The courier, a good solid ship with nothing spectacular about it, went clipping along in flightspace, bypassing all the monstrous magnitudes of normal space and time, the domain of Einstein where relativity was still in charge. For some reason the statglass ports in the control room had been left fully cleared, as if neither of the two humans aboard, both space veterans, would admit for a moment the possibility of being turned queasy by an occasional deep look into nothingness. In ordinary circumstances the sight might have bothered Harry enough to make him turn the glass opaque. But in his current mental state it was going to take something much worse than the sight of raw flightspace to have any effect on him at all.
Since coming aboard, Harry had been wandering the confined spaces of the ship, not knowing what he was looking for or why. On entering the control room, he had let himself down into the copilot's chair, but only because it had seemed the handiest seat available. He wasn't doing anything, not even thinking clearly, just waiting for this ride to be over.
The captain-pilot wasn't quite sure yet how to deal with this special passenger, who had to be important in some way the captain had evidently not figured out. He touched a pilot's helmet hanging on its umbilical. "Care to take the helm for a while, Mister Silver?"
Harry roused himself from a dark place. "No, thanks."
The captain cleared his throat. "Sir, now we're securely spaceborne, it's time I leveled with you. We're not really going to the destination listed on our flight plan."
That awoke some interest. "Oh?"
Deferentially, the courier's captain explained that the planet name in Winston Cheng's latest message had actually been a code word. Their true destination this time was not one of Cheng's palaces, or corporate headquarters. Instead, they were traveling directly to an operational base of some kind that Cheng Enterprises had established within a couple of hours' flight time from the Gravel Pit.
"It seems like there's something pretty hush-hush going on around there," the captain offered, then paused, looking closely at his passenger.
Harry shook his head and puffed out breath. He had signed on for a technical operation, and it was time he began to get a grasp of practical details. "What solar system?" he wanted to know.
"None. We're headed for a wanderworld. The address is WW 207GST." The captain went on to give Galactic coordinates.
The term "wanderworld" was generally applied to rocky masses that were large enough to be in some way interesting and attractive to humanity, but were currently free of gravitational attachment to any solar system, though some of these Galactic vagrants showed signs of having spent long periods of their early history, sometimes hundreds of millions of standard years, as members of systemic families. Like other bodies of its type, WW 207GST could be thought of as a citizen of the Galaxy. Many were of suitable dimensions for suited ED humans to walk on them in natural gravity and reasonable safety, though the lack of solar heating generally kept any atmosphere that might be present in a firmly frozen state.
Harry reflected that with the sprawling empire of interstellar real estate that Winston Cheng had at his disposal, it wasn't surprising that the old man had been able to come up with a handy rock on which to establish a secret operational base of his own, from which to launch the secret effort that he liked to call a rescue expedition. Of course secrecy would be important; let the Space Force catch wind of his plan, and they would certainly try to close it down.
The onboard data bank revealed that wanderworld WW 207GST was currently plowing through space at a modest few score kilometers per second relative to the nearest stars, in the general direction of the Gravel Pit. In another thousand standard years or so it might even be in a position to apply for membership in that chaotic system. Meanwhile, it was tens of light-years distant from any of Cheng's major business operations, or any of the worlds on which he maintained a publicly acknowledged residence.
The courier captain, no doubt in the belief that he was being subtle, warily refrained from trying to pump Harry for information on the mysterious happenings on WW 207GST. But it was obvious that the captain knew the big boss was planning something very much out of the ordinary there, and he was curious about it.
After a while he asked Harry: "Have you met the Lady Masaharu?"
Harry was taking a break in his restless, compulsive wandering. They were sitting in the courier's little galley, and the captain had a mug of something hot in front of him.
"Once," Harry admitted.
"Then you probably know she's Winston Cheng's chief personal assistant."
Harry didn't answer.
"She's on 207GST right now. And he depends a whole lot on the lady."
Harry, whose attention had already started to drift away again, looked up, faintly curious. There were certain things it would be good to know about Cheng, as they got ready for what was to come. "I take it they're not married."
"To each other?" The courier captain seemed to find that amusing. He confirmed that she was Winston Cheng's most trusted associate, and had been with him for some great but uncertain number of years. "Lady Laura's never married anyone, as far as I know." As for the old man himself, it was more or less common knowledge that the last of his succession of wives had enjoyed an amicable separation and settlement some years ago.
