Julian May - Orion Arm: The Rampart Worlds:, Book 2

ORION ARM

The Rampart Worlds

Book II

Julian May

A Del Rey Book

THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP

NEW YORK

Copyright 1999

ISBN 0-345-39519-0

First American Edition: April 1999

CONTENTS

The Saga of Pliocene Exile

Volume I: The Many-Colored Land

Volume II: The Golden Tore

Volume III: TheNonborn King

Volume IV: The Adversary

Intervention

Volume I: The Surveillance

Volume II: The Metaconcert

The Galactic Milieu Trilogy

Volume I: Jack the Bodiless

Volume II: Diamond Mask

Volume III: Magnificat

The Rampart Worlds

Volume I: Perseus Spur

Volume II: Orion Arm

His Daimler-Tori hoppercraft hurtles down from the ionosphere on its programmed course. The time is 0247 hours and the appointment with Alistair Drummond is at 0330. Below, the land is hidden by a thick layer of clouds, but the ship's ground display shows the enormous expanse of the capital conurbation and its satellite residential communities, spread along the entire northern shore of Lake Ontario.

The hopper joins a sparse swarm of other light aircraft hovering within a holding pattern at nine thousand meters. The ship's navigation unit says: "Now arriving Toronto Conurb ATZ. Please supply next routing."

He has dozed fitfully most of the way from the Sky Ranch in Arizona, exhausted by the stress of the general board meeting and fearful of the challenge that lies ahead. Rousing with a muttered curse, he removes the templets of the dream machine and says: "Wait."

The navigator acknowledges.

He leaves the flight deck and enters the Daimler's tiny lavatory. After relieving himself, he fumbles at the convenience console and calls up shave-gel, mouth rinse, an astringent towel, and a mild stimulant. As he completes the grooming ritual and the drug takes hold, his reflection in the mirror changes. The features lose the blotched puffiness of fatigue, becoming keen and judicial, and the sunken, haunted eyes take on a counterfeit sparkle. He combs his hair low on his forehead and to the side, concealing the prominent widow's peak that characterizes so many members of his famous family.

Returning to the flight deck, he opens a locker, removes a hooded featherweight soft-armor jacket with a one-way visor and puts it on over the tropical business suit he had worn to the board meeting. The personal weaponry can wait until he's on the ground.

He addresses the ship's navigator again. "Go to Blue Disenfranchised Persons Reserve. Prep for manual touchdown at junction of Mamertine and Borstal streets."

"Warning. This area is outside the jurisdiction of Toronto Conurb Public Safety-"

"Cancel advisory."

"Warning: Touchdown in a DPR is at your own risk. No aid units will respond to emergency summons"

"Cancel."

"Warning. Touchdown in a DPR will render all vehicle insurance coverage null and void. The following precautions are "

"Cancel all advisories and go."

"Air access to Blue DPR visitor landing sites requires barrier override code. Please enter code."

His fingers tremble only slightly as he plugs in the data-dime furnished by Galapharma's Arizona covert op. The navigator blinks in approval.

"Confirmed. En route."

The hoppercraft drops through the cloud deck to an altitude of less than five hundred meters. It comes in from the south, over the dead-black lake. Rain is falling heavily, blurring the pinpricks of colored light delineating the cityscape below. Only the Toronto core and its adjacent maze of islands to the east are clearly visible, shielded in the tenuous golden glitter of a Class One force-umbrella nearly forty kilometers in diameter. Protected from the weather, handsome government buildings and the proud bright crystalline towers of the Hundred Concerns defy the stormy summer night.

The panorama is gorgeous, but he is in no mood to appreciate it. He calls up a triple-shot espresso with a tot of cognac and sips it, speaking the magic words aloud: "Calm. Competence. Courage."

He possesses all three qualities in abundance, and they will carry him through the upcoming ordeal. However, since he is the bearer of disappointing news, he rehearses the spin angle he has calculated will be most effective with Alistair Drum-mond. Galapharma's CEO will probably be furious at the setback, but Drummond is no fool, and he'll have to concede that the Rampart takeover can be leveraged only with inside assistance.

His assistance.

There is really nothing for him to be afraid of.

Coventry Blue is finally gone, along with the other wretched excesses that were tolerated by a compliant CHW government under the corrupt thumb of galactic Big Business. Nowadays, white-collar criminalslike himget their comeuppance in a more humane, if less colorful, manner.

Too bad.

He deserved Coventry Blue if anyone did, the treacherous bastard. But I suppose I'm prejudiced...

Before the Haluk War, the penal institution that combined the worst aspects of an ancient Soviet gulag with anything-goes 2050-vintage Las Vegas was situated on the western outskirts of Toronto. It was the largest and most flagrantly mismanaged Disenfranchised Persons Reserve in the Commonwealth. Nobody seems to know how the dark carnival aspect first invaded this particular Coventry, but it undoubtedly persisted because the Hundred Concerns found it useful as a tangible deterrent to corporate disloyalty. Among other things.

The DPRs were originally designed as walled, self-contained penitentiary villages, providing their lifer inmates with an environment that was supposed to allow them a limited amount of independence and dignity. Self-government by the highly educated felons was one of the prime organizing principles, and in most of the Coventries the system worked well enough. Guards kept order, but under the original charter, they operated more like a small-town police force than like jailers. The convict population lived in apartments instead of cells. They didn't have to wear uniforms. There was no onerous regimentation. The prisoners had ample opportunity for gainful employment and recreation, and according to regulations, they were allowed visitors once a week. Life in a conventional Disenfranchised Persons Reserve wasn't all peaches and cream, but it wasn't a lunatic jamboree of Neronian depravity, either.

The same couldn't be said about Coventry Blue.

Most of the luckless felons sentenced to permanent residence there (some having been apprehended by me, when 1 was an enforcement agent for the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat) would have sold their souls to be elsewhere. At the same time, naughty-minded free citizens on the Outside were paying good money to get into the damned place!

Blue's transient clientele came from all over the home world and from adjacent planets of the Orion Arm. The goal: to party down and dirty. Libertine tourists romping along the notorious Blue Strip could count on rubbing elbows if nothing elsewith distinguished local citizens, many of them members of the capital's political and corporate upper-crust who might deplore the place's wickedness in the public forum but didn't hesitate to indulge illicit Blue itches when the need arose. To the more vicious variety of well-heeled thrillseeker, the sort who could afford the stiff bribe for the night entry code and the outrageous fees charged for the unique attractions, Coventry Blue was the carnal cruise destination of choice: zero-K cool, the ultimate hoot, where vile amusements weren't bloodless virtual reality, but shockingly, deliciously, perilously actual.