Angel opened her eyes, but they wouldn’t focus and showed multiple whirling visions of a lot of people she didn’t want to see very much. She shut her eyes, tried to slow down the room or wherever it was, and began a series of calming and breathing exercises that seemed to help somewhat.
Next was tuning out the pain, or as much of it as she could. Then she brought her head back up and opened her eyes to an almost steady scene, although she still had blurry double vision.
“What? Who?” she managed, her voice sounding like the croak of the walking dead even to her ears.
“Welcome back!” Wallinchky said with smug cheerfulness. “I see your lovely friend is also coming around. It’s no use trying to struggle against the bonds. We know how to tie them right, and they’ll just tighten and get worse. If you struggle, it’ll cut off your circulation and you might lose some limbs, which may not be worth regenerating in a med-tank. That depends on how much trouble you are. Oh— terribly sorry! I forgot. I am Jules Wallinchky, the Realm’s greatest collector.”
“Collector?” Angel managed. “Of what?”
“Why, of everything, of course. Art, wealth, knowledge, people, services, political power, great inventions—you name it, I got it. Some folks in the past went out to conquer their world or their system or even the entire Realm. They all failed, in the end. Even Alexander the Great died a mere youth, mostly because he felt there were no new worlds worth conquering. Fortunately, our physical and personal universe is infinite, so for me conquest has never stopped being a source of fun and satisfaction, maybe because, unlike this Emperor Hadun, I have no desire to conquer the universe itself. Someone else can do that. 1 don’t conquer it, I acquire it. Or anything within it that I want. I have whole planets devoted just to storing and displaying my most private acquisitions.”
“Wallinchky, you bastard,” Ming managed in a voice that sounded as bad as Angel’s. “What are you going to do with us? Why didn’t your hired hand just kill us and be done with it?”
The crime king chuckled. “Weren’t you listening, my dear? I have no desire to kill two such attractive and capable young women. I’ve simply acquired you, you see. I’ll be taking you both home with me. There you will be— prepared—and properly set up to join my collection, just as the Kharkovs will be polishing and repairing the settings on my most precious gems.”
“I’ll see you in Hell first!” Ming snapped.
“Well, you’ll still be mine even if we go that route, but I doubt we will,” he responded. “That soreness and taste of blood in your mouth is from where we removed the poison while you were out. Ivan Kharkov is a wizard with all sorts of little things like that. And we won’t trigger your implanted death command. Far from it. I don’t want to ask you anything at all, so there won’t be any hot button to push. In fact, I think we’ll simply erase and replace. Probably for the both of you. It’s easier that way. Knowledge is only important if it’s useful, and I suspect that neither of you know anything I don’t.” Wallinchky grinned. “And it’s not your personalities that I find attractive.”
“God will smite you for this abomination!” Angel spat.
“I doubt it, but by all means pray silently for it to happen. I suspect you’ll find out what I did long ago as a child—that God answers every prayer, but the answer is almost always no.”
“Can’t you at least let us sit in seats and get circulation back?” Ming pleaded with him. “This is very painful.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you in pain—I really don’t— but one of you is a trained undercover policewoman, and I’ve seen the other outmaneuver our Geldorian friend with some sort of impressive martial arts. Unless you’re under sedation or isolation from me, I don’t think I can afford to have either of you loose.”
“Ship coming in!” Ari announced. “Pazir class. A minor warship, but it’s got enough power to catch us and enough to tow a mod at least two light-years given a fuel hookup.”
Wallinchky frowned. “Our Captain won’t like that. Pazir class aren’t adapted to breathers.”
“I doubt if he expects the Emperor to be aboard or anywhere near here,” Martinez responded. “He’ll try and chase or get aboard.”
“A good point. Are we well away from the ship? I don’t know what they have in mind, but it would be nice to be on their side of their guns.”
“I can’t quite do that,” Martinez said, “but I don’t think we’re close enough to get harmed. I’m station-keeping with the two water lifeboats and they seem satisfied.”
A ship entering from null-space was an eerie sight; there was no bright flash, no spectacular opening in space-time, at least not that anyone could see. It was just as if a ship emerged from nothing, or from a narrow slit that nothing could detect. It was unlike going into null-space, where there was a substantial energy flow and discharge.
