The Price of Conquest

The hotel where Sangrey was staying was nearly a kilometer away. Tyler chose to travel the entire distance on foot to give both the eaze and the memblock a chance to get a good hold on Kressa before they arrived.

As they rode the lift up to the hotel's top floor where Sangrey had his rooms, Tyler pulled another drug pad from his pocket and administered it to himself.

"What's that?" Kressa asked. She'd been humming idle tunes to herself and watching the lights flash as the lift ascended, but she was looking at him now, a curious expression on her face.

"It's a neutralizer for this." He held up the marble grenade.

She leaned closer to get a better look, swaying slightly. "And what's that?"

"You'll find out in a little bit," he said. "Now, be quiet. When we reach Sangrey's room, his guards are probably going to want to search us for weapons. Let them."

"Sure, Dev. All I got is my knife."

"Knife?" he asked, alarmed. He pressed the pause control on the lift. "What knife?"

She drew a slender blade from a sheath in her boot.

Tyler silently cursed himself. He'd seen her with the weapon in Cassia's the night they met, but completely forgotten about it.

"Give me that," he said, and reached for the knife.

She snatched it away. "Ah-ah."

He gave her a serious look. "Kressa, I'm not kidding. Give me the knife."

"Why?" she pouted.

"Because Mister Sangrey is a rightfully paranoid man, and he won't appreciate it if anyone comes to visit him wearing a blade." He held out his hand. "Give it to me."

"Will I get it back?" she asked.

"Of course."

After another momentary hesitation, she held it out to him, hilt first.

He took it, then used it to pry up the carpet in a back corner of the lift. He slid the blade underneath and then pressed the carpeting back down as well as he could. He didn't think anyone would notice it in the time it would take for him to complete his plan and retrieve it. If someone did, he would come up with a story to explain how she lost it.

He reactivated the lift. Seconds later, they arrived on the top floor. Tyler placed the marble grenade in his mouth and escorted Kressa to the door of Sangrey's suite.

The door opened as Tyler was reaching for the announcer. The two bodyguards he'd noticed sitting near the pirate's table earlier in the evening stood in the opening. They motioned him in, and then stepped aside. Neither of them carried any obvious weapons, but Tyler knew by the way they moved that they wore shoulder holsters under their coats.

An electric tingle raised the hair on Tyler's arms as he stepped forward; there must be a weapon scanner built into the doorway—just one of the perks a prime suite like this could provide to anyone with the money to afford it.

Beside him, Kressa shivered as she stepped through the field. "Feels funny," she said in a loud whisper, and then looked back as the door closed behind them.

The guards patted each of them down expertly, clearly unwilling to trust their boss's safety to the scanner. The man searching Kressa did a more than thorough job, his hands sliding with unnecessary intimacy over her body. She endured his attention stoically, but Tyler felt an unreasoning flash of outrage at the man's excessive familiarity.

He pushed the feeling away and surreptitiously scanned the room, noting the positions and distance of each person and object, including several openings through which additional people could potentially appear.

Still dressed in the showy gold and black outfit he wore earlier, Sangrey lounged on a large daybed centered on the main room's back wall. A vast assortment of cushions mounded the bed, and a thin haze of smoke blued the air around it, drifting from several liftsticks burning in a nearby holder. Sangrey wore two knives at his belt. Gold and gems encrusted their highly ornamental hilts, but Tyler knew there would be nothing ornamental about the actual blades. Except for the knives, the pirate appeared unarmed.

Two scantily clad women sprawled on the cushions to either side of him. At first Tyler thought they were asleep or unconscious, but the woman closest to Sangrey was breathing too irregularly to be anything other than completely awake and alert.

Their search complete, one of the guards glanced at Sangrey. "They're clean, Tio."

"Come in, Mister Roth," Sangrey said, using the name Tyler had given him. He stood, and Tyler noted that he moved with surprising grace for a man of his size. "Let me have a closer look at this beauty you've brought for me."

Kressa's gaze had been wandering idly about the richly decorated room, looking like a child who had suddenly entered a colorful wonderland full of surprises, but her attention snapped to Sangrey as he spoke.

Tyler led her toward him.

As they entered the hazy cloud of liftstick smoke that hung over the daybed, Tyler brought his hand up and feigned a cough, transferring the marble grenade from his mouth to his hand.

