Zero-G

by William Shatner

  Dr. Saranya May was a strikingly handsome Indian-Malaysian woman with silky, raven-black hair pulled into two tight braids that were clipped to a necklace designed to hold them in zero gravity. Her rose lips curved upward and her nose was long and straight. But her most striking feature were her eyes. They didn’t glitter like Lord’s gray ones. They glowed, like onyx.

  Standing five foot four—physical stature mattered on the lunar base, where resources were highly prized and the average height was five foot eight—she wore a simple Armstrong Lunar Base Lab overall that covered everything from her chin down, though Lord picked out her pleasing contours with an experienced eye. She carried only a small waistpac with saddlebag-like extensions designed to carry personal essentials.

  Lord’s SimAI recognized her and offered a drop-down of Dr. May’s official biography. He waved it away. He wanted to hear it from her. You could learn a lot about a person by what they chose to tell—or withhold.

  “Director Lord,” she said, offering her hand as she reached his side. Her voice was warm, low, and lightly accented.

  “Sam,” he suggested, smiling as he took her hand.

  “Saranya,” she replied. The way she pronounced her name was like swallowing smooth chocolate. He could not help but think, If all work were like this, we’d have a world of laborers.

  “Were you expecting a private escort?” he asked, indicating Ziv’s shuttle.

  “Yes,” she answered thickly.

  “I assume they—”

  “Asked questions and were disappointed in the answers, yes,” she said.

  Lord smiled appreciatively. He gestured toward the exit and they moved forward, she in front, using the pylons, he behind, using the rails. Though it was quiet in here, save for the almost imperceptible buzz of the IC’s electric field generators, they did not talk—not for security reasons, but because space etiquette had decided that it was bad manners to talk to the back of someone’s head. Lord waited.

  A moment later they were side by side in the wider corridor beyond the PriD area. The woman’s shoulders were set, her back straight, her shoulders locked. This was not a woman who seemed willing to back down from a scrap.

  “You spent time in Malaysia,” he said.

  She looked at him with surprise. “Is that in my biography?”

  “Haven’t read it,” he admitted. “You drew out your tones and there was just a hint of a mah at the end of your sentences. I spent time in Hong Kong. That’s a classic discourse particle in Chinese, Malaysian, and other Eastern dialects.”

  She gave him a respectful look and then her onyx eyes narrowed. “I wonder,” she said thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “If you’re naturally curious or naturally an investigator,” she said.

  Lord was caught off-guard. He was so used to being himself that he didn’t think of himself as FBI.

  “You can decide that for yourself,” Lord answered as they approached the first of the elevators. “But I promise you that where we are going will certainly make others curious.”

  “Where is that?” she asked.

  He replied, “My quarters.”

  Tucked in a deeply cushioned seat of Ziv Levy’s private shuttle, Colonel Jack Franco stared out the window at the reflected stars on the Mylar sail of the Empyrean. He was still belted in with a shoulder harness, his arms floating idly over the open straps of the armrest.

  Ziv sipped a vegetable drink from a squeeze bottle. “I’m the CHAI, but your eyes are the ones that look like little machines,” he said.

  “She was lying,” Franco groused.

  “And after all you did to get out there and meet her,” the cybernetic human responded with his customary diffidence.

  Franco peered directly into the Israeli’s face. He didn’t like the tea bag. He wanted to accuse him of using the media to play on the rest of the world’s “new progressivism” toward SimAI and androids, but there wasn’t time.

  “Don’t act like you wouldn’t have benefited,” Franco said.

  “If your intel was correct,” Ziv pointed out.

  “It fits,” he said angrily. “It all goddamn fits.”

  Franco looked back out the small window, continued to stare at the heavens without seeing them. He was picturing the woman’s soft features, remembering her hard parting words.

  “Thank you for the ride,” she had said. “I wish I could have been more helpful to you.”

  “Maybe she’ll soften a little while she’s here,” Ziv remarked. “Or maybe she’ll respond better to a less heavy hand.”

