Star Rogue, page 7
We were pulling into the shuttle bay. I shot another call to my ship.
“Wanderer, there’s a chance someone may attempt my capture as I approach you. Do you detect any vehicular action in your immediate vicinity?”
His answer came in a moment. “There are several scooters and two cargo vans operating within a radius of one thousand yards of my position and several ships moored nearby are partially manned.”
“Yes, but anything suspicious?”
A silence. Then:
“There is one gig in parking orbit just beyond the fringe of my energy shield. I did not notice it before because it is hidden behind a 360° light-baffle. I am monitoring it on the asdar screen now. Asdar reports the spacedoors are open and several men are nearby in airsuits. I would judge their activities as definitely suspicious.”
So would I. An invisible gig with men hovering about. Beautiful!
“Thanks, Wanderer! Now hear this! Special operating procedures follow, which supercede your standard operating procedures in categories C through H and the entire K series: these men will probably try to capture or at least attack me as I approach. They will most likely wait until you bring down your energy shield so as to permit me entry into your spacedoor. You will not interfere in any manner unless, and until, you detect deployment of energy weapons. This procedure does not include use of a neuronic scrambler. Repeat, do not fight back if I am attacked with a neuronic scrambler, unless I am subjected to same for a period of time sufficient to kill. As soon as I cease this transmission I will leave the transceiver on so that it emits a carrier wave. When, and if, my captors transport me either to planet Demaratus, to another orbital station, or off-planet and into paraspace, you will request departure clearance from the Docking Authority in normal manner and track my wave, following at a distance beyond reach of their detectors. You will continue to track me wherever I am taken and will maintain a posture of armed readiness, prepared to get me out if I call for help or if my wave should for any reason cease transmission. Understood?”
“I understand and will comply.”
“Transmission ends. Now.”
Maybe I was taking a big chance by letting the Opposition ambush me this way but sometimes you have to risk it. Sure, I could have fought back in hopes of grabbing a prisoner who could tell me what I wanted to know about the Opposition. But that might have ended in another stalemate. I fought back when Kory’s gang tried to grab me back there in the parking lot and such was my luck that the one single prisoner I took hardly knew anything.
You will understand that before I could effectively employ counter-actions against the Opposition, I had to find out just who they were and what they wanted with me. Until I discovered the answers to those questions, I was flying through space blind with my asdar nonfunctional.
I had already done some thinking about who the Opposition might possibly be, although I had little enough data in the banks to expect a valid extrapolation. For one, this might conceivably be the long-delayed culmination of a century-old private vendetta. I’ve already mentioned how unlikely it was that I could have a personal enemy still living but it was fully possible that the children of some foe from the good old days was trying to wreak a spot of vengeance for some ancient wrong. If so, his or her grievance would have to date back to before Year 3962 of the Imperium, which was when I turned Citadel command over to Ben Dalmers and I couldn’t think of anything around that date that could have resulted in a vendetta of this tenacity and intricacy.
Of course, I came briefly out of retirement just about a hundred years ago but that was to handle an outbreak of Dirghama and I’m sure I made no enemies then.
Another possibility had also occurred to me. Suppose Dom and his compatriots were actually agents of the Intruder—either traitors enlisted through subversion or flesh robots infiltrating our society from the Magellanics? This seemed mighty possible and was by far the grimmer of the two alternatives. And then again, come to think of it, there was a faint possibility that this was a case of mistaken identity and had nothing to do with the Intruder at all. That is, maybe some gang was out to pull a really big job of some kind on Demaratus and had planted Dom in the terminal to watchdog for any telepathic practor who might turn up on the trail of this plot. Spotting me, Dom might have panicked and jumped to the conclusion that my arrival at just this time was involved with their plot, whatever it might be. Anyway, I had to find out. And the quickest way to discover what they wanted with me was to let them have me. So I went about my business just as if I did not know that a trap was already laid for me.
