Voyagers III - Star Brothers (24 page)

His star brother slowed Stoner’s heartbeat and breathing rate. His whole body, rigid with the electrical shocks, spine arched, fingers and toes clenched so hard that tendons were popping, it all relaxed as if Stoner had slipped off into a deep and restful sleep. Or death.

But he heard the voices from the ceiling speaker.

“You’ve gone too far!”

“Not at all. Look at that EEG; have you ever seen anything like it before?”

No response.

“A normal brain would show a scrambled set of jagged peaks and troughs. His curves are as gentle as a sleeping baby’s. It’s fantastic!”

“Hasn’t he had enough for today?”

“I want to try a couple more shocks, just to see if we can break him out of the shell he’s gone into.”

“You’ll kill him!”

“I doubt that we could kill him if we tried.”

“May I remind you that the purpose of these experiments is to determine why he survived cryonic immersion and thawing, not to chop him up into bloody little scraps!”

“Interesting choice of words, Doctor.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

“Because tomorrow I’m going to see if he can regenerate significant parts of his body. We’ll start by amputating a finger.”

“God! You can’t be serious!”

“Never more serious. And don’t try to interfere. I’m in charge here, and I’m going to find out what makes that man tick if I have to take him apart like an old windup clock.”

The words would have struck fear into Stoner’s battered consciousness if his star brother had allowed a man’s normal hormonal reactions. Instead he lay there on the gurney perfectly still, utterly relaxed, seemingly unconscious or in a deep coma.

But his mind was racing. I know those voices! I know who they are!

Vic Tomasso paced nervously back and forth across the length of the balcony. His apartment was two floors below the penthouse of one of the tallest residential towers in Hilo. On a normal weekend afternoon he would have been sitting out in the sunshine, improving his tan while alternately watching the professional football games on TV and the women frolicking on the golden sandy beach in their minuscule swim suits.

This was not a normal weekend.

He could feel the searing heat of Jo’s suspicions of him. Hell, even if he had been totally innocent it would be natural for her to cast a distrustful eye at the man she thought she had planted in Hsen’s camp. But Jo glowered at him like the burning end of a red-hot branding iron. Even though she tried to control herself and not reveal her inner thoughts, the fury and suspicion that seethed within her glowed hot as hellfire.

He had volunteered to an interrogation under truth drugs. “I might remember something Hsen or his people said that my conscious mind doesn’t recall,” he had said to Jo. She had nodded and approved the interrogation. Tomasso dutifully reported to the security office and was interrogated by a team that included the physician whom he had been sleeping with for the past four months. She believed that Vic truly loved her. The drug she injected into his bloodstream was nothing more than a mild tranquilizer. Vic passed the test easily.

Still, the pressure was mounting. Jo would not be satisfied until she found the traitors in her midst. He knew that she had people backtracking every phone call he had made over the past several weeks, trying to trace every move he had made. Tomasso worried about that last call he had made to Hsen, telling him that Stoner was returning early from Moscow. The number he had actually called was another apartment in Hilo; a “girlfriend” who in reality was an employee of Pacific Commerce’s intelligence operations. The call had been relayed to Hsen in Hong Kong from her phone.

That should be safe enough, Tomasso told himself, pacing endlessly across the balcony. Safe enough.

But Jo was like an avenging angel, fiery sword in hand, searching for dragons to slay. Tomasso felt like a very small dragon; more like a defenseless lizard.

If I run, that’ll prove to her that I was in on the operation. Prove to her that I’ve been working for Hsen.

Pace the length of the balcony, reach the end and turn back again.

But if I stay she’ll grab me sooner or later. Even if she doesn’t get any real evidence against me. She suspects and that’ll be enough for her. She’ll have her own Italian bodyguards grab me and squirt
real
truth serum into my veins. Or worse.

The far end of the balcony. Turn around and pace the other way. Ignore the beach, the sunlight and surfers and palm trees. Tomasso was looking inward, trying to discern his own future.

She’ll make me talk and once I do I’m a dead man. But if I run to Hsen he’ll figure I’ve outlived my usefulness to him. I’m dead either way!

