Generation Warriors (29 page)

In here was a tiny square office, crowded with desk and two chairs. The woman pulled open a drawer and slapped an aid kit down on the surface.

"He won't pass anywhere, with all that blood. Clean him up. I'll be back with another coverall for you."

Aygar sat in one of the chairs while Sassinak cleaned the shallow gash and put a sticker over it. He did look less conspicuous with the blood off his face. She used several more stickers to hold the rents in his coverall together. The scratches under them had long stopped bleeding.

The woman came back with a cheap working coverall of tough tan fabric and tossed it to Sassinak.

"Get that smelly thing off so I can run it through the shredder in the kitchen. What'd you do, camp out in a grocer's trash bin?"

"Not exactly." Sassinak didn't want to explain. She handed Aygar the gun out of her pocket before peeling off her coverall and slipping into the other one. Aygar, she noticed, was trying not to watch while the woman stared at her.

"You must be Fleet," she said, more quietly. "You've got muscles, for a woman your age. Over forty, aren't you?"

"A little, yes."

The tan coverall was a bit short in the arms and legs, but ample in the body. Sassinak transferred her ID and the handcom into its pockets and then took the gun back from Aygar.

"Ever heard of Samizdat?" The woman's voice was even lower, barely above a murmur.

Sassinak stared, remembering that bleak afternoon when Abe had told her a tiny bit about that organization.

"A little," she said cautiously.

"Hmm. Fleet. Samizdat. Fleur. Tell you what, honey, you'd better be honest, or I swear I'll hunt you to the last corner of the galaxy, my own self, and stake your gizzard in the light of some alien sun, so I will. That Fleur's a lady, saved my life more'n once, and never thinks the worse of a girl for doing what she has to."

"She's a Fleet captain," said Aygar.

Both women glared at him.

"I didn't want to know that," said the woman. "A Fleet captain with undisciplined crew..."

Before Aygar could say anything, Sassinak said, "He's not crew; he's civilian, an important witness against planet pirates, and they're trying to silence him. We were supposed to have a quiet meeting but it didn't stay quiet."

"Ah. Then you
do
know about Samizdat. Well, well have to get you out of here later, and I'll send word to Fleur..." She stopped, as voices erupted down the passage. "Rats. Up out of that chair, laddy-o, and quick about it."

Aygar stood, and the woman shoved until he flattened against the wall. Sassinak, guessing what she wanted, lifted the chairs onto the desk. Beneath the worn carpet was the outline of a trap door. The woman didn't have to urge quickness, not with the words "search" and "illegal aliens" and "renegade posing as Fleet" booming down the hall.

First came a straight drop down five feet to a landing above a short stair. Aygar had scarcely bent to get his head below floor level when the trap banged down, leaving them in complete darkness. Sassinak could hear muffled thumps and scrapes as the rug and chairs went back atop it. She had made it almost to the next level, but stopped where she was, afraid to move in the darkness lest she trip and make a noise. Aygar crept down three steps and touched her shoulder.

"What now?" he asked.

"Shhh. We hope the searchers don't know about the trapdoor."

For the first time since trouble started, Sassinak had leisure to think about it and about her ship. She had been fooled by the original communication because it was in Fleet slang. That implied, but did not prove, that someone in Fleet was trying to get her killed. Whoever it was knew enough about Coromell to suspect that his name would lure her and that she would know only his general appearance. He was famous enough. It wouldn't be hard for anyone to know his height, his age, and find someone reasonably close to impersonate him.

But why all the complexity? Why not simply have someone assassinate her, or Aygar, or both, as they were on their way out of the shuttleport, or any place between? And, assuming those orange uniforms were the police, why were the authorities on the side of the attackers?

She tried to think what someone might have said to convince the local police that she and Aygar were dangerous criminals causing trouble. Fleeing a bar fight was only common sense. She'd originally thought to call in to Coromell's office as soon as she found a telecom booth. And what was happening to her ship, topside? She wanted to pull out the comm unit and find out, but dared not with searchers after them.

Time waiting in the darkness had strange dimensions. Endless, seamless, compressed by fear and stretched by anticipation: she had no idea how long it was before she dared extend a cautious foot to the next lower step. She edged down, drawing Aygar after her. Just in case they found the trapdoor, she'd rather be around a corner, behind something, under something. Another step, and another.

