The Legacy of Lehr (20 page)

Shannon drew a deep breath and let it out. “I think it's silver.”

“And?”

“Don't you dare laugh. The latest victims were two children. The one who survived was wearing that around his neck. I think it's silver, and I think it's what saved him.”

Mather's expression did not change, but his hand tightened minutely around the heap of chain and medallion before he opened it to scrape a thumbnail tentatively against one link.

“It
would
appear to be silver,” he said impassively, “though I'd have to test it to be sure. Were you able to get any description of the killer?”

“The boy called it a boolim, whatever that is,” Shannon said impatiently. “Smitty, have you found him yet?”

The security man flipped another set of switches and shook his head. “He doesn't answer a standard page, Doctor. He must be inside one of the cabins.”

“Doesn't he carry a personal communicator?” Mather asked.

“I've tried that, Commodore. Either he's turned it off or left it somewhere, which I doubt, or else it's being shielded inside a room. A lot of our passengers insist on extra security and privacy protection—and the rooms with controlled environments, such as some of our alien passengers require, would read the same way. If you could narrow down the possibilities, though, I can override some of them, for good cause.”

“I assure you, this is a good cause,” Mather said, hefting his handful of chain. “Try Lorcas Reynal's cabin, and then work through the other passengers on our B-positive blood list.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Smitty set to his work, Mather turned back to Shannon.

“You mentioned a boolim. Do you know what that is?”

Shannon shook her head.

“
Boolim
is a common Al Kaffan slang term.” He glanced more closely at the ident tab. “Yes, I thought so. Young Nikkos is Al Kaffan. It's one of those curious parallels I was trying to tell you about the other night. In the general sense, it's akin to the old Earther ‘boogieman,' but it has its specific roots in the Al Kaffan myth cycle as the
abul-aienim
, meaning
he who drinks blood by night
.”

“In other words,” Shannon answered weakly, “a vampire.”

“If you will.”

Mather had just turned to query the security man again when the man looked up.

“He isn't in any of those cabins, Commodore.”

“He isn't?”

“I mean, he definitely isn't in all but one of them. I can't tell about number thirty-nine, on Deck Two. There's some kind of interf—”

“Thirty-nine is Reynal's cabin!” Shannon said with a gasp.

“There's interference? Is that what you were going to say?” Mather asked, leaning over the man's shoulder to adjust a control. “What do you mean, you can't tell?”

The man tapped out a set of commands, then set his finger under a small green tally light.

“Do you see that light? It's for cabin twenty-two, on Deck One—a Mister Carrington's cabin. The green means that no one is in there. A yellow light would mean that Carrington himself was present. If the captain were there, the light would show red, since that's who we're looking for. But when I reset for cabin thirty-nine, Deck Two”—he pushed another series of buttons, and the tally light went off—“I don't get anything at all. And it isn't a malfunction in the circuits, either. I checked that already. Doctor, could there be some kind of special life-support system in cabin thirty-nine that I don't know about?”

“Yes, there could!” Shannon said, snapping her fingers as she remembered. “He requested a sterile air circulation system and microbe-repellent force screen for the room. I think he also wears a personal microbe shield. Either one could be interfering with the locator signals.”

“Is there any way to jam through a message?” Mather asked.

Smitty shook his head. “Afraid not, Commodore. Not without going up there and altering the systems that are causing the interference.”

“Never mind.” Mather gestured to one of the Rangers. “Get the rest of our people together, Perelli. Leave—ah—Fredricks here with the cats, and the rest of you go up to cabin thirty-nine, Level Two, and wait for us. Gather up as many of ship's security as you can along the way and arm with stunners as well as needlers. Do what you think necessary, if anything happens before we can join you, but otherwise, just stand by. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

“Meanwhile, Doctor Shannon and I are going to make a detour through Medical Section, on the way. I want to make sure this is silver.” He flourished the chain in his hand. “And I want to pick up a few things. Doctor, I hope that your reagent shelf is well stocked, because I think I know how to stop our vampire.”

