Shadow of the Warmaster

8

By the time I got back to the trucetel, Adelaar and the others were waiting for me. There was a burn on one of Adelaar’s arms, the tip of Pels’ left ear was flat instead of round, but Kumari looked cool as mountain water. “Crawler,” she said. “We stayed in the bright instead of taking the tube run, put his timing off.”

“Business finished?”

“All done.”

“We paid up here?”

“More than paid, if you count the deposit.”

“Good. Order dinner for…” I frowned at my ringchron, surprised to find it was barely the third hour past noon. Seemed like it should’ve been closer to sundown. “Eighth hour. What’s the shuttle schedule like?”

“Midday, it’s usually fairly light. You want to take a chance?”

“Yeh. The paperwork’s done, the squirt link’s set up and Vnok is primed, better we leave before Bolodo thinks up something new.”

“Terminal,” Adelaar said suddenly; she’d been listening and looking peeved at being left out of things. Couldn’t help that, I wasn’t going to tell her about Vnok’s list until I had to and that wasn’t till we got wherever it was we were going. “The dinner ploy’s so old it stinks, it won’t fool anyone.”

“No problem. Remember Barker and his friends? I hired them to hang around the transfer point until we showed up. Gave us a discount, they did. Don’t like Crawlers any better than I do.”

Maybe it was Vnok pulling strings, maybe it was Luck coming round to kiss us sweet, but we got loose from Helvetia Perimeter in half the usual time and dipped into the insplit clean and lonesome.

We made Weersyll three weeks later. Security at the port was a joke; getting into the holding pens might have been a problem, but we weren’t going near the place. There was only one ship down and they kept searchlights sweeping the metacrete around it, the flickering light and shadow making ideal conditions for Pels. The guards at the gates had obviously been warned to look out for intruders, but they weren’t really interested in anything except giving the haulers a hard time, making them unload crates and open them up so the contents could be inspected. One time, just for the hell of it, seemed to me, they shot up some crates of frozen poults to the vast and vocal annoyance of the cargomaster waiting for them. No bloodoons or sniffoons, no heatseekers. A joke. Pels put a packet of ticks in his mouth, turned on his camouflage and walked through the gate, then climbed on a flat as it trundled through after him and rode in comfort to the ship. He set the ticks and rode the flat out again, ignored by one and all. And that was that.

1. Eight months std. after Adelaar hired Quale.

Asteroid Belt/Horgul system/Swardheld Quale et al. With Slancy Orza tucked neatly out of sight on a large stone asteroid.

Pels scratched at his healing ear. “Four and Five are inhabited. Five looked to me like a penal colony, I saw an insystem ship eject half a dozen pods and leave orbit before they were down; obviously no one cared whether they landed in one piece or not or what happened to the people in them. The Transport went down on Four, so I thought better not send EYEs there yet, I didn’t want Bolodo techs picking up search traces and following them back to us. There’s another reason, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve had EYEs poking about Five since we got here, I figured I could get some idea what we’re facing from the convicts, if that’s what they were. They are. The place has evidently been a dumping ground for quite a while, some of the buildings down there are old enough to have great-grandpups. What we’re facing, mm. Good news and bad news. The good is we’ve got a fair version of the local language in MEMORY. A little updating and we’re home free on that. Remember Hordaradda? You picked up some plants there, the ones you delivered to University the time we met.”

“I remember. Yes. Hordar?”

“Looks like.”

“And the bad news?”

“The bad news. Bolodo landed on Four. Which means the head whosis is there, government records will be there, including the list of the two-legged cargo Bolodo’s been supplying the past however many years, their names and whereabouts. We need that list.” He dug his claws into the fur under his chin. “Which means we’ve got to go there and get it.” He sucked in a long breath, let it trickle through his blunt black nose. “You know what’s orbiting that mudball, Swar? Riding in synchronous orbit over what’s probably the capital city? A Monarch class Warmaster,” he was speaking slowly, enunciating his words with much care, “and it’s working just fine, far as I can tell; I didn’t hang about long after I saw what she was and felt her start sniffing after who it was making waves around her. She’s old, but those things were built to last. I wouldn’t want to try sneaking Slancy down past her.”

Quale slumped in his chair, crossed his legs at the ankles and contemplated the screen with its schematic of the system, green dots marking the location of the two worlds they were interested in and some slowly shifting red dots that were insystem ships traveling between those worlds. He ruffled his fingers through the short hairs of his beard, stroked his mustache. Watching him, Adelaar felt like screaming: shave that fungus off if that’s all you can do, sit there fondling it. There were things going on here she didn’t understand, more to getting that list than finding out where Aslan was. I’m paying you, I own you for the next few months, she told herself, but it didn’t help, she was a passenger and he was running the game. I could have done all this myself, she thought, I wouldn’t need him if I had a ship of my own… She swore under her breath, she’d put off and put off buying her own ship, it seemed such an unnecessary expense, what with upkeep and fuel and crew and most of all mooring fees, so much easier to buy space on a freighter or a Worldship. What’s going on here? I won’t be a passenger. I won’t be pushed into a closet and left out of things…

“No,” Quale said. “No, we won’t take Slancy anywhere near that thing.”

“Swar.”

“Kri?”

“Kinok says don’t be so spooky. If there was anyone onboard who really knew how to operate her, she would have picked us up the moment we came this side of the Limit and ashed us before we knew what was happening.”

“That’s supposed to be comforting?”

