“And I’m going over the bloody wall, spacer,” she added to Witmer in a snarl. “Hit at a run and flip over, just like in training. There’s nothing on top, Pohaska says. It’s just me and this—” She patted her bush knife.

  “And sir, all right, you come. But you got to carry a real gun.”

  “I’ll take one for you,” I said. “For myself, I’ll use the one my father gave me when I turned eleven and I could kill birds with in my sleep. But I’ll carry solids and heavy shot.”

  Joss laughed. “You’re okay,” she said. “And maybe you can haul a couple grenades for me besides.”

  * * *

  We’d followed the Langsam road for almost ten miles, flying twenty feet in the air. I could have gotten a precise figure from my handheld but it didn’t matter and it was more important that I concentrate on what I was going to do when we landed. There was no road traffic in the middle of the night.

  When Kent pulled off into the woods, he slacked speed and began weaving through the trees. He was using light enhancement with false color added to make up for the lack of depth perception. I’d still have felt safer if he’d slowed down a little more, but I kept my mouth shut.

  I was in the middle of the cab between Kent with Joss on the door. The three of us were silent, though occasionally the spacers in the back spoke loudly enough for me to catch the sound—though not the meaning—through the communicating window. This irritated me though there was nothing wrong with it. Nobody could hear them over the fan intake, and the treetops and breeze scattered even that.

  I was nervous and becoming irritated with others who dealt with their own nervousness in a different fashion.

  I kept my mouth shut. I’ve found that’s usually a good choice, even when I’m right.

  “We’re going in pretty quick,” Kent said out of the side of his mouth. He was concentrating on his driving.

  “Roger,” Joss replied.

  A moment later I said, “Thank you.” I’d seem a fool trying to copy military jargon.

  The aircar lurched and literally splashed down, raising a great bulb of spray. It wouldn’t be visible in the darkness but it startled the bloody hell out of me.

  Joss opened the door and leaped out, landing ankle deep in the boggy soil. At least the car wasn’t sinking, which was my first thought. This was a clearing because it was a low spot. Standing water killed the roots of saplings before they got to any size.

  I followed Joss out and splashed clumsily to solid ground before I paused to organize my gear which was suddenly a lot bulkier than it had seemed back on the Far Traveller while we were planning the operation.

  I was wearing my shooting vest with reloads. Grenades and a small grapnel on a monocrystalline line were in the knapsack which I now managed to shrug onto my back; I’d thought the grapnel and line were for going over the wall, but Joss said that we’d use it and the aircar to tear the new cover off the window if we couldn’t get inside the house door for some reason. I could think of many reasons, but Joss seemed confident that we wouldn’t have to take the brute force approach.

  Following the directional beacon on my handheld, I stumped clumsily toward the gate. Joss had glided away through the trees, but we were headed in slightly different directions anyway. I’d slung her submachine gun over my left arm and was carrying my shotgun at the balance.

  I’d thought I could carry the heavy pry bar by hooking it over my belt. I could do that, but it banged my left ankle at every step.

  I hadn’t thought things through carefully enough. Fortunately determination will make up for many mistakes. I slogged on.

  The thick vegetation and the beacon absorbed my attention so completely that I almost ran into the gate before I realized I was close. I stopped and the right side of the double leaves swung open.

  “Good timing,” Joss said. She carried her bush knife in the other hand. The blade was stained.

  She noticed my eyes on the knife as I slipped through the gate. “There were a couple guards back here,” she said. “Two fewer to worry about in the house.”

  She wiped the blade on the trousers of a body lying on the ground, the torso hidden by the berry bushes planted on this end of the garden. The bushes were why we’d come in this way rather than from the west side where a swale provided an even better approach to the grounds.

  I dropped the bag of grenades, shrugged the submachine gun off my left shoulder, and rearranged the pry bar slightly now that I’d gotten free of the rest of my load. I couldn’t carry it in my left hand because I’d need both for the shotgun. If I needed the shotgun.

