The Sagittarius Whorl

  "Try the Wild Turkey," he urged. "Let me know what you think."

  I sipped the exquisite bourbon through my mask's integral straw—not the best way to savor one of Earth's premium spirits, but the bouquet came through with a vengeance. "Superb," I said. "One of the best I've ever tasted."

  "I think so, too. What's your last question?"

  "What are the Haluk doing here in the Sagittarius Whorl?"

  "Grabbing transactinides. They figure if we start experiencing a shortage, they can jack up their prices."

  "It seems logical," I said. "Are you ready to undergo the truth test?" I took out the little machine and set it on the table right next to the EFT card. Barky had put it down when his fresh schooner of beer arrived.

  "I don't think I'd better," he said, pushing the card toward me. "Our deal is off, Citizen Frost. But it was fun talking to you." He raised his voice. "Lola!"

  Oh, shit. The force-field projector was in a pocket behind my robe's front scapular drape. I tried to reach for it, but my arm suddenly wasn't working. Neither were my leg muscles when I tried to jump to my feet. Earlier, when I'd been forced to visualize the failure of my grand scheme, Ram Mahtani had played the villain's part. But Ram wasn't the one who had worked with Barky Tregarth to play me for a sucker.

  The waitress named Lola came around the table and for the first time I got a good look at her. She was drop-dead gorgeous, with glossy black hair that had a white blaze at the left temple.

  "Dolores da Gama?" I managed to whisper. "You slipped me a mickey?"

  "It seemed the simplest course," the demiclone said complacently, "with all the body armor you're wearing. The drug is a harmless and effective way to bring you down."

  Barky was standing beside her. "My bouncers will take him to your starship gig. It was great doing business with you, Lola. You make a pretty good waitress. Sure you don't want a job?"

  Dolores da Gama laughed richly and gave him a playful smack on his taut, leather-covered buns. I felt strong hands grip me, hoist me upright, move me toward the rear door. Dolores was utilizing my own abduction scheme.

  "Why ..." I gasped. "Why ... want me alive?"

  "We'll think of something wonderful, sweetie." Her smile was megawatt bright in my fading vision.

  "How... find me here?"

  "Your gunfight with our corsairs. One of the pilots transmitted your starship conformation and fuel-trace signature to our base on Amenti before you blasted her out of the sky. Your ship is unique. We sent out other corsairs to track you to Phlegethon."

  We were in the elevator, going up. I was seeing the world through a shrinking tunnel embedded in fog. "But how did ... you get here so quick?"

  "I left Earth the day after you escaped from us. So did other Haluk agents. The massive fuel-bunker refit on your ship showed your intent to undertake a long, stealthy voyage. It was a toss-up which way you'd go—either the Spur, for a penetration of our cluster, or the Whorl. We believed you might have found out about our campaign against Sheltok. Other Haluk were waiting for you near Seriphos and Tyrins, in case you topped off your tanks at either planet before leaving the galaxy. I drew the Sag assignment and went to Amenti with my assistants. And suddenly, there you were. Potting our people in cold blood. You're a ruthless man, Asahel Frost."

  "What happen ... real Dolores? You show her ... any bloody compassion?"

  We were out of the elevator, heading for a gig. I had no doubt that a fast Haluk starship was waiting in orbit, hidden with a dissimulator field a little less efficient than Makebate's.

  My head in its Joru makeup wobbled helplessly. In another minute I'd pass out, and she seemed to know it. "You're about to experience what Dolores did. It won't be unpleasant. But before you sleep, here's a little extra information to give you pleasant dreams. We have another reason for stealing transactinides: our ships will need extra fuel for the invasion."

  "I knew that," I said, and faded to black.

  Chapter 7

  I expected they would take me to their secret base on Amenti—an asteroid station abandoned nearly eighty years ago by Sheltok—or even to a Haluk colony in the Perseus Spur. Instead, as I discovered much later, they brought me back to Toronto, to the commercial and residential tower where they had established their embassy and secure living quarters.

  There I was demicloned. Twice. The complicated process took about seven months. When I was finally released from the dystasis tank it was mid-November, although I didn't learn the date right away.

