The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [97]
That helped to refocus their attention. “Tell us what you found out first,” Lowenthal said, in what might have passed for a polite tone if he’d been a better actor.
I decided to keep my hand hidden, for the time being, on the grounds that the few cards I held might look a bit more impressive when I’d worked out how best to play them.
“I didn’t find out anything much,” I told him. “She says she wants to tell us everything but needs permission — she wouldn’t say from whom. She says she’s trying to protect us, but won’t say from whom. She says that she’s trying to prevent a war, but reckons I don’t have the imagination to understand who might be fighting it or why. The only solid fact I know is that her name’s Alice.”
“Alice?” Lowenthal queried, with an almost imperceptible sneer of disbelief, as he tried to get around me so that he could block my path to the doorway.
Surprisingly, Christine Caine stepped casually into his path and practically shoved him out of my way. “As in Wonderland,” she said. “Madoc needs to rest. You can all leave him alone until he feels better, okay?”
It was sheer amazement rather than politeness or caution which kept Solantha Handsel from felling Christine with a casual blow of her fist, but Lowenthal was much quicker on the diplomatic uptake. He turned on Niamh Horne as if she were the one making difficulties. “Christine’s right,” he said. “There’s no hurry. Madoc needs time to recover. We can save all the questions till later. I think we ought to eat, if we can figure out how to work this antique equipment. Do you know how to do that, Christine?”
“Figure it out for yourself, asshole,” was her reply to that ploy. She shepherded me into the cell and shut the door behind her. “Are you okay?” she asked, anxiously, as I climbed back into the lower bunk. “You did lose a lot of blood — and pills aren’t going to help.”
“I’ve bled before,” I told her. “Thanks for that.”
“We freezer vets need to stick together,” she told me. I hoped fervently that it was true. I understood why she was trying to forge an alliance. She was as fearful as the rest of us, although she didn’t want to make her terror too obvious, and she knew only too well that she was the remotest outsider in our little company.
She came closer, and leaned over so that her head was only a few centimeters from mine. “Are they listening in on us?” she asked.
“Of course they are,” I murmured. “No matter how ancient this place is, or how recently our captors moved in, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to wire it for sound. Unfortunately, the pirates are probably the only ones listening in. We can’t know for sure that they flushed out all our IT, or why, but they wanted to make as certain as they could be that none of us was carrying bugs capable of signaling our whereabouts to the outside world. Horne’s external implants may have all kinds of talents we don’t know about, but my guess is that our friendly neighborhood kidnappers are the only ones who can hear us.”
She nodded. “So who’s our friend and who’s our enemy?” she wanted to know. “Just give me your best guess,” she added, as an afterthought.
“I wish I knew,” I said.
Perhaps there was something in my tone that I hadn’t intended to put into it, or perhaps she wanted to do her level best to convince herself. At any rate, her eyes narrowed slightly and she said: “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not dangerous. Not to you.”
“We freezer vets need to stick together,” I reminded her. “If you do feel an overwhelming urge to kill someone…”
It wasn’t a sensible move to try to make a joke out of it. I knew that it wasn’t a joke, and so did she — but old reflexes can be hard to control. She couldn’t contrive a laugh, but she managed to keep on smiling. “Are we in any worse trouble now than we were before?” she wanted to know.
“That’s a good question,” I muttered. “Probably, but possibly not. If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, we probably have a few friends somewhere — but until we figure out who our enemies are, we won’t know where to look for them.”
“Lowenthal