Voyagers III - Star Brothers

by Ben Bova

  “Africa too?”

  The black man nodded and folded his hands prayerfully on the table top. He was of powerful build, and in his white tribal robe the darkness of his skin radiated strength and endurance.

  “Within the past few days the plague had leaped across the Sahara and is spreading through Chad, Zaire, Uganda, and even as far as Namibia.”

  “Good lord!”

  “It hasn’t hit Latin America?”

  “Not yet,” said the Argentinean physician who represented that continent’s environmental movement.

  “They call it the Horror,” the slim, delicately beautiful woman from Hanoi said. She reminded Baker of An Linh Laguerre, the woman he had lost because of Stoner and his bitch of a wife.

  “It is a horror,” the Argentinean agreed. “I have seen the clinical reports. It must be like the tortures of hell.”

  What do you know about the pains of hell? Baker snarled inwardly. What do any of you know about pain? Maybe when this bug hits you, then you’ll know what I had to go through. Maybe then—but then it’ll be too late for you, won’t it?

  “The question is,” he said aloud, “what can be done to stop it? And what should we be doing to help?”

  The Filipino representative, also a physician, said, “Every medical service in every affected nation urgently requires our help. They need more hospital beds, more clinical facilities, supplies, personnel…everything.”

  “In other words,” said the hologrammic image of Li-Po Hsen, “they need more money.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we have already invested billions in medical research and services,” said Wilhelm Kruppmann. The burly Swiss banker was also a hologram image.

  “That was before this plague started,” Baker pointed out.

  “How many times can you draw water from the well before it runs dry?” Kruppmann rumbled.

  “How important is it to stay alive?” Baker shot back, his lips curling slightly in a smile that might have been a sneer.

  Jo Camerata sat in the small office she maintained at her home and watched the byplay on a flat video screen. She had been up most of the night with Rickie, who still screamed with nightmares whenever he tried to sleep. Her attempts to find Keith had so far been fruitless, but it had only been a few days since Hsen had kidnapped him. Only a few days since Cathy had been murdered.

  She pecked at the keyboard on her desk and the screen zoomed in to a closeup of Hsen. A hologram, of course. Jo had half of Vanguard Industries’ electronics experts at work tracking the signals that produced Hsen’s three-dimensional image for the meeting. She wanted to know where the head of Pacific Commerce actually was.

  Wherever you are, she said silently to Hsen’s image, I’ll find you. There’s no place on Earth you can hide from me.

  After three days of being a virtual prisoner, Paulino had learned only two things about the people who had rescued him from his errant tractor: they were employees of Vanguard Industries, and this place where they were holding him was some sort of secret base called Delphi.

  It was almost entirely underground, of course. A satellite scanning the Mare Imbrium’s surface would see only a pair of well-disguised entry ports, domes no larger than telephone booths and covered with rubble from the lunar soil. Even a man on foot could pass within a few dozen meters of the entrances and not realize that they were anything more than medium-sized hillocks.

  “You’ve posed us quite a problem, son,” said the grizzled, square-jawed older man who seemed to head the facility. Like everyone else in the base, he wore coveralls of faded blue with a stylized V emblazoned on the chest above his name tag, which read MATTHEWS.

  “We’ve sent your tractor out on a course that will take it into a main traffic region. Somebody’ll pick it up. They’ll probably think you’re dead, although they might send a ballistic rocket this way to survey the area and try to find your body.”

  “Why cannot you return me back to Archimedes?” Paulino asked in his hesitant English.

  Matthews made a sour face. “Goddam’ security regulations. Nobody’s supposed to know we’re here. If it’d been up to me we would of just let you trundle on by; you’d never have known we’re here.” He shook his head. “But I’ve got a gungho smartass of a security chief here who believes everything they wrote down in the regs. So you were stopped and detained, as per regulation XYZ or whatever.”

  Bewildered, barely comprehending what the man was telling him, Paulino asked, “What do you plan to…to do with me?”

