I ordered the screen to black, touched my harness release, and swung my feet over the side of the bed. Sasha hit her release a second time. “Hey, Max, this thing’s jammed.”
I stepped over to the storage locker, ordered it open, and grabbed the bag I had packed six hours earlier. “Really? That’s too bad. I’ll tell maintenance to take a look.”
Sasha swore, tried to free herself, and gave up. Her first reaction was anger. “You did this!”
I looked in the mirror, polished my skull plate with a hand towel, and straightened my collar. “No, I asked Joy to do it.”
Always happy to hear the sound of her name, Joy climbed my pants leg and claimed her place on my shoulder. She was cheerful as always. “Sorry Sasha, but he’s the boss. I had to obey.”
Sasha strained against the harness, hit the release five or six times, and fell back against the pillow. Her expression changed to one of concern. “What will you do?”
“Find your mother, ask her what she stored in my head, and decide what to do with it.”
The kid shook her head in amazement. “You’re nuts. Absolutely nuts. You know that?”
I nodded agreeably. “So I’ve been told, although most people are less charitable and say I’m stupid.”
She gave me one of those looks, the kind that turn me gooey inside, and said, “Take care of yourself.”
I said I would and let myself out. There was lots of traffic, most of which was headed towards the C Deck lock. It was tempting to join the flow and let it carry me along, but I wasn’t that stupid. Assuming the greenies still planned to grab me, and I had no reason to doubt it, the lock was the logical place to do it. No, the crew’s lock, which was located one level down on D Deck, would be a safer bet.
I fought the current like a long-extinct salmon fighting its way upstream and made my way to one of the more utilitarian lift tubes frequented by the crew. And, given the fact that beyond the occasional tryst, passengers had no reason to visit crew quarters, there was nothing to prevent me from doing so. I wound up on a platform with a couple of stewards. They pretended I wasn’t there. No small task where I’m concerned.
The doors opened as the platform stopped on D Deck. The stewards got off and I followed. Europa’s gravity was a good deal lighter than the Earth-normal conditions maintained while the ship was in space. I moved carefully and used the slide step I’d learned on Mars.
The wood paneling had disappeared. Steel bulkheads, liberally sprinkled with safety slogans, morale boosters, and other corporate propaganda passed to either side. I noticed that androids and crew people alike had the ability to look right through me. I found the lock, joined a load of palletized cargo, and cycled through.
The corpies grabbed me as I stepped off the ship. There were four of them, all heavily armed and clearly expecting me. I considered giving them a tussle but it seemed pointless. They located my weapon within a matter of seconds. Joy bailed out of my pocket and was halfway to the deck when a man grabbed her. She struggled, but it was useless. Their leader, a skinny woman with a pink crewcut, glanced at her hand term and nodded. “Yup, he’s the one. And right on time too. Put the zappers on him and get a move on. The doc’s extra pissy today.”
Even I could figure out who “the doc” was. I should have been afraid but was ashamed instead. The fact that they had taken me so easily was worse than whatever lay ahead. It struck at the little bit of pride I had left.
The zappers were shaped like fat bracelets and felt slimy as they wrapped themselves around my wrists. The woman with the crewcut held a control unit in front of my face. I nodded my understanding. The yellow button would “zap” my nervous system, the amber button would induce temporary paralysis, and the red button would stop my heart. I wondered if the woman had orders to stop short of that. I figured she did. Casad would have a hard time getting any information out of a refried brain. That gave me an edge, but a damned thin one.
Crewcut gestured for me to move, and I obeyed. My escorts walked two ahead and two behind. I didn’t see much of the habitat at first. Just a bunch of maintenance ways, freight tubes, and high-gloss corridors. After all, why march a prisoner through the station’s public areas if they didn’t have to? Still, they were forced to lead me across an enormous observation deck about halfway through the trip. It was packed with people just off the Queen. Most stared open-mouthed at the enormous Jupiter that hung overhead. It was beautiful, and there were lots of “oohs” and “aahs” as people struggled to look up through the triple-thick duraplast.
I scanned the crowd for people I knew, came eyeball to eyeball with Bey, and was about to say something when crewcut jammed something hard into the middle of my back. Bey looked surprised, alarmed, and agitated all at once. He pushed an elderly woman out of the way and burrowed into the crowd. A pair of doors marked “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” swung open to admit us, and the open area disappeared behind.
The first hint of our destination was a passing glimpse of a laboratory packed with esoteric equipment and staffed by a crew of lab-coated techies. That signaled me that we had moved from the outer world into Doctor Casad’s private domain, a place populated by facts and figures.
We passed a room filled with light so intense that some of it leaked through the plastifiber walls, heard a rhythmic thumping sound, and smelled something so foul it made crewcut swear out loud. Then we passed through an emergency lock and entered an area that screamed “executive offices” with every inch of its deeply carpeted floor, art-covered walls, and wood-accented, fiber-formed furniture. The reception area was large and rectangular. Everything was spotless and arranged with the same precision that a staff sergeant admires in a footlocker. The reception desk was circular, stood about chest-high, and had been designed to accommodate the four-armed android mounted at the center of it. He, she, or it had paisley-covered skin, four arms, and a no-nonsense attitude. “Dr. Casad is waiting. Take him in.”
I felt my heart beat faster as I was led through double doors and into the presence of the person who had stolen my life. Marsha Casad was smaller that I had expected, and the similarities between her appearance and Sasha’s were made all the more obvious by the fact that they were standing next to each other. I should have been surprised, but wasn’t. Nothing else had gone properly…why would this?
The elder Casad was prettier than the woman who haunted my dreams and had the same brown eyes, pretty face, and shapely body that her daughter did. A fact that the primitive male part of me noticed and reacted to in spite of the fact that to do so was stupid-proof positive that I’m at least three rounds short of a full magazine. But the mother was harder than the daughter, her flesh closer to the bone, her eyes like lasers. Power surrounded her like a cloak and was so much a part of her that it was taken for granted.
Both women stood with their backs to a steel-framed Jupiter. Its storm-lashed surface moved with dreamlike slowness. Sasha spoke first. She was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Max, I really am, but you forgot to disable the com set.”
I swore softly. Of course! The com set had been voice-activated. It had been a simple matter to call a steward, have herself released, and contact her mother. Damn. All that energy, all that effort, only to have it end like this. I shrugged. “Don’t worry, kid. You did what you had to do.”
Sasha nodded, but her chin trembled, and I saw a tear trickle down her cheek. Not so her mother. She was brisk and rather cheerful. Her eyes glittered like those of the robo-snake outside Wamba’s quarters. There was no understanding or mercy in them, just her unrelenting will. The voice was cold and distant. “You are no longer equipped to appreciate the importance of this, Maxon, but thanks to the information stored in your head, a new era is about to begin.”