Hot Sky at Midnight Read online

  Instead of replying, Farkas pivoted, knelt, came up with something from the ground in his hand—a jagged lump of slag, maybe?—and swung it in a level arc toward Carpenter’s head. But the hyperdex was doing its work. Carpenter was prepared for some sort of attack; and, the moment it came, he moved back and to one side, easily outpacing Farkas’s movements, so that Farkas’s arm moved futilely through empty air. Carpenter heard the bigger man’s grunt of surprise and displeasure.

  He jumped forward, trying to get around Farkas and return to the daylight of El Mirador. But Farkas blocked the door; and when Carpenter attempted to feint past him, Farkas simply spread his enormous arms and waited for Carpenter to run into them. Carpenter backed off. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, saw nothing but stygian gloom behind him, and backpedaled into it even though he had no idea of where he was going.

  Farkas came after him.

  “Keep heading that way,” Farkas said. “You’ll fall off the edge. There’s a shelf there, just before the layer of protective tailings, and then there’s a drop, and you’ll go right into the gravity well. It’s a long floating fall, but by the time you hit bottom at the rim, it’ll be Earth-one gravitation. Very messy for you.”

  Was he bluffing? Carpenter had no clear idea of the geography in here. He hesitated just a moment, and Farkas lunged. The man was quick, and he was huge; but once again the triple hyperdex dose made the difference. To Carpenter, Farkas’s movements seemed ponderous, almost glacial. It was easy to avoid them. Carpenter stepped aside, catching no more than a glancing blow on his left shoulder. He heard Farkas, puzzled and angry, muttering to himself.

  But Farkas was still standing between him and the exit from the shell. And Carpenter had no idea of what lay behind him, closer to the satellite world’s skin.

  Further retreat might be just as unwise as Farkas had told him it was. Ahead of him was Farkas. He’s terribly quick and strong, Jolanda had said, and he can see in every direction at once. Yes. But there wasn’t much choice. Carpenter pulled his head down, getting his center of gravity as low as he could, and went running straight at Farkas. As Carpenter came within reach, Farkas caught hold of him, and they grappled furiously for a couple of moments. Carpenter was altogether unable to budge him. Farkas was huge and immensely strong, and Farkas was braced. His hands had found Carpenter’s throat and he was squeezing.

  Carpenter went into manic overdrive, jigging about wildly, writhing, going limp and suddenly tightening up again. Somehow he twisted himself about and wriggled free of Farkas’s grip and danced away. A lucky shift of his weight: it was, he knew, probably not a trick he could manage a second time.

  Farkas came after him, moving unerringly as they passed into a zone of deeper darkness where Carpenter had almost no notion of what lay around him. Vaguely he saw Farkas’s long arms stretching toward him, dark lines against the darkness. Carpenter probed cautiously backward with the tip of his foot, trying to find out whether he was approaching the abyss of which Farkas had spoken, or, conversely, whether Farkas was backing him into a dead end. But he was able to learn nothing. He was practically unable to see, now.

  Farkas could see, though.

  In front of him and behind, too. The blindsight gave him 360-degree vision, Jolanda had said.

  Carpenter heard Farkas’s rough breathing. He sensed but did not see the massive form approaching him. Carpenter had superhuman speed on his side, but Farkas could see, and he was bigger and stronger. Here in the dark it was an unequal match.

  In one smooth rapid motion Carpenter pulled his woolen vest off and held it lightly, by the tips of two fingers. Farkas came barreling forward. Carpenter waited for him, bracing himself as solidly as he could.

  Their bodies collided. Carpenter felt a tremendous blow against his chest and he thought that all the air would leave his lungs in a single gust. His whole rib cage seemed to be collapsing.

  But he was able to put the pain away and stay upright. He brought the sweater up, holding it like a noose, and as Farkas leaned down toward him for the coup de grace Carpenter drew it quickly down over the dome of Farkas’s head, twisting it around Farkas’s neck at the bottom end, pulling its hem up and tucking it through, tangling and knotting it, fastening it like a hood over Farkas’s head. He seemed to have plenty of time to do what needed to be done. Actually it took probably no more than a tenth of a second.

