Between the Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

in future. Neutral status meantime. Out." Neutral status meant left alive. Suspended death sentence.
    Early the next morning she made hasty excuses to her wealthy lover/victim and arranged for a descent to Heathrow Complex. His personal conveyance (moon-buggy was entirely too prosaic a word) deposited her at the VIP lounge of the Armstrong space facility. In the lounge she sipped an Irish coffee as a cat crawled into her lap to be petted. The lunar breed were long and ferret-like, with short legs to negotiate the narrow passages and tunnels that riddled the Lunar settlements.
    She felt no disappointment that her months of preparation, of arranging introductions and working herself into the magnate's trust and finally his bed, had ended inconclusively. She knew that some of her colleagues thirsted for the kill, but not Valentina. If a termination had been ordered, she would have executed it. As it was, she had done her job and done it well. Now she would see what new task Carstairs had for her.
    She had been chosen for her work at the age of ten, after a complex series of physical and psychological tests. Her scores had lifted her from the squalor in which nearly ninety-nine percent of Earth's population wallowed and propelled her into higher State schooling. Her schooling was quite different from that of ordinary children or of the children of high Party members. Besides an intensive course of conventional education, with emphasis on languages, she took years of ballet, acting, computers and security systems, armed and unarmed combat, codes, extraterrestrial anthropology, sabotage and a score of other subjects even more arcane.
    When her schooling was finished, she was picked for Carstairs' personal security team. She had seldom met any of the others. Most of his people preferred to work solo. The fewer people on a given assignment, the less opportunity for betrayal. Also, it made for less difficulty should it become necessary to assign one of the team to terminate another.
    She was beautiful today, as she usually was. She was black-haired and green-eyed because that was what her lover/victim liked. Her skin was perfectly white, because that was true of most Caucasian Lunaires. She could look like anything she wanted, even a man. But she had found that beauty seldom hindered an operation and usually got her more cooperation than ugliness.
    As she waited, she reflexively fended off the polite advances of male travelers. It was not difficult in the VIP lounge. The very rich are seldom crude. Simultaneously, she kept her acute hearing occupied eavesdropping on nearby conversations. Important people usually talked about money, business and politics. She caught, from three different places in the large, luxurious chamber, a new subject: alien artifact. It was out of place here. She had been hearing it all her life. From the dawn of the space era, the popular media had been full of unsubstantiated reports of alien visitation and artifacts. None had ever panned out. Anyplace else, she would have tuned out all such talk. Not here.
    When she reached Heathrow she took a tube car to Greenwich. After a long stay on Luna, she always found London depressing, and this way she avoided it. The city had changed little since Victoria's day, except to grow shabbier and more dilapidated. The hideous council housing of the previous century still stood, each unit now holding five or six times as many inhabitants as originally intended. With unemployment nearing seventy percent, most people spent most of their time on the streets. For the average citizen, participation in government was practically nil. Holovision, gang fighting and soccer riots provided the major pastimes.
    The truly sad part, Valentina thought as the tube car sped toward Greenwich, was that London was one of the most prosperous cities on Earth. The wretchedness of what had once been called the Third World was simply beyond human comprehension. For generations, the resources of the