Voice of the Whirlwind (31 page)

“No notion, buck,” Zhou said. “I don’t have the equipment to check that kind of thing in any detail. These viruses are about two hundred millimicrons in size, and that’s small even for a virus. And the internal structure is very strange—the nucleoprotein that carries the genetic material is like nothing I’ve seen. Not that I’m an expert—a virologist might be able to tell you more.”

“Is it contagious?”

“I doubt it. The virus has a limited tolerance for oxygen environments—it’s got to get into a host in a few hours at the most or it dies. But I don’t know what the host would be. I put the virus into a couple of rats and it died. Maybe the pH wasn’t right, or something. I can do more specific tests.”

“Anything happen to the rats?”

Zhou chuckled. “They’re thriving. Having a nice time, here in their sterile boxes. I’ll destroy them after I check for long-term effects.”

Bright holograms urged Steward to buy. He was floating at the limit of the phone cord. Frogs swam by in the air.

“Don’t bother with more tests,” he said. “But I want you to take very good care of that flask. I’d like to impress something on you—that stuff’s very hot. If you tell anyone about it—
anyone
—you’ll die. Probably in a very unpleasant way. That’s a certainty.”

Zhou’s voice was quiet. “Are you threatening me, buck?”

“Not me. If you talk, I’ll die right along with you.”

“Ah.” Steward heard the sound of a nicotine stick being inhaled. Zhou’s voice, when it returned, was philosophical. “Then I won’t talk.”

“It’s best all around, believe me. Now, I’m going to be gone for some weeks. I want you to put the flask in a safety deposit box and send me the key. My mailing address is on Moscow.”

“You’re going to give me your real name and address? I can’t believe it.”

“It’s not going to make much difference, is it? If either of us talks, we die, no matter what name we use. Right?”

Zhou gave a chill laugh. “You know,” he said, “I think my rates for doing these little jobs have just gone up.”

Steward grinned. “I can’t blame you in the least,” he said.

*

“I want to talk to somebody about trust funds,” Steward said.

He’d shuttled from New Humanity to Solon. Solon was a quiet place, a twilit torus full of soft conversation, flickering communications screens, and the soft digital hum of accumulating dollars. Solon was a banking center and a disproportionate amount of the wealth belonging to the habitats in Earth and lunar orbits passed along its coded threads.

From here Steward could get a shuttle to Earth. He’d checked the latest news from Charter and his luck was still holding—there was no news of a dead man being found at the Xylophone. As far as he knew, he was unpursued.

This place was called the Stone Bank, and from Steward’s researches it seemed the kind Steward wanted. There were no teller windows, no vid screens connecting the customer to an AI. There was dark wool carpet imported from Earth, solid mahogany desks, and quiet, cool cubicles where officers could meet with their clients and enjoy a drink or smoke while doing business. Steward had visited banks like this all through his Canard period. He had always been mildly surprised how well they treated him.

The woman at the front desk was dressed in a dark silk shirt and a carefully cut blue blazer with white piping. An interface stud was inserted at the base of her skull to connect her mind with the financial information flow. She looked Steward up and down, noting the battered jacket, the worn jeans. “I’m not sure—” she began.

Steward held up a needle. It glowed in the subdued lighting like old, polished silver. “Thirty K Starbright,” he said. Just by way of establishing common ground.

The woman took it in stride, without a change of expression, just another piece of data in the long string being fed to her
mind. Steward smiled in admiration.

“I think Janice Weatherman is the person you want,” she said.

*

Weatherman was about twenty-five. She had delicate features and dark blond hair, and Steward admired her cashmere rollneck and gold jewelry. She treated Steward very nicely indeed and helped him set up a trust fund in the name of Andrew Steward, current address New Humanity Hospital. Natalie would have nothing to do with the administration of the trust—she could neither profit by it nor refuse the money, and none of the money would ever be in her name. The trust officer would spend such monies for Andrew’s benefit as he saw fit and would consult with New Humanity’s doctors in any treatment Andrew might need. Stone Bank’s person on New Humanity would be required, however, to submit an accounting of his expenditure to Natalie, so that if there was something wrong with the accounting, Natalie might be able to inform the bank. Steward himself, once he’d put his thumbprint on the desk scanner, couldn’t free the principal. It was so divided among various investments that even the collapse of the Stone Bank and half the policorps would not inflict mortal damage.

