by Jake Elwood
He nodded and pointed at her PAD. "Same code, too."
"Well, that was easy. What next?" She already knew what was next, though.
Jerry apparently knew what she was thinking. He said, "Maybe a cautious approach is best. You know, think things through, select the best strategy."
"If you're waffling this much, you already know her address."
"Maybe," Jerry said. When she glared at him he nodded. "Yes. I know where she lives. What I don't know is what sort of security she has, whether she's alone, or how quickly we'll be arrested if we do something stupid."
She didn't answer, just looked at him.
"Fine," he said. "You're not using my lawyer when we're arrested." He tapped an icon on the dash screen and gave the car an address.
Chapter 14
Dovecote Tower featured security gates at ground level, which meant Cassie and Jerry left their guns in the car and headed inside. They walked through the gates without incident, but a young woman in a dark uniform intercepted them on the far side. She looked uncertain but determined, someone just out of school and trying to do well at her first real job. She held up a hand, looked Cassie in the eye, and said, "You're wearing scrambler collars."
Cassie gave the kid a frosty glare. "I value my privacy."
"Well, I understand, but you can't come into the building with a scrambler on."
Cassie lifted an eyebrow. "I'm in the building."
"Well, yes, but you're not allowed to have …"
"Throw me out, then," Cassie said, and pushed past her, Jerry on her heels. The woman trailed after them until they stepped into the bounce tubes. Cassie could see her staring at them in frustration as the tubes whisked them up and out of sight.
Slan had an apartment on the nineteenth floor. Cassie stepped out of the bounce tube into a small lobby, Jerry a reassuring bulk at her back. A reception bot with a broad plastic smile turned to greet them. "Welcome to Dovecote Tower. May I help you?"
"No, thank you." She went left while Jerry went right. There were only four suites on the nineteenth floor, each with a fanciful name. Cassie found doors marked "Sunrise Rooms" and "Coral Rooms."
"Here it is," Jerry called. She hurried back, ignoring the querulous robot, and found him attaching his PAD to a panel beside a door marked "Aurora Rooms." As she reached him, the door slid open.
Slan had a corner suite with windows giving a nice view of the city center. Cassie and Jerry marched into a wide, airy room with entertainment units along one wall and a broad desk under the windows. Cassie caught a quick impression of deep carpets and expensive art, but she focussed her attention on the room's sole occupant, a figure seated behind the big desk.
Slan was a stern-faced woman in a business suit, young at first glance, but the skin around her eyes showed the tell-tale signs of cosmetic redesign. She was old enough to be a grandmother, Cassie decided, as she leaned across the desk and hauled Slan out of her chair.
PADs, data chips, and flimsies scattered across the carpet as Cassie dragged the woman across the desk. When Slan lay on her stomach and chest on the desktop, face toward the floor, Cassie wedged a forearm across the back of her neck and said, "Why are you after my family?"
"Security and police are on their way," said a smooth mechanical voice. "You would do well to release Ms. Slan immediately."
For the benefit of the eavesdropping AI Cassie said, "Let's get her to the car." Then she took a firm grip on the woman's collar, hauled her the rest of the way across the desk and onto the floor, and dragged her to her feet. Jerry led the way to the hall door, Cassie on his heels. Slan struggled, thumping Cassie's ribs with her elbows, so Cassie bounced her off the doorframe as they went through. "Knock it off."
Slan's legs went limp and she sagged in Cassie's grasp, gripping the door frame and bawling for help. Jerry reached past Cassie, murmuring, "May I?"
"Be my guest." Cassie let go and stepped back.
Jerry buried his fist in the woman's hair and said, "Your scalp is coming with me. With or without the rest of you." He hauled her up, and Slan rose, her legs stiffening. "Now come on."
They hurried down the corridor and through the lobby. Jerry stepped into a bounce tube with Slan, holding her close in the confined space, and they shot up out of sight. When the doorway of the tube flashed green, Cassie followed.
