The View from the Imperium (28 page)

It was not to be. The door of the ballroom slammed open, and five more Crocs burst into the room. Luckily, behind them were Team B and Juhrman.

“We’re here, my lord ensign!” he bellowed, grinning widely, waving a pulse rifle over his head. The soldiers with him cheered.

Their support gave me heart.

“To me, Smithereenians!” I shouted.

Two enemy Geckos leaped for me. I crouched, awaiting their arrival, one eye on the display on my viewpad. “In forty-five seconds, the walls are going to change again,” I told my troops over the communications link. “Make sure you are on the inner side of the partition coming up from the floor. It will block the pirates from entering the maze with us.” I grabbed each Gecko by a hand and stood up. The shorter beings were forced together by my action, and slammed into one another. To my amazement, they fell backwards and crashed to the floor. I looked around.

“Did anyone else see that?” I exclaimed. “That was brilliant!”

“Great, sir.” Chan threw herself on her back with one foot in the belly of another Gecko pirate. She tossed it straight into the midst of the enemy who had regained their feet and were now barreling towards me. The Geckos tumbled. “Twenty seconds!”

Suddenly, as one, the remaining pirates turned to look at me. They eyed the license stuck to the front of my tunic. The captain, lost in the maze, must have notified them by communicator that I had what they were looking for. They shoved away from the battles they were waging, and made for me. I could not let them get their hands upon me. I felt for the license, snatched it free, and sent it arching over the heads of the pirates toward the door.

Or so they thought. In truth, I palmed it and flung the pistol that I had obtained from one of the Geckos, but the movement fooled the pirates as if they were a score of dogs playing fetch. In the seconds that it took them to realize they had been duped, I signed to my troops to leave the melee and follow me. The pirates ran after them. One second later, the barrier rose up, knocking them backwards.

“You diseased softskins!” came a bellow from the other side, along with determined pounding. Most of the pirates were trapped outside, as I had planned.

But not all of the pounding was going on outside. Three of the suspect crew, two humans and a Gecko, realized that they were alone on our side of the wall. Panicked, they clawed at the partition.

“Get us out of here!” they cried.

“Get ’em!” Chan shouted, hoisting her stunner.

Her volunteers leaped on them. The fight was short, dirty and brutal, but when it ceased, they were bound with restraints and piled in a heap off to one side. Panting, Chan came over and gave me a nod.

“Nice work, Captain,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” she said, looking suitably gratified.

Shouts of anger and the explosions of plasma charges were muffled by the panels, but I feared not for long. It bought me enough time to check the control panel, making certain that the program continued to run as I intended it. Rous and Oskelev guarded my back. I could hear the pirates blasting and hammering at the wall.

“They’re almost through, sir,” Bailly said.

“Almost there,” I said, concentrating hard. I heard splintering noises. The hotel frame was meant to withstand an asteroid crash, but the interior could not be that strong.

“What is the plan, sir?” Plet asked.

“We keep them busy,” I said. “The captain is already bumbling around within the maze. They might be able to communicate with him, but they can’t reach him. I have the room programmed to change every three minutes from left-right configuration to right-left configuration. At the center of the maze is a small chamber sans windows or doors. We will lead them into the trap, and keep them confined there until the authorities arrive.”

“They weren’t coming,” Plet reminded me.

I raised an eyebrow and treated her to a short, deprecating version of my patented laugh. “After the mess we left behind in Oatmeal and Son? They must take notice now.”

“True,” she said. “No word yet from Commander Parsons or the
Wedjet,
sir.”

I nodded grimly. “We’ll just have to hold on as long as we can. The pirates should be no trouble once we’ve got them locked up.”

“From your mouth to eternity’s ear, sir!” Bailly said.

A howling sound as might be made by a drill gone mad burst on our eardrums. The wall between us and the pirates burst asunder in red flames. The crew boiled through the irregular hole, gnashing their teeth.

“Into the maze!” I cried.

