Star rogue, p.10
Star Rogue, page 10
I found a wall with long windows, what we used to call “French windows” in the old days back on Earth, and I found a row of dense candlewood trees growing close to the house. I crept behind them, found an empty room and let myself in by the simple and time-honored expedient of smashing a pane of glass and reaching through to unlatch the window.
Once inside, I began searching with all my sensories. My mind could detect the presence of another mind and seize control of it easily; thus I did not find it very hard to make my way deeper and deeper into the house. Everyone that encountered me had the memory instantly erased from his mind.
I prowled cautiously through the ground floor of the mansion, being careful to search each room and corridor with full sensories before venturing into it. The big house was decorated expensively—luxuriously—and with exquisite taste. There were suites and apartments hung with gorgeous tapestries, including priceless examples of subtle Vruu Kophe work. The Vruu Kophe race had been killed off back in the Third Imperial War which had begun in the sixteenth year of the Empery of Uxorian I and ended in the fifth year of Arban IV. That was three and a half millennia ago and any examples of the gorgeous tapestry-art of the now-extinct arachnidian race were incredibly valuable and even more incredibly rare, which meant the chief of the Opposition was wealthy on the grand scale.
Then came a series of corridors whose walls were decorated with paintings, mullages, stabiles and chromophanes by the dozens—enough to stock three or four small museums. I recognized art by thirty or forty more famous artists of the past several centuries.
Wealthy was not quite the word.
Apparently, the ground floor of this palatial manse was for formal display, not for living. I passed through museum rooms and chambers given over to display cases of Herculean ivory, Baracheusian jewel carvings, Iocran wood sculpture, as well as enormous rooms filled with portraiture, statues and busts, mosaics, frescoes and curio collections. There was also a formal dining hall that could probably seat at a pinch two hundred guests, a ballroom big enough to house Wanderer and a library that you would have to see to believe. It must have held fifteen thousand books if it held a dozen, all rare first editions and fine bindings. Yes, I mean real books—genuine antiquities, printed on paper and bound between leather boards! —not just cassettes or tape reels, such as most people have been using for ages.
The Big Boss had real class, that was certain.
There must have been fifty guards stationed on the ground floor of this place alone, not counting the electronic surveillance equipment. I managed to dodge discovery without much trouble. I am an old hand at this sort of thing. (I’ve always thought I would have made a terrific cat burglar—it’s an idea, you must admit.)
The sentient sentinels gave me little trouble. My sensories gave me advance warning whenever they came near and as none of them wore mindlocks, a bit of mental tampering made me just about discovery-proof. The ever-vigilant electronic guard system was a bit more difficult to circumvent. Once again, I thanked my luck that the boys on the freighter had left me in possession of my “business” suit. Wired into the fabric of those fatigues and concealed in all sorts of unlikely places was enough microminiaturized gadgetry to fool the most complicated system of spy eyes, body-warmth detectors, proximity alarms, audio search beams and any other sophisticated mechanical watchdogs you could think of. I had a couple narrow escapes, I frankly admit, but I got through everything undetected.
The palace had two main wings which I searched after disposing of the central part of the structure. These wings were given over to business. And a pretty dubious business it would seem to be. I saw a communications set-up that would not have been shamed by comparison with Imperial Naval headquarters on Trelion V and a code room as fully equipped as Citadel itself.
Several suites were given over to operations and files. I didn’t poke around in them very much, just gave them a quick once-over-lightly to ascertain their purpose. This was the heart and brain and nerve center of the Opposition’s entire activities—whatever they were—and undoubtedly the electronic surveillance here would be pretty fierce. So I left these suites alone, just taking a look-see with my sensories.
I had no particular desire to trigger the self-destruct circuits presumably built into those files. If I wanted to attract attention, a far easier way would be to go outside and shoot up the grounds.
