Starhammer (16 page)

He let himself in, made some instacaf and lay down on the bed. He was utterly weary. He tried to call Meg but received no reply except the answering file on Daisy. He left a message then put his head down with a great sigh and prepared to sleep.

He was just sinking into a pleasant oblivion when a brutally loud knock sounded on the door. It was repeated, along with a megaphone voice calling his name. Groggily he got up and went to the door. He looked at the screen. A pair of men in yellow-and-silver uniforms were outside, along with a woman in the red and blue of the Police Commission Political Section. He opened the door.

"Jon Iehard?" He nodded.

"Apparently you failed to make a court appearance this morning. The Baltitude Gas Company presented a suit against you and won judgment for two million credits. Immediate payment was demanded and all your accounts, credit, and possessions are to be impounded at once. These gentlemen are from Baltitude and they have come to seize any possessions that may be deemed valuable enough to sell. Please stand aside, do not hinder them in their work."

She attached a long pink-and-blue docket to his door, just above the word "Laoman" that already decorated it.

He stared as the movers entered his apartment and took away his antique rug, his ornately carved side table from the watermoons of Ingrid, his pair of pleasant watercolors by M'Aicey of Camleopard Al Kuds. At the last moment he went to the side table and grabbed up his clothes and plucked the silver cube from Fabulous Fara out of a little antique Earthbowl, just before it, too, went out in their arms and was loaded onto a hand cart.

When they'd finished, he was stripped of everything but one suit of clothes, his boots, and the little cube. The last thing taken had been the TV, which had wowed plaintively as it vanished out the door.

They left and he sat down on his bare mattress. All the materials of nine years of life had been taken away. He would appeal the suit, he might even win it and eventually he'd get it all back, but for now it was gone and it made him feel frighteningly hollow. Everything hurt. Life seemed to have reached an astonishing low point.

He slept for eight hours, then he pulled himself out of bed with enormous effort. He was a mess, it even hurt to open his mouth. His face was swollen and puffy.

Under the medipads his ribs were purple and yellow. He whistled to himself. This kind of treatment was almost enough to turn Jon Iehard, reasonable human being, into a religious fanatic, a Panhumanist Elchite even.

He showered, put on his remaining clothes, and looked forlornly around his stripped apartment. He now owed that wealthy oaf Baltitude. He wondered how he was ever going to get even.

He went down to the Mass Murder Squad. The place was alive with activity; a "bad one" was in progress. Coptor and both wing squads were out hunting around Octagon Six for a frag bomber who'd terrorized the early-morning office rush.

The computer operatives were hard at it. Monitor screens flickered throughout the warren. No one paid Jon much notice. He limped into his own desk and removed his spare Taw Taw .22 and a box of ammo clips from their hiding place under the desk top. Next he took an ankle holster and strapped it on inside his boot. He knew better than even to try on a shoulder holster.

As he left the office, a Buro tail fell into place behind him. The security litany ran through his mind—"Number One, he's the obvious one. Number Two will be somewhere behind him, he or she will not be obvious." But that day he didn't mind if they saw where he went.

He rode transit to Octagon Seven and went straight to Meg's. The door opened to his card, as normal, but once inside all his worst suspicions were confirmed.

The computer pit had been rearranged. The office was too clean, it even looked as if it had been dusted. Most unusual of all, the DAex Ram 44000 was doing nothing but answering telephone calls. Normally it would have been working on Masque routines, building up character programming.

Nor did the computer know where Meg was. "No data" was all it would put on the screen in response to his questions. That spoke volumes.

He examined other pieces of equipment. The data transfer printer had worn its inkers down to nubs. When he scanned the piles of data storage modules, he noticed they were not in Meg's precise patterns.

Superior Buro had taken Meg and they had dumped and printed out everything they could use. Unless—

He called Ingrid Kopelin.

Her anxiety was immediately obvious. "She's been gone for twenty-four hours at least. It must have been the Buro. Oh, Jon, I'm so afraid for her."

"If Meg was hiding, where might she go?"

