She smiled. ‘I don’t do sleep. And it’s only nine-thirty yesterday in the American dome. They’re five hours behind.’
Cunard liner SS Queen Victoria, Lunar Orbit
Early afternoon, 1st January 1989
I’d finally dragged Sophie to her bed, screaming if not actually kicking, sometime after five in the morning British time, with the observation that while she might not feel the need to actually sleep, I did. Now, seven hours later, only three of which had been sleep, I was feeling a tad fragile. But I was at least within easy reach of a well-stocked bar, which was more than she’d be able to say, located as she currently was in a solar yacht control pod the size of a coffin.
The race fleet was a few miles below and behind the Victoria, catching up fast by virtue of its lower orbit, the yachts jockeying for positions that would allow them to intercept their boosting lasers and ride through the start just as race control sent out the starting signal.
A figure floated up beside me. I didn’t take much notice; the Victoria’s observation lounge was packed with support crew, friends, families, press, celebrities, and the general hangers-on that swirl across such events like flies on horse-shit.
‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ the figure remarked.
I said nothing, and instead put my lips to my drink’s teat, giving the bulb a long slow squeeze and me a few seconds with which to regard him.
‘Giles,’ he told me, extending a hand. ‘Giles Townsend.’
The introduction had been superfluous; being the Queen’s nephew does that.
He nodded towards the approaching fleet. ‘Came here to watch my cousin. I understand you’ve been giving the unenviable job of looking after her at Liberty?’
I nodded. No point denying what he clearly already knew. And besides, while my involvement was still supposed to be secret, Sophie’s taking part in the race had been announced to the press some half hour previously, an act that had sent them surging to the rear bank of phones like fish in a tank at feeding time.
A voice boomed from a dozen concealed speakers.
‘Sixty seconds!’
The yachts were close behind now, brightly coloured sails miles across but only hundredths of an inch thick jostling for position as they hit the launching lasers that would boost them out of Lunar orbit. Sophie’s giant Union Jack was moving fast; in fourth and challenging for third, which was actually second given that the joker at the front had clearly mistimed it and was going to have to go around.
‘And the entry from MIT’s gone through the line ahead of the starting gun and will have to go around.’
Told you.
‘And… They’re off!’
Cunard liner SS Queen Victoria, Cislunar Space
Evening, 1st January 1989
With the time aboard the Victoria my own, I indulged in a leisurely afternoon of gym, sauna and massage such that by the time dinner rolled round I’d pretty much sweated off the previous night and was ready for a spot of fine dining. The ship’s dining room turned out to be sumptuous, if a little dated, but as long as the food was equally sumptuous but not as dated I frankly didn’t care.
A couple of waiters floated by the entrance, wearing slightly absurd one-piece black and white jumpsuits. Imagine the bastard offspring you’d get if you threw a penguin in with a hippo and then kicked them hard until they agreed to give it a go, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.
‘Can I show you to your seat sir?’ one of the two men asked, holding out a hand.
‘No,’ I told him, coming to a halt with a fancy back-turn and twist combo intended to show I knew my way round zero-G. ‘But you can show me my seat. Stone. Pete Stone.’
‘Certainly sir. It’s the far table in the corner.’
The table already had occupants: Giles Townsend, and a dark-skinned Arabic-looking bloke who seemed familiar—in that nagging behind the eyeballs, where have I seen you, kind of way.
Giles smiled as I dropped into my seat.
‘Lieutenant Stone. So glad you could join us. I don’t think you’ve met my companion before?’
I shook my head. I might be convinced I’d seen the bloke somewhere, but if he’d forgotten me I didn’t see any need to give him a reminder.
‘This is Nigel Al Farooq. Nigel, this is Lieutenant Stone. He’s the poor wretch who’s been tasked with keeping tabs on Sophie during the layover at Liberty.’
Nigel, if that was really his name, smiled a tight, controlled smile and extended a hand which, when I took it, proved to be firm in grip and smooth in skin. A man’s man, but not one who’d ever worked for a living. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, in the smooth, cultured tones of an English public school.
