The Venus Belt (8 page)

Koko looked up from a coffee-stained display case where she’d been drooling over some new engine of destruction. “Medieval is right, firmly rooted in the bedrock of—”

“Koko, when I need your help, I’ll send up a semaphore—maybe even a
whole
phore.” I glowered right back at the ‘smith. “Can you put the sights on, or can’t you?”

He rubbed a grimy thumb over his unshaven chin. “Well, it means u
n
shipping the front coil, and I gotta find someplace t’mount the rear sight. Take me at least a week. Wanna loaner?”

“Make it twenty-four hours. And what have you got?”

“Well, how about a nice .14 Edison—one in the back room I got stuck with on a bad debt—you bein’ an electric man?”

“I’m a
Smith & Wesson
man. Tell me, what have you got that’s
very
small?”

“Small?” He rummaged around in the fascinating debris under the counter. “Nothin’ that’d interest you. What’s a Smith & Wrestling, some kinda European number? Got a couple of kids’ guns here.” He handed me a tiny weapon, no bigger than a matchbook, marked Kolibri. “Electric .09—probably got a barrel liner around here’ll beef it up to .17, so you can use your own ammo. Single-shot, though. What you want with a dinky li
t
tle—”

“Ever hear of a holdout gun?” He hadn’t. In this whole enormous tri
g
ger-happy civilization, concealed backup guns were a novelty. I d
e
cided to skip it—I could get along for a day or two unarmed. I persuaded him to complete the alterations in two days, but I wanted to get some practice with the Webley first.

“Hold on, what’s this?” The gunsmith had the rotor housing off a
l
ready, peering down the barrel from the muzzle end. He fumbled absen
t
ly on the bench behind him for a brass cleaning rod.

“Something wrong?” Odd, I’d figured Glongo for a fellow who’d keep his hardware spotless, inside and out.

“Dunno. Let’s—” The rod went halfway down the barrel. And stopped.

I took the weapon and sighted down the smooth, shiny bore. Not much to get dirty in there. The .17 caliber needles, magnetically suspended in flight, never contacted the inside walls. A bias in the windings put spin on the projectiles. “Looks okay to me. I can see daylight just fine.”

“Yeah, and you’ll see
stars,
too, right before the end. There’s som
e
thing—” He put some pressure on the rod. It bent a little, then slid stu
b
bornly until an object popped out on the counter and rolled to the floor. He squatted with a grunt and picked it up.

“
Here’s your
‘daylight,’ mister.” It was a tiny, bore-size cylinder of incre
d
ibly transparent plastic, about a quarter of an inch long. “Fella, you pull the trigger on that thing—at eleven thousand foot-seconds—it woulda blown you clean away. Couldn’ta got in there by accident. Som
e
body don’t like you.”

***

“
El Presidente,
”
I told the terminal, turning my back. “
Boop!
”
the m
a
chine answered. I wheeled, taking up a little on the trigger. A brilliant spot of crimson splashed the target center, followed by a pair of steel needles as I pulled the trigger through. I shifted to the next silhouette, and on to the third. A fast reload, and once over lightly. Score: 42. Time: 9.67.

This was going to take some practice.

I examined the Webley: ambidextrous controls—something U.S. man
u
facturers had never gotten around to, as if a seventh of their clientele weren’t southpaws—the safety fit nicely under my thumb, and, further fo
r
ward, a lever, marked with three positions. The first was SAFE, the second had delivered one shot at a time, each time I pulled the tri
g
ger. Now I slid the lever to the middle BURST position and called for a target.

D-d-dit
! Three ragged holes in the plastic. Experimenting with a knob at the back of the rotor housing allowed me to adjust the burst-length an
y
where from two shots to a dozen. I set it on five and left it there.

Next lever-position was
full
automatic: an empty magazine (about four seconds) later, and the plastic target looked like a sheet of badly w
o
ven lace. I switched back to BURST and called for a solid target, something appro
x
imating the fluid characteristics of living tissue.

D-d-d-d-dit
!
When the ventilators finished pulling steam out of the room, I took a good look at the pseudocarcass downrange, and set the BURST control back to three. No use getting penalized for unnecessary roughness.

I left the Webley with the ‘smith, reminding myself to double wha
t
ever his bill came to—small payment to the guy who saves your life. Question: was it
my
life the sabotage had been aimed at terminating, or Olongo’s?

Koko complained so loudly about my “social nakedness” that I gave in and went up to my cabin for the Rezin. The Telecom was blinking on and off in red—probably my apprentice downstairs hollering at me to get a move on. Strapping the unwieldy knife to my hip, I hurried back down to see the sights.

***

One whole tower, the blue, of course, was for porpoises and killer whales. I resisted Koko’s urgings that we rent some scuba gear, following the air-filled parallel corridors, instead. We stared at the marine critters on the other side of the glass; they stared right back at us. In a sort of aquator
i
um, they were holding a class in the use of smartsuits.

Funny, I hadn’t thought of smartsuits for the water-walkers. The i
n
structor was a chimp, the same guy I’d signed us up with for later in the week. Floating in the middle of the theater, he was demonstrating the a
d
vantages of rubber spacewear, pointing out to the cetaceans that, in zero gee, they could maneuver in a
waterless
environment just as well as any a
n
thropoid. I was tempted to have the engineer stop the train so I could see that, but I couldn’t find the emergency cord.