The captain went on, providing Harry with what he evidently considered juicy inside information, obviously in hopes of getting similar material in return. Maybe, thought Harry, the man was spying for some rival corporation.
"The only people old Cheng seems to care much about are his granddaughter and her kid. They spend a fair amount of time with him. Oh, Masaharu's usually at his side—except when he's in bed. Sleeping is one thing they don't seem to do together."
Harry was getting tired of it. "So where are you watching all this from—under the bed?" That earned him a lengthy period of silence.
The silence had hardly started to erode before the courier in its preliminary approach to the clandestine base made contact with an early warning system. Looking at the display as it came through on instruments, Harry could see it was a very simple and primitive one.
He slightly adjusted the fit of the copilot's helmet on his head. The perception was vaguely perturbing. "That's all the eyes they have?" he asked the world in general. Not that he really gave a good damn about defense anymore, but where there was one deficiency there were likely to be others; and he wanted the mission being planned to be technically first rate.
The captain had regained his voice, if not his cheerfully confiding manner. He remarked stiffly: "Whoever's in charge on this rock isn't putting much time and effort into defense. Probably no bad machines expected in this zone. Maybe they found some exotic matter on the wanderworld. Wish I knew what it's all about."
"If you don't know what it's all about, you ought to keep your mouth shut."
The next period of silence was satisfyingly long.
Certainly none of the occupiers of WW 207GST, past or present, had made much effort at serious fortification; faint scars on the rock suggested there had once been some tentative beginnings along that line, which had later been removed, probably when the first ED human visitors decided to abandon the place—perhaps a hundred standard years ago. Harry supposed that even then old Cheng might well have qualified as old.
One result of that previous cycle of activity on WW 207GST had been, the courier captain said, the creation of somewhat spartan living quarters for more than a hundred people, along with docking facilities capable of handling several small ships.
What natural warmth the mass of rock enjoyed—and that was very little, in terms of human needs—was generated only by the long-burning fires of its own deep radioactivity. Uncounted millions of bodies similar to this one, the debris of ancient cosmic accidents, drifted in the depths of interstellar space.
As the courier on its final approach pulled within a kilometer of the wanderworld, Harry, looking out through a cleared port, could see plain docking facilities, all open to space, next to a sprawling building. There was room for perhaps half a dozen ships, but only one, another courier, was visible at the dock.
Crowding up beside it were the smaller shapes of about half a dozen superluminal robotic couriers, no more than elaborate message capsules, ready to be loaded with information and fired off at a moment's notice. Until now the space traffic at 207GST had never been heavy enough to require a landing field; a second reason for the absence was the weak natural gravity, so feeble that parked ships would be unstable, subject to accidental tipping. No star was close enough to be called this world's sun, but the Gravel's Pit's primary came closest.
Harry could see no sign of the two armed yachts that Winston Cheng had spoken of with restrained enthusiasm. Evidently those ships were not yet ready. Or they might be engaged in some test flight or scouting mission. There was no sign of anything that might qualify as a secret weapon. Well, Harry had not a whole lot of faith in secret weapons anyway.
Harry found the minimal signs of activity, this lack of martial hardware, disturbing. How many days had already passed since Cheng's two family members had been lost? He realized he had lost count. How much longer was the business going to be dragged out—or might old Cheng have lost his fiery urge to battle? Somehow Harry doubted that.
At some level of his mind, he had been vaguely, unrealistically, looking forward to being able to step out of this courier right into a fight against berserkers. But of course organizing a rescue attempt, or even a suicide attack, wasn't going to be that simple. Few things ever were.
In his mind Harry hadn't yet made the faintest attempt at detailed planning. Maybe it was better that he shouldn't. Every hour that passed must reduce the chances of any of the four kidnap victims being still alive—but if, as hard reality insisted, those chances had been microscopic to begin with, perhaps the loss of time was not important. Now, belatedly, Harry started to attempt a mental calculation of just what the odds might be on prisoner survival, but could get nowhere. On this subject his mind was still flatly refusing to grapple with practical details.
And now the wanderworld was right in front of them, so for all the eye could tell they were about to land on the nightside of a real planet, barren and forbidding. A minute later they were on the dock, where inhuman-looking robots waited to secure the ship, and the building was extruding an air-filled passenger tube/gangway to let two fragile humans walk from ship to shore without bothering with spacesuits. They went walking and not drifting; artificial gravity generators had been built in, to fit the place for long-term occupation.
