by Tim Pratt
The shimmering overlay in Felix’s contact lenses showed him the proper route in blue, a narrow path leading from a pile of crates to the shadow of a crane and so on, and would flash red if he so much as stepped one toe off the path. He went carefully, methodically, knowing sudden movement was more visible than slow. Not for the first time, he envied Tib’s ability to fade. He supposed humans had their own unique advantages, too, though just at this moment he couldn’t remember what any of them were.
To make up for his lack of natural resources, he had a variety of small and useful items in his pockets, the sort of things favored by Coalition raiders, very few of them legal in the galaxy’s more civilized jurisdictions.
He finally ducked behind a stack of barrels marked “protein slurry, grade three,” slipping into the narrow space between the supplies and the wall. There was a ventilation grille there, and as he crouched toward it, the screen slid aside. Eyes like lanterns shone from within, and Tib’s hand emerged and beckoned before vanishing from sight.
Felix had to slither into the duct on his belly. There were maintenance tunnels in the station meant for people his size, but none with access hatches in the cargo bay, and these were never meant for anything bigger than a drone repair unit to enter. Tib fit easily, of course, but Felix had to push himself along mostly with his toes, wriggling more than crawling, following Tib’s whispered directions in his comms. After a couple of sharply angled turns, and a distressing head-first slide down at about a thirty-degree angle, they finally emerged into a dim room full of thrumming machinery, furnaces, and air filtration systems.
Felix gasped and wiped sweat from his forehead. He wasn’t claustrophobic – he’d grown up slithering through tunnels on a shipyard station, though he’d been smaller then – but it was still a relief to stand up and stretch his limbs. A nearly naked Letnev was propped unconscious in the corner, wrists bound to ankles with zip ties. “You’ve been busy,” Felix said.
“I hope the uniform fits.”
Felix put on the guard’s clothes. The Letnev ran slightly smaller than humans as a species, but Felix was slim. The shirt was tight across the chest, but not enough so that anyone would notice, and the long black gloves would hide the shortness of the sleeves, just as the tall black boots concealed the shortness of the pants. The full-face mask was the best part, though – Felix couldn’t pass for Letnev at a glance, but with his face hidden, he could move anonymously through the station.
“What’s the lay of the land?” he asked. Tib had spent the past hour doing reconnaissance and acquiring Felix’s disguise.
“I think I know where Shelma is being held,” Tib said. “Unless there’s more than one Hylar on board. She’s not in a cell, though – she’s in a laboratory or something.”
“Or something?”
“All I know is, there are a lot of screens, a lot of terminals, and bits of disassembled machinery all around. She went to get something to eat and she was escorted by a guard, and later she had to return to what I assume are her quarters, and a guard took her there, too.”
“She must be a dangerous character.”
“She also summoned guards on three occasions to fetch her equipment from other rooms and, once, to remove a spider from a corner of the ceiling. The poor man had to stand on a wobbly table, and she told him not to kill it, just to take it to the gardens, so it could eat pests. She treated the guards more like servants than jailers.”
“Maybe she’s just valuable rather than dangerous, then,” Felix said. “The Letnev must be forcing her to continue the research she did with Thales. Can we get her out?”
“No one seemed to pay attention to her at all, so long as there was a guard walking beside her. You look like a guard. I think we can work out a cunning plan based on those conditions.”
“Getting her to the ship and off the station is the tricky part,” Felix said. “That’s not something a guard would do, and the Letnev ask questions with lethal force. I’d rather get out of here without being murdered. Can we bring her back through the tunnels?”
Tib shook her head. “She’s one of the fully aquatic sub-species of Hylar – her tank is set in an exo-suit, and she scurries around on a lot of little legs and manipulator arms. Her rig isn’t huge – she can fit through ordinary doors – but she’s not crawling through any tunnels.”
“Damn,” Felix said. “We need to leave here quietly.”