Sangrey laughed and waved a hand as if to dismiss the smoke from his presence.

"I apologize, Mister Roth. I fear a good 'stick is one of my vices." He turned his full attention to Kressa. "And this is another one."

She met his eyes defiantly, and Tyler's pulse quickened. He hoped the eaze would be enough to keep her under control.

"Even better up close," Sangrey said and reached a hand toward her.

Lightning fast, she moved to slap it away, but Sangrey was faster. He caught her wrist in one hand and wrapped the other around her throat.

Tyler glanced back briefly as the two guards moved closer, eyes locked on Kressa, watching her every move. But Sangrey had her well under control.

"Sorry about that," he said to Sangrey, and silently thanked Kressa for bringing the guards closer. He couldn't act if there was too much distance between himself and the room's known threats. "She's a wild one. I gave her a bit of eaze to make her more manageable."

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"No need to apologize," Sangrey said, continuing to watch Kressa closely. "I like it when they've got a bit of fight in them. That's why I particularly enjoy these gengineered aristocrats— strong-bodied and strong-willed. And damn, damn nice to look at. It's a pity they're so rare."

He pulled Kressa's hand to his chest and slid it down his body. "Like this, beauty," he purred. "Be nice to Tio, and he'll be nice to you." He released her wrist and slipped his hand through an opening on the front of her singlesuit. "But if you aren't nice…" He tightened his hold on her throat.

She whimpered and tried to pull away.

"Don't fight me, girl."

A second rush of resentment swept over Tyler. He glanced at the guards. They had relaxed.

There would never be a better time.

Tyler pressed the break point on the grenade, tossed it toward the guards behind him with a flick of his wrist, then pushed his way between Kressa and Sangrey. He reached for one of the pirate's knives with one hand while the other shoved Kressa far to the side, hopefully out of line of any subsequent gunfire.

The grenade hissed behind him, sending waves of an invisible, fast-acting sedative gas into the air around the guards.

He launched Sangrey's knife toward the female guard on the daybed. The weapon was not designed to be thrown, but Tyler meant it simply as a distraction.

It worked.

The woman had come alert at the sound of the sudden commotion and pulled a pulse gun from deep within the cushions. She swung it toward the source of the disturbance, but the sight of the knife flying at her forced her to duck, and her shot went wild.

Tyler drew Sangrey's second knife and kicked out backward as a movement behind him revealed one of the guards drawing a laser pistol from the holster beneath his coat.

His kick only grazed the guard's side, but the man had already breathed in some of the gas and his attempt to avoid Tyler's attack overbalanced him. He fell to the floor and did not get up again.

Tyler straightened from the kick and drove his elbow hard up under Sangrey's ribs. The pirate doubled over, gasping for air, and crumpled from the effect of the gas. Tyler ducked, spun, and dove for the fallen guard's laser. He slashed out with the knife, aiming for the second guard. The man was beginning to weave on his feet and the blade sliced across his belly. He collapsed with a guttural yell, clutching at the wound, thrashed once, and then lay still.

Tyler rolled as his hand closed on the laser pistol's grip. He fired at the woman on the daybed just as her second shot burned into the carpet where he had lain an instant before.

She collapsed into the pillows and her weapon fell from a suddenly lax grip.

The sound of another pulse gun shot pierced the air. Pain flared in Tyler's upper right arm. He pulled the trigger of the laser pistol he held and swept it toward the source of the shot—one of the openings behind him.

He got lucky or, more likely, enough of the gas had wafted into the other room to slow the man's reflexes. Tyler's shot sliced across the man's chest, and he crumpled to the floor.

Tyler lay still for a moment, breathing hard, and struggled to ignore the flaming agony in his arm. Then he held his breath and listened for any additional threats coming from inside the suite. He wasn't worried about any from outside—high-price suites like this were insulated well enough for a small war to rage inside without disturbing the neighbors. The only thing he heard was the crackle of a fire that his sweeping shot had started in one of the cushions as the laser pistol's beam passed over the daybed.

Concerned that the heat or smoke from the fire might set off an alarm that would bring someone to investigate, he rolled to his feet, but tunneling vision and a sudden wave of dizziness sent him stumbling back to the floor. He closed his eyes until the worst of the dizziness passed, and wondered if he should blame it on his wounded arm or the effect of the gas making it through the neutralizer he'd administered earlier.

