So she borrowed energy from every Stardancer in the heavens who was not shouting something, and used it to drive a message that had never before been sent across the matrix.
Shut the fuck up!
The System seemed to echo in the sudden relative quiet. Even the wordless wail from the Ring halved its “volume” and “pitch” and dropped back down into the region of speech. The words—Save him, Sulke!—repeated endlessly, like a mantra.
And now Sulke could clearly hear the gentle voice she most needed to hear. All right so far, cousins, Reb said. We are all unharmed so far, which means they intend to parley. Be calm.
She knew his location precisely now. The vessel in which he was imprisoned was superbly stealthed—the combined power of the United Nations could not have found it—but she had detection gear no battle cruiser could match, if the target was another telepath. Reb had been one years before he’d met his first Stardancer; a natural adept. So were Fat Humphrey and Meiya.
So were four other humans currently in space, and fourteen on Terra. About average for humanity. All of them had been kidnapped too, at the same time as Reb, Fat and Meiya—every one was now a prisoner—but this vessel was Sulke’s pidgin: the one she personally happened to be close enough to do something about. She instructed her subconscious to monitor the other ongoing rescue operations for data relevant to her own problem, and consciously ignored them.
She fed Reb’s location to those who were good at orbital ballistics, grabbed the report that echoed back and swore. You’re going nowhere fast! Your trajectory is taking you up out of the ecliptic, and there’s nothing there!
He was still calm. Naturally. We knew they must have a covert base in space; now they’re leading us to it. We already know where the ones dirtside are being taken.
Yeah, and we can’t touch the place. What if where you’re going is just as well defended?
Then we will have to be very clever. And very lucky.
She went briefly into rapport with those who had had military training back in their human lives, and swore again. We have Stardancers vectoring to intercept your projected path at multiple points… but there’s no way to know where you’re going until they decelerate. And if they maneuver in the meantime, we could lose you completely.
They probably will. They’re paranoid; they’ll assume their stealthing may not be good enough, and try every trick there is.
I can match orbits with you right now, she said. You’re coming right at me, near enough.
What about relative speeds?
She was already adjusting her lightsail, spinning out Symbiote like pizza dough. You’re a bat out of hell—but if I can grab hold, and it doesn’t kill me… She had an unusually powerful thruster on her belt she had never expected to use; she poked it carefully through the Symbiote membrane, borrowed a hundred brains to help her aim it, and fired it to exhaustion.
What can you accomplish? Meiya asked.
Tear off antennas, bugger up their communications, bang on the hull and distract them while you jump ’em… if I have to, I’ll unscrew the fucking drive with my fingernails.
There was a hint of a chuckle in Reb’s voice. I love you too, Sulke. Whoops—they’re about to drug me…
Me too, Fat Humphrey said. Watch your ass, Sulke.
She could see them now, by eyeball, and they were indeed coming on fast. But she was confident; she had learned to board a moving freight when she was eight years old, leaving a place then called East Germany. Yeah? she sent back. I’ll give you a two-kilo gold asteroid if you can pull off that trick, pal.
His answering giggle was the last thing she ever heard. She never saw the white-winged figure who came up behind her and put a laser bolt through her brain.
PART EIGHT
22
The Shimizu Hotel
25 February 2065
Jay remembered an old story from the dawn of spaceflight: a Skylab astronaut had awakened to a lighting failure, and had taken nearly twenty minutes to find the backup switch—in a sleeping compartment the size of a phone booth. Darkness and free-fall were a disorienting combination.
He knew his way around the Shimizu about as well as anyone alive—but in the eerie, feeble glow of emergency lighting, everything looked different. In places even the emergency lights had failed, and almost everywhere he and Rand encountered adherents of the ancient philosophy, “When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” There was absolutely no doubt in Jay’s mind that somewhere Evelyn Martin was hemorrhaging and tearing his hair out in clumps.
For the first time in his life, Jay did not give a damn about offending guests; he and Rand went through them like buckshot, leaving a trail of outrage and broken bones that was sure to give birth to expensive litigation.
The destination that would most efficiently allow them to find out what was going on, report what had happened, and do something effective about it, was Kate Tokugawa’s office. There were other nerve centers, but that was the only one Jay was confident he could find in his sleep without AI assistance. It was startling to realize how much you depended on the damn things. God help me if I suddenly need a cube root or something, he thought wildly, bouncing a fat bald groundhog off a bulkhead.
Rand deked expertly around the ricocheting guest and pulled up alongside him. “They couldn’t have started losing pressure before the blackout, or we’d have heard alarms. To reach zero by the time we tried that latch, they must have blown out fast.”
“The whole window must have gone,” Jay said.
“Is that possible?”
“No. Not without help.”
“So they’re dead?” He clotheslined an employee who was, quite properly, trying to prevent them from speeding recklessly through a developing riot—and, since it was the quickest way to explain, regretfully sucker-punched the woman as he went by.
“Probably. But maybe not.”
“How do you figure?”
“I ask myself, what could take out a whole window? I come up with a ship designed for the purpose. I think they’ve been snatched. I think when they jaunted into that room, the window was already gone: they saw a holo of one. And at some point they all got sleepy…”
“And somebody came through the holo and towed them away… wouldn’t somebody notice a fucking barnacle attached to the Shimizu?”
“Remora,” Jay corrected. “It moves. Not if it was stealthed well enough. Fat’s room is all the way around from the docks. And by now it’s gone—and the sphere of space within which it could possibly lie is expanding every second. You can spot even the best-stealthed ship by eyeball, by occultation of background stars—but you have to know just where to look.”
“Maybe we should quit dawdling, then.” They were into the final corridor now, a straight run of perhaps two thousand meters; perhaps a dozen flailing figures cluttering the way between them and the door to Management country. He lifted his head, bellowed “FORE!” at the top of his lungs, tucked his chin and triggered all his thrusters at max.