The Venus Belt (33 page)

“If I wasn’t, we wouldn’t be talkin’ ‘bout it!” She pointed to the r
a
pidly widening outer door—she’d cycled us through, heedless of the risk.

We stumbled out onto the rocky surface. Behind, some radio equiv
a
lent of the alarm still blared: “
Alert! Alert! All personnel take cover! Alert! Alert!
”
Above our heads a swarm of heavily armed flivvers circled like vultures, Darling guns on either fender and rocket tubes protruding from their a
r
mor-plated bellies. The muzzles of their weapons flashed and sparkled; a midwestern dust-devil churned before us on the not-so-distant horizon, a miniature tornado of swiftly marching high-velocity death.

I threw an arm up and
fired
!
The Webley smashed my hand, its Owen tube wide of the mark. I racked up a second, aligned the sights and fired again. This time an aggressor skewed and wobbled in its orbit, throwing sparks and rapidly diffusing smoke. There was a flare, the buffet of a shockwave, and they were gone in a million fragments.

One down, several dozen yet to go.

“
You on the surface!
”
demanded an amplified, authoritative voice. “
Stand where you are! Drop your weapons!
”

Win Bear wasn’t going back to any cell! “Scatter!” I hollered, ignoring my own orders by gathering Clarissa to me. We threw ourselves into a crater, bouncing up to toss a little mayhem at the enemy. I scored on a s
e
cond and a third flivver. Is it three kills or five to make an ace?

Four cars dropped out of the orbiting armada, settled in a broad-flung square around us. Men emerged, various other critters with toes in their suitfeet, running low, swinging deadly looking fléchette-guns. Overhead a smartsuited cetacean squadron jetted from the vehicles, chin-mounted lasers twinkling in the starlight as they tossed and twisted, trying to draw a bead. The rock beside me fused and smoked.

I
fired
. A shotgunner crumpled, hanging three feet off the ground, squirting blood until his suit sealed. I fired again and sensed the thrum of Clari
s
sa’s smaller weapon on my shoulder. There was a flash as Lucy’s .50 joined the chorus, chewing impressive hunks out of the enemy’s grounded flivvers. The different-colored flash of Karyl’s laser accounted for two more bad guys.

As I groped for another magazine, the world exploded around me. When it settled down again, my left arm wouldn’t work—sensible, given the fist-size chunk of tissue missing from my shoulder. A dozen steel needles sprouted from the wound like Lilliputian arrows. Oddly, it didn’t hurt a bit.

Clarissa ripped the nutrient cuff off my right arm and slapped it over the wound. Now
that
hurt; I sort of faded for a moment, and when I joined the universe again, there were a lot of extra shadows on the crater floor. Our ersatz foxhole was ringed solidly with angry-looking gunmen pointing their fléchette-guns at the bridge of my nose.

A bore that size, you can actually see the shell up in the breech.

I holstered the Webley, suddenly too tired to think, and unbuckled the belt one-handed. Across the rock, more movement. “Here we go again,” muttered Lucy, being frogmarched from behind her shelter. “Take yer poxy mitts off me, you...
Cossacks!
”

“Shuddup!” A burly black-and-silver-clad figure signaled to his only slightly less-impressive minions, who gathered up our guns and Clarissa’s bag. Gesturing us toward the lock we’d come through, he waited for us to obey, then followed. My last glimpse of the surface was of a hundred cars disgorging soldiers; my only satisfaction the number of stretcher cases they were dragging. Come to think of it, I could have used a free ride, myself. Karyl seemed to be okay, Clarissa and Lucy were unharmed.

Okay, I’d settle for that.

They hup-hoop-heeped us through the corridor. “Where are you taking us?” my wife demanded, pointing at the wounded all around us. “These people are hurt—they need attention!”

The guard leader chuckled. “Don’t worry, honey, the boss’ll give
you
plenty of attention! Now
move!
”
We reached an all-too-familiar-looking door. He straightened his shoulders, prodded a couple of his sagging troops erect. “Look smart, you monkeys!” It was Malaise’s office, of course. The head goon rapped. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Karyl loosening the welding torch in his belt. The seams of Lucy’s hidden gun compartment were slowly growing wider. I slipped a hand up to the neck of my suit, ready to dive for the Bauer. If we were doomed, we might as well go out in style.

The door slid aside, the room beyond was dark.

“Come in, Captain! Confound it, where’s the lightswitch!” The glare sprang up around us. There, leaning over the desk looking angry as hell, was Mr. Big himself, J. V. Tormount.

Known to his constituents as Olongo Featherstone-Haugh.

“F

ifty-seven dead, eight seriously disabled, half a dozen walking woun
d
ed. Win, how could you
do
it?” Olongo wiped a paw across his tired expression and sighed. “The policeman in you, I suppose. Once an authoritarian, always a—”

“What the hell did you expect, long-stemmed roses? Your thugs lock me up and starve me for a week, I’ll be
goddamned
if I don’t burn a few, first chance I get!” I elbowed away the goon in charge of me and peeked beneath Clarissa’s slapdash bandaging. It still looked like strawberry shortcake, the dozen or so fléchettes embedded in the muscle beginning to throb discor
d
antly.

Olongo recoiled. “You were a
prisoner
here?” He paused for a long time in astonished reassessment. “I’d give anything to believe that, Win. But why did you open fire on the very people coming to rescue you?”

“Mr. President, I don’t know who’s kidding who—whom—but we’d damn well better get it sorted out. Hell, I thought you’d thrown in with the Hamiltonians. Didn’t these screws of yours call you ‘Tormount’?”

The security chief peeled off his hood and took a belligerent step t
o
ward me. I met him halfway and we tried to see who could grind his teeth the loudest. He won, but I had a three-tooth handicap.

