FALLEN DRAGON (41 page)

He clenched his fists, pulling desperately. "God no. No. No." His contorted face so nearly let tears escape down his cheeks. "Why me? Why did you pick on me? It's not fair. Not fair."

The door closed again behind the man. Jones let out a sob, and the tension went out of his body, leaving him drooping painfully from the frame.

"Please," he told the empty room. "I'm nobody. I'm not important. You don't have to do this. Please."

He was sniveling now. Wretched and pathetic. Back on Earth, anti-interrogation training had gone through the routines for strengthening resolve. How to withstand tiredness and strain, how not to be caught out in lies. That was training. That wasn't real. Not when some bunch of psychotic terrorists have got you stripped naked and strung out like they're about to crucify you. Not when you are so utterly helpless that you would genuinely sell your soul to the devil you now want to believe in very badly indeed. Because there's no other way out.

Where were they? God damn it, where were the platoon?

"Everyone is important in their own way, Mr. Johnson."

Jones's head snapped up. There was a beautiful young woman in the room: her long flatfish face was one that any man would find enchanting. Thick dark hair swung around her head as she stared at him. Her movement was birdlike, examining him from minutely different angles. She was twisting a gold ring on her index finger.

"Please," he entreated. "Just let me go."

"No." She said it with a finality that was horrifying.

"Why! What are you?"

"At this particular stage of our mission, I suppose you could call me a revolutionary anarchist. It is my task to bring chaos and disorder to Memu Bay."

"What?" he blurted.

She smiled gently and took a step closer. Her proximity was one he found alarmingly sexual. Then she picked up the tubing. One end was carefully plugged into the top of a container. She began to uncoil the rest.

"Don't," he begged. "Jesus, please."

"There will be very little pain," she said. "I am not a sadist, Mr. Johnson."

Jones clenched his buttocks as if he were going for Olympic gold. "I'll tell you anything. Just... don't."

"I'm sorry. You're not here for questioning. I already know more about the universe than you ever dreamed existed."

He stared at her, coldly shocked by the realization that she was no revolutionary, she was simply insane. Bug-eyed, dancing-in-the-moonlight crazy. It was one of the universe's most heinous crimes that a creature so beautiful should possess such a demented soul.

"People will die," he cried. "Your people, the ones you're supposed to be fighting for. Is that what you want?"

"Nobody will die. Zantiu-Braun will never know for certain if you are alive or not. It is a dilemma that will eat at their souls. That is what I want."

She brought the end of the tube up to his neck. With ab
s
olute horror, he saw the end was shaped exactly like a Skin circulatory nozzle. It clicked neatly into his carotid valve.

"It won't work," he said hoarsely. "If you want me dead, you'll have to do it the hard way. It's not that
easy,
bitch!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Johnson." She glanced at her ring.

Jones laughed in her face. Stupid bitch didn't know the valves were e-alpha protected. His laugh burbled away to a terminal scream as he saw his precious scarlet blood race down the tube and splatter into the container.

He actually saw her flinch. There were tears in her eyes, revealing shame. "Know this," she said. "Your essence will go forward to flourish in a world free of sorrow. I promise you." Then she turned away.

He cursed her to hell and beyond. He screamed. Pleaded. Wept.

All the while his blood flowed along the tube.

Fight it,
he told himself.
The boys will find me. Don't lose consciousness. They'll rescue me. They will. My friends. There's time. There's always time.

One of the containers was completely full. And still the tube was red as his heart pumped away faithfully.

Blood and world began their final fade into gray.

CHAPTER NINE

Lawrence's flight to Earth lasted several weeks. He
didn't have any of the claustrophobic cabin restrictions and mind-rot routines that were the norm throughout his every subsequent flight. Passengers traveling from Amethi were a rarity; there were only eight on board the
Eilean
when it activated its compression drive. It meant only one life support wheel was active. But even then he had a whole family cabin to himself, and the rest of the place to roam through. The crew tended to ignore him, assuming he was some rich brat whose overindulgent Board family had paid for the flight and a tour around Earth. He never even registered with the other passengers, McArthur ultraexecutives who spent the whole time interfaced with their personal AS. He got to spend as much time as he wanted in the gym, while the rest of his waking hours were taken up accessing the ship's extensive multimedia library.

