payroll, too.”
“He’d have to be,” Jules agreed. “From the way they were talking, Lady A visits Gastonia
fairly regularly. I doubt whether any ships could take off or land here without people in
the garrison knowing about it-nor could they have built that big house without attracting
someone’s attention. The only explanation is that the Governor and some of his staff
were paid to look the other way.”
He smashed his palm with his fist. “Lady A was right; the Service provided her with the
perfect breeding ground for her conspiracy. We rounded up all the prospective recruits
and located them here, in one place, for her to take her pick. The planet was so quiet
and well-run that we hardly ever thought about it, a person sent here was as good as
dead, so we forgot all about him. It’s obvious now that they kept it that way on purpose.
Where would be a better place to hide a conspiracy than among a group of former
conspirators who are now presumably defused and harmless? It makes me so angry that
they’ve fooled us so badly for so long.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Yvonne couldn’t help smiling slightly. It was
hardly Jules’s fault that this operation had continued this long; someone else in the
Service should have reasoned it out long ago. But her husband so identified himself with
SOTE that he felt personally responsible for every slip the Service made. But then, she
realized, it was that very dedication to his ideals that made her love him so deeply.
“The problem is, though, what are we going to do about it?” By asking her question,
Vonnie was hoping to nudge her husband gently onto a more positive line of thought.
“We can’t let Lady A escape again, not when she’s this close.”
“I agree. But she’s only going to be here another day and a half; we’ll have to move
quickly. Once she’s off-planet, we won’t have any way to get her.”
Jules nodded. “We’ll have to attack the house tomorrow night, before she leaves.”
“Is there time?” Vonnie wondered. “We don’t have a copter to take us there, and from
your description it’s easily a full day’s march away. Plus you mentioned guards with
blasters and an infrared scanning system. If we were on a civilized planet we could find
the equipment to get around all that-but what do we do here on a world where stone
axes are the ultimate weapon and running water is but an idle reverie’?”
“We improvise, ma cherie, we improvise,” said Jules-and the smile on his lips told
Yvonne he was already formulating a plan.
They had little time for sleep that night, just a couple of hours between the time they
thrashed out their attack strategy and the time they needed to leave. It was still long
before sunrise when they left the primitive hovel they’d called home for the past few
months. Whatever the outcome of their impending assault on Lady A’s citadel, they knew
they would never be coming back here again.
The initial part of their plan was one that gave them a great deal of satisfaction-stealing
the sleigh from old Zolotin, the driver who had cheated them on their arrival. It was a
simple enough matter to break into Zolotin’s barn and hitch the docile yagi to the sled.
With any luck it would be several hours before the theft was discovered. There was little
they could do to hide the sleigh’s tracks out of the village, but they figured there was little
likelihood that anyone except Zolotin would be eager to follow them. Other people had
their own work to do, and there were more profitable ways to spend their time than
chasing into the hills for a stolen sleigh.
Once they were several kilometers away from the village and dawn was beginning to
glow in the eastern sky they relaxed and got the rest they needed before their big
adventure that night. They took turns, each driving the yagi for a few hours while the
other caught some sleep. The yagi was slightly faster than they remembered it, but still
not the speediest of beasts; they could have walked more rapidly, but then they would
have arrived at their destination exhausted. This way they would be fresh and ready for
action when they arrived.
They stopped twice during the day for the yagi to rest and browse on some of the low
scrub vegetation in the area. Jules had been tracing the path from memory, hoping he
remembered the various turns and twists in the trail his hunting party had taken-and also
hoping he could recreate his wandering pattern during the blizzard. The land started
looking more and more familiar, and just as the sun was setting he spotted it. “There!” he
cried, pointing at the distant hill where the house reflected the light of the departing sun.
Yvonne squinted until she, too, could make it out. “It’s still awfully far away,” she said.
“Their scanners have quite a range,” Jules said. “We should be safe enough here. We’ll
wait until nightfall and then move in closer.”
Even after it was dark, the house could still be seen as a glimmering light too steady to
be a star. Quickly, then, the two agents prepared their makeshift apparatus for fooling
the guards’ scanners. Yvonne lay face down in the sleigh and Jules covered her over with
a fur blanket they had brought with them. After covering the blanket with a layer of snow,
he took the reins of the sleigh firmly in his hand and crawled under the blanket with his
wife, disturbing the snow as little as possible. Gently, then, he urged the yagi on its
plodding way, leaving just enough room out of the top of the blanket for him to see out
and guide the beast in the proper direction.
The d’Alemberts were hoping that, because of Gastonia’s technological backwardness,
Lady A would not have bothered to install one of the more sophisticated infrared
detection systems, relying on a simpler one to suit her needs. Infrared detectors worked
by sensing the heat difference between an object and its surroundings. If they had
chosen to move ahead on foot, they would be radiating energy at the normal body
temperature of thirty-seven celsius, and would stand out easily against the much colder
snowdrifts around them.
By covering themselves over with snow, however, they hoped to mask their radiative
effect. The more sophisticated infrared systems would not be fooled, but a simplified
detector would see no further than the snow that covered them. There was no way to
similarly disguise the body heat of the yagi but then, they didn’t want to. The yagi was
part of their plan.
Minute by minute, meter by meter, Jules drove them closer to the hill and to the guard
station at the bottom. If his plan was working correctly, the guards would see on their
screens the image of a yagi drawing an apparently empty sleigh, yet coming unerringly
toward them. He was hoping that would pique their curiosity enough to come and
investigate what was happening.
There was a small stand of trees near the base of the hill, and that was where Jules
stopped the sleigh. There were three guards manning the station, and at least one of
them would remain at his post while the sleigh was being investigated; if the sleigh were
out in the open, he would see two figures suddenly jump out, and he could send the
alarm before the d’Alemberts could stop him. But infrared could not see through objects
like trees, so whoever stayed back at the station would have no way of knowing what
happened here.
Jules and Vonnie waited.
If an empty sleigh had seemed suspicious, its sudden stopping would appear even more
so. After ten minutes of silence, the d’Alemberts could hear the sounds of two people
crunching through the snow toward them. The guards came slowly, not wanting to take
any risks; they probably had their blasters drawn, though the SOTE agents couldn’t see
them, and they were approaching from both sides of the sleigh to avoid a possible
ambush.
Jules carefully gauged the sounds of the footsteps and, at his whispered command, the
two DesPlainians leaped into action. They tossed off the blanket that had covered them,
sending a fountain of snow rising into the air and startling the two men who’d been
approaching them. Even as the guards’ attention was momentarily distracted by the
shower of white, the d’Alemberts jumped out of the sleigh to either side. The two men
could not react half as fast as their DesPlainian adversaries; within seconds they were
lying unconscious on the ground and they had not even had a chance to fire their blasters
or in any way warn their comrade back at the guard station.
The SOTS agents exchanged their crudely made village furs for the better parkas worn