She came out five floors higher. One more tube would take them to the building's top floor. Jerry, though, stared down the corridor. Cassie turned, her hand going to the spot on her hip where her pistol usually hung. "What? What is it?"
Then she saw it. Steel-gray shapes rising past the window at the end of the corridor. Security bots, heading for the roof.
"This way," Jerry snapped, heading toward the window. He paused in front of the transparent panel as one last bot rose past them, then shoved Slan to the floor by his feet. A small red emergency panel decorated the wall beside the window, and Jerry flipped it open.
"Emergency use only," said a prim artificial voice. "Security services have been notified."
"What are you doing?" Slan said, her voice quavering. Cassie felt a moment of remorse, wondering if the woman might be innocent. Well, they would know for certain soon enough.
"The window should not be opened without deploying the evacuation chute," the artificial voice complained. "Serious injury or death could result."
Jerry tugged sharply on something in the depth of the wall and the floor-to-ceiling window swung suddenly wide. An alarm blared, and Cassie felt a rush of wind as warm air poured out of the corridor. Slan let out a squeak of fear.
Cassie looked down at her. The woman wore a pinstriped jacket with some sort of dark soft sweater underneath. A white blouse peeked out from under the collar of the sweater. Cassie yanked the kneeling woman forward and shoved her face-down on the floor, then peeled the jacket off her. Slan cried out, a wordless wail of distress, and struggled as Cassie tried to turn her over. Finally Cassie took a page from Jerry's book and grabbed her by the hair. Slan stood, and Cassie shoved her against the wall, then grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled yanked the fabric up and over the woman's head. Slan was blinded, her face covered by the sweater, her arms sticking out to either side. She reached behind her for the hem of the sweater, and Cassie pulled her arms down.
Jerry pressed a button inside the emergency panel and the escape chute deployed, a long flexible tube of micro-thin fabric strong enough to support a dozen people or more. With a faint mechanical whir the top end of the tube drew tight and sealed around the window. The fabric billowed a bit with escaping air, looking entirely too flimsy to support a human being. Cassie knew it was reasonably safe, though.
"What do you want?" Slan shrieked through the fabric of her sweater.
Cassie shoved her toward the window. "Two more steps and you're going out that window. Five seconds after that, you're hitting the pavement at fifty meters per second."
Slan whimpered and tried to edge backward. She hadn't recognized the small sounds of the chute deploying, then.
"Why are you after my family?" Cassie demanded.
"I don't know what you—"
Cassie shoved her forward. Slan stumbled, blind, screaming and turning her head. When she tried to back up Cassie was right behind her. "Talk," she told the woman. "Talk or die."
A door slid open in the corridor. A fat man stuck his head out, gaped at them with wide, frightened eyes, and ducked back inside.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Slan shrieked. "You have the wrong person, I swear, I don't know what you—"
There was no time to be delicate, not with cops and security closing in. Cassie shoved the woman forward and out the window. Slan screamed as she fell, sounding unhinged with terror. Cassie gave Jerry a tight grin, then threw herself out the window after the woman.
She slid. The cloth of the tube tugged at her on all sides, slowing her just enough to save her from serious injury. She dropped, blinded by the fabric whistling past, her knees and shoulders
and elbows growing warm with friction. There would be no protrusions on the side of the building, not in the track of an escape chute, but she thumped against the flat outer wall as she fell, hitting the smooth panels hard enough to bruise.
Somewhere just above her she could hear Jerry gasping and cursing as he slid. She would have to get out of his way the instant she landed, or he'd come down on top of her. She didn't care if he landed on Slan.
The woman's endless shriek cut off abruptly with a fleshy sound of impact. An instant later, Cassie's feet hit something soft. The chute expanded at the bottom, and Cassie tumbled sideways, landing hard on one shoulder. Escape chutes were an improvement over staying trapped in a burning building, but they were definitely for emergency use only.
Another squawk from Slan marked Jerry's arrival as he landed on her. He grunted and tumbled to the side. Cassie hauled herself to her feet, ignoring dizziness and too many bumps to count. Slan was just pulling the hem of the sweater down from her face.
