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gravest danger. And he was certainly in poor physical shape for such an
operation.
Damn it! That's what made the damned challenge so appealing!
And when you're caught, Murphy, what do you tell 'em then? They'd put your
brain through a wringer with one of them stones of theirs, find out what an
old idiot you were, then scrub your brain clean as a whistle and you'd wake up
in a trash dumpster someplace not even rememberin' that you ever done it.
Idly he wondered just how many of those gems they had, and whether or not all
of them were in use or stuck in boxes someplace. Just a few dozen of them
wouldn't depress the collector's market but would set him up nice for life.
He couldn't forget the effect on that young sergeant, though, looking into
just that one. But it showed that you had to basically touch one, or be very
close to it, and look into it in order for it to work its voodoo. No getting
around touching, but you sure as hell didn't need to look into the damn
thing's cursed eyes.
It seemed so strange, standing here in the middle of genteel civilization,
thinking of those girls and such things as those gem neck laces. It wasn't the
idea of losing his soul to the devil-if he had one, the devil long ago owned
it outright.
But he preferred not to meet the old bastard until he had to.
So what the hell are you doin' here, you blasted idiot?
At just that moment he sensed that he was not alone in the alleylike back
lane. It wasn't anything he could see or hear or smell, but there was some old
survival sense that told him that he was being observed, and not through some
remote camera or sensor. Someone, something, was right here with him,
watching, waiting, and, somehow too, he felt that it knew him.
He tried to seem natural, looking eventually up one direction and then back
the other. Nothing. Nothing but some of the inevitable big bugs and other
creepy crawlies that were too much a part of this world to even be banished
from these sorts of neighborhoods.
He knew, though, that he wasn't imagining it. Life and death more than once
had depended on him accepting these feelings, and more than one promising
young scoundrel he'd known had died by dismissing them.
The back doors and windows? Maybe, but the feeling didn't seem that remote,
nor did the stone walls lining both sides of the alley lane make for good,
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consistent angles from which to observe an intruder. Robotic systems would be
used for security by folks with this kind of money and status; maybe some
suspicious, noisy pet with big teeth as well. This wasn't that. It was more
like the sense you got in a jungle when you knew that the snake was just two
meters from your neck and ready to pounce. And since nothing that large and
intelligent and dangerous would be allowed outside private grounds and
certainly would never get this far into the city without tripping all sorts of
animal control sensors, that meant a mind.
But where? The brickwork seemed unbroken, the tops of the walls and fences
were high but not high enough to conceal somebody like that, and certainly
there was nobody in the middle of the road.
Suddenly a male voice whispered to him, so close that he jumped.
"Captain, go down the street to the end, make a left. Someone will meet you at
the end of the block."
He went from jumping to freezing solid, and then he turned and slowly, warily,
looked closely again.
Nobody. Nothing.
He started walking down to the end of the block, casually, but rather
obviously in a hurry, taking out his hip flask as he did so and going a wee
bit faster with each step. He got to the end, took a hard swallow, looked
around, saw nobody yet, took another, and then began walking down the street
as directed. At this point, he was too committed to run, and too curious and
involved to want to.
Near the end of the block was a lamppost and an ornamental tropical tree. As
he approached the tree, a figure seemed to ooze right out of it.
"Captain Murphy, what in the world are you doing here?"
He stared at the small figure for a moment. "Why, it's Lieutenant Chung, isn't
it? I could ask the same of you."
"I can't believe you'd miss them or worry about them at this point," she said,
shaking her head. "Not you."
He looked a bit sheepish and shrugged. "I know, I know. But there was just
somethin' about them, somethin' that was wrong, if you know what I mean.
Volunteers is one thing, even young girls, but them devil jewels-they was
runnin' the show. I don't like that sort of thing. Never held with it.
Besides, somethin' in the whole stinkin' mess just got me Irish up. Hundreds
of years the damned Limeys run our old land, worked us on our own home soil
like slaves, treated us like no better than animals. We threw 'em out finally.
Got fed up with it. I'll be damned if I see some other group doin' the same
damned thing again."
His answer surprised her. She hadn't thought him even that deep. "My people
had a similar experience with the Japanese so I can sympathize. Still, what
were you going to do?" she asked him. "Be a new hero of your people? Rush in,
blow open the iron gates, find them and steal them back?"
He seemed to sag a bit, and sighed. "Somethin' like that, I guess. Or maybe
not. I dunno, really, what I was thinkin' of doin', or what I might be able to
do. But I had to see if there weren't somethin', y'see. And," he added,
needling a bit, "it didn't look like there was anybody else that cared."
"We've been here ever since they were brought in," the lieutenant told him.
"That's why we couldn't stay with you. That way, we were an obvious and public
danger to whoever went to so much trouble to get them."
"You saw who took 'em, then?"
She nodded. "We know a fair amount at this point, although not nearly enough.
We didn't have to put a one-on-one tail on them, you see. There was enough
chemical tracer in the bath wash in the courier ship that I could probably
eventually trace them down within a couple of parsecs of this planet if need
be."
Murphy glanced back up the street towards the compound. "So what do they look
like, these devil folks?"
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"Ordinary. I don't think they're behind this at all. Just tools, like the
girls and many others. Rich folks playing at being naughty. Their kind's
always been with us. Some can be quite dangerous, fanatics who have become
lost in their own fantasy world, but they can be dealt with. Oddly, they are
usually intellectuals with good contacts and influence. We would rather not
have to harm them if we can avoid it, but they must be dealt with."
"You're sure the girls are still in there?"
She nodded. "As of now, yes. But people and vehicles come and go around here,
and we sincerely doubt if this is their final destination. They're going to
want those babies born outside the city, outside of authorities and monitors
and records. We're scouting the place now as minutely as possible to see if
there is a good, easy way in. The problem is, the girls are only a part of our
problem. We need to know who is behind all this. We need to know just
precisely what this is really all about."
"Hmph! Well, I wish I was, but I ain't much of a burglar. Not at my age," the
old captain told her.
"That's all right," she responded almost instantly. "We are."
* * *
The next big shock Murphy got was the discovery that there were eight
commandos in the team, not just the two. The other six apparently spent the
trip in a lower compartment of the courier in some sort of quick-
acting suspended animation. The girls, and the powers they had thanks to the
gems, apparently never sensed their presence for just that reason. When the
enemy's got hold of your computer, it seems, don't tell your computer anything
you don't want everyone to know.
Of the group-four men, four women-only a five-person team were the kind of
commandos, all marines, who went in and engaged in the action; the other three [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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