House of the Sun (6 page)

We put down at the commuter terminal of Casper International at oh-four-forty-five, which gave me fifteen minutes to collect my baggage and hump it over to the international terminal. According to the signs, there was an automated people-mover to carry passengers the klick or so from one terminal to another. But, according to other signs—hastily hand-lettered—the people-mover was down for maintenance, and should be back up and running three days ago, thanks for your patience. There were shuttle-buses too, but the one I tried to catch was full—or so the big, burly Amerind driver told me, even though I could see a dozen empty seats—and fragging near rolled over my toes as it pulled out. Well, it was a nice morning for a brisk walk anyway.

Not only did I get my exercise, but I also got a good view of the international terminal that I would have missed if I'd ridden the underground people-mover. It's a sight I wouldn't have missed for anything ...
null!
In the darkness of predawn, under the harsh glare of arc lights, it looked like an overgrown bomb shelter or missile bunker: prestressed ferrocrete with less aesthetic appeal than a brick.

The suborbitals, though—they were a different story. As I hiked my way beside the access road—cursing silently at the two shuttle-buses that blazed on by me without even slowing—I could see three of the things out on the apron beyond the terminal building. Gleaming white under the carbon arcs, they were beautiful—geometrically precise, like the crystalline purity of mathematics itself somehow made tangible. Okay, I admit it, I copped that last line from a trideo talking head. But he was right. The suborbitals were unbelievably striking, unbelievably beautiful in a kind of heart-stirring way.
They
don't
belong
here,
on
the
ground
—that's the thought that struck me.
Any
time
they
spend
down
here
in
the
dirt
is
just
waiting,
just
marking
time
before
they
can
re-enter
the
element
for
which
they
were
born
. ..

That heartwarming feeling of awe lasted until I'd entered the international terminal, and vanished precisely one microsecond after I'd laid eyes on the hard-case customs and safety inspectors waiting for me at the security gate. Sigh. You'd think the fact I was carrying an open corp ticket would give me some kind of clout with the inspectors, wouldn't you, would guarantee me some special treatment? No luck there, chummer. (Or maybe—and this was a scary thought—what I went through
was
special treatment ...) In any case, as a gaggle of technicians poked and prodded and X-rayed and assensed and MNR'ed my bag, a couple of hard-eyed and horny-handed trolls in undersized uniforms did much the same thing to me. Metal detectors to analyze the composition of my dental fillings. Chemsniffers to check if I was wearing clean underwear. Magical examinations to make sure I wasn't actually a fire elemental trying to fool them. The whole enchilada. Finally—and only after the fine uniformed gentlemen had made a detailed manifest of every speck of lint in my possession—was I gestured on.

Then came Immigration Control or Emigration Control, or whatever the frag the Sioux government's calling it now. Once again, I was looking up at a couple more uniformed Amerind trolls while their 'puter whirred and clicked and tried to decide whether it liked the passport data on my credstick. And I was trying not to sweat; it was supposed to be the best fake datawork (a lot of) money could buy, but you never really knew how good this kind of drek was until it was put to the test. My sphincter contracted as the 'puter went
brack
sharply. But the trolls handed my credstick back without a word and gestured me on. Signs directed me to the departure gate, so I followed them.

And almost had a childish accident when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I spun, and I
think
I stopped myself from yelping aloud. I looked up, expecting another troll ... then quickly down when the slag who'd stopped me cleared his throat rattlingly. A dwarf, he was, even stockier and more dour than most of his metatype, still on his toes after reaching up for my shoulder. He was wearing the nondescript black suit I've come to associate with government agents, and a cold fist squeezed my stomach. Somehow, I managed to force a well-meaning smile onto my face. "Is there some problem?" I asked genially.

"You're Brian Tozer?"

I nodded; that was the name on my fake datawork. "That's me, er ... sir. Is there a problem with my ticket?"

"Follow me, please." And he turned his back on me and walked off without looking back, fully expecting me to follow him blindly.

