Tovera gave the impeller back to Woetjans. “That should do,” she said.
Adele squatted and took out her personal data unit; the helmet’s inputs weren’t sufficient for what she needed now. At a nod from the bosun, Jiangsi shrugged off his pack and began lifting out blocks of explosive with the blasting caps already in preformed sockets.
“Wait,” said Adele, concentrating on her display. “We could do more damage than we intend with that.”
“You want me to take down the wall instead of the door, mistress?” Jiangsi offered. “That won’t be hard.”
“Wait,” Adele repeated.
She turned on the vision panel above the Captal’s huge circular bed and routed to it the output of the security camera in the main room of suite; she focused the image closely on what was left of the guard’s head. The slug must have been tumbling slightly when it came through the wall.
“Captal da Lund!” Adele said through the intercom. “We will let you and all your surviving personnel go free once you’ve answered our questions about what happened to Lieutenant Leary. Open the door to your suite. If we have to blow our way in, there’s a possibility you’ll be killed and a near certainty that you’ll be badly injured.”
“No ‘near’ about that,” Woetjans muttered. Her big scarred hand patted the length of tubing in her belt. She’d wrapped tape around one end for a better grip.
“You’ve got thirty seconds,” Adele continued. “I’m going to begin counting down. Thirty, twenty-nine—”
The man cowering in the bedroom suddenly snatched open his door. “Wait!” he cried. “For the love of God, wait!”
Adele rose to her feet and put her data unit back in its pocket. She lifted her visor; she didn’t need to watch further. The spacers tensed, but Tovera merely shook her head in disappointment.
The bar scraped on the other side of the door. When Woetjans heard it click free of the staples, she kicked the panel open with the heel of her boot. It bloodied the Captal’s nose as it knocked him down.
Adele had never seen the exiled dictator in the flesh. He would have looked distinguished under most circumstances, but blubbering so that tears streaked the blood on his cheeks was not his best moment. Woetjans and Jiangsi thrust their guns in his face.
“Please, please, I’ll pay you more money than you ever dreamed!” the Captal cried. “I’ll make you rich for life, only don’t kill me!”
It was funny in its way. “Tovera,” Adele said. “How much money would it take for you not to kill this gentleman if I told you to do it?”
“If you allowed me to do it, you mean, mistress,” Tovera said. They were playing a game, she and her mistress, but every word of it was true. She shrugged. “I don’t need money, mistress.”
Adele was unable to keep to keep from sneering when she looked down at the sniveling exile, but perhaps that was the right expression for the purpose anyway. “When you’ve told us how to find Lieutenant Leary,” she said evenly, “we’ll release you and your personnel.”
“They’re all right, they’re perfectly safe,” the Captal said. He’d pulled his knees up to his chest and his fingers covered his face, pressing to either side of his nose. Was it broken, or was it simply fear that had so unmanned him? “It was nothing to do with me, really, I was just helping Vaughn out of friendship for his father. Getting your captain out of the way so that no one would give the alarm until Vaughn was safely back on Strymon.”
Woetjans tapped the Captal’s left wrist with her impeller muzzle. The heat shield was still hot from the recently fired slug; the prisoner jerked his hand down with a cry of terror.
“Where?” Woetjans said. “Or I’ll tie your dick to the aircar and fly back to town. So help me God.”
“At Site Two on South Land!” the Captal cried. “Dorotige took them there, he can find them again. Besides, it’s in the car’s navigation system!”
Adele frowned. “Is that true?” she asked the bosun.
Woetjans shrugged. “Likely enough,” she said. “Liebig’ll know.”