Ceres

by L. Neil Smith

  In the two weeks he had before the real action began and he had to abandon the City of Newark along with the Null Delta Em people he was supposedly watching over, he had plans to enjoy this excursion thoroughly.

  Passenger Deck Four, the boarding pass specified, Stateroom Number Three. Crenicichla opened the gasketed door—right, he recalled, these wedge-shaped cabins could detach from the service core, becoming lifeboats if it was required of them—and went inside, closing it behind him and double-locking it. He looked around the small room very carefully, making certain no one was waiting to ambush him. Although it looked a great deal like any hotel room, there were no big windows on the curved outer wall, only a porthole, covered by a small, silly curtain.

  Crenicichla set his briefcase on the small writing table and extracted his computer. He called up the virtual keyboard and display screen, and activated a security program. It would detect hidden cameras and listening devices, rendering useless those he chose to leave in place.

  In the bathroom, he looked inside the medicine cabinet and found a screw holding it to the wall. The paint in the screw’s slot had been slightly chipped and he could see bare metal. That was a mistake somebody should probably be gigged for. Extracting a ten dollar coin from his pocket, he turned the screw. The entire cabinet swung away from the bulkhead on hidden hinges. Inside the compartment he found behind it, was a large manila envelope, sealed with a common bronze office clasp.

  This was a principal reason he’d acted to defeat any surveillance devices that might be in the compartment. Inside the envelope, which he laid on the vanity counter, was a special pistol, the most recent weapon to be issued to the East American and United Nations military. It held cartridges in a magazine and shot copper-jacketed lead bullets like most handguns still did, even in this century, but each of them had been treated with an extremely fast-acting neurotoxin, released only by the energy of the bullet’s impact, and would also be charged, on its trip through the barrel, with three hundred thousand volts of electricity.

  Deal with that, Wilson Ngu, Crenicichla muttered to himself, surprised at the vehemence of his feelings concerning the bloodthirsty boy from Ceres. On the other hand, the Environmental Defense Brigade had been his own pet idea—he mourned its several fatalities; many of them had been friends, and only hoped the survivors wouldn’t identify him as their mentor—a fine and noble idea that the wealthy young gunslinger had erased from the board before it had even gotten started.

  He put the pistol back in its envelope, closed it with its bronze fastener, and stowed the package away again behind the cabinet. He wouldn’t be needing it yet, not for two weeks. But it certainly was a convenience, he thought, having so many people in so many sensitive positions.

  About now, Krystal’s operatives should be finding their weapons, too—those who had just come aboard. The others—copilot, purser’s assistant, and hostess—were the folks who’d stashed these deadly toys here to begin with, proving once again that you can’t prevent crime, you can only move it, in this case from the passengers to the crew.

  Someone knocked on the door. The small screen on its inside showed the face of Denise, the Purser’s Assistant. She shouldn’t be here like this.

  He swung the door aside and opened his mouth to reprimand her.

  “Good day, Mr. … Krennykickla.” She studied a clipboard in her hand intently. “I hope I pronounced that right. We’re letting all of the higher deck passengers know that it’s only a few minutes before departure.”

  She was good. “Thank you, Miss. Do I have to do anything special?”

  “No sir. For a moment, you’ll just feel a little like you’re in an elevator. We’ll start at a sixth of a gee and accelerate gradually to a third of a gee at Turnover—that’s the same as Mars’ gravity—and remain at that rate of acceleration until we arrive at Mars’ orbit.”

  He nodded. “Well, thanks again, Miss—Denise. Do you require a tip?

  “Oh, no, sir. East American Spacelines’ tariffs strictly forbid it.” She turned a little, as if to take her leave, and fluttered her eyelashes.

