Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [68]
She sighed, rubbing her face; she’d been working, with only catnaps to refresh her, ever since she’d received the first Mayday: prowling about the immense cargo bay, checking every single ship in the facility time and time again, trying to locate exactly which of the hundred or so ships hid the victims. But her locator, despite being state-of-the-art, displayed so many “echoes,” even when placed against a hull, that she had been unable to pinpoint the target ship. Fortunately, her disguise had saved her from retaliation by some of the ships personnel: aliens in particular were apt to take offense if you were seen hanging about their vessels for no apparent purpose.
At the outset of this incident, she’d seen the women in the company of Macci Sendal, so she hadn’t been as close on Yana’s heels as she normally would. For that she blamed herself. Getting slack in her middle years: she’d have to quit this kind of work if she was going to be less than top efficient all the time.
So the pair waited. Commander an Hon courteously supplied her with a meal and then a shower in his private facilities while fresh clothing was procured for her. She was adrenaline-poor at this point, having pushed herself so hard for days, and she almost nodded off when the first reports came in. The slowest of the five vessels had been apprehended: it was, as it was supposed to be, a drone grain carrier, and all its components checked out as they should. The second was carrying only two holds of cargo, to the captain’s disgust, and he was in no fit mood to be stopped on such a spurious charge. The third was also innocent, and the fourth, but of the fifth, all they found were large fragments of the hull.
“Wasn’t blown apart, wasn’t hit by any space flot, wasn’t burned or melted or anything, Commander. Just like the hull had been a weevy-fruit, split open down the axis.”
An Hon and Charas exchanged despairing looks.
“Damn that Louchard!” Charas felt as near to tears as she had the day her mother died, when she’d been eight years old.
“Any residuals to track?” an Hon asked.
“We’re searching, sir, but they could have just used the drift to take ’em the way they wanted to go and, begging your pardon, it could take weeks to do a search pattern and we’d still not be sure we got the right trail.”
“Return to base, Captain, and thank you.” Grimly Commander an Hon looked at Charas. “You still have a life signal from Madame Algemeine, don’t you?”
Charas touched the point on her mastoid bone and inclined her head positively. Madame Algemeine was the only client for whom she would have permitted such an invasion of her personal privacy: she owed her, for her life and her sanity.
“We can check with Sally Point-Jefferson, too,” she said.
The tall lean commander waved aside that suggestion with a twitch of his lips. “If she got the blast, so would you!” When a death occurred, those carrying the implant tuned to a person experienced an unforgettable blast.
“Now what? The kidnappers didn’t leave a final warning of any kind, did they?”
“Nothing past the last one M’sser Klausewitch passed on to us.”
“Klausewitch,” Charas murmured, and locked eyes with the commander. “Odd man to be chosen as messenger. And Madame herself cancelled Millard and Sally as bodyguards?”
“Hmmm.” An Hon shrugged at the whimsies of the rich. He would have had an operative with Yana in the head, in her tub, and under her bed, but who would have thought a kidnapping of someone of Madame Algemeine’s status would occur in this day and age after the Amber Unicorn fiasco! True, there were occasional incidents involving lesser lights like merchants, captains, executives, and enough freaks eking out a marginal living on any big station like this to account for GBA and “accidents,” as well as extortionist intimidation, but nothing on the scale of this felony. “Madame Algemeine had some critical meeting or other that they had to prepare for, and doubtless she felt that she was well enough known—with Klausewitch along—to