Balcescu Station
Debrecen Planetary Orbit
Balcescu System
“I don’t mean to insult our hosts or anything,” Indiana Graham said, “but this dump makes Seraphim look good.”
Damien Harahap looked around. In its better days—which he doubted had ever been all that good—the area of Balcescu Station through which he and his companion were passing at the moment had been a vending area. A string of small shops on either side of the corridor had catered to the needs of the station’s crew and visitors.
Those glory days, such as they had been, were long gone. As time passed and Balcescu Station’s business had become more and more enmeshed in the slave trade, it had suffered from the same condition slavery always brought with it. Wherever it spread, everything not bound up with slavery itself began withering on the vine. The wages of free people stagnated or declined, and while the wealth of the relative few who benefited from slavery increased, that wealth wasn’t typically spent in the places where slaves did their work or the slave trade was concentrated.
The only exception to that rule of which Harahap was aware was the planet on which genetic slavery had originated. Mesa itself had remained a wealthy and advanced star nation, despite being the headquarters of Manpower and despite the fact that the majority of its population were slaves or descendants of slaves. And while he didn’t know why that was true, he agreed with Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat, both of whom were convinced the reason it had was at the heart of what they called the Manpower Mystery.
“Manpower makes no sense,” Cachat had once told him.
“Economically, it—and slavery—should have died a natural death long ago. Which is why Anton and I are both sure it isn’t really a business to begin with. It’s a disguise—a way to hide malice and malevolence beneath mere greed and corruption.”
As badly as slavery might undermine a healthy economy however, its sudden disappearance left a vacuum. Whatever business had allowed the small shops to survive had declined since Torch’s navy had seized the station. The navy’s personnel substituted to a degree for the now vanished practitioners of the slave trade, but only to a degree. Mostly because there simply weren’t as many of them, but also because they weren’t transients. They’d buy food and drink regularly, so restaurants and taverns survived, although even they had fewer customers, because there were fewer mouths to feed. But the market for other goods, the sort travelers tended to pick up in transit—never great to begin with—had all but collapsed.
“I wouldn’t call them our ‘hosts,’ exactly.” Harahap’s tone was even drier than usual. “Given that Torch seized the place by force, its people are more in the nature of an occupying force than a bunch of guests.”
“And scary occupiers, to boot,” Indy agreed, and Harahap snorted.
“Scary” was one way to put it, he supposed. The civilian inhabitants of Balcescu Station had come perilously close to being massacred by the Torch Marines who’d witnessed the destruction of the pinnace they’d sent to seize the Luigi Pirandello. Harahap couldn’t find it in his heart to blame the Torches for their reaction. In fact, the thing that truly surprised him was that there hadn’t been a massacre. Not even a handful of freelance murders. Given how many of Torch military’s personnel were ex- (and, in some cases, not so very ex-) members of the Audubon Ballroom, the temptation must have been high. The fact that they hadn’t yielded to it spoke well for their discipline.
According to reports, they had come close, however. Which was all very regrettable, of course…but was likely to increase the locals’ eagerness to cooperate.
They’ve got to be worrying that something might trigger us into having them summarily executed after all, he thought. Not that he ever would. But neither would he refuse to capitalize upon the fact that they didn’t know that.
They made their way through the rundown shopping area to the entrance to the section of the station in which the Torches had established their headquarters. The two guards waved them through without bothering to check their credentials, which they’d already seen. Harahap thought Torch’s military—its ground forces, at any rate—were quite good. Not surprising, perhaps, in troops who’d been trained by Thandi Palane. But they weren’t what you’d call a spit-and-polish outfit.
That was fine with Harahap. He vastly preferred competence to perfection of drill. He nodded approvingly to the guards, and the treecat on his shoulder bleeked in amusement. No treecat would ever need something as silly as “credentials” to know if someone was who he said he was, and Fire Watch had even less use for pointless formalities than his two-leg.
They continued down the passage to the office of the station’s new commandant, and Harahap pressed the door buzzer. Lieutenant Colonel Kabweza was perched on a chair behind a desk covered with old-fashioned handwritten notes. Like a bird. Kabweza was so short that when she raised her chair to a comfortable work height, her feet would have dangled a few centimeters off the deck if not for the footstool under her desk.
Now she looked up and waved them inside. Her expression was not happy. Neither was it particularly surprised, however.
“No luck,” she said with a scowl. “We’ve scoured the records every which way from Sunday. They’ve been scrubbed completely clean.” She nodded toward the chairs in front of her desk. “Have a seat.”
