The Assassination of Billy Jeeling Read online

  “What you’ve done to improve it, Billy.”

  He nodded somberly.

  Her heart went out to him, and she wanted to just hold him and comfort him. But he was obviously not in any mood for that sort of thing.

  “We’ll go head-to-head against the unfounded criticisms, Billy. We can bring in some psych-war specialists to mount a strong counter-attack. Barrage the AmEarth Empire with our propaganda.”

  “Don’t go too far. I want to spread the truth, not the distortions that typically come with propaganda. I want to take the high road in everything we do.”

  “I understand, but to strike back effectively, you may need to fight the way they do, putting a spin on things. You say you don’t want to make personal attacks against your leading critics, okay. But we have to tell a story, your story, and we need to make it compelling.”

  He shook his head, causing his graying, curly locks to flip farther back, off his forehead. “Keep it clean, Lainey. Tell my story with dirt free, provable facts, but don’t spin anything, don’t twist anything. We’ll fight this my way. I want you to run the details past me for approval.”

  “That will slow things down.”

  He glowered. “It’s the way I want it.”

  “All right. How about dispatching a team of rebuttal robots with standard messages and standard responses? Just a few hundred of them that we spread around the planet. You could design and build them yourself.”

  “I’m not sure about that idea, but we’ll talk more about it. I agree that we need to do more.”

  She sighed. “We’re making some progress in this discussion, anyway.”

  “Remember, we’re not going to sling mud at their level. We’re above them, in more ways than one.” He glanced at his wrist watch, depressed the crystal and forced a smile. “Forty-nine point five-six kilometers above them at this moment.”

  He patted the cube of inky formula on his desk, what he called the “initial stage” ingredients, part of a much more complex formula that was processed by Skyship and emitted into the atmosphere. “This is just one example. Set up an interview of me in this office, and I’ll talk about this cube and its significance. I think about the importance of the proprietary gas formula every day. People need to understand better who I am, what I’ve done for AmEarth, and what I’m continuing to do. I have not outlived my usefulness.”

  She saw him staring at a headline on one of the newspapers, accusing him of shanghaiing young people into the SkyCorps that operated many of the services on the great ship, and into the JeeJees who supported him with almost fanatical devotion.

  “Billy, maybe you shouldn’t look at the details so much, maybe you should—”

  “Aw, to hell with it!” Jeeling snapped. He swung a forearm, sent the stack of newspapers flying. Only the purple cube remained on his desk.

  “I should be leaving,” Lainey said. She bowed in her graceful manner, with a sweep of one arm and then up, a dancer’s motion. She liked to move this way, and in privacy she practiced her many dance moves. It was relaxing for her, a natural talent she’d always had, back to her earliest memories as a little girl on AmEarth when she used to perform for her family.

  “I have things to do myself.” Billy guided his maglev chair on its cushion of air to the wall, where the opening to the guideway slid open smoothly, with a small click. Moments later he was inside, and she heard smooth machinery sounds as he sped away into the honeycomb of tunnels, passages, and chambers on the great ship.

  CHAPTER 4

  The list of what I know is much shorter than anyone realizes.

  —Billy Jeeling

  Billy Jeeling awoke before dawn to the jarring sound of an explosion that he felt and heard. It was not a good way to start the day.

  He slid his crippled body onto a dressing platform, waited impatiently while robotic arms helped him into a black uniform shirt and tan slacks. This took only a few minutes, but seemed like longer. Then, sliding off the other side of the platform, he dropped onto his maglev chair, and rode it into the corridor outside his apartment. His son Devv was already there, hurrying toward the maglev tube, to catch a high-speed passenger capsule. The two Jeelings lived next door to one another, each with small, humble living arrangements.

  “Something blew up!” Billy said.

  Devv nodded but didn’t reply. A younger version of his father, he had AmAfrican features and a strong bone structure. He stood there for a moment, listening to the mindwave communication system that was linked to his brain—messages that were called “mindcoms.” If he wanted to, he could switch to audiovisual that both of them could see who was talking on the other end, in a two-way VR bubble, but he didn’t activate that option.

  The mindwave units that people had installed voluntarily in their brains were manufactured by a variety of competitive private companies, and had to meet certain criterion. Because they were implanted devices, they met strict medical standards for quality and safety. They also had to be compatible with one another, so that all brands featured virtual-reality bubbles, and all could communicate clearly with one another in both sound and picture.

  Billy didn’t use the system, didn’t want one of the mindwave implants himself. He wasn’t a Luddite, just didn’t like certain technologies, such as the internet and mindwave. He considered both to be intrusive, and had a long list of reasons why he loathed them.

  In his mid thirties, with curly black hair that was shorter and neater than his father’s, Devv wore a blue Security Commander’s uniform, with white trim; it was wrinkled, with no cap or tie. He had a classically handsome face like his father’s, but not as broad, and his skin was a little lighter. The effect was just different enough from Billy that the ghost of Devv’s mysterious mother seemed to be just beneath Devv’s skin. In particular, the eyes were not remotely Billy Jeeling’s. They were pale blue, delicate and penetrating, fragile and aware. Highly unusual for a black man, and quite striking in appearance.

