Voice of the Whirlwind (37 page)

Fear trickled up Steward’s spine. They could do it. His vision of Orion dimmed. He spat salt from his mouth.

There was a buzz at the door, a red light blinking behind Curzon. He stepped to the door and pressed the intercom. “Yes?” A woman’s voice, American, grated from the speaker.

“Security breach, sir. In the Power Legation. I need to talk to you.”

Curzon gave a quick glance over his shoulder at Steward. Steward knew Curzon was wondering what knowledge Steward had of this, if he should have conducted the interrogation along other lines.

Curzon opened the door and admitted a tall Security Division officer in full equipment—armored jacket, helmet, heavy gloves, transparent plate lowered over the face. The voice came from a speaker clipped to her belt. Steward thought of Orion striding across the sky. Anything to conceal his surprise.

“We think we’ve got a biological contamination in the Legation. Maybe a weapon.”

Curzon turned to Godunov. “The telephone,” he said. “Sound the alarms.”

“Already done,” the woman said, and then a purring sound filled the room. The sound of Darwin Days.

Curzon fell heavily, his good hand still reaching for the phone as a line of red splashed up his chest. Godunov’s head exploded in red froth and she fell back against her chair.

The woman walked to Godunov’s desk and tapped on the Colonel’s console for a moment. “I’m erasing the interrogation,” she said. “Wouldn’t want to give them any more data than necessary.”

Steward grinned at her weakly. “Hi, Reese,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“I thought maybe I owed you something.”

Her long-legged stride, even in the heavy combat suit, was completely familiar. She walked to Steward’s table and began pulling electrodes off his head.

“I’ve got a broken arm in here somewhere. Don’t just roll me out.”

Reese began undoing straps. “You’ve got a catheter, I see. I’ll let you take that out yourself.”

“Thanks.”

They’d put his arm in plastic before they put him in the sheet, and taped his ribs. After he was unwrapped, he stood up, swaying a bit. Sweat chilled on his naked skin. He reached for his clothes and with Reese’s help managed to put them on. There was a sling in a medical cabinet that made it unnecessary to take Curzon’s from his body. Reese put something heavy in the sling next to Steward’s arm.

“It’s a fragmentation grenade,” she said. “If we’re caught, pull the pin and fall on it. It wouldn’t be smart to get captured again.”

He looked at her through the transparent blast shield over her face. “You’re the boss,” he said.

Her eyes were painted like butterfly wings.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“You’re Group Seven, aren’t you?” Steward said. Gravity pressed on his throat. There was bitterness on his tongue.

Reese looked at him, her face shadowed by webbing. “I can’t say.”

“You’re Group Seven. And I’ve been working for you all along.”

The freighter increased acceleration as it cleared Ricot’s safety zone. Steward had to fight for breath as gravity climbed to six g. They were falling toward an independent mining colony sunk into the surface of Regio Galileo on Ganymede, from which, Reese explained, they would in a week or so hitch a ride on a supply ship headed directly for the Belt.

Pain seized Steward’s ribs. He clenched his teeth and fought it. Tears welled in his eyes.

Reese had led them out of the Ricot Security Division without incident, showing the proper ID at every station. No alarms had gone off anywhere. In five minutes Steward had been back on Methane Street, walking in silence along the alloy floor. Reese led him to an interior airlock, where he’d stepped into the boarding tube of the small Jove system freighter. The freighter’s pilot, a small, well-muscled man of sixty or so, let them through the hatch without a word. The freighter was old, its bulkheads scarred, access panels long vanished, the wiring they revealed hanging in clumps restrained by duct tape. Reese took her grenade back. She and Steward were shown to a small passenger cabin, and they webbed themselves in. Within the hour they were moving toward Regio

The engine cut off, and Steward floated in his webbing. Reese began pulling off straps. He looked at her. “That alarm in the Power Legation,” he said. “That’s real, isn’t it?”

“It will be,” Reese said. “We wanted to get the Powers on their ships as well as in Ricot. The virus takes a while to work. There’ll be a lot of alarms in another twenty-four hours.” She smiled grimly. “Much good it will do them.”

