Judgment at Proteus (35 page)

I returned to the big cylinder and took a closer look. It was made up of individual two-meter-long segments, either welded together or else connected with some kind of fasteners. I rubbed my fingers along one of the junction lines, brushing off the accumulated dirt. Nothing. I moved to the next junction and repeated the process, then to the next.

Finally, at the fourth junction, I found what I was looking for: a section that was notably shinier beneath the buildup of dirt. Clearly, this part was a replacement that had been added after the original cylinder was installed.

And instead of welds, it was held in place by a set of standard klinckers, probably the galaxy’s best compromise between strength and ease of attachment. It was also something my multitool was designed to handle. “Go around to the other side and see if you can spot anything that looks like an access panel—they have to be able to get to the driving fans somehow,” I instructed Doug. “I’ll start taking this off.”

With an acknowledging woof, Doug headed back toward the elevator. Pulling out my multitool, I set to work.

There were six klinckers on this side of the cylinder. I had five of them off when I heard a soft yip from the other side. I finished undoing the sixth fastener, then retraced my steps to the elevator and went around to the cylinder’s other side. Doug was waiting at the end by the wall, his head held high in obvious triumph.

There it was: a thirty-centimeter-wide cover panel, situated halfway between the wall and the cylinder section I’d begun loosening. Undoing the four klinckers that held the panel in place, I pulled it off.

Not surprisingly, given the official purpose of the access hole, I was greeted by a blast of warm air from the edge of a spinning fan blade. Blinking against the dust, I peered inside.

One glance was all I needed. The fan was an open design, which meant that once I stopped it I should be able to squeeze myself between the blades. Even better, once I was past the fan the only thing between me and the dome was a fragile-looking grille held in place by four more klinckers.

I looked at Doug. “You’re absolutely sure she’s in there?”

His woof was about as definitive as a woof could get. “Okay,” I said.

There were also six klinckers fastening my target section on this side. I got them off, then worked the now freed section back along the main part of the cylinder until there was an opening big enough for me to squeeze through. Returning to the access panel, I swapped out the klincker tool for the small knife blade and reached gingerly through to the fan’s double power cable. Carefully, wondering distantly how much current the fan was drawing, I sliced through both cables.

There was a muffled blue flash, a momentary tingle as some of the rerouted current traveled into my hand and arm instead of down the other wire, and with gratifying speed the fan blades slowed to a stop. I gave the cable one final slice, just to make sure, then turned to Doug. “Here’s the drill,” I murmured as I started tying my appropriated power cable to the fan housing. “In about two minutes I’ll pop open that grating, rappel down through the opening, charge inside, and grab Bayta.” I frowned. “She
is
in Building Eight, right? The one where they were keeping Terese?”

Doug woofed and bobbed his head in an affirmative. “While I do that,” I continued, “I want you to find some stairs leading to the corridor down there, so that once Bayta and I are out we can sneak back up here. If there isn’t any such access, we’ll have to split up—you head to Bay 39 on your own, and we’ll do the same. Think you can do that?”

Doug woofed again, and with a flick of his tail turned and headed back through the tangle of equipment. I finished tying the cable, slid the coil in through the access panel, then returned to the open section and squeezed through. The opening between fan blades was small, but the thought of Bayta in Shonkla-raa hands was a powerful motivator. A few seconds later I’d made it through and was at the grille.

I had two of the four fasteners off and was starting on the third when Minnario’s comm vibrated in my pocket.

I grabbed it, wondering if I dared take the time to get out of the cylinder before answering. All I needed now was to have one of the Shonkla-raa down there hear a Human voice wafting down at him from heaven.

But the minute I entered the dome life was likely to get very hectic indeed. Keying the comm, I pressed it close to my ear and mouth. “Compton,” I murmured.

“Emikai,” Emikai identified himself, an edge of grim satisfaction in his voice. “We have found her.”

I peered through the grille. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening down there. “Where?”

“A medical storage facility in Sector 18-B,” he said. “The patrollers are surrounding the area now.”

I felt the sudden pounding of my pulse in my throat. Could the Modhri be wrong about Bayta being in the medical dome below me?

