Authors: Steve Perry
Bork nodded.
He put his travel bag in the sleep chamber she offered him, and they went to sit in the biggest of the common rooms. The chairs were nonmechanical, overstuffed, and comfortable for somebody Bork's size.
"So. What do you think about the killings?"
He leaned back. "Locked-room stuff almost always turns out to be done by insiders. A bribed guard, security monitor, somebody selling codes, like that."
Taz nodded. "Yeah, that's how we figured it at first."
"But not now?"
She shook her head. "We've strained the brains of the guards, secretaries, friends, lovers, and so far gotten null. You saw the latest one. I'd bet a thousand stads to a toenail clipping everybody we touch will come up clean, even on the deepscans."
"You have enough money and clout, you can get around a deepscan."
"Sure, if the operator is open to baksheesh or a higher-up wants to diddle with results. We have our share of bent cools, but we aren't that corrupt."
"Then you haven't scanned the right people yet."
"Yeah, that's what we figure. Problem is-how do we find the right ones? Take the second case. Woman killed was Leona chu balm Sikon, a rich humanist. No enemies. Two bodyguards outside her bedroom on the ninth floor of a residential plex. No way in or out save through the door they watched. No windows. The guards tested truthful when they said nobody came or went, but she was chopped up like the others, head here, body there. If what the guards said was true, it was impossible. Just like when my gun got lifted on your planet. It doesn't compute."
"When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, has to be the answer,"
Bork said. "Emile used to quote that at us when we were training in defense scenarios. Some famous investigator said that, Watson Hemlock or somebody."
"Fine in theory," she said. "But we've had our own people working during three of these assassinations and we ain't eliminated shit. Our computers fuzz when we feed them info; we have almost no physical evidence. How are we going to figure out where to grab hold of these things when they're as slick as lube on thincris plate?"
"Next time you get a threat, I'll park myself next to the client," Bork said. "Maybe get a look at what's sneaking under the door."
Later, when Taz was sleeping, Bork went for a workout. She'd converted half her garage into a gym, and it was outfitted fairly well, except there weren't enough free weights. Taz liked the machines, and while Bork preferred plain flexsteel bars and plates, he could make do. He'd stripped to hardskin gloves, headband and a groin strap, and he had a thick towel over one shoulder.
The murders were interesting. He'd never come across anything quite like them, though the matadors had a common file where they dumped records of assassination attempts upon various of their clients.
There was a case where a man had been killed inside a locked and guarded room on Spandle. But that had turned out to be an induced suicide. Somebody had coated a drawer handle with a tailored psychedelic derm chem that soaked through the client's skin when he touched it. The chem drove the guy crazy and he dived off the desk onto the floor and broke his neck.
It probably wasn't real likely the guy Bork had seen earlier in the day had chopped his own head off and then cleverly hidden the weapon afterward.
Bork adjusted the controls on Taz's ROM gear, stepped into the device and allowed it to test his tonus.
A couple of warm-up sets and he began to work out in earnest. He began with legs, and when the machine said he'd reached his limits, he overrode the safety and added five more to his kiloage. The machine could see muscle density, could determine nerve conduction, but no machine could yet measure spirit.
A soft voice repeated, "Warning, you have exceeded your limitations," as Bork went down to parallel, then slowly strained against the bar across his shoulders to come up. It was hard. The mechanical aspect of it was beyond him, according to the device designed to know such things.
Bork did three reps.
Then he grinned at the computer voice when it said, "Warning, systems malfunction. Please call your dealer for repair. Your operating program is in error."
Sorry, machine, Bork thought. But he really wasn't sorry. He'd always liked the fable of John Henry and the contest with the steam engine. He was aware that he was among the strongest men or mues in the galaxy. There had been times when he'd known for sure he was the most powerful person on a particular planet-there were records kept of certain endeavors, weightlifting being a common enough sport on most worlds. If he could push more than the local record, that was pretty much self-evident. It was a mild curiosity in him, though, not one he put much energy into. Strength, like intelligence, was a variable thing. One day you might beat a guy, the next day he might beat you. At noon the puzzle might be beyond you, at dinner the answer easier than snapping your fingers. At any given time there might be a pool of fifty or sixty people, mues surely, who could move more weight than could he; then again, maybe he could outlift them. So he might not be the strongest guy in the galaxy, but then again, maybe so. In any event, it gave him a certain perverse pleasure to make the machine blink when he went past its boundaries.