Speed was still wiring his system. He couldn’t stop thinking, no matter how much he wanted to. “You used me as cover,” he said. “You let me develop my own mission, and when the security people were stirred up over me and covering their execs from nonexistent assassination attempts, you were able to run your own op into the Legation with less chance of trouble.”

Reese plucked at straps. “Something like that.”

“That’s why you said you owed me. That’s why you got me out. I made things easier for you.”

She drifted free. Her hair floated in a halo around her face. She looked at him. “Our employers aren’t always honorable, buck. They don’t always pay their debts. I figure people like us can behave better.” She shrugged. “And I had the documents, the uniform, and so on. I could get in and out. I had better support than you.”

“You’re a mercenary, then. Working for Group Seven.”

She tossed her head. “A mercenary anyway.”

“Griffith was part of it, too. Tsiolkovsky’s Demon was just a gimmick you cooked up so that I could seem to earn some money, then use it to develop my mission. And that business in Los Angeles—was that a plan that went wrong, or did you just want to see my moves?”

“We had to see whether you still had what it takes. You did. Your conduct was exemplary.”

“I killed somebody.” Pain jetted up his ribs. “You set it up that way.” He remembered the way the wire tugged at his hand, the screams amid the billowing smoke. He shook his head. “I wondered why people were storing secrets on a place like Charter, with plenty of transmitters for hire. There weren’t any
secrets, ever. You were putting Tsiolkovsky’s Demon into the station comps when we arrived. When I broke into the Vesta computers and started sending
real
secrets back, it must have caused some comment.”

She grinned. She drifted to the padded bulkhead above her and she put out a hand to stop herself. “Yep. You should have seen the query I got.”

“And the two high-priority last-minute shipments: first to Vesta, then Ricot. That was Group Seven again, making sure we got where we needed to go. I was so eager that I never stopped to wonder how I got there. And you put the information about station security into
Born
’s
computer.” Speed jittered up his spine and turned into a laugh. “I wondered why you kept insisting I go into the Power Legation when we were on Vesta. That was something your bosses arranged. The food poisoning, the autoloader breakdown.”

“I had orders to expose you to the Powers as much as possible. Even if that put you in some danger.”

“So that I’d put things together. I’m surprised your employers would want me to.”

“Maybe they didn’t want you to figure out as much as you have. People have a way of underestimating you.”

“Why send me to Vesta in the first place? Why not send me to Ricot right off?”

“The weapon—the virus—it wasn’t going to be ready for months. Why not use the time?” She looked at him indulgently. “Do you want out of the web?”

He laughed again. “No. I’ve been in a web the whole damn time. Carried from place to place so that I could be an accomplice to poisoning a whole community.”

Reese shrugged. “They started it. Or so I’m told.”

Hot rage tore at him. He punched the air with his good arm. “Fucking mercenary. Fucking mercenary bitch.”

She looked up at him, held his eyes. “I’ve been called worse.”

“Let’s find out,” Steward snarled. “I’m just starting.”

Reese kicked off from the wall and flew to the door. She slammed open the partition into the corridor outside, then turned. “Being a bitch is better than being a sheep,” she said. “That’s the choice, the way I’ve always seen it.”

“Shit.” He was fumbling with his webbing, not knowing precisely what he was going to do once he got loose. By the time Steward was through unwebbing, Reese was long gone, and he was long out of ideas.

*

Reese came back in for the deceleration burn and landing, webbing herself in without a word.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I just do the job,” Reese said. Her voice was stubborn. “I work for all sorts of people. Policorps, outlaws, gangs, police. I don’t see a lot of difference between them.”

“I don’t either. That’s why I don’t want to work for any of them.” Bile rose in his throat. “
Didn’t
,
I should say. Because I helped you kill thousands today.”

She looked at him. She was still wearing the uniform shirt and trousers. He couldn’t read her expression. “I probably could have got in without you. For what it’s worth.”

Steward looked at the scarred bulkhead. It wasn’t worth much.

“We didn’t start out like this.” Reese blurted it out, as if she wanted to justify herself somehow. “We started as a bunch of veterans trying to help each other out. We all knew each other. It was friendly. And then things happened and it all…evolved. It got heavy.”

“Heavy,” Steward repeated. The word meant nothing to him.