More guests arrived: an equerry, a lady-in-waiting, a press officer, and a friend of Sophie’s who on a different occasion I might have been up for a tumble with. Starters, fish, mains, cheese, and deserts came and went, followed by a round of coffees, each course spiced up by a constant torrent of bullshit from Giles. By seven-thirty we were all on the port and he was demanding that the waiter bring a bottle of some single malt or other. Given that he was already looking like a man about to float out of his seat, unconscious, I had to admire his spirit, if not his stamina.
But when it came to loud drunks, his friend Nigel was a notable non-contender, having restricted himself to the occasional tiny squirt of wine and the odd, guarded comment.
Where the hell had I seen him?
I was still pondering on that when the object of my pondering made his excuses and left, abruptly, with the air of a man who had a place to go to and a job to do when he got there. Which would have been fine if we hadn’t been on a liner in the middle of space, and I hadn’t been convinced that I’d seen him somewhere, quite possibly in a professional capacity.
I gave him a few seconds head-start and then yawned.
‘Better get going myself. Long day, you know.’
I grabbed an unopened bulb of scotch from an approaching waiter and set off after Nigel.
Passenger quarters in the Victoria were in the bow, where the views were—so it seemed curious that Nigel had turned left out of the dining room and was headed towards the stern, gliding from point to point in the effortless manner of a man who’d spent time in zero-G.
Curious.
He paused briefly beside a door marked ‘Crew Only’ and, with only a slight backward glance, tapped in an access code to open it and passed through.
And curiouser.
I quickly glided over to the door, paused for a moment to listen, and then―hearing nothing―tapped my code into the control pad. The door slid open, revealing an empty corridor beyond. I’d got a crew-area access code by showing my RSF Special Investigation Bureau ID card to the First Officer.
How had Nigel done it?
An orange light was blinking a little way down the corridor, indicating that an airlock was currently being transited. Someone was going on a spacewalk, which wasn’t something anyone in their right mind would be doing right now, given that the engines were currently booming every few minutes to boost the Victoria into a transfer orbit to Liberty.
Which meant pretty much no-one save Nigel.
And me.
I waited a few minutes until the light went green, then tapped the door open. Beyond was the airlock’s tiny vestibule, and beyond that a door leading to the airlock proper, with a little glass window through which I could just make out a suited figure exiting to space. I grabbed a spacesuit that looked something like my size from the cupboard beside the door and quickly pulled it on, pausing only to grab my gun from its shoulder holster and shove it into the suit’s belly pouch.
Two minutes later I was pulling myself hand-over-hand along the hull towards the bow in pursuit of the white-clad figure some way ahead of me. He was moving cautiously; he might have had his zero-G legs, but spacewalking was clearly something he’d only limited experience of.
I quickly closed in on him to within a dozen or so yards, but then kept that distance away. I did
n’t want to stop him; I wanted to find out where he was going. Now I was closer, I could clearly see a metal canister slung over his shoulder, floating a few inches clear of him on its strap. It must have been left in the airlock for him to pick up. What the hell was it?
Best way to find out was probably to wait and see what he did with it.
It was actually one of the easier tracking jobs I’ve had. It’s pretty hard for someone to look over their shoulder in a spacesuit and you don’t have to worry about the sound of you stepping on a twig.
After ten minutes of slow progress, Nigel reached the lifeboats, which on the Victoria were clustered in a ring around the bow passenger area. He moved in on one, took out a zero-G screwdriver, and started to unscrew a small access cover.
I edged closer, to see what it was he was doing, and be in a position to stop him if that proved necessary.
Of course, that was when my old friends Mister Fate and Captain Cockup chose to have Nigel fumble the screw he was currently taking out. It floated past him, he twisted to grab it—and saw me.
Through the faceplate I could see his eyes widen and his mouth go open in surprise. Then he launched himself at me. It was clumsy, and it was unskilled, but his lunge was on target and he had Newton on his side. The impact ripped my gloved hands from the handrail they’d been grabbing hold of and sent us spinning into space.
