Voyagers III - Star Brothers (21 page)

THE control board of Paulino’s tractor glared with red lights, but when the oxygen supply hit the critical level a soft female voice purred in his helmet earphones, “Only one hour’s worth of oxygen remaining.”

He did not think he could be more frightened than he already was, but Paulino tensed at the words so hard that he felt his teeth grinding together painfully. There was an emergency tank of oxygen on the tractor, of course, but at best that held another two hours of breathable oxy and he had been tooling around out here on Mare Imbrium for at least eight hours.

No way to get back safely, and for some reason the radio was no longer working. He felt strong and alert, thanks to the Moondust, but he could not raise the base back at Archimedes, could not even hear a homing beacon. The radio had gone completely dead.

In misery he trundled along in the massive tractor’s cab, totally lost, the fear of death crawling up his spine like a loathsome poisonous insect’s larva, the kind that wormed its way inside your skull and slowly, agonizingly ate your brains away.

The dusty desert of stone stretched away to the frighteningly close horizon no matter which way he looked. Not a sign of human habitation, not a landmark nor a signpost. Nothing but craters and rocks. He could not even see the Earth in the black sky. Completely alone. Paulino would have welcomed the vicious snarling of his boss; he prayed to hear the nasty little man’s voice excoriating him as a fool and idiot.

But his radio yielded nothing but a crackling hissing sound with an oddly whining note running up and down the scale like a tin whistle on a roller coaster. The noise made him shudder like fingernails on a blackboard, but he dared not turn off the radio. He glanced down at the control panel and saw that the emergency transmitter was still on, beaming out its plea for help.

Rescue me! Paulino prayed to the stars that looked down at him. Save me! Don’t let me die!

His vision blurred with tears as he thought about the church in his village, so far away. How he had prayed to the Virgin and the saints when he had been a child. They never answered him. Not once. Never did they grant his simple requests. What makes you think anyone is going to save your miserable life now? he asked himself.

“You in the tractor, identify yourself.”

The voice cut through the whining static in his earphones like the clarion call of an angel. The breath caught in Paulino’s throat. He was so excited he could not speak.

“Identify yourself or you will trigger automatic defenses that could destroy your vehicle.”

Gulping down tears and fright, Paulino stuttered, “I’m lost…from Archimedes…Paulino Alvarado is my name…please…I need help.”

“Stop your tractor immediately,” commanded the radio voice. “Two vehicles will come out to inspect you. You have entered a security zone without authorization. You are in big trouble, buddy.”

Paulino laughed. He threw his head back inside his fogged, dust-caked helmet and laughed uproariously.

Hanging in the harness of the backpack rocket, Stoner saw the lights of home dwindle in the distance. Looking up he could see the remaining intruders as shadowy silhouettes against the moonlit sky. Deep inside his brain he wanted to lash out at these murderers, kill and maim them the way they had slaughtered his daughter. Blood for blood, the ancient voice spoke to him. Kill them all, as painfully as possible.

But his star brother’s voice interrupted the primeval urge to vengeance. Who are these men? Who sent them? Where do they intend to take us, and why? A cool, calculating voice. Tranquilizing. And steel-hard in its control over Stoner’s body. He felt a glacial calm creep along his seething veins, cold ice replacing blazing rage. His heartbeat slowed, his breathing deepened and became more regular. The glands within him slowed their secretions of danger-generated hormones.

Leave me alone! he screamed silently at the alien presence.

So you can kill them? What will that gain?

I want to destroy them!

They’re mercenaries. You know that. Professional killers. What they did they did for money. And no one would have been harmed if the robots hadn’t attacked them.

They killed Cathy!

Who sent them? That’s the important question. Who sent them and why?

Stoner saw the sense of it, and as his star brother soothed the animal fury within him, he realized that it was important—vital—to let these mercenary thugs take him to whoever had hired them. Yes, he finally told his star brother, I understand. I even agree, damn it.

The backpack rockets had only a few miles’ range. As they flew out over the dark ocean, the rocket thrusters bellowing painfully in Stoner’s ears, he spotted a tiny square of light bobbing in the distance. Sure enough, his captors headed toward it, remotely maneuvering the steering gimbals of Stoner’s backpack to follow them.

