The Fifth Quadrant

by C. J. Ryan

  “Can we talk to them?” Gloria wondered.

  “My thought exactly,” said Volkonski. “Erskine?”

  “External mikes and speakers on, sir. Just use your throat mike.”

  Volkonski took a couple of breaths, then said in an authoritative voice, “This is Dexta Internal Security. Cease fire at once!”

  “Fuck you, Bug!” came the reply, followed by another blue-green plasma discharge into the water just ahead of the Cruiser.

  “Who are you?” Volkonski demanded.

  “We are the People’s Anti-Imperialist Nexus, and we’ve got you in our crosshairs, lickspittle!”

  “I guess you boys don’t get many newstexts out this way,” Volkonski said in a more conversational tone. “PAIN’s leadership group has been captured, and the whole operation is disbanding. The war’s already over, and your side lost. Give it up now and you’ll get off easy.”

  “You must think we’re idiots!”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. Who else but idiots would let themselves get stranded on this stinkhole fighting for a cause that’s already lost? How long have you guys been stuck here, anyway?”

  There was no immediate response. Then a different voice called out, “None of your business, Bug!”

  Volkonski put his hand over his throat mike and said to Gloria, “I thought so. They’ve been here a while. The main thing they want is to get off this planet. I don’t think they’ll do anything to damage the ship.”

  The first voice from outside called, “Hey, Bug! We’ll make you a deal. Come out with your hands up, and we won’t kill you.”

  “We’ll make you a deal,” Volkonski replied. “Put your weapons down and we won’t set fire to your planet. Twenty-nine percent oxygen out there—you’d go up like torches.”

  “Then we’ll all burn together, Bug,” came the response.

  “He means it,” Volkonski said to Gloria.

  “This could go on all day,” Gloria said.

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  “Just one,” she said. “I think this may be the time for a distraction.” She hit the contact switch that quickly rendered her bodysuit 90 percent transparent, then opened the pressure seam in front as low as it could go.

  “Just remember the mission, Arkady. If you get a chance to get away, take it. You can always come back for me later.”

  Volkonski nodded. “Good luck, Gloria.”

  Gloria leaned toward Volkonski’s throat mike and announced, “This is Gloria VanDeen of Dexta. I’m coming out.”

  WHIT BARTHOLEMEW’S LIMO RETURNED PETRA to the Imperial Cantabragian that morning, and she walked through the crowded lobby, still nearly nude in her flimsy nighttime togs. She immediately encountered Althea Dante, who gave her a friendly kiss on the cheek and gushed, “Petra, darling! We’re all so proud of you! A marvelous piece of detective work.”

  “They made a public announcement?” Petra asked.

  “Of course not. But Dexta people know. And don’t you look glamorous!” Althea gave her a wicked grin. “I trust you had a fulfilling evening?”

  “It was interesting,” Petra said.

  “I’ll just bet it was. You’re getting to be quite the Tiger, aren’t you? Maybe I could teach you a few things sometime.”

  “C’mon, Althea, you know I don’t do that.”

  “Variety is the spice of life,” Althea countered.

  “I think I’ve got enough spice in my life for now,” Petra said. “But tell me something. What do you know about Whitney Bartholemew, Junior?”

  “Not much,” Althea replied. “I get the impression that you must know a lot more than I do. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering. He’s a strange man, in some ways.”

  “So I gather. I never really knew him, but as it happens, we went to the same college. He was a few years ahead of me, of course. At the time, he was one of those hairy campus radicals—you know the type. Always hogging the microphone at demonstrations and droning on and on about the evil pigs and the Hagoolian dialectic.”

  “Hegelian,” Petra corrected.

  “Whatever. He was never exactly my type.” Althea eyed her inquisitively. “Is he yours, Petra, dear?”

  “I’m not sure,” Petra answered. “Althea, what do you do when you’re attracted to a man you know is bad for you?”

  “I usually give in to my own low urges and let the chips fall where they may. But that’s just me. I’m not sure it’s you, though. Petra, would you mind some gratuitous advice?”

  “Please.”

