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thirty-eight

The first thing that Samurai checked while still in the airport was on getting the rest of the way to Semipalatinsk. The last flight that evening to Odessa, shown on an illuminated map by the ticketing desks as the capital of the Inde-pendent State of Moldavskaja, was full, but there would be two the next morning and another in the afternoon. From Odessa, as the cargo pilot had said, he would be in the trans-Siberian trunk net, and the rest was -straightforward.

Samurai hadn't realized that in their race to lay waste the planet, the Eurasians were flying SSTs. If he took the early flight to Odessa, he could get an SST connection direct into Semipalatinsk by early afternoon, even with the four-hour time difference; but the fare was high compared to the subsonic alternatives, and Roxy hadn't been kidding when she warned him that Western currency wouldn't stretch very far. He didn't want to use his credit cards -because of the risk of giving anyone with the right contacts or access procedures an audit trail of his movements—despite superficial East-West differences, he didn't know what arrangements might exist between security agencies. And it was still only December 3. The launch that Ashling was scheduled on wasn't until the sixth. Samurai still had plenty of time.

The Air Moldavskaja flight tomorrow afternoon would get him into Odessa at 5:00 p.m. local time, with a connection later that evening to Volgograd. From there, a long Aerospaceflot night flight would arrive in Novosibirsk at the ungodly hour of 4:40 a.m., from where an early morning flight south to the Kazachskij Republic got into Semi-palatinsk at 8:30. That would be on the morning of the fifth, still giving him a full day to locate Ashling. Of the two morning flights to Odessa, the first was too early, and a quick study of the connections showed that the second wouldn't gain him anything. Accordingly, he booked a seat on the afternoon flight. Any misgivings that he might still have had about being traceable from passenger lists were quickly dispelled: the ticket carried flight details only, without requiring a name. Tomorrow morning, he decided, could usefully be spent shopping to replace the clothes and other things that he'd left with his bag in the police building at Zittau.

* * *

A branch of the local rapid transit system, running -every two minutes through a glass-walled flyover, connected the terminal to a hotel complex by the airport approaches. From the view out of the car as it passed above traffic ramps and parking lots, much of the surroundings seemed to be still under construction, with concrete being poured under arc lights into huge steel and timber forms, and cranes working into the evening. But the hotel section itself, when he got there, was more or less complete, even if still lacking in some of the finishing touches of comfort and decor, and Samurai had no trouble getting a room for the night.

The room came with bathrobe, disposable slippers, and a complimentary kit of toilet articles, he discovered, so at least he would be comfortable until morning. On a less salubrious note, an automatic dispenser offered candy, alco-hol, coffee, tobacco, and a selection of drugs, right there in the room. The local business and entertainments directory included with the hotel guide listed sexual companionship—straight, gay, male, female, or both—alongside where to shop, places to eat, music and shows, and the old city's museums and medieval churches. Guns were advertised openly, and there was a school of erotic moviemaking. The police even ran an ad giving a get-you-home-safe number that drunks could call to avoid driving. Farther on, Samurai was astounded to read that a private investigative agency in the city included "legally sanctioned homicides" in its list of professional services.

But at least there was some comfort in the thought that self-destruction would inevitably overtake such a society before it could proceed too far with the destruction of everything else. He could see why many of the West's analysts had concluded that eventually the solution would have to be a military one.

He ate later in the hotel restaurant. The food was ample and varied, but irresponsibly nonselective. Service, although efficient, was performed with a presumptuous familiarity that bordered on insolence. The host who showed Samurai to a table joked about American "neurotics" as if there were something wrong with being educated about dietary risks, and then added insult by referring to the U.S. -Bureau of Environmental Control as the Green Gestapo.

Later, the waitress, as she was clearing the dishes, asked Samurai if he was on his own here. When he replied that he was, she murmured that she finished her shift at ten and could stay an extra hour "for half the rate you'll get in town."

A big, bearded man dining at the next table overheard and cautioned Samurai not to have anything to do with it. "It's a rip-off. She'll talk the money out of you ahead of time, then no-show. By the time she gets back on her next shift you'll be a thousand miles away. She wouldn't try it on us, but Westerners get taken every time."

