On the other hand, the absence of Sushi and Do-Wop was some cause for concern, predictable though it was. Whenever there was trouble, one or the other was likely to be in it up to his ears. This time it looked as if both were involved. They’d never missed a ship, to her knowledge—not yet, at least. But they were an excellent bet to come racing up at the last possible second, with someone or another in hot pursuit. She hoped she wouldn’t have to slam the shuttle door in a security officer’s face. She’d spent so much time building a positive image for the company, it’d be a shame to leave the station on that sort of note.
But with half an hour to go, she might as well spend the time doing something other than worrying. She pulled out the art history book she’d been reading. She’d never had much interest in the old twentieth-century “moderns”—it seemed curious to call them that, so long after they were all dead and gone—but the author was making a good case that Picasso was, after all, a very talented draughtsman. She turned to where she’d left off and began reading.…
* * *
Maxine Pruett didn’t usually answer the communicator herself. In fact, it was fairly unusual that she even heard its summons. People didn’t call her—she called them. If they needed to get in touch, there was an office number, with a secretary during the day and an answering service at night. Only very close personal friends (and there weren’t many of them, nowadays) ever called her at home. And when they did, Laverna answered it.
So, it took her some time to notice the persistent buzz. She had the sound on the holovision turned up loud, as always, and the comm unit was in another of the suite’s eight rooms. Maxie didn’t have a nagging fear of missing an important call. That was for other people to worry about. She was perfectly capable of letting the communicator buzz until she felt like picking it up, or turning off the buzzer if she wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t her that was going to be in trouble if an important message didn’t get through …
But the damned thing had been buzzing for at least five minutes, and Laverna still hadn’t answered. Where the hell was Laverna? Finally, Maxine stomped out to her office—really Laverna’s office, since Laverna was the one who used it ninety-five percent of the time—and picked up the handset—a basic, voice-only unit. Nobody in her business wanted a videophone in her private home. “Who’s there?” she growled.
“Ah, Mrs. Pruett, I was beginning to wonder if you were there,” said a familiar voice.
“Captain Jester,” she said, although she knew perfectly well his real name was Phule. Now this was a surprise. “What can I do for you, Captain?” she added. She wasn’t inclined to do anything for him, but it was good policy to be minimally polite to somebody who had an armed Legion company on call.
“You can tell me where my butler is,” snarled the captain. “Better yet, you can send him back—all in one piece, if you don’t mind.”
“Your butler?” Maxine’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know anything about your butler.”
“Don’t play games with me, Mrs. Pruett,” said the captain. “Beeker was near your headquarters when he disappeared, and I have reason to believe he had gone there to see one of your subordinates. Now, are you going to send him back or not?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking abou … Wait a minute,” said Maxine, suddenly making a mental connection. “Which of my subordinates was he coming to see?”
“I don’t know her full name,” said Phule stiffly. “Livorno, Laverne—something like that.”
Maxine’s teeth clenched. “Laverna? Damn! Captain, can I call you right back? I need to check on something.”
“I’ll be waiting,” said Phule, and gave her the comm code. “Don’t take too long, though—I can promise you, you don’t want me to send my people over to find out what’s causing the delay.”
“I don’t need your promises to know that,” Maxine snapped at the captain. “Cool your jets—I’ll get right back to you.” She slammed down the receiver and went looking for her assistant.
It didn’t take long to determine that Laverna wasn’t anywhere in the suite. A quick phone call established that she wasn’t in the bar downstairs—her usual watering hole. The last person who’d seen her was the guard at the door. That had been in midafternoon—as she was leaving the building with a conservatively dressed middle-aged man. The butler!
“That bitch!” Maxine slammed down the phone. Then she began to figure out what she was going to tell the captain.
* * *
“You sure we got time for this?” said Do-Wop.
“All the time in the world,” said Sushi, bending over an open panel behind which could be seen complex circuitry. “Quiet, now, I need to concentrate. And make sure nobody’s watching.”
“Yeah, right,” said Do-Wop. He scratched himself and pretended to goof off, gazing back down the little alley next to the casino offices. Night never fell on Lorelei, but it was early evening by Galactic Standard Time, which was the system observed on the space station. There were a few people on the streets—those finishing an early dinner, or casino workers coming off shift—but nobody seemed to pay much attention to a couple of men in maintenance uniforms crouching by an open panel with tools spread around. Just act like we belong there, Sushi had told him, and it was apparently working.
“Nobody payin’ attention,” he reported. He peered back to see how Sushi was doing. The job involved removing a particular chip and replacing it with a slightly more complex one designed to fit in the same slot. That sounded easy, but sometimes the installation didn’t resemble the pictures in the manuals. An easy job could become impossible if you only had limited time. There was a wire from some previous repair that was going to have to be disconnected, moved aside, and reconnected when the job was done. A few minutes longer. Well, that’s why they always told you to allow more time than you thought you needed to pull off a job.
And now there was somebody looking at them. “Soosh!” he hissed, and tried to act as if he wasn’t nervous. “Casino guard.”
“Act calm,” said Sushi, snapping the new chip into place, and pocketing the old one. “Now all I gotta do is reconnect the repair wire.”
