“What, then?”
“Put yourself in their shoes. First you protect your find from being disturbed, and then you get together a team to go retrieve and investigate it. As long as you’ve done the first one right, you can take your time doing the second. They’ll be here when they’ve assembled the people and the hardware they need. At the very least they’ll need to scare up a bulk freighter to carry the spacecraft back and a warship to give the raiders second thoughts.”
Katherine sighed. “What a mess. Maybe we ought to just let them have it.”
“The hell with that,” Derec spat. “As long as Aranimas doesn’t have the key, and the raiders don’t attack, and Jacobson is still on Nexon-we’ve got a chance.”
“But it’s a race.”
“Yes. It’s a race. And we can’t wait around for you to get a clean bill of health from Dr. Galen before we start,” Derec said pointedly, bracing for an argument.
The argument never came. “You’re right,” she said simply, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and feeling for the floor. “Where to?”
Before that question could be considered, there was Dr. Galen to deal with. The robot came bursting into the room before Katherine’s bare feet even had a chance to pick up a chill from the floor.
“Please return to the bed, patient Katherine,” Dr. Galen requested. “Florence can see to whatever needs you might have.”
Derec was girding himself for another protracted argument, but Katherine surprised him. “I’ll go where I want when I want,” she snapped. “And if you start trying to act like a warden instead of a doctor I’ll have your brain reprogrammed for basket-weaving.”
“I must protest strongly-”
“Am I in danger of dying?”
“No, patient Katherine. But your recovery-”
“Then save your protest for your medical log: ‘Patient Katherine Burgess disregarded recommended rehabilitation program.’ Isn’t that the phraseology? Derec and I are going for a walk. If you don’t want me catching pneumonia you’d better get me some normal clothes. And something for my feet.”
Any human addressed in that tone would have been clenching his fists and strongly considering using them. But Dr. Galen only nodded slightly. “I will have clothing brought.”
“If it’s not here in five minutes I’m going out like this,” she warned him. “And don’t get any ideas about following us around. If I have any problems, Derec will be there to bring me back.”
When the robot left, Derec stared at Katherine in amazement. “How’d you learn how to do that?”
She shrugged. “Medical robots are as bossy as they come, but they can’t make it stick unless you’re really in some danger. I’m not.”
“All the same, it would have taken me twenty minutes to get to the same point, if I’d ever gotten there at all.”
“That’s because you always let yourself get suckered into arguing with the robots. I just give them orders. Much more efficient.”
“I guess it is, sometimes,” Derec said. “But you ought to know, in about four hours your dermal analgesic is going to wear off and your skin is going to start feeling like someone’s scraping it off with a spatula.”
As Derec spoke, Florence entered, wordlessly laid a sleeveless jump suit and a pair of foot pillows on the end of the bed, and then left.
“Thanks for the warning. Let’s make a point of being back in three and a half,” Katherine said. “Now get out of here while I change.”
By the time Katherine emerged from the ward, Derec had decided to go along with her proposal that they look for Aranimas’s ship first. He had several reasons for surrendering that the ship was the last known location of the key, that even if the key had been found and removed it might logically be kept nearby. But the most important reason was that if he didn’t show her early that she was wrong, she’d soon be trying to order him around as she did the robots.
The electronic map on the wall of the lobby offered little help, Rockliffe Station was built out of three connected spheres. The central sphere, called C Section, contained some forty levels from top to bottom. Two satellite spheres barely half as large were anchored to it by cylindrical pylons only a few levels in diameter.
Large areas within the station’s outline were colored black and labeled “Inactive.” No amount of coaxing could persuade the map’s controller to reveal what facilities were in those areas or even show the traffic grid.
Less than fifteen percent of C Section was drawn in with the pale blue color, labels, and identifying symbols of the active zone. Most of E Section, which contained the known dock facilities, was blue. But W Section, together with its connecting pylon, was completely black.
“There,” Katherine said, pointing to W Section. “They probably had an east terminal and a west terminal.”
“Symmetrical design,” Derec agreed. “Makes sense.”
“It’s a good place to start, anyway.”
“Let’s hope that those sections are just closed down, not closed off.”
The hospital was located near the center of C Section, three levels down from the main thoroughfare. Together, Katherine and Derec climbed up to the main level and headed west. There were no physical barriers, though the four-lane express slidewalk was not operating, obliging them to walk.
But past the boundary of subsection 42, the corridor lights were out and the directional “lightworms” were off. Based on what he had seen during his earlier excursion, Derec had thought that might be the case. He had hoped for either a local control option or a presence sensor, but in vain. With eighteen subsections of blackness ahead of them, they were forced to turn back.
They recruited the first robot they encountered to show them where hand lanterns were kept, and soon returned to the subsection 42 threshold. The beams of the powerful portable lights stabbed deep into the cavelike corridor and created a cozy island of light around them. But they were very aware of the darkness beyond, the way their footsteps echoed hollowly, the chill of the unused spaces they were entering.
