FSF Magazine, August 2007 Page 10

  I went for the CM once again, this time with hands free and with lethal intent. But my feet were still tied and we fell all in a heap together, not against the deck but against a bulkhead—so far we'd bounced off all four—then up against the ceiling. But he'd had enough, he pushed me off, and he and his remaining bully tumbled through the doorway and disappeared.

  This strange underwater ballet of a brawl was over. Sister Jann and I were left bobbing around the room like corks, along with two bodies, one groaning, one not. As we reconnected with the deck, Master Po began clapping his ancient hands. “How splendid!” he exclaimed. “How splendid!"

  I bent down and freed my feet. Recovered my omni, which had escaped Aung Chai's sleeve at some point and was floating in midair. I was still trying to get my breath; the CM's pals had almost dislocated my shoulders and I felt pretty battered. I foresaw a painful awakening next morning, but at least I would awaken.

  I pointed at Sister Jann's knife and gasped, “So there were two samples in that shipment?"

  Apologetically she smiled. “Yes. I hid this one inside Brother Kendo's body when I was doing his autopsy. After the search was over, I recovered it. Given the situation, I thought I'd better go armed.” She used her sleeve to wipe the CM's loathsome blood off my face. I had to grin. This was not a lady I'd ever think about romantically, even if she were so inclined. But as an ally she was worth her weight in something a good deal more valuable than gold. I reflected that virgins in ancient myth were often pretty ferocious, like Athena and Brunnhilde, filled with magical power because they'd never learned either to love or fear men.

  "Where's the would-be rapist?” I inquired when she'd cleaned me up a bit.

  She sighed, saddened by the things she'd had to do. “In the bedroom. I left him spinning in an eddy of red fog. What a fool, throwing me over his shoulder that way. I had the knife in my left sleeve and when the bedroom door shut I pulled it, twisted around and slashed his carotid artery. To think I'm a doctor and a nun, and here I've killed four men."

  She glanced at the body that was groaning, but had now stopped. “Maybe five."

  "Don't fall into the absurdity of regretting necessary actions,” piped up Master Po. “There's still much work to be done. And it will be dangerous work."

  "More dangerous than this?” I asked, gesturing at the casualties.

  "Possibly. He underestimated us before. He won't again. We haven't yet seen the worst these people can do."

  "Then we'd better be going."

  I picked up Master Po. In this near-weightless world, with only an occasional gentle nudge he floated, the mythical Levitating Master come to life. All I really had to do was steer him. We hastened into the corridor, and the door whispered shut behind us.

  * * * *

  We didn't know where the Chief Monk was, or what he was doing, but we could all guess without any trouble. He was in his lair, summoning whatever remained of his gang. They would wait for lights-out tonight and come hunting us, scouring the rings and spokes one by one. We needed help, needed it quick, and I didn't have to think twice to know where to find it.

  We hustled on down to B Ring where the Honored Guests resided, and I knocked on Death's door (!). Gladiator Rhee, otherwise known as Huksa Byung, opened up, stared in astonishment at the floating Master, then invited us in with a deep bow.

  "Ah, my son,” piped up Master Po, “we come to ask you for aid, and may joy and good fortune light upon you and your house if you give it to us."

  "For you, Master, anything,” he said. “But what—?"

  Briefly I put him in the picture. A simplified version, of course: the Chief Monk had turned traitor and wanted to kill the Master in order to take his place. Black Death showed no surprise at hearing this.

  "Sounds like home,” he nodded. “In the whole history of Korea, whenever we weren't being invaded by foreigners, we were having palace revolts. I pray,” he added to the Master, “that you will enroll me under your banner."

  "With pleasure. And now,” he said, “may I visit your bathroom, Honored Champion Rhee? I've drunk a great deal of tea, and the bladders of the very old are notoriously weak."

  While we waited for the Master to reappear, I asked our new ally what usually happened to palace rebels in old Korea.

  "If a rebel won, he became emperor. If he lost, he perished by the Slow Death."

  "Which meant?"

