Kyle walked into his empty apartment and shut the door. Nothing greeted him, not even the apartment’s computer. He’d programmed it to not announce his comings and goings.
Almost two weeks in the presence of the insufferably pompous Rassinger had flayed his patience to the bone. But he had learned things. He was certain, now, that Rassinger had expected to find the alien wreck. He was pretty sure that Rassinger had not expected to find Kyle.
What he didn’t know was whether his tip had been a setup to get him killed, or a lead from a competing faction of the League. Or possibly even from an anti-League agent. And he didn’t know why Rassinger was out there looking for alien spaceships.
After only one day, the Phoenix had loaded the wreck into its hold, and bolted for home. Kyle had begged a ride, partly to spy on the odious Rassinger, but also because he could accomplish nothing more on Kassa. The locals finally had enough government established that they resented his influence.
Rassinger had tried to hide the wreck from him, sealing off the cargo bay and posting armed guards. Kyle found it disturbing that the district leader trusted Fleet personnel more than he trusted a fellow League officer. One with a sterling reputation, no less. True to that reputation, he had not even tried to breach Rassinger’s security cordon.
Instead, he’d bowed and scraped, flattered and obeyed. It was sickening.
Back on Altair, the Phoenix had vanished into the depths of a Fleet dock, discharging him like a bad sneeze along the way. He appreciated it. Security was tight, and the newsvid hounds had missed him. They found Rassinger and the captain of the Phoenix, through their various inside contacts, and ambushed the two officials with cameras and microphones. To little effect, since those two exalted individuals could cry “No comment” and push through the pack of slavering reporters with impunity. But a lowly functionary like Kyle would have found his private credit history accessed, and investigative snoops threatening to broadcast those indiscreet trips to the topless bar unless he gave them the scoop now.
Not that there were any such trips. He’d lived his cover twenty-four and seven. After the traffic stop incident, he hadn’t really felt like a man, anyway. The urge had shriveled up and slunk away to hide.
It was back now, in full insatiated force. The cool, slim figure of Prudence Falling haunted his nights. Her ambiguous status only added fuel to the fire.
Was she a carefully placed operative or just a freelance captain in the wrong place at the wrong time? All he knew for sure was that she didn’t like Rassinger. That made him like her, of course, but it wasn’t quite enough. It didn’t mean she was on his side.
If she was working for the League, and found out his true mission, she’d kill him without blinking. If she wasn’t working for the League, then just the armband he wore would drive her as far away as star-flight could take her. Either way, Prudence Falling was going to be nothing but a memory for him.
Or possibly a lead. After checking his console for taps, snitches, and worms, he put out a few discreet inquiries. Starship travel schedules, sandwiched in between commodity prices. If anybody was watching, they’d think he was merely trying to profit off of his insider knowledge of the situation on Kassa.
Prudence’s ship had left only a few hours before the Phoenix had dropped in-system. A wise move for her, and what he had expected, but he still felt the pang of disappointment.
She hadn’t gone back to Kassa. The log showed her heading out another one of the twelve nodes that fed Altair. That wealth of connections combined with an innocuous ecosphere had quickly marked Altair out for local supremacy in this sector of nodes. Life had been easy and good for a hundred years.
Maybe too easy. Altair had stopped making hard choices a long time ago. The future looked like it was going to require some.
He corrected himself; she hadn’t gone directly to Kassa. There were ways to get there other than the shortest route. Unwilling to trust the computer with such a sensitive inquiry, he printed out a node-chart and checked the routes by hand. She could still reach Kassa with seven extra hops.
So now he knew no more than when he had walked in the door.
The cupboard still had a few beers in it. Beer was old, old as Earth. Even on Earth it had been old. People liked that about it. They liked those little things that tied them to the past. People who couldn’t spell “Earth” without blushing, people whose sense of history extended no deeper than last season’s ball-game playoffs, would wax eloquent about the virtues of their favorite brand of beer, about how true its recipe was to the original, brewed by blind Tibetan monks in a stone castle a thousand years before electricity was invented.
Not that anybody even knew what a Tibetan monk was, really. Half the sources said they were religious zealots, and the other half said they were super-soldiers with magic powers. Whatever beliefs they had held, whatever principles they had lived and died for, were dust now. Dust on a planet no one even remembered how to find. All that was left of them was a name, a few stories, and beer.
