The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (53 page)

“The rock’s about two kilometers in diameter. The official name is 2131YA, but it’s also called Cuervo Gold.”

“Funny names they’re giving asteroids these days.”

“They’ve run out of minor Greek gods, I guess. Cuervo’s officially owned by a non-policorporate mining company called Exeter Associates, which in turn is owned by us. Gold’s an Apollo asteroid, crossing Earth’s orbit on a regular schedule, and that makes it convenient for purposes of resupply, and also makes it a lot more isolated than any of the rocks in the Belt. We’ve had a lab there for a while, using it to develop some technology that—” He grinned. “Well, that we wanted to keep far away from any competition. Security on Vesta is tight, but it’s a port, people are always coming in and out. What we’ve got on the asteroid is pretty hot stuff, and we wanted to keep it away from the tourists.”

“I don’t really want to know,” Reese said.

“I don’t know myself, so I couldn’t tell you,” Berger said. “The work was in a fairly advanced stage when certain activities relating to your old friend Griffith became public. It became an urgent matter to shut down the project and transfer its members to other duties in central Africa, where I work. If the investigators found out about our owning that asteroid, and what’s on it, Brighter Suns could be very embarrassed.”

“The techs refused to move?” Reese asked.

“They protested. They said their work was entering a critical stage. A transport was sent from Earth to pick them up, but they refused to evacuate, and then we lost touch with the freighter. We think the crew have been killed or made prisoner.”

“Your people could have defected to another policorp, using the transport.”

“We don’t think so. Their work would have been hard to take with them. And they couldn’t have gone far without attracting attention—some of the lab personnel were Powers.”

A coolness moved through Reese’s bones. She sat up, regarding Berger carefully. Powers were forbidden off the two entry ports—the official reason was that there was too much danger of cross-contamination from alien life-forms. Plagues had already devastated the two Power legations, and the reverse was always a possibility. The discovery of Powers in Brighter Suns employ outside of Vesta would ruin Brighter Suns’ credit for good.

But after a while the heat on Brighter Suns would die down. Trade with the aliens was too profitable for people to interfere with it for long. In a year or two, the lab could be reopened with cloned personnel and some very mean security goons to make certain they followed orders.

“I understand your sense of urgency,” Reese said. “But why me? Why not go yourself?”

“We don’t have anyone with your talents on Earth,” Berger said. “I’m not wired the way you are. And…well, we’d like to know you’re gainfully employed by us rather than floating around Uzbekistan waiting to be captured by the heat. If we can find you, they probably can.”

Reese sipped her club soda. “How did you find me, exactly?”

“Someone recognized you.”

“Who might that have been?”

The skin by Berger’s eye gave a leap. “It’s already taken care of,” he said. “We didn’t want him giving your name to anyone else.”

Da Vega. Well. At least it wasn’t Ken.

But there was also a threat: Berger didn’t want her in this refugees’ paradise, where the number of desperate people was higher than average and where a policorporate kidnap team could find her. If they’d already iced one person, they could put the ice on another.

“Let’s talk payment,” Reese said. “Brighter Suns, I think, can afford to pay me what I’m worth.”

R
AM’S COPS HAD
beaten some woman to death during interrogation. Ken was busy at his console, putting out fact and opinion pieces, making the most of another death for the revolution. Reese paced the room, picking at the tattered wallpaper, eating Mongolian barbecue from a waxed paper container. Below the window, some drunken descendant of the Golden Horde was singing a sad song to the moon. He kept forgetting the lyrics and starting over, and the burbling ballad was getting on Reese’s nerves.

“I’d feel better,” she said, “if Cheney was paying you a decent wage.”

“He pays what he can afford.” Ken’s fingers sped over his keyboard. “The money has to be laundered, and he has to be careful how he does it.”

“You don’t even have a promise of a job after it’s all over.”

Ken shrugged. “Prince can always use another economist.”

“And you don’t have protection. Ram could order you iced.”

“He needs a live scapegoat, not a dead martyr.” He frowned as he typed. “This isn’t a mysterious business, you know. Ram knows our strength and most of our moves, and we know his. There aren’t very many hidden pieces on the board.”

