by John Barnes
The Duke of Uranium
Ihey threw Jak into a ground car, not gently but with no more roughness than was incidental to the process, and took off at great speed; probably the Duke's guards didn't have to worry about whatever traffic regulations there were in Fermi, if any. "Station Four," the guard said. "Can you believe he still makes us say 'Station Four'?"
"Shut up. There's a hostile present."
"Right, and six of the biggest media outlets, and a dozen viv programs, all have run and rerun that big story by Mreek Sinda, the one called 'Secrets of Station Four.' And there's a chain of flashclubs in ten cities at least—including this one!—called 'Station Four, Fit for a Princess!' So nobody knows that Station Four is really—"
"You heard me. Shut up. I'm not getting punished for you being a blabbermouth. Not for the third time this year, not ever again, nunh-unh. So shut up."
Jak had specked it already, of course; well, he was getting closer to Sesh, probably into the outer guard areas of Psim's palace. He saw no way that this could be help-fill, but it was something to know about. He pushed himself into deeper concentration, hoping to be mostly self-hypnotized by the time his beating began.
They used a power dolly to move him inside the big building at the other end of the trip; Jak couldn't look around, so he had no way of confirming that he was in the palace, just yet, but he tried to make sure he stayed fully as alert as if he were.
"Rab, we brought your guy here. Riveroma's orders. Here's a copy in case you tossed the ones you already got."
"Thanks—I had. Weehu, what a day. One contradictory order after another. I don't know how they do it, I really don't. All right… hey, how long has he been bound?"
"I don't know. Riveroma didn't say—"
Jak felt rather than saw Rab Beversen bending over him and probing—"Weehu, and weehu again. Lots of areas on his skin that are cold as a lizard. I can't work on that. The pain monitors will read all wrong and there's a risk of doing way too much tissue damage, bruising him way more than the orders—and these orders are the strictest I've ever seen. We'll have to untie him and let him recover for at least an hour, so he can get his circulation back and his joints can get back to normal. If it isn't one thing, it's another!"
Jak felt absurdly grateful—it's absurd to be so happy at being untied entirely for the purpose of being beaten, and yet to be released from those bonds was still, somehow, the best feeling in the world. He lay on his side, gasping, working his jaw, stretching his legs and arms, trying to control the unbearable tingling on the side of him pressed against the floor. The sensations rushing through his body were overwhelming, and for a long time he concentrated entirely on those, trying to get his motor control and sensation back at least a little before they would realize he had it.
Gradually the sensations of being rubbed with sandpaper, pricked with a thousand cold needles, and dropped into a saltwater bath with a live electrode all diminished to the level of mere discomfort; he could have moved, but he was careful not to, waiting to see what chance he might be able to find in the next few seconds.
The places where Riveroma had kicked and hit him hurt terribly, but none of them was vital, and toktru it was no worse than losing a dozen rough rounds of catch-as-can. He might very well have taken a worse thumping than this at gen school championships a couple of years ago. Though he was having all sorts of doubts about his other training, he was grateful to Uncle Sib for having made sure he trained enough to really dak pain; that was critical right now, the knowledge that things hurt badly, but that he wasn't hurt badly.
As he was able to return his focus to the room around him, he realized that there were only two people left in it; Rab had switched into his dress uniform "because her princessy-ness is always coming up with more annoying things for us to do, I think she just wants to make sure she doesn't make any friends here!" Apparently if you were really a specialist at beating people up, there was a special beating-people-up uniform you had to wear to do it just exactly singing-on right, and Rab had already taken his beating-people-up uniform off, so while Jak was recovering, a surly private, who was quite sure it was not part of his job description, had to be bullied into going to Beversen's quarters, getting that specialty uniform, running it through a quick fresh-up, and bringing it back here. "And hurry—I don't have much time but I have to do this one absolutely singing-on right!"
"I'll be back in four minutes, Sarge, you can place a bet on it that I will. And with it all cleaned and freshened. Really!"
