Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Page 6

  I looked at Kate looking at the sergeant, and I thought of that battered girl, and I knew a momentary impulse to take Rex and Caleb back to my office to inventory the paper clip supply. We could return in an hour or so with mops, to clean up all that would be left of the liberty party. I controlled myself. The boss is paid to control herself. I was goddam tired of being boss. “She isn’t only anything,” I said to the sergeant. “She is a Fiver, with all the rights and privileges implied therein. She said no. Everyone here heard her, including you. You couldn’t buy her because she wasn’t selling, so you took. You don’t ‘take’ on Ellfive.”

  Kate puffed out a large cloud of smoke. It drifted into the sergeant’s vicinity. “Or you don’t and live,” she added gently.

  The sergeant closed up like a clam. “We’re Patrolmen. You can’t do anything to us. I demand to call my commanding officer on Orientale.”

  “You sure about that? At least four of your people as trained warriors are guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, and of rape, and the rest of you are guilty of conspiracy of silence in the action of a felony. The penalty for any one of those offenses is the same on Luna as it is on Ellfive.”

  He maintained a stubborn silence. O’Hara motioned to me and we moved to the other side of the room. “Who is their commanding officer?”

  “Commodore Grayson Cabot Lodge, CSPOB, Luna.”

  He whistled. “The Fourth?”

  “The same.”

  “What’s the problem? Turn ‘em over. Lodge is a fine soldier, and from all I’ve heard a responsible and even an honorable one. He’s not going to condone this kind of behavior in troops under his command.” I remained silent. He said, “You’ll have to turn them over sooner or later.” I said nothing, and he added, “Unless you want me to space them here and now?”

  I blew out a breath. “Where’s your viewer, Kate?”

  She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, her eyes never leaving the Patrolmen. I picked my way through the debris around the bar. The viewer was miraculously undamaged. “Archy, get Lodge.”

  He kept me waiting for fifteen minutes. When finally the screen dissolved to Space Patrol Headquarters on Luna, his bright brown gaze was steady and guileless. Only the very best liars can meet your eyes with that kind of candor.

  “What can I do for you, Star?”

  The sergeant must have heard and recognized Lodge’s voice for he let out a yell. O’Hara promptly and efficiently gagged him. I told Lodge what had happened in flat monosyllables. His face had darkened by the time I finished, but all he said was, “My men?”

  I stared at him. “Your men are fine, Grays. Not a scratch on any of them.”

  “Well, ship them on back to Luna, along with any evidence you have.” When I would have protested he raised one hand and said, “They will be punished under the law, Star, I will see to it personally. You have my word.”

  Somewhat to my surprise I saw that he meant it, that he was furious beneath his calm. “Too little, too late, Grays,” I said, more mildly now. “This is the second riot started by a Patrol liberty party in two months. We were lucky last time, nobody got hurt. This time, your people go back to taking liberty at GEO base.” He started to say something and I raised my voice. “I imagine Kate will be sending you a bill for damages. The girl’s unconscious now, but when she wakes up I’ll encourage her to file suit in the System Courts for actual and punitive damages, medical expenses, and wages lost. I imagine the Magdalene Guild will be contacting you as well.”

  “You imagine correctly,” Kate said over my shoulder. Lodge’s lips compressed into a thin line, but he gave a curt nod and I cleared my screen and turned to O’Hara. “Take them back to Orientale restrained and under guard. Archy.”

  “I’m here, boss,” Archy said, sounding more sober than I would have believed possible.

  “Tell Daedalus to assign an Ellfive pilot to the Patrol shuttle. Caleb? Stay at Orientale just long enough to land and turn over your cargo and no longer. Don’t sit down to eat with those sonsabitches, don’t accept so much as the offer of a drink, and don’t stay the night. Rex? Take the security scout and go with him to bring him back, and be careful, damn it. Go.”

