Starhammer (7 page)

He looked up and spoke to Iehard, in interlingua with remarkable little accent, a sure sign that the Urall had served a long time in human systems. "We have learned that you were born on a lao-ruled world. Why did you choose to leave?"

Iehard knew that deceit would be detectable. "I wanted to be free."

The Urall nodded. "I understand. I would feel the same if our situations were reversed. So you are a man of your race, but now you must cooperate with us. A terrible wrong must be righted. This fugitive, do you think he can be found?" The Urall's great eyes had tightened.

"This evil creature has escaped before!" the Lady Blasilab broke in. The Urall was visibly annoyed at the interruption. Jon, however, had counted the seven marks of lineage Blasilab wore on her taut bosom. In bloodlines she outranked even the young Morgooze. Thus the Urall bit off his remonstrances and continued to eye Jon while she ranted on.

"Once, we had him cornered. But he performed an amazing feat. He escaped our net and we still do not know how he got away. So we must be very certain this time. We must track him very, very carefully. He must suspect nothing. That is why we demanded you. We cannot afford to have dozens of humans blundering about, only the very best."

She stabbed a long, slightly blue finger at him to emphasize her words. Iehard fought the compulsion that made him see sexual attractiveness in her. He found his throat uncomfortably tight as he replied in a quiet voice.

"It is of course very unusual for an Elchite to be found in this sector of the human hegemony." His quietness forced them to concentrate. Laowons often failed really to listen to what humans said. Lady Blasilab, however, interrupted harshly.

"What is this hegemony? You refer to the designated region. Hegemony is a word that is inappropriate to human tongues."

Jon stared into the wrath of the blue-skinned goddess and refused to tremble. He'd been free too long for that.

The Urall chided her lightly in a Tollicki dialect of the hunting tongue. Iehard understood only snatches but the recriminating tone was plain. Then he continued smoothly to Jon.

"This man has traveled a very long way, it is true."

"Just ensure that he is taken this time!" said Blasilab sharply.

Petrie broke in with diplomatic smoothness to describe Iehard in flattering terms.

The young Morgooze laughed suddenly, interrupting. "I know this man. He kills for the Mass Murder Squad, am I correct?"

"Yes," Iehard said in a whisper.

The Urall's eyes widened. "Not in my brief. I will have to speak to my advisers. An odd omission for them."

"But you won't kill the Elchite, will you?" The young Morgooze's eyes were hard and bright. "You see, I must take him to the chair myself and there make him expiate before the cameras. In the name of Blue Seygfan, I demand this!"

As he uttered those words the young lord seemed to expand, to fill the space and speak for all justice, everywhere. His voice resonated in a way that made Jon's eyes blink.

On the psi plane, however, he could detect Lady Blasilab's rage and the Urall's unease. There was a silence in the room.

Iehard took a moment to speak. "I won't kill your Elchite. I only insist on one thing. That when I start the case I work alone, or only with those with whom I choose to work. Later, when I find him, you can come in, but until then I want no interference."

They-who-were-innately-glorious raised their eyebrows in an almost human expression of surprise. But Jon read the nuances of reproach, disgust, anger wisely withheld.

In the end, though, they agreed, most reluctantly, but they admitted that they had no real choice. Lady Blasilab tried to activate the submission/agreement conditioning that she suspected the willful human must have received in his youth. She used the coded allure of her eyes and lips, smiling, stretching, promising. Iehard ignored it all. The Urall even chided her again, which roused her wrath considerably at being thus exposed before a human—he read the face tongue, that was plain.

And for his part Jon knew that no one in the meeting could speak for the Superior Buro anyway. Buro agents would be on his trail. He knew what to expect.

And if he found the fugitive for them? Then an old man would be taken by the laowon and flown at enormous expense at FTL speed all the way to Lao itself and there made to scream and writhe before a crowd of thousands and a battery of cameras under hot bright lights.

A few minutes later the laowon left. Iehard was free to start his search.

From a park bench, he called Coptor Brine and gave him the news. He would be freelancing for the Military Intelligence people until further notice, top priority.