  “You’re a delightful and charming young woman, and very sexy when you want to be. But you have an unfortunate streak of innate goodness in you. That can be very inconvenient when it comes to sex. When you get right down to it, women like Gloria and I are—to be coarse about it—cunts. The difference between us is that Gloria wants people to think that she’s a nice cunt, and I don’t give a shit what they think. But you really are nice, in some fundamental way. Don’t lose that, Petra. Just because things didn’t work out with Peter Pan, don’t throw yourself at Captain Hook. You’re better than that. And now,” Althea said, giving Petra another peck on her cheek, “I must be off. Ciao, darling!”

  Petra made her way to the elevators, deep in thought, pausing briefly to accept congratulations from two Dexta people she didn’t even know. Once in the suite, she stretched out on a sofa and contemplated her navel, which she had heard was a good way to achieve enlightenment. She thought she needed some of that.

  Whit wanted her to fly away with him on Sunday. With his mother. Just what she needed, another disapproving matron to impress. She wanted to go, wanted to spend a week or so on a far-off world—with low gravity!—and just forget about everything that had happened on New Cambridge. Lose herself in the angry passion of Whit Bartholemew.

  But why did it have to be Sunday? Why couldn’t he just wait a few days? What was so important about Sunday?

  Abruptly, unexpectedly, Petra achieved the enlightenment she had sought. It had a physical force to it, and it almost made her ill.

  She grabbed her purse and pad and all but ran out of the suite to the elevators. She had to get back to her office in Gibraltar. Enlightenment was one thing, but she needed facts.

  GLORIA STEPPED OUT ONTO THE DOCK AND IMMEDIATELY wrinkled her nose at the pungent scent of the scumworld. The oxygen-rich air seemed to burn her lungs, but after a couple of deep breaths, she felt better. The air was cool and the sky was a faded blue-green. She saw two men flanking the path at the top of the rise, aiming their rifles at her. One of them carried a flèchette gun, the other an old Mark IV plasma rifle. She walked slowly to the end of the dock and waited. One of the men waved her on, and she made her way up the path; it looked as if someone had sprayed it with an herbicide that kept the surrounding algae mats in check.

  Reaching the top of the rise, she paused again. Two more men appeared, one with a flèchette rifle and the other holding a plasma pistol. They were all dressed in pea-green jumpsuits, mottled with random patterns of brown and tan.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Gloria asked.

  “No one,” said the man with the pistol. “We are not hierarchical. We are an affinity group and we make collective decisions.” Yet it was clear to Gloria that, anarchist ideology aside, the man with the pistol was effectively in charge. He was about thirty, brown hair, brown eyes, and like the others, wore a scraggly growth of beard.

  “You mean I have to negotiate with all four of you at once?”

  “Who said anything about negotiations?” said the man with the pistol. All four men were staring at her with what seemed to Gloria to be hungry appreciation.

  “We didn’t invite you to come out here,” said the man with the plasma rifle.

  Gloria slowly turned to look at each of them. “Come on, guys,” she said, “we’ve got a situation here, and we need to discuss it. You obviously want our ship, or you’d have holed the hull by now.”

  “We can do more than
that, Ms. VanDeen,” said one of the men with a flèchette rifle. “We’ve got plasma RPGs, and we can blow that ship straight to hell.”

  “And probably yourselves, too,” Gloria pointed out. “But even if you lived, you’d still be stuck here. How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough,” said the man with the pistol. “But our relief could arrive at any time. Maybe even today.”

  Gloria shook her head. “I wouldn’t count on it. Didn’t you hear what we said? PAIN is out of business.”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  “What choice do you have? Look, we’ve got something you want, and maybe you’ve got something we want. Let’s walk over to your building so I can get a look at those weapons—if you have them.”

  “We’ve got ’em, Ms. VanDeen,” said the man with the plasma rifle.

  “Then let’s see them. I’m not going to negotiate until I see what we’re negotiating about.”

