A Plague in Paradise (Masters of Space Book 3) Read online

  A PLAGUE IN PARADISE

  Masters of Space 3

  ROBERT E. VARDEMAN

  © Robert E. Vardeman 1987

  Robert E. Vardeman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

  First Published in 1987 by Avon Books

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Gwynne Scholz, the naked DEA agent falling through the ceiling, the $13,000 kidney, being fed to alligators, and all the other great stories

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s not possible,” Barton Kinsolving muttered to himself as he struggled with the luxury yacht’s simple, foolproof controls. “The Lorr police vessel is homing in on us.”

  “They’re following us?” Lark Versalles brushed back long strands of her fine blond hair and revealed her forehead. The glamour dyes she had injected subcutaneously whirled about in complex eddies just above her eyebrows and slowly turned different shades of purple. Kinsolving tried to decide if this color change meant the woman was agitated or if she felt only annoyance at the delay in leaving the system.

  For Kinsolving, having the alien spacecraft homing in on them meant more than simple irritation at being detained. He had escaped the planet of Zeta Orgo 4 and its arachnoid inhabitants only minutes ahead of the Lorr police. It mattered little to the spiderlike creatures that he had thwarted a plan — the Stellar Death Plan — of his former employers that would have destroyed the aliens’ minds. In their oddly twisted way of looking at the world, the arachnoids had not betrayed a benefactor by turning him over to the Lorr.

  Kinsolving stared at the vidscreen and the dim image of the approaching Lorr spaceship. When he had worked for Interstellar Materials on the planet Deepdig as a mining supervisor, he had been wrongly implicated in the death of a Lorr agent-captain. The trial and conviction had been swift, and alien justice required exile to a prison world.

  He had escaped — the only sentient being to do so. And Barton Kinsolving had become the preoccupation of every Lorr peace officer.

  Even worse, those in power at IM eagerly sought him, too. They wanted nothing less than the total extinction of hundreds of alien races populating known space. Genocide. Even thinking of their hideous scheme on Zeta Orgo 4 made him shudder. He had stopped them this time. He had seen one of the IM directors killed and, for all he knew, the assassin Cameron had died, also. Kinsolving shuddered. He dared not take the killer’s death as a fact. Cameron had proven himself too wily in the past to succumb to an ambush while guarded by his specially designed robots.

  “They’re getting closer,” Lark said. The purples swirling beneath her skin faded and became light yellows, giving her a jaundiced, diseased look. Kinsolving had to interpret this as increasing dread on her part. He felt as ill as she looked.

  “I’m doing all I can. The overrides on the ship make it hard to work.” Not for the first time, he cursed the safety features that prevented casual access to the controls. Its former owner, Rani duLong, might have been able to get around the safeties but she had been murdered by Cameron’s infernal robot killers. Kinsolving and Lark had escaped only through good luck and a small bit of skill on his part in fixing the ship’s hyperspace shift engine electronics.

  Kinsolving dived under the control panel and found the spots where he had shorted out the safeties once before. Small charred areas marked his successes. What might fail because of his efforts he dared not think about.

  “Lark,” he called out from under the panel, “what’s the course indicator reading?”

  “Something about, oh, it’s set for Paradise!”

  “I don’t care where we jump as long as we do it soon. Is that the lowest numbered reading?” He had no time for complex alignment. The first star system that matched in the navigation computer would be their destination.

  “Yes.”

  He thrust his hand upward, putting his thumb on one exposed contact and his thick index finger on another. Kinsolving screamed as pain assailed him — but the pain came not from the minute electrical current finding a least resistance path through his sweat-dampened skin but from the impact of the hyperspacial shift.

  He felt as if he were falling down an infinite well. Colors more vivid than any in Lark’s cosmetic arsenal spun in demented kaleidoscope patterns before — behind — his eyes, through his brain, deep into his very soul. And the sounds! He always heard phantom music, haunting, alluring. He tried to turn to face its source, but it changed as he moved. Always, it came from a different direction, a place beyond sight and hearing. Kinsolving struggled to make out the eerie tune, to put a name on it, to be able to remember it.

  As always, he failed. The churning in his gut subsided. The music drifted away. The wild vortices of color collapsed and normal sight returned. With it came the light pseudogravity of shift space and an odd stench.

  It took Kinsolving several seconds to realize that the skin on his fingers had burned. He jerked back, breaking the contact.

  “Bart, darling, what happened?” asked Lark. Her voice carried the plaintive quality which demanded that he respond and make everything right again in her spoiled, rich universe.

  “I probably ruined the control circuits.” He sucked on his burned fingers to cut off the oxygen to the wounds. Crawling from under the panel, he looked up at the woman and, not for the first time, felt a surge of emotion. Putting a definition on what that emotion really was proved even more difficult than identifying the phantom music of pipes and synthesizers created during shift.

  Love? He doubted it. Lark had inadvertently rescued him from the Lorr prison world. For that he owed her much. No one else had ever escaped that cruel exile. But what he felt for her transcended simple duty. He had assumed an obligation when he had allowed her to accompany him. For her, he provided a new and exciting diversion. Kinsolving wondered if Lark understood how truly dangerous it was being near him. Possibly. She was not a stupid woman.

