Space Stations Part 12

Always know when to run: Amparo had often told her that.

She had gone far enough by now. Alonza looked back; she could no longer see the place where she and her mother had been. There was a recycling bin to her right, but too many people were loitering near the s.h.i.+ny metal receptacle. She turned away and kept going until the corridor branched into two more long gated hallways. People were lining up at the gates for the suborb flights.

At last she came to a stretch of gates and waiting areas that were nearly empty of people. She hurried to the nearest bin and dropped the stolen bracelet into a slot, then continued down the long lighted pa.s.sageway. Her feet were beginning to hurt.

Amparo had traded a stolen belt for the shoes, which were made of synthaleather, b.u.t.the leather had molded itself to its former owner's feet and had never fit Alonza's very well.

She was far enough away from the bin now. Alonza moved toward one of the empty waiting areas and sat down on one of the smaller cus.h.i.+ons, wondering how long it would take Amparo to find her.

"Stay in one place," Amparo had always told her, "and sooner or later I'll find you." Alonza sat there, listening to the announcements in Anglaic, Arabic, Espaqol, and other languages. "Twelve-twenty suborb to Toronto, gate fifty-two, now boarding." "Two zero five, suborb to Damascus, gate forty-seven, now boarding."

"Sixteen thirty-one, shuttle flight to the Wheel, leaving at thirteen-oh-two from gate ninety-five."

The Wheel! Alonza thought of the s.p.a.ce station high above the Earth and was soon lost in a familiar daydream. Someday, when she was older, she would board one of the shuttles and travel to the Wheel herself, to wander its curved corridors and loiter in its lounges before boarding a torchs.h.i.+p to another place, maybe Luna or the Islands of Venus. Her daydream was formed mostly of images and experiences drawn from a mind-tour called "Journey to the Wheel," one of the mind-tours anyone was free to call up without having to spend credit, even people like her and her mother who had to live on Basic and steal anything else they needed. Most of the free mind-tours she had seen bored her; either they were designed to teach some sort of skill like homeostat repair or else they were filled with action scenes that tired her out and were often hard to remember later.

But "Journey to the Wheel" was different. It kept her interested even when there wasn't really that much going on, when she was feeling and seeing what it was like to travel in a shuttle, floating weightlessly up against the harness that held her to her seat while viewing the distant pale circular tube with spokes that was the Wheel. The end of the mind-tour always left her with a tired but happy feeling of expectation, of feeling that something wonderful was about to happen to her.

Maybe people who went to other places, who didn't just do their traveling with bands around their heads so that the cybers could feed them a mind-tour's images and sensations, had that kind of happy feeling all the time. She imagined leaving the room she shared with Amparo and never having to return to the maze of apartment buildings, cubicles, and shacks where the homeostats rarely worked and the air was always too hot and smelled of sand and dust. Maybe- "Going to Shanghai, child?" a woman's voice said in Anglaic.

Alonza looked up. A woman with short dark hair and a kindly smile was gazing down at her.

"No," she replied hastily.

"But this is the waiting area for that suborb flight."

"I'm waiting for my mother," Alonza said. "She told me to wait here." She glanced down at her hands and saw, too late, that she had forgotten to pull the long sleeves of her tunic over her wrists. The woman would notice that she was not wearing an ident.i.ty bracelet. But the stranger did not look down at her hands, but instead continued to stare at Alonza's face.

"I see," the woman said.

"She didn't want me to get lost," Alonza added.

"Of course. Well..." The woman turned away and sat down on a cus.h.i.+on near the wall.

Alonza waited as more people entered the lounge and settled themselves on thecus.h.i.+ons around her. Among them were two Linkers, dressed in long white formal robes and kaffiyehs, each with the diamondlike gem on his forehead that marked him as one of the few who had a direct Link to Earth's cyberminds; the two men sat together, and those making their way past them nodded respectfully in their direction. A few of the people were eating small rolls and pieces of fruit, and drinking from small bottles; Alonza, feeling very hungry, wondered if she could risk begging or stealing some food. Nearly every seat was taken by the time she started worrying about Amparo.