“Not a problem for me,” Tib said. “I just don’t know what to do about you and the squid.”
“Maybe,” Felix said, “we don’t need to be quiet. Maybe we just need to be less noisy than something else.”
•••
They had to peel open the guard’s eyelid and put his head half in the mask to unlock the biometric locks on the operating system, but once they did that Felix had access to a wealth of information about the station. Maps, a navigation system, and even a personnel roster – which notably didn’t mention Shelma, but did include a distressing number of guards, a dizzying array of bureaucrats, a few scientists, assistant under-directors, assistant directors, and just the one director. He took particular note of the security provisions, which were extensive, but mainly focused on preventing outside threats – once he was inside, assuming he wasn’t challenged, he should be able to move fairly freely.
Tib faded out of sight and went off to handle her part of the operation, while Felix stepped out of the machine room and followed the glowing path to the lab where Shelma was working. He passed a couple of other masked guards, who ignored him completely, and he did the same in return, though he fine-tuned his own stiff walk and ramrod posture to better match theirs. The station was a joyless sort of place, all gray metal and white tile and dim recessed lighting. He turned a corner, entering the corridor that should have led him to the research wing, and almost collided with a dark-haired woman, dressed in the requisite amount of gleaming black, who stood talking to a pair of masked guards. She stopped mid-sentence, looked at him, and frowned.
Felix’s heads-up display helpfully identified her: this was Severyne Joelle Dampierre, technically an assistant director, functionally the head of security. Felix automatically noted that she was pretty, in a severe, hair-pulled-back-too-tightly way – not that it mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d met in some difficult-to-imagine social setting, instead of during a jailbreak. He’d dated Letnev who’d grown up in the Coalition, but the ones from the Barony were by all accounts immune to charm, fun, or entertainment. The old joke was, “Why don’t Letnev have sex standing up? Because someone might think they’re dancing.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, sharp and peremptory.
Well, why not? Unnecessary lies only got you in trouble. “To the Hylar’s lab, Director Dampierre.”
“That’s AD Dampierre,” she snapped. “You’re on her detail, are you? What does Shelma want now?”
“She says one of the tables is wobbly, AD Dampierre. She wants me to level it.”
“Someone should level her.” Dampierre scowled again. “Well? Carry on, don’t dawdle in the corridors.”
Felix snapped off a salute and went on his way. That had gone better than it could have. As he walked, he scrolled up the available information on AD Dampierre. She’d only served the mandatory minimum of Letnev military service, so she wasn’t a professional soldier – maybe her job running station security had been bestowed for political rather than practical reasons, or maybe she was a terrifying clandestine operative whose training was so secret it didn’t show up in her public-facing files. Ideally, he’d never have to find out.
Felix’s helmet had the necessary authentications to make the next four sealed doors unlock for him, and to open the elevator that led to Shelma’s floor. He exited the elevator and approached the blinking icon in his display that marked the door to the lab. A guard stood stiffly before it, arms at his sides. “Is the Hylar in there?
” Felix asked, the suit modulating his voice to an amusingly menacing degree.
“Where else would she be during working hours?” the guard replied.
“Good point,” Felix said, and punched her in the throat. He had on a pair of rings beneath his gloves that discharged a single-burst electric shock sufficient to paralyze the body and scramble the brain, and the guard slid down the door. Felix’s HUD obligingly showed him the location of a storage closet, so he dragged the guard inside, found a roll of tape, and wrapped it around and around the masked head, to serve as a blindfold and to make it hard to remove said mask, which he thought was rather funny. Then he bound the guard’s ankles to her wrists and turned to the door.
He stopped, turned back, looked down at the guard, sighed, knelt, and laboriously unpicked and unwound all the tape from the mask. He undid the clasps and removed her mask, then put it on a high shelf, because otherwise when the guard woke up, she would have called for help on the mask’s integrated comms. “There’s such a thing as being too clever, Felix,” he muttered.