  Duty and gratitude, yes, and more: these he felt for her. And friendship. He liked her in spite of the differences in their backgrounds and outlooks. She had seen the horror Interstellar Materials sought to create by their genocidal Plan and had aided him. Deep down, though, she did not feel the commitment he did, the outrage, the stark revulsion at Cameron and IM’s Chairman Fremont.

  Lark Versalles skimmed through life, sampling daintily, tasting the sweet wines and never finding the bitter.

  “The ship’s going to need a long time in dock to fix,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. My credit’s still good. Especially on Paradise!”

  “What is this world?” he asked, pulling himself up and buckling himself down in the pilot’s acceleration couch. He only half listened to her gushing explanation as he scanned the limited controls. Most were nothing more than warning lights. The ship’s on-board robot repair crew toiled to fix most minor problems. The major ones he had created required human attention and the complete equi
pment of an orbiting dry dock.

  A quick glance at the vidscreen showed only the jumbled patterns of hyperspace. The Lorr had tracked them too quickly back in the Zeta Orgo 4 system. Something — someone — had alerted them to his presence. They had no reason to suspect this luxury yacht of harboring their prime fugitive from justice.

  By choosing a world at random, Kinsolving knew he had eluded the Lorr — unless their technology far exceeded that of the humans. Could the aliens follow a starship through a shift and pinpoint its destination? Kinsolving shuddered again, a mental picture forming of them coming out of hyperspace and finding the Lorr police vessel waiting.

  “ … spent months there. It’s photonic, Bart, darling. Anything you want, and I mean anything!”

  “Paradise?”

  Lark swung about and snuggled close, her long arms circling his neck. Her face blocked out the vidscreen and control panel. It wasn’t a displeasing situation, but Kinsolving experienced a pang of uneasiness at being unable to watch the control panel telltales. Too many circuits aboard ship had been destroyed to grow careless.

  Lark’s bright blue eyes bored into his dark ones. Her lips parted slightly, sending waves of light greens radiating from her mouth in a delicate spiderweb. The woman’s cheeks flushed a bright pink, then turned a more passionate red.

  “We’re free of them. The Lorr, IM, all of them. Let’s relax and enjoy ourselves, Baiton, my dearest.”

  She bent forward and kissed him. Kinsolving resisted slightly, thinking he saw a flashing red light on the control panel. He took a quick look and saw nothing. He had seen Lark’s cheeks blazing crimson as her desire mounted. He reached out and put his strong arms around her, drew her closer. There might be better ways of passing the time in the infinite expanse of hyperspace, but Barton Kinsolving could not think what they might be. Not with a woman like Lark so close.

  *

  “Again, Bart, please,” begged Lark. She knelt behind the couch and put her arms around his neck. Her soft blond hair brushed the side of his face, the sunlight-gold strands floating up in the breeze to tickle his nose. He brushed them away and reached out to press the appropriate controls on the panel.

  “Time to shift back to normal space,” he said.

  She brightened at the idea of again being on Paradise. She swung about and dropped into the acceleration couch beside him, her hand firmly clutching his bulkier one.

  Kinsolving gulped as the starship dropped from hyper-space, the full array of sensory confusion assaulting him. He strained to hear the phantom music, but heard nothing this time. In its place, he tasted metallic bitterness on the sides of his tongue, and his feet froze as if he had thrust them into a bucket of icy water. Keeping him from complaining at the shift was the firm grip Lark kept on him the entire time. Knowing that someone shared all this with him eased the burden.

  The vidscreen lit up with a display of approach numbers from the Paradise Port Authority and a small picture of the planet’s surface. Kinsolving frowned. Such views normally came through the on-board cameras. They were still almost fifty AUs away, a distance making such detail impossible.

  “They transmit a picture of what we’re going to see,” Lark supplied. “Isn’t it wonderful!”

  “Wonderful,” Kinsolving agreed halfheartedly. He didn’t like the idea of the Port Authority taking control of the vidscreen. The Lorr starship might be only seconds behind and he would be unable to detect it. Another shift might be necessary; he had to know if the aliens had followed. That new shift, if required, might destroy them. He would prefer to let the Paradise dry docks refit the yacht. Too many amber and red indicator lights popped up, showing how he had abused the vessel.

  He toggled the ship-to-station communicator. “Earth ship von Neumann desiring repair facilities.”

  “Attention, von Neumann,” came the instant response. “We are sunward less than point one AU and read your problems. Are you able to reach Paradise orbit unassisted?”

  Kinsolving poked at the vidscreen controls. The Paradise Port Authority had not released the vidscreen to allow him to pick up the other ship.

  “We can attain orbit unassisted. Can you release remote override on my vidscreen?”

  A tiny pop of static and a man so handsome that Kinsolving had to consider him beautiful appeared on the vidscreen. “Captain Luxor of the Paradise Assistance Fleet,” he said by way of introduction. “Most of the ships coming to our planet like the view of the surface. I understand your problem, however.”