Her mother should have been here by now, Alonza thought. Soon all these people would begin to board the suborb, and somebody else would wonder what she was doing here. Already a gray-haired man was watching her with a puzzled look on his face, while a guide wearing dark blue overalls and a badge hanging over his chest had come by a couple of times already, slowing down to glance at her both times.

A s.p.a.ce in the back wall opened. A man came through the opening and stepped to a counter as the doorway behind him closed. He wore a dark blue s.h.i.+rt; like the guide, he had a badge that said "Port of San Antonio" on the top and "Nueva Republica de Texas" on the bottom. Alonza knew how to read a little, and she had seen those words often enough to recognize them immediately.

The man peered at the screen of his console, apparently checking the pa.s.senger list. That meant that everyone here would be lining up in a few minutes, having their bracelets scanned and their ident.i.ties and credit confirmed, and then heading for the doorway that led to the field outside.

She was suddenly frightened, afraid to move from her cus.h.i.+on. Then she saw the guide walking toward her with another man at his side, a tall thin pale-haired man in the black uniform of a Guardian, with a stun wand hanging from his belt.

"Is your name Alonza Lemaris?" the man in the Guardian uniform asked.

She nodded. If he knew her name, it meant that her mother had been caught.

"Come with me," the man said.

They took her to a small room. The guide left them there alone, and the Guardian asked her a lot of questions, keeping his hand around his wand the whole time, but terrified as she was, she knew that Amparo would want her to say as little as possible.

"I'm waiting for my mother. She told me to wait there for her. She told me not to get lost." She kept saying the same thing over and over and at last the Guardian stopped pacing and sat down in front of her.

"Listen to me, you little b.i.t.c.h," he said angrily. "We've already got your mother on a.s.sault, credit theft, and ident theft. If we put her to the question, we can probably get a lot more out of her, but she wouldn't be the same afterward, and you're the only one who can stop us from doing that kind of damage to her. So you can begin telling me about what kinds of things she's been up to, and we'll find some work for her to do while she's serving her sentence that won't be too hard on her, or else we can start interrogating her until she breaks down and confesses. She won't be of much use to anybody after that. Some people get so messed up in their minds afterward that they end up killing themselves."

"I want to see her," Alonza said softly.

"You won't see her until after she's finished her time, and that's going to be long from now. Get this through your head-you'll probably never see her again. The only favor you can do for her now is to tell me exactly what she's done, what you've seen her do, what you've done together."

Amparo had always been terrified of getting caught, of being interrogated byGuardians. They would put a band on your head, her mother had told her, one of the slender silver ones like the ones people used to access a mind-tour, and then they would dig into your mind, force you to confess, find all kinds of ways to hurt you and make you scream in pain until you told them the truth. That was why it was so important never to get caught; better to be dead than in the custody of Guardians preparing to question you.

"She didn't do anything," Alonza insisted, staring at the gold lieutenant's bars on the man's shoulders. "She told me to wait for her, that's all."

The Guardian stood up and slapped her in the face. The blow shocked her more than it hurt her. "You're a stubborn one," he muttered, sounding almost pleased. "I guess we'll let you visit with your mother after all."

He led her out of the room, gripping her arm tightly. A hovercar with another Guardian was waiting for them. They rode through the hallways of the port to another room, where two more Guardians were waiting with Amparo.

Her mother was bound to a chair. A console with a screen sat in front of her. "I didn't say anything," Alonza cried out, trying to free herself from the man holding her arm, but Amparo did not seem to hear her. Then one of the men in the room stepped toward Amparo and held out a circular silver headband.

Amparo screamed. Her scream was so sharp and piercing that Alonza froze.

"Tell them!" her mother shrieked. "Tell them anything they want to know!"

Alonza told the Guardians about the woman and how Amparo had struck her and where she had ditched the bracelet they had stolen from her. The men asked her more questions about other marks they had taken things from, and Amparo, who was sobbing by then, told Alonza to answer those questions, too. When Alonza had finished telling the Guardians about what they had stolen over the past months and how they had obtained the goods, the pale-haired Guardian told her that her mother would be doing useful labor for the Nomarchies of Earth while serving out her sentence. They did not say anything about a hearing, how long a sentence Amparo would get, or how unpleasant the useful labor would be.

