“Do you two have to snipe at each other all of the time?” Lyall demanded, sounding all confidence although he leaned back out of the line of fire. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we could call a truce?”
Meeka bristled, still spoiling for a fight, more like a small, spitting kitten than a roaring tiger, and the sight brought my sense of humour back on line. “I think the best we could manage at the moment might be an armed stand-off.”
“Very well, until we find Angel I’ll hold my tongue,” the girl agreed sulkily. “After that, I’ll scratch a scar across that smug face of yours, I swear I will!”
“You don’t have one tenth of the speed you’d need to lay a finger on me.” I curled my lip at her. “Nor one hundredth of the nerve!”
“Girls, girls!” Lyall raised both hands to placate us, “Let’s order some more drinks, relax and stay calm—”
My ears picked up a tiny rustle in the roses above us, beating Zenni’s scan by a fraction of a second. A small construct, mass around three kilos, mammalian.
Meeka let out a strangled squeak and her slim hands flew to her mouth to hold back the sound. Following her gaze, I looked up at a sharply-pointed snout patched with white and brown, like a fox in a butterfly mask.
“What in heaven’s name is that?” Lyall snapped, as his probe found a blank where the creature’s mind should have been.
“Our messenger, no doubt.”
The construct dropped down to the table-top, a ball of buff fur with a spectacular tail, as long again as the rest of its body and banded with chestnut. It sat up on its haunches and combed through its tracery of whiskers with long, dainty fingers. I guessed that it was a Tambou species, as the nearest Terran equivalent would be a lemur and those had never possessed such well-developed hands.
“What is it?” Meeka viewed the creature with a mixture of distaste and fright.
“It’s a simulacrum—a computer brain in an animal body. Tambouret excels at making such things.”
She was appalled. “How cruel! They inflict that on a poor defenceless creature?”
“It was never a real animal, just a piece of insensate flesh grown in a tank with the circuitry spliced into its skull.” I brushed a fingertip over the construct’s silken coat and it skipped up my arm to settle on my shoulder, remarkably light for its bulk, as if it had hollow bones. It ran a hot, spidery finger around the rim of my ear, tweaked at the topaz earring and then delicately picked the blue Tambou flower from where I’d wound it into my hair. It ate the bloom in two quick bites, and when I giggled at such behaviour, it matched my amused stare with chocolate-drop eyes bright with robot intelligence. “Who do you seek, little friend? Do you have a message for us?”
“This unit is programmed to speak to a Mr Marteen and a Madame Jansen,” the construct said, in a perfect soprano. Its mouth moved in time with the words, open and shut, like an old-fashioned flat-screen cartoon, revealing needle-sharp teeth and a baby-pink tongue.
“I’m Lyall Marteen, on this world at least.” The telepath admitted, with a rueful smile. “Speak your piece.”
“The words concern Madame Marteen and the child. Both are safe and they will remain so, but only if you are sensible and share none of this with the authorities.”
“Are you threatening to harm them?” Meeka’s hands balled into fists as if she would strike the little animal.
“This unit was instructed to deliver a message.” The lemur’s tail twitched nervously. “Will you hear it out?”
“Please go on.” I stroked the construct between its ears and it chittered at me before leaping back to the table-top.
“If you wish the return of the woman and child, this is what you must do. At noon tomorrow, this unit will guide you into the forest where you will leave a certain token at a specified place and, one hour later, the captives will be released. You will not speak of this incident to the authorities, neither Tambou nor Terran. If you disobey these instructions, the consequences could be dire.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘a certain token’?” Lyall asked. “What do you require as ransom? Money?”
“The parties who engaged this unit do not want Terran currency. It is useless to them. What they ask for are the shares owned by Madame Marteen. Their monetary value is not substantial, a small price to pay for her life. They also wish for the stock owned by Madame Jansen; a greater sum perhaps, but they consider she would sooner part with that than have her daughter mutilated, or even killed.”
“You monsters!” Tears welled up in Meeka’s dark eyes.
