Beginnings-eARC Read online

  Sojourner looked down at him for several moments, then nodded abruptly, once.

  “The best you can do is the best you can do,” he said. He laid one hand on the smaller man's shoulder and squeezed briefly. “I know you'll do everything you can, Jacques. Take care.”

  “And you,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, and watched him walk away.

  * * *

  “Why don't we just go ahead and shoot the little son-of-a-bitch?” Giuseppe Ardmore demanded.

  He and Tobin Manischewitz sat at the desk in the cheap hotel room gazing down at the display of the computer on top of it. They could see Sojourner X ambling aimlessly away down the landscaped paths of Rosalind Franklin Park, but their attention was focused on the much smaller man he'd been speaking to. They knew where to find Sojourner again if they needed to, and he was less important than the man he'd met, anyway. As they watched, the object of their scrutiny seated himself on one of the benches, gazing out over the lake as if he had not a care in the universe.

  “The bastard's caused us more headaches than any other three people I can think of,” Ardmore continued, “and it's not like there's never any crime even here on oh-so-perfect Beowulf. Put a pulser dart through his brain, take his wallet and his chrono, leave them with a mugging by ‘parties unknown,' and be done with it!”

  “I can't say the notion isn't tempting,” Manischewitz acknowl-edged, but he also shook his head sourly. “In fact, it'd tickle me pink, to be honest. Unfortunately, whatever we might be able to sell to the general public, BSC and the System Bureau of Investigation will know perfectly well what happened, whether they're ever able to prove it or not. That's why Upstairs seems to've decided he's just a little too prominent for us to get away with popping him right here on Beowulf. He may be only a pipsqueak captain in the BSC, but his family makes him a very special pipsqueak captain. If we knock off a Benton-Ramirez y Chou on Beowulf, hell wouldn't hold the Beowulfers' reaction. Hell, if he gets run down by a ground car crossing against the signal at least half of Beowulf will think we put a hit out on him!”

  “So what?” Ardmore scowled. “They hate our guts anyway!”

  “Look, nobody's going to scream too loud if we knock off one or two—even a dozen—other BSC officers. Oh, they'll be pissed, and we'll probably get whacked a time or two for it as soon as they get the chance, but for the most part, they'd put it down to the cost of doing business. The sort of thing that happens when they piss off someone like Manpower. But if we take down a Benton-Ramirez y Chou, especially here in Beowulf itself, that's a whole different game. That family is Beowulf, Giuseppe. I think our esteemed superiors are afraid a deliberate assassination directed against one of them is likely to provoke retaliation at a somewhat higher level, and none of them want to be the object of the lesson BSC and Beowulf in general might decide to deliver. Not unless there's one hell of a potential return involved, anyway! For that matter, I have to admit that killing him could have exactly the reverse of the effect we want. It could just as easily drive the Board of Directors into adopting the policy he's been pushing for and opening a direct connection to the Ballroom.”

  “Then why are we even bothering to watch him?” Ardmore waved a disgusted hand at the display, where Benton-Ramirez y Chou was leaning back on the bench with his legs crossed. “We didn't stop ‘Sojourner' from passing along the info. We're not going to kill Benton-Ramirez y Chou. We're not going to kill ‘Sojourner'. So just what the hell are we going to do? I mean, all due respect for Upstairs and everything,” he didn't sound very respectful, Manischewitz observed, “but this is a colossal waste of time if we're not going to do anything!”

  It was highly probable, Manischewitz reflected, that a lot of Ardmore's frustration stemmed from the fact that both of them knew things would not go well for them if they fell afoul of the Beowulfan authorities. Their cover as licensed employees of Black Mountain Security, one of Old Earth's biggest private security and investigative agencies, wouldn't stand any serious scrutiny, despite the fact that it was completely genuine. The Black Mountain executive who'd “hired” them to provide them with the credentials which did so much to facilitate their journeys about the Solarian League would disavow them in a heartbeat if Beowulf turned up a link between them and their real employers. And that was assuming their ostensible employer even knew they'd been grabbed. Beowulf had an almost fanatical respect for the individual rights of its citizens; it was rather less fastidious about the legal rights of non-citizens in the employ of Manpower, Incorporated.

