Authors: Robert Buettner
TWENTY-SIX
The moment when Mort remembered that he needed to reconnect with Kit Born’s consciousness was shortly after he had left behind the remarkable and all-consuming distraction of mating. So obsessed had he become that he had scarcely eaten, an error he now sought to remedy.
Mort was ambling along a riverbank that had frequently come within his territory during his youth. The skies were, as always, reassuringly cloudy, he felt his cousins everywhere, and the scents and intellects of prey drifted nearby in abundance. The river was a safe day’s travel removed from the nest of humans with whom grezzenkind deigned to share their world, and from the fields of homing mines, deadly even to grezzen, behind which the humans hid.
When he found Kit, he realized from what he saw through her eyes that Kit rode within the belly of a moving nest like the
Gateway
, which had borne him home. In fact, she rode within the nest called
Yorktown
, the nest he had stumbled upon when searching for Jazen at that time that now seemed so long ago. At the moment, Kit appeared to be within a pyramidal space within the
Yorktown
smaller than, but otherwise similar to, the quarters he had inhabited aboard the
Gateway
, called a “bay.”
“Mort? Izzat you?” Mort felt Kit’s thoughts, and heard her elation as she spoke them aloud when she felt him return to her mind. Her audibilized words were slurred by a salty liquid she was drinking.
As he saw through her eyes, she unconsciously read markings on a hatch in front of her,
“HUS Yorktown
, Bay 6, No civilian access.”
“Kit! Yes, it is me.” He pronked, springing vertically from all six legs simultaneously.
He repeated the behavior three times, then thought, “I apologize for my delay in reestablishing contact. I was distracted.”
“No problem. Your mating’s over, then?”
“Yes. As Jazen predicted, I did not quit until she screwed my brains out.”
He felt Kit panic, like a drowning woog, then heard a snort and a splashing noise. “What is wrong?”
“S’okay. You just made me honk a quart of hydration fluid out my nose.”
“Oh.”
Kit spoke. “Well? How did it go? Was she hot? I want details.”
“The female was—is—in excellent health. Strong, with a wide pelvis.”
“Did you knock her up?”
Mort paused and drew himself up onto his back two, to denote affront. Then he realized that the learned physical gesture was meaningless, when performed out of the sight of humans. “It was vigorous contact, but non-violent.”
“What I mean is, is there a little Mort in the oven?”
“Ah.” He nodded, despite her absence. “Yes. My potency is incomparable.”
She paused, then thought, “Mort? If you try to date again? Don’t use that for your pickup line.”
“I do not understand.”
“Men never do.” Kit paused again. “Seriously, what a stud! Congratulations.”
As she walked toward a glistening black object in the chamber’s center, Kit sipped liquid from a pouch. The object resembled a melon seed with an upturned stem curving from its tapered rear end. The seed hovered above the deck plates, quivering, like a sapsucker at a blossom, but the melon seed was longer than he was. Three humans covered in red integument bustled around the object with apparent but incomprehensible urgency.
“Kit, what is that?”
She reached the seed, then crouched and crawled beneath it, eyes on the thing’s underside. As she crawled, she touched and prodded the thing’s belly, which was warm, vibrant, and metallic. “Scorpion-T. Four-place special operations variant of a Scorpion fighter.”
“A shell in which humans fly? It does not look like a tilt-wing.”
“A Scorpion’s no tilt-wing, Mort.”
One of the red-clad humans held out a leaf to her.
She examined the leaf’s surface, nodded, then pressed one of her foreclaw digits to one of the leaf’s corners. “If you saw the number I just thumbed for, you’d know that. If I bend it, I’ll be working for free ‘til I die. This thing doesn’t just fly. It flies in space. Like a starship, but more maneuverable.”
“You are about to fly it? Where?”
“
Yorktown’
s just come out of her last jump. She’s inbound through line-of-sight normal space toward an on-time arrival at Ring Station above Yavet. So you got back to me just in time.”
“Yavet? I advised you and Howard that Jazen was attempting to reach Yavet.”
Another of the red-clad humans laid a metallic lattice against the Scorpion’s flank, and the seed split, its dorsal side opening like a jaw.
“And a good thing you did. Jazen’s a stealthy little rascal when he tries. You’d think he grew up an urchin sneaking around through sewers on his belly just to eat. I can’t be sure it was him, but somebody left a mess behind on Funhouse. My guess is Jazen’s inbound right now on the cruiser just ahead of this one.” Kit clambered up the lattice, and slid inside the seed’s mouth.
