He gazed out across the water, its thick green surface crowded with long-legged algae harvesters like water skates on a pond, their stainless steel manifolds reflecting the golden sunlight of early morning. The commander was staring past them, straight at the sun—probably wishing he had a different view of it, one without a lot of muggy atmosphere in the way. After a few moments he turned to Sparta, clearing his throat roughly. “Okay. Seems Inspector Bernstein thinks highly of you. She wrote you a good ER. We’re giving you a solo.”
Sparta’s pulse raced; after two years, the prospect of a mission of her own! “I’mgrateful for her recommendation.”
“I’ll bet you are. Especially since you never thought she’d let you out of her grasp.”
Sparta allowed herself to smile. “Well sir, I admit I was getting to know Newark better than I ever wanted to.”
“No guarantee you won’t go back there when this is over, Troy. Depends.”
“What’s the assignment, Commander?”
“TDY to Port Hesperus. The Star Queen thing.
Shouldn’t be too hairy. Either the ship was holed by a meteoroid or it wasn’t, in which case it broke or somebody broke it. The owner and most of the people concerned are already on their way to Port Hesperus in Helios, but we’ll get you there first. You’ll be working with a guy named Proboda from the local. He’s got seniority, but you’re in charge. Which reminds me . . .” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a leather folder. “Since we don’t want the locals to push you around”—he flipped open the folder to reveal a gold shield—”you’re promoted.”
He handed it to her. “Here’s the visual aid. Sliver in the case. The electronics are already in the system.”
Sparta took the badge case in both hands and studied the intricate shield. A delicate flush bloomed on her cheekbones.
The commander watched her a moment, then said abruptly, “Sorry there’s no time for ceremony, Inspector.
Congratulations anyway.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Here’s your ride now.” She turned with him as a lowslung white helicopter dropped shrieking toward the helipad in front of the Council of Worlds tower. It touched down gently, its turbines spinning down to idle, its rotors whistling in lazy circles. “Forget your personal gear, you can req what you need,” said the commander. “Within reason, of course. You’ve got a shuttle to catch at Newark and a torch waiting in orbit. Everything you need to know is in the system. We’ll update you if we have to.”
She was startled at her sudden impending departure, but she tried not to show it. “One question, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why anyone from Earth Central, sir? Why not leave the investigation to Port Hesperus?”
“Port Hesperus is short a body. Captain Antreen is in charge there; she looked at what we had available and asked for you by name.” The commander grinned again.
“Be grateful to her. Bernstein never would have let you out of Customs.”
Sparta saluted and walked briskly toward the waiting helicopter. The commander watched her go on with undisguised envy.
Beside its three-person crew the torch-powered cutter carried Sparta and no one else. The slender white ship, bearing the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control, streaked sunward on a hyperbolic orbit and closed on Port Hesperus a week after Sparta’s hasty Earthside promotion. Two days out, less than a week from rendezvous with Port Hesperus, a radio message came through.
“This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking. Engineering Officer McNeil and I have jointly concluded that there is sufficient oxygen remaining for one man . . .”
Earth Central was on the horn to Sparta in less than an hour; the commander’s lined and blackened face appeared on the videoplate in the cutter’s comm shack. “All right, Troy, this adds a wrinkle. We need to know whether this crewman went out the airlock this morning on his own, or did he get pushed?”
“Yes, sir. Are the dossiers I requested on the Helios passengers available?”
There was a minute’s delay while her words made the trip to Earth and his made their way back. “We’re squirting you with what we have on the blackchannels,” he said. “I can tell you that you’re dealing with an odd bunch there.
A guy working for the insurance people who’s a known con—they know it too, so apparently it’s all right with them. A woman into heavy machinery and old books. Her temperamental girlfriend. A guy who owns a spaceship with a history so odd it had to have its name changed.
Another guy with practically no history at all.”
“Thanks, Commander.”
A minute later he said, “Watch yourself, Inspector.” He signed off.
