Lina couldn't help trembling. “Should I try a biofilter?”
“No, just port it in.” Three floating balls flew in to take formation around the booth. With his hands folded, Wiley clacked his rings together as he waited expectantly.
“Okay. I can’t visualize… There it is. Carefully.” She bit her lip as she concentrated for more than a minute. “Shit,” she said as it materialized and simultaneously exploded. The booth shook. Debris struck the glass only to ricochet in the confining space before sliding to the floor.
Both of Wiley's eyes focused on the cataclysm. “Yes!” he said. “Excellent!”
“I didn't get the electrical potential balanced. S-sorry.” A bomb! A bomb at her house! Her cats in danger!
And all because she knew Londo.
“An interstellar teleport combined with a Terran manufactured bomb,” Wiley said even as he began to run play-backs. “Very interesting!”
Lon massaged her shoulders. “Terry must think there's a chance you could still be alive. I guess she wanted to cover every contingency.”
Lina clutched at Lon's arm. “If she thinks I could still be around, how about you? You'd be the one she'd be concerned with. Are there any bombs at your place?”
He rubbed his nose. “And how would I know? I'm not… clairvoyant, that's the word. Don't know my household devas. Do apartments have devas? But I have neighbors who might be hurt. Can we get a patch through to the ParaNet? Who's on com duty here?”
“A chance for another bomb? Let me configure the connection,” Wilder said. It took a few minutes, but a 3-D screen soon appeared in the air next to the lab's central desk. It cleared into a view of a small room covered with monitors: regular TV screens, Lina noted. Background music played at medium levels, the latest from the Devil's Owed.
At the main console sat the Bolt, his visor pulled back so you could see his face and brown hair clearly. He was drinking a Snapple through a curlicue fun-straw. When he realized Londo was on the screen, he jerked straight up in his chair, eyes wide.
“Eff it all!” he exclaimed. “You cockeffing shit!” He hit his desk with his fist as he directed a few more f-combinations Londo's way. “We've been wondering if you were alive or what! Where the eff have you—”
“Salut to you, too, Gary.”
Now the Bolt used both fists to pound his console. The effort seemed to calm him. “We've been searching for you everywhere. The last we heard was the Armageddon call.” He eased back and gave a snort of a resigned sigh. “Effing suckass effer. So you're off-planet. No wonder no one could find you.”
“Oui, I'm on Sarastor for a few more days yet. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“You could have put in an effing Cancel Emergency call!”
Lon frowned. “Sorry. Too many things have been happening. I forgot. Mea culpa. Cancel emergency.”
Bolt grumbled as he typed a quick message, then hit a “send” button. “Okay. Okay, a favor after he gives us all effing heart attacks. What is it?”
“There could be a bomb planted at my apartment. Maybe at Starhaven, but I don't think Terry knows about that place.”
“Terry Rhodes again, huh?” The tone was easy, but the eyes glinted, the face tightened.
“In spades,” Londo said as his own gaze darkened. “That bitch was the problem the other day. Could you transport down and check things? Keep your distance, of course. If you could take a visual display with you and patch into this channel, it would help.”
“Sure thing. Give me a moment.” Clicking his visor into place, the Bolt dissolved into a crackling blur. He reappeared with what looked like a rubik's cube. “Let me put things on automatic.” His hands moved in blurs of speed, giving off tiny sparks. “Okay, beaming down.” He nodded at Lon and streaked out of the picture.
The screen showed the empty room for a moment before it faded into a picture of a condominium hallway with homey striped wallpaper and potted ferns in brass buckets. Front and center was a door with an apartment number on it: 2817C. Bolt pointed at a large UPS-marked box in front of it. “Bumeff bomb. Or is it your latest beer club selection?”
Chapter 17
Londo's hands balled into fists. “Crisse! So much for building security. Stand clear; it could be on a proximity fuse.”
“Sure thing.”
Wiley craned his neck at the scene. “It can't be sensitive to motion if they delivered it—by hand, I presume?”
