Ethan of Athos

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ethan and Quinn were shoved together within the potential radius of fire from the bell-muzzle of the nerve disrupter, held in the tense hand of the man in the Security uniform. Cee was segregated from them under Rau's stunner. It needed nothing more than that to give Ethan a silent appreciation of their relative status.

Quinn looked even worse close up, with a split swollen lip, and white and shaking from either pain or the aftereffects of low stun. She seemed shorter without her boots. Cee stumbled like a corpse looking only for a place to lie down; congealed, cold, the blue light of his eyes extinguished.

"What happened?" Ethan whispered to Quinn. "How did they ever find you when Security couldn't?"

"I forgot the damned beeper," she hissed back through clenched teeth. "Should've shoved it down the first trash vent we passed. I knew it was compromised! But Cee was arguing with me, and I was in a hurry, and—oh, hell, what's the use…" She bit her lip in frustration, winced, and licked it tenderly. Her eyes returned again and again to their opponents, adding up the unfavorable odds, rejecting the sum and trying again with no better luck.

Millisor walked around them, smooth and smug. "So glad you could make it, Dr. Urquhart. We could have arranged accidents for you and the commander separately, but having you both together allows us a rather exquisite opportunity for—efficiency."

"Vengeance?" quavered Ethan. "But we never tried to kill you."

"Oh, no," Millisor protested. "Vengeance has nothing to do with it. You both simply know too much to live."

Rau grinned nastily. "Tell them the rest, Colonel," he urged.

"Ah, yes. With your sense of humor, Commander, you will particularly like this one. Observe, if you will, all those unused flex tubes on the outer wall. Sealed at both ends, they make a very private little compartment. Just the spot for a couple with rather odd tastes in adventure to arrange a tryst. How unfortunate that, in the sound sleep following their exertions—"

Rau waved his stunner cheerfully, by way of indicating just how that sound sleep was to be achieved.

"—the flex tube is vented into space in preparation for locking in the auto-conveyer from a freighter hold. Said freighter being due in this docking bay immediately after my courier departs. Shall we leave you two entirely nude, I wonder?" he mused, "or merely naked from the waist down, suggesting fumbling passionate hurry?"

"God the Father," Ethan moaned in horror, "the Population Council will think I was depraved enough to make love to a woman in a flex tube!"

"Gods forbid," Quinn, looking equally appalled, echoed under her breath, "that Admiral Naismith would think I was stupid enough to make love to anything in a flex tube!"

Terrence Cee's eyes roved over the docking bay, as if seeking death as desperately as Quinn's eyes sought escape. He made a little jerky motion; Rau's stunner instantly drew a bead on him.

"Dream on, mutant," Rau growled. "We aren't giving you a chance. One wrong move and you'll be carried aboard stunned." His lips drew back unpleasantly. "You don't want to miss the show your friends are going to put on for us, do you?"

Cee's hands clenched and unclenched, despair and rage struggling for ascendancy in him, both equally impotent. "I'm sorry, Doctor," he whispered. "They held a nerve disruptor to the commander's head, and I knew they weren't bluffing. I thought maybe you wouldn't come, just for a call from me. I should have let them shoot her then. Sorry. Sorry…"

Quinn's lips turned sardonically upward, breaking to bleed again. "You don't have to apologize quite that fervently, Cee…. Your resisting wouldn't have saved him anyway."

"You don't have to apologize at all," said Ethan firmly. "I'd have done the same myself, in all probability."

The man with the nerve disruptor waved them apart, and drove Ethan and Quinn to the outer wall, and along it toward the bay's far end.

"Who is that guy, anyway?" Ethan asked Quinn with a jerk of his head. "Setti?"

"You guessed it. I should have shot him in the back when I had the chance, and collected the other half of my bounty from House Bharaputra," Quinn replied in a disgusted undertone. She added thoughtfully, "If I jumped that goon, d'you think you could make it across the bay to one of those corridors before Rau stunned you?"

It was fifty meters or more across the cavernous chamber. "No," said Ethan frankly.

"How about a dash for the cover of that flex-tube?"

"Then what? Make faces at them till they walked over and shot me?"

"All right," she snarled impatiently, "you come up with a better idea."

Ethan's hands twitched in his pockets, and encountered a little oblong. "Maybe we could buy some more time with this?" he said, pulling out the message capsule.

"What the hell's that?"

"It was the weirdest thing. On my way here this man came up to me in the mall and pushed it on me—he said it was a message for Millisor. It's activated by Millisor's military service number, and I should give it to him if I saw him—"

Quinn froze, her hand clenched on his arm. "What color was he?"

