Horizons

TWENTY

ANOTHER MEAL TRAY LAY ON THE FLOOR. DANE HADN’T even bothered to lift the cover.

He looked up as the door opened, expecting the guard who would retrieve the tray and vanish without a word.

Li Zhen burst through, a small stunner in his hand. Beyond him, Dane saw the backs of two men in Dragon Home uniform. Their tension and exhilaration rolled into the room like a cloud of acrid smoke.

“Come, now.” Li Zhen jerked his chin at the door.

Dane bolted to his feet, headed for the door. Paused as Li Zhen grabbed him by the shoulder. The Chairman of Dragon Home planted a small black disc on the collar around Dane’s throat, then shoved him toward the door. An override? He’d find out soon enough. He burst from the cell, found himself in a small room with four CSF face down on the floor, hands clasped behind their heads, guarded by six Dragon Home Security.

Dane cast a glance at Li Zhen, but one of the guards was already shoving him toward the exit at the far side of the room. They ran together down the short hall, stepping over another prone CSF. The last two guards backed after them, tossed a gas grenade that burst at the end of the hallway. The guard in charge of Dane said something that clearly meant “hurry up” and shoved Dane through an opening door and into a small lock. The final two guards burst in after, letting their breath out in desperate gasps, a faint sickly sweet scent clinging to their uniform singlesuits. Dane felt briefly dizzy and the small, slight guard closest to the two swayed and nearly fell. Potent stuff. Hands propelled him through the lock of the small docked shuttle, everyone crowding in, bracing feet and hands against the bulkheads as the hull closed and the lock instantly cyycled. The small, dark woman at the controls said something sharply and they blasted out of the lock.

Acceleration shoved at them all, but they were packed in so tightly that there wasn’t much room to fall.

The elegance and cleanliness of the shuttle’s interior and the comfort-padded webbing and jade Buddha mounted above the control center suggested that this was Li Zhen’s private shuttle.

He was speaking rapidly, in Mandarin. His speech was angry, with a hint of subservience that didn’t fit Dane’s impression of the dominant head of Dragon Home. But the rhythm of the conversaation, punctuated with brief pauses, suggested that Li Zhen was speaking to someone downside. It occurred to him that he was speakking to his father, the Chairman of China.

Acceleration slammed them all sideways and then the shuttle braked hard. All up and down vanished in an instant and they floated in microG. Li Zhen faced him as the lock cycled and their ears popped slightly.

“We are at your axle. Where is your ship? Quickly.”

For an instant Dane hesitated, but the raw edge of Li Zhen’s urgency decided him. “Private lock, here at the axle.”

“Good.” Li Zhen nodded. “I was correct. Take me there.” He pushed himself away from the control panel, the hull opening as he soared through.

The Chairman was skillful in microG. Dane pushed after him, a little lightheaded from the gas.

Recognized the main cargo lock at the NYUp hub. His ship was next door. He activated his direct link, waking the ship-core, ordering warm up and standby.

“This way.” Dane pushed through the lock as it opened, into the thick, familiar breath of the garden. He stretched his senses to the limit, searching for the bright echoes of Koi’s people.

Silence.

His heart sank.

“Hurry,” the Chairman snapped.

“Not yet.” Dane stilled his momentum on a tube of peppers, faced the Chairman. “Details first.” He held the man’s glittering black stare. “What is going on?”

“The Gaiists have managed to acquire a rock and some assisstance.” Li Zhen bit the syllables off, his accent barely noticeable. “They will drop it on Earth in order to provoke closure of the Plattforms. This must not happen.”

A rock? “That’s crazy. It would take a lot of careful coordinaation and people who know what they’re doing, up here.”

“Your friend… Kyros?” He pronounced the name carefully. “He believes it is could be done. Ahni Huang says it will happen.”

Ahni… “Where are they? I want to talk to them.”

“They are finding the rock and the ship that guides it.”

Dane closed his eyes. If someone was really doing this they’d carry serious weaponry. Kyros knew that.

“I have gambled much on Ahni Huang’s correct projection of the situation,” Li Zhen said precisely.”We must prevent the catastrophe from occurring and…” he paused, “I must have proof of what we have done here. You will obtain this.” He held Dane’s eyes. “If you do not…” He shrugged. “None of us may have much influence on the immediate future. Huang believes that this matters to you. Does it?”