There was only one way out, one bargaining chip remaining with which to buy his life. He had been holding it back, carefully keeping it to himself until the right moment. His ace in the hole.

Well, Tomasso said to himself, if you don’t use it now you might not live to use it later.

Nodding to himself, convinced he had no other path to safety, he drove to a shopping mall in downtown Hilo and picked out a public telephone at random. Pecking out the same “girlfriend”’s number, once he connected with her answering machine he spoke the code phrase that automatically transferred his call to Hsen’s office in Hong Kong.

Hsen was not there, said the Chinese beauty whose face appeared on the tiny phone screen. She looked too perfect, too flawless, to be anything but a computer graphic.

“Tell Hsen that Vanguard Industries has a secret operation going on the Moon, a special base called Delphi, far out on the Mare Imbrium.”

The simulated woman smiled blandly and waited for more information.

“Nobody on the board of directors knows about it,” Tomasso went on, nervous, glancing out toward the balcony, as if expecting Jo herself to suddenly materialize there, desperately hoping he had not been followed by anyone. “Ms. Camerata and her husband…they’re building a starship there. A ship that will be able to fly out of the solar system. I think they intend to send it back to the planet that the alien ship came from.”

Lela Obiri spent every night in dread. Out in the forest, wrapped in her sleeping bag against the chill damp darkness, listening to the hootings and growls floating through the night, she slept fitfully if at all. Gradually she had grown accustomed to the natural sounds of the forest, and during the day she had come to love this emerald world with its mottled sunlight and clean sparkling streams. The thick foliage of the forest closed in like a green womb, surrounding her, enfolding her in its leafy arms. Each day she walked through this primeval universe, the only human being in a new Eden, alone with brilliant flashing birds and scampering chattering monkeys.

Yet she knew she was not really alone. Koku was shambling through the woods up ahead of her, sniffing the shrubs and pristine air, bringing scents to Lela’s mind that she had never known before. Seeing the green world through Koku’s eyes made it a true paradise, and she began to love the forest as he did.

Yet the night frightened her. Not because of the cold mist that condensed dripping from every leaf. Nor because of the predators that lurked in the darkness. Those she understood and accepted. They would never attack a human. Her sleeping bag was guarded by a tiny electronic transmitter that surrounded the area out to a dozen meters with a nerve-jangling field that would frighten off even a starving jackal.

There were other humans out there in the trees. That is what frightened Lela. There should be no one except herself in this sector of the reserve, yet she kept hearing the distant faint sounds of men talking, occasional clinks of metal on metal, even a whiff of tobacco smoke now and then.

They were stalking her. They had started by going after Koku, but now they were following Lela. They could never keep up with Koku once the gorilla was warned to stay away from them. So they were following Lela. Not merely following her, either, but constantly pushing between Lela and the territory that Koku was supposed to reach. They kept far enough away so that she could not see them. But at least once each day a stray breeze carried fresh proof of their presence.

Or am I being paranoid? Lela asked herself. Alone in the woods, city girl, and you see danger behind every bush. Once again she tried to radio back to headquarters, and once again she got nothing but screeching static on her hand-sized radio. Interference. Was the radio being jammed? How much safer she would feel if she could talk to Professor Yeboa or the captain in charge of the reserve’s rangers. She longed to hear a helicopter thrumming high above, scanning the trees with its arrays of sensors.

Koku was well ahead of her, but still far from the territory where his mates were waiting for him. It was going to be difficult enough to have the tame-born young male take up a natural life in this habitat. Worrying about poachers made matters infinitely worse.

After days of inner turmoil, Lela finally made up her mind. Koku could take care of himself for a day or so. She would confront the poachers and make them know that they would be apprehended and jailed if they did not leave the reserve immediately. Inwardly she was frightened that they might kill her, but she forced such fears from her conscious mind. Nothing like that had happened in years, decades. Besides, both she and Koku were being tracked by locator satellites. Her voice radio might be jammed, but the beam of her locator transmitter was on an entirely different frequency. Even if someone jammed it, the loss of signal by the satellite would itself alert headquarters and a squad of rangers would start out immediately to search for her.

