[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  "Thanks," he said. "But what about our real IDs? And what about our tickets? We can't get on board ship without them."

  Jens was inspecting his own credit case—a bit awkwardly, because of the blaster in his right hand. "With the stuff they've set up for us in these, coz, we could buy a ship outright if we had to."

  "Nothing but the finest merchandise from Huool Galleries," said Miza. She gave the blaster a dubious glance. "Are you planning to lug that thing around in plain view all the way to the port?"

  "Yes, I am," Jens said. "And I hope you remembered to include a permit-to-carry along with all the rest of the fake paperwork."

  "It's in the back with the insurance papers," Miza said. "But I wouldn't take it out yet, if I were you. The ink may not be all the way dry."

  Chapter V.

  Ophel; Cracanth

  « ^ »

  CHAKALLAKAK ngha-CHAKALLAKAK had slept late that morning. Let Faral and Jens tire themselves out with rushing about in downtown Sombrelír; some people had more sense than to bother. She'd gotten out of bed in her own good time, and had spent a pleasant day lazing amid the trove-stores in the spaceport concourse, before making her way over to RSS Lav'rok—the ship that would carry them all to Eraasi and who-knew-what adventure.

  As she'd expected, Faral and Jens weren't aboard yet. If the pair of them ran true to form, they'd arrive breathless and flushed with exertion moments before the ship's main passenger lock snapped shut for lift-off. Chaka looked forward to watching the two thin-skins try to strap in while the nullgravs were tilting Lav'rok to launch position.

  Already the luggage was strapped in place in the middle of their travel compartment for their use during the trip. Rather than unship it and have to put it back again before launch, Chaka left the cabin and headed for the Lav'rok's common compartments. Now was as good a time as any to look over their shipmates for the coming transit. From Ophel to the Mageworlds was a long haul no matter how you sliced it.

  Lav'rok's common passenger space had room for a gaming area, an industrial-size refreshment dispenser, and a holovid lounge. Chaka stopped first at the dispenser to get a tall frosty mug of Khesatan sulg. She'd never tasted it before, but starting off your wandering-time with a new experience was supposed to be good luck. Besides, Jens claimed that the bright blue liquid didn't taste half-bad.

  Jens was wrong. It did taste half-bad, and then some. No point in wasting it, though, or the luck. She pulled the membranes across her nostrils and swallowed anyway. Mug in hand, she walked across to the holovid lounge, where a dozen local broadcast stations were displayed on as many monitors.

  The main holovid tank was showing an ancient Spaceways Patrol episode with voices dubbed into the local lingo. A glowing line of unfamiliar script ran around the base of the tank, translating the dialogue into a second language that Chaka didn't understand either.

  A flatvid screen set into a nearby bulkhead was showing what looked like a newscast from downtown Sombrelír. A thin-skin wearing what Chaka had learned was their sober-and-serious expression gazed earnestly out over his audience and spoke in rapid Ophelan. Behind him, a long shot of the city showed a plume of smoke rising from among the buildings.

  Chaka sipped at her mug of sulg and gave the newscast half an eye. Some kind of disaster in the city, apparently— thin-skins in medical and emergency uniforms rushed about while the announcer kept talking in front of them. Suddenly two pictures flashed on the screen, side by side: Jens and Faral, in their entry-visa flatpix.

  *Wait a minute!* Chaka shouted as she slewed around toward the screen fast enough to slosh her drink. *What's going on? Does anybody in here speak that forsaken lingo?*

  *Settle down, young one,* came a low growl from the table beside her.

  Chaka turned in that direction. The speaker was a big male Selvaur, his grey-green hide starting to go coarse and wrinkly with age. A ripple of scar tissue ran down his left arm, and his left eye was filmed over. He had a mug of redbriar ale in one hand, and his demeanor was considerably calmer than her own.

  *Did you understand what the announcer said?* Chaka asked him—adding the honorific, *Known One,* almost as an afterthought at the end.

  *Maybe I did… what's your interest?*

  *I believe I'm acquainted with those two thin-skins.*

  *Then this could be your lucky day,* said the older Selvaur. *There's a reward out for both of them—for them personally, or for knowledge of their whereabouts.*

  *Never mind the reward,* Chaka said, tossing back the sulg regardless of the taste. *They're my friends.*

  *No good ever came of consorting with their kind,* the old one said. *Take it from me.*

  *Thanks,* said Chaka. She stood up and slapped the empty mug down on the table as she spoke, then headed for the door. *I'll try to keep that in mind.*

  The secret way out of Huool's back rooms opened onto a brick-paved street in another block, beneath a green-painted arch of metal sculpted to look like a flowering vine. An open-air café stood on one side of the arch, a millinery shop on the other; the arch itself bore only a house number worked into the metal. This was the section of the Old Quarter where the more conservative members of Sombrelír's business community were in the habit of keeping their established paramours, in jewel-box apartments with just such unmarked entrances. Anybody who happened to see three young people leaving together in the middle of the afternoon would think, with a bit of amusement, that some paragon of wealth and respectability was not getting all the fidelity that he or she had paid for.