Or had he never intended for me to find her in the first place? Had this whole thing been nothing but a scheme by the Shonkla-raa to get me out of the way while they dragged Bayta’s secrets out of her? “How did they find her?” I managed.

“The locator in her comm,” Emikai said with even more satisfaction. “Most people who disable their locators do not realize that law enforcers can reactivate them.”

I smiled tightly. So actually, they hadn’t found Bayta. All they’d found was her comm. An old trick, and a rather childish one at that, but Wandek probably figured that any time he could gain was worth the effort, even if it meant sending Bayta’s comm on a trip across the station. “I didn’t know that myself,” I lied. “Clever.”

“Do you want me to join the patrollers in their sweep?” Emikai asked. “I have completed the first part of my errand. I could go to 18-B before I seek out Attorney Minnario.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said. He had better things to do than join the rest of Proteus’s Jumpsuits in a wild-goose chase. “I’m closer to 18-B—I’ll go. You concentrate on getting Minnario to the bay without being spotted or stopped. Can you alert the patrollers that I’m coming and to hold off their raid until I arrive?”

“I will try,” Emikai said doubtfully. “But it may be difficult to hold them back. Filiaelians do not like kidnappers.”

“Neither does anyone else,” I said. “Tell them I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I keyed off the comm and peered again through the grille. All seemed normal down there. Apparently, they hadn’t heard me, after all.

And then, the two Fillies I’d seen loitering along the approaches to Building Eight simultaneously strolled away from their posts. Their eyes moved casually around the upper part of the dome as they walked, as if they were merely admiring the mountain painting.

But I wasn’t fooled by the carefully crafted nonchalance. They’d heard me, all right, or else the broken fan had clued someone in to the fact that trouble was skulking around up here.

Either way, I was out of time. Wrapping the power cord once around my left leg, I got a grip on it with my left hand, pulled my right foot back, and kicked as hard as I could into the center of the grille.

It popped out with gratifying ease and a clatter that could probably be heard three corridors away. Kicking the coil out of the cylinder, I shoved myself off the lip into the open air and slid toward the deck below.

The two Fillies were already racing toward my landing point, along with three others I hadn’t been able to see from my angle. I yanked out my Beretta as I slid toward the ground, lined the muzzle up on the nearest of them, and fired.

The first shot was easy, the snoozer dropping the running Filly into a face-first sprawl and skid on the deck. Unfortunately, shooting while hanging from a rope meant the first shot was the only easy one you got. The gun’s recoil threw me into a sudden violent spin, and I wasted my second shot before I was able to nail one of the other Fillies with my third.

And then my feet hit the deck, my bending knees dropping me into a crouch as they absorbed the impact. The remaining Fillies were still coming toward me, but now that I had a stable firing platform I was able to drop them with three quick shots. Dodging through the field of sprawled bodies, I headed toward Building Eight at a dead run.

I was halfway there when the building’s door opened and two more Fillies stepped into view. They took a couple of paces toward me and stopped, waiting for me to come to them. I considered giving them a snoozer each, decided to wait until I was closer and could enjoy the thuds as they hit the floor, and kept going.

I don’t know what it was that alerted me: an incautious step, a hint of reflection off a window, or just some sixth sense I’d developed during the long months of this war. Whatever it was, I suddenly felt unfriendly eyes on the back of my head, and half turned to look over my shoulder.

All five of the Shonkla-raa I’d just put on the deck were on their feet again, loping silently toward me in an attempt to put me in a pincer that would take me down for good.

And as I skidded to a halt and spun around to face them, the Filly in the lead hurled himself into a pouncing tiger leap straight at me.

There was no time to line up a shot. I ducked to the side out of his path, dodged his flailing arm, and slammed the Beretta’s muzzle hard into his side as he passed.

Only instead of feeling the softness of flesh and the slightly flexible hardness of the bone structure beneath it, I felt the muzzle bounce off something hard and unyielding.

Apparently, Wandek had learned from Jagged Nose’s encounter with me outside Hchchu’s office and had dug up a few sets of snoozer-proof body armor.