Ingrid shrugged. "Where indeed? I don't think Meg thought much about hiding. If she was in trouble with the Buro she'd have stayed by the computer, in communication with a lawyer to the very last minute. But I checked and she never called. They must have come very suddenly."

Then he looked at his own desk. Everything had been put back more neatly than before. He presumed it had all been filmed.

On his notepad he found a small scrawled note. Meg's handwriting. Dated the day before.

"Jon—Roq left a message for you."

What did that mean? He looked at Daisy dubiously. The Buro would have loaded the computer with bugs. Meg meant him to check this on another system. He went to the stack of file modules and took down the one marked "Louis Quatorze" and pocketed it.

His jaw set grimly, Iehard headed back to Octagon Five and Petrie's section. Everything hurt like hell, but he persisted in moving his arms and gradually his muscles loosened up somewhat. His left side was finally the only place he really had to favor.

The reception officer returned after a moment with word that the commander was in a meeting. Perhaps an appointment could be made for another time, or day? Iehard said he'd wait, and wait he did, until, after a little more than an hour, Petrie suddenly emerged from his office and escorted Jon inside. A guard frisked him, removing the Taw Taw.

"Jon, I have bad news for you."

Iehard sat down heavily. So they had given Petrie the unpleasant little task of telling him.

"Where is she?" he breathed. He could smell Petrie's discomfort despite the little suppressor band.

"You know how they are, Jon. They wanted to teach her a lesson, a short sharp shock. After all, they caught her inside military files aboard
Illustrious
."

"What do you mean, 'short sharp shock'?"

"You were raised on a laowon world, Jon—you know their methods. Your friend has gone to the Brutality Room."

"They did
that
! Just for trying to find me some information on this filthy fugitive of theirs! And
you
let them!"

Petrie flinched.

"Who rules in this system?" Jon screamed. "And tell me, why is this case such a goddamn secret anyway? They either want me to find the man or they don't, which is it? I mean, I'm sorry, Commander, please accept my apologies, since we are being awfully nice about all this, but what are they trying to do? Yesterday I almost got killed tracking someone who I'm sure is related to the case, and now they've put my computer op in the Brutality Room!"

Petrie spread his hands wide, summoned his best empathic tone. "Jon, I'm sorry. But why do you think the Buro would tell me? Believe me, between MI and the Buro there exists an, aah, 'adversarial' relationship, only we have to be the gracious loser most of the time. You can imagine what that means to all of us, to our morale. But I want you also to understand that I win a few, here and there, and those wins sometimes involve getting someone back. If she keeps her tongue in check, your Meg may be back with us tomorrow, chastened but alive."

"If they kill her I swear I'll—"

Petrie waved his hands anxiously. His voice hardened. "Don't say it, Jon. No threats. Now calm down, quickly now."

Jon saw fear in old Petrie's face and he realized he was going too far. They would have to take him out of service after this; the laowon wouldn't want him running around armed, making threats against blueskins.

And that would ruin everything. Suddenly an enormous realization sank home. He had his own agenda now. All the rules had changed without his even realizing it.

Without paying attention, he listened to Petrie's smoothing of the roiled waters. As soon as possible he retrieved his gun and headed out again. He chose to walk through the park, thinking things through. They'd given him back his gun! He imagined that Petrie had already given someone hell for that.

By the time he'd reached the Hyades Monument he'd made up his mind. He turned on his heel and sprinted suddenly through the crowds, down into the Brambles, a wild section of woodland with many paths. He knew it well from his regular jogging run. He left the path precisely where he could vanish most easily in dense shrubbery. He watched from concealment.

A woman panted down the path. He could sense her disquiet; she'd lost him and she knew her masters would be upset. She was running hard, a handbag flying out behind her.

He waited until she was gone and then doubled back, cutting diagonally across the park to Octagon Nine where he caught a red-line car all the way to Octagon One. There he headed for the Gas Exchange. Inside that enormous tower he took the elevator to the reference library. Once in a computer booth it was a matter of moments to log on and find the entry he sought.