Harahap detected no enthusiasm in her invitation, which didn’t astonish him. From her point of view, investigators sent out from Mesa were more of a nuisance than anything else. But she’d been polite and cooperative, and she obviously didn’t like telling them her efforts had been fruitless.
“Completely scrubbed?” Indy said as he took his seat. “That seems odd. I wouldn’t expect a station like this to maintain tight security.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you,” Kabweza said. “Especially when you add in the warning not to mess with their computer files we gave them as we approached the station. Understanding that the distinction between ‘warning’ and ‘bloodcurdling threats of ghastly horrors’ couldn’t be discerned without special optical equipment.”
She smiled, although the expression was fleeting.
“But there it is. By the time we were able to check the records ourselves, there wasn’t anything left.”
“I assume you didn’t carry out the bloodcurdling threats of ghastly horrors,” Harahap said, and the colonel shrugged.
“What would have been the point? What’s done is done—and, besides, we don’t think the station crew were the ones who did it. My technicians tell me they’re pretty sure it was a prearranged scrub. Probably programmed to happen automatically under certain conditions.” She smiled again, more broadly. “Conditions like, oh, imminent occupation by hostile forces.”
Harahap wasn’t surprised. The Alignment was anything but sloppy, when it came to security. They wouldn’t have overlooked programming the computers of a transit station they were using for a special evacuation to scrub themselves if it even looked like someone else might get a look at them.
He didn’t waste anyone’s time with phrases like are you sure? and have your technicians doublechecked?
This trip was looking more and more like wasted effort. Well, he’d been on wild goose chases before. He’d be on more in the future. And he’d always known the expedition to Balcescu was something of a long shot, anyway. Zachariah McBryde had last been seen leaving Mesa aboard a luxury liner. The liner had made its first stop at a planet named Descombes, and they’d found a recording that showed McBryde disembarking from the ship.
Then…he’d vanished. Further investigation determined that there were three alternate ways he could have left Descombes, and Harahap had picked the one he thought was the most likely choice for a clandestine evacuation—a nondescript general cargo ship that had offered limited—and cramped—passenger accommodations.
That had led him and Indy to Balcescu. Which now looked to be a dead end.
“The one thing I’d still like to do,” he said, “is to question the former station CO. Somogyi, I think his name was. I assume you still have him in custody?”
“Zoltan Somogyi,” Kabweza agreed with a nod. “And, no, we don’t. We just released him a few hours ago. There didn’t seem to be much point in keeping him.” She tapped the touchscreen built into her desk. “Zoltan Somogyi’s address,” she said.
“Somogyi, Zoltan,” a computer voice replied. “Section Alpha Two, Suite One-One-Three.”
Kabweza tapped another command, and the terminal transmitted the same address to Harahap’s uni-link. The station schematic he’d loaded to it on arrival blinked alight, highlighting the route to Alpha 2, Suite 113.
“Thank you,” he said, standing once more. “It’s probably a long shot, but longshots sometimes pay off. Come on, Indy. Let’s go pay a visit to Mr. Somogyi.”
✧ ✧ ✧
“I know you’re the fearless, brilliant interstellar secret agent,” Indy remarked to no one in particular as they hiked through less than pristine passages towards their destination. “But to an amateur such as myself, this seems like a waste of time. If the Marines couldn’t sweat anything out of him when he was still scared to death, what are the odds we can?”
“It probably is a waste of time,” Harahap agreed. “But, like I told the Colonel, you never know. And we don’t have anything else to do right now, so why not take a chance? Besides—”
He reached up to caress the ears of the treecat on his shoulder.
“I’m willing to bet Somogyi’s never met a treecat, but he may have heard about their reputation by now. Maybe he hasn’t, too, in which case we might just…enlighten him. Someone who can stand up to familiar interrogation techniques can be rattled by something unfamiliar. And if he happens to buy into the notion that Fire Watch here can actually read minds, and not just emotions…”
He shrugged, and Indy snorted.
“Did I ever mention that you’re a very devious fellow?” he asked, and Fire Watch bleeked a laugh of agreement.
✧ ✧ ✧
“Hurry,” Zoltan Somogyi hissed, leaning over Sophie Bordás’s shoulder. Bordás was—had been, at any rate—Balcescu Station’s sensor officer. At the moment, she sat at a work console in one corner of his three-room suite, keying in commands.
She also restrained herself—barely—from snarling, If you think this is so easy, why don’t you do it yourself? Instead, she said, “We made these security protocols hard for anyone to access for a reason, remember?”
