“What can we do?” Sib asked at once. “We don’t belong here.” He made a gesture that indicated the whole cruise. “We haven’t got any allies—or any resources. As soon as Nick cuts off our credit, we won’t even be able to eat. And we can’t ask another ship to take us. He made sure of that. Nobody will touch the people who started those rumors. They’ll leave us to the Bill—or Captain Chatelaine. And they won’t care about us. They’ll just want to know who’s being betrayed.”
Inspired by his fears, he’d considered implications which hadn’t occurred to Mikka before. With a sting of apprehension, she realized that he was right.
“That means interrogation,” Sib finished softly. Visceral dread twisted his face. “I don’t want to be interrogated here.”
Her lip curled into a snarl. Drugs. Zone implants. BR surgery. She also didn’t want to be interrogated here.
“Damn,” she muttered. “We shouldn’t have done it. We should have kept our mouths shut.” To Vector and Sib as well, but especially to her brother, she said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t been thinking very clearly.”
“So we can’t afford to sit here”—Vector sounded strangely jocular, as if he were trying to cheer her up—“and wait for events to unfold. We need a plan. We need to move.”
She glared at him. “Don’t tell me—let me guess. You’ve got an idea.”
Despite his tone, the engineer’s smile was humorless and determined. “Well, for a start,” he offered, “it might be interesting to figure out what Nick is up to.”
Mikka’s old anger was directed primarily at herself. “And how do you propose to do that?”
Vector shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t fit in here.” Like Sib, he referred to the cruise. “On my own, I probably wouldn’t last more than a day or two. I don’t know what’s possible here and what isn’t.”
“It has something to do with Soar,” Sib put in tentatively. “Captain Chatelaine. Mikka says she’s the woman who cut Nick. He wants revenge somehow.”
Mikka nodded. Nick must have lost his mind. He was in too much trouble himself: he couldn’t waste his time on revenge when his bare survival—not to mention Captain’s Fancy’s—was at stake.
Unless he had some reason to believe that causing trouble for Sorus Chatelaine would somehow loosen the stranglehold of his circumstances.
If that were true, Mikka and her companions might be able to benefit from it.
Pup, Vector, and Sib were all looking at her. With her hands locked into fists on the tabletop, she ground the knuckles together, trying to force herself to think.
They couldn’t approach Soar: that was obvious. The rumor they’d started tainted them; they would end up dead—after the Bill or Chatelaine ripped their brains apart.
But Soar and her captain weren’t the only players in Nick’s game.
Abruptly she put her palms down flat on the table. “Not the cruise,” she announced quietly. “Not Soar. Trumpet.”
Her companions studied her, waiting for an explanation.
She leaned forward. “Everybody on this damn rock,” she whispered intently, “heard her talking to Operations. We know Angus Thermopyle is aboard. Along with a bugger named Milos Taverner, who used to be deputy chief of Com-Mine Station Security. All by itself, that stinks. I’m surprised Operations let them in. Maybe the Bill figures they’re less dangerous docked than anywhere else. But that’s not the point.
“The point is, Nick has been talking to Trumpet ever since Operations cleared her. And Milos Taverner has been bugging for Nick for years. In fact, we wouldn’t have been able to frame Thermopyle if Taverner hadn’t helped us. Now suddenly the man we framed and the man who helped us frame him arrive here—together, for God’s sake!—and Nick is talking to them.
“That’s what we need to understand. If there’s any window out of this mess, that’s it.”
“Fine,” Vector remarked succinctly. “How?”
“Well”—Mikka fought down an impulse to clench her fists again, pound them on the table—“we might start by watching Trumpet. See who goes aboard, who leaves. If nothing else, that’ll get us off the cruise, which should make it harder for the Bill to find us.”
