“That doesn’t sound like progress.”
“There’s something else. My lunar contacts paid off. I’ve got a meeting with a guy who’s high up in the east coast artifact distribution business. One of Hopkins’ old contacts. He may have a lead.”
“Fantastic! When and where?”
“Understand, I have to meet him alone. It’ll be at the St. Louis maglev station tomorrow.”
“A train station? I thought you said alone?”
“No place like a crowd to make initial contact. Easy to skip the meet if it looks bad, plenty of noise to make surveillance tricky.” St. Louis was a major maglev hub, only two to three hours from anywhere east of the Rockies. “For a spook you don’t seem up on field work.”
“I’m an intelligence analyst—”
“A spook.” Rico couldn’t see a difference.
“I usually work a desk,” said Brown. “My field work was archaeological.”
“Okay, no offense. Anyway, I’m on the morning train. I should be back by tomorrow night or the next morning.”
8: Epsilon Indi
Aboard Sophie, entering the Epsilon Indi system
The Sophie sliced through normal space in the inner Epsilon Indi system, accelerating toward Taprobane under modest thrust. Captain Roberts had just finished transmitting her data updates to the planet’s net when a chime announced an incoming message. Probably something that had been waiting in the system and automatically uploaded when the Taprobane link recognized her presence. She scanned the message headers.
“It’s for you, Carson,” she announced.
“From Marten? Go ahead and play it.”
The not-quite-human face of a Tabrobane native, a timoan, appeared on the screen. “Greetings, Hannibal. I got your message that you’d be coming out here. You didn’t provide a lot of detail but I assume this is related to what we found on Chara III and the talismans. Or is this some other ‘treasure hunt’ you have in mind? You neglected to give a specific date but I can clear my calendar quickly if necessary. Signal me when you get this and if the timing works I’ll meet you at the spaceport. If you’re travelling with Jackie, tell her hello for me. Marten out.” The vid ended.
“Jackie, Marten says hello,” Carson said, deadpan.
She grinned. “At least this time he knows we’re coming.” When the only way of sending a message faster than light was via another starship, that wasn't always guaranteed. Jackie touched the control panel and made an adjustment. “There, you can use your omni to call him through the ship’s radio. We’re still about five light-minutes out from the planet so you might as well just text him.”
“Sure. What’s our ETA?”
“We’re approaching turnover in about an hour.” It would take some hours after that to decelerate to an orbit around Taprobane, plus time for clearance, re-entry and landing. She checked a screen. “Call it tomorrow morning Clarkeville local time. I can adjust to whatever specific time you’d like.”
“All right, tomorrow morning it is.”
9: Rico Takes a Ride
Colorado, Earth
Twenty-six miles east of old downtown lay the huge expanse of the Denver Air and Space Port, and beneath its terminal buildings, the Denver Maglev Station. The maglev tracks emerged from below ground a couple of miles from the buildings, near the field’s perimeter. From what Rico could tell, the only lines out of Denver went south to New Mexico and Texas, west to the mountains and then California, north to . . . there must be something in that direction, although he didn’t know what, and east to Kansas City and St. Louis. The station was surprisingly busy, but then Rico was still getting used to the sheer number of people on this planet.
An auto-taxi had deposited him at the surface terminal and he’d made his way to the train station proper, underground. Rico—and his Richard Lee persona—had grown up on Earth, but he had been away for nearly fifteen years, and the colonized worlds of T-space were sparsely populated. Even Sawyers World, the longest-settled and most populous, had far less than one percent of Earth’s nine billion. Rico didn’t know the exact numbers, but he couldn’t think of more than three or four cities on that planet anywhere near the size of Sawyer City, which, he was sure, held barely a million people. Certainly it was much smaller than Denver, although Sawyer City was growing. Between lowered birth rates and a reluctance to live in a potential target, cities on Earth were gradually shrinking.
There was another, smaller group of demonstrators here at the maglev station, which surprised him. There was at least some kind of logic behind agitating to “make T-space safe for Terrans” at the spaceport, but Rico didn’t really see the point here. Then he realized that the two individuals wearing uniforms and handing out literature were connected with the demonstrators. He didn’t recognize the uniforms, although the sleeve bore a patch with what might be the letter V, and he didn’t want to get close enough to those crazies to get a better look. He steered his way through the crowd towards the platform for the St. Louis express.
Somehow the people managed to give each other space, as though they were all wearing personal force fields, not that such things existed. He guessed it was an adaptation to always being surrounded by people. His own experience included hand-to-hand combat training and time in zero-gee, both of which made one hyper-aware of one’s body position. As he moved, he automatically tried to avoid looking at, or providing a profile view to, the many cameras overlooking the station, all without making it obvious that he was doing so. He knew it was probably futile—it wouldn’t surprise him if the computers were programmed to look for just such behavior—but it was an old habit.
He crossed a pedestrian way above the track and paused to look over the train. The vehicle lay like a huge silver snake stretched out along the track bed, the twin windows at its streamlined, pointed front end reminding Rico of eyes. He couldn’t see the back from where he was, but the vehicle seemed odd to him. He was used to spacecraft that tended to be bulbous trapezoids or fat deltas so as to make best use of the volume in a warp bubble. This thing was clearly designed to minimize aerodynamic drag. He hoped it wouldn’t be too cramped, although tight quarters were nothing new to him.
