He passed the datapad over to me, and I silently perused its contents. Gregor on the other hand, without any prompting, launched into explanations of how he managed to come by such important and difficult information.
I could barely keep myself from bursting out with laughter. The information he gathered wasn’t completely worthless, but it might as well have been. Every summary and piece of data was rather sloppy in presentation. There was no organization, no uniformity or cataloguing, and each entry dealt with some manner of adventure, emphasizing action over truth. The entire collection seemed a series of elaborate fabrications.
I saw a few materials on Hanatar and the ever-illusive battles of Caldonis and New Prague, but they hinted at some greater dramatic flair with little grounding in reality. The datapad did contain a few still images, gathered from the security tapes during Ivan’s assault. Though indistinct, they featured a large man with sharp features, corresponding to the principle descriptions I’d gathered prior. Again I wondered if this truly was Ivan. If it was, I further wondered if his actual intention at Luna was nothing more than a robbery.
A couple of the stories caught my eye, and as much humoring him as searching for more details, I allowed Gregor to prattle on. I even let him speak past the allotted time, but I quickly realized no further useful information would be obtained there.
“Mr. Wilhelm, I thank you for your time,” I said, rising. “Your information has been most helpful, and I hope you won’t think me rude to refuse your kind offer of hospitality.”
He stood up and held out his hands. “You can’t be thinking of leaving, good Archivist. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of my findings!”
I forced a chuckle. “Even so, I’m afraid I have appointments and will have to return at some later time to hear them.” The offer was an outright lie, but it appeared to boost his spirits.
“Oh, well, I of course understand. I did spend all hours of my youth building this resort, you see. Busy busy busy, all the time.” Gregor laughed. “Youngsters never quite get how to take things easy, do they?”
With a thin smile, I replied, “No, I suppose not.”
He patted me on the back while we walked over to the exit. “Bertram will show you to your vessel. You must make sure to contact me ahead of time for your return. I’ll be wanting to block off a couple of days to talk to you, and I’ll make sure our finest suite is available for your comfort.”
I nodded, and we shook hands. The doors to the lift slid open, and Bertram was standing inside. “Please follow me, sir,” he said.
The servant/manager held the same level of silence as he brought me back to my ship. With a slight bow and a, “Good day, sir,” he walked away when we arrived. A few more minutes and a proper exit procedure later, Minerva slid out of the docking bay.
After a quick and curious flyby to the iridescent pollution of Old Earth, I set my thrusters to full and moved away from the system.
Chapter 7: Reductio Ad Absurdum
Not every piece of this matter came easily, and this was no more evident than in the informational dry spell which resulted after my meeting with Gregor Wilhelm.
It seemed that Traverian Grey was about as easy to locate as Ivan himself. No leads pointed me in the correct direction, and everywhere I looked, the former mercenary appeared as a long-departed specter. Grey worked for almost everyone: corporations, the government, criminals, and even a handful of private citizens provided the money was decent enough to warrant his skill.
However, no one had the slightest clue as to what happened to him. Most signs pointed to some fabled, legendary battle with unknown individuals, which claimed either life or limb for Grey. This was followed by a retirement or burial somewhere nameless, far away from those with grudging notions. With as long and lucrative a career as Grey had, the number of potential nemeses was not small.
Even so, all leads turned up dry, and the dozens of inquiries I flitted out to sources, contacts, and complete strangers filtered in over the course of a couple of weeks without a hint of helpful information.
Worse yet were my own personal movements, most of which were too worthless to even mention.
Even before I made it out of the solar system of Old Earth, a single-passenger vessel caught up with me. The individual inside was one of the security guards who hoped to get a chance to speak with me. I sensed a certain awe and bizarre hero worship for my kind, which instantly put me in a foul mood.
“I totally have information for you. Ivan information!” he exclaimed over the communicator. “I can come with and help you search!” At once, I assumed some fraction of the meeting with Wilhelm seeped out.
After repeated flat denial, the mildly crestfallen man still begged me to stop at a fueling station, to have dinner and a drink with him, and to allow him to tell me the story that burned in his mind: his encounter with Ivan.
I gave him ten minutes to talk while we both progressed towards the edge of the gravity well.
“Sure, I’ll take what I can get.” The enthusiasm he provided was more irritating than Wilhelm’s. “You’re gonna love this.”
I did not.
He launched into some pointless story mirroring that of the one I was just told. He swore that Ivan, by himself, raided the casino not for a hefty payday but to free some woman, the apparent love of his life. Why she was there, how he completed it, and everything else was left absent, and I suspected it was because my clinging friend hadn’t quite figured those parts out yet.
In about seven minutes, I was almost ready to blast him out of the sky to rid myself of the high-pitched babble and his absurd tale. Limbs torn off, bare-handed smashing through the vaults, and inexplicable detail of a pointless seduction of a female guard, it became a rambled tale of heroism without a grain of sensibility.
Nothing seemed to be remotely true, and I found myself pining for the company of the alleged Dr. Trevors, likely still crawling around the conduits of Ethra and searching for the illusive conspiracy which would validate his lunacy. At least the madman’s story had relative sense to it, not some rambled mash of improbable events.
I was able to extract myself from the clutches of the admirer and depart to the next location. Sullen though he was at my firm rejection, the fellow allowed me to leave in peace.
The border world of Rupe, implying as much refinement as the brevity of its name, was a cornucopia of various ore production. It’s decadent display of brown tones and endless fields of dirt housed my next pointless inquiry.
A bar, of course a bar, had been burned to the ground eight years prior. In a bout of wild and outlandish claims, the owner managed to get his insurance paid out because he attributed the damage with some measure of evidence to Ivan.
The owner was a half-senile, amoral crackpot with an incredibly foul mouth. This fellow was openly hostile, glaring at my, “Godramn mettle bits,” and cursing my name at every opportunity. This was shortly before trying to, “Rid the cusswirping glalacky,” of my particular nuisance by way of murder.
Tranquilizers calmed him down.
Racism aside, his hostility was also due to the fact that he believed I was investigating him for the successful fraud which allowed him to live his sunset years in meager retirement. He told me this after he pulled a flechette
