“Then I trust you can provide an alibi for the time in question.”
“Of course. I—”
He realized that Sedra Hemnask was standing close by in the crowd. No doubt she had heard everything. He met her eyes, prompting her to come forward. Surely this changed things.
But Hemnask returned his gaze with apology . . . then turned and walked away without a word.
Corthoc estate, Rigel IV
The guard slumped, unconscious, and Valeria Williams released her grip from around his neck. She’d employed a Vulcan Suus Mahna sleeper hold that left no mark; with luck, when the Zami guard recovered, he’d simply assume he’d fallen asleep on watch and gotten a crick in his neck. But she had to act quickly to be in and out of the hangar before that happened.
Getting into Corthoc territory had been relatively easy with help from the rival Kanyor clan, a well-bribed operative of whose had brought her across the border in the garb of a servant. Her light skin and auburn hair let her blend in well with the Zami, and those who lived in the Kanyor lands often had rounder pinnae than the species norm, so Doctor Liao hadn’t even needed to give her prosthetic ears (which was almost a shame; she was somewhat curious to see how she’d look with points added). After that, she’d been transferred into the care of the local resistance, though indirectly. The Kanyors were happy to abet anyone who wished to undermine the Corthocs, but they were still feudal lords who oppressed their own commoners just as harshly (according to the resistance, though the Kanyors insisted they treated their serfs better, like beloved pets), so any cooperation between the two groups was strained at best.
The downside of the stealth approach was having to leave her phase pistol and communicator behind. The Corthocs, like most of the First Families, hoarded higher technology to themselves and constantly scanned the peasant districts for contraband. The districts that Williams had passed through on her way here had been an odd mix of technological levels. The most advanced contrivances the peasants were allowed were the 2D viewscreens that broadcast an endless barrage of propaganda and pabulum to lull them into complacency. The screens seemed out of place in dwellings that, in some districts, were virtually medieval. The farming and construction vehicles were cumbersome, rusty things on rubber wheels, powered by hazardous and unreliable internal-combustion engines. Many farmers and merchants made do with carts pulled by four-horned, orange-furred Rigelian yaks, which were arguably better suited for the rough, cobbled roads than the combustion-powered trucks were, at least when they didn’t find one of those trucks broken down in their path.
Yet Family-owned facilities such as this hangar, or the fortresses where the feudal lords dwelt, were full of the modern technologies and comforts that the Families denied their serfs. Which included security sensors to supplement the live guards, so Williams had to be careful from this point. Luckily her scanner could operate at low enough power to avoid tripping the contraband sensors, unlike the power pack in a phase pistol or the subspace transceiver in a communicator. Plus, she had intelligence from the local resistance about the best places to subvert the security system. Williams was thus able to locate the sensor fields, tap into their control circuits, and do to them essentially what she’d just done to the guard.
The resistance, sadly, was still weakened from a series of recent purges, biding its time and rebuilding its strength. So it hadn’t been able to spare anyone beyond a single junior recruit who still hadn’t overcome his fear of the Corthocs enough to risk entry into one of their facilities. Williams supposed that someone whose only exposure to high technology was the lash of the oppressor’s whip could be forgiven a certain technophobia. So she had the youth stand watch outside while she infiltrated the facility.
An emergency ladder, a couple of picked locks, and a maintenance-catwalk crawl later, the lieutenant stood above the target vessel, a Grennex RK6 light freighter. After ensuring its own systems, security included, were powered down, Williams lowered herself onto its bridge tower by rope, then made her way down and back to the vessel’s dorsal spine. She found a maintenance port and hooked her scanner to its computer interface. Two minutes later, she’d verified that Grev and Sam had never been aboard this ship—which frustrated but hardly surprised her. It had always been unlikely that the Corthocs would have brought the abductees to their own estate. But the RTC’s intelligence reports suggested that the Corthocs were not known for having much intelligence of their own, due to extreme decadence and a degree of good old-fashioned inbreeding, so it had been worth checking the possibility.