CHAPTER THREE
We left the office, Cherno in front, Floyd at the rear, Selene and me sandwiched between them. Cherno led us to an unobtrusive elevator discreetly tucked away in one of the hallways near his office. We went down an undisclosed distance to an underground tunnel, rather like the secret passage that led to Gaheen’s own mansion headquarters on Huihuang.
Back when we’d used that one, Floyd’s fellow enforcer Mottola had suggested that the tunnel might be a leftover from some previous owner, and that Gaheen might not even know about it. Now, with a second secret tunnel connected to a different local boss’s headquarters, I was beginning to wonder if whoever first started this organization had simply liked secret tunnels.
If so, he’d had a much bigger budget to work with on Huihuang than he had here. Instead of leading to a hidden entrance with an elaborate opening mechanism, this tunnel merely took us to a narrow flight of steps, up through a trapdoor, and into a huge, windowless, warehouse-sized building.
There, looming high over our heads, were the conjoined spheres of a Gemini portal.
The things were monstrously huge, bigger than anything I’d ever seen that wasn’t a space station, a Class X freighter, or a ground-side building. The larger sphere, the receiver module, was a good twenty meters across, while the smaller sphere, the launch module, was slightly smaller at fifteen meters and was attached to the receiver’s side like a mismatched cell starting to undergo mitosis. Five wide, thick bundles that looked rather like bales of hay nestled close to the sides of the spheres, which puzzled me until I realized they were the rolled-up ends of cargo straps that the portal was resting on, probably what Cherno had used to bring the portal here. The structure around us was just barely big enough to contain it, with no more than a couple of meters’ clearance around the ends of the portal and a slightly less claustrophobic ten meters on the end that housed our trapdoor. It was, I thought as Cherno led the way toward the portal, almost as if the place had been built specifically to house it.
In fact, it had. I peered down at the flooring as we walked and spotted the mismatch in the tile pattern. There’d once been a much smaller building here, possibly a panic room or a hangar for an emergency aircar, which had been torn down and this warehouse thing put up in its place.
“The hatch is over here,” Cherno said, leading the way toward the left side of the receiver module, where the edge of a dark rectangular opening was visible at the sphere’s curve. “So far only the portal’s gravitational field is operating.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “I presume you know how to turn it on?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. But I don’t think—”
Cherno stopped short and turned to face us. “Excuse me?” he asked, his voice suddenly gone very quiet.
I stopped, too, a dozen warning bells going off in the back of my mind. “I said we can’t activate it,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “But I’ve already been informed that my associates don’t need to see that it’s fully functional.”
“I don’t care if your bosses want to see it work,” Cherno said in that same voice. “I want to see it work.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, trying to kick my brain into gear. Floyd was somewhere behind us, but I couldn’t tell how close he was without turning to look.
Not that that mattered. He was armed, and I wasn’t. I had my handful of knockout pills in my left wrist’s secret compartment, but unless I could persuade Cherno to take high tea with us they weren’t going to be of any use.
Still, back when Floyd had first pitched this deal Selene hadn’t detected any deception from him. That suggested Cherno hadn’t shared any of these new plans with him. Did that put Floyd on our side?
Probably not. Just because Cherno was suddenly taking an unanticipated left-hand turn on this deal was no reason for Floyd to not stick by his boss.
“It’s not that we’re unwilling,” I continued earnestly, stalling for time. “It’s that we simply can’t.”
“Because it’s the wrong one,” Selene spoke up.
Long and sometimes painful experience had taught me to never show surprise unless it was part of the story or the plan. In this case, Selene’s statement was neither. What in hell’s name—?
“This portal is half of a dyad,” she continued. “What we call a Gemini. You can activate the pair together out of a dormant state, but only from the dominant one, the one called the master.” She gestured to the spheres filling the room. “This one’s the slave.”
“How do you know?” Cherno demanded suspiciously. “And why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“Because you didn’t tell us you wanted a demonstration,” I said, hoping I was picking up correctly on Selene’s play. Whatever it was. “You said you were going to trade this for passenger transport. It didn’t matter to our associates whether it was the master or the slave.”
For a long moment Cherno just stared at us, his eyes flicking between our faces. Once, his gaze went over my shoulder, presumably to Floyd. “Very convenient for them,” he growled at last.