"Huh?"

"The man, the man!"

"Pink. That is, he had this pink suit."

"Not the suit, the man!"

"Interesting—sort of a coffee-color. Extremely elegant. I wish I could've got some of those skin genes for Athos—"

"Hey," Setti began, moving toward them with a frown.

"Giveittome, giveittome," Quinn gabbled, grabbing the message capsule out of Ethan's hand. "Lessee. 672-191-, oh gods, is it 142 or 124?" Her shaking index finger jabbed at the tiny keypad, then agonized in hesitation. "421 and pray. Here, Setti!" Quinn cried, and tossed the message capsule at the startled Cetagandan, whose left hand snaked out in an easy, automatic catch. "Down!" she yelled in Ethan's ear, kicked his feet out from under him, and dropped atop his head.

There was a moment's puzzled silence. The tiny hum of a holovid forming its image sounded insect-thin.

"Aw, rats," Quinn groaned, her weight slumping on Ethan. "Wrong again."

Ethan rather muffled, complained, "What the devil do you think you're—"

The shock wave blew them both ten meters across the docking bay floor, to fetch up in a tangle of arms and legs against the outer bulkhead. Except for the ringing in his ears, Ethan could not at first hear a thing. His bones seemed to reverberate like a struck gong, and his vision darkened.

"Thought that had to be the case," Quinn muttered in shaky satisfaction. She stood up, fell down, stood up again and bounced off the wall, blinking rapidly, her hands feeling in front of her.

Alarms seemed to be shrieking like mad things all over the place. Emergency lights came on with a brilliant glare—Ethan was relieved to realize he hadn't been struck blind—and the distant booms of airseals shutting followed one another like dominos falling.

Closer, quieter, and much more ominous was a hissing, rising to a whistling, of air escaping around the nearest flex-tube seal, damaged in the explosion. Icy fog boiled in a cloud around it.

Even Ethan had the sense to start away from it, crawling on his hands and knees. The gravity wavered nauseatingly. A melted patch in the metal deck was just ceasing to bubble. Ethan skirted it. Of Setti there was no sign anywhere.

"By God," Ethan muttered dizzily, "she is good at getting rid of bodies…."

He looked up across an interminable metallic desert to see Terrence Cee, running like a deer, brought down in a flying tackle by Rau. Millisor, dashing up behind, took aim to give the telepath a swift kick in the head, thought better of it, and hopped to his other foot to deliver a blow to Cee's less-valuable solar plexus instead. Millisor and Rau each grabbed an arm, dragging Cee from his crouch toward the activated flex tube beyond which their ship waited.

Ethan staggered to his feet and began running toward them. He hadn't the least idea what he was going to do when he got there. Except stop them, somehow. That was the only clear imperative. "God the Father," he moaned, "there had better be a reward in heaven for this sort of thing…"

He had the advantage of a shorter angle to cross, against Millisor's and Rau's disadvantage of their writhing burden. Ethan found himself standing, legs spread apart, blocking the entrance to the flex tube. Perfectly positioned for a fast draw, barring the minor hitch of being weaponless. Help, bethought. "Stop!" he cried.

To his surprise, they did, cautious. Rau had lost his stunner somewhere, but Millisor pulled a vicious, glittering little needler from his jacket and took aim at Ethan's chest. Ethan pictured its tiny needles expanding on impact and whirling like razors through his abdomen. His autopsy would be the godawfullest mess…

Terrence Cee yanked away from Rau and spun to stand in front of Ethan, his arms spread wide in a futile gesture of protection. "No!"

"You think I have to keep you alive just because the cultures are gone, mutant?" Millisor, furious, cried at him. "Dead will do, by God!" He raised his weapon in both hands. "What the—" he lurched as his feet rose from the floor, his hands clutching out for lost balance.

Ethan grabbed Cee. His stomach seemed to be floating away independently of the rest of him. He looked around hysterically, to spot Quinn clinging to the far wall near one of the corridor entrances, the cover plate forcibly torn off an environmental engineering control panel beside her.

Millisor's body undulated in midair, compensating expertly for his unwanted spin, and he brought his weapon back to steady aim. Quinn, yelling helplessly, tore the cover plate the rest of the way off its cabinet and flung it toward them. It spun wickedly through the air, but it was obvious before it was halfway across the bay that it was going to miss Millisor. The Cetagandan's grip tightened on his needler trigger—

Millisor's body, haloed for a blinding instant like some burning martyr, convulsed in the booming blue crackle of a plasma bolt. Ethan's head jerked at the pungent stench of burnt meat and fabric and boiling plastics. He blinked red and purpled afterimages of the dancing, dying silhouette of the ghem-lord.

