An icicle ran down Benton-Ramirez y Chou's spine. If there was one thing he knew, it was that whoever had Allison would never return her alive, whatever he did. They might keep her alive as long as he did whatever it was they wanted him to do, but when the time came—when they had everything they wanted, or when there was nothing left for him to give them or do for them—they would kill her. The penalty for kidnapping on Beowulf was the same as the penalty for first-degree murder, and that didn't even consider his connections to the BSC and the SBI. They would kill her to dispose of any witnesses, and they would kill her because they knew how badly it would hurt him and his family.
Of course, he'd probably already be dead by then, as well, he thought harshly, because they couldn't afford to leave him as a witness, either. That wouldn't affect the thinking of whoever was hiding behind that voice, though.
“What is it you want?” he asked.
“I think of this in the nature of a first date,” the voice replied. “We'll start with something small, just to see whether or not you understand how to follow instructions. I want a roster of the Biological Survey Corps personnel operating out of your embassies and consulates in the systems of Posnan, Breslau, Sachsen, Saginaw, Hillman, Terrance, Tumult, and Carlton.”
Benton-Ramirez y Chou felt his teeth grind together. That list represented every sector capital in the Silesian Confederacy, which was steadily becoming a hotbed of genetic slavery transfers and sales points despite everything the Royal Manticoran Navy and the Imperial Andermani Navy could do about it. It was a region to which the BSC had been paying special attention for the last few T-years, because the situation was going to get nothing but worse. At least some Manties were beginning to realize what the People's Republic of Haven's military buildup was really all about, and it was inevitable that tensions between the Star Kingdom and the PRH were going to worsen. They were already pretty damned bad, given how enthusiastically Manticore had greeted Havenite emigres (and especially professionals fleeing the provisions of Haven's Technical Conservation Act). They'd grown steadily worse in the sixty-four T-years since the TCA was enacted, but when the SKM in general realized the “alarmists” were right—that the Peoples Navy's buildup wasn't just a “public works” job program, whatever the Legislaturalists had to say about it—the Manties would have no choice but to begin recalling more and more of their naval units in the face of that threat, and when that happened . . . .
“What makes you think I have the reach to get you that kind of information?”
“Oh, come now, Captain! We all know what an ingenious sort you are. You have all sorts of contacts, and I'm sure a skilled BSC officer such as yourself is well-versed in all the ways to break into theoretically secure databases.”
“That kind of information's not going to be in any one database I can reach.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou shook his head. “I might be able to get to some of it, but not all of it. Not without tripping security fences right and left, anyway.”
“Then you have a problem, Captain. Or perhaps I should say your sister has a problem.”
“How do I even know she's still alive?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked harshly.
“You have a point. Just a moment.”
Perhaps forty-five seconds passed. Then—
“Jacques?” It was Allison's voice, shaky and trying to hide its fear. “Are you there, Jacques?”
“I'm here, Alley!”
“They told me to tell you there's a reason you should listen to them,” his sister said. “They—”
Her voice broke off in a high, shrill shriek that went on and on. It couldn't possibly have lasted as long as it seemed to, and then it ended with knifelike suddenness.
“Pity,” the synthesized voice said as Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou stared at the blank com, his rigid face pale. “Passed out sooner than I expected her to. Oh well, there's always tomorrow, isn't there, Captain? I think you'd better go ahead and get me that information , don't you? I'm sure she'll think so, anyway.”
He paused, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou could hear his own breathing. Then—
“We'll be in touch for a progress report soon, Captain,” the voice said, and the connection went dead.
* * *
Alfred Harrington forced himself to sit back in the hovering taxi, eyes closed, concentrating on the tenuous connection he was certain now that he wasn't imagining.
He had no idea what it was or how it had happened, but it was real. He could point directly to where she was, and when he focused as hard—and as desperately—as he did now, there was more. It wasn't clear, it wasn't sharp, but it was deep and powerful. Her presence had stopped moving, and he was actually sensing her emotions.
And the more he sensed, the more desperate he became.
She was terrified, with the gut wrenching sort of terror that could come only to someone who was strong, who knew her own capabilities . . . and knew the horrifying reality of complete helplessness. And then, only minutes ago, had come something far, far worse—a frantic, silent scream for help she knew could not come that went on and on until it finally chopped off and all he could sense was the direction from which it had come.
His mind seethed with possibilities, questions, terrified speculation, but he forced all of them into the back of his brain, locked them down under the icy discipline of the Marine platoon sergeant he once had been, and forced himself to think coldly and logically.
He had absolutely no information about her captors, nothing upon which he could base an action plan, try to formulate a strategy or tactics. He had no idea how to contact any member of her family, and they would probably have thought he was a lunatic if he'd been able to reach them. Worse, they might conclude that he was the one responsible for her disappearance. The same was true where Beowulf law enforcement was concerned. If they checked, they could certainly determine that the “ambulance” which had picked her up had never delivered her to any of Grendel's hospitals, but that alone wouldn't be enough to convince them that a complete stranger like Alfred Harrington knew where to start looking for her. Hell, he wouldn't have believed it! His own immediate response would have been to take someone making such claims into custody on the grounds that he probably knew more about it than he was telling, but his knowledge had nothing to do with mysterious emotional links between complete strangers.
All of which meant he was almost certainly the only person who knew she was in trouble, and he was definitely the only one in a position to take any immediate action.
And immediate action is what she needs, he thought coldly. I don't know what they're doing to her, but I know it's ugly. She's frightened, she's hurt, she's alone, and for all I know they're going to kill her in the next five minutes.
Despite his iron self-control, his mind shied like a terrified horse from that thought. He didn't even know her, hadn't exchanged more than a couple of dozen words with her, certainly couldn't claim any relationship with her . . . and the thought of losing her was more frightening than anything he'd ever experienced in his life.
All right. That just means you're going to have to be at least halfway smart about this, he told himself.
