Ken Rand, page 1
Bad News From Orbit
by Ken Rand
Copyright (C)2004 by Ken Rand
* * *
The Ear of Mt. Horiuchi
I knew the instant I walked into the Wafaerer's Siding that I'd more likely leave as an organ donor than as a Kirov Prize for Journalism candidate.
An outer ring runway informant had tipped me that I'd find CMC Sgt. George Horiuchi in the pub. I wanted to be the first newsworker on Berenson Corp. Station Number One—or “the One,” as everybody called the orbital city—to interview Horiuchi after what Colonial Marine Corp execs had called his “selfless bravery in the face of enormous odds, blah, blah,” and “single-handedly securing an amicable resolution of the Spiratz Mining Division Altercation, etc. blah, blah.” CMC media releases were pure static, so I wanted to talk to Horiuchi himself, away from his handlers, to get the real story, to find out how he really won the war.
Many newsworkers covered the “Altercation,” as the government called the rebellion on Spiratz, but maybe my runway sources were better than others were or maybe I just got lucky, I don't know. Anyway, Slinky Tomasi, one of my contacts, earned his extra twenty-mark chip for being the first to find Horiuchi. I flipped Slinky what he called his “eyeball coin” and got to the Wafaerer's quick. Who knows which of my rivals Slinky would deliver the same message to next or how long I had before the pub looked like an Intersystem Newsworkers’ Assn. convention.
Who knew if Horiuchi would talk to me at all? Still, I had to try.
Wafaerer's Siding is a notorious hangout for shipcrew, dockhands, stimpeddlers, thieves, smugglers, and various n'er-do-wells. It was on the city rim, heavier spin grav so cheaper rent. I'd heard that it once had a realtime view of Earthome, that smoking, toxic black cinder where people used to live, if you want to call it that. But those old transparent plates against the outer wall had probably been covered with posters and vids long ago. Who wanted to see that toxic wasteland, a sore spot in the spinning starscape?
The Wafaerer's Siding had become legendary as the place where Adrian “Doc” Kennedy lased his former shipmate, the outlaw Percy Diego, two years past. CMC execs had posted the place off limits to grunts on R&R, but that didn't impress Horiuchi.
Stamper Clyme, the Wafaerer's owner-operator, became wary of the media after the Kennedy-Diego shoot-out. On the one hand, the publicity helped business. On the other, it drew too much attention from authorities. Company gendarmes descended on the pub and had a field day clearing out their “most wanted” files. Tourists, slumming, looking for local color, stole ashtrays and towels until Clyme started a gift shop next door as a sideline.
He wasn't excited to see my ident on the entry keypad.
“Peter Amundsen,” he muttered as he scanned my card readout, “TransSystem InfoNet. Newsworker.” He spat as if he'd just bitten into a rotten pitflower seed, and made no move to key entry. By Intersystem Convention Code, he couldn't deny entry to anyone not proscribed by a federal Interdiction Tag, but ICC regs didn't prevent him from making it clear with his unwelcoming gaze that he was the boss and he wouldn't tolerate anything or anybody harassing his customers.
“You pleasuring, newsie, or you working?” He stood before the portal, folded arms, and spread feet, a massive immovable rock, body language reinforcing a malevolent frown under a thick, black brow.
“I'm entering, Mr. Clyme.” My voice did not quiver. I'd been with TSIN for a few years. I started out in FashionWatch and moved up from there. I knew the ways. He hesitated, until I moved to key on my recorder implant at my left temple. He snorted something unpleasant and tapped the portal field to neutral. I stepped in. He closed the field behind me.
It's impossible to describe the Wafaerer's. You can scan holo images all you want, but you won't get it. Its reputation as a wastechute is deserved and seriously understated.
As you pass the entry field, your ears are assaulted by the cacophonous howl of at least three audboxes playing different poptunes at full volume and all at once, the clatter and whack of billiard games and the hum of several conversations, punctuated with frequent laughter, male and female. The occasional scream fails to stand out enough to merit attention.
