Shebat Kerrion was kneeling on the paved walk, her hands over her eyes. Beside her, stretched out on its back, was the corpse of a man twice her weight whose nose had been slammed into his brain by her kick.
He thrust himself upright. Breathing hard, he half-stumbled over the second corpse. There, leaning on the signpost which was unconcernedly blinking:
red—green —red
, he took a moment to collect his thoughts, to examine the unlikely tableau of victor and victim. Someone had well-schooled her in defense. He must remember that. He remembered, also, what she had said about being sorry for doubting him, reflecting that though the man who had sicced these dogs on him had done him a favor, it had been an unintentional one. As for what had been intended, he would return that in kind. Later. Now, the opportunity to play his own hand could not be ignored.
“Well, little murderess, do you finally believe me? Get up. The questions we have been deliberating have become suddenly academic.
Move!
”
She scrambled to her feet, her skin deathly pale even during the sign’s flashes of red. “Do not run,” he advised. “Just walk steadily. Put your arm around my waist. That’s good. Now, this way.”
Three corners later, they stood at the door he had been seeking. It was down a flight from the street, unlit and unmarked. In the black well, as Spry tapped a pattern, Shebat drew back. Her voice, very small, came from behind him. “They were two of my bodyguards, you know. Oh, Softa, I am so frightened.”
“It will be taken care of,” he promised grimly. “And so will you.”
Then the door slid aside, and a softly back-lit dream dancer said: “David, you are late. We have been waiting for you.”
As he took a solitary lorry up to Kerrion levels, Spry meditated on the unexpected appearance of the pair of Kerrion retainers, and what might have prompted their attack. The most likely possibility was simply that they had been sent down to eliminate him after he had performed his task, but arrived too early. It was
not
likely that the two men had been told what he was about: that would have necessitated two more men to eliminate
them
. And the man who had been told to take Shebat by the other had not attacked her; but had been attacked by her, a function of the suspicions Spry had sowed. It looked, most of all, like the consul general’s office trying to cover its tracks. It smelled, most of all, like a piece of typical Kerrion double-dealing. One thing bothered him: why would the dispatcher have taken the chance of befouling his own plan?
Spry pulled on his lower lip, eyes narrowed, watching unseeing as the large level numbers in the up-shaft flashed by. Then he laughed, a short, sharp bark. There was just the vaguest possibility that the men had been in low-life disguise merely to avoid scandal, were only about their jobs—as suddenly given back to them as they had been mysteriously taken away—
because the whole affair was exposed
, causing the dispatcher to abort it to save his skin. If so, he would be walking into a trap.
He sighed a deep sigh as the lorry halted, whirring expectantly. He punched
Hold: Full Fare
. Then he leaned back, staring blindly at the padded ceiling, and thought his data pool access code very clearly, with the imaging part of his mind. The computer’s soft voice rang in his head, repeating his number and clearance mechanism, and offering its services. He asked a series of questions, the answers to which convinced him that as far as the data pool was concerned, he was still a master pilot in service to the Kerrion consulate; Shebat Kerrion was still presumed to be at an unspecified location in the Kerrion complex (here followed two referrals, one of which was: slip fifteen). In short, all was well, at least in the data pool’s mind.
What had he expected? His name and status, red-lined? An all-points alert? He broke his query-line quickly, not to give the data pool any questions to mull in its micro-maw. Then he opened a manual com-line, feeding it the change he had gotten in the bar, and left a message with the consulate’s service that the secretary thereof meet him at 2300 hours at the flagship’s slip. He made it an emergency priority.
Then once more he closed his eyes:
“Bucephalus?”
his mind shouted silently through a babbling sea of cross-talk.
“
Yes, David? I am here,
” the cruiser answered in its deep, cold whisper from the exact center of the back of his head.
“We have an unusual problem. I have an equally unusual solution. Listen closely, for when I get to you I will not be able to help you implement these procedures, which you should immediately get underway, following exactly the timetable I am about to give you, no matter what happens.”
“Ah, human subterfuge. Speak on. Pilot. What is it we shall do today?”
When David Spry reached the
Bucephalus
, he had only time enough to activate his manual systems before the boarding light came on and Jebediah hurried like a dried leaf borne on a storm wind through the port.
“Take a couch, and strap yourself in,” suggested Spry coldly. His fingers blurred and the hatch hissed shut and beneath Jebediah’s feet the bulkhead shivered as the ship came to life.
“But—”
“Security,” snapped Spry. “I will tell you when it is safe.”