The taxi waited with the patience of its artificial intelligence while he punched up more maps on his uni-link. The AI didn't mind hovering in one spot all day long as long as the meter kept running, and unlike a human pilot, it had no sense of curiosity to interrupt him with irritating questions.
He studied the display, orienting himself with the ease of long experience, superimposing the vector of his immaterial homing beacon onto the map.
They'd left Grendel behind over a hundred kilometers ago, heading out across rolling woodland dotted with the homes of people who preferred the attractions of a more sylvan existence to those of the city, and that told him at least a few things about whoever had kidnapped her.
Personally, Alfred would have opted for hiding her somewhere in Grendel itself. The city was enormous, with literally millions of people packed into it. Once they'd gotten away clean and gone to ground, which they certainly seemed to have done, they could have hidden for days—weeks—against that teeming background of humanity with very little chance that the authorities would be able to find them, unless they did something stupid to draw attention to themselves. The countryside seemed to offer more hiding places, but as someone who'd grown up in the Sphinx bush, he knew how much of an illusion that actually was. Traffic was easier to spot where there was so much less of it, buildings and encampments stood out sharply, and people had a greater tendency to notice strange air cars or strange people in the neighborhood, as well.
But the people who'd taken her had chosen the countryside. Unless he wanted to assume this was purely personal, a case of someone kidnapping her and dragging her off to his own home ground which simply happened to be in the country, that meant they wanted space, the ability to see people coming at long distances. It was always possible that “purely personal” was exactly what it was—that burst of terror could easily have come from someone who'd realized she was in the hands of a sadist or a serial killer—but it didn't fit the profile. Her abduction had been too smooth, too professional. The apparent seizure or collapse, the Good Samaritan and the waiting ambulance, all suggested careful planning by a group, not by a deranged individual. They wanted something, either from her or from someone who cared about her, and they intended to get it. Money was the first possibility that came to mind, although getting away with any ransom after the funds had been transferred would be problematical. He had no reason to believe her family was especially wealthy, either, and he took a moment to swear at himself for not having found out more about her. He should have at least found out who she was related to, damn it! But it would have felt too much like voyeurism, a confirmation that he was turning into the sort of obsessive stalker he'd been half-afraid he was becoming. All he knew about her was her last name—Chou—and that was scarcely an uncommon one here on Beowulf!
It was more likely they wanted something else, anyway, he told himself. Something that wouldn't leave traceable electronic footprints like a funds transfer. Information of some sort? That was certainly possible. Information techs didn't have to be wealthy or important themselves to have access to data that could be literally priceless to the right person. And information handed over on a data chip wouldn't have to pass through any of the galaxy's banking systems to be useful, either. He couldn't rule out a cash ransom, but the more he considered it, the more plausible the information theft motive looked.
Of course, what they wanted might be simple revenge for something, in which case they might well have—indeed, probably did have—no intention of ever returning her alive.
A fresh spike of fear threatened his cold detachment at that thought, but he forced it back. He couldn't afford it.
No. They were professionals, and that meant they probably wouldn't kill her immediately. But they'd brought her out here to make certain no one could get into striking range of their base undetected. They might also be out here because they wanted seclusion, but seclusion could be found in an urban environment, as well, if someone had a deep enough cellar. Most likely, they'd set up a military-style—or what they believed was a military-style—perimeter around their HQ, and that could be very, very bad. It was highly unlikely that anyone who could engineer this so smoothly would delude himself into believing he could have the firepower to stand off what the Beowulfan law enforcement agencies could bring to bear once they knew where he was. So his perimeter defense would be designed to buy time. Time for him to execute whatever bug out plan he was counting on to get his arse out of the frying pan before it fell into the fire. And that bug out plan was just as likely to include killing his captive before he ran for it as it was to include taking her with him.
All right. The first step was to find her. There was no point thinking about approaches or tactics until he'd managed that much, and at least he was pretty sure he knew how to do it.
He switched the map to a topological display, considering the terrain with a Marine's eye, and looked along the line between him and her. Distance was much harder to estimate than direction, especially when he had no previous experience with ESP, but there were a couple of places along that line that looked probable. He just had to figure out which one of them she was actually in.
“Come to a heading of zero-three-five degrees,” he told the AI. “Head in that direction until I tell you to stop.”
“Of course, sir,” the AI replied cheerfully. “Would you like me to open an entertainment channel for you while we travel?”
“No,” he said flatly.
“As you wish, sir. Ajax Cabs of Grendel appreciates your business. I hope you enjoy the flight.”
* * *
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou finished dressing and sealed his tunic with a hand which should have resembled a castanet but didn't. His eyes were bleak, hard, and something entirely too much like panic gibbered just below the surface of his tightly focused thoughts.
It was Manpower. It had to be, given the information they wanted, and that meant his sister—his twin—was in the hands of people who routinely used rape and torture as “training tools” and couldn't care less how many mutilated bodies they left in their wake. Worse, they were people who had deeply personal, as well as professional, reasons to hate him and, by extension, his family. It was entirely too likely that whoever had hurt Allison to make the point of his helplessness to him had enjoyed doing it. That they would do it again, with or without the intention of driving him to do their bidding. And it was certain that in the end, they would kill her.
But what did he do about it?
The first thing he did was to stay as far away from the members of his own team as he possibly could. It was possible Manpower hadn't IDed any of the other members of that team, but it was unlikely. And if they did know the team members, they'd have any of them they'd identified under surveillance. They had to know his natural response would have been to reach out to the people he trusted most in the world to help get Allison back, and the instant they saw any of those people doing anything out of the ordinary, they would assume that was exactly what he'd done. At which point, Allison would almost certainly die.
But that didn't mean he couldn't contact anyone in the BSC. He'd just have to be insanely careful about who and how.
