by Steve Perry
Time to go pick up his date for the prom.
* * *
The door to Billie’s room slid open. Locked to the bed by the pressor field as she was, she couldn’t do more than turn her head slightly.
“Wilks!”
“Yep. Pack your socks, kid. We’re going for a ride.” He moved to shut the pressor field off.
“How did you—? Why—?”
“We’ll talk later,” he said. “Right now we need to hustle along. I might have made a couple of enemies on the way in here and I don’t think we have time to discuss it.”
Billie rolled from the bed. She grabbed a robe and put it on. “I’m ready.”
“What, you don’t want to fix your hair or spray makeup on or something?” He grinned.
“I’d crawl over broken glass to get out of here. Go.”
He turned, stuck his head out into the hall. “Okay. Clear.”
She followed him into the hall.
They were doing pretty well until they got to the elevator’s atrium. The tube’s doors opened and two orderlies and two guards came out, moving fast. The guards had their stunners out and the orderlies both waved shockers.
Wilks never hesitated. He pulled a pistol from under his jacket and fired. Billie watched the little red dot his weapon projected bounce across the heads of the guards and orderlies. Three of them went down, their own weapons clattering quietly on the soft floor. The last orderly, a new one that Billie didn’t know, rolled and came up in some kind of martial arts stance, facing Wilks.
Wilks tucked his weapon away. “Stay behind me, kid.”
The orderly moved in and swung the shocker like it was a sword.
Wilks dodged to his left, slapped the man’s outstretched arm to one side, and punched him low on the ribs.
The orderly grunted, made as if to turn and swing the shocker again, and Wilks kicked the man, hitting the side of his knee with the edge of his boot.
Billie heard the orderly’s knee crack as something gave in it.
The orderly’s leg folded and he dropped, but Wilks pulled his foot back and thrust it out again, smashing his heel into the man’s head. The orderly flew sideways and slammed into the corridor wall.
“The stairs?”
“That way!”
Billie followed Wilks down the hall to the end. She glanced at the guards and orderlies as she went past. He’d taken them out almost instantly, without even working up a sweat.
“Why didn’t you shoot the last one?” she asked as they reached the stairwell.
“Pistol’s charge was depleted,” he said. “Didn’t have time to reload.”
They went down two flights—her room was on four—then Wilks led her into the second floor.
“This isn’t the ground—” she began.
“I know. They’ll have the doors covered by now. We have to find another exit.”
She followed him. Two was quiet, and they moved briskly, but not at a run. A tech glanced at them as they passed his station. Wilks smiled and nodded. “How’s it going?”
The tech nodded back. Then his control board lit up, pulling his attention away from them.
“Move,” Wilks said to Billie. “That’ll be the alarm.”
Billie ran. There was an emergency escape window at the end of the corridor, but it required a staffer to open it. “That’s a coded lock,” Billie said.
“Yeah, and I didn’t have time to get all the exit numbers,” Wilks said. “But I have a nifty little master key, courtesy of the Colonial Marine Corps armory.”
Billie found out what he meant as Wilks slapped a wad of what looked like hair gel onto the lock mechanism, squeezed it three times, and waved her back.
Behind them, the tech started yelling. “Hey, you two! Get away from that window! I’ve called Security!”
The gel flashed bright blue and started to sizzle as if it were a piece of soypro on a too hot grill. The lock’s stacked plastic casing bubbled and ran like water.
“Don’t look at it,” Wilks said. “It’ll burn your eyes.”
Billie turned to see the tech coming toward them.
“Wilks!”
“No problem.” He pulled his pistol from under his jacket and pointed it at the tech.
The tech stopped. He held his hands out in front of him defensively. “Hey, hey, take it easy!”
“Get the hell out of here,” Wilks said.
The tech turned and ran.
Wilks smiled. “Amazing what even an empty gun can do, ain’t it?” He put the weapon away.
The lock dripped into a puddle on the floor, plastic slag. Wilks kicked the window and the unbreakable clearflex swung outward on its side hinges. He leaned out, looked down.
“Too high to jump, we’d break an ankle.”
He pulled a small device from under his jacket. Billie watched as he unfolded a pair of handles that jutted at right angles from the thing, a rounded square of black plastic the size of a big man’s hand.
Wilks pointed the device at the windowsill and touched a control on it. It popped loudly. A thin line of white sprayed out from a nozzle on the end and hit the sill. He touched another control and loops of the line paid out. “One, two, three, four,” he said. “Okay, it’s set. Climb onto my back,” he said.
Billie obeyed.
With that, he stepped up onto the sill, turned to face the hallway, and began to climb down the outside wall. The line coming out of the thing in his hands looked awful thin to support them. He said, “Hang on, I’m going to lean back.”
She clutched him tightly with her arms and legs. Holding them with his arms outstretched, he began to walk backward down the wall.
“Spider gear,” he said. “Don’t worry, this line’ll support ten men without breaking.”
It took no more than a few seconds for them to reach the ground.
As she slid from his back, Billie said, “Where are we going?”
“Does it matter?”
She shook her head. No. It didn’t matter. Anywhere was better than having her brain diced and scrambled.
