He gripped his handhold, and extended the laser drill up past the motion sensor for the next burn.
The lift tube’s grav field switched off.
Even half-expecting it, he was nearly ripped from his perch by his own weight. Howl could not contain it all. Mark screamed silently, flooded in pain. But he clung, and did not let them fall.
The last three meters of ascent could have been called a nightmare, but he had new standards for nightmares now. It was merely tedious.
There was a tanglefield trap at the top entrance, but it faced outward. The laser drill disarmed its controls. He managed a crippled, shuffling, crabwise walk into a private underground garage. It contained the Baron’s lightflyer. The canopy opened at the touch of Ryoval’s ring.
He slid into the lightflyer, adjusted the seat and controls as best he could around his distorted and aching contours, powered it up, eased it forward. That button on the control panel—there? The garage door slid aside. Once through, he shot up, and up, and up, through the dark, the acceleration pummeling him. Nobody even fired on him. There were no lights below. A rocky winter waste. The whole little installation must be underground.
He checked the flyer’s map display, and picked his direction—
He kept accelerating.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The lightflyer banked. Miles craned his neck, and caught a glimpse of what was below. Or what wasn’t below. Dawn was creeping over a wintry desert. There appeared to be nothing of interest for kilometers around.
“S” funny,” said the guard who was piloting the lightflyer. “Door’s open.” He touched his comm, and transmitted some sort of code-burst. The other guard shifted uneasily, watching his comrade. Miles twisted around, trying to watch them both.
They descended. Rocks rose around them, then a concrete shaft. Ah. Concealed entrance. They came to the bottom, and moved forward into an underground garage.
“Huh,” said the other guard. “Where’s all the vehicles?”
The flyer came to rest, and the bigger guard dragged Miles out of the backseat, and unfastened his ankles, and stood him upright. He almost fell down again. The scars on his chest ached with the strain from his hands bound behind his back. He got his feet under himself, and stared around much as the guards were doing. Just a utilitarian garage, badly-lit, echoing and cavernous. And empty.
The guards marched him toward an entrance. They coded through some automatic doors, and walked to an electronic security chamber. It was up and running, humming blankly. “Vaj?” one guard called. “We’re here. Scan us.”
No answer. One of the guards went forward, looked around. Tapped a code into a wall pad. “Bring him through anyway.”
The security chamber passed him. He was still wearing the grey knits the Duronas had given him; no interesting devices woven into the fabric, it seemed, alas.
The senior guard tried an intercom. Several times. “Nobody answers.”
“What should we do?” asked his comrade.
The senior man frowned. “Strip him and take him to the boss, I guess. Those were the orders.”
They pulled his ship-knits off him; he was far too out-massed to fight them, but he regretted the loss deeply. It was too damned cold. Even the ox-like guards stared a moment at his raked and scored chest. They re- fastened his hands behind him, and marched him through the facility, their eyes shifting warily at every intersection.
It was very quiet. Lights burned, but no people appeared anywhere. A strange structure, not very large, plain and—he sniffed—decidedly medical in odor. Research, he decided. Ryoval’s private biological research facility. Evidently, after the Dendarii raid of four years ago, Ryoval had decided his main facility wasn’t secure enough. Miles could see that. This place did not have the business-air of the other locale. It felt military-paranoid. The sort of place where if you went there to work, you didn’t come out again for years at a time. Or, considering Ryoval, ever. He glimpsed a few lab-like rooms, in passing. But no techs. The guards called out, a couple of times. No one answered.
They came to an open door, beyond which lay some sort of study or office. “Baron, sir?” the senior guard ventured. “We have your prisoner.”
The other guard rubbed his neck. “If he’s not here, should we go ahead and work him like the other one?”
“He hasn’t ordered it yet. Better wait.”
Quite. Ryoval was not the sort to reward initiative in subordinates, Miles suspected.
With a deep, nervous sigh, the senior man stepped across the threshold, and looked around. The junior man prodded Miles forward in his wake. The study was finely furnished, with a real wood desk, and an odd chair in front of it with metal wrist-locks for the person who sat in it. Nobody ran out on a conversation with Baron Ryoval till Baron Ryoval was ready, apparently. They waited.
“What do we do now?”
“Don’t know. This is as far as my orders went.” The senior man paused. “Could be a test. …”
They waited about five more minutes.
“If you don’t want to look around,” said Miles brightly, “I will.”
They looked at each other. The senior man, his forehead creased, drew a stunner and sidled cautiously through an archway into the next room. His voice came back after a moment. “
This was too much even for the dim bulb who held Miles. With his ham hand still locked firmly around Miles’s upper arm, the second guard followed the first into a large chamber arranged as a living room. A wall-sized holovid was blank and silent. A zebra-grained wood bar divided the room. An extremely low chair faced an open area. Baron Ryoval’s very dead body lay there face-up, naked, staring at the ceiling with dry eyes.
There were no obvious signs of a struggle—no overturned furniture, nor plasma arc burns in the walls— except upon the body. There the marks of violence were focused, utterly concentrated: throat crushed, torso pulped, dried blood smeared around his mouth. A double line of fingertip-sized black dots were stitched neatly across the Baron’s forehead. They looked like burns. His right hand was missing, cut away, the wrist a cauterized stump.
The guards twitched in something like horror, an all-too-temporary paralysis of astonishment. “What happened?” whispered the junior man.
How did Ryoval control his employee/slaves, anyway? The lesser folk, through terror, of course; the middle-management and tech layer, through some subtle combination of fear and self-interest. But these, his personal bodyguards, must be the innermost cadre, the ultimate instrument by which their master’s will was forced upon all the rest.