  “I don't know that we're ‘not going to do anything,' Giuseppe,” Manischewitz said after a moment. “Sure, Upstairs isn't crazy about escalating any potential retaliation to upper management, but I think someone's getting more worked up about our friend Benton-Ramirez y Chou for some reason, so maybe they are going to authorize a move against him. In fact, I'm starting to think there's a pretty fair chance of it, if it can be handled anonymously enough. Not even Beowulf's going to launch the overkill kind of response Upstairs is probably afraid of if they don't have pretty damned solid proof of who needs killing from their perspective. Just floundering around popping people in the executive suite in general could easily draw too much official attention from the League. I'm pretty sure Adamson and the rest of Interior's senior people are pissed off enough with Beowulf as it is. If they know Beowulf's going after the right targets after something like a Beton Ramirez y Chou hit, they'll probably just swallow it. The last thing they'd want is for Beowulf to dump proof of a Manpower op here on League territory in Beowulf. No telling what kind of other crap might make its way into the 'faxes if that happens. So, yeah, if they can come up with something Beowulf can't prove, they might just decide to let us take him down after all.

  “Problem is, we don't really know a lot about his conduits, or how tied in he is to the Ballroom in general. I'm pretty damn sure ‘Sojourner' isn't his only contact, though. And we don't know how far up he actually reaches in the system government or even the System Defense Force. We know Brigadier Tyson and Hamilton-Mitostakis think very highly of him, but not everyone in the SDF thinks all that highly of BSC's ‘hotdogs,' and we don't know how Tyson's superiors regard him. We sure as hell don't know what kind of contacts he may have on the civilian side, either! I'd be ready to bet he's got quite a few of them, though, given his family connections. I don't think anyone's going to authorize just taking him out without being able to answer some of those questions. We need to know a lot more about what he's been up to and how to tie up loose ends before Upstairs'll risk the kind of retaliation killing him's likely to provoke, no matter how deniable they think they could make it.”

  “And how are we going to manage that?” Ardmore snorted. “We've had exactly zero luck getting any of our bugs inside BSC, and their security's even tighter on the Board of Directors' side. We were lucky we picked up in time to catch him and ‘Sojourner' making the drop, but we could spend years trying to get a handle on everything he's ‘up to' right this minute. And by the time we had it, he'd be years along in making even more trouble for us!”

  “Maybe we could convince him to tell us about it himself,” Manischewitz suggested softly.

  “Lots of luck!” Ardmore snorted again, even harder. “I've tried to get info out of one of those Survey Corps bastards before. They're tough, they're better immunized against interrogation drugs than the frigging Solarian Navy, and every one of them has a suicide switch. Even if Upstairs let us grab him, and even if we could do it without that emergency beacon implanted in his shoulder bringing the local cops and the SBI—or the damned BSC—down on top of us, we'd never get anything out of him.”

  “You see?” Manischewitz' smile was not a pleasant thing to see. “That's why I'm in charge. You think in such direct, simple, brutal terms, Giuseppe. Assuming I can convince Upstairs to go along with us, I have a much more subtle idea in mind.” His smile turned even colder. “One Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou won't like one little bit.”

  * * *

&
nbsp; “Lord that's a sick weapon,” Alfred Harrington said, looking at the neural disruptor on the laboratory worktable. He felt a surge of remembered nausea, and he was actually a little surprised his hand didn't shake when he reached out to touch it.

  “It is that,” Penelope Mwo-chi agreed. She stood a couple of meters back from the table, arms folded in front of her, and her face was grim.

  “I've never understood why anyone would develop the damned thing in the first place, Doctor,” Alfred admitted. He turned it over and noted with a feeling of relief that there was no powerpack. “It's effective enough against unarmored opponents as a close-quarters weapon, but battle armor stops it dead, and over seventy-five or a hundred meters, it starts losing effectiveness fast even against unarmored targets. By the time you get to a hundred and fifty, you might as well be shining a flashlight at someone!”

