Ethan of Athos (9 page)

Ethan decided that all that was needed to make his day complete would be for it to rap back. But she had grounded the pallet and was piling up some cushions. “No blankets,” she muttered. “I gotta keep my jacket. But if you sort of burrow in here, you should be warm enough.”

It was like falling into a bank of clouds. “Burrow,” Ethan whispered. 'Warm...”

She dug into her jacket pocket. “And here's a candy bar to tide you over.”

He snatched it; he couldn't help himself.

“Ah, one other thing. You can't use the plumbing. It would register on the computer monitors. I know this sounds terrible, but -- if you've gotta go, use the canister.” She paused. “It's not, after all, like he didn't deserve it.”

“I'd rather the,” said Ethan distinctly around a mouthful of nuts and goo. “Uh -- are you going to be gone long?”

“At least an hour. Hopefully not more than four. You can sleep, if you like.”

Ethan jerked himself awake. “Thank you.”

“And now,” she rubbed her hands together briskly, “phase two of the search for the L-X-10 Terran-C.”

“The what?”

“That was the code name of Millisor's research project. Terran-C for short. Maybe some part of whatever they were working on originated on Earth.”

“But Terrence Cee is a man,” said Ethan. “They kept asking me if I were here to meet him.”

She was utterly still for a moment. “Oh... ? How strange. How very strange. I never knew that.” Her eyes were bright as mirrors. Then she was gone.

Ethan awoke with a startled gasp as something landed on his stomach. He thrashed up, looking around wildly. Commander Quinn stood before him in the wavering illumination of her hand light. The fingers of her other hand tapped a nervous, staccato rhythm on her empty stunner holster. Ethan's hands encountered a bulky bundle of cloth in his lap, which proved to be a set of Stationer coveralls wrapped around a matching pair of boots.

“Put those on,” she ordered, “and hurry. I think I've found a way to get rid of the body, but we have to get there before shift change if I'm going to catch the right people on duty.”

He dressed. She helped him impatiently with the unfamiliar tabs and catches, and made him sit again on the float pallet. It all made him feel like a backward four-year-old. After a quick reconnoiter by the mercenary woman, they left the chamber as unseen as they had entered it, and drifted off through the maze of the Station.

At least he no longer felt as if his brains were suspended in syrup in a jar, Ethan thought. The world parted around him now with no more than natural clarity, and colors did not flash fire in his eyes, nor leave scorched trails across his retinas. This was fortunate, as the Stationer coveralls Quinn had brought him to wear over his Athosian clothes were bright red. But waves of nausea still pulsed slowly in his stomach like moon-raised tides. He slouched, trying to lower his center of gravity still further onto the moving float pallet, and ached for something more than the three hours sleep the mercenary woman had allowed him.

“People are going to see us,” he objected as she turned down a populated corridor.

“Not in that outfit,” she nodded toward the coveralls. “Along with the float pallet it's the next best thing to a cloak of invisibility. Red is for Docks and Locks -- they'll all think you're a porter in charge of the pallet. As long as you don't open your mouth or act like a downsider.”

They passed into a large chamber where thousands of carrots were aligned in serried ranks, their white beards of roots dripping in the intermittent misting from the hydroponics sprayers, their fluffy green tops glowing in the grow-lights. The air of the room through which, Quinn assured him, they were taking a short cut, tasted cool and moist with a faint underlying tang of chemicals.

His stomach growled. Quinn, guiding the float pallet, glanced over at him. “I don't think I should have eaten that candy bar,” Ethan muttered darkly.

“Well, for the gods' sakes don't throw up in here,” she begged him. “Or use the --”

Ethan swallowed firmly. “No.”

“Do you think a carrot would settle your stomach?” she asked solicitously. She reached over, tipping the pallet terrifyingly, and plucked one from the passing row. “Here.”

He took the damp hairy thing dubiously, and after a moment stuffed it into one of the coverall's many closured pockets. “Maybe later.”

