Power Play

by Anne McCaffrey

  She pondered the brief sentence from Shongili—for who else would be “SS”? “Nothing a person could do,” huh? Well, that was certainly in line with Yana’s allegation. Wouldn’t the anxious husband of a newly wedded pair try to bargain? Not, Dinah came to the reluctant conclusion, if he had no control over this planet entity, this sentient world. Then she turned to the bulk of the message—so innocent and naive. If she could get out of her job as a pirate? What ingenuousness. Part of Shongili’s ploy? No, the words had the ring of truth.

  Further to that, which the Tanana Bay O’Neills couldn’t have known at all, was that she was a descendant of that Rory O’Neill, Handy Red O’Neill, who had been so proud of fighting that battle on the Rosslare Ferry. The last stand of the Virtuous, he’d called it. And he’d composed a roaring saga which was one of the few memories she had of her own redheaded father: bellowing out the chorus to the many stanzas of that saga. Oh, she’d have a family song to sing to these O’Neills of Tanana Bay, she would indeed.

  Abruptly she clicked on the holoshield control set in one of her rings and depressed another button to summon Megenda.

  Almost immediately, Megenda reported to his Aurelian captain. “Yes, Captain Louchard?”

  “It’s time to leave. We’re going to Petaybee, Megenda.”

  The man’s broken teeth showed in a grin. “Aye-aye, Cap’n.”

  16

  Kilcoole

  “Sean?” Simon Furey came charging into the governor’s mansion. “I got someone here from . . .” Furey frowned down at the plasfilm sheets trying to curl around his gloved hand from the static in the cold air he brought in with him. “Nakatira Structural Cubes?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “I have!” Furey said, impressed.

  Sean reached for the film and they both had trouble unwinding it to the point where the consignment note and the invoice could be separated and read. “I don’t know a thing about this,” he added, shaking his head, especially over the fat letters of the NO CHARGE stamped on the invoice.

  Furey jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the junked cabin room. “They’d be damned good things to have, y’know.”

  Sean looked about him, snorting at the confusion of tiers of boxes on every available space, boxes into which Una and her helpers filed the stuff that every shuttle brought down to dump in his already stuffed premises.

  Adak came in just then, waving more plasfilm. “The most humongous slabs just arrived, Sean. They gotta be unloaded and put up, and I dunno.” Adak’s eyes were wide in his round face. “What are they?”

  “Climatically resistant and atmospherically adjustable additional autonomous units, complete with all facilities, that can be erected instantly and with little or no site preparation,” said the rangy redheaded individual who had followed Adak in. “But I gotta tell ya, man, we gotta fix and run or we miss the next delivery, and that’s not company policy. We only got three days to site these things, and you’re lucky to get delivery so quickly, considering how far in advance clients usually gotta book Nakatira Cubes. So where do we put ’em?”

  “Them?”

  The redhead flicked fingers at the film in Sean’s suddenly limp fingers.

  “Five of ’em.” The redhead held up four gloved fingers. The gloves seemed to be his only concession to Petaybean weather, although the outfit he wore was probably one of those lightweight thermal beauties like the ones Minkus had brought with him from Herod’s. Now the Nakatira emissary looked about him. “This the governor’s mansion?” he asked incredulously, assessing the clutter in a single, not-quite-contemptuous glance.

  “How big are these cubes?” Sean asked.

  The redhead snorted. “Hell, man, you could put six of this bitty place in one and still get a rattle.”

  “Then I want one right beside this,” Sean said, suddenly decisive. “Adak, get some axes and—”

  The redhead held up a restraining hand. “No sweat, mate. Oscar O’Neill, the Great O.O., will take care of that detail. Like we claim, little or no site preparation is needed.”

  “What wouldja do with them trees then?” Adak demanded, his head protruding from his parka like a turtle’s.

  “You need the wood? We keep the wood,” the Great O.O. said amiably. “That’s one down, Governor Shongili . . .” And Oscar O’Neill paused to receive Sean’s disposition of the others.

