Read an Excerpt
Clarke County, Space
By Allen Steele OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1990 Allen Steele
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-7595-3
CHAPTER 1
Departure
(Wednesday: 11:15 P.M.)
She had anticipated that the main passenger terminal would be crowded, and she was correct. The long Memorial Day weekend was approaching, and despite the late hour people were scurrying along the concourses and walkways of the vast airport, on their way to catch flights to all the usual vacation spots: Bermuda, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sydney, St. Thomas, New York, Ho Chi Minh City. A group of little Japanese kids crowded against a railing, staring at a replica of The Spirit of St. Louis suspended from the ceiling, while beneath the antique airplane the holographic ghost of Charles Lindbergh, dressed in flying leathers and jodhpurs, delivered a prerecorded lecture on his flight.
Today, thanks to suborbital travel, you can fly to Paris in less than an hour, the young pilot commented as a baggage autocart rolled heedlessly through his body, but in 1927 my solo flight took almost thirty-four hours and was considered the most dangerous flight yet.... Yeah, Chuck, Macy thought as she turned away. Tell me about dangerous flights.
At least the vast numbers of men, women, and children swarming around would make it hard for her to be spotted, if indeed she was being followed. Even if one of Tony's goons found her here, a quiet abduction would be difficult. If someone grabbed her, Macy could scream rape, draw attention to herself, perhaps spook whoever it was into retreating. Above all else, Tony always wanted family business to be done quietly.
She hurried down the concourse towards Gate 27, passing through the security smartgate, which automatically scanned her face, verified her identity and the presence of the passenger tag on her ticket, and probed her body and the contents of her nylon shoulder bag, Macy's single piece of luggage. She glanced at a status screen as she walked by: 11:17 P.M. Tony was supposed to have picked her up at the compound at ten o'clock when he came back from "business." Even if he was his usual tardy self, she had little doubt that her absence from the Salvatore mansion was already known.
At this minute they would be searching for her. Macy had done her best to cover her trail, prepurchasing her ticket on the Amex card bearing her Mary Boston pseudonym, and bribing the cab driver who had picked her up in Ladue to forget her face. Yet she knew that Tony would quickly run through all the possibilities; undoubtedly, someone would already be on the way to Lambert Field, to see if Tony's woman was trying to catch a plane. Maybe that someone was getting out of a car even now, out on the sidewalk in front of the terminal, striding in through the automatic doors she herself had passed only fifteen minutes ago....
Cut it out, she told herself. Don't panic now. Just get on the shuttle down to Texas and you're home-free. You'll be out of St. Louis. Then in another couple of hours you'll be on Matagorda Island, and an hour after that, you'll be off the planet....
She harbored no illusions that putting 200,000 miles of outer space between her and St. Louis would be enough to keep her from Tony Salvatore and his goon squad. It would stall him, but not stop him. Yet all she needed was time and a little distance. Then she could get revenge, erase Tony from her life once and for all. The contents of her shoulder bag would see to that, once she delivered it into the right hands. So she hoped.
She found Gate 27, the United Airlines flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. The waiting area was crowded, but while there were still a few seats vacant, she did not sit down. She had to keep her face hidden a few minutes longer. Instead, Macy turned her back to the concourse and faced the wall, fixing her eyes on an ad screen.
By coincidence, it was displaying an animated holo of Clarke County. It rotated gracefully in space, the gentle silver-gray orb of the Moon gliding past in the background as the TexSpace logo shimmered into existence in front of the colony. Macy stared at it, and smiled for the first time since she had climbed over the wall surrounding Tony's mansion. Three days and she would be there.
The screen went blank, and in the moment before a chorus line of Las Vegas showgirls began goose-stepping across the screen, she glimpsed in the black panel a reflection of the scene behind her. About twenty feet away, standing next to the gate entrance, was a man in a suit, perfectly ordinary—except for the fact that he was watching her. Not with the eyes of a casual stranger sizing up a beautiful woman who happened to be by herself, but with the gaze of a person who was discreetly keeping track of her movements.
A chill electric wave coursed from the nape of her neck to the bottom of her spine. Macy slowly turned away from the screen, forcing herself to stare out the windows overlooking the apron where the airliner nuzzled against the passenger walkway. In the reflection of the window she could see herself, and further away, the man in the suit was still watching.
She began to turn in his direction, and a fat man with a bawling kid in tow lurched into her. He stopped and excused himself before pushing past, and the kid trampled across the toes of her boots. When they were gone and she dared to look back again, the man in the suit had disappeared.