The Bill’s surveillance was everywhere, of course. But the bugeyes and wires were strictly impersonal: they watched everything in general—and nothing in particular. Without specific instructions to the contrary, the recordings of Mikka and her companions would simply be filed in the Bill’s gargantuan surveillance database. And those instructions might not be issued until Nick’s rumor had time to spread; generate repercussions. Then more time would be required to run search-and-compare programs on the database. An hour or more might pass before Captain’s Fancy’s castoffs could be located.
“Maybe we’ll get a chance to sneak aboard ourselves,” she went on. “Maybe we’ll even see Nick. In which case”—she gritted her teeth—“we’ll have new options.”
“Like what?” Sib asked.
Mikka bit down on her anger until her jaws ached. “Like tying him up and delivering him to the Amnion, just to prove our good faith. Or like making him believe we’re going to do it, so he’ll think he has to deal with us.”
“We can’t!” Pup protested as if he were shocked.
She scowled at him harshly. “Why not?”
“You saw him fight Orn.” Pup’s voice cracked; but he was too shaken to stop. The step from distrusting Nick to attacking him was a large one. “He could beat us all with one hand.”
Sib nodded vehemently. He was no fighter.
“Maybe.” Mikka shrugged. “Maybe not. And maybe we’ll have help. Somehow I doubt lockup has taught Angus Thermopyle enough forgiveness to make him a friend of Nick’s.”
Vector pushed himself to his feet. “I’m satisfied. Let’s do it.” He moved as if his joints hurt less in Thanatos Minor’s g—as if some of the weight he usually carried had been set aside. “Sitting here makes me nervous.”
“But—” Sib scrubbed at the sweat on his face.
“Sib,” the engineer asked mildly, “if you were Sorus Chatelaine, how long would you wait before you sent your whole crew to get their hands on the people who started that rumor?”
Mackern blanched. Then he jumped out of his chair as if he’d been poked with a stun-prod.
“Mikka—” Pup’s eyes were full of supplication; but he didn’t know how to ask for what he needed.
She stood; taking his arm, she pulled him up. Then she hugged him quickly.
“Ciro, I can’t promise we’re going to get out of this alive—or in one piece,” she told him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But whatever it is, you won’t be alone. You’ve got friends.”
Despite his trepidation, Sib managed a wan smile. Vector nodded gravely.
“And,” she finished, “I’ll kill anybody who tries to separate us.”
Pup returned her hug long enough to murmur, “All right. I’ll be all right.” Then he stepped back.
Mikka Vasaczk didn’t hesitate. She had no time to spare for doubt—and in her heart she believed she wasn’t brave enough for it. She’d depended on Nick Succorso longer than Vector, or Sib, or Ciro; needed him more. With her companions behind her, she left the bar-and-sleep, heading for Reception and Trumpet.
ANGUS
inally his instincts or his datacore told him that the time had come.
He could hardly speak. Blisters covered his tongue; his throat was full of ash. Spasms of nausea pulled at his diaphragm, forcing hot bile into his esophagus, but his zone implants stifled that reflex. The pressure they exerted to control him seemed to cramp his chest. Minute by minute, the pain threatened to become more than his caged mind could bear.
That hurt echoed the condition of his whole body. For an hour now, he’d fought with every gram of his strength and will to break his datacore’s hold; find some instance of incompleteness or vulnerability which might allow him to slip free of his zone implants long enough to kill Milos. That was all he wanted
: a chance to crush Milos to pulp and splinters; a chance against the abyss. But he couldn’t crack the prison which had been constructed inside his skull.
With his mouth full of ash and fatality, he recognized that before long he was going to go mad. Then he would be irremediably lost—a lunatic screaming and gibbering inside his own cranium, helpless to make himself heard, helpless to have any effect at all on anything his body did or his mouth said.
He would be back in the abyss—
back in his crib
with his scrawny wrists and ankles tied to the slat
while his mother
while howls he couldn’t utter clamored against the unyielding bone of his head
while his mother filled him with pain—
Yet he went on fighting. He had no alternative. As soon as he stopped, as soon as he surrendered, he would be swallowed back into the absolute dark from which he’d spent his life trying to escape at the cost of so much fear and blood and loneliness.
