by A. C. Ellis
A few seconds later Evans appeared. He nodded. “Captain Tanner,” he said flatly. The smile was gone.
“Have you found anything?”
Evans frowned. “Look, Captain, we’re good at what we do, but we can’t work miracles. It has been less than an hour since my people left your quarters.”
“It’s been at least three hours!”
He didn’t say a word. When the silence became too awkward, Susan broke it: “What time do you have? There seems to be something wrong with my chronometer.”
Evans looked at his wrist chronometer. “Zero nine twenty-nine.” Susan checked her own. It read the same.
“Thank you, Staff Sergeant. I’m sorry I bothered you. I laid down for a while, and I guess I’m still a bit disoriented.”
“You’re sure there’s nothing else?”
For an instant she considered telling him about the second attack, but only for an instant.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I’ll call as soon as I have something,” Evans said, then disappeared, his image instantly replaced by the holographic date-time display: OCT. 3, 2187— 0930.
Susan walked to the chair behind the desk and sat. Placing her elbows in the center of the desk, she rested her head in her hands, then closed her eyes.
What was going on? Had more than three hours actually elapsed since her first conversation with Evans, as she remembered, or had it been less than an hour, like Evans had said? Was it possible for something to affect every chronometric device on Fleet Base, mysteriously causing them to lose more than two hours?
She didn’t know, but she doubted it. She couldn’t imagine anything that would affect only the chronometers, leaving the base’s other systems untouched. And Evans would have noticed if there had been something wrong with his date-time display. He would have said something.
Then what could have happened to those two missing hours? She remembered living them. Apparently Evans did not.
I should never have called him, she thought. Too much pointed to Base Security’s involvement in the attacks. Even if Evans wasn’t personally responsible, he could be used to get to her.
Besides, he really wouldn’t be much help. No doubt he thought her insane. And perhaps, she thought, I am.
But now there was a way to find out. If the attack in the exchange area had actually happened. It would be recorded in her LIN/C, stored in the device’s memory circuits.
She opened her eyes. Taking the LIN/C from its pouch, she placed it on the desk, then thumbed the memory tab. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the events she remembered happening in the exchange area less than half an hour ago.
Instantly she stood in the access corridor outside the curio shop. She walked to the main corridor and stepped out into the crowd. Again she saw the glint of light on metal, spotted the figure cloaked in shadows, felt panic scurry through her mind like a small, sharp-clawed rodent. And again she scanned the corridor for somewhere to hide.
Her ears popped, just as they had before. The man holding the blaster on her vanished, and the crowd thinned. The air was suddenly much cooler and fresher than it had been an instant before.
She felt the dizziness again, and the building headache. Then the snowflake pattern formed in her thoughts as she mouthed the monosyllabic mantra, and the headache and dizziness were gone.
The pendant burned between her breasts beneath her uniform…
With a thought, she stopped the flow of images and emotions. She took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, then opened her eyes. Again she sat at the desk in her quarters.
So, it had happened, just as she remembered. She had lived those missing hours. But why didn’t they show on her wrist chronometer? Why hadn’t the holo-phone’s chronometric circuits registered them? And why weren’t they lodged in Evans’s memory?
Removing the pendant from the pouch she had put it in outside the curio shop, she held it up before her eyes. Egg-shaped. Pitted dull-gray metal. And now it was again cold to the touch.
Could it have somehow been responsible for what she had experienced in the corridor outside the curio shop? Was it at the heart of what was happening to her? Both her attackers had worn one like it. And the one she had been wearing had become hot when that last attacker disappeared.
She still didn’t have any of the answers.
Who might have them? she wondered as she returned the pendant and her LIN/C to their pouches. Who could possibly help her?
Instantly she knew.
She stood and went to the holo-phone’s lens cluster on the far side of the room. It activated with a date-time display: OCT. 3, 2187—0934.
“Personal call for Admiral James Renford,” she said. After a few seconds Lieutenant Krueger appeared. It was a head shot, but behind him she saw a Rembrandt. He was in Renford’s office.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” he asked.
“Is the Admiral in?”
“I’m afraid not. He left on the Earth-bound shuttle almost twenty minutes ago. I don’t expect him back on Luna for several days.”
“Thanks.” She stepped out of the phone’s sensor field. She didn’t want to talk to Krueger.
Besides, she thought, perhaps Renford had done all he could by getting her off Fleet Base and out of sight.
Chapter Six
The trip out from Fleet Base to Luna City took nearly five hours by floater.
Although she had slept little the night before—again the nightmare had come to haunt her dreams, rendering what little sleep she could wrestle from the night both unpleasant and unrestful—she dared not sleep onboard the floater. Filled to capacity with a complement of forty passengers, it could be a death trap; any of its passengers, or even a member of its three man crew, might be her next assailant.
Strapped securely into her acceleration webbing, she watched those around her without seeming to do so. Most were Fleet enlisted personnel on their way to a Luna City furlough, eager for the many entertainment possibilities that civilian outpost offered over the military base. Six were officers, either likewise headed for furlough or, like Susan herself, on orders to the Survey Service facility. Only three were civilians.
