''Justin," Grant said. "For God's sake—"
"Everything's all right. You go exactly the way we planned—"
" Igo—"
"I'm not leaving. You are."
"You're out of your mind! Justin!"
Justin clambered aboard the nearest boat, opened up the pressurized cabin door and left Grant nothing to do but follow him aboard with his objections.
"Justin, if you stay now, they can arrest you!"
"And if I take you out of here there's no way in hell I'll ever get certified to be near you, you know that. So I'm not down here tonight. I don't know a thing about this. I just go back up there, say I never left my room, how am I to know where you went? Maybe a platythere ate you and got indigestion." He flipped the on-switch, checked the gauges, one toggle-switch and another. "There you go, everything's full, batteries all charged. Wonderful how the staff keeps things up, isn't it?"
"Justin." Grant's voice was shaking. He had his hands in his pockets. The air was bitter chill near the water. "Listen to menow, let's have some sense here. I'm azi. I was listening to tape in the cradle, for God's sake. If she runs something on me I can handle it, I can rip the structures apart and tell you if there were any bugs in it—"
"The hell you can."
"I can survive her tests, and there's no way she can axe my Contract, there's no axe-code. I know for a fact there's not—I knowmy sets, Justin. Let's just forget this and go up the hill and we'll figure out another way. If it gets bad, we always have this for an option."
"Shut up and listen to me. Remember how we mapped this out: first lights you see on your right are still Reseune: that's the number ten precip station, up on the bluffs. The lights on your left two klicks on will be Moreyville. If you run completely dark you can pass there before Ari gets wind of this, and it's a clear night. Remember, stay to the center of the channel, that's the only way to miss the bars, and for God's sake, be careful of snags. Current comes from the left when you get to the Kennicutt. You turn into it, and the first lights you see after that, two, maybe three hours on, that's Krugers. You tell them who you are and you give them this—" He turned on a dim chart-light and scribbled a number down on the pad clipped to the dash. Under the number he wrote: MERILD. "Tell them call Merild, no matter the hour. You can tell Merild when he gets there—tell him Ari's blackmailing Jordan through me, dammit, that's all he has to know. Tell him I can't come until my father's free, but I had to get you out of there, you're one more hostage than Jordan can cope with. Understand?"
"Yes," Grant said in a faint voice, azi-like: yes.
"The Krugers won't betray you. Tell them I said sink the boat if they have to. It's Emory's. Merild will handle everything else."
"Ari will call the police."
"That's fine. Let her. Don'ttry to go past the Kennicutt. If you have to, the next place on down the Volga is Avery, overnight, maybe more, and she couldintercept you. Besides, you'd get caught up in Cyteen-law and police down there, and you know what that could be. Krugers is it. It has to be." He looked back at Grant's face in the faint glow of the chart-light, and it struck him suddenly that he might not see him again. "Be careful. For God's sake, be careful."
"Justin." Grant embraced him hard. "You be careful. Please."
"I'll push you out of here. Go on. Dog the seals down."
"The other boat—" Grant said.
"I'll take care of it. Go!" Justin turned and ducked out of the door, hopped up on the deck and onto the echoing grating. He cast off the ties then, threw them aboard, shoved the big boat back with his foot and with his hands till it drifted clear, scraping the buffers.
It swung round sideways, inert and dark, then caught the current off the boathouse and drifted, following the sweep of the main channel, turning again.
He opened up the second boat and threw up the cover on the engine.
The starter was electronic. He pulled the solid state board, dropped the cover down, closed the hatch behind him, and dropped the board into the water before he made the jump between the boat and the metal grid of the dock.
In the same moment he heard the distant, muffled cough of Grant's engine.
Solid then, chugging away.
He cleared the boathouse, latched the door and ran. It was dangerous to be down here on the river-edge, in the dark, dangerous anywhere less patrolled, where something native could have gotten in, weed in the ditch, stuff carried in the air—God knew. He tried not to think about it. He ran, took up on the road again, walking as he caught a stitch in his side.
He expected commotion. He expected someone on night shift at the airport to have seen the boat, or heard its engine start. But the work at the hangars was noisy. Maybe someone had had a power wrench going. Maybe they thought it was some passing boat from Moreyville or up-Volga, with a balky engine. And they had the bright lights to blind them.
So far their luck was a hundred percent.
Till he got to the House and found the kitchen door locked.
He sat down a while on the steps, teeth chattering, trying to think it through, and gave it a while, time for a boat to get well on its way. But if he sat there the night, then it was unarguable that it was conspiracy.
If he gave them evidence of that—
It would land on Jordan.
So there was nothing to do finally but use his key and trip the silent warnings he knew would be in place by now.
Security showed up to meet him in the halls by the kitchens. "Ser," the azi in charge said, "where are you coming from?"
"I felt like a walk," he said. "That's all. I drank too much. I wanted some cold air."
The azi called that in to the Security office; Justin waited, expecting the man's expression to change then, when the order came back. But the azi only nodded. "Good evening, ser."
He walked away, weak-kneed, rode the lift up and walked all the lonely way to the apartment.
The lights came on inside. "No entries since the last use of this key,"the dulcet voice of the Minder said.
He went into Grant's room. He picked things up and hung them back in the closet and put them in drawers. He found small, strange things among Grant's belongings, a tinsel souvenir Jordan had brought back from holiday in Novgorod, a cheap curio spacer patch of the freighter Kittyhawkthat he had brought back from Novgorod airport, for Grant, who had not been allowed to go. A photo of the pair of them, aged four, Grant pale-skinned, skinny, and shockingly red-haired, himself in that damned silly hat he had thought was grown-up, digging in the garden with the azi. Another photo of them, at a mutually gawky ten, standing on the fence of the livestock pens, barefoot, toes curled identically pigeon-toed over the rail, arms under chins, both grinning like fools.
God. It was as if a limb had been cut off, and the shock had not quite gotten to the brain yet, but it had hit his gut, and it told him it was going to get worse.
Ari would call him now, he had no doubt.
He went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, hugged his arms about himself and stared at the patterns in the veneer of the table, anything but shut his eyes and see the boat and the river.
Or think of Ari.
Only Grant?Merild would ask, when he got that phone message. Merild would take alarm. Merild might well call Reseune and try to talk to Jordan; and he could not afford that: he tried to think what he would say, how he would cover it. Grant could tell Merild enough, maybe, to set Merild working on a rescue of some sort; but, oh, God, if something got to Jordan about Ari and him, either from Grant, from Merild, or from Ari—and Jordan blew up—
No. Jordan was too cagy to do something without thinking it out—