House of Shards (31 page)

Khamiss opened Maijstral’s belt pouches and surveyed the contents. Her job as a security officer allowed her to recognize most of the objects therein, but unfortunately she had never actually operated any of them before. Her ears twitched in puzzlement.

Pearl Woman stepped closer to her, merging air pockets. “I hate to impart a traumatizing sense of urgency,” she said, “but if you don’t open the door very quickly, we’re all going to run out of air.”

“A moment. I’m not entirely familiar with the equipment.”

“I think that point has already been demonstrated,” Pearl Woman said, “but thank you for the reminder.”

Khamiss took a moment to smooth her rising hackles. Moving deliberately, she chose the detector she thought she needed, scanned the door, and perceived the energies operating in the door's lock. The lock was simple—this was a personnel hatch, not a security door, and its operation was as simple as possible for the convenience of the crew. She reached for what she recognized as a tossoff remote and placed it above the lock, cutting out the circuit that would report the lock's status to
Cheng's
control room. Then, with an insouciant gesture, she triggered the circuit that would open the airlock door.

Pleasure trickled through her as the door began to open.

“Very professional, Miss Khamiss,” Zoot said. He handed her a handkerchief, and Khamiss placed it to her nose.

Pearl Woman had already dropped into the airlock. Media globes recorded her movements. Her mouthed comments were fortunately inaudible through the vacuum of space.

Khamiss and Zoot followed. The door closed and air rushed in.

Pearl Woman drew her Fantod in one hand and a cutlass in the other. Her smile was cheerful.

“Now the fun starts,” she said.

*

Vanessa Runciter had always suffered from an excess of passion. Her first slug therefore missed—she was so passionately angry that she fired her rifle from the hip, and the round went wide.

An electric shriek of fear crackled up Maijstral’s spine.. He forgot he had a pistol in his hand, forgot where he was and what he had around him—instead he slammed on his darksuit’s shields, his camouflage, and his a-grav harness, and went skimming backward at full speed.

A blaze of Roman’s spitfire charges fountained off Vanessa’s shields. Out of the corner of his eye Maijstral saw Roman moving, Chalice charging, and then his vision went to hell as disaster struck. He had forgotten the robot and the pile of loot that were just behind him, and his lower body struck the robot with a numbing crunch. His velocity was such that, on impact, his feet were thrown skyward— his boots hit the ceiling and rebounded; and this impact, in turn, flipped him so that his head was thrown upward. Stars filled Maijstral’s vision as his skull rang against porcelain-covered asteroid material. He hit the ceiling a second time. His gun clattered to the floor.

Maijstral threw his a-grav repellers into neutral. His velocity diminished. Through the galaxies that exploded behind his eyes, he dimly saw Gregor jump behind the robot while clawing desperately for his pistol, Roman flattening Chalice with an expert roundhouse kick to the head and then leaping vainly for Vanessa, and, most horribly, Vanessa shouldering her rifle and taking careful aim, pointing the barrel directly between Maijstral’s eyes. . . .

A lunging form intervened. Roberta flung herself from the elevator in a perfect racer’s pass, feet first, legs lashing out in a kick at the precise moment of impact. Vanessa’s ribs caved in with an audible crack and she flew like a broken doll across the hallway. The mapper slug went into Baroness Silverside's collection and demolished a genuine Adrian bronze of Rashman Capone, the famous stage actor and swindler.

Roberta twisted in midair and landed, amazingly enough, on her feet. She reached for Vanessa’s rifle, snatched it, and drove the stock of the Nana-Coulville quite deliberately into Vanessa’s face. Vanessa fell to the floor unconscious.

“Hit her again,” Maijstral wanted to say, “she might be faking.” But he seemed unable to speak. Instead he floated near the ceiling and watched as Roman and Gregor relieved Vanessa and Chalice of their gear.

“Are you all right, sir?” The voice was Paavo Kuusinen’s.

Maijstral willed off his camouflage and made an affirmative gesture with his ears. He looked down at Kuusinen.

“I believe so,” he said, pleased to discover his voice working again.

He lowered himself to the floor. His found to his surprise that his legs would support him. He bent to pick up his pistol.

“If you don’t mind an inquiry, sir,” Kuusinen said, “what was that about?”

Maijstral looked at the two unconscious bodies and could only flutter his ears in bewilderment.

