She drifted free. Her hair floated in a halo around her face. She looked at him. “Our employers aren’t always honorable, buck. They don’t always pay their debts. I figure people like us can behave better.” She shrugged. “And I had the documents, the uniform, and so on. I could get in and out. I had better support than you.”

  “You’re a mercenary, then. Working for Group Seven.”

  She tossed her head. “A mercenary anyway.”

  “Griffith was part of it, too. Tsiolkovsky’s Demon was just a gimmick you cooked up so that I could seem to earn some money, then use it to develop my mission. And that business in Los Angeles—was that a plan that went wrong, or did you just want to see my moves?”

  “We had to see whether you still had what it takes. You did. Your conduct was exemplary.”

  “I killed somebody.” Pain jetted up his ribs. “You set it up that way.” He remembered the way the wire tugged at his hand, the screams amid the billowing smoke. He shook his head. “I wondered why people were storing secrets on a place like Charter, with plenty of transmitters for hire. There weren’t any secrets, ever. You were putting Tsiolkovsky’s Demon into the station comps when we arrived. When I broke into the Vesta computers and started sending real secrets back, it must have caused some comment.”

  She grinned. She drifted to the padded bulkhead above her and she put out a hand to stop herself. “Yep. You should have seen the query I got.”

  “And the two high-priority last-minute shipments: first to Vesta, then Ricot. That was Group Seven again, making sure we got where we needed to go. I was so eager that I never stopped to wonder how I got there. And you put the information about station security into Born’s computer.” Speed jittered up his spine and turned into a laugh. “I wondered why you kept insisting I go into the Power Legation when we were on Vesta. That was something your bosses arranged. The food poisoning, the autoloader breakdown.”

  “I had orders to expose you to the Powers as much as possible. Even if that put you in some danger.”

  “So that I’d put things together. I’m surprised your employers would want me to.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want you to figure out as much as you have. People have a way of underestimating you.”

  “Why send me to Vesta in the first place? Why not send me to Ricot right off?”

  “The weapon—the virus—it wasn’t going to be ready for months. Why not use the time?” She looked at him indulgently. “Do you want out of the web?”

  He laughed again. “No. I’ve been in a web the whole damn time. Carried from place to place so that I could be an accomplice to poisoning a whole community.”

  Reese shrugged. “They started it. Or so I’m told.”

  Hot rage tore at him. He punched the air with his good arm. “Fucking mercenary. Fucking mercenary bitch.”

  She looked up at him, held his eyes. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “Let’s find out,” Steward snarled. “I’m just starting.”

  Reese kicked off from the wall and flew to the door. She slammed open the partition into the corridor outside, then turned. “Being a bitch is better than being a sheep,” she said. “That’s the choice, the way I’ve always seen it.”

  “Shit.” He was fumbling with his webbing, not knowing precisely what he was going to do once he got loose. By the time Steward was through unwebbing, Reese was long gone, and he was long out of ideas.

  *

  Reese came back in for the deceleration burn and landing, webbing herself in without a word.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I just do the job,” Reese said. Her voice was stubborn. “I work for all sorts of people. Policorps, outlaws, gangs, police. I don’t see a lot of difference between them.”

  “I don’t either. That’s why I don’t want to work for any of them.” Bile rose in his throat. “Didn’t, I should say. Because I helped you kill thousands today.”

  She looked at him. She was still wearing the uniform shirt and trousers. He couldn’t read her expression. “I probably could have got in without you. For what it’s worth.”

  Steward looked at the scarred bulkhead. It wasn’t worth much.

  “We didn’t start out like this.” Reese blurted it out, as if she wanted to justify herself somehow. “We started as a bunch of veterans trying to help each other out. We all knew each other. It was friendly. And then things happened and it all…evolved. It got heavy.”

  “Heavy,” Steward repeated. The word meant nothing to him.

  He thought of the Powers, the sounds they made. He wondered how they sounded when they were dying in agony.

  Fire exploded from the engines. Gravity returned and took Steward by the throat.

  *

  Ganymede was a cold black piece of stone. Jupiter burned high in the radiant sky and offered no heat. Reese gave Steward a new passport with a new name. He was now a citizen of Uzbekistan. With the passport came a credit needle with 5,000 Pink Blossom dollars on it. “I insisted they make provisions for getting you out,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He looked at the passport and thought again about how he’d earned it.

  Reese put her hands in her jacket pockets. She was out of uniform now, in clothes borrowed from the miners’ store. Some of the people here seemed to know her.

  “Want to work out?” she said. “The light gravity here will make it interesting. I’ll go easy on your arm.”

  Steward shook his head. “No. Thanks. I think I’ll get some sleep.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Yes. It has.”

  He wanted sleep to come. It was the better part of a day before it did.

  *

  Steward spent most of his time on Ganymede in his room, reading whatever he could find in the library, or watching the vid. On the long trip back to the Belt he did much the same.

  He missed the Born, the informal friendships, the structured life, the sense of purpose. He wondered if SuTopo had tried to find them, had assumed that Steward and Reese had been disappeared by the authorities. It would be in SuTopo’s character to think that.

