Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

When she caught up with the uniformed man, he was marching along the river walk in the Council of Worlds grounds, heading away from the Earth Central offices of the Board of Space Control. The formal gardens were green with the tender new leaves of budding trees; another spring had come to Manhattan…

  “Assistant Inspector Troy, Commander. They told me to catch you before you left.”

  He kept walking. “I’m not going anywhere, Troy. Just getting out of the office.” She fell into step beside him. He was a gaunt man, of Slavic ancestry by the look of him, with an iron-gray crewcut and a Canadian-accented voice so hoarse it was hardly more than a whisper. His blue uniform was pressed and spotless; the gold insignia on his collar gleamed; his chest was pinned with only a few ribbons, but they were the ones that count. Despite the blue suit and the headquarters job, the commander’s deeply creased face, burned almost black, betrayed his years in deep space.

  He opened a silver pill case and popped a tiny purple sphere into his mouth—then seemed to remember Sparta, marching beside him. He paused at the steel railing and held out the open case. “Care for one? Rademas.” When she hesitated he said, “Lots of us use them, I’m sure you know that—mild boost, wash out of your system in twenty minutes.”

  “No thank you, sir,” she said firmly.

  “I was kidding,” he rasped. “Actually they’re breath mints. Violet flavor. Strongest thing in ’em is sugar.” He stretched his face into a shape that was not much like a grin. He still held out the open case. Sparta shook her head again and he flipped it closed. “As you wish.” Grimacing in distaste, he spit the mint he’d been holding under his tongue over the rail, into the gelid East River. “Guess I’ve pulled that dumb stunt too often; you rookies are wise.”

  He gazed out across the water, its thick green surface crowded with long-legged algae harvesters like water skates on a pond, their stainless steel manifolds reflecting the golden sunlight of early morning. The commander was staring past them, straight at the sun—probably wishing he had a different view of it, one without a lot of muggy atmosphere in the way. After a few moments he turned to Sparta, clearing his throat roughly. “Okay. Seems Inspector Bernstein thinks highly of you. She wrote you a good ER. We’re giving you a solo.”

  Sparta’s pulse raced; after two years, the prospect of a mission of her own! “I’m grateful for her recommendation.”

  “I’ll bet you are. Especially since you never thought she’d let you out of her grasp.”

  Sparta allowed herself to smile. “Well sir, I admit I was getting to know Newark better than I ever wanted to.”

  “No guarantee you won’t go back there when this is over, Troy. Depends.”

  “What’s the assignment, Commander?”

  “TDY to Port Hesperus. The Star Queen thing. Shouldn’t be too hairy. Either the ship was holed by a meteoroid or it wasn’t, in which case it broke or somebody broke it. The owner and most of the people concerned are already on their way to Port Hesperus in Helios, but we’ll get you there first. You’ll be working with a guy named Proboda from the local. He’s got seniority, but you’re in charge. Which reminds me…” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a leather folder. “Since we don’t want the locals to push you around”—he flipped open the folder to reveal a gold shield—“you’re promoted.” He handed it to her. “Here’s the visual aid. Sliver in the case. The electronics are already in the system.”

  Sparta took the badge case in both hands and studied the intricate shield. A delicate flush bloomed on her cheekbones.

  The commander watched her a moment, then said abruptly, “Sorry there’s no time for ceremony, Inspector. Congratulations anyway.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Here’s your ride now.” She turned with him as a low-slung white helicopter dropped shrieking toward the helipad in front of the Council of Worlds tower. It touched down gently, its turbines spinning down to idle, its rotors whistling in lazy circles. “Forget your personal gear, you can req what you need,” said the commander. “Within reason, of course. You’ve got a shuttle to catch at Newark and a torch waiting in orbit. Everything you need to know is in the system. We’ll update you if we have to.”

  She was startled at her sudden impending departure, but she tried not to show it. “One question, sir.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why anyone from Earth Central, sir? Why not leave the investigation to Port Hesperus?”