Kyle popped the tab off the bottle, and waited the five seconds necessary for the contents to chill to the preset temperature. You could adjust it, if you wanted to, but Kyle left it at the factory default. It was his little homage to the wisdom of the monks. Presumably they knew what temperature beer tasted best at.
He told the house audio system to play something. It picked a recording at random, which just happened to perfectly match his mood. The guitar was a one-man instrument, played by skill and subtlety. More impressively, it was analog. Thus, no two performances could ever sound exactly the same. The iconography was irresistible.
Of course, his mood for the last five years had not changed. He was always alone, always in the dark, always brooding. Once he’d convinced the audio system to stop playing popular tunes delivered by advertising agencies, it had quickly learned to restrict itself to the solitary lament of classical guitar.
He had never heard a live guitar performance. He wasn’t sure anybody on Altair even knew how to play one. The irony of appreciating an analog instrument, with its necessary unpredictability, through a digital recording, which was inflexibly unchanging, was not lost on him. It was just one of the many, many injustices he could do nothing about.
In the middle of the night, he was able to answer one of his numerous questions. When the bomb went off, blasting through the ceiling of his bedroom and incinerating his bed, he immediately understood that Rassinger had not expected to find him on Kassa alive.
The district leader was destined to be disappointed yet again. Kyle had developed the habit of sleeping anywhere but his bedroom. Usually it was the couch, but he also had a polyfoam mattress in the study.
This was not as irrationally paranoid as it might seem. Kyle had his reasons, gleaned from a murder investigation several years ago. An assassin had rented the room below the victim’s apartment, set a directed charge on a timer, and departed for parts unknown. By the time the bomb went off, the trail was already three months cold. The chances of catching a man in his bed at 3:00 A.M. were reasonably good. Not good enough for any normal assassin, who got paid only on a successful job, but good enough for an organization that had a very long-term view, plenty of money to spend, and a powerful need to be completely insulated from any taint of illegality.
An organization like the League, for instance.
Of course, they could have just blown out his whole apartment. But the chance of collateral damage was high, and that meant a bigger investigation. They could flood his rooms with a neurotoxin with a short half-life. But that level of sophistication pointed fingers of its own. A simple shaped charge, within the skill set of any amateur chemist, a dozen credits’ worth of electronics, and a forged identity on a rental agreement were too generic to point anywhere.
Sometimes the most sophisticated method was the simplest. The League had precious few virtues, but a crude appreciation for effectiveness was one of them. This trick had been used enough times that the city government had considered imposing real-time identity checks for apartment rentals. Naturally, the legislation never made it past the “under consideration” stage.
Lying on his couch, watching the flames in his bedroom, he wondered what he should do. The internal fire control system was spritzing the blaze, and would eventually win its battle of chemistry. But police units had to be already en route.
Hopefully they would be loyal to the force, and not Rassinger’s faction. Otherwise they might decide to finish the job before starting their investigation.
His comm unit started ringing. Struck by the sheer incongruity of it, he answered.
“Kyle? Are you okay?”
A friendly voice. Or rather, the voice of a friend. Sergeant Baumer was far too bald, thick, and beady-eyed to be friendly. But he was honest, clean, and still tolerated Kyle from the patrols they had shared before the League had taken over Kyle’s career.
Flicking on the unit, Kyle answered. “Help me, Baumer. I’m badly burned … passing out. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” He tossed his comm unit into the bedroom, where the flames quickly devoured it.
It was a long shot. Baumer might or might not get the reference, and he might or might not be in a position to act on it. One of Kyle’s first days on the job, Baumer had been tasked by the others to vet the new kid. A med comm call had come in, and Baumer had let his face sink into the most wretched seriousness. He’d driven like a maniac to the apartment building, a seedy retirement den, and sprinted out of the car with Kyle close behind. At the building’s entrance he pulled Kyle away from the elevators.
“They can’t be trusted, man, and it’s a matter of life and death!”
After the first three flights of stairs, Baumer had collapsed, holding his ankle and cursing like a vid star. Kyle bounded up the next eight flights, his heart pounding, the fire in his lungs fueled by the desire to be a hero, the good cop, the man his father had expected. The locator led him to the apartment door, opened it for him, and he rushed inside.
Dolores McNabtree was ninety-seven years old, a little senile and a lot crabby. Lying on her kitchen floor, she hissed at him like a wounded cat.
