Voice of the Whirlwind (18 page)

“In a minute,” Steward said, and continued with his current set.

“Get on your knees.” The voice was as expressionless as before. “Face away from the door. Put your hands behind your back.”

“Nine. Ten.” Steward wondered how many times they’d repeat the instructions before sending in people with zap gloves, decided that this wasn’t the best time to find out. He obeyed instructions and knelt with his hands behind him.

The door opened. From the sound of their boots on the metal floor he sensed at least two guards, maybe three. Hands seized his forearms. He felt a garment being pushed roughly up his arms, dropping onto his back and calves, and then handcuffs closed around his wrists. He tried the handcuffs, found that they were the kind with a solid bar between them instead of a flexible chain.

“Stand up.” The voice was odd, filtered somehow, as if heard over a telephone.

As he stood he looked at the guards, two men and a woman. The woman stood behind the other two with a zap glove on each hand, gazing at him with butterfly-wing eyes. Each was taller than he was, muscular, stone-faced, dressed in a gray uniform complete with big armored jacket. They were wearing black plastic helmets with face shields lowered. If Steward tried to hit them, all he could do was break his own knuckles. The odd quality of the voice was due to its coming from a speaker on a guard’s belt and originating from a mic inside the helmet.

Before cuffing him they’d pushed a thin cotton robe onto him from behind. One of the men stepped to Steward’s front and drew the robe around him, fastening it with Velcro tabs. Steward looked down at the robe. It was faded blue and had a number and Steward’s name stenciled on it in bright new black letters.

The guard dropped a pair of heelless plastic slippers in front of Steward. Steward stepped into them.

“Turn around,” the guard said.

“I don’t suppose it would help to ask why I’m being held.” Which, Steward knew, would have got him a backhand across the face in two-thirds of the jails in the human sphere. He wanted to find out what their orders were.

“Turn around.” Without a blink. Maybe they’d been told to exercise special care.

Steward turned, felt the guard seize the bar that kept his handcuffs apart. He was going to try to remember every detail of what he saw next.

“Follow.”

The corridor was bare alloy and was lit by fluorescents set into slots in the ceiling. The guards marched Steward past the featureless doors of six other cells—Steward counted each one—and then through an armored security door. Here was a desk with another guard, his helmet off, holding papers that one of Steward’s escort had to sign. Presumably they released Steward into his custody. Beyond him was an elevator door. In order to work it one of the guards had to feed his plastic ID into a slot next to the buttons. The elevator rose four floors. Steward felt lighter as he rose in the massive centrifuge. His knee joints crackled.

The corridor was busier, filled with guards and businesslike, incurious people in civilian clothes. The ceiling and floor were alloy, the walls plastered and painted beige. There were closed doors, each numbered, with electric keyboard combination locks. Signs on the walls warned about security, safety, and procedural matters, and there was a bulletin board with notices pinned to it, the board next to a vidscreen on which notices—possibly the same notices—scrolled continuously.

The escort moved Steward into a large room full of desks and people. Steward noticed a durable carpet on the floor, soundproofing on the ceiling, clutter on the desks. There were murmured conversations and the tapping of console keys. Coffee and soft-drink dispensers were built into the walls. “Stop,” said the man behind Steward, tugging on the crossbar of his handcuffs. Steward came to a halt.

The guard in the lead left the group, moved to a nearby, empty desk. He raised the faceplate of his helmet to talk to a woman at the next desk, who nodded and indicated a man who was standing against the near wall, pushing buttons on a coffee dispenser. The guard moved toward him. When the man turned at the guard’s approach, Steward saw he was of middle height, age about forty, a little puffy around the middle. He was dressed in dark trousers, bulky quilted jacket, light blue shirt. He was going bald on top and his dark hair was cut short. The guard stopped near him and addressed him respectfully. The man sipped his coffee from a foam cup, made a face, and then looked across the room to Steward.

A warning moved up Steward’s spine. The man’s eyes were angry, intelligent, almost savage, cold as the solar wind.
I’m going to break you like a twig.
That was the message Steward read. It was like looking into the void.

