Voyagers III - Star Brothers (22 page)

The intelligence chief had never seen her master look surprised before. Or frightened.

“Killed her daughter!” Hsen shot to his feet, eyes blazing, fists clenched.

She bowed her head and said nothing.

Hsen paced to the broad windows of his spacious office and stared out for many minutes at the busy harbor. As usual, he wore a loose short-sleeved shirt and comfortable dark slacks. He clasped his hands behind his back, his wiry frame wound tight with tension.

Finally he turned back to the woman who directed his intelligence operations. “What kind of bunglers did you hire? What kind of fools would make such a shambles of everything?”

In a very quiet voice, she replied, “It was accidental. More than half the force was killed by the so-called household robots. They were equipped with laser weapons that we did not expect.”

“The robots were not included in Tomasso’s report on the house’s defenses?”

“No, sir. Obviously he did not know about them.”

“Obviously.” Hsen paced nervously to his desk, flipped open a gold oblong box and put a cigarette to his lips with trembling fingers. He picked up the gold lighter and touched it to the cigarette’s tip, then suddenly whirled and threw it across the big room. It banged into a bronze statue of a warrior on horseback with a loud clang.

“Sir,” said the intelligence chief, “I should remind you that the mission achieved its major objective. We have the man Stoner.”

“Yes, and you have Jo Camerata swearing vengeance against me with all her Italian blood!”

“She has no evidence that you…”

“She knows!” Hsen shouted.

The woman backed a few steps toward the door. Hsen puffed furiously on his cigarette. Even from the distance between them the intelligence chief could smell the acrid fumes of old-fashioned tobacco. There was a cloying odor too: the tobacco was laced with something, perhaps an opium derivative.

Hsen pointed a bony finger at her. “Prepare to evacuate my personal staff to the lunar retreat. But it must be done in absolute secrecy! I don’t want that woman to know where I am!”

“Sir, you are scheduled to attend the meeting of the International Investment Authority on Sunday, in Sydney.”

“I will attend by hologram.”

“Sir, there is a two-second time lag in communications from the Moon. She will immediately know where you are.”

Hsen snorted smoke through his nostrils. “Yes, yes, I hadn’t thought of that.” He sat at the swivel chair and drummed his fingers on the desk top. “Very well, I will move to our center in Xinjiang. From there I will proceed to the lunar retreat as soon as the IIA meeting concludes.”

The woman hesitated, then asked, “Do you think that she will attend the meeting?”

Hsen nodded nervously. “She will attend it, all right. Probably by holo, but she will be there. I have no doubt of it.”

SITTING at the head of the gleaming long, broad conference table, Cliff Baker called the meeting to order. All thirty members of the International Investment Agency were in attendance, although more than half of them were holographic images that sparkled and wavered slightly, looking almost like ghosts rather than live solid human beings.

The sweeping windows that lined one side of the conference room showed the towers of Sydney’s business and financial district. The beautiful harbor was hidden behind their glass and steel facades. On the far side of the room stood an elaborate sideboard of finger foods on silver trays and beverages ranging from iced tea and cola to Scotch whisky and chilled vodka.

Maybe we should have set up some photographs of food and booze, Baker thought with an inner grin. To take care of the hologrammers.

But he kept his face serious as he tapped the immaculate table top with his writing stylus. The men and women present in person quickly stopped their muttered conversations and looked toward him. The holograms also sat up straighter and looked ready for business.

“There’s only one item on the agenda,” Baker started, without preamble. “You all know what it is: this plague that’s spreading throughout lower Asia and the western Pacific.”

“It has also hit cities in Europe and North America,” said the woman who represented Scandia Banking.

“And Africa, I am sad to announce.” The man from the Central African Confederation said in a heavy deep voice. He was Nkona’s personal emissary, a terrorist as a youth until that Great Soul captured him with his vision of a peaceful, prosperous, united Africa.

“Africa too?”

The black man nodded and folded his hands prayerfully on the table top. He was of powerful build, and in his white tribal robe the darkness of his skin radiated strength and endurance.

“Within the past few days the plague had leaped across the Sahara and is spreading through Chad, Zaire, Uganda, and even as far as Namibia.”

“Good lord!”

“It hasn’t hit Latin America?”

“Not yet,” said the Argentinean physician who represented that continent’s environmental movement.

“They call it the Horror,” the slim, delicately beautiful woman from Hanoi said. She reminded Baker of An Linh Laguerre, the woman he had lost because of Stoner and his bitch of a wife.

“It is a horror,” the Argentinean agreed. “I have seen the clinical reports. It must be like the tortures of hell.”

What do you know about the pains of hell? Baker snarled inwardly. What do any of you know about pain? Maybe when this bug hits you, then you’ll know what I had to go through. Maybe then—but then it’ll be too late for you, won’t it?

“The question is,” he said aloud, “what can be done to stop it? And what should we be doing to help?”

