"Be quiet!" The voice was a whiplash. The pistol muzzle pressed harder, and Vincente swallowed, more frightened for his family than ever.
"That's better," the intruder said. "Your wife and children will be our guests, Mister Cruz, until you do exactly as we tell you."
Vincente licked his lips. "What do you want?" he asked hoarsely.
"You're a senior programmer for Imperial Terra," his captor said, and even through his fear Vincente was stunned. His job was so classified even Elena didn't know precisely what he did! How could these people—?
"Don't bother to deny it, Mister Cruz," the masked man continued. "We know all about you, and what you're going to do is add this—" he waved a data chip before Vincente's eyes "—to the ship's core programs."
"I-I can't! It's impossible! There's too much security!"
"You have access, and you're bright enough to find a way. If you don't—" The man's shrug was a dagger in Vincente's heart. He stared into the eyes in the mask slits, and their coldness washed away all hope. This man would kill him as easily as he might a cockroach... and he had Vincente's family.
"That's better." The masked man dropped the chip on his chest and straightened. "We have no desire to hurt women and children, but we're doing the Lord's work, and you've just become His instrument. Make no mistake; if you fail to do exactly as you're told, we will kill them. Do you believe me?"
"Yes," Vincente whispered.
"Good. And remember this: we knew where to find you, we know what you do, and we even know what ship you're working on. Think about that, because it also means we'll know if you're stupid enough to tell anyone about this."
The masked man stepped back, joined by his female companion and a tall, broad-shouldered man with the capture gun. They backed to the door, and he lay helpless, watching them go.
"Just do as you're told, Mister Cruz, and your family will be returned safe and sound. Disobey, and you'll never even know where they're buried."
The leader nodded to his henchman, and Vincente screamed as the capture field suddenly soared to maximum and hammered him into the darkness.
Chapter Eight
Senior Fleet Captain Algys McNeal sat on his command deck and watched his bridge officers with one eye and the hologram beside him with the other. Physically, Admiral Hatcher was several hundred thousand kilometers away, but fold-space coms let them maintain their conversation without interruptions. Not that Captain McNeal felt overly grateful. Commanding Battle Fleet's most powerful warship on her maiden cruise was quite enough to worry about; having both heirs to the Crown aboard made it worse, and he did not need the CNO sitting here flapping his jaws while Imperial Terra prepared to get under way!
" ... then take a good look around Thegran," Hatcher was saying.
"Yes, Sir," McNeal replied while he watched Midshipman His Imperial Highness Sean MacIntyre running final checks at Astrogation. The Prince had obviously hoped for assignment to Battle Comp, but he was already a competent tactician. He'd learn far more as an assistant astrogator, and so far, McNeal was cautiously pleased with Midshipman MacIntyre's cheerfulness in the face of his disappointment.
"And bring back some green cheese from Triam IV," Hatcher continued.
"Yes, Sir," McNeal said automatically, then twitched and jerked both eyes to his superior's face. Hatcher grinned, and McNeal returned it wryly.
"Sorry, Sir. I guess I was a bit distracted."
"Don't apologize, Algys. I should know better than to crowd you at a time like this." The admiral shrugged. "Guess I'm a bit excited about your new ship, too. And frustrated at being stuck here in Bia."
"I understand, Sir. And you're not really crowding me."
"The hell I'm not!" Hatcher snorted. "Good luck, Captain."
"Thank you, Sir." McNeal tried to hide his relief, but Hatcher's eyes twinkled as he flipped a casual salute. Then he vanished, and McNeal's astrogator roused from her neural feeds to look up at him.
"Ship ready to proceed, Sir," she said crisply.
"Very good, Commander. Take us out of here."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Commander Yu replied.
Birhat's emerald and sapphire gem began to shrink in the display as they headed out at a conservative thirty percent of light-speed, and Imperial Terra's officers were too busy to note a brief fold-space transmission. It came from the planetoid Dahak, and it wasn't addressed to any of them, anyway. Instead it whispered to Terra's central computer for just an instant, then terminated as unobtrusively as it had begun.
"Well, they're off," Hatcher's hologram told Colin. "They'll drop off a dozen passage crews at Urahan, then move out to probe the Thegran System."
Colin nodded but said nothing, for he was concentrating on the neural feed he'd plugged into Mother's scanners. Imperial Terra had to be at least twelve light-minutes from Bia to enter hyper, and he sat silent for the full ten minutes she took to reach the hyper threshold. Then she blinked out, with no more fuss than a soap bubble, and he sighed.
"Damn, Gerald. I wish I was going with them."
"They'll be fine. And they've got to try their wings sometime."
"Oh, that's not my problem," Colin said with a crooked grin. "I'm not worried—I'm envious. To be that young, just starting out, knowing the entire galaxy is your own private oyster... ."
"Yeah. I remember how I felt when Jennifer made her middy cruise. She was cute as a puppy—and she'd have killed me on the spot if I'd said so!"
Colin laughed. Hatcher's older daughter was attached to Geb's Reconstruction Ministry, with three system surveys already under her belt, and she was about due for promotion to lieutenant senior grade.
"I guess all the good ones start out confident they can beat anything the universe throws at them," he said. "But you know what scares me most?"
"What?" Hatcher asked curiously.
"The fact that they may just be right."
The Traffic Police flyer screamed through the Washington State night at Mach twelve. That was pushing the envelope in atmosphere, even for a gravitonic drive, but this one looked bad, and the tense-faced pilot concentrated on his flying while his partner drove his scan systems at max.
An update came in from Flight Control Central, and the electronics officer cursed as he scanned it. Jesus! An entire family—five people, three of them kids! Accidents were rare with Imperial technology, but when they happened they tended to happen with finality, and he prayed this one was an exception.
He turned back to his sensors as the crash site came into range and leaned forward, as if he could force them to tell him what he wanted to see.
He couldn't, and he slumped back in his couch.
"Might as well slow down, Jacques," he said sadly.
The pilot looked sideways at him, and he shook his head.
"All we've got is a crater. A big one. Looks like they must've gone in at better than Mach five... and I don't see any personnel transponders."
"Merde," Sergeant Jacques DuMont said softly, and the screaming flyer slowed its headlong pace.
Underway holo displays had always fascinated Sean, especially because he knew how little they resembled what a human eye would actually have seen.
Under the latest generation Enchanach drive, for example, a ship covered distance at eight hundred and fifty times light-speed, yet it didn't really "move" at all. It simply flashed out of existence here and reappeared over there. The drive built its actual gravity masses in less than a femtosecond, but the entire cycle took almost a full trillionth of a second in normal space between transpositions. That interval was imperceptible, and there was no Doppler effect to distort vision, since during those tiny periods of time the ship was effectively motionless, but any human eye would have found it impossible to sort out the visual stimuli as its point of observation shifted by two hundred and fifty-four million kilometers every second.