Isaac Asimov's Aurora Read online

  Anda sighed heavily. “Laris, give me a brandy, please.” He looked at Masid, eyes narrow and intent. “Tell me about it.”

  Masid showered in the hygienic cubicle of the stateroom Anda gave him. The spray of water and massage of ’sonics felt like the caresses of sirens to him. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.

  He had not told Anda very much—mainly the murder on Kopernik and the subsequent entrapment of the cyborg, leaving out all of Derec Avery’s and Ariel Burgess’s involvement. He tied it in with the baleys through Sipha Palen’s death in the explosion of the shuttle delivering the head organizer of the baley traffic. He had had to mention the dead baleys that had prompted the investigation, but that did not give much away. He left Anda with the impression that he was carrying on this investigation independently of most Spacer, Settler, or Terran authority, something Anda knew Masid tended to do from time to time.

  Working his way into the baley network had taken far too long and left him far too out of touch with events. Evidently a mess had been made of the whole traffic in the wake of the Kopernik affair. No one seemed to be in charge anymore, and the independents were both too paranoid and too incompetent to fill the void left by the traditional smugglers.

  Why would anyone want to kill Ambassador Chassik?

  It made no sense. Chassik represented Solaria, which had taken a “no comment” position on the entire Nova Levis situation. There was no motive. All they could hope to achieve would be to irritate the very world that was their only hope of independence.

  Chassik had been recalled . . . what had that all been about?

  He had gotten no answers from the Aurorans, who were in charge of the Spacer mission on Earth. He had not pressed for them, either. No time, he had wanted to get moving . . .

  Masid sighed and closed his eyes again. There was nothing he could do about it this minute, anyway. He still needed to get to Nova Levis. He had to be careful what he dug into right now.

  If I turn over the wrong rock, I’ll be answering questions put by boards of inquiry from now till the Omega point.

  The water felt too good to give up just now. If he could only stop thinking for a time.

  Mia Daventri looked up from the workstation as the short, thickset man entered the cabin. He stopped just inside the hatch, blinking at her, doubtlessly wondering what an Internal Security inspector was doing in his quarters.

  He began to step back through the open door. The pair of security officers flanking the hatchway closed ranks to block him.

  “Corf.”

  The man glared toward the voice, which came from a meter behind and to Mia’s right.

  “Sir,” the thickset man said grudgingly.

  Mia heard two steps and then felt the presence of the officer beside her. A slender hand came out and tapped the screen before which Mia sat.

  “You’ve been industrious, Corf,” the officer said.

  Mia glanced up at him. Tall, almost Spacer slender with smooth skin. Cosmetically enhanced, she knew, to look . . . not young, so much as healthy and well-aged. It made a more profound impression. As Mia had come to know Lt. Commander Reen, if it would have served him to appear as a hideous, boil-encrusted ogre, he would have had the surgery. His only vanity seemed to lay in his sense of duty.

  “Sir,” Corf said noncommittally.

  “I’m impressed,” Reen said, nodding. He caught Mia’s eye. “How about you, Lieutenant? When was the last time you saw these kinds of numbers attached to an illicit trade?”

  “Not since I was on Earth, sir,” Mia admitted, playing along with Reen’s game. If he had a fault, it was that he enjoyed teasing people too much.

  “And what did you do when you saw those numbers?”

  “Shut them down, sir.”

  Corf scowled at her.

  “Completely,” she added.

  “That’s the only way to do it,” Reen said. “Let me see . . .” He leaned closer, making a show of reading the screen. “One hundred seventy-eight thousand credits in the last sixty days. I see cases of antivirals, anti­biotics, wine, variable lobe wheat seed . . .” He looked bemused. “Soap.”

  Corf frowned uncertainly.

  Reen continued reading. “Two isotope analyzers . . . that’s interesting, I wonder where you got them? Perhaps those two missing from Stennis’s lab on the Thessaly? Two hundred meters of silk, nine thousand meters of polythor thread, and two hundred and thirty-one books.”

  Reen stepped around the console and stopped before Corf. “I can see a lot of that, but the first two items, the antivirals and ’biotics—what is that about? Those items come under the aegis of humanitarian exception. We let medical supplies through.” He waited, but Corf said nothing. “You’ve probably convinced some profiteer down there that we’ll be cutting them off soon. Who knows, maybe the same profiteer is intercepting what legally gets sent down and is selling both your supplies and ours at obscene prices to people who have no choice.”

  He wheeled on one heel and came back around the console. He slapped the screen sharply with his knuckles, making Mia jump.

  “We’ll find out,” he said. “You could save us time and make your pun­ishment a bit less by providing us names of contacts.” He held up his hand. “Not now. Think about it for a day or so. I don’t trust quick confessions.”

  Reen nodded his head, and the security officers clasped Corf’s arms and hauled him out of the room.

  Mia waited while Reen paced.

  “I hate this,” he said. “Not bad enough we have to deal with actual pirates, we have to have some of our own decide to try it out. Good work, Daventri. You’ve copied all this to the main log?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Reen leaned on the console again, staring at the screen. “Fabric. Med­icine and fabric. No food yet.”

