Diamond Sphere Read online

  “It’s hostile to life though,” I said.

  “Yep, that’s Hera!” said someone else, a strange someone else. Nell and I were no longer alone.

  I turned away from the window and saw a thin man walk behind the desk. He wore a white shirt and black pants; he offhandedly dumped a file onto the desktop, then looked at me through thick eyeglasses.

  I waited only a moment before I demanded, “What’s this all about? Why were we stopped?”

  “Because of what you do for a living,” the man said, his glass-covered eyes looking from one to the other of us. When we both remained silent, he said, “Let me see your itineraries.”

  I handed him my paperwork.

  Nell did the same, saying, “So what’s the problem? We’re security specialists—so?”

  His eyes were on our papers. “What are you doing on Hera?”

  “We’re on vacation,” I said.

  Now he just stared at me, sarcastic gray eyes behind his thick lenses.

  “A working vacation,” added Nell.

  He glanced down at our itineraries again. “I see you’re off to Shiloh Center in a few days. You two speak Moonspan?”

  I shook my head “no.” Nell didn’t move. I could see annoyance behind her fake blank face. She was trying to hide her pique, unsuccessfully—though maybe the man couldn’t tell that because he didn’t know her. At least I hoped he couldn’t tell; I wanted to get out of here without incident….

  “You’ll need a guide around there,” the man said now. “I can hook you up with a good one.”

  “No thanks,” I said fast. “We can get our own guide.”

  “No, I’m setting you up with a guide. He’ll be in touch.” There was a smile on his face now, a pushy knowing smile. He handed back our itineraries; a gray business card sat on top of mine. The card said: Jamie Connors, Personal Heran Guide To The Heran Sky.

  My brow lowered. “What’s this all about?”

  He held out a hand, palm-up. “A tip,” he said. “You’ll soon learn on Hera that when someone gives you information, you have to give something back.”

  For a moment, I just glared at him.

  Then my fingers fished in my shoulder bag for my wallet; I pulled out a Diamond twenty-dollar bill and shoved it into his waiting hand. But his hand still waited.

  If this really was the Heran way, I’d soon be broke.

  Swearing under my breath, I slapped down another twenty.

  “Very nice,” he said, his long fingers slipping the two bills into his white shirt pocket.

  *

  A moment later he’d let us go, we were outside his office, and Nell was glaring at me. “What the hell was all that crap about?” she asked fast.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care. Let’s get to the hotel.”

  *

  We spent the rest of that first day resting in a near-to-the-port hotel room, which would be our base for now.

  However, our adjustment to the air just wouldn’t go well; we both felt too lightheaded. So we (stupidly) tried eating more than normal to make the physical transmission smoother. But that only made Nell feel worse.

  By the early afternoon of our second Heran day, she had taken a couple of unpleasant toilet trips. After the third trip and a long shower, she came out of the bathroom complaining of persistent nausea.

  “Is it morning sickness?” I asked her, pressing a cold damp towel to her forehead as she lay back on her bed.

  She was wearing only a robe now, and her body seemed too heavy for her, seemed to sink into the mattress. “No, it’s afternoon sickness. It’s not the pregnancy. I mean, I’m sure that’s making it worse, but that fried squash last night, and then before….”

  “I’m not surprised you feel so sick. Fried food’s not exactly health food for anyone. But we’ve got to get over to Cielo tomorrow—you think you’ll be able to handle that longer train trip?”

  “Yeah. But whether I can do anymore than that is another story.”

  “I need you with me, Nell. Or at least I can’t leave you alone later.”

  “I’ll try, Pia. What did you have to do today?”

  “Just one thing, but first there’s the supplies to get. There’s the protective-polyskins and helmets—we should wear the skin-suits beneath our clothes, just in case. I mean, the store downstairs recommends them to tourists. I’m gonna buy one. What do you think?”

  “I think if we’re going to run around here, we better be prepared.”

