The 97th Step (11 page)

Gworn dropped onto a chair nearby. He slouched, resting on his backbone well above his buttocks, legs extended straight and locked. "Yeah, well, you shouldn't have. It's all too flash, you know what I'm saying?"

"Anything for a laner."

"So, how'd you get stuck on this dirtball? Bad connect?"

Ferret shrugged. "I snatched a half-system ticket with a penalty for re-route. I was heading toward Three-One-Three-Cee but it was here or come up with stads for a change. I'm glued here for two days."

"You going to Ohshit? How come?"

Ferret shrugged again. The Nu System had one world, a heavy gee planet that exported mostly heavy metals. Officially, it was called 1313-C, a number its discoverer had hung on it and then never gotten to change before he died in a windstorm. The popular name came from what the majority of new visitors said when first they felt the gee-and-a-half and saw the surface of the world, which seemed at first glance all bare rock and stubby plant life. Then on second glance, it
really
looked bad.

"I hear there's a change in the local Confed government. The new people are looking for tourists, so there are ticket points and freestarch at every spaceport. Supposed to be seven ports."

"Eight," Gworn said. "I touched down there last year. They built a new one."

"Whatever. I thought I'd take it easy and spend a month or two there."

Gworn bent his legs and sat up straighter. He looked tired all of a sudden.

"You ever think about quittin'?" he asked.

The question surprised Ferret. It sounded sincere, and sincere was something you usually didn't hear from other laners. Everybody had a blade to sharpen, and if you didn't watch close, you'd get it in the back. But Gworn's question didn't sound like a knife being honed. For a moment, he almost dropped his guard. Not quite.

"Sometimes. But what would I do? I don't have anything anybody wants to buy, leastways nothing I want to sell."

Gworn leaned back and sighed. "Yeah. I hear you."

Ferret felt uncomfortable. This was not a conversation he'd had before, and not one that led to pleasant thoughts. The road ahead loomed long and tricky, and while it was the only thing he knew how to do, he was pretty sure it eventually would take him nowhere. Free, all right, but at a price, always. There was the danger, sure, but more than that, there was worse, the being alone. Trusting anybody else usually got you hurt. It was one against the universe and fuck you pal if you get in my way.

But something about Gworn touched him, made him feel, if only for a moment, somehow safer. As though Gworn had
risked
something by talking to him.

"Uh, look," Gworn said. "I got a place. Not much, but it'll sleep two. If you're interested. No wires on the offer."

Ferret looked at Gworn. Jesu, he was no more than a boy underneath all that leather and dazzle. And what Gworn was feeling had to be the same thing he was feeling: lonely. It was a big galaxy, and the lanes weren't places to be vulnerable. They'd eat you alive out there, and smile around your splintered bones.

So you toughened or you didn't make it. Ferret was tough, and he knew Gworn had to be tough, too, and yet what he felt at this moment was what he saw from Gworn. He was tired and he was lonely.

Maybe, just maybe, they could trust each other. Eventually. It was risk, more than theft, but what the fuck—everything was a risk. Gworn just happened to come along at the right place and the right time.

Maybe it was more than coincidence. Maybe it was like fate or something.

"Sure," Ferret said, his voice clear of sarcasm. "Why the hell not?"

So it began. At first, it was warm bodies together, hands and mouths and nerve endings, touching, but with eyes open, giving, but holding back, taking, but with caution.

After a time, it seemed more comfortable, two against the road, and so keeping the dark at bay was only half as hard.

A few months later, they loosened up, and began to see that they could trust each other. And why not?

They had nobody else, and everybody needed somebody.

So they slept together, though it was no big deal; ran together; stole together. They laughed while running from vigilantes on Hadiya; got stoned stupid and nearly drowned while on Maro; scored high on a theft of suckee powder on Kaplan, then lost the money gambling. They were young and invincible, nothing could stop them, now that they were together. They were Ferret and Gworn: touch one and the other would be on your back. It built up into something, something more than they'd had before. It was scary at times, exposing yourself, but Ferret learned to enjoy it. A friend was something he had never had, and he was sure he would have cut off his arm for Gworn.

