The Chaos Crystal (68 page)

'I didn't open the rift that destroyed Amyrantha,' Declan reminded them tightly, 'I was pulled through against my will trying to stop Lukys from opening it.'

'Clearly the experience has left you emotionally scarred beyond redemption,' Maralyce noted wryly.

'The point is,' Lukys said, trying to get the meeting back on track, 'the exploration of the asteroid belt is about to cause us some serious problems.'

'What problems?' Declan asked. 'I've had no reports of problems.'

'That's because you're the boss, Declan, and underlings tend to be reluctant to report problems to bosses, particularly when they have a reputation for being
—'

'Nut jobs,' Cayal offered helpfully.

'What is the problem, then?' Arryl asked, sparing Cayal the briefest of smiles. She, at least, hadn't lost her sense of humour.

'The problem is that Declan sent out a mining exploration vessel and, as exploration vessels are wont to do, they went exploring.'

'I'm guessing they found something other than enough iron ore to keep the planet going for the next two hundred years.'

Cayal was a little surprised it was Kentravyon who came to that conclusion first, but then, Cayal reminded himself silently, Kentravyon was mad, not stupid.

'Oh, yes,' Lukys said. 'They found something.'

He dimmed the lights with the remote lying on the table beside his left hand and then swivelled his chair around to face the screen behind him, at the back of the room.

'This is a recording of the live feed that's been coming in from the AEVITAS ship,
Cape Canaveral, '
Coryna explained, as the picture resolved into a sharp 2D image on the screen. 'As you can see by the date stamp, this happened about two weeks ago. Lukys called this meeting about five minutes after we realised what they'd found.'

'Where did you get this?' Declan asked, his eyes fixed on the screen. 'More to the point,
how
did you get it?'

The Rodent sounded surprised and more than a little displeased that Lukys and Coryna had video from his exploration vessel, even before he'd seen it.

'According to our sources,' Coryna continued, 'the crew of the
Cape Canaveral
feared if
they
didn't release this information, it would be buried along with their discovery.'

'You really should vet your staff more carefully, Declan,' Lukys added with a slightly disapproving frown, idealism can be very awkward when there are practical business decisions to be made.'

Lukys sped the feed up a little as he spoke. They were watching a scan of an asteroid, the craft manoeuvring closer to a large, cigar-shaped lump of rock.

'How did you get this, Lukys?' Hawkes demanded.

it was sent to a young woman working in the AEVITAS command centre, I believe. Apparently, she's engaged to the ship's medic, who prevailed upon his

girlfriend to do the world a favour by releasing it before anybody could stop the news getting out. It'll hit most of the world's media outlets within a day, I'd say.'

News
of
what?
Cayal couldn't think of anything more boring than a live broadcast of a ship slowly scanning the surface of a dead lump of rock. He was about to say so when the image jerked a little. There was no sound with the feed, but something had obviously caught the eye of whoever was operating the camera. The focus moved. A speck on the horizon soon resolved into something larger. The camera zoomed in.

Across the table, Declan rose to his feet, leaning forward to examine the object more closely.

'Oh, my God,' he breathed almost inaudibly.

Cayal stared at the screen as the image resolved, as he realised what had made Hawkes utter such a curse.

'Tides,' Kentravyon said, squinting a little in the dim light of the conference room, is that
...?'

'Yes,' Lukys said, it is.'

'Dear God
...
it can't be!' Arryl gasped. Like the others, she was transfixed by the image on the screen. She sounded almost as gobsmacked as Hawkes.

Cayal didn't know what to think. He didn't know what to feel. The pressure in his chest was mostly in his mind, he told himself, not destiny catching up with him and slamming his heart with a sledgehammer.

He glanced at Hawkes, seeing his own confusion, shock and disbelief reflected in the spymaster's face.

'What are we going to do now?' Arryl asked as the image silently resolved into clarity on the screen.

'Retrieve the Chaos Crystal,' Lukys said, freezing the image.

'Do we know where it is?' Cayal asked, hoping he sounded as if that was all he cared about.

isn't it here in Paris?' Maralyce said, in a museum?'

Coryna shook her head. 'Our skull is in Chicago. It's part of a private collection. With the Tide up, it should be a simple matter to retrieve it from the owners.' She smiled at Hawkes. 'Tides, you're the richest man on Earth, Declan. You could probably buy it for us.'

'And then what?' Hawkes asked with a worried expression.

'We start making preparations for the next King Tide, son,' Lukys announced, turning from the screen to face the others, 'because as soon as the people of Earth see these pictures coming in from space and realise what it means, it will be time for us to move on.'

'Use the Chaos Crystal? That will destroy Earth,' Hawkes reminded them, quite unnecessarily, Cayal thought.

'Shame about that,' Lukys said with a shrug.

CHAPTER 64

The Med-Lab of the AEVITAS Deep Space Explorer
Cape Canaveral
was stark and white and carefully temperature controlled. And had been strictly sealed against all outside contamination ever since they'd found their prize floating in space. Randy checked the seal gauge on his suit one last time, making certain it was green all the way, before he opened the inner door. When he was satisfied it was safe, he palmed the lock with his gloved hand and waited as the clear glass door slid open with a faint hiss. He floated through, palmed the lock on the other side and went to check on his patient.

Dr Randy Marks was more than a little taken with his patient. Even unconscious, she was beautiful, and he'd spent hours in here, checking her over, wondering who she was.

Physically, she was flawless. Almost too flawless. He couldn't find a single fault with her physiology — except for her continued coma. He couldn't pinpoint her ethnicity, either. She was like one of those exotic creatures who cropped up in late-night ads for virtual sex who claimed — with a seductive giggle — to be of Irish/Chinese/African/Spanish extraction.

