Erick cancelled the constraint blocks and opened his eyes. “What the fuck’s going on?” he datavised to Desmond.
Desmond glanced around to see a pair of furious eyes staring at him out of the green medical nanonic mask covering Erick’s face. He managed a snatched, semi-embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Erick, we didn’t dare wake you up in case someone heard the commotion. We had to get you out of there.”
“Why?”
“The Dechal is docked here. But don’t worry, we don’t think Hasan Rawand knows about us. And we intend to keep it that way. André is working on his political contact to get us a departure authorization.”
“For once he might make a decent job of it,” Madeleine muttered as they steered Erick’s bulky bed into the lift. “After all, it’s his own neck on the block this time, not just ours.”
Erick tried to rise, but the medical packages were too restrictive, he could only just get his head off the pillows, and that simple motion was tiring beyond endurance. “No. Leave me. You go.”
Madeleine pushed him down gently as the lift started upwards. “Don’t be silly. They’ll kill you if they catch up with you.”
“We’ll see this through together,” Desmond said, his voice full of sympathy and reassurance. “We won’t desert you, Erick.”
Encased in the protective, nurturing packages, Erick couldn’t even groan in frustration. He opened a secure encrypted channel to the Confederation Navy Bureau. Lieutenant Li Chang responded immediately.
“You have to intercept us,” Erick datavised. “These imbeciles are going to take me off Culey if no one stops them.”
“Okay, don’t panic, I’m calling in the covert duty squad. We can reach the spaceport in time.”
“Do we have any assets in the flight control centre?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Activate one; make sure whatever departure authorization Duchamp gets is invalidated. I want the Villeneuve’s Revenge to stay locked tight in that bloody docking bay.”
“I’m on it. And don’t worry.”
Desmond and Madeleine had obviously devoted considerable attention to planning their route in order to avoid casual observation. They took Erick straight up through the rock honeycomb which was Culey’s habitation section, switching between a series of public utility lifts. When they were in the upper levels, where gravity had dropped to less than ten per cent standard, they left the bed behind and tugged him along a maze of simple passages bored straight through the rock. It was some kind of ancient maintenance or inspection grid, with few functional net processors. Lieutenant Li Chang had trouble tracking their progress.
Eighteen minutes after leaving the hospital they arrived at the base of the spaceport’s spindle. Several intrigued sets of eyes followed their course as they floated across the big axial chamber to a vacant transit capsule.
“We’re two minutes behind you,” Li Chang datavised. “Thank heavens they chose a devious route, it slowed you up.”
“What about the departure authorization?”
“God knows how Duchamp did it, but Commissioner Ri Drak has cleared the Villeneuve’s Revenge for departure. The Navy Bureau has lodged a formal protest with Culey’s governing council. It should earn us a delay if not outright cancellation; Ri Drak’s political opponents will use the complaint to make as much capital as they can.”
The transit capsule took them to the bay containing the Villeneuve’s Revenge. It was a tedious journey; like the rest of the structure the transit tubes were in need of refurbishment, if not outright replacement. The capsule juddered frequently as it ran through lengths of rail with no power, the light panels dimming, then brightening in sympathy. It paused at several junctions, as if the spaceport route management computer was unsure of the direction.
“Can you manoeuvre a bit now?” Madeleine asked Erick, hopeful that free fall would grant them some relief from straining at his mass. She was carrying two of the ancillary medical modules which were hooked up to his dermal armour of packages, feeding in a whole pharmacopoeia of nutrients to the new implants. The tubes were forever tangling around her limbs or snagging on awkward fixtures.
“Sorry. Tricky,” he datavised back. It might earn them thirty seconds.
Madeleine and Desmond swapped a martyred glance, and bundled Erick out of the transit capsule. The hexagonal cross-section corridors that encircled the docking bay were white-walled composite, scuffed to a rusty grey by the boots of countless generations of crews and maintenance staff. The neat rows of grab hoops running along the walls had snapped off long ago, leaving only stumps. It didn’t matter, the kind of people frequenting Culey spaceport were hardly novices. Madeleine and Desmond simply kept Erick in the middle of the corridor, imparting the odd gentle nudge to prevent him touching the walls as inertia slid him along.
Once the transit capsule door closed behind him, Erick lost his communications channel to Lieutenant Li Chang. He wished the packages didn’t prevent him from sighing. Did nothing in this rat’s arsehole of a settlement ever work? One of his medical support units emitted a cautionary bleep.
“Soon be over,” Madeleine soothed, misinterpreting the electronic tone.
Erick blinked rapidly, the sole method of expression left to him. They were risking themselves to save him, while he would be turning them over to the authorities as soon as they docked at a civilized port. Yet he’d killed to protect them, leaving them free to commit murder and piracy in turn. Applying for a CNIS post had seemed such a prestigious step forwards at the time. How stupid his vanity appeared with hindsight.
His eye focused on a two-centimetre burn mark scoring the composite wall. Instinct or a well-written extended sensory analysis program, it was the result which mattered. That burn mark was on the cover of a net conduit inspection panel, and it was fresh. When he switched to infrared it still glowed a faint pink. With the spectrum active, other burns became apparent, a small ruddy constellation sprayed around the corridor walls, every glimmer corresponding to an inspection panel.
“Madeleine, Desmond, stop,” he datavised. “Someone’s deliberately screwed the net here.”
Desmond halted his ponderous glide with a semi-automatic slap at the stump of a grab hoop. He reached out to brake Erick. “I can’t even establish a channel to the ship,” he complained.
“Do you think they got into the life-support capsules?” Madeleine asked. Her own enhanced retinas were scanning around the fateful inspection panels.
“They wouldn’t get past Duchamp, not while his paranoia’s roused. We’ll be lucky if he even opens the airlock for us.”
“They’re armed, though; they could have cut their way in. And they’re in front of us.”
Desmond peered down the slightly curving corridor, alarmed and uncertain. There was a four-way junction ten metres in front of him, one of its branches leading directly to the docking bay’s airlock. The only sounds he could hear were the rattly fans of the environmental maintenance system.
“Go back to the transit capsule,” Erick datavised. “That has a working net processor, we can open a channel to the ship from there, even if we have to route it through the external antenna.”
“Good idea.” Madeleine braced her feet on a grab hoop stump, and gave Erick’s shoulders a steady push, starting him off back down the corridor. Desmond was already slithering around them, lithe as a fish. When she looked back she could see shadows fluctuating within the junction. “Desmond!” She scrambled inside her jacket for the TIP pistol she was carrying. An elbow hit the corridor wall, setting her tumbling. She tried to damp her momentum with one hand clawing at the coarse composite, while still fumbling at the obstinate holster. Her feet caught Erick, sending him thudding against the wall. He bounced, trailing long confused spirals of tubing, ancillary modules flying free.