In the end, after a great deal of consideration and discussion, Arran and Phoebus had reluctantly decided between themselves upon taking but a single ship, principally because their patron had described their present mission as “a preliminary reconnaissance.” They would play the turtle then, in terms of tactics, rather than the tiger. And if need be, they would play the rabbit, unashamedly showing their heels to any well-found enemy they happened to meet, living to report to their mistress, and then to come back and fight another day.
That ship would be the long-legged, extraordinarily well-armed Osprey, with Arran in overall command and Phoebus acting as his first officer and chief gunner. Combining their two ships’ crews would greatly reduce the need to recruit more. And best of all, for the most part, they could keep their designs “within the family,” as it were, of long and well-trusted men and women.
During their necessarily prolonged sojourn upon the cloudy capital world, the women of the Islay family, mother and daughter, remained in residence at the palatial Daimler-Wilkinson town mansion, which was certainly no more than as it should have been, since Loreanna happened to be her late father Clive’s rightful heir. Clive’s widow Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson might have disputed such a claim, but had betrayed no inclination to do so, appearing well content to let her daughter act as mistress of the house. Loreanna’s half brother, the wild youth Woulf, had been a houseguest, along with his mother, at the family establishment even before Loreanna and her family had arrived upon the planet. As the mighty labor in synchronous orbit continued apace—supplies, tools, and spares being shifted from one vessel to another—boredom had set in below.
“You have managed, somehow, to ingratiate yourself to some degree with my mother and to a lesser degree—because the latter is absent most of the time—with my father. Pray do not deceive yourself that it will be so easy with me.”
Bretta had been blessedly alone, high in the rooftop solarium—the name for which, of course, was an utter joke upon this world of eternal overcast—watching Brougham and his minions scrubbing blast streaks off the transparency that her father’s steam launch had left the day before, arriving and departing the platform not ten measures away. Briefly, she wondered what those streaks must be composed of, since the auxiliary vessel’s exhaust byproducts consisted principally of water vapor—she must remember to ask—but what a spectacle it would have been, she thought, to have watched the landing and takeoff from here!
To the tremendous annoyance of a suspicious and hostile young Skyan, her new “uncle” (she still thought of him that way, in quotation marks) had taken it upon himself just now to deprive her of her long-sought and highly valued solitude.
Her brusque response was to an innocent opening remark he had made. He replied, “My guess, Robretta Islay, is that there is nothing at all easy about you.”
She rather liked that, and had to rein herself in, to remain properly indignant with him. There was something about the clothing she was wearing which made that especially difficult. “In this, sir, you are quite correct, for it is the way my father has brought me up. Ours is a hard life upon a frontier world, not to mention aboard ship. It requires hard people to live it.”
Woulf nodded agreeably. His manner was disarmingly open and frank, his speech better cultured than his appearance. “My life, and my mother’s, have been soft by comparison, I suppose, spent in the relatively luxurious sewers and posh back alleys of the cities of a hundred worlds, where merely looking about too eagerly for a place to sleep can earn you a smile—from ear to ear.”
He made a broad, curving, throat-slitting motion and a horrible noise she had first heard when, her hunting knife clenched in her bloody fist, she had penetrated the body cavity of the first large forest animal she had ever killed.
She was stunned.
He grinned.
She laughed.
Then they were both laughing and slapping one another on the back, tears running from their eyes, as Brougham peered at them distressfully through the transparency.
As Woulf wiped his eyes a final time, he told her, “Truthfully, niece, I am here because I overheard this stupidity about women not being permitted to venture into the streets of Hanover unescorted. I have also heard something about life upon the planet Skye, and understood that this absurd rule would be intolerable to you. So I thought to ask whether you desire an ‘escort’ in an exploration of the city that you would invariably attempt, with or without such.”
Ceo blast his baby blue eyes—the curse was a result of Phoebus Krumm’s influence, the only aspect of the fellow her mother deplored—how could he know her that well? For the first time, she gave her uncle an evaluating look.
