Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [196]
At the ring of footsteps Ethan turned his head the other way, to find Millisor and Rau walking toward them.
Chapter Thirteen
Ethan and Quinn were shoved together within the potential radius of fire from the bell-muzzle of the nerve disruptor, held in the tense hand of the man in the Security uniform. Cee was segregated from them under Rau's stunner. It needed nothing more than that to give Ethan a silent appreciation of their relative status.
Quinn looked even worse close up, with a split swollen lip, and white and shaking from either pain or the aftereffects of low stun. She seemed shorter without her boots. Cee stumbled like a corpse looking only for a place to lie down; congealed, cold, the blue light of his eyes extinguished.
"What happened?" Ethan whispered to Quinn. "How did they ever find you when Security couldn't?"
"I forgot the damned beeper," she hissed back through clenched teeth. "Should've shoved it down the first trash vent we passed. I knew it was compromised! But Cee was arguing with me, and I was in a hurry, and—oh, hell, what's the use . . ." She bit her lip in frustration, winced, and licked it tenderly. Her eyes returned again and again to their opponents, adding up the unfavorable odds, rejecting the sum and trying again with no better luck.
Millisor walked around them, smooth and smug. "So glad you could make it, Dr. Urquhart. We could have arranged accidents for you and the commander separately, but having you both together allows us a rather exquisite opportunity for—efficiency."
"Vengeance?" quavered Ethan. "But we never tried to kill you."
"Oh, no," Millisor protested. "Vengeance has nothing to do with it. You both simply know too much to live."
Rau grinned nastily. "Tell them the rest, Colonel," he urged.
"Ah, yes. With your sense of humor, Commander, you will particularly like this one. Observe, if you will, all those unused flex tubes on the outer wall. Sealed at both ends, they make a very private little compartment. Just the spot for a couple with rather odd tastes in adventure to arrange a tryst. How unfortunate that, in the sound sleep following their exertions—"
Rau waved his stunner cheerfully, by way of indicating just how that sound sleep was to be achieved.
"—the flex tube is vented into space in preparation for locking in the auto-conveyer from a freighter hold. Said freighter being due in this docking bay immediately after my courier departs. Shall we leave you two entirely nude, I wonder?" he mused, "or merely naked from the waist down, suggesting fumbling passionate hurry?"
"God the Father," Ethan moaned in horror, "the Population Council will think I was depraved enough to make love to a woman in a flex tube!"
"Gods forbid," Quinn, looking equally appalled, echoed under her breath, "that Admiral Naismith would think I was stupid enough to make love to anything in a flex tube!"
Terrence Cee's eyes roved over the docking bay, as if seeking death as desperately as Quinn's eyes sought escape. He made a little jerky motion; Rau's stunner instantly drew a bead on him.
"Dream on, mutant," Rau growled. "We aren't giving you a chance. One wrong move and you'll be carried aboard stunned." His lips drew back unpleasantly. "You don't want to miss the show your friends are going to put on for us, do you?"
Cee's hands clenched and unclenched, despair and rage struggling for ascendancy in him, both equally impotent. "I'm sorry, Doctor," he whispered. "They held a nerve disruptor to the commander's head, and I knew they weren't bluffing. I thought maybe you wouldn't come, just for a call from me. I should have let them shoot her then. Sorry. Sorry . . ."
Quinn's lips turned sardonically upward, breaking to bleed again. "You don't have to apologize quite that fervently, Cee. . . . Your resisting wouldn't have saved him anyway."
"You don't have to apologize at all," said Ethan firmly. "I'd have done the same myself, in all probability."
The man with the nerve disruptor waved them apart, driving Ethan and Quinn to the outer wall, and