consolidated as the author of his addiction, or is grateful to them.
Vee addict. The words flickered along his mind, and he mouthed the words silently, trying their feel on his tongue. His pulse quickened. He paged back, then, to the long sections of medical history. Appendicitis, scarlet fever, malaria… ah. Vee tag. Vee addict. There was a Y next to each, a Yes. And an endnote just beneath, which led him to an appendix at the end of the file.
Knowledge of the existence and etiology of vee addiction is restricted to those with Grade XVI Clearance or Grade XII (Medical) Clearance, or higher. Violators may be subject to criminal penalty involving imprisonment, mental rehabilitation, execution, or worse. Anyone found disseminating knowledge of vee addiction is to be reported at once to the Pulsar Division or other Brighter Suns security personnel.
Execution or worse? Steward thought, and laughed. Thoughts were crackling through his mind like summer lightning. He jumped up and began to pace his cabin, needing movement now, a complement to the storm in his brain.
His first thoughts were that vee addiction was caused by a drug under development by Consolidated, something not yet on the market that had been tested on Consolidated personnel, perhaps without their knowledge, and that it had produced addiction, perhaps unintended. And then, since Consolidated and Brighter Suns both seemed to have it, that the drug had been imported by the Powers and was being kept secret, possibly because it gave the two policorps some unforeseen edge. Maybe the drug led to radically increased intelligence, enhanced intuitive or prigoginic leaps, or altered behavior in some useful way.
Vee tag, he thought, and then, I’m not allowed into the Legation—I got bugs. I guess. The words of the taxi driver on Vesta.
When the thought came, it came all at once, a waterspout that he could feel rushing up his spine and exploding in his head, a wave of leaps and hunches wrapped together with the few facts he knew, and Steward had to stand still for a moment and sort it out before he could tell whether or not it made sense.
The Powers had left Earth, allegedly on account of cross-contamination.
Everyone who entered Vesta was given a blood test. To find the vee tag?
Some people were forbidden, on unknown medical grounds, from entering the Power Legation.
Some people loved the Powers beyond reason. Some even had Power citizenship. And so far as people knew, they never left the Legation once they’d entered.
Sereng’s eyes were funny.
The Powers, Steward realized, were addictive. They saturated the air around them with hormone aerosols, and some of these had unintended effects on humans. When the Powers first delivered the Icehawks to Earth, enough of the Icehawks had been exposed to them for periods long enough to result in addiction. Griffith had been an addict, and hadn’t known it. His life had been a misery after his return, and he’d never understood why. Sereng was an addict, too, but he had skills the Powers wanted, and so he was taken into Vesta to live with them. Susceptibility to the addiction had to be transmitted genetically, hence the blood test, the vee tag, to spot the chromosome that led to addiction.
Vee tag. Y. Vee addict. Y.
Cold horror flooded Steward’s mind. He could feel his skin contracting, turning to gooseflesh. He had the tag, and he’d been exposed to the Powers for three days.
That’s why the Pulsar people weren’t interested in him as a prisoner. Instead they’d exposed him to the Powers, then waited for the transformation, or the addiction, to take its effect. After that he’d do whatever they wanted, just to get back to the Powers.
Panic throbbed in his chest. Steward took a series of quick breaths and sat down in front of the monitor, the cold glowing spider-letters that spelled the penalty for knowing about vee addiction. Or worse. Steward was beginning to understand what that phrase meant.
Then, slowly, the fear ebbed, and his mind began to worry at the problem. He hadn’t felt high in the Power Legation, or felt anything out of the ordinary. He’d done a lot of active physical labor and hadn’t been slowed or hampered. Whatever the vee addict felt, it had to be very subtle.
Steward looked up at the monitor suddenly, seeing his own ghost reflection in its dark surface. He didn’t feel any different. He didn’t miss the Powers, or want to be around them.
He wasn’t an addict. And that meant his theory was wrong.
Steward’s head was swimming. He rested his head between his knees and took a long, shuddering breath. Sweat dripped on the Velcro padding beneath his seat. Steward didn’t know whether or not to be grateful for this new realization. His thoughts had made perfect sense up to a point, and that point was his own experience, and experience contradicted everything and stopped his theory dead in its tracks.
