It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.
Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn't see what was happening above him, and he didn't try. He was listening for Castro's voice.
If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls-wherever they were-then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?
And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.
... That was Castro's voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.
Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.
No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn't stay here forever.
If only Laney were here now.
A voice. Polly jerked to attention--except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.
A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she'd wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn't concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends' faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more...
A voice. It had her complete attention.
"Polly," it said, "you must trust me."
She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless.
"I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell," said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, "I cannot do that just yet. There are people making me keep you here."
A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it.
"Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won't let me free you" Castro's voice. She wanted to scream-"because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one-forty-three. You failed."
Liar! Liar! I didn't fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro's aim. But she hadn't talked in so long!
"Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth Would you like that?"
I'd love that, Polly thought. I'd tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years, not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they'd given her water intravenously. But however long it had been, she'd slept for some part of the time. Castro didn't know about the mercy-bullets. He'd come hours early.
Where was the voice?
All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone.
Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot?
Speak!
Speak to me!
The Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck: trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed.
So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families.
That which was now Jesus Pietro's interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a cardtable, a coffeetable, a reader screen connected to the ship's library, a small refrigerator. The tables and other things were gone now, cut from the outer wall with torches long ago. It had been a big room, luxuriously so for a spacecraft, where room is always at a premium. It had had to be big. Any normal apartment-dweller can step outside for a breath of air.
Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to the corridor had become a trapdoor, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, an empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box.
"Give her ten minutes to think it over," he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time.
His handphone buzzed.
"I'm in the vivarium," Major Jansen reported. "The girl's a colonist, all right, in stolen crew clothing. We don't' know where she got it yet. I doubt we'll like the answer. We had to pump antidotes into her; she was dying from an overdose of mercy-weapons."
"No sign that anyone came with her?"
"I didn't say that, sir. There are two things. One, the wires were pulled on the chair she was sitting in. Her helmet was stone dead. She couldn't have done that herself. Maybe that's why one of the prisoners woke up this afternoon."
"And then he freed the others? I don't believe it. We would have noticed the pulled wires afterward."
"I agree, sir. So somebody pulled those wires after she was in the chair."
"Maybe. What's your second point?"
"When the gas went off in the vivarium, one of the four police wasn't wearing his nose plug. We haven't been able to find it anywhere; his locker's empty, and when I called his wife, she said he took it with him. He's awake now, but he has no idea--"
"Is it worth bothering with? The guards aren't used to gas filters. Or gas."
"There was a mark on the man's forehead, sir. Like the one we found this afternoon, only this one is in ballpoint ink."
"Oh."
"Which means that there must be a traitor in Implementation itself, sir."
"What makes you think so, Major?"
"The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. Further, only a guard could have made that mark. Nobody else has entered the vivarium tonight."
Jesus Pietro swallowed his impatience. "You may be right, Major. Tomorrow we'll devise ways to smoke them out."
Major Jansen made several suggestions. Jesus Pietro listened, made appropriate comments, and cut him off as soon as he could.
A traitor in Implementation? Jesus Pietro hated to think so. It was possible, and not a thing to be ignored; but the knowledge that the Head suspected such a thing could damage Implementation morale more than any possible traitor.
In any case, Jesus Pietro was not interested. No traitorous guard could have moved invisibly in Jesus Pietro's office. The bleeding heart was something else entirely.