Rico started at a sudden loud hiss—in an earlier age it might have been steam, but Rico’s first reaction was rocket pistol and he almost dived for the deck, but the hiss went on too long for that—then he saw a cloud of condensation jetting from beneath one of the train’s cars. Liquid nitrogen? he wondered. If they were still using low-temperature superconductors in the levitation magnets this train must be old. The paint did look worn, and the windows showed a slight haze of faint scratches. Either this train had ridden through a dust storm—not impossible, Rico guessed—or it had seen a lot of years and miles. He turned from the view and made his way down to the platform.
The faded and worn upholstery on the seats and the general air of shabbiness Rico sensed when he boarded decided him on the latter explanation. This train was just old. Apparently, though, they’d kept up the maintenance where it counted. He wasn’t aware of any sensation of motion when it started, and they were already moving over a hundred kilometers per hour by the time a change in lighting signaled their exit from the tunnel under the spaceport. He glanced at his wrist omni. They’d be in Kansas City in two hours and St. Louis an hour after that, including the brief stop. He wondered about breakfast.
Rico had little experience with trains. None of the settled planets had them, although there’d been some talk on Sawyers about building one between Sawyer City and . . . he couldn’t remember. But from what he’d seen in old movie vids they typically had a dining car. He got up and wandered back to see.
It was a kind of weird walking down the aisle between the seats. Although there was a faint wind noise, the train felt as rock solid as if it were embedded in concrete . . . and then you looked out the window and saw the landscape rushing past at 500 kph.
On the north side was a highway, and as Rico watched, the train ascended the gently
inclined track which arced over part of the divided highway and continued on above the broad grassy median. Interstate Highway 70, he remembered from the route map. The roadway held a roughly even mix of trucks and passenger vehicles, quickly left behind by the maglev, but they looked much like vehicles anywhere. Perhaps less utilitarian; Earthers could afford fancy.
Although not, apparently, on this train. The dining car turned out to be an autochef and some counter space, with a few seats angled to face the windows. Rico shrugged and ordered up a handmeal, some kind of muffin and egg sandwich with something that might even have been real meat, but from a carniculture rather than an animal. That was one thing the frontier worlds had over this place: real food. Although, Rico reflected, the amount of time he’d spent aboard ships it was autochef synthetics just as often as not. Hopkins, his late boss, had eaten well but it was rare that he’d shared meals with his crew. Rico didn’t miss him.
They were already somewhere in Kansas now. On the north side of the highway was a series of towers, huge metal poles a hundred or more meters tall and spaced a few hundred meters apart. What in the world? A minute later he had his answer as they zoomed past a crew removing a rotor blade from a hub at the top of the tower. Further on the old windmills still had their blades, but none were turning. Rico was surprised they were even still standing. Fusion power had replaced almost every other large scale energy source decades ago.
∞ ∞ ∞
As Rico made his way forward along the aisle to return to his seat, another passenger stood up and turned into the aisle just in front of him. The collision was minor but annoying.
“Watch it,” Rico muttered.
The passenger hastily retreated, apologized, and stepped back out of the aisle to let Rico pass.
At the end of the car, Rico glanced back. The passenger was disappearing through the door back to the next car. That eased his suspicion a bit, but Earthers generally seemed too good at avoiding such unwelcome contact. He moved forward into the next car and then into the lavatory. Working quickly, he slipped off his wrist omni and touched a sequence of contact pads on the back. It morphed from a wristband into a narrow rectangle with a wand-like projection. His omni had quite an array of blackware apps, but this one in particular was courtesy of Quentin Ducayne and his boys in Homeworld Defense.
He ran the sensor wand over his clothes and was rewarded with several chirps; some at his left shoulder and more at his right chest where the stranger had bumped him. He’d been tagged. He pulled his shirt off so he could more easily scan the back. Yes, there was another tag.
Using the wand to localize them and the magnifier function of his omni to pick them out, he carefully removed the sand-grain sized tracking tags and placed them on a paper towel from the dispenser. Now, how best to dispose of these? And, who was that guy and why did he tag me?
What Rico wanted to do was tag him back, find out where the fellow went, but he couldn’t see any easy way to do either of those things without tipping his hand. All right, plan B.
He donned his shirt and reset his omni to its bracelet configuration and slipped it on. He palmed the tags and made his way back to his seat, occasionally leaning on a seat back as though to steady himself. The latter was hardly necessary given the rock-steadiness of the maglev, but with a light touch—Rico could pick a pocket with the best of them—he planted two of the tags on one unsuspecting passenger and the third on another. When they got to St. Louis whoever was tracking him would suddenly find they had two targets to track, and while they might assume one had brushed off on somebody else, they wouldn’t be sure. They’d have to consider that he might have found two of them and planted them on somebody.
Rico didn’t really care. If someone knew he was aboard, he had no intention of riding the train all the way to St. Louis.