  The man with the plasma pistol frowned, then turned to one of the men with a flèchette rifle and said, “Take her down the path a little way and watch her.” Then he walked past Gloria and huddled with the other two men. Her guard motioned for her to move, and she did, but she noticed that the other three men were engaged in what seemed to be a heated discussion behind her. Apparently it was difficult for anarchists to give orders to each other.

  The man guarding her was tall and thin, with dirty blond hair and hazel eyes. From the look of his beard, she guessed that they had been here at least three months. And they probably hadn’t seen a woman in all that time.

  Gloria smiled at him. “I’m Gloria,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  The man hesitated, then answered. “Doug,” he said. “And that’s Marty, and the other two are Alex and Rick.” Doug was trying to look Gloria in the eye, but his gaze kept darting down to her mostly uncovered breasts and her torso, which was not at all concealed beneath the clinging, nearly transparent bodysuit.

  “Is it just you four?” Gloria asked. “Must get lonely around here.”

  Doug started to answer, stopped himself, then said, grinning self-consciously, “We got a whole army just over that hill.”

  Marty, the man with the pistol, returned, having completed his parley with the rest of the affinity group. His comrades looked back over their shoulders at Gloria, then turned to concentrate their attention on the Cruiser.

  “Okay,” Marty said, “walk. And if you try anything funny, we’ll shoot you where you stand. We mean it.”

  “I know you do,” Gloria said. “One of your comrades parted my hair with a plasma rifle a few weeks back.”

  “Yeah,” Doug said, “we heard they were going to try for you. Kind of glad they missed.”

  “Shut up and walk,” Marty said, and so they did. Gloria kept ahead of the two men, putting a little extra hip waggle into her stride. Anarchists, Gloria assumed, had the same hormones as other men.

  After a few minutes, they reached the building. The main door, about twenty feet on a side, was closed. Marty indicated that she should go through a smaller door to the right. That led into a small pressure chamber, and when the outer door was closed behind them, there was a brief hissing sound and the inner door popped open. Inside, the stench was less noticeable, and the air seemed more Earth-like.

  “Just so you’ll know, we can use a plasma weapon in here,” Marty told her.

  “I’m sure there won’t be any need for that,” Gloria replied. Marty led her down a short corridor, opened a door, and gestured for her to go ahead. She stepped out onto the concrete floor of the main room. Ahead of her sat a medium-sized freight skimmer with a closed cab and a flatbed, parked immediately in front of the large pressure door at the entrance. Beyond it, she saw a variety of unfamiliar machinery and equipment, apparently left behind by the terraforming crew. To the right, and extending two hundred feet to the rear of the building, were stacks of shipping containers and crates of various sizes. Overhead panel lighting cast a diffuse, yellowish glow.

  Gloria walked ahead of the men, toward the containers. She glanced around, like a potential house-buyer idly checking out the premises. When she reached the first of the containers, she paused and read the stenciled notations on their sides. Deciphered, the string of letters and numbers seemed to announce that the containers each held two orbital plasma mines. The date read 06-23-63.

  “This what you came to see?” Marty asked, a hint of a sneer in his voice.

  “Some of it,” Gloria said, trying to sound unimpressed. “Where are the big plasma bombs?”

  “Back there,” Marty said, pointing with his pistol.

  “How many?”

  “Enough.”

  “Come on, Marty,” Gloria said. “Don’t play cute. We know there were eighteen of them in the original shipment. You sent one of them to New Cambridge, and we already have that one, so you should have seventeen left here. Unless you sent some of them elsewhere. We need to know. Seventeen?”

  Marty pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded. “Seventeen,” he said. “Back there on the left.”

  “Let’s see them. I want to count.”

  They walked on. Marty said, “How do we know you really got the one on New Cambridge?”

  “I told you, we broke up your whole New Cambridge operation. Think about it. How else could we have found you here?”

  “She’s telling the truth, Marty,” Doug said.

  “Maybe. So why’d they send you here, Ms. VanDeen?”

  Gloria turned and smiled at the two men. “Oh, you know. Glamour. Publicity. ‘Beautiful Dexta Agent Finds Missing Arms Cache.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Figures,” Marty snorted.

