“Don’t bother to answer that.” Cinnabar Baker was moving on. The allotted ten minutes had passed. “Tell me this instead. You’re proposing to leave at once. What’s the hurry? Why not wait a few more days?”
“More days?” Turpin repeated.
Sylvia shook her head. “I daren’t. Paul Chu is at that location to perform a facility conversion, adding a low-g drive—probably to a cometary fragment. That means he’ll be working alone except for machines. We’ll be able to talk freely. But that will last only another couple of weeks, then he’ll be leaving. I don’t know where he’ll be going next.”
“Does he know anything about this?”
“Not a thing. I didn’t suggest to anyone that I might try to visit him. You’re the only person who knows I’m even thinking of it.” She saw the slow nod of Cinnabar Baker’s head. “You will approve it, then?”
Baker grunted. “Fernald, I never did like Paul Chu. I remember him, and I don’t believe he’ll do one thing to help you.” She held up her hand. “But before you begin to argue, let me tell you I’m going to approve your request. You ought to have this job for a day. You’d approve anything that might give you a toehold on our problems. The Cloud’s technology is all going to hell, people daren’t go near the form-change machines, we’ve been receiving communications from some of the other harvesters that suggest the populations there have all gone crazy, and I just had a report from the other side of the Cloud about a bad accident on another of the space farms. To top that off, one of our inbound cargo ships was destroyed yesterday, and the Sunhuggers are blaming us for it—saying we blew up one of our own vessels!”
She sighed. “All right. You’ve heard enough of that. Of course I’ll approve it. Go do it, and use my authority if you need it to get your ship. But one other thing,” she added as Sylvia stood up. “This has to be a two-way street. You won’t tell anyone where you’re going. And I won’t tell anyone, not even the Inner Council, what you are trying to do. If you get into hot water, I’ll have to disown you. I’ll even deny that you had my permission for a transit ship. We have a firm policy, you see: We don’t deal with the rebels in any circumstances. Understood?”
Sylvia bit her lip, then nodded. “All right.”
Cinnabar Baker reached out and took her hand in an unexpected gesture. “We never had a meeting tonight, Fernald, and you leave by the other exit. I have another group of people waiting outside. Good luck, and good hunting. You’ll be a long way from home.”
“From home,” Turpin echoed hoarsely. The crow wagged his head. “Way from home.”
That had been eight days earlier. Eight days of silence and solitude. Sylvia had maintained strict communications blackout all through the journey, even when the ship’s drive was inactive and it was easy to send or receive signals.
But as she slowed to approach her final destination, the rendezvous only a few minutes away, her nervousness increased. The urge to send some kind of message back to Cinnabar Baker grew stronger. Sylvia had been provided with an ephemeris for a body in an orbit skirting the outer part of the Kernel Ring; she was told that Paul Chu should be there. But the positional data had come with an admonition to strict secrecy—and nothing else. She had not been told the nature of the object to which she was traveling, or whether it was large or small, man-made or natural, a colony or a military base. She had assumed a cometary fragment—why else would he be installing an add-on drive unit—but suppose that was wrong?
Well, she would know soon enough. At last the body was visible. From a distance of five kilometers it was like an irregular, granular egg, shining by internal lights. Sylvia turned the high-magnification sensors onto it. She was confused, and her nervousness had increased. The object was about three hundred meters long, too small to be a harvester, a colony, or a cargo ship, and the wrong shape for a transit vessel. That fit with the idea of a small comet nucleus, still rich in volatiles. Yet the pattern of ports and lights implied an inhabited body, and two docking ports and air locks were clearly visible on the surface.
If it were a natural body, then it was one that had already seen some internal tunneling and modifications. The newly installed drive unit was easily recognized, gleaming at the thicker end of the lumpy body.
Delay would not help, and she had not come so far for nothing. Sylvia was already in her suit. She allowed the transit ship to dock itself gently against the bigger port, opened the cabin, and went straight to the lock.
It was open, contrary to standard safety regulations. And the inner lock was open, too, which meant that the interior of the body was airless. If Paul Chu were inside, he was wearing a suit or he was a corpse. Sylvia noticed how loud her own breathing sounded in the helmet. She set her suit receiver to perform a frequency sweep and passed on through the inner air lock.
The first chamber had been carved from the water ice and carbon dioxide ice of the cometary interior, and it was clearly intended as a workshop and equipment-maintenance facility. There were plenty of signs that it had been recently inhabited, with cutting torches still attached to their fuel bottles in a tool shop chamber and an electrical generator in standby mode. Three or four construction machines were waiting patiently against one of the walls. Sylvia regarded them with irritation. They were obsolete models by Cloud standards. If they had been made just a little bit smarter, she could have asked them what was going on. As it was, they had been designed with a specialized vocabulary and understood nothing but mechanical construction tasks. If no one came along to give instructions, they would wait contentedly for a million years.
She passed on through a sliding partition, deeper into the interior. The scan on received signals had produced nothing, so she switched to an all-frequency broadcast. “Paul Chu. This is Sylvia.” Her suit repeated the message automatically, over and over, and listened for any reply.
She had reached the temporary living quarters built by the machines near the center of the body. He was not there, but she saw many signs of his recent occupancy. That was definitely his computer link, the one he had used for ten years. No Cloudlander, no matter how long he was away from the Outer System, would ever leave metal objects strewn so casually around unless he knew he would be coming back soon or had been forced to leave in a great hurry.
Or dead, her mind said insistently.
She pushed away the thought. Perhaps Paul was somewhere on the other side of the body, or perhaps he had been temporarily called away.
But called away to what? And to where? She had seen no sign of other bodies in her approach, and her suit radio had an effective range of many thousands of kilometers.
The suppose that he did not want to meet her and was hiding away to avoid an encounter? That thought rejected itself. How could he be hiding when he had no idea that she was even coming? He thought she was back in the Outer System.
Almost against her will, Sylvia set out to explore the desolate interior. Sometime, far in the past, it had been a human home for a long period. There were kitchens, bedrooms, even chambers set up for entertainment and exercise. Those rooms held harnesses, stretch bars, and workout machines, each with dials to measure effort level and progress. But over all the equipment and instruments lay a thin layer of sublimed ice. No one had touched anything there for years, maybe for decades.
In less than half an hour she was convinced that there was no one anywhere on the hollowed-out comet. She was alone. And only a few moments later she felt a strange vibration beneath her feet and sensed a slight pressure on the front of her suit. She knew at once what was happening. The air locks had been closed on the body’s surface, and the interior was filling with air.