The pair of them hurried away.
10
“This is Salvaje, bringing you word of the True Messiah. Listen to me, my fellow seekers.
“I know that which you lack.
“I know of your incompleteness.
“I have the answer.
“The True Messiah can make you into a Holy Receptacle. For it is in bearing the sons and daughters of the Messiah that you will find your salvation. Listen, and know that I speak only the truth! False prophets and false gods have brought our world to the brink of ruination! False gods ask that you worship them from afar, but they remain cold and aloof and sterile. The True Messiah will join with you! You can feel the True Messiah, touch the True Messiah, become one with the True Messiah! Do not allow yourselves to be misled any longer, my brothers and sisters! Throw off the chains and shackles of your oppression, get rid of the old and make room in yourself for the new!
“The True Messiah is coming, brothers and sisters. Soon the communion will be possible, and only those who open themselves to the ultimate experience will survive the coming devastation that man has brought upon himself! Prepare, prepare yourselves for the Coming! Listen for the call in your dreams! Listen and heed!”
“That’s it, doc,” Pindar said. “We’re off the air.”
Salvaje shrugged. “Install a new dish. My message must continue to go forth.”
It was Pindar’s turn to shrug. “It’s your money.”
“Money means nothing, fool. My parents left me millions, the faithful send me millions more. Soon it will be worthless, as all the works of man will become worthless on this fouled planet. The True Messiah is coming. Soon.”
Yeah, right, Pindar thought. Maybe he should take some of Salvaje’s about-to-be-worthless credits and spend a couple of days in Madam Lu’s Pleasure House. Long as the Messiah was coming, no reason why Pindar couldn’t come a little himself.
“Anything
you say,” Pindar said. What a shamoo this guy was. Crazy as a stepped-on roach. But as long as he paid, what the hell. He could dance naked in peanut butter for all Pindar cared. Two more like him and he could retire.
True Messiah. Yeah. Right.
11
Green and Red came out of the theater where their limo idled, fanning up grit from the street-level plastecrete road. The driver touched a control and the rear door slid up. Green and Red entered the limo and sank into form-cushions whose machineries adjusted to fit them perfectly. “To the tower,” Red ordered the driver.
The limo lifted slightly and slid away on its cushion of air.
“What did you think?” Green asked.
“Did people really used to go out to gather and listen to noise like that?”
Green laughed. “So the history books say. Rock concerts, they called them. Actually attending them instead of sitting comfortably in their own living rooms and watching it on the holovee.”
“What was the point?”
“It was for the totality of it—sight, sound, smells, feelings—a shared experience.”
Red shook his head. “A wonder we ever got civilized. Risking death on the unregulated roadways to listen to that jarring shit. Also a wonder they all weren’t deaf.”
“Hey, times change. We don’t wear animal skins and hit each other over the head with clubs anymore, either.”
“Speaking of clubs… how is the intercept going?”
“As well as could be expected.”
“That business with whatshisname? Massey? No problems there?”
Green nodded. “No. It’s been resolved.”
“What exactly happened? I didn’t get the full details.”
Green reached over to the limo’s bar and punched in a code. After a moment, the dispenser delivered two bulbs of some frothy blue liquid. Green took one, handed the second to Red. “Ah. Not bad for a robot bar.”
“You were saying…?”
“Ah, yes. Well, one of the communications people slipped up. Sent an uncoded file to Massey’s residence. Computer didn’t catch it. Real snafu. That would have been bad enough, but unfortunately, Massey’s son accessed the material.”
“Stupid,” Red said, sipping at his drink.
“Extremely so. The boy showed it to his mother. Neither of them understood the full implications, of course, but they got enough of it to possibly compromise the mission. Massey was in the shower when the message came through. When he got out, his wife started babbling about what they’d seen.” Green squirted more of the froth into his mouth. “Massey really had no choice, not if he wanted to maintain security.”
* * *
The boy smiled at his father. Massey returned the smile. Reached out and took his son’s head gently in his hands. The move was so fast the boy didn’t have time to be surprised. A hard twist. The snap of bone, the instant limpness.
His wife’s eyes widened in horror, but before she could even begin to digest the impact of what she had seen, Massey reached her. A single, practiced move, fast, no suffering. It had to be done, but he had grown fond of them, after all. It was the best he could do. They deserved that much.
* * *
“God. That’s cold,” Red said.
“Yes. It was SOP, of course, but they had been married for six years. Even as cover, you’d think he’d want somebody else to do the wetwork on this one. But he did it himself. The company made sure the investigative team from the local police were friendlies and Massey’s story about coming home to find them dead was accepted. The local law figures it as a robbery gone bad or a wilding by somebody clever enough to bypass building security.”
“What about the communications tech, wasn’t there something about that?”
Green finished his bulb, punched up another one. Looked at Red with one eybrow raised.
“No, I’m fine.”
Green said, “Massey took him out. Fed the body into an industrial disposal unit that makes fertilizer. Guy is probably helping flowers and vegetables grow in half a dozen countries by now.”
“Pissed Massey off, I imagine.”
“Well, that’s the strange thing. Not personally. Massey killed him cleanly, no torture or anything, if what I heard is correct. It was just another job to him.”