  “I got a mindwave report a few minutes ago,” the young Security Commander said. “Something blew in Sector H-577. Damage has been contained, but the sooner we get there to inspect, the better. Luckily, Skyship is compartmentalized—smart design on your part, Father—so we can isolate the trouble, keeping it in a small area. That explosion was close.”

  “Anything about whether it was an accident, or sabotage?” Billy asked.

  “No.”

  Billy flipped down the sidecar of his maglev chair, and the second seat folded open, allowing his son to climb aboard. A clearplaz protective cocoon went up to protect the passengers. Glancing to his right, Billy saw Devv secure his safety harness, then clip on a headset so that the two of them could converse more easily, over the droning noise that would soon fill the capsule. The enclosed chair whooshed on a cushion of air to the maglev tube. A door slid open, and they accelerated into the guideway, a long, curving tunnel that sloped slightly upward.

  The tunnel was clearplaz, affording them a view of the onboard city with its high-rise office buildings and habitation units. Small, top-rotor aircraft flew around the spacious interior of the metropolis, which reminded Billy of a huge, hollowed out eggshell. The small aircraft, humbabies, looked like bees or other insects, and some of them—the ones with multiple rotors on top—were large enough to accommodate as many as eight passengers. In this tunnel he couldn’t hear them over the drone of the maglev system, yet out in the city they produced a constant background hum.

  Billy wore a headset, but in his customary fashion, no safety harness, and pressed the control bar to open the chair all the way up, to top speed. He enjoyed going fast, and if he could make the device go any faster, he would. Already the chair and its guideway system were fitted with superchargers, and he was forever tinkering with the technology, giving his engineering and construction robots detailed instructions for them to make subtle improvements.

  The clearplaz tunnel enclosing the guideway provided some feeling of security, along with the knowledge that when
Billy’s chair was in the system, all other vehicles were shoved onto sidings, to await the moment when he disembarked. At least he and Devv couldn’t get in a collision with another vehicle. But if they ever de-tracked accidentally, the decking alongside the guideway was hard to fall against, and so was the clearplaz. There were no walls at the end of any section—everything was continuous loop—and some of the turns were very sharp.

  Once, Lainey Forster had asked Billy if he needed speed to compensate for the loss of his legs, and he’d responded with a laugh. “Not at all, I’ve always been a little nuts.”

  “More information coming in,” Devv said, listening to the mindwave unit in his skull. Glancing to the side, Billy saw the energy of the transmission dancing in front of Devv’s eyes. “They’re collecting evidence,” he said, “analyzing it to see what happened.”

  The maglev capsule reached top speed, and Billy saw Devv holding onto a bar in front of him with white knuckles, as if he were a small child on a carnival ride. Devv was not normally worried about his personal safety. In fact, in running the Skyship Security Force, he had shown great courage in going after saboteurs, and once had even engaged in a shootout against an intruding commando team, killing all four of them single-handed. But something about this maglev system terrified him.

  “We’re almost there,” Billy announced, in a reassuring, paternal voice. He saw Devv nod, but the younger man’s muscles did not start to relax until the maglev chair decelerated and came to an abrupt stop.

  “We’re not at the station,” Billy said, feeling his pulse quicken. “That was almost an emergency stop.” He peered ahead, and in the low illumination of the guideway he saw flickering lights and shadowy shapes.

  “Those are my officers,” Devv said. “They’re mindcomming me. They say the explosion tore apart a section of the guideway track.”

  Billy knew that most members of the Skyship Security Force were robots, and all could transmit to humans over the mindwave system. He had designed them himself, and had supervised much of their design and assembly. Now he opened the plaz shell, and used a manual override to move the maglev chair forward slowly.

  A robot officer appeared beside the chair, and motioned Billy forward for a ways, then put up a metal hand to stop. “We’re not finished with the security sweep ahead, sir. The protocol is for you to stay back.” Billy knew this was true; Devv had explained the reason for it, saying Billy was the one irreplaceable person on Skyship.

  “What the hell happened here?” Billy demanded. He smelled dust from the explosion, and odd odors that he couldn’t identify. Chemicals that were used in a sabotage?

  Devv stepped out of the sidecar, said, “I’ll see what I can find out.” He walked ahead a ways.

  Billy lifted himself onto a ledge between his cushioned seat and the sidecar, for a better view. His leg stumps hung uselessly; he reached down to scratch one of them, a nervous thing he sometimes did. He saw a gaping hole in the side of Skyship, heard the loud sounds of onboard atmospherics, and saw the breach being sealed over automatically by built-in systems. The replacement wall-section was pale, translucent green, contrasting with the original gray.

  Human and robotic officers collected fragments of evidence, pieces of Skyship, and perhaps fragments of an explosive device if one had been used—Billy couldn’t tell. The robots cast a yellow glow around their gleaming bodies as they scanned all of the items on the spot. Devv stood in their midst, watching and waiting. They told him something and he nodded, then walked back to Billy.

