The Venus Belt (32 page)

“You’re not—” I added, but got cut off at the pass.

“That makes sense,” said Karyl, I think to Lucy, even if it didn’t.

“One at a time,” Clarissa finished for the three of us, “but first, let me take care of my slightly under-nourished husband.” She untangled he
r
self, stepped out into the hall to retrieve her medikit and an armful of other junk. She extracted something that resembled a blood-pressure cuff, wrapped it around my arm, and plugged its cable into my suit controls. “Just as I su
s
pected,” my personal Healer observed, “pretty close to empty—though not nearly enough to explain some of these symptoms.” She pushed a button on the wraparound. “We’ll pump nutrients directly into your sy
s
tem, and you’d better take these tablets—watch it, dear, they swell in the stomach.”

She was right. They
were
swell in my stomach. I burped, washing them down with something from a flask that Karyl provided. Now I knew what was different about Clarissa, but wasn’t sure I wanted to ask about it.

Not here, anyway.

”That’s what I was tryin’ t’say,” insisted Lucy, running an expert mani
p
ulator around the ragged doorframe. “Sounds more like anoxia, an’ I think I’ve figgered out why.”

“Why?” in three-part harmony, yours truly off the pitch a little.

Our semi-cybernetic sidekick pointed to the formerly molten seam along the door. It had been
yanked
inward, producing little horizontal steel icicles. “Y’used up all th’ air in here, dummy, that’s why! Musta been pret’near hard vacuum by th’ time we cut our way in.”

Pretty impressive testimony to the smartsuit, creating that kind of vac
u
um, then protecting its wearer so it went unnoticed. “You’re right, I
did
use up all the air, several times, in fact. I just zipped up my suit and—”

“An’ waited while it manufactured more? Lemme see yer status lights, boy—’swhat I thought, empty as a bureaucrat’s braincase. Winnie, even
m
i
crotanks
have bottoms, an’ it looks like you started scrapin’ ‘em two, mebbe three days ago.” She turned very slowly, surveying the cell, then pointed toward the sink. “
That’s
where yer oxy was comin’ from, that little drip of water, an’ yer own recycled sweat. But it never came in fast enough, so—”

I interrupted with a brilliant thought: “So the leftover
hydrogen
is what explo— No, that blast was
inward,
damn it!”

Karyl nodded vigorously. “These walls never were hydr
o
gen-proof—sloppiest metalwork I’ve seen in years. But it was tight enough to vacuum-boil water, and the door came crashing in as soon as it was soft around the edges.”

I shook my head, only half hearing him. I was still confused about Clarissa. She caught me staring at her middle.

Her lovely, slim,
unpregnant
middle.

“Don’t worry, darling,” she told me, patting my hand, “I’m fine, and our daughter’s safely tucked away in stasis at Mulligan’s Bank and Grill. I’ll finish her as soon as we get home—which reminds me, you’d better take this—” She handed me my gunbelt, Webley, Rezin, spare ammun
i
tion, and all. “We found it in a sort of office, with Lucy’s and a lot of others. Then I knew for certain you were here.”

Dead or alive.

I checked the charge level and gave the rotor knob a twist, flipping a projectile into place behind the starter-coil. “And what was Voltaire M
a
laise doing while you were rummaging through his ill-gotten armory?” And hadn’t we better be moving along, I thought, before he found out he’d had visitors?

“Voltaire Malaise the newsman? What’s
he
got to do with—”

“Everything. I think he’s J.V. Tormount.” I strapped my weapons on and tucked the .25 away, explaining what I’d gone through in Malaise’s o
f
fice.

Lucy sputtered and fumed. “But Winnie, don’tcha remember? I was standin’ right behind ya while they worked y’over—paralyzed by a tenth-bit electronic thingummy!” Okay, so it
hadn’t
been a filing cabinet that thug was leaning against. I didn’t remember being beaten up in the office—hadn’t it all happened out in the hallway?—which goes to show you som
e
thing. I’m not sure what.