Samurai was outraged. "Why doesn't someone tell the management about it?" he demanded.

"They already know."

"What! And they don't do anything?"

"What should they do?"

"Well, get it stopped. Fire her or something."

"Why? Whose rights are being violated?"

Samurai gestured helplessly with a hand and shook his head. "But hell, their staff, their room?"

"She's not 'theirs.' She works the hours for them that she contracts to, that's all. And so long as you're paying the charge, it's your room."

It still didn't sound right to Samurai. "Well, if it's a rip-off, doesn't the hotel figure its customers have a right to be protected?" he said.

The bearded man thought about it. "Maybe," he conceded. "But they probably figure they're doing them a bigger favor by letting them learn not to be stupid."

After dinner, Samurai wandered into the bar and permitted himself a vodka with tonic. The place was raucous and noisy with what looked like engineers and construction crew from the work going on all around the area, and a lot of what Samurai assumed were local women. He left and wandered around a few more parts of the complex that were sufficiently finished to be open for business, but found them much the same. The atmosphere didn't appeal to him, so he returned to his room and retired early.

* * *

More of the vicinity was visible the next morning. The airport adjoined what was virtually a new industrial city springing up separate from the older, historic capital of Transylvania, which dated from fortifications first recorded in the thirteenth century and had been largely preserved as a cultural center. The constructions that Samurai had seen from the plane lay beyond the far edge of the airfield, and revealed themselves now as just one end of a line of massive structures in various stages of completion extending away for what must have been one to two miles, with tangles of service roads, pipe runs, and latticeworks taking shape between them.

He asked about it at the hotel information desk and learned that the new city was being developed as a spaceport and would become the region's principal link to the Offworld independencies. Similar things were going on in Latvia and the Belorussian Republic. The Eurasians, it seemed, regarded the Consolidation as a temporary affair that was destined to fall apart, and the westernmost FER states were vying for the Western European space business that they expected to materialize when the Green Curtain came down.

Samurai didn't bother disagreeing. It was depressing enough to watch so much effort and material being misdirected into pipe dreams. But the more chilling thought was the ease with which such facilities could be converted for military use when the orgy of profligacy ended and the FER was forced to turn upon the West. Or maybe the Eurasians weren't the simpletons they seemed. Could that be the real intent, he wondered, and the talk about spaceports mere camouflage?

He took the transit shuttle into a nearby part of the city to buy the things he needed, and found it to be pretty much as he'd expected: superficially glittery and affluent, but underneath it all the kind of mindless gaudiness that -inevitably accompanied preoccupation with the material and the banal. There were too many colors and styles of every-thing on the shelves, too many overproduced, overadvertised gimmicks that consumed resources to no useful purpose, and that no half-effective planning committee would ever have allowed. The automobiles were huge and criminally wasteful, many of them carrying only the driver. Every conceivable type of electronic and computing device was on open sale, with no evidence of proof-of-need or licensing requirements.

He was in a sober and reflective mood by the time he returned to join the flight for Odessa. There were no secur-ity checks on boarding. Half the people on the plane were smoking and drinking. Segregation was nonexistent, and he had to share the cabin with plebs.

At Odessa everything was as bad, but on an even vaster scale, with hypersonic, suborbital transports leaving for Tokyo, Singapore, and Capetown. During the flight from Odessa to Volgograd, two couples across the aisle were playing a card game that involved brazen gambling, and the flight attendants didn't even seem to notice.

Everywhere was degeneracy, recklessness, profligacy, corruption, all on its way to going out of control. Samurai didn't think that these people would ever find it within themselves to put a stop to it. That meant the West would have to, before everyone was dragged down.

* * *

Previously known as Stalingrad, the easternmost limit of advance reached by Hitler's armies in 1942, Volgograd had been completely rebuilt from rubble after World War II. It suffered further damage in the turbulent years following the final breakup of the Soviet empires—though nothing like the devastation wrought previously—and was again restored to become one of the FER's most ambitious metropolises. Samurai had neither the time nor reason—nor, for that matter, any particular inclination—to leave the airport to see the city at close hand, but as the plane came in late in the afternoon, it presented a full view of the integrated central area, with towers, -terraces, and glass walled cliffs, all flowing together and interpenetrated by elevated roads and rail tubes like -arteries feeding a single sprawling organism.

