In the Lion’s Mouth

VII. Yuts’ga: A Role, in the Hay

Yuts’ga was known once as Second Earth; but that was in the Commonwealth’s palmy days, when comparisons to Terra were made openly and with pride. She bulked larger than the Homeworld, tugged a bit more than bones or muscles liked, and spun more slowly. She owned a moon too, which they called “Djut Long Dji,” which meant “second moon” in some ancient tongue of Terra; but their grandchildren’s grandchildren wondered why it was called “second” if there was only one and the name eventually collapsed into Tchudlon.

She was a large moon as such things go, and it was a rare thing for a small planet to have a large moon; but she was not so large as Luna, and so was less of a pestle to Yuts’ga’s mortar. The seas were stirred by moderate tides; life was ground, but not so finely as on Earth.

Still, life was life. It was more than the prokaryote cryptolife that was the fruit of most worlds’ groanings; more than the lichens that had graced the downy cheeks of Dao Chetty. Her vast world-sea was called the Wriggling Ocean because there were—by the gods!—worms burrowing in the ooze. Who knew what might next be found?

The answer, as it turned out, was nothing; and as world after barren world followed, men ceased to care. Worms? They vanished under the bioload of the terraforming arks. An easy job, the old captains said. Yuts’ga had done half their work already. They stroked her seas and quickened her with fish and insects and smiling crocodiles, graced the land with pine trees and waving grasses and fragrant rhododendrons. They did remember to save a few of those ur-worms, and studied them closely and found them much like Terran acoels; but they did not let them get in the way of things. There was work to do! A galaxy to conquer!

Much later, the world was called “Tikantam,” which meant “the sensible horizon,” because her star was the farthest of the Commonwealth suns plucked by eye from the skies of Terra. But it was not too long after that men ceased to care what could or could not be seen from Terra. There were convulsions, wars, cleansings. In the end, as epigones reconnected their ancestors’ bones hoping that they might once more live, the older name was rediscovered and she became Yuts’ga once more.

Somewhere along the way, they lost the worms.

Yuts’ga was now a moderately prosperous world, dimly aware that she had once been important. But importance was gathered now into the Secret City like pretty baubles into a raven’s nest, and the Yutsgars hunkered down and did as they were told. Now and then, the plates trembled and the sea floor turned over and the night breezes brought the stench of the ooze onto the land. “Worm weather,” the Yutsgars called it, though no one remembered why.

Cambertown was the largest city in the Arwadhy District and the site of Number Three Spaceport, and several Confederation Sector Offices. The people there spoke a dialect that was a mixture of the old Taņţamiž lingua franca and the cant of the Zhõgwó, who had held the Mandate of the Heavens before the Vraddy. Consequently, they spoke Manjrin in an antique manner that otherworlders found alternately charming and exasperating. Definite articles were nowhere to be found; “is” and “have” lurked in elliptical constructions; and parts of speech oft jammed together into a single word. They would serve you up a word, and then start decorating it like a Festal Tree, adding markers for voice, tense, aspect, person, and sometimes just for the hell of it, negation, so that after you thought you had grasped the gist of it after all, it was turned at the very end all topsy-turvy on you. “Of course, you help ing do will I—not” was a favorite punch line on scores of nearby worlds.

The Mountain Dragon Inn stood on Fishbound Street in the Seventh District of Cambertown, just off the Ring Road. There were no mountains in the surrounding countryside; and even dragons were more rumored than seen, so where the name came from no one knew. It was justly famed for its own brew: Bartholomew Black.

Domino Tight was a small man, well formed of countenance. His hair curled in tight, black ringlets; his lips curled in perpetual good humor. A good man to drink with; a good man to sport with. During one assassination, he had reduced his target to helpless laughter while in the very act of killing him. “Screams of laughter,” he liked to say when he told the story on himself, which was often enough that it had grown tedious.

