HELLGATE #3: Cry Liberty
Copyright by Mel Keegan, 2006
All rights reserved.
This Smashwords edition published by DreamCraft, August 2011
ISBN: 0-9758080-3-6
This is a work of fiction. No characters or situations are intended to depict real persons, alive or dead. The locations are real places, however.
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For all things Keegan …
Prelude
Hydralis, Omaru
The squad flyer came out of nowhere, cut a line over the roofs of Arkady Mall and buzzed the crowd. Six months ago the panic would have been thick as smog, with civilians screaming and running, and the Fleet security detail would have found easy pickings. Tonight, the flyer attracted a mix of curses and big-caliber gunfire. Shots peppered the blue and white tail of the squat, stubby craft and it bobbed up, high above the mall, rotating through three-sixty as it rose.
The squaddies were scanning, pinpointing the snipers, and moments later four rotary cannons in the blunt nose opened up. Windows blew out on the second and third levels of the Meiguo Hotel, and the kiosks and stalls threading down the center of the mall were pelted with glass and masonry. The public address bawled over the gathering riot with orders to lay down arms, be still, surrender.
But Leon Sherratt had never seen a Hydralis crowd obey orders from the squaddies. They were Fleet. They were military police from the blockade, as loathed as plague carriers — but no longer feared. Six months of constant sparring with gunships, squad flyers and worse had scarred the city, demolished parts of it, reduced others to fields of cinder. But while buildings could easily be ruined, people became inured to threat, and so habituated to the sound of chain guns, they merely dove into cover. Panic was sparse on the street; rage was ubiquitous.
Pressed against the bricks in the service alley at the side of a danceshop called Désireux, Sherratt covered his ears with both hands. The combination of guns and public address would make a man’s eardrums bleed, no less than the blare of ‘music’ from the danceshop. Synthrock was not to Sherratt’s taste. Perhaps Resalq nerves were more receptive to the subetheric tracks, and while humans actually paid to enter Désireux and listen to the din, it was making Leon Sherratt’s spine crawl.
Lit in purple and blue by the animated neon from the danceshop, the blind windows in the hotel across the mall gushed return fire. Someone up there had a light launcher and a supply of rockets — enough to worry the squaddies. Not quite so brave now it was a standup fight, the flyer’s crew pulled out to rooftop level and the crowd below broke into a chorus of cheers of abuse. Sherratt was less optimistic. He leaned out of the alley and gave the squad a glare.
They ‘situation’ had turned ugly. It was racing out of their control, and he knew the Fleet MPs must be routing in backup.
It could be a gunship next, blotting out the late evening sky above Arkady Mall, and Leon’s palms prickled with anxious sweat. The squaddies were not here by chance. No one among the crowd would guess what had brought the Fleet bastards here tonight, but Sherratt was painfully well aware of it.
His palms were still blistered and the muscles in his thighs trembled with leftover fatigue. He was out of shape, and if he died tonight, he would have his own physical shortcomings to blame. He had been hiding too long, and when a man was cooped up, fearing to show his face to the street, he soon got soft — in a place where softness was as terminal as a disease.
The city was a bad place to be. Many of the locals had pulled out. They were up in ‘the valley’ and beyond, taking their kids and their old people, getting them out of the target zones. A month ago, Fleet had raided Hydralis almost every day. Industry was here, the big auto factories of Rand, Cyber-Zabou, Volvo and Weiss. Aircraft, engines, mainframes and the AI interfaces that made them work — everything was manufactured in the Hydralis area. This was the first city completed by the terraformer fleet, the first populated by humans. It remained the biggest city on the planet, with a population above six million and almost all of Omaru’s industry. Fleet knew exactly what to target, to hurt.
Yet they had not destroyed Hydralis, and Leon Sherratt knew how much of the urban demolition was due to the fighting, missile overshoots, heavy vehicles going down hard in the industrial precincts. When a gunship bottomed out, even if the reactors did not spill, the devastation was the equal of anything wreaked by an artillery assault. Harlington and Southwark were wastelands. The Volvo assembly plant was a crater.
But Fleet had not inflicted the devastation it had expected in Hydralis, and if the officers commanding the blockade had hoped to beat the people into submission, they were disappointed. Omaru had not even begun to retaliate in earnest. Its citizens did not want to fight, yet they had shown their fangs to elements of the DeepSky Fleet, and they had drawn deep, arterial blood. Fleet backed off to lick its wounds.
The attacks came again — as they must: the Fleet blockade squadron was under orders countersigned in political offices in a city called Chicago, which Sherratt had never seen, never expected to see — but the raids were more cautious, infinitely more cunning. They feared the Hydralis militia. And they had reason to.
Fear was like a virus. Leon Sherratt felt it licking along his nerves, and swallowed on a dry throat. His palms burned after the climb, his legs trembled after the sprint. He was at liberty, but he wondered how many humans would be picked up by medevac and transferred directly to the morgue. Too many, he thought bitterly, and tonight their blood was on his own hands.
He had brought Fleet here. He had thought to vanish into the crowd, one more face among a thousand others, his biosigns lost in the tide of so many others that his ‘gibberish’ sensor readings would not give him away when the squaddies came.
They had come sooner than he expected. By his chrono it was just after 19:45 local time, and in this month of early summer the sky was the color of satsuma plums, with two moons up and the brightest points of the Rabelais Drift beginning to glitter like carnival lights in the north. From the west side of Mount Miorosu, out of the city lights, Hellgate was a pale, milky swathe in the sky, bright with superluminous, giant stars. The naked eye could see Nova 2631C, and with field glasses it was a visual spectacle.
