(CHAPTER-HEADINGS TO BE ADDED LATER, EVERY 3000 WORDS OR SO.)
Commissioner Jutta Nilsson, a slight, wrinkle-lipped woman with hair bleached white with age and care, stared across Crater Lipsky to the encircling hills. Their shattered crags and swathes of scree glowed mould-green against a black sky: a sky spattered with stars like snow on a bear's pelt. On the plain before her, four hundred spikes of pumice stood like soldiers on parade. They cast dark shadows, needle-sharp in the westering sun.
Four hundred: that was the number there should have been. But one single headstone was absent. A roughly-dug hole, like a pool of ink, marked its proper position in the carefully aligned array. Beside the hole lay a cosmonautical hibernator pressed into service as a coffin, the same as had been done for all the other graves. Prior to burial the hibernators would have been closed and sealed, though not activated. But this particular casket lay beside the hole with its lid thrown back.
The Moonforce sergeant standing beside her handed her the gravestone to read as if it were an empty box. Carved as it was from foamy lava it didn’t weigh a lot. Besides, in lunar gravity even a largeish rock can be held steady in one hand.
“Peter Zwillinge,” enunciated Nilsson, scanning the inscriptions on both sides. “Why would anyone want to dig up the body of that monster?”
The sergeant shrugged as he silently led the way to the desecrated grave.
“When was this discovered?”
“Two circadians ago,” said the sergeant. “The perpetrators were surprised in their work by the grave-master. They fled leaving everything just as you see it. Knowing your interest in the deceased person, it occurred to someone you ought to be informed.”
“Not before time, Sergeant, not before time.”
Nilsson stood gazing at the charred skeleton inside the casket. Twelve years had passed since TC Prometheus had returned to the Moon with a crew of dead men. But bodies buried in the lunar soil don’t rot. Average temperatures of a few degrees Kelvin saw to it that they’d remain in a state of preservation for millions of years. If it was a skeleton they saw now in that casket, it was a skeleton that had been interred in the first place.
“That,” she said with heavy emphasis, “is not Peter Zwillinge.”
The officer turned to her, mouth gaping. “How can you be so sure so quickly, Commissioner?”
“This is the skeleton of a normal healthy gaian male...” she paused for emphasis, “with legs and hips intact.”
“Of course...!” The sergeant smacked the palm of his gloved hand to the brow of his helmet.
Nilsson continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Peter Zwillinge was a chimorg: a chimaeric organism. An exceptionally ugly, misshapen chimorg—even if we on the Moon deemed him to be human. Now in order to be granted restricted human rights on Mars he had to sacrifice his mobility, since no chimorg can ever be accepted there as a full citizen of class seven, that is, mobile, sentient and economically active. So, Sergeant, do you know what they did to him?”
Several seconds of silence followed. Nilsson assumed the answer was “no” and carried on in her forensic monotone.
“He was judicially crippled by the Vratch: the Olympian medical police. It was done in such a way as to make it impossible for legs to be grafted back on ever again. Whilst retaining the sacrum, they removed both os innominatum bones, inserting a stainless steel basin in their place. In the event of a rupture this was meant to keep the prisoner’s intestines from spilling out on the ground.”
Nilsson saw the sergeant shudder underneath his inflated uniform. She switched on her laser communicator and pointed with it. “Now take a look at that pelvis.”
“It looks quite normal to me.”
“Exactly. The leg-bones might possibly have come from another corpse and accidentally been placed in this hibernator. The clearing-up, as you can imagine, took place under far from ideal conditions. But the evidence of the pelvis is undeniable.”
Sticking her thumbs in the belt of her rover-suit, she gave out a long meditative groan. “Someone with an acute interest in the fate of Peter Zwillinge has unwittingly made us a gift of staggering consequence. Just how staggering I cannot begin to gauge.”
Her companion’s voice was scarcely audible. “What does it all signify, Commissioner?”
“It signifies, Sergeant, that we have let the most notorious mass-murderer in Selenean history slip through our fingers.”
“Star-child!” The unexpected guest raised her veil to gaze in wonder with huge uncanny eyes. “How like your mother you are!”
Anitra backed against the doorframe as if she’d been struck a blow. Self-consciously she brushed aside a long black wisp of hair.
Peter Zwillinge’s plug-ugly face stretched in an elastic smile like dough between a baker’s fingers. “Here’s our pretty young lass,” he said, gesticulating from his trolley. Anitra knew his smiles, his every mood. They were rarely forced, rarely insincere. But that was just how he was smiling now.
“Anitra, my love, this is Supreme Councillor Zvezda, personal advisor on groubian affairs to the Goubernator of Olympia.”
“Call me Dolpou,” smiled the visitor.
“Dolpou... has come all the way from Nix City, just to see you.”
Anitra’s jaw dropped. Nix City: a name she’d heard of—a name of fable and mystery to her, like Shangri-La or Timbuktoo. But she knew nothing about it... except it wasn’t on the planet Earth.
She blinked. As a normal girl might blush, her face went into a flurry of coloured flames. “You’ve come to see me? Only me?”
“No; your brothers too.”
The stranger was well-dressed in a neatly-cut dark suit and black-plumed hat: normal clothes—but of a style nearly a century old. A millionaire’s widow? Or a female undertaker—if they’d had such things back then? But those scary eyes, with their omega-shaped pupils, made her look like nobody Anitra had ever seen. Not in the flesh, that is, for Dolpou Zvezda looked just like the photos of her long-dead mother.
Anitra herself didn’t look like her mother, whatever the visitor might think. Yet in a way they were alike, she and this stranger who had appeared in her living room. In a way that wouldn’t have shown up in an old black-and-white photograph: the colour of her skin. Colours, plural, one should say, because it was never the same from one moment to the next.
She recalled a conversation she’d once had with a fellow-attendee at a cosmetics exhibition. The other had expressed her sense of shock on first meeting someone else who shared her disfigurement: a strawberry birthmark covering half her face. There had been an upwelling of empathy, curiosity—and something more... love-at-first-sight? Or the projection of self-hatred?
Why Anitra was in the habit of attending cosmetics exhibitions, as were her brothers, was on account of their unusual skin. It placed them in the category of “special needs”. It wasn’t a disorder though, just a unique characteristic.
No one else had chromatophores.
No one else’s skin could instantly change hue, making faces in a witchy fire, flickering in swirls of red, gold, green, blue and purple with every shift of mood, making it impossible to tell a lie.
To live in Wear Valley, to withstand eleven years of state schooling, she and her brothers had needed to apply a masking creme each morning to their faces, necks and hands, washing it off again as soon as they got home. Physical Education was something to be automatically excused, as were communal showers. Bringing friends home was likewise never done.