He had settled himself into a companionable silence in a booth near the inn’s rear exit with a schooner of Bartholomew Black. But a Shadow like Domino Tight does not wait for no purpose. He waits for signs and portents. He was on Yuts’ga to move the Talker of the Yutsgar Nexus. Once that unfortunate was cleared away, the Third Undersecretary for Information could take charge of the Interstellar Comm Clearance Center, and message packets entering the Sector on their way to Dao Chetty would thereafter be inspected, censored, and cleared by the Revolution. But while the Talker was a dead man walking, he was under the protection of the loyalist Shadow, Pendragon Jones; and so he might yet walk a little farther.

It was a matter of insertion between Pendragon Jones and the Talker. Domino Tight had narrowed the search to Cambertown and had scattered his magpies to scour the city for signs.

From time to time, young men and women garbed in the current fashions of the Arwadhy drifted into the Mountain Dragon, some for a “pint o’ th’ Black,” others for the free lunch, but still others to drop a word or two in the ear of Domino Tight. Pendragon’s magpies had been spotted here, there, moving thus. The Shadow collected these words and pricked them off on a chart he kept on his pocket screen. The screen pondered vectors and applied algorithms of the mathematical art, searching for the barycenter of the motions, for at that centroid would, like mistress spider, lurk Pendragon Jones.

Among those lifting “pints” in the Dragon were three of Domino Tight’s magpies—Two, Five, and Fourteen—forming a cordon. There was also a man at the bar who reminded Domino Tight of steel wool. He did not grow hair so much as bristles, and the eyes above the thin mustache were a deadly topaz. Domino Tight wondered if he might be in the Life and crooked a finger at Two, who shook her head at the question.

“Not one of Pendragon’s men,” she murmured when called to his side. “We’ve pegged them all. A courier for someone else, maybe, just passing through.”

Or a local thug—a mover, a scrambler, or whatever they called their petty criminals in Cambertown. He sat on a bar stool and drank his Black and seemed to pay no mind to the comings and goings of magpies, by which Domino Tight knew he was paying very keen attention indeed.

The rear door to the Mountain Dragon creaked open and Domino Tight released the safety catch on the teaser he held unholstered in his lap. A bilaterian, like many Shadows, his left hand oft worked independently of his right.

The light from the wall lamps blotted out and the entry to the booth was eclipsed by a presence. Domino Tight reengaged the safety catch. “G’day, Jacques. When did you blow in?”

“Since three days,” said Big Jacques, finding a bench to sit upon, which he angled to take in the room. “You be a hard man to track down, Domino Tight.”

“I should be an impossible man to track down,” he answered. “What brings you?”

Big Jacques rumbled. One always knew when he was about to essay a joke, for he laughed peremptorily at his own wit. “Why, my ship done brought me.” Then, unable to contain himself, he slapped the table, causing the accouterments to dance. Domino Tight snatched his schooner up before it could topple, and returned a smile as broad as the humor.

There is a stereotype held in the minds of most, even of those moderately keen, of an inverse relationship between the size of the body and the size of the mind. Big Jacques knew that and played to the stereotype. The duller his opponents believed him, the greater the edge he had in playing them.

“We missed you at the facemeet on Henrietta,” Jacques added. “You shoulda seen it. Dawshoo told us the Cause was lost and we should just give up. I think he said that so we’d all cry up nay. You shoulda seen old Gidula’s face! And Dawshoo’s too, when half the room started to walk out.”

“Hunh. Dawshoo’s a galah.” Domino Tight took a pull from his schooner while Jacques signaled to the tavern-keeper for a drink of his own. “I’m going to guess,” Tight said when he put the schooner down, “that Oschous rallied the troops.”

“Oh, he did, for sure. That face of his would have gone white if it hadn’t been all covered with red fuzz. Dawshoo oughta watch his back. There may be some discussion on who should lead us, once the Names are ousted. My money’s on Oschous.”

“Gidula, I think. Oschous actually believes in the Cause. That’s not good for a revolutionary.”

Jacques rumbled once more. “Near as I can figure, I’m doing pretty much the same crap I was doing before. Just a different target list, is all.”

“So, why one and not the other?” Domino Tight asked from genuine curiosity. He had never decided whether Big Jacques had hidden depths or no depth at all.

“Oh, the quality o’ the targets, of course. Takes more skill, more practice, more craft. ‘The knife grows dull when the target is soft.’ You move your man here yet?”

