Hotel Andromeda

by Edited by Jack L. Chalker

  Half a dozen arms waved in greeting when he stepped up to the counter. “May I help you?” his translator said.

  “I need to carry a message to the T’klar delegate. Can you tell me where I could find her, please?”

  More arms waved. “I’m sorry, but that information isn’t available—”

  “Not true. I’ve just talked with your chief of security, who told me all the guests in this wing were being monitored. Where is she?”

  The Cheedon froze for a moment, then another ripple of movement played through its arms. “I apologize, Ambassador. She is in her suite.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Level nine. Room twelve.”

  “Thanks.” David dug into DeLange’s pocket and found a handful of change. He slid a steel half-solar across the countertop to the Cheedon and headed for a lift.

  There were dozens of lift shafts and drop shafts in the hotel, most of them simple vertical corridors with force fields to support passengers who stepped into them. It was old technology, enhanced with the ability to maintain the cocoon of air around people while they moved from floor to floor, but alongside the shafts was a different kind of lift that David hadn’t seen until his stay in the Andromeda. It was evidently made for burrowing creatures, and was basically a pulsing hole in the wall that would push them along in close confinement. When David had first seen one he’d been tempted to try it until he’d seen a ten-foot caterpillar crawl out of one and slide off down the corridor on hundreds of foot-long legs.

  He stepped into the open air shaft, pausing to avoid another guest rising up from a lower deck. This one was a more familiar form, a Bajoda, humanoid save for a smaller head and spindlier arms. They had been one of the first alien species humanity had encountered, and they could coexist with humans, though they seldom did. There was speculation among some exobiologists that the two species had come from a common ancestor left behind by some earlier space-faring race, but whatever the reason for their similarities, millennia of separate evolution had left them direct competitors. Their empires were too close together in space and too similar in requirements for comfortable coexistence. The one in the lift shaft eyed David distrustfully as it rose, and David was glad when it got off on level seven.

  There was one species that could probably tell humans apart, though, he thought.

  He stepped out on level nine, checked the holomap in the foyer, and headed down the corridor for room 12. One of the doors halfway down had a robot guard on either side of it, and as he approached it he had a sinking suspicion that it was the T’klar’s. Sure enough, his quick door count ended with them. Should he walk on past, or try to brazen it out?

  The robots made his choice for him. When he was still a couple of steps from the door, one of them slid out to block his path. “I’m sorry, sir,” it said, “but I must ask you to state your business in this section.”

  David swallowed the lump in his throat. “I’ve come to talk with the T’klar ambassador. About the, uh, murder suspect.”

  “Ambassador Sarell does not wish to be disturbed.”

  “Tell her it’s important. It could, uh, mean considerable embarrassment for her if she ignores what I have to tell her.”

  The robot paused, no doubt relaying the message. Then it abruptly slid back and the door opened. “She will see you, but only if one of us accompanies you.”

  “Fine.” David followed the robot into the T’klar’s suite.

  She stood before the window, her back to the stars. To her left, another doorway led off into the rest of the suite. The entire room sparkled with the blue fluorescence peculiar to her atmosphere, and up close David could see that her fur was also a light shade of blue, and as fuzzy as a kitten’s. Her ears were high and rounded, half buried in fur, and though her eyes were in the right place they were twice the size of David’s and irised in six segments like star sapphires. She wore a single piece of clothing, a strip of green cloth wound once around her waist and looping up over her right shoulder.

  The robot took up station between David and her, slightly to the side. “Ambassador Sarell,” David said.

  Her head whipped around like an owl’s, back and forth from David to the robot and back in a motion almost too fast to see. “You are not Ambassador DeLange.” she replied.

  Uh-oh. So all humans didn’t look alike, at least not to all aliens. “He’s, uh, indisposed at the moment,” David said. “I’m one of his aides. He sent me to tell you that he visited with the man you accused of killing the Ranthanik, and he’s convinced that David Wikondu is innocent.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I saw him fire the shot.”

  “You watched a being wearing a human mask fire the shot. Then he turned and ran, but collided with David. The real assassin got away, while David tried to see if he could help the Ranthanik.”

  “He ran back for the gun he’d dropped,” Sarell said.

  “The gun? Wait a minute. The gun!” David suddenly realized he had a chance. “I—David never touched the gun. Fingerprints would prove that.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  David nodded eagerly, “Right, fingerprints! Human hands are each unique. They leave their pattern on whatever they touch. We can check the gun for fingerprints and prove that David didn’t shoot it.”

  “You’re calling me a liar? The T’klar ambassador?” Her eyes seemed to blaze at him.

  “I—no, of course, I—” David spluttered to a stop. Was he about to create another interspecies incident here? He looked away from her hypnotic eyes, checked the robot to see if it might be about to toss him out the door. Wait a minute, he thought. The robot.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. Aloud he said, “You call yourself a liar. Why else are you under guard if you’re so sure you’ve caught the assassin?”

