The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (22 page)

Suss wished for eyes growing out of the back of her head as she moved out into the outer office area. She was there fast enough to see Spencer’s party head down the emergency stairs, but she did not dare call to them. She patted her hip pouch. Santu was there, safely packed away. God willing the AID had captured the data they would need to find Captain Destin—and some answers. That would make all this worthwhile, if anything could.

Now all she had to do was get the hell out of here—preferably by another route than Spencer’s, if he was going to serve as any sort of diversion for her. But how?

She had barely begun to consider the question when the alarm bells rang. She dove down behind a desk as two security cops rushed out of the shot-up stairwell and rushed across the huge room, ignoring the fire Spencer had started, heading straight for the stairs Spencer had taken. They hurried down the stairs at the double, clearly men who knew where they were going and what they were after.

Suss felt a sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. Her friends were caught, trapped, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do about it.

Nothing, except to take advantage of their sacrifice by escaping. She hunkered down behind the desk and checked the time. Two minutes. She would give them two minutes to focus their attention completely on Spencer’s capture, and then she would move out, using the other stairs.

It was going to be a long two minutes.

###

Spencer led Sisley and Dostchem down the emergency stairs, planning to get out of the stairs ten or fifteen floors below, leaving the hue and cry safely above and behind them.

They had only gotten six floors down when the cops appeared.

This time the cops did it right, those above popping out of the doorway on the floor above just as the cops waiting on the stairwell below came into view. There were too many of them for Spencer to have any hope in a fight, and all of them were taking good advantage of cover, all heavily armed and wearing enough body armor that one repulsor wouldn’t have a chance of getting them all.

Besides which, there were now twenty heavy-duty repulsors pointed straight at the three intruders.

Spencer said nothing. He just dropped his weapon, raised his arms over his head and waited for them to swarm in and arrest the three of them.

Three? Even as the cops rushed in to grab him, Spencer suddenly noticed that Dostchem wasn’t
there
anymore. How the hell had she gotten—and then he knew, and forced himself not to look up as the cops slipped the cuffs on him and started stripping his gear off.

Capuchins were a lot more arboreal than humans, after all, and the overhanging shadows of the gloomy stairwell could hide a lot. Spencer trussed him up so he couldn’t walk, then flipped him over on his back onto a waiting stretcher to carry him away, completely immobilized. As he was carried back down the stairs to whatever the hell they were going to do to him, he spied a lump of shadow wedged in below the underside of the stairs above, and felt glad she had gotten away.

Spencer told himself that he should have been mad that Dostchem hadn’t stayed with them, but what was the use in all three of them being tortured to death?

He blinked. Torture? He was surprised at the thought, and then realized he had known that all along. StarMetal was playing this for keeps. Torture. Pain. Death.

For the first time that night, fear, real fear, swept over him. He felt his trussed-up hand reaching for a ghostly feel-good button.

###

The sun was coming up. Tarwa Chu led her weary first-watch bridge crew down from the simulator to the operations bridge. There was something most disconcerting in moving from one room to its identical twin, moving from a place where a shadowy, unreal
Duncan
was controlled to the duplicate compartment that sailed the real ship.

The fog of exhaustion played into it as well, no doubt, but Tarwa felt as if she were sailing between alternate worlds. They had spent the entire night sailing a whole fleet of
Duncans
out of port—crashing some of them, sinking a few, twice ramming lesser vessels. At last the bridge crew had gotten the hang of the procedure, and successfully conned the huge craft out of port and into open water, where she could safely boost to orbit.

After each run, failed or successful, Tarwa had pressed the
reset
button, and the computer-driven images and sounds of the world outside the
Duncan
had melted away. A shattered harbor full of ruined ships, the pier aflame, or a triumphant lifting into space on a column of fire would vanish, flicker to nothingness.

Nothing is, but what is not,
Tarwa told herself, and wondered where the words came from. Now came the last run, the only one that mattered. She watched as the bridge crew relieved the last watchstanders, settled into their stations, checked their boards and got ready.