“Not as convenient as you might think,” I said. “Now they’ll have to figure out where the master is and dig it out before they can do anything with this one.”
Cherno’s gaze went over my shoulder again. “Floyd?” he asked, the word a mix of question, demand, and accusation.
“I didn’t see their other portal being activated, sir,” Floyd said. “That was done before we arrived.”
“And you’re sure this is the slave?” Cherno demanded, shifting his glare back to me and ramping up the shrivel power.
“Very sure,” I said.
“There’s an easy way to tell if we go inside,” Selene offered. She looked at me. “The triangles.”
“Right,” I said, clamping down on my surprise for the second time in this same edgy minute. Her pupils were registering a tense agitation way beyond even the danger we were currently in the middle of. Something about the portal had figuratively kicked her in the teeth, and I had no idea what it was. “There’s a row of small triangles etched into the master portal’s status board between the oxygen readout and grav-status panels.”
“About midway from the hatch to the extension arm,” Selene added. “They’re . . . ” She broke off, waving her hands helplessly.
“They’re easier to point to than describe,” I told Cherno. “Let’s go in and look, okay? If they’re there, then we obviously misread which dyad this is and we’ll start it for you. No drama, no foul.”
Once again Cherno gave us a hard look. “Fine,” he said, his voice heavy with suspicion. “Floyd, keep your gun on them. If they even look like they’re trying to pull something . . . ” He pointed at Selene. “Shoot her in the leg. After you, Mr. Roarke.”
The receiver module’s hatchway was positioned about a meter above the warehouse floor at one end of the portal. I walked over to it, noting that from that position I could see the other rolled-up end of the nearest cargo strap, and stuck my head and torso inside. For a moment I felt the usual disorientation as the local gravity suddenly pointed my inner ear toward the portal’s inside hull. I waited until that had passed, then pushed myself in far enough to swivel up into a sitting position on the edge of the opening. “Okay, I’m in,” I called, standing up and backing away. “Come on.”
Floyd was next, his lack of experience making his entrance a bit awkward. Or maybe it was the Skripka 4mm gripped in his hand that hampered his movements. After him came Selene, and finally Cherno. The boss’s entrance was nearly as good as Selene’s and mine—clearly, he’d practiced going in and out while Floyd was busy flying us here. “All right,” Cherno said when we were once again assembled. “Show us.”
“Fingers crossed,” I said. “This way. Watch your step.”
I led the way around the receiver module to the open hatchway that led into the launch module. I kept an eye on Cherno the whole way, watching for the vertigo that initiates invariably suffered. But there was none. He’d definitely spent time in here. We reached the hatchway, and I lay down beside the opening and rolled through into the smaller sphere’s competing grav field. Once again I stood back while I waited for the others.
And as Floyd, Selene, and Cherno each took their turns, I gave the space around me a quick but careful survey. As far as I could tell, it was identical to the Gemini portals we’d pulled from Popanilla and Fidelio, except that the loose mesh that covered much of the inside surface had been cut away in a few places to expose the wires and cables lying there.
“All right, we’re here,” Cherno growled when we were once again together. “Where are these oxygen and grappling panels?”
“Oxygen and grav panels,” I corrected, starting toward the black-and-silver-striped extension arm stretching toward the center from the other side of the module. “They’re over here.”
The panels I’d described were exactly where they were supposed to be: Two long rectangular sets of button lights that would be colored blue, red, and orange if the portal was fully active. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what they actually indicated, of course, but for purposes of our story I figured oxygen and gravity were good enough.
And of course, there were no triangles etched into the hull between them.
“Right here,” I continued, squatting down and pushing aside the mesh. “Here’s where they would be, right here on the hull between the panels. They’re faint and hard to see unless you’re right on top of them . . . but no. No triangles here.”
Cherno stared down at the deck, his face set in stone, and for a long moment the module was filled with a brittle silence. Then, finally, he stirred. “So. You can find this master portal, I assume?”
I stood upright again, swallowing against the sudden lump in my throat. “I don’t know,” I said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing in either the master or slave that points toward the other one. Even if this one was active, which it isn’t.”
“What about the range?” Cherno persisted. “Do you know how far they can operate?”
“As far as I know, no one’s ever put a limit on it,” I said. “The master could be anywhere in the Spiral. Possibly anywhere in the universe.”
