Kill Ratio

by David Drake

  “Voila,” he said with a hushed flourish as he pushed it open.

  In less difficult circumstances Ella might have giggled, or thrown her arms around the man's neck in joyous thanks. As it was, she merely slipped by him and whispered, because she was illegally entering someone else's premises, “Thank you, Smith. I'll tell Ting what a help you've been.”

  “I won't wait, then. If you need anything else, or just want some company, punch my number. We're here to serve.” He winked and swung off down the hall and around the corner before Ella had enough presence of mind to get out of the other woman's doorway and close the door firmly behind her.

  God, what was she doing here? Never mind, Bradley; don't answer that. She knew exactly what she was doing. What disquieted her was that young Peck Smith seemed to know, too, and didn't care. Or did care, rather, but cared to aid and abet. Things would never again be quite the same between Taylor McLeod and herself. Not now that she knew more than she'd ever have wanted confirmed about his work. . . .

  For there to be the awkward moment she was envisioning between them, she'd have to survive this insanity she had in mind. She could, she supposed, have detailed the fine young man Taylor had loaned her to do the dirty work for her. He would have been glad to oblige, without a blinked eye or even a hesitation.

  But she didn't want to betray Yates' confidence any more than she already had. Yates and Yesilkov were adamant that no one be brought in to this. If she called Peck Smith again, it would be to get any or all of their party out of jail, or off Sky Devon sans hot pursuit.

  It was only for such exigencies that McLeod had loaned her the man. They'd discussed it obliquely, and the bounds of their agreement were clear: she would do what she thought necessary, and only if she failed would McLeod take direct action on his own. In return for this admittedly chancy hesitation on his part, she was to come to him directly with specifics, once she learned them.

  McLeod's voice had been dry and precise as he'd said over the coded Earth/Moon link, “Of course, what matters to us ultimately is who. Some proof of what, where, when, and why would be nice, certainly, but I doubt this thing will go public ... at least not through my office. We would, however, appreciate - “

  “The culprits, yes. Well, I wouldn't know what to do with them if I had them,” she'd said. “Yesilkov and Yates, however, might have some objections.”

  A chuckle had come up from Earth. “I have a feeling your friends are going to find themselves well out of their depths, and soon. Not with the culprits, as you call them, but with the people behind them - the men that pay the bills.”

  “You'll take Yates and Yesilkov into consideration, then?”

  “I have no choice. They're in this up to their collar tabs. I'll guarantee their anonymity if they allow me room to move, but you'll have to reach them and explain. A trail of mayhem won't be easy to cover, and that's what those types tend to do. That's why I'm not arguing with you - I need you to establish some viable guidelines, a chain of command.”

  You need me? How lovely. You need someone on the scene, and I'm it. It's almost romantic, nearly exciting, she'd heard herself thinking. It wasn't either, of course, but neither was it excessively foolhardy in Taylor McLeod's opinion. Which in itself was strange; she'd made him promise before she filled him in not to argue about her participation, because she'd been nearly sure he would. Whatever McLeod perceived in this as advantageous to himself, it was sufficient to keep him from telling her not to go.

  But she'd underestimated the thoughtful, low-key man on the other end of her com line. Or the seriousness with which he took all this business about the Plan and some Club and the viruses that could be tailored to suit and unleashed on a timetable.

  Whatever, she now had “All my support, everything we can do to help. Just ask. And my best wishes. Do be careful. Elinor. If it wouldn't take too long despite every string I can pull, I'd ask you to wait for me. But it would, and I can't.”

  There had been a longer pause than the number of nanoseconds between Earth and Moon could account for, before she said, “Taylor, you're wonderful.”

  Again the chuckle. “You're pretty wonderful yourself. Go give 'em, hell, Dr. Bradley. And don't worry about picking up the pieces - that's what my men are for.”

  She'd rung off, and realized that her heart was pounding. It was rather like the old days in North Africa, when there'd been a clear division between right and wrong and she'd exceeded her brief, on occasion, because the real world has nothing to do with channels and paper flow and command trees.

