Profiteer - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Anrdew Swann (Начало книги) #1

For a hundred million years the two-kilometer-long Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. Dimitri Olmanov had only been visiting it regularly for the past century.

The first time he had seen it, Dimitri had needed a pressure suit and the sky had burned a hostile red. Today he survived wearing only a heavy parka. Today his breath fogged beneath an infinity of crystal blue that was only slightly tinted by clouds of engineered microorganisms.

His doctor would curse him for not using a respirator. Dimitri, he’d say, your new heart has quite enough trouble with the stress of your job. Don’t burden it with a too-thin atmosphere.

His general staff would object to him being out in the open like this—even with the omnipresent Ambrose. Too much risk in his job without inviting assassins.

The Confed publicists wouldn’t like to have it public knowledge that Dimitri—the Dimitri—had a sentimental streak. They made much of the mythical Iron Man at the head of the TEC.

He could ignore them with impunity.

The Face, Dimitri could not ignore.

He was the most powerful human being in the Confederacy. He needed to remind himself that there were things bigger than he was.

Dimitri turned to look at his bodyguard-companion. Ambrose appeared unmoved by the alien structure filling a third of their horizon. But, then, he never was. Ambrose stood at parade rest, wearing less covering than Dimitri did, breath hardly fogging the Martian air. Ambrose was two and a half meters tall, hairless and tan, and stared out at the world from behind black irises that nearly swallowed his pupils.

“Ever wonder why they died out?” Dimitri swung his cane in the general direction of the dome that supposedly protected the ancient artifact from the oxygenating atmosphere.

“No, sir.” Ambrose shook his head.

Sometimes Dimitri wondered how much cognition really went on behind Ambrose’s dark eyes. Most of Ambrose was construct. Only a quarter of his original brain was left. Ambrose’s conversation had more to do with the computer programs that maintained the other three-quarters of his mind. Despite the brain damage, Ambrose was loyal, somewhat intelligent, efficient, and perfectly programmable—all without violating the Confederacy’s taboos on AIs or genetic engineering.

But Ambrose would never be a great conversationalist.

Dimitri hobbled forward on his cane. “Was it a natural flaw? Some inherent weakness?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“They achieved so much ...”

The Face was one of only a handful of remnants of a civilization that flourished and died before any of the known intelligent races achieved sentience. Humanity had originally called them Martians, believing the Face to be the product of a dead Martian race—

That was before humans had discovered a carved starmap that led them to Dolbri. Dolbri was an inhabitable planet that absolutely could not have evolved naturally. It was only the first example of extraterrestrial terraforming. Mars, it seemed, was an example of a similar effort. However, Mars—unlike Dolbri—had stalled halfway. The biosphere never took, the atmosphere thinned, and the water froze or evaporated.

It seemed that the ancient Dolbrians had died out at their zenith, and no one could figure out why.

“Is there a problem, sir?”

Dimitri realized he had trailed off in mid-sentence. “No, no.” I’m just thinking, Ambrose. Not having a stroke. “It’s just the Dolbrians reached such a point—may have been gods compared to us—and still destroyed themselves. What chance have we got?”

“Do you know that, sir?”

Dimitri smiled bitterly. “It’s the nature of thinking animals to create Evil. And Evil is what destroys us.”

Ambrose stared at him.

“You should realize that, Ambrose,” Dimitri said. “We wade through it every day. Or I do. One hundred and sixty years of humanity’s collective Evil. “That’s what I am.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“Someday you may have to disagree with me, Ambrose.” Dimitri bent down and pulled a strand of green-webbed demongrass from the dirt. It came reluctantly, trailing chunks of partially-dissolved rock and some of the engineered symbiotes that supported its simple ecosystem. He rolled the strand between his fingers, crushing tiny white insects. “What would you do if I tried to kill myself?”

A pained look crossed Ambrose’s face. “Sir—”

“That would give you some problems. You’d have to leapfrog that programming of yours and use whatever judgment you have left.”

“Don’t.” Ambrose seemed to have trouble talking.

Dimitri let the strand tumble from his fingers. “Don’t worry. I’m cursed with the knowledge of what a succession battle would do to this Confederacy I’m supposed to protect. I will not allow myself to die.” Not until I know that my replacement isn’t going to be worse than myself.

The look of pain on Ambrose’s face seemed to fade somewhat.

“The nature of the beast. The head executive is going to be a monster. But the monster has to have a scrap of a soul.”

Ambrose had faded back into his natural mode, parade rest, nodding, saying, “Sir.”

Dimitri barely noticed. He stood up from his too-long squat and felt the joints of his knees pop. “Remember to serve my successor as well as you serve me, Ambrose. You’re going to outlive me.”

“Perhaps, sir.”

Dimitri sighed and started walking back to the aircar. He had seen enough of the Face. “Do you remember Helen, Ambrose?”

“No, sir.”

“You wouldn’t. It isn’t relevant to you, is it? You don’t retain anything that isn’t relevant, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Helen was before your time, anyway. When I knew her personally, that is. I dealt with her fifteen years ago, and now I’m going to have to deal with her twins.”

“Sir?”

They reached the aircar and Dimitri leaned on the hood. He decided that he probably should have brought a respirator. “The propagation of Evil, Ambrose. Sins of the fathers and so on—” Dimitri paused and caught his breath. In a few seconds he was racked with painful coughs that made him dizzy.

Ambrose was at his side before Dimitri could say, “Back!” He warded Ambrose off with his cane. “I’m fine! No doctors this week. They’ll only replace another organ.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

Dimitri nodded, even though his head was spinning. The aircar door was open and Dimitri slipped inside. Ambrose took the driver’s seat and the door closed. Dimitri felt better when the car repressurized.

He looked out the window at the Face and realized that it was probably the last time he would see it. Whether he managed to create a successor or not, his doctors could keep him alive for only so much longer.

Dimitri didn’t want to live any longer. He had lived too long already.

He had lived through the rise and fall of the Terran Council and the forced depopulation of the Earth. He had seen the wormhole network superseded by the first tach-drive starships and the subsequent explosion of mankind across the sky. Humans had founded colonies on fifty separate worlds since his birth, most of them in the last century. In his lifetime the Martian atmosphere had been made breathable and the majority of mankind had moved to the stars.

It was too much history for one man.

He was the head executive of the Terran Executive Command, the secret police, army, and enforcement arm of the eighty-three planet Confederacy. Dimitri and the TEC represented the only centralized authority over all of those eighty-three planets. Eighty-three independent governments that would gladly tear the Confederacy apart if it weren’t for the thin diplomatic glue holding the whole thing together.

Sometimes it was nearly too much to bear.

And, speaking of diplomatic glue.

“Let’s go, Ambrose. We have a meeting.” As the vehicle lifted off, Dimitri added, “Someday you’ll make me late for my own funeral.”

* * * *

Far away from Dimitri’s aircar, in a Martian rock formation that could have been a Dolbrian artifact, or simply a weathered crest of rock, a lone figure lowered his binoculars. The man knew it was a risk to be this close to Dimitri, especially with that creature, Ambrose, hanging around. In fact, he was just remembering how much of a risk it was. He had almost forgotten about Dimitri’s pet golem.

Not forgot, just another thing I didn’t want to remember. The man looked at the dull chrome cybernetic hand at the end of his right arm. The hand was scarred and pitted by years of use, and he walked on a leg that was similarly tarnished. The old man has a habit of making people over in his own image.

He backed down the rock, away from Dimitri’s aircar. He was risking too much. Dimitri, the Confederacy’s chief executive, was a white-hot nova of unwanted attention.

Once he was out of view of Dimitri’s aircar, he put the optical binoculars back into their case.

He stayed immobile past the point where Dimitri’s car should have disappeared beyond the Martian horizon. He maintained as low a profile as possible. It helped that they weren’t looking for him.

No one was looking for him.

No one knew he existed.

He had spent nine years making sure that he had as little impact on the world around him as possible. It was very necessary that no one knew he was here. He was an anomaly, a temporal hiccup that could destabilize the events he was here to correct.

So much could be disrupted if he was discovered, if his crystalline caverns were discovered—and still, despite the need for caution, despite his fabricated—and all-too-real—nonexistence, he still made his pilgrimages to see the Face. He had braved this hive of academics many times over the past nine years, just to get a good look at the alien structure.

The Face reminded him of home.

He now knew the other reason he’d done it.

He had hoped to see Dimitri.

He had known about the old man’s obsession with the Dolbrians and the Face. Deep down, despite his efforts to remain unobserved, he had wanted to look upon the man who was responsible for everything. He wanted to see his former commander, a man he had respected at one time.

Now, at the Face this last time, he’d finally seen Dimitri as well. This close to exile’s end, it had been an unexpected shock.

And when he had finally seen Dimitri standing on the Cydonia plain, all he could think of was how easy it would be to kill the old man.

Even after nine years of self-imposed isolation, his hatred of the man who would give the orders was un-dimmed. Worse. If his sacrifice was to mean anything, he had to let that old man give the orders. To have a chance of saving anything, he had to wait until the orders had been given, wait until they had nearly been carried out.

Wait until it was nearly over.

But he had waited nine years; he could wait four more months.

At least, very soon, he could ship himself to Earth without changing anything. He had always wanted to see Earth.

After a long pause, when Dimitri and Ambrose were long gone, he started the long walk back to his camp, a crystal structure as impressive in its own way as the ancient polyceram of the Face. Unlike the Face, it was only nine years old and hidden underground.

* * * *

Dimitri’s meeting was a dozen kilometers away from the Face, in one of the abandoned academic stations clustered around the alien structures known as the City. The station was buried at the root of one of the ten-kilometer-high atmosphere towers, one of the more spectacular artifacts of the human terraforming effort. The atmosphere towers, built by intelligent self-replicating machines back when mankind felt safe using such things, dotted Mars like gigantic albino dandelions.

Dimitri liked thinking of the Terran Executive Command meeting under the roots of a weed. The metaphor gave one a sense of place in the universe.

The meeting room itself, chosen by Dimitri, was twenty meters underground. He had chosen it as much for security—all the TEC-commandeered structures on Mars were secure, by definition—as for his own convenience. Dimitri hadn’t wanted to alter his trip to Mars, and it was easier to have the TEC meeting on Cydonia than it was to reschedule it.

Such was bureaucracy.

Dimitri was the last one to arrive. The five delegates were already seated at the table, waiting for him. Five delegates, two distinct sides. Dimitri went through the pro forma greetings, shaking hands and nodding.

On one side of the table were Pearce Adams for the Alpha Centauri Alliance and Kalin Green for the Sirius-Eridani Economic Community. The Centauri and Sirius arms almost always acted together in Confed policy matters. Their capital planets of Occisis and Cynos were nearly as rich and central as Terra herself.

On the other side of the table were Robert Kaunda, Sim Vashniya, and Francesca Hernandez. Kaunda represented the smallest arm of the Confederacy, the Union of Independent Worlds. Vashniya represented the largest, the Protectorate of Epsilon Indi. Hernandez represented the insular Seven Worlds and was the first delegate to appear from that arm of the Confederacy in at least two decades.

Hernandez also wasn’t human.

Dimitri had to hold his breath when he held his hand out to her. She was a bipedal feline creature who stood taller than any human in the room. Her cat-face was totally unreadable.

The Confederacy would’ve liked to forget the past that the worlds beyond Tau Ceti represented. No one liked to think that humans once played around with genetics, creating intelligent creatures.

People could forget about the AIs. Those you could turn off. You couldn’t forget creatures like Hernandez. No matter how insular and xenophobic the Seven Worlds became, they were still there.

After the formal greeting—with the exception of Hernandez he knew all these people professionally— Dimitri slipped into the briefing on Operation Rasputin.

Like the handshakes and the greeting, his discussion of BD+50°1725 and the troublesome planet that circled it was perfunctory. Everyone here was aware of the planet Bakunin. Everyone here knew the economic drain it was for the Economic Community and, to a lesser extent, the Centauri Alliance. Everyone here knew Sirius’ proposed solution.

The reason the five delegates were here had nothing to do with Dimitri’s speech. It had to do with the vague permutations of physics. Confederacy law required a simultaneous vote on capital intelligence matters, and simultaneity was just not possible over interstellar distances, even if you used a planetary tach transmitter.

To satisfy both Confederacy and natural law all the voting parties had to be in the same reference frame. Which meant that Dimitri faced five individuals in this room, each bearing the proxy for one of the collective powers of the Confederacy.

Dimitri ended with, “It is important to remember that, since the planet Bakunin is not a member of the Confederacy, none of the legal constraints on Executive activity apply. None of what I’ve described to you is illegal under the Charter.”

Dimitri overheard Kaunda mutter, “Meaning we throw the Charter out the window.”

Dimitri ignored him. No one would like the precedent that this kind of invasion would set. No one but Sirius and Centauri, who were both in economic trouble even without the financial black hole of Bakunin sitting at their back door.

“If you’d please finalize your votes and pass me the chits.”

Adams and Green slid their cards over simultaneously.

Kaunda wrapped his dignity around him like a cloak and slowly slid his card to Dimitri. The gesture would have looked regal if it weren’t for that fact that Dimitri knew that the Union only had one vote to cast in this matter; they only had one prime seat.

Hernandez clicked her claws on the card as she passed it over.

Vashniya hesitated. He looked at his card while everyone waited. He was a chocolate-brown man, bald with a heavy white beard, and very short. As he sat there, smiling enigmatically, he looked like a dwarf smiling over some golden horde.

Vashniya’s expression was unaccountable. Dimitri certainly didn’t understand the delegate’s glee. Dimitri had already counted prime seats in his head. Even if Vashniya had his two allies solidly with him—even if Indi and company were unanimous against—they would still be one vote short, twenty-two to twenty-one.

Vashniya passed the card over.

Dimitri slid all five cards into a terminal set into the tabletop and read the results to himself before announcing them.

What? He almost said it out loud. He almost let surprise register in his face, something he never let himself do. It wasn’t that Operation Rasputin failed. The measure passed, just as expected, and with a heavy margin.

It was how it passed.

In a dry voice, Dimitri read off the totals. “The final vote of the Executive Command stands: Twenty votes for, seven against, sixteen abstentions.” When Dimitri read the number of abstentions, Kalin and Green looked shocked, and most of the people in the room turned to look at Vashniya, who was smiling impishly. “The motion carries,” Dimitri concluded.

Why? Dimitri thought. The entire block from Epsilon Indi abstained, all fifteen votes. That wasn’t all. There had been two defecting votes from Sirius. That meant that if Indi had voted against, Rasputin would have been blocked.

The Indi Protectorate constantly complains about Centauri and Sirius having de facto control over Confed policy. And Vashniya, after gathering the Union and the Seven Worlds into a coalition, just let Centauri and Sirius force through another proposal.

So why is he smiling?

Dimitri left the Executive meeting planning to assign a task force to study recent changes in internal Confederacy politics.

* * * *

Ambrose met him at the door, as always. Dimitri’s bodyguard was never more than fifty meters away from his charge, a distance Ambrose’s enhanced body could clear in less than a second.

“Rasputin passed, Ambrose.”

“Very good, sir.”

They walked to the aircar. As they did, Dimitri decided he was going to miss Mars. If you left out the effects of the atmosphere, the lesser gravity made Dimitri feel half his age.

Unfortunately, half his age was eighty years standard.

“I suppose it is good, even if the circumstances were odd.”

“Yes, sir.” Anyone else would ask about the “odd circumstances.” But Ambrose seemed to have no sense of curiosity. It was one of the things Dimitri liked about him.

“Good indeed. Sirius gets to pretend it’s solving its economic problems, and I get to finally stage the climactic confrontation.”

Ambrose opened the door for Dimitri, and Dimitri tapped the side of Ambrose’s leg with the cane. “Do you get that? My swan song, finally.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Dimitri slipped into the back of the aircar, and Ambrose settled into the driver’s position. “I’ve been waiting ten years to send Klaus to Bakunin.” Dimitri closed his eyes. “With the need for my successor becoming more and more pressing, for a while there I thought I was going to have to exceed my authority—if that’s possible— and invent a mission for him.”

“It is good you didn’t have to, sir.”

“Yes, Ambrose.” Dimitri yawned. “Wake me when we get to the spaceport.”

* * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Freedom Fighters

“War is simply honest diplomacy.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“We go to gain a little patch of ground

That hath in it no profit but the name.”

—William Shakespeare

(1564-1616)

Captain Kathy Shane had a bad feeling about Operation Rasputin. It wasn’t just the fact that this was the first time she’d been attached to a Confed Executive mission. If that had been it, she might have been able to discount the feeling. It wasn’t even the fact that the two companies under her command were going to operate outside the Centauri Alliance, the first time she’d heard of the Occisis marines leaving that sphere.

No, that wasn’t the problem. This was a cooperative effort with the TEC, which meant that her command could leave their nominal jurisdiction for anywhere in the Confederacy.

Anywhere in the Confederacy.

That was the problem.

The planet, Bakunin, was outside of the Confederacy’s jurisdiction. It had never signed the Charter. It didn’t even have a government with which to sign the Charter.

That lack of a government was the seed of the dilemma facing Captain Shane. One of the cornerstones of the Confederacy Charter was planetary sovereignty. Layers of sovereignty wrapped the Confederacy like an onion. Every planet was a force unto itself, the arms of the Confederacy keeping interplanetary order, and the TEC keeping interstellar order. Only two things were supposed to call for interstellar military action—

Defending a sovereign planet from external aggression, and defending a legitimate planetary government from internal rebellion.