The Filipino representative, also a physician, said, “Every medical service in every affected nation urgently requires our help. They need more hospital beds, more clinical facilities, supplies, personnel…everything.”

“In other words,” said the hologrammic image of Li-Po Hsen, “they need more money.”

“Exactly.”

“But we have already invested billions in medical research and services,” said Wilhelm Kruppmann. The burly Swiss banker was also a hologram image.

“That was before this plague started,” Baker pointed out.

“How many times can you draw water from the well before it runs dry?” Kruppmann rumbled.

“How important is it to stay alive?” Baker shot back, his lips curling slightly in a smile that might have been a sneer.

Jo Camerata sat in the small office she maintained at her home and watched the byplay on a flat video screen. She had been up most of the night with Rickie, who still screamed with nightmares whenever he tried to sleep. Her attempts to find Keith had so far been fruitless, but it had only been a few days since Hsen had kidnapped him. Only a few days since Cathy had been murdered.

She pecked at the keyboard on her desk and the screen zoomed in to a closeup of Hsen. A hologram, of course. Jo had half of Vanguard Industries’ electronics experts at work tracking the signals that produced Hsen’s three-dimensional image for the meeting. She wanted to know where the head of Pacific Commerce actually was.

Wherever you are, she said silently to Hsen’s image, I’ll find you. There’s no place on Earth you can hide from me.

After three days of being a virtual prisoner, Paulino had learned only two things about the people who had rescued him from his errant tractor: they were employees of Vanguard Industries, and this place where they were holding him was some sort of secret base called Delphi.

It was almost entirely underground, of course. A satellite scanning the Mare Imbrium’s surface would see only a pair of well-disguised entry ports, domes no larger than telephone booths and covered with rubble from the lunar soil. Even a man on foot could pass within a few dozen meters of the entrances and not realize that they were anything more than medium-sized hillocks.

“You’ve posed us quite a problem, son,” said the grizzled, square-jawed older man who seemed to head the facility. Like everyone else in the base, he wore coveralls of faded blue with a stylized V emblazoned on the chest above his name tag, which read MATTHEWS.

“We’ve sent your tractor out on a course that will take it into a main traffic region. Somebody’ll pick it up. They’ll probably think you’re dead, although they might send a ballistic rocket this way to survey the area and try to find your body.”

“Why cannot you return me back to Archimedes?” Paulino asked in his hesitant English.

Matthews made a sour face. “Goddam’ security regulations. Nobody’s supposed to know we’re here. If it’d been up to me we would of just let you trundle on by; you’d never have known we’re here.” He shook his head. “But I’ve got a gungho smartass of a security chief here who believes everything they wrote down in the regs. So you were stopped and detained, as per regulation XYZ or whatever.”

Bewildered, barely comprehending what the man was telling him, Paulino asked, “What do you plan to…to do with me?”

“Damned if I know,” Matthews replied. “Just your bad luck, kid. You stumbled into our area while we were testing an electromagnetic system that must’ve screwed up your navigational beam. Now I’m stuck with you until some genius further up the chain of command figures out what to do.”

So for several days Paulino was free to wander around the underground base. It was small; there were no more than fifty men and women at work in it. Most of them were older than Paulino, in their thirties and forties. They all wore blue coveralls; Paulino’s pumpkin orange seemed glaringly out of place. They seemed to be scientists of one sort or another, and almost all of them were from North America or Western Europe. Not an oriental or Latin American in the place, nor any Africans—although several of the Yankees were black.

He thought about offering some of his Moondust for sale, but hesitated. His supply of pills was dwindling, and these people looked like the type who would flush them down a toilet and turn him into the police. So he kept the pills to himself and tried to ration himself to one per day. Unsuccessfully.

They let him wander freely through the narrow tunnels and windowless chambers of the base, knowing that even with a pressure suit he was not going to walk hundreds of kilometers back to Archimedes. And there seemed to be no ground vehicles in Delphi. If there were any, they were locked away where Paulino could not find them.

The people were friendly, but guarded. They gave him a room to himself, a narrow little cell that held a comfortable bed, a TV, and little else. They provided him with coveralls and toiletries. He ate with the others in the base’s only galley. Men and women talked with him freely enough, although they never discussed their work. The TV picked up programs from all over Earth; Paulino did not lack for entertainment.

He began to think that being officially dead was perhaps not so bad a thing. If these Vanguard people could provide him with a new identity and a solid job, perhaps he could truly begin life anew. Perhaps even get away from the Moondust. He sought out Matthews and broached the idea to him—without mentioning his addiction.

The older man grinned through his two-day stubble. “Like the old videos where the FBI protects a witness against the Mafia, huh?”

Paulino did not understand.

“Might be a good idea,” Matthews said. “I’ll buck it upstairs and see what they think about it.”

That confused Paulino even further. Upstairs was nothing but the barren surface of Mare Imbrium.

