Wireless (39 page)

“Okay, bed time,” I agreed, nodding like a fool.

Guard number two sighed dispiritedly as he sheathed his sword. “Petunias.”

“What?”

“Not daisies. Petunias.”

“Bed time!” Guard number one said brightly. I think he had a one-track mind.

“We were supposed to bury you under the petunias if you resisted,” Guard number two explained. “It’s so hard on the poor things, they don’t get enough sunlight out here and the soil is too alkaline—”

“No, no, see, he’s quite right; if we bury him, he’s supposed to be
pushing up daisies
,” said Guard number one, finally getting hold of the conversation. “So! Are you going to bed or are we going to have to tuck you—”

“I’m going, I’m going,” I said. The homicidal horticulturalists let go of me with visible reluctance. “I’m gone,” I whimpered.

“Not yet, sir,” said Miss Feng, politely but forcefully propelling me away from the ring of clankie guards surrounding the stage. “Let’s continue this discussion in private, shall we?”

The guards escorted me out of the dining pavilion and up two flights of stairs, then along a passageway to a palatial guest suite which had been made available for the members of the Club. Miss Feng followed, outwardly imperturbable, although I heard her swear very quietly when the guards locked and barred the main door.

“Dash it all.” I stumbled and sat down on a pile of cushions. “I’ve got to rescue her before it’s too late!”

Miss Feng raised one thin eyebrow. “Indubitably, sir. However, we appear to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified palace built by a paranoid emperor, with guards standing outside the door to prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after-dinner digestif and a postprandial nap instead?”

But I was too far gone in my funk to take heed. “This is my fault! If only I’d talked to her instead, she wouldn’t be here. This isn’t like Abdul, either. I know him, he’s a good egg. There must be some mistake!”

“If Sir will listen to me for a minute.” Miss Feng drew a deep and exasperated breath, her chest swelling beneath her traditional black jacket in a most fetching manner. “I believe the key to the problem is not rescuing Miss Laura, but
making a successful escape afterward
. Sir will perhaps recall the planetary defense gras ers and orbital arbalests dug into the walls of the caldera? While I am an adequate pilot, I would much prefer our departure from the second-most-heavily-fortified noble house on Mars to be facilitated by traffic control rather than fire control. And”—she raised one eyebrow, infinitesimally—“Sir
did
promise his sister to take care of her mammoth.”

“Dash it all to hell and back!” I bounced to my feet unsteadily. “Who cares about Jeremy?”

Miss Feng fixed me with a steely gaze. “
You
will, if your sister thinks you’ve mislaid him on purpose, sir.”

“Oh.” I nodded, crestfallen, and ambled over to the screen of intricately carved soapstone fretwork that separated the central lounge from the inner servants’ corridor. Small thingumabots buzzed and clicked outside, scurrying hither and yon about their menial tasks. “I suppose you’re right. Well, then. We need to rescue Laura, retrieve Jeremy from whatever drunken escapade he’s got himself into,
and
talk our way out of this. Bally nuisance, why can’t life be simple?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment, sir. Compared to covering for one of Prince W XIII’s little escapades, this should be a piece of cake. Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about His Excellency the Sheikh Abdul tonight?”

“What? Apart from his rum desire to butcher my beloved—”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the spinal parasite crab someone has enterprisingly planted on him since the race, sir.”

“The spinal
what
? Dear me, are you telling me he’s caught something nasty? Do I need to take precautions?”

“Only if Sir wishes to avoid having his brain hijacked by a genetically engineered neural parasite, his prefrontal lobes scooped out and eaten, and his body turned into a helpless meat puppet. Mr. al-Matsumoto’s burnoose covered it incompletely, and I saw it when he turned round: you might have noticed he’s not quite himself right now. I believe it is being controlled by Toshiro ibn-Rashid, the vizier.”

“Oops.” I paused a moment in silent sympathy. “Bloody poor show, that.”

“I’ve seen more than one attempted coup d’etat in my time, sir, and it occurs to me that this is an unhealthy situation to be in. The banquet continues for three more days, and Sir might usefully question the wisdom of staying to the end. After all, His Excellency’s puppet master didn’t throw a party and invite all of the prince’s personal friends along for no good reason, did he?”

“Then I suppose we’ll just have to rescue Laura and make our escape.” I stopped. “Um. But how?”

