Empire Builders (11 page)
SIXTEEN
Dan GRINNED AT Kate Williams from behind his desk. “Welcome back, Scarlett. You’re fired.”
She almost grinned back at him. “You can’t fire me. I resigned twelve hours ago.”
“You never really did work for me anyway, did you?” “We don’t have time for chitchat,” Kate snapped. “You’re under arrest. Get on your feet and come with us.”
Dan put his hands flat on the desktop. “Now, wait a minute. I’m being charged with kidnapping, right? Well, here’s my ‘victim.’ Let’s ask her if she was kidnapped or not.”
Kate shook her head. “Nice try, Dan, but I’ve already spoken with President Scanwell, while we were on the way here. She’ll testify that you brought her here against her will.”
Dan swiveled his chair slightly to face Jane. “Is that true?” Jane hesitated only a fraction of a heartbeat. “Yes. That will be my testimony. That’s what you did, Dan, and we both know it.”
He shrugged as if defeated. “Et to, Janie?”
“On your feet, Randolph,” snapped one of the young men standing beside Kate. He looked like a jock: broad shoulders, burr haircut, jacket straining across his chest. Dan realized that he was carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. Probably all of them are, except for Kate. Maybe her too; be just like her to have a loaded bra.
Slowly, so as not to alarm them, Dan slid open the top drawer of his desk. “Just give me a minute here,” he muttered as he pushed away the papers that covered the slim matte-gray pistol he had put there.
“I really have no intention of going anywhere with you, Kate,” he said, leveling the pistol at them with one hand and pulling out his computer keyboard with the other.
“This is nonsense,” Kate began. “You can’t-”
But the burrhead beside her started to reach into his jacket. Dan fired once, a sudden shocking explosion of noise and smoke. The kid slammed over backward as if hit by a baseball bat and smashed into the couch along the far wall, then slumped to the floor.
Before any of the others could react, Dan said, “He’s not hurt much. It’s a tranquilizer dart. He’ll be okay in a few hours.” No one else moved.
“I spent a lot of years in Venezuela ,” Dan said, tapping keys with his left hand. “The Indians out in the Orinoco River valley have developed some dandy drugs. They use them for hunting. Once in a while they hunt other people. Still a few cannibals out there, although nobody wants to admit it.” He grinned
wickedly.
wickedly.
“Dan, you’re crazy,” Jane said. “You can’t expect to get away with this.”
He pointed the gun at her. “You’re a hostile witness, Madam President. The jury will disregard your remarks.”
“He’s gone insane,” Kate said.
“Maybe.” Dan swung the gun back toward her. “Is insanity a valid defense, in my case?” She clenched her fists and took a step toward him.
“Don’t let your temper trip you up, Scarlett. I’ll shoot you if you force me to. And I don’t know how the stuff in these darts might affect you. The close is big enough to knock out a horse like your snoozing pal. It might do more damage to somebody of your petite she” “You’re only making things tougher for yourself,” Kate said. But she stood still.
“Tougher than a kidnapping charge? Terrorism is punishable by execution. What can be tougher than that?”
Jane said, “Dan, please ...”
He gave the keyboard one final touch, with a flourish of his left hand, then stood up. A hooting wail clamored out of the speaker set into the ceiling panels.
“EMERGENCY!” bellowed a computer-synthesized voice. “LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEM WILL FAIL IN ONE MINUTE! ONE MINUTE TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE!”
Dan hollered over the warning system’s announcement, “In one minute this entire level of offices will be opened to vacuum. I suggest you haul your asses out into the corridor and run like hell to the nearest emergency hatch. Those hatches are programmed to shut automatically when they sense a drop in air pressure. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a hatch when it slams shut.” “You’re bluffing!” Kate snarled.
“FORTY-FIVE SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE. FORTY-FIVE SECONDS.”
Dan shrugged. “Sure I am. And rain makes applesauce.” He backed away, still pointing the pistol at them, and felt for his private door behind him.
