Asimov’s Future History Volume 9

by Isaac Asimov

  The aide kept hold of him until they had made their way through the dangerously disorganized stowage and onto the loading deck.

  More robots, a few more Theians. The aide led him to an arbitrary spot against a bulkhead.

  “Stay here,” she said, then signaled for a robot to stand watch over him. Masid suppressed a smile, tempted to point out to her that he was himself not Terran and knew better than to be afraid of a robot. But he nodded mutely, gave the robot what he hoped was a convincingly fearful look, and slid to the deck to wait.

  The aide spoke to a couple of the other Theians, then returned the way she had brought him.

  Half an hour later, the Theian officer who had recognized him emerged from the maze. He stopped immediately in front of Masid.

  “Vorian, what in the hells of space are you doing here?”

  Masid glanced at the other Spacers; none of them showed any sign of having heard.

  “Trying to be inconspicuous,” Masid said. “What are you doing here, Anda?”

  “Arresting the crew of this—” he turned and waved disgustedly at the mass of precariously balanced cargo “—this excuse for a freighter. You could have died inconspicuously, you know.”

  “It’s good to see you, too,” Masid said, standing. “I’m trying to get to Nova Levis.”

  “Really. Well, forget it. The blockade became real a few weeks ago, when Aurora finally joined it officially.”

  “Is that what happened? I wondered why my passport wouldn’t work with the major carriers.” He glanced around again. “Nothing personal against your people, but could we carry this conversation on somewhere more private?”

  Anda’s eyes narrowed. “You’re working, then.”

  “Amazing powers of deduction you have there. They should promote you.”

  Anda scowled. “Come with me.”

  Masid followed the man to the big cargo bay door. The personnel hatch stood open. An umbilical ran a short distance to the Theian cruiser that held the freighter tightly in a tractor grip.

  As soon as he stepped out of the umbilical, into the Theian ship, Masid felt physically better. The air was cleaner for one, as were the decks and bulkheads. He suddenly felt a bit self-conscious in his grungy traveling clothes. He had been in the baley-hole for twelve days without undressing.

  Abruptly, a small sphere appeared over Anda’s left shoulder, hovering and slowly revolving. Anda spoke into the air.

  “This is Masid Vorian, officially a guest of the ship. Confirm.” A few seconds later, he nodded. “Come on,” he said to Masid.

  Two turns and up one deck, and they entered a spacious, pleasantly-appointed private cabin. A slender, ivory-colored robot met them just inside the door. The sphere hovering at Anda’s shoulder shot across the cabin and set itself in a slot in the wall.

  “Captain Wilam, welcome back,” the robot said, voice slightly feminine. “This is ship’s guest Vorian?”

  “Yes, Laris, this is Masid.”

  “Welcome, Masid. May I serve you a confection?”

  Anda unbuckled his weapons belt and dropped it on a couch. He glanced at Masid. “Drink?”

  “Clean water would be wonderful.”

  “Nothing for me, Laris.”

  The robot drifted off to a bar on the other side of the room and returned quickly with a tall glass of water.

  “If there is anything else you require, Masid, I am at your service.”

  “Thanks,” Masid said, accepting the glass.

  “So just what are you doing?” Anda asked.

  Masid took several long swallows. “You first. I’ve been out of the loop for over a month.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to get to Nova Levis. I haven’t had this much trouble getting somewhere in—hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever had this much trouble.”

  “What do you want on Nova Levis? It’s a sewer.”

  Masid fingered his collar. “I should fit right in, then.”

  “We’ll fix that later.”

  “I’m sure.” Masid finished his water and handed the glass to the robot. “Please, sir, I want some more. I’ve been drinking recycled fluid—I won’t call it water—with electrolytes added like seasoning for the past two weeks.”

  “Goes with the job, doesn’t it?” Anda asked caustically.

  Masid ignored that. “Nova Levis is a sewer, huh? That wouldn’t have anything to do with your new and improved blockade, would it?”

  “A blockade runner fired on us. You knew about that, didn’t you?”

