Federated Worlds Embassy, city of McNair, Commitment
Michael’s heart was hammering, his mouth bone-dry. He could not help himself. The prospect of leaving the safety and security of the FedWorld embassy compound absolutely terrified him. He took a deep breath to stiffen himself and stepped forward. He was about to climb into the secret compartment slung under the embassy people mover when the ambassador’s hand on his arm stopped him.
“Good luck, Michael.”
They shook hands. “Thank you, sir.”
“Look after Marine Shinoda. The marines want her back in one piece.”
“I’ll make sure they do, sir.” Michael tried hard not to think about Corporal Yazdi lying alone in a shallow grave on some godforsaken mountainside.
Five minutes later, the people mover cleared the embassy compound and, with its DocSec escort falling in close behind, was on its way south.
Later that morning, a young couple-poor country people to judge from their clothes-made their way into Bretonville Station. Tickets clutched in hand, they boarded the maglev express to McNair. A passing DocSec patrol did not bother to check them out. They were just another pair of country bumpkins going up to the big smoke, so why bother?
An hour later, the couple stood in the impressively ornate lobby of the state lottery office, models of embarrassed indecision. Eventually, one of the staff deigned to notice their predicament and waved at them to go inside to the counter.
A bored clerk looked up at them as they approached. “Yes?”
Michael cleared his throat. He hoped that the vocalization reprogramming that had been dumped into his neuronics would work as advertised. If it had not given him the flat, crushed vowels of a native-born Hammer, he and Marine Shinoda would be in a lot of trouble.
“Umm, yes. Er, we, we have a winning ticket in last night’s lottery and I, er. . I would like to collect that, please, if you could, um, help us, please,” Michael gibbered. Christ, he was nervous, which was probably a good thing. He did not have to work too hard to look like the hayseed his clothes and identity card declared him to be. And speaking of identity cards, he had been hugely impressed with Bichel’s technical team. He and Shinoda were now fully paid-up members of DocSec’s Section 4 Knowledge Base, something Michael never would have believed possible. Apparently it was. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Bichel’s team had hacked into the state lottery to give him a winning ticket. It was the simplest way to give them a sizable lump of untraceable local funds without creating a public profile, Bichel had said smugly.
An elbow in the ribs from Shinoda brought him back to reality.
“The ticket, husband. Give the man the ticket,” she whispered, a paragon of the wifely deference so prized by Hammer men.
“Oh, yes. Hang on.” Michael fumbled in a pocket. “Here it is.”
The clerk checked the ticket painstakingly before running it under a scanner. After a short pause, he nodded.
“It’s for 250,000 k-dollars,” he said, “and no publicity.” The clerk, elevating bored disinterest to an art form, did not even ask for Michael’s identity card before handing over an anonymous stored value card loaded with their winnings. Michael held the small plastic card tightly and marveled at the inconsistency of it all. On the one hand, the Hammer was the most tightly controlled society in human history. On the other hand, they still used anonymous stored value cards; Bichel had told him there was no limit to the amount they could carry. Michael suspected he knew why. Corruption on the massive scale that infected Hammer society could flourish only if huge amounts of money could move untraced, hence the anonymous stored value card clamped in his hand.
Five minutes later, his confidence rising by the minute, Michael and Shinoda were on their way to get exit visas for Scobie’s World from the downtown DocSec visa office. That, too, happened without any fuss. The visa clerk, openly impressed by their lottery win and surprisingly unresentful, downloaded the visas they needed into their identity cards in a fraction of the time Bichel had warned it might take. They made two more stops-to buy tickets on the first starliner for Scobie’s World and to find new clothes-before they were finally on their way to McNair spaceport, a pair of exuberant, blow-it-all lottery winners.
For Michael, the tension was finally easing. He had one last DocSec check to get through, and then he would be off this goddamned planet, never to return, he hoped. No, that was not right; he would happily come back as long as he was piloting a FedWorld assault lander. His newfound belief in Bichel’s technical team was growing to a point where he was beginning to enjoy the whole business even though the suicide pill he had asked for-which, somewhat to his surprise, he had been given-was a constant reminder not to get too confident.
Things that could go wrong often did.
Not this time.
With mounting excitement, Michael, his hand tightly locked in Shinoda’s, stood at the floor-to-ceiling plate of armored plasglass that formed an entire wall of the first-class lounge. He was watching something he had not dared dream about: the planet Commitment receding slowly away from them as the liner Councillor Vladimir Spassky began its slow acceleration out-system. He gave in to a sudden wave of impulsive happiness and picked Shinoda up, folding her into a bear hug of an embrace, the relief swamping his body madly intoxicating.
