He went on to dictate four or five paragraphs, in proper inverted pyramid style, then hung up and turned back to the girls. “That should guarantee a crowded, noisy boarding area for the dashing Captain Alan West to escort you through. He’s not an East American, you understand, he’s from Chugwater, Wyoming, or something like that. I went down there one time to go antelope hunting with him and had to do all my shooting from a damn wheelchair!”
“So why does antelope hunting friend work for East Uglies?” asked Jasmeen.
“East America has a critical shortage of competent pilots, so he flies for the pay. He’s one of the goodguys, I promise, Miss Khalidov. He’ll take care of your unmentionables himself, until you get to Mars.”
***
“Next!”
The line today seemed extremely long and slow-moving.
When they were roughly halfway to the East American security inspection point, the phone on Krystal’s hip began vibrating. That disturbed her. In the first place, she didn’t care for the sensation, not at all. And more importantly, very few individuals had her number—in fact it didn’t officially exist—and all of them had been very severely cautioned never to use it unless there was some kind of emergency.
They pushed their carry-on luggage a few steps further along the line.
She gave her new associate the briefest of glances. Unlike this fellow’s late, unlamented predecessor, Brian Downs, “Brazos” Jeffries was nothing if not totally level-headed. Even better, he was perfectly willing to follow her lead in the field, without any argument. He was an excellent shot, well-trained in knife fighting, as well as unarmed combat.
He was also a handsome devil—she thought he was cute, anyway—tall and dark in a whitebread sort of way. He looked a little younger than his personnel jacket said he was, well-scrubbed, short-haired, clean-shaven, and tidy without being obsessive about it. Krystal thought he might have passed as a graduate student in accounting or theology.
She, herself, was in a kind of disguise this morning. You could never tell what security cameras might have picked up that day Brian had flown off the handle. She had abandoned the one-piece pants suit or faded Levis she preferred, for a long, colorful “broomstick” skirt, an off-white, homespun top with lace trim, thick-soled sandals, and large-framed glasses she felt made her look like a bug.
She carried a purse that had been woven or braided by hand out of Yeti hair or something. Her long brown wig had been put up into dozens of tiny braids when wet, allowed to dry, then combed out to produce a striking wavy appearance. She even wore a scent that mimicked that of marijuana smoke.
Reluctantly, although there was no indication who was calling—in her line of work, there wouldn’t be—she answered her telephone, assuming the ultra-pleasant tone and demeanor that went so well with her name, and never failed to strike absolute, mind-numbing terror in the hearts, both of her enemies and of those with whom she chose to work.
“Hello … This is she … Oh, it’s you! How very pleasant to be speaking with you in this way—so unexpectedly, I mean … ” She listened intently. “Oh, you don’t say! Well I must confess, that’s certainly very interesting. I was annoyed, at first, that you’d rung me now, but it was mercy, believe me. Thank you very much for calling, dear.”
She pushed buttons, put her phone in her purse, and turned to Brazos. They were only a few paces from the spaceline’s security inspection station. “Well gosh. You’ll never guess who that was,” she said.
He blinked. He didn’t get the saccharine act. It made him nervous. He’d been told it usually preceded an act of bloody violence. “Who was it?”
“It was our Jocelyn.” she said, pretending to be excited by the news.
Brazos nodded. He was the new guy here, and was only beginning to know these people. Jocelyn was the short, brown Asian woman (Krystal had said she was Vietnamese) who would be boarding City of Newark, too, in due course. Presently she was only a few paces away, keeping a watchful eye on their backs, as well as on the Ngu girl and her Martian companion.
“Jocelyn tells me,” Krystal said, “that an old friend of ours is here at this very spaceport, this very morning, watching us—no, no, don’t look back!—and that he might even possibly be planning to board this very ship with us. Let me tell you, that could turn out to be a pretty darn interesting development.” She suddenly felt a strong craving for a cigarette. “I swear, I just don’t understand how a guy can do all the lurking around that he manages, when he’s so gosh darn tall.”
