Hide and seek (4 page)

“Linda, behind you!” her mother shouted.

Linda spun and dived for the chopper’s cockpit. She could have been floating on the moon: the scene was a frozen tableau. The man in the left seat was half out of it, twisted toward her, swinging his arm toward her at the rate of one millimeter per century; the body that slumped out of the other seat was presumably that of the legitimate pilot. Linda–in case she should ever meet him again–dispassionately recorded the usurping pilot’s looks and the strange smell of him, half cologne, half adrenaline, noting calmly that she had seen him at least once before. Then she plucked the pistol–a .38 Colt Aetherweight with flash suppressor–out of his unwilling hand.

Time unfroze. She brought the pistol down with precisely aimed force against the side of his head, under his ear. He collapsed, and she yanked him out of his seat, pulling him bodily over the backrest.

She moved with the grace and sureness of an acrobat, leaping into the seat, taking hold of the controls. She shoved the throttles forward; the turbines rose in pitch and the rotors accelerated. She twisted the pitch control, and the armored machine shuddered and rose half a meter from the ground. Expertly she let it spin where it hung on the axis of its own rotor shafts, just a quarter turn, until it faced the attackers on the roof of the house, presenting those unseen gunners with a slender target. She stopped it there and squeezed the triggers of the Gatling guns.

The noise was an ear-piercing howl. Blue fire–a hundred rounds in half a second–ate off the roof of the house.

In the stark white beams from the chopper’s floodlights she saw her father’s body lying facedown in the grass. There were other bodies in the grass, not moving, those of the guards. She pushed the chopper’s nose down and the heavy craft stuttered forward, roaring and blowing, until it was hovering almost on top of her father, its steel skids bracketing him.
She spoke aloud to the helicopter. “Snark, this is L.N. 30851005, do you acknowledge?”

“I acknowledge your command,” the helicopter replied, confirming her voice pattern.

 

“Hold this position in three-dees,” she ordered. “Rotate to cover me if necessary. Return fire if fired upon.”

A handful of bullets sprayed the chopper’s nose, crazing the armored cockpit glass–somewhere in the shadows to the right, there was another gunner. The Snark jerked right and its starboard Gatling gun screeched; the tree from which the bullets had been fired exploded in tatters.

There was no resumption of fire from beyond the disintegrated tree. “Order confirmed,” said the helicopter, with a machine’s satisfaction.

 

“Hold your fire,” she heard a man shout in the darkness, and she knew the voice: the gray man’s, Laird’s.

She jumped out of the command seat, into the cabin. “Mother, help me.” Together she and her mother–a strong and slender woman, her hair as black as her husband’s–wrestled the limp bodies of the hijackerpilot and the gray woman and rolled them through the open door. The gray woman tumbled out after the man and bounced from the skid to lie motionless beside him in the grass.

“Stay back. Inside,” Linda said to her mother, as she jumped out and landed lightly on both feet, flexing deeply, diving and rolling under the chopper in a continuous series of precise actions. The noise and the wind buffeted her ears, but she could separate the boom and shriek of the chopper from the shouted voices nearby.

Her father’s black hair was bright with blood from a scalp wound, but he was conscious. “Can you move?” she shouted.

 

“My leg is broken.”

 

“I’ll pull you.”

The chopper suddenly shifted where it hung in midair, and she saw shapes running at the edge of the lawn. But no bullets came out of the dark, and the Snark, following its orders to the letter, did not fire. Crouched on her knees, she hauled her father by his shoulders, and he did what he could to help, pushing at the muddy lawn with his good right leg; she saw that he had lost his shoe. For fifteen seconds she was exposed as she pulled him under the skid.

She boosted her father by his shoulders and he hopped unsteadily onto the skid. Her mother took his hands and tugged as he bent and pushed off with his right leg. He landed heavily on the floor of the chopper.

As Linda poised to jump after him she felt the blow to her hip. There was no pain, but it was as if someone had hit her and pushed her to the ground, and when she tried to jump up again, nothing happened. She felt nothing in her leg and could not move.

The Snark swiveled, but its Gatling gun stayed silent. It had not heard the bullet any more than Linda had.

