"I'm sorry. But we don't give out that kind of information."
Alex looked in my direction. Worth a try. "I wonder if it would be possible to speak to the captain of the Goldman ." "He's off duty," came the response. "He'll be in tomorrow morning." Alex said thanks, switched off, and looked up the specifications for the Goldman . Among them he found the captain's name. Ivan Sloan. "Ivan?" I said. "Yes. Do you know him?" "He was one of my trainers at StarFlight." "Good," said Alex. "Marvelous." He asked the AI to find the number for Ivan Sloan. "You'll probably find him at Samuels."
"That is correct, sir. Do you wish to be connected?"
"Please." Alex got up, signaled for me to do the call, and left the room.
Ivan was one of those people who strikes you as being a bit slow until you get to know him. He was always there when I needed him and, when I was having some doubts about whether I'd ever graduate, he took me aside and asked how serious I was about piloting interstellars. I told him I was serious. That there was nothing in my life I wanted more than that. "Then get your act together," he'd told me. "You'll be okay. You've got all the talent you need. Hell, it doesn't take that much talent. All you have to do is be smart enough to tell the AI what to do." He said that as if he meant it. "What you don't have," he added, "is confidence in yourself. Probably from too many people over a lifetime telling you what you've gotten wrong." There was truth to that. My dad was forever warning me not to touch stuff, so I wouldn't break it. When he saw me he knew me at once, and broke into a big smile. "Chase," he said, "what are you doing out here?" He was seated at a table, with a cup in one hand, a dinner plate and silverware in front of him. Behind him I could see a mural. A sailboat. "Came out to see you , Ivan. How are you?"
"I'm serious. You're the last person I expected to see in this corner of the cosmos."
"I'm on vacation," I said. "How about you? How do you come to be here?" "I'm from here." "You're kidding. You're from Salud Afar? I never knew that." He shrugged. "I might not have mentioned it." "Running tours?" He looked embarrassed. "That's pretty much what it's come down to." Tours from Salud Afar? I looked through a viewport at the black sky. "So where do people go? What's to see?" "Varesnikov," he said. "It has a magnificent set of rings and moons. And people like Sophora, too. It's a crystal world. Looks great when you get the right angle on the sunlight." "I guess." I saw something in his eyes. Pain, maybe. Or embarrassment. As if his life hadn't turned out the way he'd expected. "So how'd you turn up on Rimway?"
"I cleared out of here when I was twenty-two, Chase. Those were bad times. I didn't much like living under the Bandahr." He turned away for a moment. Spoke to someone else, then angled the link so I could see the people with him: a man and two women. We did a quick round of introductions. One of the women was his wife Mira. She was attractive, congenial, probably twenty years younger than he was. The other couple were friends. "Let me ask a quick question, Ivan," I said, "and I'll get out of your way. A couple of months ago, you had a passenger named Vicki Greene. Do you remember her?" "The company did," he said. "I didn't." "I assumed she'd gone out on the Goldman ." "As a matter of fact, she did. But it wasn't my ship then. Haley Khan was running her at the time."
"Would it be possible for me to talk to Haley? Can you give me his code?"
"He's gone, Chase. Disappeared."
"How do you mean?"
"He vanished. Right off the station."
"How could that happen?"
"Don't know. It happened several months ago. Right after Vicki Greene had been here. There's no record he took the shuttle down. But he didn't show up for work one day and we've never been able to find him."
"You called the police?" "The CSS. Yes. They couldn't find him either." He paused. Said something to the others at the table. Came back to me: "What's your connection with him, Chase?" I told him about Vicki. "Do you know where she went? On the Goldman ?" "Probably the standard tour route. I never got a chance to talk to him after the flight."
"Did anybody else?"
"I don't think so, Chase. That was the same question the Coalition guys were asking. Haley came off the flight and went back to the hotel. He usually did that. He wasn't much for hanging around. Anyway he had a couple days off coming to him, and we just never saw him again. Ride with Vicki Greene and walk out of the world. It's like one of her books."
"What about the AI?" "The CSS took it. Part of their investigation." He paused, lost in thought. "There was something else odd, too."
"What's that, Ivan?"
"She bought out the ship. Wanted to travel alone. No other passengers."
"Would you guys take her someplace special if she asked?"
"Oh, sure. We'll take you sightseeing anywhere you wanted to go. If nobody objects."
"Like if there's nobody else on board."
"Yes."
"Okay. So she wanted to go off the usual tour destinations. Where else might she have wanted to go?" "Chase, you got me. There is nowhere else. There's nothing out here for hundreds of light-years in all directions." "Do you know where she was coming from ?" "No. I can check the logs."
"Would you do that for me? And get back to me?"
"That kind of information's supposed to be private."
"I'd appreciate it, Ivan."
He called the next morning. "There's no record," he said. "What happened to it?"
"Officially, the flight never happened. That tells me the CSS took it."
SIXTEEN
Barry would have been all right if he hadn't become a physicist. But all that nonsense about mass and energy got him believing he really knew how the world worked. And he didn't. He never did. And that's what got him killed.
- Midnight and Roses
Vicki, Ivan said, had signed on for the flight from a hotel in Moreska. Moreska was a small town in the middle of nowhere. It had no spectral claims, no demons, creatures from another age still haunting the roads. But it had once been home to Demery Manor, which, for reasons unknown, had been blown apart during the final year of the Bandahr's rule, just months before his assassination. Nobody knew why the incident had occurred, although everyone assumed Nicorps was involved. The manor's owner, Edward Demery, was not an enemy of the regime, as far as was known. I didn't think blowing up a house was enough to have interested Vicki Greene. Until I heard that seventeen other homes, throughout the region, had been destroyed the same night.
The Demery Manor site consisted of a few burned timbers and a couple of stone walls jutting out of the earth. The common wisdom held that Edward Demery had incurred the wrath of Aramy Cleev and paid the price. According to the flyers we'd gotten at the hotel in Moreska, "most experts" believed the Bandahr had been personally offended when Demery, during an interview, had described the compassion and basic decency of Dakar Cleev, Aramy's grandfather, without mentioning Aramy's own matchless compassion. The dictator had said nothing publicly, of course, and had in fact even praised Demery's perspicacity. But anyone who knew Aramy Cleev understood the failure to note his kindness would not have gone down well. The general destruction had come six days after those unfortunate remarks and had been spread over several hundred kilometers in all directions. Houses, villas, and manors had been leveled. There'd been no survivors anywhere. Nicorps, it was assumed by many, was closing its books on people who had incurred the Bandahr's displeasure. We were looking at the ruins, on a cold afternoon, while a wet wind blew in off the sea. We had an autoguide with us. "They killed him and his wife," said the autoguide. "Eighteen houses in one night?" said Alex. "That seems a bit extreme."