“Sorry.” Somogyi straightened and wiped his face with one hand. “I just—”
The entrance buzzer sounded. Bordás broke off what she was doing and both of them stared at the closed door.
“Just ignore it,” she whispered.
Somogyi hesitated, obviously drawn to the idea. But after a moment, he shook his head.
“Better not. I told that bitch Kabweza I was going home. If she’s sent somebody to check on me, I damned well better be here.”
He moved to the door and activated the bulkhead viewscreen that showed the corridor beyond it. Two men stood there, neither of whom he recognized. One of them was an obviously young, wiry fellow. The other—probably the older of the two, Somogyi thought, although prolong made such judgments chancy—was probably the most ordinary looking individual Somogyi had ever seen. As he watched, the ordinary looking one pressed the buzzer again.
“Come on, Zoltan,” he said into the mic above the buzzer button. “We know you’re in there. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Somogyi looked back at Bordás. She stared at him for a couple of seconds, then shrugged.
“I’ve been covering my tracks as I went,” she said. “They probably won’t figure anything out even if they look. But give me a second to get away from the console.”
She crossed swiftly to a nearby couch and slid into it. Then, after a brief hesitation, she sprawled across it, as if she were a very regular visitor to Somogyi’s apartment. A lover, maybe.
Fat chance of that ever happening. Somogyi was tolerable, but that was about the best she could say for him.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Let ’em in.”
Somogyi unlocked the door and opened it.
“What do you wa—”
He broke off, staring down at the animal seated upright on the deck next to the older man. It was vaguely catlike, allowing for the fact that it had six limbs and was quite a bit larger than any Old Terran cat he’d ever seen. It was also staring at him, quite placidly, to his relief. The thing was dangerous looking.
That was his first thought. Then he noticed the harness it wore…and what looked like a very small pulser holstered under its left forelimb.
He gawked at it, and the man standing next to it smiled at him.
“Never seen a treecat? I thought you probably hadn’t. Which is why Fire Watch got off my shoulder and out of your doorcam’s field of view.” He smiled again, a pleasant expression which somehow failed to set Somogyi at ease. “We didn’t want you to be nervous or anything, Zoltan. I can call you ‘Zoltan,’ can’t I?”
“Uh…” Somogyi replied.
“Good!” The older man patted him on the shoulder. “This probably won’t take more than a few minutes of your time, Zoltan,” he said breezily as he pushed past Somogyi into the apartment. One eyebrow rose as he saw the woman sitting on the couch.
“Good afternoon, Ms.…?”
“Bordás,” she supplied.
“Ah! The sensor officer.” The interloper beamed. “The very person I wanted to talk to next.”
Somogyi stared at him, then back down at his monster, trying to remember…Treecats. What had he heard about treecats? He’d certainly never heard that they packed pulsers! But—
They can read minds. The damned things can read minds!
Panic roared through him, and he slammed his shoulder into the younger fellow, who was still standing in the doorway. The impact knocked him aside, and Somogyi raced toward the lift shafts. He’d gotten at least three whole meters down the passageway when something slammed into his shoulders from behind. He twisted under the solid, sinuous weight of the impact, then—
“Bleek!”
A hand—a four-fingered hand, with long, multi-jointed fingers—reached around from behind, into his field of view. Those fingers wiggled there, as if to be sure they had his attention…and then an obviously razor-sharp claw popped out of each fingertip. One of them just brushed his cheek, ever so lightly, and he froze.
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He barely even breathed, and a single thought went through his mind.
I am so screwed.
✧ ✧ ✧
“Those are copies of the station’s surveillance records,” Colonel Kabweza murmured. It had taken her security techs an hour or so to break Bordás’s codes, and she frowned down at the imagery flowing across her display. “Now, why would Somogyi have made them?” she asked herself thoughtfully.
“Petty extortion and blackmail,” a voice said, and she looked over her shoulder. Damien Harahap had entered the compartment; now he crossed it, Fire Watch flowing along beside him, to stand at her shoulder. “He and his partner in crime—well, more like partner in peccadillos, really—made them because they’d realized how regularly and thoroughly the station’s security protocols scrubbed the originals.”
He handed a chip to her.
“Run this,” he said. “Let’s see if anything turns up.”
Kabweza looked at him dubiously for a moment. She wasn’t a big fan of running someone else’s executables on her own terminal. But she plugged it in, tapped YES at the run prompt, and sat back with her arms crossed.
