“You didn’t learn this kind of tactics at the Academy,” Arena whined.
“It’s the times,” I said. “They have a coarsening effect.”
“Williams was a fancy-pants,” Arena said. “No guts. He pulled the stopper.”
“Talk plainer,” I said, and kicked him again, hard—but I knew what he meant.
“Blew his lousy head off,” Arena yelled. “I gassed him and tried scop on him. He blew. He was out cold, and he blew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hypnotics will trigger it.”
“Fancy goddam wiring job,” Arena muttered, wiping blood from his face,
* * *
I got the wire and trussed Arena up. I had to clip him twice before I finished. I went through his pockets, looked at things, recovered my souvenirs. I went over to Stenn. He was breathing.
Arena was watching. “He’s okay, for crissake,” he said. “What kind of punch you think I got?”
I hoisted Stenn onto my shoulder.
“So long, Arena,” I said. “I don’t know why I don’t blow your brains out. Maybe it’s that Navy Cross citation in your wallet.”
“Listen,” Arena said. “Take me with you.”
“A swell idea,” I said. “I’ll pick up a couple of tarantulas, too.”
“You’re trying for the hack, right?”
“Sure. What else?”
“The roof,” he said. “I got six, eight rotos on the roof. One highspeed job. You’ll never make the hack.”
“Why tell me?”
“I got eight hundred gun boys in this building alone. They know you’re here. The hack is watched, the whole route. You can’t get through.”
“What do you care?”
“If the boys bust in here after a while and find me like this . . . They’ll bury me with the wires still on, Maclamore.”
“How do I get to the roof?”
He told me. I went to the right corner, pushed the right spot, and a panel slid aside. I looked back at Arena.
“I’ll make a good sailor, Maclamore,” he said.
“Don’t crawl, Arena,” I said. I went up the short stair, came out onto a block-square pad.
Arena was right about the rotos. Eight of them. I picked the four-place Cad, and got Stenn tied in. He was coming to, muttering. He was still fighting Arena, he thought.
” . . . I’ll hold . . . you . . . get out . . .”
“Take it easy, Stenn,” I said. “Nothing can touch this bus. Where’s the boat?” I shook him. “Where’s the boat, Stenn?”
He came around long enough to tell me. It wasn’t far—less than an hour’s run.
“Stand by, Admiral,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where . . . you . . .”
“We need every good man we can get,” I said. “And I think I know a guy that wants to join the Navy.”
EPILOGUE
Admiral Stenn turned away from the communicator screen. “I think we’d be justified in announcing victory now, Commodore.” As usual, he sounded like a professor of diction, but he was wearing a big grin.
“Whatever you say, Chief,” I said, with an even sappier smile.
I made the official announcement that a provisional Congress had accepted the resignations of all claims by former office holders, and that new elections would be underway in a week.
I switched over to Power Section. The NCO in charge threw me a snappy highball. Damned if he wasn’t grinning too.
“I guess we showed ’em who’s got the muscle, Commodore,” he said.
“Your firepower demonstration was potent, Max,” I said. “You must have stayed up nights studying the tapes.”
“We’ve hardly scratched the surface yet,” he said.
“I’ll be crossing back to Alaska now, Mac,” Stenn said.
I watched him move across the half-mile void to the flagship. Five minutes later the patrol detail broke away to take up surveillance orbits. They would be getting all the shore leave for the next few years, but I was glad my squadron had been detailed to go with the flagship on the Deep Space patrol. I wanted to be there when we followed those star surveys back to where their makers came from. Stenn wasn’t the man to waste time, either. He’d be getting under way any minute. It was time to give my orders. I flipped the communicator key to the squadron link-up.
“Escort Commander to Escort,” I said. “Now hear this . . .”
ONCE THERE WAS
A GIANT
1
It was one of those self-consciously raunchy dives off Cargo Street that you can find in any port town in the Arm, serving the few genuine dockwallopers and decayed spacemen that liked being stared at by tourists, plus the tourists, but mostly the sharpies or would-be sharpies that preyed on both brands of sucker. I came in with just enough swagger to confuse the issue: which kind was I? There was that subtle rearrangement of conversational groups as the company present sorted themselves out into active participants and spectators, relatively few of the latter. I saw my mark right away, holed up in a corner booth with a couple of what he probably thought were tough guys. All three swiveled their heads in a leisurely way long enough to show me matched insolent snickers. Then one of the side-boys rapped on the table and rose; he said something to the mark, an ex-soldier named Keeler, and pushed off for the bar, which put him behind me. The mark made a production of not looking at me as I worked my way over to his corner, while appearing to be a little bewildered by it all. I fetched up at his table just in time to get jostled by hard boy number two, just getting up. I gave him an uncertain grin for his trouble, and took his still-warm seat, opposite Keeler. The hard case drifted away, muttering. That left me and Keeler, face to face.
“—if you don’t mind,” I was saying when he poked a finger at my chest and said, “Beat it, bum.” in a voice as friendly as a slammed door.
I sat tight and took a good look at him. I knew a little more about this mark, more personal detail, that is, because twenty years before he had been the paid-off lieutenant who had let a Mob ship through his section of the Cordon to raid the mining camp on Ceres where I had been spending my time growing up to the age of twelve. I remember wondering “twelve what?” and not quite understanding why it had something to do with the number of times one of the brighter nearby stars—the double one, really a planet—went from left of the sun to right and back again, which seemed pretty screwy to me. Bombeck and his raiders hadn’t left much of Extraction Station Five, but a few of us kids hid in an old cutting and came out after the shooting was over. Time does strange things, and now I was Baird Ulrik, licensed assassin, and Keeler was my current contract. Well, it’s a living.
2
It’s not often a fellow gets paid well to do what he’d like to do for free, and it made a lot of difference. No contract man can afford to be picky, but I had always made it a point to accept contracts only on marks that I agreed needed killing: Dope-runners, con-men, rabble-rousers-for-money, and the like, of which there was an adequate supply to keep our small but elite cadre of licensed operators busy. When Keeler came along, I tried not to look too eager, to keep the price up. It wasn’t any life-long dream of mine, to get the man responsible for the slaughter of what passed for my family, including burning the old homestead with them in it, alive or dead, nobody knew—but I thought there was a certain elegance, as the math boys say, to my being the one to end his career for him. After he was cashiered, he’d signed on with the Mob, and worked his way up to top son-of-a-bitch for this part of the Ring. Maybe you’re surprised that it made any difference to a hardened killer, but I’d never really gotten much satisfaction out of my work, because it came too easy to me. Sure, I’m a contract killer—and if not proud of it, at least not ashamed of it. Like they say, it’s a tough, lonely, dirty job—but someone has to do it. It’s really a lot more civilized to give the condemned man a gun, if he wants one, and let him run as far as he likes, to exercise his instinct for self-preservation, rather than locking him up on Death Row to wait for an impersonal death by machine, like I understand they used to do in more barbaric times. Keeler knew he had it coming to him, but not when, or how, or by whom. He’d find out soon enough; I didn’t keep him in suspense.
“Don’t kid me, Keeler.” I told him. “Do you want it right here in front of all your friends, or shall we take a little walk?”