Voyagers III - Star Brothers (26 page)

Controlling fear is not the same as being fearless, Stoner realized. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest, feel perspiration beading his upper lip.

The second robot held two of its clawlike hands above Stoner’s outstretched fingers. One hand gripped a pneumatic hypodermic syringe, its needle inches above Stoner’s wrist. The other held a hair-thin optical fiber that wound back from the robot’s delicate fingers to a compact surgical laser resting on a second table, closer to the door.

Stoner never heard a command given. The fiber suddenly glowed and a white-hot beam of light lanced across the base of his little finger. He knew that all sensations of pain were being shunted away, controlled by his star brother. But his breath still went ragged as he watched with staring eyes while the beam of light severed his little finger from his hand.

He heard a howling, bellowing noise and realized it was his own voice screaming not in pain but in savage, uncontrolled rage. His star brother was startled momentarily, but deep within his mind Stoner felt the alien presence agree that his primal scream was the simplest way to release the tension that racked his body.

The robots were totally unaffected by Stoner’s feral roar. Their grip on his flesh did not tighten a millimeter. Or loosen. The laser light winked out and the finger dropped to the table top, disconnected, and rolled over slightly so that it lay askew, like a ship with a bad list. Stoner blinked and felt tears in his eyes. His throat was raw. There was a bit of bleeding but even that quickly stopped. The robot picked up the severed finger, its arm bending in ways impossible to a human, and deftly deposited it in a fluid-filled glass jar.

“We will preserve the finger,” said Janos’s voice from the ceiling speaker, “to compare its tissue composition with that of the new finger he grows.”

“If he grows a new finger,” said Ilona’s voice.

“He will, I’m certain.”

“Not without food,” Stoner heard a voice reply. His own. Croaking, dry, harsh with brute anger and the rawness of his throat.

“What did you say, Dr. Stoner?”

“I won’t be able to regenerate unless I get food. Any system needs an energy input.”

“We must allow him food,” Ilona’s voice said.

“Tomorrow,” replied Janos. “I want a baseline profile. Tomorrow morning we will go through the complete physical exams, plus a brain scan, and then he can be given food.”

The robots released Stoner, gathered up their tools with quiet efficiency, and left the room. Stoner glimpsed the guard robot out in the hallway, massive as a small tank.

He flexed his left hand. The stub where his little finger had been was seared black. No blood, although a little clear liquid leaked through the burned skin. A tide of sullen, remorseless anger began to rise in him, only to be drained away by a coldly rational calm, like flames extinguished by a blast of icy water.

Let me have my anger, he snarled inwardly. Let me
feel
what a human being should feel!

His star brother replied silently, The most horrible things that human beings do, they do in anger.

Or in fear.

Or in fear, his star brother admitted. Anger is often the mask for fear.

“Bastards,” he muttered aloud. But to himself, to both his selves, he said, We’ve got to find a way out of here.

Ilona, he called silently. Ilona, I need your help. He’s going to kill me. You know that he won’t stop until the ultimate test—to see if I can survive a fatal trauma.

He felt her presence, her own fear, her uncertainty. But he got no reply to his plea.

FOR the first time in nearly two weeks Vic Tomasso leaned back and relaxed. He had been nervous throughout the Pacific Commerce flight from Hilo to Tokyo, wondering if Hsen had the balls to sabotage one of his own rocketplanes just to get rid of a man he no longer wanted alive. But the flight went smoothly and he transferred on the hovertrain to the spaceport out in the harbor, streaking along the superconducting rails that levitated the train on a cushion of magnetic force.

Now he sat back in a Pacific Commerce space shuttle, confident that if Hsen was too cheap to blow up one of his own aerospace planes he certainly would not destroy a much more expensive shuttle. Not just to assassinate me, Tomasso thought. And he wouldn’t spend the money to take me to the Moon if he wanted to get rid of me. He could have had a couple of goons knock me off at the airport or on the train. Cheaper, by far.

So he felt reasonably confident that his information about the secret starship project had bought his life for him. Now all he had to do was lead Hsen’s people to Delphi base out on the Mare Imbrium and let them take things from there.

After the shuttle took off from the harbor spaceport and angled steeply into the sky, Tomasso even managed to drift off into a restful sleep while the craft glided weightlessly toward the Vanguard space station that was the first stop on the way to the Moon.

In her office at Vanguard’s headquarters Jo smiled humorlessly to herself as she studied the computer screen display. So it was Vic after all. The truth drug session had been a sham. I’ll have to check on the doctor who handled the interrogation, she thought. I’ll bet it was a woman.

The Hungarians should have been a tip-off, Jo realized with perfect hindsight. They disappeared the day after Cathy’s murder and I never even paid any attention to it. No one but Vic could have gotten them out of the house, even in all that uproar. It’s been him all along, the smiling traitorous murdering bastard.

Vic thought he was so clever, flying to Tokyo unannounced and getting onto a Moon-bound shuttle flight so quickly that no one could follow him.

