Voice of the Whirlwind (33 page)

He wondered if there were alarms inside the room. He turned on his UV light and switched his specs to UV. There was one sensor in a high corner of the room. Infrared, he decided, probably for detecting fire—there was a sprinkler system in the roof—but possibly for detecting people. He moved up in the tunnel and told his cloak to vent his body heat. He thought of the movement of heat in the tunnel and the possibility of an extermination drone downwind from him, and coldness
that had nothing to do with his cloak tingled in his nerves. Steward moved back down the tunnel and contemplated
the size of the ventilator. It seemed far too small for him. He decided to try it feet-first.

During the first attempt Steward jammed at the waist, squeezed through thanks to the slick surface of his cloak, then stuck again just below the armpits. He emptied his pockets silently, hoisted himself out, and tried again. He was caught again
beneath the arms. His cloaked boot touched the corner of a desk and then flailed in the air. He tried squeezing out by holding one arm down and working one shoulder out first, but failed. He put both hands over his head and tried once more, facedown
this time. Pain flickered at the touch of the metal ventilator frame. The skin of his back and chest was turning raw. He was jammed thoroughly.

Sweat poured like quicksilver down his face, smudged the backs of his scanner shades. The air in the face mask tasted of acid. He remembered the guard’s head bobbing to music and wondered how the guard’s head would bob in laughter when he saw an intruder’s ass hanging out a ventilator.

He rested for a moment, caught his breath. Tried to perceive the Zen. Steward began to breathe carefully, feeling how gravity tugged at his legs, the way the ventilator held him. Becoming a part of it. Each exhalation seemed to make his body looser, more relaxed. He poured air from his throat, feeling the humid warmth of his lungs filling the face mask as tried to make himself empty, a thing of limp slick boneless plastic, a nerveless creature who couldn’t feel the flaming agony of torn skin as he began to drop through the ventilator, as the metal edges tore his flesh even through the cloak that covered him….

Relax, he thought. Breathe out. Blackness touched his vision. His head spun.

Steward dropped to the floor and staggered as his muscles tried to adjust from a relaxed mode to a supportive one. A desk caught the back of his legs and he almost pitched over backward. Stars flashed in his eyes.

Gratefully he breathed in. Within the space of a dozen heartbeats, the world came back.

He took his tools out of the ventilator and turned to inspect the sensor in the corner. It seemed set up to detect IR, but he couldn’t tell how sensitive it was, whether it would register a person or not. He took a sheet of plastic insulation material from a pocket, taped it into a box shape, and then taped it over the sensor.

Steward peeled the cloak off his body and breathed happily in the cool air. His T-shirt and shorts were soaked with sweat. He told the cloak to dump all heat and checked the office for other alarms, finding none.

According to the holographic nameplate on the desk, it belonged to a man named Morrison Falaye. His desk had holo cubes of two children and a pair of elderly parents or grandparents. He was also careful with his passwords, and didn’t leave them lying in his drawers on pieces of paper.

Well. That’s what the black labs in Uzbekistan were for.

In Vesta, Steward had Angel’s key to the Pulsar Division’s data files. Here he had nothing except the mercenary talent of renegade computer jockeys living on the bitter shores of the Aral Sea. He’d tested their programs before he left Earth and found them satisfactory. They’d custom-tailored the latest intruder software to his specific needs, and promised him no legitimate policorp was going to be able to counter these intrusion programs for at least another year.

“Brute force,” he’d been told, “combined with a certain elegance. Force to break in, elegance to make sure nobody finds out about it.”

Steward sat down in Falaye’s desk and put three needles into the terminal and an interface stud into the socket at the base of his skull. He switched on the terminal with a push of his mind. Programs flashed on the screen too fast for Steward’s eye to follow, their phosphor afterimages glowing faintly on the crowded screen after the programs did their job and went. The same long strings of data formed in his mind, projected by the interface stud, and he rode along with the intrusion program, watching the magic do its work, ready to intervene if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary.