Coptor agreed sourly to what was an unpleasant reduction in his limited force. But if Commander Petrie demanded it, there was no point in raising objections. "Take yourself good care, young Iehard. I want you back."

Then Jon rode the transit tube to Octagon Seven, where Meg Vance had her computer studio. Old Meg Vance was the only person he'd met who truly didn't care about his laobreed origins.

Octagon Seven was the center of the fashion industry. The station exited at the bottom of a wide shaft of reflecting glass walls. On the walls flowed gigantic projected images, models, clothes, faces, colors. Everything shifted constantly and changed frame. Seven was the frantic heart of Hyperion Grandee's nonstop social life.

The crowds on the ramps and on the prime level were heavy. It was a bluecard hour, the card cops were out in force. All bearers of red and green cards had to stay out of the octagon until the hour changed. Since it was just a few days before the Seasonal Festival that would inaugurate the annual thirty-one days of Winter Month, everyone was out shopping for something to wear to the huge corporate parties and the Masque balls that would pound on for days during the ThanksaKrismas weekend.

That's when the habitat mirrors would be tilted to the "winter position," which allowed a fraction less light. The interior would cool about fifteen to twenty degrees and a carefully orchestrated recreation of a terrestrial winter would take place. Right down to the annual snowfall, for an hour or two. It was a mark of Corporate Style, something that Hyperion Grandee and other major corporate megahabs clung to in the face of the slow, remorseless economic decline.

When two card cops in their distinctive brown uniforms demanded his bluecard, he flashed them his squad card instead. Their eyes bulged a little, but one was angry, thinking it a hoax, and wanted to check it in the nearest function box; but the other dissuaded him with urgent gestures and handed the plastic back to Jon. They moved away quickly with anxious glances back over their shoulders. No cop wanted to be involved in
that
kind of business!

He turned off onto a small service ramp and went through a beat-up floppy door to a delivery corridor. The glamour soon faded back on the workshop floors. The hideous yellow wall panels were cracked and seamed. There was even some loose garbage, packaging materials and stuff, left in the corners. It could almost have been Main Street in some impoverished gigahab.

But this was just low-rent space with few amenities. Noncorporate workers, who always struggled to survive on Hyperion Grandee, clung on in competitive niches like freelance computer services. This was where Meg Vance lived and worked.

In fact Meg did well enough on the freelance money she earned from the Mass Murder Squad, working as computer backup for Iehard, that she could have had an office on a much nicer level, even with windows. But Meg was too careful with money, and too cantankerous a tenant, ever to move upscale.

In effect, outside the squad, she was Iehard's only true friend. With other people, his laoman identity had always somehow intruded even though his brands were gone. People just hated the laowon so. He remembered a girl who'd been ready to match genes with him once, then she asked him about the triangular notch in his ear. When he told her she went cold. Days later she ended the affair.

He thought sometimes that without old Meg, he would have spaced himself, just gone down to the docking bays and committed a Section Nine crime: "The felonious removal of a human body from the Hyperion Grandee biosphere without approval of the Funerals Board and its Biosphere Fluids Management Committee."

She had always managed to be there when he needed her. It was a debt they were both conscious of but never alluded to. In some ways, he thought, Meg treated him like the son she had never been able to afford. Of course she always laughed their friendship off, said that since she'd come up from the Unders of Nostramedes herself, she never felt right about putting on airs with people from anyplace else.

It wasn't until he fulfilled a contract job on Nostramedes one time that he discovered just how bitter a joke that was.

He turned left onto Corridor 117, which was flanked by dozens of doors, their yellow panels dirty and worn. He reached No. 99 and bopped an entry code into the door computer. It winked its little red light at him as it took his video trace and then the door slid open with a slight squeal of protest.

In the narrow hallway tottered stacks of data modules a meter high. Each was neatly identified by colored tags. White tags were subscription-journal data, to be picked through for selections. Red tags were Mass Murder Squad cases, a whole section was devoted to them. A much larger section, marked with purple, contained Meg's Masque records.