Macy Westmoreland would have panicked at that moment—absolutely flipped, lost her cool, bolted for the ladies' room or the nearest security guard or even, God forbid, to a phone to call Tony to say that she was sorry, she was coming home now, please don't have anyone kill her, or whatever opportunity came first—when the gate agent picked up her mike and announced that United Airlines Flight 724 nonstop from St. Louis to Dallas-Fort Worth was ready for boarding. Even before the agent had done the bit about carry-on bags and persons needing assistance, Macy was pushing her way towards the ramp.
FBI Special Agent Milo Suzuki watched as the woman shoved and squirmed her way to the front of the mob of passengers, almost falling over an old man in a wheelchair as she thrust her ticket into the hand of the ticket agent. He could hear the protests of the other passengers and caught the sour look on the agent's face. There was a brief exchange between the agent and the woman, then the agent reluctantly ran her optical scanner over the ticket and allowed the woman to be the first person aboard the aircraft.
Suzuki shook his head. "And away she goes," he whispered to himself. When it came to shaking off a tail, the woman was an utter amateur.
He walked away from the gate to the nearest phone booth, in an alcove just off the concourse. Shutting himself inside and picking up the receiver, he pulled out his datapad and, after connecting the interface to the phone, dialed the number to the St. Louis field office's computer. Once he was logged in, he typed on the pad's miniature keyboard: WESTMORELAND, MACY—CROSS-REF SALVATORE.
Within a few moments, the computer downloaded the file into Suzuki's datapad. A head-and-shoulders photo of the woman who had just boarded the airliner appeared on the screen. There was more information, of course, but this was all that Suzuki needed to confirm that it was, indeed, Tony Salvatore's mistress who had boarded a jet to Texas.
He opened a window on the screen and dialed into United Airlines' passenger reservations computer. At first, the AI system would not permit him access to the passenger list, until Suzuki typed in his federal authorization code—in effect, showing the computer his badge. Once in, he typed in Macy's name again. No record of Macy Westmoreland was entered in the United Airlines passenger manifest. Suzuki pursed his lips, then studied Westmoreland's dossier again. Bingo: she had a couple of aliases, chief among them "Mary Boston."
REQ. ITIN. 5/29/49: BOSTON, MARY, he typed. This name the computer recognized; it immediately printed out Mary Boston's travel itinerary, gathered from the flight reservations she had made through the airline. Milo studied the schedule, tracing it with his forefinger, frowned and then smiled.
How interesting. Macy Westmoreland had used her "Mary Boston" Amex card to purchase bookings all the way to Clarke County. United 724 would get her to Dallas-Fort Worth, where she would catch the special TexSpace commuter helicopter to the Matagorda Island Spaceport. From there, she was scheduled to catch the TexSpace SSTO Lone Star Clipper to Clarke County, traveling in First Class. In fact, she already had a room reserved at the LaGrange Hotel in the colony.
"So why are you running away from Tony, babe?" Milo Suzuki muttered to himself. He saved the information he had gathered within the datapad's memory bubble, then logged off and disconnected the pad from the phone. Well, it didn't matter to him. He had followed Macy from the Salvatore compound, where he had seen her climb over the wall from his stakeout point up the street, and now he knew where she was going. All he had to do was contact the Dallas field office and have her picked up when United 724 landed there. There had to be some usefulness in the fact that Tony Salvatore's bimbo was apparently going AWOL.
He had just tucked the datapad into his pocket and had pulled his phonecard out of his wallet, when the door to the phone booth suddenly slid open and a man shoved himself into the booth. Milo Suzuki had just enough time to clumsily bring up his hands and open his mouth before the squat barrel of an oversized pistol was pressed into his sternum.
Suzuki looked up into the impassive face of the intruder. "Golem ..." he said.
Without a word, the intruder slapped the gun's barrel into the palm of Suzuki's upraised right hand and squeezed the trigger. There was a soft whufff! as a tiny sliver was fired into the FBI agent's hand.
"Yow!" Suzuki jerked back from the sudden sting. It was the last thing he ever said.
Two cc's of sea wasp venom—the secretion of a jellyfish found only in the Indian Ocean off the Australian coast, the rarest and most lethal natural poison known to man—was already coursing through his bloodstream. Within seconds it entered his heart. Suzuki's eyes widened as his heart began to beat wildly out of control. Gasping, he clutched at his chest and sagged against the back wall of the phone booth until, half a minute after the dart had been fired into his hand, he collapsed and died.
The intruder caught Suzuki with his gloved hands and carefully settled his corpse onto the booth's seat. He looked over his shoulder to make sure he had not been seen, then he quickly and artfully positioned the dead man's arms, legs, and head so that it appeared as if Suzuki was just another exhausted commuter catching a few quick winks in a phone booth. When the FBI agent's body was eventually discovered and examined, it would seem as if Suzuki had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. The dart itself would dissolve within ten minutes; only a thorough autopsy would reveal the tiny puncture mark in his right hand.
