A Princess of the Aerie (30 page)

There really weren’t as many heets in line as it had looked like, Jak realized after a while. It was just that most of them
sized each other up and decided to allow a lot of personal space.

When he went through the door at the end of the line, he was already cutting it close for getting to the demonstration on
time, but there was still some time to do some good here. Then he saw that the “reception desk” was just a camera and mike
set hooked to an AI; he would have just left, but he was at the head of the line, so he walked up and answered the standard
questions—name, occupation, and so on. There was no way to probe for any good quotes, for Sinda.

“How long will I have to wait to be interviewed?” Jak asked, looking at the dozen or so goons roosting on the bench along
the back wall of the waiting area, bodies bent forward because most of them were too large for the narrow bench.

“Wait your turn. Your name will be called in the order in which you arrived. Next.”

Jak sat and keyed his purse to time the interval; after a minute or so, another heet was called in. It was ten minutes and
seventeen seconds before he emerged and the next one was called. There were thirteen heets in front of Jak, now, he realized,
counting. About two and half hours, far too long. He got up to go, and was actually walking through the door when the voice
said, “Jak Jinnaka. Jak Jinnaka, please come in for a special interview, proceed directly to the president’s office.”

Maybe they wanted him for an executive position or something. Jak turned and walked back, past the bench of goons, and through
the small door that dilated at the end. It slammed shut behind him in an emergency seal, and reflexively Jak grabbed for his
helmet—normally that sound meant a major pressure breach somewhere—so Jak was reaching back over his shoulder and bending
down when a thrown knife rang against the door behind him, right where his head should have been.

Jak looked up. Bex Riveroma, the man he had the most cause to fear anywhere at any time, was coming at him.

Jak had studied the Disciplines since before he could remember, and he had practiced even more ever since Riveroma had beaten
him so thoroughly on Earth. He sometimes practiced with an image of Riveroma’s face on the viv attacker. The situation was
surprising, but familiar; Jak did not hesitate.

Riveroma lunged for a grip. Jak sank, swept Riveroma’s hand away with a left block, caught the hand, and pivoted into the
body drop, jabbing sideways at Riveroma’s temple. Riveroma hip-blocked and ducked, freeing his arm, his hands trying to slide
into Jak’s collar, and Jak followed the motion, folding around the big man, hooking a leg and rolling it.

His blood screamed through his veins, the world was rimmed in red, and a rough tornado howled in his throat. He wanted to
attack, but in a sustained fight, Riveroma, master that he was, would surely win. So as Riveroma rolled, Jak kicked the tall,
muscular heet on the top of his bald head, then threw himself back against the light partition wall.

The wall went over as a unit, and there were shouts and bellows and the odd sensation of sliding down a wall under which several
heets were trying to stand up. Jak had crashed back into the room with the long weaving line of applicants.

As he bounded for the door, over the heads of the confused crowd in the middling grav, Jak shouted, “Police sting! Big bald
pokheet in there! They’re checking records and executing fugitives!” He charged through the door and down the corridor.

Behind him, slug-throwers popped, and a fighting laser hissed, amid screaming and shouting. Someone must have believed him.

Jak dodged at every corner, in the direction of less traffic, stopping for breath when he could no longer hear the uproar.
He had his purse shut off Sinda’s mikes and cameras, ran through a few more corridor intersections, and took the time to pry
them off and crush them under his boot. No sound of pursuit.

So Riveroma was president of MLB. It made sense. A heet with many different prices on his head, all of them large, couldn’t
hide anywhere forever. And fearsome as his skills were, he was becoming a liability to hire. Probably like many people before
him, finding that he could not get hired to do what he was good at, Riveroma had gone into business for himself.

His choice was bold but offered a real chance of success. While he was starting out, Mercury was as safe a place for an outlaw
as one might find in the solar system. And if Riveroma went on to gain control of Mercury, he would be too tough ever to dislodge.
Every international expedition ever sent to Mercury to put down a revolt had taken months to ship troops, bring them down
on the loop to a loyal city, and then move to take back areas in revolt. And in more than fifteen hundred years of space travel,
no one had ever successfully invaded an armed, hostile planet. In the Seventh Rubahy War, the Rubahy attempt to storm Mars,
and the human counterinvasion of Pluto, had both failed miserably, and nothing had changed in the seven hundred years since;
a planet gave too much cover, and space was too exposed. Trying to storm a planet from space was like trying to take a medieval
castle atop a perfectly smooth glass mountain on a bright sunny day.