Then, a short time ago, he’d received an unexpected touch of mercy. Automatically solicitous for his physical well-being, his computer had taken notice of the damage burning like a slow torch in his mouth. When his distress exceeded acceptable parameters, a gentle electronic emission began to inhibit the pain receptors in his brain. The harm was still real, of course. Nevertheless he was able to continue functioning.
Thickly, as fumble-mouthed as a half-wit, he told Milos, “Try it now.”
Machine mercy didn’t relieve his despair.
Milos shrugged. Exhaling another stream of smoke into the clotted haze left behind by Ease-n-Sleaze’s inadequate scrubbers, he rose to his feet. Completely absorbed in himself, as if he were alone with his supply of nic and his ashtray, he moved to the data terminal. With a tap on the keys, he opened a channel to Trumpet and instructed her communications board to relay any messages she’d received.
After a moment he murmured, “Looks like it’s here.”
“You’re the one who knows the code,” Angus croaked as if he weren’t perilously close to failure. “Is it time to go?”
Milos muttered to himself as he deciphered the message. At last he announced, “I guess.” He sounded sad and obscurely bitter, as if something he needed had come to an end.
Angus pushed himself out of his chair. His legs would have trembled under him if his zone implants hadn’t steadied them; another kind of tremble, which his datacore ignored, rose from his groin to his lungs and the muscles around his heart. Movement, any movement, was better than remaining still while insanity hunted him down.
He didn’t wait for Milos. Striding slowly to conceal his desperation, he moved toward the door, out into the hall. As long as he kept his mouth closed, nothing betrayed his pain except the ashen pallor of his face.
Milos followed him unwillingly. With his second behind his shoulder, Angus took the lift down to the level of the bar and walked out of Ease-n-Sleaze.
The blare and swirl of the cruise hit him like a blast of relief. No wires nearby; bugeyes too far away to pick out individual voices. Most of the people who loitered or shoved along the street were enmeshed in their own needs, their own corruption; they took no notice of him. And the air smelled sweet to him, suggestive and familiar: it reeked of synthetic and natural ruin, but nic was only a small component of its complex assault. Here despair appeared in guises he understood.
For a minute or two he moved along with no particular aim, simply breathing the air, absorbing the glare of color and the muted unstable thunder of boots on the cement floor; tasting the atmosphere for threats. Then he took hold of Milos’ arm and pulled his second close enough to hear a whisper.
“We can talk now,” he mumbled past his sore tongue. “No wires or guards”—he made a short, harsh gesture—“near enough to hear us. What did Captain Sheepfucker say?”
A twist of disgust lingered on Milos’ face. “According to Succorso,” he answered softly, “the Bill doesn’t have a lockup. He doesn’t punish people that—simply. But he has a series of cells for interrogations. Down in his command complex somewhere. That’s where he usually keeps people until he decides what to do with them.” He looked like he wanted to spit. “The woman didn’t know anything else.” After a pause he added, “It’s not much to go on. He didn’t tell us how to find the cells. And we can’t be sure the kid is there.”
“It’s enough.” Angus knew where those cells were: he’d spent some time there years ago, during one of his more problematic visits to Thanatos Minor. Apparently the Bill hadn’t changed his procedures for dealing with human loot since then. That was all the reassurance Angus needed.
Milos waited for more information. When he didn’t get it, he hissed, “All right. Assume you can find the cells. Assume the kid is there. You still haven’t told me how you propose to get him out. We can’t just walk in there and ask for him.” His head twitched a reference to the Bill’s ubiquitous surveillance. “And you haven’t told me why,” he finished almost plaintively.
Good questions, both of them. No more than a minute ago, Angus couldn’t have answered either one. And he still had no idea why he’d made this deal with Nick; why Warden Dios wanted him to do whatever he could for Morn. But as soon as Milos said the words ask for him, the datalink in Angus’ head opened like crossing the gap, and information he’d never seen before came on-line.