One of the major Siberian spacegates already operating to support the Offworld expansion was located several miles to the north. Shortly after Samurai emerged into the ele-vated level of the airport transfer lounge, with high observation windows stretching the length of the building, a squat delta shape rose up above the skyline, balanced on a pencil of violet light, and accelerated rapidly to vanish into the high cloud cover.

"Heavy-lift surface shuttle going up on a ground laser," he overheard a man nearby saying to a boy, who looked like his son. "Could be heading for a lunar-transfer orbit."

"That's three in the last hour," the boy said.

"Gonna be a lot more'n that before much longer too."

Samurai turned away and began heading toward the departure gate for his flight. Just then, an unusual sound, like that from an approaching train still in a tunnel, came from outside, and several people began pointing. He stopped and looked back. A craft unlike anything he had seen before had broken through the cloud canopy and was coming down toward the field at an angle steeper than any conventional airplane. It was disk-shaped, black and featureless in silhouette against the sky, although there seemed to be a bluish radiance emanating from parts of the rim. As it came lower over the far boundary fence, it revealed a humped upper part, the shape of a flattened bell. And most puzzling of all, it seemed to be hanging on the end of a faint beam of pinkish light, like a barely visible rod supporting it at its center, coming down through the clouds.

"That's an IRH pulsejet lifter," a voice mused next to him. "What's it doing here? I thought they were still -experimental."

Samurai turned and saw that it was a man in a jacket and tie with an overcoat, addressing a companion.

The other shook his head. "Maybe they're trying out a few prototypes." He noticed Samurai looking at them and inclined his head to indicate the vessel outside. "Do you know anything about it?"

Samurai shook his head. "I've never even heard of it."

The man caught the accent and smiled elusively. "Cana-dian? American? I can tell it's not British."

"U.S.," Samurai said.

"Ah, yes. . . . We're engineers, you see. That uses what's called IRH: Internal Radiation Heating. It's an air breather, but using external laser energy to heat it instead of onboard fuel. The beam comes from a nuclear generator satellite in a two-thousand-mile-high orbit."

Samurai looked out across the airfield again. The disk was just coming down behind some conventionally shaped craft on the far side of the main runways and appeared a little smaller than them, making it maybe fifty to a hundred feet across. "I've never seen anything like that," he said.

"No, probably not," the first of the two engineers said. "Your countries won't let them fly over because they think the risks of down-pointing lasers are too high. There was a big political thing about it a few years ago. But I don't suppose they told you about that."

* * *

A part of Samurai's implanted nature had been designed to make him an instinctive combatant. Alertness to danger was his natural condition, causing him to scan and scrutinize everything around him constantly and automatically.

As soon as he entered the departure lounge, he read something suspicious in the manner of the two men sitting together among the passengers awaiting the Aero-spaceflot night flight to Novosibirsk. Their body language betrayed tenseness, and they shifted their eyes away too suddenly when Samurai entered, yet at the same time their altering of postures signaled an unnatural interest in him. Without changing his step, he ambled across to a bookshop on the far side of the area and observed them through the window while turning idly through a magazine from one of the racks. Their clothes were of American style and cut, marking them as recent arrivals. One of them was watching him and trying not to show it.

Samurai bought the magazine and tucked it under his arm, then came out of the shop and began walking toward them, noting the involuntary stiffening of their postures as he approached. He stopped several yards away from them and reached suddenly inside his coat. One of the men began moving a hand reflexively toward his jacket, checking himself with a conscious effort when Samurai produced his ticket.

They were armed.

Samurai studied his ticket nonchalantly for a few seconds and then walked away without looking at them. Why anyone from the States should be after him was a question that could wait till later. The important thing for now was that somebody was trying to interfere with his mission. If it were anyone legitimately connected with it, they would have simply contacted him openly. When he was out of sight around a corner he bought himself a cup of tea and sat down to think what he was going to do.

Meanwhile, one of the two Americans had gone to a booth to make a phone call. "Identification positive," he said into the receiver. "We'll be shadowing him all the way on the same flight. Get the welcoming party ready at Novo-sibirsk. We'll grab him there."

 

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Framed