Planet Pirates Omnibus

by neetha Napew

  Nonetheless, she did worry as he slipped the access

  cover behind the next file cabinet over, and backed

  down into the hole, dragging the file cabinet with him.

  Sorely he couldn’t possibly move it all the way into

  ; Jlbce, just with his hands? He could.

  They were in the dark again, the top of the shaft waled with the file cabinet, but she could hear the proud grin in his voice when he said, “Unless they beard mat, they won’t know. And I think it’s been used Aat way before. That cabinet’s not as heavy as a full OttB would be.”

  •^l” % ,*

  _ _ _ - j ~ —.

  She patted his leg and backed on down the ladder. y ought to come to a cross-shaft . . . and her foot nothing below, then something uneven. She ran foot over it in the dark, momentarily wondering ..__, she’d been stupid enough not to bring along a Jttndlight. Lumpy, long, slick . . . probably the bun-
  Chapter Fourteen

  “What about a light?” asked Aygar softly.

  Sassinak counted to ten, reminding herself that he was not, despite his talents, a trained soldier. He would not have thought to tell her before that he had a light.

  “Fine.”

  Above her, a dim light came on, bright enough to dark-adapted eyes. Shadows danced crazily as he passed it down. Below, the cross tunnel was twice the diameter of theirs, its center full of pipes, with a narrow catwalk along one side Sassinak eased down, swung her legs onto the catwalk, and guided Aygar’s feet. She had to crouch a little; he was bent uncomfortably. She touched his arm and jerked her head to one side. They would move some distance before they dared talk much.

  Twenty meters down the tunnel, Sassinak paused and doused the handlight. No sound or sight of pursuit. She closed her eyes, letting them adapt to darkness again, and wishing she had even the helmet to her armor. Even without the link to the cruiser’s big computers, the helmet onboard with sensors could have told her exactly what lay ahead, line-of-sight.

  She opened her eyes to darkness. Complete . . . no. Not complete. Ahead, so dim she could hardly make it

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  out, a distant red-orange point. She squinted, then remembered to shift her gaze off-center and back across. Two red-orange points. She leaned out to peer back past Aygar. Another, and another beyond that.

  Marker lights for maintenance workers. That would be the most harmless. Alternatives included automatic cameras that could send their images straight to some police station without ever giving them enough light to see. Or automatic lasers, linked to heat and motion sensors, designed to rid the tunnels of vermin.

  She hated planets. There might even be vermin in these tunnels. But when there were no choices, only fools refused chances ... so Abe had said. She edged sideways along the catwalk, moving with ship-trained neatness in that unhandy space. Aygar had more trouble. She could hear him thumping and stumbling, and had to hope that there were no sound sensors down here. She used the handlight as seldom as she could.

  Moving past the first dim light in the tunnel’s roof set off no alarms she could sense, but then a good system wouldn’t tell her. She was sweating now in the tunnel’s unmoving air, and wondering just how good that air was. Between the first and second lights, she felt a sodden draft along her side, and turned the light on die tunnel wall. Waist high, another grill, this one rectangular. A silent, slightly cooler breath came from it. She could hear no fan, not even the hiss of air movement. Then for an instant it changed, sucking against die back of her hand, then stilled, then returned as before.

  Nothing but a pressure-equalizing connector, probably from die subway system, she thought. Nice to know they were connected to something else with air, though shed rather have found a route to the surface. She tapped Aygar’s arm, and they crouched beneath the vent to rest briefly.

  “I’m not sure who’s after us,” she said. “That wasn’t die man I was supposed to meet, back there, just someone the right age and size, but not the same.”

  Aygar ignored this. “Do you know where we are? Can we get back?”

  “Not die right questions. To get back, we have to

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  figure out who’s trying to kill us. At this point we don’t know if they’re after you, me, or both. And why.”

  She could think of reasons both ways. All three ways, and even a few more. Why send her to meet a fake CoromeU and then kill him? It could hardly have been a mistake; the difference between a white-haired old man and a dark-haired woman was clear to the stupidest assassin. It couldn’t have been bad marksmanship, not with the cluster that had destroyed the man’s face. Had there been two different sets of conspirators whose plots intersected in wild confusion?

  “You said that wasn’t Coromell.” Aygar’s voice was quiet, his tone alert but not anxious. “Did the one who killed him know that?”

  “I’m not sure.” She was not sure of a lot, except that she wished she’d stayed on her ship. So much for confronting old fears. “If that had been Coromell, and if I’d also been killed, perhaps the next round of fire, you’d have been the ranking witness for Tanegli’s trial. And, as you’ve said often enough, you don’t know anything about the dealings Tanegli had with the other conspirators. All you could do is testify that he lied to you, led you to believe that Ireta was yours. If there were some way Coromell’s death could be blamed on me . . .”

  “And why were all those other people waiting for us outside?” Aygar asked.

  Clearly his mind ran on a different track. Natural, with his background. But it was still a good question.

  “Hmm. Suppose they plan to kill Coromell in the bar. They expect me to run, with you, just as I did. The only smart thing to do in something like that is get out. So they’ve got others outside, to kill us. Or me. Then they could pin Coromell’s death on me, discredit Fleet, and any testimony I bring to the trial.”