Ten minutes of walking brought them to the great triple pressure seal doors at the outerboundary of C Section. The doors were resting retracted in their grooves, apparently deactivated. Past the interlock, the throughway narrowed to a single-lane slidewalk in each direction with far fewer jumpoffs and side passages than before.
Derec expected to find robots guarding the entry to W Section, and told Katherine so. But when they reached the far end of the slidewalk, they were still alone. The west docks were there, just as they had guessed. But the main public entrance to the complex was not even locked.
“No guards, no locks,” Derec said as they stood on the threshold. “This looks very bad. Maybe they had one of the tugs take the ship and stand off a hundred klicks from the base.”
“Let’s find out,” Katherine said, starting ahead.
If the west docks were being held for possible military use as Dr. Galen had implied, it was merely as a line item on some logistics officer’s list of resources. There was no sign that the complex had even been or ever would be anything other than a general purpose cargo and passenger transfer node. All the familiar facilities were there: Import Registry, Customs, the travelers’ Personals.
Katherine led Derec past the unstaffed security stations and up the loading ramp to the upper concourse. Along the length of the high-ceilinged room were six check-in stations, six glassed-in waiting areas, and six two-story viewports each of which looked out onto an enormous docking slip and space beyond. All six slips were empty and dark. Nothing could be seen through the viewports except a few dim and distant stars.
“Downstairs?” Derec asked.
Her lips pressed into a tight line, Katherine answered by leading the way back down the ramp. The lower concourse seemed like a mirror image of the upper. All six bays on the lower concourse were dark-but one was not empty.
“Bingo,” Derec said, sprinting through the check-in station and up the boarding tunnel.
“I don’t understand,” she said, dogging his heels. “Where are the guards? There ought to be guards.”
“Maybe they’re inside,” Derec said, pulling up short. The boarding tunnel was connected to the emergency hatch they had seen being installed, and across the lock-side seam there was a security seal. It was a token seal, however, meant only to give notice that the hatch had been opened. It could not stop them from going aboard.
Nothing inside had been disturbed, it seemed, since they had been found and removed. For that matter, except for cracks in three of the screens above the great command console, it did not even seem as though there had been an explosion on the main deck. Yet there were a dozen blackened fist-sized pits in the walls and ceiling to mark where the charges had been.
“You don’t blow up your house because a burglar breaks in,” Katherine observed. “Aranimas’s security would have been tailored to his own species. Whatever you want to call what we tripped-”
“Radiation bomb, maybe.”
“-must have been designed to kill or disable an Erani without doing serious damage to the ship.”
“It did a good enough job on us.”
Though they could not find Aranimas’s stylus, whatever locked the deck plates in place had apparently been disabled when the ship was powered down. Twenty minutes later, they had torn up the whole floor, but found nothing.
“Shall we put it back?” Katherine asked, gesturing at the mess they had created.
“No point. The robots are going to know we were here anyway.”
“They have the key, don’t they?”
“Almost certainly. If they don’t, Jacobson does.”
Katherine sighed. “How are we ever going to find it? The size of this station-even if it were just lying in open view in a corridor somewhere, it’d take us weeks to find it. And you know that they’ve hidden it better than that.”
“There’s a lot of places they could put it that you can be sure they didn’t,” Derec said, looking around the main cabin one last time. “They won’t leave it unattended, you can count on that. Not like they left this ship.”
“Do you have any idea why they let us in here?”
Derec nodded slowly. “I think so. To send us a message. To tell us just how harmless they think we are. That there’s nothing we can do to them.” He sighed. “And they may just be right. Let’s get out of here, huh?”
Chapter 17. Partners In Crime
Squeak.
Brush.
Squeak.
Brush.
The sounds were soft and distant, but they were there, all right. If either he or Katherine had been talking, as they had been the first third of the way back, there would have been no way he would have heard them. But ever since they had fallen silent in individual introspection, the sounds had played at the threshold of Derec’s hearing.
At first he had thought them echoes of their own footsteps, or merely the product of paranoia. But as they were passing into subsection 51, Derec decided that they were real and not imagined. Something was following them.
“Don’t say anything and don’t turn around,” Derec whispered. “You hold both lamps. Keep walking.”
“What?”
“Ssssh. Keep walking. Keep the beams angled down so you won’t be silhouetted. Try to make it look like you’re two people.”
“What’s this about?” she demanded. But she contained her curiosity to a whisper, and kept walking as he had asked.
Handing the torch to her at arm’s length, Derec slipped away into the darkness and squeezed back against the wall. As he waited, he wondered who he was waiting for. One of Dr. Galen’s robots? One of Jacobson’s? Or Aranimas? He wished he still had the gas aerosol, or had kept his torch to use as a club.
Have to do it on your own, he told himself, dropping to his knees and huddling against the base of the wall.
The shadow was past Derec before he even saw it. Only when he looked back toward Katherine and caught a glimpse of it silhouetted against the glow of her torch did he move. Gathering himself up, he took three running steps and launched himself at the figure’s legs. He struck cloth and bone, not syntheskin and metal, and the stranger came down in a heap on top of Derec, squealing protest.