  Miza led the way, setting a brisk pace—but not, she hoped, one so brisk that the two young men behind her would think she was trying to outrun the blaster that Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin had inside his jacket pocket. Huool had made it clear, by his words and his manner, that the safety of Jens and his cousin was a matter of paramount importance, and that responsibility had fallen upon her to get them to the port and away.

  Huool wanted somebody who'd never done escort duty before, she thought. She knew what that meant, too. On all the civilized worlds, a package in the hands of a recognized and neutral courier was, by tradition, safe from attack. So if Huool was taking pains not to let a known courier like himself be connected with the two young men, then he wasn't counting on people being civilized.

  Miza wondered what had made the pair such a hot item on everybody's requisition list. She'd probably never find out.

  Get them safe to their ship and that's an end to it, she thought. Maybe I'll hear about them someday on the holovid news.

  "All right, guys," she said, turning back toward them. "We go left at the next corner."

  The words were all the way out of her mouth before she noticed that neither of the two young men was there anymore. They were, in fact, gone. And they'd been right behind her— she could have sworn it—not a second before.

  "Oh, damn," she muttered. She could see the failing grade on her work-study transcript already. She hopped up onto the plinth of a bronze statue of the city's first Lord Mayor, the better to look back at the street behind her, but her wayward charges were nowhere visible. They were well and truly gone.

  "Oh, damn," she repeated, with deep feeling.

  "The problem with letters of credit," Jens said, "is that they're traceable."

  Faral made a noncommittal noise. He was fairly certain that his cousin's knowledge was a secondhand acquisition, much as the blaster had been. So far, their escape from pursuit hadn't been difficult—giving Miza the slip had required nothing more than an exchange of glances, a nod, and a quick fade at the nearest corner; easy work for anyone brought up under the Big Trees—but the hard part was yet to come. If Jens knew something useful, it didn't matter to Faral how and where his cousin had picked it up.

  Jens was still explaining, or remembering aloud as the case might be. "Once you draw on the credit you leave a record of your exact whereabouts for at least the person or entity who issued the letter. Cash, on the other hand—"

  "—doesn'
t have anybody's name on it," said Faral. A shopwindow beckoned ahead on the left, with the word exchange glowing inside a sheet of what looked like solid armor-glass. The display technique—the effects of depth and movement embedded in a solid substance rather than projected outward—was one that he'd already learned to associate with the Mageworlds, and half of the languages in the display looked to be from the other side of the Gap Between. He pointed at the sign. "Is that what you're looking for?"

  "It is," Jens said. "Let's see how much of the local coin we can draw on these instruments, and then drop Gentlesir Huool's generous gifts down the nearest recycling tube."

  The little shop had an armor-glass wall against the back, thick enough to slow almost any portable energy or projectile weapon. A single clerk, a wizened little man wearing a green apron, sat behind the glass reading a datapad. He looked up when Faral and Jens walked in.

  The clerk's mouth moved, but the security screen blocked whatever sound came out of it. Instead, an amplified voice spoke from the upper right corner of the outer room.

  "Can I help you?"

  The speaker's accent was local, but the words were Galcenian. Faral wondered if he and Jens had that obvious an off-planet look, even in borrowed clothes from the upstairs room at Huool's establishment.

  Probably, he thought. Nothing we can do about it right now, except hope that this guy doesn't care as long as our money is good.

  Jens had apparently reached the same conclusion. "We find ourselves in need of ready funds," he said. He drew forth the credit voucher—using, Faral noted, his left hand, which meant that his right was free for the blaster now tucked out of sight in his coat pocket—and slid it toward the exchange slot. "How much can you advance us on this paper?"

  The letter of credit vanished with a gentle sigh of air as the security screen's vacuum system pulled it under the armor-glass. The purple glow of an active scanner flashed from the narrow aperture a second before the slip of paper appeared on the other side. At a nod from Jens, Faral extracted his own letter of credit and slid it through the scanner after the first one.

  "A fairish amount," the clerk said a moment later. "On both of them combined, considerably more than a fairish." It was disconcerting to see the man's mouth move while his words came from a disembodied source in the outer room. "Assuming that you are the persons to whom these letters apply."

  "We have identification," Faral said.

  "Assuredly," said the clerk. "Such fine gentlemen as yourselves. Please put your identity chit in the slot, then place your hand in the receptacle."

  The panel below the security screen lit up, revealing a row Of narrow slots paired with open bays. Faral regarded the setup dubiously. Back among the woods and rocks of Maraghai, only foolhardy off-worlders reached barehanded into shadowy recesses—and some of them came away with fewer fingers than they'd started with. But Jens was already feeding his ID card into one of the slots with a studied nonchalance; Faral supposed that he had no choice but to do likewise.

  The reader swallowed his card. An amber light flashed on the panel, and he fitted his right hand into the bay underneath. A tight band closed around his wrist, trapping his hand in the reader.

  Foolhardy off-worlder, he thought. That's me, all right.

