The Prometheus Project Part 14

who were following us."

"So you've said. But are you sure you were really being followed? People in completely unfamiliar surroundings have been known to imagine things."

I put on a great show of keeping anger under tight control. The act didn't take much effort. "Do I tell you

and the other Section Five types how to d.i.c.ker with the Delkasu? Then don't subst.i.tute your judgment for mine in my area of expertise. Unless, that is, you think you have reason to doubt my competence to carry out the Section Two functions for this mission. In that case, I have a right to demand that you put in writing your-"

"Oh, don't play regulations lawyer with me!" Novak fumed for a second or three. "All right, all right; you know when you're being shadowed. But why should the Agardir be taking an interest in us humans all of a sudden?"

I didn't dare make eye contact with Chloe. Khorat had insisted that we keep everything he'd told us to ourselves. I'd agreed, on the general principle of restricting information to those with a need to know.

Chloe had contended that Novak had such a need. In the end, Khorat and I had argued her down. But another sound principle is that of keeping one's prevarications to the minimum necessary number. So we'd told her about the Agardir, elaborating our escape from them just enough to account for our lateness in returning, and left it at that, with no mention of Khorat.

"I haven't any idea," I stated. Chloe and I had agreed in advance that I would do the talking, given my

more extensive experience in reciting whoppers with a straight face. "I mean to find out."

"By all means try . . . from inside this ship. In light of this incident, I'm canceling all private pleasure jaunts into the city."

"You can if you want." Well, I thought, so much for my ambition to be crowned Mr. Popularity. "But my interest in this matter is neither private nor for pleasure. I must insist that you allow me to get out and conduct my investigation in my own way."

"No! It's too risky."

"I remind you that I'm in charge of security for this mission. In the face of an unantic.i.p.ated threat, I have discretion to use my own judgment." This was undeniable, as Novak's silent glare attested. I pressed my advantage. "Furthermore, under extraordinary circ.u.mstances such as these I am empowered to co-

opt-'deputize,' if you will-non-Section Two personnel. I'll need an a.s.sistant. Miss Bryant is already involved, so she's the logical choice."

Novak's glare intensified. "Devaney, don't you have more important things to do than antagonize me?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "But they're not as much fun."

With some people, it would have served as a tension-reliever. Novak, though, spoke through lips that

barely moved. "Get out."

As we were exiting the door, my conscience caught up with me and I turned back to face Novak. "You know, I'd really rather that you not cancel everybody else's sh.o.r.e leave. I mean, if we can keep everything as routine as possible, so as not to alert the Agardir that we're on to them-"

"Get out!"

"Nice going," Chloe murmured as the door slid silently shut behind us. "El Smootho rides again."

"She'll get over it," I a.s.serted, exuding more confidence than I felt. "Anyway, the point is that we have

freedom of movement. And this time we're not trying to attract attention. We'll take precautions."

We proceeded to Izzy Berman's digs to collect those "precautions." He had prepared a privacy field generator on the same level of sophistication as the one Renata Novak had shown me on that memorable occasion in DC but even more compact, as might have been expected after five years. This was merely one of the widgets he had in his shop as more or less standard items. He'd also been confirming the old chestnut about idle hands by poking into new applications of galactic-level technology. One of the by- products of his little hobby was a device which enabled us to open the outer hatch of the ship-the only

hatch that mattered, as the air lock was irrelevant here on dear old Antyova II-without activating the automatic tally of arrivals and departures.

Chloe felt compelled to register a protest. "But you just got Renata to agree that you and I could leave

the ship!"

"True. But she never agreed that we could come and go without her knowledge."

"You never asked for her consent to that."

"Of course I didn't. She would have had no reason to grant it, and therefore she almost certainly wouldn't

have." I hastened to provide rea.s.surance. "Hey, you just don't have the right mind-set for this sort of thing-"

"Thank G.o.d!"

"-so take my word for it: any secret known by more than one party isn't a secret anymore. She talks to other people, you know. And we have no idea who the traitor is." That brought Chloe's splutterings to a thoughtful halt, and I pressed on. "So let's keep it to as few people as possible-meaning you and me."

"Izzy also knows about this hatch-opening gizmo," Chloe pointed out.

"True. And he and Dan know about the homing devices Khorat gave us. But that's all they know. Even that is too much for my taste. Let's not let it go any further.""When Renata finds out we've been keeping things from her-""-We'll be delivering the traitor to her on the proverbial silver platter with an apple in his mouth. I think you'll find that covers a mult.i.tude of sins-if not with her, certainly with her superiors."

Actually, the problem of the traitor's ident.i.ty was bothering me more than I cared to admit. Especially worrisome was the fact that I didn't even have a theory as to motive. The ever-popular one of greed had never seemed very likely to me. The Project was a fairly tight-knit little world; it would be awfully suspicious if one of its personnel suddenly came into Croesus-like wealth. So how would the traitor spend it? Unless, of course, he planned to defect altogether and be taken into the sheltering arms of the Tonkuztra . . . but how many people would willingly relinquish all contact with the rest of the human race for life?

