Timothy Zahn - Judgment at Proteus

“Vibrant—? Oh, right,” I said. The place officially known as Kuzyatru Station actually had thirty different names, one for each of the Twelve Empires’ official languages. Vibrant was the Nemuspee version, just as Proteus was its name in English. “Congratulations. I understand they’re the best in the Assembly. It was very wise of you to apply there.”

[Ah! Therein lies the irony,] he said as he swiveled his chair around and maneuvered it into a set of clamps along the wall in front of us. [Knowing how few cases Vibrant Station takes, I didn’t apply there.]

“Really,” I said. “And, what, the director picked your name out of a hat?”

[I don’t actually know who decided to offer me treatment,] he said as the clamps locked securely around his chair. [The message carried no name, but merely Vibrant’s contract logo.] He swiveled half around, another lopsided smile on his face. [A gift from the heavens, indeed.]

I looked at Bayta, saw the tightness around her mouth. “Indeed,” I murmured.

Only I doubted it was the heavens that had supplied the crippled Nemut with this sudden largesse. This gift had come from much lower down, from the general vicinity of hell.

Sometime during our last two weeks of travel, word of Asantra Muzzfor’s death had made it to Proteus … and someone there wasn’t buying my story that he’d died in the violent climax of the series of murders that had taken place aboard our super-express. That same person had apparently decided to hedge his bets by bringing in another witness to those events.

Or maybe even more than one. For all I knew, the whole first-class section of that train could be on their way to Proteus right now.

And that could be a problem. A big problem. I knew exactly where Emikai, Aronobal, and Terese had been at the time of Muzzfor’s death. Bayta and I had worked it out down to the quarter second and the square meter, confirming that none of them could have seen or heard anything that might contradict my version of those events.

But I had no idea where Minnario had been. It had never even occurred to me to track his movements. And with the Spiders who had served on that train now fifteen thousand light-years behind us there was no way I was going to do it now.

I didn’t know if Minnario knew anything. But it looked like someone on Proteus thought he might.

And if he did, the carefully crafted story I’d worked out was suddenly not looking so good.

The hatchway overhead closed, and there was a slight shudder as the clamps holding us to the station floor disengaged. A moment later the shuttle’s drive kicked in, angling us away from the Tube and bringing us around toward the transfer station a hundred kilometers away. “Frank?” Bayta asked, just loudly enough for me to hear over the engine noise.

I reached over and patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m on it.”

After all, we still had the shuttle ride, the usual customs procedures at the transfer station, and then a three-hour torchferry journey to Proteus itself. Surely in all that time I could come up with a new story that would cover anything Minnario might be able to tell them.

I’d better get started.

* * *

Kuzyatru Station, according to all the brochures and encyclopedia entries, was the diplomatic jewel of the Filiaelian Assembly, a high-visibility meeting area for conferences and interstellar meetings as well as a top-rated medical and genetic research facility. It was an odd combination, in my opinion, but it apparently worked well enough for the Fillies. Certainly the photos and holos of the place showed they’d considered it worth dousing with bucketfuls of money.

It wasn’t until our torchferry was on its final approach that I realized just how inadequate those holos and descriptions really were.

For starters, the place was huge. It was roughly disk-shaped, with a rounded top and bottom, the whole thing ten kilometers across and ranging in thickness from a kilometer at the edge to three at the center. I was a little vague on my high-school geometry, but I was pretty sure that gave it at least twice the volume of a typical Quadrail station.

That was impressive enough. Even more so was the fact that a Quadrail station was mostly empty space, whereas Proteus’s living areas were sliced into three-meter-high decks. That gave the place the carrying capacity of a small nation.

But more even than its size was its sheer grandeur. I had assumed that the huge historical panoramas decorating the areas around each of the thirty-three main edge-line docking stations were simple hull paintings. In fact, they were intricate mosaics, built of five-centimeter-thick tiles no doubt designed to be resistant to micro-meteor damage. The running lights that interstellar law required on every spacegoing vessel or station had here been tweaked into a laser light show that as near as I could tell never repeated itself once during the half hour it was visible from my torchferry window.

And if that hadn’t been enough to set it apart from the rest of the galaxy’s space habitats, Proteus wasn’t just orbiting its sun, but was actually holding itself in constant, stationary position relative to the equally stationary Quadrail station by a massive, brute-force application of Shorshic vectored force thrusters. That meant that, instead of tracing out a long orbital path that might put it anywhere from two hours to four weeks away from the Tube, it was always going to be a convenient three-hour flight for new arrivals to the system.

It was, in short, a huge, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing stack of metal and plastic and ceramic.

And as I listened to the murmured oohs and aahs of our fellow passengers I felt my heart sink.

Because my plan had been to march into the station, loudly announce the arrival of Terese German, and watch for interested parties from the Shonkla-raa to pop out of the wainscoting. Now I realized that wasn’t going to work. Whichever docking station we ended up getting routed to, there was every chance that I would be so far away from the Shonkla-raa that they might not even hear the news that Terese was aboard until long after Reception had thanked me for my service and courteously ushered Bayta and me onto the next outgoing torchferry. Even if I could find some excuse for us to stay aboard, we could wander a facility this size for months without ever finding Muzzfor’s fellow conspirators. Especially since those conspirators probably didn’t want to be found.

“Frank?” Bayta murmured.

“I know, I know,” I murmured back. “I’ll figure out something.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning. “I was going to ask why we’d changed course.”

I frowned in turn. I’d been so caught up with thinking about Proteus and the future of my plans I hadn’t even noticed the change in the torchferry’s insertion angle.

But Bayta was right. Whereas we’d been heading for one of the docking stations in the upper twenties—probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight—we had now come around and were heading instead into the mid-teens.

Had someone aboard the station belatedly spotted Terese’s name on the passenger list and rerouted us accordingly? If so, and if that someone was connected with the Shonkla-raa, Plan A might work after all.

Not surprisingly, the Proteus docking procedure was different from that at every other space habitat I’d ever visited. Instead of simply sidling up beside the station so that our hatchways lined up, we nosed directly into a huge docking bay, complete with clamps and restraints and a collar that looked like it could adjust to anything from our torchferry all the way up to a full-blown torchliner. Personally, I would have simply made a group of docking bays of different sizes, but once again Proteus’s designers had decided to go for the more flamboyant approach.