Between the Stars (2 page)

"It seems to be inert." He sent her a holo of the ovoid in its actual size. "Look at the rough readings."

Her brow became a mass of wrinkles as she read the figures. "Never seen anything like that.
Nothin's
that dense!"

An hour later, she came aboard with her team. The group crowded
Cyrano
's tiny interior space. Two wore some sort of protective clothing and carried between them a container that looked like a baby bank vault. They all looked at the egg with awe. In zero-gee it floated like everything else, but their instruments proclaimed its utter alienness.

"I want this kept secret," said a man who wore blue collar tabs. The Confederacy made little use of uniforms or insignia, but Derek figured he was some kind of official.

"Whaffor?" Jackson said. "The Confederacy has no Official Secrets Act that I ever heard of."

"There must be an exception for this," the man insisted stuffily. "This is an event of the first magnitude and it may be of vital strategic significance to the Confederacy."

"Are we at war?" Derek asked. "I hadn't heard."

"Of course we aren't at war!" snapped blue-tabs. "But scientific data constitute vital intelligence which may be crucial in any future conflict."

"That true, Ethelred?" Derek asked.

"Truth of the statement is immaterial," the computer answered. "Free exchange of scientific information is one of the bedrocks of Confederate policy and any infringement of it is quite illegal."

"The law was never intended to extend to such events as this!" blue-tabs insisted. "To noise this about would be totally irresponsible. It will draw every Earthie agent in the solar system!"

"Nonetheless, that's how policy stands," Jackson said. "I just looked up state policy for this kind of discovery. It says any such objects are to be transferred to Aeaea for analysis." She turned to a subordinate. "Cut loose the Carnegie, sober up her skipper, and send her to Aeaea with this thing immediately."

"I shall protest," said blue-tabs.

"Knock yourself out," said Jackson, affably. When the others were gone she turned to Derek. "Just in the thirty-odd years I been out here, we got bureaucrats, functionaries, all that stuff. The business kind are bad enough. The government kind are worse."

"I don't know what the procedure is," Derek said, "but I'm quitting. I'm heading back toward Avalon as soon as I get clearance."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. It was an Earthie gesture that the spaceborn didn't have. "Wanna get there ahead of the artifact? Figure you can snag all the glory, have all the holorecorders on you when it gets unveiled?"

He bristled but restrained himself. "Sure, why not? How many people get a chance like this? I'd be a fool to pass it up."

She shrugged, another piece of Earthie body language. "Nothin' to me. Seein's you didn't make it to your first payday, I don't have to worry about paying you. Law says any man wants to quit his job he's free to do it." She began to leave, then turned at the hatch. "You figure on dropping in on old Sieglinde?"

He hadn't expected that. "Why do you mention her?"

"Because I know how tight your clan is. And I think you're holding something back. Now, was we back on Earth, you might be under arrest right now, answering some hard questions. As it is, you're free to go. When you see her, tell her Helen Jackson says hello."

"You know Sieglinde?" he asked, realizing as he said it how stupid the question sounded.

"Sure, I known Linde since I first come out here. She got me my first job with McNaughton, after I got out of the POW pen. You take care now." She drifted out through the hatch, a bulky, gray-haired woman who would never look like anything but an Earthie.

Within the hour he was on his way to artifact number two.

The Ciano Museum was a featureless hunk of rock drifting in a solar orbit not far from Avalon, as distances were calculated in the Belt. Fortunately for Derek, it was, at this time, somewhat closer to the termination of his route from Rhea than was Avalon. He knew his luck was holding when he saw that there were no ships parked near the museum. It was a popular site for school outings. He hit the museum frequency.

"Roseberry? Are you there?" He waited a few minutes, then an incredibly ancient face appeared in his holo tank. It was extravagantly wrinkled and surrounded by wispy white hair and whiskers. Roseberry, who had only one name, was believed to be the oldest human in existence. He was nearly two centuries old and living proof that longevity and hard drinking were not mutually exclusive.

''Well, if it ain't young Dmitri! How you doing, boy?"

"Dmitri was my uncle, Roseberry," Derek said. "He's been dead for twenty years. "

"Wait a minute, I'll get it in a minute! Derek! That's it, ain't it? Ivan and Mitsuko's boy?"

He grinned. "That's right. How's it going, Roseberry?"

"Dull, just like always. Since the war, it's all been dull. Hardly anybody ever comes by. Even the kids. They don't bother to teach young folks about the past anymore." He sighed heavily.

Derek knew better than to contradict him. The old man had probably conducted about a thousand schoolchildren through the museum in the last ten days, but to mention it was to invite an hour-long harangue on the neglect of the younger generation.

