The Venus Belt

  “You heard her?” I looked my cone-shaped fellow prisoner over. It was like she’d been scaled to the summit by a thousand tiny alpinists with ice axes. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”

  Her answer should have seeped out through a sheepish grin. “Got plumb tired of waitin’, an’ finally decided t’rescue m’self! I was in a room like this’n, only I had a bunk I didn’t need, an’ acourse, a toilet. Anyway, day before yesterday, I figgered I was gonna check out pretty soon no matter what I did, so I opened up m’Darling gun—datdatdatdatdat! You shoulda seen it, Winnie, ricochets buzzin’ around like hornets! But all I managed was this little bitty hole, an’—”

  “And,” Karyl finished impatiently, “we found a cell along this hallway with a telescoping antenna sticking through the door, broadcasting an S.O.S.!”

  She slid the aerial out through a slightly opened gunport, punched him gently in the nose, and retracted it again. “Who’s tellin’ this, sonny, you or me?”

  Karyl placed one hand on his middle, gestured broadly with the other, and bowed deeply from the waist. “Madame, I humbly beg your—”

  “An’ don’t call me no madame, neither, whippersnapper! Anyway, they cut me loose, an’ here we are!”

  “Not for long, if I have anything to say about it!” I shuddered. “How did you find me?” Lucy pointed to the twice-scorched door; scrawled across it was a faint chalky inscription: BEAR II.

  “Orderly bastards, weren’t they? But that must mean—”

  Clarissa nodded. “We can’t seem to find him though. Do you—?”

  “Except for these four homely walls, my love, and your Gigacom—where the hell’s my Gigacom?” I found it lodged beneath the sink, seemingly undamaged. “Let’s see if we can find him now—time we were getting the hell out of here, anyway. Everybody ready?”

  “Right.” Clarissa closed her bag with a snap and hitched the strap up on her shoulder where it wouldn’t cramp her cross-draw. I squeezed her hand once more, nodded to Karyl and Lucy, and stepped out into the hallway for the first time in a week. It seemed more like a lifetime—and very nearly had been.

  I drew my gun and slid an Owen tube over the barrel. If I saw so much as an earwig, I was going to blast a hole in it you could navigate a flivver through.

  Thinking about bugs gave me an interesting tactical idea—just in case Clarissa’s informal census was wrong. I motioned to my companions and stickied up my shoe soles. It was easier for Lucy on the floor of the corridor, so I walked along the ceiling. My wife and the welder took a wall apiece. Whoever we ran into was gonna be one confused Hamiltonian, and that might buy us an extra few seconds.

  Karyl tucked his torch into his belt and pulled out the biggest goddamned laser I’d ever seen. We started slow; there was nothing to be seen down the dimly lit hallway for a hundred yards in either direction.

  “Seems to be unfinished crew-quarters,’’ I whispered. “How the devil did you find this rock in the first place?”

  Clarissa kept her voice low. “When I got back from Mulligan’s, somebody had wrecked the house—I didn’t stay around to investigate.” She lifted her feet carefully to avoid sliding down the wall. Her bag hung toward the floor, standing out “sideways” from her body.

  “Smart lady.” And pretty, too—I’d almost forgotten how pretty.

  “No, just chicken-hearted. There was an outbound medical courier willing to buck the solar flare. Freshly cloned tissues that had to be delivered.”

  “And anyway, there wasn’t any solar flare,” said Karyl from the other wall. “I told you—”

  “So y’did,” acknowledged Lucy. “Mind where yer pointin’ that overpowered flashlight, willya?” She waved her Gabbet Fairfax for emphasis, if not example.

  “On Ceres,” my wife continued, “I put out a general call for you and Koko—where is she, by the way?”

  I told her in words of one syllable, most of them with four letters.

  “Oh dear, that doesn’t sound like our Koko, does it? Anyway, you’d already left Ceres, but I got answered by two different Healers and Karyl here, who decided to come with me.”

  “Needed a vacation,” grinned the welder-restaurateur, “and I’d always planned on seeing more of the Belt. We traced you to Navigation Rock, and through the Patrol from Bulfinch to the bugranch. But then you didn’t go where you were supposed to.”

