It took her an instant to realize that the weapon was not a stun pistol, but a blaster. It would not merely knock her out; it would burn flesh and char bone. It could kill.
She scanned the corridor, looking for somewhere to hide. The nearest shop entrance was several yards away. The other could get off two, perhaps three shots before she reached it.
Then her ears popped, as if there was a sudden change in the corridor's air pressure, and the man standing in the shadows holding a blaster on her disappeared. One instant he was there, the next he was not.
Could she have looked away for an instant without realizing it, she wondered, giving him a chance to become lost in the crowd?
No, that made no sense at all. He'd had her-he wouldn't just melt into the crowd without first taking a shot. And even if he had taken it, and missed, the blaster charge would have hit something or someone. There would have been destruction, or at least panic in the crowd around her.
But there was nothing. The crowd remained calm and unaffected, their movements not at all out of the ordinary. Yet it was a much thinner crowd than it had been only an instant before, as if two out of every three people had simply vanished.
And now Susan noticed the air in the corridor was cooler, the odor of many tightly packed bodies considerably diminished from what it had been only an instant before. The ventilation system, unable to cope prior to her attacker's disappearance, was suddenly doing a quite adequate job.
It couldn't have reacted that quickly, she thought. Even if the crowd had miraculously thinned, the ventilation system would have taken at least an hour to cool the air and scrub it of the stench of so many bodies. Yet in the blink of an eye it had accomplished exactly that.
Her mind felt suddenly numbed by the experience, her thought processes momentarily paralyzed as they came up hard against the inexplicable. The dizziness she had experienced earlier in her quarters returned, and again the pain began to build behind her eyes.
Instantly the snowflake pattern blossomed in her thoughts, and within seconds she was mouthing the mantra's guttural monosyllables. The headache and dizziness subsided as quickly as they had come.
She became aware of a burning sensation between her breasts, beneath her jumpsuit. Fumbling for the chain hanging around her neck, she pulled the pendant out. It felt hot in her prosthetic fingers. She unfastened her jumpsuit several inches down the front and checked her skin. There was a definite reddening where the gray metal had rested between her breasts.
Why was the pendant now hot, she wondered as she re-fastened her jumpsuit, when only a few seconds before it had felt cool against her skin? Why and how had her assailant, as well as a good portion of the crowd, suddenly vanished?
It all seemed so familiar, smacking of that earlier incident when the dark man had attacked her in her quarters, then disappeared. He, too, had been wearing a pendant.
Lifting the chain over her head, she dropped the pendant into one of the pouches at her waist. She would not wear it again, she decided, until she knew more about it.
She started down the curiously depopulated corridor toward her quarters, glancing at the chronometer on the back of her left wrist. It read 0911-slightly more than three hours earlier than it should have registered. She tapped the crystal with her fingernail and waited for the last digit to change. It was working, but she would have to get it looked at.
Pushing that thought from her mind, she again concentrated on more urgent matters. One thing was certain: There was no longer any doubt that the first attempt on her life had been meant for her. Evans's inference that it might have been a case of mistaken identity no longer held up. They, whoever they were, had now tried twice.
But Evans would have just as much trouble believing an account of this attack as he had that first one. There was simply too much that could not be explained: The way the attacker had failed to take his shot. The way the crowd had thinned and the pendant had become hot. But most of all, the way the attacker had vanished.
She would report the incident to Evans, she decided, but she didn't expect him to believe her. She was having trouble believing it herself.
Suddenly, it struck her-she had not known of this attack before it happened; she had not been forewarned. Each time she had been in danger since Aldebaran, she had been given the slightest hint of a warning just before it happened. But not this time.
Of course, she could not tell Evans about that.
The date-time display read 0927 as she again stood before the holo-phone lens cluster in her quarters. She glanced at her wrist chronometer. It indicated the same time. Apparently, there was nothing wrong with it.
But that couldn't be. It couldn't have displayed the correct time back in the corridor, outside that strange little shop. It had said 0911 then, but at 0911 she had been in Admiral Renford's office.
There had to be something wrong with the phone's time display circuitry as well.
"Base Security," she said. "Priority emergency follow-up."
The date-time display vanished, and the image of the young man who earlier had been so unnerved by her nakedness appeared. He looked up from his computer printouts and blushed.
"Can I help you, Captain?" he asked nervously.
"Get me Staff Sergeant Evans," Susan replied. He reddened further as he reached out and pushed a button on his desk top console, then disappeared.
