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

Hesperus, the crown jewel of colonies, Mars Station was a pragmatic place built from metal and glass that had been smelted from a captured asteroid, its design owing much to the Soviet engineers who had supervised its construction. The station was too close in the cutter’s videoplates for those on board to see anything but the glassy expanse of the cylinder’s starside end–its angled mirrors, its communications masts, its docking bays protruding from the unrotating axle like spokes from a nave.
    A ring of ships floated “at anchor” in near space, for docking room was limited. But the Board of Space Control maintained its own high-security locks and had its own ways of moving passengers and cargo on and off its ships. The paid spies and idle watchers who continually lurked about Q sector clustered thicker whenever a Space Board ship arrived.
This time, after the docking tube had slammed shut over the cutter’s main airlock, the watchers saw only one passenger emerge, a slight blond woman in Space Board blues. Inspector Ellen Troy.
III
    Blake spent two hours cuddled in fetal position inside an overheated black plastic bag with an oxygen mask clamped to his face. As he was beginning to feel the first nibblings of anxiety– do they remember I’m in here? –something punched the side of the bag; a teleoperator arm had gripped it and was drawing it slowly through the deuterium slush in which it was immersed.
    Once through the tank’s locking valves, it took Blake several minutes to work himself free of the triply insulated bag. He was getting unseen help from outside. Finally he clambered sweating out of it, leaving it wobbling like a collapsed balloon in the microgravity. Blake found himself hovering inside the Q sector pumping station, surrounded by huge spherical tanks of deuterium and lithium, the precious fuels that powered the Space Board’s fusion-torch ships.
“You are Mr. Redfield,” announced a small, black-haired woman in Space Board uniform, who was studying him with evident distaste. “I am Inspector L. Sharansky.”
    Blake nodded at Sharansky, trying to be polite as he glanced curiously at the raw steel walls that surrounded him. The cavernous chamber was festooned with thick garlands of pipe and cable. Clouds of white vapor rolled through the air, condensing from tanks and pipes that flowed with liquid hydrogen. Red and yellow warning lights made the clouds glow and turned the dripping steel room into an antechamber of hell.
He returned his gaze to the inspector. She was definitely unhappy about something; her thick black brows were knitted together in a fearsome scowl.
     
“Very happy to meet you, Inspector Sharansky,” he said.
     
“Da,” she said. “These for you.” She thrust a bundle of smelly clothes at him. “Please put them on now.”
     
He was glad to comply, since he was wearing nothing at all, and if he was in hell, hell felt like it was freezing over.
    It occurred to him that Sharansky’s disapproval had to do with confronting a naked man; for all their political progress in the past century, the Soviets had never lost a certain puritanical streak. When he finally finished pulling on the grease-stiffened black pants and heavy black sweatshirt and black boots– no simple task in weightlessness–he oriented himself toward her and tried another smile. “They’ll never see me coming on a moonless night.”
“Is no moonless nights on Mars,” said Sharansky.
     
“A joke,” he said.
     
“No joke,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.
     
“Right,” he said, clearing his throat, “and it’s not funny, either.”
    “Is other clothes,” she said, shoving a duffle bag in his direction. He took it without comment and waited for her to make the next move. She consulted her noteplate, then held out a tiny sliver. “Is I.D. sliver and job record. You are Canadian. Your name is Michael Mycroft.”
“No doubt I’m known as Mike,” he said brightly.
    “That is