Ethan of Athos (7 page)

“I -- I'm not ungrateful,” he stammered, his voice rising in pitch, “but, uh, I have a stomach ache,” quite true, “thank you anyway,” there was a lift tube to the next level, the one his hostel was on, “good-bye!”

He bolted for the tube, leaped in. Reaching upward did nothing to speed his ascent. His last shreds of dignity kept him from flapping his arms. He offered her a strained smile through the crystal sides of the tube as her level fell away in dreamy slowness, distorted, foreshortened, blinked out.

He nipped out of the tube at his exit and darted behind a sort of free-form sculpture with plants nearby in the mallway. He peered through the leaves. She did not chase him. He unwound eventually, slumping on a bench for a long, numb time. Safe at last.

He heaved a sigh and got to his feet, and dragged off up the mall. His little cubicle seemed newly attractive. Something very bland to eat from the room service console, a shower, and bed. No more exploratory adventures. Tomorrow he would get right to business. Gather his data, choose the supplier, and ship out on the first available transport...

A man dressed in some planetary fashion of dull neutrality, plain grey tunic and trousers, approached Ethan on the esplanade, smiling. “Dr. Urquhart?” He grasped Ethan's arm.

Ethan smiled back in uncertain courtesy. Then stiffened, his mouth opening to cry indignant protest as the hypospray prickled his arm. A heartbeat, and his mouth slackened, the cry unspent. The man guided him gently toward a bubble car in the tubeway.

Ethan's feet felt vague, like balloons. He hoped the man wouldn't let go, lest he bob helplessly up to the ceiling and hang upside down with things falling out of his pockets on the passersby. The mirrored canopy of the bubble car closed over his unfocused gaze like a nictitating membrane.

Ethan came to awareness in a hostel room much larger and more luxurious than his own. His reason flowed with slow clarity, like honey. The rest of him floated in a sweet, languid euphoria. Distantly, under his heart, or down in his throat, something whined and cried and scratched frantically like an animal locked in a cellar, but there was no chance of its getting out. His viscous logic noted indifferently that he was bound tightly to a hard plastic chair, and certain muscles in his back and arms and legs burned painfully. So what.

Far more intriguing was the man emerging from the bathroom, rubbing his damp reddened face vigorously with a towel. Grey eyes like granite chips, hard-bodied, average height, much like the fellow who'd picked Ethan off the mall and who even now sat on a nearby float chair, watching his prisoner closely.

Ethan's kidnapper was of so ordinary an appearance Ethan could hardly keep him before his mind even when he was looking directly at him. But Ethan had the oddest insight, like x-ray vision, that his bones contained not marrow but ice stone-hard as that outside the Station. Ethan wondered how he manufactured red blood cells with this peculiar medical condition. Maybe his veins ran liquid nitrogen. They were both utterly charming, and Ethan wanted to kiss them.

“Is he under, Captain?” asked the man with the towel.

“Yes, Colonel Millisor,” replied the other. “A full dose.”

The man with the towel grunted and flung it on the bed, next to the contents of Ethan's pockets, and all his clothes, arrayed there. Ethan noticed his own nakedness for the first time. There were a few Kline Station tokens, a comb, an empty raisin wrapper, his map module, his credit chit for his Betan funds for purchasing the new cultures -- the creature under his heart howled, unheard, at that sight. His captor poked among the spoils. “This stuff scan clean?”

“Ha. Almost,” said the cold captain. “Take a look at this.” He picked up Ethan's map module, cracked open its back, and fixed an electron viewer over its microscopic circuit board. “We shook him down in the loading zone. See that little black dot? It was caused by a bead of acid in a polarized lipid membrane. When my scanner beam crossed it, it depolarized and dissolved, and burned out -- whatever had been there. Tracer for sure, probably an audio recorder as well. Very neat, tucked right in the standard map circuitry, which incidentally masked the bug's electronic noise with its own. He's an agent, all right.”

“Were you able to trace the link back to its home base?”

The captain shook his head. “No, unfortunately. To find it was to destroy it. But we blinded them. They don't know where he is now.”