“What happened to the people who lived here? The one you kidnapped? The others?”

“They are safe. You have no time.”

Dane heard truth and pushed off. As he arrowed between the planted tubes with Li Zhen and his team at his heels, he stretched once more to search the hub. If the CSF had been keeping watch here, they were gone now. He reached the small, private lock wher he kept his ship with the Dragon Home team still at his heels, palmed the door.

His ship greeted him with a system check summary across their private link. All ready and on standby.

“This is what you do.” Li Zhen had spilled his momentum on the lock doorway, hung motionless, a small compact unit in his hand, very much like a tracking unit, but slightly larger. “Link your ship sensors to this.

It is already set to search for the transmitter beacon I planted on Huang. It is a sophisticated hacking-nano designed to divert a copy of incoming sensory data from her bioware directly to this transmitter, and from there, the data will come to me. But its range is very limited. You must be close to her transmitter.” Li Zhen shrugged. “I need records of the rock and records of the successful intervention.

That is critical. The miner indicated that you know where illicit asteroids might be safely parked. The unit will alert you when it has connected with Huang’s beacon and will begin to relay.”

“What’s in this for you?” Dane held himself still beside the open hull, although every nerve in his body screamed action. “You do nothing for free, Chairman of Dragon Home.”

Li Zhen stared at him, anger leaping behind his black-hole eyes.

“A future for my son,” he said softly. “I have already gambled far more than you know.”

Dane nodded and toed himself neatly into the familiar confines of the ship. You’re carrying trackware, Miriam told him.

“I know. It’s a deal. Don’t mess with it.” He brought up the control field as the hull sealed. “We’re looking for the signal the trackware is looking for. And don’t try to block it. The trackware needs to hack your sensor net.”

Hack me? Miriam could express outrage as well as any real-human voice. No way.

“Do it. We’re going to sweep the rock holes. Spiral outward from NYUp.” They would choose a hole near the platform. For ease of acccess. Still, he could wander aimlessly out here for a week, second guessing himself. He didn’t have a week. The trackware hacked his ship and he felt the shiver of the connection through their link. Well, Li Zhen and whoever he directed the stream to was going to know all the rock holes in the system… or at least all the holes until they found the missing rock. And Ahni and Kyros. If they were still in one piece. “Listen to the chatter,” he spoke to the ship out loud. “See if anyone has reported an explosion or a debris drift, will you?”

Nothing so far.

“Keep me posted.” How in the nine hells had Ahni convinced Kyros to give away all his trade secrets?

He would have said her entire family didn’t have enough money to meet that price.

They passed the first hole, a nice little shadow created by the interaction of a rock jock station and the end of the NYUp platform. Nothing. No signal from the trackware. No sense of Ahni. What would happen if a rock came down? It couldn’t be too big, not if it was coming down through the sentry net and the hidey holes of the rock trade. But you could drop one big enough to flatten a major metro area, set up your entry so that it hit where you wanted it to hit. Someone would have to ride it down, keep it on course. Grimly, Dane glanced at the blue and white disk of Earth. There had always been people willing to die. The Gaiists, Li Zhen had said. He drew a blank on that one.

Next hole, coming up, a funny patch of blank space right out in the middle of nowhere.

Nothing there, Miriam echoed his awareness. A security sensor-beam touched him, carried on a brief conversation with the ship’s auto-ID, and moved on. Whoever was moving that rock would have to have valid ID. Kyros might be able to skip from hole to hole in his ship, and dodge the security beams, but you couldn’t do that pushing a rock. The rock collectors hacked the beam patterns and came straight in through them. Once they hit a hole, they didn’t move around, they just carved the rock up there and shipped it to the refineries on barges. Usually took ’em a matter of hours.

But this person would have to move the rock into orbit. So a security beam would certainly catch it. But the beams weren’t designed to supply visuals or even a mass quotient. Lots of stuff of all sizes moved around inside the security net. As long as you weren’t on a collision course with anything and you had a legitiimate ID, you weren’t going to set off any alarms. Unless someebody eyeballed you and blew the whistle. But the holes that got used were all outside normal traffic lanes between the Platforms. Residents didn’t joyride around out here much. Vacuum was real, you went out and worked in it only when you had to. The tourists all had to look at the Platforms from the outside, skim the lunar surface, look at Earth from a tourboat, but they kept to safe, regular routes.

