Free Will (And Other Compulsions)
Book 2 of The Antithesis Progression
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Science Fiction
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions
Text Copyright © 2011 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Author contact information at http://www.jdsawyer.net
Quotation from Sing Song by Christina Rossetti, 1893
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers
Cover Art © 2010 ArtisticWhispers Productions
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Free Will
And Other Compulsions
Book II of The Antithesis Progression
by J. Daniel Sawyer
Dedication
This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in
Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tienanmen
Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives
in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we
owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come
true
For Everyone
Forever.
Men keep agreements when it is to the advantage of neither to break them...
Put more trust in nobility of character than in oaths.
–Solon of Athens
War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.
–Carl Von Clausewitz
The Story So Far
Recap of The Antithesis Progression, Volume 1:
Predestination and Other Games of Chance
The year is 2125, and the United States is in the grip of a protracted cold war with The Persian Empire. America's ability to hold on the Lunar colony is slipping as its economic power stagnates, and the presiding Administration fears that if the Peacock Throne gains a solid foothold in space, they will use it to reduce the United States to a vassal nation.
When an intercept commissioning a contract murder arrives in the office of the United States National Security Advisor, it is collated and put in the stack of reports for review. It is only upon reading the intercept that the NSA—one Reuben Briggs—realizes that he is its likely target.
Leaving behind his career, and his pursuit of corrupt senator Bill Shelley, he flees Washington under pretext of taking a midwinter vacation in Trinidad, and disappears.
Three years later, fifty thousand miles above the Earth on Space Station Sidon, a man slips through customs on a false passport. Leaner, edgier, and older for his years on the run, the man now calling himself Joss Kyle has one day until his scheduled flight to Luna and the outer colonies. As far as he knows, the rest of the world believes him dead, and he's eager to start a new life on Mars.
An avid cardsharp in need of ready cash, Joss heads straight for a tavern near the spaceport widely known as the home turf of the best poker player in the solar system. His name is Alex Hart, and he's been waiting for a year for the chance to play cards with Joss Kyle.
Joss does not know that Alex Hart is a cover for Jim and Alyssa Hartman, a team of bounty hunters who have been tracking Joss's movements for a long time, hoping to collect the price on his head. After verifying his identity, they attempt to apprehend him, but he escapes their net with the help of merchant shipping tycoon and underworld boss Cassy Orinthal, who has also been waiting for him.
Over the next eighteen months, Joss becomes her lover and employee. She sets him up as a barkeep on Space Station Nineveh, a way-station between the outer and inner colonies. There he runs surveillance and courier operations for her growing resistance movement, turning his knowledge of American security services against the very country he once helped defend.
Meanwhile, news of his narrow escape has reached the ears of Senator Bill Shelley, who sends his son-in-law Percy to infiltrate the underground and discredit Joss. Percy conducts a series of carefully planned destabilizing actions—attacking VIPs, staging suicide bombings, and leaving everywhere the slogan “Lay Off Luna”—leading the public to believe that the Lunar independence movement has turned terrorist.
Percy murders and assumes the identity of Lunar dockrat and corrupt resistance informant Scott Walters, and travels under his passport to Nineveh. He uses the identity to sell Persian military codes to Joss Kyle, then stages an attack in Joss's bar, using the confusion to plant evidence implicating Joss as a double-agent on the take from the Persians.
Joss is vaguely uncomfortable about his business dealings with Percy—distrustful of the ease with which the Persian codes come into his possession and convinced that he's seen Percy before, he tries the codes out himself. When they appear to be genuine, he sends them up the line to Cassy, along with a note about his suspicions. Upon receipt of the information, Cassy launches an investigation into Scott Walters' sudden disappearance from Luna without clearance.
Senator Shelley, once a staunch advocate of Lunar independence, uses Percy's faux-terrorist actions as an excuse to change his position on Lunar independence, aligning himself squarely against the colonies. We learn that he is being blackmailed by the Persian government, who wants the American military out of the way.
With a newly strengthened Persian fleet on the move toward important choke points in the colonial trade routes, the Lunar colonies stand without protection from invasion unless they can flush out the terrorist element within their organization. Unfortunately, all the evidence that Cassy and her compatriots discover points solidly at Joss Kyle.
When the Colonial government votes to institute martial law and broker a rapprochement with Washington, the minority throws in with Cassy's movement, and they launch a joint mission to apprehend Joss Kyle. However, Douglas Reeves, a judge who has secretly been aiding the resistance for years, does not trust Cassy's loyalties. Knowing Joss's reputation for escaping sticky situations, he hires in the Hartmans for extra muscle.
While Cassy is on route to apprehend Joss on Nineveh, Percy uses Scott Walters's dead body to stage a suicide bombing on the Lunar Spaceport. Shortly thereafter, he is accosted by Scott Walters's friends, who attempt to murder him on the tarmac. Barely escaping with his skin, Percy realizes that the only way they could have found him was if Bill Shelley had tipped them off. He strikes out for Washington vowing revenge.
Joss, sensing the noose tightening around him, purchases a private ship and prepares for another run. When Cassy arrives on Nineveh, she puts him on trial before Reeves and the Hartmans. As they review the evidence, Joss remembers where he's seen “Scott Walters” before, putting the face together with the fact that it belongs to Bill Shelley's son-in-law. Unfortunately, with the real Scott Walters dead on Luna and Percy disappeared, he has no way to prove his suspicions and win his freedom. Instead, he appeals to Cassy, and she allows him to slip her grasp as he's being arrested.
Pursued by the Hartmans through the streets of Nineveh to his private dock, Joss manages barely to get aboard in time to blast away. Hot on his heels, Alyssa Hartman slips aboard, but gets trapped in the airlock, while Jim Hartman is left on the dock without his partner or his bounty.
