Family Law 3: Secrets in the Stars (43 page)

"I wasn't aware such a thing was available," Lee said, shocked and interested.

"I've said too much," Gabriel admitted. "When you had the video I assumed you knew other things. You should discuss this with Lady Lewis. I will say, because you should know, such alterations are prohibited on Earth and Mars. Indeed beyond being merely illegal, they are an item of loathing and religious prohibition. They'd arrest you on entry if they were detected."

"Well, that seems stupid," Lee said. "What business is that of anybody else?"

Gabriel smiled. "As I said, you'll do just fine."

* * *

When Gabriel was gone until the morning, Gordon called the hotel concierge and arranged for a bonded courier to take a memory module to Green, Bennett and Glenn in New York. The data was for the firm to prepare their Claims, and Gordon hadn't wanted to send such a huge file, basically their whole voyage log, from the
High Hopes
even with high level encryption.

Lee went to work on the hotel data link, determined to download everything she could find about The Three, Home, The Central Kingdom and The Lunar Republic. Whatever she learned from their interview tomorrow she wanted a catalog from different sources to compare and double check what she was told. Her dad had put her onto a study of history when they were all still exploring together. His idea had been to start her from the beginnings of written history and bring her forward to the present. Such a course of study might have worked well. She was sure it appealed to his linear mindset, if only it hadn't been interrupted by his and her mother's deaths.

Except for personal interest outside her lesson plans, she hadn't progressed in detail beyond the Greeks, with foreshadowing of the Romans much in evidence in her lessons. She did have a personal fascination with sailing ships and their history. But she would probably would never go back and pick up her formal studies again. Right now she was finding that starting at the present and going back would have been more useful. The rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent was very well and interesting, but what happened last century had suddenly assumed much more importance.

Lee sourced material from European, Asian and South American sources, going light on North American news and academic texts, because her own experience with North American hospitality had left a bad taste in her mouth. She's been fostered to distant relatives for a summer in Michigan, and what passed for the free news and public study channels available to negative tax people hadn't impressed her either. The other sources might have biases too, but at least she could compare their biases.

She could easily stay up all night doing data searches, but she had a lot more money than sleep time. Instead Lee picked a shotgun approach, loading entire decades of certain news channels with anything that had a few dozen key words. It was still loading when she went to bed, and the pad indicated it would finish halfway through the night and use about a third of her memory. She'd never come anywhere near loading that much on her hand pad.

In the morning Lee rolled over, checked her pad and told the AI program she hardly ever used to search all the material loaded and assemble the ten most common topics contained in the references that she had
not
set as search terms the evening before, and load all those for the same sources and decades. Gods only knew what that was going to cost, and probably fill her pad three quarters full. But she wanted it.

An Artificial Stupid would grab some idiotic things like the price of fast food or the evolution of shoe styles, but it would likely find some pay dirt also. Lee cleaned up and got ready to have breakfast. Nobody had told her to dress specially so she wore a shirt with pockets and brush pants. Shorty boots and high end spex. She clipped her pad on her belt. It never occurred to her it would be out of range to pull data. This was civilization after all.

Since the invitation specified weapons for adults she wore the special knife Gordon bought for her on their first Derfhome trip. It was fancy pattern Damascus and bejeweled, a cabochon final on the hilt and lapis balls held in silver claws for a guard. A plain Jane 6mm went in a cross draw holster, the first time she'd worn it in awhile. She still got mistaken for a
kid
. The gun should prevent that today.

Gordon, on the other hand, limited himself to a utilitarian ax in his belt.

Before Lee walked out for breakfast she checked the pad to see what it was pulling in. The three top searches that surprised her were asteroid mining, life extension therapy, and influenza. Good thing her pad could do multi-threading. It would start other strings she was sure. To her mind she hadn't touched on either of those items in her key words yesterday. Maybe she should have asked for another day just to do these searches and skim them. Too late now.