  If she hadn't known McLeod from those days, she wouldn't be standing here now, inside Kathleen Spenser's Sky Devon apartment, lurking in the dark like a mugger.

  But she was. Waiting, she began to have second thoughts. She shouldn't be here. This wasn't helping to smuggle a defector across the Algerian border or helping to get an ANC dissident out of a South African jail. This was a one-on-one confrontation with a desperate enemy; it had nothing to do with what color one's passport was or how many friendlies in convenient embassies or film crews one knew.

  This could be dangerous. She should have asked Peck Smith to stay. But what she had in mind wasn't something she really wanted anyone to see, especially not someone who was being daring and modern and egalitarian by dropping the hyphen from his name.

  She could have had Peck Smith's help; she'd known that once he'd picked Spenser's lock for her. But then she'd been thinking that the man would, of necessity, have had to file a report, if only verbally to McLeod.

  And she didn't want Taylor McLeod to know that she'd brought proscribed substances in the form of truth drugs, as well as the needle stunner, through customs. She especially didn't want him to know what she intended to do with them. It just wasn't ladylike, and like the darker side of his own work, it ought not to be discussed or even acknowledged between them.

  Just as she was beginning to lose her resolve and thinking that she might call Peck Smith, that this was no time to worry about what Taylor thought of her, she heard a sound outside the apartment door.

  She pushed herself back against the wall as if she could melt into it, the stunner grasped tightly in one sweaty hand. For the first time in what seemed like hours, she thought about Sam Yates, Yesilkov, and the poor dead people from Le Moulin Rouge.

  Dead Arabs - those she'd seen, and the seemingly countless corollary casualties that had come after. All a test, if what Yesilkov had learned from Piet van Zell could be believed.

  All this woman's handiwork, if the person now opening this door was indeed Kathleen Spenser. And all the frustration in Ella Bradley, who'd joined the Peace Corps and later the UN, and finally NYU because of her humanitarian bent and a genuine desire to promote equality and understanding where equality was impossible - all that frustration surfaced as the person came through the door and hit the light switch.

  It was Kathleen Spenser; the face matched the image Yates had shown her in his holotank. She was alone. As the other woman started to close the door, Ella Bradley stepped away from the wall, out from behind the door, and said: “Please stand very still. I'll close the door. You drop your pocketbook and hold your hands away from your body. I want to know where Yates and Yesilkov are, and I want to know now.”

  “What the hell?” said the doctor named Spenser, one hand reaching for her throat. Spasmodically, at the other woman's movement, Ella Bradley's finger squeezed the trigger of the stunner, and with a little cry, Kathleen Spenser toppled backward.

  Chapter 27 - HEAD GAMES

  Sam Yates didn't at first remember, as he awoke, what was wrong. He couldn't roll over; his arms and legs were tangled up in his bedcovers. Yeah, that must be it, because he was cold too. Naked and cold.

  And then he did remember, and lunged against his bonds, driving the raw flesh at his elbows, wrists, and ankles against the vacuum tape that restrained them. It hurt like hell.

  He opened his eyes, hoping against hope he was coming out of the worst drunk of his life in s
ome nice padded holding cell somewhere. Hoping that what he remembered wasn't true.

  But it was. There, naked and tied to the chair opposite him, was Yesilkov, her head thrown back, livid bruises and taser bums on her bare breasts and belly. He called her name, but it came out from behind his taped lips as nothing more than an animal moan.

  Their interrogator was concentrating on Yesilkov now. Yates could see her flesh quiver as de Kuyper moved close. Yesilkov's body was trying to cringe from the taser and the knife the Afrikaner held, but she'd been bound by an expert.

  A practiced interrogator such as de Kuyper could bring a stronger personality than Yesilkov's under his control.

  Yates struggled wildly, but managed only to rock his chair slightly. This got Yesilkov's attention, but not de Kuyper's.

  The big Afrikaner slapped the woman's cheek with a backhanded motion that sent sympathetic trauma down the side of Yates' face and into his aching neck.