  *

  “I look like I’m going diving,” I said a few hours later, standing before the dresser mirror as I adjusted a purple skin-suit’s top beneath my black blazer. I shoved the purple gloves inside my blazer pockets, eyeing my top’s back neck, where a flexible folded breather-helmet hung limp; I’d only need to use the gloves and helmet if I got stuck outside a bubble, which hopefully wouldn’t happen.

  Behind me in the mirror, a fully dressed and suited Nell was lying back on the bed again with that damp towel over her eyes. Earlier I’d urged her to see a doctor, but she only refused and came with me downstairs, first to send a we-got-here-okay message to Derek and Tan, and then to the hotel’s store, where we wound up finding some medicine. So far, via the medicine, Nell was doing better; at least she no longer needed bathroom time.

  “You sure you can do this?” I asked her in the mirror now.

  In response, the towel bobbed up and down with her nodding head.

  Twenty minutes later we were on a train to two cities away.

  Most of the Heran cities were laid out in long connecting lines, so when you had to travel a long distance via land, you also had to pass through one city after another. It was slow traveling. And some very crowded cities were often hard to avoid.

  Fortunately, this train trip was on the medium-speed rail, and the trip wouldn’t last very long. Unfortunately, the trip was still quite long, and Nell’s normally cocoa-colored skin soon took on a pale green tinge as the train rocked back and forth, stopping and starting often through particularly crowded city areas.

  I finally said to her, looking down at her seated below me, “Oh christ, Nell—you don’t look too good.”

  “I’ll be all right once we…get off this thing.”

  “How the hell are you going to make tomorrow’s trip?”

  “We’ll worry about that later. Right now, I’m closing my eyes….”

  She promptly fell asleep and dozed for the rest of the trip. It wasn’t a long nap, but she seemed better when I woke her right before our stop came up: a moment later she bounded off the train quite eagerly. At first I thought that was because she just couldn’t stand being on the train any longer. But then I saw her normal color had come back into her face, which was a good thing because I had been two seconds away from taking her to a hospital….

  We stopped in a quite-dark side-alley off our destination’s main street. The damp alley air smelled stale, smelled Heran-metallic—another shitty thing about the shitty Heran air. The human-made bubble construction supports were responsible; moisture in the air eventually corroded the bubble framework, which metallic soup dripped down onto the floor-ground. Puddles lay everywhere “outside” on Hera.

  “All right—where to next?” Nell asked me now, sounding like her old more eager self.

  “A medical complex,” I said, taking my special case’s strap off my shoulder. “You’ll need my scanner.”

  I’d only shown Nell how to use the Osier scanner once, months ago, so now I had to spend a bit of time refreshing her memory.

  She finally stuck the scanner into one of her blue jacket’s pockets, saying, “I hope I do this right.”

  “You’ll do fine. Just hit Record. It’s simple.” We began walking.

  “So why are we here?”

  “This is the closest Millie-itinerary entry to our hotel, so I figured we’d go here first.”

  We reached the complex’s front door, and my eyes scanned a huge plaque nailed there; I saw about two-dozen n
ames stamped on the list, but I didn’t have an actual name, just this location.

  “Crap,” said Nell. “Don’t tell me we’ve gotta check out all these offices.”

  “All right, I won’t tell you that. Because we don’t. I’ve got a feeling….”

  Moments later we walked into a Doctor Strand’s empty-of-people reception area. A young man in a nurse’s uniform sat behind the front desk inside a wall cutout. There were ads all over the wall behind him and all over the reception-area walls beside his desk area: Tighten your forehead with DermaRejuvo…This simple procedure will lift your buttocks high as the Heran sky…Do you ever feel too saggy to make it through your entire day?

  “Oy,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes at Nell.

  Then I began dealing with the guy at the front desk, while Nell began casually strolling around the waiting area, touching a few plants, picking up magazines and stopping near doors, as I’d instructed her to do.