Which I did, of course—not that I had much choice. I followed him through an unmarked door into a small, bare room, and I braced myself for a cavity search or worse.

The dwarf didn't say anything once he'd shut the door behind me. He just scrutinized me, dark eyes narrowed beneath beetling brows. If he wasn't going to say anything, neither was I. If we were going to play the old "who speaks first" waiting game, some years from now an airport employee would open the door and find two desiccated corpses in this bare room, still glaring at each other.

Finally, he frowned, and his brows merged into something that looked like a road-killed squirrel. "You
are
Brian
Tozer?" he asked.

And that's when I got it. I pulled out my credstick—the one with the digital signature on it—and extended it to him. He sneered—
"Fragging
twinkie
," I could hear him thinking—and he slipped it into the oversized chipjack mounted in the base of his skull. His eyes rolled up in their sockets for a moment. Then, with a quick movement, he clicked the stick free from his slot, tossed it back, and held something out to me. An optical chip: a tiny sliver of impure silicon the size of a pen-point, in a plastic chip-carrier the size of my first thumb-joint.

"That's your payload for our mutual friend," he grunted, already starting to turn away.

"Hold it," I said quickly. He turned back, and one of his eyebrows tried to crawl up into his hairline. "Look," I told him, "I don't have any of the details on where I'm going, who I'm supposed to give this payload to, and when. Don't you think it might make my job a little easier if—"

He cut me off with a sharp, "You'll be met." And again he turned his back on me and strode off. This time I let him. I glanced down at the chip-carrier in my hand, and for just a moment I had the impulse to throw it to the floor, grind it under my heel, and just
run
like
hell
. The pleasant fantasy didn't last long. I sighed, opened the door, and re-emerged into the concourse.

In the course of following the dwarf, I'd lost track of my gate. Fortunately, some airport employee—a flackish-looking slot with a carcinogenic tan and plastic smile—noticed me looking lost. He was actually
polite
to me—a first for the day—and he led me directly to the Global Airways departure lounge.

That's when things started to look up a tad. I'd expected the usual barren, sterile-looking holding pen with its plastic seats designed to make it categorically impossible to find a comfortable position in them. The usual stained, institutional gray carpet. The usual boarding and departure announcements that might as well have been made in Urdu, for all the meaning they conveyed. The usual crush of (meta)humanity, where you try to avoid having your toes stepped on while you play the old game of "Spot the Hijacker."

Buzzz,
thanks for playing!
This
was where the open corp ticket came into play big-time. The flackish kind of guy led me right through the holding pen where the hoi polloi were contained, past an armed sec-guard who actually touched his cap to me as I passed, and through a pair of double doors that could have been real mahogany. As we stepped through, me and my flackish shadow, I saw arrays of tiny LED ripple and flicker on both sides of the doorway. Yet
another
weapon-detector of some kind. I congratulated myself once again for deciding to travel completely unarmed except for my rapier wit.

The Global Priority Class Stand-By Lounge—that's what the nameplate on the door identified it as—looked like a cross between a gentleman's club in Edwardian London (or, at least, the BBC rendition thereof), and a high-tone computer dealer's showroom. Heavy wood paneling, burgundy plush carpets, wingback leather chairs, crystal decanters on mahogany sideboards ... and everywhere, suit-clad travelers tapping away on palmtop computers, babbling into cel phones, or staring off into space with fiber-optic spiderwebs trailing from their temples. Of the fifteen or so people in the lounge, the only people who weren't engaged in some form of electronic or verbal intercourse were me, the flack—who, with one final unctuous comment, made himself scarce—and a particularly shapely bartender (bartendress? bartendrix?) whose smile hinted she
really
needed my patronage to make her day complete. Out of the goodness of my heart I obliged her, and spent the next ten minutes savoring the best of all possible lands of single-malt Scotch whiskey—free singlemalt Scotch whiskey.

