Hide and seek by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online Page A

his eyes and mouth, an expression almost of longing. But then a ripple of uncertainty crossed his face. His mask hardened. When he spoke he said, “I wish I could say the same.”
Still sweating, they rode the cramped elevator to the command deck. “All this is useless if anybody makes you,” she said.
     
“Makes me what?”
     
“Excuse the jargon. Recognizes you on Mars Station, I mean.”
     
“We’ve gone over this.”
     
“Equally useless if you don’t make it onto the regular shuttle run. I could commandeer a shuttle if I had to, but you’ve got to make the scheduled run or you’re out of the fight.”
     
“Give me credit for some brains.”
     
“I give you credit. I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
     
“Stop worrying about me.”
     
She watched him sidelong. “Before I met you, I didn’t worry about anybody but myself.”
     
“You worried about finding your parents,” he said bluntly.
     
“Yes.”
     
“And the others.”
     
“Yes, Blake, the others. The ones who tried to kill me and who probably killed them.”
    “Because that’s why I’m here. . . .” He broke off. When his emotions got the better of him he sometimes forgot that he must always call her Ellen, if he named her at all. When he’d first met her as a child, and throughout the eight years of their growing up together, her name had been Linda. “That’s what all this is about.”
“No, it’s simpler than that. We’re here to solve two murders. We’re here to recover the Martian plaque. That’s all anyone needs to know.”
     
“I think your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, blue-eyed Space Board commander knows more already. A lot more.”
    She was saved a reply when the elevator door abruptly slid open. “Let’s talk to the captain.” “Through the flush tubes,” said the captain. Her name was Walsh, and she was maybe thirty years old, this veteran cutter pilot–old enough to have gained the experience, young enough to have retained the synapses. “We put you in a bolus bag, flush you into the station’s holding tank; half an hour or so later, somebody fishes you out.”
Blake paled. “You want to flush me into a tank of liquid hydrogen?”
     
“Deuterium slush, technically speaking.”
     
“What keeps me from freezing? What do I breathe?”
     
“That’s all covered. These bolus bags are supposed to be pretty good,” said the captain. “Never had occasion to use one personally.”
     
“Is there some method a bit more traditional?” Sparta asked quietly.
    Walsh shook her close-cropped head. “We know there’ll be spies. Every port crawls with ’em, freelance types mostly. We know some of the spies on Mars Station, and we know they’re onto what you call the traditional methods, Inspector–assuming you mean laundry bags, that kind of stuff.” She shrugged. “Told me before, we could have dumped him on Phobos, picked him off on the next orbit.”
“That’s standard?” Sparta demanded.
     
The captain grinned up at her. “I just thought of it this minute. Phobos looked pretty good on this approach. Might be worth a try, don’t you think?”
     
“You’re very resourceful, Captain,” she said.
     
Walsh relented. “I know it sounds scary, Mr. Redfield, but it works. I can’t guarantee the local busybodies aren’t onto it already, but at least you’re not going to die in there.”
     
Blake let his breath out slowly. “Thanks for the reassurance.”
     
“Make sure your bladder’s empty when you climb into the bag. Could be a while.”
     
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
    Mars Station dominated the sky, its thick blunt cylinder turning against the stars, its axis pointing straight down; from the approaching cutter’s angle the space station looked like a slowly spinning top, balanced on the sharp arc of the planet’s horizon.
Newer and more comfortable than L-5, the first of the giant space settlements which orbited the Earth, but older and simpler than Venus’s Port