  The liberty party marched out, escorted by Rex and Caleb. Almost on the inward swing of the door Paddy materialized with the inevitable squeebee. I grabbed it and downed three gulps before I remembered what it was I was swallowing. I coughed and said, “And what did you do in the war, Mommy?”

  “Wasn’t it a good thing I was after finishing up the punch card on the hangarlock?” she said soothingly. “I wouldn’t have been so close with the tay as I was otherwise.”

  “We could have used some help.”

  “ ‘Tis a lover and not a fighter I am, Star Svensdotter, as well you know. And wasn’t I listening in to the donnybrook on the gadget, now?” Gadget was Paddy’s word for any technological device newer than the plow, and in this case meant her communit, which for once was on her wrist.

  I took another gulp of poteen. “Just one damn thing after another, Paddy. Just one damn thing after another.”

  “Sure, and I haven’t had this much fun since the Maze in ’97,” she observed. She reclaimed her squeebee and held it out to Kate, who refused the offer with less tact than speed and headed for the bar. Paddy vanished.

  Responsibility is a fine thing; when you take on a lot of it for someone else, they give you a big house with a wet bar, and only last Christmas Frank Sartre sent me a crate of Glenlivet, most of which was still there. I went home to both.

  — 3 —

  Just One Damn Thing After Another

  A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well.

  —Petronius

  I SLEEP HARD and wake up surly. You would think, then, that Archy could have found some more appropriate way of waking me up than by blaring the 1812 Overture over the ceiling pickup. On the other hand, I have to admit that sometimes nothing less will get the job done.

  I groaned. “ ’Kay, Arch. Gimme a minute.” I rolled over and sat up as Hotstuff protested loudly from the foot of the bed. A series of indignant squeaks indicated that her five daughters and two sons were not amused, either. Archy had a lot to answer for. “S’matter?” I said thickly. “Flare alert?”

  “No, it’s Helen. She’s waiting for you onscreen.”

  I knuckled my eyes and heaved myself to my feet, wrapped myself in the sheet—Hotstuff’s progeny protesting at this further disruption of their breakfast—and staggered into the office to flop down in front of the viewscreen. Helen’s gray eyes looked out at me. “Good morning, Star.”

  I looked at the chronometer blinking red in one corner of the screen. Five o’clock. “Yeah, the hillside’s dew-pearled. What’s so important it couldn’t wait another hour?”

  “Bad news travels fast. There’s a Time reporter at GEO Base. She’s coming up to Ellfive on Monday’s shuttle.”

  On the whole I would have preferred the flare alert. I took a deep, calming breath, counted to ten, and said carefully, “You got me up in the middle of the night to tell me that?”

  Helen’s tiny smile came and went. She looked in excellent spirits, which would have made me suspicious right from the start if my ganglia had been closer to on than off. “No. Remember the Russian gentleman we were discussing? He’s ready to come over.”

  I sat up, suddenly wide awake. “Vitaly Viskov? The silicon polymer specialist?”

  “Yes.”

  I whistled. “How did you put that together so fast?”

  Even from a distance of four hundred thousand kilometers the smugness of Helen’s expression was unmistakable. “His wife defected in Paris two days ago. They haven’t seen each other since he was posted to Tsiolkovsky Base. He asked us if we could smuggle her to Luna since his own people wouldn’t do it. I informed him that if he cared to transfer his place of employment, they could both have jobs on Ellfive.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Helen.”

  “Y
es?”

  “You are such a ballbreaker.”

  “I am, aren’t I,” she said, not without pride.

  She was in Sartre’s study, and the good doctor stuck his head into pickup view. “Tell me about it, Star.”

  “How are you, Frank?”

  “My balls remain intact thus far.”

  I congratulated him. “Viskov arrived at Copernicus Base last night, your time,” Helen said, ignoring us in a manner that indicated at least one of the three of us was a grown-up. “As soon as you can find him a place, Jorge will ship him over.”