It was a sizable raft tethered between a pair of trimarans, sleek triple-hulled boats shaped like jet airplanes. Two of the mercenaries landed expertly on the raft, then Stoner felt himself dropping down toward it.

He flexed his knees as the rocket gave a final roar of thrust and cut off about ten feet above the deck. Stoner hit the yielding spongy plastic with his bare feet, then rolled forward. The two men already there caught him in their arms.

They stripped the pack from his shoulders, then began to pull off their own gas masks and backpacks as the others dropped down, one by one, until eight of them stood clustered on the pitching, heaving raft.

“Is that all?” came a voice from one of the trimarans.

“That’s all,” said the last mercenary to land. Shrugging out of his shoulder harness he strode over to Stoner.

“Twelve men killed,” he snarled. “For you.” And he swung a punch at Stoner’s face with all his weight behind it.

He was a big man, slightly taller than Stoner and thick in the chest and shoulders. His face was lost in the moonlit shadows, but his eyes blazed with the fury of a man who had missed death by inches and had to work off the fear and hatred boiling inside him.

Stoner’s old black-belt training returned to him unbidden. He blocked the punch with his left forearm and rammed his right fist into the man’s solar plexus, stepping into the thrust with every ounce of his own raging blood lust. The man was lifted off his feet and before he even started to fall Stoner’s left hit the carotid artery in his neck like a knife edge. He crumpled to the plastic surface of the raft and did not move.

“And you bastards killed my daughter,” Stoner said as half a dozen guns pointed at him.

“Dr. Stoner!” the voice from the trimaran called urgently. “We did not want to shed any blood. I do not want to use any further force on you, but we will if you make it necessary.”

Again Stoner felt the icy fingers of calm prickle along his nervous system.

“It won’t be necessary,” he said. “Unless I have to defend myself.”

“Bring him in here,” the voice commanded, “then drag your incapacitated friend to your own boat and get the hell out of here.”

A pair of mercenaries escorted Stoner across the bobbing raft and onto the trimaran’s nearer hull. Another man, shorter, wearing a sailor’s pullover shirt and shorts, took him by the arm and led him across the curving wing to the central hull. Inside, only red night lights were on. Silently the man led Stoner to a small cabin and locked him in it.

Stoner peered out the cabin’s tiny porthole; much too small for a man to crawl through, he saw. So he watched as the mercenaries quickly folded up the raft, four of them plunging into the water to do the job, then stowed it aboard their trimaran. They scrambled up into the boat and it pulled away, heading swiftly toward the distant Makapuu Head, as nearly as Stoner could determine.

Then the engine of his trimaran rumbled to life and he felt the boat bite into the waves. It swung around and headed straight out to sea.

Just as Stoner was turning away from the porthole, the other trimaran exploded into a red ball of flame, searing his eyes as a clap of thunder blasted across the open water. Squeezing the burning after-image away, Stoner looked out the porthole again and saw nothing but bits of burning wreckage tracing fiery arcs across the dark sky.

The mercenaries’ reward, he realized. Whoever hired them doesn’t want any witnesses. Then he thought, more grimly, And how much cheaper to buy a few pounds of explosives, rather than paying the men you hired.

He watched as the trimaran put distance between itself and the pitiful few scraps of burning wreckage floating on the dark swells.

“Enjoy your reward,” he muttered into the darkness. “You bastards earned it.”

In the dawn’s first light Jo looked out across the patio with sleepless red-rimmed eyes. A team of robots and humans were busily cleaning up the blood stains and repairing the bullet-smashed windows. She still wore the same robe she had hastily pulled on when the attack had started. It was smeared with Cathy’s blood.

It had taken hours and a strong sedative to get Rickie to sleep. Half a dozen doctors were in the house now. She had refused to talk to any of them, especially the psychiatrist who offered to set up a counseling session for her. It had taken all her self-control to refrain from throwing the heaviest vase she could lift at the man. He was trying to be helpful, she knew, but she did not need counseling.

