Well. A chance, anyway. But even if they failed…
Victor chewed on the problem. He wasn't positive, but he suspected this was a kidnapping attempt rather than an assassination under way. And if so, a new possibility raised itself.
"Oh, wow," whispered Berry, staring out over the main gaming hall of The Wages of Sin. She and Ruth, followed by their guards, had just emerged through the entrance. Web Du Havel had remained behind in their suite, claiming that his age and sedentary habits would leave him exhausted if he tried to tag along with two youngsters enjoying their first romp through one of the galaxy's premier gambling casinos.
Even the princess, accustomed as she was to the splendor of the Star Kingdom's royal palaces, was impressed. " 'Oh wow' is right. Although-I'd say it was garish, except the word 'garish' doesn't begin to do it justice."
Berry chuckled. Leaving aside the flashy gaming tables and machines themselves, everything about the main hall seemed designed to overwhelm the senses of anyone standing in it. She was particularly taken by the holograph images spreading across the entire ceiling, some thirty meters or so above the floor. Right now, the gaming hall seemed to be racing through the center of a galaxy, with the coruscating side effects of an invisible black hole ahead of it. A moment later, the holographic image swept aside and they were back out in intergalactic space, with the Sombrero Galaxy looming in the rear of the hall.
"Wow,"Berry repeated.
Seeing the expressions on the faces of her special unit as they stared at the space station looming ahead of them, Thandi had to keep from smiling. For all their superior airs, the truth was that the ex-Scrags were the equivalent of country hicks. Their whole lives had been spent either in the slums of Terra's major cities, or skulking through other interstices of the inhabited galaxy. Their education was as spotty as Thandi's had been, when she'd left Ndebele years earlier-but, unlike her, they hadn't spent the intervening years in a determined effort to remedy the lack. Secure in their own subculture's superstitions-what do supermen need to learn from sub-humans?-they'd only begun resuming a program of study since encountering Thandi herself. She'd enforced that just as firmly as she had everything else. But, her program hadn't placed any great priority on teaching her new charges the curlicues which galactic luxury could create.
"Luxury" was only part of it. The shuttle, designed specifically for the transport of prospective sheep to their fleecing place, had a huge viewing port. All the better to whet the appetite of the sheep when they got their first sight of the place where they thought they'd be munching the greenest grass in the universe. Which, indeed, they would be-while being fleeced in the process.
The space station wasn't simply dazzling and impressive, it was also huge. Huge, and incredibly complex in its design. Roughly speaking, it was the shape of a sphere-but not a solid so much as a construct of interlocking tubes and passageways and, here and there, much larger chambers. Thandi was fond of a type of food which still went by an ancient term referring to its origins-Italian, it was called-and The Wages of Sin reminded her of nothing so much as what a bowl of spaghetti might look like in zero G. Keeping in mind that the pasta and the meatballs were colored in every shade of the rainbow, lit throughout by a dazzling display of modern fluorescence and holographic technology-and somewhere in the vicinity of eighteen kilometers in diameter. The shuttles she could see in its vicinity, here and there, looked like specks beside it.
A gleam from reflected sunlight on what was apparently a large ship not far away caught Thandi's eye. She suddenly realized that the merchant ship the shuttle had passed very recently was not more than six or seven hundred kilometers from the space station-the space-going equivalent of being within mooring distance.
"Excuse me a moment," she muttered, going over to the viewport controls and turning up the magnification. One of the passengers in the shuttle glared at her, but said nothing. The combination of her imposing height and figure and the fact she'd been polite, was, as usual, enough to deter anything more vehement.
Yes.That gleaming sunlight did come from the same freighter they'd passed. A fairly standard commercial design, massing perhaps five million tons.
Thandi returned the magnification to its normal setting and turned away from the viewscreen, frowning. She wondered what the ship was doing there. There was no particular reason for a freighter to be riding in orbit that close to a pleasure resort, after all. A liner, certainly. The Wages of Sin was Erewhon's principal tourist attraction. But not a freighter.
She hesitated, and then decided it was time anyway to alert Rozsak's destroyers that they might soon be needed.
One of the other luxuries afforded by Wages of Sin's transportation was a complete communications suite, with a plentiful supply of encrypted channels whose privacy the government guaranteed. Which, she reflected as she plugged her personal com into one of them, means a bit more here than it might somewhere else, doesn't it?
Not that it prevented her from bringing her own encryption software on line.
"Horatius, Lieutenant Carlson speaking," the voice of the duty com officer said into her earbug. "What can I do for you, Lieutenant Palane?"
Her personal encrypt had identified her, just as it had automatically routed her to the watch officer instead of one of the duty ratings. But it was still reassuring-and satisfying-to be part of an operation where Navy senior-grade lieutenants (the equivalent of a Marine captain) not only knew which end was up but actually sounded like they wanted to help her do her own job.
"Mainly, I'm just checking in, Ma'am," Thandi informed her, speaking very quietly into her privacy mike. "My unit and I are about to make rendezvous with Wages of Sin-we're aboard their shuttle Diamond."
"Half a sec, Lieutenant," Carlson replied. Thandi could hear her saying something to someone else, then she came back on the line. "Tracking has you, Lieutenant. We make your ETA about eighteen minutes."
"Confirm, Ma'am. As far as I can tell at this point, everything's under control, but I'm declaring Code Maguire."
"Acknowledged," Carlson said. The Navy officer had no idea in the universe what Code Maguire was all about, but it was on her priority list as an operational ID. "I'll inform the captain. Anything else we can do for you at this point, Lieutenant?"
"Just one other thing," Thandi said. "Do we have any idea what that big freighter is doing riding in orbit so close to the space station?"
"Hold on, and I'll check." After half a minute or so, Carlson's voice came back in her ear. "It's the Felicia III, a combined freighter and personnel transport. Registered as an independent carrier out of Yarrow-that's a system in Grafton Sector-but our records show it's really owned by the Jessyk Combine. According to the manifest they filed with Erewhon's orbital monitors, they're carrying about three thousand economy-rate passengers and are making a short stop-four days-to let their customers enjoy the resort."
Thandi stared at the space station. It was gigantic, now, filling the entire viewport.
She didn't believe it for an instant. True, there were freighters who provided comfortable if slow passage for people who couldn't afford the top rates charged by cruise liners. But Jessyk Combine's hybrid freighters specialized in transporting the galaxy's poorest residents. People who'd barely been able to scrape up the money to afford a single trip, almost always a voyage to settle as colonists in a new world somewhere. The one thing they wouldn't have was extra money to splurge on a four-day stop at a pleasure resort. Certainly not on a Jessyk vessel-the Combine was notorious for being able to squeeze blood out of a stone.