He left his apartment, locked the door behind him, and headed for the parking garage. No doubt he was under surveillance at that very moment, but the very information they'd demanded from him gave him a perfectly logical reason to head for the Biological Survey Corps' headquarters at Camp Oswald Avery three hundred kilometers outside Grendel. The sort of detailed information they wanted couldn't be remote accessed without all sorts of challenges and authorizations. From his workstation inside Oswald Avery, over the camp's secure server network, it would be quite another matter.
But so would his ability to communicate without worrying about any eavesdroppers.
* * *
“Damn, I hate it when they pass out that fast,” Giuseppe Ardmore remarked, tossing the neural whip into the air, flipping it end for end and catching it again.
Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou was still unconscious, drooping in the chair to which she had been strapped, and Ardmore smiled as he watched her breathe. She wasn't blindfolded or hooded, which would have told her brother a great deal about how likely she was ever to leave this room alive. She might not realize that, but she sure as hell knew now that she was in deep, deep shit and sinking fast.
He caught her hair in his free hand, pulling her head back to study her critically. She was a beautiful bitch, he'd give her that, and maybe before it was all over, he'd have the opportunity to take advantage of that, too. But for now—
“Do you really think he's going to roll over for us?” he asked, never lifting his hungry eyes from her face.
Tobin Manischewitz regarded the other man without any particular expression, yet Ardmore's attitude disturbed him. The original concept for the operation had been his, but Ardmore was making it too personal. Manischewitz wasn't going to be a hypocrite and pretend he hadn't known exactly what sort of ugliness his plan entailed, but for him, it was simply the cost of doing business. A man didn't go to work for someone like Manpower if he had much in the way of scruples, and Manischewitz had never claimed he did. He'd always known Ardmore had a vicious streak, as well—it was one of the things which had made him so effective when it came to “wet work”—but it looked like the man had a deeper and uglier vein of sadism to go with it than he'd thought.
In some ways, that suited Manischewitz just fine. Ms. Benton-Ramirez y Chou wasn't going to survive the operation, no matter what happened, and her brother's love for her was both well known and evident. If anything was going to shake his professionalism, get under his skin and cause him to make mistakes, it would be his burning fear of what would be happening to her. Manischewitz's own estimate was that Benton-Ramirez y Chou would give them what they demanded as long as it wasn't core information about BSC strategies and human intelligence sources. He might hand over the humint names, but that would be a far harder call for him, especially since whatever his emotions told him, the professional part of his brain must know how little chance there was of his ever seeing his sister alive again, whatever he gave up for her. But he'd give them what they asked for as long as he could convince himself that it wouldn't be critical, wouldn't cost the lives of people who'd put those lives on the line for him . . . and as long as he could convince himself there was still a chance of finding his sister and somehow getting her back.
There wasn't a chance in hell of that, and sooner or later he'd realize it, but in the meantime, letting Ardmore demonstrate what was happening to his sister—or what would happen to her if he failed to cooperate, at least—was the best way to push him off balance and keep him there. For a threat to be credible, however, it must be demonstrated to be real, and he would be more than happy to let Ardmore do the demonstrating.
Unless, of course, Ardmore's . . . enthusiasm was likely to lead him to kill the girl too soon. Worried or not, Benton-Ramirez y Chou wasn't going to continue committing treason if he wasn't convinced his sister was still alive to suffer if he didn't.
“I think if he wants to have any chance at all of ever getting her back alive, he'll geek to at least the first couple of demands,” he replied after a moment. “I doubt we'll be able to string him along forever, though. Once he realizes he's not getting her back, he'll pull the plug.” He shrugged. “I'm not sure what he'll do at that point. He could try something really stupid if he thinks he's figured out where she is, but that's not going to happen. Why?”
“Because I don't think he is,” Ardmore said, and licked his lips slowly, his expression ugly. “I think no matter how hard I work at convincing him to be reasonable, he's not gonna cough up the information more than maybe once. And I'll lay you odds he's not gonna give us accurate info even the first time. I'm looking forward to that.” He released Allison's hair with a flick of his fingers that bounced her head limply, and looked at Manischewitz with eyes that glittered hungrily. “I'm really looking forward to it. 'Cause when he sees what happens to his darling little sister in glorious HD, I think what he's gonna do is put a pulser dart through his own brain.”
Manischewitz nodded slowly. That was his own estimate of Benton-Ramirez y Chou's ultimate response when he hit the limit of what he could—or would—deliver and realized how agonizingly his sister had died because he had. Still, the Beowulfer was a tough little bastard; it was possible he'd refuse to kill himself and dedicate what remained of his life to the pursuit of vengeance, instead. Manischewitz had taken that possibility into consideration when he planned the op, which was why Benton-Ramirez y Chou was scheduled to die on his final information delivery. A nice, nasty little bomb hidden in the dead drop and remote-detonated would see to that, without anyone ever being stupid enough to take the chance of letting Benton-Ramirez y Chou into range of a live human being.
“Just don't get carried away,” he told Ardmore. The other man's expression tightened, and Manischewitz shook his head. “He's going to need a little more convincing even after he coughs up the first data dump, so don't worry. You'll get your chance to ‘convince him.' But if we push too hard, too fast on the very first date, he's likely to balk or try something desperate the next time. These things have to be handled properly, Giuseppe. And”—he looked directly into Ardmore's eyes—“if I were you, I'd be careful how much time I spent on camera with her myself. You know what cyber forensics can do with visual data, no matter how carefully we camouflage things.”
“Don't worry.” Ardmore smiled and stroked the neural whip as if it were some treasured pet. “All he'll see is her and the end of this.” He stroked the whip again. “And I'll make sure he gets a really nice close-up of her eyes.”
* * *
“Christ, Jacques!” Colonel Sean Hamilton-Mitsotakis stared at the small, slender man standing in his office. “Allison? Right here in Grendel?”
“Why not?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked harshly. “God never promised me a cloak of invulnerability for my family. I should've remembered that. I should've made her take more precautions! But I didn't, and whatever happens to her is my fault.”
