Rock Killer Page 4

  Kirsten looked up at him from her seat.

  “Now,” he barked.

  Kirsten usually refused to react to Alex’s occasional macho spells. But this time she decided it was better to accede to his demands and work it out later in private. She stood and looked apologetically at their hosts. Then she followed Alex out of the house and to her car.

  McConnell watched them leave. “Fascist,” he said.

  His wife nodded.

  In the car, Alex apologized.

  “It’s okay,” Kirsten said with a sigh. “They’re self-righteous snobs.” She waited a few heartbeats. “Who was killed on the Moon?”

  “Frank DeWite and someone you never met named Prince.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter Three

  “…that damn rope slipping through my fingers.”

  Bente Naguchi gazed out the window at the Earth. In the SRI Low Earth Orbit Facility at an altitude of about 400 kilometers, this was as close as she ever planned to get. Born on the Moon 25 years ago, she was sure she could live in one gee. She’d felt that and more on some ships she’d traveled in. But she knew she wouldn’t like it one bit. Sometimes she wished she could visit the blue and green world of her parents.

  She’d seen pictures, of course, but they couldn’t convey the entire sensation of being outdoors with no pressure suit confining you. She’d heard there were places, in Europe mostly, where it was legal to go naked. She wondered what that would be like: to have nothing between you and everything. Maybe someday she’d visit; someday, for a very short period.

  Bente was over 225 centimeters tall but massed about the same as a “normal” woman. She had long, black-brown hair and large, brown eyes with an exotic hint of an epicanthic fold. Her mother, a German, had given her skin a paler complexion than her Japanese father’s. She knew that some considered her attractive. That was attested to by the number of men, and sometimes women, who approached her in this bar while she waited for transportation to the Moon. But she also told herself that “Moon Maidens” were considered a novelty, and relative attractiveness had little to do with the number of propositions she received.

  “Shuttle to Lunar Facility One departing in ten minutes,” a voice said over the public address. Bente put her SRI card in the slot, pressed her thumb to the plate, and pushed herself out of the bar. She didn’t notice the numerous pairs of eyes following her.

  On the shuttle, Bente didn’t need a window seat–she gave hers up to a tourist. At turn-around, during the few minutes of free-fall, Bente made sure she was far, far away from the tourists and others on their first space excursion. Frankly, watching others with space sickness made her sick. She watched the descent to the Moon on a monitor. She could see the original NESA site: a metal dome less than 100 meters in diameter. From this, like a spreading plant, the facility grew. It was a hodgepodge of domes, tunnels, and corridors.

  Occasional windowed boxes that were a few stories tall marked NESA hotels and resorts made to resemble their terrestrial counterparts. The farther the facilities were from the original dome, the newer the construction. A lot of the facility was under the surface, and the parts that weren’t were partially covered with black slag from SRI asteroids. The slag provided extra protection from radiation but still, during solar flares, everyone huddled in shelters under meters of lunar rock.

  NESA Facility Two was a framework about a kilometer away. Occasionally she’d see the sharp sparkle of a welder. Bente caught a glimpse of the SRI area and the shipyard, and saw workers crawling over the carcasses of the destroyed ships. She had a passing acquaintance with some of the dead people. Murdered people, she reminded herself.

  The shuttle landed and the enclosed ramp extended and mated to the ship. Bente let the tourists, giddy with excitement–the space sickness only an acrid memory–de-shuttle first. Then Bente threw her bag over her shoulder and entered the shuttleport. As a resident she skipped lightly through customs and went to the subway. A few minutes later she was in the residential area. She found her parents’ new apartment with little trouble. Since both she and her brother had moved out, they had moved into a smaller domicile.

  When Bente entered her parent’s home, Mozart’s Requiem was playing on the stereo system. How fitting, she thought as the mournful basses droned out the dirge that only the son of Leopold could make that beautiful. This might be her swan song with her family if she and her father couldn’t work out their differences.

