Starliner(56)

"I've got fourteen hours," Ran said deliberately.

She touched a control. The passenger door swung open. "Hop in," she said, "and I'll show you the moon-fish spawning in a lagoon."

Then she said, "And there's an air mattress in the back."

* * *

Tug motors hammered as they helped a tramp freighter down into the New Port. The blue glare was reflected from the office building opposite and through the glazed front of the Port Complex Towers.

Miss Oanh turned her face toward the empty lobby and watched her shadow lengthen across the tile floor. Disks behind the clear tube of the drop shaft paused, indicating that someone had gotten on at a higher level, then began to fall smoothly again. When she called up to his room, Franz had said he would be only a moment.

The starship dropped below the rooflines of the outer buildings in the complex. The cutting light vanished and the noise dulled to a rumble. Oanh looked out the front window again. If she stared at the drop shaft, Franz wouldn't be the one to appear in it . . . .

The hotel was fully automated. The only living things besides Oanh in the lobby were the local life forms swimming in an aquarium. Fish on Ain al-Mahdi tended to metallic colors and vertical rather than horizontal compression, but Oanh's only interest in the creatures was as possible food—

And food was the farthest thing from her mind, now.

Most First Class passengers took ground accommodations during the Empress's layovers. Minister Lin did not. He expected Oanh to remain in the suite with him and his staff. They spent the time digesting the information sent to meet them by courier torpedo: data from Nevasa, Tellichery, and very possibly from agents on Grantholm itself. His daughter was simply to wait, safe and silent until the Empress of Earth was star-borne again.

Oanh didn't have credit in her own name . . . but Franz had booked a room here at the Towers. While they were aboard the starliner, there was a constraint that affected both of them though they had never mentioned it.

The safety door of the drop shaft rotated open. Oanh turned, her smile as bright as her dress of gold-shot natural silk, and faced the four big men who stepped off the platform.

She recognized them as passengers from Grantholm traveling aboard the Empress of Earth. They'd stared whenever they noticed her in the starliner's public rooms. Though the Grantholmers never said anything, they were the last people Oanh would have chosen to meet off the ship.

"Well, what have we here?" the leader of the group said in delight.

The men seemed to have been in a serious accident since Oanh last saw them. Two of them walked stiffly, one had a patch over his right eye, and half the leader's beard had been shaved away so that a ten-centimeter slash up his cheek could be covered with SpraySeal.

The Grantholmers looked even more like a gang of pirates than they had aboard the Empress of Earth. Oanh turned very quickly and walked out of the hotel. The filter field across the open doorway tugged momentarily at her hair and clothing.

The air outside was five degrees warmer than that in the lobby—closer to what Oanh personally preferred. Night-flying insects, whose ancestors were unintended immigrants aboard earlier starships, buzzed about her face. The filter kept them out of the hotel as it sorted air molecules by energy level, directing slow molecules inward while shunting the faster ones outside.

Bioliers on high curved standards flooded the street with their soft gleam, about forty percent of normal daylight illumination. They were balanced toward the green in a way that Oanh found unpleasant. A minibus and a large cargo hauler moaned past.

At the side of the Towers building was a barred rank of rental vehicles, two- to eight-place in size. Oanh stepped toward them before she remembered that her credit chip was valid only on Nevasa.

She turned. The four Grantholmers were already on top of her. They must have moved like cats, for all their bulk and injuries. "Looking for a ride, girlie?" one of them said. "We'll give you a ride."

"Rent one of those vans, Golschbauer," the leader ordered curtly. "The closed one."

Oanh tried to dart between two of the men. The leader caught her easily and gripped her from behind at the base of her skull. His thumb and forefinger clamped like ice-tongs. Oanh tried to scream, but she couldn't make any of her muscles obey. Her vision slipped through screens of orange and blue. The edges of things blurred.

"Now, Golschbauer!" the leader snarled from a great distance. "Don't do anything to offend the spy cameras."

Holding Oanh with an ease that mimicked gentleness, he smiled and nodded in the direction of the recording unit on the nearest biolier. An artificial intelligence patrolled the streets of the New Port, fed by cameras mounted to view all of the community's open spaces.