Jay did likewise. Miraculously, everyone managed to scatter out of their way. Halfway to the door, they shut down, flipped over, and began to decelerate—and discovered that they had both burned themselves dry. They impacted with bone-jarring crashes, desperately grabbed handholds, and nearly had their arms pulled out of their sockets by the rebound. Jay’s first thought was for Rand, but his brother threw him a shaky grin and a circled thumb and forefinger.
Jay found the manual doorlatch and released it. He was greatly relieved when this one worked; he had not been sure he would find pressure in Management—and had had no idea what to do if he didn’t. They scrambled in together, then resealed the door to keep out guests who wanted a refund. There was nobody at the front desk, nor in the outer offices beyond it. “Where the hell is everybody?” Rand snarled.
“I don’t know,” Jay snapped, even more nervous than his brother. This was wrong, wrong—“Wait a minute.” He doubled back, went to the front desk. “I filled in for a guy once or twice,” he said as he got there, and began tapping code on a drawer under the counter. “Let’s see if they still… ah!” He got the drawer open—and took from it a totally illegal police-issue GE hand-laser. “Sometimes Security doesn’t show up fast enough when you call them,” he said, checking the charge and clicking off the safety. “Now let’s go see what’s in back.”
“I’ll go first and draw fire,” Rand said. He and Jay exchanged a glance. It became a grin. “The Hardy Boys in High Orbit,” Rand said.
“And in a big-ass hurry.”
They worked their way back through the outer offices to Kate’s door cautiously but quickly, Rand preceding his brother through every doorway. Finally they floated outside her office.
“No point in listening at a soundproof door,” Jay said.
“No point in knocking, either,” Rand agreed, and opened the manual release compartment. “I’ll go first, again.”
“No need. I’ll know where the target is, if there is one.”
“Okay. If there’s trouble in there, you go right and I’ll go left.”
“Which way is that?” They happened to be upside down with respect to each other.
“You go away from me and I’ll go away from you.” Rand unlatched the door. It let go with a pop, and opened a few centimeters. He gripped the release latch to brace himself, and slid the door the rest of the way open. He and Jay entered together, and stopped.
And then both began to laugh.
They knew it was inappropriate; that only made it worse. Facing them was one of the most ridiculous sights they had ever seen: Evelyn Martin, holding a gun.
Laughing, Jay tried to move away from Rand as agreed—and remembered that his thrusters were dry. He still was not worried; he and his brother could outjaunt a spastic like Martin with muscles alone.
Then he saw Katherine Tokugawa well to his left, also armed. His laughter died away. They were outgunned. He shook Rand’s shoulder and pointed her out. After a microsecond’s thought, his own gun steadied on Martin. If he were going to be killed by one of these two, he preferred Kate. More dignity.
“Drop it,” Martin yapped.
Jay thought hard for a whole second, then opened his fingers. The gun, of course, stayed where it was.
“Lose it,” Martin corrected, expressing his exasperation by putting a bolt into the wall beside the doorway. The smell of burning bulkhead plastic filled the room faster than the air-conditioning could suck it away. Jay gave his own gun a finger-snap, like a child shooting marbles; it drifted away toward Martin. Ignoring the man, he turned and addressed Kate.
“I should have figured you’d have to be in on this,” he said. “But I’m damned if I can see how you expect to come out of it with your job.”
“Oh, I’ll probably lose that eventually,” she agreed. “But by then I’ll have a better job.”
“A better job than this?”
“Much better. I’ll be running something a little more prestigious than a hotel.”
“What’s that?”
“High Orbit,” Martin said, and snickered.
“Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa snapped.
He stared. “What the hell are you talking about? Nobody runs High Orbit.”
“No,” Martin said. “The UN wouldn’t let them. But the UN isn’t going to be around much longer.” He giggled nervously.
“Shut up, Ev,” Tokugawa barked. “You can tell them things like that after they’re dead. Not before.”
Jay tried to restart his laughter; it didn’t catch. “You seriously think you can take on the UN—and the Starmind—and win?”
Kate couldn’t resist answering. “Not me,” she said. “But I know people who can. I’ve been working for them all my life.”
“You artists are always yapping about your ‘vision,’ ” Martin said, and brandished his gun. “Ha! You assholes don’t know what vision is! We’re gonna reshape the future.”
Jay felt the universe shifting in his head, crushing his brains beneath it. Surely this was lunacy. Even the UN itself could not have defeated the Starmind. He could conceive of nothing human that could.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Tokugawa said then. Jay glanced over his shoulder, and saw two Security men enter with guns drawn. Each, he noticed, wore an unfamiliar earplug and an unobtrusive throat-mike. Communications gear that did not use the house system. Turning back, he saw that Tokugawa and Martin both had them too.
“So,” he said to Kate, “you already know more about what happened in Fat Humphrey’s room than we do.”
She nodded. “Oh, yes. Much more.”
“Of course. You assigned Fat his room. So this is where you gloat, and tell us what’s going on, so we can be awed by your cleverness?”
“No,” she said. “This is where you get taken away and killed. Goodbye, Sasaki.” She sketched a gassho bow. “It has always been a pain in the ass to work with you. Martin, you go along with them—make sure it looks pretty; that’s your line of work.”
Jay opened his mouth to say something, but never got a chance to learn what it was going to be. Something touched the back of his neck, and he slept.
It was a very troubled sleep, full of unpredictable accelerations that triggered horror-dreams of falling from his terrestrial past, and unfamiliar voices shouting incomprehensible things in the near and far distance, and the nagging certainty that something he couldn’t quite recall was terribly, terribly wrong.
You were meant to come out of the drug confused. But his surroundings when he finally did certainly enhanced the effect.
He was in a corridor. Not a public one, a… the term took awhile to surface. A service tunnel, that was it. The lighting was even lousier here. Things were floating in his vicinity—important ones, he sensed. First he counted them: four. Then he classified them: human beings. Next he laboriously identified them. Evelyn Martin. His third-grade gym teacher—no, that was… was… right, one of the security guards who was going to kill him. Sure, there was the other one. And the extra one… hell, know him anywhere: that’s my bro. Like a brother to me.
So now he had them broken down into two groups. Friends: one. Foes: three. That didn’t seem like a favorable ratio. On the other hand, one of the guards seemed to be lacking a face; that evened things up a little. And Ev Martin’s head hung at a funny angle…
A few more foggy seconds of contemplation and he had a second breakdown he liked much better. Rand was breathing; the rest were not.