  “Port Hesperus is short a body. Captain Antreen is in charge there; she looked at what we had available and asked for you by name.” The commander grinned again. “Be grateful to her. Bernstein never would have let you out of Customs.”

  Sparta saluted and walked briskly toward the waiting helicopter. The commander watched her go on with undisguised envy.

  Beside its three-person crew the torch-powered cutter carried Sparta and no one else. The slender white ship, bearing the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control, streaked sunward on a hyperbolic orbit and closed on Port Hesperus a week after Sparta’s hasty Earthside promotion. Two days out, less than a week from rendezvous with Port Hesperus, a radio message came through. “This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking. Engineering Officer McNeil and I have jointly concluded that there is sufficient oxygen remaining for one man…”

  Earth Central was on the horn to Sparta in less than an hour; the commander’s lined and blackened face appeared on the videoplate in the cutter’s comm shack. “All right, Troy, this adds a wrinkle. We need to know whether this crewman went out the airlock this morning on his own, or did he get pushed?”

  “Yes, sir. Are the dossiers I requested on the Helios passengers available?”

  There was a minute’s delay while her words made the trip to Earth and his made their way back. “We’re squirting you with what we have on the blackchannels,” he said. “I can tell you that you’re dealing with an odd bunch there. A guy working for the insurance people who’s a known con—they know it too, so apparently it’s all right with them. A woman into heavy machinery and old books. Her temperamental girlfriend. A guy who owns a spaceship with a history so odd it had to have its name changed. Another guy with practically no history at all.”

  “Thanks, Commander.”

  A minute later he said, “Watch yourself, Inspector.” He signed off.

  Three days before arriving at Port Hesperus, the cutter crossed Helios’s path and a day after that, Star Queen’s. If Sparta had had a telescope, she could have looked at the fast ships with the perspective of a cosmic observer. But it was the people aboard them that interested her.

  With its mighty torch blazing, the cutter decelerated toward the great rings and spokes and cylinders of Port Hesperus, that whole spinning conglomerate of a space station hanging in high orbit over the dazzling clouds of Venus, with its axis pointing straight at the center of the planet.

  At the radiation perimeter the cutter’s torch flamed out. It approached under chemical power, gingerly.

  Port Hesperus was one of the triumphs of 21st-century engineering, built almost entirely from the raw materials of captured asteroids. Exploiting the resources of the planet’s surface, it had paid back its cost within two decades; it currently housed a hundred thousand people in conditions that nine-tenths of Earth’s population would have considered luxurious. Parks, for example, and green things… The great glass central sphere of the station was filled with lush gardens, some of them in tribute to the old dreams of Venus as a world of swamps and jungles. Come to Venus and you could see jungles, all right, as long as you stuck to the paths of Port Hesperus’s brilliantly lit central sphere. Don’t try to visit the surface of the planet, don’t even ask. Of the five human beings who had made the attempt in armored and heat-shielded landers, only two had returned to tell the tale.

  Sparta’s cutter matched spin with the star-side docking bay under chemical power; in fifteen minutes, under automated landing controls, it had made it into the huge axial bay, crowded
with local traffic.

  The high-security side of the docking bay was all business, no nonsense, without amenities—all white steel and black glass, pipes and hoses and blinking lights. A tube like a giant leech closed over the cutter’s lock, the air slammed into it under high pressure, and the cutter’s hatch popped.

  Sparta clapped her hands over her painful ears. Floating in the airlock, she found herself suddenly face-to-face with a delegation from the local Board of Space Control headquarters, advancing toward her in the docking tube. They didn’t look all that friendly.

  The tallest of the locals facing her was the Port Hesperus unit captain, Kara Antreen. She was dressed in a gray wool suit worth a month of her respectable salary; her gray hair was cut in a severe pageboy, and her pale gray eyes fixed on Sparta from beneath thick black brows.

