Spin the Sky (36 page)

More people came filing in. Cesar realized after a while they were the same people as before, only now they talked instead of listening.

Larry shouted even louder.

The scene became like one of those bar fights where the music is too loud to really understand what’s going on and everybody is shouting but no one hears a word. Cesar knew by the glances he was getting that these people expected him to play a part in this unfolding drama. He tried to look stern and keen, hoping that will suffice. His mind felt stuck in a loop of questions about Penelope and Trevor.

Cesar made an effort to focus on what was happening around him, but it all seemed just further confirmation of what he already suspected. Uri Mach ran the Seven Skies Trading Company fleet of cargo vessels all over the skies, but no one knew where their base colony was located. Seven Skies was shady at best and little more than a gang with ships at the worst.

Lately, Uri had been saying that Spacers needed to arm themselves against the Earthers, that maybe it was the Spacers’ turn to own a piece of the Earth.

People showed Larry and Cesar reports, receipts and Ether messages. The Ex-Austrian Engineering Complex has been behind on its work lately and outright refusing jobs, saying they were too busy. The EEC was working on something big, but no one knows what. They were making large orders for equipment, but no one knew why. One man reported that his cousin was complaining about a large order of industrial lubricant that Asner bought and then returned, screaming that it was inadequate.

Equipment has been seen on the Moon and signs of a settlement, but any ship that came in for a close view saw nothing out of the ordinary.

The Moon had never been colonized. Cesar tries to remember why. Before the Spacer War, no one would think of violating the Moon Treaty for fear of antagonizing the Earthers. The Moon Treaty was created to limit the size of military bases in the sky and leave the Moon for all humanity.

In practice, that old treaty only kept permanent bases off the Moon. Many colonies used the Moon as a dumping ground for old vehicles or obsolete projects that they might want to pick up later for spare parts. The Earthers complained that the Moon glittered with Spacer trash. In the orbitals, they maintained that a true Spacer wouldn’t know what the Moon looked like from “down there.”

After the War, there wasn’t any reason not to put a settlement on the Moon other than having to wade through all the trash, but nobody tried it. If they thought about it, Spacers would probably consider putting a colony on the Moon to be rude. The Moon was there for all of them. Also, there was that old urban legend about how anything done to the Moon would cause the tides on Earth to go all wonky and kill everybody. Most Spacers didn’t hate the dirt-lovers
that
much.

More people wandered in and out.

Cesar kept trying to call Trevor, but Lazar House communications had gone from repeating a pre-recorded message about riots to being totally offline. All he got was static. The Ether rumors said the riots on Lazar House were over and negotiations were going really well, but that didn’t make any sense to Cesar. Why would they turn off their Ether?

Cesar looked around and realized there were more than a hundred people milling around outside Larry’s shack. Until that moment, he assumed they were talking to all the crackpot conspiracy nuts on Ithaca, but there were too many people and the whole thing was way too organized.

In an effort to make sense of what was going on around him, Cesar listened to the angry conversations around him. He learned that there were mutterings on Earth about how belligerent some of the Spacers have been lately. Like maybe the Spacers have something new, something that will turn them from a stubborn set of strange beggars into a threat to be reckoned with.

Then a sweaty anxious little man showed up with two large Ithaca farmers half-dragging him into the room. The little man looked around anxiously. Cesar knew this guy looked familiar, but it took him a minute to place the face.

“Look, I just sold them some nukes. That’s all,” protested the little man. The name “Finomus” popped into Cesar’s mind. This was the man with the platypig. Cesar remembered the conversation he overheard that night he kissed his wife for the first time in fifteen years. Cesar stepped forward. He wanted to hear what this Finomus man had to say.

Just then, old Mathis appeared in front of him, exuding a cloud of alcohol-soaked breath and looking pleased with himself.

“Found your kid,” the old man cackled. Then he shook a grubby finger in Cesar’s face. “And don’t think you fooled me, sneaking into Ithaca like that, young man. Not for a minute. Old Mathis doesn’t miss a trick.”

Cesar was almost positive that Mathis was totally fooled by his re-entry into Ithaca, but doesn’t say so. “Where’s Trevor?” he asked instead, steadying the old man with a hand.