  “What would happen to the Zaid-Dayan? Who is your heir?”

  “Heir? Ships aren’t personal property! Fleet would assign another ...” She stopped short, struck by another possibility. “Aygar, you re a genius, and you don’t even know it. Testimony is one thing: a ship of the line

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  is another. My Zaid is possibly the most dangerous ship of its class. If it’s the ship they fear and want to render helpless, then by taking me out or even keeping me onplanet while Coromell’s death is investigated, that would do it. It would be Standard weeks before another captain arrived. They might even seal the ship in dock.”

  And why would someone be that upset about a cruiser at the orbital station, a cruiser whose weapons were locked down? What did someone fear that cruiser could do? Cruisers weren’t precision instruments, Despite her actions on Ireta, cruisers were designed as strategic platforms, capable of dealing with, say, a planetary rebellion, or an invasion from space. Or both.

  Sassinak was up again before she realized she was going to move. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to the ship.”

  As if that were going to be easy She started looking for another access port. Soon enough this tunnel would come to someone’s attention, even if they didn’t find the escape hatch from that . place Her mind was working now, full-speed, running the possibilities of several sets of plotters It could reduce to one set, if they had some way to interfere with Coromell’s return and thought the singed corpse could pass as his for long enough to get her in legal trouble. Or suppose they’d captured the real Coromell and could produce his body.

  Not her problem. Not now Now all she had to do was find a way out, to the surface, call Arly and get a shuttle to pick them up. She longer cared about the legal aspects of action.

  The next access port led them down, deeper into the city’s underground warren o
f service tunnels. This one was lighted and the single rail down the middle of the Boor indicated regular maintenance monorail service. Plastic housings covered the bundled cables along one wall, the pipes running along the other Sassinak noted that the symbols seemed to be the same as those used in Fleet vessels, the colored stripes and logos she knew so well, but she didn’t try to tap a water pipe to make sure. Not yet. They could walk along the catwalk beside

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  the monorail without stooping. With the light, they could move far more quickly.

  That didn’t help if they didn’t know where they were going, Sassinak thought grimly. The port they’d come out of had a number on the reverse: useless information without the map reference.

  “We’re still going the same way,” Aygar said.

  She stared at him, surprised again. He was taking all this much better than she would have predicted.

  “It’s easy to lose one’s way without references,” she began, but he was holding up a little button. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a mapper,” Aygar said. “One of the students I met at the Library said I should have one or I’d get lost.”

  “A locator transmitter?” Her heart sank. If he was carrying that, their unknown enemies could simply wait, watching the trace on a computer, until they came up again.

  “No. He said there were two lands, the land that told people where you were so they could find you and help you, and the kind that told you where you were for yourself. Tourists carry the first kind, he said, and rich people who expect their servants to come pick them up, but students like the second. So that’s what I bought.”

  She had not realized he’d been on his own long enough to do anything like that. Thinking back . . . there were hours and hours in which he’d been left at the Library entrance. She’d taken him there, or the FSP prosecutors had, between depositions or conferences. She hadn’t even known he’d met anyone else.

  “How does it work?”

  “Like this.” He flicked it with a thumbnail and a city map, distorted by the casing of the cables, appeared on the wall of the tunnel. A pulsing red dot must be their position. The map seemed to zoom closer, and letters and numbers replaced part of the criss-cross of lines. “E-84, RR-72.” Aygar flicked the thing again and a network of yellow lines appeared. There they were, in

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  what was labelled Maintenance access tunnel 66-43-V. “Where do we want to go?”

  “I’m . . . not sure.” Until she knew who their enemies were, she didn’t know where it might be safe to surface and call Arly. Or if even that would be a good idea. “Where’s the nearest surface access?”

  The red dot distorted into a line that crept along the yellow of their tunnel, then turned orange.

  “That means go up,” Aygar said. “If we have to go down to get somewhere, our line will turn purple.” It made sense, in a way.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  She let him lead the way. He seemed to know how the mapper worked. She certainly did not. She wanted to ask about scale, but they’d been in one place too long already. Her neck itched with the certainty that pursuit was close behind.

  “If you have any more little goodies, like the light, or die mapper, why not tell me now?” It came out a bit more waspish than she intended.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He actually sounded abashed. “I didn’t know . . . There hasn’t been time.”

  “Never mind. I’m just very glad you opted for this kind of mapper and not the other.”

  “I didn’t think I’d need it, really,” he said. “I don’t get lost easily. But Gerstan was being so friendly.” He shrugged.

  Sassinak felt another bubble of worry swell up beside die cluster that already filled her head. A friendly student who just happened to take an interest in the well-being of a foreigner?

  “Tell me more about Gerstan,” she said as calmly as she could.

  Gerstan, it seemed, was “a lot like Tim.” Sassinak managed not to say what she thought and hoped Aygar had made a mistake. Gerstan had been friendly, open, helpful. He had sympathized with Aygar’s position. Because, of course, Aygar had explained all about Ireta. Sassinak swallowed hard and let Aygar go on talking as they walked. Gerstan had helped him use the Library

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  computers to access the databases, and he had even said that it was possible to bypass the restriction codes.