Tonight he had no chance to even notice El’arne. The squad was still hovering 75 meters north of the Meiguo Hotel, and it was only a matter of minutes before their backup arrived. Another squad or a gunship — either way, he would be picked up. And if a gunship dropped in to fly topcover for the bastard squaddies, the autoguns would batter Arkady mall to rubble.
Leon Sherratt had to get out — and let them know he was leaving. Just as he had led them here like a fool, he had to lead them away again, fast. Too many people could die tonight, and he might still be taken. If the squaddies caught him, or killed him, it was all for nothing. The risk, and the cost of the blood spilled here, were too high.
Synthrock blared out of Désireux without pause. The volume inside the dance shop was so high, most of the clients were unaware of the riot. He recognized the vocal track. The lead singer for a band called Lux was screaming out a lyric about out-of-mind angelino ‘rides,’ and a boy called Rico. The song, if it could be dignified with the term, had charted across the colonies, where citybottom reverberated to the pungent subetherics of synth. Leon longed for the naive old steelrock of other decades, and for the complex cross-harmonies and quarter-tones of his own people’s music.
It was too long since he had heard Resalq music, sung by native singers. The ancient music, discovered in the ruins on Jagreth and Velcastra, was being performed again, by humans now, but they got it wrong. Their voices could slither around the complex melodies, but their ears — accustomed to the fifteen-semitone scale — could barely even hear the Resalq quarter tones. A few bands were close enough to be bearable. One Celtish vocal quartet from the homeworlds was eerily close, but the heavy, relentless beat used to back their vocals set Sherratt on edge.
A twist of homesickness ambushed him as he leaned out from the alley once more, to get a visual bearing on the squad. He had been here too long. Omaru had a small, insular Resalq community, but they referred to themselves as ‘gypsies.’ They were nomads, footloose, like Dario and that pred’yche of his. Leon tried to remember the name, and then let it go. It meant nothing. The only thing that mattered now was to stop the shooting, stop the killing — and get out of Hydralis with his life and his data.
He knew the interior of Désireux well enough after several parties. In the front were the foyer and public facilities; then it was four levels of dance salons, and below them, the bar and the ‘flops,’ where patrons could sleep off the dream smoke which sizzled in the air of at least two of the salons. And above were the rooms where hustlers entertained their trade.
He needed a vidphone, quickly. His own phone was no good — he knew he was tapped. Fleet had traced him, isolated him out of a company of more than fifty individuals with access to the laboratory, and then they had cut him out of the pack the way a crippled deer was singled out by hunting wolves. Leon knew his phone was tapped, and he had hidden it an hour ago, left it open and receiving — ‘the forecast for Greater Hydralis City, 14:00 to 20:00 hours, is for mild, changing conditions with winds from—’
The squaddies would have wasted precious minutes homing on the phone’s signal, while Leon climbed the power conduit down the inside of the lift shaft, from the third-level garages to the second subbasement. It was the only way in or out of the lab, without being picked up by a surveillance camera, and even though he was a friend of the sovereign state of Omaru — even though the government of Hydralis had given him a smart card, passwords and AI recognition, he desperately avoided the cameras.
The system was hacked. It was lousy with virus-like spies, and as fast as the UOH particle physics lab cleaned them out, they were back. For the last three months Leon had lived on the edge, knowing the squaddies were never more than one step behind him. University of Omaru, Hydralis was a good place to hide. He was one more academic among a tribe of them, all thronging the campus, determined to keep to schedules while the colonial war erupted around them. Leon could pass for a post-grad student or one of the younger faculty members. He had the looks, and the qualifications to pull his weight in the particle physics lab, though he was not a physicist. Even a basic grasp, freshman level, of Resalq and Zunshu technology was enough to open doors at UOH, and once he was on the inside, campus security and faculty alike had made it so easy, he almost felt guilty.
Only Roy knew what he was. There was no way to fool Roy Arlott. He looked at Leon with the eyes of a lover — the first time in so long that Leon had looked into a lover’s face, he could only surrender. Roy knew soon enough that Leon was different. The body geometry was a fraction ‘off,’ and the skin pigment, the exact shape of the pupil when it was fully contracted, even the body temperature. Roy was a linguist, not a physical scientist, but he was a highly intelligent man, and he knew Leon was not quite human.
The band bellowing out of Désireux changed, though the din remained the same. And Leon Sherratt was out of time. Roy Arlott’s face whirled before his mind’s eye as he took a breath, held it, and stepped out into the body of Arkady Mall.
The crowd had scattered. Many of the hucksters’ stalls and kiosks had been ruined by the exchange of gunfire. Fruit, vegetables, junk jewelry, cheap cosmetics, body paints, vidcubes, were scattered in a trampled mess, while the traders had hurried under cover. Most of the city’s buildings had shelters, strong-points where an earthquake or an artillery salvo might level the surface yet leave the strengthened basement intact.
Sherratt was almost alone as he deliberately stepped out into the open and turned his naked face to the squad flyer. Being alone, he attracted attention. They would scan him to be sure he was not armored, carrying a weapon which could knock down the flyer; or was he vidnews paparazzi, unarmed but still a target, because Fleet was getting bad press and freelance vidjockeys were the poison they lived with.
They knew his face — it was on file, though as yet they had no name to tag it with, much less a set of biosigns which would set Leon Sherratt apart. He gave the squaddies a measured four seconds to see him, image him, and try to get a scanner lock-on, and then he ran.
