Voyage Across the Stars (52 page)

“So now we wait three hours,” Tadziki said in a neutral voice.

“Captain,” Louis Boxall said, “we’ll need some apparatus to make this work. Can you give us a hand with the shopwork? You’re the best hand with the hardware on the
Swift.”

“I’m not sure I’m willing to go through with this, Tadziki,” Lissea said. Her eyes were on Ned.

“It’s my responsibility!” Ned shouted. “You will
not
interfere with matters that are my responsibility!”

Men looked away. “Touchy little feller, ain’t he?” Deke Warson murmured to the ceiling.

“All right, Boxall,” Lissea said. “Come back to the ship with me and we’ll build your apparatus.”

“We can only clear one suit at a time with the hand sterilizer, ma’am,” Eugene said doubtfully. “Should we wait a couple minutes, Lou and I?”

“No, you can curst well stand outside the ship while I clear through the airlock!” Lissea replied as she stamped into the foyer. “This is your idea!”

To Ned’s surprise but perhaps not to Tadziki’s, there was a reply. Gresham’s console logged it in eighty-eight minutes after Ned had sent the query on its forty-one-minute route to Nieuw Friesland. Hard copy scrolled from the printer, but the assembled men read the message from the screen:

Herne Lordling swore under his breath.

Ned said, “My uncle Don understands what it’s like.”

He spoke loudly but without a specific listener in mind. His mind was a collage of memories, views of a big man with a smiling mouth and eyes that could drill an anvil.

“He won’t second-guess the man on the ground.”

Gresham was crying.

Save for the anchor watch, the
Swift’s
complement was assembled in the station foyer. It was a change of scenery from the interior of the vessel, though a sterile one. Paixhans’ Node wasn’t a world which encouraged spacers to sightsee during their stopovers.

“Ten minutes till the next feeding, then?” Tadziki said after glancing at the clock above the door to the supply alcove.

Gresham nodded sluggishly. He’d eaten a ration bar from the
Swift.
It was the closest thing he’d had to a balanced diet since a similar offering from the most recent supply ship months before.

The station ran on Zulu Time: a twenty-four hour clock based on that of Earth at the Greenwich Meridian. It was as good a choice as any, since planetary rotation didn’t affect the bright skies and the personnel weren’t expected to go outside often anyway.

The inner lock cycled to admit the Boxall brothers and Lissea. The three of them had squeezed into the decontamination chamber together.

“That’s not safe,” Gresham complained. “You might miss a spore—”

Lissea opened her helmet. “Shut up, Gresham,” she said.

Ned looked away from her.

“Well, I suppose if you’re careful . . .” Gresham mumbled.

“We got it done,” Eugene Boxall said. “Are we in time?”

Tadziki shrugged. “Eight minutes,” he said. “Then twelve hours to the next, ah, load.”

“Plenty of time,” said Louis.
“Plenty
of time.”

He opened the front of his pressure suit and held out the egg-shaped case he’d carried inside the garment. “We’re going to need one of you to go along with us,” he continued. “Slade, that’s you if you’re up to it.”

Ned reached for the egg. “You bet,” he said.

Herne Lordling snatched the object from Boxall’s hand. “Negative,” he said.
“I’ll
go.”

Eugene dropped his suit on the floor of the foyer. “Look, Lordling,” he said. “This isn’t about shooting. This
particularly
isn’t about shooting.”

“Give him the scrambler, Herne,” Lissea said. “Ned was my recommendation for the job.”

Lordling glared at the Boxalls, then Lissea. He refused to look at Ned, and he continued to hold the object. Without speaking to one another, the Warsons shifted in concert to put themselves at two corners of an isosceles triangle with Lordling the third point. If shooting started, the brothers wouldn’t be in one another’s line of fire.

“We’re not,” Tadziki said, “in that much of a hurry.” He stepped forward so that he was between Lordling and the Warsons, looking from Deke to Toll and back with a glum expression.

“Take the curst thing!” Lordling said. He thrust the object out to the side, not so much handing it to Ned as dissociating himself from what happened to it.

The egg was heavy. Within the clear plastic case, Ned could see a power supply and what he thought was an oscillator.

“Whoever’s taking the food,” Eugene resumed, “he’s got to be a Wimbledon teleport like ourselves. Now I know, five meters is usually good distance and here we’re maybe talking thousands of parsecs.”