  “I see.” He slipped her a hundred dollar bill exactly as he would have been expected to by anybody watching. “Very well, then, thank you again.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He closed the door, got a flask from the one small piece of check- through luggage he’d discovered waiting for him in the stateroom, and poured himself a healthy drink. The ship’s 3DTV system followed East American “broadcast standards”, which meant that there was virtually nothing on worth watching, but he found a soccer game, reclined on the bed, drank his drink, and eventually took a nap, missing the thrill of takeoff.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: THE DIAMOND ROGUE

  We’ve all heard it said that people who’ve been married for a long time tend to look like one another. I can’t really testify to that, but I do believe that people who are going to be married for a long time tend to think like one another from the beginning. That’s why they fall in love in the first place, and that’s what makes it work. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  “Would you care for a little more of this cocoa?” Adam asked.

  A breeze off Lake Selous stirred, bringing more leaves down from the trees. Pallas was having an Autumn, courtesy of Weather Control, and it would be enjoyable. The breeze was warm. An efficiently quiet machine the size of a small suitcase traveled between the lake and the house, cutting the grass and converting the orange and yellow leaves it found to a fine powder.

  Ardith replied, “No, thank you, dear, I’m about cocoaed out.” As he put the Thermos down, she snuggled into the red plaid blanket he’d covered her with when she’d sat down on the recliner, so that only her dark eyes showed. She felt better now, but she was still weak from moment to moment, and got chilled easily. “But I don’t want to go back indoors just yet.” She glared back toward the house. “My phone’s in there, and more reports from my lab people that nothing has changed up there.”

  She used her eyes to indicate the giant Drake-Tealy object orbiting Pallas.

  A few yards away, a fat red squirrel scampered over the backs of a pair of ship-lapped rowboats that had been pulled out of the lake and turned over. Birds sang in the kind of sunshine peculiar to Fall, and an occasional whitecap on the lake showed it was breezy out there, too.

  Their lives were here, Adam thought. Not far off, screened by a row of trees, lay the final resting places of most of the Ngu family, excepting Emerson and Rosalie, who had disappeared, and their son Bill, his own father, of whom there had been nothing left to bury. Rosalie had had her mother, Gretchen Singh Altman, reburied here, as well. Adam had played among the markers as a child, and so had Ardith. Now his brother Lindsay was here, too. It was hard to believe it, sometimes, let alone endure it.

  Sitting in an upright chair beside his wife, Adam nodded. “Mine, too. I’m grateful Arleigh was willing to oversee repairs to the atmospheric envelope for a while. I need time to think. And breathe. And keep you company. Whatever else has happened between us, I owe you that, and I want it, too. You’re still by far the most interesting person I ever met.”

  On the lake, a small squadron of mallard ducks made an impressive amphibious landing and immediately began bobbing for food until, in their very midst, a huge fish jumped into the air, scattering the flock. Beneath the edge of her blanket, Ardith smiled. “That’s about the nicest compliment I’ve ever received.” She sighed and tilted her head over to rest it on his arm where it lay on the arm of his chair. “Why the hell can’t we get along for more than about three days, my love?”

  He shook his head. “My darling Ardith, if I knew that … ”

  “You could die a happy man?” she asked, mischief in her eyes.

  He looked at her. She was also the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, but for some reason she never seemed to like to hear it. “Yes, I believe I could. Whenever we are getting along, well, I carry the happiness of that around with me for months afterw
ard. Sometimes for years.”

  “Me, too.” Against a feeling that her heart was about to stop beating, she took a determined breath. “Adam, we have to do something about this. And no, I don’t know what. We’ve been married for twenty years and we’ve spent, I guess, about ten percent of that whole time actually living together. I don’t want to do it that way anymore, do you?”

  He didn’t want to, and said so, hoping all of this wasn’t leading up to a divorce. If it did, he wasn’t sure he would want to go on living.

  “For what it’s worth,” she added, “I think the whole thing’s my fault.”

  He blinked, his train of thought derailed. “What makes you think that?”

  Ardith took another deep breath. “I believe it was that visit that your mother paid me in the hospital that got me started thinking about it. You know, I’ve had a lot of time lately, in the hospital at first, and then resting here at home, to examine every aspect of it in fine detail.”

