Moonrise (65 page)

“And concubines,” said Melissa, deliciously.

For an instant Rashid looked as if he would toss the table aside and seize her in his arms. But then the fire in his eyes dimmed, shifted. His face fell.

“Greg Masterson,” he muttered. “And his mother.”

“But they’re a quarter-million miles away,” Melissa said.

“You can outmaneuver them.”

He shook his head. “Joanna is a powerful woman. And Greg—he must be the one behind this diamond Clippership concept.”

Melissa took a deep breath, then said, “Why don’t you let me deal with them?”

“What do you mean?”

Very seriously, Melissa replied, “Let me go to Moonbase and speak to them directly. Let me try to convince them that shutting down Moonbase is the right thing for the corporation to do.”

“How on earth can you possibly do that?”

With a knowing smile, Melissa said, “Oh, there are ways to convince people of almost anything.”

“Are there?”

“Yes, of course. Especially if you know things about them that they would prefer to keep others from knowing.”

“I am honored that you have come to see my humble patch of weeds,” said Lev Brudnoy, quite seriously.

He had been bent over one of the miniature lime trees that he had planted in a row of pots filled with lunar sand. Getting the cuttings to start the miniature citrus orchard had been relatively easy; people brought them up from Earthside, and after an intense inspection by Moonbase’s environmental protection scientists, they were carried in sealed containers to the farm. The little orchard was another step in Operation Bootstrap.

Joanna cocked a brow at him. “Come off it, Lev. We’re not in old Mother Russia anymore.”

Brudnoy pawed awkwardly at his shock of graying hair.

“But you are such a great lady, and I am only a sort of peasant …”

“Lev,” said Joanna sternly, “how long have we known each other?”

He screwed up his eyes, thinking. “About nine months, more or less.”

“How much actual work have you seen me do in that time?”

“Work?” He spread his hands. “Your work is far removed from the kind of thing I do.”

“Not anymore,” said Joanna. “If we’re going to make a success of this Operation Bootstrap that you helped hatch up—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Maybe it was entirely Doug’s idea, but I have a feeling that you at least aided and abetted him.”

Brudnoy spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I am part of the cabal, I confess it freely.”

Joanna’s expression relaxed into a smile. “Very good. So am I, from here on. I’m here to help you. What do you want me to do? Weeding? Picking? Name it.”

He swallowed visibly. “Well, we don’t have weeds. So far, we’ve been able to screen them out before we accept a new batch of seeds or cuttings. But pruning is important….”

Joanna rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and made a mental note to wear regular coveralls the next time she came to Brudnoy’s farm.

“Look, I know how I’d feel if I was still the base director and my predecessor showed up all of a sudden,” said Jinny Anson.

Seated behind his curved glass desk, Greg eyed her suspiciously. “Do you?” he retorted.

Anson gave him a disarming smile. “I don’t want your job, Greg! Honest. Been there. Done that. All I want is a place where my husband can work in peace.”

“Doug suggested he come up here.”

“With two teenaged daughters?” Anson shook her head. “You don’t want that, I don’t want that, and they don’t want that.”

“Then what?” Greg demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Anson admitted. “There’s gotta be someplace on Earth where Quentin can teach without being hounded by the New Morality bigots.”

A slow smile crept across Greg’s lips. “You could move to Kiribati.”

Anson blinked. “Kiribati.”

“The islands are really lovely,” said Greg. “I wish I were there right now.”

“Kiribati,” she repeated.

Three extra people at Moonbase strained the living accommodations. Zimmerman got the base’s only unoccupied quarters. Anson and Cardenas had to share one room, and a ninety-day contract employee, a young nanotech engineer working on the mass driver, reluctantly agreed to give up his quarters and double up with one of the other short-timers for the remainder of his stay.

Anson called her husband in Austin as soon as the crew that delivered the extra bunk to her quarters had shut the door behind them.

“Kiribati?” Quentin’s placid face crinkled into a mild frown. “Where the hell’s that?”

Knowing that she was taking her husband’s career in her hands, she said, “Way out in the middle of the Pacific. They used to be called the Gilbert Islands, I think.”

