Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Page 4

  He turned and left.

  "That was stupid," Lobo said in my ear. "What's wrong with you? Never mind: Don't answer that. It doesn't matter. Answer this: Are you good to go?"

  "Yes," I subvocalized. He was right. I was letting my frustration affect my actions, and that was indeed an idiotic thing to do.

  I glanced at Suli, who stood a meter away to my left. She was watching me closely, but she said nothing.

  I nodded in the direction of the guard, and we headed after him.

  Over the next ten minutes, the man made his own small invitations, stopping suddenly several times so I'd have an excuse to run into him—and he'd have a reason to react. I stayed away from him each time; he was not, I reminded myself, the job at hand. Once, after I stopped and waited for him to resume, he faced me briefly and raised his right eyebrow in question. I shrugged and smiled.

  We went through a set of blast hatches and emerged into a corridor that made sure you understood that you were now in executive territory. Lining the walls was a dark purple wood—real wood, I felt it—that made me wonder if it came from some relative of the trees on Arctul. Covering the floor was activefiber carpet that sent waves of blue in circles around each foot as you stepped on it. Soft, wordless music I didn't recognize, something with a faint piano and soaring violins, wafted under the sounds of our footsteps; I couldn't spot the speakers. A starscape projection turned the ceiling into a night on a planet still unspoiled by light pollution. Even the funk of humanity that tainted the air in the other parts of the Sunset was now gone, replaced by a faint hint of the smell of a forest after a strong afternoon rain. I've never been in so wonderful a corridor on a spacecraft.

  Twenty meters later, the guard stopped one stride past a hatch, which opened itself as he waved us toward it. He gave me a hard look, a last chance to make a play for him.

  I pretended I hadn't noticed, pointed at the entrance, and said, "After you, please."

  His anger looked less practiced this time as he said, "I'm to wait for you outside. Councilor Shurkan would prefer to meet with you two alone."

  I nodded and stepped into the room. Suli followed me closely.

  The conference space made the hallway look like a trash- and drunk-infested alley. Blond wood planks polished to a high gloss covered the floor. Every inch of the walls danced with holo displays of various CC systems, with an ancient image of Earth in a place of honor facing the door. The ceiling resembled a sky on the edge of rain, ripples of silent lightning arcing across it. The burnished metal table in the room's center appeared to hover over the floor. A dozen chairs, each covered in rich black leather, stood around the table, spaced so no one had to be too close to anyone else.

  At the table's far end sat what I would have taken to be a boy playing at being a grown-up had I not already seen Shurkan on Lobo's display. On one side of him was a holo of Arctul's lavender jump gate, its pretzel-like shape gently and unrealistically rotating. On his other side was a holo of Arctul itself, the planet also slowly rotating. His chair had boosted him so high his legs must have been pushing up on the table, and still he couldn't manage to look imposing. I wondered again at his body and lifestyle choice; it had to be a disadvantage in a world where the executive norm was tall and thin. To overcome it, I reminded myself, he had to possess some special drive or unusual skills, so I'd be foolish to underestimate him.

  "Recording," Lobo said in my ear. "If they stop our voice comm, I'll send a tingle through the shirt on an alternate frequency they're less likely to block. Scratch your left arm if you're receiving me."

  I stared at Shurkan as the door closed behind me, then looked away and pretended to study the room as I scratched my arm.

  "Come, Mr. Moore," Shurkan said, "surely the time for stalling is past. Sit." He motioned to the chairs on either side of him.

  Suli took the one on his left.

  I ignored him and chose a chair to my right, one that put a corner of the room behind me and presented a clear line of sight to both Shurkan and the door.

  Shurkan laughed. "Do you mind if I call you Jon?"

  "Feel free."

  "Jon, though I've always been one to appreciate a healthy dose of paranoia, I must say that in this case it is entirely unwarranted. If I'd wanted you dead, I could have had the fleet blow you up on the way to the gate. Won't you sit closer?"

