Orion Arm

  "Just keep on trucking," I said through my teeth.

  "Clear at nine klicks," said Ildiko.

  "Surface is broken petroleum aggregate. Through-route to the left ahead."

  "Got it." The windshield light-amp shut off just as I flew through a confusing cluster of red-rock towers, cursing under my breath.

  We knew that the target was on a level plain hemmed about with high rock formations. However, the GBD projector that roofed the place had subtly distorted the near-surface features on our map, especially those within a four-kilometer radius of ground zero, leaving us ignorant of the immediate target surroundings. It was possible that Galapharma and the Haluk had built their mystery facility on pontoons floating in the bitumen; but I fervently hoped that they'd chosen the easier option of solid ground. We had no easy way of traveling on foot over a treacherous morass of tar.

  Ildiko said, "Still clear at eight klicks."

  "Level surface is stiff petroleum," said Zorik. "Better slow it way down. Shitty terrain ahead."

  "Right."

  The contour-flying tuqo now resembled a small boat creeping through increasingly narrow straits that separated lofty barren islands. In some areas the closely crowded rocks made it impossible to skim the bitumen and I had no choice but to hopscotch to altitudes of fifteen meters or more. Our blaze-orange aircraft might have been invisible to sensor waves, but an intelligent observer could have spotted it with ease.

  "Clear at seven klicks."

  "Level surface is gravel, some shallow water over petroleum."

  Then I saw what I had been hoping to find. And brought the tuqo to an abrupt hover-stop just above the tarry shore of a small lake.

  "Yes!" I hissed in satisfaction. "Look—that squatty conical butte dead ahead of us across the water? It's an ancient volcano with a talus-slope collar. We've got a jillion of 'em in Arizona. First one I've seen here. I betcha there's good firm rocky stuff all around it. Check it out with the day-glasses, Zorik."

  The dark-colored eminence was about three kilometers in diameter and half as high, mostly a heap of shattered basalt. Only a stub of solid rock poked out the top, the remnant of a vent plug. To the north were two lesser sister formations of igneous rock. According to the map, they seemed to be separated from Conical Butte by a precipitate narrow canyon. A stream running through it probably supplied the lake we were hovering beside. To the south loomed a colossal red sandstone outcropping. The corridor between Big Red and Conical Butte was wider than the northern canyon through the Sisters. The map showed a dense cluster of tall crags at South Corridor's far end...

  Beyond which lay the flat with the secret Haluk installation.

  "This is it, troops ... Ildy, scan the tops of all these buttes with the whole spectrum. Zorik, scope 'em out as well as you can with the glasses. If this outfit is really security conscious, they'll have spy-beams up there. The GBD field isn't strong enough to seriously inhibit coverage."

  But there was nothing.

  I flew across the lake and zipped around the foot of Conical Butte counterclockwise, keeping the bulk of the degraded volcano between us and the facility. Viscous bitumen beneath the water gave way to asphalt aggregate and then to a rough stony surface with only a few traces of petroleum. At Kilometer 4.2 we reached the crags, which seemed to be a fragmented lava dike extending out from the tumbled talus slope of Conical Butte. Three spindly columns of black smoke arose from the crags' far side.

  It was nearly full daylight.

  I eased the tuqo into a deep niche with a rocky floor, touched down, and killed the engine. All three of us scrambled out and covered the aircraft with filotarps, which instantly assumed the colors of the surrounding shadowed rock. Northwest of us Conical Butte was rosy gray in the light of the rising sun. Above our heads to the south, the sunlit crown of the monster sandstone formation I'd dubbed Big Red appeared to be painted in fresh blood. An even bigger red-rock mountain to the east, which would later be named Jukebox Butte by Zorik O'Toole, glowed fiery around the edges. The cool air was foul, not only with the usual hydrocarbon odor but also with the acrid smell of oily smoke.

  "Surely the Haluk wouldn't use these bitumen deposits for fuel as the Qastt do," Ildiko said. "They have efficient small fusion generators and matter converters."