The search was never-ending for new and better cosmetic products to make them look—not perfect—but like everybody else. Whilst their contemporaries squeezed pimples in the bathroom mirror, wanting them to go away, they used to get fake ones in little plastic boxes like bindi spots and painstakingly apply them with tweezers.
Peter Zwillinge wheeled himself in his electric trolley round beside the visitor. “She doesn’t mean of course that you look anything like your mother in facial features. But Dolpou doesn’t see faces as we do: only patterns of colour. She sees the exalted ancestry of your spatio-color signature.” He glanced up at the visitor, who smiled and nodded.
Anitra fidgeted with her charm bracelet, a curiously retro present from her “Uncle Peter” on the recent occasion of her eighteenth birthday. “They’re—I mean—Gaby’s taken them off in our bus for a day-out. I couldn’t go with them. I had something I needed to finish.”
“I... um... told Dolpou about that,” said Uncle Peter. At least he had the grace to sound apologetic.
Anitra wished he’d kept quiet about it. She’d been unusually furtive over her hand-knitted jumper and her eagerness to finish it: a birthday present for her sweetheart Dorian. Well, maybe it was an open secret among the household—but why go telling strangers? She glanced anxiously from one to the other, her gaze coming to rest on the visitor. “Can I, er, get you a glass of tea?”
A “glass of tea”... staxán tcháiou in M1, the primary language of Olympia. With every word she uttered, did she but know it, Anitra subtly betrayed the Martian roots of her family life.
The eldritch visitor smiled again and shook her head. The pattern on her face signalled its own message, which was nothing to do with tea. It surprised Anitra how much of it she understood. Spatio-color: the silent body-language of the groubians. And of octopi, squids and cuttles too, their ancestors on earth.
She knew the name for it, but to her it was a secret mode of communication which she and her brothers all happened to share. She’d never stopped to think of it as the basis of a formal language of culture and wisdom, spoken by a whole nation, in just the same way as English is based on a series of moans and clicks coming out of peoples’ mouths.
Now, faced with this exquisitely refined, infinitely expressive visage from another world, she felt she was the country cousin coming to the capital.
“I won’t stay long,” said Dolpou. “I only came to find the right house and make your acquaintance. But I’ll be back tomorrow. Then we can have a good long chat.” She smiled and glanced speculatively at Peter. “The first of many, perhaps...?”
The chimorg smiled back, but once again Anitra saw that his gargoyle grin was forced. Clearly these two had the advantage of long acquaintanceship, though it hadn’t been friendship.
“Dolpou has a proposition to make,” he said. “But more of that later.”
The visitor lowered her veil and picked up her shiny black handbag to depart. Passing Anitra in the doorway, she briefly raised her veil again to bestow a delicate kiss on the young adult’s kaleidoscope cheek. Anitra felt the tack of her lipstick and recognised her perfume. How strange: it happened to be one she wore herself whenever she wanted to appear grown-up.
Peter followed the visitor out of the room to show her to the front door. Then he trundled slowly back. Sitting in his trolley in the doorway, he stared silently at the young woman who called him “Uncle”.
It was a bleak stare. In Nix City, he was thinking, Anitra would never dare to call him “Uncle”, though he was closer to her than the vast majority of uncles to their nieces. He’d assisted at her birth and helped her foster-mother Gabrielle to bring her up. There was no relationship by blood of course. In Nix City, he, Peter Zwillinge, wasn’t even classified as human. He wondered to himself though: would she be?
Anitra’s hands were on her hips. “That was a groubian!”
“Now, at last, you’ve seen one in the flesh.” He shut the door.
“Was my mother Tvoul... like that?”
“No, not to me she wasn’t.” Peter Zwillinge’s bloodshot eyes seemed to glaze over as he went back in his memory. “Though I doubt you could have told the difference. So—yes, I suppose you could say she was.”
Anitra sat down hard in the nearest chair, hands in her lap, playing with the charms on her bracelet.
“Why did she call me Star-child?”
“Because, my dear, that is what you are.”
Anitra tossed her head in irritation, eyes rolling. It was just a silly pet-name among the family. What business had a stranger using it? Peter noticed her retreat into denial and added “But not only for me. For other people too...”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “Dolpou wants to take you away from us, from Gaby and me. To take you back to Nix City, where she is sure your destiny lies.”
Anitra struggled to her feet, to flop back down onto the chimorg’s lap as though she were a little girl again. “She can’t do that,” she shouted. “Uncle Peter, I shall never, ever leave you. Never.”
The failed laboratory experiment patted her dark hair as her face nestled into his hollow chest. His eyes grew moist. “In the end you will, my dear. You must.”
She looked up. “Why?”
“Because I shall die of old age... and you will not.”
It wasn’t as if Peter’s prognostication was news to her. But she and her brothers took it as some fond conceit of his. After all, weren’t they the first of their kind? So how could anyone be sure how long they’d live? The matter was never mentioned outside the family and seldom within it. Unlucky to do so.
“I won’t go off with that... that groubian. Make her go away!”
“Anitra...” The chimorg gently pulled her head back down onto his breast. “Tomorrow we must listen, you and I, to what Dolpou Zvezda has come all this way to say.”
“Commissioner Nilsson,” said the image on the screen. “You have no jurisdiction in the mir of Prometheus.”
Nilsson’s mouth compressed itself to a lipless line. “Magic Mirror, you are no longer a mir: you are a war-grave. These past twelve years you have been orbiting the Moon with not a single living denizen.”
The hollow mask of a very old man shimmered like a drop of oil in a pool. It was silent. Was it digesting the information, or did it simply have nothing to say?
Nilsson pressed the “hold” button on the console and turned to the person sitting beside her.
“I find this incredible! Here is the central services supervisor of Prometheus: a robotic agent the crew knew as Magic Mirror, MM for short. Nothing escaped its vigilance.”
“Yes, Commissioner—I mean, no, Commissioner.” The officer next to her, the captain of the watch, late-twenties, well-groomed, not-so-well-experienced, sat sweating in awe of this terrible veteran.
“So how come it doesn’t know what’s been going on the last twelve years?”
“It’s been switched off the whole time. When Prometheus appeared in our skies, central services had already been disabled. The vessel was inserted into lunar orbit under manual control.”
“Under manual control...?” Nilsson turned to glare at him. “This is Prometheus we’re talking about: the prototype of the present-day thermonuclear ferries. There is only one person in System Sol who could have done such a thing. And he was supposed to be dead.”
“I wouldn’t know. It all took place before my time.”
Nilsson’s features relaxed, but not to soften. “So... they’ve put you in charge, Captain, and you know nothing?”
“I-I’ve read the reports,” the other stammered. “They are detailed and comprehensive.” He knew that Nilsson would have read them too—pored over them—and silently prayed she wouldn’t test his knowledge.
“Well, Captain, tell me this. Why wasn’t MM switched on and carefully debriefed? Wasn’t it the obvious thing to do?”