“What took you so long? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Don’t just stand there, you young fool! Bring me my walker!”
He carried the aluminum walker the three feet from the wall to the old lady. Then he picked her up with one hand. It took him another fifteen minutes to escape her constant nattering. He finally had to fake another emergency call. By the time he got out of her apartment, the musty smell had rubbed off on his new uniform.
Baumer was sitting at the foot of the stairs, laughing his ass off. Dolores called in at least once a day. Sometimes three times a day, if her equally geriatric daughter failed to visit her.
“How do you know it’s not a real emergency?” Kyle appreciated a good joke as much as the next man, but he wanted to learn.
The answer was simple. Whenever Dolores got bored and lonely, she would hold her breath until her medical monitor freaked out. Despite her age, she could hold her breath like a champion—the current record was three minutes and fifteen seconds. The way you knew it wasn’t a real emergency was because of the unique combination of elements: a “not breathing” call, after two in the afternoon, from Dolores’s med unit.
The lesson was that you had to learn your beat. You couldn’t let a machine do it for you.
Kyle started packing a pillowcase with the things he might need. Papers, credit sticks, a change of underwear, that sort of thing. Not his service pistol. It had a GPS tracker in it. The police liked to know where all their people were. That was why he was using a pillowcase, too. All of his luggage had GPS trackers in them. So many ways to foil thieves; so many inconveniences when a man wanted to disappear.
The police were taking an unusually long time to appear. Kyle tossed his pistol into the smoking room—the fire was out now—and retreated to the study. Hiding in the shadows of his own apartment. If they came in with IR goggles, it wouldn’t matter.
Finally the door swung open, unlocked by a police override. As he had hoped, Baumer stepped through it first.
“Kyle?” he called, softly.
Kyle made a softer sound, tapping the door he was half-hidden behind. Baumer flicked his eyes that direction, and then let in two more men.
Firefighters, not medics, which was odd. But they weren’t wearing League armbands, which was a relief.
They closed the door behind them. The firefighters went straight for the ruined bedroom. Baumer let them go and then slipped over to Kyle.
“What on Earth is up, Kyle?” He kept his voice at a whisper.
That was a good question. But Kyle had one of his own. “Can you trust them?”
“Yeah. I told the ambulance team it was a potentially dangerous situation, and made them wait for the fire squad. Heck, it’s even a fire. So I got my nephew in here. He’ll play along, and so will his partner. But any second now those boys are gonna figure out there isn’t a body in there.”
“Sergeant Baumer,” a voice called from the bedroom. “Could you give us a hand?”
Smooth kids. Aware that they might be being recorded, they chose their words with care.
Baumer looked at Kyle expectantly.
“I think the League is trying to kill me.” “Think” wasn’t really the right word, but it didn’t matter. Baumer had never liked the League. He’d made plain his unhappiness over Kyle’s involvement with it. That Kyle couldn’t afford to tell him the truth was another crime for the ledger. “Cover for me, and I’ll slip out behind you.”
Baumer shook his head. “No way. What if they’ve got backup waiting out there? A rifle across the street. Or a car full of gunmen. You need an escort.” He tugged Kyle’s arm and led him into the bedroom.
“Looks like he’s burned bad, boys.” The kids were staring oogly-eyed, but keeping quiet. “Put him on the stretcher and let’s get him to the transporter.”
The short one must be Baumer’s nephew. He had the thick bullfrog look already developing.
“Gotta foam him, Sergeant. Or he won’t survive the trip.” They had the stretcher out by the time the kid finished talking. Kyle lay down on it, and the two young men started spraying him with medical foam.
Wonderful stuff. It came out like shaving cream, but quickly hardened to plastic. Porous enough to breathe through, it was waterproof and antibiotic. Within seconds Kyle was a white, lumpy mummy, covered from head to toe.
“Is it bad?” Baumer was saying. His nephew took the hint.
“Real bad, Sergeant. Hope he was having sweet dreams, ’cause he’s never gonna wake up. A few days in the trauma tank, and then it’s over. Burns like this, it’s a waste to even try.”
Kyle had gotten a glimpse of the bed before they sealed his eyes shut. If he’d really been sleeping in it, he would be a pile of ashes by now.
The sensation of being carried was more unpleasant than sitting on the deck of the Launceston under fusion power. In both cases he had to wait passively while someone else saved or lost his life.