  “I don’t have to find him a place, he’s got a job as of yesterday with Jerry Pauling’s bunch in the Frisbee. What’s his wife’s specialty?”

  “Frank said she’s a botanist.” She turned to look at her husband and he said something I didn’t catch. “Says her name’s Yelena Bugolubova.”

  “Yelena Boogie-what?”

  Helen spelled it for me. “I’ll put her on the TAVliner for GEO Base today.” She paused. “I’ll reserve her a seat on the Express next to the Time reporter.”

  I brightened. “Helen, that’s an inspired idea. ‘Red Lovers Seek Refuge in the Sky.’ What reporter worth her Gothic typeface wouldn’t go for a byline under a headline like that?” And leave me alone in the process. “A botanist, huh?” I thought. “Roger will take her on like a shot. Wc could use some fresh blood in the farming toroids. Maybe she knows something about mameys.” Helen didn’t respond or sign off, just sat there looking expectant, waiting for me to ask, so I sighed and said, “Okay, Helen. I’ll bite. What else?”

  The flickering smile waxed and waned. “Dr. Viskov’s opening bid for our services was a copy of a rather intriguing message from Gagarin City to Baikonur. It seems the Russians on Mars have intercepted a transmission from Betelgeuse.”

  Was that all? I sat back in my chair and tried not to snicker out loud. “Another one?”

  Since the original 1992 message everyone from ham operators in Sri Lanka to BBC listeners in London, along with Project META, Arecibo, and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii had been interpreting sub-millimeter spectrum readings, magnetic distortions, and solar flares as messages from the Beetlejuicers. The messages, freely translated, ranged from plans for an eminent attack on Terra to excerpts from “Emily Post’s Guide to Extraterrestrial Etiquette,” and usually provided most or all of the light relief in the Ellfive Gazette.

  So I snickered, or tried not to, and Helen said, “They haven’t translated it yet, because it seems it’s coded differently than the ‘92 message, but they do say they intercepted the information by tapping into Odysseus II’s daily transmissions to JPL.”

  I harrumphed and rearranged my face into a frown, fixing my boss with a stern stare. “What have you and Frank been up to, Helen?”

  “Nothing, Star, on my honor,” she assured me.

  “What have you and Helen been up to, Frank?” I said.

  He craned his neck to put his head back in range of the pickup and said around his pipe stem, “She’s telling the truth, Star. For a change.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Archy, go to secure scramble, ears only, hush both ends and do not record. Although I should record this for posterity,” I added for Helen’s benefit. She stared back at me, unblinking. Her face was unlined, with regular, unremarkable features, except for her hair, which stood up around her head like a dust mop in zerogee and made her look like a cross between Albert Einstein and the Bride of Frankenstein, and her eyes. Those eyes got to me every time, an intense, passionate, hypnotic gray that saw everything without giving anything away themselves. Those eyes said that Helen Ricadonna, like J. Moore, was on a mission from God. Whenever I wondered what the hell I was doing at Ellfive, something that had been occurring more often of late, I remembered those eyes and stopped wondering, but today I would not be overawed. “Helen,” I said, slowly and carefully, as one addresses a backward child, “wherever that message came from, it didn’t come from Betelgeuse.”

  The good doctor stuck his head back into range. “I know that, Star, and Helen knows that, and you know that.” He gave me a smile I would have called impish on someone less jealous of his personal dignity. “But the Martians don’t know that.”

  “All right then, assuming I believe you, which I don’t, where did it come from?”

  Helen shrugged. “Where do any of them come from? The Martians probably misinterpreted some of the probe data.” Her fleeting little smile reappeared. “They sounded a little, well, frantic, shall we say.”

  “I’ll bet they did,” I said dryly. “This month anyone inbound for Terra by way of Odysseus II has to pass through Mars’s orbit to get there. I’ll just bet they’re nervous.”

