Rik felt sick. He seemed to be underwater, his body surging with the ebb and flow of powerful tides. Panicking, he tried not to breathe, forced his eyes to open, struggled to move his arms and legs. But opening his eyes didn't help. Bright walls surged and whirled all around him, making no sense, making his nausea worse than before.
He remembered the upload, Rivers, grabbing his gun. Forgetting the water, he called out, “Fariba!” But he didn't hear his own voice, just a distant, incoherent moan.
He realised he was on his back and tried to sit up, but he couldn't move. Tidal forces moved him. Bright walls shifted across his vision. He could hold his breath no longer and gulped in a lungful of air. His relief at not drowning started him laughing.
“He's coming round,” someone said. He tried to move his head, to see who it was, and sent the lights smearing across his vision.
“He's secure,” said another voice. “Let's just get him on board and I'll give him another shot.”
“Is that safe? He's already had more than–”
“What do you care? Just keep moving.”
Zero-G! That's why Rik felt so strange. He was strapped to a gurney and two men were moving him along a short corridor. And he was in space. He remembered the scramjet standing on the tarmac at LAX. Had they taken him up in that? If so, they must have docked with another ship in orbit. They were transferring him.
He began struggling as best he could, but the straps were tight and his body was weak. And Fariba... What had they done with Fariba? He tried to call out again, but his tongue was fat in his mouth and his voice was a low groan.
They stopped moving and a door shut behind them, metal on metal. His ears popped as the pressure changed. Airlock. The pressure was never quite the same on two different ships. It always took a moment to change from one to the other. He stopped struggling. Whatever ship they were taking him to, they were already inside it. If only his head would clear.
-oOo-
“That's it. He'll be awake in a moment.”
Rik saw a woman in a jumpsuit step away from him and lower an infuser. His head ached, and he felt like he weighed a ton.
“Fariba,” he croaked and this time his voice seemed to work.
“He must really like this Fariba bitch,” a man said. “It's all he ever says.”
Rik tried to raise his head to look at him, but his skull was too heavy. Hot pain shot across his eyes, making him squeeze them shut.
“OK, can we take him now?” It was a different man's voice.
“Give him a minute,” the woman said. “Unless you feel like carrying him.”
The man laughed. “Not that big bastard. Not with the G we're pulling. He can damn well walk.”
“Where am I?” Rik managed to say.
“You're aboard a space cruiser named The Phenomenon of Man,” the woman told him. “I'm afraid you've been unconscious for quite a while, so it may take some time to get your strength back.” She stepped into his line of sight again. She was young and serious, and her jumpsuit had a medic's patch above her left breast.
“How long?” he croaked.
The medic fetched him a bottle of water that he could suck at through a plastic pipe. The water was wonderfully cool in his throat.
“The woman who was with me. Is she all right?” With every passing second, his head felt a little less fuzzy. The pain, however, would not go away.
The medic looked to one side, and a man answered him. “There wasn't no woman with you, you dumb, drugged-up fuck.”
Rik pulled his head up to look at the speaker, and this time he managed to get a look at the guy before his head fell back. An ugly, grizzled man with a shaven head, a kicked-in face and flat, lustreless eyes that said 'hired muscle' as plainly as if they'd flashed it up in neon. He too was wearing a jumpsuit, but the only patch on it was the ship's logo with the words ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ around the outside.
So Freymann wasn’t with him. Rik didn't know if that was a good thing or not. Maybe she was of no interest to whoever had snatched him.
He hoped so.
“What about the upload?”
The muscle sneered. “Yeah? Which one? We got more zombies on this ship than in my great-granddad's book collection.” He thought he was a great wit, and laughed at his own stupid joke.
“A delightful young lady. Looks like she's been dipped in oil.” Just talking was exhausting Rik.
“Oh, that one.” Rik could tell from the change in tone that the muscle and Rivers weren't close. “She's around. Hey, is he ready yet?”
“Help yourself,” said the medic.
The two men unstrapped Rik and dragged him to his feet. The gravity in the ship was crushing, and he couldn't stand without help – which his captors gave with much cursing and complaining. They led him out of the medical ward and along narrow corridors to a room with toilet facilities.
“Clean yourself up,” the muscle told him. “You stink like old fish.”
Showering was hell. Just standing up was hard enough, and doing it under stinging hot water while trying to move his arms was more than he could take. After a while, he let himself slump to the bottom of the stall, and sat there letting the water scour his body.