Kumari hiss/rattled her amusement. “Ve says, we’re alive, aren’t we. Why should we need comforting?”

“Teach me to argue with a Sikkul Paem.”

“I doubt it.”

“Mmh.” He watched the screen a moment longer. “Looks like there’s a fair amount of traffic out this way.”

Pels extruded his claws, began picking away old horn. “There’s some mining the next quadrant over. Not a lot, mostly rare earths, things they might be short of on Four. And there’s some trade between Five and Four. Mainly gemstones, furs and ivory.”

“From the readings, those ships aren’t much bigger than the tug. Say we left Slancy out here, we might be able to use the cargo carriers as stalking horses, make believe we’re one of them. What you think, Kri?”

She tilted her head, listened a minute. “Kinok says maybe so, but ve needs more time to analyze the emissions.” She studied the screen. “The touchy moment is when we have to break loose from the pattern. Pels, I don’t see any satellite traces. Is that right, or were you too leery of the Warship to hunt for them?”

He rumbled a mock growl deep in his throat. “I’m not putting a pip near that world until I absolutely have to.”

“You absolutely have to fairly soon, furface. I can’t plan if I don’t have data.” She listened again, eyes closed, nodding at intervals. “Got it.” She swung her chair around. “Kinok says ve needs to watch say four or five of those ships landing; ve says, Pels, lay out some passive EYEs, ve swears on the drives the Warmaster won’t eat you.”

Pels growled again. “And you tell ve to go twist veself; ve makes any more little jokes like that and I’ll have ve for salad my next meal.

Kumari listened again, shook her head. “No, Kinok, I’ll let you tell furface that yourself, save it for the next time you see him. Swar, Kinok thinks as long as we keep the tug to local speeds, the Warmaster won’t get nervous about us. Ve says, though, it’s very important before we do anything, that ve has the landing data. Ve can handle salad threats, but ve has no desire at all to achieve vaporization.”

Adelaar watched impatiently, her fingers tapping a jittery rhythm on her thigh. Now that she was so close, her blood was on fire to finish it. Her mind told her that this careful probing and planning was essential, her body told her GO. If she were doing the observation, if she were directing things, she could be crisp and calm and efficient and all that. She wasn’t. She was more useless than the baggage in the hold. And it was driving her crazy.

“Right. Pels, you’d better get started with those EYEs. The sooner you slide them into orbit, the sooner you can fetch them back so we can read them off and get on with this.” He watched the Rau pad out, then gazed at Adelaar, his fingers poking in his beard again, then he turned his head to Kumari. “I suppose it’s time.”

“Might as well get it over with.” Kumari turned her pale gray eyes on Adelaar, sat with her hands folded, cool and disengaged.

Adelaar forced the tension out of her hands and arms; as cool as Kumari, she said, “I’m paying freight here, I have a right to know what you’re doing.”

Quale pinched the end of his nose. “You heard us talking about ti Vnok.”

“So?”

“Jaszaca ti Vnok. Agent. Among other things, he’s been handling offers from relatives and so on of people who’d dropped down a hole somewhere. They want them back. Most of them couldn’t afford Hunters Inc., but they did the next best thing and put a reward offer in ti Vnok’s files. He gets his cut if he manages to connect with someone who’ll do the digging, the rest goes to the digger if he’s lucky enough to find one of the disappeared. A few years ago he tried getting us interested, but we couldn’t afford to waste time on a cause as lost as that with no payback unless we actually produced the body. Not our kind of project anyway. Then you come along and it begins to look like some of those lost might have gone down the same hole your daughter did.” He scratched at his jaw, fingers digging through the short soft black beard. “We have a partial list which we’re going to try matching against the one in those files Pels was talking about. You said it yourself a while back, two flights a year for fifty, sixty years, maybe more, that adds up to a lot of bodies. We match ’em, snatch ’em, take ’em back to Helvetia and go home with a nice fattener for the pot.”

“Earned with information I collected, information I nearly got killed for. My information.”

“You might say that.”

“Might!”

“You’ll get your daughter back. That’s what you hired us for. Don’t you think it’s a bit premature getting steamed over a side bet that hasn’t paid off yet? That might never pay off?”

He was being so sweetly reasonable he couldn’t know it made her want to tear his throat out. Kumari stirred. “Swar, behave yourself.”

His brow shot up, he looked amused and rueful and he stopped talking.

Kumari stroked her fine white hair. “You don’t think we’re cheating you.” It wasn’t a question.

Adelaar clamped her lower lip between her teeth and said nothing.

“You are a rational being, aici Arash,” Kumari went on. “Use your brain, not your spleen. There is another aspect to this worth considering. The more witnesses we return to Helvetia, the safer you and your daughter will be. If we find even a tenth of them, you and Aslan won’t be the only ones telling the tale, your credibility won’t be attacked so vehemently and probably destroyed, your lives won’t be put at risk. Some of those on the list have powerful connections. If I were you, aici Arash, I would pray to whatever gods I recognized that we locate a goodly number of them and get them safely away.”

“I can’t dispute that,” Adelaar said, her anger ashes in her throat. “But you should have told me before this.”

Kumari’s pale rose mouth curved into a slow smile. “Would you have done so, Adelaar Adelaris-na? Would you have told us about the attacks on your life before the bargain was made if Fate had given you that choice?”

It wasn’t a question Adelaar felt like answering. She said instead, “So, what happens now?”