  “Agreed.” Mwo-chi cocked her head. “That's right, you did say you'd seen what one of these did. Can I ask where?”

  “I . . . can't say,” Alfred replied. He looked up at her. “Sorry. I can't talk about it.”

  “I see.” Mwo-chi considered him for a moment, and her nostrils flared. “I'll hazard a guess, though,” she said. “I'll bet you it wasn't in the hands of any regular military force, was it?”

  “No. No, it wasn't.” Alfred frowned, and Mwo-chi chuckled harshly.

  “Of course not, and not just because it's outlawed by the Deneb Accords, either. Like you just said, it's not very effective at any kind of range. At close range, sure. Anybody it doesn't kill outright will certainly be incapacitated and—what's that term you uniformed people use? ‘Combat ineffective,' isn't it?”

  “Yes.” Alfred's voice was flat, and Mwo-chi shook her head quickly.

  “That wasn't a slam at you, Alfred,” she said almost gently. “Or at any of your people. But however lethal it may be at close range against unarmored opponents, it's a lot less . . . flexible than an old-fashioned chemical-powered assault rifle, far less a pulse rifle or a tribarrel.”

  “The crew-served version's got more range,” Alfred said grimly. “I've seen one of them take somebody down at three hundred meters. But you're right—by the time you can get that kind of range out of it, you're talking about something half again the size of a heavy tribarrel that'll kill a battle-armored infantryman at ten times that range, with an energy signature a blind man couldn't miss. That's why I've never been able to figure out why anyone persevered with its development long enough to turn it into even a practical close-range weapon.”

  “That's because it wasn't originally developed as a weapon at all.” Mwo-chi's voice was as grim as Alfred's had been. He looked back up from the neural disruptor in surprise, and she shook her head. “It was developed from something called a neural whip . . . on Mesa.” Alfred's eyes narrowed, and she nodded. “By Manpower. I've got one of the damned things around here, and I'll show you my notes on its development history later, but basically they wanted an effective discipline tool, and they got one. After they'd realized how effective it was in that role, they started wondering how it would work as a ranged ‘crowd control' weapon.” She bared her teeth mirthlessly. “Give each slave a dose or two of the whip and then kill a couple of them in front of the others with the disruptor. Some forms of death are worse than others, and I imagine quite a few people who'd be willing to risk a pulser dart or a blade would think two or three times before challenging a neural disruptor. Especially if she knew it was going to be set on area effect and that everyone within ten or twelve meters of her would suffer the exact same thing she would.”

  Alfred's jaw tightened hard as pieces snapped into place. Clematis hovered in the back of his mind once more, ugly with smoke and screams . . . and understanding.

  She's right, a tiny voice told him. She's exactly right about how people would react. If I'd known, guessed, they'd had those damned things waiting for us, I'd never have—

  He cut the thought off ruthlessly. It was hard, but he managed, and drew a deep breath, swelling his lungs with oxygen. And if this abomination was, indeed, a product of Manpower and its genetic slavers, finding them on Clematis made perfect sense.

  “Can I ask why you have this thing sitting here, Doctor?” he said, tapping the disruptor with a forefinger.

  “For the same reason I've got that whip locked up in a safe—to remind myself what I hate, Alfred.” She stepped closer, never unfolding her arms, and looked down at it. “Mesa's like Beowulf's dark twin. It's almost as if they're determined to deliberately turn themselves into our polar opposite in every way they can. And the hell of it is that we find ourselves doing exactly the same thing where they're concerned. I'm as guilty of that as the next woman, I suppose, but deep inside, I know it was a Mesan neurologist who came up with this thing. I can actually recognize the neural stimulator they took as the core of it, and that came from Beowulf, too. That's why I've been quietly looking for ways to reverse or repair the damage it does for so long, and I keep this here to remind me of what it is I hate.” She lifted her eyes, meeting Alfred's gaze. “So don't think I don't understand whatever it is you can't talk about. And I guess I might as well admit I've been looking for an assistant crazy enough to join my efforts for a long time. Welcome aboard, Crazy Al.”