  "You could always change your mind," I said, smiling but not moving.

  He laughed again. "Fine. Let's get to business." He paused, as if awaiting some reaction.

  I stayed silent. I'd been reacting entirely too much and too quickly since the CC ships had intercepted us; I'd do better to stay silent.

  After a few awkward moments, he continued. "What do you know about Heaven?"

  "Which religion's?"

  He smiled, and for the first time since I'd entered the room, the reaction struck me as genuine. "The planet, not the afterlife."

  "I've never visited it," I said, "but I've picked up the same basics as anyone who travels a great deal: They used to call it Bart's Folly, which from what little I've heard is a more accurate description than its current name. Some marketing genius came up with the new label. It's in CC space, though at the very edge. It started with only one aperture, but it has more now." I paused, but I really didn't know anything else. "That's about it."

  "Not surprisingly," Shurkan said, "your data is out of date. The planet drew so little attention for the first several decades after the CC settled it that most people don't bother to keep up with it." He leaned forward and gestured toward the center of the table. "As you can see, several very important factors have changed."

  A holo of a planet and a jump gate snapped into view. From my angle the globe was on the far side of the very pale blue, almost white gate. The gate had four apertures.

  "So you can now jump to more places from there," I said. "New apertures form at many gates, and aside from the inevitable commercial competition for access to the new planet on the other side of each one, they're not remarkable." I didn't add that those competitions could turn violent and dangerous. I'd found myself in the middle of one on a backwater Frontier Coalition planet named Macken, and though the experience had brought me Lobo, it had also added to the memories that woke me up in the middle of the night.

  I glanced at Suli, wondering what she was making of all this, but she appeared relaxed, almost bored. Good: The more she controlled her emotions, the better.

  "What's unusual and important about these apertures," Shurkan said, "is that two go to planets in CC space and two lead to EC worlds."

  That was definitely not the norm. Most border worlds had at most one way to jump to a planet outside their own federation. It's as if the makers of the gates—if there are makers; we have no clue how the gates came into being—decided to divide space neatly into sectors and provide only a few points of contact between those areas.

  "It started as a CC world, right?" I said.

  He nodded.

  "So, I assume it's still one, just a CC planet with two links to the EC. What's the problem?"

  "The problem," Shurkan said, his voice turning harsh and giving away the true age his body tried to conceal, "is that the same government that renamed the planet doesn't share your assumption."

  "So they've joined the EC?" Such changes in allegiance were rare, because the owning federation was unlikely to tolerate them, but this wouldn't be the first one.

  "No," Shurkan said. "The government of Heaven has declared that it is in the middle of a multi-year process of selecting the federation it will join."

  "So it's playing you and the EC to see which of you will give it the most?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "So go take it back," I said. "Isn't that what the CC would normally do?"

  "Yes," he said, "in most cases we would do just that. Unfortunately, the government of Heaven didn't make the break until it had persuaded my predecessor—" he paused as if even mentioning the person left a bad taste in his mouth—"to
withdraw most of our local fleet because it was hurting their growing tourism business. At the same time, they were secretly courting the EC."

  "So now neither of you has a large military presence there, and neither of you can assemble one without the other responding in kind."

  "The end result of which—" he said.

  I cut him off. "Would be war. I understand. What I don't get is why you're telling me all this, fascinating as it may be."

  "Patience, Jon, patience. We're almost there."

  I forced myself to stay silent even though I wanted to scream at him to get to the point. Bureaucrats always take inefficient routes to their goals, and you rarely have any chance of rushing them.

  When I didn't speak again, he nodded in satisfaction and continued. "We don't want a war, and neither does the EC; we're too evenly matched, and both sides inevitably lose more than they gain in such a fight. At the same time, we do want control of the planet—as, of course, does the EC."

  He leaned back, smiled, and said, "Which brings us to you."

  I refused to take the bait and kept quiet.