  “Damned if I know,” Matthews replied. “Just your bad luck, kid. You stumbled into our area while we were testing an electromagnetic system that must’ve screwed up your navigational beam. Now I’m stuck with you until some genius further up the chain of command figures out what to do.”

  So for several days Paulino was free to wander around the underground base. It was small; there were no more than fifty men and women at work in it. Most of them were older than Paulino, in their thirties and forties. They all wore blue coveralls; Paulino’s pumpkin orange seemed glaringly out of place. They seemed to be scientists of one sort or another, and almost all of them were from North America or Western Europe. Not an oriental or Latin American in the place, nor any Africans—although several of the Yankees were black.

  He thought about offering some of his Moondust for sale, but hesitated. His supply of pills was dwindling, and these people looked like the type who would flush them down a toilet and turn him into the police. So he kept the pills to himself and tried to ration himself to one per day. Unsuccessfully.

  They let him wander freely through the narrow tunnels and windowless chambers of the base, knowing that even with a pressure suit he was not going to walk hundreds of kilometers back to Archimedes. And there seemed to be no ground vehicles in Delphi. If there were any, they were locked away where Paulino could not find them.

  The people were friendly, but guarded. They gave him a room to himself, a narrow little cell that held a comfortable bed, a TV, and little else. They provided him with coveralls and toiletries. He ate with the others in the base’s only galley. Men and women talked with him freely enough, although they never discussed their work. The TV picked up programs from all over Earth; Paulino did not lack for entertainment.

  He began to think that being officially dead was perhaps not so bad a thing. If these Vanguard people could provide him with a new identity and a solid job, perhaps he could truly begin life anew. Perhaps even get away from the Moondust. He sought out Matthews and broached the idea to him—without mentioning his addiction.

  The older man grinned through his two-day stubble. “Like the old videos where the FBI protects a witness against the Mafia, huh?”

  Paulino did not understand.

  “Might be a good idea,” Matthews said. “I’ll buck it upstairs and see what they think about it.”

  That confused Paulino even further. Upstairs was nothing but the barren surface of Mare Imbrium.

  There were parts of the base that were locked, where Paulino was not allowed. He guessed that they might be hiding their tractors in there. As one day slid into another, Paulino began to think that if he could get away and find his way back to Archimedes, the information about this secret base might be worth something to his employers. Not as good as starting a whole new life under a new identity, but it would be a backup in case Matthews decided to make Paulino truly dead and solve his problem that way.

  It was a simple matter to walk past the locked doors often enough to watch people tap out the security code on the electronic lock. They were careless, not suspicious. Paulino memorized the combination soon enough. The base worked on Greenwich time, with only one shift. Everyone slept during the “night” hours. Paulino never saw any guards; who needed them, this far out in the lunar wilderness?

  So one night when everyone was asleep he slipped out of his room and walked softly to the nearest of the locked doors. Pecking out the memorized combination he held his breath for
an instant.

  The door slid open. The lights inside turned on as Paulino stepped through. And lurched against the wall in sudden terror.

  He found himself high on the open grillwork of a catwalk that circled an immense circular chamber. The floor was fifty meters below and for an instant Paulino felt so giddy he had to grasp the steel handrail with both hands.

  The huge chamber contained a giant circular vat filled with a bubbling, frothing liquid. It gurgled and simmered like a titanic brew being slowly boiled. It must have been as high as the spires of a cathedral, at least. Waves of sultry heat flowed from it. A plume of steam rose from its top and was sucked away by vents set into the ceiling high above. Paulino did not know if the sweat that poured from him was from sudden fear or the heat that made this vast chamber feel like the inside of an oven.

  The vat was transparent, or almost so. Squinting against the mist that shrouded its curving flank, Paulino tried to make out what was inside the seething circular tank. There were vague shapes in there, a glint of something, a graceful curve perhaps. But it was obscured by the steam and the bubbling ferment within the tank itself.

