The Sam Gunn Omnibus (56 page)

I
felt
inexpressibly sad. He was my enemy, the sworn foe of my people. I should have
hated Sam Gunn. Yet, as he flew off into the unknown dangers of living in the
radiation belt for who knew how long, I did not feel hatred for him.
Admiration, perhaps. Respect for his courage, certainly.

Suddenly I blew him a kiss. To my
shock, I found that I actually
liked
Sam Gunn.

“It’s a good thing he couldn’t see
that,” Ricardo growled at me. “He would turn the OTV around and come to carry
you off with him.”

I
leaned back in my
chair, my head throbbing from the tension, glad that this Queveda person was
there to remind me of my true responsibilities.

“Sam is a rogue,” I said loftily. “One
can admire a rogue without being captivated by him.”

Ricardo snorted his disdain and got
up from his chair, leaving me alone in the control center.

I
waited until
almost dawn before daring to phone my father. The mission was going as planned:
Sam was coasting out to GEO, all systems were within nominal parameters, there
was nothing for anyone to do. We had not even chatted back and forth since the
launch; there was no need to, although I found myself wondering if Sam was so
worried about his brash jaunt into the radiation dangers of GEO that he had
finally lost the glibness of his tongue.

Somewhere a band of university
scientists that Spence had hired as consultants were figuring out how long Sam
could remain in GEO safely.

Queveda
and the other technicians went home. Other technicians came in and sat on
either side of me. After an hour of nothing to do, I told them to take a break,
take a nap if they liked. I could monitor the controls by myself. I promised to
call them if I needed them.

I
phoned my father
instead. He was still in New York, where he planned to wait for the success of
the Brazilian mission. I woke him, of course, but at least this time he was
alone in his bed. Or so it seemed.

“He is already on his way?” My
father’s sleepy eyes opened wide once I told him about Sam.

“Yes,” I said. “And the United
States is asking the IAA to make a safety investigation of the Brazilian
spacecraft.”

He seemed confused by that.

“It will delay the Brazilian mission
for days!” I hissed, not daring to raise my voice. “Sam will be in GEO and
claim the territory before they even get off the space station.”

My father lapsed into a long string
of heartfelt curses so foul that even today I blush at the memory.

He raged at me, “And what have you
done about it? Nothing!”

“There is nothing I can do, Papa.”

“Bah! I am surrounded by traitors
and incompetents! My own daughter cannot raise a finger to help me.”

“But Papa—”

“Do you realize what this gringo is
doing? He is turning our own position against us! He is using my speech as a
pretext for taking the equatorial orbit away from us! I will look like a fool!
Before the United Nations, before the news media, before the whole world—I will
be made to appear like a fool!”

I
was shocked and
saddened to realize that my father’s concern was not for his people or for the
injustice of the situation. His first concern was about his own image.

“But Papa,” I asked tearfully, “what
can we do about it?”

“You must act!” he said. “You said
you were prepared to sabotage their spacecraft. Now is the time to do it.
Strike! Strike now!”

I
stared at his
image in horror. My father’s face was contorted with fury and hate.

“Kill that gringo bastard!” he
snarled at me. “He must never reach the equatorial orbit alive.”

THE BUG THATI
had inserted into the mission
control program merely allowed me to fire an OTVs thrusters when I chose to.
Originally I had thought that I could send an unmanned OTV crashing into a
communications satellite; a neat piece of sabotage.

Sam was not planning to park his
spacecraft close enough to a commsat for my plan to work, however. He merely
wanted to establish himself in GEO long enough to make the territorial claim
that my father wanted for the Twelve—and for the UN to recognize that claim.

I
could not send
him crashing into a satellite, I realized. But what if I used my bug to fire
his thrusters as he approached GEO? He would go careening past the orbit,
farther out into space. His trajectory would undoubtedly carry him into a
wildly looping orbit that would either fling him into deep space forever, or
send him hurtling back toward the Earth, to plunge into the atmosphere and burn
up like a meteor.

Yes, I told myself, I could kill
Sam Gunn with the touch of a finger. I was alone in the mission control center.
No one would see me do it. I could then erase the bug in the program and no one
would ever know why Sam’s thrusters misfired.

But—murder Sam? Only a few hours
earlier I had been telling myself that my father was too good a man to stoop to
murder. And now—

“They’re going to assassinate him.”

I
whirled in my
chair to see Ricardo standing just inside the control center’s doorway. His
face was grim, his eyes red and sleepless.

“I thought you had gone home,” I said.

“Didn’t you hear me?” He stalked
toward me, angry or frightened or both, I could not tell. “They’re going to
kill him! Assassinate him!”

“No ... I can’t....” My voice
choked in my throat.

“It’s all set up,” Ricardo said,
padding to the chair beside me like a hunting cat. “There’s nothing you can do
about it.”

“I can’t kill Sam,” I said, nearly
breaking into sobs.

