Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) Read Free Page B

missing.
    Reese grinned. The Uzbeks, a people who usually endorsed the long view, had probably turned da Vega into fertilizer by now.
    The amplified muezzins fell silent. The bartender returned and flipped on todo music broadcast by satellite from Japan. He took her order and then Berger walked in, dabbing at his nose with a tissue. He hadn’t been ready, he explained, for this bitter a spring. He’d have to buy a warm jacket.
    “Don’t worry, Miss Waldman,” he added. “I’m not here to crease you. If I wanted to do that, I could have done it on the street.”
    “I know. But you might be a cop trying to lure me out of Uzbekistan. So I hope to hell you can prove to me who you are.”
    He grinned, rubbed his forehead uncomfortably. “Well. To tell you the truth, I am a policeman, of a sort.”
    “Terrific. That really makes my day.”
    He showed her ID. She studied it while Berger went on. “I’m a captain in Brighter Suns’ Pulsar Division. We’d like to hire you for a job up the well.”
    “Vesta?”
    “No. Closer to Earth.”
    Reese frowned. Policorp Brighter Suns was one of the two policorps that had been set up to deal with the alien Powers. It was almost exclusively into Power imports, and its charter forbade it from owning territory outside of its home asteroid, Vesta. A lot of Brighter Suns execs were running for cover ever since Steward had blown Griffith’s network in L.A., and the whole Vesta operation was being restructured.
    “The Pulsar Division handles internal security on Vesta,” Reese said. “Your outside intelligence division is called Group Seven. So why is Pulsar handling a matter so far away from home?”
    “What we’d like you to handle is an internal security matter. Some of our people have gone rogue.”
    “You want me to bring them back?”
    Something twitched the flesh by one of Berger’s eyes. She knew what he was going to say before the words came out his mouth. She felt her nerves tingling, her muscles warming. It had been a long time.
    “No. We want you to ice them.”
    “Don’t tell me anything more,” she said. “I’m going to check you out before I listen to another word.”
    *
    “It’s not even murder, I’d say,” Berger said. He was eating spinach salad in an expensive restaurant called the Texas Beef, named after a vaguely pornographic and wildly popular vid show from Alice Springs. Dressing spattered the creamy tablecloth as Berger waved his fork. “We’ve got tissue samples and memory thread, like we do for all our top people— hell, we’ll clone ’em.”
    “That doesn’t mean I can’t end up in prison for it.”
    “Who’s gonna catch you? It’s a goddam asteroid fifty zillion klicks from anywhere.”
    She had checked him out as far as she could. After telling him what she was going to do, she’d sent a message to Vesta asking for confirmation of the existence of one Captain Berger of the Pulsar Division, that and a photo. Both arrived within twelve hours. If this was a plot to arrest her, it had some unlikely elements.
    Reese took a mouthful of lamb in mustard sauce. She worked out hard enough, she figured, and deserved her pleasures.
    “The rock’s about two kilometers in diameter. The official name is 2131YA, but it’s also called Cuervo Gold.”
    “Funny names they’re giving asteroids these days.”
    “They’ve run out of minor Greek gods, I guess. Cuervo’s officially owned by a nonpolicorporate mining company called Exeter Associates, which in turn is owned by us. Gold’s an Apollo asteroid, crossing Earth’s orbit on a regular schedule, and that makes it convenient for purposes of resupply, and also makes it a lot more isolated than any of the rocks in the Belt. We’ve had a lab there for a while, using it to develop some technology that—” He grinned. “Well, that we wanted to keep far away from any competition. Security on Vesta is tight, but it’s a port, people are always coming in and out. What we’ve got on the