Finally, I began a tour of the upper floors. Here, one might guess, were the living quarters of the staff. Electronic safeguards should have been minimal on the second floor, where any sleep-walking Third Assistant Under-Chef or philandering Sub-Butler, Second Class, would be likely to trip off a proximity alarm or light up a body-warmth detector. Here I felt relatively safe and thought I could probably do a little snooping into sleeping minds.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, as it turned out. I ran straight into a robot.
An ice-cold ball of lead congealed in the pit of my guts and my heart, as the ancient cliché has it, rose into my mouth. I froze motionless. But it was no good.
I stared at it and it stared back at me. Cold receptor lenses (equipped, I noted all in one flashing second, to scan in visible light and infrared both) subjected me to a searching scrutiny. When I realized that proximity and body-warmth detectors would not be used to keep the living quarters under surveillance, I should have known that anybody as rich as the museum-cum-art-gallery-cum-library on the ground floor exemplified, would be rich enough to afford a staff of robot watchdogs. They made perfect night watchmen. Tireless, unsleeping, ever-vigilant, they were guards you could not bribe, anesthetize, garrote, knock out, or fool.
Of course they were linked on a common circuit with the house thedomin, whose positronic memory retained the likenesses of every single sentient being or animal pet permitted access to the house. A single glance at any intruder, a microsecond for memory comparison with stored likenesses, and the robot guard could detect that intruder.
I barely got my body shields up in time to fend off the stungun bolt with which one of the forelimbs of the robot was equipped.
Of course, I had no gun. Meade had used it to shoot me with. And I hadn’t thought it necessary to relieve any one of the guards I mind-controlled of his hardware in passing. I must admit I did feel kind of naked without an iron on my hip but it was too late to worry about past regrets now. I was trapped.
There was no way I could fight this thing—it must have weighed half a ton even without the caterpillar treads (the robotic equivalent of being barefoot. To avoid undue noise during sleeping hours, this tinplated watchdog rode a soundless hover-field).
And I couldn’t take it over as I had its human counterparts on the floor below. The human mind and robotic intelligence are incompatible, unlike human-and-thedominic sentience. Already it had flashed an alarm to the house thedomin; such a reaction would have been instantaneous. By now every other robot in the house had gotten the message, if I was right about them being on a common circuit.
There was a chance, the slightest, slimmest chance possible, that I could get the house thedomin under the control of my mind. I had done it before, at various times in my lurid past. But no chance of riding the robot’s beam back to the thedomin.
I was trapped, all right.
Before the neuronic attack ended, security gates were sliding out of the walls and cutting me off from the nearest exits. Even if I had relieved one of the guards of his hand laser or Barringer, or whatever, I couldn’t have cut my way through these grills. They were made of what looked like collapsium -9 and I would need a nega-grav-mounted semiportable energy gun to get through that stuff.
And then in the next fraction of a second the gas hit me. It must have been piped along the ceilings with release cocks every few yards or so.
It was the kind you don’t have to breathe. All it had to do was touch your skin and you were down for the long count. I didn’t even feel the floor when it came up and slapped me in the face…
TWELVE
Well, there I was in this big comfortable pneumo upholstered in what felt like fine velour. The chair was fully equipped with miniature tangle-field projectors that held me in their molasses-like grip. My arms and legs were immobilized, and comfortable enough, except when I tried to move them. Then I felt the tingling quicksand feeling tighten over my limbs and the surface tension of the field felt like rough sandpaper as it dragged against my bare skin.
This time, I had been stripped completely naked, my body gone over with a fine-toothed comb, and then somebody had thoughtfully put a dressing gown over my nakedness.
They were through playing games, obviously.
The chair had just given me a jet of counteractive gunk and it withdrew its extensible hypospray from the big artery in my arm as I came awake. The effects of the gas were just about gone. I felt a little logy and heavy-lidded, and the gas had left a taste in the back of my mouth you could have scraped off my tonsils with a rusty butter knife, but otherwise, I felt chipper enough.
A nicely-focused and perfectly tuned dampener field was localized on my chair. I couldn’t raise a watt of T-power if my life depended on it—which it probably did.
