Between the Stars (3 page)

When her schooling was finished, she was picked for Carstairs' personal security team. She had seldom met any of the others. Most of his people preferred to work solo. The fewer people on a given assignment, the less opportunity for betrayal. Also, it made for less difficulty should it become necessary to assign one of the team to terminate another.

She was beautiful today, as she usually was. She was black-haired and green-eyed because that was what her lover/victim liked. Her skin was perfectly white, because that was true of most Caucasian Lunaires. She could look like anything she wanted, even a man. But she had found that beauty seldom hindered an operation and usually got her more cooperation than ugliness.

As she waited, she reflexively fended off the polite advances of male travelers. It was not difficult in the VIP lounge. The very rich are seldom crude. Simultaneously, she kept her acute hearing occupied eavesdropping on nearby conversations. Important people usually talked about money, business and politics. She caught, from three different places in the large, luxurious chamber, a new subject: alien artifact. It was out of place here. She had been hearing it all her life. From the dawn of the space era, the popular media had been full of unsubstantiated reports of alien visitation and artifacts. None had ever panned out. Anyplace else, she would have tuned out all such talk. Not here.

When she reached Heathrow she took a tube car to Greenwich. After a long stay on Luna, she always found London depressing, and this way she avoided it. The city had changed little since Victoria's day, except to grow shabbier and more dilapidated. The hideous council housing of the previous century still stood, each unit now holding five or six times as many inhabitants as originally intended. With unemployment nearing seventy percent, most people spent most of their time on the streets. For the average citizen, participation in government was practically nil. Holovision, gang fighting and soccer riots provided the major pastimes.

The truly sad part, Valentina thought as the tube car sped toward Greenwich, was that London was one of the most prosperous cities on Earth. The wretchedness of what had once been called the Third World was simply beyond human comprehension. For generations, the resources of the planet had been squandered to provide for the growing, unproductive surplus population. The long-promised development of the Third World with its attendant employment opportunities never occurred.

Catastrophe might have been averted had population been controlled. It had been assumed that education and growing sophistication would take care of the problem. In the late twentieth century, a sudden, unforeseen resurgence of primitive religion had changed everything. The priests, mullahs, imams, evangelists and whatnot condemned birth control as unnatural. Alarmed at the booming population of Third World countries and afraid of being swamped, First World nations encouraged larger families, while decrying everybody else's lack of restraint.

After several nightmare decades during which even a modest, conventional war could kill hundreds of millions without putting a significant dent in the birth rate, the iron-fisted rule of Earth First had descended, slowing the deterioration without stopping it. There had been a sort of recovery during the Space War years, but the war had ended inconclusively. It was significant that those slightly less miserable years were being looked back on with nostalgic longing.

Carstairs glanced up as she entered his Greenwich office. As usual, he wasted no time. "Evening, Val. Special assignment this time—maybe the most important you've ever had."

"Alien artifact?"

His eyes widened slightly. In all of known space, she was one of the few people who could still surprise him. "Christ, you haven't been idling, have you now?"

"I heard some talk about it before I left Armstrong. Serious talk from people who don't fall for con games. You don't have many agents who can work in the Belt."

"Right you are, love. Have a seat." He took a bottle of Glenfiddich from his desk and poured two gills. "Official word reached here two days ago. The U.N. Academy was informed that something strange as all hell was found on Rhea. It's being studied. They promise to share all data with us. The trick is, they have the bloody thing and we don't, so do we trust them to tell us everything they find?"

"Have we any choice?" She let the smoky taste of the Scotch roll over her tongue.

"That's where you come in. I'm sending you out there. I want you to get close to whoever's analyzing the thing and report back to me. It's more complicated than it sounds, but we'll get to that in a minute."

Her stomach tightened. An assignment in the Belt! She had smuggled herself out to the Confederate asteroids on two occasions, but only to train and learn how to pass as a native. She had never had an assignment there.

"Our esteemed Secretary General made a brief statement to the media this morning," Carstairs went on. "Made a bloody fool of himself by calling Rhea one of Jupiter's moons, but who notices these days? Now Secretary Larsen's in the act. This came across about an hour ago." He waved a hand and a wall of the room ran a holo display. From his office in the Geneva Complex, Secretary for Planetary Security Aage Larsen was addressing a flock of unseen reporters. Like Shevket, the Dane was the opposite in appearance from what one would guess. He was a small, dapper man with shiny black hair and a dark-complected face dominated by enormous brown eyes. His small mouth made a prim line below a pencil-thin mustache.