The alley was a dead-end filled with overflowing trashpacks and miniature whirlwinds of litter. He jumped the legs of a doper who had passed out there, and went around the teens who were painting up a new round of lurid graffiti. They looked blankly at him as he dove by, headed for the service entrance where delivery drivers brought in supplies. Booze for the bar, cartridges for the dream smoke blowers, fresh food for the kitchens.
The cleaners also used the side entrance. The door was fouled with machines and chemicals, which broke several civil regulations — this door also served as a fire escape. In a panic, people would trip, fall, and be trampled. Sherratt kicked away the machines. They were sleeping drones, not even semi-intelligent, and they knew nothing as he pressed through a crush of cartons, stacked furniture, strewn coats and assorted baggage, to reach the inner door.
The sign pasted to it read Private: staff only. No one noticed as he appeared from the storeroom, and before him was the first of the floors, an arena filled with dancers, loud with synthrock, buzzing with dream smoke. The smoke had no effect on a Resalq, save to make him sneeze, but bass tracks hidden in the music, below the level of hearing, made his hackles rise and sweat spring from his pores. Hearing the same subetherics, humans became aroused.
Across the floor, revelers were clenched in twos, threes, bunches, gyrating to the heavy, audible beat. The heat and humidity were oppressive, and Sherratt was already sweating. In the strobing glare of the lights, paint smeared around the flanks and limbs of the dancers — most were naked, and the fluorescent warpaint, chic this year in the colonies, gave them a primal aspect. Exciting, disturbing, frightening.
The Companions were always the best dancers. Leon knew several of them, from nights spent here at private revels. Roy’s group loved to boogie. The big redhead, Carlos, was on the near edge of the floor, working his body hard. Gold rings caught the strobes at his neck, wrists, breast and groin, fine chains winked against his skin as he spun, too absorbed in the performance to notice Sherratt.
Leon spared him only a glance, and his eyes moved on, looking for a way through the crush. The vidphones were on the other side, a rank of booths beside the bar. He saw an opening and launched himself into it. Dream smoke tingled in his nose, irritating his sinuses. Faces turned toward him with curious looks — what was he doing here, still in street clothes, wild eyed, driven?
Recognition sparked in some of the faces but Leon ignored them, pushing through, trying not to notice the odors of hot male bodies, sweated in heat, aroused by the synth. A man called his name, and though he knew the voice he ignored it and pressed on.
Two of the four vidphones were free, and as he reached the edge of the floor he hunted through his pockets — not for the smartcard which would have flagged his presence to the security computers in an instant, but for a five dollar coin. The squaddies already knew he had come in here: now let them work for their pay. If he made it too easy for them, he could be dead before he got out of Désireux.
As he ducked into the thick plastex hood the synth din abated enough for him to hear. He dropped the coin into the machine and stabbed numbers on the screen, a phonecode engraved in his memory. Not Roy’s number, though he could quote that in his sleep. 8847 6635 was a number on the other side of Hydralis, out on the ’skirts, in the burbs beyond the factories, where people lived.
Only one question haunted him. Was Mitch home to pick up on the house line? It was too dangerous to call him on the road. If the machine at the house tried to forward the call, Leon would cancel at once. His fists clenched, nails raising welts in his palms, as he waited. If Mitch was out, Leon was not quite on his own, but the next few hours would be interesting. And then —
“6635, Garret.” Like balm on a wound. Mitch had selected voice-only when he accepted the call, so the screen remained a kaleidoscope of colors, formless, sensual, suggesting half-imagined shapes before dissolving again.
“Mitch, it’s me. Leon.”
“Leon! Where in the hell are you, man? I called —”
“I’m in trouble,” Leon said over the synth and Mitch Garret’s voice. “You know a dance shop called Désireux?”
“What are you doing at Désireux?” Garret’s voice rose sharply.
“Using a phone the bastards can’t trace, and trying not to get killed!” Leon forced a breath to the bottom of his lungs. “I need a pickup, Mitch, or I’m not going to make it out.”
“Christ.” Garret skipped a beat. “Not from Désireux. There’s too many people, no place to put down, and there’s already squaddies there, right?”
“A flyer over Arkady Mall. They’ll be in here soon.”
“How did they find you?” Mitch began. And then, “Later. Can you yet to Brady’s?”
It was a restaurant on the south side, beyond the Weiss plant, not far from Mitch’s place. Leon knew it. “Too far,” he muttered. “I don’t have wings or a groundie, and I’m running out of time. Can you make it to Camden Park?”
“I can’t land there,” Garret warned. “It’s too open, too many people again. I’d draw a squad faster than you could whistle, if I try putting a truck down in the middle of a bunch of kids and old ladies. Come on, man, think!”
Think. Leon Sherratt clenched his eyes shut and rubbed his face hard. The synthrock was starting to deaden his frontal lobes and speak to the ancient reptile complex buried deep down, inside the Resalq brain. Senseless dread uncoiled through him like a ravel of tired party streamers.
And then he had it. “Touch and go,” he said hoarsely, “don’t land, just touch and go — C-Zab air park. Can you do it?”
Again Garret skipped a beat, and then he was back. “When?”
“Give me an hour,” Leon panted. “You can see the C-Zab building from the Mall, but I have to shake these bastards for long enough to make the pickup, or I’ll just drag you into this mess with me.”
“And you’ll be telling me what the fuck your mess is,” Garret said tersely, “when I pull you out! An hour, Leon. Be there. I won’t be able to hang around waiting for you — and if you bring the squaddies with you, I can’t afford to be seen.”
Mitch Garret was the link back to too many others, and if he were taken alive, drugged, ‘interviewed’ by Fleet’s master interrogators, the price of Leon Sherratt’s liberty would be too high.