The man nodded again, then moved back to his desk. He picked up a key spike from a box filled with papers that sat on his desk and put it in his pocket. He punched a number on his phone and spoke briefly, then picked up a file folder from his desk and moved toward where Steward waited. “Number twelve,” he said to the guards, and brushed past Steward without looking at him. He had an accent that Steward couldn’t place.

“Turn around,” said the guard behind. Steward shuffled around till he was facing the other way, then let himself be marched down the corridor in the other direction.

He could smell the balding man’s coffee. It made his mouth water.

The balding man took the spike out of his pocket and pushed it into one of the locks on the door. He pressed a code into the keyboard, and electronic bolts shot back. He stepped back from the door, putting the spike back in his pocket.

“Put him in the chair,” he said. Steward’s guard moved him through the door and ordered him to sit.

The chair was black gas-planet plastic, backless, and bolted to the floor. The bar on Steward’s handcuffs was fastened to a metal projection that thrust from the back of the chair.

There was a small desk in front of Steward. The balding man sat behind it. Steward could see LEDs reflected in his eyes, monitoring Steward’s condition through the cuffs and through stress indicators in his voice.

Monitored. Steward tried to bring moisture into his mouth, failed.

He possessed nothing, he knew, but himself. Nothing else could help him. He had no armor, no weapons. He had to build them, somehow.

I have no tactics, he thought. I make existence and the void my tactics. A Zen chant.

I have no castle. The immutable spirit is my castle.

I have no sword. From the state which is above and beyond, from thought, I make my sword.

The universe was hostile; he would therefore, he decided, make his own. He decided to build constellations in his head, remember the stars and the way they were arranged. One by one, until he had heaven in his mind. Scorpius first. He tried to remember how many stars it had, how they were arranged. Antares, M4, M7, just so. All learned in his night navigation classes.

“Leave us,” the balding man said. “I’ll let you know when we’re done.”

The guards left. The alloy door closed behind them. Steward thought of stars as the balding man stared at him in cold silence and sipped his coffee. Steward breathed deliberately, flexed his muscles in the cuffs, testing the limits of his posture. Tried to keep his mind elsewhere, away from the stare he felt on him, away from the metal box that was holding him. Tried not to react when, after a long time filled only with the whispering of the vent, the man finally spoke.

“I’m Colonel Angel,” he said. “I work for the Pulsar Division. And you’re my meat.”

Achernar, thought Steward. At the end of Eridanus.

Wolf 294, he thought. Sheol.

*

Angel was trying to hold his eyes with his stare. Aldebaran, thought Steward. In Orion. Wrong. In Taurus.

“Firstly,” Angel said, “the Procureur has declared your case a matter covered by the Internal Security Code. That means you will be held as long as we feel like holding you, and any records will be under permanent seal. You won’t be talking to anyone, not an attorney, no one. No habeas corpus, no bond. You’ve just disappeared into a pit, and I’m the only man who has the ladder that can get you out.”

Steward looked up at him. From the universe in his head Angel seemed a long way. “I don’t suppose the code authorizes you to tell me exactly what I’ve supposed to have done.”

There was a vein pulsing in Angel’s temple. “Multiple murder, for a start.”

More than one? Steward thought.

“Sabotage. Espionage. Attacks on accredited members of the Power Trade Legation. Minor things like theft and customs avoidance.”

“When am I supposed to have done this, exactly?”

“Nineteen February. This year.”

Steward forced himself to smile. “Got you there. I was someplace else.”

Angel seemed unimpressed. “I suppose you can prove it. Witnesses and everything, right? You never left Ricot.”

“I’ve never been on Ricot. Last February I was in a cryogenic vault in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA.” Angel didn’t react.

“That’s on Earth, spacebuck,” Steward said.

“New bodies happen all the time. I can see you’re younger than you’re supposed to be.”

“I don’t have memories of anything that happened after the age of twenty-two. So you’re throwing me in a pit for something I have no memory of committing.” Steward grinned again. “I guess you’ll look pretty silly to the Procureur.”

“Consolidated would be stupid not to give you a new identity after what you did.”