Three days before arriving at Port Hesperus, the cutter crossed Helios’s path and a day after that, Star Queen’s. If Sparta had had a telescope, she could have looked at the fast ships with the perspective of a cosmic observer. But it was the people aboard them that interested her.
With its mighty torch blazing, the cutter decelerated toward the great rings and spokes and cylinders of Port Hesperus, that whole spinning conglomerate of a space station hanging in high orbit over the dazzling clouds of Venus, with its axis pointing straight at the center of the planet.
At the radiation perimeter the cutter’s torch flamed out.
It approached under chemical power, gingerly.
Port Hesperus was one of the triumphs of 21st-century engineering, built almost entirely from the raw materials of captured asteroids. Exploiting the resources of the planet’s surface, it had paid back its cost within two decades; it currently housed a hundred thousand people in conditions that ninetenths of Earth’s population would have considered luxurious. Parks, for example, and green things . . . The great glass central sphere of the station was filled with lush gardens, some of them in tribute to the old dreams of Venus as a world of swamps and jungles. Come to Venus and you could see jungles, all right, as long as you stuck to the paths of Port Hesperus’s brilliantly lit central sphere. Don’t try to visit the surface of the planet, don’t even ask. Of the five human beings who had made the attempt in armored and heat-shielded landers, only two had returned to tell the tale.
Sparta’s cutter matched spin with the star-side docking bay under chemical power; in fifteen minutes, under automated landing controls, it had made it into the huge axial bay, crowded with local traffic.
The high-security side of the docking bay was all business, no nonsense, without amenities—all white steel and black glass, pipes and hoses and blinking lights. A tube like a giant leech closed over the cutter’s lock, the air slammed into it under high pressure, and the cutter’s hatch popped.
Sparta clapped her hands over her painful ears. Floating in the airlock, she found herself suddenly face-to-face with a delegation from the local Board of Space Control headquarters, advancing toward her in the docking tube.
They didn’t look all that friendly.
The tallest of the locals facing her was the Port Hesperus unit captain, Kara Antreen. She was dressed in a gray wool suit worth a month of her respectable salary; her gray hair was cut in a severe pageboy, and her pale gray eyes fixed on Sparta from beneath thick black brows.
Even without her hands over her ears, Sparta was at a social disadvantage. It was this matter of her clothes. She had found little to requisition from ship’s stores, despite the commander’s invitation—the quartermaster’s imagi- nation seemed limited to gym shorts, personal care products, near-beer, and “entertainment” items emphasizing soft-porn videochips—so besides picking up a few changes of socks and underwear and acquiring a comb and a toothbrush, she’d arrived at Port Hesperus still wearing the mufti of an assistant inspector assigned to shuttleport customs and entry—that is, the plainclothes disguise of a bribable dock rat: plastic patch-pocket cargo pants, olive drab tank top, polymer canvas windbreaker. The outfit was distinctly on the casual side, but at least it was neat and clean.
“Ellen Troy, Captain,” Sparta said. “I look forward to working with you and your people.”
“Troy.” Antreen smiled then, lessening the tension.
“And we look forward to working with you. Any cooperation we can give you—anything at all—we want to be there helping out.”
“That’s very . . .”
“Understood?”
“Certainly, Captain. Thanks.”
Antreen extended her hand; they shook vigorously.
“Inspector Troy, this is my aide Lieutenant Kitamuki. And this is Inspector Proboda.”
Sparta shook hands with the others—Kitamuki, a slender woman with long black hair knotted back and floating over one shoulder in a sinuous ponytail, Proboda, a roughhewn blond male giant, Polish or maybe Ukrainian, with a touch of the old hell-for-leather cossacks about his slanted eyes. Antreen was all smiles, but her two sidekicks studied Sparta as if considering arresting her on the spot.
“Let’s get into some gravity,” Antreen said. “We’ll show you to your quarters, Troy. And when you’re settled we’ll see if we can clear off a desk for you at unit HQ.”