Brazos grinned. In a twinkling, he became a totally different individual, a natural, instinctive predator, utterly without qualm or compunction. His eyes were like those of a shark, uncaring, cold, and voracious. Krystal adored that in a man. He said, “Would you like me to—”
“No, no, no. Wait’ll we’re underway, sweetie. We’ll have all of our toys then, and a much freer hand than we have now—that’s for sure. For the time being, let’s just do our darnedest to look and act like ordinary tourists, honeymooners, even. We’ll get on board the pretty spaceship as if we didn’t have a care in the Known Galaxy, and let our friends Jocelyn, Donna, Denise and Minde all do what they do best.”
Although she liked having someone like Brazos around, Krystal much preferred working with other women. They were always so thorough and attentive to detail. Donna and Denise and Minde were already aboard, filling posts that would stun the media and the government, once the facts were allowed to come out. Just as no one can stop an assassin if he’s prepared to die with his victim, Krystal thought, no one can stop hijackers if they’re willing to spend enough money. It made her proud that this was already the most expensive op she’d ever been involved with.
She winked. “Thanks for the thought, though.”
Brazos raised his eyebrows, obviously fighting the urge to peer around. Krystal noticed that he looked like a young graduate student again.
He asked her, “So who is this tall guy, anyway?”
“That’s right,” she observed. “I tend to forget that you’re new around here. Well, sweetie, we don’t even know his real name. He has nine or ten aliases. He’s sort of an odd kind of a stealth bodyguard. I can’t begin to guess how expensive he must be. More than I could afford.”
“A stealth bodyguard?”
She nodded. “In more ways than one. The kind of soft, pampered rich folk he protects often don’t even know that he exists, since he’s usually been hired by some interested third party. In this case, the smart money is saying that it’s either Adam Ngu, the little girl’s father, or Julie Segovia Ngu, her grandmother. Nobody’s quite sure which, but I can promise you, the man is going to be a great deal of trouble.”
You’d damn well better believe I will, Miss Sweet, mused the remarkably tall individual who thought of himself as the Fastest Gun in the Moon. He’d been listening to everything via a tiny microphone and transmitter he’d planted on Krystal’s purse. You may count on it!
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: BEER AND SYMPATHY
One good reason to get rid of politics is the traps that politicians are always setting for one another. Ordinary people get ensnared in them and it ruins their lives. In the 17th century your career could be ended if you backed the wrong semicolon in some verse in the Book of Common Prayer. Nobody really cared, it was just another way to discredit your opponent.
Lately, gene-sorting scandals have been the ruin of many an East American politician. It’s what stem cells and cloning were back in the 21st century, or abortion or philandering in the 20th. It’s not illegal, it’s just expensive and elitist. If they can afford the pricetag, they’ll suffer a brief bout of “self-improvement flu”, after which they’ll be handsomer or taller, and their kids will never go bald, catch a cold, or get cancer.
But there’s another price. If they’re unlucky enough to get caught by the predatory media (who happen to be hooked on the stuff themselves), they lose the proles—the beer and Prozac vote—and have to use their acquired charms to sell used
cars. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu
“Everything tasting all right, honey?”
The waitress was a tall, good-looking strawberry blonde, with long hair and freckles across the bridge of her turned-up nose. The skirt of her peach-colored outfit was only about a quarter of an inch longer than it absolutely had to be, and the rest of it did nothing to conceal her other ample assets. She also wore a handkerchief-sized apron.
Naturally, when she asked the question, Wilson’s mouth was full. Waitresses and dentists. He’d chosen the open-faced hot Martian-raised turkey sandwich with homemade bread, sage dressing, mashed potatoes, and a dark brown gravy that seemed to be the signature of this eatery, which for some peculiar reason, referred to itself as “Deep Space Little America”. Later, he’d promised himself, there would be lemon meringue pie.
The dining room was all right, nothing special, a maze of booths with little windows, or partitions above the backs, made of wood-framed pebbled glass. The ceiling was high, with a dozen slow- moving fans. The light was just right. The floor was a polished synthetic.
