She laughed at the memory, and the sound of her own laughter woke her up.
Her blue eyes opened to find Viktor Proboda’s brighter, bluer ones, wide in his square pink face, only inches away.
“How do you feel?” His blond eyebrows were twitching with concern.
“Like somebody hit me in the head. What was I laughing about?” With his help she sat up. There was a heavy ache in the muscle of her jaw that brought back an old memory, from circa age fourteen, of an abscessed wisdom tooth. Cautiously she touched her cheek. “Oww! I bet that’s pretty.”
“I don’t think the jaw’s broken. You’d know.”
“Great. Do you always look on the bright side, Viktor?”
She pulled herself to her feet with his help.
“We should get you to the clinic. A concussion requires immediate . . .”
“Hold off a minute. Did you pass your friend Sondra Sylvester on your way in here?”
Proboda looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Yes, in the core, just outside the Ishtar gate. I knew something was wrong from her face. She looked at me but she didn’t even see me. I was thinking about what that mining robot did on Star Queen, and I thought that’s why you came here, so I thought I’d better find you.”
“Thanks. . . . Dammit.” She grabbed at her ear, but her commlink had fallen out. “She knocked it loose. Viktor, call in and send a squad to the Hesperian Museum on the double. Call the museum too, try to warn Darlington. I think she went to kill him.”
He knew better than to ask for explanations. He keyed the emergency channel, but as soon as he mentioned the Hesperian Museum the squad dispatcher interrupted.
He listened, his jaw sagging, then broke the link. He looked at Sparta. “Too late.”
“Is he dead?”
His chin jerked in a nod. “She put four .32 slugs in him. After they grabbed her, she put four more through his glass ceiling. It’s lucky she didn’t kill somebody on the other side of the station.” Still looking on the bright side.
She touched his arm, half urging him to start moving and half comforting the big, sad cop—recognizing that he was sad for Sylvester, whom he’d admired, not for Darlington, that silly leech. “Come on, let’s go,” she said.
A tall woman was standing in the doorway, Kara Antreen.
Rigid and gray, her square-shouldered severity was at odds with the luxury of Sylvester’s office. “Viktor, I want you to take immediate charge of the investigation into the shooting of Vincent Darlington.”
Proboda halted, perplexed. “Not much of an investigation, Captain. There was a roomful of witnesses . . .”
“Yes, it shouldn’t take long,” Antreen said.
“But Star Queen . . .”
“You are relieved of your responsibilities with respect to Star Queen,” Antreen said flatly. She cocked an eye at Sparta, daring contradiction. “That’s a new case, now.”
Sparta hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right, Viktor.
You’ve been very helpful, and I appreciate it. . . .”
Proboda’s unhappy face grew longer.
“The captain and I should be able to wrap things up pretty quickly,” Sparta said.
Proboda stepped away stiffly. He’d been impressed by Inspector Ellen Troy and had unbent enough to let her know it. He had even defended her to his boss. Now she’d grabbed the first chance to cut him out of the case. “Whatever you say,” he growled. He marched out past Antreen without wasting a backward glance on Sparta.
Alone, the two women watched each other in silence.
Antreen was impeccable in her gray wool suit, Sparta was a weary urchin, battered but streetwise. But Sparta no longer felt at a disadvantage. She only felt the need for rest.
“You’ve repeatedly and ingeniously managed to avoid me, Inspector Troy,” Antreen said. “Why the sudden change of attitude?”
“I don’t think this is the place to talk, Captain,” Sparta said, tilting her chin to indicate the room’s invisible bugs and eyes. “Corporations like this one are good at keeping secrets. But it could still be considered a violation of the suspect’s chartered rights.”
“Yes, certainly.” Antreen’s eyelids drooped over her gray eyes—and here was an excellent liar indeed, Sparta saw, who did not betray herself when she had been anticipated, even two moves deep. “Back to headquarters, then?” Antreen suggested.
Sparta walked confidently past her; Antreen fell into step immediately behind. They walked into the spiraling transparent corridor that overlooked the control rooms.
Sparta paused at the rail.