My troops, somewhat reduced by injury, fled into the tunnel behind me, with the pirates in angry pursuit. We had a minor head start on them.

The labyrinth was a simple one. There had been no time for niceties. I had employed the most classic of patterns, with a twist. Taking every left would take one into the center, which was scheduled in exactly fifteen minutes to close into a box with no exits or windows. That, I hoped, would hold the pirates until they could be picked up. We had to lure them in, then escape.

“Stay with me,” I warned the troops over the communications system, as we hurried along the dark blue corridor lit with bronze sconces as well as the diffused light from the landing pad above the clear ceiling. If I had not been in the presence of armed soldiers, I might have been looking for a friend’s hotel room. “When the timer in my viewpad goes off, the polarity will switch, and where we might turn left, we must turn right, instead.”

“Aye, sir!” they chorused.

“So, we go right, then left,” I said.

“Sir, didn’t we turn right when we came in?” Plet, always the wet blanket, inquired.

“Yes,” I said. “Then our next turn is left.”

We ran. Flashes of red light behind us lent speed to our heels. The two soldiers in powered armor lagged at the rear of the party as they were meant for strength, not agility.

“Hurry,” I pleaded. I could not rebuild the sequence from inside the maze. If we did not get the enemy into place within a quarter of an hour, the labyrinth would freeze in its last position, with or without the crew trapped. We ran onward. Left, right, left, right, time! Right, left, and into a carpeted corridor.

A tiny whine alarmed all of us. To my delight, however, it was the sound of my Callusion Optique returning. It had done its job, luring the captain into the maze, and had returned to me. I snatched it from the air. It whistled a protest.

“Make no noise!” I hissed. I was rewarded by the sound of a barrage of repulsor fire that underlined the import of my order to those cowering with me. They subsided into silence.

The corridor ended with a graceful spiral staircase to our left. To my dismay, at the top, our only choice of direction was left.

“What now?” Chan’s voice whispered in my ear.

My heart sank. I knew that we had gone off the sequence. I signed to take the left, and we would go to the next right.

I needed Parsons. He would cope with the situation. I must send a message to him. As long as we kept hold of the license plate for the pirate ship, it could not take off. He would think of some means to capture them.

I recorded a message on my camera, added text by means of the Sang Li fingerspelling that emerged as text on the bottom of the last image of my face, then I sent it out looking for Parsons, using its internal facial recognition software. It downloaded images from every image-capture system on the planetoid, sorted through thousands of images per second, and then floated away out of my hands. I hoped it could find a hole for it to escape through, and that the next of the sliding panels we encountered would not open out onto a contingent of pirates.

Chapter 16

“And, so I sez, you can’t park that thing there! It’s already rotting!” The old woman chortled to herself. “ ’Course, it wouldn’t go anywhere. The critter had already given up the ghost. Get it?”

Parsons offered her a wintry smile. He straightened a pile of plastic crates through which he had searched meticulously for the missing data crystal and dismissed as potential hiding places. He had gleaned all the information from the old woman that he felt was possible to glean. She knew nothing beyond her brief to deliver the object to him, but was putting off the moment as long as she possibly could. She was lonely, felt separated from the circle of covert operatives in which she had long enjoyed membership, and saw him as a link to her past. If he pressed her and demanded the crystal, she might lose it or destroy it deliberately. He had no choice but to continue as a sounding board and unpaid organizer, as long as she pleased to delay him. He felt that it was safe to continue, at least for the time being. Lord Thomas was occupied at the banquet where he was being lionized by the local militia. If Parsons were needed, the viewpad at his hip would signal him.

Parsons admitted that in the hours he had been in the fuel depot, the storage room was already fifty percent organized to a professional standard, where it had been chaotic before. He also had no doubt that the moment he left she would rearrange it to chaos again, so that no one would easily be able to discover its contents. Secrecy was one of her few resources. It was not a worthless one: even determined spies often gave up a search if the odds were too greatly balanced against a swift removal.

“So, what do you hear from the central office?” the old woman asked again, as she had every few minutes when the front office was empty of customers.