“Not yet. Pendragon’s on-world protecting him.”

“The hell, you say! How did he know we were going to move the Talker?”

Domino Tight shrugged. “‘Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ Just makes it a bigger challenge. The target’s night soil; just a matter of time.”

Big Jacques nudged him with a forefinger. “There. Y’see? ‘A bigger challenge.’ But you may as well fold the play. If Pendragon’s mother-henning your target, he’s probably figured why he was in the cross-hairs in the first place. Whole point of moving our man into the Comm Center is that they don’t know we done it.”

“Oh, half a dozen cadre move up the ladder if the top dog’s capped. Might not be obvious which we wanted moved. Tell me, Jacques. We chance-met here, or have you looked me up ’cause we’re cobber?”

“Bone homey, we call it where I come from,” said Big Jacques. The tavern-keeper brought him a large stein of uncertain content. The big man grumbled about something he called a demitasse and tossed it off in a single gulp. “Nah, just a call of the courtesy,” he continued when the tavern-keeper had gone off to draw five more steins. “I’ll be sending magpies out and your guys might cross paths with mine. Don’t want no misunderstandings.” He handed the smaller man a bubble case. “That’s got the dance card for our FOFs. The identifier changes randomly, but that’ll keep your guys in sync so they can know Friend or Foe. I’d appreciate the same info from you, ’cause while my main interest is that your boys don’t pot my boys, I don’t really want mine potting yours, either.”

“Bad for morale,” said Domino Tight.

Both Shadows took a moment to download the codes through their own intranets. “Who’s your date, Big Guy, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ekadrina Sèanmazy.”

Domino Tight’s magpies had been whispering the latest intel in his left earwig. He touched pause. “Ekadrina? She’s on-world?”

“Not yet. She went to Ashbanal for the pasdarm. But she’ll be stopping here to check with Pendragon on her way to Dao Chetty. She may have sent some of her magpies on ahead. You ain’t seen any taijis drifting around have you?”

Domino Tight shook his head. “That … could send things up a gum tree. Ekadrina is a big bite to chew on. You have the teeth for it?”

Jacques grinned wide. “Who else you think could take her?”

“Oschous.”

“Might could be. But we don’t put our brains on the block. Gidula too, in his prime; which you might have noticed, he ain’t. Maybe Dawshoo; and notice the ‘maybe’.”

“Manlius?”

“Not even a maybe. Only one who thinks he could is Manlius.”

“There was Geshler Padaborn once,” mused Domino Tight, “but she took him down in the end.”

Jacques finished another stein. He smiled, as if to himself. “Sure, after he was already a prisoner, and had escaped her cordon.”

Domino Tight nodded. “Speaking of the pasdarm, how did that play out? Which one retired, Epri or Manlius?”

“You have a way of asking things … Don’t know. Message packets ain’t caught up yet. I come here direct from Henrietta, but Oschous, Dawshoo, and them went to Ashbanal to collect Manlius. Which reminds me. They’ll be looking you up soon. Big play coming, and you’re the man for it. Or one of them. Seven Shadows in the play.”

“Seven!”

“And our flocks too, I guess.”

“What’s the play? I suppose you already know, being in the Inner Circle and all.”

“Yeah, I got it writ down somewhere. I’ll let you know.”

Domino Tight grimaced. “Well, I always did like surprises. Who else is in? Can you tell me that?”

“Oh, beside you and me, there’s, lessee…” He counted on his fingers. “My copain, Little Jacques—I hit ’em high, he hits ’em low—Oschous himself, Ravn, Manlius … Oh, and Padaborn.”

“Padaborn!”

“Yeah. Padaborn’s back. Showed up on Henrietta just after most of us left, courtesy of your old friend, Ravn Olafsdottr. She tracked him down over in the League, bagged him up, and brought him back.”

The curly-haired Shadow finished his schooner. “How … interesting. Ekadrina know?”

Jacques grinned. “That’s the problem with the Long Tall One. You never know what she knows.”

“Padaborn…” said Domino Tight. “The greatest of the Shadows … He’ll give the Cause a new life.”