“In hindsight perhaps, given more police resources. At the time it was assumed there’d been a good reason for disabling central services. As you saw for yourself, on being rebooted, MM would predictably try to take charge of the vessel.”
Slowly Nilsson turned back to the screen. “MM,” she said. “Are you prepared to answer my questions?”
The fibrillating mask spoke slowly and precisely, its mouth opening onto nothingness. “What is it you want to know, Commissioner?”
“Where is Peter Zwillinge?”
“Twelve years ago, the passenger known as Peter Zwillinge was placed alive into a hibernation casket by Nurse Gabrielle Starr.”
Nilsson lurched forward. “Whatever happened to that casket?” she screamed.
“There is a gap in my recollection.”
Commissioner Nilsson flopped back in her seat. There would be, wouldn’t there, if Prometheus had arrived at the Moon with central services disabled. “Listen to me, MM. Twelve years ago a hibernator was buried in Crater Lipsky under the name of Peter Zwillinge. Whose remains are they are in that casket?”
“From what you tell me I deduce them to be those of Crewman Steve Talbot.”
“Ah. And how did Crewman Talbot die?”
“By incineration,” said MM, “when Shval Meteor massacred the crew.”
“Shval Meteor,” murmured Nilsson after a pause, savouring the words as if to judge whether to execrate the taste or simply hate it. “Together with Peter Zwillinge, plus one other—dead by that time—they comprised the Meteor Gang. Their speciality: electronic fraud. Which in the end extended to terrorism. Spectacular acts of terrorism, like obliterating the Gaiascope with sixty thousand people inside.”
Nilsson knew Shval’s history and she knew Gabrielle Starr’s affidavit off by heart. But there were some details she wanted to verify.
“What became of Shval Meteor?”
“Crewman Meteor perished on Titan in the destruction of Platform Two.”
That chimed with the report. On that day, some eighteen years ago, an apocalypse had taken place. Not one, but two entire miri—worlds—had come to an end. The mir of Prometheus—and the mir of Titan.
“I’ve never managed to understand,” said the captain of the watch, “why the Meteor Gang travelled to Titan in the first place.”
“To get their hands on the star-children,” replied Nilsson. “When Shval heard that her twin-sister Tvoul had succeeded in getting pregnant by a gaian, she strove by every means to capture her, dead or alive, to get her hands on the embryos inside the zygocysts. What she would have done with them is anybody’s guess. Some say she wanted to take her sister’s place and become the All-Mother: ‘Eve’ to an emergent nation spreading across the Milky Way.”
She cleared her throat as if dismissing the notion. “Personally I think she’d have sold the zygocysts on Tvoul’s body for whatever she could get for them. It would have been in-character.”
She turned back to the screen. “MM... whilst all this was being fought-out, where was Peter Zwillinge?”
“in the ship’s strong-room, frozen down in a hibernator. He was judged too dangerous to prowl the ship unsupervised.”
Commissioner Nilsson grunted, letting her head drop forward. “Well, at some stage someone used their common-sense.” Again she raised her head.
“So when Prometheus reached Titan, Zwillinge wasn’t revived along with everyone else, but simply left in the cooler, so to speak?”
“Yes.”
“At what point was he revived—and why?”
“When s-bots came from Platform Two with the body of Tvoul, there was nobody alive on board except Nurse Gabrielle Starr and the passenger Zwillinge. I notified her of this—and she had the s-bots fetch his casket from the strong-room and resuscitate him.”
“The least of all evils,” said Nilsson, her lips wrinkling even more. “But in so doing you acquired the services of a superb technician, able to undo Shval’s mischief.”
“No, it was not ‘the least of all evils’. There was absolutely no alternative. Nurse Starr lacked the necessary skills.”
“And six years later, on insertion into lunar orbit, Peter Zwillinge went back into hibernation and his casket placed alongside the dead crew. What happened then?”
“I don’t know,” replied MM. “You must ask Moonforce.”
The captain of the watch took up the story. “It seems we shipped the caskets down to the surface, all except the one allegedly containing the remains of Steve Talbot. Nurse Starr made the generous offer to take it with her to Gaia, along with the star-children.”
The Commissioner’s face took on the aspect of a charging lion. “And Bergström let her?”
“She offered to ensure that Crewman Talbot, a British citizen like her, received a proper burial in his native town. It relieved Moonforce of responsibility for disposing of his remains. I know it was only one body out of four hundred-odd, but it was one less body to process.”
“Very smart,” said Nilsson, her voice a hissing growl. “Very smart. However did Steve Talbot’s hibernator get mixed up with Peter Zwillinge’s? Could it just have been a mistake?”
“Possibly...” said the captain of the watch, who was wilting under the Commissioner’s relentless inquisition.
“No,” said MM. “It was a deliberate act of substitution by Nurse Starr.”
Nilsson’s wrinkled mouth opened like a toad aiming for a fly, then she banged the console. “Why didn’t we interrogate Nurse Starr more thoroughly?”
“There were the children to consider,” replied the captain of the watch. “For their sakes she was allowed to proceed to Gaia with all due speed. She had offered to assume their guardianship. She was de-facto their guardian already, so we gladly left it to the British authorities to have the final say on the matter. She had given us a detailed statement, which had the appeal of being corroborated by all the known facts.”
“Except in one respect, one insignificant little respect: the actual whereabouts of Peter Zwillinge.” Nilsson’s eyelids drooped as if she were about to fall asleep. Then they flew open. “This is the Butcher of the Gaiascope,” she yelled. “A man with sixty thousand Selenean deaths on his conscience!”
The captain of the watch winced and shrugged. “We accepted Gabrielle Starr’s story, to the effect that Zwillinge had given her every assistance to care for the children, but couldn’t face standing trial for the Gaiascope atrocity. So he took his own life.”
“And Bergström believed that story?”
“The tragic circumstances excited pity. We were glad to close the case on the Gaiascope and we had the body to bury—or at least a body. Nurse Starr was held by all to be of good character. Why not accept her version of events?”
“Why not? Why not? Look!” Nilsson thrust her forefinger into the palm of her hand. “When someone has rescued you from perpetual orbit around Titan and brought you safely home, having been your constant companion for six long years and helping you bring up nine children on a salvaged vessel—nine very special children—mightn’t you feel the urge to do something for that person in return? Mightn’t you continue to feel in need of someone as resourceful as the formidable Peter Zwillinge?” The last two words came howling out.
The captain of the watch kept still. Nilsson’s face sank into a drooping scowl. She continued in a murmur, as though talking to herself.
“Might not the children? They were six years old by then. Possibly they’d grown fond of this monster.” Her eyebrows rose, as did her voice in a sardonic lilt. “Maybe they called him ‘Uncle Peter’...”
