Star Risk - 04 The Dog From Hell (4 page)

"So the first question to worry about is this: What do our charming innocents have control of or access to that can justify the total destruction of a multibillion-credit ship?"

"That's one good worry," Riss agreed. "A second, incidental, one might be what the girls are now up to."

"Uh-oh," von Baldur said.

M'chel gestured for Grok to explain.

"I was making a routine check of the rooms our clients are occupying, just to ensure there was no mischief at hand," the alien said, "and I found a nice, compact little laboratory in Lis's closet."

"Making what?" Jasmine asked.

"That took a bit of analysis," Grok said. "It turned out to be a substance from Earth's dark ages. Something called lysergic acid diethylmide, a derivative from the fungoid known as ergot.

"It basically instills in the taker a psychotic state, resembling what humans knew as schizophrenia.

"It was very popular at one time, taken recreationally before listening to rather primitively structured music."

"People got messed up on it for fun?" Jasmine asked.

"They did," Grok said. "Which is why Lis was making it�for sale to the older students. It was becoming the newest fad when I intervened."

"Oh, brother," Goodnight said. "So next we'll be accused of turning a bunch of children into drug addicts."

"Possibly," Grok agreed. "But if so, that eventuality has already occurred, and is not worth concerning ourselves with.

"I confiscated the chemical gear and destroyed the portion Lis had already formulated."

Grok was silent for a moment.

"Except, I shall confess, for a single dose that I calculated to be correct for my body mass."

"You took this swill?" M'chel asked, incredulous.

"I did," Grok said. "And found it a quite pleasant experience. It provided great insights into various metaphysical matters that I have been pondering. Besides Earth's grappa, it was one of the most enjoyable substances I've ever ingested."

"Wonderful," Riss said sarcastically. "Not only do we have a murderous alien as a partner, but one that's now an addict as well."

"This has nothing to do with my theory that all this may be aimed at us," von Baldur said, a trifle impatiently.

"Not enough hard data to operate from," Jasmine said. "At present, no more than an interesting conjecture at best."

"I did not think it worthy of more than mention," Friedrich said. "So I suppose we just sit here until Cunard sends a replacement for the Victory."

"Hopefully," Riss said, "we'll be allowed to do just that."

They weren't.

It was quite a professional kidnap attempt.

They came in just before dawn, evidently planning to take off with their prey and bury themselves in morning commuter traffic on the nearby throughway.

There were four lifters. Two were medium capacity, two were heavy-duty. One heavy-duty antigravity lifter orbited the school, the other three made straight-in approaches and slammed in on the school's flat roof.

Fourteen men and women armed with gas guns and blasters, wearing dark body armor, dashed out. Eight of them carried what could only be called kidnap kits�restraints, gags, blindfolds, sedatives.

The roof appeared free of any security precautions.

There'd been none when Star Risk arrived.

All there'd been time enough for was for Grok to jerry-rig a proximity braking unit from one of their own rental lifters to use as a warning radar, which yammered out a warning instead of hitting the braking unit.

The raiders blew the door to the roof open, and then were stopped. The stairwell had been thoroughly blocked with old desks and furniture.

They milled about indecisively for a moment, giving Star Risk time to yank on clothes and combat harnesses.

Jasmine thought, later, that it was as if their plan had gone only so far, and now they were improvising.

The attackers grabbed furniture and threw it out of the stairwell, clearing the way.

By that time, Grok had smashed a window in his room two floors below, and was eeling up the side of the building, using the ever so ornate and sturdy red ivy as a climbing rope, Riss and Goodnight after him.

The stairwell came clear, and the first pair of raiders started down it.

Jasmine King and Friedrich von Baldur were waiting, and blasters thundered, the bolts ricocheting up the passageway into soft targets.

The raiders flinched back, straight into fire from the three who'd reached the roof.

They might have been well prepared up to a point, but they weren't ready for a combat assault.

Rounds from their blasters were going high, wide, and handsome.

