Sertian Princess

by Peter Kenson

  "Actually it's both. I couldn't make up my mind between them, so it seemed the only fair solution. The priest was a little reluctant to perform the ceremony; kept insisting it was unusual or something. But we managed to persuade him in the end. It was a beautiful service."

  "And you keep those two hulking great brutes satisfied, all by yourself?"

  Now it was her turn to let slip a half-smile. "It's more a question of them keeping me satisfied," she replied, looking straight at Stefan.

  "That sounds like a challenge," he said, reaching out to cover one of her hands with his.

  "You can take it whichever way you want to, lover. But you might not get what you expect."

  "I guess I'll just have to take my chances on that, won't I?"

  She glanced across the room and then looked back at Stefan. "I guess you will.... but now might not be the right time. Here's Bruno coming and he looks a little miffed."

  Bruno had come into the lounge a few seconds earlier and looked round for Maddie. On seeing her in close conversation with Stefan, his face had darkened and his frown was so deep that his brows met in a V above his nose. The lounge was rapidly filling up now, but Bruno made a beeline for Maddie's table, shoving people unceremoniously out of his way to both left and right. What protests were made, were hastily stifled as people took notice of the size of the man and the expression on his face.

  Stefan, too, looked across at the onrushing Bruno and very casually got to his feet. Maddie was right: this was not the time. "Tonight then," he said softly. "When we get to Parm."

  "Maybe," was all she replied in words, but the smile on her lips promised a great deal more.

  Stefan dodged nimbly round a couple of occupied tables as Bruno slowed his advance, unsure of whether to go after him or to continue over to Maddie. Maddie won, and Stefan took the opportunity to make good his escape from the lounge.

  Brianey whispered into her throat microphone, telling Cerys to follow Pulowski, while she would stay with the blonde.

  Bruno reached Maddie's table before he spoke, although the bellow he used could have been heard from the other side of the lounge. "What was he doing here, talking to you? The Major said there was to be no contact between the groups."

  "Sit down and shut up, you loud mouthed oaf. It was the Major who sent him," she lied smoothly.

  "Well, I don't like him hanging around you." He sat down and proceeded quite obviously, to sulk.

  "Now don't you start having one of your tantrums," she said sharply. "God, you and Karl are worse than a couple of kids. What are you doing here anyway?"

  "Oh yeah. It's time to go. Karl's already in position and he sent me to get you."

  "Well, I'm glad you remembered the message." Acid dripped off every word as she looked at him with undisguised contempt. "Let's get it done."

  ***

  David and Marienna were in their stateroom. Their targets, Nerissa and Lynda, had established a routine of returning to their own cabin at about this time every day to freshen up before lunch. So David and Marienna had adapted this to their own use, taking advantage of the break to check the automatic surveillance on Jorgensen, and to establish a routine comms link with Suzanne.

  It was the latter that David was engaged in when the knock came on the door. If a large part of his consciousness had not, at that moment, been in a tiny cabin on the Cleopatra, he might have sensed the danger. As it was, Marienna answered the door.

  "Who is it?"

  "Steward, ma'am."

  Marienna transferred the tiny needle gun into her left hand, concealing it from sight and went to open the door. She reached out to touch the control panel, and as she did so, that entire section of the wall vaporised, taking her right hand with it. She looked down in apparent puzzlement at the bloody stump on the end of her arm, and the violet flash of a laser pulse took her full in the chest, knocking her backwards into the room. As she fell under the force of the blast, her body executed an almost perfect backwards roll, knocking over the small table on which the remote monitoring equipment had been placed.

  Part of David's mind watched the scene unfold as if in slow motion, whilst the rest of his senses struggled back across the light years. Even as Marienna's body was tumbling backwards into the room, he saw three blurs of movement entering through the hole where the door had been. Each one, as it entered, dived for the floor and rolled, one left of the hole, one right, and one following Marienna.

  "Professionals," he thought, as the basic instinct for survival took over motor control of his body. "Very smooth."

  He hurled himself out of the chair in which he had been sitting, a fraction of a second before two laser pulses hit the back of it in a sear of violet light, burning two holes the size of small plates, clear through. As he rolled across the floor, his left hand automatically reached for the belt switch to trigger his personal force field, while the wrist muscles in his right arm operated the spring mechanism and the needle laser appeared in his right hand.

  He was back in command of his body now and, as he came to the top of one of the rolls, he found that his survival instinct had led him in the direction of the doorway through to the bedroom. He caught a glimpse of movement on the far side of the room and loosed off a snapshot before throwing himself into the bedroom and slamming the door with his feet.

  The yell of pain which came from the other room, was small consolation for the fact that he was trapped. There was only the one door into the bedroom, and he had just come through that. He tried to call Zara and the others, using the throat microphone, but the short range radio system was notoriously unreliable inside large metal structures such as a spaceship. There was no reply.

  He had two choices. He could stay where he was in the bedroom and try to defend the doorway but judging by the cavalier manner with which his attackers had removed the door, and indeed, most of the wall in the other room, he did not feel tremendously confident in this strategy. That left attack: carrying the fight back to his attackers and often, in any case, stated to be the best form of defence.