“So hurry up and do it. He’s comin’!”
“Oh, in that case …” Sushi took his soldering laser and quickly played it over the base of the chip they’d removed. He stood up and said loudly, “Look at this piece of crap.”
“What the hell?” said Do-Wop, and then the security guard was looking over his shoulder.
“They had the wrong value in. No wonder the bastard burned out so soon. Some guy was too lazy to go back to the shop for the right one.” Sushi took up the obligatory repairman’s critique of his predecessor’s shoddy work.
“You guys workin’ late,” said the guard.
“Yeah, Liverakos told us finish up this last job,” said Sushi. Of course, he’d found out the casino maintenance chief’s name. “They got a new kid on next shift, and he’s late already.”
“Yeah, I seen him around,” said the guard. There were always new kids around. “Guess he won’t be here long.”
“Unless he’s related to somebody,” griped Do-Wop.
He and the guard went on about the ills of nepotism and favoritism on the job for a couple of minutes while Sushi quietly knelt down and finished reconnecting the wire. “OK, we can close her up,” he said. “And then I can find out if my wife’s gonna kill me for getting home late.”
“Lucky guy, you got a wife,” said Do-Wop.
“You call that lucky?” said Sushi, and the guard laughed. They wrestled the panel back in place while the guard kibitzed, and Do-Wop tightened the fasteners. Sushi started packing the tools.
“OK, see you boys around,” said the guard, wandering back down the alleyway.
“See you,” said Sushi. It probably wouldn’t be too soon, though. Unless something suddenly went very wrong, they’d be in deep space less than an hour from now. They finished packing up their tools, cleaned up the small amount of
debris the “repair” had generated, and walked casually out of the alley.
Across the street, the security guard was standing, looking completely uninterested in them. They walked away quickly.
* * *
Maxine was still trying to decide on her story when the communicator buzzed again. She strode over and picked it up. “Yeah?”
It was the guard downstairs. “Boss, that Legion captain’s here, with a bunch of soldiers, and they’re loaded for bear. The customers are buggin’. How you want me to play it?”
Maxine’s reply was instantaneous. “Stall ’em—and keep your own guns out of sight. I’ll be straight down.” She disconnected, and headed for the door. Halfway there, she stopped and checked her gun; it was ready and loaded. For a moment, she considered leaving it behind—it would be next to useless against the legionnaires’ weaponry, and more likely to get her into trouble than to get her out of it—but long years of habit overrode the prudent impulse. She returned it to its concealed holster and stomped out the door.
Down in the lobby, Phule was there with half a dozen legionnaires. From behind the nearby row of quantum slot machines, tourists stared at Phule and his men (although they kept pumping in coins). A few nervous gamblers waited at the window, cashing their chips while they still had the chance. And several bulky gentlemen—plainclothes casino security—occupied seats in the lobby area, studiously ignoring the armed invasion.
Phule turned when he saw her and said, “About time, Mrs. Pruett. I have a confirmed report that my butler was in this building. Where are you keeping him?”
“Keeping him? Are you crazy?” Maxine said, taken aback. “What the hell do I want your butler for?”
“I don’t know, but I want him back,” said Phule. “And I’m not going to wait very long.”
“Look, I don’t know where he is and I don’t care. Feel free to search the place,” said Maxine. She was confident that anything she didn’t want him to see was well hidden; the place had been built on the assumption that search parties might occasionally come through. A few had, over the years, though none had penetrated beyond the nominally secret areas where teams of casino employees conducted surveillance and security operations, all perfectly legal and innocuous. Maxine’s real secrets were much better hidden.
“You don’t care?” said Phule. “Not even if he’s run off with your assistant?”
Maxine stared him down. “What if he has? She’s of legal age, after all.”
“If she knows half as much about your business as he knows about mine, we’re both in trouble,” the captain hissed. Then he looked around and said, “Is there someplace we can talk? Someplace secure? There are too many people here for my nerves.”
“Too many for my nerves, too,” she said, seizing the moment. “Most of ’em are your troops, if you want to know the truth. Get ’em the hell out of here, so my customers can go back to playing instead of gawking at all that hardware, and I’m sure we can find a place to talk.”
“We can arrange that,” said Phule. He turned to his troops. “I’ll be talking to Mrs. Pruett. You take up positions outside—with your eyes open. I’ll be half an hour—if I need more time, I’ll call you.” He tapped his wrist communicator. “If you don’t hear from me by then, you call me. If I don’t answer, you know what to do. Understood? Do whatever you need to do.”
“Yes, sir!” said the squad leader, a huge man with sergeant’s stripes. He signaled the troops and they began to file out the door.
Maxine nodded. “This way,” she said, and Phule followed her to her office. He took the chair she offered, and they sat facing each other across a large desk. “Now,” said Maxine, “what makes you think I know anything about your butler?”
“You as much as said so,” said Phule. “‘She’s of legal age’—you know they’re together, or you wouldn’t have been talking that way. We’ll both save time if we cooperate on this. I want my butler back, you want your assistant … maybe for different reasons, but we both want the same thing. We both gain by working together on this.”
Maxine didn’t blink. “Working together how?”
