by Paul Preuss
“Kronos was not a good name for a spaceship,” Pavlakis said.
She nodded solemnly. “A titan who ate his own children. It must have been difficult to line up qualified crews.”
Pavlakis’s amber beads were working their way over and through his strong fingers. “When will I be allowed to examine my ship and its cargo, Inspector?”
“I’ll answer your questions as best I can, Mr. Pavlakis. As soon as I finish this procedure. Please wait for me—through that door to your left.”
Again the invisible door yawned unexpectedly on the cold steel tube. Grimly, staring down over his mustache, Pavlakis moved through it without another word.
When the door closed Proboda admitted the next passenger from the disembarkation tube. “Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa, Port Hesperus, unemployed.” She came in mad, glared at Proboda wordlessly, sneered at the videoplate. As the corridor door closed, sealing her inside, Proboda said, “This is Inspector Troy.”
“Ms. Mokoroa, a year ago you sued to break a three-year companionship contract with Mr. Vincent Darlington, shortly after you both had arrived here. The grounds were sexual incompatibility. Was Mr. Darlington aware at the time that you had already become the de facto companion of Mrs. Sondra Sylvester?”
Nancybeth stared silently at the image on the videoplate, her face set in a mask of contempt that was the product of long practice—
—and which Sparta easily recognized as cover for her desperate confusion. Sparta waited.
“We’re friends,” Nancybeth said huskily.
Sparta said, “That’s nice. Was Mr. Darlington aware at the time that you were also lovers?”
“Just friends, that’s all!” The young woman stared wildly around at the claustrophobic carpeted room, at the hulking policeman beside her. “What the hell do you think you’re trying to prove? What is this…?”
“All right, we’ll drop the subject. Now if you would…”
“I want a lawyer,” Nancybeth shrieked, deciding that offense was better than defense. “In here, right now. I know my rights.”
“…answer just one more question,” Sparta finished quietly.
“Not another damned word! Not one more word, blue-suit. This is unlawful detainment. Unreasonable search…”
Sparta and Proboda traded glances. Search?
“Impugnment of dignity,” Nancybeth continued. “Slanderous implication. Malicious aforethought…”
Sparta almost grinned. “Don’t sue us until you hear the question, okay?”
“So we don’t have to arrest you first,” Proboda added.
Nancybeth choked on her anger, realizing she’d jumped the gun. They hadn’t arrested her yet. Possibly they wouldn’t. “What d’you wanna know?” She sounded suddenly exhausted.
“Nancybeth, do you think either of them—Sylvester or Darlington—would be capable of committing murder … for your sake?”
Nancybeth was startled into laughter. “The way they talk about each other? They both would.”
Proboda leaned toward her. “The Inspector didn’t ask you what they…”
But Sparta silenced him with a glance from the videoplate. “Okay, thanks, you can go. Through that door to your right.”
“Right?” Proboda asked, and Sparta nodded sharply. He opened the doorway.
Nancybeth was suspicious. “Where’s that go?”
“Out,” Proboda said. “Fruits and costumes. You’re free.”
The young woman stared wide-eyed around the room again, her flaring nostrils seeming almost to quiver. Then she darted through the door like a wildcat freed from a trap. Proboda looked at the videoplate, exasperated. “Why not her? It looked to me like she had a lot to hide.”
“What she’s hiding has nothing to do with Star Queen, Viktor. It’s from her own past, I’d guess. Who’s next?”
“Mrs. Sylvester. Look, I have to say I hope you’ll handle this with more tact than…”
“Let’s play the game the way we agreed.”
Proboda grunted and opened the door to the tube. “Mrs. Sondra Sylvester, Port Hesperus, chief executive of the Ishtar Mining Corporation.” His voice was as formal, as heavy with respect as a majordomo’s.
Sondra Sylvester floated smoothly into the small carpeted room, her heavy silks clinging about her. “Viktor? Must we go through this yet again?”
