Alicia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and chewing her lip while she tried not to stew. It was becoming steadily more difficult.
In one sense, things weren't actually that bad. Tannis' diagnostics were reporting exactly what they ought to, now that Tisiphone knew what results they were supposed to get, and Alicia wasn't worried about revealing anything she chose to conceal. Tannis had tried direct neural queries, chemical therapy, even hypnotic regression, but Tisiphone was an old hand at controlling human thoughts and responses. She might not be able to do it to anyone else these days, but Alicia's brain and body were her own front yard, and she allowed no trespassers, so that side was secure enough.
Unfortunately, that didn't help against her boredom. Tisiphone might enjoy fooling the medics or roaming Soissons's planetary computer net, but Alicia was going mad. The thought woke a sour smile, but it had stopped being funny when she realized what was really happening to her grief and hatred.
They were still there. She couldn't feel them through Tisiphone's shields, but she sensed them, and she hadn't dealt with them. She couldn't deal with them, because she couldn't touch them, and that left an odd, dangerously unresolved vacuum at her core. Worse, she thought she knew what Tisiphone was doing with all that raw, oozing emotion.
The Fury had no interest in dissipating it, for she knew only one catharsis. At first Alicia had suspected she was absorbing it like some sort of strange sustenance, but a worse suspicion had occurred to her, and the Fury had refused to deny it.
She was storing it. Distilling it into the pure essence of hatred, reserving it against some future need, and Alicia was afraid. Drop commandos had few self-delusions—they couldn't afford them—and she knew about her own dark side. She'd demonstrated it, without a trace of regret, on Wadislaw Watts, and there had been times in the field when her killer self had threatened to break free, as well. It had never happened, for the rest of the personality her parents and upbringing had built had been even stronger, but it had been a near thing more than once, and a woman stayed clear-headed in combat or she died—probably taking other people with her when she went.
Thoughts of what the sudden release of all that pent-up rage might do to her judgment terrified her, but Tisiphone refused even to discuss it despite requests which had come all too close to pleading before pride drove Alicia to drop them. She was helpless in the face of the Fury's refusal . . . and Tisiphone had reminded her—not cruelly, but almost kindly—that she had agreed to pay "anything" for her vengeance. That was nothing less than the truth, and the fact that she'd thought she was mad at the time had no bearing. She'd given her word, and like Uncle Arthur, that was the end of it.
But now a fresh disturbing element had been added, for Tisiphone was clearly up to something. There was a pleased note to her mental voice which made very little sense, given their total lack of achievement. Alicia was astonished that the fiery, driven Fury hadn't insisted on making their break long ago. To be sure, she'd gleaned a tremendous amount of information—including everything Colonel McIlhenny and even Ben Belkassem knew about the pirates—but there had to be something else. . . .
<Indeed there is, Little One.> The comment was so sudden Alicia twitched in surprise, and Tisiphone chuckled silently. <In fact, the event for which I have waited has now occurred, and the time has come for us to depart.>
<Are you serious?!> Alicia jerked upright, then gasped as Tisiphone answered without words. Her augmentation came spontaneously on line, her boosted senses spun up to full acuity for the first time in more than two months, and she twitched again as Tisiphone activated her pharmacope. The first ripple of tension ran through her as the tick reservoir administered its carefully measured dose to her bloodstream, and the world began to slow.
* * *
She bit her lip, confused by the speed with which the Fury was moving, and a faint, familiar haze hovered before her eyes. It cleared quickly, and her ears rang with the high, sweet song of the tick.
<We will go now,> Tisiphone said calmly. <I have placed commands in their computers to reroute their sensors, deactivate the door security systems, and summon the floor nurse elsewhere, but I cannot control who we may meet along the way. Dealing with them will be your responsibility.>
Alicia rose with the tick's floating grace as the door oozed open with syrupy slowness.
She floated through it. The corridor beyond was empty, the nurses' station unmanned as Tisiphone had promised, but there was a permanent guard on the elevators. She'd met the night guard, and though the earnest young man had been very careful never to say so, she knew why he was there, for he, too, was a drop commando. But the elevators were around a bend in the corridor, and she flowed down the hall like a spirit, riding the tick's exaltation.
