The Mandala Maneuver

by Christine Pope

  Assuming she lasted that long, of course.

  A flinty-eyed Gaian in a black coverall not unlike the one she wore approached, his pulse pistol pointed right at her heart. Mouth thinning, he leaned past her and shut down the comm channel.

  “Out,” he said, and indicated with the pistol that she should go back down the narrow aisle between the seats and exit the ship.

  Resistance probably wasn’t a very good idea, so she nodded meekly, hands held in the air, and walked past him and out of the ship. On the ground at the foot of the stairs stood an elegant Gaian woman wearing a suit so modish it put anything in Alexa’s own wardrobe to shame. Beside her was a man in a black uniform with no distinguishing insignia, dark glasses covering his eyes.

  The woman looked Alexa up and down, and smirked — at her grubby attire, most likely. But all she said was, “Well, Ambassador Craig, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. All his nerve endings seemed to be thrumming with unease. At this distance he couldn’t sense Alexa, but that didn’t prevent him from worrying. Actually, it made the situation worse.

  Normally, waiting was not something he found difficult. All Zhore knew how to meditate, to go within and find the calm at one’s center. That, however, was not so easy to do when the woman he loved was marching straight into danger. She could downplay the risk all she wanted, but he knew better. Anyone who would pull a ship from subspace and destroy it, then attempt to hide all trace of the incident by killing the survivors, was no one to trifle with.

  To occupy himself, he pulled out the beacon and Alexa’s tablet, and set them on top of the cargo compartment, as that was the only flat surface the skimmer afforded. He activated the beacon, and watched as the screen on the tablet resolved itself into the field where he was supposed to enter what Alexa had called the “SOS” code, along with a brief message. But if he did that, the beacon would transmit directly to GEC HQ…and that, he was fairly certain, would do him no good at all.

  Instead, he stared down at the device for a moment, then typed in “help.” The screen pulsed, and resolved itself once more into the field awaiting input. He should have known it wouldn’t be quite that easy. All right. It was set up to accept data from the tablet, and so perhaps a regular command would be enough to bring him to some sort of setup screen. Perhaps he should try that.

  But typing in “setup” did nothing, either. Nor did “configure,” or “change coordinates.” Obviously the little device was not that literal. It would not help to think of the moments ticking by, of what might be happening to Alexa as he sat here and fiddled with the beacon.

  All right, time to try a different approach. Perhaps he needed to reset it somehow. He was not entirely familiar with Alexa’s tablet, as it was set up to Gaian specifications, but some things were universal…like that little key at the top right of the virtual keyboard with “Esc” stamped on it in the letters of Galactic Standard.

  He pushed that button, and the original input screen disappeared, to be replaced by the words “configure setup now?”, followed by “Y” and “N.” Hardly daring to breathe, Lirzhan touched his fingertip to the “Y,” and watched as the screen changed again, this time to one with several fields to be filled in, some pertaining to encoding and other things he didn’t quite understand. What he did understand was the field labeled “destination coordinates.”

  Thank Irzhaan.

  She had used the notepad function of the tablet to write down Targus Station’s coordinate code, and so he pulled that up, then copied and pasted it into the field as requested and pressed “enter.” Once again the screen changed, this time going back to the original one. The field only accepted up to one hundred characters, so he would have to be brief. Alexa Craig & Lirzhan shot down Mandala GSC 2897. Hostiles on planet. Pickup requested ASAP, he typed, then pressed “send.” A small blue light on the beacon began to pulse, apparently signaling that it was now transmitting the message.

  It made him feel a little better, but not much. He glanced at the chronometer at the top left of the tablet’s screen. She had been gone not quite a standard half hour. Not so very much time, and certainly well within what they had expected would be the time required for the operation, but….

  Now that he had gotten the beacon to work, he truly had nothing to occupy himself, except his own worried thoughts. The shuttle had been shot down a little more than six hours into a twelve-hour flight, and so that meant help might be here as soon as six hours from now — if all went well. Would those receiving the message even believe it? No reason not to, of course, not when sent via a beacon like that. Or so he tried to reassure himself.

  All the same, he knew he’d feel much better once Alexa returned. And if she didn’t…

  …Well, he’d just have to go find her himself.

  The room they’d brought her to was small and gray and absolutely featureless. No windows. Industrial-looking light bars to provide illumination, and a long gray table surrounded by hard gray chairs. No, it wasn’t a holding cell, but there also wasn’t much here to provide any reassurance.

  They’d sat Alexa down on one of the chairs. She wasn’t bound, and she supposed she should be glad for that. Then again, where would she run? The hard-faced officer and the well-dressed woman stood facing her, and two men in black coveralls guarded the door outside. Even if she had the sort of training that would allow her to disable the two people standing in front of her — which she didn’t — the guards in the corridor would either disable her or kill her outright the second she went through the door.

  “Ambassador Craig,” said the woman. “Do you want to tell us what you were doing on our ship?”

  Alexa lifted her shoulders. “What’s the point? I’m sure you had your people in there accessing the comm log as soon as I was gone.”

