Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Read online

  “Boss! It’s about time you got home! Simon and Elizabeth are all wound up in plans for this mass transfer gadget they dreamed up. Bo-ring. I—”

  “Archy, signal Orientale that I want to talk to Commodore Lodge. Now.”

  “Nice to see you, too, boss,” Archy said with what sounded like real indignation, and Lodge’s regal head and starred shoulders filled the viewer forthwith. His hair as usual was impeccably coifed, and I wondered yet again how he kept it from floating around in the one-sixth lunar gravity. Most Loonies shaved their scalps or at the very least cropped their hair short to avoid the fuss. “Greetings, Star,” he said primly. “Welcome home.”

  “Welcome home, my ass, Grays,” I said. “Let’s cut out the bullshit.”

  He grinned. It was a wide, white, attractive grin, warm and friendly and infectious. A funny thing about that grin, though, the longer I looked, the longer his canines got. “What can I do for you, Star?”

  “You can make your Ellfive liberty shuttles shove off on time from the North Cap hangarlock, for starters,” I snapped.

  Lodge’s grin seemed to freeze in place. He wasn’t used to being reprimanded by anyone of less rank than the Secretary-General of the American Alliance. He didn’t like it, not one little bit, and wasn’t that just too bad. I said, “Crippen Young says the Patrol’s shuttles are making a habit of being in the way. In the way of inbound Express ships, in the way of LIMSH tenders, in the way of solarscooters, in the way of mass capsules. In fact, Grays, the only way your people seem able to get out of is their own. It is not an inspiring sight, according to Crip. Makes him lose faith in the legendary competence of Patrol pilots. Says he’s thinking about making a formal complaint to the Aerospace Pilots Association.”

  It may have been wishful thinking on my part but I thought the commodore flushed slightly. “That’s Crip’s opinion,” he said with a contempt that somehow made him seem less handsome. “What can you expect from a civilian pilot?”

  “I expect him to meet his scheduled departure times, and he does,” I said. “Let me make myself clear, Grays. Your people screw up one more docking schedule in Hangar One, and I’ll make it SOP for every in-bound Patrol vehicle from troop carrier to liberty shuttle to the admiral’s gig to take on an Ellfive-certified pilot at the Warehouse Ring. And I’ll bill Orientale for the service.” I shut down the circuit with my fist and put both hands up to massage my temples. “Oh, God. Is my head still on?”

  Charlie regarded me with pursed lips and a disapproving expression. “Something tells me it was more than the Soldotna High School Marching Band that put that lovely chartreuse color into your cheeks.” I growled something or other and she said firmly, “Take a light hit. That’ll make a start at getting your body clock back on schedule.”

  “How many candles?”

  She shoved me inside the booth that stood in one corner of my office. “I’ll do it, I’m the doctor.” Short people spend much of their lives with cricks in their necks from trying to look everyone else directly in the eye. This makes them domineering, cantankerous, and natural physicians. I muttered, but let her close the door and set the gauge while I fumbled with the goggles.

  “All set?”

  I adjusted the goggles. “Green light.”

  There was a click and a thud and a low whine. I closed my eyes as what felt like a billion candlepower irradiated my poor abused carcass and theoretically rearranged my biorhythms into something approaching normality. Much better than drugs for depression, ship lag, and fatigue, Charlie declared. Well, maybe. My head hurt about the same, before and after. “There should be a law against after-dinner toasts,” I said, emerging and pulling off the goggles, “with the penalty for offenders death by drowning in a butt of malmsey.” I looked toward the window and felt better at once.

  Charlie looked from my face to the view and back again. “Why did you want a window that faced inside anyway, Star? You’ve always been such a stargazer.”

  “Outside whizzes by once every two minutes,” I said. “Makes me seasick. Besides, when we put on spin there was more free-floating construction debris outside than there were stars. And besides that”—I waved a hand toward the window—“that view’s why we’re here, after all.” I sat down behind my desk and accessed the screen. “Archy?”

  “Yo.”

  “Bring up the Hewies, will you?”

  “Can do.”

