“Um,” said Captain Campbell. For the first time, she began to wonder if she would survive this conversation. She thought about apologizing—for half a nanosecond—then decided against it. She would not show weakness to this thief, no matter how much larger he loomed. She stared up at him defiantly, expecting at any moment to receive an individualized tour of the digestive system of a Moktar Dragon.
But the taste of pfingle eggs had taken the edge off the Dragon Lord’s quickness to anger. He felt too pleased with himself right now to kill anyone. He wanted to gloat. And besides, he preferred a larger audience for his horrific deeds—he needed witnesses other than his own underlings to properly spread the word.
“Let me explain something to you,” the Dragon Lord said in a voice that sounded like an avalanche turning cold. “As a Regency officer, I have the right of first refusal on all necessary supplies in times of planetary emergency. Such as now. I also have the right to set a fair price. I have offered you a fair price. You have rejected it. If necessary, I can appropriate what I need without recompense. I will do that now.”
Captain Campbell pointed at the window of the overhead office. “I have an arbiter watching this entire proceeding, my lord. I will file a claim of unlawful seizure if I have to. I would not like to embarrass the Dragon Guard by bringing such a charge, but I will if I have to.”
The Dragon Lord glanced upward, identified Harry Mertz at the window—Harry waved and offered a weak smile—then the Dragon Lord glanced back down to the captain of The Lady MacBeth. He grinned widely. “You know how to play this game well,” he acknowledged. “But unfortunately, not well enough.”
“My lord?”
“My inspection of your cargo has turned up an interesting anomaly. I don’t think these eggs carry a correct rating. These eggs do not taste like 30 day eggs. They taste like ten day eggs. I believe someone has falsified the labels on these crates in a deliberate act of ecological sabotage. However, we have discovered the danger before any damage occurred, and I will graciously arrange the immediate destruction of this cargo and spare you the additional expenses you would otherwise incur. We can call it even, correct?”
“I thank you for your consideration, my lord. I appreciate the demonstration of how you earned your reputation for justice and graciousness; but please let me do the honors. I will take custody of these eggs immediately and—with your permission—remove them from the surface of Burihatin-14.”
The Dragon Lord shook his head. “The law requires mandatory destruction. Usually by incineration. If I let you take custody, I would have no way of knowing for certain that you would satisfy the conditions of the law. I couldn’t let you put yourself in jeopardy that way.”
“I will drop the eggs into the sun—”
“A fine promise indeed,” the Dragon Lord acknowledged. “But what if you decide to believe these incorrect labels and attempted to deliver your cargo somewhere. No, I couldn’t let you endanger yourself and your crew. You would have more than ten days of travel to the nearest market. Even if you did get there before the eggs exploded, they would still present a major danger to the buyers. No, I could not allow the possibility of that occurrence. I would have failed badly in my duty to protect the various peoples of the Regency.” The Dragon Lord lowered his head in a great bow. “Therefore, I must declare this cargo a total loss and seize it in the name of the Regency.”
“You leave me no choice, my lord, but to express my admiration for your wisdom, your thoughtfulness, and your incredible . . . incredible . . . appetite. For justice, I mean.”
“Thank you, Star-Captain. I hope our next encounter will please both of us as much as this one has.”
“Yes,” Captain Campbell agreed. “I will bring great hopes to our next encounter. You may definitely count on that.”
She kept her smile firmly in place as she returned the Dragon’s final bow. She backed away, bowing and scraping, bowing and scraping. As she stepped back into the drop chute, she stopped bowing and started swearing slowly and quietly, all the way up.
“Those filthy, egg-sucking, Vampire-toady, scaly-skinned, scum-sucking, lawyer-loving, degenerate spawn of a sand-bellied, dirt-crawling, black-slime, mud-devilled. . . . “
Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell knew how to swear in twelve different languages, including binary code. Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell could have continued swearing for six days straight without repeating herself. Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell could have blistered paint at two hundred meters with just an angry glance. Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell’s language could have shattered glass and crippled strong men. Star Captain Neena Linn-Campbell’s language represented a life-threatening danger to animals and small children.
Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell readied herself for such a full expression of her feelings. She stopped just long enough to take a breath. . . .
—at which point Ota clapped her great furry paw over Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell’s mouth and, with the help of the rest of the crew, dragged her quickly out of the warehouse before she set off the emergency sprinkler system.
Chapter Eleven
Outside, the bright actinic sunlight cast harsh shadows through the dusky glow of Burihatin. The day seemed both lazy and hard at the same time. It matched their mood. They all felt a need to act immediately, but they all felt the profound emptiness and despair of their situation. Each of them—Gito, Robin, Shariba-Jen, Harry, Ota, Star-Captain Campbell—reacted in a different way.
Curiously, Captain Campbell’s behavior seemed the most muted. Once they had gotten safely away, Ota removed her hand from Captain Campbell’s mouth. Neena Linn-Campbell didn’t react at all to the offense that Ota had committed. She just stood silently, showing no emotion at all. The others looked at her curiously.
At last Captain Campbell looked up. She looked to Ota with a strange expression. “The Dragon has put us out of business. Hasn’t he?”
Ota nodded. They had hocked the entire corporation for this cargo.
“It should have worked,” said Robin. “We planned it perfectly. Everything. The market price, the delivery costs, the transportation time, we should have cleared three million easily—” And then she added, “If only that damn bitch, Zillabar, hadn’t forced her charter on us, none of this would have happened. We could have done it. I know it—”
Captain Campbell ignored Robin’s litany of if-onlys. “What about our insurance?” she asked Ota.
“Canceled. We forfeited Guild insurance when you turned in the Insignia.”
“Mm. I thought so.” She kicked at a nonexistent rock, and started heading back toward the StarPort. The others followed dejectedly in her wake.
“How long have we got?” Gito whispered to Robin.
“Well, the Captain Campbell I used to know,” Robin whispered back, “would already have a new cargo secured by now, and we’d lift as soon as we could seal the hatch. Any legal servitor with a warrant would find only an empty launch cradle. We’d work our way back up, somehow. But—” She shrugged helplessly. “—as long as the lockdown at the port remains in place, we can’t leave. These warrants may actually get served. Hmm. . . .”
She thought about it a while longer. “On the other hand, with the lockdown in place, the servitor’s office doesn’t have to rush. They know that no one can lift, so why bother hurrying?” A thoughtful frown crossed her face. “I wonder if Captain Campbell has realized the same thing I just did. Some circumstances mandate immediate clearance from a StarPort. An outbreak of Meazlish Plague, for one—”
“That sounds a little extreme to me,” Gito said in a gravelly voice.
“We’ll have to research this, I think.”
Up ahead, Captain Campbell still walked alone. The day had turned abruptly dark as the pinpoint of the sun disappeared below the red rocky hills at the edge of the close horizon.
Harry Mertz, (retired) Arbiter of Thoska-Roole, hurried to catch up with her. He didn’t speak, he just walked beside her in an act of com
fort and support. If she had anything she needed to say, he would at least provide the ears to listen.
After a moment, Captain Campbell said something, too soft for Harry to understand.
“Say again?” he asked.
She repeated it, this time louder. “I want revenge.”
Harry nodded. “I can understand that. You need to know, however, that revenge does not produce satisfaction.”
“In this case, it will.”
“Your anger speaks for you now. Remember the words of the Zyne Masters. Revenge does not demonstrate enlightenment.”
“So? When did I say I wanted enlightenment?”
Harry bowed his head in acknowledgment. “I stand corrected.”
“Good.”
They walked a while farther in silence.
After a little longer, Captain Campbell said, “So you think I shouldn’t want revenge, right?”
Harry nodded.
“All right. I don’t want revenge. I want justice. Tell me the difference?”