  The woman’s perfect brows creased. A certain tautness about her forehead seemed to indicate that she wasn’t as young as she looked, that she’d had more than a few cosmetic procedures to ensure she maintained that mask of plastic perfection. “Very well, then. Do you want to explain why you, as a representative of the Consortium, were sending messages to the Council facility in the Targus system rather than back to your superiors at the embassy on Eridani, or indeed directly to the consulate offices on Gaia itself?”

  Lies, truth, or something somewhere in between? None of them seemed all that appealing. The most Alexa could hope for was to stall, to keep them talking to her, questioning her, until the rescue team from Targus could get here. She shrugged again. “It seemed the logical thing to do, as my next posting is to the Gaian consular office on Targus Station. Why would I backtrack to Eridani or Gaia?”

  The woman clearly didn’t like that answer. Her mouth pinched, and she leaned over and whispered something to the man who stood beside her. He shook his head infinitesimally.

  Alexa knew it was probably best not to volunteer any more information, to play dumb as much as possible. While she wanted to demand that they tell her what the hell was going on here, to ask why those men had been sent to kill her and Lirzhan, that would only be tipping her hand, and might provoke them into a very unwelcome response.

  Straightening, the strange woman crossed her arms and gazed down at Alexa the way she might have stared at an insect that had had the temerity to crawl across her boot. “It didn’t do you any good anyway,” she said. “We immediately followed up with a message saying that the previous communication had been garbled, that we had been intending to send an update to HQ on Gaia, and to ignore it.”

  Goddammit. Maybe the people at Targus Station had believed the lie…which was arguably flimsy…and maybe they hadn’t. Alexa couldn’t know for sure. And she wouldn’t know until some five and a half hours from now, when the rescue team from Targus Station might or might not show up.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?” she said coolly.

  “We’re not going to do anything of the sort,�
� the flinty-eyed man said, speaking for the first time. His clipped accent clearly betrayed his origins — the United Kingdom, Alexa thought, something northern, like Manchester or Edinburgh. “But you are going to tell us where Ambassador Lirzhan is.”

  Oh, so you can kill us both at the same time? Like hell.

  “I have no idea,” she replied, making sure to keep her tone even. After all, she’d had a lot of practice in such things. Only a few months ago she’d stood her ground while a heavy-browed Stacian diplomat practically screamed in her face when she was part of the team attempting to clear up the aftermath of that mess in the Chlorae system. “He dropped me off and went back into the woods somewhere. I said I’d signal him when I was done.”

  “Signal him with what?” the woman demanded. “We found nothing on you.”

  No, they hadn’t, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The pat-down had been more than a little rough, and she’d endured it while staring straight ahead, ignoring the way the two soldiers or mercs or whatever they were handled her a little too familiarly. But all she’d brought with her was the toolkit from the skimmer, so there wasn’t much to find.

  “I must have dropped it,” Alexa said. “That was some rough territory, coming over here.”

  The woman made an exasperated sound, although something about the sideways flicker of her eyes told Alexa her interrogator wasn’t all that convinced. “How unfortunate.” She tilted her head to one side. “So how is your companion going to retrieve you?”

  “He isn’t,” Alexa replied. “I told him that if I didn’t signal him, then it meant I’d been discovered and he’d need to stay far away.”

  The woman appeared to digest that comment for a moment. Then she arranged a sticky-sweet smile on her perfectly glossed lips and asked, “But why stay away in the first place? I would have thought that, once you located this facility, you would have attempted to make contact to get assistance. You are a representative of the Consortium, and this is clearly a Consortium facility.”

  “Is it?” Alexa inquired in return. “Because I don’t see any insignia on that man’s uniform, and you have yet to identify yourselves. Forgive me if I was being unduly cautious.” Oh, how she wanted to tell them that of course she wasn’t going to walk up and knock on the door of the people who’d just spent the last four days trying to kill her and Lirzhan. But that would be revealing far too much. It was clear that this woman still couldn’t tell for sure whether Alexa suspected the people at the facility of being the ones behind the assassination attempts, or whether another group was responsible. And as long as that uncertainty existed, Alexa would be sure to cultivate it.

  “Forgive me,” the woman said, still wearing that plastic smile. “I am Melinda Ono, and this is Captain Marquand. I’m the administrator here.”

  “And what exactly are you administrating?”

  The smile tightened. “I’m afraid that’s classified, Ambassador Craig.”

  Alexa sent her an equally false smile in return. “Yes, but I’m cleared up to level seventeen.” Not that that would get her anywhere, but it would be fun to see this woman, who clearly was an executive from some corporate interest or another, scramble to explain why a level-seventeen clearance wasn’t sufficient to access the information on this facility.

  “And I’m sure in most cases that would be enough, but not here, I’m afraid.” Melinda Ono gave an apologetic little shrug that wasn’t convincing in the least. “I will assure you that we have all the necessary clearances and licenses to be operating this facility. But perhaps you can explain that to your superiors once you’ve returned to Gaia.”

