ADHIRA DHAWAN
The ship was powerful and swift, but Loris found the voyage of Fair-Haired Demeter interminable, despite the fine food and abundant entertainment. Some insufferably cheerful woman tried to get her involved in group activities, but Loris gave her one look and the woman ignored her after that.
All Loris could think about was how much Karil would have enjoyed the trip. He’d be in there, literally charming the pants off female passengers. Loris would have had to warn him off that wealthy vacationing family’s bored teenage daughter, who would have found him the most exciting thing on the ship. Even the little old ladies with their grumpy companions would have basked in his smile and big brown eyes. Loris couldn’t help but think Auntie Em had made a mistake. But Atalanta would clearly have drawn unwelcome attention approaching High Asia and the spaceliner would not.
The food was too rich for her. She would have preferred a sandwich while studying star-charts with Karil and Atty. She worked out sometimes in the amazingly equipped exercise room, but the men wouldn’t leave her alone, until she found that exercising with less clothing did not excite them more, it just intimidated them. Some of the women would eye her surreptitiously, but somehow getting to know them would have been less exciting without Karil’s enthusiastic help. Some of the men would clearly have preferred him. She was beginning to understand just how essential the maddening guy had become to her, and Atty as well. Did knowing he would be going into danger with Inger to watch over him make it better, or worse?
The best part of the voyage was the tour of the ship’s bridge. The captain would invite passengers to accompany him to the bridge, where he would impress them with the view through the forward port and a casual tour of the flight-controls. Loris was not supposed to be a spacer, so she could not ask the questions she wanted to, but fortunately some of the younger passengers were avid space-fans and peppered the captain with intelligent questions. He enjoyed answering them and Loris picked up a lot of information. Her keen eyes missed nothing.
It was not until Earth hove into view that she took a serious interest in the view outside the observatory bubble. The planet was always so beautiful—tiny and vulnerable in the night. But the misery of the people on the surface, as always, didn’t bear thinking about. High Asia was another kind of jewel, revolving in a stately manner within its nest of mirrors and discs. The ship mated at one end of Cylinder One and Loris boarded the colony, showing the credentials that Galilean Security had created for her, under the name Adhira Dhawan.
She drifted to the elevator and dropped down to the circumference, feeling the gravity increase as she fell. It had been a good idea to exercise in full gee on the ship. She stepped out onto the terrace and looked about. In front of her lay High India, the city stretching across the dry plains to the forested mountains at the far end-cap. Golden or alabaster temples thrust up from the teeming city, alive with flags and banners. For Loris, used to corridors and icefields and the interiors of ships, it was the most colorful sight she had seen in a long while. Looking up past the solars, through which she could see the Earth and Moon, surrounded by colonies and space-stations, she saw High China in the sky, with its palaces and monumental walls, and on the other side, High Japan, with its glittering cities and calm gardens.
Visible through the solars was the other cylinder. Surrounded by glistening blue sea were the lush islands and peninsulas of High Malaysia, High Indonesia, and High Korea. One came to High China, Japan, and India to make money, one went to the other cylinder to spend it.
Eschewing the transportation devices available near the spaceport elevators, Loris shouldered her bag and walked to the city, stretching her long legs in the full gravity. She checked into her hotel room, and after a breakfast of foods she had not eaten since her childhood, she changed into her fighting clothes and took the elevator up the circumference to High China. It was quieter here than in High India, but there were acrobats and street-performers galore. She made her way through the colorful crowds to the headquarters of Zhang Industries and walked into the lobby.
“I am here to apply for one of the Security Guard positions,” she said to the man behind the counter. Silently, and perhaps a little put out, the man checked her credentials. She had no worries, as Galilean Security’s forgers were the best.
“Dhawan,” the man said. “Take Elevator Two to the fifth floor.”
She did that and entered a door to the Zhang Industries Security Office. The receptionist, a woman this time, glared at her and generally seemed as unfriendly as the guard downstairs, but she was ushered into a waiting room. She understood the cool reception she had received when she saw that she was the only woman in the room. Funny, she thought, how the high Companies moved out into space only to fall back into the stupidities of the Terran past. The others in the room were powerful, battle-scarred men and looked at her with expressions ranging from astonishment to instant hate.
