S. Andrew Swann - Hostile Takeover 02, page 6
“She cashed out her share.”
Dom turned to face Zanzibar. Things couldn’t collapse that neatly, the universe wasn’t built like that.
Zanzibar wore an uncharacteristically gentle expression.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She had Ivor drop her at the Proudhon Spaceport.”
“When? Damn it, when?” He tried to control his voice, but it still came out harshly.
“Five days ago.”
Dom let that sink in. “Five. Days?” he repeated like an idiot.
Zanzibar nodded.
There was a long silence during which Dom could feel all the liquid in his body slowly turn to stone. He took a deep breath. Slowly, he nodded. It only took him a few seconds to gain control of his voice.
“She’s gone by now,” Dom said. “On her way anywhere.” Zanzibar released his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” Dom felt confused for a moment. “No reason to be sorry. She told me her intentions a long time ago.” Was it that you didn’t believe her? “I think I’ll find my own way to my apartment.” Zanzibar nodded and stepped back. “The board meeting?” Dom had already started down the hall. “First thing tomorrow.”
“Not tonight?”
Not tonight, Dom thought. He said nothing.
Dom retreated into his apartment. It wasn’t much different than the residential apartments built for the twelve hundred people that now swarmed the black Diderot caverns. The room itself had been quickly hacked out of the bedrock. Where the lasers had carved, the stone was smooth black and polished. Where there had been voids in the rock, the walls were unfinished.
It was one room, half natural cavern—and the instant Dom entered it, he realized that there was no place he could look and escape his reflection in polished rock.
“Evil bastard,” he whispered at multiple images of himself.
His hands—both of them—were shaking.
He had driven Tetsami off-planet. He was driving Shane, perhaps, to suicide. They were symptoms of a larger problem.
Dom realized his eyes were closed.
“Look at yourself!”
And he was looking at himself even before he opened his eyes. He didn’t need his hands in view to see the blood on them. Behind him was a trail of destruction that he had run from all his life—
He had never faced it.
His eyes were open now, and he willed the pigment to fade from his synthetic skin. In the walls, fractured, color-distorted images of himself clenched their fists, shaking accusations at him. Their flesh faded from the chocolate brown that had been Shaji’s disguise, through the copper-bronze that was his “normal” coloring, to the translucent white of an albino, to clear pseudoflesh. Dom ripped off the clothes he wore, the fabric parting with little resistance.
He stood naked before himself, infinitely repeated, stigmata fully revealed—the titanium alloy bones, the artificial muscles snaking with wire filament, the few glistening pink-red organs he had been born with, and the chromium skull with the incongruous brown eyes and white enamel teeth.
All this under a body that pretended to be human, a body whose exterior was indistinguishable in form and function from the one that his brother had nearly destroyed a decade ago.
You ape humanity, Dominic, but this is your true face. A technological death’s head.
For a decade he had never looked straight at himself, at this. The symbol of his guilt.
The reconstruction he saw had saved his life. He should have died.
He had come to Bakunin instead.
Ten years he had been in the Terran Executive Command, the enforcers of the Confederacy. He had been an officer. He gave the orders. Orders to kill troublemakers, suppress demonstrations, neutralize orbital habitats, and in one case, reduce an entire rebellious city to chunks of gravel the size of his little finger. He was good at what he did.
Then Helen Dacham had died.
His mother dead by his ignorant hands. For the first time he had seen what he was good at.
Death for thousands—millions—that’s what he was. Maybe he thought to achieve some sort of balance as a gunrunner. Selling arms to the revolutionaries as well as the imperialists, the Confed planets and the separatists, the capitalists and the socialists, the oppressor and the oppressed. Maybe he was leveling the playing field.
Maybe he was simply multiplying his evil.
All the justifications he had used then came to his lips now, but became so much ash before he spoke the words.
And now?
Now he made weapons.
For a quarter of a century you ‘ve been running from the corpse at the end of the gun. You stopped pulling the trigger to give the order. You stopped giving the order to sell the gun. You stopped selling the gun to build the gun. Now you want to buy the damn factory.
But it never changes, does it?
It’s still your finger on the trigger, and the corpse is still your mother.
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CHAPTER NINE
Durable Goods
“The only way to insure you like the answer is to not ask the question.”
— The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.”
—Plato
(ca. 427-ca. 347 B.C.)
Tetsami spent the rest of her evening walking inside the white buildings which formed the central city of Proudhon. It helped sharpen the edge to her paranoia.
Something big enough to empty Proudhon of mercs would have lit up warning lights all over the planet.
Wouldn’t it?
The central cluster of skyscrapers was the only area of the spaceport-city that had a logic to its design. She wandered along their crystal walkways. Outside, the red evening light of Kropotkin washed the world in blood. Hours ago she’d passed the fifty-story hotels ringing the hub of Proudhon, demarcating the line between order and chaos.
It also marked a line that the street people couldn’t cross, but a person with a visitor’s ID chit and her credit could.
She followed walkways from one office building to another, catching glimpses of the greater city. The twisted blending of spaceport and city didn’t extend to the hub.