  "They started at the tip of his left little finger, and shortened him by one joint every day."

  "Olden days, golden days."

  Master Po returned, smiling blissfully. “I used to preach a sermon on the religious significance of urination,” he said. “As with all of life, one must learn some conscious control, but ultimately one must yield to nature, and it's in the yielding that one finds pleasure and relief. Now, if you young people will hear an old man's advice, I have a few ideas to suggest. While I was a prisoner I had plenty of time to think, you see."

  Briefly the old gent outlined his plan, which began with seizing the Hub and getting control of the machinery. Shrewd and sensible. I told him, “All the years of my life I've underestimated sainthood."

  "I'm not a saint. I belong to a different tradition, which honors the sage. The saint tries to rise above nature. The sage tries only to embody it."

  "The sage too is without pity,” I quoted. “He burns the families of men like straw dogs."

  "But only when it's necessary,” he pointed out. “Our real mission is to save, but everywhere positive and negative are so closely interwoven that sometimes we must destroy in order to save. Shall we go?"

  "Stay here,” Black Death commanded Sister Jann. “They're all afraid of me. You'll be safe in my quarters."

  "No, no,” murmured the Master. “She goes with us."

  He looked a bit baffled by that. “Surely Sister isn't a warrior?"

  "You might be surprised,” I said, and quoted one of Anna's favorite lines from Lao-tzu. “Soft weakness overcomes hard strength. This is called the Dark Illumination."

  "You see,” said Po dryly, “he has a quote for everything. One of these days he may begin to speak for himself."

  We let the door close behind us. The spoke was empty; somewhere I heard faint sounds of chanting, but that was all. We set off accompanied by the patter, patter of our sticky boots. I was curious about how we were supposed to carry out the first phase of the plan.

  "When you sabotaged the monitors,” I asked Sister, “how'd you get into the Hub?"

  "Couldn't. The lock's an antique with a sensor that reads fingerprints, if you can believe that. Antique but, I might add, very effective. A year or two back they hired an expert from a museum of technology, who set it to recognize only the CM and Brother Ion. And you have to be inside the Hub to reset it. You have to be inside to get inside."

  "Then how—"

  "It was easy enough. I came down here in the middle of the night. A Ring's separated from the Hub only by a circular corridor. I started unbolting wall panels until I found where the main cable comes out."

  "So how do we get in now?"

  "Think it over, Colonel. I'm sure you'll realize there's an easy way—oh, oh."

  We heard an unmistakable bass voice, and it wasn't chanting Aum. We crowded into a handy cell.

  Somebody with a Jewish background lived here—I recognized the nine-branched Hannukah menorah. Surrounded by all these symbols of faith, I wondered if I'd missed something critical in human life by coming from a family that hadn't been observant for a couple of hundred years.

  Well, no time for that now.

  Somebody, two somebodies, no three, no four, were shuffling past. Aung Chai was trying to keep his voice down, but it was hard to do when his bass-fiddle tones made our teeth vibrate. I had no trouble detecting the word Hub. Sister Jann caught my eye and shrugged.

  "He's very bright, you know,” she whispered.

  Damn true. He'd realized the importance of the Hub and he didn't want to trust entirely to the lock. Wonde
ring how many guards he'd assign there, and where they'd be posted, I dropped to my knees, opened the door a crack, and got one eye looking down the spoke to the corridor that circles the Hub. One guard there. No, two. And here was another complication. The first guard was carrying a long-barreled pistol, a four-point-nine impact weapon, to be precise.

  So it was no more Mr. Nice Guy. The CM had broken out the hardware. Now I saw why he banned weapons—so he could monopolize them.

  The second guard was idly slamming one fist into another. Cracking sound. Making sure his brass knucks were comfy on his hand, I supposed. The two met, mumbled to each other, then slouched off together, out of my line of vision.

  Briefly I paused to do some arithmetic. If Sister Jann was right about Aung Chai having a dozen criminals in his Pack, and if she'd killed five—five! I still couldn't quite believe it—and if three were assigned to the Hub, that left the CM and no more than four others to form the search party after lights-out. Our forces consisted of one aging cop, one gladiator, one lady with a blade, and one hundred-and-twenty-three-year-old with a lion's heart and a dead cicada's body.