  Joss sheathed her knife and dropped a couple of spherical grenades into the side pockets of the mesh tunic she was wearing. Then she picked up the submachine gun—she didn’t sling it—and muttered, “Ready?”

  “Yes,” I said with a nod. We slipped forward among the plantings. I kept ten feet behind Joss, but there was no danger of me overrunning her. She moved with as little commotion as windblown fog.

  Some of the paths were bordered by shoulder-high bushes. With time and better light I could probably have identified most of them. I was pretty sure of the highbush cranberries along the main aisle we followed from the gate. We stayed close to the bushes so that they broke up our outlines, and the stiff breeze made the branches tremble and hid the fact that we were moving.

  The house had a tower—really a short third floor—on the end. According to the imagery there was a similar turret on the west also, but that shouldn’t have anything to do with us. If anybody in the tower had been alert, the automatic weapon could have raked us on the way from the gate, but everybody was asleep.

  There was a pedestrian door in the wall. A four-inch sheet of structural plastic had been bolted to the outside of the house wall, covering the window that must be there, but the door hadn’t been affected.

  Joss waved me to the side and gestured me down. I obediently hunched on the front corner. She leaned her submachine gun against the wall and drew her bush knife. There was a small window. Leaning close to the door she tapped on it and whispered, “Juan! Juan!”

  The window shutter clacked open. The door was too thick for anyone to see anything but her back and hair if they looked through. A moment later the door itself unlatched and a voice snarled, “What the hell are you playing at?”

  Joss jerked the door the rest of the way open and went in with the speed of a closing trap. I expected to hear a scream but instead there was a gurgling sound and a thump.

  Joss vanished inside. The east tower and the guards sleeping on the second floor were her job. I entered the building and stumbled over the guard on the floor of the corridor. He was making wheezing noises and had both hands pressed to his side. The big knife had gone through a kidney, and coils of intestine were leaking out past his fingers.

  I expected the door to the ground floor room to be locked, but the knob turned when I tried it. “Rick!” I said. “Time to go now!”

  A woman screamed inside the room. I threw down the pry bar I’d gotten ready for the door and found a light switch. A very pretty girl in a frilly nightdress was sitting up in bed. She screamed again when the light went on.

  Bloody hell!

  I heard a grenade go off upstairs. I grabbed the girl’s wrist in my left hand and dragged her into the hallway. She continued to scream. Joss came back down the stairs.

  “Wrong room!” I shouted. “We’ll take her because she must be somebody!”

  Joss lobbed a grenade down the ground-floor hallway left handed, then clocked the screaming girl on the head with the butt of her big knife. The girl went limp and stopped screaming.

  “You carry her, then!” Joss said. “And come bloody on! That’s Willy Pete!”

  Joss whirled though the outside doorway, snatching up the submachine gun left handed. I followed her, carrying both the girl and the shotgun across my chest. I heard the white phosphorous grenade go off with a whump! and prayed that I was clear of where the bits of burning phosphorous flew.

  I got to the garden wall just as Joss shoved a leaf open. The house was aroused now. I turned, wondering if the gun in the west turret could bear on us. Smoke and flames wrapped the house so completely they hid the entire structure.

  I staggered through the gate after Joss, who shut it behind us as a visual barrier. I hadn’t planned for getting back to the aircar. I suspected Joss could find it and I would stagger along behind her carrying the prisoner. She wasn’t very heavy, but I sure wasn’t looking forward to that.

  “Watch it!” Joss shouted, putting out her arm to stop me from taking the next step forward into the forest. I was so wrung out by what had gone on that I almost fell down.

  The aircar swooped over the trees and twitched sideways as Kent saw us. He dropped down beside the wall in a strip that the residents had cleared with defoliant to prevent tree roots from running into the garden. The car’s left side brushed the garden wall while the right edges of the fans chopped brush into wood chips.

