Mary Rosenblum (30 page)

“We need to do an evidence search.” The captain was checking a very small and compact stun gun.

“I’m coming with you.” Laif stepped forward, reading refusal in the captain’s narrowed eyes. “Simpler than issuing you a pass. You need an upper level security clearance to ride the elevator clear up to the hub … at least the agricenter part of it. It’s closed.” He dropped the useless act. “Damn it, it’s my platform.” For now. Until they had to reestablish communication or the real occupying force showed up.

At least this crew hadn’t brought a sapper.

The captain considered for the space of three seconds, nodded.

“All right. You do as I say.” He made eye contact with a small, tough looking woman with a semitic-mix face. Jerked his chin infinitesimally in Laif’s direction. The babysitter.

The captain left the hard-eyed watch bitch with Bar. So much for Bar tipping Dane off. Laif wondered bleakly who had started this ugly ball rolling. Whoever it was had clearly implicated Administration in the mess, but not enough that he was under arrest. Arlin, he wondered? But Boone was so utterly in the dark about anything that went on above the skinside level that it wasn’t likely.

At the captain’s order, Laif expressed the elevator so that they wouldn’t stop at any intervening levels.

Didn’t really matter. Dane would know the elevator was coming, and the kid would come to see …

They strapped in at the microG pause, then lifted the last stretch to the hub. They knew how to handle themselves in microG, Laif noted sourly. Probably trained over on New Singapore, where you could buy anything if you were buddies with the Prime. Competent bunch, but then they recruited kids from birth, he’d heard, bought up orphans, kids from permanent refugee camps, anyone who wouldn’t have much of a future. They grew up with no allegiance except to the Force. Ideal soldiers. Lifetime of training, and you could put ‘em in anywhere with no complications of family or national identity. The woman who had been assigned to watch him was doing just that, dispassionately and competently. He wondered what her history was, wondered how the hell he was going to fix this mess.

Sweet Mohammad, Buddha, and Jesus.

The door chimed and opened, and Laif narrowed his eyes against the flood of light, cursing himself because he had forgotten to grab his goggles. Every damn one of them had donned a pair. “You stay back,” the captain said, indicating Laif but speaking to his watchdog. She nodded. Laif didn’t. Pushed off, got about two centimeters before she grabbed him and killed his momentum, still anchored to a strap.

She didn’t say anything and she didn’t have to.

For a moment, Laif thought they had figured it out, that Koi was already off in hiding with his family, that it would work out after all. His com link vibrated. Bar? “Yes?” he murmured, activating it. Nothing. He waited for a couple of heartbeats, then shrugged. Bar changed his mind.

Two members of the team pushed off gently, drifting sideways, eyes on small, handheld screens. Spoke cryptically. The captain noddded once. Sharply. One of the others raised a small, squat weapon, fired it casually, with no apparent aim.

Guided, Laif thought bleakly. By that scanner. A small exploosion of motion among the tubes sent three of the team pushing off hard and fast. They disappeared into the greenery. Laif pushed off reflexively, was tackled by his watchdog, who slammed them both into the side of the elevator housing. The impact knocked the wind out of him and they rebounded, drifting slowly, stalling in the open space around the elevator. Laif gasped for breath, his ribs aching, as the three returned, hauling a limp form with them.

Not Koi, thank the gods. One of the females – Koi said they all had names, but he didn’t know them.

Her eyes were open, glazed and unseeing, her limbs slack. The small bright orange butt of the guided stun dart protruded from her shoulder. The leader of the trio spoke a couple of syllables to the captain, shook her head. The captain swore one very English syllable and pushed over to them. Grabbed her neck, his frown intensifying, snatched open a pouch at his belt and slapped a small patch onto her carotid groove.

Dead. Laif stared, stunned. “You shot to kill and you did it
blind
? What the hell are you up to?” He kicked off from the elevator, arrowed over to them. ”What the hell is going on here?”

“It was set on non-lethal.” The captain looked up, his own face reflecting shock. “Maximum, but not lethal.” He looked back at the narrow face and long, skinny torso, her breasts flat as any boy’s, her back gently arched, arms and legs drifting.

“My God, what is it?” The captain’s voice grated with the revulsion visible on his face. “Who would
do
this?”