And on Deck Two, Lutobo, Wallis, Courtenay, and the two Rangers were already in cabin thirty-nine, having finally opened the door with Courtenay's passkey when their buzzing and pounding brought no response. The room was dim inside, especially once the door closed behind them, and the five of them stood very quietly just inside the door until Wing could turn the lights up. Wallis's medical scanner had already told them that Reynal was not in.

“I wonder where he is,” Wallis said, glancing around the rather austere cabin. Other than a decanter and glass on the table beside a chair, and a few personal toilet items behind the frosted plastic of a lavatory storage cabinet, the room showed few signs of occupancy. The captain followed Wallis's gaze and snorted.

“I don't want to even think about where he is, if he
is
the one who's responsible for what's been going on,” he muttered, motioning for Courtenay to keep watch for Reynal's return on the door viewer. “What kind of man
is
this Reynal, anyway?”

As he gestured around the pristine cabin in disgust, pushing a chair into better alignment with one foot, Wallis put her scanner back in her medical satchel and went briskly to a set of wall storage units, opening a drawer and riffling through the contents.

“He doesn't get along well with people, Captain,” she replied. “His forte is really archaeology—which is fortunate, since archaeologists mainly have to deal with dead people and things. He does know animals, though—and he was the best Lehr cat tracker we could find on B-Gem. Wing got along with him reasonably well, didn't you, Wing? At least he never seemed to deliberately pick fights with you.”

Wing opened a closet door and browsed casually among the few garments hanging there. “We spoke a few times,” he allowed. “Actually, I think he's really more of an anthropologist than an archaeologist. His people consider him one of the honored preservers of their lore. He told me some fascinating stories about the days before Il Nuadi was rediscovered: the Years of Light, they call it. He says that when the Empire found Il Nuadi again and began bringing it back into the mainstream of human civilization, they brought darkness and oblivion with them, just like the original settlers did. He says his race is dying out.”

“What does he mean, ‘his race'?” Wallis said, closing the last of the storage drawers to begin rifling the desk. “The present inhabitants of Il Nuadi are descended from human stock. The genetic pool may have shifted a little during four hundred years of isolation, but they're cross-fertile with almost any other human-originated race in the Empire—and that's the true test of species, after all.”

“All I know is what he told me,” Wing said with a shrug. “He says his people changed during the Years of Light, that they were becoming—godlike was the word I think he used. He says it was supposed to have been somehow tied in with the vanished native race of the planet. Reynal says—”

“Reynal is a very sick man,” Wallis interrupted, lifting aside a folded piece of cloth to reveal a shallow box-lid containing dozens of small ampules of a clear, straw-colored fluid. Two hypospray units lay beside the box, along with a cleaning kit. Lifting out one of the little ampules, Wallis carefully turned its label to the light.

“Reparanol,” she read. “That's a last-chance drug for inhibiting tissue rejection.” She glanced at the captain and Wing. “This doesn't fit with what
I
know of his medical history, though. He may be just a hypochondriac, or he may have a real medical problem—he was always afraid he was going to catch some disease—but you don't take a drug like this, if immunity is already low—though this could cause it. I wonder if it could also mask the lesser blood factors.…”

As her voice trailed off speculatively, Lutobo picked up another of the ampules and examined it. “Is Reparanol valuable, Doctor? I mean, is it difficult to get or something?”

“If you mean, could he be smuggling it,” Wallis said, “I shouldn't think so. It isn't a cheap drug, but it's easily obtainable by those who need it, even on B-Gem. It
is
under moderately rigid control, in that dosage is tricky—you have to have a specialist's prescription to get it—but I don't know why anyone would smuggle it. Besides, the presence of the hypos suggests that it's here to be used.”

With a sigh, Lutobo put the ampule back where he had found it and began poking farther into the drawer. “All right, then, he's a sick man. And for some reason, he didn't want the exact reasons in his medical records. That's his right, I suppose, so long as he's prepared to take the risks involved, but—here! What's this?”

