[Wildcards 10] - Double Solitaire by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

like your treatment there, and sometimes the guards are just a little slow responding to screams."
    Tach stared down into that round, pink face and felt the walls of her prison close even tighter about her.
     

Chapter Six
     
    French braiding was every bit as hard as it looked -- harder. Tachyon was trying to while away the long hours by mastering this esoteric skill, and so far was failing miserably. It made her crazy that as accomplished a surgeon and violinist as herself could not plait dead protein.
    As she frowned into the mirror, a retina-searing flare of golden light suddenly filled the room, reflecting off the glass.
    Explosion! Big one! The first panicked reaction was to dive for cover. Then she saw him hovering outside the barred window.
    "Starshine!" Tach cried, and ran for that fantastic figure in its formfitting yellow costume, green trunks, boots, and gloves, a sunburst blazing on his massive chest.
    He turned an ireful green eye upon her. "Well, I see that muckraking little excuse for a journalist was correct. But why he feels he must utilize his talents in this kind of cheap sensationalism.
    From the hallway came the sounds of running feet, orders being shouted. Tach lost the thread of Starshine's diatribe.
    "If this is a rescue, could you... " She made a tumbling motion with her hands. "Could you... get on with it?"
    "Take cover."
    Tach darted around the bed and huddled between it and the wall. She risked one glance as Starshine unleashed a flaring yellow sunbeam from his hand. Tach ducked and covered her head, and the outer wall of the building exploded into the room. Coughing, wiping plaster dust from her face, Tach tripped and dodged fallen bricks to the hole. The snap and snarl of weapons fire had now been added to the chaos. Bullets went whining off Starshine's energy field.
    The ace landed lightly in the room, dropped the field, and lifted Tachyon into his arms. Looking up into that handsome square-jawed face crowned with a nimbus of waving blond hair, Tach reflected that Starshine was, physically, at least, the perfect rescuer for a damsel in distress. Unfortunately his touch had bile rising in the back of her throat.
    "Doctor, I hope the graveness of your present situation has finally brought home to you the dangers attendant with unregulated scientific research."
    The door was swinging open. "How about the dangers attendant in guards with guns ?" Tach squeaked.
    Starshine sniffed, raised his energy field, and shot out the ragged hole. Tach looked ahead and saw a pair of Apache helicopters chewing their way toward an interception. Starshine put on a burst of speed that pressed Tach deeper into the man's arms, and they were past the choppers.
    "Where are you taking me?"
    "I would have thought you would have had enough of men making decisions for you." They dived abruptly, using the warehouses that lined the Jersey coast as a screen from both visual and radar sighting. "I'm doing you the courtesy of treating you as a fully realized woman with the capability to make decisions for yourself."
    "I am not a woman."
    Starshine looked down at her in disgust. "How typical. You have been given this chance to explore the life-affirming power of the female, and you reject it. I've done a poem on this very subject." He sucked in a breath, opened his mouth, Tach cut in.
    "Before you start quoting yourself, could you please direct us to Hook Road in Bayonne? There's an abandoned junkyard there. Right on New York Bay. We'll be safe there."
    "Incredible. I wonder what psychological problems this reveals, comparing your female state to garbage."
    "Fly," Tach said wearily. She was even too tired to remonstrate as Starshine declaimed his latest ode.
     
    Thomas Tudbury was an overweight man in his forties, and Tachyon and Starshine were standing in his kitchen. Thomas Tudbury was also supposedly dead. His alter ego, the Great and Powerful Turtle, lived on, and thus far his secret hiding place was known only to Tachyon