Free Maelstrom by Paul Preuss

she’d made during her assignment. They floated in the lock, weightless in microgravity. “I’m going to miss you, Vik.”
     
“That’s what you said the last time,” the tall blond Slav said sourly. “Before the commlink caught you.”
     
“I took out my commlink, in case somebody tried that again. This time I’m really getting out of here.”
     
“If you should get to Leningrad . . .”
     
“I’ll beam you a holo. More likely they’ll send me back to the Newark docks.”
     
“Save the false modesty.”
     
“You’re a tough cop, Proboda.’
    He thrust out his square hand and she offered her fine strong fingers to his grip. “If you don’t keep in touch, I’ll know you for the running dog lackey of the capitalist-imperialists I always suspected you were,” he grumbled.
    Still holding his hand, she pulled him to her and squeezed him gingerly. “I will miss you”–affection and caution balanced neatly–“you atheistic totalitarian commie.” Abruptly, she let go and floated away. “Don’t let Kitamuki get your goat.”
“She’s going to be a real pain in the zhopa . She certainly thought she was going to make captain.”
     
“The new guy looks competent. He’ll keep her in line.”
     
Sparta saw him shrug and said, “Sorry. Talking shop.” The launch siren wailed again.
     
“Get out of here,” Proboda said.
     
She nodded, then turned and dived toward the airlock’s tube.
     
Just before she disappeared into the long passage, Proboda called after her, “And give my very best wishes to our friend Blake.”
     
She cast a quizzical glance over her shoulder. Were her feelings for Blake really that transparent?

PART TWO
SECRETS OF THE ANCIENTS
V
    Paris, four months earlier: behind the beveled plate glass of a brass-framed window, warm light caressed yellowing fragments of papyrus. The Egyptian scroll unrolled upon the brown velvet was much deteriorated, with shredded edges and jagged lacunae, but hieratic script painted in glossy black and wine-red ink flowed across it with calligraphic grace. Its borders were painted with miniatures of musicians and naked dancing girls, at once stylized and animated.
    A hand-written card pinned to the velvet identified the scroll as a XIIth-Dynasty variant of the Song of the Harper: “Life is brief, O beautiful Nefer. Do not resist, but let us seize the fleeting hour. . . .” The papyrus was not rare as such things go, not sufficiently unusual for a museum, but certainly special enough to be worth the steep price the dealer was asking.
    Odd, then, that the man who studied it so intently through the glass was not one of the richly dressed tourists or silk-suited businessmen strolling this street of galleries and decorators’ salons in the blue summer evening. He was not one of the leaner, hungrier-looking students from the nearby technical schools and outlying classrooms of the Sorbonne; he was hungrier even than these.
    His cheeks were hollow below the high bones of what must once have been a handsome Eurasian face. His jaw was darkly fuzzed and his auburn-tinged black hair was greasy-bright, of an odd length, not quite long enough for the pigtail that sprouted from the back of his dirty neck. His shirt was in shreds and his plastic pants were too tight and too short, more badly glued patches than original fabric, with holes in the wrong places. His antic figure–teetering on high-heeled, high-topped shoes, its gaunt waist cinched in by a strip of yellow neoprene tubing–was that of a dilapidated jester.
    The proprietor of the Librairie de l’Egypte did not seem amused. Several times he had looked up from his bits of stone and scroll, his cases of scarabs and amulets, to find the eyes of the starving fellow staring at him, while well-dressed men and women, quite possibly potential customers, looked askance and walked too quickly past the shop’s open door. And this had been going on every night at this time for the past three days. The