‘Maybe,’ Shil said. ‘This still feels too much like a trap. I can’t believe he drew us here with no intention of doing something about it if we took the bait.’
‘Well…’ Araven’s eyes scanned the room and then he frowned. ‘He left his case here. Maybe he’s coming back.’
‘His case?’ Shil spotted the hard-shell rolling case set behind a sofa. It was a fairly standard model: black plastic with an extending handle and… a blinking green light where the lock should be. ‘Shit! We need to get out of here.’ The blinking light turned steady red suddenly and Shil moved. Leaping forward, she wrapped her arms around Araven, and then she threw them both toward the window as she stabbed her thumb down on the button on her little gadget.
And they were lying in the street outside the building while dust, ash, and fragments of building fell around them. Shil looked around to see most of the front of the block of flats gone. They had been blown out through the window, and then the blast had removed the wall behind them. The structure was busy collapsing in on itself, and there were fires burning anywhere anything flammable had been exposed to the heat, but a lot of the structure had simply been demolished. She really hoped there were not too many people in there, but it was early evening, and a lot of the occupants would have been home…
‘What happened?’ Araven asked.
‘Bomb.’
‘I got that. It looks like a thermobaric device. Why aren’t we burned, crushed, and mangled in there?’
Shil held up her gadget. ‘Stasis bubble generator. For about ten seconds, we were in a bubble where time doesn’t really happen. The explosion pushed us out of the flat.’
‘And you knew it was a bomb because?’
‘Suitcases don’t have green flashing lights on them.’ Shil pushed to her feet and held out a hand. ‘Come on. It would probably be best if we weren’t here when the emergency services arrive.’
~~~
The sound of the doorbell at eight o’clock on a Sunday night came as something of a surprise. Lindsey Tailor looked at her husband, and he shrugged. ‘You getting that, Marc?’ she asked.
‘I guess I am,’ Marcus said, flashing his wife a grin. Getting up from the sofa, he walked out into the hallway of their little house and opened the front door. There was a man standing there with a smile on his face. Tall, attractive, with long, dark hair, and Marcus thought he knew him. ‘Can I help you?’ Marcus asked as a name began to filter in from the depths of his memory. Donavan… The man looked like one of the company’s clients.
‘You can, yes,’ T’ney said, and he lifted his hand. Light flared and Marcus felt a sharp pain in his chest and then he was falling, his vision dimming to nothing. T’ney stepped forward, catching the falling accountant and carrying him through into the hall. He closed the door and dumped Marcus onto the carpet in one move.
‘Marc?’ Lindsey’s voice came through from the lounge. ‘Marc, who was it?’ T’ney was just about to go looking for her when she stepped through into the hall. She did not have time to really take in what she was seeing before T’ney hit her with a shock charge and she went down.
T’ney smiled. ‘Excellent,’ he said, reaching into his pocket for an injector. ‘Now I just have to leave your husband a message, and we can go have some fun.’
~~~
‘We’re going to have to discuss this sooner or later,’ Araven said. He was holding the stasis device Shil had used. It was dead, its power used up in that one activation, but he was still turning it over in his hands as though he expected it to speak. ‘This, and the other things I haven’t asked about.’
Shil sighed. She had been watching the news broadcasts for anything about the explosion. So far, it had been put down to a gas explosion. She was hoping it would stay that way because if the authorities suspected a bomb, travel would become a lot more annoying. ‘Do we really have to? Can’t you just… ignore it and be thankful I had the thing.’
‘You have a teleport projector on your ship, Shil. And your fabricator is nothing like any fabricator I’ve ever seen. Stasis technology hasn’t existed since–’
‘The veda. Yes, it’s vedan tech.’ She frowned and bit at her lip and came to a decision. ‘So am I.’
‘What?’ He was suddenly sitting up straight and staring at her.
‘You asked how I know all the things I know. Well, it’s because… The “gift” I was given by Rayan, it was a sort of viral computer system. Distributed computers in my blood and tissue that have access to pretty much everything the veda knew. Have you ever heard of the Vedan Virtues, the Veda Dorihin?’