The battle on Tembo was confined to Raion and most of the action, such that it was, to Leijona and the surrounding countryside. Tembo was a frontier world, sparsely populated, and the Confed presence consisted of a few companies, mostly conscripts and a few career officers. Even after the small infection of revolution grew into a killing plague, it came late to Tembo. The career men mostly saw which way the winds of change were blowing and stacked their weapons and commands. Confed policy wouldn't allow any significant number of local boys and girls to person the garrisons, for fear they wouldn't behave like soldiers when they knew or were related to the locals they might have to shoot at. Still, a lot of the troopers had been onplanet for years, and they had commerce and person connections with the natives. The trouble with an occupying army is that it will eventually be absorbed by the culture it resides within, and some of that had happened on Tembo. It was hard to point a carbine at the man who served you drinks with dinner every time you got liberty, or the woman you'd been sleeping with for a year, or the brother of the man married to your quad's sub-loo.
So, when the voices grew louder, the local Confed troops mostly behaved like people and not soldiers, which was a failure for the military but a victory for humanity.
Not all of them put down their weapons, however.
Since the Confed frowned upon an armed populace, there weren't a lot of folks with guns. Sure, there were permits available, but mostly those were for hand wands or stunners or sublethal dart guns, spetsdods and the like. And the few people who had those licenses tended to be fairly individualistic types who would protect themselves and their families if attacked, but not offer organized resistance to an army.
That left the cools.
That was why Tazzimi Bork found herself holding her service pistol in sweaty hands, her back against the rough permaplast exterior wall of a hitter repair shop on the southern edge of North Docktown, waiting to shoot it out with a military quad approaching her position. The magazine and loads in her pistol were reds. If she had to shoot, it would be to kill. Killing a Confederation soldier was a galactic crime, and depending on the circumstances, worth full brainstrain or lengthy incarceration.
"Yeek, Taz, you set?"
She glanced across the alleyway at Jerlu. If he looked as nervous as she did, they must be a pair to see.
He clutched his shotgun to his chest and his face was beaded with sweat, his tan uniform soaked through where his flesh touched it.
"Yeah. Set."
Taz was a cool, she enforced the laws of the city and the country, and such laws did not normally come into conflict with Confed regulations. Being as how the Confed frowned with greatly wrinkled brow on any planet daring to naysay it in any way. They enforced the stuff that concerned them, left the rest of the local regs alone. Still, it was a dilemma. While she'd never considered herself political, what the Confed did and stood for was wrong. She'd seen the replay of the 'cast where the black woman matador had called for a revolution. They'd never met, but she knew the name. Knew too her brother Saval would be right in the middle of it, and whichever side he had chosen, for whatever reason, she would not fight against him. Saval was sharp, he had an IQ that tested out far above the average, though he took pains to pretend it was otherwise. If he'd signed on with these folks, he had thought long and hard about it before he'd done so. Da was gone; the mining disaster had taken him with nine hundred others. That had crippled Ma; all that was left was a hollow, almost mindless shell, living with her only sister and well on her way to the final chill. Saval was what family she had, save for her mother and aunt, and if he thought this was a good idea, then that was good enough for Taz.
The quad jogged along, not expecting trouble. They weren't wearing armor or electronic gear that she could see, but they carried their carbines unslung, held at port arms where they could bring them into play quickly. Taz took a deep breath, let it out, inhaled through her nose again. Shifted her grip on the pistol's stickygrip, slipped her finger inside the trigger guard. Thumbed the safety print plate twice to toggle the weapon into firing mode. Glanced at Jerlu again, nodded.
