Star Trove

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Among the myriad colourful characters of the galaxy, men called him a Treasure Troubleshooter. His name was Felix Vereker, and he liked good food and fine wines and his taste ran to Moliere and ancient legends and digging up the fabulous treasures of the past - on whatever planet they happened to be buried. He did not relish the distraction of political assassination, or mysterious attempts on his own life, or the prehistoric savagery and barbarian swords of a playground world of bored millionaires. But when his professional competence as a troubleshooter for a firm of galactic antique dealers demanded, he could be rougher and tougher than all the perils pitted against him. And he knew how to handle Delia Camacho, the lady assassin, and Miss Rosalind Henley - who demanded and then rejected more than he wanted to give. This novel of future speculation and intrigue ranges a wide galactic canvas and a profusion of brilliant colourful incidents pours out in headlong action as Felix Vereker seeks control of his own identity.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 187

Sample

SHE SLAMMED the door at his face.

At his face.

“Don’t bother to call when you get back from Malfaria! If you get back!”

The door hit the jamb. A millimetre only saved him from a smashed nose.

Rubbing that bruised and offended organ Felix Vereker hammered on the door with his other hand.

“Hey! Laura! You can’t chuck me out like this!”

The door remained insolently shut.

Vereker picked up his spacetraveller’s valise from where it had been flung. The label with the big purple and yellow wording M.S.L. taunted him with his destination. He bent and retrieved his light topcoat—New York had been promised seven hours of sunshine with an hour’s rain between ten and eleven this early in May; but the Weather Bureau had been running into snags with their humidity controls just recently.

They thought they had troubles with snow and hail washing out a Fourth of July celebration last year: they didn’t have half the troubles Vereker had.

He shoved his lean face close up against the microphone recessed into the ident plate.

“What d’you mean—if I come back?”

No answer.

“Hey, Laura!”

No answer.

For one last time he kicked the door, hard, feeling the solid thunk through his cordovans.

Whisperingly, an illusion rather than an actuality, he thought he caught the ghost of a sob over the ident plate’s speaker.

“Laura?”

Silence.

“All right, Laura!” he shouted at last, his patience frazzled away. “It’s your loss!”

He walked huffily away down the apartment block corridor. He’d never, really, felt at ease with Laura. The friendship had blossomed, felt a strain, and withered. He rode down in the express elevator, which skittered on its pneumo controls and made him promise to find a girl-friend living in a better class of accommodation next time he was on Earth. As for Chairman Nolan, whose fault it was that Laura had kicked him out, Chairman Nolan having decided that Felix Vereker must space out to Malfaria to handle a routine problem, said Felix Vereker would harbour dark and dirty thoughts all the way across fifty parsecs.

The dorobot hailed a cab.

Vereker straightened his spine before ducking down to enter.

“Bosanquet Spacefield,” he instructed the audio controlled cab. “And step on it.”

He sank back on foam upholstery and stared without seeing out on the incredible panorama of New York. Colour and life and gaiety uplifted the clean city, with traffic and pedestrians at many levels hurrying about their business. Smoke and fumes, noise and dirt, were laughable anecdotes from a slightly crazy past. After all, what sort of culture would it be that could reach out to the planets and the stars and leave behind a filthy home town.

For Vereker the ride could be spent in only one way.

He switched on the cab’s information panel and dialled for direct access to Central Library.

Still and all—what had Laura meant about if he came back from Malfaria?

He dialled for digest information on Malfaria and totted quickly down the tabulated figures. Training in picking up information in coded subsections was a simple part of everyone’s schooldays since way back.

The planet turned out enough like Earth—that was Solterran normal—for the slight differences to be ignored. So that wasn’t it. He wouldn’t need strange and expensive survival suitings.

Next came ethnic, religious, cultural subgroupings.

Just the usual mishmash expected on any planet colonised by Solterra in the main stream of galactic exploration. There was no hint of any abnormal local aberration.

