* * *
Two days later, Jose Maria stopped by Myessa’s office. “May I speak with you privately, Myessa?”
She looked up. Her hidalgo was as dapper as usual, in a frilled-edge tunic that would have looked effeminate on anyone else, but he seemed troubled. “Of course, Jose Maria. Please, make yourself comfortable. May I offer you wine?”
The older man lowered himself into the seat as if his bones hurt, and stretched out his legs in front of him. “Thank you, no. The grape is an inviting hostess, but I fear that if I accept her hospitality I may overstay my welcome. I have information for you.”
Myessa inclined her head and waited. For some reason, he was finding it hard to speak. “Please.”
“The U.N. is bringing in many more ships, mustering them from Earth and every point they can. They are intending to make a massive strike against the Confederation. And there is something curious about those ships, but my source does not know what it is.”
“But this is good news, Precisely what we need to know,” Myessa assured him. Jose Maria sighed. “So, what troubles you?”
The hidalgo smiled and studied his feet sadly. “There is one who has touched my heart, the little lieutenant, Patty. I have been accepting information from her to give to you. I feel terrible. I am betraying her.”
“It is our survival, Jose Maria. We must. If we do not, many of our countrymen will die unwarned. This way, the U.N. will arrive and there will be no one there to shoot at.”
“Or it will become apparent that someone has given the information to the enemy, us. She could die a traitor’s death, and that I cannot bear.”
Myessa watched him carefully. “She is a good source.” The man nodded, still not looking at her. “But we do not have to use every source.”
For the first time, he smiled. “Thank you, maestra.” He sighed, his chest expanding as if freed from a tight band. “I ought never to have become involved. Perhaps I should retire from the escort business. Maybe marry, or just retire and watch the grass grow at home on Earth. I have money of my own, from my days as an executive, and I have saved much here.”
“You would be wasted on one woman, my friend, but as always, it is your decision. You are not betraying your friend. Information can be used as a preemptive strike, if I read Charles’s instruction book correctly. You may be saving her life.”
“Gracias. You are wiser than I.” Jose Maria bowed over her hand, and left.
Such data could not wait for her weekly letter to Njomo. Even the minutes of delay in transmission seemed too long to her. She began to encode a letter to her “friend” on Ganymede, that would be beamed as soon as she could get to the portmaster’s office. The code for urgency was the invitation to a party—but what a terrifying party, if it was not defused promptly. She was preparing the privacy seal of the message when there was a loud bam! It sounded like the impact of a heavy metal object falling on a metal floor. The lights through her bedroom door went out and there was a wash of terrible cold, followed by a powerful wind, sucking toward the bedchamber. Wafers and disks, and anything light, swept off her desk and flew through the air toward her door. As she got up to see what was wrong, disk recorder still clutched in her hands, the containment door swooshed across, blocking her. It clamped tight in its frame, and seeming to press inward. As soon as the door closed, the wind stopped. Myessa flew for her desk.
“There’s a breach in the walls!” she screamed into her intercom. “In my room! The air is running out!”
“Did the door seal it, Madame?” Columbe demanded. “Are you trapped? Can you breathe?”
“Yes, I am in my office, but my things, my clothes! It’s so cold!”
“Wait there, Madame. Do not attempt to enter. I will summon the repair crew.”
Myessa slumped in her chair, stunned. The wall had broken, and the vacuum of space was invading her personal quarters, her home! She was trapped inside a tiny box in space, surrounded by the cold hostility of the universe. Overwhelmed, she began to cry.
Columbe and one of the new bouncers came in, massive in pressure suits, followed by Sparks, the slight Chinese girl who was her communications technician. Others crowded the doorway, and Myessa looked at them miserably through a haze of smeared mascara. “Go to your rooms, children. It is dangerous here.”
“Tch, tch!” Kytera, a large Kenyan woman, clad only in a short white silk shift, bustled in and sat down on the arm of Myessa’s chair. She took one of the proprietor’s hands and stroked it. “I heard the boom. I feared you were hurt. Was it a bomb?”
