The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (52 page)

Reese laughed. The sound echoed from the cold metal street. “You’re dreaming.”

He gave her a faint smile. “You’re right, of course. I’d have to go back two hundred years, right to the beginning of artificial intelligence, and redesign everything from the start. Then maybe I’d have a chance.” He shrugged. “Cheney and I have more practical plans, fortunately.”

She looked at him. “You remind me of someone I used to know. He wanted to know the truth, just like you. Wanted
access
.”

“Yes?”

The cold wind seemed to cut her to the bone. “He died,” she said. “Somebody shot him in a hospital.” Somehow, caught in the warm rush of memory, she had forgot that ending.

“A funny place to get shot.”

She remembered Steward’s last comprehending look, the final words that never came. The northeaster touched her flesh, chilled her heart. The lonely street where they walked suddenly seemed endless, not just a street but the Street, an endless alloy thoroughfare where Reese walked in chill isolation, moving between walls of neon that advertised phantom, unreal comforts…She shivered and took his hand.

Ken’s voice was soft, almost drowned by wind. “Were you close?”

“Yes. No.” She tossed her head. “I wanted to be a friend, but it would have been bad for business.”

“I see.”

She tasted bile on her tongue, gazing down the endless gleaming Street again, the dark people on it who touched briefly and then parted. Sometimes, she thought, she just needed reminding. She wondered what Steward’s last words might have been.

A bare yellow bulb marked the door to Ken’s apartment building. They entered, the yellow light streaming through the door to reveal the worn furniture, the bright new communications equipment. “Hey,” Reese said, “it’s Agitprop Central.” She was glad to be out of the wind.

The room blinked to the distant red pulse of the minaret’s air-hazard lights. Reese stopped Ken’s hand on the light switch, stopped his mouth, every time he tried to talk, with her tongue. She really didn’t care if he had someone special back on Prince, preferred this to happen in a certain restrained, ethical silence. Her nerves were wired for combat and she snapped them on, speeding her perceptions and making everything seem in slow motion, the way his hands moved on her, the susurrus of her own breath, the endless red beat of the strobe that sketched the outlines of his face in the warm darkness…She could hear the bluster of the northeaster outside, the way it knocked at the panes, shrieked around corners, flooded down the long and empty Street outside. Kept securely outside, at least for this slow-moving, comforting moment of exile.

A
DAY LATER
a maintenance seal blew out on Prince Station and killed sixteen people. Ken was pleased.

“We can do a lot with this,” he said. “Demonstrate how the administration’s cronies can’t even do simple jobs right.”

Reese stood by the window, looking out toward the distant brown horizon, tired of Ken’s torn wallpaper and sagging furniture. In the distance, foreigners on Bactrian camels pretended they were carrying silk to Tashkent.

“Sabotage, do you think?” she asked, then corrected herself. “Sorry.
Destabilization
is the proper term, right?”

He sat crosslegged on his chair, watching the screen with an intent, calculating frown. “It could have been us, yes. An effective little action, if it was.”

“The people who got killed weren’t volunteers, anyway. Not your people.”

He grinned in a puzzled way. “No. Of course not.”

Reese turned to look at him, folding her arms. “That’s what scares me about you idealists. You shoot sixteen people into a vacuum, and it’s all for human betterment and the triumph of the revolution, so everything’s okay.”

Ken squinted as he looked at her against the light. “I’m not sure it’s different from what you do.”

“I’m a soldier. You’re an ideologue. The difference is that you decide who gets killed and where, and I’m the one that has to do it and face the consequences if you’re wrong. If it weren’t for people like you, I wouldn’t be necessary.”

“You think this difference somehow makes you less responsible?”

Reese shook her head. “No. But the people I fight—they’re volunteers, same as me. Getting paid, same as me. It’s clean, very direct. I take the money, do a job. I don’t know what it’s about often as not. I don’t really
want
to know. If I asked, the people I work for would just lie anyway.” She moved to the shabby plush chair and sat, curling one leg under her.

