She tried to thrust herself back up, but Alexsov had chosen his attack well. He knelt beside her, and she couldn't even feel his hands as he removed the tiny dart and rolled her, not ungently, onto her back.
"I apologize for the necessity, Captain Mainwaring," he murmured, "but it's only a temporary nerve block." He snapped his fingers, and one of his henchmen handed him a hypospray. "And this," he went on soothingly, pressing the hypo to her arm, "is a perfectly harmless truth drug."
Horrified understanding filled Alicia as the hypo nestled home.
Tisiphone! she screamed.
I am trying! Anger and fear-for Alicia, not herself-snarled in the Fury's reply. Their cursed block has cut off your main processor, but-
The hypo hissed, and Tisiphone cursed horribly as the drug flooded into Alicia's system... and her augmentation sensed it.
She gasped and jerked, and Alexsov leapt back in consternation. Even that small movement should have been impossible, and his brow furrowed in lightning speculation as she quivered on the carpet. Escape protocols blossomed within her, fighting the nerve block, trying to get her on her feet, but they couldn't, and panic wailed in her mind as the idiot savant of her processor considered its internal programs. Escape was impossible, it decided, and truth drugs had been administered.
***
Ben Belkassem eased through the ornamental shrubbery to the glowing windows. Their translucent green curtains let light escape yet were too thick to see through, but he'd expected that. He checked for security sensors and placed a tiny, sensitive microphone against the glass.
"... happening?!" Naked panic quivered in Oscar Quintana's voice. "You said she was just supposed to be paralyzed, damn it!"
"I don't know what it is." That lower, calmer voice belonged to the man named Alexsov, Ben Belkassem thought-then stiffened as understanding caught up with his racing mind. Paralyzed! Dear God, they must be on to her!
***
Alicia's eyes glazed. She was numb below the neck, but she felt the neuro-toxin in her gasping respiration, the growing sluggishness of her mind.
To come this far, she thought despairingly. To get this close-!
***
Glass shattered behind Oscar Quintana, and he whirled. The tinkling sound still hung in his ears as the curtains parted, and he had a vague impression of a black-clad figure that raised a hand in his direction. Then the emerald green beam struck just above his left eye and he died.
***
Ben Belkassem hit the carpet rolling and cursing his own stupidity. He should have pulled out, goddamn it! What DeVries had already accomplished was more important than either of their lives-far too important for him to throw away playing holovid hero! But his body had reacted before his brain, and he skittered frantically across the floor towards a solid, ornate desk while answering disrupter beams flashed about him.
Somehow he made it into cover, and his shoulder heaved. The desk crashed over, blocking the deadly beams, and his machine-pistol popped into his free hand.
Someone else had a slug-thrower, and he winced as penetrators chewed into the desktop. Its wood couldn't stop that kind of fire, and he ducked to his left, exposing himself just long enough to find the firer. His disrupter whined, and the fire stopped, but he felt no exultation. He'd seen DeVries in that moment-seen the way her body quivered weakly-and his mind flashed back to Tannis Cateau's briefings.
She was dying, and he swore viciously as he rose on his knees to nail a second gunman with his CHK. The thunder of weapons shook the room, Quintana's guards had to be on their way, more penetrators chewed at the desk, and then someone killed the lights and the chaos became total.
***
Tisiphone battered at the block with all her might, then made herself stop. She had to get into Alicia's main processor to reach her pharmacope, but the drug Alexsov had used blocked voluntary nervous impulses and sealed the processor's input tantalizingly beyond her reach. She couldn't reach it, yet she had to. She had to!
And then it came to her. The block couldn't cut off its victim's involuntary muscles without killing her, and the processor's output reached all of Alicia's functions! And that meant -
***
Ben Belkassem cried out and dropped his pistol as a tungsten penetrator slammed through his upper arm, yet he scarcely felt it. Any minute someone else would come in through those windows behind him and he'd be as dead as Alicia DeVries. Someone with more guts than sense rushed him. The flash of his disrupter lit the darkness with emerald lightning, seventy kilos of dead meat slammed to the carpet, and white-hot muzzle flashes stabbed at him as his own shot drew the fire of another machine-pistol. He wasn't afraid as the penetrators screamed past-there was no time for fear-yet under the wild adrenalin rush was the bitter knowledge of how completely he had failed.
But then the man behind the machine-pistol screamed. It was a horrible, gurgling sound... and Ben Belkassem knew he hadn't caused it.
There was an instant of shocked silence, and then someone else was firing. Someone who fired in short, deadly bursts, as if the darkness were light, and the whining disrupters were no longer firing at him. He shoved himself up on his knees and gawked in disbelief.
He had no idea why Alicia DeVries wasn't dead or how she'd reached the man whose weapon she was firing, and it didn't matter. The rock-steady pistol picked off guards with machinelike precision. She was a ghost, appearing in glaring muzzle flashes only to vanish back into the darkness like death's own ballerina, and the screams and shrieks of the dying were her orchestra.