I got off the shuttle, processed through outgoing customs again, turned in my Demaratan credit card, picked up my scooter, donned my airsuit and zepped out to where Wanderer was parked. This time I was ready for the attack and had taken all the precautions I could. The Opposition had no way of guessing that Wanderer was anything more that just an ordinary cruiser with extra-heavy shielding and a pick-proof lock. They knew I had no confederate aboard who could fight back when I fell under their attack. It must have looked as easy as easy can be.
Sure enough, when I halted the scooter and Wanderer dropped his screens to let me aboard, they jumped me. I didn’t feel like being stungunned again, so en route I had tinkered with my mindlock and made it opaque to the frequency of a neuronic weapon. There was no way they could detect this.
They caught me in the crossfire of three stunguns and I flopped realistically. It’s a good thing the scooter had a safety belt or I might have gone floating down into the clutches of the planet’s gravitational field. That would have been a fine way for a Star class telepath to end up—as a meteorite!
Wearing full light-baffles, they grabbed me and the scooter and bundled us aboard the invisible gig. I had been half-afraid they would try to board Wanderer. One look at his interior and they would know he was no ordinary ship. And there was a damn good chance they might try it. because Docking Administration would soon begin to wonder why my ship was still moored at Demaratus Station when I had already processed through outgoing customs.
But the gig wasted no time in entering the cargo hold of a nondescript freighter moored no great distance away. The spacedoors were sealed behind us and I guessed—correctly—that we were bound off-planet immediately. Obviously, they couldn’t be bothered burdening themselves with another ship. Let Docking Administration wonder all it liked, there would be nothing to connect my disappearance with the departure of the freighter. Dozens of spacecraft of all kinds were arriving and departing every hour. Demaratan proctors would have no reason to suspect one ordinary freighter.
Once aboard, they turned off the light-baffles and secured the gig for a quick departure. Using my sensories I took a good look around. The cargo hold was empty—empty of cargo, that is. In fact, the cargo bays had been torn out and the whole compartment newly outfitted with mooring cradles. And these cradles accommodated a broad variety of auxiliary spacecraft. They held everything from scooters and an extra gig to crawlers and atmospheric skimmers. There was even one four-man scout capable of orbit-to-surface operations very elaborately camouflaged as an ordinary aircar.
This freighter was, in effect, a regular spacecraft-carrier nesting a small private fleet! I was impressed. And mighty curious.
Having gotten a good look around, I now turned my attentions to the gang who had ambushed me. They were eight in all and I had never seen any of them before. They were a tough-looking crew with hard faces and vicious eyes. And they looked like ordinary gunmen of the sort any mastermind can hire by the dozen for a big job off-planet. I didn’t see any among the eight with the pale, washed-out complexions of Demaratans and that made me feel good. I guess my gamble was worth the risk after all; these were probably full-fledged members of the Opposition. The gang seemed to have been recruited mostly from the Hercules worlds. There were a couple big, raw-boned men among them, obviously terrestrials of colonial stock; a couple of swarthy renegades from Arkonna with beards dyed indigo; a number of scruffy, mean-looking natives for the Rilké, Chahuna or Faftol clans; at least one Nomad from the Veil and a blond, dull-eyed Centaurian. The only nonhominid among them I could see was a sleek-furred Catman from Kermnus, a low-caste Sss’tuurl from the patterns dyed in his furred upper arms.
They stripped off my airsuit and removed my gun-belt. One of them turned off my mindlock and went through my pockets, taking everything but my half-used pack of aromatiques which he most unwisely did not even bother to examine. They grinned and joked when they found the huge wad of cash I had lifted from Dom. Another of them scrutinized my rings and then pulled them off and added them to the little pile of loot. Then they ran a portable scanner over me from head to foot. It was only tuned to detect ferrous metals, so they found nothing.
The one who seemed to be the leader of the ambush gang was a small, wiry, middle-aged Herculian of about seventy. He had sharp, mean little eyes and a hungry look and his lean jaws were pockmarked from a bout with Blacklands fever. He had the Web Stars written all over him and the back-alleys of Argain were in the nasal whine of his voice.