Tetsami had combed the ads, tracing their origins. The trail had ended in the Proudhon Tower, the center of the hub. The home base for the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation.
Specifically, the ads seemed to have come out of Spaceport Security.
That scared the shit out of her.
Unlike Godwin, where the city’s order, such as it was, was kept balanced between hundreds of competing interests, Proudhon was a gigantic company town. Proudhon might not be the largest city in Bakunin, but it might have been the largest corporation. Proudhon was access to Bakunin. Anything making landfall on Bakunin had to pay a tithe to Proudhon, whether it used the spaceport or not. Proudhon had the force to back up its monopoly.
Proudhon Spaceport Security was the largest and most heavily armed force on the planet.
Spaceport Security had been doing a lot of hiring as of late.
If Proudhon Security is massing an army, someone would have to notice—
She was avoiding the return to her hotel room. Now it wasn’t just the street trash she was scared of running into. Spaceport Security could monitor everything from access in and out of the city to all the data traffic on the Proudhon comm web.
They could even monitor the ID chit that she dared not dispose of while she was inside the city. They might know that she was aware of something going on. They could decide that she knew too much. All it could take was some dedicated software monitor watching access to the public information boards.
It was sheer paranoia to think such a thing.
But they could do it, and that kind of power was an alien concept to Tetsami. She couldn’t deal with it. She was used to the free-for-all in Godwin.
Worse was the idea that someone might use that power to disappear her. She kept telling herself that there was no way someone could keep a massive security force buildup secret.
But Proudhon was a closed system. If the company wanted to, they could keep a very tight grip on information going out of the city.
Maybe lethally tight.
The dilemma was a pressure on the back of her skull. She’d dug a little too deeply, and there was the chance someone might have noticed. If she sat tight and pretended nothing was wrong, someone might decide to preempt any further curiosity on her part.
But if she rabbited now, Proudhon Security would know. They’d know the second that little ID chit left the city. She took the black electronic rectangle out of her pocket and stared at it as if it was a live detonator.
She could pitch it and run. But she had heard stories of Security goons canvassing the streets, flushing out anyone who wasn’t databased. They were usually flashed by a vehicle-mounted plasma jet and left for the infrastructure crews to mop up.
She was here under an alias, and if she attracted attention to herself, something would happen.
Chances were, something bad.
She’d been moving on foot ever since she’d discovered the scope of what was going on. Briefly, she’d thought about leaving on foot. She might avoid Spaceport Security that way, but Proudhon was surrounded on three sides by a band of black sand over two thousand klicks wide and fifteen hundred deep.
She suddenly felt she had wandered too far into the hub. She looked around, and it was as if the company had enveloped her. Halfway into the center of the hundred-square-block central city, Tetsami could no longer see a view of Greater Proudhon’s sprawl. The views out the walkways were all alike.
On every side, bone-white towers mirrored each other. Pseudo-marble pillars supported statues that guarded their corners-—eagles, griffins, pegasii, dragons, and other winged beasts Tetsami couldn’t identify.
It unnerved her.
Not the statues, but the fact that they, and the buildings, had all been built by one corporation. Godwin had bigger buildings, and more of them. But Godwin was a hodgepodge; differing construction styles and intent tended to cancel each other out.
The similarity of the buildings here in the hub seemed to concentrate their mass, focus it like a magnifying glass. It wasn’t like walking through a city, it was like walking through a gigantic machine.
She turned around to make her way back to her hotel. She had to escape this place.
Tetsami spent the rest of the sixteen-hour Bakunin night sitting cross-legged on her bed in the New Yukon Hotel, trying to figure out where she was going to escape to.
On her lap was a Bakunin Planetary Atlas she had bought in the gift shop housed in a much higher-class hotel. She had decided if her escape off-planet was blocked, she would find a nice little hole somewhere on this dirtball to lay low until whatever was about to explode blew over.
The atlas was a flimsy sheet of cyberplas. It was already beginning to warp with her repeated thumb-presses on the screen and the color display was beginning to blur.
Should have bought the fifty-gram hypermap. Not like I couldn’t afford it.
The scene slid repeatedly over Bakunin’s one continent. Cities flew by, Proudhon, Godwin, Troy, Rousseau, Wilson, Celine, Jefferson. When she touched a city location, she was awarded a brief flash of information: “Proudhon: Pop—3.6 million. City planning: ***
Security: **** Hotels: ****½ Transportation: **** …”
“Godwin: Pop—10.6 million. City planning: ½ Security: Hotels: *** …” What kind of tourist would go to Godwin?
Tetsami looked at the atlas in her hands and shook her head.
What kind of tourist would come to Bakunin?
“Troy: Pop—5.1 million. City planning: ** Security: **…”
“Jefferson City: Pop—0.5 million. City planning: ****…” Yeah, Jefferson gets four stars for city planning. Great, if you like neoclassical pseudo-marble kitsch.