“Uncle Peter, the phone. Shall I answer it?”
“No, treasure, I’m here.”
Peter Zwillinge snatched up the handset. The voice on the line sounded both officious and uncertain of itself. That sparked a thrill of warning which skipped around Peter’s frame like the fuse of a pyrotechnic setpiece.
“Mr Blake?”
“Yes?”
“Mr Peter Blake?”
“Yes...” On Earth it was the name he went under.
“Durham Police. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
Peter had gone these past twelve years in constant fear of just such a phone-call: the klaxon cry that Moonforce had rumbled his whereabouts. But as he listened, with a growing sense of being in a dream, he knew it was something far worse, if that were possible. If ever you arrive at the realisation you are dreaming, you will discover you have unlimited power: whatever it is you fancy is the thing to happen. But if ever you feel you’re dreaming and you know you’re not, then total impotence is what you have. And whatever it is you hope will never happen... does.
“What is it, Uncle Peter?” His little girl was wide-eyed and alert, like a puppy sensing a rabbit close at hand.
“Anitra, love, I have to go somewhere. Stay here and don’t let anybody in.”
“It was the police, wasn’t it? Don’t lie.”
Peter waved his enormous strong arms as if he were a baby in a pram. “I won’t be long.” But he knew he would.
“Have they booked Gaby again for parking where she shouldn’t?” Anitra frowned. She read him like a book, no matter how hard he tried to lose his place among the pages. “No...” she continued, “it’s something worse than that, isn’t it?”
“Anitra my pet, like I said...”
“I’m coming with you. I’m not going to let you go alone.”
Peter began to panic. “I don’t want you to be seen outside...” But what he really wanted was to spare her all of this: the awful sight, the anxious helplessness, the waiting around in the cold. He’d witnessed terrible things in his lifetime—done them—sitting in his little throne surrounded by blood and guts. But this was the one thing he wanted to spare his precious Anitra.
“You can’t keep me in purdah all my life. I’m a grown woman now.”
Grown woman. Eighteen last birthday, just over a week ago. How quickly they grow up. Well, now she’d be for finishing the job.
“All right... yes, I suppose you’d better come with me. Start the car and get it warmed up.”
“I’ll just go and put my face-paint on.”
“No time for that. Come as you are. Grab your biggest pair of sunglasses and... and a headscarf.”
“No, not a headscarf. Please!”
“Look, just come. We’re in a hurry.” He tore his bomber jacket down from its coat-hook and struggled into it. Then he rummaged in the hall basket for his balaclava helmet. Anitra took down her yellow overcoat, her gorgeous featherweight Italian job which made her look like a film star. She glanced appraisingly down the row of family shoes which stretched from the front door to the stairs, stepping first into an impractical pair of platform soles.
“Those are no good. There won’t be time to stand around looking pretty.”
Anitra pouted and laced-on snowy-white trainers.
“And do something about your skin. Muffle up. Try to think pink thoughts.”
“If only you’d let me...”
“D’oh! No time for it, as I keep on saying. We’ve got to be there.”
Anitra stooped and peered at him. His face had gone a nasty colour. It was never all that nice of course, but now it looked slate-grey, like unfired pottery. A vessel for display in a gift-shop as an ultra-grotesque Ugly-Mug.
“It’s bad,” she murmured, “isn’t it.”
It had come on to rain: a chilly drizzle that got into everything and made it damp. Striped yellow tapes flapping in the breeze prompted them to slow the car. Black figures in yellow day-glo jackets stood around in the road. A police officer directed them into a concealed lay-by, the one just before the viaduct: a drop-off point for a nature walk along the river.
Bishop Auckland viaduct was unusually empty. Police cars barred the way, their blue lamps flashing. Looking along the left-hand wall the reason was apparent: there were blocks on the roadway and a ragged gash in the wall where something heavy had gone through.
Peter in his trolley wasn’t tall enough to look over the parapet, but Anitra was. Just. She wouldn’t have recognised the heap of bent metal in the river Wear a hundred feet below, had it not been flaunting its unmistakeable rainbow pattern.
That was their bus! Where were Gaby and the boys?
Black peaked-hats in yellow tunics waded in the river. Things were being passed to and fro. Anitra reported all this to Peter Zwillinge who sat grimacing up at her, helpless as a smashed bowl of porridge. A policeman strode towards them.
“Sorry Madam... Sir... you can’t stay here.”
Peter spoke up. “We are the next-of-kin. We came immediately you phoned.”
“Oh, I do apologise...” The officer wasn’t sure what to do next. He pulled out his pocketphone to get instructions. Presently he said “Would you care to follow me, Sir... Miss?”
Peter could have abseiled down into the river, or hovered over the surface on the peroxide rockets fitted to his trolley. But that was not a capability he wanted to display just there and then. So he and Anitra were compelled to wait beside a police car in the lay-by, where the officer radioed for information about what was happening down below.
“The driver is still trapped in the wreckage.”
“Is she alive?”
“We think so. The paramedics are doing all they can for her. The firemen are bringing in equipment to cut her free.”
“What about the others?” sobbed Anitra. “My brothers...”
“They’ve been taken to the General. The ambulances have just this minute left.”
“Are they... are they all right?” She knew it was a silly question the moment she uttered it. The officer winced in embarrassment on her behalf.
“I’m afraid it will be necessary for you both to go to the hospital to... er...” He glanced at Peter for moral support. “To identify the bodies.”
Peter shut his eyes tight. Anitra’s features collapsed as tears flowed down, a feeble cry escaping from the back of her throat.
“When ought we to get there?” said Peter.
“Give it a quarter-of-an-hour I’d say, Sir. Then go to Casualty. The officer on-duty there will show you down to the mortuary.”
Peter reached up and patted Anitra’s hand which was clutching at his shoulder. “My love... I think we need to split our forces. I’d better stay here in case there’s something I can do for Gaby.”
The policeman gently took her arm and Anitra permitted herself to be led away. Peter was boiling inside. More than ever he wanted to fire his rockets to sail down onto the muddy waters, to get close up to Gaby and hold her hand. To rummage in his trolley for some of his marvellous hi-tech equipment. To find he had a magic wand to wave: to make it all have never happened. He reached under the ledge of his trolley and withdrew a small grey oblong the size and appearance of a wrapped butterscotch. Glancing around to see no one was watching, he spoke quietly into it.
“Gaby. Can you hear me?”
“Peter, my friend...” Her voice came in muttered gasps. It was so weak. This was his wonderful strong woman, the Angel of Titan. The giant who had plucked him from the very jaws of Moonforce to spirit him to Gaia. The only person he’d ever known prepared to forget his past and let him be born anew. Now she could scarcely talk, clamped in a twist of steel like a sardine in a crushed can, her mouth inches away from gushing water.
“What happened?”
“It was... no accident.”