"What about my daughter?" Amparo asked hoa.r.s.ely.

"That's none of your business, woman. We'll take care of her. She'll be a lot better off than she was with you. She'll be a better citizen of her Nomarchy when she grows up, and by then she'll forget about you."

The Guardian had been right. Alonza had been cared for afterward, and supposed that she had grown up to be a better citizen than she would have been otherwise.

Her memory of her mother grew fainter over time. In the first years after her mother's arrest, while she was still living in the children's dormitory, Alonza had occasionally tried to find out where Amparo was being held, but the cyberminds always blocked those channels so that she could not get an answer, and then the teaching image on her screen would order her to get back to her lessons. After a while, she stopped asking about Amparo. When she was older, after the officers in charge of the dormitory had decided that she and a few of her friends showed enough promise to be sent to a school for more lessons in academic subjects instead of being trained for satellite repair, she rarely thought of her mother.

The pale-haired Guardian had been right when he told her that she would be better off in the dormitory than with Amparo. There had been the opportunity for schooling, and since the Guardians often recruited from the children housed in the dorms while their parents served time, she had eventually been trained at an officers' academy for the important work of being one of the protectors of Earth's biosphere and its peace.Had she remained with her mother, she would have grown up to be another one like her, a mosquito as they were called in their crowded neighborhood near the port, one of those who lived by stinging any unwary travelers pa.s.sing through San Antonio. Had she stayed with Amparo, she would never have made it to the Wheel, certainly not as an officer and as an aide to Colonel Jonas Sansom, the commander of the Guardian detachment at the Wheel, and also the pale-haired Guardian officer who had detained her at the San Antonio port so many years ago.

Alonza Lemaris stood in the small waiting area just beyond the shuttle dock's bay.

Another group had just arrived, pa.s.sengers from Earth bound for Venus. Most of the people coming to the Wheel could be left to find their own way to the lounges and bays in the hub where they would wait to board their freighters or pa.s.senger vessels, but this group of travelers, who came from a camp outside Tashkent, were an exception.

Guardians were stationed at that camp to keep order, and Guardians traveled with any settlers who left the camp on the shuttle flights to the Wheel. Usually Alonza or one of the other officers met the new arrivals and ushered them to a bay near the dock holding the Habber s.h.i.+p that was to take them on the next leg of their journey to Anwara, the vast s.p.a.ce station that circled Earth's sister planet, but that was not why she had come here this time.

Settlers, Alonza thought; traitors to Earth was what many would call them. She had nothing against the scientists and specialists and workers who were trained for the terraforming Venus Project, who had been chosen to go there and who had proved their worth. But the people from the camp outside Tashkent were another matter.

They abandoned their homes and their work and even gave up all of their credit, to go to the camp and wait for pa.s.sage until a few more workers might be needed inside the domed settlements that were being raised on the still inhospitable surface of Venus.

They were, most of them, malcontents willing to leave their own Nomarchies to gamble on getting a chance at making a new world and a new life for themselves.

Maybe the Project needed such people, and perhaps the Council of Mukhtars that governed Earth's Nomarchies had been wise to allow such camps as a social safety valve, but Guardians had to keep order in the camps, and Alonza considered that a waste of their resources.

A door opened and a Guardian pilot in a black uniform entered the waiting area, followed by a man and a woman who wore pins of silver circles on their blue tunics, pins that such people were required to wear in Earths.p.a.ce so that anyone seeing them would know at a glance what they were. Alonza looked away from the pair as the pilot saluted her.

"Major Lemaris," he said, "how good of you to greet me. Congratulations on your recent promotion. I hear that it's well deserved."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Looking up at him, Alonza wondered if the man was only being polite or trying to suck up to her in the hope of gaining some future favor. Hard to tell, but it did him no harm either way.

"As soon as our charges are off the shuttlecraft, my crew and I will speed them on their way to their s.h.i.+p," the man continued.

"I came here," Alonza said, "to tell you that their trip has to be delayed. Your pa.s.sengers will have to stay here, so get them into the lift and shoot them through the spoke to Level B and the lounge next to the a.s.sistant director's office. We'll keep them under guard there until we can allow them to board their transport."