Valentina heard Carstairs chuckle. "Bastard's had those basset-hound eyes surgically enlarged. Thinks it makes him look more compassionate and humanitarian." Valentina said nothing. Surgical alteration to fit a role made perfect sense to her.

"Today," Larsen began, "we received notification from the Confederacy of Island Worlds that an artifact of extraterrestrial origin has been discovered. There seems no reason to doubt the truth of the find. The scanty data we have been provided thus far, if accurate, indicate that the Confederates are in possession of a secret of cosmic significance. If Object X, as it is being called, is not surrendered to us, it could endanger all of us here on Earth. This afternoon, I intend to place a motion before the U.N. demanding that Object X be brought to Earth for study. A refusal to comply from the Confederates must be considered an act of hostility." Before the questions could begin, Carstairs cut off the holo.

Valentina was puzzled. "He's making war talk. Is the situation so serious?"

He shook his head. "No, but Security and Military have been in bed together lately. Larsen and Shevket want to start a war. In wartime you can do all sorts of things and get away with them, like shunt aside the Party old guard in favor of ambitious younger men. Good time to get rid of the political enemies, too. Lots of treason charges and summary executions with nobody looking into them too closely. Shevket would handle the butchery while Larsen spouted his humanitarian poppycock for the public."

"They'd start a war to do that?" She was interested, not shocked.

"Too right. Takes people's minds off their problems for a while as well. A big war is always a tempting short-range fix for your problems. I should know." His wry grimace vanished as a yellow globe of light flashed above his desk.

"Well, I've finally gotten through. Sit where you are and say nothing, Valentina. This will be the Confed Ambassador. I've been trying to reach him for hours. You should see this anyway." He arranged his transmitter so that she would be invisible.

The man who appeared from nowhere by holographic exchange was sprawled on a couch. The massive discomfort of the spaceborn when subjected to Earth gravity was evident in his features. The strain added years to his apparent mid-forties. He looked vaguely Hawaiian.

"Mr. Ambassador," Carstairs said, "good of you to spare me some time from the reporters."

The ambassador mopped his forehead with a damp towel. "God, anything but more reporters! Keep me as long as you want. I notice that this is a secure line, though. I have orders from my government not to engage in any secret talks while I'm here."

"Show this to anyone at your own discretion," Carstairs said. "I just don't want anyone eavesdropping right now."

"Fire away."

"To begin with, just what is this buggering thing?"

The ambassador made a hand gesture that was equivalent to a shrug. "I'll send you exactly what I was sent."

A near-translucent, glassy ellipsoid appeared above Carstairs' desk. A complicated readout appeared below it. "Not very damned impressive, is it?" he mused. "Looks like a paperweight.'
⁵

"It's on Aeaea now. This thing is so odd they're having trouble just figuring out how to test it."

"You've heard Mr. Larsen's comments by now," Carstairs said. "How do you propose to respond?"

"We are not trying to keep it to ourselves," the ambassador insisted. "Send out all the scientists you want; they'll be welcome to study it firsthand. ''

Carstairs snorted. "Except that our scientists are not allowed to leave trans-lunar orbit."

"It was Earth First's law," said the ambassador. "You wrote it yourself, I believe."

"I'll have to see what I can do about that," Carstairs said. "So why don't you bring it here?"

"Aeaea has the most advanced scientific research facilities in the solar system. Besides, as you know well, Aeaea is the only really neutral territory between us."

Taking Carstairs' silence as consent, the ambassador continued. "Look at the readout, Mr. Secretary."

Carstairs shrugged. "Means nothing to me. I never passed my O levels."

"The figure refers to mass, not size. Object X masses better than a ton per cubic centimeter at the opaque core. It may not be as large as a football, but it's as massive as an elephant."

"Bloody hell," Carstairs said, impressed. "Physics isn't my field, but a thing like that could be useful, couldn't it?
_:

"The technology could open up the stars to us. Now think of the race that could develop such technology."

"Right." Carstairs thought for a moment. "Is Sieglinde Taggart studying it?"

"Who knows where that woman is? She's been notified, but she hadn't showed at the time of my last communication. Nobody controls her movements, but she must be far away to miss something like this."