Trouble was, there were so many planets in the human oriented section of this spiral arm of the galaxy alone to make it virtually impossible—no, he corrected himself, being a man who liked to keep his mental processes neat and tidy—statistically impossible for any one man to keep up to date with every happening. Information could not give him the latest whispers brought in by visitors from Malfaria. Central Library could only brief him on facts filed there.

So—was there something going on on Malfaria that would make this routine trip less than routine?

He decanted himself at the spaceport and paid by flashing his credit card.

A lean, neat man in an inconspicuous grey suiting, with a face in which only the set of the jaw and the level slate grey eyes made any difference and brought it out of the ruck of anonymity cloaking the billions of inhabitants of the galaxy, he strode purposefully towards the desk.

Formalities were quickly dealt with. Chairman Nolan, of Consolidated Antiques, had smoothed the way. His ticket and spaceline details were handed to him. They matched the purple and yellow M.S.L. of the ticket tied to his valise. He shouldered off to the indicated gate—Gate Number Fourteen.

At Gate Number Fourteen there was a hold up.

In line with a vivacious blonde who couldn’t have been a day over sixty and a portly gentleman, sweating and running a nervous hand around a too-tight collar, Vereker quietened himself down.

He’d dashed to the spaceport as a direct reaction to being tossed out by Laura after he’d told her that his current two-day stay on Earth had expired. Those two days had been fun, mind. He wouldn’t have lightly missed them. But Laura, evidently, liked a more steady sort of boy-friend; one who wasn’t called on at any moment of the day or night to dash off to the far reaches of the galaxy because some antiques deal had broken down.

“Just what they expect to find baffles me,” puffed the fat man.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know a, bomb from a bottle of champagne,” giggled the over-age blonde.

Vereker said nothing.

Up ahead grim-faced men in the purple and yellow of Malfarian security guards were opening passengers’ luggage and searching thoroughly—but thoroughly.

As is the way with all passengers through customs, no matter how innocent they may be, those in this line shuffled and looked as guilty as though smuggling narcotics into a dry planet.

Vereker made a brisk mental inventory of his personal effects and found therein nothing he felt could give offence.

The blonde giggled some more when her toilet articles and underwear were patiently gone through by a guard.

“Sure you don’t want me to strip off?” she enquired coyly.

Even Vereker had to mask his smile at the reply.

“That is being done under proper supervision in the customs shed, madam.” The guard was frigidly polite. “A female security officer is on duty.”

The blonde squeaked.

Now it was Vereker’s turn.

Everything he had was a direct result of years of experience in galactic travelling. He travelled light. Underclothes, a pair of soft slippers, toilet necessaries, stationery and a small personal library of cassettes.

The guard hefted them in their plastic box.

Each cassette was a small crystal tube about the size of a thumbnail. On each a reference number had been sellotaped. The guard checked each number against the library reference list.

He looked up and what might have been a smile moved the bristly moustache above his thin lips.

“You like your Molière, I see.”

“Him and the Bard. None better.”

“Quite.”

Whether or not that established some sort of bond between them, Vereker didn’t know. But the guard checked him out rapidly and passed him on to the customs shed with a quick nod.

Inside the echoing room with its lines of cubicles, Vereker undressed. His clothes and person were searched. He considered making a protest, for this was not a normal procedure—very far from it.

The portly man was protesting.

“I won’t submit to this—to this distasteful personal probing!”

He stood, fat and comical, clutching his trousers to him, his face as florid as his tie which hung awkwardly under one ear.

“You did not have to travel by Malfaria Space Lines, sir.” The guard, young and tough and matter-of-fact, pulled the portly man to one side. “If you wish to travel on one of our spaceliners it is necessary that you and your baggage be searched.”

“But why?”

A slight grimace of distaste, a moue of frustrated anger? “Surely, sir, you have read the news and seen the casts lately?”

The fat man’s mouth hung open.

“Oh! Oh, I see—”

A girl, a different sort of female from the ageing blonde, smiled at the fat man. She wore a short green tunic dress and long nylons, and her dark hair shone in the fluorescent lighting like blued-steel. Her face, very pale, with large dark eyes, held the promise of paradise for any man fortunate enough to possess the key.