Still, I heard circulation vents whining in protest as they struggled to clean the stench from unhygiened bodies, from spilled alcoholic beverages, from joestick and stimweed smoke, and years of accumulated flotsam and slime. I couldn't see the vents. They hid in the gloom cloaking the place like a muggy fog between dirty, infrequent and inadequate ceiling light panels. Some Wafaerer's denizens no doubt appreciated the darkness. Like rats or cockroaches, many had good reason to shun the light.
And what denizens. Few in the five meters visible before me looked up when I entered. Two were prostitutes. They eyed me as I tried to peer through the dark, to locate Horiuchi. One massed at least two hundred kilos of perfumed flesh, the other looked like she was on a stimweed high as she vibrated with energy. She was pretty. She wore a mean-looking gatsticker on her hip, naked steel snug against naked thigh.
They slouched against the bar fondling a tall skinny man. The man turned to glare at me. He was the ugliest man I've ever seen. Noseless. A black pit existed where his right eye had once been, and the right side of his face was a shiny purple welt that pulled his lip up in a forced grin exposing long yellow teeth. He glared at me and something in his throat gurgled.
I may have wet my pants right then if Horiuchi hadn't intervened. My hero.
“You the newsie Slinky sent?” It took me a second to realize it was Horiuchi silhouetted between me and the hellish trio at the bar.
“Yeah. I'm Peter—"
“Shut up.” He grabbed my arm and pulled. I followed. I had no choice because his hand encircled my arm like a crash belt from elbow to shoulder and when he pulled, I felt like I was being sucked out an airlock.
I followed him as he plowed deeper into the room, a bull ‘loper charging through tall grass, pushing around tables and chairs, huddled groups of quiet, savage-looking men, and one fist-fight. I glimpsed a pool of blood glittering blackly on the floor near an overturned table. We stepped through the images cast from an ill-tuned holotank in the middle of the room, flickering flesh tones from a cheap pornovid, three shapes gyrating, groaning in mid-air in feigned ecstasy. Drooling, slack-faced men grumbled as our passage distorted the images.
How deep the room was I couldn't tell. I'd lost track of the entrance as I was pulled along in Horiuchi's hulking wake. I realized the pub was wedge-shaped, the entry field at the wedge point, the walls expanding out to accommodate a wide back wall against which several large, round tables sat. Many simple, straight-backed chairs flanked each table, and a single light panel centered above the flat green surface lighted each. The light hung low and was shielded so the faces of men sitting at the table might not be easily seen from even a short distance.
That's where Horiuchi sat me, plonked me down without ceremony, as one would slap down an empty beer mug on a barroom table before demanding a refill.
He sat back to the wall facing the room, me across the table from him, my back to the room's cacophony. I began to sweat and my back itched. I remembered to turn on my HV recorder implant.
I could feel the familiar tingle of microservos buzzing under the skin behind my left ear as my HV unit adjusted for the contrast between the well-lit table and Horiuchi's face hidden in the sharp darkness centimeters above the pool of light. I subvocalized command to override the greater light source and concentrate on Horiuchi's face. Still, I knew the holo images would require enhancement back at the editing desk. I also keyed narrow focus on Horiuchi on my audio pickup. As long as I looked at him, he could whisper and I'd record and hear him clearly, the din behind me filtered out.
George Horiuchi, Sgt., CMC19861614. Age twenty-nine Realtime. Two meters exact, one hundred and ten kilos. Born on Oort Outpost Station Severeid. Widowed. One daughter living with relatives in the Beltway. Joined CMC 7/19/346 PH. Promoted in the field during assignment to Spiratz intervention. Recipient of six minor and five major unit and individual merit citations for heroism, etc. in recent Berenson Corporation Spiratz Mining Division Altercation. Wounded in action. And so on. All CMC PR—public relations non-information. A few quotes of praise from superiors and a list of citations, training accomplishments and so on in military double-talk made up all I or anybody else knew about the man who ended the Altercation single-handedly.
The orchestrated news conference a few days ago provided little else but tantalizing questions, which I hoped Horiuchi would answer for me. If so, I'd have a real exclusive.