  I had the superficial appearance of a Haluk, a side effect of the preliminary phase of the demiclone process. The disorienting discovery didn't prevent me from executing the Helly Frost replica who shared my recovery room—the demiclone who had lived most of his life as a Haluk. But another perfect duplicate of me was already at large, committing God knows what sort of crimes in my name. The first impostor was a renegade human being, collaborating with the aliens.

  I hadn't had much time to speculate on the identity of Fake Helly I. When the medical device monitoring Fake Helly II flat-lined, it triggered an alarm. Rather slow on the uptake, four blue-skinned xenos took their own sweet time coming to the recovery room to see what had happened. None wore translators. Two of the Haluk were meditechs, the same ones who had attended me and Fake Helly II while we recuperated from dystasis. The other pair were uniformed embassy guards armed with Ivanov stun-pistols.

  The aliens stood in a close group, about ten feet away from me. They had me backed up against the tall windows. I'd opened the drapes earlier to determine my whereabouts, and outside was a nightscape of downtown Toronto, a glittering forest of colored glass towers.

  The taller guard barked at me in his own language. "Human! Do not move!"

  I understood. With two laser targeting dots shining on my sternum, it was easy. I stood still.

  The female medic, Avilik, darted to the bed where the dead demiclone lay and checked out the corpse with a diagnosticon. She uttered a horrified expletive, then came away from the bed and spoke to me in the Haluk tongue. "Wah! What have you done? Ru Balakalak is not only dead, he is blah blah!”

  "Yeah. He sure as hell is," I replied in English. My tongue felt funny and my teeth seemed to be too far apart. The larynx was mine, but it was laboring under some exotic handicap. My voice was gravelly and deeply resonant, almost Louis Armstrongesque. I continued in execrable Halukese. "This one did it! Ru Balakalak will not live again by dystasis. This one thinks that is very, very good!" I switched back to English. "And fuck you all very much."

  The four of them exclaimed, "Wah!"

  Then Avilik began to jabber rapidly with her male colleague, whose name was Miruviak. I only understood one word in ten of the agitated conversation, but the general tenor seemed to be that some maximal manure would impact the rotor when the Servant of Servants found out about the catastrophe. Damage control was the order of the day.

  I was stark naked. My general bodily contour was still sturdily human, not nearly so willowy as that of normal Haluk males. I had a narrow waist and four-fingered hands without nails. My skin was sky-blue, except for the parts of me smeared with my own blood. My chest, arms, and upper legs were patterned with intricate ridges almost like glossy scars, some of them nicely marked with gold. I had seen my face briefly in a mirror before the aliens found me. By human standards I was hideous. I had short silvery hair. My normally green eyes were now a brilliant sapphire, with huge irises and no visible whites. My eye sockets were slightly smaller than those of a true Haluk, but any ordinary human observer would take me for a genuine blueberry.

  Hey, all Haluk look alike.

  I held a bloody towel to the streaming wound at the back of my neck. It marked the place where I'd hacked out a small shocker device, implanted in the skin at the base of my skull for the purpose of controlling me. It hadn't.

  Avilik and Miruviak finished talking and stared at me balefully. The big guard rapped out a question to them in unintelligible Halukese. Probably: "Should I stun t
his fucker's ass now?"

  "Don't shoot!" said Avilik. "Don't hurt him!"

  Her male partner asked a question that I only understood part of. "Blah blah him now with blah blah Avilik said, "Yes. Be careful and slow. He blah blah but we must blah and make a new demiclone."

  Miruviak carried a small case, which he snapped open, revealing a shiny little instrument with a pistol grip, a cylindrical metal body, and a short barrel tipped with a glass knob. Bea Mangan had used one of those on me, the night she'd picked me up in the snowstorm. The thing was a hypodermic injector, the kind without a needle that squirts powerful little jets of liquid right through unbroken skin and clothing. It was probably full of a gentler sort of knockout juice.

  "Human?" Miruviak said to me gently. "One will not hurt you. Only blah blah sleep."

  He started toward me. In order to inject the drug he had to touch me with the glass knob. The guards still had me targeted. They held their Ivanovs two-handed, in the approved human combat style. I suppose Haluk demiclones had bought the stun-guns on the thriving Toronto black market. No aliens were permitted to carry arms on Earth.