In the absence of an intelligible motive, there was no point in sifting through the mission's personnel for suspects, and I forced myself not to do so. It would have been a waste of mental energy, and might have led me into misleading preconceptions. Still, I found myself looking at this face and that in a whole new way: Is this the one . . . ?

All I had to go on was what Khorat had said: the traitor had been angling all along for some piece of

stolen Ekhemasu property we couldn't be told about.

Chloe and I killed time speculating about the nature of that item while we waited. We didn't have too long a wait, for the time Khorat had given us was the following night. It just seemed long, and not only because of the slow rotation of Antyova II.

"Some kind of superweapon, maybe?" I ventured, as my umpteenth guess. "So he can make himself

Emperor of Earth?"

"Give me a break! You've been watching too many James Bond movies. Besides, if the Ekhemasu had stuff like that, they would never have been taken over by the Delkasu."

"That doesn't necessarily follow." Actually, I could see Chloe's point. But I was being argumentative the way a dog chews on a bone after all the meat is gone. "Maybe they were still working on it when the Delkasu arrived, and have been secretly perfecting it since then in some underground laboratory."

"I take back what I said before; this isn't even good enough for a James Bond movie. Remember, Khorat said his organization isn't interested in overthrowing their Delkasu rulers."

"Don't believe everything you hear! Has it occurred to you that Khorat might have been lying?"

"If you don't trust Khorat," Chloe inquired archly, "then what, pray tell, are we doing here?"

Instead of trying to answer the unanswerable, I glanced down at my watch. "Oops! Time to go."

"How convenient," Chloe muttered as we headed for the air lock.

Izzy's little invention performed as advertised, and we emerged into the night of Antyova II. Except that there was no true night on Antyova II, nor on any highly developed galactic world where the stars had long since been banished by the city lights and the orbital constructs. We had no trouble seeing our way as we crossed the expanse of the s.p.a.cefield. I sometimes found myself wishing this wouldn't happen to Earth, and knowing that it would.

There were none of the shipping line's aircars waiting-there wouldn't have been at this hour even if Novak hadn't canceled sh.o.r.e leave. We proceeded on foot, like two ships on an empty sea, each of us clutching a satchel.

I had always been blessed with good eyesight, and had never needed gla.s.ses . . . and never would, given the technology now available to me. (It was one of the many benefits of membership in the Project.) But I wore contact lenses that had nothing to do with vision correction. Instead, their internal microcircuitry-activated and controlled by a remote-c.u.m-minicomputer in my satchel-displayed an ever-unfolding map, oriented on the basis of the direction I was walking. It was one of Izzy's more or less standard items, though not one for which we had any routine use. In my capacity as the representative of Section Two, I had a perfect right to requisition a set. Privately, I'd given Izzy the standard dime-sized computer disc Khorat had given me, so he could download the route to the minicomputer.

Thus I followed the ghostly thread, like a player of one of the computer games that still lay in our civilization's future, except that Chloe and I traversed the actual streets of an alien city. We drew

occasional stares from Delkasu unused to seeing aliens abroad at this time of the night and unused to seeing our sort of aliens at all. We ignored them, for by now we fancied ourselves old hands in those streets.

That delusion began to vanish when we reached what appeared to be an almost comically ordinary escalator, going down. Khorat had explained it to us. Delkasu societies, like all societies-never mind the hypocritical denials of certain human ones-were stratified. And in a megalopolis like this, the stratification was not just economic but physical. The great organism that was the city extended belowground as well as above it, like a tree sinking its root system into the soil. That subterranean (don't give me a hard time about that word) domain, which visitors like ourselves seldom glimpsed, held much of the nitty-gritty stuff that made the city run . . . and most of the people who ran that stuff, doing the sort of jobs for which they were cheaper than computers.

Don't visualize squalor out of Hogarth or d.i.c.kens. In a society as wealthy and advanced as the Selangava Empire-or any of the Delkasu civilizations-n.o.body starved. Even the local equivalent of an undercla.s.s had amenities beyond the imaginations of lower-tech cultures. As Chloe and I rode the escalator down, we emerged into a cavernous, teeming realm lit by vast holographic images-this culture's "billboards"-between artificial cliffs that were residential on the higher levels and commercial below. Here, where non-Delkasu were a rarity and our kind of non-Delkasu unheard-of, the stares we got were more blatant than they'd been in the politer precincts above. I fell into the jump-out-of-the-wayor-I'll-walk-over-you stride I'd always found useful in New York, hoping that the body language involved would transcend species and culture. Chloe must have been emulating me successfully, for the crowds parted for us. I imagine our sheer size helped.