“But this is the Node,” his twin said, taking up the theme. “We figure he could be coming from anywhere, anywhere in the galaxy. In and out like a pop-up target.”

“Fine, but why?” Toll Warson asked.

Lissea looked at Gresham coldly. “I assume because somebody paid him to make this gentleman’s life a little more miserable,” she said. “But not to kill him.”

“You see what we meant about Colonel Hammer,” Louis said. “Seventeen years means a long memory.”

“We don’t want the guy killed,” Eugene said. “Not if there’s any other way. He’s just doing his job.”

Harlow laughed. “I’ve killed lots of people who was just doing their job,” he said. “Via, I killed plenty who just happened to be standing on the wrong piece of real estate. We all of us have.”

He looked around the band of mercenaries, inviting argument.

“Wimbledon isn’t a very big place,” Louis said. When his face flushed, the scar on his temple stood out more sharply. “We’re doing this our way or not at all.”

“I said that Ned,” Lissea said, “could be trusted not to shoot unless there was no other choice.”

Ned dabbed his lips with his tongue. “Thank you, Lissea,” he said.

“We’re going to carry you with us,” Eugene said to Ned.

“You can do that?” Westerbeke demanded. “Carry stuff with you when you teleport?”

“It’s a lot harder to jump out of your clothes than it is to wear them with you,” Louis said. “Likewise the bubble of air around you.”

“Him, he’s heavy enough to be a problem,” Eugene said with a nod toward Ned. “But we’re good.”

“Via, we’re the best!”

The twins looked scarcely teenaged in their glow of anticipation. They knew as surely as everyone else in the company did that there were stronger men and better shots on every side of them now—but this was
their
skill, and there was nobody like them in the galaxy.

“When he comes, we follow him,” Eugene continued. “We don’t know where that’ll be. Anywhere in the galaxy, like I say. When we get there, you trigger this.”

His index finger indicated the thumb switch on top of the egg in Ned’s hand.

“It’s an RF scrambler,” Louis explained. “It’ll disorient any teleport within maybe five meters of it. Us included, that’s the problem.”

“Optical would work as well as radio frequency,” Eugene said, “but we don’t know where we’re going. It has to function if he’s turned away or there’s a wall between us or something.”

“Via! I forgot the tape,” Louis said. “Did you bring the tape?”

“
I
brought the tape,” said Lissea. She handed Ned a roll of black, 75-mm tape. The adhesive was alcohol-soluble, but you could lift the bow of a tank on a properly rigged cable of the stuff.

“When we get there,” Eugene repeated, “you trigger the scrambler. The guy’ll probably fall down.”

“We’ll sure fall down,” Louis said. “It’s like having the worst headache ever in your life.”

His twin shrugged. “It stops when the oscillator stops,” he said. “But
don’t
turn it off till you’ve got his eyes bandaged with the tape. Otherwise he’ll likely jump again, and maybe we won’t be ready to follow.”

“One minute,” said Tadziki.

Ned had come to the station unarmed. Lissea held out to him the submachine gun she’d brought on this trip from the
Swift.

“I don’t think I’ll need this,” Ned said.

“The teleport should be helpless,” Lissea said, “but he may not be alone wherever he comes out. Take it.”

Eugene Boxall shrugged. “Hey look,” he said. “We don’t want anybody croaking us while the scrambler’s on, either. Do what you’ve got to do.”

“Nearing time!” Tadziki said sharply.

Ned slung the submachine gun over his shoulder and stuck his right arm through the spool of tape. The twins gripped his wrists firmly, as if they were preparing for a trapeze act.

A chime sounded in the dispenser. The meal packet landed in the niche with a
choonk
—

Ned’s mind everted in a blaze of dazzling light.

The room was sunlit through a netlike screen across one whole wall. The Boxalls gripped Ned’s wrists crushingly. The figure directly in front of the mercenaries was turning as Ned’s thumb mashed down the scrambler switch.

The stranger, a woman with long, curling hair, flung up her hands with a cry of pain. Louis Boxall collapsed like a steer in the abattoir, but Eugene thrashed wildly and continued to hold Ned.

