The man’s green uniform was nothing he recognized. Nothing from any of the Auroran services, and not Central Fleet. It could be the military command from one of the other administrative clusters, of which Bertingas’ knowledge was imperfect. Or it could be the chosen uniform of his new security brigade, which Patty had neglected to show him on their inspection.
In that case, he could just walk up, identify himself, and ask permission to tap his access code into the microwave channels. There was—what?—a one-in-ten chance they would let him. And that, piled on the one-in-ten chance they weren’t part of the search teams he had been dodging for a week, made the odds about one in one hundred that he would be able to walk away from the encounter. Unless he acted aggressively.
But not too aggressively, in case they turned out to be his own people, waiting for him after all.
Bertingas massaged his legs and worked out a plan of action. No sense in moving now, when he was tired and the soldier was alert. He would wait until full dark, past dark, almost dawn.
As he prepared to enter a light doze, Bertingas’ restless fingers found the haunch of his deer, still hanging from his belt. Already in the heat its flesh was softening and becoming—unh—flavorful. He plucked bits of it and chewed them raw. As he chewed, his fingers worked out the tendons, peeled them to long, tough strings, and began braiding them. Within an hour he had a meter or more of knotted sinew. It would make a workable bowstring, when he found time to cut and shape a bow. Or sewing thread for his deerskin garment, if it ever got made. Or something more aggressive. In another hour, with his head tipped against the tree, Bertingas slept.
His biological clock woke him automatically at the darkest part of the night. His joints creaked and grated as he moved, again in a crouch, toward the edge of the trees. He paused to stretch the tiredness out.
In the starlight, the white dome of the station glowed. In its side he could see the still-open hatch. On the foreground, darker than the native rock, was the solitary soldier—perhaps a guard, after all. His head was down, sleeping.
This was going to be easier than Bertingas had thought.
Shedding his impediments—the haunch of deer, the grass cloak, the bark slippers—he crept forward and climbed toward that guard. Like a shadow among the stones, Bertingas moved around the man, whose head rose and fell slowly with each breath.
Behind him, across the hatchway, Bertingas tied the sinew string to the bottom hinge on one side and to the dog clip on the other. The string cut an invisible line, almost level, about fifteen centimeters above the lower lip of the hatch.
Bertingas plucked it once, to test the tension.
Thwunk! the string said softly, one low note in the night.
The guard stirred but didn’t rise or look around.
Bertingas’ smile showed teeth.
From the pouch at his belt, he fished out a ball of Leila sap, now slimy from resting inside the deer guts. He reversed his spear and, with his thumb, worked the sap well into the nibbled edge of its flint head. Then he crept forward, toward the guard.
The man stirred again, not really awake. He seemed to sense the presence of another Human.
Bertingas extended the spear, reaching for the neck. Just as the man started to rouse, he jabbed obliquely, right below the ear. A line of blood, black in the starlight, showed before the hand came up to cover it. The man cursed aloud and surged up, swinging the rifle around. Bertingas flattened himself on the ground.
The guard swung the muzzle past Tad’s head and continued in a circle, a loose pirouette, until his left knee buckled and he fell with a clatter.
“Corl?”
One word, called hesitantly, sleepily, from inside the station.
The last thing Bertingas wanted was for them to hole up inside the building, prepared to hold him off. He seized the rifle by its stock and coil, pried it loose from the guard’s twitching hands.
“Out here! Help me!” Bertingas called hoarsely, then dashed over to stand beside the hatch. No light came on inside, as he’d expected it would. That gave those others the same night-sighted advantage Bertingas hoped to enjoy. Not a good sign. It meant they were professionals.
The first of the other Humans came through the hatchway on the run. By chance his stride took him over and clear of the string. That fouled Bertingas’ timing.
He had expected to bring the rifle stock up in a short arc to the man’s stomach as he pitched forward. Now Tad had to change grip and bring it down on the base of the neck as the man moved out into the darkness. The blow fanned air behind the man’s head. The soldier skidded to a stop, turned, and caught a hard, level jab with the butt full in the face. He flopped on his back.