There were parts of the base that were locked, where Paulino was not allowed. He guessed that they might be hiding their tractors in there. As one day slid into another, Paulino began to think that if he could get away and find his way back to Archimedes, the information about this secret base might be worth something to his employers. Not as good as starting a whole new life under a new identity, but it would be a backup in case Matthews decided to make Paulino truly dead and solve his problem that way.

It was a simple matter to walk past the locked doors often enough to watch people tap out the security code on the electronic lock. They were careless, not suspicious. Paulino memorized the combination soon enough. The base worked on Greenwich time, with only one shift. Everyone slept during the “night” hours. Paulino never saw any guards; who needed them, this far out in the lunar wilderness?

So one night when everyone was asleep he slipped out of his room and walked softly to the nearest of the locked doors. Pecking out the memorized combination he held his breath for an instant.

The door slid open. The lights inside turned on as Paulino stepped through. And lurched against the wall in sudden terror.

He found himself high on the open grillwork of a catwalk that circled an immense circular chamber. The floor was fifty meters below and for an instant Paulino felt so giddy he had to grasp the steel handrail with both hands.

The huge chamber contained a giant circular vat filled with a bubbling, frothing liquid. It gurgled and simmered like a titanic brew being slowly boiled. It must have been as high as the spires of a cathedral, at least. Waves of sultry heat flowed from it. A plume of steam rose from its top and was sucked away by vents set into the ceiling high above. Paulino did not know if the sweat that poured from him was from sudden fear or the heat that made this vast chamber feel like the inside of an oven.

The vat was transparent, or almost so. Squinting against the mist that shrouded its curving flank, Paulino tried to make out what was inside the seething circular tank. There were vague shapes in there, a glint of something, a graceful curve perhaps. But it was obscured by the steam and the bubbling ferment within the tank itself.

Paulino unconsciously leaned forward against the rail, peering intently into the giant vat. It was like trying to see a glass sculpture inside a fish tank, only worse, more difficult.

A hand grabbed his shoulder. Paulino felt his bladder give way.

Burning with fear and shame he turned to see Matthews appraising him grimly.

“You could’ve fallen over the damned railing, you were leaning over so hard. Don’t you know curiosity killed the cat?”

“I…I…”

Matthews seemed more disappointed than angry. “Just because we don’t have armed guards patrolling the tunnels doesn’t mean there aren’t electronic alarm systems in place. You woke me out of a sound sleep, son!”

Still Paulino could find no words.

“You’ve just made everything a helluva lot more difficult,” Matthews said, leading him back into the tunnel. As he carefully shut the steel door and re-set the electronic lock, he muttered, “We sure as hell can’t let you loose now.”

“Wh…what is that…thing in there?”

With a shrug of his square shoulders Matthews answered, “Beats the hell out of me, kid. Nobody here knows what it’s supposed to be.”

For a week Stoner let them test him.

The trimaran made rendezvous slightly before dawn with a jet seaplane. His captors bundled Stoner into a windowless cabin and the plane flew for many hours. Stoner had the feeling they were flying roughly southwest, but other than that he had no idea of where they were going. There were fresh jeans in the cabin, socks, shorts, a pullover shirt, and a pair of deck shoes. All in the right sizes.

They’ve planned everything down to the last detail, he thought grimly. The image of Cathy’s bloody body floating in the swimming pool flashed into his mind again, and again his star brother instantly clamped down on the visceral emotions that would have made Stoner scream with rage and guilt.

They came for me, he said to himself. Cathy’s dead because they wanted me.

It is not your fault, his star brother soothed. There was nothing you could do.

I could tear this plane apart. I could kill everyone aboard.

To what purpose? What good is an animal’s vengeance, especially when it’s directed at hirelings rather than those responsible for the crime?

Stoner knew his star brother was right. But that did not erase the cold fury that even his alien symbiotes could not reach.

When the plane touched down in the water once more a new group of men and women entered his cabin, fitted a heavy black hood over his head, and guided him from the bobbing plane to a creaking pier and then onto solid ground. They bundled him into a van of some kind and then drove for hours. The brief moment he had in the sun felt hot and humid; the inside of the van was air-conditioned heavily enough to chill him.

When they took the hood off he was in a small windowless room that contained a narrow bunk, a wall covered with electronic monitoring equipment, and the tables, counters, glassware, and shining bright metalwork of a small but complete medical laboratory.

He almost laughed. It was nearly the same as the room he had awakened in fifteen years earlier. I’m a guinea pig again, he thought. And a prisoner.

There were four men and two women, Stoner saw, all wearing starched white uniforms. Physicians, nurses, orderlies. They avoided looking directly at him. They did not speak a word to him. Stoner thought about talking to them, influencing them to let him go or at least tell him where they were. His star brother asked silently why he did not do so. You could walk out of here and get them to fly you back home.