The Filly sailing past finished his arc, landing and instantly spinning around for another try. Again slapping his arms out of the way, I jammed the Beretta’s muzzle up under his jaw, right where it joined his neck, and fired.

Snoozer rounds were designed to be fired through normal clothing from at least a couple of meters’ distance, and putting one directly into his throat this way was probably going to cause a significant amount of damage. But right now, I didn’t give a damn. As he gurgled and started to fall, I did a quick two-step around him to put him between me and the other four attackers and started methodically putting snoozers into their unprotected noses.

The old Shonkla-raa might once have been the undisputed lords of the galaxy, but I doubted that many of them had ever done any of their own actual fighting. This bright new generation probably hadn’t done any, either, and I fully expected that the sight of my exposed back would be more temptation than the two Fillies standing by Building Eight could resist.

I was right. Even as I dropped the last of the first wave and spun around again, I found the two of them charging full tilt toward me. An extremely vulnerable position, and one which a trained fighter like me could take full and devastating advantage of.

Except that there were two of them, and I was down to a single snoozer.

The thudwumper half of my magazine still had fifteen rounds in it. But killing or maiming would be to take the fight to a new level, and I wasn’t ready yet to push things that far.

But while my attackers were Shonkla-raa, they were also normal sentient beings, with all of a sentient being’s reactions. Flipping the selector to the thudwumper side of my magazine, I aimed at the floor ahead and just to the side of the leftmost Filly and squeezed the trigger.

Thudwumper rounds weren’t nearly as loud as those from larger and heavier-caliber handguns. But the flat crack of the shot, the dull thud of the impact, and the scream of a near-miss ricochet were just as intimidating. I gave the Fillies a quarter of a second to realize I was no longer firing snoozers, then lifted the gun to point squarely at the one whose foot I’d just missed.

His reaction was exactly what one would expect from anyone not in a suicidal frame of mind, and exactly what I’d hoped for. Reflexively, he skidded to a confused halt, leaving his companion to continue their charge alone.

The first Filly came at me like a Quadrail engine, all speed and power and no finesse whatsoever, and I had the brief impression that he hadn’t yet realized that his partner had temporarily opted for the better part of valor. Once again, I did a quick sidestep out of his path. But this time, instead of spending a snoozer on him, I did a quick sweep with my leg and knocked his own legs out from under him.

He hit the ground with a grunt and bounded up again, his body armor cushioning his fall enough to keep from having the wind knocked out of him. But if he was expecting me to stick around for another round, he was severely disappointed. Even before his final bounce along the ground I was on my way again toward Bayta’s building, keeping my Beretta trained warningly on the other Filly as I sprinted past him. I reached the building, yanked open the door, and went in.

I’d expected to find a state of chaos, and I was right. The receptionist, who was leaning forward talking urgently into her comm, straightened up so fast she slammed herself and her chair into the wall behind her. I strode past her into the main corridor, Beretta held ready as I watched doctors and techs scrambling desperately out of my way or ducking out of sight into offices, labs, and patient rooms. One of the doctors held his ground, apparently with the idea of standing up to me, changing his mind only when I put another thudwumper into the equipment tray beside him. Amid the spray of shattered plastic and glass he joined his fellows in disappearing through the nearest doorway. I continued on, glancing into each room as I passed it, and finally arrived at Terese’s room.

There, just as the Modhri had said, I found Bayta.

She was in Terese’s old bed, her arms and legs strapped to the sides, her eyes closed, her face pale and drawn. Dr. Aronobal was standing beside her, a hypo in her hand clearly on its way toward Bayta’s arm. Flipping my Beretta’s selector again, I put my last snoozer into the center of her blaze.

And barely got the gun turned back around as a movement to my left caught the corner of my eye. “Hold it,” I bit out, flicking back to thudwumpers.

I’d rather expected Wandek personally to be handling this one. But instead, the lone figure standing silently by the equipment table was my old friend Blue One. “Well, hello there,
Isantra
Kordiss,” I greeted him coolly as I took a hasty step backward. “I’d stay right there if I were you.”