A Princess of the Aerie (33 page)

Or it might be something completely different.

Dujuv leading, they broke from the shadow and bounced back down into the steepening gully. A hundred fifty meters farther
on, the gully ended in an enormous pile of white powder, perhaps fifteen meters high and stretching half a kilometer across
their path, that must be some sort of tailings; Dujuv tried jumping up onto the pile but immediately rolled back, scrambling,
flinging the powder everywhere. Jak could see him shrug even in the pressure suit, seeming to say,
Oh, well, old tove, the point of this was to attract attention, masen?
Except that Jak was not sure that Duj would ever call him “old tove” again.

They dashed around the dark side of the pile. Jak was following Dujuv when he disappeared. A moment later the ground opened
under Jak, and he plunged into darkness. Barely over a second later, he thudded, hard, into a pile of sand or dirt.

He rolled over and looked up; he had fallen into a pit which faced away from the sun, and its mouth was completely within
the shadow of the old bit of crater rim, so the slice of sky he could see was spattered with stars. He let his helmet’s passive
vision adjust to the sudden change and looked around. Dujuv was just sitting up, pounding the soft dirt in frustration; though
it was hard to tell in the starlight, probably this was the same white stuff that formed the huge pile outside. Dujuv ambled
over and put his helmet against Jak’s. “You hurt?”

“I’m fine. Are you okay?”

“Other than a bad case of the frustrateds, I’m great. I guess we climb out and get moving again.”

“Yeah,” Jak said. “Well, at least we suddenly vanished; that should make us harder to find.”

“Not necessarily.” The panth’s tone was oddly tense and quiet. “Look up.”

Ten people in pressure suits stood at the mouth of the pit, blotting out the stars. A floodlight clicked on. The pit was shallow,
blind, completely a trap. In the harsh new light, Jak could see that each pressure suit bore an MLB logo, and each person
was carrying a military laser.

A tall one stepped forward. Though Jak could not see through the faceplate, the way he moved marked Bex Riveroma.

The tiny blue bar to the left in Jak’s vision showed that Shadow and the boys still had almost thirty minutes to go; maybe
no one had seen them yet—

A harsh scream filled his headphones, and all except the life-support displays on his helmet faceplate went out. They had
tried to grab control of his purse, and it had self-erased to prevent that. A voice in Jak’s earphones ordered him to put
his hands behind his back.

As someone back there tied his wrists, Jak winced with grief. He had worked with that purse for two years, trying to coach
and encourage it, and it had gotten very good at knowing what he needed and wanted. Now it was gone, just as gone as a dead
person; he could restore from a backup, of course, but somehow a purse was never the same after that.

The MLB men tied their prisoners to the railings on the platform of a big fifteen-wheeler. The driver got into the cabin and
headed the big, spidery vehicle down the slope toward the central pinnacle. “Now,” Riveroma said, in a warm conversational
tone, “what would two little boys be doing out on a mountain slope with a bomb that was barely big enough to hurt anyone?”

“We weren’t out to hurt
people,
” Jak said, hoping to sound petulant and whiny.

“Well, with that bomb you couldn’t have hurt much of anything. The instruments got a clear fix on it and the temperature and
energy output weren’t more than what might be used in a big firework. So that’s what I think it was. Probably to get my attention,
so I would come out and do what I’m doing. Now since I can’t imagine you wanted to be captured, my fine little boys, and since
I don’t think that Jak wants me to remove his liver, particularly not with him alive and unanesthetized, and most especially
since Dujuv is surely aware that I have no reason to keep him alive, it seems to me that trying to attract my attention is
a very odd behavior. This makes me think, in turn, that if you want my attention drawn to yourselves, there must be something
you want attention drawn away from … and I’m having the whole crater searched.”

The fifteen-wheeler lurched over the rise and came down a gentle slope toward the base of the pillar. Jak had no idea how
his hands were fastened together behind his back, and nothing to cut with even if he had known.