In the aftermath, having managed to conceal her complicity in Joss's escape, Cassy convinces Douglas Reeves that the resistance movement has been compromised on every level. Working together, they prevail upon Jim Hartman to help them find and purge the traitors in their midst, in return for their promise that they will help him find and rescue Alyssa.
On his little ship between planets, Joss Kyle can see only two alternatives: kill Alyssa and attempt to disappear once again, or convince her to help him apprehend Senator Shelley and bring him to Luna for trial. Having lost one family and life to Shelley's meddling, and nearly having lost another, Joss Kyle decides to turn and fight.
He sets course for Earth.
Prologue
Official Transcript
Transmission from Gagarin Station, Operations Division
Intercepted 17:35GMT, 25 December 2129
This is Gagarin Station to Persian vessel Rubaiyat. In deference to the lives of the ten thousand civilians currently on board, and by the unanimous vote of the command staff, I am authorized to deliver the following message:
We surrender.
Part I
Captivity and Other Clean Escapes
I
Tycho, Lunar Surface
18 November 2129
Nobody could have known what was coming—there was no way to know. Down in the deep south, under the shadow of Lunar night and bathed only in Earthshine, something moved.
Gray against gray, a small figure clawed its way through the spires jutting rudely at the ridge of Tycho crater. One step at a time, its feet left a permanent trail in the dust heading north by northeast from the New Zion colony toward Mare Tranquillitatis and civilization.
Eighteen hundred kilometers.
If the traveler was lucky, she could do it in one Lunar night.
Other girls had escaped before. Other girls' bodies had been found in the dust, poisoned by their own breath building up in the scrubbers or dried out from too long an exposure to the brutal Lunar sun.
This one wouldn't make that mistake.
She'd signed up for the surface gardening class at school because she knew they put something in you that kept you alive for a long time if your oxygen bottle failed. Another year in school and she'd have gotten her introductory nanotech class, and learned all about the respirocytes, artificial red blood cells that increased the human body's oxygen efficiency by a factor of thirty. She had no way to know that, and she wouldn't have stayed another year for any knowledge or money. All she knew is they might help her get a little farther.
So she'd stolen a rebreather and some extra bottles that she dragged behind her. She'd packed her p-suit helmet full of appetite suppressants and amphetamines—without food, she needed them to keep moving.
Luna City was farther than anyone had ever walked outside before, but it was the only place she could go. She couldn't cross the mountains to get to Firstown on the south pole—there were no roads between settlements in the southern hemisphere, and people lost their way and died in the mountains. It was go north and maybe die trying, or nothing.
At twelve years old, she'd rather die trying.
The stars were a good guide for direction. You couldn't grow up on Luna and not know them by heart. They were dimmer when the sun was up, but right now they showed through her face plate as clearly as through a clean porthole window. The distant fires lit her path, showing her the way through the spires and ridges at the rim of Tycho.
She didn't know if she would make it. If she had asked an adult, even one that wanted her to escape, they'd have told her that it wasn't possible. But she was too young, too stupid, and too desperate to know what couldn't be done.
On the far side of the mountains, the mottled, rock-strewn mazes of the high plains stretched out before her to the horizon. She'd been on the trek for about twelve hours, enough that they'd miss her, maybe even send out a search party. Maybe they'd catch her. She didn't care. She just knew that she had to get away and choose a new name.
This year at school, they'd learned about certainty. They'd talked about death and taxes—how death was optional if you were willing to forgo your destiny in the celestial realms, and how there were no taxes in their colony. Her teacher said that the only certain things were God's love and the word of the prophet.
She'd walked out on both, and she'd do it again even though the catheters chafed her every time she moved and her bones ached from loping across the open ground. She was alone in the night, with no air, no animals, no friends, and no God to comfort her, and she'd do it all again. That was the only thing she knew for sure.
She held on to that surety as if it were the only man-made light in the long Lunar night. Nobody in the world really knew anything for sure—it was a lesson, once learned, that she'd never forget.
II
Nineveh
14 November, 2129
Nineveh's central docking bore did not accommodate corvette-class cargo ships, even one that could technically make all the clearances. Such ships were relegated to clamp-docking along the top of the large cargo loading bay running along the spine of the station. Even though Kyrie was a few centimeters under the size limits, her proportions and mass made her unwieldy enough that the docking authority didn't want her gumming up their equipment in the central bore.
So, unlike some smaller ships Cassy had seen recently—Fugitive, for example—Kyrie had to park on top.
It had been a thirty-six hour affair, starting up her reactors from cold, going through the pre-flight checklists, and loading stores and cargo for the return trip, but Cassy finally had the old girl ready to lift off.
Reeves made the last shuttle tram before their scheduled departure. Cassy knew she should have felt something about it. Relieved, maybe, that she didn't have to wait on him anymore. Or annoyed that he'd spend the skew flip hanging around in the galley with that beaten bounty hunter, smoking her bud and putrefying her ship and eating her stores. Instead, the fact that he was on board and getting settled into his quarters just seemed like one more item off her checklist, of no more emotional importance than the reactors.
It suited her just fine. She had a few more items than normal on her checklist this time.
“Nineveh docking control, this is Kyrie, awaiting final clearance to clear moorings and disengage docking clamps.”
“Kyrie, this is Control, you are cleared to enter the pattern in eight minutes.”
“Roger that, control, Kyrie out.” Cassy locked the buckle of the five-point harness and checked the call off her list.
