The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [109]
Solantha Handsel went down again, but she was hardly injured at all except for her dignity. I kicked her a second time as she sprawled, but without any kind of footwear to protect my toes I had to be careful not to inflict more damage on myself than I could on her.
I think Niamh Horne might have come forward then to settle the matter if it had been her call, but she and Lowenthal had already exchanged glances. She had shaken her head to indicate that she hadn’t been able to get out of the corridor into which the door opened, and hadn’t found anything useful there.
Lowenthal must have calculated that there might be more to be gained by letting me run with the ball than by trying to hold on to it by force. When Solantha Handsel rose to her feet again he was quick to say: “That’s enough. Let them go.” He paused for a significant couple of seconds before saying: “Do you need medical attention too?”
Solantha Handsel was too angry to speak, but she shook her head in a suitably derisory fashion.
“Right?” was all that Lowenthal said to Alice.
It was enough. She nodded her head.
Niamh Horne stood aside and let us pass through the doorway unimpeded. The door closed behind us, leaving us in the darkness.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Alice said, as she guided me back to the cupboard.
“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, nursing my pain. “It wasn’t even sensible. But there was no way in the world I was going to resist the temptation. I’m the barbarian from the dawn of time, remember.”
“I’m older than you,” she reminded me, as the lights came on again.
This time she had a hypodermic syringe ready, and a vial from which to draw liquid.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Nanobots,” she told me.
“I thought we weren’t allowed privileges of that sort.”
“They’re making an exception.”
“They?” I queried. “Not we?”
“We’re making an exception” she said, a trifle wearily. It didn’t sound like a wholehearted correction. “We didn’t want you here, but now you are here you’re our responsibility. I know it’s difficult, given that you don’t know what’s going on, but it would help us all if you were to be patient. Please don’t do anything else to make things worse than they already are.” I gathered from this speech that the negotiations in which she and her companion were involved were proving almost as frustrating and unhelpful as Lowenthal’s conference.
“How am I supposed to know what might make matters worse?” I asked her, without having to feign annoyance. “You can’t blame Handsel and Horne for trying to find out more about their situation. Maybe it would have been a stupid move to try to beat the truth out of you, but if you wanted us to stay quiet you should have let us sleep.”
“I agree,” she said. “But we have all kinds of conflicting demands coming in. We have to keep a lid on things until we’ve set a meeting place. It’s all spinning out of control, and we have to do everything possible to keep the game going. You have to calm things down back there, if you can.” She jabbed the hypodermic in as she pronounced the final phrase, as if to emphasize it. Maybe she thought the note of challenge would get results, but I needed a better incentive than that. I wasn’t prepared to believe that I was better off not knowing what kind of “conflicting demands” she and her mysterious companion were trying to satisfy.
The nanobots were good. The injection itself hurt like hell, but the condition of my nose wouldn’t have allowed me simply to snort the stuff, and the needle got the bots to the site in no time at all. Once there, the pain dwindled away.
“It’ll take an hour or so for the swelling to go down,” she told me. “A couple of hours more to knit the tissues. Don’t get into another fight, though — they’re limited.”
“How much longer will it be before we get to where we’re going?” I asked.
She looked me up and down. I figured that she had