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There was a soft whistle from the intercom. "I don't like the sound of that,"
Rhonda said.
"Me, neither," Bilko said. "Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing and get out of here." I gazed out the viewport at the rapidly approaching asteroid below. "But it doesn't make sense," I told them. "For starters, if it's a predator or whatever—"
"If they're predators, plural," Bilko interrupted me. "Another InRed just went past."
"Fine; if they're predators," I amended, "then why haven't we seen them before?
More to the point, what are they doing hanging around the Freedom's Peace in the middle of nowhere?"
If Bilko had an answer, he never got to give it. Without warning, there was the faint flicker of a laser from the asteroid and our comm speaker crackled.
"Approaching transport, this is the Freedom's Peace," a female voice said.
"Please identify yourself."
Bilko and I exchanged startled glances. Then I dove for the comm switch.
"This, uh, is Captain Jake Smith of the star transport Sergei Rock. We, uh... who is this?"
"My name is Suze
"We were just about to ask you that question," Kulasawa said, stepping through the hatchway behind me onto the flight deck. "This is Scholar Andrula Kulasawa, in charge of this mission."
"And what mission would that be?"
"The mission to see you, of course," Kulasawa said. "We would like permission to come aboard."
"We appreciate your concern," Enderly said. "But I can assure you that we're doing fine and have no need of assistance."
"I'm very glad to hear that," Kulasawa said. "But I would still like to come aboard."
"To study us, I presume?"
I looked up at Kulasawa in time to catch her cold smile. "And to allow you to study us, as well," she said. "I'm sure each of us can learn a great deal from the other."
There was a brief silence. "Perhaps," Enderly said. "Very well."
And on the dark mass below a grid of ru
"Follow the lights to the colony's bow," Enderly continued. "There's a docking bay there. We'll use our comm lasers to guide you in."
"Thank you," I said. "We'll look forward to meeting you."
The laser winked out, and I keyed off the comm. "Well?" I asked Kulasawa.
"Well, what?" she countered. "You have your docking instructions. Follow them."
I had envisioned some kind of makeshift docking umbilical stuck perhaps to one of the hatchways we'd spotted on our approach. To my relieved surprise, the docking bay proved to be a real bay: a wide cylindrical opening leading back into the asteroid proper, fully equipped with guide lights and beacons. And, at the far end, a set of ancient but functional-looking capture claws that smoothly caught the Sergei Rock and eased it into one of the half dozen slots set around the inside of the open space.
"What now?" Kulasawa asked as we touched gently onto the bare rock floor and the overhead panel slid closed.
"We wait," I said, switching off the false-grav and fighting against the momentary disorientation as the asteroid's rotational pseudogravity took over.
"Wait for what?" Kulasawa demanded. This close to the asteroid's axis the pseudogravity was pretty small, but if she was suffering from free-fall sickness she was hiding it well.
"For them," Bilko told her, pointing out the viewport.
From a door in the far wall three people wearing milky-white isolation suits and gripping carrybag-sized metal cases had appeared and were making their slightly bouncing way toward us. "Off-hand," he added, "I'd say it's a medical team."
He was right. We opened the hatchway at their knock, and after some stiffly formal introductions we spent the next hour having our bodies and the transport itself run through the microbiological soup-strainer. Their borderline paranoia was hardly unreasonable; with 130 years of bacteriological divergence to contend with, something as harmless to us as a flu virus could rage through the colony like the Black Death through Europe.
In fact, it was something of a mild surprise to me when, after all the data had been collected and analyzed, we were pronounced safe to enter. The team gave each of us a broad-spectrum immunization shot to hopefully protect us from their own assortment of diseases, and a few minutes later we were all finally riding down an elevator toward the colony proper.
The ride was longer than I'd expected it to be, and it wasn't until we were well into it that I realized the elevator had been made deliberately slow in order to minimize the slightly disconcerting mixture of increasing weight and Coriolis forces as we headed "down" toward the rim of the asteroid. Personally, I didn't have any trouble with it, but it appeared this was finally the combination that had gotten to Kulasawa's heretofore iron stomach. Her eyes gazed straight ahead as we descended, the expression on her face one of tight-lipped grimness. I watched her surreptitiously, trying not to enjoy it too much.
Considering the historic significance of our arrival, I would have expected a good-sized delegation to have been on hand. But apparently this wasn't a society that went in heavily for brass bands. Only three people were waiting for us as the elevator doors opened: two stolid-looking uniformed men, and a slender woman about Kulasawa's age standing between them.
"Welcome to the Freedom's Peace," the woman said, taking a step forward as we stepped out. "I'm Suze
"Thank you," I said, glancing around. We were in a long room with an arched ceiling and no decoration to speak of. Set into the wall behind our hosts was a
pair of heavy-looking doors. "I'm Captain Jake Smith," I continued, returning my attention to the woman. "This is my first officer, Will Hobson; my engineer, Rhonda Blankenship; my musicmaster, Jimmy Chamala. That one's a little hard to explain—"
"That's all right," the woman assured me, her eyes on Kulasawa. "And you must be Scholar Andrula Kulasawa."
"Yes, I am," Kulasawa said. "May I ask your title?"
Suze
"I recognize the presence of authority," Kulasawa said. "Authority always implies a title."
Suze
I felt a stir go through us over that one. The traditional concept of hereditary royalty had long since vanished from the Expansion's political scene, though it was often argued that that same role was now being more unofficially filled by the Ten Families. Still, the idea of a real, working king sounded strange and anachronistic.
For some of us, though, it apparently went beyond merely strange. "A king, you say," Kulasawa said, her voice heavy with disapproval.
Suze
For a moment the two women locked gazes, and I prayed silently that Kulasawa would have the sense not to launch into a political argument here and now.
Suze
had hoped to end what had become a long and tiring day.
Fortunately, she did. "I'm just a scholar," she told Suze
"Of course." Suze
She turned and walked back toward the door, the two guards stepping courteously aside to let our group pass and then closing ranks behind us. "Incidentally, the study team tells me you have several large crates aboard," Suze