  Sarell snorted something that didn’t translate. What did translate was, “There may have been more than one of them. I’m a potential witness against them all. I’m sure they would like to keep me silent.” She started to say something else, but a thumping noise from the hallway made her pause.

  “What was that?” David asked, but he got his answer when the robot that had been stationed outside the door teetered over and fell with a crash to the floor.

  “We are under attack,” the remaining robot said with a calmness that belied its words. “Take cover.” It rolled forward, pushing David behind it with one arm while another snaked forward with a heavily finned, glistening beam weapon of some sort.

  The T’klar whipped her head around to look at David for a moment, then she grabbed his arm and pulled him into the next room, which proved to be a reasonably realistic recreation of some kind of enormous flower, opened to make a sort of bowl-shaped bed. She led him across its spongy surface, shoved one of the five-foot petals aside, and pulled him into darkness beyond.

  The crackle and thump of fighting echoed from the other room, then another crash that sounded suspiciously like the second robot going down.

  “Uh-oh,” David muttered. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  “Quiet!” She pulled him across an uneven floor littered with what felt like rocks underfoot; David noticed faint flashes of light as they grated against the floor. He stooped and picked up one in either hand. They were hot to the touch, but not so hot he couldn’t hold them. He felt silly defending his life with rocks, but they would be better than nothing.

  Sarell had other plans, though. She had better night vision than he did; she reached for something on the wall and a narrow crack of light grew before them. A door. Of course; the rooms were all the same, the hotel just connected more of them to make bigger suites. And each one had its own door.

  She stuck her head out cautiously, then pulled David into the hallway and took off running toward the lift. David glanced the other way and saw the dead robot, plus a headless body that might have been human or Bajoda lying half in the doorway. It had been wearing an air tank, too, David noticed. Evidently the other robot had
killed him before being downed in turn. David wondered how many more of them had made it into the suite.

  He and Sarell had emerged from room 10’s door; David heard a shout from behind him when they reached the room, then a piece of the wall exploded in fragments just to his left. He dodged, took half a dozen more bounding steps, and leaped for the lift shaft just as another shot sent searing pain screaming through his right side.

  Sarell reached the lift field and shot up out of sight. David stumbled into it, falling, and found himself careening upward feet first.

  Sarell snatched him out of the air four or five floors up, spinning him halfway around before the floor’s gravity caught him, and he landed with a thump on his injured side. He bit down on a scream.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, helping him to stand.

  He looked down to see a charred patch of cloth a hand’s width across just below his lowest rib. It felt as if the burn had penetrated halfway through his body, but he knew that was probably not true. If he’d been hit with a microwave laser, it would only have penetrated an inch or two at the most.

  “I’ll live,” he said through clenched teeth. “Come on, we’ve got to lose whoever was shooting at us or we might not get so lucky a second time.”

  They ran down the corridor, sending the few other guests in their way leaping for doorways and howling curses in their wake. They turned left at the first cross corridor and kept running. David wasn’t making near as good a time as Sarell was; he glanced back at the next turn, hoping they might have confused the trail enough to duck into a doorway and hide out, but there behind them floated a trail of telltale blue sparkles glimmering in the air.

  He ran to catch up with her, wincing at the pain in his side and shouting “Stop! The force fields aren’t tight enough to hold all your air in when we run. They’ll be able to track us wherever we go.”

  She skidded to a halt and looked back. The short word she spoke translated as “Snow.” For someone who slept in flowers and basked on hot rocks, David supposed that made a pretty good swear word.

  He jogged up to her and they stood there for a moment, looking at the glittering trail, then Sarell said, “Leave me. I think they’re after you anyway.”

  David shook his head. “Ha, nice try, but they came to your room, not mine.”

  “There’s no sense in both of us getting killed.”

  “Look, if you get killed, I might as well be, too. You’re the only one who can clear my name.”

  Her ears twisted forward. “What do you mean?”

  “Meet David Wikondu, the guy you said shot the Ranthanik.”

  “What? How can you—?”

  “Save it. Can you get by on oxygen and nitrogen?”

  She hummed softly. “Maybe for a few minutes. Not much longer.”

  “I think a few minutes are all we’ve got. Give me your ID card.”

  Hesitantly, she reached into a pocket in her sash and handed the gold-colored card to him. He bent down and slid it under the door beside them, then, stuffing his rocks into pockets, he took her in his arms, making sure her face nestled into his shoulder. Without her ID she wouldn’t have a force field of her own anymore, but she should be able to breathe inside his.

  He started running down the hallway again, glad she was light. She coughed and clung tighter to him.

  He heard more commotion in the hallway behind them. He hoped it was Hotel Security, but he wasn’t going to bet his life on it. If the Andromeda’s security robots were anything like the Hightower’s—and his previous experience with them told him they were—then they usually showed up long after they could do anything useful.

  He skidded around another corner, found a drop shaft in front of them, and leaped into it, nearly bowling over a Grota who was just getting off. They fell for half a dozen floors, then swung off and ran through more hallways until David was pretty sure he’d lost any pursuit. He stopped at a T-intersection and looked cautiously down the side passage, but it was deserted.

