Between the Stars (6 page)

At full inflation, the spa was a transparent capsule shaped like an oversized shoe. She stretched its top opening and stepped in. With only her head exposed, she alternated sauna and steam until she streamed with sweat. Then she let the unit fill with water. She thrust her shoulders and arms out of the unit and while she soaked she ran through the series of holographic wall displays. The room disappeared and she was in the midst of an ocean, then in rapid succession a desert and a forest, then a long series of terrains, landscapes and seascapes. Last of all were starscapes with various moons and planets. They were all familiar, artificial environments designed to relieve the claustrophobic conditions of life in space.

She dried with an airblast and deflated the spa. She contemplated getting into the infonet to begin organizing her operation, but gave it up when she realized how weary she really was. She pushed the bed control and it unrolled from its niche in the wall. The bed was a thin foam mat, all that was needed in the light gravity. She collapsed onto it face down and signaled for a masseuse. A few minutes later the masseuse arrived. She was of Scandinavian coloration, seemed to be barely out of her teens and was strong as a horse. Valentina gradually relaxed under the girl's expert ministrations. As the tension was kneaded out of each muscle, her eyelids grew heavier. She was asleep before the girl left her room.

She awoke thoroughly refreshed, but uneasy at how much she had let down her guard. It had been years since she had simply gone to sleep in the presence of a total stranger, without setting up the most elementary security. Why should this place lull her into such a trusting state? She vowed not to repeat the error.

She left the hotel to find breakfast. In the absence of day and night, Avalon operated around the clock. For the sake of convenience and thousands of years of human conditioning, there was a twenty-four-hour "day" divided into three shifts. Which shift was used for what was entirely the choice of the individual. Roughly one-third of the population was sleeping at any given time.

After breakfast, she returned to her room to begin serious work. She keyed the infonet and requested information on the alien artifact. Of hard data there was dauntingly little. She ran over the news stories and found nothing she did not already know. The object had been found on Rhea during an exploration expedition conducted by McNaughton & Co. The discoverer was one Derek Kuroda. It was duly delivered to the immense scientific station of Aeaea, where it still resided.

Periodically, Aeaea released reports of its experiments on the ellipsoid, but so far the scientists had accomplished nothing, save finding negative results almost as exciting as the positive kind. There was a long list of experiments that had turned up nothing. Valentina could understand little of that part.

From the announcement of the discovery, scholars throughout the solar system had clamored to be allowed onto the study team. Aeaea was a private company, though, and allowed only a few supremely prestigious scientists who were not among its personnel to examine the object. There was no mention of Sieglinde Kornfeld. That in itself meant nothing. Her passion for secrecy was notorious and she might be working on Aeaea under a news blackout.

Popular response to the discovery had been, predictably, mixed. Many decried the right of Aeaea to sole access. Others declared that the thing was some sort of holy relic and should not be studied at all. Another school considered it dangerous and favored putting it on a ship and firing it out of the system.

There had been a brief flurry of interest in the popular media with all the usual wild extrapolations and pseudo-scientific explanations. Astrologers had had a field day. Interest had quickly subsided, largely because the Rhea Object was so prosaic. Had it had some bizarre shape, or been very large, or covered with alien writing, it might have been more interesting. Best of all might have been a pyramidal shape, or Mayan glyphs or some discernible connection with Stonehenge. It was difficult to work up much enthusiasm over something that resembled a glass paperweight. It seemed to be utterly inert. No voices came from it; it performed no miracles. Its major distinction was its fantastic density, and that was a quality that came across poorly on holographic reproduction.

Valentina switched off the set. So much for public information. Now it was time to extrapolate. She keyed the walls for a star display
sans
planets. In an instant, she was sitting on
tatami
adrift in deep space, in total silence. Holographic display had reached such perfection that it was in no way discernible from reality except to the touch. If she reached out a few feet, her fingers would touch the solid wall. She knew that intellectually, but to all the senses, she was in space. She had always preferred this holo environment for meditation.

The available information had contained nothing new. She had little interest in the object itself. That was not her task. To get her hands on it, and on all the information, public or otherwise, that had been gleaned, required access to it. She began at the first, with the discovery. What interested her now were the anomalies. What was not being said? What was being left out, sidestepped, glossed over? There she might find the key.