  Even without her hands over her ears, Sparta was at a social disadvantage. It was this matter of her clothes. She had found little to requisition from ship’s stores, despite the commander’s invitation—the quartermaster’s imagination seemed limited to gym shorts, personal care products, near-beer, and “entertainment” items emphasizing soft-porn videochips—so besides picking up a few changes of socks and underwear and acquiring a comb and a toothbrush, she’d arrived at Port Hesperus still wearing the mufti of an assistant inspector assigned to shuttleport customs and entry—that is, the plainclothes disguise of a bribable dock rat: plastic patch-pocket cargo pants, olive drab tank top, polymer canvas windbreaker. The outfit was distinctly on the casual side, but at least it was neat and clean.

  “Ellen Troy, Captain,” Sparta said. “I look forward to working with you and your people.”

  “Troy.” Antreen smiled then, lessening the tension. “And we look forward to working with you. Any cooperation we can give you—anything at all—we want to be there helping out.”

  “That’s very…”

  “Understood?”

  “Certainly, Captain. Thanks.”

  Antreen extended her hand; they shook vigorously. “Inspector Troy, this is my aide Lieutenant Kitamuki. And this is Inspector Proboda.”

  Sparta shook hands with the others—Kitamuki, a slender woman with long black hair knotted back and floating over one shoulder in a sinuous ponytail, Proboda, a roughhewn blond male giant, Polish or maybe Ukrainian, with a touch of the old hell-for-leather cossacks about his slanted eyes. Antreen was all smiles, but her two sidekicks studied Sparta as if considering arresting her on the spot.

  “Let’s get into some gravity,” Antreen said. “We’ll show you to your quarters, Troy. And when you’re settled we’ll see if we can clear off a desk for you at unit HQ.” She moved off quickly; Kitamuki and Proboda parted to let Sparta through, then closed in tight formation behind her.

  Sparta followed Antreen easily enough through the weightless passage—she’d had three days without acceleration in the middle of her trip and she hadn’t lost the body-memory of what it was like to have space legs—passing from the station’s motionless hub through the gray metal bulkheads of the security sector. They passed the station’s huge sliding collar, and Sparta paused a moment to adjust to the spin. They moved on, through black-and yellow-striped emergency hatches into wider corridors, until they reached one of the main halls in the turning section of the station, far enough outside the hub to create fractional gees which established a “floor,” that being the inner cylindrical surface of the hall itself. Once in the hall, Antreen turned planetward, toward the Space Board headquarters in the station’s central sphere.

  Sparta paused. Kitamuki and Proboda almost tumbled into her. “Something wrong, Inspector?” Antreen asked.

  “It’s very good of you,” Sparta said, smiling. “But time is too short, I’ll have to check out my quarters later.”

  “If you say so. I’m sure we can get you settled at HQ, anyway.”

  “I’ll be going to traffic control first. Star Queen is due within the hour.”

  “We haven’t arranged authorization,” Antreen said.

  “No problem,” Sparta replied.

  Antreen nodded. “You’re right, of course. Your badge is enough. Do you know the way?”

  “If any of you want to come with me…” Sparta said.

  “Inspector Proboda will accompany you. He’ll take care of anything you need,” Antreen said.

  “Okay, thanks. Let’s go.” Sparta was already moving starward, heading for the transparent traffic control dome that capped the huge space station. Although she had never been beyond Earth’s moon, she knew the layout of Port Hesperus in such detail she would have astonished its oldest residents, even its designers and builders.

  It took her only moments to thread through the passages and corridors, past busy workers and clerks. By the time she arrived at the center’s double glass doors, Proboda had closed in behind her. He was her equal in rank, but older; handling that was going to be the first challenge of her assignment.

  The local station patroller glanced at Sparta’s badge and then at the hard-breathing Proboda, whom he recognized. The guard waved them both through the glass lock, into the glittering darkness of Hesperus Traffic Control.

  Through the arching glass dome Sparta could see the hard points of thousands of fixed stars. Below the dome, row upon circular row of softly glowing terminals were arranged like benches in a Roman amphitheater. In front of each console floated a weightless controller in loose harness. The doors through which Sparta and Proboda had entered were in the center of the ring, and they came in like a pair of gladiators onto the sand, although no one noticed their arrival. High above their heads, higher than the highest row of consoles, the chief controller’s platform was suspended on three fine struts at the dish-shaped room’s parabolic focus.