“If you believe in the Cause.”

“Well, if Ravn could bag Padaborn and haul his sorry ass back over this side of the Rift, he isn’t half the man he used to be.”

“Way I hear it, he’s four or five times the man he used to be. But they tell me he knows the way in.”

“In where?”

Big Jacques gazed at the ceiling with pursed lips. Domino Tight made a sour face.

“Oh. By the way,” Jacques added, “you know someone in the Secret City, doncha?”

Domino Tight nodded. “Tina Zhi. She works in the Gayshot Bo.”

“Yeah, those smoochin’ good looks of yours draws ’em in like a landing grid, especially the geeka girls in the Tech Ministry. She knows her way around there, don’t she? The Secret City? Maybe has maps and floor plans and crap. Knows where each of the Names lives. Staff sizes.”

Domino Tight smiled crookedly. “Maybe. But of course you can’t actually tell me what the play is.”

Big Jacques spread his arms. “I didn’t tell you, did I? See what you can get from her.” He pushed himself to his feet and whistled, and five of the patrons in the bar stood, too. “Well, see ya ’round, Curly.”

“Or not.”

The Big Shadow left by the front, preceded and followed by his magpies. “Never leave by the way you came” was a maxim of the Abattoir. Domino Tight’s Number Two magpie had been sitting at the bar. Now she came by the booth. “I don’t even have to guess who that was,” she said. “How’s the analysis going?”

“I’m running a time series now.” His instrument pinged and, without missing a beat, he said, “I’ve just finished running a time series.” He glanced at the plot superimposed on a map of Cambertown. “Root! No wonder it took so long. The barycenter is nonstationary. Our bird is on the wing. He must have twigged, because it looks like he’s probing for us. Tell the flock to fall back on refuge…” He struck a random number generator. “… three.”

The magpie chirped. “Just like a pasdarm,” she said. “With a planet-sized arbor.”

A toss of the head gathered the other two magpies in the tavern. The banty man turned and for a moment locked eyes with Domino Tight before he professed interest in the engravings on the walls. “Out the back,” Tight told the magpies. “Standard formation. Taverner, what does your surveillance say?”

It was not a nice neighborhood. The man behind the bar checked his screens. “Alley-the rear empty be-presently…”

They each pulled dazers from their belts and tugged their hoods up over their heads. The tavern-keeper pretended not to notice. Just another day in the Seventh District.

Standard formation meant Number Five and Number Fourteen would go out first—one breaking to the left, one to the right—and Number Two would go out last as a rear-guard. But at the last moment, Number Two tugged Domino Tight by the shoulder and pushed out past him.

And that meant that when the Shadow came out last, he had a perfect view of his Number Two magpie as she was shot down from ambush. Dispersal armor could dissipate the pulse, attenuate the load density; but not if the shot was in the face. Two fell backward, her face blackened, her eyes melted, her lips and tongues blistered and congealed. Domino Tight used her toppling body for a momentary shield and broke left, away from the main boulevard. He tumbled into a protective doorway.

“Got the bitch!” cried Number Five, who shared the doorway. “She was over behind the trash bins. No escape. Suicide mission.” He glanced at his master. “Shoulda been you coming out third. Two had good instincts.”

“Aye. ‘Always do the unexpected.’ See that she’s tagged for pickup. She’ll go in the Rose Garden. Assassin have a second?”

“Don’t they always? Might have flown if he thought the primary succeeded. That’s ‘you’ lying on the alley over there.”

“Good theory. Test it.”

Number Five stepped out of the doorway, but with his face averted.

The pulse took him on the armor and he convulsed and dropped. From the other side, Number Fourteen spotted the backup and sliced him up with a flechette gun.

Domino Tight tugged on Five’s leg while Fourteen went to blacklight the two assassins. “You all right, mate?”

“Y-yes,” said Five. “Just j-jangled. Dispersal armor b-better than n-nothing, but n-not all that much b-better.”

The Shadow laughed. He had used that line himself.

“Pendragon’s chrysanthemum,” Fourteen told him over the link. “Both of them. Tag ’em for pickup?”