By the time I finished my story, Clarissa was having trouble contro
l
ling her lower lip. I think half of it was sheer outrage. “Well,” she finally ma
n
aged after a couple of false starts, “the place seems deserted now, what we’ve seen of it. We heard Lucy from the office and came running.”

“You
heard
her?” I looked my cone-shaped fellow prisoner over. It was like she’d been scaled to the summit by a thousand tiny alpinists with ice axes. “What the hell
happened
to you, anyway?”

Her answer should have seeped out through a sheepish grin. “Got plumb tired of waitin’, an’ finally decided t’rescue m’self! I was in a room like this’n, only I had a bunk I didn’t need, an’ acourse, a toilet. Anyway, day before yesterday, I figgered I was gonna check out pretty soon no matter
what
I did, so I opened up m’Darling gun—
datdatdatdatdat!
You shoulda seen it, Winnie, ricochets buzzin’ around like hornets! But all I managed was this little bitty hole, an’—”

“And,” Karyl finished impatiently, “we found a cell along this hallway with a telescoping antenna sticking through the door, broadcasting an S.O.S.!”

She slid the aerial out through a slightly opened gunport, punched him gently in the nose, and retracted it again. “Who’s tellin’ this, sonny, you or me?”

Karyl placed one hand on his middle, gestured broadly with the other, and bowed deeply from the waist. “Madame, I humbly beg your—”

“An’ don’t call me no
madame
, neither, whippersnapper! Anyway, they cut me loose, an’ here we are!”

“Not for long, if I have anything to say about it!” I shuddered. “How did you find me?” Lucy pointed to the twice-scorched door; scrawled across it was a faint chalky inscription:
BEAR II
.

“Orderly bastards, weren’t they? But that must mean—”

Clarissa nodded. “We can’t seem to find him though. Do you—?”

“Except for these four homely walls, my love, and your Gig
a
com—where the hell’s my Gigacom?” I found it lodged beneath the sink, seemin
g
ly undamaged. “Let’s see if we can find him now—time we were getting the hell out of here, anyway. Everybody ready?”

“Right.” Clarissa closed her bag with a snap and hitched the strap up on her shoulder where it wouldn’t cramp her cross-draw. I squeezed her hand once more, nodded to Karyl and Lucy, and stepped out into the hallway for the first time in a week. It seemed more like a lifetime—and very nearly had been.

I drew my gun and slid an Owen tube over the barrel. If I saw so much as an earwig, I was going to blast a hole in it you could navigate a flivver through.

Thinking about bugs gave me an interesting tactical idea—just in case Clarissa’s informal census was wrong. I motioned to my companions and stickied up my shoe soles. It was easier for Lucy on the floor of the corr
i
dor, so I walked along the ceiling. My wife and the welder took a wall apiece. Whoever we ran into was gonna be one confused Hamilt
o
nian, and that might buy us an extra few seconds.

Karyl tucked his torch into his belt and pulled out the biggest go
d
damned laser I’d ever seen. We started slow; there was nothing to be seen down the dimly lit hallway for a hundred yards in either direction.

“Seems to be unfinished crew-quarters,’’ I whispered. “How the devil did you find this rock in the first place?”

Clarissa kept her voice low. “When I got back from Mulligan’s, som
e
body had wrecked the house—I didn’t stay around to investigate.” She lif
t
ed her feet carefully to avoid sliding down the wall. Her bag hung toward the floor, standing out “sideways” from her body.

“Smart lady.” And pretty, too—I’d almost forgotten how pretty.

“No, just chicken-hearted. There was an outbound medical courier wil
l
ing to buck the solar flare. Freshly cloned tissues that had to be del
i
vered.”

“And anyway, there
wasn’t
any solar flare,” said Karyl from the other wall. “I told you—”

“So y’did,” acknowledged Lucy. “Mind where yer pointin’ that ove
r
powered flashlight, willya?” She waved her Gabbet Fairfax for emphasis, if not example.