“Don't be stupid!” Hamilton-Mitsotakis snapped, shaking himself back on balance. “You did warn her, and unlike some of the other members of your family, Allison always had a pretty damned good idea of what you do. And you know as well as I do what kind of escalation this represents. They've never tried something like this right here on Beowulf any more than we've ever mounted an op against one of the Manpower families on Mesa, and you know why.”
“Well, they've sure as hell changed their operational parameters this time, haven't they, Sir?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou retorted, and Hamilton-Mitsotakis nodded.
“Yes, they have, and there's going to be hell to pay for it, I promise you that,” he said harshly. Hamilton-Mitsotakis was the CO of the BSC's Special Actions Group. That meant, among other things, that he was the man who assigned assassination targets and planned the operations to carry them out, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou knew all about the folder of high-level Manpower executives and shareholders tucked away in the colonel's files.
“In the meantime, though,” Hamilton-Mitsotakis continued, ‘we've got to get her back. I assume since you're talking to me that you've got at least something in mind?”
“Not very damned much,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou admitted bleakly. “They're using her com to make sure I know they've really got her, and because there's no way a trace could lead back to anyone besides Alley. But they've disabled the locator function—trust me, I already checked—and they're bouncing it through at least a couple of hundred intermediaries before they get to me. Not to mention the fact that Allison has the best privacyware on the market.” He grimaced. “In fact, I helped her pick it out. There's no way anyone's tracing that signal, and that means they could be anywhere on the frigging planet. For that matter, they could be off-planet; the delay with all the intermediate relays could be hiding the signal lag.”
Hamilton-Mitsotakis nodded. Beowulfers took their civil liberties seriously, and the system constitution had established hard, definitive limitations on electronic surveillance from the very beginning of the colony. Citizens had an absolute right to the best privacyware—not just encryption software, but software to disable locator functions and tracking techniques—without government-mandated back doors and workarounds. In general, the colonel approved of that state of affairs, but it could be a pain in the arse for law enforcement . . . or for the Biological Survey Corps on the very rare occasions when it operated on Beowulf itself.
Which opened another can of worms.
“I don't suppose you've cleared a waiver of Prescott-Chatwell?” he asked.
“No, Sir, I haven't.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou looked at him levelly. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Prescott-Chatwell was the law which specifically prohibited the BSC, which was not a domestic police agency, from mounting ops in the Beowulf System, and violation of it was punishable by up to thirty T-years in prison. It could be waived under special cirumstances, but that required a signoff at the level of the Planetary Board of Directors. Getting that sort of signoff was a time-consuming business, and time, unfortunately, was something Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn't have a lot of.
Now Hamilton-Mitsotakis looked into Allison's brother's eyes for a long, still heartbeat or two and then smiled slowly.
“Problem? Why should I have a problem? As far as I'm concerned, given the information these bastards want you to hand over, this is obviously a direct attack on the BSC. As such, it's clearly my responsibility to respond immediately in order to contain the damage. There'll be plenty of time to sort out any minor jurisdictional issues once the immediate threat's been contained.”
There was a moment of silence, then he shook himself.
“So if we can't track them, what do we do?” he asked.
“All I can think of for right now is to play for time, Sir,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou admitted flatly. “I think they're going to want a physical drop, because they'll be too afraid of what I might piggyback onto an electronic transfer. I doubt they'll be foolish enough to arrange the delivery anywhere near their actual base, but the problem with a physical drop is that somebody has to pick it up. Our best bet—and it's not much of one—is to set up surveillance of the drop and follow whoever collects the data. It'll probably be a drone, somebody who doesn't know squat, but eventually that information has to reach them if it's going to do them any good. All we can hope is that Alley survives long enough for us to follow the breadcrumbs to somebody I can . . . convince to tell me where she is.”
He met his superior's gaze levelly, and his eyes were bleak and cold. Cold with the promise that anyone who knew where his sister was would tell him in the end; bleak with the knowledge of how little likelihood there was that he'd ever have the chance to find her.
* * *
Alfred Harrington climbed out of the taxi and closed the hatch behind him.
He'd had it deposit him four and a half kilometers west of his destination, on the far side of a ridgeline from the people he was interested in. Hopefully, they wouldn't notice it, although he couldn't be positive they hadn't already picked him up. It all depended on the sensor systems they might have installed, and given the fact that they clearly wanted as small and unobtrusive a footprint as they could get, they were probably relying solely on passives. That would tend to limit the amount of reach and definition they had, but there was no point pretending that if they'd been watching, they wouldn't have seen the taxi fly over them, then swing to the northwest and—hopefully—disappear. The AI had been willing to come in to his present position at what passed for low altitude, but before he actually told it to land, it would never have agreed to violate the minimum hard floor of two hundred meters mandated by Beowulf's safety regulations. He was lucky it was prepared to wait for his return . . . and it had agreed to that only because he'd left a signed, thumbprinted authorization for it to keep the meter running against his card. At this rate, he was going to owe the cab company a solid month's worth of his lieutenant's pay.
It was possible he'd be making use of that taxi again. That was the plan—such as it was, and what there was of it, at any rate—although he wouldn't have cared to bet anything important on the likelihood. The best he could hope for was that before he'd cut back to the south, his approach had circled wide enough that the ridgeline had cut off any of the bad guys' sensors' line of sight to the taxi's actual approach and landing. And that by keeping it on the ground, he could prevent it from doing what it would normally have it done: lift straight up on counter-grav before heading back to Grendel for another fare. Even if he'd gotten in undetected, that would have been a flare-lit tipoff to any half-awake lookout.
This is insane, he told himself almost calmly as he made his way through the dense, unfamiliar Beowulfan trees. He might not know the names of the local species, but he'd spent enough years hunting and hiking in Sphinx's forests and the dark-bellied clouds were sweeping in from the east. He could smell the approaching rain, and a steadily freshening wind tossed the limbs overhead and filled the woods with the sighing song of dancing leaves and branches as they were flung about. A sense of motion and energy and life filled the air about him, and the scents of leaf mold, bark, and damp earth filled his nostrils. For the first time since his arrival in Grendel, he was actually in his element again, and in other circumstances he would have enjoyed the hike.