  Farkas howled. He bellowed. He stamped his feet and uttered muffled roars of fury.

  There, Carpenter thought. Does your blindsight work through a layer of wool?

  Evidently not. Farkas raged and blundered in the dark like a blinded Cyclops, and Carpenter, a lithe, frantic Odysseus, moved quickly around him, giving Farkas a powerful shove as he went past, spinning him completely around. Farkas stumbled, regained his balance, came charging toward Carpenter with enormous velocity.

  He was fast, but Carpenter was faster. Once more Carpenter stepped aside. In the blackness he could make out almost nothing, but he was aware of a breeze as Farkas, arms pinwheeling, went rushing past, growling angrily, taking huge clattering steps.

  Then a sudden shriek of—astonishment? Rage? Horror?

  A long outcry, dopplering off into silence.

  And then what sounded like an impact, a dull sound far away.

  “Farkas?” Carpenter called.

  No reply.

  “You fall down the hole, Farkas? You dead down there?”

  All quiet. Silence. Silence.

  Farkas was gone, then. Really gone. It was hard to believe, all that dark force snuffed out. That strange man. Carpenter stared into the darkness.

  But he felt no sense of triumph in the moment of victory, only disorientation and fatigue. He knew that at just this moment he had reached the hyperdex high and was beginning the journey down the other side. The high had been very high; the descent was going to be awful.

  He was assailed by a dizziness of a kind he had never known before, and an almost overwhelming nausea. The whole universe was reeling about him. He dropped to his knees and clung to the rough invisible surface below him. It was swaying, pulsating, rippling. His stomach began to heave. They were dry heaves, and they went on and on, until he thought they were going to turn him inside out like a starfish, and when they were over he crawled a short distance away and lay with his cheek against the rough scraggy ground for a long while, feeling the triple dose of hyperdex blasting through him like a trio of hurricanes. No news bulletins came out of the darkness from Farkas. Farkas was gone. Farkas was dead.

  It might have been hours that Carpenter lay there. He spent a good while in a kind of hallucinatory state. Then he returned to full awareness again, or something close to it.

  He quivered, he shook, he moaned, he wept, as the last of the hyperdex overdose burned its way through his over-stressed nervous system.

  When he tried to stand, he found that it was impossible. His legs were rubbery and his skull felt hollow and he had no physical strength at all. He lay down again, and waited, and after a time he became a little more calm. Slowly he started to crawl forward, feeling his way, making absolutely certain that no abysses were before him, and eventually Carpenter realized that he had returned to the zone where the faint light of the incandescent bulbs provided him with a little guidance.

  He found the door that led back into El Mirador.

  “Farkas?” he called one last time, looking behind him into the dark.

  Nothing. Silence.

  He staggered out into the cobblestoned plaza.

  He had no idea what time it was. Somewhere during the struggle in the shell, his wristwatch had been ripped away. But the morning seemed to be well along. Most of the tables at the plaza-side cafes were full, now. Carpenter found one that wasn’t and slumped down into it. He sensed that people were looking at him curiously. He wondered how battered and bruised he was, and how filthy.

  He felt drained, numb, dazed.

  The hyperdex was still blazing in his brain. Its accelerative force
had worn off somewhat, and he was able to move now at a normal pace, but his thoughts were driving in wild circles at the speed of light and then some.

  Was a triple dose fatal? Should he get himself to a medic?

  One will be enough for ordinary circumstances, Jolanda had said. Two, if very unusual. He had taken three.

  He shivered and trembled. It was an effort to keep from falling face forward onto the tabletop.

  An android waiter said, “Can I get you a drink, sir?”

  That seemed like an incredibly funny question. Carpenter burst into wild laughter. The android stood beside the table, patiently, politely.

  “Or something to eat, perhaps?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Carpenter forced himself to say. “Nothing at all.” His voice still sounded blurry and too fast. Thanking an android, too!

  The android went away. Carpenter sat quietly. Breathe in, breathe out.