Wilson grinned back at the waitress and nodded satisfaction. Someday, he reflected, a horde of microscopic robots would be mining the insides of his cardio-pulmonary vessels for their accumulated hydrogenated lipids. But here and now, he had his lunch before him, and was already looking forward to dinner: a whole twelve ounces of t-bone beefsteak, medium rare, a crispy-jacketed steaming baked potato with everything on it but sour cream (which he detested), stir-fried asparagus, and a tall, cold margarita on the rocks with salt on the rim.
Just now he’d settled for a Coke, also on the rocks. At “tea” he’d treat himself to red beer—Negra Modelo and Clamato—tortilla chips and guacamole.
None of it made him exactly happy—for a moment he’d considered asking if the waitress had anything else for sale (she was quite acceptably pretty and had those long, long legs), but only for moment—it dulled the pain, especially the tequila, which was all he felt he had a right to expect. He was determined to go on living his life just as he had before he’d met Fallon, having learned—from Fallon herself—that you never know when or where you’ll find your heart’s desire.
Again.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever get over Fallon’s death, not the way he’d gotten over Amorie’s … odd behavior. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. There had been some satisfaction seeing her killer’s face come apart around a bullet which had expanded to the diameter of a two-ounce gold coin, but less than he’d anticipated, and it was fading away.
The worst of it, the hardest part to live with, was that he wasn’t sure whether he’d loved her. It was pretty clear that she’d loved him. Apparently she’d stopped taking contraceptives pretty early in their relationship—one reason Terry O’Driscoll had more or less adopted him as a son—but he knew her well enough to understand she wasn’t trying to trap him. She’d simply loved him and wanted to have his child.
Which still struck him as utterly amazing.
He’d chosen this particular place to eat in because, relative to all the others, it was quiet, the only one he knew of in the station that didn’t have a row of slot machines—or a full-blown casino—at the back of the room. He didn’t disapprove of gambling—someone had once referred to it as “the thrill of bad mathematics”—although he never gambled himself, considering it a waste of time and money. He did dislike the noise it generated, with its interminable bells and sirens.
Holbrook Station was famous all over the System because it circled the Sun in Earth’s orbit, 180 degrees ahead of (or behind) the mother planet. Hidden by the Sun’s mass and glare, it was the most isolated spot imaginable that didn’t lay outside the orbit of Pluto. Depending on the constantly-changing positions of the other Settled Worlds, it was very popular with asteroid hunters who’d worked their way around this far or simply seemed to need a different set of walls, every now and again, than the ones they’d been stuck between for weeks or months.
The station consisted of two thick disks, joined at their hubs like a set of dumbbells, rotating at the right speed to produce one sixth gee at the outermost level. Each of the ten or twelve floors above that level had less apparent gravity until, nearest the hub, one could feel no gravity at all.
The hub itself—a core that went through both disks—didn’t rotate. A docking ring of steel, titanium, and carbon fiber, held in place by a dozen spokes of the same material, was attached to the hub where it passed from one disk to the other. One was free to enter the station the expensive way, by docking for a metered time at one end, or more cheaply, by mooring at the docking ring, which was stationary, relative to the station—the apparent gravity there was zero gee—and riding one of its many elevator pods up the nearest spoke to the hub.
Here on the outermost level, Wilson could look down through a large window in the restaurant’s floor, and see Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend every time the station completed a rotation and started another. She was moored by the rings and bollards she used to tow asteroids, and what he saw was her stern and the huge orifices of her engines.
What Wilson thought of as the upper half of Holbrook Station had been given over to restaurants, bars, dance halls, all kinds of shops—exactly the same kinds of enterprises that could be found at the LaGrange points or any self-respecting tourist trap in Arizona or New Mexico—and to other necessities of life, as well, like showers, luxurious baths, barbershops, and massage parlors that actually performed massages. It also offered several long rows of 3DTV phones that depended on a pair of relay satellites, also in Earth’s orbit, but a quarter of the way around the sun, to communicate with the Earth/Moon system and whatever else happened to be out of reach at the moment.