  Miruviak was coming at me from the right. Haluk faces are hard to read because of the ridged patterns, but it seemed to me that he was distinctly nervous at the prospect of putting down a brute my size.

  The big guard must have thought so, too. "Blah Vumilak and this one blah put our guns to his head blah blah. He is too large and strong blah blah blah."

  "Be silent," Avilik told Big Guy. She acted like the boss of the outfit. "The human is frightened and blah. He is also feeble from blah blah in dystasis and blah blah. You shoot blah blah blah."

  Yeah. Only as a last resort. Okay, let's boogie ...

  I touched my bloody nape, let out a groan, and did a little stagger dance that took me back against the windowsill. Cringed away and whimpered in broken Halukese, "No! Do not do it. No dystasis!"

  Clutched the sopping scarlet towel tightly at one end.

  Miruviak was closing in, making soothing sounds. I turned toward him and whip-snapped the towel sharply in his face, then flung the gory thing at the guards.

  Eeeuw! They couldn't help flinching. By the time they'd recovered, I'd grabbed the startled medic by both skinny wrists and pulled him against me as a shield. The guards fired their stun-guns. Miruviak took two bolts in the back and sagged, dropping the injector.

  I picked up his slight form and threw it at the guards. Avilik was screaming unheeded orders. The unconscious medic's body hit both Haluk and sent them sprawling. Scooping up the injector, I took a headlong dive and skidded across the slick parquet floor toward the floundering pile of aliens. Found a uniformed leg. Pressed the injector ball against a thigh and shot the high-velocity jet right through the cloth. The smaller guard let out a squawk and dropped his Ivanov. I grabbed it.

  Big Guy was on his back, still entangled in the cold-cocked medic, waving his weapon and cursing. He fired a dart at the ceiling and another at the wall. A third barely missed my head. Then I shot him in the ribs and he subsided.

  Avilik gave a wail and ran for the door. Firing from the floor, I popped her in the shoulder. She folded into a crumpled heap.

  Intense! I stayed down for a while, drained of the raging hormones that had let me override my tank-induced debility. Avilik had been correct when she opined I was feeble from dystasis and scared stiff. I'd also suffered considerable blood loss. But I was a husky human male, not a Haluk, and under certain dire circumstances we can do great and wondrous deeds. I breathed deeply, psyched myself up, and got to my feet. Washed-up Supercop pulls his fraying shit together once again, spurred by the realization that time's a-wasting.

  Get out of this goddamn place, Helly. And do it pronto.

  I made my rubber-leggedy way to the door and tried it. It was locked. Somebody had to have a key-card. I knelt beside Avilik. If she was the boss ... yes! An encoded red-striped plastic slip was in an outer pocket of her smock. I turned off all the room lights from the switch plate beside the door, unlocked it, and cracked it open the merest nanoskosh. Then I did my patented reconnoiter from knee height. Nobody ever expects to see a person peeking from down there.

  The recovery room door was one of three opening into a small foyer at the end of a long corridor. The other two doors nearby bore Haluk ideographs that I couldn't decipher. There were more doors down the hall, all closed, and an alcove midway along that I hoped might contain an elevator. No one was in sight.

  I closed the door again and locked it, turned the lights back on. Then I started undressing Big Guy. He had a nice Breitling wrist chronometer that I strapped on. His spiffy gray uniform with black accents would be a tad snug for my human physique, but at least my wrists wouldn't stick out of the tunic arms like a scarecrow's, and the boots looked like they'd fit my funny feet. He wore grubby alien underwear, which I eschewed.

  Big Guy's family jewels made a modest bulge in his drawers and seemed more meager than my own newly acquired exotic equipment. Maybe that explained Avilik's appreciative remarks earlier...

  Before I put the clothes on I took a fast shower. My damned neck gouge was still leaking—I found out later that dystasis puts anticoagulants into the blood that take a few hours to wear off—so I ripped a pillow cover into narrow strips and bound up the wound as well as I could. You try tying a pressure bandage around your neck ...