  From one of the pouches on his belt, he took goggles to cover his eyes and two small filter plugs, which he quickly inserted, one in each nostril. Then, again from the belt, he carefully unclipped one stun grenade and one gas grenade, and ran quietly back to stand flat against the wall next to the door. With the gas grenade in his right hand, he flung open the door with his left and hurled the grenade through the open doorway. As he did so, three pulses of that violet laser light flashed through the opening. Two missed him completely and expended themselves harmlessly on the far wall of the bedroom, but the third pulse caught his upper arm and he felt a tingling sensation as the force field dissipated the energy charge. Without his personal force field, he would have lost the arm just below the shoulder. As it was, he knew that the belt could only absorb a few of those full power pulses without overloading.

  Now, however, the scales were tipping back, if not yet in his favour, at least more into balance. The gas he was using was a general purpose mixture, put together in the Salamander's labs. It was opaque enough to provide some visual cover, and also acted as an irritant to unprotected eyes and lungs, although it produced no long term harmful effects. In the next room, he could now hear coughing and a great deal of colourful cursing.

  Carefully choosing a different trajectory, he swung his arm into the open doorway again and released the stun grenade. This time there was only one answering flash of violet light and that sizzled harmlessly past him. When the grenade exploded with its ear shattering crash and blinding flash of light, he re-entered the room in a diving roll to his left, the needle laser free and ready in his right hand.

  He nearly rolled straight into the first of his assailants, stopping himself short as a giant figure materialised out of the smoke, coughing violently. They both saw each other at about the same instant but David's reactions were the faster. The beam from his needle gun took Karl in the throat and the coughing changed to a sort of gurgling noise, and then
to silence.

  He did not stop to examine the effectiveness of his shot, although he judged it to have been a good one, and he continued to roll around the walls of the room, heading for the hole that had been blasted through from the corridor. Flashes of violet energy punctured the space he had just been occupying and in the glare of the reflected light, he dimly saw the second attacker on the far side of the room, the twin of the first man if appearance was anything to go by.

  Behind one of the chairs, he steadied himself and took a careful aim at his target, but even as he fired, he himself was hit full on by a blast from the third of the attackers. Bruno died where he stood, but as David spun round desperately searching for the third gunman, he was hit again by another full power pulse and this time felt the overloaded circuits of his belt finally give up the struggle. Defenceless now, he could not afford to take another hit.

  He could hear movement in the room behind him, but the smoke now hampered him as much as it had been intended to hamper his assailants. He decided that his best course of action was to make for the comparatively clearer air in the corridor outside and take a position to cover whoever followed him. However, before he could move, the hairs prickled on the back of his neck and his senses told him that he had left it too late. The third man was behind him and would fire before he could move.

  He tensed himself, waiting for the inevitable pulse of laser energy, but when it came, it was fired from in front of him. The bolt shot past his right shoulder and there was a scream of agony from behind him. He span round in a crouch in time to see his third assailant crumple to the floor. That it had been a woman he deduced from the shape of the body but her face had been completely obliterated by the laser blast. Maddie Slatter died, no longer a beauty.

  David rose to his feet and turned to see who had fired that saving shot. Brianey was standing there, looking down at Marienna's mutilated body, with tears streaming down her face. He put his arm round her and drew her head down onto his shoulder.

  After a while, when his breathing had returned to normal, he said gently, "I know she was your friend, Bri. She was that, and more besides, to me. We shall both miss Marie. Go and get a sheet from the bedroom and let's cover her decently."

  As Brianey disappeared into the bedroom, he knelt beside Marie's body and closed her eyes with his two fingers. "Goodbye my love," he whispered and stooped to kiss her lips for the last time.

  Brianey had come back with a sheet and between them, they arranged it over the corpse. Brianey was still crying and David stood up and put his arm around her again.

  "Let's go, Bri. We shall take the time to mourn Marie, but not right now. Our first priority is to the Princess. We've got a job to do and we must save the tears for later. The game is obviously underway, and I need all the players I can get on my team."

  Brianey gradually stopped sobbing and made to brush the tears from her cheeks. David took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifted her face until her eyes met his.

  "I don't know how you came to be here at the right time, Bri, but you were and you saved my life. I shall not forget that. Now, let's go and check with the others."

  CHAPTER 15

  Outside in the corridor, a young ship's officer and a couple of stewards were struggling valiantly to restrain a crowd of curious passengers. Damage from the blast was confined to a very narrow band in the passageway, indicating that some sort of shaped explosive charge had been used. Small electrical fires still smouldered where the blast had cut through cables buried in the walls and the ceiling, but there were no obvious casualties in sight.

  Amid shouts of "Gangway", a fire crew pushed through the crowd, pulling behind them a cart laden with various types of extinguisher. Hard on their heels, two more of the crew were unreeling a hose from the nearest firepoint. Seizing her opportunity, Zara, who had been trapped by the crowd, slipped quickly through the gap made by the fire crew, before it had a chance to close up again.

