C. J. Cherryh - Hellburner

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If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book

may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the

publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any

payment for this "stripped book."

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Questar* is a registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

Cover design by Don Puckey Cover illustration by Don Maitz Hand lettering by

Richard Nebiolo

Warner Books, Inc.

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

IA Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books. First Printed in Paperback:

June, 1993

10 98765432 I

CHAPTER

STOCKHOLM Is a city of islands and gardens, a stunningly eclectic

architectural mix, from the Wgsdagshus to the 23rd century Cariberg Museum,

from the restored Riddarsholm Kyrka to the Academy gardens...

Founded in the mid 13th century, the dry of Stockholm holds abundant evidence

of a thousand years of Baltic seafaring tradition, plus a lively nightllfe

centered in modem Gustavsholm—

Ben indexed through the motile pictures and the text, the statistics about

rainfall and mean average temperature which the Guide cautioned a visitor did

not in any sense mean a constant temperature. Useless statistic—unless one

contemplated Antarctica, where a mean temperature of -57° C and an average

hours of sunlight only slightly better than Sol Station core meant Ben Pollard

had no interest in McMurdo Base. Ben Pollard had seen a good deal of cold and

dark and rock in his life. Old rock. This 13th century business

• CJ. CHBWH

amazed him. The whole damn human race dated itself in eighteenths of Jupiter's

passes about the sun, to the astonishingly recent number of about 10k such

fractions, if you took the oldest cities. ASTEX R2 out in the Belt had been a

skuz old place and a friend of his had sworn it had seen better days just in

his lifetime, but when Ben Pollard thought old, he thought in millions. The

rock he'd handled out there was old. Humankind was a real junior on those

terms.

He sipped real orange juice, imported up from the blue, cloud-swirled globe

you could see at any hour on channel 55, along with the weather reports

anywhere in die motherweH.

Weather—was a novelty. Real weather. You got weather in a station core when

they were blowing cold rock down the chute. You got condensation in your

spacecraft and you swore like hell and wiped and dried and tried to find the

source of it. But in the motherweH condensation fell out of the sky in frozen

balls or slow flakes or liquid drops depending on the low level atmospheric

temperatures, and k-wide clouds threw out electrical discharges that made it a

very bad notion to stand (the Guide said) at the highest point of the

landscape.

Daunting thought.

The Guide said 70% of the Earth was water.

The Guide said water in the oceans was 10k meters deep in places, and because

it wasn't frozen, Luna's gravity pulled it up in a hump of a wave that rolled

around the globe and washed af every shore it met, enough to grind up rock

into beaches.

AH that unfrozen water. Gaseous nitrogen and liquid water mat made all mat

sparkle when the sun hit the wrinkles on it mat the Guide said were waves.

He planned to stand on a beach and get a good close look at that unfrozen

water. On a clear day, when there were no lightnings. You could do it from the

station. You could be there while you were here, but VR was a cheat, you could

be a whole lot of places that weren't real. He wanted to

H ELIBURN E

stand at the edge of the ocean and watch the real sun disappear behind the

real world, at which point he figured he would really believe he was standing

on a negative curvature.

The Guide said some spacers got dizzy, with the horizon going the wrong

direction. There were prescriptions for vertigo. There were preparatory

programs. But hell, he'd monkeyed around the core at R2, and stared straight

at the rotation interface. That had to be worse.

The clock on the screen said: 0843 June 14, 2324. And there was plenty of time

this morning for coffee. Dress maybe by 0930h. Exams were done, the last score

was going up today, but, hell, that was Interactive Reality Sampling and he

had that one in his pocket, no question, no sweat. Probably set the curve: him

or Meeker, one or the other: just let the UDC get that score, and Stockholm

was in his pocket for sure, motherweH assignment in the safest, softest spot

in the service except Orlando. Stockholm was where Ben Pollard was headed,

yeah! soon as the interviewers could get up to station.

