Rank-smelling or not, they were all busy with their own affairs (so it seemed) and didn’t give us more than the occasional sidelong glance.
At last we reached a door that had a pair of guards posted in front. With its burnished sheen and solid, mass-produced appearance, the door stood out in that run-down setting.
I recognized the model. I’d have to have been blind not to, given my photographic memory. It was a B-378 reinforced diaphragm hatch from the armored passageway of a Tribuno-class interplanetary destroyer. Knowing this did nothing to help me understand what it was doing here. Even in the chaos of Earth, as we’d always heard it described in comparison to the Burroughs, you assumed a civilian wouldn’t have access to military-grade equipment. Especially not anything this sophisticated.
In the same way, it made no sense to have two sentinels outfitted in Grendel-class combat armor, the flawless finish of their polished mimetic polycarbon contrasting implausibly with the pitiful caricatures of space suits worn by the other station occupants. But in an odd way, standing in front of that door made the two armored giants look more congruous.
The door did not open and the armor-bearing behemoths did not move one nanometer when we showed up. But their array of servo-assisted weapons turned and pointed straight at us. I didn’t find this reassuring.
“Entrance to the Old Man’s quarters,” Vasily whispered nervously. “They’ve always let me through. But now they see me with you—anybody can smell the alien-flunky on you from ten miles away. I really don’t know—”
“Before you say it: don’t even think of trying to give me the slip,” I warned him. “I don’t care if my shell is green or ripe or rotten. I’m your shadow. If they don’t let you in—well, I always thought it was a crazy idea to come all the way from Titan to an Earth orbital to check out a possible lead from some space Methuselah about a hidey-hole in the asteroid belt.”
“Buratino, sometimes the longest way is the only practical one,” Vasily whispered, glancing from the corner of his eye at the guards’ impassive armored hulks. “Man, they’re taking their time checking us out. If all this is just to tell me I’m not welcome around here, they might as well speed it up.”
All of a sudden the two doorkeepers stepped aside with a choreographic precision that displayed their excellent training (one more incongruence: Storm Troopers on the Estrella Rom?). The diaphragm-door yawned wide, its blades overlapping one another as they spun to the outer perimeter of the circle, revealing a long tunnel with a fixed rail along the ceiling from which dangled a number of hold bars. Without hesitation, Vasily passed through and grabbed onto one of the bars with both hands. Again I copied him. The door circled shut behind us. I was not at all prepared for what happened next.
Without any warning, the hold bars began to run along the rail, sweeping us through the tunnel faster and faster. Instead of running straight, the route described a broad spiral. Somebody had modified the hell out of what had originally been a short reinforced passageway on a destroyer, making it at least a hundred times longer. Holding onto the bar was no problem for me, but judging by the tension in Vasily’s neck and shoulder muscles this jungleland express couldn’t have been easy even for someone who was used to it. After a couple of seconds we hit an acceleration of nearly 4 g, and only then did we begin braking, coming at last to a complete stop. The weightlessness told me we’d returned to the center of the great wheel, taking less than five seconds to undo all the work we’d done to get to the door. Start at the center, take a million detours, end up in the same place.
The Old Man was very concerned about security, that much was obvious. But I was surprised to discover that he also knew something about history. The ancient Mycenaean labyrinth-fortresses were built on the same principle, largely forgotten in the later history of fortifications on Earth, but neatly adapted here to space.
We emerged from the tunnel and swam in the air through another diaphragm hatch, this one unguarded. When it closed behind us we found ourselves floating in an enormous, bare, hemispherical chamber. The curved wall seemed to be made of composite ceramic armor, but I couldn’t see any furnishings or anything special in it except for a circular mirror, almost thirty feet across, which covered the entire flat side opposite the entrance.
“Slovoban didn’t get to be his age by being careless,” Vasily snorted, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Hell, I’ve made this trip at least a hundred times, but he keeps making me go through all this shit. If I didn’t think the Old Man was the only one who could help us find the damn Cetian, I would have saved myself the trouble. When he understands that keeping this space dump in one piece depends on how cooperative he is, I hope he’ll tell us everything. If not, the frigates we left back there can use the Estrella Rom for target practice.”
“What makes you think that this senile gypsy, even if his home depends on it, can tell us where—” I
