When one thinks he has gone too far,
he will not have erred.
Words to live by.
Gravity pressed on his chest as the shuttle brought him to Earth, fire trailing from its polymerized wings.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Steward walked onto Charter Station from the Moscow shuttle with every nerve alert, moving in the middle of a knot of Taler employees returning from leave. Two large, soft traveling bags weighed down his shoulders by their straps. Holo adverts blossomed into life around him. He walked lightly, scanning the people waiting for the shuttle. Food smells came out of the fast eateries across from the gate. The air hummed with the noise of business.
Steward moved out of the old spindle toward the cargo docks. Gravity decreased and his strides lengthened. He bounded up the moveway, jumping over intervening pedestrians, holo images passing over his skin. The load on his shoulders lightened. He didn’t think anyone was following.
Born was taking on cargo as he arrived. The dock was bright with the sodium glow of floodlights. Cairo stood with her back to Steward, casting half a dozen distinct shadows, supervising the autoloaders. Noise racketed brightly off the metal walls. Small standardized containers moved up an endless belt. Steward narrowed his eyes, looking over the long dock, and saw no one else. He came up behind Cairo.
“Hey there, engineer,” Steward said.
She turned around and gave him a grin. Spotlight glare sparkled in the jewels on her cheeks. “Hi, Earthman,” she said. She put an arm around his waist and gave him a brisk hug.
“I brought something for you,” Steward said.
He opened one of his cases and brought up a magnum of champagne. “One of the better products of my planet,” he said. “Be sure to drink it in a glass, now. One that isn’t made of plastic.”
She held up the bottle to the light and smiled. “We’ll synthesize this stuff right one of these days, and then we won’t have to haul it out of the gravity well.”
“Yeah. Right. Any day now.”
She handed it back to him. “Could you put this in my cabin?”
“Sure.”
Cairo looked at him sidelong. “There’s a lot of stuff waiting for you in your rack. All your mail. A bagful.”
“All my friends on Earth sending me presents, I guess.”
“Do most of your friends live in Uzbekistan? I couldn’t help but notice the postmarks.”
Steward shrugged. “The Uzbeks are a generous people.” He began following the cargo into the ship’s hold.
Cairo looked after him and shouted over the noise of the loaders. “Get your body ready for a long boost. We’re going trans-Belt.”
Steward stopped moving, a cold touch on his nerves. “Where?”
“Jupiter space. Ricot. Last-minute priority drug shipment.”
A feeling of rightness passed through Steward, a knowledge of patterning. Somehow he’d known this was inevitable. He wondered if it was Vesta’s work, if they somehow still assumed he was going through with Stoichko’s plan. It didn’t matter. Even if this was not strictly coincidental, Born was still going to Ricot. He was going home.
*
While on Earth, Steward had watched the news from Charter with care—Stoichko had been discovered on the second day following his death, but the Charter police had made no announcements of any suspects and had commented that Stoichko’s origins were uncertain. The implication was that Stoichko’s death was the consummation of some business whose genesis had nothing to do with Charter, an assumption in which the Charter cops were perfectly correct. Steward was inclined to think that another implication of their statement was that the Charter police had no leads. Steward concluded that he and the Charter cops had this, at least, in common.
Steward had been moving carefully on Earth, jumping fast from place to place, doing all his business in cash on the needle head and visiting all the necessary hospitals and supply houses under false names. He hadn’t contacted Griffith or his people, not knowing how many ties Tsiolkovsky’s Demon had to Vesta. Group Seven, for all Steward knew, might be interested in avenging their dead agent, and Steward’s body was all that they might find to avenge him on.
There was a message light burning on Steward’s comp as he entered his cabin. There were four messages from Natalie. Steward felt a knife of memory jab his heart. He punched the messages up and discovered that all complained about the arrangements Steward made for Andrew’s welfare. Steward read the phosphor messages carefully as they ran by on his screen, and decided there was no point in answering. He had acted. The action had taken a life of itself, independent from Steward. It didn’t have anything to do with him anymore.