  “I heard something about it.”

  “That was incident the first. Incident the second happened three weeks ago. An Auroran police liner was attacked en route to Solaria. The ship was destroyed, all aboard killed. Including Solarian Ambassador Gale Chassik.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That was pretty much everyone’s reaction. The ships were recorded coming in, and the recordings were transmitted by hyperwave just before the liner was destroyed. They were identified as the same type that have been doing the bulk of the blockade-running off Nova Levis. Solaria was duly outraged and demanded immediate action, Aurora responded by demanding full disclosure from Solaria about their dealings with Nova Levis, and one result was Aurora presence on the blockade itself. No more Solarian ships are getting in anymore, which has one faction of the Solarian Legation mad enough to chew rocks. Once Solaria admitted to still actually owning Nova Levis, even though the Settler government is the one barring on-ground inspections, Earth began making ominous noises about Spacer collusion and we have our present situation. So we’re now intercepting ships bound for Nova Levis well in advance of their arrival—to avoid entanglements with overlapping jurisdiction, you understand—and this, too, has Earth in a spasm.”

  “How intemperate of them.”

  Laris brought Masid a refilled glass.

  “Your turn,” Anda said.

  “I need to get to Nova Levis.” Masid sipped water.

  “So you say. Who are you working for this time? Last I heard, you were actually working for Terran security.”

  “Station security, Kopernik. True enough. Right now I’m exercising my authority as an independent agent and working on behalf of everybody.”

  “Hah! There’s no such authority.”

  “You didn’t get the memo? Damn.” He leaned forward. “They’re building cyborgs, Anda.”

  Anda hesitated and stared at Masid. “Who?”

  “That’s what I have to find out. But they’re building them on Nova Levis.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “No. But I have reason to believe it. Strong reason.”

  “There are no such things as cyborgs.”

  “You wish. I fought one. Be afraid.”

  “Why Nova Levis? It’s under blockade, there’s nothing there.”

  “There’s more there than you might think. Besides, you’re providing the best cover there could be.”

  Anda sighed heavily. “Laris, give me a brandy, please.” He looked at Masid, eyes narrow and intent. “Tell me about it.”

  Masid showered in the hygienic cubicle of the stateroom Anda gave him. The spray of water and massage of ’sonics felt like the caresses of sirens to him. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.

  He had not told Anda very much—mainly the murder on Kopernik and the subsequent entrapment of the cyborg, leaving out all of Derec Avery’s and Ariel Burgess’s involvement. He tied it in with the baleys through Sipha Palen’s death in the explosion of the shuttle delivering the head organizer of the baley traffic. He had had to mention the dead baleys that had prompted the investigation, but that did not give much away. He left Anda with the impression that he was carrying on this investigation independently of most Spacer, Settler, or Terran authority, something Anda knew Masid tended to do from time to time.

  Working his way into the baley network had taken far too long and left him far too out of touch with events. Evidently a mess had been mad
e of the whole traffic in the wake of the Kopernik affair. No one seemed to be in charge anymore, and the independents were both too paranoid and too incompetent to fill the void left by the traditional smugglers.

  Why would anyone want to kill Ambassador Chassik?

  It made no sense. Chassik represented Solaria, which had taken a “no comment” position on the entire Nova Levis situation. There was no motive. All they could hope to achieve would be to irritate the very world that was their only hope of independence.

  Chassik had been recalled . . . what had that all been about?

  He had gotten no answers from the Aurorans, who were in charge of the Spacer mission on Earth. He had not pressed for them, either. No time, he had wanted to get moving . . .

  Masid sighed and closed his eyes again. There was nothing he could do about it this minute, anyway. He still needed to get to Nova Levis. He had to be careful what he dug into right now.

  If I turn over the wrong rock, I’ll be answering questions put by boards of inquiry from now till the Omega point.

  The water felt too good to give up just now. If he could only stop thinking for a time.