Without much effort, we soon found ourselves turned around and completely lost in a cargo area deep within the
Bonaventura
’s rectangular stern, something like a huge apartment building parking garage, filled from wall to wall with the slumbering shapes of a thousand inert hovercraft, gleaming in the subterranean twilight.

I always thought it was nifty how Apollo took an aluminum Lizzie to the Moon. Confederates, too, adore any contraption that’ll move under its own impetus, and they’ve harnessed every conceivable form (and not a few
in
conceivable forms) of energy to operate them: steam, internal combustion, electricity, flywheels; there’ve been attempts to run hoverbuggies on eno
r
mous rubber bands, spring clockworks, charges of dynamite, now even thermonuclear fusion.

Secretly playing Prussian War ace in a cloud of impeller dust, reading quietly while their computer-guided vehicles whisk them down the Gree
n
way at five hundred miles per, Confederates don’t really care very much about the power source. In the portable privacy of their road machines, they’ve discovered a far greater fountain of energy, a sort of deep conte
m
plative self-reliance which is the wellspring of all their “lesser” miracles.

Then I looked closer: these “hovercraft” had no impellers, no skirts, just fusion-powered drivers, perfect little copies of the monumental hel
l
burners pushing
Bonaventura
along by now at several hundred
thousand
miles an hour. So these were flivvers, miniature personal spaceships which were the asteroid equivalent of the private automobile. Reminded me of an a
r
gument I’d overheard in Denver, something about mass tra
n
sit.

“But that’s exactly what we’ve got already!” insisted Jenny (I forget which one). “And it takes you from exactly where you are to precisely where you want to go, whenever you want, in comfort, relative safety, and total privacy—at a hell of a lot less money per passenger mile than any BART or Metro system. Look it up: I’m right.”

I’d looked it up: she was.

Your basic asteroid flivver is capable of sustaining standard thrust—one-tenth of a gee—for a couple of days in a row. I was admiring a big ca
n
dy-striped 223 Truax, when I discovered something even more interesting u
n
der a canvas cover on its port fender.

“What is this heap, Koko, a police cruiser?”

“A what?” She lumbered nearer and saw what I was talking about. “Oh, that—it’s just a darling gun.”

“And I think it’s just the
cutest
thing, myself,” I lisped, peering into a cluster of six wicked-looking muzzles in a foot-long pod. “What the hell is it for?”

“A hybrid of the Dardick and the Gatling: slugs from triangular plastic cartridges at maybe twenty thousand rounds a minute. Probably going to a prospector who struck it rich—helps discourage piracy and claim-jumping. Or maybe to a Registration Patrol, who knows?”

I glanced around the hold, suddenly aware that most of these inn
o
cent-appearing vehicles were fitted out for Armageddon. “Registration P
a
trol?
That
has a decidedly un-Confederate ring to it.”

“Naww,” she sighted along the weapon, squinting a little. “They’re just insurance companies, sort of. They travel around making sure their custo
m
ers’ property doesn’t get involuntarily transferred. Kind of frien
d
ly—sometimes a patrol person is all the company a hardrock miner’ll have for months.”

Like Sergeant Preston and his dog, Tyge. A small reminder I was hea
d
ed for the frontier. I slipped the protective shroud back over the cannon and continued looking for the egress.

Instead, I found another storage hold. The light was even dimmer here, blocked off by stacks of crates that threw a million eerie angular shadows. I stopped out of curiosity: three quarters of the loot in this section was i
n
voiced to some character named J. V. Tormount, of Aphr
o
dite, Ltd. The interesting datum was the manufacturer: good old Laporte Paratronics, Ltd., creator of fine Telecommery, electric pencil sharpeners, and refrigerator parts. Also, through the scientific talents of my friends Ooloorie P’wheet and Deejay Thorens, originator of the Probability Broach.

I wondered what was inside these crates, and who the devil J. V. Tormount was. Halfway through my ruminations, I heard a little scu
f
fling noise behind me. “Koko?”

Silence. I turned, slowly, extremely conscious I was armed with only a hyperthyroid kitchen knife. I wrapped my hand around the pommel, then felt silly. Probably a spacefaring bilge rat—or some crewman wan
t
ing to know what the hell
I
was up to down here.

Another skittling noise, this time to my left. I tippy-toed in that dire
c
tion, wondering what made me do these things. Peering down an aisle b
e
tween two mountains of containers, I saw a graceful ankle disappear around a corner. Something lay on the floor between me and the fleeing feminine extremity. Four or five cautious steps took me to the object: a length of hefty jewelry chain, attached to a—

“
Boss! Look out!
”

A shadow loomed above me, getting larger, fast. I grabbed the chain and rolled forward as something landed behind me with a crash that shook the deck and hurt my molars clear down to my insteps.

Koko shoved her way through the shattered remnants of the fallen crate. Interesting: I’d spent enough time in Deejay’s laboratory to reco
g
nize loose Broach parts when I see them. “Win! Are you all right?” Her paw was sha
k
ing as she touched my bruised shoulder. I patted it.

“Yes, Koko, and thanks. I’m just rattled a little.” I glanced down at the bangle dangling by its chain from my own unsteady fingers. “And not just from being dumped on like that.” I showed her the medallion. She’d never met an Eye-in-the-Pyramid in person before.

***

Naturally, there was no other trace of the person or persons who’d dropped the medallion—and several thousand ounces of expensive par
a
tronic gear. We found our way back to my stateroom, intending to call the purser or Captain Spoonbill, or whoever was in charge of damaged goods, human and otherwise. But there was that red light, still blinking on my Tel
e
com console.