Not under these.
That other presence—Allison—was in front of him. He'd located her by the simple expedient of flying almost due north from the city, directly on his bearing to her, until suddenly that unerring sense of her presence was behind him again. The taxi had just crossed what appeared to be a nice-looking, remote hunting lodge, and as it had circled away to the west, he'd felt the bearing shift. There was no question in his mind. As preposterous as it sounded, he was certain Allison Chou was in that hunting lodge.
And if she is, what are you going to do about it, hotshot? he asked himself harshly. You're not a cop. You're not even a Marine anymore. And even if you were, you're not a Beowulfer. You've got exactly no authority or jurisdiction on this planet, idiot! And even if that weren't the case, what're you going to do? Just shoot the first poor bastard you see?
He grimaced, but he also reminded himself of the Marine Corps' motto: “Can Do!” And of the mantra of every Marine noncom who'd ever lived: improvise, adapt, and overcome. If there'd ever been a time and place for both of them, that time and place were here and now. And it wasn't like he'd never had to do it before.
A flicker of fear went through him with that thought, and he felt his hands begin to shake. He stopped in the dense shadow of a towering, vaguely oaklike tree and held those hands up in front of him, clenching them into hard-knuckled fists.
Stop that! This isn't Clematis!
Maybe it wasn't, but he was the same man he'd been on Clematis, and that was what really frightened him. That he was the same man, with the same monster deep inside, eager to get out.
He stood there for a long, dragging seconds, trapped between the memory of what had been and the fear of what might be again, and panic pulsed at the base of his throat. He couldn't. He couldn't let it out again. He just couldn't.
But then his head snapped up, his eyes wide. She was aware once more, and she was frightened—terrified. And then a dreadful, jagged bolt of anguish ripped into him. Not his—hers! The mere echo of it went through him like a vibro blade, and his teeth clenched. His hesitation disappeared.
There was a time for monsters, he thought.
* * *
Tobin Manischewitz heard the scream through the closed door and shook his head. He supposed it was unreasonable to expect anything else, and Ardmore did have a point about the need to record something suitably motivating for Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou. But there was no need to start in on the girl this early.
No need except that it's how he gets his kicks, anyway, he thought.
Another scream, this one shriller and higher than the last, came through the door, and he grimaced. He thought about opening the door and telling the other man to lay off, but he didn't think about it very hard. In the end, it was no skin off his nose what happened to her before they disposed of her once and for all, and there was no point pissing Ardmore off any sooner than he had to. But he wasn't going to get any work done with that racket going on next door, so he gathered up his computer and headed down the stairs.
Yet another scream followed him.
* * *
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou sat in the small, anonymous office. He knew all of the thirteen men and women assembled in the ready room on the far side of the borrowed office's door, completing the final checks on their gear. None of them were members of his own team, but he'd worked with several of them before, and all of them were good, solid people. Good, solid people who wouldn't have been noticed by anyone who was watching his own teammates as they drew ammunition and climbed into their armored skinsuits.
It was unlikely he was going to have anything for them to do, but if he did—if the bastards who had Allison gave him even a hint of where to find them—he was prepared to drop the entire world in on their heads, and screw Prescott-Chatwell's provisions. The only chance they'd have would be to go in quick and dirty, rushing the Manpower thugs who had to be behind this. The odds were frighteningly high that Allison would be killed in that kind of confused firefight, but her chances would be infinitely better than if the people who had her were given even a few minutes to kill her or turn her into a human shield.
Now all he could do was sit here, waiting for the synthesized voice to contact him over his com and tell him where to take the data he'd been ordered to steal.
* * *
Alfred Harrington reached the fringe of the cleared area around the hunting lodge and made himself pause. It was hard—one of the hardest things he'd ever done—and the waves of terror, the jagged bursts of agony, coming to him over that impossible link battered at him. He didn't know if she would have been able to sense his proximity the way he sensed hers even under normal circumstances; the possibility that she could sense him now, through the maelstrom of her fear and her pain had to be vanishingly small. She couldn't know where he was, yet her frantic, silent plea reached out to him, gripped him like fiery pincers. He had to get her out of there! Yet if he simply charged in, he would succeed only in getting both of them killed. He knew that, but he also knew he might be running out of time. They were hurting her deliberately—terribly—yet he had no idea why.
The one thing he clung to was that the entire operation had been far too elaborate if all they'd wanted was to kill her. A pulser dart from a passing air car would have sufficed for that. It was entirely possible they wanted, for whatever sick reason, to take their time, make sure she suffered enough to satisfy them first, and that thought dried his mouth with a terror he'd never felt for himself. Either way, they were unlikely to kill her immediately, though. He couldn't know that, but the cold focus he'd forced upon his thoughts told him it was more likely than any other outcome . . . and that if he simply went crashing in in some sort of berserk charge, they would kill her.
The good news was that since he'd been planning on spending the day in his apartment, catching up on Dr. Mwo-chi's notes, he'd been in civvies, not uniform, so at least anyone who saw him wasn't going to automatically assume he represented some official law enforcement or military agency. That probably meant they were unlikely to just shoot him and be done with it instead of trying to fob the nosy neighbor off with some cover story. Presumably they'd be prefectly ready to kill him if it looked like they couldn't fob him off, but he ought to have at least a few seconds before they started trying to.
The better news was that even though he was no longer officially a Marine, some habits died hard. That was why he'd paused to collect the contents of his closet safe, and he reached inside his windbreaker to touch the butt of the pulser in the holster under his left armpit. Bewoulf's laws on weapons and the use of deadly force were less . . . understanding than the Star Kingdom's, which was why it had stayed safely locked up in his safe since he'd arrived at ISU. Beowulfers weren't totally unreasonable about guns the way some people—Old Earth came to mind—were, however, and he was a military officer, even if he was on-planet as a medical student. That created a certain gray area . . . and under the circumstances, he wasn't all that worried about a misdemeanor weapons charge even if the matter ever came up.
