“The vee tag and the vee addiction—that was an accident,” Curzon said. “But it gave us a key. The Powers are as intelligent as we, as imaginative. But why are they so disciplined, so…cooperative? It’s the aerosols, Steward. The ultimate socializing tool. There is no dissent in Power society, no disruption. And mark this, Steward—their intelligence is not hampered. They are as smart as they would have been otherwise, smarter in fact because some of the aerosols enhance intelligence. But the intelligence is harnessed for the social good. The pursuit of happiness is not a problem—they have found it. Working for their own betterment and that of their species.”
“Sounds good. Why are their bosses poisoning each other?”
Curzon was glaring at Godunov. “I know, Colonel,” he said. “We’re going to kill him anyway, so what does it matter?”
“Some things are best not said aloud.”
Steward was mildly surprised at her voice. It was breathy, surprisingly childlike. Not the sort of voice you normally expected from a torturer.
“Pah.” Curzon began to cough, barking into a wadded tissue. He waved a hand, gulped air. “I’ll conduct this interrogation in my own way. By the book, or not. I wrote the book anyway, so what does it matter? We have all the time in the world. And Mr. Steward may prove an apt recruit.” Godunov started to speak, but Curzon cut her off: “Yes, we can ascertain whether his conversion is sincere. We have the drugs, don’t we? Fuck this nonsense.” He turned back to Steward. “Colonel Godunov is a specialist. So am I. Her training leads her to different conclusions from those suggested by my experience.”
“I will note my protest in the log,” Godunov said.
“Note it. What the hell do I care?”
Steward wondered if this exchange was genuine or some strange, implausibly baroque variation on the good-cop, bad-cop theme. Curzon was loaded with drugs, but still there was something here—some hint of falseness—that suggested the second alternative was a possibility.
“The Powers,” Steward prompted, as perhaps he was intended to. He shook sweat from his forehead. “Killing each other.”
Curzon frowned. “Yes. From our point of view their species evolution is…unfortunate. The aerosols are intended to assist their nations—tribes, perhaps a better word—their tribes in building internal solidarity. They are still competitive with one another. That is something we can help them with.”
“Jesus,” Steward said. “You’re going to start using aerosols on us, aren’t you? Make us all bright, happy junkies.”
Godunov was making throat-clearing sounds. Curzon ignored her. “We will make of humanity what it has always wanted to be. Cooperative. Peaceful. Forward-looking. A more perfect union. Workers’ paradise. Equality, fraternity. From each according to his abilities, et cetera. All the old slogans, coming true.” He waved his good hand. “After that, we can give the Powers a hand with their tribal problems. Our Primes will have their edge in the human-Power synthesis. Darwin Days will be over. In the end it won’t matter who wins, Vesta or Ricot, their Prime or ours, humanity or the Powers. It will be a synthesis.” He knotted the fingers of his good hand with the fingers of the other. “One commonwealth. One future.”
“You can’t keep this kind of thing secret. Not much longer. Hundreds of people must know.”
Curzon seemed pleased. “We don’t need secrecy much longer. And fewer people know than you would suspect. A few hundred know about vee addiction, but that is only a small part of the true story. Only a dozen people between Ricot and Vesta know our real business.
“We have appalling reserves of capital. The best biochemical researchers in human space, each compartmentalized, working on only one part of the picture. We have the Power social model to follow. Ten years, perhaps fifteen, and then we’ll have what we need. We will have to work at it very subtly at first. But after the others see it succeed—well, the other policorps will each want a piece of our edge. And all we’ll want in return is for them to join us.”
“And you want me to join, too.”
Curzon smiled down at him. “Yes. Perhaps for some very specialized work.”
Steward hacked out a laugh. “You never give up, do you?”