Operation Rasputin was neither.

Shane lay in her bunk, thinking of her upcoming command. Her cabin was tiny, wedged to the rear of the troop compartment of the Blood-Tide. Even so, the accommodations on the troopship were palatial. She was command, and thus was the only Marine officer on board with private accommodations.

Normally a Barracuda-class ship could give most officers private quarters, but Shane’s Occisis marines only formed two thirds of the ship’s complement. The rest of the force was TEC civilians—and the colonel.

The troop-carrier Blood-Tide had left Occisis undermanned. Only two, of a possible three, marine companies rode the craft to Sol. In Sol orbit, the Blood-Tide picked up the Executive personnel, their command for this mission.

That was another thing that rubbed Shane wrong. Not so much working with the TEC, but the fact that their command was a TEC spook, Colonel Klaus Dacham.

Shane looked at a chrono set in the wall.

2400 hours Bakunin. They’d been on Bakunin’s thirty-two-hour day ever since entering Sol space a week ago.

In a half-hour the Blood-Tide would engage its tach-drive.

Her ship communicator buzzed. “Captain Shane.”

She picked the little device up from a dent in the wall that wanted to be an endtable. “Shane here.”

“This is Colonel Dacham. I want the commanding officers to assemble in the briefing area for departure.”

“Yes, sir,” she said as the communicator went dead.

* * * *

At 2415 the entire command staff aboard the Blood-Tide was assembled in the briefing room. Herself, six platoon commanders, and another half-dozen civilians. Even without the uniforms, anyone could have separated the civilians from the marines. The Occisis marines were all large-boned, squat, fair-skinned, and had a habit of sitting at attention. The civilians were much more racially diverse, and a few of them exceeded two meters in height— taller than any marine on board.

Colonel Dacham seemed to bridge the gap. He was olive-skinned rather than fair, and his near-black hair wasn’t cut to military specs. However, he didn’t tower over the marines—genetics, apparently, rather than gravity—and he walked like a military man. His body language was that of someone used to command, or at least someone used to giving orders.

He wore a generic uniform, black to match the marines, that was innocent of any insignia.

Colonel Dacham stood at the head of the briefing room, in front of a giant holo display. The display showed the cockpit view out the nose of the Blood-Tide. The scene was mostly black starry void, but Shane could see the tiny image of Saturn drifting over the colonel’s right shoulder.

“In just an hour,” said the colonel, “the Blood-Tide will enter Bakunin’s airspace.”

An hour for us, Shane thought. The rest of the universe is going to lose track of us for nearly a month standard.

The colonel addressed the marines. “Fifteen minutes after that, you will lead a surgical strike against Godwin Arms & Armaments. This surprise strike is pivotal to gaining our foothold on Bakunin. The assault and capture of this objective might seem a small target for two companies of marines. Don’t let that appearance fool you into treating this mission lightly. This is only phase one of Operation Rasputin, and it may be the most critical phase.”

Saturn drifted off the screen.

“Most important, after capture of the facility itself—I cannot emphasize this enough—is the capture of the CEO of Godwin Arms, Dominic Magnus.”

Shane nodded absently as the colonel went on. He wasn’t covering any new ground. Everyone had undergone an intense week of preparation for the upcoming mission, including a few mock assaults on the Martian surface. Most of her people could do the mission blindfolded by now.

In fact, even with the obscene corporate defenses bred by the violent Bakunin environment, the fact was that the Blood-Tide was an exercise in massive overkill. There was no real question that the Godwin Arms facility would fall to the TEC invaders.

Shane’s thoughts kept returning to the fact that this covert operation, if performed anywhere within the Confederacy, would represent an act of war that could tear the Confederacy apart. The violent overthrow of GA&A— even though it was a corporation and not a government— was tearing the spirit, if not the letter, of the Charter to shreds.

The worst part of this was the fact that Operation Rasputin was cloaked in the same secrecy that shrouded most of the TEC’s activities. Shane knew absolutely nothing of what was to happen beyond phase one. That was “need to know,” and the grunts didn’t.

During the colonel’s talk, there was a brief whoop over the PA system. Colonel Dacham stopped talking and turned toward the holo.

With little sensation or fanfare, the display on the holo shifted radically. The background stars remained more or less fixed, but now in the foreground sat a small reddish sun, and filling almost a quarter of the screen was the planet Bakunin.

Bakunin was a white ball that was girdled by a wide strip of ocean around its equator. Bakunin’s one continent was on the side opposite the Blood-Tide. The tach-in had gone flawlessly.

Colonel Dacham nodded and said, “Get into position for the assault.”

* * * *

PART ONE

Leveraged Buyout

“War was not invented by humanity, but we have perfected it.”

—Marbury Shane (2044-*2074)

* * * *

CHAPTER THREE

The Military-Industrial Complex

“Capitalism is a dog-eat-dog system. However, with most other alternatives, the dog starves.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Capitalism will kill competition.”

—Karl Marx

(1818-1883)

“It isn’t a hardware problem.”

Dominic Magnus’ voice came out in a whisper. His attention was focused on his left hand. Under the translucent flesh he saw no problem with the connections. The synthetic muscles still moved smoothly, and the abstract mirrors of the printed circuits hovered unbroken just under the surface of the flesh.

He had noted his fingers drumming unconsciously, and he had hoped to trace it to some concrete miswiring. Unfortunately, the finger tapping and the facial tic originated in his brain, not in the prosthetics. They’d always been with him, but lately—with some of the recent upsets in the munitions industry—the tics had been getting worse.

He kept hoping to find some sort of mechanical difficulty, something he could get a handle on. Something to fix. Something to control. He didn’t like things he couldn’t control.

He made the mistake of looking up from his hand and caught sight of his reflection in the black marble of his desk. He closed his eyes, but since the pigment was off, it didn’t do any good.

Not that he didn’t know what he looked like when he turned off the skin. He just didn’t like the reminder.

Most of the time, Dom resembled any other man in his mid-thirties: olive-skinned, shorter than average, unremarkable. But with the pigment off, all the reconstruction was visible. Under the transparent skin, half his torso, as well as his entire left arm, snaked with wire filament and printed circuitry. All the musculature on that side of his body was synthetic and only slightly opaque. Underneath, the gunmetal gray bones glistened. A few of his remaining human organs were visible under his titanium ribs. On the right, a few natural muscles shone red, nourished by transparent capillaries carrying a watery fluid that passed for blood.

Worst of all was the face.

A titanium-alloy skull grinned from under the marble of his desk. Its teeth were too white to be real. A pair of brown, human-looking eyes stared up at him. He willed the pigment back and the skull was slowly obscured as his skin took on an olive cast, like slightly tarnished bronze.

The doctors had said he’d get used to the idea eventually. ...

So far it had been ten years standard and he had yet to get used to it.

The klaxon sounded the half-hour warning, announcing the tach-in of a cargo ship. The ship was cruising insystem and should maneuver for planetfall any minute. The scheduled ship was the Prometheus out of Cynos.

Dom supposed the coming deal was why he’d felt a sudden wave of self-consciousness when he realized he’d been drumming his fingers on the desk. CEOs weren’t supposed to get nervous.

Though, perhaps he had a right to be a little nervous. The Prometheus was a Hegira Aerospace C-545—a damn big cargo ship. It had contracted one of the biggest sales Godwin Arms & Armaments had ever contemplated, on-planet or off.

The order was big enough for Dom to have forgone some of his normal caution. In the ten years he had spent building GA&A, Dom had played the corporate game more conservatively than most, more conservatively than anyone who did business on Bakunin. The lawless atmosphere of Bakunin bred corporations that seemed to thrive on risk.

Not Dom, not GA&A.

Not until now, anyway. Dom still had a few contacts in the Confederacy from his days after the TEC. He heard little from them nowadays. Not until one of his old intel sources close to the Terran Congress sent a tach-comm warning him that the Prometheus was a Confederacy front-job.

* * * *

A few years ago that would have been enough for Dom to trash the whole megagram deal. However, during the past year Dom had winded an instability in the air, the sense of a storm on the horizon. Nothing concrete, but the paranoia was enough for him to sink a large chunk of capital into a mountainside bolt-hole. Even his chief of security, Mariah Zanzibar, thought that purchasing the virtually unknown commune wasn’t the best financial move—even if it was an admirable precaution.

Ironically, after sinking the money into that commune, he wasn’t in a position to refuse the Prometheus. Dom had to force himself to ignore his last disastrous involvement with the Confederacy, if not to forget it. Past was past, and Dom doubted that anyone in the Executive Command still knew his name—with one exception.

Dom slid a drawer out from his desk and contemplated what kind of sidearm he should carry into the deal.

The suit he wore was tailored for either a shoulder holster, or one on the hip. He chose both. On the hip he holstered a cartridge weapon, a slugthrower with nine-millimeter projectiles. It would do nothing against even halfway-decent body armor, but it was the custom on Bakunin to go into business dealings visibly armed. The chromed antique would be both expected and non-threatening.

However, because he had a Bakuninite’s distrust of the Confederacy, he wore a considerably more effective weapon in the concealed shoulder holster. A GA&A random-pulse variable-frequency antipersonnel laser was built to play hob with a personal field.

An Emerson field—force field was an unfortunate misnomer, since the Emerson effect dealt with energy, not fields of force—could suck up a considerable amount of energy at its target frequency. However, only the very high-end military models had processors able to compensate fast enough to defeat a laser that changed frequency at random microsecond intervals.

Once he was properly armed, he told his onboard computer to activate the observatory. He wanted to see the Prometheus land. The computer wired into his skull sent a coded pulse to the hemispherical white walls of his office, and they vanished from view.

His desk was on a raised dais in the center of the room, so he could sit behind it and get a panoramic view of the GA&A complex.

In the high-backed chair he could look down on the whole complex. The blinding glare reflecting off the landing quad splashed white light off of the mirrored U-shaped office complex. The smaller of Bakunin’s two moons was rising behind the concrete tower of GA&A air traffic control, above the offices.

A slight heat shimmer above the perimeter towers obscured the Diderot Mountains beyond. The shimmer was a side effect of the defense screen generators in the towers, housed below the antiaircraft batteries.

Dom sat on top of the twenty-story residence tower. The deal he’d worked with the owner of the Prometheus would bring an influx of income that would not only compensate for his purchase in the mountains, but would be enough to give every one of the 1500 employees living below him a ten-percent bonus this year.

It was almost too good to be true.

The ten-minute klaxon sounded five minutes ahead of schedule.

Dom turned the chair away from the quad and faced west. It was a nice sunset. The ruddy orb of Kropotkin dominated the horizon, larger than either of Bakunin’s moons. An awesome sight, a reminder that, in the cosmic scheme of things, life should not exist on this planet.

But then, Bakuninites had a habit of bucking the natural order of things.

Dom squinted. The ship was on its orbital approach. It would come over the city of Godwin to make its landfall. He’d see it in a few minutes.

A different klaxon sounded. The heat shimmer around the perimeter towers disappeared in a sheet of electric-blue light, the St. Elmo’s fire from the defense screens’ excess charge. The field had deactivated for the Prometheus’ approach.

Something was wrong. He hadn’t heard the all-clear first.

He told his onboard computer to call up the GA&A communications net. He needed to contact the control tower, now. Air traffic control was supposed to confirm the ID of any approaching craft and sound the all-clear before anyone even thought of lowering the defense screens.

He turned around and faced the holo projection above his desk.

Nobody was manning the control tower. He was looking at a totally empty room, lit only by the computer schematics showing the local airspace. There was no one to authorize downing the screens.

Dom called security.

The holo fuzzed and the empty control room was replaced by the dusky face of Mariah Zanzibar. “Yes, sir?”

“Red Alert. Prepare the defenses for immediate attack.”

Alarms sounded, and the antiaircraft batteries began turning to track the incoming target. Dom had the feeling that it was already too late. He turned back to watch the approaching Prometheus. The ship that was just becoming visible over the glowing sprawl of Godwin wasn’t the Prometheus, or anything close to a Hegira cargo liner—

The lines were unmistakable, even at this distance. It was a Confed troopship.

“Damn it, Zanzibar, get those screens back up—”

Even as he spoke, he could see a streak of light emerge from the ship. It split into five arrows of fire, heading right for the perimeter towers. EM-tracking missiles with independently targetable warheads. If the screens were up, the ECM would take out 70% of them.

The screens did not go back up.

Five field generators and accompanying antiaircraft exploded into cherry-red balls of flame. Dom felt the building shake underneath him and knew that defending the complex now would be a futile gesture.

The realization was like a sheet of ice slicing through him. He was suddenly very calm.

He turned back to the holo. Zanzibar was facing away from him and shouting orders at her security team. She turned back. “We can’t get the defense screens back up, Mr. Magnus. Someone scragged the independent power supply. We’re trying to hook into the factory generators. That’ll take another five minutes and the power supply will be vulnerable.”

Dom nodded; he knew his own complex well enough. “Start evacuating personnel,” he said, his voice a monotone. “It’s a lost cause.”

“Sir?”

“Get everyone you can to the Diderot Commune. That’s an order.”

“Yes, Mr. Magnus. Good luck.”

Dom cut the connection.

Behind him the holographic walls flashed with more red light. Five more warheads, Dom thought, another five perimeter towers. Even if Zanzibar could get power to the remaining screen generators immediately, the screens would cover only three-quarters of the complex.

Dom looked toward the invader. The ship was slowing, disgorging its landing craft. It wasn’t going to blast the complex.

They were going to try to take it.

His thoughts were ice-fine and cold, like filaments of metallic hydrogen. Only briefly did he wonder why this was happening. But the fact that the invaders were shifting to a ground assault gave him a chance to salvage something—

Himself.

It also gave him a chance to deny them at least part of what they were after.

Dom called down to the computer core. The control center for GA&A, its heart and brains, was buried in a concrete bunker two klicks under the surface. Even a direct hit by a micronuke would leave GA&A’s assets and records unharmed. If he’d had some warning of the attack, he could be down there and control most of the aspects of the complex, including defense.

By the time he had stopped talking to Zanzibar, the cold reptilian part of his mind had decided that there was a traitor, who he was, and where he had to be.

Cy Helmsman, his Vice President of Operations, was one of the more powerful cogs in the GA&A machine. Dom had built GA&A, but much of it had been on the foundation of Helmsman’s expertise. In many senses, Helmsman was Dom’s sword arm. Helmsman fought GA&A’s secret battles, and had brought many of GA&A’s competitors to their knees. Helmsman had come out of the same background that Dom had—war, espionage, the TEC.

Which all meant that Dom had never fully trusted him.

Helmsman was the man who answered the holo call down to the core. The core was the only place where it was possible to override the defense screens without Dom himself being present.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Helmsman said.

Helmsman was middle-aged, white-haired, a slow, plodding, methodical man used to deception and double-think. Dom had felt he could keep Helmsman’s ambition in check by using Helmsman’s incredible cowardice. Dom had miscalculated.

Very slowly, Dom asked him, “How much did they offer?”

“Ownership of the company.”

Helmsman had abandoned the TEC to save his own precious skin. Apparently he had returned to the fold because he thought he deserved a bigger slice of the pie.

Helmsman was a fool.

“Don’t try to come down here,” Helmsman went on. “I’ve planned this for quite a while. The blast-doors are all down and locked. I’ve reprogrammed all the access codes—”

Dom shook his head. Helmsman had thought everything through. He had made sure that he would pass through the battle unscathed, safe in the armored bunker at the core. Helmsman had made the assumption that he knew everything about GA&A’s security setup.

“Good-bye, Cy.”

“What?”

“Code Gehenna Hellfire.”

The holo cut out and the power to GA&A died. There was an earthquake rumble as glass blew out from the office complex. The walls to Dom’s office became temporarily opaque. It took the emergency generators three seconds to kick in.

Dom had activated a very small program buried in the communications software of GA&A. If Dom said those three words through any communications channel on the GA&A web during a full alert, the program switched a mechanical relay. Anyone who looked at the program wouldn’t even know what it did unless he dug into the heart of the mainframe and traced the wires. Something Helmsman couldn’t have done and maintain his little secret.

The relay activated a GA&A half-kiloton tactical warhead that was located about twenty meters away from Cy Helmsman, deep in the core. Helmsman and the GA&A mainframe, with its assets and sensitive information, had just become an integral part of the bedrock two kilometers beneath the complex.

It was a desperation move, to prevent a good deal of sensitive information from falling into unauthorized hands. It would also make life hell for the people taking over a complex operation that suddenly had no records, no brain. It would save many people, clients and employees, a lot of grief.

It was also the equivalent of shooting a decade of his blood in the head and leaving it to die.

Dom wanted to feel something.

The only thing there was a deep, aching chill in his metallic bones that he really shouldn’t be able to feel.

When the power came back, Dom looked behind him. The walls went transparent on the scene of the troopship hovering just outside the perimeter. Landing craft were putting down inside the complex. The landing parties looked like marines, though all he could make out from this height in the dark were the battlesuits in striped urban camouflage.

Time to get the hell out of here.

The marines were at the base of the residence tower. He stood up and walked to the curve of wall that faced the ship. Dom saw the details on the ship now.