The urgent wail of the warning siren seemed to grow louder, more shrill. “FORTY SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE.” Jane got to her feet. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, and started for the door to the outer office.
“Hey!” Dan called after her. “Don’t you want to come with me?” Jane hesitated only an instant. Then she shook her head and kept on going.
“You always were a smart lady,” Dan called after her. “See you!” “THIRTY SECONDS TO LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE. THIRTY SECONDS.”
Kate and the others suddenly bolted for the outer office and safety, leaving the unconscious burrhead sprawled on the floor.
Laughing, Dan opened his private door and stepped into the back corridor. He could hear the automated warning voice calling out “TWENTY SECONDS” and then “TEN SECONDS” as he loped down the corridor toward the hatch that led to the ladderway. Tucking his pistol into a thigh pocket and zippering it shut, Dan opened the hatch and started down the steel rungs of the ladder. He heard very faintly, “THIS HAS BEEN A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY WARNING SYSTEM. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. ALL PERSONNEL MAY RETURN TO THEIR NORMAL STATIONS. THIS TEST IS CONCLUDED.”
Chuckling to himself at the picture of Kate Williams’ face when she heard that, Dan clambered down five levels, to the very bottom of the tubelike ladderway. There was no hatch down here; he merely stepped out into the dimly lit bottom level of Alphonsus City , a world of machinery where humans rarely bothered to go.
Most of the machinery was for life support: the air scrubbers and fans, electrical inverters and routing substations, water purification systems and recirculators. The very air hummed, throbbed like the giant mechanical heart of the city that it actually was. Dan knew that there were teams of teleoperators up above, sitting in their comfortable offices and keeping tabs electronically on the machines down here. They had video cameras, too, so they could keep the entire section under visual surveillance.
He knew also that, like inspectors anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring this equipment rarely paid attention to their work, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that the computer’s sensors had detected.
Until they’re specifically told to search for me, Dan told himself, they won’t be looking for anybody prowling around down here. I hope.
He made his way through the shadowy light toward the tunnel that he knew existed at the back end of this bottom level. He had helped to carve it out of the bedrock of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains, back in the days when he operated a plasma torch and alternately drank and fought with his Japanese
co-workers.
co-workers.
One of the few mobile maintenance robots suddenly came from behind a ceiling-high electrical transformer. Dan almost bumped into it.
The robot was one of the newer models, almost six feet tall and gleaming in the far-spaced overhead lights. Its head bore two round camera lenses where eyes would be, and a speaker grille in place of a mouth. It had four arms, each ending in fully rotatable pincers with the strength to break bones.
“Unauthorized personnel are not allowed in this area,” said the robot’s tinny synthesized voice, in Japanese.
Crapola! If I exceed this double-damned tin can’s programmed commands, it’ll send a warning buzz to the operators upstairs. Thinking swiftly, Dan replied in Japanese, “This is an unannounced routine inspection tour.”
“Authorization code?” asked the robot.
Dan pecked at his wristwatch for the last authorization code he had received from the system, months ago His trembling fingers fumbled with the tiny keypad and the phone’s miniature screen lit up with: Bmtlqvy. Dan fumed and tried to find the information he needed. If Bozo here detects the gun in my pocket . . . “Authorization code?” the robot repeated. There it was! Hoping that the code had not been changed over the intervening months, Dan rattled off the numbers.
“Thank you,” said the robot. It turned and trundled away. Dan was only slightly shaken when he saw that the machine had an identical face on the other side of its head.
“I’ve heard of two-faced women,” he muttered to himself as he resumed his hurried pace toward the tunnel. “But robots? That’s weird.”
The tunnel had been started back in the days when Yamagata Industries had first decided to make a major manufacturing center at Alphonsus. Saito’s father had decided to ram a tunnel through the Ringwall Mountains , connecting the floor of Alphonsus with the broad expanse of Mare Nubium. The lunar rock had turned out to be much tougher than expected; the costs of digging the tunnel, even with plasma torches, had risen too far. So the tunnel was never finished. Instead, a cable-car system had been built over the mountains. It was more expensive to operate than a tunnel would have been but far cheaper to construct. It was still in use.
