Infinity Beach (17 page)

“Don’t know,” said Solly. “Depends how you define
near
. If you mean inside a planetary system, I’d say it’s
real
unlikely.”

“Then this isn’t right. They have to go sight-seeing. They have to decide to come out near one of the seven stars.”

Solly shook his head. “It’s not going to happen.”

She watched Tripley leave the pilot’s room, watched Emily and Kane belt down. The AI counted off the minutes, and then they sailed out of hyperspace. They were in a heavily populated area of Orion, and the sky was filled with great clouds of stars. She couldn’t see enough of it to determine whether there was a nearby sun.

They fast-forwarded. Kane used two hours to make his repairs. Then he alerted the others they were ready to go, and they began the acceleration toward the jump. Twenty-five minutes later they slipped uneventfully back into hyperspace and started the long journey to Sky Harbor.

The eastern sky was beginning to brighten, and a brisk wind rattled the windows. “I just don’t believe it,” she said.

He shut off the computer, glanced meaningfully at her, slid back on the sofa, and closed his eyes. “Looks like it was all a false alarm,” he said.

Her commlink woke her. “Kim?” It was Matt’s voice. Flat. That set off alarms. “Where are you?”

“In Salonika,” she said.

“Were you planning on checking in any time soon?”

“I assumed you’d call if you needed me, Matt.” She kept it on audio.

“I need you.”

She sighed. “Okay. What are we doing?”

“A delegation of physicians and surgeons is coming in tomorrow. We’ve offered them a tour of the Institute.”

“Okay. I’ll be there. What time?”

“Ten.”

“I’m on my way.”

“It’s an opportunity to do some good public relations. Media will be here. And Johnson.”

World’s leading cosmologist. Guarantees lots of attention.

“We’re going to spring for lunch. I’d like you to accompany the tour and talk to them over the salad.”

She listened, said she’d take care of it, and started to disconnect.

“I’m not through yet.”

“What’s wrong, Matt?”

Solly knocked softly and stuck his head into the room. She waved him in.

“Have you been nosing around Sara Baines? Asking questions?”

“Sara Baines? Who’s Sara Baines?” She looked desperately at Solly.

His lips formed the words
Deny everything
.

“Tripley’s
grandmother
, for God’s sake. We got another complaint from him. Says somebody was out to interview
his grandmother for a book. She can’t remember the title. But I don’t guess Tripley trusts you very much. He showed her your picture.”

“And?”

“She says no. But Tripley thinks it was you. Was it?”

“I guess I did it, Matt.”

She heard him let out his breath. “Kim, what am I going to do with you? Are you determined to lose your job? We’ve been through this before, and it’s not going to happen again. You will keep away from Tripley. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you.”

“Don’t take that tone with me. This is your career you’re playing with. If there’s a third round of this nonsense, I’m going to be forced to put you out on the street.”

“Matt, I don’t really have a choice—”

“You damned well do, Kim. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but your sister’s a long time gone. Ease up, okay? For everybody’s sake.”

She was staring up at the imager. “Matt, we may have found one of Yoshi’s shoes in Tripley’s villa. At Severin.”

That got a long pause. Then: “You got a DNA match?”

“No. All we have is that it’s her size. But it’s a
grip shoe
.”

She could hear Matt thinking it over. “That sounds like lawsuit country. Kim, we’re talking about something that happened a long time ago. You’re grasping at straws.”

“I know,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

“He’s right,” Solly said.

She looked at him. “We need to find the body,” she said.

“Yoshi’s? How do you plan to do that?”

“It might not be all that hard. She wore gold.”

Kim caught the red-eye back to Seabright and addressed the physicians and surgeons at the Institute breakfast. That went well, but Matt remarked quietly that it was good to see her again. His tone was simultaneously worried and accusing. He was always good at making her feel guilty. She explained that life had got hectic, and got away before he could press her. Afterward she went directly to the station and took the first train to Wakonda, home of the University of Amberlain. Solly was waiting for her in the physics department, where he’d borrowed a handheld sensor unit that the technicians were configuring to scan for gold.

When asked by the lab people if she’d uncovered a vein, Kim nodded and observed that she and Solly were about to acquire some serious wealth.

The unit tested to a range of about thirty meters for the quantity of gold one would expect to find in a bracelet roughly equivalent to the one Yoshi had been wearing.

Afterward, they caught the Snowhawk, which connected a half dozen cities across the central tier of the Republic,
from Seabright on the east, through Eagle Point, to Algonda on the west.

They retired into a first-class cabin and were back reviewing the
Hunter
logs minutes after the train left the station.

The sun was already down as they eased out of Wakonda Central, picking up speed until the landscape blurred and eventually faded into the darkness. Solly sprawled leisurely in a padded chair; Kim sat on a cross bench, her arms wrapped around drawn-up knees.

They went back to the point at which the
Hunter
had dropped out of hyperspace, and watched Kane work on the AFS.

They ran the segment again, slower this time.

