Windswept (40 page)

“The brotherhood of man won’t feed you when there are no crops, dear,” said Madolyn.

“No, but it can help you plant new ones,” I said.

“Oh, to hell with this,” said Madolyn, raising her dart gun and firing. I dove for the ground as darts punctured the workstations and clattered off the walls.

“STOP!” yelled Gricelda, and, for a moment, I thought she’d had some kind of moment of clarity, but then Banks sagged onto me, a dart right in his throat.

“Tired,” he croaked, then went completely limp, then stopped breathing.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, pulling the dart out of him. I started rescue breathing, then CPR when his pulse slipped away. I’d lost count of how many cycles I’d done when hands pulled me off and away. “Wake up!” yelled Madolyn, slapping Banks once, twice. “Wake up, goddammit!”

“What did you do?” howled Gricelda over me. “What did you DO?”

I’ve done a lot of things in service to the Union that I’m not proud of. I’ve lied to children, stolen booze from beggars, even threw a woman into a sewage digester when she wouldn’t see things my way during a dispute about safety protocols. But I’ve never, ever hit the elderly.

I wound up and socked Gricelda in her right eye. She staggered back, and I kicked Madolyn square in the jaw. “You keep away from my friend, you horrible old cunts,” I said.

Madolyn snarled and raised her gun, then doubled over, clutching her head. Gricelda did the same, both of them shrieking like birds in a meat grinder. It was deafening and terrifying how much air and noise leaked out of them. And then they both stopped and stared at me.

Banks’s entire body tensed. His back arched, pushing his chest so high it looked like he was going to leave his limbs behind. He collapsed to the floor, then sat up, eyes open. “Hello my baby,” said the Univoice from every speaker in the room.

“Hello my honey,” said the sisters in unison.

“Hello my ragtime gal,” said the Univoice.

“Send me a kiss by wiiiiiiiiire, honey my heart’s on fiiiiiiiiiire,” sang the sisters as they embraced each other and danced around the room.

“What the
fuck
?” I said.

“One last backdoor,” said the Univoice. “Also, did you know our pais could act as defibrillators?” Banks’s right eye was completely red, and he put a hand over it. “Hurts like hell, though.”

“How’s your throat?” I said, feeling my own tighten a little bit as I scooped up the guns. I popped out the magazines and tucked them into my pants before throwing the actual guns away.

He rubbed his Adam’s apple. “I think it’ll be a while before I can talk,” said the Univoice.

I nodded at him, then looked at the sole working monitor. “The first cans haven’t gotten far,” I said, pointing at the display.

A line of colored boxes climbed the screen, with no traffic ahead of them to get in the way. I tapped on the boxes to get a better look at their manifests, but the monitor blatted an angry NO ACCESS message. “Oh, don’t tell me she locked everything out.”

“Probably,” said the Univoice. “Standard protocol when we’re trying to bug out.”

“How do you do it?” I said. “Can you reverse it?”

He shrugged. “Maybe in a week. If I get help. Are there any topological cryptologists on this planet?”

I looked at him as every monitor in the room flashed the NO ACCESS message.

“Ah,” he said.

“Can you get in touch with the anchor?” I said.

“No,” said Banks. “She’s shut down comms, data, the whole lot.”

“Of course she has,” I said, banging on the monitor. “Shit. Is there
anything
you can do?”

Banks shook his head.

“Right,” I said. “Looks like I’m going to have bring it all down myself.”

“How?”

“The old-fashioned way,” I said, heading for the door. “Climb up the cable and push it off.”

“I want you to know,” croaked Banks as the cable’s black mass soaked up all the sunlight in the universe, “that I have no doubts as to your ability.”

We stood at the base of the lifter, the cable’s weird dimensions putting my brain though all sort of cognitive flip-flops. If I faced it, it was as wide as a city block; if I looked at it from its side, the thing disappeared. Crawler platforms as big as a footie field made their steady way up to space, where they’d be loaded onto the queue of starships sitting at the anchor. And somewhere up there were a few thousand contaminated cans.

