by David Drake
Something thundered like an express train through the duct to Ella's right as she paused to examine the wall of aluminum sheet/glass sponge sandwich. She had brought the tiny glow lamp in fear that a brighter light would expose her to workers on their ordinary duties, as well to de Kuyper and others of Spenser's associates. She had not expected the bottom level of the habitat to be so unpopulated.
And she could not have conceived anyplace being this dark.
The glow lamp showed nothing, not even shapes, more than arm's length from its bioluminescent surface, so it was only by sidling across the face of the wall that Ella could examine it.
Many of the smaller ducts and conduits that had made her footing doubtful disappeared into the barrier. One torso-thick pipe was painted blue. The coding meant nothing to her, nothing certain to anyone from outside Sky Devon - but the access plate near the wall had not been dogged down properly after the last time it was removed. A draft of air, clean-smelling and rather warm in this environment, drew her attention to the line.
The handle attached to the panel beneath looked so normal in the context that Ella did not immediately realize that it was what she was searching for. She touched it - bent tube stock, the ends flattened and glued to the paneling - and tugged it gingerly toward her with the hand that held the light.
Nothing moved.
Idiot! There had to be a catch, a fastener.
A simple draw bolt was mounted a few centimeters under the handle. Ella slid it open; set her glow lamp on the floor with a delicacy instinctive even in these circumstances; and poised, her left hand on the handle, and the needle stunner held vertically beside her right cheek.
She had to remember that the gun shot things out - that it wasn't simply a bludgeon of dense plastic. She knew how to use the stunner properly, if not expertly; but if the wrong reflexes took over in a crisis, she would fail.
Also, she would die.
Ella squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and tugged at the door handle with all her strength. The lower edge of the panel scrunched slightly, but it pivoted outward without serious binding. De Kuyper was an expert craftsman, and he had used as much skill in executing this project of his own as he would have if it were part of his regular employment.
The other side of the opening was an office. The muted lights in the molding were on automatically because a human being was in the room. The effect on Ella's dark-adapted eyes was equivalent to stepping from a cave into sunlight.
She sneezed.
“Mmmh!” grunted Sam Yates in response.
The big security man was seated in the chair within arm's reach of Ella as she pointed the stunner through the opening with an earnestness meant to atone for her initial stumble.
Yates had been stripped, and no effort of which his muscles were capable had been sufficient to affect his bonds. The Afrikaner had immobilized his prisoners with cargo tape, designed to strap payloads onto the barges which ferried produce from Sky Devon across the human universe.
Nor had de Kuyper made the amateur's mistake of using a piece of furniture as an integral part of the bonds. Yates' ankles were taped together, his wrists were taped together and a third length of tape connected his wrists and ankles. Only then was a loop thrown around his torso and the chair back to anchor him there. Even if the security man had been able to dismantle the chair, he would have been no closer to freedom or mobility.
Yesilkov was similarly strapped into the visitors' chair across the desk.
The office door was open. Through it Ella saw the corner of a laboratory bench and banks of data processing equipment against the wall beyond. She could not see or hear anyone else in the lab, but the lights were on. Clumsily – her eyes were glued on the doorway and her right arm held the stunner out as stiffly as a girder - she stepped through the square opening into Spenser's office.
Ella's fingernails were long enough to be awkward when she keyed data into her computers, but now they lifted the end of the tape over Yates' mouth enough to give her fingers purchase.
She'd had first-aid training years before in the belief that anyone who planned to study non-standard human societies had better not count on the medical facilities taken for granted by those who remained in the more civilized areas of Earth. It stood her in good stead now as she jerked the tape away with a single crisp motion that isolated the pain instead of spreading it excruciatingly across a cautious pull.
It was only after the motion was complete that she realized what would have happened if the prisoner's mouth were closed by the same cargo tape that bound his limbs. Adhesive meant to anchor pallets of cargo against rocket thrust would have lifted the skin from Yates' face.
There wasn't any problem. The prisoners would have been useless to de Kuyper if he could not free them to talk himself; and no one talks usefully when his mouth gurgles with blood from his flayed lips.
“He's out there,” Yates whispered, gesturing toward the lab with a toss of his head. “He's waiting by the air lock to let Spenser in.”
“She's not coming,” Ella said grimly as she reached toward the strap holding the security man's ankles together.
The anthropologist had expected her fellows to be tied, not taped, but she knew there was no likelihood she could quickly unknot ropes a strong man had tied. The steak knife she carried in her purse was perfectly satisfactory for her present need.
The button on the handle was awkward, because her left hand wasn't practiced with the tool. Nonetheless, she pressed the button on the side of the handle with her index finger so that the blade snicked out from between its ceramic guards, giving its edge a sharpening touch as it did so.
Ella sawed, her tongue set grimly, and lurched against
Yates as the tough reinforcements finally parted beneath her blade.
“The wrists,” said the security man in a low voice; but instead, Ella cut away in two quick passes the strap holding Yates to the chair. She was afraid to cut close to the man when she knew she was clumsy. The tape required more effort to cut than the prisoner's flesh would if she slipped.