Hell and away from the Belt, he was. Here you didn't jam two guys into a

fifteen by six, hell, no, Sol Station and Admin? You got a whole effm' fifteen

by six .9 g apartment by yourself, with a terminal that could be vid or VR

whenever you opted. If you qualified into the Programming track in the UDC

Technical Institute, you got an Allotment that afforded you 2c/d Personals per

effin' seven-day week, which meant oj mat was real, coffee that was real, red

meat that was real, if you had the stomach for it, which Ben personally

didn't—you lived like an effin1 Company exec and had a clearer conscience. And

if you could get that on world posting, your tech/2 graduation rating equaled

a full UDC lieu-tenancy in the motherweH, with an Army first lieutenant's pay

to start, full grade technical/1 promotion guaranteed in a year, and access

with a capital A to all the services that pay could buy. You knew there was a

war out in the Beyond, but it wasn't going to get to Earth, that was

CJ CHBWH

HELLDUKNER

what they were building that Fleet out there to stop—and even if it did nobody

was going to hit the motherwell, humans just didn't do that. You were safe

down there. You'd be safe DO matter what.

He'd got his graduation With Honors, he was certain of it; he'd sweated his

Security verifications, but they'd come through months ago, and nobody had

come up with an objection; he'd sailed through the Administrative Service

exams four weeks ago, and the only complication in his way now was the formal

interview, as soon as the personnel reps from the various agencies could get

seats on a shuttle up here—funding time and some legislative hearing in Admin

had had the shuttle up-slots jammed with senators and brass and aides for the

last three days; but that was thinning out, thank God. The agency interviewers

might turn up by the end of the week, after which time—

After which he could book himself a seat for Earth on whatever assignment

shook out—maybe even take his pick: Weiter had dropped him a conspiratorial

word mat he had three different computer divisions fighting over him,

including strategic supply modeling and intelligence, and the prestigious A!

lab in Geneva (which was for his personal ambitions a little too scientific

and academic—give him something with a direct line to politics, God, yes.

There was money in that, and a protected paycheck).

Money. A nice apartment down where you navigated a perceptually planar surface

at a 300kph crawl, when be was used to thinking in kps and nanosecond

intersects. Life on Earth went so much slower and death came so much later for

a man who had money, brains, and position.

He'd had a partner back in the Belt, Morrie Bird, who had used to talk to him

about Colorado, and cities and sunsets and Shakespeare. Bird had set a lot of

personal store by Shakespeare. Bird had thought Shakespeare was important to

understand. So when it had turned out of all things that he was going to the

inner system, he had made it a certain point to see this Shakespeare guy—

translated tapes.

of course. V-vids, where you could wander around and watch the body language.

And Bird had been a hundred percent right: Shakespeare really helped you

figure Earthers. Blue-skyers. People who had never felt null-g, never seen (he

stars all the way to forever—different people, with numbers hard to figure;

people who thought they had a natural right to orange juice and gravity,

people who (the Guide maintained) felt the moon tides in their blood.

Getting the right numbers in a new situation absolutely mattered. On Earth air

was free and ship routes and energy were what the old Earthers had fought

bloody wars over. Sincerely skewed values—but you had to think about that two-

dee surface constantly, and it was limited mat way. Finite. Finite resources.

Shakespeare helped you see that— helped you see how certain old Earthers in

control of those resources had thought they could run your life, the same as

Company execs. And how these king-types always talked about God and their

rights, like the preachers on R2's helldeck, who snagged you with tracts and

talked to you about free-shares in their particular afterlife and argued

whether the aliens at Pell had souls. Only these old kings had been the

preachers and the law and the bank.

Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school

learning nothing but Company numbers— to figuring Shakespeare and human

history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of

humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth

was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls

graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide

said so.

Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the

right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and

the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got

him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.

CJ CHERRYH

Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the

Zoological Garden in Haga Pork....

A planet that wasn't a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely

outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well

was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food

that wasn't synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the CO2

on sunlight and dark; the habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept,

non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you

with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the

stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took

for granted, and ate, if it didn't look too much like people.

He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back

at, when he'd never expect to see any real thing more exotic than miners on

R&R and bugs under a lab scope.

Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the

Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.

He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar

perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had

been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much

blue-sky attitude he still couldn't get the straight of. Baroque, was the

word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings,

that didn't have a damn thing to do with useful—

The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.

God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1

to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about

the motion.

It said:

HELLBURNER

TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2 0652JUN14/24 SN P-235-9676/MLR

Report to F5O-HQ, 0900h/ref/Simons

Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?