That left one last pre-launch item on the list. After a day and a half working with naps and popping pain pills for the wound in her shoulder, the truth was she didn't have spare energy to feel anything. She was saving it up for her last chore.
Once the docking clamps disengaged, Nineveh control would run her to the edge of the docking pattern on remote, and from there the autopilot would take over running her on the most expensive possible route—a sloping arc down the rim of the gravity well into Lunar orbit. One gravity the first day, two gravities straight shot after that with the standard flip schedule. That, at least, would help her keep her passengers under control.
Which left only one thing before she let herself nap through the launch.
Cassy punched up Kyrie's IR telescope and scrolled through its records. She'd caught Fugitive's track when she launched, and it looked like Joss's boat was making for the inner planets, still under boost. Risky move, but he probably thought he didn't have much choice.
“Where are you going, Joss?” Wherever it was, he'd better see his way clear. With war coming, she needed him in her pocket on Luna—and she hadn't let him shoot her just so that he could disappear without a trace.
She aimed a laser dish at the retreating heat bloom of Fugitive's engines, now already a quarter astronomical unit away and burning through fuel fast. She tapped a quick message and sent it, three times, in a narrow-beam burst.
You're covered for the next five days. Don't waste them.
“VAL, restrict information on this track to my voiceprint only and classify it as a root privilege. Edit it out of the IR survey for all other users.”
The AI answered: “Affirmative, Captain.”
Cassy toggled the intercom on. “All hands, strap yourselves in. Dust-off in one minute.”
With that done, she finally let her breath go. As the docking clamps disengaged, the adrenaline ebbed out of her bloodstream leaving her lolling in her chair. The vibrations sang her to sleep as the chemical engine roared to life, pushing Kyrie once again into interplanetary space.
III
Cargo Ship, Name Unknown
12 November 2129
First, it was a little whir, like one might expect from a dental drill. Then, two chirps in quick succession, followed by a solid, piercing beep. A few seconds later, the pressure changed. The hiss, followed by the clang of the exterior hatch opening, presaged the blast of warm that rushed into the hold.
The body, laying crumpled against the cargo nets next to a frozen puddle of sick in the hold, knew this; its hearing was the only thing still working.
Four days in the pressurized, freezing hold had left Percy Scott frostbitten all about his face. His eyelids were chapped, his ears were beginning to turn dusky, his mind had long since slipped into a hypothermic delirium. The insulation in his ill-fitting SkinPres suit was the only thing that kept him warm enough that his eyes and brain didn't freeze.
For his part, Percy Scott was only vaguely aware of the hands that seized him and dragged him under all the heavy gravity, out the door, and into the scratching, burning, needle-bright corridors outside.
IV
Fugitive, Destination Unknown
16 November, 2129
Through Fugitive's forward viewport, what had been a pale blue dot was now a cyan pea. Joss had allowed himself three days solid acceleration before cutting the engines. It was a risk—stealthiness in space was a bit like playing hide and seek while naked in a brier patch; it could be done, but it was a thorny business that depended upon the fact that nobody would believe you were crazy enough to actually try to pull it off.
The simple fact was that even enough life support to keep a single body alive and comfortable burned a god-awful amount of power, and burning power meant that somewhere, somehow, you had to have a heat sink to radiate the waste energy away. In a black sky, anyone with a child's infrared camera could see you, no matter how well you'd done with disguising your transponder, or stealthing your ship for radar or laser scanners. Common wisdom said it couldn't be done, even in theory.
If there was one thing Joss Kyle prided himself on, it was poking holes in perfectly good theories.
While it was just as impossible to make a ship disappear from all wavebands as it was for a stage magician to make an elephant disappear from an enclosed glass case in front of hundreds of people, magicians had been doing just that thing with elephants for hundreds of years. Successful stealth didn't depend so much on people not seeing you as it depended on them not knowing it was you they were seeing.
Confusion. That was the secret.
And, that was why, three days into his heavy boost escape, Joss Kyle started the countdown to cut the engines, ratchet up the radiators, and drift in tandem with a three-ship convoy heading back to Luna. The single passenger liner and two cargo ships already had their own heat bloom. Fugitive dumping its excess heat at them would make the bloom even bigger—and, from the point of view of Nineveh, Fugitive would just melt into the scenery. After a few days of drift, he'd be able to execute the next part of the plan.
As long as Reeves hadn't already spotted him, it should work. Cassy's promise that she had him covered might have been comforting, if he thought he could trust her. Every relationship had its difficulties, but after shooting her he doubted that he'd ever be able to sit in the same room with her again and keep his hide. The fact that she'd let him do it didn't help—the strategic situation changed the moment he'd run out of Phalanx, and what that change might look like from her point of view was something he could only guess at, and badly.
When he'd decided to run, he'd justified it to himself by saying he'd clear his name, but he'd been kidding himself. There was always a choice, and this choice was too big to make on impulse.
There were two paths open to him: run into trouble, or run away for good. Both led through Earth orbit, but he'd need more luck than God in a dozen places to even have a prayer of making a run into trouble work: if Congress got deadlocked over Shelley's policy proposals; if he was able to catch the right breaks to make planetfall before the Christmas recess; if Shelley spent Christmas somewhere vulnerable; if...he didn't know what else, because he hadn't gotten that far yet, but Joss suspected there was a monumental pile of 'ifs' still to be uncovered.
Three days wasn't enough to even begin planning an operation like this. At least another three days of research, and analysis, and going over the recordings from the standoff in Phalanx lay between him and a final decision. He had to be sure he wasn't walking into another trap. Reeves was the kind of man who'd have a backup plan—the only question was if the backup plan could have anticipated this.
