Between the Stars (7 page)

Sometime soon, she was going to have a little chat with Comrade Alexandrov.

While Derek frantically tidied up
Cyrano
's living quarters, he tried to think rationally about the woman. She'd said that her name was Valerie Amber. It sounded like a fake name, but that was nothing unusual. People changed their names all the time. Still, it was too convenient, this gorgeous creature appearing from nowhere and taking such a flattering interest in him.

Deep down, he knew he was being had. On further thought, being had didn't seem to be such a bad idea.

He knew he was in for trouble. If Ulric found out he was cozying up to a stranger who might well be an Earthie agent, he would probably have Derek expelled from the Clan. Worse, he would certainly cut off payments on
Cyrano
. It was a thorny problem, and it would do no good to consult with Ethelred. Being a computer, Ethelred had no grasp of interpersonal relationships. A certain electronic disdain was about all Ethelred could manage.

He checked for neglected food wrappers and overlooked laundry, readouts that had missed the disposal slot, tangles of hair pulled from his comb, or any other incriminating evidence of human occupancy. Certain that all was immaculate, he sprayed the interior with a commercial air freshener. On long solo voyages, you got so you didn't notice how the place smelled. Other people noticed.

A furry white blob shot past him, closely pursued by Carruthers. The two furballs disappeared into the tiny laboratory whence came a series of shrill squeaks. Derek hoped the sounds signified a kill, but you could never tell unless the cat bore the carcass back in triumph.

"Ethelred, get me Port Maintenance."

A bored-looking functionary appeared in holograph. "May I be of service?"

"When I arrived, there were no mice in my ship," Derek lectured. "I just saw my cat chasing one. How did it get aboard?"

The man looked, if anything, even more bored. "You got some way to tell an Avalon mouse from any other kind?"

"No, but I know there were none before I got here."

"I got no way of knowing that. For all I know, you arrived here with a whole cargo of 'em. Do I blame you for every mouse on Avalon? They got ways of getting onto ships. They ride on cargo pallets and hide in provision crates. They climb up chemical pipes and they squinch themselves in under those little thingies on top of gas bottles. Sometimes they just walk in through the hatches. Are all your hatches closed?"

Derek turned around, saw that his main hatch was two inches ajar, and turned back. "Hell, yes, they're closed."

"I think you need a better cat. You got any more problems? I got plenty."

"Take care of them, then." Derek switched off the holo. He longed for the days of aristocracy, when you could have insolent functionaries horsewhipped. Of course, he was assuming that he would have been one of the aristocrats. He turned to close the hatch and saw that there was a man standing in it, pointing a gun at him.

"Hell, aren't mice bad enough?"

"Mice?" the man said atonally.

"Actually, I was expecting somebody a lot prettier." Derek had a gun. Unfortunately, it was back in his sleeping quarters.

"Just step back there to the pilot's seat and make yourself comfortable," the man said, pushing his way through the hatch. "If I see your hands move toward any controls, I'll shoot."

Derek sat. "I wouldn't do any shooting if I were you. My internal security systems are pretty merciless."

"You don't have any internal security on this ship."

Damn. How had the man known that? "How can you be so sure?"

"I've gone over the latest data in the owners' files."

"Like hell. I'm the owner."

The intruder shook his head. "Bank of the Belt is the owner. You just make payments. Now quit playing games. I want some answers about that thing you found on Rhea. Specifically, I want to know what else you found. If I'm satisfied by your answers, you just might live."

"I'll do my best not to upset you," Derek assured him. "What do you want to know about it?"

"First, a little precaution." The man reached into a side pocket and fished out a small disk. Balancing it on a thumbnail, he flipped it coin-fashion at Derek's forehead. It struck with a faint splat and struck there.

"It's a truth detector. You haven't had any special conditioning to get around it, so you'd better stick to the truth. I'll shoot a little piece off you for each untruthful answer, and I'll let you wonder about which piece will go next. It stimulates the memory."

Derek made a mental note to keep his gun where he could reach it. Also to keep the hatches shut. The damnedest things came walking in. "All right, shoot. I mean, fire away. I mean—"

"I know what you mean. You're lucky I don't take your colloquialisms literally. First off—" he glanced at a wrist-set readout "—how accurate is the information disclosed thus far by Aeaea about the Rhea Object you turned over to them?"