  Sonya Yesilkov sobbed once, then straightened, looking not at de Kuyper but at Yates, defiant, her lips puffy but tightly closed.

  They'd been lying there on the floor and de Kuyper had been cutting at Yesilkov's crotch and Yates had tried to get the man to stop. ... He closed his eyes, remembering how he'd shouted for de Kuyper to stop.

  And how he'd told Yesilkov, “Don't tell him anything. He's just going to kill us anyhow, or he'd be more careful. Man's going to let you go, he doesn't slice your clothes up -”

  Smack went de Kuyper's backhand, but it had gotten that taser away from Yesilkov's quivering inner thighs. For the moment.

  He hadn't saved them anything - nothing real important, at least. Their clothes were now piled neatly on Spenser's desk, the only positive result of Yates' attempt to draw de Kuyper's attention from Yesilkov to himself.

  In answer to Yates, Jan de Kuyper had pulled on his nose ruminatively and said, “You're wrong, Supervisor - I'll let you go, both of you, as soon as you tell me what I want to know.” And he'd grinned then, as he came forward with a knockout ampule Yates couldn't avoid.

  Once it pierced his skin, the room began to spin. He'd been barely aware of de Kuyper explaining to Sonya that if she were a good girl and took her own clothes off without any false moves, de Kuyper might let her strip Yates for him.

  So that was how Yates had come to be tied to this chair. Adrenaline goosed him as he realized that he had no way of determining what, if anything, Yesilkov had divulged to de Kuyper. Like he had no way of stopping the torture progressing before his eyes.

  Keep 'em closed as long as you can, he warned himself. But even through his tight-shut lids he fancied he could see Yesilkov's flesh as it tried to flinch away from the taser shocking her genitals.

  Maybe Yesilkov hadn't said anything. Or maybe de Kuyper wasn't satisfied with what she'd told him. The Afrikaner wasn't going to buy the fact that Yates and Yesilkov were here without any sort of official backing - no brief, no portfolio, no support structure on Sky Devon. Any more than he'd buy that Yates was exactly what his credentials said - Entry, nothing heavier. Not from some anonymous government organization or rival terrorist group. It wasn't sensible, so de Kuyper was going to keep digging until he forced the information he wanted to hear from Yesilkov.

  Or from Yates. Yates' eyes snapped open of their own accord. Now he understood why Yesilkov looked like that. The Afrikaner wasn't going to give up until he heard what he wanted to hear, and Yesilkov didn't know what to tell him.

  Yates was going to volunteer. He thrashed as noisily as he could in his chair, suddenly conscious of his own nakedness and vulnerability.

  A few feet away Yesilkov was emitting strangled screams as the laser shocked her. Her knees, Yates now noticed, were taped to the arms of the chair to keep them open.

  When de Kuyper finally turned to Sam Yates, the security man wasn't even aware that he was yelling through his gag at the top of his lungs.

  He just wanted to make it stop, to deflect the Afrikaner to another target besides Yesilkov, who wouldn't be in this if it weren't for him.

  He no longer harbored any illusions about the two of them surviving this interrogation. You didn't do to a prisoner what de Kuyper was doing to Yesilkov unless you were going to imprison or kill that individual out of hand. And de Kuyper couldn't have facilities on Sky Devon to keep Yesilkov in this condition semi-permanently.

  This sort of thing only happened to people who “disappeared,” in the time-honored usage of the word.

  And de Kuyper, now stalking over to him with a pink-stained knife in one hand and the laser in the other, was having loo much fun with Yesilkov to let up any time soon. Not soon enough for her to survive.

  Yates was ready and willing to make a deal. He tried lo shout his intention lo de Kuyper, but he couldn't form words with his lips taped.

  The arid eyes of the Afrikaner met his and the big man said, “So? Nice of you to join us, whoever you are. I've been hoping you would. Do you know, by any chance, what would be the result if you and Yesilkov were” - he smiled a carnivore's smile - “connected, let's say, when the taser touched her wet cunt? By means of your tongue, perhaps, or your lips? Or some other part of you?”

