Fortunately, there was a way to be certain. He put the headset away, nodded briefly to Commander Barr, and headed for sickbay.
The hover cab stopped outside the imposing gates, and Alicia stepped out into Wyvern's autumn night, damp and rich with the scent of unfamiliar, decaying leaf mold. She fed her credit card into the cab's charge unit and looked around, tugging her bolero straight. Chateau Defiant lay thirty kilometers from town, and clouds hid both moons. Without sensory boosters, the blackness would have been Stygian; even with them, it was dark enough to make her jumpy-especially in light of the importance of this meeting.
"Calm down, Alley. Get your puke back down where it belongs, girl!"
"Yes, ma'am," Alicia thought back obediently, and brought her augmentation on line. Her racing heart slowed, and she felt herself relax. Not enough to lose her edge, but enough to kill the jitters.
"Just keep your head together, okay? I want you- hell, I want both of you-back up here in one piece. Or two. Or whatever."
"Have no fear, Megarea. I shall keep my eye upon her."
"Ha! That's what worries me most!"
Alicia swallowed a chuckle as she reclaimed her credit card. The gates opened silently, and Quintana's voice issued from the speaker below their visual pickup.
"Hi, Theodosia! We're in the Green Parlor. You know the way."
"Pour the drinks, Oscar," she replied with a cheerful wave. "I'll see you in a couple of minutes."
"Good," Quintana said, and switched off with an unhappy glance at Gregor Alexsov. "Is this really necessary? he asked, gesturing distastefully at the peculiar, long-barreled pistol one of Alexsov's people carried.
"I'm afraid so." Alexsov nodded, and the man with the pistol retreated into the next room and pulled the door almost closed. "I trust you completely, Oscar, but we can't afford any slips. If she's as trustworthy as you believe, it won't hurt her a bit. If not …" He shrugged.
Alicia strode up the walk with brisk familiarity. She'd been here several times in the past weeks, although Oscar Quintana's memories of her overnight visits differed somewhat from her own. She grinned at the thought, relaxing further with the amusement, and never noticed the catlike shape that slid tracelessly through Quintana's sophisticated security systems behind her.
She was one of Quintana's "special friends" now, and the retainer who met her at the door gave her a wry, half-apologetic smile as he held out his hand. She smiled back and slid her disrupter from its holster, then handed over her survival knife and the vibro blade from her left boot. He stowed them carefully away and gestured politely at the scan panel beside him, and Alicia made a face.
"Oh ye of little faith," she murmured, but it wasn't bad manners on Wyvern, where titles of nobility-and estates-had been known to change hands with sudden and violent unexpectedness. No doubt Tisiphone could have gotten an entire arsenal past the man behind the
scanners, just as she did Alicia's augmentation, but there was no real point in it.
"There, see?" she said as he peered at her internal hardware without seeing it.
He smiled at her rallying tone and bowed her past, and she grinned back as she turned down a corridor hung in priceless tapestries. If not for the way it was paid for, she could have gotten used to this kind of life, she thought, nodding to an occasional servant as she passed.
The double doors to what Quintana modestly called the Green Parlor stood open. She stepped through them, and he turned to greet her, standing beside a tallish man she recognized from his mind.
"Theodosia. Allow me to introduce Captain Gregor Alexsov."
"Captain." Alicia held out her hand and made herself smile brightly.
"Captain Mainwaring." Alexsov extended his own hand graciously. She took it and felt the familiar heat, then-
"No, Alicia!" Tisiphone screamed in her mind, and something made a soft, quiet "PFFFFT!" sound behind her.
Ben Belkassem muttered balefully as he filtered through the pitch-black grounds. This damned house was even bigger than he'd thought from the plans, and he'd almost missed two different sensors already. He paused in the denser darkness under an ornamental tree and checked his inertial tracer against the plat of the grounds. Quintana had mentioned the "Green Parlor," and if his map was right that was right over there… .
Alicia gasped and snapped around to stare at Quintana as pain pricked the back of her neck. He looked distressed-he was actually wringing his hands-and her eyes popped back to Alexsov, then widened as she collapsed. The carpet bloodied her nose as her face hit it, and deep within her she felt the elemental rage of the Fury.
She tried to thrust herself back up, but Alexsov had chosen his attack well. He knelt beside her, and she couldn't even feel his hands as he removed the tiny dart and rolled her, not ungently, onto her back.
"I apologize for the necessity, Captain Mainwaring," he murmured, "but it's only a temporary nerve block." He snapped his fingers, and one of his henchmen handed him a hypospray. "And this," he went on soothingly, pressing the hypo to her arm, "is a perfectly harmless truth drug."
Horrified understanding filled Alicia as the hypo nestled home.
"Tisiphone!" she screamed.
"I am trying!" Anger and fear-for Alicia, not herself-snarled in the Fury's reply. "Their cursed block has cut off your main processor, but-"
The hypo hissed, and Tisiphone cursed horribly as the drug flooded into Alicia's system … and her augmentation sensed it.
She gasped and jerked, and Alexsov leapt back in consternation. Even that small movement should have been impossible, and his brow furrowed in lightning speculation as she quivered on the carpet. Escape protocols blossomed within her, fighting the nerve block, trying to get her on her feet, but they couldn't, and panic wailed in her mind as the idiot savant of her processor considered its internal programs. Escape was impossible, it decided, and truth drugs had been administered.
Ben Belkassem eased through the ornamental shrubbery to the glowing windows. Their translucent green curtains let light escape yet were too thick to see through, but he'd expected that. He checked for security sensors and placed a tiny, sensitive microphone against the glass.
"… happening?!" Naked panic quivered in Oscar Quintana's voice. "You said she was just supposed to be paralyzed, damn it!"
"I don't know what it is." That lower, calmer voice belonged to the man named Alexsov, Ben Belkassem thought-then stiffened as understanding caught up with his racing mind. Paralyzed! Dear God, they must be on to her!
Alicia's eyes glazed. She was numb below the neck, but she felt the neuro-toxin in her gasping respiration, the growing sluggishness of her mind. To come this far, she thought despairingly. To get this close-!
Glass shattered behind Oscar Quintana, and he whirled. The tinkling sound still hung in his ears as the curtains parted, and he had a vague impression of a black-clad figure that raised a hand in his direction. Then the emerald green beam struck just above his left eye and he died.