  “Really?” said Sassinak, hoping her ears weren’t standing right straight out. “That’s pretty hard, I’d always heard.”

  Aygar’s explanation did not reassure her. Gerstan, it seemed, had friends. He had never explained just who they were: just friends whose specialty was intercepting data transmissions and diverting them.

  “What land of transmissions?”

  “He didn’t say, exactly.” Aygar sounded slightly grumpy about that, as if in retrospect Gerstan didn’t seem quite as helpful. “He just said that if I ever needed to get into the databases, or ... or slip a loop, whatever that is, he could help. Said it was easy, if you had the knack. All the way up to the Parchandri, he said.”

  An icy spike went straight down Sassinak’s back at that. “Are you sure?” she said, before she could stop it.

  “Sure of what?” Aygar was lolloping ahead, apparently quite relaxed.

  “That he said ‘all the way up to Parchandri?’ “

  “The Parchandri. Yes, that’s what he said. Why?”

  He glanced back over his shoulder and Sassinak hoped her face revealed nothing but calm interest. Parchandri. Inspector General Parchandri? Who should not be here anyway, but at Fleet Headquarters. As if they were printed in the fiery letters in the air before her, she could see that initiation code, supposedly coming from the Inspector General’s office. . .

  “I’m just trying to figure things out,” she said to Aygar who had glanced back again.

  Should she explain any of this to Aygar? His own problems were complicated enough, and besides he had no real right to Fleet’s darker secrets. But if something happened . . . She shook her head fiercely. What was going to happen was that she would be laughing at The Parchandri’s funeral. If, in fact, The Parchandri was guilty of Abe’s murder.

  At intervals they passed access ports on either side, above, below. Each had a number stenciled on it. Each

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  looked much the same as the others. Had it not been for Aygar’s mapper, Sassinak would have had no idea which way to go.

  She had been hearing the faint whine for some moments before it registered, and then she jumped forward and tapped Aygar’s shoulder. “Listen.”

  He shrugged. “This whole planet makes noise,” he said. “No one can hear anything in a city. Nothing that means anything, that is.”

  “How far to where we go up?” asked Sassinak. The whine was marginally louder.

  “Haifa kilometer, perhaps, if I’m reading this right.”

  “Too far.” She looked around and saw an access hatch less than twenty meters ahead, on their side of the monorail, below the cable housing. “Well take that one.”

  “But why?”

  The whine had sharpened and a soft brush of air touched his face. He whirled at once and raced for the batch. Sassinak caught up with him, helped wrestle it open. At once, an alarm rang out, and a flashing orange light, Sassinak bit back a curse. If she ever got off this planet, she would never, under any circumstances, go downside again! Aygar was dropping his legs through the hatch, but Sassinak spotted another, only five meters farther on.

  “Ill open that one, too. Then they won’t know which.”

  She could not hear the whine of the approaching monorail car over the clamoring alarm, but the air pressure shifts were clear enough. She ran as she had not had to run for years, scrabbled at the hatch cover, threw it back, and winced as another alarm siren and light came on. Then back to the first, and in. Aygar had wisely retreated down the ladder, giving her room. A quick yank and the hatch closed over them. They were in darkness aga
in. She could still hear the siren whooping. From this one? From the other? Both?

  All the way down that ladder, much longer than any they’d taken before, she scolded herself. She didn’t even know the monorail car was manned. It might have no windows, no sensors. They might have been able to

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  stand quietly, watch it go by, and then walk out following Aygar’s mapper. Then again maybe not. Second-guessing didn’t help deal with consequences. She took a long, calming breath, and reminded herself not to tighten up. Although one thing after another had gone wrong, they were alive, unwounded, and uncaught That had to be worth something. Her foot touched Aygar’s head. He had reached the bottom of the ladder.

  “I can’t find a hatch,” he said. His voice rang softly in the echoing dark chamber. “I’ll try light.”

  Sassinak closed her eyes, and opened them when she saw pink against her lids. They were at the bottom of a slightly curving, near-vertical shaft, and nothing marked the sides at the bottom. Not so much as a roughly welded seam. Aygar’s breath was loud and ragged.

  “We . . . have to find a way out. There has to be a way outl”

  “We will.”

  She felt almost comfortable in shafts and tunnels, but Aygar had had a wilderness to run in until he boarded the Zaid-Dayan. He’d done remarkably well for someone with no ship training, but this dead end in a narrow shaft was too much. She could smell his sudden nervous sweat; his hand on her leg trembled.

  “It’s all right,” she said, the voice she might have used on a nervous youngster on his first cruise. “We passed it, that’s all. Follow me up but quietly.”

  It was not that far up, a circular hatch in the shaft across from the ladder, easily reached. Sassinak just had her hand firmly on the locking ring, ready to turn it, when it was yanked away from her, and she found herself pinned in a beam of brilliant light.

  “Well.” The voice was gruff, and only slightly surprised. “And what have we here? Not the Pollys, this time,”