“That’s . . . unfortunate,” Cherno said, his voice gone deadly quiet. “In that case . . . ”
“But there may be a way to narrow the search,” I cut in hastily. “The Erymant Temple where we found one of the other Gemini portals has a distinct and unique alien architecture. That may—may—be a pattern that points to where others are located. If you can get your organization’s information sources busy looking for similar styles elsewhere in the Spiral, we may be able to get a leg up on the search.”
“There isn’t anything else like the Erymant Temple,” Floyd said suspiciously. “I looked it up.”
“Because that one’s mostly intact,” I said. “What we’re looking for are ruins that show some of that same architecture but might not be immediately recognizable as following the Erymant style.”
Cherno snorted. “You’re talking years’ worth of searching,” he said. “We’ve got—” He clenched his teeth, his eyes gone distant as he seemed to work out some calculation. “Six weeks.”
I blinked at him. “Six weeks?”
“I told you this was time-sensitive,” Floyd reminded me.
“So you did,” I acknowledged, trying to think. The Icarus Group might have additional data, but I didn’t dare drag them any further into this. Especially not with Floyd or Cherno looking over my shoulder. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Most alien ruins on the Spiral’s inhabited planets have been at least catalogued, and I presume Mr. Gaheen has people everywhere who can sift through their own local data and forward anything that sounds promising.”
“Mr. Gaheen’s people have more important things to do than read small-town legends and research reports,” Cherno bit out.
I braced myself. “In that case, you’re right,” I said as calmly as I could. “It probably will take years.”
Cherno looked at Floyd, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was wondering if a little torture or a few judiciously placed gunshots would jog my imagination a little. “Fortunately, as soon as we have some leads, Selene and I can narrow the field considerably,” I added in hopes of swaying any such decisions. “Once we’re on the ground, there are a few specific tags we can look for. Nothing we can teach your own investigators, unfortunately.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Can’t,” I said. “It comes down to more of a gut feeling than anything else.”
He rumbled deep in his throat. “Convenient.”
I waved my hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m afraid that’s just how it works.”
Cherno looked at Selene, his eyes tracing her alien features, perhaps wondering if she was the one with the sensitive gut and I was more expendable. “And once you’ve found it, you can activate it?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I assured him.
For another few seconds he continued to stare at me. But this time, I had the distinct impression his mind was spinning elsewhere and I just happened to be in the direction his eyes were pointed. “I need to make some StarrComm calls,” he said at last.
We made our way back through the receiver module to the warehouse. “Floyd, escort them to the guest suite and make sure the dispensary is properly stocked with refreshments,” Cherno ordered. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“Yes, sir,” Floyd said. “Shall I have the beds made up for them?”
“Not yet,” Cherno said. Brushing past me, he headed for the stairs. “As I said, this may only take a few hours.” He paused at the trapdoor and looked back. “Or it may take a few days,” he added. “I’ll let you know.”
With that, he headed down. “A few days?” I murmured to Floyd.
“Probably not.” Floyd considered. “Hopefully not. After you.”
* * *
Cherno’s guest suite consisted of two bedrooms, a sitting/conversation room, a bathroom with a complete spa setup, a large balcony, and a kitchen nook with an extensive food and beverage dispensary.
I wasn’t really hungry, and I could tell Selene wasn’t either, but both of us availed ourselves of the nook’s selection. As my father used to say, Never pass up an opportunity to eat, drink, or sleep. Bathroom breaks are good, too.
The spa bathroom was also very nice.
Aside from the waiting itself, the most maddening part of the whole exercise was that I couldn’t ask Selene what was with the master/slave fabrication she’d spun for Cherno. Nice though our quarters might be, we were in the home of a criminal boss, and I had zero doubt that the room was loaded with enough hidden cameras and microphones to supply a news center for months. So we ate and drank, chatted a bit about frothy topics, and occasionally rested on the contour couches. Floyd had insisted we leave all our electronics aboard the yacht, which also limited our entertainment options.
I was bracing myself for the few days that Cherno had threatened us with when, four hours later according to the elaborate wall clock, the master of the house reappeared.
“It’s all set,” he said, talking mostly to Floyd but the information clearly intended for all three of us. “You’ll take them back to Xathru and their ship, then proceed to Balmoral to pick up the passenger.”
