The System seemed to echo in the sudden relative quiet. Even the wordless wail from the Ring halved its "volume" and "pitch" and dropped back down into the region of speech. The words-Savehim, Sulke!

-repeated endlessly, like a mantra.

And now Sulke could clearly hear the gentle voice she most needed to hear.All right so far, cousins, Reb said.We are all unharmed so far, which means they intend to parley. Be calm.

She knew his location precisely now. The vessel in which he was imprisoned was superbly stealthed-the combined power of the United Nations could not have found it-but she had detection gear no battle cruiser could match, if the target was another telepath. Reb had been one years before he'd met his first Stardancer; a natural adept. So were Fat Humphrey and Meiya.

So were four other humans currently in s.p.a.ce, and fourteen on Terra. About average for humanity. All of them had been kidnapped too, at the same time as Reb, Fat and Meiya-every one was now a prisoner-b.u.t.this vessel was Sulke's pidgin: the one she personally happened to be close enough to do something about. She instructed her subconscious to monitor the other ongoing rescue operations for data relevant to her own problem, and consciously ignored them.

She fed Reb's location to those who were good at orbital ballistics, grabbed the report that echoed back and swore.You're going nowhere fast! Your trajectory is taking you up out of the ecliptic, and there's nothing there!

He was still calm.Naturally. We knew they must have a covert base in s.p.a.ce; now they're leading us to it. We already know where the ones dirtside are being taken.

Yeah, and we can't touch the place. What if where you're going is just as well defended?

Then we will have to be very clever. And very lucky. She went briefly into rapport with those who had had military training back in their human lives, and swore again.We have Stardancers vectoring to intercept your projected path at multiple points . . .

but there's no way to know where you're going until they decelerate. And if they maneuver in the meantime, we could lose you completely.

They probably will. They're paranoid; they'll a.s.sume their stealthing may not be good enough, and try every trick there is.

I can match orbits with you right now,she said.You're coming right at me, near enough.

What about relative speeds?

She was already adjusting her lightsail, spinning out Symbiote like pizza dough.You're a bat out of h.e.l.l-but if I can grab hold, and it doesn't kill me . . . She had an unusually powerful thruster on her belt she had never expected to use; she poked it carefully through the Symbiote membrane, borrowed a hundred brains to help her aim it, and fired it to exhaustion.

What can you accomplish?Meiya asked.

Tear off antennas, b.u.g.g.e.r up their communications,bang on the hull and distract them while you jump 'em . . . if I have to, I'll unscrew the f.u.c.king drive with my fingernails.

There was a hint of a chuckle in Reb's voice.I love you too, Sulke. Whoops-they're about to drug me . . .

Me too,Fat Humphrey said. Watch your a.s.s, Sulke.

She could see them now, by eyeball, and they were indeed coming on fast. But she was confident; she had learned to board a moving freight when she was eight years old, leaving a place then called East Germany.Yeah? she sent back.I'll give you a two-kilo gold asteroid if youcan pull off that trick, pal.

His answering giggle was the last thing she ever heard. She never saw the white-winged figure who came up behind her and put a laser bolt through her brain.

PART EIGHT.

22.

The Shimizu Hotel 25 February 2065.

Jay remembered an old story from the dawn of s.p.a.ceflight: a Skylab astronaut had awakened to a lighting failure, and had taken nearly twenty minutes to find the backup switch-in a sleeping compartment the size of a phone booth. Darkness and free-fall were a disorienting combination.

He knew his way around the Shimizu about as well as anyone alive-but in the eerie, feeble glow of emergency lighting, everything lookeddifferent. In places even the emergency lights had failed, and almost everywhere he and Rand encountered adherents of the ancient philosophy, "When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." There was absolutely no doubt in Jay's mind that somewhere Evelyn Martin was hemorrhaging and tearing his hair out in clumps.

For the first time in his life, Jay did not give a d.a.m.n about offending guests; he and Rand went through them like buckshot, leaving a trail of outrage and broken bones that was sure to give birth to expensive litigation.

The destination that would most efficiently allow them to find out what was going on, report what had happened, and do something effective about it, was Kate Tokugawa's office. There were other nerve centers, but that was the only one Jay was confident he could find in his sleep without AI a.s.sistance. It was startling to realize how much you depended on the d.a.m.n things.G.o.d help me if I suddenly need a cube root or something, he thought wildly, bouncing a fat bald groundhog off a bulkhead.

Rand deked expertly around the ricocheting guest and pulled up alongside him. "They couldn't have started losing pressure before the blackout, or we'd have heard alarms. To reach zero by the time we tried that latch, they must have blown outfast ."

"The whole window must have gone," Jay said.

"Is that possible?"

