2:15 p.m. CST, June 18th, 2673; Gamma Wheel, Clearwater Prime

The two agents spent a couple of hours examining the buildings on the way to the tram station. The investigations did not turn up anything of value; most of the buildings were still abandoned and looked to stay that way till the ring was reconstructed.

Fortunately, the tram had already been remodelled for the new gravity conditions, and trams ran on demand to the disused areas of the station. The two were the only ones in the car.

The other rings were likewise unpopulated. The single disk, while it was still undergoing construction, had more than enough space to fit the entire population of Clearwater Prime, even during the station’s heyday before the war.

“Where do we go next?” Anna asked.

“Back to the studio for me, I think. You should go back to the Glasgow. You’re sure to have better equipment onboard than what you can bring with you.”

“I don’t know if that will help much. I can probably order a set of diagnostic programs throughout the fleet to search for signals, but I’m not sure I can do that without returning to active duty. And if I have to go back on duty, I probably won’t be able to get out of it again to help you. At least not without telling the admiral I’m with SSB.”

“You can’t break cover, Anna. The more people who know, the higher the chance that it will get out. We don’t know who the leak is, and they might come gunning for you.” Beth sighed as she relaxed against the padded seat of the tram, her eyes scanning the car again, just to make sure it was empty.

Beth turned her eyes and gave Anna an almost penetrating look. “So you’re still with Phil? I’m a bit surprised. He didn’t seem to be your type.”

“Well, we do get along, and he doesn’t ask too many questions. At least not about what I really do. It can get a bit annoying that he doesn’t ask them, but it is better this way. He’s very good at partitioning things. Work is work, and play is play. He doesn’t bring his work home with him. That means I don’t have to explain what I do either. It also means I can’t explain things to him.”

“That’s convenient in our line of work.”

“Yes it is, but it can still be frustrating. Part of our job is the gossip, and he’s not really telling me about what is going on. I had to find out a lot of what’s going on in the dreadnought squadron from other channels. Though now that he’s gotten command of TBC-473, he seems to talk more about work in his letters to me.”

“I didn’t think he would have had the time to send more than one.”

“He’s sent out two so far. In those two he’s given me more gossip than he has in the past six months. I guess it’s been kind of hard on him, with him on the dreadnought and me on the command ship. We only saw each other when the fleet was docked at Clearwater Prime.

“Now with him in a command position, he doesn’t seem to have anyone to bounce ideas off of. He was the junior tactical officer for Brown’s task force, so he had a senior officer to discuss ideas with. Now he doesn’t, or he doesn’t trust his new CO enough. I guess that means he’s using me as the sounding board, even though I can’t say much.”

“Well, with him gone, you can flirt with the handsome men on the command ship and get information that way.”

“Uh…no. I don’t think so, Beth. If Phil found out about it, I don’t know how he would react, and I do quite like him.”

“Well, why don’t you marry him?”

“I told you, he doesn’t ask many questions, even the ones that he should.”

“So, um, what gossip does he give you in his letters then?”

“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?” Anna said. Beth raised an eyebrow at her temporary partner. “Don’t worry about it, Beth. He just told me about the gel suits that you were working with. He also asked if I remembered someone named Beth Hastings. Seems he didn’t remember your name at all.”

“I don’t know if I should be insulted or happy about it. You and I were roommates for the three years he was dating you at the Academy, and the year after he graduated and went to the front lines.”

“Well, you are better looking than me, Beth.”

“Glad you finally noticed, Anna. But you Terrace worlders don’t seem to notice those of us not born on a high-G world.”

“Maybe, but I think it was more that Phil thought you were out of his league, and as you said, you’re not from Terrace. You’re taller than he is, and I think you intimidated him just a touch.”

“I get that a lot, though not as much with my current cover.”

“Yes, your current cover. What’s it been, Beth, six years now? And just why are you asking me about my boyfriend when you have all your boy toys?”

Beth let out a long sigh, and her face dropped from the expression she usually wore. She hardly ever let anyone this far into her. Anna was the only person who frequently saw beneath the mask. She was the only one to see it in the past four years.