“This early?” Floyd asked, frowning. “She wasn’t supposed to—”
“Of course she wasn’t,” Cherno cut him off brusquely. “But the situation has changed. Fortunately, she was able to make this new schedule.” He looked across the room at Selene and me. “When Mr. Roarke finds the other portal—when, Mr. Roarke, not if—we won’t want to risk the need to add additional travel delays to the schedule.”
“Understood, sir,” Floyd said.
“In the meantime,” Cherno added, “we’ll have our people make up that list of alien ruins you wanted.” His expression went stiffer. “I trust that will prove sufficient.”
“Let’s all trust that,” I agreed.
“Good,” Cherno said. “All right, Floyd. Get them out of here.”
* * *
The trip back to Floyd’s yacht was very quiet. Selene didn’t seem inclined to talk, and we’d run out of innocuous subjects during our forced relaxation. Anyway, I wasn’t much in the mood for conversation, either. Floyd, for his part, gave occasional instructions to the drivers, but otherwise also maintained the overall silence.
Selene mostly kept her face turned away from me as we traveled. But occasionally I caught a glimpse of the brooding dread in her pupils. Something was going on in there, something beyond simply the situation we were in. But it was clear it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about, at least not with other people listening in.
So I sat quietly beside her, cultivated my patience, and wondered what the hell we were going to do.
We were back on Floyd’s yacht, and I was settling down in my sleeping nook in our suite, when the moment finally came. Selene slipped into my room, climbed into bed alongside me, and pressed her lips to my ear. “I need to talk to you,” she whispered.
I found her hand and gently squeezed it in silent acknowledgment. We’d used this trick once before, back when we were aboard Nask’s ship and knew there were multiple cameras and microphones trained on us. If Floyd or the yacht’s crew were monitoring us right now, they would probably just assume that Selene and I were taking advantage of our presumed privacy to get cozy with each other and not consider that we might merely be talking. “The portal?”
“Yes,” she said. “Gregory, that’s not . . . when we were standing outside I thought I smelled . . . and then when we went inside . . . ”
She paused and I felt her brace herself. “Gregory, Sub-Director Nask’s scent is in there.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat. What the hell? “Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” she said. “That wasn’t some portal Cherno found somewhere. It’s the one the Patth took from Fidelio.
“Cherno stole it from the Patth.”
* * *
For a few seconds I lay silently beside her, staring up into the darkness, my brain spinning. No—that was impossible. The Patth had dug it out of the ground, hauled it into space, presumably transferred it to one of their massive freighters, and disappeared into the eternal night. How could it have ended up in a warehouse outside Cherno’s mansion?
With a great deal of effort, of course. And, knowing the Patth, probably a great deal of blood and death.
“Were there any other Patth scents in there?” I whispered.
“There were several others in the area,” Selene said. “Probably on the hull, possibly inside. With the hatch open so long all of it was mixed together.”
“What about Floyd? No—never mind Floyd,” I interrupted myself. With Floyd standing right beside us she wouldn’t be able to sort out whether or not he’d been in there earlier. “Forget Floyd. What about Trent?”
I could visualize her pupils forming a frown. “Trent?”
“Trent,” I repeated. “Remember the hijacking on Kelsim he was talking about?”
“I thought he said that was Oberon.”
“He implied it was Oberon,” I corrected. “I’m wondering if Trent pitched it to us backward. That he was the one who masterminded that attack.”
I felt warm air on my ear as she huffed out a sudden breath. “The second hijacking. The one he wants you in on. You think he’s going after the other portal?”
“It’s the logical conclusion,” I said. “Which doesn’t necessary mean it’s the right conclusion.”
“What are we going to do?”
Idly, I brushed my fingertips across her hair. Human hair was soft and silky; the Kadolian version was even more so. “Top of the list is to drop this whole mess in the admiral’s lap as soon as possible,” I said. “Nice stalling tactic with the Gemini master/slave thing, by the way. Keeps Cherno from pressuring us to get him the activation instructions. On the other hand, nine days is a hell of a long time to hang fire. Maybe I can persuade Floyd to stop somewhere near a StarrComm center.”
“Maybe you can frame it as getting the admiral to start looking for the other end of the Gemini, too.”
“Good idea,” I said. “And then, once we’ve got Icarus in the loop, I’m thinking we should touch base with Trent.”
“Are you going to take him up on his offer?”