The only clothing in sight when he got out was one of the ship jumpsuits. The fact that it fit him perfectly implied the ship was equipped with a clothes printer, and that it had unobtrusively scanned him at some point. Not that he cared. His head hurt so much he just wanted to curl up on the floor. Clothed or naked; it was all the same to him.
The muscle turned up and led him back into the corridor, then back to the medical ward. He asked the medic for an aspirin, and she gave him a shot. Within seconds the pain started to ebb.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, rubbing his temples.
“The pain? Nothing to do with me. Maybe you had a bad reaction to the sedative?”
“What about my cogplus? I've been getting headaches ever since I had it fitted.”
“You want me to take a look?” She stepped towards him, but the muscle grabbed her arm and pulled her away.
“What do you think you're doing?” He fixed Rik with a glare. “Get on that couch. This ain't your private hospital. Docking manoeuvres start in two minutes.”
The medic shrugged and left the room. Rik sat where he was told, and the muscle strapped him in again.
“Who are we docking with?” he asked.
“You'll see.”
“I didn't know the Chicago Mob had space facilities.”
The muscle made himself comfortable on another acceleration couch. “I think your brain's still fucked. Why don't you shut your face?”
The sickening feel of his stomach floating up into his chest told Rik the fierce deceleration was over. During the next fifteen minutes, long periods of free fall were interspersed with short, powerful accelerations that pushed him in unpredictable directions. When a longer push from the floor below ended in a solid thump that echoed throughout the ship, he breathed a long sigh of relief. They were docked, and feeling a steady one-third G force through the floor.
“A space station,” Rik said. Most of them aimed for about one-third G. It was what most spacers considered comfortable.
“Give the man a coconut,” the muscle grumbled.
“A rock and roller, right?” All the latest stations were of this type now, tethered to an asteroid on a long lead, and rotating around their common centre of gravity. Dragging big rocks in from the asteroid belt, to use for stations in Earth orbit, had become one of Cordell's fastest growing business sectors. Maybe The Phenomenon of Man had lifted them from low Earth orbit to one of the geosynchronous stations at thirty-six thousand kilometres. That was a long haul, but it would only have taken a few hours. Rik felt that much more time had passed than that.
With his headache receding and the crippling two-G deceleration now over, his brain was slowly rebooting itself. It occurred to him that he could call Freymann and check up on her. If he could have slapped his forehead, he would have done. What kind of idiot wouldn't have thought of using the phone? But when he tried, his cogplus gave him the 'no signal' message. In frustration, he turned to the muscle.
“Why am I here?” he demanded. “What the hell do you think you're doing, kidnapping me like this?”
His companion was already unstrapped and heading for the door. He looked back at Rik briefly and smiled. “You'll see.”
The next person to walk into the room was Rivers Valdinger, looking fresh and perky and very pleased with herself. Rik watched her carefully, wishing his arms weren't strapped down.
“What did you do with the woman I was with?” he asked.
“What do you care? She was obviously CIA, or whatever.” She came up close to him and bent down towards him, her face close, her head tilted and her black, featureless eyes looking into his. “Or did you have the hots for the little G-girl?”
Rik fought down his anger. “Just tell me what you did with her.”
Rivers straightened up and walked away. “I'd have thought you'd be more interested in what's about to happen to you, Rik.”
He glowered at her. “What, we're on first-name terms now, are we?”
She turned and smiled. Rik had known a few uploads in his time. Not many, but enough to understand that their robotic bodies were animated by a human personality, that their gestures, their body language, reflected the person that lived within. Rivers must have been a very young woman, he guessed, and an attractive one, before she died. This creature of carved obsidian moved with the self-confident grace of a high-school cheerleader. For an instant he could see her as she might have been, lissom and athletic, as careless of her beauty as she was of other people's lives.
She seemed to be studying him, too. What she made of him, he had no interest in finding out. He just wanted her to tell him Freymann was OK and get out of his face. But neither wish stood much chance of being fulfilled.
She untied him quickly and took his arm, dragging him to his feet and leading him in silence out of the ship. They passed through the airlock, which was standing open, and into the biggest docking bay he had ever seen outside of a space bridge terminal. He asked again where he was, and again he got no answer.
She took him across the dock and into a corridor that wound between offices and meeting rooms. They entered one, and she laid him on a gurney. She tied him down once more with chest, leg and arm straps, and fitted him with a VR helmet and gauntlets.
“What is all this?” he complained, but didn't really expect an answer. The spinal clamp at the back of the helmet pressed against the back of his neck, and his visor turned opaque.
“Maybe I'll see you inside,” Rivers said.
And then he was in Hell.