Involuntary excitement thudded through him as he received a flood of new knowledge.
Triggered by Milos’ words—or the proximity of a crisis—this database informed him that his EM prostheses had capabilities he’d never suspected. They weren’t simply able to identify wires and bugeyes; read alarms and locks; analyze technological enhancements. Properly coded, they could also emit jamming fields for a wide variety of sensing devices. He could glitch a monitor until it recorded nothing but distortion, if he got close enough to it.
Or—
Suddenly his excitement became so intense that he forgot Milos and the cruise, Warden Dios and Morn Hyland. The world around him seemed to vanish in discovery.
Or he could bend light.
Not over a large area, of course. His power supply wasn’t adequate for that. But he could surround himself with a radiant curve, an electromagnetically induced refraction wave in the visible spectrum, which would make him effectively indistinguishable to most optical monitors. Human eyes would always be able to see him. But neurologic and electronic encoding were fundamentally different, vulnerable to different kinds of distortion. And because the Bill’s bugeyes were designed to function over distance under uncertain lighting conditions, they received wider bandwidths—with less accuracy. They would record Angus as nothing more than a slight opalescent ripple in the image, like a blur on the bugeye’s lens.
The ripple could still be tracked. An intensive computer analysis of the recordings could follow it as it moved. But first it had to be noticed: someone in Operations—or in the Bill’s command complex—had to see it and worry about it. And that might never happen. No one on Thanatos Minor had any reason to suspect that Angus carried this kind of jamming equipment—that he or anyone else could carry it.
Light-bending fields were known, of course, but they weren’t common: their emitters were too bulky, and required too much power, to be effectively portable. And even where the size and power consumption of the equipment weren’t a problem, the fields themselves remained too small and immobile to have much practical application. By welding these emitters into Angus, Hashi Lebwohl had accomplished a miracle of miniaturization.
The codes were right there in Angus’ head.
Lebwohl and Dios had left him defenseless in the path of madness; he hated and feared them. But that didn’t prevent him from experiencing a strange, amazed exultation which bordered on gratitude at their technical abilities. When they’d taken his freedom away, they’d made him into something wonderful.
He hadn’t felt an emotion like this since the day an Amnioni had taught him how to edit Bright Beauty’s
datacore.
He’d earned that knowledge by committing what the UMCP would probably have considered the worst crime of his life—a crime they still didn’t know about because none of his human or computer interrogators had possessed enough information to frame an accurate question. Single-handedly he had hijacked a large in-system hauler; but he hadn’t wasted his time with the actual cargo. Instead he’d loaded the survivors, twenty-eight men and women, into Bright Beauty’s holds and sold them directly to the Amnion on Billingate.
In return for booty on that scale, the Amnion had supplied him with the skill which had kept him alive ever since. Plainly they’d believed he would in turn sell the information to other illegals, thereby doing humankind’s defenses incalculable harm.
The memory still brought him a burn of satisfied rage as consuming and addictive as matter cannon fire.
“Listen,” Milos protested insistently. “You’re probably going to get us killed. At the very least we’ll be caught. I won’t know what to do—I won’t be able to react properly, I won’t be able to back you up—if you don’t tell me what you’re planning.”
In the grip of an excitement like glee, Angus stopped, turned. Ignoring the crowds and hawkers, the bright, wild signs, the inviting doorways, the occasional shove, he held Milos’ arm with one hand; with the other, he reached up and clenched Milos’ pudgy cheeks so that his mouth gaped like a grotesque kiss.
“Then pay attention.” Angus’ datacore didn’t require him to reassure his second. “I’m only going to say this once.
“I don’t need you. You’re irrelevant here. I’m keeping you with me because I can’t send you away. The fuckers who did this to us don’t trust you out of my sight. But all you have to do is stay with me and stay close. This close.” He grinned again, squeezing Milos’ cheeks harder. “If somebody shoots at us, try to hide behind me.”