  I laughed. “Trying to lose the bad guys. I didn’t realize we’d be confusing anybody else—careful now!” We’d reached an intersection. I peered around the corner, as did Lucy below me, and kept an eye on Clarissa, for whom the same reconnaissance amounted to peeking cautiously over a metal cliff edge. The corridor beyond us was deserted. With Karyl and my wife jumping the gap, we moved on. “So what happened then?”

  Karyl spoke up: “We knew you were hunting missing persons, so the good doctor here thought of contacting Ceres Central to see if there was any pattern to the disappearances.”

  “Which brought you to the Cluster.” I nodded, understanding.

  “Which brought us straight to Bester,” said Clarissa. She reached across to punch me softly on the arm in gentle reproach. “We nearly caught up with you, too—at the refueling station—remember Pleistocene Plaza?”

  “Oh hell!” I paused, thinking about the guilty fleeing where no Federalist pursueth. “But then we’d all have wound up in these cells, wouldn’t we? How was it you came straight to Bester? I didn’t get that part.”

  She looked stunned. “Why, it’s the statistical center of all the disappearances!”

  I stopped, nearly losing my purchase on the ceiling. “I’ll be damned. Lucy, we lugged along all that Broach equipment for nothing!”

  “So that’s what all that junk was,” said my wife. “We saw it in Lucy’s flivver. You might have picked a more sensible orbit to park it in. We almost didn’t catch it.”

  Lucy hadn’t answered, but stood there on the floor, slapping her pistol in the palm of a manipulator. “Take a look at this here bulkhead, Winnie. We’ve found another missing person.”

  The streaky chalkmarks on the tightly welded door said SCHROEDER, P. The bugrancher’s other daughter. I looked at my wife and our friends grimly. The girl had been a prisoner here far longer than Lucy and me. I tapped on the wall with my Rezin handle and waited.

  No answer.

  Karyl limbered up his burner again, torching a cautious half-inch hole in the door. He turned the welder off, but a roaring sound continued as a miniature torrent of air was sucked into the wall. When it quieted, and the edges were cool, I pushed some buttons on my forearm, raised the hood of my suit, and stuck a periscopic finger into the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Huddled pitiably in one bleak corner lay a little pile of bones and teeth and hair and smartsuit scraps. She could have been dead for a week, or any time since they let the pyramids out for bid. Karyl and Clarissa had a look, too, Lucy tuning in on our suit frequencies.

  I don’t think any of us said a word.

  We continued down the hall until we reached the end of the line; a painted arrow on the wall pointed to an airlock on our left. I weighed various factors in my mind, then said: “Clarissa, you and Lucy get off this rock and run like hell for help. Karyl—if you’re willing—we’ll stay and look for Ed.”

  My wife opened her mouth to protest; Lucy exclaimed, “Nothin’ doin’, youngster! I can set up a distress call from th’ flivver, then we’ll all tear this joint apart until—”

  CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! Noise exploded through the steel-corridored complex. I stood frozen, the front sight of my pistol questing for a target. Clarissa grabbed my arm and towed me to the lock. We buttoned up in clumsy haste. “You sure you’re still airtight, Lucy?” I dropped my weapon fooling with hoodseams and stooped to retrieve it.

  “If I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be talkin’ ‘bout it!” She pointed to the rapidly widening outer door—she’d cycled us through, heedless of the risk.

  We stumbled out onto the rocky surface. Behin
d, some radio equivalent of the alarm still blared: “Alert! Alert! All personnel take cover! Alert! Alert!” Above our heads a swarm of heavily armed flivvers circled like vultures, Darling guns on either fender and rocket tubes protruding from their armor-plated bellies. The muzzles of their weapons flashed and sparkled; a midwestern dust-devil churned before us on the not-so-distant horizon, a miniature tornado of swiftly marching high-velocity death.

  I threw an arm up and fired! The Webley smashed my hand, its Owen tube wide of the mark. I racked up a second, aligned the sights and fired again. This time an aggressor skewed and wobbled in its orbit, throwing sparks and rapidly diffusing smoke. There was a flare, the buffet of a shockwave, and they were gone in a million fragments.

  One down, several dozen yet to go.

  “You on the surface!” demanded an amplified, authoritative voice. “Stand where you are! Drop your weapons!”