“I . . . I don’t think so. If it was, it wasn’t inside the station.” Myessa looked up at her, wide-eyed, like a child. “A bomb, set on the shell by someone to kill us!”
“You shouldn’t be saying things like that,” Kytera chided her. “Things collide with us in space. See the face of Ganymede leading us in our orbit? Full of craters and holes.”
Narntil crept in behind the two of them and undid Myessa’s long fall of hair and began to brush it. Soothed, Myessa was soon in control of herself again.
The bedroom door slid open. Sparks had taken off the wall plate and activated the controls manually. Columbe and his partner slipped inside. Through the doorway Myessa could see the appalling debris left behind the cyclone that the breach in the bulkhead had caused. Her mattress was pinned flat against the wall, and sucked halfway into the hole.
“It saved her life, Madame,” Columbe called. “Phrang, as I move it, throw the patches at the breach. Quickly!” The big man heaved at one end of the mattress, and the cold wind swept them again until the patch was in place. The door slid closed past Sparks, who exclaimed under her breath and went to work again. She never swore. She was the quietest person in Myessa’s entire stable.
Strictly speaking, Sparks wasn’t in the stable. She’d had a try at hooking, didn’t like it, wasn’t very good at it, but she could make a single transformer think it was the whole Very Large Array and perform accordingly. Myessa hired her at a bargain, because she was insufficiently appreciated in the Chinese family-dominated small company from which she’d come in old Hong Kong, and gave her unlimited control and a generous budget sufficient to fund personal experiments.
“Where is the maintenance crew?” Myessa demanded.
Repeated calls to the repair facility confirmed that a crewman had been sent out. Myessa was at first in a state of panic, and at last angry when the man finally appeared. He was youngish, probably on the underside of thirty, and smiled nervously at the mob of frightened people who greeted him at the door of Club Mardi Gras and hauled him and his bag up to the second level.
“Madam Casales? I’m sorry. I was held up waiting for official channels to clear me through to you. I hope no one was injured?” He shook her hand and looked around the room. Columbe, still in his suit, waited by the temporary patch, watching it for new breaks.
“Official channels! Christo mio!” Myessa exclaimed. “I will never love bureaucrats. They told me you were sent out already, half an hour ago. But since we cannot just walk away from them in vacuum, we must deal as best we can. Here,” she slipped the embarrassed handyman a credit voucher. The sum was generous, but she wanted to make a point with him. “Next time, don’t wait for the official word, I beg you.”
The man looked at the bill in his hand and turned red. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I . . . I was ordered to wait to respond. I guess l owe you to know that.”
He tried to return the voucher, but she closed his fingers on it. Myessa thought she could guess the identity of the person behind the repairman’s conflicting orders. “Keep it,” she insisted, “and remember you owe me a favor sometime. Now, fix.”
* * *
All that night, Myessa lay awake in the dark, listening to the air-recirculation unit and worrying about her safety and the safety of those who depended on her. She owed them her protection, for what tiny meas
ure of security that was worth, here in the shadow of mighty Jupiter. It was not possible to run away. There was no place to go or to hide. Outside of this metal box were millions of miles of cold vacuum, and it could gain admittance to the box so easily. It niggled at the back of her mind that she shouldn’t have taken the job for the intelligence colonel. Surely she shouldn’t have involved forty other people, whose lives could so easily be snuffed if someone chose to interfere with the precious station life-support system. Yesterday’s inaction by the maintenance staff had proved that. If she gave in to that U.N. blackmailer, she realized, she would be more vulnerable than ever. But how best to regain the advantage? He wielded fear as his weapon. In its face, mere bravery wouldn’t serve. She still could die horribly, and all her employees with her, swept away by another such accident. But what about bravado, concealing wit? Certainly that was one of the things for which the colonel had employed her.