Mort paused where the river shallowed as it roiled among flat rocks. Tasty reptilians abounded beneath the stones, but so did venomous snakes too stupid for him to easily detect. After his long absence from home, the prospect made him vaguely apprehensive. “I sense from you that you are apprehensive for Jazen’s safety. And for your own.”
He probed, unsuccessfully. “And something else troubles you greatly.”
The black seed closed its mouth and sealed Kit inside where she squirmed in darkness. Then a sparkle of lights illuminated the small space that surrounded her. Some flickered red, some yellow, then all winked and shone steadily green.
She spoke aloud as she fastened flat vines around her torso. “
Yorktown
offload control, this is bay six occupant. Do you copy?”
After a pause a voice reached her ears. “Uh. Bay six, this is
Yorktown
offload control. We copy. Colonel Born? Ma’am, I hear you’ve had the ship prepped? And you’re aboard?”
“Locked and loaded, Eddie. Wall to wall green in here. She’s good to go.”
There was another pause, during which Mort heard through Kit’s ears her command, “Forward canopy to max visual.”
A whir like a skim bug’s mating call filled Kit’s ears as a wide slit opened, splitting the green lights above and below, so that Kit saw out into the ship’s bay. The three red-clad humans were now visible behind a transparent screen, peering out at her. “Bay is clear, offload control. Depressurize and open outer doors.”
“Colonel Born, you’re not the first spook we’ve been asked to insert. And I’m sure you’re very good at what you do. But we were told your bird would drop four days out.”
“I hate getting stuck in traffic, Eddie.”
“Colonel, even at a Scorpion-T’s best economic speed you’re seven standard days out from Yavet now. That ship’s life support’s max rated for four days.”
“That’s with two crew. I’ll take shallow breaths.”
“Ma’am—”
“The Yavi know a Scorpion’s published range as well as you do. By the time
Yorktown
’s four days out, you’ll have a Yavi fighter escort the size of the Spanish Armada keeping you within visual range. And they’ll know the difference between a Scorpion and those smuggler’s barges this cruiser will be crapping like turds.”
The voice chuckled. “Colonel, the Captains would be shocked—shocked!—to learn smuggling was going on aboard this ship.”
“Exactly. If you don’t open bay six’s doors within two minutes, the captains and I will be having a conversation that will be more uncomfortable for them than for me. Especially when I get back to Washington. Call ’em. I’ll wait.”
There was silence, broken by Kit whistling softly. Then Mort heard a great roaring hiss somewhere beyond the seed, like a gale through treetops.
The disembodied voice called Eddie muttered, “Fucking spooks.”
Moments later the view before Kit changed. The bay’s doors yawned like a vast mouth, and revealed blackness punctuated by tiny lights.
Mort felt a metal bit, cool against Kit’s foreclaw as she rotated it forward. She said, “Yee-ha.”
Then the bay was gone and blackness surrounded the seed. There was no sensation of motion, except as betrayed by Kit’s elevated heart rate and respiration, which indicated to him that the seed was now traveling very fast indeed.
Mort resumed his amble along the riverbank. “Now what, Kit?”
“Now I set the autopilot to keep hauling ass ’til I’m a hundred thousand miles wide left of
Yorktown’
s inbound track. Then this ship will turn itself to Yavet, and make an ecliptic approach to the planetary vicinity, just like a million boring little rocks do every day to a million other boring planets.”
“What happens when you reach the vicinity?”
“Plenty, if you do your job between now and then.”
“My job?”
“Mort, I still need you to find Jazen for me. Precisely.”
Mort paused with one foreclaw fishing beneath a likely stone. “I cannot.”
“You can. Your potency is incomparable, remember?”
Mort flipped a reptilian out onto the bank, where it thrashed until he severed its spine with a claw slash. “The cosmos are too vast.”
“Cut down the odds. Like when you hunt. First find Yavet. It shouldn’t be hard to cut it out of the herd. It’s the most populous planet in the Human Union. There are thirteen billion human intellects in one lump.”
“Perhaps that is possible, if I concentrate. But it is one task to search within three thousand migrating woog for the weakest. Quite another to search for a particular intellect within thirteen billion.”
“You know Jazen. You said that makes it easier.”
“It does. Nonetheless—”
“Attaboy. Get crackin’. Keep this line open and we’ll talk again in six days.”