Two of those were that seedy breed of pioneer that made a rough life on any human frontier. It was these she watched most closely. Her next attacker, if he was onboard at all, would probably be one of them.
Did she really have anything to fear, she wondered, or was she simply being paranoid?
No, someone was out to get her—there was no doubt of that now. The first attempt had failed, so whoever wanted her dead had sent out another assassin. And somehow, miraculously, she had been saved from that killer as well. Whoever was behind those attacks would not give up until she was dead.
Or until she discovered who he was and stopped him.
After fifteen minutes, she realized the attacker would not give himself away. He would try nothing right now, but would wait until she was alone, with no witnesses and no one to interfere. Perhaps in her temporary quarters in Luna City.
She turned her attention to the cratered and dusted landscape of Mare Tranquillitatis displayed on the small viewscreen, marveling at its primeval beauty and serenity. The last time she had made this trip was nearly four years ago, yet the scene remained unchanged. Again, as she had that last time, she felt awe at the tremendous energy it must have taken to transform Luna’s surface into this harsh yet beautiful landscape. Man’s efforts, his pitiful scratchings at the lunar surface, seemed pathetically meager by comparison.
Less than an hour into the journey, the floater crossed the terminator, and instantly the landscape’s brilliance became muted on Susan’s screen. Yet there was still sufficient light to make out major features—a profusion of intensely bright stars shined out of the black sky, accompanied by a nearly full Earth of rich blues and browns, streaked with white layers of cloud.
The subdued illumination produced a tranquilizing effect, and soon she fought to stay awake.
Su
san was again Executive Officer onboard the Federation Fleet cruiser Defiant as the ship stood on station outside Aldebaran system.
There was a Federation colony on the second planet out from the primary. Established thirty-five years earlier by a militant Moslem faction, and backed by a consortium of high-tech companies eager to show off their world-conquering equipment, the colony had been threatening secession for nearly half its existence. Now, it seemed to mean business.
The colonists had begun to set up a blockade, positioning their ships around the system’s perimeter. They might just be strong enough to make the blockade work, but only if they were given the time necessary to get a sufficient number of ships into space and positioned around the system before the Federation Fleet arrived.
Defiant‘s captain had been killed in the first skirmish as the Federation Fleet ship entered the system. At that time a call for assistance had been sent out by hyperspace radio.
Now Susan was in command, and the hard decisions of battle were totally hers to make. Should she give the order to go in before the colonists could complete their blockade and close off the system, running the blockade alone and risking the lives of Defiant‘s three hundred plus crew? Or should she wait for the Federation Fleet ships she knew were even now making their twisted way through hyperspace to bring aid—perhaps too late?
She decided not to wait. She was determined to take Defiant in alone. When she told Karl of her decision, he tried to dissuade her.
They were in Susan’s cabin, laying together in her zero-gravity hammock, trying to snatch a few private moments before beginning the battle to which she had already committed them. They had just made love, and that familiar glow of satiation was still with her.
“You’re making a mistake,” Karl said as he held Susan close, “a horrible mistake.”
“Are you talking as a ship’s officer?”
“No. Nothing so official as that. But it’s a mistake, all-the-same.”
“Something has to be done,” she said, then kissed him tenderly on the neck, breathing in his heady man-smell. “And there’s no one else here to do it.”
Karl crawled out of the hammock and hung weightless before her. “It’s too great a gamble,” he said, “especially with this ship. Its crew is untried, made up of little more than children. And you will be sending most of them to a certain death.”
“Then you think I should wait? You think I should allow those colonists down there the time they need to finish their blockade?”
“You’ve called for help. A Fleet task force will be in-system soon enough.”
“I’m sorry, Karl,” she said, “I can’t wait. It will be too late by the time Fleet arrives. These colonists are too strong, and too determined.”
“Then it’ll be on your head.” He turned and kicked off against the bulkhead. Floating to his clothing, he steadied himself with an arm through an anchoring ring and silently got dressed. Without another word he floated from the cabin.
After a few minutes Susan got up and got dressed as well. She went into battle with Karl’s words burning in her mind.
“Ten minutes to docking,” came the floater pilot’s voice from a speaker in the passenger compartment’s overhead. “Passengers will please prepare to disembark.”
Susan blinked her eyes open. The mining camp stood out on the screen. The floater was passing within a quarter mile of the oldest still-functioning facility on Luna, its route taking it past on slightly higher ground.
The camp’s layout should have been bathed in too-white, artificial light. Instead, it was dark. Yet in the dim starlight and the soft glow from the near-full Earth, she could just make out the camp’s major structures.
In the foreground were the miners’ quarters, little more than an air-tight Quonset hut covered over with lunar soil. Three large, rectangular pits filled the majority of the camera’s field of view. She knew at the bottom of each a yellow- painted scooper should have been working, an occasional puff of water vapor turned ice cloud its only exhaust. Yet they were not there. The nuclear power plant, a large dome-shaped structure, stood several hundred yards to the right of and beyond the living quarters. It, too, sat darkened on the cratered plain.