And then there was Alyssa. She might be the backup plan. She had to be gotten rid of, somehow, and without giving her a clue what he was up to or how to find him. She'd turn him in as soon as she walked off the ship—the hormones were barely keeping her quiescent enough now. Pump enough bonding potion into a woman's wetware and her willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt skyrocketed. She wasn't getting itchy feet. At least, not yet.
That situation would not last forever. She didn't like being a prisoner, and her quiescence certainly wouldn't stick after he turned off the intestinal device that time-released the drugs—something he had to do as soon as he let her go. Part of the bargain he made with his conscience—something about self-respect. He wished the fucking thing would just go back to sleep.
Not that he needed to worry about inventory. At this rate, he could stay adrift for a year without having to restock on the hormones—though food might be a problem if he wound up having to go in by the slow-ship cargo route. Mondu had left him well situated—he should have been pleased.
Fugitive herself was performing as advertised so far, at least enough that he trusted her to earn her keep. The gentle slopes of her lightweight polished interior were miles different from what he remembered of Kyrie's clunky, all-switches-and-buttons aesthetic. Then again, Kyrie had been built before magnetic shielding got cheap enough to make a full fly-by-wire setup feasible. It wasn't just solar radiation one had to worry about in the dark, there were pirates out here, and their favorite weapon was EMP. Without a full Faraday cage and mechanical overrides, a ship like Kyrie would choke under it.
Fugitive had no such problems, not with the Bussard Polywell Dynamo secreted in its belly, and her interior reflected the fact. She was fully automated—he suspected that the coffee machine ran on brew-by-wire.
No, the ship wouldn't get in his way. Neither would his passenger. Joss winced when she floated back to the top of his thoughts. It wasn't that she was easy on the eyes, or that he thought Cassy would begrudge him if he slept with her—trading lead slugs pretty much put questions of fidelity into the “less than trivial” category, and it wasn't that kind of relationship in any case. And it wasn't that he didn't think he'd find a way to give her the slip without screwing himself over. It was just...
Goddammit, it was only a neurotransmitter cocktail. It was a temporary measure. Once they reached port, he wouldn't need it anymore. Besides, as drugs went, it was essentially harmless.
He kept telling himself that. He almost believed it, too, when he could ignore the nagging memory of a paper he once read:
“...when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to their lies.”
The conscience which had caused him so much trouble wouldn't quite allow him to indulge in Goebbels for comfort. Not yet.
Joss Kyle, a man with no home, paced the bridge of his ship under his last few hours of acceleration and tried to avoid his passenger. The passenger who kept buzzing at his door. The passenger who was going out of her mind with boredom. The passenger who, thanks to him, couldn't figure out what to do with herself when he wasn't in the room.
He hadn't meant to trap her here. If she hadn't been so fucking tenacious and swift-footed, he'd have gotten away clean. All Joss had wanted from the beginning was to keep his skin, but when the price on his hide went up, the price he had to pay to keep it went up too.
His passenger, Alyssa Hartman, and her employer Douglas Reeves, had cost him his home. It was the second time someone working for Senator William Shelly had done so. So far the price for keeping his skin more or less intact tallied up at two children, one ex-wife he was rather fond of, two homes, one business, two jobs, and four years of his life on the run—during which he'd left more than his fair share of carrion on the vulture's heap.
Joss poured himself a cup of coffee from his thermos to keep himself from traveling any farther on that train of thought. When he knew how to get rid of her, then he'd have plenty of time for qualms. Right now, it was chemical restraints. Dosing her was a simple matter of self-defense. But that didn't help him shake the feeling that this time he might finally have left too many cards in the blind.
Perhaps it was time to rewrite the rules again.
V
Lunar Surface
22 November 2129
The shadow on the Lunar surface skittered from a lope to a trudge. She had to keep going. By her best reckoning she'd only made three hundred clicks in the last ninety-six hours. With fifteen hundred still to go the hike looked longer than when she started, and if she didn't find a way to go faster, she wasn't going to make it to Luna City before she ran out of air.
After an hour of stumbling along the ground, the rubble strewing the plane grew up into a field of massive boulders. She dodged between them as well as her jellied muscles could manage, trying to keep her bearing as close as she could to the course plotted by her helmet-bourne GPS.
The ground in front of her grew more stubborn with every step until at last it wouldn't give any more. Her legs wouldn't budge, not for a single step more. Without noticing the transition, she sank to her knees, then fell slowly to the ground next to a large boulder, and fell into sleep as colorless as the sky.
Shrieking static woke her up. She clawed at the outside of her helmet, writhing around on the hard pan basalt until some part of her remembered to hit the mute switch with her chin.
The noise stopped.
She opened her eyes and saw rock in front of her in her helmet lights, still shining. They'd probably been shining since she fell asleep, drawing their recharge power from her body heat. Her left arm itched, but when she tried to move it she had no luck.
She reached her right arm across to it and ran into the ground, which wasn't where she expected to be. Somewhere in her sleep she'd gotten turned around. She closed her eyes and tried to get a feel for which direction was up, but the SkinPres suit pushed in on her more or less equally from all angles, and her mind still swam with a morass of dream images colliding with the ringing in her ears.
Up and down meant gravity. If there was something she could drop or dangle—there wasn't a lot of dust on the basalt pan, but she had the oxygen bottle on her belt.
She unclipped it and reached her hand up over her head and dangled the carabiner. It fell and clanked against her helmet. She was laying on her left side, so the rock in front of her was a rock, and not the ground. Somehow she'd gotten wedged up against it in her sleep.
She heaved and wriggled and pulled herself up to her feet, tottering a bit and bracing herself against the rock once she got there.
