The holster was an old friend, a civilian rig his father had presented to him on his sixteenth birthday and he’d used ever since, but the pulser was pure military. He and his company’s armorer had tweaked and tuned the long, barrelled, three-millimeter Descorso to suit his personal preferences, though, including after-market Shapiro grips, a Simpson & Wong 216 holosight, and an action smoother than glass, and two spare magazines rode the leather under his right arm. The Descorso might not have been with him as long as the holster, but it had been with him long enough, and so had the Marine-issue vibro blade mag-locked horizontally across the back of his belt. They were tools he knew how to use only too well, but they were also all he had, and he had no idea what he might face in the next few minutes.

  He did have a little information, though. As soon as he’d located the lodge, he’d punched up a query on his uni-link, and he’d been lucky. It had been built as a commercial operation and it was the better part of three hundred T-years old, but it had been on the market for almost a full local year until someone purchased it barely three months ago, and as soon as he’d called up the deed and checked the record of the transaction, Alfred had realized the buyer had been a front. The sale had been registered by a shell corporation which no longer existed and had almost certainly been set up for the sole purpose of making the buy. That struck him as pretty solid evidence that Allison’s abductors were indeed professionals, not simply some psycho stalker, and he tried to tell himself that was a good sign.

  The actual transaction record had been interesting, if not terribly informative, but the original real-estate listing for the lodge hadn’t been cleared from the realtor’s site. It was still there, including a profile that showed a floor plan for the main lodge, specified its construction standards, and included a virtual tour of the house and the grounds, extolling a whole raft of recent renovations to the rather elderly buildings. The tour had obviously been intended for a sales tool, and it wasn’t remotely close to anything he would have called a complete intel packet, yet at least it meant he had a firm notion of the physical layout of what he was going to be dealing with.

  He’d also had the taxi AI bring up the sight-seeing features built into its windows and view screen and downloaded the magnified imagery of the terrain they’d overflown on their entire flight from Grendel to his uni-link, which meant he’d gotten at least some aerial shots of the lodge as they passed over it. It wasn’t much—certainly not the kind of information military-grade sensors could have pulled up—but it had confirmed there was a commercial-style air-van in the vehicle park for the main lodge. He didn’t have a very good angle on it, but it looked like the same sort of body that was used by almost all ambulances here on Beowulf, and if it wasn’t painted white, it was easy enough to use smart paint and reprogram it to a different color combination when you were done playing dress-up.

  He’d made himself spend several minutes looking at the plat from the sales site and from the Registrar of Deeds’ office, as well, and comparing both of them to his own overhead imagery and the topographical maps available over the net from the planetary geographical base. The maps seemed to be very good, as good as anything the Sphinx Forestry Service could have provided back home. That was why he’d come in from the west. Not only had the maps suggested the ridgeline would offer the taxi at least partial concealment on its approach, but his overheads showed that the perimeter of the cleared area around the lodge pinched in closest to the main building from this direction. Even better, a ravine—it looked like it was probably a seasonal watercourse—snaked through the trees and out across the clearing, passing within no more than seventy meters of the lodge, and the maps indicated it was well over a meter deep—more than two meters, in places—for its entire length.

  Now he looked out across that clearing, confirming his impression of the terrain. There was a small utility building between the ravine and the lodge. According to the real-estate site, it housed the lodge’s power receptor, tied into Beowulf’s orbital power stations. The entry on the site had had very little to say about the receptor, although it had waxed almost lyrical about the many ways in which the lodge’s internal systems had been renovated and updated. That suggested one possibility, at least, and it also came closest to affording him cover for that final seventy meters. It wasn’t much, but when the situation offered so little, it was up to a man to manufacture his own edge.

  Another of those frantic, agonized bursts sizzled through him with the knowledge of someone else’s pain and terror, and his nostrils flared. Enough! It was time to stop thinking and start doing.

  * * *

  The lights flickered.

