by Ginger Booth
“I could maybe swing that drink,” Willow allowed. “I’m feeling rather…fond…about now.”
“Yeah? Hold that thought. And keep my contact info, lovely sar. I’ll hope for a call from you tomorrow.”
What a smooth schmooze. Willow enjoyed the smile stuck on her face and the warm blush as he loped away, with a few backward glances. It was only after she was locking up again in the cargo hold that she recalled his suggestion of an industrial espionage income opportunity. Right up her alley. But then he hadn’t brought it up again.
She dismissed the conversational gambit as part of the seduction, rather than the other way around. She headed for the bridge to straighten out her ship. Judge pinged her briefly when his team was ready for her to release the remainder of the berg. He added some more fun innuendo. Once the ship was turned around, she decided she might stop by her cabin for a few minutes of privacy with a fantasy.
59
Ben was wrong about serving as guide on this expedition. Copeland overruled him on a couple turns even on the old pizza box levels of the station. Once they entered the rock, Ben trailed him through stone corridors he’d never seen before. No one walked these halls during the station-wide holiday spirit of sunset. Doors and cross-corridors bore arcane labels detailing facilities and industrial plant.
At one point Cope stopped and cut his personal grav. The rock itself supplied no grav plating, unlike the old orbital section. They stood beside a horizontal chimney with chrome banisters on either side. Cope flipped himself to take it head first, and started accelerating himself hand-over-hand. After a few moments of that, he changed his mind and backed out, opting instead to go feet first with low grav accelerating him thataway.
“Cope, there’s got to be another way,” Ben complained.
But his ex was already falling around a curve 40 meters to his left. Teke clambered in to follow him, opting to orient himself first, then switch gravity vector.
Hunter hazarded, “Is this where I experience zero-g and lose my lunch?”
“You vomited on EVA?” Zan asked in alarm.
“Well, no,” Hunter allowed. “Feet first, huh?”
“I’m not that trusting,” Zan declared. He set his grav so down was through the chimney, but hands-first, and dove in.
“After you,” Ben invited Hunter. “I’ll go head first so I don’t kick you.”
“Feet first for me,” Hunter allowed with a sigh. “I’m too old for this crap.”
The chimney curved and twisted, as had the corridors before, and the stairs and ramps. Estimating by elapsed time, Ben figured they’d come a couple kilometers, though he had no idea which direction. He would have sworn the excavated portion of the asteroid wasn’t this big. He was comforted by the frequent pressure doors, each equipped with emergency air kits.
Reunited with Cope in a new corridor, even more roughly hewn, they proceeded to a door with a rough-looking guard, armed, the first person they’d seen in a while. He nodded to them, reached over, and pounded the door, in the rhythm shave and a hair cut, two – leaving off the last thump for bits.
Cope and Ben grimaced at the hanging sequence.
In a moment, the door opened from within. Yet another apparent 25 year old in perfect health emerged. Ben found the guy oddly familiar, but couldn’t place him.
“Pollan,” Cope acknowledged with a nod, and introduced the others, ending with, “You remember Ben Acosta.”
Once-Chief Pollan smirked. “He doesn’t remember me. This way.” He led further down the corridor, his henchman falling into line behind Ben and Zan.
“Pollan?” Ben asked Cope urgently, soft-voiced.
“We flushed the sewers for him,” Cope reminded him. “Our first visit to MO.”
Ben could hardly forget. That memorably disgusting occasion was only a few days after Thrive first reached orbit. “Ah, that Pollan,” Ben breathed. The bastard nearly killed Cope with radiation exposure. He was apologetic about it. Cope forgave him, Ben not so much.
Pollan led them to an armorglass elevator door. His security stayed behind as they crowded in. The doors hushed shut to put surprising pressure on Ben’s ears. He forced a yawn and wiggled his jaw around, trying to equalize. Then the elevator emerged from the asteroid, giving a panoramic view.
“Shit!” Cope cried, and stumbled backward into him. Ben grasped his hand for moral support, and nearly had his long bones broken with the strength of Cope’s panicked return squeeze. “Thanks for warning me, Pollan. Wanker.”