Her left arm, now that it wasn't pinned beneath her with its blood supply strangling off, worked properly. She hopped up and down a few times and stretched as well as she could, trying to shake the sleep off. How long had she been asleep?
She punched up the HUD from her wrist control. Twelve hours. Her stomach sank. That was twelve hours she couldn't afford. She reached forward with her lips and sucked on the water nipple, then shifted her head to the left and tongued the pill dispenser. A distasteful little pile of marbles—one amphetamine, two sugars, one salt, and one vitamin—popped into her mouth, and she sucked them down with another mouthful of water.
Okay. That was done. She'd be back in running shape in fifteen minutes, despite the searing pain in all her muscles as they warmed up. There was nothing left for it but to start walking. Keep putting the kilometers behind her.
The GPS pointed her north, but she still had to dodge between the boulders—and who knew how much farther they'd stretch?
It would be worth it once she got there.
Once she got there, she'd need a cover story. She hadn't thought about a story before she left, she'd just gotten out as soon as she could, before her wedding. Before she'd fallen asleep, or at least before her brain got too tired to think anymore, she'd considered the issue of names, but hadn't gotten anywhere. Now, with the drugs hopping up her system, she had to keep busy, and it was as good a place to start as any.
New Zion was loud about the fact that it didn't share information with Luna City, so they probably wouldn't be able to figure out where she came from. She could tell them any story she wanted. She could use any name she wanted. She didn't have to stick to Emma Hale anymore—it was a stupid name anyway—but she didn't know anything better. Every name she'd ever heard was a reminder of the authority of the church and the prophet and the quorum, and the holy war against Salt Lake City, and those were things she didn't ever want to think of again. Luna City was supposed to be a sewer of depravity, where nobody believed in the words of the prophet and only knew enough about Jesus to take his name in vain. Once she was there, she'd never even find another Mormon, and she didn't want to carry that filthy label around with her anyway. God and all his prophets and angels and Latter-Day Saints could have the whole universe if they wanted, but they'd never have her. No matter what. Never again.
Nobody had even shown up yet—had they even noticed she was missing? The thought that she wasn't worth the trouble to chase took some of the excitement out of running—what if she could have gotten away with refusing to marry? If nobody cared...
No. If they let her get away with that, she'd just have spent her life as a pariah.
The pain in her muscles was starting to fade as the drugs kicked in. She tried a couple long strides and everything seemed to work right.
The surface was dark at night—dark enough that she still felt like she was asleep.
Asleep...
She hadn't just woken up on her own. Her suit woke her up. The radio static...
She jutted her chin forward and tripped the radio switch.
“...trail leading northwest here.”
“Ye thinks she's hiding in the boulders?” Boulders. They were close.
“Probably got wedged or fell down an' needs help.” A third voice, just as businesslike but not so rough.
“Hell to pay if we don't find her alive soon. Keep movin'.”
She broke into a run. The rocks in front of her started to thin. A couple hundred meters ahead there was a big one, maybe big enough to climb up and see how far behind they were, maybe figure out where to hide. Get her up off the plane so there wouldn't be any other chance of leaving tracks.
On the third stride, something yanked her belt and she flew backwards, landing hard on her oxygen bottle and bruising her ribs as her body bent back around it.
Something dragged her back. She scrabbled with the tether, worked the carabiner lose from her belt. The rope holding her spare oxygen bottle flew backwards.
The girl flailed over onto her side and rolled to her feet, coming face to face with a man twice her height in a SkinPres suit, his feet wide apart and ready to spring, and coil of rope in his hands.
VI
Location Unknown
13 November 2129
When you see the white light, you're supposed to step through the door. You're supposed to step through and face Him, so He can tell you whether to stand with the sheep or with the goats. Then He would tell the goats that He never knew them, because they didn't do justice. They didn't do mercy. He would send them down into the fire, to the worm, and the darkness.
Percy clawed and clung to the edge of the tunnel. Blinding. Searing. Every time he blinked his eyes the light stabbed him, but he wouldn't step through. He couldn't. Not yet. Not until he found his redemption, or he'd be shuffled off with the goats. The beep-beep-beep that filled the tunnel seemed to pulse with the light. The voices around him kept saying things like “heparin” and “O negative” and “suture.”
Death wasn't supposed to make sense anyway. It never did. Life, on the other hand...
Maybe death wouldn't be so bad after all.
VII
Kyrie, bound for Luna
17 November, 2129
“I'm sick of you.” Jim Hartman's voice came from somewhere behind her feet.
“You know where the space sickness bags are.” For her part, Cassy was floating comfortably above her console, chatting with VAL through her PPD, checking up on fuel use, checking navigation curves, and walking through the dozens of other items that had to be looked at during a skew flip. It was the price of keeping VAL on a short leash—she could have let the ship's AI take care of the whole thing, but if VAL got taken down by a malfunction, it would leave Kyrie plummeting between planets like a lost missile looking for a target.
“That's not what I mean, and you know it.”
Cassy looked ahead to the edge of the nav blister, and saw Jim's image in the glass. He hovered just inside the open door to the bridge. “Are you on my bridge?”
“Oh, yes, the great and powerful Green Lady must keep her little fiefdom inviolate.” So the man had a vocabulary. That made him marginally less uninteresting. “I went through the posted procedure. I emailed you from my quarters, I hailed the bridge...”
“And I'll get back to you when I'm good and ready.”
In the glass, she saw him draw back a meter or so, putting him just outside her bridge. He rapped on the bulkhead.
“Captain Orinthal?”
She cleared her PPD screen and stuck it to one of the velcro pads on her belt. “Yes?”
“I'm here to request access to the sensor and communications array.”
“Request denied, anything else?”