“You don’t give us much time.” I wondered what answers had been placed in the creature’s head and what questions it would respond to. We could have tapped into its memory as we had done the tiger’s, but I felt we should hear all of the program first. “How can we get all you ask for in a little over thirteen hours?”
“All that is required is a bill of sale, and that can be drafted by any lawyer in Krystallya. Perhaps the hotel staff can recommend one. The document must be made out in favour of one Madame N Hanna, citizen of Ovambos.” The construct paused, watching each of us in turn. “This unit was directed to tell you that if you attempt to revoke the bills of sale after your dear ones have been returned, then unpleasant things will occur. Mr Marteen will fully understand what is meant by this. Do not detain or damage this unit. If you interfere with it in any way, you will lose all chance of reclaiming your companions, for if no tokens are left at the designated spot, both of them will die. That is the total content of this unit’s message.”
Even as the final word was out of its mouth, the lemur was moving, darting between Lyall and Meeka. I gave chase without reaching a conscious decision to do so, following hard on its magnificent tail as it skirted the pergola and gained the terrace wall. It hesitated for a fraction of a second before jumping, unfurling the loose flaps of skin that lay alongside its lithe furry body, holding them taut between outstretched limbs to glide down the mountain-side. It passed beyond the compass of light cast by the terrace lanterns and I lost it in the darkness, then Zenni cut in the heat-sensors and we tracked the warm pink source down to the canopy of the forest, where it was quenched in the deep blue patchwork of cool, wet foliage.
“Which way did it go?” Lyall asked, as I came back to them. There was a strained look about his eyes. I guessed that he’d tried to follow me and found his reserves of strength wanting.
“Straight down. It coasted on the wind, like a flying squirrel.”
“You could have stopped it.” Meeka accused. “Your sort has all that wonderful psi. Why didn’t you use some?”
“My sort also has a smattering of intelligence. If what it said was true, any attempt to hold it might have wiped its program and dashed our only chance of releasing Chandre.”
“You don’t give a damn for my daughter, do you?” She snarled back in my face. “You don’t want to rescue her, a child of the man you hated so much! All you care about is saving your precious Chandre!”
“She’s my precious Chandre as well,” Lyall said, and the hurt in his voice doused my rising temper, like a pail of ice-water full in the face. “If I wasn’t a bloody invalid, too weak to walk across a room, I’d be ransacking this city to find her. Both of us are helpless to resolve this threat, so we’ll have to trust Anna to save both of them.”
“Trust her?” Meeka spat. “Better to trust the kidnappers!”
I turned my back on her, plucked my glass from the table and drained the rest of my wine. For most of the evening our quiet eccentricities had been ignored by the other guests on the terrace but now the volume and increasing savagery of our arguments were attracting too many curious stares. “This isn’t the place to discuss such sensitive issues. I suggest we adjourn to Lyall’s room before continuing.”
Meeka snorted. “That’s the mark of a true coward, running away from any confrontation, however minor—”
“Let it be, girl.” Lyall cut in. “Anna’s right.”
It took a whi
le to summon a pair of porters to do the honours with Lyall’s wheelchair, and Meeka used the time to glare her hatred, like a well-honed stiletto, into the back of my neck. Once we’d gained our retreat, Zenni ran his habitual scan for hidden eyes and ears, which was negative, as usual. I didn’t believe that the Tambou would ever fall from their state of rustic grace and use such blatant trappings of technology within the rocky confines of their city. I opened the doors to the balcony a sliver, just enough to admit the night breeze, and took the end of the sofa nearest to them, curling up in the deep upholstery. My companions left it to me to pose the relevant question, although I felt sure I already knew the answer. “Exactly what are these shares of Chandre’s?”
“To my knowledge she only owns the stock of one company.” Lyall sighed. “Delany Corp.”
“I was afraid of that.” I glanced at Meeka. “You too?”
“Jan left it to me,” she replied defensively. “I wouldn’t buy into your family business.”