Steward and Weatherman shared a piece of cream pastry in celebration, and then Steward walked for the shuttle gate. He booked onto the Earth shuttle that would bring him to a water landing off the port of Trincomalee.

From there, he was going to Uzbekistan. They had hospitals that would do what he needed, and legally.

His instinct, he thought, had been pure. His action had been correct.

No one needed him now. He was free of responsibility, and free to act.

And suddenly, as if the knowledge of his rightness had somehow released the necessary synthesis, an idea appeared, cold and perfect, gemlike, in his mind. He examined the blue diamond brilliance of it and could find no flaw.

Neither he nor the Alpha had the vee tag. He was not susceptible to the Powers or to their addictive aerosols.
The Alpha had lied!
He’d told his recruiter he was a Power junkie in order to get access to the Prime, the better to do his penetration mission into the heart of the Legation, but it had not been true, and the Pulsar Division had not checked it—hadn’t thought they needed to check it. It wasn’t the kind of thing a defector would lie about. And when he—the Beta—had gone through the blood test on Vesta, they hadn’t checked the results—their security comps were setting off so many alarms they’d just picked him up, and not coordinated their data. It had
said
on his file he had the tag—once again, they hadn’t thought to check it.

Steward closed his eyes and smiled. Beneath his lids he saw the shadow of a dream, the pulsing redness on the horizon, the way the ground rushed past under the slate sky. He was coming closer. He remembered Hagakure:

When one thinks he has gone too far,

he will not have erred.

Words to live by.

Gravity pressed on his chest as the shuttle brought him to Earth, fire trailing from its polymerized wings.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Steward walked onto Charter Station from the Moscow shuttle
with every nerve alert, moving in the middle of a knot of Taler employees returning from leave. Two large, soft traveling bags weighed down his shoulders by their straps. Holo adverts blossomed into life around him. He walked
lightly, scanning the people waiting for the shuttle. Food
smells came out of the fast eateries across from the gate. The air hummed with the noise of business.

Steward moved out of the old spindle toward the cargo docks. Gravity decreased and his strides lengthened. He bounded up the moveway, jumping over intervening pedestrians, holo images passing over his skin. The load on his shoulders lightened. He didn’t think anyone was following.

Born
was taking on cargo as he arrived. The dock was bright with the sodium glow of floodlights. Cairo stood with her back to Steward, casting half a dozen distinct shadows, supervising
the autoloaders. Noise racketed brightly off the metal walls. Small standardized containers moved up an endless belt. Steward narrowed his eyes, looking over the long dock, and saw no one else. He came up behind Cairo.

“Hey there, engineer,” Steward said.

She turned around and gave him a grin. Spotlight glare sparkled in the jewels on her cheeks. “Hi, Earthman,” she said. She put an arm around his waist and gave him a brisk hug.

“I brought something for you,” Steward said.

He opened one of his cases and brought up a magnum of champagne. “One of the better products of my planet,” he said. “Be sure to drink it in a glass, now. One that isn’t made of plastic.”

She held up the bottle to the light and smiled. “We’ll synthesize this stuff right one of these days, and then we won’t have to haul it out of the gravity well.”

“Yeah. Right. Any day now.”

She handed it back to him. “Could you put this in my cabin?”

“Sure.”

Cairo looked at him sidelong. “There’s a lot of stuff waiting for you in your rack. All your mail. A bagful.”

“All my friends on Earth sending me presents, I guess.”

“Do most of your friends live in Uzbekistan? I couldn’t help but notice the postmarks.”

Steward shrugged. “The Uzbeks are a generous people.” He began following the cargo into the ship’s hold.

Cairo looked after him and shouted over the noise of the loaders. “Get your body ready for a long boost. We’re going trans-Belt.”

Steward stopped moving, a cold touch on his nerves. “Where?”