The warship looked like nothing so much as three large gunmetal-gray balls one after the other, with the center section ringed by smaller balls of the same type. Although huge when measured against the lifeboats, it was minuscule when contrasted to the massive City of Modar, whose engine and bridge section alone was a good forty times the warship’s size.
The small balls ringing the center section suddenly flared up with a blaze of yellow light that quickly went to white, resembling nothing so much as searchlights going out into space from the ship. As suddenly, the beams converged, and at the point of convergence well ahead of the warship a brilliant thin white beam so bright it overloaded the lifeboat cameras shot out and struck the City of Modar at and just forward of the bridge. A huge section of it vaporized; the interior, which had been under pressure, blew out, scattering debris, and the transparent tunnel and catwalk linking it to the passenger module was sliced off and twisted away from the blast.
The beam winked off, then quickly back on again, this time coming down on the hapless freighter like a knife through soft bread, slicing through the docking mechanism and connectors, literally severing the engine and bridge module, and the main computer, from the tow.
“I’m sorry you can’t see this,” Jules Wallinchky told his prisoners, fascinated by the sight. “It’s pretty impressive.”
The colors on the small balls now changed from white back to yellow, and then to a bright orange, converging again about a quarter of the distance to the now adrift but still station-keeping power plant of the big ship. A series of bright burning fireballs of the same bright orange emerged from the convergence, struck the City of Modar, exploded there, and literally pushed it away and on a different trajectory than the rest of the long train of modules. It got, perhaps, a kilometer away, and then exploded in a spectacular silent fireball.
“Wow! Now that was a good show!” Wallinchky enthused. He turned to the back. “Teynal? It’s your turn to take over negotiations here.”
“Why do they have to negotiate?” Ming asked, almost taunting him, even though speaking hurt her parched throat. “They have the train and maybe two weeks minimum lead time. They could just blow us away and take everything.”
The serpentine Rithian leader came forward and took the portable communicator from Jules Wallinchky. “Not exactly,” he hissed. “Even if they are thinking along those lines, now is the time to disabuse them of that.”
With that, the Rithian spoke into the communicator. It was in a local Rithian dialect and in code; translator modules couldn’t handle it, and all they heard were the deep, inhuman sounds the creature actually uttered.
There was a sudden flare at the connector between the now exposed passenger module and the next mod up the train. Small jets automatically fired, moving it away from the others, whereupon it exploded spectacularly on its own.
“Goodness me! I hope the Captain wasn’t in either of those units,” Jules Wallinchky said in a sarcastic tone that implied exactly the opposite sentiment. “I don’t underestimate him, though. I just wonder what his plan really is, out of plain curiosity.”
“You blew up the passenger mod? Why?” Angel asked him.
“It’s not like anybody who counted was left on it. I suspect it was evacuated fully,” Wallinchky replied. “And now they know we can blow up what they want, just as they can blow us up. It makes a wonderful basis for trust and mutual exchange. The Ha’jiz are the very best at their job.”
“Signal coming in!” Ari told him.
Teynal’s cobralike head bobbed in satisfaction. “Put it on speaker. I will use this for responses.”
A voice came through the lifeboat’s public address unit, sounding a bit tinny but otherwise okay. “You’ve made your point,” it said in a high, reedy tone that gave no clue as to the race of the speaker. “So how do we make the exchange?”
“I assume you wish the entire module?” the Rithian asked him. “It certainly will be easier to move that way.”
“Yes, that is satisfactory. Any problems?”
If Rithians laughed, Teynal would have. “Some. You should know that Jeremiah Wong Kincaid was aboard and that he stumbled over our plans.”
There was a long pause, then, “Kincaid! Oh, they will love that! You dealt with him?”
“Probably not. My best guess is that he is still here, in this area, not on one of the lifeboats, but that he intends to somehow board you and have you take him to your leader, as it were.”
“Any idea where he might be hiding?” the suddenly worried-sounding voice from the warship asked.
“We have some ideas. The most logical is that he located our cargo and is hidden within the module somewhere in an environment suit. You will have to take it with you and thus him, and it would be ridiculous to try and ferret him out in this environment. I could be wrong, but it is the only idea that makes sense to me.”
The man on the warship considered it. “Sounds logical to us, too. All right, I think we can contain that. In fact, I suspect that His Imperial Highness will be overjoyed to have old Kincaid on our turf, as it were, now that we know he’s out there. All right. Which module is it?”
