Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  The Consolidated Security Directorate was in the same detached modular office block that had housed Coherent Light’s intelligence effort. This was near the north pole. The place had only two tunnels entering it and was otherwise surrounded by a wide area filled only with scaffolding and single-mindedly homicidal robot guards. The tunnel entrances were heavily guarded. One tunnel led to the gravity-free polar industrial area that included the plant where Wandis worked. The other led into broad metal Methane Street—a lot of the streets here were named after Ricot’s products—which featured clothing stores, specialty food stores, restaurants, and bars at which the tables were separated from one another by ultrasonic privacy screens. The executive housing unit was a short distance away by moveramp.

  To absorb some of the local style, Steward bought clothes in Methane Street. He also bought a briefcase and a comp deck and began frequenting the local bars, sipping his drinks and playing with the comp as if it were part of his job. Mostly he played computer games and watched the windows. When the shift change came, he went out into the street, looking for faces he knew. After the first two days he knew the rhythm of the street fairly well. Security patrolled up and down Methane but never rousted the execs in their watering holes. He started keeping his pistol in the briefcase, under the computer deck.

  Looking for faces. Gathering power. Waiting for the moment.

  Information implied action. Action was latent in him, in his briefcase.

  One life, one arrow.

  When the moment finally came he was in motion instantly, and when the susurrus of surprise whispered in his mind, it was only an afterthought. Suddenly, on a street bustling with quiet well-dressed people going off shift, there were two faces he’d seen only in pictures—Curzon’s square and heavy-lidded, the shadow of a dark beard on his cheeks and chin, moving next to the young de Prey, the face Steward had seen in the man’s St. Cyr dossier, a dark diffident face moving a half-step behind his superior. Steward saw them in three-quarter profile, moving past, and he didn’t need to look again…. Instead, he was scanning for bodyguards, knowing they had to be present around a Brigadier-Director of security.

  He found two at least—young males in big jackets—one medium-sized man moving behind, a big man stepping ahead, each marked by the purposeful robotlike movement of the head that indicated sophisticated threadware impelling their regular visual scans. Their hands were stuffed in their jacket pockets. Steward heard a whisper of triumph in his mind as he saw them. There was a third man with them, flanking Curzon, a gray-haired older man, smoking a short cigar, who had the look of an exec rather than an ice expert.

  Steward couldn’t see anyone else. The crowd was too big, too varied. A few were looking alert, most weren’t. He decided it didn’t matter. This kind of chance—de Prey and Curzon in the same place—would never happen again.

  He drifted after them, tucked the briefcase under his arm, opened the latch. Awareness tingled in his body, his limbs. His enhanced neural connections seemed to branch out, extend beyond his body to touch the crowd, the two execs, the metal street. He had never consciously chosen a purpose, had moved instead through a kind of instinct, a half-certain sense of what the Alpha had wanted done, moving as a Zen arrow aware of its target only at the end of the journey. Now a conscious decision needed to be made, and he was only faintly surprised to find that he had made it long ago and that the sight of the two men, walking side by side, had only confirmed the judgment. He, the arrow, now perceived the end of his journey. Readiness filled him like fire.

  A few days before he had lain in the tunnel, gathering power, making of himself a spring with its focus at the blade, becoming in the end the blade itself moving, a rushing and a light. Now he felt himself gathering in another way, toward another end. Though he could not touch it, felt it only as a weight under his arm, he was becoming the pistol, the cocked mechanism, the bullets… potential violence in self-consuming casings.

  De Prey and Curzon split at the second intersection, de Prey and the gray man going right, Curzon and the two guards left. Steward hadn’t expected that, but he didn’t quicken his pace. He could work with this. Head lowered, he scanned left and right for movement that seemed out of place, for any wrongness…. He found none. From the middle of the street he cut on a diagonal, closing the distance to de Prey. The cross street was called Molybdenum Way. He lowered the briefcase from under his arm to his left hand, and its own weight opened it. He seemed to feel the touch of wind on his face.

