Colony, page 35
The violence that has swept through the United States and other parts of the world has seared the heart of every man and woman of conscience. I, El Libertador, call myself a revolutionary. But the violence in North America's cities has gone beyond revolution. It can lead to nothing but more bloodshed and chaos. I hereby disassociate myself from it, and I urge all true revolutionary movements around the world to disavow such mindless bloodletting tactics.
Let us have a moratorium on violence! Enough of killing! The time for reconciliation has come.
To help bring an end to the violence and terrorism that are increasing in scale throughout the world, I hereby offer to meet with the new leadership of the World Government—anywhere in the world that they may choose—to discuss with them a method of bringing peace to the world and a means to correct the grievances that have caused revolutionary movements to arise everywhere.
It is a choice between peaceful negotiation and worldwide civil war, between reconciliation and chaos. I, El Libertador, renounce violence as of this moment. We will strive for peaceful reconciliation.
—Global broadcast, 30 November 2028
~~~
THIRTY-FOUR
As Bahjat strode down the corridor from David's room, blind fury whirled hotly in her mind.
Fool! she raged at herself. To believe that what he felt and spoke of when we were together in danger would be his real heart. He has known this Englishwoman since before he came to Earth. How could he love an Arab, a guerrilla who holds him prisoner; a woman who has already confessed her other loves to him?
The cafeteria was empty now, the TV turned off. Bahjat frowned in puzzlement. Why? Where could they all have gone?
“Scheherazade... there you are.”
She turned and saw one of the young black girls who was part of the local PRU structure. She seemed frightened, fighting for breath but calm enough to speak.
“They got a big argument goin’—Leo an’ Tiger. Ever’body scattered, don’t wanna be in the middle. You better go calm ’em both down.”
“Where are they?” Bahjat asked.
The girl pointed off toward a row of offices that led down a corridor away from the cafeteria.
She could hear Leo’s booming voice and Hamoud’s urgent, hissing sibilants before the words themselves became clear to her.
The two men were in a big office. An ultra-modern curved desk was in the corner by the draperied window. Most of the room was taken up by a circular conference table. But no one was sitting. Leo paced along a wall-long stack of bookshelves like the lion of his namesake. Hamoud stood by the green chalkboard, radiating stubborn anger and looking faintly ridiculous in his mock football uniform. Two of Hamoud’s bodyguards stood tensely at the door. Bahjat had to shoulder her way past them.
“I need those steroids, man!” Leo was shouting. “Like food! Like air! If I don’t get them, I can’t keep my body goin’. I’ll fall apart. I’ll be dead of a heart attack in a couple of days.”
Hamoud’s bearded face was just as obstinate as ever. “I cannot give you men and guns for a raid on the Kennedy spaceport. It would be madness—especially with the local police and militia already inflamed by your attack.”
“My people are gettin’ themselves killed by the thousands, fightin’ your fight!” Leo bellowed. “Now I need some help…”
“A suicide mission is stupid!” Hamoud snapped.
“What is going on here?” Bahjat demanded, stepping into the center of the room.
Hamoud gestured angrily toward Leo. “He needs certain drugs.”
“To stay alive. Not narcotics. Steroids. Other things, enzymes and stuff, to keep my body goin’. Been livin’ off them since I was a teenager in college football.”
“And he wants us to raid Kennedy spaceport to get them for him.”
Leo’s voice contracted, lowered in volume, as he explained to Bahjat, “See, they was makin’ the stuff for me here, in this lab. That’s why I had this place staked out for my getaway. But Garrison double-crossed me and stashed the stuff at J.F.K.”
“Why the spaceport?” Bahjat asked.
“ ’Cause he’s sending it up to Island One. Maybe it’s already gone there.... I don’t know.”
“All the more reason,” said Hamoud, “to stay away from the spaceport. It’s a trap to catch us.”
“I gotta have that stuff!” Leo said.
“Wait,” Bahjat said. She asked Leo, “Garrison? The same man who controls Garrison Enterprises?”
Leo nodded.
“And he controls Island One,” Hamoud said, “together with four other men.”
“Including Sheikh al-Hashimi.” She almost said my father, but she caught herself at the last moment.
“Including the sheikh,” said Hamoud.
“They’re living on Island One,” Leo said, “all five of ‘em.”
“All of them?” Bahjat asked. “Including al-Hashimi?”
Hamoud nodded.
Suddenly it all became clear to her. “Then we must go to Island One, also.”
“What?”
Leo gaped at her.
“Don’t you see?” Bahjat said to them both. “It all fits together perfectly.”
Hamoud walked slowly across the room toward her. “What do you mean?”
Bahjat said, “Island One controls all the Solar Power Satellites. Whoever controls Island One controls all the energy being beamed to Earth from those satellites.”
Hamoud’s eyes widened. “Almost all of Europe depends on that energy.”
“And most of North America,” added Bahjat, “as well as Japan.”
“By destroying Island One we could destroy the whole energy system!” Hamoud exulted.
“We will not destroy it,” Bahjat said firmly. “We will capture it, and with it, the five wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. Imagine what hostages they would make!”