Woulf was not a big man—he scarcely stood as tall as Bretta—but he was quick of reflex and well muscled. She had even noticed with approval that there were hard spots upon his hands which spoke of honest toil. She approved less of the fact that it was difficult to tell which part of him was tanned and which was dirty with an urban kind of grime that never seemed to wash out. His hair was dark and shoulder-blade long, but not as clean as it might have been. His clothing was subdued in color and hung about his body, almost in tatters. Only his light, soft shoes and the long, flat scabbard upon his hip with the dark, knurled metal hilt protruding from it, spoke of any care or grooming.
“How exceptionally thoughtful of you, Uncle.” And she discovered that she meant it. By the Black Void itself, were those dimples she felt forming in her cheeks, entirely of their own accord, like malignant organisms of some variety? First freckles, then this. And just exactly what was happening to her, beneath the lacy bodice of her dress? “I accept your offer, sir, most gratefully—provided that the very first place we shall stop will be a tailor.”
More than anything, the accord that eventually developed between Bretta and Woulf was a matter of cultural contrasts—between the pair of them, and between them and the world in which they found themselves unwillingly. Arran Islay’s daughter was, above all, a hardworking, stoic frontier girl, from a hardworking, stoic frontier world. The worst epithet she had ever thought of to employ against another human being, and her version of an obscenity, was “useless.”
Over the next several weeks that she whiled away in her uncle’s company, Bretta discovered the worldwide city of Hanover to be quite an interesting place, despite her initial prejudices against it, with its many historical monuments, museums, interplanetary zoos, botanical gardens, aquaria, and other attractions. There were buildings to see that stood several klommes tall, and subterranean habitations to explore which had been dug just as many klommes deep.
Together, they slipped into the visitors’ gallery of the great ’Droom of the Monopolity itself, crowded appendage to appendage with human and alien tourists alike, and experienced a guided trek through the Ceo Lia’s palace as mere anonymous tourists. Bretta surprised herself again and again, finding that she especially enjoyed visiting shops of every variety imaginable which abounded within the planet-enwrapping city. For her own part, her mother, astonished at all of this sudden enthusiasm, bestowed upon her a generous allowance. Bretta was quietly determined to spend every Hanoverian clavis of it.
Upon the other hand, the girl soon found herself severely disimpressed with the people who inhabited the Hanoverian metropolis, and came almost to feel as if they were all spoiling it for her deliberately. If they would just go away, she thought (and became perhaps the trillionth individual ever to do so), it would be grand. She tried—with a remarkable degree of maturity—to be tolerant and make allowances. But as a matter of plain fact, she found her revulsion with the great city’s inhabitants increasing, virtually by the hour.
For one thing, none of them smelled much better than Woulf or his mother did. Nor was it particularly long before she came likewise to despise their studied ineffectuality and their effete, overly civilized mannerisms. Bretta abominated helplessness—she hated it even more than uselessness—in any sapient being. The stylish, feigned helplessn
ess of the affectedly fettered Hanoverian women she encountered in her explorations of the city revolted her utterly. As for the lisping, limp-wristed responses of their—theoretically—male counterparts, she found that even more revolting, if such a thing was possible. She caught herself making excuses to avoid shaking hands with every individual she was introduced to; she could not bear the moist softness of their overly pampered flesh. And afterward, she could never bring herself, in ordinary conversation, to refer to these self-emasculated urban specimens as “men.”
How pathetic and ridiculous they all were, in their masquerade play-party costumes which her father and mother had inadvertently inspired. To Bretta, it was as if the entire planet of Hanover were inhabited by eunuchs dressed as clowns!
And perhaps most intolerable of all, these wretchedly affected creatures, not one of whom could have survived upon his own for as much as half an hour, were he dropped into the deep everblue forests of her increasingly beloved Skye (Bretta was unaware that, fifteen years earlier, under different circumstances, her father had fondly imagined exactly the same event) actually believed that they could look down their elevated, snotty noses at vital frontier worlds like her own!