But then her magazine was empty, and there were still three enemies left. Ben Belkassem hunted for them desperately, lacing the smoke-heavy blackness with disrupter fire in a frantic effort to cover her, then groaned in despair as an emerald shaft struck her squarely between the shoulders.
DeVries grunted, but she didn't go down, and his own disrupter fell to his side in shock.
She was dead. She had to be dead this time! But she spun toward the man who'd shot her even as two more disrupters hit her. A vicious kick snapped his neck, and the two remaining guards screamed in terrified disbelief as she charged them. One of them rained green bolts upon her as she closed, but the other tried to run. It made no difference; the fleeing guard got as far as opening the door, spilling light into the death-filled gloom, and then he died, as well.
She spun again, whirling to face Ben Belkassem, and he dropped his weapon and raised his good hand with frantic haste.
"Stop! I'm on your side!"
She slid to a halt, jacket charred from disrupter hits, and frozen eyes regarded him from a face of inhuman calm.
"Ben Belkassem! I'm Ferhat Ben Belkassem!" he said desperately, and saw recognition in those icy eyes. "I-"
"Later." Her voice was as inhumanly calm as her expression. "Get over there and cover the door."
***
Ben Belkassem scrabbled up his weapons and raced to the door before his dazed mind even considered arguing, and only then did he truly realize how quick and brutal the fight had been. He fed a fresh clip into his pistol, clumsy with only one working arm, and when he looked out into the corridor the first of Quintana's retainers were only now racing towards him. He dropped the three leaders, then glanced over his shoulder as the survivors fell back.
DeVries knelt beside Alexsov, ignoring the blood soaking his tunic and pooling about her knees. She pressed her hands to his temples, leaning over him, her face almost touching his as blood bubbled on his lips, and Ben Belkassem shuddered and turned back to his front. He didn't know what she was doing. What was more, he didn't think he wanted to know.
More guards came at him. These had found time to scramble into unpowered armor, and the loads in his CHK were too light to get through it at anything above point-blank range. He dropped it and shifted to his disrupter, praying the charge held out. Five more men went down, and then the survivors withdrew to regroup.
Something thundered behind him, and he swore feelingly. DeVries was by the wi
ndows, firing someone else's weapon out into the grounds. They were pinned; no matter how many they killed, the others would get them in the end. But he'd seen the way DeVries moved. If either of them could make it....
"I'll cover you!" he shouted, starting towards the window
"Watch your front," she said calmly, never even turning her head. "These bastards have a surprise coming."
There was no time to ask what she was talking about. A fresh rush was coming down the corridor, and a buzz from his disrupter warned of an exhausted charge as he beat it back. Her "surprise" had better come soon, or -
Something howled in the dark. Something huge and black, borne on a cyclone of turbines, wing edges and nose incandescent from reentry. Chateau Defiant heaved as rockets and plasma cannon shattered its other wings, and Ben Belkassem rolled across the floor, coughing on smoke and powdered stone.
A steely hand grabbed his collar, dragged him out the windows, and hurled him at the grounded assault shuttle. He charged its ramp like his last hope of salvation, DeVries on his heels, and heard incoming fire spanging off the armored hull and the whine of powered turrets and the end-of-the-world bellow as the shuttle's calliopes covered their retreat. He staggered through the troop bay to the flight deck and slumped against a bulkhead, suddenly aware of the pain in his arm and the weakness of blood loss, as the shuttle leapt back into the heavens.
DeVries shouldered past him to the pilot's couch, and he slid down to sit on the deck in fresh shock that owed little to blood loss as he realized that seat had been empty when the shuttle swept down to save them.
He sat there, searching for a rational explanation, but none occurred to his muzzy brain. Disrupter fire had charred her jacket in half a dozen places, yet she was alive. That was insane enough, but where was her crew? And what in God's name had she been doing with Alexsov back there?
"What-?"
He stopped and coughed, surprised by the croak of his own voice, and she spared him a glance.
"Hang on," she said in that same calm voice, and he clutched for a handhold as something fast and lethal sizzled past and she whipped the shuttle into wild evasive action-without, he noted numbly, even bothering to don the flight control synth headset.
And then she started talking to herself.
"Okay. Dial 'em in and take them out," she told the empty air.
He clawed his way forward and tumbled into the copilot's seat just as something carved a screaming column of light through the night. He gaped out the cockpit canopy, then jerked back as terrible white fire erupted far below. Another followed, and a third, and DeVries spared him a wolf's smile. She flipped on the com-he hadn't even realized it was turned off-and an angry male voice filled the flight deck.
"... say again! Cease fire on our shuttle, or we will destroy your spaceport! This is First Officer Jeff Okahara of the starship Star Runner, and this is your final warning!"
"Way to go, Megaira," his pilot murmured, and Ben Belkassem closed his eyes. It had been such an orderly universe this morning, he thought almost calmly.