  Bente’s mother loved Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. Once someone asked her how she felt about Rimsky-Korsakov–her mother almost spat. “Russians,” she said. “The Russians have been conquered by everybody including the Communists. Conquered people can’t write powerful music.” That the listener was a scientist from the University of Moscow didn’t make her any more reticent in expressing her low opinion of Russian composers. Bente had been raised on a combination of classical music and the stuff kids listened to all over the world and even in space. Now, if she happened to hear popular music, she had to wonder if it had gotten worse or her tastes had gotten better.

  She suspected the former.

  “Mother,” she called out, closing the door behind her.

  Bente’s mother came into the foyer of their apartment. Her mother seemed to have gained a few kilos in the months Bente had been gone, and her hair’s blonde color seemed to have faded to a dull shade bordering on gray. Her round face, though, probably would never develop wrinkles.

  “Bente, welcome home!” her mother exclaimed, wrapping her arms around her daughter. Bente could literally look down on her head.

  Releasing Bente, her mother asked, “How are you?”

  “Fine, Mother. Is Father home?”

  Mrs. Naguchi shook her head. “Not yet. He’s still at the lab working late. He didn’t know you’d be coming.”

  “I should have called from the Low Earth Orbit Facility.”

  “SRI pays you enough to afford trans-lunar connections?”

  Yes, she thought. She shrugged. “You’re right.”

  “I’ve got good news,” her mother beamed. “Akio’s home.”

  Bente didn’t groan like she wanted to. She didn’t even roll her eyes.

  Dinner at the Naguchi residence was always an unusual combination of Japanese and German tainted by the lack of meat and by the abundance of vegetables available from the NESA farms. Akio deftly put the sauerkraut into his mouth with chopsticks. Mr. Naguchi had developed a taste for the putrid vegetable, but it seemed to him his wife thought it was a staple.

  “Is the development of the lunar-equatorial accelerator going well?” he asked Akio.

  “Yes,” Bente’s younger brother replied. “We hope to start digging the tunnel by next year. I hope I’m alive to see its completion.”

  “Are you still having financial problems?” Mr. Naguchi asked.

  “It’s getting better. Even the American government is putting in money–almost as much as the Russian Federation.”

  “What energies do you hope to obtain?” Mr. Naguchi asked as if reading from a script.

  “Near primordial energies: About ten to the minus one hundred seconds after the big-bang,” he said proudly.

  “And, Bente,” Mr. Naguchi chided. “What do you do? You go off to make money. You mine asteroids.”

  “I’m a navigator, Father,” Bente said patiently. “And I don’t do it for money.”

  “Then why would you throw your education away on SRI? You could be working with your brother on the accelerator, or on some other research project.”

  “Father, research is fine,” Bente replied. “But it takes money. Akio? How much was SRI’s contribution to the accelerator?”

  “About five billion euro,” Akio admitted reluctantly.

  “You see,” Bente said. “The reason I joined SRI is that they’re doing something other than sitting around theorizing. They have a manned outpost on Europa, for heaven’s sake. They’ve gone farther into space than any government. They’re movi
ng man into the frontier. Sure it’s for profit, but in history that’s why all the new lands were explored. It was only in the twentieth century that ‘profit’ became a dirty word.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Naguchi retorted. “But SRI was started by NESA; a multi-government research agency.”

  “And then NESA sold SRI to the stockholders and made enough to afford to bring more research scientists to the Moon. Like you and Mother.”

  Mr. Naguchi looked at his daughter. “Do they teach you disrespect at SRI?” he asked quietly.

  “No, Father.”

  “Then where did you learn it?”

  “I’m sorry, Father. I meant no disrespect.”

  The rest of the meal was unusually quiet.