Riss and Goodnight pulled themselves onto the rooftop, and were in prone firing positions. Grok held on to the ivy with one enormous paw and started shooting promiscuously into the raiders' midst.

Someone shouted, "Extract!" and three or four of the raiders ran for the largest, rearmost lifter.

The engines had been left running on the lifters, and the pilots were gunning their engines, eager to pull out.

The rear lifter, not full, came off the ground just as two more raiders grabbed for the still-open ports.

The pilot of that lifter pushed at them, trying to get them to let go while he tried to clear the lifter in front of him.

Distracted, he didn't use enough power, and the bigger lifter tore into the top of the small one in front.

The pilot lost control, and the heavy lifter cartwheeled and spun.

Grok carefully put half a magazine of bolts into the control compartment of that lifter, and it twisted down, crashing and exploding in the school grounds.

The lifter it had smashed into also tried to get away, and Riss sprayed a burst into the engine compartment.

Its engine died, and it crashed back down on the rooftop, rolling onto its side.

Riss killed the pilot as he tried to jump out, then ran to the lead lifter and chattered the rest of her magazine around its interior.

She crouched against it for cover as the few remaining raiders ran from Goodnight's deadly blaster fire toward her.

One of them might have been lifting his arms to surrender, but was a little too slow and died with his fellows.

The rooftop was smoke hung, and Riss heard, over the ringing in her ears, the screams of the students in the floors below.

Goodnight put a bolt into one raider who was still moving and trotted to Riss.

The fourth watchdog lifter recognized the predicament he was in, broke out of his orbit, and put on full power away from the school.

Riss braced, took careful aim, and realized her blaster was dry.

She changed magazines and retook her stance as the sole surviving lifter went low, just above the trees, and was gone.

"You all right?" Goodnight said.

She nodded.

Chas looked around and saw that Grok was uninjured, as Jasmine and Friedrich burst onto the rooftop.

He considered the bodies and the girls now cautiously peering up from windows, the wisping smoke, the blaster holes everywhere.

"Well, enough of this shit," he snarled.

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SIX � ^ � Chas Goodnight went ship hunting as soon as the schoolgirls had been relocated to a luxurious but defensible hotel, and a dozen armed security types had been laid on.

With him went Friedrich von Baldur. This was one of Freddie's favorite side benefits of being a mercenary�being able to shop for exotic toys with someone else's money.

He still recalled most fondly a brief interval when he'd had his own battleship, until one of Star Risk's accountants took a look at the wallowing warship's operating costs and rather sternly told him that he could either dump the barge or rapidly find a client with a good-sized fleet willing to let him play admiral.

Von Baldur couldn't, and so the battleship vanished into the mists of history.

At the third shipyard they got lucky, finding a recently built research vessel, intended, von Baldur thought, for small expeditions that'd cover its real use as a yacht that was quite operable by a crew of three.

It wouldn't be economical to operate, but it was sleek and very, very fast, its engine spaces fully automated. And besides, von Baldur told Goodnight reasonably, the fuel costs would be the clients' problem. "And no doubt dear, sweet Mrs. Rosewater-Jones can field the ticket, especially since she owns a gambling world."

"True," Goodnight said. "All she has to do is kick the vig up a point, and she'll never ever notice the pain."

One of the biggest virtues of the ship was having crew quarters very separate from those of the "research fellows."

"We can stuff the kids in the suites," Goodnight said, "and not have to worry about what they're plotting."

Friedrich pouted a bit about not being able to occupy the owner's suite, but subsided when Chas glowered at him.

Better yet, from Star Risk's perspective, the partnership that owned the good ship Monkey Business was more than willing to turn it loose on a short-term lease rather than sell it outright, particularly when Goodnight had no objections to an all-inclusive insurance policy.

"I'm betting they can't dump a fuel hog like the Business with a gun at somebody's head, and are hoping like hell that we're going to do something nice and high-risk with it," Goodnight guessed. "Which, of course, we are, since I'm assuming the bastards would like to have another try at us."