  Mia gestured. “Wine.”

  “Hardly a necessity.” He slapped the console. “We could probably shut all the traffic from our own people down in no time at all. I don’t want to. Shut enough of them down to narrow the goods going through military hands. I want to monitor it. When they start importing food—”

  “The wheat seed?”

  “Seed, Daventri. It means they have time to grow it. They’re still eat­ing. When they start buying prepackaged foods through the black mar­ket, then we know it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask a question, though?”

  Reen nodded.

  “You told Corf that we send medical supplies through as humanitarian goods. Doesn’t food qualify?”

  “No. We want them pressed, Daventri, but healthy. We don’t need epi­demics taking root when we intend to occupy and resume relations with a planet. We’ll help them stay disease-free, but we won’t feed them. Star­vation isn’t communicable.”

  He straightened. “See if you can dig any contacts out of these mani­fests. We’ll let Corf worry over his situation for a day or two before we question him. Meantime, if you can come up with some associates . . .”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Good. Carry on.”

  Reen strode out of the chamber. The hatch snapped shut.

  “Shit,” Mia breathed.

  The blockade was approaching a year old now, and the Settlers on the ground had given no indication of yielding. It seemed immoral to her to continue this way. Reen’s attitude held sway, though, throughout the military, and Earth was backing them.

  “Can’t have pirates roaming the trade lanes,” she said with mock gravity.

  Still, as much as she hated what they were doing to the citizens of Nova Levis, she loathed people like Ensign Corf who were more than will­ing to take advantage of them to make a few extra credits. Finding them and flushing them out felt . . . fulfilling.

  The best use of her talents.

  Under these circumstances.

  She had trouble deciding about people like Reen who seemed willing to use both the situation and the avarice of Corf to enhance the efficiency of
his own job. The end result was not a bad thing, but in the meantime people who should not suffer suffered.

  “Maybe I’ll understand when I grow up,” she mused aloud.

  She adjusted herself in the chair and began asking the already com­promised system more questions. Corf had stuffed the illicit records in with the routine departmental memos everyone received and no one read, memos concerning recreational activities, uniform inspections, promo­tions, demotions, policy statements, recommendations for protocol, receptions, and a great many bits of propaganda about the important job the blockade and the Terran Expeditionary Taskforce were doing here. Corf slipped the logs of his black market business into the “Personal Notes” files attached to these memos. By code, people at Corf’s level were not allowed personal datums. Corf’s unique use of otherwise public databases impressed Mia. She wondered who had come up with the idea.

  Mia tapped instructions into her own personal datum, connected now to the console. The troll program she initiated would scour the entire databank for communications related to the manifest. As thoroughly as the illicit goods were recorded, she felt certain that a trail existed, from source to delivery.

  WORKING appeared on her datum screen.

  Mia turned in the chair to survey the rest of the small cabin. Ensigns did not receive a great deal of private space on a ship like this. The Helico was a mid-range attack cruiser, three hundred crew plus a contingent of officers. It spent most of the time in dock, its primary purpose in life being pursuit and assault.

  Consequently, she knew, most of the crew spent as little time as possi­ble on board. The blockade stations, immense and spacious by compari­son, offered a wider variety of release from the drudgery of duty. Cabins like this, therefore, tended to be either very neat or very neglected.

  Corf kept his neat.

  Mia went to his locker. After playing with the code for a few minutes, she took out her passkey and inserted the bit into the receptacle below the touchpad. The lock clicked off and the door slid open.

  At first glance it appeared to be a standard kit. Uniforms stacked there—two sets of dress grays still in the shrink wrap—other, personal, clothing in that container; two packs; an extra sidearm locked in a secure storage container; a case of book disks.

  Mia pulled out the last item with some effort—twelve or more kilos, at least—and carried it to the console. She unsealed it and removed the transparent lid.

  Among the blocks of book disks, Mia found a few printed volumes. Surprised, she gingerly pulled them out and opened the covers. The pages bore faint finger smudges, evidently from frequent reading. Old. Mia brought one close to her face and sniffed. The faintly sweet odor of a pre­servative could still be detected. She shuffled through the container, pulling out the paper volumes, four in all. She glanced at the titles: War and Peace, Of Human Bondage, Oliver Twist, and Les Miserables.

  Mia went through the disks, but quickly noticed that they were either technical works or contemporary fiction. The paper volumes were the only ancient works. “Classics,” her Culture and Diversity Instructor had called them.

  Mr. Jayn, she recalled. She had enjoyed his classes and his somewhat trendy disdain for what he called “the contemporary excuse for culture, which is little more than aggressively spinning in place, hoping the scenery changes on the next turn.” He had not pushed that line too hard—a little contempt served to keep students interested, while too much could be seen as fomenting disrespect, something apparently only educational oversight committees really worried about—but Mia took enough to heart to find herself continually dissatisfied with most of her choices thereafter.