Jebediah, knowing better than Spry the keenness of the Kerrion slipside’s mechanical ears, swallowed his protest. He was here, incriminating himself. He took the acceleration couch the pilot indicated, fastened the three straps, and leaned back with closed eyes. He was getting too old for this sort of thing. He needed time to think matters out, and he was not getting it. If he had had any brains, he would not have come here. But his fear had been greater than he could bear: the two men sent to end this problem of the pilot had not reported back; the emergency request for his presence here was against all his instructions. Something had gone terribly wrong. Above all, he needed to know what that something was. In his hands he held an attaché case. In the case was twice the scrip the pilot had been promised: who knew what the man might demand? He was thrust deeply into the cushioned couch. Red lights danced before him. He could only wonder at the speed of which the
Bucephalus
was capable; then at the bravado of the pilot to tear spaceward at such a pace. Then the hand was gone from about his heart so abruptly that the stomach threatened to pop out of his mouth, and before his eyes the view port drew open to display a dopplered red star-scape.
“What do you think you are doing. Pilot?” he snapped.
“Taking you for a little ride, to personally inspect the anomalies I reported, so that you will authorize the rather extensive overhaul I suggested in my memo. When Parma goes out tomorrow evening, we would not want anything to be amiss, would we?” The pilot, hands clasped behind his neck, did not turn when he spoke, but seemed to be staring out the port.
“What prompted you to risk everything this way? You needed so desperately to see me privately that you made an emergency call. Now, since we are beyond the keenest surveillance, sacrosanct, as best may be:
what is it you want?
” Jebediah’s hands were shaking with rage. He could feel the sweat breaking out on his upper lip. He fumbled at the straps, failed to disengage them.
“We have a debt to settle,” answered the pilot softly, causing his couch to tilt forward. “Or have you forgotten?”
“Yes, yes. I have your money here.” He fumbled further in his lap. “If I can just get these belts open, I will give it to you.”
Spry chuckled. “That is not too likely,” he said softly. “You see,” and he reached over without unfastening his own harness and took the attaché case from the secretary’s lap, “that is the problem I felt you should inspect personally. The eject mechanism,” he said almost kindly, “has a glitch in it somewhere. It activates at random—” At the key word,
Bucephalus
heard, and obeyed.
With a horrifying pop all the cabin depressurized. David Spry felt the customary smothering sensation as his mil-hood swelled protectively, the burning of his lungs as he held the one precious breath remaining to him. To his right, a pop-eyed, gaping-mouthed old man struggled weakly as the ejection cocoon reared up out of the deck and enclosed him.
Ten seconds:
David Spry counted to himself. Without a mil-hood and suit, unconsciousness would have come in fifteen seconds; properly protected, a man had up to a minute. . . .
The right-hand acceleration couch’s floor bolts released, while bells rang silently in the vacuum and emergency lights flashed on, bathing all in baleful red. A soft vibration came up through Spry’s feet as the clear cocoon was lifted toward the yawning emergency exit yet dilating above it.
Twenty seconds:
He could see the desperate fists pounding, the old man lunging against his straps; then his feet drumming helplessly against the clear capsule; then just the capsule, spinning sunward.
Twenty-five seconds:
The hatch above the couch closed. The lights turned blue, icing the exposed mechanism where the couch had been before. Spry fingered the attaché case in his lap, his body floating ever so slightly against the straps in zero gee.
Thirty seconds:
His ears ached, heard a hiss. His body settled against the couch. All the emergency lights turned green, then faded as running lights came on.
David Spry expelled a long breath into the repressurized cabin, and said:
“Many thanks, Bucephalus. I hate to do this, but you are going to have to erase certain parts of your memory as to what has just occurred.”
When he had done that, he logged an emergency report of a random ejection with a ninety-nine-to-seven-nines probability against retrieving the capsule, and waited for further orders.
When they finally came through, there was no chance at all of recapturing the capsule, caught in the magnetic chop toward which
Bucephalus
had unerringly aimed it, spinning sunward with a fireglow of its own crawling over a shell meant for the gentle void of deep-space, and not the deadly excrescence between the sun’s molten eye and her flare-bound companion black hole.
