“There's been nothing unusual that way,” Ariane replied. “The one called Dyron speaks occasionally with Evella Copoz's favourite, Coryn, on the bench outside, but they've been doing that for months. Coryn says that they just like to talk, sometimes, without having every word overheard; they trade stories about their pasts, and such. And Evella's got him so drugged up, most of the time, that I'm surprised that he's not walking into walls.”
“Ah, good for Evella, that!”
Thus, early one afternoon, a couple of hours after Evella's minions had dropped him off, Coryn, who had elected to exercise outdoors on the grass, rather than in the gym, got the agreed-upon signal (the whistle of a bird from Dyron's home world), and immediately hurried to the landing pad.
Dyron was there, with one of his compatriots. The little flit was regurgitating the usual Terran young man; he was wearing his restraints, and one of the Underkeepers had come to the building door to welcome him, holding in her hand the remote which controlled the restraints.
“The cameras are off,” Dyron said, and he and his countryman walked over to the little flit, as if to talk to the Elite woman who was seated inside it, the engine running.
Coryn ran over to them; they arranged their bodies to screen, the best they could, what was happening at the flit, from the Underkeeper. It took only a good tug for Coryn to dislodge the woman from the flit and its controls—he had surprise on his side! He pushed the woman towards the two men, they caught her before she fell to the ground.
“Thanks, guys,” he said, shutting the hatch, at the same time determining that he was familiar with the controls of the particular flit model.
He was up in the air before the flit's owner had managed to open her mouth to scream. He was pleased with his performance; considering the circumstances, and how much drugs Evella had pumped into his bloodstream the previous night, the smoothness of the operation was almost a miracle! He still had the reflexes of an Agent, in spite of everything!
**
He was halfway across the cat-infested park when the flit's engine began to sputter.
“Damn!” he swore.
He did not believe for a second that it was a problem with the electric charge, or the engine. This was some kind of a security feature that had been added to the machine by the Neotsarian manufacturers who had copied the original Confederation design. He had to make it across the park and the outer fence before the flit sank to the ground!
All the flying vehicles built by the Confederation Sector manufacturers had an emergency power source which could keep them airborne for another half-an-hour or so, in case the machine was in trouble, maybe getting shot at. The dash had to be opened to access it; he tore at the covering with shaking fingers until it gave way. Yeah, he recognized the controls from some lesson which he had been taught during his training days—thank the heavens that the drill masters had insisted that the would-be Agents pound details like that into their skulls! They had been right when they had said that knowing something like that could mean the difference between life and death; he was proving it at the moment!
The flit began to rise again, if more slowly than it had been moving earlier. Nevertheless, he was making headway over the hungry cats' domain, towards a streetscape!
He had just made it over the fence when the sirens began to blare all around him—whether inside the flit, or outside it, he was not totally certain. Possibly both.
He brought the machine down in the nearest alleyway and groped for the manual release of the hatch; he did not doubt for a moment but that the electronic control would not respond to his touch. But the manual release was another emergency feature, and no-one in his or her right mind would ever get rid of it. Besides, not everyone even knew that manual controls like that existed—that knowledge was another useful tid-bit from his training days.
He was outside and running then. He was still hearing sirens, although they were not as loud as the ones in the flit had been. But they were all around him.
He kept on running, in the opposite direction from the Elite Womens' Pleasure House. He tried to keep under cover as much as was possible, preferring alleys to streets, and crossing yards and parks shrouded in shrubbery and trees whenever possible. He was surprised by how few people he saw; it was an afternoon, for heavens' sake. To his thinking there should have been pedestrians about, even if he was in a residential district.
He was running out of a narrow alley on to a wider boulevard, hoping to quickly cross it into a wooded park on the other side, when suddenly a silent flyer swooped down over him, and settled down on the pavement in front of him.
He whirled around to return to the alley. A quick glance back showed the hatch of the flyer opening, and a hand with a stunner aimed at him. The shot missed him; he managed to put the corner of the nearest building between himself and it. He ran down the alley, memory telling him that there was a place, not far away where the buildings on both sides gave way to fences and some greenery. Yes, indeed; he hopped the fence on the side that looked more lush to him. He crossed a yard to a hedgerow which seemed to extend into the distance, its sidewise growth having apparently escaped pruning clippers for some time. It provided cover, perhaps enough to shake his pursuers, and allow him to make it, undetected, to the park that he had seen earlier.
“Gol-darn it!” snapped the Law-Enforcer at the flyer's controls to his two companions. “The tracer signal's fading in and out! He must have found some foliage—living plants can confuse such signals! Don't the people around here understand that they're not allowed to let trees and bushes grow wild! Lazy bastards, making our work harder than it already is!
“You two will have to chase him on foot,” he added, “while I go back up. It'll be easier to trace him from air; at worst I'll pick up the signal the moment he clears out of the greenery, and then we'll have him. He won't get far, that's for sure!”
The other two Law-Enforcers shared a look; then one of them shrugged, exiting the flyer, and was followed by the other one. They ran to the alley into which the quarry had disappeared, reaching the place where the fences and the green growth began, in moments.