The packages he’d sent himself were secured in his rack webbing. He opened them carefully, checking the wrapping first to make certain they had not been tampered with. There was nothing unexpected. Most of the packages carried data spikes that represented keys to things—keys to boxes, to information, to money, to the way things moved. Other mail contained various souvenirs—Indian religious statues, Russian art, Tibetan prayer cloths, things that could be taken as the private ventures his company allowed. These were mixed with parts that, when assembled, transformed themselves into a custom-made long-barreled pistol, made entirely of an advanced plastic that would pass most detectors and which fired recoilless, near-silent cartridges with self-consuming casings, He’d brought the ammunition himself on the Earth shuttle. Also in the packages was chemical equipment that would allow him to put together plastic explosive and detonators out of chemicals the Born had in stock to clean its toilets, maintain fuel cells, and strip old paint. In one of Steward’s bags was a hooded one-piece environment suit that would reduce Steward’s body heat to background levels, lowering his profile to IR detectors. One of the needles held a schematic for an ultrasonic sound suppressor that would reduce the sound of his movements, breath, and heartbeat and that he could build on his way to Ricot. He’d also bought a new-model pair of night specs, with image enhancement and image enlargement abilities, IR and UV detectors built in, and with interface pickups built in the bows, so that he could control them with a push of his mind. They looked like a heavy pair of mirrored sunglasses. On Earth, they had been a part of Urban Surgery, a fashion. Here, they were something real.
Steward spent a half hour stowing it all away. His cabin was going to be crowded on his way to Ricot, and he regretted that he had no clear idea how much of this gear he was actually going to need.
He was acquiring equipment at the same time that he was paring himself down, becoming leaner, faster, harder. He tried to expunge the parts of his personality not strictly functional, not relevant to the task at hand. He could look at himself now, in the reflective canyons of Earth condecos or the mirrored lenses of his night specs, and understand what he was looking at.
Day by day, he was turning himself into the instrument of his desire.
*
Reese arrived the next day, her hair turned bright copper by the sun, just in time to begin the four days of engine checks necessary before undocking. Following the first engine check, sparring with Reese in Born’s little gym, Steward tagged her on the ear with a reverse heel hook and she stepped back in surprise, grinning at him warily through her mouthpiece.
“You didn’t used to be able to do that,” she said, her words slurred by plastic.
Steward spat his mouthpiece into his glove. “Sublimity. Constancy. Perseverance,” he said. “Modes of living for the successful martial artist.”
“Fuck sublimity,” Reese said. “You got your nerves jacked up. Nobody’s that fast in the real world.”
“I got tired of you beating me up,” Steward said. “Now we’re more even.”
He inserted his mouthpiece and slid into a five-strike combination suggested by his new data threads. He drove through Reese’s defense on his fourth punch before her counterattack developed and he had to back off to avoid being beheaded by a spinning back-knuckle punch. Through his mouthpiece,
he laughed. Six weeks ago, he would have had to take that punch just to get his attack through.
The threads running through his brain and tagged to his nerves held coded artificial reflexes, knowledge of martial-arts techniques and patterns, weapons, small unit tactics, all courtesy of labs in Uzbekistan. Better, more varied and advanced than the standardized implant knowledge the Alpha had carried as an Icehawk and that Reese carried now, reflexes Steward had longed for, and if the implant threads proved inadequate, he could access more through the interface socket set in the base of his skull. It was like carrying a small army in his head, ready for use when he needed it.
He decided to let Reese discover the army on her own, soldier by invisible soldier.
*
Ricot’s vast silver flank reflected the glowing ocher sphere of Jupiter with a slight distortion, like a heat shimmer over alloy. Born drifted by the station’s side, waiting its turn at the polar docks. Steward had to restrain an impulse to reach out of the docking cockpit and touch the alloy planetoid with his hands. Need was pulsing through his veins like blood. He was close.