  “Sam huking Lord?”

  “Sam Lord, yes,” Ziv replied with more respect than Franco was inclined to show him.

  The CHAI flexed his fingers, which weighed more than twice that of the colonel’s hands combined.

  Franco wasn’t listening. He was picturing the images he had seen from Japan—destruction so thick that it had created an offshore reef that had impacted the entire flow of the Kuroshio Current—appropriately, the Black Current—so that it diverted the southern-flowing Kamchatka Current toward the east. The models were already predicting gross upticks in the ferocious Santa Ana winds along the coast of California.

  That pompous flyboy Lord doesn’t have to worry about any of those bigger problems, Franco thought. Zero-G only has to put out little fires. They deal with crimes not disasters.

  “Where are you, Colonel?” Ziv asked.

  “Why did she want to talk to him?” Franco wondered aloud.

  “Ah, obsessing.”

  “There has to be something I’m missing.”

  “Charm?” Ziv suggested. “I mean, she talked to him because Lord has bagfuls of that? Because he doesn’t buy his dates from a holopop?”

  “Some of us are busy working for a living,” Franco replied. “Not posturing like our own self-made constellation the way Lord does.”

  “Some of you are impatient and chauvinistic,” Ziv replied.

  Franco didn’t even hear the man. His mind was torn between the smug, interference-running Lord and the hated Jade Star and Red Giant. Under the best of circumstances, those shadowy enemy outposts loomed like intelligence black holes, information going in, nothing coming out. He had been working on Earth to change that. Up here, the threat from enemies that had more or less equal tactical footing seemed even more acute—and more frustrating. The Chinese station was big and serpentine and visible from the Empyrean. Franco wanted it.

  “Still, it was worth a shot, talking to her,” Ziv admitted, quietly sucking the last of his beverage.

  This time Franco heard the man and nodded. It had been a calculated risk; asking the Israeli for a ride meant taking him along. But the DIA had been tracking Armstrong Base since it was constructed, and this unplanned trip by Dr. May, its timing, was extraordinary. Ziv knew that too and Franco was sure the tea bag was already formulating his next step—a step that would not involve Colonel Jack Franco.

  I can live with that, Franco thought. If the Mossad gets answers, we can do business.

  “Mr. Levy?”

  It was the voice of the pilot. Amit Stein, “Frankenstein,” was a fighter pilot with the Israeli Zroa HaAvir VeHahalal, the Air and Space Arm. He went down in a memorable test of the space plane Kokhav yam—­Starfish—and rather than accept CHAI implants he wore his scars proudly.

  “Yes, Amit,” Ziv replied. “Tell the Drum that we are ready to depart the station. After Colonel Franco disembarks, which he is about to.”

  Franco wasn’t insulted by the dismissal. It was Ziv’s way. The man wanted to be in a relatively secure environment to contact Jerusalem, and a shuttle in Earth orbit was about as private as anyone could ask for these days.

  Franco threw off his shoulder harness, pushed gently off the armrest, and floated up to the hatch.

  “Thank you for this little ad
venture,” Ziv said. “If nothing else, Dr. May is the loveliest scientist I’ve seen since Dr. Aharonovich replaced my eyes.”

  Once again, Franco did not reply. If the intelligence from the moon was correct, Dr. Saranya May represented just one thing: the key to the most powerful science ever devised.

  Science that the Department of Defense should be running, not NASA.

  EIGHT

  DR. MAY SEEMED uncomfortable as they entered the elevator.

  It was a tight fit, as ever, and not unpleasant to Lord. Dr. May was too seasoned a spacefarer, too accustomed to small places to be bothered by that. It was something else.

  “Why your quarters?” she asked.

  “They’re relatively secure,” Lord replied.

  “Define ‘relatively,’ ” the woman said.

  “Easier if I show you,” Lord replied.

  “Let me ask that another way,” Saranya said. “Why not the FBI command center? I assume official business is conducted there?”