“Six days? And what will
you
be doing while I am cracking?”
“As little as possible. Once I dial back the life support, and the sedative I just shot up kicks in, this thing’s gonna be one very hot, very stuffy coffin. In six days I will be dehydrated, punchy, and sweaty as a locker room.” She spoke aloud, not to him. “Canopy to max protect.”
The eye ahead winked shut, the lights faded, and Kit rested in absolute darkness.
“Kit! A coffin is a shell for dead humans.”
“Figure of speech. Nighty-night.”
“Kit?”
He felt her heart rate and respiration slow to hibernative levels as her consciousness faded.
Mort located the crook of a boulder in the river, from which point he could both drink from upstream and urinate downstream, and within which he could curl and remain undisturbed for days. Then he harvested a half-dozen of the reptiles, skinned and hung them from a branch a paw swipe away. Then he settled in and began sifting through the vast number of intellects that populated the even vaster emptiness of the universe. The task seemed hopeless. He wondered whether Jazen was even
in
this Yavet nest he was looking for.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I first saw him just after I exited the downshuttle terminal in the midlevels. I was weaving through the midday crowds that thronged Sixty-first and Sylvan, Thirty-two Upper. Until then, I had been enjoying my first moments back within the unfriendly confines of Yavet in general, and my homestack of Yaven in particular, in spite of myself.
I turned in to a kaffee stand that I remembered, bought an extra large, and the bald proprietor smiled and thanked me for the tip.
The last time he saw me, although he didn’t realize it, he had been a busboy with greasy hair, I had been thin enough to crawl through a class three utility, and he had run me off for stealing spilled sugar from the floor beneath his tables.
Today I sat at one of his tables, sipped my kaffee with a spoonful of sugar, and thought about Orion, how she had looked then, how I imagined she might look today. And about my parents, who I had never seen with eyes capable of focusing, and how I imagined
they
might look today.
The neighborhood wasn’t one I had visited often. It was middle-class, medium-lit, with menial and domestic peeps packing the passages shoulder-to-hip with bigs who lived, or owned retail shops, mixed with the Kubeowners in the neighborhood who they served.
The docs Ya Ya had provided hadn’t merely freed me to walk the passages of Yaven as a big for the first time, and to pour sugar into kaffee until it mounded up and overflowed, if I chose, like I had once imagined rich men could.
The bribes Ya Ya had caused to be pre-placed where needed had gotten me from Trueborn cruiser disembarkation to the Ring to the down-shuttle terminal in four hours. The same steps typically took Kit and me six hours when arriving under business or tourist cover on planets with half the security of Yavet. In that area, at least, Ya Ya had delivered most first-class passage.
Immigration and Customs had even waved me through a VIP line that I had all to myself. There, a friendly but incompetent hostess exchanged my jacket for one of those lead-lined anti-radiation robes while she took my jacket and pressed it for me as I cleared customs. I say she was incompetent because she had my coat longer than it usually took to plant the tracking bug every offworlder wasn’t supposed to know they were going to be carrying.
Despite my hostess’ extra effort, I felt the bug out easily during the ride down from the ring, then at the down-shuttle station I cut it out of my coat pocket’s lining and flushed it down a Sanex.
I finished my kaffee, wiped the table clean, then walked on down the passage. I would now begin a whirlwind, unguided search of what had been Orion’s favorite hangouts. Surely someone there would remember, and could send me to her. Midwives, like drug dealers and other criminals, moved around a lot to stay a jump ahead of vice, so there would have been no point in her giving me an address even if she thought I was coming.
As I wove through familiar congestion, I frowned.
The big, the one I had seen that had motivated me to stop for kaffee, was still there, which was unpromising. There was no question it was still him. He was my height, so he stood out above the peeps. He wore a medical technician’s snug blue cowl headcover. And eyeshades, which were just a bit out of place in medium lighting.
Spies in Indian country learn to notice things that are a bit out of place, or they aren’t spies for long. Bug or no bug, I had expected to be tailed, right from the down-shuttle station. That came with being an offworlder, no matter how tight the legend.
My legend was that I was a lighting technology sales representative from Freyen. Freyen was a pre-nuclear seeded world known for making really good incandescent lamp bulbs. Freyen was non-aligned, so the Trueborns permitted nonmilitary commerce between Freyen and Yavet. Freyens were considered as harmless, as utilitarian and as behind the times as their principal export.
