“Great!” Wanamaker snapped. “She’s in a potential enemy’s camp and we can’t even track her movements.”
“If she gets outside again the satellites’ll pick up her signal,” said the chief tech, hopefully.
“If she gets outside again,” Wanamaker muttered.
“Not while the solar storm’s in progress,” said one of the younger techs, wide-eyed with worry. “Radiation level’s too high. It’d be suicide.”
Rumors spread through a tightly knit community such as Selene like ripples widening across a pond. One comm tech complained to a fellow Astro employee about the tongue-lashing Wanamaker gave to everyone in the communications center. The Astro employee mentioned to her husband that Pancho Lane had disappeared down at the Astro base near the south pole. Her husband told his favorite bartender that Pancho Lane had gone missing. “Probably shacked up with some guy, if I know Pancho,” he added, grinning.
At that point the rumor bifurcated. One branch claimed that Pancho had run off with some guy from Nairobi Industries. The other solemnly insisted that she had been kidnapped, probably by Martin Humphries or some of his people.
Within hours, before Wanamaker or anyone in the Astro security office could even begin to clamp down a lid on the story, Selene was buzzing with the rumor that Pancho was either off on a love tryst or kidnapped and probably dead.
Nodon heard the story during his first hours of work as a maintenance technician in the big, echoing garage that housed the tractors and tour busses that went out onto the surface of Alphonsus’s crater floor. He went through the motions of his new job and, as soon as his shift ended, hurried up into the “basement” to find Fuchs.
Fuchs was not at the stacks of shelving where Nodon and the others had met him before. Nodon fidgeted nervously, not knowing whether he should start searching through the dimly lit walkways or wait where he was for Fuchs to return. A maintenance robot came trundling along the walkway, its red dome light blinking. Nodon froze, plastering his back against the storeroom shelves. The robot rolled past, squeaking slightly. The maintenance robot needs maintenance, Nodon thought.
Half a minute behind the robot came Lars Fuchs, in his usual black pullover and slacks, and the usual dark scowl on his face.
“Kidnapped?” Fuchs gasped when Nodon told him the tale.
“Perhaps dead,” the Mongol added.
“Humphries did this?”
To his credit, Nodon admitted, “I don’t know. No one seems to know.”
“It couldn’t be anybody else,” Fuchs growled.
Nodon agreed with a nod.
“Down at the south pole, you say? They captured her down there?”
“That is the story. Some say she has run off with a lover.”
“Pancho wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have to. If she wanted a lover she’d do it right here in Selene, where she’s safe.”
Nodon said nothing.
“It’s got to be Humphries,” Fuchs muttered, as much to himself as his companion. “He’s probably having her taken to his mansion, down below.”
“Do you think so?”
“Even if he hasn’t, that’s where he is. We’ve got to get in there. And quickly.”
Daniel Tsavo tried to hide his nervousness as he toured Pancho through the construction areas and finally down into the finished section of the Nairobi base, where he and the other corporate executives resided. It was blessedly quiet down at this lowest level; the constant battering noise of the twenty-four-hour-a-day construction was muffled by thick airtight hatches and acoustical insulation. As they walked along the carpeted corridor toward the executive dining room, Tsavo kept Pancho on his right, as he had done all through the brief tour, so that he could hear the microreceiver embedded in his left ear without being obvious about it.
It troubled him that Nobuhiko Yamagata himself was speeding to the base on a high-g rocket from Japan. The interrogation team had already arrived, but their work was suspended until Yamagata arrived.
Pancho, meanwhile, was trying to sort out in her mind everything she had seen in this brief tour of the unfinished base. It’s enormous! she thought. They’re not just building a phase-one facility here, they’re putting up a whole city, all in one shot. This place’ll be just as big as Selene.