And a mighty sloppy job they did of that, too …
“So Emily’s magic exon occurs in nonallos and demiclones both,” I said, “and we have no notion why. Aren’t most mutations harmful?”
“Not necessarily,” Bea said. “Given the highly idealistic temperament of Konigsberg, it doesn’t seem likely that the exon would be deleterious. She wouldn’t want to harm her Haluk friends. The mutation is probably neutral—or even beneficial.”
“For who?” I murmured. “Humans or Haluk?”
A silence.
Finally, I said, “This new information bugs the hell out of me. What if that damned woman figured out a way to increase the Haluk lifespan, or make them super-healing, or something?”
“That’s extremely unlikely,” Bea said mildly. “But I could discreetly consult my forensic colleagues. Perhaps some of them would agree to quietly undertake some tissue-culture experiments, using biosamples from Brown Fleece. They wouldn’t have to know the subject was a Haluk demiclone in order to investigate the effects of the mutation.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “But for God’s sake stress the need for secrecy.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about their discretion.” She paused. “However, there’s another kind of secrecy we should be very concerned about. Have you considered that there might be demiclone spies in Efrem Sontag’s office? His association with you and his skeptical attitude toward the Haluk Consortium are well-known.”
“Sontag and his staff and even his family will have to be vetted,” I said. “He’s already agreed to it. We’ll obtain DNA samples without the other subjects’ knowledge and you can do the assays.” I glanced apologetically at Karl and Charlie. “You’ll have to test us, too, Bea.”
“Oh, I’ve already done that, Helly.” She smiled into her cup of peppermint tea. “I took biosamples from you to the lab and compared them with the Vital Stat database. You three are absolutely authentic. But I’m afraid you’ll have to take me on faith—at least for the time being.”
“We’ll risk it,” I said.
Not long afterward, Karl and I boarded his hopper and took off into the rainy night sky. For no reason other than an old security chief’s love of arcane gadgetry, he had installed a sophisticated intruder-defense system in his small home in Port Perry, south of Fenelon Falls. It was the kind of setup that would hold off even the most determined Haluk kidnappers, far superior to that in my Rampart Tower apartment. I asked Karl if I could stay with him, and he readily agreed. He was a widower and lived alone except for a ten-kilo purebred, bluepoint Ragdoll cat named Max. The cat even liked me.
“It’ll just be for three days,” I said, “while we work out a long-range game plan with Sontag based on all this new evidence. After that, I’m off to a Sagittarian asteroid named Phlegethon. Barky Tregarth is supposed to be holed up there—literally. The friggin’ place is an orbiting rabbit warren. Hollow.”
Karl turned in the pilot’s seat and regarded me with amazement. “But you can’t go now—not after what’s happened!”
“Sure I can.” I was scrolling through the hopper’s music library. Mostly classical, dammit, and heavy on Khachaturian. Finally, I found a Cal Tjader collection and called up “Running Out.” Apropos, no?
“You’re needed here!” Karl protested.
“No, I’m not. You need Cassius Potter, Hector Motlaletsie, and Lotte Dietrich.” They were the retired Rampart security agents who had worked closely with us in the Perseus Spur during the Galapharma takeover attempt. The three were among the few people fully cognizant of the Haluk demiclone threat.
“My Over-the-Hill Gang?”
“Sign ’em on again,” I told him. “They’ll come running if you explain the situation. We’re going to need Lotte’s computer expertise to analyze the archival material we got from Lorne Buchanan. She’ll know how to validate its authenticity for Sontag, in case SXA tries to discredit the chain of evidence later. Cassius and Hector will have an even more sensitive mission: collecting biosamples from every Delegate in the Commonwealth Assembly. They should all be tested. So should as many of the Delegates’ aides as we can grab DNA from. If any demiclones are found, we leave them in place—then let Sontag blow ’em sky-high when he starts his committee hearings.”
“You should be here for those. You’ve got to be here! You’re a principal witness.”
