Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Poison the ocean indeed! she sniffed, thinking of the exchange. Like that would have stopped them from becoming translucent units of a greater whole.

  Well, she’d get the crew put up at Canyer’s Guild Hostel about a hundred kilometers south of here. That would at least have them out of Kajani territory, so any funds that might be dropped by or on behalf of the crew wouldn’t go back to those bastards.

  What she needed was a room, a hot bath with real water, and maybe a few patches of squibs to send her into another and more pleasurable state of mind for a while. Canyer’s had mineral baths, and even if she would have to tap her private account for some privacy, it was available.

  She looked around the place for the last time and sighed. We, too, are in the funeral business, she thought sourly. In this day and age, it’s everyone for themselves and if it takes grave robbing, then so be it. These days what was left of civilization maintained itself by robbing the failures of the past and by cannibalizing the rest. Eat. drink, and be merry, for tomorrow… Nobody thought much about tomorrow, herself included. Not in this day and age. No money, no job, you did what you had to do. She’d worked her way up to here from a start in a navy brothel, and she’d do it again if she had to.

  Those Kajani bastards! Did they think she’d have let such a threat as that thing in the sea stop her from a profit even if it had cost the whole damned ground crew? She’d authorized the shutdown because it was impossible to salvage without even her becoming a part of that thing. “Dialogue is irrelevant.” What a stupid worm that was! It wasn’t enough to imitate, you had to learn from your victims. She’d have sold out the whole damned human race except for her own private places if that thing had been smart enough to make a deal.

  And this would have been a hell of a great base for taking over the rest of the race, too. Everybody came here eventually, everybody who could. Three of the biggest salvage yards in the remnants of the empire were right here. Hell, that destroyer up there… How long would it take the worm to have taken every soul down to the rats and roaches on the damned thing? A few days? Less? And then it goes back and takes a planet destroyer, and the rest of the battle group, and there’s power. That’s what she would have done, but she didn’t have to spread her knowledge over countless cells. It was nice, compact, and in one place for easy correlation.

  Trouble was, I needed to become the worm, not the other way around, she reflected bitterly.

  Canyer’s Guild Hostel looked like the kind of place that put up working stiffs between jobs on a junkyard planet. Cobbled together from every conceivable kind of old building site, it seemed less a large building than an assemblage of junk that had somehow come alive from the weight of salvage all around and under it. It could have been described as ball-shaped, triangular, oblong, rectangular, starlike, and flowing adobe and been pretty well depicted correctly. The only assurance was that, because it had been put together by the same sort of people who might need to stay in it for a while, it was pretty damned stable. No two rooms were remotely alike.

  Getting the crew set up wasn’t a problem; the guilds owned the place, and if you had a valid card they couldn’t refuse you, even if you couldn’t afford to stay there. Salvagers, like other skilled workers in guild or union organizations, took care of their own because, God knew, nobody else would.

  There weren’t many different guild facilities on a dump of a world like this. Salvagers’, engineers’, longshoremen’s, and entertainment were about it. “Entertainment,” of course, was always there except on the Holy Joe-type worlds, and, buried deep, even on a couple of those. The folks who lived in the entertainment hostels didn’t exactly do Shakespeare. They were more like a service industry.

  The odd thing was, she was a card-carrying member with some experience in three out of four. Engineers required more than on-the-job training; when you were dealing with the complex cybernetic spaceships and robotic design and reprogramming, well, you needed an education for that.

  But she’d run tugs to and from orbital freighters, she’d been on and then led salvage teams, and she’d begun, actually had been born, in one of those entertainment guild hostels, so she had the other three. She might have had the fourth one, too, if she’d ever had the time to learn to read and write. That was a luxury in an automated age, even one that was falling apart. She’d never felt the need nor figured out the sense of knowing those skills.

  She set up the crew and signaled them to pack up and come on down, and suddenly felt empty, almost drained. It took her a moment to realize why.

  For the first time in a very long time, she was absolutely on her own. She’d done the last thing she had to do. Oh, a few added debriefings, and some soft soap and maybe fancy moves when the leasing company digested the fact that the Stanley’s rent hadn’t been paid, but, otherwise, she was done.

  She had a week or two, she knew, before things began to get ugly. Word didn’t exactly travel instantaneously around the known galaxy anymore; it took time for these things to get back to the leasing people, for somebody to figure out the score, and maybe for some enforcers to be sent out to see what could be done, if not to collect, perhaps to make examples for the future.

  Avoiding those types wasn’t a real challenge, either, for the same reason as it took for word to get around. The distances involved in this kind of life were vast. The real challenge was the DNA sample they had of her, but even that could be fudged, if it came to that.

  What was required was what she didn’t have: money.

  She wasn’t worried about the others. They were a guild crew and had been properly hired; she was the one with her ass on the line, putting her neck on the chopping block thanks to a talkative young marine who’d seen this whole deserted colony while on his last patrol and who wanted to show off just where he’d been.

  She knew now that she should have left it to the marines, but the money potential had been so huge that it had been worth the risk. She still would take such a risk again for such a possible prize. Those who didn’t take those kinds of risks remained insects, grunts on the ground or in the brothels doing the same monotonous and degrading shit until they either died or killed themselves leaving no permanent marks on the landscape of history.