  Sarell was coughing steadily now. She pulled away from him, breathed the ambient air for a moment, then coughed again and stuck her face back into his force field.

  “I don’t know which is worse,” she wheezed.

  “Hang in there. I think we—”

  A patch of fur on Sarell’s arm turned instantly black, and she howled in pain. David leaped into the side passage, ran to the end of it, turned again, ran, then skidded to a stop at the next. “They’ve got to be tracking my ID, too,” he said, setting Sarell down and digging DeLange’s card out of his pocket.

  “That’s the only way they could have found us.”

  “I cannot understand you,” she said.

  Of course not. Without her ID, she had no translator. “We’re about to be even,” David said. He took one last deep breath, shoved the card under another door, and grabbed Sarell’s hand. Together they ran on down the corridor.

  His first breath of the habitat’s ambient air nearly seared his lungs. There was enough ammonia in it to scrub the decks with, and sulfur compounds and a couple dozen more exotic gases as well. He couldn’t smell it, but he would bet money there was methane in it, too. All the gases that leaked out of the force fields mixed together. It was evidently easier to leave it this way than to try cleaning it up; besides, with so many different species coming and going, what would they have used for a baseline anyway?

  He hadn’t blacked out yet, so evidently there was at least a little bit of oxygen in it as well. That was a blessing, for him anyway. Some other species found oxygen deadly.

  The gravity varied from heavy to nothing, too. Evidently it didn’t reset to any particular value after someone had passed, but stayed whatever it had last been until another being came along. It felt like running over uneven ground, except there was no way to know where the bumps were.

  That explained the peculiar stumbling gait of the assassin. And the air tank. He hadn’t been carrying false ID; he hadn’t been carrying ID at all, for fear of being traced.

  Just as the ones chasing them now weren’t. The dead one at Sarell’s suite had carried an air tank, too. David considered looping back for it, but he had no assurance it contained anything better than what he was breathing now. Besides, someone might still be waiting for them there.

  He wished they still had a translator, but they didn’t need speech to communicate things like “left here,” or “I’m choking to death!” They ran, staying just a few turns ahead of their pursuers, but slowly losing ground as they lost stamina in the bad air.

  David realized he was eventually going to have to stop and make a stand with his two rocks. That would be suicide, of course, but unless he could find a better weapon, and soon, he was going to have to try it.

  He was panting like a dog, but his vision was growing full of swirling lights. He needed more oxygen. Did oxygen rise?

  That depended on the average density of everything else, but he bet it wouldn’t. But methane probably would. And hydrogen, definitely.

  Holy shit! He pulled one of the rocks from his pocket, then dug into the pocket again and came out with another steel half-solar. Mother of God. He’d just discovered his weapon. Maybe. But could he use it without blowing up the Andromeda in the process?

  Probably. Oxygen would be the limiting factor, not methane or hydrogen. Humanity and its cousins were a distinct minority in the hotel.

  “Up!” he shouted, pointing at the ceiling. “Find us a lift shaft!” He knew his pursuers could hear him, too, but that was fine. Let ‘em follow.

  Sarell turned around just long enough to see where he pointed, then took off running again, zigzagging through guest-filled corridors and meeting rooms until she eventually came to another lift, but instead of jumping into the shaft she ran toward one of the pulsing orifices in the wall beside it and squeezed into that.

  “What are you doing!” David screamed, but when she began to rise into the wall, he realized she was right. They’d be easy targets in an open lift shaft, but the
ir pursuers couldn’t shoot at them in the enclosed elevator.

  David stepped in after her, wincing as the walls squeezed tight around him and a wave of constriction carried him up-ward. The walls of the tunnel were nearly frictionless; he would hardly have been aware of movement if there hadn’t been an opening at each deck.

  Sarell slid out of the lift after a dozen floors or so. David jumped out just long enough to look down the open lift shaft and see through the swirling tracers in his vision that, yes, they were still being pursued by what looked like three more Loren Larues, then he jumped back in and let the enclosed lift carry him on up. He let it take him as far as it would go, eventually spitting him out on the top floor. It wasn’t the top of the hotel, just the top of the multi-species wing, but it was far enough.

  Aside from himself, and moments later, Sarell, the deck was deserted. It was evidently too far up to be a convenient guest deck, or maybe the hotel just didn’t have enough guests to fill it up yet, but whatever the reason there were no signs of life at all. Perfect. David looked for the air lock he knew had to be there, found it only a few paces away. It was designed for emergencies; it had a solid door rather than a force field, and from the hinges it looked like it opened outward. That might complicate things, but it should still work. He wished he knew what kind of habitat lay beyond, but at this point he couldn’t afford to be choosy.

  Sarell took the hint when he pointed at the lock, and staggered over to open the door while he peeked down the lift shaft again. The three disguised aliens, all of them armed and wearing breathing equipment, were the only ones in the shaft for twenty floors or so. Good. The other guests’ force shields should guard them from harm on the decks below, but these three would be as vulnerable as David and Sarell.