“I fought for humanity once, in the Artifact War. I was on Archangel with Far Jewel, making the planet safe for the Freconomicist cause. Making use of the alien technology we’d stumbled on by accident, all that biochem ware the Powers are so good at. It sounded like a noble adventure, but what we were doing was looting alien ruins and stealing from the other policorps. The war blew up, and next I knew I was below the surface in those alien tunnels, and I was facing extermination cyberdrones and tailored bugs with nothing between death and my skin but a very inadequately armored environment suit. And then I got killed.”

Ken looked at her with his head cocked to one side, puzzled. “You had clone insurance? This is a different body?”

Anger burned in Reese as she spoke, and she felt it tempering her muscles, turning them rigid. Remembered dark tunnels, bodies piled in heaps, the smell of fear that burned itself into the fibers of her combat suit, the scent that no amount of maintenance and cleaning would ever ever remove.

“No. Nothing like that.
I
did the killing—I killed myself, my personality. Because everything I was, everything I’d learned, was just contributing to help my employers, my officers, and the enemy in their effort to murder me. I had to streamline myself, get rid of everything that didn’t contribute in a positive way toward my own physical survival. I became an animal, a tunnel rat. I saw how qualities like courage and loyalty were being used by our bosses to get us killed, and so I became a disloyal coward. My body was working against me—I’m too tall for tunnels—but I tried real hard to get short, and funny enough it seemed to work. Because in times like that, if you’ve got your head right, you can do what you have to.”

She looked at Ken and grinned, baring her teeth. An adrenaline surge, triggered by the violent memory, prickled the down on her arms. “I’m still an animal. I’m still disloyal. I’m still a coward. Because that’s the only way to keep alive.”

“If you feel that way, you could get out of the business.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I do best. And if I did something else—got a job as a rigger, or some kind of tech—then I’d just be somebody else’s animal, a cow maybe, being herded from one place to another and fed on grass. At least this way, I’m my own animal. I get my reward up front.”

“And during?” Ken’s dark eyes were intent.

Reese shifted in her seat, felt a certain discomfort. Nerves, she thought, jinking from the adrenaline. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You like the work. I have that impression.”

She laughed. No reason to be defensive about it. “I like being wired and hanging right on the edge. I like knowing that I have to do things right, that any mistake I make matters.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand that. People like you.”

“You haven’t had to become an animal. You’re a macroeconomist, and you’re trained to take the long view. A few people blown out a hatch, that’s just an acceptable sacrifice. I tend to take this kind of thing personally, is all. See, I figure everyone who ever tried to get me killed was looking at the long view.”

Ken’s gaze was steady. “I’m not planning on getting you killed. That’s not part of my view.”

“Maybe someday I’ll end up standing between you and your revolution. Then we’ll see.”

He didn’t say anything. In the steadiness of his dark eyes, the absence of expression, Reese read her answer, and knew it was the one she’d expected.

“R
EESE.”

It was the first time she’d heard her name in six months, and now it came from a complete stranger on a streetcorner in Uzbekistan. Her hardwired nerves were triggered and her combat thread was evaluating the man’s stance, calculating possible dangers and responses, before she even finished her turn.

He was about forty, tanned, with receding brown hair and a widow’s peak. His stance was open, his hands in plain sight: he wore a blue down vest over a plaid shirt, baggy grey wool pants, old brown square-toed boots. He smiled in a friendly way. His build was delicate, as if he’d been genetically altered. His face was turning ruddy in the wind.

“You talking to me?” Reese asked him. “My name’s Waldman.” Her wetwear was still evaluating him, analyzing every shift in posture, movement of his hands. Had Ken shopped her? she wondered. Had Cheney, after deciding she was a danger to Ken?

His smile broadened. “I understand your caution, but we know who you are. Don’t worry about it. We want to hire you.”

His voice was as American as hers. Her speeded-up reflexes gave her plenty of time to contemplate his words.

“You’d better call me Waldman if you want to talk to me at all.”

He put up his hands. Her nerves crackled. She noticed he had a ragged earlobe, as if someone had torn off an earring in a fight. “Okay, Miss Waldman. My name’s Berger. Can we talk?”

“The Natural Life, in an hour. Do you know where that is?”

“I can find out. See you there.”