They rose past a dozen stacked banks of growing vegetables to take an exit high in the chamber wall. NO ADMITTANCE, it said in glowing green letters. Quinn ignored the admonition with a verve bordering, Ethan thought, on the anti-social. He glanced back at the door as it hissed closed behind them. NO ADMITTANCE, it repeated on this side. So, they had committees on Kline Station too....

She brought the pallet down in the next cross-corridor beside a door marked ATMOSPHERE CONTROL.

NO ADMITTANCE. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, by

which Ethan reasoned it must be their destination.

Commander Quinn unfolded herself from a half-lotus. “Now, whatever happens, try not to talk. Your accent would give you away at once. Unless you'd rather stay out here with Okita until I'm ready for you.”

Ethan shook his head quickly, struck by a vision of himself trying to explain to some passing authority that he was not, despite appearances, a murderer searching for a place to bury the body.

“All right. I can use the extra pair of hands. But be prepared to move on my order when the chance comes.” She led on through the airseal doors, float pallet following like a dog on a leash.

It was like stepping into a chamber beneath the sea. Viridescent lines of light and shadow waved and scintillated across the floor, the walls -- Ethan gaped at the walls. Three-story-high transparent barriers held back clear water stuffed with green and pierced with brilliant light. Millions of tiny silver bubbles galloped merrily through the minute fronds of aquatic plants, now pausing, now streaming on. An amphibian fully half a meter long pushed through this underwater jungle to stare at Ethan through its beady eyes. Its skin was black and shiny as patent leather, striped in scarlet. It shot away in a spray of silver to vanish in the green lace.

“Oxy-CO2 exchange for the Station,” Commander Quinn explained in an undertone. “The algae is bioengineered for maximum oxygen generation and CO'2 absorption. But of course, it grows. So to save having the chambers down half the time while we, ah, bale hay, the newts -- specially bred -- crop it for us. But then, naturally, you end up with a lot of newts....”

She broke off as a blue-suited technician shut down a monitor at a control station and turned to frown at them. She waved at him cheerily. “Hi, Dale, remember me? Elli Quinn. Dom told me where to look you up.”

His frown flipped to a grin. “Yes, he told me he'd seen you...” He advanced as if he might hug her, but settled on bashful handshake instead.

They exchanged small talk while Ethan, unintroduced, tried not to shift about nervously, or open his mouth or act like a downsider. The first two were easy enough, but what was it that marked a downsider in Stationer eyes? He stood by the float pallet and tried desperately to act like nobody at all.

Quinn ended what seemed to Ethan an unnecessarily lengthy digression about the Dendarii Mercenaries with the remark, “And do you know, those poor troops have never tasted fried newt legs!”

The tech's eyes glinted with a humor baffling to Ethan. “What! Can there be a soul in the universe so deprived? No cream of newt soup, either, I suppose?”

“No newt Creole,” confided Commander Quinn with mock horror. “No newts 'n chips.”

“No newt provencal?” chorused the tech. “No newt stew? No newt mousse in aspic? No slither goulash, no newt chowder?”

“Bucket 'o newts is unknown to them,” confirmed Quinn. “Newt caviar is a delicacy unheard of.”

“No newt nuggets?”

“Newt nuggets?” echoed the commander, looking suddenly really nonplussed.

“Latest thing,” explained the tech. “They're really boned leg meat, chopped, reformed, and fried.”

“Oh,” said the mercenary woman. “I'm relieved. For a moment there I was picturing some form of, er, newt organettes.”

They both burst into laughter. Ethan swallowed and looked around surreptitiously for some kind, any kind, of basin. A couple of the slick black creatures swam to the barrier and goggled at him.

“Anyway,” Quinn went on to the tech, “I thought if you were about due for the culling this shift you might spare me a few, to freeze and take back with me. Assuming you're not short, of course.”

“We are never,” he groaned, “short of newts. Help yourself. Take a hundred kilos. Take two. Three.”

“A hundred would be plenty. All I can afford to ship. Make it a treat for officers only, eh?”