Ricot was the ultimate, obsessive artifact of Coherent Light’s hubris, the relic of an attempt to physically relocate humanity’s future beyond the Belt by building a structure so vast, so elaborate, that sheer awe would draw future generations into its pattern. Humanity would take Ricot as its template, Coherent Light as its messiah, and wealth and technology would shift from the Belt and inner economies to areas dominated by the Outward Policorps.
Huge as it was, there was a practical dimension to the place. Jupiter space was rich: Enormous dronescoops skimmed the surface of its atmosphere for the raw materials of the new plastics, and the upper reaches of the planet were rich in other materials, ranging from hydrogen to polypeptides. Minerals were plentiful in Jupiter’s major and minor moons.
But the place was dangerous. Jupiter’s size made every inch of its grasping gravity well a battleground, radiation was a continuous hazard, and tidal quakes rocked its moons, threatening instant decompression to any human environment. The smart money had long been in the Belt—development was considered easier there.
Ricot was conceived as an answer, a grand human outpost on the border of Jupiter’s devouring gravity. The artificial moon orbited beyond any of Jupiter’s satellites, on the rim of the Jovian gravity well, beyond the dangerous reach of major tidal stresses and armored with enough stone and alloy to prevent the penetration of gene-warping radiation. It was big enough not simply to repair and maintain the Jovian dronescoops, but to build them. It was intended that eventually all Jovian commerce was to pass through Ricot’s docks.
The planetoid was built to handle it. It was shaped like an American football, twelve kilometers long and three across, its blunt polar caps stationary and gravity-free while the rest of its cylindrical bulk was set in a slow rotation. Three to five million people were seen as eventually inhabiting its alloy corridors. The design featured enough redundancy in its systems and structure to minimize any disaster, from plague to collision. From its armored command centers, the fastest and brightest AIs were to assist Coherent Light executives in charting the future of humanity.
But Coherent Light had to mortgage much of its future in order to build Ricot, and no matter how well the policorp strained the vast wealth of Jupiter passing through its docks, it was difficult to justify Ricot in economic terms. The housing blocks held 150,000 people at their greatest extent: Most of the housing remained in potential only, and the hollow interior remained a webwork of skeletal girders ready for the modular housing that never came. The Artifact War drove all belligerents to the brink of bankruptcy; with Ricot and the war, Coherent Light had a double monkey on its back. Toward the end of the war, CL citizens were rioting in their stainless alloy corridors and sabotage tested the redundancy of safety systems. Executives defected by the hundreds to other policorps that were, themselves, soon caught in the panic. At the end of the war, Ricot was home for a skeletal population composed of Jovian miners working out their contracts with other firms, off-center visionaries and political ideologues unwelcome elsewhere, the lost, the looney, and a few remaining true believers. Only the appearance of the Powers and the astonishing wealth they represented, combined with the Jovian mining, had finally made Ricot profitable. Consolidated Systems was paying unprecedented dividends.
Steward looked at the planetoid’s long, brilliant expanse, the shimmering kilometers-long reflective wall that stood alone and featureless against the darkness. Memories of humming corridors filled his mind, the chorus of whispering vents, the crackle of hydraulic joints constantly readjusting themselves to the stresses of rotation and gravity, voices that spoke to him in terms of yearning, of yielding.
Readiness filled him. His action would be correct.
*
Born would unload, then spend two weeks floating at the end of a tether in Ricot’s improbably huge gravity-free interior. Steward concluded this was time enough to do what he needed to do.
For a few days he just moved around Ricot, trying to find the rhythm of the place, the way things worked. Warm familiarity touched his mind and he fought it, wanting to see everything with new eyes, clear, untouched by memory.