 

Linda lay on her back, staring up into the meshing blades, seeing the white faces of her mother and father peering down at her only a meter away–
“Linda! Linda!”
–their hands outstretched.

 

Her mother started to climb out over edge of the door.

 

“Snark,” Linda shouted. “Immediate evasive action. Take all necessary measures to protect your passengers.”

 

The Snark heard her. Its searchlights went dark; its turbines instantly wrapped up to supersonic pitch and it rose screaming into the sky, rocking sideways.

 

Laird’s shout:
“Fire! Fire! Stop them!”

Tracers tore at the chopper and bounced from its skin and whined away from its rushing rotors. With her uncanny eyesight Linda saw her mother fall back through the open door and saw the armored door slam closed behind her, as the Snark took steps to protect its human cargo. In seconds the helicopter had vanished into the hazy night sky.

She lay on her back, alert and helpless, smelling the wet warm grass and the burned fuel and the H.E. and the blood, as figures came running out of the darkness to stand over her.

 

“Kill her, sir?”

 

“Don’t be stupid. Not until we’re sure her parents are dead.”

 

“We’d better face facts, Bill,” said another. “We can’t just pretend that nothing’s . . .”

 

“Don’t tell me my business. Patch her up and do a good job of it. There may be inquiries.”

 

“Bill . . .”

 

“It’s
not
over. This can be contained.” “William . . .”

The gray man flinched, and Linda looked up ruefully at the face that pushed into the tightening circle of her consciousness, the face of the gray woman; she stood beside Laird, her long gray hair spilling in tangles, a silenced pistol in her hand. That’s who had shot her, Linda realized–after Laird had told the others to hold their fire. Shot her because Linda had not taken the time, had not had the will, to kill her first.

“Why her?” Laird barked at the gray woman. “It’s Nagy you should have killed, him and his wife.”

 

“I didn’t intend to kill her, William. I intended to keep her here.”

 

The bedraggled helicopter pilot staggered into the circle of faces, his face contorted in rage. “You left her an opening! She . . .”

 

“Shut up,” the gray man said, ignoring him, glaring at the woman. “Nagy came near to succeeding, and he’s not through yet. How could you be so careless?”

 

“We can’t simply discard her, William. She could be the greatest of us.”

 

“No more! She resists our authority. She has always resisted it. Look at this . . . this debacle.”

 

“She’s a child. When she realizes the truth, when she really understands everything . . .”

 

“To resist us is to resist the Knowledge.”

 

“William . . .”

“No more talk from any of you.” He looked down at Linda with the hardest eyes she had ever seen, even in his hard face. “This one is so much unenlightened meat. We’ll put her away somewhere she can’t be found. Then we’ll start over.”

Seeing herself lying paralyzed on the grass, her new persona knew that if she could free herself from this horrible dream of reality, she would be safe. Linda opened her mouth–
“Blake,”
she whispered.
“Blake.”

 

Laird looked down at her and his face twisted into a bitter sneer.

 

This time when she came awake, there was no one with her. And as she lay alone in the dark cabin, her heart pumping, she struggled mightily to remember what she had just been dreaming.
II

The gleaming white ship fell swiftly toward Mars, a sleek cutter emblazoned with the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control. It was falling tail-first toward Mars Station; its fusion torch had been extinguished at the radiation perimeter, and the ship was braking itself into parking orbit on chemical rockets alone, maintaining a steady one-gee acceleration.

Shielded against heavy radiation in every wavelength, its hull had no windows opening upon the universe. The young woman stood before the wallsized videoplate in the wardroom, watching the view from the stern, where black Phobos slid across the pale orange disk of Mars–a moon only twenty-seven kilometers long seen against a planet only 6,000 kilometers away. “Potato-shaped” was the cliché people had used to describe Phobos for over a century, but no other phrase captured the essence of its form so succinctly: pitted, lumpy, black, Phobos could have been a fine russet spud freshly dug from Idaho’s volcanic mud.

The woman who watched this intimate spectacle called herself Sparta. It was not her real name. It was her persona, the mask she showed only to herself, and Sparta was a secret name, secret from everyone but herself. To most people she was known as Ellen Troy–Inspector Troy of the Board of Space Control. Which was not her real name either. The people who knew her real name held her life in their hands, and most of them wanted to kill her.