  "Maybe our friends across the way accidentally ignited a seep of crude oil or some volatile stuff," I said. "Or there might be a live volcanic vent that did the same thing. If petroleum products are smoldering underground in the rock fissures, they might be impossible to extinguish."

  Ildiko made a face. "Let's get back inside the ship where we can breathe clean air."

  We retreated and I put her back to work on the scanner. "All-band surveillance for at least another hour, with special emphasis on the com frequencies. We want to be sure no bad guys come cantering through the crags with guns blazing."

  "One of us should do a fast long-range ground recon as well," Zorik stated. "I volunteer. I'll do an optical peek around those pointy-top rocks just north of here. Move less than a klick away from the ship. Scope out the Three Smokes and make sure there's no unusual volcanic activity. Might even be able to view the target if the terrain's favorable. What say?"

  Oh, you spring-butt bastard. Just can't wait to get into action. ..

  "Good thinking, Zorik. Gear up. I'll do the comlink right away so you can keep in touch with us here through your helmet LC."

  He went aft to prepare his equipment. Ildiko resumed her station at the scanner and 1 fiddled and diddled with the CL-4 until its thread-thin modulated laser beam found Chispa Dos in her geosynchronous orbit half a million kilometers above the Great Bitumen Desert.

  Joe Betancourt reported that Ogu, Tisqatt, and Tu-Prak were very subdued and compliant. Three Qastt vessels had lifted off from the planet's central starport yesterday afternoon and left the solar system. The only human starships on the move were obvious Rampart vessels coming and going from Cravat, thirty-three light-years away. There was no trace of Haluk starship activity within a sixty-light-year radius of the Dagasatt solar system. Mimo and Ivor had just reported a quiet night aboard the privateer with no sign of additional search-and-rescue aircraft from Taqtaq.

  I thanked Joe, gave a brief report of my own, then had him activate the relay system that turned Chispa into a very expensive private communications satellite. As I signed off I heard the back hatch of the tuqo close softly, but 1 thought nothing of it.

  My mind was already on breakfast and I dug out the pod containing our selection of ready-to-eat meals. "Carnivore or veggie?" I asked Ildiko. "Coffee, tea, or juice?"

  "Veggie, please. English Breakfast tea with two honeys, apple juice if you have it."

  " Yo, Zorik!" I called. "You want to feed?"

  No answer. I figured he'd gone outside for a dump. It was impossible for a human to sit down inside the incommodious Qastt amenity at the rear of the tuqo.

  I started pinching hot and cold bags, loading food onto little degradable dish-trays. One order of walnut oatmeal, grilled soy bacon, hot apple-raisin compote, and beverages; one order of ham-mushroom omelette, mini-bagels and cream cheese, cherry-pineapple-blueberry yogurt, and black coffee. There was no activity on the scanner except signals from commercial and government stations in the refinery towns, scratchy solar wind, the enormously long waves of distant lightning, and a fluctuating IR emanation from the burning site beyond the crags.

  "You're from Earth, aren't you, Ildy," I remarked after stuffing my face.

  "Yes. How can you tell?"

  "Elementary, my dear Szabo! I used to be a cop. Actually, it's the slight accent you give to your Standard English that betrays you. Colonials homogenize their speech within a generation and talk media-vanilla. Only people born on the Old World retain regional accents. I can't place yours."

  "It's Hungarian. My mother and father have a hydroponics farm in a small town north of Budapest. They grow roses and freesia for the floral trade. I helped them from the time I was small." Her fa
ce took on a rather wistful expression. "They were marvelous parents, but I thought they were very bourgeois and boring. I couldn't wait to join Zone Patrol and take a posting as far away from Earth as possible. I wanted adventure and excitement among the stars."

  "Did you find it?"

  "Oh, yes. It was a good twenty-five years."

  "But you opted for early retirement. Why?"

  A mischievous flicker in her eyes. "Not for the reason O'Toole did! My girlfriend Cosa was invalided out. Bilateral arm replacement. I decided to go, too. Stand by her during rehab. She and I retired to Seriphos. We thought it would be amusing to grow flowers as my parents did, and it was great fun... until Cosa met someone else. Poof!" She shrugged.

  "And why did Zorik leave the patrol?"