Security was tight and omnipresent. There were cameras above a lot of doors, and armed men guarding critical installations. Consolidated could afford the best. Sometimes there were spot checks, men with guns and body armor moving into an area and running every ID through security comps. Living in Ricot, he decided, was a lot like living in the army. After a while the uniforms and security became invisible, just part of the background hum. Steward’s ID and passport were in order, so he never had trouble.
He began moving his equipment onstation, piece by piece, storing it in out-of-the-way places, vent shafts, maintenance storage spaces, the girders of unfinished structures. Up near the north pole, far away from the Powers, where security was lighter.
Wondering, he looked up Wandis. She lived in a small apartment in an old housing unit that a lot of Icehawks had once lived in. Steward hung out in the unit’s recreation space for an hour before the first shift, picked her up when she left her apartment, and followed her to work. Wandis was a tall blond woman in her thirties, broad-shouldered, wide-hipped. Jewel implants winked from around her left eye. About as far away from Natalie as she could get, and Steward wondered if the Alpha had been attracted to her for that reason. She worked in some kind of metal-processing plant in the zero-g north pole, and Steward turned away from the heavy security at the plant entrance. It didn’t seem to be a high-prestige job, and her housing unit wasn’t anything special. He wondered if Consolidated was penalizing her for leaving her secrets around the apartment, even though Steward had been following their instructions when he sold them. He wondered also if Wandis had known what the Alpha had been planning, or whether it had all been a surprise.
Still curious, he picked her up at shift change and followed her home. She didn’t talk to anyone. After she went into her apartment, Steward hung outside for a while, but she didn’t leave again.
Steward didn’t feel anything at all for her, a matter of some surprise. He had expected some kind of resonance, some glint of the Alpha, and he found nothing. A moderately attractive older woman, living alone, whose life seemed so spare, so restrained, that he could not help but wonder if she had deliberately crafted it that way out of preference.
His lack of reaction disturbed him somehow, and he followed Wandis for two days. Her behavior was much the same. He stopped following. He had other plans.
*
Most of Ricot’s security was concentrated on defending the Powers from intrusion and, presumably, infection. Steward wasn’t interested in the Powers—he had left Stoichko’s virus sitting in its safety deposit box on Charter—and much of the rest of station security was gathered around air recyclers, power mains, dock autoloaders—traditional targets of sabotage. Steward wasn’t interested in them, either.
He was
interested in Consolidated’s insurance company.
The company was called Iapetus, and the part Steward was interested in was built into a new structure, a module recently added to the skeleton of potential housing in Ricot’s giant interior space. Steward donned a vac suit and examined it from the outside, seeing the vast compressors and huge webwork of coolant pipes that kept genetic material in cryogenic stasis. He noted the places where he could put explosives even as he rejected the idea as inelegant and unnecessarily… noisy, he decided, noisy in the way that noise has of attracting attention.
Steward wandered by the place during each shift and found Iapetus open for business only during the first. During other two shifts a pair of armed guards patrolled the lobby, their jackets stuffed full of armor, helmets jammed with scanners. There were only a dozen or so people working in the place—any revivification would be done outside, in a hospital—and the guards would probably know each employee by name.
So much for the front door. It didn’t bother him. Sublimity, he told himself. Constancy. Perseverance.
He had a lot of tricks left.
*
Through his fingertips, his toes, he could hear the planetoid’s metal joints as they crackled around him. The sound of his breath was loud in his ears. He was moving up an air main, swathed in the loose all-body combat cloak that masked his infrared emanations. Moving air tugged at the cloak’s polymer skin. Insulation swathed his limbs.
Stoichko’s plans didn’t cover this part of Ricot in any detail—he’d been interested in the south pole, the Power Legation. But Ricot’s designers had been faithful to their modular concept—throughout the gleaming cylinder, patterns repeated, the major power, air, and hydraulic mains and their access tunnels rang changes on one another, repeated throughout the structure until they came up against the bulkhead that had been built to seal humanity from the contamination of the Power Legation.
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