  “There, or in one of the station bars,” Lord said. “I wasn’t authorized to share your debriefing with the staff.”

  “Don’t you trust your own people?”

  “Completely,” Lord replied. “Why would you ask that?”

  Saranya realized, too late, her error. This man was an investigator. His little half-smile told her she’d just let slip the fact that she had reason not to trust her own staff. Saranya closed her lips and said nothing more.

  During the twenty-six-second ride, Adsila informed Lord that in order to get access to Dr. May, Ziv’s private craft had identified itself to her shuttle using an Empyrean ID. That made it imperative for the shuttle to meet Ziv’s ship, which also happened to be before it met the solar kite. That would have sliced twenty-nine minutes from Dr. May’s travel time, in addition to the sixteen-minutes-faster flight time of Ziv’s ship versus the solar kite.

  Lord thanked Adsila with a text.

  There were rules about impersonating an official vessel, and Israel was a signatory to the American Space Station Regulations—the unfortunately acronymed ASS-Regs, which invited derision and noncompliance. Lord’s group was supposed to enforce them with heavy fines and possible imprisonment, but Adsila also found out that Ziv’s privately built shuttle was registered in Switzerland, which did not have a space program and had not signed the document.

  With the few seconds that remained in the ride, Lord took an opportunity to study his companion. Being up here, with him, had obviously not made her feel noticeably more secure. The lines of her lovely face were tense, her fingers were restless, and her breathing was rapid . . . though the latter could be the result of having to adjust to yet another variation in atmospheric pressure—Earth to hyperplane, hyperplane to Ziv’s shuttle, Ziv’s shuttle to the Empyrean—and her third form of gravity—Earth-normal, zero, now increasing centripetal—in under an hour. Biologists said it would take generations to find a balance and possible remedy for those changes, and even then they didn’t know if it would come from Earth-born or space-born children. So far, the nineteen children born in American space—including two at Armstrong Base—had adjusted worse to gravity than Earth children to low and zero-gravity. After brief visits to Earth, none of them had gone back—except, reportedly, three Russian children who had suffered muscular degeneration after prolonged visits to Earth. Lord was awed and a little frightened to see the birth of the newest human species since the Cro-Magnon, what scientists were already referring to as Homo galaxicus.

  Lord and Saranya changed elevators, moving horizontally along Radial Arm Six. This was one of two wings for permanent residents. The FBI had their quarters near a one-g microgravity center; scientists and engineers occupied similar quarters in Radial Arm Five along with Stanton’s team from the commander to maintenance—including the Gardener. Guests occupied Radial Arm Four along with the laundry, recycling, and recreational areas. A robot cart came by to collect clothes and trash each morning and returned the former at night.

  Emerging, Saranya appreciated the ease of their strides here and she enjoyed the abundant installations of real flowers, as well as the haptic-­voxel gardens and parklands spread across the floor and walls. Mt. Fuji was depicted in one of them, another tribute to the stricken nation. Lord watched as her eyes turned down. This was becoming more intriguing by the minute.

  Her avoidance of the image was not the only sign that Dr. Saranya May had a dark, probably dangerous secret. The flowers had more vibrant energy than she did. Something was haunting her, something fresh that she had not yet been able to process. Being here, maybe feeling safe, she was beginning to lower her guard—the fear of being watched, overheard, followed—but also her façade as well. The woman walking beside Lord suddenly, unexpectedly seemed to have more life in her, from her eyes to her light step.

  The unique IC/encephalogram link popped the door to Lord’s quarters. The light came on automatically and he gestured for Dr. May to enter first. Although the studio unit was small, only 290 square feet—which was fifty more than most cabins—it seemed almost luxurious to her. He had decorated it like a handmade log cabin, and even though the wall was comprised of haptic-display surfaces it was quite convincing . . . even the view of the patio and changing sunlight on the far wall.

  Beside it, on a real saddle rack, was a volumetric-display saddle.

  “That’s . . . interesting,” she remarked.