That reactor was more important now than it had ever been in the past. It not only supplied power to the mining camp, but supplemented Luna City’s power resources as well. Three months ago, when the city’s solar power satellite was destroyed by a faction opposed to lunar independence, the city had to again rely on nuclear power. And Luna City had grown too large in the past several years for its own antiquated nuclear power plant to be sufficient.
But why was it all dark now? Why couldn’t she see the activity she knew should be going on?
To the right of the reactor dome the mass-driver’s dual track stretched off into the distance, barely discernable in the darkness. Susan imagined its buckets flashing down the track, accelerating packets of lunar material to escape velocity for their two day journey to the catcher forty thousand miles above the moon’s far side. She should see it happening before her—the spots of light that were the packets flashing down the mass-driver’s track at the rate of one each second. But she did not. For some reason, it was not in operation.
The mass-driver had launched its payloads nearly continuously since it had been opened almost one hundred fifty years ago. Only twice in all that time had it been shut down for maintenance, and both times it had been for less than a month.
But if it had been shut down, she would have heard about it. It was a rare enough occurrence that it would have made the holo-vid broadcasts on Earth. And she would certainly see a repair crew working on it now.
She would find out when she got to Luna City, she thought. The mining camp was only thirty miles from the city. She squinted at her wrist chronometer in the dim cabin light. It read 10:47. She had slept through the majority of the trip.
The floater banked to port. On her viewscreen she noticed a barely discernible spot of light ahead and to the left, bobbing frantically.
At first she thought it was her imagination, but as she squinted and strained she thought she could make out a human figure atop a low hill, silhouetted against the star field. Someone was out there, walking the lunar surface. Probably a miner from the camp. Or a member of the mass-driver’s maintenance crew.
The floater descended into a narrow canyon, and the spot of light disappeared. The nightmare’s remnants rushed in to fill her thoughts.
It had come again as she slept, sharp and clear after all the years, unlike most dreams that possessed a quality of the unreal.
She forced that thought from her mind, then scanned the passengers, again wondering if someone onboard might actually have orders to kill her. If so, which one? From what quarter would the next attack come?
“Five minutes to docking,” the overhead speaker squawked.
Now she could see the glowing dome-shape of Luna City on her screen, an almost surrealistic apparition. She was nearly there, nearly to her new assignment. Then the floater banked hard to the left, and the dome was blocked from the camera’s field of view by the bulk of the floater itself.
What is this assignment for Survey Service? she wondered. Renford had said he didn’t know, and Susan believed him. As far as she knew, he had never lied to her. But there was security around this thicker than methane around Jupiter.
“Docking in one minute.”
What could it possibly be? What was so important that Hyatt could not permit even Renford to know the details?
“Docking in five seconds. Four…three…two…one…” A shudder ran through the floater’s structure. “Docking complete.”
Susan hung quietly in her webbing while those around her busied themselves with unstrapping, gathering their belongings, and shuffling toward the hatch in the forward bulkhead. They talked loudly of the fun they would have on furlough, more softly of their temporary assignments to Survey Service. Only the civilians remained silent.
One i
n particular seemed to be paying her a great deal of attention. He tried to look as if he was not watching, quickly averting his gaze whenever she glanced in his direction. But to her trained eye it was all too obvious—he was watching.
He was a foul looking character. About five ten in height, he was at least a hundred pounds overweight. He wore a scraggly growth of beard, and his jumpsuit was soiled and worn. But what struck her most were his eyes. They were sharp and clear, almost calculating. Certainly not what one would expect in a ne’er-do- well of his apparent ilk.
What could she do? Should she ask one of the other passengers for help, or go straight to the Luna City police?
Neither course of action felt right. The other passengers would only think her a silly paranoid woman, and the police could do nothing until he had committed a crime. By then it might be too late.
Suddenly she realized what she had been thinking. With all her experience in security matters, and her extensive training in hand-to-hand combat, she should be able to take care of the assailant herself, no matter who he might be. It was the strange disappearances of the first two attackers that had so unnerved her.
She unstrapped and stood, then shuffled to the hatch behind a group of loud enlisted men and women. She could almost feel the civilian’s gaze on her back. She wanted to turn and face him, to look him in the eyes and confront him, but she couldn’t. Her best weapon was surprise. She had to keep him thinking she was not yet aware he was watching.
The hatch irised open and the passengers began filing out.
Susan’s eyes were assaulted by brilliant light from beyond the hatch, and her sense of smell was assailed by an exotic mixture of odors. The smells of several different kinds of smoked drugs filled the air, as did the hint of a variety of alcoholic beverages and coffee. The noise level was nearly deafening: mumbles and shouts and laughing and backslapping, a multitude of languages and dialects mingling to make it almost impossible to identify any one.