She was called into the next room first. Possibly, the interviewer had been informed that a woman was here, and he wanted to see her immediately. The man behind the desk was familiar to her from the Galilean Security files, but she did not react. It was Wu-Jing Zong-Yao, Mister Zhang’s Security Chief. He was a huge man with a burned and scarred face and Loris could believe he was as experienced a warrior as his reputation suggested. His expression seemed permanently cast in a scowl.
“The opening is for a bodyguard,” he said. “Why have you applied?”
“I need work. And I’m supremely qualified.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Loris unwrapped her sari, tossed it aside, and stood in her underwear. Wu-jing looked her up and down.
“You seem fit,” he said. “Where are your references?”
Clearly there was no place they could be.
“My former employers do not wish to be named. When I leave your employ, I will not mention you either.”
He seemed to buy that. “Then how will you prove that you are as capable as you say?
“Test me in combat. With you, perhaps.”
He seemed genuinely amused. “If I was younger, perhaps I would enjoy that, Madame.”
“There is a room full of fighters out there.”
He smiled, looking rather like a shark. “How many do you propose to fight, to prove yourself supremely qualified?”
“It doesn’t matter how many, Sir. I’m quite used to fighting multiple opponents.”
Wu-Jing tapped a key on his desk. “Send in all the applicants,” he said. The door opened and seven men entered. They stared open-mouthed at Loris.
“The man who defeats this women in combat will be hired. If none of you do, she will be hired. Is that understood? Begin.”
It took a moment for the men to understand. They spread out and began to surround her.
One eager young applicant was first to attack. Loris spun about and kicked him in the head, and he went down. There was a moment’s hesitation and two attacked at once, from opposite directions. She picked the one who was closest, blocked his attack with her left arm and struck him in the throat with her right. As he fell, she threw him into the face of the other, knocking him off balance, then tossed him into the path of another who was jockeying for position to attack her. He stumbled and she kicked him in the solar plexus. He went down and she rushed past him into the three remaining applicants, who stepped back before her rush. She grabbed two of them and cracked their heads together. The last man suddenly turned and ran for the door. She kicked him in the small of the back and he struck the door headfirst, knocking him unconscious. Then she turned and bowed to Wu-Jing. She was not even breathing heavily as she put on her clothes.
“You are hired, Adhira Dhawan,” he said. “I have been wondering what to do with you, once it became obvious how good you are. Since I have serious doubts about putting you in the men’s quarters, I think I have the perfect position for you.” He wrote on two scraps of paper. “Take this to the room number I indicated, and you will be fitted with a uniform. One of those for the taller men should fit you, but tell them you do not want tight-fitting trousers, so you won’t have to strip down to your skivvies to free your magnificent legs. Much as I enjoyed it, that would not be efficient. The other note is an address in High Japan, where you will be assigned. Bring this to the garage and a car will take you there.” He stood and bowed to her, and she bowed back. Then she left with her two scraps of paper.
She made her way down the elevator and the corridor to the clothiers. She approved of the jacket when it was clear she could move her arms freely and tried on several pairs of linen trousers until she found one that was voluminous on the bottom and tight on the top, which not only facilitated the movement of her legs but flattered her tight butt—a touch of vanity there. The uniform reminded her of an Indian garment called a Tang Pyjama, with perhaps a touch of Brazilian jiu-jitsu Gi. The trousers were elastic, and she knew she could drop them and step out of them if need be. The jacket was closed with snaps, and she could rip it off and toss it aside quickly if she liked and fight in her preferred battle dress—as little as possible.
A car took her through the teeming streets and across a bridge mounted on a solar frame toward High Japan. It was strange to look down over the edge of the road and see the Earth and the Moon revolving in the starry sky below. She was taken up a winding road above the city into the forested mountains and through a barred gate to a long, low house. She stepped out of the car with her kit and walked through the grounds to the door. A servant answered her ring, and she was led through the house, past a room that was set up as an office with a computer and a smartboard covered with complex formulae, then out into the garden.
She was stunned by the beauty of the young woman calmly raking tiny stones in the Zen Garden. She was slight of build and moved with grace. Her oval face and almond-shaped eyes were lovely, and her long hair was a soft brown.