First, there was the discoverer. The find was being treated as a McNaughton discovery, because it had been found during one of that firm's explorations, and it had been a McNaughton ship that had delivered the object to Aeaea. Why was the discoverer, Derek Kuroda, being slighted?

A team of high-powered physicists and other scientists had been assembled to study the thing, most of them Aeaeans, but some from other places. Why was the most illustrious physicist of them all, Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart, not mentioned? It might be her passion for secrecy, but there might be other reasons. Was she dead? Was she conducting her part of the study from a distance? Was she in some part of the system so remote that she had not had time to reach Aeaea yet? It was not unthinkable. Even with the development of the Ciano-Kornfeld antimatter drive, there were parts of the system that could require months to reach. But she had reliable information that Sieglinde had been on or near Avalon just days before the discovery. Intuitively, Valentina felt that the key to her problem was here. She suppressed it and left it for her subconscious to work out.

Back to the discoverer. She called up all the information she could find on Derek. He was younger than she had expected. His resume listed excellent academic credentials. His background was in the sciences and he had requested a place on the first expedition to be put together upon development of the superluminal drive. He had had a great deal of physical preparation for planetary environments and was qualified to work for limited times at up to 1.5 Earth gravity.

With her professional skills, it was not difficult for Valentina to gain access to the Academy's restricted files on young Derek. Here his record was not so sterling—repeated absenteeism, a fondness for carousing and brawling, occasional insolence toward his superiors. It was not highly unusual among students in the rough-hewn Island Worlds society, but not to be expected from the scion of one of the most illustrious Founding Families.

McNaughton records showed that Derek had been employed by them only briefly. He had tendered his resignation immediately after delivering the Rhea Object. He had not even stayed for the few days left until payday. That seemed totally out of character. A quick search turned up information that his solo ship,
Cyrano
, was on a payment schedule. It was up-to-date, even since Derek had left his employment. There was no record of his securing further employment. This meant nothing in itself, since the Confederates were notorious for their cavalier attitude toward recordkeeping, especially if it might end up in government files and tax accounting.

As for Sieglinde, Valentina didn't bother to try. The woman had managed to erase nearly all traces of her former life and what could be learned since was restricted to what she chose to release to the popular media and her copious scientific publications, none of these being very useful in researching her private life. All that was known was that she had been born on Mars, her parents had died in the Barsoom City riots, and that she was probably the greatest genius of the age.

She had married into the Taggart family, part of the Kuroda-Sousa-Taggart-Ciano extended clan, and had four living children. Her husband, Thor Taggart, had died under mysterious circumstances while testing an experimental drive unit.

There were linkages and connections everywhere here and Valentina spent some time sorting a few of them out. Young Derek was a Kuroda, and apparently something of a black sheep. Sieglinde was related to that clan by marriage, although there were indications that she was not greatly loved by the Kurodas or Taggarts. As strange as she was, she was far more likely to be on good terms with the unbelievably eccentric Cianos. It was possible that the connection was coincidental. After all, the Island Worlders ran to large families and the older clans numbered many hundreds of members. But Valentina did not believe in coincidence.

So here she had young Derek, He had made a fabulous discovery but had handed it over to the McNaughtons. Granted, his contract stipulated that he had to do exactly that, but if she read him right, he was not the type to let such trivialities stand in his way. He ran off without collecting his pay. His debts were paid up. A thought occurred to her and she broke into the McNaughton files for Derek's mamaship.
Cyrano
had been low on fuel when he had left. A query turned up the information that he had had barely enough to reach Avalon.

She ran a scan of Avalon's docking records. He had arrived fully fueled. Where had he been in the interim? How had he paid for the fuel? A broad smile spread across her face as it came to her.

"You clever little bastard!" she said in reluctant admiration. "You found two of them, didn't you?" With such a find, where would he go? Where but to his relative, Sieglinde? So that was why she hadn't showed at the most exciting study in history. She had an egg of her own.

Valentina shut off the holo and infonet and sat back, satisfied. It had been a good morning's work. She was ready to act now, and the place to start was with Derek Kuroda.