My chair sat in the middle of a long, high-ceilinged room decorated in exquisite taste. There were low tables of Kiogan and Mandrakor and Astysian work from the finest periods covered, with expensive bric-a-brac. Silver bowls filled with fresh-cut flowers added their sweetness to the cool air that blew from tangy woods beyond the tall windows. The carpeting underfoot had three-inch deep pile. The walls were beautifully paneled in rare woods, and here and there upon them hung still more paintings by famous artists, discreetly lit. The room breathed taste, elegance, luxury. And money. Lots of the latter.
Seated in a large, high-backed, wide-armed Kiogan chair across a low table from me, a slim, regal, beautifully-gowned and coiffured woman busied herself with tarrojan things of silver and fine crystal. The delicate aroma of excellent tarrojan rose to my nostrils.
“Good evening, Cn. Everest. Will you take nace or thoroway with your cup?” she inquired with a calm, gentle smile. Her hair, naturally grey, was built into an elaborate structure. Her gown, a long formal Tregephontane dining-robe, was made of dark rose velvet, silvery-grey silk and fabulously ancient lace, as yellow and fragile as old ivory. Her hands, slender and elegant and beautifully groomed, were without ornamentation except for one iridium ring that bore a Kyrian stardrop worth a quarter of a million units.
Well, she could afford it. And a dozen like it, out of the household money.
Of course, I knew her at a glance. Even hermitted away the past one hundred fifty years on Home, I had heard of her. You just don’t get that rich, that powerful, without getting well known. To half the galaxy she was the saintly and martyred widow of a mighty statesman, cut down on the very threshold of ultimate achievement; to these, the little people, she was a resigned, sweetly dignified widow, living in private seclusion. To the other half of the galaxy the rich, influential, titled, nobly born or ambitious, she was the reigning monarch of a powerful political machine who remained in seclusion, ready to return and claim her position of vast and central influence at any time, like the exiled queen of some fallen or deposed dynasty.
I will admit I was astonished to discover just who the Big Boss really was. Astonished? Staggered is, I think, the more appropriate word. The untouchable, pure, nobly-suffering paragon of wifehood … the bluest of the blue-bloods, the cream of the upper crust of Society … the Dowager Empress of good taste, good manners, and good breeding.
The biggest surprise, though, was to find her still alive. She had been an elderly woman way back in Year 3962 of the Imperium when I “retired.” I had no idea just how old she really was but she must have spent a truly princely fortune on antigeriatrics, cosmetic surgery and longevity treatments.
“Thoroway, thank you, Madame Lyntonhurst,” I replied quietly. “Although how I can drink it with my hands tied down I can’t quite imagine. A long straw, perhaps?”
She smiled sweetly.
“That will not be necessary, Citizen,” she said. Raising her voice just a little, she addressed the empty air. “I think Cn. Everest may be permitted the use of his hands, Control. But let us continue the restraint on his legs, just at present, if only to avoid accidents.”
The tangle-fields projected from the arms of my pneumo went off and I rubbed my numb fingers together with relief. My several rings, I saw, had been removed. That was a pity. The Antares moon-opal on my pinky could have cut her in half with a needle-focussed laser beam, if I was still wearing it.
I half-wondered if she would be stupid enough to hand me my cup but I should have known that no one as old or rich or powerful as Madame Lyntonhurst could have gotten as far as she had without having better sense than that. She poured my cup, slipped a sprig of thoroway into it and set it down on the edge of the table nearest to me.
“There we are, young man. I believe you can reach the cup from where you are without the necessity of getting up,” she said, with a gracious, dreaming smile.
I could.
Sipping the fragrant brew of herbs, I remembered it had been a long time since I had eaten anything. The steaming decoction of spicy, mild tarrojan was deliciously pungent and tangy. I set the cup down and let my eyes drift around the perfectly appointed room.
“Nice place you have here,” I remarked. “But then, I suppose, with all the annual dues of the Party to dip into, you can afford the good stuff.”