The needler spun away, and Rau lost his grip on the floor in an aborted grab for it. The Cetagandan captain swam frantically in air, swivelling his head in urgent search for the source of this devastating new attack. Quinn's cover plate, rebounding off the far wall, winged by nearly taking Ethan's head with it.

"There he is!" Cee, grappling in midair with Ethan, pointed with a shout at the catwalks and girders. A pink blur moved along them, aimed something at Rau. "No! He's my meat!" Cee cried. With a berserker yell, Cee launched himself off Ethan toward Rau. "Kill you, bastard!"

The only benefit Ethan could see coming from this insane outbreak of martial spirit was that he, Ethan, was pushed toward the outer bulkhead wall. He managed to catch a grip on a projection without breaking a wrist, and halt his mindless momentum.

"No, Terrence! If somebody's firing at Cetagandans, the thing to do is get out of the way!" But this voice of reason whipped away in the wind. Wind? The air leak must be widening—explosive decompression at any moment, surely…

Cee's and Rau's struggling forms sank to the deck like a pebble dropping through oil, as Quinn gradually turned up a little gravity. Ethan's own body stopped flapping like a flag in the breeze, and he found himself hanging, though still lightly, entirely too far above the deck. He began to climb down hastily, before Quinn decided to try something like Helda's trick with the birds.

Rau threw the smaller, lighter Cee bouncing and skidding along the deck, and whirled to dash for his ship's flex tube. Two steps, and he flared, melted, and burned like a wax image in a brilliant plasma cross-fire, coming from not one but two sources among the girders. He fell with a meaty thunk, and, horribly, lived a moment more, writhing and screaming soundlessly through fleshless black jaws. Cee, on hands and knees, watched open-mouthed, as though himself dismayed by the completeness of his vicarious revenge.

Ethan started across the deck toward the telepath. On the Station side of the bay, two men swung out of the network of girders and catwalks. One was the pink apparition from the mallway, a second was another dark-skinned man dressed in shimmering brown in a similar highly-decorated style. They closed on Quinn, who, so far from welcoming her rescuers, started back up the wall like a busy spider.

Each of the dark men grabbed an ankle and yanked her down, careless of what her head struck on the way. An attempted karate kick on her part was foiled by brown-silk and turned into what would have been a nasty fall in higher gravity and still didn't look exactly pleasant. Pink-suit pinioned her arms from behind, and brown-silk took the fight out of her with a breath-stopping blow to her stomach.

One on each side, they hustled her away up the corridor ramp toward the emergency exit as pressure-suited Stationer damage control squads began to pour into the chamber from several other entrances.

"They're—they're snatching Quinn!" Ethan cried to Cee. "Who are they? What are they?" He danced from foot to foot in an agony of bewilderment, pulling Cee up.

Cee squinted after them. "Jackson's Whole? Bharaputrans, here? We've got to go after her!"

"Preferably while there's still air to breathe—"

Clinging to each other, they proceeded in a sort of bounding hobble as rapidly as they could across the docking bay and up the ramp.

At the emergency airseal they had to wait for terrifying seconds, working their jaws to protect their ears against the now rapidly decreasing air pressure, while the trio ahead of them cycled through and vacated the personnel lock that permitted escape from blocked chambers. Jabbing at the control button in a panicked tattoo, or even leaning on it, did nothing to hasten the process, Ethan found; the door opened only when it was damn good and ready.

They fell through, and had to wait again while pressure equalized, and Quinn's assailants gained a lengthening head start. Ethan gasped in relief. He had been entirely mistaken about Stationer air; it smelled just great, better than any air he'd ever had.

"How the devil," Ethan panted to Cee as they waited, "did Millisor and Rau ever get out of Quarantine? I thought even a virus couldn't escape it."

"Setti sprang them," Cee panted back. "He came in either along with, or pretending to be, the guard taking them to their deportation dock, I'm not sure which. They walked right out the door. All the documentation and IDs perfect, of course. I don't think even Quinn realizes how far into the Station computer network they'd penetrated in the time they were here."

The emergency airseal lock hissed open at last, and Ethan and Cee staggered up the corridor in hot pursuit of a quarry now out of sight. They bumped to a halt at the first cross-corridor.

Cee, his arm flung out, turned in a circle a couple of times like a damaged clockwork mechanism. "That way," he pointed to their left.

"You sure?"

"No."

They galloped down it anyway. At the next cross-corridor they were rewarded by the sound of a familiar alto voice, raised in protest, wafting from the right. They followed on, to come out in a stark freight flex-tube foyer.