She stepped around the bend, and the guard looked up. She smiled, and he smiled back slowly, so slowly. But then his smile changed as he recognized the precise, gliding movement of the tick.
His hand started for his stunner, and Alicia wanted to laugh in pure exultation. He was too far away to reach before the stunner cleared its holster, but Old Speedy wasn't racing through his veins. Though he got the stunner up before she reached him, he didn't have time to reset its power.
The green beam struck her dead on—with absolutely no result. The neural shields built into drop commando augmentation could resist even nerve disrupter fire, to a point, and a stunner blast which would have downed an elephant or a direcat had no effect at all on her.
He really was young, she thought tolerantly as her hands started forward. Perhaps he'd been confused by the fact that he knew her augmentation—including the shields—had been disabled. On the other hand, he'd obviously recognized tick mode when he saw it, which indicated her augmentation had been reactivated. Except, of course, that he hadn't had time to think. If he had, he would have gone for her hand-to-hand from the start. He probably couldn't have stopped her that way, either, she reflected as her first lightning-fast blow drifted towards him, but he might have lasted long enough to sound the alarm.
They'd never know about that now. Her floating hand smacked precisely behind his ear, and she spun him like a limp, toffee-stuffed mannequin. Her fingers sought the pressure points, and he went down in a boneless heap before his own augmentation could spin up to stop it. Best of all, he'd recognized her; he knew she wasn't going to try to capture or interrogate him, which in turn, made his automatic protocols a dead letter.
Alicia tugged him into the elevator and closed the doors, wondering where they were supposed to go now.
<Down,> a clear voice said. <There is a vehicle in the parking garage. I reserved it for you this morning.>
<I hope you know what we're doing, Lady.>
<Oh, I do, indeed,> Tisiphone purred, and Alicia punched the button for the subbasement garage. The trip seemed to take forever to her tick-enhanced time sense, and she wondered what she would do if they were stopped along the way by another passenger.
They weren't—no doubt because it was well after local midnight—and the doors slid open at last. Alicia looked thoughtfully down at the unconscious guard and removed the stunner from his nerveless fingers. She reset it and gave him a careful shot that would keep him under for hours, then hit the emergency stop button, locking the car in place.
<All right, where's this vehicle?>
<Stall one-seven-four. To your right, Little One.>
Alicia nodded and jogged briskly down the lines of stalls. Most were empty, and the vehicles she saw were mainly civilian, with only an occasional military or governmental ground car or skimmer—until she reached the appointed slot and blinked at the lean, lethal-looking recon skimmer in it.
<Very impressive,> she thought, glancing at the fuselage markings of a rear admiral as she popped the hatch, <but where are we going?>
<Jefferson Field, Pad Alpha Six.>
<A shuttle pad? Just what are we up to here?>
<We are leaving Soissons, Little One.>
Again there was a mental chuckle—almost a giggle, if the grim and purposeful Fury could have produced such a thing—and Alicia sighed with resignation.
Tisiphone seemed to know what she was doing, though it would have been nice if she'd bothered with a mission brief. They were going to have to have a little discussion about this sort of thing, Alicia reflected as she brought the skimmer's counter-gravity to life, lifted it twenty centimeters from the garage floor, and sent it up the ramp at a sedate speed, but even through the exhilaration of the tick she felt a deeper, sharper stab of pleasure as the star-strewn sky of Soissons gleamed clear and clean above her. Out. Free. Something of Tisiphone's eagerness touched her, like the joy of the hawk in the moment it tucked its wings to stoop upon its prey, and she took the skimmer into the night.
* * *
The Fleet skimmer's com panel whispered with routine messages as Alicia slid through the darkness towards the brightly illuminated perimeter of Jefferson Field, and she felt herself relaxing within the cocoon of the tick. She knew relaxation was dangerous, particularly since she still had no idea what Tisiphone intended, but she was on a sort of autopilot.
It was disturbingly unlike her. A strange fatalism had replaced her normal, sharp thoughts at such times, and she disliked it, yet it was oddly seductive. She tried to resist it, but her steel had turned to something that bent and flexed, and a part of her wondered how Tisiphone had done it. For one thing was crystal clear: the Fury was in the pilot's seat. The long, boring weeks of inactivity and comfortable mental chats had blinded Alicia to what she truly was. Those chats hadn't been subterfuge, nor had the gently malicious teasing, but they were only one side of Tisiphone, and not the strongest one. There was an elemental ruthlessness to the Fury when the moment for action came. She hadn't discussed her plan with Alicia because it hadn't occurred to her that there was any reason she should, and now her unwavering determination had made Alicia a prisoner within her own body.