The hundred-meter long monster was a Paralian-designed drop-ship, a Barracuda-class troop-carrier. Hovering, it blotted out most of the western sky—a dead-black rectangle with a drooping nose and stub wings. The drive section to the rear was half again the size of the rest of the ship. Missiles clamped to hard-points in the ranks across the skin of its midsection. Ten landing craft had clung to parasitic blisters under the wing like suckling young. Each could handle ten marines in full battle dress, and all had dropped. A five-barrel Galling pulse cannon stuck out of the troopship’s nose. The cannon could waste the whole GA&A complex with a single strafing run. Dom didn’t look at the ship long enough to determine if it had a full bombload.

Once he was close to the wall, he could make out where the door was. He found the switch and placed his hand against it. He could have had his onboard computer open it, but he wasn’t going to risk a transmission.

The invisible door whooshed aside and let in the smell of smoke. Dom ran out onto the roof of the residence tower. Behind him, from the outside, his office was a matte-black hemisphere. As soon as he emerged, a high-freq laser lanced out from somewhere in the sky, to score on the dome. Don smelled kilos’ worth of electronics crisping in the walls behind him.

Sounds drifted from below. Explosions and screams.

Without a wall between him and it, the Paralian ship seemed bigger than ever. It nearly blocked his view of Godwin. He ran, paralleling its profile, hoping another laser wouldn’t target him.

Dom raced to the edge of the roof, where one corner was paved for a small landing area. In the center of the area was a canvas tarpaulin. Dom threw it aside to reveal a Hegira personal luxury transport. It wasn’t armored and it wasn’t armed. Dom had only used it to get around the GA&A complex—

There was a very ancient proverb about beggars and choices.

The canopy slid up slowly over the drive section and Dom jumped into the leather bucket seat. He started the power sequence wishing for wings, a hypersonic drive capability, life support capable of low orbit, a tach-drive—

A pulse laser strafed the roof in front of the car, leaving a blackened groove. Dom looked up and saw a marine landing craft heading for the roof.

The Hegira’s vectored jets hadn’t reached full pressure yet. Dom didn’t wait for them. He hit the main drive units on full and rolled off the edge of the roof. The car was designed for vertical takeoff. It needed those vector jets to maneuver. It fell.

Dom had a great view of a platoon of marines below him. They saw the descending craft and—probably a smart move—broke formation and ran. Behind him, the main drive blew out windows down the side of the residence complex.

He wasn’t in free fall. The drive accelerated him faster than gravity wanted him to. Dom watched the pressure of the vector thrust build. Slow, too damn slow. The ground was too damn close.

He opened the vector jets prematurely and hoped it would be enough to maneuver the craft.

The Hegira shot away from the wall, and Dom desperately tried to get the nose up. The front end drifted upward, giving him a view of scattering marines, landing craft, and the blown perimeter defenses.

The G-force he pulled would have made him black out if he were still built with his original equipment.

According to the altimeter, he couldn’t have dropped as far as it had felt like. He could have sworn he’d kissed the ground, but when the car’s trajectory flattened out, he flew by just under the top of the fifty-meter-tall perimeter towers.

Once he cleared the edge of the GA&A property, the ground started dropping away. The foothills below him began to sprout thick purplish-orange forest as he shot west, away from the mountains.

Red lights began to flash across the control console. The Hegira had soaked up a few hits. Even as Dom started to assess the damage, the little craft began shaking.

The view out the windshield wasn’t encouraging. It looked as if he were skimming right on the top of the forest canopy. Barely a second would go by without an outflung branch throwing ocher foliage across the nose.

He switched on the rear video. There wasn’t any sign of pursuit. The attack didn’t want him, or at least he wasn’t a priority target. They were after the GA&A complex. That gave him room to breathe. If he could land this thing.

Woods shot by around him, getting closer. Godwin was still a good ten klicks away, and now that the grade below him had flattened out, he was losing altitude. The pressure in the vector jets wasn’t enough to keep him airborne, and there was no way he could cut them and let the pressure build back up.

He should have budgeted for a contragrav.

The view out the nose was now totally obscured by dark foliage. Warning beeps sounded from every available speaker. The Hegira was shaking like someone having a seizure. It crashed through the canopy with a sound as though it was tearing the universe a new asshole.

He needed to gain altitude—quick.

He lowered the rear of the Hegira, hoping to use the main drive in the rear to boost him up.

The craft reached a forty-five-degree angle and he stopped losing altitude. As the Hegira began rising on a ballistic arc, the violent shaking subsided, and the night sky drifted into view.

Just as Dom started smiling, the Hegira hit something. A final devastating thud shook the entire craft, and the remaining half of the warning lights came on in front of him.

In the rear camera view, Dom could see a single tree pointing out of the canopy, about twenty meters more than it had a right to. It was broken and burning. He had clipped it with the main drive.

He assessed the damage. Rear vectors were out. All he had were the nose jets and the main drive, and the main drive acted erratically. He was in trouble. The damn thing now needed a runway—

The craft hit four hundred meters altitude and the main drive started stuttering. Damn it! He needed at least another fifty meters for the ejection seat—

Five klicks to Godwin and he was losing altitude and going three hundred klicks an hour. Time to start decelerating and hope for the best.

It was an opportune time to make that decision because the main drive quit altogether. He was going to ballistic into Godwin on only his maneuvering jets, a third of which were dead.

Dom pulled the crash harness around him just in time. The Hegira plowed into an abandoned warehouse on the east side of Godwin at one-fifty klicks an hour.

* * * *

CHAPTER FOUR

Industrial Espionage

“Industry is amoral.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Honor sinks where commerce long prevails.”

—Oliver Goldsmith

(1728-1774)

Tetsami had that sinking feeling she always got near the end of a job. This was the part she hated—the waiting.

She could cruise a proprietary operating system laced with lethal security without breaking a sweat. But now, sitting in the dark outside an old bunker waiting for the meet, she could feel her palms getting damp under her driving gloves. She straddled her jet-black Leggett Floater and idly eased the drive back and forth. The little contragrav bike obliged her by pacing back and forth in front of the loading bay.

She shouldn’t have taken the Leggett. It was an expensive piece of hardware, and East Godwin was full of maggots.

Tetsami cussed herself. The time for second-guessing was before the operation. She had taken the Leggett for a very good reason. The few hours before the payoff were when things were most likely to go bad. It wasn’t that she expected her employer to pull a double cross—if she had, she wouldn’t be here—but it was a good idea to have an escape route, in case....

Nice if I had a job where that wasn’t a priority concern. Nice if I had a life where that wasn’t a priority concern.

Tetsami put those thoughts out of her mind. Right now wasn’t the time.

She concentrated on the meet.

The place the execs had chosen for the payoff seemed relatively clean. They’d found a place with one hell of an approach radius. The area around the bunker had been blasted clear for a few city blocks in any direction. Blasted by an artillery barrage or an orbital strike.

The bunker she waited by had once been a very secure building. It was the only survivor of whatever had reduced the surrounding blocks. The ruin still had shelter-quality armor, but the façade had been blown off. All that was left was blackened metal in the shape of a truncated pyramid.

The only entrance, the loading dock, had been blown inward by a direct hit from an energy weapon.

She wondered what this was the remains of. East Godwin had once been a corporate center before a few ugly company wars reduced a lot of the neighborhoods to rubble. The bunker could date from that blowup—around the time her parents had come to this ugly little planet.

Why Bakunin, Dad? she thought at her long-dead father. The question occurred to her even though she knew the answer. After Dakota, Bakunin was the only place that would accept their kind.

She wished the execs would show up.

Every minute she spent waiting for them to show, the data package under her seat got hotter. She wasn’t made of time. The op had gone without a hitch. But that only meant that the spuds in Bleek Munitions weren’t going to discover that their R&D database had been compromised until the next routine cataloging of the user list. In less than fifteen minutes now the spuds would see a red flag next to a user that logged out without any record of logging in.

The snag was unavoidable. Bleek’s system was too tight for a dry run. She’d spent over a week planning the break-in, an hour weaving her magic into the system, and ten minutes on-line. After all that, she’d cut out with very little finesse or ceremony when she had what she wanted.

What the execs wanted.

If Bleek security ID’d her while she still had the data, things could get real hairy. She was a target until she passed the package to her employer. Once the exchange occurred, once she’d been passed the gold, she’d be free and clear.

Until then, she was hotter than a megawatt laser with a gigawatt power cell.

Think about the payoff, she told herself. Fifty kilos in the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective. Not enough for her to retire on, but it might be enough to get her off-planet.

Off this slimy godforsaken rock. A graceful exit, as soon as possible. She wasn’t like some software jockeys who went exponential until they crashed and burned. She knew she was pushing the envelope. If she didn’t realize that, she had Ivor—her adopted father—to tell her she was eight years into a profession that chewed up and spit out most in less than three.

More than that, she wanted to abandon the planet that had killed her parents. Leave and forget that Bakunin ever existed.

She wished Ivor were in town right now. He was the only honorable, worthwhile human being on this planet, and she sensed that she’d need some handholding when this was all over.

There was a flash above her. She looked up.

A dead-black stub-winged drop-ship passed overhead, going east. It was a half-second until the bass rumble of the drives reached her. She could have sworn it had just fired something. It continued its stately progress across the night sky until she lost it behind the eastern skyline.

And there they were.

The execs were coming down a blasted stretch of road, toward the bunker. Three metallic-blue groundcars were weaving through the rubble, dust blowing out from under their skirts. They were armored for the neighborhood. Three cars. Godwin Arms might be slow, but when they show up, they put out the red carpet.

Tetsami didn’t like red carpets. They tended to hide godawful piles of dust.

She stopped the Leggett and primed the grav unit for a five g vertical acceleration, just in case. Her palms were sweaty again.

Two of the cars pulled around to port and starboard, the third pulled in front of her. That left her with her back to the loading bay of the bunker. The door on the car in front glided open. Tetsami caught sight of a security goon—the goon was in civvies but Tetsami knew the type-—before the corp walked out.

The corp wasn’t her contact.

Shit.

The guy who stepped out was all teeth and smiles, with a generic face that came out of some production vat. Dark blue suit with a metallic shimmer on the edges. The guy dressed to match the cars.

The corp extended a hand, and left it there for a long time before he realized that Tetsami wasn’t coming within five meters of him.

She moved her thumb toward the throttle. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m assistant VP in charge of operations for GA&A. Mr. Helmsman is occupied back at the company—”

Helmsman was the GA&A veep in charge of operations. Tetsami knew him. Helmsman never delegated covert ops. Something was seriously wrong if the man didn’t show.

“Bullshit,” Tetsami said. “Whoever you are, I only deal with my employer.” She kept her eyes on the junior veep, but she could hear a hiss as the doors on the other cars opened. More goons, probably armed. The only way she’d get out of this was if they didn’t see her telegraph what she was going to do. She hoped they weren’t armed with projectile weapons.

“My dear lady, your employer is GA&A, of whom I am a representative. I can provide you with ample identification. If you would just provide us with the data, we will transfer the gol—”

A dull subsonic thud reverberated through the clearing, felt more than heard. It rippled in from the east, and she could hear the piles of rubble shifting around. It felt like a massive subsurface explosion, or an earthquake. The veep toppled to the side as the ground shifted.

Tetsami couldn’t ask for a better distraction. She hit the throttle and keyed her personal field.

The Leggett slammed into her backside. It felt like the bike was trying to split her up the middle as it shot straight upward, straining the contragrav near the red line. She felt a warm tingle as her field soaked up some sort of energy weapon.

She looked down. The ground and the three cars were rapidly receding below her. One of the goons had hit her and was tracking her with his laser on full. Her field was absorbing the beam’s energy, but the heat was getting bad. She could smell the ozone-transformer reek that announced that her field was close to failure.

Another laser hit and she’d be toast.

Time for some fancy maneuvering. She cut the contragrav and leaned forward. The Leggett was compact, top-heavy, and as aerodynamic as a brick. It dove nose-first straight toward the ground.

The maneuver had the desired effect. She dropped out from under the stare of that laser immediately.

However, while she’d pulled this stunt before, she’d never done it this close to the ground. It took two seconds for her contragrav to key in from a cold start—there was a good chance she’d plow into something before she gained power again.

She switched the contragrav back on and hoped she’d done it soon enough.

She was pointed down, straight at the three cars. She could see goons piling out of the cars and unlimbering weapons, but they weren’t pointing them at her—

“Lord Mother Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ!”

Her epithet was lost on the execs. The ground around them had erupted with troops in powered armor. The execs were surrounded.

Tetsami felt extremely stupid. There must have been at least twenty men buried in the rubble around the bunker, and she’d called the place clean because the bunker was empty.

The contragrav kicked in when she was barely ten meters above the cars. The seat split her backside again, and her face slammed into the—thankfully padded— handlebars. It was just in time.

Through eyes watering with acceleration, she glimpsed something streak past the bunker and target the central groundcar. A smart missile. It maneuvered for the open door. The veep was in the way.

She had a subliminal flash of the corp folding over the missile and flying backward into the car. A split-second image of the junior veep doubled over, exhaust shooting out of his midsection.

Then the groundcar exploded.

The car’s body was armored enough to hold its shape, but flame shot out the windows and the car landed back on its skirt.

For some reason, Tetsami thought of the last time she’d ever seen her father. He’d told her mother that the job was nothing to worry about, it was just a “routine penetration.”

That word, “routine,” flew through her brain like a runaway bullet.

She vectored the drive as she heard another groundcar taken out. The Leggett shot out at a tangent, past one of the armored soldiers—all white enamel and gold and looking nothing like Bleek infantry.

The Leggett was maxed at five gees, and Tetsami wished she could get more out of it.

She banked the bike toward the east side of the clearing. She streaked by only five meters above the ground. The velocity indicator shifted digits too fast to read.

Halfway to the surrounding buildings, and cover—

Something hit her. Something big.

It was an energy weapon, because the field soaked up most of it. But the rear of the bike blew out as the power cells for the field overloaded explosively. The Leggett listed to port and banked away from the edge of the clearing. Tetsami tried to get the bike under control, but the explosion had damaged the grav unit.

She thanked God that personal transports only used catalytic injection grav units. They might power up slower than a quantum extraction unit, but they didn’t turn into clouds of radioactive plasma when they malfunctioned.

The ground began sliding upward, and she wondered what would hit her first, the ground or another shot from that weapon.

It was the ground.

The left front of the Leggett clipped the corner of an old building foundation and flipped up and around in a slow spin that was only possible with a contragrav. Tetsami had a moment to see the ground spinning to meet her. She released herself from the bike and hoped her body armor would save her.

She hit the side of a sloping mound of dirt. Her helmet hit something hard and she could hear a crack. She was rolling too fast to see anything. It took her a second to realize that she was still alive.

Something above her exploded and showered dirt over her. She didn’t know if it was her bike or a missile.

She came to a stop in a trickling river of slime at the base of the hill. She was nauseated, dizzy, and aching in every muscle of her body, but she seemed to have gotten off with little damage.

Tetsami raised her head—

She ripped off her helmet and threw up into it.

Elsewhere, the sounds of battle continued. If she was lucky, they counted her among the dead now. She raised herself upright, and this time the vertigo was easier to deal with.

She had rolled to the bottom of a large blast crater. The river in the bottom was the effluent from a broken sewer line. “Well, girl,” she said to herself as she walked away from the battle. “You’ve been at this for eight years standard. You’ve finally hit the wall. What are you going to do now?” She didn’t have an answer.

She still had to worry about getting out of this alive.

She climbed, haltingly, toward the lip of the crater. It was hard going, but her condition improved as she went. It got better when, halfway up, the sounds of fighting ceased.

She got to the edge believing she’d managed to survive the incident—

When she cleared the lip, she came face-to-face with a man in a battlesuit of chrome, gold, and polished white enamel. He wielded the nastiest energy weapon she had ever seen.

* * * *

CHAPTER FIVE

The Underground Economy

“A criminal is a revolutionary without the pretense.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

There might have been a worse place to ditch the Hegira than the east side of Godwin, but if so it wasn’t on any of the eighty-three inhabited planets in the Confederacy.

Dom opened his eyes with the hope that what he was feeling was due to a screwed up balance circuit. It wasn’t. He was hanging upside down from the crash harness.

There was a bright side. The drive hadn’t blown.

The Hegira had plowed through the tenth floor of a fifteen-story warehouse and had flipped over. Perhaps it had rolled. Dom didn’t remember anything after the small aircraft’s impact with the building. It’d smashed through the other side, planting its nose in the roof of a neighboring building. The drive section balanced precariously on the bottom half of the window the Hegira had broken through.

Dom was suspended, headfirst, about thirty meters above a very hard-looking alley.

He waved a hand experimentally at the space where the windscreen had been. His hand brushed empty air.

As Dom scrambled to untangle parts of his body from the crash harness, he got subliminal glimpses of a group of spectators below him. The eidetic computer net wired into his brain dutifully recorded impressions of leather, metal, kevlar, and monocast with little rhyme or reason.

The most vivid detail that registered as Dom unwedged his artificial left leg from the Hegira footwell was the Proudhon Spaceport Security logo one of them wore.

That was before someone started to take potshots at him.

Suddenly, the group below him had Dom’s full attention.

The shooter was shaved bald and wore an exec’s monocast vest. Baldy was firing some hideous homemade weapon. The others were laughing as he paused to reload it. Even though Baldy was the one shooting, what scared Dom was the pulse carbine slung cross the back of the one with the spaceport shoulder patch.

Make short work of me and the Hegira—though it’d be difficult getting it recharged in this part of town.

Must be their idea of fun.

Dom pulled his body as far as he could into the shelter of the cockpit just as another shot hit the side of the Hegira.