Von Baldur wasn't paying any attention. He was trying to figure how he would convince the others that the captain's quarters should rightfully be his.

M'chel Riss, on the other hand, had been brooding.

After a while, her dark thoughts were so productive she roped in Jasmine King, who, in turn, involved Grok in the project.

When Chas and Freddie came back to the hotel, full of technobabble about the performance of the Monkey Business, they were summoned to Riss's suite.

"And what," Goodnight asked jovially, full of testosterone and adrenaline from his test flight, "would Her Supreme Marineness like?"

Then he noticed the pile of odd artifacts on the bed and, in a chair, looking as if she were about to either panic or burst into tears, sat Alice Sims.

He also noticed she was restrained with cable ties around her wrists to the arms of that chair.

"Uh-oh," he said, brilliantly.

"Yes," Riss said. "It is time for us all to have a word with our liaison officer here."

She indicated the objects on the bed.

"I started thinking about Lis suddenly coming up with her chemistry set, then I thought of all the other interesting things our lovely ladies might have squirreled away that might prove to be a discomfort.

"So I decided to shake them.

"Then another thought came�or, rather, a series of thoughts. Such as, how the hell did these baddies find out that we'd taken refuge in that school?

"I guessed that they knew who and how many they were after. So why eight neat little snatch packages? Were they planning on leaving Sims? That was the most logical explanation.

"But then I gave in to my paranoia, and wondered if Sims was expected to leave with them�of her own free will. If Sims was in with them, that would answer my first question.

"At this point, I brought in Jasmine, to tell me I was just thinking weirdly.

"Instead, she came in with a question of her own. If our kidnap team was so well prepared, why did they suddenly go to square zero when they actually hit the grounds?

"Had they been expecting more data?

"Too many questions� so Jasmine and I decided to shake not only the girls, but tender young Alice, as well.

"This is what we got."

She indicated the collection on the bed.

"A couple of nasty little push daggers, some paralyzing gas, rigged dice, three fixed game capsules, two marked decks, those very pretty knuckle-dusters and so on�all just about what we could have expected from the juvenile set.

"Then these two items."

She picked up one.

"A high-powered multiband radio receiver.

"Property, Miss Alice Sims."

Sims squirmed.

"I got it used," she said. "I like to listen to the radio late, and didn't know what was in it."

"What it is," M'chel said, "is also a medium-powered transmitter. Of course she didn't know that.

"The second item here is Sims's private com. A bit strange that she would take along equipment that wouldn't necessarily broadcast on whatever public frequencies are used on Porcellis.

"We asked Grok to disassemble it, and found that not only would it work on Earth, but also on an unassigned frequency.

"An outgoing signal on that frequency would also set off a small homing device in Sims's com."

"And, by the way," Jasmine put in, "I checked with the local library, and found out what com frequencies are used on Porcellis. None that the chips of this com are set for."

"At that point, we thought it was time to bring in our principal. So far, we've gotten nothing but a few sobs and bleats of innocence."

"So you decided it was time to call in the wrecking crew," Goodnight said. He went to Sims's chair and stroked her hair gently. She flinched.

"Now, Alice," Goodnight said. "I don't suppose you've studied torture at all. It's pretty much a cheap trick, and is only worth considering if you're under the pressure of the moment and need easy information that you know the other party's got.

"Or else if you've got weeks and months and want to know everything about the person who you're slowly skinning.

"But desperate people do desperate things.

"I'd like you to think about how desperate we are�and remember that none of us particularly liked getting shot at the night before last, so we may be feeling a trifle barbaric around the edges."

She looked at him, eyes wide in fear.

Goodnight smiled, sweetly, innocently, and his eyes were dead pools.

"I didn't know� I didn't mean�" she blurted, and the story came out.

There'd been this man back at the school who'd met her in a bar one night, and it was very lonely with all of the "friddly farts" at St. Searles, and these "slithery little bitches," and he was very good-looking, and she didn't have any money, and all he said he wanted was to know what was going on, because he had some friends who were interested in investing in Porcellis, and they'd pay well, and