“Madame Suzuki,” Loris said. “I have been sent to be your bodyguard.”
She looked up from her raking and peered intently into Loris’s eyes, as if she could read her thoughts.
“I won’t disturb your circles,” Loris said. Karil would have been proud of her for the reference.
Marjorie Suzuki put down her rake and walked up to Loris, who towered over her. “You should call me Margie,” she said. “Knowing Mister Zhang, we’ll be together all the time.” She felt the muscles of Loris’s arms and then her thigh. To her astonishment, something like electricity arced through Loris at her gentle touch.
“Can you shoot?” Margie asked.
“I can shoot anything: lasers, rifles, crossbows. I know Judo, Ju-jitsu, Kenjitsu and modern Kendo, Karate and Aikido, Muay Thai, Taekwondo, Capoeira, Kalaripayuttu and Kobudo. And recently someone taught me Israeli Krav Maga.”
“I see. Well, I’m not sure why Mister Zhang thinks I require around-the-clock protection, but I’m glad he’s stopped sending me his usual gorillas who would sit in a chair all night watching me sleep. They gave me the creeps. I suppose you know how to keep quiet and out of the way until you’re required to beat the crap out of somebody.”
“Keeping quiet is my specialty, even more than beating the crap out of people. I can meditate anywhere, anytime.”
“Fine. You can sleep with me.”
“Madame?”
“Margie.”
“I mean, Margie.”
“They sent me a serving girl who would sleep on a trundle that slid out from under my bed, but that gave me the creeps too. I stepped on her a couple times. Sometimes I like to talk, to get things straight in my mind. You can listen, can’t you, even if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about?”
“Actually, I’m used to that.”
“Okay, I think we’re going to get along fine.”
Marjorie returned to her garden and Loris meditated in the close sunshine of Earth. Later, Marjorie came in and did something incomprehensible with the figures on her smartboard. Loris understood something of the orbital geometries, but the rest of it was gibberish as far as she was concerned. Dinner was delivered by a servant, and they ate in silence. That night, they slept together in the too-large bed. Marjorie did not seem to care that Loris slept in her underwear, not knowing, actually, that she usually slept in the nude in her warm ship. Marjorie had silk pajamas, which suited her ethereal beauty. Here we are, Loris thought, Beauty and the Beast.
***
In the morning, at breakfast, Loris noticed a Samurai sword on a stand in the living-room and asked permission to touch it. Margie brightened at the request and readily agreed. The weapon was a thing of beauty, clearly ancient but lovingly constructed and perfectly balanced. Margie told her it was an heirloom, passed down in her family for centuries, but speaking of her family was clearly difficult for her, and Loris backed off on the questions.
As the days passed, they began to talk. Marjorie told of her childhood in High Japan, her early interest in physics and accelerated education. Loris was careful to reveal as little as possible about herself, and she created Adhira Dhawan out of whole cloth, though not far from the truth—her childhood on the streets of Terran India, growing up tough and combative, joining the military, and her interest in what she thought of as combat mysticism. She mentioned nothing about going to space and involvement with Galilean Security, and it became clear that Marjorie was being just as careful not to speak of her involvement with Mister Zhang—how she came to work for him and what precisely she did. But every day, she agonized over her figures on the board, some aspect of which was clearly bothering her, and Loris came to realize that Marjorie was deeply unhappy.
Wu-Jing took a particular interest in Loris—not in hand-to-hand fighting, because there was obviously nothing to teach her, but mostly on the firing range. Like a lot of youngsters—she almost smiled at that—she was fond of lasers, but Wu-Jing found them unreliable compared with old-fashioned ballistic weapons. He particularly liked the fact that guns had to be cleaned on a regular basis, which gave the shooter a daily ritual to perform. He emphasized the double-tap. Two bullets in the brain or the heart made sure your target would not embarrass you by getting up and killing you.
It was several nights later that Loris found herself suddenly awake in the middle of the night. There was no sound but the splashing of water in the garden outside and murmurs drifting across the open from the other landscapes in the cylinder.
