Sertian Princess (14 page)

"The Aldebaran will be approaching within range of our scanners in just under three days’ time.  We will pick her up and shadow her at extreme scanner range.  If there is to be any action, it is likely to be in the 24 to 48 hours after that.

"In the meantime, all we can do is wait.  And while we wait... Your Royal Highness, Captain Boronin, we should be delighted if you and your officers would dine with us aboard the Salamander, this evening."

CHAPTER 14

For most of the 1000 or so passengers on board the luxury liner Aldebaran, the first five days of the flight from Andes to Quental passed very pleasantly indeed, but to describe the days as uneventful would be misleading.  The Aldebaran was equipped with every facility to amuse its passengers and to wile away the time on the long journeys between the inhabited worlds.  The crew also, at least that part of it in daily contact with the passengers, had been selected as much for their personality and their ability to get on with people, as for their skill at doing their particular job.

So the days, and nights, were filled with organised events in which the passengers could participate or not, as the mood took them. During the day were the various sporting tournaments; low gravity sports such as space tennis in the Astrodome; normal gravity sports such as squash, pelota and bowling; and aquatic sports, both surface and submerged.  At night there were dances, discos, fancy dress parties and in the Astrodome, an aerial ballet of quite breathtaking beauty was performed each evening by a troupe of artistes from the Imperial Ballet School on Petrograd.

Not all of the passengers, however, could allow themselves to be diverted by the amusements in progress around them.  David and Marienna quite openly watched Nerissa and Lynda.  They had to tread a very careful line between concealment and disclosure, wanting on the one hand, to attract the attention of the opposition's team, and on the other hand, wary of dancing too closely in attendance on the Princess and her companion, and possibly provoking a complaint to the ship's officers which would seriously hamper their plan of campaign.

The Blue Star Streak Group split themselves into the same three teams as they had used on Andes, namely, Tessa and Carly, Cerys and Brianey, and Corin and Zara, and operated a shift system between them.  While one team rested, the second team maintained surveillance on Stefan Pulowski and the third team kept a very discreet watch on David and Marienna, trying to detect anybody else who might also be watching them.  So far they had not been asked to demonstrate their musical talents by performing together as a group, although they had made use of their time aboard the Phoenix to put together some routines in case the occasion arose.

Morten M. Jorgensen remained a mystery.  The automatic surveillance system which David had installed, continued to record his movements every time he entered the lounge area of his suite.  Once he had been incautious enough to enter the room carrying a small, compact hand laser: so he was armed.  Apart from that he had done nothing to justify the surveillance operation.  He had no visitors; he did not make or receive any calls and he never left his cabin.  The only detectable abnormality in his behaviour was in his eating habits.  He had all his meals served in his room and could be observed to consume anything and everything that was placed in front of him with considerable gusto, which hardly squared with his story to the steward, that he was suffering from severe ulcer problems.

In terms of learning anything new about the identities or intentions of the opposition, those first five days were a period of absolute frustration for the watchers.  It was not until the morning of the sixth day, that their luck changed.  Cerys and Brianey were on Pulowski duty.  They had taken over from Corin and Zara as he left the dining room after breakfast.  Since then they had watched him sit through one of the semifinals of the space tennis tournament and then make his way down to the squash courts to play his scheduled game on the ladder.  Now, just before midday, he was back in the first class lounge overlooking the Astrodome.

On entering the lounge he had looked around the room and paused for a long second, staring at a table at the back of the lounge before crossing to the bar to order one of the more lethal cocktails which were on offer.  With his drink in his hand he threaded his way through the other early drinkers to a table which was occupied by a stunning blonde, and appeared to be asking permission to join her.  It could have been a casual pick-up, except that Brianey had seen her before, in the company of a rather large, red-headed man.  Pulowski had looked at her then and for an instant it had seemed to Brianey that there was something between them; that the look was being returned.  Then the big redhead had looked round, the contact had been broken and the moment was lost.  It had not seemed significant enough to report at the time, especially as there had been no verbal contact nor any opportunity to pass a message.  Now though, alarm bells started ringing in Brianey's head as she pointed the contact out to Cerys.

They decided to split up to get a better coverage of the pair. Brianey went to take a table as close as she could to Pulowski and the blonde, while Cerys put a call through to their room to alert the back-up team, and then took up a position near the door.

***

"Hello Maddie.  Mind if I join you?"

"Be my guest."

"I see you've finally managed to slip your minders' leash," he said, watching with a badly concealed smile as her lips tightened in reaction.

"I go where I like, when I like, Pulowski.  I don't need any minders.  I can look after myself."

"I just bet you can, Maddie.  But just to satisfy my curiosity, which one of those carrot-tops are you really married to, Karl or Bruno?"

"Actually it's both.  I couldn't make up my mind between them, so it seemed the only fair solution.  The priest was a little reluctant to perform the ceremony; kept insisting it was unusual or something.  But we managed to persuade him in the end.  It was a beautiful service."

"And you keep those two hulking great brutes satisfied, all by yourself?"

Now it was her turn to let slip a half-smile.  "It's more a question of them keeping me satisfied," she replied, looking straight at Stefan.

"That sounds like a challenge," he said, reaching out to cover one of her hands with his.

"You can take it whichever way you want to, lover.  But you might not get what you expect."

"I guess I'll just have to take my chances on that, won't I?"

She glanced across the room and then looked back at Stefan.  "I guess you will.... but now might not be the right time.  Here's Bruno coming and he looks a little miffed."

Bruno had come into the lounge a few seconds earlier and looked round for Maddie.  On seeing her in close conversation with Stefan, his face had darkened and his frown was so deep that his brows met in a V above his nose.  The lounge was rapidly filling up now, but Bruno made a beeline for Maddie's table, shoving people unceremoniously out of his way to both left and right.  What protests were made, were hastily stifled as people took notice of the size of the man and the expression on his face.