  Win Bear wasn’t going back to any cell! “Scatter!” I hollered, ignoring my own orders by gathering Clarissa to me. We threw ourselves into a crater, bouncing up to toss a little mayhem at the enemy. I scored on a second and a third flivver. Is it three kills or five to make an ace?

  Four cars dropped out of the orbiting armada, settled in a broad-flung square around us. Men emerged, various other critters with toes in their suitfeet, running low, swinging deadly looking fléchette-guns. Overhead a smartsuited cetacean squadron jetted from the vehicles, chin-mounted lasers twinkling in the starlight as they tossed and twisted, trying to draw a bead. The rock beside me fused and smoked.

  I fired. A shotgunner crumpled, hanging three feet off the ground, squirting blood until his suit sealed. I fired again and sensed the thrum of Clarissa’s smaller weapon on my shoulder. There was a flash as Lucy’s .50 joined the chorus, chewing impressive hunks out of the enemy’s grounded flivvers. The different-colored flash of Karyl’s laser accounted for two more bad guys.

  As I groped for another magazine, the world exploded around me. When it settled down again, my left arm wouldn’t work—sensible, given the fist-size chunk of tissue missing from my shoulder. A dozen steel needles sprouted from the wound like Lilliputian arrows. Oddly, it didn’t hurt a bit.

  Clarissa ripped the nutrient cuff off my right arm and slapped it over the wound. Now that hurt; I sort of faded for a moment, and when I joined the universe again, there were a lot of extra shadows on the crater floor. Our ersatz foxhole was ringed solidly with angry-looking gunmen pointing their fléchette-guns at the bridge of my nose.

  A bore that size, you can actually see the shell up in the breech.

  I holstered the Webley, suddenly too tired to think, and unbuckled the belt one-handed. Across the rock, more movement. “Here we go again,” muttered Lucy, being frogmarched from behind her shelter. “Take yer poxy mitts off me, you...Cossacks!”

  “Shuddup!” A burly black-and-silver-clad figure signaled to his only slightly less-impressive minions, who gathered up our guns and Clarissa’s bag. Gesturing us toward the lock we’d come through, he waited for us to obey, then followed. My last glimpse of the surface was of a hundred cars disgorging soldiers; my only satisfaction the number of stretcher cases they were dragging. Come to think of it, I could have used a free ride, myself. Karyl seemed to be okay, Clarissa and Lucy were unharmed.

  Okay, I’d settle for that.

  They hup-hoop-heeped us through the corridor. “Where are you taking us?” my wife demanded, pointing at the wounded all around us. “These people are hurt—they need attention!”

  The guard leader chuckled. “Don’t worry, honey, the boss’ll give you plenty of attention! Now move!” We reached an all-too-familiar-looking door. He straightened his shoulders, prodded a couple of his sagging troops erect. “Look smart, you monkeys!” It was Malaise’s office, of course. The head goon rapped. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Karyl loosening the welding torch in his belt. The seams of Lucy’s hidden gun compartment were slowly growing wider. I slipped a hand up to the neck of my suit, ready to dive for the Bauer. If we were doomed, we might as well go out in style.

  The door slid aside, the room beyond was dark.

  “Come in, Captain! Confound it, where’s the lightswitch!” The glare sprang up around us. There, leaning over the desk looking angry as hell, was Mr. Big himself, J. V. Tormount.

  Known to his constituents as Olongo Featherstone-Haugh.

  19: The Sheep from the Goats

  “F

  ifty-seven dead, eight seriously disabled, half a dozen walking wounded. Win, how could you do it?” Olongo wiped a paw across his tired expression and sighed. “The policeman in you, I suppose. Once an authoritarian, always a—”

  “What the hell did you expect, long-stemmed roses? Your thugs lock me up and starve me for a week, I’ll be goddamned if I don’t burn a few, first chance I get!” I elbowed away the goon in charge of me and peeked beneath Clarissa’s slapdash bandaging. It still looked like strawberry shortcake, the dozen or so fléchettes embedded in the muscle beginning to throb discordantly.

  Olongo recoiled. “You were a prisoner here?” He paused for a long time in astonished reassessment. “I’d give anything to believe that, Win. But why did you open fire on the very people coming to rescue you?”

  “Mr. President, I don’t know who’s kidding who—whom—but we’d damn well better get it sorted out. Hell, I thought you’d thrown in with the Hamiltonians. Didn’t these screws of yours call you ‘Tormount’?”