"I didn't turn it over to them, McNaughton—" The muzzle of the pistol switched from his midriff to a point at the top of the bridge of his nose. "As far as I know, it's accurate. They didn't make public any data that contradicted what my own instruments had found. Of course, they have much more sophisticated instruments of analysis."

"That is the kind of cooperation I want. To continue: What else beside the egg did you find?"

"I didn't see any alien artifact that was un-egg-shaped." Jesus, he thought, I could've phrased that better. The holos made it look a lot easier to think fast at gunpoint.

"Ah-ah-ah, Mr. Kuroda, that won't do." He lowered the muzzle back to Derek's midriff, then lowered it farther. "You aren't exactly lying, but then, you aren't telling the whole truth. So, I won't shoot off your whole—" He stiffened, his eyes crossed, and he collapsed to the deck.

Valerie stood above the inert form, a long needle in her hand. She released it and it slipped back up her sleeve. There was a look of intense disgust on her face. "I guess this means I don't get the interview, huh?"

Things were happening too damned fast. Derek didn't know which was worse—the surprise, the embarrassment, the sheer disorientation, or what. "Next time," he said finally, "I keep my gun with me."

"It wouldn't help," Valerie said. "He was a pro. Not in my class, but a pro. What that means is, if you started out with your gun in your hand and he had his back turned and his weapon anywhere in reach and you tried to shoot him, he'd manage to get you first."

"You know," Derek said, "I can't think of a single day in my whole life that's given me so many blows to my ego."

"The day isn't over yet, Derek," said Ulric. He came in through the all-accommodating hatch. The gray old man wore his black armorcloth singlet and carried a pistol that looked a lot more lethal than the one the somnolent agent had carried.

"Hi, Ulric!" Derek said. "I want you to meet my friend Valerie. Val, this is—"

"Shut up," said François. He was behind Ulric, and had a weapon that looked even deadlier. "I can't believe that you've been allowed to work in Clan security. You're so dumb—"

"Don't talk to me," Derek said. "Talk to your superior here, who appointed me to my present—"

"Shut up, both of you," Ulric said. "It's this lady that concerns me now. Your name, please, and no prevarications."

"Valentina Ambartsumian."

"Hey, that's not too far from the name you gave me," Derek said. "If I had a name like that, I'd shorten it, too."

"Will you be quiet?" Ulric shouted. "I've been following this lady's progress in our fair asteroid since she arrived. She's an Earthie agent, recently operating on Luna."

Valentina was appalled. How had the man known that? Her training and cover was the best to be had. She didn't think she could have been detected by some slipup, like Alexandrov. Far more likely, there was a traitor in Carstairs' operation. Treachery was one of the great human constants.

"If she's an Earthie agent," Derek said, "then why did she nail this one?" He nudged Alexandrov with his toe. The body shifted in the faint gravity. "By the way, is he dead?"

"Paralyzed but conscious," Valentina said. "He'll come out of it in a couple of hours."

"Excellent," Ulric said. "The fact that you removed him as a threat in so professional a fashion is the main reason I'm being so civil. My first impulse was to shoot you."

"Let's not rule that out as an option," François said. "She may still be armed. I say we search her."

Derek turned to her. "You're not going to commit suicide, are you?"

"What in the world for?" she asked.

"I thought spies and secret agents carried poison around in case they were captured."

"How melodramatic. No, that may be true in wartime, when an agent may have secrets that the other side shouldn't learn, or just to avoid torture. I don't have any information that would do my superiors any harm and I doubt that you employ torture."

"More's the pity," Ulric said. "By way of precaution, young lady, would you please remove the device with which you dealt with this man?"

Valentina pulled back her sleeve and unclipped the sheathed needle. It drifted to the deck and lay there looking absurdly harmless.

"She could have implants," François insisted.

"No, Gretchen says there's nothing under her skin that didn't grow there." He turned to Valentina. "Gretchen was your masseuse."

Only her superb self-control kept her from flushing. "So for all your talk of an open society you're as spy-ridden as any Earth government."

"Not at all," Ulric said. "We may believe in complete individual freedom, but we're not stupid. Besides, this had nothing to do with the Confederacy, or with the Avalon government. I set it up myself using Clan manpower and that of allied families."

"With Derek as bait?"