  Mia Daventri looked up from the workstation as the short, thickset man entered the cabin. He stopped just inside the hatch, blinking at her, doubtlessly wondering what an Internal Security inspector was doing in his quarters.

  He began to step back through the open door. The pair of security officers flanking the hatchway closed ranks to block him.

  “Corf.”

  The man glared toward the voice, which came from a meter behind and to Mia’s right.

  “Sir,” the thickset man said grudgingly.

  Mia heard two steps and then felt the presence of the officer beside her. A slender hand came out and tapped the screen before which Mia sat.

  “You’ve been industrious, Corf,” the officer said.

  Mia glanced up at him. Tall, almost Spacer slender with smooth skin. Cosmetically enhanced, she knew, to look . . . not young, so much as healthy and well-aged. It made a more profound impression. As Mia had come to know Lt. Commander Reen, if it would have served him to appear as a hideous, boil-encrusted ogre, he would have had the surgery. His only vanity seemed to lay in his sense of duty.

  “Sir,” Corf said noncommittally.

  “I’m impressed,” Reen said, nodding. He caught Mia’s eye. “How about you, Lieutenant? When was the last time you saw these kinds of numbers attached to an illicit trade?”

  “Not since I was on Earth, sir,” Mia admitted, playing along with Reen’s game. If he had a fault, it was that he enjoyed teasing people too much.

  “And what did you do when you saw those numbers?”

  “Shut them down, sir.”

  Corf scowled at her.

  “Completely,” she added.

  “That’s the only way to do it,” Reen said. “Let me see . . .” He leaned closer, making a show of reading the screen. “One hundred seventy-eight thousand credits in the last sixty days. I see cases of antivirals, antibiotics, wine, variable lobe wheat seed . . .” He looked bemused. “Soap.”

  Corf frowned uncertainly.

  Reen continued reading. “Two isotope analyzers . . . that’s interesting, I wonder where you got them? Perhaps those two missing from Stennis’s lab on the Thessaly? Two hundred meters of silk, nine thousand meters of polythor thread, and two hundred and thirty-one books.”

  Reen stepped around the console and stopped before Corf. “I can see a lot of that, but the first two items, the antivirals and ’biotics—what is that about? Those items come under the aegis of humanitarian exception. We let medical supplies through.” He waited, but Corf said nothing. “You’ve probably convinced some profiteer down there that we’ll be cutting them off soon. Who knows, maybe the same profiteer is intercepting what legally gets sent down and is selling both your supplies and ours at obscene prices to people who have no choice.”

  He wheeled on one heel and came back around the console. He slapped the screen sharply with his knuckles, making Mia jump.

  “We’ll find out,” he said. “You could save us time and make your punishment a bit less by providing us names of contacts.” He held up his hand. “Not now. Think about it for a day or so. I don’t trust quick confessions.”

  Reen nodded his head, and the security officers clasped Corf’s arms and hauled him out of the room.

  Mia waited while Reen paced.

  “I hate this,” he said. “Not bad enough we have to deal with actual pirates, we have to have some of our own decide to try it out. Good work, Daventri. You’ve copied all this to the main log?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Reen leaned on the console again, staring at the screen. “Fabric. Medicine and fabric. No food yet.”

  Mia gestured. “Wine.”

  “Hardly a necessity.” He slapped the console. “We could probably shut all the traffic from our own people down in no time at all. I don’t want to. Shut enough of them down to narrow the goods going through military hands. I want to monitor it. When they start importing food—”

  “The wheat seed?”

  “Seed, Daventri. It means they have time to grow it. They’re still eating. When they start buying prepackaged foods through the black market, then we know it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask a question, though?”

  Reen nodded.

  “You told Corf that we send medical supplies through as humanitarian goods. Doesn’t food qualify?”

  “No. We want them pressed, Daventri, but healthy. We don’t need epidemics taking root when we intend to occupy and resume relations with a planet. We’ll help them stay disease-free, but we won’t feed them. Starvation isn’t communicable.”