Young Woulf, by unmistakable contrast, appeared to abide in a quiet—if somewhat grubby and bedraggled—strength. To Bretta, he might as well have belonged to a different plane of existence, or at least a different species of animal, altogether, one that she—and several increasingly suicidal tailors in rapid and acrimonious succession—had difficulty finding suitable attire for.
It was at the commercial establishment of the last of these desperate souls that she received an urgent message from the Daimler-Wilkinson mansion—implying that her father was maintaining some sort of watch over her, as well.
“This is Robretta Islay speaking,” she informed the portable view screen at present hanging before her eyes. Beyond it, she watched a silent struggle taking place between Woulf and a fitter. Both of these worthies seemed to be taking it personally, in their own characteristic ways, that the sleeves of a velvet jacket outfitted with lace cuffs could be rolled up to his elbows only at the cost of destroying both the desired sartorial effect, and the garment itself.
The screen resolved itself into an image of her grandmother. “Robretta, my child, wherever you happen to be at the moment, you must return home immediately!”
A sick, paralyzing fear coursed through the girl’s body as she suddenly thought of everything that could happen to Arran, working upon his ship in orbit.
“I greatly fear for the safety of your dear mother,” Owld Jenn told her, however. To Bretta, the old woman seemed uncharacteristically lucid. Perhaps it was on account of an adrenaline-charged terror that she was in danger of losing her only daughter for a second time. “They say she is about to be arrested!”
The screen went blank.
CHAPTER XXI:
NOBLE SAVAGES
Together, Bretta and Woulf hurried out the door of the shop into the street, the latter trailing pieces of the suit which the tailor had been fitting to him. Behind them, the tailor shouted at them, shook his fist at the sky, and cursed.
Bretta hailed a passing conveyance-for-hire, while Woulf disposed of the remains of his suit. They leapt in, she spoke the name of the family mansion, and they were off—until, a few blocks later, when Woulf cried, “Stop the machine!”
He turned to her in his seat, laying a hand upon her arm. “I have seen many an urban constabulary, Bretta, and remember all too well the way they work. In a city upon one planet I recall, I watched them burn down an orphanage in order to ‘save’ the children within, who were all killed by the fire they set. Will you believe me when I tell you they were all given medals for their ‘valor’?”
She raised her eyebrows.
He nodded confirmation.
“That message from my mother was cut off by whatever jack-booted thugs are trying to arrest your mother. It is standard operating procedure and all a part of state terrorist tactics. Most likely they have the town house under siege by now, surrounded by a hundred thrustibles. And they will have their plainclothes agents out, trying to find you—which is why I thought it wise to get away from that threadmonger as quickly as we could. Now, contact your father if you can, from that street screen. Then will we continue to the mansion.”
It sounded like good advice to Bretta, and she had every reason to believe him about the police. Woulf was as wise in the ways of the town as she was in the ways of field and forest. She observed his face, however, understanding that the bright, clean avenues they traveled now were territory quite as alien to him as to her. Woulf, she knew, had arisen from the raw underbelly of that most human of institutions, the megapolis. He had survived in many such, upon many worlds, in many imperia-conglomerate. But his home ground was the gritty, utilitarian, dark, and seamy part of the urban arena where tough-minded values and skills had saved his life and his mother’s upon many an occasion. It was an environment Bretta had been aware of only from her reading, but Woulf’s were the same tough-minded values and skills, she could not help but persuade herself, that she herself had been brought up by her parents to practice and cherish.
Of a sudden, Bretta warned herself: history demonstrates clearly that to thoughtful individuals everywhere, and in all times, shared values have always been a powerful aphrodisiac. So, for that matter, she thought, have shared dangers.
Mindful once again of what she carried beneath the sleeve of her dress, she stepped from the machine and dropped a coin into the communicator, giving it a code her father had given her in case of an emergency like this. Neither Arran nor Phoebus answered. Instead, she saw a card upon the screen that told her the device she was connected to had no visual component. And she heard a voice.
