The Road of Danger-ARC (20 page)

Adele touched the unit to check. She loved information, no matter how valueless, the way an alcoholic craves the bottle.

—pornography involving women, more women, and animals. At least she assumed it was pornography. She had never pretended to understand the allure of sex, but it puzzled her than
any
one could find these images titillating.

She looked down at the dead man, wondering what had happened to the pair of soldiers who had killed her sister Agatha. No doubt they would have explained that they were just doing their jobs, but logic as well as Adele’s anger argued that men who cut off the head of a little girl were not likely to die in bed themselves.

The inner door wasn’t locked. Adele pushed it open.

The space beyond was a single room thirty feet deep and twenty wide. On the right-hand wall was an electronics suite that would have done credit to the bridge of a battleship.

The floor to the left was a stainless steel tray with upturned edges. On it was a floodlit operating theatre. A child, probably an undernourished ten-year-old rather than someone younger and healthier, was strapped to the table.

The man who had been bending over the child was in his sixties and fat, with lifeless hair. He was nude except for splotches and splatters of blood; he seemed to have dipped his thumbs in the blood to paint designs on his chest.

He held a scalpel. It and his hand were dripping.

Light reflecting from the door’s inner face must have drawn him from his leering concentration. He rose and stared at Adele in surprise and anger. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “Get out!”

“Put down the knife,” Adele said. She kept her eyes on the fat man as she walked toward to three linked consoles against the wall.

Her personal data unit was out in her right hand. It didn’t have to be in contact with a console, but it was probably safer sitting on one than it would be anywhere else in the room for the next short time.

“I told you to get
out
, you stupid bitch!” the man said, raising the scalpel as he started around the table. There were drains in the floor.

Adele shot him through the wrist. He didn’t drop the scalpel until three spaced rounds had puckered the skin, smashing the cartilage and delicate bones into grit and gelatine. She set the little data unit on the console’s fascia.

“What did you do?” the man shouted in disbelief. “
What did you do?
”

He lunged toward Adele. She shot him twice through the right knee, then twice more through the other. He finally twisted to the left and fell, still shouting.

Sheer mechanical damage had brought him down; he didn’t seem affected by pain. Either he was heavily drugged, or the endorphins which his brain released from delight at torturing children protected him from what should have been agony.

Adele walked to the boy, keeping the table between her and where the naked man had fallen. Blood had stopped leaking from the network of shallow cuts, but she touched the victim’s throat with the tips of her right index and middle fingers.

There was no carotid pulse. She suppose that was just as well. As well as carving out the boy’s eyes, the man had cut his vocal cords.

“Are you police?” the man said as Adele walked back around the table. “You’ve made a mistake, a terrible mistake! I’m Charlie Platt. Talk to your watch commander. You’re not supposed to be here!”

He wheezed suddenly; perhaps the pain was getting through after all. “Oh, what have you done? You bitch, you stupid bitch!”

“I’m not the police,” Adele said. She checked her little unit as it mined the consoles and transferred their data to her base system on the
Princess Cecile
. Though it purred along happily, it hadn’t completed its tasks yet. There must be an amazing amount of information in Platt’s system.

The man on the floor had fallen half on, half off, the tray under the operating theater. He must have begun noticing discomfort from the raised steel gutter, because he tried to squirm off it. That flexed his right knee; he screamed and his whole body quivered.

“I thought I might need access codes from you,” Adele said. “Apparently not, since my unit is mirroring yours without difficulty. Your external security was very good, though.”

“I’ll pay you,” Platt said, breathing quickly. “I can pay any amount,
any
amount. I’m a very important man!”

Platt had fouled himself when his leg bent. He was an aging fat man who wore only his own feces and a child’s blood, and he was bragging about his importance.

“You
must
be very important,” Adele said in a calm, reasonable tone. “To be allowed to do this.”

She gestured toward the operating table with her right hand.

“Even on a frontier world like Madison, that’s amazing.”