As we proceeded, the streets (they were too vast for the word "pa.s.sageways" to be a good fit) frequently took the form of gently sloping ramps that led farther and farther down. The deeper we got, the less s.p.a.cious and brightly illuminated things became, while a dinginess we hadn't seen on Antyova II became more and more p.r.o.nounced. The first-level storefronts included more and more food shops, from which a variety of odd odors wafted. The crowds grew more raucous and surly, and their clothing had a look I could now recognize as both flashy and sleazy.

This was Tonkuztra country. Their kingpins might be the tyc.o.o.ns of interstellar-scale illegitimate businesses nowadays, but this was where they'd come from. Up above, in order to pa.s.s in the Delkasu equivalents of executive suites and country clubs, they had to take on the protective coloration of the larger society. Down here, they were in charge, wherever and whenever there was no cop in sight. More than once, I saw the crowds cringe away from some gaudily dressed, physically above-average Delkar who had "enforcer" written all over him. (Or all over her. Given the minimal s.e.xual dimorphism of the Delkasu species, strong-arm types were as likely as not to be female.) The ramps continued down and down, switchback after switchback. I had no idea how far beneath the surface we were. Most of the hectic, noisy garishness was behind us, and the cavernousness it had concealed like makeup was now exposed like an aging wh.o.r.e's raddled face. These, Khorat had explained, were regions dating back at least a thousand Earth years, now seldom frequented. The Tonkuztra bosses came here when they had very secret business to conduct. They and their business a.s.sociates had more direct and convenient means of access than the one we had followed. I consoled myself for my sore feet with the thought that it meant we almost certainly hadn't been noticed. n.o.body had any reason to watch the route we'd taken.

Still, I made sure there was no one in sight when we turned down a certain altogether deserted pa.s.sageway. Finally, we emerged into a vast, relatively well lit octagonal open s.p.a.ce, extending all the way up into invisibility. (It seemed an awfully inefficient use of s.p.a.ce, but then I wasn't exactly up to speed on Delkasu architectural precepts.) At its center was a depressed area of the same octagonal shape, from which a shallow dome with a stepped base rose. The eight angles around the dome held Delkasu-sized entrances from which stairs led downward into antechambers of the domed octagonal room below.

This was what Khorat had described to us. He'd also stressed that we needed to be there before a certain time, but not so much before it that our loitering might attract attention even in this unfrequented neighborhood. We followed his instructions, slipping into one of the stairwells and composing ourselves to wait in the shadows.

It was hard to get comfortable. Fortunately, we didn't have long to wait.

A shuffling sound from below alerted us. I peered cautiously over the edge of the stairway, as several nondescriptly dressed Delkasu entered the hexagonal chamber, moving purposefully. It's always hazardous to try and superimpose human preconceptions on an alien race, even for someone with more experience at it than I had. But even across the interspecies divide, I could sense the difference between these Tonkuztra and the swaggering thugs we'd seen in the pa.s.sageways. These were pros. They ran devices whose functions I could confidently guess at over every surface of the large room, then fanned out into the antechambers.

But for all their professionalism, there was a perfunctory quality about their scrutiny. This place had probably been used for so many meetings that their search for surveillance devices, always fruitless before, had settled into the grooves of routine. For one thing, they didn't exert themselves to climb the stairs. They just used their superadvanced sensors on the obvious places, then left.

It was what Khorat had told us to expect. And it was what gave me my opening. After the last of them was gone, I slipped down into the big chamber carrying a device the size and shape of a thumbtack head. Actually, the business end of it was the size of a pinhead; the rest was plastic with the adhesive backing by which I proceeded to attach it to the inner surface of the dome, reaching up to do so at a height of almost eight feet-higher than a Delkar would normally look. Then I rejoined Chloe, and we reemerged into the open s.p.a.ce above the dome. We took shelter-such as it was-against the curve of the dome in one of the angles formed by the eight walls. Then I took a very small readout from the satchel, and activated its screen. The sweep by the Tonkuztra security types would have detected the nan.o.bug I'd stuck to their wall with ridiculous ease. But they didn't expect anyone to be around to attach it after that sweep. That had been our window of opportunity. Now Chloe and I gazed at the tiny screen and saw what the bug was recording.

It was also recording sound . . . which, unfortunately the readout couldn't convey to us in real time. We had to settle for the visual image from that near-microscopic camera-a supremely boring image of an empty chamber, at first.

That soon changed. First, a group of three Delkasu filed into the chamber, accompanied by a double file of the security people, armed with weapons I recognized as cutting-edge even on the standards of the Selangava military. I was even more interested in those security guards' body language. Unless all my instincts were wrong, these guys (and gals) were responsible for the safety of VIDs-Very Important Delkasu. I applied my knowledge of the race to the trio of big shots, and recognized them as middle-aged, well nourished, and suffused with that indefinable air of authority. They sat down at one side of a long table that occupied the center of the room.

One of them spoke tantalizingly inaudible words to a security guard. The latter performed a hand-to-

forehead gesture of respect and opened a door opposite the table.

A single individual-doubtless the prospective buyer-entered, bending down a little to pa.s.s through a Delkasu-sized door.