"There's thirty of them," the pilot said. He glared at the man and woman with the silver pins, as if they were to blame for the delay. "Might be kind of crowded.""They shouldn't be there for more than ten to twenty hours," Alonza murmured, "thirty at most. They're from a camp, so they know hards.h.i.+p."

The pilot shrugged.

"Warn them that it'll be close to a g there," she went on, "not the half-g they've got here in the hub."

"I a.s.sume that we at least will be able to stay aboard our s.h.i.+p until our departure, since I know the Wheel's s.p.a.ce is limited." The man in the blue tunic had spoken; he was a small man, barely taller than Alonza, with short dark hair and brown almond-shaped eyes. His companion, a short dark-eyed woman with a cap of thick black hair, stared past Alonza, avoiding her gaze.

"Unfortunately, you can't go aboard," Alonza replied, "because a few components in the dock have to be replaced before it's safe to ferry anybody to your s.h.i.+p."

The man frowned, looking as though he did not believe her, not that it mattered whether he did or not. He and his companion were Habitat-dwellers, or Habbers as they were derisively called. Their ancestors had abandoned Earth centuries ago for the a.s.sociated Habitats, the homes they had made for themselves in s.p.a.ce, and there were many who believed that, despite their appearance, the Habbers were no longer truly human, that their genetic engineering had far surpa.s.sed what Earth allowed among its people. Habbers might have their uses; some of them worked with the scientists and specialists of the Venus Project, and having them ferry settlers from the camps to Venus was certainly a convenience. Changing the orbits of a few asteroids so that they would come nearer to Earth and could be more easily mined had been another service of the Habbers to the home world.

Alonza could grant all of that, but loathed the air of superiority that Habbers exuded, as if the resources they provided and the necessary tasks they voluntarily undertook for Earth's benefit were little more than crumbs thrown to beggars. She thought then of how the home world must seem to Habbers, with its flooded coastlines, melting ice caps, and an atmosphere that was still too thick with carbon dioxide six centuries after the Resource Wars. They probably thought of themselves as fortunate for having abandoned what they must see as a played-out world populated by deluded die-hards. Even these two Habber pilots had that look of superiority in their eyes, the calm steady gaze of people who seemed to lack any turbulent and upsetting emotions.

"Where are we to stay, then?" the female Habber asked.

The woman probably expected to have to stay in the lounge with all the pa.s.sengers going to Venus. Alonza was silent for a moment, then said, "We want you to be comfortable. I believe that our agreement with the a.s.sociated Habitats also requires us not to inflict any unnecessary discomfort on any of you. So we've found a room for you in our officers' quarters. You'll have to share it, but there are two beds, and a public lavatory just down the corridor."

"That's very kind of you," the male Habber said, and she heard a note of sarcasm in his voice. Being sarcastic was uncharacteristic of such cool and rational types as Habbers, but then this Habber and his companion were not like others of their kind.

After getting their thirty Venus-bound pa.s.sengers out of the lift and settled in the lounge, Alonza led the two Habbers to their room, which was just three doors from her own quarters. In the three years since she had been a.s.signed here, she had grown used to the gently curving and brightly lit corridors, to the gravitylike acceleration, only slightly weaker than Earth's, that was imparted by the Wheel's rotation around its hub, to the pilots and pa.s.sengers pa.s.sing end-lessly through this station. Everytwenty-four-hour period brought the promise of something new-of an unusually interesting traveler, official visitors, a new detachment of Guardians with intriguing tales of a Nomarchy she did not know that much about, the possibility of a mission that might take her to the L-5 s.p.a.ceport, to one of the industrial, recreational, and military satellites that orbited Earth, or even to Luna. Her post here often imparted a heightened sense of expectation, of feeling that she was on a journey that would never end. It was as if she were somehow picking up that feeling of antic.i.p.ation from all of those who pa.s.sed through the Wheel on their way to other places.

"Your room," Alonza said to the two Habbers as she pressed the door open for them. They entered a small room bare of furnis.h.i.+ngs except for a small wall screen and two cus.h.i.+ons in front of two low shelves. "You pull the beds out from the wall."

