Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [123]
There was always the risk, he explained to Clarity, that the Elder had been lying. “Couldn't take the chance that there might have been five detonators,” he told her, “or more. Don't worry. If there were, Pip would have found them.”
Gathering up the four detonators, he turned and headed for the hallway. Behind him, Sylzenzuzex was busily trussing the hands and feet of the recovering Order members with a spool of wire-thin makesafe that was standard issue equipment for a Church Security operative.
His rented skimmer was parked where he had left it. Ten minutes later he was forty kilometers away and hovering a centimeter above the center of a small, shallow lake. Slipping out of his clothes, he picked up the detonators one last time, took a deep breath, and plunged into the cool water. Reaching the bottom, he proceeded to shove them as deep into the mud as he could. Lastly, he moved a large flat rock over the top of them before returning to the surface to gulp air.
Moments later he was back at the Order's villa. No smoke rose from the middle of the building and insofar as he could tell, the central atrium had not collapsed. His relief was not complete, however, until he was once more in the central chamber.
Emerging from the individual paroxysms of pleasure induced by Flinx's emotive projecting, the now bound and secured members of the Order were suffering from varying degrees of emotional hangover. The Elder in particular looked especially distraught. None of them were in any condition to confront him verbally, far less physically. Her training had taught Sylzenzuzex how to secure detainees. None of the Order members could stand, much less mount an assault.
“What do you want to do with them, Flinx?” One antenna waved in his direction while the other indicated the prisoners. “What did you do to put them in this condition, anyway—drug them?”
“Something like that.” Years ago, when they had met on Ulru-Ujurr, his Talent had still been in its infancy. He had only been able to infrequently read the emotions of others—not to project his own onto them.
He realized with a start that dealing with the Order posed a tricky problem of its own. Their organization might be secretive, but that did not make it illegal. Attempted murder, of course, was another matter. But declaring the attempt on his life would require registering a formal complaint with the Nurian authorities, giving a relevant deposition, appearing before an adjudication automaton, and answering the kinds of questions he preferred not to answer. On the other hand, if he and his friends simply departed and left them bound as they were, eventually they would free themselves and come after him again. Perhaps less precisely next time: say, by locating him in a public place in downtown Sphene and then bombing it. That risk he could deal with, but not the prospect of endangering innocents.
It was Sylzenzuzex who proposed a solution. One that was temporary, to be sure, but temporary was all that was required. The members of the Order needed to be neutralized only until he and his friends were safely away from New Riviera.
“In my capacity as a Church Security officer I am allowed a certain amount of operational leeway.” A truhand indicated the bound and now increasingly active throng of believers. “If I file a report stating that these confrontational humans are members of a potentially dangerous organization, they can be taken into official custody until the truth of the claim is adjudicated one way or the other. It is not necessary for me to mention that they have attempted murder and hired a Qwarm to do so. It should be enough to keep them in custody for a couple of days. Will that be sufficient for your purposes?”
He would have hugged her except that he was afraid of breaking a delicate truarm. He settled instead for swiping his hand across the tips of both antennae.
“Go ahead and file the necessary report. I'll see