  “Oh, we’re going to land on Paradise,” cut in Lark. “I’ve enjoyed my other stays here.”

  “But we do have some on-board problems,” Kinsolving finished.

  “Do you have a Pleasure Code?” asked the captain of the other ship.

  “It’s the same as for Galaxy Pharmaceuticals and Medical Techtronics — GPMT.”

  Kinsolving stared at Lark. Was she lying? Then he realized that he knew little about her background. She never spoke of her family, of former lovers, of friends. Always Lark Versalles lived for the instant. Let it pass and it was as if she forgot.

  “Lark Versalles,” came Captain Luxor’s reply, “welcome back to Paradise. We will happily escort you to Almost Paradise.”

  “Almost Paradise?” Kinsolving asked the woman.

  “Their orbiting station. Paradise caters to all races. Almost Paradise allows time for quarantine, if necessary, acclimation, a chance to anticipate all that can come true on the surface.”

  “If they can repair the ship.” Kinsolving went cold inside when Captain Luxor’s image flickered on the screen, then firmed again. The captain had cut for transmission, probably to the main data banks on Paradise, and had not wanted Kinsolving to know.

  “You are aboard a ship licensed to the sister of Aron duLong, chairman of Terra Computronics. Is Rani aboard?”

  “She’s just loaned us the ship,” Kinsolving said quickly, turning even colder inside. Her body still rode in the main storage hold of the von Neumann, secure in a vacuum coffin.

  Kinsolving did not want to consider a murder charge placed against him on yet another world.

  “GPMT credit will suffice,” said the captain. With those words, Kinsolving got a clearer picture of Paradise. If someone could pay, any trouble could be smoothed over.

  “Should I dock or will you send out a grapple tug?” he asked of Luxor.

  “We have already fastened lines to your hull plates.”

  Kinsolving tried to verify but found the sensors on the composite hull to be malfunctioning, like so much aboard the yacht. He had not heard or felt the vibrations from the magnetic grapples being attached to the special tug plates, but his Doppler radar showed a closing vector on Almost Paradise impossible without the lines.

  The ship docked gently, barely jarring them. Lark shot out of her couch, her face radiant with every color of the rainbow. Not even trying to hide her excitement, Lark pulled on his arm and said, “Hurry, Bart, darling. There’s so much to do aboard Almost Paradise. If it wasn’t so much fun on-planet, I’d spend all my time on the station.”

  Kinsolving followed reluctantly. His bleak mood contrasted sharply with Lark’s ebullience. So much needed to be done and he had no clear idea how to accomplish it. Cameron had killed the Lorr agent-captain; how could Kinsolving clear himself? IM had been prevented from burning out the brains of the aliens on Zeta Orgo; did they pursue their mad scheme on other worlds? Probably. He needed to find out for certain. The aliens might not know

  of the danger posed by Interstellar Materials. They might even deny any human capable of such intricate planning, but Kinsolving knew. And he had to prevent Fremont and the others from mass killing, whether the aliens appreciated his sacrifices or not.

  The airlock cycled open. To his surprise, Kinsolving’s ears did not pop from poor pressure-matching between ship and station. Someone had taken the trouble to mesh perfectly. A cool, scented breeze blew inward and peaceful pale green lights shone on a tastefully decorated re
ception area.

  “Welcome, Lark,” greeted a petite woman, hands held out for Lark to grip. They kissed chastely. Something about the small woman’s attitude told Kinsolving that, for all the overt friendliness, she was only an employee. Her smile came too quickly. Every detail about her neat, conservative dress spoke of carefully chosen effect. Kinsolving held back asking her what she would have worn had she been given a chance to choose her own clothing. He guessed that her tastes paralleled Lark’s. Something flashy, something skimpy, something scandalous.

  But to dress like that in Lark’s presence would have put the woman in competition. Kinsolving had to wonder how the greeting would have differed if he had arrived without Lark.

  “Welcome to you, too, sir,” the woman said, her small hand cool against his. She shook hands firmly, quickly, then backed away without making eye contact. Her every action was one of deference.

  “Please accept my personal apologies about accommodations aboard Almost Paradise. We cannot put you into the Royal Suite because of a special conference on-planet.”

  “Conference?” Kinsolving asked.

  “Terra Recreations operates Paradise as a restful environment where any pleasure is available,” she said, more robotic than human as she slipped into her sales speech. “From time to time we allow alien races the use of our facilities for interspecies diplomatic conferences. Currently, we are honored with seven different species on-planet while they conduct business with Earth representatives on trade and other matters of mutual interest.”

  “But the Royal Suite.” Lark pouted. “I had my heart set on staying there again.”

  “Oh, Lark,” the small woman said, sounding genuinely sorry, “we just can’t. The Trekan ambassador requires time to acclimate himself to Paradise’s atmosphere. The Royal Suite is the only one suitable for complex gas exchange.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Kinsolving. “We’re not going to demand anything that lavish.” He glared at Lark when she started to protest his peasant attitudes.