A few seconds later Evans appeared. He nodded. "Captain Tanner," he said flatly. The smile was gone.
"Have you found anything?"
Evans frowned. "Look, Captain, we're good at what we do, but we can't work miracles. It has been less than an hour since my people left your quarters."
"It's been at least three hours!"
He didn't say a word. When the silence became too awkward, Susan broke it: "What time do you have? There seems to be something wrong with my chronometer."
Evans looked at his wrist chronometer. "Zero nine twenty-nine." Susan checked her own. It read the same.
"Thank you, Staff Sergeant. I'm sorry I bothered you. I laid down for a while, and I guess I'm still a bit disoriented."
"You're sure there's nothing else?"
For an instant she considered telling him about the second attack, but only for an instant.
"Nothing," she said.
"I'll call as soon as I have something," Evans said, then disappeared, his image instantly replaced by the holographic date-time display: OCT. 3, 2187- 0930.
Susan walked to the chair behind the desk and sat. Placing her elbows in the center of the desk, she rested her head in her hands, then closed her eyes.
What was going on? Had more than three hours actually elapsed since her first conversation with Evans, as she remembered, or had it been less than an hour, like Evans had said? Was it possible for something to affect every chronometric device on Fleet Base, mysteriously causing them to lose more than two hours?
She didn't know, but she doubted it. She couldn't imagine anything that would affect only the chronometers, leaving the base's other systems untouched. And Evans would have noticed if there had been something wrong with his date-time display. He would have said something.
Then what could have happened to those two missing hours? She remembered living them. Apparently Evans did not.
I should never have called him, she thought. Too much pointed to Base Security's involvement in the attacks. Even if Evans wasn't personally responsible, he could be used to get to her.
Besides, he really wouldn't be much help. No doubt he thought her insane. And perhaps, she thought, I am.
But now there was a way to find out. If the attack in the exchange area had actually happened. It would be recorded in her LIN/C, stored in the device's memory circuits.
She opened her eyes. Taking the LIN/C from its pouch, she placed it on the desk, then thumbed the memory tab. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the events she remembered happening in the exchange area less than half an hour ago.
Instantly she stood in the access corridor outside the curio shop. She walked to the main corridor and stepped out into the crowd. Again she saw the glint of light on metal, spotted the figure cloaked in shadows, felt panic scurry through her mind like a small, sharp-clawed rodent. And again she scanned the corridor for somewhere to hide.
Her ears popped, just as they had before. The man holding the blaster on her vanished, and the crowd thinned. The air was suddenly much cooler and fresher than it had been an instant before.
She felt the dizziness again, and the building headache. Then the snowflake pattern formed in her thoughts as she mouthed the monosyllabic mantra, and the headache and dizziness were gone.
The pendant burned between her breasts beneath her uniform…
With a thought, she stopped the flow of images and emotions. She took a deep breath, exhaled noisily, then opened her eyes. Again she sat at the desk in her quarters.
So, it had happened, just as she remembered. She had lived those missing hours. But why didn't they show on her wrist chronometer? Why hadn't the holo-phone's chronometric circuits registered them? And why weren't they lodged in Evans's memory?
Removing the pendant from the pouch she had put it in outside the curio shop, she held it up before her eyes. Egg-shaped. Pitted dull-gray metal. And now it was again cold to the touch.
Could it have somehow been responsible for what she had experienced in the corridor outside the curio shop? Was it at the heart of what was happening to her? Both her attackers had worn one like it. And the one she had been wearing had become hot when that last attacker disappeared.
She still didn't have any of the answers.
Who might have them? she wondered as she returned the pendant and her LIN/C to their pouches. Who could possibly help her?
Instantly she knew.
She stood and went to the holo-phone's lens cluster on the far side of the room. It activated with a date-time display: OCT. 3, 2187-0934.
"Personal call for Admiral James Renford," she said. After a few seconds Lieutenant Krueger appeared. It was a head shot, but behind him she saw a Rembrandt. He was in Renford's office.
"What can I do for you, Captain?" he asked.
"Is the Admiral in?"
"I'm afraid not. He left on the Earth-bound shuttle almost twenty minutes ago. I don't expect him back on Luna for several days."
"Thanks." She stepped out of the phone's sensor field. She didn't want to talk to Krueger.
Besides, she thought, perhaps Renford had done all he could by getting her off Fleet Base and out of sight.