But the tunnel was still there; incomplete, unused for nearly two decades, but still there. So were the access shafts that had been drilled upward to the face of the mountain. The first of those access shafts opened into an emergency shelter where there were pressure suits and spare oxygen bottles, in case the cable-car system overhead broke down.
That was Dan’s objective. Alphonsus City , like any settlement built in the harsh airless environment of the Moon, was a tightly sealed, closely controlled community. No one got into a cable car or stepped through an airlock without being scrutinized. You could walk for miles inside the main plaza or along the city’s corridors, but there were always video monitors watching. The monitors were there for safety, but they could easily be used to find a fugitive. Dan mused as he made his way toward the tunnel that there had been amazingly few fugitives, to his knowledge. In a community as large as Alphonsus City had grown to be, there were bound to be some thieves or perverts or the occasional case of murderous violence.
But living and working on the Moon apparently sorted out the unstable types very quickly. They killed themselves, and often killed those unfortunate enough to be near them when they screwed up.
He grinned to himself as he realized that most of the inhabitants of Alphonsus were Japanese. Sure, there might have been a few with larcenous souls among them, but by and large they worked hard, obeyed the regulations, and lived frugally. He remembered the rare thief that had been caught and brought to trial.
Usually it was white-collar stuff: a bartender stiffing his employer, a logistics clerk jiggering the computer system so he could sell company equipment on the black market.
There is a black market here, he knew. But it’s usually so small and harmless that it’s not worth the trouble going after it.
As far back as he could remember, though, there had been no real fugitives from justice at Alphonsus City
. Or any other lunar settlement. You can’t go out and hide in the hills. Not on a world where the only air and water is manufactured in the cities.
. Or any other lunar settlement. You can’t go out and hide in the hills. Not on a world where the only air and water is manufactured in the cities.
There had been a few disappearances, of course. That was to be expected on a harshly unforgiving frontier world. But no fugitives.
Not until now.
The tunnel entrance was closed, but the electronic lock on the metal hatch was easy enough to decipher. He had expected the hinges to squeal painfully, since the door probably had not been touched in years. But it opened smoothly, quietly. Are the robots programmed to oil the hinges? Dan wondered.
The air inside smelled dusty, stale. He coughed. But it was air.
It was breathable, if you didn’t mind the sensation of fine talcum powder choking your throat. There was no light. Dan had forgotten to bring a torch with him, and the dim light from the basement quickly petered out in the depths of the tunnel. He felt his way along the rough side of the tunnel, thankful that this was on the Moon and there’d be no unpleasant critters slithering around in the darkness. Wrong! A pair of tiny burning red eyes stared balefully at him out of the shadows, shoulder high. Dan felt his heart clutch in his chest, then realized that it was the indicator lights of an emergency lamp, left there years ago by the construction gang, still powered by its radioisotope system.
His fingers found the lamp’s square shape in the darkness and slid across gritty dust until they touched its activating switch. The sudden light made Dan squint, but his eyes quickly adjusted. It was easier going with the lamp. In a few minutes Dan found the hatch to the access tunnel and started climbing up the ladder toward the emergency shelter up on the surface. As far as he knew, the access tunnel had never been used to rescue stranded cable-car passengers. Never had to be. The cable system had worked fine ever since it had been erected, except for a few minor glitches that stranded cars for an hour or less—well within the air supplies the cars themselves carried.
At the top of the access tunnel, the hatch leading into the shelter had no security lock; a simple spin of a well-oiled wheel opened it easily. Dan felt some puzzlement as he pushed the metal hatch back and climbed up into the shelter. The robots from down below didn’t come up here for maintenance work.