In five minutes, they were ready. Tarwa sat down in the command chair, not even noticing at first that she felt no awe about sitting in the holy spot. Then she realized where she was, and what she had done, and decided that perhaps that was the real purpose of the simulator—to do everything—even die—over and over again, until it became routine, and all the needless emotions that got in the way of the job were gone. After wrecking the ship a few times, it hardly seemed to matter what seat she sat in. She punched the intercom button. “All hands,” she said, “prepare to cast off.”

###

“This is gonna be something,” the young guard said cheerfully. “I ain’t never rid on one of the big exec’s elevators before.”

Spencer, trussed, tied, and blindfolded, lay on his stretcher, listening to his captors. As best he could tell, there were only two of them now, the rest having returned to their other duties once the captives were rendered helpless.

“Don’t look so happy about it,” his older partner warned. “I’ve never heard of anyone in Security going up to Jameson’s office. All hell’s breaking loose around here—or else the chain of command is so screwed up we
had
to take orders from the machines. Do
you
want to be standing right there when they’re looking for a fall guy?
I’d
just as soon be home drinking a cool one when they decide who to blame for this mess. None of this is normal procedure. They’re going crazy up there. Things ain’t right.”

The older one seemed about to say something more when the elevator’s door chime sounded. “C’mon,” the older voice said. “Here it comes. Let’s get these bozos up to Jameson right now before anything else can happen.”

Bound, gagged and blinded, Spencer felt himself being picked up with all the care and caution that might be given a bag of potatoes. They dumped him inside the elevator. Then he heard Sisley being dumped alongside him.

But he seemed to be able to sense more than that. Perhaps because his eyes were useless, his ears were straining for every possible noise. And he heard, or thought he heard, a tiny rustling noise, like padded feet moving over a carpeted floor, coming from behind him, in the direction they had come from.

Then the elevator doors shut, and he felt an increase in weight as it lifted toward the top of the building.

What did Chairman Jameson want with them?

###

“Hard aport, dammit!” Tarwa Chu snapped. “Forward starboard thrusters and aft port thrusters, ten percent power.” She tried to clear her throat. Shouting her commands to engineering was making her hoarse.

What thumb-fingered idiot was on duty down there, anyway? She shook her head and forced herself to unclench her fists. Things were not going well.

The simulator hadn’t taken
this
situation into account. The real-life fly-by-wire system simply wasn’t up to the job of sailing the
Duncan,
with the result that they had been forced to shut down the automatics and run the thrusters manually, which in turn meant shouting into a mike to the main engineering center to order maneuvering, hoping the ninnyhammers down there managed to punch the right button at the right time.

It was no way to negotiate a busy harbor. But two more kilometers, and they’d have reached open water. All they had to do was—Dammit, they were drifting off their bearing again! “Engineering! Hard aport! Turn to port! That current’s still turning us!”

She felt the sweat running down her spine, and kept her eyes glued to the instruments.

###

Suss checked the time and made sure her feet were still tucked in under the desk. They had both gone to sleep on her, and she was not looking forward to what they would feel like once she could move and restore circulation.

Her two minutes were up, and long gone, but there was very little she could do about that. Not with a fire-fighting team on the far side of the room, quelling the last of Spencer’s little diversionary blaze. Not with a herd of security types removing their dead comrades and generally milling about Sisley’s office. She was pinned down here, forced to hide, forced to pray they wouldn’t search too hard.

Suss blinked, and noticed a gleam of light coming in the window, glaring in her eyes. Good God, the sun was up. How had the night ended so soon?

There was a sudden buzzing in her ears as her mastoid implant switched itself on. “Relaying from Dostchem,” Santu announced simply.
“Greetings, Suss,”
the Capuchin’s voice whispered in her ear.
“Santu informs me that you have not escaped from the outer office area. Are you equipped with a protective breathing apparatus?”

“Yes,”
Suss subvocalized, wondering what the hell Dostchem was up to.

“Excellent. I assume that you do not dare move enough to put the mask on while the security men are about. They will be diverted in a few moments. When they are, put on
the mask and proceed toward the stairwell Captain Spencer
fired at. Do you understand?”