The Uzbek began his song again. Reese clenched her teeth. She put her hand on Ken’s shoulder.

“I’m disappearing tomorrow,” she said.

He tilted his head back, looking up in surprise. His fingers stopped moving on the keys.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I got a job.”

She saw a confirmation in his eyes. “Not one you can talk about,” he said.

“No. But it’s not for Ram. In case you were wondering.”

He took her hand in one of his. “I’ll miss you.”

Reese put her food carton on top of his video display. Her chopsticks jabbed the air like rabbit ear antennae.

“I’ve got another twelve hours before I take the plane to Beijing.”

Ken turned off his console. “I can send the rest out tomorrow,” he said.

Reese was surprised. “What about the revolution?”

He shrugged and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Sometimes I feel redundant. The revolution is inevitable, after all.”

“It’s nice to know,” Reese said, “that the devil can quote ideology to his purpose.”

Outside, the Uzbek continued his wail to the desolate stars.

T
HE TUG WAS
called
Voidrunner
, and it was thirty years old at least, the padding on its bulkheads patched with silver tape, bundles of cable hanging out of access hatches. Reese had been in enough ships like it not to let the mess bother her—all it meant was that the tug didn’t have to impress its passengers. The air inside tasted acrid, as if the place was crammed full of sweating men, but there were only four people on board.

Berger introduced the other three to Reese, then left, waving cheerily over his shoulder. About four minutes later,
Voidrunner
cast off from Charter Station and began its long acceleration to its destination.

Reese watched the departure from the copilot’s chair in the armored docking cockpit. The captain performed the maneuvers with his eyes closed, not even looking out the bubble canopy at the silver-bright floodlit skin of Charter, reality projected into his head through his interface thread, his eyelids twitching as his eyes reflexively scanned mental indicators.

His name was Falkland. He was about fifty, an Artifact War veteran who, fifteen years before, had been doing his level best to kill Reese in the tunnels of Archangel. A chemical attack had left his motor reflexes damaged, and he wore a light silver alloy exoskeleton. Fortunately his brain and interface thread had survived the war intact. He wore a grey beard and his hair long over his collar.

“Prepare for acceleration,” he said, his eyes still closed. “We’ll be at two gees for the first six hours.”

Reese looked out at Earth’s dull grey moon, vast, taking up most of the sky. “Right,” she said. “Got my piss bottle right here.” Hard gees were tough on the bladder.

After the long burn
Voidrunner
settled into a constant one-gee acceleration. Falkland stayed strapped in, his eyelids still moving to some internal REM light show. Reese unbuckled her harness, stretched her relieved muscles while her spine and neck popped, and moved downship.

Falkland offered no comment.

The crew compartment smelled of fresh paint. Reese saw the tug’s engineer, a tiny man named Chung, working on a bulkhead fire alarm. His head was bobbing to music he was feeding to his aural nerves. Chung was so into the technophilic Destinarian movement he was turning himself slice by slice into a machine. His eyes were clear implants that showed the interior silver circuitry; his ears were replaced by featureless black boxes, and there were other boxes of obscure purpose jacked into his hairless scalp. His teeth were metal, and liquid crystal jewelry, powered by nerve circuitry, shone in ever-changing patterns on his cheeks and on the backs of his hands. He hadn’t said anything when Berger introduced him, just looked at Reese for a moment, then turned back to his engines.

Now he said something. His voice was hoarse, as if he wasn’t used to using it. “He’s downship. In Cargo B.”

His back was to Reese, and she had been moving quietly. His head still bobbed to inaudible music. He hadn’t even turned his head to speak. “Thanks,” she said. “Nice implants.”

“The best. I built ’em myself.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be monitoring the burn?”

He pointed at one of his boxes. “I am.”

“Nice.”

She always found she had common ground with control freaks.

Vickers was in Cargo B, as Chung had promised. He was Reese’s armorer, hired by Berger for the sole purpose of maintaining the combat suit that Reese was to wear on Cuervo. Vickers was young, about eighteen, and thin. His dark hair was cut short; he had a stammer and severe acne. He was dressed in oil-spattered coveralls. When Reese walked in, Vickers was peeling the suit’s components out of their foam packing. She helped him lay the suit on the deck. Vickers grinned.