He couldn’t risk return fire. With his reflexes he might get two of them with his pulse laser, but that would inspire the survivor to use a real weapon.

He put his left hand, the fully cybernetic one, on the side of the canopy and clamped it there. Then he wrenched the crash harness off, swinging out the missing windscreen.

Dom dangled under the Hegira, his left hand clamped around a strut in the canopy.

The punks below applauded him.

Dom looked down. The gang was closely grouped under the Hegira.

Dom looked back along the drive section, at the window on the floor below. The window had been cracked by the Hegira’s impact, but it was still there. It was a risk....

He looked at his audience, who seemed to be enjoying the show.

If you liked that, he thought, you’ll love this.

Dom reached up and pulled the emergency eject lever. His left hand was holding on to the canopy. When he pulled the emergency lever, two tons of gas pressure blew the canopy back on its track, shooting toward the drives. The ninth-story windows of the warehouse raced toward him. He let go, and slammed into the window.

For a split second he worried if the weakened window wouldn’t give—

He smashed through.

As he crashed into the ninth story, rockets blew the driver’s seat down, straight at the punks. The rocket had enough thrust to blow the chair up for fifty meters. It tried to level itself, but trapped by the alley it only managed to slam itself into the walls. The rocket would still be going when it hit the ground.

Dom rolled over broken glass to the receding thrum of the seat’s thrusters. As he skidded to a stop, ruining his suit, he caught a brief glimpse of orange as the chute deployed all wrong, billowing itself up to the Hegira.

The few real parts of his body hurt.

He got on his hands and knees. The entire floor was one room. It was empty, stripped. Anything of value had long ago been ripped off—light fixtures, electronics, plumbing, carpeting, walls, furniture.

He had rolled to the far wall. Next to him was a deep shaft. Someone had made off with the elevator.

He turned away from the shaft. The floor was about five-hundred meters square. The only light came from anemic moonlight filtering through dust-hazed windows. No one could sneak up on him here. Just empty gray space. At first Dom was surprised at the lack of people or graffiti, but as he heightened the gain on his photoreceptors, he realized that there weren’t any stairs.

The missing elevator had been the only access to the upper floors.

“Damnation and taxes.” His voice echoed back at him, enforcing the sense of emptiness.

He shook with delayed reaction. He forced himself to stop.

A sickening screech shattered the silence, followed by a snapping sound. A grinding noise—accelerating in pitch—came from the window Dom had broken through.

He looked back as the majestic shadow of the Hegira slowly moved. The nose slid toward the ground. The grinding reached its apex and the entire craft jerked downward.

It slid by the window with comparative soundlessness.

A half-second later he heard the sound of tearing metal and shattering plastic. The concrete floor shuddered with the impact.

He paused a few seconds, rubbing his bruised right arm; then he walked to the broken window and risked a glance downward.

The Hegira was longer than the alley was wide. It hadn’t fallen all the way to the street. It was wedged between the buildings again, four floors down. No sign of the punks.

Dom’s nose itched with the acrid smell of burning synthetics.

He couldn’t see it with the Hegira in the way, but he supposed that the ejection seat’s rocket had ignited the chute during the descent. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but Dom doubted the designers had anticipated their seat being deployed upside down in a narrow alley only thirty meters from the ground.

He cast a cursory glance at the building exterior, but there was no sign of a fire escape. He checked all four sides of the structure, kicking out the plastic windows. No luck. He hadn’t expected any. This looked to be a secure building in its day. That meant one way in, one way out. When the neighborhood went bad, the owners took everything.

If it had been modular, they probably would have taken the building as well.

He walked back to the rectangular shaft that used to hold the elevator. It had been a maglev, and bolts were anchored in the wall every few meters where the magnets had been attached.

He took hold of a projecting bolt and put his weight on it. It held.

He took a deep breath and began the descent.

It was slow going. He took the time to make sure the bolts were firmly attached and that his grip was solid. His scrupulousness paid off at least once, when one of the bolts bent under his foot and slid out of the wall in a shower of masonry dust.

As he climbed down, he tried to avoid thinking about what was happening.

He tried.

He failed.

The world had crumbled from underneath him. Again. The only real surprise was the fact that he hadn’t expected it. He had naively thought that he had finally cemented his niche in the world and could forget his past.

He had thought that when the TEC had recruited him and his brother.

He had thought that when he had abandoned the TEC after Helen’s death.

He had thought that when he had come to Bakunin after ...

After he’d stopped being human.

A bolt bent in his left hand and he almost fell.

He calmed himself. It might be a nightmare. But it wasn’t the worst possible nightmare. He’d already lived through that.

When he reached the fifth floor, he began to realize that something other than the chute was burning below him.

The signs of humanity had been growing as he descended. On the fifth floor were a few rat-gnawed mattresses and a few words written on the walls. Odds were that the first floor of this place was littered with combustible material.

As Dom paused to consider his options, a dull thud reverberated below him, followed by a wave of greasy black smoke that belched up the shaft.

He jumped out of the shaft and on to the fifth floor. He was in trouble.

He searched for an escape route. And there it was, the mangled drive section of the Hegira, sticking through a window.

Dom ran over to it and looked out a neighboring window. The nose of the craft had jammed itself into a window in the building across the alley.

It looked stable.

Dom climbed on top of the drive section. It was still warm from his escape. Although it felt as if the Hegira was solidly wedged between the buildings, Dom didn’t want to trust that.

The floor behind him was already opaque with smoke. Breathing was difficult.

Down the length of the craft—a bare ten meters—was only a slight angle.

He held his breath and crawled out on to the Hegira’s belly. The underside was smooth metal, and it was all Dom could do to maintain a slow pace that wouldn’t have him sliding off into the alley below.

Below him was an inferno. Orange-red flame danced in the gaps between the roiling black smoke filling the alley. As he watched, a storage barrel shot up out of the smoke with a dull foomp sound, trailing fire.

What the hell was stored down there? He hoped another barrel didn’t hit his craft.

The smoke got denser. Bangs and thuds continued as chemicals ignited behind and beneath him. He finally made it to the opposite window. He put his hand on a piece of twisted molding—

Behind him someone kicked open the gates of Hell.

The warehouse behind him and the ally below him exploded. No dull thud this time. This was a shuddering roar that belched a sheet of toxic fire up past him. If it weren’t for the two tons of Hegira shielding him from the blast…

The sound was overwhelming enough for his audio to cut out for a second, leaving him in a violent whited-out silence.

The vehicle took the worst of it. Dom felt the craft rise up underneath him. The echoes of the blast were still fresh as the remains of the car dropped out from under him. Somehow he managed to grab the molding with his other hand.

The aircraft smashed drive-end first into the alley below, leaving Dom dangling from a broken window frame, five stories up. He swung a foot up and pulled himself into the window. He rolled, face first, into a rotting cardboard box filled with mildewed clothes. He came to a stop nose-to-nose with a dead rat that had crawled into the box to die. There were other things moving in the box.

He stayed until the explosion had dulled and his hearing returned. Then he pushed himself upright slowly, turning to face the warehouse.

The first two floors were invisible behind belching smoke, and he could see orange flickering as far up as the fourth floor. The explosion had blown out every window on the building.

He needed to get somewhere he could breathe.

He turned away from the window. He faced a hallway that was cloaked in graffiti and garbage. The place smelled of rot and mildew, but it was clear that people lived here. He passed open doorways that led into rooms with candles and soiled mattresses.

Eventually, he found stairs. He made it five floors down and to an exit without running into any of the natives.

Then he made the mistake of counting himself lucky.

As Dom opened the door to the outside, a bald punk in an exec’s monocast vest grabbed his arm and threw him down the front stairs of the building. Dom hit the ground and heard his ceremonial slugthrower clatter out of his belt holster.

He landed, faceup, in the center of a ring of a half-dozen punks. They had the real weapons out.

Baldy, punk number one, picked up Dom’s slug-thrower, smiled in appreciation at the expensive antique, and aimed it at Dom.

Punk number two, the one with the Proudhon Spaceport shoulder patch, leveled a Griffith-Five High Frequency pulse carbine at him. The pulse carbine was a close-combat infantry weapon that, in a pinch, could be watted up to take on light armored vehicles.

Punk number three wore a black beret, leather jacket, and a three-fingered artificial hand. That hand was holding a fifteen-millimeter Dittrich High Mass Electromag. The HME rounds would be steel-cored uranium. If it hit the target, the target would drop. Even if the target wore powered armor. A testosterone weapon.

Punk four had vidlens eyes and a necklace of human teeth. The fact that he armed himself only with a machete in the midst of all that hardware made him a little scary. It also marked him as stupid, or crazy.

Punk five wore half a facial reconstruction in brushed chrome. He carried an antique frontier auto-shotgun. That thing was made for taking on large hostile fauna. He wore crossed bandoliers of shells.

Punk six had a smartgun. She had old unit tattoos on her face, from some off-planet marine force. Her custom job had wires jacked into her arm.

Dom would have preferred the Confed marines.

“A fucking corp,” said Beret.

“Vent his ass,” said the woman.

“Hell you say, Trace. Corp exec, ransom—” said the one with the shoulder patch.

“Sell ‘im,” the guy with half a face agreed.

“Vent him,” said the woman as she began to power up her weapon.

“It’s your call, Bull,” said the man with video eyes.

The bald one looked down on him, shaking his head. “He looks like a corporate type. Could be worth something to someone—”

Patch and half-face gave satisfied nods to each other.

“—But I don’t want to deal with the upkeep, and the bastard shot a chair at me.” Baldy looked up at the woman. “Vent him, Trace.”

“Just the head,” said Beret, “We can harvest—”

Dom had been trying to think of a way he could either talk or fight his way out of this. He was about to say something, when Beret was interrupted by an impact that shook the ground. The punks all turned to face in the same direction.

“Shit, it’s a fucking paladin!” That was the last thing Beret ever said. A beam of energy shot through his torso, cutting him neatly in half.

The one with the shoulder patch fired his pulse carbine, cutting a left flank swath while the woman with the smartgun cut in from the right. They should have caught the attacker in the cross fire.

A shadow passed over them. Whoever it was jumped. There was another impact, and the ground shook again.

Trace and Patch were cut down from behind.

Half-face returned fire with his auto-shotgun. It sounded like a jackhammer and was about as accurate. A beam of energy erased the remainder of his face.

In the interim, Baldy and the video-eyed machete wielder had run off for parts unknown.

Dom got to his feet, holding his arms wide, and faced the paladin. The paladin’s body armor was spotless white, gold, and gleaming chrome. He had a narrow-aperture plasma weapon cabled into his backpack. The pack towered over the ovoid helmet, sign of a manpack contragrav unit. A gold cross was laminated on the paladin’s right shoulder.

The voice that addressed Dom passed through a electronic filter and had the bass turned way up. “Lower your hands, citizen. I do the Lord’s work.”

Religious fanatic. “I appreciate your help—” Dom read a small chromed nameplate on the breast of the body armor. “Brother Rourke.”

“Thanks are not required. It is our calling to combat the Devil’s influence on this poor lawless world—”

Dom ignored Rourke’s pitch. He spent the time looking over the four sinners that the nut had just erased. It wasn’t that he objected to the killing. If there were ever four people that needed the express route off-planet, it was these punks. It was doing it in the name of God that grated. It was almost as bad as killing someone in the name of some government.

“—is customary to transfer a small tithe to the Church.”

Dom looked up from Trace’s corpse. “What?”

“Proper thanks to the Church of Christ, Avenger for your deliverance is made by tithing to—”

“That’s what I thought you said.” Great racket, save any poor bastard that looks like he has two grams to rub together and make a sure profit. It was just too bad for Brother Rourke this time. “All my assets have been taken over. I don’t have any cash on me.”

“That is unfortunate.”

Rourke lifted another weapon before Dom could react. The paladin shot him, and the world blinked out of existence.

* * * *

CHAPTER SIX

Coup d’État

“Might might not make right, but it makes a damn good argument for its position.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.”

—Marcus Tullinus Cicero

(106-43 BC)

At exactly 2542 hours, Godwin Local, Colonel Klaus Dacham strode into Dominic Magnus’ office. Klaus was not in a pleasant mood. Ten years ago he’d convinced himself that it had been dealt with. Then came the discovery of Dominic Magnus’ identity, and then this mission—

And at the critical moment the murdering bastard escaped.

The feeling strung Klaus’ nerves tight, in an invisible tide, as if he were piloting his mental ship much too close to a point gravity source. It was a point he’d been orbiting for fifteen years.

Forget her, said a small heretic thought. She’s dead.

The thought angered him even more. The fact that she was dead, beyond reach, beyond any reconciliation—that was the dark hole his soul orbited. Killed by her favorite. The knowledge that the murderer had escaped justice this past decade tore all the wounds open.

The blood was still fresh.

And her murderer was still alive.

Sometimes Klaus wondered why he was obsessed with punishing the murderer of a woman he had hated. Hated and abandoned. Still hated. Every memory of her burned as badly as acid.

However, also burning in him was the sense that he was right. The necessity to punish the wrong was a scar on his soul deeper than even his duty to the TEC. A burning scar that, until recently, had been dormant.

Klaus should have been able to take Dominic, this time, without having to stretch the authority the TEC had given him.

And the murderer had still slipped through.

Klaus wondered if anyone at Executive Command— other than him—knew who Dominic really was. Did his superiors know why Klaus Dacham was so eager to command his first field mission since Paschal, at an age when most TEC agents were comfortably ensconced behind desks?

Klaus suspected that the old man Dimitri knew. If Dimitri Olmanov didn’t know, he was certainly capable of knowing. It was rumored that the head of the TEC could know anything that he put effort into finding out.

Klaus was skeptical of omniscience. However, Klaus did believe that if Dimitri knew about Dominic and still ordered this mission, then Klaus had implicit permission to act as he saw fit.

“Dominic Magnus—” Klaus frowned at that. It was a pretentious alias.

Klaus had only recently learned that his quarry had fled to Bakunin. Apparently, “Dominic” had appeared here within a year of Klaus’ last attempt to bring a belated end to the murderer’s life.

Coming to Bakunin had been like falling into a black hole. Bakunin was not part of the Confederacy, and even the TEC couldn’t penetrate beyond the scarred surface of its society. Klaus had been liaison between the TEC and the SEEC intelligence community, a dusty desk job, when he had learned of his quarry’s continued existence.

The file on “Dominic Magnus” had been buried in with a mass of reportage dealing with the arms industry on Bakunin. Klaus would never have seen it if the information packet hadn’t been mislabeled. The report had been requested by Klaus’ opposite number in the SEEC, and Klaus was only supposed to be a courier. Instead, someone had keyed the file “ATTN: Klaus Dacham.”

That file had been a minor part of Sirius’ and Centauri’s massive preparatory effort for Operation Rasputin. Seeing “Dominic Magnus” buried in those files had resurrected old phantoms Klaus had long thought exorcised.

Even when he maneuvered to be part of Operation Rasputin, Klaus had never thought he’d receive authorization to go to the planet himself.

Then, suddenly, Dimitri placed Klaus in command of the mission.

Not only a command, a real force, but a chance to—

Klaus slammed his fist into the wall of the hemispherical observatory.

It had been prefect! Stage one of Operation Rasputin was to take a munitions company. A munitions company. The objective was almost tailored for him to target “Dominic.”

He looked out the holo-transparent walls and watched the mop-up operation. Klaus’ ship was settled in the landing quad, a Barracuda-class troop-carrier with oversized engines. It was modified and fitted with enough weaponry to conduct an air assault on a small city. The Paralian-designed ship was named Kalcthwee’rat. The translation was Blood-Tide.

The ship and 130 Occisis-trained marines, and the murderer got away.

“Colonel?”

Klaus turned toward the voice.

The woman addressing him was still in field combat armor, though she’d removed her helmet. Her hair was shaved into the transverse stripes that were the trademark of the Occisis marines. Her red hair and stocky build marked her as a native. She was the captain, the ranking officer among Klaus’ marines.

Klaus didn’t like her. He had been given a week to prepare himself for the mission and another week with the marines in Earth orbit. The briefings he gave on Bakunin and their mission—the part the marines knew about anyway—had been successful, for the most part. He felt he could count on the large majority of his troops.

But Captain Kathy Shane had remained aloof. She had paid attention to Klaus’ strategic holos, and the mission specs, but she’d remained uninvolved in Klaus’ discussion of Bakunin itself. She acted like a sympathizer.

Klaus turned to face a blackened spot where a laser had penetrated the wall. It obscured the world beyond. “Captain Shane.”

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

That wasn’t quite true. What he wanted to do was get some priorities straight. “I understand that you didn’t fire upon Dominic Magnus as he escaped toward Godwin. Is this correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

Klaus ran his hand over the marble desk. A corner was charred by the same shot that had pierced the wall. So close.

“Was there confusion about the identity of the target?”

“No, sir.”

Klaus turned back to the marine captain. Same nonexpression on her face. That annoyed him. “Perhaps you can clarify exactly why you didn’t fire on him?”

“Sir, we have standing orders from the Terran Executive Command not to widen the scope of any conflict on Bakunin—”

Klaus nodded. “Until our primary mission has reached the stage—etcetera, etcetera. I know that. You have not answered my question. Why did you not fire on him?”

Was that a trickle of sweat on her upper lip? Good. “Sir. By the time we had the craft targeted, he had left the perimeter of the complex. Our orders were not to expand—”

“I see.” Klaus paced around the desk. “Now, listen closely, Captain. Who is in charge of this operation?”

