The Venus Belt (34 page)

She grinned. Apparently her smartsuit had repaired her knife wound well enough. I dabbed the blood leaking from beneath my own makeshift bandage. “Why’d you take so long getting out here yourselves? And why the Marine Corps assault?”

Koko snorted. “We sent three teams—borrowed from various registry patrols—and they vanished. We figured whatever we did next should e
i
ther be very cautious or highly dramatic.”

The President chuckled. “Koko argued for dramatic, naturally. There’s very little else to tell: I used a lot of precious time and money importing a small army, and here we are. I’m sorry they wound up a
t
tacking an empty base—and innocent parties—believe me I am.”

Clarissa finished the last of the casualties, came in, and started on me. “I’d believe you a lot more readily—”

“Ouch, honey! That hurts!”

“Didn’t mean to take it out on you, dear—a lot more readily if you’d mentioned, any time in the last half hour, what Aphrodite’s
real
purpose is out here.”

Lucy pivoted, fixing her optical surfaces on the big simian. He glanced at Koko, who shrugged, then back at us: “Clarissa, Win—and you, especia
l
ly, Lucy. You know I’ve fought the Hamiltonians in Co
n
gress, in Uganda, Antarctica, Hawaii. Have a little faith in me on that account, if no other. When I can speak freely...But there are partners, shareholders, parties sworn to mutual secrecy. Fortunes could be lost with a single careless word.”

I stomped my cigar out. “Which means you’re not going to tell us.”

“That’s what he means,” observed Lucy disgustedly. “My Eddie mi
s
sin’, folks gettin’ murdered all over th’ place—Olongo, we deserve be
t
ter’n this.”

The gorilla smiled and shook his head. “Indeed you do. I’ll make it up to all of you, rely on it. In the meantime, I have personnel combing every cubic inch of this rock. They’ll find Ed if anybody can. He’s my friend, too, my dears, a brother-in-arms on more than one occasion.”

The door slid open and Gunnison Griswold ran in. “Chief! Check the Telecom—channel 47-D!” He tried to stop, but slid around the desk and nearly crashed against the wall. Olongo reached out an easy hand, righted him as if he were a plastic chessman, and projected the suggested channel on a wall screen.

“Sector Nine
,” said a disembodied voice, “
we have a bandit breaking off, refe
r
ence B for Bakunin.
..”

“Meteor watch?” I asked. Olongo nodded, shushing me. The vie
w
point of the ‘com surged outward, centering on a shiny dot, which puffed up into the outline of a flivver—a big one, more of a bus, really. “
Malaise!
The ba
s
tard’s getting away!”

Olongo stabbed buttons. “Try and disable that—”

Flash!
The spacebus vanished, leaving emptiness behind and little purple dots dancing on our retinas. “That was a Broach!” I said, unnecessarily. “He’s on the other side now, probably heading for his fleet.”
Which meant they hadn’t taken off yet
.

“Olongo!” As quickly as I could, I summarized my conversation with the System’s Most Trusted Criminal. “You people have Broach equi
p
ment here, I saw it. Is there any way we can—” The gorilla pushed more buttons as we watched; a familiar cheerful voice answered. Olongo r
e
peated what I’d told him, and, thirty seconds later, the office door slid aside again to a
d
mit an old friend.

Deejay Thorens.

“Hello, Win, Clarissa, and is that—
Lucy!
Olongo, I’m going to need a
n
other hour to calibrate before we can follow that flivver. Converting a st
a
tionary rig for mobile use...”

A small word about Deejay, who looks more out of place in a physics lab than I would in Haight-Ashbury. I’m told she’s one of the great theore
t
ical minds of the age, with an added and unusual flair for the sort of applied tinkering American “pure” scientists frequently scorn. One look into those orchid-colored eyes and even Heisenberg would’ve known for sure.

I love my wife, but I’m not blind.

Deejay bent over Olongo’s desk, zipping facts and figures past a ‘com screen. Occasionally she’d stop to answer questions or issue orders to her crew, wherever they were hiding. I sat still, thinking furiously—or trying to—while Clarissa pulled little steel shotgun darts out of me. Reverse ac
u
puncture.

“Ouch!”
Plink!
Good thing for me Olongo had brought his army from Earth; Gunny Griswold and his gang were sharp—”Ouch!” but
here
they were out of their element. Fléchettes need an atmosphere for their little st
a
bilizing fins; in a hard vacuum, they’d tumbled randomly, which is why—”Ouch!”—I was still alive.
Plink! Plink! Plink!

More or less.

One of the nasty little things had gone in fins-first backward!

“Ow!” A 230-ship fleet was parked out there invisibly, on the other side of reality. Were they piping Malaise aboard even now, for the long jump to the stars? “Ow!” That didn’t make much sense, for how could he be sure he wouldn’t materialize—”Ow!”— right inside one of his ships? Now
that
would be some explosion. “Ow!” Let’s see: the asteroid Bester probably e
x
isted on the other side as well, and—!

“Ouch! Goddammit, stop a minute, honey! Deejay, could you get a Broach cooking
right here
,
and fast?” With the regiment of gunsels Olongo’d brought along, we might be able to cancel this Federalist excu
r
sion.

She turned to look at me, bewildered for a moment, then: “Of course! We have a battery of research machines. Come on down to the lab!” She was gone with a twinkle of smartsuit-covered ankles and a swirl of labcoa
t
tails. Clarissa smoothed a flap of suit material over my wound. Once again I gathered up my weapons and friends, following the physicist. Griswold glanced around at the bandaged, sleeping portion of his crew, then took up a disgruntled rear-guard.