  Sparta launched herself upward.

  She turned as she touched down lightly on the platform edge. The chief controller and his deputy seemed only mildly interested in her arrival.

  “I’m Inspector Ellen Troy of Central Investigative Services, Mr. Tanaka…”—she’d stored the names of all the key personnel in the station—“And this is Inspector Proboda,” she added as the blond hulk arrived behind her, scowling. “I’m instructed to direct the investigation of Star Queen.”

  “Hi, Vik,” the controller said cheerily, grinning at the flustered cop. He nodded to Sparta. “Okay, Inspector. We’ve had Star Queen on auto for the past thirty-six hours. We should have her onboard in about seventy-two minutes.”

  “Where are you parking the ship, sir?”

  “We’re not. You’re right, normally we wouldn’t dock a ship of this mass, we’d stand her in the roads. But Captain Antreen of your office here suggested we bring Star Queen on into the security sector to facilitate the removal of the … survivor. That will be dock Q3, Inspector.”

  Sparta was mildly surprised at Antreen’s order—the crewman on Star Queen had survived a week on his own, and the extra half hour it would take to bring him in from a parking orbit on a utility shuttle would hardly make a difference.

  “I’d like to stay to observe the docking procedure, if you don’t mind,” she said. “And I’ll want to be first in line when the lock is opened, if you’d be good enough to inform your personnel of that.” She turned her head, sensing that Proboda was about to object. “Of course you’ll be with me at the airlock, Inspector,” she said.

  “That’s fine with us,” Tanaka said. He could care less. “Our job’s over when the ship’s in and secured. Now if you’ll excuse me…” The muscular little man ran a thick hand lightly over his black crewcut. Not until he moved forward out of the harness in which he’d been floating did Sparta notice he had no legs.

  An hour passed in Traffic Control; the hot sun rose somewhere below. From her perch on the chief controller’s platform Sparta could see up to the stars and across to the intense ascending sun; she could see down to the first ring of multi-ringed Port Hesperus, which turned ceaselessly about its stationary hub like a heavenly carousel. She could not see the di
sk of Venus, which was immediately under the station, but the glare of the planet’s sulfuric-acid clouds reflected onto the station’s painted metalwork was almost as bright from below as the direct rays of the sun were from above.

  Sparta’s attention was not on the station but on the hundred-meter white ship, standing straight up against the stars, which lowered itself by inches with spurts of its maneuvering thrusters, toward the gaping bay in the hub below the traffic control dome.

  The sight triggered an odd memory, of a backyard barbecue in Maryland—who had been there? Her father? Her mother? No. A man, a woman with gray hair, other older couples whom she could not now quite picture or place—but that was not the memory, the memory was of a bird feeder suspended from the branch of an elm in the backyard by a long, thin wire, the sort of wire used as baling wire, and at the end of this wire was the bird feeder full of seeds, hanging from the wire a good two meters below the branch and a meter above the ground, to protect the seeds from squirrels. But one squirrel was not to be thwarted; this squirrel had learned to grip the wire with all four paws and slide—slowly, and with obvious trepidation—headfirst down the wire, from the branch above to the feeder below. The people who were giving the barbecue were so impressed by the squirrel’s daring they had not even bothered yet with any new scheme to frustrate it. They were so proud they wanted Sparta to see the animal perform its trick.

  And here was a huge white space freighter, sliding headfirst down an invisible wire, into the maw of the docking bay…

  Something else that memory was trying to tell her … but she couldn’t dredge it up. She forced her attention back to the moment. Star Queen was almost docked.

  Outside the security sector the passage to the lock was jammed with media people. Sparta, with Proboda dogging her, arrived at the back of the crowd.

  “I wonder what he’s feeling like now?” a cameraman was saying, fussing with his videochip photogram.

  “I can tell you,” replied a sleek brushcut type, a standup reporter. “He’s so pleased to be alive…”