Voyagers III - Star Brothers (9 page)

LI-PO Hsen believed that he was a self-made man.

Born in bustling, crowded Shanghai, his father had been a street peddler, offering stolen radios and wristwatches from his ancient bicycle on the streets and alleys of the vast city, while his mother slaved twelve hours a day in a sweatshop that manufactured electronic circuit boards more cheaply that the modern roboticized factories could, thanks to the starvation wages it paid the women who worked there.

His father had died when Hsen was barely nine years old, an opium pipe clutched so tightly in his cold fingers that it took the neighborhood mortician and two assistants to pry it loose. When he was twelve Hsen ran away from the rat-infested crumbling ruin of an apartment block that had served as home for hundreds of families. He left his graying mother to fend for herself. He could work, just as his father did. He could support himself.

He had only one goal in life: to become rich. His father’s example had given him a priceless nugget of wisdom: stay off narcotics
—all
the narcotics that can cripple a man and kill him slowly from within. Hsen neither smoked nor drank. He never allowed a woman to gain a hold on him. He sold drugs, when the opportunity presented itself, and women too. But he took none for himself.

He saw his mother only once again after leaving her miserable home. Through the human chain of street talk that spread information across the length and breadth of Shanghai, he learned that she had died. For one day, a few hours merely, he returned to the filthy overcrowded slums where he had been born and gazed upon his mother’s dead features. He cut a strange figure, in his hand-tailored westernized suit, among all the ragged tenement dwellers. Then he went through her meager possessions, which included the key to a safe deposit box in one of the city’s largest and most dignified banks.

To his utter surprise and delight, the safe deposit box contained handfuls of paper money. The old woman had amassed a meager fortune over her years of toil. He pictured her shuffling from the factory to this bank every week, shabby and exhausted, to secrete another yuan or two in this steel box.

Hsen stuffed the bills into his pockets and strode out of the bank purposefully. He had a plan.

For although Li-Po Hsen had sworn to abstain from all narcotics, he was hopelessly gripped by the most common drug of all: the desire for wealth.

With his mother’s pitiful savings he bought a hand-sized computer (his mother had probably made its circuit boards) and a train ticket to Hong Kong, the city of golden opportunity for a man of strong will, strong stomach, and quick wits.

Within five years he was a successful merchant, respected by the business community and suspected by the police of smuggling, drug running, and dealing in stolen goods. But the police could prove nothing and as Hsen’s fortune grew, his esteem among his fellow businessmen rose.

By the time he was thirty he, with three older associates, created Pacific Commerce Corporation out of a failed shipping line, a scattering of warehouses in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and elsewhere, and a fleet of aged jet cargo planes whose owner faced bankruptcy and disgrace. Hsen made a key decision the following year: he convinced his three associates that Pacific Commerce must enter the booming business of space transportation. They reluctantly allowed him to start a space division, and watched with no little trepidation as Hsen poured virtually all of the company’s assets into it.

By the time Hsen was forty he had bought out his three associates and completely controlled Pacific Commerce and all its sea, air, and space transportation divisions.

Now he sat in his Hong Kong office, at home in a short-sleeved, open-neck white shirt and comfortably baggy dark slacks, his reclining chair tilted back almost to the horizontal. He had a slight, wiry frame, and the powered chair in which he reclined seemed almost to be engulfing him like some cocoa-brown monster ingesting its victim.

Hsen steepled his fingers over his chest as he gazed silently at the four people—two men and two women—who sat in more conventional chairs looking back at him. One of the men was Wilhelm Kruppmann, a member of Pacific Commerce’s board of directors, among other things. The other was also a white man in a business suit, looking rather nervous. The two women were Chinese, although they both wore western dresses.

The office was immense, the entire top floor of one of Hong Kong’s tallest towers. Heavy silken drapes covered every window. The modernistic furniture was all teak and chrome and glass; the walls were panelled in teak. Priceless vases and porcelain sculptures adorned the vast room, dimly visible in the shadows.

The only light came from tiny pivoting lamps in the ceiling that focused on each of the figures in the room and followed them wherever they moved. Although Hsen did not mention it, each lamp was paired with a small but powerful laser that could kill with an intense burst of energy, if activated. A secret little security precaution that Hsen enjoyed.

This was his stronghold, his castle, defended by faithful electronic devices and slavish robots. At his fingertips Hsen could manipulate more energy and more information than all the emperors of China’s long tortured history.

“I asked you here,” Hsen said at last, “to hear the result of our search for the originator of our troubles, the master conspirator who has been working against us in so many places.”

Kruppmann leaned forward eagerly. “You have found who he is?”

Hsen nodded a bare fraction of a centimeter. In the beam of light from the ceiling lamp, his eyes were lost in shadow. He pointed a slim finger at one of the women.

“My director of intelligence,” Hsen said, smiling slightly. “Your report, please.”

She was neither particularly good looking nor all that young, thought Kruppmann. She must be good at her work.

The intelligence director swiftly outlined the procedures whereby computer banks from half the world had been searched and scanned until three matching photographs of the same man who had visited the Brazilian president de Sagres and several other key world figures such as Dhouni Nkona had been identified with ninety-percent accuracy.

“It was a difficult search,” she said, in peculiarly flat unmodulated English. “Hardly anyone recalls seeing this person. It is only in facilities where hidden security cameras automatically record each visitor that we were able to find holograms of this man. And most such holos were somehow blurred or otherwise distorted.”

Hsen made a small noise of impatience.

“However,” the woman went on, more hurriedly, “we did obtain three barely usable holograms, and with computer enhancement we were able to identify the man in them.”

