Displays flickered on the screen. The thing had scented Chung. Reese could do nothing but tell him it was coming.
Chung was by the aft airlock, halfway into the rad suit he’d need to flee through the airless engine space.
His face was fixed in an expression of rage. “Steward!” Reese screamed. The ten-gauge barked twice, and then the Wolf froze. The displays were gone. The Wolf, still with considerable momentum, continued to drift toward the aft bulkhead. It struck and rebounded, moving slowly toward Chung.
Reese tried to move in the suit, but its joints were locked. Her crashing pulse was the loudest sound in the helmet. She licked sweat from her upper lip, felt it running down her brows. Chung’s body slowly collapsed in the insignificant gravity of the asteroid. Drops of blood fell like slow-motion rubies. The gravity wasn’t enough to break the surface tension, and the droplets rested on the deck like ball bearings, rolling in the circulating air.
Reese’s heart stopped as she realized that the sound of the Wolf’s air-circulation system had ceased. She had only the air in the suit, then nothing.
Her mind flailed in panic. Shouting, her cries loud in her ears, she tried to move against the locked joints of the Wolf. The Wolf only drifted slowly to the deck, its limbs immobile.
Like Archangel, she thought. Nothing to look forward to but dying in a suit, in a tunnel, in the smell of your own fear. Just like her officers had always wanted. She tasted bile and fought it down.
I’m using air, she thought, and clamped down, gulping twice, trying to control her jackhammer heart, her panicked breath.
Chung’s furious eyes glared into hers at a distance of about three feet. She could see a reflection of the Wolf in his metal teeth. Reese began to move her arms and legs, testing the tension of the web.
There was a pistol under her left arm. If she could get to it with her right hand, she might be able to shoot her way out of the suit somehow.
Fat chance.
But still it was something to do, anyway. She began to move her right arm against the webbing, pulling it back. Blood rubies danced before her eyes. She managed to get her hand out of the glove, but there was a restraining strap against the back of her elbow that prevented further movement. She pushed forward, keeping her hand out of the glove, then drew back. Worked at it slowly, synchronizing the movement with her breath, exhaling to make herself smaller. Steward, she thought, would have been quoting Zen aphorisms to himself. Hers were more direct. You can get smaller if you want to, she thought, you’ve done it before.
She got free of the elbow strap, drew her arm back, felt her elbow encounter the wall of the suit. She was beginning to pant. The air can’t be gone this quickly, she thought, and tried to control panic as she pulled back on her arm, as pain scraped along her nerves. Sweat was coating her body. She tried to think herself smaller. She could feel warm blood running down her arm. The Wolf was saturated with the scent of fear.
Reese screamed as her arm came free, part agony, part exultation. She reached across her chest, felt the butt of the pistol. It was cold in her hand, almost weightless.
Where to point it? She could try blowing out the faceplate, but she’d have the barrel within inches of her face, and the faceplate was damn near impervious anyway. The bullet would probably ricochet right into her head. The Wolf was too well armored. Chung’s angry glare was making it impossible for her to think. Reese closed her eyes and tried to think of the schematics she’d studied, the location of the variable-lattice thread that contained the suit’s instructions.
Behind her, she thought. Pressed against her lower spine was the logic thread that operated the Wolf’s massive limbs. If she could wreck the thread, the locked limbs might move.
She experimented with the pistol. There wasn’t enough room to completely angle the gun around her body.
Sweat floated in salty globes around her as she thought it through, tried desperately to come up with another course of action. The air grew foul. Reese decided that shooting herself with the pistol would be quicker than dying of asphyxiation.
She tried to crowd as far over to the right as possible, curling the gun against her body, holding it reversed with her thumb on the trigger. The cool muzzle pressed into her side, just below the ribs. Line it up carefully, she thought. You don’t want to have to do this more than once. She tried to remember anatomy and what was likely to get hit. A kidney? Adrenal glands?
Here’s where I really take it up the ass, she thought. She screamed, building rage, and fired... and then screamed again from pain. Sweat bounced against the faceplate, spattering in the fierce momentum of the bullet’s pressure wave.
The Wolf’s limbs unlocked and the cyberdrone sagged to the deck. Reese gave a weak cheer, then shrieked again from the pain.
She had heard it wasn’t supposed to hurt when you got hit, not right away. Another lie, she thought, invented by the officer class.
There was something wrong with the world, with the way it was manifesting itself. She realized she was deaf from the pistol blast.