So, if he got control of Mercury … Riveroma could proclaim himself whatever title he wanted to take, emperor if he liked,
and make it stick by the traditional right of conquest. And in a few hundred years no doubt his bloodline would be as honored
as the Karrinynya.

Jak shuddered. He splurged on a confidential, untraceable sprite to guide him to the rally. The strike leaders needed to know
what was going on.

As he neared the rally site, the flow of the crowd became against him—sad, grim people walking away from the space where the
rally was to be held, rather than toward it. Then he saw the little knot of the Eldothaler Quacco coming on, Durol at the
center of it talking with Kyffimna, with Dujuv and Shadow walking a little farther away—
No, Dujuv at point guard, Shadow at rear,
Jak realized. He pushed through the crowd to join them

“What’s going on? Where’s everyone going?” Jak asked.

“Where have
you
been?” Dujuv sounded angry.

“I got a chance to check out something about MLB. Bex Riveroma is the president of it—”

Dujuv looked stunned. “Weehu. Well, I guess that explains a lot.” He never took his eyes off the crowd, and Jak realized that
his tove was not just angry at Jak, but also alert and psyched and expecting an attack at any moment. “Well, great, we can
use that later to get some bounty hunters in here after him. For right now, listen up because there’s a lot for you to catch
up on. Watch my left rear for me while I talk, okay, and keep a general eye out in all directions.

“Now, while you were off playing detective or playing media star or whatever your game was today, MLB bought the public space
we were going to demonstrate in, revoked our permission to use it, and sent the pokheets to arrest the whole demonstration.
So all these people are going to walk a kilometer and a half out of the big doors on the south side of Bigpile, to a mine
that belongs to one of the quaccos that’s with us—we’re hoping that doing this as a march, even an illegal one, will keep
enough of our people together so that the pokheets will be too scared to try to break it up.

“Now, why we’re guarding. A heet tried to stab Durol Eldothaler, as we came out of our rocket, and there was a dud bomb thrown
at the feet of the leaders at the start of the rally.”

“It wasn’t a dud,” Kyffimna said, behind them. “
Somebody
grabbed it and stuffed it into a hazardous materials chute so that it went out onto the surface before it went off.”

“Kyffimna, I’m trying to keep you and your father safe,” Dujuv said, impatiently. “We can cover exact details
later.
It was no big deal. I need to brief Jak right now. Anyway, one pokheet shot at Durol—and Shadow shot back, which made the
pokheet think about another line of work and hurry off to apply. So besides opposing scum we have to watch out for police
scum. Durol is listed as a ringleader, and Shadow will probably be wanted for assaulting an officer soon, so they both have
to be hidden out in the kriljs somewhere. And they’re
so
inconspicuous.

“So while you were off doing all that doubtless fascinating stuff, and yes it’s good that we know that it’s Riveroma, old
tove, we just developed a few little problems, which are kind of urgent, and if you’re not doing anything else, and can take
time out of your busy schedule, maybe you could help Shadow and me guard the leadership, because you might have noticed this
is a big crowd, and there’s only two trained fighters to guard Durol, with thousands of people all around, and I’m normally
only this nervous during urological surgery.”

Jak didn’t blame Dujuv for sounding angry—Jak was late, he’d been needed, it was justified. He did dread Dujuv’s finding out
he had been late because he was dealing with Mreek Sinda.

Well, time enough to explain everything later. Meanwhile, he moved into the position where Dujuv wanted him, and put all his
attention into being a guard.

It became more of a march as they went on. People pulling on pressure suits joined them; shopkeepers stood at their doors
and cheered them on; there was a crowd along the streets, and Jak caught sight of Mreek Sinda, over to the side in one of
the large spaces, talking to one of her drones while a dozen of them buzzed around the crowd. As the side walls came to be
lined with spectators, the miners packed closer together, and as Bigpilers who had run home to grab their pressure suits rejoined
the march, it became still more compact.