As a low-risk, low-interest subject, I had expected my tail would be just a snitch, a little person who “volunteered” to assist Internal Security in order to avoid the living hell of detention.
Orion had been a snitch for years, for a rat bastard vice cop (but I repeat myself) named Polian.
A snitch tail was no worry. First, conscripts in any society rarely did their jobs zealously. Orion, for example, had fed her rat bastard vice cop control officer crap intel whenever she could get away with it. Second, snitches transferred their info only by meeting their control officer, an event so choreographed and infrequent that the tailed subject could be long gone by the time vice learned that they were up to something.
I slowed and window-shopped a store along the corridor.
One of the first urban surveillance and evasion skills a spy is taught is using windows as mirrors for indirect observation.
In the reflection, I saw Headcover bobbing behind me above the crowds like a blue balloon on a long string.
Crap. My heart rate climbed.
Unlike a snitch, a plainclothes regular tail looked like just another civilian big, but was wired. Where little people or offworlders were concerned, a plainclothes tail had the same summary enforcement power as his uniform counterparts, although the tail would never reveal himself by arresting a subject personally.
If something that the tail’s subject did appeared suspicious to the tail, the tail just called it in. Then, suddenly, a couple armored uniforms would appear. The something that converted a subject to a suspect usually involved peep-on-big crime, or less often big-on-big. The crimes ran mostly to pocket picking, or less often armed robbery. Peep-on-peep crime was pretty much considered by vice as a benefit to society, because it reduced the peep population at little government expense.
If the plainclothes tail’s suspect was lucky, the uniforms would just kick the shit out of him or her. If the suspect was unlucky, he or she was shot to death on the spot. Or, perhaps unluckiest of all, the suspect was hauled downlevels to detention.
I turned to walk on, and looked up the corridor.
Crap again. A two-man uniform foot patrol walked toward me, fifty yards ahead.
Their needlers were reverse slung, their helmet faceplates were up, and they seemed to be paying more attention to their own conversation, and to the little people and the bigs who parted immediately before them, than to anyone ahead of them. But their indifference could be for show.
My heart chattered now, more than beat.
What if Headcover was just driving me toward them like a herded cat?
The gap between me and the two uniforms shrank to twenty yards, then the cop on the right swung his needler up and aimed it my way.
My heart rate whirred, but I just kept walking toward him as though I didn’t notice. The bigs around me did the same.
If the cop intended to shoot me, I was dead. If he didn’t, I was fine. Rule one of peep street survival on Yavet. Let the other peep take the needles.
Yavi cops carried needle carbines, rather than the gunpowder pistols Trueborn cops carried. All things and all available technologies considered, Yavet’s cops had the best equipment for their job, which was killing peeps without breaking the furniture or injuring persons of value, who were by definition bigs.
Quick-draw, Trueborn pistols seem like the ticket for use in urban close quarters, compared to a cumbersome long gun.
But in a genuinely bang-bang, stressed, moving-target tactical environment, a Trueborn cop, or even a Trueborn case officer unless she was Kit Born, couldn’t
guarantee
a shot group the size of a fist, or more to the point, the size of a human heart, every time at the distances to targets that Yavi cops dealt with inside a stack city. And no matter how tight or how reproduceable the shot group, gunpowder bullets passed through human tissue and damaged bystanders, or heaven forbid, property, more often than needle rounds. Needle rounds exhausted their kinetic energy and violence within a body, ruining soft tissue and bone with an efficiency Trueborn dum-dum bullets could only dream of, if bullets dreamed.
And repeatable shot group size is less relevant anyway, because even a half-blind Yavi cop rarely needs more than one shot with a needle carbine. A needle carbine’s length allows for effective aiming, as well as space to install its active barrel stabilization system, so a needler’s basically as point-and-shoot as your ‘puter’s camera. A single squeeze of a needle carbine’s trigger delivered, without recoil, a whirling hornet swarm of tiny razor darts, that expanded to the diameter of a fist at a range of twenty yards. A center-mass chest shot at that range was unsurvivable, period. Just about anywhere else in the torso, the victim bled out in minutes. Beyond fifty yards, however, a needler had the accuracy and stopping power of a water pistol.
Bottom line? Never hunt bear with a needler. Never bother to hunt peep with anything else.
I blinked as the cop’s needler flashed blinding blue.
Hsss
.
