Juggler of Worlds Read online

  “Meaning me.” Ben Grimaldi, Undersecretary-General for Inspections, leaned casually against the wall. Body language somehow added, Your suspicions make this easier.

  That was self-justifying nonsense, of course. Grimaldi would not have shown himself had there been any chance Sigmund would be let free.

  Grimaldi broke a lengthening silence. “I need to learn what you know. More importantly, I need to know how.”

  Once I reveal that, Sigmund thought, I’m dead. He shifted position, his chains clicking dully. Change the subject. “Why the Trojans?”

  Grimaldi smiled humorlessly. “We prefer Achilles. The Trojans were losers.”

  The Trojan Asteroids fell into two groups, those orbiting the L4 Lagrange point, 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter in its orbit, and those orbiting the L5 point, 60 degrees behind. The Greek Camp and the Trojan Camp, as they were sometimes called. Achilles was among the largest asteroids in the Greek Camp. Of course Hector also orbited there, so named before the labeling convention began. . . .

  Sigmund pinched his leg, desperate to unmuddle his thoughts. “How much dope did you give me?” he demanded.

  “Enough.” Grimaldi looked pointedly at his wrist implant. “I must be going soon. Your stay here will be much more pleasant if you answer our questions voluntarily.”

  More pleasant, perhaps. Also shorter? Did buying time matter? “Why the Trojans?”

  “Why would you think, Ausfaller? They made a generous offer for my assistance. Official scrutiny is bad for their business.

  “You’re an odd one, Sigmund, but I admit you’re capable. Persistent. I truly wish I thought we could buy you. Sadly, you inherited piles of money. You still chose to work for a pittance at the UN.” Grimaldi shook his head. “You live like a monk. You dress like a monk. Why offer you money when you ignore the wealth you already have? It seems too likely you have principles.”

  And there it was, the memory Sigmund had struggled for. Money. He tried and failed to blink away the fuzziness. “Perhaps I can pay you.”

  A reflexive flash of contempt—and then, more slowly, an expression of low cunning. Grimaldi said, “You’d still have to tell everything you’ve learned about me and my associates. And every detail about how you learned. It won’t do for someone else to discover what you did.”

  “Understood.”

  “You wouldn’t try to trick me, now would you?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Of course not,” Sigmund answered.

  Grimaldi smacked his hands together; strangely, that assurance had sufficed. “Stet. There will be no negotiation. One million stars, transferred into the numbered Belter account I will give you. Don’t bother to protest. I know you’re good for it. When your weekly reports began to show progress, I made it a point to learn about you. Here’s the deal, Mr. Ausfaller. You pay. You tell all. Then we let you go.”

  He’d never be let go, but Sigmund acted as though he believed. Anyway, the million-and-change he thought Grimaldi could trace was merely the fraction of Sigmund’s wealth he intended to be visible—and it wasn’t as though there were anyone to leave his money to. At worst, the charade might make his final hours less unpleasant.

  Sigmund raised his arms, clanking on purpose. “For a million stars, I want these off. I want a nicer room. A suite with plumbing would be good.”

  “We’ll see about that after the funds clear. Until then, maybe a pot.” Grimaldi took a sonic stunner and a handheld computer from pockets of his bodysuit. He whispered inaudibly into the handheld, set it on the deck, and then slid it with his shoe tip toward Sigmund. Handheld and foot never came within Sigmund’s reach. The sonic stunner was fixed on him.

  “I’m logged into an anonymous account. All other comm functions are locked out. Moments after my funds are received, they’ll be shifted elsewhere.” Grimaldi laughed. “My colleagues, as I’m sure you know, are skilled in anonymous transfers.”

  My funds. Sigmund held in his anger. “Funds transfer from Bank of North America.” He paused for the voiceprint check. “Account: five . . . four . . . one. . . .” He articulated slowly and distinctly, leaving no chance for misinterpretation. Account number. Subaccount. Access codes.

  The good news was the response time. He was still on Earth.

  The stunner never wavered. He’d be lucky to utter a suspicious syllable without being zapped. “Four . . . two . . . niner. . . .”

  The bank AI spoke a challenge code. Grimaldi snorted in disgust. He wiggled the stunner, just a bit, in warning.