“Watch it, sailor,” she whispered into his ear as he swung her around. “We may be Mr. and Mrs. Benoit to those shitsucking Hammers, but. .”
Michael laughed out loud as he put her down. “Sorry,” he whispered back. “It’s been a tough few months.”
“I know,” Shinoda said.
Afterward, Michael realized that he should not have been surprised at what had happened. Nature had its own ways of helping broken minds mend. Falling into bed with Marine Shinoda a day out from Commitment, overwhelmed by a wave of physical desire that he was not going to argue with, was probably one of them.
Try as hard as he might, he did not feel the slightest bit guilty at betraying the promises he had made to Anna.
That was then. This was now. Against all the odds, he was alive. He was battered, he was bruised, he had injuries he would carry for the rest of his life, but he was alive.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We have docked, and you may now disembark. We trust you had a good trip. We look forward to seeing you all again on board soon.”
Not a chance, pal, Michael said to himself, not a chance in hell.
He and Shinoda hung back. Around them, excited Hammers, voices raised at the prospect of shaking off the petty repressions inflicted on them back home, poured off the Councillor Vladimir Spassky straight into the milling line piling up at immigration control. But even there they were not out of the Hammer’s reach. Officially, Scobie’s World was an independent, sovereign system, a fiction cruelly exposed by the DocSec trooper sitting behind the clerks processing the new arrivals.
Michael shivered at the sight of the hated black uniform. He knew as well as anyone that it took a delicate balancing act to maintain Scobie’s independence. On the one hand, Scobie’s World tried extremely hard not to upset the Hammer. On the other hand, it tried equally hard not to be classed as a Hammer vassal system with all the economic restrictions that would bring. But in the end, most of what Scobie’s World did was on the Hammer’s terms, and one of those terms was ceding de facto control to DocSec over everyone arriving on or leaving the place. That was not surprising. The Hammer was well aware that many of its citizens would never return home given the chance.
The line began to shrink. The time had come for Mr. and Mrs. Benoit to disappear.
Michael and Shinoda, waved through immigration without incident, took the first shuttle heading dirtside for the capital of Scobie’s World, New Dublin. Once they had passed through the spaceport, a mobibot took them into town and dropped them off right in the heart of the city. New Dublin’s mixture of the garish and the shabby was expertly tailored to the Hammer tourists who infested every souvenir shop, every wedding chapel-Doctrine of Kraa ceremonies a speciality-every bar, every casino, every strip club, every massage parlor, and every brothel. Michael shook his head in disbelief. How anyone with half a brain could enjoy a shithole like New Dublin was beyond him. He would be glad to get off-planet, and the sooner the better, even if it meant the end of his unplanned relationship with Marine Shinoda.
It took two more mobibots before Michael started to feel safe. “What do you think?” he asked.
Shinoda’s head had not stopped moving from the moment they had left the Councillor Vladimir Spassky, her neuronics working overtime to make sure the faces of the people they met did not reappear around the next corner, that the pattern of movement around them was that of Scobie’s Worlders going about their everyday business.
“Well,” she said, “I think it’s safe to say that I don’t think anyone is even the slightest bit interested in two Hammer tourists wandering around this back-blocks shithole.”
Shinoda grinned as Michael folded her into a fierce bear hug.
“God, I hope so,” he whispered into her ear.
Shinoda laughed. “Put me down, sailor. Come on. We’ve got work to do. This way.”
Michael followed Shinoda past endless giant holovid screens pulsing with light and color. He shook his head. From what he could see, nothing was off-limits. If it could be bought, someone on Scobie’s World would sell it to you. Shinoda made a quick final check as they turned down a narrow street. Michael winced as he laid eyes on their final destination. Crass did not even begin to describe it. Twenty meters from the corner was the Leprechaun’s Retreat Irish Bar and Restaurant, its exterior festooned with enough virulently green shamrocks and gold harps to leave even the dumbest Hammer in no doubt that this place was a genuine Irish bar.
Michael and Shinoda plunged inside, the noise deafening as a small band struggled to be heard over the determined efforts of hundreds of Hammers to have a good time, an exercise that largely appeared to mean getting blind drunk in the shortest possible time. There, toward the back, was what they had come so far to find: a small, disheveled, and extremely drunk Hammer doing a bad job of singing along with the band.