  Threadware calculated trajectories, distances. Ricot was so big that Molybdenum Way was, for all intents and purposes, flat, the curve imperceptible. De Prey was probably wearing armor, and that meant a head shot. Steward, with the support of the threads in his nerves, was confident of hitting anything he needed at sixty meters provided the target image was sufficiently uncomplicated.

  People bustled around Steward, intent on their own business. He could feel the whirlwind building in him. There was certainty in his mind. This would be good Zen.

  He reached into the case, took out the gun, raised it to aiming height almost casually, and fired a single shot from behind at a distance of thirty-odd meters. The self-consuming casing made a mild nonthreatening hiss along its course, like a whisper of wind. The gun’s mechanism made a gentle click as it jacked the next bullet into the chamber. When de Prey’s head burst open in a spray of red, Steward was already poised to return the gun to its case, turn on his heel, move in the other direction.

  The gun thunked into the case. He was already turning, moving after Curzon. The individuals in the thinning crowd continued on their courses.

  Pure Zen, he thought. The movement had been so natural that even in the midst of the crowd it hadn’t seemed out of place. The gun had made no sound that would awaken people from their postshift dreams. It would take a few seconds for the afterimage of the movement to register, and then for the crowd to react…. By that time, Steward intended to be on his way. Be another person, another silhouette, another bullet.

  “Hey.” Anger hummed in Steward’s nerves at the disruption. This was too soon. Someone must have been looking right at him.

  “Hey. Hey, you.” A young voice, still filled with surprise. Behind him there was a growing disturbance.

  “Hey, I saw that!” Insistently, but with a touch of wonder in the words. As if he were asking Steward to confirm what he had just seen.

  Steward still felt the lightness in his soul. He spun in his tracks and raised a finger to his lips. He saw a young dark-skinned man with a scatter of jewels implanted as a starburst on his forehead. “Hush!” Steward told him, saw the confusion in the man’s eyes as he turned back into the crowd, and felt the long hesitation behind him as he took one step, then another, then a third… and by then he was invisible, moving in the crowd that trailed after Curzon.

  A half-second later, when he heard the cry of, “Hey, wait a minute. He just shot somebody!” the man and he were absolute strangers, whatever moment that had once connected them now long gone.

  Steward put on his shades, opened his blue jacket to reveal the yellow T-shirt underneath. Changing the profile just a bit. Moved fast through the crowd, almost flying, carried by the wind that howled inside him.

  Ahead there was a disturbance in the pattern. One of the guards was looking back, standing on tiptoes to peer over heads. Curzon’s ponderous head, glimpsed briefly through the confusion of bodies, was seen in the act of lifting, as if in surprise. The peering guard had one hand pressed over his temple, perhaps to hear an inner voice more clearly.

  More bad luck. The cigar smoker, de Prey’s companion, must have had a radio, and the guards receivers planted in their skulls.

  Curzon turned and peered back himself, an ideal, hesitant target. Steward’s hand began its move to the briefcase. And then the guards grabbed Curzon and began moving with him toward one of the shops. Steward felt the moment ebbing away, the wind dying in his brain. Frustration began to bubble in his veins as he pulled his h
and back. If he hadn’t had to stop and quiet the stranger, the second bullet would have found its target.

  Steward continued his movement, purposeful, still on his old course toward where Curzon had been. The guards would have perceived any altered movement as suspicious—their wetware worked that way. He decided to try a snap shot as he passed the shop.

  In the window of the shop a holographic bottle of beer rose from an ice planet in a rush of chill ammonia vapor. Curzon was standing in the doorway, looking a little ruffled, brushing his hair back with a wide palm. His guards were holding their hands in their pockets, turning to scan the street one last time. Steward slowed slightly, maneuvering one passerby between him and the guards, and chose his targets as he reached for the pistol. First guard, second guard, Curzon, he decided. Inelegant, less surgical than his original plan, but if he gave the guards any leeway, they’d kill him. And the guards could be revived as clones, assuming they’d bought any insurance….