  “That doesn’t sound particularly healthy. I’ve never much cared for—”

  “Sooner or later, Adam, sooner or later, as I begin to feel closer to you, some little nastiness inside me starts to exercise its evil influence. It makes me willfully misinterpret the most innocent thing you say. It makes me feel angry at you and everything else in sight. I’m ashamed to say I feel the same thing when I’m close to our kids. Whenever I find myself getting close, then this core of rage takes over.”

  “My mother the marriage counselor.” He sat silently for a moment. Then: “Rage?”

  “Yes, rage. That’s what I said, and … and who the hell are you to—damn it! It started up again, all by itself. You see what I mean, don’t you? This must seem perfectly insane to you. In all honesty, Adam, I can’t understand why you’ve stayed married to me so long.”

  “Because, my very dear, of that first time I kissed you on your parents’ second floor deck.” He nodded in the general direction of the Zacharenko house, the next residence north along the Lake Selous shore. It was dark, empty, and locked up at present; its owners were upsystem at the Jupiter habitat. “Since then, I never really looked at another—”

  “Really?” she grinned. “Not even your sexy little Asian office assistant?”

  “Ingrid?” Adam shrugged and looked perplexed. “You think of Ingrid Andersson as sexy? Hmmm … Well, I suppose you could look at her that way if you really worked at it. She’s kind of young, though, don’t you think?”

  She laughed. “The other woman usually is, Adam.”

  “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. Since you were seventeen, there hasn’t ever been another woman for me. Sometimes I’ve wished—”

  “I’ll bet you have.”

  His hands were up: “Not fair, my dear, not fair. You set that one up, yourself.”

  “Most first wives do,” she replied. “Okay, how about before I was seventeen?”

  “What? Well, you’ve got me there. Sarah, this blond in my Spanish class—”

  “Adam Ngu, you were home-schooled, just like me, you complete, utter, and total fraud! In fact, we learned Spanish together, you and I, from our neighbor old Mrs. Gonzales.” She punched his shoulder, hard.

  “Well you know what they say, ‘Spanish is a loving tongue’.”

  “You keep your tongue out of it—at least until we’re back in the house.” Then she reddened at what she’d said to him, and fell silent.

  Adam slipped out of his chair and knelt beside hers, so he could hold her in his arms. She put her hand on his cheek and he kissed her fingertips. Her recent illness was one of the most frightening things he’d ever experienced; the thought of losing her was unbearable. “I guess I shouldn’t admit it, but your first time was my first time, as well.”

  “Our first Spanish lesson?”

  “No, you know what I mean—in the boat house over there.”

  She blushed again, into his shoulder. “Hey, I knew that.”

  “Did you also know,” he asked her, “that in all those years—twenty-two of them—we’ve never had a vacation together? Not even a honeymoon?”

  She crinkled her forehead. “That’s right. They’d just brought in a whole load of Drake-Tealy Objects loaded with beryllium, and you were working on the refit of Marshall’s Lady of Spain for the Jupiter route.”

  “What would you think about taking a vacation together? The canopy fix will take months, and even if you have a giant Drake-Tealy Object alive and pulsing in orbit, nobody’s demanding that you go back right away.”

  “Thanks a lot! It’s nice to feel indispensable … Where would we go?”

  “How about Mars? Llyra will be there pretty soon, and—although I can’t believe it when I’m saying it—we haven’t seen her in two years. Our beautiful little girl, and we haven’t seen her in two years.”

  Ardith considered it. “Or Jasmeen, for that matter. But we’d be helpless there, Adam, in a third of a standard gee, almost seven times what we were born to and grew up in. We’d be wheelchair bound at the very least. And if both of us were invalids, who would take care of us?”

  Adam answered, tentatively, “My mother?”

  This time when she hit him, he said, “Ow!”