Carstairs knew her habits better than most. Once, when his intelligence service had her located in Jovian orbit, she had walked into his maximum-security office in Geneva. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Ambassador. Please keep me informed of future developments."

"I'll keep the whole world informed, Mr. Carstairs. This could be the beginning of a new age for humanity." The hologram faded.

He shook his head. "Bastards still talk like that. Rough as it is out there, I don't know why they haven't had the optimism kicked out of them yet."

Valentina shrugged and finished her Scotch. "Pioneer spirit, I would imagine. You want me to find out what they really know about Object X?"

"Exactly. It won't be easy, because you'll not only have Confed security to contend with, but another U.N. team or two on the same mission. Also, Larsen and Shevket will send someone as well. That's where the real danger will be. Whatever this thing means, I don't want it in the hands of those two."

THREE

Sieglinde wasn't alone when she arrived. Derek broke off a chess game with Roseberry to meet her at the airlock. She smiled at him as she came in. Her appearance had changed little in the previous three decades. She was a small, compact woman with short, blonde hair. As she hugged him, he saw the man behind her. He was Chinese, wearing the utterly incongruous robes of a Confucian scholar. He knew this had to be Chih' Chin Fu, another of the legendary figures of what were, to Derek, the "early days" of the independent Island Worlds.

"It's so good to see you, Derek! You know Chih' Chin Fu, don't you? You don't? Well, surely you've heard of him."

"Who hasn't?" Derek said. He took Fu's hand. Spacers never actually shook hands, an operation that could be dangerous in zero-gee. Fu had been the media wizard of the war. While the Confederate forces and the outlaw Defiance Party had fought the military end of the war, Sieglinde had dominated the scientific end and her husband, Thor, had been the leader in Confederate Diplomacy. Throughout, Fu had handled the propaganda war, for years bombarding Earth with a relentlessly accurate picture of exactly what was happening. Everyone agreed that it had been Fu's propaganda campaign, enabled by Sieglinde's inventions, that had finally brought Earth to the peace talks.

"Honored, sir," Derek said. As he looked more closely, he saw that the frail old man before him was actually in his vigorous middle years. The elderly effect was the result of makeup, for what reason he couldn't imagine. People like Sieglinde and Fu were renowned for their eccentricities.

"So you are the young man destined for the history books?" said Fu. "I envy you."

"Maybe on Rhea they'll build a monument to my sore toe," he said. As he led the pair to the lab where the egg was stored, he told them his story. At the lab, Sieglinde stared at the thing in rapt silence for a full twenty minutes, then she turned to Derek.

"Finding it may have been blind luck, " she said, "but getting this one here undetected was sheer genius. From now on, you can write your ticket with the family."

"Actually," Derek said, "what I really need is some fuel. See, I—"

"I brought it. This is an unbelievable opportunity. Now I can conduct my own investigation without bother from those idiots on Aeaea, or the Institute for Arts and Sciences." It seemed odd to hear the most formidable institute for applied technology and the most distinguished body of abstract scientists in human history thus referred to, but Derek said nothing.

"I think," Roseberry said hesitantly, "old Ugo has a message for you, Linde."

"I know he has. He has them for everybody and every occasion. I'll be damned if I'll listen to another one. I still think it was that last one that got poor Thor killed." She looked at the others as if they were strangers. "Excuse me, but I want to be alone with this—this thing. I have some ideas about it. I work better alone."

"Perhaps," Fu said, "we might avail ourselves of Mr. Roseberry's excellent refreshment facilities."

"You talking about the bar?" said Roseberry. "Sure, sure, come on. Linde, don't you starve in here. I seen you like this before."

"Certainly,'' she said, distracted. "Just send in meals. I promise to eat. Now go."

Discreetly, they made their way out. Had their been any real gravity, they would have tiptoed. Sieglinde never took her eyes from the green egg. In the bar, they drew drinks all around. It was a spherical room detached from the main body of the museum and consisted mainly of windows open to the starry vastness of the Belt.

"Now, young Derek," said Fu, "it is time we got to know one another. Since your clan is as numerous as my own, you must forgive me for not having made your acquaintance before this." The Fus were not prominent in the Belt, but there were incredible numbers of them on Luna, on Mars and in the orbital colonies. Chih' Chin was one of the elders and by far the most famous of them. "Do you know Sieglinde well?"