  Sigmund shrugged. Clank. With the challenge-response feature set, a bank would accept transfer authorizations only in real time. Challenge-response defeated coerced recordings. What rational person didn’t configure his account this way?

  Sigmund could authorize the transfer with a duress code. That would alert his bank, but so what? Money laundering was big business for the Trojans. Within minutes of the money’s release, it would be laundered through a dozen shell companies, off-world tax havens, and other anonymous venues. The duress code would accomplish nothing.

  If he purposefully aborted the transfer, Grimaldi would know instantly—and the coming questioning could become a lot less pleasant. Or—

  Dr. Swenson had been right: Sigmund was paranoid. And now, he thought, we’ll see if I’ve been paranoid enough.

  SIGMUND REMAINED IN chains, but he’d been offered a chair, an improvised chamber pot, and a greasy drinking bulb with tepid water. For a million stars, there should have been at least a leaded-glass tumbler and ice.

  Grimaldi was long gone. He had delegated the detailed questioning to the lanky Belter Sigmund had met earlier. His interrogator disdained to offer a name. Sigmund chose to think of him as Astyanax: Hector’s little boy, hurled from the ramparts of Troy. Like Achilles’ son, Sigmund wanted no more kings of Troy.

  Slow, pensive sips didn’t buy much time.

  All crimes lead to tax evasion. Sigmund had concentrated his quest for the Trojans there. He discoursed methodically on forensic techniques in spotting hidden income, waxing ever more pedantic. Whenever Astyanax began looking impatient, Sigmund offered a tidbit about which banking investigations had suggested what line of further investigation. A few such admissions evoked surprisingly astute questions. The Belter was something of an expert himself on income-tax evasion.

  A handheld in Astyanax’s pocket squawked in alarm. There was sudden pandemonium in the corridor. Thudding footsteps. Thudding bodies? The unmistakable zap of sonic stunners.

  Astyanax dropped his own stunner, and took a utility knife from his belt. Low-tech but lethal.

  “Don’t,” Sigmund said. “You’ll only make it wor—”

  He gasped in shock at the sudden agony in his stomach. His shirt and Astyanax’s hand were bright red. Lifeblood red.

  “Nothing personal,” Astyanax said.

  As Sigmund slumped, a squad of battle-armored ARMs burst through the door. To the frying-bacon sound of stunners, as everything went dark, Sigmund thought: Too late. . . .

  2

  Sigmund awoke. The incredible pain in his gut was gone. His wrists and ankles no longer throbbed from tight restraints. He was clearheaded and full of energy. Rested. Content.

  It scared the hell out of him.

  He opened his eyes. A transparent dome hung centimeters from his face. Reflected LEDs shone steadily, all in green.

  He was in an autodoc.

  Readouts told Sigmund that the ’doc had replaced his heart and part of his liver! And two liters of blood, and—he stopped reading. He raised the massive lid and sat up, to echoes of pain in his chest and belly. Logically, those pangs were in his head, since the ’doc had declared him healed. They hurt regardless.

  The room seemed chilly, but that might only be because he wasn’t wearing anything. You never did in an autodoc.

  “Welcome back.”

  His head swiveled. A stranger in a drab bodysuit occupied the room’s only chair. She was lean, almost gaunt, but also massively muscled. He guesse
d she worked out obsessively. She would have been striking, if not exactly pretty, if she didn’t scare the bejesus out of him.

  The stranger stood and handed Sigmund the robe that hung from a hook on the door. She did not turn her back. “You’ll want this, I expect. Then we should talk.”

  “Where are we?” Sigmund asked.

  Instead of answering, she waved a blue disc at him. A holo shimmered, Earth, and a bit of text: Special Agent Fiona Filip.

  It appeared to be an ARM ident. Perhaps she had answered him.

  The Amalgamated Regional Militia was the unassuming name for the UN military forces. Understatement sufficed when merely to see an ARM made most people quail. Everyone knew the militia was how the United Nations maintained control, not just civil order.

  Sigmund slipped on his robe and climbed out of the autodoc. Everyone knew what someone meant everyone to know. Grimaldi? The people for whom Grimaldi worked? Maybe the rescue had been staged, Sigmund’s stabbing a bit of theater for credibility, to hear what he’d tell those he thought were the authorities. To see whom he’d contact next.