While I was being searched, he went over to a wall-phone.
“Commo, let me have the boss,” he grunted. A momentary pause, then, “Boss? This is Kile, down in Cargo. We got him easy, no problem. You wanna look him over before we zepp him in with the other one? Right!”
He turned to snarl, “Look alert, you guys, the boss is coming down with the med to have a look.”
The other one, I thought. Does that mean they have another prisoner?
A couple of minutes later two men stepped out of the gravity well that connected with the upper decks. One was obviously “the med,” a bony little man with a medikit clutched in one hand. And the other was, beyond question, the “Boss.” He was a big man, well-fleshed and had about him that hearty, jovial air of a moneyed man of position—the aura of expensive jewelry, beefsteaks and brandy, luxury hotels and costly pleasures. But the illusion of joviality was a lie. One look at his hard, heavy face and cold eyes told you that. The wiry little ambush-leader, Kile, met him and his companion at the well with a cringing, servile demeanor and ushered the two over to where I lay. They had finished searching me by now. Carelessly, they had left me wearing my own space-fatigues. Either they were confident of their ability to hold me, or the scanner-test persuaded them I had no gadgetry concealed on my person. In either case, they were acting like amateurs because they left me in full possession of a micro-miniaturized arsenal—for what seemed to be an ordinary, innocent set of airsuit liner coveralls was one of my special “business” suits.
They would have been smart to strip me to the buff and give me some cast-off clothing to wear. That they didn’t was a tactical error and I was determined they were going to regret it.
The boss raked me over with a cold, measuring glance and pawed contemptuously through the pile of belongings that they had found on me.
“Just junk, chief,” Kile observed. The boss grunted, then waved forward the medic.
“Look him over. See when he’s coming out of it,” he said flatly. And I began to sweat. I could impersonate the victim of a stungun assault well enough to fool the eye—that just took a little acting. But a meditest was something else and the doctor probably had an e.e.g. in his kit. If he used that, he could tell instantly that I was faking because I could not disguise my amount of mental activity from an electroencephalograph.
Oddly enough—to my intense relief—he either didn’t have one or didn’t bother to use it if he did. He gave me a very brief once-over, too. The doctor was a scrawny old man of ninety or so, with the red-rimmed eyes and loose twitching mouth of a kelsenite-habituate.
As he bent down to examine me, I threw myself into a light trance state, the better to fake the effects of stungun paralysis. I was ready to seize control of his mind if he reached for a portable e.e.g., although using any of my T-powers beyond merely my sensories was risky and might be detected by another telepath, if they had one aboard.
But the old man gave me a most cursory examination. He checked my pulse, pushed back my upper lid and flashed a narrow light-beam into my eye and then got up stiffly.
“Well?” the boss demanded.
Apparently my hastily-assumed trance fooled the medic for he reported in a quavering voice, “The patient seems to have sustained only a glancing shot and should be coming out of the mental paralysis at any moment.”
Kile’s swarthy face flushed at the implied criticism of his gang’s marksmanship.
“Chief,” he said indignantly, “I swear t’Plenum we had three beams on him! Why, at fifty yards my boys c’d—”
Just at that moment my sensories detected an audiobeam transmission from somewhere very close by.
I wasn’t attuned for reception but I managed to catch the “peaks” of the beam. What I heard made utterly no sense to me—then. It was a jumble of syllables that sounded like “GEERPTSFOOMENELG-TIVTEEEFF.” I filed the nonsense word away for for further study later. Meanwhile, things were moving forward swiftly.
The boss had not been listening to Kile’s indignant protestation. His attention was elsewhere. Now he waved the little gang-boss into silence and turned a wide, expansive grin on the gunmen who stood around apprehensively.
“Doesn’t matter. You got him, that’s the important thing. Good work, boys! I’ll put in a good word for you when I see the Big Boss… .”