"I've seen her maybe a dozen times in my life," he admitted. "Mostly at family functions—weddings and funerals and so forth. She's not what you'd call one of the family favorites." He hastened to avoid a misunderstanding. "I mean, it's not like anyone's hostile, it's just," he groped for words, "I guess we're all in awe of her."

Fu smiled. "She is not the most approachable of women. I must tell you her story some time. The real one, not the one everybody learns in school. My old friend Thor was probably the only human being to penetrate beneath the armoring she constructed around herself. She is not always as forbidding as when hot on the trail of some new scientific principle."

"Fine woman," Roseberry said. "Crazier'n hell, but a fine woman." He nodded in vigorous agreement with himself.

"One way or another," Fu said, "your discovery shall be of tremendous significance. It could not have come at a better time for us. Sieglinde believes that it may turn the balance in our favor for the coming conflict."

What conflict? Derek thought. "Does she know what it is?"

"She has a theory, based on the data released so far by Aeaea. On the way here she was devising tests to prove or disprove this theory. She did not tell me much."

"You mentioned a conflict. I've been sort of out of touch in the Saturn orbit. Has something been going on?"

"Ah, the young," Fu said with a heavy sigh. "They have so little grasp of public affairs. Of course, their elders have little more, but that is no excuse."

Derek dialed himself a beer. He was in no hurry.

"The last few years," Fu continued, "our peace with Earth has become increasingly fragile. A complete break is not far off. A new generation of leaders is gaining power, the economic and environmental situations are growing more desperate—"

"They have only themselves to blame," Derek said.

"And they certainly aren't going to do that, so who does that leave for them to blame? It has to be us, and the answer has to be another war."

"Another war?" There had been no wars in his lifetime, and it wasn't something the Confederates glorified. Life could be hard and dangerous enough without people deliberately trying to kill one another. Once piracy, hijacking and raiding had been a constant hazard in the Belt, but no longer. After the Space War, the Confederacy had made use of the extensive intelligence and security networks built during the conflict to obliterate the outlaw gangs. Under the leadership of the redoubtable Hjalmar Taggart, the campaign had been brief and brutal. Since then, criminal activity had been rare. The Belt was no longer used as a dumping ground for Earth's undesirables, and the rougher element among the immigrants had settled into steady, if hard-bitten, citizens.

That was the elimination of one hazard. There were others in plenty. Space was the most unforgiving of environments, with the possible exception of ocean depths. The slightest mistake was usually rewarded with instant death. Even using the greatest care, disaster could come from sheer bad luck. Systems failures and particle collisions took a tragic toll, and every year dozens of vessels and their crews simply disappeared. Prosperous colonies were occasionally discovered with all personnel dead, and sometimes, mysteriously, found abandoned.

As a result of the uncertainty of space life, the Belt dwellers had become cheerfully fatalistic. You did your best, and if you got killed anyway, that was tough luck. There were definite advantages to the life for those with the guts to live it. Low-to zero gravity eliminated many physical infirmities and bestowed a greater life span. Second and more important, spacers were the freest human beings that had ever lived. At least, they believed themselves to be, which was the same thing.

War was something else. Derek had seen violent death in plenty, amid the dangers of asteroid life, but the organized butchery of warfare was something different. If anybody would know about it, it would have to be Chih' Chin Fu.

"Do you think it'll happen soon?" he asked.

"Much may depend upon the nature of your artifact. It may be the answer to the problems that have defeated Sieglinde since the last war."

Derek knew something of what Fu was talking about. In the years after the war, Sieglinde had labored over the obstacles to superluminal travel, and had reached a dead end every time. She had hoped to have large-scale emigration to the stars under way within twenty years, but her development of Ciano's pioneering work had never reached fruition, due to the inadequacy of the technology. Despite her many successes, these failures had cost her. Lesser, envious scientists used them to accuse her of being a mere crackpot.

"How is this thing going to affect a war?" he asked.

"We shall have to wait for her to tell us," Fu said. "But I have had many years to learn respect for her judgment. She has never disappointed me and has invariably confounded her adversaries. That is a good record."

"Looks like we're headed excitin' times," Roseberry said. "I was hoping I was through with that kind of thing."

"Come, Mr. Roseberry," Fu said, "surely you are not intimidated by another time of danger?"