  After a time, Carpenter remembered that Davidov’s plan had called for Farkas to get in touch with a certain Colonel Olmo of the Guardia Civil at seven this morning and tell him that bombs had been planted all over the habitat, that Generalissimo Callaghan would have to abdicate by noon or the whole place would be blown up. Had Farkas actually delivered the 0700 ultimatum to Olmo?

  No. No. At 0600 hours Farkas had been chasing Carpenter around the shell of the satellite. Farkas had wanted to dispose of the Samurai Industries spy first thing, before getting on to speaking with Olmo. So the ultimatum had never been delivered, most likely, unless Farkas had jumped the schedule and spoken to Olmo in the middle of the night.

  Olmo knew nothing about the deadline, then. The coup attempt had misfired.

  But the bombs were still set to blow at half past one.

  “Excuse me,” Carpenter said to a woman at an adjacent table. His voice was hoarse, ragged, broken, the voice of a torture victim recently released from the grasp of the Inquisition. “Can you tell me what time it is?”

  “Eleven-thirty,” the woman said.

  Jesus. Less than thirty minutes to go to the putative deadline for the abdication. Two hours until the time the bombs were supposed to go off.

  Carpenter began to see that he must have been zonked out on the floor of the shell for hours after the fight with Farkas.

  He looked around for a public communicator wand at his table and found one clipped to its left side. Its keyboard was tiny and his fingers seemed as thick as tree trunks, and when he tried to remember the call code for Davidov’s hotel room he came up with fifty thousand different eight-digit numbers in a fifty-thousandth of a second.

  Calm. Calm. He threaded a path through the maze of numbers and found the right one, and punched it in.

  No answer.

  No hunt-and-seek, either.

  Carpenter punched the “help” node and told the wand to go looking for Davidov anywhere on Valparaiso Nuevo. Why that hadn’t been done automatically, Carpenter didn’t know; but in a moment the communicator came up with a null code for the desired person.

  Where was Davidov?

  He tried the number of the room that Enron and Jolanda were sharing. Nothing.

  Something very wrong here. Where was everybody? The bombs were ticking.

  He took a deep breath and punched what he hoped was the directory code, and told the communicator wand that he wanted to talk to Colonel Olmo of the Guardia Civil. The communicator got him a line to the Guardia operations room.

  “Colonel Olmo, please.”

  “Who is calling?”

  “My name is Paul Carpenter. I’m with—” He almost said with Samurai Industries, and caught himself. “With Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. I’m an associate of Victor Farkas. Tell him that. Victor Farkas.” It was very difficult for him to enunciate clearly.

  “Wait one moment, please.”

  Carpenter waited. He wondered how much to tell Olmo, whether he should spill out the whole conspiracy scheme to him. It wasn’t his responsibility to deliver the ultimatum. He was only a flunky in this thing. On the other hand, he was the one who had removed Farkas from the picture, and nobody knew that except him. Was it now his duty to take Farkas’s place in the program?

  A voice said, “What is the nature of your call, Mr. Carpenter?”

  Jesus. Jesus.

  “It’s a confidential matter. The only one I can communicate it to is Colonel Olmo.”

  “Colonel Olmo is unavailable now. Would you like to speak to the officer on duty, Captain Lopez Aguirre?”

  “Olmo. Only Olmo. Please. This is very urgent.”

  “Captain Lopez Aguirre will be with you in a moment.”

  “Olmo,” Carpenter said. He felt like crying.

  A new voice, brusque, bored, said, “Lopez Aguirre speaking. What is this in connection with, please?”

  Carpenter stared at the wand in his hand as though it had turned into a serpent.

  “I’m trying to reach Colonel Olmo. It’s a matter of life and death.” He struggled to make his words understandable.

  “Colonel Olmo is not available.”

  “I’ve already been told that. You’ve got to put me through to him all the same. I’m making this request on behalf of Victor Farkas.”

  “Who?”

  “Farkas. Farkas. Kyocera-Merck.”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  Carpenter started to give his name again. Then he said, “Who I am doesn’t matter.” He was still fighting the hyper-dex, stumbling over his own tongue. “What matters is that Mr. Farkas has very important information to give to Colonel Olmo, and—”

  “Who are you? What is this all about? You are drunk, are you? You think I have time to speak with drunks?”

