Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  I set the bar down and felt for the view panel, suddenly wishing I’d brought a light after all. There was a slot-head screw in each corner of the cover plate. I’d lubed each of them on my first visit to the passage, but I hadn’t come back to open them.

  I fitted the screwdriver, gripped the handle with both hands, and leaned against the butt to keep it in contact. To my great relief, the first three cracked free when I turned them out.

  When I started to turn the last one, the plate itself swung down as the screwhead loosened. The screech of rusted metal probably wasn’t loud anywhere but in the sealed passage, but despite my startlement I was also relieved that I’d been able to open the thing. I hadn’t really been sure until it happened.

  “Are you there?” a girl asked from the other side of the heavy screen. “Can you get me out of here? I can pay well!”

  “I’m here,” I said, looking out at the back of a blond head. “But getting you out is going to take a while. I plan to do it.”

  “Can you watch for anyone coming up behind me?” the woman said. She got up and turned her wicker chair around, then sat down again facing where I stood. Her lips were farther away, but I could see them—which really would help me understand her words.

  “Who are you?” Monica said. “And how were you able to send me a message in the package of hot sauce?”

  “Look, I’m a friend,” I said. “And I want to get you out of here, but it takes planning.”

  I was afraid to tell her my name. I didn’t know whether she was the sort to blurt things to friends or scream threats to an enemy; and anyway, it wouldn’t help her to know.

  From what I’d seen from the cameras, Monica was about as solid as I could wish for. I was still afraid.

  The note was simple enough. I had gone to Roussel with the latest specialty order and told him to place it under the four bottles of Saguntine pepper sauce. If he did so without opening it, there would be a hundred piasters cash as soon as I was sure.

  The note said:

  If you want to get out, write YES on a card and place it where the camera in your room can see it. Then sit in the garden near the door through which the lemon tree came in. It may take some days for me to respond.

  If this note has been opened, write NO. I’ll find another way.

  “All right,” said Monica. She swallowed. “How can I help?”

  I could see to the cross wall past her blond head, but the opening was fairly narrow. It was possible that someone could approach from the side without me seeing them. That would require walking in the direct sun, but I still worried.

  Monica may have thought the same thing. She grinned and raised her open book slightly. “I’ve begun mumbling the words when I read,” she said. “It won’t surprise anyone. Only three of the other wives can read at all.”

  “Getting us off planet is going to be very hard,” I said. “You’re a Saguntine citizen, though, so you’re covered by treaty. I could get you to the Karst consul, and he could get you back to Saguntum.”

  “No!” Monica said, loud enough that she started herself. She turned her head to see if anybody else had heard her. Apparently not, because she faced me again and said, “He already knows I’m here. He won’t help. He doesn’t dare help!”

  “All right,” I said. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear but I’d have to take her word for it. “I’ll work something else out.”

  “Marc is coming over with a glass of sherbet!” Monica said, her voice dropping to a hiss. “When can we talk again?”

  “Keep coming here,” I said. “I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

  I swung the plate up over the screen. I fitted in a second screw with my fingers because I didn’t want to touch metal to metal while a eunuch might be right outside.

  Back to square one. Well, I’d get there.

  We’d get there.

  * * *

  On the way around toward the palace entrance, I said to Abram, “Do you know anything about the Karst consul?”

  “Platt?” He snorted. “Nothing that makes me want to know him better. What are you after?”

  “Anything you can get,” I said. “Everything.”

  Despite Monica’s violent response, it seemed to me that Platt was the best place to start. All I could find on the console about him was his rank, where he lived, and how many soldiers—six—were assigned for his protection.

  Foreigners generally had official guards with them when they went out. Most of Salaam was what would be called a slum on any civilized world, and the locals were likely to blame foreigners rather than accept the responsibility themselves. I’d been told there’d been riots in the past, but all that I’d heard of during my weeks on ben Yusuf were cases of stone throwing directed at merchants from off planet.

  I wore the feathered red cap of the palace, and mostly I was with Abram. I hadn’t had any trouble.

  I’d switched to going over the food deliveries, figuring my portion. It was about time for me to canvas the suppliers to pick up the cash I was owed. As a result I’d forgotten about Platt when Abram reappeared at my side.

  “Want to meet a couple guys?” he said when I’d paused and looked at him.

  “Sure,” I said. “Where and when?”

  “Right now,” Abram said. “And down to Etzil’s, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” I said, rising from the console.

  “Ah, this might cost something, you know,” Abram added with a frown.

  “That’s all right too,” I said as we headed for the stairs.

  I was carrying several thousand piasters in my money belt. Ben Yusuf didn’t have scrip or a real credit-banking system, but I was going to have to find something to do with my earnings pretty soon or I’d weigh too much to move around. Abram would probably have a suggestion.

  I’d just started my graft to give me pocket money, but it’d taken off almost by itself. I wondered what my dad would have thought?

  What I thought was that I ought to be ashamed of myself. I was stealing candy from babies, it was so easy. But I had to have money to get off planet, and this was the only way a slave could get it.