Londo grunted affirmative.
“Unless they remote-triggered a motion sensor later, of course.” Wiley's squadron of sensor balls dipped and realigned themselves in mid-air to get a better view.
Lina shifted so she could see the screen clearly, too. Bolt could see her now, standing next to Londo as she said, “It's the same thing, but more so. Let me see if I can put a scale on it.”
Bolt cocked his head. “English? Or are those Legion translators getting better?”
“English,” Londo confirmed as Lina concentrated.
“Okay, I've linked the deva of your apartment with the deva of my house, and they're comparing. Yours says that this is… One, two, three, oh, 40 times as powerful.”
Wiley gave what Lina could have sworn was a soft squeak of pleasure. She turned to him. “Do you have some place that would contain that? I'll be extra-careful this time with the potentials. I think I can do it. I know what I did wrong.”
“Absolutely, but not in this lab. We have holding cells that would handle it, all impervion walls.” He tapped a finger against his upper lip, so deep in thought that his eyes moved in unison. “Ah, I know exactly the one. Well-monitored, very well indeed. Good acoustics.”
“Can you show me a picture of it?”
Wiley touched a ring and the picture with the Bolt went to split-screen to show a lackluster cube of a room in dim light. Apparently Bolt could see it, too, because he studied something just to the left of his camera.
“That's the place,” Wiley told her. “If you can't do it, then just hold it to your time limit. It would be interesting to examine the device, but it's not essential.” He actually bit his lip before he added, “But if you can bring it in, I'd appreciate it.”
Jae harrumphed; he'd come over to stand behind them. “Lina, one of Wiley's hobbies is loud explosions.”
“To each their own. Chacun à son goût and all that,” she said to break the grim set of Londo's mouth.
“Marde, your accent is terrible.” But he smiled.
“English or French?” she asked. “Okay, here goes. Let's see if I can get it here in under four minutes, unexploded.”
Bolt folded his arms across his chest. “Four minutes? Earth to Sarastor? That I'd like to see.”
“She's been practicing most of the afternoon,” Lon said as he watched her stare at the screens, then close her eyes. Bolt jumped as the package disappeared from the hallway.
He said, “I'll check the rest of the place and then buzz over to Starhaven.”
Lon nodded, squinting at the screen as a flash of light zipped through the door and back. The lightning-Bolt coalesced back to human form in front of the camera, which was still floating in the hallway. “All clear here. The place is a wreck, though. As usual. When are you going to hire an effing maid?”
“Nobody likes a nag, Gary.”
The Terran part of the split-picture blurred as the ParaNet's mechanical transporter took effect. Then Bolt stood on a rocky mountainside with long rows of windows in its undulating face. Lon glanced over to see if Lina could see the picture, but she still had her eyes closed. It was sunset there, but enough light lingered for Bolt to search inside and out. It helped that using his power furnished his own illumination.
“All clear here, too,” he reported with a sneeze. He slapped at some newly-settled dust on his shoulder and then looked at Lina's image curiously.
“Okay, it's coming through. I'm pretty sure I've got it,” she announced. On the other side of the screen in the empty room, the package appeared. It
held steady, just sitting there. Nothing exploded. “Time?”
Wiley's mouth opened and turned into a grin: the proud father seeing his child arrive in the world. His eyes flashed triumph, though not in concert. “Three and a half minutes. Very good indeed.”
“It's still a biohazard, but at least the electric potentials are perfectly matched.” Lina breathed a sigh.
Bolt scratched his cowled head, his mouth screwing in different directions as he tried to make sense of the screen. “That's Sarastor. Eff.”
Londo wiggled his eyebrows at him. “Right. You're going to have to get back in training, Gary, because you've got competition now. Tell the Network I'll return in a few days. We're waiting out a quarantine here.”
“Sure thing. Anything else I can do?”
“Um…” Lina chewed on her lip, wondering if she should say anything.
