Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “This doesn’t have a very nice sound.”

  “The harmony is bad in spots,” Coren agreed, “but it resolves well. If the players all stick to the score.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Coren slid a disk across the table. “That contains files pertaining to a certain lab, and how it relates to Rega Looms and his children.”

  “Child, you mean.”

  “No. Children. Plural.”

  “You mean that . . . person . . . has a legitimate claim?”

  “Jerem has a claim. It’s legitimacy has been compromised. Those doc­uments will explain. What I need from you is follow-up.”

  “All those raids a couple of months ago weren’t enough?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The sandwich arrived. Coren took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.

  “The proverbial shit is about to fly,” he said finally. “Whoever has set Jerem Looms to reclaiming his heritage wants more than trade conces­sions on Earth. I don’t have the resources to investigate the police. Maybe you do. But at this point, I’ve given up resolving this through legal chan­nels.”

  “I should arrest you now, Lanra,” Capel said.

  “You won’t. You understand what I’m telling you. Jerem Looms has enough claim to make it stick and become the head of DyNan Manual Industries. That will bring everything we thought we cleaned up right back into our midst—and more, besides. You know and I know that if this becomes an open investigation and the system is brought to bear, corrup­tion will proliferate and no solution will be found in our lifetime. I can take care of this without compromising any legal authority on Earth. What I need afterward is a thorough investigation of the institutions and people contained in those files. You know perfectly well that this may be our best chance of stopping a disaster before it begins.”

  Capel’s eyes narrowed. “So I won’t arrest you?”

  “All you’ve got right now is hearsay. You know what I intend to do, but that’s not proof, and nothing has happened. Besides, it wouldn’t do either of us any good in the long run. And that’s what I’m talking about. The long run.”

  “Let’s assume you’re right. What next?”

  “DyNan is about to undergo a small coup,” Coren explained. “My sec­ond in the security department is bad. I’m setting things up for her to be replaced. The man stepping into her job—and probably mine—is named Gansi Tellen. He’s new to DyNan, but I went over his jacket—he’s good, he’s clean, and he’s honest. I spoke to him earlier. I’m asking—work with him. Don’t make him an enemy.”

  “I’ll reserve judgment, but I see no problem with that.”

  “If something goes wrong,” Coren said, tapping the disk between them, “there’s sufficient evidence here for you to arrest Shola Bran, my second. Do so. At the very least, see that her license is revoked. Also, if something goes wrong, contact a Spacer named Hofton at the Auroran Embassy. He knows as much, if not more, about this than I do. Work with him.”

  “Aurorans . . . Does this have anything to do with the death of that Spacer, Chassik?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it at all. And if I were you, I’d reserve judgment about that, as well.”

  Capel slipped the disk into his jacket. “I don’t know what you’ve gotten into, Lanra, but I do not envy you.”

  “You may end up envying me.”

  Capel shrugged. “How long do I wait?”

  “You’ll know by tomorrow noon at the latest.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “You’d like the alternative even less.”

  Capel gestured at the hemisphere. “I think we’re done. That might draw attention if it’s on too long.”

  Coren switched the device off and put it away. The two men said very little while Coren finished his sandwich. When he stood, Capel got up and extended a hand. Silently, they shook. Capel looked sad and appreciative and, unexpectedly, respectful. He left the restaurant first.

  Shola waited at the ticket booth at Union Station. Coren greeted her as he always had, slipping easily into the usual banter, and purchased two tickets on the next semiballistic the Kenya District. For her part, Shola kept up the banter just as easily, all the way up to boarding.

  No one spoke during a semiballistic flight, and for that Coren was grateful. He closed his eyes and waited.

  Mia flipped from one passage to the next. She felt trapped between passages, not altogether sure she understood them—how could she really grasp them, they were so far removed from her own time?—but she could not escape the conviction that, after millennia, they spoke to her of things which had yet to change if she could only see their true forms beneath the new clothes of a different era.

  Here disinterest vanishes and a demon becomes manifest—the spirit of each for himself. A sightless monster howls and scrabbles in the darkness. Anarchy lurks in that void.

  Wild figures, half-animal, almost ghosts, prowling in the dark­ness have no concern with universal progress, neither the thought nor the word is known to them, nothing is know to them but the fulfillment of their individual cravings. They are scarcely conscious, having within them a terrifying emptiness . . .

  She let the pages roll by from beneath her thumb to the next page that had claimed her attention, convinced that they reflected each other, made each other sensible in a way she still could not quite grasp.

  The work of the wise is one thing and the work of the merely clever is another. The revolution came to a stop. The instant a revolution runs aground, the clever tear its wreckage apart.

  The clever, in our century, have chosen to designate themselves statesmen, so much so that the word has come into common use. But we have to remember that where there is only cleverness there is necessarily narrowness. To say, “the clever ones” is to say, “the mediocrities”; and in the same way to talk of “statesmen” is sometimes to talk of betrayers.