“That’s why they made the backup records,” Harahap continued, his eyes on the display. “As for the elaborate security precautions, that was because both of them—especially Somogyi—were wary of the people he thought really controlled Balcescu Station. He wasn’t trying to blackmail them, just spacers and slavers passing through who engaged in petty offenses of one kind or another. But he also figured anyone scrubbing data so furiously would be…less than happy to discover that someone was circumventing their security measures.”
“And just who were ‘the people’ he thought really controlled the station?” she asked, and Harahap smiled at her.
“That, Colonel, is a very interesting question, isn’t it?”
A tone chimed, and he and Kabweza looked back at the display. The image of a man, sitting at a small table in one of the station’s passageways, filled the left half of the display. Two women sat at it with him. The one to his right was obviously talking, and he was listening to her. A far larger version of the man’s face filled most of the other side of the screen.
A line of alphanumeric characters blinked below the face: Zachariah McBryde. Probability 98.8%.
“It’s McBryde, all right,” Harahap said. “I’ve studied enough of his imagery by now to be sure of it, even without the recognition software. I recognize the woman talking to him, too. Don’t know the other one, but that’s his boss, Lisa Charteris. But—”
He frowned, and used a finger to indicate another man, standing a few meters away, watching McBryde and his companion at the table. His posture seemed stiff; his bearing, alert.
“But this is the guy I really want to find out more about,” Harahap continued. Fire Watch bleeked questioningly, and he looked down. The ’cat’s fingers flickered, and Harahap chuckled. “I want to find out more because if he isn’t a watchdog, I’ve wasted my life,” he told the treecat. “I’ve seen a lot of them, and he’s nowhere near as good at it as most of them have been. Not if part of his job is to be unobtrusive, anyway.”
“Why would McBryde need a watchdog?” Kabweza wondered. “He’s in no danger by this point.” She glanced at the time mark. “This recording was made twenty-six hours before we seized Balcescu Station. By the time we got here, he could have left on either the Prince Sundjata or the Luigi Pirandello. And once we did get here, no bodyguard could have helped them, anyway.”
“I said ‘watchdog,’ not ‘bodyguard,’” Harahap replied, his eyes back on the display. “He’s not a protective detail. The reason he’s watching McBryde and the others is to make sure they don’t get captured…or try to run away on their own. And I’m willing to bet we just found out what happened to the Luigi Pirandello and the pinnace that seized it.” He nodded at the display. “That man—or someone else like him—was aboard the Luigi Pirandello. Once he knew capture was inevitable, he blew up the ship and took your Marines with him.”
Kabweza frowned, rubbing her chin with the tip of an index finger.
“But was McBryde aboard when he did it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s see if we can find out.”
He reached past her to her console and raised an eyebrow at her. She grimaced, but she also sat back and nodded permission, then watched him enter another command.
✧ ✧ ✧
It took a while, and the recognition rating wasn’t quite as firm—but 87.4% was more than good enough for Damien Harahap. Especially when the only reason the rating was a bit low was that the images had been captured from the rear, showing only a partial profile, as people boarded ship for departure. The rating for Charteris was a bit better—91.1%—although she was in a different boarding queue.
“Okay,” Harahap said. “Zachariah McBryde got out of the system aboard the Prince Sundjata. And Lisa Charteris had the bad luck to be aboard the Luigi Pirandello. So now her real status matches the official one. Dead as a doornail.”
“That’s a bit cold, don’t you think?” Kabweza asked, and he shrugged.
“There’s nothing any of us can do to change what happened to her at this point,” he said, still gazing at McBryde’s image. “And she worked for an organization that killed God only knows how many innocent bystanders covering her disappearance. I’ve carried out operations with a lot of ‘collateral damage’ in my time, but not like this. So it’s a little hard to work up a lot of sympathy for her. I feel a lot sorrier for the other passengers and your Marines, Colonel.”
“Point,” she agreed with a nod. “Definitely a point.”
✧ ✧ ✧
Harahap and Indy stood gazing through the crystoplast wall of the departure lounge while they waited for their courier boat to mate with the boarding tube. There wasn’t much to see. The planet below them, Debrecen, was as drab and nondescript as the station that orbited it, and Fire Watch had opted to nap in one of the lounge’s—many—unoccupied seats instead of watching nothing at all happen.
But Harahap wasn’t actually looking at the planet, either. He was gazing at the starfields beyond it.
“Wonder where McBryde is now?” Indy said.
“I don’t know,” Damien replied. “And it’s a big galaxy. But someday, I intend to find out.”