“We'll have to split up,” one of them said, stopping. “No telling which way he went. Dicky's right; there's way too much uncontrolled plant growth in this neighbourhood. Trees, hedges, shrubs, you name it, and nobody's bothered with the proper trimming.”
“Easy for Dicky to talk,” grumbled the other one. “He gets to send us out to do the footwork while he sits up in the air in the flyer.”
His fellow Enforcer merely shrugged.
“He's the Squad Leader,” he said. “He gets to make the decisions. And to take the blame if things don't work out. But this guy ought to be easy pickings, once we find him. He's a frigging male whore; probably can't fight to save his life!”
“Yeah, maybe you're right,” his companion said. “Which way you want to go, Shank? The houses and the trees, or follow that overgrown hedge out the other way?”
“I'll take the houses and the trees, Rocko. You go and check out the hedge. He could've gone either way, be hiding in the shrubs for all we can tell; things are so overgrown around here. Keep your com handy in case Dicky calls you.”
Rocko headed for the hedge, feeling petulant since he figured that Shank was sending him in the likelier direction, taking the easy way out for himself. He ought not to feel that way, of course; it was important to catch the escapee. However, he was not altogether convinced that the man they were following was easy pickings, in spite of Shank's opinion. But, maybe Dicky would be able to pick up his tracer, and let Rocko know his location. Dicky, in the flyer, could follow the pursuers by the signatures of their coms.
Sure enough, Rocko was carefully making his way beside the hedge, brushing the extraneous branches from his face, when his com beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket.
“Rocko here,” he spoke into it in a low voice.
“I'm getting a signal from ahead of you,” Dicky's voice said. “It's unsteady—he must be
hiding among the leaves of the hedge. Get your stunner out, and step carefully. He's not moving, I don't think, so he must be waiting to ambush you. Don't let him.”
Rocko felt a sickening lurch in his stomach.
“How far ahead of me?” he asked, trying to peer into the greenery of the hedge in front of him as he pulled out his stunner.
“Really close!” he heard Dicky's voice on the com, and then he was accosted by a seeming whirlwind!
He had a com in one hand and the stunner in the other when fingers tightened around his throat and cut off his wind, long enough to make him black out, and drop the items which he had been holding.
Breathing hard, Coryn let the Enforcer fall to the ground in front of him.
“One down,” he muttered to himself, picking up the fellow's stunner and giving him a shot to the chest. “He was talking with someone back there, so there's another one coming on foot, and probably at least a third one, in the flyer.
“Fuck, this isn't going to be easy, even if the dorks are useless fighters.”
At least the adrenalin had cleared most of the drug from his brain; he felt like he could strategize again.
It was probably best to deal with the fellow chasing him on foot first, he figured. Whoever was in the flyer was probably a boss-man of sorts, and, therefore, likely the worst fighter of them—well, always assuming that he was not two men, and hadn't already called up back-up forces.
“If I can get them one at a time, and then disappear before reinforcements can arrive, I'll have done it,” he told himself, turning back towards where the second man had to be searching for him.
He came across the second pursuer unexpectedly quickly. The Enforcer approached Coryn noisily, before Coryn had had time to leave the cover of the end of the hedge—had he tried to raise his partner on the com and received no answer? The speed of his response made no sense, but Coryn could not dwell on that. Instead he had to take the guy out of action; doing so would be easier than the first one had been, since he now had a stunner, and the fool was shuffling across an expanse of grass, making no effort to hide.
What was the matter with these guys anyway? Hadn't they had the most elementary lessons in combat?
Coryn stunned the man with a shot to his chest—the Enforcer did not know enough to try to protect himself from the effects of a stunner by crouching to keep from giving the weapon a good, clear target. Then he turned around to head for the park that he had been aiming for in the first place.
The flyer would be coming after him; he needed to get under some decent cover as quickly as possible.
Dicky, in the flyer, was pseudo-swearing.
“Those gol-darned idiots, can't they do anything right? They let the pretty man-whore get the better of them, the silly fools! And where are my reinforcements, anyway?”
Ah, there the help was! Oh, boy, the Office had sent the new-fangled flyer out! That was all right! It had an on-board stunner, of all things, programmable to zero in on tracers! Dicky had admired the machine, although he had not had the opportunity to ever see it operate, never mind use it himself!
He watched the escapee's listless body crumple on to the ground, the stolen stunner falling out of his fingers. He brought his flyer down on to the pavement, next to the fancy machine, and went to help the Enforcers in it collect the stunned blond man.
“Good thing Elite Mogron insisted on spending the money to mark the turd with a tracer,” one of the newcomers said as he began to manhandle Coryn's body into the fancy flyer. “Seems the guy can fight. If it wasn't for the tracer he'd have gotten away, whore or not.”
**
“Heavens, where on Yukoid do they grow them that big? You did say that you were from Yukoid?”
The short, skinny Volgoidian Port worker was staring at Sandy who towered over him in all her muscular bulk.
“Never been to the Southern Continent, on Yukoid, have you?” Shellion smiled broadly at the man who was directing the group towards Customs.
When the man shook his head, Shellion laughed.