“Bastard,” Pollan returned equably. “Wanted to show you. Isn’t this cool?” He pressed a button to halt the ‘elevator’ – it had clunked over to a horizontal track – to behold his domain. “The captain turned down my proposal to make a whole fleet of these elevators. I think they’re cool.”
He proceeded to point out his outdoor industrial facilities sprouting from the rock 30 meters below. These mostly looked like assorted dark boxes and pipes, with an occasional light that didn’t illuminate much. “And those are the smelters,” he said proudly.
While the rest of them cringed in the middle of the glass box, Hunter stepped forward beside Pollan and pressed his face to the glass for a better look. “I’ll be damned. I had no idea.”
“We’ll rival Hell’s Bells soon!” Pollan boasted. “It’s just night and day how much industry we’ll be able to support on Mahina from here. No steel constraints. Any rare earth you need. Pure perfect silicon wafers, the works.”
“Pollan,” Cope interrupted. His panic attack was easing, Ben judged. At least, Ben’s hand was no longer in danger of breaking. “Why the rego hell did you drag us up here?”
“To show off my plant,” Pollan returned, affronted. He pointed to Hunter. “He likes it.”
“I do indeed,” Hunter confirmed. “Magnificent. Outstanding work, Pollan.”
“See? Besides, this is our cover story,” the old chief justified. “Courtesy tour. I’m showing an old friend, an industry bigwig, around our new facilities. If Spaceways wants to build a new ship in orbit, we can set you up.”
Cope blew out trying to control his temper as well as anxiety. “Could we go now and see the stuff?”
“Spoilsport.” But Pollan punched the button to get the lonely chamber of air moving again. “If we lost cabin pressure, air masks would fall from the ceiling. Be sure to affix your own mask before helping others. This box is perfectly safe.”
Ben swallowed and checked out the sky instead of the dirty industrial buildings. He spotted a vivid tiny blue-green ‘star’ and pointed it out to Zan and Teke. “Denali.”
Of course, Pollan had to stop the box again so they could all look. “Huh! Any other planets?”
“Mahina,” Ben replied sourly. Indeed, the moon ‘above’ filled most of their sky, looming so large that they could spot a tinge of green marking a settler town, late to the sunset celebration. The two cities amounted to a faint glimmer in the dark. Mostly their home world looked like a barren moon despite over a century of human habitation. Little of the starry heavens had room to peek around the edges.
“Right.” Pollan set his traveling observation bubble moving again. Only a few meters farther, it lurched to another ‘vertical’ track and sank toward the rock again. “There’s no corridor access to my private office.”
“We have a shuttle,” Cope pointed out. “Pressure suits.” He let out a huge sigh of relief as the view blinked out, surrounded by a rock shaft again. This one was shallower. The elevator halted at minimum depth for the rock, 6 meters under. Sheepishly, he let go Ben’s hand. Ben missed his touch.
“Well, a shuttle would be conspicuous,” Pollan muttered, and opened the door. Ben’s ears popped. “Welcome to my lair.”
Pollan wasn’t the luxury type. If anything, his hideaway was even more Spartan than the ‘public’ hideaway where they found him. Although the reception area by the elevator was dominated by a wall of scrubber trees. Ben could tell by the clean smell, slightly citrus and olive. These trees mus
t have grown from cuttings from Thrive’s two trees years ago, wide and space-filling with no particular inclination to stretch ‘up’ in zero g, strongly lit from all sides.
Pollan led them into his office. “All these people?” he asked Cope dubiously. The Spaceways president shrugged in resignation and perched his rump on the man’s desk. Hunter and Zan claimed the steel-framed love seat. Ben and Teke took the hard plastic visitor chairs in front of the desk. They didn’t remain seated long.
Pollan transferred a basket of fruit to the floor, then brought up a picture on his desktop. “A mining skiff out of MO spotted the item, next ring band inward from ours. No reason for anyone to go there.” This first picture was murky. A couple skiff lights illuminated parts of a geodesic ball in space, with maybe 60 triangular faces of dull metal with a few markings, protuberances, and impact scars.
He set the image in motion, presumably video from the skiff approaching. An audio track supplied the typical banter of ignorant workmen. Pollan muted the sound.
After a couple seconds watching, Ben paused the frame and pointed. “Hell, that’s from Sanctuary!”