“I was the Chief of Systems at Fleet Prime on Pleasaunce!” Platt said. Adele wasn’t sure whether it was breathy enthusiasm or only pain which she heard in his voice. “I should have been promoted to Technical Director, but some officious fool started making trouble and I had to, well, I came here. I—”

He paused and panted for a moment while he retrieved the thread of his argument. At last he said, “I know powerful people here. They’ll give you whatever you ask to free me.
Anything!
Just ask.”

“Your protector is Commander Doerries of Fleet Intelligence here?” Adele said. She backed a few steps to glance sideways at her data unit without looking away from Platt.

“That doesn’t matter!” Platt said. “I can get you more money than you dream,
that’s
what matters!”

“No,” said Adele, “it isn’t. Even if I cared about money, it wouldn’t matter now.”

She shot Platt through the eye; twice, as she had been trained to do. He spasmed and went flaccid.

You don’t torture a cockroach
.

“Coming through!” Tovera said from the doorway. “Coming through!”

Adele slid the data unit into its proper sheath beneath the borrowed trousers. She continued to hold the pistol out. It would have cooled sufficiently to pocket by the time she stepped into the open air again.

“I’m almost done here,” she said, turning. “Bring a—ah. Yes, of course you would.”

Tovera gave Adele a snake-like smile. She held two of the automatic carbines which dead guards had dropped.

“Step clear, mistress,” she said, holding one of the carbines sideways at her waist. The other was slung over her shoulder.

Adele obediently walked toward the door. When Tovera was satisfied that Adele was at a safe distance, she fired into the first console. Because the impellers were smoothbores, rifling didn’t twist the barrel to the side but the fully automatic burst did lift the muzzle slightly under recoil.

The thirty osmium pellets spaced themselves across the body of the console and halfway into its nearest neighbor. Sparks, fragments, and the sizzle of short circuits followed the line of destruction.

When the weapon was empty, Tovera tossed it into a corner—the muzzle glowed a yellow which shimmered toward the white—and unlimbered the other carbine. Her second long burst was in perfect alignment with that of the first.

She dropped the carbine onto the steel floor; it sizzled and stank in blood. “I’ll lead,” she said, drawing her sub-machine gun as she stepped ahead of Adele at the door.

“No problems?” Adele said.

“The woman on the console tonight had her girlfriend in to improve the time,” Tovera said. “I expended six rounds instead of three, that’s all.”

She held up a keychip in her left hand. “I thought we’d leave the van here and go out in the girlfriend’s car,” she said. “Nobody will connect that with this business if it gets noticed before we’re back aboard the
Sissie
.”

“All right,” said Adele. It was very improbable that anyone would notice the slaughter for days if not weeks, given the care that Platt and Doerries had taken to keep the location secret.

Adele didn’t care. She wasn’t sure she cared about anything at the moment.

The three-wheeler’s back wouldn’t have held an adult, but they easily folded the drugged boy into it. Tovera got into the driver’s seat and switched the vehicle on. Adele took out her personal data unit by rote.

“The boy back there?” Tovera said without looking at Adele.

“He was dead,” Adele said. She opened the gate for Tovera to accelerate into the street, then started it closing again.

Adele looked at her servant. “Tovera?” she said. “Does what happened to those children disturb you?”

Tovera did not look away from the road. “It bothers me, mistress,” she said, “because it should bother me. It bothers you.”

“Yes, it bothers me,” said Adele. She thought about Agatha. “It bothers me a great deal.”

***

Daniel and Hogg got out from opposite sides when the aircar landed. Its fans blew grit across their ankles as it lifted and curved away from the quay where the
Savoy
was berthed. Watchly didn’t look back at them.

“I chatted some with Martensen, the guard back to the farmhouse, you know?” Hogg said in a quiet voice, his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t spoken about the farm or the people there during the return journey.

“Ah?” said Daniel. Kiki Lindstrom came to the
Savoy
’s entry hatch, probably summoned by the sound of the aircar. She didn’t call to them or start across the catwalk. Her face was impassive in the high light standards on the quay.

“We didn’t talk about much,” Hogg said, still facing in the direction Watchly had driven off. “But his boots were Fleet issue. And the poncho he was wearing had G 37 stencilled on the back.”