“I understand,” quavered the fat man. “You mean these sabotage scares? The bombs?”

The guard inclined his head.

“You wish to continue—?”

“Er—yes. Yes, all right.”

The fat man’s trousers slithered to the ground.

The dark-haired girl turned and began to slip the green tunic over her head.

Vereker, hitching his grey suit together, had to remember that nudity between the sexes was so old a concept that deviation from it was now the usual thing; but he had to force himself to allow the compatibility of the portly body and the slim lissomness. They might have been bred from two alien stocks on planets parsecs apart.

“Number Fifteen Twenty Five!” bellowed an annunciator.

Long inured like everyone else to being herded about under the label of a number and at the behest of anonymous broadcast exhortations, Vereker checked his number. He saw the number on the ticket. Fifteen Twenty Six.

The girl picked up her case and, smoothing down her hair, walked with a graceful swing towards the exit.

The annunciator bellowed his own number. Then the next.

He followed the dark-haired girl and, in turn, was followed by the blonde, who giggled at the fat man as she passed. He was having difficulty in pulling his pants up.

They paused a moment beneath the neon-lit exit sign.

Ahead of them stretched the brilliantly illuminated tube with the waiting shuttle cars.

A red-faced man, with almost all his blond hair gone and replaced by wrinkles, joined them. He wore a midnight blue lounging tunic with gold epaulettes, and he carried a valise with the label with the yellow and purple lettering.

“Lot of fuss,” he grunted sourly. “Over nothing.”

The fat man puffed up, perspiring.

“I don’t fancy a madman bringing a bomb aboard,” he said to the group. “At least this eases your mind.”

These four people, two men and two women, people who were to be his future travelling companions, stood around Vereker waiting for the shuttles to start.

They stood closely together, shoulders and elbows brushing, then parting to step aboard the shuttles as they jogged up, one after the other like sausages linked by electronic loops.

A shout lifted behind them.

A shocked shout, high and incredulous.

Almost at once, as the shuttles moved along the lighted tube, the explosion blasted hot gas and débris after them.

Vereker heard the bang and felt the air go whistling over his head as he ducked. A chunk of metal gonged against the side of the shuttle.

The blonde screamed.

He realised with an amused and rapid delight that the scared blondes of fiction were only too true.

Then the shuttles picked up speed and bore them away.

Black smoke rolled into the tube from the exit of the customs shed.

“So,” said Vereker to no one in particular. “They did find a bomb, then.”

The odour of smoke and burning clung to the shuttles.

The blonde continued to sob every now and then, mostly to herself, but she took care that the others knew and recognised how upset she was.

Her nerves, Vereker told himself, with only half a smile.

Like everyone else who travelled extensively, either on the long blank pathways between the stars or even, more locally, over the rocket-routes englobing a planet, Felix Vereker recognised the diseases of travel. Oh, nothing so serious that a man might have to call a doctor. But a person tended to lose identity when travelling. He, himself, understood that loss of self, that subsumation into a waiting-room persona. The desks, the lights, the tickets, the pretty hostesses or implacable robots, the cafés of various standards, the bars. Most of all, the waiting, sapping strength and concentration, that reduced a man to a cipher.

He had learned to live with a galaxy-hopping job, had Vereker.

As a trouble shooter for Consolidated Antiques he had shared his fair proportion of headaches. He liked, when he travelled, to do so in style. So now, as soon as the shuttle deposited him aboard the vast and somehow familiar interior of the starship Duke Perhanois, he sent his valise and coat with a robot to his cabin and turned immediately towards the lounge.

All sailing ships between the stars above a certain tonnage tended to look alike. Differences in racial taste ironed themselves out against the astronomical verities. But individual planetary taste still counted.

The starship Duke Perhanois, now, tended to a taste in Late Empire in decoration and furniture. Vereker passed a dozen botched imitations of swan-legged couches and tables, inlaid bureaus and paper-thin chairs, their scrollwork dazzling with gil. . .