The man in chocolate-brown silk had Quinn shoved up facing a wall, her arms twisted behind her. Her toes stretched and sought the floor, without success.

"Come on, Commander," the man in pink was saying, "We haven't got time for this. Where is it?"

"Wouldn't dream of keeping you," she replied in a rather smeary voice, as her face was being squashed sideways into the wall. "Ow! Hadn't you better run off to your embassy before Security gets here? They'll be all over the place after that bomb blast."

The man in pink whirled, raising his plasma gun, as Ethan and Cee skidded into the foyer. "Wait," Cee said, his hand restraining Ethan's arm.

"Friends!" Quinn shrieked, twitching. "Friends, friends, don't fire, we're all friends here!"

"We are?" Ethan, winded and dizzy, dubiously absorbed the tableau before him.

"Mercenaries who take money for contracts they can't carry out don't have friends," growled brown-silk. "At least, not for long."

"I was working on it," argued Quinn. "You goons have no appreciation of subtlety. Besides, you can litter the place with corpses and run off to the protection of your House consul. No skin off you if you're deported and declared persona non grata on Kline Station forever. Not only do I have to play by different rules, but I wanna be able to come back here someday. Let's try for a little finesse, huh?"

"You've had nearly six months for finesse. Baron Luigi wants the House's money back," said pink-silk. "That's the only subtlety I have to appreciate."

Brown-silk lifted Quinn a few more centimeters.

"Ow, ow, all right, no problem!" yammered Quinn. "Your credit chit is in my right inner jacket pocket. Help yourselves."

"And just where is your jacket?"

"Millisor took it off me. It's back in the docking bay. Ow, no, honest!"

There was a disgusted pause. "It could be the truth," mused pink-silk.

"Docking bay's crawling with Station Security by now," brown-silk pointed out. "It could be a trick."

"Look, fellas, let's be reasonable about this, huh?" said Quinn. "Luigi's deal was half in advance and half on delivery. Now, I already took care of Okita. That's one-quarter right there."

"We have only your word for that. I haven't seen a body," said pink-silk.

"Finesse, Gen'ral, finesse."

"Major," pink-silk corrected automatically.

"And it was I who took out Setti in the docking bay just now. That's half. Seems to me we're even."

"With our bomb," said brown-silk.

"You gonna argue with results? Look, are we allies, or not?"

"Not," said brown-silk, and elevated her slightly more.

Voices, and a clatter of boots and equipment, echoed down the corridor from the direction of the docking bay. Pink-silk shoved his plasma arc into a holster out of sight under his embroidered jacket. "Time's up."

"Are you going to let this slide?" demanded brown-silk.

Pink-silk shrugged. "Call it even at half-pay. You right-handed or left-handed, Quinn?"

"Right-handed."

"Take the Baron's interest out of her left arm, and let's go."

Brown-silk, quite deliberately, let Quinn drop, achieved an arm-bar, and popped her left elbow. The muffled cartilaginous crack was quite audible. Quinn made no other sound. Again, Cee restrained Ethan's forward lurch. The pair of Bharaputrans stepped delicately into the nearest lift-tube, and sank from sight.

"Damn, I thought they'd never leave," Quinn sighed. "The last thing I need is for Security to catch up with those guys and start comparing notes." She slithered greenly to a seat on the floor, her back propped against the wall. "I want to go back to combat duty. I don't think I like this Intelligence stuff as well as Admiral Naismith said I would."

Ethan cleared his throat. "You, ah—need a doctor, Commander?"

She grinned wanly. "Yeah. Do you?"

"Yeah." Ethan sat down rather heavily beside her. His ears still rang, and the chamber walls seemed to pulsate. He mulled over her comment. "This isn't by chance your first Intelligence assignment, is it?"

"Yep."

"Just my luck." The floor beckoned; never had friction plating looked so soft and inviting.

"Security's coming," she observed. She glanced up at Cee, hovering in anxious but helpless solicitude. "What do you say we do them a favor, and simplify the scenario for them? Get gone, Mr. Cee. If you walk and don't run, those green coveralls will carry you right past 'em. Go to work or something."

"I—I…" Terrence Cee spread his hands. "What can I ever do to repay you? Either of you?"

She winked. "Never fear, I'll think of something. Meantime, I haven't seen any telepaths around here today. Have you, Doctor?"

"Not a one," agreed Ethan blandly.

Terrence Cee shook his head in frustration, glanced up the corridor, and faded into the Up lift tube.

When Security finally arrived, they arrested Quinn.