Steel Beach (70 page)

Well, it
was
their own people who did it, and it wasn’t the only thing about the assault that didn’t make sense. But I learned about that much later. Hiding there in the pipes all I knew is that a lot of people had tried to kill me, and a lot more were still trying. It had been a game of cat and mouse for about three hours since the null-field power went down.

The power loss had immediately turned the corridor I meant to travel to the
Heinlein
from a silvery cylinder into a borehole through eons of trash, just like the one I had traveled to lo those many weeks ago to enter this crazy funhouse in the first place. That was a damn good thing, because not long after the blowout I met the first of many pressure-suited people coming down the path in the other direction.

We didn’t actually meet, which was another good thing, because he or she was carrying a laser just like the one that had almost fried me. I saw him (I’m going to say him, because all the soldiers were male and there was something in the way he moved) while he was still some distance from me, and I quickly melted into the wall. Or into where the wall had been, you see. There were thousands of gaps along the corridor large enough for even a pregnant woman to squeeze through.

Once into one of the gaps, however, you never knew what lay beyond. You had entered a world with no rational order to it, a three-dimensional random maze made of random materials, some of it locked in place by the pressure of other junk above it, some of it alarmingly unstable. In some of these hidey-holes you could slip through here and squeeze through there and swing across a gap in another place, like in a collapsed jungle gym. In others, two meters in and you found a cul-de-sac a rat would have found impassable. You never knew. There was simply no way to tell from the outside.

That first refuge was one of the shallow ones, so I had pressed myself against a flat surface and began learning the Zen of immobility. I had several things going for me. No need to hold my breath, since I was already doing that because of the null-suit. No need to be very quiet, because of the vacuum. And in the suit he might not have seen me if I’d been lying right in his path.

I told myself all those things, but I still aged twenty years as he crept by, swinging his laser left and right, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him.

Then he had passed, and it started getting very dark again. (Did I mention all the lights went out when the power failed? They did. I’d never have seen him if he hadn’t been carrying a flashlight.)

I wanted that flashlight. I wanted it more than anything in the world. Without it, I didn’t see how I’d ever make it to safety. It had already gotten dark enough that I could barely see the useless rifle I’d carried with me, and wouldn’t see anything at all when he’d moved a little farther along.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized he could have seen the flashing red light on the empty clip as he passed; I’d forgotten to cover it up. If only I had another…  then I looked more closely at the clip. It had an opening at the end, and a brass shell casing gleamed in there. I realized it was
two
clips taped together. The idea was to reverse it when you’d used up the first. God, soldiers are tricky bastards.

So I reversed it, almost dropping first the clip, then the rifle, and I leaned out into the corridor and squeeze off a shot in the direction the soldier had come from to see if the damn thing worked. From the recoil I felt, I knew it did. I hadn’t counted on the muzzle flash, but apparently the man didn’t see it.

Stepping out into the corridor, I fired a short burst into the soldier’s back. Hey, even if I
could
have shouted a warning to him in vacuum, I really don’t think I would have. You don’t know the depths you can sink to when all you’re thinking about is survival.

His suit was tough, and my aim was not the best. One round hit him and it didn’t puncture his suit, just sent him stumbling down the path, turning, bringing his weapon up, so I fired again, a lot longer this time, and it did the trick.

I won’t describe the mess I had to sort through to find his light.

My fusillade had destroyed his laser and used up my last ammo clip, so encumbered with only the flashlight and what remained of my wits I set out looking for air.

That was the trick, of course. The null-suit was a great invention, no doubt about it. It had saved my life. But it left something to be desired in the area of endurance. If a Heinleiner wanted to spend much time in vacuum he’d strap a tank onto his back, just like everyone else, and attach a hose to the breast fitting in front. Without a strap-on, the internal tank was good for twenty to thirty-five minutes, depending on exertion. Forty minutes at the outside. Like, for instance, if you were asleep.