  “Sabotage for damn sure,” Devv reported. “No evidence of plazteke explosives or unstable chemicals, but the surveillance system for this section was disabled, although my robotic guard force has no recollection of anyone getting in. Curiously, the explosive they used left no trace evidence behind.”

  “Could there have been a memory wipe on the robots? I could check that.”

  The younger man shook his head. “That’s already been checked, using your own procedural instructions. No wipes were done. Unfortunately, we have one dead officer—Naklos Averon—a trusted human I stationed on the guard force for this section. Sorry to lose him; he had potential to rise in the ranks. He died horribly, his body torn apart.”

  “I didn’t know him. He’s not a suspect.”

  “No, he was a good man—I’m sure he could not possibly have been involved in the explosion; the lie-detection robots went over him thoroughly before he was hired and regularly afterward, along with every other human on my force. He wasn’t a suicide bomber or anything crazy like that.”

  Billy chewed nervously on the inside of his mouth. This was the third instance of sabotage in the past year, and he had no idea who was doing it. All the human workers on Skyship—no matter their jobs—had been carefully checked by the specialty robots with their infallible lie-detection methods; none of the people were telling anything but the truth. That meant the saboteur—or saboteurs—had gained entry to the vessel surreptitiously, and might still be hiding somewhere on board. Billy had suggested this possibility to his son before, concerning the other sabotages, and the police had searched everywhere they could think of, without finding anything.

  “I can’t believe any fool would want to harm Skyship,” Billy said, “not with all the horrendous consequences that could ensue.”

  Devv nodded. Both of them knew what he was referring to, a dire warning Billy had delivered to Prime Minister Yhatt and the people of AmEarth, that if the great vessel were ever destroyed, it would set off huge atmospheric explosions that would exterminate virtually all life on the planet.

  The Imperial government had accused Billy of either lying or gross exaggeration, and had demanded a detailed, scientific explanation. He had not been able to provide that, however, because Tobek was the only one who knew, and he’d died strangely and horribly, taking the secret information with him. The old inventor’s tone when he’d spoken to Billy of the danger had been ominous, unwavering, and convincing. Billy had believed him, and had waited for the promised explanation that never came, because of Tobek’s unexpected and untimely death.

  Billy had responded to the government that he was not going to provide details, because it was part of the proprietary information he was keeping to himself about the operation of Skyship. This had been convincing to some, it turned out, but not to everyone.

  Billy didn’t know much about the exact nature of the danger, and what little he did know he’d only revealed to a few of his most trusted robots. As for Devv, he only knew what Billy had said publicly, and though the younger man had pressed him for information, Billy had deferred, saying he couldn’t talk about it yet. This was highly ironic, considering the position Billy had been in earlier, trying to find out more than he was being told.

  “It would take time to rebuild Skyship, but you could do it,” Devv said now. “You’re the designer, know all the architectural and scientific details.”

  Scowling, Billy said, “It would not be so easy.”

  “Maybe not, but you could do it. I assume you’ve placed full blueprints and other documents in safe storage away from here, down on the planet?”

  Billy looked away, didn’t respond. The answer was no, because he had nothing meaningful to store. He had part of the secret gas mix formula, of course, and maybe he could place a copy of what he knew somewhere on AmEarth—if he could figure out how to do it without risking its premature discovery. But Skyship’s destruction would be an irreparable loss, because his knowledge of the vessel’s secrets was minimal and superficial. Its impenetrable technology could never be replaced, not even if Billy survived the ongoing sabotage attempts—and that technology was essential to the processing of the initial stage ingredients of the gaseous atmospheric-repair mixture, and essential to the method by which it was released into the atmosphere.

  Billy knew quite a bit about the robots, because they had been his specialty, and he had some other information, but it was not enough. And there were even things about the robots that
Billy didn’t know, despite his own expertise. Tobek had taught him robotics in the first place, and eventually had said that Billy’s skills exceeded his own. But Billy had never believed that was really true, and Tobek had designed and built his own laboratory robots.

  And even if Billy knew everything that was important about the robots, Skyship was a lot more than these sentient, mobile machines—and Tobek had died with the lion’s share of his secrets.

  Devv didn’t know about Tobek or his strange and disturbing death, or a lot of other things. He didn’t need to know.

  “Maybe a robot or robots did this,” Devv said. “I don’t think it’s a human hiding somewhere, because we’ve searched every nook and cranny on Skyship. By process of elimination, that means it’s probably a robot, one that’s had its operating systems compromised. Maybe there really was a memory wipe, and you need to check the ‘bots yourself, delving even more into their program histories.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” Billy said, “but you’re right. I’ll arrange for my specialists to make the deepest probes possible, and compile a report on the results. We need to check every possibility.”

  CHAPTER 5

  You aren’t really human until you take big chances.

  —Anonymous

  “You did what?” The young woman’s voice was shrill as she looked up from her window seat, where she’d been reading a book. The volume slipped from her grasp, closed itself on her lap.

  It was hot in the rental bungalow Yürgen Zayeddi shared with her. She always kept it that way; it was just one of their many disagreements. He waved a hand at the thermostat, tapped the smaller dial on his smart watch, and heard the furnace go off. He’d been telling her what had happened at the plant that day, the disturbing events.