“And they’ve got my steroids up there,” Leo said.
“By seizing and holding Island One,” Bahjat went on, “we could topple the World Government at a stroke. The revolution will have been won, and a new world order will begin.”
“With us in command,” Hamoud said, his fists clenching.
“Exactly.”
“We could take it,” Hamoud said, “if we had the transport. But how could we hold it? The World Government could shoot us out of the sky. The laser satellites could destroy us in minutes.”
Bahjat smiled at him. “With ten thousand hostages aboard? With T. Hunter Garrison and Sheikh al-Hashimi and all those others? With the control center for the Solar Power Satellites? Would they destroy that? They cannot, and they know they cannot.”
“We’d have them whipped!” Hamoud said.
Leo added, “An’ we could get ’em to turn my people loose.”
“We could run the world the right way—our way!” Hamoud said, and he actually smiled at the thought of it.
Bahjat nodded and said nothing.
“But...” Leo raised a ponderous hand and pointed toward the ceiling. “How do we get there? They ain’t gonna send us no engraved invitations.”
“Yes, they will,” Bahjat said. “Leave that part to me.” Inwardly she smiled. My father wanted me to go to Island One. Now his repentant daughter will beg his forgiveness and ask to be with him.
A young Arab burst into the room, wild-eyed, a bluish bruise just visible along his jaw.
“The prisoner... the one from the space colony... he’s escaped!”
~~~
Newsflash***Newsflash***Newsflash***
For Immediate Release, Interrupt All Programming At Once
30 November 2028
MESSINA: With unexpected swiftness, the World Government Council has agreed to meet with representatives of the breakaway nations of Argentina, Chile, and South Africa to discuss means of ending the worldwide outbreaks of violence and revolution.
“I will be glad to meet with representatives of the secessionists,” said Kowie Boweto, Acting Director of the World Government, “and with El Libertador himself.”
Rumors in Messina suggest that the meeting place may be literally out of this world—on Island One, the space colony a quarter-million miles from Earth.
“It’s a neutral location,” said a Council spokesperson who refused to be identified. “We certainly won’t be interrupted there by riots or other politically inspired acts of violence.”
~~~
THIRTY-FIVE
Within a few moments after Bahjat had stormed out of his room, David whirled to face Evelyn.
“Tell the guard you’re leaving,” he snapped.
“What?”
“Call him. Now! Tell him you want out.”
Looking confused and hurt, Evelyn got up from the couch and went to the door. “Let me out,” she said. “I’m leaving.”
The guard was still grinning as he swung the door open. David yanked him by the arm, spun him around, and felled him with a solid punch to the jaw.
Evelyn stared, goggle-eyed.
“Do they trust you?” he asked her. “Would you be in trouble with them if they thought you helped me get out of here?”
“Of course I would...”
She got no further. He clipped her on the jaw, too, and she fell backward onto the couch.
“If you’re smart you’ll stay there until the guard wakes up,” David muttered, pulling the carbine away from the guard’s numb hands. He ducked out into the hall, then pulled the door shut behind him.
There’s no way for me to escape and no place for me to escape to, David thought as he padded swiftly down the corridor.
What he needed was information. Must be a computer system here, he told himself. Find an empty office and...
He poked into the first open doors he could find. Another apartment, vacant. A janitor’s closet, with sink and mops.
An empty office, with a computer terminal sitting atop the otherwise bare desk. Its blank gray viewscreen looked like a precious jewel to David. He closed the door and jammed it shut with the carbine. Then, sitting at the desk, he tapped into the computer’s data system.
It seemed like only a few minutes, but he knew the time was flying by. The computer flashed information on its screen. It held back no secrets. Whatever David wanted to know, the computer would tell him... if he asked the right questions.
It was a medical lab, as he suspected. Most of its work was in manufacturing antitoxins for contagious diseases. Like most modern laboratories, the manufacturing process involved mutated microbes that happily reproduced the antitoxins that the biologists inserted into their genetic structures. But there was a large research section that developed new antitoxins and tested them on live bacterial and virus cultures.
Another sizable section of the laboratory had been devoted to manufacturing steroids and other hormones.
Know thy enemy, David thought as he fished Leo’s medical records out of the computer. It took a bit of doing, because he was listed under his real name. David had to ask the computer for a list of clients who were on steroid therapy and check them out by physical description.
ELLIOT GREER, the data file said, glowing in green letters on the viewscreen.
“My God, he’s a walking chemistry lab!” David muttered. Adrenocorticals, ACTH, somatotrophic hormones for stimulating growth, thyroid hormones to maintain his metabolic rate, cyclic AMP... “Even his dark coloring comes from the drugs,” David noted aloud.
And without a steady supply of the drugs, Leo’s cardiovascular system would clog and break down in a matter of days—if something else didn’t go wrong with his muscular systems first.
He tapped the keyboard’s TIME switch. The guard ought to be up and giving the alarm by now. Got to move.