The captives' clothing was stacked on a corner of the desk with a neatness that seemed typical of de Kuyper. Maybe she would feel less awkward when her companions were dressed again. ...
Yates determinedly stretched his arms out behind him. “My wrists,” he repeated.
“Mmmm!” said Sonya Yesilkov as the Afrikaner walked back into the office.
De Kuyper was even more startled than Ella Bradley, for she at least had known consciously that the Afrikaner was nearby. He had the better reflexes for the situation, though. He launched himself without hesitation toward the startled woman.
The knife he had brought into the office for other purposes was open in his hand, while Ella's fingers could neither swing the stunner on target nor squeeze its trigger.
Sonya Yesilkov thrust herself and the chair to which she was strapped, pushing against the desk with her bare toes. Her shoulder slammed de Kuyper in the stomach as he started to leap the desk.
“Shoot! Shoot!” screamed Yates, rising to lift his bound arms off the chair back. He teetered, unable to spread his legs.
Ella braced herself, staring at the gun with both eyes. It expanded into a black blur. All sound paused. There was only motion and stray color beyond the fuzzy outline of the weapon. She shot at empty air, and the world locked into normal focus again.
Yesilkov had tangled the Afrikaner with her legs and those of the chair. The two of them crashed into the front of the desk and both fell to the floor.
She couldn't hold him. De Kuyper pushed himself away
with three limbs and stabbed with the knife in his right hand, a motion as instinctive as the disemboweling stroke a leopard makes with its clawed hind legs.
The point sank a half-inch deep in the plastic chair back and stuck there. De Kuyper rose with his teeth bared in savage intention. The needle that Ella Bradley triggered by sheer willpower snapped into the shell of the Afrikaner's right ear.
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Nerve spasms flung de Kuyper across the room. The instant effect was that of being slapped in the head by a heavyweight boxer.
Slapped, not punched. There were too few nerve endings in the skin and cartilage where the needle glittered to transmit the full paralyzing charge that a solid hit could deliver.
Ella squeezed the trigger again and shot three more needles out the empty doorway.
Yesilkov was making smothered squalls like those of a cat in a bag. She could see there was no one in the doorway through which the needles sparked, but the desk blocked her sight of her fellows. She couldn't even twist her head far enough to see de Kuyper behind her.
“Mmmm!”
She didn't know about the knife sticking into the chair back that had saved her life; but anyway, that was the risk you took when you jumped an armed man.
“At him!” Yates cried. He was unable to hold his balance any longer, but he managed to teeter across the top of the desk instead of falling onto the floor in back of it.
Ella swung the gun with a forcefulness more fitting for an eight-kilo hammer. She fired again. The needle shattered in a purple nimbus on a filing cabinet along the sidewall.
Jan de Kuyper was half blind, and the pain that wracked the side of his head was no less real for being superficial. He knew needle stunners and knew that the effect would wear off in another ten or twenty seconds.
But he also knew that he was cold meat if he tried to grapple with the shooter immediately - even with a clown like the frozen-faced woman he saw through curtains of dazzling pain. He bolted for the door to the lab.
Yesilkov kicked at the Afrikaner as he jumped past her, but her bare feet only brushed his pants's leg. “Mmh!” she grunted as Yates shouted, “That's right, that's - “
De Kuyper leaped out of the office. Ella Bradley's arm traversed like a gun turret while her index finger squeezed down on the trigger and needles clicked and bounced at waist height from the front wall. It was the same motion that Steeks had used to paralyze her while she struggled in her apartment.
The momentary hesitation when de Kuyper changed the direction of his flight meant that a needle buried itself near the base of the Afrikaner's spine even as he slid for cover behind the laboratory bench.
“You got him!” Yates shouted, sprawling across the desk like a hog trussed for slaughter. “My hands! Free my hands!”
Ella hadn't dropped the steak knife, though for a moment she didn't remember that or even remember that the tool existed. De Kuyper was howling somewhere out of sight. She did not know whether the thump of equipment she heard meant the Afrikaner was getting a weapon of his own or just thrashing wildly.
Deliberately, because the seconds of panic had burned away all ordinary fear and left Ella's intellect in full control, she set the stunner down on the desktop and switched the knife to her right hand - the blade snicked in and out of its guards as her right thumb replaced her left index finger on the button.
It was more important that she free the security man quickly and safely than that she stare over the sights of a gun she didn't understand toward an empty door through which a killer would return when he was ready.
Her blade slid through the cargo tape with a rustling the razor edge would make in gristle.
“Here,” she said, placing the stunner firmly in Yates' hand before the big man was even sure that his wrists were free. “But don't move until I've got your ankles.”
She bent to her next task while Yates braced himself on his side, a position as awkward as it was ridiculous for the naked gunman.
“There!” said Ella, and the security man pivoted off the desk in a motion made easier by the muscles that still had much of the tone they had gotten in Earth gravity. Ella stepped around the piece of built-in furniture and reached the sprawled police lieutenant as Sam Yates fired at the Afrikaner, who had just wormed his way into sight.
De Kuyper fired back with a plasma discharger.