He chuckled, and led her up a ladder to an access port. Ethan skittishly followed her come-along gesture, bringing up the float pallet.

The tech picked his way delicately across a mesh catwalk. Beneath them the waters hissed and rushed in little edthes; a fresh draft from below cooled Ethan's skin and cleared his aching head. He kept one hand on the safety railing. Some of the whirlpools below suggested powerful suction pumpers at work somewhere in the silver-green. Another water chamber was visible beyond this one, and beyond that another, retreating out of sight.

The catwalk widened to a platform. The hiss became a roar as the tech pulled back a cover above an underwater cage. The cage roiled with black and scarlet shapes, slipping and splashing over each other.

“Oh, lord yes,” yelled the tech. “Full house. Sure you don't want to feed your whole army?”

“Would if I could,” called Quinn back. “Tell you what, though. I'll trot the excess down to Disposal for you, once I pick out my choice. Does Transients' Lounge need any?”

“No orders this shift. Help yourself.”

He opened a housing over a control box, did something; the newt trap rose slowly, draining water, compressing the wriggling black and scarlet mass. Another motion at the controls, a buzz, a blue light. Ethan could feel the nimbus of a powerful stun beam even where he stood. The mass stopped writhing and lay still and shining.

The tech heaved a large green plastic carton from a stack of identical ones and positioned it on a digital scale under a trap door in the bottom of the cage. He aligned a chute and opened the trap. Dozens of limp newts slithered down into the carton. As the digital readout approached 100 kilograms he slowed the flow, and tossed a last black body in by hand. He then removed the carton with a hand-tractor, replaced it with another, and repeated the process. A third carton did not quite make it to full capacity. The tech entered the exact biomass removed from the system into his computer log.

“Want me to help you pack your canister?” he offered.

Ethan blanched, but the mercenary woman said lightly, “Naw, go on back down to your monitors. I'm going to sort through these by hand a bit, I think -- no point in shipping any but the best.”

The tech grinned, and started back across the catwalk. “Find 'em some nice juicy ones,” he called. Quinn gave him a friendly wave as he vanished back through the access port.

“Now,” she turned back to Ethan, her face gone intent, “let's make these numbers match. Help me get that dirt-sucker up on this scale.”

It wasn't easy; Okita had stiffened, wedged in the canister. The mercenary woman stripped him of clothes and a variety of lethal weapons and made them into a compact bundle.

Ethan shook off the paralysis of his confusion to attempt a task he at last felt sure of, and weighed the corpse. Whatever this madness was he had fallen into, it threatened Athos. His original impulse to escape the mercenary woman was becoming, in his gradually clearing head, an equally strenuous desire not to let her out of his sight until he could discover, somehow, everything she knew about it.

“Eight-one-point-four-five kilograms,” he reported in his best clipped scientific tone, the one he used for visiting VIPs back at Sevarin. “Now what?”

“Now get him into one of these cartons and fill it to, ah, 100. 62 kilos with newts,” she instructed with a glance at the first carton's readout. When this was done -- the last fraction of a kilo was accomplished by her pulling a vibra-knife from her jacket and adding slightly less than half a newt -- she switched data discs and sealed the carton.

“Now 81. 45 kilos of newts into that shipping canister,” she instructed. It came out even, leaving them with three cartons and a canister as before.

“Will you please tell me what we're doing?” Ethan begged.

“Turning a rather difficult problem into a much simpler one. Now instead of an extremely incriminating drum full of dead downsider, all we have to get rid of is 80 or so kilos of stunned newts.”

“But we haven't got rid of the body,” Ethan pointed out. He stared down into the bright waters. “Are you going to dump the newts back in?” he asked hopefully. “Can they swim all right, stunned?”

“No, no, no!” said Quinn, looking quite shocked. “That would unbalance the system! It's very finely tuned. The whole point of this exercise is to keep the computer records straight. As for the body -- you'll see. '

“All set?” called the tech as they floated out of the access port, canister, cartons and all stacked on the pallet.