“You might be interested to learn how the Powers train one of their spies, someone who is intended to infiltrate a rival tribe and learn what they’re up to. They have to resort to biologic surgery. They disassociate certain sense receptors, sever a few nerve junctions. Make their spy immune to the aerosol hormones dispersed by the other side. The shock is too much for a lot of their people. They go mad. The alteration makes their agent…an individual. More than that, a maverick. A sociopath. A renegade.” Curzon peered down at him. “Someone like you, Mr. Steward.”
Amusement skated along Steward’s nerves. “That’s how you want me to work for you. A renegade in the workers’ paradise.”
“A renegade for the workers’ paradise.”
Steward grinned. “I’ll think about it.”
Curzon stood up. He gestured with a fist. “I don’t want you to think about anything,” he said. “I want you to feel. Feel the rightness of this. The correctness of this vision. The necessity of it.” Steward could see patches of sweat under Curzon’s arms. “I want you to sense, Steward, that this is something worth having.”
“I can’t sense much of anything wrapped in this sheet, Brigadier-Director.”
Curzon gave a harsh laugh and stepped away. He paced the length of the room, and sweat poured down Steward’s brow as he turned his head to follow Curzon’s movements. Curzon stopped by Godunov’s desk, took the headset off, and held it in his hand. His voice was muted by the soundproofing. “I don’t need the headset to see your resistance. A little too much maverick pride in your case, I think. Perhaps I’ll just clone some cells and put your mind on thread. Keep you in storage till we need someone like you. Once you see the future in action, maybe you’ll be convinced by it. And after we take the cells, you won’t be necessary at all. Colonel Godunov can do…what she’s so good at. Find out if you’ve been spinning me a story all along.”
Fear trickled up Steward’s spine. They could do it. His vision of Orion dimmed. He spat salt from his mouth.
There was a buzz at the door, a red light blinking behind Curzon. He stepped to the door and pressed the intercom. “Yes?” A woman’s voice, American, grated from the speaker.
“Security breach, sir. In the Power Legation. I need to talk to you.”
Curzon gave a quick glance over his shoulder at Steward. Steward knew Curzon was wondering what knowledge Steward had of this, if he should have conducted the interrogation along other lines.
Curzon opened the door and admitted a tall Security Division officer in full equipment—armored jacket, helmet, heavy gloves, transparent plate lowered over the face. The voice came from a speaker clipped to her belt. Steward thought of Orion striding across the sky. Anything to conceal his surprise.
“We think we’ve got a biological contamination in the Legation. Maybe a weapon.”
Curzon turned to Godunov. “The telephone,” he said. “Sound the alarms.”
“Already done,” the woman said, and then a purring sound filled the room. The sound of Darwin Days.
Curzon fell heavily, his good hand still reaching for the phone as a line of red splashed up his chest. Godunov’s head exploded in red froth and she fell back against her chair.
The woman walked to Godunov’s desk and tapped on the Colonel’s console for a moment. “I’m erasing the interrogation,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to give them any more data than necessary.”
Steward grinned at her weakly. “Hi, Reese,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you.”
“I thought maybe I owed you something.”
Her long-legged stride, even in the heavy combat suit, was completely familiar. She walked to Steward’s table and began pulling electrodes off his head.
“I’ve got a broken arm in here somewhere. Don’t just roll me out.”
; Reese began undoing straps. “You’ve got a catheter, I see. I’ll let you take that out yourself.”
“Thanks.”
They’d put his arm in plastic before they put him in the sheet, and taped his ribs. After he was unwrapped, he stood up, swaying a bit. Sweat chilled on his naked skin. He reached for his clothes and with Reese’s help managed to put them on. There was a sling in a medical cabinet that made it unnecessary to take Curzon’s from his body. Reese put something heavy in the sling next to Steward’s arm.
“It’s a fragmentation grenade,” she said. “If we’re caught, pull the pin and fall on it. It wouldn’t be smart to get captured again.”
He looked at her through the transparent blast shield over her face. “You’re the boss,” he said.
Her eyes were painted like butterfly wings.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You’re Group Seven, aren’t you?” Steward said. Gravity pressed on his throat. There was bitterness on his tongue.