"What brings you by, Derek? I know you seen this place plenty of times."

"Well, I thought we'd have a drink," he saw how the old man's eyes lit up, "and I wanted to talk to you about something exciting. It's the most exciting news since the war. I knew there was only one man to come to with this.''

The old man began to cackle. "Well, you come to the right place, all right! Dock your ship and come aboard and tell old Roseberry all about it."

Twenty minutes later, Derek exited
Cyrano
. The museum had a spin sufficient to create a faint artificial gravity. With the gliding, low-grav walk of the spacer he passed the holographic image of Ugo Ciano and threw the tiny man a respectful salute. Ciano looked like a miniature King Lear, with his swirling white hair and beard and his perpetual furious glare. Ugo Ciano had been the Newton of the space age, and never shy about admitting the fact.

"Come on in, Derek," Roseberry called. "I got the sake all heated up."

Derek went to the old man's quarters, just off the dock. Even seeing the old derelict so close, Derek still felt a sense of awe. Roseberry had lived through the entire span of man's expansion into space. He had known all the giants: Sam Taggart and Ugo Ciano, Martin Shaw, Thor Taggart and Sieglinde Kornfeld. It was even rumored that, as an infant, he had sat on the lap of Wernher von Braun. Even Derek didn't believe he was
that
old. They sipped sake for a few minutes before Roseberry, unable to contain his curiosity, broke the silence.

"Come on, what you got for me?"

This was touchy, but Derek knew that Thor and Sieglinde had put the museum, once Ugo's personal lab, under Roseberry's care because they considered the old drunk to be absolutely trustworthy.

"Rosesberry, I've found it. What everybody's been searching for. Out there in my ship I have an alien artifact."

In the blink of an eye, the old man sobered. "You wait right here. I got a couple of things I gotta do."

"I need to talk to Sieglinde," Derek said, "secretly."

"That's one of the things I gotta do," Roseberry said. "I have to set up a meet between you and her. Other thing is, you gotta talk to Ugo."

Derek groaned. Ugo had been dead for almost a century. He had left behind numerous holographs of himself, dispensing advice and orders. All of his descendants had to endure them.

"This is one nobody ever seen before," Roseberry insisted, "not even me. It's for when one of you finds the alien artifact. He always knew it'd be someone of his blood."

"That's because he was crazy!" Derek protested. "It was pure chance I stumbled across this."

"Ugo had him some theories about chance," Roseberry said. "He always held there was rules to chance that most of us didn't understand. Must've been something to it. Man played a mean crap game. Couldn't play poker worth a damn, not like old Sam could. Too much skill and what Sam called human interaction to that, but Ugo could always ace 'em at craps and blackjack, because it was all chance, you see. He—"

"Okay," Derek said. "Go warm up Ugo's holo. It'll be something to see a new one." He thought for a moment. "And tell Sieglinde I'm out of fuel."

"You know what old Ugo used to say about his kids when they called up from all over out of fuel and credit?"

"I can imagine."

"Well, lemme go make my calls. I'll send Ugo in. Then I want to see that artifact. It got any writing on it? Anything like that?"

"Nothing like that, but it's plenty weird."

"Hot Damn!" Chuckling, Roseberry hurried off on his errands.

Without preamble, Ugo Ciano was in the room with him. The tiny man was, as always, ebullient and manic, positively erupting with energy. "So you done it! Congratulation! Jesus, I envy you, kid!" How did he know the discoverer would be young? Derek wondered. "Now, lissen up. You just found out we ain't alone. Philosophically, that's the greatest discovery ever made. See, all the big discoveries are the ones that change how we see the universe. Mostly, they're made by big geniuses like Newton and Darwin and me, but sometimes an ordinary jerk will find something that changes everything. That's what happened to you." The grating Brooklynese dialect still sounded awful after a hundred years.

"We useta live in a cozy little world," Ugo lectured on. "It only stretched as far as the horizon and we was right in the middle of it, with the sun going around us. Copernicus theorized, and Kepler and Galileo further demonstrated, that we wasn't the center of anything, that the universe didn't revolve around us. Other astronomers showed that we was just riding on a dirtball way the bleedin'
hell
out on the edge of a second-rate galaxy." He punctuated his speech with explosive, extravagant gestures that set him spinning in zero-gee.