The needle carbine’s report echoed simultaneously with a scream, and the touch of a hand on my left sleeve, and I looked down.
The bulging eyes of the gangsta peep who the cop had spotted trying to pick my pocket stared up at me, and the peep’s mouth was wide and already bubbled blood as he screamed. The cop’s shot had opened a hole the diameter and color of a raw Trueborn hamburger center mass in the peep’s chest, and the little Yavi’s heart would pump him dry long before the Cleaners arrived.
What had just happened was an everyday occurrence in any stack, and pedestrians, whatever may have been their inner horror, simply rerouted themselves around the thrashing little peep, and hoped they weren’t going to have to remove bloodstains from their clothes.
I had seen this feature often enough, too. My peep self-preservation reflexes overrode any sensitivity that years among the Trueborns might have rebuilt in me.
There was nothing I could do for the peep who was dying for attempting to rob me. But there was something he could still do for me.
While one of the cops was calling for the Cleaners, the other was snapping helmet-cam photos of the suspect.
Whether or not Headcover had yet called the pair of them to pick me up as a suspicious offworlder, I didn’t want to be found and questioned, even as an innocent offworld victim big, either.
During the precious window of seconds that the cops were distracted, I walked five yards, then stepped to my right, into the next vertical, and dropped two levels unbuffered by the updraft.
Then for three blocks left, one ahead, and one up I sprinted and dodged like I had just stolen something. Nobody gave me a glance.
Except on the uppermost levels, people ignored street crime that didn’t happen to them. So did the system, except when the crime could be dealt with on the spot with a needler, a fist or a boot.
Still, every moment I expected to hear a needler hiss, then feel the round tear my lung out.
Finally, puffing like a steam engine escaped from a pre-industrial, I snuck a direct glance over my shoulder. No uniforms. Headcover’s blue balloon had disappeared, too. I slowed, straightened up. Lost ’em.
Then I spotted him, fifty yards back, and my heart skipped. My tail had shed his headcover and eyewear, revealing steel-colored hair that framed a square-jawed face. But it was still him, alright.
My shoulders slumped.
Another lesson spies learn quickly about urban surveillance and evasion is to change appearance on the fly. A headgear change was the school solution, because it yielded the quickest and most dramatic results and was readily reversible if you could pocket the hat.
Headgear’s quick change squashed any hope of coincidence. He was a pro, and now my evasion antics had confirmed to him that I wasn’t here on Yavet to sell light bulbs.
I swore again.
Busted an hour after hitting dirt. If Kit were here she would laugh her ass off.
No, Kit would never laugh about a Trueborn case officer taken alive by the Yavi. She had survived interrogation once. She talked hard-ass about the experience when we were among those cleared to hear it. But each time the dreams woke her, screaming, beside me, I had to rock her in my arms, like she was a little girl, until she sobbed herself back to sleep.
The prospect of capture nearly made me run again. Instead I dodged ahead through the crowd, merely like a salesman late for an appointment, and let my mind do the sprinting. The longer I walked along with my tail dragging behind me, the more certain it was that a goon squad would pounce on me. Anything I did would be a bad option, but doing nothing would be worse.
A peep wearing gangsta leathers, not so different from the one who had died alongside me minutes earlier, passed by me. I jostled him and picked his pocket for the shiv protruding from his shoulder scabbard. He turned and snarled up at me. I flashed the shiv and snarled back, twice his size, and suddenly better armed.
The gangsta did the math, then moved on, cursing.
Somewhere ahead of him, somebody was about to lose
their
shiv.
I pocketed my new weapon and kept walking. Ahead, the corridor intersected with a smaller tributary transverse, low-ceilinged, sparsely trafficked, and dim, that branched left. On the far side of the transverse, however, a display window of the shop that fronted the main drag wrapped around.
I sauntered around the corner into the transverse, then pressed my back against the wall on the shadowed near side. To my front, the display window now showed me a mirror image of oncoming traffic that had been following me up the main drag, while from the main drag my own reflection was invisible in the shadows.
Four heartbeats later, I glimpsed steel-gray hair as the reflected image of my tail flashed into my view. His stride was smooth, and his jacket lapel bulged. He moved left, across pedestrian traffic, so he could turn down the transverse.
My heart raced. I drew the shiv, and held my breath.
He was close, now.
There was something about his face. Lean. Familiar. Maybe he was a uniform cop who I had seen when I was a kid, who had in later years graduated to plainclothes duty?