Voyagers III - Star Brothers (29 page)

Jo had frowned at comparing her daughter to a tadpole, and she frowned now as she recalled the bald medic’s words. But Cathy was with her, and Rickie, and she would see to it that they were safe and beyond all harm.

But Keith. Where was Keith? When will I be with him again?

Yet even while she ached for her husband, Jo felt a tiny undercurrent of seething anger. Once on the Moon, she intended to squeeze Vic Tomasso until she learned all that he knew and then execute him for Cathy’s murder. Then she would find Hsen, wherever he was hiding, and broil him over a slow fire. But she knew that Keith would never stand for that. He was too different, too alien, to feel the normal human hatred and thirst for vengeance that Jo felt.

Keith will try to stop me from killing them. He’ll want to understand them, convert them, allow them to change their lives and their ways. Jo’s fists clenched until the nails bit into her palms. I want them
dead
. They killed Cathy and I’m going to kill them, no matter what Keith wants.

It was not the first time she had faced the realization that if she were actually reunited with her husband, he would try to work against her.

Maybe it’s better if I don’t find him, Jo thought. Not just yet.

She tried to bury the guilt she felt over that. And she was successful, except that as she slept on the way to the Moon her dreams were filled with images of roasting her enemies over red-hot coals. And Keith was one of the men she tortured.

THEY were getting closer to Koku. Lela sensed that the gorilla was near. No matter how urgently she warned him to flee from these murdering marauders, Koku seemed reluctant to run away.

As they struggled up the steep slope of a hill, the thick foliage so wet from the night’s rain that they were all soaked through to the skin despite their heavy khaki clothing, Lela desperately tried to make Koku understand that he must run away.

But she could feel the young gorilla’s confusion. The only humans that Koku had known had been at the university park, where men and women such as herself had lovingly tended the baby gorillas and reared them from infancy with all the care and affection of foster parents. Koku did not know that humans could kill.

“Take five,” gasped the blond leader. The men flopped to the soaking ground, breathing hard from the punishing climb. The two blacks were up ahead of Lela, leading the way along a trail of flattened foliage so clear that even she could see it in the thick, dripping brush. Behind her was the redhead with the foul mouth and his silent friend. The leader stayed at Lela’s side.

Her boots were soaked through and she could feel her feet blistering inside them. Sitting on the wet ground, she stared up at the menacing gray sky and wondered hopelessly what was going to happen to her.

And Koku.

Closing her eyes, she saw the world as the gorilla did. Koku was very near, she realized with a shock of fear.

He sniffed the breeze wafting across the steep hillside and smelled the faint tang of gun oil and tobacco. Koku put down the thorny blackberry branch he was nibbling on and hauled himself up on all fours.
Lela
. Lela afraid. Fear had a smell to it. From the biochip implanted in his brain Koku sensed Lela’s terrible fear. And he vaguely saw men sitting on the ground, heard them speaking, saw one of them puffing on a slim white cigarette.

Dimly Koku remembered a man who had smoked in the house where he had been reared. Lela had pulled the cigarette from the man’s mouth and shouted angrily at the man.

Now Lela was afraid. Koku felt her fear inside his own mind as he turned away from the men and from Lela and resumed his climb up to the crest of the ridge, shambling through the thick foliage in the characteristic knuckle-walking gorilla way, mashing the bushes and grass flat beneath his ponderous bulk.

Koku obeyed Lela’s wordless warning. He moved away from the humans, away from Lela. But slowly, reluctantly.

The Pacific Commerce shuttle coasted weightlessly through the emptiness between the Earth and the Moon. Zippered into fiber mesh cocoons, the passengers slept and dreamed their separate dreams. All except Stoner, who lay awake, strapped into a sleep cocoon with the burlap hood still over his head and his wrists still cuffed behind his back.

Four pilots—two humans and two computers—monitored the spacecraft’s flight up in the cockpit. Stoner knew that there was little for them to do in this stage of the journey. The craft was coasting on a trajectory that Isaac Newton could have predicted, as inert as a rock as it glided from one world to another in the frictionless vacuum of space.

Nature abhors a vacuum, Stoner mused to himself. The human pilots up front think that space is empty, but Stoner could feel the energies that pulsed all around them: particles streaming from the Sun, magnetic fields reverberating like the strings of a stupendous bass viol thrumming notes that no human ear could perceive, cosmic radiation singing of the death of stars and their rebirth.