"Darwin came along and showed that the universe wasn't created for us, that we just evolved right along with everything else. That was some blow to the collective ego right there. Then along came Freud, and he hypothesized that there was whole big chunks of our own minds we had no knowledge of, that we just had an imperfect understanding of the conscious part." He stopped spinning and held up a cautionary finger. "Now, what you gotta remember is, all these people got their butts kicked for demonstrating these unwelcome facts. You just found out that we ain't alone in the universe, that God or nature or whatever don't consider humanity to be the ultimate product. So prepare to get your butt kicked.

"Now, don't get too alarmed," he said, conspiratorially. "After the initial butt-kick period, you can make a pretty good deal outa this. Freud did. And look at me!" He threw his arms wide, as if inviting inspection. "All my dumb but highly placed colleagues said I was crazy. But I'm richer than all of 'em put together and I've already outlived all but a few!" He went into convulsions of chortling, then shut it off abruptly and went dead serious.

"The next part's for if you was alone when you found whatever it was. Keep it to yourself for as long as you can until you got some real understanding of what it is. It's gonna be a real power for human motivation, even if it's just a piece of rock with alien writing or something. If it's real evidence of a technology superior to ours, it can be truly explosive. But, above all," he waggled the admonitory finger again, "publish it all over hell and die doing it before you let it become a government or corporate secret. That kind of thing can be a death sentence for all humanity."

"Be careful who you trust. If you trust nobody, you might as well be dead, but there's no sense overdoing it. Trust your close family, except for the ones you can't stand. In-laws don't count. You can trust Roseberry, if he's still alive. If you go public right away, it goes to everybody: Earth, the planets, the orbiting colonies. I don't care what your political situation is. One last thing." He glared into empty space as if trying to project his will into the far future. Which, in a sense, he was doing.

"If you're already in other solar systems and you found your alien artifact there, no sweat. But, if you found it somewhere in ours, remember this: They can come back someday." The image winked out. Derek let out a long-pent breath. Listening to a Ciano lecture was as strenuous as a bout of zero-gee wrestling.

TWO

Anthony Carstairs relaxed, as much as he ever could be said to relax, in his office overlooking a park in Greenwich. It had been for the park that he had chosen Greenwich instead of nearby London. The park had been landscaped by Louis XIV's gardener. It amused him that the Sun King's gardener designed his view. Visitors never understood his choice of locale, and that amused him as well. My own little Versailles, he thought, only without all the courtiers and parasites.

Carstairs was Coordinating Director for United Nations Services and Activities. The title was deliberately meaningless. What he was in reality was all but absolute ruler of Earth, and had been for the better part of four decades. During that time, he had wielded power behind a series of figurehead Secretaries General. Every few years he changed his title to something else equally obfuscatory. He was little known to the great masses of Earth's people, but that suited his personal style. Everyone who counted knew him for what he was. Far more important than his U.N. title was his Party title. Anthony Carstairs was General Secretary of the Earth First Party. For a generation, the Earth had been ruled by a one-party government and Earth First was that party. They made a pretense of parliamentary democracy, but it was a sham and everyone knew it. Fortunately, the planet's population had grown so passive that there was little serious protest.

He was a squat, bullet-headed fireplug of a man who looked like the dockworker he had been in his youth, following his father and grandfather. He had gone from gang boss to union chief to Party secretary to virtual dictator by a combination of intelligence, brute force, astute political maneuvering and ruthlessness.

He opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, twisting off the old-fashioned cap with fingers still powerful despite his years, which were nearing the century mark. Advances in medicine kept his appearance and health those of a man in his mid-fifties. As he emptied the bottle, he thought of the long road that had brought him to this desk on this day.

The early years had been brutal: the street-fighting it had taken to establish Earth First, the years of conniving with loathsome pseudo-capitalists who only wanted monopolies and protection from competition. There had been the opportunistic politicians who had scented a powerful new bandwagon, and corrupt military officers eager to trade favors for future promotion. Carstairs had used them all, and most of them he had, eventually, imprisoned or executed. He had never persecuted anyone for personal reasons, nor from spite. All had been done in accordance with his personal vision for the salvation of the planet. He was absolutely certain that, had it not been for him, the planet would have lapsed into utter barbarism decades before.

It was a lonely job being dictator. Even as the thought came to him, he smiled thinly at the silliness of the platitude. A man who wanted to have friends had no business seeking power. It was an irony of his life that most of the few people he had liked had been enemies—Thor Taggart, Sieglinde Kornfeld, even old Martin Shaw, whose name still gave him the shudders after all these years. They had been people of character and force, not like the sheep he led or the hyenas who wielded power for him.

He nursed the brown ale along, putting off his next appointment. It was uncharacteristic of him to put any-thing off. Ordinarily he tackled each problem immediately and got it behind him. He knew that procrastination was the greatest sin of the statesman. The man in the outer office was Mehmet Shevket, Deputy Chief of Staff of the U.N. Armed Forces.