Reese leaned back, took a deep breath of foul air. Now, she thought, comes the easy part.
*
Reese managed to put her right arm back into the sleeve, then use both arms— the armor, thankfully, was near weightless— to get herself out of the suit. She moved to the sick bay and jabbed endorphin-analogue into her thigh, then X-rayed herself on the portable machine. It looked as if she hadn’t hit anything vital, but then she wasn’t practiced at reading X-rays, either. She patched herself up, swallowed antibiotics, and then out of nowhere the pain slammed down, right through the endorphin. Every muscle in her body went into spasm. Reese curled into a ball, her body a flaming agony. She bounced gently off one wall, then another. Fought shuddering waves of nausea. Tears poured from her eyes. It hurt too much to scream.
It went on forever, for days. Loaded on endorphins, she looted the station, moving everything she could into the freighter, then pissed bright blood while howling in agony. Fevers raged in her body. She filled herself with antibiotics and went on working. Things— people, aliens, hallucinations— kept reaching at her, moving just outside her field of vision. Sometimes she could hear them talking to her in some strange, melodic tongue.
She grappled Voidrunner to the freighter’s back, then lifted off Cuervo and triggered the charges. She laughed at the bright blossoms of flame in the locks, the gush of air that turned to white snow in the cold vacuum, and then into a bright rainbow as it was struck by the sun. Reese accelerated toward Earth for as long as she could stand it, then cut the engines.
There was a constant wailing in her ears, the cry of the fever in her blood. For the next several days— one of them was her birthday— Reese hung weightless in her rack, fought pain and an endless hot fever, and studied the data she’d stolen, trying to figure out why nine tame scientists were willing to commit murder over it.
The fever broke, finally, under the onslaught of antibiotics. Her urine had old black blood now, not bright new crimson. She thought she was beginning to figure out what the station crew had been up to.
It was time to decide where she was going to hide. The freighter and the tug were not registered to her, and her appearance with them was going to result in awkward questions. She thought about forging records of a sale— credentials, after all, were her specialty. Reese decided to tune in on the broadcasts from Earth and see if there were any new places for refugees to run to.
To her surprise she discovered that Ram’s executive board on Prince Station had fallen three days before, and Cheney had been made the new chairman. She waited another two days, studying the data she’d stolen, the bottles of strange enzymes and tailored RNA she had moved to the freighter’s cooler, and then beamed a call to Prince and asked for S. C. Vivekenanda. She was told the vice president of communications was busy. “I can wait,” she said. “Tell him it’s Waldman.”
Ken’s voice came on almost immediately. “Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m coming your way,” Reese told him. “And I think I’ve got your architecture of liberation with me. But first, we’ve got to cut a deal.”
*
What the lab’s inhabitants had been up to wasn’t quite what Ken had been talking about that gusty spring night in Uzbekistan, but it was close. The Brighter Suns biologists and artificial intelligence people had been working on a new way of storing data, a fast and efficient way, faster than variable-lattice thread.
They had succeeded in storing information in human DNA.
It had been tried before. Genetically altered humanity had been present for a century, and the mysteries of the genetic mechanism had been thoroughly mapped. There had long been theories that genetic material, which succeeded in coding far more information on its tiny strand than any comparable thread-based technology, would provide the answer to the endless demand for faster and more efficient means of data storage.
The theories had always failed when put into practice. Just because specialists could insert desirable traits in a strand of human DNA didn’t mean they had the capability of doing it at the speed of light, reading the genetic message the strand contained at similar speed, or altering the message at will. The interactions of ribosomes, transfer RNA, and enzymes were complex and interrelated to the point where the artificial intelligence/biologist types had despaired of trying to control them with current technology.
Alien genetics, it turned out, were simple compared to the human. Power DNA chains were much shorter, containing half the two hundred thousand genes in a human strand, without the thousands of repetitions and redundancies that filled human genes. Their means of reproducing DNA were similar, but similarly streamlined.
And the Power method of DNA reproduction was compatible with human genetics. The transfer and message RNA were faster, cleaner, more controllable. Information transfer had a theoretically astounding speed— a human DNA strand, undergoing replication, unwound at 8000 RPM. Power RNA combined with human DNA made data transfers on thread look like slow motion.
Once the control technology was developed, information could be targeted to specific areas of the DNA strand. The dominant genes could remain untouched; but the recessive genes could be altered to contain information. Nothing could be kept secret when any spy could code information in his own living genetic makeup. And no one could discover the spy unless they knew what code he was using and what they were looking for.
