Rice looked at the clustered towers of pumps, coolers, and catalytic cracking units. “It’s a goddamned shame,” he said. “All that work, shot to hell.”
“We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There’s plenty of eighteenth centuries.”
The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice’s hovercar burst through the ages. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe’s Mongols yanked the invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire across the gates.
Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a few steps behind.
“Wolf, you bastard!” she shouted. “You leave me behind! What about your promises, you merde, you pig-dog!”
Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. “Who is this woman?”
“The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me the card!” She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When she whirled on him, he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the tarmac.
The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. “Was you, eh? You, the traitor?” With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol and jammed the muzzle against Mozart’s nose. “I put my gun on rock and roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man.”
A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe’s head rocked back, and he fell in a heap.
Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment shed. He held a Walther PPK. “Take it easy, Rice,” Parker said, walking toward him. “He’s just a grunt, expendable.”
“You killed him!”
“So what?” Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart’s frail shoulders. “This here’s my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a month ago. You know what? The kid’s number five on the Billboard charts! Number five!” Parker shoved the gun into his belt. “With a bullet!”
“You gave him the Green Card, Parker?”
“No,” Mozart said. “It was Sutherland.”
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very soul?” Mozart rolled his eyes upward. “She gave me the Green Card, but that still wasn’t enough. She couldn’t handle the guilt. You know the rest.”
“And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn’t pull out. So you decided to drag me into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons. That was your doing!”
As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice didn’t care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen.
Mozart shrugged. “I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they’re very uncool. I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened.” He waved casually at the carnage all around them. “I knew you’d get away from them somehow.”
“You can’t just use people like that!”
“Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I needed this siege so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ’s sake, I can’t wait fifteen years to go up the line. History says I’m going to be dead in fifteen years! I don’t want to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!”
“Forget it, pal,” Rice said. “When they hear back in Realtime how you screwed things up here—”
Parker laughed. “Shove off, Rice. We’re talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery.” He took Mozart’s arm protectively. “Listen, Wolf, baby, let’s get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future.”
The sun had set, but muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonballs clanged harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg’s time had run out.
Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.
THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN FUTURE
Allen Steele
With the publication of his novel Orbital Decay—about the engineering and political problems that zero-g “beamjacks” overcome to build satellites in outer space—and its sequel Lunar Descent, Allen Steele earned comparisons to Robert Heinlein and established his credentials as a promising new writer of hard science fiction. Since then, Steele has set his novels aboard space stations (Clarke County, Space; A King of Infinite Space), in undersea research facilities (Oceanspace), and in an earthquake-devastated near-future St. Louis (The Jericho Iteration). The Tranquillity Alternative is set at a civilian-manned moon base in an alternate world where manned space flight occurred in 1984 and lunar colonization took place shortly thereafter. A prodigious writer of short fiction, some of which has been collected in All-American Alien Boy and Rude Astronauts, Steele is the author of the Hugo Award–winning stories “The Good Rat,” “The Death of Captain Future,” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread.”
The name of Captain Future, the supreme foe of all evil and evildoers, was known to every inhabitant of the Solar System.
That tall, cheerful, red-haired young adventurer of ready laugh and flying fists was the implacable Nemesis of all oppressors and exploiters of the System’s human and planetary races. Combining a gay audacity with an unswervable purposefulness and an unparalleled mastery of science, he had blazed a brilliant trail across the nine worlds in defense of the right.
THIS IS THE TRUE STORY of how Captain Future died.
We were crossing the inner belt, coasting toward our scheduled rendezvous with Ceres, when the message was received by the ship’s comlink.
“Rohr…? Rohr, wake up, please.”
The voice coming from the ceiling was tall, dark, and handsome, sampled from one of the old Hercules vids in the captain’s collection. It penetrated the darkness of my quarters on the mid-deck where I lay asleep after standing an eight-hour watch on the bridge.
I turned my head to squint at the computer terminal next to my bunk. Lines of alphanumeric code scrolled down the screen, displaying the routine systems-checks and updates that, as second officer, I was supposed to be monitoring at all times, even when I was off-duty and dead to the world. No red-bordered emergency messages, though; at first glance, everything looked copacetic.
Except the time. It was 0335 Zulu, the middle of the goddamn night.
“Rohr?” The voice was a little louder now. “Mister Furland? Please wake up….”
I groaned and rolled over. “Okay, okay, I’m awake. What’dya want, Brain?”
The Brain. It was bad enough that the ship’s AI sounded like Steve Reeves; it also had to have a stupid name like The Brain. On every vessel on which I had served, crewmembers had given their AIs human names—Rudy, Beth, Kim, George, Stan, Lisa, dubbed after friends or family members or deceased shipmates—or nicknames, either clever or overused: Boswell, Isaac, Slim, Flash, Ramrod, plus the usual Hals and Datas from the nostalgia buffs. I once held down a gig on a lunar tug where the AI was called Fughead—as in Hey, Fughead, gimme the traffic grid for Tycho Station—but no one but a bonehead would give their AI a silly-ass moniker like The Brain.