The Blue Marble Gambit (2 page)

I
backed up against the bulkhead. Ahead of me, beyond the enclosing thicket of aliens, lay the scenic
clearsteel window, and beyond that only vacuum. Cold, dark, airless - but at the moment
it didn't sound so bad.
Almost hospitable, in fact.

"I
especially like the surprise ending," I hinted. Most of the Old Galactic Races evolved
from colonial insects and so lacked the sense of individual identity and
selfishness which
a certain non-colonial organism, descended
from ape-like creatures in a dull and uninteresting corner of the Milky Way,
prided itself upon. A bug would
never do what I was about to do.

"Me
too," agreed the Mainer, misunderstanding. “It was nice, yes?" Clear yellow
fluid dripped from his serrated fighting claw while long, sickening,
blood-colored appendages whipped out from a nasty fringe-lined maw in his lower
carapace, to caress and fondle and lick at each other. Tiny prehensile tongues, I realized.

"It
will be," I said. I raised my
hand with fingers extended. “Know
what this is?"

The
Orlyx answered. “A quaintly
primitive grasper, with a single opposable digit."

I
clenched it shut. “Not quite. This is a fist."

Then
I reached up and pulled the handle.

As
my five-fingered hand used its admittedly primitive opposable thumb to grip and
pull, the Mainer's ruby
eyestalks
vibrated and a
boiler - the Mainer's weapon of choice - was suddenly rising in a cradle of
slim purple tentacles. But it was
too late.

The
handle made a loud cracking noise, which was suddenly repeated, much more
loudly and with much greater sincerity, as the viewport broke free. A roaring hurricane erupted and it was
as if the CasinoPlex had taken a deep breath eons before and been waiting all
this time to exhale. To make up for
the delay it now was trying with impressive success to vomit itself into space. The distant thunk of autodoors closing
far off would change nothing here.

I'd
dropped to the steel floor just after pulling, which avoided the brace of
boiler bolts the Mainer managed to trigger, but which also took me away from
the handle. Now the rushing air
dragged me along the smooth floor. I glanced about idly for a handhold, but saw none, as expected. I'd looked earlier.

The
Crunchies fought and clawed and ended up in a clump, madly grabbing each other,
which did them no good because they were all headed
Out
. A heart-warming cacophony of trills and
bleats and squawks and shrieks sounded over the wind as they rolled in an
interspecies ball and then popped out the hole in a messy, tangled mass. Millions of years of evolution from
three different
worlds,
nicely disposed of in one fell
swoop.

Out
into black space

harvest
of alien bugs

die
, headpickers, die!

Maybe
not haiku in the traditional sense, but it worked for me.

I
took a moment to exult, but only a moment, for now that my head would remain
attached, and the kill team was out of the way, another crisis moved to the top
of the list: hurtling into outer space without spacesuit or air.

The
floor between
me and the hissing, sucking exit
was
smooth metal. The sides of the hole
were too far away to grab. I could
see, with startling clarity, a few scattered stars. Unless I thought of something quickly,
I'd be joining them.

I
thought. Quickly. Nothing came to mind.

I
thought a little harder, and even more quickly. Still nothing. Then I saw with some surprise that I was
out of time.

Sure
enough, I popped out the hole. Deep
space, I immediately noticed, was cold and tingly, and rather stung a bit.

CHAPTER 2
. HEADLOCK

As
I drifted away from the station in a slow spin, I felt a cold plucking sting
along my arms, legs,
all
my skin. Vac flush, I knew. Bye bye, capillaries! Adios, alveoli!
I'll be along shortly!

The
axial fibers built into my Fist-issue jumpsuit tightened and squeezed, trying
to offer some protection from the depressurization of vacuum. Death in vacuum is actually not
instantaneous, but takes just long enough for Mother Nature to make a point
which she wants to be sure you have time to appreciate: Idiot! Primates should stay on their
planet!

I
began appreciating whole new subtleties of this apparently simple edict; with
the encouragement of exposure to vacuum it seemed to take on vast new meanings
and a complex multi-layer
structure which
coherently
summarized all of human existence into one brief line of extraordinary
simplicity and genius. I realized
that I was only just beginning to understand the elegant vastness of this
simple axiom, while simultaneously and regretfully experiencing the
circumstances leading to my extremely temporary enlightenment.

At
the same time I was expecting the next moments to be both impressively gruesome
and remarkably uncomfortable. The
mixture of a soft pressurized human body with the unpressurized environment of
space can be spectacular, at least to a disinterested observer, which I
unfortunately was not. I tried to adopt
a positive mind-set about exploding. I failed miserably. Maybe it
wouldn't feel as bad as it looked.

Probably
it would be worse.

And
then something - it felt like a hand - grabbed my arm. I didn't fight it because I foolishly
imagined that it couldn't do anything worse to me than was about to happen
anyway.