"Star Runner, you are ordered to return your shuttle and its occupants to the port immediately to answer for their unprovoked attack on Lieutenant Commander Defiant's estate!" another voice roared over the com.
"Bugger off!" Okahara snarled back. "Your precious lieutenant commander just got what he fucking well had coming!"
"What?! What do you mean-"
"I mean you'd better notify his heirs! And anybody else who tries to murder our captain is going to get the same!"
"Listen, you-"
The furious voice chopped off. Ben Belkassem heard another voice, quick and urgent, muttering words that included "HVW" and "battle screen," and looked across at Alicia again.
"Quite a freighter you have there, Captain Mainwaring," he murmured.
"Isn't it?" The turbines died as the shuttle streaked beyond air-breathing altitude and the thrusters took over. "Strap in. We don't have time to decelerate, so Megaira's going to snag us with a tractor as we go by."
"Megaira? Who's Megaira?"
"A friend of mine," she replied with a strange little smile.
***
Commander Barr couldn't believe any of it. One minute everything was calm, the next a shuttle from an unarmed freighter screamed planetward at insane velocity and reduced Chateau Defiant (and, presumably, Captain Alexsov) to flaming rubble. And when Groundside tried to down the shuttle, that same unarmed freighter blew the engaging weapon stations into next week with HVW!
Barr had no better idea of what was happening than anyone else, but his drive was working hard, because he knew Harpy didn't even want to think about engaging that "freighter." God only knew what it might produce next, and he intended to be several light-seconds away before it got around to it.
Now he stared into his aft display, wondering who was aboard that shuttle. He could still nail it short of the freighter-which was putting out battle screen now, for God's sake!-which might be a good idea. Except that Captain Alexsov might be aboard it. And, Barr admitted, except that firing on it seemed to be a good way to convince the freighter to respond in kind.
Then he no longer had the option. The shuttle slashed towards the freighter at far too high an approach speed, only to stop with bone-breaking suddenness as a tractor yanked it inside the screen. Barr winced. He'd been through exactly the same maneuver in training exercises, but his sympathy was limited, for the freighter was already swinging to pursue him.
***
A groggy Ben Belkassem swam back to awareness draped across Alicia DeVries' back in a fireman's carry. It was an undignified position, but he was in no condition to argue, and a part of him apologized for every doubt he'd ever entertained over Sir Arthur Keita's descriptions of drop commandos.
She dumped him gently on the floor of the ship's elevator and crouched beside him, ripping his blood-soaked sleeve apart.
"Nice and clean," she told him. "Got some nasty tissue damage, but it missed the bone." He hissed as she strapped a pressure bandage tight. "We'll take care of that in a minute. Right now we've got other worries."
"Like what?" he gasped.
"Like eight Wyvern Navy cruisers and a Fleet tin can we have to kill."
"Kill a Fleet destroyer?!"
"The one Alexsov came from, HMS Harpy. Her transponder's buggered to ID her as Medusa, but-"
The lift door opened, and she seemed to teleport through it. Ben Belkassem followed more slowly onto what he realized must be the bridge and peered about him.
"Where is everybody?"
"You're looking at everybody. Megaira, give him a display."
He jumped as a holo display sprang to life, hanging in midair and livid with the red-ringed blue dots of hostile Fasset drives. Eight came from the direction of Wyvern, already shrinking astern; a ninth glowed dead ahead.
***
Commander Barr swallowed bile. Harpy was putting everything she had into her drive... and the cursed freighter was gaining. It was running away from the Wyverian cruisers with absurd ease, shrugging aside everything they and the planetary defenses could throw without even bothering to reply. Clearly it had other concerns.
"Stand by! The instant they flip to engage us, I want-"
***
"And now..." Alicia murmured beside Ben Belkassem.
***
Commander Barr and the entire company of HMS Harpy died before they even realized their pursuer had already flipped.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Delicious smells filled the small galley, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem sat at the table. He wore a highly atypical air of bemusement and sprawled in his chair without his usual neatness, but then he'd earned a little down time-and hadn't expected to live to enjoy it.
He felt a bit like the ancient Alice as he watched Captain DeVries stir tomato-rich sauce with a neurosurgeon's concentration. Her dyed hair was coiled in a thick braid, and she looked absurdly young. It was hard to credit his own memory of icy eyes and lightning muzzle
flashes as she sampled the sauce and reached for more basil. The lid rose from a pot beside her, hovering in midair on an invisible tractor beam, and linguine drifted from a storage bin to settle neatly in the boiling water.
"And what do you think you're doing? I told you I'd put that in when I was ready," she said, and this time he barely twitched. He was starting to adjust to her one-sided conversations with the ship's AI-even if they were yet another of the "impossible" things she did so casually.
Ben Belkassem had boned up on the alpha-synths after DeVries stole this ship. Too much was classified for him to learn as much as he would have liked, but he'd learned enough to know her augmentation didn't include the normal alpha-synth com link. Without it, the AI should have been forced to communicate back by voice, not some sort of... of telepathy!