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CHAPTER 23

I opened the cell door carefully. No one around. Interesting. Maybe Nitin hadn’t been lying and Lionside and his pals didn’t know where Nitin had taken me. Meaning that Lionside probably didn’t know they’d captured Slinkie, either. Or she was in his quarters being ravaged by him. I chose to focus on option number one.

One of the things I’d lifted from Nitin was what appeared to be an electronic compass. Turned it on. Better than a compass. It was a system tracker, set to the military complex. This would have been better if Randolph were with me, since he could figure out the code to make it work with a lot more accuracy.

However, some things were automatically loaded into these things—the owner’s individual living quarters, main holding cells, general areas, things like that. I tried to figure out where I was from any of the standards. Near as I could tell, Nitin’s quarters were nearby. Decided to head for them—he was male and holding Slinkie. She was probably already tied up in his bed.

Let part of my mind enjoy itself with this train of thought. The majority of my mind was focused on getting to this location undetected. The complex was a big rat maze, and I was going to get lost in it. Tried to pull up the simple rhyme Randolph had taught me years ago when dealing with something like this.

“Dots are natural, dots are fun, dots are best when they’re one on one.” Realized this made no sense to me at all and figured Randolph had been deranged for at least as long as I’d known him.

Stared at the system tracker again. There were dots on it. One was green and it seemed to be moving. Another dot was blue, several were yellow, a couple red. The red ones were in what looked like bigger areas. Okay, figure red meant main area. Avoid red.

Since there was only one blue dot, and it was closest to where the green, moving dot was, I tried to see if I was the green moving dot by heading towards the blue dot. Seemed to be working. The green dot reached what appeared to be a corridor at the same time I reached what was for sure a corridor. So far, so good.

I turned and walked towards the blue dot. The green dot did the same. Felt I could safely assume I was the green dot. No firm assumptions yet on what the blue dot was.

I heard the sound of running footsteps and noted there were several gray dots moving towards the area where my green dot had been not too long ago. Decided to make a wild guess that these were more military—decided to worry about whether they were Nitin’s guys or another set of goons later.

Looked around. Not a lot of hiding places. Typical. Ran on towards the blue dot. I had to turn a corner again and, thankfully, there were doors in this new corridor. The blue dot wasn’t all that far away so I raced for it. Green dot was pretty much on top of blue dot. So far, so good. Or at least, not so awfully bad yet.

I pulled out Nitin’s keys. Happily, he had a master—they were always camouflaged to look like an ordinary key. Problem was, they all looked alike. Well, not a problem for me. Because to learn what the master for any world was like was to learn how to spot all the others on said world. Why locksmiths kept on making masters like this was anybody’s guess, but I never argued with luck going in my favor.

It worked on the door. I opened it, stepped inside, closed and locked it quickly and quietly. It was dark in here, which was fine for right now. I could hear the pounding footsteps and they were getting closer.

Heard what sounded like people trying to open doors, the one I was standing by included. “Locked.” Male, not a voice I recognized.

“Yeah, all of them. Any idea what’s going on?” Different male, still no one I’d heard speak before.

“No, but Major Lionside’s pretty upset. Not that we’ll be able to do anything when we find Nitin.”

“Cut the chatter.” This voice was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it to a face. “Find Nitin, find the offworlders. Figure he stashed them separately.” I heard footsteps trailing off. It sounded like everyone was gone. But I had instincts, and they told me I wasn’t alone.

“We’re in the midst of one messed up interstellar incident,” the first voice said. He was still right outside my door. “We don’t want that… do we, Captain Outland?”

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Framed