  “Sigmund, this will be hard for you. I understand better than you can know.” The stranger sighed. “Let’s start over. I’m Fiona Filip. My friends call me Feather. I’m an ARM—but not the kind that extracted you. I prefer to avoid guns and knives. People can get hurt with those things. As you recently learned.”

  When had they become friends? “Where am I, Agent Filip?”

  Her smile looked wrong, somehow. Unpracticed rather than insincere. “A SWAT team extracted you from an interplanetary freighter on the tarmac at Mojave Spaceport. You were dying of a stab wound. You were also, by the way, pumped full of truth serum.

  “They always bring autodocs on raids. The squad leader popped you into a field ’doc and delivered you to the nearest ARM District Office. That’s Los Angeles. Hollywood, more precisely, if you know the area.”

  Sigmund remembered saying he wasn’t trying to trick Grimaldi, and the bastard had taken his word for it. Truth serum explained it. He had told the literal truth. He hadn’t been trying to trick Grimaldi—he was tricking him.

  If any of this was real, of course.

  “I want you to trust me, and that doesn’t come easily to you, does it?” Filip turned the chair and sat, legs straddling the back. “I don’t expect an answer, by the way. As I said, I understand you. I’ll answer the questions you don’t dare to ask. For starters, you’re not a suspect. Not for anything.”

  Sigmund’s mind raced. Except for the usual fresh-from-the-autodoc burst of energy, he felt normal. Normal for him, that was. How could that be? “Then I’m free to go.”

  She flashed an I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin. This smile looked natural. “Yes, but you won’t, because you need to know more.”

  If Filip was who she said she was, she must know how he had signaled for help. If she wasn’t . . . to even reveal that he had signaled could bring on retribution. It would, at a minimum, make the Trojan Mafia hide him better.

  “You’re dying to know how you were rescued. No, let’s be honest. Sigmund, you’re wondering if you were rescued.” She laughed at his twitch of surprise, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh. “You’re kind of cute in an intense way. Just hear me out.

  “You came into a fair amount of money when your parents died, part inheritance, part insurance. You took control of that money once you reached twenty-one. The interesting thing, Sigmund, is what you’ve done with that money.”

  “Nothing.” Sigmund willed his voice to stay level. In fact, he’d divvied the money into several accounts, two directly in his name, the rest far more subtly registered. He hadn’t broken any laws in doing it—they certainly watched for that—but he had, arguably, bent a few. “It’s my rainy-day fund.”

  Filip shook her head. “Hardly. You sloshed your wealth around in very unusual ways. You triggered trip wires in more money-laundering audits than I care to admit.” She cut off his objection before he could do more than open his mouth. “Relax. You did nothing illegal. Not quite. You kept the individual funds transfers just below the banks’ required filing threshold. And once my colleagues determined the ownership of all the blind trusts, they saw none of the money had even changed hands.

  “Given what you do—you’re very good at it, by the way—you knew exactly what would happen. You knew the pattern of activities would flag those accounts. Sigmund, you went to a lot of trouble to create bank accounts the authorities would forever watch.”

  Sigmund shrugged. He could feign nonchalance all he wanted, but were sensors even now picking up the pounding of his brand-new heart?

  “Rainy-day fund? It apparently poured yesterday in the Mojave,” Filip said. “From an account long idle, suddenly there’s a million-star transfer into a numbered account in a Belter bank haven. It set off all kinds of alarms. I wondered: If you wanted attention, why not just make the transfer using a duress code?”

  Because a duress alarm wouldn’t say enough! If a duress code caught your eye, you might not look any further. Wasn’t that obvious?

  “I dug a bit deeper,” Filip said. “You could have used any of those red-flag accounts. Did your choice matter? Banks assign account numbers, but account owners choose their own access codes. So: I ran your access codes through crypto software. Each of your funny accounts had its PIN derived from the name of a high official in the UN Inspections Directorate. The PINs changed, but not the pattern.” She patted Sigmund’s arm and he flinched. “The PIN that released those funds decrypted as ‘Grimaldi.’ He was at Mojave Spaceport when you authorized the payoff.”