  The security chief peeled off his hood and took a belligerent step toward me. I met him halfway and we tried to see who could grind his teeth the loudest. He won, but I had a three-tooth handicap.

  “Gunny!“ Olongo ordered. Now I knew why the son of a bitch looked so familiar—it was Gunnison Griswold, himself. Brrr. “Get these people some chairs—and see to your wounded. Clarissa, apparently I’ve no right to ask it, but would you mind helping, dear?” She nodded and repossessed her kit, taking the local militia with her into the hall. I sat down and began exploring for a cigar.

  Olongo closed his eyes, resting his broad black face in his broad black hands. “‘Tormount’ I am, too. A lodge name, Win: Altruistic Protective Enclave of Simians...” He spread his enormous arms, practically filling the room. “My late lodge-master’s idea of humor.”

  Lucy, trundling out to help Clarissa, paused in the doorway. “Better answer his question, old anthropoid. How’d y’get hooked up with Federalists? Them vermin never had a kind intention toward nonhumans that I knowed about.”

  The President slapped his paws on the desk and rose, discovering, just like Malaise, that you can’t pace in a hundredth-gee. He wound up leaning his massive bulk on a filing cabinet—a real one this time. It groaned and a drawer popped open. “I scarcely know where to begin, my friends. Aphrodite, Ltd., is as far from a Hamiltonian conspiracy as you could imagine: a relatively simple engineering scheme—though I suppose the scale of the thing might surprise you. I only learned recently that we had unwittingly become a front for something much more sinister. Which, of course, is why I came out here to investigate.”

  “You, too?” I shook my head in disbelief.

  “Me, too!” replied a walking stack of print-outs which emerged from an adjoining room. “Where y’want these, Unc?”

  “Koko!” Lucy beat me to it, but not by much. The furry little twerp set the hardcopies on the desk, flipped one of its bungees over to hold them, and ran to embrace Lucy and my wife in turn. She came back with the great granddaddy of all embarrassed, guilty looks. “Boss...”

  “Don’t call me ‘boss’! You were fired the day you left Navigation Rock—in Lucy’s car!” Was that a tear rolling down her leathery cheek? Maybe it was just my cigar smoke.

  She sniffed, “Aw, Win, I...”

  “Ahem!” Olongo conjured up a stogie of his own, lit it with a flourish, and, having gotten our attention thus, abused it with a long and thoughtful pause. Finally: “My boy, she acted at my request—reluctantly, for what it’s worth—to
help me ferret out what was going sour with our operations here...”

  ***

  “Sour” wasn’t quite the word. Aphrodite had been conceived nearly ten years earlier when the then-Vice President and his baby niece were traveling in the asteroids on casual vacation. He’d stayed a while, then left the fledgling enterprise in what he’d believed were trustworthy hands, returning only for rare inspections, taking care of the business end back home on Earth.

  Early in the venture, Voltaire Malaise had caught wind of it. Instead of exposing it to the viewing public, he’d insisted on buying in. Olongo’s partners had assented in the interests of secrecy, and out of admiration for the newsman’s enthusiasm for space exploration. With the passing of time, the Voice of the Stars assumed an increasingly central role, becoming virtual overseer of operations in the Belt. Until recently, when lagging production, scheduling and cost overruns, and a rash of mysterious disappearances in the Nomad Cluster and elsewhere had prompted Olongo to initiate his first inquiries.

  Whereupon the conspirators had tried to knock him off via remote control.

  ***

  “Thus, my decision to pursue the matter further in person. And it served a second purpose, as well,” admitted Olongo, “keeping me out of sight—and alive.” Somehow, with that cigar in his hand, he made me think of Ernie Kovacs. All he needed was a xylophone and a derby.

  I grunted. “Koko was a backup—or maybe another clay pigeon—like me?” I turned to glance out the door where Clarissa was administering electronarcosis. She looked up, smiled, and went right back to work.

  Koko giggled. “A little of both, I guess. Uncle President needed elbow room; I proposed to muddy the water—be a noisy, visible diversion—while he simply disappeared. No one would ever suspect—”

  “I thought I recognized that last-minute invalid they wheeled aboard the Bonaventura, a reddish-pelted, elderly—”