Probably a little of both, he decided and climbed to his feet, carefully this time.

He stood still for a moment to make sure his head did not betray him a second time, then moved slowly toward the daybed, alert for movement from any of the figures sprawled around and upon it.

Satisfied no one would be getting up anytime soon, he used one of the undamaged cushions to smother the fire and then sat down on the daybed to wait through another dizzy spell. Finally his head cleared and he forced himself to his feet. He still had hours of work ahead of him, some of it dangerous, before he could declare this job a success.

He went to Kressa first. He made sure she was uninjured and then laid her out more comfortably on the plush carpeting to let her begin sleeping off the effects of the gas and other drugs.

Sangrey was next. Tyler searched him carefully, removed every piece of jewelry and ornamentation he found on the pirate's body, and then bound and gagged him with strips of cloth cut from several pieces of discarded clothing scattered about the room.

By the time he finished dealing with Sangrey, the pain of his wounded arm had increased beyond his ability to ignore. He found a fully stocked medkit in the suite's main washroom and rubbed on a numbing cream that hardened quickly into a temporary dressing.

He returned to the main room and went to the guard with the belly wound. The man was still alive, but based on the appearance of the injury and the growing blood stain on the carpet beneath him, he would not last much longer.

Tyler slid one of Sangrey's knives between the dying man's ribs and into his heart, hastening the inevitable, then he searched the body and took everything of value, including his identification.

The second guard was uninjured, a victim of the gas, however, there was no additional bounty offered for bringing in any of Sangrey's crew alive. Proof of their death was all he needed to collect the reward for them.

Tyler rolled the man onto his back and slipped the knife into his heart. With a brief shudder followed by a quiet sigh, the guard joined his partner in death. Tyler searched him, as well.

He checked the two women next. The one he had shot was dead, a blackened hole in her chest. The second was only unconscious. Tyler noticed a small tattoo just behind her right ear—most likely the mark of the flesh peddler who sold her to Sangrey. He knew of no bounty for any of the pirate's women, so he left her where she lay and started toward the man who had shot him.

As he made his way across the room, he wondered what the woman would do when she woke up.

Probably make a run for it, he decided. Most likely, she'd end up in the hands of some other dealer, or try to make a living gloving it on her own.

He took a handful of credits he'd removed from one of the guards out of his pocket, returned to the woman's side, and tossed the money down beside her.

The man who'd shot him was dead, or so close to death it did not matter. Tyler relieved him of his valuables and ID, and then conducted a thorough search of the suite for anything else of value or importance.

After that, he took a short break to give his throbbing arm a rest and to precisely map out the remainder of his plan.

It took all night and a couple of extra doses of sedatives for Kressa, Sangrey, and the woman, but finally Tyler was able to get the pirate to the Gamble and secure him in the small hold at the rear of the ship, capture a series of images of his four dead companions, as well as collect DNA samples to confirm their identification, and then get himself and Kressa (and her knife) back to their room, all with no one the wiser—at least until one of Sangrey's people came looking for the pirate, or his lease on the suite ran out and someone came to collect additional payment. By then, however, Tyler would be offworld. Soon after that, Sangrey would be in Patrol custody, and Tyler would have the bounty and official amnesty for any legal transgressions committed in the process of bringing the pirate to justice. Although Vsuna's new Free World government was under no obligation to recognize amnesty granted by the United Galaxy, Tyler doubted that anyone in a position of power would question what he had done to take out someone as contemptible as Tiode Sangrey, especially since Tyler had been careful not to harm any innocents in the process.

Once back in their room, Tyler removed Kressa's clothing and put her in the bed, then he treated the burn on his arm with a second application of ointment and wrapped it carefully. As he worked, he fine-tuned the story he'd come up with to explain away the hours that would be missing from Kressa's memory and added a few details to account for his injury.

Well after sunrise, he undressed and slid into the bed beside Kressa. He hoped to get at least an hour or two of sleep, but between the tension of the night's activities and the added stimulation of Kressa moving beside him as she began to overcome the last dose of sedative, he realized that sleep was out of the question.

With a groan that was equal parts exhaustion and pleasure, he pulled her close against him.