Then what had awakened her? She looked around the darkened room, but all seemed normal. Then she realized that a shape in the darkness was wrong. The normal shapes of furniture and small objects were there, but one of them was simply wrong. The instant she realized that the object was not furniture, but someone contorting his body not to look human, she realized that it was a ninja warrior dressed in black. It moved suddenly and the light from a lantern in the garden glinted off a steel blade.
She threw her sheet at the man, and he became entangled as she rolled out of bed onto her feet. She kicked with all her might and her calloused foot connected with her attacker’s throat. She snatched the blade from a suddenly limp hand as the man fell, spun it about, and struck. Something hit the floor with a thud and two other figures came toward her in the dark. She kicked the headless body of the first attacker into them, took a step backward and slashed with the sword, striking the second attacker’s femoral artery inside the thigh, then spun and slashed again as the third attacker came close, and another head hit the floor. It all happened in a few seconds.
Marjorie groaned and switched on a light. Before she could scream at the sight of the decapitated bodies, the still-rolling heads, and the blood-spatter, Loris clamped her hand over Marjorie’s mouth.
“There may be others,” she whispered. “Get dressed and come with me.” As Marjorie scrambled for her clothes, Loris threw on her own. She removed the belt and the scabbard from one body and strapped them on.
“Stay behind me,” she snapped.
She kicked open the door, stepped into the hallway, and her sword clashed with another with the ring of steel. She swung her sword in an arc over the attacker’s head and slashed his subclavian artery, behind the collarbone. Then she turned and defended against the second sword by dropping to the floor on her right knee, ducking under the blade, while whipping hers in a horizontal arc and slashing her enemy’s ribcage, nearly cutting him in half. As he fell, she grabbed the whimpering Marjorie and ran down the corridor into the garage.
She snatched a key from the rack and clicked open the door of a nearby car, then threw Marjorie inside and slid behind the wheel. Two more assassins pelted into the garage from outside, their swords raised, and Loris ran them down with a sickening crunch. The car roared down the road, supported on its cushion of air, and sped over the kilometers-wide crystal expanse of the solar, dark now as the mirrors were closed.
In a few minutes, they nosed into the parking lot of a cheap High India hotel. As Marjorie stood trembling behind her, hiding the sword, Loris used her Zhang Security card to rent a room and dragged Marjorie up the stairs. The robot clerk seemed not to notice the blood on Loris’s clothing. Once in the locked room, she turned to face the trembling, panting woman, took her face in her hands and looked into her eyes.
“Margie! Get control of yourself. Who sent those men? Was it Zhang?”
Marjorie slowly gained control. “No, he needs me. His project won’t work without me. I’ve written nothing important down. It’s mostly in my head.”
“So. His enemies?”
“It must be. He has so many, or it might be Galilean Security.”
“It’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“I know how they work. Sending Ninjas in the night? That’s not their style. Trust me.”
“Then take your pick of anybody in the High Companies. They’re all so jealous of each other. He’s one of the richest and hated by everyone. Nobody knows what his Project is all about. They just know that if he succeeds, he might become the most powerful man in the Solar System.”
“What Project?”
Marjorie’s knees gave way, and she began to collapse.
“In the morning, “ Loris said, “we’ll call Wu-Jing and make sure he finds a safer place for you. Now, get into bed.” She began to undress Marjorie and tucked her into the bed, then stripped off her blood-soaked clothing and crawled in beside her. Like a dam breaking, Marjorie crawled into Loris’s powerful arms and fell to sobbing uncontrollably. Loris kissed her forehead and held her tightly, until she drifted off to sleep like a child in Loris’s arms.
Tomorrow, she would pressure Mister Zhang into moving Marjorie to a more secure location, and hopefully that would mean Earth.
***
Loris and Security Chief Wu-Jing watched Marjorie Suzuki through a one-way mirror as she sat quietly, looking depressed, in a waiting room.
“You know,” Loris said, “I don’t know why Mister Zhang needs a physicist and I don’t care. But if you had any idea, when you gave me this baby-sitting job, that an entire team of Ninjas would be coming after her, I would have appreciated a heads up before it became heads off.”