  Standing before the guy, I said, “Hello. I’m interested in your practice. I’m wondering if you do everything here in the office—all the procedures? I’m also looking for someone: my cousin Millie Rodriguez. I’ve come over from Crayton as a surprise visit, but we lost touch months ago, and I don’t have a new address for her. I remember she had work done here and was coming back. Has she been in recently? I’ve come such a far distance! And I really want to see her. It’s been so long….”

  “The doctor’s on break,” the guy responded in a bored voice as his fingers partially opened a file folder, seemingly so only he could see inside. “You could talk to him when he gets back in an hour. But I can’t give out private information about patients.” He’d been smiling a little as he spoke, but now his narrow face closed up somewhat.

  “Well, can you at least tell me if she even is a patient here?” I reached into one of my inside pockets and removed my wallet, sliding out the corners of a couple of Diamond twenties till they were clearly visible.

  The young man’s pink tongue appeared and it quick-licked his lips. “I can’t give out private information,” he repeated, his eyes right on the twenties.

  I yanked out first one bill and then another, laying them on the counter in front of me, in front of him. I kept my voice low. “You don’t have to tell me anything. If she’s a patient here, just take the money. If she isn’t a patient here, don’t take the money. I’ll trust that you’re honest.”

  “But how will you know that?” he said, his eyes sly as he pulled the money off the counter and slipped it inside his pant pocket.

  Now I said, “My instincts about people are always correct.”

  Well, not always. But he didn’t need to know that.

  *

  Nell and I left the office and went back to that alley. Somehow it had grown darker, and it smelled even staler there this time.

  “You think he was telling the truth?” Nell asked me as she handed back the Osier.

  “I don’t know. I might have just blown forty dollars—which reminds me that we’ve gotta cash in our travel cards and start paying people off in Heran dollars. It’s certainly cheaper,” I finished in my uber-dry voice.

  I opened the scanner’s keyboard and punched in the Replay code, calling up Nell’s recordings from the doctor’s office and checking any prints against ones I’d taken in my old office before the move and at the Castano house that first night.

  The scanner’s memory spat back nothing but lots of “No Matches.”

  “So I guess he was lying,” said Nell, sighing hard.

  “We’ll see,” I replied, snapping the keyboard shut.

  Normally at this point, I would have checked out more offices, but I still had a feeling about the Strand one. And I didn’t want to push Nell too much; she was looking too pale again.

  We went back to the hotel. We each used the bathroom in turn, Nell taking longer than she should have, but then emerging from it not looking too ill and declaring, “I’m hungry.”

  And I realized then that I was hungry too.

  We went downstairs to the hotel restaurant, both of us promising ourselves and each other that we’d stick to having big salads, at least until we’d adjusted to the air more.

  The restaurant was crowded tonight, too many people squeezed into too few tables. We had to sit at the restaurant’s bar, which we’d yet to do since we’d arrived on Hera.

  But now I plopped my ass onto a stool as a bartender came up to us. He was skinny, hairy and sweaty. He glanced down at my neck and laughed.

  My hand automatically shot there; I felt my helmet hanging off to the side, visible to my front, where he was still looking.

  “Tourists,” the bartender said while laughing at me.

  “Drop dead,” I said, shoving the helmet toward the back of my head.

  “Are you always this nice to customers?” Nell asked him, glowering at his grinning face.

  “Hey…I don’t own the place. I just work here. But you tourists always get rooked into buying the suits.”

  “Rooked? They’re necessary,” I snapped.

  “Naaa. So you get sick once in a while. It’s like motion sickness; you recover. But that’s what these are for anyway.” His arm sprung up and I saw a watch or something on his wrist. “That’s a daxon gauge. Just get yourself one of these and keep an eye on it. That’s what we natives do.”

  “As you pointed out, we’re not natives.”

  He didn’t respond to that. He just flashed his sweaty-lipped grin at me. “So what’ll you ladies have?”

  “Dinner,” I snapped again.

  Shrugging, he walked away, then he returned an instant later with two menus in hand, which he dumped in front of us. “I recommend you start off with the Supershot—wine fermented in oxygenated cryalon gas.”