"No. Not without help."

"So they're dead?" He clotheslined an employee who was, quite properly, trying to prevent them from speeding recklessly through a developing riot-and, since it was the quickest way to explain, regretfully sucker-punched the woman as he went by.

"Probably. But maybe not."

"How do you figure?"

"I ask myself, what could take out a whole window? I come up with a ship designed for the purpose. I think they've been s.n.a.t.c.hed. I think when they jaunted into that room, the window was already gone:they saw a holo of one. And at some point they all got sleepy . . ."

"And somebody came through the holo and towed them away . . . wouldn't somebodynotice a f.u.c.king barnacle attached to the Shimizu?"

"Remora," Jay corrected. "It moves. Not if it was stealthed well enough. Fat's room is all the way aroundfrom the docks. And by now it's gone-and the sphere of s.p.a.ce within which it could possibly lie is expanding every second. You can spot even the best-stealthed ship by eyeball, by occultation of background stars-but you have to know just where to look."

"Maybe we should quit dawdling, then." They were into the final corridor now, a straight run of perhaps two thousand meters; perhaps a dozen flailing figures cluttering the way between them and the door to Management country. He lifted his head, bellowed "FORE!" at the top of his lungs, tucked his chin and triggered all his thrusters at max.

Jay did likewise. Miraculously, everyone managed to scatter out of their way. Halfway to the door, they shut down, flipped over, and began to decelerate-and discovered that they had both burned themselves dry. They impacted with bone-jarring crashes, desperately grabbed handholds, and nearly had their arms pulled out of their sockets by the rebound. Jay's first thought was for Rand, but his brother threw him a shaky grin and a circled thumb and forefinger.

Jay found the manual doorlatch and released it. He was greatly relieved when this one worked; he had not been sure he would find pressure in Management-and had had no idea what to do if he didn't. They scrambled in together, then resealed the door to keep out guests who wanted a refund. There was n.o.body at the front desk, nor in the outer offices beyond it. "Where the h.e.l.lis everybody?" Rand snarled.

"I don't know," Jay snapped, even more nervous than his brother. This was wrong, wrong-"Wait a minute." He doubled back, went to the front desk. "I filled in for a guy once or twice," he said as he got there, and began tapping code on a drawer under the counter. "Let's see if they still . . . ah!" He got the drawer open-and took from it a totally illegal police-issue GE hand-laser. "Sometimes Security doesn't show up fast enough when you call them," he said, checking the charge and clicking off the safety. "Now let's go see what's in back."

"I'll go first and draw fire," Rand said. He and Jay exchanged a glance. It became a grin. "The Hardy Boys in High Orbit," Rand said.

"And in a big-a.s.s hurry."

They worked their way back through the outer offices to Kate's door cautiously but quickly, Rand preceding his brother through every doorway. Finally they floated outside her office.

"No point in listening at a soundproof door," Jay said.

"No point in knocking, either," Rand agreed, and opened the manual release compartment. "I'll go first, again."

"No need. I'llknow where the target is, if there is one."

"Okay. If there's trouble in there, you go right and I'll go left."

"Which way is that?" They happened to be upside down with respect to each other.

"You go away from me and I'll go away from you." Rand unlatched the door. It let go with a pop, and opened a few centimeters. He gripped the release latch to brace himself, and slid the door the rest of the way open. He and Jay entered together, and stopped.

And then both began to laugh. They knew it was inappropriate; that only made it worse. Facing them was one of the most ridiculous sights they had ever seen: Evelyn Martin, holding a gun.

Laughing, Jay tried to move away from Rand as agreed-and remembered that his thrusters were dry.

He still was not worried; he and his brother could outjaunt a spastic like Martin with muscles alone.

Then he saw Katherine Tokugawa well to his left, also armed. His laughter died away. They were outgunned. He shook Rand's shoulder and pointed her out. After a microsecond's thought, his own gun steadied on Martin. If he were going to be killed by one of these two, he preferred Kate. More dignity.

"Drop it," Martin yapped.

Jay thought hard for a whole second, then opened his fingers. The gun, of course, stayed where it was.

"Loseit," Martin corrected, expressing his exasperation by putting a bolt into the wall beside the doorway. The smell of burning bulkhead plastic filled the room faster than the air-conditioning could suck it away. Jay gave his own gun a finger-snap, like a child shooting marbles; it drifted away toward Martin.

Ignoring the man, he turned and addressed Kate.

"I should have figured you'd have to be in on this," he said. "But I'm d.a.m.ned if I can see how you expect to come out of it with your job."

"Oh, I'll probably lose that eventually," she agreed. "But by then I'll have a better job."

"A better job thanthis?"