Sam Yates' needle spattered harmlessly on the dense glass of the laboratory bench, but perhaps the wicked sound of it startled the Afrikaner into squeezing his own trigger a millisecond early. Yates' hair stood up and his bare left side prickled in an echo of injuries still unhealed, but it was the back wall of the office and not his torso that exploded in a ball of flame.
Ella moved with programmed precision. She slashed the strap between Yesilkov's wrists and ankles, then freed the wrists from one another. The desktop protected both women from the globe of vaporized glass and metal, but the anthropologist's knife hand did not even twitch at the flash and bang.
She was fully committed to her task. By focusing herself completely within that compartment of her mind - doing something that was necessary and which she understood— the anthropologist could relegate all other occurrences into things glimpsed in the news from distant countries.
Ella reached for the security lieutenant's ankles. Before she could sever the tape there, Yesilkov kicked with both feet together and slammed the office door onto another plasma bolt. The panel was two sheets of thin titanium, hollow within except for the struts from corner to corner to stiffen it. The outer panel vaporized. The inner bulged and bounced back on its hinges as if kicked by someone hugely stronger than a human.
Yesilkov snatched the steak knife away from Ella and cut her own legs free. The chair was still strapped to her back, and her mouth was taped.
Sam Yates had dived out of the doorway in reaction to the first plasma bolt, though it was past him and crashing coruscance on the far wall before his brain told his body to move. The fireball congealed, some of it across his back and shoulders. When he hit the floor beside the two women, the sheet of redeposited glass shivered off again in flakes and shards as his muscles flexed.
They weren't going to win a slugfest against a plasma discharger in the hands of a man who knew how to use it. The gun frightened Yates, and the aging, incredibly tough Afrikaner who wielded it scared the security man even more. De Kuyper had taken a couple stun needles. From the broken-backed way he squirmed out from behind the bench, his legs were probably paralyzed.
He was still going to cook the three of 'em alive if they hung around much longer.
Yesilkov was freeing herself from the chair. Ella Bradley hunched over something between the desk and the filing cabinets.
“Come on and keep low!” Yates said as he kicked the lower edge of the door to close it again.
The titanium glowed white where it bulged, radiating heat fiercely into the office, but the sheet a meter below the plasma's impact was still at room temperature. Much of the outer door panel was gone, but the hollow core and titanium's high melting point preserved the inner surface as a barrier against another shot.
Which enveloped the front of the office as the trio, protected by the desk, crawled toward the opening in the rear wall.
“Run!” screamed Sam Yates to his companions as he stood and fired his needle stunner back through the inferno of burned air and burning metal.
The top half of the door was gone, and beside it a meter-wide semicircle of the wall. Carpeting had melted, and the wall finish had become hot enough to sparkle with low, sooty flames. Where the door had been, brown gases and heat waves turned the air into a translucent curtain through which the lab bench was a wobbly shadow and the gunman beside it invisible.
But the incandescent bore of the plasma discharger was a glaring point of aim for the security man. He snapped toward it the three needles remaining in his weapon's magazine.
Jumping bolt upright had been crazy - he could have peered over the desktop and fired with as much effect. It'd seemed the right thing to do at the time.
All Sam Yates could think about now was the way his bare cock swung in the air with nothing between it and the next jet of plasma.
“Run!” he repeated at a higher pitch than before as he turned, ducking toward the gap where de Kuyper's first shot had widened the opening of the hinged panel. The two women, the idiots, had halted just the other side
of the wall.
Yesilkov had jumped past when Ella Bradley shifted her bundle, before she swung her leg up and through the hidden door. The plasma bolt didn't penetrate far, but its energy had devoured part of the air duct that served the office. The individual fan, most of its motor, and the associated resistance heaters were gone. They'd protected the resin-cased packet with a data window and a caged button lying behind them in the duct.
When the security lieutenant paused in the doorway, Ella bumped past her more firmly than necessary. “What are you doing!” she cried to the naked woman.
“Look!” said Yesilkov, but it didn't look like anything even when Yesilkov flipped the cage away from the packet's button and the window began to flash the digits 30 in red light.
“Run!” Sam Yates was saying as he bowled into them. He grabbed Ella's upper arm fiercely and dropped the stunner in order to reach for the blond woman.
Yesilkov swayed away from the big man long enough to slap the button with her palm. The digits switched to 29 as Yates propelled the three of them into the darkness. Unlike the women, his muscles still regarded a half G as low gravity.
“Maybe I hit - “ Yates said, and the room behind them blazed with a plasma bolt which disproved the hope before he had time to fully utter it. This time the blast was echoed by high-voltage arcs. The Afrikaner had hit the desk, and the power lines feeding its circuits were shorting across the fireball of conductive ions.
The security man sprawled, throwing his companions down to either side of him. The plasma bolts had been so dazzlingly bright that the light from the office behind them did them no good.
When they fell, Ella freed herself from a grip that was as needless as it was insulting. She slipped to one knee again immediately - the conduits had tripped them the first time - but she struggled up determinedly and stayed half a step ahead of her companions. They would all be filthy when they reached the access shaft, but that shouldn't be a crucial problem.
Not like being stark naked would have been.
“I have . . . your clothes,'' she said, breaking the sentence when she almost lost her footing.