“Ah, I knew you’d get down to business when you saw the advantages,” said Phule. “Here’s the way I see it. We can’t equal your intelligence sources on-station—we aren’t bad, mind you, just not your equal. Yet. We do pick up items you wouldn’t, and as far as our off-station sources—well, you’re not in that league.”
“You’d be surprised,” said the mob boss. “But let’s say it’s so—you’re saying we share whatever tips we get? What’s to stop somebody from keeping secrets?”
“Really, Mrs. Pruett,” said Phule. “We aren’t going to pass along sensitive information, and neither are you. But we have to trust each other to pass along anything relevant to our mutual business. Just as we have to trust whoever finds the fugitives to return them in good condition—my butler is of no use to me dead.”
“No accidentally shot resisting arrest, in other words,” said Maxine. “Well, I hate to tie my people’s hands that way. It’s going to make things more expensive.”
“I don’t know about your assistant, but I can assure you that losing my butler will make things extremely expensive for me,” said Phule. “There won’t be any accidents, will there?”
“No accidents,” said Maxine. “I don’t see how I’ve got anything to lose passing along a tip that might help me as much as it does you, if you’ll do the same for us. And we’ll pass along your butler if we catch him. My guarantee on it.”
“And we’ll send your assistant back,” said Phule. “Here’s what we know: My butler didn’t come back from a visit to this hotel, for a lunch date. We searched his room a while ago; there wasn’t much missing, just everything he’d take if he weren’t planning to come back. And he took a few pieces of, uh, company property that I had issued to him for use in his work. That’s when I called you.”
“Right, one of our guys saw him leaving here,” said Maxine, deciding she could confirm Phule’s deduction. “Right about lunchtime, in fact—with my assistant. Ten-to-one those two have gone freelance. They’re old enough to know better.”
“That’s for sure,” said Phule. “I thought Beeker was …” His communicator buzzed. “Jester here,” he answered. He put it to his ear for privacy, but Maxine could hear the buzz of an excited voice—a woman’s voice from the pitch. “When …? I see. They’re certain …? Well, we’d never get the authority to run them down in space, but we can grab them at the other end. Who do we know there? OK, stay in touch. Jester out.”
“They’ve left the station,” said Maxine.
“Right. Two-nineteen shuttle to the Patriot liner, which went translight three hours ago. Next stop is Trannae. We’ll have somebody looking for them when they land. Do you have anybody there?”
“Maybe,” said Maxine, trying to remember which family was in charge at Trannae. It was about ninety days’ journey to Trannae, if she remembered correctly—which translated to what? Three weeks shiptime, she thought. Laverna would know….
Phule broke into her thoughts. “I’ll get the arrival info sent to you as soon as I get back to my office, but it looks as if we’ve got them,” he said. “They aren’t going to get off a liner in hyperspace.”
“Good,” she said. “I think we’ve got a deal—and now, would you and your soldiers get off my property? You’re frightening the marks.”
* * *
21:48—a little more than ten minutes left before departure time. If the captain hadn’t appeared by then, Lieutenant Rembrandt was going to have to delay the shuttle. Her orders said to leave precisely on schedule, no matter what. But she also had her own judgment, and she meant to use it. Abandoning the captain wasn’t an option.
A quiet tone notified Rembrandt that someone had entered the corridor she was guarding. She put down her book and stood up to see who was coming. She didn’t expect trouble, but she pulled her weapon out of its holster just in case. If trouble did come calling
, she was armed with the Phule-proof adaptation of Qual’s stun ray.
The broad corridor was well-lit, and so she easily made out the two figures approaching her. They wore regulation Legion black, with unit patches for the Omega Mob. But despite the familiar uniforms, she didn’t recognize the faces. One, a lean, black woman, was a complete stranger to her. The other, a heavy-built man, had sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve and an ill-fitting full beard … there was something about him, but …
The eyes gave him away. “Beeker!” she whispered, recognizing him through the disguise. “What’s with the chin shrubbery? And who’s your friend?”
“The new recruit, Lieutenant,” said the butler, his voice a low-pitched growl. “Permission to board?”
“Permission granted, Sergeant,” she said, doing her best not to let her amusement show. Beeker was the last person she’d ever expected to see in uniform. As for his companion, she was obviously a good bit past the usual age for recruits—even in the Legion, notoriously lax in its entrance requirements. The “sergeant” and “recruit” saluted—superfluous, since she herself was in mufti—and went through the shuttle entry way.
Rembrandt peered along the corridor, but there was no one else. She checked her watch. She had time to finish a chapter, so she sat back down with her book.
She’d read half a page when the alarm sounded again. She looked up to see a single figure approaching: the captain. She put down her book and rose to her feet. “Good to see you, sir,” she said. “How’d it go?”
“Smooth as butter, I think,” said Phule. “Lex’s actors were very convincing as legionnaires, and Maxine bought my line of goods about Beeker and Laverna running off. Did they get here all right?”
“Yes, they were right ahead of you. Very well-disguised, too. I didn’t recognize Beeker right away, and if I didn’t, his own mother couldn’t.”
The Complete Phule’s Company Boxed Set Page 67