Finally, the boarding call came—delivered in person by a shapely, and decidedly mammalian, flight attendant—and we started to make our way through the priority boarding tube. This was a transpex cylinder—scrubbed so clean you could see the walls only by the way they diffracted lights outside—which extended from the terminal building to the first-class passenger door of the suborbital. Twenty meters away was another, similar tube—which suddenly reminded me of those "HabiTrail" things kids use to incarcerate gerbils—used by the
declasse
from the economy-class holding pen.

I took a couple of steps into the HabiTrail, and then stopped dead, earning a bad look from the
shaikujin
—still jacked into his portacomp—who tripped on my heel and collided into my back. I couldn't help it; I'd never had a chance to look at a suborbital from this close up before, and I certainly wasn't going to pass it up so he could get to his complimentary pretakeoff gin and tonic a couple of seconds sooner.

The thing was
huge,
much larger than I'd expected. Hell, suborbitals only carry about 150 people. How much space do you need for
that
? But of course, there's a lot more to a suborbital than the passenger compartment. There's all the stuff that goes into any standard civilian transport: turbojets, fuel, landing gear, navigation drek, baggage bays, and that place up front where the crew and the flight attendants have their parties. And then there's the
extra
stuff needed when you're flying at altitudes of 23 klicks (75,000 feet, for the metrically challenged) and speeds of Mach 20+. SCRAMjets to get you to cruising altitude and speed. Fuel for those SCRAMjets ... and lots of it (SCRAMjets aren't known for their fuel economy). Cooling systems to keep your hull from melting under the air friction. And on and on. All in all, the suborbital was longer than a football field, a big integral lifting-body with tiny stub wings bolted on apparently as an afterthought. The body lines followed some complex—and very beautiful—multiple-recurve pattern, making the thing broad and high at the nose, but narrower and thinner toward the tail: something like an asymmetrical teardrop, maybe.

Finally, the pressure of
shaikujin
behind me got too much to ignore any longer, and I had to move along. Once I was inside, I could just as well have been in any plane—row upon row of seats in a three-aisle-three arrangement—except for one detail: no windows. The entertainment suite mounted in the seatback ahead of me made up for that lack, I decided quickly once I'd found my spot. As well as the usual selection of mindless movies, and even more mindless "classic tri-V" reruns, several of the program selections offered views from various microcams mounted on the hull. While the cabin attendants handed out free drinks and flavorless snacks—to the first-class passengers only, not to the great unwashed flying cattle-class, which started one row behind my own seat—I thoroughly enjoyed watching the baggage handlers conduct torture tests on people's suitcases as they threw them aboard.

Then we got the standard safety lecture—what to do in an emergency, like if the galley runs out of Bloody Mary mix—then we were rolling, and then we were climbing out. On my seatback screen I saw the ground drop away behind us, becoming a detailed scale model, then a contour map. Speed and angle of climb seemed—in my limited experience, at least—pretty extreme. But then the SCRAMjets kicked in—the pilot actually warned us before he lit them off—and I got a taste of what "fast" and "steep" really mean. Some ridiculously short time later, a voice came over the intercom, telling us we were at cruising altitude—23,000 meters, give or take—and flying at a mind-buggering 29,000 klicks per hour.

"We're on course and on schedule," the friendly voice announced, "and we should have you on the ground at Awalani a couple of minutes shy of four-fifty a.m. local time. Have a good flight." I checked my watch, which I'd already adjusted for Hawai'i time: a couple of minutes past four in the morning. That put total flight time at something under one hour, gate-to-gate, Casper to Honolulu. Ain't progress wonderful?

With some regret, I wiped the external view—a distant horizon, showing some definite curvature—from the seatback screen, and tried to concentrate on biz. I'd never been to the Kingdom of Hawai'i before and knew next to squat about it (apart from what I'd seen on trid pabulum actioners like
Tropical
Heat)
. Sure, some of the runner wannabes who hang out in low-life bars copping a 'tude will tell you that the shadows are all the same, no matter where in the world you are. But I've never bought into that. Hell, from my own experience, not extensive, I
know
it's not true.