“You are, sir.”

“I am glad we have that straight.” Klaus sat in the chair behind the desk. “From now on I want you to act like it.”

“Sir?”

“TEC isn’t commanding this mission. I am. And when I give you a priority target, you take the target out!”

“But sir, our orders from command—”

“Only concern me.”

“Yes, sir.” Yes, he had her sweating all right. Now the hard edge in her voice was becoming a little more strained, a little more forced.

“I’m glad we have an understanding. Now here’s an order, and it takes precedence over everything— understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even Executive Command.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Your orders are— If anyone, I mean anyone, sees ‘Dominic Magnus,’ they are to kill him on sight. I do not care if this means dropping a warhead in the center of Godwin. He is to be eliminated. No qualifications. No exceptions. No excuses. This isn’t going to happen again.”

She looked a little pale now. “Yes, sir.”

Klaus nodded, smiled to himself, and turned the chair around. He didn’t hear her leave. “Is there something you want to say, Shane?”

“Sir, there’s a question about what to do with the prisoners—”

Klaus closed his eyes and sighed. “What’s to question? Shoot them.”

Her voice finally cracked. “Sir?”

“Was I unclear?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m glad we had this chance to talk. Dismissed.”

Klaus listened to her leave. He hoped he wouldn’t have any more problems from that quarter, but he doubted it. Shane was on the top of a list of people Klaus saw as spots of potential disloyalty. Spots that would need to be cleaned before he went on to the second phase of this operation.

But not yet. First he had to get GA&A up and running.

The holo lit up above Dominic’s desk and Klaus turned to face it. It was the ground team’s chief engineer, Atef Bin Said. The TEC had recruited the tech on Khamsin, right out of Hegira Aerospace’s R&D department.

“Damage report.”

“Go ahead.” Klaus closed his eyes because the holo projection had been damaged. The unsteady image wildly shifted perspective and it hurt his eyes.

“As expected, the perimeter air defenses of the complex are a total loss. The attack wiped them out. The field generators and weaponry aboard the Blood-Tide can cover the same area until we can rebuild the ground units. Damage to the aboveground structures is superficial. I estimate repairs to be in the neighborhood of a hundred-thousand credits—”

“Gold, Said, we’re on Bakunin now. Gold or the equivalent—”

“Ah, yes, sir— I’ll get the estimates converted.”

“What else?”

“Well, I said most of the aboveground damage is superficial. One building—GA&A security from our intel schematics—is a near total loss. This is, again, something we can handle from the Blood-Tide. In fact it would be recommended that we do that, in any event, until we have thoroughly examined GA&A’s security setup. There could be some nasty surprises, given the environment.”

“I understand. Anything else?”

“Yes, and I am afraid it is something we didn’t anticipate. Ninety percent of GA&A’s processing capability, its records and mainframes, was bunkered two klicks below the surface. TEC didn’t anticipate any battle damage—”

Klaus nodded. “Booby-trapped. That was the subsurface detonation we detected, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s too hot to make a direct assessment of the damage, but we can assume a total loss. The Blood-Tide doesn’t have the processing capacity we need for an operation like this. It’s a military vessel and the computers are too specialized.”

Klaus rubbed his forehead. The TEC’s little traitor, Helmsman, was to have been waiting in the bunker. Well, this saved Klaus the trouble of dealing with Helmsman himself. The agent down here had made a messy little deal to get Helmsman to even consider turning, but now there wasn’t any question of who was in charge.

Klaus ran GA&A, period.

“How long before we can replace the computers?”

“Do you want to import the units?”

“Hell, yes! We cannot have any native Bakuninites enter the complex—for any reason.”

Said paused in thought. “Fortunately, our finances aren’t limited. The closest Confed planet is Dolbri, but they wouldn’t have what we need. Next closest is Earth—”

“God, no. We can’t go anywhere near the capitals. Too many people are watching.”

Said scratched his chin. “Cynos is out?”

Klaus nodded.

“Styx doesn’t have an export industry ... hmm— Banlieue is a little farther away, and expensive, but they’ll have what we need and it’s in the other direction from the Confed capitals. Will that do?”

Klaus nodded.

“Then I’ll prepare a tach-comm to order what we need. If we use a military transport, it’ll take about twenty-three days standard. About eighteen days Bakunin.”

“Installation?”

“Two days at most.”

The delay grated. But there was little Klaus could do about it. “Make the order. Any good news?”

“Yes, there is. The Shaftsbury has tached in ahead of schedule. We’ll be able to start downloading personnel from orbit as soon as we have the living quarters cleaned out.”

“Good. Keep me posted, and call me as soon as you know exactly when we can expect those computers.”

“Yes, sir.”

The holo faded.

Klaus’ thoughts returned to “Dominic Magnus.” He didn’t expect his marines to get anywhere near him again. His sudden reappearance showed that if there was one thing the half-human bastard knew how to do, it was preserve his own hide.

Fortunately, Klaus had contingencies. Contingencies that had nothing to do with TEC covert operations. He had not relied on the TEC-supplied commandos to fulfill his own personal agenda, especially back when it seemed unlikely that he would be part of the Bakunin operation. He had made other arrangements.

Klaus walked to the door where he had left his case. He picked it up and carried it to the desk and set it down. He stuck his thumb in a hole in the side and waited for the mechanism to identify his genetic material.

The secure holo was a costly personal extravagance when the TEC would provide its officers with communications just as secure. Of course, the communications provided by the TEC weren’t secure from the TEC.

The lid opened and the holo’s lasers carved a blue spherical test pattern in the air over the base. Klaus tapped a twenty-three digit number seed into the keypad to start the scrambler on its work. Then he called a number in Godwin.

The holo display proved superfluous, since the recipient only transmitted audio back. “Greetings, Colonel.”

“It is time we discuss our arrangement, Mr. Webster.” Webster was an alias for a man—or woman, the voice could easily be a construct—that Klaus had never met. Klaus had worked a long time getting a few contacts on Bakunin. Now that he had actually come to Bakunin, he had made one of these contacts lead him to someone who seemed to have fingers in every rotten pie in Godwin.

To Klaus, Webster was nothing more than a high-priced informant, a messenger boy—

But informants had their uses.

“I’ve been expecting your call,” Webster said. “I have been quite thorough in assuring that the proper people are aware of the value you’ve placed on GA&A’s personnel.”

Klaus smiled. The TEC might accept half-measures, but Klaus was not going to take a chance that there were any of Dominic’s loyalists at large. It was an easy thing to get GA&A’s personnel list from Helmsman. No one had even questioned why he had needed it.

“There’s a special one on the list. One that has to be eliminated.”

“Dominic Magnus.”

“Good guess.”

“How much is this one?”

“My finances are unlimited. He must die. Even if you have to do the job personally. My security teams tracked him into East Godwin.”

There was a dry chuckle on the other end. “I don’t do anything personally. Besides, East Godwin would do the job for free. But—”

“But what?”

“I believe your target, and someone else on your list, are in the hands of the Church.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Bakunin Church of Christ, Avenger. I gave them your list. BCCA is always open to new means for receiving donations.”

“Is he dead?” It would be appropriate for a church to dispense justice, after what he had done—

“BCCA is—hmm—unusual. They do things their own way. He’ll be alive until airtime. The show starts in a few minutes. Your holo can probably pick up their transmission.”

“I don’t like delays.”

“If there’s a problem, feel free to call back. Think of it this way, you get to watch.”

Webster cut the connection.

The show?

Klaus adjusted the holo receiver and tried to find BCCA’s broadcast. It took a while. The airwaves on this planet were hopelessly cluttered and followed no logical progression. When he locked on to the BCCA broadcast, it was a scene featuring a priest on stage in front of a massive tote board labeled “Gold for God.”

The priest yelled at an unseen crowd. “Welcome to our program of retribution.”

There were cheers.

Klaus settled back to watch the broadcast.

Ten years he’d waited to get this close to Jonah.

Fifteen since their mother, Helen Dacham, had died.

“Death is the best you can hope for, brother,” Klaus said.

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

Criminal Justice

“An efficient legal system operates on the assumption that everyone is guilty of something.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Justice in government is as rare as a rich [man] in prison.”

—Datia Rajastahn

( ?-2042)

Dominic dreamed ugly dreams.

Dominic dreamed of a forested ball of racism called Waldgrave, his home planet. He dreamed of his mother’s drunken rages. He dreamed of her paranoia. He dreamed of the salvation the TEC recruiter offered.

Dominic dreamed of an ugly little planet in the Sigma Draconis system, a planet named Styx. He dreamed of thirty-five thousand people vaporizing as two tons of polyceram monomolecular filament struck from orbit. He dreamed of a city that no longer existed.

Dominic dreamed of the day that city had caught up with him. He dreamed of the slug slamming into his shoulder. He dreamed of falling over the railing, the endless fall. He dreamed of his body’s reconstruction.

Dominic dreamed of the destruction of GA&A.

He dreamed his life was a massive glass sculpture, shattering again and again. Every time it broke, a few more pieces were missing. Now it seemed all he had left was a few twisted shards.

* * * *

As the stunner gradually wore off, the outside world leaked back in. Dom heard people talking.

Someone with an insincere voice yelled at a crowd. “Welcome to your program of retribution.” Cheers. “First off, I want to welcome back part of our viewing audience. The Zeno Commune has finally repaired the battle damage to their vidsat substation—”

The emcee was drowned out by more cheers. Dom was still fogged, but he could tell he was overhearing a holo broadcast.

“And now, our first criminal. He was caught by one of our roving patrols raping a teenage girl—

“So what are we going to do to him?”

“Fry him!”

“I can’t hear you.”

“FRY HIM!”

“And why are we going to fry him?”

“BECAUSE HE’S SCUM!”

The audience broke into applause.

“Well, we certainly hope so. But you know the rules. Our lines are open for pledges, and our target with this boy is a full kilogram.”

Whistles from the audience.

“If we don’t meet or exceed our target—we let him go!”

Boos from the audience.

“So, while the home audience is making up their minds, let’s roll the video of the attack—”

“You, CEO-man, you awake yet?”

Dom opened his eyes. The last voice was a lot closer.

He was on the floor of a small concrete cell, and a young woman was bending over him. Her age was somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two years standard. She was only one-fifty centimeters tall. She had straight black hair cut on an asymmetrical diagonal, almond-shaped green eyes, and a concavity in the flesh of her neck that was the sign of an electronic biolink.

“I’m awake. Where is this?” he asked as he got to his feet.

He looked around for the holo he heard in the background. The cell itself was empty, but one wall opened into a carpeted lobby. The room beyond was where the holo was playing.

“Prime time, that’s where this is. We’re going to be making money for the mother Church—”

The lobby was done up like an exec office, static holo landscapes on the walls, soft-white indirect lighting. A uniformed guard sat in a plush red-velvet office chair, watching a holo mounted on a receptionist’s desk. The desk must have faced the entrance to the room, but any exit was far to the right, out of his field of view.

The entrance to the cell was open, with the exception of a sphere mounted on a column, standing in the middle of the doorway. It didn’t take a genius to figure that it was an Emerson field generator, the same idea as the paladin’s stunner, a field programmed to raise havoc with human neural impulses. Walking through it would be painful, and you’d come out the other end unconscious.

Dom had a glimmer of an idea.

“The name’s Tetsami,” his cellmate went on. “Let me guess, you tried to shaft them on payment for their Samaritan deal.”

“How’d you know?” He kept his eye on the guard. The guard seemed intent on the holo broadcast and wasn’t even looking in their direction.

“The only way they’d end up with a corp type. They take tithing very seriously. They’re doing background checks on you now, to get something to put you on trial for. They need to recoup their costs.”

After an overlong pause she asked, “So what do they call you?”

“I’m called Dominic Magnus.” He debated with himself over what he was about to do.

Unless you pumped a hell of a lot of power into it, or it was tuned to a visible EM frequency, a static Emerson field was invisible. There’d be no way to see how the thing was tuned unless something passed through it.

He could make a few assumptions, though.

The Emerson effect’s peak absorption band was based on the power you pumped into it. Widening the band increased the power consumption logarithmically—if someone pumped an infinite power supply into an Emerson field, you’d have a black hole—but at normal power ranges the fields were narrow-band things. There was a good chance that the field on this door was keyed only to interfere with a biological nervous system.

Of course, like most defensive screens, it could have a processor ready to adjust the frequency of the peak absorption band based on the field’s own feedback.

In that case he would be in trouble.

Tetsami snorted. “Sounds like a corp name. You know, they’re going to put one hell of a price on you. An exec would pull hellacious pledges from the communes.”

“What’d you do?” There was also the small chance that the field was powered up to interfere with more things on the EM spectrum.

That would also be trouble.

“Same deal, bad luck to be saved before I got paid. Unfortunately, my normal employment is on their sins list.”

“So what do you do for a living?”

Dom ran his photoreceptors through the whole range of possible configurations. There was no visible sign of the field’s presence. Which only meant that, at the moment, it wasn’t interfering with any of the EM spectrum he could pick up.

“Software, industrial espionage, that sort of thing. Apparently that makes me a thief. But I’ll be better off than you will.”

Dom inched up to the edge of the field. It could’ve come off of GA&A’s assembly line. GA&A had a specialty in small-scale field jobs.

“Why do you say that?”

Tetsami seemed to realize something abnormal was going on. She kept her voice calm, but Dom felt her slide up next to him to watch his hands. “They told me the script. I’m the multiple-choice criminal today. Three pledge totals, the viewers are going to vote on whether I die, am maimed, or set free. I’ll be set free.”

“Why are you so sure?” Odds were it was just the neural field. Dom doubted there were any more fancy, or expensive, security measures. At least, that’s what he was hoping.

After all, if there were anything beyond the field, they’d dispense with the guard.

Dom gritted his teeth and stuck his left hand through the field. If he was wrong and the field was broader-spectrum than he expected, there was a good chance he’d fry the cybernetics in his arm.

Nothing happened.

He saw Tetsami wince; obviously she had tried this before. However, Tetsami probably had natural limbs, while Dom’s left arm was totally artificial.

There was a tingle, but no paralysis, no pain, and no alarms. He had to elbow Tetsami to continue the conversation; they couldn’t have the guard looking around now.

“You see,” she continued, “they’re giving me five minutes for my own defense.”

Dom felt along the other side of the central sphere. It was the obvious place for the control. There had to be a cutoff. Dom hoped it was within reach. “You’re going to convince the audience you’re innocent?”

Tetsami laughed. It sounded a little forced, but the guard didn’t notice. “Hell, no. I’m going to promise to fuck anyone who donates a kilogram to let me go.”

Dom found the switch.

He pressed the button, and again no alarms.

To test it, he put his right hand through the area where the field was. Nothing. The screen had dropped.

He waved Tetsami forward. “That’s a dangerous offer.”

Tetsami hesitantly stepped over the threshold. “My philosophy is to take things as they come. Get free, worry about the consequences later.”

Dom stepped through himself, releasing the switch. According to the readout, the field sprang back up.

Now he had to deal with the guard. “Are you sure that you want to promise something you might not want to go through with?”

The guard was still oblivious.

Tetsami hung back, letting him take the lead. “If someone gets me out of this mess ...”

The guard didn’t show any sign that he knew his prisoners had escaped until Dom had slipped directly behind him. The guard began to turn in his seat and saw Tetsami. As the guard’s hand went for his gun, Dom wrapped his left arm around the guard’s neck.

“... I owe him that much,” Tetsami finished.

Dom got the guard in a sleeper hold. He hoped the guard didn’t have any enhancements in the neck area. “Tetsami, get his weapon.”

Tetsami ran up and emptied the guard’s holster. The guard thrashed a lot, kicking over the holo before losing consciousness. Dom let him go. The guard slid off the chair and landed facedown on the ground.

Tetsami covered the guard with her new weapon. It was a GA&A pulse laser.

The exit was a fairly normal chromed metal door, but above it was a red blinking light that said “on the air.” This was a staging area, a holding cell for guests about to go in front of the audience.

“What now?” Tetsami asked.

“We dispose of the guard. Go over and hit the switch for the cell’s field.”

Tetsami did so, and Dom dragged the guard into the cell.

“Do you know the layout of the building?” he asked as he patted the guard down for IDs or card keys. No such luck.

She shook her head. “I was as zoned as you were when they brought me in. All I know is that this room is right off the stage, and they can only open it from the other side.”

The room was small enough that Dom could see at a glance that there was only the one door. He searched around a bit, but nothing offered itself as a control to open it. Tetsami was probably right.

“We’ll have to ambush them when they come for us.” He went to the desk and pulled the holo projector upright. One of the lasers inside it had been knocked out of alignment, wildly distorting the blue part of the image, but they could still see the show. “This should give us some warning.”

They stood in silence for a while on either side of the chrome door.

The show went on.

They had fried the rapist. The emcee, a slick hawker in a cassock and black pompadour, was going on about the next criminal. A mass murderer, he said.

After a few minutes, Tetsami asked, “How’d you put your arm through that thing?”

Dom kept watching the show. They were showing a video of the current subject emptying a Dittrich Hyper-Velocity Railgun into an East Godwin apartment complex.

“A biofield has to intersect a human nervous system to disable someone. My arm’s a construct.”

Tetsami gave him an appraising look, and they went back to waiting in silence.

They topped ten kilograms on the murderer. They burnt him alive, to the applause of the studio audience. Once the corpse sputtered out, the emcee came back. “Once again we’ve achieved divine retribution directed by your pledges. When we come back from our sponsor’s message, we have a very special person to put on the block. The target is going to be a hundred kilograms. You won’t want to miss this one.”