“Buddha, that is cold. Guy was responsible for the death of my spouse and kid, I’d want him to twist a little in the breeze before I finished him.”
“Yeah, but you aren’t a sociopath. With Massey, the job is what comes first, last, and always. He doesn’t care what he has to do to get it done.”
Red pretended to shiver. “We got some kind of failsafe on this guy?”
“Of course. You don’t think we’d let a man like that run around without a control, do you? He’s got a cap of C9 circset into his hypothalmus, along with a beeper. He ever turns on us, somebody in Security only has to get within a klick of him and send a coded pulse—and blammo! Massey’s head turns into a big bowl full of mushy brain salad.”
“Good,” Red said. “Guys like him are necessary, but I’ll sleep better knowing we can take him out if need be.”
“Not to worry,” Green said. “It’s our job to think of these things. We’ve got it covered.”
* * *
Massey left the funeral of his wife and son, looking somber but playing a role. He didn’t feel anything in particular about the loss. One less woman and child didn’t mean anything, and while it was true he’d gotten used to them, he’d get used to them being gone, too. That’s how it was.
Behind him, his control dogged his heels, blending skillfully into the passersby outside the crematorium. The man was good, but Massey had spotted him months ago. He hadn’t let on, of course, because it was better to have the devil you knew tailing you than the one you didn’t know.
Massey wanted to grin, but he kept his face neutral as he caught a walk moving down from the crematorium level toward the elevated p-mover that would take him home. The company thought it was real clever, injecting a bioexplosive into his system during a routine physical. Massey had more money than he knew what to do with, and with enough credits, you could get a very good doctor. The C9 had been easy enough to remove. The pinhead-sized capsule had also been easy to load into a high-pressure injector gun. When Massey had taken his “vacation” to the Amazon Preserve a few weeks ago, they’d followed him, of course. The Preserve was almost twenty square kilometers of “authentic” rain forest, bounded by high containment fields that kept the animals in and civilization out. Local wildlife included such pests as insects, some of which liked to bite. Massey’s control had lost his insect repellent, or so he’d thought, and when the mosquitoes began eating at him, one of them had bitten him particularly hard. He’d slapped his hand over the wound but missed the flying bug. Because that particular bite wasn’t from an insect at all.
And now, that deadly C9 capsule was lodged in the control’s brain. The day he sent a coded pulse to kill Massey would be most surprising. And, Massey thought, particularly fitting. He’d kept the locator they’d put in, slightly altered. He didn’t give a damn if they knew where he was for now. When he decided he didn’t want them to know anymore, the beeper would stop sending its signal as quickly as he could touch a button on his belt.
The doctor who’d performed the surgery was now part of a batch of steel forming a bridge suspension on Mars, if Massey’s information was correct. No loose ends to tangle things.
As long as they let him do his job, Massey wouldn’t have any problems with the company. But if they somehow lost faith, well, there was no point in being unprepared. Mistakes happened, even though he didn’t make them. Always better to be ready than not.
The job this time was a big one, worth a lot of credits. For him the money was just a way to keep score. So far, Massey was winning big. There wasn’t anybody else close. The company thought it was clever, but they didn’t belong in the same class with him. He was the best. He intended to keep on being the best for a lo
ng, long time.
* * *
While Wilks was only a sergeant and theoretically subject to command by any officer of line rank, the truth of it was that on this mission, only Stephens was going to be giving him orders. They wanted him on this ship and so they’d bent over and handed him the soap. Wilks figured he might as well use it.
The first thing he did was program the ship’s computer with a personal override, using the last bit of the favor he was owed. He could come and go pretty much as he wanted. Getting Billie on the ship was easier than getting her out of the medical center. When Wilks accompanied two of the spare hypersleep chambers into the loading bay, Billie was inside one of them, the lid opaqued. Nobody even bothered to question him; he waltzed past the trooper leaning against the door with nothing more than a few words.
“Hey, Sarge,” the man said. “You cuttin’ it kinda thin, ain’tcha? It’s only five minutes to log-on deadline.”
“Live fast, die young—” he began.
“—and leave a good-looking corpse,” the trooper finished. He laughed.
Wilks shook his head. A lot of civilians believed that Colonial Marines were all steely-eyed, boot-tough, deadly as a box full of Acturian wasps and as sharp as a room full of needles. The entertainment vids made it out that little, if anything, got past a trained marine. That they could chew up nails and pee thumbtacks. The truth was that a basic trooper was usually a kid, barely old enough to be depilating his peach-fuzz whiskers, and as big a sucker as any teenager. It didn’t take a genius to pass basic military entrance exams. If you could find your way to the test site and spell your name for the computer, you were probably bright enough to get in. How long you stayed alive after that depended on how well the training took and how stupid your officers were, but the myth of the take-charge marines was just that, a myth.
Wilks walked the chambers past the trooper, floating them easily on their humming repulsors. Nobody expected anybody to smuggle a person onto a military ship leaving Earth. Coming back, maybe, a lot of folks wanted to get home out in the frontier worlds, but few people wanted to go bad enough to sneak into an outbound ship.