Vesta sidled forward. “Nessus received the image only seventy-one Hearth days after we destroyed the ARM ship, so you can see how implausibly coincidental that matchup is.”
“The differing length of days,” Nike mused. “How extraordinary.” He spaced his heads far apart, the better to examine the image. “This view is from galactic north, since we see the Cone Nebula as background, but I understand the synchronization principle is the same.”
A different apparent vantage point to imply a different sighting. Adjusting the original image, from red-shifted by the Fleet’s velocity away from the ARM ship, to blue-shifted consistent with capture by a sensor in the Fleet’s path. Shifting the spectra of the few visible stars, to impute a velocity to an imaginary ship.
“If we could only be sure,” Nike said. “Undetected ARM ships, especially ahead of the Fleet, are unacceptable. If we could only be certain the image was a fake.”
The boundaries of cloud seen from great distances were indistinct, and some areas were prone to persistent cloud cover. Statistical analyses of the apparent cloud cover were rather subtle for a politician. As Achilles and Baedeker murmured to each other, trying to frame a succinct argument, Vesta again cleared his throats.
Vesta had many virtues. Technical insight was not among them. Achilles wondered what his acolyte thought to contribute.
“I think,” Vesta said, “we’ve made convincing ourselves more difficult than we need to.”
NESSUS WORKED AT a drink bulb, too preoccupied to notice what he was swallowing. He replayed Vesta’s message three times, its implications ever darker.
That Ausfaller had tricked Nessus again was the least of them.
The possibility of undetectable ships dropping undetectable objects into the Fleet’s path had enforced a tacit truce with Earth. The Fleet had reached three percent light speed. Even a small mass impacting at that speed would be a fearsome thing. And who was to say the ARM, if provoked, would limit itself to a small mass?
At least that might be how Ausfaller saw it.
Aegis hung deep in the Oort Cloud, stealthed, scanning from a safe and hopefully invisible distance broadcasts from across Sol system. Or was Aegis’ invisibility as illusory as the hologram a terrified Max Addeo had provided?
The bulb went dry. Nessus finally noticed he’d been drinking plain water. He circled the relax room to the synthesizer, this time selecting warm carrot juice.
Ships appearing undetected in the Fleet’s path would be perilous. Then there was the matter of what ARM ships might discover, a provocation far beyond anything his meddling had so far created.
How would Ausfaller react if he learned what lay ahead of the Fleet? Nessus quivered at the thought. With his unencumbered head, he plucked deep inside his mane.
Had Achilles, in his limited time in Human Space, ever seen a house of cards? Nessus guessed not, although peace among worlds had become as wobbly as that. One world safeguarded by the intimations of antimatter it must control—a defense Baedeker had cast into doubt. Another world deemed untouchable by reason of its undetectable ships—a digital sleight of mouth Baedeker had now also discredited. Between, the anxious worlds of the Fleet.
And now, the house of cards had flown apart.
Much cautious planning must take place before any action could be initiated against either world. For that long, at least, peace would remain.
Sixty-two days after the destruction of the ARM ship, the largest volcano on Nature Preserve 3 had erupted. Had Mount Granthor not stained the skies with smoke and ash, Ausfaller’s deception might still be raising doubts on Hearth. Still be protecting Earth.
Sometimes luck just ran out.
Nessus sipped his carrot juice pensively, wondering if Ausfaller’s talents could somehow be used to save that other world.
45
The head of Special Investigations could go anywhere he chose. If people wondered why Sigmund chose to spend so much of his time visiting ARM squad rooms, they didn’t ask. The truth was pathetic. He was substituting secondhand camaraderie for lost love. Someday, he’d get past it.
Sigmund told himself there was more to his roaming than that. For one, shifting around helped to obscure his surveillance of Beowulf Shaeffer. Bey hadn’t worked a day on Earth, at least not legally, in three years. Tax records would have shown it. What the Puppeteers had paid Bey to explore the core (the last money he had gotten from General Products, Sigmund was almost certain) was long gone. Carlos was wealthy enough, but there were no signs he had transferred anything to Shaeffer, and Sigmund couldn’t imagine Bey accepting money from that source. If Bey couldn’t father his own children, he would tanj well support them.
