Then came Immigration Control or Emigration Control, or whatever the frag the Sioux government's calling it now. Once again, I was looking up at a couple more uniformed Amerind trolls while their 'puter whirred and clicked and tried to decide whether it liked the passport data on my credstick. And I was trying not to sweat; it was supposed to be the best fake datawork (a lot of) money could buy, but you never really knew how good this kind of drek was until it was put to the test. My sphincter contracted as the 'puter went brack sharply. But the trolls handed my credstick back without a word and gestured me on. Signs directed me to the departure gate, so I followed them.
And almost had a childish accident when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I spun, and I think I stopped myself from yelping aloud. I looked up, expecting another troll… then quickly down when the slag who'd stopped me cleared his throat rattlingly. A dwarf, he was, even stockier and more dour man most of his metatype, still on his toes after reaching up for my shoulder. He was wearing me nondescript black suit I've come to associate with government agents, and a cold fist squeezed my stomach. Somehow, I managed to force a well-meaning smile onto my face. "Is mere some problem?" I asked genially.
"You're Brian Tozer?"
I nodded; that was the name on my fake datawork. "That's me, er… sir. Is there a problem with my ticket?"
"Follow me, please." And he turned his back on me and walked off without looking back, fully expecting me to follow him blindly.
Which I did, of course-not that I had much choice. I followed him through an unmarked door into a small, bare room, and I braced myself for a cavity search or worse.
The dwarf didn't say anything once he'd shut the door behind me. He just scrutinized me, dark eyes narrowed beneath beetling brows. If he wasn't going to say anything, neither was I. If we were going to play the old "who speaks first" waiting game, some years from now an airport employee would open the door and find two desiccated corpses in this bare room, still glaring at each other.
Finally, he frowned, and his brows merged into something that looked like a road-killed squirrel. "You are Brian Tozer?" he asked.
And that's when I got it. I pulled out my credstick-the one with the digital signature on it-and extended it to him. He sneered-"Fragging twinkie," I could hear him thinking-and he slipped it into the oversized chipjack mounted in the base of his skull. His eyes rolled up in their sockets for a moment. Then, with a quick movement, he clicked the stick free from his slot, tossed it back, and held something out to me. An optical chip: a tiny sliver of impure silicon the size of a pen-point, in a plastic chip-carrier the size of my first thumb-joint.
'That's your payload for our mutual friend," he grunted, already starting to turn away.
"Hold it," I said quickly. He turned back, and one of his eyebrows tried to crawl up into his hairline. "Look," I told him, "I don't have any of the details on where I'm going, who I'm supposed to give this payload to, and when. Don't you mink it might make my job a little easier if-"
He cut me off with a sharp, "You'll be met." And again he turned his back on me and strode off. This time I let him. I glanced down at me chip-carrier in my hand, and for just a moment I had the impulse to throw it to the floor, grind it under my heel, and just run like hell. The pleasant fantasy didn't last long. I sighed, opened the door, and re-emerged into the concourse.
In the course of following the dwarf, I'd lost track of my gate. Fortunately, some airport employee-a flackish looking slot with a carcinogenic tan and plastic smile noticed me looking lost. He was actually polite to me-a first for the day-and he led me directly to me Global Airways departure lounge.
That's when things started to look up a tad. I'd expected the usual barren, sterile-looking holding pen with its plastic seats designed to make it categorically impossible to find a comfortable position in them. The usual stained, institutional gray carpet. The usual boarding and departure announcements that might as well have been made in Urdu, for all the meaning they conveyed. The usual crush of (meta)humanity, where you try to avoid having your toes stepped on while you play the old game of "Spot the Hijacker."
Buzzz, thanks for playing! This was where the open corp ticket came into play big-time. The flackish kind of guy led me right through me holding pen where the hoi polloi were contained, past an armed sec-guard who actually touched his cap to me as I passed, and through a pair of double doors that could have been real mahogany. As we stepped through, me and my flackish shadow, I saw arrays of tiny LED ripple and flicker on both sides of the doorway. Yet another weapon-detector of some kind. I congratulated myself once again for deciding to travel completely unarmed except for my rapier wit.
The Global Priority Class Stand-By Lounge-that's what the nameplate on the door identified it as-looked like a cross between a gentleman's club in Edwarthan London (or, at least, the BBC rendition thereof), and a high-tone computer dealer's showroom. Heavy wood paneling, burgundy plush carpets, wingback leather chairs, crystal decanters on mahogany sideboards… and everywhere, suit-clad travelers tapping away on palmtop computers, babbling into cell phones, or staring off into space with fiber-optic spider webs trailing from their temples. Of the fifteen or so people in the lounge, the only people who weren't engaged in some form of electronic or verbal intercourse were me, the flack-who, with one final unctuous comment, made himself scarce-and a particularly shapely bartender (bartendress? bartendrix?) whose smile hinted she really needed my patronage to make her day complete. Out of the goodness of my heart I obliged her, and spent the next ten minutes savoring the best of all possible kinds of single-malt Scotch whiskey-free single-malt Scotch whiskey.
Finally, the boarding call came-delivered in person by a shapely, and decidedly mammalian, flight attendant-and we started to make our way through the priority boarding tube. This was a transpex cylinder-scrubbed so clean you could see the walls only by the way they diffracted lights outside-which extended from the terminal building to the first-class passenger door of the suborbital. Twenty meters away was another, similar tube-which suddenly reminded me of those "HabiTrail" things kids use to incarcerate gerbils-used by the declasse from the economy-class holding pen.
I took a couple of steps into the HabiTrail, and then stopped dead, earning a bad look from the shaikujin-still jacked into his portacomp-who tripped on my heel and collided into my back. I couldn't help it; I'd never had a chance to look at a suborbital from this close up before, and I certainly wasn't going to pass it up so he could get to his complimentary pretakeoff gin and tonic a couple of seconds sooner.
The thing was huge, much larger than I'd expected. Hell, suborbitals only carry about 150 people. How much space do you need for that? But of course, there's a lot more to a suborbital than the passenger compartment. There's all the stuff that goes into any standard civilian transport: turbojets, fuel, landing gear, navigation drek, baggage bays, and that place up front where the crew and the flight attendants have their parties. And then there's the extra stuff needed when you're flying at altitudes of 23 klicks (75,000 feet, for the metrically challenged) and speeds of Mach 20+. SCRAMjets to get you to cruising altitude and speed. Fuel for those SCRAMjets… and lots of it (SCRAMjets aren't known for their fuel economy). Cooling systems to keep your hull from melting under the air friction. And on and on. All in all, the suborbital was longer than a football field, a big integral lifting-body with tiny stub wings bolted on apparently as an afterthought. The body lines followed some complex-and very beautiful-multiple-recurve pattern, making the thing broad and high at the nose, but narrower and thinner toward the taiclass="underline" something like an asymmetrical teardrop, maybe.