I hadn’t done much sleeping and didn’t plan on any soon, but I hadn’t thought it would be a problem at first. All or the corridors were provided with an ALU every half-kilometer or so. The power to these had been cut, but they still had big air tanks which should still be full. Recharging my internal tank should be just a matter of hooking the little adapter hose to my air fitting, twisting a valve, and watching the little needle in my head-up swing over to the FULL position.

The first time, it
was
that easy. But I could see even then that having to search out an ALU every half hour was the weakest point in my not-very-strong survival strategy. I couldn’t keep it up endlessly. I had to either get out of there on my own or call for help.

Calling seemed to make the most sense. I still had no idea what was happening beyond the limits of Heinlein Town, but had no reason to suspect that if I could get through to a lawyer, or to the pad, my problems would not be over. But I couldn’t call from the corridor. There was too much junk over my head; the signal would not get through. However, through sheer luck or divine providence I was in one of the corridors I was fairly familiar with. A branch up to the left should take me right out onto the surface.

It did, and the surface was crawling with soldiers.

I ducked back in, thankful for the mirror camouflage I was wearing. Where had they all
come
from?

There were not regiments, or divisions, or anything like that. But I could see three from my hiding place, and they seemed to be patrolling except for one who was standing around near the entrance I’d just exited. Guarding it, I presumed. Perhaps he just meant to take captives, but I’d seen people shooting to kill and wanted no part of finding out his intentions.

One of the other things I’d been lucky about was in seeing the man in the square who’d been hit by bullets while wearing his null-suit. Otherwise I might have wrongly concluded the suit, through which nothing could pass, could render me immune to bullets. Which it
would
…  but only at a cost.

This was explained to me later. Maybe you already figured it out; Smith said “as should be intuitively obvious,” but he talks like that.

Bullets possess kinetic energy. When you stop one dead in its tracks, that energy has to go somewhere. Some of it is transferred to your body: e.g., the bullet knocks you over. But most of the energy is absorbed by the suit, which promptly freezes stiff, and then has to
do
something with all that energy. There’s no place to store it in the null-generator. Smith tried that, and the generators overheated or, in extreme cases, exploded. Not a pretty thought, considering where it’s implanted.

So what the field does is radiate the heat away. From
both
surfaces of the field.

“I’m sure it’s a symmetry we can defeat, given time,” Smith told me. “The math is tricky. But what a bulletproof jacket it will make, eh?”

It sure would. In the meantime, what happened is you got parboiled. Getting rid of excess heat was
already
your biggest problem in a null-suit. You could survive one hit in a suit (several people did), but usually only if you could turn it off pretty quickly and cool yourself. With two or more hits your internal temperature would soar and your brain would cook.

The suit was supposed to turn itself off in that case, automatically. But naturally it wouldn’t turn off if there was vacuum outside. It won’t do that no matter
how
extreme conditions inside got; vacuum is always the worst of any set of evils.

If I got shot now, I’d cook, from the skin inwards.

I didn’t start
out
singing hosannas to the name of A.G. Bell. For the first hour I wanted to dig him up and roast him slowly. Not his fault, of course, but in the state I was in, who cared?

After filling my tank again I made my way to the top of the junk pile. This was possible—though by no means easy—because where I was, near the
Heinlein
, the thickness of the planetary dump was not great. By squirming, making myself small, picking my way carefully I was soon able to stick my head out of the mess. Any of a thousand passing satellites ought to have a good line of sight at me from there, so I started dialing as fast as my tongue could hit the switchboard on the insides of my teeth. I figured I’d call Cricket, because he…  

…  could not be reached at that number. According to my head-up, which is seldom wrong about these things. Neither could Brenda, or Liz. I was about to try another number when I finally realized
nobody
could be reached, because my internal phone relied, when out on the surface, on a booster unit that’s standard equipment in a pressure suit.

How could I be expected to
think
of these things? You tap your teeth, and pretty soon you hear somebody’s voice in your ear. That’s how a fucking telephone
works
. It’s as natural as shouting.