  A yellow circle with a dot in the middle of it appeared on my viewer, displayed on a black background. At equidistant points around this circle smaller circles blinked steadily, representing the monitoring satellites of the Helios Early Warning System. The display held for a few seconds, to show all twelve monitors up and running. I punched a button and it was replaced by a rolling readout of the current atmospheric conditions on Sol, monitor by monitor.

  “We’re only into the fourth year of Cycle 23,” Charlie said at my shoulder.

  “I never take Sol for granted,” I replied. Not anymore, not ever again. Monitor Seven was showing some turbulence. “Archy? Put in a call to Mitchell Observatory.” I waited, and Sam’s face came on the viewer. “Sam? I’m looking at the Hewie display. What’s this I see on Hewie Seven? Area—uh—378?”

  A long-suffering sigh gusted down the commlink. “And hello to you, too, Star,” Sam Holbrook said. “Welcome home.”

  “Never mind that, what about this reading?”

  “What about it?” he said testily. “It’s not a flare, it’s not even big enough to qualify as a solar incident. We’re keeping an eye on it. Why else did you shanghai me out of my nice comfortable chair at Stanford?”

  “To keep both eyes on Sol and anything else that wanders into view,” I said. “And I didn’t shanghai you, you volunteered. Thanks, Sam. Keep in touch.”

  “Do I have a choice?” he snapped. My viewer went dark.

  I looked at Charlie. “Do I need to access Blackwell?”

  “Nah. I medivacked a couple of space-happys, is all. And I’ve been treating a Frisbee chemist who hasn’t been keeping up on his full gee workouts. He’s got a mild case of hypercalcemia but we caught it in time. He should be back to work in a couple of weeks.”

  “What about that rigger, Charlie?”

  “Thanks, Arch, I forgot. I’ve got a rigger on the ward who ripped his p-suit glove on the framework of Island Two. He’s being fitted for a three-finger prosthesis.”

  “That it?”

  Charlie smiled her Cheshire cat smile. “Well, I do have an electrical engineer new hire yelling about violation of his civil rights.”

  “He doesn’t want to pee in a bottle,” I guessed.

  “I don’t care what people say about you, Star, you are too average bright.”

  “You know the policy, Charlie. If he refuses a pre-employment bodily fluids test, and won’t agree to random sampling during his employment, kick his application out. And don’t make a secret of it, either, downstairs or up.”

  “And his civil rights?”

  Vacuum is unforgiving as hell. Working in it requires, above all else, a clear head and steady hands. “I don’t give a damn about his civil rights.”

  “He will be made aware of that fact.”

  “Good. That it?”

  Charlie regarded me thoughtfully. “Has anyone ever called you overly conscientious?”

  “No,” I said in genuine surprise. “I don’t think so.”

  “How about a long-nosed, interfering bitch?”

  I had to grin. “Only you. But a little learning is a dangerous thing.” To prove my point I accessed Demeter, the agronomy program. Demeter informed me that the first batch of Apis mellifera had tested the subgee waters of an Express cargo bay with all six sets of toes and had died immediately thereafter of, as near as anyone could figure out, sheer indignation. “A honeybee in zerogee is an unhappy honeybee,” I said, sighing.

  “Why do we need the damn things, anyway?” Charlie said. She had a tendency to levitate, loudly, in the presence of any creature with
six or more legs. When we were kids she swelled up to twice her normal size if a mosquito so much as sneezed in her direction. I sometimes suspect Charlie’s main motivation for spacing was the lack of insect life in vacuum.

  “The agronomics experts engineered a specific number of pollen plants into the farming toroids,” I said, for the two or three hundredth time, “and hand pollination is a bitch—it’s boring, time-consuming, and hell on the lower back.” I read further. “Interesting. Even if they survive the flight, the bees don’t seem to be able to fly.”

  “They’re not supposed to be able to fly at full gee on Terra anyway,” Charlie said.

  “Aerodynamically speaking, no,” I agreed. “You’d think they would take to subgee the way a TAVliner does to orbit. But they don’t, it says here. I love my job.”

  Just then the office door slid open and Simon came in with a face like Zeus making ready to hurl a thunderbolt. He was followed by two massive security guards who dwarfed the little man clutched firmly between them.