The holo started to play a recruitment commercial for the Girolamo Commune. It took a dozen kilograms to buy a share.

Tetsami leveled the laser at the door. “A hundred K! You’ve got to be on next. Get ready—”

As if Tetsami had cued it, the door whooshed open.

Two guards were coming in. They weren’t expecting trouble. Dom reached through and grabbed a wad of faithful. He held the leader by the gun arm and kneed him in the crotch.

Tetsami fired through the open door and a pulsing polychromatic beam burned the air. It got the second guard in the shoulder.

Dom brought his left fist down on the back of the leader, who was doubled over in front of him. The guard dropped to the floor.

The one with the burned shoulder committed a tactical blunder. He should have ducked for cover and called for help. Instead, he tried to close the door. The chrome door closed. The first guard was draped across the threshold and the door slammed into his side, prompting a groan.

Dom jumped through the gap. The mobile guard pulled his weapon and tried to track him. Tetsami shot him in the other shoulder. The guard’s arm jerked, sending his shot wide as Dom got behind him.

Dom linked his hands and slammed both fists across the guard’s back. The guard bounced off the far wall with a thud. The guard’s laser dropped. Dom didn’t wait for Tetsami to shoot again; he rushed the guard’s back, grabbed him by the hair, and slammed his face into the wall.

The guard collapsed at Dom’s feet. Dom glanced back at the door and saw that both guards were now unconscious. Tetsami stepped through the door as he bent and retrieved the guard’s weapon. She was holding two guns herself, having disarmed the guard blocking the door.

They were in a short hallway with only one open exit. First came a half-dozen closed chromed doors. Then there was a curtain at the end of the hall. Beyond the curtain, Dom could hear a roaring crowd and the emcee’s patter. No one seemed to have heard the commotion.

Tetsami stared at the curtain. “Think the alarm’s raised yet?”

“Not yet. Not until the end of the commercial break.”

“What now? Got to be a thousand people out there screaming for blood.”

Dom started adjusting his audio pickup. He ran it through the onboard computer, and there was something repetitive about the waveform. “I don’t think so.”

“What did you say?”

“Have you ever seen that studio?”

“No—”

“Come on.”

Dom headed straight for the curtain. He emerged right behind the emcee, put his arm around his neck, and put the guard’s laser up to the man’s ear. Dom faced the cameras. “This is called a powerful negotiating position.”

Tetsami followed. She covered the broadcast studio.

The audience stopped applauding as the tech manning the speakers cut the feed. There wasn’t a live audience, or even space for an audience. There was just the bare stage, lights, tote board, the holo cameras, and, behind a glass partition, a tech manning the broadcast and the electronics. There were two guards, but they were busy removing a charred corpse from the stage.

The guy in the cassock lost his cool. “Guards!”

Tetsami pointed one of her lasers at the two men on the corpse. She kept the other pointed at the tech. “Nope.”

There was a door to the control room, and Dom headed for it, dragging his hostage. The emcee was still bleating. “Help. Someone call the tac units. Get a paladin up here—gack.”

Dom had been increasing the pressure on the guy’s windpipe to make him shut up. He shouldered through the soundproofed door to the control room while Tetsami covered the tech and the guards. Dom threw the emcee to the ground in front of the console and addressed the tech. “Put on a prerecorded show, more commercials, something—”

The emcee found his voice. “Don’t do it Hanson, sound the alarm—”

Dom shot the emcee in the gut. The emcee screamed, and the tech lost all the color from his face. “Your host will probably survive that wound. Do what I say or he’s going to look like your criminal of the week.” Dom cocked his head toward the charred corpse.

Dom emphasized the statement by upping the power control on the laser. The iris on the firing aperture obligingly dilated a few fractions of a millimeter. The power cell could only supply five shots at the maximum setting. But they were shots best not contemplated.

The tech did as he was told.

The viewing public was about to be treated to a full hour of prerecorded commercials. It would be a little time before anyone in the Church organization realized that something had gone desperately wrong with their programming. By then he hoped to be out of the building.

Once the commercials got under way, Tetsami covered the guards and the tech back to the cell room. Dom had to drag the wounded emcee, who was crying. All six-including the two unconscious guards—ended up in the cell. Dom didn’t bother deactivating the field, he pushed them through, one at a time, to fall unconscious on the other side.

“Now—” he began.

“Now,” Tetsami finished, “we get the hell out of here.”

* * * *

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mergers

“Alliances are based on the premise that the parties involved benefit more from screwing the rest of the world than from screwing each other.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Money degrades all the gods of man and converts them into commodities.”

—Karl Marx

(1818-1883)

Just outside the door of the high-tech holo studio was an anachronistic maze of stone corridors. The hall was dimly lit by recessed fixtures that tried to imitate torchlight. In recessed niches sat religious statues. The statues were either martial in nature, or they were horrific.

Either the Crusades or the Inquisition.

As they ran through the halls searching for an exit from the catacombs, Dom passed one that was particularly disturbing. He only caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough for the whole picture to register. The sculpture showed a pair of hooded figures lowering a pathetic-looking individual into a vat. What was in the vat wasn’t clear, but the victim’s expression left little doubt that it was extremely unpleasant.

Dom did not like the memories that conjured up.

Too many nightmares to wake up from.

“You didn’t handle yourself—” Tetsami paused for breath “—like an exec back there.” From the tone of Tetsami’s voice, it was a compliment. “And what do people. Really call you? I’m not going to be. Yelling ‘Dominic Magnus.’ In the middle. Of the next, firefight.”

They were fugitives running for their lives and he almost told her to call him Mr. Magnus. He had to remind himself he wasn’t at GA&A anymore. He was just another piece of human flotsam washed up on the shores of Godwin now.

But only for the moment.

“Call me Dom.”

Tetsami nodded.

The catacombs were endless. They ran past dozens of heavy iron doors. The doors were windowless, but Dom figured that behind them sat material for future programming. Every few seconds he stopped at one and tried to open it.

He stopped when one finally opened, releasing the fetid stench of mold and rot. Beyond the door was a windowless cube, the stone walls covered with black-green slime. In the center, a humanoid skeleton that still bore a few scraps of flesh completed the effect.

Flabby white vermin scurried away from the light.

Behind him a breathless Tetsami said, “Ugh.”

They went another five minutes without finding stairs or a window. The farther they went while still in the Church’s domain, the greater the chance God’s servants were going to land on them.

Dom stopped Tetsami at an intersection. “We’ve got to get some bearings before they start after us.”

“We’re getting nowhere,” Tetsami agreed, panting.

They must be underground. From the stone and the low-tech construction, the place they were in could date from the first colonization of Bakunin. Back before the cities decided to jell. These corridors were built, probably, when the Church was sovereign over a large section of what was now part of Godwin. These halls could snake under the city forever.

However, he had the feeling that there was a cathedral above them somewhere.

Now that they had stopped, the only sound was the echo of dripping water.

“So where—”

Dom put his fingers to his lips and began to increase the gain on his audio input. He thought he could hear something else.

Tetsami’s breathing became a thunderous bellows in his ears as he upped the gain. He tried to have his onboard computer filter out the noise and was only partially successful. He muted her breathing, but suffered a periodic deafness every time Tetsami exhaled—

But there was something else.

He might not know a word of Latin, but he knew where it was coming from.

“This way.” Dom followed the sound.

It was long going, with a lot of false turns and backtracking. But eventually they came to a wooden door behind which was a spiral staircase. From up the staircase came the sounds of a midnight service. Dom took the lead and started upward. Tetsami followed.

They circled upward, past more wooden doors that opened onto more underground corridors. When the stairs ran out, they found themselves in a niche recessed behind a Gothic stone arch. Dom looked out of the darkened space and into the floodlit cavern of a stone cathedral.

He grabbed Tetsami and started for the doors. They ran in the shadowed space beneath the choir loft, along the narthex.

The Church of Christ, Avenger, had tried to recapture the architectural glory of the Terran Middle Ages. The ceiling arched way above the assembly, dwarfing the human worshipers. A Hegira C-545 could be comfortably parked in the nave. The silhouette of Schwitzguebel, Bakunin’s largest moon, was visible behind a stained-glass rose window high above the altar.

As they ran, Dom desperately hoped that no one noticed them.

Their shadowed hallway followed the main chamber. To their left, the only thing separating Dom and Tetsami from the ranks of seated worshipers was a fluted stone pillar every three meters. To their right they passed niches containing the odd—some very odd—saint.

Dom kept an eye on the throngs of faithful gathered in the pews of the nave. The crowd had a few nonhumans— though no true aliens—and seemed to be quite involved in their devotion. What worried Dom was the fact that every ten meters or so, they passed the back of a paladin’s body armor. The Church’s muscle was invariably facing the crowd. He couldn’t count on that to last.

They stopped short of the main entrance, opposing the altar. There were two paladins guarding the doors, facing into the nave.

“Shit.”

Tetsami shook her head. “They go to a lot of trouble to keep their faithful in line—”

“Let’s get off the floor before someone spots us.”

They faded into another niche recessed into the right wall of the narthex. It was another spiral staircase, this one going upward. They ended up on a balcony overlooking the service and all the paladins.

Dom was running out of ideas. “Know how this place operates?”

“Caught their holo show a few times.” She shrugged and continued to catch her breath.

“Does it look like the battlesuits are guarding the worshipers?”

Tetsami nodded. “Must take tithing very seriously.”

If the guards were for an external threat, they wouldn’t be watching the faithful quite as closely. Dom retreated from the balcony. “If we’re lucky, the guards will disappear when the crowd leaves. We just have to wait.”

So they waited.

They sat on a stone bench carved into the wall. Tetsami faced down one end of the hall, Dom the other. The paladins didn’t move.

There was a long pause before Tetsami asked, “You native to Bakunin?”

“I thought it was bad form to ask that.”

Dom heard her chuckle. “No, the question you don’t ask is why a nonnative came to the planet in the first place.”

“No, I’m not native.”

There was another long pause. Then Dom asked, “Why do you ask?”

“Sometimes seems Bakunin’s got the monopoly on god-junkies.” Dom had never really thought of it that way. “Do things get this weird off-planet?”

“It’s not easily escaped. Wasn’t this planet founded on socialist atheism?”

Tetsami chuckled again and waved at the cathedral. “The Founding Commune would toss their collective lunch if they saw this display.”

“At least there isn’t a state religion.”

“There will be—five minutes after someone founds a state on Bakunin.”

“We should both live that long.”

The priest went on interminably. It was beginning to become clear why there was heavy security. It had slowly dawned on Dom that two-thirds of the worshipers wore restraint buckles on wrists and ankles. He was looking at a captive audience. Most of them were prisoners of the Church.

After a while Tetsami asked, “Would it be bad form to ask what nuked you?”

“Meaning?”

“Your suit’s worth a kilo. They put a hundred-K bill on your head. You look like an exec. You fight like a brunet refugee from the New Aryan Front. And you smell like an East Godwin maggot-brain—”

“You forgot the cybernetic limb.”

“Yeah, so where do you come from?”

Dom clenched his teeth. They were artificial, smooth, and fit together perfectly. He got no pleasure from grinding them. “You just told me you weren’t supposed to ask that.”

“Well, fuck me, Dom. I have an unhealthy curiosity. Won’t force it.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

Dom relented. “My company, Godwin Arms, was attacked—shot out from under me. My escape crashed me into East Godwin.”

“Oh, shit.” Tetsami only managed a hoarse whisper.

“What?” Dom turned to face her and her normally pale skin had faded to white.

“Shit shit shit.” Tetsami shook her head violently.

“What?” He repeated, more forcefully this time.

She sucked in a breath. “The biggest contract I ever got blew up in my face during the final meet. My contacts were scragged by a paladin hit team ...” She shook her head again, as if she didn’t believe what she was saying. “Guy, I was working for GA&A.”

“Wait a minute—”

“No, I don’t believe in coincidence. Those paladins came out of nowhere. You got tagged by them, too—”

Tetsami’s nervousness was rubbing off on him. “Slow down. Let me think.”

“Think? Someone’s got a contract out on us.”

“I don’t like this.”

“What’s not to like?” Tetsami put her head in her hands.

Dom went on. “Having GA&A fail like that is one thing—but going after field employees is another.”

Tetsami seemed not to hear him. “It was the job, right? Had to be. Espionage is a dangerous biz ...”

Dom thought of the invasion, and the hardware that the Confederacy had brought to bear against GA&A. “I don’t think the hit squad had anything to do with your line of work. It was who you were working for.”

Dom heard the service breaking up below. He stood up and watched the crowd of involuntary worshipers filing out, escorted by the paladins. The two-thirds with the restraint buckles were vanishing into the sides of the church, presumably to be locked into the catacombs that he and Tetsami had vacated. The free third left through the main doors at the front of the cathedral.

Tetsami was looking up at him. “Don’t say that.”

“I think that explains why they treated us differently.”

“What do you mean?”

“There has to be quite a lead time before they put a victim on their show. They seem to have at least five hundred selected criminals in their charge, but they scheduled us the same day they locked on to us. They didn’t even spend the time to program one of those restraint buckles. They wanted us on the air tonight.”

The silence between them was tangible.

Tetsami looked him in the face. He could feel his facial tic start up and he turned away.

“It is a contract,” she said.

“There’s probably a standing bounty for the heads of GA&A’s personnel.”

“No. This shit ain’t got nothing to do with me. I’m a freelancer—”

“The kill list is going to be based on the payroll records. If you had contracted work for GA&A, you’d be on the list.”

There was a long pause, and for the first time Tetsami sounded as young as she looked. “Damn it, you’re scaring me.”

Dom had scared himself. He had prepped that commune in the mountains for an emergency such as this. But he had never thought that GA&A’s personnel would become targets. The top execs, maybe. A few corporations weren’t above the occasional assassination. But going after employees, that made no sense. Even if they were loyal to the previous management—

Dom resolved not to lead anyone to the commune until he knew exactly what was going on.

That meant staying in the cold a little longer.

Damn.

Dom kept looking down into the nave. The last paladin was vanishing into the back, leaving the cathedral empty of evidence of the Church’s enforcement arm. The small collection of people below were unrestrained, here of their own free will.

Sick bastards.

“Why?” she asked in a very small voice.

“If I knew that, I’d feel better.”

There was a footstep behind them.

Dom turned and saw a paladin in a full suit, ten meters down the length of the balcony. The paladin froze in shock for a moment. Then he started yelling on his radio and unlimbered his weapon.

Five more minutes and they’d have been out of there with no trouble.

Tetsami shot. Her aim was exemplary. She focused on the faceplate. But the hand laser wasn’t very effective against a military-quality field. Her shot did give them a few seconds to spare. The paladin’s faceplate darkened instantly, blinding him in the dim lighting.

Dom grabbed Tetsami. “Brace yourself.”

“What the fuck?”

Dom lifted her, stepped up on the railing, and jumped off.

Brief memory of flipping backward over the metal railing, tumbling endlessly into the hungry slime below—

He didn’t like doing it, even though it was only ten meters. There was a chance he could land on his real leg. The remaining few worshipers were turning to watch with growing expressions of shock on their faces. The few underneath him were scrambling out of the way.

His left foot, the artificial one, landed on the seat of a pew, sending a vibrating impact up his body. A circuit somewhere was overloaded, and for a split second his entire left side was frozen and numb.

He didn’t stop moving. The pew splintered and gave under his weight, and then his right leg hit the ground. A shuddering wave of pain crashed over his right side as his leg buckled under him. Fortunately, Tetsami was prepared when Dom let her go. He had managed to soak up most of the impact, and she only had to roll into the aisle and get to her feet.

The overloaded circuit started working again, and Dom could stand up. Tetsami was firing again. The paladin on the balcony was still blinded, but Dom’s enhanced ears picked up the sound of more armor approaching.

“Reinforcements are coming.”

Tetsami turned to him and noticed his limp. “Can you walk?”

“The question is, can I run?”

Dom started for the main doors. Tetsami came up behind him and pulled his right arm around her shoulders. She ran, pulling him along. It was a good thing she did. Dom thought his right ankle might be sprained, if not broken.

It seemed to take much too long to get to the doors, but they made it before more paladins showed.

They made it down the front steps of the cathedral and Dom was gratified not to see the war zone of East Godwin—

But he had no idea what part of the city he was in. He had spent way too much time sequestered in his suite at the GA&A complex.

He let Tetsami lead. She seemed to know where they were.

They’d gone barely thirty meters down the road when she turned him down a brick street that’d be too narrow for half the traffic in Godwin. They passed two skinny doorways and she pushed him into a third. This doorway was a kiosk that someone had constructed a building around. No door, only stairs down. In the darkness, Dom automatically adjusted his photoreceptors until he saw a monochrome light-enhanced image of a frozen escalator descending five stories below street level.

“Where are we going?”

“The Bakunin underground—” Tetsami snorted. When they hit a landing, she continued. “Five years ago someone tried to run a passenger commuter train from Godwin to Proudhon. For some reason it went bankrupt about three months before they finished construction. Some bank owns it now.”

They left a short corridor and ended up on an abandoned train platform. Tetsami appeared unable to see in the darkness, but she moved as if she knew the place. She felt along a wall and found a control box.

About half the panels set in the wall started glowing.