Once her words reached him, his frown dissolved. “The Gilberts? Robert Louis Stevenson lived there! He loved it! Said it was the best place on Earth.”

“Really?”

They chattered back and forth—with three-second lags—for more than an hour. Quentin pulled up a geography program that showed them both the modern Kiribati: palm-fringed atolls in the tropical Pacific; small towns with happy, crime-free people.

“It’ll be a better place to raise the girls than Austin,” said Quentin, with real enthusiasm.

Jinny worried about tropical islanders’ ideas about sex, but said nothing.

“I could start the English department for this new university,” Quentin went on. “I could really—” Suddenly his voice cut off and his big smile vanished.

“What is it?” Jinny asked.

Before her words could reach him, Quentin said, “But what about you? You’ll have to leave your job with Masterson Aerospace if we move to the islands.”

Jinny relaxed. “Don’t sweat it,” she said easily. “I’ve got a new job all picked out. I’m going to be president of the new university, whatever we decide to name it.”

His eyes widened once he heard her response. “President? Wow.”

“Damn right,” said Jinny. “I’m gonna be your boss, sweetheart!”

She couldn’t get what she wanted without going to bed with him. Melissa decided that she had played Rashid as far as she could; the next step had to involve sex.

Rashid was no fool. He realized that the only way for him to get out from under this Kiribati farce was to move the
fusion development forward. He had to get the board of directors hot for fusion energy, divert their attention—and their funding—from Moonbase and nanotechnology.

Both Rashid and Melissa assumed, automatically, that Greg Masterson was behind the diamond Clippership scheme. Melissa urged, almost begged, Rashid to send her to Moonbase to deal with Greg.

Yet Rashid was wary of allowing Melissa to go to Moonbase. He wanted to know how she could possibly stop Greg Masterson and, even more difficult, his mother.

She told him, part of it, in bed.

They had their usual dinner in his tent. This time, though, instead of keeping him at arm’s length, Melissa let Rashid hold her, kiss her, undress her. She almost laughed at the way his hands trembled as he fumbled with the old-fashioned hook-and-eye at the back of her blouse’s collar.

It wouldn’t do to tell him outright, she knew. Her story would have much greater impact if she seemed to reveal it to him reluctantly, overpowered by his masculine mastery, her resistance melting away under the fierceness of his passion.

So she let him paw her and walk her to his double-sized cot and run his hands and lips over her naked body. She felt almost nothing; she kept herself in rigid control. But she moaned for him and writhed and gasped and heaved when he entered her.

At last it was finished. She wanted to leap out of the narrow bunk and run to the lagoon for a cleansing swim in the warm enfolding waters. Instead she lay at Rashid’s side, breathing softly.

He turned toward her and propped himself on his elbow. Looking down at her in the darkened tent, he asked, “Was that enjoyable for you?”

Melissa made a sigh. “The best I’ve had in years and years,” she said languidly. Truthfully.

He laughed gently. “How many years?”

“Ever since …” Melissa let her voice fade away into the shadows.

“Since when?”

“I shouldn’t tell you,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t let anyone know.”

“Know what?”

For long moments she remained silent, waiting for his curiosity to grow unbearable, knowing that the best lies were always based on truth.

He leaned over her, grasped her by the shoulders almost menacingly. “What is this great secret? Tell me.”

Melissa let the breath sigh out of her. “It was so long ago, so many years have passed …”

“You can confide in me,” he said more gently. “I won’t tell anyone else.”

“Years ago—a lifetime ago—” She hesitated.

“You must have been only a girl,” he said.

“Yes,” Melissa replied. “I was very young. And I fell in love.”

“Ahh.”

“With Greg Masterson.”

Even in the darkness of the tent she could see his eyes go wide. “Greg Masterson?”

“I was his lover,” said Melissa, in a little girl’s voice. “But he cast me aside. He nearly destroyed me.”

Rashid dropped onto his back and lay beside her. “Greg Masterson,” he muttered.

“Greg Masterson,” she repeated.

“And you want to go to the Moon to be with him again.”