POROX, NATHAN:
Independent Gas Dealer. Address for communications: Indian Trend, Sooner. Comm. No. 7234588-9P.

The entry on Sooner arrived a few seconds later.

SOONER:
Cometary remnant, approx. mass 20M Kilotons. Highly eccentric orbit, 22 degrees above Nocan equatorial plane at perigee in region of orbit of William. Colonized in year 12 of Nocanicus System Exploration. Population in census of AD 4420, 436,288.

He ordered a geographical printout on Sooner, plus a printout of gas delivery schedules between Sooner and Hyperion Grandee.

He read through the schedules while gobbling some lunch in a small restaurant that served the office crowd from Gas Alley; the sector included the dozen towers of the giant gas and chemical companies. There were lots of Mooners too. The embassies of the watermoons of William and Shala were next door. The Mooners kept their embassies close to the docking structures, thus showing a certain degree of disdain for "official" Hyperion Grandee, which was grouped around Octagon Five, several kloms away.

It was immediately apparent. Sooner was very close by, a matter of a few million kloms. This was the busy period for the Sooners, marketing gas and water to the nearest habitats as they fell through the belt. Sooner was sure to be crowded with ships, mostly tankers of course, all trying to get in to the loading docks and out again before being carried too far into the inner system.

He noticed a construction contract listing as well. The Sooner sunshield was being refurbished before they passed into the torrid zone around Nocanicus.

His next stop was a little mercantile bank, Banco Gasto, on Element Walk. He stopped by the safe deposit counter. A few minutes later a clerk brought up the box. He removed a special credit card blank, one that Meg had made for just such a situation as that which faced him now.

The card had nothing visible printed on it, but its surface was primed with Meg's deadly supercode. It was the result of years of Meg's work with her baby Bioram.

If the card worked, then for a while—a few hours, perhaps even a day, until the habitat mainframes caught on and switched access codes in all the function boxes—Meg's supercard would override credit and ID requirements as effectively as a Nocanicus Authority Executive Security Card.

With it he would be very hard to trace, which was going to be very important for a while.

But first he entered an executive function box booth. He used the card to create a temporary RAM buffer in the booth, big enough to unload the file concerning the hunchback character Roq, from the Louis Quatorze module.

There was a file he didn't recognize, a random number. He looked it up. Roq sprang to life.

"Jonno! Didn't Roq do well in the king's return to the stable?"

Roq faded off the screen. The file ended. Iehard punched up the file containing Roq's big scene. Hell, Roq hadn't done anything in that scene except get horsewhipped for being sullen in front of the king. What was the message about?

There was now a shortened version of the king's return from hunting, surrounded by courtiers on horseback and wornout hounds. The servants cheered, trumpeters sounded off. There was nothing unusual about it. Iehard was on the verge of flicking forward when it suddenly cut to a stable interior, rushed, background was full of dropout. Roq awaited the entrance of the king.

This is where they had been before the Morgooze so rudely interrupted. But now Roq turned full face to the screen. In the character's gruff, almost unintelligible speech he said, "Jon, warn them, the
Illustrious
is not alone. Another battlejumper is on station at William. They are not discovered yet, but the laowon suspect they will head for William. They must be warned."

Roq winked. "Now you'd better erase this section," he growled.

Hurriedly Jon did just that, then collapsed the temporary RAM buffer and retrieved his supercard. He hurried down Element Walk and went downramp to the Arterial. He chose another phone booth.

He called Melissa Baltitude at the Baltitude home number. When the phone answered he gave it the private code she'd given him but kept his face plate off. When she picked up the phone, he told her that since her father had completely bankrupted him that morning, there was nothing keeping him from accepting her wonderful offer of a little boat ride out to the fabulous megahabitats.

She was overjoyed. They could leave as soon as he was ready. Perhaps she could finally teach Daddy a lesson. He suggested they meet at the Dove model B's parking slot. She gave him the address and promised to have the boat ready to go when he got there. He emphasized that last point. She blew him a kiss as they cut the link.