“I’m pretty sure the attack on the Galactic was faked.”
Her eyes slid momentarily shut, and her lips tightened. “What makes you think so?”
“I’m still working on the details. I’ll give you everything I have when I can.”
“I don’t see how it’s possible, Mac.”
He explained how it might have been managed.
“That implies,” she said, “Terranova, too.”
“Yes.”
“How sure are you, Mac?”
“I don’t think there’s much question.”
Hutch’s dark eyes smoldered. “If you’re right, you know what it means about Valya.”
He knew. God help him, he knew. “But I don’t see how she could have managed it.”
“Damn,” she said. “It never did feel right.”
“I thought the same thing.”
“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t going to be easy on you.”
“In what way?”
“Come on, Mac. I’m not blind.”
“It’s not a problem.”
“Okay.” She played with a pen. Dropped it on her desktop. The silence stretched out. “All right. Let me get out of your way.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Nothing for the moment. Until I find out what’s going on at Origins. Maybe that’s faked, too. We’re going to want to take a look at the Ophiuchi monitor.”
“Why?”
“To nail things down.”
“How do you figure she did it? Did she rig the monitor in some way?”
“That’s the way I’d have done it.”
“Tell me how.”
“All Valya had to do was load a doctored chip into it. If she did that, what we saw at Terranova, the sighting, everything, would have been pure showbiz.”
“But we saw the rock. We saw it from the ship. We all but landed on it. It was really there.”
“Sure. But you didn’t see the moonriders. You didn’t see what put it on course for Terranova.”
“You’re saying it could have been an ordinary ship.”
“Yes.”
“One of ours?”
“Sure. The asteroid wasn’t that big. Not like the one at Capella. Any of the major corporates could have managed it.”
“That might explain why we had to go back to the monitor to do repairs.”
“I wasn’t aware of that. You had to repair the monitor?”
“Yes. It was in The National’s account.”
“I missed it. And I guess I didn’t look as closely as I should have at the trip report.”
“She was removing the chip,” said MacAllister.
“Sure.” Hutch took a deep breath. “How do you explain what happened to Amy?”
“Bought and paid for? Like Valya?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe that.”
AN HOUR LATER he got through to Delesandro. She recognized his name. “It’s quite an honor, Mr. MacAllister,” she said. “Is there something I can do for you?”
She was a middle-aged woman. Light brown hair, dark blue sweater thrown over her shoulders, fireplace visible off to one side. A bookcase behind her. She looked scared.
“Yes, Dr. Delesandro. I think there is. I wanted to talk to you about your work in The Planetary Field Journal. From Capella.”
She tugged at the sweater. “That’s a few years back.”
“Doctor, you’re aware of the incident at Capella last week.”
“Of course.”
“The asteroid in question was of a significant size. Apparently, judging by your work, there were only a handful in the entire system that were larger.”
“That’s correct.” Her voice was soft. He had to strain to hear her.
“The asteroid that hit the Galactic doesn’t appear anywhere in your report.”
“Yes, I know. I obviously missed it. When I did the survey.”
“How would that happen?”
She held up one braceleted arm in a who-knows gesture. “Planetary systems are very big, Mr. MacAllister. A lot of empty space.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“I’d be surprised if I hadn’t missed others.”
“Really?”
“Any general survey like mine is necessarily a hit-or-miss proposition. We look at the overall structure of a system; we don’t try to categorize everything.”
“But the asteroid would have been somewhere in the inner system.”
“Who knows? If these moonrider creatures have the capability they seem to possess, it might have come from anywhere.”
“I see.”
“Was there anything else I can help you with?” She was trying hard to look at ease.
“Yes. My information is that a survey of this type, by its nature, does try to perform a comprehensive sweep.”
“‘Comprehensive’ is a relative term, Mr. MacAllister.”
“Doctor, doesn’t it strike you as odd that the asteroid — the very large asteroid — that you didn’t notice happened to be the one that struck the Galactic?”
She swallowed. “Not at all. I — ”
“Do you think there might be any others of that size you missed?”
“I don’t know. I really do not know. It’s certainly possible. Likely, in fact.”
“I understand you’re acquainted with Charlie Dryden.” He made it a simple statement of fact.
She had to think it over. “Not well,” she said.
“You understand, Doctor, that Dryden and his people conspired to put lives at risk. That you were party to that conspiracy.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. MacAllister. But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She looked like a cornered rabbit. The woman wasn’t used to lying. “Let me tell you what happened,” he said. “During the survey mission you discovered that one of the asteroids, a big one, was going to have a close encounter with Alpha II. Literally skim the top of the atmosphere.
“You came home and started putting your results together. During that period, you met Dryden at the Bannerman Award ceremony at Broken Brook. Maybe you knew him earlier. I don’t know. But during the course of the event, you mentioned the asteroid. He got interested, and either then or later, he asked you to omit it from your report. And paid a considerable sum in exchange for your forgetting about it altogether.”
“Mr. MacAllister, you have a wild imagination. For God’s sake, I wouldn’t tamper with the results of a study like that. Ask any of my colleagues. They know I wouldn’t.”
“Anybody can make a mistake, Doctor.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“You can listen now, or you can read about it in The National.”
“This is crazy,” she said, and broke the connection.
DECISIONS FOR THE upcoming issue were only two days away. MacAllister went back to reading copy, analyses by Ar-leigh Grant (“The Wolf in the Garden: Why the Greenhouse War Is Going Nowhere”) and Chia Talbott (“Looking Back from the Parthenon”). There was also a clutch of book reviews, including one that was going to generate an angry reaction from the author, a prize-winning historian who had apparently lost his ability to think straight. He was interrupted periodically by calls, mostly from his writers.
One was from Delesandro.
“Okay,” she said. She was sitting straight up.
“Okay what, Doctor?”
“You’re right. But I didn’t have any idea what it was about. I didn’t know what he intended to do until I heard the reports that it would hit the hotel.”
He was thinking about Mark Twain again. “They deliberately built the hotel in its path.”
“Apparently so.”
“Apparently?”
“Yes. That’s what they did.”
“It was a nice piece of engineering. They needed perfect timing.”
“Yes. Yes, they did.”
“When you realized what they’d done, did you talk to him about it?”