“More.” One of the pair holding scanners spoke up.

Dear gods, the whole family might be coming, maybe hoping to save this one? “Get out!” Laif yelled it at the top of his lungs, n longer giving a damn what the consequences were. “Now! Get out of here!”

Too late. Koi burst from the leaves, his milky eyes wide, zoomming like an arrow straight at the cluster of CSF. The young latino-mix with the weapon pointed it casually …

… and went tumbling wildly, weapon flying, as Dane hit him from the rear, shoulder first, slamming him into a head-over-heels tumble into the planted tubes. “Koi,
go
!” He pushed off a tube, ricocheted off another, oblivious to a dart as it zoomed past him, not guided, just aimed. Hit a woman with just the right angle to send her cartwheeling, caught another tube and pushed off, aiming like a thrown spear for the captain.

A spot of bright orange appeared on his side.

He spasmed, arms and legs flying out, back arching briefly ane terribly, muscles all jerking at once.

Began to tumble, out of control spun by the captain and slammed into a tube planted to beets.

Rebounded in a cloud of torn leaves and droplets of crimson juice. Like blood, Laif thought numbly. He pushed off, blocked his watchdog’s grab almost without thought, eyes on Dane’s slack tumble, head full of white noise and a howl of pain like an animal dying.

Koi?

Laif reached Dane a heartbeat before the CSF, slammed into his limp body, going too fast, arms going around him, tumbling with his limp sprawl into another tube, blinded by a flurry of ruined leaves. Feel for it, feel – He groped, fingers finding Dane’s throat, searching for a pulse even as hands closed on him like claws, reeling him in.

“He’s alive, Koi,” Laif yelled. “Get
out
of here.”

They hauled him off Dane and they weren’t gentle. Hung for a lamb, hung for a sheep, he thought and wondered for a flickering instant where the hell that saying had come from. Then he got a foot planted on a tube, slammed his forearm into the throat of the woman trying to twist his arm behind his back and had the small satisfaction of seeing her do a backward flip, struggling to breathe, before someone got a choke hold on him from behind. They won at that point, and when the blackness cleared from his vision, his hands were locked behind him and someone had just finished strapping his ankles together.

“You just killed a person, a kid,” Laif rasped. “Hope you can justify child murder here.”

The captain spared him one icy glance. “That’s not human.”

”You haven’t seen the DNA readout yet. Don’t get too cocky.”

He didn’t know if the captain heard, or cared if he did. They weren’t going to look beyond that face, eyes and body. Not until they had the readout in their hands, and even then it was going to be hard.

He knew that well enough.
Sorry, Dane
, he thought.
I really tried
. He twisted, trying to get himself drifting so he could see how Dane was doing. But then one of the CSF hauled him into view, heading for the elevator. They had put a restraint collar on him and a moment later, another of the ‘Keepers was locking one around his throat, too. The woman fit it snugly, not tight, making sure that they’d get good contact if they zapped him, Laif thought sourly. You couldn’t take these things off without a key. Not if you wanted to keep your head.

They’d slapped a patch on Dane’s throat and he was coming around from the stun. They’d hit him with the top setting on the dart, Laif thought. He could have ended up like the girl. He watched Dane’s eyes focus, watched memory flush out confusion. A ‘Keeper grabbed him as he groped for something he could push off from.

“Koi’s okay,” Laif said conversationally.

Dane’s eyes flicked his way, his expression utterly unreadable. But he relaxed. A hair.

The captain was reading them both their status, that they had been taken into custody by the World Council, that they would be treated under the International Convention on Human Rights statutes for all detainees, that they would have access to legal counsel and so forth. Dane’s eyes had taken on a glazed, faraway look and Laif worried silently about that high-level stun. He could see a couple of the CSFs sealing the girl’s body into a body-bag. No sign of Koi. They hauled the two of them into the elevator, and when it halted at the micro point, the captain released their restraints and explained the action of the collar in graphic detail.

At least he didn’t demonstrate it. Laif silently thanked him for that small kindness.

Dane didn’t look at him, merely stared at the wall as the elevator dropped to skin level. He might have been any commuter on his way to a boring day job.

The skinside corridor was empty and the back of Laif’s neck prickled. Even the vendors’ carts were deserted, parked crookedly in the promenade, the shops closed, curtains pulled across display space.