"All right. You're on. Beer tonight on me if you get it here in four minutes. Ready, go—"
The door closed. Rab Beversen paced around impatiently; after a moment, he grabbed a chair and took off his coat, hanging it neatly over the back. He draped his belt and sidearm across the coat. Then he removed his tunic, which he laid across the seat and smoothed flat. His boots came off next, and he placed them carefully under the chair, presumably so that no one would trip and scuff them.
His trousers were just at his calves when Jak shot from the bed in one smooth motion, driving a shoulder into the sergeant's buttocks, smashing headfirst into the wall before he could reach forward to catch himself. It didn't make much of a sound; the wall seemed to be solid stone. Jak slipped the butterfly strangle on him, squeezing the man's carotid fiercely, and in a moment felt the body go limp. He grasped Rab's jaw, turning the unconscious body to face him, and slammed the man's head against the wall as hard as he could, hoping to give him a concussion or perhaps a fractured skull. "After all," Jak muttered, tugging the pants off the unconscious body, "you'd have done the same for me." He specked he had no more than two minutes left before the other guard re-turned—after all, beer was riding on this. Jak had no idea how to lock the doors in this place, so he just finished dressing in Rab's uniform, noting with mild distress that the sleeves and legs were about a centimeter long, enough for a smart person to notice.
He thought for an instant about picking up the sidearm but then remembered that it was sure to be keyed to Be-versen's thumb and index finger prints, and that if Jak tried to take it, it would sound an alarm and turn on a transponder. Hating having to go unarmed, he hurried through the other door.
He emerged into a courtyard, and at the other side of it he saw what was clearly an internal checkpoint. Chances were that each internal checkpoint would mark one step closer to Sesh. Therefore, crazy as it all was, he'd have to head straight into this one.
Ninety seconds to come up with something beyond what he had already improvised. He had no idea, so he walked straight and tall, headed directly through the checkpoint, and saluted the guard standing there.
The guard looked at him coldly; seeing only corporal's stripes on his arm, Jak said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me the password?"
The guard pulled his stun baton. "I don't expect an escaped prisoner to know it," he said, closing in.
Jak struck with the best disarm of his life, and followed up with an elbow to the head. The man went down and Jak went through; about ten seconds of freedom left, now, and still no plan.
The gate had turned out to open into a courtyard, and in the center of the courtyard there was a high-walled building; far above, Jak could see branches of trees from what had to be a rooftop garden on the building. That had to be where Sesh was being held, he realized. He looked wildly around; there were more than enough handholds on that wall, because it was all in faux-medieval broken stonework, but he'd be at least an hour getting up its twenty meters. He picked a direction at random and dashed left, trying to suppress the image of being found running aimlessly around the building.
On the back side, there was a small platform elevator, hanging from cables, just two meters off the ground, and two masons were slowly, contentedly tuck-pointing the wall.
Jak sprang onto the platform, toppling the bucket of mortar and knocking one mason to the ground. The other, clutching the cable to stay on the elevator, hastily saluted, and Jak, remembering that he was still in a sergeant's
dress uniform, returned the salute, sketchily and badly. "Emergency!" he shouted. "The princess is in danger! I am commandeering this elevator as an emergency transport for the Duchy of Uranium. Take it to the top, now! Full speed—uh, up!"
The mason saluted again and yanked at the controls; the open platform shot upward, Jak clinging to the cable to stay on. He made the mistake of looking down just once, and realized that twenty meters was several times the fall needed to catch a bad case of dead. After that he kept his eye on the wall and the approaching top parapet.
With a thump, the elevator stopped. The top edge was still two meters above their heads. "This is all the further it goes, sir," the mason said.
"I knew that," Jak said. He firmly told himself not to look down; the gap between the platform and the wall was only about a fifth of a meter or so, at closest approach, as the platform swayed gently. He reached out, got a grip with one hand, got a grip with the other, and jammed a boot into a crevice in the stonework.