  Jan de Kuyper was fondling the taser at eye level, and Sam Yates couldn't help but fix on it. His eyes were fastened to it as if someone had taped them to the taser with the same viciously adhesive material that bound his elbow, wrists and ankles.

  As de Kuyper lowered the taser toward Yates' crotch, very slowly and deliberately, Yates shouted again: “I'll tell you anything you want to know, damn it. Just stop!”

  Yates thought it was incomprehensible, but it must not have been, for de Kuyper chuckled like a gagging cat and said, “I know you will, I know you will - when I get through with you, you'll do anything I say. And you will not dare to lie.”

  Inexorably the taser came closer, and Yates craned his neck, forcing himself back against the chair he was tied to, every inch of him desperate to escape, while in the background, out of sight and nearly out of mind, Yesilkov sobbed softly.

  Chapter 28 - BACK CHANNEL

  The plastic body of the needle stunner was as warm as Ella Bradley's hand, but its weight kept forcing her to remember that she held it. Batteries, high frequency oscillator and coils to charge and spit out the bipolar needles ... the needles themselves.

  She couldn't remember anything hurting her as much as the needles that knocked her down in her own apartment. White pain fluctuating from her abdomen had made her legs numb and her arms thrash. She would have screamed as the bearded Afrikaner bent toward her with the drug injector, but her shuddering chest could not pass enough air through her vocal cords to make the sounds.

  Ella shuddered again. Her mind slipped back to the present, where her left hand reached forward with a lamp glowing deep amber, and her right foot was poised to step over a trio of heavy conduits blackened with the slime that migrated to the lowest levels of Sky Devon. She took the step.

  The man who had shot her was dead. His companions were dead. And the two people whom Ella Bradley had involved in this . . . terror, were going to die if she froze or failed.

  Her mind threw her the image of Sonya Yesilkov, spread-eagled on a laboratory table - her bloody scalp in the hands of a bearded man, and Dr. Spenser peering attentively at the twenty feet of intestine she had uncoiled from Yesilkov's belly.

  The vision was bad enough without the instinctive flush of pleasure that followed it. Ella's face prickled with embarrassment - though no one could have seen the inside of her mind, and she knew perfectly well that it was the sort of thought that occurred to even the most civilized people.

  Under certain conditions of rivalry,

  She really didn't want to think about that. Which was good, because the confused emotions gave her the energy that she needed to clamber through the dark recesses of Sky Devon under an apparent gravity much higher than that of the Moon.

  She was not especially frightened by what would happen when she reached her destinati
on, because she hadn't been able to imagine that scene in terms even she could believe were realistic.

  The hope to which Ella clung was that she could not possibly fail to find the Pest Control Research Laboratory if she continued to grope in the proper direction through the bilges of Sky Devon. She had gotten to the proper segment, number 9; and she had found the access door beneath the transit platform and opened it with the mechanical key - stamped MAINT. - which Spenser had surrendered to her.

  But the hundred meters or so that she had to grope along the habitat's lowest level was much farther in reality than she had expected it to be.

  The huge ducts to either side of Ella channeled her progress as surely as the walls of a tunnel. One of them was silent, but the other coughed and rattled hugely at regular intervals. She guessed that it shifted solid material - produce, judging from the duct's size and the fact that its contents were not being moved in a water suspension, as wastes would be.

  She could not miss the lab in this linear waste of darkness, stale air, and the effluvia which dripped down from even the most rigidly-attended activities on the higher levels. She had to believe in the certainty of success, or she would hunch down into a fetal ball and let the terrible memories cover her.

  Because the darkness was so complete, what Ella first saw in front of her was the reflection of her glow lamp rather than the looming wall on which the daub of yellow light appeared. She thrust the needle stunner out in front of her but did not fire. The motion was instinctive, but the reasoning portion of the anthropologist's mind analyzed it as soon as momentary paralysis passed. She was using the gun as a hard object with which to fend off whatever was approaching in the darkness —

  And nothing was approaching. She had reached the wall of the laboratory, her destination.