  It was time to find her own room here, take a shower, dress for optimism, and go on over to a bar.

  * * *

  She didn’t want a place close to the guild billets; it would do her no good to run into everybody she knew or try and pick up another broke guildsman. Hocking what little she had left, she got herself more than presentable and took a taxi over to the Hotel Center where the buyers and sellers of all sorts of junk congregated.

  Most of the time she always hated being so small. A hundred and forty-five centimeters put you well below most, and even if your body was very well proportioned, forty plus kilos didn’t make for an imposing figure. You had to do that on look, on bearing, on how you moved. Her entertainer background was always the most useful to her when not in space, although much of it came as naturally to her as her height or weight. She hadn’t been designed as an entertainer in some genetics lab, but the odds were her mother, or maybe her whole lineage, had been.

  That’s why she’d liked space so much, though, other than that you were on your own or the equal or boss of the rest of your fellow workers. If you were in a weightless area you could move a ton of ore just as easily as someone twice your size, and even if you were piloting a tug, the tug became an extension of you and made you just as powerful as anybody else in one.

  Now it was back-to-basics time until she had enough to break away again and guarantee a disappearance into another more equalizing position.

  The dumb-clever name of the Prefabricated Inn showed up between two of the five central hotels in the business district. It looked like the right kind of place, although she didn’t remember it from the past.

  She paid the taxi with her card and then got out and looked around the place as the little vehicle, itself rescued and rehabbed
from the junk pile, buzzed off.

  It hadn’t been too long ago that she’d been a guest in one of these, after she’d taken the prospectus and proofs to the agency reps and gotten financing for the salvage trip. It had been, in many ways, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: Here not because you were doing escort duty, plying business information, or giving other forms of personal service, but because you were a guest, a paying guest who belonged here. Being called “Miss” and “Ma’am,” having the service types try and solicit you, walking into places like this bar like you were about to sign a billion-dollar deal.

  Well, she was dressed pretty much the same now, and had the same look, so maybe she’d be remembered. If so, nobody would be looking for her as just another escort on the make. She just hoped she could find a mark quickly and easily in this place.

  She couldn’t afford to be sitting around one very long otherwise, and it was a long, long trip back to the hostel if she didn’t score.

  Young, old, male, female, it didn’t really matter so long as they had some money. Even information wouldn’t be all that valuable now. Not until she could clear the decks and her obligations and take chances again.

  The place wasn’t a dump like the world it was on, but it was a prefab model that some designer had tried to disguise as something interesting while only making it something more plastic. It probably was something from the salvage yard—even the fancy hotels in this area were assembled from true surplus projects—but, for a bar with some limited food service, it looked and smelled pretty clean.

  It wasn’t all that busy, though. Oh, there were a few dozen men and women, mostly business types, sitting around talking in low tones to each other, and a few young people in military uniforms over in one corner accompanied by a man and a woman who were clearly both from the escort services and doing their usual fine acting to their paying clients. She recognized the guy—Yuri, his name was—from old times, but she gave no acknowledgment nor would he to her if he saw and recognized her. It was part of the code.

  You knew you were in a first-class establishment, though, because there were real people doing drink service. Usually it was all automated: you gave your order into a hidden speaker, it arrived on a robot tray after being mixed by some barely concealed bartending machine, and that was that. Nobody needed to wait tables, or be waited upon. It was all ego, all part of making you feel like you really were better than other people. Not like the escorts. Cybersex could be far more intense than real sex and very, very authentic, but it turned out that you paid a real price physically for doing a lot of it, and it got cold after a while, too, because you knew it was fake and you knew just how it would wind up. Until people became machines they needed other people.

  She had always wondered about those who did merge with machines. It was a one-way trip; you could be switched to other mechanical devices but you’d never be human again. Like the woman who was the captain of the Stanley, for example: a brain and spinal cord in a charged fluid bath whose thoughts controlled every aspect of that big ship and whose thought processes and calculating abilities were augmented by a gigantic high speed quasi-organic super computer. What would make somebody do that? You really didn’t live much longer, overall, unless you were employed by people willing to put in constant maintenance. Even then, even if you got to live a few extra centuries, what did it matter? You might feel superhuman and all powerful, but you were really just a part in a big hulking ship that went where others told it to go, and you could never touch or feel other human beings, never really come down here, even to a dump like this, and enjoy life.

  But you sure were anonymous if you wanted to be. After all that experience, An Li realized that she never knew the captain’s name, nor anything about her past except that she’d been a woman. She’d been nothing but a disembodied voice, the captain. She was up there now, unable to move out of orbit until somebody with the correct codes allowed her to do so, and then only to where those signals told her to go.

  One thing was sure—you had to be crazy or desperate to become like that. Little more than a slave to some corporation, forever locked in a cold vacuum of space, looking down on what you could never again share.

  She could never do that. She thought death far preferable to that kind of life, but because others thought differently she and the rest of humanity could still travel on working ships requiring no crew and no skilled bridge. It wasn’t the only way to travel through space, but it was the most cost-effective, the most efficient way to do it.

