FOUR
“Relax your forward hand, Mr. Quartermain. Let the rifle’s gyros do the work and you’ll kill him clean.” As Carl Otto, Hospitality Vice President of the Bank of Rand, whispered, he laid his own mittened hand on his depositor’s coveralled forearm. The two of them lay prone on a rock ledge in the High Rand Range, within a firing position that the guide hired by the banker had scooped in the snow.
Quartermain peered through the stabilized rifle’s optics across a glaciated valley draped by late afternoon shadows, then shrugged off the banker’s hand and snarled. “I don’t pay you to touch me!”
The depositor kept squeezing the forward stock so hard that the rifle’s muzzle quivered visibly as the man outfought stabilizers whining at their limits.
The depositor’s name wasn’t really “Quartermain,” of course. Outworlders who visited Rand typically assumed aliases, because they came less to take the mountain air than to manipulate money they weren’t supposed to have. In fact, the Rand Tourism Bureau offered an online alias list to arriving passengers.
Most of the Bank of Rand’s sealed accounts were assumed to belong to Trueborn Earthmen, because, among the Human Union’s five hundred planets, Earth was where the money was. But the assumption was further supported by the Trueborns’ insistence on picking their false names with the same self-referential carelessness by which they dismissed the banker’s home world as “Switzerland with bad travel connections.”
This particular depositor had chosen the name of a storybook Trueborn hunter. He wasn’t the first to make that choice, and it gave him away as obviously as spoor steaming in snow gave away a trophy animal.
But if the Trueborns’ privilege and arrogance insulted the Rand, the Trueborns’ benign mercantilism made Rand, and worlds like it across the Union, prosperous and kept them independent. The banker’s family had lived well for generations by catering to pompous Trueborns even worse than this one. Outworlders said that it was easier to take a Trueborn’s money than it was to take a Trueborn.
The banker sighed, withdrew his hand and stroked his neat, red beard.
Four hundred yards across the valley, atop a sheer, windswept spur, a trophy sized, stationary rock goat bull balanced on all six hooves as solidly as though it was part of the mountain. The goat’s grown-out mating coat blazed scarlet against the snow, and he emanated musk so strong that the banker’s experienced nostrils caught a whiff of the scent on the breeze that blew toward them.
The rutting male stretched his neck and trumpeted, for the benefit of a hundred as-yet-unmet girlfriends.
Before the trumpet’s echoes died, the depositor fired.
Blam.
The animal lurched and thrashed in an explosion of snow, and within three heartbeats bled buckets. The bull’s masculine trumpet dwindled to a piteous bleat.
The banker closed his eyes to shut out the mess, and swallowed. Like most Rand born to wealth, he had since childhood hunted big game among the High Rand’s peaks, and not every kill had been sporting. But he had rarely seen worse than this. “Quartermain” had pissed up an unmissable kill shot, and struck the bull not in the thorax but the hindquarters.
The hired guide, who lay alongside this Trueborn’s guest in a similar blind a hundred yards away, whispered in the banker’s earpiece. “Sir, should I let Mr. Hickok put him down?”
The banker cocked his head.
“Quartermain” had chosen his guest’s alias, a name that referred to a Trueborn wild-west sheriff. But “Hickok” had a Yavi accent so thick that he couldn’t be Trueborn. That made “Hickok” not only a Yavi, but a liar, and as bad a liar as Quartermain. However, Hickok could scarcely be as bad a shot.
The banker winced as the bull’s bleats echoed off the valley walls. “Let him try. Pelt’s spoilt anyway.”
Two heartbeat’s later, Hickok’s shot cracked across the col. It struck and nearly severed the bull’s right forelimb. Hickok may, like his namesake, have been some sort of sharpshooting sheriff in real life. But Yavi weren’t accustomed to the recoil of gunpowder rifles. “Hickok’s” shot struck the bull above the midshoulder, bloody, painful, but not immediately fatal.
However, a meat axe still cuts, even if two butchers have to swing it repeatedly.
The bull stumbled, its chin tusk furrowing the snow, toppled off the spur and tumbled a half mile through the air, its echoing bleats diminishing as it fell. Finally, the carcass bounced off the scree apron that angled out from the sheer valley wall, then the bull slid across the glassy valley floor, leaving a hundred-foot-long blood trace atop the ice.
Quartermain pounded the heated mat on which he lay. “Damn it! That was my goat!”
“Ah . . . it wouldn’t have made a trophy, sir.” The banker bit his lip, glanced at the sky. Shooting light was gone for today. He radioed for the pickup skimmer, then shivered in silence as they waited for it.