Jak was at right rear, Shadow at left. The back of Shadow’s pressure suit, where there were small pockets to accommodate the
rage spines, had an odd bubbling motion that indicated that at the least, Shadow on the Frost was getting precessed by the
number of places that had to be watched for a threat, and the number of people moving through them.

Dujuv, up ahead, working point, was better at this. His level, even voice—“Keep back, please, clear the way, please, sorry,
security, I need you to move back”—cut right through the crowd noise, and people seemed to comply with his directives as if
he were the voice of authority.

At the center of the group, Durol had his head down close to his daughter’s, talking fast and low; from the few words Jak
caught, he gathered that they were replanning the program—conducting it outside in vacuum, some things like group singing
had to be omitted, and they urgently needed to assign radio channels for each function, and to work out contingencies for
things like radio jamming.

By the time the marchers sealed helmets and walked into the big airlock, things were in at least some sort of order. Without
a pressing crowd around, the march widened and slowed, like a river coming out of a narrow canyon into a broad shallow valley.

The south side of Bigpile fronted on a long, boulder-covered slope, and going around the larger boulders further divided them
into small groups. They were a straggling rabble by the time they reached the outer rise of the small, round crater and passed
through a narrow tunnel into the inside.

The crater was perfectly round, with very high walls that rose almost to the vertical, jagged-topped and very narrow. Durol
and the other quacco leaders would speak from a ledge that had been excavated across the foot of the crater wall, standing
in front of an ore separator that was still finishing the day’s run in a blur of plates and catchers. There was no sound,
of course, in the vacuum, and it seemed to Jak that it was sort of a waste that everyone would hear perfectly anyway due to
digital radio; if there had been air, this crater would have resonated beautifully.

Shadow’s voice crackled in Jak’s ear; the yellow telltale on Jak’s helmet faceplate display told him that this was private
channel and that only he and Dujuv were hearing it. “Here I am being a guard in a Bombardment crater. I’m not sure whether
this qualifies as your human idea of irony.”

“It’ll do,” Dujuv said, and Jak agreed. The Bombardment—the initial Rubahy attack, a thousand years ago, when they had tried
to conquer the solar system—had been made up of many thousands of quartz balls, about the size of coffee mugs, arriving at
more than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, aimed at the four lower planets, about fifty a day for about fifty years
on each planet. The Bombardment was the reason why Earth, north of 21°S, was dotted with tiny circular lakes, and why Mars
now had a dense atmosphere after the release of deep frozen volatiles deposits north of 23°S. But on Mercury, the craters
of four billion years had never eroded, and a mere million additional kilometer-and-smaller craters had been barely noticeable.
Nonetheless, Shadow was right—the steep high sides, indicating very fast liquefaction and very great recoil forces (more energy
released in a smaller space than ever occurred with a natural meteoroid)—meant that this had to be a Bombardment crater.

When everyone had come into the crater, Durol announced, over the general speech channel, “We’re going to start now.”

It was impossible to find a good place from which to guard the people speaking, and anyway the speakers had not consulted
their improvised (and desperately undermanned, and underRubahyed) security detail. Durol Eldothaler, with his row of about
ten supporters and other speakers behind him, stood directly in front of the body of the separator, which provided a plain
white-and-black backdrop. Someone had hung a banner, “Strike Against Tyranny,” on the side of the separator’s main tank, about
two meters off the ground. Dwarfed by the four-story-high, sixty-meter-wide tank, it looked pathetic.

He was wide open to any shot coming out of the crowd, and anyone in the front row might have tossed a grenade or a bomb in
among the platform party. For that matter, there were excellent sniper positions all around the crater rim, and in the low
gravity a man with a club or an ax might pop out of the crowd and be in among the speakers in three hard bounds. Worse still,
Kyffimna caught them and said, “Pop wants you well out of the way. He says having bodyguards makes it look like he’s done
something wrong.”