  Paulino unconsciously leaned forward against the rail, peering intently into the giant vat. It was like trying to see a glass sculpture inside a fish tank, only worse, more difficult.

  A hand grabbed his shoulder. Paulino felt his bladder give way.

  Burning with fear and shame he turned to see Matthews appraising him grimly.

  “You could’ve fallen over the damned railing, you were leaning over so hard. Don’t you know curiosity killed the cat?”

  “I…I…”

  Matthews seemed more disappointed than angry. “Just because we don’t have armed guards patrolling the tunnels doesn’t mean there aren’t electronic alarm systems in place. You woke me out of a sound sleep, son!”

  Still Paulino could find no words.

  “You’ve just made everything a helluva lot more difficult,” Matthews said, leading him back into the tunnel. As he carefully shut the steel door and re-set the electronic lock, he muttered, “We sure as hell can’t let you loose now.”

  “Wh…what is that…thing in there?”

  With a shrug of his square shoulders Matthews answered, “Beats the hell out of me, kid. Nobody here knows what it’s supposed to be.”

  For a week Stoner let them test him.

  The trimaran made rendezvous slightly before dawn with a jet seaplane. His captors bundled Stoner into a windowless cabin and the plane flew for many hours. Stoner had the feeling they were flying roughly southwest, but other than that he had no idea of where they were going. There were fresh jeans in the cabin, socks, shorts, a pullover shirt, and a pair of deck shoes. All in the right sizes.

  They’ve planned everything down to the last detail, he thought grimly. The image of Cathy’s bloody body floating in the swimming pool flashed into his mind again, and again his star brother instantly clamped down on the visceral emotions that would have made Stoner scream with rage and guilt.

  They came for me, he said to himself. Cathy’s dead because they wanted me.

  It is not your fault, his star brother soothed. There was nothing you could do.

  I could tear this plane apart. I could kill everyone aboard.

  To what purpose? What good is an animal’s vengeance, especially when it’s directed at hirelings rather than those responsible for the crime?

  Stoner knew his star brother was right. But that did not erase the cold fury that even his alien symbiotes could not reach.

  When the plane touched down in the water once more a new group of men and women entered his cabin, fitted a heavy black hood over his head, and guided him from the bobbing plane to a creaking pier and then onto solid ground. They bundled him into a van of some kind and then drove for hours. The brief moment he had in the sun felt hot and humid; the inside of the van was air-conditioned heavily enough to chill him.

  When they took the hood off he was in a small windowless room that contained a narrow bunk, a wall covered with electronic monitoring equipment, and the tables, counters, glassware, and shining bright metalwork of a small but complete medical laboratory.

  He almost laughed. It was nearly the same as the room he had awakened in fifteen years earlier. I’m a guinea pig again, he thought. And a prisoner.

  There were four men and two women, Stoner saw, all wearing starched white uniforms. Physicians, nurses, orderlies. They avoided looking directly at him. They did not speak a word to him. Stoner thought about talking to them, influencing them to let him go or at least tell him where they were. His star brother asked silently why he did not do so. You could walk out of here and get them to fly you back home.

  No, Stoner decided. I want to know who these people work for, and why they want me so badly. You were right: why deal with the hirelings? It’s their masters I want to get my hands on.

  The picture of Cathy came unbidden to his mind once again. Even before his star brother could clamp down on the tidal wave of grief and guilt that gushed from his glands, Stoner saw his daughter ripped apart by their bullets, flung into the pool, her young life torn from her by the intruding murderers.

  The lava-hot surge dwindled, ebbed, nearly disappeared altogether. Stoner still saw Cathy die, still felt hatred for the men who had done it and the person who had sent them. But the emotion was gone. The alien presence within him damped down the inner fires almost completely. Left in its place was a cold implacable determination to find who was responsible for Cathy’s murder.

  The white-uniformed silent men and women left him alone in the room. There was only the one door, a conventional wooden door with an electronic lock. Not a star-given energy portal that could be solid wall one instant and an open doorway the next. I could pick the electronic lock in a couple of seconds, Stoner knew. Maybe that’s what they want to see me do. It looks like they want to test me.

