Hellflower (v1.1) Read Online Free PDF

with the old body-heat dodge.
    So what did that leave?
    Vibration. Spidey’d been interested when the door hit the wall but not very. If I set foot to floor how long until I was up to my absent blasters in Guardsmen? If that wasn’t it there wasn’t anything else I could think of.
    Great. Now all I had to do was get out of here without walking across the floor-and me without my A-grav harness.
    I looked up. What there was, was an air vent. The vent was just below the ceiling, a little to the left of the top of the cabinet and big enough to hold me on a skinny day if I gave up breathing. Three cheers and a tiger for impecunious bureaucrats and Free Port owners that want to save every credit. Even for the Outfar this was backward. "Butterfly?" Paladin demanded in my ear. It gave me the weirdest feeling-no room for anyone to be standing behind me but he sure sounded like it.
    "Securitronic sweet for the shaky, seeming. So I’m going through the air vents instead of over the floor."
    ###
    We will pass lightly over me climbing to the top of the cabinet, leaning out into infinite space to get the grille off the vent, not dropping the bolts on the floor, and managing to get a handhold on the edge of the vent-shaft to pull myself in, and go directly to where I was jammed into the air vent with slightly less than no room to wiggle.
    "Pally? How long’s it been?"
    "One hour five. Butterfly, are you sure this is a good idea?" "One helluva time to bring that up," I told him, and started up the shaft. I could hear Paladin inside the vent, which augured well for our future deceiving securitronics together, but I’d lose him by time we got to Security Detention. By then it would be up to me and Tiggy Stardust. I knew more or less where to go to pluck my hellflower, thanks to the mindless faxhandler who decreed all Justiciary levels be laid out to the same pattern. The floor plan for this level was classified-but the floor plan of the identical level two floors up wasn’t. The lift we wanted was just outside the main sentencing arena.
    Six subjective eternities and the loss of my pant-knees later, Pally and me came to a promising grille. It looked down from a good five meters into what looked like one of the sentencing arenas, and the room was full of tronics. I pushed the comlink up against the grille and waited for Pally to give me some glad news.
    "Fortune is with you, Butterfly," he told me a few minutes later. "This is the main sentencing arena-the housekeeping and security tronics use this for their central dispatch area during Third Shift. The lift to the Security Detention levels is just outside the door. You can walk right through."
    "Yeah?" I said. Leaving aside for the moment Paladin’s definition of luck, there was the minor matter of more rude mechanicals down below than I ever really hoped to meet. And securitronics tend to be irritable.
    "’Yeah. Housekeeping and Security are programmed to avoid each other-I will provide them with the proper code, and you will walk across the floor and out the other door. As long as they receive the proper codes, the tronics will not care who you are. Just move slowly, as if you were another machine."
    "If this is so easy, why don’t everyone come dancing in here? Think of the valuta they could save on fines."
    "In the first place, the recognition codes for the security devices are changed by the computer on a random sequence. In the second place, it is generally accepted that breaking into a prison is an unnecessary exertion."
    I ignored that. I also knew there wasn’t any other way in.
    I got a pocket-laser out of my bag of tricks and took out the grille. I passed it over my back into the airshaft, eased out through the hole until I was hanging by my fingers, and dropped. I came up with the stunner ready, but I couldn’t see a thing. Heard the whine of servomotors as a securitronic waddled over to me. It was a handspan taller than me and much wider, with all its come-alongs and