  Spacers jumped out of the back gate. Two of them went to help Joss; the other two more usefully grabbed me and the girl and hustled us forward to the cab. I wanted to tell them to put the girl in the specimen box in back but I couldn’t get the words out audibly and they probably wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about anyway. They shoved the girl into the seat and boosted me in after her, then scampered around to the back. I supposed Joss would get in with them, but I didn’t know anyone for whom there was less reason to worry about how she was getting along.

  I held the girl and held her against me to keep her out of Kent’s way. The car lifted as it ran parallel to the wall. I could hear the left side panel rubbing.

  My left arm was around the girl while my right still held the loaded shotgun. I’d need more room before I could open the breech and remove the slug cartridge.

  Also I would need to get better control of my nerves and my breathing. Being back in the aircar and by now out of sight of the house was helping with both those things, but I had a ways to go.

  * * *

  I gave Kent some orders to pass on by radio to his buddy in the transport section. Then I got to work on the injured girl.

  There was a first-aid kit in the cab as well as a canteen of water. I used light amplification so I didn’t need to call further attention to us by lighting the cab. This had the further advantage of eliminating color so I didn’t have to see how much blood I was mopping off the face of quite a pretty girl. It was a nasty pressure cut on her forehead where the skin had been smashed against the bone.

  The antiseptic creme may have stung or maybe it was just cool—the water in the canteen was at the temperature of the muggy air. Anyway, something brought the girl around when I applied it.

  When I felt her squirm under my fingers I said, “Ma’am, who are you?”

  “I’m Ophelia Pilkey,” the girl said, “and my father will have you flayed for this!”

  “Let me get a bandage on that,” I said. “Just hold still for a moment.”

  I set the bandage over the wound—trying not to press onto the cut itself—and stripped the backing off the adhesive fringe at the four corners. I realized I was sticking at least part of the fringe to her fluffy hair.

  “Who are you!” the girl said when I lifted my hand. “And why have you taken me?”

  “I’m Lord Harry Harper,” I said. “Taking you was an accident. Your father has kidnapped a friend of mine and I was trying to get him back. We got the wrong room, is all. I’m sorry about that, so we’ll have to get Rick back another way.”

  I’d had time to think about it and I’d come up with a plan. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a way to go forward. The best thing I could find to say about it was that if things went wrong I was likely to die, which would mean it stopped being my problem.

  “My father isn’t a kidnapper!” Ophelia said.

  “Well, the actual job was done by a fellow named Arno,” I said. “I don’t guess he’d have done that without your father telling him to, do you?”

  I tilted the shotgun barrel out of the cab, which gave me enough room to open the breech and extract the load. I dropped it into one of my breast pockets.

  “What are you going to do with me?” the girl asked in a much quieter voice.

  “I plan to give you back to your father as soon as possible,” I said truthfully. “I really regret that my friend wasn’t under guard in that room like we thought.”

  “You’ll really let me go?” Ophelia said.

  “On my honor as a Harper,” I said. She probably didn’t understand how serious an oath that was, but I hoped I sounded reassuring anyway. “Just as soon as your father returns Lieutenant Grenville.”

  “I see Bertie,” Kent said. “I’m setting us down.”

  I said to the girl, “I’m going to cover your head and put you in a box to move you. You know who I am and you know what I look like. This is entirely my own business and I’ll take all the responsibility for it. I’ve put pressure on some people who don’t know what I’m doing and I won’t drop them in the stew, so I’ll be the only one you can identify. That’s all.”

  Kent brought us in smoothly on a stretch of road half a mile from the harbor. The trike was parked at the edge of the trees with the cargo box in the back open. Tech 3 Bertie came toward us, holding a tarp sewn into a crude bag—really just a blindfold.

  “Get out and let me put this over you,” I said. “I’m going to take you someplace and stash you, someplace more comfortable than a ship’s bilges, I mean.”