“Those boy toys are OK. But they’re not hired for their brains, just a certain attribute and how good they look on camera. They can get tiring after a while. And you know something? To look good on camera, they generally lift weights for two or more hours a day. They’re so desperate to keep looking like studs that they can’t focus on anything else. The rare exceptions actually have some grey matter between their ears, but they aren’t interested in Darline.

“Darline is a type A airhead. Just enough brains rattling in the vacuum between her ears to run the studio…with help. Don’t ask me how she got certified with the gel suits. That’s one set of encounters I don’t want to repeat or remember. Horny fans are one thing, but horny fans that have something you need and know it are quite something else.

“I’ll be glad when this is over. It wasn’t supposed to be this long, Anna. I was blond before, but it was a honey blond, not this trashy bleach blond I have now, and I sometimes don’t recognize these blue eyes are mine. And you know every male seems to lust after these breasts. I much prefer the trimmer ones I had when we met; these give me the occasional backache. If it wasn’t for the nano-bots and other treatments, I would be going through menopause right now.” Beth sighed and relaxed back.

Anna changed the subject. “So tell me about the suits. Phil said there were six crewmen who needed outfitting in them. Are they really going to work out for them?”

“I shouldn’t tell you, you know. After all, this is supposed to be a top-secret project, and you know there’s all that compartmentalization between branches of the navy. But you are CMI like me, and if I can’t trust you, than who can I trust?”

“Beth, if they were still top secret, what are you doing with them at a movie studio?”

Beth gave Anna a bright smile. “Exactly. You know, it is sometimes nice to have a confidant. The gel suits that Darline is certified in are long-term commercial suits. So, if those navy boys and girls are careful, they won’t have any problems. They’ll be uncomfortable but alive.

“Beth, on the other hand, is certified with space marine-grade suits, and those are a completely different beast than the commercial grade suits. They’re also higher grade than the navy suits that are undergoing trials back in the Terrace system. I know how to make a mixture to produce all the grades of suits.

“The suits I gave those boys and girls are marine suits. They are a bit thicker than the navy suits and much thicker than the commercial suits. They’re partially self-healing. Basically, anything up to a seven-millimetre slug hole, they can keep a marine from bleeding out. If a major artery is hit, they might be able to save them, though that hasn’t been fully tested.”

Beth’s voice took on the quality she took when she was trying to bring something fully to the front of her mind and memory. “You see, the gel reacts to blood. When I acquired the design specs from Dalrun, they had just finished that aspect of the suit.

“The gel hardens, or congeals—I’m really not sure on the proper term—and attaches itself to a person’s skin when it’s activated. The gel will soften and become a gel again when it comes into contact with blood. It uses the blood as a component to replicate and grow itself over the hole. If it grows faster than the person is bleeding, it can plug the wound. But there are limits to how fast it can grow.”

“That sounds almost too good to be true, but still useful.”

“Very useful if the military procurement would get off its butt.”

“Are you siding with the company in this? I thought you were supposed to be in OB.”

“Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be infiltrating the company, but that doesn’t stop them from having a product we can use. And it could be vital to our forces. You know, I had some of my actors try to get them on in a hurry—the practised ones, that is, not the rookies—and it took them less than two minutes. And they didn’t have any urgency pushing them.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want you to lose perspective.”

Beth snorted and said, “And who recruited whom for the CMI? But you know, even though I was already an agent before I went to the Academy, that doesn’t mean my time there didn’t give me some loyalties to our fighting men.”

The conversation turned to other subjects as the trip back to the station continued. The tram took thirty minutes to run from the rim of the wheel to the hub. Before the reconstruction started, a trip from one wheel to another could take over an hour, and potentially much longer, depending on which wheels the traveller started and ended the trip on. The new disk and the disks that were planned would not rotate, and would be used to support each other in the new artificial gravity. More trams would be added, and elevators outside the hub were to be constructed. With only one disk currently undergoing construction, the new elevators were not in position yet.

The dance the tramcars had to go through to dock with the hub was no longer needed. With the rotating wheels, the cars had to be loaded into containers that moved them to match the angular velocity of the wheels or the hub so they could make the trip. With the wheels locked in place, the tram hardly slowed down as it entered the hub and approached the station.