  Becoming a Special Service agent had then seemed the best answer to that dissatisfaction. For a time, she had felt amply fulfilled. Then everything had gone wrong during the Eliton Conference fiasco and she had been in the middle of every possible controversial aspect: personal secu­rity for Senator Eliton, Service manager of the only autonomous positronic robot the Service possessed, implicated in the conspiracy to murder Eliton and the chief delegates of the Spacer legations, and then, after, a traitor to the Service for exposing the agents who had been involved in the plot . . .

  A mess indeed . . .

  Now, in the logic of the Service, having proven herself capable of policing her own people, she was Internal Security on the Nova Levis blockade, responsible for finding and neutralizing corrupt officers.

  She gazed at the four bound volumes. How corrupt can a man who reads these kinds of books, this way, be . . . ?

  It was tempting to believe refined taste placed one in a special cate­gory. Not a common black market operative, surely. A misunderstanding?

  Her datum still worked through the comm logs. No, the manifest she had found was clearly Corf’s.

  Up to this point everything about him fit what she expected. An ensign, passed over for promotion twice due to substandard fitness reports, disciplined once for brawling, twice for “intemperate language to a superior,” and with a credit account several hundred credits richer than it should have been. A mediocre cadet, an average crewman, now a prob­lematic officer: he would serve out his time and be discharged with no option for re-enlistment, vested in a small retirement pension. An unex­ceptional, somewhat dull, short-tempered, progressively bitter man, the perfect profile to be recruited by smugglers. His current duty was in Stores, also ideal, specifically requisitions for shipboard amenities . . .

  Les Miserables . . . ?

  Mia grunted and sat down. She tapped her datum for a second task and entered the specifications for the four books. She wanted to know what they would cost.

  WORKING

  She leafed through Oliver Twist while she waited. She stopped at a section to which someone had added a checkmark in the margin:

  For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a system­atic course of treachery and deception. He was raised by hand. The hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether there was no female then domiciled in “the house” who was in a situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourish­ment of which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be “farmed,” or, in other words, that he should be despatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing . . .

  Mia felt an inexplicable twist of conscience reading this. She looked at her datum.

  EXTERNAL SOURCES REQUIRED FOR INQUIRY

  She leaned over and pressed the CONTINUE key.

  Mia continued leafing through the book. It seemed incredible to her that she should know a few orphans. Here was a story more than a thousand years old about a situation that humanity, in all its progress and through all its various periods of wealth, had never solved.

  Curious, she pulled up Corf’s record again. No, he had never been an orphan.

  She opened the other books to see if any other passages had been checked. She found several, in all of them. The books had clearly not sim­ply adorned a shelf somewhere unread. These volumes had been well used.

  No owner’s name appeared in any of the books. One, however, had a bookseller’s imprint on the inside back cover: OMNE MUNDI COMPLURIUM, ANTIQUITIES, LYZIG.

  She added that to the search protocol and set the books aside.

  The datum chimed, the first search concluded. She pulled up the results and sat back, dismayed. The trails of communications spread out like a complex algorithm, a web of interconnected associations covering several ships and traversing many levels of command hierarchy.

  Mia’s mood darkened. This is going to take days to collate into useful tables . . .

  “Tha
t’s why I earn the big money,” she said aloud, and began copying everything to a disk.

  She resealed the container of book disks and returned it to Corf’s locker. The paper volumes she tucked into her pack. She then made another search of the cabin, but she found nothing else out of the expected.

  Her datum still read WORKING, so she closed it up for now. It would continue to pursue the search. She slipped it into her pack, closed down Corf’s workstation, and left the cabin. She slapped an IS seal on the door and activated it. Only her code now would open Corf’s cabin.

  Satisfied that she had overlooked nothing—for now—she hoisted her pack over her left shoulder and headed for the ship’s personnel lock.

  5

  DEREC SEALED the last bag and set it by the cabin door with three others. Most of his worldly possessions filled those packs, the bulk having arrived only within the last week, shipped up from Earth. Hofton had managed to get it all through customs without question.

  I’m going to miss Hofton, he thought as he sat down to stare at the collection of luggage. Then: Hell, I’m going to miss everything . . .

  The door chimed and slid open. Ambassador Yart Leri, branch head of the Kopernik Auroran embassy, stood at the threshold with two security officers. Behind them, in the corridor, was a large porter robot.

  “Mr. Avery,” Leri said, looking and sounding slightly embarrassed, “the Wysteria is boarding. It may be best to go early, before it fills up and becomes a party.”

  “Of course,” Derec said. “Thales and . . . ?”

  “Already loaded and secured. My assistant saw to it earlier today.”

  Derec heaved to his feet. He felt intensely weary. “Fine, then. Shall we get started?”

  “Um . . . of course.”

  Leri stood aside and gestured. The robot floated on noiseless pivots, entered the cabin, and extruded limbs that deftly hooked all the bags. Thin straps appeared, wrapping instantly around the luggage, securing them firmly to the robot’s body. It rolled back into the corridor and waited.