Voice of the Whirlwind (21 page)

The old security guard had been replaced by a younger man. The cop nodded at him as he stepped into the lobby. “Working hard?” he asked.

Steward gave him a weary grin. “Inventory,” he said. He stepped to the clear plastic door and gave it a push. It wouldn’t open. A warning tugged at his nerves.

He looked at the guard. The man was fumbling at his belt. “I’ll need to unlock that,” he said.

The warning faded away. The guard unlocked the door and Steward stepped out into the tunnel. He said good-night and repressed the urge to laugh out loud.

Later, near a waste receptacle, he took Angel’s spike, put its needle tip on the alloy floor, and snapped it in half with his foot. He tossed the remains into the trash. Angel would miss it by the next day, and after that it would be far too dangerous for anyone to possess. Pulsar’s software would be altered to look out for anyone using it.

The spikes would be hidden in one of the cargo holds that had already been filled with goods. He wasn’t going to touch them till he’d left Vesta.

He wasn’t going to leave the ship again. Not until it was docked someplace where Angel couldn’t get him.

CHAPTER TEN

It was four days since Pulsar had let him go. Steward
lay on his rack, watching a telecast of Kawaguchi’s
Fourth Millennium.
This was a classic visionary Imagist drama from the previous century, set in a mannered future in which a genetically altered posthuman society was confronted by the return of violent human primitives from a forgotten space colony, a comedy of manners laced with acid and appalling violence. The NeoImagist Policorp Pink Blossom had recently produced an elaborate version of it, intended as political propaganda for their perception of the future, starring the free-fall kabuki actor Kataoka XXII. Brighter Suns, being a nonideological policorp, was broadcasting it on the feed link from Vesta. Steward was enjoying the show, but suspected the interpretation was slanted a bit toward the posthuman point of view, having been dictated by contemporary political realities. Pink Blossom was showing a decline in its rate of growth and might have concluded that their vision of tomorrow might need a little polishing in order to get the troops enthusiastic about their work.

Steward flexed his right hand as he watched the vid. Feeling was almost back to normal. No permanent damage, he thought.

There was a knock on Steward’s door. “Come in,” he said, setting his vid unit on record, and Reese entered.

There was an annoyed frown on her face. “Out of the rack, buck,” she said. “We’ve been ordered to Vesta in an hour. We’re going into the Power Legation.”

Steward sat up. Alarms clattered in his mind. “Why?” he asked.

“There’s a Starbright ship in dock,” Reese said. “The cargo handlers got sick, and some of the autoloaders have broken down. It’s a special cargo, and the Starbright people don’t want anyone but our employees to deal with it. We’re being ordered to help load the stuff by hand.”

“Why us?”

“It’s those blood tests we had to take. We tested out okay to work with the Powers.”

Steward slapped off the vid. Anger was beginning to fill him. “It’s a scheme to get me onstation,” he said. “They’re going to provoke some kind of incident and toss me in a cell again. Or assassinate me.”

Reese leaned against a padded bulkhead and crossed her arms. “Not likely,” she said. “They let you go once. Why would they pick you up again?”

Steward hesitated for a moment. He had to think of something besides the fact he was suspected of stealing Angel’s key spike. “Maybe they couldn’t make up their minds till now,” Steward said. He jumped out of his rack and began pacing. “Or maybe they just wanted me dead and it took a while to put a scheme together so that it doesn’t look like their fault.” His mind was whirling. “Look,” he said. “I’ll go to our pharmacy and give myself something to make myself sick. You just tell our bosses I’m ill.”

Reese shook her head. “Take it easy,” she said. “I’ve got an obligation to our superiors. If you don’t show up, it could cost Starbright millions of its own dollars.”

He looked at her. “If I
do
show up it could cost Starbright a promising young trainee.”

Reese shook her head again. “I can handle this. I’m gonna get on the phone, see where this order came from. Talk to our consul—”

“Lal. That creep.”

“Don’t interrupt me, buck.” Steward looked up in surprise at the venom in her voice. She was glaring at him. “I’m going to get some guarantees from the Vesta personnel. They’re going to look out for you.”