When the lights went on, her vision blanked for a moment. Aygar gasped. Now she could see the long narrow room. She ran down the last few steps, Aygar behind her, and looked for a place to hide. There? An angle of wall, perhaps a support for something overhead? She ducked around it, out of sight of the stairs. Then a voice crackled from some hidden speaker.

"....now you have a basement, Sera Vanlis, and you'd better cooperate. This is nothing to play games about."

"I still don't see a warrant." Not quite defiance, but not quite calm confidence, either. "I've nothing to hide, but I'm not setting precedent by letting you search without one."

"I'll call for one."

A pause, then the sound of speech Sassinak could not distinguish. Did the sound go both ways? She had to trust not, had to hope the woman had hit some hidden switch to give them both warning and a way out. But nothing looked like a way out. No doors, in the long opposite wall, or the far end. No door at either end. A fat column of cables and pipes came out of the ceiling, entered and exited a massive meter box covered with dials, and disappeared into a grated opening in the floor.

Aygar nodded toward it. Sassinak looked closer. Not big enough for Aygar and she wasn't sure she could slither alongside the bundled utilities, but it gave her an idea. If this were a ship, there'd be some kind of repair access to the utility conduits. She couldn't find it, and the conversation overhead could have only one ending.

Then Aygar picked up a filing cabinet, one of a row along the far wall, but in line with the path of the cables, and there it was. A flat circle of metal, with a pop-up handle, and under it a vertical shaft with a ladder fixed to one side. She would have had trouble getting the cover free, and up, but Aygar's powerful fingers lifted it as easily as a piece of toast on a tray.

Sassinak eeled into the hole, slipped easily down the ladder to give Aygar room, and murmured "How're you going to cover it after us?"

"Don't worry."

Nonetheless, she did worry as he slipped the access cover behind the next file cabinet over, and backed down into the hole, dragging the file cabinet with him. Surely he couldn't possibly move it all the way into place, just with his hands? He could.

They were in the dark again, the top of the shaft sealed with the file cabinet, but she could hear the proud grin in his voice when he said, "Unless they heard that, they won't know. And I think it's been used that way before. That cabinet's not as heavy as a full one would be."

"Good job."

She patted his leg and backed on down the ladder. They ought to come to a cross-shaft... and her foot felt nothing below, then something uneven. She ran her foot over it in the dark, momentarily wondering why she'd been stupid enough not to bring along a handlight. Lumpy, long, slick... probably the bundled utilities. She couldn't quite reach them with her hand while clinging to the ladder. She'd have to drop. Aygar's foot tapped her head, and she touched his ankle, a slight sideways shove that she hoped he would understand as "Wait!"

Chapter Fourteen

"What about a light?" asked Aygar softly.

Sassinak counted to ten, reminding herself that he was not, despite his talents, a trained soldier. He would not have thought to tell her before that he had a light.

"Fine."

Above her, a dim light came on, bright enough to dark-adapted eyes. Shadows danced crazily as he passed it down. Below, the cross tunnel was twice the diameter of theirs, its center full of pipes, with a narrow catwalk along one side. Sassinak eased down, swung her legs onto the catwalk, and guided Aygar's feet. She had to crouch a little; he was bent uncomfortably. She touched his arm and jerked her head to one side. They would move some distance before they dared talk much.

Twenty meters down the tunnel, Sassinak paused and doused the handlight. No sound or sight of pursuit. She closed her eyes, letting them adapt to darkness again, and wishing she had even the helmet to her armor. Even without the link to the cruiser's big computers, the helmet onboard with sensors could have told her exactly what lay ahead, line-of-sight.

She opened her eyes to darkness. Complete... no. Not complete. Ahead, so dim she could hardly make it out, a distant red-orange point. She squinted, then remembered to shift her gaze off-center and back across.
Two
red-orange points. She leaned out to peer back past Aygar. Another, and another beyond that.

Marker lights for maintenance workers. That would be the most harmless. Alternatives included automatic cameras that could send their images straight to some police station without ever giving diem enough light to see. Or automatic lasers, linked to heat and motion sensors, designed to rid the tunnels of vermin.