“What do you mean? How could you...?”
“An elstat. Know the sound.”
“An elstat!” Nobody on Gaia used elstats. They didn’t even know they existed. Peter’s mind raced. “Certainly not one of mine.”
“Fired-on... from a distance... breaking glass, then... crackle-pop! I’m sure the boys were dead before we hit the bottom.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Can’t talk... they’re coming for me... aagh!” Gaby’s voice became immersed in pain as firemen began to cut her free, or so he presumed.
Peter discreetly put away the Selenean wristlink, for that was what it was. If the bus really had been attacked with an elstat, he conjectured, surely she’d have died as well? There was a glass screen behind the driver’s seat, that’s how she might have survived the electric shock. Well, that explained it. Gaby was a careful driver, if a sloppy parker. He couldn’t imagine how it might have happened otherwise.
He began to regret sending Anitra away. They should have kept together. How else could he protect her? She was gravely in need of protection the whole time—but never more so than now.
Commissioner Nilsson sat hunched forward in the jolting ambulance during its brief journey to hospital, her hand stroking the casualty’s forehead. The very person she had come to Gaia to interview—snatched away from her by this terrible accident.
It was an ill wind, though, that blew no good to anybody. The tragedy unrolled before her would at least draw Peter Zwillinge to the scene. There had been no sign of him on the bridge (she didn’t know of the hidden lay-by) so it was most likely he’d turn up sooner or later at the hospital. The sole remaining stellan, Anitra, was already there, according to her information. She knew precisely where the girl would be—and where she would be going next. It wouldn’t be long now before they’d meet.
Gaby stirred and groaned. “Peter—is that you?” She shook her head sluggishly, sensing a hand upon it. A thin one—not Peter’s.
“Anitra...?”
“...Is safe, for the present. You will see her very soon.”
Gaby detected an accent. “Hvem er det?” she whispered in Selensk, the language she knew went with the accent.
Nilsson was about to reply, then she checked herself. Gaby had distinctly said “Peter”. Quite likely he was in the vicinity—and she’d been in wristlink contact with him. But Nilsson knew that without the repeaters embedded in the walls of every concourse on Selene, a wristlink had a range of barely fifty metres. By now the ambulance was far away from the scene of the accident, so it was perfectly safe to reveal her name.
“It’s Commissioner Nilsson. Don’t worry. All’s well.”
“Commissioner... I’m sorry... so very sorry...” It was the last thing Gaby ever said.
Leaning forward even further, Nilsson caressed the patient’s forehead. “Don’t try to speak any more. Conserve your strength. We’re nearly there. Soon you’ll be in a nice warm bed.”
But Gabrielle Starr wasn’t due for a nice warm bed. Following a doctor’s cursory examination she went straight in the refrigerator.
Commissioner Nilsson had been one of the most successful, most persistent investigators Moonforce had ever had. She was spending her retirement as a freelance agent tracking down the Butcher of the Gaiascope. For him there would be no amnesty, however long he lived. She had the full co-operation of her former employers, plus splendid resources: better, she reflected, than those she’d enjoyed as a serving officer.
But she was not a technical genius—and Peter Zwillinge was. She had neglected to allow for the possibility that he could improve on the standard wristlink. Although he’d been out of range the first time Gaby had called out for him, once back in range he got her call—and more. As soon as he reached the hospital and tried to re-establish contact with her, he knew that Nilsson would be there inside, waiting for him.
But he’d keep one step ahead of her. Not for the first time. Once before he had managed to fool her into letting him depart from Selene on the Oberon. It was the occasion of the crime for which she was hunting him down across world after world.
“Anitra. Listen to me.”
“Is that you, Uncle Peter? I can hear a voice.”
“Put your ear close to the bracelet I gave you.”
“Uncle Peter!”
“Hush,” he commanded. “See the charm that looks like the Smiling Sun? It’s also an ear-stud. Put it in your ear.”
Anitra did so—and she could hear Peter much better.
“Are you alone? Is anybody looking at you?”
“No...” She sounded hesitant.
“By now you will have met a Selenean lady called Jutta Nilsson. Commissioner Jutta Nilsson.”
“Yes, that’s right. How did you know? Is she a friend of yours?”
“Where is she now?”
Why hadn’t Peter answered her question? “She’s talking to the mortuary attendant. She’s come back in the ambulance with Gaby—poor Gaby—and she’s done the honours for me. I wouldn’t have had the heart. It was the most I could do for Alex. Listen—I couldn’t even recognise my own brothers! I do wish you’d been here.”
“I wish so too, my love.”
“I’ll call Miss Nilsson over and you can talk to her.”
“No, don’t!” It shocked her to hear Peter say that—the urgency with which he said it. “She wants to take you home, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does. She’s awfully nice. Will you be home soon too? Shall I make tea for us all?” She needed to be doing something practical. To talk to someone—anyone. To prattle.
“No. Try to slip away from her. Lose her in the corridors.”
“What? Why?”
“Anitra, believe me—it is vital. Nice as she sounds, she doesn’t mean us well.”
“Peter!”
“Run away. If all else fails, hide in a cupboard.”
Nilsson, still speaking to the orderly, happened to glance round at Anitra and stopped abruptly. The look in the Selenean’s eyes startled Anitra. She turned and bolted. As she ran she heard the Commissioner cry out “Stop her!”
“Uncle Peter,” she gasped, “I’m only doing what you said.”
“I know. I can hear. When you’ve shaken her off, call me back.”
“How do I do that?”
“Speak naturally as you are doing now. Just say my name.”
“Have you got away from her?”
“I’m trying to, but she’s using some pen-like object. It always seems to end up pointing at me. It’s scary.”
“She’s stuck a bug on you. OK... here’s what to do.”
Peter instructed her to look on her charm bracelet for a little death’s-head. “When you’re in an empty corridor, coming to a corner, and you know she’s just behind you, drop it on the floor and run like the blazes. I’ve designed it so that it can’t possibly hurt you. It won’t arm itself until you’re safely round the corner.”
“What will it do to her?”
Peter hesitated. He would have killed Nilsson without pity. It was going to be him or her, so sooner or later he would have to do it. But he simply couldn’t delegate the job to Anitra, of all people.
Anitra didn’t know he was a wanted criminal on the Moon. He dreaded what would happen when she found out. He had come to Gaia to lose himself. To begin all over again. Doing the most worthwhile job in the universe: helping Gaby bring up the Stellans. No doubt Dolpou would tell Anitra all about his former life. But whatever happened he must never, never, embroil her in his wicked past.
“Change of plan, love. Put it back on your bracelet. Keep running.”
Evading Nilsson didn’t count as a crime. On Gaia she had no jurisdiction. Nor did Selene have an extradition treaty with any nation on Earth. She was completely off her turf.