  Sigmund couldn’t help shivering. He pulled his thin robe more tightly closed, but he doubted it fooled her. Then it was true: ARMs traced people through the transfer-booth system. He’d always worried about that. Transfers had to tie back somehow to people, for billing purposes.

  Or the Trojans were even cleverer than he’d feared. Grimaldi might have recorded his PIN as he authorized the transfer. If Trojans had decrypted his code, they might be testing him now. . . .

  “Sigmund! Come back.” She laughed, somehow kindly this time. “Who but a paranoid sets traps with the ARMs to implicate their co-workers? You came out of the autodoc as paranoid as you went in. I see it in your eyes. Surely you noticed. Have you asked yourself: Why?”

  He sat still, afraid to speak. Why hadn’t the autodoc reset his brain chemistry?

  Filip said, “Here’s where we become friends, Sigmund. You’ve heard the rumors. Senior ARM agents are paranoids. It helps us with the job. We get that way chemically. We’re pumped up for the workweek, and pumped out when we go off-duty. Most ARMs, that is. Like you, I’m a natural schiz. I’m drugged before they send me home for the weekend.

  “The thing is, today is Wednesday. A workday. After your little mishap, you went into an autodoc. Ours see nothing unusual with a bit of schizo brain chemistry. It’s no accident you’re as messed up as ever.

  “Sigmund, that’s the reason I understand you. We’re the same.”

  He wanted to believe. Of course, he’d heard the stories. Who hadn’t? The thing was—

  “Sigmund,” she snapped. “Stay with me. You’re thinking: ARMs put out the rumor that they’re paranoid to trick you into revealing that you’re paranoid. I did, too.”

  For the first time since Sigmund had climbed out of the autodoc, she peered directly into his eyes. “Bright and paranoid is a license to be miserable and alone. Miserable maybe I can’t help. But alone—that’s something else.”

  He accepted the new ident chip she offered him. When he held it just right, a blue globe and his name shimmered above it. It was supposedly keyed to his DNA and would get him into the ARM academy in London. He struggled into the plain, black suit she whisked from a cabinet. It didn’t surprise him that it had been synthed to his size and preferred style.

  He admitted nothing, promised nothing. He was, finally, apparently free.

  Free to go? Free to be followed? Fe
stooned with tiny cameras?

  Beyond the clinic door, an office buzzed with activity. No one paid Sigmund any attention. Ignoring the transfer booths, he found his way outside. Large five-pointed stars shone in the pedestrian walkway. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre stood across and just down the street.

  He turned. Above the double doors through which he had just exited, stone-carved letters read: Amalgamated Regional Militia, Los Angeles District. A faux ARM office could hardly be fabricated in such a public place.

  Sigmund fingered the ident chip Agent Filip—Feather—had given him. It suddenly seemed possible, after more than a century alone, that he had finally discovered a place where he could fit in.

  A MISSION OF GRAVITY

  Earth date: 2641

  3

  “Eerie, don’t you think?” Without waiting for an answer, Trisha Schwartz cranked the bridge telescope’s holo to max magnification. Her voice brimmed with curiosity and impatience.

  Nessus marveled. Their ship was not even a minute out of hyperspace. Curiosity explained why she and her colleague were here; there was much to be learned in this place. Their impatience explained why he was. Someone had to show judgment.

  She should be eager. This was, theoretically, a rescue mission. Nessus kept his pessimism to himself.

  Distorted and curdled starlight rushed at him and vanished, replaced by . . . nothing. Vertigo washed over him. Nessus braced himself against the nearest bulkhead and sought meaning in the amplified hologram display.

  Trisha said, “It shows in the mass pointer. Its magnetic field is enormous. It’s unmistakable on deep radar. And here”—she poked a hand into the center of the projection—“nothing.”

  Beside her, a crash couch creaked as Raul Miller shifted his considerable bulk. “Just wait,” he said. A tiny circle of light flashed and disappeared. Seconds later a second halo flickered.

  Trisha was delighted. “See? Gravity lensing as stars pass directly behind it. We’re still not seeing it. It’s eerie, I tell you. Don’t you agree, Nessus?”