“On Ceres,” my wife continued, “I put out a general call for you and Koko—where is she, by the way?”

I told her in words of one syllable, most of them with four letters.

“Oh dear, that doesn’t sound like our Koko, does it? Anyway, you’d a
l
ready left Ceres, but I got answered by two different Healers and Karyl here, who decided to come with me.”

“Needed a vacation,” grinned the welder-restaurateur, “and I’d always planned on seeing more of the Belt. We traced you to Navigation Rock, and through the Patrol from Bulfinch to the bugranch. But then you didn’t go where you were supposed to.”

I laughed. “Trying to lose the bad guys. I didn’t realize we’d be confu
s
ing anybody else—careful now!” We’d reached an intersection. I peered around the corner, as did Lucy below me, and kept an eye on Cl
a
rissa, for whom the same reconnaissance amounted to peeking cautiously over a me
t
al cliff edge. The corridor beyond us was deserted. With Karyl and my wife jumping the gap, we moved on. “So what happened then?”

Karyl spoke up: “We knew you were hunting missing persons, so the good doctor here thought of contacting Ceres Central to see if there was any pattern to the disappearances.”

“Which brought you to the Cluster.” I nodded, understanding.

“Which brought us straight to
Bester
,”
said Clarissa. She reached across to punch me softly on the arm in gentle reproach. “We nearly caught up with you, too—at the refueling station—
remember Pleistocene Plaza?
”

“Oh hell!” I paused, thinking about the guilty fleeing where no Federa
l
ist pursueth. “But then we’d
all
have wound up in these cells, wouldn’t we? How was it you came straight to Bester? I didn’t get that part.”

She looked stunned. “Why, it’s the statistical center of all the disappea
r
ances!”

I stopped, nearly losing my purchase on the ceiling. “I’ll be damned. Lucy, we lugged along all that Broach equipment for nothing!”

“So
that’s
what all that junk was,” said my wife. “We saw it in Lucy’s flivver. You might have picked a more sensible orbit to park it in. We a
l
most didn’t catch it.”

Lucy hadn’t answered, but stood there on the floor, slapping her pistol in the palm of a manipulator. “Take a look at this here bulkhead, Winnie. We’ve found another missing person.”

The streaky chalkmarks on the tightly welded door said
SCHROEDER, P
. The bugrancher’s other daughter. I looked at my wife and our friends grimly. The girl had been a prisoner here far longer than Lucy and me. I tapped on the wall with my Rezin handle and waited.

No answer.

Karyl limbered up his burner again, torching a cautious half-inch hole in the door. He turned the welder off, but a roaring sound continued as a mi
n
iature torrent of air was sucked into the wall. When it quieted, and the edges were cool, I pushed some buttons on my forearm, raised the hood of my suit, and stuck a periscopic finger into the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Huddled pitiably in one bleak corner lay a little pile of bones and teeth and hair and smartsuit scraps. She could have been dead for a week, or any time since they let the pyramids out for bid. Karyl and Clarissa had a look, too, Lucy tuning in on our suit frequencies.

I don’t think any of us said a word.

We continued down the hall until we reached the end of the line; a painted arrow on the wall pointed to an airlock on our left. I weighed var
i
ous factors in my mind, then said: “Clarissa, you and Lucy get off this rock and run like hell for help. Karyl—if you’re willing—we’ll stay and look for Ed.”

My wife opened her mouth to protest; Lucy exclaimed, “Nothin’ doin’, youngster! I can set up a distress call from th’ flivver, then we’ll
all
tear this joint apart until—”

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
Noise
exploded through the steel-corridored complex. I stood frozen, the front sight of my pistol ques
t
ing for a target. Clarissa grabbed my arm and towed me to the lock. We bu
t
toned up in clumsy haste. “You sure you’re still airtight, Lucy?” I dropped my weapon fooling with hoodseams and stooped to retrieve it.