Domino Tight glanced at Number Two’s body. “No. Strip their identifiers. If Pendragon’s magpies think they’ll never sleep in the Rose Garden, they may hesitate to do his bidding.”

Fourteen looked at him from across the alley. “If we start pulling their identifiers, they’ll stat pulling ours,” he pointed out. “‘The dead take no sides,’” he quoted. “Everyone agreed on that chapter from the onset. They’re dead once, master. Why kill them a second time? What more can they do?”

Domino Tight sighed and wondered at the wisdom of a war fought with rules. “Very well, tag them.” Then he opened the link. “Listen, my flock,” he said. “The mum has found the lyre. Two has retired the service. Continue shifting. Who’s watching the crosshairs?”

“One and Twelve,” came the answer.

Domino Tight sighed again. Another agreed chapter was “Don’t spook the sheep.” Removing the Yuts’ga Talker was supposed to be a tragic accident. If it looked like assassination, the sheep-cops started asking cui bono. “One. Twelve,” he said. “Move the target. But move his protectors first.”

“Ah, so that is how to suck an egg!” That was One answering. Close enough to winning a name to treat with her master as an equal.

“Do it.” Domino Tight closed the link. “Right,” he told the others. “Let’s blow this place.”

At that point, he learned that the dead did sometimes take sides. Both assassins had worn dead-man’s packs, and when the timers ran out the blasts took Domino Tight and Number Five and left no trace of Number Fourteen but a thin film of oil on the paving.

“Not exactly what I meant,” murmured Domino Tight before darkness took him.

Big Jacques set up a command center in an old warehouse along the River Cola in the Fourteenth District of Cambertown. He was the sentimental sort and saw no reason to site a potential combat zone in an area frequented by the sheep. “We’re supposed to keep things on the q.t.,” he reminded his flock.

When he had his equipment set up and linked to the string of microsatellites he had strewn in orbit on his arrival, he took reports from his flock. Seven would take the ship to the forward libration point, near the ruins of an old Commonwealth habitat. One had remained at Inbound to follow Ekadrina when once she had appeared.

Two, who was monitoring planetary news distributors, said, “That a good idea, boss, leaving One up there? What if she spots him? We should bushwhack her at Arrival Groundside. She won’t be expecting you.”

Big Jacques leaned back on the shipping crate he had appropriated for a seat and linked his hands behind his head. “First off, One has one of those baby faces that blends right in with the sheep. Looks innocent.”

“No one’s that innocent.”

“Said he looked it; didn’t say he was. Second off, a bushwhack at Arrivals ain’t artistic. Thing that griped me most about the Life was hunting down all those sheep. A corrupt governor, an uppity businessman, an ambitious swoswai. All they do is whine and cower when you corner ’em. What sport, that? Third off, Yuts’ga’s got five spaceports. Where do we set up the ambush?”

“She’ll come down here, won’t she?” the magpie asked. “At Number Three. I mean, she’s coming to meet with Pendragon, and he’s set up here in Cambertown.”

“Yeah, and so’s Curly. Getting crowded. But maybe she comes down at Spaceport Two and takes skimmers over here. Main Rule of Arrivals?”

Two sighed. “‘Never the obvious.’”

“Yeah.” Big Jacques looked around his command center and wondered if he was being too obvious about using isolated locations. “Six,” he said, “take a couple of the boys and set up a dummy command center somewhere else. Somewhere I might have chosen. No, don’t tell me where ’less I got need-to-know. Keep an eye on the dummy from a sniper nest and see if anyone shows an interest. Make it a little more obvious than here. Use the playbook. Funnel all the comm traffic through there, but keep the link between here and the dummy site deep in the black. Two: Nothing goes in and out of here except through the funnel.”

For a few moments bustle engulfed the warehouse as the subteam formed up, commandeered equipment, and departed. Two watched them go, then flipped up his data goggles. “Think Six is ready to solo?”

“Were you? If the ruse works, it works. If not…” The big man shrugged.

“If the ruse works,” said Two, “Lady Ekadrina and her whole flock could come down on them.”

“That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”

“Master, we are in rebellion. We are not getting paid.”