‘I think I… They’re a legend.’
‘No, they were real. They were created by the veda, but several of them survived the veda dying out. I’m the host of the Virtue of Justice, Anoa. That’s why I do what I do. It’s my… purpose. I hunt down the worst of the worst, and I put a stop to whatever they’re doing. And, Araven, I need you to keep this out of your reports. No one needs to know that there are still Virtues out there, doing what they always did. Especially not StarCorps.’
‘But–’
‘No buts. The galaxy isn’t ready to have vedan tech out there again, not without the veda to keep it in check. You–’ She stopped at the sound of a knock on the door of the suite. The door was thick enough to obscure the heat signature behind it a little, but there seemed to be a single person out there. There was no way T’ney would try taking them on alone, but Araven picked up his weapon as Shil walked over to the door.
The mystery just deepened when she checked the spyhole. She pulled the door open. ‘Marc? What are you–’ The man looked like Hell. He was trembling, and his eyes were puffy, but they widened as he took in who was standing in front of him and saw past the different hair.
‘Sheila? Shit, Sheila, what are you doing here? Where did you–’ He cut himself off, jamming his eyes shut. ‘Never mind that. Someone came to our home tonight. I’d swear it was Anthony Donavan. I’m not sure exactly what happened then, but when I woke up, Lindsey was gone.’ He pulled his hand from the pocket of his coat and thrust a sheet of paper at Shil. ‘She was gone, and this was left. It says… It says that if I want to see her again, I need to bring this here. To this room. To… you?’
Rather than taking the note, Shil grabbed Marcus’s arm and pulled him inside. Closing the door, she said, ‘Araven, get him a drink. T’ney’s kidnapped his wife.’ Then she switched to English. ‘Marc, this is Araven. He’s a friend. He doesn’t speak any English, and you don’t speak anything he does, but he’s here to help. You’re sure it was Donavan?’
‘Uh,’ Marcus watched as Araven went to the drinks cabinet, ‘no, but… Yes. I’ve only seen him a couple of times, but I think it was him. Weren’t you seeing him before you vanished?’
‘He kidnapped me.’ She steered Marcus to a sofa and pushed him down into it.
‘D-does Brian know you’re back?’
‘No, and I’m not. Not really. We’re here to arrest Donavan, when we find him. When that’s done, I’ll be leaving again. Give me the note.’
The paper had two distinct sets of writing on it. The first part was in English, with instructions for Marcus to take the note to Shil and Araven’s room. There was, of course, a threat there too. The second part was in Gadek Taved: Come to the coordinates below. Unarmed. You have until 15:30 local time to get there, or you can say goodbye to Lindsey.
‘I don’t know what that second bit is,’ Marcus said. ‘I’ve never even seen lettering like that.’ He looked up as Araven handed him a glass of whiskey. ‘Uh, thank you.’
‘You are welcome,’ Araven replied, then he took the paper Shil was handing him and began to read.
‘He does know a few words of English,’ Shil said. ‘Tourist phrases mostly.’
‘And he can read that weird writing,’ Marcus said. ‘What’s going on, Sheila? Your hair… And you look… different.’
‘A lot happened to me after I was taken, Marc, and I can’t go into it. The important
thing is that Donavan wants me and Araven to go somewhere to get Linds, and we’re going to go.’
‘With the flight times back to Romania,’ Araven said in Luris, ‘he’s not leaving us much time to prepare. I don’t see how we can get in there to get her out.’
‘Did he say Romania?’ Marcus asked.
‘He did,’ Shil replied and then looked up at Araven. ‘You are forgetting something,’ she said in Luris. ‘We’ve been using air transport to stay under the radar and avoid too much trouble with customs. We have an alternative method of transport, and it’s a lot faster.’
‘We do?’ Araven asked. His eyes widened. ‘We do!’
‘Right.’ She turned back to Marcus. ‘Marc, I need you to go home. Don’t call the police. Let us handle it. We will get Lindsey back to you as soon as we can.’
‘But–’ Marcus began, and then he stopped when he saw the look in Shil’s eyes.