  * * *

  Allison Chou sat in the environment-controlled gazebo on the ISU quadrangle with her eyes theoretically focused on her computer display. Practice was somewhat different from theory, however. In point of fact, her eyes weren't focused on anything at all and her mind was someplace else entirely.

  Three weeks had passed since she'd lunched with her brother, and she was no closer to deciding what to do than she'd been when she finished the dessert course. That wasn't like her. She wasn't actually the shatter-brained, reckless, impulsive person her parents had occasionally accused her of being, but it was true that she seldom hesitated or spent a lot of time second guessing herself. She trusted their instincts, and while she might be wrong upon occasion, she was practically never uncertain.

  This time, she most certainly was.

  A flash of space-black and gold flickered at the corner of her unfocused vision. She looked up quickly, and her lips tightened. She'd had more than a few liaisons, and at least two genuinely passionate relationships, but she'd never felt anything like what she felt as she watched Lieutenant Harrington's tall, athletic figure striding across the quadrangle. He moved so smoothly, so confidently, and her nostrils flared as if she could scent some elusive fragrance. But it wasn't anything she could smell; it was what she'd felt, and for the first time in her fearless life she was truly afraid of another human being.

  No, be fair, she told herself. You're not afraid of him; you're afraid of what you're feeling, because you don't understand it.

  And that was nothing but the truth.

  She'd never felt so strongly drawn to a man, or to any other person. Even now, with him at least sixty meters away and not even looking in her direction, she felt that same, soft, warm purring sensation deep inside. It wasn't simply sexual attraction, although it was simultaneously one of the most erotic things she'd ever felt, and it wasn't appreciation of masculine beauty or awe of his brilliant intellect. He wasn't all that handsome, and while for all she knew he might well be brilliant, she'd scarcely even spoken to him, so he certainly hadn't had much of an opportunity to impress her with his intellectual accomplishments! It was just . . . nice, although that was a ridiculously anemic word for what she was feeling. It was as if she'd found something she hadn't realized she'd lost, encountered an old friend she'd never known she knew. As if she'd finally discovered what she needed to complete herself. The sheer intensity of it, for all its warmth and gentleness, would have been almost enough to frighten her all by itself. She would have wondered how much of that she was imagining, how much she was making up out of whole cloth, and how long anything so ephemeral, so impossible for her to define even to herself, could possibly endure.

  But it wasn't alone, and that was w
hat truly frightened her. There was that darkness, that sense of pain, like a promise of anguish—or anger—hidden just beyond the horizon. It was like a brooding shadow looming over everything else, and she didn't know what it was or where it had come from or what it might mean. Was it something coming from him, something inside him, hidden under everything else like poison at the heart of some delectable confection? Or was it something inside her, something she'd never realized was there which roused itself when he was near? Or some sort of premonition, some subliminal warning she was sending to herself on the basis of clues her conscious mind hadn't grasped yet? Or was it even real at all? Something she was simply imagining, just as she was imagining all the rest of it? And what right did a young man whom she didn't even know, someone from an entirely different star nation, have turning her calm, orderly life topsy-turvy without even so much as looking in her direction?

  She sighed, shook herself, and made herself focus once again on the display. She was behind on her assigned reading, and Doctor McLeish wasn't going to take “I was mooning over a young man I don't even know” as an excuse.

  * * *

  Alfred Harrington never even glanced in the gazebo's direction, but he knew she was there. He always knew where she was—or in what direction, anyway—and that worried him. It worried him a lot.

  He continued on his way, never breaking stride, never hesitating, never indicating any awareness of her presence at all, yet it was as if he could feel her inside his own skin with him. The strength of the attraction was astounding, and it frightened him, because he couldn't explain it.