  ***

  “I never would have stumbled across it,” Marko told them as they left the security office, following the fight in the restaurant, “if it hadn’t been for that frigging short circuit in Mina’s command console.”

  He looked at each of his three friends expectantly. Wilson refrained from repeating what Marko had just told them, but neither Mikey nor Scotty could resist: “A short circuit in your command console?”

  “Is there an echo in here?” Marko laughed. “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened, all right. For some reason all my communications were going out at radar frequencies, while my radar was trying to operate on comm frequencies. People must have thought that First Contact had finally happened.”

  “That’s what you get for drinking soda pop while you’re at the con. Sooner or later, you’re gonna squirt a baggie in your keyboard, and—”

  “Thanks, Mikey, shut up. Anyway, this Big Black Rock happened to be passing—close enough to singe my frigging hair—but it doesn’t seem to absorb comm frequencies quite as well as it does radar. Thanks to the radio-absorptive quality of its surface, it was impossible to peer into the interior, determine whether it was an aggregate of some kind, a solid, or just a gigantic overcooked marshmallow. I watched it with my lidar, too, and let my computer plot its line of flight. Then I unsnarled my wiring and skedaddled back here to Holbrook to enlist some help.”

  “Guess it’s a good thing Mikey and Scotty were handy,” Wilson observed. Holbrook was a very popular place in this half of the Solar System. In fact, it was the only place, until you got to the orbit of Mars.

  “No such a thing,” said Marko, shaking his head. They reached an elevator, got in, and Wilson pushed some buttons. They were headed for their rented quarters and a decent night’s rest in the other half of the station. Wilson hadn’t been up that long, himself, but he could always catch up on his reading, his correspondence, or watch a movie. Once again, he was tempted to purchase some female companionship, but he didn’t know how, and it had always struck him as a little shabby and demeaning, although whether to him or to the lady or both, he wasn’t prepared to contemplate.

  In any case, at present, they were taking an elevator “upstairs” to the hub. There, they would take another car—traveling at right angles to the first, and in zero gravity—to the residential half of Holbrook Station. And finally, another elevator would carry them down to whatever floor they’d been assigned. Wilson had chosen one third gee.

  The brief voyage gave them all a chance to talk.

  “Matter of fact, I was downsystem, mooching around the junkyards at L-Three, looking for spare parts,” Mikey told him with a straight face. “Poor Albuquerque Gal had a catastrophically failed flux capacitor that was gradually fractionating her dilithium crystals, and
seriously decalibrating the matter-antimatter ratio in my portside interociter.”

  “At one point twenty-one jigawatts?” Marko inquired, deliberately mispronouncing it.

  “Ah, the classics endure forever,” Scotty observed. “As for me, Nessie and I were in the middle of the Belt, checking out rumors of gold on Vesta. Guess what: there’s no gold on, in, or around that dumb chunk of granite. If this expedition doesn’t turn out to be something wonderfully decent, I’m seriously out of pocket for reaction mass and consumables.”

  The real surprise,” Marko told Wilson, generating a hurt sort of tone, “was finding you sitting in that eatery, complacently munching a hot turkey sandwich instead of coming out treasure hunting with your old friends who have absolutely nothing but your best interests at heart.”

  The elevator reach the top of its shaft. A recorded voice reminded them that they were in a microgravity section of the station. The door opened.

  Wilson slapped his backside. “Just checking that my wallet’s still there.”

  Marko gave him an evil laugh. They floated out.

  As he grabbed a nylon handstrap—there were several of them, color coded, and running in different directions along the corridor—Mikey shook his head. “No, the surprise was we didn’t get fined or jailed for that fight. Happily, Shorty and his pals are well known troublemakers and Security just assumed that they’d started it.”

  Wilson protested, “But they did start it!”

  “No, Wilson, ” Marko replied. “All that guy Shorty did was insult you verbally. ‘Sticks and stones’ and all that. You threw the first punch.”

  Wilson thought about it. “You’re right. I guess I did.”