Harry grinned. “In this case, none. You want the pain spread around equally. That serves as justice for most people.”
Captain Campbell looked at the old man sideways. Did he really mean that? She caught the impish twinkle in his eyes and her features relaxed into a momentary smile of appreciation. “Yeah,” she agreed. “I got it.”
They trudged on.
“It still doesn’t solve my problem,” she admitted. “But at least now I know what I want and why I want it.”
“Captain—?” Ota, the bioform, came trundling forward to walk along her other side. “I really do need to report something else to you.” Harry fell back, a polite half-step.
“More bad news?”
“Sort of. I think. For someone. Anyway.”
Captain Campbell looked at Ota surprised. The bioform rarely hedged its language with uncertainty. “Go ahead,” she said. “I have no more anger left in me—at least, not for a while.”
“Um. After you went down to confer with the Dragon Lord, I did a terrible thing.”
Captain Campbell raised an eyebrow. “Ota? What did you do?”
“Well . . . when I saw that the Dragon Lord would not negotiate in good faith, I reset the cargo management program of the warehouse computer. I changed all of the temperature controls from refrigeration to incubation. I doubt the Dragons will notice, with all their heavy insulated armor, but the eggs most certainly will. I expect the eggs to hatch sometime within the next thirty hours.”
Captain Campbell didn’t react immediately. She pursed her lips and frowned as she considered the image of thirty-three metric tons of industrial-grade pfingle eggs hatching all at once within a self-destruct, high-security warehouse. After a moment, she shuddered. She looked at Ota, surprised. “I had no idea you had such a potential for . . . vindictiveness.”
Ota replied, “I didn’t do it out of viciousness, Captain. I just asked myself what you would have ordered me to do.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” Captain Campbell grinned. Ota’s great furry expression remained as placid as always. After a moment more of uncomfortable empathy, Ota faded back to walk beside Harry.
Harry Mertz remembered a much older conversation, one that had occurred in the stygian depths of a Regency prison. He glanced sideways to Ota and said quietly, “You once told me you had no intention of getting involved.”
Ota shrugged. “They filled my cup with vinegar. Three times over. How could that not involve me?”
Keep On Tracking
South of StarPort, where the red rocks crumbled brokenly into the briny waters of Slug Lake, a less official community had sprung up. Here, clinging to the sides of the cliffs, carved into the bluffs, perched precariously on top of escarpments, or jammed into the spaces between two upthrusts of land, a haphazard collection of shanties, shacks, and tumbledowns had grown like a cancerous animal. The community alternately clustered and sprawled, with rough-hewn ways barely connecting each part with every other. Multiple piers extended out over the waters of the lake. Occasional towers climbed up out of the water, with tendrils extending onto the land. The smoke of industrial plants and cooking fires collected in an odorous brown haze that hung permanently over the village, giving everything a gangrenous smell of rotting flesh, sewage, brine, and sulfur.
The inhabitants called it Porginara. Everyone else knew it as Pig Town.
Where StarPort lay heavily under the Authority of the Regency, Pig Town gave its allegiance only to the banknote. Everything in Pig Town had its price. Those who came here usually did so with a specific purpose, a specific end in mind.
While Pig Town may have lacked much of the resources or versatility of larger communities, like MesaPort on Thoska-Roole, the intent remained the same—to provide access to commodities and services not generally available elsewhere. A ruggedly independent trade in darkside goods had grown up here and after several hundred years, still stubbornly resisted all attempts to control or eradicate it.
Here in Pig Town, you might not find exactly what you wanted—but you would certainly find someone who knew where you could get it. If you could afford it.
On the afternoon in question, two aristocratic fops wandered into Pig Town on an excursion of obvious curiosity. They strode arm-in-arm, chattering gaily, pointing, and taking pictures of everything that didn’t glower at them. Few of the natives of Pig Town paid them any serious attention. Tourists from the nearby StarPort often came down to the shores of the lake to sample the more vigorous life of Porginara. As long as they left some money behind, no one paid them too much attention.
