Juggler of Worlds (34 page)

He could arrange most things in the ARM. “What did you have in mind?”

“I heard about something that would be a real change.” She paused to drain her vodka tonic, then keyed an order for another. The bar was too noisy for speech-recognition mode. “There’s an ARM ship mothballed on Mars that needs shuttling to the Smithsonian. Fourth War vintage, believe or it not.” He must have looked puzzled, because she added, “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of the transfer. The museum folk think the Belters would object to moving it, which is probably the case. They’re keeping it quiet. Carlos told me. He knows because he’s on the museum’s board of directors.”

Mars was an unattractive bit of real estate: resource poor and too small to hold a useful atmosphere. Hardly anyone lived there. Mars was UN territory mostly because the Belters didn’t find it worth claiming. They did claim an interest in anything moving outside normal Sol-system shipping lanes; Mars qualified.

“That sounds like Belters,” Sigmund said.

“I don’t know.” Feather smiled. “Some Belters are all right.”

He remembered that glimpse of Feather wrapped around Beowulf. Feather going off-world for a while sounded better and better.

Fourth War made the ship almost Sigmund’s age. A dinosaur. It belonged in a proper museum. Spiting Belters was icing on the cake. “I’ll put in a word for you. Who do I talk to?”

“You’re a prince.” She leaned over the tiny table and kissed him. “Knowing that, I brought the information with me.”

Feather prodded her pocket comp, calling up requisitions for the ancient lander and an ARM transport ship,
Boy George
. “If this meets with your approval, just okay it. Carlos will take care of things from the Smithsonian end.”

Amid the din of the bar crowd, Sigmund had to resort to protocol gamma to make his voiceprint understood. Then Feather dragged him up to the karaoke stage, and the day got even wilder.

The advisory stared at Sigmund.
Boy George
was overdue. There had been no distress call, and its traffic-control transponder was not to be found.

Feather had played him like a fiddle. And for a fool.

It didn’t take long—a few comm calls, and netting into the hidden sensors at Carlos’s underwater lair—to confirm what Sigmund’s gut told him. Carlos and Feather were gone. So were Beowulf, Sharrol, and the children. In both homes, the agents Sigmund sent found the chaos of hurried packing. Carlos’s custom autodoc, the supposed nanotech marvel, was missing.

A big piece fell into place when Medusa dredged up the records on the ancient lander. “Feather neglected to mention it had full stealth gear.”

“I thought she was someone I could trust.” And that hurt.

So:
Boy George
hadn’t landed because the ancient lander had secretly retrieved the escapees. Lander and transport ship would rendezvous, and then they’d be off to—where? Wherever they were headed, they could land just as stealthily.

“I don’t understand,” Medusa said. “Why steal ships? Why not just emigrate? Bey isn’t even a Sol-system resident. And any world would happily welcome Carlos.”

The same question nagged at Sigmund. He crossed his living room, to peer into a holo cube of himself and Feather, taken at a happier time. “What was on your mind?” he asked.

Bey and Sharrol would have left Earth long ago, only she was a flat phobe. That’s why Carlos had had to father the children. “Here’s a theory. Of all of them, only Feather can’t emigrate. As an ARM, she knows too much. When she retires, she has to stay in UN territory. The problem is Feather wants to have children and she can’t. Not here. That’s why
she
wants to escape. To change names and disappear.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Medusa said.

“I know.” Sigmund began to pace. “Here’s a theory. She wants
Carlos
to father her children. She convinced Carlos to run with her.” She’d say the UN feels it owns his genes, and the new autodoc he was so proud of. She’d tell him her orders were to keep him on Earth. Why wouldn’t he believe her? Hence, he would skulk away with her, misguidedly grateful.

“But Carlos cares about Louis and Tanya”—and Sharrol, too—“and
wouldn’t go without them and Beowulf.” That required convincing Shaeffer he was no longer permitted to leave Earth. Sigmund presumed
he
was the ogre of whatever tale Feather spun. “Here’s where my imagination fails me. How was a rampant flat phobe persuaded she could handle the trip?”

The trip, followed by a new life—off-world. Sigmund broke into a cold sweat. He knew with grim certainty that resolving this mess would take him off-world. His misplaced trust had made possible the theft of the lander, and with it what was, effectively, Carlos’s kidnapping.

Perhaps all trust was misplaced. Sigmund intended, nonetheless, to rescue Carlos. He would need help to do it.

“Medusa,” Sigmund said. “Send a recall notice to Ander. We have a new mission.”

“Ta-da,” Ander said, dropping
Seeker
back to normal space.

A star shone straight ahead. It was older and hotter than Sol, but its yellow-white hue wasn’t too different from Sol at a like distance. Sigmund sighed with relief.

Ander had handled most of the piloting. He had talked as nonstop as on that long-ago trip to Jinx; this time, Sigmund welcomed it. He welcomed any distraction from the hungry nothingness. Frequent drops from hyperspace, compelled by Sigmund’s need for reassurance that the universe still existed, made an already-long trip interminable.

“Here goes nothing.” Ander tapped a button on the main console. A shadowy sphere formed in the deep-radar display, slowly expanding.

With an imminent return to hyperspace not weighing on him, Sigmund felt better than he had in weeks. He managed to work up some amusement. “You hope to find a stasis box
here?
It’s not like this is an unexplored system.”

“It can’t hurt.” Ander smiled. “And the reward if we
do
find one is enormous.”