Yet it was even more complex than that, Alicia reflected as her obedient hands guided the skimmer along the Jefferson Field approach route and their admiral's markings and transponder took them through the unmanned, outer checkpoints. Even while a tiny part of her fluttered like a panicked bird against Tisiphone's control, another part was perfectly content. It was the part which always heaved a sigh of relief once the briefings were over and the mission began. They were moving, they were committed, and the predator within her purred with the elation of the hunt. Her brain hummed and wavered with conflicting impetuses, yet her thoughts and actions came crisp and clear and cold, and she'd never felt anything quite like it in her life.
<Now what?> she asked as they approached the inner security gate.
<Drive through,> Tisiphone responded, and her own will stirred sleepily.
<That's not a very good idea. You may have snabbled up an admiral's skimmer, but I don't have the papers to match it.>
<It does not matter.>
<You're crazy! This gate's got real, live sentries, Lady!>
<But they will see nothing. Have you forgotten the nurse?>
<Damn it, they don't rely on just their eyes, and this thing is armed! Their sensors are going to go crazy!>
<Let them. We need only a few moments of confusion.>
<No way.> Alicia began to slow the skimmer. <We're out of the hospital. Let's pull back and rethink this before we get in so deep we—>
Her thought shattered in white-hot anguish, and she grunted as her eyes went blind. The pain and blindness vanished as quickly as they had come, and her brain writhed in useless revolt as her body obeyed the Fury's will. She felt the skimmer surge forward under maximum power, blazing through the security gate, and the alert sentires saw nothing at all. She caught a glimpse of them in the aft display, spinning towards their com links in total confusion as lights flashed and sirens whooped, but her hands were on the controls, whipping the skimmer higher and wheeling for the shuttle pads.
<Let me go!> she screamed, and wild laughter flooded her mind.
<Not now, Little One! The game has begun—there is no going back!>
<I'm not your puppet, damn you!>
<Ah, but you are.> The Fury's voice paused, then resumed a bit more tentatively, as if puzzled by her resistance. <This is what you asked of me, Little One. I swore to give it to you, and I shall.>
<This is my life, my body!> The sense of content had vanished, and her rousing will battered at Tisiphone's control. She gritted her teeth, smashing with fists of outrage, and fresh pain surged. She panted with the ferocity of her struggle, gasping in triumph as her hands began to slow the skimmer, then cried out as Tisiphone struck back furiously.
<You must not! Not now! This is to lose all at the last moment!>
"Then let me go, goddamn you!" Alicia gritted through clenched teeth. Her anguish-tight voice was strange and twisted in her own ears, but somehow she knew she must speak aloud. "I want myself back!"
<Oh, very well!> Tisiphone snapped, and the skimmer swerved wildly as the Fury abruptly released all control. Alicia moaned in relief—then yelped as a plasma bolt whipped past her canopy. She hurled the skimmer into a screaming turn, still in the grip of the tick, and a second miss sent a parked air lorry's hydrogen reservoir fireballing into the darkness.
<I trust you are satisfied now?> Tisiphone remarked, but Alicia was too busy to respond as she writhed in a mad evasion pattern. More plasma slashed past like lethal ball lightning, and she punched up the skimmer's light screen. It wouldn't do much against a direct hit, but it should fend off a near-miss.
Fires glared in the night as she turned the vehicle almost on its side, trading lift for evasion. Warehouses belched flames under the fury of her pursuers' fire, and she swerved down a narrow opening between freight carriers and loading docks. The com unit yammered with demands for her surrender and warnings that deadly force would be employed if she refused. Not that she'd needed that, she thought as the flames vanished astern and her scanners reported atmospheric sting ships closing from the north. Closer to the ground, security skimmers were howling in pursuit. They'd overshot when she whipped to the side, giving her a small lead to play with, but they were just as fast as she, and they knew the base far better.