“Yes. I'd like to use the sensor and communications array.” His jaw shifted slightly, as if her were slowly grinding his teeth down to herbivore flatness.
“I can say no as many times as you like, or I can confine you to your quarters for the rest of the skew flip.” As she spoke, Reeves' hulking frame rose through the hatchway behind Jim.
“Reeves guaranteed me access to your resources...”
“And you'll get them when we hit Luna...”
“What seems to be the trouble?” Reeves floated past Jim and secured himself to a chair next to the coffee machine on the starboard side, near her lounge door.
Jim kept his eyes pointed at Cassy. “Our godmother doesn't want to live up to her end of the bargain.”
“Ms. Orinthal...” But Reeves didn't have a chance to finish the sentence.
“VAL, grant level three voice access to Jim Hartman on tracking and communications computers.” She wasn't going to let Reeves dress her down in front of the hired help. Cassy nudged the edge of the nav blister with her left hand, pushing herself into a slow flat spin until she faced her 'guests.' She extended her knee and caught the wall with it, slowing herself to a stop. “Satisfied?”
Jim nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Thank you.”
“And you,” Cassy looked past Jim to Reeves, sucking on her bud again to keep himself functional in freefall. The slight skunky odor of vaporized cannabis wafted from the receiving corridor onto the bridge. “What do you need?”
“Permission to enter the bridge.”
So, he wanted to have the meeting here. Well, it was less cramped than the galley, and he would probably get vertigo than on the cargo deck, so it was as good a place as any. “Granted.” Cassy tucked her legs up and righted herself so that she was on the same axis as her passengers.
Reeves glided past Jim, who stayed at his anchored position just outside the hatchway. She inclined her head to Jim. “You too.”
Jim, brooding like a bad sterotype of his profession, let go his grip on the hatchway and floated on in.
“How long until we ground?” Reeves found a spot near the copilot's chair, less than two meters from her—which meant she had to deal with the smell. Keeping the vapor in the air would help him, which meant that as long as his groundhog carcass was floating on this level, Cassy couldn't kick up the exhaust. The last thing she wanted was little globs of politician vomit floating around near her control equipment.
“Fifty hours, give or take, once we're under acceleration again.” Cassy felt herself drifting subtly away from the wall, and reached back for a hand grip so she wouldn't get stuck in a two hour drift across the empty space of the bridge.
“Give or take?” Jim, at least, wasn't smoking her shit or living with her sister, and once the job was done she wouldn't have to have anything further to do with him—earning him a slightly leading position on her internal “least irritating man in the room” scorecard.
“The last leg depends on the traffic at Luna City Ground Control—we could slide right in, or we could be held up at the Ring. Charters sit low on the priority list.”
Jim found a hand grip near the flight control computer, settled against the edge of the nav blister, and looked expectantly to their mutual master. Reeves took the baton.
Reeves exhaled a thin cloud of vapors. “So we have, what, twelve hours before we go back under sedation?”
Cassy flitted her eyes to the binary countdown display behind Jim. “Eight.”
“Now,” Reeves repositioned himself, as if vainly trying to change the arrangement of his internal organs, “Everything I tell you from here on out is confidential unless I explicitly say otherwise.” Reeves fixed Cassy with a dark look—if she'd harbored any doubts that he was perfectly capable of ordering her death, they'd not have survived it. After what he'd done to Joe two years ago, she had no illusions that Jade's cozy family-life fantasy was anything other than wishful thinking. She never would. “Do we understand one another?”
Cassy jerked her head sharply, once. Doug's gaze flitted across to Jim.
“You're already my client,” Jim said, “this is redundant.”
“Very well. I've received some disturbing news from my staff on Luna. It seems that our Mr. Walters screwed up when setting a bomb in an access hatch at the end of the spaceport. There's a Board meeting on the twentieth to discuss the matter.”
Jim snorted. “Inconvenient.”
“Without Briggs, we need to move fast. I need the two of you to find out who was pulling Scott Walters' strings. Give me something—anything—I can use.”
“What about the security leak?” Jim was brimming with helpful suggestions today. The thought of the groundhog troweling his way through her organization did not fill her heart with endless fountains of glee. She was going to have to do something about him.
“He came to Nineveh to sell classified information to Briggs. He had a source, or a controller. Find it, and you'll find the leak.”
Cassy took a grim comfort in the fact that the man still thought like a chess player even though, twice now, she'd known him to let pawns slip through. First when Joe helped her get away, and then when Joss slipped his net. “What about LOXCOR?”
“I'll deal with LOXCOR.” Reeves waved her off and took another hit on his vaporizer.
“You gotta love a guy who doesn't know when he's beaten,” Jim leaned out toward Cassy as if he were sharing a secret.
“Excuse me?” Doug said.
Cassy knew where Jim was going, and tried to dissuade him with a little shake of her head, but he wasn't having any. “We're not the hired help. This is a conspiracy. You wanted me in, we made a deal. You say you need me to do this, then you're not exactly in a position to be keeping secrets.”
“I see.” Reeves, pale green as he was from the freefall, seemed to darken back to his natural color as he stretched out, as if trying to figure out how to tower over Jim when there was no up to look down on him from. He looked to Cassy, but she shook her head and demurred. She wasn't going to fight him on this one. For now, she was content to follow her marching orders just as far as she had to, and no farther. She followed his eyes over to Jim, who stared at him as if they were rats about to gnaw on the same bit of cheese. “I read something once, by Benjamin Franklin. Maybe you read it too, in college? Three may keep a secret,” He held onto the punchline for a moment. Jim clearly didn't know the rest of it. “So long as two of them are dead.” Jim blanched, but quickly covered it up. Cassy couldn't fault him for it—she barely suppressed her own shudder, and the memory of what Joe's body looked like when she found him. “A good conspiracy does not run on that kind of trust, Mr. Hartman. It runs on another kind. I trust you to keep your end of the bargain because that's the kind of man you are. You trust me to help you find your wife because that's the kind of man I am. And Ms. Orinthal has her own reasons to want our operation to succeed.”