Chalice moaned. He stirred himself and opened his eyes to find himself staring into a circle of pistols. Gregor gave him a look.

“Isn’t this a little overdone,” he said, “just to escape a ten-novae debt?”

*

His mind aswim, Zoot stepped from the airlock into
Viscount Cheng's
crew quarters. Khamiss and Pearl Woman, weapons in their hands, glanced fore and aft at the complex pattern of small rooms, then looked at each other. “Where’s a service plate?” Pearl Woman asked. “We’ll ask the ship for a path
to
the control room.”

“That way,” Zoot said, pointing aft. He wondered if he should draw his weapon, then decided to keep it bolstered for the time being. He stepped out of the airlock and began moving toward the ship's stern. Pearl Woman looked at him suspiciously.

“How do you know?”

Zoot was offhand. “I’m familiar with the specifications of the Celebrated Noble class.”

Pearl Woman's suspicion was undiminished. “How? Do you stay up at night studying ship architecture?”

“I travelled in the crew quarters of the
Baron Marbles
once, when I was on the Ottoman expedition.”

“I see.” Still unconvinced.

Zoot led them to an elevator and called for it. “The control room’s a short distance from the elevator on the Grandee Deck.” He looked at his companions and a flood of doubt entered his mind. He still had no clear notion what he and the others were doing here. He gnawed his lip, then spoke cautiously.

“I wonder, ladies, how we're going to handle the, ah, problem.”

Khamiss’s tone was worried. “Lord Qlp’s got five brains. It’ll be hard to knock out.”
Lord Qlp
? Zoot wondered.

The elevator arrived and the party stepped into it. “If we can catch its lordship by surprise,” Pearl Woman said, “we can put a volley into it. That should probably do the job. My mapper can burn its nerves in a few seconds.”

Khamiss seemed undecided. “I’d hate to kill it. It’s probably just crazy.”

“It might well be Lord Qlp or us. Or even Lord Qlp and the station.”

“I’d still prefer to give it a chance to surrender. Or stun it.”

Danger to the station? Zoot thought. And then, Lord Qlp?

“That may not be possible,” Pearl Woman said. “It may be armed. It may also have ordered the ship to dive into the antimatter bottle on oral command—it’d only need a second or two.”

Antimatter bottle? Zoot thought. He drew his pistol and contemplated both the setting and the consequences of an accident with a large antimatter container. His diaphragm pulsed in resignation and he clicked the setting to “non-lethal.”

“I would prefer to stun its lordship if possible,” he said. “The three of us should be able to do that, certainly.”

The elevator doors opened. Pearl Woman looked disgruntled, then bolstered her pistol, which had no nonlethal setting. “Right,” she said. “I’ve an idea.” She stepped out of the elevator, glanced left and right, and stepped through an open office door labelled “Purser.” When she returned it was with a small container.

“I’ll tell it I’ve got the Shard,” she said. “That should distract it for a few seconds.”

Shard
? thought Zoot.

“Good idea,” Khamiss said. “Best speak in Khosali— its lordship may not understand Human Standard.”

The hallway was far more sumptuous than the crew quarters: parquet flooring, hand-woven, sound-absorbent tapestries featuring scenes of festive aristocrats dining amidst exotic splendor. “The command center is just through those doors,” Zoot said, pointing to a pair of doors made of mottled ceramic and decorated with reliefs featuring the high points of Viscount Cheng's colorful Colonial Service career.

“Let me check it.” Khamiss stepped forward and deployed her detectors. She found the door locked and alarmed and, moving carefully, she deployed her unfamiliar equipment and took apart its defenses. “Ready,” she said.

The Shard
? Zoot thought. He looked at Pearl Woman and the box. An idea struck him.

“Here,” he said. “Take one of my lights.” He took a pencil flash from his inner jacket rig and gave it to the Pearl.

“Turn it on and put it in the box. When you open it, the interior should glow. It may look as if the Shard is inside.”

“Thank you, Zoot.”

Pearl Woman brushed her leonine hair back from her eyes. One of her media globes circled to record her from a more favorable angle. “I’ll go through the right door while you hide behind the left. I’ll use the darksuit to fly across the room. When I’ve got its attention directed toward me, step into the doorway and open fire.” She gave a devil-may-care grin for benefit of the recorder. “Let’s go,” she said.

Lord Qlp, Zoot mused, and the Eltdown Shard. Antimatter bottles, and a liner apparently stolen.

