Free Wolf Time (Voice of the Whirlwind) by Walter Jon Williams Page A

its weather, Uzbekistan was good at that sort of thing.
    The last person she’d known who had lived here was Steward. Just before he came to L.A. and blew everything to smithereens.
    A young man on the vid was putting himself into some kind of combat suit, stuffing weapons and ammunition into pockets. He picked up a shotgun. Suspenseful music hammered from the speakers.
    Reese turned up the sound and sat down in front of the vid.
    She had considered getting back into the trade, but it was too early. The scansheets and broadcasts were still full of stories about aliens, alien ways, alien imports. About “restructuring” going on in the policorps who dealt with the Powers. It was strange seeing the news on the vid, with people ducking for cover, refusing statements, the news item followed by a slick ad for alien pharmaceuticals. People were going to trial— at least those who survived were. A lot were cooperating. Things were still too hot.
    Fortunately money wasn’t a problem. She had enough to last a long time, possibly even forever.
    Gunfire sounded from the vid. The young man was in a shootout with aliens, splattering Powers with his shotgun. Reese felt her nerves turn to ice.
    The young man, she realized, was supposed to be Steward. She jumped forward and snapped off the vid.
    She felt sickened.
    Steward had never shot an alien in his life. Reese ought to know.
    Fucking assholes. Fucking media vermin.
    She reached for her quilted Chinese jacket and headed for the door. The room was too damn small.
    She swung the door open with a bang, and a dark-complected man jumped a foot at the sound. He turned and gave a nervous grin.
    “You startled me.”
    He had an anonymous accent that conveyed no particular origin, just the abstract idea of foreignness. He looked about thirty. He was wearing suede pumps that had tabs of velcro on the bottoms and sides for holding onto surfaces in zero gee. His hands were jammed into a grey, unlined plastic jacket with a half-dozen pockets all sealed by velcro tabs. Reese suspected one of his hands of having a weapon in it. He was shivering from cold or nervousness. Reese figured he had just come down the gravity well— he was wearing too much velcro to have bought his clothes on Earth.
    Some descendants of the Golden Horde, dressed in Flieger styles imported from Berlin, roared by on skateboards, the earpieces of their leather flying helmets flapping in the wind.
    “Been in town long?” Reese asked.
    *
    He told her his name was Sardar Chandrasekhar Vivekenanda and that he was a revolutionary from Prince Station. His friends called him Ken. Two nights after their first meeting, she met him in the Natural Life bar, a place on the top story of a large bank. It catered to exiles and featured a lot of mahogany imported at great cost from Central America.
    Reese had checked on Ken— no sense in being foolish— and discovered he was who he claimed to be. The scansheets from Prince mentioned him frequently. Even his political allies were denouncing his actions.
    “Ram was trying to blame the February Riots on us,” Ken told her. “Cheney decided I should disappear— the riots would be blamed on me, and Cheney could go on working.”
    Reese sipped her mataglap star, feeling it burn its way down her throat as she glanced down through the glass wall, seeing the wind scour dust over the Uzbeks’ metal roofs and receiver dishes. She grinned. “So Cheney arranged for you to take the fall instead of him,” she said. “Sounds like a friend of humanity to me, all right.”
    Ken’s voice was annoyed. “Cheney knows what he’s doing.”
    “Sure he does. He’s setting up his friends. The question is, do you know what you’re doing?”
    Ken’s fine-boned hands made a dismissive gesture. “From here I can make propaganda. Cheney sends me an allowance. I’ve bought a very good communications system.”
    She turned to him. “You going to need any soldiers in this revolution of yours?”
    He