Nor was the happy family surviving on Sharrol Janss’s money. Sharrol had never had much money or been paid much, and she’d stopped working when Louis was born.
That left Gregory Pelton. What, Sigmund wondered, was Bey doing to get money from that source?
“YOU’LL FIND THIS interesting,” Medusa said.
Sigmund lifted his head from his arms, folded on a mildly scuzzy table. He was in an ARM off-duty lounge. They all looked alike; it took a few seconds to remember he was in London. By body time, it was after midnight. “What’s that?”
Serpents slithered. “I intercepted a call to Mary Ortega’s pocket comp from Sharrol Janss.”
Across the room two off-shift ARMs sat, their feet up on the battered coffee table, arguing about rugby. They must have come in while Sigmund dozed. It took him a moment to remember Ortega was Sharrol and Bey’s babysitter. There had to be more to Medusa’s news than a mother checking on her kids. “Continue.”
“The packet headers show the call originated in Prosperine.”
Sigmund sat up. Prosperine, Australia, was the nearest community, a town only if one was feeling generous, to Carlos Wu’s home in the Great Barrier Reef. A fiber-optic cable into town was the logical way for Carlos to get comm service. Not even Carlos could swing a radio antenna sticking up from the reef. “Is Mom having a little action on the side with Carlos?”
Medusa’s smile bared fangs. “If so, it’s most interesting. A wrong-number ping on Stepdad’s comp puts him there, too.”
Whatever they were plotting, Sigmund wanted to stop speaking in circumlocutions. He could order the off-duty pair away, or commandeer an office, or go elsewhere, or—
“Protocol gamma,” Sigmund ordered. The privacy screen surrounded him.
The underwater dwelling teemed with microbugs, relayed by Feather’s comm link. Sigmund could not remember the last time he’d peeked in, only why he had stopped: He trusted Carlos.
Be honest with yourself. He had stopped lest he see Feather and Carlos together.
“Medusa, give me your latest visual,” Sigmund said.
Four bodies moved in the hologram. They wriggled and writhed in an evidently room-sized sleeper field, amid a floating profusion of discarded garments. Everyone was dyed, and mercifully he couldn’t see faces, but the beanpole with a Belter-style crest was surely Shaeffer.
And that energetic, lithe figure . . .
Feather rolled over and stared straight at a sensor. Sigmund told himself it had to be coincidence. “Kill video playback.” His voice shook. “Medusa, when were Shaeffer and Wu last together?”
Medusa said, “That we know, not since Carlos was released from the hospital with new lungs in ’fifty-two.”
Two years. Sigmund had to know if anything other than an orgy had brought them together. Why now?
What Sigmund’s imagination painted onto the audio playback was, if anything, more painful than watching. He heard moans, sharp cries, urgent directions, inarticulate sighs, and then—
Silence.
“At that point, I lost signal,” Medusa said. “Standard ARM jamming.”
Discretion at last, Sigmund thought. “Keep monitoring for as long as Bey and Sharrol are there.”
FEATHER CALLED MIDMORNING. “Sigmund, I have a major case of cabin fever. How about I flick
over to New York? Carlos is tucked in for the night.”
It was a bit after one in the morning for her and Carlos, and the reports Sigmund was writing could wait. “Will Carlos stay put if he wakes up and you’re gone?”
“He takes direction well, Sigmund.”
He’d seen ample proof of that a few days earlier. Sigmund spoke as calmly as he could. “Sure. We’ll go out for a drink.”
As things turned out, they had several. They barhopped through the East Village, with a lunch thrown in. Asked about food, she said, “Anything but fish. I am so sick of seeing fish.” They got Italian.
At the fourth bar, she leaned over and gave Sigmund a hard kiss. “Finagle, this feels good,” she said. “There’s not a lot to do at Carlos’s place.”
You found a way to entertain yourself. Sigmund kept that comment to himself. “It’s good seeing you. Maybe it’s time to rotate assignments. Now that Carlos is accustomed to protection, chances are he’ll accept someone else.”