  The smile vanished; that clearly wasn't the reaction he wanted. "We'd like to pay you to help overthrow Heaven's government."

  I laughed, a genuine reaction that it felt nice to let myself have. "You have the wrong man, Shurkan. I'm a courier. I don't know anything about politics."

  "Don't be modest, Jon. We know you're a courier, but we also know you spent some years with the Saw, so your military training has to be topnotch. You own a PCAV, which is hardly a standard courier vehicle."

  "I received it as compensation for a job I did a couple of years ago, the only form of payment the client could afford."

  He waved his hands. "We really don't care. We verified your ownership is legitimate, so you can take it anywhere."

  I stood. "So I spent some time as a soldier; a lot of poor guys do. That in no way qualifies me to attack an entire government. I think we're done here."

  "No," he said, leaning forward again and placing his hands on the table, "we're not. Sit."

  I again regretted the quickness of my reactions. I shouldn't have stood, because now I either had to sit and thus appear to accept his authority, or try to leave and learn the hard way that I was locked in, as I almost certainly was. I opted for saving face, a tactic many bureaucrats will support by reflex. "Give me a reason not to leave," I said, keeping my tone level and polite.

  "I'll give you two," he said. "We'll pay you a great deal of money, and what we want you to do is something a person with your skills can handle."

  I stood for a moment as if contemplating his words, then nodded and sat. "Go ahead."

  He relaxed and smiled, back on familiar ground. "If we thought we could bring down the government of Heaven by assassinating a few leaders, you and I wouldn't be meeting. If bribery was a realistic option, we also wouldn't be here. Neither of those will work; the key players are too close-knit a group. What we need you to do is locate and bring to us a single criminal. That's it. Succeed at that task, and we'll make you wealthy."

  I didn't have to force myself to be quiet this time; I was genuinely puzzled. I certainly wasn't a bounty hunter, though I'd done that kind of work before I joined the Saw, and I understood it. Still, it made no sense for the CC to be involved with crime on a planet that at best only partially belonged to it. Finally, I said, "What's the connection between this criminal and Heaven's government?"

  "They're sponsoring the man," Shurkan said. "He's working for Heaven, officially doing legitimate work, but in secret committing a very dangerous crime. We can't go after him directly, because doing so would mean going up against the government—which would immediately draw the EC into action. By contrast, if you, a man with no clear ties to any planet or coalition, a tourist, could deliver him to us, we could put him on trial, blast every feed with the news of his crimes, and make very clear to everyone—"

  "That Heaven was harboring and supporting him," I said. "That part is obvious. What is he doing that would upset that planet's citizens enough to cause them to vote out their government?"

  "Research with live subjects—people—into making nanomachines live successfully for extended periods in human bodies," he said. "Research," his voice dropping a bit and becoming more adult in tone, "that not only has been banned for over a hundred years, but that is killing the subjects."

  I didn't have to force myself to be quiet; I needed time to collect my thoughts. The experiments Shurkan had described were exactly what the scientists on Aggro had done to me, to Benny, and to many, many others. All the others had died from the tests. Only Benny and I had survived even the initial rounds, and now, to the best of my knowledge, I was the only remaining success of the Aggro research. The nanomachines that laced all my cells kept me looking twenty-eight perpetually, let me eat as much as I wanted and never gain weight unless I chose to do so, and provided me with many other abilities—but they also ensured that I could never stay anywhere for long, never tell anyone about my past, never let myself be caught and tested, never be normal.

  "If you know about this research," I said, "why not simply expose it right now and be done with it?" And why, I thought but did not say, talk about it in front of Suli? He must have considered her so harmless that she couldn't use the information to hurt him or the CC. I glanced at her for a moment; she still appeared calm, though a tightness around her eyes betrayed her increased tension.