  “Make a much better school than the latchkay does . . .” Simon Furey suggested appealingly.

  “Done!”

  “School’s to be nearby?” O.O. asked.

  “Just up the road,” Simon replied eagerly, pointing in the right direction.

  “Road?” O.O. asked condescendingly.

  “Road,” Sean said firmly, and wondered what to do with the others.

  “Kin I make a suggestion, mate?” O.O. asked, and when Sean nodded, he said, “Well, I spent a good deal of good daylight e-rection time trying to find you. Wouldn’t have found you at all if not for Cap’n Greene and his flyin’ machine. He came along just as I was about to mark this lot ‘return to sender.’ Why not install one cube at that so-called SpaceBase of yours to direct incoming traffic and take”—he looked around him again—“some of the paperwork outta here.”

  Sean couldn’t have agreed more; he was baffled by the whole situation. The NO CHARGE aspect of this largesse could not be explained by O.O. All he knew “was what was on the dockets, man,” and “no charge” meant just that, and who were they to argue with Head Office? By the time the necessary decisions were made, Sean had a new office block adjacent to the marital cabin; awed Kilcoole had a new school; Petaybee Admin had its own—if empty—premises on the edge of the SpaceBase; there’d be a temporary “holding area” cube installed at SpaceBase as well, to take care of the unwanted visitors already cramping local dwellings; and Lonciana was going to find herself the recipient of the fifth Nakatira Structural Cube. If she was having half the trouble managing the Southern Continent that Sean was in the North, she’d need the space to do it in, too.

  As abruptly as O.O. and his men had appeared, they left.

  “He was as good as his word, wasn’t he?” Una commented, standing in the new-fallen snow in front of the cube as the governor’s “staff” took stock of their new premises. “It’s just forty-eight hours since they arrived.”

  “So it is,” Sean said, totally bemused by the speed with which this had all been accomplished. O.O. and his men hadn’t even paused when snow had whipped around so thickly that visibility was almost nil—despite the banks of heavy-duty lights that had been put up for work through the night.

  The building had been sunk into the ground, neatly placed behind a screen of Kilcoole’s conifers so that it didn’t even seem to be an intruder. A unanimous decision had voted for an outer coating of a barklike paint so that it resembled—at least in color—the other cabins along the road. Of course, the upper level did tower above the neighboring buildings, but there were trees behind it that were taller still. It was empty, of course, for no one had had time to transfer anything.

  “What a difference a day makes!” Sean said.

  Cautiously approaching the new building, Marduk let out a little snarl. He was pacing along the front of it, sniffing here and there and usually sneezing at the chemical smells clinging to the newly erected building, pawing at the one or two mounds of disturbed dirt left over.

  “Well, no good standing around out here, is there?” Sean said and took the three entrance steps in one.

  Gal Three

  “I tell you, Louchard’s real ship only just left,” Charas vehemently insisted to Commander Nal an Hon. She was once more dressed in the gear of a station brat, but there was nothing of the child in her manners as she leaned across the desk, hands gripping the edge, her white knuckles demonstrating the intensity of her belief in what she said. “That’s why you never found the kidnapped victims in any of the ships that had disembarked.”

  “Your instrumentation could be faulty, Char
as,” the commander said patiently.

  “Faulty my aunt’s left toenail!” She swung away from the desk and began pacing. “My instruments registered the original Mayday from both Madame Algemeine and the colonel. I followed them to Cargo Bay 30—”

  “And followed the shuttle . . .”

  “So I did, but the shuttle seemed the obvious escape vehicle . . . and we were going so fast . . . My implant returns only life-sign readings past a certain distance.” Charas shook her head: they all had been sure the shuttle had the victims. “But the signal from the implant suggests that Madame Algemeine is still on Gal Three. I got the strongest response in the cargo bay, only there’s some sort of a scrambler system that diffuses so one can’t accurately locate the source.” She held up a hand when the commander started to interrupt her. “Until just this past half hour. Operations say that only five ships have requested clearance in the past hour—hours, that is,” she corrected herself, her smile grim, “since it’s taken me longer to reach you with this information. Freighters, all of them, incapable of moving at any great speed.”