  Instead, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the cot, hands behind his head, and pretended to sleep. The light panels in the ceiling dimmed. Yes indeed, I’m being watched and tested. Angrily he asked himself, So what else is new?

  He thought about Jo. She had seen her daughter, her firstborn, slaughtered. And she had to bear that grief without him. Jo was tough, he knew, but could she stand up to this? He wished he could reach her, communicate with her, at least tell her that he was alive and unharmed and trying to track down the people who had killed Cathy. She’s strong, Stoner kept repeating to himself. Jo is the strongest woman I’ve ever met. The strongest person, man or woman. She’ll handle it all right. She’ll come through it.

  He told himself that her Italian thirst for vengeance would help to sustain her. The blood is strong. The age-old instincts boil to the surface and wash away all the veneer of polite civilized behavior. Jo doesn’t have an alien brother inside her to clamp down on the emotions and control the heat that burns through the blood. She won’t leave it to law and order. Her daughter’s been killed; she’s going to move heaven and earth to find the killers. God help them when she does.

  Rickie. He’s the one who needs help. It’s a shattering blow to a ten-year-old. Strangers breaking into his home. His sister killed before his eyes, his father abducted. The poor kid’s had almost every emotional prop knocked out from under him. All he’s got left is his mother. Will Jo pay enough attention to him, or will she be too busy seeking out her revenge?

  When I get back home, Stoner promised himself, I’ll keep him close to me. I’ve got to rebuild his feelings of security and trust. All the psychologists and neural programming in the world can’t do that for him. It’s up to me, I’ve got to make him feel safe and certain of himself again. That’s more important than anything else.

  When I get back home.

  CHAPTER 24

  CLIFF Baker walked along the magnificent beach and watched the surf pounding up onto the sand. Hundreds of bathers were in the sparkling blue water, diving into the waves. Half a kilometer up the beach the surfers were
riding their boards on the big breakers. Further out windsurfers leaned out from their sails and cut along the swells like oversized waterbugs.

  Once these beaches had been preyed upon by “the men in the gray suits,” vicious, swift, voracious sharks that could take a man’s leg with a single snap of their powerful jaws. Now a flimsy net of electrical wires protected the beaches and kept the sharks away. Hasn’t been a shark attack at a protected beach since I was a teenager, Baker thought idly.

  The sun was high and Baker’s ragged cut-off shorts and flapping unbuttoned shirt were wet with perspiration. Soak some of the booze out of me, he thought. On the other hand, a cold Foster’s would feel very good right about now.

  He turned around and headed back toward the beach house. One of the advantages of being chairman of the International Investment Agency: a marvelous twelve-room house on the most expensive beach in the Sydney area. Rank hath its privileges.

  Sunday’s meeting had gone exactly the way he had thought it would. The regions hardest hit by the plague needed money immediately for medical services. The ecologists and the representatives of areas not so badly threatened by the Horror wanted to spend more money on research. The bastards from the corporations, who had the goddamned money, didn’t want to spend their precious loot at all.

  They hadn’t accomplished a bloody thing. They had argued and called each other names and agreed to nothing more than appointing a bloody committee to study the problem. Study it! While thousands were dying in agony every day and the plague spread across Africa and into Europe and North America.

  Baker grinned, a lopsided smirk that was far from pleasant on his bloated reddened face. Let them argue, he told himself. Let them delay. Soon enough the Horror will start to pick them off, one by one. The women first, and then the men. They all deserve it.

  As he trudged barefoot through the sand he wondered about Jo Camerata. She had been strangely silent at the meeting. Usually she took charge and made things come out the way she wanted them. But she had barely said two words. It was hard to tell when you were looking at holograms instead of live people, but it seemed to Baker as if Jo spent the whole damned meeting staring at Hsen instead of paying attention to the business at hand.