Only when the rock braked and started a reentry would alarms start going off, Dane thought grimly. And then it would be too late. It wouldn’t be like the early space platforms that started a slow lazy spiral down to a fiery death, giving the rock jocks plenty of time to cut them into chunks or blow them apart. This would be a fast drop, like the ancient shuttles that had lifted people to orbit before the Elevators.

Earth had a huge hole in its defenses, Dane thought. He leaned forward because they were approaching the next hole on their spiral sweep.

Nothing. His ship’s voice sounded as tense as he felt.

Big stuff wasn’t supposed to get inside the net. Fast and maneuverable as they were, a dozen jocks would have to work together to bust a killer asteroid and they didn’t have the heat shielding to take atmosphere. They’d have a limited time to react.

And if the ship doing the pushing was armed… Two more holes came up blank. And then…

…he felt her. Ahni. Lost her. Dane strained for that whisper of contact, that faint echo of her thought.

He had never really figured out the range of empathic contact. It seemed to vary quite a bit.

He groped until his head ached, couldn’t find her. Just as he was beginning to think he had imagined it… he felt it again. A brief bright flicker of ‘aha’ came and went. They were out there, she and Kyros. And they had found the rock.

He called her, eyes closed, straining to reach her until he thought his head would explode. Wasn’t sure if he had made contact or not, lost her again. “Start looking hard,” he told his ship. “I think they were in the next hole. Plot a trajectory from the hole to orbit… something benign that won’t wake up a security probe.”

Plotting,the ship murmured. They could pick up a tourist trail and end up well inside Platform orbit.

They’d look like one of those big luxury liners.

Bingo! Someone had put a lot of clear thought into this. The luxury liners were big floating hotels for the high-end paying guests who wanted to play at living in microG for a couple of days in utter comfort. They offered rooms with satin-lined padded walls and special features to let honeymoon couples do downside sex, water rooms, where you wore a breather and played among flying spherelets of water, fancy viewing rooms. The rock would be bigger than a liner, but if it behaved like a liner, in all probability, nobody would notice.

“I assume you’re listening, Li Zhen,” Dane said out loud. “I think we found it.”

He’s listening. Miriam gave a very human sniff.

“I think it’s following a tourist liner trajectory. That will take it well inside Dragon Home’s orbit and that much closer to atmossphere when it starts its descent. Looks like our rock dropper picked your turf, Zhen. I might be wrong but we’re close. Better call out the guard.”

They passed the next hole. “Can you access the nearest liner route?” Most of the operators reserved routes with the platform traffic departments. That way, they had right of way over random traffic.

Got it, Miriam said cheerfully.

Nothing. They slid along beside Dragon Home’s curve. It was a lot longer than NYUp, with a larger population. It blocked out the sun and Earth’s blue disk and the stars blazed coldly. In the far distance, Dane caught a glimpse of New Singapore’s solar collectors gleaming in the sun.

There they are.

Dane suppressed a moment of nausea as his ship zoomed in on the tiny image in the distance. It resolved into a rock that looked like a pebble. Until you noticed the small matte black ship body next to it. The dull sheen of a second ship, smaller than the tug annchored to the rock, caught his eye. “Closer zoom,” he snapped.

That’s all you get without losing resolution, his ship sounded huffy. But it was enough. He recognized Kyro’s green celtic-knot glyph on the hull.

Kyros’ ship, Miriam confirmed. His ship just answered my ID call.

At that moment, light winked on the tug.

Missile, Miriam said sharply. It got ’em.

White light blossomed and his ship’s eyes zoomed out, filters darkening the glare instantly. Dane blinked, red blotching his sight. As his vision cleared, he squinted, trying to spot Kyros’s ship. Praying that his ship had been wrong.

Nothing there. A few bits of debris drifted. One jagged chunk bore a green streak… part of the hull and the celtic knot.

Dane put his face in his hands.