Lon gave her a nudge of encouragement. Bolt looked from one to the other with an inquiring glance before he shrugged his shoulders and gave his head an infinitesimal shake as if to say, no way.
“Ask,” Londo told Lina.
She summoned her courage. “W-would it be too much trouble for you to call my work and tell them I'm in quarantine? Tomorrow or the day after I'll be overdue and it would be nice to still have my job when I get back. A call from a ParaNetter might keep the position open for me a while more.”
Inside she squirmed. Here she was worried about her little desk job when she was surrounded by people who saved entire worlds on a daily basis. Even worse was what the Bolt would think of her if he ever figured out what she did at work. Lots of people had the wrong idea about healthy porn.
“Sure. Tell them you're on Sarastor?”
“Oh no! They think I'm on Tiawa in French Polynesia. I'd port you in a pad and pencil, but I'm having a little problem with biohazards. Oh, of course. Wait.”
Bolt jumped as a pen and piece of paper from Lina's office appeared in his hand. It held the corporate name. Unlike some of the companies within the corporation, that wouldn't be familiar to anyone.
“The main number's on the pad,” she told him and gave him a name and extension. Bolt wrote it down. The receptionist would answer with the corporate name. He'd never know.
“Please tell her Carolina O'Kelly's in quarantine, home in a few days. If you could throw in something like a world emergency or the end of the universe so they wouldn't fire me, I'd appreciate it.”
“Sure thing. Anything else?”
Lon nudged her. “The cats? Your family?”
She gave him a smile now that she didn't have to worry about her job. “Porting without seeing both ends is out, but maybe I can zigzag catfood into one of the containment compartments and then back home. There wouldn't be any contamination that way, would there? I mean, if it works.”
She'd have to repay the grocery store when she returned, and the cats did need real human attention… Oh well, they had each other to play with. She'd have to get the knack of this real soon, but she'd always worked best under a deadline. “My parents won't even notice that I'm gone,” she told Londo.
“That's it? D'accord, see you in a few days, Gary. Rand out.”
“Good to see you're still with us. Effass.”
The screen cleared and disappeared.
Lina gulped. “Did I actually talk to the Bolt? I mean, the Bolt?”
Lon laughed lightly and hugged her to him. “Gary's just a regular guy. Just like me.”
“I would never make the mistake of calling you a regular guy.” She ran her fingertips across his broad shoulders. Even when she set aside the fact that he was Valiant, Londo was the most special man in the world. Her protector. She gave him a thankful kiss and he shifted his hold on her so he could draw it out. The tip of his tongue grazed her bottom lip. Just that much ignited a fire within her and she opened to him, eager for more.
The air clicked as another screen flared to life in front of them. Londo muttered a curse onto Lina's lips. Stoan's face appeared.
“Feeling better, are we, Londo?”
“Ahem. Yes, Stoan, Feeling much better now.”
“What the kick are you people doing up there? We just registered an explosion a few minutes ago, and now there's a sizable explosive sitting in one of the IM-area holding cells.”
“Lina's porting in some bombs from Earth. Boobytraps for us. We thought some innocent bystanders might get caught by them, so we elected to bring them here. Wiley wanted to play.”
“I didn't get the first one exactly right,” Lina said. “It went off. Sorry.”
Stoan gave her a measuring stare that she didn't like in the least. Londo tightened his grip on her under it.
“So tell me. Is it Lina or Carolina?” Stoan asked.
“Carolina for long, Lina for short,” she replied, trying not to sound nervous. Should she call him “sir?” He didn't seem much older than Lon, maybe in his mid-thirties—young but mature. The bluish cast to his skin should have given him a death pallor, but the color was a living one. It merely made him seem…distant. Cold. He needed some yellow in it to warm it up, like Wiley had.
“So tell me, Carolina,” Stoan said. “Can you teleport anything anywhere?”
“I don't know. I just started doing this, what, three days ago? So far so good on anything I've tried.”
“Could you handle, say, this entire building?”