The holster was an old friend, a civilian rig his father had presented to him on his sixteenth birthday and he'd used ever since, but the pulser was pure military. He and his company's armorer had tweaked and tuned the long barrelled, three-millimeter Descorso to suit his personal preferences, though, including after-market Shapiro grips, a Simpson & Wong 216 holosight, and an action smoother than glass, and two spare magazines rode the leather under his right arm. The Descorso might not have been with him as long as the holster, but it had been with him long enough, and so had the Marine-issue vibro blade mag-locked horizontally across the back of his belt. They were tools he knew how to use only too well, but they were also all he had, and he had no idea what he might face in the next few minutes.
He did have a little information, though. As soon as he'd located the lodge, he'd punched up a query on his uni-link, and he'd been lucky. It had been built as a commercial operation and it was the better part of three hundred T-years old, but it had been on the market for almost a full local year until someone purchased it barely three months ago, and as soon as he'd called up the deed and checked the record of the transaction, Alfred had realized the buyer had been a front. The sale had been registered by a shell corporation which no longer existed and had almost certainly been set up for the sole purpose of making the buy. That struck him as pretty solid evidence that Allison's abductors were indeed professionals, not simply some psycho stalker, and he tried to tell himself that was a good sign.
The acutal transaction record had been interesting, if not terribly informative, but the original real estate listing for the lodge hadn't been cleared from the realtor's site. It was still there, including a profile that showed a floor plan for the main lodge, specified its construction standards, and included a virtual tour of the house and the grounds, extolling a whole raft of recent renovations to the rather elderly buildings. The tour had obviously been intended for a sales tool, and it wasn't remotely close to anything he would have called a complete intel packet, yet at least it meant he had a firm notion of the physical layout of what he was going to be dealing with.
He'd also had the taxi AI bring up the sight-seeing features built into its windows and view screen and downloaded the magnified imagery of the terrain they'd overflown on their entire flight from Grendel to his uni-link, which meant he'd gotten at least some aerial shots of the lodge as they passed over it. It wasn't much—certainly not the kind of information military-grade sensors could have pulled up—but it had confirmed there was a commercial-style air-van in the vehicle park for the main lodge. He didn't have a very good angle on it, but it looked like the same sort of body that was used by almost all ambulances here on Beowulf, and if it wasn't painted white, it was easy enough to use smart paint and reprogram it to a different color combination when you were done playing dress-up.
He'd made himself spend several minutes looking at the plat from the sales site and from the Registrar of Deeds' office, as well, and comparing both of them to his own overhead imagery and the topographical maps available over the net from the planetary geographical base. The maps seemed to be very good, as good as anything the Sphinx Forestry Service could have provided back home. That was why he'd come in from the west. Not only had the maps suggested the ridgeline would offer the taxi at least partial concealment on its approach, but his overheads showed that the perimeter of the cleared area around the lodge pinched in closest to the main building from this direction. Even better, a ravine—it looked like it was probably a seasonal watercourse—snaked through the trees and out across the clearing, passing within no more than seventy meters of the lodge, and the maps indicated it was well over a meter deep—more than two meters, in places—for its entire length.
Now he looked out across that clearing, confirming his impression of the terrain. There was a small utility building between the ravine and the lodge. According to the real estate site, it housed the lodge's power receptor, tied into Beowulf's orbital power stations. The entry on the site had had very little to say about the receptor, although it had waxed almost lyrical about the many ways in which the lodge's internal systems had been renovated and updated. That suggested one possibility, at least, and it also came closest to affording him cover for that final seventy meters. It wasn't much, but when the situation offered so little, it was up to a man to manufacture his own edge.
Another of those frantic, agonized bursts sizzled through him with the knowledge of someone else's pain and terror, and his nostrils flared. Enough! It was time to stop thinking and start doing.
* * *
The lights flickered.
It was so quick, so fleeting, Tobin Manischewitz might not have noticed under other circumstances. Under these circumstances, his nerves were cranked up to maximum sensitivity and his head came up abruptly. He looked around the sunny office on the lodge's ground floor, although he wasn't certain what he was looking for. At least it was far enough away from Ardmore to muffle the sounds as he . . . amused himself, and it offered a nice view of the mountain range rising misty-blue with distance to the north. It did not, however, offer him any clue as to why the power had just hiccuped, and he started to get out of his chair, then paused as the door opened and Riley Brandão, his third in command, poked his head into the room.
“What?” Manischewitz asked before the other man could speak.
“The frigging power receptor's down,” Brandão said sourly.
“What happened?” Manischewitz sat up straighter, his eyes narrowing. The sudden failure of normally reliable bits and pieces of technology at critical moments in operations always sounded internal alarms.
“Looks like it's the tracking unit,” Brandão replied. “The diagnostic panel in the kitchen says we've stopped tracking the assigned satellite. anyway. Sawney's gone out to check.” He grimaced. “I told you we should've had the damned thing replaced when we bought the place. Piece of crap's older'n I am!”
Manischewitz resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. Brandão took an irritating relish in “I-told-you-so”s, and he could be relied upon to find any potential fault with any plan, order, or piece of equipment well ahead of time, thus providing himself with endless opportunity to utter the fateful phrase. The fact that almost none of his gloomy prognostications ever came to pass didn't faze him one bit. Instead, he seized upon the thankfully few occasions on which he'd been right, and Manischewitz was torn between hoping it really was something as minor as the tracking unit and hoping it was something else entirely just so Brandão couldn't look at him triumphantly.
Unfortunately, Brandão was almost certainly right, he reflected gloomily. The power receptor was an ancient unit, and the one moving part most likely to fail was the tracking unit that moved it from powersat to powersat as the satellites moved across the heavens.