He couldn’t discount the evidence of his own body.
So vee addiction was something else. Steward thought about it for a long moment, the flawed construct of his earlier theory hanging before him in his mind, mocking…. Nothing else made as much sense.
Steward concluded that vee addiction probably had something to do with the Powers, related to something they were importing. Perhaps the Powers were tailor-making drugs, chemicals, or hormones for Consolidated and Brighter Suns, and that these were addictive, somehow, to those who worked with them. Maybe the Powers were experimenting with human subjects, dosing them, hoping to find out how humanity worked, how humanity could be controlled. Maybe Consolidated and Brighter Suns knew this but couldn’t stop it without bringing a halt to trade with the Powers, their only reason for existence, and so the policorps were just trying to limit the number of people exposed.
Steward decided his speculations were growing increasingly pointless. He went back to his file.
After de Prey’s report, the Colonel appended a plea to the Brighter Suns Commissaire of Corporate Safety asking for permission for the Pulsar Division to attempt the Alpha’s recruitment. Though de Prey conceded that the recruitment of defectors was usually the task of Group Seven, he asked for a special exception to be made on the grounds that the recruit’s previous relationship with him would aid in the recruitment. There followed a letter of protest from a director of Group Seven, and then the Commissaire’s decision to allow de Prey to attempt the recruitment. The Pulsar Division, Steward thought, was gloating a little bit, letting the correspondence relating to de Prey’s bureaucratic maneuvering remain in the file.
There followed a number of communications from Brighter Suns agents who had observed the Alpha in the Power Legation on Ricot. The Alpha Steward had seemed bored with the restricted life in the Legation, had been observed drinking heavily, seemed to be spending little time with Wandis. Cautious approaches were made and not rebuffed. The Brighter Suns agent grew bolder. The Alpha seemed pleased with the notion of working with Colonel de Prey again. The agent pointed out how the Alpha’s addiction had been engineered by Consolidated for their own benefit, to make him dependent on them, and pointed out how Brighter Suns personnel had a much less restricted, a more active life. He even mentioned the possibility of detoxifying the Alpha, freeing him from his addiction, but the Alpha seemed indifferent to the idea.
Eventually he asked the Alpha to steal something for him, just to prove his sincerity. The Alpha obligingly copied some of the work his wife had brought home with her, a classified document on a new method of Penrose tiling, and Consolidated had responded with a payment of 4,000 Starbright dollars put into a numbered account in a bank in Antarctica. A receipt for th
e amount was given to Steward, and the number of the account. It was pointed out to him that although he could access the money at any time, his life was so monitored on the Ricot colony that he would have difficulty spending it.
Weeks of haggling followed. Eventually the Alpha agreed to defect to Brighter Suns for the sum of 10,000 Starbright placed in the numbered account, a promotion to a high rank in the Pulsar Division, and transportation to Vesta. In return he’d bring large numbers of classified documents from his own department, from Wandis’s, plus his knowledge of the personalities and policies of most of Consolidated’s high-ranking security personnel. The Alpha also mentioned that when he had designed the security system to Sivi Source’s data banks, he’d also designed himself a way into it. Sivi was still the cutting edge in certain types of wetware, and Brighter Suns’ wetware people were anxious to get their hands on the information. Some of the Pulsar Division’s memoranda began to take on a gloating, congratulatory tone. Here was one in the eye for Group Seven.
The mechanics of the defection were arranged, and the Alpha transported to the Belt in a small cargo shuttle. An offer to move his wife with him was declined without fuss. Wandis would remain behind, marked for life as the wife of a defector.
A report from the agent who accompanied him indicated that his withdrawal from vee addiction caused him considerable discomfort on the journey, but that sedatives provided seemed to ease his trouble. Once the Alpha arrived, he was shown to lavish quarters in the Power Legation, his health and spirits revived, and he was debriefed, under drugs, by Brighter Suns specialists.
Debriefed under drugs. That, Steward realized, was why Colonel Angel had used the zap glove. The drugs hadn’t worked the first time, and Angel had gone for more direct methods.
The rest of the file was an attempt to explain and cover up the subsequent disaster. The Alpha, as a new high-ranking security officer assigned to the Legation, had requested an interview with the Head of the Power Legation, the Prime….
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