  “Look, I want Madame Algemeine back as much as you do, but I’ve only so many forces to handle search and recover operations.”

  “Madame Algemeine will, of course, reimburse your costs. What are you waiting for, Commander?”

  “Nothing,” he said abruptly. Depressing the Alert pad, he issued instructions, detailing the descriptions and numeric IDs of the five ships to be stopped and boarded.

  “Ingenious, you must admit,” Charas said, relaxing now that she had gotten him to act, “remaining on Gal Three while the first of the search and boards were being initiated. But then we know that Louchard uses state-of-the-art technology. This abduction was very carefully planned.”

  She sighed, rubbing her face; she’d been working, with only catnaps to refresh her, ever since she’d received the first Mayday: prowling about the immense cargo bay, checking every single ship in the facility time and time again, trying to locate exactly which of the hundred or so ships hid the victims. But her locator, despite being state-of-the-art, displayed so many “echoes,” even when placed against a hull, that she had been unable to pinpoint the target ship. Fortunately, her disguise had saved her from retaliation by some of the ships personnel: aliens in particular were apt to take offense if you were seen hanging about their vessels for no apparent purpose.

  At the outset of this incident, she’d seen the women in the company of Macci Sendal, so she hadn’t been as close on Yana’s heels as she normally would. For that she blamed herself. Getting slack in her middle years: she’d have to quit this kind of work if she was going to be less than top efficient all the time.

  So the pair waited. Commander an Hon courteously supplied her with a meal and then a shower in his private facilities while fresh clothing was procured for her. She was adrenaline-poor at this point, having pushed herself so hard for days, and she almost nodded off when the first reports came in. The slowest of the five vessels had been apprehended: it was, as it was supposed to be, a drone grain carrier, and all its components checked out as they should. The second was carrying only two holds of cargo, to the captain’s disgust, and he was in no fit mood to be stopped on such a spurious charge. The third was also innocent, and the fourth, but of the fifth, all they found were large fragments of the hull.

  “Wasn’t blown apart, wasn’t hit by any space flot, wasn’t burned or melted or anything, Commander. Just like the hull had been a weevy-fruit, split open down the axis.”

  An Hon and Charas exchanged despairing looks.

  “Damn that Louchard!” Charas felt as near to tears as she had the day her mother died, when she’d been eight years old.

  “Any residuals to track?” an Hon asked.

  “We’re searching, sir, but they could have just used the drift to take ’em the way they wanted to go and, begging your pardon, it could take weeks to do a search pattern and we’d still not be sure we got the right trail.”

  “Return to base, Captain, and thank you.” Grimly Commander an Hon looked at Charas. “You still have a life signal from Madame Algemeine, don’t you?”

  Charas touched the point on her mastoid bone and inclined her head positively. Madame Algemeine was the only client for whom she would have permitted such an invasion of her personal privacy: she owed her, for her life and her sanity.

  “We can check with Sally Point-Jefferson, too,” she said.

  The tall lean commander waved aside that suggestion with a twitch of his lips. “If she got the blast, so would you!” When a death occurred, those carrying the implant tuned to a person experienced an unforgettable blast.

  “Now what? The kidnappers didn’t leave a final warning of any kind, did they?”

  “Nothing past the last one M’sser Klausewitch passed on to us.”

  “Klausewitch,” Charas murmured, and locked eyes with the commander. “Odd man to be chosen as messenger. And Madame herself cancelled Millard and Sally as bodyguards?”