Cassie's knee came down on the side of the woman's head, and she pressed down, hard. Slan's head turned under the pressure, her cheek pressing into the hard concrete of the sidewalk beside the building. She squirmed and yelped, mouth opening and closing as she fought for each panicked breath.
"Why are you after me? This is your very last chance to talk."
Slan, completely unstuck with terror, started to babble. "It's O'Malley. He showed up on the roof and saw our team getting ready. We need to know how much he knows. We tried to capture him, and then we decided to kill him. And we went after you because we need to interrogate you. Oh, God, please don't k—"
Cassie ground her knee into the side of the woman's head, silencing her. Men shouted, not too far away. The cops would be on top of them in a matter of moments. "What's it all about?" she demanded.
"The princess! We have to get the princess."
"Hey!" a voice shouted, and Cassie looked up. The chute had dropped them along the side wall of the building. A man and woman in security uniforms rounded the corner from the front, the woman reaching for a weapon while the man lifted his wrist to his mouth. "They're here! West side of the tower!"
Muttering a curse, Cassie sprang up and started to run, Jerry right beside her. She could hear Slan blubbering behind her as she ran for the cross street between buildings. A stun shot sizzled the air in front of her, close enough that one of her pumping hands went numb. She heard the second shot as a faint hum that sent an electric tingle across her shoulder blades.
The next shot hit her dead centre in the middle of the back. Her body went rigid and her momentum carried her forward. She watched helplessly as the hard pavement of the street rushed toward her.
Jerry's arms snagged her out of the air at the last instant. He slung her across his shoulder, her face against his stomach, her legs dangling down his back. He ran, the jolt of his shoulder against her stomach a distant thing through the numbing cocoon of the stun blast.
An icy rush engulfed her left foot, and she tried to smile with paralyzed lips. Her foot had just stopped a stun blast aimed at Jerry's back. A moment later Jerry sprinted into the lobby of the adjacent building, putting glass and steel between the two of them and the incoming stun shots.
The hunters had to be closing in. It would be a moment's respite only, but a moment was all they needed. Jerry thundered through the ground floor, dashing past startled shoppers browsing the kiosks on either side, and charged out through the exit doors on the far side. He dumped her into one of the city's uncountable autonomous cabs, scrambled in behind her, and directed the cab to a posh hotel.
In the meantime, Cassie went to work tensing and relaxing her muscles, trying to work off the stun. Pins and needles erupted through her whole body, but she managed to wiggle her hands and one foot. She was face-down on the cushions with Jerry sitting on her legs. He worked her legs out from under him, then dug his fingers into the muscles of her calves, massaging hard. Cassie fought a scream as life returned to her limbs.
The cab went dead a block short of the hotel, then started to back up. That would be the police, taking control remotely. Jerry hit the emergency stop button, which also popped the doors. The two of them left the cab, Cassie leaning heavily on Jerry, his arm around her shoulders holding her up. Her left foot dragged, but she was able to hobble along on her right leg as they switched cabs and headed for a popular restaurant.
With every block of travel and every switch the net grew larger and more complex for the police. They would be safe soon, especially as Cassie regained mobility. She leaned back against the seat of the cab, brought her paralyzed foot into her lap, and massaged her sole, gritting her teeth against the pain.
"Princess," Jerry said. "What in space did she mean?"
"Highstar," Cassie told him, then hissed as her foot started to wake up. "Kaia or Kia or something. She's not actually a princess, but everyone calls her that. Daughter of the high muck-a-muck of Skyland. She's supposed to be coming down with her father to have a tour and visit all us grubby land-dwelling primitives."
"And someone's after her," Jerry said. "Some mystery cabal of landscapers and assassins." He shook his head. "Is it just me or is this deeply goofy?"
"More to the point," Cassie said, "What do we do next?" She frowned. "Lark's school group is supposed to meet this Highstar girl."
