Cosmonaut Keep (38 page)

"Yes," said Driver. "But it was your idea, wasn't it?"

"There was nothing wrong with the idea," said Volkov. "If you are suggesting sabotage, it is ridiculous. I thought it was Andrea Barsova on that sled. I wouldn't risk a cosmonaut's life. You know that, Colin."

"But you weren't risking anyone's life," said Driver. "Barsova is an experienced sled operator, and you would have expected her to jet clear at the first sign of trouble."

"This is all speculation," said Chumakova.

"It isn't," said Driver. "We know you're in touch with elements in the Party and government. After Matt spoke to you, you relayed the conversation to a contact in Brussels. Someone quite high up in the administration. Within hours, Jadey Ericson was released and a fake confession was in circulation, calling me a CIA agent and so forth. I don't think that was a coincidence, and I don't think the people you immediately contacted within the station just happened to be colleagues."

"How do you know -- ?" Volkov stopped, and glared at me.

"All right," he said. "So Matt told you, and then you followed every contact we made afterward. What of it? It's not a crime."

"Some of your people have talked, and they admit it was more than talk," said Driver.

Volkov laughed. "You won't catch me with that one."

"Maybe not," Driver allowed. "But we'll catch you with the recordings."

Chumakova made a convulsive movement. Lemieux stopped spinning his pistol, and cocked it. Driver gave him an anxious look.

"Easy, easy, Paul," he said. "Aleksandra, you were saying?"

"Nothing that we did was a crime! We value our work, and we will not let you hand it over to the Americans! You're a spy and a filthy traitor, Colin Driver, and when order is restored you'll be shot."

"I'll take my chances on that," Driver said. "Now, I'll ask you to step outside and accompany the detail to the brig."

Volkov shot me another look of disgust, then shrugged and nodded.

"Very well," he said. "It's an honor. We won't have much time to enjoy it."

"What do you mean by that?" said Lemieux.

"Look at the news, everyone," said Chumakova, over her shoulder. "Order is being restored."

19

____________

The First Navigator

Elizabeth, straddled across his hips, leaned forward, hair swinging, cheek catching the dim light, and teased his nipples with her fingertips. "What are you laughing at?"

He reached up, returning the favor. The breasts so soft and smooth, the nipples so hard and rough, and so much bigger than his two tiny tips. He wondered, in a kind of detached way, whether her pleasure at this manipulation was greater in a similar multiple. If it was, he envied her.

"I'm laughing at me," he said. "I've been a fool."

Her hair made a broad brush-stroke down his chest.

"That you have, Cairns, but not as big a fool as me."

His hand was in her hair, another marvel. He wished his response could be as inexhaustible as the stimuli, so many of them, so much jungle and ocean, mountain and hillock, the long white beach of her back, the whole unending planet of her body, the blazing dark sky of her mind. A world that he had explored for hours, and which had explored him right back.

"I don't know if that's going to work, this time," he said.

Her tongue did something shockingly clever with his foreskin, by way of reply; an experiment that refuted his null hypothesis. She was a biologist, and she knew her subject well.

Third block, Quay 4, Ferman and Sons. At eight in the morning the quay was a vile place, the wind off the sea carrying the stench from the killing-cliffs and the closer, chemical reeks from worn refrigeration and harsh disinfectants on the factory ships. Bone-chips underfoot and a slippery mixture of mineral and animal oils. Haulage vehicles creaked and rumbled on the cobbles. Among the dockers and sailors the saur and the two humans were inconspicuous. They found a waterfront cafe opposite the office building's entrance, and lurked around a table by the steamy window. Elizabeth and Gregor munched their way through smoked-fish sandwiches; Salasso picked at strips of brackie beef. Gregor kept lookout, wiping the window every so often with his sleeve.

"Lipids colloidally suspended in water droplets formed around smoke particles," he said. "You could write a whole thesis on this place without even starting on the biology."

"Have another coffee," said Salasso. "Your brain is undergoing early consequences of sleep deprivation."