It should have been, he decided later, golden-age space travel, slow and leisured. The only possible equivalent was a voyage in a 1930s-vintage airship, although those would probably have better food. And a decent view.

Perfect, if he could just have forgotten about
her.
But the loneliness and relative isolation contrived to tweak every tiny memory into a full-on reverie. The color of a graphic display reminded him of a certain dress she wore, exactly that shade of turquoise. Food was a meal they had shared once. Menus on the multimedia library brought back the hours they spent accessing together, curled up in each other's arms on the couch in his den.

Starflight, the desire of his life, was made wretched by the love of his life. Ironies didn't come much worse.

Earth, however, did not disappoint. During the orbital transit flight from Glencoe Star, McArthur's Lagrange point base, he spent almost the whole time pressed up against one of the ship's four viewports watching the planet grow larger—blissfully unaware of the radiation threat. He'd thought his departing view of Amethi to be the most wondrous sight of his life, with its surface features of ocher, ash and white, and Nizana's dusky radiance reflected from Bar
c
lay's Glacier. But Earth with its vibrant montage of
living
colors made his heart ache as it grew closer and brighter. He landed in a Xianti, bitter at the spaceplane's lack of windows.

McArthur's principal spaceport was Gibraltar, the Rock's inhabitants still stubbornly clinging to their independence from Spain, if not the European Federation. Their government council had negotiated a deal with McArthur, involving liberal taxes in exchange for infrastructure investment and a mutual noninvolvement/liability clause.

The politics went clean over Lawrence's head. Once he was out of the spaceplane and through the arrivals hall (where he generated a brief flurry of interest from security— uneasy at allowing a Board family member to wander around unaccompanied), all he wanted to do was get outside and experience the romance of the Old World. He walked away from the terminal building that now occupied the site of the ancient RAF base and went down to the huge spaceplane runway that the company had built, a five-kilometer strip of concrete stabbing out into the Med. For hours, he simply stood in wonder on the boulders that skirted the concrete, looking out across the water. Spain was on one side, an unbroken swath of urbanization that ran along the shoreline right over the horizon, with the mottled brown slopes of low mountains rising up behind the tumbling sprawl of whitewashed buildings. Africa haunted the other side of the sea, a dark, featureless stripe highlighting the boundary between water and sky.

For some strange reason, given how he'd actually flown across half of Amethi, this planet seemed much larger. He simply couldn't get used to the scale of the elements. So much water, lapping and frothing around his feet. It gave off the most potent smell, hundreds of subtle scents blending together in a harsh salt zest. And the air... nothing had ever been so warm in his life, he was sure of it, not even the tropical domes. The heat and humidity made it hard to breathe.

It wasn't until the sun fell and the lights from the Costa twinkled over the swelling water that he turned around and made his way into Gibraltar town. Money wasn't too much of a problem; his Amethi credits were easily changed at the bank for EZ Dollars. With the resulting balance he'd be able to stay in any average hotel for several months before even thinking about getting a job. That wasn't what he wanted.

He remained in Gibraltar for several days, spending nearly all of the time accessing the global datapool, filling in significant gaps in his political education. The one thing Roselyn had been truthful about, he was relieved to discover, was Zantiu-Braun. Most companies were reducing their starflight operations to an essential minimum: keeping in contact with existing colonies and asset-realization missions on planets newly acquired from their struggling founder companies. While almost alone, Z-B maintained a small exploration fleet, and was still establishing colonies through their portals. Although even they weren't building any new starships. All the Lagrange shipyards had either been mothballed or turned into service and maintenance bays.

Starflight really was an era that was drawing to a close. But it wasn't over yet Even at its current wind-down rate, there would be ships flying for decades.