  Shurkan chuckled, but there was no warmth in the sounds he made, only tightly controlled tension. "Jon, I've tried to not insult your intelligence; why are you insulting ours? If we had enough proof to pass public review, or if the legitimate work this man is doing didn't provide such a good cover story, then we would have revealed his crimes long ago. With what little data we have, however, we would both fail to induce the administration change we need and cause the government to move the man to a new location."

  "I'm sorry," I said, meaning it. "I was stupid. I was surprised to hear that anyone was conducting such banned tests, because they're supposed to be insanely dangerous." That was true as far as it went, but I was now also wondering why they'd picked me and what they knew of my past. I would not let myself end up a test subject again. I would not. "None of this, though, is my problem."

  "We can't send in a CC team," Shurkan said, "for all the obvious reasons. We can hire people who do this kind of work, of course, but I've always found that while money is a good motivator, caring about the job often matters more."

  "I'm sorry," I said, perhaps too quickly, "but I don't see why I should care any more than anyone else you might try to hire."

  "From some friends of ours in the EC," he said, "friends who provide us information from time to time, we've learned that you recently went to a great deal of trouble to save the life of a young boy—and failed."

  I instantly pictured the boy, Manu Chang, as I'd last seen him, vanishing down a crowded street, very much alive but dead as far as the EC was concerned. I shoved down the memory, because the boy's ability to catch glimpses of the future meant he'd never be safe if the EC or the CC or any other large organization, governmental or corporate, knew he was alive. I'd helped stage his death so he'd have a chance at as normal a life as his abilities would permit.

  "Doing what you want," I said, grateful for a good excuse for letting some tension into my voice, "won't bring back that boy."

  "No," Shurkan said, "it won't. But it could provide a way for you to atone for whatever part you played in his death."

  "You have no right to talk about what happened," I said, "and I don't see its connection with your problem."

  Suli's expression changed for the first time, and the pity I saw on her face only made me feel guilty for lying about the entire affair. The lie, though, was necessary. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and I shook my head. She stayed quiet.

  "How familiar are you with the story of Aggro?" Shurkan said.

  I didn't like him bringing up Chang, but my i
nvolvement with that boy and the EC was less than a year in the past, so I wasn't disturbed that he'd found out about it. His question about that horrible place, by contrast, made me wonder just how much data he had acquired about me. I fought the urge to run and forced myself to answer in the same tone as before. "I know what everyone knows from vids and holos: It was an orbital prison where they conducted experiments on prisoners, and a nanotech disaster destroyed it and led to the quarantine of the planet it was orbiting."

  "Pinkelponker," Shurkan said, "and yes, that's correct as far as it goes. What we've recently learned is that one of the scientists on Aggro had sent a few messages to his family suggesting his team was converging on success, that a few subjects had not died instantly, and that the key seemed to be to use younger people." He paused and stared at me.

  I returned the look as I pictured those few other prisoners I'd seen while stuck in that orbiting hell-hole. My memory supported the observation, and I made a connection I'd never made before: Benny and I were the only survivors. We were also the only prisoners who were not full-grown adults. We were the size of adults, we were teens and so old enough for some cultures to consider us adults, but neither of us had yet hit puberty. That fact had never mattered before. Now it hit me hard.

  "The man we're after obtained that information," Shurkan said, "and began experimenting on children."

  He balled his small fists and slammed them into the table.

  "Children, Jon. He's killing kids, and you can help us stop him."

  Chapter 5

  I don't know what to say," I said, meaning it.

  "Say that you'll take the job," Shurkan said. "Help us save lives—the lives of children. And make yourself a lot of money: We're prepared to pay three million upon delivery."

  I sat and thought.

  Shurkan let me be.

  Suli looked like she wanted to speak, but she didn't, for which I was grateful.

  The holos continued to dance silently in their places. The air in the room was as still as when I'd entered it. Everything appeared exactly as it had a few minutes before—but everything was different now. The deal was on the table, and it was one that in two ways I was motivated to accept. I hated it whenever anyone hurt children, and I liked the size of the payday; it would support Lobo and me for at least a couple of years.