She gave a silvery laugh and there was amusement in her well-bred, patrician voice as she said, “Come, now, young man. As you know, the funds of the Libertarian Party are devoted to purely political activities.”
“Yeah. Spying, kidnapping, murder and building up a private Navy. I never did understand politics… .”
The polite, kindly expression on her fine-boned, aristocratic features did not alter by a millimeter.
“Now you are trying to insult me, Cn. Everest. As you must know, my husband, the late Centumvir, left me quite wealthy.”
“Left you with a well-organized political party to play around with, as well,” I said levelly. “He didn’t pack half the units you inherited from your first three husbands.”
Another gracious smile on that calm face.
“I see you are well acquainted with my history, young man. Unfortunately, I am not as familiar with your own. But, no doubt, we shall become better acquainted in time.”
“No doubt,” I grunted. “Especially if you go in for a bit of torture or like to drug your prisoners with a little monopentothal.”
Another silvery tinkling laugh.
“I see you enjoy plain, honest talk, Citizen! Well, so do I.”
“Yes, I believe in calling a spade a spade,” I said lightly. “And a murdering, power-hungry old bitch a murdering, power-hungry old bitch!”
She lost just a bit of the sweet graciousness from her eyes and her gently smiling lips tightened and went just a trifle hard.
Just then a door opened across the room and Meade came in. A very different Meade from the barelegged girl in the three-piece glitterfoil costume. She wore a modest, mousy tunic that covered her from collar-bone to knee-caps. Her hair was plainly dressed and her natural dark brown with fugitive red glints—no longer the fantastic sculptured and plasticined concoction ablaze with little witch-lights. No longer ruby red, her eyes were dark brown and subdued. The glowpaint had been washed away and a creamy tan, dusted with tomboy freckles, was revealed to sight. She still had the small, stubborn jaw, the pert little nose and the wide, warm, soft pink mouth. It occurred to me, suddenly, that it was distinctly kissable, that mouth. But it was a little too late for me to do anything about it, now.
“Will you take tarrojan, my dear? I believe you have already met my grand-daughter, Cn. Everest?” Madame Lyntonhurst asked sweetly.
“I have had that pleasure, yes ma’m,” I replied gravely. “Some hours ago she blew out my brains with a hand-laser.”
It wasn’t much of a dig but Meade flinched a little. I didn’t pursue it or try to improve upon it at that time. Not to spare the girl, of course. People who make a good try at frying my skull with a hand-laser have already forfeited their rights to Marquis of Queensberry treatment—at least in my book.
But I was thinking over the implications in that word “Granddaughter.” Granddaughter indeed! Not very likely. Great-great-granddaughter would be more like it. But the curt pronunciation of the term, coming from Madame Lyntonhurst, was interesting. Revealing. The old woman still had a very feminine set of instincts … and just how old was she, anyway?
As you can see, I was hunting for a weapon. Any weapon. There are damn few ways a man tied down can fight back but a well-honed tongue, a clever brain and a canny set of wits make pretty fair weapons in a pinch.
But no time for this now. She was speaking to me. These thoughts had occupied only a tenth of a second and Madame Lyntonhurst was still reacting to my blunt gibe.
“Come, Citizen, no hard words, please! I asked you if you would have a cup, my dear. I am not accustomed to repeating myself.”
Keeping her lashes lowered and her eyes fixed on the carpet, not looking at me, Meade said in a soft, subdued voice, “No thank you, grandmother.”
“Then sit down, my dear. Citizen Everest and I were just getting acquainted. Sit there,” she said, indicating a chair with a gesture of one beautifully-manicured hand. Meade said, “Yes, thank you, grandmother,” in a low hesitant voice and sat down quickly, tucking the skirts of her long tunic modestly around her tanned bare knees.
She was a completely different person in the presence of her grandmother. Gone was the bold, bright, gutsy girl of before. This young woman was modest, shy, diffident and subdued. A prickling went over my scalp. I could understand what being raised by this sweet, saintly, patrician old lady might be like. I felt like vomiting. Poor Meade… .