∞ ∞ ∞
At Kansas City he stayed on the train for a few minutes after other passengers had debarked. If he was being watched, let the watcher relax. Then he quickly slipped out and made his way to a car rental kiosk. It was staffed by an attractive and apparently young woman. Another sign of Earth’s population; where they had cars on the outer worlds such a kiosk would be completely automated, if it existed at all, since everything could be done as easily directly from an omniphone.
“I want something small but fast,” he said to the clerk. “Interstate.”
“Yes sir. When will you be returning it?”
“One way. I want to drop it in St. Louis.”
That earned him a quizzical look from the attendant. “If you’re in a hurry you could take the maglev.”
“I just missed it,” Rico said.
She glanced over at a wall clock. “Oh no sir, it doesn’t leave for—”
“I said, I just missed it,” Rico repeated in a firm tone. Then he lightened up and grinned. “What’s the matter, don’t you want to make a sale? Besides, I might want to stop along the way.”
She looked at him with a bland expression. He’d managed to offend her. “Of course, sir. Whatever we can do to help. I’ll need your identification and a credit authorization.”
Rico waved his omniphone next to the desk scanner where the devices exchanged information, then added a thumb-print and completed the rest of the transaction. The clerk transmitted the authorization to his omni with the same bland smile.
“There you are, Mr. Lee. Will there be anything else?”
“No, thank you.” She was kind of cute but things had clearly taken a wrong start and he didn’t have the time. He tossed her a half-wave as he turned from the counter. A few minutes later he was walking out the terminal door as the self-guided vehicle pulled up in front of him. He touched his omni again and the car’s door opened.
By the time the St. Louis express accelerated out of the station Rico was already cruising down I-70 at 200 kph. The train would beat him to St. Louis by at least an hour, but he would still have time to make his meeting at the station, and it would confuse hell out of anyone expecting him to arrive on the maglev. He dimmed the windows and reclined the seat. He might as well get some sleep now; who knew what would happen in St. Louis.
10: Meeting with Marten
Taprobane
“Delta Pavonis? Isn’t that the system where you found that first talisman fragment?” Marten and Carson were sitting in Marten’s office at the Kangara College in Clarkeville. Clarkeville was an artificial town on the large island of Borealia; many of the buildings presented a false front to mimic the native medieval villages of the Taprobane mainland. Humans and timoans worked together here in a cultural exchange, select timoans learning modern human technology while the humans studied the mainland iron-age timoans without, it was hoped, disrupting their culture too much. “The artifact that got us into all this in the first place?” Marten continued.
“It is, and one of the new talisman patterns points to it. I clearly missed something the last time I was there. The pyramid I found was just a native burial tomb, far smaller than what we found of Chara III.”
“But a pyramid, not the domes typical of other Verdigran tombs.” The stone domes of Verdigris—Delta Pavonis III—were well-described in the archeological literature. It was expected that Marten would know about them.
“Yes, but if the talisman is any indication, there should be another Chara-type pyramid on the planet.”
“Not necessarily. The talisman could be the key to something else, or nothing.”
“The artifact I found proves there were spacefarers there.”
“True enough. What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Hannibal, you never tell the whole story the first time. If it were just a matter of going to Verdigris and looking for another pyramid, would you really have contacted me? I’m glad you want to keep me included, of course, but I think there’s something else.”
“Damn, I’m getting too predictable,” Carson muttered. “All right, yes. Jackie ran a 3-D astrometric analysis of all the talisman patterns we’ve fo
und so far. At least all those that seem to be legitimate.”
“And she found what?”
“They’re all drawn as through from a common viewpoint, somewhere in or around the Alpha Mensae or Zeta Reticuli systems.”
“And you want to see what’s there.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course I do. And there’s something else.”
“Something that can top that? Let me guess, the Velkaryans are somehow involved and I’m going to end up fighting for my life again.”
“What? No. At least, not as far as I know. This involves a story about an alien abduction, over a century ago.”
“An alien abduction story that doesn’t involve humans abducting timoans? This I have to hear.”
“That’s not fair. You stowed away.” At least, that was the story Carson had heard. Marten was one of the first timoans to be contacted by, or rather to contact, humans. Before the quarantine on the mainland had been put in place, a ship had landed there for a general survey. Later, in space, they’d discovered a young adolescent timoan kit hiding aboard. Marten.
“I’m joking, Carson, relax. Although there’s probably something to it as far as some other timoans are concerned. But tell me what you’re talking about.”
Carson related the details, such as he knew, of the Betty Hill alleged abduction and the Zeta Reticuli star map. “Ducayne is attempting to retrieve the original incident files. It may be nothing more than coincidence. While we’re en route you can go over what we copied from the net.”
“I suppose given enough made-up reports, one of them is going to sound close to real events.”
“You don’t think there’s anything to it?”
“Carson, I am the last person to discount the possibility of extraterrestrial—or extrataprobani—aliens and contact with such. But the specific details do sound a little far-fetched. The tale could have been embellished in the retelling, of course.”
The Reticuli Deception (Adventures of Hannibal Carson Book 2) Page 5
