Between the Stars (5 page)

Vladyka decoded the microburst message in his ship,
Ivo the Black
. It had been months since he had been given an assignment, and his smile widened as he read this one. It was more than he could have hoped. And the implications were enormous. It meant, for one thing, that Shevket was ready to take power, and that his most valuable followers would rise with him.

It would be difficult, and by far the most deadly and dangerous operation he had ever undertaken. But, he thought with satisfaction, that was why he had been chosen for the job: Daniko Vladyka was the best. He would have to crack Aeaea's legendary security, and he would have to get close to the equally legendary Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart. His mind whirled with ideas. He would have to contact his various agents and team members, scattered as they were throughout the Belt. Fortunately, most of them were concentrated in the vicinity of Avalon.

He would set up a careful operation. The message had given him no time frame, so he was free to set his own schedule. From all reports, the Aeaeans were no closer to solving the puzzle of the Rhea Object than they had been when they had first seen the thing. As for the Kornfeld woman, she would not be far from the alien artifact. Come to think of it, it seemed strange that she wasn't on the thing the minute it showed up. It probably meant that she was secretly on Aeaea, studying the problem. Everyone knew about her fetish for secrecy.

Vladyka was a burly man in his mid-thirties. He told people his muscle mass was due to treatment and training for planetary environments. A generation before, few except the Earthborn carried so much redundant muscularity. The prospect of convenient interstellar flight caused a demand for treatment to ready the pioneers for exploration of planets with real gravity.

Once he had been dark, with dense, coarse black hair and a drooping mustache. For life in space, his head had been depilated and his skin lightened. He especially missed his mustache. In his homeland it was all but synonymous with manhood. Well, when he pulled off this feat, he could return to Earth and look as a man should look once more. Surely, Shevket would reward him with a high position, perhaps even Chief of Intelligence.

After allowing himself a few moments to revel in the prospect, Vladyka dismissed all such fantasies from his mind. From now on, he would allow only the job at hand to concern him. In sequence, he brought up the faces of his team. As each appeared before his mind's eye, he weighed their merits and faults for the plan that was already beginning to take shape within his mind. Which should he contact first?

When he had his plan roughed out, he ordered
Ivo
's computer to take him to Avalon.

Valentina watched through a small port as the transport docked at Avalon's North Polar terminal. The trip out had been tedious, but she had used the opportunity to study recent Confederate history. From London she had traveled to Luna, and there she had arranged for a clandestine outbound passage to the Belt. It was not difficult, using her contacts. Once among the Island Worlds, her mobility was all but unrestricted because the Confederacy did not use internal passports.

Personal suspicion was another matter, and she had carefully built up a believable personality, and the physiognomy to go with it. Her hair was now dark, parted in the middle and drawn back tightly. Her skin was pale and she appeared to be wearing no cosmetics whatever. Her beautiful features were unchanged, but she managed to radiate plainness by her expression and bearing.

"We have arrived at North Pole Dock on Avalon," said the captain's voice over the intercom. "Docking is complete. Passengers may now disembark."

Valentina unclipped her landing harness and floated toward the exit hatch. Around her, twenty or so other travelers did the same. Experienced spacers, they managed to make the transit without jostling or kicking each other's faces. Very few people who were not spaceborn could manage the feat, but Valentina did it effortlessly. Had she wished, she could have adopted the distinct zero-gee body language of one raised on Luna or Mars. It was failure to master such subtleties of body language that exposed far more agents than verbal slipups or inconvenient physical evidence.

At the end of the umbilicus connecting ship and port, she followed a flashing stripe color-coded for baggage claim and Transit Authority. She collected her single bag and towed it toward an official who was speaking with the passengers and checking off something on a belt unit.

"Your name?" the official asked.

"Valerie Amber." It was a persona she had established several years before, complete with records. It would stand up to a fairly rigorous investigation.

"And your occupation?"