He thought of the Powers, the sounds they made. He wondered how they sounded when they were dying in agony.

Fire exploded from the engines. Gravity returned and took Steward by the throat.

*

Ganymede was a cold black piece of stone. Jupiter burned high in the radiant sky and offered no heat. Reese gave Steward a new passport with a new name. He was now a citizen of Uzbekistan. With the passport came a credit needle with 5,000 Pink Blossom dollars on it. “I insisted they make provisions for getting you out,” she said.

“Thanks.” He looked at the passport and thought again about how he’d earned it.

Reese put her hands in her jacket pockets. She was out of uniform now, in clothes borrowed from the miners’ store. Some of the people here seemed to know her.

“Want to work out?” she said. “The light gravity here will make it interesting. I’ll go easy on your arm.”

Steward shook his head. “No. Thanks. I think I’ll get some sleep.”

“It’s been a long day.”

“Yes. It has.”

He wanted sleep to come. It was the better part of a day before it did.

*

Steward spent most of his time on Ganymede in his room, reading whatever he could find in the library, or watching the vid. On the long trip back to the Belt he did much the same.

He missed the
Born
,
the informal friendships, the structured life, the sense of purpose. He wondered if SuTopo had tried to find them, had assumed that Steward and Reese had been disappeared by the authorities. It would be in SuTopo’s character to think that.

Reese tried to be friendly, but although Steward was polite, he didn’t really respond. She learned to leave him alone. Once they landed in the Belt, she shook his hand—he was out of the cast, hormone infusions having knitted the bone in a matter of days—and walked away with her trademark long-legged stride. She didn’t look back.

He heard a lot about the plague on Ricot. Thousands of Powers had died. The destruction was so appalling that there was no hope of Consolidated being able to cover it up.

In another three months he was on Earth. He took a small apartment with a view of the Aral Sea and spent hours watching the steppe wind as it scudded across the water. He was trying to decide what to do with his life. He wondered what occupation would allow him to be the most anonymous.

One day it just came to him, a realization that dropped into his mind from nowhere. A gift from the void. He knew he had been wrong about everything.

He began to make preparations. Knowledge implied action.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LA.

Night.

One of the condecologies on the Orange County horizon was topped by a revolving searchlight, a masterpiece of arrogance, and blazing white fire lanced into the room every few seconds, turning the bed, the table, the lamp into flashing monochrome images, all shadow and silver. Steward sat silently in the secure blackness of a long deep shadow, breathing slowly, listening to the humming of his nerves, his mind. There was no sound but that of circulating air. It sounded like far-off applause.

Steward waited, building power. He had all the patience in the world.

His mind hummed. An endless ovation came from the air vent. On his neck he felt the touch of the whirlwind.

At last a new sound came, the solid thunk of an electro-magnetic bolt slamming back. Then footsteps. A compressed-air hiss, a sniff. Footsteps again. Then the click of a light switch. The flash from the distant condeco was drowned in light.

Griffith’s ravaged face gazed into the barrel of Steward’s gun. He froze. The inhaler, in its insulating plastic jacket, was still in his hand. A light touch of frost was visible on the metal parts.

“Giving yourself a fix, buck?” Steward asked. He rose from his crouch and started walking toward Griffith.

Only Griffith’s eyes moved, flicking from Steward’s hand to his feet, his body, his other hand. Measuring things. “I’ve got wired nerves, buck,” Steward told him. “I can kill you before you can try anything. So don’t try anything, right? D’accord.”

With all his power Steward drove the ball of his right foot into Griffith’s solar plexus. The breath went out of the smaller man and he folded. He hit the floor hard, with his shoulder and the side of his face. His fingers were white on the inhaler.

Steward searched him for weapons, found none, and stepped back. Griffith was still trying to breathe.

“Hey,” he said. “This is mild, compared to what you did to Dr. Ashraf. Right?”

Griffith tried to speak. Tears rolled down his face. Steward watched him. “No hurry,” he said. “We’ve got all night.” He stepped back and sat on the bed.

Griffith clawed for the doorframe, pulled himself upright, leaned back against the frame. His arms folded around his stomach, pressing hard against the pain. “How,” he said.