The price could be Omaru. The end of the colonial wars before they properly began — the subjection of every colony in the Deep Sky … and for the Zunshu, no opposition.
The vidphone clicked off from Garret’s end, and Leon dragged his sweating palms over his chest. The linen shirt, with the green-copper crest of UOH on the breast pocket, was soaked. The thick braid into which he had roped his hair was heavy, annoying. Many times he longed to cut it, but it served a purpose. Many Resalq of his generation were not the same, and the diversion —
“Hey, Leon, man, you look like all hell.”
A hand fell on his shoulder, making him jump. It was the big redhead, the Companion with the gold rings and blue-green body paint. The hair veiled Carlos’s face, spilled around his shoulders, and the chameleon body paint changed color in the lights when he moved. He was local, bred and born in Hydralis and wasted here. With that face, the stature, the body form, the heavy genitals that could have been molded by the hand of a sculptor, he could have done well in uptown Sark, even Elstrom StarCity, Velcastra. More than once Leon had told him so, but Carlos only laughed. He was uneducated, with a broad accent from the wrong side of Hydralis, which would always imprison him here.
“You don’t want to be with me, kid, not tonight.” Leon’s eyes were on the foyer, where patrons were still coming into Désireux though the club was already too packed for comfort. The squaddies could not be far away. “I have to get out of here.” He heard the edge in his own voice.
Carlos tossed the long red hair back out of his eyes and looked over both shoulders. “Who’s after you? You want I should get security? Désireux don’t like it when their guests get hit on.”
“No!” Leon held up both hands. “There’s squaddies out there, Fleet bastards. They’re looking for me, kid, and the less you know about it, the better. I just have to get the hell out.”
“Fuckitall,” Carlos said, half amused, “you don’t do nothing by half. Git, man, while you can. Go out the back.”
The back exits led around to the same alley where he had come in through the store room, and Leon was uncertain. If the squaddies knew this dance shop even a tenth as well as its patrons did, they would block the alley mouth, and when he tried to get back around to the mall he would run right into them. Leon cast about for options, furiously aware of the clock ticking in the back of his mind.
And all at once his time was up. The commotion in the foyer made Carlos spin, and as the shouting roared over the thundering synthrock, Sherratt took his chance.
He saw the squaddies over the heads of the dancers — three men and a woman, all of them Pakrani or Kuchini, in helmets and flak gear, visors down, searching the dance shop visually and on instruments.
As he had done in the street, he bobbed up out of concealment and showed his face just long enough for them to pinpoint him. And then Sherratt was gone like a jackrabbit. In ten paces he thanked whatever gods might be watching that he had let Roy Arlott drag him to idiotic faculty parties at Désireux.
If he had never been here before, the two Fleet MP squads would have taken him, because the crush of dancers parted before them like a mob of sheep before the dogs. Some were screaming, others were yelling abuse, but they cleared the way for the squaddies to make good time across the floor, in the direction of the phone booths.
Long before they were there, Leon Sherratt was gone. Running crouched, he used the dancers for cover until he found his way through to the back. The stairs curved around the elevator shaft. The MPs would expect him to use the elevator, which would immediately tell them which floor he had punched for. Sherratt leaned into the one waiting car and selected level 9 — and then he fled up the stairs.
Thigh muscles which had cooled and stiffened after the sprint from the UOH transit station hurt with each step. He tuned out the pain, forcing himself on — but not to level 9. The squaddies would take one of the three lifts. They were lazy, Sherratt thought, accustomed to flying or riding wherever they were headed. It was a conditioned reflex after long service in uniform. These squad officers would be from some Middle Heavens world, possibly even from the homeworlds. Fleet was not foolish enough to assign Deep Sky citizens to trash their own homes, persecute their own people.
Level 7 was the parking garage, open to the air on both sides of the building, with the rooftops of Arkady Mall at least one floor below. Above the garage were four levels of luxury accommodation and a bistro right on the roof, with a pointless, ugly view of the industrial parks. No one in Hydralis seemed to notice that the factories seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. Industry was the life’s blood of Omaru. It had made the world the richest in the Deep Sky, and the most densely populated — all of which made it a big, fat target for the Confederacy. The military service levy bit deeper and harder here, and at ‘tax time’ the fortune levied from Omaru would have settled the tax bill for any three other colonies.
It was natural for the colonial wars to begin here, Sherratt thought dizzily as he pushed his legs on, up, around the curving stairs. His right hand grabbed for the rail. He began to haul himself up as he passed the fourth level, and as he grasped the hollow steel he felt the resonance of the elevator going up right beside him.
With a blistering curse he sucked in a breath and pushed himself harder. He turned his wrist to see his chrono, and listened to the drumbeat of his heart. He was out of shape, and he was in deep trouble. He had been too long in hiding, spent too long going soft while he waited for Fleet security to search elsewhere for him.
Weeks had become a month, more, and at last he assumed they would guess he had skipped, gotten out of Hydralis with the tidal surge of people taking their kids and old folk to the agricultural towns. He was certain Fleet must be searching for him in places like Troy and Larisa, and he played his hand.
Humans had a saying: everyone was allowed one mistake. Sherratt was sure he had made many more than that, and this one could be his last. He was fish-breathing as he dove into the cool, shifting and acrid air of the parking garage. He took a precious moment just to force air into his lungs, and then he dragged both hands over his sweating face and pushed on.
If someone had left a car unlocked —
Only a moron would leave a vehicle unlocked in this part of town, but Sherratt hunted up and down the ranks, trying a door here, a window there. He had no tools to break in and hotwire a car, but he might have gotten lucky: guys were often stoned before they arrived at Désireux, and forgot little things like security.
