I hadn’t been on one of these machines for nearly ten years, but I didn’t anticipate much difficulty driving. I was in no hurry. Alistair Drummond would wait for me in the backwoods arena of his choosing.
I hoped to arrive at a time, and from a direction, that was not of his choosing.
The snow was coming down heavier. It was now impossible to see the opposite shore of the lake, six klicks away. I checked the scanner to be sure my adversary wasn’t lurking anywhere in the immediate vicinity—or circling the compound to catch me from the rear. Even with a tree-filter, there was a lot of clutter on the screen. It showed only a single warm body blip, sans machine accompaniment, moving at a brisk galumph through the woods on the other side of the lake. An animal. The data strip said:
SPECIES: WOLVERINE–WT: 35.5 KILOS
“Go away, beastie,” I murmured. “Other game is afoot.”
I called up the positioner map, selected a twenty-kilometer radius, and studied the bright terrain-proper display. A number of narrow tracks webbed the forest and bogs surrounding the lodge, illegally zapped a couple of years ago by bored security guards whose duty it was to nanny my unfortunate brother.
During warm weather the trails were probably horrific even for iron-butt backpackers or anglers—muddy, rough with burned-off stumps, and mosquito-plagued. In winter, after the snow attained a reasonable depth, they’d be handy little corridors for snowmobilers and game poachers, hence the gun-mount on my sled. Nothing like a rack of venison or a moose-muffle to liven up the staff menu. Nothing like a running target to sharpen rusty marksmanship skills.
I expanded to a 50 km overview, then 100 km. The last display included the hamlet of Central Patricia ninety klicks to the west. A single trail, beginning at the far side of Caddisfly Lake, twisted and twined and ended up there. I wondered briefly what attractions the lonely men had found in the tiny outpost. A bar with live music and friendly local ladies? Hey, in their shoes it would have appealed to me.
I highlighted the C-Pat Trail, then returned to the large-scale map and called up a holographic topo display. To check for high ground overlooking that trail—preferably not too far away from the lodge.
There wasn’t much. The most likely—very nearly the only!—ambush spot I could find was a sparsely wooded granite ridge only 29 meters above the surrounding terrain. It was situated about nine klicks from the western lakeshore. The ridge was relatively steep and treeless on the southern side, above the trail, and sloped gently to the north, where the forest was thicker.
The stretch of the C-Pat Trail next to the ridge was fairly wide and straight, inviting a sledder to travel at speed. A couple of klicks west of the high ground, a branch trail came in on the right. This was a much narrower and more convoluted path leading back to the lake, paralleling a short creek that drained a pond. Its termination was about five kilometers north of the C-Pat trailhead.
If I were Alistair Drummond, I’d drive across the lake and go west on the C-Pat past Granite Ridge to the Creek Trail junction. Turn right. Trend back eastward a klick or two behind the ridge. Leave the trail and drive my sled ever so carefully south, upslope through patchy trees and rocks to the overlook.
Hunker in. Wait for Helly to come bombing along the C-Pat down yonder, gung ho to catch up with the fleeing miscreant. Pot him like a ptarmigan.
Unless the intended victim entered the forest on Creek Trail instead, and snuck up behind the sniper.
I sped diagonally across the lake. The ice was freeway flat and the scanner came up dead empty. From the shore the Creek trailhead was almost invisible, clogged with brush and a tangle of downed birch saplings. I punched the antigravity and hopped over them, then started along a winding path that was barely wide enough for a single machine. The air temperature was minus-five. My snow-depth indicator read 34 cm. Ten of that was fresh powder, and there’d be lots more before long.
Nearly an hour had passed since I’d spoken to Karl Nazarian. The SWAT team would be arriving soon. I cranked the throttle and drove as fast as I dared. The engine was a tiger-purr, muffled by the falling white stuff.