“Oh, yeah. Then we’re doing this for honor. Hey, drop the kid a message and remind him to have his boys sneak in and out of the center now and then. Foot traffic, you know.”

“Nasty job,” said Two, “when the prey is just as able to pot you. Give me the low hanging fruit any day.”

“That’s how you get soft, Two.”

“Hold one…” Two held a hand to his ear, listened, then flipped down his goggles and started scanning the planetary network. “What was the name of that tavern where Lord Domino … The Mountain Dragon? The news dispensers here say there was an explosion there. Power cell overload or something.”

Big Jacques grunted. “Or something. Body count?”

“Ah … The sheep are being assured that the tavern itself was undamaged and will be serving Bartholomew Black as usual in the morning. No mention of bodies.”

“That’s nice.”

“Local bobs are investigating and the Riff of Yuts’ga is flying in from Great Hardwick in case there are Confederal implications.”

“In case.”

“Does the Riff know we’re on-world?”

“Not if you ain’t told him.” Jacques tapped his comm box. “My skinny tells me the Yutsgar Riff is a loyalist. So Pendragon maybe gave him a heads-up.”

“And…” Number Two listened again. “… Number One reports Lady Ekadrina’s ship entering parking orbit.”

Jacques considered that. “I hate coincidences.”

Domino Tight felt a numbness all over his body, as if he had been sealed away from the outside world and nothing in it could touch him anymore. His head, lolling to the side, saw nothing but the back door of the tavern and the boneless body of Five. Something sharp had been accelerated by the explosion and protruded slightly from the back of the man’s head, and Domino Tight could see enough of it to be glad he could see no more. His ears rang, and sounds also seemed far away, beyond the barrier encasing him.

But his vision had brightened, and with it, his spirits. Some of his colleagues liked to talk about “a life unworthy of life,” but when presented with the thing itself, Domino Tight found it always worthy enough.

The tavern door opened, and the banty man stepped into the alleyway. Oh, yes, he was in the Life! Look at the way he stepped, at the way his topaz eyes sought out threats, at the ready manner in which his dazer hunted out hidey-holes and snipers’ nests. And only when satisfied, did he step clear and to the side of Domino Tight.

He walked at an eerily canted angle, but the Shadow recognized that as the way his head was resting on the ground. His common sense, that integrated all of his sights and sounds and kinesthesia into a common image, was not yet in sync. The alley smelled orange.

“Do you wish surcease?” the stranger asked him. He held his dazer to the ready, muzzle pointing straight up.

Domino Tight tried to speak. “Tina,” he heard someone say, possibly himself, though it sounded like another. And why should he call on the young woman in the Gayshot Bo on far-off Dao Chetty?

The stranger’s bristles crinkled with his smile. “No one who calls on a woman is yet ready to depart. Quickly, tell me. Are you with the rebels or the loyalists?” He had reached into his pouch and removed a packet of some sort.

The Shadow gasped, and whispered, “Which do you want me with?”

The other man laughed— and Domino Tight glimpsed teeth sharper than a man’s ought be. He looked to the right, toward Fishbound Street. “I can’t stay here. The smart move is to leave you, but … I don’t like ambushes. Right after you left, the taverner finished his sentence by adding ‘not’ to the end. He laughed, like he’d done something clever. I took care of that for you, in case you need company on the ferryboat.”

The stranger opened a tear in Tight’s spun armor and pulled the rip apart. He placed his packet on the chest of Domino Tight; then he struck it hammer-wise with his fist.

The Shadow felt nothing. His body remained laminated by the concussion, and the blow might as well have struck someone else. But fire ran through his body. A tingling returned to his fingers and toes. “Th-thank you,” he managed to gasp.

“Don’t be too sure I’ve done you a favor. The booster won’t set your broken bones. You’d best get yourself inside a meshinospidal right soon. For now, adieu.” And the stranger stood, looked all directions, and vanished into the night.

Domino Tight found he could move his right arm. His right leg was not so fortunate, as he could see that it lay at more angles than knees and ankles could account for.

What the devil was a meshinospidal? His earwig had not yet resumed functioning; might need to be replaced entirely. It sounded vaguely like …

He snatched the spent emergency packet from his chest and held it to his still immobile face so that he could see the instructions upon it.