  Reese tried to be friendly, but although Steward was polite, he didn’t really respond. She learned to leave him alone. Once they landed in the Belt, she shook his hand—he was out of the cast, hormone infusions having knitted the bone in a matter of days—and walked away with her trademark long-legged stride. She didn’t look back.

  He heard a lot about the plague on Ricot. Thousands of Powers had died. The destruction was so appalling that there was no hope of Consolidated being able to cover it up.

  In another three months he was on Earth. He took a small apartment with a view of the Aral Sea and spent hours watching the steppe wind as it scudded across the water. He was trying to decide what to do with his life. He wondered what occupation would allow him to be the most anonymous.

  One day it just came to him, a realization that dropped into his mind from nowhere. A gift from the void. He knew he had been wrong about everything.

  He began to make preparations. Knowledge implied action.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Griffith looked at him for a long moment. “You want to join us,” he said. He looked as if he were saying the words for the first time, exploring the way they sounded.

  “I want to work for a winner, and Prime-on-the-Right is going to win,” Steward said. “He’s smart, he’s got the right moves. I’ve seen his opposition up close and they haven’t got a chance.”

  Griffith brushed a hand over his eyes. “This is weird,” he said.

  “Prime-on-the-Right uses people who don’t have the vee tag,” Steward said. “Reese doesn’t have it. He needs people who aren’t addicted to him for use in long-distance errands.”

  There was color in Griffith’s face again. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “The people without the tag don’t know about the Prime. We can only trust tagged people not to tell.”

  Steward grinned at him. “You can trust me. I found out and I haven’t told anyone. And I won’t—so long as I get a piece of the action.”

  Griffith’s look was sharp. “What do you mean?”

  Steward barked another laugh. “You sure you can’t figure it out? Let’s say that I’ve got a friend in an orbital habitat who will release certain information to the scansheets unless I make contact every few hours and give the proper code. The code changes every time, and only I know how it changes. You won’t be able to get to my friend in time to prevent it—it’s many hours to where he lives. And he won’t release the stuff to anyone but me, in person. That means that even if you, ah, do an Ashraf on me and get the codes, you still won’t get the information my friend is holding, just delay its release. And eventually it’ll be released, because there’s a time limit on the codes, and if I don’t appear in person within a certain time, they get released anyway.”

  Satisfaction welled in Steward’s mind. The best part of this was that it was true. Only the pronoun he was a blind—Steward had gone through Janice Weatherman in the trust office of the Stone Bank on Solon. They’d shared a piece of cream pastry while setting up the deal and calculating her commission. Weatherman acted as if she performed similar tasks every day. Possibly she did.

  There was a muscle working in Griffith’s cheek. His gaze was stone. “You’re dangerous, buck,” he said quietly.

  “That’s why you wanted me to run your mission for you,” Steward said. He laughed. “Hey, I’ve already done a good job for your boss. Why should he mind if I want to do a few more? I just want to get better wages next time.”

  “I have to think.”

  “Let Prime-on-the-Right do your thinking for you. He’s better at it.” Steward reached into his pocket and took out a portable phone, tossed it in Griffith’s direction. “I’ll call at nineteen hundred tomorrow night. You can tell me what your source has to say.”

  Griffith looked at the cheap plastic device that had fallen to the floor near his legs. He reached out with nicotine-stained fingers and took it.

  Steward stood up. “I’ll be going now. Talk to your boss.”

  Griffith was still looking at the phone as Steward stepped over him, keeping the pistol trained at Griffith’s head.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to explain this,” Griffith said.

  “That’s easy, comrade,” Steward said, moving for the door. “Just tell him you fucked up.”

  *

  The revolving searchlight was visible from Steward’s hotel room on the waterfront, flashing in mute time to the rhythm of his thoughts. He listened to the telephone purr. Griffith answered on the second ring.

  “Steward?”

  “That’s right, comrade.”

  The sound of a cigarette being inhaled. “You’ve got your meet.”

  “When?”

  “Right now, if you want it.”

  Steward smiled. The searchlight strobed at the edge of his vision. “D’accord,” he said. “I know where it is. I’ll meet you there.”

  He hung up before Griffith could object, then reached for the freeze-dry canister on the table, the one he’d picked up from the safe-deposit vault on Charter the same trip he’d arranged things with Weatherman.

  Warning, it said. Biologic seal. Open only in sterile environment.

  Steward peeled back the foil that protected the seal, then twisted the cap off. The seal broke with a hissing sound. He raised the flask and poured the brown dust over himself, brushing it into his clothing. He put some in his pockets, then rubbed powder on a pair of handkerchiefs and wadded them into his pants pockets. He checked the pistol in his shoulder holster, then put on his jacket and took his car keys from where they waited on the hotel dresser.

  He left the room to the silence and the flare of the searchlight.

  *

  Entire moth nations danced in the halogen glow above Lightsource, Limited. The building was prefabricated, two stories, built next to a warehouse on a piece of landfill sealed from the Pacific by a seawall. As Steward walked toward the entrance, he saw Griffith standing by the entrance with a cigarette in his hand. The tattooed boy, Spassky, waited with him, smiling from behind his video shades. Spassky’s tall goon waited like a malevolent lamppost in the shadows behind.