Stefan, too, looked across at the onrushing Bruno and very casually got to his feet.  Maddie was right: this was not the time. "Tonight then," he said softly.  "When we get to Parm."

"Maybe," was all she replied in words, but the smile on her lips promised a great deal more.

Stefan dodged nimbly round a couple of occupied tables as Bruno slowed his advance, unsure of whether to go after him or to continue over to Maddie.  Maddie won, and Stefan took the opportunity to make good his escape from the lounge.

Brianey whispered into her throat microphone, telling Cerys to follow Pulowski, while she would stay with the blonde.

Bruno reached Maddie's table before he spoke, although the bellow he used could have been heard from the other side of the lounge.  "What was he doing here, talking to you?  The Major said there was to be no contact between the groups."

"Sit down and shut up, you loud mouthed oaf.  It was the Major who sent him," she lied smoothly.

"Well, I don't like him hanging around you."  He sat down and proceeded quite obviously, to sulk. 

"Now don't you start having one of your tantrums," she said sharply.  "God, you and Karl are worse than a couple of kids.  What are you doing here anyway?"

"Oh yeah.  It's time to go.  Karl's already in position and he sent me to get you."

"Well, I'm glad you remembered the message."  Acid dripped off every word as she looked at him with undisguised contempt.  "Let's get it done."

***

David and Marienna were in their stateroom.  Their targets, Nerissa and Lynda, had established a routine of returning to their own cabin at about this time every day to freshen up before lunch.  So David and Marienna had adapted this to their own use, taking advantage of the break to check the automatic surveillance on Jorgensen, and to establish a routine comms link with Suzanne.

It was the latter that David was engaged in when the knock came on the door.  If a large part of his consciousness had not, at that moment, been in a tiny cabin on the Cleopatra, he might have sensed the danger.  As it was, Marienna answered the door.

"Who is it?"

"Steward, ma'am."

Marienna transferred the tiny needle gun into her left hand, concealing it from sight and went to open the door.  She reached out to touch the control panel, and as she did so, that entire section of the wall vaporised, taking her right hand with it.  She looked down in apparent puzzlement at the bloody stump on the end of her arm, and the violet flash of a laser pulse took her full in the chest, knocking her backwards into the room.  As she fell under the force of the blast, her body executed an almost perfect backwards roll, knocking over the small table on which the remote monitoring equipment had been placed.

Part of David's mind watched the scene unfold as if in slow motion, whilst the rest of his senses struggled back across the light years.  Even as Marienna's body was tumbling backwards into the room, he saw three blurs of movement entering through the hole where the door had been.  Each one, as it entered, dived for the floor and rolled, one left of the hole, one right, and one following Marienna.

"Professionals," he thought, as the basic instinct for survival took over motor control of his body.  "Very smooth."

He hurled himself out of the chair in which he had been sitting, a fraction of a second before two laser pulses hit the back of it in a sear of violet light, burning two holes the size of small plates, clear through.  As he rolled across the floor, his left hand automatically reached for the belt switch to trigger his personal force field, while the wrist muscles in his right arm operated the spring mechanism and the needle laser appeared in his right hand.

He was back in command of his body now and, as he came to the top of one of the rolls, he found that his survival instinct had led him in the direction of the doorway through to the bedroom.  He caught a glimpse of movement on the far side of the room and loosed off a snapshot before throwing himself into the bedroom and slamming the door with his feet.

The yell of pain which came from the other room, was small consolation for the fact that he was trapped.  There was only the one door into the bedroom, and he had just come through that.  He tried to call Zara and the others, using the throat microphone, but the short range radio system was notoriously unreliable inside large metal structures such as a spaceship.  There was no reply.

He had two choices.  He could stay where he was in the bedroom and try to defend the doorway but judging by the cavalier manner with which his attackers had removed the door, and indeed, most of the wall in the other room, he did not feel tremendously confident in this strategy.  That left attack: carrying the fight back to his attackers and often, in any case, stated to be the best form of defence.

From one of the pouches on his belt, he took goggles to cover his eyes and two small filter plugs, which he quickly inserted, one in each nostril.  Then, again from the belt, he carefully unclipped one stun grenade and one gas grenade, and ran quietly back to stand flat against the wall next to the door.  With the gas grenade in his right hand, he flung open the door with his left and hurled the grenade through the open doorway.  As he did so, three pulses of that violet laser light flashed through the opening.  Two missed him completely and expended themselves harmlessly on the far wall of the bedroom, but the third pulse caught his upper arm and he felt a tingling sensation as the force field dissipated the energy charge.  Without his personal force field, he would have lost the arm just below the shoulder.  As it was, he knew that the belt could only absorb a few of those full power pulses without overloading.

Now, however, the scales were tipping back, if not yet in his favour, at least more into balance.  The gas he was using was a general purpose mixture, put together in the Salamander's labs.  It was opaque enough to provide some visual cover, and also acted as an irritant to unprotected eyes and lungs, although it produced no long term harmful effects.  In the next room, he could now hear coughing and a great deal of colourful cursing.

Carefully choosing a different trajectory, he swung his arm into the open doorway again and released the stun grenade.  This time there was only one answering flash of violet light and that sizzled harmlessly past him.  When the grenade exploded with its ear shattering crash and blinding flash of light, he re-entered the room in a diving roll to his left, the needle laser free and ready in his right hand.

He nearly rolled straight into the first of his assailants, stopping himself short as a giant figure materialised out of the smoke, coughing violently.  They both saw each other at about the same instant but David's reactions were the faster.  The beam from his needle gun took Karl in the throat and the coughing changed to a sort of gurgling noise, and then to silence.