Jettero Heller's dress uniform breast had neither silver nor copper braid. It was an almost solid mass of gold!
I lifted some of the flaps: building a bridge under severe enemy fire; mining the orbit of Banfochon III; rebuilding the destroyed control center of Hemmerthon under enemy barrage; recovery of the derelict Genmaid;sabotage of the Rollofan transport system; mining the fortress ofMontrail . . .On and on! I had to look at several more before I even found the battleship Menuchenken.Jettero Heller's few years of service had been active ones even for a combat engineer. Behind each one of those brief entries would lie a whole lurid scene of close shaves and violent battle.
I told myself how it must have happened: fellow gets a reputation and they keep drafting him when the odds look hopeless. And in times of perpetual war, there were lots of these. Then my estimate was soured by noting that what they call the "Volunteer Star" – a blaze of diamonds with a ruby center – was tucked with its ribbon inside the jacket. They award that for fifty perilous volunteers. They didn't keep drafting him – he kept volunteering!
I thought I had it then: a glory hound. That was his fracture. If I could play on that . . .
"He has a lot of other citations and awards," said the old gunner-manager. "Some of them are so valuable we keep them in the big vault. He never wears them." So he wasn't a glory hound. Oh, well, there were other faults he might have that I could exploit. I wandered off to look at the walls.
He had a lot of pictures of people. I don't know why portraitists always insist on cloud-sky backgrounds: when you see one of these three-dimensional color shots against a sky it makes it look like a little bust parked in the heavens; gives it a religious note as though everyone was being made into a Goddess or Godlet. I don't like them; they make the viewer feel like he's in the sky, too, and I don't care for that.
There was an older woman with a gentle smile, evidently his mother. There was a tough old hawk of a man in a shabby business tunic: it was inscribed "To my dear son." And then there was one of... I stopped dead. I was looking at the most beautiful female I have ever seen in my life. It was one of these trick portraits where the bust follows you with its eyes and when you lower your head it just looks sweet but when you raise it, the lips smile. Honest, this beauty took your breath away! Wow!
I had it now. This was the handle! I turned toward the gunner-manager.
"That's his sister," said this hope-shattering fiend. "She's a star on the Homeview circuit. You must have seen her." I hadn't. We are too busy in the Apparatus for self-indulgence like art. I wandered off to an assembled collection of press photos, all in their fake porthole frames. Jettero with classmates; Jettero being carried on the shoulders of some crew; Jettero finishing a bullet ball tournament; Jettero being introduced at a banquet; Jettero pulling a basketload of survivors into a ship. On and on. But before I could conclude I had a publicity freak on my hands, I noticed that the little otherfaces in the pictures were circled and their names written under the circles: they were a gallery of his friends,not Jettero. (Bleep), but you can't succeed with just a few tries.
But there wasone of Jettero alone! It was full color, three-dimensional and gorgeous. He was sitting in the seat of a ship: it was one of these knife-edged racing craft they use in space – the kind that blow up if you just look at them.
"That's the Chun-chu,"said the gunner-manager. "She broke the Academy interplanetary speed record and it's never been bettered since. Jet loved that ship. It's down in the Fleet museum and Jet's always telling them it will still fly. But you'd have to get an order from the Lord of the Fleet just to move its position on the museum floor. They won't let Jet go near it so he keeps this picture of it." They had a bag packed. It had taken them time because they'd argued amongst themselves about "Jet would want this" and "not want that." I was glad to get out of there. For all my prying and hopes, I had really learned nothing useful, nothing that I could use, that is. To handle someone, from an Apparatus viewpoint, you have to have his flaws. And all people have flaws. I told myself I'd keep looking.
We went on downstairs (they call them "ladders" in the club, which is silly because they're twenty feet wide) and I was about to walk out of the lobby when I found my way blocked.
The biggest, ugliest young officer I have ever seen before or since, stood squarely in the middle of the doorway. And he had the toughest, nastiest expression on his face I never want to see again.
" 'Drunk,' " he said. "I just want you to know that if any of this is crooked, if Jet is notall right, if anything happens to him, we have your identocopies and we have your photo. And remember what I say," and he spoke in an even, grating voice that leaves the nerves scraped, "we will take you personally ten thousand miles up into cold, empty space; we will remove your clothes; we will push you out the airlock into vacuum. And in seconds you will be a pale, pink mist!"The last three words were punctuated with hard, firm taps on my chest.
"Right!" It was a roar! It was behind me! And I turned to find that about two hundred young officers were there in a sullen mob.
I am not all that brave. It scared me.
I got by the brute and ran down the steps with the bag. The airbus was there and I dived in.
With shock I saw my driver, Ske, was soaking wet. They must have thrown him in the nearby fountain.
He took off nearly vertical and fast. His hands were clenched and shaking on the controls. He could see me in his rear screen.
"It looks like they really put you through the grinder," he said. And it's true, I must have looked like quite a mess with cuts clotted up and bruises beginning to swell.
He drove for a bit, guiding us into the diversionary course so we could head, undetected, for Spiteos. Then Ske said, "Officer Gris, how could they possibly have known we was from the Apparatus?" I didn't answer. Because we're shabby, I thought. Because we're dishonest. Because we're just crooked thugs and never should be permitted to go near decent people. Because we stink. It had been a very trying day.
"Officer Gris," said the driver when he had the airbus scooting above the floor of the Great Desert, "if you had just told me they would know we was from the Apparatus, I could have brung a blasthoser and wiped the (bleepards) out." Oh, fine, I thought. That was all this mission would need: two or three hundred dead Royal officers and an Apparatus Secondary Executive standing there amongst the charred remains. Maybe I belonged in another Division!
But you don't transfer out of the Apparatus – you leave it feet first, stone-dead.
I had no slightest choice except to carry out this mission to its violent, brutal end! And succeed.
Chapter 8
Lombar, seated in a king's chair looted from some Royal tomb, looked agitated.
We were in his tower office at Spiteos, watching the weekly "freak parade." The whole wall of glass at the office end had refraction index switches: it could be a mirror, it could be a black wall and it could be so set that we could see out but nobody could see in. It was set the last way now. Beyond it, completing the width of the rampart, was a vast, stone-walled room.