Some people see a desert as a barren wasteland; others see life thriving there. Humans believe that space is a vacuum when it’s actually the vibrant plasma of the universe, Stoner thought. How easy it would be to lose yourself eternally in this so-called emptiness; to go on and on forever, looking, listening, tasting the wonders of creation.

But there was work to do, he reminded himself. No time to swim among the star clouds. Not yet.

Ilona Lucacs was barely asleep, miserable and writhing inside her zippered mesh cocoon, alone and longing for the pleasure of her electronic stimulator. Stoner soothed her and she began to dream of her father. Her body relaxed as she saw the man she loved beyond all measure smiling at her approvingly. The man sometimes looked like her father, sometimes like Zoltan Janos. And now and again his face resembled the bearded visage of Keith Stoner.

Janos was deep in dreams, his eyes scanning rapidly back and forth beneath their closed lids. With all of the Hungarian’s conscious defenses down, it was easy for Stoner to look deeply into Janos’s mind and to learn who was behind his abduction and the murder of his daughter.

Stoner’s own eyes widened as he learned the truth. His hands behind his back clenched into fists powerful enough to snap the flimsy chain of the handcuffs. But he caught himself just in time.

It isn’t the moment to strike. Not yet. Get them all together first. All of them. Until that moment, don’t let them know what you can do. Let them keep on believing they’re leading a lamb to slaughter. Don’t show the wolf’s teeth until you can get each and every one of them.

“Can’t I go with you?”

Rickie said it in the semi-whine of a ten-year-old being told to come in from play and wash up for dinner. But Jo saw the fear in his eyes.

He had spent the day exploring the Archimedes facility under the watchful care of two security men, and now he sat unhappily in a big chair in his mother’s office, looking to Jo like a little boy on the verge of tears.

Jo was sitting on the edge of the sofa next to her son. She made a bright smile for him. “It wouldn’t be much fun for you. It’s a business trip. You’ll enjoy staying here at Archimedes more.”

“I don’t want you to go away,” Rickie said.

Even on the Moon Jo had an apartment/office suite that was exactly like her suites at other Vanguard centers. The only difference here at Archimedes was that she wore special weighted boots to counter the gentle lunar gravity and save her from undignified stumbles and hops when she tried to walk.

Nearly everyone wore simple coveralls on the Moon. Most of the Vanguard employees’ outfits were color-coded: tan for administration, coral red for security, yellow for engineering, pumpkin orange for maintenance, blue for research, apple green for safety. Jo was in a metallic silver zippered suit that bore only a faint resemblance to coveralls. And her weighted boots glittered stylishly.

Rickie enjoyed the low gravity. He bounced and leaped across furniture and up the walls. He never walked when he could hop like a kangaroo. Even when he did misjudge and stumble he could put out his hands and right himself before hitting the floor. In less than a day he had become a veteran lunar resident. He loved being on the Moon. But the thought of being separated from his mother clearly troubled him.

“It will only be for a day or two,” Jo told her son. “Aunt Claudia and Max will be right here with you.”

Rickie did not seem reassured. “What’s so special about where you’re going?”

“It’s business, Rickie. Something mother’s got to do.”

“I want to go with you. I’ll be good, I promise.”

Jo got off the sofa and knelt on the carpeted floor. Wrapping her son in her arms, she said softly, “I know you’d be good, dearest. But this isn’t the kind of trip that you’d enjoy. You’d be bored and very unhappy.”

Rickie clung to her.

“Listen,” she said. “While I’m gone, Max can take you up to the flying center. You can rent wings there and fly around the main dome. Would you like that?”

“Can I? And do high dives in the swimming pool?”

She hesitated. “You’ll have to take a few classes in low-gee acrobatics before you can do that.”

Rickie grinned at his mother and agreed to be a good boy while she was gone. She excused him and he dashed happily toward the door and his own room down the underground corridor from her office. There were wall-sized video screens there, and he could go exploring the Moon from the safety of a snug apartment more than twenty meters below the radiation-drenched airless lunar surface.

Claudia’s like a she-wolf when it come to Rickie, she told herself. And Max has two kids of his own back Earthside, so he’ll know how to take care of him while I’m gone. Rickie will be all right. Jo repeated that to herself several times until she almost believed it.