The architecture of liberation. Risk-free transfer of data. It would be years before any of this was possible— Prince Station’s newly hired biologists would have to reconstruct all the station’s work and then develop it to the point where it was commercially viable. But Prince Station was going to have its new source of technology, and Reese a new source of income— she’d asked for a large down payment in advance of a small royalty that should nevertheless make her a billionaire in the next forty years. She’d asked for that, plus Prince’s help in disposing of a few other problems.
*
Reese looked down at her double, lying on a bed in a room that smelled of death. Her twin’s eyes were closed, her breasts rose and fell under a pale blue sheet. Bile rose in Reese’s throat.
Reese was blond again, her nose a little straighter, her mouth a little wider. She had a new kidney, a new eardrum. New fingerprints, new blue irises. She liked the new look. The double looked good, too.
Two bodies, a man and a woman, were sprawled at the foot of the bed: assassins, sent by Berger to kill her. They had followed a carefully laid trail to her location here on Prince, and when they came into her apartment they’d been shot dead by Prince’s security men firing from concealment in the wide bedroom closet. Reese had waited safely in the next room, her nerves burning with adrenaline fire while she clutched Ken’s hand; her nerves alert for the sound of gunfire, she watched her double breathe under its sheet.
Then the security people came for the mannikin. They were going to kill it.
The double was Reese’s clone. Her face had been restructured the same way Reese’s had, and her artificial eyes were blue. Her muscles had been exercised via electrode until they were as firm as Reese’s. There was even a metal pin in her ankle, a double of the one Reese carried. The clone was an idiot— her brain had never contained Reese’s mind.
The idea was to make it appear that Reese and the assassins had killed each other. Reese looked down at her double and felt her mouth go dry. The security people were paddling around the room, trying to make appearances perfect. Hot anger blazed behind Reese’s eyes. Fuck this, she thought.
She pried the pistol out of one of the assassins’ hands and raised it.
She was a tunnel rat, she thought. An animal, a coward, disloyal. Sometimes she needed reminding.
“It’s not murder,” Ken said, trying to help.
“Yes it is,” Reese said. She raised the killer’s gun--an ideal assassin’s weapon, a compressed-air fletcher— and fired a silent dart into the mannikin’s thigh. Then she closed her eyes, not wanting to see the dying thing’s last spasm. Instead she saw Steward, dying in his own silent bed, and felt a long grey wave of sadness. She opened her eyes and looked at Ken.
“It’s also survival,” she said.
“Yes. It is.”
A cold tremor passed through Reese’s body. “I wasn’t talking about the clone.”
While Ken’s assistants made it look as if she and the assassins had killed each other, Reese stepped through the hidden door into the next apartment. Her bag was already packed, her identity and passport ready. Credentials, she thought, her specialty. That and killing helpless people. Group rates available.
She wanted to live by water again. New Zealand sounded right. It was getting to be spring there now.
“You’ll come back?” Ken asked.
“Maybe. But in the meantime, you’ll know where to send the royalties.” There was pain in Ken’s eyes, in Steward’s eyes. Attachments were weakness, always a danger. Reese had a vision of the Street, people parting, meeting, dying, in silence, alone. She wouldn’t be safe on Prince and couldn’t be a part of Ken’s revolution. She was afraid she knew what it was going to turn into, once it became the sole possessor of a radical new technology. And what that would turn Ken into.
Reese shouldered her bag. Her hands were still trembling. Sadness beat slowly in her veins. She was thirty-seven now, she thought. Maybe there were sports she shouldn’t indulge in.
Maybe she should just leave.
“Enjoy your new architecture,” she said, and took off.
The End
BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS
Novels
Ambassador of Progress
Angel Station
Hardwired
Knight Moves
Voice of the Whirlwind
Days of Atonement
Aristoi
Metropolitan
City on Fire
The Rift (originally as by Walter J Williams)
Divertimenti
The Crown Jewels
House of Shards
Rock of Ages
Dread Empire’s Fall
The Praxis
The Sundering
Conventions of War
Investments (short novel)
Dagmar Shaw Thrillers
This Is Not a Game
Deep State
The Fourth Wall
Collections
Facets
Frankensteins & Foreign Devils
The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories
Privateers & Gentlemen (historical novels, originally as by Jon Williams)
To Glory Arise (originally published as The Privateer)
The Tern Schooner (originally published as The Yankee)
Brig of War (originally published as The Raider)
The Macedonian
Cat Island
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Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) Page 4