David needed speed and stealth. He kept to the shadowiest parts of the corridor, slipping along unnoticed. He heard a hubbub from downstairs, in the cafeteria area, and knew that his “escape” had been discovered.
Skirting along the balcony that ringed the cafeteria, he headed back toward the laboratory area.
If only they haven't cleaned out everything back there, he thought. They've taken Leo's drugs, but maybe there's a chance that they left what I need.
The laboratories themselves were vast, confusing tangles of glass and metal piping. David had to stop at each computer terminal he could find to learn exactly where he was and what the equipment around him was supposed to do.
He heard shouts off in the distance, and turned down the lights around him. The computer viewscreen glowed an eerie green, but he couldn’t do without the information he sought.
In the back of his mind, he knew what was at stake: not only his life, and Bahjat’s and all the others’, but Island One. That was what they were after. Maybe they didn’t know it themselves yet, but David did. Sooner or later they would realize that Island One was the key to their violent dreams. They were going to try to seize Island One, or destroy it. David knew that he would have to stop them. No one else could.
He was in the deepest end of the toxic disease laboratory when all the overhead lights flared up.
David looked up from the lab bench, got down from the stool he had been using, and walked as slowly and calmly as he could toward the front of the lab.
A half-dozen young blacks burst into the room, with Leo at their head.
“There he is!”
One of the youngsters raised his rifle, but Leo pushed it aside.
“They want him alive,” Leo said.
“Thanks,” said David, who had his hands up, palms out, to show that he was unarmed.
Leo grunted at him. “Don’ thank me, man. Once they start workin’ you over, maybe you’d be happier to be dead.”
Bahjat sat behind the desk. Hamoud paced nervously in front of it. The office was small, its only window a mere vertical slit in the wall. The air was acrid with electrical tension.
“Destroy him!” Hamoud snapped. “I say we execute him here and now. He almost slipped away from us once. We cannot afford to have him escape and reveal our location.”
Bahjat sat quietly in the chair, trying to remain calm, when in fact her mind was a whirlpool of conflicting emotions.
“We must not kill him,” she said. “He is too valuable to us.”
“To you, perhaps.” Hamoud glowered at her.
“To our plans for capturing Island One,” she countered as coolly as she could.
“You two were together for months,” Hamoud said. “Don’t tell me that you didn’t sleep with him.”
“I will tell you this. I discovered that he has lived all his life in Island One. He knows every part of the space colony—every leaf of each tree, every dial on each computer terminal. He is a living blueprint of the entire colony.”
“And you love him!”
She ignored that. “Island One is a huge, complicated place. To capture it, we will have only as many people as can be fitted into a single space shuttle. We must learn where to strike, where their key control centers are, how to take them....”
“I know.” Hamoud stopped his pacing and faced her. “We must have detailed information about every square centimeter of Island One. I know that.”
“And we have such information. It is inside his brain. He knows everything about Island One—everything.”
“But will he tell us?”
Bahjat suddenly felt as if she were somewhere else, far away, looking down at herself as if she were watching a play or a TV show. She watched herself smile cruelly, and she heard herself say, “Oh, I’m sure we can persuade him. If nothing else works, we can always let him watch as we slice pieces off his English girlfriend.”
The office had been turned into an efficient little interrogation cell. David sat in the unyielding stiff-backed chair, a strap pinning his arms to his sides and holding him firmly against the chair’s back. The overhead lights were off. A single harshly bright lamp was aimed straight into his eyes.
His arms and feet were numb. He had lost track of the time since they’d strapped him into this chair. He couldn’t see the walls. The window, if there was one in this room, must have been behind him. His mouth and throat were sandpaper-dry; they hadn’t allowed him even a drink of water for a very long time. Yet his bladder was full and ached dully.
For the moment he was alone. The bruise under his eye throbbed painfully. They hadn’t used any physical torture on him, but they’d underestimated his own anger and determination. David had fought them when they brought him into this interrogation room. He knocked down several of them before Leo and the others had battered him into unconsciousness. When he woke up, the strap had been tightly fastened around him.
He heard the door open, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the glare of the lamp. A single pair of feet stepped lightly toward him.
“You are a very stubborn man.” It was Bahjat’s voice.
“Thanks,” he replied, his voice cracking.
“Here.” He could just make out her shadowy form. She must be standing next to the lamp on the desk, he thought. Her hands materialized out of the darkness. There was a glass of water in them.
He leaned his head forward and sipped. The water tasted wonderfully sweet and refreshing. Bahjat tilted the glass for him and he gulped it all down.
“You must tell them what they want to know,” she said, her voice soft, concerned.
“Why? So they can blow up Island One?”
“No,” she said, “not that. We simply want to... to occupy the space colony. We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“This is your idea, isn’t it?”
“Mine... and Hamoud’s.”
He gave a harsh, dry bark of a laugh. “I guess you were right. We can’t be political opponents and lovers—not at the same time.”
“You don’t love me,” Bahjat said.
“I did.”
“Until you were reunited with your Englishwoman.”
“Evelyn? I hardly know her.”
“Don’t lie,” Bahjat said. “You can’t protect her.”
