The Sam Gunn Omnibus (115 page)

I m
ade a smile at
his sudden Western folksiness. Sam was a con man, and everybody knew it. That made
it all the easier for me to con him. I’m a scam artist, myself, par excellence,
and it ain’t bragging if you can do it. Still, I’d been very roundabout in
approaching Sam. Conning a con man takes some finesse, let me tell you.

About a year ago I talked myself
into a job with the Honorable Jill Meyers, former U.S. Senator and American
representative on the International Court of Justice. Judge Meyers was an old,
old friend of Sam’s, dating back to the early days when they’d both been
astronauts working for the old NASA.

I
had passed myself
off to Meyers’s people as Garret G. Garrison III, the penniless son of one of
the oldest families in Texas. I had doctored up a biography and a dozen or so
phony news media reports. With just a bit of money in the right hands, when
Meyers’s people checked me out in the various web nets, there was enough in
place to convince them that I was poor but bright, talented and honest.

Three out of four ain’t bad. I was
certainly poor, bright and talented.

Jill Meyers wanted to marry Sam.
Why, I’ll never figure out. Sam was—is!—a philandering, womanizing,
skirt-chasing bundle of testosterone who falls in love the way Pavlov’s dogs
salivated when they heard a bell ring. But Jill Meyers wanted to marry the
little scoundrel, and Sam had even proposed to her—once he ran out of all the
other sources of funding that he could think of. Did I mention that Judge
Meyers comes from Old Money? She does: the kind of New England family that
still has the first shilling they made in the molasses-for-rum-for-slaves trade
back in colonial days.

Anyway, I had sweet-talked my way
into Judge Meyers’s confidence (and worked damned hard for her, too, I might
add). So when they set a date for the wedding, she asked me to join Sam’s staff
and keep an eye on him. She didn’t want him to disappear and leave her standing
at the altar.

Sam took me in without a qualm,
gave me the title of “special consultant and advisor to the CEO,” and put me in
the office next to his. He knew I was Justice Meyers’s enforcer, but it didn’t
seem to bother him a bit.

Sam and I got along beautifully,
like kindred souls, really. Once I told him the long, sad (and totally false)
story of my life, he took to me like a big brother.

“Gar,” he told me more than once, “we’re
two of a kind. Always trying to get out from under the big guys.”

I
agreed fervently.

I’ve been a grifter all my life,
ever since I sweet-talked Sister Agonista into overlooking the fact that she
caught me cheating on the year-end exams in sixth grade. It was a neat scam for
an eleven-year-old: I let her catch me, I let her think she had scared me onto
the path of righteousness, and she was so happy about it that she never tumbled
to the fact that I had sold answer sheets to half the kids in the school.

Anyway, life was always kind of
rough-and-tumble for me. You hit it big here, and the next time you barely get
out with the hide on your back. I had been at it long enough so that by now I was
slowing down, getting a little tired, looking for the one big score that would
let me wrap it all up and live the rest of my life in ill-gotten ease. I knew
Sam Gunn was the con man’s con man: the little rogue had made more fortunes
than the New York Stock Exchange—and lost them just as quickly as he could go
chasing after some new rainbow. I figured that if I cozied up real close to Sam
I could snatch his next pot of gold before he had a chance to piss it away.

So when Judge Meyers asked me to
keep an eye on Sam I went out to the Beethoven habitat that same day, alert and
ready for my big chance to nail the last and best score.

Amanda Cunningham Humphries might
just be that opportunity, I realized.

So now I’m bringing a tray of lunch
in for Sam and Mrs. Humphries, setting it all out on Sam’s desk while they
chat, and then retreating to my own little office so they can talk in privacy.

Privacy, hah! I slipped the acoustic amplifier out of my desk drawer and
stuck it on the wall that my office shared with Sam’s. Once I had wormed the
earplug in, I could hear everything they said.

Which wasn’t all that much. Mrs. Humphries was very guarded about it all.

“I have a coded video chip that I want you to deliver to my ex-husband,”
she told Sam.

“Okay,” he said, “but you could have a courier service make the delivery,
even out to the Belt. I don’t see why—”

“My ex-husband is Lars Fuchs.”

Bingo! I don’t know how Sam reacted to that news but I nearly jumped out
of my chair to turn a somersault. Her first husband was Lars Fuchs! Fuchs the
pirate. Fuchs the renegade. Fuchs and Humphries had fought a minor war out
there in the Belt a few years earlier. It had ended when Humphries’s mercenaries
had finally captured Fuchs and the people of Ceres had exiled him for life.

For years now Fuchs had wandered through the Belt, an exile eking out a
living as a miner, a rock rat. Making a legend of himself. The Flying Dutchman
of the Asteroid Belt.

It must have been right after he was exiled, I guessed, that Amanda
Cunningham had divorced Fuchs and married his bitter rival, Humphries. I later
found out that I was right. That’s exactly what had happened. But with a twist.
She divorced Fuchs and married Humphries on the condition that Humphries would
stop trying to track Fuchs down and have him killed. Exile was punishment
enough, she convinced Humphries. But the price for that tender mercy was her
body. From the haunted look of her, maybe the price included her soul.

Now she wanted to send a message to her ex. Why? What was in the message?
Humphries would pay a small fortune to find out. No, I decided; he’d pay a
large
fortune. To me.

MRS. HUMPHRIES DIDN’T
have all that much more to say and she left the office
immediately after they finished their lunch, bundled once more into that
shapeless black coat with its hood pulled up to hide her face.

I bounced back into Sam’s office. He was sitting back in his chair, the
expression on his face somewhere between exalted and terrified.

“She needs my help,” Sam murmured, as if talking in his sleep.

“Our help,” I corrected.