So she took her courage in her hands that morning and doubled back along the steep ridge she had been following. The rising sun was just starting to burn off the chill gray mist. The trail along the ridge was wet, the grass slippery.

Koku had awakened with the sunrise. When Lela closed her eyes she could see another part of the forest, taste the delicious leaves he delicately stripped from the
galium
vines around him, rejoice in the strength and freedom he felt.

Then she heard voices. Unmistakable. Her eyes wide open now, visions of Koku fading into the back of her mind, she ducked low and crept slowly, carefully through the thick enfolding bushes toward the sounds, as silent as she could be without stopping altogether. A tendril of smoke rose from behind the bushes off to her left. Lela’s nose wrinkled at the smell of grease burning.

With newfound cunning she flattened herself on the damp grass and slithered around a thick clump of bush. There were four of them, two black men and two white. Just starting to break camp. One of the whites kicked loose dirt onto their small fire. They all wore khaki shirts and trousers, and each of them carried sidearms. Lela saw rifles stacked next to one of their sleeping bags. Five bags, she counted. Yet she saw only four men.

“What have we here?” a deep voice boomed out.

Lela scrambled to her feet. A big, ruddy-faced redheaded man was grinning at her, a huge rifle cradled in his bare arms.

The other four men dashed up to them.

“Well, well, well,” said one of the other whites. “It’s the bride of the gorilla herself!”

CHICAGO

FROM behind the roadblock, the TV news reporter quickly sprayed her hair so it would not blow untidily in the early autumn breeze.

It was an unusually warm October afternoon out on Interstate 80, ten miles beyond the city line. The sun shone serenely out of a pale blue sky washed by a morning shower. Off to the east puffy white clouds were building up by the lake shore. The woods on the far side of the highway were glorious in their autumnal reds and golds.

From the slight rise in the ground where the cameraman stood, I—80 stretched out to the horizon, a snarling metallic snake filled with fuming automobiles, vans, trucks, even school buses. Heat waves rose from the highway where the traffic stood tangled and stopped, glittering and growling in the sunlight. A roadblock of National Guard tanks parked shoulder to shoulder across the highway, median divider and all, had stopped the vehicles desperately trying to leave Chicago. National Guard soldiers in mottled camouflage uniforms, wearing their battle helmets and carrying assault rifles, were turning the cars around and heading them back toward the city.

The TV reporter, standing just outside the mobile news van with a big numeral nine painted on its side, made a final check of her appearance in the full-length mirror that hung on the inside of the open van door, then walked quickly up to the spot where the cameraman stood.

They made an almost laughable contrast. The reporter was neatly turned out in a pale silk blouse, pleated skirt, and beige jacket—and muddy, sturdy, comfortable jogging shoes. The Channel 9 pin on her jacket’s lapel was actually her microphone, sensitive to a range of about three yards. The cameraman wore a grease-stained sweat shirt and jeans. He was bald, fat, and had tattoos on both his forearms. His camera was no larger than one of his ham-sized hands. Its monitoring screen was the size of a postage stamp.

“I got all the traffic footage I need,” he said. Pointing toward a woman soldier bearing gold oak leaves on her shoulders, he said, “There’s the major in charge of this mess. She’s waitin’ for you to interview her.”

The major was gray-haired and had a face as hard as armor plate. She was not a happy person.

The reporter stood before the camera and put on her professional smile. “This is Becky Murtaugh on Interstate 80 about ten miles west of the city. With me is Major,” she peered quickly at the major’s name tag, “Wallinsky of the Illinois National Guard.”

Turning slightly, but making certain her face was still on camera, the reporter asked, “Major, how do you feel about stopping all these people who want to leave the city?”

The major grimaced. “I feel like hell! But I got my orders. We’re supposed to keep the city sealed off in order to stop the spread of the plague.”

Someone started honking his car horn and almost instantly the miles-long pileup of vehicles began bleating, blaring their fear and frustration. The reporter had to shout to be heard over the din. “But only five cases of the Horror have been reported in Chicago so far. Why is everyone trying to run away?”