But it seemed his luck was spent tonight. All the luck he owned had been invested in getting out of the lab alive, making it into the elevator shaft via a service hatch, down and out through the subbasement.
Even now, no one at UOH would know what he had done, what he had taken, where he had hidden it. They would know soon enough what was gone, and as soon as the news was public, that Leon Sherratt had been killed by Fleet squaddies, or arrested, they would know who had taken the device.
Leon did not care — they could have it back, when Mark or Dario, or that human Mark was so fond of, Jazinsky, was finished with it. If Mark and Jazinsky were even half as smart as they believed they were, the government of Hydralis could have fifty of the things, fresh off the assembly line. But first they had to surrender one for study, and the devices were so rare, so precious, they might have been stuffed with gelemeralds.
No authority on Omaru was about to make one available to a stranger, an offworlder, unconnected with the university and the government. Sherratt was out of options.
His heart was slowing, he had his breath back, and he knew the Fleet squad would be turning the bistro upside down and shaking it. They would be in the kitchens, in the bathrooms, believing he had lost them. They would be frustrated and angry, and they would be vicious. The whole dance shop would be sealed, and the interrogations would go through till dawn: who had assisted the fugitive, who had hidden him, who knew him? People would die, others would rot in the prison on Rashid, the second moon. Leon could easily be there with them, and the thought filled his veins with liquid fire.
He was breathing easier, though his legs shook and the blisters in his palms were bleeding; and again he was out of time, almost out of options. From the open mouth of the garage, on the north side, which faced away from Arkady Mall, he could see the top section of the CyberZabou building.
The company designed the AI human-machine interfaces for half of the mainframes from the homeworlds on out. The C-Zab building reared eighty floors above Camden Park, and the company occupied only twenty levels, close to the top. The bottom fifty floors were filled with arcades, retail, entertainment, and the top ten were executive apartments, high above the street — under the air park which was Leon’s goal.
His way down from the garage was the fire escape, an old fashioned zigzag of bare metal against the wall, in the alcove housing the lift shaft. The night air was as cool as equatorial Hydralis would ever enjoy, and he poised on the threshold, searching for a blunt object. Cleaning drones had been here, not long before. The whole garage was almost too clean, but at last he saw what he wanted.
A champagne magnum — bearing the label of Hsian Sheng Wineries, Velcastra, and still smelling of white wine not yet gone rank — stood just inside the top of the fire escape. Someone had finished their party out here, in the cool and quiet of the evening. From the city rooftops you could watch the sternflares of ships departing Hydralis Field. The spaceport was on the horizon, but the big ships cut a line out over this part of the city. Kids came up to rooftop level to find cool air, get stoned and make out.
The broken blisters smarted as he lifted the magnum. The plastex almost slipped on the blood in his palm, but he twisted it, hefted it over his shoulder and hurled it, hard, into the canopy of the most expensive car in reach. The alarm exploded, hurting his ears, but Sherratt did not wait around to listen.
Two levels above, in the bistro, the squaddies would assume he had given them the slip a second time and tried to steal a car. His attempts had set off the alarm. The Fleet officers would be in the elevator moments later.
The fire escape was steep, the going was slow, but two floors lower he had access to the building’s interior once more. His ears were still full of the electronic racket of the car alarm when he dove through the wide glass doors into the Orange Blossom cafe on level 5. The doors shut out the alarm, but the synthrock reverberated through the whole framework of the building.
Faces turned toward him as he appeared from the fire escape but he ignored them all. The service lifts — the big freight elevators which served the kitchens — were off to the right, behind the meandering tables, with their ridiculous umbrellas, as if the Orange Blossom were in the open air, and it was not night outside.
His one prayer was that the freight lift would be available, and for the first time in almost two hours, he was in luck. He was inside at once, and punched for street level. The platform went down fast, being designed for cargo, not the comfort of human passengers, and it opened into the chill air and odd reek of the yards out back of Désireux.
Now he was gambling, but it was a good wager: he had been seen inside, he was known to have punched the elevator for level 9, and he was suspected to have tried to steal a car on level 7. His gamble was that all the squad officers had been called up to the garage, leaving the ground floor either unguarded, or only lightly covered.
Luck was holding together, and a thread of hope uncoiled through his chest as he saw the clear alley mouth. He was moving at once, and at the same corner where he had hidden to watch the flyer buzz the crowd, he ducked into concealment again, long enough to scan the mall visually in both directions.
The squad flyer and its backup — another identical craft, blunt-nosed, with the high tail and the cannons mounted in the belly — had landed in the ruined body of the mall. Two officers and a swarm of drones guarded the vehicles; the other four would be in the parking garage — if they had not played a hunch and taken the fire escape. Before long the Orange Blossom’s patrons would be describing the wild-eyed fugitive who had bolted into the freight elevator, and he would have company.
In a way, he was counting on it. Sherratt sucked in a quick breath, bunched his muscles and launched himself. The mall was ten meters wide, and dead opposite was the YukiYume Arcade. It was still belching music though most of its patrons had dispersed with the arrival of the flyers. The arcade’s wide entranceway was lit with dancing blue and white neon, and Sherratt made a dead run, not even breathing, into the glare and noise.
The security drones which swarmed around the flyers picked him up at once, but he was inside before they caught him up, and lost among the hundreds of people who had come here to get away from Hydralis’s fierce equatorial heat.
To one side was the rink, a vast arena of ice where skaters circled endlessly and the technicians were programming the Zamboni to clean up the surface before the midnight hockey game. To the other side was the bar, O’Grady’s, and the first of YukiYume’s many VR dens.