My
vision was blurred from the eye bulge caused by the vacuum, but I saw that it
was a hand, and even more interestingly, that it was connected to a human. The other hand slapped something on my
face, a sticky-fuzzy creepy-crawly mass that would have smothered me, except
that there was no air to breathe anyway.

The
sticky-fuzzy creepy-crawly mass was suddenly moving, stretching out and
thinning to wrap itself around me, trying to engulf me like a wide flat
anaconda. I had a quick flash of
panic then realized that it was a vac-pack - an emergency space rescue pack,
formed from a slab of intelli-nano, tiny bots interspersed with a clump of
oxygen-saturated spaceplas. When
activated and slapped into place, they instantly reformed the mass into a thin
but form-fitting and life-saving suit. My head was now enclosed; skeins of nanoplas raced down my arms and
legs, sealing them off. My skin
felt a bit better, though my lungs still ached.

The
material tightened for a moment and then puffed off my skin, as if
inflating. Supposedly the bots
would liberate oxygen molecules from the suitplas to not only pressurize the
interior
but
create a breathable mixture.

Hesitantly,
I took a shallow breath. In. Out. In. Out.
Again,
and again.
Still alive.
By
definition, then, whatever I was breathing wasn't bad. It smelled like nanoplas - and what
didn't, these days - but there wouldn't be any complaints from my quarter. The expectation of imminent conversion
into a poorly constructed meat omelet tends to rob one of the
urge
to whine about trivia. A mist appeared before my eyes and then
cleared as final modifications were made to the molecular structure of my face
screen.

The
figure before me was clad in a tight space-black suit with a silvered
visor. He waved, then looped a
monofil tether around me and began a swimming motion. The lunar fly, I saw. He had grav paddles in both hands and on
both feet; these played off the local gravity waves, and in a neat irony of
physics gave one a grip on the ungrippable.

I
glanced at my nanosuit. Oddly, it
had hardened to a deep black. Vac-pack suits were usually a bright yellow or interstellar orange,
designed to be seen
easily against the void.

I
noticed something even odder. My
rescuer was not taking us back towards the station, the only refuge for parsecs
around. We were going the opposite
direction.
Away
from the station.
Out into
the great lonely deep of space.

Ahead
of me the gracefully butterflying figure kept rhythmically swimming through the
void.
Stroke
,
pull
.
Stroke
,
pull
. The grav paddles generated a surprising
amount of acceleration; these must have been military grade. But towards what were we accelerating?
And who was my rescuer?

The
answer obviously lay ahead - there was no doubt we were going somewhere - and
so I settled in for the ride. I
could have hauled myself up my tether and grappled with my human tug but that
hardly seemed like an appropriate gesture of gratitude.

So
I stared ahead, past those stroking arms and kicking legs, until finally a dim
shape began to appear.
A black and indistinct outline, occluding a few dim stars.
It was impossible to tell how far away
it was, at first, or even what it was.
A non-gravitational black hole?
A rip in the continuum?
A burned-out space
billboard?

No,
none of those, I saw, as we drew closer. A ship. In fact, one
particular, and particularly huge, ship. A ship I recognized.

The
Bigger Than Yours
.
The mobile
headquarters of the Fist, and my uncle's flagship.
I shouldn't have been surprised, but I
was. I was on leave; supposedly no
one within the Fist even knew my whereabouts. The Fist should have been off doing
good, fighting Earth's battles, tilting at alien windmills. Instead, here it was. While I appreciated the favor I simply
had no business being rescued by the Fist. Put another way, they had no business following me around. I'm not naturally devious but most of
those I work with - and for - are, so that started me thinking.

Meanwhile
my rescuer pulled me into an open personnel lock. The door irisced shut and the lock
pressurized with a palpable pop. With the touch of a probe to my nanosuit it poured off me like liquid,
puddling into a lumpy mass on the floor.

The
black-clad figure stripped off helmet and suit and stood before me, stark
naked. What I noticed first was
that he was not a he. Her hair was
space-black and long and lustrous, her body hard and toned. Nudity was socially acceptable in the
23rd Century, but still. Even a
life-long apple farmer will admire a particularly perfect apple. And this was a spectacular example of
proportion and form. This
statuesque figure could make a Greek statue jealous.

"Welcome
back," she said as she shrugged on a coverall. Not out of modesty
;
it was cold in the lock.

"Thank
you," I said, as at my feet the puddle of my nanosuit collected itself
into a gray brick, shivered with contentment, and lay still. “How nice that you happened to be
passing by."

She
grinned, a full-lipped smile, wide and easy. One of her eyes was bright gold, the
other a piercing
sea-green
. “As I'm sure you've guessed, I was
hardly just passing by." She held out a hand. “Trina Nova. And I already know who you are."