“Rousseau: Pop—1.8 million …”
It was the eighth time she had paged through the information. It felt like population statistics for a hundred different cities were scrawled permanently into the backs of her retinas. Most of the information provided by the atlas was useless. Its capsule security ratings were laughable. And who gave a shit if Jefferson City had the best hotels on the planet, or the worst hospitals?
Its data on communes was even worse. It tried to treat them like cities, which they weren’t For one thing, communes were closed. Not just in terms of environment—almost every commune on Bakunin tried to be self-sufficient—but also in terms of population. The half that even allowed in outsiders nearly always forced the visitor to buy a share of the commune.
The other difference between the communes and the cities was philosophy.
The cities were all in a tenuous equilibrium state between hundreds of forces, from the corporate entities based in them down to the street gangs that fed off the debris drifting to the bottom of the social order.
Communes, however, were monolithic entities dedicated to a single—sometimes bizarre—belief.
Technically, Jefferson City was a commune, though the Jeffersonians hated the term.
The atlas she had left out entries for some of the biggest communes. The Zeno Commune, she knew, had something like a half-million people in it, but there wasn’t a listing for it. Worst of all, the atlas gave no indication about a commune’s sociopolitical slant.
She could decipher a few communes that gave their ideology away in their name.
New Jerusalem was probably not a bunch of rabid atheists. But when she saw the name Olympia … Was that a bunch of classical democrats? A collection of neopagans under the Grecian pantheon? Or was it a free-love sex colony?
Tetsami’s eyes hurt. She tossed the atlas.
Might as well strike out at random and dig in as soon as she found population.
If she wanted population, she knew what direction she should go in. Proudhon was the only major community on the eastern side of the Diderot Mountains. The city sat on Bakunin’s tepid equator at the edge of a desert nearly as empty of people as it was of water. There were a few towns on the eastern coast of the continent, where the land began to flower a little again. The biggest of those was Sartre, a million people about twelve hundred klicks east of Proudhon.
However, most of Bakunin’s population was to the west. Almost all of Bakunin’s population was concentrated in a three-thousand-kilometer strip running from the opposite slope of the Diderot Mountains a nearly equal distance to the western shore.
Since Bakunin had at least a billion people—no one was really sure, no accurate census existed—the concentration of the habitable living space made the population density in that strip equal to some of the oldest continually inhabited areas of Earth.
That was the way she should go to find population.
Tetsami didn’t want to go back in that direction.
She threw herself back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. There was a slight vibration as the fluid in the mattress readjusted to her position, and she sank a few centimeters. Above her, her reflection stared down out of the mirrored ceiling.
“Why don’t I just go back?”
Damn regrets again. The feeling that she had abandoned everything. The sense that, if she gave Dom another chance—
She clamped down on that feeling. Hard.
Dom was an icy unfeeling bastard who didn’t give a shit about her or the way she felt, and the sooner she accepted that, the sooner she’d get that part of her life over with. She’d have to be happy with the twenty megs she had.
After all, Dom certainly wouldn’t be thinking about her. Once she was out of his business operations she’d be even more irrelevant to him than she’d been when she was there—
Christ! Stop thinking about it. You ‘ve got more problems than Dom’s insensitivity.
“Sheesh, this is all bullshit.”
Tetsami got off the bed, grabbed her black duffel from the closet, and started packing. She emptied drawers indiscriminately into it. She’d hesitated long enough. She’d been in this hotel for too long. It was time to get out. She’d beg, borrow, or steal an aircar, and she’d be out of Proudhon today. She’d chuck the ID chit out over the desert somewhere.
There were more than enough communes on this side of the Diderot Mountains and, damn the consequences, she’d strike north until she found one that would let her in. Whether it was an Amish farm community or a Rastifari ganja plantation, she’d deal with it when she got there.
It was closing in on dawn, the streets were empty of most human debris.
She had made it out of the New Yukon without checking out, and it took her nearly an hour at a bulletin kiosk to find a vehicle. Her ID chit was tied to the transaction, but she had to deal with that risk.
Problem was, all the rental agencies—agencies, Tetsami realized, that only operated at the sufferance of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation—were closed. The only aircars around were taxis, which were run by Proudhon and wouldn’t leave the city limits. Eventually, Tetsami had to satisfy herself with buying an off-road groundcar from the classifieds.
She called the owner and was surprised at how ready the man was to meet her at this time in the morning.
By the time she reached Proudhon Security’s northernmost checkpoint, the man was waiting for her.
He was sitting on the hood of the dirtiest vehicle Tetsami had ever seen. Under the dust she could see something that could have been black-gray desert camouflage, or simply a very bad paint job. Unlike an urban groundcar, this thing had wheels, huge ones. The tires came up to her chin.
When she reached the vehicle, the owner vaulted off the hood in front of her, forcing her to come to an abrupt halt.
“Jarvis,” he said, sticking out a hand armored in calluses. He was tanned a deeper brown than most people managed in Kropotkin’s red glow. His hair was the color of driftwood.
“Kari Jorgenson,” Tetsami said, using her alias. She tried to figure out the man’s age, but it was as fruitless as trying to date a piece of mahogany. Somewhere between forty-five and two hundred.