Clearly, Wu-Jing was not used to apologizing to his staff, and it almost stuck in his throat. “I’m genuinely sorry, Dhawan. I frankly assigned you to this baby-sitting job, as you say, because I didn’t know what to do with you and didn’t want you going to our competitors. Mister Zhang had impressed on me that she was important and needed to be protected, but that’s all. I’m not privy to his secrets. But I assure you that I try to take care of my staff as well as I can. We believe the ninjas were sent by one of our competitors on High Japan.”
“Well, Sir, if there is some place more secure than this busy colony, I recommend moving her there.”
“This is going to happen, Dhawan. It’s isolated, but comfortable, and the security is seriously tight. Besides, it’s about time for Doctor Suzuki’s work to move to another location, anyway.”
***
Loris and Marjorie were allowed to pack and were taken to High Asia’s spaceport, where they were put aboard a Zhang Industries shuttle. As the ship dropped toward Earth, Marjorie became animated, observing the High Company colonies and space-stations, the moon’s ravaged face dotted with the lights of thriving colonies, and the lovely blue and white Earth as they darted toward it. She took Loris’s hand and smiled at her. She may have been a genius, but she often seemed like a child.
They emerged from the clouds over the Americas. Nueva York appeared, the skyscrapers thrusting from the floodwaters and Central Spaceport beckoning in the middle of the city. For a moment, Loris thought they would be landing in the city—a problem, perhaps, as Loris was known there—but the shuttle turned south over the jungle-clad Appalachians into the depopulated Southern States.
A vast industrial complex emerged below, invisible until they were close above, surrounded by jungle and covered with camouflage netting and real foliage growing on the flat roofs. A camouflaged roof slid back, and the shuttle descended into the open, then the roof slid back again. They stepped out onto the green tarmac and descended the ramp. Two guards came toward them from the nearest structure—a pair of cyborg soldiers with heavy tread, artificial limbs, ravaged faces and blinking camera eyepieces.
“I will take you to your quarters,” the first one said. The second said nothing, and Loris realized why with a start. It was a Morg. Long ago, perhaps as long as the Second Civil War, a soldier with smart body armor, motorized replacement limbs, and computerized comms had been killed and his systems continued to function as his body decayed. It remained capable of following simple orders, much like a robot, but without the higher functions that prevent robots from harming human beings. The grinning death’s head clad in rusted armor would no doubt fill the locals, if any, with superstitious dread of the whole complex. Loris herself was repulsed. She found Marjorie sheltering under her arm, and she squeezed the troubled scientist’s shoulders.
Loris had seen a creature like this once before, wired into the smart controls of a gunship, but to see one walking about with a huge machine-gun in its claw-like hands was genuinely terrifying. Former soldiers had told her of encounters with these monsters and she had not been sure whether to believe them. Mister Zhang must have scoured the continent in search of this creature, and she wondered how many he had. They would be the perfect guards—following orders to the letter, never needing food or sleep, killing instantly without compunction.
The arrivals were led into the building and escorted to the residences. A pleasant apartment with a fully equipped office and an isolated garden, open to the sky, was hers to share with Marjorie. When she saw the office, the latter brightened up and sat down at the computer. As Loris searched for sensor bugs and found several to be removed, Marjorie began to jot on her smartboard and seemed to be her old self again. Loris vaguely recognized what Suzuki was working on. There was a diagram that reminded her of Atalanta’s fusion driver, in which magnetic storage units fed deuterium and helium-3 through conduits to the thrust nozzle to be ignited by a laser. Margie noticed Loris studying it.
“This is an antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion driver,” she said. “Much more powerful and efficient than fusion drivers. If it wasn’t for the cost, this would be used by everyone in the Solar System. Antimatter is frightfully expensive to create. Always has been. And if it wasn’t for the Tyrrell-Jagganath collider process invented fifteen years ago, we’d still be collecting anti-particles one at a time instead of in a stream. Also, this particular design uses anti-protons instead of positrons, which is a power advantage over some previous concepts.
“But the expense is only half the problem. Any device using antimatter is basically a hair-trigger nuclear bomb. Worse than a bomb, in fact; you have to actively keep it from exploding. Its core technologies require perfect engineering. They have to be a hundred percent reliable, or the odds are going to catch up with you sooner or later. That’s what makes al-Zubair’s design so important.”