What in bloody hell?

MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn't gotten the message. No way to

query the CO. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn't have the

answer, and he'd effin' better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted

with a UDC lad, hadn't he?

It wasn't an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn't need a UDC

programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply

modeling. Did they?

Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the

UDC EIDAT with the Heel's Staatentek system through the EC security screen,

that was what. The Fleet Staatentek system tried to phone the UDCs EIDAT 4005

to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind (he EC's security cloak,

spat up a UDC Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—

But you couldn't ignore it. You didn't want to face the interviews with an

interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!

No second cup of coffee. He drank the half he had left while his fingers

tapped up the station map and asked it where in hell FSO-HQ was on the trans

system from his apartment in TI 12 for a 0930h appointment.

9:15 2 green to 14, blue to 5-99: pass required for entry.

Hell and gone from TI, and it was already 9 o'clock. Ten effin' minutes to

shave, dress and find his copy of his rating, which clearly said UDC Priority

Technical/2, before the

CJ CHEIWH

HELLBURNER

Fleet grabbed him and stuck him at Mars Base doing data entry in Supply.

He burned the beard off, pulled on his dress blues: never wear fatigues to an

interservice glitch-up. He had to talk to officers, no question, before this

one was straightened out, maybe all the way up the effin' C/O/C in the UDC and

the Fleet. It could be a long day.

Envelope from UDC Technical at Geneva in the briefcase, where it belonged. He

put it in his breast pocket.

Never a friggin' situation without a last friggin' minute complication. God,

he didn't know why things like this happened to him. His interview appointment

could come through at any hour, he didn't want Meeker to grab the first slot—

first effin' thing he was going to do if they gave him Geneva was put the

shove on that damned EC Software.

He checked his watch. 0908. Five minutes to walk to the trans. Orders in his

pocket. Yes. And out the door.

Trans was packed. A whole wide-eyed batch of shiny new C-l's with their entry

tags and their hand-baggage occupied all the seats, and Ben clung with an

elbow about a pole and punched buttons on the hand reader, running down the

applicable rules on interservice transfer apps.

Wasn't any reason to sweat it. Couldn't be. Weiter'd shoved him through three

levels in a year.... He was Weiter's fair-haired baby, best Weiter had ever

had in the department. Him and Meeker, neck and neck all the way. No way

Weiter wouldn't go up the chain for him.

Green 14. He made the transfer and lost the C-l's—thank God. He got a seat,

sat down and read.

Right of appeal. Ref: Administrative Appeal, Sec. 14.... Through chain of

command in service of origin.

In service of origin. Which meant the United Defense Command, which wasn't,

never mind Fleet Captain Conrad

Mazian's performance at the UN, going to let the Fleet get its hands on

whatever it wanted.

Blue line now. Institution blue. The walls outside the spex in me doors grew

skuzzier and skuzzier and the air that sucked in when the doors opened was

cold and smelled of oil.

Descent into hell, Ben thought. Like R2 all over again. He sat in his dress

uniform and watched the scenery, dark tunnel and grim flashes of gray-blue

panels and white station numbers as the trans shot past stops without a call

punched. Thump of the section seals. He could almost smell helldeck, all but

hear the clash of metal and the hard raucous beat of the music echoing down

the deck. He smelled the peculiar taint of cold machinery and kept having this

most damnable feeling of—

—belonging in the dark side, living on the cheap, getting by, scamming the

Company cops and knowing he could always slip through the system, knowing far

more about the company computers and access numbers than the Company thought

he'd learned. Him and Bud. —And Sal Aboujib.

Damn.

Helldeck wasn't a place you'd miss. He was someone else now. Spiff uniform and

a tech/2's collar phi. Clean fingers—in all senses. He didn't do a thing

illegitimate with the computers he worked with. He didn't know anybody who

did, no, sir, didn't even dream about that h-word near the Defense Command

computers.

He'd got away with it. Was still getting away with it. He'd dumped the card on

R2, and it had never surfaced; he'd gotten his security clearance. He'd gotten

his rank. Nobody was going to screw that up. Nobody could have found anything

to screw him now...