At least she had decent instrumentation, and she cursed as she picked up still more security vehicles. They were outside her, and she swore again as she checked her map display. She still didn't have the least idea what Tisiphone was up to, but the pursuit had cut her off from retreat. They were closing in, driving her deeper into the base in what looked entirely too much like a preplanned security maneuver. There had to be something nasty waiting for her, yet the only place left to go was directly towards the shuttle pads, exactly as Tisiphone had originally planned.
She wrenched the skimmer through another turn, half her mind watching the sting ships' traces. They'd responded quickly, but it would still take them a couple of minutes to get here, and the pads loomed ahead of her.
"All right, Lady," she gritted, punching commands into the auto-pilot. "If you can still make us invisible, this is the moment."
<And what good will that do?> Tisiphone sniffed. <As you yourself have pointed out, they will still have us on their sensors, and—>
<Just shut up and do it!> Alicia snapped, and hit the eject button.
The pilot's canopy blew off, and the ejection seat's tiny countergravity unit flung her high. She gasped with the shock of it, but her hands were on the armrests, riding the control keys.
The maneuvering jets flared, and she swallowed a hysterical cackle. This, by God, was seat-of-the-pants flying! The jets lacked endurance—they didn't need it, with the counter-grav to do the real work—but they were designed to dart away from a plunging wreck or make a last ditch effort to evade hostile fire. That gave them quite a kick, and the seat was made of low-signature materials, almost invisible to the best sensors. She sent herself flying towards Pad Alpha Six and pirouetted in midair to watch their stolen skimmer execute her final command.
The vehicle rocketed upward in a desperation escape attempt as the security skimmers closed in at last, and bursts of fire followed it. Not just plasma cannon, which were relatively short-ranged in atmosphere, either. The security people were playing for keeps, and the red and white flashes of high explosive converged on the wildly careering hull, but Tisiphone seemed to have worked her magic, for no one was shooting at her. An explosion flowered amidships, and the skimmer shuddered, shedding bits and pieces but still climbing vertically, almost out of sight from the ground. More hits splintered armorplast and alloy, and then a sting ship screamed in.
Alicia winced as twin bores of eye-searing light blazed. Those weren't plasma bolts; the skimmer was high enough for them to use heavy weapons on it, and it vaporized in a sun-bright boil as the HVW struck at seventeen thousand KPS.
<Crap, those people aren't kidding!>
<No, they are not,> Tisiphone replied tartly, then relented. <Still, this was very clever. No doubt they will think you died in the skimmer.>
<As long as none of them noticed us punching out.> Alicia hit her keys again, killing the jets and powering down the counter-grav. They landed in the shadow of the freight pad, and she shucked the safety harness. <And now that we're here, just what the hell do we think we're doing?>
<Escaping. I have arranged an appropriate vehicle for the purpose.>
<A cargo shuttle?> Alicia was sprinting for the pad stairs even while she protested. <That's not going to get us very far.>
<It will get us far enough—and have I said anything about a cargo shuttle?> Tisiphone replied as Alicia cleared the stairs and rocked to a halt.
"Oh, shit," she whispered, and closed her eyes as if that could make it go away. When she opened them again, the fully-armed Bengal-class assault shuttle was still sitting there.
<It is amazing what one can arrange through computers.>
<You are out of your mind! That thing costs sixty million credits! They'll never let it go—and I've never handled one in my life!>
<You are already pre-flighted and cleared to lift in two minutes, and I checked carefully, Little One. You are fully qualified on Leopard-class shuttles, and while the Bengals are larger, the major changes are in payload, sensors, and increased armament, not flight controls.>
<But I haven't flown anything in over five years!>
<I am sure it will all come back to you. But for now, I suggest we hurry. Our launch window is short.>
"Oh, God," Alicia moaned, but she was already dashing for the ramp. She had no choice. Tisiphone was out of her mythological mind, but whether Uncle Arthur believed in her or not, the Fury had done too many fresh impossible things. Alicia would never get out of observation after this!
The shuttle interior was cool, humming with the familiar tingle of waiting flight system. It was like coming home, despite the madness, and she charged through the troop section towards the flight deck. A freight canister—a very large freight canister, with very familiar bar codes—was webbed to the deck, and she almost stopped when she saw the codes on it.