Green marble stairs led down into the underworld of subbasements, and glass-bottomed lifts whisked patrons up through the honeycomb superstructure of the mall, which shared a common wall with the Meiguo Hotel. Leon did not know this part of Arkady as well as he knew the dance shop, but he had often killed a few hours here to escape the heat. If he closed his eyes, the chill of YukiYume reminded him of Riga, in the mountains far to the north of Sark.
The homesickness was back, full-force, as he headed past the stairs and into the maze. YukiYume was a labyrinth, with blind passages headed off, up and down, apparently at random. Arkady Mall was not designed by the terraformer fleet. It was built only fifty years before, to replace the area of the city which was razed by fire when a crippled heavy lifter lost its Aragos and smacked down short of the spaceport. The arcade wound itself around the back side of the ice arena, looped up and down like a series of switchbacks, and even people who knew it well could get turned around.
The worst thing Leon could do was run. The squaddy security drones would pick him out of the crowd in an instant if he moved too fast. He knew they were back there, sniffing, imaging, sorting, and when he saw the signage of a den he recognized, he stepped inside, under the animated logo proclaiming Phantasm.
It was part VR parlor, part sexshop — the line between the two often blurred into meaninglessness. The sharp smell of chimera was on the air here, tingling in his head, and the cavern was dark red, dark green, warmer than the arcade yet still twenty degrees cooler than the street. Life-sized holos of the house Companions shimmered in alcoves off to both sides of the doorway, advertising their wares.
Patrons could hire them for real, enjoy flesh, blood and bone, for high prices; or they could take the VR option, where fantasy encounters had been woven around the Companions. Sabel was ebony-black, with the stature of a Pakrani and the ripped physique of a man who lived in the gym. He was magnificent in scraps of silk and leather, with his mane of scarlet-streaked dreadlocks, and he knew it. Lex was a gold-skinned Lushi, buzzcut, tattooed from head to foot. His holo twisted and writhed to display the lean body of a dancer, the agility of an acrobat, and an arrogance which outmuscled Sabel’s. Coraline was from some colony Leon did not know, with subtle engineering — or else she was local to Hydralis, and her body had been reworked for the trade. The legs were too long to be natural, and those pneumatic breasts could not have suffered the tug of Omaru’s gravity for long.
He bypassed them all, cutting a line into the waiting room and looking for one specific face. It was after seven. Danny should be at work by now, and he should be here. The lounge was occupied with the usual flock of hopeless, helpless late teens, two boys and a girl, waiting for a VR hookup. The tiny rooms in the back were all busy, with three more waiting their turn. Downstairs, the flesh and blood Companions, Sabel, Lex and Coraline, would be playing poker, drinking coffee, smoking bel-grass, waiting for a trick to show who could afford the real deal, not the VR sim. Some nights they had a long wait.
A bell on the low counter carried a sign: Ring for service. Leon thumped it hard enough to make the waiting kids jump, and an angry face thrust out of one of the hookup booths. “Hey, if you don’t like waiting, you can get the fuck out of my — oh, it’s you, Leon. Christ, you look like shit. What you need? Are you using? I didn’t think that was your scene!”
As he spoke, Danny Shroeder was tugging Leon out of the lounge and into the back, the private area where the shop-sitters relaxed. The threedee was on, displaying some vidmovie. Danny had just muted the sound and left it running while he went to clean up the booth for the next client in line to fry his brains. Fresh VR jacks, a paper sheet over the couch, a water bottle with the seal intact, the remote lying on the pillow.
Framed in the threedee, two husky youths were entwined and heaving. One was bronze-skinned, the other pale as drifted snow, and both could have been churned out by the same personal trainer, in the same gym, on the same machines. Both boys were beautiful, but to Leon’s exhausted eyes, something about them looked fake, while Danny Shroeder was infinitely more appealing.
He was short, pale because he worked in the arcade, with sunburn on his nose from some foray out and up, straggling brown hair that was still trying to grow out the service cut, and the soft hands of a guy who had done his entire five-year hitch in data processing. But Danny was real, and his plain, ordinary face was filled with concern as he pressed Leon into a chair and reached for a bottle of Green Douglas malt whiskey, ‘the Deep Sky’s best Irish.’
“Leon, for godsakes.” He pressed a double into Sherratt’s hands and perched on the arm of the chair as if he worried Leon would drop it.
“I’m okay, Danny,” Leon said hoarsely. It was water he needed, not booze. “I’ve got squaddies behind me — they just shot up the mall. You can’t hear it in here over the music from the rink.”
“It was on security.” Danny waved vaguely at the threedee. “Stay off the streets, it said. Action in progress, some kind of bullshit. I didn’t look too close. That was you? Christ.” He fidgeted with anxiety. “You, uh, didn’t lead them here —?”
Sherratt gave him a reproachful look. “You know me better than that. They know I’m in YukiYume somewhere, but this place is an ant heap, and I’ll go through too fast.”
“Go where?” Danny demanded. “If there’s squaddies behind you, and you’re on foot —”
“I’ve got a pickup, 45 minutes, the C-Zab air park.” Sherratt handed back the whiskey untouched. “You got any water, Danny? I’ve been running my ass off for the last hour, and I’m so far out of shape, if they don’t take me I’ll probably drop dead of a heart attack.”
“Damn.” Shroeder scrambled up and hurried into the lounge for a bottle from the cold cabinet. A voice spoke to him, under Leon’s hearing, and he snapped back, “In a minute, sir, soon as I get it set up.”