Kane finished up, notified the AI, and disappeared off-screen. Forty minutes later, scrubbed down and in a fresh uniform, he arrived in the pilot’s room. Emily came up and they surveyed the enormous star-clouds.

“In there somewhere,”
Emily said, dreaming of celestials.

“Maybe,”
said Kane. He was invariably more forthright with her than with Tripley.
“But unless you’re damned lucky, you’ll need more than a single lifetime to find them.”

She sat down in the right-hand seat.

“Eight minutes to jump,”
said the ship.

Kane pushed back and let his eyes half close.
“We’ve been fortunate,”
he said.
“This is the first serious technical problem we’ve had in, what, a dozen or more missions? That’s not bad.”

She looked across at him, her spirits visibly sagging. Emily did not want to go home.
“A lot more than a dozen. Markis, how long do you think it’ll take to make the repairs?”

He considered it.
“They’ll pull the unit and replace it. A couple of days. No more than that. But the ship needs some general maintenance too before it goes out again.”

They continued in that vein while the AI counted down. The minutes ticked off and the conversation subsided while
Kane turned his attention to the console. The power buildup that routinely preceded a jump became audible.

At thirty seconds, the main engines shut down and
Hunter
went into glide mode.

“There’s nothing here,” said Solly, somehow disappointed, as if they hadn’t already seen the sequence, didn’t already know nothing was going to happen. The jump procedure was now too far along to stop. If a celestial had pulled alongside and waved, they could have done nothing.

When the
Hunter
made its transition to hyperspace, Emily was staring out the window at the stars.

The Snowhawk was passing through a valley. Two of Greenway’s moons were in the sky, drifting among wisps of cloud. Dark slopes rose on either side. Treetops swayed in the blast of the passing train. Away to the north she could see the glow of a town.
“Can’t really expect to hit it right away,”
said Markis.
“You have to be patient.”

“We’ve
been
patient.”

“Okay,” said Solly. “That does it for the celestials. Now we’re just looking for a motive for murder.” He looked at her. “You think if someone killed them, Yoshi and Emily, he wouldn’t have taken the gold?”

“If it was a burglar, something like that, sure he would have. But Tripley’s the prime suspect. You think he’d kill over some jewelry?”

“You really think Tripley did it?”

“No. But I can’t bring myself to believe they were killed by a robber. Wherever Yoshi is, she’s wearing her gold.”

Kim and Solly fast-forwarded through more conversations, all routine, mundane, what they would do when they got home, how they would spend the unexpected time. Tripley made it clear that he planned to mount the next mission as quickly as time permitted, and that he hoped to retain the services of the current crew. They didn’t hear him say it explicitly, but that the sentiments had been delivered beyond the range of the recording devices was apparent from the
conversations in the pilot’s room. Everyone planned to return.

All this took the edge off the frustration, particularly for Yoshi, who’d come as an intern and who must have been worried that she might not be invited back. The weeks passed, and the general morale recovered and was reasonably high when they returned at last and docked at Sky Harbor.

Yoshi told Kane that she would stay the night with Emily at the Royal Palms in Terminal City, and then spend some time with her family until they were ready to try again. There was no indication, no nonverbal signal, that she was not telling the truth.

Tripley promised to hustle the repairs along. He estimated a relaunch in about a month. Was that satisfactory for Kane?

It was.

Tripley informed him that he would receive a bonus for his performance. Then he left Kane alone in the pilot’s room.

The captain spent a few minutes with the instruments, collected his sketchbook, and left. The imager blinked off.

It was over.

“No matter how many times we run it,” said Solly, “it’s going to keep coming out the same way. Nothing happened.”

The flight home had required forty-one days. They went back and looked again, with no idea what they were hoping to find. When Tripley spoke of Yoshi, he showed a genuine affection for her. And he seemed far too gentle to perpetrate either physical or psychological violence against anyone. His clone-son, thought Kim, was a different order of beast altogether.

They reviewed Kane’s conversations with the other crew members, listening, moving on. Kim watched Emily as the days ran down, thinking how luminous her sister looked, how energetic she was, how driven by the great search. And she was within days of losing her life.

But gradually an inconsistency emerged. She watched the interplay between the captain and Emily, went back to their conversations in the first part of the mission, and compared the earlier with the later. “Do you see it?” she asked Solly.

He leaned forward and squinted at the screen. She’d frozen the images, a few days from the end of the voyage. Kane and Emily had been talking about getting more serious about their physical conditioning programs on the next flight.

“What?” said Solly. “I don’t see anything.”

“What happened to the passion?”

“
What
passion?”

“Do they sound like lovers to you?”

“They
never
sounded like lovers to me.”

“Solly, they were hiding it before. Maybe from the others, or from the imager. Maybe from each other. Now it’s just not there.”

“Maybe they had a fight. We can’t really see very much, you know.”

“No, it’s not like that. There’s no tension between them on the return flight. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d see in the aftermath of a breakup. It’s simply a cordial relationship between congenial colleagues. Not at all the same thing.”

