R. Garcia y Robertson: Fair Verona

Proteus obeyed — ( Alexander Gracchus, CEO of Transgalactic for the Deneb Kaitos, offices in Mt. Zion in Mt. Zion system, on Aesir III and Vanir II in the Twin Systems, and on Pair-a-Dice in Prospero System. Personal residences: Baldar, main moon of Aesir VII, Sylvan Hall on Vanir II, and a lodge in the Quartz Peaks Hunt Preserve on Aesir III. Three wives, five children, 2s. 3d.)

The rest of the party looked tiny compared to Gracchus and his hulking bodyguards. Two of them were women. Proteus identified them as Gracchus’s younger wives—Selene and Pandora. Selene, older and senior, had blonde hair and fair skin dusted with silver. She wore a feathered, flaring gown better suited to a ballet than a Wyvyrn hunt. Pandora, the junior wife, was more sensibly dressed, wearing thigh-length boots and a leopard-skin leotard. Alert and self-reliant, she had a friendly, curious face framed by untidy lacquered hair trimmed to ten-centimeter spikes. Like the stevedores, she wore an electronic slave collar—only diamond-studded.

Pandora immediately took charge of the baggage, helping to stow it aboard a big aerial barge docked by the Beanstalk. Working briskly and cheerfully in her spiked hair and leotards, she encouraged the convict labor by passing out stim tabs from a pillbox on her wrist. Toni lumbered over to lend his four mechanical hands. If he could not be in Verona, he meant to be doing something.

The baggage pile vanished into the barge, and Pandora (whose name meant “All-giving”) emptied the contents of her pillbox, passing out extra tabs as rewards. A guard wearing a purple skin-suit with broad white vertical stripes strolled over, one hand resting on a holstered riot pistol. He signed for her to stop. Without saying a word, Pandora whipped a miniature chrome holocam off her wrist. Smiling, she handed the holo-cam to the guard, who pocketed it, turning his back on the proceedings.

One port worker refused the pills. An older woman with graying hair, she glared at Pandora, saying that she did not need “hoppers.” Whatever crime the woman had to work off probably didn’t come close to passing out drugs to convicts. Or bribing a trustee.

Pandora deftly handed her tabs to the next guy. Reaching up, she removed two sapphire chip earrings, putting them in the older woman’s palm. “No one should work for nothing.”

The woman gaped at the tiny blue stones, then swiftly closed her hand before the guard could see.

Pandora smiled ruefully up at Toni. What could you give a three-meter-tall cyborg? “Maybe later,” she said, and shrugged. Toni did not answer—totally uninterested in whatever she had to offer.

The hunting party trooped aboard the barge and lifted off into dawn light. Freeport and Pair-a-Dice Beanstalk fell behind them. The barge was big, resting on huge rounded helium tanks, with a wide observation deck forward, and a jet-powered hovercar sitting on the fantail. Toni stood on the foredeck, staring out across tens of thousands of square khcks of dazzhng white cloud plain, wishing he were in Verona. Beneath him, below the cloud plain, lay Ariel’s surface, a pressure-cooked caldron of searing hot winds and greenhouse gases. Partial terraforming had given the planet a rudimentary biosphere based on mountain tops and high plateaus. Incompletely habitable, Ariel was very much a work in progress.

Telescopic vision let Toni make out their destination, the ringwall of Elysium poking through the sea of clouds. A massive volcanic caldera rearing up into the biosphere, Elysium formed a huge natural amphitheater more than a hundred khcks across, a great green bowl of misty jungle, surrounded by stadium-like walls.

Seeing Elysium ringwall reminded Toni of the Arena in Verona—the ancient Roman amphitheater that the Lady-in-Gold had vanished into. Seized by the image, his mind immediately tried to catapult back to Verona. Toni fought the impulse. Such spontaneous flashbacks terrified him. They were symptoms of acute mental feedback, severe glitches in his neural circuitry. A hazard Toni would rather not think about—and one he had to hide from his employers at all cost. If Dragon Hunt suspected him of having cybernetic seizures, they would yank his program—stranding him in real time.

The jolt of landing helped jerk Toni back to reality. The landing zone sat on a cleared semicircle blasted out of the crater rim, big enough for the barge and a base camp. A trail sloped downward, choked with cycad fronds and tall bamboo. Vines and creepers kept Toni from seeing more than a couple of meters into the tangle.

Happy to be back in control of his augmented psyche, Toni helped with the unloading, piling safari supphes about the landing site. Turning up his hypersensitive hearing, he tried to tell if the Hunt Guide had noticed his lapse.

“…but with the brain shot the angle of entry varies too much to rely on surface features. Don’t count on aiming between the eye cells. Or above the mandibles.” The Guide was giving a short lecture on the best way to scramble a Wyvyrn’s neuroanatomy.

“What should I aim for?” Gracchus asked. His weapon hung loosely from one huge hand—a long gray 30mm recoilless minicannon, with a padded shoulder rest and a broad ugly snout.

“Imagine a line running between the bases of the primary antennae. The Wyvyrn’s cerebrum is a barbell-shaped pair of ganglia midway along that line.”

Gracchus grunted. “Sounds tricky.”

“It is,” the Guide admitted, “unless you’re close enough to tickle its tonsils. You might want to try for heart number one. It is located in the center of the second segment back from the head…

Fine. The Guide was too busy bullshitting Gracchus to care what his cyborgs were up to. It surprised Toni that someone so obviously successful as Gracchus could fall for such a shuck. But the allure—and expense—of a real hunt, with real prey, was too much for folks with more money than sense.

Toni had a true 3V addict’s contempt for “real” adventure. For a tiny fraction of the cost, Gracchus could be a 3V Beowulf, or Siegfried. He could kill Fafnir, battle sea serpents, and fuck Brunhilde, all without leaving home. But that would be too much like the plebs.

Toni looked about, seeing the impassive Chimp bodyguards. And Gracchus’s two wives, now drenched in sweat. Selene’s fairy gown was drooping, and smeared with silver dust. Pandora looked cooler in her leopard-spotted leotard. Neither dared to complain.

Why haul everyone through this? Dragging folks about in the flesh—just to show that Gracchus had the power and money to make it happen. The Guide’s little bullshit lecture made no mention of collared Wyvyrn. Wyvyrn were flying megafauna from Beta Hydri IV. Huge hundred-meter, semi-intelligent, flying omnivores, with less reason to tangle with humans than lions had. Humans didn’t taste good to them—and normally they had sense enough to stay out of their way. To get them to cooperate, Dragon Hunt went into Elysium ahead of time and collared a couple of prime specimens. Once collared, the Wyvyrn could be made to stick around. Even attack. Without control collars, Gracchus would be lucky to see a Wyvyrn, much less get off a “brain” shot.

It was all as phony as 3V. Only less comfortable, and a damned sight more expensive. Which, alas, was the point. So long as Toni was paid, he kept his complaints to himself. Besides, who cared what a cyborg thought?

The Guide signaled with his hand, and they set out. Harpo went ahead, hacking out a path. Toni lifted a field shelter, ration case, and microstove, along with a hundred-odd kilos of baggage and ammunition, falling in behind Doc.

The first couple of klicks were dense brush, a claustrophobic pile of creepers and wrist-thick bamboo, crisscrossed with lianas and strangler vine. Toni kept station a dozen meters behind Doc, turning when he turned.