His display assured him there were no other guards in the immediate vicinity, so he went into the lab, the door sliding silently shut behind him. “Shelma?” he said.
The Hylar was enclosed in a transparent globe full of pale fluid, the sphere set into an exoskeletal body with scores of many-jointed limbs, some for walking, others for manipulating objects, still others for specialized purposes he couldn’t imagine. Shelma herself was small, head shaped a bit like a lemon, trailing fronds of tentacles and feelers that wriggled into the controls of the exo-suit. Her large, dark eyes gazed at him. Her skin, a pale green at first, flushed through oranges and reds. Felix knew the Hylar communicated among themselves with color changes, but he didn’t understand what these meant.
Apparently, the colors didn’t indicate a warm welcome. “What is it? You’re interrupting my work.” Her voice was querulous and sounded like a human with nasal congestion. Despite her assertion, her manipulator arms continued to solder components into the guts of a torpedo-shaped object resting on the work table.
“I’ve come to rescue you,” he said.
“Oh, by the bubbling crevice,” she said, becoming an even deeper red. “Are you from the Federation of Sol? The last time you reached out, I told you, I have no interest in going back. As far as I’m concerned, our relationship ended when our lab was destroyed.” She waved a cluster of manipulators at him. “Shoo.”
Felix blinked behind his mask. “Ah, no. I’m not from the Federation. I represent other parties interested in your research. I was under the impression that you were a prisoner here?” A red light began to blink in his peripheral vision.
“Prisoner or employee? I suppose it’s a fine distinction.” She turned away from him, back to her apparatus. “If I’d refused to help the Barony, they probably would have imprisoned me, and if I said tomorrow that I’d grown weary of my project and wanted to retire to the hot springs of Wun-Escha, I doubt they’d be supportive. But I agreed to work for the Barony, and they have honored the terms of my agreement. Who told you I was a prisoner?”
Don’t tell her you’re working with me, Thales said. I want to surprise her, Thales said.
“Phillip Thales did,” Felix said.
She didn’t turn around, but the color drained out of her. “He’s still alive, then. And still a liar.”
“A liar,” Felix repeated. “Do you mean he can’t do what he claims?” If Thales was lying about his invention, the Table wouldn’t mind if Felix stranded him on an asteroid somewhere. It would be the end of glory, but it would also be the end of being sent to infiltrate Barony research stations on false pretenses.
“Did he claim he can share credit, display empathy, or listen to anyone else’s ideas without shouting at them? In that case, no, he can’t.” Sparks cascaded up from the device, but apparently that was supposed to happen, because she kept working. “If he claimed he can create wormholes, though, that part’s true. He’s the only person in the galaxy who’s come close to creating that technology – except for the Creuss, if you believe the rumors, and myself, of course. Thales has a brilliant scientific mind. It’s a shame the rest of his mind is a burning pile of garbage.”
“Ah. I haven’t known him long, but I don’t disagree.”
“Why did he send you here? Our partnership ended… dramatically.”
“He says you’re essential to completing his prototype.”
“Does he? That’s actually flattering. Last time I saw him, he said I wasn’t qualified to clean fish tanks. He may have reached the limits of his abilities, though. He was always better at theory than application, and I’m making great progress on a working prototype. It’s–” She abruptly went silent. Felix almost felt bad for her. She was a scientist, not a spy, but she was doubtless feeling bad about spilling so much to the representative of some unknown force.
“Is that the working prototype?” Felix pointed at the cylinder.
The pause was just a moment too long. “No. No, that’s just, ah… an air purifier. The air here, I’m told, is very impure. Smells of mushrooms. I’m helping.”
“My ship has a terrible odor. We think something died in the vents. I’d better take the purifier with me.” He drew his sidearm, but didn’t point it. “You should probably come with me, too, and show me how to work it.”
“And see Thales again? I’d really rather not. We didn’t part on good terms.”
“I’m afraid I must insist.”