Nothing about her DNA gave. any hint of her origins, either.

Randy checked the monitors again, knowing that as usual, there would be nothing new, and then he turned to study her again. He dreamed about her sometimes. In fact, it was such a dream that had

brought him here tonight — although night was a relative term aboard ship — to check on her progress.

The mystery of the Asteroid Girl — as the media networks had dubbed her back on Earth when word got out about her existence — defied all logic. Randy had not been able to explain how she lived, how she had survived the incomprehensible cold of deep space, how she'd not imploded from exposure to a vacuum — or, indeed, how she had managed to get here at all.

They were checking, of course. But the
Cape
Canaveral
was the first Earth ship to make it out this far into the asteroid belt. Supposedly.

The scenario with the shortest odds was that she was the last survivor of a Russian ship sent out during the 1960s. Perhaps she was a cosmonaut. Perhaps her capsule overshot the moon and she ended up here in the asteroid belt.

Of course, for that to be the case there had to be a Russian capsule somewhere out there, too. And she'd been naked when they found her. Even assuming that was the case, any collision with an asteroid violent enough to destroy a space capsule and burn the clothes from a cosmonaut's body, wasn't going to leave the cosmonaut whole, unharmed and with not a mark on her.

And still alive over a century later, after breathing nothing but vacuum for all that time.

Although he knew it was pointless, Randy checked the monitors again. As they had shown since they found her, everything was perfect. Her heart beat like a metronome. Her breathing was deep and even. Her brain activity was slow but more than enough to indicate there was an awareness hiding somewhere, waiting for a chance to return.

Because the Asteroid Girl was so physically flawless, a few of the crewmen were speculating that she was really an android. Randy had scoffed at the suggestion. If you cut her, she bled like any other

human (as he'd discovered when he took blood for testing when they'd first brought her in), although she'd healed with unnatural speed.

Like everything else about this enigmatic woman, her blood work showed nothing but perfectly normal levels of everything that ought to be there and nothing that shouldn't.

That in itself was worrying. There wasn't the slightest trace of anything that might have chemically preserved this woman and stopped her from dying in space.

Randy looked up as the door hissed open and discovered another suited figure floating into the Med- Lab. The glare of the overhead lighting made the occupant's features invisible behind the plexiglass faceplate. The name on the suit's left breast, however, gave the newcomer's identity away.

'You're up late, Captain.'

So are you, Randy. Any change?'

He looked down at his patient and shook his head. 'Nothing. What brings you down here?'

'The company wants another series of photos sent through. Something a little less necrophiliac-ish than the last shots you sent, is how the publicity people put it.'

'Jeezus, can't they leave her in peace?'

'A beautiful woman found inexplicably alive and floating naked in space? The poor girl is never going to know another moment's peace as long as she lives.' The captain reached down and stroked her dark hair gently. 'Poor thing. She's square in the middle of a political storm she doesn't even know she's causing.'

'How bad is it?'

The captain shrugged. 'I've just been watching the news from Earth. Deke Hawkins has been on every channel who'll give him airtime, crowing about the value of exploration. Apparently, finding our girl here has made him a real hero, even though we all know

the bastard would have said nothing about this if we hadn't blown the whistle on him before he got a chance to quash the news.'

Randy nodded, glad now that he'd asked his fiancee, Sally, to risk her job by releasing the video onto the net.

'Of course,' the captain added, 'every nation on Earth with a space program is accusing the others of sending ships up here in secret to steal the resources of the Belt, now. Kinda glad we're up here with a transmit delay, so they can't drag us into the argument.'

'They're assuming she's a survivor of a failed mission?'

The captain nodded. 'That's the money bet. I hear there's several religious cults started up, too, who are already worshipping her image. One of them believes she's the Virgin Mary.'

'She's not.'

'Well, yes, Randy, I did sort of work that out for myself.'

He smiled. 'Actually, ma'am, I meant she's not a virgin.'

'How do you know?' 'I checked.'

He couldn't see her face clearly because of the reflection of the lights on the plexiglass, but he could imagine the look the captain was giving him. 'I see.'

'You ordered a thorough physical exam when we found her, ma'am,' he explained, before she could jump to the wrong conclusion, 'I took thorough to mean an external
and
internal examination.'

That seemed to satisfy the captain. 'How old is she, do you think?'

'Hard to say. There's no deterioration in her cells. She has all her adult teeth, so she's not a child, but as for her actual age — anywhere between fifteen and fifty. Take your pick.'

'I'm fifty,' the captain reminded him with a small groan. 'And trust me, son, I'm in nothing like the shape this girl is in. Still, the trashy gossip sites will love her. She's pretty enough to pique their interest.'

'Because God knows, the scientific miracle of her survival is only a mild curiosity,' Randy said, shaking his head, it's so much more important that she's pretty. God, can't they let her alone? At least until she wakes up?'

is she
going
to wake up?' the captain asked. 'She's been like this for a while now, you know. Maybe she's doomed to spend the rest of her life in a coma? That sort of thing has happened before, you know.'

Randy shrugged.
'To
be honest, there's no medical reason why she's
not
awake. Other than, you know
...
the whole we-found-her-floating-naked-in-space thing.'

'Well, I don't suppose I have to tell you to call me if anything changes?'

'Not really, ma'am,' Randy said. 'No.'

The captain pushed off the side of the bed and floated toward the door, saying something Randy didn't catch, which was odd, because the suits were radio-miked and they'd all learned the hard way that even the most inaudible comment was recorded for posterity by the ultra-sensitive pickup.