It was also completely empty.
Fine by me, she thought as she stood in the lobby, more an access corridor than a lobby in fact, as the ship’s gym’s AI ran her through the options. She really was spoiled by the choices. The place had pretty much every form of physical exercise capable of being stuffed into a commercial spaceship, and for those that couldn’t, it had the latest in sims. Swimming, running, bikes, horse riding, surfing, walking, resistance work, weights, white water, rock work, zero g, every brand of unarmed combat and ball game known to humankind and more. Much more. If she wanted to, she could climb almost any mountain in humanspace in the middle of a howling blizzard wearing a bikini, sandals, and a beanie. The options were as endless as the imaginations of sim engineers were boundless. No, she decided after a moment. Something simple, something that didn’t need a full-function envirosim. A long, hard walk and spectacular scenery-something from Old Earth would be nice-and she’d be well set up for whatever else the
Even as she made her decision, the gym began to fill up in a hurry. One by one, a group of men filed past her. For a moment Kerri thought nothing of it, but then she looked closer. It wasn’t just any old group of men, she realized. They were all young; they all looked to be in great physical shape and had a disciplined, controlled way of moving. And they said very little, just a few words now and again, but so quietly that she couldn’t make out their accents. She watched them as they split up and with no time wasted started on the weight machines, working with a focused intensity that was almost robotic. Military, perhaps? Professional futbol team, maybe? No, military. Had to be. They just had the look.
It was odd, though, she thought. She’d skimmed the manifest looking for any Space Fleet or Marine Corps people she might know and hadn’t seen any mention of a group like this. Well, she thought, they have a right to travel, too, whoever they might be. “Come on, Kerri, time to get moving,” she said quietly to herself, promptly walking right into another young man as he tried to get past her and into the gym.
“Oh, sorry about that,” she said, embarrassed by her carelessness.
“No problem,” said the man.
To look at, he was obviously another member of the group now working out in front of her with silent, almost manic determination. Without being too obvious, Kerri moved so that he couldn’t easily get past her.
“So,” she said casually, waving a hand at the men working out in the gym, “you’re part of the team? What do you guys do? Professional futbol, maybe?”
“Please excuse me. I need to get on,” the man said quietly, his gray-blue eyes fixed on some distant point over her shoulder.
“Oh, sorry,” Kerri said, standing unmoving in the center of the narrow gym lobby, her face sporting her best “I’m a clueless old bat so please indulge me” look. “I don’t mean to hold you up, but what do you do? Come on. You’re professional futbollers, aren’t you? But which team?”
“Madam, please, I…”
“Oh, come on,” Kerri pleaded, watching with interest as the man struggled to keep control in the face of what he must have thought was a dangerously obsessive woman. “You can tell me. I can keep a secret. Which team?”
The man shrugged his shoulders in defeat. “Not futbol, ma’am,” he said resignedly, smiling a thin, forced smile, “We’re just a bunch of guys off to Frontier. We’re hard-rock miners, and there’s an asteroid waiting for us out there. Now really, please may I pass? I must get on.” His tone was polite but firm, his accent thick with the flat, stretched vowels of a Damnation’s Gate native. Well, that was what her neuronics had decided, anyway.
Kerri had had enough of the young man with the untidy yellow-gold hair and hard gray-blue eyes. Why the man made her so uncomfortable, and he did, she’d probably never know. But if he was a hard-rock miner, she was a cabbage, a very big one. She’d sneaked a look at his hands, and they looked to her like the hands of a man who’d spent a great deal of time practicing unarmed combat. The closest they’d been to rock would have been climbing a cliff.
“Oh, yes, silly me. I do so like to talk,” she said gushingly as she stood aside and waved him past. “Please.”
“Thank you,” he said more curtly than was polite.
Kerri watched him for a moment as he went through. Something wasn’t right here. A group of military men, possibly special forces, some of them, pretending to be hard-rock miners? Didn’t stack up. But, but, but. All of that might be the case, but it really wasn’t any of her business. After all, whatever mischief they might be up to, it would have to wait until they got dirtside on Frontier. There sure as hell wasn’t much they could do millions of light-years from anywhere, stuck in the vast nothingness of pinchspace.
Exercise over, aching muscles more than compensated for by a definite sense of virtue at having completed a good, solid workout, Kerri dropped into what was to become her routine for the trip: a brief word with an uncommunicative and sleepy Sam followed by a shower and breakfast and then on to the forward business class lounge. There the holovids presented a truly spectacular three-dimensional simulation of local normalspace as it rushed past them at over 4.3 billion kilometers per second. Even though it was something created by the ship’s AI- the actual view outside being only the murky gray-white nothingness of pinchspace-Kerri never tired of it. For a while as
It was an effort to get up and go for a walk around the ship before lunch in time for her other passion: contract bridge with a group organized by the ship’s entertainment officer. That was followed by a people-watching walk through the small piazza, coffee with Sam at one of the small cafes before happy hour in the business class lounge, followed by dinner, idle conversation, and then bed.
If it hadn’t been for the persistent unease she felt about the group of men she had met in the gym that morning, it would have been a perfect day. Stop fussing, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep. They might well be, as she now suspected, a group of mercenaries bound for one of the endless wars that sputtered and flared on some godforsaken world out on the rim of humanspace, but that was somebody else’s problem. She’d do what little she could. She would make sure that she had full neuronics recordings of each group member, and once back home, she’d pass them on to one of her contacts in Space Fleet intelligence. They’d follow up if necessary.
Sunday, September 6, 2398, UD
The city of Foundation, Terranova’s oldest and, as the name suggested, the first settlement of the Federated Worlds, was quiet in the last few hours before dawn.
Low in the western sky, Castor was setting behind the massive bulk of the New Tatra Mountains. High to the south, the razor-thin crescent of Terranova’s second moon, Pollux, cast a faint light across the sleeping city.
The large house on the low hills overlooking the city, and beyond it, the sea, dark and quiet. Inside, the sleeping form of Giovanni Pecora, federal minister of interstellar relations, struggled to resist the increasingly strident demands of his neuronics. But eventually they could not be refused any longer, and Pecora, a bulky man in his early seventies, his dark brown hair laced liberally with streaks of white-unusual for such a heavily geneered society-and red-faced with sleep, swung himself up and out of bed, muttering under his breath.
He accepted the comm.
“Okay, okay, I’m up. Give me two minutes to organize myself and I’ll be straight back to you.”
Pecora’s tone made it clear to the caller, the ministry’s duty officer, how he felt about being dragged out of bed that early in the morning. This had better be something worthwhile, something his personal agent couldn’t have dealt with, or the duty officer would wish she’d never been born. And why me? Pecora wondered as he fumbled in the dark for his dressing gown and slippers, trying hard not to wake his wife. Suddenly it hit him. The duty officer had called him direct rather than one of his senior ministerial staff, and a cold clammy hand clamped itself around his heart. Jesus, he thought, something has happened, and he was bloody sure he didn’t want to know what it was.