  “You’d better look at this,” Simon said without preamble, and held out my opened pack.

  I looked, and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Tucked in between my tattered plastiback edition of The Riverside Shakespeare and a dozen skeins of báinín was a small cube of gray explosive, a modest detonator, and a timer set for half an hour later. “Looks like a bomb,” I said.

  “Nothing gets by you, Star,” Simon said.

  My eyes were burning and I rubbed them with the heels of my hands. It helped, but not much. “Well, at least it’s not ticking.”

  “Not very funny. Star,” Charlie said, looking at the little man without expression. From experience I knew she was not really seeing him, that for her he had already ceased to exist.

  “No,” I agreed. “Not very funny. Where did you find him, Simon?”

  “Rex saw him fussing around your bag up in Cargo. You know Rex. He tailed him into the men’s room and caught him slipping it into your pack.”

  I lifted my head to stare across my desk at the little man. Why are fanatics always so short? The eyes are always the same, too, the kind of eyes that see only what they want to see and no more because it might interfere with their vision of what should be. The Luddites didn’t have a lot of time to spare for what actually was. The name stenciled over the left pocket of his immaculate jumpsuit, so immaculate that it must have been stolen right off the Supply rack, was J. Moore. I made a mental note to ginger up the security around Supply. There was as yet no fear in his face, only pride of purpose and a fervent desire to immolate himself upon the altar of his cause. “Well, Mr. Moore, or whatever your name is,” I said, keeping my voice even, “have you anything to say for yourself?” I was miserably aware that it would have been more appropriate if I had asked him if he had any last words.

  He did, of course. They always do, the Luddites. His shoulders were back, his chin was up, his syntax perfect and perfectly demented and impossible to reproduce. Moore believed his was a holy mission—“God has sent me to you.” He made no attempt to deny his culpability—“It was all my idea, I built the bomb and I brought it up and I waited until Svensdotter came back and I put it in her luggage.” I had no reason to think he was lying. That unimaginative little lump of explosive, with no attempt to disguise it, was proof positive. An engineer would have thought up something much more difficult to detect, and the Luddites never wasted the few engineers they managed to entice into the theological fold in actual execution of a plan. Shortsighted, ignorant, and bigoted, they weren’t stupid. Moore moved from method to motivation—“This must stop, this abandonment of Mother Earth, this adoration of the false god of technology.” He begged us to see the light before it was too late, before the human race had trapped itself in a future that was as unnatural as it was abhorrent, he didn’t say to whom.

  I watched him preach on, only half listening. I’d heard it all before. The Luddites had been trying to destroy Ellfive for years, in the beginning on the floor of the American Alliance Congress, and then in more direct fashion, as with the barely aborted sabotage of the unfolding of the first solar receptor, and ending most recently with the murder of an astrophysicist who had, ironically, spoken out against the construction of Ellfive. Not to mention the last time they tried to knock me off. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

  “So what are you going to do, Svensdotter?” Moore said at last with what I was sure he felt was magnificent scorn. “Get your goons to take me out and shoot me?”

  The Luddites had what someone once called the one-syllable view of life. Yes, no, black, white, good, bad. If only it were that simple. I fought back a wave of nausea. Charlie, Simon, and the guards were motionless, staring anywhere but at either of us. “I couldn’t shoot you even if I wanted to, Mr. Moore. If you had done your homework you’d know there is nothing to shoot with at Ellfive, and as long as I’m boss here there never will be.”

  Something of our tension seemed to penetrate his self-absorption then, and his eyes darted around the room. “I want a lawyer. I want to be charged.”

  I raised my head and looked at him. His features were small and pinched. “This isn’t Terra, Mr. Moore. There are even fewer lawyers on Ellfive than there are weapons.”

  He stilled finally and stared at me, uncomprehending. I elaborated. “There are no lawyers. There is no judge, no jury, and no appeal. Until commissioning, I am the law on Ellfive. And the law, Mr. Moore, as provided by the Ellfive charter, demands immediate execution of a sentence in kind to the offense. Article II, paragraph three, subsection one.”