  It was so quick, so fleeting, Tobin Manischewitz might not have noticed under other circumstances. Under these circumstances, his nerves were cranked up to maximum sensitivity and his head came up abruptly. He looked around the sunny office on the lodge’s ground floor, although he wasn’t certain what he was looking for. At least it was far enough away from Ardmore to muffle the sounds as he . . . amused himself, and it offered a nice view of the mountain range rising misty-blue with distance to the north. It did not, however, offer him any clue as to why the power had just hiccuped, and he started to get out of his chair, then paused as the door opened and Riley Brandão, his third in command, poked his head into the room.

  “What?” Manischewitz asked before the other man could speak.

  “The frigging power receptor’s down,” Brandão said sourly.

  “What happened?” Manischewitz sat up straighter, his eyes narrowing. The sudden failure of normally reliable bits and pieces of technology at critical moments in operations always sounded internal alarms.

  “Looks like it’s the tracking unit,” Brandão replied. “The diagnostic panel in the kitchen says we’ve stopped tracking the assigned satellite. anyway. Sawney’s gone out to check.” He grimaced. “I told you we should’ve had the damned thing replaced when we bought the place. Piece of crap’s older’n I am!”

  Manischewitz resisted the temptation to roll his eyes. Brandão took an irritating relish in “I-told-you-so’s” and he could be relied upon to find any potential fault with any plan, order, or piece of equipment well ahead of time, thus providing himself with endless opportunity to utter the fateful phrase. The fact that almost none of his gloomy prognostications ever came to pass didn’t faze him one bit. Instead, he seized upon the thankfully few occasions on which he’d been right, and Manischewitz was torn between hoping it really was something as minor as the tracking unit and hoping it was something else entirely just so Brandão couldn’t look at him triumphantly.

  Unfortunately, Brandão was almost certainly right, he reflected gloomily. The power receptor was an ancient unit, and the one moving part most likely to fail was the tracking unit that moved it from powersat to powersat as the satellites moved across the heavens.

  “How’s the auxiliary?” he asked, and Brandão shrugged.

  “Kicked in automatically,” he admitted. “It’s carrying the entire load with a thirty-percent reserve.”

  Manischewitz nodded. Brandão’s current post was in the kitchen, monitoring the camera system they’d installed to watch the grounds. He’d tried a motion-sensor net first, but that had been a diaster, given the amount (and size) of the local wildlife, so they’d fallen back on visual imagery instead. He wasn’t happy about the change, but as Ardmore had pointed out, their real security depended on not having anyone come looking in the first place. It wasn’t like they were going to have the personnel or the firepower to fight off a full-bore commando raid, after all.

  They’d put the primary monitoring post in the kitchen because it had been simpler to piggyback it onto the lodge’s existing environmental and services monitor, and that had been located in the kitchen by some previous owner. There were drawbacks to the arrangement, since the kitchen had only one set of windows and the greenhouses on that side of the lodge blocked anything someone might have seen out of them. Still, it worked, and it meant Brandão had been in the right place to check the other systems when the receptor went down.

  And at least the auxiliary power system, unlike the power receptor, was practically brand new. It was also rated to keep the entire lodge up and running for a minimum of one planetary week, so there was no immediate problem. Even assuming they couldn’t repair whatever was wrong with the receptor out of their own resources—which was unlikely, given the skill set of his team—they had several days before they had to worry about getting a repair crew out here.

  “Hopefully it’s just a reset,” he said now. “If it’s more than that, send Sawney in to tell me how bad it is when he gets back.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Brandão nodded and closed the door behind him, and Manischewitz turned back to his paperwork.

  * * *

  Sawney Sugimoto grumbled under his breath as he trudged across to the power receptor.