He was back then, snapping the cap off a plastex liter bottle. Leon took it from him and forced himself not to swallow the whole thing in one pull. It would only cramp his belly, and he had far to go. “I need a way out, Danny,” he said between swallows. “Other side of YukiYume from Désireux, something that gives me a clear shot through to C-Zab.”
Anyone who worked here, as Shroeder had, since he was released from his Fleet service, knew the arcade blindfolded. “Under the rink, through the service ways,” Danny said without hesitation. “I know the codes to get the doors open, because my cousin works for the company that services the freezing gear for the rink. He comes down here, gets stoned out of his gourd, and I kind of cover for him while Sabel bounces him senseless.” He flushed, which looked unhealthy on one so pale. “I’m not supposed to, you tell anyone, Leon, and my job goes whoosh, but for godsakes, it’s only watching the machines, and I just did five years in data processing on the Chicago, I’m so far overqualified for Rod’s job, it’s not funny, and Rod doesn’t get much chance to skull out and get done by somebody like Sabel too often, and —”
He was babbling because he was scared, and Leon also was watching the time, listening to the relentless tick of the clock in the back of his mind. “Not a word to a soul, Danny. The service ways come up where?”
Shroeder sucked in a breath. “In the alley between YukiYume’s blind side and the Ressmeyer Complex, it’s all parking garages and trashpacks. When you get out the door, turn right, man, you got it? Right. Make a left and you’re dead. You’ll come out on Shackleton Square, in the open. Make a right, and take every right after that— I think there’s three — and you come out on Argyll Plaza.”
It was perfect. Sherratt knew Argyll Plaza well. There was a bistro there, with a view of Camden Park on one side, and the CyberZabou building towered over the park’s west border. “Got it. And thanks, Danny. I owe you one.”
“You owe me three for this,” Shroeder corrected. “You know what you owe me. I’ve called you three times in the last week, you’re never answering.” He opened his arms, inviting an embrace.
“I’ve been busy.” Leon swept him up, held him tightly and kissed him, though there was little time to linger. “I’ll call you, Danny, when it’s safe.” He and Shroeder had not shared more than an hour of intimacy, stretched over months, and he knew Danny wanted more — he knew Roy would only be amused, or might even invite himself along. Roy was not the kind to settle down, or want the comfort of an enduring partnership, let alone the fidelity that went along with promises. Roy was not yet thirty years old, and though he thought he knew Sherratt’s secrets, there were some he had never dreamed. Leon Sherratt was four times his age.
And he might be dead in minutes. He could not allow himself to be arrested. Much more than his own life was riding on this crazy scheme, and not for the first time he called himself a fool — though not for being involved. Not for talking his way into the particle physics lab at UOH, where Roy worked and could easily get him a job as a lab assistant — jobs were easy to get in Hydralis, since the Fleet raids began.
But Sherratt was no kind of professional thief. Getting into the lab was as easy as using Roy’s smartcard. Roy did not even know, yet, that Leon had taken it; he should never have known. It should have been back in his wallet before he missed it, and Leon castigated himself viciously. He knew he should have been able to get out of the lab again with the borrowed device, without tripping the security system.
For minutes he had thought he was out, free, and he only realized a silent alarm must have triggered when he saw the drones buzzing around. They were outside the long windows, every meter of the way down the side of the lab building. The ways out were covered— he would be arrested as soon as he put his nose outside.
As he released Danny Shroeder he peered at his palms. The bleeding had stopped but they were full of raw flesh. He had skinned them going down the elevator service shaft, and his shoulders were beginning to stiffen and ache after the unaccustomed physical effort. His legs were protesting just standing, and he chastised himself mercilessly for falling so far out of condition. But Fleet had imaged his face three months ago, and thereafter liberty meant hiding, because nowhere in Hydralis City was free of Fleet surveillance. The drones were everywhere, often too small to be seen. Some of them were no larger than his thumb, scattered like thistledown from the bigger viddrones which were quickly shot down by snipers like those in the mall.
His one chance to get his hands on a device had come tonight, and it might not come again. Some specialist from the Winslow-Mao Institute had come in, running the blockade with a mercenary crew, or gunrunners. It could be done, but the danger was terrible. The man from Winslow-Mao had run the gauntlet, but Sherratt was bleak about his chances of understanding the device well enough to duplicate the technology.
Without any shadow of doubt, that device was either ancient Resalq — or it was Zunshu, and Leon was too young to know. What a physicist from Velcastra was expected to make of it, he could not imagine. It should be Jazinsky studying it, and his own e’quero, even his brother, who was a cryptocyberneticist. But the shot through the blockade was too dangerous to risk them. Mark Sherratt and Barb Jazinsky would never be allowed to do it, even if they were insane enough to volunteer, and Leon prayed they were not.
The humans had another timeworn saying, which he had never understood, much less appreciated. If Mohammed would not go to the mountain — whoever, or whatever ‘Mohammed’ was — then the mountain would have to be fetched to him, or it.
And since there was no way Mark or Jazinsky would ever be on this side of the blockade, the device was going to have to go to them, whether the government of Omaru in general and the faculty of UOH liked it, or not. There were times when Leon Sherratt thought it would be easier to physically move a mountain.
If he died tonight, the ancient device was so expertly hidden, it was not likely to be found for more than a year. And if Leon did perish tonight, he would take its secret with him — and any real hope the Deep Sky had of victory in the colonial wars.
“I have to go, Danny,” he said huskily. Wide blue eyes blinked up at him, and he dropped a kiss between them. “I don’t want to get you in trouble, and there’s squaddies out there, not far enough away. Codes?”