  Christ! Lopez Aguirre sounded very annoyed. In another moment, Carpenter realized, Lopez Aguirre was likely to send someone over to the plaza to pick him up for questioning, a suspicious character, a public nuisance. Toss him in a back room somewhere, get around to him after lunch. Or maybe some time tomorrow.

  He shut the communicator wand off and headed across the plaza, expecting a Guardia Civil man to step out from behind one of the palm trees and clap a set of magnetos on him before he reached the far side. But no one interfered with him. He moved jerkily, in double time, still hopped up on the hyperdex to some degree. He knew that he would be for hours more.

  Into the elevator. Down-spoke to the hub, to the shuttle terminal. Most likely that was where everybody was, Enron, Jolanda, Davidov, Davidov’s people. Waiting to catch the twelve-fifteen shuttle if Olmo turned out to be unable to topple Generalissimo Callaghan from his throne.

  Through the glass wall of the elevator tube Carpenter caught sight of a clock. Quarter to twelve, now. Unless Davidov had had some kind of backup scheme ready, the noon deadline was going to run out without anything being communicated to Colonel Olmo. Which was not the really serious problem. The really serious problem was that when the ninety minutes of grace expired and nothing had been heard from Olmo, the bombs were going to go.

  At the terminal, the outbound shuttle was all ready to take off. Carpenter saw its gleaming shaft jutting right into the rim of the docking module, and the shuttle itself stretching upward behind it. Bright confusing signs blinked everywhere. Where the hell was the embarkation lounge? he wondered.

  He found himself in some kind of waiting room. Half a dozen local kids were slouching around in there. Carpenter remembered seeing them upon his arrival: couriers, they were, sharp operators who preyed on the incoming travelers. He looked for the one who had checked them through customs— Nattathaniel, that was his name—but didn’t see him. But then another one, a hefty, pink-faced blond boy who was probably not as soft as he seemed to be, came over and said, “Help you, sir? I’m a licensed courier. My name is Kluge.”

  “I’ve got a ticket on the twelve-fifteen to Earth,” Carpenter said.

  “You go right through that door, sir. Shall I get your luggage from the locker?”

  Carpenter’s luggage, such as it was, was still in his hotel room. To
hell with it.

  “I don’t have luggage,” Carpenter said. “But I’m looking for some friends who are supposed to be taking the same shuttle out with me.”

  “They’d be in the embarkation lounge, then. Or on board the shuttle. Boarding time’s come and practically gone, you know.”

  “Yes. I wonder, have you seen them go past?” He described Enron, Davidov, Jolanda. The courier’s eyes lit up at the description of Jolanda, particularly.

  “They haven’t been through here,” Kluge said.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I know those people. Mr. Enron, of Israel, and Ms. Jolanda Bermudez. And the other one, the big one with the close-cut hair, he uses various names. I worked for Mr. Enron and Ms. Bermudez the last time they were here. I’d have seen them if they had come past here anywhere in the last hour.”

  Carpenter’s eyes grew wide with dismay.

  “You’d better go into the lounge, sir,” Kluge said. “They’ll be calling last call any minute now. If I see any of your friends come in, I’ll tell them you’ve already gone on board, will that be all right?”

  Where were they? What the hell had happened?

  Olmo had been supposed to discover some of the bombs. That was the plan, Davidov said: to have him find some of the bombs. So that he would know that the threat was no bluff. Suppose this Olmo had found the bombs, then, or several of them, at any rate, and had found the ones who had planted the bombs, too, Davidov’s men, and had used whatever cute little methods the Guardia Civil of this place usually used to extract information. And had rounded up the rest, Davidov, Jolanda, Enron—was holding them in interrogation cells somewhere, meaning to go around and talk to them later in the day, or maybe tomorrow—

  “Final call for Flight 1133,” a voice said over the terminal speakers. “Passengers for San Francisco, Earth shuttle, on board now, please—”

  “You’d better go on in there, sir,” Kluge said again.