“Understandably. Well, that gives us one fragment of the puzzle. Michael told me that the market in Delany stock had heated up, as if someone was hoarding it to swing a takeover bid. He laid the blame on an offworld manufacturer called Transyst-Interworld.”
Meeka gaped at me. “If they take Delany, then EI falls straight into their hands!”
“That’s the intention, although I don’t think it was the real reason behind this kidnapping.”
Lyall edged his chair round to get a better look into my face. “Are you playing logic or intuition here, Anna?”
“Neither. All we’ve got is a Pandora’s box of variables, a viper’s nest of assorted facts, some mystifying and some even contradictory.” I dragged my hair free of Caron’s plait, combing it down with my fingers to ease the tautness in my scalp. “Want to hear my best-fit scenario?”
“Whatever we want, I expect we’ll be forced to sit through your vain little performance.” Meeka folded her arms and leaned back in her seat, distancing herself from the conversation.
“It often helps to talk things through and the least we can do is listen.” Lyall nodded to me. “Go ahead, speculate.”
“On their way home from the river, Chandre and Angel wander off the path—perhaps they hear something strange, perhaps Angel runs off into the forest, whatever—and by accident they stumble into a gathering of Tambou. It’s an illegal meeting, maybe a secret ritual or forbidden ceremony, and the participants are angry or scared enough to reach the rash decision to kill the trespassers.” I held up a hand on cue to quash Meeka’s outburst and she snapped her mouth shut, a martyr to sulkiness. “Someone’s sent back here to erase all evidence of their presence on Tambouret and someone else is dispatched to fell some timber, leave some false clues and spatter the whole with chicken gore.”
“They must have known that a set-up like that wouldn’t fool anyone,” the telepath observed.
“Perhaps they hadn’t bargained on cynical old pros like us, eh?” My imagination was freewheeling pretty well, so I ran with it. “Meanwhile mercy prevails. Maybe the leader has a change of heart or maybe Chandre talks him or her into sparing their lives, but the accident’s already been staged, the hotel cleared, the records tampered with, and only the victims are missing. I’m convinced that the pair of them might have been released if Chandre had agreed to be sworn to secrecy on the affair, then someone found out who she was and turned the whole charade into a kidnapping. Luck has given our unknown group two valuable hostages and the means to grab some worthwhile assets. Even if they don’t want the Delany stock themselves they can sell it, for funds or favour.”
“What about this ‘Madame Hanna’?” Lyall asked. “Surely that’s one firm lead?”
I waited for an answer to come down the link. “Half of the population of Ovambos is called Hanna or some close variant of that word. Apparently it was the name of the founding family.”
“Where is Ovambos?” Meeka wondered.
I almost groaned at the answer. “At the edge of the Aegea Cluster.”
The significance of that was lost on the girl, but not on Lyall, who opted for a reprise of yesterday’s wan pallor.
It’s all beginning to make horrible sense, I admitted to my partner. Transyst must be acting as a front for a Cluster rebel group aiming to tear the throat out of EI, while the Sisterhood have their poisonous fingers in the pie and the whole shebang is complicated by a unknown factor or two here on Tambouret.
Just the kind of mess we’d cry off and get our tails out of the system, before we worked for EI, that is. This time we’re in it right up to our necks. Zenni sighed. Our only advantage is that they don’t know who you really are.
And I pray to all Jeb’s heathen deities that it stays that way! Having voiced that fervent hope I turned my attention outwards again, aware that Lyall had asked me a question.
The telepath frowned at my silence and repeated himself. “Anna, what are we going to do?”
My intuition wavered, then grounded itself on the rock. “What choice do we have? Capitulate, of course.”
“We can’t give in to their demands!” Meeka protested. “Even if we do, what guarantee do we have that the kidnappers will keep their word?”
“Everything we’ve seen so far suggests that’s the last thing in the galaxy they will do.” Lyall added.
“Do you think Chandre and your child will be set free if we do nothing?”
She shook her head, turning pleading eyes towards Lyall, who threw the problem back into my lap. “You’re our prime-pair, Anna, and it’s time to prove your worth. You cut the cloth.”
