My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (33 page)

“The decision is yours, Danny,” Jaenna said. Right then, I would have been more comfortable if she had had less confidence in my judgment.

“Bring him along,” I said. I hoped that we wouldn’t regret it.

Jaenna motioned Syranna to stand by the door, then told him to wait for her order. It was, I knew, at least twenty feet from the door to where the cul-de-sac joined the main corridor. It would be a long way to go, with no cover, to reach the guards. Jaenna apparently didn’t plan to try. From beneath her cloak she pulled three pieces of plastic that fit together to form a long tube with a mouthpiece at one end. Then she brought out a smaller tube that had a canister fixed to it. From this tube she pulled two long slivers of dense plastic. Each had a small plug at one end and came to a sharp point at the other. Carefully, she pushed the sharp end of each through one end of the canister, then withdrew it.

“What’s in that?” I asked.

“Bacclonar,” she answered.

Bacclonar. That was a chemical cousin to curare. God in Heaven! Jaenna had a blowgun!

“Where did you get that?”

“On a station, a while back,” she answered me. “In pieces, there’s nothing any scanner will pick up as a weapon. I figured that after giving them a blaster and the rocket at the gate, they wouldn’t look any further when they saw a clear scan.” Then she turned to Syranna and hissed, “Now!”

Syranna put his hand on the plate and the door slid open. Jaenna glided into the corridor, raising the blowgun to her lips in one smooth motion. She blew twice in quick succession. Down the hall, the first dart buried itself in the cheek of one guard. The second struck his partner in the neck. Before either of them could do more than gasp, they toppled onto the floor. We sprinted from the door to pull the bodies out of sight and gather their weapons. Never had it felt so good to have a weapon in my hand.

“I’m afraid the only exit from this building that I know is the main one with the guardpost,” Syranna told us.

“That’s all right,” I assured him. “We have to have our weapons back, even if it means a fight.”

Fortunately, at that hour the corridors were deserted. There was no one to see us as we headed to the checkpoint. With Syranna along, the automatic electronic guardians of the building saw nothing amiss. The backside of the checkpoint was open above the barrier to allow the guards to monitor those on their way out as well as in. The guards were probably well trained. It made no difference. No amount of training could have prepared them to have a quiet night shattered by a crowd charging them from behind, blasters firing as they came on. One guard went down with the first volley, cooked pieces of his brain splattered across the guard station. His partner managed one shot in return before we blasted him down also. It was a good shot though. One of my guards went down, his larynx burned away. We dragged all three bodies behind the barrier, where they were temporarily out of sight.

My key no longer worked on the locker, so Jaenna simply blasted the lock. Our weapons were there, including Jaenna’s pet rocket. From that point, it looked to be a footrace. The guards had probably been unable to give an alarm, but it was only a matter of time before the surveillance systems alerted someone.

We dashed outside and Syranna led us into the shrubbery, away from the marked path we had followed earlier. No sooner were we off that path than a siren erupted from the building.

“Oh shit,” I muttered, “here comes trouble.”

They didn’t, however, come in our direction. From Syranna’s description, this path sounded like Aalaza’s bolt-hole. Most of the guards probably didn’t know it existed. We reached a section of wall hidden behind a dense row of tall hedges, which looked otherwise identical to the rest of the wall. There we waited nervously while Syranna searched for the touch plate.

“Ah!”

Silently, a narrow section of wall dropped away, revealing a sward outside and well-spaced homes beyond it. “Activating this door creates a dead zone in the sensors running all the way to the tree line,” Syranna said.

I turned to Syranna to thank him. “You know, “ I said, “you could come with us. You would be welcome and you may not be safe here.”

“No, Captain. I’ve done what honor demanded. My post is here and that same honor demands that I stay. No matter what happens, my family will understand and I will be content.” There was pride in his voice, his decision made.

We left him then, and Syranna closed the passage behind us.