“When you’re far enough away from her, feel down your clothing. Look for anything that wasn’t there before. It may be small, but it will be metallic.”
“I’ve found something. It’s like a shiny rice-grain.”
“That’s it. Throw it away. Onto something moving, if you can.”
Down the corridor Anitra could see a trolley being pushed towards her. She had just passed the entrance to the operating theatre and she guessed that’s where the trolley was heading. Lying on the trolley was a patient with his eyes closed and the porter was looking down at the ground. Unwittingly the patient took receipt of Anitra’s grain of rice.
Peter laughed. “Well done, love. That’ll keep her busy for a while. Now listen carefully. Can you see signs to the exit?”
“Yes, I’ve just passed one. And there’s another. But it’s pointing the other way...”
“There are two main exits from the hospital. It doesn’t matter which you choose: I’ve ordered two taxis for you—one at each exit. They are waiting there now, I’m assured. Go out any door. When you see a taxi, get in it and say your name is Gillian Brown. Got that?”
“Gillian.”
“Yes...”
“Brown.”
“Good.”
She had never done anything like this before. Of course she hadn’t: Peter and Gaby had brought her up far too well for that sort of thing. She was proving to be pretty alert though, and Peter was proud of her. There was just one thing. Obedience had never been prominent among her many virtues. Would she be able to carry out instructions to the letter? It was something they’d soon find out.
Behind her Anitra could hear raised voices, among them the Selenean tones of Commissioner Nilsson, trying awkwardly to explain herself and why she’d chosen to barge into the operating theatre. Anitra’s mood briefly lightened and she heard herself snigger.
Turning a corner she found she was in a crowded lobby. Out-patients were there in numbers, awaiting treatment. She saw sliding glass exit doors with daylight shining through and broke into a run. Everybody looked at her. Her face glowing and pulsating with shame in primary colours, which must have drawn attention to her even more, she slowed down again and left the building as decorously as she could.
She saw a taxi waiting. Heart pounding with relief, she wrenched open the back door and climbed inside.
“Where’re you off to, flower?”
“Home. Have you been ordered for me? I’m Gillian Brown.”
“I’m waiting for someone called Anitra Starr.”
Anitra opened her mouth to confirm her name, then it hit her with a pang of fright. She tumbled out, grazing the heel of her palm on the gritty ground. Leaving the door open, she began to run.
“Hey, get back in!” cried the taxi man, if that was what he really was. He got out of his cab. Behind there was another taxi. Without hesitation she got into it. “I’m Gillian Brown,” she gasped.
Without a word the taxi driver drew away.
The first taxi man waved his arms wildly and banged on the window as the cab went past him. Anitra pretended not to notice. Her driver did likewise. She might have been a princess being driven through a crowd.
They’d been going for a quarter of an hour and had reached Crook town centre. Neither she nor the driver had spoken. Gaby had driven her and the boys everywhere, so she was familiar with all the townlets and tiny pit-villages which sprawled across Wear Valley, plus the complex net of narrow hilly roads which connected them. She soon noticed that they were not going north towards Esh Winning, but had taken the A690 towards Durham City.
“Why are we going this way?” she said. “It’s much quicker to go through Billy Row and Waterhouses.”
“We’re going to the hotel in Durham, like your dad said.”
Panic again clutched at Anitra’s throat. “No!” she choked. “It’s home I want. Take me there. Please-please!”
“Where’s home?”
“Esh Winning. I’ll direct you...”
“I know the way.” The driver sniffed. “I’ll take the ring road.” To Anitra’s disbelief, he sounded as if he was prepared to do exactly what she wanted.
A little voice sang in her ear like a gnat. “I heard all that. Anitra, you aren’t going where you’re meant to.”
Anitra was about to answer back when she realised the taxi man would think her strange. Just in case he didn’t already. She had a brilliant idea and pulled out her mobile phone. “Hi,” she said to the idle phone. “No, Uncle Peter, I’m going home first.”
“Anitra, don’t go home. Dolpou Zvezda is staying at the Royal County Hotel. You’re to go straight there and ask for her.”
“I have to go home first. There’s something I’ve got to pick up.” It was becoming plain that Uncle Peter and the scary Martian lady between them were planning on her never setting foot in the house again. But there was no way she was going to abandon the beautiful present she’d made for Dorian. She’d put so much work into it—lavished so much love on it. What could possibly replace all that?
“Anitra, you must do as I say. Must. Please.”
Anitra took out the ear-stud and clenched it in her palm to stifle its tiny voice. By the time they reached Esh Winning, darkness had fallen. A few brief directions from her and the taxi came to a halt outside her house. Trembling, subliminally aware that heavy things hung on her disobedience, she opened the door and got out. The stud fell out of her hand. She scrabbled on her hands and knees looking for it in the gutter, but couldn’t see it in the dark. Eighteen-year-olds have the acutest hearing they will ever have in their lives. She was sure there was a little voice saying “Get back in the taxi, Anitra. Please. Now.”
She clenched her jaw and turned to stare at the house, groping in her coat pocket for her fresh-cut front-door key, scratching its keen edge reassuringly against her thumb.
The house was all in darkness. It looked spooky. Her brothers’ dead faces seemed to stare out of every window. She waited hopelessly for Gaby to come rushing out the door and wrap her in her arms. To tell her it all hadn’t really happened. Suddenly she wept uncontrollably, tears of loss and fright.
“Areet, pet?” The taxi man sounded genuinely concerned.
She’d made a lot of heavy decisions that day. Perhaps it was only because she’d done so without hesitation, following her instinct, being proven right each time, that she did what she did then. Getting back into the taxi she sobbed “I’m not going in. Take me to the hotel. Be as quick as you can.”
Inside the house, a stranger’s hand let the lounge curtain fall back. “She’s getting away. Out there and snatch her!”
“No. Wrong thing to do. The taxi might escape. Wait till it’s driven off, then we’ll follow at a distance.”
No sooner had the taxi drawn away from the kerb when another vehicle pulled up in its place. The door opened, but nobody immediately stepped out.
“Bózhe-moi! It’s Peter Zwillinge. Get back in hiding.”
A thick arm snaked out of the car and pudgy fingers felt in the gutter for something miniscule without needing to look. It soon found what it was after and the arm withdrew. Then a trolley was brought forward from the back of the car and pushed out through the open door.
Like an orang-utan, Peter manhandled himself with his powerful arms out of the driver’s side and into it. Leaving the headlights on and the engine running, he trundled cautiously towards the house. Anyone who knew him would have sensed he was ready for any kind of trouble—and it would have made them quail.
But for once he wasn’t ready enough.
The taxi turned in under the arch in the middle of the Royal County Hotel and stopped outside Reception. Anitra got out and paid off the driver. She peered in her purse: her ready cash was getting low, but she had a brand-new debit card: one of the things that came with her eighteenth birthday. She proudly stroked its crisp white edge, wondering if she’d soon get a chance to use it in earnest.