And then the engines fired, although I was a little too busy to notice that just then, given that Nigel was now trying to strangle me.
I’ll say this for Nigel: he knew how to throttle a guy. His hands were like an iron ring around my neck, everything was starting to go a little fuzzy at the edges, and my repeated punching of his faceplate didn’t appear to be distracting him. I summoned up whatever energy I had left and gave the faceplate a last hard punch. A small crack appeared, but the glass held. I punched again, and this time it gave way, with a shower of glass shrapnel that rattled off my own helmet and then a sharp rush of air that blasted him away from me. I had a momentary glimpse of his face beginning the unpleasant transformation a man’s face experiences when he’s killed by a vacuum, and then his body was spinning away.
My lungs were on fire, my vision grey, my brain barely there. I gave myself thirty seconds to let the shaking stop, then clicked on the radio. Nothing. Ah. I tried again, cycled through the channels, clicked it off and on, and finally banged my fists on every bit of spacesuit I could reach. Nothing. Dammit. Nigel’s radio was probably fine, but given that it was currently floating about fifty yards away from me, and I had absolutely no means of propulsion whatsoever, it might as well have been fifty miles away.
Which, from the pinprick size of its exhaust flare, was about the distance that the Victoria was now away from us, a gap that would be widening by the second.
Bugger. That was me pretty much out of options, something which five minutes checking of spacesuit supplies and equipment only confirmed. Even the gun was useless—it was a recoilless zero-G model that fired rocket-powered slugs. The problem with the radio might just have been a loose connection, but the thing with spacesuits is that you do generally have to get out of them to repair them.
Damn.
Four years dodging Soviet agents in the Belt’s cold reaches, only to bite the big one a few thousand miles out of Lunar orbit in—I checked the air supply reading on the suit’s display panel—another forty three minutes. Forty three minutes? I really should have checked it before leaving the airlock, not that it would have made any difference. I wondered if Nigel was holding a place in the queue for me at the Pearly Gates. Oh well, there was one obvious way to pass the time while I waited to die. I clicked the suit’s voice recorder on and began to speak.
‘This is the last will and testament of Peter Nathaniel Stone, made this day, First January, nineteen eighty-nine. To my eleven-year-old red-headed nephew Godfrey, I leave my set of Forgan & Sons golf clubs. May he like the game more than I ever did. To my younger sister Alice…’
A half hour later, I’d rattled off the usual things—a small scholarship at my old school, a trust to fund an annual memorial dinner at the RSF club in Pall Mall, drinks for the lads at Chatham—and was ready to wind it up, and then, well, die.
‘And finally, to my elder brother Geoffrey, whom I have always despised, I leave nothing save the observation that he will never amount to anything, and the revelation that when he was working so hard twelve years ago to make partner, his new bride was passing her time by knobbing his red-headed friend Roger. Thus ends the last will and testament of myself, Peter Nathaniel Stone.’
I clicked the recorder off and gazed out at the stars. They were magnificent, in a way they never are from Earth. Not a bad way to end it all. And then I realised what the canister still hanging from Nigel’s shoulder was. It was unmarked, but the shape was that of a chaff canister, for loading into an RSF chaff dispenser. It was a long shot, but…
I pulled the gun out of the belly pouch, waited for Nigel’s slow spin to bring the canister into sight, and squeezed the trigger. The canister exploded under the force of the pressurised gas within and the chaff—silver metallic strips—tumbled out in a cloud.
I waited.
Seven minutes later, the stars started blinking out as a shadow moved across them. A shadow that proved to be that of an Avro Liverpool-class patrol boat, with an RSF roundel on its side and a waving RSF Senior Space Officer in its nose.
Three minutes after that I was being hauled out of an airlock and into the cockpit and was having a bulb of hot, sweet tea thrust into my hands.
The Senior Space Officer made the introductions. ‘I’m Butler. The two Space Officers here are my navigator Jones and my chief weapons officer MacDonald.’ He pointed to a man across the compartment floating upside down. ‘And that’s our engineer, Space Sergeant Bruce. He’s Australian, which we presume explains his habitually irregular orientation.’