Once she'd made the choice, she found there were a lot of other POs who were in agreement. Threequarters of the force, it turned out. She'd suspected the rebels had a lot of sympathy, but hadn't guessed it to be quite so high. Or so high up. The Supe himself, nearly all of the WCs, most of the ranked officers.
And they were glad to have her declaration.
When it finally shook loose, maybe three-quarters of the Confed troops said 'Fuck it,' and shucked their weapons. But there was a core of those who were loyal or venal or something, a couple of hundred soldiers altogether, who moved to take control of the planet Tembo. Not many, but they were better armed and knew tactics and strategy in a way most civilians did not. Fifty troopers with two hovertanks and medium-heavy weapons occupied the Rubani port, so offworld traffic was under their control-at least insofar as normal boxcar drops and lifts went.
The remaining troops moved to take classic objectivesbroadcast and com centers, food distribution points, local transportation plexes, river and highway access, seaport docks.
Taz and Jerlu and five others had been sent to North Docktown to keep the agroplex clear. It was not the most important spot in the city, but a lot of food was imported through the agroplex, and whoever controlled it would have an advantage. Regardless of who was in power, people had to eat.
Taz and Jerlu were the sentries. They had short-trans com sets, basically an ear button and mike, but they had to assume the military could monitor the standard opchans with their scanners, so any transmissions had to be short and fast, even with compscramblers working. Taz and Jerlu had to warn the five-person team heading for the harbormaster's control office if trouble showed up, and they had to delay it long enough for the team to get in place. The HCO was fairly defensible from the inside, so whoever got there first would have a big advantage.
A quad had one less member but a lot better firepower than the five-person team of cools with sidearms and shotguns. In a stand-up, the Confed boys would most likely win.
"I got the two in front," Taz said.
"Copy," Jerlu said.
"I'll call the team now," she said.
He merely nodded. She could see he was afraid, could smell his fear. Or maybe that was her own nervous sweat she smelled.
"Team, company, one quad, flitter shop," she said. She hoped somebody was paying attention, because if the quad got past her and Jerlu, it would be the team's problem.
Taz could hear the quad's boots thumping now. The sound grew louder. The four soldiers would pass right by the alleyway on the narrow street, moving from right to left across her field of vision. Any second.
"Heads up!" she called to Jerlu.
He brought the shotgun up, flicked the sighting laser on. Swallowed loudly enough so she could hear it.
She didn't trigger her own built-in laser sight. The quad would come past at maybe ten meters away, max. She didn't want to take the time to put the dot on the target; she would do better with a barrel index. She hoped.
The first trooper moved into view.
"Go!"
Taz pushed away from the wall, snapped her pistol up and pointed it like her finger at the trooper.
Pressed the trigger, as if she were at the range and had all the time in the world. But her nervousness told; she kept firing the gun even as the man fell, following him down, half a dozen shots.
The rest of it went both slow and fast. The other three troopers, two men, one woman, appeared as if thrust by rockets. Taz swung her pistol up from the still-falling man and toward the second man, but it was like moving a heavy weight through gel; she couldn't believe how slow it was.
Jerlu's shotgun went off. Some of the unburned propellant sprayed onto Taz's neck and face, stinging where it touched bare skin. The sound was like a bomb, bounced and funneled from the walls over them in a hard wave. The woman trooper's face disappeared, wiped clean by the heavy metal shot that sleeted into her.
Taz's pistol thrummed and whumped, spewing deadly missiles at her second target. The trooper was trying to stop and turn, and he managed neither well, but he did point his carbine in her direction.
The tiny red dot of Jerlu's laser sight danced in slow motion and came to a vibrating semistop on the carbine of Taz's target. What was he doing-?
The little red spot was like an electron's orbit. Taz had all the time in the galaxy to see it; it reminded her of nothing so much as a small child playing with a flickstick at night, waving it in a tight, squashed circle so fast that a human eye made it into a line and not dots. The persistence of vision, they called that, Taz remembered.