  He straightened. “See if you can dig any contacts out of these manifests. We’ll let Corf worry over his situation for a day or two before we question him. Meantime, if you can come up with some associates . . .”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Good. Carry on.”

  Reen strode out of the chamber. The hatch snapped shut.

  “Shit,” Mia breathed.

  The blockade was approaching a year old now, and the Settlers on the ground had given no indication of yielding. It seemed immoral to her to continue this way. Reen’s attitude held sway, though, throughout the military, and Earth was backing them.

  “Can’t have pirates roaming the trade lanes,” she said with mock gravity.

  Still, as much as she hated what they were doing to the citizens of Nova Levis, she loathed people like Ensign Corf who were more than willing to take advantage of them to make a few extra credits. Finding them and flushing them out felt . . . fulfilling.

  The best use of her talents.

  Under these circumstances.

  She had trouble deciding about people like Reen who seemed willing to use both the situation and the avarice of Corf to enhance the efficiency of his own job. The end result was not a bad thing, but in the meantime people who should not suffer suffered.

  “Maybe I’ll understand when I grow up,” she mused aloud.

  She adjusted herself in the chair and began asking the already compromised system more questions. Corf had stuffed the illicit records in with the routine departmental memos everyone received and no one read, memos concerning recreational activities, uniform inspections, promotions, demotions, policy statements, recommendations for protocol, receptions, and a great many bits of propaganda about the important job the blockade and the Terran Expeditionary Taskforce were doing here. Corf slipped the logs of his black market business into the “Personal Notes” files attached to these memos. By code, people at Corf’s level were not allowed personal datums. Corf’s unique use of otherwise public databases impressed Mia. She wondered who had come up with the idea.

  Mia tapped instructions into her own personal datum, connected now to the console. The troll program she initiated would scour the entire databank for communications related to the manife
st. As thoroughly as the illicit goods were recorded, she felt certain that a trail existed, from source to delivery.

  WORKING appeared on her datum screen.

  Mia turned in the chair to survey the rest of the small cabin. Ensigns did not receive a great deal of private space on a ship like this. The Helico was a mid-range attack cruiser, three hundred crew plus a contingent of officers. It spent most of the time in dock, its primary purpose in life being pursuit and assault.

  Consequently, she knew, most of the crew spent as little time as possible on board. The blockade stations, immense and spacious by comparison, offered a wider variety of release from the drudgery of duty. Cabins like this, therefore, tended to be either very neat or very neglected.

  Corf kept his neat.

  Mia went to his locker. After playing with the code for a few minutes, she took out her passkey and inserted the bit into the receptacle below the touchpad. The lock clicked off and the door slid open.

  At first glance it appeared to be a standard kit. Uniforms stacked there—two sets of dress grays still in the shrink wrap—other, personal, clothing in that container; two packs; an extra sidearm locked in a secure storage container; a case of book disks.

  Mia pulled out the last item with some effort—twelve or more kilos, at least—and carried it to the console. She unsealed it and removed the transparent lid.

  Among the blocks of book disks, Mia found a few printed volumes. Surprised, she gingerly pulled them out and opened the covers. The pages bore faint finger smudges, evidently from frequent reading. Old. Mia brought one close to her face and sniffed. The faintly sweet odor of a preservative could still be detected. She shuffled through the container, pulling out the paper volumes, four in all. She glanced at the titles: War and Peace, Of Human Bondage, Oliver Twist, and Les Miserables.

  Mia went through the disks, but quickly noticed that they were either technical works or contemporary fiction. The paper volumes were the only ancient works. “Classics,” her Culture and Diversity Instructor had called them.

  Mr. Jayn, she recalled. She had enjoyed his classes and his somewhat trendy disdain for what he called “the contemporary excuse for culture, which is little more than aggressively spinning in place, hoping the scenery changes on the next turn.” He had not pushed that line too hard—a little contempt served to keep students interested, while too much could be seen as fomenting disrespect, something apparently only educational oversight committees really worried about—but Mia took enough to heart to find herself continually dissatisfied with most of her choices thereafter.