A week after arriving on Earth, he took a train to Paris and walked into Zantiu-Braun's headquarters. The personnel division, like McArthur security before them, were slightly flustered by his origin. However, the AS and human supervisor managed to convince him his best way into the exploration fleet was through their general Astronautics Division. He didn't, they pointed out, have enough money to buy himself an initial stake in Z-B large enough to select his career path. What he should do, like hundreds of thousands before him, was get in on the bottom rung and earn the stake necessary to make the transition. As an added advantage, people who applied from in-house were always given preferential selection over those coming from outside. His lack of a university education was dismissed as unimportant at this stage: Z-B always offered educational sabbaticals to any staff member eager to progress up through the company structure. And as it happened, there were openings in an Astronautics Division that would serve as an excellent primer to their starship officer college. Had he ever thought of a career in strategic security?

Two days later he was on the train to Toulouse.

Eight months after that, he was in space again, heading for the Kinabica system. He and Colin Schmidt, the two newest members of Platoon 435NK9, were held in pretty high contempt by their fellow squaddies.

Kinabica was one of the earliest star systems to be settled, and in two and a half centuries it'd achieved a respectable socioeconomic status, with a high-level technology base. Quite how and why its founding company, Kaba, had divested itself of such a primary asset was never detailed in the briefings the platoon were given. Kinabica with its population of seventy million was now effectively self-supporting. All the principal investment had been made. There was no more heavy-duty industrial plant to be shipped out, no more biochemical factories or food refineries required, no mining equipment that couldn't be built locally. Everything was there, in place, wired up and chugging away merrily.

"It's because there's no dividend," Corporal Ntoko told Lawrence one day during the flight. Like every newbie, Lawrence was filling his day with questions, though he asked a lot more than Colin. Ntoko had taken some pity on him and supplied him with a few answers. It did at least stop the questions for a while. "Kaba has poured money into Kinabica ever since its discovery, and it's getting virtually nothing in return. The whole place is a rotten stake for investors on Earth."

"But
it's a whole planet," Lawrence insisted. "It must be profitable."

"It is, but only within its own star system. Suppose they produce a memory chip with a density equal to anything on Earth: they still have to ship it across fifteen light-years to sell it. While any Earth factory producing the same kind of chip has only got a couple of thousand kilometers to reach its consumer population, and that's by train or bulk cargo ship. Which transport method is always going to be more expensive?"

"Okay, so Kinabica should produce something unique. That's how real trade works, an exchange of goods between supplier and consumer on both sides."

"That's the theory, sure. But what can Kinabica produce that Earth can't? Even if they got lucky and designed a neurotronic pearl way ahead of anything on Earth, it would only take a couple of months for any of our companies to retro-engineer it. At our current level of manufacturing technology, the only production that makes sense is local production. Starflight is just so goddamn expensive."

"Then why are we doing this?"

"Because asset realization is the one thing that can justify interstellar flight. On Earth, the concept is plain digital accounting, swapping figures around in spreadsheets. There's very little actual money involved. Z-B accepted Kaba's negative equity loading to help with its own starship operation funding problem; the two complement each other perfectly, provided you have the balls to see it through. That's why we're out here in a tin can flying faster than a speeding photon, to turn all that nice corporate financial theory into dirty physical practice. Z-B was in almost the same boat as Kaba was when it came to financing our starflight division; they'd laid out a trillion-dollar expenditure over the last couple of centuries and have precious little on the balance sheet to show for it, except for fifty multibillion-dollar starships with nowhere to go. Except now we have Kinabica's debt on our books, we can legitimately employ our own starships to collect some equity. As we've essentially written off the planet's founding investment debt, all we need is the products from their factories to sell on Earth. That way, the production costs are simply cut out of the equation, so now all the money realized by the sales of Kinabica's high-tech goodies goes directly into maintaining Z-B's starships, the strategic security division, and servicing the equity debt. If the accountants do their sums right, we also come out with a profit."