  ***

  Griffin woke from a light sleep and exited the closet-sized captain’s quarters. He climbed the ladder that put him on the deck with the galley and bridge. Knecht was sitting in front of her computer. The ship was small and most of it was devoted to equipment, not living space.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Knecht literally jumped a foot off the chair in the low gravity. She turned and a short yet lethal-looking knife was in her hand. She didn’t relax until she saw Griffin, and that he was a good, long ways away.

  “What do you want?” she asked, more than just a little suspicious.

  Griffin spread his hands in supplication. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d check on how things are going.”

  “You need to sleep,” Knecht stated flatly. “As shorthanded as we are.”

  Griffin nodded. He hadn’t anticipated losing three on the Moon; that damn security man. But Knecht took care of him.

  “I know,” he said. “How’s the navigation?”

  Knecht started to relax. She enjoyed computers and the challenges of navigation. One uses computers, they don’t use you, she thought. And they didn’t hurt you, at least not maliciously. Everything a computer did was logical, even if their programmers were not.

  “Fine,” she said. “If the Syrians get here soon and if the information we got out of the computer on the Moon is correct, we should reach the belt way ahead of time; even with this delay. Matching orbits shouldn’t be a problem. We can accelerate nine times as much as they can.” She smiled at that thought.

  Griffin also smiled. God, he thought, she is beautiful when she’s not trying to prove what a cold bitch she is. “That’s good,” he said. Silence hung thick in the room.

  “You should get some sleep,” Knecht stated. She almost sounded caring. Griffin moved closer; he could reach out and touch her. His hand hesitated, then moved for her shoulder. But she caught the action and flinched away. The knife was less relaxed in her hand.

  “Go to sleep, Griffin,” she ordered.

  He nodded and turned to the opening in the floor. As he descended the ladder he watched her watch him leave.

  ***

  Security Chief Mitchel looked at the faces on the screen that covered one wall of his office in the SRI Headquarters building.

  “NESA is very embarrassed,” Rodriguez said on the Moon. “They are willing to help any way they can in the investigation within the confines of their privacy laws. But they don’t think we’ll ever know how the weapons got on the Moon.”

  “Did you,” Mitchel asked, “tell them about the Syrians?”

  Two seconds later Rodriguez nodded. “Yes. But they can’t really investigate in the UBS area any more than they can investigate in our area.”

  “Okay,” Mitchel said. “What about Trent?”

  Another man on the screen spoke from Washington. “Our people watching her say she met with Syrians last night. We put an ultrasound beam on the windows but all we got was a local radio station.”

  “Damn,” Mitchel grumbled. They may be radicals but they weren’t stupid. “What about Damascus?”

  Elisa Morgan was the boss at SRI’s Middle Eastern terrestrial information gathering office in Tel Aviv. “Our agents in Damascus have trouble,” she reported. “Syria’s too much a police state. But, we’ve connected with an underling in the Baath party. He’s getting some information to us. A French arms seller, Philippe Thorez, will be visiting Damascus soon. He specializes in space-borne weapons. This isn’t his first visit.”

  “Find out why he’s there,” Mitchel ordered crisply. “It may be important.”

  Morgan nodded. “I will.”

  “Anything else?” Mitchel asked. No one said anything.

  “Okay. Let’s get on this. We need to find out what the GA is up to. Rodriguez, stay on. Everyone else, thank you and good-bye.”

  The screen cleared and showed the SRI logo. Mitchel turned to the smaller screen on his desk. “Rod,” he said, “I’ll be arriving on the next shuttle. How’s Charlie?”

  “Really well, considering,” Rodriguez replied two seconds later, a shade of sadness in his voice. “Anything else?”

  “No, not now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  ***

  Alex held Kirsten’s hand across the table. He’d been home a few days and they finally found time to drive to Denver to his favorite Korean restaurant, the Sai Han Sheik Dong. It was in the lower downtown district near Union Station. Denver had closed its city center to private vehicles so they parked Kirsten’s car in a huge underground parking lot at the edge of town and took a light-rail into the city. The train stopped at Union Station and from there it was a short, albeit cold, walk to the restaurant.