“This here’s corvette Osprey, an Third Officer Savage ye’er speakiri to.”
“Fionaleigh, is that you?”
Not “armed cargo vessel Osprey,” Bretta noticed, but “corvette.” Her father had put his crew upon a wartime footing. The answering voice had been that of Phoebus Krumm’s longtime first officer. The woman had also been her uncle Robret’s mistress upon Skye, in the dark days of the Black Usurpation. Now, apparently, she was integrated into the Osprey’s complement. Bretta wondered how her long-dead uncle’s unwedded wife felt about that. She never even considered the possibility that Lia might not know; no such possibility existed.
“An’ who else would it be, Bretta me lass, answerin’ squawker wi’me name? I’d say ye’d grown foot, but wi’this comset, it might’swell be growin’ from yer head. Now tell Fionaleigh what she can do for daughter o’ Henry Martyn.”
Bretta told Fionaleigh about the message she had received from Jennivere Daimler-Wilkinson. Arran and Krumm were with Sedgeley, as it happened, down here upon the planet’s surface, at the ’Droom, speaking with some of Lia’s political allies. The Osprey’s third officer was in possession of a screen code that would reach them in extreme need, and she promised to attend to it straightaway.
She made Bretta promise to be careful.
Bretta rang off, rejoined Woulf in the conveyance, and immediately broke her promise to Fionaleigh, ordering the machine to resume its progress, and to stop at the next street over from the Daimler-Wilkinson establishment. She had suddenly remembered something her mother had told her recently about the house.
“The foundations of the building go back,” she told Woulf, as people and lampposts flew by her window, “almost to the original settlement of the planet—some believe that was about nine hundred years ago. It would appear that this world was, from time to time, not entirely as sedate and civilized as we see it now.”
“I see,” Woulf replied. “You regard this situation as ‘sedate and civilized’?”
Bretta shook her head, ignoring the digression. “At the rear of the back garden of the house there is a gazebo—although why anyone would wish to sit outdoors upon this drizzly ball of rock, I cannot imagine. In any event, the gazebo boas
ts a trapdoor in its floor, opening upon a tunnel leading directly into the cellars of the house. It was intended as an emergency escape route. I rather doubt that its builders ever visualized its being used to get back inside.”
“I doubt it, too,” Woulf agreed. “Be that as it may, what have you for weapons?”
She showed him the lens of her thrustible. He was suitably impressed. Then she told him, “Turn away, if you please, while I retrieve another item we may require.”
Woulf obeyed, hearing the rustle of her skirt and petticoats. When she told him to look again, she held a sizable knife before his eyes, one that nearly triggered a killing reflex within him, although he managed to control it.
“I wish I had my crossbow with me, it is quiet. But I had to leave it home.”
The conveyance stopped; Bretta paid it. Together, they slipped through a back gate. Bretta was astonished at how silently Woulf was capable of moving. They could not see the front of the house, of course, but there were armed men at the back, standing about as if they had nothing to do. Their attention was focused upon the house itself; the gazebo had been deliberately constructed to be disregarded, in order to screen its users from the scrutiny of just such marauders.
Inside, Bretta had a bad moment when she could not seem to find the trapdoor, and an even worse one when she discovered that it had been painted shut, many times over. Woulf’s big black knife whispered from its sheath, however, and together they cut at the paint-filled joints in the floor until they were able to pry the trapdoor open. Immediately a musty smell wafted up to them, and a dense curtain of ancient cobwebs waved like seaweed in a gentle swell upon the ocean.
It was dark down there.
“Ladies first,” Woulf offered, raising a single, sardonic eyebrow.
“I have always wished I could do that,” she replied. The clothes she had been forced to wear made her feel utterly ridiculous. But, knife in her left hand, thrustible at the ready upon her right, she swung her legs over the edge.
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 20