Michael flicked a glance at Shinoda. She nodded. The logo on the T-shirt-an obscene cartoon of a pig doing something unspeakable with a large cucumber-identified him as the man who would give them the new identities and clothes they needed to get off-planet.
Twenty minutes later, Michael and Shinoda were in a mobibot on their way back to the spaceport.
Michael sat silently, savoring the wonderful feeling of connectedness that enveloped him as he let his neuronics hook into the net. He had been out of touch for a long time, and even if he could not talk to the AI-generated personal agent who managed the routine details of his life, it was good to be able to find out what was going on in humanspace without having to watch the turgid bullshit that passed for a Hammer newsvid.
The news was not good.
The Hammers clearly were having some success with their campaign against Fed merchant shipping. From the look of it, Fleet was having a hard time coping with hit-and-run attacks that had spread right across humanspace. The government was paying the price; most commentators were confident in their predictions that the New Liberal government of Moderator Burkhardt was finished.
Michael stopped scanning after a while. It did not make sense, any of it. He could not even begin to understand why the Hammers were doing what they were doing. The elaborate scheme they had concocted was unraveling badly. When the Fed government saw his neuronics records, the Hammer’s days had to be numbered. After the Mumtaz affair, the government would rip the heart out of the Hammers and nail it, bleeding, to the nearest wall.
He smiled, a smile utterly devoid of charity, the smile of a man watching his bitterest enemy swing on the end of a rope. Well, if it came to that, he would be there. That was for sure. He was in the mood to rip out a Hammer heart or two.
“Spacer Torrens, Spacer McArthur. Returning to the FedWorld Courier Ship Spacerunner.”
Michael’s mouth was bone-dry. He could not help it. This was the tricky bit. Hacking into the Hammer’s knowledge base to create false identities for him and Shinoda was one thing. Hacking into Scobie’s immigration control systems was quite another, not least because unlike the Hammers, they would use purpose-built security AIs to manage their system audits. In theory, that should make a successful hack next to impossible, though if that had been the case, he and Shinoda would not be standing there. Michael could only hope that the unknown hackers had done a proper job. Fingers crossed, he stood waiting.
“Comm me your entry permits and full identities. Finger in the scanner for DNA matching.” The immigration officer did not bother to conceal his lack of interest. Nor, to Michael’s relief, did the inevitable DocSec watchdog.
Michael and Shinoda did as they were told. An anxious pause followed as they waited for the system to confirm that they were legitimate crew members of the Spacerunner.
With a flick of the wrist, the officer commed them the clearances they needed. He waved them through. Ignoring a sudden desperate urge to break into a run, Michael walked into the access tube.
Then he was through Spacerunner’s air lock and back on sovereign FedWorld territory. He got only another meter before his attempt to confirm his identity to the ship’s staff crumbled to dust. All of a sudden, it all became too much, the accumulated stress of the past months driving him onto his knees.
He was safe.
“Feeling better?” the Spacerunner’s doctor asked.
Michael nodded. He certainly was. His body never missed an opportunity to remind him of some old injury or other, and deep down inside he was far from all right, but as long as he did not think too much, he felt pretty good. He had slept well, breakfast had been as good as anything the first-class restaurant on the liner served, and the young doctor standing in front of him was no more a commercial spacer than he was. She was FedWorld Space Fleet from her regulation haircut right down to her fleet-issue boots, and Michael felt all the better for it.
The doctor smiled. “Good. Now, I have some people who have been on my back from the moment you arrived on board. They want to talk to you. You okay with that? Because if you’re not, they can wait.”
Michael shook his head. No matter how much he wanted to forget the past, he had to tell the debriefing team everything he knew-good and bad-if he was ever to come to terms with what he had done, what he had been through.
“No, no. I’m fine. Where do they want me?”
“Conference 2. Ship’s AI will show you the way. You can contact me any time if you need a break. Got that? Call me any time at all, and I’ll put a stop to it.”
Michael nodded as he got to his feet. “Thanks.”
The doctor took his arm. “Michael.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let them push you around. When you’ve had enough, you call me. Is that understood?”
Michael bobbed his head. She would never understand that he wanted to unburden himself, and now.
The doctor watched Michael as he made his way out of the sick bay. She shook her head as she began her draft report to Fleet’s surgeon in chief.