He’d already inspected the swimming pool, a cluster of hot tubs, saunas, and the inevitable centrifuge full of brides and young matrons from the outer worlds, hoping to conceive and to avoid miscarriage. He’d also found a handball court, a tennis court, and a shooting range with its own gunsmith. He badly needed practice, he felt, with both his Herron StaggerCyl .270 and his great grandfather’s .45 Magnum Grizzly. Llyra—she and Jasmeen should be starting for Mars right about now—would be disappointed to learn that they had no ice-skating rink here.
He’d been happy to find a well-equipped gymnasium and weight room. His muscles had long ago adapted from the one tenth gravity of Ceres to the one sixth of the Moon. He’d recently started using the engines aboard Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend to work his way up, a few digits at a time, from the Moon’s point one, six, six, six, et cetera, to the point three, three, three of Mars. He thought it might make a nice surprise for his little sister and her coach if he showed up on Mars, at some point, able to get around on his own, without mechanical assistance.
There was a fuel desk, the main reason for the station’s existence to begin with, where asteroid hunters and other travelers paid for reaction mass and other things to keep their catalytic fusion powerplants sizzling.
Most importantly, there were extensive ship repair facilities here. Wilson believed that one of his engines had a hairline crack in its rocket nozzle liner, which had already reduced that engine’s power by eleven percent and would eventually cause a catastrophic failure in the field. That was the main reason he’d come here. They actually had a pressurized facility large enough to accommodate Mighty Mouse’s Girlfriend. This was good because, as expensive as hangar time could be, paying a mechanic suit-time was ruinous.
There was a water desk, as well, half a dozen movie theaters, a multifaith chapel with facilities for weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs, offices representing banks from all over the Solar System, the law firm of Mercot, Flambingo, Creasing, and Plavnivs, and several establishments dedicated to the needs and comfort of lonely traveling men.
These establishments also made housecalls, to the rooms in the lower cylinder—actually an enormous hotel with a twenty-bed infirmary and a fully equipped operating theater—or to ships docked at the ring. The infirmary specialized
in the diseases of insufficient gravity: deteriorating skeletons and muscles, ailing immune systems.
Holbrook Station offered at last fifty places to eat, ranging from many standup counters and familiar fast food joints like Zeefo’s or Ali Wanna, to a genuine five-star restaurant that required its customers to wear a necktie, a formal pistol belt, and other suitable attire. It served fresh vegetables it grew in a greenhouse, and lobster, which it raised in a tank.
Abruptly, it wasn’t as quiet in the restaurant as it had been. An indeterminate number of noisy voices erupted behind him—somehow, Wilson thought, it seemed a bit too early in the day for that sort of thing—he peered around the back of his booth to see what was going on.
“There he is!” said one of the three young men coming toward him. It was his old friend Mikey Mitzvah with his round face, short blond hair, and spectacles. With him were Marko Fang, the tattooed warrior with a scalp lock, and Sean Ian Scott, otherwise known to everyone as Scotty.
“What the hell are you three doing way out here?” Wilson asked. “Are you aware you’re making enough racket for a dozen guys your size?”
“Hot turkey sandwich and a Coca-Cola!?” Marko said, flinging himself into the booth opposite Wilson. “Looks like it’s lunchtime for Mr. Ngu. We’re eight hours out of synch. It’s way after suppertime for us.”
The other two were right behind him. Mikey sat by Marko. Scotty said, “Shove it on over, Sport,” adjusted his kilt for sitting, and slid in beside Wilson, who hated being trapped on the inside of a booth. Nevertheless, he moved over, taking his plate and drink with him.
The waitress materialized almost immediately. “What can I do for you gents?” she asked, expecting—and receiving—the usual round of fresh answers. She’d noticed the original customer at this table looking at her legs and her breasts (who wouldn’t, considering what she had to wear) but at least he’d been a little shy and perfectly polite about it.