“I want to go to the Moon,” whispered Melissa, “to repay him for the way he treated me.”

“You no longer love him?”

“I’ve hated him for nearly twenty years.”

Rashid was silent for a long time. At last he asked, “And what can you do to him on the Moon that you can’t do from here on Earth?”

“I can confront him. And his mother. His mother is at Moonbase. She’s protected him all these years.”

“Protected him? From what?”

“From—” Melissa stopped herself. She had no intention of telling Rashid everything. “From me,” she said. “I was carrying Greg’s baby when he sent me away. I had an abortion. All my life I’ve had to live with the knowledge that I murdered my own child.”

It was a clever variation of the truth. But it was enough to convince Rashid.

“So you want to go to Moonbase to confront Greg and Mrs. Stavenger.”

“Yes. I want them to know that if they don’t shut down Moonbase I’ll tell the whole world about him, how he abandoned me, how he made me commit murder.”

Rashid thought it over for a few moments. “But that all happened almost twenty years ago, you say.”

Melissa pulled her trump card. “There is no statute of limitations on murder. The law says abortion is murder. I’m willing to stand trial for what I did. I deserve to be punished. But Greg will have to stand trial beside me, as an accomplice to murder.”

“My god!”

“That’s the law now in America,” she said.

“It would ruin him,” said Rashid.

“It would force him to return to Earth to face trial,” Melissa said.

“His mother would never allow that.”

“Do you think she would shut down Moonbase instead?”

“Yes,” said Rashid. “I think she would. The old tigress would blow up Moonbase and all the people in it before she’d let her son be humiliated and destroyed like that.”

Melissa nodded in the darkness. What would Mrs. Stavenger do once she knew that her precious son would have to stand trial for the murder of his step-father?

“Then you’ll send me to Moonbase?” Melissa asked.

He hesitated. “There’s a board of directors meeting coming up next week. I’ve asked to be put on the agenda, to make a presentation about the fusion program to them. Let’s see how that goes. It might not be necessary to … go to all that trouble.”

Melissa knew that she should not press him too far. “You’re thinking of me, aren’t you? Trying to save me the pain, the suffering of confronting them.”

“If the board allows me to push the fusion development, then why go to all that trouble?”

“But if the board decides against you …?”

“Then,” Rashid said, his voice cold and hard, “yes, I will send you to Moonbase like a guided missile.”

“Good,” said Melissa.

“You
want
to go?”

“I want to help you,” she said quickly. “I want to see you gain the power and recognition that you deserve.”

“But you must return to me,” he said, excited by the future parading before his eyes. “I will become the most powerful man in the corporation once Moonbase is closed.”

“And I will be one of your loving slaves,” Melissa lied.

It aroused Rashid just as if it were the truth.

Good things always happened to Alan Johansen. Never a deep intellect, he had at least been clever enough to pick extremely wealthy parents. He also inherited their good looks: Johansen had the chiseled blond features of a Nordic warrior of old, although his slim, almost delicate build was more like that of a dancer than a Viking. With his slicked-back hair and thin-lipped smile he looked like a chorus boy from the Roaring Twenties.

He was, in fact, chairman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation. And very confused and troubled.

It was bad enough that Joanna Stavenger insisted on attending board meetings electronically instead of in person. Her image appeared on the wallscreen at the end of the conference table, floating above their heads like the magic mirror in
Snow White.
At least Carlos Quintana was able to keep things running smoothly, even with that infernal delay whenever she wanted to say something.

Now Quintana was gone, and half the board members were scheming and trying to make alliances against the other half, and to top it off they had set up this dummy corporation on some tropical islands out in the South Seas to take over all their space operations. It sounded awfully tricky to Alan, maybe even illegal.

And on top of everything else, the man they had sent out to those islands was pestering him with some crack-brained
idea about nuclear energy, of all things. Why, nuclear energy was as dead as the horse and buggy. People
hated
nuclear! It was full of dangerous radiation.

Alan sat at the head of the polished board room table, watching Rashid’s video. In the big Windowall that stretched almost the length of the entire room, a smallish metal sphere stood, humming slightly, doing nothing.