Face it, Tony, Carstairs thought, he scares you. In all these years, he's the first human being since Martin Shaw to throw a real scare into you. And why? He's a bloody savage, but you've dealt with them before, used them and discarded them. This one is different, though, he told himself. He's brilliant, he's just like me, only he has no morals or scruples whatsoever. I want to save a planet and he just wants to rule it. Kill him, then. But he's the only military man I have who's worth two hairs on a rat's arse. I may need him soon. And, admit it, he has a private power base. Killing him could be your own death warrant.

And I'm getting old. Twenty years ago, I'd have squashed him like the Turkish bug he is. Now, I'm not so sure. Yes, Tony, old age is a terrible thing. Now quit feeling sorry for yourself and see what he wants.

Carstairs addressed the empty air above his desk. "Send him in."

Mehmet Shevket had been born in the sprawling slums of Istanbul, the child of parents he had never known. Growing up in the streets, with minimal state schooling, he had become a ruthless, prominent gang leader by the age of fifteen. A local politician who had made use of his services took him on as protégé and sponsored young Mehmet for admission into a U.N. military school.

From the first, the young man's military career had been remarkable, both for his brilliance and for his stunning capacity for violence. He had been commissioned into the World Peace Force, a much-hated body dedicated to putting down insurrections worldwide. His successes were noted and he was marked for better things. From one post to another, he was renowned for his capability and brutality. After holding the position of Chief of Military Intelligence, he had stepped into the Earth's number-two military slot. Effectively, he was generalissimo, because the number-one slot was largely ceremonial.

Anyone who, from his name and history, expected to see a classical Turkish bandit would have been surprised to see the man who walked confidently into Carstairs' office. Mehmet Shevket was a tall, powerful man with the physique of a competition bodybuilder. He was as handsome as a holostar, with wavy blond hair and ice-blue eyes. At forty-five, he looked ten years younger, not much changed from the Olympic boxer and gymnast he had been during his military academy days. A slight beefiness of neck and jaw were the only signs of age and dissipation visible. If half the stories about him were true, Carstairs thought, the man had the best degeneracy-hiding system since Dorian Gray.

Shevket saluted smartly. "Mr. Secretary, good of you to see me on such short notice."

"Have a chair, General. What's on your mind?" As if I didn't know, he thought.

Shevket sat and crossed his elegantly booted legs. Since modern warfare was largely vehicular or space-borne, the drab camouflage uniforms of the twentieth century had given way to handsome garb designed by the best couturiers. Shevket's was his own design—severe black pseudo-leather with white facings. He wore no insignia of rank and the only trace of color was the hilt of the
jambiya
dagger at his belt. It was carved from a single piece of blood-red coral. It was the only weapon he bore, unless one counted the three-strand horsewhip of knotted leather that dangled from his black-gloved wrist.

"I won't waste your time, Mr. Secretary. Military Intelligence has picked up a report from the Confederacy. He said the word as if it were a unique blasphemy. "It seems that an alien artifact has at last been found."

"Been hearing that one all my life," Carstairs said. "It's never panned out so far." His own spy network had reported the finding the day before, and he suspected that Shevket's personal sources had kept him informed likewise.

"This one seems to be authentic. We have no word as to the exact nature of the find, but it seems that it is no mere passive evidence, writing or the like, but something of a new principle and possibly of vast importance, both militarily and politically."

"Bloody hell," Carstairs said. Neither man gave the slightest thought to the philosophical implications of the find. "We have to get our hands on it, then, or at least learn everything about it that they do." The Island Worlders were the bane of Carstairs' existence. They had been siphoning off Earth's most adventurous spirits and best scientific brainpower for three generations.

"The find was made by one Derek Kuroda," Shevket said, "apparently quite by accident."

"Kuroda!" Carstairs spat. "Every time there's trouble from those buggers, it's a Kuroda, a Ciano, a da Sousa or a bloody Taggart! All their talk of freedom and democracy and they're just a pack of primitive clans."

"I agree," Shevket said. "And it is time we did something about them."

"It's not time for another war, General," Carstairs said.

"There are those who disagree," said the Turk. Idly he flicked his horsewhip, snapping the lashes against the side of his chair. "Some think it is high time we had a war against somebody other than petty rebels. This time, we must not settle for a humiliating peace."

"Oh?" The comment was dangerously bland. "As I recall it, the Confederates submitted to a demonstration of overwhelming force." The face-saving charade had fooled few people, but it was unwise to point that out to Carstairs.