Pulling out a stack of ship's stationery, Lutobo pointed to several miniature power packs, no bigger than a man's thumbnail, then yanked the drawer out of the desk entirely and dumped its contents on the bunk. Far at the back had been half a dozen boxes of low-load needler darts, packed twenty to the box. One box was nearly empty.

“And no pistol,” Wallis siad breathlessly, when they had spread out all the contents of the drawer. “These darts are from the same manufacturer as the one I took out of our dead cat, too.”

“Then Reynal is our murderer,” Lutobo murmured.

“It certainly looks that way.”

Lutobo shook his head. “I have to confess, I almost wish the cats
had
been responsible for all of this, Doctor,” he said a little sheepishly. “I doubt that Lehr cats are half as cunning as the human animal. This also means that Reynal probably has the weapon on him, too, doesn't it?”

“I'm afraid so, Captain.”

“We'd better put out a search for him, then,” Lutobo said, heading for the door where Courtenay had been keeping watch. “And Doctor Hamilton, I may just owe y—”

“Uh-oh, Captain, we aren't going to have to look for him,” Courtenay said suddenly, stiffening at what he saw in the door viewer. “He just came around the corner, headed this way, and there are six or eight other passengers in the vicinity. Do you want to risk a shoot-out in the corridor, or shall we try to take him in here?”

“Hide and let him get inside!” Wing said, taking charge before Lutobo could answer and motioning with an already drawn needler for all of them to move. “Captain, get down behind the bed! Casey, behind the chair. Courtenay, hit the lights and then hide in the shower with Doctor Hamilton.
Move
, people!”

The two civilians obeyed immediately, instinctively recognizing Wing's more specialized training, and Wallis and Casey were not far behind. As the young Ranger lieutenant wormed his way into the tiny closet, needler at the ready as he eased the door shut, the captain ducked down on the hidden side of the bunk, sweeping the telltale debris from the drawer onto the floor and also drawing his weapon. Wallis, when Courtenay had doused the lights, drew the security chief into the bathroom with her, stumbling a little in the suddenly subdued light; she left the shower door just slightly ajar so she could see, one hand rummaging in her medical kit as quietly as possible for her knockout hypo.

Endless hours seemed to pass before she heard the cabin door sigh open and then closed, and the owner of heavy footsteps immediately wrenched open the bathroom door and staggered into the little room though he did not turn on the lights. Wallis tried not to breathe—and prayed that Courtenay would not, either—as a dark form half collapsed over the sink and began to gag, almost immediately vomiting up an enormous quantity of fluid.

She could feel Courtenay fighting his own gag reflex as the stench of blood inundated their enclosed cubicle, and she almost considered using the hypo in her hand on
him
. But then the figure at the sink—it
was
Reynal—was straightening and glancing into the dark mirror, staring incredulously at the reflection
behind
him, and she knew that she needed Courtenay very badly.

“Take him
now!
” she shouted, kicking the shower door open and shoving Courtenay ahead of her as she lunged with her hypo toward Reynal's bare wrist.

It connected with empty air; or rather, it hissed harmlessly against the microbe shield that, she immediately realized, was now a defense against far more than germs. Nor were Courtenay's needler darts any more effective. Reynal recoiled in momentary panic, though, seizing Courtenay in a grip that instantly incapacitated him and then glancing around wildly as Casey and the captain exploded from cover and came out firing, their darts also splatting harmlessly against the shields—except for several that hit the already helpless Courtenay.

Reynal howled at that, his golden eyes blazing and thin lips curled back in a triumphant sneer, and dropped Courtenay—but it was only to turn his attentions on the captain and Casey, the latter of whom dove back behind his chair to reload. As Reynal advanced on Lutobo, scorning the weapon that Lutobo emptied impotently against the shields and then threw at him, Wallis scrambled after and grabbed the decanter off the table he had just passed.

But as Reynal reached Lutobo and grabbed him, too, taking him to his knees with no more than a flick of his wrist, and Wallis drew back to fling the decanter at Reynal, hoping the impact of a larger, slower projectile might at least divert him, a familiar voice suddenly called her from behind. She whirled to see Wing emerging from the closet. An odd little smile played around his lips as he raised his needler.