She sat over her desk the next morning reading but not comprehending the financial report that her computer had spat out. Her aching head felt like a nova about to go super. There was a clatter from the intercom, and Arsine’s voice announced van Owen was here to see her.
“Admit him, but stand by.”
“Oui, Madame.”
Myessa pulled herself upright and hoped she didn’t look as wretched as she felt. The door slid into the wall and van Owen strode in, looking fresh and arrogant. Myessa longed to slap his face.
“I hope you are well today, Madame.”
“You find me in health, thank you.”
“I wonder if I find you any more cooperative than I did three days ago?” Van Owen raised an eyebrow expectantly. “They say that adversity brings out the best in people.”
She knew what he meant, and scowled at him. The lives of her people were at stake. “I don’t do anything for free. I’m here to make a living. I’m not greedy, but I’m not a fool, either.”
“Madame, you are in a precarious position.”
“I am in a just barely legal profession. I’m used to being in precarious positions. Nino, you can go ahead and ruin me. I never gamble the rent. My bank balance is fat enough to fly out of here first-class. I’ll go home to Earth. Health tests are a matter of public record there. I’ll just go back into business. Or maybe I’ll retire and raise chickens.” With an effort, she wiped all expression from her face and waited.
Van Owen broke first. He must really have felt that he needed her as a conduit. He was dangerous, but he was vulnerable, too. “Very well, how much?”
“I can be reasonable.” They dickered. Myessa watched him out of narrowed eyes as she rejected one offer after another, and made her counter-offer. This man was failing to respond to all the sensual signals she was firing at him. Either he took it as his due as a hotshot, or she wasn’t what he liked. It might help her to understand him more if she could find out what he did like. She’d parade her group through next time he came and spot the best choice for later analysis.
A price was agreed upon. “Now,” the U.N. man went on, rising to his feet, “I’ll be back on a regular basis for your reports. I wish you a good day. Oh,” he stopped at the door, “sorry about your girl, Yao Pei. She was just fine.”
Myessa had already heard Yao Pei’s side of the story. “I know. Don’t expect free love next time you come. You’ll pay, just like everyone else.” More if I can help it, chico, she thought, as the captain left.
Naturally, the report of his whole visit went in the next message to Colonel Njomo. Her people received their new instructions with disbelief. Two of them asked to be excused from the duty even if they heard something, and she gave them her permission.
“He won’t know what we don’t tell him, right?” Myessa said at a meeting, after Sparks had swept the room for stray listening devices. “I can’t force you to betray your countrymen, and it would be unwise to make up data. I’m waiting to hear instructions from Earth.”
It was a terrifying three weeks until she received word that Njomo had her message. During that time, Myessa closed down several of the rooms, complaining that there was structural damage caused by the breach, and gave some of her people a paid furlough, so there wasn’t much going on to report either way. Captain van Owen came back in the second week for his report, and threatened her because she didn’t have so much as the location of a remote mining stake to give him. In a dudgeon, she took him to the blocked-off rooms and showed him the damage caused by the break in the wall, some of which had been artificially made worse by Sparks and the two decorators.
“The Space Station Authority thinks it may have been a meteor, but I suspect a stray shell from the battles, or deliberate sabotage,” Myessa said pointedly. “I am losing money every day until this is repaired. I will give you data when I have it. I have agreed. Come back later. The Executive Officer of the Simon Bolivar has an appointment with two of my people at the beginning of second shift.”
When van Owen had gone she sorted out declassified information from a training handbook Colonel Njomo had given her, and gave that to van Owen. It gave him the official strength of the Bolivar, months outdated, but she guessed he wouldn’t know that.
When he returned, she gave him the disk. The U.N. man put it into Myessa’s desk reader and turned the hooded screen toward him as she stood watching. His eyes flickered as they scanned the text. “Very nice,” he murmured, scrolling down the short page. “Yes, not bad. Not a lot of information, but we will save this, awaiting further confirmation. Your payment, Madame.”
