McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (23 page)

“How?” she asked. “I would have thought this ball of ice was about as solid as it is possible to get.”

He explained about the tidal stresses. “In fact, it’s the very rigidity of the planet that causes the quakes. It tries to flex, but can’t; so it cracks. The building pilings serve both as shock absorbers and insulators.”

The subject switched to the project in New Mexico. Susan brought him up-to-date on who was sleeping with whom, and the petty politics that suffuse any isolated group. Having spent less than a month there, Mark didn’t know most of the people of whom she spoke. Still, it was a pleasant diversion and before he knew it, an hour had passed swiftly.

He was brought back to the present by the sudden chirping of his communicator. He signaled acceptance and heard a voice in his ear. It was Yeoman Barnes from the Port Captain’s office.

“Commander Rykand, you haven’t fallen into a snow drift have you?”

“I’m fine, Yeoman. I met an acquaintance aboard ship. We’ve been talking.”

“The Captain would like to see you at your earliest convenience.” Mark sighed. That meant, of course, that the captain would like to see him at his, the Captain’s, earliest convenience.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. What has gone wrong now?”

“One of the plows has buried itself in nitrogen again. The captain wants an assessment of the damage by someone he trusts. Remember what the engineers told him last time?”

“Right. See you in twenty.”

He switched off to see Susan looking at him strangely. “I take it that you have to go.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Just one more reason to look tired.”

“I’d like to see you again,” she said, “if there’s an opportunity before the ship spaces, that is. We’ve got three of our Easter Eggs onboard and are headed for Brinks Base. Once the alien psychology people give us a target, we’re going to begin sowing dissension among the enemy.”

“You’ll be unloading freight for another three days. How about dinner tomorrow night?”

She smiled. “I would like that.”

“Very well. I’ll meet you at the airlock at 18:00 hours. Dinner at 19:00. Wear something warm. It gets cold in those tubes.”

“Should I bring a bottle of wine? I can get one from ship’s stores. It will only cost me a week’s pay.”

He sighed again, this time with regret. “A waste of money, I’m afraid. We keelhaul anyone who drinks on this planet. It’s a dangerous life. Let the troops get drunk, and some damned fool will leave an airlock open.”

“Eighteen hundred it is,” she agreed. “I’ll be waiting.”

Mark said his goodbyes after getting directions back to the main airlock. As he climbed back into his suit, he found himself humming.

#

Chapter Twenty-Three

Susan Ahrendt was waiting for Mark the next evening as promised inside the freighter’s main airlock. She wore the bunny suit that was standard outerwear for Nemesis’ populace. Like Alaskans and Siberians, the inhabitants of Port Grayson had become used to bundling up whenever they left their living quarters. The electrically heated coveralls were more than adequate for indoor use in the pedestrian tubes and warehouses.

Susan’s suit was the usual padded pillow shape, hiding her curves. Her lips were red and her eyes and lashes subtly shaded. Her hair was piled high on her head.

“You are beautiful this evening,” Mark said, surprised at the incipient stutter her appearance caused him as he cycled through the inner airlock door.

“Thank you, sir. It’s a social occasion, so I thought I would treat it like one.” She turned and lifted a vacuum bottle from a rack beside her. “Here. It’s sparkling cider. Non-alcoholic, but we can pretend.”

“Thanks,” he said as he accepted the pressurized cylinder. He then offered her his arm and said, “Shall we go?”

The inside of the pedestrian tube was unrelievedly drab. Save for the expansion joints and widely spaced overhead glow tubes, there was nothing to see. Windows would have let the heat out, and decorations were both superfluous and not in the Port Captain’s operational plan. Nevertheless, Susan commented on the change of scenery.

“Damn it’s good to get out of that ship!”

Mark laughed. “This can hardly be better,” he said, gesturing at their surroundings.

“Better, no. Different, yes! I don’t know how you survived a whole year in isolation during your trips to and from The Crab: the same faces day in, day out; the same jokes told over and over again. It’s only been a month and I swear I’ll strangle Dr. Smithers if he tells his Mother Superior and the Blind Man joke one more time.”