“Something wrong?” Antreen asked.
“Not at all. I didn’t really get to see this on the way in. I was too busy. For someone who’s never left Earth before, it’s an impressive sight.”
“I suppose it is.”
From ten meters overhead, behind the curving glass, Sparta and Antreen peered down at the men and women of Ishtar at their consoles. Some were alert and hard at work, some were lounging, idly chatting with each other, sipping their coffees and smoking their cigarettes while watching on giant screens as loyal robots sliced and shoveled through the underworld.
Antreen’s right hand was in her outside jacket pocket.
She leaned in close to Sparta, a movement that an Arab or a Japanese might not have noticed. But she was close enough to make a typical Euro-American nervous.
Sparta turned to her, relaxed, alert. “We can talk here,”
Sparta whispered. “They left the eyes and ears out of this stretch.”
“You’re positive?”
“I checked the corridor coming in,” Sparta said. “So let’s stop playing games.”
“What?”
Sparta heard offended dignity, not guilt, overlaying Antreen’s caution—she was excellent. Sparta’s tone grew exaggerated. “By now you’ve got the files I ordered from Central, haven’t you?” She was playing the tough cop from headquarters, dressing down the locals.
“Yes, of course.”
Anger, persuasively laid over confusion, but Sparta laughed in her face. “You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”
Antreen was suddenly prickling with suspicion. She said nothing.
Sparta prodded her hard. “The files on Pavlakis Lines.
Get your staff in shape, will you?”—but behind the contemptuous sneer on her bruised and blackened face, Sparta was striving to keep her throbbing consciousness from fractioning again. The broken bits of the kaleidoscope were whirling at the edge of her vision. “If you’d seen the reports you’d know it was that ape Dimitrios, taking it out on young Pavlakis. Revenge. Because the kid ended the forty-year-old insurance con Dimitrios had been running with his dad. Pavlakis played into his hands by hiring Wycherly to protect him—a guy who was already in on the scam, who needed money more than anything and had the added advantage of being a dead man in advance. Got all that?”
“We have that information,” Antreen snapped. Anger again, this time laid over smug relief, for Sparta was talking police work after all. “We have Dimitrios’s statement, the widow’s statement. Pavlakis came to us himself before we could pick him up—before the blowout. He says he suspected it all along, that Dimitrios rigged a phony accident.”
“He did?” Sparta grinned, but it was a weird grin com- ing out of that swollen, seared face. “Then what are you really doing here?”
“I came to tell . . .” But this time Antreen couldn’t disguise the shock. “. . . you . . .”
“You came for me. Here I am. Took you forever to get me alone.”
“You know!” Antreen looked around wildly. They were hardly alone. But they were isolated from the workers below in a glass tube with no ears. Afterward, what would witnesses make of what was about to happen?
Whatever Captain Antreen told them to think.
Antreen jerked her right hand up and out, but she was close—it had been a mistake to move in so close. Sparta’s own right hand came across the space between their bodies and seized Antreen’s wrist as it cleared her pocket. In a microsecond Antreen was stumbling; Sparta was taking her down sideways along the direction of the resisting arm, using the resistance. Startled, Antreen’s left leg tried to move across for balance, but it went nowhere except into Sparta’s solidly planted left thigh. Antreen dove, but Sparta did not let her dive; controlling the weapon, Sparta never let go of Antreen’s right wrist, and Antreen spun onto her back as she fell. She hit the carpeted floor heavily.
If Sparta had been a little stronger, a little bigger, a little less tired—if she’d been perfect—she might have prevented what happened next. But Antreen was quick and strong and as practiced at unarmed combat as Sparta.
With the leverage of her long legs and free arm she rolled, pulling Sparta across her—Sparta brought Antreen’s arm up sharply behind her back as she rolled—another half roll and Sparta would lose her grip; Antreen would be on top of her. . . .
Antreen screamed when she drove the spike into her own spine.
It was a crescendo of pain, but she screamed with more than pain. She screamed in the horror of what was happening to her, what was about to happen to her—what would happen quickly, but not quickly enough.