Free Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams

work.”
    “Not bad,” Steward agreed. He had one of her cram books open in front of him, but he hadn’t looked at it in a while.
    Ardala drew up a leg, scratched a bare calf. “I assume this is against the law.”
    “It isn’t. I used your comp and checked the library.”
    “If it isn’t illegal, then it’s dangerous.”
    Steward frowned. “Maybe so. Griffith says not.”
    Ardala handed Steward the Xanadu. He inhaled. “How well do you know Griffith?” she asked.
    “At one time, very well.”
    She sat up, leaned toward him, propping her elbows on her knees. “He’s changed a lot. You said so.”
    “Yes.”
    “So it’s dangerous.”
    Steward shrugged and handed the cigarette back to Ardala. She looked at it in her hand and ignored it. “What was the company he worked for?”
    “Lightsource, Limited.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know it, but I’ll check my files. I should be able to find out something about it.”
    Steward shrugged again. Ardala’s green eyes narrowed. “You act,” she said, “as if you don’t care whether or not your old friend is going to fuck you over.”
    “He’s giving me something else I want.”
    She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, made a face at the discovery that it had gone out. She dropped it in an ashtray. “He’s giving you a chance to get into space, right? Money? Lotta good it’ll do if you’re dead.”
    He looked at her. “Sheol,” he said.
    The word seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, like honey dropping from a spoon. Ardala shook her head and fell back to the pillows. “It’s like you want to give Sheol a second chance to kill you. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.”
    He reached out, put a hand on her knee. “I can’t do anything about whether the job’s dangerous or not. All I can do is be ready. I’m ready.”
    She turned her head away. He could see her throat working. “Dead man,” she said. “A fucking dead man.”
    Steward took his hand back, gazed down at the book. “I’ll be back in a day or so,” he said.
    Ardala was still looking away. “So you say.”
    *
    “At the beginning it was easy. Sheol was pioneered by Far Ranger, but Coherent Light got the Icehawks into the Wolf 294 system before anyone else. Mobilized, declared hostilities Outward, and went. Only the male Icehawks were sent Outward; the women’s battalions were kept in-system to guard against sabotage and maybe try some themselves. The women weren’t happy about it—what were they trained for, anyway?—and a lot of the men were pissed off because they got separated from their girlfriends.
    “Far Ranger only had a few pioneers down in the northern hemisphere, and a small base on the big moon. We captured all their personnel and got all their artifacts and data. Fortified the moon base, put some ships in orbit, put our people down. We had the Icehawks plus two brigades of corporation grunts that had been recruited and shipped up from Earth at the last minute. Plus support personnel and a couple hundred archaeologists, xenobiologists, scientist types.”
    Griffith let his head fall forward. He passed his forearm across his eyes, wiping away invisible sweat. His voice changed, lost in a grating reverie. “Sheol was…lovely,” he said. “It was summer in the northern hemisphere when we landed. The planet had been tamed by the Powers over thousands of years…they’d arranged it like a garden, landscaped the mountains and rivers. It had overgrown and changed, but the intent was still there. The…harmony of the way they’d set things.”
    He raised his head. “The Powers—they’re not like us.” Griffith’s watery eyes seemed to shine. “They’re older,” he said. “Better. They…they know how to live with each other. What we found on Sheol and its moon reflected that. They built well, but after all the years they’d been away, there wasn’t much intact above ground. But they live in tunnels as well as on the surface, and