5-99. The sign outside the doors said: SECURITY AREA.

RESTRICTED. SHOW PASS.

He got up and got out in a beige, plain hallway, warmer here, thank God, it

wasn't going to freeze his ass off or have him shaking when he was talking to

the desk. He straight-

CJ CHERRYH

HELLBURNER

ened his coat, clipped his fancy-tech reader onto his belt and walked up to

the only door available, under a security array that was probably reading his

respiration rate and taking notes.

He put his card in the slot: the door clicked and opened. Reel Security

occupied the solitary desk in the foyer; beyond it was a potted silk palm, an

abstract picture, and another beige windowless door.

"Pollard," the officer said, with no attention to the protocols in the

rulebook. Or his face. Just the readout on his screen. "Benjamin J. You're

carrying electronics."

"Reader."

The officer held out his hand. Ben surrendered it and watched the officer turn

it on and punch buttons.

"Fancy."

Break his effin' neck getting here and this cop-type stalled him playing games

with a piece of expensive and delicate equipment. He said, "I've got an

appointment at 0930."

The guard said, "HQ," and motioned with the back of his hand. "Lieutenant

Jackson."

Jackson, was it? Fleet Lieutenant. Which, in the much-argued and protested

Equivalencies, was a rank just under Maj. Weiter's; and one over his. Ben drew

himself up with a breath, thinking, with part of his brain: Son of a bitch

deep-spacer Attitude, and minded for half that breath to make an issue of

interservice protocols; but the rest of his brain was still wondering if the

Fleet could have any legitimate interest in him and hoping all he had was a

pocket full of EIDAT-screwed orders. So he saluted, got a flip of the hand and

walked to the inner door, that clicked open on a long bar of a desk and a

sober-faced clerk who said (efficiency, at least) "Lt. Pollard?"

"Yes." Manners. Finally. He took the offered escort to a side office. Jackson

took the salute, offered him a seat. Young guy. Pleasant, serious face.

Better, he thought.

"Thank you, sir."

Jackson folded his hands on the desk, "Lt. Pollard, —I'm sorry to be the

bearer of bad news: a friend of yours has been involved in an accident."

"Friend of mine?" That was a complete mental shift. He honestly couldn't think

if he had a friend. Not lately. Bird was dead. Sal?

"Name of Dekker," Jackson said and Ben all but said, Shit! before he

remembered he wasn't in the Belt and swallowed it.

"Fatal?"

"Serious. He's asking for you."

"For me?" He was vastly relieved it wasn't Sal. Distressed if Dekker'd gotten

in trouble. He didn't hate Dekker. Not really. Dekker had enlisted with him,

gone off into some secret pilot training program... real hot piece of

equipment, Dekker had said.

Jackson said, "His doctors fee! it might be some help, a familiar face...."

He thought. Oh, God, I don't want to do this. I don't want to see the guy

again—I hate hospitals... I don't like blood—

But there it was, the brass had made a humanitarian move, no way to explain

all the old business between them—it could drag up too much he didn't want on

record; if Dekker had killed himself in some top-secret operation he was

sincerely sorry, and if he was all Dekker could dredge up for a request—well,

hell, the guy had saved his neck, sort of, back in the Belt—

And cost Bird's life, damn him, however indirectly.

"Sorry to drop this on you," Jackson said.

"Not a problem. Truth is, we weren't friends. —But I guess I owe him to drop

over there."

"I've got a travel voucher for you."

"Travel voucher."

"B dock."

"Oh, now, God, wait a minute—" B dock wasn't on Sol One, it was on an

auxiliary station three and more days out,

CJ CHBWH

on Sol Two. Ben reached for his pocket, right then. "I can't do that. I'm

sorry. This is a priority rating. There's an agency officer coming for an

interview this week. I can't leave."

Jackson laid an envelope on top of his. "There's a B dock shuttle leaving at

1205. That's your travel voucher and your leave. It's already signed and

cleared."

"Sir, —that's six days even if I get a same day turnaround," He gingerly eased

his letter from underneath and laid it gingerly to the side, in Jackson's

view, where the United Defense Command logo showed. "This is from HQ Geneva.

It says I'm a military priority."

"This one's from Captain Keu, in this office. On a classified priority. You're

going."