“Consolidated didn’t. That’s my point. My Alpha—that’s the buck you’re after—he died on Ricot in March. Consolidated Systems isn’t interested in me. They didn’t give me a new identity. If I were still working for them, do you think they wouldn’t give me a new name and prints, at least?”

Angel’s expression didn’t change. “Delaying tactics won’t work, Steward,” he said. “Your only hope of getting out of here is to cooperate.”

“Look it up. Get my records out of the hospital.”

“Records can be altered.”

Steward shrugged as far as the handcuffs would let him. The door behind Angel opened and another man came in. Ghostly fingers brushed Steward’s belly at the sight of him, a fear that mutated rapidly to anger. The man was big, bullet-headed, narrow-eyed. Steward recognized him as the one who had hit him with the zap glove when he was arrested. The second man leaned against the back wall without saying anything. He had his hand stuffed in his coat pocket, as if he still had a zap glove on.

I’d like a minute with you, Steward thought. A minute without your glove or jets or whatever technology you’ve got threaded into your nerves. I don’t care if you’ve got twenty kilos on me.

LEDs winked red in Angel’s eyes.

Steward took a breath. M44, he thought. In Cancer.

Interrogation technique, he thought. The primary rule was always to isolate the individual: That was the first thing. Make him feel alone in the world. Put him naked in a metal box. Shine spotlights on him all the time so he doesn’t know if it’s night or day, so that one of the first things to go is his sense of time. March him through the security station so that he will feel even more alone, an individual caught in a vast machine. Then put him in a small room, tell him the only way he’ll ever get out of the machine is to do as he’s told, and provide just that extra burst of fear by putting him in with a very large man who, very recently, has just caused him vast pain….

By contrast with the other, Angel would become the good guy. Steward would become dependent on him to keep the other away. Would wish to please him, confide in him. Give him everything he wanted.

Steward knew all the moves, exactly what Angel was doing. But that didn’t mean Angel’s techniques wouldn’t work. The only way not to crack was to keep himself intact, integral, away from this. Inside the universe of stars that he was building in his head.

There was more than one interrogation here, Steward thought, and he was the only one who was aware of it. Angel and his partner knew what had happened here on Vesta, and were trying to find the answers to what they didn’t know. Steward knew less than they, couldn’t give them anything new. But the very questions they asked might tell Steward something, and he had to keep them asking. He had protested his innocence because it would have seemed odd if he hadn’t. But really he wanted the interrogation to continue, wanted Angel and the other to talk about what they thought Steward already knew. And in order to do that, he had to interest them, had to convince them somehow that he had the answers they wanted. He had to act as if he knew things they didn’t.

Angel crushed his foam coffee cup, dropped it onto the desk. He held up the file folder, opened it, glanced through it. Steward saw the name on it: filesecur:steward.1 “What were you going to do, Steward?” he asked. “Were you going to a meet? Visit someone you knew? Or were you just going to check the extent of what you did last time?”

“I was going,” Steward said, “to a place called Time Zero.”

“To meet somebody?”

“To meet Fischer. He’s communications officer on the
Born.
He called me and told me there was a good party.” He looked up at Angel and grinned. “I’m sure you were recording communications on and off the ship. Listen to it. Maybe it’ll satisfy the Procureur that you know what you’re doing.”

Angel’s partner took his hand out of his pocket. He was wearing a zap glove. He held an inhaler in his gloved hand. He put the inhaler to his mouth and pressed the trigger.

Great, Steward thought. An asthmatic goon.

Angel’s voice filled the silence. “Who do you know on Vesta, Steward?”

Steward turned his eyes to Angel and tried to put as much venom into the look as possible. “You tell me. You’re the fucking expert.”

“Who did you see in February?”

Steward only looked at him.

“On whose orders were you here?”

Mira. In Cetus. Angel’s partner was taking off his jacket.

“Did the order come from high up? Or was it Curzon?” Steward felt something inside him leap at the mention of the name. Seen on Angel’s readouts, no doubt, which might make him think he had something.

Angel’s partner, carrying his jacket, was slowly moving around the desk, toward Steward.