Sale was a full corridor ahead of him.
The lines didn’t normally push him to do things he wasn’t capable of. They were more likely to try to fix it for him. What was he missing?
“Faster,” and the lines sounded relieved that he’d finally stopped.
“Faster,” Ean agreed, and let the noise push him toward the wall.
Nothing. He was going to walk into the wall. Ean closed his eyes and let the music guide him.
Something jerked, and grabbed him, like the force that grabbed the shuttles. Lines four and three were loud, the other lines finally silent. He opened his eyes. It was dark, but he knew he was moving—horizontally, he thought. Scarily fast. He shot upward, then down, then along again. It was worse than a jump; it was a rushing pneumatic tube, and he was in it.
He shot out the other end, onto the bridge in a rolling heap that he couldn’t stop, in time to hear Sale say to Craik, “I’ve lost Ean. I need to go back for him. Can you manage?”
“Too fast.” Lines one, three, and four seemed to be conferring. “Human. Slower?” As if they weren’t sure they could get it any slower.
Ean hit the wall, bounced off, and finally came to a stop. He got to his feet, choking, trying to catch his breath. His suit had sealed automatically. Wherever he’d been, there was no oxygen.
“He’s just arrived on the bridge,” Craik said. “Get here as fast as you can.”
“But he was way behind me.”
“He’s here now, Sale. Trying not to throw up.”
“Shit.”
When he could finally speak, Ean said, “Sale. You should—”
But she was here now, stopping with a skid at the entry to the bridge. “Status?”
Craik shook her head. “No change on station.” She glanced over at Ean. “Not sure about him.”
“I’m fine.” It was a wheeze, but he was fine. He checked the readings on his suit. Radko insisted he always check before he took the helmet off. The air was clean. “Thank you,” he whispered to the ship.
All he ever had to do was listen. “If I don’t listen next time, tell me ‘faster,’ and I’ll remember.” At least, he’d try to remember.
Sale asked, “Is Radko alive or dead, Ean?”
“I don’t know. Jakob said he wanted to talk to her. That was after he shot her, so I think so.”
Please let her be alive.
Sale said, “I need to see the control center on that station. Anything line eight is involved in. And I need to see Bach, Jakob, and Radko.”
What was the control center on a station? The administrator’s office?
“Bach?” Craik said. “Radko?”
“I’ll explain in a minute. Ean?”
He sang up the lines. Station “Ship,” anywhere with line-eight activity, then had to flick through each of the cameras to get Radko—and Bach and Jakob—because none of them were linesmen, and the station lines weren’t as strong as ship lines. Maybe there was something in Wendell’s theory that the more you went through the void, the stronger the lines became.
But speaking of lines.
Ean stopped. “There are a lot of linesmen on that station,” he told Sale. “They’re all strong, and… a little strange.” Crazy was the word that came to mind, but you wouldn’t have a station full of crazy linesmen. Maybe they’d been trained by a secret line guild on the Worlds of the Lesser Gods and were different. “They’re very strong.”
Many of them were reacting badly to the presence of line eleven.
“Show me.”
Ean put them up on the screen on the wall, a matrix of five images by four, room by room. He brought a new one up every five seconds, replacing the one that had been there the longest.
Radko would be in the prisons. He could see two people locked in cells. One was a middle-aged woman who was inspecting the walls of her cell with care, looking for a way to escape. The other was a bulky younger man who sat in the center of the featureless room, staring ahead.
The rest of the station seemed to be a minibarracks. A warren of living areas, offices and meeting rooms, some training rooms. They had a huge medical center. The first rooms were empty, but the rest had patients. All of them were linesmen. Some of the linesmen were being attended to. They had the strongest lines. And felt the craziest.
Ean tried not to shudder. It was an insane type of crazy, unhinged almost.
Most of them wore the uniform of House of Sandhurst.
There, finally, in a room on the sixth level. A woman strapped to a chair, with two men standing nearby. One of the men wore the uniform Ean recognized from the Factor’s entourage. Jakob. The other wore the gray of Lancia. Commodore Bach.
The woman in the chair moved slightly, and Ean could have cried.
Radko.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DOMINIQUE RADKO
Radko woke to cramps, and pins and needles.
Jakob hadn’t killed her. He’d stunned her.
She was bound to a chair, arms by her sides, strapped at the shoulders, the waist, the wrists, and around her ankles. The bindings were tight all the way down. She couldn’t slip out of them. The ties were behind her, and the seat was fastened to the floor.
She might not be dead yet, but it was difficult to see how she would get out of this.
“Those useless Redmond lackeys,” Jakob said. “Their security is full of holes. Look at this.” Something spun. She caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, and moved her eyes without moving her head so she could see it better. It looked like a comms. “We didn’t even know this was gone until Martel found it among your girl’s belongings.”
Radko kept her head down. The longer Jakob thought she was unconscious, the better. She could see one pair of polished boots. Worlds of the Lesser Gods boots were a deep navy. These were black. Lancian boots. Commodore Bach was here.
Please let Vega have received her message.
“What is it?” Bach sounded almost disinterested although Radko would bet he wanted to know.
“The report on experiments Quinn is doing on the linesmen. It was stolen two weeks ago. Redmond and TwoPaths Engineering didn’t plan on telling us.”
Surely they knew it wasn’t the original report that had been stolen. Or maybe only Dr. Quinn did, and if no one had said the original report was missing, would they admit to a second one going missing? Probably not.
Radko knew secrets she couldn’t afford to give away. Even if Jakob didn’t kill her, she couldn’t stay alive to blab those secrets out. The question was, how to do the most damage to Jakob and Bach on the way. And somehow steal the comms and get it to Vega.
Jakob must have turned to face her, for his voice got clearer. “We’re in a hospital full of doctors, and they can’t even administer a drug properly. This time I’ll give her the truth serum myself.”
“I never thought much of Dromalan truth serum, myself.” That was Bach, and the bile rose in Radko’s throat just thinking about him.
“It’s not my favorite, either,” Jakob admitted. “I prefer something faster acting. But there are gallons of this stuff lying around on station. They use it for experimenting on the linesmen.”
Bach shuddered, and Radko wanted to do the same. The serum made a linesman more receptive to the lines, but the stronger the linesman, the more damage it did. And you never sent a linesman who’d been doped with it through the void. You destroyed his lines.
“Some of the experiments strike me as barbaric.”