"Dekker isn't a friend of mine!"

"He's listed you as next-of-kin."

"We're not related! God, —he's got a mother right here on the station, Astrid,

Ingrid, something like that. Talk to her!"

"He's in a classified program. Only certain people are approved for contact in

a next-of-kin emergency. You're it. You're not to call anyone. You're not to

talk to anyone. Your CO will be advised simply that you're on humanitarian

leave—"

"I'm UDC essential personnel!"

"Show me an assignment."

Shit!

"So you're going."

"What about my interview?"

"That's not my information flow. I'll log it as a query."

"Look, this is important. If I miss this slot I could wait six months!"

Jackson shrugged. "We all have our hardships, lieutenant."

"Look, this is a screw-up. It's an absolute screw-up. God, Dekker and I don't

even like each other."

H EL L BU

Cold as a rock. "I don't have that information. Transport will pick up your

baggage at your quarters. Just leave it. Report to the shuttleport by 1145."

"It's near 1030 right now. It's twenty minutes to quarters—"

"I'd be on that shuttle, Lt. Pollard. When you get to B • dock, report

directly to the FleetOps office on the dock, give them this pass and they'll

see you get straight to the hospital. Don't mistake that instruction."

"Listen, —sir, you know what happened—Dekker wrote me in as a joke. He never

thought they'd be using that information. It's a damn joke!"

"If it is, I'm sure they'll straighten it out at the other end. I'd be moving,

lieutenant." Jackson stood up and handed him the two envelopes as he rose.

"Good luck."

"Yes sir," Ben said, took his papers and his orders, saluted the son of a

bitch and left.

Collected his reader from the front desk, and made a fast, desperate

consultation of the trans schedule while he was walking to the doors.

Twenty minutes to his apartment, thirty to the shuttle dock, ten to pack. If

he risked a phone call to Weiter to request a rescue, it was a 90% certainty

that Weiter couldn't do a damned thing against FSO before 1145 or later and

he'd be screwed with Weiter for putting him in a Position. You didn't crack a

security screen. Not if you hoped to keep your clearance in UDC computer tech.

They'd get him back in maybe six days?

Hell. Six days too late if he was on humanitarian leave on ' B dock when the

UDC filled the Stockholm post. He'd get the scraps, the cold left-overs after

Meeker got posted; and Hamid; and Pannelli— The next best choice he had was to

appeal to Weiter when he got back and hang on as staff til something else came

through, oh, six months, seven, eight months on, who knew?

Dekker had screwed up, the Fleet was evidently about to

CJ CHEKPYH

lose ite investment in him—and, not in his most copacetic state, Dekker had

asked for him?

Ben thought, with every thump of the trans on its homebound course: I'll kill

him when I get my hands on him, I'll fuckin' kill him.

CHAPTER

DEN hated institutions, hated hospital smells and institution colors and most

of all he didn't look forward to this, in his first hour on B dock. He felt

like hell, he'd slept in a damn cubbyhole of a berth hardly larger than a

miner-ship spinner, his feet had swelled, he'd had sinus all the way: he'd

spent too long in the null-g hi his life and his body had a spiteful

overreaction to the condition. They didn't issue pills and stimsuits for a

three-day shuttle trip, no, that prescription's not on your records,

lieutenant, sorry... If you'd just checked with medical—

It was damned well going to be on the record when he left Sol Two. Talk to the

doctors in this hospital, get some damn good out of this end of the trip...

because he meant to be on that shuttle on its turnaround tonight. Six hours

was plenty of time to see Dekker, and get out of here.

—after three days of floating in a three-berth passenger module on a cargo

shuttle, ahead of a load of sanitation chemicals and spare parts. He'd had no

one to talk to but a couple of machinists who were into some vegetarian reli-

-15-

CJ CHEfWH

gion and hooked on some damn VR game they wanted to explain to him; and he had

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Ifyoupurchasethisbookwithoutacoveryoushouldbeawarethatthisbookmayhavebeenstolenpropertyandreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher.Insuchcaseneithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedanypaymentforthis"strippedbook."WARNERBOOKSEDITIONCopyright©1992byC.J.CherryhAllrightsreserved.Questar*isaregiste...

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