Twenty minutes later I was behind Granite Ridge. The irregular ground upslope showed no trace of a warm body. I could only presume he was on the other side of the crest, where broken rock formed a natural redoubt above the C-Pat. If I went farther along the Creek Trail, looking for his sled tracks to verify that he had, in fact, chosen this spot for the ambush, there was a chance he might scan me or hear me. I opted to climb the ridge on foot. The scope of my Tala-G had a thermal targeter three times more sensitive than that of a Ski-Doo—or a Claus-Gewitter blaster.
I called up a compass on my visor display and took a rough bearing on my objective. The vantage point was about a mile and a quarter southwest. There would be adequate cover until I reached the ridge top, where only small clumps of trees had found a footing in the frost-fractured granite.
My boots had a nifty feature: deployable miniature bear-paw snowshoe webs. I spread them and started mushing. The blood singing in my ears was the only other sound in the winter fastness. I still didn’t have my old stamina, but I made the climb without too much difficulty in the relatively shallow snow, doing a sweep with the scope every dozen meters, finding nothing warm—and no shield ionization signature, either.
Just below the ridge crest, sheltered by a group of jack pines, I rested and turned off the heating system of my envirosuit. Every little erg counts. Then I began to creep toward the overlook, which I estimated was about 200 meters away, snaking through tall snow-covered rocks, taking advantage of every bit of cover, sighting through the gun scope every other minute, praying that Drummond was up here and that he was concentrating his attention on the C-Pat Trail, not scanning the ridge to his left.
In the scope, two blips of warm.
I flattened, sinking into the snow behind a white-capped chunk of granite the size of a car. Changed the scope mode to amplification, peeked out.
I saw a crouching figure holding a long gun at the ready. His Ski-Doo waited close by, slightly downslope among the trees. No force-field hemisphere, of course. You can’t shoot a blaster through a simple portable shield.
I pulled off my right mitten so I could operate the trigger and targeted Alistair Drummond, the man wearing my body. Range, 156.2 meters.
Don’t do this, Helly. Not if you love me. Don’t go after that man to kill him.
I’ll bring him back alive if I can.
Rats.
I switched the gun to manual fire and blasted a pine snag six meters away from him. He fired down at the C-Pat Trail, then sent another wild shot to his right, decapitating a small balsam fir. He hadn’t found me with his scope and the snow made it impossible for him to judge my position.
I waited. Willing him to do it.
He fired again, coming nowhere near me, then made a dash for his snowmobile. Boarded, flicked on the shield. Safe from my photon weapon beneath his sparkling dome, he started his machine and headed downhill toward Creek Trail, weaving feather-light through the spindly pines. He’d turned on the antigravity enhancer to maximize his speed on the fluffy powder.
I surged to my feet, clambered on top of the rock, and began to mow down the trees ahead of him, blasting the trunks near the base so they dropped like jackstraws. Some bounced harmlessly off the force-field, others fell to either side as I continued to aim in front of the scuttling, turtle-shaped mass of golden sparks.
He had nearly dropped below my line of fire when I nailed him. A perfectly felled pine came down right across his path and the sled hit it head-on. The force-field projector cut out as the power died. I watched the yellow-and-black machine do a nose-flip right over the log and begin rolling down the steepening slope. Drummond was still in the saddle.
The Ski-Doo disappeared in the snow. I hopped off the rock and began floundering after it. I found him a few minutes later, under the broken and twisted machine. It had fetched up against a tree. Both of his legs were grotesquely entangled in the
skid-frame. There was not much blood.
I dug the snow away from his head and opened his visor and looked into my own face, twisted in agony. Alistair Drummond was fully conscious.
He said, “Damn you. Damn you.”
“There’s no way I can winch this thing off without hurting you,” I told him. “I’ll have to go back to the lodge and find a cutting tool.”
“Why didn’t you shoot me on the ridge?” he asked.
“I killed myself once in Macpherson Tower. Once is enough.”
The first-aid unit and survival kit were intact. I wrapped the parts of his body that I could reach in mylar foil blankets. Did my best to inspect his shattered legs without removing the remnants of his envirosuit. It was still producing warmth.
“There’s bound to be a medic in the Rampart SWAT team coming up from Toronto. It should arrive soon. I’ll put up the survival tent to keep the snow off you. Would you like a drink of water?”