What Vic did not know was that he carried imbedded beneath the skin on the back of his left shoulder a microscopic transmitter, powered by the heat of his own body, that faithfully beeped out a location signal every minute of the day and night. It had been implanted during Tomasso’s very first physical examination by Vanguard medics when he had first been hired by the corporation. A routine procedure that no one, not even the chief of corporate security, knew about. No one except Jo and the medics who did the work. And the medics were bought off nicely with early retirements at huge pensions—and distant retirement homes.

The procedure had started years earlier as a security move against terrorism, when corporate executives were under constant threat of kidnapping or worse. Although such hazards had dwindled greatly Jo still found it convenient to be able to keep tabs on selected members of her staff—without their knowing it, of course.

Vanguard surveillance satellites routinely monitored only the location signals of the corporation’s top executives. Jo had no need or desire to keep track of everyone, although there had been times when an individual attracted her attention enough to start the satellites searching. Since the murder of her daughter, they had been tracking Vic Tomasso. Jo wished bitterly that Keith had allowed her to implant a monitoring device in him, but he had refused with a grin.

“I’ve got enough going on under my skin, don’t you think?” he had said. And she had reluctantly let him go unprotected.

Now she sat alone in her office late at night, the only light in the room coming from the glow of the display screen. Jo tried to put herself in Tomasso’s position, tried to determine what he was up to. Clearly he was on the run. Probably to the Pacific Commerce mining center on the Sea of Tranquillity. He’s a damned fool if he thinks I can’t reach him there.

She eased back in her butter-soft leather recliner, thinking to herself, Vic will be out of range of the satellite sensors once he transfers to the lunar shuttle. I’ll have to get somebody on the space station to lock onto him before he gets away. Which means I’ve got to act fast. Using the keyboard set into the armrest of her chair she asked the computer to locate Nunzio, her erstwhile bodyguard.

The dogged old Italian was on Taiwan, the screen told her, stubbornly tracking down rumors that Li-Po Hsen had retired to a fortified castle high in the island’s central mountains. It was close to the dinner hour in Taipei. Jo put through a call.

It took a few minutes of computerized searching and switching, but finally Nunzio’s craggy, wary-eyed face showed on her screen.

“Si, Signora?”

“Nunzio, I have a different task for you to do.”

A man of few words, Nunzio said nothing, waiting for her to instruct him further. Jo transmitted Vic Tomasso’s photograph and personnel dossier to him and told him to follow Vic to the Moon.

“
La Luna, Signora?
” For once, Nunzio’s shaggy brows rose with surprise.

“You’ve never been in space, have you?”

“No,
Signoia
.”

Jo quietly explained that everyone gets sick their first few hours in weightlessness, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. The spacecraft crew provides pills, but still he will feel nauseous.

Nunzio’s face became an impassive mask. Finally he asked, “And this Tomasso…he is to be killed?”

“No. He is to be held until I can join you.”

“And the Chinese, Hsen?”

“If you find Tomasso you will find Hsen also. I am certain of it.”

“Su la Luna.”

“Yes. If you do find Hsen there, you know what to do.”

“
Si, Signora
.” And almost as if he did not know what his hand was doing, Nunzio drew an extended finger across his throat.

That will take care of Vic, Jo said to herself once the call ended. Then she thought about sending some Vanguard security people to the Moon as backup for Nunzio. With a curt shake of her head she decided against it. Hsen’s people would not recognize one gray-haired Italian tourist as a threat, but they would quickly sniff out a team of Vanguard professionals. Besides, Nunzio’s honor was at stake. He had failed to protect his patroness and her family; he was working now to redeem himself. He would die before failing her, she knew.

She sighed deeply, looked around her darkened office, then got up to head for home. She wanted to be there when Rickie woke up in the morning. Her son was sleeping without nightmares now, but Jo was careful to be with him when he went to bed and to be there when he awoke, no matter how busy she might be during the business day.

During the nights she worked on her revenge.

Pretending to sleep, Stoner lay hungry and alert on his cot. For hours he had tried to make some kind of mental contact with Ilona Lucacs, but the young Hungarian scientist was either totally engrossed in her pleasure machine or simply too far away to feel his silent cries for help.

Then the lock on his door clicked. Stoner felt every nerve in him go taut as a bowstring. Slowly the door swung open. Feeble light from the hallway spilled onto the floor, marking out a dim rectangle with the figure of a woman framed within it. And the implacable guard robot behind her.

For a long moment neither one of them moved. Stoner lay on his cot, the woman stood silently in the doorway.

Then he got to his feet and called softly, “Ilona?”

She seemed to flinch, but finally entered the darkened room. “Are you…all right?” she whispered.

“I’m still alive,” he said, pulling on his jeans.

“Your hand…?”

“It will heal.”

“And the finger will grow back?”

“Maybe. I don’t really know.”

Without closing the door she took a few more steps into the room. Instead of her customary tweeds she wore a pair of snug-fitting dark slacks and a man’s tailored shirt, unbuttoned low enough to show considerable cleavage.