From the wall, we headed obliquely away from the main gate and toward a row of trees. Our back door exit had bought us valuable time. Aalaza’s guards must have still believed us to be inside the compound, and they bent their energies in that direction. But before we reached the trees someone on the wall must have detected our movement. We found that out when the red flare of a heavy blaster split the night. The bolt burned straight through Jonorosso and he fell face first onto the ground. The rest of us dove forward, found a downward slope and rolled to the tree line, while blaster fire scorched the ground behind us.

“We need one of those hovercars real quick, or it’s good night, Irene.” Angel’s voice came from the vicinity of a tree trunk a few feet to my right.

I couldn’t have agreed more. “Is Jonorosso alive?”

“No,” came Jaenna’s answer. “Just the three of us.”

“Just like old times,” Angel grunted. “I think I saw a road past those houses to the right. Want to try it?”

We decided to try it. The slope gave us cover from the fireworks that were crisscrossing the crest, enough so that we were able to work our way over toward the houses without difficulty. The longer they kept shooting up the meadow, the longer it would be before a search party went through there. When they did, though, Jonorosso’s body would help keep them on the trail. At least, it would have to wait for a personal search. With all their shooting, they had started several small fires that would make it hard to pick us up by infrared.

The houses began about a third of a mile from the governor’s compound. They were low, sprawling affairs, more like haciendas than Earth suburban developments. Each one sat on several acres of land. It made sense that the area near the compound would belong to the wealthy. I hoped that meant Aalaza would think twice before cutting loose with his blasters there. Some of the houses had their own walls around them, others were open. There were ground-effect vehicles parked near them.

“Anyone know how to hotwire one of those things?” I asked, hopefully.

Neither Jaenna nor Angel was any help. Maybe just as well. That way, we weren’t tempted to come in close to the dwellings. Logically, they would have been equipped with their own surveillance apparatus. Instead, we went straight for the road. It proved to be a moderate hike, what with our constant worry about detection, but eventually we cleared the last grove of trees and stood looking out over the road. The surface was sunken below the level of the surrounding land, so that the traffic would not ruin the view of the surrounding home owners. Ahead of us, the road ran toward the edge of the cliff and then down toward the city proper. At widely spaced intervals, cuts in the embankment served to let vehicles out to the houses. Evidently, where there was little traffic, or no need for speed, grass served as well as a road for the hovercars. The defile had an advantage for us; its banks would help hide us. At least, they would until Aalaza got an airborne search organized.

We had been walking along the road no more than five minutes when we saw lights coming up behind us. Given the limits imposed by the construction of the road, we didn’t have much choice. Angel stood in the middle of the road to draw the driver’s attention, while Jaenna and I tried to melt into the wall. There was only a single occupant visible as the vehicle came to a stop in front of Angel.

“Hey, what do you want?” yelled the driver.

“Your car!” I shouted leaping into the road with my blaster trained on him.

The Srihani in the car was past middle age, with a deeply lined face and completely gray hair. He froze when he saw the blaster scant inches from his head. That gave Angel and Jaenna time to force the door opposite him. Then the surprise wore off and he took a good look at us.

“You are not Carrillacki.” It was a flat statement, not a question.

“Good guess,” I told him. “Be real careful now. We’ll have no compunctions about burning any Carrillacki we have to.”

The change in the driver was astonishing. All at once his face lit up. “Hail Emperor and to hell with Carrillacki!” he exclaimed. “Get in the car and tell me where to take you.”

It was my turn to be surprised. Not so surprised, though, that I failed to get in, nor so surprised that I put my weapon down. I told him to head for the spaceport, as we were declining an invitation from the governor. He answered me with a broad grin. Then I sank back into the cushions as he fed power to the ground-effect motors.

The driver, Sselar by name, was eager to talk to us. He was old enough to have some perspective on the incessant infighting in the empire. It had soured him on the kvenningari. He had seen Calldlamm change its first loyalty fifty planetary years before and the experience had earned Carrillacki an extra helping of his distaste. Not that he had ever done anything about it. Sselar owned and managed two bakeries in Kordon, which made him a relatively prosperous merchant. He had centered his life on his family, maneuvering a good tie for his oldest, and on his business. It had been his business, a special delivery to a wealthy patron, that had brought him near the governor’s compound so late at night. Somehow, the realization that we were enemies of Carrillacki had unleashed four decades of subconscious rebellion. He proclaimed that he would see us to the spaceport at all cost. It would be his personal act of defiance.