Harry disembarked from the courier with the captain at his side. On emerging from the gangway the two of them found the tall figure of the Lady Masaharu waiting, her pale eyes fixed on Harry, glowing with what might have been enthusiasm. The captain murmured something respectful, enacted a slight bow, and promptly retreated to his ship.
The lady hardly seemed aware that the officer had come and gone. Her body looked even thinner than before, perhaps because she was dressed quite differently, in spacer's gray coverall and boots. But the impeccable hairdo was still in place.
Almost her first words to Harry were: "Mister Cheng is here. And he is anxious to see you."
Harry nodded. There was something else he wanted to do first. "Be right with you."
Turning his back on the building's main entrance that bulked nearby, Harry moved to stand looking out through a statglass port. The port had been placed to give observers a direct view of the brightest single star in the dark sky, the sun of the Gravel Pit system. It was a bigger and more elaborate installation than anything on shipboard. There wasn't any doubt of which star he ought to look at. A couple of globular clusters hovering relatively close were near enough, at only a few hundred light-years, to furnish useful light, and if you squinted at them they took on the aspect of fuzzy suns.
Ignoring the nearby rocky surface of the wanderworld, he dialed the port to high magnification, giving him the best look possible at the place to which Becky and Ethan had been taken, and where he was going to follow them.
The wanderworld possessed no atmosphere worth mentioning, but it definitely looked to him as if that star, the central sun of the Gravel Pit, was twinkling.
"The irregular variation in intensity is not intrinsic," a voice from some nearby machinery assured him. "The cause of twinkling is the intermittent passage of ponderous masses of opaque material across its tiny disk."
Becky and Ethan. If they were anywhere, they were there.
Apparently the lady's schedule was not able to accommodate more than about ten seconds of stargazing. Her voice was even sharper than usual. "Mister Cheng has a number of urgent things to do."
"So do I," said Harry over his shoulder. Ten more seconds passed before he turned away from the port and in silence followed her stiff back to a chamber much different than the site of their previous meeting.
Some of the rooms in the refurbished installation were big enough to have contained a hundred people or more in reasonable comfort. Some of these chambers had not yet been reopened, but there was already plenty of volume available for the current staff to live and work in. Parts of the complex had been constructed on the surface of 207GST, while other parts were housed in cavities blasted or melted into solid rock.
The rocky fabric of 207GST, like the great majority of wanderworlds of its general size and type, contained no fossils to show that there had ever been native life. It seemed to Harry the kind of world that berserkers ought to heartily approve.
As Harry entered the small room, Winston Cheng looked up from where he sat in front of his virtual desktop, a flat surface before him on which strings of pictures, graphs, and symbols came and went. He said: "You're looking well, Harry. How are you bearing up?"
"I'm not. But here I am."
The lady had conducted him on foot along one passage and another, catching sight of a few other people in the distance, to a fairly small interior room, with only one door that was soon snugly closed behind them. Primitive ventilation whispered audibly, and the lighting seemed barely adequate.
"No one can hear us now, Harry." Rising from a simple chair and extending a hand in greeting, the old man seemed confident of the fact, and Harry was inclined to believe him.
"Fine with me," said Harry. It didn't seem worthwhile to wonder aloud why it should matter whether anyone heard them or not. He got right to the point. "Coming in to land, I didn't see any weapons."
This time all three of them were sitting in very ordinary chairs, there were no exotic chewing pods in sight, and no semi--intelligent furniture. The holographic ghosts of Cheng's dear departed had also been left behind.
Cheng was looking vaguely military, in a tailored kind of spaceman's coverall in ordinary fabric. An odd-looking robot, anything but anthropomorphic, stood, or rather crouched, at the tycoon's elbow. Eyeing the machine, Harry decided it was probably a communications specialist, present for the sole purpose of making sure that no one and nothing else could overhear.
In fact the old man himself did not appear to be bearing up all that well. "Good for you. Together you and I, with the help of some good friends"—with a stately inclination of his head he included the lady—"are going to achieve—all that is left in this world for men in our position to accomplish."
Harry said: "I don't suppose this robot is your secret weapon."