Printed in Gaelactic.

His savior had been a Hound of the Ardry.

Domino Tight laughed. He would take help whence it came and not ask too closely after it. He released the packet and the wind funneled by the alleyway caught it and it tumbled away toward Fishbound Street. “Tina,” he said again.

And the air rippled and a woman stood before him, having just thrown a cloak back over her shoulder. Her mouth opened in an O and she knelt by his side, probing for his hurts.

Perhaps he was delusional from the concussion. First a Hound where no Hound ought by rights to be; then a woman appearing from nowhere.

“Tina!” he managed to say.

“I told you to call me if you ever found yourself in trouble. You should not have waited so long, my dearest.” Then she unhooked her cloak and spread it over the both of them, and the darkness enveloped Domino Tight once more.

Oschous Dee Karnatika brought Dark Horse into High Yuts’ga Orbit, watching from the command chair in the control room with Ravn and Donovan to either side. Manlius, now hale, had returned to his own ship and was on his way to the Century Suns to meet with Dawshoo. Yuts’ga was a major node on the network of interstellar “tubes” and the number of ships in port was considerable. It was not a difficult docking for all that, as the Long Moon had plenty of facilities, and long-term parking was shifted by valet over to the First Equilibrium point.

However, no one touches a Shadow’s ship but his trusted magpies. Oschous told Number One to “ping the parking” and see who was on-world.

Domino Tight and Pendragon Jones. Gidula. Big Jacques.

“Awfully crowded,” Donovan commented.

“Yuts’ga is a major node,” said Oschous. “Many pass through.”

“I thought Big Jacques was tracking Ekadrina,” Ravn said.

“He was. Either he gave up, or…”

“Or he didn’t. Is her ship here?”

“Not overtly.” Oschous dropped the screen to the table. “There’s one other ship that didn’t respond to the ping. Courier, maybe, passing through and traveling dark.”

“I don’t like this,” Ravn said. “We’re starting to go straight after each other.”

Oschous swung his seat to look at her. “We’ve turned over glasses ere now. Some on our side; some on theirs. Ekadrina is probably just doing a face-check on Pendragon.”

“I didn’t mean her. I meant Big Jacques. Sure, sometimes, trying to move or to protect an asset brought us into conflict. But Manlius go after Epri, and now Big Jacques go after Ekadrina, and not in pasdarm.”

“It’s the way these things work,” cracked the scarred man. “Gentlemen’s agreements require gentlemen to keep them.”

“Well, Yuts’ga big planet,” Ravn said. “Perhaps not all gone to same district, let alone same township.”

Oschous Dee grunted. “Don’t tempt the Fates, Ravn. They’ll send them there just to spite you. Number One!”

“Aye, master?” The magpie in the supervisor’s chair swung to face him.

“Monitor the channels that Domino Tight and Big Jacques use. Gidula, too. Sift the other channels for sign of Pendragon or Ekadrina. Commandeer the Yutsgar Union’s comsat network, if you must. And look for their personal satellites. Let me know what you catch. I don’t like the way this is developing, and I don’t want to go in blind. Ravn, Gesh, I’ll see you again at lunch. If anything develops before then, I’ll summon you.”

In the gray and gold corridor outside the control room, Ravn slipped her hand through Donovan’s arm. “Coom, my sweet,” she said, leading him off toward the lounge. “Perhaps we will sit and chat and I will let you have your way with me.”

Donovan allowed himself to be led. “Don’t be too wishful of that until you know what ‘my way’ is. Do you expect a big rumble down below?”

“Roomble? Anoother Terran woord? You must mean fight, a passage of arms.” Her teeth showed white against her lips. “Every thing will work oot fine. Once Ooschous pulls Doominoo off task, noo reason he and Pen fight. And Jacques maybe not find Ekadrina befoor she leave. Big woorld, noo?”

But Donovan shook his head. “No, it will all go to shit, and we will be in the middle of it.”

“You are sooch cheerful ooptimist … Boot we keep you out of it. You are too valooable to waste on sooch squabblings.”