Would the Yamagata safety people who maintain the cable cars take care of this hatch too? The shelter reminded him of the old days, when construction crews lived in “tempos”: temporary shelters made of expended spacecraft sections, thin aluminum cylinders that they buried under a few feet of rubble scooped up from the regolith. Life in the tempos had been spare and rugged, no place for a person of delicate sensibilities. Or a keen sense of smell, for that matter. Tempos. He had lived in them for nearly three years, and here he was back in one. It was a curved-roof tempo, sure enough. Almost bare inside, Dan saw in the light of his hand lamp, except for tall green cylinders of oxygen, a phone console sitting on an otherwise empty desk, a couple of shelves of emergency medical kits and rations—and a quartet of space suits, standing stiffly in their racks like knightly armor of old, complete with helmets on shelves above the empty torsos.
The first suit he picked had only a quarter of its normal supply of oxygen in its tanks. Annoyed, Dan went to the next suit. Its tanks were dry.
“They maintain the damned hatches,” he muttered, “but not the suits. That’s brilliant.”
The other two suits were almost empty, as well. Fuming now, Dan went to the oxygen cylinders to start refilling one of the suits.
They too were low; each of them was missing from half to three-quarters of its normal capacity. This is crazy, he said to himself.
It was laborious work even in the low gravity. It took more than an hour for Dan to fill the backpack
tank of one of the pressure suits. Then he waited, worriedly, for two hours more, watching the suit’s gauges to make certain that the tank did not leak.
tank of one of the pressure suits. Then he waited, worriedly, for two hours more, watching the suit’s gauges to make certain that the tank did not leak.
No leaks, he decided with relief. But then, how did the tanks lose oxy? And the standby cylinders, too?
His wait had accomplished another purpose: the sun should have set by now. Checking his wristwatch computer, he found that it was indeed nighttime outside. It would be more difficult for them to spot him out in the open. Not impossible, by any means. But the cover of darkness gave him a bit more of an edge.
If I don’t break my damned neck out there, he groused.
Very carefully he stepped into the leggings of the suit he had selected and pulled on the thickly insulated boots. Then he wriggled into the hard-shell torso and wormed his arms through the sleeves. Stomping around the cramped shelter, he tested the suit’s flexibility. Then he backed into the backpack, still hooked to its rack, and felt its latches click against his suit’s fittings. It had been a long time since he’d carried a fully loaded backpack and pressure suit. Even in the Moon’s gentle gravity it felt like a ton of dead weight on his shoulders and back. The damned pistol still in the pocket of his coveralls jabbed against his thigh annoyingly.
Dan pulled on the suit’s gloves and sealed them to the wrist cuffs. He flexed his fingers, thinking, They haven’t made much of an improvement on these things. Feels as stiff as rigor morris, and the damned suit’s not even pressurized yet.
Finally he slid the helmet over his head and sealed it to his collar ring. He pulled the visor down and locked it, then clumped over to the only oxygen cylinder that still had some gas in it. Fitting its extension hose to the port on his suit, he over pressurized his suit until it bulged out like a balloon, making it awkward to move his arms or legs.
Then he waited, watching alternately the watch and the pressure gauge on the instrument cluster on the suit’s left wrist. With nobody here to check him out, this was the only way to test that the suit was properly sealed and there were no pinhole leaks anywhere. There are old astronauts and there are bold astronauts, Dan remembered the old saying, but there are no old, bold astronauts. Haste is the enemy of safety, he knew.
At last, satisfied that the suit was tight, he let most of the over pressurizing oxygen hiss out of the port and stepped slowly, like some monster from a horror video, to the airlock of the shelter.
It took several minutes for the lock to cycle. Then the indicator light turned red and Dan slid the outer hatch open. The smooth gentle slope of Mt.Yeager confronted him. Downslope he could see the humped mass of rubble that covered Alphonsus City ’s main plaza. Directly overhead ran the cable-car line.
His wristwatch tingled against his skin. Glancing at the watch on his suit cuff, Dan realized what the programmed wristwatch was telling him. This was the exact moment of his birth, fifty years ago, precisely.
“Happy birthday,” Dan muttered as he stepped out onto the glassy, pitted slope of Mt. Yeager .
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