Nearly a year after they met, Gworn disappeared for a few days on the frontier world of Greaves. At first, Ferret didn't worry; they didn't dog each other's shadow, and there were spaces in their togetherness. But after nearly a week, he began to get really nervous. They were due to meet on the spinward outbound ship, and it was leaving in two hours. Where was he? Had something happened to him?

Finally, Gworn showed up, grinning like a wirehead and looking five kilos lighter.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Ferret managed, his voice quivering from the relief of tension. A minute earlier, he had been scared; now, he was angry.

"Hey, flo'man, I spent some time in the woods. I hit a mark with some pull, and he had sniffers all over the place looking for me."

"Yeah, well, you could have let me know you were doing something stretchy, you know? I would have helped." His anger warred with his relief, and the relief won. Gworn was all right. An asslick nodick, but that was fine, as long as he was okay.

Gworn grinned, white teeth against chocolate skin. "Nope. This was my caper, Willie. Had to be. It's your birthday today, check?"

Ferret stared at him. "How'd you know that? I never said."

"I might have accidentally viewed your old ID or something. You know, while you were asleep."

"You turd." It was said without heat, and as much a part of their normal conversation as insulting each other's penis size and sexual abilities.

"Hey, don't spaz up, pal. I… got something for you."

Ferret was curious. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. A present."

They sat in the small cube they'd rented at the port. It was bigger than a sleep stall, but not much. Both of them sat on the bed, and Gworn tendered a heavy cloth bag. "Here."

Ferret took the bag, then glanced at Gworn's face. The white teeth shone against the dark skin, the smile full of anticipation. "We got to get to the liner," Ferret said.

"We'll make it. Look at what I got you."

Ferret opened the bag. Inside was a small plastic box, heavy, and it rattled when he shook it. Next to it was what looked like a natural fabric skinshirt, soaked with some kind of aromatic lube oil. Whatever was inside the oily cloth was real heavy. He unwrapped it.

The room's light gleamed from a polished metal surface. Ferret felt his breath catch.

"It's a gun," Gworn said.

Ferret looked up from the handgun at his friend. "I know that. Think I'm stupid?"

"Yeah, I truly do. They could write tapes about it, Ferret. Volumes and volumes—How Stupid Ferret Is, In Fifty-one Languages. It'd be like a never-ending story, they could keep adding to it for years."

"Where'd you get this?"

"Where you think I been all week? There's a collector in the Outbrush, he's got a whole room full of these. Not like this, but different kinds. Going back seven or eight hundred years, some of them."

Ferret lifted the weapon. It was bigger than the cheap hand wands he'd carried and never even fired in practice. The handle was of some close-grained dark wood, and the weapon was plated in some shiny metal, nickel or stainfree, he figured. There was a trigger, surrounded by a small loop of metal, a fluted cylinder set in a frame, and an external cocking mechanism. The barrel was about twelve or thirteen centimeters long, with a rounded delta-shaped ridge on the top end. As he moved the weapon around, to look at the other side, Ferret felt a sense of power and of rightness about its being in his hand. It was as if it belonged there, somehow. He had never felt such a sensation of fitness about any object before. How odd.

There was writing engraved along the length of the barrel: on the top, it said: COLT'S PT. F.A. MFG. CO. HARTFORD CT. U.S.A. Along the side, in smaller characters, it said: COLT SINGLE ACTION FRONTIER SCOUT .22 CAL. This last, .22, was repeated on the cylinder, next to the symbols L.R.; underneath the loop surrounding the trigger were some numbers; there was a tiny picture of some four-footed animal standing on its hind legs, holding something in its teeth, on the left side of the frame.

Ferret was flushed with excitement when he turned to grin at Gworn. It had to be worth a fortune. "What do the words mean? I recognize some of the symbols, but I don't know the language."

"Old style Terran," Gworn said. "I couldn't find the instruction manual for this model, but I did find a data ball on how to fire one similar."

Ferret waved the gun around, getting used to the feel of it. "Is it charged?" He pointed the gun at the wall.

"No. You have to use these." Gworn opened the box and removed some tiny cylinders. They were shiny metal or hard plastic, flat on one end and cone-shaped on the other.