“Al-Zubair?” Loris managed to hide the fact that she knew who he was. She had, in fact, witnessed the destruction of his flagship, which had killed him and most of his design team. Saturn’s rings still had not recovered from the blast.
“He was the man who invented this engine, or at least the last critical piece of it,” Suzuki said. “Engineers have tried for decades to develop antimatter-powered space-drive systems, but before al-Zubair, nobody had found a way to ensure the tolerances required. Magnetic conduits send anti-matter from the cryogenic storage tanks to the engine’s reaction chamber. But it’s important that the particles travel down the center of the conduit without touching its walls. If even a single particle does that, you’ll get antimatter reaction inside the conduit instead of the reaction chamber, which could disrupt the path of other particles, which could cause a bigger antimatter detonation and a cascading failure that would reach the antimatter tanks. They’d lose containment and the whole ship would blow itself apart.”
This was what Loris had been hoping not to hear from Marjorie Suzuki.
“But don’t worry. It’s actually quite safe, now. Al-Zubair found a way to get the risk down to an acceptable level. Or at least as close enough to zero that he decided to build a whole fleet of ships around his conduit design. Still, he made a lot of antimatter engineers nervous. But not me. Mr. Zhang came to me because he thought I could get these percentages down even further. I couldn’t believe my luck when he offered me this job. I told him I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his ship. I’m good at my job and know what I’m doing.”
Somehow, Loris was not entirely reassured.
***
They were brought a decent supper and, Marjorie, now smiling, went to bed. The younger woman snuggled into Loris’s arms and to her surprise turned and kissed her passionately. Her hand crept down over Loris’s hard body and the Galilean found herself overwhelmed with affection for her. She did the same, her hand exploring Marjorie’s smooth, lightly downed body until the latter was relaxed and sated. They curled up and Loris threw her strong arm protectively over her.
After Marjorie began to snore contentedly, Loris slipped cautiously out of bed and went out into the garden. It seemed the builders felt it unnecessary to camouflage the lush and tree-shaded garden and she looked up to see the stars and Earth’s brilliant moon. Not needing camouflage, herself, with her dark skin and well-chosen dark undergarments, she climbed the wall and crept over the rooftop toward the main building, not far away.
She found a window and peered down into a monstrous hangar. Several small shuttles and flyers in Zhang Industries livery surrounded a huge ship, resting in a cradle, bearing great driver nacelles and bristling with guns. Its name was such an obvious choice that even with her mere smattering of Chinese, Loris could read it. It was called Wan-li Chang-cheng—literally Ten Thousand Mile Wall, or The Great Wall. But Loris had heard it described by Charles Kelley when it had been the antimatter-powered warship Victory of Righteousness.
She returned over the rooftops and slipped into bed again. Marjorie Suzuki snuggled sleepily into her arms, but Loris did not sleep well.
***
The shuttle arrived at the High China spaceport and Captain Pierce, formerly Professor Kelley’s Titan Security Chief, walked down the ramp with his luggage. He had left Titan orbit on the fastest ship available immediately after his conversation with Kelley. A car from Zhang Industries was waiting for him and took him to company headquarters. He was escorted to a waiting room, where he was brought some excellent coffee by a charming young woman.
In a few minutes, Zhang Shen-Yi appeared. He was a big, bulky man in a well-tailored suit—such an imposing figure that Pierce stood up instinctively when he entered. Zhang sat down. He did not smile, and Pierce wondered in passing if he even knew how.
“What can I do for you, Captain Pierce?” he asked. Pierce had always thought that Asians were in the habit of pussyfooting around the main topic for a while with pleasantries before coming to the point, but not Zhang, apparently.
“Professor Kelley is a very smart man,” Pierce said. “It won’t be long before he realizes your team could not have come in and taken the ship without inside help. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the prison on Titan…”
“You want your reward.”
“Yes, that’s it. If I’m to live on High Europe in the lap of luxury as you promised, I’m going to need the reward we agreed on.”
“I understand. You’ll get your reward immediately and thank you for your help.” Zhang stood up and left without another word. In a few minutes, the door opened again, and a man stood there. He pulled a revolver out of his shoulder-holster and shot Captain Pierce, once in the head and twice in the heart. Two other men came in and carried off his body.