Dom killed the gain on his eyes and found himself facing the tracks for a high-speed maglev tube. A chromed sign was set in the wall. It read, “Wilson Station.” He still had no idea what part of town they were in.

“The Church’s goons can search for us, but if we go about a hundred meters down the tube, they haven’t stolen all the magnets yet—”

Dom knew what she meant. He knew the sensors the paladins would be carrying, and sitting under one of those magnets, and under a dozen meters of concrete and earth, would be effective defense against anything but an eyeball search.

“Okay. Kill that light. I can see without it, and it won’t help down the tube anyway.”

She killed it and reached out for him. He grabbed her hand and started limping down the tube. “How’d you know about this place?”

“There are stations all over Godwin.”

True to her prediction, after a short walk, the huge magnets still lined the rails in both floor and ceiling, sunk into the concrete. Even though no power ran through them, they still had enough residual magnetism to slightly blur his vision.

They sat down, next to each other.

“So,” she asked, “after we get out of this, what are we going to do?”

What were they going to do?

What could they do?

Dom called up his personal database and started taking a mental inventory of all the assets he had off the GA&A complex.

* * * *

CHAPTER NINE

Insurance Fraud

“People prefer deals where only they benefit to one of mutual benefit between themselves and others.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Nobody has money who ought to have it.”

—Benjamin Disraeli

(1804-1881)

Tetsami sat across from Dom. They were in a waiting room inside the Reynolds Insurance Building, and she wasn’t quite sure why she was here. They should’ve been holed up under a rock somewhere. She didn’t expect to see her 50 K, in the IBASC or anywhere else, no matter what Dom said. It was too easy to move money around when you didn’t have any.

Despite that, instinct told her to stick with this guy— and her instincts had taken her five years past the point anyone in her line of work had a right to go.

Dom was a survivor. Not only that, there was something buried under the impassive façade. There was power there, nearly hidden. She had the feeling that if they split up, she’d be the one someone canceled.

Still, she wished he had the sense to hole up somewhere. It was barely eight hours since they’d skipped out on the Church. Here they were, though, sitting in a corp lobby, and he flipped channels on the complimentary holo as though nothing had happened.

He barely showed any emotion at all. The only real change she’d seen on his face was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. Not the most reassuring of facial expressions.

The door to the inner offices slid aside, and Tetsami had to restrain a frantic impulse to draw her laser and shoot the secretary. She was too wired. She needed sleep. A luxury that Dom seemed to be able to go without.

The secretary was a chiseled blond whose body looked as though it had cost a small fortune in cosmetic augmentation. He talked to Dom, ignoring Tetsami completely. “Mr. Brodie will see you now.”

Dom turned off the holo. Tetsami had a brief glimpse of stock reports before the picture faded. Dom stood up and ran his hands down the front of his suit. It didn’t help. With what his clothes had been through, he looked more like a refugee from a commune war than a corp type.

Dom walked up to the door and turned around when she didn’t follow. “Come on. This concerns you as well.”

She shrugged and got up. The secretary showed no sign of caring one way or the other. He led them down a plush corridor done up in imported woods, crystal, and off-planet artwork—mostly aquatic sculpture by the Paralians. Incredibly expensive stuff to transport, all webworks of threadlike coral that had to be kept in pressurized cylinders.

What in hell was she doing here? Tetsami got nervous this close to money, at least when it wasn’t hers.

And, how much would a policy against the failure of a corp enterprise be worth? Her paranoia was kicking in again. Her palms were sweaty. It was too close to a payoff.

She felt things could go ballistic very easily.

The blond secretary stopped in front of a large door and motioned them through. The door was manual, a slightly irritating conceit. Dom led the way, and Tetsami had to put a hand out to stop the door from swinging back and hitting her. The secretary stayed in the hall.

Brodie’s office did its best to scream money. None of the wood was native to Bakunin. It was mostly the purple close-grained hardwood from the Kanaka rain forests. The wood gave the room a slight tang of bay leaves and rancid mint.

Brodie was planted behind a U-shaped desk topped with red-and-green-veined marble. The light in the room was provided by the most ostentatious display that Tetsami had ever seen. In the wall behind the desk was a window about ten by four meters. Behind it was a huge Paralian coral sculpture, and darting back and forth in its midst were tiny aquatic life-forms that had to be from Paralia themselves. What the upkeep on that must cost....

In contrast to the luxurious surroundings, Brodie looked like a cheap hood. Tetsami saw Brodie’s lean, hungry face and had no trouble picturing him doing the soft-core hustle on the fringes of East Godwin. Brodie looked like a dealer in flesh, drugs, or money who’d made good.

But then, what was insurance but a high-class protection racket?

Brodie waved them to a pair of plush chairs that were placed an uncomfortable distance from the desk. They sat and Brodie leaned forward and addressed Dom.

“Account number?”

Dom rattled off a twenty-digit number in response.

“Voiceprint checks,” Brodie said as his gaze lit on some display out of Tetsami’s field of vision. Tetsami realized that Brodie only knew Dom as a twenty-digit account number.

Brodie sounded like a hood. He had an East Godwin accent that he didn’t try to hide. “I have reviewed your file and your claim.”

A small holo display lit up above the desk. The image looked to be from a spy sat aimed at the Diderot foothills. The buildings in the image must have been the GA&A complex. Brodie leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “We’ve confirmed that Godwin Arms and Armaments was attacked and seized by hostile forces, as you’ve claimed. Our attempts to contact the new management of GA&A have proved unsuccessful.”

As Brodie spoke, Tetsami saw a craft float into the holo’s point of view. Explosions peppered the perimeter of the buildings. Brodie did something that froze the image.

“We have confirmation that GA&A was attacked by a Paralian-built Confederacy troopship. The Blood-Tide.” Brodie indicated the ship floating just outside the ring of explosions on the holo. Tetsami looked over at Dom. You said nothing about the Confederacy.

Why the hell would the Confederacy take over GA&A?

A smile crossed Brodie’s lips. “This, of course, means we cannot pay out your claim.”

“WHAT?”

Tetsami tensed and her hand drifted toward her laser. Dom was half out of the chair. Brodie was leaning back and Tetsami could sense an edge of violence in the air. She started cataloging escape routes in her mind.

Brodie either didn’t sense the impending violence, or he didn’t care. “Sit down.” Brodie hit a hidden keypad and one of the Kanakan-wood walls began to display glowing blue text. “I’ve worked in claims for nearly a decade. I have rarely come across a clearer case. You just aren’t covered for a military takeover. Rival corporations, yes. Other Bakunin organizations, yes. Confed military, no.”

Dom sat down slowly. “It’s semantics. What difference is there between a corporate takeover and the Confederacy ... ?”

“The one’s covered. The other isn’t.” Brodie looked like he enjoyed what he was doing. “You’re a businessman. You know semantics is the name of the game. This is a contract, and we’re not in this for our health.”

“I could call LCI for an enforcement.”

Brodie laughed. “You knew, when you had Lucifer Contracts witness the agreement, that they only pay attention to the letter of the contract. As I said, I’ve rarely had a clearer case of an unsupported claim.”

Tetsami saw the corner of Dom’s mouth jerk upward. He brought a hand up to his face, as if to hide it. “I see.”

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be more helpful.” Brodie couldn’t have been less sorry.

Dom nodded. “If that is the case, I would like to cash in the equity of the policy.”

Brodie’s smile froze. “You must be kidding.”

Dom was speaking in a cold voice that would have suited a machine. It chilled Tetsami. “Read your own contract. I can cash in the policy, as long as my premiums are up to date, at any time while the policy is in force—”

The idea that he might actually have to pay something out seemed to shrink Brodie in his chair. ‘This is highly irregular.”

“The whole situation is irregular. But you did say Lucifer enforces the letter of the contract. Shall we consult LCI?”

Brodie raised his hands and shook his head. “No need to involve them. You do understand that premature withdrawal incurs a stiff penalty—”

Dom kept the cold edge in his voice. “I understand perfectly.”

Brodie started typing on his hidden keypad, and the glowing blue text on the wall started changing. Brodie nodded to himself a few times.

“Cashing the policy now would realize 587.92 kilograms, after the penalty.”

Tetsami’s jaw dropped. Half a meg, and Dom looked disappointed. How much would it have been if the policy paid out?

Brodie looked at Dom. “How do you want that?”

“Whatever form that will facilitate an immediate transfer.”

Brodie humphed and started typing. It took him nearly ten minutes.

“Okay, we have one hundred seventy-five K in currency from the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective. Fifty K in bonds issued by the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation. Sixty K in off-world credit in the Confederacy Central Bank. Two hundred eleven K in script from the Girolamo Commune. Fifteen K in bonds from Griffith Energy. Twenty-seven K in our own currency. And Fifty K in miscellaneous local currencies that shouldn’t vary more than three percent from the base exchange.”

Dom nodded. “That’s acceptable, excepting the off-world credit.”

“It’s a numbered account.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want anything from off-planet except hard currency.”

Brodie shook his head and went back to his typing. Tetsami was still reeling from the numbers Brodie was tossing around. One hundred seventy-five K in the IBASC? Two hundred eleven K from Girolamo? Not only were the numbers huge, but scrip from those places was overvalued by thirty percent on the street because of its stability, and scarcity. It was hard to believe that over two hundred kilos of Girolamo currency was in circulation.

Brodie sighed. “We’re scraping the outside of the liquid assets. We have a speculation portfolio of off-world hard currency that’s currently valued at forty-five K. We can only guarantee that value within five percent over the next three days—”

“I can deal with that.”

“Finally, we have fifteen K worth of stock in Bleek Munitions. Will that be acceptable?” Dom nodded. “Good, then let’s start transferring accounts.”

* * * *

They left Brodie’s office with a hand comm that recorded assets that totaled nearly six hundred K. They were in the maglev elevator off the waiting room before Tetsami spoke.

“Can I have my money?”

She noticed Dom twitch the corner of his mouth. “When I said that, I thought I was going to receive the full value of the policy—”

Tetsami grunted. She hadn’t expected much more.

Dom shook his head. “It’s not that. You’ll be paid. I have an obligation to all my employees. I’m going to do right by them.”

Tetsami looked at the exec. No sign of sarcasm. He was serious. “How many people are you talking about?”

“I just have to—”

“Fifteen hundred?”

“Something like that.”

“How in the hell do you think you’re going to—Hell, what is it that you think you’re going to do?”

Dom sighed. “I’m not sure right now. I was hoping for an adequate flow of capital to start operations somewhere else. But cashing the policy only resulted in enough to— maybe—invest in a small inventory of personal hardware.”

The maglev whooshed to a stop and the doors opened. Tetsami scanned the lobby of the office building. She didn’t see anything she thought dangerous. But they were deep into Central Godwin, not her territory. The exec with the chrome suit could be the spotter for a hit and she wouldn’t know.

Calm down, she told herself.

“You were planning to start over from scratch?”

Dom led her toward the doors. There was little emotion in his voice. “I did it once. I’ll do it again.”

The doors slid open, and they walked out on to West Vanzetti. Now that day had hit, crossing the street was out of the question. Groundcars were zooming by, apparently at random. Dom seemed at a bit of a loss. He didn’t seem to know how to get around in the city.

Tetsami tapped his shoulder. “Let me borrow your hand comm.”

A trace of suspicion crossed Dom’s face even though she didn’t know the codes. He handed it over.

Tetsami walked as close as she dared to the speeding traffic and raised her right hand, holding the comm up toward the air traffic.

It took three seconds for a Leggett Luxury contragrav to swing a dangerous arc and pull to a low hover in front of Tetsami, barely above the speeding groundcar traffic. Three aircraft had to swerve to avoid it, one pulling a full vertical.

The Leggett cab slid over the pedestrian walkway, pivoting its passenger doors toward Dom and Tetsami.

She handed the comm back to Dom. “Where do we want to go?”

“Let’s just get airborne.”

* * * *

CHAPTER TEN

High-Risk Investments

“Money can be neither created or destroyed. It can only be taken from other people.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Money often costs too much.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882)

The aircar was laid out more like a limo than a cab. The back of the Leggett was a study in leather and earth tones. It was obvious that the driver was an independent doing business with the corp HQs in Central Godwin. They both got in the back before the driver could get a good look at the condition of Dom’s suit and have second thoughts.

The driver didn’t look enthusiastic. “Let’s see some money, folks.”

Sheesh, another perfectly chiseled blond. Tetsami wondered if it was contagious. Dom wordlessly typed a command on the comm and the driver looked at the balance change on his meter. The driver nodded. He didn’t seem too surprised. “Where?”

Dom looked at Tetsami and said to the driver, “Circle the city for a while. And close the partition.”

Tetsami saw a knowing expression cross the driver’s face as the partition closing the driver’s section opaqued. Things had been going so fast lately that it took her a few seconds to realize the conclusion the driver must have jumped to.

Yeah, she thought, I wish.

Dom looked all right. Okay, admit it, he looks damn good. Especially after all the maggots you been hanging with, girl. But there were computers that showed more emotion than he did. Tetsami tried to picture Dom having an orgasm, or even getting slightly aroused. She couldn’t.

Tetsami wondered exactly what was going on behind those brown eyes of his. She knew that there was a lot more under there than he let up to the surface. She’d caught glimpses of it—

Like the fact he hadn’t let on that the Confederacy had been the folks who took down GA&A. That was the biggest operation she’d ever heard of the Confederacy pulling on this rock. The risk—GA&A was now guaranteed to have a dozen paramilitary groups attack it, just on the grounds that the Confederacy was involved—and the cost of the operation made it pretty obvious that Dom was pretty high on someone’s shit list.

Maybe it was his deadpan personality, in the face of all that, that made her believe him when he said she was going to eventually get her fifty kilos.

But when?

“How much you need to start operations again?”

Dom took a few minutes to answer her. He stared out the window, watching Godwin rush by below them.

“GA&A was covered for a thousand megs, give or take. But that’s a bit more than I need. That would assume rebuilding from the ground up. A friendly takeover of an existing operation, I could leverage that with two hundred—maybe less.”

“Two hundred megagrams?”

Dom nodded.

What did he have? A third of a percent of that?

She was never going to get her money. She was never going to get off this rock. What’d he expect to do, she thought, rob a bank? Yeah, and what’s to prevent the bank from devaluing the currency afterward?

“Who the hell has that much money?” She was barely aware she spoke aloud.

Dom heard her. “There are more millionaires per capita on Bakunin than anywhere else in the Confederacy.”

Tetsami snorted. “Also more rackets, screwballs, hustlers, political dissidents, and religious fanatics.”

“—and two hundred megagrams is not really that much.”

Tetsami gaped. “Not that much?”

“Not in corporate terms. GA&A had at least three, maybe five, hundred megs in hard currency on the premises just for clandestine expenses. For things we didn’t want records— Problem?”

“No.” You couldn’t rob a bank ... “Tell the cab to put down somewhere.”

Dom looked out the window. “Where?”

“Anywhere.”

Dom tapped on the partition. It went transparent again. “Put us down at the nearest hotel.”

There was another knowing look from the driver as they started down.

“What’s on your mind?” Dom asked her.

“Wait.”

The Leggett set down on the roof of a high-rise on the west side. Tetsami figured it was expensive as hell, but Dom could afford it. They stepped out on to a small landing field next to a restaurant that took up half the roof. The cab lifted off, leaving them alone in the center of a number of parked contragravs.

The restaurant was enclosed by a transparent dome and seemed to be doing a healthy business with the breakfast crowd. Tetsami walked away from it until she reached the railing marking the edge of the roof.

She noticed a slight hesitation before Dom joined her by the railing.

Fear of heights? she wondered.

When Dom asked her again, he had to raise his voice over the sound of the wind. “Now, what is it?”

“Where is all this money?”

Dom turned toward her, and cast a glance back at the restaurant. No one was paying attention to them. “A safe bunkered in the third sublevel of the office complex at Godwin Arms.” Realization seemed to strike him. “You can’t be thinking—”

Tetsami laughed. “What the hell else would I be thinking?”

The hotel was set on a rise. They were maybe half a klick above the city. Hell of a view of East Godwin, craters and all. Dom was staring east, toward the mountains.

“Do you have any idea—” he started, shaking his head. “A Confederacy troop-carrier. A Paralian-built Barracuda-class drop-ship. That means at least a hundred marines, ten secondary transports, weaponry that I don’t even want to think about.”

“Look, if you can tell me that two hundred megs isn’t much money. I can tell you that the quickest way to get it is to break into your own safe.”

“You don’t understand the security on that complex—”

“Do you understand the security?”

“I designed most of it.”

Tetsami turned around and grinned at Dom. She brushed windblown hair out of her eyes. “So, with your knowledge and six hundred K on our side, tell me it can’t be done.”

“It can’t be done.”

She snorted and turned her face out of the wind, leaning on the railing. “Yeah. And you think it’s more likely that you are going to build that six hundred K into another Godwin Arms?”

“I built GA&A.”

Suddenly he shows some emotion, she thought. “How much money did you start with?”

There was a pause.

“Hell of a lot more than you have now, right?”

A longer pause, then Dom’s voice was back to normal. “This is your area of expertise, not mine. What did you have in mind?” He looked off at the eastern mountains again.

She looked toward the range herself. She could see some purple-orange, where East Godwin disintegrated into forest. There used to be suburbs back that way, but they’d been abandoned when East Godwin went to its own little hell. Most of the real development was behind her, where Godwin built westward, as if the urban center were slowly crawling away from its thousand square kilometers of infected slum.