  I pulled back inside, let the door close. “Master,” I said humbly, “this will take strategy. I ask your advice.” Which he proceeded to give, concisely.

  "So it'll be you, me, and Huksa Byung?"

  "Yes. But Sister Jann will accompany you to the kitchen, for she has a duty, too. Now move quickly, children! The time of the Great Meditation is approaching. The CM has to preside or everybody will know something's seriously wrong. But he'll make the ceremony as brief as possible. The evening meal's always a snack, and he may well advance the usual hour of lights out on some excuse or other. Once the monks and guests are in their cells, the hunt will begin. Meantime we have our window of opportunity."

  I checked the empty corridor again, slipped out with Sister Jann following. This close to the Hub the spokes were close together and we took only a few seconds to cross to the next one. Glanced down it, saw nobody, hurried to the kitchen and slipped inside. Empty and sterile; stillness of polished metal, ceramic tiles on bulkheads and deck, well-scrubbed sinks and a long, antique hotspot range scoured clean as a Zen temple. Leftovers for the evening meal laid out in covered dishes, each held down by a magnet in the base.

  While she hastened to the freezer, I cracked a door leading to the circular corridor that surrounded the Hub. Heard the low tearing-paper sounds of stickums on the carpeting as the guards approached, completing their circuit. The curvature meant they could only see a bit of the corridor at any one time. Mr. Death now was giving Master Po a gentle shove and stepping back out of their line of vision. Meantime I waited, hoping I wouldn't hear the short dry cough that is the only sound an impact pistol makes.

  "What the hell?” somebody said, and I stepped out behind the guards, who were staring dumbfounded at the Master floating toward them in midair, palms pressed together, eyes cast down, looking as if he traveled like this all the time.

  I lunged, hoping to chop the guy with the pistol at the base of the neck, but he heard my stickums and whirled around. So instead I whacked him on the inside of the elbow, aiming for the ulnar nerve. The gun went flying and he jabbed at my throat with his left hand, but I let that go past and slammed into him with my shoulder. His boots popped free of the deck and he flew backward and bumped his pal's back.

  The second goon turned, and he wasn't wearing brass knucks, he had a cestus on his right hand. It was equipment for the really nasty Absolute Combat bouts, the closed-circuit snuff shows where the sole aim was maximum butchery and blood. The Romans made cesti out of leather, but this one was the ubiquitous duroplast with studs designed to mutilate.

  The gun had floated out of reach, so I assumed the position for combat. Then shrugged and turned my back. Unseen by either thug, Mr. Death had arrived on the scene. Like a true gladiator, he gave fair warning.

  "Guard yourself,” he said.

  I took maybe half a minute catching the gun, pressing the recognition stud, and waiting for it to learn the pattern of micro-bloodvessels in my thumb. (Otherwise it wouldn't fire.) So I didn't see what happened to the goons, but when I turned back, the guy with the cestus was down, with Black Death's foot on his chest, and the first guy was trying to get away, scrabbling his way along the ceiling like an escaping cockroach. I felt embarrassed to shoot him in flight, but that didn't stop me from touching the firing stud. The bullet exploded inside him, he popped like a tick, and drifted on slowly, leaving a crimson jet trail behind.

  The champ looked around, as if expecting a referee to declare the match over. Then removed his foot and touched the body of his late adversary gently with the toe of his boot.

  "Ah well,” he sighed. “Another tablet for the temple."

  I noticed that the guy who'd had the gun didn't qualify for the brotherhood of warriors. I knew him, by the way—another killer in the CM's remarkable collection. So this too was what the Master called a well-merited execution, not that I cared a great deal whether it was well-merited or not.

  We were still looking over the battlefield when Sister Jann reappeared. She was guiding the Master back to us with one hand, while carrying a gray object in the other.