  Steward had left his rented car on another street, with a hand-drawn map on the seat showing the way to get to Lightsource. A clue for the local police in case he disappeared.

  He walked toward Griffith, his skin tingling, alert, waiting for the breath of violence on the back of his neck. It didn’t come.

  He stopped in front of Griffith and smiled. Griffith was expressionless. “Hi, comrade.” Steward looked at Spassky. “Where’s your girlfriend, buck?”

  Spassky’s video shades stared back. “She died,” he said.

  “Easy come, easy go.”

  Spassky grinned with his metal teeth. “You said it.”

  Griffith ground his cigarette underfoot. “Let’s go.”

  The office tasted lightly of the organic smell of the Powers, a maintenance dose filtered up through vents. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

  Steward followed Griffith through armored doors studded with sensors and security cameras, down a long hallway patrolled by armored guards. The guards all were in their mid to late thirties, Artifact War veterans. Spassky and his goon walked in step behind, moving a little too close for Steward’s comfort. The corridors featured deep carpeting and closed paneled office doors. Their footsteps were muffled on the carpet. Griffith came to a door with his name on a brass plate, then opened it with his thumbprint. Steward and the others followed him inside to a large office. There was a desk, plush chairs, a computer, a one meter inflated world globe. Griffith went to the desk and picked up a portable detector.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re checking them and you for weapons.”

  Steward shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He took the pistol by two fingers and handed it to Spassky. “This is all I have.”

  While Steward was being searched, Griffith told him the rules. “You’ll be staying in a dorm downstairs while we check you out. You will be allowed out to make your phone calls to your friend. You will have an escort during that time, but you can choose any phone you want.”

  “Just so long as this doesn’t go on too long,” Steward said.

  “The Prime’s a good judge of character. It shouldn’t last…beyond what’s necessary.”

  “The Prime. So his highness got a promotion, when the other Prime was killed on Vesta, right?”

  “She got promoted. The Prime is currently female. Biologically inactive right now, though.” Griffith seemed stubbornly insistent, as if Steward had invaded his sense of rightness. “And it wasn’t a promotion, it was a succession. The Powers have worked it all out decades in advance. The Prime is the descendent of a ten-thousand-year genetic manipulation program. She could be nothing other than what she is.” He looked up at Steward, and there was resentment in his eyes. “And she’s not a highness. Just a Prime. That’s how you address her. Prime says everything that needs to be said.”

  Steward shrugged. “D’accord.” He began putting his clothes back on.

  “They live for centuries, Steward. The Power elite. So can we—and not through cloning, either. We can have life in our natural bodies indefinitely prolonged.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Griffith gazed at him. Steward wanted to flinch from the intensity in his eyes.

  “It’s better than good,” Griffith said. “It’s like being God.”

  Steward leaned toward him, showing teeth. “Being God sounds good,” he said. “I want it.”

  I have no strategy. A flicker of thought from nowhere. Freedom to kill and freedom to give back life—there is my strategy.

  Uncertainty flickered into Griffith’s expression. He turned away. “You don’t know how good it is.” He took a spike from his pocket and put it in his computer console. He tapped in a code and a piece of the wall paneling slid back to reveal a private elevator.

  “Down we go,” Spassky said. There was a smirk on his face as he tossed Steward’s gun from hand to hand.

  Steward moved into the elevator and the others followed. “The Powers,” Griffith was saying. “You know why they left Sheol and the other planets?”

  The elevator’s descent was silent. Steward looked at Spassky’s leer, the goon’s stolid lack of expression, Griffith’s eagerness. “Tell me,” he said.

  “They were picking their leader,” Griffith said. “Not the Prime, but the head Prime. The head Primes rule for thousands of years, and when they die, all the Primes come to the center of the empire to choose the next, and they bring all the people with them they can spare.”

  “A war of succession,” Steward said.

  Griffith shook his head. “That’s another place they’ve got us beat,” he said. The elevator door opened. Beyond was a tunnel painted a pale green and lit by fluorescents. It dipped downward, out of sight. They began walking toward the end.

  “Not a war, buck,” Griffith said. “It was a political and economic struggle. There are rules for it. Sometimes it goes on for centuries. And when the head Prime is finally chosen, he can redistribute much of the wealth of the other Primes. Our Prime was on the losing side, and so was Ricot’s. But they’re enemies of each other, see? So the new head Prime gave them territory side by side, so they wouldn’t cooperate. And that’s where they met us.”

  “And,” Steward said, “a thousand years from now . . .”

  “A thousand years from now”—Griffith’s eyes were shining—“our Prime will have the edge. She’ll have humanity behind her, as well as her own people. She’ll win the succession. And that’ll put us right in the center of power.” His fingers clamped down on Steward’s shoulder. “Gods, buck,” he said. “We’ll be gods.”

  “Gods,” Steward repeated. Tasting the word. They passed a heavy freight elevator that apparently connected with the warehouse above.

  Ready, Steward thought. He was ready for this. So in sync with the Zen of it that all he had to do was move with it, follow the series of events as they wound toward their conclusion.