  The cafe was more crowded than it had been the first time I’d visited, but Etzil had moved other tables to a distance from the one the boy led us to. One of the two men already sitting there looked enough like Abram that they could have been related; the other was a foreigner whom I recalled sitting beside Platt during the slave auction.

  They already had wine in front of them. I waited till the boy served me and Abram, then said, “I’m hoping you gentlemen can give me information about Consul Platt. Can you?”

  “I guess we can,” said the local. “Whether we will or not, that’s something else.”

  “Yeah,” said the other man. “We work for the Karst consul so the Admiral doesn’t have any authority over us.”

  “You’d be compensated for anything you told me,” I said, giving them a friendly smile. “And so long as you never leave the consulate, you’re absolutely correct about the Admiral’s authority.”

  I paused and added, “His legal authority.”

  “Look, what is it you want to know?” the local said.

  I shrugged. “Start with the house,” I said. “How’s it arranged?”

  I didn’t see how that could help me, but it was all grist for the mill. Besides, it got them talking and allowed me to pay them for something that looked harmless. That would lubricate the process.

  “Well, it’s split in half,” the local said. “Half is consulate, but the other half’s where Platt lives with his family. They got a separate entrance.”

  “Family?” I said. I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Wife and three kids,” the local said. “She’s from Karst too, and a nastier bitch I don’t want to meet.”

  “He deserves her,” said the other man. “He figures he can treat me any bloody way he pleases because I can’t get off planet without him.”

  “I suppose that
’d take a lot of money?” I said.

  “Too bloody right!” he said. “Over a thousand pi, to get to Eski Marakech and buy passage on a freighter there.”

  “Platt has a local squeeze on the official side,” the local said. “He changes her every six months or so.”

  “I suppose the wife knows?” I said. “Servants talk, I mean.”

  “Hell yes, they talk!” the other man said. “Besides, she’s having it off with the chauffeur, so it’s not like she’s got a complaint.”

  I put a hundred-piaster coin in the middle of the table, then thought for a moment and slid it in front of the local man and brought a similar coin out. That one I put in front of the other man.

  “Go on,” I said. “They’re yours.”

  Their hands swept up the coins like lizards snapping flies. They looked at me. The local said, “That’s all you wanted to know?”

  “No,” I said, smiling again. “I believe that the consulate has a master computer. Is that so?”

  The local said, “Yeah, Abram said you’d probably want to know about that. That’s why I brought Ajax here.”

  The other man swallowed. “I run the console,” he said.

  “Can you give me electronic access to it?” I said. “Passwords, encryption—whatever I need to make full use of it?”

  The two men looked at one another. “For how much?” the local said.

  “Five hundred to Ajax right here,” I said. “After I’ve entered successfully, another fifteen hundred piasters to Ajax and”—I grinned at the local—“a thousand for you as a finder’s fee.”

  “Bloody hell,” Ajax murmured.

  “He’s a genius with the console!” Abram said, sounding like he meant it. If I’d really been a computer genius, I wouldn’t need the information I was buying. On the other hand, I had a good idea of what money could buy and how to buy those things.

  “How quickly can you get me the information?” I asked, taking coins out of my belt. I had them in pockets of five hundred piasters each.

  “How quick can you pay us?” the local said.

  “I’ll give you both your money,” I said, “as soon as I’ve entered Platt’s computer successfully.”

  I set the stack of five hundred-piaster coins in front of Ajax, but I kept my finger on top of it. “So,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Do we have a deal?”

  Ajax licked his lips and said, “Yeah, we got a deal. I’ll go back and get the codes. I can’t do it off the toppa my head. And look, I can’t get you into the consulate anyway!”

  “No problem,” I said, taking my finger off the coins and making a brushing motion with my hand toward Ajax. “You can give the information to Abram to bring back to me. I’ll give him the money for you as soon as it’s worked.”

  “I don’t want him to have our money!” the local man said.

  I shrugged. “All right, I’ll come down and pay you myself in the alley behind the palace,” I said. “Or you can come up to the chamberlain’s suite if you like. Abram can get you in, I’m sure.”

  I crooked an eyebrow. Abram nodded solemnly.

  Ajax swallowed. “Okay,” he said, sweeping up the money. “Abram can come with me now. I’ll write the codes down and come back with him. I’ll wait in the alley while he runs it up to you.”

  “We’ll wait in the alley,” the local man said. “And don’t screw around! Come right back with the money!”

  Or what? I thought, but I had no intention of stiffing them. “As soon as the codes work,” I said, nodding.

  * * *

  I went back to the palace and got to work. I liked to be seen at the console when Giorgios made one of his occasional passes through, though after my first few days on the job he’d never spoken to me about what I was doing.

  Orders were entered, directed to the proper vendors, marked as delivered, and paid as quickly as an invoice could work its way through the chancellor’s office. Which wasn’t very quickly, but that was outside my department.

  It seemed that so long as the job was getting done, the chamberlain didn’t care how that was happening. I’d been cheerful the few times he came by, but I wasn’t exactly welcoming. He was free to do anything he could on the console, but that was bloody little; and I didn’t set out to train him to do additional things.

