Sparta expelled a breath and got down to work. From the chemical traces left on the consoles, armrests, handrails, and other surfaces she confirmed that no one besides Grant and McNeil had been on this deck for several weeks.
There were still a jumble of traces, but most were months old, left by the workmen who had refurbished the ship.
Sparta had internalized the computer’s standard access codes. In little more time than it took to slip her gloves off and slide her PIN probes into the ports, she’d offloaded its memory into her own much denser, much more capacious cellular storage mechanisms.
She raced lightly through the first few files of interest.
The cargo manifest was as she had memorized it on the trip from Earth—no additions, no subtractions, no surprises.
Four detachable cargo holds, capable of pressurization.
On this voyage, only the first compartment of Hold A pressurized—the usual foodstuffs, medicines, so on—and that diminutive bit of mass worth two million pounds Sterling, a book in its carrying case. . . .
A few other items in Hold A were insured for relatively large amounts of money per unit of mass: two crates of cigars consigned to none other than Kara Antreen, valued at a thousand pounds each—Sparta smiled at the thought of the stiff Space Board captain savoring her stogies—and four crates of wine, one of which McNeil had already confessed to looting, worth a total of fifteen thousand American dollars and consigned to the same Vincent Darlington who was the new owner of the very famous book.
But there were also items that had cost more to ship than they were worth to insure: the newest BBC epic on videochip, “While Rome Burns,” massing less than a kilo (and almost all of that was protective plastic packaging), wholly uninsured. Although the original had cost millions to produce, the chips were much cheaper to reproduce than an old-fashioned celluloid-based movie or a tape cassette, and indeed (admittedly with some loss of fidelity) the whole show could have been beamed to Venus for the cost of transmission time. Plus an item that had earlier struck Sparta as worthy of close attention: a case of “mis- cellaneous books, 25 kilos, no intrinsic value” consigned to Sondra Sylvester.
The contents of Holds B, C, and D, which had remained in vacuum throughout the flight, were of much less interest —tools, machinery, inert matter (a tonne of carbon in the form of graphite bricks, for example, marginally cheaper to ship from Earth than to extract from the atmospheric carbon dioxide of Venus)—except for the “6 Rolls-Royce HDVM,” Heavy Duty Venus Miners, “at 5.5 tonnes each, total mass 33.5 tonnes gross including separate fuel assemblies,” etc., consigned to the Ishtar Mining Corporation. Sparta satisfied herself that the onboard manifest was identical with the one that had been published.
And she and Proboda had already confirmed its accuracy.
Sparta turned quickly to the mission recorder, which contained the entire public record of the voyage. Bringing the full record to consciousness, with the time-slip that involved, would be a lengthy process. For the time being she contented herself with a rapid internal scan, searching for anomalies.
One anomaly stood out, in data space, in smell space, in harmony space—an explosion, secondary explosions, alarms, calls for help . . . human voices, shocked, coping, accusing—the black-box mission recorder contained the entire sequence of events attendant upon the meteoroid strike.
Sparta heard it through at lightning speed and played it back to herself mentally. It confirmed in fine detail what she had learned in her firsthand look at the site of the accident.
One other anomaly stood out in the mission recorder’s datastream, a conversation, taking place immediately before Grant’s fateful radio message had been beamed to Earth and Venus. “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. . . .”
But in the moments preceding the announcement, Grant and McNeil had not been on the flight deck. . . . The two men’s voices were muffled by the intervening bulkhead.
One voice was momentarily raised to the threshold of audibility—McNeil’s—and his words were stern: “You’re in no position to accuse me of anything. . . .”
Accuse him . . . ?
The whole conversation might be recovered, but Sparta would have to put herself into light trance to do it. And there were other chunks of data that might yield to analysis, but she must set aside the time to deal with them. It was too soon to sacrifice alertness again. For now she had to move quickly. . . .
The fast liner Helios, driven by a powerful gaseouscore atomic reactor, had been a week out of Earth, a week and a day from Port Hesperus, when that somber message had been received throughout the solar system: “This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking . . .”
