Aces High Page 0,106

a place he has moved again," the old woman explained with careful patience, as if speaking to a retarded child.

Tach stepped forward, trying to avoid drawing the attention of the threesome by the main port, gripped the back of an acceleration chair, and sent out a tiny thread. He had a gift for insinuating himself past shields, but Benaf'saj had had more than two thousand years to perfect hers. His mouth was dry and he could feel the pulse hammering in his throat as he slipped past the first barrier.

Second level. Trickier here. Traps built for the unwary to throw the infiltrator into never-ending mental loops until Benaf'saj saw fit to release them.

He chipped one of the shields, and quickly wove a ward to cover his error. It sat like a dancing snowflake in the midst of his Kibr's mind, smoothing over the ragged edge he had left. Past one more. How many levels did the old she-devil have? Brrrrrrang*********! He never even saw the blow coming. He tripped an alarm, a white-hot sheet rose up like a wave of fire, and crashed down. He felt like every synapse in his brain had been simultaneously fired, and his mind seemed to be rattling about in his skull like a rotting walnut in its shell. He realized he was sliding backward across the floor on his butt, his fingers scrabbling at Hellcat's pearly floor. He hit the wall, and the air went out of him in a rush.

Benaf'saj stared at him, amusement and irritation flicking across her face. He could feel the blood rushing into his thin cheeks.

"I had my shields up!" he announced throbbingly and irrationally. He was feeling terribly abused.

"Mind-control me, you silly boy. And you can't build a shield I can't break. I changed your diapers when you were a squalling brat! There's nothing I don't know about you!" She turned away, dismissal written in every line of her fragile body, and humiliation rose up to choke him. "Take him away," she threw over her shoulder to Sedjur. "And this time lock him in his cabin." The last command was directed to the ship. Stony-faced, Sedjur offered him a hand up, and escorted him back to his cabin. He hurried ahead, head down, shoulders hunched, feeling five. The old man left, and Tach helped himself to several liberal pulls from his silver hip flask. The brandy helped to steady his jangled nerves, but did nothing to promote his mental processes. He paced round and round the luxurious cabin trying to think of a plan; panicking when nothing suggested itself. Wondering what was loose in the ship. Wondering.

He decided to determine precisely which humans were being held on the ship. He touched a familiar female mind. Asta Lenser, the prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theater. She was thinking about a man. A man who was having a great deal of difficulty performing. As his stocky, sweat slick body pounded down on hers, struggling for release, she was thinking how ironic it was that a man with his power couldn't get it up. The most feared man in

Embarrassed by his intrusion and feeling like a voyeur, Tach withdrew and searched further. There was nothing that felt like the amiable lunatic who had accosted him outside the clinic, and he hoped that Trips hadn't been deemed useless and disposed au There was something strange. A mind so heavily blocked as to be almost opaque. He would never have sensed it without a sudden flare of terror, but it was quickly suppressed, and he lost the source. Perhaps this was the intruder. I le searched further and found . . .

"Turtle!" he ejected, surprise and worry bringing him bolt upright.

He narrowed and refined his probe, constructed a penumbra to give the illusion to any mental eavesdropper that he was sleeping, and made contact. It was harder than he expected. His first brief touch had shown him a Turtle that he did not know, and he didn't want to jar the man by suddenly appearing in his head. He began to search for ways to make the man gradually aware of his presence, becoming more depressed with each passing moment. Dark, heavy emotions rolled like sullen, viscous waves through Turtle's mind: fear, anger, loss, loneliness, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and futility.

Feeling like an interloper, and not wanting Turtle to think he was prying into private matters that did not concern him, he tapped firmly at the man's primitive shields until