He couldn’t bring himself to soothe this idiot, whose stubborn incompetence had caused the bull gratuitous agony. To say nothing of what the bull’s potential lady friends would now be missing. But scolding a Trueborn wasted breath, and scolding any depositor would bring Bank Board discipline.
A half hour later the skimmer, with the banker, the guide, and the two offworlders aboard, settled on the Lodge’s arrival pad. Autumn twilight arrived abruptly in mountain valleys, as though a tapestry had dropped across a window, and the pad’s landing floods sparkled the powder-snow fog that roiled up from beneath the skimmer’s skirt.
The banker and the guide tied down the drone in the gloom while the depositor and the depositor’s guest disembarked. The Earthman and the Yavi stalked shoulder-to-shoulder, heads down, hands in pockets. They passed the two Rand without a word, much less the customary tip for the guide.
The Lodge’s door minders held the twelve-foot-high double doors open, and yellow glow silhouetted the clients for a heartbeat. Then they disappeared into the lodge where brandy, tobacco and warmth waited.
The guide cocked his head at the closed doors. “What’s their business, do you think, sir? Drugs? Slaves?”
The banker rubbed his beard as he turned to the guide, whose cheeks were bare as a girl’s, then poked the boy’s chest with a mittened finger. “First rule of Rand hospitality. A client’s business is his, not yours!”
The boy stiffened, wide-eyed. A guide position for the Bank of Rand was a scarce opportunity, and the boy didn’t want to lose his.
But good guides were scarce, too. The kid had simply asked aloud what had puzzled and annoyed the banker, himself.
The banker touched the boy’s shoulder as he shook his head. “Not drugs. Not slaves, either. The gangsters, they always tip big to make a show. A show’s the last thing those two want.”
The boy wrinkled his forehead. “You don’t think they’re criminals?”
The banker smiled in the dark. “There are criminals, there are serious criminals, then there are politicians.” He jerked his head toward the Lodge. “Those two are used to traveling with advance parties that see to tipping the locals. They didn’t stiff you. They just assumed someone down the line would take care of you. And I will.”
“Politicians, sir?”
“Or tycoons. And important ones, whichever they are. Middling crooks couldn’t wangle bull permits this time of year.”
“But one’s an Earthman and the other’s a Yavi!”
The banker rubbed his beard again, narrowed his eyes. “That is a sow in the parlor, isn’t it, boy?”
The Trueborns said—they had sayings for everything, whether outworlders cared to hear them or not—that politics made strange bedfellows. But a powerful Yavi and a powerful Trueborn meeting face-to-face was beyond strange. Cold War II had grown so frigid that Earth and Yavet conducted no politics with one another at all, in bed or otherwise. Even here in the most exclusive and discreet hideaway among five hundred planets.
The kid whistled. “Making peace? Or plotting war?
The boy had a knack for perceiving the obvious, which was ninety percent of what the rich paid others to do for them. He would go far.
The banker bent and tugged the drone’s tie-downs a final time, as though their solidity would soothe the discomfort that swelled in his belly. “War and peace is somebody else’s business. Your business is tracking goats. Stick to that.”
The boy tramped on ahead to his guide hut while snow crust crackled beneath his boots, echoing across the darkness. Like whispers in the banker’s head that wouldn’t quit.
Peace between Earth and Yavet? That was unlikely. But the Cold War between the Human Union’s two nuclear superpowers turning hot? That was unthinkable.
Only the Trueborns had starships. So they could rain nuclear bombs down on Yavet, or any other planet, with impunity. The Yavi had nuclear bombs in plenty, but no way to deliver them in strategic quantity.
So Cold War II stayed cold based on counterbalanced assumptions. The Trueborns were assumed to be too self-righteously moral to destroy even an enemy as evil as the Yavi, if doing so would kill billions. The Yavi, on the other hand, were assumed to be quite immoral enough to lay waste to worlds, as they had to their own, if they ever obtained the means. But the Trueborns assumed they could prevent the Yavi from obtaining the means by incremental containment: a patchwork of alliances, a mixed bag of surrogate, brushfire, and clandestine military adventures, and espionage.
It seemed to Otto a balance as ludicrous as it was precarious. But it was the only balance this agglomeration of civilizations had.
So despite a code of secrecy that had bound his family, and all the great banking families of Rand, for generations, Carl Otto had long ago chosen sides. And he would do whatever he had to in order to preserve the balance.
Inside his parka, the banker shivered, and watched until the boy disappeared inside his hut. Then Otto turned and walked toward the communications shed.