Ferret glanced at the small bits of metal. Almost unconsciously, he thumbed back the protruding mechanism on the rear of the gun. It clicked several times before it caught and locked into place. He pointed the gun at the end of the bed and squeezed the trigger. The vaguely hammer-shaped cocking lever snapped down with a sharp
click
, and a fine spray of lube showered from the impact point.

Ferret looked back at Gworn, and grinned widely. He reached out to hug the other young man. "Jesu, Benny, it's—it's, I, Jesu-!"

"Hey, don't get maud on me, shitbrain." But he didn't move away from Ferret's embrace. He put his hand on Ferret's shoulder and rubbed gently at the muscle.

"Nobody ever gave me anything this valuable before."

"It's okay, pal. Really."

"Where is that data ball? I want to see how to operate it."

"We'll miss the outbound. Can't do that, can we?"

"Fuck the outbound!"

"Right! The lanes are always open."

Ferret looked at his friend, his face serious. This was important, the effort that went into it. Nobody had ever cared enough to do something like this before, not even his mother. When he spoke, his voice trembled, almost as if he might cry. Not that he would cry, of course, it just sounded like that. "Thanks, Benny. Thanks a lot."

Gworn looked uncomfortable, as if embarrassed by Ferret's gratitude, and for a moment, Ferret was pretty sure he saw Benny's eyes begin to tear, before the dark youth blinked and turned to glance at the door, like maybe he heard somebody there. "Yeah, well, I wanted you to have something special, you know? Something from me."

Gworn turned back toward Ferret and they both smiled at each other. Ferret said softly, "Yeah, just wait until your birthday, asslick."

"You don't even know when that is, micro-cock."

"Hell I don't. You sleep too, pal."

Both of them laughed, and life felt really good to Ferret. As good as it had ever gotten.

The data ball was of some help. The loading of the chambers was somewhat different, being from the right side of the weapon, called a "revolver," instead of the left, as in the demo. The small cartridges consisted of a metal shell, filled with explosive, and a lead pellet or "bullet," also rigged to explode when it connected with its target. The revolver held six of these cartridges when fully charged, although the data ball warned that leaving an empty chamber under the hammer was a wise precaution, in case the weapon was jolted or even dropped, to prevent accidental discharge.

Ferret couldn't wait to try it. He and Gworn stole a flitter and took a ride into the forest that came nearly to the edge of the port. Greaves was a frontier planet, and wood was thick all over the place. The two drove thirty or forty klicks away from the port town into a desolate area, and hid the flitter out of sight from the road. From the data ball, it was apparent that the revolver would make some noise when discharged, and they didn't want to be noticed.

They set up a dozen plastic food containers taken from a restaurant, ranging in size from a drink can to ten liters. Ferret loaded five of the cartridges into the revolver, being careful to omit the one under the hammer. As the weapon was cocked, the cylinder revolved, placing a loaded chamber under the firing pin.

"Well, go ahead," Gworn said.

"No. You go first."

"Hey, it's your gun. I gave it to you."

"You nearly got nailed taking it. You should do it first."

Gworn nodded. "Okay."

He took the weapon.

"You're supposed to line up the front ramp with the notch in the rear," Ferret said. "And align that on the target."

"Hey, I saw the fucking data ball, jerk-oh. I know what to do."

He extended the weapon to arm's length and pointed it vaguely in the direction of the lined-up containers, which were about six or seven meters away.

"Okay, here goes—"

A bomb went off.

Ferret dropped into a crouch, looking for the trouble, as the gun fell from Gworn's surprised fingers and thumped onto the thick humus.

Ferret straightened as he realized the source of the explosion. The gun.

Gworn stared at the fallen weapon. "Did it explode?"

Ferret lifted the gun and dusted the bits of moss and leaf from it. There was no sign of damage. "I think that's the sound it always makes."

"You're damping my drive! Hell, you set that thing off in civilization and every cool for five klicks would come running."

"Right about that. What were you firing at?"

"The biggest juice can."

Ferret walked to the row of containers. "No marks on it. I guess you missed."

"Anybody would. All that noise. And it jumped in my hand, too."

"Want to try it again?"