Meg Vance meant nothing to the megahab-oriented social world of corporate Hyperion Grandee. She survived on freelance work. She was also that rarity, an immigrant to Hyperion Grandee from an older gigahab.

But in the world of Masque, the complex computer games in which everyone on Hyperion Grandee indulged, Meg Vance was of the aristocracy. She maintained seventy-three advanced characters in twelve separate games, including a queen in the top game, "Hidden Notebook."

In the main space there was an awful lot of equipment, much of it old. The DAex Ram 44000 that was Meg's primary unit took up only a little room, but its peripheral devices were everywhere. Alongside them were smaller devices that hooked into the DAex Ram's main rival in Meg's universe, the Bioram Sha3. That device, a flat tank like a tabletop containing forty pounds of human brain cells, grown in thin sheets and laid down in programmable jelly, was actually hidden from view inside a network of support systems that took up a full third of the space.

Meg herself was on the phone, no surprise there. He recognized her friend Ingrid's face on the phoneplate. Meg had her silver-gray hair tied up in an untidy bun, she wore a gray zipsuit and red plastic shoes. She sat on a chair riding an extensor bar, surrounded by five floating flatscreens, with a keyboard array poised to hand. Two other extensor seats hung in the computer pit because on some games—a two-screen combat unit in the Phototronic Gladiation League, for instance—Meg was joined by her friends Ingrid and Sindar.

He went over to the single monitor on a small desk in the corner of the room to review the contents of the mail stop he maintained there. A brochure on datachip gave him a full-color "introductory offer" to an auction of the famous Ugun Huxha ranch on luxury megahabitat Gloaming Splendor. For a mere 250,000 credit units down and 100,000 a year for twenty years he could bid on square-kilometer parcels of habitat forest and lawn.

He blipped the rest of it. His savings account held just 27,000 credit units after nine years' work in the squad. It was hard to get ahead when the price of existence on Hyperion Grandee was so high. Without a corporate rent plan he had to pay half his income for one of the endlessly similar apartments on Medium Rent that the squad found for him.

Of course he'd tried Low Rent, the illegal, sometimes dangerous world of apartments in parts of the habitat structure that were not built for human occupation. Once he'd had a long, narrow room, with a smoothly curved ceiling, situated on an engineering level in the hab-shield. It had been big enough to contain five apartments the size of his present one.

It had seemed a wonderful bargain for 600 credit units a month. He began to make plans for extensive interior decoration. Then Winter Month ended and the air-conditioning heat vent above the ceiling began to work. Through Spring it was like Summer Month, 80 degrees every day. In Summer it became an oven, more than 120 degrees on the day he gave in and moved out.

The rest of the mail was Masque-oriented junk, which he consigned to the wastebasket. Jon had never been more than a Masque viewer.

Meg finished her strategy call and emerged from the pit for an instacaf break. She gave him an affectionate peck.

"Well, I heard the story on Arnei Oh this morning. We were right about the university, just didn't think of the Orbiters. It sounded terrible. Do you feel terrible?" She wrinkled her little round nose at him.

"Today? No. Then? Yes. What else would you expect? He took a goddamn scalp in the bushes, that's what saved us. Otherwise I think he would have fragged the shit out of them and left us with thirty bodies or more."

"Coptor was good afterward." She gave him a cup.

"Coptor is always good. If only the rest of the operation was good as Coptor and you, maybe we'd have a chance."

She chucked him under the chin. "I thank you, wonderboy. What have you got for us next?"

Iehard finished the instacaf in a gulp. "You're going to hate this next case."

She grimaced. "Laowon work again, don't tell me it's that."

His eyebrows rose; Meg was right. She was always right. Sometimes it was uncanny.

"Big stuff. Someone has killed laowons. Lots of them, and there's a big hunt on. We are to track him."

"Why us? Why not Military Intelligence?"

"We are the psi-able. And this fugitive is really sensitive apparently. Look, Petrie himself called me in. I had to listen to three laowon treat him like some servant. They hectored me on the need for quick progress with minimal disturbance. The quarry is exceptionally aware of detection and surveillance. So normal MI procedures are out." He paused, became thoughtful.