"For this operation, yes. I knew it wouldn't be long before Earthie agents came after the Rhea Object, and Derek, as the discoverer, would be the focal point of some attention. It looks as if I netted two on the first try."

"I wasn't expecting to play such a passive role," Derek said.

"You'll learn," said Ulric. "This business isn't over yet."

"Well, what do we do now?" Valentina demanded. "You have no legal right to take me prisoner, but I don't suppose that bothers you."

"Not at all. Do you ever feel constrained by legalities?" He turned to Derek. "Set course for the lab." He turned back to Valentina. "As a matter of fact, we're going just where you wanted to go, but at a great savings in time. We're going to see Sieglinde."

"It's going to be a little cramped in
Cyrano
," Derek reminded him.

"That's all right," Ulric said. "We're all friends here."

SIX

Aeaea was unique among the Island Worlds in being totally artificial. Over the years it had been constructed of whatever materials were convenient. The original structure, now invisible beneath layers of metal and ultraglass, had been built in Lunar orbit using mooncrete as the primary building material. The founders had moved it into trans-Martian orbit to have freedom from government interference and privacy from their competition. Most of Aeaea's output was pure, abstract technology.

The immense tech station tried to steer a neutral course between Earth and Confederacy, but that was difficult when most Earth dwellers perceived all offworlders as enemies. Even the Earth-dominated Lunaires and Martians were regarded as little more than semi-rebellious "colonials" to be exploited. Still, the Aeaeans regarded all parties as customers and the rest usually had to go along, because their services were necessary and because no one really knew the extent of Aeaea's power. So far, its security remained unpenetrated.

Aldo Vecchio knew that he was a crack in Aeaean security, but he had not thought about the fact in a long time. He was a senior nuclear physicist in Aeaea, with twenty years on the staff. He had been born on Mars, and had been hired into the Aeaean nuclear physics department shortly after receiving his degree at the University of Tarkovskygrad.

Aside from his work, there was only one thing Vecchio cared about—his sister, Nilze. His adored younger sister suffered from a rare congenital disease, and the disease could only be treated, at great expense, on Earth. It might have been possible to treat her in Aeaea, but she had rejected the strange, sterile environment of the tech station, certain that she would wither and die there.

Treatment was available on Earth, in their ancestral Italy, but at great price. His salary was generous by Earth standards, but he had known that he could not support her treatment for more than a year or two. On one of his semiannual visits to his sister, a man had approached him with a solution to his problem. In return for clandestine, unspecified services at a future date, Nilze would be cared for in a beautiful nursing home near the equally beautiful city of Florence. The Italian government had preserved Florence and its surrounding Tuscan countryside as an irreplaceable cultural treasure.

He had sought assurance that none of these activities would jeopardize a human life, especially his own. He was assured that he would be involved in nothing so drastic, merely industrial espionage of the quasi-legitimate sort that went on all the time. His conscience somewhat mollified, Aldo complied. Ten years later, the IOU was called in.

Aldo closed up his lab and made his way to the plush senior scientist lodgings in one of Aeaea's newer sections. There was always a certain satisfaction in returning here. The address was a high status symbol in Aeaea's complicated hierarchy. It had taken him seven years to gain such a position. He had almost forgotten his old debt.

As he entered his apartment, he saw the message light flashing on his communication console. The flash-pattern indicated that it was from off Aeaea, and he wondered who it might be. He went to the console and punched in his personal code. As the message appeared above the console, he paled. It had come at last. "I will be arriving in Avalon in two weeks and staying at the Omni. I would like to see you if you can get some vacation time. Your Uncle Donald."

He closed his eyes for a moment. It was a shock, but he did not seriously consider defiance. His sister's life and comfort were too important to him. Resignedly, he booked a passage on a regular Aeaea-to-Avalon run of the liner
Horai-Maru
.

Two weeks later, he checked into the Omni, one of the asteroid's luxury establishments. He had no idea whom he would be contacted by. Undoubtedly, it would not be the man who had "recruited" him, a faceless man of a type common to all governments and most large institutes and businesses. Vecchio was not even certain whether his "employer" was a government or a private enterprise, and he had been careful not to ask. Since it had happened on Earth, it was probably the former. However, it was not outside the realm of possibility that one of the other asteroid tech stations had wanted a mole in Aeaea. He dismissed such thoughts from his mind.