“Mrs. Sylvester, I’d like to present Inspector Troy,” he said apologetically.
“I’m sure you’re eager to get to your office, Mrs. Sylvester,” Sparta said, “so I’ll be brief.”
“My office can wait,” Sylvester said firmly. “I’d like to unload my robots from that freighter.”
Sparta dipped her gaze to the phony filescreen, then up to Sylvester’s eyes. The women stared at each other through the electronics. “You’ve never dealt with Pavlakis Lines before,” Sparta said, “yet you helped persuade both the Board of Space Control and the ship’s insurers to waive the crew-of-three rule.”
“I believe I’ve just told Inspector Proboda why. I have six mining robots in the cargo, Inspector. I need to put them to work soon.”
“You were very lucky, then.” Sparta’s relaxed voice conceded no sign that she was being pressured. “You could have lost them all.”
“Unlikely. Less likely, even, than that a meteoroid would strike a ship in the first place. Which at any rate has nothing to do with the size of Star Queen’s crew.”
“Then would you have preferred to trust your robots—insured for approximately nine hundred million dollars, I believe—to an unmanned spacecraft?”
Sylvester smiled at that. It was an astute question, with political and economical overtones one hardly expected from a criminal inspector. “There are no unmanned interplanetary freighters, Inspector—thanks to the Space Board, and a long list of other lobbyists, the predictable sort of special interest groups. I don’t waste time on hypothetical questions.”
“Where did you spend the last three weeks of your Earth holidays, Mrs. Sylvester?”
A decidedly non-hypothetical question—and it cost Sylvester effort to cover her surprise. “I was vacationing in the south of France.”
“You rented a villa on the Isle du Levant, in which, except for the first day and last day and two occasions when you visited, Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa stayed alone. Where were you the rest of the time?”
Sylvester glanced at Proboda, who avoided her look. His earlier superficial questioning had not prepared her to face this level of detail. “I was… I was on private business.”
“In the United States? In England?”
Sondra Sylvester said nothing. With visible effort she settled her features.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sylvester,” Sparta said coldly. “Through that door to the left”—and Sparta noted that Proboda took just a little too long opening the hidden door, softening the impact of its surprise. “It will be necessary to detain you a short while longer. Not more than five or six minutes.”
Sylvester kept the mask in place as she went through the door, but she could not disguise her apprehension.
Proboda hurried the next passenger into the room. “Mr. Blake Redfield. London. Representing Mr. Vincent Darlington of the Hesperian Museum.”
In the instant Proboda was opening the corridor door, Sparta’s fingers flicked out to the monitoring lens, degrading the videoplate image visible to Redfield. He came into the small room, looking alert, relaxed, proper in his expensive English suit, but showing just the edge of a young man’s temptation to strut his stuff in that certain cut of the lapels, that certain length of his shiny auburn hair.
“Inspector Troy, Space Board,” Proboda said, nodding at the videoplate, failing to notice the image had lost its crisp focus. Blake turned toward the screen with the reserved, expectant half-smile that marks the socially adept. If he recognized her he did not betray himself, but she knew he was as good at this game as she was. If he had a reason to hide, he could hide better than any of the others.
She inspected
him intensely, although her macrozoom eye was largely disabled by the limited resolution of the videoplate, and she had no sense whatever of his chemical presence. She had not seen him in two years; he did not look older so much as more sure of himself. He was holding something in reserve, something she had not known in him before. The only sound from him, floating weightless in the acoustically deadened room, was his quiet breathing. He waited for her to speak.
If someone had made a voiceprint graph when she did finally speak, its very flatness would have been suspicious. “You acted as Mr. Darlington’s agent in the purchase of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mr. Redfield?”
“That’s correct.” His voice, by contrast, was warm and alert; its graph would have said, if you’re not giving anything away, neither am I.
“The purpose of your trip?”
“I’m here to see that the famous book you just named is safely delivered to Mr. Darlington.”