“My Barky Hunt won’t take long. Maybe not even two weeks. Five days to reach Phlegethon, maybe a few more to track the old gunrunner down and hook him up to the truth machines I’m packing on Makebate. If he comes up aces, I’ll transmit the results of his interrogation to you immediately via encrypted subspace com, then hightail it back to Earth with Barky lashed to the copilot’s chair.”
“And what if something goes wrong? Nothing that superannuated crook is likely to tell you is worth risking your life for.”
“That’s not true.” I told him about the upcoming Assembly vote that would permit the sale of fifty T-2 Rampart Mandate planets to the Haluk, as well as the bill that would be introduced in the next session opening an additional three hundred worlds to the aliens. “Sontag thinks it would be bad strategy to attack the fifty-planet bill by introducing the demiclone evidence during the final eight weeks of this Assembly session. I don’t agree. Maybe Barky Tregarth can help me change Ef’s mind.”
Karl was quietly appalled at the political news. “I never dreamed that the pro-Haluk faction was pushing ahead so fast! T-2 worlds … not as desirable as T-1’s, but bad enough. Isn’t there anything you could do as a Rampart director to stall the sale?”
“Me?” I let loose a cynical cackle. “Not a prayer. The Rampart board would vote me down in a landslide if I tried to block either deal. A huge credit infusion right now is just what the doctor ordered to grease the wheels of the Galapharma consolidation. The only way to force an open-door treaty on the Haluk and slow their influx is by discrediting them in the Assembly.”
“We already have the evidence to do that, using Brown Fleece and the new Galapharma material. Dammit, Helly! Galloping off after a long shot like Barky Tregarth is reckless and irresponsible. To say nothing of bloody dangerous!”
“My life’s in danger if I stay on Earth,” I pointed out. “So I might as well go. At least there won’t be any Haluk demiclones gunning for my butt around Sagittarius.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered darkly. “Why not just admit you’re hot to trot on a new offworld adventure after two years of boring legal shit?”
“There’s that,” I admitted, grinning.
He turned away and stared out the side window of the hopper. Cal Tjader was playing his great Latin take on “ ’Round Midnight.”
“So follow your damned cowboy instincts,” Karl said softly. “If you end up dead, the rest of us will carry on the crusade somehow.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I’m counting on it.”
“The bad hats will be expecting you at Phlegethon, you know.”
“That’s why I’m going there in fancy dress. I’ll disguise myself as a Joru trader. A very short Joru trader. And I’ll have trade goods that no Haluk-oriented smuggler can resist. I twisted Tony Becker’s arm and he’s putting the stuff together for me.” I told Karl what merchandise I planned to offer and he laughed. “If I give a decent performance, none of the local wiseguys will connect my Joru persona with the guy in Toronto who paid big money to learn the whereabouts of one Hamilcar Barca Tregarth.”
Karl thought about it. “Hmm. This goofy idea could actually work.”
I flashed a confident grin. “Of course it will. And you know what? Masquerading as an alien might even be fun!”
What an idiot I was.
Chapter 6
Tony Becker, Rampart Vice President for Biotechnology, was an ultraefficient executive and a fine scientist who didn’t suffer fools—or cowboys—gladly. He was scrupulously upright, loyal, hardworking, and couldn’t stand the sight of a certain flamboyant black-sheep lawyer who used his
family name and fortune to make political waves.
Tony was also the only one I would have trusted to put together my Barky bait.
When I coerced him into cooperating with me, I made it clear that I needed the crucial materials no later than 0400 hours on Wednesday morning, the day I intended to leave Earth from Oshawa Starport. Tony grudgingly promised to meet the deadline but said he’d probably have to bring the trade goods to the Rampart pilot’s lounge at the last minute.