“Hold that thought.” Feather jumped out of her chair onto the karaoke stage. She jived and sang for a while with an Elvis hologram, her voice flat, and then rejoined Sigmund. “That was fun. A new assignment? Maybe, Sigmund. I don’t know.”
His thoughts churned. Did he want them to get back together? Just want her away from Carlos—and now also Shaeffer? As long as Feather wanted children, Sigmund didn’t see how she could be happy for long with anyone.
“Maybe,” she said abruptly. “Carlos and I have gotten past purely professional. I need time away to know how I feel.” She touched Sigmund’s arm. “Can I get away for a while without giving up my current assignment? Can you arrange that?”
He could arrange most things in the ARM. “What did you have in mind?”
“I heard about something that would be a real change.” She paused to drain her vodka tonic, then keyed an order for another. The bar was too noisy for speech-recognition mode. “There’s an ARM ship mothballed on Mars that needs shuttling to the Smithsonian. Fourth War vintage, believe it or not.” He must have looked puzzled, because she added, “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of the transfer. The museum folk think the Belters would object to moving it, which is probably the case. They’re keeping it quiet. Carlos told me. He knows because he’s on the museum’s board of directors.”
Mars was an unattractive bit of real estate: resource poor and too small to hold a useful atmosphere. Hardly anyone lived there. Mars was UN territory mostly because the Belters didn’t find it worth claiming. They did claim an interest in anything moving outside normal Sol-system shipping lanes; Mars qualified.
“That sounds like Belters,” Sigmund said.
“I don’t know.” Feather smiled. “Some Belters are all right.”
He remembered that glimpse of Feather wrapped around Beowulf. Feather going off-world for a while sounded better and better.
Fourth War made the ship almost Sigmund’s age. A dinosaur. It belonged in a proper museum. Spiting Belters was icing on the cake. “I’ll put in a word for you. Who do I talk to?”
“You’re a prince.” She leaned over the tiny table and kissed him. “Knowing that, I brought the information with me.”
Feather prodded her pocket comp, calling up requisitions for the ancient lander and an ARM transport ship, Boy George. “If this meets with your approval, just okay it. Carlos will take care of things from the Smithsonian end.”
Amid the din of the bar crowd, Sigmund had to resort to protocol gamma to make his voiceprint understood. Then Feather dragged him up to the karaoke stage, and the day got even wilder.
46
The advisory stared at Sigmund. Boy George was overdue. There had been no distress call, and its traffic-control transponder was not to be found.
Feather had played him like a fiddle. And for a fool.
It didn’t take long—a few comm calls, and netting into the hidden sensors at Carlos’s underwater lair—to confirm what Sigmund’s gut told him. Carlos and Feather were gone. So were Beowulf, Sharrol, and the children. In both homes, the agents Sigmund sent found the chaos of hurried packing. Carlos’s custom autodoc, the supposed nanotech marvel, was missing.
A big piece fell into place when Medusa dredged up the records on the ancient lander. “Feather neglected to mention it had full stealth gear.”
“I thought she was someone I could trust.” And that hurt.
So: Boy George hadn’t landed because the ancient lander had secretly retrieved the escapees. Lander and transport ship would rendezvous, and then they’d be off to—where? Wherever they were headed, they could land just as stealthily.
“I don’t understand,” Medusa said. “Why steal ships? Why not just emigrate? Bey isn’t even a Sol-system resident. And any world would happily welcome Carlos.”
The same question nagged at Sigmund. He crossed his living room, to peer into a holo cube of himself and Feather, taken at a happier time. “What was on your mind?” he asked.
Bey and Sharrol would have left Earth long ago, only she was a flat phobe. That’s why Carlos had had to father the children. “Here’s a theory. Of all of them, only Feather can’t emigrate. As an ARM, she knows too much. When she retires, she has to stay in UN territory. The problem is Feather wants to have children and she can’t. Not here. That’s why she wants to escape. To change names and disappear.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Medusa said.