“One of your team?”

She nodded. “There are twelve of us this trip. We’ll divide into smaller groups of four and go with our individual Easter Eggs. Dr. Smithers is my team leader, which should make our voyage into Broan space memorable.

“It’s our job to perform final checks on the ships before they’re cast adrift. Mostly that means making sure there aren’t any loose screwdrivers or gloves left inside. The screwdrivers might fit into our storyline; the gloves… not so much.”

Three minutes after leaving the ship, they descended a shallow slope and emerged into an open space measuring ten meters in diameter. From it, a number of other tunnels radiated outward around the points of the compass. Just beyond each opening were the yellow-and-black striped doors of an emergency airlock. At the moment, the doors were retracted into their housings.

 “Welcome to Fleet Headquarters,” Mark said, gesturing expansively. “Actually, Headquarters is one flight up. This section is called ‘the Hub’ for obvious reasons. Care to take the tour?”

“My pleasure, sir!”

Mark did his best, but when he checked the time again, only four additional minutes had elapsed. Sighing, he suggested that they make their way to his quarters.

“Your quarters?” Susan asked, arching one eyebrow in the obvious unspoken question.

“I thought we would have dinner there rather than the mess hall. We’ll be able to talk and not be interrupted every two minutes by some vacuum monkey hitting on you.”

She laughed. “I might like that. It does wonders for a girl’s ego.”

“Later I’ll show you what passes for night life around here. We have a little beer garden
sans
beer set up in the next igloo over. Most nights they have a couple of rollicking games of chess going and the usual card sharps playing pinochle. Since it’s Tuesday, they will have live entertainment tonight. A couple of the women from administration are fairly good singers.”

His quarters were in the dome opposite the project social center. He led the way into a tube labeled ‘Broadway,’ past a series of identical doors save for their numbers. Upon arriving, Mark opened the airtight door to his quarters and ushered his guest inside.

The small cubicle was tidy, with the bed retracted into the wall and a table and two chairs occupying its space. (Mark didn’t mention that he’d spent two hours cleaning that afternoon.) A complicated box sat on the table, its silvered exterior glinting in the light of the glow tube, its various sections tightly latched to one another. Two place settings and a single rose in a drinking bulb completed the arrangement. The rose he had stolen from hydroponics that afternoon. The drinking bulb was a spare from breakfast that he had yet to return to the mess.

 “My, you didn’t have to go to all of this trouble on my account,” Susan said as she surveyed the scene.

“No trouble. I’ll get things set up. You will want to get out of that suit. Like most cold-country people, we tend to overheat our living quarters.”

“Mind if I use the facilities?” she asked. “I have some damage control to do after I get this bunny suit off. I’m afraid it has wrinkled me something fierce!”

“Over there,” he said, gesturing to his private bathroom.

He puttered around, filling glasses, unsealing the food and dividing the courses, including two small desserts that he stacked on his work desk. It took Susan several minutes to emerge. When she did, he saw the wait had been worth it. She took one step into the room and struck a pose.

“Do you like it?”

He gave a whistle. “You’re beautiful!”

Under the bunny suit she had been wearing a full evening gown. For a moment Mark wondered what she had done with the skirt, then realized that she must have hoisted it up around her waist to make it fit under the suit.

The gown was black and filmy, and revealed far more than it concealed. The bodice was deeply cut, showing a good deal of cleavage, and the shoulders were bare. She had added earrings to the ensemble. Of all the things he expected to see 7000 light-years from Earth, an evening gown was very low on the list.

“I hoped you would like it,” she said. “Several of my friends said I was a fool to pack it and that I would never find an opportunity to wear it out here. Thank you for providing me with one.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. The sudden constriction in his throat came from the realization that he might not be the only one here tonight who had been having thoughts they shouldn’t have.

“Shall we eat?”

#

Dinner consisted of several courses: a salad straight from hydroponics, French onion soup with real croutons, Salisbury steaks and vegetables, strawberry shortcake for dessert, and coffee to wash everything down.

“How did you manage all of this?” Susan asked as he presented the main course after some twenty minutes of small talk. The sparkling cider sat in front of their plates in two makeshift wine glasses.