Gregor yawned and nodded, smiling at Elizabeth as Salasso raised three fingers to the waitress. The cafe was full of manual workers having a late breakfast and office workers or business owners having an early one. Most of them were human, apart from a gigant docker and a couple of saurs.

"This man Volkov," said Salasso after the waitress had brought the refills. "You got the impression he knew Matt Cairns?"

"Oh, definitely. He was with a man who mistook me for Matt, from the back, anyway."

"So we know your ancestor has hair similar to yours, and perhaps a similar stance and build," said Salasso. "That may be helpful, but I wish you had spoken more to that man."

"To tell you the truth," said Gregor, "I was so shaken by meeting Volkov that the other man seemed less important. And I was being cautious, because we know
they
are cautious. Didn't want to ply him with questions."

"Even so -- "

"Look," said Elizabeth, grinning across the table at them both, "the fact is I distracted Gregor from his research. Don't be too hard on him."

"I'm pleased for you both," said Salasso, "but this liaison has happened at an awkward time. And now you are both suffering from sleep deprivation."

Gregor didn't take his attention away from the blurred view through the window. The memory of his night with Elizabeth seemed imprinted on every part of his skin, and all her curves and angles remembered in his hands.

"I wouldn't call it 'suffering,' " he said. "And while we're on the subject of awkward times, you yourself were ... "

"There is that," said Salasso. "But the consequences of my personal entanglement were
fortunate."

To Gregor this sounded uncharacteristically defensive. Whatever emotions were involved in Salasso's evidently centuries-long affair could only be intense. He decided not to press the matter.

"Anyway, about Volkov," he said. "He wasn't at all eager to let Marcus know who he was, so I don't think he'll be selling any secrets to the merchants."

"Then why's he coming here?" said Elizabeth.

"Assuming he is ... He didn't say right out that he would. Maybe he does just want to set up some deal involving marine-engine lubricants."

"There is more going on than that," said Salasso. "I am irrationally certain of it."

Gregor laid his cheek against the damp glass, not sensually -- the greasy feel was quite unwelcome -- but to see farther up toward the street end of the quay. The clock on the cafe wall showed half past eight.

"That's one of the things I like about your people," he said idly. "Humans don't call their certainties 'irrational,' especially when they are."

"Rationality is a worthy aspiration," said Salasso. "For your species."

Gregor was still chuckling when he recognized a man walking slowly along, a bit farther up on the other side of the quay, pausing occasionally to peer at doorways and signs.

"Don't all jump," he said, "but I've just spotted Matt Cairns. Wait here."

He stood up and was out the door before anyone could object, and barely remembered to look both ways before crossing the road.

The man stood on the pavement by the third block's doorway, looking at the names of businesses listed beside their bell-switches. He was just raising a tentative finger toward them when he noticed Gregor's approach, and turned.

Gregor stared at him, transfixed. The only thing about him that looked old was his jacket, its dinosaur hide worn so soft it hung like cloth. Despite what he knew, he'd subconsciously expected his ancestor to look ancient, the image of the young man in the castle portrait gravitating toward the lined features of James. Even seeing Volkov hadn't dislodged the assumption. This man's face looked younger than the one Gregor had blearily seen in the shaving-mirror a couple of hours earlier. It betrayed no recognition or surprise.

"Can I help you?" the man said.

Gregor blurted the first question on his mind. "Did Volkov send you here?"

"Volkov? Shit!"

The man immediately turned away and walked off, up the quay toward the street. Gregor hurried to catch him up.

"Excuse me," he said. "My name's Gregor Cairns -- "

"I know your name," said the man. "And I'll thank you not to say mine."

Gregor almost missed his stride. "What?"

"Shut up and keep walking and we might just get out of this trap."

They'd reached the junction of the quay and the street before the man relaxed a little. He stood with his back to the corner of Block 1, where he could watch all three of the possible approaches.

"Okay," he said. "What's this about?"

"I was going to ask you -- "

"All right. Last night I heard about your inquiries, and the merchant's." His gaze kept shifting as he spoke, with unsettling effect. "And I heard the merchants would have someone at Ferman's about nine. I didn't know Volkov was behind me hearing it. Somebody's going to get a good kicking for that little omission."

