Voice of the Whirlwind (32 page)

“Fuck sublimity,” Reese said. “You got your nerves jacked up. Nobody’s that fast in the real world.”

“I got tired of you beating me up,” Steward said. “Now we’re more even.”

He inserted his mouthpiece and slid into a five-strike combination suggested by his new data threads. He drove through Reese’s defense on his fourth punch before her counterattack developed and he had to back off to avoid being beheaded by a spinning back-knuckle punch. Through his mouthpiece, he laughed. Six weeks ago, he would have had to take that punch just to get his attack through.

The threads running through his brain and tagged to his nerves held coded artificial reflexes, knowledge of martial-arts techniques and patterns, weapons, small unit tactics, all courtesy of labs in Uzbekistan. Better, more varied and advanced than the standardized implant knowledge the Alpha had carried as an Icehawk and that Reese carried now, reflexes Steward had longed for, and if the implant threads proved inadequate, he could access more through the interface socket set in the base of his skull. It was like carrying a small army in his head, ready for use when he needed it.

He decided to let Reese discover the army on her own, soldier by invisible soldier.

*

Ricot’s vast silver flank reflected the glowing ocher sphere of Jupiter with a slight distortion, like a heat shimmer over alloy.
Born
drifted by the station’s side, waiting its turn at the polar docks. Steward had to restrain an impulse to reach out of the docking cockpit and touch the alloy planetoid with his hands. Need was pulsing through his veins like blood. He was close.

Ricot was the ultimate, obsessive artifact of Coherent Light’s hubris, the relic of an attempt to physically relocate humanity’s future beyond the Belt by building a structure so vast, so elaborate, that sheer awe would draw future generations into its pattern. Humanity would take Ricot as its template, Coherent Light as its messiah, and wealth and technology would shift from the Belt and inner economies to areas dominated by the Outward Policorps.

Huge as it was, there was a practical dimension to the place. Jupiter space was rich: Enormous dronescoops skimmed the surface of its atmosphere for the raw materials of the new plastics, and the upper reaches of the planet were rich in other materials, ranging from hydrogen to polypeptides. Minerals were plentiful in Jupiter’s major and minor moons.

But the place was dangerous. Jupiter’s size made every inch of its grasping gravity well a battleground, radiation was a continuous hazard, and tidal quakes rocked its moons, threatening instant decompression to any human environment. The smart money had long been in the Belt—development was considered easier there.

Ricot was conceived as an answer, a grand human outpost on the border of Jupiter’s devouring gravity. The artificial moon orbited beyond any of Jupiter’s satellites, on the rim of the Jovian gravity well, beyond the dangerous reach of major tidal stresses and armored with enough stone and alloy to prevent the penetration of gene-warping radiation. It was big enough not simply to repair and maintain the Jovian dronescoops, but to build them. It was intended that eventually all Jovian commerce was to pass through Ricot’s docks.

The planetoid was built to handle it. It was shaped like an American football, twelve kilometers long and three across, its blunt polar caps stationary and gravity-free while the rest of its cylindrical bulk was set in a slow rotation. Three to five million people were seen as eventually inhabiting its alloy corridors. The design featured enough redundancy in its systems and structure to minimize any disaster, from plague to collision. From its armored command centers, the fastest and brightest AIs were to assist Coherent Light executives in charting the future of humanity.

But Coherent Light had to mortgage much of its future in order to build Ricot, and no matter how well the policorp strained the vast wealth of Jupiter passing through its docks, it was difficult to justify Ricot in economic terms. The housing blocks held 150,000 people at their greatest extent: Most of the housing remained in potential only, and the hollow interior remained a webwork of skeletal girders ready for the modular housing that never came. The Artifact War drove all belligerents to the brink of bankruptcy; with Ricot and the war, Coherent Light had a double monkey on its back. Toward the end of the war, CL citizens were rioting in their stainless alloy corridors and sabotage tested the redundancy of safety systems. Executives defected by the hundreds to other policorps that were, themselves, soon caught in the panic. At the end of the war, Ricot was home for a skeletal population composed of Jovian miners working out their contracts with other firms, off-center visionaries and political ideologues unwelcome elsewhere, the lost, the looney, and a few remaining true believers. Only the appearance of the Powers and the astonishing wealth they represented, combined with the Jovian mining, had finally made Ricot profitable. Consolidated Systems was paying unprecedented dividends.