  The young officer tried to intercept her but, with a glance that could have doused the fires all by itself, she dodged passed him and wrapped her arms around David. Judging, therefore, that she was a relative of, or at least tolerably well acquainted with, the man who had emerged from the smoking ruin of the stateroom, he decided that it might be wiser to leave her alone and concentrate on organising the fire crew.

  "David, quickly," she whispered, "before he comes over. They've made their move. They're holding the Princess in her cabin but we've got the doorway covered. They can't move her."

  As she was speaking, her eyes took in the devastation in the cabin and there was a touch of genuine anxiety in her voice as she continued, "Are you all right, David?"

  "Yes yes, I'm fine. Not even a scratch, thanks to Brianey here."

  Zara looked at Brianey with a grateful smile which gradually died away as she looked round the corridor and through the hole in the stateroom wall, until with increasing alarm, she turned back towards David.

  "David, where's Marie? Where's Marienna?"

  "She's dead. Three of the bastards came after us and they took her out right at the start. I was talking to Suzanne when they hit and I just couldn't react fast enough. I don't know who the hell they were, but they were professionals."

  Zara still had her arms loosely around him, but now she hugged him close again and pressed her cheek against his shoulder.

  "Oh David," she said quietly. "I'm so sorry."

  He reacted automatically to the hug, one of his arms encircling her waist, while the other hand absently stroked at her hair.

  "She was a very special person, Zara. She was so warm, so vibrant. And now she's dead."

  "You can't blame yourself for her death. She was your bodyguard after all, and you said yourself they were professionals."

  "Yes, but she wasn't ready for a mission like this. Julia said as much, and I overruled her. I thought I could look after Marie; break her in gently. I was wrong."

  "She knew the risks she was taking, David. It's the one thing that Julia drums in to them right at the start. All of your bodyguard are volunteers; you know that. They know they may be putting their lives on the line for you. It happened to be Marie, but it could have been any one of the others."

  "In my mind I know you are right, my lady, even if my heart disagrees. Now tell me about the situation with Neri. Is Corin in control there?"

  "Three men turned up and knocked on their door. When the Lady Lynda opened it, they pushed their way in before we could intervene. They're still in there: they haven't

  tried to come out yet. Corin is there outside the door, with Tessa and Carly. Cerys is still following Pulowski."

  "You mean Pulowski wasn't one of them. The opposition are certainly here in some strength. So, two questions: the three men in the cabin may have got the Princess, but what do they intend to do with her now? And just what in hell's name is Pulowski up to?

  "Bri, check the remote monitor. See if Jorgensen's still in his room."

  "Zara, see if you can contact Cerys and find out where Pulowski is. I'll calm down the deck officer here."

  The young officer had been hovering around them, hopping agitatedly from one foot to the other and trying to catch David's eye. David went over to him and showed him a DEA identification disc, similar to the one Corin had used on Andes.

  “Sorry about the mess. Things got a little bit out of hand, I'm afraid."

  "A little bit out of hand: I should think they did. Just what is it that's been going on here?"

  "There isn't time to give you the full story now, but we've been following a major drugs dealer and some of his mules for a few weeks. They're on board this ship. It looks as though they decided we were pressing them too close and put out a contract on us. Now I need your cooperation."

  "Well," the young officer said doubtfully....

  "Look, Lieutenant....?"

  "Singh, sir."

  "Lieutenant Singh, I'll take full responsibility and I'll clear it with Captain Wainwright later,
but I don't have time right now to cut through a mass of red tape. Will you help us?"

  The young man's face cleared at the mention of Captain Wainwright's name. "Yes, of course," he replied much more confidently. "What do you want us to do?"

  "To start with, you could get some more men down here and seal off this entire corridor. Then..." he paused as Brianey emerged through the shattered wall of the cabin.

  "The remote surveillance is still operational," she reported. "And Jorgensen's still in his cabin."

  "You're sure?"

  "Positive. I saw him there myself."

  "Ok. Zara, have you got through to Cerys yet?"

  "Yes, she's still following Pulowski. She's on A deck at the intersection of corridors A8 and C37."

  David turned back to the officer. "The intersection of A8 and C37. What's down there?"

  "Nothing. Only the lifeboat station."

  "The lifeboat, of course. That's how they'll get her off."

  "Get who off?" Singh asked puzzledly.

  "We've got another group of them cornered but they've forced their way into one of the first class cabins and taken a couple of girls hostage. They'll try to take the hostages with them when they leave. Now tell me, can the Bridge prevent the lifeboats being launched?"

  "Yes, they're all under Central Control unless there's an emergency, in which case control is passed to the officer assigned to each of the boat stations."

  "Good. Contact the Bridge and make sure that Central Control is still in place. They mustn't be allowed to launch that lifeboat.

  "Brianey, use the emergency transmitter in the cabin there, to contact the Salamander. Warn them to scan for a ship coming in to pick up the lifeboat.

  "Zara, I want you to go after Cerys. Pulowski's dangerous and we don't know for certain that he's on his own. Even if he is, the others will be heading that way with the Princess."

  "But they're still trapped in her cabin," Zara said. “Corin would have said if they'd come out."