"Much better. I'll be running something a little more prestigious than a hotel."

"What's that?"

"High Orbit," Martin said, and snickered.

"Shut up, Ev," Tokugawa snapped.

He stared. "What theh.e.l.l are you talking about? n.o.body runs High Orbit."

"No," Martin said. "The UN wouldn't let them. But the UN isn't going to be around much longer." He giggled nervously.

"Shutup, Ev," Tokugawa barked. "You can tell them things like that after they're dead. Not before."

Jay tried to restart his laughter; it didn't catch. "You seriously think you can take on the UN-and the Starmind-and win?"

Kate couldn't resist answering. "Not me," she said. "But I know people who can. I've been working for them all my life."

"You artists are always yapping about your 'vision,'" Martin said, and brandished his gun. "Ha! You a.s.sholes don't know what vision is! We're gonna reshape the future." Jay felt the universe shifting in his head, crushing his brains beneath it. Surely this was lunacy. Even the UN itself could not have defeated the Starmind. He could conceive of nothing human that could.

"Come in, gentlemen," Tokugawa said then. Jay glanced over his shoulder, and saw two Security men enter with guns drawn. Each, he noticed, wore an unfamiliar earplug and an un.o.btrusive throat-mike.

Communications gear that did not use the house system. Turning back, he saw that Tokugawa and Martin both had them too.

"So," he said to Kate, "you already know more about what happened in Fat Humphrey's room than we do."

She nodded. "Oh, yes. Much more."

"Of course. You a.s.signed Fat his room. So this is where you gloat, and tell us what's going on, so we can be awed by your cleverness?"

"No," she said. "This is where you get taken away and killed. Goodbye, Sasaki." She sketched aga.s.s...o...b..w. "It has always been a pain in the a.s.s to work with you. Martin, you go along with them-make sure it looks pretty; that's your line of work."

Jay opened his mouth to say something, but never got a chance to learn what it was going to be.

Something touched the back of his neck, and he slept.

It was a very troubled sleep, full of unpredictable accelerations that triggered horror-dreams of falling from his terrestrial past, and unfamiliar voices shouting incomprehensible things in the near and far distance, and the nagging certainty that something he couldn't quite recall was terribly, terribly wrong.

You weremeant to come out of the drug confused. But his surroundings when he finally did certainly enhanced the effect.

He was in a corridor. Not a public one, a . . . the term took awhile to surface. A service tunnel, that was it. The lighting was even lousier here. Things were floating in his vicinity-important ones, he sensed. First he counted them: four. Then he cla.s.sified them: human beings. Next he laboriously identified them. Evelyn Martin. His third-grade gym teacher-no, that was . . . was . . . right, one of the security guards who was going to kill him. Sure, there was the other one. And the extra one . . . h.e.l.l, know him anywhere: that's my bro. Like a brother to me.

So now he had them broken down into two groups. Friends: one. Foes: three. That didn't seem like a favorable ratio. On the other hand, one of the guards seemed to be lacking a face; that evened things up a little. And Ev Martin's head hung at a funny angle . . .

A few more foggy seconds of contemplation and he had a second breakdown he liked much better.

Rand was breathing; the rest were not.

The example inspired him; he breathed deeply, stoked his brain with oxygen and felt the cobwebs begin to melt away.This is great, he told himself.How did I do this?

As Rand began to show signs of recovering consciousness too, a hatch opened nearby and Duncan Iowa appeared. "Good," he said. "You're awake. I ditched their comm gear on the a.s.sumption it's trackable, but we ought to move anyway. No telling which systems they have up and running." He movedto Rand, started to slap him awake . . . then thought better of it, and instead spun him, to centrifuge blood into his head. "Take this and keep lookout," he added.

Jay got his hands up in time to catch a laser considerably more powerful than the police-issue job he'd liberated from the front desk. He blinked at it for a moment-then snapped out of his fugue. He checked charge and safety, a.s.sessed the tactical situation, and a.s.signed himself a guard post. "You're something else, kid," he said wonderingly. Duncan ignored him, busy with Rand.

Rand spent less time in stupor than Jay had. Groundhogs and new s.p.a.cers usually shook off drug effects faster; their blood pressure was higher. He looked around at the drifting bodies, shook his head like a horse shooing flies, glanced at Jay and turned back to Duncan.

"I punched you in the mouth," he said wonderingly. "And you let me live."

"I had it coming," Duncan said tightly. "Look, we've got to move. I don't need to know who we're running from or why just now, but if you know anything that would suggest where to, I'd love to hear it."

"s.h.i.t," Jay said. "I wish I knew more about riot-control procedures . . ."

"What do you need?" Duncan asked.

"For a start, a large tank of sleepy gas with a hose on it."