The Golem pocketed his hospital-issue sedative gun; made of plastics and protected with a computer-fouling stealth chip in its handle, it had passed through the smartgate without raising any alarms. He then reached into Suzuki's coat pocket and retrieved the agent's datapad. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his own jacket, and stripped off his gloves and carefully backed out of the phone booth.
He shut the door of the booth, then strolled down the concourse without looking back. The United Airlines jet was taxiing away from Gate 27 as the killer reached the main terminal; by the time Suzuki's body was discovered by someone impatient to use the phone, the Golem would be long gone from St. Louis International Airport.
The Golem knew that Macy Westmoreland was aboard the plane, unreachable by him. But the G-man had found something and put it into his datapad; that information would make it easy for the organization to track down the boss's girl. She'd got a small headstart, but nothing more.
The Golem was a soldier who only carried out orders. This time, though, he hoped he was the one who got tapped for the inevitable wet job.
He had to admit it to himself. He enjoyed his line of work.
CHAPTER 2
The Coyote Dream (Friday: 6:59 P.M.)
In an elliptical orbit that varies between 100,000 and 200,000 miles from Earth, Clarke County glides through the darkness of cislunar space like an enormous, elaborate child's top. From a distance, it's nearly impossible to appreciate the size of the artificial world, for there is nothing else nearby to which one can compare it. Closer, though, with tiny OTVs and zero g "free-flier" factories parked in orbit around it, the vastness of the space colony becomes overwhelmingly apparent. With an overall length of 5,250 feet—just shy of a statute mile—and the broadest width, the circumference of its bowl-like central primary mirror, of 2,937 feet, the colony is dwarfed only by the solar power satellites in geosynchronous orbits closer to Earth.
Even so, Space Colony LH-101US is more staggering than the thirteen-mile-long SPS satellites. The powersats, after all, are unmanned solar collectors, while the first true space colony is home to thousands of people. Essentially a Bernal sphere, surrounded at each end by torus clusters arrayed along axial shafts, solar vanes and giant mirrors, Clarke County is the largest space station ever successfully built. The Great Pyramids of Egypt could be constructed within the biosphere, and the largest skyscrapers on Earth would all be diminished in stature if Clarke County were to be brought home.
Yet engineering feats are one matter and the human condition is quite another. People have lived together in communities for thousands of years, but no one has yet built a successful Utopia. You can transform sterile, cold lunar rock into air and water, living soil and comfortable houses, a new sky and a new home, but you can't so easily change human beings. In every town there are as many stories as there are the people who make up the community: some good, some bad, some absurd, and some that are best left untold.
Technology changes, and each age develops its own miracles. People, however, are as noble, ornery, vile, and downright weird as they always were.
Same as it ever was ...
John Bigthorn sat on the front steps of the Big Sky town hall and waited for the sun to go down. It was the end of his duty shift; he had left one of his deputies, Lou Bellevedere, in charge of the cop shop, with a warning not to try to call him with any problems, because he was taking off his beltphone. It was dinner time and the town square was nearly vacant. Across the square, Ginny DeMille was closing the doors of Ginny's Café. She spotted the sheriff through the window of her little restaurant and waved to him, and Bigthorn was waving back when the alarm on his watch beeped.
Bigthorn mentally counted back from five, and at the exact instant his countdown reached zero, night fell on Clarke County. As the colony's halo orbit brought it once again behind Earth's shadow, a wave of darkness started on the eastern hemisphere of the biosphere, above his head, and quickly raced down the walls of the world as a solid terminator line.
As nightfall moved across the habitat, it left behind sparks and ovals of light as photosensitive timers switched on house and street lights. Finally the terminator line reached Big Sky, and as it raced across the square the street lamps turned on as the bell in the meeting hall steeple chimed seven times. From the far-off livestock sector in the Southwest quad, on the opposite side of the biosphere, he could dimly hear the roosters crowing. Directly above his head, from the promenade outside the LaGrange Hotel, the touristas attending the daily Sundown Cocktail cheered and clapped their hands. In space, there's no such thing as a tequila sunset. Without a twilight time, night had come to Clarke County.
Bigthorn rose from the steps, pulled his dayback over his left shoulder, and began walking out of Settler's Square, passing a statue cast from a solid hunk of lunar aluminum. "The Final Shift," the statue was named: an exhausted-looking beamjack in space armor, helmet dangling from his right hand, staring upwards in perpetual awe at the artificial sky of the world he had helped build. A plaque at the base of the statue was etched with the names of the forty-seven men and women who had died—so far—during the construction of the colony. Every few weeks the sun rose to find that someone had climbed up on the statue during the night to place a pair of sunglasses on its face, crazily changing the Lost Beamjack's lonesome courage into blissed-out goshwow.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele. Copyright © 1990 Allen Steele. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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