“How's the auxiliary?” he asked, and Brandão shrugged.
“Kicked in automatically,” he admitted. “It's carrying the entire load with a thirty percent reserve.”
Manischewitz nodded. Brandão's current post was in the kitchen, monitoring the camera system they'd installed to watch the grounds. He'd tried a motion-sensor net first, but that had been a diaster, given the amount (and size) of the local wildlife, so they'd fallen back on visual imagery, instead. He wasn't happy about the change, but as Ardmore had pointed out, their real security depended on not having anyone come looking in the first place. It wasn't like they were going to have the personnel or the firepower to fight off a full bore commando raid, after all.
They'd put the primary monitoring post in the kitchen because it had been simpler to piggyback it onto the lodge's existing environmental and services monitor, and that had been located in the kitchen by some previous owner. There were drawbacks to the arrangement, since the kitchen had only one set of windows and the greenhouses on that side of the lodge blocked anything someone might have seen out of them. Still, it worked, and it meant Brandão had been in the right place to check the other systems when the receptor went down.
And at least the auxiliary power system, unlike the power receptor, was practically brand new. It was also rated to keep the entire lodge up and running for a minimum of one planetary week, so there was no immediate problem. Even assuming they couldn't repair whatever was wrong with the receptor out of their own resources—which was unlikely, given the skill set of his team—they had several days before they had to worry about getting a repair crew out here.
“Hopefully it's just a reset,” he said now. “If it's more than that, send Sawney in to tell me how bad it is when he gets back.”
“Gotcha.”
Brandão nodded and closed the door behind him, and Manischewitz turned back to his paperwork.
* * *
Sawney Sugimoto grumbled under his breath as he trudged across to the power receptor.
He didn't often agree with Brandão, but this time the a*shole had been right; the damn thing should've been replaced before they bought the place. Not that it was surprising it hadn't been. Power receptors were like roofs; people didn't worry them . . . until they broke or started leaking. And to be fair, receptors were pretty damned rugged, built to designs that were mostly at least two or three hundred years old and about as reliable as hardware got. He just hoped it was something fairly simple, because if the tracking unit was shot they'd have to pull the entire thing, and he had a pretty fair notion who was likely to get stuck with the grunt work on that one. Just like he had a pretty good idea how he'd just happened to be chosen to go check out the problem in the first place. Just like Brandão to pick him for the job! Could he have chosen Mönch, or Grazioli, or Zepeda? No, he'd had to pick Sugimoto, even if he'd been—no, because he'd been—the outside man farthest away from the receptor. Of course, Mönch was an old buddy of his, wasn't he? Couldn't have Mönch getting his arse up out of his comfortable chaise lounge and actually doing some work, could he? Especially not if he could send Sugimoto to do it, instead. It was the kind of petty, pain-in-the-arse, I'll-get-even trick Brandão specialized in, and one of these days. . . .
He reached the receptor shed and leaned his pulse rifle against the wall beside the door as he punched in the lock combination. None of the previous owners had ever bothered to change the combination from the default 1-2-3-4 setting, and frankly, Sugimoto couldn't imagine any reason why they would have. Or why they'd bothered to put a lock on the door in the first place, for that matter! Power receptors weren't exactly cheap, but stolen units weren't likely to bring in big credits, and they were big, heavy, and hard to move. Why anybody would—
The door opened, and Sawney Sugimoto's eyes widened in astonishment. There was a hole in the shed's back wall—a big hole, one that went almost all the way from ceiling to floor. It was almost two meters wide, as if someone had carved the wall's tough composite with a vibro bl—
A hand reached out from one side and caught the front of his tunic. It yanked him into the shed, spun him around as if he'd weighed less than nothing, and an arm like a bar of iron went across his throat from behind. He reacted automatically, driving his right heel back, reaching for the forearm across his throat with his right hand while his left shot back behind him, fingers clawing for the eyes of whoever that forearm belonged to.
A wrecking ball hammered his right calf as his assailant drove a booted foot into it, smashing down from above, just below the knee. Something popped in the joint with a white-hot explosion of pain, and what would have been a scream turned into a high-pitched, nasal whine as the forearm cut off his breath. His scrabbling left hand found nothing, and then he froze as a hand the size of a small shovel fastened on the back of his head. He recognized that hold, and his assailant's obvious strength was terrifying. A couple of kilos of pressure, and his cervical vertebrae would snap like a dry stick.
“That's better,” a deep, quiet, terrifyingly calm voice said behind him. “Now lose the gunbelt with your left hand. And keep the right hand right where I can see it. I'd hate to have to break your neck before we have a chance to get to know each other.”
* * *
“Tracking unit's back online,” Riley Brandão said, poking his head back into Manischewitz' office. “Everything green on the diagnostic board.”
Brandão sounded moderately disappointed, Manischewitz noted, but he nobly forbore to comment on it. Instead, he simply nodded.
“Talk to Sawney at shift change. Find out what he had to do to get it back up and see if we really do need to go ahead and replace it. I don't want anybody out here in the next couple of weeks if we can help it, though.”
“Gotcha,” Brandão said again and withdrew once more.
* * *
Alfred Harrington listened to the hum of the tracking unit, moving the receptor back into alignment after he'd removed the old-fashioned screwdriver he'd used to jam it, while he regarded his unconscious captive through bleak, hard eyes. He still knew entirely too little about what the hell was going on, yet he knew a lot more than the he'd known ten minutes ago. He wished there was time to gather still more information, but there wasn't. His prisoner hadn't wanted to cooperate, and Alfred wasn't about to put any childlike faith in the accuracy of what he'd said, but the other man had changed his mind about keeping his mouth shut when Alfred levered his left arm up behind his back until his shoulder joint separated. The Deneb Accords would have had a little something to say to Gunny Harrington about methods of interrogation if his prisoner had been a member of any recognized military organization. Not that that thought bothered him at the moment . . . and not that he was dealing with any recognized military organization.