She needed vengeance. The fury that soared within her was like a volcano’s lava. The longer she kept it bottled up inside the hotter it became. It would erupt, but only when she was ready to allow it to. And when it did, that lava-hot hatred would burn and roast the bastards who had killed her baby. Not one of them would be left alive. Not a single one.

She had spent hours with the Hilo police and several agents from the FBI. Reluctantly she allowed them to take away four of the dead intruders’ bodies; the others had already been spirited away by her own corporate security people.

Rickie was sleeping at last and Cathy’s body had been sent to the Vanguard labs nearby.

“I want tissue samples taken and cloning procedures to be started immediately,” she had told the aides and assistants who clustered around her in the house’s living room.

“And the other bodies?”

“Find out everything you can from them. I want to know where they came from and who they are. I want to find where they’ve taken my husband and how we can get him back from them. And above all I want to find out who hired them.”

But she knew who had hired them, knew it without being told, knew it as surely as if the man himself had confessed it to her.

Once the living room had been cleared of everyone else and Jo was alone with Vic Tomasso, she said, “It was Hsen, wasn’t it?”

Tomasso nodded numbly. “Honest to god, Jo, I had no idea he would spring this…”

Until that moment it had never occurred to Jo that Tomasso could have been playing a double game. She looked at him with fresh eyes. There was perspiration beading his upper lip despite the coolness of the morning. His eyes met hers only momentarily, then slid away evasively.

“Go to Hsen,” she said, her voice hoarse from crying, “and tell him what happened here.”

“He’ll know by now.”

“I want you to tell him. From me. Tell him that his people murdered my daughter.”

Tomasso blinked several times. “What else?”

“That’s all. Just tell him that.”

“Nothing else? You don’t want to ask him about getting your husband back?”

“It won’t be necessary to say anything else. He’ll know what the rest of the message is.”

Tomasso got uncertainly to his feet, then rushed out of the living room as if glad to get away from her.

Jo sat alone on the sumptuous sweeping couch that curved around the circular green marble coffee table. Alone. Husband kidnapped. Daughter murdered. Son in a drugged sleep. Assistants fluttering around the house and the office.

Keith can take care of himself, she thought. The attackers obviously came to kidnap him, not kill him. Hsen knows Keith’s the only one ever to survive cryonic suspension; the bastard wants to learn how to live forever and he thinks he can get the knowledge out of Keith.

Nothing can hurt Keith. He’s not a human being, not the way I am. He’ll twist Hsen’s brain into a pretzel if they give him the chance. He’ll walk away without a scratch while Cathy…Cathy…

She could hardly breathe. Jo wet her lips and lifted her hands to her head and held on. She felt as if she would explode. Keith would try to reason with Hsen; talk to the filthy murdering sonofabitch snake. Instead of killing him Keith would try to
understand
him and make him understand what he had done wrong.

Hsen’s got to die! The thought pounded through her blood, roared in her ears. The murdering bastard’s got to die. I want to hear him scream, I want to see knives slicing his guts, I want to fill the goddamned swimming pool with
his
blood!

Shaking with fury, she touched the comm button concealed in the couch’s upholstery.

“Nunzio.”

“Si, Signora?”

“Please come to the living room, I have a task for you,” she said in Italian.

“Right away,
Signora
.”

Nunzio had been devastated because the intruders had gassed him and the other servants in their sleep and he had been totally unable to do a thing to prevent the tragedy that took place. He felt like a useless old man, Jo knew, instead of a ruthlessly loyal bodyguard.

Now Jo would tell him how he could redeem himself. By killing Li-Po Hsen. No matter how long it took, no matter how much it cost. No matter if Nunzio had to go back to the village of his birth in Calabria and hire every male relative of his line. The only purpose of Nunzio’s existence, from this morning onward, would be to kill Hsen.

And Tomasso? She would deal with Vic herself, she decided. When he returned from Hong Kong. She would get the truth out of him and then make him pay for his part in murdering her daughter. Make him pay with interest.

Jo wanted to smile but found that she could not. In the silence of the living room she could hear, through the broken windows, the sound of the swimming pool’s pumps still working to filter Cathy’s blood out of the water.