It was a scenic, if not a particularly pleasant, way to die. At least, for the first few minutes, until Jebediah went blind. Death’s warm arms would not have come for minutes after that. Spry conjectured. Only vaguely dissatisfied with the succinctness of the affair, which he had allowed for circumspection’s sake, he ordered
Bucephalus
home without moving his lips. At interplanetary speed, he had forty minutes—and a sensitive, difficult task that might take half of that. Commending control to the cruiser, he tilted his couch back, preparing to nap for twenty. It was then that he remembered he had not opened the attaché case, and proceeded to do so. He counted it twice, since it was twice what he had expected. Both counts summed the same. He snapped the case shut, clucking his tongue at his unusual luck, sniffing around it for hidden folly. For once, no harm could be whiffed. He put the case by, and with a wriggle like a dog’s in a long-accustomed bed, fell asleep wondering what kind of dream dancer Shebat Kerrion was going to make.
The
Marada
heard a whisper, urgent and sibilant, as if from a great distance. It was not the voice of Shebat Kerrion, but it reeled off the sequence of authority only she and the cruiser itself had previously shared. So charged, the cruiser could not help but obey. Its port slid shut, lights lit, a chime sounded, though there were no ears aboard to hear. Mildly worried, if a ship’s consciousness can be said to worry, he (for so the cruiser had viewed itself ever since its female pilot had become mistress and admixed her consciousness with the ship’s own) . . .
he
, then, being capable of knowing loyalty, was also capable of experiencing other so-called human attributes: he felt dread; he felt distress. Was this then, the meaning of altruism? The cruiser pondered as it cleared its course with the data bank and whirred slowly toward the debarkation lock. It had known, abstractly, that a cruiser’s consciousness of
self
is augmented and to some extent formed by the addition of its human component. Among some of his peers he had heard a snickering reference to the pilots as mere outboard equipment. Taking stock of its own cogitation, the logical part of the ship rejected altruism as a possible name for what it was experiencing.
Indeed, in the time it took for one final lamp, ignition, to be lit, the
Marada
had rejected altruism and substituted
self-preservation
as the mode responsible for his distress, which tingled like an unscratchable itch deep in his circuitry. The reasoning pleased him, though events did not; though taking thought to the safety of his being did not. He did not like taking orders from another ship, be it the
Bucephalus
, or any other. He would not have taken them, but for the inexorable command sequence which impelled him.
Where was Shebat?
And who was this other pilot, the mover behind
Bucephalus’s
orders? And would some human come aboard him before the moment came to enter spongespace, or was this his final flight? In all of the memories of all the cruisers, no ship had come out of sponge sent in with a dead or incapacitated pilot. As for leaving spacetime with no one of flesh aboard; it was not done, had never been successfully done. And, too, he had no final destination. No coordinates for reentry had been logged. With as close as a space-cruiser could come to a shrug, the
Marada
turned to his instructions. They included one salvo of turret fire. Somehow that was satisfying; it would be a shame to die without ever having fired them.
The
Bucephalus
lay calmly in its slip, bathed in an obscene purple radiance that was the sum of the blue lights belonging to the security and rescue vehicles, and the red flashers of the slip emergency squad and the bay’s own illumination, which proclaimed in an agitated pulse that here lay a wounded, perhaps dangerously maddened cruiser.
Fire and demolition experts and security men in red coveralls swarmed over the ship, disarming weaponry and spraying anti-inflammatory foam. Medical corps and slip bosses and shipwrights in Kerrion blacks swarmed in and out of his open ports. Pilots in gray flight satins lounged wherever they chose, exercising their priorities to break through the security cordon which had been thrown like a dotted red hemisphere between the onlookers and the
Bucephalus
. A guildmaster’s silver lorry roared to slip-side, oblivious of the mechanics and security guards it scattered. A tall, white-haired man in darkest blue got out of it, flanked by two argent-clad master pilots. Attendant upon his entry into the ship, a stream of men in varicolored coveralls poured out, like a kaleidoscope roughly twisted. The lock closed.
After a time it reopened. The guildmaster and his two seconds emerged with the ship’s pilot between them. The man had to be supported between the two guild officers; his face and hands were ashy, as if his very skin flaked away. He lurched between them, an arm over the shoulder of each, as they walked him in a circle. Gradually, his steps steadied. By the time the circle was completed, he was standing unsupported. Two medics approached him, but the guildmaster waved them away. Three brash pilots succeeded where the medics had failed, stood talking to the pilot a long time. A loudspeaker began blaring for the area to be cleared. A slip boss approached and voices were raised. Then, as the purple strobing was banished by the amber running-lights of the consul general’s huge personal ground transport, the three pilots split off from the little knot of men within the larger knot of men within the half-circle of onlookers. Two entered the ship, to emerge with the pilot’s flight duffel and the metal case containing the ship’s log. The third strolled whistling, hands thrust into pockets, toward the pilot’s exit.