The second man through the door found the stretched sinew with his leading ankle and did a cartwheel out into the night. He plowed solidly into Bertingas’ back and tried to hold on, but Tad twisted around, bringing the rifle stock up into his short ribs. Once. Twice. And the man fell away to the left.
A third man hung back in the shadowed hatchway. In the starlight, Bertingas could see a rifle muzzle poking out, hunting around for a target. Slowly, silently, by centimeters, he glided out of the line of fire and over to the side of the doorway. Then with the speed of a striking snake, he grabbed the coilguide and pulled it through.
Whap! The rifle discharged into the stony ground.
As the man behind it stumbled forward into the string, Bertingas brought up his bare foot, toes curled down for an instep kick, into the man’s groin. The other gasped once and rolled on himself. Tad sealed the deal with a downward chop of his hand against the exposed neck.
Then he froze, listening.
No sound came from within the station. That meant the fourth man inside was either very cautious or nonexistent.
Bertingas had only one way to test it. Holding his newly captured weapon at the ready, but loosely, he stepped through the hatch.
No movement, no attack.
He walked once around the service foyer.
No challenge, no scuttling steps.
He turned on the lights, exposing the opened door to the emergency relay office. Through it, he could see the ends of a couple of sleeping rolls and a litter of cooking equipment. A scorched mark on the tile floor showed where someone had made a fire.
“Put down your weapon,” came a call from inside the office, “or I’ll trip the field!”
Bertingas edged closer to the door. A shadow, moving on the floor, hinted at someone just out of sight, beside the station’s master console.
“You know what that means!” the voice warned.
Bertingas held his silence, moved closer.
“The black hole will fall straight through to the core!
Step by step Tad moved, creeping up, silently.
“I’ll destroy this whole planet!”
He was half a meter from the doorjamb, now, but still off the line of sight of whoever was inside.
“I can do it!”
Tad popped through the doorway, rifle leveled, with a good pound of pull on the trigger. “No you can’t!”
The man inside, some kind of officer by the braid on his collar, raised a pistol at Bertingas’ face.
Bertingas shot his arm off, at the shoulder, with an explosive rip of glass beads.
The officer pinwheeled back against the console in a spray of blood, then slumped to the floor.
Bertingas put down his rifle, grabbed up some of the bedding, and tried to compress the flow from the open side of the man’s chest. In a few seconds, the material was soaked through, and still the blood and other fluids poured out.
“How—did you—?” The dying man’s eyes found Tad’s.
“There is no switch for the gravity field,” he explained. “No reason ever to drop it . . . I’m sorry.”
“Ohh.” The body struggled once, and then released. A stench from the relaxing sphincters reached Bertingas’ nostrils.
He left the dead man to tend the live ones. A tap on the back o
f the head put down those who were gaining their unsteady feet. Then he cut strips from their own bedrolls to bind them. Within ten minutes he was in total possession of the station.
“Priority Interrupt Q-2,” he tapped into the keyboard, cutting across the flow of microwave traffic from other dimensions down to the memory banks in Meyerbeer. “Execute lock-on search, Comm Dept. staff, Rinaldi, Gina.”
Within thirty seconds he had a voice-only link.
“Tad? Tad! Where are you?”
“Uplands Station.”
“That Firkin woman said you were dead. An attack on your—”
“Not so. I bailed out.”
“What have you been doing for a week? We’ve had so much—”
“Hiking in the woods. Look, Gina, whom do you trust right now?”
“Nobody. After—ah—”
“Wrong, my dear. You trust—I trust—Halan Follard. Get a secure line to him or, better yet, try to meet him in the flesh. Explain where I am, and say I need his help. Plus reinforcements.”
“What about the Director?”