  “You boys are just a loose end,” Gloria told them. “Nobody from PAIN is coming to pick up you and the weapons. We’re your only ticket out, guys. Or do you want to spend the rest of your lives here?”

  “Shit, I knew it!” Doug said in disgust. “They said it would just be two months, and it’s already been three.”

  “Shut up,” Marty told him.

  “Shut up, yourself! I’m sick of listening to your crap, Marty. First among equals, my ass!”

  “Are these the plasma bombs?” Gloria asked, pausing in front of some big black containers.

  “That’s them. Go ahead and count, if you want. There are seventeen of them, like I said.” Marty waved his pistol in her direction. “But don’t get any stupid ideas.”

  Gloria made a show of counting and inspecting the containers, crouching and bending as needed to give Doug and Marty a good view of her assets. Her bluff was working, so far, and sex was providing the necessary distraction. It was simply a question of waiting for the right moment.

  “Okay,” she said at last, “seventeen. Maybe we can do some business, but I need to see the other stuff, too. Where are the plasma rifles and grenades?”

  “Over here, on the right,” Marty said.

  Gloria walked over to the crates. “I don’t want to have to count all 24,000 rifles,” she said. “Help me out here, guys. How many of them have been distributed so far?”

  “Couple hundred,” Doug said, “give or take. About the same with the grenades.”

  Gloria looked at Marty. “That right, Marty?”

  “Yeah,” he said with some apparent reluctance. “That’s about right.”

  “Good,” Gloria said. “Now we can negotiate.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Marty asked her.

  “We’ll trade you. Our Cruiser for the weapons. You can leave and go anywhere you want. We’ll stay here, and when we don’t show up on time at New Cambridge, they’ll send another ship for us.” Gloria gave him a satisfied smile.

  “We don’t have a pilot,” Marty said.

  “You can have ours, as long as you promise not to hurt him.”

  She could tell from Doug’s face that he was eager to accept the deal. But Marty looked as if he needed a little more persuasion.

  “And I’ll throw in a bonus, just f
or you two. The others don’t need to know a thing about it.”

  “What bonus?” Marty demanded.

  “How long since you guys have had a woman?” Gloria stood in front of them, grinning.

  Doug’s eyes bulged out, but Marty remained skeptical. “You expect us to believe you’re going to put out for us?”

  Gloria allowed herself to look wounded by this show of doubt. “Hey, Marty,” she said, “I’m Gloria VanDeen! You’ve heard all about me, right? Sexually voracious. Wantonly uninhibited. The best fuck in the galaxy. And it’s all true. But don’t take my word for it—find out for yourselves! You must have some beds in this dump.”

  “Over there in the crew quarters,” Doug said, trying to be helpful.

  “Shut up. It’s some kind of trick.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Marty! Three months in this fucking place, and for what? You heard her—it’s over! This is our only chance to get out of here!”

  “Maybe. But I don’t like this sex business. Use your head, Doug. She’s just trying to split us up.”

  “One of you can fuck me, and the other one can watch, with a gun in his hand,” Gloria said. “I don’t mind. Unless you think you wouldn’t be able to…you know…do it. I mean, that happens with some guys. I think I must intimidate them or something. And, of course, if it’s just been you four guys here together for three months, well, maybe you’ve worked out some other arrangement for yourselves. And that’s okay, really. There’s nothing wrong with same-sex sex. I mean, I’ve done it with plenty of other women, and if you guys are like that—”

  “Hey!” Doug interjected. “It’s not like that at all. You just let me show you!”

  “You moron! Can’t you see what she’s trying to do?”

  “What are you worried about?” Doug turned and got in Marty’s face. “We’ve still got the guns! What can she do?”

  At that precise instant, Gloria showed them what she could do. A flying Qatsima kick caught Marty square in the face and sent him reeling backwards, his plasma pistol clattering along the concrete. Doug reacted, but not quickly enough, and as he fumbled with the awkward flèchette rifle, Gloria bounded up in another kick that put a heel in Doug’s groin. He doubled over, and Gloria finished him off with a knee to the chin.