“Call me,” Shroeder whispered as he scrawled a nine-digit sequence on the back of a scrap of printer flimsy, and tucked it into Leon’s breast pocket, under the UOH crest. “Promise you’ll call me.”
“I will.” Leon was already moving. “When it’s safe — you don’t want to be close to me, not now.”
“I … know,” Danny said awkwardly. He was no taller than Leon’s shoulder, his cologne was too sweet for Sherratt’s liking, and he was just twenty-three years old. Often, Leon thought of him as a child, but humans were deceptive. “Look, get the hell out, will you?” Danny said tersely. “Run, be safe, and — pick up the goddamn’ phone one of these times!”
Five years in Fleet, even in the data processing department buried in the heart of a super-carrier, gave a man a certain toughness. Sherratt touched Danny’s face with his fingertips and stepped back. “Yessir, Sergeant Shroeder.” At the curtain which separated the office from the lounge out front, he turned back. “Keep your ears open. Trust nothing, till you hear from me.”
He was gone then, doubling back toward the rink, and his eyes skipped from passage to doorway to window, watching for the drone that would put a shot in him, the vidcam that would image his face. He moved no faster than the other patrons of YukiYume, who meandered between the ice arena, the dream shops, dance shops and, on the lower levels, the sexshops, dens where the trade was rough. The way back to the rink seemed much longer than the route he had taken to Phantasm, but he was still alone as he stepped into a dogleg in the passage.
On one side was the closet where the cleaning drones were housed; on the other, a blind door with no handle, no window, no signage, just a keypad. He fished the scrap of paper from his pocket, keyed in the nine digits and held his breath.
The door slid to the right, and the lights kicked on automatically inside. A waft of freezing, dank air, smelling strongly of mildew, hit him in the face. It stank like a boat neglected too long, but he stepped right into it, grateful for Danny’s wastrel cousin and his penchant for a little upmarket dope and a big downtown Companion.
He thumped the door release from the inside to close it, and gave thanks again: the owners of YukiYume were penny-pinching. The lock was cheap, not any kind of smart lock that would demand a user ID before opening, and record who had used it. Nothing would lead the squaddies back to Danny or Phantasm.
A plain plascrete tunnel led down on a steep angle, and he knew he was under the rink moments later. Music roared overhead and the ceiling rumbled constantly with the mass of the skaters. The air down here was not much above freezing, and he jogged to keep warm.
The passage ran under the short axis of the rink, under the grandstands on the other side, and he jogged by the garage where the Zamboni was kept when it was not in use. It was up top tonight, getting a tune-up before the big game. As he hit the up-ramp, headed for the alley Danny had described, he looked at his chrono.
He was on pace to make the pickup, with fifteen minutes left to stay alive and at liberty, and find his way to the C-Zab air park. Sherratt’s pulse rate picked up as he pounded to the top of the ramp. He took a breath and hit the door release.
The alley was deep in shadow and the air was like soup, blood-heat and thick with humidity. Two lamps lit the way, and the only other light sources were at the exits of Ressmeyer’s parking garage. To his right was a street, and he must go that way. To his left the alley opened directly onto Shackleton Square, with the big bronze Tribute to the Pioneers, and twenty dusty eucalypts, jacarandas, acacias.
The air seemed quiet but he paused to listen. He heard none of the telltale whine of servos and the pish-pish sound of the maneuvering jets of small drones. Time was wasting, and he let the service door close behind him. He pushed out of the well of shadow, headed away from the tree-lined square, and as he reached the corner by the trashpacks he hunted for a landmark to get his bearings.
He could see the top of the CyberZabou building, and Danny knew this place like his own backyard. If Sherratt kept on bearing right, ducking from one dusty, gray alley to the next, he would find himself in the plaza opposite Camden Park. His whole body felt as if he had been held down and pounded, but the adrenaline rush of being out, at liberty, and close to the end, overrode pain and exhaustion.
His lungs panted the heavy air and his ears were open, scanning every moment for the sound of drones. They must be there somewhere behind. He did not believe he could outrun or outfox them, yet he was still moving, still alone, when his nose picked up the aromas of coffee and cinnamon.
Before him were the wide spaces of Camden Park, bright with the colored lights and decorations — it was Proclamation Day tomorrow. Obliquely opposite the Cafe Titania was the Cyber-Zabou building, rearing over the park like a chrome and armorglass monolith. Sherratt dragged both hands over his sweated face and peered at his chrono.
The street was a dazzle of lights, with four lanes of sporadic ground traffic and endless streamers of cars headed into the air park, high overhead. A gaggle of factory techs loitered on the sidewalk, heading for the park, and he tagged behind them as they dodged across.
Under a canopy of eucalypts that smelt strongly of tomcats, he clung to the shadows and slunk north, toward the C-Zab tower. He was still looking for drones, and the hum of insects in the night air made his flesh crawl. His hackles were up as he hugged the last shadow, opposite the bright ground-level windows of Zabou Arcade.
He was alone here — if he could make it into the mouth of the arcade, the swarm of humanity would swallow him again. If he ran, a security drone might pick him out of the confusion of traffic and pedestrians headed into the theaters and dance shops; if he meandered, he might give the machines too long to image him, cross-reference and get a positive ident. He took a breath and ran.
Traffic was thicker around the arcade mouth, but it was mostly stop-and-drops — taxis, aircabs touching town momentarily, gyrobikes milling around the head of the ramp to the basement personal parking. Halfway across the road, he knew he had been picked up. It was a feeling of tingling in the spine, when a drone imaged him. Resalq nerves could feel it, while humans were oblivious once they grew out of childhood.