Men leapt from the still-moving consulate transport: a way opened for them through the crowd. They jogged to the inner group, which by then had accrued one each of the diversely garbed officials, extricating the pilot and the tall, white-haired guildmaster therefrom.
These two did not quite run amid the Kerrion bodyguard that surrounded them: a medical man, his red-crossed back to Parma, retreated before them, slowing all things with his obvious objections.
“Let him come,” said Parma Alexander Kerrion seemingly to thin air, from behind the transport’s desk that twinkled as brightly as any tower’s central control. A little noise told him his new secretary had heard. He turned from the two monitors built into the console to the window showing the
Bucephalus’s
slip. “But keep both the guildmaster and the pill-pusher out there.”
A second beep told him that Jebediah’s distaff replacement in the tiny outer office heard and obeyed.
Minutes later the door slid back, admitting the sounds of argument and the
Bucephalus’s
pilot, whose complexion seemed to be rotting even while he took the seat Parma’s wordless gesture indicated.
Before the consul general could speak, the security officer’s line burped its disapproval that none of his men had been allowed to crowd into the tiny mobile office. He disconnected the speaker without a word. The distraught light blinked urgently. Parma Kerrion ignored it.
“I am assuming that if you are here, your looks belie the reality and you do not need immediate medical attention,” Parma said softly.
“This?” The pilot raised a white, scrofulous hand. “Just dead mil.” He rubbed right hand with left, showering his leg with what seemed like snow. The hand, so displayed, looked less unhealthy. “|Froze off when the cabin de-pressurized. It’s not anything serious, just looks bad.” The countenance, purple-lipped and brown-eyed, screwed up, showering flaked mil with each tic or twitch. “I am sorry,” the pilot said very low. “I suppose you already know what happened?”
“You tell me.”
“I had some suspicions: the
Bucephalus
had been behaving strangely; memory blanks, static spurts, things like that. I put in for an emergency overhaul when I got orders that we were to ship tomorrow, your secretary wanted to see for himself. Neither of us had any idea of the danger. . . . There was nothing I could do.”
“Is that so?”
“Sir?” The pilot, in the chair, did not sit erect, but either lounged or slumped. That bothered Parma.
“There will be an inquiry, of course.”
“My guildmaster has already confiscated the log,” said the pilot without a hint of guile.
“Then there will be two inquiries.”
The pilot sat a little straighter. “Might I remind you, sir, that I took your service formally, and an oath to that effect, that I almost lost my life in your service, in pursuit of that oath. I could be as dead as your secretary.”
“If the sabotage had been less selective?” Teasingly.
“You think
I
did this? Why?”
“I do not think anything yet, young man. As a matter of fact, you may have done me a greater service than you know. Still, until all is examined, until you are formally cleared of complicity, I am going to have you confined to your guildhall. You understand.”
The pilot did not look away, or look surprised, or do anything at all which Parma felt he should, but said: “Then I am relieved of your service?”
“No. As a matter of fact, we will make the scheduled rendezvous in Shechem, as soon as the
Bucephalus
and yourself are pronounced spaceworthy.” That got the pilot’s attention. He sat up straight, objecting that it would be more than forty-eight hours before the
Bucephalus
could be checked out sufficiently to suit him.
“So anxious to be relieved of your command? I have heard that there is a saying among you, that the only cure for space-fright is space-flight.”
The pilot did not sputter, or even speak, just met Parma’s gaze, waiting.
“Ah, young man, I cannot seem to rattle you. Do you not think that is odd?”
Spry shrugged.
“Since you are not going to ask the right questions, I suppose I will have to do all the work myself. Had you come less highly recommended, I must admit, I would not be so polite. But you are, after all, a close friend of Marada’s.” The pilot gave an almost imperceptible blink. “So,” continued Parma, letting his voice take an edge, “I am not going to revoke your citizenship and fine your guild out of hand.
What in the name of Chance were you doing with my daughter on level seven?
”
“Shebat? I took her there because . . . this is going to sound funny. . . .”
“I promise, I will not laugh.”
“—Sir, I am not sure that I understand what is going on here. And if what I am about to detail to you occurred by your orders, then you cannot blame me for misconstruing their intent.” Spry looked at Parma challengingly. With a faint smile, the consul general motioned him to speak his piece. This was more amusing than he had dared hope. And bemusing. What was the boy trying to do?