She demonstrated by pressing a panel and pulling out the lower bunk. "And the lavatory's four doors down to your right. I hope everything's satisfactory, but if there's anything else you need, do let me know."

"We're most appreciative," the male Habber said.

"I'd be most grateful if you would both be my guests at supper in two hours,"

Alonza continued. She thought of asking Tom Ruden-Nodell, the physician in charge of the Wheel's infirmary and the closest friend she had here, to join them, but decided against it. She would get more of a sense of these two by herself.

The Habbers glanced at each other, apparently surprised by her offer of hospitality.

"We're a bit tired," the man said. "Perhaps another time-"

"Tired? I didn't think Habitat-dwellers were as subject to our frailties. Three hours, then? That should give you time to rest. I look forward to seeing you then. I'll send a Guardian to fetch you." Alonza turned and left the room before the man could object again.

"Detain the operative," Colonel Sansom had said in his message, sent to her over a confidential channel. Alonza had seen the woman's file, stored under the name she was using. This was a matter Colonel Sansom should have handled himself, but he had left suddenly to go to an asteroid tracking station two days ago, to supervise repairs after a micrometeorite strike had damaged three telescopes, and would not get back to the Wheel for another thirty hours at least. A more easygoing officer might have sent a subordinate to the station, but not the obsessively conscientious Jonas Sansom.

Tracking the orbits of asteroids that might threaten Earth was one of the most important duties of Guardians, perhaps the most important. Colonel Sansom would report to his superiors that he had seen to this task personally.

"Just get her away from the others," Sansom continued, "and into custody as quietly as possible, that's all. Best if you can handle it by yourself without bringing anybody else into it, so use your judgment."

That was all. That was more than enough. Alonza was flattered that he trusted her with this task. She must not fail him.

According to the file on her screen, the operative was using the name of Sameh Tryolla. She had supposedly grown up in the Eastern Mediterranean Nomarchy, attended and then been asked to leave the University of Vancouver in the Pacific Federation for not doing well at her studies in physics, and after that had decided to leave her work as a laboratory a.s.sistant in Ankara to go to the camp outside Tashkent.

Probably everything in her file was an invention. The image of Sameh Tryolla showed a slim, young olive-skinned woman with long dark-brown hair and large hazel eyes; she looked frail, and hardly more than a girl.

The woman was to be detained, according to Colonel Sansom, because theGuardian Commanders who advised the Council of Mukhtars had abruptly decided to abort her mission. Alonza was to detain her as un.o.btrusively as possible and hold her until the colonel returned to the Wheel, after which he would take charge of the matter.

Her task seemed simple enough, but there were all kinds of possible complications in carrying it out. Perhaps this Sameh had friends among those traveling with her who might object to seeing her led away without a good excuse. Maybe the Habber pilots who were to take Sameh and the others from the camp to Venus would argue that, since she was technically in their custody until she arrived in Anwara, the Guardians had no right to keep her at the Wheel. Perhaps Sameh would demand a public hearing, claiming that the Guardian force at the Wheel was violating the implicit agreement that had been made with her by allowing her pa.s.sage from Earth to Venus.

Nothing would prevent her superiors from doing whatever they wanted with Sameh in the end, but any of these possibilities would draw too much attention to the operative. The Guardian officers close to the Council of Mukhtars wanted no attention drawn to their covert activities. Better for the secret service of the Mukhtars' personal guard to be no more than the subject of unverifiable rumors, to have even the existence of such a secret service doubted by most of Earth's citizens.

Alonza closed the file on Sameh Tryolla and secured it, knowing that she would not have to retrieve it again. The whole business had bothered her from the first, and even though Colonel Sansom had not betrayed any uneasiness, she suspected that he was equally puzzled by their orders. Why not find some way to get word to the woman about the change in plans instead of confining her on the Wheel? Why take the risk of calling attention to her by detaining her? For that matter, why not put her out of the way permanently, making her death look like an accident? Why hadn't she been stopped before she got to the Wheel?