I had been wondering what the big man reminded me of, with his well-fed, impassive face and cold, calculating eyes and general air of genial prosperity. He was fitted out in expensive yachting duds. Jewelled rings flashed on his well-manicured hands. He was wearing a very, very expensive mindlock. These things were obvious to the eye. But he had a homogenized look. I couldn’t pin down his birth-world with any kind of accuracy at all. And, although he spoke Neoanglic with a slight trace of accent, he had one of those deep, rich, well-trained voices from which the overt regional flavor had been professionally removed, like a newscaster speaking on the deleo to a galaxy-wide audience.
He had the fleshy, prosperous look of an upper-echelon management executive about him, a sort of unconscious knowledge of his own power that accepted, without really noticing, the considerable deference the others, all lowly underlings, mere pawns, displayed towards him.
But when he turned with that expansive gesture, that beaming smile, that loud hearty voice that rang with false warmth and joviality, I suddenly had him tagged.
A politician, of course. What else?
Kile fairly wriggled with relief and pleasure. “Aw, that’s big of you, boss. Real big! You know me an’ the boys … anything we can do for the Big Boss … anytime, anyplace… .”
The boss gave another of those hearty, beaming smiles. I noticed that the warmth of his smiles did nothing to take the chill out of his hard cold little eyes. “I know that, Kile,” he said firmly, “and, believe me, the Big Boss knows it too. And when The Time comes … well! … the Big Boss is gonna remember you and your boys. Yes, you’ll be all set.”
The “boys” grinned and nudged each other, exchanging bright glances.
“Now, boys,” the boss went on loudly, “I gotta get back up to Command and get this tincan zeppin’ along. Kile, you take our friend here and you lock him up real good and tight and we can get going. Put him in with the other Citadel agent we caught.”
“Right, boss!”
He turned on his heel and strode swiftly and purposively over to one of the gravity wells, the med following behind him.
The other Citadel agent?
Now, that was something to think about.
I thought about it all the way to my cell
NINE
Kile told a big lug with straw-blond hair and watery pale eyes to cart me off to the brig. From his looks and the breadth of his muscle-bound shoulders I figured he came from the heavy gravity planet, Strontame, and from the casual ease with which he tossed me over one shoulder I knew I was right.
The brig was up several decks from the cargo hold. Since there was now just the muscle-man and me, I risked some plain and fancy snooping with my primaries as we went up the gravity well. This way I spotted several entry ports and observation blisters that had been converted to gun emplacements. They were crowded with some of the heaviest ship-mounted laser batteries I had ever seen this side of a Fleet battlewagon.
Snooping the main drive compartment, I also observed some heavy-duty shield projectors jury-rigged on cargo dollies and spliced in to the central power core of the cold-fusion assembly. This so-called freighter had been carefully, and unobtrusively, converted into a medium-heavy battle cruiser. Why, from the armament and shielding I snooped, it probably had enough zazz to hold its own against a full squadron of Naval craft.
That was interesting, too. That kind of shielding is costly and you don’t buy laser batteries of that weight with pin-money. The Opposition had money behind them. Real money. I had stumbled onto something a lot bigger than I had first estimated.
A surly-faced Narlionid with apricot skin and slant 85 eyes that glistened like oiled satinwood was standing guard over the brig lock, armed with a heavy Barringer. He and the big lug from Strontame exchanged a few words and as the Narlionid opened up I noticed with more than a slight qualm that a dampener field had been set up just outside the door, up against the wall. From the position of its cone-antenna I guessed it was set to cover the brig area. And this was mighty bad news. It meant that, once I was on the inside, I would not be able to use my T-powers in any way.
This was my last good chance to try for a takeover of the Opposition ship, as far as I could tell at that moment. Very shortly I would be immobilized, my T-powers useless. Right now, if I wanted to try it, I could strike down the Strontamian and the brig guard and make my play for the control center up forward. It was a long chance but once inside that brig there would not be another.