At his first step upward, the boot came off his foot, and he was glad he hadn't worn socks, because he had a better grip with his toes anyway. He kicked the other boot off and concentrated on going up carefully; he'd done many rock-climbing vivs and at least this tower didn't feature ledges with snakes or eagles who swooped in to peck out your eyes. Also, it was really only about two and a half meters that he had to cover, even if the two and a half meters had a very unpleasant long drop under them.
Grip, reach, grip, reach… he wondered why this tower wasn't smooth. Probably one of those decorator touches—the hereditary nobility liked to pretend that their titles went all the way back to the European, African, and Asian feudal periods, so they were forever building fake ruins… grip, next grip, check that, foot, other foot, stay in close… grip—that was the top of the parapet, he realized, and a couple more moves got both his arms over it, and then his hands were over onto the other side of the wall. Groaning at doing it in the full gravity, he flipped over and dropped neatly into a fishpond, water flying everywhere.
He stood, shaking the water from his eyes, and found himself looking into the surprised eyes of Sesh, who was just clutching her torn, and now soggy, tunic over her breasts. A small, unpleasant, and strangely familiar man was gasping for air, having caught most of the pond with his face. Surmising the basic situation, and very uninter-ested in any mitigating details, Jak snapped the ball of his foot into the little man's face, knocking him backward over a bench, and said, "I don't speck any hope of getting you out—"
"Nonsense," Sesh said. "All the guards just ran down the stairs or piled into the elevators." She ran; he followed. Within seconds she'd yanked the emergency deliver car to ground floor/lockdown button for both elevators. "It's boring up here," she said, "apart from the occasional visit from His Rudeness, and I had a lot of time to study everything just in case. Now there's just the few guards on the spiral stairs—they'll be turning around any second."
She turned and dashed again, losing her tunic as she went and not bothering to retrieve it. Jak, awkward in his too-long soggy pants and bare feet, was a few steps behind as she reached the door. "How many?" he gasped, staring at the narrow staircase. He could already hear cries and pounding feet far below.
"I don't know, twenty, maybe," she said.
"Don't know how I can fight them all if they have weapons but if they come at me one at a time—"
"Oh, weehu, don't be stupid, old tove," she said, slamming the door shut and dropping a large bar across its hasps. "They never specked that they might need to be able to get in; they thought they might have to secure the stairs against a rescue attempt. That door may look like something out of old oak from a dramatization about the Middle Ages, but it could probably smother a small atom bomb. Now all we have to do is call in the rest of the rescue team—surely you had aircraft standing by… tell me you had aircraft—"
Jak's heart sank. "I came here to bargain to get you back," he said. "Till about fifteen minutes ago, there was no rescue plan."
Her face fell. "There's no one you can call?" she asked.
Jak looked down at his purse. As far as he knew, all of his friends on the planet were sitting in a coffee shop waiting for him to call in with a progress report. He could call them, but he didn't speck them turning up with a helicopter in the next two minutes, given no warning. Even the most loyal and competent friends have their limitations.
Jak stood there, dripping, barefoot, bruised, and exhausted, facing Sesh, naked to the waist in her long skirt and heeled shoes, in the middle of this absurd garden in the sky, and very seriously thought about just sitting down and giving up. He'd done pretty well for a heet who was making it up the whole way. Now he was utterly out of ideas, and even if he had had an idea, he didn't see how the best idea in the world could help now.
With a loud thud, the door to the stairs behind them went over, and Bex Riveroma strode across it. Behind him there were a dozen guards.
Sesh turned and ran; Jak thought about standing and fighting for perhaps a millisecond before his common sense took over and he ran after her. They fled down a broad aisle between pleasant fruit trees, with Riveroma and the guards rapidly closing in on them. The nasty little man who had been assaulting Sesh when Jak showed up rushed from between the trees, trying to tackle her, but she had momentum on her side; she threw an arm out and knocked him flat. Jak jumped over him and kept going. The little man got the attention of most of the guards, but Riveroma and a few more stayed right on the track, losing only a step to go around.