“I work for the Port Captain. It gives me a certain amount of pull around here… that and the fact that I promised the Mess Chief that I’d get him some cooking wine the next time a ship puts in with some. He promised to keep it under lock and key and assured me it will go only for cooking.”

“You’re that serious about the drinking ban?”

“We are. I told you why.”

“Is it really that dangerous out here?” she asked.

“Dangerous enough,” he replied. “We’re learning to live with conditions near absolute zero. It’s no different than the problems they had when they built Brinks Base… well, more intense, I suppose. Human beings have had a great deal of experience in vacuum these past few centuries. We just had to add the lessons of cold to those.

“Still, if we found a nice Earthlike planet to build on, there would be dangers there, too. Being completely undetectable to the Broa makes the danger worth it. This way they can’t wipe out our advance base and our battle fleet in a single attack. God knows that has happened often enough in the past on Earth.

“Too much talk of danger. Tell me the news of home. Did Star Metterling ever marry Clive Danning?” The reference was to two holoscreen stars who had been in the news the last time he’d been on Earth.

“They broke up six weeks ago,” she answered, laughing. “You are very behind the times, Commander Rykand!”

That he was, Mark considered. It wasn’t that they didn’t get Earth news out here. Every ship that came into the system carried an up-to-the-minute summary accurate to the moment they had gone superlight. The problem was that events on a globe a mere 12,700 kilometers in diameter didn’t seem all that important from an outpost in the middle of enemy space.

“I did hear something that might interest you, however. It was on the news just as we were waiting to board the shuttle to take us up to the ship. You know Mikhail Vasloff, do you not?”

“I do,” Mark replied with a scowl. Vasloff had accompanied them on the first expedition to Klys’kra’t. He was a complete maniac when it came to the subject of interstellar expansion, and even more so now that he knew the stars were unfriendly. “What’s he done now?”

“He ran for parliament in a bi-election on the anti-war ticket. The vote was close, but it looks like he won.”

Mark shook his head. “Mikhail got as big a scare as the rest of us when we almost let Sar-Say loose at Klys’kra’t. You would think he would have learned his lesson. Some problems are just too big to ignore.”

“I’ve heard him speak. Apparently, he thinks hiding from the Broa is still the best strategy.”

“Too late for that,” Mark said, shaking his head. He told her about the change in the stargate software that required a live transmission before a ship could jump.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” she asked, her voice tinged with fear.

“I don’t know. If they aren’t now, the time will come when they will be. We’ve penetrated their territory pretty deeply. We’ve left traces. They have full recordings of us at Klys’kra’t and Pastol. They have records of our Q-ships transiting their stargates. Once they correlate all of the data, they will probably come looking for us.”

“Then perhaps Vasloff is right.”

Mark shook his head again. “Had we pulled in our horns and hidden after the first expedition, we might have gotten away with it until our bubble of radio noise finally penetrated some Broan-occupied system. They have listening posts for just that sort of thing, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.” Susan looked pensive. Mark recognized that he’d darkened the mood again.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to get on my soap box. How would you like dessert?”

“I’d love some.”

“Dessert, coming up,” he said, half rising from the table.

“No, let me,” she answered, also standing.

For a moment, they were both crouched over the table, their faces and lips mere centimeters apart. Mark paused as he found himself looking into a pair of emerald eyes, his head spinning from the smell of perfume. Glancing down, he was mesmerized by the sight of two full breasts barely concealed by the low cut gown and one erect brown nipple prominently displayed by an errant fold. Gulping, he looked up again to discover hot lips on his own.

The kiss was a surprise, so much so that he couldn’t remember who had initiated it. It was one of those kisses that began passionate and then built from there. It lasted for an eternity that was probably no more than fifteen seconds. Then the kiss was over, truncated.

He found Susan looking at him with concern. “What’s wrong?”

Breathing deeply, he finally regained his voice, “You know what.”

She straightened up, as did he. Suddenly, they were two diners once again separated by a table and the remains of a meal. “I don’t suppose we could forget you are married, just this one night?”