Teke and Cope nodded, unsurprised. Pollan noted, “We figured that part out ourselves, Ben. Seems to be a cache.”
Cope murmured, “Nanomage must have left it here before Belker headed for Denali.”
Hunter peered over Teke’s shoulder. “Not Ganymede? From when the Vitality delivered the settlers?”
“Sanctuary was settled after they left here,” Ben explained. “That logo is Sanctuary. Nanomage is the only ship we know of that visited Aloha after the Ganymede crews left. What’s that, 80 years ago now?”
“Something like that,” Cope agreed. “And Belker came back 30 years ago. Could have been another secret visit from Sanctuary, but KISS.”
“Kiss?” Hunter inquired.
“Keep it simple, stupid,” Pollan volunteered. “So this thing was 16 meters in diameter, masquerading as a rock in a sea of rocks. No EM signature most of the time. The miners caught some kind of heartbeat broadcast, fraction of a second, repeated less than once a day. And they brought it in. And the bidding began.”
“This was seven months ago?” Cope confirmed. “Where is it now?”
“God knows,” Pollan sighed. “Cope, I warned you. The bidding was fast and furious. I lost it to the captain after a couple weeks. He sold it to Hell’s Bells for a ton of favors. Last I heard someone stole it from Hell’s Bells and sold it on Sagamore to set himself up, rich for life. Or to fund a revolution, you never know with the Saggies.”
“Rego hell!” Cope growled. “You didn’t open the box?”
“’Course I opened the box!” Pollan scoffed. “Just showing you the outside first. You could have had it all if you’d just come running. I told you first! You got your boy in orbit all the time!”
Ben glowered at him for the dig.
“Didn’t have that kind of capital lying around,” Cope complained.
“Excuse me,” Hunter interrupted. “Why isn’t this in the hands of the Mahina government?”
Pollan harrumphed. “What Mahina government. Not like they could pay us anything worth squat in the rings.”
Cope was busy studying the outside of the cache, so Ben volunteered. “Hunter, what’s valuable up here in orbit is the tools to power expansion, life support, propulsion. Hell’s Bells is way ahead of Mahina Orbital in space station tech. Star drives, fuel, asteroid smelters, mining skiffs, guns, you name it. This find is gold. MO is desperate for anything they can trade with the hellbellies. There is no inter-world currency out here. Just favors, technology, prizes.”
“But this find belongs to the people of Mahina,” Hunter claimed.
“That’s one viewpoint,” Ben allowed. “Not shared by those who found it. Probably not by those who put it here, either. Hunter, it’s space tech. Spacers figure it’s ours because we have use for it. Rego-humpers don’t.”
Cope chuckled softly at Ben claiming allegiance to the spacers instead of his birth world. To Ben it was simple truth.
“Show me what was inside,” Cope requested. “Or wait, was it interesting to open?”
“Not especially,” Pollan replied. “Just large, but nothing a skiff couldn’t manage.” He selected another video to play, of a p-suited team opening the thing in a hangar, the kind of vast space they used for chopping stony and metallic asteroids, S-type and M-type, to feed the smelters. That might have been any of several buildings they’d trundled past in the glass elevator. Pollan cut that video when they opened the cache’s hexagonal hatch.
“Here’s the contents.” The desk filled with an array of images of items of unlike size. Several of them were obvious. He named them and flicked them off the visual to save space. “Food. Water, nothing special. Spare p-suits and air tanks, no better than our stuff. Now we’ve got the toys.”
Cope touched his hand before Pollan could casually flick away the toolbox. “You kept that. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
The two seasoned space engineers stared each other down. Pollan flinched first. “Might have done.”
Cope grinned. “You dog.”
“Not for sale,” Pollan replied repressively. “Besides, I seen what you played with from Nanomage. Nothing you ain’t seen before.”
Pollan had seen video recordings of Nanomage, Ben quibbled in silence. That wasn’t the same as pulling panels and rewiring the real deal, as he and Cope did on Denali.
“Nothing new?” Cope crooned. “I bet something.”
“Yeah, alright, maybe something. But that’s not what you’re here for, is it?”
“No,” Cope sighed. He selected three peculiar items to zoom in on. He and Teke studied one of them intently.