“And who is 'they'? Terrence Cee?”

“We can hope.”

The leader, the one Ethan's kidnapper had named Colonel Millisor, grunted again, and approached Ethan to stare into his eyes. “What's your name?”

“Ethan,” said Ethan sunnily. “What's yours?”

Millisor ignored this open invitation to sociability. “Your full name. And your rank.”

This struck an old chord, and Ethan barked smartly, “Master Sergeant Ethan CJB-8 Urquhart, Blue Regiment Medical Corps, U-221-767, sir!” He blinked at his interrogator, who had drawn back in startlement.. “Retired,” he added after a moment.

“Aren't you a doctor?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ethan proudly. “Where does it hurt?”

“I hate fest-penta,” growled Millisor to his colleague.

The captain smiled coldly. “Yes, but at least you can be sure they're not holding anything back.”

Millisor sighed, lips compressed, and turned to Ethan again. “Are you here to meet Terrence Cee?”

Ethan stared back, confused. See Terrence? The only Terrence he knew was one of the Rep Center techs. “They didn't send him,” he explained.

“Who didn't send him?” Millisor asked sharply, all attention.

“The Council.”

“Hell,” the captain worried. “Could he have found himself some new backing, so soon after Jackson's Whole? He can't have had time, or the resources! I took care of every --”

Millisor held up a hand for silence, probed Ethan again. “Tell me everything you know about Terrence Cee.”

Dutifully, Ethan began to do so. After a few moments Millisor, his face reflecting increasing frustration, cut him off with a sharp chop of his hand.

“Stop.”

“Must have been some other fellow,” opined the cold captain. His leader shot him a look of exasperation. “Try another subject. Ask him about the cultures,” the captain suggested placatingly.

Millisor nodded. “The human ovarian cultures shipped to Athos from Bharaputra Biologicals. What did you do with them?”

Ethan began to describe, in detail, all the tests he'd put the material through that memorable afternoon. To his growing dismay, his captors didn't look at all pleased. Horrified, then mystified, then angry, but not happy. And he so wanted to make them happy....

“More garbage,” the cold captain interrupted. “What is all this nonsense?”

“Can he be resisting the drug?” asked Millisor. “Increase the dose.”

“Dangerous, if you still mean to put him back on the street with a gap in his memory. We're running short of time for that scenario to pass.”

“That scenario may have to be changed. If that shipment has arrived on Athos and been distributed already, we may have no choice but to call in a military strike. And deliver it in less than seven months, or instead of a limited commando raid to torch their Reproduction Centers, we'll be forced to sterilize the whole damned planet to be sure of getting it all.”

“Small loss,” shrugged the cold captain.

“Big expense. And increasingly hard to keep covert.”

“No survivors, no witnesses.”

“There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.” The granite chips sparked, and the captain looked uncomfortable. “Dose him.”

A prickle in Ethan's arm. Methodical and relentless, they asked him detailed questions about the shipment, his assignment, his superiors, his organization, his background. Ethan babbled. The room expanded and shrank. Ethan felt as if he were being turned inside out, with his stomach lining exposed to the world and his eyes twisted around and staring at each other. “Oh, I love you all,” he crooned, and retched violently.

He came to with his head under the shower. They gave him a different drug, replacing his euphoria with disjointed terror, and badgered him endlessly about Terrence Cee, the shipment, his mission, together and by turns.

Their frustration and hostility mounting, they gave him a drug that vastly increased the firing rate of his sensory nerves, and applied instruments to his skin in areas of high nerve density that left no mark but induced incredible agony. He told them everything, anything, whatever they asked -- he would gladly have told them what they wanted to hear, if only he could have guessed what it was -- but they were merciless and unmoved, surgical in their concentration. Ethan became plastic, frantic, until at last all sensation was obliterated in a series of uncontrollable convulsions that nearly stopped his heart. At this they desisted.

He hung in his chair, breath shallow and shocky, staring at them through dilated eyes.