The starport serving the Human Commonwealth capital had such heavy traffic that landings and departures were firmed up two days ahead of time. To keep Haluk agents off balance, I planned to usurp the liftoff slot of another Rampart ship scheduled to depart at 0440. It was a fairly common ploy of impatient VIP executives. The bumped vessel would be banished to the end of the line and endure a forty-eight-hour delay. Taking its place, Makebate would be entered into the starport computer record only at the last minute.
Promptly at four in the morning I sat alone in Rampart’s pilot lounge in the central module of the lake-island platform, waiting for Tony. Through the observation window I could see the cloudy sky brightening in the east. Every few minutes a massive starship lofted silently off one of the thirty-six floating cradles that encircled the tower structure, then vanished into the overcast under sublight drive.
Makebate was on the conveyor already, moving along the underwater tunnel from our shoreside maintenance facility to her designated cradle. At 0430 I’d have to be on her flight deck, going through the final checklist of procedures for liftoff, or else forfeit my slot.
The wall chronometer showed 0410 hours, and still no Tony Becker. I couldn’t believe the prickly bastard would screw me, but it wouldn’t be any surprise if he shaved the time to the bone just to make me squirm.
Phone him? Nope. I just cursed and waited.
At 0415 the pork sausage patties, scrambled eggs, and fried tomatoes Karl had given me for breakfast did a fandango in my gut. For some reason, the notion of postponing the Phlegethon trip for two days was unthinkable. If the Biotech vice president didn’t show, I’d leave without the trade goods and think up a new way to entice my quarry into range. As for Tony Becker … would I really have him fired if he failed me, as I’d threatened? Would I dismiss a valued Rampart executive, a tireless charity fund-raiser, a devout churchgoer, a staunch family man, merely because he’d refused to be an accomplice in my cockamamie scheme?
You’re damned right I would.
But he strolled into the pilot lounge at 0419, blasé as you please. I climbed to my feet and said, “Hey, Tony. Almost missed you.”
Becker was a round-faced blond man in his late thirties who wore a white track suit that was not only immaculately clean, but pressed. He looked at me as though I were something that needed scraping off his pristine athletic shoes, then thrust a padded fabric lunch pak into my hands. It was the kind of thing small children took to school, imprinted with images of the cartoon character Daffy Duck.
“Here,” he said snippily. “One of my kids contributed the deceptive packaging. Do you have any idea how tough it was to get this material put together? You’d better be damned sure nobody ever traces this unethical stunt of yours back to me.”
The Daffy pack contained only two items. One was a semiobsolete Macrodur magslate with a chipped case and a dirty screen. The other item was an important-looking little technical container about the size of a sandwich box that had built-in refrigeration and self-destruct units and biohazard symbols stuck on all sides. I tipped it carefully out of the pack onto a coffee table.
“Here’s the key.” Tony handed me a dime.
Inside the box were six smaller self-refrigerating biocontainers nested in contour padding. I opened one and found a sealed, unlabeled vial nearly full of viscous purplish liquid.
Tony Becker said, “The viral vector is the real thing, with an admixture of harmless contaminants and stain in the culture to make it look exotic. It’ll pass any test. The slate contains a complicated production protocol that I faked up, using data from our own Spur factories, and translated into Joru. It’ll serve your purposes. However, I should warn you that a really competent biotechnician will probably suspect that the alien manufacturing procedures are bogus. They’re too efficient.”
“That’s okay,” I said, “so long as the vector itself passes muster.”
“I told you it would, didn’t I?” Tony snapped.
I handed him a plastic card. It represented five hundred shares of Rampart Preferred, signed over from my personal stakeholding. “A tangible token of my appreciation, as I promised. But perhaps your tender conscience won’t allow you to accept a bribe.”
I swear that he hissed at me. Then he snatched the card, shoved it into his belt wallet and stomped off, leaving me grinning. I took a last look at the small vial before putting it away with the others. What looked like runny grape jelly was actually the genetic engineering vector PD32:C2. Barky Tregarth would be led to believe the vials were samples—from a brand new source of the invaluable virus located on a Joru planet.