  Mr. Pak, the proprietor, and his employees knew Kirsten and Alex well and, after delivering their food, left them alone unless called.

  Alex looked at the device on his wrist that was being grossly underutilized by only displaying the time. The security memorial service on the Moon was about to start. It was for the three security people killed: DeWite, Prince, and a kid named Nakamura whom Alex didn’t know. The services for the others killed were being held by their divisions. He’d debated taking time to go. Kirsten would have understood, but would have resented it after making arrangements to spend all her time with him. At least, that’s what Alex decided. That, and he preferred to honor the memory of his friends his way and in private.

  Out of one of the multitude of small dishes on the table, Alex used chopsticks to select a slice of kimchee and put it in his mouth. He followed the pickled cabbage with a gob of rice.

  “I suppose,” Kirsten chided playfully, “you expect to sleep in the same bed as me after eating that.”

  Alex nodded and swallowed. “All you have to do is eat some and we’ll cancel each other out.”

  Kirsten made a face. “No thanks, Mr. Chun.” She used a fork to eat a piece of duk-gogi.

  “It’s real embarrassing,” Alex teased, “to have a wife that can’t eat with chopsticks.”

  “Sorry,” she replied. “I don’t eat Oriental food very much. My friends like Middle Eastern food. About a month ago, Alysia and her husband and I went to this new place in Boulder, on a Monday night, and the place was packed. We almost left but everyone was there. The McConnells, the Kims–you remember Jason Quinn from Aspen?–he was there. We pushed all our tables together and talked and laughed until the owner threw us out–it was two in the morning. I almost fell asleep during a session with one patient the next day. But it was so much fun.”

  “Oh,” Alex said simply.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” she said quietly. “But you don’t expect me to pace the widow’s walk the whole time you’re gone?”

  Alex shook his head. “No, of course not. It just seems sometimes I’m only a footnote in your life.”

  “Well, Alex, you’re only here about six weeks a year. I love you, but I have to have a life. And while you’re here I put everything off. I even send my patients to other therapists; because I want to be with you.”

  “I know,” Alex intoned. “And I appreciate that.”

  “You could quit SRI,” Kirsten speculated. “Join my life full time. You’ve met most of my friends and get along with most of them. You have eno
ugh money in your SRI account we could both retire.”

  Alex shook his head. “I can’t. I mean, I can, but I won’t. I owe SRI. They took me and educated me and gave me a job–and kept educating me. Because they require employees to continue their education in order to get promoted, I have the equivalent of a B.S., at least. I’d never have gotten that if I’d stayed in L.A. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to college, and you know how it was then. The government was broke and there were no grants or students loans. I’d have worked in my father’s store on Olympic Boulevard forever; if the gangs didn’t get me, too.”

  The last sentence was stated with a mixture of anger and pain.

  “And,” he continued after a few moments, “I’d have never met you.”

  “Joey probably would still be alive if you two hadn’t gone into SRI,” Kirsten noted. “You still call out his name in your sleep.”

  “I know,” Alex replied softly. “I usually wake up right afterward. I still dream about that damn rope slipping through my fingers–if only I’d caught it. But Joey would probably be dead if he’d stayed in L.A. I never told you, or, hell, anyone this, but one reason we joined SRI was that there was a gang out to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “He refused to join. The courts were so lenient with criminals that the gangs were the defacto government in many parts of L.A. They didn’t have to worry about getting caught. You could do two years for murder. If only...”

  “If only...” Kirsten repeated. “Let’s stop playing ‘if only’ games. Let’s make the most of the two weeks you have at home. Have you decided whether to go to Frank’s memorial service?”

  “Yes,” Alex said with conviction. “I’m not going. It would take four days. I really haven’t seen Frank in years. Besides, it’s starting in about ten minutes.”

  “Oh, Alex,” she cried. “You should have gone if you wanted.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “You sure?” Kirsten asked. “I wouldn’t have minded.”