Within a period of twenty seconds, the programs had found the Iapetus data banks, broken into the high-security file, scanned for Curzon and de Prey, found the backup files, and randomized them all. The long strings of data representing the specific configurations of the two minds, their memories and reflexes and knowledge, were instantly rendered useless.

Biographical information representing Curzon and de Prey were encoded on Steward’s needles. He needed to know the name de Prey was using now.

ready, the screen told him.

He was going to make a thorough job of this. Through the interface stud he guided the program as it sought the codes of the genetic material representing potential Curzons and de
Preys, waiting their time in cold baths of liquid nitrogen. In the deep misty cold of the cryovaults, robot manipulators began to whine. The little Curzons and de Preys were moved into the file marked waste and dumped into the outflow like so much organic garbage. Genetic material was borrowed from other vials and put in its place. The records of the transactions were removed.

Interface of mind and body was a complex thing. Consciousness—memories, abilities, possibilities—was too integrated with the specific configuration of the brain to be reconstituted reliably independent of the body that once held it. Even if Curzon and de Prey updated their memory files, as they were bound to do eventually, and erased over the randomization that Steward had introduced, the memory implant would very likely fail when it went into the wrong body.

A coldness hissed through Steward’s mind like a touch of the cryovaults.

He had just committed murder.

Steward tasted the feeling. He had assured the eventual permanent death of two people, one of whom had killed the Alpha, the other of whom had killed the things that made the Alpha’s life meaningful. There was no sense of wrongness in it.

Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind,
he thought. Funny that the old Zen poem de Prey had taught him was used in booting de Prey off the wheel of incarnation.

Savoring the thought, Steward gave the last command through his interface stud: logout.

The afterimage of the command flickered in his mind, then died.

*

Steward put on his IR cloak, removed the plastic mask from around the detector, and put his tools back in his pockets and taped them down. He had to stand on Falaye’s chair to ram himself back through the vent—brute force, he thought, as opposed to elegance. It cost him a lot of skin, and he could feel blood running down his flanks, soaking his T-shirt as he replaced the vent and used an adhesive to cement the louvered vents back on.

He hoped Falaye wouldn’t wonder why his chair had been moved.

He paused in the tunnel before he began to move, listened to himself breathe, hardened his mind. Extrication following a successful mission was a dangerous time: The tendency was to grow overconfident, to think of withdrawal as a happy epilogue rather than something requiring as much skill as the penetration itself. Steward pictured the return trip in his mind, regulated his breath, calmed his heart. Remembered the guards he would pass, a helmet nodding to music he would never hear.

Steward began crawling down the tunnel. Blood felt warm on his flesh. He could feel sweat beginning to bead on his scalp. Bars of yellow light patterned his body as he moved past the lobby/guardroom. He began to breathe easier.

Red warning lights flashed in his mind. Adrenaline slammed into his system.

Radar trace, dead ahead, from the access shaft that led to the main. There was a cyberdrone in the tunnel.

It was suddenly very hot in his cloak. Steward’s heart flailed within its cage. He tried to control panic as he rolled to one side and snatched at one of his pockets. The adhesive tape stuck to his fingertips and he fought it. He thought of the Wolf Model 18, the sensors that could hear a victim’s heartbeat or taste his sweat, the armored spiderlike body with its flexible legs that could wind around the victim, holding it helpless for the thrust of the long steel poison needle. At longer range there was a fléchette gun that would fill the tunnel with a cloud of a hundred poison darts that would shred flesh and strip bone.

And it was fast, faster than any human. Sophisticated programming, in which the drone was required to compare target shapes or internal maps or configurations, could slow a machine down. Instead the Wolf 18 was told to kill anything that looked or smelled wrong, and then jack into a communications main to inform authority what it had done. Keeping the programming simple kept the extermination drone deadly. The Wolf Company on Ceres suggested its use only for guarding critical areas, where mistakes would be minimized.

Consolidated Systems considered all of Ricot’s subsystems a critical area. If repairs were made in a given stretch of tunnel, coded commands were pulsed down the tunnel for the drones to patrol elsewhere. Consolidated didn’t care about mistakes. Mistakes shouldn’t have been in the tunnels anyway.

