Sallah did, though hanging slightly upside down was not the best position for the job. She had to think carefully, for Avril had piloted shuttles and knew something of their systems. But the Mariposa, though small, was designed to traverse interplanetary distances, dock with a variety of stations or other craft, and had the sophisticated controls to perform a considerable variety of maneuvers in space and on a planetary surface. Sallah dared to hope that much of its instrumentation would be unfamiliar to Avril.
“To find out what this ship just did,” she instructed, “hit the return button on the bottom tier of the greens. No, the port side.”
Avril jerked at Sallah, tweaking strained arm and back muscles and jamming Sallah’s head against the viewscope. Sallah’s long hair was freed completely from its pins and flowed over her face.
“Don’t get cute!” Avril snapped, her finger hovering on the appropriate button. “This one?”
Sallah nodded, floating away again. Avril punched the button with one hand and hauled her back into position with the other. Then she caught the handhold to keep herself in place. Every action has a reaction, Sallah thought, trying to clear her head of pain and confusion.
The monitor came up with a preflight instruction plan.
“The Mariposa was programmed to dock here on the Yoko.” It was nice to know where she was, Sallah reflected. “Once you hit the power, you couldn’t alter its course.”
“Well,” Avril said, her tone altering considerably. “I wanted to come here first anyhow. I just wanted to come on my own.” Sallah, hair falling over her face, felt a lessening of the tension that emanated from the woman. Some of the beauty returned to a face no longer contorted with frustration. “I don’t need you hanging about, then.” Avril reached up and gave Sallah’s body a calculated shove that sent her to the opposite end of the cabin, to bump harmlessly against the other wall and then hover there. “Well, I’ll just get to work.”
How long Sallah was suspended in that fashion she did not know. She managed to tilt her head and get her hair to float away from her eyes, but she did not dare to move much—action produced reaction, and she did not wish to draw attention to herself. She ached all over, but the pain in her foot was almost unbearable.
A tirade of malevolent and resentful oaths spun from Avril’s lips. “None of the programs run, of all the frigging luck. Nothing runs!”
Sallah had just enough time to duck her head to avoid Avril’s projectile arrival against her. As it was, she went head over heels in a spin that Avril, laughing gleefully, assisted until the rotation made Sallah retch.
“You bitch woman!” Avril stopped Sallah before she could expel more vomit into the air. “Okay! If that’s the way of it, you know what I need to know. And you’re going to tell me, or I’ll kill you by inches.” A spaceman’s knife, with its many handlepacked implements, sliced across the top of Sallah’s nose.
Then she felt the blade none too gently cutting the bindings on her hands and feet. Blood rushed through starved arteries, and her strained muscles reacted painfully. If she had not been in free-fall, she would have collapsed. As it was, the agony of release made her sob and shake.
“Clean up your spew first,” Avril said, shoving a slop jar at her.
Sallah did as she was told, grateful for the lack of gravity, grateful for the release, and wondering what she could do to gain an upper hand. But she had little opportunity to enjoy her freedom, for Avril had other ways of securing her prisoner’s cooperation.
Before Sallah realized what was happening, Avril had secured a tether to the injured foot and tweaked the line. Pain, piercing like a shard of glass, shot through Sallah’s leg and up to her groin. There was too little left in her stomach to throw up. Avril jerked Sallah over to the console, pushed her into the pilot’s chair, and tied her down, twiching her improvised lead line to remind Sallah of her helplessness.
“Now, check the fuel on board, check the quantity in the Yoko’s tanks—I’ve done that, I know the answers, so don’t try anything clever.” A jerk against Sallah’s injured foot reinforced the threat. “Then enter a program that gets me out of this wretched asshole of a midden system.”
Sallah did as she was told, though her head ached and her eyes blurred repeatedly. She could not suppress her surprise at the amount of fuel in the Mariposa’s tanks.
“Yes, someone was holding back on it. You?” There was a jerk on the line.
“Kenjo, I suspect,” Sallah replied coolly, managing to suppress a cry. She was determined not to give Avril any satisfaction.
“Fussy Fusi? Yes, that computes. I thought he’d given up all too tamely! Where did he hide it?” The line tightened. Sallah had to bite hard on her lip against a sob.
“Probably at his stake. It’s back of beyond. No one goes there. He could hide anything there.”
Avril snorted and remained silent. Sallah made herself breathe deeply, forcing more adrenaline into her system to combat pain, fatigue, and fear.
“All right, compute me a course to . . .” Avril consulted a notebook. “Here.”
Only because Sallah already knew the coordinates did she recognize the numbers. Avril wished to go to the system nearest them, a system that, though uninhabited, was closer to the populated sectors of space. The course would stretch the Mariposa to the end of available fuel, even if Avril also drained the Yoko’s tanks. It gave Sallah no consolation to think that the little ship might drift for centuries with Avril safe and composed in deep sleep. Unless, just maybe, Ongola had tampered with the sleep tanks, too. She liked that idea. But she knew Ongola too well to presume that kind of foresight.
Unfortunately, the Avrils of the galaxy could make themselves at home in any time and culture. So if Avril went into deep sleep, eventually someone, or something, would rescue her and the Mariposa. Sallah did not need to see them to know that Avril had several fortunes’ worth of gemstones and precious metals aboard the Mariposa. There had never been any doubt in anyone’s mind why Avril had chosen Big Island as her stake, but no one had cared. But then, no one would have imagined that she would be mad enough to attempt to leave Pern, even with Threadfall threatening the planet.
Wondering why Avril, who was an astrogator, after all, had not been able to complete laying in such a simple course, Sallah did as she was ordered. She had more experience than Avril did with the Mariposa’s drive board. But the program was not accepted.ERROR 259 AT LINE 57465534511 was the message.
Avril jerked hard on the line, and Sallah hissed against the burning, crippling pain in her foot.
“Try again. There’s more than one way of entering a course.”
Sallah obeyed. “I’ll have to go around the existing parameters.”
“Reset the entire effing thing but plot that course,” Avril told her.
As Sallah began the more laborious deviation into the command center of the gig’s course computer, she was aware that Avril had picked up a long narrow cylinder from the rack by her helmet. She fiddled with it, humming tunelessly under her breath, seemingly thoroughly delighted with herself.
When Sallah finally tapped the “return” tab, she became aware of Avril’s intense interest in the flickering console. She chanced a look at what the woman had been fondling. It was a homemade capsule. Not a homer—they were thicker and longer—but something more like the standard beacon. Suddenly she clearly saw Avril’s plan.