Hell, yeah.
There was weather in the Colony. Understated weather, but weather still. Some of it was deliberately contrived by Life Support Systems, some of it was an accident of the Colony’s design and internal cycles. There was some clouding and mild, misty precipitation in the Open; there was a little smog sometimes, from the imperfect air filtering. The rotation of the Colony, with changes in temperature as the solar wind basted its turning sides, led to breezes produced by shifting air-pressure. Today, with the windows adjusted to let in more sunlight than other times of year, and with the evaporation from this morning’s irrigation, it was rather humid, making Parker think of Dallas.
“What I want right now… is ice cream,” he told her as they strolled down the path through the thin woods, watching potbellied “Frisbee athletes” gliding plastic plates to each other on the grassy field beyond the treeline.
“Might give you some, you play your cards right,” she said.
“You got ice cream? Since when did that ship in?”
“It didn’t. I made it. My dad had a hand-crank ice-cream maker.”
“And you’ve been hiding this from me! Boy, I tell you, there’s nothing to this old-boy stuff among the Admin people if you’re any example! Where’s my damn share of your decadent perks?”
“You got to exercise to earn it. Ice cream’s fattening. When it’s humid like this, I like to go to the freefall rooms, do some air tumbling, work out a little. It’s not much fun alone, though. You want to come?”
“Uh—sure. I guess. I haven’t been but once…”
“Elevator for that section’s at this end of the woods.”
Parker followed her onto a crosspath, toward the curving wall, recently cleaned of most of its graffiti, where a transparent-plastic corridor, like an umbilicus stretching from the placenta-like Open, led into the intricately engineered uterus of the Space Colony.
She seemed a little pensive; that, and the fact that the freefall rooms were often used for sexual trysts, made him think: Maybe I’ll get lucky.
No way. You’re too old for her.
In the Colony’s Admin Comm Center, Stoner was sucking Coca-Cola Nine from a paper carton and waiting for his call from Earth to come through. He sat at the console, staring at the empty screens; three of them centered with the words “Transmission Wait.”
Steinfeld came in first, from Israel, his image blinking onto the left-hand screen; then Smoke, from London, in the right-hand. The middle screen stayed blank, as Steinfeld said, “Our backer—” meaning Badoit “—won’t do the videoconference. He’s just too paranoid—or maybe just wiser than me. But he’s with us all right. I’ve got the money to prove it. And I think he’s going to lend us some troops for certain actions…”
With the transmission lags edited out, the rest of the conference went, “Smoke, you getting us both?”
“Right with you.”
“Steinfeld?”
“Yes.”
“Steinfeld, are you confident about the security of this transmission?”
“Unless someone’s got a technological edge we don’t know about. Always a possibility.”
“Let’s just do it,” Stoner said. “I got something I need to talk about. Look—if our Backer’s really there for us, then we don’t need Witcher. Correct?”
Steinfeld hesitated. Some interplanetary interference, maybe a burst of solar radiation in a troublesome wavelength, made his image flicker and fuzz for a moment, as if the TV screen were acting out his uncertainty. Then it stabilized—and he nodded. “We can always use Witcher’s support too, but we can now get by without it and still be effective, I think. It’s gotten worse?”
“Yeah,” Stoner said. “it’s gotten worse. I’m pretty sure Witcher’s making concerted efforts to keep intelligence from us.”
“This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s hiding something from us for, ah, the wrong reasons,” Steinfeld said. “It might be a need-to-know issue. Because of extractors.”
“What extractors? Here on the Colony? I doubt it. Anyway—I’ve had an inkling what some of it’s about. It’s something he definitely should be sharing, you know what I mean?” Stoner paused, sucked thoughtfully at the Coca-Cola. These transmissions were expensive, the systems time shouldn’t be squandered, but he had to think about how he put this. “He approached one of our technicians, offered him a lot of money to work for him in private. Setting up a transmitter controlled from his room. He paid the guy to do EVA work, set up a shortwave antenna to piggyback the signal onto our main beam after the transmission goes out, and receive independently… Well, the guy thought about it and came to Parker to see if it was okay. Russ Parker’s the security chief, and assistant administrator. And Parker brought it to me. I told him go ahead and install it, with some modifications… and Witcher doesn’t know about the modifications.”
“You’ve been spying on him?” Steinfeld said. “That was pretty risky. If he’d found out and we didn’t have the backer…”
“Maybe. I couldn’t resist the chance to find out what’s going on with him.”
“You’re still CIA at heart, Stoner,” Smoke said.
Stoner shot a glare at Smoke’s camera. The remark hadn’t been a compliment.
“It’s done,” Stoner said, “and what I got is some back-and-forth with his company vice president about some investigation his outfit’s been doing for him. The SA’s been hiring people with expertise in gen-engineering viruses. Witcher sent a transmission asking them to get him the specs…”
“To me, sounds like he’s doing research for our protection,” Steinfeld said. “We have worried about the fascists developing biowar materiel.”
“But why all this secretiveness about the transmission? His transmission is no more secure than ours—except from me and Parker.”
Steinfeld shrugged. “He’s a paranoid, maybe deciding to look into it on his own, doesn’t want to trust anyone else until he has to.”
“It doesn’t feel like that to me. It doesn’t jibe with my experience,” Stoner said. “And that is the CIA man in me.”
Steinfeld said, “Okay, keep monitoring him. Investigate any way you want. The risks…”
“Maybe,” Smoke said, “it warrants extractor interrogation—if it comes to that, we could talk about it.”
“Are you serious, Smoke?” Steinfeld asked. “Witcher?”
“I’ve often felt he had some kind of… hidden agenda,” Smoke said.
“He might be playing both ends against the middle,” Stoner said. “NR against SA for some reason. Maybe just to benefit his company.”
“No,” Steinfeld said. “If you think that, you don’t know him. He’s a strange sort of idealist. If he’s playing us against them, he has some other reason.”
“So I can go ahead and look into it.”
“Yes.” There was regret in Steinfeld’s tone, audible over hundreds of thousands of miles of void. “Look into it.”
Women’s liberation, Russ Parker thought, was a regional thing on Earth. It was widespread in much of the US and Europe, still a rarity in much of the Middle East and parts of India though the worst oppression of women had eased there. Lately it was doing surprisingly well in Africa, largely due to the efforts of the black woman who was the president of South Africa and the chairwoman of the African National Congress.
But it hadn’t made a lot of headway in Texas. Not where Parker was raised.
It was one of those things that Parker believed in—but somehow found hard to live up to. So Claire’s aggressiveness caught him off guard. Confused him.
That’s not to say he didn’t like it when she grabbed him in midair, kissed him hard on the mouth, and wrapped her legs around his hips.