  He didn’t often agree with Brandão, but this time the asshole had been right; the damn thing should’ve been replaced before they bought the place. Not that it was surprising it hadn’t been. Power receptors were like roofs; people didn’t worry about them . . . until they broke or started leaking. And to be fair, receptors were pretty damned rugged, built to designs that were mostly at least two or three hundred years old and about as reliable as hardware got. He just hoped it was something fairly simple, because if the tracking unit was shot they’d have to pull the entire thing, and he had a pretty fair notion who was likely to get stuck with the grunt work on that one. Just like he had a pretty good idea how he’d just happened to be chosen to go check out the problem in the first place. Just like Brandão to pick him for the job! Could he have chosen Mönch, or Grazioli, or Zepeda? No, he’d had to pick Sugimoto, even if he’d been—no, because he’d been—the outside man farthest away from the receptor. Of course, Mönch was an old buddy of his, wasn’t he? Couldn’t have Mönch getting his arse up out of his comfortable chaise lounge and actually doing some work, could he? Especially not if he could send Sugimoto to do it instead. It was the kind of petty, pain-in-the-arse, I’ll-get-even trick Brandão specialized in, and one of these days. . . .

  He reached the receptor shed and leaned his pulse rifle against the wall beside the door as he punched in the lock combination. None of the previous owners had ever bothered to change the combination from the default 1-2-3-4 setting, and frankly, Sugimoto couldn’t imagine any reason why they would have. Or why they’d bothered to put a lock on the door in the first place, for that matter! Power receptors weren’t exactly cheap, but stolen units weren’t likely to bring in big credits, and they were big, heavy, and hard to move. Why anybody would—

  The door opened, and Sawney Sugimoto’s eyes widened in astonishment. There was a hole in the shed’s back wall—a big hole, one that went almost all the way from ceiling to floor. It was almost two meters wide, as if someone had carved the wall’s tough composite with a vibro bl—

  A hand reached out from one side and caught the front of his tunic. It yanked him into the shed, spun him around as if he’d weighed less than nothing, and an arm like a bar of iron went across his throat from behind. He reacted automatically, driving his right heel back, reaching for the forearm across his throat with his right hand while his left shot back behind him, fingers clawing for the eyes of whoever that forearm belonged to.

  A wrecking ball hammered his right calf as his assailant drove a booted foot into it, smashing down from above, just below the knee. Something popped in the joint with a white-hot explosion of pain, and what would have been a scream turned into a high-pitched, nasal whine as the forearm cut off his breath. His scrabbling left hand found nothing, and then he froze as a hand the size of a small shovel fastened on the back of his head. He recognized that hold, and his assailant’s obvious strength was terrifying. A couple of kilos of pressure, and his cervical vertebrae would snap like a dry stick.

  “That’s better,” a deep, quiet, terrifyingly calm voice said behind him. “Now lose the gunbelt with your left hand. And keep the right hand right where I can see it. I’d hate to have to break your neck before we have a chance to get to know each other.”

  * * *

  “Tracking unit’s back online,” Riley Brandão said, poking his head back into Manischewitz’ office. “Everything green on the diagnostic board.”

  Brandão sounded moderately disappointed, Manischewitz noted, but he nobly forbore to comment on it. Instead, he simply nodded.

  “Talk to Sawney at shift change. Find out what he had to do to get it back up and see if we really do need to go ahead and replace it. I don’t want anybody out here in the next couple of weeks if we can help it, though.”

  “Gotcha,” Brandão said again and withdrew once more.

  * * *

  Alfred Harrington listened to the hum of the tracking unit, moving the receptor back into alignment after he’d removed the old-fashioned screwdriver he’d used to jam it, while he regarded his unconscious captive through bleak, hard eyes. He still knew entirely too little about what the hell was going on, yet he knew a lot more than the he’d known ten minutes ago. He wished there was time to gather still more information, but there wasn’t. His prisoner hadn’t wanted to cooperate, and Alfred wasn’t about to put any childlike faith in the accuracy of what he’d said, but the other man had changed his mind about keeping his mouth shut when Alfred levered his left arm up behind his back until his shoulder joint separated. The Deneb Accords would have had a little something to say to Gunny Harrington about methods of interrogation if his prisoner had been a member of any recognized military organization. Not that that thought bothered him at the moment . . . and not that he was dealing with any recognized military organization.

