This Alien Shore (48 page)

Finally the injured twin settled down into the stretcher, seemingly asleep. His double was whimpering in the far corner, where Porsha was clearly happy to ignore him. He and Frank were both silent as they manipulated the innernet to heal the injured man—Porsha doing the work, Frank watching his every cybermove like a hawk. At last Porsha nodded, and took off his headset. The captain had seen no change take place in the patient that he could put his finger on, but now that he really looked at him, his color did seem marginally better.

All right. So this whole thing was legit.
And
it hadn't taken all that long. Maybe he'd be lucky, and they'd get through the rest of the day without interruptions.

“Listen,” the blue-faced man said, “I can't thank you enough—”

“Just simple courtesy,” the captain said gruffly.
Required courtesy.
“I'm glad we were able to help him.”

“No really, I owe you—”

“Forget it,” he said. And then, when it didn't seem like that was going to be enough for the man, he said it more emphatically.
“Forget it.
”

That ended the attempt to establish further conversation, anyway. Good thing. The captain might acknowledge his responsibility to help a traveler in need, but he had no responsibility to stand around shooting the breeze with a total stranger when there was work calling to him. He'd be polite, but that was it ... and even the politeness had a limit. They saw the strangers to the air lock, opened it, and let them pass through. His people were ready for trouble, he saw, weapons hidden behind them as they flanked the three strangers. But there was no trouble. It looked like the visit was purely legitimate, just some guy who'd needed the aid

of a passing ship to clean out his head. But just to be sure

“Check it,” he told Frank. “Check it all. I want the gateways to the med system probed inside and out. If there was an attempt to break in, even one test against the password system, then you tell me and we'll start going over it bit by bit, until we know for sure it's all clean.”

He wasn't going to tolerate some yahoo's virus on his ship, that was for sure. Or overlook any attempt to copy the data he was carrying. Probably their visit was nothing, just what it seemed ... but in his business you couldn't be too careful.

I
t was an old pirate's superstition, not to count your loot until you were well out of earshot. Of course, the whole concept of earshot was irrelevant in space, so God alone knew how the custom had gotten started, but it was still considered traditional to put good distance between you and your victim before you exulted over his stupidity.

Which in this case had been massive.

“Tam?”

“No problem,” the Belial told him. “Right where I was standing during the med stuff, under the console. No one was even looking at me, so I got a good placement. They won't find it by accident, that's for sure.”

“Excellent.” They'd stay a safe distance from the
Wayward,
but not so close that low-strength transmissions couldn't bridge the gap between them. In a few hours Calia would send out the codes that would bring their hidden transmitter to life, and Tam could bounce a signal off that right into the
Wayward's
innemet. Which he could then hack into at his leisure, long after anyone aboard had stopped watching for such interference.

It was the kind of trick you couldn't use too often, but when it worked right, it could net a treasurehouse of data before anyone caught on. If they were lucky, no one ever would. Sometimes you were that lucky.

“Allo, I've got a signal coming in.” It was Sumi. “Customs, it looks like.”

It was a cold word in the otherwise jubilant atmosphere. Allo felt his mood deflate quickly. “What do they want?”

Sumi closed his eyes to better envision the message. His tentacles twitched slowly as he read.

“Permission for search,” he said at last.

The words hung there in the air for a moment, heavy with connotations of trouble. It wasn't unheard of for a Customs team to go out and aggressively search independent vessels in the vicinity. Most smugglers knew enough to dump their loads at private docks before showing up at the waystation, so it was pretty much the only way they were going to nail anyone. But still. It wasn't that common. And now? Bad timing.

Allo bit his lower lip, considering. At last he said, “Your take?”

It was a long second before Sumi answered. “If we say no, it's trouble. You know that.”

Yes, he did. It shouldn't be that way, but it was. In the spacelanes you were considered guilty until proven innocent, no matter what the laws said to the contrary. On a station he might argue. Out here in safespace, there was no one to argue with.

“Calia?”

“We've got nothing to worry about on board,” she said coolly. “You did a scrub after that last drug shipment. We haven't carried anything else that would leave signs.”

“We've got logs of legitimate business,” Sumi added. “As always.”

God, he hated this. You wanted to turn them away, to tell them to go off and mind their own business ... and they might even do that, if they didn't have a proper warrant. You'd be within your rights to refuse them. But you could bet your ass that they'd be waiting at the next station you visited, and the next one, and the next one after that. If Allo and his crew were really legitimate, then it would just be a nuisance. But they weren't. And God knows, like Calia said, the ship wasn't ever going to be cleaner than it was right now.

“Tam, I want all our programs—”

“Erased from the main banks,” the Belial said. “Already done.”

His crew was good. They knew how to think, and they knew how to move fast, and most of all they knew how to lie. Sumi best of all. He'd let the Medusan play guide to the customs crew. That would give this little invasion the attention it deserved, not too little and not too much. It was important to get those gestures right.

“Check their ID,” he said at last.