Within minutes—even before Peter Grant had left the Star Queen’s airlock for the last time—the skipper of Helios had received orders from the Board of Space Control, acting under interplanetary law, to notify his passengers and crew that all transmissions from Helios were being recorded and that any pertinent information thus obtained would be used in subsequent administrative and legal pro- ceedings, including criminal proceedings, if any, bearing on the Star Queen incident.
In other words, everyone aboard Helios was a suspect in the investigation of some as yet unspecified misdeed on Star Queen.
Not without reason. Helios had left Earth on a hyperbolic orbit for Venus two days after the meteoroid struck Star Queen. The departure date for the fast liner had been on the boards for months, but at the last minute, after the meteoroid strike, Helios acquired several new passengers.
Among them was Nikos Pavlakis, representing the owners of the stricken freighter. Another was a man named Percy Farnsworth, representing the Lloyd’s group who had insured the ship, its cargo, and the lives of its crew.
Other passengers had booked the flight long in advance.
There was an emeritus professor of archaeology from Osaka, three Dutch teenage girls setting forth on a grand planetary tour, and half a dozen Arabian mining technicians accompanied by their veiled wives and rebellious children. The Dutch girls rather relished the notion of being suspected of interplanetary crime, while Sondra Sylvester, another passenger who had booked in advance, did not. Sylvester’s young travelling companion, Nancybeth Mokoroa, was simply bored rigid by the whole affair.
These were not the sort of passengers who mixed easily: the Japanese professor smiled and kept to himself, the Arabs kept to themselves without bothering to smile. The teenagers staggered about in their high-heeled shoes during periods of constant acceleration and twitched uncomfortably in their unaccustomed tight dresses, whether under acceleration or not, and at all times made a point of ogling the one unaccompanied male passenger over fifteen and under thirty. He did not return their compliment.
He was Blake Redfield, a last minute addition to the manifest who kept very much to himself throughout the voyage.
Such social encounters as did occur took place in the ship’s lounge. There Nikos Pavlakis did his nervous best to be gracious to his client Sondra Sylvester whenever their paths crossed. That wasn’t often, as she generally avoided him. The poor man was distracted with worry anyway; he spent most of his time nursing a solitary ouzo and a plastic bag of Kalamata olives. Farnsworth, the insurance man, was often to be found lurking in the nearby shadows, sipping on a bulb of straight gin and ostentatiously glowering at Pavlakis. Pavlakis and Sylvester both made it a point to avoid Farnsworth altogether.
But it was in the lounge, not long after Grant’s public sacrifice, that Sylvester found Farnsworth plying Nancybeth with a warm bulb of Calvados. The middle-aged man and the twenty-year-old woman were floating, weightless and slightly giddy, before a spectacular backdrop of real stars, and the sight infuriated Sylvester—as Nancybeth had no doubt intended. Before approaching them Sylvester thought about the situation—what, after all, should she care? The girl was possessed of heart-stopping beauty, but she had the loyalty of a mink. Nevertheless, Sylvester felt she could not afford to ignore the sly Farnsworth any longer.
Nancybeth watched Sylvester’s approach, her malice diffused only slightly by weightlessness and alcohol. “ ’Lo, Sondra. Meet m’ friend Prissy Barnsworth.”
“Percy Farnsworth, Mrs. Sylvester.” One did not get to one’s feet in microgravity, but Farnsworth straightened admirably nonetheless, and tucked his chin in a credible bow.
Sylvester looked him over with distaste: although he was approaching fifty, Farnsworth affected the look of a young army officer, off duty for the weekend to do a bit of pheasant slaughtering, say—Sylvester’s recent acquaintance at the Salisbury proving grounds, Lieutenant Colonel Witherspoon, was a model of the type. Farnsworth had the mustache and the elbow-patched shooting jacket and the rigid set of the neck right down. The public school accent and the clipped Desert Rat diction were strictly secondhand, however.