"Student." It was the most plausible of covers. Students were everywhere, enrolling in courses for a term, then moving on to another school or instructor, working when they ran out of funds. For many, it was just an excuse to travel, which was an education in itself.

"Passing through, or do you wish to settle here permanently?"

"Passing through."

"Enjoy your stay." That was it. No customs search or stamping of passports. Her baggage had been searched when she had left Lunar orbit, not for contraband but for explosives or toxic chemicals that might endanger the ship and its inhabitants. Other than that, nobody cared a great deal what a traveler might be carrying. At an office labeled Inprocessing she paid a minuscule facilities deposit to cover the air, water and public restroom facilities she would be using. Payment would be deducted according to length of stay. Anything else she required, she would be charged for.

Along with a crowd of other new arrivals, she pondered a three-dimensional chart of Avalon. It was color-coded, with blue for open chambers, yellow for tunnels, green for tube-car passages and so forth. It was confusing, because Avalon had never been planned as a habitat. It had been one of the earliest mining operations in the Belt, and the tunnels and chambers were long-abandoned mine galleries. People had moved into the larger chambers, and access tunnels had been cut to connect them. It was a bewildering labyrinth, so Valentina purchased a small holographic facsimile and earset to keep from getting lost. When she activated the holo, a flashing white dot would show her where she was.

The Hall of the Mountain King seemed as good a place as any to start, so she caught a tube car. It was crammed with workers headed for their jobs, spacers just off their ships and students doing whatever it was students did. The Belt settlements had nothing like the luxurious space of the Lunar or Martian colonies. An old, established habitat like Avalon could be as crowded as an Earth city, not because of population but because of limited space.

As they moved toward the asteroid's outer periphery, the car swung on its gimbals in response to the growing, spin-induced artificial gravity. Some of the travelers took anti-nausea pills from belt dispensers. To those unused to gravity, its effects could be distressing. As she stepped from the car, Valentina affected the slightly wobbly gait of one to whom even the Lunar gravity of HMK was an unaccustomed experience.

She passed through a low, rough, stone arch into the main chamber. The access tunnel opened onto a wide terrace about midway up the layers of tiers surrounding the major open area. The plan was amorphous, with many smaller canyons opening off the major gallery. Most of it was crammed with commercial establishments. She keyed her holographic guide for a quick orientation. Near her, many others were doing the same. The flicker of holos was the trademark of new visitors. To Valentina, the place was only mildly bewildering. Some of her fellow travelers had never before seen an indoor space so large.

"The Hall of the Mountain King," said the voice from her earset, "has grown over the years into the largest man-made, non-Lunar habitat space in existence. At any given time, several hundred businesses are located here. There are travelers' accommodations and entertainment facilities, eating establishments, places of worship and a few private residences. Besides the main chamber, there are side galleries such as the Grotto, the Bat Cave, the—"

Valentina let it drone on until she was sure she had the layout of the place firmly fixed in her mind. Then she shut off the holo and stepped out onto one of the spindly catwalks that connected adjacent tiers and other catwalks in no particular order. The term seemed especially appropriate since a good many cats shared the walks with the humans.

Few people spared her a glance. Even young men, after a flicker of interest, looked elsewhere. Her drab clothing, severe hair style and lack of cosmetics suggested that she was from one of the more severe religious settlements, possibly the neo-puritans. The prim, humorless set of her mouth reinforced the impression. She did not move with undue speed. She had definite plans and goals, but her persona required a certain aimless quality—that of a student who was not quite committed to a certain course.

Sometimes Valentina wondered whether her meticulous planning was worth the trouble. Chances were, nobody would notice her anyway, if she merely took the trouble to disguise her beauty. However, the urge to stay in persona had been drilled into her early, at a time when the Intelligence schools had hired the finest acting coaches to instruct the pupils. Now it was all but impossible for her to drop the character she had constructed. She could switch from one to another with facility, but acting naturally was all but unthinkable.