“Twenty-seven. It is, remember, wired—we shall transmit the codes in due course—but we can do an automated disconnect safely. Stand by.”
Again the Rithian spoke some noises none but one of his kind could speak into the communicator, using the preestablished command frequency. Well out in front, virtually too far up the tow to see, the magnetic locks slipped back, the module turned using small steering jets, and it rolled out of line, spinning, until the jets reversed and stopped it. Module 27 was now station-keeping about a hundred meters from the rest of the tow.
“We just scanned it, can’t pick up any life signs,” the ship reported. “Of course, he would have thought of that. Very well. We are going to catch it with a tractor beam and bring it into line with us. Remain where you are until we’re done.”
“Think they’ll pull a fast one?” Wallinchky asked, sounding worried for the first time in the operation.
“They better not,” Teynal hissed. “If they do, it will blow up on them. And I do not think that there’s another of those to be had.”
Angel could only hang against the seat and listen, imagining the sights they were watching on the screen behind her and also watching Jules Wallinchky’s face. He was in fact nervous, but he also seemed to be enjoying the stirring of his own fear. He’d gotten where he was by rising to the criminal top as a man of action and a consummate risk-taker; it probably had been a long time since he’d put himself on the line, and it was feeding some inner need in him. She had to wonder if personally taking these risks wasn’t necessary to his well-being, perhaps a better explanation for ventures like this than the desire to own the jewels or whatever else he might “acquire.”
Still, a warship shouldn’t be so easily fooled by a captain who’d had command only a few days and certainly was winging this. She was certain Kincaid wasn’t dead; she could feel his presence out here, somewhere, somehow.
And not on Module 27. As these crooks noted, that would be the logical and first place anybody would look.
So where else would you hide? she wondered. Someplace that would shield you from probes but give you a crack at boarding that thing?
There was a long period of tense waiting, then finally a crackling in the communicator. “We have it. Now, in turn, the three lifeboats will all dock at the designated ports on our ship. You will dock at Port Six, which you’ll see by a series of pulsing green lights on the rear section.”
“Hold it! That was not our deal!” Wallinchky growled.
“We were not to board you,” the Rithian echoed. “This is improper.”
“Well, you stick explosives all over, so our captain thinks we need a few more guarantees from your end. If you want your payment, come aboard and get it.”
“I do not like it,” Teynal told the crime king. “Once we’re docked, we’re at their mercy. We could hardly blow the module without killing ourselves.”
Wallinchky thought a moment. “Yeah, but they still can’t get at it without us, right?”
“Without several of us,” the Rithian agreed.
Ming had to laugh even though it hurt. “Double-crossed, huh? You’re stuck as much as we are!”
Wallinchky got out of his seat and struck her face hard. It didn’t matter. She was already so in pain it hardly registered.
Teynal was not deterred. This was what they paid him for, after all. “We do not consent. Send one of your small boats over with the goods. Know that Rithian honor would require us to die before handing anything over to you in such a nonguaranteed manner.”
There was again a long pause, followed by “All right. Stand by!” from the warship.
“I don’t like it,” Ari commented. “They agreed much too quickly.”
“Noted,” the Rithian responded. “However, we will be able to see the boat, and we can monitor our own status, I assume? They will not be able to leave a crippling bomb?”
“Not a crippling one, no. Not without us knowing. That would require them to either get in here or have somebody outside. I don’t think the latter can be done without me knowing about it. The former—well, the solution’s obvious. It’s crowded in here anyway. Do the business on their courier boat.”
“They’ll still blow us to hell the moment you give them the codes,” Ming taunted. “After all, why not?”
“Because I will possess the Jewels of the Pleiades,” Jules Wallinchky told her, “and the Kharkovs will authenticate them. The only reason for a double cross here would be to retain the jewels and get the trade. If they blow us up, the jewels are also blown up. Hadun’s like a lot of others, even me. He would kill an entire planet, but he’d do anything to prevent the destruction of unique and timeless art. If I wasn’t absolutely sure of that, this would never have taken place.”
A small courier boat was even now leaving the warship as the two lifeboats with the water breathers were heading in to dock with it.
Angel had listened to all of this, and now felt certain she knew exactly where Captain Jeremiah Wong Kincaid was, and just how he was going to manage it.
That did not, however, do her or Ming, or Tann Nakitt, either, much good.