She touched a button on the keypad built into the arm of her chair and a three-dimensional hologram sprang up in the middle of the darkened room.

“I know who that is!” blurted the young man sitting beside Kruppmann.

Hsen replied mildly, “I should think that you do. It is Dr. Keith Stoner, former astronaut, former astrophysicist. The man who first made contact with the alien starship some thirty years ago.”

“He was frozen for eighteen years and then revived in the Hawaii laboratories of Vanguard Industries,” said the intelligence director. “That was fifteen years ago.”

Hsen studied Stoner’s powerful bearded face. The hologram was slightly larger than life, and the face seemed to float in mid-air like the stem image of some mighty god.

“You are certain that he’s the one?” Kruppmann sounded unconvinced. “A former scientist is our master conniver?”

“He is the one,” answered Hsen.

“Ninety-percent certainty,” the intelligence director repeated.

Kruppmann shook his ponderous head. “I find it hard to believe that a scientist would…”

“He is no longer a scientist,” Hsen pointed out. “One might say that he is retired. And he is married, very interestingly, to the president of Vanguard Industries, and has been so almost since the very day he was revived from freezing.”

Kruppmann’s mouth flapped open and closed several times. Finally he gasped, “Married to Jo Camerata?”

“Do you find that as interesting as I do?”

“The bitch!”

“Indeed.”

The Swiss banker’s face was turning red with fury. “We should eliminate them both!”

But Hsen held up one finger. “A moment of consideration, if you please. Consider: Stoner is undoubtedly the thorn in our flesh. Also: Jo Camerata, his wife, has undoubtedly been helping him all these years.”

“Her and her International Investment Agency,” Kruppmann muttered. “No wonder she…”

“Finally,” Hsen interrupted, “Stoner is the only man to survive cryonic freezing.”

The room went absolutely silent.

Hsen took a breath and said, “I suggest that Dr. Stoner is worth much more to us alive than dead. The secret of immortality seems to be hidden within his body.”

“Mein Gott!”

“Also,” Hsen went on, almost lazily, “I wonder what his motives are for fomenting the changes he has produced. Is he working for some alien creatures? Is he a Judas in our midst?”

“Gott in Himmel!”

Turning to his intelligence director, and the younger woman sitting beside her, Hsen asked, “Would it be possible to bring Dr. Stoner to one of our special facilities?”

The intelligence director nodded. “I will need a detailed layout of his home in Hawaii.”

Hsen pointed to the man beside Kruppmann. “You were there only a few days ago.”

He licked his lips nervously, then replied, “I can give you the complete layout, yeah. Security systems, everything.”

“Then we should be able to abduct Dr. Stoner.”

Kruppmann asked, “What about his wife? What about the traitorous bitch?”

Hsen made a small shrug. “When the time comes, we will deal with her.” To himself he promised, I will deal with her personally. It will be most enjoyable.

Lela Obiri sat down with a tired, undignified thump on the hard ground, her back to the huge bole of a lofty tree. The bushes were so thick that they swallowed her slight frame almost up to her shoulders. Good camouflage, she thought absently. Wearily she shrugged out of the shoulder straps of her backpack, then leaned back against the tree’s rough bark and closed her eyes.

Koku was safe. That was the important thing. Through the eyes of the young gorilla she saw that he was alone now in the forest, peacefully sitting in the middle of a clump of wild celery, calmly stripping the branches clean and eating the stalks, leaves and all. She could taste the raw celery: so crisp and delicious that it made her mouth water.

The team of hunters that had been tracking him was nowhere to be seen. But they were out there in the brush, and much smarter than Lela had at first thought they could be. They had maneuvered themselves to a position between Koku and the electronically-fenced area where the three female gorillas were waiting. They had set up a trap and now they were waiting for Koku to fall into it.

I must find some way to get past them, Lela told herself. If only the radio was working…

With an effort of will she made Koku look up and sniff the air. No trace of human sweat or the pungent oil they used for their guns. Strange; Lela had never noticed the odor of gun oil before. But with Koku’s senses transmitted by the protein chips to the neurons of her own brain, the smell was obvious and repugnant. Koku heard no sound of anything except the normal chattering and raucous calls of the forest’s birds.

Earlier in the day Lela had heard a helicopter fluttering high above the forest canopy. Perhaps her radio calls back to the headquarters of the rangers who protected this reserve had finally paid off. Maybe they had caught the poachers. But she could not make contact; no one answered her repeated calls for help. Obviously she could no longer depend on the radio.

The biochips were working fine, thank god. Lela almost felt as if she
were
Koku. She felt her teeth stripping the outer layer of the celery stalks and tasted the sweet pulp of their softer centers. She felt the solidity of the ground on which the gorilla sat. She looked up and peered around the forest greenery. She sniffed the air again and grunted with satisfaction; no humans in the area.

Can Koku sense me? Lela wondered. Can I make him get up and move even when he doesn’t want to? Sooner or later I must. I’ve got to introduce him to the females the university released in his territory. And then leave him.

The thought saddened her. It would be like leaving a part of herself behind, forever in the forest. But that was her mission, the task she had knowingly accepted: to help this young gorilla become the founder of a family. As a mother must rear its child for the inevitable day when it will leave and establish its own home.

In the midst of her ruminations she heard the faint rattle of metal upon metal, like a hunter’s rifle barrel tapping against the buckle of a strap.

Lela froze, every sense alert. There should be no other humans in this area. It could only be the poachers. Instead of waiting to trap Koku, they were looking for
her
.