“No! Do not tell Selwin Praise. Let him still think I’m dead. In fact, after I close here, you are to wipe the last half-hour’s feed from this station.”
“Tad!”
“Do it, Gina. Purge the banks. Everything.”
“All right. Are you well?”
“Never better.”
He closed the link and purged it from his end, putting the whole station off-line until further notice. Then he sorted through the soldiers’ gear, looking for any kind of civilized food. He came up with three energy bars and a packet of cocoa powder. Within five minutes he had a small fire going in the burn mark on the floor and a cup of water bubbling away, ready for the powder. Breakfast.
Within two hours, as the first light of dawn was coming across the mountains behind him, the aircars started to land. In the lead was a dull-gray bus with the gold flashes of the Kona Tatsu. Halan Follard stepped out, flanked by two heavyset men in anonymous coveralls.
From upcountry a second vehicle circled around and landed. Patty leaped clear before it had fully touched down. Behind her came a trio of fierce-looking Ghiblis, the poisoned spittle dripping unconsciously off their fangs. The driver of her car was a Cowra that seemed to have calmed down: its hands were competently steady on the controls.
Behind Follard’s bus came a transatmospheric boat of the Central Fleet. It landed upright on the flat space behind the station dome and discharged a squad of Marines. Leading them, a bright spot of color against their field gray uniforms, was the admiral’s daughter, Mora Koskiusko. Either she had patched up her suspicions about Captain Thwaite, or she’d stolen the boat from under his nose.
The three sets of rescuers converged on Taddeuz Bertingas and his bound hostages.
“Tad!” Follard shouted and rushed toward him, arms outstretched. The Kona Tatsu chief stopped three paces away, breathing shallowly. His arms came down slowly. “It’s—so—good to see you.”
Mora came up to him, paused, wrinkled her nose, and backed off two paces.
Firkin beamed at him. “Grub any good in these woods?” she asked.
“Fair, when you can find it,” he answered.
“Put up much of a fight?”
“Not if you surprise it.”
“Who are these guys?” She bumped one of his hostages with her booted toe. “Dinner?”
“You tell me. Halan, have you ever seen a uniform like that?”
“Not local, is it?” Follard shook his head. “Maybe something private?”
“Could be.”
“Do they talk?”
“Haven’t tried them yet,” Bertingas shrugged.
“We’ve got things in the bus that’ll take care of them . . . Ah, Tad?” He coughed. “Aren’t you cold?”
Bertingas looked down at himself. Bare feet. Tattered underwear. A belt of woven grasses. Dirt. He stroked his jaw and felt the dried blood and grime crackle in his beard.
“Do you want a blanket?” Firkin asked.
“How about a hot shower?”
“We’ve got that in the bus, too,” Follard said. “Come on.”
Chapter 16
Halan Follard: ROUNDUP
As he led the flight of airbuses and the ship’s boat down toward the landing pad at Kona Tatsu headquarters in Meyerbeer, Halan Follard ordered the building sealed.
“Say again, Chief?” the duty man at the comm console, one Special Agent Cobb, asked.
“Close the visa office, clear out the waiting rooms, lock the front door, put out the un-Welcome mat, and cancel your afternoon tea. Go to full security. With sidearms. Chop-chop.”
“Unh . . . Yes, Sir! May one ask why? Sir?”
“One may not. I am bringing in a little lost sheep who’s survived half a dozen recent attempts on his life. Also in my custody are three soldiers, fully armed and combat trained, whom he brought down with a piece of string and a stone spear. The fourth one died trying to take out this lamb.”
“And you want us mobilized to hold onto this guy, right?” Cobb asked.
“Wrong. I want you mobilized in case the people who are trying to kill him try again. I would find it intensely embarrassing if this Service were to lose possession of a protected person inside its own Cluster HQ.”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Short of atomic attack . . .” Follard mused over the open circuit. “In which case, you’d better rig the Elsewhere button. Put a remote in my office.” He knew it was a purely theoretical precaution, because no one had ever tried, or seriously tested, the Elsewhere system.
