Sulke Drager had always hated it when everybody talked at once. Thirty years as a member of a telepathic community had taught her a great deal about handling multiple inputs—more than any human being had ever known—but never before in history had so much of the Starmind all been sending at the same time. And underlying it all, pervading the whole Solar System like a taste of metal in the back of the mouth, was the wordless shriek from Saturn.
And naturally, the "voices" she most needed to "hear" were the weakest. They were also the closest, but distance means nothing to a telepath; signal strength and bandwidth were all that counted.
So she borrowed energy from every Stardancer in the heavens who was not shouting something, and used it to drive a message that had never before been sent across the matrix.
Shut the fuck up!
The System seemed to echo in the sudden relative quiet. Even the wordless wail from the Ring halved its "volume" and "pitch" and dropped back down into the region of speech. The words—Save him, Sulke!—repeated endlessly, like a mantra.
And now Sulke could clearly hear the gentle voice she most needed to hear. All right so far, cousins, Reb said. We are all unharmed so far, which means they intend to parley. Be calm.
She knew his location precisely now. The vessel in which he was imprisoned was superbly stealthed—the combined power of the United Nations could not have found it—but she had detection gear no battle cruiser could match, if the target was another telepath. Reb had been one years before he'd met his first Stardancer; a natural adept. So were Fat Humphrey and Meiya.
So were four other humans currently in space, and fourteen on Terra. About average for humanity. All of them had been kidnapped too, at the same time as Reb, Fat and Meiya—every one was now a prisoner—but this vessel was Sulke's pidgin: the one she personally happened to be close enough to do something about. She instructed her subconscious to monitor the other ongoing rescue operations for data relevant to her own problem, and consciously ignored them.
She fed Reb's location to those who were good at orbital ballistics, grabbed the report that echoed back and swore. You're going nowhere fast! Your trajectory is taking you up out of the ecliptic, and there's nothing there!
He was still calm. Naturally. We knew they must have a covert base in space; now they're leading us to it. We already know where the ones dirtside are being taken.
Yeah, and we can't touch the place. What if where you're going is just as well defended?
Then we will have to be very clever. And very lucky.
She went briefly into rapport with those who had had military training back in their human lives, and swore again. We have Stardancers vectoring to intercept your projected path at multiple points . . . but there's no way to know where you're going until they decelerate. And if they maneuver in the meantime, we could lose you completely.
They probably will. They're paranoid; they'll assume their stealthing may not be good enough, and try every trick there is.
I can match orbits with you right now, she said. You're coming right at me, near enough.
What about relative speeds?
She was already adjusting her lightsail, spinning out Symbiote like pizza dough. You're a bat out of hell—but if I can grab hold, and it doesn't kill me . . . She had an unusually powerful thruster on her belt she had never expected to use; she poked it carefully through the Symbiote membrane, borrowed a hundred brains to help her aim it, and fired it to exhaustion.
What can you accomplish? Meiya asked.
Tear off antennas, bugger up their communications, bang on the hull and distract them while you jump 'em . . . if I have to, I'll unscrew the fucking drive with my fingernails.
There was a hint of a chuckle in Reb's voice. I love you too, Sulke. Whoops—they're about to drug me . . .
Me too, Fat Humphrey said. Watch your ass, Sulke.
She could see them now, by eyeball, and they were indeed coming on fast. But she was confident; she had learned to board a moving freight when she was eight years old, leaving a place then called East Germany. Yeah? she sent back. I'll give you a two-kilo gold asteroid if you can pull off that trick, pal.
His answering giggle was the last thing she ever heard. She never saw the white-winged figure who came up behind her and put a laser bolt through her brain.