The switch had a detent to lock it until a second thrust released the spring. Ned dropped the unit. It bounced on a floor covered with long, meter-wide rugs laid edgewise and overlapping by half their width. He used both hands to break Eu gene’s grip, then turned his attention to the woman.

She was short, young, and strikingly beautiful in a smooth-skinned, plumpish style. The scrambler’s invisible impact had driven her to her knees. Her eyes were closed, and she squeezed her temples with clenched fists while she made cackling sounds.

Ned yanked the roll of tape off his arm. He stretched a length, slapped it over the woman’s eyes, and knocked her hands aside so that he could complete the loop around her head.

The submachine gun swung like a heavy pendulum, getting in his way. He set it on the floor with hasty care—there was one up the spout, and
no
safety could be trusted absolutely— before he finished the job of blindfolding the woman.

Breathing hard, more from stress than actual exertion, Ned looked for the scrambler. It had rolled beneath the legs of an intricate brass floorlamp. Ned poked the switch again to release it.

This was a
very
nice room, tasteful as well as expensively decorated. The window overlooked a parklike city from thirty stories up. The glazed surface curved to include half the ceiling as well, showing that this was the penthouse. The long wall opposite displayed two large abstracts, coolly precise, which flanked a curtained doorway. There was relatively little furniture, but pillows heaped against the short walls would serve as chairs or couches.

Louis Boxall raised himself to a squat. “Lord, Lord,” he muttered. “Did anybody get the number of the truck that hit me?”

“Hey, it’s a girl,” Eugene said with considerably more animation. He still lay on the rugs, but his eyes were open and turned toward the captive. She was beginning to stir also.

“Rise and shine, troopers,” Ned said. “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you.”

A man walked through the curtained doorway. “Tanya?” he said. His face blurred in surprise at the scene. He reached into the pocket of his flaring jacket.

Instead of snatching the submachine gun, Ned grabbed a double handful of a rug. He yanked at it, thrusting off with his legs as well as using his upper body to pull.

The newcomer’s feet flew up. His arms flailed and the back of his head clunked into the wall. A needle stunner flew from his hand into a corner of the room.

“Father?” the girl called. She jumped to her feet, her face terrified beneath the band of tape. “
Father!”

“He’s all right!” Ned said as he grabbed the man. He pulled the man’s jacket down to bind his arms while he was still logy, then checked the pockets for further weapons. There were none. The fellow’s hair was coarse and black, but by the looks of his facial wrinkles he was probably in his sixties.

“Father?”

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“Hold him,” Ned said, swinging the stranger toward Louis. He scooped up the submachine gun and quickly checked the remainder of the suite. There were two large bedrooms, two baths, and a fully equipped kitchen/dining room. No one else was present, and the exterior door was secured with a 5-cm steel bar as well as a pair of electronic locks.

Ned walked back into the living room. “All clear,” he said. He tossed Eugene a bottle of clear liquor.

“Meet the Glieres, Slade,” Louis said. “Oleg, and his daughter, Tanya. We’re just explaining to them that their contract with Colonel Hammer is now at an end.”

Eugene wetted the tip of the neckerchief he wore over his tunic with the liquor. It had a minty odor. He dabbed alcohol onto the tape, starting at the woman’s hairline. Oleg watched nervously. There obviously wasn’t any fight in him.

“Where are we, anyway?” Ned asked, looking out the window. It was a lovely city, wherever it was.

“Wonderland,” Tanya said. She had a throaty, attractive voice that fit her physical person. “In the Trigeminid Cluster.”

Ned shrugged. He’d never heard of the place—which implied that Wonderland had never been a market for mercenary soldiers, an even better recommendation than the broad swathes of landscaping among the buildings below.

“I . . .” Oleg said. He looked as though he wanted to sit down but didn’t dare to. Louis gestured him toward a pile of pillows. “We’ll of course do what you say. But I hope Colonel Hammer won’t be offended.”

“Oh,” Ned said, rummaging in his breast pocket. He came out with two flimsies: the hard copies of his message to Friesland and Hammer’s reply. He handed them to Gliere, who read, then reread the documents to be sure of their meaning.

Eugene lifted the cargo tape from Tanya’s eyes. She had remained perfectly still during the process, but now she shuddered and said, “Oh thank God, thank God. I was
blind.”

“We needed to talk with you,” Eugene said, “so that, you know, it could stop with talking.”