  “What would you like, ma’am?”

  She was startled out of her reverie by the question. She looked up and saw a young, dark, curly-headed man in a kind of uniform wearing a barely visible headset and microphone.

  “Oh, give me a half carafe of the house chablis,” she responded.

  “Yes, ma’am. Coming right up.”

  She wasn’t used to being waited on, and she couldn’t see the appeal of it. Hell, with the all-automated system she’d have ordered when she wanted to and had a quick response. Now she’d been interrupted, would have to wait until this boy got the wine from probably the same kind of machine they had in the lower-class places, have him bring it when he had the time and noticed it was up, and then she’d have to pay him or even tip him. It seemed not only archaic but so… unnecessary.

  She decided to keep to something mild and controllable. Any of the fun drugs would just siphon precious cash while impairing her, and hard booze was murder on somebody her size. Wine was low-alcohol, and she could sip it.

  She looked around, and settled for some reason, perhaps past experience or just plain instinct, on one guy who was sitting at the end of the bar near the route to the rest rooms. She wasn’t sure why her senses were attracted to him; certainly he looked less like he belonged here than she did. Maybe that was the reason—he just looked like a fish out of water. Rumpled clothes that looked like they’d been slept in, but of an expensive designer-type cut and look. Gray and black peppered hair that went in all directions at once and looked not only uncombed but perhaps uncombable, and a full but very nicely trimmed beard and mustache of the same middle-aged mix that fit his face quite well but which also marked him as an anachronism. Nobody who traveled between worlds had beards these days. Too much trouble. And the fact that the thick facial hair got a lot of attention when the rest of him did not told her that the look he had was the look he deliberately cultivated.

  And he smoked! She wasn’t sure what he smoked, but the pipe was clearly visible when he reached inside his coat for something. People who smoked were just about flaunting their wealth and position, particularly these days.

  What was a guy like that doing on a world like this drinking beer alone in an overpriced bar?

  She decided to see if she could find out.

  The method wasn’t subtle nor innovative, but it usually worked if a guy liked women. Sitting as he was on the stool just in front of the rest rooms, it was fairly simple to go by him fairly ostentatiously to get a feel if he noticed you, and, whether he did or not, when you came out (assuming he was still there) you were simply stuffing something, maybe a small makeup kit or anything that would make a real clatter on the floor, and you just dropped things near the guy. Most people were polite enough to notice and even help, and it broke the ice.

  This guy was no exception. In fact, she felt his eyes on the back of her neck as she went in, and, after five minutes or so, when she emerged and dropped the small makeup kit so that it opened and scattered small stuff all over the floor, he was fairly quick to slide off the stool and begin to help her retrieve things.

  She gave him the patented smile and thanked him for helping. It didn’t take a minute to recover and put away the dropped materials. “Thanks,” she said. “I do that a lot, I’m afraid, after I’ve been offworld for a while and then get back on. Different gravity or something, I guess.”

  His eyes, an odd blue-gray unusual in any company, widened a bit and his bushy eyebrows rose. “You’ve been i
n space as more than a passenger, I take it?” It was a throaty baritone, one that wouldn’t carry all that far but had a kind of friendly, relaxed texture to it. The accent was definite but unplaceable; he was from someplace she’d never been.

  She nodded. “Just got back from saving the universe and getting canned for my trouble. We weren’t getting paid to save the universe, we were getting paid to salvage a dead world.”

  He was definitely interested, possibly hooked. “You were with that group that ran into that thing that ate a whole colony? I heard about that.”

  “Everybody has. All it’s done is make me and most of my crew unemployable around here. I shoulda brought back some of the damned worm and let it eat my creditors. Trouble is, the worm would then know what they knew and it would still come after me for the money.” She looked around. “Pardon, but I’m standing and my drink’s over there. Care to join me, Mister…?”

  “Norman Sanders,” he responded. “Thank you, I’d be delighted for the company.”

  It was as easy as that. It still amazed her after all this time, but it usually was as easy as that.

  “You know,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “this is quite a coincidence. I was actually thinking of getting in touch with you, or at least one of your party, when I heard the story. Might not pay much to these hard-bitten salvage types, but it might well make a great production.”

  “Production?”

  “Yes, that’s part of my work. I’m a producer. Actually, I’m a writer, but you have to be officially a producer or they rank you lower than the janitor.”

  “A producer of what?” She honestly didn’t know what the guy was talking about.

  “Comedies, dramas, extravaganzas. Whatever they’ll pay to watch. Go in, pay your money, and become one of the crew of—what was the name of your ship?”

  “The Stanley.”

  “Ah, yes! Become one of the crew of the Stanley as it explores a bizarre and sinister world of the dead. Feel what it’s like to be pursued by a voracious monster! And, if you survive and get away, this time you’ll be a hero. It’s a natural. I write it and get a real producer to finance it—piece of cake with all the clearances in hand—and then we use some classic virtual actors and a few real ones and we pump in the adrenaline and it’s a natural. Fine tune it, pump it up, and sell it to the bored and stuck masses on a hundred worlds, particularly the young folks, and we got a hit. And based on a true incident, hell, it’s critic proof!”