“Nothing much,” Parsons assured her as he had over and over. “There’s been a shakeup.” That was safe to say, even if anyone had been listening. A shakeup was always predicted or had just occurred. It changed little in the way the service ran. She nodded her head sagely.

Parsons continued sorting with an infinity of patience, knowing that rushing his idiosyncratic connection would not work. She would rather destroy the precious information than pass it along under force. Parsons had dealt with plenty like her over the course of years. There was time. His charge was the center of attention at a banquet in his honor, with plenty of people to listen to his stories and, Nature give him patience, that wretched collection of images and videos that he loved to show off. Including the images that the boy had had hidden in various nooks and crannies in his equipment of which that he thought Parsons was unaware. Since Parsons had been directly involved on the design of five of these secure storage devices for the service, there was nothing of moment he did not know about retrieval of information from them. Still, no harm would really be done by the images that he had permitted Lord Thomas to retain. If any embarrassment was due from them, it was fleeting. The young man had the sense not to make use of them for profit or to ruin the lives of those whose images he had captured. Lord Thomas possessed consideration and good sense, though he seldom made use of the latter.

“Well,” the old woman said, as Parsons completed the sixth stack of crates, “mebbe I remember where I stuck the thing. It might be right in there.” She stood up and massaged her back.

She opened the electrical systems panel in the wall. With the turn of a hidden knob, the frame containing the circuitry sprang out on a hinge. Parsons held his distance, not wishing to offend her by looming over her shoulder, even though his impatience was at a fever pitch.

“They’ve got guns!” A panicked shout erupted through the door. Parsons peered out of the shop toward the main street. A large crowd of terrified beings of all ages and species fled from the commercial section. The old woman slammed her cache shut and stalked out into the midst of the tumult. Parsons followed more cautiously, unclipping his personal weapon from the hidden sheath.

“You!” the depot owner bellowed, grabbing for the handle of a nanibot rolling down the road. It swung around to face her, the lens of its video pickup enlarged. A fully charged laser pistol rose on the stalk from its command center. “Oh, put that thing away! What in black holes is going on?”

The nani’s charge, six months or younger by the sound of the hysterical cries issuing from its interior, was awake and angry.

“I must tend the child!”

“I order you to relate information,” the old woman said, her manner snapping from the casual patois of the space station to that of a figure of authority. Parsons had a fleeting glimpse of how effective she must once have been in the service. “I require an account of the last twenty minutes. That should about do it, right, honey?” she asked Parsons.

“I would believe so,” he agreed mildly.

She raised an eyebrow, and he realized he had not spoken in the unschooled manner he had affected in her presence. Both of their covers were blown. Luckily no one was there to observe it but an upset LAI with a crying baby on board. She had calculated her statement correctly. When operated in a certain fashion, the LAIs stopped their artificial personalities and downloaded data as required.

“A crew involved in a brawl with the local militia opened fire within Oatmeal and Son, northwards along the road one hundred forty meters,” the nanibot responded obediently. “Laser weapons.”

“What?” the old woman asked. “Guns? How did they get them past security? I’m going to toast those baby-asses over a fire made of their own uniforms! The militia is involved, you say?”

“The militia is in the hotel,” Parsons corrected her. “They are holding a celebration dinner.”

“Uniformed beings, then, in a brawl with a crew from a visiting ship,” the nanibot said. “They woke the baby! She has had an ear infection. I brought her to Oatmeal and Son because she enjoys the décor and the nutritionally complete orange-flavored drink. It will take much time to soothe her to sleep. Would you care to see pictures of her?
Would you?”
The mechanical voice sounded slightly hysterical, as if it needed some soothing of its own.

“I’ll look at ’em,” the old woman said to Parsons. “You go see. Sounds like you’re involved. By the way, here.” She reached into a pocket of her coveralls and pulled out a blue data crystal the size of her little finger. She gave him a sheepish little smile. “Thanks for the cleanup. And the company. Guess you can tell I miss the old times.”