Part 6 (1/2)

I slept like a creature stunned and woke to an empty house. She'd left a note on the microwave that she had a sequence scheduled at 8:45 and would see me at the lunch group meeting. It was after ten.

A Sat.u.r.day meeting; science never sleeps. I found some clean clothes in my drawer and took a quick shower.

THE DAY BEFORE I went back to Portobello, I had an appointment with the Luxury Allocation Board in Dallas, the people who handle special requests for the nano-forge. I took the Triangle monorail, and so got a glimpse of Fort Worth streaming by. I'd never gotten off there.

It was a half hour to Dallas, but then another hour crawling through traffic out to the LAB, which took up a huge piece of land outside the city limits. They had sixteen nanoforges, and hundreds of tanks and vats and bins that held the raw materials and the various nanos that put them together in millions of ways. I didn't have time to walk around, but had taken a guided tour of the place with Reza and his friend, the year before. That's when I got the idea to get something special for Amelia. We didn't do birthdays or religious holidays, but next week was the second anniversary of the first time we were intimate. (I don't keep a diary, but could trace the date down through lab reports; we both missed the next day's sequence.) The evaluator a.s.signed to my request was a sour-faced man, about fifty. He read the form with a fixed glum expression. You don't want this piece of jewelry for yourself. This is for some woman, some lover?

Yes, of course.

I'll have to have her name, then.

I hesitated. She's not exactly my- I don't care about your relations.h.i.+p. I just have to know who will eventually own this object. If I should approve it.

I wasn't enthusiastic about having our relations.h.i.+p officially doc.u.mented. Of course anyone who tapped me with a deep jack would know about it, so it was only as secret as anything in my life was secret.

It's for Amelia Blaze Harding, I said. A co-worker.

He wrote that down. She also lives at the university?

That's right.

Same address?

No. I'm not sure what her address is.

We'll find it. He smiled like a man who had sucked on a lemon and tried to smile. ”I see no reason to disapprove your request. A printer in his desk hissed and a piece of paper flipped up in front of me.

That will be fifty-three utility credits, he said. If you sign here, the finished piece should be available at Unit Six within half an hour.

I signed. More than a month's worth of credits for a handful of sand transformed was one way to think of it. Or fifty-three worthless government counters for a thing of beauty that would have been literally beyond price a generation ago.

I went out into the corridor and followed a purple line that led to Units 1 through 8. That split, and I followed a red line to Units 5 through 8. Door after door concealing people who sat at desks slowly doing work that machines could have done better and faster. But machines had no use for extra utility and entertainment credits.

I went through a revolving door into a pleasant rotunda built around a rock garden. A thin silvery stream fell and washed through it, splas.h.i.+ng among exotic tropical plants that grew out of a gravel of rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and dozens of glittering stones with no common names.

I checked at the Unit 6 counter and it said I still had a half-hour wait. There was a cafe, though, with tables ringed around half the rock garden. I produced my military ID and got a cold beer. At the table where I sat, somebody had left a folded-up copy of the Mexican magazine s.e.xo!, so I spent the half hour improving my language skills.

A card on the table explained that the gems were specimens rejected for esthetic or structural flaws. They were nevertheless well out of reach.

The desk announced my name and I went over and picked up a small white package. I unwrapped it carefully.

It was exactly what I had ordered, but seemed more dramatic than its picture. A gold chain necklace supporting a dark green nightstone inside a halo of small rubies. Nightstones had only been around for a few months. This one looked like a small egg of onyx that somehow had a green light imbedded. As you turned it, the green changed shape, square to diamond to cross.

It would look good on her delicate skin, the red and green echoing her hair and eyes. I hoped it wouldn't be too exotic for her to wear.

On the train ride back, I showed it to a woman who sat next to me. She said it was pretty, but in her opinion was too dark for a black woman's skin. I told her I'd have to think about that.

I left it on Amelia's dresser, along with a note reminding her it was two years, and went on to Portobello.

JULIAN WAS BORN IN a university town, and grew up surrounded by white people who weren't overtly racist. There were race riots in places like Detroit and Miami, but people treated them as urban problems, far removed from their comfortable reality. That was close to the truth.

But the Ngumi War was changing white America's feelings about race-or, cynics maintained, allowing them to express their true feelings. Only about half the enemy were black, but most of the leaders who appeared on the news were from that half. And they were shown crying out for white blood.

The irony wasn't lost on Julian, that he was an active part of a process that was turning American whites against blacks. But that kind of white person was alien to his personal world, his daily life; the woman on the train literally came from a foreign land. The people in his university life were mostly white but color-blind, and the people he jacked with might have started out otherwise, but didn't stay racist: you couldn't think black people were inferior if you lived inside black skin, ten days every month.

OUR FIRST a.s.sIGNMENT HAD a lot of potential to turn ugly. We had to remand for questioning -kidnap- a woman who was suspected of being a rebel leader. She was also the mayor of San Ignacio, a small town high in the cloud forest.

