Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series Read Online Free PDF Page B

•
    “Hey, Njangu,” Ben Dill said. “I got a small confession to make.”
    “Don’t tell me the baddie we’re looking for is you?” Since Dill had been party to the blown mission into Larix, nobody had bothered to run the cover story about the phony Kura operation past him.
    “Yeh,” Dill said, and bared his fangs. “Went and bribed me for two honeys and a roast
felmet
under glass.”
    “I should’ve known that was why your breath smells the way it does. What’s the confession?”
    Dill told him. When he finished, he spread his hands. “Sorry. But we were in a hurry.”
    “You
just
remembered that?”
    “No.” Dill looked shamefaced. “Alikhan had to remind me.”
    “Fine,” Njangu snapped. “Now be sure and remind me if you happen to remember anything else, like you’ve got an aged aunt who’s head of Redruth’s security.”
    “You mean I didn’t mention her already?”
    • • •
    “
Cent
Ben Dill to pick up some charts,” Dill said. “Requisition YAG One-Nine-Eight.” The Musth beside him didn’t speak, but his head darted back and forth.
    The clerk took off her glasses, scowled at the alien, then lifted a security case from under the counter, set it down, a little too heavily.
    “Thank’ee,” Dill said, scrawled a signature, and the pair left.
    The clerk looked around the airfield office. Her supervisor and another clerk were still working.
    “Could you take the desk for me, ma’am, for a couple of minutes?”
    The supervisor nodded, taking her folder to the desk. The clerk picked up her belt pouch, and headed for the bathrooms.
    • • •
    “Bingo,” the tech said. “The scan picked it up right away. We’ve got ‘Eleven’ and ‘Scrambling.’ The rest of the transmission’s coded.”
    “Enough?” her
tweg
asked Yoshitaro.
    “More than,” he said, turned to the four military policemen in the back of the Grierson, parked a few meters from the spaceport’s administrative building. “Take her. Don’t let her use an L-pill, and make sure you grab all of her possessions. Get in and out, fast. She’s got no rights. No talking to anybody, no lawyer, no nothing.”
    • • •
    “We’ve got an agent,” Hedley said. “I’ve got our analysts looking for others. But so far, this Pon Wrathers is all we’ve got.”
    “Bear down,” Angara said. “The clock is running.”
    • • •
    The room was very big and felt like it was far underground. An air conditioner was running somewhere, just loud enough to be annoying. Pon Wrathers stood in a pool of light. There was a desk in front of her. Sitting behind it was a man, hidden in the shadows. There was a small box on the table.
    “I wish a lawyer.”
    Silence.
    “Who are you?”
    “My name is Njangu Yoshitaro.”
    “What are you? Some sort of policeman?”
    Again, silence.
    “Why am I being held?”
    “Who do you suppose you’re spying for?” Njangu asked.
    “I’m not a spy!”
    “Then why did you make a coded transmission just after giving some officers of the Force classified navigational data?”
    “I made no transmission! That scrambler was planted on me by one of those thugs who arrested me.”
    “You’re either naturally quick, or well trained,” Njangu said. “Did you realize you were working for an agent of an extrastellar government?”
    Wrathers jerked just slightly. “I did no such thing! I want a lawyer!”
    “Let me apprise you of something, Wrathers. You don’t know who I work for, what agency of the government. Perhaps I’m not working for
any
government. The Rentiers used to run their own police and death squads, remember?”
    Wrathers blinked.
    “If that were the case, your asking for a lawyer is a joke,” Njangu went on. “You ought to be more concerned about what could happen to you, here, alone, in a strange place, when no one on the outside knows anything about where you are.”
    “Who are you? What are you doing to me?”
    Njangu waited silently for a moment. It was interesting