I sure as hell thought about it then, and soon realized I had another problem. The signal from my phone wouldn’t get through my null-suit field. The Heinleiners used the field itself to generate a signal in another wave band entirely, so they could communicate with each other, suit-to-suit, and nobody, not even the CC, could overhear them. I was screwed by their security.

I thought about this a long time, keeping one eye on the oxygen gauge. Then I went back to the dark corridor and sneaked up on the body of the man I had killed.

He was still there, though shoved over to one side of the passage. I managed to get his helmet off and lose myself back in the maze, where I used my light and a few bits of metal that came to hand to pry out what I hoped was the booster for his suit radio. I had done my work better than I knew; there was a bullet hole punched through it.

I held on to it anyway. I got another charge of air and went back to the surface, where I used a length of wire to connect my pressure fitting to the radio itself, on the theory that this was the only way for
anything
to get out of the suit. I switched it on, was rewarded with a little red light going on in a display on the radio. I dialed Cricket again, and got nothing.

So I brought all my vast and subtle technological skills to bear on repairing the radio. Translation: I
whanged
the sumbitch on the dashboard of the junk rover I was sitting in, and I dialed again. Nothing.
Whang
. Still not a peep. So I
WHANGED
it again and Cricket said “Yeah, what the hell do you want?”

My tongue had been leading a life of its own, nervously dialing and re-dialing Cricket’s number as I worked my engineering magic on the radio. And now, when I needed it, I couldn’t get the damn tongue to work at all, so overwhelmed was I at hearing a familiar voice.

“I haven’t got time to dick around here,” Cricket warned.

“Cricket, it’s me, Hildy, and I—”

“Yeah, Hildy, you cover it your way and I’ll cover it mine.”

“Cover what?”

“Just the biggest damn story that ever…  ” I heard the sound of mental brakes being applied with the burning of much mental rubber; after the clashing of mental gears Cricket said, sweetly, “No story, Hildy. Nothing at all. Forget I said anything.”

“Damn it, Cricket, is the shit coming down out there,
too
? What’s happened? All I know is—”

“You can figure it out for yourself, just like I did,” he said.

“Figure
what
out? I don’t know what you’re—”

“Sure, sure, I know. It won’t work, Hildy. You’ve conned me out of a big story for the last time.”

“Cricket, I don’t even
work
for the
Nipple
anymore.”

“Once a reporter, always a reporter. It’s in your blood, Hildy, and you could no more ignore this one than a whore could keep her legs together when the doorbell rings.”

“Cricket, listen to me, I’m in big trouble. I’m trapped—”

“Ah
ha
!” he crowed, confusing me completely. “A
lot
of folks are trapped, old buddy. I think it’s the best place for you. Read about it in a few hours in the
Shit
.” And he hung up.

I almost threw the radio out across the horizon, but sanity returned just in time. With it came caution, as my eyes, following the would be trajectory, saw two figures clambering up the junk. They were headed for me, probably on the scent of my transmission. I ducked over the side of the junked rover and dived back into the maze.

I still haven’t entirely forgiven Cricket, but I’ve got to say that love died during that phone call. Sure, I deserved some of it; I’d tricked him often enough in the past. And in his defense, he thought I was trapped in an elevator, as thousands of Lunarians were at that moment, and he didn’t think I’d be in any particular danger, and if I
was
, there wasn’t anything he could have done about it.

Yeah, sure. And your momma would have fucked pigs, Cricket, if she could have found any who’d have her. You didn’t give me time to
explain
.

What really high-gravved me was that, when I finally got back in position to call him again, he’d set his phone to refuse calls from me. I risked my neck ducking in for more air then finding a new place to transmit from, and what I got for my efforts was a busy signal.

I got a lot of those in quick succession. Brenda didn’t answer. Neither did anybody at the
Nipple
, which worried me no end. Think about it. A major metropolitan newspad, and
nobody’s answering the phone?