As he awaited his contact, Vecchio pondered the timing of the summons. Coming when it did, it probably concerned the Rhea Object. On Aeaea, it was the subject of all conversation, even among those who were not assigned to the project. If so, his caller would be disappointed. Thus far, they had discovered nothing of much use to anybody. To scientists, of course, this lack of response to tests was as exciting as the no doubt shattering discoveries that would inevitably be made. Exploiters, however, would want something more concrete and immediate.

The small room's console announced a visitor. Aldo took a deep breath and touched the entrance control. The door slid back to reveal a burly man, hairless and pale. Something struck Aldo as strange about the man's looks, but he refused to speculate on what it was.

"
Buona sera
, Signore Vecchio. I bring you greetings from
Signorina
Nilze."

"Come in, please." Like nearly everyone offworld, Vecchio had spoken English all his life, but on Mars he had been raised in the small Italian community. His own family was from Trieste, and he recognized the man's accent as Slavonic, possibly Serbian.

"I am Josip Mihajlovic. For our purposes, I am from Trieste, and our families back on Earth are old friends for many generations."

"As you wish," Aldo said, with a sinking feeling. The man's name, although undoubtedly false, was not unthinkable. Trieste had a sizable Yugoslavian community. In the turmoil of World War II, Croatians had attacked their traditional enemy Serbs, many of whom had fled there in the aftermath.

"Please take a couch." Aldo indicated a spindly structure with a sling of thin cloth. "May I get you a drink?"

"That would be excellent," the man said in English. "Gin, if you don't mind." The English was flawless. If he had not spoken Italian, Aldo might not have guessed his origin. He went to the compact bar and drew gin for Mihajlovic, chianti for himself. To the Serb, this obviously took care of the amenities.

"I am here to learn what I can about the Rhea Object," said Mihajlovic. "My employers do not believe that Aeaea is making public all that they have learned about the thing."

Aldo released a tiny sigh of relief. "I can assure you that they have. So far, we know nothing save that it defeats all our attempts at testing."

The Serb shrugged, a thoroughly Earthly gesture. "No matter to me. If I can confirm this, perhaps they will be satisfied. The fact remains, they do not trust the official version."

"How shall we effect your entry into Aeaea?" Aldo asked. "Have your employers taken care of that?"

"Oh, yes. I am a lab technician from the International Institute of Theoretical Physics, in Trieste. Since my degree is a minor one, I've taken advantage of the recent relaxation of restrictions declared by Mr. Carstairs so that scientific personnel from Earth can come out and take part in the study on Aeaea. Naturally, as a man who has always yearned for an opportunity to come here, I began to pull family strings to get you to take me on as a temporary lab technician."

"Aeaea is difficult when it comes to—"

"As a senior staff scientist, you have authority to hire some assistants at your own discretion. Island Worlders will always acknowledge family obligations as legitimate motives. I assure you that I shall pass the security check. Great care has gone into creating my background."

"Let us hope so," Aldo said. "I risk my career by sponsoring you."

"You would risk a good deal more than your career by betraying me," the Serb said coldly. There was something in the man's attitude, in his burly, forceful presence, that said he was something more than an industrial spy.

"I shall be most careful," Vecchio assured him.

Like most overtly egalitarian societies, that of Aeaea had a subtle but all-pervasive status system. Housing was its most noticeable gauge. When Vladyka, alias Josip Mihajlovic, finished in-processsing at the tech station, he was taken to an area of Spartan accommodations where workers, technicians and low-ranking scientists lived. He congratulated himself on his easy penetration of Aeaea, although it was Shevket's foresight in planting a mole here years ago that had made it possible.

"Welcome to the peons' quarters," said a man who wore a pink coverall. There was some sort of color-coding to the uniforms, but Vladyka hadn't learned it yet.

"So some are more equal than others, eh?"

"You ever encounter a society where that wasn't true?" The man's accent was Lunar, possibly from one of the old U.S. colonies.

Vladyka thrust his single bag into the cubbyhole that was to serve as his sleeping quarters. "Are Earthies second-class citizens as well?"

"No, because you're not a citizen at all. Earthies are more like fourth-class aliens. Loonies like me get third-class status."

"I'll be lab-teching for a senior staff scientist. Is he first class?"