  "Ready?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer she shoved Brother Ion's severed right hand into the sensor and the door to the Hub purred open.

  The first firefight of the season followed. We heard two short coughs inside and two impact rounds exploded against the corridor's outer bulkhead. You don't think much under those circumstances, so I shoved my weapon around the jamb and tapped the firing stud three times, producing sounds of disintegration, human and mechanical.

  Somewhere a shrill alarm bell began ringing.

  I edged one eye into the opening, and yes, I got the third guard, but also some equipment I hoped wasn't absolutely essential to our survival. Entered cautiously, leading the way, wondering if a fourth killer could be hidden somewhere. But this was the command center, all controls and dials laid out in a circle. It was like a clam; once it opened you saw the whole inside.

  The door closed automatically behind us, shutting off the noise of the alarm bell. Sister Jann approached the dead body, but she wasn't looking at it—in fact, looking at it wouldn't have yielded much information, since one of my rounds happened to hit the face. She was staring instead at the damage done by my second and third shots to the console behind the body. One had torn a big hole. The next had gone straight through into a complicated maze of printed circuits.

  I began to get a sinking feeling, confirmed when Sister Jann murmured inadequately, “Oh, dear."

  "What'd I do?"

  "I'm no engineer, but judging by what's left of these dials, I rather think you've wrecked the temperature regulating system. With the solar panels continuing to pour in power, this station's going to have what amounts to a heat stroke."

  She moved down a row of undamaged dials, muttering, “Now where's the thermal register—ah. It's slightly elevated already, about a tenth of a degree. I'd guess that within a day the heat buildup will reach uncomfortable levels. Then rapidly become unbearable. Eventually all the circuitry will fry, including the computers that maintain the station's attitude and keep it in a stable orbit. Then Heaven's Footstool will start to wobble, the orbit will decay, and—"

  * * * *

  "I think,” piped up Master Po, “that we had better conclude our business here sooner rather than later."

  We tumbled into the corridor, scooted up the nearest spoke and popped into an empty cell. It belonged to the guy with the images of compassion. We were barely in time. Voices muttered in the ring we'd just left, including that unmistakable bass. Responding to the alarm, they were finding the corpses, the wreckage. A scream rose, a horrible long-drawn-out scream not of fear but of pure rage—the scream of a dying puma that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  I edged into the spoke again, every sense straining, followed by our gladiator. One thug stood outside th
e door to the Hub, gun in hand. The others must have gone inside to view the catastrophe. I checked the little window on the back of my own weapon to see how many shots I had left. Exactly one, and if I missed—Then Black Death intervened. With the speed only a pro can manage, he fell and rolled into the corridor. The guard whirled around and his gun coughed, but now the Champ was taking advantage of the curvature, he was out of sight and the guard—who couldn't have caught more than a glimpse of somebody in motion—went after him. His mistake.

  By the time Black Death returned, I'd discarded my empty weapon and was pressing the recognition stud on the guard's. Softly it beeped at me, and then I used it to destroy the sensor on the door to the Hub. Was there a manual override so the CM could get out again? If so, I figured to give him a greeting he wouldn't forget.

  The door remained shut, though we heard muffled thumping against the inside.

  Sister Jann and the Master joined us. A Ring looked like the last act of Hamlet, except that the bodies were floating instead of lying around in heaps. Incidentally, the pseudograv wasn't totally dead, because over time the bodies drifted very slowly downward, like drowned mariners in a very salty sea. Droplets of their blood formed perfect, glistening spheres and for some reason seemed to follow the men they once helped to animate, like the tails of comets.

  I said, “I'll stay on guard here, just to make sure nobody escapes. You go ahead, and—"

  "Oh no,” said Master Po, positively, shaking his head. “No, no. Our brother, Honored Champion Rhee, will do the guard duty. From you, Honored Colonel, I still have one final favor to ask."

  I suppose I was looking stupid, for he said, as if that explained everything, “You see, it's the hour of the Great Meditation. They're waiting for the CM and me, all the monks, the real monks I mean. The nuns. The guests. And we must not disappoint them."