FIVE

The bar was called the Black Hole, and it opened off the next-to-uppermost tier of the Bat Cave. Its entertainment offerings were fairly sedate compared to some of the rougher spacer establishments. The clientele ran largely to students, younger ship's officers, and local business types.

Derek sat at his usual corner table, putting on a fair imitation of well-lit bonhomie. The others at the table were enjoying his company and doing most of their drinking at his expense. The table and chairs were scarcely needed in the light gravity, but they were traditional and gave scale and a certain cohesiveness to a convivial gathering. There were some parts of the human psyche that refused to respond to the possibilities of life off Earth. Working accommodations had infinite variety but bars looked like bars everywhere.

"Confess, Derek," said the girl to his right. He turned and looked at her, making the movement slow and deliberate, pausing a second to let his eyes refocus. She was a da Sousa, a distant cousin, and she worked on a passenger ship. Her hair lay back along her scalp in sleek waves and a tiny ruby gleamed from her left nostril, accentuating her sharp, unpretty features. Her looks were correctable, but many spacers stubbornly refused to employ cosmetic surgery.

"Confess what?" he said, slurring slightly.

"Where you're getting the credit for all this glad-handing. You're notoriously the brokest Kuroda of your generation. Then you find the alien what'sit, which the McNaughtons promptly appropriate before firing you—"

"I quit."

"Whatever. Anyway, suddenly, you're a gentleman of leisure. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm taking advantage of your largesse, after all. But there haven't been any large robberies recently that I've heard of. What is it? Something scandalous, or at least faintly disreputable?"

Esmerelda. That was her name, he remembered. He'd known her when they were small children. Even then, she had talked too much.

"Like I said, Esme, I sold my story to a big Earth media syndicate. They paid big."

"For a story about how you stubbed your toe? Granted, it's not easy to do in low-gee like that, but it's nothing to pay for." She keyed a new holo display over the table and realistic tropical fish flickered colorfully amid their drinks.

"Hell, no. I made up all kinds of lies. There were the six-toed footprints, the wreckage of a ship shaped like an Egyptian scarab beetle, the glowing writing that appeared in the vacuum over the green egg, warning me to repent and stop eating so many sweets—" He broke off as everybody snatched up their drinks. A cat had charged onto their table and was trying to catch the holographic fish. Someone changed the display to a platter of glowing coals and the cat left.

"And they believe all you brought back was the paperweight?" Berkeley said. He was a young man little older than Derek who worked for Port Authority and wore a perpetual affected air of boredom. He turned to Esmerelda. "What's a paperweight, anyway? That's what the Earth commentators are always calling it."

"It's a necessity where you've got paper, gravity and wind. Haven't you ever been to Earth?"

"No, and I never will," Berkeley said. "Have you?"

"Sure. I went down once to see if my gravity conditioning really worked. I felt like hell but I managed." She shuddered. "It was the big spaces and the bugs and animals and all the people that got to me. And the oceans! The holos don't give you any idea how they
smell!
"

Derek wished they would leave. Somehow, carousing wasn't nearly as much fun when you had to do it. He'd put together a small team of people he'd known since his early school days, and that had been fun, but the hanging around in bars and gambling establishments had palled quickly.

A chime sounded and Berkeley got up, washing down a sober-up pill with the last of his drink. "End of second shift," he said, "time to go to work. What a bore. I wish they'd outlaw something around here so we could have smugglers again. I hear they were fun to outwit."

As Berkeley went through the screen that shut off light from the terrace outside, he stepped aside for someone. Derek saw the woman as he was exhaling and for a few moments, he forgot to inhale. Even in the dim light she was stunning, with tawny hair and huge eyes. It was obvious she was new in Avalon, and her unfamiliarity with the gravity gave her a slight, delicious awkwardness.

Esmerelda followed the direction of his gaze. Her eyes, set a bit too close to her long nose, narrowed slightly. The woman stood blinking while her eyes adjusted to the dimness. He grunted as Esmerelda elbowed him in the side.

"Pull your tongue in, Derek, it's unseemly to slobber all over the table. Where's your taste, anyway? She looks like a tarted-up Earthie to me."