He put a credit voucher down on the desk. From where she stood Myessa could read the denomination, and picked it up disdainfully with finger and thumb-tip. “What’s this, a tip?” she demanded.
“Your remuneration. I think it’s adequate. You can’t expect full payment for such a morsel of information.”
Myessa dropped it as his feet. “I certainly do. If I perform, no matter how the customer responds, I get paid, hijo. Go ahead. Call in your ID. Call in your brawlers. I guarantee I won’t be on Earth two weeks before I’ve got a new shop. I’ll send you my change of address letter.”
Angrily, he retrieved the voucher, keeping his eyes locked with hers as he knelt and handed her another voucher, this time for the full amount. “If I don’t get more satisfaction for my money the next time, there will be trouble.”
Myessa tucked the voucher into her cleavage. “I can’t give you what I haven’t got, Señor. You’ll just have to wait, as we do.” She smirked as he left the room, though she was quaking inside. He might cause her more trouble, as a warning, if she didn’t come through soon with real data. But where was her backup? Njomo had assured her that she would have the support of the Inteligencia Militaridad. Where was it? She issued a quiet order to the others never to go walking alone, and to stay away from her visitor if they saw him in the corridors.
The mail packet arrived from Earth on a scientific shuttle that called at Jupiter Station before proceeding to Tito Two, a U.N. research vessel. There was a box for Myessa, four inches square by a foot long. Inside were two dozen new sixteen-track CD’s, with a note. “Apologize for the delay. More complex and wonderful music than any ever written is what sings in my mind when I think of you. Can’t wait to hear from you again. Your adoring Charles.” There was nothing further in the box, but Myessa suddenly felt safer. He had read her messages and understood the danger. She kissed the note. “I adore you, too, Charles. Thank you.”
Within a week there was word from the portmaster, notifying her that there were three Confederation ships bound for Jupiter Station.
“One of them is all the way from Earth,” the portmaster informed her. “Carrying a consortium of executives from the ice-mining companies, the passenger list said. Be nice to ’em. That’s where the money is. “
Club Mardi Gras’s fame had obviously spread to the crews of the Cristobal Colon and the Emperor Akihito.
As soon a
s shore leave was permitted, the common room of the Club was filled with Confederation sailors and marines. The ladies and gentlemen of Club Mardi Gras were overjoyed to see so many of their old countrymen and improvised a party of welcome, complete with dancing and music. The cook and baker outdid themselves for a buffet spread.
“I was beginning to get a Northern accent,” complained Feliciana, opening a bottle of the best rum in the liquor stores for a Peruvian geologist from Nippon Enterprises. “All these Canadians and Germans. I love to hear a good South American voice again.”
Some of the visitors stayed in the common room to sing and drink, but most of them were eager for friendly company after the long journey from Earth.
Myessa herself entertained a high-level Egyptian executive from Confederation Pure Water, Incorporated. Fouad Fatah was a small, square-shouldered man with glasses, who bowed deeply and gratefully when she led him to her private shower room and threw the taps on full. He disappeared into the spray while Myessa prepared herself.
When he emerged from the shower room, wrapped in a robe made of toweling, hair damped down to his skull, Myessa was waiting for him, in a flame-colored silk shift and peignoir of nearly invisible gold chiffon. She settled him on the bed and gave him the “big strip tease.” It was a cross between a dance and a disrobing, which ended with her loosing the shoulder straps of the shift so that it slid down her hips to the floor, leaving her naked, with skin aglow in the silken light of the silver room. Fouad never moved throughout her dance. The man must have had iron control. Normally, the client was across the room with his head buried between her breasts by the time her shift hit the floor. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested. Myessa could see his flesh straining against the fabric of his robe. He must like to have the lady do more of the work. Very well; she always did what would please the client best. She glided across the room to him, and knelt at his feet.
The Jupiter War Page 22