"So it may be. The fact is, the new generation has not tasted war, and that means they have never known defeat. Now is the time, before they grow jaded and defeatist."

"Bloody convenient, isn't it?" Carstairs said. "Every twenty years or so, a bunch of dumb kids grow to military age thirsting for blood. By the time they find out what it's really like, it's too late. No, General, we wait. The Confederacy's never been anything more than a loose-knit coalition facing a common enemy. Now their commercial interests are pulling them apart. Another few years and they'll be ripe for picking."

"You have been saying that for a good many years now," said Shevket. "Yet we are no closer to resuming hostilities. I have forged our armed forces into a superb instrument of conquest, but the finest weapon grows dull with disuse. Bismarck said, 'The problem with a bayonet is that you can do anything with one except sit on it.' You can't sit on our armed forces for much longer, Mr. Secretary."

"They'll stab me arse if I do, eh?" Carstairs grinned mirthlessly. "Well, we'd better make no move until we know what this alien whatsit is. Might be the ultimate weapon, and then we'd look pretty silly, wouldn't we?"

"Therefore, we must have it," Shevket said. "With your permission, sir, I shall send a team to locate it."

You already have, you deceitful bugger, he thought. "By all means, General. Report to me the moment you find anything of value."

"I shall take my leave, then." Shevket rose, saluted and left. Carstairs watched the broad, leather-clad back pass through the door.

"Bloody butcher," he muttered. Then, to the air above his desk, "Get me Valentina Ambartsumian."

Valentina was on the Moon when she got the summons. She lay amid the elegant luxury of the Mondberg development. To build it an entire mountain had been hollowed, its interior devoted to services, its exterior to housing for the very rich. All the dwellings had exterior windows facing onto the Lunar landscape. Status was differentiated by altitude and the quality of view of the Earth.

The bed where she lay was in a penthouse apartment on the very peak of the berg, with windows facing both east and west. All its appointments and services were so modern that to someone living just twenty years previously, they would have seemed like magic. Even in this age, even on Luna, even in the Mondberg, there were few who could afford such luxuries.

The man who lay in the bed next to her was such a person. He was the head of six major corporations. On the Moon, that was not meaningless, as it had become on Earth. He was also suspected of backing several national separation movements on the motherworld. It was Valentina's task to stay close to him. Orders to terminate might come at any time.

She winced when her implanted summoner went off, a hand going involuntarily to her ear.

"What is it, my dear" said the man who dozed next to her.

"I pulled a neck muscle playing mercuryball this morning," she said. "Nothing to concern yourself about. I think I'd better pay a visit to the pharmacy, though."

He waved a hand toward an alcove curtained with a sheet of shimmering red light. "Be my guest. I'm sure I have something to soothe your pains."

She glided from the bed and made her way gracefully to the alcove. She had a lean, muscular, athletic build, because that was the fashion on Luna at this time. Plasticity of physique was one of her specialties. Any native Lunaire would have thought her a native as well, so perfect was her mimicry.

Safely inside the light barrier, she muttered, "What is it?" Her voice was almost inaudible.

"Return to head office immediately." There was no identification or priority, nor was any needed. Valentina had only one superior, and only one transmitter could reach her summoner. All orders from that source were absolute.

"Present subject," she said, "terminate?"

"Negative. Contact may prove valuable in future. Neutral status meantime. Out." Neutral status meant left alive. Suspended death sentence.

Early the next morning she made hasty excuses to her wealthy lover/victim and arranged for a descent to Heathrow Complex. His personal conveyance (moon-buggy was entirely too prosaic a word) deposited her at the VIP lounge of the Armstrong space facility. In the lounge she sipped an Irish coffee as a cat crawled into her lap to be petted. The lunar breed were long and ferret-like, with short legs to negotiate the narrow passages and tunnels that riddled the Lunar settlements.

She felt no disappointment that her months of preparation, of arranging introductions and working herself into the magnate's trust and finally his bed, had ended inconclusively. She knew that some of her colleagues thirsted for the kill, but not Valentina. If a termination had been ordered, she would have executed it. As it was, she had done her job and done it well. Now she would see what new task Carstairs had for her.

She had been chosen for her work at the age of ten, after a complex series of physical and psychological tests. Her scores had lifted her from the squalor in which nearly ninety-nine percent of Earth's population wallowed and propelled her into higher State schooling. Her schooling was quite different from that of ordinary children or of the children of high Party members. Besides an intensive course of conventional education, with emphasis on languages, she took years of ballet, acting, computers and security systems, armed and unarmed combat, codes, extraterrestrial anthropology, sabotage and a score of other subjects even more arcane.