“Here they come,” announced Tori from the control room.
“The intercom better be off in the corridor,” muttered Helen.
“Tori knows what she’s doing,” Michael assured her, somewhat absently.
Ben said nothing. He was too busy dealing with his own emotions. Anger, irrational and completely out of proportion, seemed inside him. He feared that if he had to open his mouth, it would all come spilling out in an unstoppable red flood.
God, I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad.
The last time he’d seen the U.N. come into a colony, he’d been in a holding cell, watching lines of neatly dressed judges and bureaucrats arrive with their armed escorts. There seemed to be hundreds of them, all there to deal with the “criminals” who had “broken the rule of law in Bradbury.” He remembered the fear he’d felt, wondering what would happen to them all now, and the deep shame at that fear.
None of the people standing next to him now knew about that cell or that he had ever lived on Bradbury at all. He’d managed to disconnect his records from that past and that person. But he could not disconnect his memories, even if there were times he wanted to.
Like now.
The hatch cranked itself open. Ben’s stomach clenched itself involuntarily. Get over it! They’re just tourists. They’re going to be rumpled and gravity dizzy and slightly stupid, like any other crowd of Earthlings.
Edmund Waicek, the man Ben considered to be the most dangerous member of the C.A.C., had cheerfully sent Venera’s governing board a list of their invaders. Ben had to admit, Helen had worked her end quite well. It could have been a lot worse.
The first two down the ramp Ben recognized as Robert Stykos and Terry Wray, the media faces. Their job was to create the in-stream “news” presentations on the U.N. investigation of the Discovery. Both had been restructured to look exactly average, only more beautiful. They might have been brother and sister, with their coffee-and-cream skin, big brown eyes, and shoulder-length black hair (hers pinned under a bronze scarf, his pulled back into a ponytail under a red beaded cap). But where Stykos was tall and broad, Wray was petite, almost elfin. Both wore glittering camera bands on their foreheads and command bracelets on their wrists.
“Mr. Stykos, Ms. Wray.” Helen, in full public relations mode, stepped forward and shook their hands. “Welcome to Venera Base. I’m Dr. Helen Failia. Allow me to introduce my associate, Dr. Bennet Godwin, who is our head of personnel and chief volcanologist.”
So it began. Stykos and Wray both looked long and hard at him, making sure their cameras got a good image of him smiling and shaking their soft hands. Lindi Manzur, the architect, beamed up at him as if she’d never met anyone more fascinating, except maybe Troy Peachman (was that a real name?), the comparative culturalist (whatever that was), at whom she kept glancing fondly as he followed her down the line, shaking everybody’s hands with a kind of firm enthusiasm that came with practice.
What have you two been doing for the past week and a half? he wondered snidely.
After them came Julia Lott, the archeologist, a sturdy fireplug of a woman with a square face and tired eyes. She was followed by Isaac Walters who looked so uncomfortable that Ben had to wonder if he’d ever left Mother Earth before.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ben saw Grace Meyer smile broadly and step forward from the line.
Oh, right, this is the biologist, he thought as he passed Walters down to Michael.
Next, a tall, pale woman in artistic black and white swept up the line. Veronica Hatch, here to look at the laser and pronounce judgment. In contrast to Walters, she seemed ready to parachute down to the ground and start digging in.
There was a pause then, just long enough for Ben’s anger to start simmering again. There were only two people left to come.
Angela Cleary and Philip Bowerman emerged together from the docking corridor. She had sandy skin and sandy hair, which she wore short under her white scarf. He was darker, with wavy hair and tropical skin and eyes that took in the entire room at a glance. Both of them were tall, broad in the shoulders and narrow at the waist, people whose bulk came not from body-mod, but from work. They both wore the blue tunics with white collars that were the uniform of U.N. security assessors on official duty.
Ben’s blood ran hot, then cold. It must have showed in his face. He knew Michael was looking at him, but he couldn’t help it. He’d sat for hours in little windowless rooms with uniforms like these, being recorded and interrogated until he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t remember if he’d implicated his friends or not, couldn’t decide whether his own lies still made sense. All he could do was feel his burning eyes, raw throat, and aching bladder.