I locked up the container, slung the Daffy pack over my shoulder, and dashed to the transporter. I arrived at Makebate’s cradle with two whole minutes to spare.
The early part of my voyage to Phlegethon was spent in dress rehearsal for my upcoming role as a Joru. I strode masterfully about the cramped flight deck practicing xeno gestures, dressed in flowing black-and-white brocaded robes reminiscent of those worn by medieval Dominican friars, doing my best to convey the impression that I was a third of a meter taller and weighed an additional 45 kilos. (A few shrimpy Joru were my height, 193 cm.) My stage presence had to reflect the almighty chutzpah of a person who believed, as every supremely self-confident male Joru did, that the sun, moon, and stars shone out of his cloaca.
The costume I had purchased at the Mississauga theatrical supply establishment recommended by Halimeda Opper was elaborate and expensive, intended for human actors impersonating Joru in close-up holo performances. The fabric and accessories seemed authentic at close inspection. My body, beneath the voluminous robes, was modified by a padded suit that gave it additional bulk in the right places. I also wore soft-armor longjohns and had additional armor in the hood of the costume. My hands were enclosed in six-fingered gloves—the prosthetic extra digits were even capable of movement—that simulated hairy orange paws adorned with heavy golden rings. I slipped small armor pads into the gloves to guard the backs of my hands.
Disguising my head and face was trickier, requiring the use of recontouring makeup appliances, bulging faux eyes with vertical pupils, skin texturizer, and a bald cap sporting a knobby crest and tufts of apricot fur.
Alien oxygen-concentrating equipment hid the lower part of my face—and made the entire impersonation feasible, since Joru had peculiar narrow jaws that were impossible to simulate on a normal human skull. The mask wasn’t operational, of course. Instead it was fitted with a special internal translator device that modified my whispered utterances into the alien language and broadcast them through an annunciator at normal volume.
I also wore an earpiece that would decipher Joru in case any member of that race tried to speak to me in the mother tongue. A second pendant-model translator, clipped to my collar in the usual fashion, could be activated to retranslate my Joru words back into appropriately florid Standard English; I wasn’t a good enough actor to reproduce the mechanical idiom on my own.
After getting my moves down pat and polishing my conversational candences, I used the ship’s computer library to brush up my knowledge of Joru culture. I also created a personal legend that was loosely based on a Joru criminal I’d known in the old days.
My new identity was that of Gulowjadipallu Gulow, a native of the planet Didiwa in Sector 7 in the inner Orion Arm. I had three wives, fourteen offspring, and a pet wulip back home. I was a professional middleman, an information broker, as were so many other members of my urbane and discreet race. I was semiretired, but still ke
pt a paw in when a truly unique opportunity presented itself. Because I was rich and my time was so valuable, I traveled in a late model starship of human manufacture. No one at Phlegethon would scan it closely because I’d leave it in orbit, hidden in its impenetrable dissimulator field, and dock at the asteroid in my ordinary-looking ship’s gig.
With luck, minions of Ram Mahtani or other unfriendlies would never see through my elaborate camouflage; and Barky Tregarth, even forewarned and wary, wouldn’t suspect my true identity until it was too late.
Four days out of Earth, as I was traversing Red Gap, between the Orion Arm and Sagittarius, I picked up a distress call on the generalized subspace communication channel. At the time, Makebate was outside the normal shipping vectors, streaking through faintly glowing drifts of interstellar gases slightly below the galactic plane. There wasn’t a star within 350 light-years, and no solid matter larger than a mouse turd within 100.
The automated beacon-style subspace signal was so faint it almost missed me. But Makebate’s gonzo receiving equipment managed to pull one of the flashes into dimensional focus, enabling us to lock on. I only hesitated for a moment before transmitting a beamed response.
“Vessel in distress,” I said, “do you copy on Channel 6113?”
“… We copy on Channel 6113. Thank you for responding.”