  The pulse rifle his prisoner had been carrying was a powerful, high-capacity-magazine military weapon, however. That alone would have been enough to convince Alfred that the current owners of the lodge weren’t the innocent and law-abiding civilians they obviously wanted people to think they were. The pulser holstered at the man’s belt would have been another indication in the same direction. And although he hadn’t admitted it in so many words, even when Alfred twisted that dislocated shoulder, what he had admitted made it fairly clear who Alfred was dealing with.

  Manpower. His nostrils flared, and he felt the monster stir, testing its chains as he remembered Clematis. Manpower, again. What could Manpower want with Allison Chou? What could possibly make her important enough for Manpower to risk an operation here? The entire galaxy knew about the searing mutual hatred between Beowulf and Mesa, and Manpower’s operatives could have very few illusions about what would happen to them at the hands of the Beowulfan court system . . . assuming they got as far as the court system.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to get more complete information out of his prisoner. They were bound to miss the man sooner or later, and probably sooner. The Manpower thug knew that as well as Alfred did, and he’d obviously been trying to play for time. He’d admitted that they’d grabbed Allison as part of some sort of extortion plot, although he’d also claimed he didn’t know who the object of the extortion was. That was entirely possible—Alfred would have kept the operational details as closely held as he could if he’d been planning something like this—but it was also entirely possible the man had been lying. Trying to give up just enough information to satisfy Alfred’s questions while he stalled until someone else came looking for him. That was why Alfred had given himself only ten minutes to ask questions. What he had at the end of that time was all he was going to get, and that was one reason he’d been as . . . insistent as he had.

  His virtual tour of the lodge’s layout had allowed him to catch his prisoner in two lies, and the pain he’d applied when he did had probably convinced the other man to be at least reasonably truthful. It had been hard to stop with mere pain. The monster was rousing again, and the repeated bursts of agony—and the sense of fading awareness—coming to him through whatever linked him to Allison had made it even harder. But now he had to decide what to do before he moved on, and he touched the hilt of the vibro blade. It had sliced through the synthetic composite of the shed wall like a knife through butter; a human throat would be far easier to cut.

  Alfred’s nostrils flared and his fingers tightened around the hilt. The need to remove the unconscious thug from the face of the galaxy quivered in those fingers, and the hot, sweet taste was back in his mouth, made hotter and sweeter still by his own sense of desperation as those thunderbolts of someone else’s hopeless pain and terror ripped through him. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do, and anyone who gave his services to Manpower—anyone prepared to help kidnap and torture Allison Chou—had already paid for his own ticket to hell.

  But Alfred Harrington wasn’t a Manpower thug. He was—he had to be—better than that, because if he wasn’t . . .

  He snarled in frustration and reached for the roll of tape in the toolbox on the receptor shed’s supply shelf.

  * * *

  Giuseppe Ardmore made himself step back and switch off the neural whip. It was hard, and he licked his lips, savoring the rich, addictive delight of handing out pain. Of inflicting pain, especially on someone like this bitch. Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s sister. Oh, that made it especially sweet as he remembered New Denver! But he had to be careful. Manischewitz would be pissed if he killed her too quickly. Ardmore could have lived with that—Manischewitz would get over it, in time—but he didn’t want to kill her too quickly, either. He wanted to keep her alive for as long as he could, and he looked forward to using more traditional methods to help motivate her brother.

  He clipped the neural whip to his belt and stepped over to the recording unit trained on the nearly naked young woman in the middle of the room. Watching the imagery and listening to the audio would be almost as good as doing it all over again, he thought, and it would be a very good idea to be sure he’d stayed out of the camera’s field of view himself. Manischewitz was right about what could be teased out of even fragmentary images, although no one was likely to get much from a gloved hand wielding a neural whip. Best to be positive about that, though.