"Pretty high up. But the top of the heap here are the ones who were born on Aeaea. You won't see many of them. The quarters they like drive other people crazy and some of 'em don't even look human. They go in for all kinds of optical and electronic implants to help in their researches. Hell, I saw one a few days ago drifting through one of the labs stark naked and I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, there were so many gadgets attached to it."

It was a stroke of luck to find someone so talkative. It made sense, though. This man was a foreigner here and he wanted a sympathetic listener. "Back home," said the Montenegran, who was masquerading as a Serbian, "we keep hearing that the people out here are mutating into something inhuman. I thought that was just the alarmist media, but maybe there's something to it."

"I've been all over the Belt and on most of the inhabited satellites, and there's some pretty strange people living on some of them, but I never saw anything as weird as the native Aeaeans. Some of 'em are third generation, though why anything that looks like them wants to reproduce is beyond me."

They were in the middle of a shift so there were few workers in the quarters. "I take it you're off-shift right now?" Vladyka queried.

"I don't go on for another four hours."

"I have a couple of shifts to get myself oriented. That means finding a bar. Show me where to find a drink and I'll stand you to one."

"You'll get along fine here. My name's Gorshin. I work in hydroponics. That's what the godawful pink uniform means. There's places where people'd get the wrong idea, they saw you wearing a color like this. Just pull yourself up this tube here and we'll be in concourse B, where the good bars are. Where'll you be working?"

"In Aldo Vecchio's lab. Something to do with the Rhea Object." He pulled himself up a tube with fluorescent walls, an easy and efficient process in the faint, spin-induced gravity. The concourse above was nearly tubular, more of a flattened ovoid, and had clearly been something else at one time. Nothing was wasted in space, and concourse B might once have been a particle accelerator or plasma generator. Doorways of varying shape opened off the concourse. Most of them seemed to be commercial establishments.

"Concourse B's a commercial zone," Gorshin said. "It's one of the places anyone has access to. Most of Aeaea, you have to have the right clearance to get into." It seemed that the tech station had nothing like the chaos of Avalon. The signs were discreet and always set to the left of the doorway. If there was some significance to this regularity, Vladyka couldn't imagine what it might be, except as confirmation of Ugo Ciano's famous characterization of the founders of Aeaea as "a buncha anal retentives."

Unlike the workers' quarters, the concourse was thronged. A great many of those present were not dressed in any of the local uniforms but many wore the white coverall favored by laboratory scientists everywhere. The two men entered a bar imaginatively titled "Bar #5." It, too, was crowded.

"Is it always this jammed?" Vladyka asked. "I had always thought of Aeaea as mostly automated with a small staff."

"Usually it's a lot less crowded. People've come here from all over to work on the Rhea Project, just like you." They punched orders on the top of their pedestal-type table. The artificial gravity was too weak to bother with chairs. The drinks appeared within seconds, sealed in film so thin they looked like mere blobs of liquid. They took thin straws from a dispenser and poked them through the film.

As he sipped, Vladyka eyed the crowd in the bar and those passing by outside. Somewhere here, he was certain, he would find Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart. She would be in disguise, of course, but he was confident he could find her. He was confident he could do anything he wanted, including killing Sieglinde and stealing the Rhea Object. Self-doubt was for losers and defeatists.

"Has any progress been made on the famous green egg?" He noticed that the egalitarian spirit did seem to extend to the bar. It was crowded with menials, scientists and what appeared to be media people, indiscriminately mixed.

"Working in hydro-P, I don't have much to do with it. But it's all anyone's talked about for weeks, and from what I hear they haven't turned up a damned thing."

Vladyka knew this was the official story. He was equally certain that the true story was something else entirely. Naturally, the Aeaeans would pretend that they had discovered nothing. Even a senior staff scientist like Vecchio would not be let in on the real discoveries. After all, Vecchio was not native-born, not even an Island Worlder, but merely a Martian immigrant. He knew that no government, no corporation made free with its secrets. The whole concept was laughable.

"I suppose security must be tight," he suggested.

"No more'n usual," Gorshin said. "Like I told you, a lot of this place is limited access, but that's mainly organization, not security. In Third Quadrant there's a bunch of labs and manufacturing facilities that's off limits to all but a few. That's where they work on the items they don't make public till they got the patents nailed down tight."