“Go to hell.”
He turned his head away and didn’t say anything else. His eyes were closed. There was a pulse in his neck, so I figured he’d either fainted or gone into shock.
Time to move along. I flicked the emergency beacon, erected the tent, and turned on its heater. Then I hiked back down Creek Trail to my own machine and returned to the lodge.
Joanna and I were still trying to find a cutting torch in the shambles of the workroom, which was in the damaged staff wing, when five blue Rampart ExSec hoppers landed in the compound. The team leader was an Amazonian black woman named Captain Sarah Marcus.
She had the medical personnel and the equipment necessary to free and evacuate Drummond. She had the good sense not to argue when I said I was going along.
Two aircraft landed in the creek bed, the only open space available. Captain Marcus supervised loading the gear on AG totes, but I was the one who led the way as we snowshoed through the cold white woods to the place where Alistair Drummond awaited rescue.
“What the hell is that stink?” Marcus said.
I said, “Oh, shit,” knowing.
We found the tent torn to bits and bloody snow trampled by clawed feet and a body with its throat torn out, defiled with foul-smelling musk.
“There it is, Cap!” one of the troops cried, whipping out his Kagi sidearm and taking aim. “Looks like a goddamn bear!”
I knocked his gun arm up and the blast went harmlessly into the trees. A bulky dark form bounded out from a tumble of rocks and dashed downhill with surprising speed. In a moment it had vanished into the storm.
“Not a bear,” I said. “A wolverine. Leave it alone.”
Captain Marcus said, “It killed this man. We can scope it out and burn it later, when we’re airborne.”
“No,” I told her firmly. “We’ll let the animal be. It’s a wild thing. It acts naturally, following its own rules. It has a right to do so. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She turned her back on me and began giving orders to the others, and I tramped away downhill into the clean white falling snow.
Epilogue
The scout ship that Adam Stanislawski had sent to Amenti, in the Sagittarius Whorl, reported that the asteroid was the home base of an estimated two hundred Haluk corsairs. Shortly after the incident at the Haluk embassy was reported by the media, the Macrodur chairman dispatched a fleet of Concern cruisers to clean out the pirate nest.
Following the destruction of their starships, the Haluk declared war on the Commonwealth of Human Worlds.
A force of consisting of eighty heavy warships and 160 light starfighters lifted off from Haluk colonial planets at the tip of the Perseus Spur and headed for Seriphos, Rampart’s local headquarters. The attackers were intercepted in deep space by Rampart starships and Zone Patrol. Eventually they were annihilated, although the outnumbered defenders suffered heavy casualties. Seriphos itself was left unscathed.
Immediately after this engagement, a second enemy fleet of equal size left the Haluk worlds and began to encircle Cravat, sole source of the genen vector PD32:C2. Rampart forces had been siphoned away from Cravat to defend Seriphos, and the tide of battle began to turn toward the aliens.
At the same time, Rampart’s powerful Fleet Scanner Satellite at Tyrins detected nearly four thousand alien vessels en route from the Haluk Cluster to the Perseus Spur.
I consulted with the Rampart Board of Directors, then ordered the Rampart defenders to incinerate every landmass on Cravat with antimatter bombs.
Virtually every armed Concern and Commonwealth starship in the galaxy, including that of Captain Guillermo Bermudez Obregon, based on Kedge-Lockaby, was mobilized to defend the Milky Way Galaxy. I drove Makebate.
After sixty-one days of fighting in intergalactic space outside the Perseus Spur, the aliens surrendered.
Mimo, who was once again in excellent health, personally accounted for eighty-four ship-kills. He threw a celebratory luau at his Eyebrow Cay home, and some three dozen lowlife starship commanders who had distinguished themselves in the late conflict attended.
So did I. I was still blue, but no one minded. I had popped 166 of the bastards.
The defeated Haluk deposed the Servant of Servants and imprisoned him in a monastery of Anointed Elders, where he was to undergo corrective meditation for the rest of his life.