“I know.” Sigmund began to pace. “Here’s a theory. She wants Carlos to father her children. She convinced Carlos to run with her.” She’d say the UN feels it owns his genes, and the new autodoc he was so proud of. She’d tell him her orders were to keep him on Earth. Why wouldn’t he believe her? Hence, he would skulk away with her, misguidedly grateful.
“But Carlos cares about Louis and Tanya”—and Sharrol, too—“and wouldn’t go without them and Beowulf.” That required convincing Shaeffer he was no longer permitted to leave Earth. Sigmund presumed he was the ogre of whatever tale Feather spun. “Here’s where my imagination fails me. How was a rampant flat phobe persuaded she could handle the trip?”
The trip, followed by a new life—off-world. Sigmund broke into a cold sweat. He knew with grim certainty that resolving this mess would take him off-world. His misplaced trust had made possible the theft of the lander, and with it what was, effectively, Carlos’s kidnapping.
Perhaps all trust was misplaced. Sigmund intended, nonetheless, to rescue Carlos. He would need help to do it.
“Medusa,” Sigmund said. “Send a recall notice to Ander. We have a new mission.”
47
“Ta-da,” Ander said, dropping Seeker back to normal space.
A star shone straight ahead. It was older and hotter than Sol, but its yellow-white hue wasn’t too different from Sol at a like distance. Sigmund sighed with relief.
Ander had handled most of the piloting. He had talked as nonstop as on that long-ago trip to Jinx; this time, Sigmund welcomed it. He welcomed any distraction from the hungry nothingness. Frequent drops from hyperspace, compelled by Sigmund’s need for reassurance that the universe still existed, made an already-long trip interminable.
“Here goes nothing.” Ander tapped a button on the main console. A shadowy sphere formed in the deep-radar display, slowly expanding.
With an imminent return to hyperspace not weighing on him, Sigmund felt better than he had in weeks. He managed to work up some amusement. “You hope to find a stasis box here? It’s not like this is an unexplored system.”
“It can’t hurt.” Ander smiled. “And the reward if we do find one is enormous.”
Eons ago, two ancient races had waged a war of galactic extermination. Little remained of their epic struggle beyond a few artifacts preserved for eternity within stasis fields. Most items recovered from stasis containers defied comprehension. All embodied technology of frightening power. Conventional wisdom had it that the caches were weapons stockpiles. Not surprisingly, every race in Known Space offered re
wards for new stasis boxes. A man could live a long life in princely style on the standard ARM bounty for one. To Sigmund’s knowledge, it was a rare decade that saw the ARM making that payout.
Stasis fields reflected everything: light, radio, even the neutrino pulses emitted by deep radar. It was second nature for pilots approaching a solar system, any solar system, to do a deep-radar ping—and hence it was hardly a surprise that no undiscovered stasis containers awaited them in this long-settled system. Sigmund couldn’t begin to guess how many times this system had been scanned by optimists like Ander.
“Oh, well,” Ander said eventually. “Looking cost us nothing. Next stop, Fafnir.”
TRANSFER-BOOTH ABDUCTION ALSO worked on Fafnir.
“You’ll be all right,” Nessus told the panicked man in the isolation booth.
The man spun toward the disembodied voice. He must not have liked his reflection in the one-way mirror. He shuddered once, and forced himself to be still. “Show yourself.”
That would hardly help. “You are Logan Jones, director of facilities at the Drake Hotel?”
“I am.” Suddenly, the man beat on the impregnable—well, under ordinary circumstances—walls. Fists certainly couldn’t harm the hull material. “I have no money worth mentioning. No one close to me does. You might as well release me.”
“All in good time, Mr. Jones.” Nessus paused to let that sink in. “My hope is to send you on your way somewhat wealthier for this inconvenience.”
Jones’s eyes narrowed. “In return for doing what?”
How much easier things would be if Ausfaller used transfer booths. He drifted from one ARM office to another, and through a few very public venues for variety, unapproachable. Any criminal force Nessus might hire to grab Sigmund might accidentally harm him, or worse, even if such action could be initiated in secrecy.
“We’re done,” Sangeeta Kudrin had said. “Sigmund is too smart. I’m tanj lucky he traced General Products money to Max Addeo, not me. Nessus, you can’t tempt me any longer.”