“If the next word out of your mouth is ‘however,’” I said, zipping up a deck jacket I’d found in a nearby locker, “then I will throw you off this platform.”

Banks looked at me, his fingers twitching in midair, like he was calling up a thesaurus. Then he just shook his head and said, “Shit.”

“I’m not crazy about the idea, either,” I said, throwing the jacket’s collar up around my neck. If there’d been more time, I would’ve hunted for a pressure suit, but this would have to do.

“Then could you please wait for someone with more experience?” said Banks. “Isn’t there another shift of orbital workers or a way to get a message topside?”

“There probably is, but we’ll waste a day trying them, thanks to your lovely protocol,” I said.

“But it’s not like this has to be taken care of
now
,” said Banks. “Those cans still have another two days to go.”

“You worried about me, Banks?”

“Of course, I am,” he said. “And I’m also worried about
me
, because if you screw this up then a few billion tons of stuff are going to rain down on my head.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to run,” I said. “Just make sure you aren’t standing in any shadows.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said, and stepped into the emergency ascender that gripped the cable. I looked at the MacDonald Heavy chop that adorned its interior and hoped the Union hadn’t bought this one at a fire sale.

The ascender was little more than a coffin with giant fuel cells bolted on the lid and crawler grips on the back. It was meant as a way to bring medical personnel up to a tender ring or to bring wounded workers down, all in a hurry. I’d set the altitude brakes for what I’d hoped was the topmost of Saarien’s crawlers, then hit the START button and listened as the Univoice started a countdown from twenty.

The ascender had a single porthole, and I saw Banks through it. He stood on the edge of the platform, a tiny figure dwarfed by all the massive machinery. He swayed a bit, then started, like he’d been stung. He ran toward the ascender, waving his arms and pointing up. I shook my head; there wasn’t even room to raise my arms. He pointed up again, still yelling, his voice drowned out by the noise of the grips warming up and the Univoice going
six, five, four...

Banks put his face right against the porthole and yelled:
An ascender is missing
. And then the Univoice said, “Start,” and my brains fell into my toes.

I concentrated on keeping my guts in place as the ascender tore into space. I forced air into my lungs, shut out the sound of the whining grips and the air whooshing past as I shot upward. The ground tumbled away, and then the ocean, and then I was above the clouds and into the deepest blue sky I had ever seen in my life.

The ascender slowed, then came to a clanking halt as it made contact with the crawler platform. My view of the sky shifted as the ascender’s grips swung the whole thing around the cable until I saw nothing but cargo cans. The seals hissed open, and I shivered from the biting cold as walked out onto the platform. I was so high up I could start to see the curvature of the planet. I hung onto the safety bar as the crawler rumbled and shook; a massive black wall rolled past us; it was a cross-section of a giant tender ring, one of the hundreds that hung from the cable every kilometer.

I took a breath and looked next to me; there was another ascender. It was open and empty and its grips were still warm.

The crawler was actually a set of five giant shelves, each one crammed with cans. On the spine was a ladder that opened on each shelf, as well as leading off to various maintenance hatches and walkways. At the top was a small crew compartment where the cable apes would rest on their way to and from their shifts, along with the control suite.

Chances were good that whoever else was up here would be, too.

As I gripped the safety bars and peered over the side, the thin, frigid air bit at my face. I saw that, yes, I was on the highest loaded can on the cable. Below me were a long string of crawlers, all trailing like a train that had been tilted onto its caboose. Above, there was nothing but empty crawlers.

I crept around the bottom shelf, opening various cans to find anything I could use as a weapon. All I found was a lot of drums, all filled with molasses. I had no way of knowing which were legitimate and which had come from Saarien, so I had to operate under the grand assumption that everything on the cable was tainted. Being at the top of the train would certainly make things easier, but how the hell could I slow down or stop this mess from hitting orbit?

After looking through a dozen more cans and finding nothing but molasses, I went to the spine and took a quick peek up the ladder. Nothing came rattling down on me, and I couldn’t see any booby traps. I could see that the emergency stop button had been torn out, along with its wiring. As I climbed the ladder, I saw the same scene on every floor.

