Back in the cockpit, Ruiz settled Bolard in the jump seat again, then secured the merchant carefully to the seat with a roll of adhesive restraint webbing from a supply locker in the hold. Bolard’s eyes showed relief at this indication that Ruiz planned no immediate mayhem. He would have spoken, but Ruiz stretched a piece of webbing across his mouth and patted him reassuringly on the head.
“Well, now we’ll just have to wait and see what develops,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz sat back, clearing his mind. The boat rolled down the tunnel on its pneumatic casters, and the minutes passed.
Ruiz saw a tiny glitter of light far ahead. They approached the end of the tunnel rapidly, and the light swelled into a half-disk. A boat, the last one ahead of Ruiz’s, climbed over the edge and disappeared into the glare. Ruiz thought to himself, I might just make it out. How strange. Then the half-circle became a crescent, narrower and narrower, as a blast door levered shut. Ruiz pounded the control panel with his fist, hard enough to make the dust rise from the crevices. “Shit,” he said.
The opening shrank to a thin arc of light and then closed completely. Ruiz knocked the controls back into manual and slowed the boat. He boosted the running lights as high as they would go, and rolled to a stop before the massive blast door.
He saw no activity. To one side, a maintenance corridor opened in the meltstone tunnel lining. An illuminated sign read: emergency personnel egress. To Ruiz’s eye, it might as well have read; Ruiz Aw trap. He sighed. What other choice did he have? No matter what reception Preall had managed to arrange for him, Ruiz would have to leave the pleasantly appointed cockpit of the Terratonic. He turned to Bolard. “Well, friend Bolard, our paths part at last.”
Bolard’s eyes bulged and he struggled against the webbing. “No, no,” Ruiz said soothingly, “don’t worry.” He grasped Bolard’s fat neck with both hands, his fingers probing for the carotids. “I told you I wouldn’t hurt you. You’ll sleep for a while. I’ll leave the air lock open for Preall’s men; they’ll eventually get here.” Ruiz bore down. Bolard relaxed and slipped into unconsciousness, a look of sheepish gratitude on his broad face. When the merchant was thoroughly under, Ruiz broke his neck with a quick twist.
“I don’t know why I didn’t just let you be afraid,” he told the dead man, thinking of the ones who slept in the hold.
Chapter 22
Ruiz sat for a few moments beside the merchant’s corpse. All his attention was focused on the corridor that led away from the blast doors. Was it a good enough trap?
In his favor was the general ineptitude shown by Preall’s men, and the fact that the tunnel ended out in the jungle, at a distance from the pens. Perhaps Ruiz had only to contend with the security forces resident at the launch ring; perhaps Preall had not yet been able to supply reinforcements. It was possible that Preall’s major forces were still back in the pens, fumbling through the intricate maze that led to the wall.
Or were even now traveling through the tunnel toward him. The thought galvanized Ruiz into movement. That he had not considered the possibility before frightened him; he just wasn’t concentrating.
Ruiz wheeled the Terratonic about and set the brakes. He ran the thrusters up, until the little boat trembled. He killed the running lights, locked the pilot to the guidance strip, overrode the safety monitor, and hit the touchbar that opened the air lock. A final question occurred to Ruiz: Were the frozen clones in the hold equipped with their customary weapons? He went to see.
He shut down the stasis trays. As he had hoped, the Dwellers carried their little leaf-shaped daggers in their forearms, in toughened sheaths of living flesh. But the Dwellers were like so many brittle sculptures, held in the field that damped the molecular energy in their bodies, and it would take too long to thaw them. He cast about the hold for something hard and heavy, and found a chunky creeper-cleaner nuzzling for dirt in one corner.
The arms of the Dwellers shattered readily under its weight, but Ruiz’s cheek was grazed by a shard of frozen flesh, cutting him slightly.
Soon two daggers lay loose in a jumble of glassy red fragments. Ruiz picked them up in a fold of his cap. They smoked and grew furry with hoarfrost. He dropped them, still wrapped in the cap, into his boot.
In a moment, Ruiz stood beneath the belly of the boat, under the maze of conduits and servo lines exposed by the open lock.
Ruiz tried to look two ways at once: at the corridor, from whence an unpleasant surprise might at any moment leap, and at the darkened depths of the tunnel. Far away down the tunnel he seemed to see a tiny white light, like the light another boat’s running lights might make at that distance.
He reached up and tugged violently at the brake servo line, which resisted only for a moment and then tore away in a shower of sparks. Ruiz threw himself to the side, and the rear casters of the boat passed over the spot where he’d been standing an instant before.
By the time he picked himself up, the twin blue glows of the Terratonic’s thrusters were already far down the tunnel.
Marmo watched the screen. The unknown was standing at the tunnel end, watching the departing spaceboat with a disquieting look of satisfaction on his hard handsome face. Marmo turned to Corean with a whine of tiny servos. “I begin to see the source of your fascination,” he told Corean, who watched with an expression disturbingly similar to the unknown’s.
“Oh?”
“Yes. You are a pair.”
Corean refused the distraction, saying nothing.
“Have you rehearsed what you will say to Preall when he comes to you, complaining that one of yours destroyed a substantial portion of his security force, killed a customer, and blew up his tunnel?” Marmo’s voice betrayed no more than a polite interest.
“How will he guess? Preall knows my stock. Have I ever before traded in assassins?”
“Ah,” Marmo said, returning his attention to the screen. The unknown was running toward the corridor now, long springing strides.
“What about the security men the Moc killed at the ring? I doubt that Preall will accept that their wounds were made by anything human. I remind you, Corean, you’re notoriously the only leaseholder of the Blacktear Pens who commands the services of a Moc.”
“Marmo, you’re tediously and repetitiously concerned with Preall’s happiness. I am not,” Corean said. Her tone quivered at the edge of ugliness. Marmo felt an involuntary cringe creeping along his circuits, and said no more for a while.
The two of them watched in silence.
Eventually Marmo summoned enough courage to continue the conversation.
“Perhaps you would indulge my curiosity,” he said. “Since we’ve begun this risky maneuver, I haven’t really understood why.”
Corean kept her eyes on the screen. “I explained all that, Marmo, before we started. I told you then, I wanted to learn as much as I could about the man, before we took the risk of freezing him. Otherwise I’d have done it in the pen.”
“Ah, yes. For what reason did you wish to learn about him? It seems to me that our response would be much the same, no matter who he turns out to be. If he’s a tourist, kill him. If he’s free-lance, kill him. If he’s League, kill him carefully. If we’d just killed him carefully at the beginning, that would have covered all the possibilities, and we might have saved ourselves much uncertainty.”
“Marmo, you’re too logical. I know that’s what I pay you for… but have you no curiosity?”
Marmo made no further appeals to logic. For some reason, Corean was unwilling to admit that she wanted the unknown for a toy — though this was abundantly clear in the flush of her cheeks, in the sparkle of her eyes, and in the eager stance of her body.