“I have a plan, sir. If you’d start by taking this sober-up, then I’ll explain . . .”

Miss Feng’s plan was certainly everything you could ask for. One might even suspect her of black ops training, but experience has taught me that it is best never knowingly to underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about the nature of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high, I was prepared to work to any plan, however rare.

However, we had to wait until after midnight before we could start. That was when the guards opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated Edgestar and a thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company. “Pip Paaarrrrrp,” Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in the middle of the floor: his cortical turret spun round with the force of the belch, and his lights strobed down through the spectrum and went dark.

“Am being pithed,” said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and collapsing onto two legs. “Huuuurk!”

“Let me help you with that,” I said, stepping forward to relieve him of his camel-hair coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had secreted beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite an armful, especially when it’s bottled up in corrosion-proof steel behind biohazard warning stickers.

“Aaah, that’s better,” mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a hiss of hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. “ ’M tired. G’night.”

“Quietly,” Miss Feng reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to the tiles. “Excellent. I’ll take care of this.” She rolled it on its side, directing it toward the door, as she palmed a preemptive sober-up. “I’m sure it will be quite the hit at the squishie servants’ party,” she added, with something very like a shudder.

I tiptoed away from the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my room to hide as the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better chance of avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for which Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well suited. And so I swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and approached Toadsworth.

“Excuse me, old chap,” I essayed, “but are you up for a jolly jape?”

“Bzzzt—” The cortical turret turned toward me and I confronted a red-rimmed eyestalk. “In-ebriate? Par-ty?”

“Jolly good show, Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first, what?” I flicked the sober-up at him. “Don’t want to let the side down, do we?”

There was a muffled explosion, his cortical turret spun round three times, and steam hissed from under his gasket. “You unspeakable bounder!” he buzzed at me. “That was below the belt!” His lights flashed ominously. “I’ve a good mind to—”

“Whoa!” I held up a hand. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll happily demonstrate the depth of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can imagine afterward, but we need to rescue Laura from the harem, then we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind-control crabs.”

“Really?” The Toadster froze in place for a moment. “Did you say
evil vizier
? With crabs? My favorite kind!”

“Top hat, old boy, top hat!” I waved my hands encouragingly. “All we need to do is get old Edgy awake—”

“Some’buddy mention nominative identifier?” With a whine of overstrained hydraulics, Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap on the floor. One foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling around the skirting board. It barked furiously until the Toadster shot it to death with his inebriator. “Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of orientation?”

“That way,” I said, pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to quiver and fold in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.

“Vroom,” he said uncertainly. “Where to?”

“To the harem! To rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss Feng poisons the squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s Bragote,” I explained. “If you’d be so good as to follow me, chaps . . .”

I pulled on the black abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent down to tap on the robot servitors’ hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss Feng had acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch deigned to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly grateful.

The servants’ tunnel was built to a more-than-human scale: not all the bots were small bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and hurried along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in remembering to download the map. I don’t mind admitting that I was sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with Edgestar whizzing alongside like a demented skate-board and the Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty inebriator raised and ready to squirt.

Miss Feng’s plan was clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly be languishing under lock and key in the harem. Moreover, the harem’s main entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly chaperone bots. However, she speculated, the servants’ passage would still be open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back door. We would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back inside. Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s tipple should have taken effect . . .

Something moved in the tunnel ahead of me, and I froze, knock-kneed in fear. I don’t lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem. “What is it?” he buzzed, quietly.

“I don’t know. Shh.”

Holding my breath, I listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a breathy whistling, then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a twisty little side passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something else, something familiar—then I blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed orbs brimming with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness toward me.

“Jeremy!” The delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks drunkenly in my face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow a betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for it—I reached out and grabbed. “Hush, you silly old thing! If they hear you, they’ll kill you, too!”

Grabbing a mammoth by the trunk—even a hungover miniature mammoth who’s three sheets to the wind and tiddly to the point of winking—is not an adventure I can endorse if you value a quiet life. However, rather than responding with his usual murderous rage at the universe for having made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me tipsily and sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would pass without upset—but then the gathering
toute
came out
suite
, and the foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of beer-smelling spray in my direction. I let go instinctively: he struggled back to his feet and began to reverse shambolically into the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed over my left shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. “Dash it all, men, follow that mammoth!”