Confluence

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DOMINIQUE RADKO

Radko woke to cramps, and pins and needles.

Jakob hadn’t killed her. He’d stunned her.

She was bound to a chair, arms by her sides, strapped at the shoulders, the waist, the wrists, and around her ankles. The bindings were tight all the way down. She couldn’t slip out of them. The ties were behind her, and the seat was fastened to the floor.

She might not be dead yet, but it was difficult to see how she would get out of this.

“Those useless Redmond lackeys,” Jakob said. “Their security is full of holes. Look at this.” Something spun. She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, and moved her eyes without moving her head so she could see it better. It looked like a comms. “We didn’t even know this was gone until Martel found it among your girl’s belongings.”

Radko kept her head down. The longer Jakob thought she was unconscious, the better. She could see one pair of polished boots. Worlds of the Lesser Gods boots were a deep navy. These were black. Lancian boots. Commodore Bach was here.

Please let Vega have received her message.

“What is it?” Bach sounded almost disinterested although Radko would bet he wanted to know.

“The report on experiments Quinn is doing on the linesmen. It was stolen two weeks ago. Redmond and TwoPaths Engineering didn’t plan on telling us.”

Surely they knew it wasn’t the original report that had been stolen. Or maybe only Dr. Quinn did, and if no one had said the original report was missing, would they admit to a second one going missing? Probably not.

Radko knew secrets she couldn’t afford to give away. Even if Jakob didn’t kill her, she couldn’t stay alive to blab those secrets out. The question was, how to do the most damage to Jakob and Bach on the way. And somehow steal the comms and get it to Vega.

Jakob must have turned to face her, for his voice got clearer. “We’re in a hospital full of doctors, and they can’t even administer a drug properly. This time I’ll give her the truth serum myself.”

“I never thought much of Dromalan truth serum, myself.” That was Bach, and the bile rose in Radko’s throat just thinking about him.

“It’s not my favorite, either,” Jakob admitted. “I prefer something faster acting. But there are gallons of this stuff lying around on station. They use it for experimenting on the linesmen.”

Bach shuddered, and Radko wanted to do the same. The serum made a linesman more receptive to the lines, but the stronger the linesman, the more damage it did. And you never sent a linesman who’d been doped with it through the void. You destroyed his lines.

“Some of the experiments strike me as barbaric.”

“Barbaric or not, they’re working. Redmond has done more with linesmen than your world or my world would do in a lifetime, and they’ve done it in fifteen years.”

“We’ve done some exceptional work of our own, recently,” Bach said.

“Not like this. Wait till we get those ships. You’ll see what—” Jakob broke off as his comms sounded. Radko saw the shadow of his hand move as he flicked it on. “I told you not to disturb me.”

She listened hard, but didn’t catch the reply.

“Talk sense, man.” Jakob pushed the call onto the wall screen. Radko looked up properly, and saw that was to free his hands so he could fill the syringe with green liquid from the jar on his desk.

The caller was Martel. “The alien ship is here.”

“Here?”

“Right in our space.” The volume rose as Martel spoke, until he was almost shouting. “Which stupid idiot thought that would be a clever trick? Because it wasn’t. It was downright dangerous.”

Bach pointed his blaster at Jakob. “This is supposed to be a three-world initiative. The ship was to go to Redmond. Does the Worlds of the Lesser Gods plan on going it alone?”

Jakob waved him away. “It was supposed to go to Redmond. But who cares. We’ve got the alien fleet. All of them?” he asked Martel.

His comms was going crazy with people trying to call him. He ignored them.

“Isn’t one enough?”

Jakob looked at Bach. He ignored the blaster. “They only brought the one ship? You said we take one ship, and it brings the whole fleet. It didn’t matter which ship.” He lifted the comms to talk into it again. “Which ship is it?”

“Which bloody ship do you think it is? It’s massive. And it’s close. Oh, and it’s threatening to use a destructive green field.”

Radko started to hope.

“Contact your man,” Jakob said to Bach.

Bach opened his own comms. “Status report, Rigg.”

There was no answer.

Bach would only be calling the ship if it was his people who had stolen it. How many Lancastrians were involved in this betrayal?

“Come on,” Jakob said. “How hard can it be to steal a ship and send a message?”

An alarm sounded. First in the corridors outside, then over the speaker. Jakob clicked back to Martel. “What’s happening?”

Martel glanced sideways. “It’s an internal alarm. I’ll call you back.”

“I hope it’s not someone panicking about the ship. We have captured it.” Jakob clicked off, then added under his breath as he waited for Bach’s call to be answered, “We’d better have, anyway. Come on, it can’t take this long.”

It could if Rigg wasn’t in charge of the ship. The lines would be blocking the calls.

Martel called back. He had Dr. Quinn on split screen. Quinn started talking almost before the call was open. “They’ve attacked our linesman.”

“We’re not under attack.”

“They’re all out cold, or screaming, or… Do something. Get rid of it. Now.”

Radko grinned. The ship out there was one of the eleven ships. Probably the Eleven itself. And she knew which linesman would be on it.

Time for a rethink on her action plan.

She spoke softly, under the noise. “Ean. Can you hear me? Flash the lights once if you can.”

The lights blinked.

Good. “I need someone to free me.”

Bach turned his head to watch her, but he didn’t raise his weapon or stop her. Hopefully, he wouldn’t realize what she was doing until it was too late.

“I have at least two people on the station with me,” Radko said. “Hopefully, three. They’ll be in cells. Or two of them will.”

“Calm down, Quinn,” Jakob said. “You know how the lines on the alien ship affect the linesmen.”

Quinn was working himself into his own heart attack. “That’s why the ship wasn’t supposed to come here. Look at them.” He brought up visuals of rooms and corridors. Dozens of linesmen, most of them on the floor, all of them trying to breathe. One of them didn’t look to be breathing at all.

If only one ship was here, Ean had used line seven, and they would still be in contact with the other ships in Haladean space. “Vega will identify my team for you,” Radko said.

“It felled half the linesmen,” Quinn cried.

“See if you can rescue them,” Radko continued. “If you can, get them to come here. But tell them I’ve two armed men here who are as good as any of our own people, and not to underestimate them. If you can’t get them here, get them to the shuttles.”