“W-wolf 17,” he said. His voice was American Southern. “My favorite. You’re gonna kick some ass with this. It’s so good it can p-practically do the job by itself.”

The suit was black, long-armed, anthropoid. The helmet, horned by radio antennae, was fused seamlessly to the shoulders. Inside, Reese’s arms, legs, and body would fit into a complex web that would hold her tightly: the suit would amplify and strengthen her every move. It wasn’t entirely natural movement—she’d have to get used to having a lot more momentum in free fall than she normally did.

“F-fuckin’ great machine,” Vickers said. Reese didn’t answer.

The Wolf’s dark viewplate gleamed in the cool cabin light. There was a clean functionality to its design that made it even more fearful—nothing in its look gave the impression that it was anything but a tool for efficient murder. The white Wolf trademark shone on the matte-black body of the suit. Reese fought a memory charged with fear—Wolf made most of the cyberdrones she’d encountered on Archangel. The combat suit, free of its packing, had a smell she’d hoped she’d never scent again.

“I want to look at the manual,” she said. “And the schematics.” If her life was going to depend on this monster, she wanted to know everything there was to know about it.

He looked at her approvingly. “I’ve got them on thread in m-my cabin. The suit’s standard, except for some c-custom thread woven into the t-target-acquisition unit. Berger knows who you’re going to b-be gunning for, and he put in some specific target-identification routines. You’re gonna be h-hot.”

“That’s the plan,” Reese said. The smell of the Wolf, oil and plastic webbing and cold laminate armor, rose in her nostrils. She repressed a shiver.

Vickers was still admiring the Wolf. “One wicked son of a bitch,” he said. When talking to machines, he lost his stammer.

R
EESE AND THE
Wolf moved as one in the void. Amber-colored target-acquisition data glowed on the interior of the black faceplate. Below them the asteroid glittered as flecks of mica and nickel reflected the relentless sun.

No way they’re not gonna know you’re coming,
Berger had told her.
Not with your ship’s torch coming at them. We stabilized the rock’s spin, so you can try landing on the blind side, but they’re smart enough to have put detectors out there, so we can’t count on surprise. What we’re going to have to do is armor you so heavily that no matter what they try to do to you, they can’t get through.

Great, she thought. Now the rock’s little techs, human and alien, were probably standing by the airlocks with whatever weapons they’d been able to assemble in the last weeks, just waiting for something to try booming in. All she could do was hope they weren’t ready for the Wolf.

The hissing of her circulating air was very loud in the small space of the helmet. Reese could feel sweat gathering under the Wolf’s padded harness. The rock’s short horizon scrolled below her feet. Attitudinal jets made brief adjustments, keeping Reese close to the surface. The Wolf’s suit monitors were projected, through her interface stud, in a complex multi-dimensional weave, bright columns glowing in the optical centers of her brain. She watched the little green indicators, paying little attention as long as they stayed green.

The target rolled over the near horizon in an instant—a silver-bright pattern of solar collectors, transmission aerials, dishes pointed at different parts of the sky…In the middle squatted the gleaming bulk of the freighter that had been sent to retrieve the base personnel, its docking tube still connected to the big cargo airlock.

Reese had a number of choices for gaining entry: there were two personnel airlocks, or she could go through one of the freighter locks and then through the docking tube. There were nine personnel on station, five humans and four Powers.

They can brew explosives with the stuff they’ve got on station,
Berger had told her.
But they can’t put anything too big around the airlock, or they’d decompress the whole habitat—and they don’t have enough stored air to repressurize. They can’t set off anything too big inside, or they’d wreck their work. It’s too small a place for them to plan anything major. We figure they’ll depend on small explosives, and maybe gas.

The base rolled closer. Reese felt her limbs moving easily in the webbing, the hum of awareness in her nerves and blood. A concrete certainty of her capabilities. All the things she had been unable to live without.

Coolant flow had increased, the suit baking in the sun. The webbing around her body was chafing her. She thought of explosive, of gas, the way the poison clouds had drifted through the tunnels on Archangel, contaminating everything, forcing her to live inside her suit for days, not even able to take a shit without risking burns on her ass…at least this was going to be quick, however it went.