Rather than bang heads with them, Ben studied a third item on the other end of the table, rotating it to face him. Then he rolled it 90 degrees a couple times. The boxy device looked like the warp drive they found in Nanomage, the one Sass used to take the Thrive to Sanctuary. Or so they hoped. No one had heard from Sass since she engaged the warp, nor would they. If all transpired according to plan, she emerged from warp over a year ago objective, and was only now approaching the Colony Corps bolt-hole world of Sanctuary.
“Cope?” he murmured.
“I see it,” Cope agreed. “Just a toaster oven.”
“Hah!” Pollan scoffed. “That there’s a spare warp lens, and you know it. The only one in the system. You don’t have a prayer of getting it, either. Hell’s Bells won’t give it up.”
Cope shrugged. Can’t blame a guy for trying. He assigned the middle picture for Ben to investigate, and returned to studying the third artifact with Teke.
60
His assigned item to study had Ben floored at first. Not a standalone unit, the shape of the device’s protuberances reminded him of the heart, including stumps for the aorta and other blood vessels branching out to the lungs. No, this was meant to hook into the guts of… He mirrored the item, then flipped it upside down. “Pollan, any more pictures of this?”
“Double-tap it. Got a hundred pictures apiece on the interesting ones.”
Ben required exactly one more image to nail his identification, though he sifted through 20 to find that perfect angle. Yeah, he knew what this was. He paused, but realized Cope wouldn’t want him to say. Unlike the warp lens, this bit of Nanomage was never heralded on the news. Ben wasn’t even sure Cope saw it. So he continued perusing its images – maybe 40, not 100.
Beside him, Cope and Teke fixated on a new picture, their same boxy device with fold-out antlers extended. The black moose-box, as Ben mentally dubbed it, had a peculiar pewter sheen to it, almost oily. Teke played a video which slowly panned around the antlers, and zoomed in. He replayed the same half-second about a dozen times, then stood back with a sigh.
“These three items went to Hell’s Bells?” Cope confirmed. “Do you know for a fact which ones went down to Sagamore?”
“Like I said, the hellbellies are keeping that warp lens,” Pol
lan supplied. “The other two went walkies, the way I heard it. So give. What are they?”
“Give over the images first,” Cope demanded. “We had a deal.”
“You haven’t delivered yet,” Pollan argued. “One for a down payment, maybe.”
Cope narrowed his eyes. “I got two containers full of protein stock. Plus an iceberg big enough to irrigate a town and crack air besides. My deal didn’t include provisions. How many more paddies do you think that’s worth?” Rather than press the deal to a close, he backed off. “Show me this toolbox.”
Pollan didn’t take much coaxing. Deep down he must have longed to show off his prize to people who’d properly envy him. He pressed a release button to open a secret closet posing as a back wall. He caught it with his hand before it opened fully, so they wouldn’t see what else he had squirreled away back there. And he reached in to produce a sturdy fiberglass toolbox, its elderly handle lovingly duct-taped for that custom comfort grip.
He placed it on the table and lurked behind its lid a few moments to rearrange things. Ben and Teke leaned forward to peek, Cope sidling around the desk, a hand on Ben’s shoulder. Pollan lowered the lid to glare at Cope. “Do you mind? Back off.”
Ben and Cope withdrew. But Pollan didn’t glance Teke’s way. The physicist remained still, his eyes fixed for when Pandora’s box reopened. Ben observed this with peripheral vision.
People underestimated Teke. Less stocky than his fellow Denali, he finished growing at 1 g instead of his native 1.1 g. He was a harmless academic, right? Except Teke trained with hunters for fun, as well as cosmopolitans and his fellow academics. He spent his creche years in an agricultural dome like all Denali children. Pan-curious and super-genius, the younger man was a jack of all trades, and master of one.
Pollan opened the box again to rummage and hide his favorite treasures. Ben was sure Teke got a good look. Then the old chief turned the container to display the tools proudly to Cope and Ben.
The Spaceways president reached a hand and paused a few centimeters from the implements to ask permission. Pollan nodded, and Cope picked up several tools to admire, passing them to Ben, who handed them in turn to Teke. Cope did this with several exemplary and exotic screwdrivers, socket wrenches, wire strippers and whatnot, before seizing the one Ben was sure he targeted from the first.