There was nothing that could help me in the cans: they were all filled with molasses. Even the tool lockers were useless, all of them empty except one that had a half-smoked cigar and a metal lighter with a Union fist engraved on the side. I left the stogie and put the lighter into my pocket, right next to the magazine from Nariel’s gun. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to save the world, I might have remembered to bring the actual gun with me, too.

I almost hit pay dirt on the top shelf: it was filled with legitimate cargo: rolls of coral nanowire, handcrafted silks, and–

One can squeaked open, and there were crates full of bottles, all nice and snug. They were triangular, made from glass the color of the water at Chino Cove, that brilliant blue-green that make you think that God Almighty really was kind and benevolent because He made things so beautiful.

I reached for a bottle of Old Windswept, felt the familiar bumpy surface, the result of the odd mineral content of the sand off Saticoy. Estella Tonggow may have been shitty at scheduling, but she had one hell of an aesthetic sense that, when combined with her need to use as much local material as possible, made for the most recognizable packaging on the planet.

I turned the bottle over and felt my heart stop and a lump form in my throat as I looked at the familiar label. There was the woman in her lounge chair, sitting on a lanai overlooking the ocean. You could only see her shapely leg and lovely foot and how she had tied a string to her big toe. The string still attached to the box kite that bobbled in the breeze that blew from the mouths of the caricatured men on the clouds. I cracked the bottle, and the sweet, glorious scent of warm cinnamon and fresh pears filled the can.

It was the shipment that I had promised to make sure got on the lifter. I started laughing at that, then hugged the bottle as I sank to the ground and realized how incredibly, incredibly screwed I was. Maybe the best thing would be to spend the next two days getting good and drunk, and just hope someone would be able to stop this train from hitting orbit. The Fear, silent for the longest time, growled in agreement.

I twisted the cap on tight and put the bottle back. No, dammit. I was here, and I was going to finish this. I went back up the ladder and climbed to the crew compartment airlock.

Both the inner and outer doors were jammed open with screwdrivers in the frames. I looked into the compartment: there were beat-up couches, a few chairs, a coffee table covered with flight manuals and dirty magazines. There was also a thin trail of smoke heading into the open airlock, and I saw it was coming from an open hatch up above: the control suite.

For a moment I thought about climbing up there and seeing if my new buddy had left something undamaged, but there was a muffled
thump
, followed by gouts of flame and sparks. If anything had worked before, it was now on fire, and not even God’s Own Engineer could fix it. I would have to think of another way to stop the train.

I rubbed my temples, wondering if it was from the beginning stages of altitude sickness. Even if I could call Henry and his cable apes, there was no point because the saboteur had already overridden whatever they’d done. There was no way to stop the crawler. I could spend the next two days rolling barrels off the side, and I wouldn’t be a tenth of the way done by the time I hit orbit.

Back in B-school, we’d been told there would be times in our careers as executives when things would go completely, utterly, horribly wrong. A situation would slip out of control and spiral away in slow motion, and you wouldn’t be able to stop it before it brought down people, structures, and stock prices. Whenever that happened, we had to take a breath, count to three, then dive in and do
something
, because the only thing that looked worse on a project post-mortem than the wrong action was inaction. We were being shaped into decision-making machines, and, by God, that’s what we would be.

Those speeches were then followed by videos of catastrophic starship accidents, building collapses, and lifter cable failures. The results were never pretty.

I had to do something, but what? The crawler would hit orbit, and I would asphyxiate, and the crews topside would load up the contaminated cans, kicking them across the stars and fucking up all of Occupied Space.

At least I would be dead and wouldn’t have to face the proof of my own incompetence...

I stood upright. Holy shit. Proof.

Centuries ago, sailors got rum as part of their daily rations. It was cleaner than water and kept the crews happier. And, in order to make sure they were getting the right amount of booze in their mugs, the sailors used to pour in a little gunpowder and light it. If they got a bang, they had enough alcohol. If not, they could show their captain the proof that they’d been ripped off.