During the building’s construction, Kona Tatsu architects had buried—between the second and third subbasements—a mass inverter. It was a Fleet-rated device, big enough to jump a naval cruiser through four phases of hyperdimensional space. Of course, no one had ever jumped, intentionally, from the surface of a planet. No one had ever jumped a structure as fragile as a planet-bound building, a gravity-supported framework of stone and steel, woodwork and plastic panels, cableways, piping and waveguides, cornices and carpeting. Neither had anyone ever landed from such a jump, at ground level—not two meters above—in otherwise unoccupied territory, under an atmosphere.
Follard suspected that the pop on arrival would be just as loud as the bang going away.
On the one hand, Elsewhere was some paranoid planner’s brainstorm of the ultimate defense maneuver. On the other, no one had ever thought of a better way to defend a Human-made structure against atomic assault.
“Yes, Sir. Activate Elsewhere,” the console jockey repeated.
“Wait for my order, if and when, to activate. For now, just rig the button. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Follard out.”
He put the two buses on the roof and directed Mora Koskiusko’s pilot to land the ship’s boat in the square that fronted the building. It wasn’t exactly a warship, but the twenty-millimeter plasma pump in its nose would hold off ground forces. Its re-entry shielding of ablative ceramics would take a certain amount of pounding.
A squad of K.T. Storm Troopers met them at the tube shaft. Follard pointed to the three unidentified soldiers being carried out, now thoroughly webbed and drugged.
“Take them to the receiving chambers. Wake them up, gently, and find out who they are. Full details. Down to their mothers’ maiden names.”
The troopers laid hands on Bertingas, who had dressed in the dark green uniform of the dead officer. It was almost whole, except for a ragged seam on one shoulder, and had been hurriedly washed of its stains, blood and otherwise. It was a bad fit, but better than the ragged thermal bodystocking and stinking animal skin they had found him wearing.
“Not him. Counselor Bertingas goes to the infirmary for a complete physical. Pump him full of vitamins, check his head for lice, and put him under the narcolights for an hour of total rest. Then bring him to my office.”
The lieutenant leading the troopers nodded, saluted, and
whisked their charges away.
“Shall we go down to my office and await developments?” he asked Patty. He also signaled an aide to bring Koskiusko up, once she had her admiral’s barge jacked upright and depressurized.
Firkin hesitated, looked back at the collection of beings who attended her.
“Bring your lieutenants, of course,” he urged.
She tapped off two Satyrs and a Ghibli, all armed. The latter carried what looked like a portable plasma gun across its back. The rest she instructed to wait with the bus.
Follard took them to a room on the third floor that embarrassed even him. It was twenty by forty meters, with ceilings fifteen meters high, hung with white-frosted plaster drapes and cupids. Two chandeliers, in brass and purple-tinted crystal, took the shape of bunches of Earth grapes. This space had originally been the ballroom, for formal receptions with the governor and other Central Center dignitaries.
The last Inspector General had cleverly rescheduled those celebrations into nearby public halls, finally abandoning them as formal K.T. functions. Then he had appropriated this room for his office.
During Follard’s administration, as the rest of the building filled with secondary staff, subdirectorates, third and fourth bureaux, new data analysis techniques and equipment, a records retention section, and a complete library, it had become impossible for him to move out of this space without setting off a chain reaction of office bumping that might not settle down for two years. So Follard ran the local K.T. station from a lone desk, a worktable, and half a dozen visitors’ chairs that huddled in one end of a space that could string three foozleball nets and hold the Cluster Semifinals, complete with Freevid coverage.
Mora Koskiusko entered with two Marines who wore sergeants’ chevrons and carried repulsor rifles at port arms. She walked over and took one of the circle of guest chairs, at the center, without being asked. Patty hung back, near the door, uncertain. Follard could guess she was feeling less than social with him.
An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Page 18