Of
course it was no coincidence that she was waiting outside with a vac-pack. Like a blind man bumping into an
elephant my brain had sensed that there was quite a bit more to this than I had
seen. But I needed time to explore
the pachyderm.
To
feel out all the angles, so to speak.
For example, one pointy tusk was that
she had brought me back to the mobile headquarters of the Fist. But the
Bigger Than Yours
was super secret, known only to the members of
the small and exclusive Fist. A
round gray leg was that I knew - or at least knew of - all the other
Agents. And she was not one of
them.

When
you want to catch a fish, throw out some bait.

"You're
with the Fist?"

She
nodded. “Just joined up. A week ago."

She'd
neatly eaten the worm but dodged the hook, or most of it. No one just joined the Fist. But I let that slide for now.

"How
did you happen to be out there?"

She
smiled in
a
exuberantly sly way. “Someone told me to."

Slow
progress, but progress nonetheless. “Who?"

Her
eyes twinkled. I noticed that the
gold one twinkled slightly more energetically than the green one. “They tell me you're smart. Who do you think?"

Her
mocking tone was as subtle as a comet's tail, and so I didn't have to
think. I knew. I glanced around the room frantically;
with a good camo-suit, a muscular, slightly-crazed avuncular Admiral could well
look like that hatchway, that arch, that chair, that viewport, that—

Arg!
The potted plant! In the corner of my eye I saw it break into a blur. I spun.

Too late.

A
hard shape that looked like a ficus on legs plowed into me and bowled me
over. I managed a shot into the
ribs that earned a grunt, and another at the skull, which hurt my fist. My own head - the object of so much
recent attention - neatly blocked a pair of stiff punches. Then two python-like forearms coiled
around my neck and twisted, contracting, squeezing me down. My vision tunneled. I collapsed to the floor.

"Say
it!" hissed a voice in my ear, a voice I knew all too well.

"Urg!"
I said.

"Not
that," instructed the voice in a calm and helpful tone. The pressure on my windpipe
increased. Damn my twisted
family! Sooner or later I would
have to say it, I knew. In that
case, it might as well be sooner.
But not just yet.

"Hmph,"
I gasped.

"No,
wrong again," counseled the voice.

"Ack?"
I tried.

The
grip tightened.

"Uncle,"
I rasped.

"Pardon
me?" inquired the voice politely.

"Uncle!"
I shrieked, and the pressure vanished. I picked myself up and turned to see the hulking, evilly grinning form
of Admiral Beaugeste Fairchile, bearer of that ignoble and oddly anatomical
title Head of the Fist.
Short, thickly muscular, and bald as a moon, which exaggerated the
bullet-shape of his skull.
My most dangerous Uncle.

"Hello,
Court," he said. “Still a diz
Astor, eh?"

"Always,"
I grunted as I rubbed my neck. This
was our standard verbal family greeting, just as the wrestling match was our
standard physical greeting. Sometimes I got the drop and choked a few garbled "Nephews"
out of him, but these lacked the same satisfying effect, somehow.

"Thanks
for saving my life," I grumbled.

He
stroked his bald dome. “You're
welcome. Now, you remember the deal
we made when I first recruited you?"

I
stopped rubbing and glared at him. “I think it was: the Fist or prison?"

"That’s
the one."

"Funny
you should mention it. In light of
recent events, I'm reconsidering it."

He
smiled, revealing a front incisor chiseled from a whole diamond plucked by a
robot probe from the heart of a neutron star. It glinted. “Too late for that. I never said the Fist would be
safe. I said it would be
interesting."

I
rolled my head around, working a few kinks from my neck, and picked some lint
from my short and
conservatively-orange
hair. I didn't go for the extreme natural
colors now favored by young punks. “I am truly cursed, then. I
live in interesting times."

"Don't
we all," the Admiral muttered.

I
saw through a clear porthole several suited Fist workers using a small
space-tug to haul my void kayak into a large cargo bay. It had been at the CasinoPlex.

"How
considerate of you," I said.

"Not
at all. Evidence for your future
trial," the Admiral replied.

I
smiled, widely, forgetting for a moment that this wasn't an insult to
humans. The Admiral caught my
intent and returned an evil, carnivorous grin, while tilting his head enough to
be sure that the light would reflect off the huge neutron-star diamond. It sparkled painfully. He knew that it always made me wince.

I
winced, so that he would stop.

He
stopped.

"She
was waiting outside that window," I finally said, gesturing at my
savior. “For me to come through
it."

He
nodded happily.

Both
of us were thinking the same thoughts, though from opposite perspectives. I was the fish, he the fisherman, as I
pieced together the chain of events that had brought me here. He of course was already well aware of
those events, and was enjoying my cascade of chagrin as I fit them
together. The only way he would send
someone to wait outside that window, invisible against deep space, was if he
knew I was inside but likely to come bursting through. And the only way he could know I was
likely to come bursting through was if he knew I was with my very own kill
team. Which he plainly, therefore,
had known about long before I
had.
Yet instead of a warning or
back-up
, he sent one single person to wait outside the
window. You could take that as
either a certain level of confidence in me, or a certain level of disinterest
in the outcome.