  "Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it. He hung it up a year before I did. There's nothing on his record but gold stars, not the least hint of slime. But some of the ZP insiders said that Commander Iron Nuts was given a clear choice by the brass: retire or get flushed. It was never clear exactly what happened. There were rumors of some gross piece of insubordination. O'Toole never was one to suffer fools gladly— even if they outranked him."

  Ildiko fell silent, studying the monitor of her instrument with particular intensity. Eventually she shook her head. "Nothing transmitting out there. Just the usual, and the Three Smokes glowing beyond the pointed crags."

  We ate without speaking for a time. Zorik still hadn't joined us. I began to describe my former life as a happy beach bum and charterboat skipper and told a few yarns that made her laugh. Then I got down to what was public knowledge concerning my devastated career in the ICS Enforcement Division, figuring she had as much right to know as O'Toole did.

  She listened with sympathy. When I finished, she asked, "Do you think you were framed by some criminal type with a grudge?"

  "No. Almost certainly by Galapharma AC. As a deliberate opening move in its corporate chess game with Rampart. It was a nifty piece of irony. I'd joined the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat in the first place to defy my father and thumb my nose at the family Starcorp. I was a flaming idealist when I was young. Ready to expose the heart of darkness in the Hundred Concerns and all the other corporate predators who think they own the galaxy. Pretty sappy, huh?"

  "No," she contradicted me softly. "They think they're above the law, that the Commonwealth Assembly is a collection of puppets and they pull the strings. The big Concerns have even corrupted the patrol—some wings of it, at any rate."

  "How do you know?" I'd heard the same rumors, of course. Not only about the patrol, but about the ICS as well.

  "That was the reason I requested a transfer out of Zone 16. You must know about the dirty business involving Carnelian AC and the Joru years ago. Well, it never really stopped— just became more discreet. Among other things, the Carnies have been literally getting away with murder, liquidating uncooperative xeno gashrunners with the collusion of a patrol death squad. The involved officers have never been charged, but the rest of us all knew what was going on."

  "Have you ever heard talk of ZP corruption out here in the Spur?"

  "There were hints of payoffs by Galapharma. For unauthorized variations in patrol patterns, mostly. The grapevine had it that Gala was spying on Rampart as part of its acquisition strategy and didn't want its speedboats logged in certain areas."

  "Near which worlds?"

  "Mostly around Seriphos, Plusia-Prime, and Tyrins. The high-traffic Rampart planets. But also way out near the Tip where there are hardly any human colonies at all. That was hard to figure." Her blue eyes suddenly widened. "Would it have had something to do with the Halukt"

  I stared at her for a moment without speaking. The rear hatch of the tuqo slammed.

  Hurriedly, I said, "Ildy, what do you intend to do when this mission is over?"

  She seemed flustered. "Well.. . if you're satisfied with my work, 1 hoped you might keep me on. Let me do prisoner-escort duty. Help take the perps back to Earth. I'd like to see my folks. Check out the family greenhouse." Her mouth twisted wryly. "Who knows what I might do if the right position comes along?"

  "You're hired," I whispered. "But it'll be our secret, for now."

  "Is that coffee I smell?" O'Toole sang out.

  "You want some?"

  "Damn right! Make it big, make it black, make it extra hot, and make it snappy." He barked out a laugh to let me know he was only perpetrating a little comradely whimsy, then called, "Anything on the scan, Lieutenant?"

  "Nothing at all, Zorik." Ildiko winked at me. She wasn't falling for his rank-pulling bullshit. "It doesn't look as though the opposition expected anyone to get through the perimeter defenses."

  "One jumbo Java, coming up," I said.

  When I took it back to him a few minutes later, he was already dressed in full battle gear, except for the helmet. He poured the coffee into an insulated flexcanteen and said, "I've decided on a tentative reconnaissance route. Want to see?"

  I refrained from giving the question the response it deserved. "Sure."

  He laid out a completely new topographic plot.

  It had to have been made within the last few minutes, using our own portable photon-differential terrain mapper.

