“You’re flying too fast—and why won’t you use the automatic approach system? Don’t forget, my special authorization isn’t valid on Earth,” I reminded Vasily one more time while his hands danced across the controls, working to synchronize our shuttlecraft’s angular momentum with the ramshackle docking bay of this unlikely independent orbital station.
The idea of flying in on a broken-down space jalopy confiscated from a ring of spice smugglers—not a nice new police frigate—was Vasily’s, of course. He said it was the only way we’d meet the mysterious Old Man. From the little he’d told me, this guy knew everything about dirty business. Giorgio Weekman’s business in particular. More than likely he had even heard something about Makrow 34. But he wasn’t the sort of guy you could approach in an official capacity, that much was obvious. He didn’t like to connect to the Web either. Our best bet was interviewing him in person, old-school style, on his own turf.
Muhammad coming to the mountain. No surprise there. If the mountain tried coming to Muhammad there’d be a landslide.
“Chill. The orbital ain’t planet Earth, Raymond,” he reminded me in turn, using my name for the second time since we’d met. He hadn’t been exactly communicative during our two days flying from the Burroughs to this terrestrial orbital. He seemed to think spending all his time on the Web, getting up to speed on current affairs, was more urgent than wasting it talking to me. For my part, I worried that even with a couple of police frigates escorting us, he’d stop helping me if I got in his way. The one time I did try, he called me Dick Tracy again. “Anyways, you know your problem ain’t the limits they put on you, it’s the xenophobe crazies. I’m docking manual because we look suspicious enough coming here in a practically brand-new ship. You mighta found something older, more beat-up. Ain’t too many automatic control shuttlecraft—or pilots in their right mind—who’d get anywheres near this piece-of-shit station. Except pigs. Earthling police. I don’t wanna make an old friend feel sorry ’cause he shot me down—especially as it’s been so long since we seen each other.”
I took a long, uneasy look at the clumsy patchwork of junkyard scrap they called a space station and shrugged. There was no sign of a defense system, which didn’t mean there wasn’t one. They could keep antimatter minicannons hidden behind any of those sheets of old metal. Or worse. From what I’d heard, these independent stations had exceptionally effective protective mechanisms.
“I guess they don’t get too many visitors. At any rate, I’m not too crazy about coming to a station that could fall to bits just from docking with it. I really hope they haven’t forgotten you. And let me remind you that everything up to 10,000 miles above the planet’s surface is considered its sovereign territory, under the laws of the Solar System. Besides, can you guarantee that somebody crazy enough to live in a heap like that isn’t also a rabid xenophobe with an itchy trigger finger?” I felt especially satisfied to be able to slip that old Chandlerian slang into my speech. That’s what Marlowe might have said in my shoes.
Vasily didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Docking a shuttlecraft by hand isn’t the sort of thing you can do without giving it your full attention—if you’re a human and organic, not a pozzie with a high-powered computer for a brain.
But I have to hand it to El Ex-Afortunado: he managed it pretty well, even though the anti-Psi collar kept him from using his powers. Especially considering he’d just spent three years imprisoned, unable to handle a shuttlecraft control panel except in simulations. We docked on our fourth attempt, just a few scratches on the hull the worse. Instead of the soft click that a similar maneuver with any normal ship would have caused on the Burroughs, the racket ringing across the cabin sounded more like a meat grinder trying to sing opera, off-key. Under any other circumstances I would have rated it “extremely worrisome,” but one look at Vasily convinced me that, here, this must be the ordinary routine.
The builders and residents of the Estrella Rom apparently had the same careless attitude toward systems maintenance as they did toward space engineering and everything else. I remembered the warning that flashed on-screen before the start of at least half the detective videos Spillane loaned me: The film you are about to see is a reconstruction based on a number of worn copies. They should inscribe that over this whole station, in capital letters.
If anybody on board knows how to read and write, I mean.
“Well, here we are.” Vasily wearily took his hands off the controls and strapped on a cartridge belt so full of ammo it would have embarrassed a professional twentieth-century mafia hit man. I watched him with resentment. He’d insisted on getting back his whole personal artillery stockpile, and when I refused he threatened to trash the deal. I had to give in. But two masers, an infrasonic stun gun, a mini-rocket launcher, a pocket crossbow, and especially his old large-caliber chemical-munition revolver with the laser scope seemed a bit over the top to me. “I hope his damn hypertrophic osteopathy hasn’t done in Slovoban, that old fossil. And I hope the Old Man will understand he has to give us a couple pieces of information if he wants to get to know his great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Follow me and don’t open your mouth any more than you have to. They don’t like guys poking around here asking too many questions.” I was about to say something, but he stopped me with a commanding gesture. “Zip it. The rules here ain’t the Burroughs rules. If you can say there’s any rules at all.”
He was the criminal (or “former” criminal), the one who knew his way around the place, so I kept my mouth shut and followed. But I had a huge pile of questions I was dying to ask. Hypertrophic osteopathy? The only thing I had about it in my data bank was a brief mention of a rare pituitary disease—and no cases of it had been reported since the aliens revolutionized human medical care. Was the Old Man one of those fundamentalist diehards who refused to accept any technology that had non-human origins? And… great-great-great-great-grandchildren? The surprisingly spare information about the Estrella Rom stored in my database said Slovoban was the name of the Romani chieftain who had founded the station, in a drunken stupor or a fit of madness, it was unclear which—but that was ninety-six years ago. Could this mean—?
The lack of gravity around the central docking bay didn’t surprise me. The Estrella Rom had been constructed (so to speak; “agglomerated” or “amassed” would be more accurate) using the oldest and cheapest design capable of simulating something like gravity: a wheel.
Okay, that was the basic design of the Burroughs, too, but there the similarity ended. The Estrella Rom spun like crazy on its axis to generate enough centrifugal force to keep all the calcium in its inhabitants’ bones from leaching out. No cutting-edge alien tech here. No gravity generators, no variable acceleration zones to facilitate coupling with arriving ships. There’s no way to know whether the designer intended to add those things later on to his gypsy paradise but ran out of funds, or whether he simply didn’t give a damn that the residents of his little world would have to choose between weightlessness and being dizzy all the time.
We passed through an airlock that Yuri Gagarin would have found old-fashioned. The Estrella Rom looked even more makeshift on the inside than it did on the outside. Now hanging on by a metal ring that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bronze Age museum exhibit, now pushing off with one foot from a tin plate on which I could still read the faded letters of an antediluvian earthling soda pop ad, Vasily floated and rebounded with simian agility. If I hadn’t known he’d been locked in an anti-Psi cell for the past three years, I would have assumed he’d spent his whole life leaping like a mountain goat. Jump, rebound, push off—until, as we moved farther from the center, his feet began to be attracted, only weakly at first, by one of the bulkheads.