He turned and walked casually up the narrow street. She watched till he was gone and then went to the apartment she rented in a waterfront condecology. She looked for signs anyone had been there in her absence—there weren’t any, but that didn’t mean anything—and then, to calm her jittery nerves, she cleaned her pistol and took a long, hot bath with the gun sitting on the side of the steel tub. She stretched out as far as the tub would let her, feeling droplets of sweat beading on her scalp while she watched the little bathroom liquid-crystal vidscreen show a bouncy pop-music program from Malaya. She changed her clothes, put the pistol back in its holster—the security softwear at the Natural Life would shred her with poisoned darts if she tried to carry it in—and then headed back into town. The muezzins’ song hung in the gusty air. Her mind sifted possibilities.

Berger was the heat. Berger was an assassin. Da Vega had shopped her out of pique. Cheney had sold her name. Ken had regretted telling her so much about his revolution and decided to have her iced before she sold his plans to Ram.

Life was just so full of alternatives.

Berger hadn’t arrived at the bar when she came in. The bartender was at prayer and so she turned on the desktop comp and read the scansheets, looking for something that might give her an edge, help her to understand what it was about.

Nothing. The aliens hadn’t generated any headlines today. But there was a note about a Cerean exile named da Vega who had been found dead, along with a couple of his bodyguards. Another bodyguard was missing.

Reese grinned. The Uzbeks, a people who usually endorsed the long view, had probably turned da Vega into fertilizer by now.

The amplified muezzins fell silent. The bartender returned and flipped on todo music broadcast by satellite from Japan. He took her order and then Berger walked in, dabbing at his nose with a tissue. He hadn’t been ready, he explained, for this bitter a spring. He’d have to buy a warm jacket.

“Don’t worry, Miss Waldman,” he added. “I’m not here to crease you. If I wanted to do that, I could have done it on the street.”

“I know. But you might be a cop trying to lure me out of Uzbekistan. So I hope to hell you can prove to me who you are.”

He grinned, rubbed his forehead uncomfortably. “Well. To tell you the truth, I
am
a policeman, of a sort.”

“Terrific. That really makes my day.”

He showed her ID. She studied it while Berger went on. “I’m a captain in Brighter Suns’ Pulsar Division. We’d like to hire you for a job up the well.”

“Vesta?”

“No. Closer to Earth.”

Reese frowned. Policorp Brighter Suns was one of the two policorps that had been set up to deal with the alien Powers. It was almost exclusively into Power imports, and its charter forbade it from owning territory outside of its home asteroid, Vesta. A lot of Brighter Suns execs were running for cover ever since Steward had blown Griffith’s network in L.A., and the whole Vesta operation was being restructured.

“The Pulsar Division handles internal security on Vesta,” Reese said. “Your outside intelligence division is called Group Seven. So why is Pulsar handling a matter so far away from home?”

“What we’d like you to handle
is
an internal security matter. Some of our people have gone rogue.”

“You want me to bring them back?”

Something twitched the flesh by one of Berger’s eyes. She knew what he was going to say before the words came out his mouth. She felt her nerves tingling, her muscles warming. It had been a long time.

“No. We want you to ice them.”

“Don’t tell me anything more,” she said. “I’m going to check you out before I listen to another word.”

“I
T’S NOT EVEN
murder, I’d say,” Berger said. He was eating spinach salad in an expensive restaurant called the Texas Beef, named after a vaguely pornographic and wildly popular vid show from Alice Springs. Dressing spattered the creamy table cloth as Berger waved his fork. “We’ve got tissue samples and memory thread, like we do for all our top people—hell, we’ll clone ’em.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t end up in prison for it.”

“Who’s gonna catch you? It’s a goddam asteroid fifty zillion klicks from anywhere.”

She had checked him out as far as she could. After telling him what she was going to do, she’d sent a message to Vesta asking for confirmation of the existence of one Captain Berger of the Pulsar Division, that and a photo. Both arrived within twelve hours. If this was a plot to arrest her, it had some unlikely elements.

Reese took a mouthful of lamb in mustard sauce. She worked out hard enough, she figured, and deserved her pleasures.