There was no wind, but it was cold and raw. A drizzle had started again. As droplets floated past the hotel lights, they sparkled and danced their way from darkness into darkness, like rainbow midges in a forest sunbeam.
She had never been in a hotel on her own. It was hard getting out of the school-mentality: at any moment she anticipated someone was going to tell her off for being out-of-bounds. “I have as much right to be here as anyone,” she told herself, and squared her shoulders.
She had a purse with ten pounds and a Visa card: what more did anyone need to be allowed to go into a hotel on their own? Her hair look nice, if a little damp, and her overcoat looked smashing. She wasn’t a beggar… and she wasn’t a prostitute trying to pick up a client. She approached the reception desk with as much confidence as she could summon.
The girl behind the desk smiled at her, inviting her inquiry, which served as encouragement for what she was doing. She did wish however that people wouldn’t stare at her face when she didn’t have her make-up on.
“Do you have a guest staying here by the name of Dolpou Zvezda?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Anitra had to repeat the name twice more. Everyone began to look at her—or so she felt. The reason for the funny name was because she was an alien, Anitra nearly said, but felt it was better not to.
“I don’t know... I’ll have to look it up on the computer.” The expression of puzzlement deepened on the receptionist’s face. “Could you spell it for me please?”
Anitra wrote it down on a piece of paper: DOLPOU ZVEZDA. Frowning, the girl stared at the screen which made her features shine, though not with the light of intelligence. She slowly shook her head. She hadn’t really expected to find the name and she didn’t.
First hurdle down. Perhaps Dolpou was travelling under a different name? Something ordinary like Miss Smith... she wouldn’t have been surprised. Her face would have seemed strange enough—like Anitra’s. To go giving a strange name as well was one strangeness too many.
But it gave Anitra an idea. “Have you got someone staying here who looks like me?” The girl was clearly taken aback by the frankness of the question. But it did have the merit of hauling Anitra back out of Funnyland and putting the onus on the staff to confirm or deny it.
“I—I don’t know—I’ve only just come on. I’ll ask the manager...”
“No, don’t bother just yet.” Anitra wanted to do anything but make a fuss and draw further attention to herself. “Is there anywhere I can wait inside, out of the rain?”
“There’s the coffee shop, but it’s just closing. You could sit in the lobby in one of the armchairs... or there’s the bar.”
Thanking her, Anitra began to walk slowly in the direction indicated. The lobby was well-lit: she would be conspicuous sitting there. In the bar however, the lighting was dim and intimate. She picked an empty table in an alcove, where she supposed she’d be less noticeable. But after a minute a boy of roughly her age came over. A good-looking boy, Anitra had to admit.
“Is this seat taken?” Her heart went thud.
“I-I’m afraid so.” The boy went away again.
She leaned sideways and peered out into the lobby. She couldn’t quite see the main entrance from where she was. There was little hope that Dolpou would simply walk by. However was she going to make contact with her? It was all very well of Uncle Peter to say just go to the hotel and find her. She felt a great hole in her life where Gaby had been brutally torn away.
Taking out her mobile, she phoned home. If Peter was there the phone call would connect with his fancy gadgets. So when it rang and rang, she knew he wasn’t there.
Or did she? Might something bad have happened to him? She had a nasty feeling that it might. It was a day for bad things to happen. Oh, how stupid of her to go losing her ear-stud.
“Can I get you something to drink, Madam?” A waiter was standing in front of her waiting for her order.
Madam: did he mean her? When you’ve only just left school, it takes a month or so to get used to being called “Madam”. Flustered, she replied “I’ll just have a lemonade, thank you.”
When he had gone away again, she chided herself for not having had the presence of mind to order two drinks: one for her and one for Dolpou—when eventually she came. It wouldn’t make it quite so plain that she was there on her own.
What was she worried about? Didn’t people meet up in hotels all the time? Yes, but maybe most of them had something to hide. Something to be furtive about. Well, that’s how she felt: furtive. She imagined unseen eyes appraising her, weighing her up, popping her into one of a small number of pigeon-holes. Waiting for her sugar-daddy? No doubt: too young to be anything else.
But if they could have clearly seen her face, the pigeon-holes might have dwindled alarmingly. Orphaned alien hybrid, waiting for Lady from Mars to turn up on spec?—oh, yes, that must be it.
How long would the hotel let her sit there, she wondered. Possibly all evening, growing more and more uncomfortable as the minutes dragged by. But she couldn’t stay there all through the night. Uncle Peter had been most insistent that she should not go home. Why not? Perhaps he wasn’t sure himself, but he’d implied there was danger in doing so. As yet she didn’t know (as he did) that the bus crash hadn’t been an accident but an assassination.
What would he have wanted her to do if she couldn’t make contact with Dolpou? Check-in for the night? There might be enough money in her account for a drink or two, but not to stay the night in a four-star hotel.
The waiter brought her order. It didn’t look a very grown-up drink: it had a slice of lemon and plenty of ice—and there were a pair of straws. There was also a chitty on a little silver tray, which she could have signed-off to her room-number, had she been staying. The price was certainly grown-up.
After an hour the drink was gone, the ice sucked dry and Anitra was still not able to decide for the best. She was growing more and more fretful. There was nothing for it: she simply had to go home and find out what had happened. Back in the house, if Uncle Peter still hadn’t come home, she might find Dolpou’s phone number, or some instructions for getting in touch with her. The chance was a meagre one. But stuck out here in Durham City she could do nothing at all.
She called the waiter over and gave him the chitty and her ten pound note. There wasn’t much change when the waiter returned, and there was even less after she’d left him a tip—perhaps too generous a one, but she felt intimidated by her predicament. There wouldn’t be enough cash for a taxi home. She would have to go and find a cash machine in town. There were bound to be some in the Market Place. She hoped that she would remember her PIN number correctly and that the machine wouldn’t just eat her brand-new card and leave her destitute in the dark. She didn’t want to ask if there was an ATM in the hotel because she felt she’d already outstayed her welcome—even though nobody had offered her the slightest reason to go thinking so. She was feeling extremely sorry for herself: this shouldn’t have to happen to someone who had just lost their family.
Outside it had stopped raining. The air felt warmer and the darkness was actually inviting in its anonymity. She walked under the arch of the hotel to the street—and as she did so a car turned from Old Elvet to drive into the car-park, skidding slightly as it braked. For a moment she was picked out clearly in the headlights. She stepped to one side to let the car pass, but instead of starting off again she heard the rasp of a handbrake being forcefully applied and the driver’s door flew open. She panicked. Not knowing which way to run, she froze.
A moment later she smelled a familiar perfume as Dolpou Zvezda folded her in her arms.