Exclusives are rare in my business. Newsworkers follow stories where they lead so we end up in hoards, going from one war, riot, strike, accident, government function or natural disaster to the next—one conference, briefing, backgrounder, or orchestrated tour or event to another. It's hard to come up with something everybody doesn't already have, something worth having. If a newsie comes up with something different, it's often just a sidebar or a feature. Nothing important.
But here I sat with the man every newsie in the system would give his or her right eyeball to interview one-on-one. In person and close-up, Horiuchi was as mountainous as his holoimage seemed. His round head, neckless and bald, protruded like a rock above massive shoulders, all muscles. Deep-set eyes burned from under a hairless Neanderthal brow ridge. His nose seemed incongruously button-like, too small for his face. His lips were a tight line above a solid chin.
His left ear was missing and a red and orange flame, a recent t attoo, emerged from the earhole and spread up the side of his smooth head. His incredible musculature, neckless head, and piercing eyes intimidated enough, but the missing ear and the flame tattoo gave him a barbarous look that could loosen the bowels of the most cold-blooded.
I sat silent, awed by—Mount Horiuchi, as I found myself editing tape in my head already. Mount Horiuchi. My editor would love it.
He spoke. “We ain't live, are we?"
“Not from inside a private business establishment. That would violate ICC regs. I am obliged to tell you that I am recording this for broadcast at a later—”
“I picked you cause you work for TSIN."
And my brilliant response: “Huh?” We'd have to edit audio at the desk. Still, I felt myself tingle. Horiuchi had chosen TransSystem Info?
“Why?"
“My little girl—Molly's her name—she likes watching your Capt. Whistler Kid's Hour on the holly.” He spoke as he'd done briefly at the conference, a bit breathy and high-pitched, with an odd twang, dropping ‘g's’ from his gerunds, an Oort accent.
For whatever reason, Horiuchi's military handlers tried to keep their pet hero from saying more than a few phrases at the conference. Maybe they feared he'd reveal state secrets. Who knows how the military mind functions? Of course, this tantalized us newsies to hear more, hence my presence in the Wafaerer's to accomplish just that.
“You sought me out because—"
“I don't watch holly myself, mind. But my girl dotes on your show, so who else to blab to? I know one of you newsies is going to corral me by and by, before my unit outships, so I reckoned my best bet was to nail you first. Slinky only charged me a twenty to find you."
“Well,” I ahemed and spoke for the record, “on behalf of TSIN, I'm sincerely—"
“You want to know how I lost me ear is what."
Hell no. I want to know how you won the war. That's what I thought, not what I said. “I hear the rebels tortured you—"
“So HQ says and so that's what the history books'll say. But I'm figuring to tell the truth and nothing but, HQ be deviled if they don't like it. So listen and don't interrupt, cause I'm only telling it once, you savvy?"
I nodded and wished I had a beer, something to wet my dry throat. I listened and Horiuchi talked.
* * * *
This is the part everybody knows, the history, but Horiuchi told me anyway, and I didn't interrupt him.
The tunnels on Spiratz are a maze, he said. Thousands of kilometers of passageways, cavernous rooms and interlocking pits, vaults, and warrens had been dug deep into the planetoid's hard rock to extract the aulerite ore prized by the Berenson Corp. Shipbuilding Division in the Aragon star system, a short jump from Spiratz. The ore is a key element in the metallic-ceramic alloy used to build null-transit ship hulls. Interstellar commerce would be impossible without it.
Spiratz is the ore's primary source. In the 120 years Realtime since company scouts first assayed it, Spiratz had become a company colony. Most people on and under surface and in the orbital stations around the planetoid worked for Berenson or otherwise depended on company payroll.
Given their growing prosperity and other factors discernible in hindsight, it was only a matter of time before the Spiratz population entertained nationalistic notions. A remote and insensitive bureaucracy whose decision-makers had failed to read history responded to overtures of independence with iron-fisted intransigence. Friction grew. Civil war seemed predestined.
And it happened. A miners’ union declared independence, shut down operations, overran security forces, commandeered key installations and equipment, ousted or imprisoned management, and issued demands for redress of grievances from Berenson Corp. in a “Declaration of Independence” patterned after the historic Earthome document of the same name.
