Zero-G
Page 36
“You can be certain of that,” she replied, shutting her eyes. “Thanks for coming by.”
“A pleasure,” he said. “By the way?”
“Yes?”
“There’s something I want you to think about,” he said. “Did you know that chai means something in Hebrew?”
“No,” she said, “and my IC is off.”
He smiled crookedly at her insistently shut eyes. “It means ‘life,’ ” he told her. “Do not ever take yours for granted.”
With that, Ziv left the medbay.
Adsila didn’t know whether his parting words were meant as a threat, a warning, or a recruitment tool. In any case, she did not want or need the CHAI.
She had, now, a life that was far greater than just herself, which was greater than she had ever allowed herself to imagine.
“Doctor?” she said.
Carter appeared in the doorway. “What can I do for you?”
“A favor,” she said. “It’s important.”
Sam Lord returned to the comm, after first inviting Dr. Lancaster Liba to come at once and tend to the foliage there. Upon arriving, Lord went from Grainger to McClure to Abernathy, commending his team.
“You have all performed above and beyond, and I am waiting to tell the PD that as soon as we are all—”
“We are all here,” a voice came from behind him.
Lord turned and watched Adsila enter, walking unaided, Dr. Carter behind her. He smiled and felt a long-unfamiliar pressure behind his eyes as the two made their way to Adsila’s station. She sat, Dr. Carter beside her now, facing Lord.
“I believe that now we are all here,” the medical officer said.
“So we are, Doctor,” Lord said proudly.
Carter sat at his rarely used station near the LOO and, with a forward wave of his hand, index finger raised, contacted Prime Director Al-Kazaz on the Zero-G IC.
EPILOGUE
DOUGLAS CAMERON FINALLY felt free.
For the first time in a week, the assistant botanist was alone in the agricultural section of the Empyrean. It wasn’t that Dr. Liba never left; but when he did, he always gave his assistant an assignment that kept him occupied until the chief botanist returned. Dr. Liba even slept here many nights, singing to his plants—and one in particular, which he kept locked in a virtual room deep in the greenhouse.
The one Cameron was dying to see.
When he left this time, Dr. Liba had either neglected to assign Cameron a task . . . or else he had taken pity on the thirty-three-year-old. Like everyone else, the young man had been distracted by the so-called death beam that had been leaving a path of ruin on and around Earth. Now that the threat had been eliminated, there was a sense of euphoria that reached even this remote section of the space station.
Even the usually bucolic Dr. Liba had seemed taut and distracted during the crisis. When the danger had passed, and with a fresh spring in his already loose-limbed step, Liba had gone off to attend to plantings in the Zero-G command center. As Liba put it, “Those buds were in the heart of darkness. They require immediate care.”
Just getting there and back would take at least a half hour. That gave Cameron time for his own little journey. Through the warm mist and intruding fronds, Cameron made his way to the seven-foot-high mystery literally planted in their midst.
Virtual vaults were tricky. They were opaque but not solid. They were also heavily fortified with alarms and scramblers. Some contained lethal electrical charges. They were opened by codes in the ICs of people with authorized access . . . and Cameron was not one of those individuals.
However, he did have a way in, a key of which Dr. Liba had been unaware. It had been specially created for this vault: a seed that contained molecular transmitters created onboard the Russian space station Red Giant. The day he arrived, Cameron had placed the seed on Dr. Liba’s greenhouse gloves; with a microdetonator keyed to react to movement, the seed had begun counting down when Liba put the gloves on. A few minutes later, in the greenhouse, the casing had popped and the molecular transmitters remained airborne.
But not inactive.
The dust particles had been electrostatically drawn toward the wall of the vault. There, they received—and stored—any electronic signals that passed to the vault from Dr. Liba’s IC. If their operatives on Earth were right, the sealed area concealed a top-secret project. Being far behind the Americans and the Chinese technology, Moscow wanted an advantage.
They hoped that whatever was in here might be worth the effort it took to get a qualified agent on board.
And where else would a “plant” go but the agricultural sector? he mused.
Reaching the vault—which was the size of a large walk-in freezer but was designed to resemble a nineteenth-century terrestrial safe, thick and forbidding—Cameron held up a fake fingernail on his CHAI left thumb. Though the vault blocked all electric and magnetic signals, it could not neutralize gravity. The fingernail had been constructed from synthetics created by research with dense quark-gluon plasma in the Pushkin Collider. Just to hold it had required the amputation of his birth thumb.
The motes floated dutifully toward the fingernail, which Cameron immediately placed in his IC for uploading. When it was finished, he inclined his head toward the vault. A door-size section wavered and he stepped through.
The environment inside was the same as outside, since the vault had no function other than to provide security. But what stood before him—that was different. And unexpected.
The Kremlin will never believe this, he thought as instruments in the digital CHAI took readings and he gazed, transfixed. They will never believe!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are deeply indebted to Ric Meyers and Peter Ch’ng, our advisers in Asian culture, and to Michael Simses, our science maven.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
AUTHOR PHOTO © MANFRED BAUMANN
WILLIAM "BILL" SHATNER is most famous for his role as Captain Kirk on the science fiction series Star Trek and in seven Star Trek films. He has also acted in numerous television shows and movies, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Gunsmoke, Miss Congeniality, Rescue 911, and Boston Legal. He has recorded four studio albums of music and spoken word poetry, and written several autobiographies and novels. An avid equestrian, Shatner lives in Kentucky on a farm where he raises American Saddlebreds.
JEFF ROVIN is the author of more than 100 books, fiction and nonfiction, both under his own name, under various pseudonyms, or as a ghostwriter, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. He has written over a dozen Op-Center novels for the late Tom Clancy. Rovin has also written for television and has had numerous celebrity interviews published in magazines under his byline. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Horror Writers of America, among others.
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