Then she went back in her swivel chair and began completing the arrangements to travel out to Delphi base. She thought about Nunzio. A fatal heart attack while sitting in his hotel room at Hell Crater. No one in that family had ever had heart problems. They died of cancer in their nineties, or shotgun blasts much earlier. Nunzio had been murdered. By Vic Tomasso or the man Vic worked for, Hsen.

Jo felt a brief twinge of guilt. Maybe Nunzio had become too old for such work. Maybe she should have sent a younger man, or at least some backup. But old or not he had located Vic for her, and that was what she had asked him to do. Of course, Vic could lose himself among the tourists coming and going at Hell. He might even double back to Earth. But she knew, and she knew
he
knew, that if he set foot on Earth there would be Vanguard people to track him down.

No, Jo said to herself, staring up at the featureless smooth ceiling of her office, Vic will stay here on the Moon. Under Hsen’s protection. I’ve got to flush him out. Flush both of them out where I can deal with them. The ceiling was painted plastic sheeting that covered the bare lunar rock from which the room had been carved. Every day Vanguard security personnel checked her suite for electronic bugs. Jo had swept the office herself, with her own pocket-sized detector, barely an hour earlier.

Now she smiled and leaned across her desk to touch the keypad of her phone unit. She told the computerized voice that answered that she would need a cross-country tractor with a driver and two security men.

“I’m going to visit Delphi first thing tomorrow morning,” Jo added. It was a serious breach of her own security regulations to give such information over an ordinary telephone link.

Then she buzzed the chief of Archimedes’s security office and asked her to come to her office. In person. With no tappable communications links between them. Rickie’s protection had to be absolutely foolproof. So did Cathy’s.

They may call this place Hell, thought Vic Tomasso, but it’s more like paradise to me.

He was living out an old fantasy, running up win after win at the craps table while the crowd grew and all eyes focused on him. White dinner jackets were
de rigueur
at the casino, even though it was permissible to wear baggy gym pants beneath them. Vic glimpsed himself in the big ceiling-high mirror behind the craps table: the lapelless jacket looked terrific with its padded shoulders and his pale-blue shirt with the bow tie painted on it.

He threw the dice again and watched in fascination as they tumbled slowly in the soft lunar gravity and came up eleven. The crowd gasped and applauded. The croupier chanted, “The man wins again!” and pushed a small mountain of chips toward Vic.

Gorgeous women in low-cut glittery gowns with warmly inviting smiles clustered around Vic. He took the dice in hand once more, but before he could throw again, someone tapped him firmly on his padded shoulder.

A blank-faced oriental, small and slight as a child, almost. Yet he looked mercilessly dangerous, the kind who used knives in the dark.

“Mr. Hsen wishes to see you immediately.”

The stress on
immediately
was very slight, but very noticeable. Vic put down the dice and told the two women on either side of him to split his winnings between them. They squealed with delight.

“Plenty more where they came from,” Vic said lightly to the oriental. The man did not reply.

Swiftly they went down the special elevator to Hsen’s private quarters.

Li-Po Hsen was pacing back and forth in the spartan living room, hands clasped behind his back, so deep in furious thought that he paid no attention to the holograms of Ming vases and bronze horses that decorated the room. The plastic flooring and ceiling beams lovingly painted to resemble actual wood, the imitation oriental carpets and tapestries, the sweeping video window that showed the Great Wall snaking over hills as far as the eye could see—all were ignored.

“She’s going to Delphi,” Hsen snapped as Tomasso entered the breathtaking room.

“How do you know?” he replied automatically.

“She ordered a cross-country tractor for tomorrow morning.”

“How do you know?” Tomasso repeated.

“The telephone lines!” Hsen nearly shouted. “Do you think I’m without my resources?”

Tomasso stopped a few paces before the Chinese. He knew that Hsen did not like to have taller men standing close to him. It pleased Tomasso to be taller than this powerful, ruthless oriental. But he took his pleasure sparingly; Hsen was obviously upset, and there was no sense turning that anger toward himself.

“I don’t like it,” Tomasso said. “Jo knows better than using phones…”

“Perhaps she feels safe at Archimedes.”

With a shake of his head, “She must know that the old man is dead. Why should she feel safe?”