Lina shook her head. “Oh, no. Much too big. I think I'd better stay in the human size range. Maybe something a little bigger, but not much.”
“Can you sense the entire building?”
Lina concentrated. Get the feel of this room, its connections to the larger building, the space it took up in the world… It wasn’t a good time for her meds to start wearing off. She tried to ignore that and extend her senses. “I…think so. It would take me some time to go through the entire place and map it out, but given a few days—No, jesus, how big is this place? Big. Given a few weeks, maybe, I could.”
“With all security systems mapped out, too?”
“What are you getting at, Stoan?” Londo snapped.
“I know what he's getting at, Lon,” Lina said. “It would be a rough map, but I think I could get a reasonable percentage of the things that would make sense to me. I don't know about the odder stuff. Maybe; maybe not.”
Stoan gave Londo a hard look. “What kind of security clearance would you give Carolina if you were in my shoes?”
“I'm not in your shoes. I know Lina well enough by now. I'd trust her with my life. I already have.”
“She's been in our system.”
Lina didn't like the way this conversation was going. She didn't like that this man was using her to embarrass Londo's position here. “Wiley checked after me. He knows exactly what I've accessed, and he seemed to be perfectly all right with it.”
“How much more time do you have on the quarantine?” Stoan asked.
Lon looked at his padd. “Almost two days.”
“I'm thinking about coming in there. Just as a backup.”
“To what?” To make things worse, a quick sensation of burning flesh flashed across Lina's back. She was too angry to breathe into it, so it lingered and sizzled before finally fading away.
“That's not needed,” Londo told Stoan as he squeezed reassurance to her. **Let me handle this.**
The squeeze pulled the tight, healing skin of her side. He released instantly. **Sorry.**
“Can you transport me in there directly?” Stoan peered at Lina's expression.
She tried hard not to scowl, but had to pause before answering. “That's odd.”
“What?” Londo wanted to know as Stoan's eyes shuttered on Lina.
“He's got, I guess that's a magnetic field built up around him,” she said to Lon and then addressed herself to Stoan. “Is that your normal field, or are you increasing it for some reason?”
“I'm in my normal mode,” he said.
Lina thought he might be lying. She shook her head. “I wouldn't advise port
ing you. I'm not sure I can port a field like that and keep it intact.”
Stoan looked strangely satisfied, and Lina concluded that he thought that here was something she couldn't control. He didn't realize that she could port him, but that his field would be wrecked to hell if she did.
“I could set up an emergency airlock for the lab and enter that way. Or use our own transporters,” Stoan said smugly to Londo.
“And that way we'd all have to stay here another three days while we waited for you to go through decontamination.” Londo's voice was liquid as he tried to ease the situation. “Stay put for another day, Stoan. We're fine in here. Everything's under control.”
“That's what I'm afraid of,” Stoan said tightly. He stared down Lina.
Damn it, he was trying to turn Lon against her! “I do not control minds! I am not controlling anyone.” She tried to think through all the information she'd gathered up until now. “Don't y'all have any telepaths around? I thought there was one on the membership list. Londo, you said you knew a telepath. Is she a Legionnaire?”
Stoan glowered at her. “Psyche's not here now. She's on a mission. She doesn't seem to be in the same class as you; she doesn't talk to spirits and angels.” He named the two snidely, as if he were talking about children's fantasies. “She doesn't bring people back from the dead.”
“None of that is telepathy. At least, I don't think it is.”
“I've already left messages for Chim,” Lon interrupted. He used the name as if this Chim might be the same person as Psyche.
“Then we are at an impasse since I believe that this is all telepathic in nature. Chim tells me that mind control is theoretically a fairly simple thing to do, if one has the right intent and skills.”
Londo pulled Lina back from where she'd advanced to the screen to face down the Legion commander. He stepped in front of her as a shield. “So when she returns she can scan Lina and everyone else in here and confirm that no one's being controlled.”
Touch of Danger (Three Worlds) Page 45