  The whirlwind wailed in his ears. He lifted the gun and turned, a move simultaneous with the concealing pedestrian’s movement out of the line of fire, and anger boiled in him at the change in target image, the last glimpse of Curzon’s balding head moving into the dark interior, behind the hologram that concealed his form, the cold eyes of the two guards whose level gaze returned his own. He lifted the pistol slightly, the merest tensing of the upper arm, to put the first bullet between the eyes of the taller guard, and then, as the nerve impulse to squeeze the trigger was already on its way to his hand, Steward’s upper arm was shattered by a bullet that came from his right.

  Steward’s shot went somewhere into the bar. He tried to tell his hand to retain the pistol.

  Without hesitation he turned left and ran, trying to disappear into the crowd, hoping to let the wind carry him. The briefcase tumbled onto the metal street behind. The pistol was still clutched in his hand.

  The third guard, the one he hadn’t seen who had fired the shot, caught him before he’d moved three steps. He stumbled to his knees as a flying heel slammed into his left kidney and pain shrieked along his nerves. On his knees he twisted left, tried to use his good hand, but another kick smashed into his ribs and his parry went nowhere. He could feel something break deep inside him. The third guard was a woman, he saw, a small black woman in inconspicuous clothes, her upper lip drawn back in a bright, intent parody of a smile. Moving air screamed in Steward’s mind. He swept out with one foot, caught her by the ankle, and brought her down, but before he could stagger to his feet, Curzon’s two guards were closing on him. Steward recognized zap gloves on their left hands.

  He ducked beneath the first punch, hit Molybdenum, and rolled, pain from his broken arm driving bright needles into his skull, and then he came up again, one foot lashing out, catching a guard in the midsection. The breath went out of the man, but he snatched at Steward’s pants cuff and held on, delaying him for the fraction of a second it took Steward to snap his leg back. It unbalanced him and spoiled the next kick, which was aimed at the second guard and parried by the guard’s left hand—the glove contacts failed to touch Steward’s flesh, luckily, and he staggered back, saw the woman jumping up to join the fight again, and suddenly the big guard was flying at him, trying to knock him down bodily—he caught a blow on the face before he could move aside, and then the woman’s foot slammed against the side of his knee, buckling it.

  One life, one arrow.

  Shit.

  After the impact with the alloy street he could hear only the wind, see nothing but the zap glove coming down, landing right on his chest, pinning him onto Molybdenum Way like a butterfly transfixed by a shining electric needle.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Steward felt a needle—another needle—jab his thigh. A tidal wave of broken glass rushed through his body. Nerves awakened and sang in pain. His mouth was dry, his lips cracked. From somewhere was the hum of a ventilator. He opened his eyes.

  From out of a tunnel of blackness a calm female face gazed down at him from beneath cropped blond hair. There was a sunburst of jewels implanted around her left eye. His mind fumbled at recognition.

  “Wandis,” he said. It hurt to speak the word.

  Her mouth twitched in the beginnings of a smile. “Steward,” she said. “Better have something to drink.”

  A bulb mouthpiece touched his lips. He drank gratefully. Spots of warmth leaped on his skin like jumping spiders. He tried to scratch and found he couldn’t move.

  As he sipped at the bulb, vision seemed, in a Coriolis swirl of dim color, to drain slowly into his head. He was wrapped in a kind of sheet and strapped to a table of brushed alloy. At least, he thought, the table didn’t have blood gutters. He could feel electrodes pasted to his head, and his interface socket had something in it that wouldn’t answer when he tried to give it orders. Human figures moved in dim light behind Wandis. Steward recognized Curzon’s blocky silhouette standing between a slim frowning woman in a uniform and a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. Steward’s clothes were in a pile by his table.

  Pain throbbed in his arm, his side, his kidneys.

  He looked at Wandis. “Sorry I got you into this,” he said.

  She took the bulb away and shrugged. “I’m just here to help in the debriefing. Because I know you.”

  Steward saw now that she was wearing a tailored blue jacket with an ID holobadge clipped to the collar. secdiv, it said.

  “You work for Curzon,” he said thickly.