  All dressed up, wearing Big Guy's holstered Ivanov and with the second stun-gun tucked inside my tunic, I looked like one dangerous Haluk. I felt on the verge of keeling over, but that was not an option. Searching the other three bodies, I found an assortment of colored key-cards and tucked one of each kind into my gun-belt pouch. All of the aliens carried phones, and for a few moments I thought I'd hit the jackpot. But when I tried to call Karl Nazarian's personal code—one of the few I could remember offhand—I reached a Halukese-speaker and hastily hit End. A check of the instrument's dex showed that only a list of preprogrammed codes were accessible—and they all had to be Haluk. I might have known there'd be no easy access to the general telecom net.

  Rats. Without a pocket phone, and the personalized dex and datalink facilities that went with it, you were almost nonexistent on twenty-third-century Earth.

  Well, if I couldn't call for help, I'd have to walk out. Or ride.

  Unfortunately, the aliens weren't carrying human money or credit cards, which might have been useful. The only other items I appropriated were the sedative injector—returned to its case; a flashlight, wrist restraints, and magazine pouch that were clipped to Big Guy's belt; an alien switchblade knife I was surprised to find on Miruviak; and a steel flask from Small Guy's inside tunic pocket that contained a facsimile of high-proof vodka.

  Science tells us that alcohol is not a stimulant. I beg to differ. A quick snort perked me up considerably.

  After momentary hesitation I also stole Big Guy's platinum ring inset with a fire-opal cabochon, slipping it on my own elongated alien finger. If I didn't have money or credit, maybe I could barter.

  Before I left the room I returned to the window and tried to orient myself. The Haluk embassy occupied the top 210 floors of a huge structure called Macpherson Tower, on Edward Street near Yonge, right across from Sheltok's headquarters. My window looked south, toward Sheltok Tower, and by comparing the two buildings I figured I was on the 180th floor, or thereabouts. Most towers in this vicinity had automobile access ramps to the downtown skyways on the fiftieth, 100th, and 200th floors. Maybe I could commandeer a car at one of the upper ramp portals.

  That would be my preferred plan of action. If it didn't work I'd try to descend to the Path—provided I could pass through the security system that sequestered the Haluk section of the tower from the human-occupied suites below. The only other way out I could think of was via the hopper sky-port at the tower's summit, which was used exclusively by the alien tenants. But high-floor suites inevitably belong to high-ranking persons. Security up there and at the skyport was probably extra-tight. The l
00th-floor auto ramp was my best hope.

  I left the recovery room, found the elevators, drew the Ivanov from my tunic, and pressed the Down pad. The wait seemed endless.

  Except for a few signs and door designations in Halukese and a nice piece of alien sculpture by the window at the end of the lift alcove, everything I'd seen in the corridor looked undistinguished and completely human—the carpeting, the light fixtures, card locks on the doors, even the occasional potted terrestrial plant. But it was a human-owned building, of course. The Macpherson management would not have allowed major xenoforming.

  The elevator arrival chime sounded and I felt my muscles tense. I had tucked my right hand into the front of my tunic, Napoleon style, gripping the unholstered Ivanov. If the door opened on a squad of armed Haluk coming to reinforce the two I'd chopped—worst-case scenario—I was ready to fill the car with stun-bolts. But disposing of the snoozers would be risky, maybe impossible.

  If I got lucky and the car held unarmed Haluk or demiclones, I'd play it by ear. Act the aloof cop and keep my mouth shut if anyone spoke to me. I could only guess which pad designated the 100th floor unless the Haluk had left the original numbering intact. However, most commercial tower elevators had a hopper or auto icon next to the pads for the appropriate floors.

  The door slid open. Only one person was inside, a tall, thin human male.

  My older brother Daniel.

  For a moment I was sandbagged with shock. But his glazed eyes slid over me, hardly seeing me. I was just another alien.

  I stepped into the elevator beside him and glanced briefly at the panel. There were no icons designating the skyway portals, and the floors were designated only with alien symbols. I touched the pad for the lowest floor. A red light immediately began blinking beside a card slot that bore a little Halukese sign. The car door remained open and the chime pinged annoyingly.