  Mia worried at a knuckle and finally snapped the book closed. “ ‘The Miserable Ones,’ indeed,” she murmured, staring at the title. She glanced at her desk screens. The flow charts she had pulled from the encryptions in the endpapers made a convoluted but traceable path from Earth to the blockade and through various points among the ships, where everything came and went on Nova Levis as though a military interdiction was merely thicker air to shove through. If the numbers were to be believed, traffic in and out of the planet had decreased by less than forty percent since the line went up. That was hardly a sanction at all. Luxury goods had accounted for nearly forty-eight percent of trade goods prior to the blockade. The necessities still flowed.

  Her comm chimed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Yalor,” her aide said. “Can we talk?”

  “Come by my cabin.”

  A few minutes later, Mia admitted Ros Yalor. He spotted the bound volume of Les Miserables lying on her desk and stood over it, gazing down with a bewildered near-reverence. Books, Mia reflected, are gener­ally outside common experience; books like this are nearly alien objects—apocryphal, arcane, somehow magic, and not quite real.

  “Do you have something for me?” she asked finally.

  “Um . . . yeah. Reen’s off-duty time seems to be spent mainly with Illen Jons. A lot of time in her cabin. When they go out, it’s either to the offi­cers’ lounge or over to one of the Keresian ships. I haven’t been able to follow them there, obviously, but four hours ago I picked Reen up without her, going through the machine shops next to the recon patrol docks.”

  Mia looked at the flow chart still displayed on her desk screen. “What did he do there?”

  “I didn’t get too close. But he waited for nearly forty minutes. A tech sergeant showed up then and they spoke, and Reen left. I thought about following Reen, but I stuck around. About ten minutes later, a row of supply trucks rolled into the dock.”

  “Containing what?”

  “Nothing. They were empty. Half an hour later, a ship docked. The tech sergeant met the pilot and the two of them
started unloading a cargo. Packages—I couldn’t see what was in them, but they filled the train. The pilot went back to his ship, and the tech sergeant removed the trucks.”

  Mia thought for a moment. “Tech Sergeant Uliskis.”

  Yalor started. “Exactly. How—?”

  “The routes through the regular cargo bays seem to be dodges. A lot of them get through, but they always plan on them getting caught. That’s why we never find much of any consequence in them—food stuffs, fabric, data. Always nice when it gets through, but nothing vital. The real smug­gling is going through the recon docks—military, secured areas, with Reen controlling the surveillance. I needed proof.”

  Mia tapped keys on the desk. Data shifted on her screens. “That—” she pointed “—is a list of officers ordering and receiving copies of these things.” She held up the book. “All of them are recon. All of them are cleared for overflights on Nova Levis. All of them have access to the seven docks listed here—” she pointed at another screen. “These are what I culled from the encrypted data in the endpapers of the books I took from Corf. There’s a network of connections throughout the blockade, but they all funnel into these seven docks. All of them are recon patrol. Finally, I have this.” She indicated a third screen. “The books were all purchased through the same supplier. The names were different on all the orders, but the pay­ment came out of one source. That source uses the same bank as Com­mander Reen. Reen maintains a joint account in that bank.”

  “With who?”

  “A Keresian named Lavis. Till recently, he was a personal aide to the Solarian ambassador on Earth.”

  Yalor looked confused. “How . . . where . . . ?”

  “You thought what? I was just an out-of-favor field operative trans­ferred out here for disciplinary reasons?”

  Yalor frowned. “No, I—”

  Mia laughed. “Forget it. Actually, the hardest part was finding the bank account. It’s held under a corporate blind. But someone has to sign the receipts.”

  “So there’s a contact on Earth supervising that end . . . and Reen here supervising incoming and outgoing . . . and a cadre of corrupted recon officers actually moving the merchandise . . . it still doesn’t quite add up.”

  “What’s wrong?” Mia asked.

  “Well, I can understand what Nova Levis wants, what they’re import­ing. But what’s coming back out?”

  “And where is it going? Good question.”

  “Do you have a good answer?”

  “A good suspicion . . . but I don’t want to say anything till I know. There are only a few places where Tech Sergeant Uliskis could stash con­traband near that dock. How long ago did you leave him?”

  “Half-hour at most.” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty-three min­utes.”

  Mia closed up her desk. “I want a look inside those trucks.” She opened a drawer and took out a holster and blaster. “Are you armed?”

  “A stunner,” Yalor said.

  Mia handed him another holster. She shrugged off her jacket and slipped the rig on over her shoulders. She zipped her jacket and waited for Yalor to do the same.

  He looked uncertain. “What if—?” he began.

  “We’re going to be prowling around a thief’s property,” Mia said. “How do you think he’ll react if he catches us?”

  Yalor put on the shoulder rig.

  Mia squeezed through the space between two columns, into a short, low-ceilinged platform above an equipment locker. Below, Yalor’s train of drone trucks stood near the hatch. Voices came from within the locker. Mia palmed her stunner and leaned out to peer into one of the open trucks.

  Neat rows of long blue packages filled the last car. As Mia stared at them, she experienced an intimation about their nature that made her shudder.

  A shadow reached out from the locker and she pulled back.

  The tech sergeant and another man came out and began removing the packages. Each of them hand-carried about six of the objects. She rejoined Yalor.