Back in Dolpou’s hotel-room, sitting side-by-side on the bed, the dam of Anitra’s emotions had burst and she’d dumped the lot as tears on the groubian’s soft shoulder. Now she was lying curled up on the pillow, having cried herself to sleep.
Dolpou sat gazing down at her, one hand fondling her long black hair. There was a knock at the door. She rose to her feet and peered through the spy-hole. It was room service with the hot chocolate she’d ordered for the girl, but it seemed a shame to wake her.
She had to remember, she told herself, that it was not a baby groubian she was caring for, but a young gaian adult, for which the treatment in distress was altogether different. A gaian adult—in the skin of a groubian child. There hadn’t been such a child for fifty thousand years, but it was impossible to forget how they were brought up. Rarely by their own mothers, who died in childbirth as a rule. It was a slow, often painful training, which could last as long as three hundred years: groubians were not considered adults until they were quite ready.
The learning capacity and resourcefulness of young gaians amazed her. For such a short-lived species they were remarkably intelligent—if intelligence it really was, not merely released instinct. But in her opinion gaian children were routinely entrusted with heavy decisions to make, having only rudimentary experience of an unforgiving world, be that world Mars or Gaia.
Dolpou had got Anitra to tell her everything. Consequently there’d been no opportunity to tell her anything in return. Such as: where she, Dolpou, had been that afternoon.
Taking a rest in her hotel room, having got back from Anitra’s house around midday, Dolpou had seen news of the crash on regional TV. Straightaway she’d hurried—not to the scene of the accident, like Anitra and her uncle—but to police headquarters at Aykley Heads.
In her capacity as a member of the Supreme Council of Olympia, Dolpou was entitled to booner status on Mars, which on Gaia automatically made her a Martian envoy. It was nothing the local police would appreciate, but it carried enormous privileges: ones to be used only in emergency.
It was an emergency now.
She had phoned her FCO contacts in London and an hour later a chief superintendent appeared in the waiting room to inform her that they had been instructed to afford her every cooperation.
“How should I introduce myself in order to elicit this cooperation?”
“That is up to you, your Excellency. But may I suggest you say you’re from the Office of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary.”
What happened next came as a severe shock. A detective inspector was assigned as her guide, who straightaway took her to meet another visitor purportedly from the same “Office”. “You will of course... er... know each other?”
As it happened, they did. It was none other than Commissioner Nilsson.
Dolpou challenged her in Selensk: “Hvad gør Selstyrke på Gaia?” What was Moonforce doing here on Earth?
“Shto delaet Goubernatzia na Gaia?” Nilsson countered with a scowl, using Dolpou’s language M1. What was the Office of the Goubernator doing here on Earth? Then, remembering that they were in company, she let her mouth expand into a smile. “It is better that we speak English, I think?”
After brief pleasantries for the benefit of their hosts, during which neither saw fit to mention the Goubernatzia or Moonforce again, whether in Selensk, M1 or English, Nilsson was driven off to the scene of crime. The scene of the accident, as they all pretended to each other. Dolpou later learned that she had gone with Gabrielle in the ambulance, had met up with Anitra at the hospital and had subsequently lost her. Since that time Dolpou had been making frantic efforts to find out where Anitra had gone.
As the exhausted girl slept on the bed, Dolpou took the opportunity to phone the family home. Anitra had said she hadn’t been able to get an answer when she’d phoned earlier that evening, but there was no harm in trying again.
This time, to her surprise, a voice came on the line “Family Starr’s house. Can I take a message?”
Dolpou thought she detected a Selenean accent. In a moment of inspiration she said “Can I speak to Commissioner Nilsson?”
“Who is it?”
“Her colleague from the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.” Dolpou’s words were precise and clipped.
There was silence. Dolpou fully expected the phone to be put down, but a moment later there came a different voice. “Nilsson here.”
“Commissioner—what a surprise.”
“It shouldn’t be. You knew who I was after.”
“Of course I do. It happens to be just the person I want to speak to. Could you put him on the line please?”
“I’m sorry. He can’t come to the telephone.”
Dolpou’s voice went harsh. “What have you done to him, you thugs?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Zvezda. We’ve found Peter Zwillinge in a dismal state of health. For his own wellbeing we’ve frozen him down in a hibernator. I want him alive and well... to stand trial on Selene for mass-murder.”
“The modern version of the rolled-up carpet, eh?”
“If by that you mean ‘will he be conveyed to the Moon in hibernation?’ the answer is yes. If you have anything important to tell him, you’ll have to leave a message with me.”
“Tell him that Dolpou Zvezda is inquiring after his health. As is his niece.”
Nilsson snapped back like a piece of elastic. “Do you have the girl with you right at this moment?”
Dolpou hesitated. She nearly said yes, then decided to make Moonforce a gift of as little information as possible. Echoing the other’s tone of voice, she said “Don’t jump to conclusions yourself, Nilsson.”
The Commissioner began to bluster. “Anitra Starr is a vital witness in the prosecution of Peter Zwillinge for mass-murder. The only living witness, as it happens. You will kindly hand her over to me.”
“Commissioner, aren’t you exceeding your authority? Peter Zwillinge has done nothing to infringe British law, so far as I’m aware, and there’s no extradition treaty with Selene. If you’ve harmed him in any way, I could have you arrested for assault and kidnap.”
“And what is your authority for withholding Anitra Starr?”
“I am the executrix of her mother’s will. In that capacity I am her legal guardian.”
“Legal on Mars maybe—not here on Earth. Did you just use the word ‘kidnap’?”
“Anitra is coming back to Mars with me of her own volition.”
By now the girl was awake and sitting up, staring wild-eyed at Dolpou.
“You are aware,” said the voice on the telephone, “that in order to get back home to Mars you will have to pass through Selene?”
“You will not dare to hinder me,” Dolpou snarled, “else you will precipitate a diplomatic incident.”
“Your Excellency...” Nilsson stressed the words with heavy irony. “You are free to come and go as you please. It is Anitra we want. She will be detained the moment you both reach Selene. So... less talk from you about having me arrested.”
It was lucky they were communicating on a terrestrial telephone, or Nilsson would have seen Dolpou go the colour of a boiled lobster. In a voice trembling with fury she replied “You are mistaken, Commissioner, if you think I’m going to hand Anitra over to Selenean irregulars.” The last word came out rough and gravelly. “We shall surrender once we reach the Moon to the proper authorities—and to no one else.” She slammed down the phone.
As her anger ebbed, her face went a blotchy purple-grey, like petrol spilt on harbour water. Anitra knew the look of her: it was how she went herself when deeply upset.
“Dolpou, what was all that about?”
“Get your shoes on, Star-child—we must fly. Nilsson and her Moonforce ruffians will be here any minute.”
[To be continued.]
© 2009, Clark Nida.
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