Sparta paused. It seemed an illogical reply, deliberately provocative, which she could not let pass without challenge. “If you were planning to personally insure its delivery, why ship it aboard Star Queen? Why not keep it with you?”
Redfield grinned. “Perhaps I did.”
He knew she knew he didn’t. “I’ve confirmed that the book is aboard Star Queen, Mr. Redfield.”
“That’s reassuring. May I see it too?”
Sparta’s heart thudded, hard and quick. Well below the level of anything she could bring quickly to consciousness, she knew something was happening that she had not anticipated. On the spot she decided that Mr. Blake Redfield was not to be given more information than he had already. “Soon, Mr. Redfield. Through that door to your right, please. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
As he went out she could see that he was smiling broadly. He meant for her to see it. Impatiently she said, “All right, Viktor, he was the last of the sheep.”
“The last of the what?”
“The goats are in the pen. Let’s get ’em.”
The tiny room into which Farnsworth, Pavlakis, and Sylvester deposited themselves after negotiating a dogleg twist in the steel tube was another cube—this one of raw steel, as featureless as a submarine’s brig. The cell had no visible exit; the way back had been closed off by sliding panels. The blank videoplate overhead filled the entire ceiling.
The sullen conversation among the three inmates was on the verge of slicing into vicious bickering when the dark videoplate suddenly brightened. A close-up image of Inspector Ellen Troy, now three times life size, formed on the screen.
“I promised that this wouldn’t take long, and it won’t,” the iconic face announced. Sparta’s image was replaced by a crisp view of a convexly curving metal plate. “This hull plate from Star Queen’s life support deck, designated L-43, has a hole in it.” The image zoomed in rapidly to the upper right corner, to the neat black hole in the paint.
The screen switched to another view of the plate, its inner surface blackened, concave. “The plate displays internal spalling characteristic of a high-velocity projectile, such as a meteoroid”—and again the image changed, moving in closer to show a crater in the steel as vast as Aetna’s—“which was covered by hardened plastic foam, making the hole airtight.” A new image showed a shiny, viscid lump of yellow plastic mounded over the spot in the plate where the crater had been displayed—a view of the hole before the protective plastic had been removed.
Sparta’s pedantic, almost hectoring voice continued over the succession of images. “The significant damage to Star Queen was done by an explosion that destroyed both major oxygen tanks and a fuel cell,” she said, as a view of the blackened mess inside the flight deck came up on the screen.
She paused a moment to let them study the wreckage before saying, “Neither the hole in the hull plate nor the internal explosion was caused by a meteoroid, however.”
Their solemn faces were washed in the screen’s cold light. If her audience of three were surprised by this news, none betrayed it except by the deepening silence.
Another close-up, this one a micrograph, snapped into view. “The melt pattern around the hole shows large, irregular metal crystals, characteristic of slow melting and cooling—not the fine regular crystals that would have resulted from an instantaneous deposition of energy. This hole was probably cut with a plasma torch.” Another micrograph. “Here you see that there are in fact two separate strata of the hardened plastic plug—the first is very thin and its laminations do not show the turbulence patterns expected from a supersonic airflow through the hole—you can see the smooth exfoliation here.” A computerized chart, this time. “As this spectrograph proves, this layer of plastic was actually catalyzed over two months ago. In other words, the hole was in the plate and sealed with plastic before Star Queen left Earth. Note that this same thin layer has been shattered in the center, blasted outward. The explosion occurred inside the ship—blew the hole open, allowing the air to escape—then was quickly sealed again by the ship’s emergency systems.”
More charts and graphs. “The interior explosion was caused by a charge of fulminate of gold, detonated by acetylene, placed inside the casing of the fuel cell—these spectrographs reveal the nature of the explosives. Ignition was electrical and was probably triggered through the fuel cell monitor, by a preset signal in the ship’s computer.”