Asking such questions, though, was not part of her a.s.signment; nor was wondering what Sameh Tryolla's mission might have been. The Council of Mukhtars had many ways of monitoring the progress of the Venus Project and the loyalty of the Cytherians, as the people who lived in the surface settlements and on the domed Islands that floated in Venus' thin upper atmosphere preferred to call themselves.

Alonza had always a.s.sumed that one of the Mukhtars' methods was to plant a few spies among the settlers. She hoped that this was all the Council was doing, that the spies were no more than informers alerting Earth's rulers of possible difficulties and dissatisfactions that might require their attention.

Irrationally, something inside her insisted upon hoping that Venus might become a place where people could win more for themselves than they were allowed on Earth, that the Cytherians would make something new, that the machinations of the Mukhtars would not dampen their dreams. She had picked up such sentiments from others who had come to the Wheel, the scientists and workers and others who looked forward to the work of terraforming, even knowing that they would never live to see the results of their labors and could only hope that their distant descendants might live on the green and growing world they would create. The terraforming of Venus would redeem Earth and provide a new Earthlike planet for its people. Far in the future, the technology used to transform Venus might even be used to heal humankind's wounded home world.

Not that Alonza would let such pa.s.sing thoughts interfere with her duty.

She thought of her own arrival at the Wheel, when Colonel Sansom had welcomed her to her post with a dinner in the officers' mess. "I thought you might have themakings of a Guardian," he had told her, "even back in San Antonio. You wouldn't talk, even with all the scary tales you'd surely been told about Guardian interrogations, not until we took you to your mother and she begged you to talk. First you demonstrated your loyalty, and then you showed your good sense. Adjusting well to the dorms and doing well at your a.s.signed studies only confirmed my original judgment."

That she had never asked the Guardians about her mother had likely been another point in her favor. She had learned to control her curiosity, to live with knowing that many of her questions would never be answered and that any answers, if she somehow found them, would only bring her trouble.

Alonza did not suppose that she would learn much, if anything, about Sameh Tryolla from the two Habber pilots. The woman was only another one of their pa.s.sengers; it was unlikely that they had exchanged even a few words with her. But she had to know if they might pose an obstacle to her a.s.signment.

She met them at the entrance to the officers' mess and led them to their table. Most of the low tables were in the common area, open to all officers and their guests, but Alonza and the Habbers would dine in the smaller adjoining room where Colonel Sansom often entertained visiting Linkers and other dignitaries. She wanted some privacy, so that the Habbers would feel freer to talk.

Keir Renin, the Guardian officer in charge of the camp outside Tashkent, had sent her a confidential message about the two Habbers. The woman went only by the name of Te-yu, not unusual since it was the custom among Habbers to use just one name, but her full name was Hong Te-yu. The man was known as Benzi and also had the surname of Liangharad. This was the third time that the two were ferrying people from the camp to Venus, and Keir Renin had been given the distinct impression by Te-yu and Benzi that this would be the pair's last such journey.

What was unusual about these two was that they had not been born and reared in a Habitat. They had close kinfolk on Earth and also among the Cytherians, and had grown up on one of the Venusian Islands. But being given a stake in the Venus Project had not been enough for Te-yu and Benzi, who with several other conspirators had seized control of a shuttlecraft to flee to a Hab not far from Venus.

Few took the risks of fleeing to any of the Habitats and asking for refuge, and some had died in the attempt. Capture meant imprisonment and a forever restricted existence; other failed attempts had ended in death aboard s.p.a.ce vessels too limited in range to reach a Habitat. Alonza had never heard of any successful refugees returning to Earth or to the regions of s.p.a.ce controlled by the Council of Mukhtars.

She wondered why these two had done so, whether they now regretted the choice they had made, if there was some way she might be able to use them.

The two Habbers sat down across from her on their cus.h.i.+ons. Alonza folded her legs in front of her, under the table, then studied the pocket screen on the tabletop.

"Do you have any particular preferences?" Alonza asked her guests. "With people coming through here from so many different regions, we have more variety in our cuisine than you might expect."

The woman named Te-yu shrugged.

"Please feel free to order for both of us, Major Lemaris," her companion Benzi murmured. He smiled slightly. "No doubt you know what's best."