“Jupiter space. Ricot. Last-minute priority drug shipment.”

A feeling of rightness passed through Steward, a knowledge of patterning. Somehow he’d known this was inevitable. He wondered if it was Vesta’s work, if they somehow still assumed he was going through with Stoichko’s plan. It didn’t matter. Even if this was not strictly coincidental,
Born
was still going to Ricot. He was going home.

*

While on Earth, Steward had watched the news from Charter with care—Stoichko had been discovered on the second day following his death, but the Charter police had made no announcements of any suspects and had commented that Stoichko’s origins were uncertain. The implication was that Stoichko’s death was the consummation of some business whose genesis had nothing to do with Charter, an assumption in which the Charter cops were perfectly correct. Steward was inclined to think that another implication of their statement was that the Charter police had no leads. Steward concluded that he and the Charter cops had this, at least, in common.

Steward had been moving carefully on Earth, jumping fast from place to place, doing all his business in cash on the needle head and visiting all the necessary hospitals and supply houses under false names. He hadn’t contacted Griffith or his people, not knowing how many ties Tsiolkovsky’s Demon had to Vesta. Group Seven, for all Steward knew, might be interested in avenging their dead agent, and Steward’s body was all that they might find to avenge him on.

There was a message light burning on Steward’s comp as he entered his cabin. There were four messages from Natalie. Steward felt a knife of memory jab his heart. He punched the messages up and discovered that all complained about the arrangements Steward made for Andrew’s welfare. Steward read the phosphor messages carefully as they ran by on his screen, and decided there was no point in answering. He had acted. The action had taken a life of itself, independent from Steward. It didn’t have anything to do with him anymore.

The packages he’d sent himself were secured in his rack webbing. He opened them carefully, checking the wrapping first to make certain they had not been tampered with. There was nothing unexpected. Most of the packages carried data spikes that represented keys to things—keys to boxes, to information, to money, to the way things moved. Other mail contained various souvenirs—Indian religious statues, Russian art, Tibetan prayer cloths, things that could be taken as the private ventures his company allowed. These were mixed with parts that, when assembled, transformed themselves into a custom-made long-barreled pistol, made entirely of an advanced plastic that would pass most detectors and which fired recoilless, near-silent cartridges with self-consuming casings, He’d brought the ammunition himself on the Earth shuttle. Also in the packages was chemical equipment that would allow him to put together plastic explosive and detonators out of chemicals the
Born
had in stock to clean its toilets, maintain fuel cells, and strip old paint. In one of Steward’s bags was a hooded one-piece environment suit that would reduce Steward’s body heat to background levels, lowering his profile to IR detectors. One of the needles held a schematic for an ultrasonic sound suppressor that would reduce the sound of his movements, breath, and heartbeat and that he could build on his way to Ricot. He’d also bought a new-model pair of night specs, with image enhancement and image enlargement abilities, IR and UV detectors built in, and with interface pickups built in the bows, so that he could control them with a push of his mind. They looked like a heavy pair of mirrored sunglasses. On Earth, they had been a part of Urban Surgery, a fashion. Here, they were something real.

Steward spent a half hour stowing it all away. His cabin was going to be crowded on his way to Ricot, and he regretted that he had no clear idea how much of this gear he was actually going to need.

He was acquiring equipment at the same time that he was paring himself down, becoming leaner, faster, harder. He tried to expunge the parts of his personality not strictly functional, not relevant to the task at hand. He could look at himself now, in the reflective canyons of Earth condecos or the mirrored lenses of his night specs, and understand what he was looking at.

Day by day, he was turning himself into the instrument of his desire.

*

Reese arrived the next day, her hair turned bright copper by the sun, just in time to begin the four days of engine checks necessary before undocking. Following the first engine check, sparring with Reese in
Born
’s
little gym, Steward tagged her on the ear with a reverse heel hook and she stepped back in surprise, grinning at him warily through her mouthpiece.

“You didn’t used to be able to do that,” she said, her words slurred by plastic.

Steward spat his mouthpiece into his glove. “Sublimity. Constancy. Perseverance,” he said. “Modes of living for the successful martial artist.”