“Yes,”
Suss answered. How the hell had Dostchem tapped into a commlink with Santu? Never mind, didn’t matter. It shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, Dostchem was an instrument maker. Just be glad she had put her skills to good use.

There was a sudden deepening in the air conditioner’s hum. Suss looked up in time to see a stream of thick white smoke pouring out of the overhead ventilators.
And where the hell had Dostchem come up with crowd gas?

Suss held her breath and listened as the security men cried out, started to cough and wheeze, and began to drop, rendered unconscious by the powerful gas. Suss clamped her lips shut as she reached into her backpack for the breathing mask. She didn’t want to inhale so much as a molecule of that stuff. Her fingers found the mask and pulled it from the pack. She pulled it on and opened the valve on the air supply. She glanced around, and saw the big room fading away into a milky fog.

Time to get moving. She got to her feet, and nearly collapsed as her legs, still full of pins and needles and refusing to cooperate. She kept herself crouched low and made her way toward the stairs.

“Head upwards, not down,”
said the Capuchin’s voice in her head.
“Proceed up three flights and wait for me there.”

Suss slipped through the ruins of the shot-up door, turned, and ran up the stairs, feeling like a damn fool. No good could come out of listening to voices in her head. Just ask Joan of Arc. Look what happened to
her.

###

The elevator stopped, and Spencer felt himself being lifted up again.

The stretcher bearers carried him a short distance, and then stopped abruptly. “Damn, Larry, what the hell is—” The younger guard’s voice sounded shocked, confused.

“Shuddup, Ty. I
told
you we didn’t want to come up here. We don’t see anything, we don’t
say
anything.”

“Where the hell is Jameson?”

“Right here, gentlemen!” a third voice announced from some distance away.

“Oh my God!” Spencer felt the stretcher buck a bit as the younger guard jumped in startlement. “I’m—I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t see you there.”

“You weren’t supposed to,” the new voice replied in childish tones. “Just dump them out and strip them. I don’t want them to have any nasty toys to play with here.”

Spencer felt the guard setting the stretcher down, and then felt a pair of hands undoing the straps that held him to the stretcher. That accomplished, the bearers flipped the stretcher on its side and unceremoniously dumped him to the floor.

It felt like he had landed on thick carpeting. Footsteps retreated and then returned. A moment later, a thudding noise alongside him told him Sisley had been dropped alongside him.

Then they started to strip him, leaving the bonds on his hands and feet in place and cutting his clothes away, peeling back his garments in ribbons. But worse than the loss of his clothes was the loss of his equipment—especially his AID. He felt naked long before they got his pants, the moment they pulled the AID’s hip pouch off his belt.

“Uncloak them,” the odd, simpering voice commanded. Rough hands reached down and stripped the black hood from his head. He blinked and stared up at the ceiling, dazzled by the sudden light.

“And ungag them, you fools,” the same voice demanded querulously. “How can I question them if they can’t speak?”

A hand came into view and reached behind Spencer’s head. It yanked the gag away roughly, and Spencer, still bound hand and foot, rolled over and levered himself up to a kneeling position. Sisley, likewise stripped, struggled to her knees alongside him.

They were in an ornately appointed room, half-office, half-luxurious bedroom suite. The high, vaulted ceiling made the place seem even larger. The walls were huge viewscreens, each showing a jarringly different scene—one an underwater panorama, one a tropical forest, one a view of København as seen from the StarMetal building, and the last a slowing wheeling view of the stars, apparently a live transmission from some space installation or another.

Wide, low, plush couches and chairs were scattered about, and a huge circular bed, reminiscent of the bed Kared had left behind on the
Duncan,
took up one whole end of the huge room. But the bed was rumpled, unmade, musty. The rest of the room was a full-blown mess. Food containers, dirty clothes, broken toys and gadgets were strewn about the place, together with a litter of what looked like official StarMetal papers. A strange, murky odor, half the locker-room smell of unwashed clothes, half the sickly sweet stench of meat gone bad, hovered over the room.