  She got out of the car after me with her head bowed and her hands pressed tightly together. I handed my shotgun to Kent and said, “Tell Mahaffy to wipe this down and put it away till I come back.”

  I turned to Ophelia, holding the bag open.

  She said, so softly that I could scarcely make out the words, “Please don’t kill me.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” I said as I swept the bag over her head; it covered her down to her ankles. “I’ll swear that.”

  What I added only in my own mind was, And I hope to heaven that your father’s reasonable so I can give you back to him.

  * * *

  The tricycle was remarkably simple to use but I kept twisting the throttle on the right handgrip too much or letting it drop to an idle. Fortunately the little diesel engine was geared so low that my problems weren’t very evident from the outside. Uncomfortable though the pillion seat was, I really wished Rick were here to drive.

  The thought made me laugh, which must’ve startled Ophelia in the cargo compartment if she could hear me. She’d been completely agreeable to anything I requested, allowing me and the two spacers to lift her into the cargo compartment without a struggle. Either she trusted me or she was completely terrified.

  I was sorry Joss had hit her so hard, but something had to be done about her screaming. I wasn’t going to second-guess Joss, and even after leisure to consider it, I couldn’t think of a better way to have done it.

  Because Blenkins House was on the harbor road there was more traffic than in most of Keelung but at least I couldn’t miss it. Nobody was expecting me, but when the attendants heard the trike ringing up the road toward them they opened the gate to peer out. One of them must’ve recognized me, because they flung the leaves fully open.

  I pulled in and called, “They’re not expecting me. Is it all right?”

  The other guard was already on the intercom. He waved me up to the house with a cheerful nod.

  I stopped at the bottom of the ramp to the porch this time. I didn’t want a servant in the house to hear the girl if she started to make a fuss. Although she’d shown no sign of that sort of behavior thus far.

  I strode up to the door, ready to knock, but before I got there Master Blenkins snatched it open. “Lord Harper!” he called. “You are very welcome here!”

  “Sir,” I said, stepping past him to keep the business as private at I could. “I have a very serious problem, and if you get involved as I hope, it will put you in a great deal of danger.”

  The plump man may have stood a little straighter, but his voice was perfectly even as he said, “Go on, your lordship.”

  The three sturdy attendants in the room weren’t the same individuals that I’d seen on my first visit, though I thought maybe they had been on the gate that time. Blenkins must have a considerable staff of heavies.

  “A man named Pilkey, Lord Pilkey, has kidnapped my friend Lieutenant Grenville to put pressure on the government,” I said. Getting it out straight was the quickest way to put the information before Blenkins. “I attempted to free Rick and accidentally kidnapped Pilkey’s daughter instead. I hope to exchange the girl for Rick, but I need a place to hide her in the interim. Do you have an out-of-town property where I can do that safely?”

  “You’ve taken little Ophelia?” Blenkins said. “Oh, I hope she’s all right?”

  “I have her, yes,” I said, feeling my heart turn to ice. “She was knocked unconscious during capture but I think she’s basically all right.”

  “Well, I certainly hope so,” Blenkins said. “She’s a delightful little thing. How a man like Pilkey could have such a daughter is beyond me.”

  He cleared his throat and continued, frowning. “I have properties variously on the planet, but why would you want to place Ophelia in one of them?”

  I swallowed. “Well, sir,” I said. “I thought it would be safer for you. In case Lord Pilkey should guess where his daughter is and attack to free her.”

  Blenkins sniffed dismissively. “I’m not afraid of Pilkey,” he said, “and I have my support staff here in the house where I am. It seems to me that if Pilkey had concentrated his forces you might not have her now. In any case if you’ll permit me, I’ll entertain Ophelia here in the house and undertake to return her to you when you request I do so.”

  I started to say, “That makes you party to a kidnapping!” which was true but not something I should be emphasizing to my host. Besides, I didn’t know what the laws on Mindoro were. For people at the social level of Blenkins and Pilkey, probably pretty much everything was all right if they could enforce their will.