To those who did not know her, Sparta seemed young, beautiful, intelligent, mysteriously gifted, strangely lucky. She was in fact powerful beyond casual comprehension. But to herself she seemed frail, her humanity crippled, her psyche constantly on the edge of dissolution.

Now she’d been yanked out of the normal course of her life once again–if her life could in any sense be considered normal–to be thrust without preparation into a situation which would require her complete alertness and total concentration, a peak performance that was to be demanded after two weeks of suffocating shipboard imprisonment on this cutter. Given the present alignment of the planets, an EarthMars crossing in two weeks was as close to instantaneous as even a Space Board cutter, the fastest class of ship in the solar system, could get . . . two weeks during which Sparta had nothing to do but study the meager information on the unsolved case that awaited her.

Her brooding was interrupted by the young man who entered the wardroom behind her. “Phobos and Deimos,” he said cheerfully. “Fear and Terror. Wonderful names for moons.”

 

“They fit well enough,” she said. “The chariot horses of Mars, weren’t they?”

 

He lifted a black eyebrow over a green eye. “Ellen, is there really something your encyclopedic brain hasn’t stored? If you want to get fussy, the god in question was Ares–the Greek war god, not the Roman. Phobos and Deimos were two of his three sons by Aphrodite, not his horses.”

 

“I read they were his horses, and they ate human flesh.”

 

“Mangled mythology. The man-eating horses–there were four, one also named Deimos but none named Phobos–belonged to Diomedes. You’ll recall him from
The Iliad
.”

 

She smiled. “How do you keep all that stuff in your head?”

“Because I love that stuff. I love
The Iliad
enough that I got through even Alexander Pope’s awful translation.” He smiled back at her. “A woman who calls herself Ellen Troy,” he whispered, “really should read it at least once.”

Blake Redfield–his real and quite public name–was one of the few who knew that her name was not Ellen Troy. He was one of the few–perhaps the only one of those who knew the truth–who did not seek to kill her for it. If at times Sparta thought she loved Blake, at other times she was afraid even of him. Or perhaps of her love for him.

Love was a subject she had been avoiding lately. “Look, you can see Phobos Base.”

Bright points glistened on the edge of Phobos’s biggest crater, high-rimmed Stickney, eight kilometers across. Sharply limned against the midlatitudes of Mars, Stickney was an iron-black chalice against a golden mirror. Eighty years ago the first human expedition to Mars had landed on Phobos, and for several decades the moon had served as a base for the exploration and eventual settlement of the Martian surface. “Looks like it was built yesterday,” Blake said. “Hard to believe it’s been deserted for half a century.”

Aluminum huts and domes still stood on Stickney’s far rim, undamaged, unoxidized, a time capsule of planetary exploration.

On the videoplate Phobos was already sliding away; off in the far corner of the screen Mars Station emerged from the crowded field of stars–it being the reason Phobos Base was deserted, no longer of practical use. The station was a big bottle of air that rotated fast enough to provide substantial artificial gravity on its inner surface.

They watched in silence until Mars Station blazed as bright as the sun and the black moon had dwindled to a void in the star field. Sparta turned to Blake. “What we talked about before . . . I’ve thought about it some more. I want you to stay on Mars Station until I’ve completed the investigation.”

“Sorry. I won’t do it.”

 

“They know who we are. We
don’t
know who
they
are.” “We know how they operate, anyway. I better than you.”

 

“I was trained for this job,” she said, her voice hardening.

 

“I believe my training matches yours,” he said quickly, “even if it has been a bit unorthodox.”

 

“Blake. . . .”

 

“I’ll prove it to you.”

 

“Prove it?”

 

“Right now, in the gym. Hand to hand.”

 

“What would that prove?”

 

“You said it yourself: we don’t know who they are. So you’ll have no more warning than I will. If I can beat you hand to hand, what’s the logic of penning me up?”

 

She hesitated only an instant. “I’ll meet you in the gym.”

Perhaps Blake had played into her hands. The side of her that loved him had its own motivation, for she wished him to survive even if she did not. The side of her that wanted him out of her life, that wanted all things human out of her life, could dispense with him easily. But as she knotted the black belt around the rough cotton of her gi, she knew that she would have to fight him handicapped.