Steward didn’t have access to the codes that would tell this drone to go away. They changed hourly, and the communication systems in the tunnels were protected by far more safeguards than the internal comp in an insurance company.

The red light grew stronger, the pulses more regular. The drone was getting closer.

Holding a blade in his gloved, insulated hand, trying to move without a sound, Steward crawled down the tunnel on elbows and knees. His breath was loud in his mask. Schematics of the Wolf 18 flickered in his mind, in the threads tagged to his memory. Cold wind poured past him like a tide.

He was down a side tunnel from the shaft in which the drone was moving. The drone couldn’t detect him around the turn with its radar. He might have a chance if he could ambush the drone here, if the drone tried to go straight along the tunnel to the top instead of crawling into the tunnel with Steward.

The drone’s shaft ended just above Steward’s branch. Did the drone’s programming include that knowledge, or would it just have to bump into the top of the shaft?

Steward’s mouth was dry. He came to the tunnel branch, waited for the moment, aware of the scrabbling sounds of the drone moving up the shaft, the monotonous, mental red throb of the radar signal scattering down his tunnel, most of all the sound and heat of his own pulse.

One chance. At least death would be quick.

Fuck that thought.

One life, he thought, one arrow.

The antennas came first, taste sensors on the end of whipping stalks. Lucky the thing was upwind. Then one of the thing’s feet, a flexible metal tentacle, flopped into Steward’s tunnel and slid over one arm. He had to restrain himself from jumping back.

Concentrate, he thought. Everything ready for the one strike with the right hand. The body a spring, coiled, ready to project the hand, the arrow, with all Steward’s weight, with all his assurance. The pulse beat in his ears like a shrieking wind.

Eyes next, peering lenses set in a flat armored head that featured the stainless poison needle, retracted save for the tip. Stubby radio antennas set beside the eyes. The Wolf was moving fast, upward, full of death and inhuman purpose.

The arrow struck, one hand shooting out to ram a thin ferrous alloy blade between the Wolf’s head and cylindrical body. There was a flash, an arc of light as electrical connections were made. Steward’s mind quailed as he realized that he’d lost his vision, that he’d been dazzled. Something struck him in the face, and he recoiled. The red beating light was gone from his mind.

His vision cleared. The Wolf was dying, its poison needle thrust from the bullet face, firing a diminishing spray of poison high into the tunnel. Steward could hear it spatter like rain on his arm.

He pulled his arm back and the Wolf fell down the shaft. Distantly Steward heard the crash. The capacitors of his suit signaled him that they were drained. He stuck his blade back in his pocket and crawled into the shaft.

Steward’s nerves were keening with adrenaline and he needed it all as he dropped down the shaft, seized the drone, dragged it behind him as he ran along the main. He didn’t want this dead thing found anywhere near his target. Its radio signal was gone now, and when it failed to report in on schedule, other drones and their human masters would be moving in toward its last location.

A colony of roaches bolted from under his feet. He ran down the main, beneath one vertical shaft, then another. A grating echoed under his feet. He lifted it and dropped the drone there, down another shaft. He opened a pocket and took out a small screwdriver, then dropped it after the drone. Maybe it would look like someone had left a tool in the shaft and the drone had some strange accident with it. If nothing else was amiss in the shaft, the security people might actually choose to believe this theory rather than have to fill out a half-hundred reports explaining how they didn’t know why their drone was lost.

There was an access door nearby. It wasn’t the one Steward had entered, but he wanted to get out fast. He cracked open the door, saw through darkness a roomful of stored maintenance equipment. He jumped out and closed the access behind him, then pulled off the heat-suppressing cloak. The air was cool and welcome. He rolled the cloak into a bundle, taped it shut with Velcro straps, and left the room.

Blood was drying on his T-shirt under his arms. Nobody seemed to notice.

*

The next day he drifted again, moving up and down Ricot’s corridors, trying to find the rhythm. It hadn’t changed. There was no hint of Consolidated’s reaction to finding one of its cybernetic sharks with a melted brain at the bottom of an air shaft.