Jim rolled his eyes. “You're an idiot.”
“Am I?”
“You're going to need someone who knows how to run an investigation if you want to get LOXCOR under control. You'll need leverage for...”
“I know what I'll need, Mr. Hartman. And I know where to find it. And I know where to find you when the time comes—and yes, it will come. Until then, I need you to find Walters' controller.”
Jim turned to Cassy. “You know where this guy lived?”
She nodded.
“And where he worked?”
“He worked for one of my businesses.”
“I'm going to need access to your records and your people.”
Records? Over my dead body. “You'll get it. You're going to come in as a new bodyguard, that'll give you access to everyone in the organization.”
“So when I find this guy,” of course, he would assume that the culprit had to be a man. Predictable groundhog behavior. “He's your problem. I don't kill people.”
Reeves pursed his lips, an evil smile creeping across his face. “No, that won't be necessary. I think there are more productive ways to deal with problems like this. Don't you think so, Ms. Orinthal?”
He obviously expected her to know what he was talking about, but whether he meant Jade, or Joe, or Joss, or someone else entirely she didn't really give a damn. She nodded as if conceding the point so that he'd finish. The pot was getting to him, and he was having too much fun playing innuendo games for the meeting to be productive much longer.
“Now, unless either of you has anything else?” Cassy and Jim both shook their heads. “Then, if you please, Mr. Hartman, I need to consult with our Captain in private.”
Without a word, Jim kicked away from the wall and ricocheted off the edge of the hatch, bouncing off the bridge and down the ladder like a sullen basketball.
Once he was well out of earshot, Cassy turned her attention to Reeves. “Well?”
“You're unusually quiet. Is this going to be a problem?” He jerked his head toward the vacant hatchway.
“No, this isn't.”
“Something else then.”
Cassy turned away from him, curling up toward the nav blister. Once his pathetic, space sick, dope smoking slug of a body was safely at her back, she said: “It'll keep.”
“If it will compromise...”
“It won't.” She looked out at the sunward sky in front of the ship. Somewhere out there, Joss Kyle was busy hiding from Kyrie's sensors, and whether he got whatever he was going after or not,the next few weeks might spell the end of everything she'd worked for since she was twelve years old. If that happened, she wanted one last prize before Luna burned around her.
Reeves wasn't moving. She could see his purulent reflection behind her, sitting down in that chair as if there were gravity to worry about. He was waiting for an answer. She had to give him one.
Cassy took her PPD off her belt and decrypted it, the flat ink-like display resuming its place in her checklist. Measuring her voice so that every bit of it sounded like she barely considered killing him worth the time to think about, she muttered, “When this is over, I'll come for you. You're safe until then.”
“You won't find it as easy as you think.”
“Maybe not. I've always collected my debts. When the time comes, I'll find you.”
She saw him nod to himself, as if satisfied with her answer. He let go the chair and floated the three meters to the dorsal hatchway. Once there, he stopped, as if suddenly remembering something. She watched his reflection as his head gradually shook from side to side, as if he were chiding himself for missing something terribly obvious.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
“Oh, I'm sorry. I just realized...” he sounded like he was suppressing a laugh. He took a breath, cleared his throat, and started again. “I just realized why it is you're coming after me. When you do, be sure to ask for the rest of the story. I think you'll be pleased.”
Cassy set her jaw and closed her eyes. She wouldn't rise to the bait. A few more hours and everyone would be strapped down. Then they'd be off her ship. “I'll remember that.”
“Remember this too,” his voice was grave again, “those that die well often deserve far better from the people they're protecting.”
Before she could find a gun so that she could lose her temper properly, he was through the hatch with the door closed behind him.
Outside, the stars still shone. Somewhere out there, Fugitive still flew. Some things, at least, were dependable.
For now.
VIII
Space Affairs Committee, Washington D.C.
20 November, 2129
“Mr. Chairman, I protest! This is an improper procedural move...”
“Your objection is noted.” The honorable Senator from Massachusetts wasn't about to let that Savannah hick Solin derail his meeting now. “Unfortunately we must move this matter to the Senate floor as soon as possible. This resolution was drafted by this committee months ago in case anything like this happened. Now we have a fleet of Persian warships moving toward Gagarin, toward Sidon, toward Luna—we cannot wait any longer. The resolution is carried, and is hereby submitted to the full session.”
Bill Shelley gaveled the closed session of the Space Affairs Committee to a close and retreated quickly to the safety of the rear exit, where the press couldn't reach him.
Ordering the attack on...ordering the attack at Sidon and the others on that day laid his neck on the headsman's block. His actions in committee today gave the headsman his cravat, pony-tail, and collar. Now his neck was exposed, and the next couple moves would either bring the axe down on him, or grant him a stay just long enough to kick the cowled fucker right in the balls.
Bill, with his obligatory entourage in tow, shouldered his way past the throng of reporters at his door. He left his staff in the outer office, muttering a gruff “Cancel my appointments” to his secretary.
The quiet, soundproofed walls of his Capitol Hill office—which was not the one he preferred to work in—helped quiet the adrenaline spurting into his veins from every available gland. He took a couple deep breaths. He was well into it now. He'd managed to follow instructions to the letter, and still put himself in position to make sure the Persians paid for their presumption. They wanted the declaration of martial law that his committee just referred upwards to the Senate. They wanted the declaration of war against the Persian Empire that was almost guaranteed to follow it. The crud-eating bastards who ran him wanted it all, and he was happy to give it to them.