  “It’s the saddle my pioneer ancestor Isaiah owned,” he said. “It would have eaten up my entire clothing and toiletry allotment to bring up the real one, so”—he shrugged—“it’s that, for now. The original is at my cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.”

  She seemed intrigued. “Was it difficult to leave that for this?”

  “Well, I do a lot less shooting up here,” he admitted. “I hope that doesn’t offend you—”

  “Not a bit,” she replied. “Whenever I’m on Earth, I get in some bowhunting in the Garo Hills, along the Simsang River.”

  He smiled. “Artemis.”

  She smiled too—for the first time. He didn’t have to explain. The Greek goddess of hunting was also the goddess of the moon.

  “Something to drink?” Lord asked. “And by that I mean water or fruit juice made right here in our Agro.”

  “No,” she said quickly. It sounded abrupt even to her. “Thank you,” she added. “Sorry, Mr. Levy and Colonel Franco were overly insistent that I try some fruit drink on the shuttle.”

  “You refused, obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “Because those Haifa Cocktails are enhanced for CHAIs,” he said. “Or, put another way, they’re spiked. They pack more energy in there for their mechanisms in an arrangement that looks a lot like ethanol—about a hundred proof. But, clearly, you are not wasted.”

  “Wasted?”

  “Drunk,” Lord said. “An old term. That stuff’s like kerosene rocket fuel.”

  “Ah.”

  Lord offered her the one spartan chair with its padded cushion. She accepted it with a gracious nod and sat with an elegance that he had not seen enough of up here. Still achy from his adventure in the elevator shaft, he gratefully if not gracefully flopped on a corner of the small bed. Before Dr. May could say anything, Lord held up a finger. She hesitated and shot him a quizzical look.

  He pointed to a wind chime that hung in the center of the room. He touched a button in his IC drop-down and a vent in the ceiling started to whisper. The chime began to sing.

  “That does not look like it’s from your mountain cabin,” she said, admiring the design.

  “It was made for me in Hong Kong,” he told her. “Hand-carved wood top with chimes made from ancient Chinese coins and little bronze bells, hand-selected for the most pleasing tones. Chimes are actually big among my team.”

  “Earth-feel?” she asked, using a term common to spacers. It meant that something u
p here reminded them fondly of something down there.

  “That’s what outsiders think,” Lord said. “The truth is, if anyone tries to listen in, to electronically enhance our conversation, they’ll get 1812 Overture–level cannons ringing in their ears, drowning us out.”

  Saranya seemed almost wistful now. Her expression seemed to say, If only all solutions were so simple.

  Lord settled back against the wall and waited.

  “I want to trust you,” she said at last. “I very much do.”

  “Thank you,” Lord said. “I prefer that to ‘I trust you because I have no choice, I’m stuck.’ ”

  “I am that too,” she said.

  “Say what you want, if you want, when you want,” Lord told her.

  Saranya smiled again, relaxed a little more. She was silent after that, as though uncertain where to begin.

  “Can I take your waistpac?” Lord offered, extending a hand.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

  The woman wasn’t going to hand anything to anyone, not an accessory or information. Despite his calming words, Lord decided to give her a gentle push—for her own sake as much as his.

  “So,” he said invitingly, his hands open wide, “what can I do to help you? Beyond making sure you are safe?”

  Saranya hesitated. “What have you been told?” she asked.

  He repeated everything Al-Kazaz had said, which was very little. When he was finished, the scientist’s eyes continued to show hesitation. Her lips were still emphatically shut.

  “Dr. May, Saranya, I’ve promised not to probe, to interrogate,” Lord went on. “But you came here for protection—so anything you can share will help me do that.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Why I came here, to Empyrean. It all seems so hopeless now.”

  “What does?”

  She regarded him, her eyes reflecting that hopelessness. “One of the most secure and isolated facilities ever constructed—my laboratory—had apparently been breached. I couldn’t trust anything electronic, not even my IC.”