“Why do I get the feeling that when you finally do waste me, it will be a really crappy situation.”

She patted his cheek with her free hand. “When oonly the best are needed.”

“You know, it’s not like I’m incapable…”

“Hoosh, my darling. Remember my advice.”

“Oschous knows. There are no flies on him.”

“Noo flies? You have the foony way of speaking. Come, in here.”

The ship’s lounge was broad and circular, decorated in silver and black. On the wall were embedded a shifting array of images: places where Oschous had been, magpies that had been in his service. Game consoles, spool racks, desks, and craft stations stood about the room. Save at the beginning and the end, interstellar journeys consisted primarily of doing nothing. Some of that was taken up in training and exercise, but there was such as thing as overtraining, so everyone in the crew had developed a hobby or interest. Magpie Four Karnatika, for example, was preparing an anthropological study of the Regensthorp Sector; Magpie Six engaged herself in clay sculpture.

Two magpies were present when Ravn and Donovan entered, one reading a screen, the other playing battle chess on a projection stage. Olafsdottr waved her arms about. “Go! Go, scat! Doonoovan would make passionate loov to me, and wishes noo audience.”

The magpies laughed and one said, “I’d want no audience either, was I him.” But they gathered up their things and left the lounge, still laughing.

Donovan frowned. “Why did you tell them that…?”

But Ravn scythed him with an ankle sweep and he fell onto the sofa with Ravn atop him. She wrapped arms and legs around him, and it was like being baled up in wire. He could not move. “What the hell…?”

“Hush, my sweet,” she whispered in his ear in the Gaelactic. “Listen, and listen. Oschous was bound to learn that you are hale. That could not be helped. But Gidula is the key. Whatever you do—and as long as we lie here on this couch, sweet, you may do whatever you wish—do not let Gidula know your sundry selves have come together. Billy Chins’ last message told him that you were a broken man. That is what he expected when he had me fetch you, and that is what you must show him.”

Donovan pulled his head back enough to see genuine fear in the eyes of Ravn Olafsdottr. “Why…?” he whispered. But Ravn kissed him to stop the question; then, nuzzling his neck, she whispered again.

“Do not ask questions for which I cannot yet give you answers. The caution is sufficient unto the day. It is worth your life, and mine.”

“Will not Oschous tell him…?”

“Hush. Oschous is clever. Knowledge is power. He does give it away. Mmm, you are good kisser.”

“When I have to, I can play a role.” Once again, he found his words smothered.

“Tell me,” Ravn whispered between kisses. “Whatever. Become. Of Billy. Chins.”

“He retired.”

Ravn fell still for a moment. “How … sad,” she said.

“He wasn’t too happy about it, either; but I wasn’t ready to retire myself.”

“How fortunate for my present pleasures, then,” Olafsdottr said and resumed her caresses. When a time went by with no further warnings, Donovan disengaged.

“Anything else?”

“Ooh, my sweet. We must not be too obvious that this roll was only a role; that this ‘seduce’ was but a ruse. Play the game to completion, darling. I told you before that we would become good friends someday. What better day than today?”

But if no drug could ever completely dull the whole of Donovan buigh, if no rite of meditation could ever completely entrance him, neither could the rush and flow of enzymes entirely engage his mind. The Silky Voice was seduced; but the Fudir stood aside, faithful to the memory of a woman who hated him, and Inner Child, as always, kept watch, and the Sleuth tried to deduce what it all meant.

Who does she want this conversation kept secret from? he asked the Fudir.

Oschous. Who else has eyed and eared this vessel? The question is what did she want kept secret from him. Not the condition of our mind. He already knows.

Oh, that is obvious. What she conceals from our host is that Gidula mustn’t know. And notice what she said.

Do not ask questions for which I cannot yet give you answers, the Pedant helpfully reminded them.

Cannot yet give the answers; not that she does not yet know them.

To a nonnative speaker, the distinction between “cannot’” and “can not” may …

Shut up, Pedant. How are Donovan and the others doing?

Yes, thought the Fudir. There is more than a peck of trouble here, and it’s not all down on Yuts’ga at all.