She wanted to tell him. She wanted to sob against his chest, blubbering her entire story while he stroked her hair. But she couldn't. If she told him what was happening, that might somehow jeopardize her assignment. It might be cancelled, and she could not allow that for any reason; this was probably her last chance to get back into deep space. And she couldn't let anything stand in the way of that.
Besides, she wasn't entirely sure she could trust him. And even if he wasn't involved in this, whoever was after her could use him against her.
She shook her head. "I just can't," she repeated.
"If that's the way you want it…"
"That's the way it has to be."
Darcy nodded. "One thing is certain: you can't stay here tonight. They- whoever they are-might return."
"Someone is expecting to contact me here."
"You can leave a message. You're coming home with me tonight, where security is considerably tighter."
"But-"
"No buts. Make your call, and we'll leave. And don't tell them where you'll be. Just give them this number." He spoke five digits. "It's unlisted and private."
He was right. She would be much safer with him tonight. And she didn't want to be alone.
She took a step back, out of his grasp, then looked around the room. They had trashed her quarters thoroughly.
Why? What were they looking for?
The pendant.
She fingered the lump of dull gray metal hanging from its chain around her neck. It had to be the pendant. It had saved her once.
But that didn't make sense. The first attack, in her rooms back on Fleet Base, had occurred before she had possessed the pendant. Yet, why else would her rooms here in Luna City be searched?
The pendant was part of it. Although it probably wasn't the only cause for what had been happening to her, it might explain some of it.
But why were they after her in the first place? Why did they want her dead?
Perhaps it was her assignment with Survey Service. Those behind Hyatt's impostor would want her out of the way if they thought she might be sent after him.
And then there was Aldebaran.
She stepped around a pile of clothing, went to the phone and placed a call to the Survey Service duty desk. She kept visual off so they would see neither Darcy nor the condition of the room. They would think she was merely undressed.
She could do nothing to let Clayton know.
Two extremely capable-looking young men in Luna City police uniforms stood guard outside the entrance to the mayor's apartment. The quarters were large and luxurious, but still without the more expensive wood furnishings.
Susan slept in a guest room, on a huge round bed, beneath an old-fashioned feather comforter, alone. Under ordinary circumstances she and Darcy would have slept together, but Susan was too confused for that now. Too much had happened during the past few days, too much for which she had absolutely no explanation. Darcy understood, and respected her privacy.
Before she went to bed she checked her LIN/C. According to its memory circuits, Sam Darcy was dead. Yet she remembered him being alive only a few weeks ago, when she had watched him give a holo-vid address beamed to Earth from Luna City-a speech condemning lunar independence. Obviously at that time there had been no censoring of news from Luna City. At least, as she remembered it. But her LIN/C had not recorded a holo-vid broadcast originating from Luna City in quite some time.
She checked, as well, what information her LIN/C contained concerning the solar power satellite. Its memory contained no reference to the satellite's destruction. In her own memory, however, the satellite had been destroyed three months ago.
Chapter Thirteen
The nightmare came, as it had nearly every sleep period for the past ten years, sharp and clear, as if played directly into her mind through her LIN/C.
Heat. The stifling rage of fire in a confined space. Smoke. And the choking fumes of burning insulation.
She approached the air-tight door to Engineering Department's crew's quarters and brought the back of her hand to within a few inches of its polished metal surface. It radiated sufficient heat to instantly blister her flesh.
Searching by feel, she groped for the dogging wrench she knew should be in its rack beside the door. Twice her hand came off the bulkhead minus skin before she found it. She put it to one of the dogs and strained. The dog moved grudgingly, but finally gave.
Another dog…Another…Six in all. All tight due to metal expanding in the tremendous heat.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, they were all loose. Using the dogging wrench, she pushed the door inward.
Flames leaped out at her, singeing her hair and blistering the flesh on her face and the backs of her hands. Through the wall of fire she saw others, men and women, rushing toward the open hatch, then forced back by the heat and flames.
They were members of her crew. And they were trapped in there.
Movement to her right, beyond the wall of flames in a dark corner of the compartment, caught her attention. She turned toward the movement.
Then nothing…
Susan woke in the middle of the night, screaming, the charred and twisted bodies of nearly three hundred dead hanging before her eyes. The nightmare had been particularly bad this time. And, as always, it had been incomplete.
Had she jumped through that wall of flame in an attempt to save those others? That was the scenario which had emerged during her court-martial, but she could not be sure. She simply couldn't remember. For all she knew, she might have turned and ran. The last thing she remembered was turning toward sudden movement in a corner of the compartment. Then nothing.
And she couldn't use her LIN/C to verify the occurrence. For some reason, the device had not recorded any events her conscious mind had not registered. The technicians couldn't explain it, but there was simply no record.
Chapter Fourteen
She spent most of the following two days in Darcy's apartment, studying the chips Karl had supplied, familiarizing herself with the LIN/C reports of four of the best operatives the Survey Service had ever produced. In spite of their impressive abilities, they had not succeeded in apprehending Hyatt's impostor, and all four had died.
Several hours both days were spent leaning on the catwalk railing overlooking hangar four, gazing down at the small spacecraft huddled in one corner under brilliant overhead lights. The technicians no longer crawled over its outer hull. Now, the hatch stood open and an occasional white-clad tech entered, laden with instruments, only to emerge empty handed minutes or even hours later.
As she watched, she had to continually remind herself that the ship was being readied for her. After ten years, she would again pilot a ship. That ship was not a massive Fleet cruiser, or even a destroyer, but it was hers, and it would again take her beyond Luna's orbit.
Late the second day, she received a call from Clayton. "You're hard to reach," he said as his image materialized on the flat screen in front of her. Behind him she recognized the wall of a pay phone booth.
"There's good reason." She told him about her ransacked apartment.
"Then they were searching for something," he said.
"So it appears. I think it might be the pendant."
Clayton nodded. "I have to talk to you. Meet me in your quarters in half an hour." He clicked off without another word.
Chapter Fifteen
Clayton sat in the jumbled chaos of Susan's apartment as she entered, his huge frame nearly overflowing the room's only chair. But he no longer looked sloppy-fat, simply large. And he no longer wore the soiled and tattered jumpsuit she had last seen him in. Instead, he was dressed in the powder blue of the Survey Service, silver captain's stripes sewn on his sleeves. The beard, too, was gone.