Were things unusually confused right now, he wondered, or had life always been this way and Zoot not noticed?

“Very good,” he said. Readiness coursed through him. At the worst, he reflected, he'd only kill himself in this adventure, and that was what he'd set out to do in the first place.

Zoot stepped behind the door and deployed his jacket's darksuit projectors. They were far less sophisticated than those built into the suits Khamiss and Pearl Woman were wearing, providing only a cloud of darkness that obscured his outline rather than causing it to blend in with the background, but he concluded that it might serve to confuse Lord Qlp even so.

Khamiss stepped behind him and triggered her own camouflage. She pressed close. Zoot could hear her heart thudding against his backbone.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Same to you.”

Pearl Woman took a breath, stationed her globes for best advantage, and flung herself through the door. Lord Qlp’s sputtering, booming voice, formerly suppressed by the sound screens in the door, was suddenly very loud. Zoot could feel Khamiss jump in surprise at its lordship's volume.

“I’ve got the Shard!” Pearl Woman shouted, in Khosali Standard. “Put down the pistols! I’ve got the Shard!”

Pistols? thought Zoot, alarmed at the plural. For a frantic moment he considered changing his weapon's setting to “lethal,” decided against it, then stepped into the doorway and braced his own pistol to fire.

The control room was very large and sumptuously appointed—travellers sometimes stopped by to chat with the captain, and expected the amenities. Pearl Woman floated against the far wall, shouting frantically, waving the bag under her chin. Ghostly light from the flash illuminated her face from below.

Lord Qlp had disdained the padded captain's chair and instead was reared up near the communications console at the front of the room. Two of its eyestalks had wrapped themselves around pistol butts and triggers, the eyes laid along the barrels in order to sight them. The guns were both directed toward Pearl Woman.

Zoot thought fast. Lord Qlp had a mouth at either end, and therefore both mouths should be stunned first in order to end any possibility of an oral command being given. That, unfortunately, would leave the pistols free to fire.

Concern for Pearl Woman and Khamiss flashed into his mind. He overrode it with an act of will.

He fired for the upper end first. Lord Qlp gave a startled belch from its lower mouth and fell forward across the console. One of its pistols went off, and a chugger slug exploded off the wall near Pearl Woman. Khamiss’s stunner crackled and Lord Qlp twitched. Pearl Woman flung the bag at Lord Qlp and commenced a zigzag path across the room while drawing her cutlasses. Explosive chugger rounds blew holes in the ceiling.

Zoot fired for the lower mouth. Lord Qlp collapsed. One of its pistols trained toward Khamiss, and alarm flared in Zoot as his next shot missed.

Pearl Woman gave a shout and flung a cutlass. It sliced the eyestalk neatly and the pistol fell. Khamiss and Zoot fired four or five more times each. Lord Qlp thrashed and lay still.

Zoot stepped to the navigation console in three fast strides. “Display course plot,” he said. The computer obliged, snowing a trajectory plotted, sure enough, right into the magnetic bottle that held antimatter for the power station.

“Cancel plotted course,” Zoot said, and the plot vanished.

Pearl Woman gave a triumphant laugh and performed a somersault in the air en route to the navigation console. “I did it!” she cackled. “That cutlass was right on target!” Her exuberance turned to shouts of joy. “
Yaaaaaah! Yaaaaaah
!” She touched the controls to the video unit and broadcast her image to Silverside Station. The hologram of a wide-eyed Tanquer appeared over the console, with the Cheng's captain peering anxiously over her shoulder.

Pearl Woman smiled and turned her head slightly to display the pearl dangling from one ear. She brandished her remaining cutlass. “This is Pearl Woman,” she said. “We have retrieved the situation. All’s well.”

The Tanquer’s eyes rolled up into her nictitating membranes as she passed out. There was an audible thump as she hit the floor.

“Send a crew to bring us to dock,” Pearl Woman said to the remaining figure of Cap’n Bob. She peered into the hologram. “And who was that, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” said the captain. “Whoever she is, she's rather odd.”

Zoot put his pistol in his holster and looked at Khamiss. Khamiss held his gaze for a moment. Zoot felt a glorious moment of internal warmth. Khamiss looked away. Confusion roiled in Zoot's breast. He turned back to the course plotter and felt something awkward in his breast pocket. He was surprised to remember that it was his suicide note.