  I set my teeth and my knees and got up to go around the desk. I nodded at the two guards who stood on either side of the little man. They stepped back. Simon didn’t. I gave him a look that allowed as how I didn’t need a whole lot of help with someone shorter than Charlie and whom I probably outweighed by twenty-five kays, and I was right. It wasn’t difficult to take one of Moore’s arms and bend it up behind his back. I put my other arm in a choke hold around his neck, for insurance. I had to bend over a little to get the right leverage. I forced him step by step out the door, the guards flanking me on either side, Simon bringing up the rear. Charlie stayed behind. She always did. I wished I could.

  Rex was leaning up against the wall of the corridor, looking mean and suspicious. Rex Toranaga, straw boss of the North Cap security crew and a descendant of samurai warriors by way of the Maui cane fields, had a naturally mean, suspicious face and an equally mean and suspicious nature. I liked him, not least because I knew he wasn’t hanging around waiting for his quota of gratitude. When he saw where we were headed he gave one nod of grim approval and went back to work. Other people passed our little procession. A few of them glanced at us and then as quickly away, as if they had committed an act in questionable taste. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that one of the guards was a little green around the gills. I didn’t blame her. In thirteen years I had had to space eleven people, four at Copernicus Base on Luna and seven at Ellfive. If I wouldn’t let myself remember their names, their faces were imprinted forever on my retinas. I clutched at the little man with sweaty hands and forced him on.

  Airlock OC-3 was a scant New York City block from my office, a small room with spacesuits in various states of age and repair hanging from hooks on all three walls. The fourth was given over to the airlock. The room stank of stale sweat. Moore started to make little gobbling noises when Simon cycled the lock. He managed to sink his teeth into my forearm, right through my sleeve, and rip off a good-sized strip of skin. He started to scream when I shoved him inside and slammed the hatch. I didn’t look and I tried not to listen but while the atmosphere in the lock was bleeding off he made enough noise for a shower full of people at Auschwitz. When the lock cycled back I had to lean on the flusher for several minutes.

  Back in my office I dismissed the guards and went into the john to throw up and change into a clean jumpsuit. When I came out Charlie had her bag open. “Sit,” she said sternly, poin
ting to my chair. When my sister gets in these Hippocratic moods, you can either go along with her or you can coldcock her and carry on. The problem with door number two is that eventually she wakes up. I sat. She zapped my wound with an asceptiwand and smoothed on a layer of shamskin. “That should fall off in a few days.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Quijance,” I said, flexing my arm and wincing. “Let us hope the little bastard wasn’t hydrophobic.” I rubbed my forehead and said wearily, “Got anything for this headache?”

  She rummaged around in her bag and handed me two capsules without comment. I broke them under my nose one at a time and inhaled. The sharp aroma swarmed into my sinuses like a relieving army and the steady throb behind my eyes eased up. “Archy, front and center.”

  “Yo.”

  “Archy, send a message to Colony Control. Tell Ricadonna I want that new security supervisor up here as in yesterday. You can make the language as nasty as you want.”

  A bang on the door interrupted his reply and in marched a stocky little woman in her fifties or thereabouts. She had a full head of flaming red hair, a tiny butterfly tattoo at the corner of one eye, and the inevitable squeebee hooked to her belt. “And so it’s the bloody-minded Luddites again, is it now? Then it’s a drop of the mountain tay you’ll be needing, Star,” she said without ceremony. She unhooked the squeebee and handed it over.

  I took the bottle, only because I knew it would bring on one of Paddy’s redheaded mads if I didn’t. I uncapped it, sent up a small prayer, and drank. It went down like liquid oxygen. I wheezed a little, suppressed a gag, and felt hot beads of sweat pop out of every pore. Paddy looked me over appraisingly, gave a satisfied, less-than-maternal nod, recovered her squeebee, and marched out again.

  “What does she put in that stuff, anyway?” Simon asked.

  “I’ve always been afraid to ask,” Charlie admitted.

  “You’re responsible for the health of the crew on this project,” he said, a little pompously. “That stuff is poison, it has to be. You should shut her down.”