Steward laughed. Reese jabbed a finger in his face. “
I’m dealing with it
,
Steward. If you get near the first-aid chest, I’ll put you on report. I put myself on the line to get you out of the Pulsar Division and I’m not going to let you disappear again, but I’m not about to cost our nation a fortune, either. So pack yourself three days’ worth of gear while I get on the telephone. I’ll let you know how it all comes out.”

He looked at her levelly. “They’re going to kill me, Reese.”

“I don’t plan on letting them.”

“I don’t think you can stop it.”

Her look was unreadable. “Then I’ll be wrong, won’t I?”

She closed the sliding door behind her. Steward could only stare at the door for a moment. There was something wrong here, something unbalanced in Reese’s behavior. She’d
seen
the shape he was in when the Pulsar Division let him go. He wondered if Brighter Suns had paid her to get him killed.

He grabbed a ruck from his closet and packed in a fury for the first few minutes, then paced the cabin like a madman, patrolling back and forth in a room only three paces across, his fingers working as if clutching Angel’s thick neck.

Then, slowly, he began to calm himself, forcing his mind to cope with what now seemed inevitable. He’d given away his plan to make himself sick, and although he could do it in spite of his announcement, the drugs would wear off sooner or later and then he’d be flung out into the Power Legation anyway.

He’d just have to be ready. He changed his belt to one with a heavier metal buckle in case he had to use it as a weapon. He clipped a knife inside the waistband of his jeans, where the top half inch of the hilt that protruded above his pants would be covered by his jacket. He had no other weapon—a rigger’s knife wasn’t unusual, and no one would look twice at his belt, but anything else would be cause for comment. He’d simply have to be ready for whatever Pulsar would use, the zap glove or dart gun or poison spray.

Steward changed his jacket to something heavier, to better resist attacks. He put on a pair of insulated gloves that he might be able to use to block a punch from a zap glove. He went to the crew locker and got a fire fighter’s Kevlar hard hat with plates that fell from the rim to protect his neck and the sides of his head, as well as a detachable transparent shield to cover his face.

He sat on his rack and waited. Listened to himself breathe. Felt the blood course through his limbs. Trying to ready himself to face the moment of annihilation when it came. He was going to be following his Alpha a little sooner than he’d thought.

One arrow, he thought, one life. A short ride from bow to target.

Reese was gone half an hour. When she came back, she had a printout in her hand. She looked at his helmet and grinned. “Take a look at this, samurai,” she said, and drifted it across the room toward him.

There were two documents. The first was a statement from the Starbright consul—Steward sneered at Lal’s signature—that he had Brighter Suns’ assurance that Steward was not a subject of inquiry. The other was a signed statement from Brighter Suns security stating they had no further interest in Steward, that there was no investigation concerning him, and that he was free to come and go as he wished.

He grimaced, folded the sheets, put them in his jacket pocket. “They’ll make a great epitaph.”

“Off the rack, Steward,” Reese said. “I’m tired of you doubting me.”

He stood and slung the ruck over his shoulder. “Lead on,” he said. “I’ll look out behind.”

As Steward drifted down the access tube, Vesta’s gravity tugged at his stomach and for a moment there was panic, the sense of falling head-downward. Bile surged into his throat. He swallowed it with savage anger and tried to resurrect his calm. Before he could, the whistles and sirens, the crashes and bustle of the loading dock, roared up around him. His head moved wildly, looking for things out of place, for big men in bulky jackets.

“I’ll stick to the wall, okay?” he said, remembering the feeling of drifting helplessly in that vast space, but Reese shook her head and pointed to the Starbright logo on a long narrow tunnel shuttle stuck to the chamber’s alloy wall by electromagnets. Eight seats were lined up behind the driver. It looked like an alpine bobsled.

“That’s our transportation,” Reese said.

Steward kicked off from the wall and shot the ten-yard distance to the shuttle. He absorbed the shock of impact with his arms and swung himself aboard, into the seat behind the driver. The driver looked back at him.

“You planning on putting out a fire or something?”

“I’m just safety-conscious, buck.”

“Whatever you say.”