“First of all, after taking her guild oath, Shebat seemed to drop out of sight. I left messages for her that she did not answer. I contacted your office, which informed me that her whereabouts could only be ‘probably determined.’ Would you not have thought that odd, were you I?”
Parma agreed that he would have thought that most odd.
“Then I determined that her bodyguard had been reassigned.” The pilot peered in what was a most obviously assessive manner at Parma. “Sir, if you yourself gave that order, then all I did after guessing that you had not will make no sense. I am no creature of platform politics. . . .”
Parma allowed that he had given no such order, asking the pilot just what that piece of information had led him to construe.
“That something was going to befall Shebat: an accident, most likely. I took it on myself to find her and warn her, believing that I could get no message through to you that would not alert whoever had pulled the bodyguard.”
“You took it on yourself to do this?”
Parma snarled suddenly.
“Sir, if the subterfuge were far-reaching, as it seems now to be, considering the sabotage of the
Bucephalus
, I did not have time to make an appointment.”
“Do you know what you have done?”
“Sir?”
“The
Marada
is gone: logged out with no destination, into spongespace. Shebat, also, is gone. What would that lead you to conjecture. Oh amateur sleuth?”
“What?”
interrupted him. Then: “Did you send a pursuit ship?”
“No. I did not want to chase her. But now I know what scared her enough to make her run. You idiot! I . . .” Then, controlled once more, he added: “Of course, we are assuming that it
was
Shebat in that ship. . . .”
“So, this is about Shebat, not your secretary. She and I parted company on level seven, if that is what you want to know.” He jerked his head toward the window, beyond which officials still scurried. “That explains your bodyguard’s less than polite attitude. Are you accusing me of something? Am I under arrest for causing Jebediah’s death? Or for saving your life? Or in point of fact, for trying to help the girl? Was it your game I fouled, rather than some nebulous saboteur’s?”
“I will ignore that last. Two of my men are dead on a seventh level street corner. My private secretary has been murdered, under your aegis if not more than that. My heir is missing. My ship is incapacitated.
Her
ship has disappeared, though everyone who saw you and Shebat leave the
Marada’s
slip swears they did not see her, or anyone, go back aboard. Exactly,” Parma glanced at his desk-top display, “ten minutes ago, a large explosion, either ship’s fire or ship’s destruction, occurred along the flight path the
Marada
was traveling. We had a double reading, very briefly, lasting three seconds. Then we had no reading whatsoever. Empty space, the bulk of the planet, nothing more.”
“And you do not think she just dark-sided?”
“What?”
“Took the ship around behind the planet, where she could not be tracked?”
“I am not sure,” Parma thundered, “that she was
in
the ship.”
“What else?” queried Spry.
“Indeed, or rather:
where
else?” He let the question hang between them, excavating in the pilot’s face for signs of duplicity. Behind the cover of flaking mil, it was impossible to tell what the man might be thinking.
Parma sighed, “All right, then, Spry. Perhaps, coming on Marada’s recommendation, you are replacing him as the millstone about my neck. At the very least, you have stretched your guild immunity to the breaking point. At the most, you are a walking dead man, lawful punishment being too gentle to suit me should I discover you are lying, that any of this was your doing. Do you hear me? I will strangle you with my bare hands! Now, to avoid that rather strenuous exercise, I suggest you tell me everything: where you took Shebat; what was said between you; how you came to leave her unescorted when you knew she had no protection.”
“Leave her . . . you just told me I had overstepped my oath. She’s a Kerrion; I am employed by Kerrions. She dismissed me. I had other things on my mind, like the
Bucephalus
, I had done my guild-duty by warning her.”
“And I suppose she said nothing to you about being forbidden the lower levels.”
“As a matter of fact, she did; she was worried you would take the
Marada
away from her. But we were already down there. . . .”
The desk was bleating like a sheep. Parma punched a button; the guildmaster’s demands for entry reached him; he fingered the button briefly. “Then, you did take her downunder and leave her there.”
“Yes, I did that. I do not see what was wrong. . . .”
Parma ignored him, speaking into his desk’s blinking recess. “Guildmaster? Take this pilot of yours and run your inquiry. I, also, will run mine. When we are both feeling less emotional, we will decide what to do with him. When that moment comes, I want him fat, happy and well-basted. If he disappears, I’ll have your carcass instead.” Parma broke the connection, leaned back in his chair, and said to Spry: “Go rest secure in the arms of your guildfellows.”
Then, when Spry only stared incredulously at him:
“Move!”