That’s what East Godwin is, a trail of slime left by the city as it crawls away from the mountains.

Tetsami decided that her lack of sleep was allowing her mind to wander.

What the hell did she have in mind? Whatever Dom said, this wasn’t exactly her area of expertise. She was a systems expert, a data thief. She’d never planned a job to physically go into a target. Before yesterday, she’d never even fired a laser in anger.

Cool it, she told herself, that’s the number one screwup—don’t ever start doubting yourself. Never on the job. That’s what gave the young software jockeys the edge. They were too inexperienced to worry about the risks.

She told herself to concentrate on her assets. The primary asset was the fact that she had access to the designer of a previous generation security setup. She’d be willing to crack almost anything with that edge.

“We obviously need a team to go in—”

“Obviously.”

Wow, she thought, what sage advice. Sheesh. “We’ll need someone to handle the comm in the complex. That’s my specialty, running around the systems in there—”

“The mainframes were destroyed.”

“Well, whatever’s left.” What else? “We need an expert on Paralian ship design, and another software jockey to handle the ship’s system. Chances are it’s isolated.”

Dom nodded.

“We need some muscle, weapons people to protect the specialists that go in. Not too many. The more people, the harder this will be to pull off.” How many? “Two people. It looks like two teams going in. One for the ship and one for the safe.”

Dom nodded again. What the hell was he thinking? Did this sound like she was making it up as she went along? “We need a demolition expert, to make sure we crack the place with the money, and we’ll need an electronics expert to help prep us. Those and a driver.”

“That’s six more people.”

Six? Tetsami made a head count. “I count seven.”

“We only need one spear carrier.”

Spear carrier? Oh, the muscle. “Believe me, we need at least one per team.”

“We’ll have one per team.” Dom looked straight at her and she suddenly realized what he must be thinking.

“You?”

“I’ll go with the team to the safe.”

“I don’t think you—”

Dom shook his head. “I’ll probably be the only one who knows the complex firsthand.”

“We’re going to need someone with combat experience and weapons expertise—”

Dom nodded. “I know.”

Tetsami looked at the exec and waited for an explanation.

Eventually, one came. “Ten years in the TEC. Special forces, retired.”

She looked around by reflex, to see if anyone had overheard him. The landing pad was still empty of people. She broke out into a chill anyway. She suddenly had second thoughts that had nothing to do with her own competence.

It was a Bakunin tradition to dislike the Confederacy. It was another Bakunin tradition to hate the TEC. Some of the more radical communes had regular executions of “TEC spies.” Bakunin was, in one sense, a planet of dissidents, and the TEC’s major function in the Confederacy was crushing dissidence.

Tetsami began to realize that the attack on GA&A must have been a TEC operation, and she mentally revised the number of assaults the new management was going to have to repel. GA&A was probably going to be hit at least once by every military-capable fringe group within fifty klicks of Godwin.

She could see someone lobbing a nuke just because the TEC was involved.

Dom turned away from the edge of the roof and started walking back toward the restaurant and the entrance to the hotel. “Okay, Tetsami, I’ll back your idea. I’ve risked money on less promising enterprises.”

Tetsami stayed by the railing. She was still dealing with his admission. After a few seconds, she cursed herself and followed Dom.

Dom booked rooms for both of them. There was enough money, and most of it wouldn’t be traceable. They should be safe for a while at least.

The hotel was the Waldgrave and it sat slightly west of Central Godwin. It tried to emulate its namesake planet in a number of ways, all with varying success. Wood was everywhere, though none of the rich Waldgrave stock that was the planet’s primary export—if you didn’t count fascism.

The hotel tried for a Germanic flavor, which ended up in silly affected accents and sillier uniforms. The staff’s only successes in its homage were in the expense of a stay, which approached what a stay on Waldgrave might really cost, and the absolutely feudal organization of the staff.

In the end, Tetsami decided she couldn’t have cared less. By the time they got their rooms she was thoroughly bored with the place. What she wanted was sleep. After some rest, maybe her pitch to Dom might not seem as insane as it did right now.

Glibly throwing requirements around was one thing. Just talk. However, coming through with a workable plan was something else entirely. Even coming up with people with the required skills—

Just thinking about it gave Tetsami a headache.

Top all of that off with the fact that people were out to kill her and Dom. That showed how insane this all was.

The guy in lederhosen who led them to their rooms didn’t stick around for a tip.

Dom opened his door and turned to her. “After we both get some rest, we’re going to have to talk about your plans.”

Tetsami nodded and watched him go in. She stood in the hall and held the card key for the neighboring room. She looked at it and thought about how much it cost. Dom had booked them for two days. It might come to just under a kilo.

It wasn’t much, but she knew scams well enough that she could go to reception and cash the key in. It would be enough running expenses to get her as far as Proudhon. She couldn’t buy passage, but there were ways around that. She could manipulate a ship’s manifest as easily as a corp’s database.

But she was no surer now than she had ever been of making such a software jimmy last all the way to the destination. There were just too many people to fool for too long a period of time. Ships were too careful when they made landfall on Bakunin. And stowaways often found themselves spaced, or tagged as inventory for planets with rather repressive ideas about personal freedom. Even the best case would get her to another planet, yes, but stranded, with no cash. In a situation where her only marketable skills were probably frowned upon.

She rolled the card between her fingers.

She had also made a deal. It had been her idea, and she had convinced Dom to go along.

Tetsami had never thought of herself as a particularly honorable person. She’d always pictured herself as riding the midline of corruption on Bakunin. Looking out for number one was the overriding priority.

Despite that, she realized she wouldn’t skip.

But she was going to ask for a hell of a lot more than 50 kilos if they pulled this off.

Tetsami ran the card through the reader and walked into her room.

* * * *

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Depreciation

“History is written by those in power to justify the present. Memory is the same thing on a smaller scale.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“The slaves to the past are all volunteers for its tyranny.”

—Jean Honore Cheviot

(2065-2128)

Dom did not sleep.

Ten years of chronic insomnia, and it never bothered him as much as it did now. He was sprawled, naked, on a bed in a luxury suite in the Waldgrave, and he couldn’t stop thinking. His first chance to sleep, and he couldn’t wrest his mind away from what had happened. He picked over the events of the past thirty-two hours like some ghoulish spectator who couldn’t tear himself away from the bloody remains of an aircar pileup.

Could he have done better?

Could he feel something?

Dom sat up, feeling the side of his face vibrate. The room was dark, and he didn’t bother heightening the gain on his photoreceptors to compensate.

The nightmares were bad.

The memories were worse.

“Damn it,” Davis had said, back during his last day on Banlieue, “you’re not a machine.”

It had been ten years and the memory was still a fresh scar. “Yes, I am, Dave,” he had responded. He had been a machine even before the “accident.” He had been an automaton ever since Styx. The cybernetics were simply an external manifestation of his inner landscape.

He was a machine, but an imperfect one. A perfect machine wouldn’t agonize over its own continued existence.

Davis Maclntyre was his second in command, the man who now controlled the small arms empire Dom had built after his “retirement” from the TEC. Davis was from Earth and had nearly as many unsavory contacts in the Confederacy as Dom did himself. He was, arguably, the man who had saved Dom’s life.

“You would prefer it if we had left you in that tank?”

They were standing on a small porch adorning one of Banlieue’s millionaire’s villas. The view looked over a small vineyard, which the company also owned. Dom tapped his fingers on the railing. “Maybe it would have been better.”

“Do you actually buy into Klaus’ bullshit?”

Dom didn’t answer.

Was it Helen’s death? Or was it simply what her death represented for him? If he had known, ahead of time, that she was one of those thirty-five thousand people, would he have acted differently?

He had joined the TEC to escape her.

Her death had made escape impossible.

He kept staring out at the vineyard, tapping his finger.

David grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “Say something, you ungrateful bastard! Rage, scream, cry, something! It’s still you in there. The brain was one of the few things the bacteria didn’t get to.”

Dom found himself wishing he could do something to comfort his old friend. After a while he said, “I do appreciate what you did for me.”

Davis dropped his shoulder as if that wasn’t the right thing to say at all. “You’re burying this. It won’t go away.”

Dom nodded. It never went away. People died, but their accusations lived long after them.

He’d almost fooled himself into believing he was over it. Then Klaus had appeared, nearly killing him. Now, it was as if the wounds had become gangrenous, killing the nerves, leaving him numb.

Davis was still talking. “Someday all that pent-up anger is going to explode on you.”

“I know.”

“You’re a different person than you were.”

“I know.”

Davis shook his head and headed for the door. “We have the transport and the account transfer ready for you— Are you sure you want to do this?”

Dom nodded.

“Just because I can handle the company without you doesn’t mean we don’t need you.”

“You know you can’t afford to hide one of your officers from the TEC indefinitely. You’ve done it too long already.”

“But Bakunin?”

“A new name, a new planet—I can disappear there.”

Davis gave him a backward look over his shoulder that told Dom that he doubted he could disappear anywhere. After a pause, he said. “We had to, you know. With all the damage to you and the TEC on our necks, there was no time to clone a real body.”

Dom raised his hand to the side of his face to hide the tic he was developing. “I know that. It’s nobody’s fault.” Besides, if Dom were to be really honest with himself, the cybernetics weren’t the real problem.”

“It’s Klaus’ fault, damn you!” Davis left, leaving Dom with no opportunity to think of a response.

Dom had been left, standing on the porch of the villa, trying to scrape together a hatred for his brother. Like every effort to pull together the pieces of his broken mind, it left him with no tangible results.

That was the last time he had seen Davis Maclntyre.

The last time he had someone he could call a friend.

Dom got off of the bed. After all this, if all I can feel for the loss of ten years of work is this vague unease, what’s the point?

He walked into the plush bathroom and up to the washbasin. At a touch, the chrome-metal basin began to fill from an invisible faucet. He placed his right hand, the mostly real one, in the basin, covering the drain. The metal was cool against his hand, and the sink beeped at him as the basin began to overflow.

With the left hand he turned on the lights. The panels around the mirror in front of him lit.

Water washed over the counter and splashed his thighs.

He put his left hand on one of the lit panels that surrounded the mirror. He began to slowly apply pressure to the plastic covering the light.

Water washed across his thighs, his calves, and his feet.

He had thought of this a few times since his reconstruction. A clean way to do it. The veins that pumped the clear fluid that passed for blood were self-sealing. His digestive system was artificial and would filter out most of the poisons he could think of. Most falls and projectiles wouldn’t touch his brain within its chromed prison.

A long time ago he had decided that there were two ways he could do this cleanly.

One way was to step out of an air lock without an environmental suit.

The other was an adequately grounded electrocution.

The plastic on the panel cracked and his left hand came in contact with the cool surface of the glowing light beneath. A little more pressure and the frosted chemical illumination would crumble and his hand would be touching the live contacts, ending it all.

He wondered what his mother had thought before Perdition had been reduced to gravel.

Dom chanced to look at the mirror in front of him. The expression he saw on his own face made him jerk back. His foot slipped on the wet tile beneath him and he fell backward. He caught himself on the toilet before his head slammed into anything. As if it would damage him.

He sat, unmoving, wondering what had happened.

Above him, he heard the drain slurp itself empty.

He slowly got to his feet and looked in the mirror. He touched the surface, to reassure himself that it was, indeed, a mirror. The face beneath it was familiar, impassive, his own. There was no sign of the agonized mask he had seen a few moments ago.

Could he really wear an expression that held so much pain when he felt nothing himself?

Dom grabbed a towel and silently returned to his bed.

* * * *

PART TWO

Fellow Travelers

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

—John Bradshaw

(1602-1659)

* * * *

CHAPTER TWELVE

Secret Agenda

‘Anyone who believes in free speech has never tried to make a living as a writer.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

‘All revolutionaries are criminals meeting in secret.”

—Yoweri Adyebo

(b. 2303)

It had been a busy three days for Dom.

The first and most massive undertaking had been laundering the money he had received from Reynolds Insurance. No names had ever been attached to the account, but the nature of the policy—insuring GA&A—meant that someone might eventually trace the money to him. Dom had spent a whole thirty-two-hour Bakunin day on the hotel’s comm, wrangling financial deals ranging from commodities trading to currency speculation.

He came out of that day with a profit and an untraceable portfolio.

The second day he’d spent checking on names Tetsami had given him—the potential team members. There were a number of freelance security corporations in Godwin offering services to the two thousand corporations that formed the knotted heart of the city. Most of them would profile anyone for a price. It was simple for Dom to order up dossiers on the first two people Tetsami suggested contacting.

Ivor Jorgenson and Johann Levy.

He also called up a report on Tetsami herself.

Within a day of his order, Argus Datasearch supplied him with three thick packets of information. All of them he’d downloaded into his onboard computer to peruse at his leisure.

According to Argus’ data, Tetsami’s parents had come to Bakunin over two standard decades ago, from Dakota. That was interesting. Dakota was one of the Seven Worlds, and that entire arm of the Confederacy was populated by the descendants of Terran genetic engineering. Most of the people of the Seven Worlds were as radically nonhuman as one of the squid-delphine natives of Paralia. The natives of Dakota, however, were descended from gene-engineered humans. Unfortunately, all the data indicated was origin—not what made the Tetsamis different.

Tetsami’s parents had gone to work for Holographic DataComm, a broadcast network that no longer existed. The reason HDC no longer existed was a dirty little corporate war over broadcast airspace. A war that fried every one of HDC’s on-line hardwire console jockeys when the competition lobbed an electromagnetic pulse at the corporate HQ. HDC’s computers were EMP hardened— unfortunately, the console jocks weren’t.

Scratch Tetsami’s parents.

Seven years later, Tetsami went into their line of work. Strictly freelance, though. She could’ve made a lot more by latching on to some corporation. She’d been hacking the comm net for eight years standard.

There was another interesting thing in her file.

No wonder she trusts Jorgenson.

Ivor Jorgenson had come to Bakunin from Styx within three years of Tetsami’s parents. He had worked transport for HDC until the shit hit the fan. The file had little personal data, but Dom was adept at reading between the lines. The parallel addresses listed for both Tetsami and Jorgenson over a seven-year stretch was enough. Jorgenson must’ve been a friend of the Tetsamis’ and had taken care of the kid after the balloon went up.

Another thing Dom noted was the fact that Jorgenson and Tetsami diverged when Tetsami took up her parents’ profession. From the record, she was only thirteen at the time.

The other data on Jorgenson showed that, indeed, he’d make a good driver for the job. Spotless record in nearly twenty years standard. Freelancer since HDC. Most importantly, no connection to the Confederacy in any way, shape, or form.

However, for some reason that man made him uneasy.

Dom supposed it was the reminder about Styx.

The third file was Johann Levy.

The data here was sparse, but Levy seemed to be what Tetsami claimed he’d be, a wired-in part of Godwin’s seamy underside. The data said that Levy had been involved in the uprising against the theocracy on his home planet of Paschal. That seemed to give him a good reputation in this part of Godwin.

The uprising on Paschal had happened after Dom left the TEC, but he had heard about it. A collection of teachers, lawyers, and students demonstrating against the more extreme excesses of the Paschal government.

When the Paschal Elders called in the TEC, the revolution found out exactly what extreme was. As far as Dom knew, the mass grave didn’t even have a marker.

Dom had heard rumors that Paschal was where his brother got his commission, and a promotion to a desk job.

More important, though, the ex-lawyer Levy had made a reputation for himself as a safecracker.

As they waited outside Levy’s bookstore, Dom wondered if he had enough data on Levy to trust him.

Answer: he didn’t have enough data on anyone.

The bookstore they waited outside felt ironic to Dom. Just the fact that Bolshevik Books sold books, expensive, paperbound tomes of a generally political nature, gave Dom a feeling the place marched about half a cycle out of phase with the rest of the universe. Truly ironic was the fact that the place had a distinctly anticapitalist slant, and they were going to ask the owner to help resurrect a corporate enterprise.

Dom sat next to Tetsami in the front seat of a used Royt groundcar. They were both similarly clad in leather-covered monocast armor, and they both now wore personal field generators. His old exec suit had found its way into a disposal shaft in the Waldgrave the second day of their stay.

Today, Dom had moved them into cheaper accommodations. Dom had rented a small warehouse from Bleek Munitions. He rented the warehouse because it sat on top of the main spur of the same Godwin-Proudhon commuter tube that he and Tetsami had hidden in after escaping the Church.

Dom noticed that he was drumming his fingers on the control console and forced himself to stop. They had been waiting for two hours.

They were parked across the intersection of Sacco and West Lenin from the store, waiting for it to close. Tetsami had said she didn’t want anyone walking in while they talked to the owner.

“What do you know about this Johann Levy? Other than the fact he’s a demolition expert.”

Tetsami yawned and turned to face him. If she noticed the emphasis on his statement, she didn’t show it. “Known him years. Never been on a job together, but he has a reputation in the community—hooked into everything. Never heard of him going out in the field, but he’s got more than his share of hatred for the Confederacy.”

Dom looked at the bookstore and the rampant anticapitalism plastered all over the facade. “So he might be willing to join our enterprise despite his politics—”

“Doesn’t have any politics. He just stocks the bookstore so it’ll fit the neighborhood. Makes his real money with special-order ordinance, hooking contacts together, and helping locals deal with the Confed legal system.”

Ex-lawyer, Dom thought. That’s how nuts Bakunin is. An anarchy and lawyers can still find work.

“Supposed to have been involved in a revolution against the Paschal theocracy,” she continued. “Gives him lots of points with the politicos around here.”