Or maybe when he saw her eyes: Shil had a feeling that they were doing the glowing thing again. ‘Trust me, Marc. We’ll get her back, and Donavan is going to pay for involving her in this.’
Romania, 14th March.
‘They have it pretty well camouflaged,’ Shil commented. They were looking down on a ten-thousand-ton Harkonet freighter which had been hidden away in a valley in the northern Romanian mountains. Someone had rigged camouflage netting around the bulky ship, breaking up its outline, but the hull had some sort of chameleon coating on it as well. With the netting, the vessel blended into the mountains almost perfectly, so long as you were not too close.
‘Luckily,’ Araven replied. ‘This is going to be a mess to clean up. What were they thinking? Anyone could come across that thing.’
‘I’d imagine they were thinking that they’re going to make a lot of money selling humans off-world. Besides, I see several automated sentry units and a couple of guards. I figure there are more of the latter inside, but we need to observe for a while to figure out the schedule. Uh, what’s the policy on humans working for them?’
‘Not covered by the warrants. We can’t have them telling people what they’ve seen, at least until we’ve had time to get this area sanitised.’
‘Yeah, without evidence they’ll just be nuts with wild stories. The conspiracy nuts on the internet might believe them, but I doubt anyone else will, and that’s assuming they say anything given what they’re doing. “Yes, officer, there was an alien spaceship here which we were using to transport people off the planet and into slavery.” Not going to go down well.’
‘Huh. Observation then? I don’t think D’nova can have got your friend here this fast. If we’re lucky, we’ll see them arrive.’
‘Observation,’ Shil agreed. ‘As soon as Lindsey gets here, I want to be able to go in and get her out.’
~~~
‘Truck coming up the valley,’ Araven said. He was peering down the cleft in the mountains with a pair of high-tech binoculars, though the light amplification and infrared systems had not really been needed for about twenty minutes; the sun was not quite up, but they had been watching things around the ship for over three hours and this was the first time anything had approached.
‘See anyone in it?’ Shil asked.
‘I think… Yeah, that’s D’nova driving. There’s a woman in the seat beside him.’
Shil shifted, sitting upright from where she had been resting for a while and picking up her own binoculars. ‘That’s Lindsey. She looks… too quiet.’
‘Not scared. Not much of anything. Does it look like there’s a band around her head?’
‘Damn, yeah. Bastard’s got her in a slave band.’ Slave bands were illegal on a lot of worlds and considered relatively useless on others. They reduced activity in the frontal lobes of someone wearing one with the result that they took away volition. They were too easy to dislodge to make them of practical use long term, so where slavery was legal, they were only used as a temporary measure. That left the more universally illegal, shorter-term uses: kidnapping and rape. ‘Okay, we can’t get to them before they get to the ship, and we’d give ourselves away if we did. So, we go in as soon as they’re inside. We’ve got the route plotted, and we’ve got an estimate of the force on guard. We go in fast and hard. Agreed?’
Araven turned and picked up a harness which he began strapping on. ‘Agreed.’ The harness held a small pack between his shoulder blades, and that connected via a cable to a bulky rifle; a heavy electron rifle, quite capable of reducing a human to a smoking corpse in one shot, and the bulletproof vests the guards were wearing were not going to be much of an obstacle to it.
‘That is not a subtle weapon,’ Shil pointed out.
‘No, but we can clean up corpses as easily as keeping these people quiet any other way. The more I think about it, the more I don’t want anyone left around here who knows what’s been going on.’
Shil frowned. ‘That does not exactly bode well for the ones they’ve already got aboard. Or Lindsey.’
Araven paused, checking the charge indicator on his weapon. ‘Perhaps sitting here has just made me keen to exact some frontier justice. Having seen they’re using slave bands, I’m more sure than ever that they’re probably using other controls on the ship. I suspect StarCorps are going to need to do some deprogramming before we can send the other victims back. Blocking a few memories at the same time is practically no extra work.’
‘Oh. That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that, and I should have.’
‘You’ve got all that knowledge in your head, Shil, but you still haven’t been doing this for as long as I have. I think that’s a good thing, if I’m honest. Too much reality can make you kind of cynical.’