“You have interesting experiences to look forward to, then,” he said. “We've got two of them, actually. Leon, being a guy, is even bigger than Sandy. You have no idea how handy they are if we run into rowdies when we put on our shows.”
In the time since the group had left Yukoid, Shellion had displayed his usefulness many times. Lindy had had reason to be grateful to Kami for having hunted him up. Dini and Lew had made themselves useful, too, although the romantic dynamics between them could be annoying. Seer Jon, however, had urged the others on the Team to enjoy “the Lew and Dini show”, as Kami had taken to calling it. All three Yukoidians knew plenty about their home world, and had taught much that was important to know, to the others. It had been Shellion who had invented the village on the Southern Continent which harboured a genetic anomaly that had resulted in overgrown human beings.
“The Southern Continent really is a weird place,” he had said. “Not many people live there. And fewer people travel there. Nobody from off-planet ever goes there; I've heard that they have stories about monsters, and other anomalies, about the Southern Continent of Yukoid, out there in the big Galaxy. I don't know who started them, maybe one of us, for some reason which was valid at the time. In any case, we can use that to explain the presence of your gentle giants among us.”
“Lucky Sandy and Leon,” Lindy had laughed. “They'll have a built-in excuse for any faux pas that they might commit! The rest of us will just look like fools!”
However, they hadn't, and on occasion, that had been thanks to some fancy footwork on the part of the true Yukoidians among them. Shellion, especially, was quick to cover any little lapses which his companions might make; those were always possible when you had immersed yourself into a culture not your own, as Lindy pointed out. Which was one reason why, she said, Agents were keen to work with the locals when they were undercover.
The worker with whom Shellion had spoken was so busy gawking at Leon when he walked by, that he paid scant attention to Sunny, Seer Jon, or the Greencat as they slipped by his supposedly inspecting eyes, (the freighter Captain had informed them that such inspections were happening). By the time he did do a double take at the Greencat, the group of ten had already gone by him, except for Shellion, who trailed the others.
“The big cat?” the Neotsarian worker asked him. “Is it from your Southern Continent, too.”
“Like I said, the Southern Continent is weird,” Shellion reiterated, without actually answering the question. “She's a remarkably gentle creature, too.”
“Not like our big cats, then. The Elites use them for security. They'll tear a human being apart within minutes when they're hungry—and the Elites keep them hungry when they use them.”
“Not very nice,” commented Shellion before moving on.
“No, but it is effective,” replied the worker and waved him on.
The Ship Captain had explained that there were Elites—pretty high up ones at that—looking for a small, black-haired, pale-skinned young woman who they expected to be travelling with a few other people, although nobody seemed to know what the composition of the group that she would be among, was. Thus the amateur entertainment Troupe could expect to be scrutinized closely, although they obviously had no-one fitting the description among them.
“Maybe the idiots will want to go through your luggage with a fine-toothed comb,” the Captain had joked. “Just in case you're somehow hiding her among your paraphernalia.”
He, obviously, had little love for the Elites, but then, as he was fond of pointing out, he had grown up on another of the planets where the population had for a long time been chafing under the strict rules the Elites tried to enforce. He had, in fact, befriended the Troupe when they had boarded his ship, and identified themselves as Yukoidians. Shellion had spent some pleasant hours trading “war stories” with him while the rest of the Troupe had rehearsed their acts to the delight of the of the crew and the passengers. It was useful t
o have something to fill the long hours of space travel, especially on a slow-moving freighter, and everyone had taken advantage of the entertainment.
The Customs did put them through a thorough check. Their bags and instruments were minutely examined. Scanners were run over their bodies.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” Shellion casually asked the Official who scanned him.
“The people we're looking for may be hiding some valuable gemstones,” the Official replied. “Should we find something like that among your things, you'll be going off to be interviewed by the Elites themselves.”
Shellion snorted.
“Like poor entertainers would have gemstones,” he said. “If any of us had ever had anything like that, it would have been sold long time ago to buy some equipment, or just to make ends meet.”
“Yeah, well... we still have to check.”
“What are you wearing on the chain around your neck, little girl?” the woman who was scanning the females of the Troupe suddenly asked, her attention on Sunny. “I can't get any kind of a reading off it though there's something there. If it's a medallion, or even a cheap bauble my scanner should tell me so.”
Sunny stood perfectly still, stared at the floor, and said nothing. Lindy and Sandy moved closer, and hovered protectively over her.
“Can't she talk for herself?” the woman asked irritably.
“Not really.” Lindy directed a baleful glare at the woman while Sandy flexed her muscles just a little, and loomed.
“Sunny's my little sister, and I promised our mother that I'd always look after her. And no, she doesn't speak all that well; there are lots of things she doesn't do so well. But she's sweet and lovable, as you'd expect of someone whose name is Sunny. And she helps some of us with our acts.”
“Fine,” the woman snapped. “I'm no Elite to want to euthanize a relative who came out of her mother's womb somehow damaged. But I need to know what she's got in that leather bag on her chest.”
Lindy and Sarah had worked this one out a long time ago, with the help of Marlyss, the Guru Johannes, and the Greencat.
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