  I was lost in maintenance accounts when Abram reappeared. He got my attention by stepping so close that he was almost leaning into the projected image. I raised a finger for attention, shut down what I was doing, and said, “What do you have?”

  He handed me a piece of paper, the inside of a wrapper from a container of toiletries from Karst. “They’re in a hurry,” he said.

  “They’ll wait,” I said as I began the process of connecting with the computer in the Karst consulate.

  Salaam didn’t really have an internet, but there were wired connections from the four off-planet consulates to the palace, as well as a connection between the palace and the Admiralty, which was the headquarters of the War Leader who would command the community’s ships in event of open warfare.

  That would only come about if another planet attacked ben Yusuf, which hadn’t happened in living memory. It was less expensive to make treaties with the pirate cities and pay tribute—it was called “indemnities”—for the privilege of placing consuls to safeguard captured citizens.

  I had my own opinion of that, but it was a political question and the Olfetries weren’t politicians. I’d joined—tried to join—the RCN, though, which I guess was my answer to the question.

  I reached the Karst computer, which I hadn’t been sure of doing, and keyed in the initial password—Demetrian. The site responded, albeit slowly.

  “I wonder why Demetrian?” I muttered, mostly to myself.

  Abram was standing close. He said, “That’s Ajax’s name, his last name. Why?”

  I looked at him. “It’s the password,” I said. “Can you read, Abram?”

  “Naw, it didn’t seem worth the effort,” he said. He tried not to sound defensive, but he turned his face away as he spoke.

  “It’s the main password for the computer,” I said. “I don’t think being able to read gains anybody much on ben Yusuf, no.”

  If I were going to stay, I’d see to it that somebody taught Abram to read. I looked at the computer directory, then opened the subdirectory marked CONSULATE. It required the second of three numerical passwords which Ajax had written under Demetrian.

  It was an inventory of consulate equipment. It included a ship, the Alfraz.

  I got up. “Let’s go give our friends their pay, Abram,” I said. “They’ve earned it.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  My money belt was a lot lighter as Ajax and his buddy walked out of the alley, but that didn’t matter. I had no use for ben Yusuf money except to get off ben Yusuf, and I still had this week’s round of the suppliers to make.

  We were alone in the alley, so it was a good place to talk. “Abram,” I said. “There’s a ship in the harbor named the Alfraz. I want to know what its status is, what crew; everything you can about it.”

  “I don’t know nuffing about ships,” Abram said, frowning.

  I grimaced, but it was the truth. Asking a layman to investigate a specialized subject wasn’t a good way to learn things.

  “Find out what you can,” I said. “They main thing I want to know is how much it’d take to get the ship ready to lift. And say—is Lal still around?”

  “I can ask,” Abram said. “He was in a spacers’ hostel because he doesn’t have family in Salaam.”

  “I’d like to see him,” I said. “Ah, Abram? Would it be possible for me to get a pistol here? I don’t want one right now, but could I?”

  “I guess,” said Abram. He looked like I’d told him to smother his pet dog. “It’ll cost you something, but I guess you don’t care about that.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said calmly. Abram sounded bitter. I could imagine several reasons, but frankly they didn’t matter. I wasn�
��t behaving the way he wanted me to, and he wasn’t willing to accept that it was none of his business.

  “Hey boss?” he said, looking up suddenly. “How many men does it take to crew a spaceship?”

  “It depends,” I said, “but half a dozen would be an ordinary short crew for a civilian ship. The one I was captured on had a crew of five.”

  “Well, I’ll see if I can turn up Lal,” Abram said. “Since that’s what you want.”

  When I didn’t walk with him toward the alley mouth, he stopped and said, “You’re not coming?”

  “Not just yet,” I said.

  “You’re a bloody fool,” he said and went off.

  I opened the alley door and slipped into the passage. I’d seen Monica through the garden camera when Abram called me down to meet Platt’s servants. I’d stuck the screwdriver in my pocket then.

  I removed the upper screw—I’d only put one back of the three I’d taken off originally—and the cover plate rotated clear. The sound was part squeal, part scrape.

  “Oh, thank the heavens!” Monica said, jolted alert in her chair. She was facing the opening when I peered through. “Where have you been?”

  “Working to get you free, mistress,” I said, polite but feeling a little miffed. It seemed to me obvious that this was a major job and that I had better things to do than chat with her.

  Though I’d really been looking forward to chatting with her again. And now I was doing that, and she was snarling at me.

  “Look, I’ve just spent thirty-two hundred piasters toward getting you free,” I said. “I don’t care about the money, but that ought to show you that it’s taking a lot of effort to get there. It’s going to take a good deal more time, too. If I try to cut corners, I’m going to get caught. Then you’ll be here until you rot, and I’ll be screaming my lungs out as they slide me down on a stake. Okay?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I can make up the money to you if we just get to a civilized planet. I’m just—oh, it’s awful and I’m losing my mind!”

  “If you throw a hissie now, you’re going to get noticed,” I said, as calm as I could. Her nervousness was getting me wound up. “Just keep calm and we’ll get out of here. It’ll just take a while.”