She stopped at a booth that offered shrimp tempura. From the earliest days of self-sustaining life off-Earth, shrimp had been a principal source of protein. They grew in pestiferous abundance in the salt-water tanks throughout the Belt. Everywhere around her vegetation grew. In the tunnels, on the tiers, even on the catwalks, vines, bushes and dwarf trees grew from planters. They aided in atmosphere production, produced food and softened the harsh functionality of asteroid life.

As she ate, Valentina watched the people around her. The Earth origins of spacers could be tricky to read, but most of those on Avalon seemed to be Caucasian or Asiatic in about equal numbers, with a sprinkling of people from everywhere else and innumerable mixtures. There were a few eccentrics who had chosen cosmetic treatments that gave them the appearance of no known race. Clothing was mostly functional, although there were some who wore very little of it. There seemed to be a fad for garish jewelry among the young.

There was a lot of exuberant advertising in every possible medium. Most of it was holographic, but some used archaic lettering, a rarity on near-illiterate Earth. Chinese banners of scarlet cloth bearing gold calligraphy were stretched on the fronts of some shops, and one establishment had revived flashing neon in glass tubes. From what Valentina could make out, the lower levels of tiers were devoted to selling necessities and equipment, the middle range to luxuries and services, and the upper tiers to entertainment.

It was nothing particularly enthralling to her, but she reminded herself to rubberneck. In her current persona, she was the Belt's equivalent of a hick in the big city. The brief preliminary scan told her that she should modify her persona to something more worldly. It had served its purpose.

At intervals along the tiers, small side-tunnels led to public restroom facilities. Valentina located one and paid a small fee for a private booth. She maneuvered herself and her bag into it and found that it had sparse shower facilities and a holographic mirror. She switched on the mirror, undressed and went to work on her appearance. She unbound her hair and, with a few deft cosmetic touches, altered her appearance into something far more alluring. She did not bother with a full-strength vamp treatment, but now her eyes and lips were highlighted. The coverall she took from her bag was as functional as the other had been, but it had a shiny finish and was tailored to emphasize her figure rather than disguise it. When she left, she was the object of a good many appraising looks, not all of them from males.

On the thirty-fourth tier, amid the entertainment section, she found a hotel in the middle price range. She chose it primarily because its hand-lettered sign listed the symbol for infonet services among its facilities. Instead of having a front wall, the tiny lobby was separated from the tier terrace by a living fence of close-planted bamboo. A tiny woman in a kimono came around the reception desk and bowed. In the primarily zero-gee Island Worlds, the custom of bowing had fallen out of use, so someone in this place was a traditionalist.

"May I help you?" she asked, straightening.

"I need a room with infonent services," Valentina said.

"Of course. Please come this way." Behind the desk was a corridor. Sliding partitions lined the walls at intervals and the woman opened one. The room was small, about three meters square. To Valentina's surprise, it was floored with
tatami
. On an impulse, she took off her boots before entering. At this level the gravity was somewhat less than one-third Earth normal, but she could feel the pleasant texture of the weave.

"We have a
tatami
craftsman here on Avalon," the woman said. "He contracts with one of the grain firms to grow the reeds. I know of no other settlement that has them."

"They're exquisite," Valentina said. "I've never seen reed mats before."

"This is your first visit to Avalon? Welcome, then. I hope you enjoy your stay. All four walls and the ceiling have holo display." She indicated a plate with pressure points marked in symbols. "These are your service and infonet controls. The folding spa unit has bath, steam and sauna capability. For an extra charge, we have masseuse service."

"I'll take it. I'm still on ship's time and exhausted. This will be perfect."

"Then I'll let you get some rest." The woman took a small exchange unit from her obi and Valentina thrust her credit crystal carrier into its slot. The woman bowed her way out and Valentina found herself alone for the first time in weeks. The ship had not been luxurious and she felt the urgent need of a bath. She hit the spa control and undressed as the unit inflated.