* * *

Gabriel was back,
or maybe he stayed in the hotel
, Lee thought. She wasn't sure how long it took to get to Central. He'd just sat and had coffee when they ate last night, assuring them he wasn't hungry yet, but he'd waited, or more likely Gordon had invited him, and he was eating with them this morning. He was dressed much like yesterday, but a little fancier. He had on what looked like a silk shirt with gold buttons rimmed with tiny gold beads and a neck chain with a gold coin hanging she didn't recognize.

They entered a limo almost big enough to call a bus through a short boarding tube at the private rear entry lock at the Holiday Inn. The trip wasn't that long. It just seemed to take forever when frozen in fear. Starships went fast when they didn't displace instantaneously. But they didn't pass between outcroppings of rock that looked to come within centimeters of the road.

Ships didn't dive through tunnels that looked like a black target on the mountainside. They didn't suit up either, trusting this vehicle to maintain pressure. Something she was pretty sure it wouldn't do if it smacked any of those rocks. The road looked
narrow
, and when they passed a vehicle going the other way it was a streak that passed before the eye could even focus on it. Their limo had
wheels
.

Lee remembered riding a hotel bus on Earth. It had seemed to go maybe ten meters a second, and stopped a lot. When she asked Gabriel how fast the limo went he said somewhere around five hundred kilometers an hour. She tapped it in her pad because she couldn't think straight looking out the front viewports and got a little under a hundred forty meters a second. That was the same as the Earth bus for any reasonable discussion. It
felt
like a different order of magnitude.

When they arrived they left through a short walkway that sealed right to their limo, just like they'd boarded. Inside it looked more like the lobby of their hotel she remembered from her previous visit. They'd never seen it this trip, but Gabriel assured her it was public spaces. There was quite a bit of greenery and the most surprising a delicate fountain that changed constantly with indirect lighting.

There were groups of public elevators clustered. Lee saw people consulting a screen beside some and sitting at a bench to await its arrival. Other elevators opened and she saw they were furnished nicely as their limo or better. One elevator opened and was big enough to carry vehicles. There was s line of cargo carts waiting to board it.

Gabriel, however, took them to a corridor instead of directly to an elevator. The corridor had a guard shack, that's what Lee was pretty sure its function was. A kiosk sitting square in the center of the corridor entry with a lip around it that had about a meter of thickness to it, before a thick transparent cylinder continued to the overhead. There didn't seem to be any hatch, so they must enter from a lower level. When Lee looked up there was a concentric circle in the overhead around the clear tube.

Gabriel was acknowledged by one of the two guards inside before they were very close. They obviously knew him by sight. He still made a gesture that displayed the ring, but it seemed a formality. They walked right past in a group without a pause.

Lee became aware Gabriel was watching her inspection. "Does the overhead come down and seal off against the ledge to seal them off in an emergency like a sleeve?" she asked him, with hand gestures to try to illustrate what she meant.

"Good guess, but the whole assembly drops down to the next level if things go really bad. The part you pictured as a sleeve follows it down and plugs the hole for about ten meters deep."

"Ten meters? What are you expecting? A nuke attack?" Lee wondered.

"That would handle a small one," Gabriel allowed. "The last time they bombed us here the crater was over two hundred meters deep, and I doubt being four or five hundred deep would have saved anybody. Any excavation would have collapsed. But if they can get just a few minutes warning there are slide tunnels they can dive into and get far enough down to be safe."

"Here?" Lee asked to be certain, pointing at the deck, er, floor.

"Yes, the Chinese were sending a punitive force to Home, and Heather objected to them being in her sky. They'd breached the L1 limit," Gabriel stopped and asked, "You are apprised there
is
an L1 limit?"

Gabriel stopped and put his hand on a plate. It was ceramic, so it wasn't a print reader. A DNA taster, very high security. They didn't have to wait; the doors opened right up.

"Yes, we were told that by a Fargoer captain," Lee admitted, "but the more I find out the more it seems I don't know. I wish I'd had more time to research it before I sound like an idiot to your Lady."