“Sam?” Ricardo’s brows knit. “I’m
not talking about Sam. It’s your father. The rebels are going to assassinate
him in New York.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Because I’m one of them,” he
snapped. “I’ve been with them all along. And now I’ve been assigned to kidnap
you.”

“Kidnap me?” My voice sounded like a
stranger’s to me: pitched high with surprise and fear. Yet inwardly I was not
afraid. Shocked numb, perhaps, but not frightened.

Ricardo’s expression was
unfathomable, but he seemed to be in torment. “Kidnap you,” he repeated. “Or
assassinate you if kidnapping becomes impossible.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

He made a bitter, twisted smile. “This
is our moment, princess. Your father is in New York, where we have enough
people to get past his security team. You are his only living relative—or the
only one he admits to. General Quintana is already storming the main army
barracks in the capital.”

“General Quintana? But he’s ...”
The words choked in my mouth as I realized that Quintana was a traitor.

“He will be our next president,”
Ricardo said, then added, “he thinks.”

I
could feel my
eyes widening.

Still with his twisted smile,
Ricardo explained, “Do you think we are fools enough to trust a traitor? Or to
put a general in the president’s chair?”

“No, I suppose you are not.”

Ricardo fell silent for a long moment,
then he asked, “Will you allow me to kidnap you? It will be merely for long
enough to keep you from warning your father.”

“So that you can murder him.”

“I didn’t want them to do that. I thought
we could overthrow him without bloodshed, but the others want to make certain
that he won’t be able to stop us.”

I
said nothing. I was
desperately trying to think of something to do, some way to escape Ricardo and
warn my father.

“After we finish Sam’s mission I’ll
have to take you with me.” His expression changed. He seemed almost shy,
embarrassed. “I promise you that you will not be harmed in any way. Unless you
try to resist, of course.”

“Of course,” I snapped.

He pointed to my display screen. “It’s
almost time for you to activate your bug.”

“You know about that?”

“Of course I know about it,” he
said. “I have been watching you very closely since the first day you came here,
pretending to be from Los Angeles.”

My heart sank. I had not fooled him
for a moment. Yet, somehow, I was forced to admire how clever Ricardo had been,
even though he was my enemy. Or rather, my father’s enemy.

“It will be a shame to kill Sam,”
he said, with real regret in his voice. “Maybe his trajectory will bring him
close enough to one of the space stations so that somebody can rescue him.”

“Not much chance of that,” I said.

He shrugged. Unhappily, I thought. “It
must be done. We can’t allow Sam to claim the equatorial orbit.”

“So your glorious rebels want the
orbit for themselves,” I taunted.

“Yes! Why not? It is the one chance
that a poor nation such as Ecuador has to gain some of the wealth these
corporations are making in space.”

“So you will kill Sam as well as my
father.”

“No,” he said grimly. “You will
kill Sam.”

At that instant Spence’s voice came
through the radio receiver, “Preparing for OIB.”

Spence’s voice. Not Sam’s.

Ric looked surprised. I felt a
flame of shock race through me. I whirled my chair back to the console and
toggled the radio switch.

“Spence! Where are you?”

“Aboard the OTV, Juanita honey. Sam
got a brilliant idea at the last minute and we switched places.”

“Where is Sam?”

“He ought to be in New York by now.”

“New York?” we both said in unison.

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m five minutes
away from OIB. You copy?”

Orbital insertion burn. The final
firing of the OTV’s thrusters to place the spacecraft in the geosynchronous
orbit. The time when my bug would make the thrusters fire much longer than they
should and fling the craft into a wild orbit that would undoubtedly kill its
pilot.

But the pilot was Spence! I had
found it troubling to think of killing Sam, but it was Spence inside that OTV!
No matter how angry I was with him, no matter how much I told myself I hated
him, I could not knowingly, willingly, send him to his death.

“For what it’s worth,” Spence
reported cheerfully, “the radiation monitors in this ol’ tin can show
everything’s in the green. Radiation’s building up outside, but the shielding’s
protecting me just fine. So far.”

I
turned from the
display screen to Ric. His face looked awful.

“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t
kill him.”

He reached out his hand toward my
keyboard, then let it drop to his side. “Neither can
I
.”

“OIB in three minutes,” Spence’s
voice called out. “You copy?”

I
looked at the mission timeline clock as I flicked
the radio switch again. “We copy O
I
B in
two minutes, f
i
fty-six seconds.”

Ric
sank down onto the chair next to me, his head drooping. “Some revolutionary
,
” he muttered.

“Let
me warn my father,” I pleaded. “You don’t want his blood on your hands.”

“No,”
he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “I can’t go that far.”

“But
Sam will be with him, don’t you understand?”

“Sam?
Why would—”

“Sam
went to New York! That’s what Spence told us. The only reason for Sam to go to
New York is to see my father. Sam will be in the line of fire when your
assassins strike. They’ll kill him too!”

Ric
looked miserable, but he said in a hoarse croak, “That can’t be helped. There’s
nothing I can do.”

“Well,
I can,” I said, reaching for the telephone.