Eons ago, two ancient races had waged a war of galactic extermination. Little remained of their epic struggle beyond a few artifacts preserved for eternity within stasis fields. Most items recovered from stasis containers defied comprehension. All embodied technology of frightening power. Conventional wisdom had it that the caches were weapons stockpiles. Not
surprisingly, every race in Known Space offered rewards for new stasis boxes. A man could live a long life in princely style on the standard ARM bounty for one. To Sigmund’s knowledge, it was a rare decade that saw the ARM making that payout.

Stasis fields reflected everything: light, radio, even the neutrino pulses emitted by deep radar. It was second nature for pilots approaching a solar system, any solar system, to do a deep-radar ping—and hence it was hardly a surprise that no undiscovered stasis containers awaited them in this long-settled system. Sigmund couldn’t begin to guess how many times this system had been scanned by optimists like Ander.

“Oh, well,” Ander said eventually. “Looking cost us nothing. Next stop, Fafnir.”

TRANSFER-BOOTH ABDUCTION also worked on Fafnir.

“You’ll be all right,” Nessus told the panicked man in the isolation booth.

The man spun toward the disembodied voice. He must not have liked his reflection in the one-way mirror. He shuddered once, and forced himself to be still. “Show yourself.”

That would hardly help. “You are Logan Jones, director of facilities at the Drake Hotel?”

“I am.” Suddenly, the man beat on the impregnable—well, under ordinary circumstances—walls. Fists certainly couldn’t harm the hull material. “I have no money worth mentioning. No one close to me does. You might as well release me.”

“All in good time, Mr. Jones.” Nessus paused to let that sink in. “My hope is to send you on your way somewhat wealthier for this inconvenience.”

Jones’s eyes narrowed. “In return for doing what?”

How much easier things would be if Ausfaller used transfer booths. He drifted from one ARM office to another, and through a few very public venues for variety, unapproachable. Any criminal force Nessus might hire to grab Sigmund might accidentally harm him, or worse, even if such action could be initiated in secrecy.

“We’re done,” Sangeeta Kudrin had said. “Sigmund is too smart. I’m tanj lucky he traced General Products money to Max Addeo, not me. Nessus, you can’t tempt me any longer.”

Nessus had answered, “But I can arrange for Ausfaller to learn about your past help … unless you continue to support me.”

She’d nodded, fear and misery writ plainly across her face. Information continued to flow, including the report that Ausfaller, finally, was going off-world again. New surroundings meant at least the possibility of safely approaching the ARM.

“In return for doing what?” Jones repeated. “Tell me!”

Nessus found himself half-wrapped into a ball. I’m terrified of meeting faces to face with Sigmund. He forced himself to unroll. “Two flatlanders, Sigmund Ausfaller and Ander Smittarasheed, will check into your hotel soon.”

That was to say, an abducted desk clerk said they had yet to check in. Despite Ausfaller’s head start, Nessus had arrived first. To hear Sangeeta, the marvel was that Ausfaller could drag himself aboard another ship. Nessus imagined
Seeker
dropping frequently from hyperspace.

“Look to your right, Mr. Jones. You are to hide one of those flat devices”—stepping discs—“under the carpet in each of their rooms before they arrive. For your services and silence, after I have electronically confirmed the discs are properly installed, you will receive ten thousand Earth stars.”

“Are they explosives?”

“They are teleportation devices,” Nessus said. “You’re standing on one just like them.”

Jones’s glance wavered between the booth floor and the nearby stacked discs. “The hotel
has
transfer booths. In the lobby, not in the guest rooms, but still …” Jones’s voice trailed off in confusion.

“I mean neither man any harm. You have my word. Do you want to know more than that?”

“All right,” Jones said. “I’ll do it.”

WELCOME TO FAFNIR.

The sign suspended over the customs counter made Sigmund’s skin crawl. He focused on his breathing. The gravity wasn’t far off, and he was indoors. You can cope, he told himself.

Behind him in the debarkation line Ander chatted up a pretty brunette passenger from a newly arrived starliner. Ander was always ready to mix business with pleasure.

The customs officer was a Kzin. His fur was mostly gray, with a jagged scar down one arm. A veteran, Sigmund guessed. Did
you
eat my parents?

Sigmund finally reached the head of the line. The Kzin gave Sigmund’s
civilian ident a desultory scan. “Welcome to Fafnir. What brings you here, Mr. Ausfaller?”

A year of increasingly desperate data mining. A large-caliber gun gone missing from an ARM weapons locker around the time of Feather’s disappearance. An odd police report on Fafnir’s public net, months old, of a man rescued at sea. His flotation vest had large, ragged holes front and back. The man claimed a sea creature had torn his jacket.

“Sightseeing,” Sigmund said.

“The water wars,” Ander piped up from behind. Water war was
the
Fafnir sport, an underwater free-for-all among mixed teams of people (wearing breathers) and dolphins. Ten teams chased or herded three native creatures sort of like turtles. It made a weird kind of sense on a world that was almost all ocean.

The ratcat wrinkled his muzzle. He apparently felt the same way as an Earth cat about water. “Your timing is good, sirs. A big tournament is coming up in Pacifica.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Sigmund picked up his luggage.

Once Ander cleared customs, they took their gear to the Arrivals area. Sigmund shook his head when Ander started toward a row of transfer booths. “We’re tourists, Ander. Let’s take a cab.” They got into a taxi floater. Sigmund told it, his eyes closed against the too-pale sky, “The Drake.”

“Excellent choice, sirs,” the AI said. “I’m told it’s one of our finest hotels.”

And most expensive, surely. Ander had done the research and picked it.

They settled into their rooms, the connecting doors open, Ander disapproving still of Sigmund’s insistence on rooms without ocean views. Sigmund ignored the complaints: The cityscape ten floors below felt almost like home. He began configuring a computer rack and display arrays. ARM sensors that Ander would be spreading would fill those displays soon enough.