Shil gave a shrug and picked up her sword. ‘I’m not allowed to be cynical. Part of the programming. Justice over everything and all that. I’ll go take out the guards. Follow me down when it’s clear.’
~~~
Taking out a guard and then stealing the IFF transponder he was wearing was easy. Shil even left the man alive, gagged, and trussed up behind one of the freighter’s landing struts. The transponder identified her as friendly to the four robot turrets watching the area. They were far enough out that the precaution was not entirely necessary, but then Shil had no idea what was inside the ship.
The second man went down to the stun head on the hilt of Shil’s sword, and Araven joined her as she was finishing securing the second guard. She handed him a second transponder. ‘I’m assuming you don’t want them dead anyway?’ she asked.
‘Are you asking my personal opinion, or my official stance?’ Araven asked in reply.
‘I think I can guess at both. Okay, if this lot have any idea what they’re doing, they’ll be operating a check-in system, so we may not have long before it’s noticed they’re down. On the other hand, if they had much of an idea, they wouldn’t have separated like that.’
‘Let’s assume we need to move fast.’
Shil grinned. ‘I like fast. And remember to let me take the brunt of the gunfire. My screen can handle it better than your vest, and if they hit you in the legs…’
‘I’ll try my best not to leap in front of you protectively.’
The airlock was actually open on both sides. Clearly, no one aboard thought there was any form of threat here on backward little Earth, and that was knowing that they had StarCorps looking for them. Of course, T’ney thought Shil and Araven were in London, desperately trying to get an early enough flight to Bucharest to make the deadline. There was a turret set in the middle of the corridor inside the airlock, however; that would slow down anyone trying to get aboard… if they had not already stolen the guards’ IFF transponders.
‘I don’t suppose you know the layout of these ships?’ Shil asked.
‘Engineering to the rear. The midsection is almost entirely cargo hold. Forward you’ve got almost as much hold, but there’s also the control room and habitation. The design on these isn’t much different from the design of countless other freight haulers, but this
one’s been modified. They don’t come with stealth systems as standard, and I’d imagine the interior has been moved around a little.’
‘Habitat and control seem like the obvious places to go look.’
‘Yes, I’d–’ Araven cut off as Shil lifted a hand. From somewhere up ahead, he could now hear sounds. Whistling. Someone, somewhere down the corridor, was whistling. Then there were some words in Romanian, and then two men turned a corner and came to a sudden stop.
For what felt like a minute or more to Shil, the two groups stared at each other. It was less than a second, but it felt much longer as she watched the gunmen realising what they were seeing. There was Araven, holding a rifle which looked nothing like the AK-74s the locals were armed with. And there was Shil, without a gun, but wearing a red costume which might have graced a stripper and carrying a weird-looking sword. They were standing in a spaceship, so aliens were a given at this point: these two had to be aliens, and not the kind paying them.
The first man started to swing his rifle up from where it hung on his harness, but Araven was holding his at the ready and faster. A pulse of energy leapt from the barrel of Araven’s big rifle, and the man’s chest was more or less gutted as high-energy electrons burned through his assault vest, his shirt, and then his skin and bones. And then Shil was stepping in front of Araven as the second man opened up with his rifle. He more or less hosed down the corridor, bullets slamming into the decking and then rising to strike, shimmering impact terminals across Shil’s force screen. For three seconds there was the shattering noise of automatic fire, and then the AK-74 clicked empty. As the guard looked down at his rifle as though he was surprised that it was no longer firing, Araven stepped from behind Shil, lifted his weapon, and put two pulses through the man’s chest.
That was when an alert siren began to howl.
‘I think they know we’re here,’ Shil commented. She started down the corridor at a run, and Araven had to push hard to catch up with her. There were, maybe, another eight guards: they had seen eight outside the ship and were assuming there were a few more than that. That was excluding T’ney, P’taric D’vol, and Thadic. Thadic, in particular, was an issue, though if Araven could put a couple of blaster pulses in him, the problem would be significantly reduced.
The Eyes of the Huntress Page 19