He could feel nothing through the foam, so he didn’t know when they went into the cold, open air. Only the sound of doors slamming told him he had made it to the transporter without catching a bullet. Either there was no backup, or the kids were putting on a great performance. If he was as good as dead, why complicate the inquest?
The transporter was gravitics powered. They had spent a lot of money making it small enough to fit in city streets, and it was still half the size of a bus. But it sailed over traffic and buildings smoothly, and carried medical berths for four patients.
More important, it would be almost impossible for anyone to follow them. Only emergency vehicles were allowed in the air. Once the vehicle landed, Kyle would have a head start over any ground pursuit.
The nephew made it even better. “Hey, Jones, head for M7.”
A voice responded through an intercom. “Navcom says Golden Hill is closer. And they have a great burn ward.” That’s where they would be waiting for him, then.
“Yeah but…” Baumer’s nephew fished around for a reason. “I heard some dog on them, man. Their tank fluid’s being recycled.”
The intercom was disbelieving. “Are you serious? No way!”
“Earth, it’s just what I heard. I dunno. But this guy hasn’t got any skin left. I don’t want him in a tank that somebody else might have to share. He’s gonna die anyway, so what’s the difference?”
A subtle shift in direction. The rumor was mightier than the computer.
The rest of the very short trip was in silence. The inside of the transporter was certainly under continual surveillance. Kyle revised his opinion of Baumer’s nephew again, upward. Without the foam, the ruse would have been exposed immediately. The kid wasn’t just reacting well, he was actively planning ahead.
Descent, followed by a gentle bump. The landing was smoother than being lifted out of the transporter. Kyle was helpless, his awareness of the outside world blocked by a layer of foam. He had to wait until the nephew told him when he could make a break for it.
More bumps—he must be on a gurney. Amazing that they spent so much money on a smooth ambulance ride, and then jostled him like a sack of potatoes for the last ten meters.
“Tell Kragen I’ve got a special for him.” The nephew was speaking loudly—too loudly. Obviously half the message was for Kyle.
“Dr. Kragen is with another patient.” A female voice, officious and bossy. “Take it up to the tank ward.”
“Trust me, Kragen is gonna want to see this guy.”
“Dr. Kragen doesn’t specialize in burns, medic.”
“Yeah, but this guy’s a League member.”
A brief silence.
“I’ll page him.” Then, mumbled, “Poor sap.”
It challenged all of Kyle’s newfound faith in the nephew not to panic at that.
More rolling, and then stillness.
It was only ten minutes. Kyle knew this because he counted his pulse. He didn’t have anything else to do. After fifteen minutes he would assume he was alone, and try to escape. But he forced himself to wait, first. That was the most basic mistake the nefarious always made: not having enough patience.
Not enough prudence, even. The humor of the pun was quickly overwhelmed by the desire to share this warm, soft cocoon with her.
“Still alive, I see.” A man’s voice. Given that aura of authority, it had to be a doctor, which implied it was Kragen. “If you can hear me, try not to move. If you can’t hear me, then don’t worry about it.” Graveyard humor. Not exactly what Kyle looked for in a doctor.
Something pressed on his chest. A monitor. The readings it would be giving off had to be most unexpected.
The monitor remained for a very brief moment. Then Kragen spoke in his ear.
“A curious chart. It says you’re a badly burned League officer, in danger of dying at any minute. Given my public opposition to the League, one might think that you were sent in here to finish dying in my disinterested hands. The monitor, however, says you’re perfectly healthy, and even a little bit aroused. But my sexual preference is a matter of public record, and in any case it’s not my birthday.”
A sharp edge brushed against Kyle’s upper lip, pressure was removed, and then he could taste fresh air unfiltered through the antiseptic of the foam. Kyle was still catching up to Kragen’s logic. The doctor was a fast thinker.
“My staff, expecting the possibility of my failing my Hippocratic oath, will automatically compensate by looping the vid recording, making it look like I spent five minutes in diagnosis instead of five seconds, thus covering up whatever criminal negligence they expect, or possibly hope, for me to commit. I suggest you keep your explanation terse.”
It made sense. If the League was trying to kill him, why not take him to an anti-League doctor? Kyle was pretty sure it was only part of the League trying to kill him, though, and that meant that the anti-League might still view him as League, since their contacts in the League might still think of him as loyal. Unless those contacts happened to be undercover League anti-League agents. Like Kyle.
Okay, it didn’t make sense.