  He caught my look of shocked surprise and incipient anger and smirked. "Not to worry, Chief. I drew it with a single pulse at the very instant the sun peeked over the mountains. Even if the hostiles noticed, they'd think the burst was a solar flare phenom. Just part of the dawn chorus. I used the same trick during a successful clandestine action on Bandusia."

  "Zorik—"

  "Check it out!" He was very proud of himself. He'd displayed creative initiative while I'd been playing short-order cook. "This copy's for you. I have another one in my pack. With the photons bouncing off this collection of buttes, I was lucky enough to get some really useful detail."

  The single-shot holographic "shoot-around-corners" computer-enhanced image was necessarily imperfect, with no fine resolution of the topo features or true differentiation between tar and hardpan on the ground surfaces; but it was a hell of a lot better map than the one we'd made with the Qastt equipment. It clearly showed rocks as small as watermelons. It penetrated all but the final kilometer or so of the circular GBD field. There was even a fuzzy ghost image of the shielded Haluk facility itself, a central module with three equidistant projecting wings like stubby propellor blades. East of the structure was a very shallow expanse of water, and beyond that rose another monstrous sandstone formation with steep sides that he'd christened Jukebox Butte.

  I said, "I wish you'd consulted with me before making this map."

  "You'd have agreed, right?"

  "Probably, but—"

  "I remembered the solar-flash stunt in the last minutes before the sun popped up. There was no time for discussion." He continued, as though that were the end of it—and I suppose it was, "Now then, since we have this new map, there doesn't seem to be any really compelling reason why I shouldn't do a full target recon right away. I'm feeling great. Got plenty of z's riding in. I estimate the round-trip would take five or six hours, max. Continuous feedback to base, of course. With the recce done, I'll still have plenty of time to rest up for our strike after nightfall. What say?"

  "Explain in detail what you're proposing."

  "First, I considered and rejected the idea of climbing Conical Butte and doing the recce from up there. Even though there's plenty of cover, I believe that the target's GBD umbrella would interfere with high-angle powered optical observations. We've no choice but to check out this target at ground level." He gave me a severe look. "After evaluating the adjacent terrain on the new map—a goddamn hedge of high rock surrounds the place—I'm provisionally accepting your assumption that there'll be no perpendicular dissimulator field hindering our direct observation of the building itself. Under the circumstances, the defenders wouldn't be concerned about low-angle spying from a distance."

  "Go on."

  "I'll make an approa
ch this way, always keeping solid rock between me and the target, until I reach this point."

  His finger traced a tortuous eastward-trending path among the volcanic crags and redstone outcroppings, well to the south of the area from which the Three Smokes emanated, until he turned north across a nearly level region and came to a narrow sandstone pinnacle over 140 meters tall. The facility lay only about fifteen hundred meters beyond it.

  The pinnacle had a lot of broken rock at its base and was oddly twisted in its upper reaches, bearing a passing resemblance to a huge corkscrew. Relative to the target, it was the closest bit of useful cover to be had, and looked like the best place to launch a penetration.

  O'Toole certainly thought so. "This is the most appropriate assault route. The new map indicates that the area between Corkscrew Pinnacle and the target structure is dry ground."

  "Seems to indicate," I corrected him.

  He waved that aside. "I'll confirm it optically, of course. No other potential line of attack looks nearly as promising.

  East of the target is water: an impossible approach. The open area due west of the target, between it and the rough talus at the base of Conical Butte, is nearly three thousand meters across and has almost no cover, only a few widely scattered boulders that are less than man-sized. The region southwest of the target, in the direction of the crags where we're hiding now, probably has burning oil pools—my deduction from those three smoke plumes."

  "The smokes concern me," I said. "The recon path you've chosen precludes any exploration of their source."

  "Irrelevant, unless the primary assault route choice proves impracticable—in which case, we'll have to consider an approach from the north or the southwest. Time enough to check out the smokes then, if necessary."

  "With all its twists and turns," I said, "this route of yours covers at least five kilometers one way. That's a considerable distance for a lone scout in a potentially hazardous alien environment."

  "I don't see any real problems for an experienced man utilizing camo gear. Do you?"

  "Not according to this map."

  "Then do I have your permission to proceed?"