The surrender agreement was eyeballed by Locutor Ru Kamik and the Council of Nine. In it they abjectly disavowed the Grand Design and begged the Human Commonwealth to have mercy on the Haluk people.
Magnanimous in victory, the Commonwealth agreed to sponsor a massive research program—contracted out to Rampart Concern—synthesizing the vector virus PD32:C2. If, after five years, the aliens demonstrated that they embraced peace and abandoned the pernicious philosophy of uncontrolled population growth, the vector manufacturing process would be made available to them, gratis. Human inspection teams and family-planning counselors were to be welcomed in the Haluk Cluster, as well as the Haluk colonial worlds. Normal trade relations would be reestablished. If all went well during the five-year period, the Commonwealth would consider systematically granting limited numbers of Milky Way planets to the Haluk, until their population pressures eased.
Until then they were stuck with allomorphy and the worlds they already inhabited.
The flawed allo-eradication therapy developed by the late Emily Blake Konigsberg would be studied by human experts during the interim, and tweaked to eliminate the relapse factor. Fortunately, treated Haluk individuals who had reverted to the testudomorph state did emerge from their chrysalids as healthy allomorphic graciles.
In another condition of the surrender, the Haluk agreed to round up all Haluk-human demiclones, toss them into dystasis tanks, and change them back into normal Haluk. A few genetic transforms, including the woman known as Dolores da Gama, eluded the dragnet and are said to be blissfully enjoying the human condition on obscure freesoil worlds.
Nearly ten thousand human DNA donors were rescued from the Haluk colonies, in addition to the higher-status individuals imprisoned in Macpherson Tower. Some of the former had floated for years, and had had five or six alien copies made of themselves. After memory reprogramming, over half of the donors regained their mental health, found employment, and resumed their interrupted personal lives. The others were cared for by the Commonwealth at Haluk expense.
The Haluk promised to eschew mining transactinides with convict slave labor. In another CHW-sponsored project—contracted out to Sheltok Concern—human mining engineers traveled to the Haluk Cluster to instruct the aliens in more civilized technology. The Haluk were apt pupils. In time Sheltok would find itself purchasing more efficient machinery for the Sagittarian mines, designed by Haluk—just as Bodascon Concern would adopt certain Haluk starship innovations.
The aliens were hardware hotshots but abysmally unskilled in biotechnology and computer science. The new trade treaty allowed them to buy all the human goods they wanted, with the exception of certain armaments.
Enormous quant
ities of Macrodur computers were sold to the Haluk. The manufacturers of ticklesuits and Japanese kimonos also did a roaring business.
Meanwhile, back on the planet Earth, a political upheaval was in full swing.
Many Conservative Delegates were recalled and Reversionist candidates elected to take their places. Geraldo Gonzalez matured into a statesman of major stature. Together with Efrem Sontag, he sponsored Assembly bills that eventually eliminated the longstanding domination of CHW politics by the Hundred Concerns.
Pocket Delegates disappeared into oblivion. Syndics found other jobs. Corporation finks were immediately purged from the Secretariat for Xenoaffairs, the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat, and Zone Patrol. Over the next decade, legislation was enacted that reformed many areas of the human governmental structure.
The Conlegius statutes, which had given Concerns farranging independent police powers, were abolished. At the suggestion of Delegate Sontag, Karl Nazarian was appointed to a new CCID task force overseeing Concern security reorganization.
The Commonwealth Correction System was also revamped, eliminating the penalty of disenfranchisement except for capital crimes. Throwaways were invited to reapply for citizenship and carefully screened. The scandal-ridden Coventry penitentiaries were closed down.
Corporate ownership of the stars would persist for a long time, as the Assembly slowly whittled away at the entrenched hegemony of Big Business and enacted new tax measures to finance the reforms. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a galactic democracy.
Nonstargoing Insap races were granted just wages and given educational options. They did not become corporate stakeholders and share in the profits of their exploited worlds. Their consciousness raised, some of the natives became predictably restless. But the majority didn’t give a damn, so long as the human invaders brought in plenty of trade goods.