"There's no reason to think she'll be in any danger," Jerry reassured her. "They'll probably call off their attack anyway. We've just taken out their assassin and forced a confession out of one of their leaders. Slan will go into hiding."
"Why? It's not like we can touch her."
"Conspiracy breeds paranoia." Jerry grinned. "You wouldn't believe some of the crazy things I saw people do when I was a bounty hunter. When you know people are hunting you, you over-react."
Cassie, who knew what it was like to be hunted, nodded.
"We've thrown them into chaos," Jerry continued. "The princess is probably safe now. You and I need to get out of town and keep a low profile for a while." He touched the scrambler collar at his throat. "These little toys won't stop witnesses from describing us. We'll lie low, and when Lark gets home, the three of us will take a little off-world vacation for a couple of months. We'll come back when the heat has died down."
She gave him a dubious look. "We should pull her out of school right now. Take her with us."
Jerry shook his head. "That draws attention to her and us. And it puts her right beside the only two people who are actually targets in all this. No, she's safest right where she is."
Cassie gave him a long, searching look, then nodded. "I guess you're right. She'll be fine."
On the other side of the city a shaken and bedraggled Dorienne Slan let herself into a darkened room in what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. Three men and two women looked up from their chairs, silent, eyes suspicious and accusing.
"I'm blown," Slan said. "Everything connected to Elysian is hot now."
A cold-faced older man in a charcoal jumpsuit scowled at her. "That's enough to bring this whole house of cards tumbling down."
"Not for a few days," she said. "And a few days is all we need." She rubbed her hands together, trying to portray more confidence than she felt. "We have to adjust our plan again, but that's all right. We can be flexible. We have to speed things up." She looked at the older man. "Don't worry, Hiram. We'll get your son back."
There was a quick babble of voices that trailed off when Hiram stood. "When do we grab her?"
"Tomorrow," said Slan. "She's meeting a bunch of schoolkids. We'll take her then. And we'll kill anyone who gets in our way."
Episode 5 – The Wrong Girl
Chapter 15
The Hall of Heroes took Lark's breath away.
Completely secular in function, the building was modeled on the ancient cathedrals of Earth. Lark followed the rest of the class down a room so long it felt like a street, listening to the echo of footsteps on the swirled white stone floor. The ceiling was magnifi
cent, all curved vaults painted with murals of the first colonists. Much of the detail was wasted, however, because the ceiling soared so high above the floor. Lark had never been in such a tall room.
Bronze statues lined the center of the long hall, solemn figures five meters tall, frozen in heroic poses as they built or dug or operated vast machines. The heroes of the hall weren't especially heroic in Lark's carefully censored opinion. Sure, they had worked hard, but they had done it for their own immediate benefit. They weren't heroes like Cassie and Jerry. They were, apparently, all that Zemoth had.
"Now, remember," Miss Grimsby said, "when Miss Highstar gets here you're all to stand politely in line. No flocking around her like a lot of pigeons. Is that clear?"
The students muttered their acquiescence. Gentle nagging reminders came to them every few minutes, from Miss Grimsby, from the planetside organizers of the visit, and from the Skyland security people. The adults seemed to see Lark and her classmates as a mob of unwashed monkeys just waiting to go on a rampage, and Lark was sick of it.
"All right, this is our spot." She gestured the children into a more-or-less straight line against the wall, close by a statue of a young woman hoisting a communication satellite over her head as if she was about to heave it into orbit.
Other groups lined the wall on either side. Lark could see a dozen kitchen staff murmuring quietly on her right, and beyond them a cluster of office workers. Custom demanded that planet-dwellers sneer at the snobs from Skyland, but a couple of hundred people were nevertheless queuing up for no other reason than to shake hands with President Highstar and his daughter.
A Skyland security team made its way up the line, a couple of stern men in body armor flanking a woman with a hand scanner. The men watched alertly as she played the scanner over the waiting Zemothans.
"I almost wish someone had a gun or a bomb," Millie whispered. "I'm bored!"