"No Earthie walks like that," Derek said. "And I'll pass my own judgment of desirability, if you don't mind."

She stood. "You're welcome to her. I have a gaggle of tourists to nurse. If you plan to move in on glamour queen there, I'd suggest you take a sober-up first. You're cross-eyed and your breath could set off atmosphere alarms." She whirled and left in a low-gravity stalk while he made an elaborately obscene gesture toward her back.

He looked around and saw that the woman had seated herself at a nearby table, its holoset displaying a miniaturized volcano erupting on Io. Such low-level lighting was unflattering to most women, but it did not detract from this one's beauty.

Feverishly, Derek sought a way to approach her. She looked older than he, but not that much older. He reminded himself that he was pretending to be a rake, a playboy and hell-raiser. How would such a person go about this? Should he continue his drunk act? Best not. Surreptitiously, he sprayed a breath-freshener into his mouth. What else? He was presentably dressed, his hair was impeccable. His problem, as he pondered it, was lack of experience with glamorous ladies from nowhere. Dare he just go over and introduce himself and risk acting like a lout?

When Valentina had walked in, she had pretended to spend a few seconds adjusting to the change in light. She had used those seconds to scan the room, spot Derek, and do a quick study of the young man and his companion. Body language said the two were not close friends. Derek was also pretending to be drunk, for some reason. It was useless to speculate on that now. There was a brief, even-so-slightly acrimonious exchange, and the plain-featured girl left. That was convenient.

She saw that Derek was fidgeting. As she had intended, he had been smitten the moment she walked in. It almost seemed a pity to take advantage of such inexperience, but a professional used every tool that came to hand. She looked over the surroundings. The bar was typical, sparsely populated at the moment, but it would probably fill nearer the end of this shift. A girl took her order. In the Belt, humans performed many of the lesser tasks given up to robot labor on Earth. One of the walls was a holographic display in which a troupe performed a nude zero-gee ballet with consummate grace amid underwater lighting effects. In this place, she thought, it probably passed for sophistication, if not outright decadence. She let Derek sweat for a while.

He nerved himself up to go over and say something like, "May I buy you a drink?" when she took it out of his shaky hands.

"Aren't you Derek Kuroda?"

He looked up. It was her. For a moment, her question puzzled him. Then the answer burst into his mind. "Yes, I am."

She smiled, and all the blood drained from his brain down to the vicinity of his gonads and their environs. "I saw you on the holos, after you made the discovery. I hope you don't mind me coming over here like this, a total stranger."

"Oh, not at all! Have a seat. Can I order you something?" Desperately, he tried to think of something witty to say, something devastatingly disarming. His brain seemed to have turned to toxic sludge.

"I hear Avalon has wonderful Chablis," she said.

"The best!" he insisted. He despised Chablis. "The very best. Margaret!" The waitress came over, yawning. "Bring this lady a Chablis."

"Any particular brand?" Margaret asked. "Or do you want the plonk we have on tap?"

"Never!" Derek said. "A Chateau Orecrusher 72, from vineyard 4D, third level up, next to the infrareds."

"Jesus, Derek," Margaret said, wrinkling her nose, "that's the crummiest Chablis ever made." She turned to Valentina. "Lady, you want a good one, try Chateau Sauve-Qui-Peut '69. They were trying out the new sugar-enhancing bacterium that year, and the radiation level was a bit higher because of the supernova of '69 or something. Anyway, they've never been able to repeat the circumstances and it's the best Chablis ever."

"In that case," Valentina said, "I'll try it."

Derek shrugged. "Not my specialty, I'm afraid."

She smiled and his heart lurched. "Actually, I don't know a thing about wines. I'm a student."

"A student of what?"

"Journalism. I intend to be a freelance reporter for one of the holo networks. That's how I spotted you. I spend a lot of time following the reports about your discovery. One of the things I wanted to do when I got here was to interview you, but I wasn't expecting to just run into you like this. I want to hear all about it. The discovery, I mean. I just can't understand why you, the discoverer, went so unnoticed."

"It's a cruel world. The McNaughtons wanted credit for the find and I was under contract to them."