“
Ah
,” Daniel repeated in a brighter tone. “There’s a destroyer
G 37
in Fleet service. Probably not first-line by now; the class was laid down about twenty years ago, which is a long time for a destroyer.”

“Martensen isn’t a kid,” Hogg said reflectively. “He’s a husky fellow, though.”

He shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “I thought you might want to know.”

“Yes,” said Daniel, “thank you. It confirms my suspicions.”

He didn’t know what it meant. The fact that an Alliance officer was pretending to be a Cinnabar officer certainly meant
something
, but it might simply be that the Chief was a grafter who thought that patriotism would make former RCN Lieutenant Pensett more willing to lend himself to some black-market scheme.

Daniel touched the RCN document case in his pocket. Adele would be able to open it safely, he was sure, but he didn’t want to take it straight back to the
Princess Cecile
. There was an obvious chance that Martensen or someone of his ilk was watching “Pensett’s” activities, or that Lindstrom herself would contact her backer if she decided Daniel’s behavior was suspicious.

Daniel—or perhaps Hogg—would have a chance to deliver the package tomorrow, when he was sure that Adele had returned to the
Sissie
. He wasn’t going to risk this heaven-sent opportunity to meet Freedom without a better reason than he had thus far.

“Let’s go aboard, Hogg,” Daniel said, “and choose our bunks.”

There was an old girl who lived in Cairo Port…
he whistled as he preceded Hogg across the catwalk.
How I wish that she was dead!

CHAPTER 14: Ashetown on Madison

Adele entered the Battle Direction Center and sat at the empty console beside Cory’s. She had left the borrowed over-garments in the three-wheeler when she and Tovera abandoned it in an alley behind a row of brothels.

Someone would probably steal the vehicle before morning, but that didn’t matter. There was no harm done if the car remained where it was for however many days it was before the authorities discovered the owner’s body was one of many at a massacre site.

“Mistress!” Lieutenant Cory said. “I didn’t expect you back here. Ah—that is, I’m glad to see you. It feels, well, I’m used to being on the bridge, so this station isn’t… I mean, even though it’s a promotion to First Lieutenant.”

Adele looked at him. The others present in the BDC were Fiducia, the missileer’s mate, and Knibbs, a technician whom Cory had been instructing in astrogation simply because he was willing to learn.

And Tovera, of course. It was easy to overlook Tovera, while things were quiet.

Captain Vesey, as she had become, was at the command console on the bridge. Although she would not have questioned anything Adele did, Adele would feel constrained in Vesey’s presence. Vesey felt that she
ought
to understand what Lady Mundy was doing.

Cory didn’t feel anything of the sort. If Adele had begun tap dancing on the seat of her console, the most Cory might have done was ask if he could help. She’d chosen the BDC for no better reason than that.

“I suppose it’s the opposite with me,” Adele said. “I thought this would be a more comfortable setting for a task I have to do. Though I hadn’t connected the cause and effect until you spoke, Cory.”

In fact, she realized, she wasn’t making many connections at all since the shootings. She had subconsciously divorced herself from everything that was going on around her.

She felt a touch of wry humor, though nobody looking at her face would have recognized it. The disconnected way she had felt since leaving Platt’s sanctum wasn’t very different from her normal state of existence.

Cory’s enthusiasm cooled as Adele looked at him without emotion. “Ah…” he said. “I’m watch officer, but since it’s quiet I thought I’d go over procedures with Knibbs here. If you’d like us to leave…?”

“Not at all, Cory,” Adele said as she synched her personal data unit with the console. She preferred to use her little unit as an interface. She found the wands with which she controlled it to be her fastest and most efficient input method. “Strictly speaking, this isn’t really RCN business.”

“I better get back to the Power Room,” muttered Knibbs. He got up without looking at Cory or Adele. Fiducia had already slipped out of the BDC.

I didn’t care
, Adele thought wearily.
But I couldn’t have cleared the compartment more quickly if I’d waved my pistol
.

“I could—” Cory said.

“Sit down,” Adele said, much more sharply than she had intended. She grimaced. She was on edge, but that was no excuse for snarling at a—well, at a
friend
—who was simply trying to be polite in a confusing situation.