The top of the tower was only about 150 meters square, and in just seconds, the parapet was ahead of them. Sesh veered left and Jak followed, hurdling a hedge after her as she tossed aside the hampering skirt. Now they were only three paces at best ahead of Riveroma, and from the shouting all around, Jak knew other guards must be closing in and heading them off. The parapet was getting nearer, just a second or two away, and neither he nor Sesh could possibly climb down fast enough, nor was there anywhere to jump.
Something thundered up above the parapet in front of them.
At first it was just a strange bluish blur, then metal— and to Jak's astonishment, a helicopter drifted in toward them, just off the ground. He thought at first it was the last reinforcement for the pursuit, but then it pinged and rang as the guards fired on it with their small tranquilizer pellet pistols, the only weapons they had.
Sesh darted for the helicopter door, ducking low, no doubt betting that if the guards didn't like it, it was friendly to her, and Jak followed. The door opened and Jak's friend Black, from the prison, pulled Sesh inside, and beckoned Jak on. Jak was just reaching for Black's hand, himself, when his legs went out from under him— Riveroma had tackled him. He tried to turn and fight, but the big man was strong enough to drag him away from the copter. The other guards closed in around him.
With a screeching whistle, rather like a gut-shot teakettle rising into audio feedback, something hit one of the guards in the back, knocking him down, then leapt over Jak's supine body and laid into Riveroma, who shouted in terror.
Jak rolled over and sat up, seeing Riveroma, blood running down his face and an expression of pure horror, before Jak realized that he was also seeing the back of a Rubahy, the rage-spines standing straight out. The other guards were fleeing as fast as they could. Riveroma fell backward, hands over his face.
"Into the copter!" Shadow barked at Jak. Jak jumped to his feet and dove through the open door of the slowly drifting helicopter. Shadow followed, jumping over him to claim a seat. Before Jak had the door all the way closed, Black whipped the copter around and put it into a shallow climb. They streaked away to the north.
Clinging to a seatback, Jak carefully closed the door and looked around. Black was flying the helicopter with a big, happy grin. "Now this is the way things should get done," the man said, his eyes twinkling.
A series of "bloop-bloop-bloops" came from Shadow on the Frost, as his rage-spines retracted into his back. "A splendid day with pl
enty of honor," he agreed.
Sesh was sitting on the seat, not quite aware yet that she was wearing only briefs and one high heel; no doubt she'd realize in a moment.
Meanwhile, Jak said, "I would really like an explanation for all this."
Below them, the great city of Fermi swept by; there was plenty of air traffic, as always, but it seemed to be being routed around them, leaving them with an open bubble in the sky.
"And there will be one," Black said, "but just now we have to go meet your friends at the spaceport. They had to get the last part of this mission accomplished, or we're going to have even bigger problems than we've had so far. Shadow, would you mind—?"
"Of course." The Rubahy lifted his left hand and pointed it toward his face; "Get me the blue team," he said to his purse.
"Full secure?"
"Yes." There was a long pause while the purse established a multiple-indirect-route encrypted connection.
"Here they are. Go ahead," the purse said.
Jak was startled to hear Piaro's voice. "Everything's fine. No casualties on either side. The package is in hand and will stay in hand for a little while longer. But we are surrounded by B&Es and they seem to be trying to speck how to get the package back without damaging it."
"Tell him we'll be there in two minutes," Black said, "and to just keep stalling and avoid any shooting. We don't want anyone hurt."
Shadow repeated the orders. As they neared Fermi's spaceport, the tall buildings of the city gave way to pleasant suburbs, and then to the sort of suburbs that are only occupied by people who can't afford better, and are punished for that by being subjected to constant rocket takeoffs and landings. They flew across the green safety belt, toward the military part of the spaceport where the warcraft sat parked on their landing gear or reared back and ready to roar up the catapults. The spaceport drew nearer, and Black angled toward a complex of buildings where people were running around like a kicked anthill.
Black got on the air and talked to a couple of people, apparently worried about possible violence, and not getting any of the reassurance that he really wanted.