"Volkov -- "

"Fucking hates my guts. Not like he'd stick a knife in them, but anything he sets me up for is unlikely to be much fun." He met Gregor's gaze full-on for the first time. "What are you after?"

"We were hoping you had some old tech from the ship."

"What for?"

"Navigation."

The response was a rude laugh.

"What's so funny?" Gregor was finding the man's manner as annoying as his shifting gaze, and was beginning to glance around uneasily himself. The street was unfamiliar in the daylight, the traffic light, the pavements cluttered with the flapping canopies and bare tables and detritus of the market winding down. The quay was loud with the squeal of metal and the hiss of rubber on cobbles.

"I'll do the watching," the man said. "You look at me, and tell me what you see."

"I see Matt C -- "

"Like I said. Shut the fuck
up
with that name. The second one. Yes, I'm Matt. Matt Spencer. Side branch of the family. Interesting resemblance, isn't it?"

"You mean you're
not
-- "

"Yes, of course I'm the goddamn navigator. That's worth far more to the merchants than anything to so with navigation. They have navigation. They don't have this."

"Ah," said Gregor. "That's what Salasso said."

"Your saur pal figured it out, did he. Good for him. If I know Volkov, he thought the same, and made fucking sure that if anyone turned up for the meeting with the merchant, it wouldn't be him."

"Would meeting the merchants be all that dangerous?"

Matt's gaze fixed on him again.

"Would you like to find out?"

Gregor walked back down the quay in a dino-hide jacket from whose pockets an interesting collection of weapons had been removed. Imagining that extra kilogram's weight on his shoulders helped him get Matt's walk and stance more or less right. He resisted the temptation to glance across at the cafe.

The sheet-metal door of the block stood open, to a concrete passageway ending in a spiral stair. Beyond the stairwell another door stood open to a narrow lip of quay. He checked the faded labels pasted beside the doorbell buttons:

Ferman & Sons, 3rd Fir. Marine Engnrs.

He bounded up the three flights of stairs and arrived a little dizzy. A big door with the firm's name on a brass plate stood slightly ajar. It swung back on a gentle push. Across a couple of meters of stained carpet was a heavy wooden desk. The female pithkie behind it looked up and smiled.

"Good morning," she said. She glanced down at an open diary. "Are you expected?"

Gregor's head lowered and his shoulders hunched involuntarily as he stepped into the office, a warehouse conversion, open-plan, partioned at head height. Keyboards clattered and conversations hummed. Narrow floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the harbor. Nobody waited at either side of the door.

Still looking around, he stopped in front of the desk.

"Good morning," he said. "I'm not expected, but I'm here to meet Grigory, uh,
Antonov."

"Engineer Antonov should be along in a moment," the receptionist said. She picked up a pen. "And your name?"

"Cairns."

She noted the name, then rippled her long-fingered, long-nailed hand to indicate a leather sofa to his left.

"Please, take a seat."

"Thank you."

He sat on the edge, fists in empty pockets, and then willed himself to sprawl, if not relax. After a minute Volkov strolled in. He was walking past when he must have noticed Gregor out of the corner of his eye, and turned around sharply. The edges of his hands came up like knives in front of him; his knees crooked. Then he straightened and backed off. Gregor had jumped up to meet the expected attack, for all the good that would have done.

Volkov laughed and stepped forward, hand extended. Gregor shook it gingerly.

"Good morning," said Volkov. "My apologies -- for a moment I mistook you for our friend Matt." He looked pointedly at the jacket. "I see you've met him."

"Yes," said Gregor. "And if you hadn't been mistaken?"

Volkov shrugged and smiled. "He might have tried to attack me. He's a bit paranoid, as you'll have noticed."

"Uh-huh," said Gregor, in as neutral a tone as he could manage.

"I suppose he expected the people from the ship to shanghai him or something, and that I'd somehow set him up for it." Volkov shook his head. "And why did you come here in the first place, before you ran into Matt?"

Gregor looked around.

"Uh, can we talk privately?"

"Of course," said Volkov. "This way."