The train was pulling into the outskirts of Eagle Point.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

Kim shut down the program but she stared at the screen until the train stopped moving. “I’m not sure,” she said.

They checked into the Gateway and Kim stayed up most of the night replaying the conversations between Kane and Emily. Outbound, the captain’s depth of passion was quite evident. He loved her sister. She could see it in his eyes, in his tone, in his every gesture. She wondered what the interaction between the two was like when they were away from the recording devices.

But it had changed during the return. Not because, as Solly had suggested, they’d had a falling-out. In that event
they’d have been cold in each other’s company. The body language would be exaggerated. She’d see resentment in one or the other. Or both.

But none of that was present. Their mutual regard was precisely what one might expect from good friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

Again and again, she listened to their final conversation, recorded during the approach to Sky Harbor:

“Thanks, Markis.”

“For what?”

“For getting us back. I know we put some pressure on you to continue the mission.”

“It’s okay. It’s what I would have expected.”

They were on the night side of Greenway. The space station looked like a lighted Christmas ornament. Its twin tails were also illuminated, one reaching toward Lark, the other dipping into the clouds.

“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”

Kim shook her head. The remark was artificial; the voice contained all the passion of a cauliflower.

“You too, Emily. But I guess we’ll be back at it in a couple of weeks.”

“I hope so. I’m getting tired coming home empty all the time.”

The station grew larger in the screens and then the
Hunter
was approaching one of the docks. People were visible in the operational sections and a spacesuited technician waited for them with an umbilical. There was a slight bump as the ship came to rest. A bank of console lights blinked furiously before settling on amber.

“Time to go home,”
said Kane. They unbuckled and left the pilot’s room, Emily leading the way. If they said anything else to each other, it was lost.

Solly had come out of his bedroom during the last minutes. He was wrapped in a muted yellow robe. “So now,” he said, “Kane stays with the ship for a few hours to take care of the paperwork. Then he goes down to Terminal City and checks into a hotel. Tripley flies home. Yoshi and your sister
flag down a cab, tell it to take them to the Royal Palms, but they don’t arrive.”

“That’s the scenario.”

“But we think Yoshi somehow or other got to the Severin Valley. Which probably means Emily was there too.”

“Probably.”

“Okay.” It was still dark outside. “If we’re going to go looking tomorrow, we’d better get some rest.”

They used the network to rent diving gear and a collapsible boat from the Rent-All Emporium, and a flyer from Air Service. Then they went down to a late breakfast. The flyer, with the equipment inside, was waiting for them when they finished.

Kim tied the gold sensor to an input jack, through which it would interface with the onboard tracking systems, displaying results on an auxiliary screen.

At a few minutes after noon they lifted off the roof of the Gateway and turned south toward Severin. The day was cold and cloudless.

“How’d it happen,” Solly asked as they flew through bright skies, “that both Kane and Tripley lived in the same small town?”

“Tripley didn’t
live
there,” Kim said. “Severin was a tourist spot, and he vacationed there. He also used it as a retreat during the off-season. He liked the solitude.

“Kane moved there in 559, when he inherited a villa from a relative who’d admired his war exploits. He was already beginning to make a name for himself as an artist, and he decided it would be an ideal place to work. The town only had a thousand or so people then, so it’s no surprise that the two eventually met. When Tripley went looking for someone to pilot
Hunter
, Kane was at hand.”

Mount Hope dominated a group of peaks to the southwest. They were coming down the Severin, flying low, barely a thousand meters off the ground. This stretch of the river wasn’t navigable: it descended toward the dam through a series of cataracts. On either side, thick forest advanced to
the water’s edge. They saw an occasional farmhouse, inevitably dilapidated. The landscape was deep in snow.

Kim watched a freight train moving west. It was gliding just over the treetops, and the trees reacted to its passing in the manner of a bow wave, parting in front, closing behind. It was headed toward the Culbertson Tunnel, which would take it through the solid wall of mountains. The tunnel wasn’t visible from her angle, but she saw the train begin to slow down as it made its approach.

She hadn’t been able to give the flyer the exact coordinates of Tripley’s villa, so she switched to manual as they glided out over Remorse. The lake was a sheet of glass.

Solly activated the sensor. The display gave them groups of configuration data, blanked, and then went green. Negative return.

Ahead, Tripley’s villa sat on its lonely hilltop.

The place felt as if it were pinched off from the real world, like a black hole, a singularity where the laws of physics were slightly warped. Where footprints vanished.

They descended to treetop level and moved in directly over the roof. The display remained green.

The utility building showed nothing.

She circled the immediate area, keying off the villa. Most of the old Tripley property was new-growth forest and heavy underbrush. Its fences were down, and a group of spruce trees on the east side looked dead.

Next she extended the search several kilometers west, flying a crosshatch pattern, scanning as far as the ridge that had protected the town on the night of the explosion. She checked along the summit, surveyed the far slope and the woods beyond until the ground got rocky.

Using the map, she came back and flew over the town. The center of Severin Village was in the water. She went down until the treads got wet. The display remained green.