Sharon Lee - Adventures in the Liaden Universe

And this—this was the third validation, and the most compelling reason to continue on the course she had charted, in case she was having any last minute doubts.

“You gonna die for twenty Standards ago?” She asked herself, and heard her voice echo off the metal walls of her ship.

You gonna turn your back on a friend when he needs your help? Her ship whispered in the silence that followed.

No, she thought. No; she’d done that once, and it had stuck in her craw ever since.

One good thing—she could go on her own time, now, since the way she saw it, “don’t come” trumped St. Belamie.

Smiling, she reached to the board and opened a line.

“Tower, this is Skeedaddle , over at Vashon’s Yard. How soon can I lift outta here?”

There were restraints this time, uncomfortably tight, and a violent headache.

So , he thought, laboriously. You wanted to make the guy with the gun use it, and he did. Quitcherbitchin.

“He’s back,” a man’s voice said breathlessly from somewhere to the left.

He’d managed to land some blows of his own, which didn’t comfort him much, since he was still alive.

A man hove into view, his right check smeared with blood and a rising shiner on his left eye.

Good , he thought, and then saw the injector. Not good.

He tried to jerk away, but the cords only tightened, constricting his breathing—some kind of tangle-wire, then. He might be able to—

“No, you don’t, fly-boy,” the man with the injector snarled, and grabbed his chin in an iron grip, holding him immobile while the cold nozzle came against his neck.

There was a hiss, a sharp sting, and the injection was made. The man with the black eye released him and stepped back, grinning.

He closed his eyes. Fool , he thought.

The drug worked fast. The irritation of the wire was the first to fade from his perception, then the raging headache. He lost track of his feet, his fingers, his legs, his heartbeat, and, finally, his thoughts. He hung, limbless, without breath or heartbeat, a nameless clot of fog, without thought or volition.

“What is your name?” A voice pierced the fog.

“Korelan Zar,’’ another voice answered, slowly. Inside the fog, something stirred, knew the voice and the name. Recognized, dimly, peril.

“Good,” said the first voice. “Where is the High Judge?”

“I don’t know,” he heard himself say.

“I see. Why were you going to your ship?”

“Orders.”

“What orders?”

He was listening in earnest now, interested in the answer; expecting to hear another, “I don’t know...

“Orders to get out, if it looked like going to hell.” Well , he thought, inside the thinning fog, that certainly makes sense.

“And things in your opinion were going to hell?”

He’d said so, hadn’t he? “Yes.”

“Ah,” said the voice. That not being a question, he found himself speechless. Time passed; he felt the fog growing dense about him again.

“What,” the voice said, sharp enough to shred the fog and cut him where he hung, defenseless. “What was the text of the last message you sent to the High judge?”

“Situation stable,” he heard himself answer.

“When was that?”

“Four weeks ago, local.”

More silence; this time, he found he was able to concentrate and thin the fog further. He could feel the shadows of the tanglewire binding him to the chair; a breath of headache...

“You were at the comm when we located you earlier this evening. Who did you send to?”

A question had been asked; the drug compelled him to answer with the truth, but the truth had facets...

“An old girlfriend.”

“Indeed. What is your old girlfriend’s name?”

The answer formed; he felt the words on his tongue, swelling, filling his mouth, his throat...

“Impressive,” the voice didn’t-ask, releasing him. Exhausted, he fell back into the fog, felt it close softly around him, hiding the restraints, the pain, the sense of his own self.

“What,” the voice asked, soft now, almost as if it were part of the fog, “is the code of the last receiver to which you sent a pinbeam?”

Calmly, his voice told out the code, while he sank deeper into the fog and at last stopped listening.

She set Skeedaddle down in the general port, calling some minor attention to herself by requesting a hot pad. Tower was so bland and courteous she might have been back on Kago, which didn’t comfort her as much as it maybe should have.

Sighing, she levered out of the pilot’s chair and stretched, careful of her back and shoulders, before moving down the hall.

She pulled a pellet pistol from the weapons locker, and a needle gun—nothing more than a trigger, a spring and the needle itself. Completely illegal on most worlds, of course, though she’d come by it legal enough: It had been with Berl’s body, when it came back, with his ship, to his sister.

She slipped the needle gun into a hideaway pocket, and clipped the pistol to her belt. That done, she straightened her jacket, sealed the locker and went back to the galley for a cup of ‘toot and a snack while the hull cooled.

The fact that they hadn’t killed him was—worrisome. That they kept him here, imprisoned, but not particularly misused, indicated that they thought there was more he could tell them.

He’d had time to consider that; time to weigh whether he ought to file his last flight now and preserve what—and who—he could.

The end of that line of consideration was simply that he wanted to live. His one urge toward suicide had failed and he couldn’t say, considering present conditions, that he was sorry on that score. If it came down that he died in the line of doing something useful, then that was how it was. But to die uselessly, while there were still cards in play—no.

That decision left open the question of what he could do of use, confined and maybe being used as bait. Not that the Judge would fall for bait, but Grom Trogar might not know that. In fact, Chairman Trogar might well see the Judge’s concern for his household and his courier as a weakness to be exploited. Big believer in exploiting other people’s weaknesses, was Mr. Trogar.

Having the time, he thought about his life past, and what he might’ve done different, if he hadn’t been your basic idealistic idiot. Put that way, he could see himself staying with Midj, leading a trader’s prosperous life, raising up a couple of kids, maybe getting into politics. There were more ways to change the galaxy than the route he had chosen. And who was to say that change was the best thing?

He’d been so sure.

She had a plan, if you could call it that. Whoever had done the alias for the pinbeam Kore’d sent his last message from had been good, and if she’d started with no information, she’d right now be on a planet known as Soltier, somewhere over in the next quadrant. Knowing that Kore was on Shaltren made the exercise of tracking the ‘beam something easier, and she thought she had a reasonable lock on his last location.

Nothing guaranteed that he’d still be at that location, of course, but it was really the only card she had, unless she wanted to go calling on the chairman, which she was holding in reserve as her Last Stupid Idea.

For her first trick, she needed a cab.

There was a cab stand at the end of the street, green-and-white glow-letters spelling out Robo Cab!

Cheap! Quick! Reliable!

Right.

She leaned in, hit the call button, and walked out to the curb to wait.

Traffic wasn’t in short supply this planet-noon, and the port looked prosperous enough. If you didn’t know you were on galactic crime headquarters, in fact, it looked amazingly normal.