Reese looked at him, her face shadowed by webbing. “I can’t say.”
“You’re Group Seven. And I’ve been working for you all along.”
The freighter increased acceleration as it cleared Ricot’s safety zone. Steward had to fight for breath as gravity climbed to six g. They were falling toward an independent mining colony sunk into the surface of Regio Galileo on Ganymede, from which, Reese explained, they would in a week or so hitch a ride on a supply ship headed directly for the Belt.
Pain seized Steward’s ribs. He clenched his teeth and fought it. Tears welled in his eyes.
Reese had led them out of the Ricot Security Division without incident, showing the proper ID at every station. No alarms had gone off anywhere. In five minutes Steward had been back on Methane Street, walking in silence along the alloy floor. Reese led him to an interior airlock, where he’d stepped into the boarding tube of the small Jove system freighter. The freighter’s pilot, a small, well-muscled man of sixty or so, let them through the hatch without a word. The freighter was old, its bulkheads scarred, access panels long vanished, the wiring they revealed hanging in clumps restrained by duct tape. Reese took her grenade back. She and Steward were shown to a small passenger cabin, and they webbed themselves in. Within the hour they were moving toward Regio
The engine cut off, and Steward floated in his webbing. Reese began pulling off straps. He looked at her. “That alarm in the Power Legation,” he said. “That’s real, isn’t it?”
“It will be,” Reese said. “We wanted to get the Powers on their ships as well as in Ricot. The virus takes a while to work. There’ll be a lot of alarms in another twenty-four hours.” She smiled grimly. “Much good it will do them.”
Speed was still wiring his system. He couldn’t stop thinking, no matter how much he wanted to. “You used me as cover,” he said. “You let me develop my own mission, and when the security people were stirred up over me and covering their execs from nonexistent assassination attempts, you were able to run your own op into the Legation with less chance of trouble.”
Reese plucked at straps. “Something like that.”
“That’s why you said you owed me. That’s why you got me out. I made things easier for you.”
She drifted free. Her hair floated in a halo around her face. She looked at him. “Our employers aren’t always honorable, buck. They don’t always pay their debts. I figure people like us can behave better.” She shrugged. “And I had the documents, the uniform, and so on. I could get in and out. I had better support than you.”
“You’re a mercenary, then. Working for Group Seven.”
She tossed her head. “A mercenary anyway.”
“Griffith was part of it, too. Tsiolkovsky’s Demon was just a gimmick you cooked up so that I could seem to earn some money, then use it to develop my mission. And that business in Los Angeles—was that a plan that went wrong, or did you just want to see my moves?”
“We had to see whether you still had what it takes. You did. Your conduct was exemplary.”
“I killed somebody.” Pain jetted up his ribs. “You set it up that way.” He remembered the way the wire tugged at his hand, the screams amid the billowing smoke. He shook his head. “I wondered why people were storing secrets on a place like Charter, with plenty of transmitters for hire. There weren’t any secrets, ever. You were putting Tsiolkovsky’s Demon into the station comps when we arrived. When I broke into the Vesta computers and started sending real secrets back, it must have caused some comment.”
She grinned. She drifted to the padded bulkhead above her and she put out a hand to stop herself. “Yep. You should have seen the query I got.”
“And the two high-priority last-minute shipments: first to Vesta, then Ricot. That was Group Seven again, making sure we got where we needed to go. I was so eager that I never stopped to wonder how I got there. And you put the information about station security into Born’s computer.” Speed jittered up his spine and turned into a laugh. “I wondered why you kept insisting I go into the Power Legation when we were on Vesta. That was something your bosses arranged. The food poisoning, the autoloader breakdown.”
“I had orders to expose you to the Powers as much as possible. Even if that put you in some danger.”
“So that I’d put things together. I’m surprised your employers would want me to.”
“Maybe they didn’t want you to figure out as much as you have. People have a way of underestimating you.”