Had anyone paused to give them a serious inspection, he would quickly have noticed that neither of the men wore clothes that fit them very well, and the uncomfortable mix of color and garment suggested either an ignorance of style, or a deliberate flouting of convention. Their cloaks did not match their boots, their breeches caught and bagged in all the wrong places; their vests betrayed the bulges of too many weapons.
An even closer observer would also have noticed that these two fops didn’t even like each other very much and most of their banter seemed forced and deliberate. Indeed, they exchanged most of their words through clenched and gritted teeth.
“I don’t like it here,” Lee whispered to Sawyer. “This place has a bad reputation for violence. Even Death travels in pairs.”
“You want the goddamn TimeBand?” Sawyer whispered back. “Then we need to find an Informant. Now quit your damn bellyaching and let me do my job.”
“Can’t we do it somewhere else? I don’t think the residents of Pig Town feel very kindly toward human tourists.”
“Don’t take it personally. They hate everybody equally. What do you expect from porcines?” Sawyer grabbed Lee’s arm and pointed. “There. That green banner.”
He led his companion across the broken plaza toward a small round structure, festooned with green banners, silken veils and velvet drapes. They ducked into it quickly and found themselves in a room of dark blue and green light that came filtering down through a stained glass ceiling. More silks hung all around—they hung in tatters and shreds and gave the chamber a feeling like the inside of a spider’s nest. In the center of the room sat a small, low table. Around the edges sat gray featureless lumps.
Lee took one look around and reacted in dismay. He wrinkled his nose at the musty smell and tried to wave it away.
“You’ve never visited an Informant before, I take it?”
“I’ve never had need of their services,” Lee said. Then he admitted, “Actually, I don’t believe in Informants.”
“They probably don’t believe in you either,” said Sawyer. “Sit over there on that gray lump.”
“Lump of what?”
“The Knaxx spin great bales of silk, which they sell to the unwary. Sometimes you’ll find an unpleasant surprise inside all the windings. But don’t worry, you can sit on it safely.” Sawyer seated himself on another great gray lump.
Lee lowered himself tentativ
ely onto the mass of silk threads that Sawyer had pointed him toward and found it surprisingly comfortable. He allowed himself to relax only slightly. “You’ve come here before, haven’t you?”
“Once or twice,” Sawyer admitted.
“Do you trust this Informant?”
“I trust Informants,” Sawyer said obliquely.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve never known if I’ve ever spoken to the same Informant twice. Nobody does. They all look exactly the same.”
“Don’t they have names?”
Sawyer shook his head. “They have no identities at all. I’ve never heard of a way to tell one Knaxx from another. I don’t think they can do it themselves. Apparently, they consider it rude to ask. If you even raise the subject, they get up and walk away.”
The curtains at the back of the room parted then, and the creature known as the Knaxx stepped out into a beam of amber luminance.9 Lee’s eyes widened at the sight. The creature had a short fat body, it glistened with chitiny scales that reflected back a metallic sheen. Glittery-green and shiny all over, the Knaxx had huge multifaceted eyes that covered the greater part of its head. Instead of a mouth, it had a pair of short mandibles surrounding a curled proboscis.
Lee stiffened where he sat. Sawyer leaned over and touched his arm gently. “Relax. They only eat fruit. They just look like . . . well, what they look like.” Sawyer did not know if a Knaxx could take offense. He didn’t want to find out now.
The creature did not speak. It eyed both of the men without apparent expression or reaction. With one bony arm, black and hairy, it reached into the folds of its garment, a vest-like affair, and extracted a small white bowl, which it placed in the center of the table before them.
“What do we do now?” Lee asked.
“We ask our question,” Sawyer explained. “Then we start putting money in the bowl. When we’ve put enough money in the bowl, the Knaxx turns the bowl over and answers the question. Unfortunately—”
A Covenant of Justice Page 18