Sparta’s stern image reappeared, fiercely bright in the stark steel cell. “Who sabotaged Star Queen? Why was it sabotaged? Anyone who can shed light on this may speak now. Or if you prefer, please privately contact the local office of the Board of Space Control. Star Queen will remain off limits pending the completion of our investigation.”
A shaft of light pierced the room and partially washed out the screen. A double door had opened at the back of the cell; right outside was one of the core’s busiest hallways.
Meanwhile Sparta had flipped a switch that cycled her austere videoplate image. Her tiny control room, hardly more than a closet full of glittering panels, was tucked into a crevice between corridors. She was physically closer to them than any of the people in the cell realized. Under cover of the cycled frame she turned to Proboda, who hovered near her in the control room. “Viktor, you thought I was impertinent with Mrs. Sylvester. You follow her, then. If she goes to her office or approaches Star Queen, signal me right away. Wherever she goes, call me in five minutes. She’s already leaving—get going!”
Sparta flipped her videoplate image back to live feed. Farnsworth and Pavlakis were still in the room, although Pavlakis had one tentative foot out the door and Farnsworth was walking boldly up to the videoplate.
“Odd, that,” Farnsworth said to the giant screen over his head. “Revealing your evidence without making an accusation.”
“We’re aboard a space station, Mr. Farnsworth. More isolated than a town in Kansas.”
“And if the villain isn’t here with us?”
“Then no harm done,” she said.
The man was transparent, but bold—standing there as much as telling her he knew what she knew about his past, that she would be mistaken to suspect him. “D’you expect your revelations to remain secret more than a few minutes? Even from Earth?”
“Did you have a specific comment to make, Mr. Farnsworth?”
Farnsworth jerked his thumb toward Pavlakis, who was still hulking in the background, silhouetted against the brightly lit corridor outside. “That one. Family history of defrauding insurors. Never been able to prove it. But if he’s not your man he can tell you who is.”
He was an insolent man, even if in this case he was, as she had already decided, quite innocent. “What would you say if I told you Sylvester did it?” Sparta asked. Good. That set him back a bit—
He took it seriously. “Jealousy, you mean?”—as if he’d never thought of it. “This fellow Darlington buys the book she wanted, so she makes sure he never … and so forth?”
“And so forth.”
“Novel theory, that…” Farnsworth muttered.
“It’s not a theory, Farnsworth.” Her face, three times life size, leaned toward him.
“Not a theory?”
“Not a theory at all.”
“Quite enough said then. Do forgive…” He was suddenly in a hurry to radio his employers. He swam off awkwardly toward the door.
Pavlakis had disappeared.
The commlink chimed in her right ear. “Go ahead.”
“This is Proboda. Mrs. Sylvester went straight to the headquarters of the Ishtar Mining Corporation. I’m outside the Ishtar Gate right now.” The Ishtar Mining Corporation was located almost two kilometers away, at the far end of the space station; there its windows and antennas could look straight down on the bright clouds of Venus.
“That seems to eliminate her, too. Meet me back here as soon as you can.”
“What happens next?” Proboda sounded irritated. She’d sent him on another wild goose chase.
“We’ll wait. Our list is very short, Viktor. I think we’re going to see a confession or an act of desperation. Not long. Maybe ten or fifteen min—”
She felt as much as heard the massive thud. The lights went out, all of them, all at once, and in the blackness the low moan of the warning sirens rose quickly to a thin, desperate wail. Wall speakers urgently addressed everyone within hearing, repeating themselves in English, Arabic, Russian, Japanese: Evacuate core section one immediately. There is a catastrophic loss of pressure in core section one. Evacuate core section one immediately…
Proboda shouted into the commlink, loud enough to deafen her. “Are you all right? What happened up there? Troy?” But no one answered him.
18
A space station’s vital systems are both independent and redundant. Someone who knew Port Hesperus well had managed to isolate the entire starward quarter of the hub, interrupting main bus power from the nuclear reactor and cutting the lines from the solar arrays. All this in the instant that a pressure hatch blew out in the security sector—