  Her look was matter-of-fact. “Have all along,” she said. “I’m plant security now.”

  Steward tried to grin but a pulse of pain ran up his side and he gasped instead. There was a flash of concern in Wandis’s eyes. “Debriefing,” he said. “Isn’t ‘interrogation’ the word you’re looking for?”

  “Whatever you like,” she said. Wandis stood up, and behind her, a battery of floodlights turned on. She dissolved to a fractured silhouette. Pain stabbed Steward’s eyes and he turned his head away. He heard footsteps, then another voice.

  “Steward.” The voice was mild, unconcerned. The English was lightly accented, and Steward assumed it belonged to Curzon. “We’re here to learn the truth.”

  “Écrasez l’infâme,” Steward said. “Will that do?”

  A pause. “We’re going to find the truth, Steward. We have drugs, we have power over you. Most of all, we have time. All the time necessary to find out what we need to know.” He cleared his throat, a cold sound. “You’ve already been condemned, you know. Three of the people in this room are empowered to constitute an emergency security tribunal. We’ve passed sentence on you. All that remains to be done is fill in the forms.” Another throat clearing, even colder. “A great many forms, unfortunately. Irregular procedures, however legal, must always be justified by an expansion of the bureaucracy.”

  “You have my sympathy,” Steward said. Things were still crawling over his skin.

  “The sentence was death.”

  Steward turned to him and gave him a grin. “Is that supposed to terrify me?” Through slitted eyes he saw that the voice was Curzon’s. He was standing nearer, under the lights, while the others were behind him, seated at a desk. Probably watching the monitors that were supposed to monitor Steward’s state of mind.

  Curzon’s arm was wrapped in bandages and hanging in a sling. That last wild shot into the bar had actually hit him. Steward squinted at him, saw his paleness, the little hint of pain in his eyes. He’d probably had a broken arm and lost a certain amount of blood.

  “The law requires I tell you the sentence,” Curzon was saying. “Now it’s on the record of the proceedings. I don’t care whether you’re terrified or not. You’ve ceased to become a problem other than a bureaucratic one.” Pause. “I suppose I should also tell you that we can rescind the sentence, provided you cooperate with us, et cetera. Understand, Mr. Steward?”

  “A ray of hope. How nice.”

  The bright lights were making Steward’s eyes water. He looked away.
Insect legs dug into his skin. He tried to shift his position, failed.

  “Are you uncomfortable, Mr. Steward?” Another voice. Steward squinted at it, found it belonged to the man in the white coat.

  “Yes,” Steward said.

  “The drug we used to bring you to consciousness may cause some discomfort. It will be momentary.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We haven’t given you any painkillers. They would make you drowsy. So there may be pain as well.”

  “I’ll be on the alert for it. Thanks again.” He closed his eyes.

  Curzon’s voice came back. “Shall we begin, then?”

  Steward didn’t answer. He wished the sheet he was wrapped in would permit him to shrug.

  “Who are your contacts on Ricot?”

  A smile, the sort made when you know the truth won’t be believed. “I don’t have any.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “Myself.”

  “Does that mean you are a mercenary?”

  “That means I am working on my own behalf.”

  “No one hired you to kill St. Cyr.”

  “No one.”

  There was a pause. “These are the answers we expected, Mr. Steward.”

  Steward grimaced through a spasm of pain. “Then you are not disappointed,” he said.

  “They are the answers any agent would give—that he acted alone, under no one’s instructions.”

  Steward again suppressed his urge to shrug.

  “Untrue answers will drag out these proceedings,” Curzon said. “We will find out the truth regardless. You can only delay matters.”

  Steward looked at him. “Take all the time you need. I’ve got nothing else planned for today.” Pain throbbed in his forehead at the intensity of the light.

  “Why did you kill St. Cyr?” The question came quickly, a riposte.

  Steward closed his eyes against the floods. There was a bright yellow glow on the backs of his lids. His skin crawled and he tried to ignore it. “Because St. Cyr tried to kill me. Back when his name was de Prey. He sold out my unit, and a lot of friends died.”