“Okay.” I paused for a sprinkling of seconds, waiting for the lightning-flash of inspiration. None came and all I was left with was a plan dumb enough to be the plot of a seedy thriller. If I’d seen the script before being cast, I’d have turned the part down flat. “My advice is this—we get the documents made up and take them to the appointed place tomorrow. I’ll wait there and follow whoever makes the pick-up, which should lead me to Chandre and Angel. Then all I have to do is stage a spectacular escape, not forgetting to snatch back those vital papers, after which we can hold a tearful reunion, get off-planet as fast as we can and head back to Earth. It’ll be a snip, for sure.”
There was a silence of the icy and unpleasant variety. Zenni held his non-breath and although he didn’t say it, I knew that he doubted that they’d buy it.
“That’s it?” Meeka all but shrieked at me. “Terra’s government lavishes all this on the Zenith programme—millions of credits, the time and expertise of its finest brains, the best hardware ever built—and all you can come up with is bullshit like that? Jesus in diapers!”
I folded my arms. “Care to come up with anything better? Unless Erik gave you a crash course in his own devious brand of espionage, I doubt that you can.”
“We could let the local police in on this latest development, bring them into the loop?” Lyall suggested, when the girl declined to rise to my challenge.
“And have that idiot SantDenis do exactly what I’m proposing to? Do you think he’d make a better job of it than an agent-pair?”
Meeka buried her face in her hands, not to hide tears but to conceal how weary she was. After a minute or two, she combed the braids back from her forehead and looked up. “We don’t have any choice—you’re right in that much.”
“So you’re willing to go along with Anna’s plan?” Lyall asked, in amazement. “Holes and all?”
Jansen’s child-widow rose gracelessly to her feet, her response the barest nod. “We can do the necessary paperwork tomorrow. For now, good-night.”
Neither of us made any objection to her leaving. Lyall hauled himself out of the wheelchair and managed a creditable stagger to the other end of the couch. “How’s your precog? Does this lame strategy of yours have any chance of succeeding?”
“Ask the Misses Treebone to scry that for you. I’m deaf, dumb and blind in the fortune-telling department tonight.”
“Even if yo
u do free Chandre and the child, we’re not home free. If the contract goes out on us to the Sisterhood, we’re all dead meat. Their greatest boast is that they never fail to execute a mark.”
“You’re still alive.”
“Only due to your timely intervention.” Real terror flickered behind his hazel eyes. “Will you watch over all of us for the rest of our lives? Will you spend every day of the next four or five decades looking back over your shoulder, in ceaseless vigilance, living in fear of a knife in your back, because that’s what it will take to avoid those assassin witches?”
“I’ve been under threat of death before.”
“And you failed to escape it, didn’t you?”
That made me smile, and it seemed so long since my lips had curved upwards that they’d almost lost the trick of it. “I’d say I was in pretty good shape for a corpse!”
“Our trap on Lysseya was first rate, designed to hook and hold a prime-pair. We left you dead, or very close to that state.” Lyall had rarely spoken of our first encounter and I wondered what prompted him to now. “We’d chosen that world because it was so primitive—no surface vehicles, few spacecraft and only a barbaric level of medicine. You were so badly injured that no native could have helped you, and that fiery purgatory of a desert should have finished you off.” He paused. “I never have been able to accept that Anna-Marie came through all of that.”
It wasn’t a new accusation; Jansen had said as much to me before I’d silenced him for good. “Who am I, then? A substitute planted by EI’s enemies, surgically altered to wear Anna’s face? If not that, then a clone or perhaps a simulacrum from this place? How far does your imagination stretch?” I switched to the harsh glottal language of the Lysseye, my accent rendered rough through lack of use. “As far as the quial took you, my friend Qeshaan, in the walled city of Da Dulyss?”
Lyall hastily erected a pale smokescreen of unconcern over his emotional turmoil, yet it did little to cloak the black horror beneath. “As I recall it, that bloody drug took you further than I’ve ever been.”
The Beauty of Our Weapons Page 13