“Why send me to Vesta in the first place? Why not send me to Ricot right off?”
“The weapon—the virus—it wasn’t going to be ready for months. Why not use the time?” She looked at him indulgently. “Do you want out of the web?”
He laughed again. “No. I’ve been in a web the whole damn time. Carried from place to place so that I could be an accomplice to poisoning a whole community.”
Reese shrugged. “They started it. Or so I’m told.”
Hot rage tore at him. He punched the air with his good arm. “Fucking mercenary. Fucking mercenary bitch.”
She looked up at him, held his eyes. “I’ve been called worse.”
“Let’s find out,” Steward snarled. “I’m just starting.”
Reese kicked off from the wall and flew to the door. She slammed open the partition into the corridor outside, then turned. “Being a bitch is better than being a sheep,” she said. “That’s the choice, the way I’ve always seen it.”
“Shit.” He was fumbling with his webbing, not knowing precisely what he was going to do once he got loose. By the time Steward was through unwebbing, Reese was long gone, and he was long out of ideas.
*
Reese came back in for the deceleration burn and landing, webbing herself in without a word.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I just do the job,” Reese said. Her voice was stubborn. “I work for all sorts of people. Policorps, outlaws, gangs, police. I don’t see a lot of difference between them.”
“I don’t either. That’s why I don’t want to work for any of them.” Bile rose in his throat. “Didn’t, I should say. Because I helped you kill thousands today.”
She looked at him. She was still wearing the uniform shirt and trousers. He couldn’t read her expression. “I probably could have got in without you. For what it’s worth.”
Steward looked at the scarred bulkhead. It wasn’t worth much.
“We didn’t start out like this.” Reese blurted it out, as if she wanted to justify herself somehow. “We started as a bunch of veterans trying to help each other out. We all knew each other. It was friendly. And then things happened and it all…evolved. It got heavy.”
“Heavy,” Steward repeated. The word meant nothing to him.
He thought of the Powers, the sounds they made. He wondered how they sounded when they were dying in agony.
Fire exploded from the engines. Gravity returned and took Steward by the throat.
*
Ganymede was a cold black piece of ston
e. Jupiter burned high in the radiant sky and offered no heat. Reese gave Steward a new passport with a new name. He was now a citizen of Uzbekistan. With the passport came a credit needle with 5,000 Pink Blossom dollars on it. “I insisted they make provisions for getting you out,” she said.
“Thanks.” He looked at the passport and thought again about how he’d earned it.
Reese put her hands in her jacket pockets. She was out of uniform now, in clothes borrowed from the miners’ store. Some of the people here seemed to know her.
“Want to work out?” she said. “The light gravity here will make it interesting. I’ll go easy on your arm.”
Steward shook his head. “No. Thanks. I think I’ll get some sleep.”
“It’s been a long day.”
“Yes. It has.”
He wanted sleep to come. It was the better part of a day before it did.
*
Steward spent most of his time on Ganymede in his room, reading whatever he could find in the library, or watching the vid. On the long trip back to the Belt he did much the same.
He missed the Born, the informal friendships, the structured life, the sense of purpose. He wondered if SuTopo had tried to find them, had assumed that Steward and Reese had been disappeared by the authorities. It would be in SuTopo’s character to think that.
Reese tried to be friendly, but although Steward was polite, he didn’t really respond. She learned to leave him alone. Once they landed in the Belt, she shook his hand—he was out of the cast, hormone infusions having knitted the bone in a matter of days—and walked away with her trademark long-legged stride. She didn’t look back.
He heard a lot about the plague on Ricot. Thousands of Powers had died. The destruction was so appalling that there was no hope of Consolidated being able to cover it up.
In another three months he was on Earth. He took a small apartment with a view of the Aral Sea and spent hours watching the steppe wind as it scudded across the water. He was trying to decide what to do with his life. He wondered what occupation would allow him to be the most anonymous.
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