Sam blinked, shook himself, and sat up erect. He nodded and grinned at me.
“I knew I could count on you, Gar.”

Then I remembered that I was supposed to be working for Judge Meyers.

“HE’S GOING
0UT to the Belt?” Judge Meyers’s chestnut-brown eyes
snapped at me. “And you’re letting him do it?”

Some people called Jill Meyers plain, or even unattractive (behind her
back, of course), but I always thought of her as kind of cute. In a way, she
looked almost like Sam’s sister might: her face was round as a pie, with a
stubby little nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Her hair was light brown and
straight as can be; she kept it in a short, no-nonsense bob and refused to let
stylists fancy it up for her.

Her image in my desk screen clearly showed, though, that she was angry.
Not at Sam. At me.

“Garrison, I sent you to keep that little so-and-so on track for our
wedding, and now you’re going out to the Belt with him?”

“It’ll only be for a few days,” I said. Truthfully, that’s all I expected
at that point.

Her anger abated a skosh; suspicion replaced it.

“What’s this all about, Gar?”

If I told her that Sam had gone bonkers over Amanda Humphries she’d be up
at Beethoven on the next shuttle, so I temporized a little.

“He’s looking into a new business opportunity at Ceres. It should only
take a few days.”

Fusion torch ships could zip out to the Belt at a constant acceleration.
They cost an arm and two legs, but Sam was in his “spare no expenses” mode, and
I agreed with him. We could zip out to the Belt in four days, deliver the message
and be home again in time for the wedding. We’d even have a day or so to spare,
I thought.

One thing about Judge Meyers: she couldn’t stay angry for more than a few
minutes at a time. But from the expression on her face, she remained highly
suspicious.

“I want a call from you every day, Gar,” she said. “I know you can’t keep
Sam on a leash; nobody can. But I want to know where you are and what you’re
doing.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course.”

“Every day.”

“Right.”

Easier said than done.

SAM RENTED A
torch ship, the smallest he could find, just a set of
fusion engines and propellant tanks with a crew pod attached. It was called
Achernar,
and its accommodations were really
spartan. Sam piloted it himself.

“That’s why I keep my astronaut’s qualifications up to date with the
chicken-shit IAA,” he told me, with a mischievous wink. “No sense spending money
on a pilot when I can fly these birds myself.”

For four days we raced out to Ceres, accelerating at a ha
l
f-g most of the time, then decelerating at a
g-and-a-ha
l
f. Sam wanted to go even
faster, but the IAA wouldn’t approve his original plan, and he had no choice.
If he didn’t follow their flight plan the IAA controllers at Ceres would
impound
Achernar
and send us back to Earth
for a disciplinary hearing.

So Sam stuck to their rules, fussing and fidgeting every centimeter of the
way. He hated bureaucracies and bureaucrats. He especially loathed being forced
to do things their way instead of his own.

The trip out was less than luxurious, let me tell you. But the
deceleration was absolute agony for me; I felt as if I weighed about a ton and
I was scared even to try to stand up.

Sam took the strain cheerfully. “Double strength jockstrap, Gar,” he told
me, grinning. “That’s the secret of my success.”

I stayed seated as much as possible. I even slept in the copilot’s
reclinable chair, wishing that the ship had been primitive enough to include a
relief tube among its equipment fixtures.

PEOPLE WHO DON’T
know any better think that the rock rats out in the Belt
are a bunch of rough-and-tumble, crusty, hard-fisted prospectors and miners.
Well, sure, there are some like that, but most of the rock rats are
university-educated engineers and technicians. After all, they work with
spacecraft and tele-operated machinery out at the frontier of human
civilization. They’re out there in the dark, cold, mostly empty Asteroid Belt,
on their own, the nearest help usually so far away that it’s useless to them.
They don’t use mules and shovels, and they don’t have barroom brawls or
shootouts.

Most nights, that is.

Sam’s first stop after we docked at the habitat Chrysalis was the bar.

The Chrysalis habitat, by the way, was something like a circular, rotating
junkyard. The rock rats had built it over the years by putting used or
abandoned spacecraft together, hooking them up like a Tinker-toy merry-go-round
and spinning the whole contraption to produce an artificial gravity inside. It
was better than living in Ceres itself, with its minuscule gravity and the
constant haze of dust that you stirred up with every move you made. The
earliest rock rats actually did live inside Ceres. That’s why they built the
ramshackle Chrysalis as quickly as they could.

I worried about hard radiation, but Sam told me the habitat had a
superconducting shield, the same as spacecraft use.

“You’re as safe as you’d be on Earth,” Sam assured me. “Just about.”

It was the
just about
that scared me.

“Why are we going to the bar?” I asked, striding along beside him down the
habitat’s central corridor. Well, maybe “central corridor” is an overstatement.
We were walking down the main passageway of one of the spacecraft that made up
Chrysalis. Up ahead was a hatch that connected to the next spacecraft component.
And so on. We could walk a complete circle and come back to the airlock where
Achernar
was docked, if we’d wanted to.

“Gonna meet the mayor,” said Sam.

The mayor?

Well, anyway, we went straight to the bar. I had expected a kind of rough
place, maybe like a biker joint. Instead the place looked like a sophisticated
cocktail lounge.

It was called the Crystal Palace, and it was as quiet and subdued as one
of those high-class watering holes in Old Manhattan. Soft lighting, plush faux-
l
eather wall coverings, muted Mozart coming
through the speakers set in the overhead. It was mid-afternoon and there were
only about a dozen people in the place, a few at the bar, the rest in
high-backed booths that gave them plenty of privacy.

Sam sauntered up to the bar and perched on one of the swiveling stools. He
spun around a few times, taking in the local scenery. The only woman in the
place was the human bartender, and she wasn’t much better looking than the
robots that trundled drinks out to the guys in the booths.