"Naw, I was just hoping to be on my way out of the solar system by now anyhows."

"We might still make it in our lifetime, Mr. Roseberry," Fu said. "Sieglinde has only dropped hints, but I believe she thinks the Rhea Objects are tied to some sort of propulsive device, and that she might be able to duplicate them."

"She's come up with that already?"

"I have no idea," Fu said, "but I have learned never to discount her hunches."

By the time Derek reached Avalon, the initial flurry of interest in the Rhea Object was waning. There had been no immediate revelations from it, and there were always plenty of other things to occupy people's attention. Avalon was the capital of the Confederacy of Island Worlds and it always swarmed with activity. Government functions were minimal, but business was roaring along at a great clip.

Cyrano
safely docked, fees paid and reprovisioning operations arranged, Derek happily made his way toward the Hall of the Mountain King, social center of Avalonian life. He had expected some kind of hero's welcome as the discoverer of the alien artifact, but nobody paid him any special attention. This seemed to be a clear case of injustice, but he was prepared to live with it as long as nobody found out that he had secreted away a second egg.

HMK had been expanded greatly over the years and was by then the largest non-planetary open area in existence. Avalon's spin gave it artificial gravity, roughly Earth normal at the equator near the outer skin of the asteroid, dwindling to zero-gee at the axis. Within the huge, wheel-shaped chamber were stacked tiers of business facilities, provisioning yards, restaurants, hotels, entertainment centers, media facilities and other attractions, in vast profusion. Everything seemed to be thronged. He had come through an access tunnel onto a tier devoted mainly to entertainment. There were roughly equal numbers of tiers above him and below.

"Derek!" He turned. Recognition at last. Then he saw who it was. "You owe me, boy! You and your friends busted up my place and I intend to be paid. You want the debt police after you?" The debt police were mythical. The phrase meant that Derek stood in danger of being posted as a deadbeat or welsher. In Belt society, that was several degrees lower than being dead.

It had been a graduation party months ago that had grown a bit raucous toward the end. Derek muttered as he handed over his credit crystal. "There were twenty of us at that party. Why didn't you get one of the others?"

"You were the first one to show his face." The barkeeper fed the crystal into his belt counter, then handed it back. "Besides, you're the one who discovered that thing, so I knew you'd be able to pay up."

"Nice to know my fame is good for something." He broke off when he saw the man who was coming toward him with an intent, bouncy stride. "Oh, no." It was François Kuroda, possibly his least favorite living relative. There were, however, many others in competition for that position.

"I heard you got fired," François said without preamble.

"I quit," Derek insisted. "It's different. What kind of welcome is this, anyway? I made the most important discovery in the history of humanity and I get treated like an Earthie."

"The way I heard it," François said, "you practically tripped over the damned thing. Nobody's found a use for it anyway. What kind of discovery is that? I also happen to know you left your job broke and low on fuel, and here you are after a mysterious absence getting your ship reprovisioned and your fuel topped off. I just saw you repay Fischetti for busting up his place. Where did this sudden wealth come from?"

"I put the touch on a soft-hearted relative," Derek said with his best fake sincerity.

"Crap. You don't have any soft-hearted relatives. Just us."

"Who appointed you my watchdog?"

"Ulric," François said, grinning.

Derek winced. This sounded bad. Ulric Kuroda was the head of clan security. One of his duties was the disciplining of members who strayed too far from clan standards of propriety. He lacked a reputation for tolerance. "I suppose he wants to talk to me."

"Immediately," François confirmed. "Come on."

They walked to a tube station for the short ride to the old Sidon mining site, where the Kurodas had their stronghold. All the way, Derek kept hoping for a reporter to stop him for an interview about his exotic find. Nobody seemed to be interested.

The Sidon district was a large, mined-out hollow surrounded by residential tiers. More than half of them were claimed by the Kurodas and collateral families of the extended clan. The warren was protected by the latest vault doors and all units were interconnected by a maze of tunnels, in which certain family members were rumored to be still wandering around lost after a massive party at the Ciano place twenty years previously.

The largest door was marked with the Kuroda plum-blossom
mon
. It slid open at their approach and a battery of security devices trained on them just in case the door's system had been faulty. The place seemed to be deserted, which was nothing unusual. The family's mining and freighting operations kept most members on their ships or at their sites most of the time.