  “I wanted you to know before the news broke. Especially with the Time reporter on her way up.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Helen smiled and somehow I knew she’d been waiting for that question since the beginning of her call. “Emily Holbrook Castellano. I believe you have met before.”

  We had, and Helen knew we had. Castellano was Dewayne Nierbog Jr.’s unofficial press agent and a certified Luddite sympathizer, if not a card-carrying member of the organization’s public relations arm. “I had to space a Luddite the day I got back, Helen.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t take much more of this shit and Castellano, too.”

  “That’s why we sent you O’Hara.”

  “So you say. He doesn’t seem to be doing much but follow me around.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “Up yours, Ricadonna,” I said. “Is this guy really any good?”

  “You tell me,” she said sweetly, and in the background I heard Frank’s hoarse guffaw.

  “Helen,” I said, and I wasn’t smiling.

  She sobered and said seriously, “He’s the best there is, Star. You couldn’t do better if you had him made to order.”

  “He says you hired him last month,” I said. “He says because he isn’t an Alliance national it took a while for the visa and the green card to come through.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s O’Hara really doing on Ellfive, Helen?”

  “Caleb Mbele O’Hara, son of Sean O’Hara, mercenary, and Uhura Mbele, chief,” Helen recited. “Father died in the New South African revolution. Mother is now minister without portfolio for the New South African Tribal Congress. Enrolled at Dartmouth, studied history, dropped out to serve in the War of Independence in his father’s unit, and later in the Diamond Rebellion. NSA Cross of Freedom with bar, Medal of Valor—”

  “Yeah, yeah, and enough ribbon to trim a ball gown,” I said. “Saw post-war service as a special security adviser to the new president, set up the New South African equivalent of the Secret Service, security consultant to various international organizations and events including the Winter Olympics in Anchorage, application to emigrate has been on file at Colony Control for five years, never been married, no known offspring. I read his file, too.”

  “I liked the caution of that last entry,” Helen said.

  Exercising great restraint, I said, as calmly as I could, “Helen. What I want to know is why someone who stands to practically inherit an entire nation on Terra chose to space instead.”

  She said blandly, “Why would someone who was running offshore oil drilling operations for practically the entire West Coast of the American Alliance choose to space instead?” I had an answer for that but she jumped in before I could voice it. “How is the work coming? Any major problems?”

  I spluttered for a while. “Oh, the hell with it. If you won’t talk, you won’t. Simon says we’re on schedule, except for personnel housing, but that should be up to speed by the time the first colonists arrive. We’ve taken a few meteorite hits but they’re so tiny and we’re so big that pressure isn’t affected before we have time to slap a patch on it. The alarm system Simon worked out with Archy is performing perfectly—”

  “Thanks
, Star!”

  “Quiet, Archy,” I said, “and I mean it this time. The flowers are blooming, Helen. The trees are leafing out. My front lawn needs mowing. The first crop of wheat was harvested from the Nearest Doughnut last week and the last batch of biobeef out of the vats tested Grade A. You can send up that first load of pioneers as planned.” She was silent. “Helen?”

  “I heard you.” Her tiny smile came and went. “We’re going to do it. We’re really going to do it.”

  “Just like you said we would. Unless the Beetlejuicers get here first.” She stared out at me from the viewer, the picture of outraged innocence, and I laughed, my first real belly laugh in far too long. “How is the colonist selection process coming?”

  She grimaced. “Everybody wants to be the first one on board the Mayflower. No one is willing to wait a year or even a month to emigrate, no matter how high up they are on the approved list. I would find their enthusiasm encouraging if I didn’t suspect that panic was an even stronger motivating factor.”

  “I can’t blame them.”

  “Neither can I. As you saw for yourself last month, things are getting more than a little crowded down here, and what with the North American drought and the African famine, not to mention the conventional wars breaking out like an epidemic of measles now that we’re using nuclear warheads for rocket fuel instead of peacekeepers—”

  “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,” I said. “Another couple of weeks, Helen, and we can start to take some of the pressure off.”