But, of course, he wasn't President yet. He wouldn't be President for another three years, unless he got supremely lucky. Finding a way to hasten his accession was not something he was even willing to consider. For now, he'd need to get access to the White House and its foreign policy wonks another way.
Bill sat down on his chair and took a mouthed a silent prayer for calm and guidance to Ahura Mazda, then punched the intercom.
“Yes, Senator?” His secretary's voice was every bit as grating as it had been the day he hired him. Good for keeping the constituents at bay.
“Get me the White House Chief of Staff. It's an emergency.”
IX
Fugitive, Destination Unknown
16 November 2129
“Five card stud, jokers wild.” Ali dealt the initial round carefully, the metallic filaments in the paper helping the cards float down to the felt in the table's gentle magnetic field. It wasn't a good simulation of gravity, but it made gameplay possible.
Her opponent, seated opposite her (as much as anyone could be seated in freefall), shifted his body and then, to cover the flinch, reached out to pick his cards up as they came to him.
She was getting to him. Every time she called wild cards. Every time she bluffed him. Every time she raised an eyebrow at him, daring him to challenge her. Every time, he flinched.
Across from her, the traitor—who laughingly called himself a revolutionary as he spread destruction across the solar system—mulled over his cards and tossed two chips at the center of the table. A conservative opening; he was getting more careful the last few days. It was one of a set of things that had Ali, despite her imprisonment, feeling reckless, and powerful.
The fact that she was alive after firing on him, again, spoke volumes. Joss Kyle—Reuben Briggs—was famous for his cruelty. He had vivisected men who got in his way, tortured to death women who came close to catching him, bribed and cheated anyone he could to save his skin, and yet here she was, alive. He could have killed her at Sidon. He could have shot her in the bathroom at Phalanx where he'd merely kicked her nose in. He could have spaced her when she slipped aboard, or given her a lethal injection when he had her on the table in sick bay.
Joss hadn't kept her alive just for the company. He had plans for her—or, at least, fantasies. His eyes lingered at her mouth, on her neck, and other places they wouldn't linger if he was just leering. Whatever the plans were, they went far beyond merely tripping her into bed, but the fact that his eyes lingered told her that, appearances aside, she had the upper hand. Without Jim's brooding clouding her judgment, she could finally see clearly.
Ali called the bet, rearranging her cards so that her three diamonds were all next to each other.
“Three.” Joss, not bothering to conceal a grimace, picked the trio of cards from the middle of his hand and set them face down on the galley table.
Ali pursed her lips, making sure he saw the little bit of a gloat. “The lady isn't smiling on you any more.” She dealt him three cards from the top of the pile, then discarded her two black cards, hoping that her draw would get her two more diamonds.
“Luck? Anyone who trusts that fickle bitch deserves what he gets.” Joss smugly retrieved his cards and shuffled them into his hand. “I prefer to make my own.”
He lead with another small bet. Come to think of it, she didn't know if he was good for any of the money he owed her. Sure, when she brought him in she'd get plenty of cash, but she still bristled at the thought that he might stiff her.
She raised him ten bucks. “Sooner or later you're going to run out of cards to palm.”
“I don't think so.” He tossed another five in. “The world has a way of presenting options, if you keep your eyes peeled.”
Ali looked down at her cards, shaking her head as if Joss were a slow, but amusing, child. “If you were half the man your PR says you are, you'd have killed me by now.” She reflexively reached for her pile of chips, but stopped before she saw his bet. “In fact, now that I mention it...” She looked up and caught him straight in the eyes. She knew he'd be looking. “I think you're full of shit.”
She thought she caught a small reaction at the corner of his left eye. A flinch that he couldn't quite suppress? Maybe.
Joss shrugged disarmingly, like a good little political worm. “It's not an uncommon opinion. My wife said the same thing—so did everyone I ever worked for. Are you gonna play?”
“Don't you think the game's getting old?”
“Have it your way.” He folded his hand and set it face down in front of him, his face a mask of exhaustion and boredom, and pushed back from the table. “I'll go read.” Joss kicked the floor, floated up past the top of the table, grasped a hand grip recessed in the wall behind him, and pushed himself toward the galley door.
“Aren't you going to finish the hand?”
“I'm perfectly capable of giving myself a hand job, thank you.” He reached the door and repositioned his body for the next stretch of his flight.
“Don't you dare walk out on me.” She didn't expect to say it, but there the words were, hanging there in the air next to him in all their acidic glory. They brought him up short. The muscles in his back tensed beneath his shirt as if he were suddenly afraid that she'd smuggled a gun in somehow. Ali decided to play her hunch for a long bluff. “Let's up the stakes.”
He stayed in the doorway, his hand on a grab bar, his back to her. He didn't turn around. “I'm listening.”
Ali chose her words carefully. She was pretty sure that she had the leverage to push him over, but if she played it wrong she could find herself doped and locked up until they got to wherever they were going. “Destination.”
“What?”
“I want to know where we're going.”
Her jailer chuckled. “We're not going anywhere. When this ship reaches its destination, you're going to fall asleep, and when you wake up you'll be free to go wherever you want to.”
“I'm taking you back with me.”
“You think so?” Joss kept his grip and tapped his foot against the bulkhead. His body pivoted around his hands until he was floating roughly sideways, facing her. He looked her over as if sizing her up. “Since you woke up you've sat there playing cards. You haven't recorded a confession or prayed, you haven't tried to call your husband.”