The town was so small that any two of us could have destroyed it in minutes. We circled it in a silent flyboy, studying the infrared signature and comparing that to maps and low-orbit pictures. The town was lightly defended, apparently; ambushes set on the main road where it entered and left the town. Of course there could be automated defenses that didn't betray themselves with body heat. But it wasn't that rich a town.

Let's try to do this quietly, I said. Drop into the coffee plantation about here. I pointed mentally to a spot almost two kilometers downhill from the town. Candi and I'll work up through the plantation to the rear of Senora Madero's house. See whether we can make the s.n.a.t.c.h without raising any fuss.

Julian, you ought to take at least two more, Claude said. The place is gonna be wired and 'trapped.

I gave him a nonverbal reb.u.t.tal: You know I considered that. Just you be ready to charge up if something happens. We start making noise, I want all ten of you to run up the hill in a tight formation and circle Candi and me. We'll keep Madero protected. Lay down smoke and we head straight down the valley here and then up this little rise for a cargo s.n.a.t.c.h. I felt the flyboy relay that information laterally and, in a second, confirm that we could have a warm-body s.n.a.t.c.h in place.

Now, I said, and all twelve of us were falling fast through the cold night air. We s.p.a.ced ourselves fifty meters apart and after a minute the black chutes whispered out and we drifted invisibly down into the acres of low coffee trees-bushes, actually; a person of even normal height would have a hard time hiding out there. It was a calculated risk. If we'd landed closer to town, in the actual forest, we would have made a lot of noise.

It was easy to aim between the neat rows. I sank up to my knees in the soft wet soil. The chutes detached and folded and rolled themselves into tight cylinders that quietly fused into solid bricks. They'd probably wind up as part of a wall or fence.

Everybody moved silently to the tree line and took cover, while Candi and I worked uphill, weaving quietly between trees, avoiding brush.

Dog, she said, and we froze. From where I was, slightly behind her, I couldn't see it, but through her sensors smelled the fur and breath and then saw the IR blob. It woke up and I heard the beginning of a growl that ended with the thap of a tranquilizer dart. It was a human dose; I hoped it wouldn't kill the dog.

Just past the dog was the neatly trimmed lawn behind Madero's house. There was a light on in the kitchen- worse luck. The house had been dark when we jumped.

Candi and I could just hear two voices through the closed window. The conversation was too fast and too heavily accented for either of us to follow, but the tone was clear-Senora Madero and some man were anxious, whispering urgently.

Expecting company, Candi thought.

Now, I thought. In four steps, Candi was at the window and I was at the back door. She smashed the window with one hand and fired two darts with the other. I pulled the door off its hinges and stepped into a storm of gunfire.

Two people with a.s.sault rifles. I tranked them both and stepped toward the kitchen. An alarm whooped three times before I could track down the relay clicking and rip it out of the wall.

Two people, three people running down the stairs. Smoke and VA, I thought to myself and Candi, and dropped two grenades in the hall. Using vomiting agent was a little tricky, since our s.n.a.t.c.h was unconscious; we couldn't let her inhale it and possibly choke on her own puke. But we had to work fast anyhow.

Two people were slumped over the kitchen table. There was a circuit-breaker box on the wall; I smashed it and everything went dark, though for Candi and me it was bright red figures in a dark red kitchen.

I picked up Madero and her companion and started back for the hall. But along with the sounds of gagging and retching I heard the greased-metal snick-chk of a weapon being armed, and the snap of a safety switch. I flashed an image to Candi and she stuck one arm through the window and swept half the wall down. The roof sagged with a creak and then a splintering crash, but by then I was in the backyard with my two guests. I dropped the man and cradled Madero like a baby.

Wait for the others, I vocalized unnecessarily. We could hear townsfolk running down the gravel road toward the house, but our people were moving faster.

Ten black giants exploded out of the forest behind us. Smoke there there there, I thought. Lights on. White smoke welled up in a semicircle around us and became an opaque blinding wall with our sunlights. I turned my back on it, s.h.i.+elding Madero from the random chatter of gunfire and laser stab and sweep. Everyone VA and split! Eleven canisters of vomiting agent popped; I was already in the woods and running. Bullets hummed and rustled harmlessly overhead. As I ran I checked her pulse and respiration, normal under the circ.u.mstances, and checked the dart site on the back of her neck. The dart had fallen out and she'd already stopped bleeding.

Leave the note?

Candi thought, Yes: on the table somewhere under the roof now. We had a supposedly legal warrant for Senora Madero's detainment. That and a hundred pesos would get you a cup of coffee, if there was any left after export.

Out of the forest, I could run faster. It was exhilarating, bounding over the rows of low coffee bushes, even though in some corner of my mind I always knew I was lying inert a hundred miles away, inside an armored plastic sh.e.l.l. I could hear the others running just behind me and, as I moved up the hill toward the pickup, the faint hiss and snap of the approaching chopper and fly-boys.

When it's just us soldierboys they s.n.a.t.c.h us at speed; we hold up our arms and grab the bail as it sails by. For a warm-body s.n.a.t.c.h, though, they have to actually land the helicopter, which is why she had two flyboys as escorts.