They wrestled furiously in the darkness, each with different objectives. Derec was trying to get a firm grip on an arm, leg, or neck and pin the other to the floor. His adversary was trying only to break Derec’s grip and escape.
Derec was much the more skilled. He had no difficulty getting what he thought were solid holds on the other. The difficulty was in maintaining them for more than a few seconds. Had they been wrestling in competition, he would have been getting the takedowns, his opponent the escape points. Part of the reason was the other’s compact strength, and part the slippery fabric its clothes were made of.
But in the dark, luck counted for more than skill or strength, and neutralized both. The two combatants rolled from one side of the passageway to the other, neither able to gain a lasting advantage. Then, with a sudden twist and a lucky grab, Derec found himself on top, straddling the other’s waist and with each of his hands locked in an iron grip on one of his opponent’s wrists.
Just then Katherine shone one of the lamps full on the shadow’s face. His adversary squinted up at him out of eyes nearly hidden by mottled gold and brown fur, and its mouth twisted into a familiar grimace.
“Wolruf!” Derec exclaimed.
“‘Ur stronger than ‘u look, Derec,” Wolruf said, still grinning. “But I ‘ope ‘u know I let ‘u win.”
Derec grinned back. “As ugly as you are, I’m awfully glad to see you. I was afraid we’d lost you when we were cut loose.”
“Why are you treating it like some long-lost friend?” Katherine demanded. “It’s Aranimas’s fetch-boy.”
“Girl,” he corrected. “Besides, you don’t understand,” he added, helping Wolruf to her feet. “She’s my friend.”
“Partners,” Wolruf said proudly.
“Oh? Then why was it skulking along behind us like that?”
“Following,” Wolruf said.
“What were you planning to do?”
“I never ‘urt ‘u-”
“You were waiting for us to find the key, weren’t you? And then you were going to steal it-”
“Katherine-she’s sick,” Derec said suddenly.
“What?”
“Look at her,” he urged. “Look at me,” he added, reclaiming his torch and turning its beam on himself. His clothing was covered with long gold and brown hairs. In the light of Katherine’s torch, the alien’s fur was so thin in patches that Derec could see the pale leathery skin beneath. And there was something about Wolruf’s eyes that telegraphed the distress she had been enduring.
“What’s wrong with you?” Katherine asked, a faint note of suspicion tainting her concern.
“ ’Ungry,” she said simply.
“Of course,” Derec said. “She’s starving. There isn’t even any food she could steal here.”
Katherine squinted at the alien through narrow-slitted eyes. “Is that why you were following us? Not to get the key, but to find out where we were getting our food?”
“I don’ care about the jewel,” Wolruf said. “Juss ‘ungry. I ‘ide, follow the robots, look for food. I follow them everywherr and never smell food.”
“You don’t like the robots, do you? It isn’t just Alpha,” Derec said.
“Brood-captain tell me a ‘undred times, never trust strange animal until ‘u’ve seen its meal table,” she said weakly.
It sounded like an attempt at a joke. “And robots never eat,” Derec completed. “Well, we’ll get you something. I hope we can get you something. Can you eat what we eat?”
“Just hold on,” Katherine interrupted. “You were on the ship with us the whole time? And you’ve been hiding out ever since?”
“I wass coming through interlock-Alpha, too-when heard the bomb go off,” Wolruf said. “Noise bri
ng other Erani. Controls dead an’ ‘u not much better. So I cut us loose. When robots come I ‘ide, when ship dock I slip out. Been ‘iding ever since.”
“Where’s Aranimas?”
“Don’t know. Left behind.” Wolruf was noticeably unsteady on her feet.
“We can sort the rest of this out later,” Derec said sharply. “We’ve got to get her something, quickly.”
“Not so quickly,” Katherine said, stepping closer. “Where have you been hiding? Here, in the dark sections?”
“Mostly. No robots here. I like the dark better than I like robots.”
“How much of the dark sections have you been through, looking for food?”
“Lots,” Wolruf said. “But the jewel’s not there, if thass what ‘u’re wondering.”
“How do you know?” Katherine demanded. “Because you put it somewhere else?”
“I don’ want the jewel. Juss trouble for everyone,” Wolruf said. “But I know wherr it iss.”
Derec impulsively grabbed the alien by both cheeks and planted a kiss on her forehead. “All right!” he declared. “We’re in business!”
Katherine held her enthusiasm in check. “How do you know?” she repeated.
“I follow when they took it from the ship. I think they take it to ‘umans, ‘umans ‘ave food. Wrong. Robots took it wherr therr are lots of robots, no ‘umans, no food. I almoss got caught”
“Do you remember exactly where? Can you take us there?” Katherine asked.
“Thought robots ‘ur servants,” Wolruf said, wrinkling her face in puzzlement. “Why not juss ask them to bring it to ‘u?”
“Nevermind about that,” Derec said gently. Answer Katherine’s questions. Do you remember the way? Can you take us there?”
“I remember, always, so I can take ‘u. Don’ want to. Don’ want key, don’ want to see robots or robots to see me. But ‘u be my friend and feed me and I be ‘ur friend and show ‘u. Okay?”
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