“Zoltan plans to leave you alone for a few days, to see what the finger does.”

“And after that?”

She fell silent. Stoner deliberately stepped into the rectangle of light thrown across the floor from the hall; as he had expected, Ilona’s eyes widened at the ugly red burn marks on his chest. But she quickly looked away. Beyond the door Stoner could see the obstinate robot standing on its unmoving treads.

“Can you get me past that robot?” he asked as he slipped on his shirt.

“No,” she said.

Stoner walked up to her and, lifting her chin gently, looked deeply into her eyes.

“Before they find you in here, we’ve got to get away,” he said softly.

But she pushed his hand away. “I am supposed to be the one on duty monitoring the video screens and other displays tonight. No one will see me here. You made me come in here to you, didn’t you?”

“I called to you and you responded.”

“Zoltan wants the powers you have. He’s obsessed with the idea of becoming superhuman. I think he is going insane.”

“We’ve got to get past that robot,” Stoner insisted.

“I don’t know how to change its programming. I don’t even know how to shut it off. I can’t help you. I’m useless to you, to Zoltan—even to myself.”

Stoner turned away from her and went to sit on the bed. “Then he’s going to kill me. He’ll keep pushing my physical limitations until he kills me.”

She said nothing.

“He’s killing you, too, you know. With that electrical ecstasy machine of yours.”

“Please, Dr. Stoner, no lectures.”

“Are you going to let him murder me? Are you going to help him?”

“What can I do?” There was no fear or conflict in her voice. Merely the statement of someone who felt helpless. “We will all die soon enough. What difference does it make? I have nothing to live for.”

She really believes that, Stoner saw. Her willpower, her individuality, is being sapped away like lifeblood trickling from a wound that won’t heal. He looked at her more carefully. Her face was pale, eyes red with dark half-circles below them. She seemed to have lost weight. Like a vampire, the pleasure machine was sucking her life away a little more each night.

“Where are we?” Stoner asked. “How did you get here? Who’s behind all this?”

Languidly, as if it took more effort than she could spare, Ilona went to the stiff wooden chair by the monitoring equipment and slowly sat on it.

“The morning after you were kidnapped and…and…”

“And my daughter killed,” Stoner said grimly.

Ilona swallowed hard, then went on, “A security team from your wife’s office took Zoltan and me out to a private airport and put us aboard a jet plane. We flew directly here with no stops. We refueled from tankers in mid-air. Twice.”

“Here? Where?”

“Beirut. The old city.”

Stoner nearly gasped with surprise. Old Beirut had been abandoned for decades. Shattered by a civil war that had lasted for a generation, bombed, gassed, blasted by rocket artillery, every wall in the old city pockmarked by machine gun bullets and shell fragments. Old Beirut had even been treated to the last nuclear explosion in the world.

The homemade plutonium bomb had gone off prematurely while still in the cargo hold of an Italian passenger liner. The waterfront area was flattened beneath a towering cloud of radioactive steam. Half a million people died, most of them in long-lingering cancerous agonies.

The world trembled with terror for days after that blast, then took the steps necessary to make it the
final
nuclear explosion in history. Old Beirut was abandoned and a new city, financed heavily by both Arabs and Israelis, with plenty of help from the superpowers, began to rise south of the once-embattled airport.

Old Beirut was left to stand as a shattered hulk, a reminder of the madness of war and terrorism. Abandoned to bleach under the hot Mediterranean sun, visited only by tourist helicopters that quickly flitted across the radioactive ruins while their pretaped lectures spoke of the horrors of war and their tourists took pictures of Earth’s last battlefield.

“This hotel is well away from the harbor area,” Ilona said. “The residual radioactivity has gone down almost to the background level.”

But Stoner was working on another puzzle. “It couldn’t have been a Vanguard Corporation team that brought you here. Not for this. Not for what you’re doing to me.”

Ilona said, “A Vanguard security executive took us to the plane. He had an Italian name: Tomasso, I think.”

“Is Janos still working for the government of Hungary?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know,” Ilona replied. “What difference does it make?”

Stoner sat silently on the edge of the bed for several moments, trying to sort it all out. Finally he looked up at Ilona, waiting passively, and focused all his mental energies on her.

“You’ve got to find out who Janos is reporting to, and get a message to them. Tell them that instead of determining how I survived freezing, he’s slowly killing me. Tell them that I’ll be dead in a few more days if they don’t stop him.”

Ilona blinked slowly at him. “Zoltan would not kill you.”

“Yes he would,” Stoner answered, certain of it. “He’ll keep pushing until he kills me just to see if I can repair myself and come alive again.”

She nodded. He could not tell if she actually agreed or was merely unable to argue against him.

“If he kills me, his superiors—whoever they are—will be extremely unhappy with him. His usefulness to them will be at an end. They will murder him.”

That made her dark-circled eyes widen slightly.

“You’ve got to save me. Otherwise Janos is going to die.”

Stoner desperately hoped that she believed what he was saying, and still had enough volition in her to act on his words.