Suddenly the Chelon convulsed and clutched her throat—and Kirk realized there was a very large knife stuck in it. He thought he saw a glimpse of motion by Mishima, but by the time he turned his head, he only saw the crewman—falling to the floor with a knife in his upper chest, his phase pistol only half-drawn. Kirk and Grev recoiled in horror. Kirk sensed more movement around him—a faint shuffling step, a puff of moving air, a shadow in the corner of his eye—but he could see nothing but the archive stacks.
“I advise you not to run,” Vons told them in a bored tone. “Let me show you why.”
The Jelna clicked his tongue several times, and the scene changed. Kirk blinked in confusion, seeing the chamber anew as if he had just woken from a dream. He and Grev were surrounded by several large Zami armed with knives and guns—and by something else. By Vons’s feet were two large, six-legged lizards, maybe a meter eighty from snout to tail tip and a third of that in height. Their swaybacked pink bodies, frilled necks, prominent overbites, and upturned mouths gave them a comical, Seussian appearance—in striking contrast to the horror of the scene surrounding them, where not only Mishima and the Chelon but Tastra and the four vault guards lay bleeding out on the floor. One of the lizards blinked its yellow eyes at him lazily, as unconcerned by the carnage as Vons himself.
“What . . . what’s going on here?” Grev demanded, trying and failing to put steel in his soft tenor voice.
“Oh, don’t worry, you won’t be joining them,” the assistant director replied as he moved toward the vault. “We require your services—or will once we obtain what we’re here for.” He placed his hand on the vault’s biometric interface, then let it scan his irises and repeated a code phrase to verify his voiceprint. Then one of the Zami assassins placed Tastra’s hand on a scanner at the guard station. For a moment, nothing happened, but then the vault door unlocked and began to swing open. “That’s a relief,” Vons said. “Just enough of a pulse left. For a moment there, Damreg, I thought you’d miscalculated how long he’d take to die.”
“We know our business,” the fair-haired, pointed-eared assassin said, letting Tastra fall hard to the floor. Kirk turned away before he hit.
Vons led two of the assassins into the vault while the others kept watch over Kirk and Grev. Finally the criminals emerged carrying what looked to Kirk like some kind of computer servers, boxy hexagonal units just small enough to be tucked under an arm and adorned on one edge with indicator lights, most of which were dormant. “What are those?” Kirk asked.
“Be patient, Mister Kirk, you’ll find out. We could use your help breaking the encryption on their contents. Well, mainly Mister Grev’s help, but your own skills could prove useful in evaluating what he decrypts.”
“And what makes you think I’d help you?” Grev insisted, crossing his arms.
“Well, how about this?” Vons gestured to a darker-haired assassin with rounder ears than the rest, and suddenly Kirk was in the Zami’s grip with a knife edge tickling his throat. “I said he could prove useful, but I was being polite. Mainly he’s a hostage for your cooperation. Do we have an understanding?”
Kirk rallied his courage. Whatever was in those servers was important enough to warrant extensive security—and important enough to kill for. It couldn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. “Don’t help them on my account, Grev!”
“Noble words, Mister Kirk, but think it through. If he refuses to cooperate, we’ll have to kill you both anyway. That would make the decryption somewhat more challenging for us, but really, what choice would we have?”
But Grev was already looking at Kirk with concern and apology. “I’m sorry, Sam. I can’t let them hurt you.” He sighed. “I’ll go with you, but you have to let him go.”
Vons looked annoyed. “You really don’t grasp the situation, do you? I don’t ‘have’ to do anything. I’m the one with all the power here. Which means you have to do what I say you have to do.” He shook his head. “Honestly, why am I trying to convince you? You’re both coming anyway, because that’s the plan.”
He turned to Damreg. “Is the relay in place?”
The assassin checked an interface device in his hand. “Online and ready.”
Vons nodded. “Place the charges.”
The other assassins removed small packs of what looked like plastic explosive from their belt pouches, positioning them strategically. Kirk reflexively started to protest, horrified by the imminent loss to history, but the knife against his throat reminded him of a more pressing set of priorities. He cursed himself for his helplessness; no doubt Val would’ve known several dozen moves for disarming the assassin and getting the drop on the others.