“Now, Jak,” Bex said, “the real question is whether you are going to be cooperative, in which case the sliver will come out
of your liver in a relatively gentle fashion managed by a professional surgeon, or uncooperative, in which case I shall simply
lop off the parts of you that are hard to fit into a storage canister—that would be your head and limbs—and hand your torso
over to qualified personnel for disassembly at some more convenient location. Dujuv, I’m afraid all that I can offer you is
your life. If you should tell me what is going on, and where I should look for what threat, right away, then you will get
to keep it. For either of you, the answer to that set of questions—‘what operation is this a diversion for, who is involved,
where are they, and what do I need to do to foil it?’—is all I will be interested in.

“Now what I propose is this. Whichever of you takes my very generous offer first, will get the full benefit. Going second
will do no good; once I have the information from one of you, I will dispose of the other.”

“I’m not stupid enough to fall for that trick,” Dujuv said. “It’s the prisoner’s dilemma problem. You study that in school
when you’re, what, ten? It’s not even a very hard one.”

“Oh, on the contrary, there’s nothing harder than a dilemma. By definition, it’s a situation where there’s no good solution.
Of course, one man’s dilemma is another man’s ironclad guarantee. I’ll let you think about which man is which. Don’t overtire
that panth brain.”

“Can we make you a counteroffer?” Jak asked.

Riveroma waited a few seconds before answering. They were almost at the central pinnacle now, a massive tower of broken-faced
rock perhaps eighty meters high. There were crevices and chimneys enough, Jak realized, so that in the low gravity he could
climb it easily—if only he were there and if only his hands were untied. Well, the former was happening pretty fast; the fifteen-wheeler
was now less than half a kilometer from the dark broken cathedral of melt-glass.

“If you have a counteroffer to make,” Riveroma said, “I suggest you talk fast.”

“Untie my hands first.”

“Tell me everything I need to know, and then I certainly will. You’ll need your hands free to carry Dujuv’s body.”

Jak said, firmly, “If I talk we both live. You have no reason to let Dujuv live, I understand that, but you also have no reason
to kill him. Untie my hands, let us both live, and I’ll talk.”

“Is that the best offer you can make?”

The fifteen-wheeler rolled into the flat area that had been glazed into a parking lot. Two ten-wheelers and a little five-wheeler
sat on the lot. No sentries or guardposts; must be robot guns in shadows somewhere. The main door stood to one side of a tall
outcrop; on the other a dark zigzagging line up the cliff face marked a crevice. There would be lots of handholds in there,
and it ought to take them at least twenty minutes to get him surrounded and pinned down and force him to surrender. …

If Shadow and the boys had been caught already, and had talked, Riveroma would just have killed them and taken the parts of
Jak he wanted. If they had accomplished their mission, Riveroma would be running. But if, as seemed most likely, Shadow and
the boys were still at large, more delay—besides, if Riveroma only held Dujuv, he would be safe until Jak was recaptured.
“Uh, yeah,” Jak said. “Those are my conditions. Untie my hands and let us both live.”

Riveroma leveled his laser at Dujuv. “Suppose I shoot him now and then we’ll only have to discuss untying you.”

“No.”

“You see how it is. I just don’t think that helping me—much as I truly do need the help—is really your priority.” Riveroma
poked Duj’s belly with the laser a couple of times and said, “Now, how do you feel about that, Dujuv? You could go on breathing,
you know. And I have rather a better record of keeping my word than your ostensible friend does of keeping his.”

“Up yours.”

“Touching. A historical quotation. Who’d have thought a panth had that in him?”

Riveroma was trying to infuriate them. What could he get out of that? Uncle Sib—who had known Bex Riveroma for more than a
century—always said that though Riveroma was an amoral butcher, he was also a complete pro. He never did things just to be
nasty, unless you counted existing.

So there was some reason he wanted them both angry and not thinking straight.

“I don’t see why you balk at the cost to get everything you want,” Jak said. “Our other team was only about five minutes from
their objective when you picked us up. If I tell you about it, you might have to scramble, but you could probably still undo
what they’ve done, as long as you act within—well, weehu, my purse went and suicided when your heets tried to hack it, you
know, so I couldn’t exactly say how long you have. But knowing where the evidence was, either for the burning armchair case
or about
Titan’s Dancer,
ought to be worth taking off a pair of cuffs.” Jak was gambling that Riveroma couldn’t afford to have his past crimes discussed
with fifty MLB malphs listening in.