Bruce’s voice boomed across. ‘G’Day!’
Butler gave me a suspicious look. ‘Care to explain what you were doing out there?’
I reached into the spacesuit and pulled my ID card out from inside my jacket. ‘Space Lieutenant Stone. SIB. I was on the Victoria. Took a walk. Got lost.’
Butler smiled. ‘Understood sir, understood.’
‘Thanks for picking me up. Lucky you were in the area.’
Butler looked a bit embarrassed. ‘Yeah.’
I followed his awkward gaze and saw a big heap of sail material at the back of the cabin.
‘We’re members of an amateur solar-sailing club at Chatham,’ Butler explained. ‘Thought we’d loiter behind the fleet, pick up any discarded sails.’
‘Faked an engine problem, then said you needed a test trip?’
‘Erm… yeah. Sorry sir.’
‘Relax. I’m not a man who shafts blokes who’ve just saved his life.’
That got thumbs ups and thanks all around.
I pointed through the cockpit windows at the tiny pinprick of the Victoria’s exhaust flare. ‘Can you get me back onto the Victoria?’
‘We’ve got five tons of Rolls-Royce’s finest at our backs and the best damn navigator in the fleet. We can get you there.’ Butler paused for a moment. ‘There was a dead gentleman in a spacesuit floating next to you when we picked you up, sir. What do you want us to do with him?’
I shrugged. ‘You can take him back to Chatham and mount him above the bar for all I care. Just get me on that ship.’
Liberty
Late morning, 3rd January 1989
When we arrived at Liberty, the place was in chaos. This was the ’roid’s third Earth-Mars-Earth transit, and it would be carrying more emigrants to Mars than ever before. Some twenty thousand, if the newspaper reports were to be believed. All of them would be looking for somewhere to stay, half of them would be looking for jobs to pad out their seed money, and right now, they all seemed to be looking for somewhere to get a bite to eat and a drink.
The tabloid press would have you believe that Lib
erty’s a twentieth-century Port Royal full of pirates and freebooters. It’s not. This isn’t the seventeenth century and deep space isn’t the Caribbean. Liberty is, however, full of crooks, chancers, con-artists, and property developers, any one of whom will happily relieve an emigrant of his or her life-savings.
It was twenty minutes into this bedlam that Sophie, with only a giggle and a bit of misdirection, managed to give me the slip and head off with Giles.
Even on a crackling phone link, Carstairs clearly wasn’t happy.
‘You’ve lost her?’
‘More she lost me.’
‘Well you’d better find her then, hadn’t you?’
Then he hung up. Man of few words my boss.
A fat cop shuffled past my borrowed desk. Of course, he wasn’t strictly speaking a cop, just as this wasn’t strictly speaking a police station. Legally, Liberty’s not sovereign territory but a merchant ship, owned by a multinational consortium, and registered in Panama.
Tax, apparently.
So its police are actually corporate security guards, and this was just security central. When I’d reported Sophie missing their boss—an expensively suited Texan by the name of Marshall J. Peterson III—had declared she was just avoiding me and put only a minimal number of his guys onto the case. Way he figured it, he’d start worrying when, or if, she didn’t turn up for the race tomorrow.
I put the phone down.
Sat across from me was Peterson’s secretary, Silvie. She was smart, pretty, and had more class in her little finger than the rest of the wankers in that dump put together.
‘Trouble?’ she asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘Let’s just say my boss is attaching a higher degree of urgency to this case than yours is.’
‘Guess you’d better find her then,’ she said, smiling.
‘Guess I better had.’
I grabbed my jacket and headed outside.
Liberty
Early morning, 4th January 1989
Truth told, I’d probably have agreed with Peterson if it wasn’t for one thing: Nigel. He’d been just one link in the chain away from Sophie and up to something indisputably dodgy. But what was it he’d been doing, and did it have anything to do with Sophie?
The New Hero: Volume 1 Page 11