Sumi shut his eyes and started trading codes with the distant ship. After a moment he nodded. “Checks out,” he pronounced. “Looks like they're the real thing.”

He didn't know whether that was good or bad. An enemy might have been easier to deal with. “All right,” he said. He could hear the frustration in his own voice. “Tell them to come on in.”

Sumi looked up at him; he nodded. They knew each other well enough for no words or flashed messages to be necessary. After all, they'd been through such searches before. Allo hated it every time, but it was hardly unfamiliar ground.

It took the customs ship half an hour to reach them, and almost that long again to dock. Inwardly Allo was seething, but he knew the game for what it was. Node law forbade any truly invasive search without just cause and a warrant. But the minute he made any move against these people that could be read as defiance, a warrant was no longer needed. If they could frustrate him to the point of losing his temper, he'd be playing right into their hands.

He hated this game. But he usually won it.

The officials who entered his ship were crisply dressed, fresh from easy duty on some pleasure station, he'd bet. Their uniforms were emblazoned with signs of local rank that Allo didn't recognize, but the sheer number indicated considerable authority. He wasn't sure yet if that was good or bad.

“Allonzo Porsha?”

“Yes.”

“This is your ship?”

He stifled a nasty retort and said simply, “Yes.” Like they didn't have the ownership records already loaded into their heads.

They introduced themselves. He introduced his people. They stared at nothing while checking off the names against some list inside their heads. Then their leader asked to see the ship, and Sumi moved forward to lead them—

And there were weapons in their hands, appearing so suddenly that Allo barely had time to react. Even as he pulled out his own, a spray of some chemical enveloped him, an acid fog that burned his eyes and his throat and set off a spasm of coughing so violent that he couldn't even see straight. Damn! Blinded, doubled over as his body fought to heave up the poison it had breathed in, he didn't dare fire for fear of hitting his own people.
Jesus Christ!
He sure hoped Sumi and the others were on top of this situation, 'cause he'd been blinded but good. He tried to get the innemet to feed him something visual from a cam so that at least in his mind's eye he could see what was going on, but the poison spray had kicked off spasms so terrible he couldn't visualize the icons clearly. With a grunt of pain, he dropped to the floor and felt something sharp and nasty bite into his arm as he hit it, hard. His wellseeker flashed him a warning that was all blurred, probably about some new poison the shot had injected into him.
Damn. Damn. Gotta fight this....
The sharpness became a burning that began to spread through his torso, and his whole body started shaking. All around him he could hear the sounds of battle, the hot buzz of electrical contact, the soft whir of darts ... but even the sounds were blurred, as if his brain would no longer accept clean input. Was that poison in his veins? Something worse? He heard cries and crashing and the garbled curses of his crew. Jesus Christ, where had these bastards come from?

There was a final crashing sound, and then a hand grabbed him by the sleeve, forcing him upward a few feet. The motion proved too much, and he started vomiting; the bile was like acid on his tongue, as if whatever they'd shot into him had corrupted his own body fluids. They knocked his weapon out of his hand and then dragged him across the bridge, to the place where their own ship waited. He banged into something on the way; a body? Moist tentacles were ground underfoot as his captors forced him into the air lock, and a trail of sticky blood marked his progress like the slime trail of a slug. Was anyone from his crew left alive? He tried to call to them but gagged on the words, his throat clogged with bile and worse. Desperately he tried to cough some of it up so that he could breathe.

And then someone hit him on the back of the head, hard.

And then there was darkness.

S
ounds. Distorted colors, slowly coalescing into shapes. Bright lights, too bright. He tried to turn away. Couldn't. Motor control offline. Or was he paralyzed?

He blinked hard, trying to focus. Something stirred in front of him, other shapes following. People?

“He's awake.”

The voice was gruff, and it was followed by a stinging in his arm and the hiss of a medspray. Something gripped his heart and squeezed it, hard. His wellseeker, which should have protested the move, was silent. He tried to call it up. No good. The fist around his heart loosened up a bit, but each beat that followed banged against his rib cage with unnatural force. He could feel a spark of life coming back into his brain, as the drug they'd given him forced his body into a more active state. He suspected that he'd have been better off staying asleep.

“Time to wake up now.” It was a male voice, harsh and cold. Something chilly wafted across his nostrils and a sharp, stinging odor brought him suddenly into the here-and-now.

Big room. Mostly empty. Two men standing. Him sitting. Bound. Or maybe just shut down below the neck, like a program that wasn't needed.

The light was turned into his face, blinding him. Something buzzed inside his skull; brainware response to alien instructions? He tried to shake his head hard enough to throw off the headset, but of course it was locked into place.

—And pain, blinding pain, seared through every nerve in his body. Not as if he'd been hurt, nothing so centralized as an injury. It was as if all his blood had suddenly started to boil, and the flesh around it melted, and the skin over that dissolved in acid. It was hot and it was sharp and it was crushing and it was tearing, and every other word that had ever been associated with pain, or ever might be. All at once.