Steward looked at the planetoid’s long, brilliant expanse, the shimmering kilometers-long reflective wall that stood alone and featureless against the darkness. Memories of humming corridors filled his mind, the chorus of whispering vents, the crackle of hydraulic joints constantly readjusting themselves to the stresses of rotation and gravity, voices that spoke to him in terms of yearning, of yielding.

Readiness filled him. His action would be correct.

*

Born
would unload, then spend two weeks floating at the end of a tether in Ricot’s improbably huge gravity-free interior. Steward concluded this was time enough to do what he needed to do.

For a few days he just moved around Ricot, trying to find the rhythm of the place, the way things worked. Warm familiarity touched his mind and he fought it, wanting to see everything with new eyes, clear, untouched by memory.

Security was tight and omnipresent. There were cameras above a lot of doors, and armed men guarding critical installations. Consolidated could afford the best. Sometimes there were spot checks, men with guns and body armor moving into an area and running every ID through security comps. Living in Ricot, he decided, was a lot like living in the army. After a while the uniforms and security became invisible, just part of the background hum. Steward’s ID and passport were in order, so he never had trouble.

He began moving his equipment onstation, piece by piece, storing it in out-of-the-way places, vent shafts, maintenance storage spaces, the girders of unfinished structures. Up near the north pole, far away from the Powers, where security was lighter.

Wondering, he looked up Wandis. She lived in a small apartment in an old housing unit that a lot of Icehawks had once lived in. Steward hung out in the unit’s recreation space for an hour before the first shift, picked her up when she left her apartment, and followed her to work. Wandis was a tall blond woman in her thirties, broad-shouldered, wide-hipped. Jewel implants winked from around her left eye. About as far away from Natalie as she could get, and Steward wondered if the Alpha had been attracted to her for that reason. She worked in some kind of metal-processing plant in the zero-g north pole, and Steward turned away from the heavy security at the plant entrance. It didn’t seem to be a high-prestige job, and her housing unit wasn’t anything special. He wondered if Consolidated was penalizing her for leaving her secrets around the apartment, even though Steward had been following their instructions when he sold them. He wondered also if Wandis had known what the Alpha had been planning, or whether it had all been a surprise.

Still curious, he picked her up at shift change and followed her home. She didn’t talk to anyone. After she went into her apartment, Steward hung outside for a while, but she didn’t leave again.

Steward didn’t feel anything at all for her, a matter of some surprise. He had expected some kind of resonance, some glint of the Alpha, and he found nothing. A moderately attractive older woman, living alone, whose life seemed so spare, so restrained, that he could not help but wonder if she had deliberately crafted it that way out of preference.

His lack of reaction disturbed him somehow, and he followed Wandis for two days. Her behavior was much the same. He stopped following. He had other plans.

*

Most of Ricot’s security was concentrated on defending the Powers from intrusion and, presumably, infection. Steward wasn’t interested in the Powers—he had left Stoichko’s virus sitting in its safety deposit box on Charter—and much of the rest of station security was gathered around air recyclers, power mains, dock autoloaders—traditional targets of sabotage. Steward wasn’t interested in them, either.

He was interested in Consolidated’s insurance company.

The company was called Iapetus, and the part Steward was interested in was built into a new structure, a module recently added to the skeleton of potential housing in Ricot’s giant interior space. Steward donned a vac suit and examined it from the outside, seeing the vast compressors and huge webwork of coolant pipes that kept genetic material in cryogenic stasis. He noted the places where he could put explosives even as he rejected the idea as inelegant and unnecessarily… noisy, he decided, noisy in the way that noise has of attracting attention.

Steward wandered by the place during each shift and found Iapetus open for business only during the first. During other two shifts a pair of armed guards patrolled the lobby, their jackets stuffed full of armor, helmets jammed with scanners. There were only a dozen or so people working in the place—any revivification would be done outside, in a hospital—and the guards would probably know each employee by name.