Cheng looked tired, and the lady answered. "No. It is only here to assure security. It has a short-term memory of only thirty seconds for new information, and a long-term memory that holds nothing but its wired-in instructions. As for the weapon you speak of, arrangements have been made, and delivery is expected to be on schedule."
"So that's not what you want to talk about."
No, it wasn't. It came as no surprise to Harry to learn that their investigation into the kidnappings had reached the same conclusion he had come to himself: there had to be some connection between the two events. But they had made little progress beyond that point.
Cheng was saying in a fatalistic voice: "We have no real evidence regarding the possible nature of this tie. We still have no more than shadowy suspicions."
"Isn't that about where we started?"
The lady inclined her head in a grave bow. "I regret that is correct."
Harry was looking steadily at him. "I don't believe the point actually came up last time we talked, but it seems distinctly possible that there's a traitor somewhere in your organization. Someone who told the bad machines just when and where to snatch your people, and then told them of our meeting. Someone who has turned goodlife."
Cheng sighed. "Of course, and we are looking into it. The investigation advances very slowly. You will surely understand that it is complicated by the fact that I must take no steps that might jeopardize our mission here." He paused for another sigh. "I must ask you, Harry: have you ever talked about our previous meeting, mentioned it to anyone at all—?"
"No."
"I hadn't expected that you would." After a pause the old man added: "It kills me, Harry, to think there's someone in my organization who could do such a thing, sell out to the enemy in such vile, cruel fashion. But I find it hard to come up with any other explanation."
The lady said: "In any organization the size of Cheng Enterprises, there will always be a few who hate the one on top."
That wasn't news to Cheng; he only nodded gently.
Harry went on: "If we're right, the really strange thing is that there's one of your people who not only hates you but hates me too. Enough to . . ." Somehow he couldn't finish.
Cheng glanced at the lady, perhaps signaling that it was time for her to enter the conversation again. She said: "Mister Silver, there is one person in the organization, in fact now present on this base, with whom you have had dealings, and in fact notable disagreement, in the past. His name is Del Satranji."
It took a moment for the name to click. Harry got up from his chair, took a few paces, and sat down again. "Yeah, I know him . . . knew him. Only slightly. 'Notable disagreement'? I wouldn't call it that."
Both people were still looking at him, and he went on. "I haven't thought of him for years. As you've discovered, we were in a certain military thing together, a long time ago."
When Harry thought about it, he supposed it wasn't really strange that Satranji should be here now, on the wanderworld. People who might be considered expert at the job of fighting berserkers made up only a very small segment of the vast Galactic population.
"What was the nature of the trouble between you?" The lady's question was professional; just gathering the facts.
"It was . . . something to do with our job." Harry frowned. "Damned if I can even remember the details now. An argument about piloting techniques, as I recall . . . at least that's how it started.
"Satranji and I just rubbed each other the wrong way, I guess. He liked to challenge people. Everything had to be a competition. Certainly we weren't friends. But all that was years ago. I wouldn't describe him as an enemy." Harry shook his head. "It's hard to picture him coming up with any devilish plot."
"Was there a woman involved, in the difficulty between you?"
"A woman." Harry was about to deny that, but then something elusive caught at his memory, and he couldn't be sure. He shook his head, doubtfully.
"In the days ahead it will sometimes be necessary for the two of you to work closely together."
"I don't see any serious problem with that."
"That is good. He has given me the same answer to the same question."
Winston Cheng sighed. It was a delicate, snakelike sound. "I employ many human workers. Perhaps the malefactor who works to arrange kidnappings is one of my other people, who hates you for some reason we have not yet discovered. Or perhaps one of my machines has been subverted. There are several extremely intricate corporate information systems. Of course an artificial intelligence cannot hate. But . . ."
"But it can be programmed to give a bloody good imitation of hatred," Harry finished. The point needed no elaboration, not with the perfect example of the berserkers themselves in constant view.
He went on: "Anyway, that's about as far as I've been able to get, just trying to think about it. I say 'trying' because there are only certain days when I can even try. There has to be a connection between one crime and the other, between your people being snatched and mine. I haven't been able to take it any further. But I don't have an army of people to put to work finding out what the connection is. I've been assuming that you do."
Cheng was nodding, slowly, gently. "Naturally I have already taken steps, and the effort you suggest is well under way. Of course it is not the type of problem where the literal employment of an army would be of material help. Rather the issue has been placed in the hands of a chosen few. So far, I regret to say, without any very useful result."