Management appealed to government for troops to halt the strike. Government, even more remote from the situation “on the ground,” and, in a realpolitic sense, “in the pocket” of Berenson, agreed to intervene. They dispatched the nearest available CMC unit and predicted victory in a few weeks.
Superior CMC forces soon suborned rebel-held orbital installations and recovered key equipment and personnel. CMC land units, Horiuchi's outfit, regained the planet's surface with little effort. But the rebels could not be extracted from their underground warrens by reason, coercion, or force. They fought a low-tech guerrilla war, mobile hit and run tactics. They thumbed their noses at CMC, the most sophisticated war machine known to man, and got away with it for two years.
Little ore flowed to the Aragon Shipyards, interstellar economy faced collapse, and the government and Berenson got nervous. CMC HQ tried several ways to get the message—"Let's talk terms,"—through to the rebels. Nothing worked. The rebels were too suspicious of traps and refused to respond. Desperate, HQ sought volunteers with underground experience to make contact with the enemy and offer peace terms—in essence, to surrender.
Finding an enemy to surrender to would be difficult. Rebels evaded CMC and company troops, or wounded or killed them. They seldom took prisoners. Few grunts, even those with firefight experience, had ever seen a rebel.
Horiuchi was among the fourteen grunts that volunteered to walk alone into separate cave entrances unarmed, without supplies or even communications or survival gear, except a lightbeam, to wander around until they made contact with the enemy. A desperate and daring tactic. HQ figured enemy scouts would see the single defenseless troops and rather than kill them or wound them on sight, would capture them out of curiosity. Maybe one would get word to rebel command—"Let's talk peace. Please."
When he set out, Horiuchi asked for a deck of cards to bring with him. He got his wish. He didn't explain why he wanted the cards.
* * * *
“Why cards?” I asked.
“Cause I knew the rebs played poker."
“I'm afraid I don't—"
“A few weeks earlier, while doing a search and destroy with my unit, I come across a card, ‘twas a diamond seven, tucked behind this rock, sorta. Didn't say diddly at the time. It didn't seem important then, but I thought on it a lot, later. I went back by and by, alone, and staked out the card, you know. Sure enough, a reb come for it."
“For one card?"
“His deck was incomplete, y'see."
“So what happened?"
“Well, I tried to take him but he outgunned me and got away. He about killed me."
“But I don't understand—"
“D'you recall me telling you to shut up a bit ago?"
I shut up.
* * * *
Horiuchi walked into the labyrinth for a few hours, found a spot, sat down, took out his cards and started playing solitaire. He continued playing hour after hour. He didn't move from the spot except to piss behind a nearby rock.
Late on the third day, Horiuchi awoke from a catnap abruptly, a pulse rifle muzzle in his nose. Before he got a glimpse at his captors, they blindfolded him and tied his hands behind his back. Someone took his cards. Strong arms helped him stand.
“Don't talk,” a gruff voice whispered. “Walk."
Horiuchi walked, firm hands on each elbow keeping him from stumbling over obstacles. He smelled bodies long unwashed. He didn't bother to remember the turns, dips, and rises in the journey with his silent escorts, nor to time it. He'd been lost since an hour after he'd first entered the passageways. He figured he was now being taken to somebody he could talk to.
He found the person he sought in a cavern that looked like every other cavern in the underground complex. Somebody pushed him to the floor and he sat hard. Somebody ripped the blindfold off and he squinted into a bright light directly ahead, aimed at him. A man squatted on heels before him, silhouetted in the light. The man had about him the air of leadership Horiuchi recognized from experience. Small, skinny and boyish, as far as Horiuchi could tell through the bright light, but something about the man said “leader."
The leader-person accepted the cards from one of the reb escorts. He rifled expertly through the deck, grunted, made a hand motion and the bright light turned away from Horiuchi. Somebody untied his hands.
“We caught all your friends,” the reb leader said, voice a husky rasp. “Stripped them, put them in a bag, and set them all outside the door. Nobody hurt, yours or ours."