  “Hmmm.” An Hon shrugged at the whimsies of the rich. He would have had an operative with Yana in the head, in her tub, and under her bed, but who would have thought a kidnapping of someone of Madame Algemeine’s status would occur in this day and age after the Amber Unicorn fiasco! True, there were occasional incidents involving lesser lights like merchants, captains, executives, and enough freaks eking out a marginal living on any big station like this to account for GBA and “accidents,” as well as extortionist intimidation, but nothing on the scale of this felony. “Madame Algemeine had some critical meeting or other that they had to prepare for, and doubtless she felt that she was well enough known—with Klausewitch along—to inhibit any confrontation.”

  “And who let the two kids loose?”

  “That has already been dealt with,” the commander said in a hard voice. The “unseen eye” supposed to follow the young folk had missed their departure from the Algemeine apartments. His license had been revoked, and he was currently looking for any work he could get.

  “That Klausewitch fellow,” Charas said, returning to one aspect of this whole affair that nagged her like a damaged nerve. “What else have you discovered about him?”

  “I got a repeat of the original clearance. He certainly wouldn’t have been hired by Rothschild’s if there was anything suspicious about him. But I’ve asked again for a comprehensive.”

  “He was sure green-e-o at Algemeine’s first thing that morning. And I heard he doesn’t usually rise until midday.”

  “That is true.”

  “Or is he just queer for pregnant women?” Charas asked with feminine cynicism.

  “There was that case”—an Hon paused, rubbing his chin speculatively—“where a salesman with an impeccable record was convicted of grand larceny following an investigation of his accounts. He admitted falling under the spell of this Louchard personage. It is a possibility,” an Hon admitted. “As the Great Sleuth remarked, when you discount the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, will be the answer.”

  “You’ve got surveillance on him?”

  “You may be sure of that, and on anyone else even remotely involved in this affair, up to and including our society hostess, Pleasaunce Ferrari-Emool.”

  “Yeah, her!”

  “She’s been known to associate with some unlikely characters.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Get some sleep, Charas. You’re not good to anyone in your present state, though you cleaned up better than I thought you would.”

  Charas managed a grin. “Any place here I can catch a few winks?” she asked, rising. “Don’t want to be far away if you need me. And I’m not all that sure I could make it to my digs.”

  When Madame Algemeine had imported Charas as her Gal Three “unseen eye” she had naturally introduced the woman to Commander an Hon. Charas had assisted him from time to time when her principal client was absent from the station, so he had a high degree of respect for her capabilities, the present situatio
n notwithstanding. He himself showed her to one of the cabins reserved for unexpected visitors. She lay on her side, positioned her legs comfortably, and immediately her breathing went into a deep-sleep pattern. He activated the comm link and left.

  He should be getting some gen back on Klausewitch, and he couldn’t imagine why it was taking so long. Because of the prestige of its special residents, Gal Three had priority clearance up to top-secret levels. Surely Klausewitch was not above that category.

  17

  On board the pirate ship

  “There!” Diego cried. “I can feel the vibrations now. Can’t you?” His tone was slightly accusatory.

  “Yes, actually, I can,” Yana said, her fingers splayed on the bulkhead.

  “And the air has definitely changed,” Marmion said, sniffing. “I’ve never noticed before how different air can smell.”

  “You would if you lived where it’s pure,” Bunny said somewhat condescendingly, “and then had to breathe the muck. Oh, your launch had good air, but some places on Gal Three it was . . . well, it was downright stinky. Like the stuff that hovers over SpaceBase back home.” The last few words came out in a tone that everyone recognized as homesick. But Bunny made an effort, inhaled the bad air, and turned resolute.

  “We’ll get back to Petaybee, gatita, I know we will,” Diego said soothingly.

  “Hell’s bells,” Yana said. “For all we know we may be heading there right now.” She looked queryingly at Namid.

  He shrugged his helplessness. “Louchard is known to be devious but rarely direct. He likes to hunt, stalk his prey, and then snatch.”

  “He makes a practice of kidnap?” Marmion asked, startled, and for the first time fear colored her expression.