  Some part of Alexa was relieved by these words, as they seemed to indicate that Ono & Company had abandoned the idea of murdering her outright. Then again, Gaia was the last place she wanted to go. Lord knows what story this woman would cook up to explain Alexa’s presence here, and no doubt her superiors in the diplomatic corps would swallow the whole thing. Money talked, and Alexa was only one woman, with not a great deal of clout. Yes, on the surface her career had looked promising, but she wasn’t naive enough to believe that a junior ambassador had the kind of sway to override input from one of Gaia’s mega-corps.

  And what about Lirzhan? She had no idea where he was right now. For all she knew, they had parties out searching for him, and he’d been captured as well. What if they tried to take his robes away from him? He’d been wearing them, but with the hood down. She couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of a violation that would be for a Zhore.

  “Sending me to Gaia would be a waste of resources,” Alexa said calmly, refusing to allow any of her inner turmoil to bubble its way to the surface. “My next posting is Targus Station, and if you’re going to send me off-planet — which I understand is fully within your rights, as this is a secure facility — then that is the most logical place to send me.”

  “We’ll send you where we decide to, and that’s the end of it,” Marquand put in, clearly wearying of the back and forth between the two women. “You can cool your heels in here for a while, Ambassador — Ms. Ono and I have a few things to discuss.”

  Melinda Ono looked briefly displeased by this, but then she nodded and said, “We’ll follow up soon, Ambassador Craig,” before following Captain Marquand out of the room. The door shut behind them, and Alexa heard the faint tinny beep of the electronic lock being engaged.

  She didn’t even bother to get up and test the door. The sound was final enough, and told her she was stuck in here until they came back and…did what? Shot her outright? Called in a transport to haul her back to Gaia, where her story would mesh so badly with whatever lies Ms. Ono and her cohorts could concoct that she’d be discredited before she even got started?

  And then there was the question of Lirzhan. She could only pray that he’d had the sense to lie low, that he wasn’t going to play his world’s equivalent of the knight in shining armor, coming to rescue the princess. Because the story that never got told, but probably happened more often than not, was of the knight ending up in the dungeon, right next to the princess.

  Twelve

  Forty-five standard minutes, and now he knew she must be in trouble. She’d told him not to come looking for her if anything happened, but he knew he could no more do that than stop breathing. Although they’d seen no obvious surveillance during their quick fly-by, it was clear it existed, and it had caught her.

  She must be alive, though. Surely he would have felt it if they had killed her, even at this distance. Far more likely that they would be questioning her, probably to locate him so the final loose end could be wrapped up once and for all.

  But he wouldn’t make it easy for them.

  Coming in from the landing pad was clearly not the answer. Too exposed, too close to the barracks. He had no idea of the schedule at the facility, and so didn’t know when the people who worked the mines might be coming and going. But there was still the first approach, from behind the ridge. In the shadows of the rocks there he could slip in by the refining factory, and follow its pipes to the main building. From there he would have to improvise, but he thought it might be done.

  He glanced at the chronometer on the tablet. Five hours until rescue at the very earliest. A great deal could happen between now and then. It was entirely possible that the rescuers might have no one to rescue by the time they got here.

  No. He would not allow himself to think that way, for then he would be admitting defeat before he’d even begun. The universe could not be so cruel as to have brought Alexa to him, only to have them torn apart before they had barely even begun to explore a relationship.

  After disconnecting the beacon from the tablet, he tucked the larger device into an inner pocket in his robes, and placed the beacon in the emergency bag, now resting on the floor of the skimmer. The beacon had either done its job or it hadn’t, but it was of no further use at the moment.

  This would be the first time he had driven their borrowed vehicle, but he had watched Alexa, and the procedure did
not seem terribly difficult. Push that button to engage the engine, and the other to set off the thrusters and tuck the wheels into the undercarriage. From there it was a simple matter of steering between the trees, and using the lever off to the left to adjust his altitude.

  Even so, he felt the small craft dip a little as he pulled back on the lever, and hastily pushed forward instead, bringing the skimmer up to approximately two meters above the forest floor. That was high enough to avoid any underbrush and boulders, but not so high that he could be easily spotted.

  Keeping his forward speed low, he maneuvered around the trees, retracing their first route, the one that would take him back to the ridge line, so he might dip below it and come up from behind the facility. A shadow passed over the sun, and he glanced up, seeing clouds begin to move in. The breeze somehow felt colder, as if the chilly air currents were bringing with them a shift in the weather.

  He hoped not, for up until now they had been lucky enough to enjoy a prolonged dry spell. The skimmer was an open vehicle; perhaps it had some sort of retractable cover, but if it did, he could not find the controls to work it, and he didn’t have any time to waste.

  Slowing to a crawl, the craft emerged from the trees, hanging below the ridge so the skimmer could not be seen by direct line of sight. If they had scanning equipment at the facility, then it would most likely pick up the vehicle’s heat signature, but he would have to take that chance.

  A slight whine from the engines as he engaged the thrusters again, and settled the skimmer on the rocky ground between several boulders, where he hoped it would be more or less hidden. From there it was a climb of some twenty meters to get over the ridge and down behind the refining plant. With the day growing rapidly darker as the cloud cover thickened, he hoped that he, in his black robes, would appear to be just another shadow.