The two exited the car and walked onto the platform of the station. They did not need the yellow painted handrails to guide them along the path to the elevators that would take Anna back to the Glasgow and Beth back to her studio. There was one other person, a stocky man who had gotten off the tram in front of them. He paid them no heed as he walked briskly toward the elevator.

“I thought we were the only ones in that sector,” Anna said to Beth.

“I guess not. We should follow him. He could be a lead.”

Anna shook her head at Beth and sighed to herself. They were short on leads, but this did not look like one to her. She followed after Beth, since she did not have a better suggestion. The man beat them to the elevator, and the door was already closed before the two got close enough to hit the call button.

“Why, how rude!” Beth said with her airhead personality’s voice. She hit the call button, and it was not long before an elevator car showed up at one of the other doors.

“I think we might still be able to catch him,” Anna said as she got into the elevator and held up her hand to Beth. She pushed a button for one of the other rings and exited the elevator before the doors closed. “We don’t want that car.”

Three more cars showed up at different doors before one showed up at the door that Anna wanted, the same one that the man had left on. Anna got onto that car and waited for Beth to join her. She pulled another gadget from her pack of tools.

“It’s about ten kilometres down the spine to the disk,” she said as she examined the maintenance panel. “These elevators only speed up to around thirty kilometres an hour, so it’s still a twenty-minute trip.”

“So, you’re good at math. We’re still minutes behind and probably won’t be able to follow him when we get there.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Anna said and went about disabling the alarms on the panel before she opened it. “It’s a good thing I’m with Secure Signals, Beth. The alarm is probably trying to go off right now, but it’s blocked.”

“We wouldn’t have needed that if you didn’t open the panel.”

Anna ignored that as she hooked up cable to a jack inside the maintenance panel’s computer and hooked the other end to her portable terminal. She spent a few moments breaking the codes before she got the access she wanted.

“I thought those computers could break the codes automatically,” Beth said as she looked over Anna’s shoulder.

“Where is the fun in that? Besides, I like to race the computers sometimes. Keeps me up with the latest advances. Now, to pull up the logs.” Anna started by searching the logs of the car that the two agents were currently on. That led her to the trip record and then the identification number of the entrance port. With that information in hand, Anna pulled up the logs for the entrance door to find out the list of cars that recently used the door.

“And here’s our rude gentleman’s elevator,” Anna said as she pulled up the interface for the car on her terminal.

“Its destination is the disk, all right. Let’s slow him down.” She entered some commands into the computer and fooled the other car’s sensors into thinking it was going slightly faster than it should. The elevator decelerated slowly to twenty-five kilometres an hour. Anna used the same trick to speed up the elevator the two women were in.

“We should catch up with him soon.” She also had their elevator switch tracks to go to a door other than the target elevator.

“OK, that’s set up now; we’ll be arriving at the disk five seconds before him, two doors down.” She double-checked her programming and then pulled up the video feed from the other elevator.

“And here’s our man.”

The image she showed Beth was of a man wearing a long dark jacket, tan slacks, black dress shoes, and a front buttoned-up white shirt and tie. On his head he wore a hat. The camera angle did not give them a good view of his face.

“His clothes make him look stocky,” Beth said as she looked at the lay of the fabric on the man’s body. “They’re more like business wear, rather than workman’s wear. And there aren’t any businesses out in the wheels these days.”

“The body type isn’t your normal Terrace heavy worlder, but he’s definitely from a heavier world, the way he has his feet and knees set. That means he has a firm grip on the floor and doesn’t want to stumble or fall.”

“Falling hurts, Beth.”

“Yes it does. A person who grew up on Terrace or Olivier or one of the other heavy gravity worlds instinctively sets himself in the most stable standing position possible. If I wanted to attract a man from one of those worlds, I would set my stance in the same way, even though I wasn’t born there.

“Someone from one of the space colonies, especially if he’s light on gravity, won’t set himself like that. His feet would be more together and his hands tighter against his body. They’re usually more crowded than a heavy-G world. Look at how his hand is away from his body and near the handrail of the car.”

“Fine, I bow to your ability to read body language. It was never my best subject in spy school.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that.”

The rest of the trip was made in silence. The only activity was when Anna disconnected her terminal from the maintenance port of the elevator, reset the various logs, and closed the maintenance panel.