The Genius Asylum: Sic Transit Terra Book 1 by Arlene F. Marks

surrounded by blackness, the body aware of movement but the eyes denying it. Helpless to prevent the collision that his every instinct insisted was only a breath away, Drew stiffened in his seat.
    Beside him, Teri was silent. Maybe she had been lucky enough to pass out.
    As the universe continued to spin around him, Drew forced himself to think, about anything that would take his mind off his current predicament. Unfortunately, there weren’t many memories he cared to recall. Louelle Truman, perhaps, at the Security barbecue where he’d first met her shortly after being partnered with her husband. She’d been wearing a bib apron over her hot pink bikini, flipping burgers one-handed and sucking lemonade-flavored punch through a straw…. Lemonade-flavored! Drew bolted upright in his seat, cursing himself for slow-wittedness.
    There had been barrels — barrels! — of precious lemon juice in the hold of that long-hopper from Earth.
    For the past several years, CommNews had been reporting massive citrus crop failures over most of the world. Only Isrusalem and Java still had healthy orchards, and their fruit was going to the highest bidders. In most places on Earth, even the wealthy and powerful were making do with chemically-flavored juice substitutes. But real lemon juice was being shipped out here by the barrelful, on demand and apparently without question, so that a bunch of bad apples could trade with the Nandrians. And, by strange coincidence, Earth was now secretly in possession of a piece of Nandrian technology for which the price could have been measured in only one thing.
    Lies, he thought disgustedly. Earth High Council lied to the Great Council and to all the Regional Councils. SISCO lied to the High Council and to the Relocation Authority and to Earth Security. Anyone in power lied to the media, who then lied to the public. The Relocation Authority routinely lied to everybody. Lying convincingly had been a survival skill for Drew on the streets of New Chicago, long before it became just another tool in his crime-solving kit. And he was pretty sure Ridout had purposely withheld information from him during his briefing for the SISCO mission. No wonder the EIS chose to remain a secret organization: it had been formed to gather and store — and take action on — truthful intelligence, which was in frustratingly short supply these days.
    That was the reason for Drew’s mission to Daisy Hub. If anything happened to compromise the position or integrity of the EIS on Earth, the organization would need a remote cell, a place to regroup, a base from which to launch an offensive if necessary.
    In the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, truth had always been “a hard deer to hunt”. Now it was an endangered species, needing to be protected at all costs. And the latest of many ironies in Townsend’s life was that he, a convicted criminal and unregenerate con artist, was the man entrusted with the responsibility of laying the groundwork for its preservation.

Chapter 5
    Zulu and Daisy Hub had been placed in high synchronous orbit on opposite sides of a gas giant circling a medium-sized yellow star on the edge of Earth space. Some puckish fellow had named the planet Helena, after a character with two unwilling suitors in a Shakespearean comedy. At the height of an Earth mania back in the mid-twenty-second century, the star had been named as well, for the wife of a philanthropist on the occasion of her hundredth birthday. The residents of the Hub, however, had changed “Marvella Labatt” to a name they considered more appropriate — Purgatory.
    The Relocation Authority had planned Zulu and Daisy Hub to be completely self-contained and self-maintaining — it was officially labeled as an experiment in isolated deep space living. Purgatory and Helena had so far suited their purpose admirably. For half of each planetary day, one of the installations was exposed to Purgatory’s stellar winds and radiation, providing an