  “Once they seal that locker,” she whispered, “we might not be able to get in without setting off an alarm.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  Mia considered. “I don’t see anyone but those two. I’m going down.”

  “Let me,” Yalor said.

  “You think you’re a better thief than I?”

  He frowned.

  “No,” she said, “you stay up here and cover me.”

  She found a ladder down to the lower level. As she descended, she worked through her reasoning. She needed evidence to break into that locker officially. She needed something she could accuse Reen of smug­gling in that would draw enough attention to effect appropriate action. If she was correct in what she believed was in those packages, no amount of bribery would keep an inquiry from falling on Reen like a rock.

  And she wanted to justify her own mounting rage.

  Mia kept to the walls and shadows as she worked her way close to the trucks. She could hear the two men within the locker, talking in reasoned, calm voices. They did not seem to be in a hurry.

  She wished she could get to the other side of the train, use it as cover, but that might be too risky. She came as close to the open locker door as she dared and waited. The sergeant and his assistant came out, gathered a load of the packages, and reentered the locker.

  Mia stepped up to the truck. She glanced back quickly. She saw nei­ther man.

  She reached into the truck and grabbed one of the packages. Her hand closed around a familiar shape within the loose blue wrapping, and she knew at once what it contained.

  Her body seized as if waves of electricity had been suddenly poured over her. She could not move. Her jaw ached from clenching. She felt simultaneously weightless, her feet barely touching the deck, and enor­mously heavy.

  After what seemed like minutes, the current stopped. Her head lolled back on her shoulders, her vision danced with sparks, and she never felt the impact as she hit the floor.

  She opened her eyes to darkness and rumbling. It took seconds for her to identify her surroundings, for her mind to confirm what her senses already knew.

  I never expected death to be so loud, she thought.

  Then she was fully conscious, and she knew. She groped in her jacket for a hand light, felt the ominous shape of her blaster—cocky bastards, leaving her armed, but what difference would it make on impact?—and then found the little flashlight. She thumbed it on.

  The light scattered over a jumble of shapes that refused to make immediate sense. Gradually, she recognized them as shipping webs, con­taining cargo nacelles.

  She reached out in the near weightless space and grabbed one of the straps. She pulled herself forward—at least, toward the direction she faced—until she got to the end of the row of cargo.

  Yalor floated in the harsh beam of her light, tied loosely to another web. The side of his head looked swollen, dark.

  “Shit,” she hissed.

  She probed the nacelles within the webbing. Hard casing, no telling what was within them unless she could get one loose and open it. Mia began pulling herself frantically through the hold of the drone. Somewhere, on board all these boats, there ought to have been crash couches, “just in case,” as the tradition of using anything and everything as a life raft dictated.

  Near the aft engine housing she found them. But cargo had been lashed to the bulkheads all around. Even strapped into the couches, if the boat slammed into the ground they would be crushed by the cargo that would no doubt pull free.

  She took out her blaster and set the beam for a narrow, low intensity burn, and cut through webbing. One nacelle floated out. She wrestled into onto one of the couches and cut the seals.

  It was filled with bubblepacks containing, as best she could see, phar­maceuticals. She checked the ‘packs—impact resistant, unbreakable, opened only by a molecular key.

  Mia managed to secure the nacelle to the couch, then wrestled another one into the next couch. She emptie
d out several of the bub­blepacks to make room, then towed Yalor’s limp body over. She got him inside the nacelle and shoved ‘packs around him as best she could, then resealed the nacelle. It was a risk, she knew, unsure how long they still had in the descent—average for a drone was half an hour, but she had no idea how long she had been unconscious—and they might suffocate before hitting the ground. Either way, they would be dead, but there might be a chance inside the well-packed confines of the nacelle—

  She heard a high keening sound, at first distant, but growing. Atmos­phere raking the hull.

  She climbed into her own coffin and jerked the lid to. She groped through the ‘packs until her hand brushed the inner surface of the lid and found a molded form. She took hold of it with both hands, held tight, and waited.

  A few minutes later, the first impact yanked the lid from her fingers. Somehow she stayed inside, even while all the bubblepacks spilled through the air above her.

  The lid slammed back down, and the boat began its skipping and plowing crash into the dirt of Nova Levis.

  23

  Derec opened his eyes in the silver-blue darkness of his new apart­ment. His skin felt cool, all his muscles pleasantly stressed. Clin lay beside him, her breath deep. The sheets were tangled around their legs; the room smelled of them, their heat and urgency, a lingering reminder that now stirred Derec’s belly with returning interest.

  He did not move, though, enjoying the reverie.

  What woke me . . . ?

  He heard a dim whisper of air or movement elsewhere in the apart­ment, so low that he was uncertain it was a sound outside his own skull. He could hear, faintly, his pulse, just behind his left ear, so maybe it was just that . . . but he blinked and listened.

  It was like one piece of paper sliding over another.

  He turned his head to look at Clin’s back. Her breath still came heav­ily with sleep, the one arm draped along her right side rising and falling with each breath. Derec swallowed. He had forgotten in the last few years how delightfully erotic he found a woman’s back, especially one that showed the delicate musculature—