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Say what you will, murder is at least a straightforward crime, honest and direct. There are other acts far worse, more cowardly, more cruel.

—Edward Trout, during the penalty phase of the trial of Thomas Witcover

SIXTY YEARS LATER. 1428TH YEAR SINCE THE WORLD FOUNDATION OF ASSOCIATED STATES (RIMWAY).

I would probably never have gotten involved with the Polaris business had my boss, Alex Benedict, not figured out where the Shenji outstation was.

Alex was a dealer in antiquities, although he could be infuriating because his passion for artifacts inevitably took second place to his interest in profits. He was in it for the money. His job consisted largely of schmoozing with clients and suppliers, and he liked that, too. Furthermore, his career choice brought him more prestige than he could ever have earned as an investment banker or some such thing.

The truth is that I did most of the work at Rainbow. That was his corporation. He was the CEO, and I was the workforce. But I shouldn't complain. The job was intriguing, and he paid me well.

My name's Chase Kolpath, and I was with him during the Corsarius affair, twelve years earlier. Which, as you might know, led to some rewriting of history. And a small fortune for Alex. But that's another story.

In his chosen profession, he was a genius. He knew what collectors liked, and he knew where to find it. Rainbow was primarily a wheel-and-deal operation. We located, say, the pen with which Amoroso the Magnificent had signed the Charter, talked its owner into selling it to our client, and took a generous commission. Occasionally, when the prices looked especially appealing, we bought the objects and turned them over at prices more commensurate with their value. During all the years I worked with him, Alex seemed invariably to be correct in his judgments. We almost never lost money.

How he managed that without giving a damn about the objects themselves, I've never understood. He kept a few around the country house that served as his private residence and corporate headquarters. There was a drinking cup from the Imperial Palace at Millennium, and a tie clasp that had once belonged to Mirandi Cavello. That one goes back two thousand years. But he didn't really connect with them, if you know what I mean. They were there for show.

Anyhow, Alex had located a previously unknown Shenji outstation. In case you don't stay up with these things and have no idea what an outstation is, corporations used them as bases when travel around the Confederacy took weeks, and sometimes months. I know I'm dating myself when I admit that I was a pilot in the days before the quantum drive, and I remember what it was like. You left Rimway and headed out and it took a full day to go twenty light-years. If you were doing some serious traveling, you got plenty of time to improve your chess game.

Outstations were placed in orbit at various strategic points so that travelers could stop and get refreshed, pick up spare parts, refuel, replenish stores, or just get out of the ship for a while. Some were run by governments, most were corporate. Unless you've been on an old-style flight, you have no idea what sitting inside one of those burners for weeks at a crack can be like. It's all strictly eyeblink now. Turn it on, and you can be halfway across the Arm before you finish your coffee. No limit other than the one imposed by fuel. Alex gets credit for that, too. I mean, he was the one who found the original quantum drive. And I won't be giving away any secrets if I tell you that it hasn't made him happy that he was never able to cash in. It seems you can't patent historical inventions that somebody else, uh, invented. Even if no living person knew about it anymore. The government gave him a medal and a modest cash prize and thanked him very much.

If you've read Alex's memoir, A Talent for War, you know the story.

The outstation was orbiting a blue giant whose catalog number I've forgotten. Doesn't matter anyhow. It was close to six thousand light-years from Rimway, on the edge of Confederacy space. If the sources were accurate, it was eighteen hundred years old.

Outstations are almost always reconfigured asteroids. The Shenji models tended to be big. This one had a diameter of 2.6 kilometers, and I'm talking about the station, not the asteroid. It was in a seventeen-year orbit around its sun. Like most of these places that have been abandoned a while, it had developed a distinct tumble, which, of course, tends to shake up whatever might be stored inside.

It was the first time in its history Rainbow Enterprises had discovered one of these things. "Are we going to register it?" I asked. We would do that to claim ownership.

"No," he said.

"Why not?" It would have been just a matter of informing the Registry of Archeological Sites. You gave them a brief description of the find, and its location, and it was legally yours.

He was looking out at the station. It was dark and battered, and you could easily have missed seeing what it was. In its glory days it would have said hello and invited you over for some meals and a short vacation. "Off-world law enforcement doesn't exist," he said. "All we'd be doing is giving away the location of the site."

"Maybe that's what we should do, Alex."

"What is?"

"Give it away. Contribute it to Survey. Let them worry about it."

He stuck his tongue into the side of his jaw. "That might not be a bad idea, Chase," he said. We both knew we could carry off pretty much everything of value, short of the site itself. Giving it to Survey would generate goodwill with an organization that had always supplied well-heeled clients. And Rainbow Enterprises would get plenty of free publicity. "Exactly what I was thinking, my little urchin."

Most of its space had been given over to docking and maintenance. But there had also been a couple of dining areas, living accommodations, and recreational facilities. We found the remains of open spaces that had once been parks. There'd been a lake. And even a beachfront.

It was all gray and cold now. Eighteen centuries is a long time, even in near vacuum.

There was no power, of course, hence no gravity. And no light. But that was okay. We had made a serious strike, and Alex, usually staid, complacent, one might even say dull, became a child in a toy store as we toured the place, dragging spare air tanks with us.

But the toys turned out to be pretty well smashed. Personal items left behind by the inhabitants were afloat everywhere, going round and round with the station. Chairs and tables, stiffened fabrics, knives and forks, notebooks and shoes, lamps and cushions. And a lot of stuff that was beyond recognition, bits and pieces of everything, whatever might have broken off over the years. The place was turning on its axis every seven and a half minutes, an action that sent clouds of loose objects bumping around the bulkheads. "The thing's a giant blender," said Alex, trying to swallow his disappointment.

Copyright © 2004 by Cryptic, Inc