"So you quit because they wanted to hog all the glory. I think that was a fine gesture." She hoped she wasn't laying it on too thick. Just because he was young didn't mean he had to be dumb.

"Actually, there was more to it than that." He knew he was being flattered and decided that he liked it. "I didn't like working for McNaughton."

"I'd heard the McNaughtons and Kurodas didn't always get along together."

"It wasn't that. Sometimes I don't get along with my family either. McNaughton's gotten to be a big corporation with a bureaucracy all its own. Most of the lower-level people were all right, but the upper management were always sticking their noses in, demanding reports and paperwork and standardization of procedures and stuff like that. Hell, if I'd wanted to live like that, I would've moved to Earth."

"I can see how you'd feel disillusioned." She blinked at him admiringly. "Listen, I don't want to seem pushy, but would you be willing to give me an interview? I'd like to get the real story. Not just about making the find, but about how McNaughton manipulated it. I think your side of it should be public."

"You think so?" Actually, she didn't really seem so much older than himself. Three or four years at the most. "I'd have no objection."

"What would be a convenient time?"

"Let's see, what shift are you on?"

For a moment she didn't understand what he meant, then she remembered the peculiar local time system.

"This is my second shift since I woke up. I just arrived on Avalon yesterday. I'm still adjusting to your time."

"Fine. We're both on the same timeframe, then. I'm free for the rest of this shift. Where do you suggest?"

"Your ship? That always makes a good setting for an interview with an explorer. I hope it's here. I don't have equipment to simulate it."

"No problem. It's at the South Pole Dock." He looked up with annoyance as three men pushed boisterously into the bar. They were dressed as commercial spacers and were well into their voyage-end celebration. As they took a table and ordered, he turned back to Valentina. "Would two hours from now be all right? I have a few things to take care of." Actually, he needed to clean up the mess in
Cyrano
, which had the characteristics of bachelor accommodations throughout history.

"That would be perfect. I have to go to my place and get my equipment ready. It's an old secondhand holo outfit without much editing capability, but I can make do." She glanced at the three roistering spacers, realized she recognized one of them, and paid them no further attention.

After a few last-minute instructions on how to find
Cyrano
, she left the bar. Immediately, she took a catwalk to the tier opposite. In the Bat Cave, the distance separating them was only about fifty feet. She pulled up the integral hood of her coverall to disguise her hair and pretended to inspect the goods in the glass window of a luxury shop, keeping her attention on the reflected entrance of the Black Hole. After a few minutes, Derek came out and made his way toward a droptube. Within seconds, one of the spacers came out and followed. It was the one who had seemed familiar. She did not bother to follow the two. Instead, she concentrated on the gesture that had prodded her memory.

As she made her way back to her hotel, she thought it over. It was the way the man had picked up his glass. Faces meant nothing. Surgical clinics routinely reconstructed faces. Coloring, hair texture, even height could be manipulated. Tiny mannerisms were far more revealing. He had cocked his wrist inward and jerked out his elbow before tilting the glass up. He wasn't one of the big ones, but she knew she had seen that one before.

Just as she reached her room, she had it: Alexandrov. Two years before, Carstairs had slipped her into a party hosted by the Russian embassy in London. She was there to leech onto the Burmese Minister for Opium, but Carstairs had pointed out Alexandrov, who was a colonel in Russian intelligence.

Now what the bloody hell, she wondered, was a Russian doing here? Obviously, he was on the same sort of errand she was. Surely Carstairs hadn't held back something? No, unlike some superiors, Carstairs never sent his people out without a complete picture of the situation.

Why would the Russians be involved? The Soviet Union was all but moribund, its client-states long since broken away, its huge Islamic South joined with the Moslem states of the Middle East and little left save Great Russia to bear the torch of discredited Marxism. What was their interest here? It might be their all but reflexive urge to meddle and snoop. But it might be something else. Like the British and the Americans, the Russians dreamed of a return to their former position of world dominance. It was possible that someone in their intelligence apparatus saw in the Rhea Object a path back to power. If so, might Alexandrov have reached the same conclusion as she about Derek? Or were they just covering all possible bases?