The blue-uniformed figures guarding the first major intersection confirmed Laif’s guess. The CSF saluted their small force, their faces alert and incurious. One of them murmured something, clearly speaking over a link.

The group split and half of them hustled Laif down the intersecting corridor toward the alley that led to Admin. He craned his neck to see where they were taking Dane, but a sharp shove in the small of his back encouraged him to keep moving. Another pair of CSF guarded the entrance to the alley. This corridor was eerily empty, too, although in the distance, Laif could make out blue figgures clustered about at least a couple of residents. Arresting them? Answering questions? It was too near the rise in the corridor and he couldn’t sort out the scene.

Efficient, these guys.

Laif shuffled into Admin flanked by the captain and his babysittter. The rest of the team vanished, off to some duty or other. Admin was full of blue uniforms. Two youngsters, a pair of scrawny, freckled redheads that looked like twins worked on the controls. The sappers. Laif’s shoulders sagged. Three other CSF conferred over a holomap of the platform, speaking in link-voices. The captain gave a short, chest-high salute to an older man with a major’s insignia. Laif strained his ears, but his babysitter hustled him off with that hard and unloving hand above his kidneys.

She took him to the tiny conference room at the end of Admin, shoved him through the opening door, just hard enough to make him stumble. By the time he recovered his balance, the door had closed behind him. Unsurprisingly it didn’t open for him.

“Welcome to the holding tank.” Bar sat on the tiny conference table, swinging his feet. “These guys are really really good.”

“So I gather. What the hell happened here?”

“They showed up right after you left. I guess they came up on New Singapore’s elevator. You know how they are over there … if they want secrecy, they get it.” He grimaced. “Private contract transport over here. They hit the dock with a Council Directive that overrides everything, I guess, had our internal communications shut down about two seconds after Immigration gave me a heads up. I called you when they walked in the door, but they shut me down beefore you picked up.”

Oh yeah … that com-link prod. Laif’s lips tightened. He should have checked, would have maybe been alerted when the sysstem turned out to be down.

What did it matter?

Bar shook his head, his eyes bleak. “Man, next time some fool hotshot at a bar spouts off about taking on Earth in some kind of military head-on … ” He laughed a short, sour note. “They just got to meet these guys. No wonder it’s so damn peaceful downside. You should have been here when they busted in the door. I damn near wet my pants.”

“I didn’t see anyone in the corridors.”

”They got the elevators locked down. No traffic between levels. Without authorization. And they shut down the Can.” He shrugged. ”That took their net geeks a little time. They crashed it just before you got here–that’s when they stuck me in here. Hey, we impressed ‘em a little bit there anyway. They didn’t like me much when I said I didn’t have a clue how to control it, but I guess they play by the rules.” He gave Laif a weak snllie. “At least they didn’t do some of the things they sort of hinted they were thinking about doing.”

And if they hadn’t managed to crash it? Laif hunched his shoullders, because you heard rumors.

The door whispered open again. A young CSF stood there, a broad faced African-mix wearing a Sergeant’s insignia, short and muscular, his posture a relaxed readiness that suggested good beehavior was a wise choice. ”You the boss man?” He spoke an easy U.S. slang, no second-language stiffness at all, although his accent suggested he was more likely Confederated Peoples of Africa than New York.

“Yeah.” Laif lifted one shoulder. “I guess.”

“I guess you’re not anymore.” The man’s grin widened a hair. “Orders from downside. I guess your assistant’s running the show. Cooperative guy. So you don’t have to stick around.”

Laif glanced sideways at Bar. “We can leave.”

“Not him.” The Seargeant shook his head. “Just you. But we want you to stay home for awhile, you know? Just so we know that you’re not causing us any trouble.” He stepped aside. “Let’s go.”

Laif exchanged another brief look with Bar, who lifted one shoulder. Straightening, Laif left the small chamber, following the CSF through the now-crowded admin. Yeah, there was Arlin, practically bowing and scraping as he conferenced with the gray-haired Major. Laif kept his eyes straight ahead as he marched though the press of blue uniforms. Nobody paid any attention to him, and the comments that he overheard were cryptic at best, a mix of at least four languages he could identify, maybe more.