“Oh, he’s up at Lazar House,” the old man replied breezily. “Saw him myself. He’s learning to fly some old wreck and flirting with a little plague girl. Trevor’s fine.”

Cesar closed his eyes, saying a silent prayer for patience and then asked through his clenched teeth, “And why didn’t you bring him home with you?”

Mathis scowled back at him, not appreciating the tone. “Don’t get snippy with me, young man. I’m not the one that dumped him off on the Synthlep colony, am I?”

Cesar apologized, asking after Trevor again.

Mathis looked more inclined to go wandering about the room to see what was going on. He dismissed Cesar’s question with a wave. “Trevor said he was coming home in your ship. He’ll be here in a few hours.”

That was all Cesar could get out of Mathis. The old man shook him off with a curse, stumbling off to where Larry was holding court by the tequila still. Cesar watched his father interrogate Mathis briefly before turning his attention back to the crowd. Well, if Larry wasn’t concerned then Cesar could wait a few hours.

A group of cowgirls hustled in with a man in a Nullball jersey, hogtied and covered in lipstick. People swarmed around the Nullball player angrily. Cesar could make out the Seven Skies logo on the player’s jersey.

He wanted to get closer to see what they would do with the player, but that’s when Argos showed up talking about how Penelope went off to the Nullball Tournament with Asner and wasn’t he their new arch enemy?

Cesar tries to get information out of Argos while ignoring the whoops and screams behind him as they question the Nullball player. Cesar realizes he is clenching his jaw so hard he can taste blood. He forces himself to stop.

Trying for a calm tone, he asks Argos, “Would you just tell me everything you saw? Did Penelope look worried or upset? Was Asner maybe pointing a gun at her from under his clothes?”

Argos scratches his chin and thinks hard. “Well, now that you mention it, she did look pretty upset, like maybe she’d been crying again. And he was kind of dragging her along.”

Cesar feels rage burning through his veins like a shot of whisky for the soul. It drowns out all reason with the throbbing song of madness.

Asner has taken his wife. The man dares to kidnap his woman? This ends now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

P
enelope feels awful when she wakes up, groggy and disoriented. All she can think is that she must have done something truly stupid to feel this bad. Her head feels like something crawled in there and died. Her eyes aren’t quite tracking the way she’d like them too.

She stares blearily at three Asners and really doesn’t want to see any of them. She closes her eyes but the spinning doesn’t stop.

“I figured it out, Penelope,” Asner is saying. “A way to end war. I actually made a machine that will end war.”

She squints in his general direction and the three Asners do a crazy dance through her field of vision.

“That’s very nice,” she tells him. “Now, how about you let me go?” For emphasis, she pulls against the tape holding her in the chair, but Asner is in full rant mode and not paying attention to the comforts of his audience.

The low gravity isn’t doing her skewed vision any favors. The small room she’s held in has the classic industrial strength bioplastic fittings you see in mass-produced Spacer ships or orbitals. Homemade projects might have bac-wood or biosteel. Penelope lets her mind wander around with those facts, but it doesn’t get anywhere with them. This bare little room looks like typical ship’s quarters. It is a small room with a fold-up bed, pullout sink and collapsible toilet. She could be anywhere.

Her hair drifts into her eyes and she reflexively tries to reach her hand up to push it away before remembering that her hands are bound with tape. Penelope looks at Asner, trying to decide if she can find a way to get him to at least free her hands. Asner continues droning on about something or other, but it’s just giving her a headache. She blows at her hair until it drifts away from her eyes.

Asner looks more than a little crazed right now so she decides she’ll just wait until he pauses to bring up the whole “incarcerated against my will” topic again. That will give her some time to pull herself together.

“You were always against the War, against violence,” says Asner. “I admire that about you. And I agree there should be no war. My family was killed when the Earthers attacked. Earther soldiers butchered my brothers and their families. That should never happen again, Penelope. I figured out a way to do it.”

Penelope feels the throbbing pain on the back of her head that says someone hit her hard enough to scramble her brains for a bit, hopefully not permanently. She has a strong feeling that she is no longer on Ithaca. It just smells wrong. Foreign. Perhaps she’s on a ship? No, there is definitely some gravity. Could she be on a foreign orbital? How long was she out?

