Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 02 by A Gathering of Stars

Author:A Gathering of Stars
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-05T14:36:46+00:00

Styxville was like Plutopolis, only less so. There was only one street in what passed for the moon’s capital, with nothing larger than an eighty-foot dome. Two long rows of dilapidated wood or plastic hovels fronted on a thoroughfare that the snowmobiles had stirred into slush. The messy backyards behind the main street were dotted with even cruder outbuildings and littered with junk—broken-down snow vehicles, scrap racial, gigantic log skidders, obsolete mining equipment. Clusters of frosted spheres that were men in cryosuits strolled along the duckboard walks like snowmen come to life. It seemed to be some sort of a Charonian fashion statement to wear a woolen scarf between the large sphere of the torso and the smaller sphere of the helmet. One dapper fellow had a battered stovepipe hat perched atop his helmet.

The saloon that Hamid-Jones entered appeared to have been carved out of a single tree stump some forty feet in diameter. The bioengineered bark, a better insulator than most commercial materials, was still on it, and it had been roofed over with a curving slab of more tree.

Inside was a hollowed-out chamber of random shape and an irregular floor covered with sawdust. The massive bar had been carved in one piece out of the floor. The bartender worked in his long-sleeved thermal undershirt and a neckerchief that ought—Hamid-Jones thought disapprovingly—to have been his headcloth. The place served no fancy drinks as the Ice Palace’s bar had done—the Charonians had not yet grown effete. Instead of cocktails with fruit garnishes and paper parasols, the clientele stuck to plain whiskey, beer, or one hundred-proof gin frozen into slush by the liquid nitrogen in the glass’s hollow stem.

Hamid-Jones hung his rented snowsuit on a hook; its coating of hydrogen frost immediately went up in vapor without having time to drip to the floor. He made the mistake of touching the outside surface with his bare flesh and jerked his hand away with a frostburn on his fingers.

The bartender looked at him oddly when he ordered a Moon of Religion but poured it out for him without comment. He took it over to a corner booth and sat nursing it while he watched the door.

All the Assassins had been able to gather from Izzat’s travel papers was that he was supposed to show up on Charon, where someone would make contact. The Centaurans maintained no official presence on Charon—or on Pluto, for that matter. The nearest Centauran consulate was on Neptune’s giant moon, Triton, and that was only manned by a chargé d’affaires. But of course there would be an unofficial presence—a clandestine agent or two fitting into the local life and keeping tabs on any situation that might tend to jeopardize the black hole project.

Eventually the Centauran agent would find him. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Styxville was small—most of Charon’s population was out in the boondocks. There were only a few rooming houses and public gathering places to keep tabs on. Stumpy Pete’s, as this wooden rat hole was called, was Styxville’s most popular watering place.

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