  “Sounds very appetizing,” I said. “I think I’ll pass.”

  “Seriously. It helps with the air sickness,” he persisted as I read the menu.

  My eyes finally narrowed up at him. The shots weren’t cheap; that could have been why he was recommending them. On the other hand, buried in Derek’s list somewhere, I remembered something about a drink being helpful….

  “All right,” I said to the bartender. “Give me a shot. And the house veggie salad with the chickpeas and bread.” I glanced at Nell; her eyes were still on the menu. “Nell?”

  “Eh, no shot for me, but I’ll take the same salad. And a glass of Diamond spring water.” She flung her menu onto the bar.

  *

  A moment later, the guy brought my shot.

  Gingerly, my nostrils sniffed the red liquid inside the brown shotglass; it smelled faintly of wine. I shrugged. “All right, well: you only live once.”

  I downed the shot in one go, and it sped right up my nose into my brain, then down my throat into my crotch. It left a trail of fire on all my mucus membranes; I thought I would croak via chemical burn.

  “Omigod,” I gasped, my fingers tightening on the bar’s edge as I nearly fell off my seat.

  Nell grabbed onto me, righting my body. “Pia! Shit, I should have warned you.”

  “You—you mean you’ve had one?”

  “A couple, that one time here. They take getting used to. But you seemed determined. I won’t drink it now because of the babe. But that asshole is right; they make you feel better here.”

  …Slowly, I began to see what she meant. The burn died down and left a clear-headedness in its wake. My sinuses felt wide open now, as did my lungs. And my crotch—it felt pleasantly stimulated, almost post-orgasmic. I couldn’t help smiling. “I see what you mean…. Christ, what was in that?”

  “What he told you,” said Nell, absentmindedly pointing down the bar, then turning away from it. “It’s too crowded in here. Hope the food comes soon.”

  It did. And we ate quite fast.

  Near the end of the meal, a few tables finally opened up so we moved to one of those.

  Nell was enjoying a cup of coffee there and I was still basking in the Supershot orgasmic glow when
this young grinning guy walked up to us. He handed me a card—the same one that port-office guy had given me.

  I stared down at the words, Your Guide To The Heran Sky, thinking, Oh yeah.

  “Hello!” said the young guy now.

  Neither Nell nor I responded. We just looked up at him, which was easy to do: he was slim and dark and cute, in a young eager way.

  “I’ve been told you’re looking for a guide,” he continued in a louder voice. “Look no further! I can speak ten languages fluently. English, Russian, Moonspan, Spanish, Ker—”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but we don’t need help with any of those, except maybe Russian and Moonspan. But then I bought a visitor’s guide to Moonspan—”

  “You really think you can learn Moonspan from a book!” He laughed now, very loudly. Several heads turned our way.

  Goddammit. This was like some hard-sell spectacle. “Pipe down,” I said angrily, glancing around us. Then I stood up. “I don’t wanna talk here anymore.”

  Nell stood too. “I’m done with my coffee. Let’s go up to the room.”

  I flashed Jamie Connors a look, and he pointed at himself, making a shocked face.

  “Yeah, you too,” I said, walking away from the table.

  *

  In the elevator Jamie suddenly and annoyingly morphed into this grinning sly guy; he grinned at Nell almost the whole ride up.

  And he was still grinning at her when we’d all stepped into the hotel room and I’d closed and locked the door behind him.

  Nell walked across the room and sat back onto her bed, leaning up against the headboard; her sharp eyes quickly caught his suggestive stare.

  Now, after a stony silence from her end all along, she said to him in an angry voice, “Cut your shit already. All the way up here in the elevator I’ve put up with your come-on looks.”

  His grin faded to a pout; he turned that pout in my direction. I walked over to the table and sat down facing him, my fingers opening my holster, which was hidden from his view by my jacket and the table. A towel I’d left there from earlier sat on the wooden tabletop. As I eyed Jamie, I pulled the towel closer. His me-man-you-woman grin started up again, at me now.