posed to be merciful, the Service of the Empire would not forget Boros’s role in the death
of so many agents. Barring a major miracle, Boros knew her life was over.
She sat limply in a chair in the control room as the three agents crowded around her to
begin their interrogation. “If you cooperate,” Periwinkle told her, “we’re prepared to be
kinder to you than you would have been to us.
“What’s the point?” Boros muttered. “I’m dead anyway. Why should I help you?”
“You may not have a choice,” Periwinkle replied. “We could always use nitrobarb to drag
the information out of you.”
“If I don’t have a choice, what does it matter? Go ahead, use the nitrobarb.”
The SOTE agents looked at one another. They really wanted to avoid that if at all
possible. If Boros died as a result of the drug, they’d only have the one session of
questioning her. She knew enough about the conspiracy to be worth more alive than
dead.
“What if we promised you’ll be allowed to live in exchange for the information you’ve
got?” Pias asked. Boros gave a bitter laugh. “You’re just field agents. You can’t promise
anything of the sort.”
Jules leaned over and held her head so she looked straight into his eyes. “We can
promise you a lot of pain and certain death if you don’t cooperate. We may be able to
save you if you do. Which is your choice: pain and death, or a chance at life’?”
Boros took a deep breath and let it out slowly._ “It doesn’t matter how much clemency
I’d get. You have no idea how thoroughly we infiltrate the Empire. As soon as it’s known I
talked, I’m as good as dead. They’d kill me as an example to others. No matter how
much protection you gave me, they’d find some way to get to me.”
“We wouldn’t be so helpless if you gave us facts to work with,” Yvette pointed out. ” A
few names, some places, and we’re in business. You saw how thoroughly we crushed
your father’s organization once we had several leads to work with. If you give us
something definite, we can root them out before they get to you.”
Boros closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair to think. She rubbed at her temples
with both hands, trying to clear her thoughts. “Oh hell, what’s the use of anything?” she
sighed. “What’d she ever do for me, anyway, but stick me out on this godforsaken battle
station with only robots for company?”
“She?” Yvette said gently. “You mean Lady AT’ “Who else? She runs the whole damn
show.” “What about C? Where does he fit in?”
Boros laughed. “There is no C. She did that just to confuse you. She told me she runs the
whole thing herself, and just made it look like there was someone else to complicate
things.” .
The SOTE agents glanced quickly at each other. If that were true, it would be a major
revelation. “Who is Lady AT’ Yvette continued.
“I don’t know,” Boros said with a shake of her head. “She doesn’t take people into her
confidence.”
“What are her plans?” Yvette persisted.
“I don’t know those either in any detail. She said she was waging a war on SOTE to get
rid of the peskier elements. This operation was part of that, but I failed her.
Boros began to sniffle. “She said she was going to restore the proper order of things,
that I was going to have a position worthy of my heritage. And then she sent me here, of
all places. At least there were other people on Gastonia!”
Before Yvette could ask another question the subcom receiver came to life. A life-sized
three-dimensional image of Lady A’s head and shoulders appeared in the triscreen.
“Time for your daily report, my d. . . . Oh, I see you have company.”
Pias and Yvette backed quickly out of camera range, hoping their adversary wouldn’t get
a good look at their faces. She’d already seen Jules’s face at very close quarters, so he
was left to deal with her. “Good day, my lady,” he said casually. “I trust you’re not too
happy to see me here.”
“I am neither happy nor sad,” Lady A replied calmly. “I am, however, disappointed. I
expected better things of you, Tanya.”
“She also told us there was no C,” Jules said, just to see how the woman would react.
Lady A did not disappoint him. Her eyes lit up and she glared at Boros. “For that, you will
die!” Then her face softened again. “Of course, you’re all going to die. Each of the
battlestations has a self-destruct device which can be activated from headquarters. It’ll
just be a few minutes while the commands are relayed. For your failure, Tanya, you must
do the honorable thing and be destroyed with your station.” The triscreen faded to gray
as Lady A abruptly ended her transmission.
Boros sat in a stupor while the SOTE team was thinking furiously. “That small ferry ship
nestled in the hull,” Jules said, grabbing Boros by the shoulders. “How do we get to it?”
“It’s only a one-seater,” the woman said despondently. “We’ll be extra friendly,” Jules
said, “Quick, we haven’t much time.
The thought of that little ship reminded Boros she’d stashed a blaster there in case of
emergency. If she could get to it, she might still have a chance to save herself.
Jumping up quickly from her chair, she bounded out to the central hollow area which was
in freefall and launched herself toward the spacecraft dock. The trio from SOTS followed
quickly after her, not wanting to be left behind.
Boros reached the hatch first. Pulling herself inside, she made a quick grab for the
blaster hidden near the doorway, pulled it out, and whipped it around to aim at her three
pursuers. She fired quickly but her shot went wild, sizzling the empty air.
The SOTE agents instinctively grabbed at the girders for cover, and that diversion gave
Boros just the time she needed. Closing the hatch door behind her, she went to the little
ship’s control room to escape from the battle station.
Jules pounded a girder with frustration. “Damn! There’s no other transportation away
from here. Even if we got into spacesuits and left the station, we couldn’t get far enough
in just a few minutes to escape the flying debris. And if we did escape it, we wouldn’t
have enough air to last until Vonnie sends the Navy out here.”
“Back to the bridge, then,” Yvette said. “Maybe we can find the bomb and dismantle it.
One of us should call Vonnie, too, before we explode, to tell her what we learned. ”
They returned quickly to the central control room, even as the battle station shook with
the departure of Boros’s ferry. On a large screen they could watch the little craft’s
progress as it pulled away from the battle station and began its flight for freedom.
They could not waste time just watching that, though. By unspoken agreement, it was
Jules who went to the subcom set to place the final call to his wife. Yvette and Pias
began frantically dismantling the control panels, looking for anything that might be
interpreted as a bomb, even though they knew it was a hopeless cause.
A sudden flare on the exterior screen caught the corner of Pias’s eye. He glanced up,
froze for an instant, and stopped his frantic searching. “Look,” he said quietly to his
companions.
Where the little ferry ship had been was now just a bright light and an expanding cloud of
gas and debris. The three agents stared at the screen uncomprehendingly for a moment,
until understanding suddenly dawned in Jules’s eyes. “The bomb was in the ship,” he said
in hushed tones. “Lady A knew how good we are at surviving, so she put the bomb in the
one possible escape vehicle and chased us into it. She ordered Boros to stay here,
where she’d be safe, thinking we’d try to save our own lives.”
“It very nearly worked,” Pias said nervously. “Why didn’t Boros go along with it?”
“She probably didn’t know about the plan,” Yvette said. “She told us Lady A never
revealed anything she didn’t have to know. Lady A was probably afraid we might torture
Boros and get the information out of her if she knew, so she didn’t tell her.”
Jules nodded. “She was hoping Boros would blindly obey her order to stay and die on
the battle station-or perhaps she thought we’d selfishly leave Boros back here to die
while we escaped ourselves. She didn’t count on Boros taking independent action.”
They watched the screen silently for a few more seconds until the cloud of wreckage had
dissipated enough to vanish against the background of space. Then, more relaxed, Jules
finished placing the subcom call to Vonnie, asking that she send a ship out to pick them