“Perhaps we should work something out,” Riveroma said, his voice slurring slightly—was he furious? Or was he laughing at Jak?

The fifteen-wheeler was slowing to a stop at the main gate to the central pinnacle.

“Look,” Jak said. “My Uncle Sibroillo always said you were a man of honor and reason.”

“He
did?
”

“I speck because he always admired your skills and your record, sir.” Best not to lay it on any thicker than that. The two
men despised each other, but each believed that the other one was secretly in awe of him. That had led Sib to do some stupid
things in the past; Jak just had to hope that Riveroma would prove equally susceptible. “Anyway, sir, here’s what I was thinking.
We do it in a series of trades. My arms really are killing me, so you could undo my bonds. As soon as you do, I tell you what
the main party has done, and how you can undo it. Then you release Dujuv. Then I let you knock me out to take the sliver,
and trust you to take it in the way that lets me wake up afterward—which you do, and then wake me up. You go on your way having
gotten everything you really want. We get to keep our lives. Everybody wins, except these poor stupid Mercurial bastards,
who neither of us cares about anyway. And chances are that neither of us sees the other one for a good long time, which I
bet you’d like as much as I would.”

“That begins to sound like a deal,” Riveroma said. “Now, how does either of us know that the other will keep his part of the
bargain?”

“We don’t, toktru. But if you untie me and I don’t tell you the truth, you tie me up again. If I tell you the truth and you
don’t release Dujuv, I fight you for the sliver and you take your chances it gets damaged. Like that.”

Riveroma leaned back against one of the guardrails and looked around. The harsh glare of lights and darks, and the weird jagged
landscape of pits and spires, piles and smears, reflected from the gold of his faceplate; his silver pressure suit was a zebra
pattern of light and dark wrinkles. “Worth a try. All right, unfasten his hands.”

Some flunky moved behind Jak, and he felt the release. Not even drawing a breath first, Jak jumped as hard as he could over
the rail, and ran. A laser spot flared on the rock ahead to his left, leaving a blue dot in his vision and a drooling red
spot on the parking area.

Over the general frequency, Jak heard a scream of “No!,” a crackle of shattering locks and seals, a dull
foom!,
and a brief harsh whistle of air. Riveroma had forced the man’s helmet off, killing him with explosive decompression.

“I’ll uncap any man who uses a weapon, is that clear?” Riveroma said. “Now catch that asshole.
Alive.
”

Three hard bounds took Jak to the crack in the pinnacle. He grabbed a handhold and started up; unfortunately, a long fall
and a suit rupture wouldn’t harm the sliver at all, despite their consequences for Jak, and therefore he needed to get to
someplace where lassoing him or just knocking him down from the wall would be difficult. He climbed as fast as he’d ever climbed,
taking chances he’d never have taken, and all the while he listened to MLB’s open channels. In the low gravity, wedged far
back in the dark of the crevice, he could move quickly but many of the moves were mistakes, and as he scrabbled upward he
showered the ground below him with rocks. He had no idea how much more of the clock he would need to run out, but he thought
this way he’d be able to run out plenty. He grabbed, pushed, and pulled, as hard as he could, as fast as he could, and when
he next looked around, he saw that he had at least reached a point where, even in Mercury’s low gravity, a fall was apt to
be fatal.

J
ak scrambled and climbed inward and upward; the farther back in the dark crevice he was, the harder he’d be to see, and if
he was far enough up in a tight enough spot, he could surely keep them busy until Shadow and the boys did the data dump, or
until the slagger went off.

Presently he came to a corner; to his right, a wall rose up toward the patch of sky where he could just see one star glittering
in the blackness. There was a dark patch on that wall about a meter above the level of his feet, and turning his head to make
out its shape in the dim passive infrared, he concluded that it was a shallow depression in the wall behind a narrow shelf.
It seemed as good a place for a stand as any.

In the moderate grav, it was easy to jump up the distance sideways onto the shelf, but in the dark, twenty meters up, it was
a nervous business. Gravel kicked out from under his feet and he went to his knees, deliberately falling forward into the
shallow cave. With his head all the way inside, the passive infrared adjusted, and he could see that what was in front of
him was a flat steel door.