So much for the front door. It didn’t bother him. Sublimity, he told himself. Constancy. Perseverance.

He had a lot of tricks left.

*

Through his fingertips, his toes, he could hear the planetoid’s metal joints as they crackled around him. The sound of his breath was loud in his ears. He was moving up an air main, swathed in the loose all-body combat cloak that masked his infrared emanations. Moving air tugged at the cloak’s polymer skin. Insulation swathed his limbs.

Stoichko’s plans didn’t cover this part of Ricot in any detail—he’d been interested in the south pole, the Power Legation. But Ricot’s designers had been faithful to their modular concept—throughout the gleaming cylinder, patterns repeated, the major power, air, and hydraulic mains and their access tunnels rang changes on one another, repeated throughout the structure until they came up against the bulkhead that had been built to seal humanity from the contamination of the Power Legation.

It was hot in Steward’s cloak. Perspiration trickled down his nose. He moved deliberately in point nine g, scanning through his enhanced senses for alarms or sensors planted in the main. There were cyberdrones moving through here, he knew, and they were programmed to kill any unauthorized personnel. Odds were he wouldn’t run into one—most would be guarding the Legation, and the dwellings of Consolidated’s major figures. A few would be scattered through the utility mains, but there were a lot of mains. There were also a lot of unusual structures in the tunnels, put there for one good reason or other—interfaces with power or communication mains, strange bulges to accommodate equipment installed on the other side, bulkheads, connections to nonmodular buildings that had been added to Ricot since the mains had been put in place. If the drones didn’t perceive Steward as alive, he could be mistaken for something that belonged there.

A cockroach scuttled across Steward’s path, and he grinned. That had been a problem during his time, as well.

He came to a smaller access shaft that led, he calculated, to LifeLight’s air vents, and he scanned his detectors. No radar pulses were coming from the tunnel, no sonar probes. He gently worked his way into the narrow shaft, then began climbing it. Sweat spattered on the inside of his mask. He couldn’t avoid an extermination drone here. The shaft simply wasn’t big enough, and even the drone’s imbecile mind would realize he was something out of place. Claustrophobia began to touch him with lamb’s-wool fingers. His respiration increased.

Cramped though it was for Steward, the shaft was a lot wider than it needed to be in order to serve Iapetus—Ricot’s designers had anticipated the possibility of more than one module being connected to the same air supply. Cool air whistled about Steward’s suit. He climbed steadily.

A tunnel branched to Steward’s left. Above him he could see that his own shaft ended, and he worked his way into the branch, moving along on his back with careful shrugs of his shoulders. Barred light gleamed through a vent ahead. He moved to it. The ventilator louvers were nearly shut. The air moved through them with a faint, almost ultrasonic whine. Steward opened the slats with his fingers and peered through: the Iapetus front office. Below was the head of a guard, his helmet bobbing to soundless music fed to the audio centers of the brain. The other guard was gazing out through the glass windows of the front door. Steward closed the slats and moved on.

A red light winked in his mind. Through his interface stud, Steward’s cloak was telling him that it had stored all the body heat it could and would have to vent it soon. In another few minutes the suit would start to randomize Steward’s body heat rather than blend it in with the background. It would give him a nonhuman IR profile, but he would still be conspicuous.

There were subtunnels moving off deeper into the building, but they were too small for Steward to crawl through. Staying in the main tunnel, Steward crawled to the next room vent, opened the louvers, peered in: an office of some kind, dark. Steward went on to the next vent: a toilet. He moved back to the second vent. He looked carefully for alarms and found none.

Tools were held in padded pockets in the front of the heat-masking cloak. Steward had removed the Velcro pocket strips because they made too much noise when opened—instead he’d shut them with transparent tape. He opened them, took out his tools, and pried off the flat metal unit containing the louvers. Reaching outside, he removed the vent grille, his fingers holding the louvers throughout the operation so the grille wouldn’t fall. He took the grille inside the tunnel with him and placed it carefully above his head.