Strangely, she slept well. But thinking over the situation the next morning, after a maid had brought a breakfast tray into her sitting room, Cardenas reasoned that Humphries was going to murder her. He’ll have to, she thought. He can’t let me go and let me tell everyone that he’s killed Dan Randolph.
With my help, she added silently. I’m an accomplice to murder. A blind, stupid, stubborn fool who didn’t see what she didn’t want to see. Not until it was too late.
And now I’m going to be murdered, too. Why else would they be taking me all the way out into the godforsaken wilderness?
The thought of being killed frightened her, intellectually, in the front lobe of her brain. But being outside on the surface of the Moon, out in the deadly vacuum with all the radiation sleeting in from deep space, out here where humans were never meant to be—that terrified her deep in her guts. This tired little tractor had no pressurized cabin, no crew module; you had to be in a spacesuit to survive for a minute out here.
This is a dead world, she thought as she looked through her helmet visor. The gray ground was absolutely dead, except for the cleated trails of other tractors that had come this way. No wind or weather would disturb those prints; they would remain in place until the Moon crumbled. Behind them, a lazy rooster tail of dust floated in the soft lunar gravity.
And beyond that, nothing but the gently undulating plain of barren rock, pockmarked with craters, some the size of finger-pokes, some big enough to swallow the tractor. Rocks strewn everywhere, like the playroom toys of careless children.
The horizon was too close. It made Cardenas feel even jumpier. It felt wrong, dangerous. In the airless vacuum there was no haze, no softening with distance. That abrupt horizon slashed across her field of view like the edge of a cliff.
She saw that the ringwall mountains of Alphonsus were almost below the horizon behind them.
“Where are we going?” she asked again, knowing it was useless.
Beside her, Frank Blyleven was no longer smiling. He sweated inside his spacesuit as he drove the tractor. When he’d made his deal with Martin Humphries, it had been for nothing more serious than allowing Humphries to tap into Astro Corporation’s communications net. A good chunk of money for practically no risk. Now he was ferrying a kidnapped woman, a Nobel scientist, for the lord’s sweet sake! Humphries was going to have to pay extra for this.
Blyleven had to admit, though, that Humphries had smarts. Stavenger wants to search for Dr. Cardenas? Okay. Who better to spirit her out of Selene for a while than the head of Astro’s security department? Nobody asked any questions when he showed up at the garage already suited up, with another spacesuited person alongside him.
“Got to inspect the communications antennas out on Nubium,” he told the guard checking out the tractors. “We’ll be out about six hours.” Sure enough, three hours into his aimless wandering across the desolate mare, he got a radio signal from Humphries’s people. “Okay, bring her back.”
Smiling again, he leaned his helmet against Cardenas’s so she could hear him through sound conduction.
“We’re going back now,” he said. “They’ll have a team to meet you. You behave yourself when we get to the garage.”
Kris Cardenas felt a huge surge of gratitude well up inside her. We’re going back. We’ll be safe once we’re back inside.
Then she realized that she was still Humphries’s prisoner, and she wasn’t really safe at all.
Dan felt simmering anger as he watched George’s report on the wall-screen of the ship’s wardroom.
“I was in on th’ search of Humphries’s place. It’s big enough to hide a dozen people. We din’t find Dr. Cardenas or any trace of her,” George ended morosely.
“She must still be alive, then,” Dan said. Then he blew out an impatient huff of breath as he realized that George wouldn’t hear his words for another twenty minutes or so.
Pancho was sitting beside him in the wardroom, looking more puzzled than worried as George’s image faded from the wallscreen.