“Probably not, but I at least want to find out what he knows and what exactly his plans are,” I said. “If he knows where the other end is and is readying an attack, we play it one way. If he’s still searching for it and is just getting his personnel ducks lined up, that requires an entirely different approach.”
Selene pondered that a moment. “If he’s searching, then we’re back to who’s funding him,” she said. “If he has better resources than Cherno, he’s likely to get there first. If he doesn’t, we may be able to beat him to it.”
“Good point,” I agreed. “Especially when you throw the Icarus Group’s resources in on our side.”
“If we can get them fast enough.”
I scowled. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll get to work on Floyd first thing in the morning.”
Because as my father used to say, Most people only want to know how a deal will benefit them now. A handful of others want to know how the deal will benefit their future.
I was pretty sure I’d find Floyd in that second category.
* * *
My guess on that one was dead on. Unfortunately, for once that foresight not only didn’t work to my advantage but instead worked against me.
“I agree we should get your people on top of this,” he said, eyeing me over his second cup of coffee of the morning. He would down at least five more cups of the stuff before the day was over, if the trip out from Xathru was any indicator. I hadn’t noticed that much of a caffeine addiction the last time we traveled together, but then I hadn’t spent much time with him on that occasion. “But stopping along the way will delay our arrival on Xathru and our subsequent trip to Balmoral. Your passenger will be there within twelve hours of our current projected landing time, and we don’t want to keep her waiting.” He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want to keep her waiting. Trust me.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m confused,” I said. “There have to be fueling stops within a few hours of whatever vector we’re on. We head over to one of them, I make a quick StarrComm call—”
“Along our present vector, you said?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a whisper of growing irritation. Why was Floyd being so resistant to the idea? “Why, were you thinking of wandering across the Spiral until we found a place with good barbeque—?”
I broke off. He was just looking at me, his expression that of a teacher facing down a particularly dim student.
And then, belatedly, I got it. “You don’t want me to know the direction we took after we left Xathru, do you?”
He favored me with a thin smile. “Not only don’t I want it, but neither do Mr. Gaheen and Mr. Cherno.”
“Of course they don’t,” I said with a sigh. “And they’re more concerned about that than they are the six-week countdown?”
Floyd shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve told the captain to jump our speed to plus-ten. That’s the best we can do without having to stop along the way for fuel.”
“Which we could still safely do,” I pointed out. “As long as you keep Selene and me in our stateroom during the fueling stop, you can land wherever you want. In fact, with full tanks you could probably jump our speed to plus-thirty, get to Xathru that much earlier, and get my people on this even faster. We’d have to double-time it to Balmoral to make our connection, but it should be doable.”
He shook his head. “Orders,” he told me. “Even if you don’t know where we are, someone out there might tag the ship while we’re on the ground.” He drained his coffee cup and refilled it from the carafe beside it. “Of course, none of this would be a problem if you’d been able to turn on the damn portal.”
“It would have saved us a lot of grief, all right,” I agreed. “But the best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.” I cocked my head. “Speaking of plans, can you give us any idea what our end of the deal is about? Who is this mysterious passenger, why does Mr. Cherno need us to cart her around, and what’s the endgame to all this?”
For a long moment he gazed at me, clearly pondering the question. I waited, just as silently, wondering if the flexibility he’d had with previous orders would extend into whatever his boundaries were here.
Then, to my disappointment, he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I’d like to, but my orders are clear on this. You’re not supposed to know what’s happening until after the passenger is aboard and you’re on your way to wherever she wants you to go.” He paused. “I will tell you this much, though. You’re not going to like it. Not a bit.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Yes, that kind of anticipation makes things so much better. Thanks.”
“At least you won’t be completely blindsided when you find out.” He took a last sip from his cup and set it down. “I need to work on some logistics files. I’ll see you later.”
For a few seconds after he left I sat there staring at his empty mug and the coffee carafe. If I dropped one of my knockout pills in there . . .
Ridiculous. I had six pills; there were eight crew aboard plus Floyd himself. And while the yacht wouldn’t have the kind of pilot-implanted systems that made Patth ships impossible for anyone else to fly, there were bound to be passcodes and bioscans to make sure that unauthorized personnel kept their hands off the controls.
Which left me the choice of relaxing during the rest of our trip back to the Ruth, or being tense and frustrated the whole time.
And as my father used to say, Worrying is just like planning, except that it doesn’t get you anywhere and keeps you awake nights.