For a while, I thought we would get away cleanly. Sselar pushed his car at frightening speed down the cliff road to the central city even though I saw no pursuit behind. Likely, it was his speed that gave us away. Had he driven like an old lady, I doubt even Aalaza’s best airborne sensors could have deduced we were in that car. As it was, we must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I tried to break into his monologue to make that point, but nothing could persuade him to slow down.

We were almost past the crest of one of Kordon’s towered hills when an official-looking car pulled out in front of us. Sselar banked his car so hard to the left that I thought we would lose the ground effect and set down on the left stabilizer fin. The air cushion stayed intact and we made a high-speed hairpin, just missing the front of a building before heading back the way we came. Blaster fire came from the car behind us. At first I dismissed it, thinking that no handblaster could burn through a shield. Then I realized that ground cars did not have shields.

Sselar gave them little chance to find their range. He banked to the right at high speed, into the first crossing street. Aalaza’s guards tried to follow us and I began to appreciate Sselar’s driving. Their driver misjudged the bank. The ground effect lost contact and inertia took over. The car flipped upside down, skidded across the roadway and shattered itself against the base of a tower. A look at Sselar’s face told me that he was having the time of his life. The lines in his forehead had smoothed out and his eyes shone.

Guards ran into the street, weapons drawn. Sselar laughed and gunned the car straight for them. Fire flickered from their weapons and was answered from the car. Angel got one, Jaenna another. Then we were on them, the car rocking as a fin cleaved one of them through the torso. We ran on toward the spaceport.

We had just cleared another roadblock when the car suddenly dropped. It slammed into the ground with a crash that rattled teeth, then skidded along the road leaving a trail of shredded metal. Someone’s lucky shot had hit the engine. Fortunately, we were able to open the doors and scramble out. A squad of six Srihani was charging down the street toward us, firing wildly as they ran. We took shelter behind the ruined car and fired back. It was no contest. The advancing squad was coming full bore, right out in the open. Jaenna’s blaster was out before she hit the ground. Each time she moved her blaster, she fired. What she fired at she hit, and what she hit went down. I took out one on my side and saw Angel drop another. It was over that fast. Six bodies lay in the street. We rose to find ourselves unscathed. Well, not really. Behind us, Sselar lay on his back, a ragged gash burned into his chest. He hadn’t known to stay low. A carefully structured lifetime was gone, for the sake of a moment’s rebellion. Was it worth it? For us, certainly. Somehow, I doubted that his family would have agreed.

We were not far from the main spaceport entrance, maybe a half dozen irregular city blocks, but we no longer had a car. Meanwhile, the local constabulary was becoming more coordinated. What saved us was that Aalaza’s cops drew the same conclusion from the bodies by the car as Mark Twain’s cat did from the hot stove lid. They did a lot of shooting, but seemed disinclined to press too closely. We didn’t have night glasses, and such was the haste with which they had been mustered, neither did they. Most of the shooting did more damage to the buildings than to any of the combatants. This allowed us to retreat in a reverse leapfrog toward the port.

In that fashion, we quickly whittled down the distance to where the buildings of the succeeding block ran right up to the ring road around the port wall. I nestled myself into a convenient doorway where the entrance formed an open-ended vestibule, allowing me to shelter most of my body while shooting. Farther up the block behind me, flashes came from Angel’s and Jaenna’s positions. Still farther back, on the other side of the road, the Calldlamm troopers lit up the street like a chain of firecrackers.

I yelled to let Angel and Jaenna know that I was ready, then I began firing back at the locations of the blaster flares. The firing from one of our positions stopped. Angel or Jaenna—I couldn’t tell which—kept going until they were across the street behind me. Then there was a yell. It was Angel. Firing resumed from a new point at my back. Shortly afterward, I could see shadows on the street as the Calldlamm troopers advanced again. I fired where I saw movement and was rewarded by a scream.