“Insist all you like. I hit my panic button four minutes ago. Guards should be descending here en masse any moment.”
“I noticed. I’m hooked into the station’s security system.” He tapped his mask. “‘En masse’ might be overstating things. There are two guards coming, and they’re having some trouble with the elevator. That’s fine. We’re going out another way anyway. I hope you like service tunnels.” Tib couldn’t compromise the station security systems from the maintenance area she’d secretly accessed, but she could break a few things, which was why those guards were currently pushing buttons futilely in an elevator stopped between floors.
“I won’t go anywhere with you.”
Shelma was faced with an armed man, professed agent of an unknown organization sent to rescue – make that “abduct” her – and she was still stubbornly acting like she was in charge. Felix began to see why she and Thales had worked together.
“I’m still insisting. Things are going to get very loud and chaotic on this station, and even though you don’t want to be rescued, I’ve gone too far to stop now.” He stepped toward her, and her manipulator arms stretched out defensively. They probably could have soldered, laser-etched, or sliced him up, but they didn’t stop him from lobbing one of the objects from his pocket at her – a little thing, the size and shape of a plum – where it struck her glass dome with a splat, sticking to the side.
“That’s a very small, inward-pointing explosive, coated in epoxy resin. It’s now firmly attached to your helmet. If you attempt to remove the device, it will explode. If I don’t disarm it in half an hour, it will explode. The solvent I need to remove it…” He made a show of patting his pockets. “I seem to have left it on my ship. We should go there, don’t you think?” He hadn’t planned to use the little bomb for this, and in fact it wouldn’t explode at all unless he triggered it deliberately, but he was a Mentak Coalition officer: they were expected to improvise.
“Severyne won’t let you take me,” she said. “I’m very valuable.”
“Severyne is going to be busy soon,” Felix said, and his tactical display lit up with emergency alerts as the first of the bombs Tib had set up in the station went off.
Chapter 9
At first, Severyne didn’t take Shelma’s latest push of the panic button seriously. In the ten months since Severyne had taken over security for this station, she’d learned that the Hylar scientist didn�
�t share the same definition of the word “emergency” the rest of the universe did. The first time the panic button went off, Severyne responded personally, charging into her quarters followed by six elite soldiers. Shelma had looked up from a tablet and said, mildly, “The lights in this room are too dim. Please get me brighter ones.”
Severyne had dismissed the soldiers and given Shelma a stern talking-to about the proper channels for maintenance requests. “I tried those channels,” Shelma replied. “They said they would add my request to the non-essential queue. That is not acceptable. I thought perhaps this button might bring a more rapid response, and I was correct.”
“That button is for moments when your life is in danger, or when you have reason to believe this station is under attack, or that our security has been compromised.”
“I believe that’s what you intended the button for,” Shelma said. “But I’m an engineer first and foremost. I’m interested in what things actually do, not merely what they were designed for.”
After that, the Hylar used the panic button indiscriminately, for the most trivial things, until, in desperation, Severyne finally gave her a dedicated comms channel and a small rotating group of guards who could take care of her endless insignificant needs – the lights too dim, the liquid in her tank an imperfect pH, her tools not calibrated perfectly to her liking, her quarters not the right temperature (even though she could control the temperature of her tank!), and a thousand other trivial details. After that, her use of the panic button trailed off, but didn’t stop entirely, especially when she was in a bad mood or frustrated by setbacks in her work. She enjoyed spreading the annoyance around.
So when the panic button went off this time, Severyne sighed and dispatched a pair of guards to look in on the scientist, then went back to working on the duty rosters. Lestrande had shown up for his last shift with a tiny blot of protein slurry on his elbow, and such slovenliness must be punished, so she decided to assign him to be one of Shelma’s babysitters for the week, and put a note about conduct unbecoming in his file. He’d probably never be promoted again with a mark like that against him, but he should have thought of that before he ate like a slough-beast.