Minutes later, with hardly a chance to admire Deejay’s shiny new labo
r
atory, I stepped carefully between the pole-pieces of a freshly opened Broach, back into my home universe. Bester was here, too, all right, but the Hamiltonians’ ideas on architecture were markedly—and typica
l
ly—different. I was in the middle of a wide, corrugated, barnlike structure, crue
l
ly illuminated, divided, like a National Guard armory on 4-H day, into countless pens and cages, uninhabited, and unspeakably filthy. One whiff and I suddenly knew exactly what an eighteenth-century slaveship must have smelled like. The captives in their thousands were gone, but they’d left behind an almost tangible aura of the misery the Federalists and their allies had imposed on them.

And would continue to, unless we stopped it, now.

Somebody needed killing. I hoped I’d get the chance to do it.

I turned and watched my friends step through a ghostly circle floating in midair. Deejay came last, pressing a hand-held control. The Broach shrank to an almost invisible dot, but didn’t quite vanish. Impo
r
tant, if we were going to get back home again.

We spread out through this harshly lit gallery of horror, grateful that our suits carried their own supply of fresh air. Everywhere I turned, a maze of excrement- and blood-encrusted bars confronted me, moldering re
m
nants of food that was probably poor to begin with, skittering furry little things, and here and there the graying bones of a few potential breeding slaves who hadn’t survived.

Maybe they were the lucky ones.

Atop one skull, like a giant plastic leech, the casing of a brain-bore gli
t
tered obscenely. I finally reached the end of the enclosure where a door led to a series of corridors. I stepped inside and—

—found myself looking straight and stupid into the muzzle of the bi
g
gest little pocket pistol I’ve ever seen. Sixty caliber, and behind it stood a highly familiar-looking figure.

“
Ed!
”

He grinned—my grin—and let his gun arm drop wearily. “Brother, it’s good to see your homely face again. Thought I was stranded out here fore
v
er. Where’s Lucy?”

“I,er...”

“Eddie!” Lucy wheeled through the door, nearly bowling me over. Clarissa joined us and I put my arm around her, turning so that Ed and L
u
cy could have some privacy. They were going to need it.

Olongo puffed into our ken, and if gorillas can look pale, that’s what I was seeing now. “I can’t believe it! There must have been
thousands
—”

“
Tens
of thousands,” Ed said grimly. Koko stumbled toward us, so
b
bing openly.

I felt my stomach turn over. “A quarter of a million was the figure M
a
laise mentioned. Ed, what are you doing running around loose?” I was b
e
ginning to experience an odd, calm, detached feeling about all this; I knew I’d pay for it later, in dreams that would haunt my nights for months.

“I’ve been free for days, hiding in broom closets, pantries, latrines—in a place this size, and with a smartsuit—besides, the prisoners were
co
n
trolled
, they thought. No need for guards.” He paused. “Where they went, well, come with me. You won’t believe it if I just tell you.”

A long, complicated tour found us in a smaller room, circular, with an enormous, generatorlike contraption in the center. Deejay inspected it car
e
fully; the rest of us hardly noticed: outside, through wall-size wi
n
dows, was the second-most impressive sight I’d ever seen. (The first? Clarissa coming through the ruined door of my cell.) A few miles away hung the Hamilton
i
an fleet, 230 metallic globes, each perhaps a quarter of a mile across. In countless minuscule rows, their portholes were alight. A hundred thousand flivvers stood away in silent, empty profusion, the last and nearest in line, Malaise’s network bus.

They were buttoning up for a giant leap.

“
Reference!
”
At Deejay’s sudden shout, I gave a giant leap myself, and peeled Koko off the low ceiling. “
They’ve cracked the navigation problem!
”

“What?” I turned to watch her running hands over the infernal m
a
chine. Ablaze with twinkling lamps amidst a myriad knobs and buttons, it was shaped a bit like Lucy in her present incarnation, only four or five times bigger. It rested on the floor below us and protruded up into the room through a railed, circular opening.

“Look,” lectured our friendly neighborhood physicist, “the problem with traversing the Little Bang universe is that all its spatiotemporal points are geometrically common, so there’s no way to tell them apart, right?”

“That’s what they told me on Ceres,” I answered, “Which is why they gave up on the—”

“Well, this machine is the Hamiltonians’ navigational reference point. It generates a beacon of Broach noise so raw and loud that it can be used as a sort of compass, even in an alternate universe. This is how they’ll—”

“
There they
go
!
” Ed exclaimed. I could see it too, a faint bluish aura e
n
veloping each starship as it warmed up, answered by a sort of corusca
t
ing, crawling surface-discharge from the machine in the center of the—

Kabo! Blam! DitDitDitDitDit!
I guess everybody got the same idea at once. When the smoke cleared and I’d reholstered my Webley, I noticed Clarissa tucking away her little .11 caliber. Ed blinked and gave up jer
k
ing the trigger of his freshly emptied derringer. Even Deejay was stan
d
ing with a slowly cooling laser in her hand. Olongo and Koko saluted each other with the muzzles of their guns over the wreckage of the H
a
miltonian device, and Lucy’s Darling quick-shooter was folding back out of sight like the be
l
lows on an old-timey Polaroid.

Griswold blew smoke through the barrel of his .476, let the slide down on a fresh magazine, and slammed the weapon back into its sca
b
bard. Even he had been too slow; outside, like a flock of flashbulbs going off, the Fe
d
eralist fleet winked out of existence.

Koko looked confused. “Did they blow up, too?”