Unable to meta-game so many layers of deception, Kyle settled for the truth. “I am in danger of dying. The League set my bed on fire.”
“And I should care why?” Kragen was annoyingly direct.
“Because I’m undercover against the League.” Kyle almost laughed. He had revealed his secret just like that, as easy as pie, to a complete stranger. The irony was that the only reason he could do so was because Kragen might believe him. And then he could claim to the League that he was pretending to switch sides, so Kragen would let him in the secret club, so he could bust them to the League. After all, why else would the League have arranged such an inept assassination, if not to get him a chance to infiltrate the opposition? It was such a compelling argument, Kyle almost half-believed it himself.
Kragen was still unimpressed, though. “What, exactly, am I supposed to do about your personal problems?”
“Get me out of here.” Kyle didn’t need much, just a few minutes’ head start on the assassins. He’d calculated that it would take them at least twenty minutes to reach M7 by ground car. Assuming there was active pursuit, of course. But Kyle always assumed the worst.
“For the record, which won’t exist since my staff is not recording this, I don’t believe you. I am assisting you solely because you ordered me to, in your capacity as a League officer. I may hate and despise the League, and everything it stands for, but I am a loyal citizen. I will testify to this statement, should I be required to.”
Kragen’s capacity for double-dealing was awe-inspiring, even to Kyle. A whooshing sound, and then Kyle was covered in a layer of wetness as the foam melted away.
The doctor was hardly older than Baumer’s nephew. Kyle hadn’t realized people that young cared about politics.
“Thank you,” Kyle said.
“I have a patient in another ward with terminal brain cancer. He is in a coma. It would be a simple matter for me to assign him to a different room, intercept his gurney along the way, cover him with foam, and switch charts. Robert Anton Wilson would leave a room, and Kyle Daspar would enter one. It would be days before anyone noticed the switch, and then I would explain I had been ordered to do so by a League officer, in an attempt to uncover a plot against the government.”
“Thank you,” Kyle said again, weakly. It was starting to sound inadequate.
Kragen agreed, and went on to explain just how inadequate it was. “It’s ludicrous that a healer should be involved in such shenanigans. But it’s ludicrous that a professional of my skill should still be assigned to the night shift of an emergency room. Either I have proven myself obedient to the League, in which case it must cease crippling my career, or I have aided an agent who will destroy the League and eventually achieve the same effect.”
But now Kragen had said too much. He clearly wasn’t that naïve. The League wouldn’t stop harassing him just because he did what they asked. They wanted obeisance, not merely obedience. Which meant that he was telling Kyle he really was anti-League. But only if Kyle was wise enough to understand it, which would imply that Kyle really was anti-League.
Kyle nodded in agreement. He couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make his head hurt.
“Naturally, I can’t be held responsible for the theft of Mr. Wilson’s identity cards from his room. That’s a matter for the police to look into.”
With that, Dr. Kragen threw a sheet over him and spoke a command. “Attendant … take this patient to room 715.” And then the rolling journey again, as Kyle, protected only by cloth this time, waited yet again for someone else to take him somewhere else.
An elevator ride and several turns later, Kyle was left alone. Unable to remain passive any longer, he tore off the sheet.
The room was dark and empty, but he could hear voices coming. He hid behind the bathroom door, leaving it half-open so he could still see.
Two attendants rolled another gurney in, and spent a few minutes transferring a comatose old man to the bed. They puzzled over the second gurney for a moment, but unable to solve the mystery, settled for solving the problem. When they left, they wheeled both gurneys away.
Just as Kyle thought it was safe to come out into the open, Dr. Kragen strolled in.
With businesslike efficiency, he switched charts.
“Sorry about your grandfather, Mr. Wilson.” Kragen spoke to Kyle without looking at him. “He’ll be more comfortable here for the next two days. At most.”
“Thank you,” Kyle said again, but to Kragen’s back as the doctor walked out of the room.
A brief fishing expedition through the hospital bag next to Mr. Wilson’s bed yielded cards and papers. Kyle dropped them into his pillowcase.
Another elevator ride, this time under his own power, and he walked out the front door. It was amusing to think he might have passed some of the same people on the way down as he had on the way up, and they were completely unaware of it. Such were the dubious amusements of secret identities.
Outside, in the cool air, he thought about how Prudence and he had passed each other, buried under their own secrets. Dubious amusements, indeed.