The leader glared back, disgusted. “Damnation, Rau! This man is a total waste of time. The shipment that he unpacked on Athos is definitely not what was sent from Bharaputra's laboratory. Terrence Cee has pulled a switch somehow. It could be anywhere in the galaxy by now.”

The captain groaned. “We were so close to wrapping up the entire case on Jackson's Whole! No, damn it! It has to be Athos. We all agreed, it had to be Athos.”

“It may still be Athos. A plan within a plan -- within a plan....” Millisor rubbed his neck wearily, looking suddenly much older than Ethan's first estimate. “The late Dr. Jahar did too good a job. Terrence Cee is everything Jahar promised -- except loyal.... Well, we'll get no more out of this one. You sure that wasn't just a speck of dirt in that circuit board?”

The captain started to look indignant, then frowned at Ethan as though he were something he had found sticking to the bottom of his boot. “It wasn't dirt. But that's sure as hell not any agent of Terrence Cee's. Think he has any use as a stalking-goat?”

“If only he were an agent,” said Millisor regretfully, “it would be worth a try. Since he evidently isn't, he has no value at all.” He glanced at his chronometer. “My God, have we been at this seven hours? It's too late now to blank him and turn him loose. Have Okita take him out and arrange an accident.”

The docking bay was cold. A few safety lights splashed color on walls and silvered the silhouettes of silent equipment isolated in the thick stretches of dimness. The metal catwalks arched through a high, echoing hollowness, emerging from shadows, converging in darkness, a spider's skyway. Mysterious mechanical bundles dangled from the girders like a spider's preserved victims.

“This should be high enough,” muttered the man called Okita. He was almost as average-looking as Captain Rau, but for the compact density of his muscles. He manhandled Ethan to his knees. “Here. Drink up.

He forced a tube into Ethan's mouth and squeezed the bulb, for the nth time. Ethan choked, and perforce swallowed the burning, aromatic liquid. The dense man let Ethan drop. “Absorb that a minute,” Okita told him, as though he had some choice in the matter.

Ethan clung to the mesh flooring of the catwalk, dizzy and belching, and stared through it at the metal floor far below. It seemed to gleam and pulsate in slow, seasick waves. He thought of his smashed lightflyer.

Captain Rau's chosen henchman leaned against the safety railing and sniffed reflectively, also looking down. “Falls are funny things,” he mused. “Freaky. Two meters are enough to kill you. But I heard of a case where a fellow fell 300 meters and survived. Depends on just how you hit, I guess.” The bland eyes flickered over the bay, checking entrances, checking for Ethan knew not what. “They run their gravity a little light here. Better break your neck first,” Okita decided judiciously. “Just to be sure.”

Ethan could not press his fingers through the narrow mesh to cling, though he tried. For an insane moment he thought of trying to bribe his assassin-to-be with his Betan credit chit, that his captors had carefully returned to his pockets along with all their other contents before sending them off like a pair of lovers looking for a dark place to tryst. Like a drunk and his loyal friend trying to guide him back to his hostel before he wandered drunkenly into the maze of the station and got lost. Ethan reeked of alcoholic esters, and his mumbled whimperings for help had been unintelligible to the amused passers-by in the populated corridors. His tongue seemed less thick now, but this place was unpopulated in the extreme.

A surge of loyalty and nausea shook him. No. He would the with his purse intact. Besides, Okita looked remarkably unbribable. Ethan didn't think he'd even be interested in delaying his execution for a little rape. At least the money could be taken from his crumpled body and returned to Athos....

Athos. He did not want to the, dared not the. The terrifying scraps of conversation he'd overheard between his interrogators worried him like savage dogs. Bomb the Rep Centers? Banks of helpless babies crashing down, flames shooting up to boil away their gentle waterbeds -- he shuddered, and shivered, and moaned, but could not drive his half-paralyzed muscles to his straining will. Vile, inhuman plans -- so reasonably discussed, so casually dispatched... all insane here...

The dense man sniffed, and stretched, and scratched, and sighed, and checked his chronometer for the third time. “All right,” he said at last. “Your biochemistry should be muddled enough by now. Time for your flying lesson, boy-o.”