The pulse rifle his prisoner had been carrying was a powerful, high-capacity magazine military weapon, however. That alone would have been enough to convince Alfred that the current owners of the lodge weren't the innocent and law-abiding civilians they obviously wanted people to think they were. The pulser holstered at the man's belt would have been another indication in the same direction. And although he hadn't admitted it in so many words, even when Alfred twisted that dislocated shoulder, what he had admitted made it fairly clear who Alfred was dealing with.
Manpower. His nostrils flared, and he felt the monster stir, testing its chains as he remembered Clematis. Manpower, again. What could Manpower want with Allison Chou? What could possibly make her important enough for Manpower to risk an operation here? The entire galaxy knew about the searing mutual hatred between Beowulf and Mesa, and Manpower's operatives could have very few illusions about what would happen to them at the hands of the Beowulfan court system . . . assuming they got as far as the court system.
Unfortunately, he didn't have time to get more complete information out of his prisoner. They were bound to miss the man sooner or later, and probably sooner. The Manpower thug knew that as well as Alfred did, and he'd obviously been trying to play for time. He'd admitted that they'd grabbed Allison as part of some sort of extortion plot, although he'd also claimed he didn't know who the object of the extortion was. That was entirely possible—Alfred would have kept the operational details as closely held as he could if he'd been planning something like this—but it was also entirely possible the man had been lying. Trying to give up just enough information to satisfy Alfred's questions while he stalled until someone else came looking for him. That was why Alfred had given himself only ten minutes to ask questions. What he had at the end of that time was all he was going to get, and that was one reason he'd been as . . . insistent as he had.
His virtual tour of the lodge's layout had allowed him to catch his prisoner in two lies, and the pain he'd applied when he did had probably convinced the other man to be at least reasonably truthful. It had been hard to stop with mere pain. The monster was rousing again, and the repeated bursts of agony—and the sense of fading awareness—coming to him through whatever linked him to Allison had made it even harder. But now he had to decide what to do before he moved on, and he touched the hilt of the vibro blade. It had sliced through the synthetic composite of the shed wall like a knife through butter; a human throat would be far easier to cut.
Alfred's nostrils flared and his fingers tightened around the hilt. The need to remove the unconscious thug from the face of the galaxy quivered in those fingers, and the hot, sweet taste was back in his mouth, made hotter and sweeter still by his own sense of desperation as those thunderbolts of someone else's hopeless pain and terror ripped through him. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do, and anyone who gave his services to Manpower—anyone prepared to help kidnap and torture Allison Chou—had already paid for his own ticket to hell.
But Alfred Harrington wasn't a Manpower thug. He was—he had to be—better than that, because if he wasn't . . .
He snarled in frustration and reached for the roll of tape in the toolbox on the receptor shed's supply shelf.
* * *
Giuseppe Ardmore made himself step back and switch off the neural whip. It was hard, and he licked his lips, savoring the rich, addictive delight of handing out pain. Of inflicting pain, especially on someone like this bitch. Benton-Ramirez y Chou's sister. Oh, that made it especially sweet as he remembered New Denver! But he had to be careful. Manischewitz would be pissed if he killed her too quickly. Ardmore could have lived with that—Manischewitz would get over it, in time—but he didn't want to kill her too quickly, either. He wanted to keep her alive for as long as he could, and he looked forward to using more traditional methods to help motivate her brother.
He clipped the neural whip to his belt and stepped over to the recording unit trained on the nearly naked young woman in the middle of the room. Watching the imagery and listening to the audio would be almost as good as doing it all over again, he thought, and it would be a very good idea to be sure he'd stayed out of the camera's field of view himself. Manischewitz was right about what could be teased out of even fragmentary images, although no one was likely to get much from a gloved hand wielding a neural whip. Best to be positive about that, though.
He gave his semiconscious victim another glance before he hit the replay button. He'd been very careful with the setting on the neural whip, making certain it was set just low enough to avoid any permanent damage to her nervous system, but her skin was mottled with dark, angry marks and her muscles continued to jerk and quiver uncontrollably wherever the whip had kissed. He'd made sure to record a full minute of that after he switched the whip off. Might as well give her brother proof of how high it had been set, after all.
* * *
Alfred was grateful that the ravine had gotten him as far as the power receptor unseen, but there was no convenient fold in the ground between the receptor's shed and the main lodge building. He eased the door back open a crack, looking through it, and his jaw tightened. His prisoner hadn't lied about at least one thing, he thought, considering the man reclining on the chase lounge. The lounge was a good sixty meters from his present position, at an angle from the shortest line between the shed and the lodge, parked beside an outside table with a sun umbrella. The man in it didn't look to be the most alert sentry in the history of mankind—there was what looked suspiciously like a beer bottle on the table at his elbow, and Alfred knew what he would have had to say if one of his perimeter guards had decided to park his arse in the shade instead of staying alert and on the move—but he could scarcely miss seeing a two-meter tall stranger sauntering across the lawn.
On the other hand, he was sitting down, wasn't he? Presumably the rest of his team knew him well enough to expect him to be doing just that. And the cushioned back of the chase lounge was higher than his head and the chase lounge itself faced away from the lodge. Not only that, but the clouds were closer, the temperature had dropped slightly, and the wind had picked up even farther, churning the trees around the lodge with a soft, multi-voiced roar and murmur like ocean surf. All of which suggested . . .
The Descorso was a comfortable, familiar weight in his hand. He gripped the shed's doorframe in his left hand, pressing his elbow lightly against the half-open door as he turned his forearm into a rock-steady rest. He laid the pulser's long barrel across that forearm, brought the sight's red dot down until it rested directly between the seated guard's eyes.
His own eyes were very calm very, still, and the monster purred within him. He inhaled, let half the air trickle back out of his lungs, and squeezed.
* * *