Asner continues on, “They always say the best defense is a good offense. We’ll have the Moon Array online within days and then the Earthers won’t be able to stop us. They’ll pay for what they did.”

Penelope swallows a bitter laugh. The first time she leaves Ithaca in almost two decades and she does it bound and gagged. It figures. At least Asner removed the gag.

Pacing, Asner says, “The hardest part was building something that big without detection. We are still so vulnerable. But as soon as we have the final ingredient, Spacers will never be exposed again. And not just from Earth. You never know when aliens might show up. They could be a threat, too.”

She’s been trying to ignore him, but that is too much. Penelope glares at him so hard that he finally stops talking and really looks at her.

“What?”

“Seriously, Asner? You are trying to tell me that assaulting and kidnapping me was necessary for Spacer defense against
aliens
? Seriously?”

Asner scowls. “You are looking at this incorrectly, my dear. I am disappointed.” Penelope rolls her eyes, but he’s pacing again and doesn’t see her.

“Look,” she says, as calmly and persuasively as possible. “My head is killing me and I may throw up. This chair is incredibly uncomfortable. I want to listen to you, but I can’t concentrate like this.”

Penelope licks her lips and hopes she looks as pathetic and vulnerable as she feels.

“Well, if I am to make you understand then I must let you listen,” Asner says gruffly, his eyes lingering on her chest. It makes Penelope’s skin crawl, but he pulls out a blade and cuts the tape.

Before she has a chance to bolt for it, Asner quickly retapes her hands to the bed frame. Taped to a bed is not her preferred location in any room alone with Asner, but it is considerably more comfortable than the chair. Twisting her wrists just slightly, she feels confident that, given enough time, she can get out of the tape around her hands. She focuses on this task.

“So,” she says brightly, desperate to keep Asner’s mind off the bed. “Tell me about what you are making. I guess you and Uri are making… what? A weapon?”

The man smiles. “Yes, exactly. It is necessarily a secret project so that the Earthers do not try to stop us before it is done. Also, it will be easier to explain to the other colonies once we have it working and they see the benefits of it.”

Penelope asks, “But what exactly is it?”

“I call it the Moon Array,” Asner says dramatically. Penelope does her best to look impressed.

He sits down on the bed and keeps talking, “I mostly design solar sails, but my true passion is lasers. I designed some portable lasers for Uri. We started talking about how to defend Spacers against another Earther attack. You know it will only be a matter of time until they covet our freedom again.”

He pauses, before confessing, “Uri maintains a covert base for his Seven Skies Company on the Moon. A very private person, Uri Mach is. Regrettably, he is also a very ruthless and selfish. But is not the whole idea of true peace that the lion shall lie down with the lamb? Uri is a lion and we must learn how to tame him if we want peace.”

Penelope nods and makes encouraging noises while twisting her wrists slowly back and forth. She wonders if there is such a thing as space madness, because everyone around her is going totally crackers this week.

“It became apparent that Uri and I were of the same mind,” Asner says. “Except he thought the answer was to produce a great many of the mobile lasers I made for him. I showed him how we could focus them for even more power.”

Asner explains that he made Uri a dozen or so robot-controlled laser cannons mounted on moon buggies to patrol the Moon near Uri’s base like high-tech guard dogs. Uri hid his base on the dark side of the Moon to avoid detection by Earthers. The robots swarm out to attack any ships that get too close.

Apparently, Asner also designed a polycarbonate lens as a focuser for all those lasers. The laser buggies will line up and fire at the focuser, combining the strength of all the small beams to make one extremely powerful laser capable of scorching a hole practically through the Earth.

“The only hindrance in construction of the focuser was finding a large amount of lubricant for the torque iris lens needed to concentrate the laser beams,” Asner admitting, like this was a personal failing. “We tried everything, but the only thing with the right properties that holds up in hard vac is modified beef tallow and, Penelope dear, you have the only source of beef tallow in the spheres that will work. Finomus says there’s something about the genetic make-up of your cows that makes them special.”