"Most of it can be found with a diligent search of public sources, but not of course from China or North America. They got their hands slapped and they censor and feed their public... nonsense."

Lee was pretty sure he avoided using a stronger expression.

There was an actual couch and a bar with drinks and snacks. Pads for the Derf and Human seats that served the aliens well enough. A small comconsole and a big screen with an environmental feed on it. This time it definitely was Earth, not a window to fool her. Gabriel took the couch and she joined him. She could tell from the cant of his ears Gordon was listening.

"So they bombed the snot outta you here," Lee backtracked. "What happened to the 'punitive' force?"

"There were four ships, three died. One decided to defect and sought asylum at Home. A very good thing for me, because I lived on Home then," Gabriel said.

Lee remembered the list of ships lost. There was a cluster of Chinese losses, four, or was it three? Destroyed in lunar orbit. But that was way too early for Gabriel to be living on Home, unless she remembered wrong, or the data was bad, or he lied... She didn't have her pad set to run veracity, and she didn't want to stop and check dates or change the settings. Gabriel might be any number of things, but she could tell he wasn't stupid. Somehow she was pretty sure he wasn't lying. He had no reason to, and she didn't have the experience of Gordon, but she could already pick up on the facial hints and body language when somebody was lying. Unfortunately her short stay on Earth gave her a lot of intense instruction. But how could it be?

Her own face must have been telling on her, because Gabriel was watching her long silence.

"I suspect you will want to have April explain about life extension therapy, and how it has affected our relationship with Earth," Gabriel suggested.

"Thank you. I've been doing massive data searches the last couple days, and life extension therapy is one of the secondary searches my AI initiated today from yesterday's results." Surely that didn't mean what he was implying...

"Don't be shy to ask April to explain everything to you. She can tell you the straight stuff in a half hour it'll take you a month to suck out of the data. She won't talk down to you like some would."

"You say April instead of My Lady when you get informal," Lee noted.

"If I were speaking with her voice I'd be formal," Gabriel assured her. "That was just Gabriel speaking to you expressing my own opinion."

"Thank you for your help," Lee said sweetly.

"You're welcome, but you're not sure you believe me yet," was his appraisal.

"I believe you enough not to have set my pad to listen and verify," Lee said to soften it.

"All that tells you is if I believe it, not whether it is true," Gabriel pointed out.

What could she say? That was a fact. Lee realized they'd been dropping a
long
time.

"How far down are we going?" Lee asked.

"A few kilometers," Gabriel answered vaguely.

"In case they bomb you again?" Lee said, a little flip, and then regretted it.

"Our people survived before, much shallower, though offset a bit. It took a lot of effort to fill the crater back in and rebuild the road system. Jeff was thinking about building a beanstalk here; the crater and the attack made him rethink that. He decided we were too close to Earth to offer them such an easy target. I think they now know that if they, China or any other Earth powers, attack us on that scale again we'll destroy them. China came within a hair's breadth of provoking that back then. They've exhausted our patience."

He looked at Lee directly again. "You know, Home used to be in Low Earth Orbit. That's why we moved out around L2, because they couldn't refrain from sniping at us."

"I don't seem to remember that, but I'm building up a picture of events," Lee said.

Gabriel just gave a curt nod.

Gordon spoke up from his seating pad. "How old are you, Gabriel?" The directness shocked Lee.

"One hundred thirty three years, next month. Standard Earth years," Gabriel said.

"That makes sense then," Gordon said with a little nod of his own.

"Why does it make sense?" Lee had to ask him. It certainly didn't make sense to her.

"He looks thirty. Maybe I'm not as good judging age with Humans as Derf, but I don't think I'd be off more than five years at the most, either way. You're smart Lee, and getting more insight and wisdom at a scary rate. Of course you are having more
opportunity
to learn than most. But I see your limitations all the time. I don't
say
anything. Not unless I can actually benefit you with it. Some things I know you're just not ready to absorb. But, Gabriel... He's just too damn smart – deep down experienced smart – it isn't just native intelligence, it's... too
poised
, for thirty."