<There is no time. You may examine it later.>
<B-but that can't really be—>
<Certainly it can. You may need your weapons, so I ordered it prepped and loaded aboard.>
Alicia moaned again as she flopped into the pilot's couch and reached for the headset. This couldn't be happening. Trained mental reflexes brought up the synth-link, reached out to the flight computers, but underneath them was a bubble of wild laughter.
So far, in a single night, she'd escaped custody, assaulted a fellow Cadreman, stolen a skimmer worth at least twenty thousand credits, crashed through Fleet security onto a restricted military reservation, refused to stop when so ordered, and caused the destruction of said stolen skimmer and damage to sundry base facilities as the direct result of lawfully empowered personnel's efforts to apprehend her—and none of that even compared to what she was about to do. Talk about grand theft! This shuttle alone represented a good sixty million of the Emperor's credits, and if that canister really contained a suit of Cadre battle armor, the price tag was about to double. They'd build a whole new jail just so they could put her under it!
<Only if they catch you,> Tisiphone pointed out with maddening cheer.
Alicia felt her teeth grate but swallowed her savage reply, for the computers had accepted her and placed themselves at her disposal. It was a disturbing sensation, almost frightening, as their inhuman vastness clicked into place about her. She hadn't felt it in a long time, and for just an instant she quailed, but then everything snapped into focus and she was home. The shuttle and she were one, its sensors her eyes and ears and nerves, its power plant her heart, its countergravity and thrusters her arms and legs. Joy filled her like cold fire, burning away the confusion and dismay, and she smiled.
<Yes, Little One,> Tisiphone whispered. <Now is your moment. We are training flight Foxtrot-Two-Niner.>
Alicia punched up Flight Control and announced her flight designation in a voice so calm it astonished her. There was a moment of silence, and her adrenaline spiked. Her intrusion had scrambled operations. Security had imposed a lock-down on all flights until they got to the bottom of it. Someone in FlyCon had her head together and was using her own initiative to hold all takeoffs until the situation was sorted out, or—
"Cleared to go, Foxtrot-Two-Niner," FlyCon said, and she swallowed another tremulous laugh as her atmospheric turbines screamed.
* * *
The shuttle sliced up through Soissons's atmosphere, and there was no pursuit. None at all, and that was truly amazing. Of course, there was really no pressing need to pursue a purely intrasystemic craft. Where could it go, after all? For that matter, who in her right mind would steal an assault shuttle of all damned things?
"So now what?" Alicia asked aloud.
<Set course to rendezvous with beacon Sierra-Lima-Seven-Four-Four.>
Alicia started to ask what they were rendezvousing with but bit her tongue and checked her computers for the proper coordinates. No doubt she would know soon enough. Too soon, judging by what had already happened.
The shuttle swept higher, air-breathing turbines shutting down and thrusters firing to align its nose on one of the Fleet shipyards, and she frowned. If they wanted out of the system, they had to get aboard a starship, and that should have meant guile and stealth. Could Tisiphone be so confident—so crazy, she amended dourly—as to think they could hijack a ship?
If so, she was finally up against something even she couldn't manage. At absolute minimum, they needed a dispatch boat, and that meant a crew of at least eight. Not even a drop commando could force eight highly trained specialists to perform their tasks when all they had to do to maroon her was refuse to obey. And no way were Fleet officers going to help a crazed Cadrewoman steal their ship out from under them!
They continued unchallenged on their flight path, and Alicia's brows furrowed as she realized they weren't headed directly for the shipyard after all. Their destination lay in a parking orbit of its own, and she brought her sensors to bear on it. It didn't look like anyth—
"No!" she gasped. "Tisiphone, we can't steal that!"
<We certainly can, and we must.>
"No!" Alicia repeated, and unaccustomed panic sharpened her voice. "I can't fly that thing—I'm no starship pilot! And . . . and . . ."
<It is too late for such thoughts, Little One,> the Fury said sternly. <I have studied this matter with great care and obtained all the information we will require. Nor will it be necessary for you to pilot the ship. It will, so to speak,> the Fury actually chuckled in her brain, <pilot itself, will it not?>
Alicia tried to reply, but all that came out was a faint, inarticulate whimper as the shuttle continued toward the waiting alpha-synth ship.