She hated planets. There might even
be
vermin in these tunnels. But when there were no choices, only fools refused chances... so Abe had said. She edged sideways along the catwalk, moving with ship-trained neatness in that unhandy space. Aygar had more trouble. She could hear him thumping and stumbling, and had to hope that there were no sound sensors down here. She used the handlight as seldom as she could.

Moving past the first dim light in the tunnel's roof set off no alarms she could sense, but then a good system wouldn't tell
her.
She was sweating now in the tunnel's unmoving air, and wondering just how good that air was. Between the first and second lights, she felt a sudden draft along her side, and turned the light on the tunnel wall. Waist high, another grill, this one rectangular. A silent, slightly cooler breath came from it. She could hear no fan, not even the hiss of air movement. Then for an instant it changed, sucking against the back of her hand, then stilled, then returned as before.

Nothing but a pressure-equalizing connector, probably from the subway system, she thought. Nice to know they were connected to something else with air, though she'd rather have found a route to the surface. She tapped Aygar's arm, and they crouched beneath the vent to rest briefly.

"I'm not sure who's after us," she said. "That wasn't the man I was supposed to meet, back there, just someone the right age and size, but not the same."

Aygar ignored this. "Do you know where we are? Can we get back?"

"Not the right questions. To get back, we have to figure out who's trying to kill us. At this point we don't know if they're after you, me, or both. And why."

She could think of reasons both ways. All three ways, and even a few more. Why send her to meet a fake Coromell and then kill
him
? It could hardly have been a mistake; the difference between a white-haired old man and a dark-haired woman was clear to the stupidest assassin. It couldn't have been bad marksmanship, not with the cluster that had destroyed the man's face. Had there been two different sets of conspirators whose plots intersected in wild confusion?

"You said that wasn't Coromell." Aygar's voice was quiet, his tone alert but not anxious. "Did the one who killed him know that?"

"I'm not sure." She was not sure of a lot, except that she wished she'd stayed on her ship. So much for confronting old fears. "If that had been Coromell, and if I'd also been killed, perhaps the next round of fire, you'd have been the ranking witness for Tanegli's trial. And, as you've said often enough, you don't know anything about the dealings Tanegli had with the other conspirators. All you could do is testify that he lied to you, led you to believe that Ireta was yours. If there were some way Coromell's death could be blamed on me."

"And why were all those other people waiting for us outside?" Aygar asked.

Clearly his mind ran on a different track. Natural, with his background. But it was still a good question.

"Hmm. Suppose they plan to kill Coromell in the bar. They expect me to run, with you, just as I did. The only smart thing to do in something like that is get out. So they've got others outside, to kill us. Or me. Then they could pin Coromell's death on me, discredit Fleet, and any testimony I bring to the trial."

"What would happen to the
Zaid-Dayan?
Who is your heir?"

"Heir? Ships aren't personal property! Fleet would assign another..." She stopped short, struck by another possibility. "Aygar, you're a genius, and you don't even know it. Testimony is one thing: a ship of the line is another. My
Zaid
is possibly the most dangerous ship of its class. If it's the
ship
they fear and want to render helpless, then by taking me out or even keeping me onplanet while Coromell's death is investigated, that would do it. It would be Standard weeks before another captain arrived. They might even seal the ship in dock."

And why would someone be that upset about a cruiser at the orbital station, a cruiser whose weapons were locked down? What did someone fear that cruiser could do? Cruisers weren't precision instruments. Despite her actions on Ireta, cruisers were designed as strategic platforms, capable of dealing with, say, a planetary rebellion, or an invasion from space. Or both.

Sassinak was up again before she realized she was going to move. "Come on," she said. "We've got to get back to the ship."

As if that were going to be easy. She started looking for another access port. Soon enough this tunnel would come to someone's attention, even if they didn't find the escape hatch from that... place. Her mind was working now, full-speed, running the possibilities of several sets of plotters. It could reduce to one set, if they had some way to interfere with Coromell's return and thought the singed corpse could pass as his for long enough to get her in legal trouble. Or suppose they'd captured the real Coromell and could produce his body.