“
Gunny!
“ Olongo ordered. Now I knew why the son of a bitch looked so familiar—it was Gunnison Griswold, himself.
Brrr
.
“Get these people some chairs—and see to your wounded. Clarissa, apparently I’ve no right to ask it, but would you mind helping, dear?” She nodded and repo
s
sessed her kit, taking the local militia with her into the hall. I sat down and began e
x
ploring for a cigar.

Olongo closed his eyes, resting his broad black face in his broad black hands. “‘Tormount’ I am, too. A lodge name, Win: Altruistic Protective E
n
clave of Simians...” He spread his enormous arms, practically filling the room. “My late lodge-master’s idea of humor.”

Lucy, trundling out to help Clarissa, paused in the doorway. “Better a
n
swer his question, old anthropoid. How’d y’get hooked up with Fed
e
ralists? Them vermin never had a kind intention toward nonhumans that
I
knowed about.”

The President slapped his paws on the desk and rose, discovering, just like Malaise, that you can’t pace in a hundredth-gee. He wound up leaning his massive bulk on a filing cabinet—a real one this time. It groaned and a drawer popped open. “I scarcely know where to begin, my friends. Aphr
o
dite, Ltd., is as far from a Hamiltonian conspiracy as you could imagine: a relatively simple engineering scheme—though I suppose the scale of the thing might surprise you. I only learned recently that we had unwittingly become a
front
for something much more sinister. Which, of course, is why I came out here to investigate.”

“You, too?” I shook my head in disbelief.

“
Me, too!
” replied a walking stack of print-outs which emerged from an adjoining room. “Where y’want these, Unc?”

“
Koko!
” Lucy beat me to it, but not by much. The furry little twerp set the hardcopies on the desk, flipped one of its bungees over to hold them, and ran to embrace Lucy and my wife in turn. She came back with the great granddaddy of all embarrassed, guilty looks. “Boss...”

“Don’t call
me
‘boss’! You were fired the day you left Navigation Rock—in Lucy’s car!” Was that a tear rolling down her leathery cheek? Maybe it was just my cigar smoke.

She sniffed, “Aw, Win, I...”

“
Ahem!
” Olongo conjured up a stogie of his own, lit it with a flourish, and, having gotten our attention thus, abused it with a long and thoug
h
tful pause. Finally: “My boy, she acted at my request—reluctantly, for what it’s worth—to help me ferret out what was going sour with our operations here...”

***

“Sour” wasn’t quite the word. Aphrodite had been conceived nearly ten years earlier when the then-Vice President and his baby niece were traveling in the asteroids on casual vacation. He’d stayed a while, then left the fled
g
ling enterprise in what he’d believed were trustworthy hands, returning only for rare inspections, taking care of the business end back home on Earth.

Early in the venture, Voltaire Malaise had caught wind of it. Instead of exposing it to the viewing public, he’d insisted on buying in. Olongo’s par
t
ners had assented in the interests of secrecy, and out of admiration for the newsman’s enthusiasm for space exploration. With the passing of time, the Voice of the Stars assumed an increasingly central role, beco
m
ing virtual overseer of operations in the Belt. Until recently, when lagging production, scheduling and cost overruns, and a rash of mysterious di
s
appearances in the Nomad Cluster and elsewhere had prompted Olongo to initiate his first inquiries.

Whereupon the conspirators had tried to knock him off via remote control.

***

“Thus, my decision to pursue the matter further in person. And it served a second purpose, as well,” admitted Olongo, “keeping me out of sight—and
alive
.” Somehow, with that cigar in his hand, he made me think of Ernie Kovacs. All he needed was a xylophone and a derby.

I grunted. “Koko was a backup—or maybe another clay pigeon—
like me?
” I turned to glance out the door where Clarissa was administering ele
c
tronarcosis. She looked up, smiled, and went right back to work.

Koko giggled. “A little of both, I guess. Uncle President needed elbow room; I proposed to muddy the water—be a noisy, visible dive
r
sion—while he simply disappeared. No one would ever suspect—”

“I
thought
I recognized that last-minute invalid they wheeled aboard the
Bonaventura
, a reddish-pelted, elderly—”

“
Elderly?
”
Olongo looked insulted, then philosophical. “Well, perhaps not
all
of that medical apparatus was window dressing.” He blew a smoke ring. “It was a bloody rough ride! I spent several days convalescing while Koko had to hop, keeping you—”

“Fat, dumb, and happy?” I essayed.

“
Company
,” insisted the gorilla, “also running errands trying to find out what was happening here on Bester. The Federalists’ ‘solar flare’ didn’t make that an easy task.”

I looked my erstwhile assistant over. “You forgot to mention commi
t
ting burglaries,
Uncle Fagin
!”

They both shriveled. First time I’d ever had that effect on a gorilla. I kind of liked it. “Er, uh...” offered Koko.

“Umm, ah
um!
” Olongo added for clarification.

“Forget it, you two ratfinks. I finally figured it out, too: the Russian a
s
sassin dropped the wrong medallion for bait in the cargo hold. I wasn’t supposed to get a brain-bore controller. In fact I wasn’t supposed to get anything but dead. But it screwed up the Hamiltonians’ plans; their hi
t
lady had to proceed thereafter, however inefficiently, on preprogrammed sku
l
duggery. That’s why my luggage got swiped—and it’s why Koko turned my stateroom upside-down. You wanted that medal for your own investig
a
tion!”

Olongo spread his hands. “We’d heard about the brain-bore, and—”

“I said forget it. I might’ve done the same, in your place—
though I’d probably have confided in my friends
. Did I hurt you much, incompetent appre
n
tice?”