Reese swung herself gracefully into the seat behind Steward. They buckled themselves in and the driver cast off from the wall. Blipping the air horn to let others know he was moving, he guided the craft across the loading dock and into a narrow one-way tunnel. There he programmed his destination into the shuttle, gave command of the transport to the Vesta traffic computer, put his foot on the deadman, and crossed his arms. Steward was punched back into his seat as the Vesta mass drivers began to sling the shuttle down the tube like a needle out of a gauss gun. Wind howled over Steward’s helmet. Shining bits of mica and nickel in the tunnel walls flashed by in the shuttle’s headlights. He could feel himself tensing, waiting for the crash. A simple accident, that was all it would take. Override the controls on the mass driver from the central security computer and plow this bobsled into the back of an ore carrier.

The shuttle began to decelerate in a hiss of air. Steward’s straps dug into his lap and shoulders. The shuttle came to a stop. The driver took his foot off the deadman and piloted the shuttle across another large space—an empty one—and toward a small airlock.

“This is as far as I go,” he said. “I’m not allowed into the Legation—I got bugs, I guess. Your job’s to unload a Power cargo ship, get everything on pallets, then to the big cargo airlock. We can move it from there.”

Sweat was trickling inside Steward’s helmet. He was still looking for an enemy, but the room was empty. “Right,” he said.

“You’ll be decontaminated on the other side of the lock,” the driver said. “No worry. It’s to make certain you’re not carrying anything on your skin or clothes.”

There was a green light over the airlock. Inside the air had a tangy, antiseptic smell. Chrome nozzles protruded from the walls like automated weaponry, and batteries of UV lights waited behind screens. Reese and Steward were told by an automated voice to remove their clothing and place it in the lockers provided. Small personal articles were to go into a bin behind a small hinged lid.

Steward’s sweat floated out in salt, reflective globes as he took his helmet off and tossed it tumbling into the locker. There was a thud as it hit the padded wall. He was trapped in this situation, inside a huge machine that, sooner or later, was going to try to kill him, and he had no choice but to go through the motions and wait for the moment that the machine would choose, and somehow be ready.

Reality was taking on a hard-edged, surrealistic quality, as in a nightmare. Everything he saw was filled with potential menace, the chemical smell, the row of shining nozzles, the small padded room with its battery of screened lights like those in his Pulsar Division cell. His heart was hammering, and he tried hard to control it. He and Reese stripped and put their gear in the places provided. He found it hard to put away the knife—he held it to the last and had to take several breaths before he could bear to put it in the bin. He could feel Reese’s eyes on him as he gave up his weapon.

The automated voice returned, telling Steward and Reese to put on the UV goggles provided and float in midroom with their arms held high. When they were ready they were to say “Okay.”

They obeyed and the UV lights came on, a short, high-intensity dose to kill bacteria on the skin. Then the chrome nozzles began to track them and fired a gentle mist of disinfectant over their bodies. Steward tried not to shiver at the silken touch of the spray. The spray ceased and powerful fans came on, sucking the disinfectant out of the air, blowing warm wind over his skin, drying him. He spun in the nearly nonexistent gravity, drying evenly, his arms held high like a figure skater doing a scratch spin.

The fans ceased and the doors on the lockers unlocked with a solid click. The automated voice told them to put on their clothes and leave via the door with the blinking light. Reese kicked off from the wall and floated across the lock to one of the doors, then opened it. She reached in and pulled out items of clothing. Steward noticed an old scar that tracked down her lower back.

The clothes were dry and warm and smelled of disinfectant. They’d been folded neatly. The pocket flaps were all open—some security personnel, or perhaps a robot, had gone through them for harmful items. There was nothing missing.

Steward, his mouth dry, reached for the personal items bin and pulled it open. His knife waited. A credit needle floated out. He clutched the knife and only then reached for his clothing. Reese looked at him, indicating some units set in the walls. “Those look like X-ray scanners to me,” she said. “They were looking for implants.”

“Those I don’t have,” Steward said.

“I’ve got a few pins holding my ankle together,” Reese said. “I wonder if they’re going to ask me about them.”

Reese rotated clumsily as she struggled into her trousers. She reached out to one of the walls, stabilized her tumble, then Velcroed her fly. “Gut bacteria must be okay,” she said. “They’re not handing us suppositories.”