  He supposed that if anything awkward showed up in the data scan, the cuff wouldn't let go until local peace officers arrived and escorted him to someplace where he could assist them in their inquiries.

  It wouldn't be a problem, he reassured himself. Even if they

  did show up. We were attacked, and that wasn't our fault, and nothing that happened afterward was our fault either. A few words with local security might be the fastest way to get back to our ship, and maybe the safest, too.

  He was almost hoping that the papers would ring up false—that Dahl&Dahl had never heard of him, or that his fingerprints and his protein scans didn't match. But instead, he heard a buzzing sound from somewhere inside the panel, and the pressure of the restraining cuff diminished. He pulled his hand away as the clerk spoke again.

  "And how would the noble sirs prefer their cash?"

  "In large tokens," said Jens. "Though not so large as to be unusable. I have obligations to meet."

  The clerk began pulling out stacks of orange chits and sliding them through the inner door of the exchange lock.

  "How are we going to carry all those?" Faral asked.

  "Silence, coz," Jens said. "We'll purchase a carrybag at the first convenient opportunity. In the meantime, I'm positive we can stow them about our persons somehow."

  Miza carefully traced her way back from the corner where she'd noticed that Faral and Jens had gone missing. They can't have made it too far, she told herself. They're strangers here, they have no friends, they're being hunted. Where would they go?

  Where would I go?

  Their first stop, she decided after a few seconds of panicky deliberation, would be to get cash. That meant visiting a cambio, since the pair of them couldn't have been in town long enough to set up a local account. And with neither hard money nor transit tokens in the packets she'd handed them, they couldn't hop into a jitney and tell the driver to take them somewhere.

  On foot, then. And close by.

  Faral and Jens would have spotted a cambio in Fracini Square, if they'd been alert—it was the only such place in the neighborhood with a visible sign. That gave her a logical place to start looking.

  She was right, too. When she arrived opposite the cambio, she saw two figures inside the shop, dimly visible through the armor-glass of the front window.

  Miza frowned. Tourists who got more than a double fifty-chit from Barapan's establishment would meet a mugger later in the day, all but guaranteed. If the sum advanced to the off-worlders was sufficient—and Miza, who had made out the letters of credit herself, felt certain that it would be—Barapan might even have sent for the strongarms already.

  She changed position to another spot, this one not so advantageous for watching Barapan's cambio, but somewhat better for watching watchers. Then she waited.

  Yes… there they were, halfway up the street in either direction: a man in a grey hat, window-shopping, and a woman carrying a bouquet of flowers, pausing to arrange her bustier. Miza couldn't see the backup team, but she knew that the strongarms would have one lurking a block away, ready to swing onto whatever path Faral and Jens took when they left the cambio. In only a couple of minutes, half of Barapan's money would be heading back into his personal accounts, with the other half going to the robbers.

  Now what do I do? she wondered. She wasn't a physical operative, and she didn't want to be. She was an analyst, and knew that someday she'd be a damned good one, but violence had never been part of her training. If the two off-worlders were depending on her… There they come now.

  Faral and Jens came out of the shop, their pockets .bulging with what must have been every decimal-bit the letters of credit would allow, and took a right-hand turn onto the street. Miza followed, walking fast but trying not to be conspicuous in her hurry. Over on the other side of the street, and a little bit ahead of them, the gentlelady with the armful of fresh flowers and the embroidered bustier was drifting in the same direction at a deceptively easy pace.

  The two young off-worlders didn't seem to notice. They ought to have had "tourist" written on their shirts in three different alphabets and five different languages, Miza reflected, the way they were gazing at shopwindows and ambling along as if they hadn't a care in the world.

  The lady with the flowers was still following them. So was Miza—far enough behind to watch, but not close enough to appear part of the group. With any luck, when the inevitable happened, no one would be hurt. Then she could get back to taking the two young men down to the port, perhaps a little chastened and easier to handle for their misadventure.

  The blaster, she thought suddenly. You're forgetting about that blaster. If Jens is foolish enough to go for it in the scuffle…

  He won't have time to g
et it out.

  Up ahead, in another of the Old Quarter's little parks, a tree-lined bower opened its shadowed mouth onto the street. That's where it'll all happen, Miza thought. She strove to observe everything and remember it clearly. If she made a good report to Huool afterward, maybe her grades wouldn't suffer too much.

  The woman with the flowers crossed the street and headed back in the direction of the young off-worlders. Their paths converged at the opening of the bower. The woman, feigning surprise and clumsiness, lost her grip on the bouquet, scattering white and yellow josquiths all over the pavement. At the same time, a pair of muscular gentlemen stepped from the shadows and reached out to lay violent hands on the two young men.

  And then—Jens spun and kicked high, his yellow hair flying as he moved, and the point of his boot struck the nearer of the two muggers on the jaw. The man fell. At the same time, Faral grabbed the woman by her upper arms and dropped, using the momentum thus created to throw her against the second mugger. Thief and decoy collapsed together onto the grass inside the bower, entangled as if caught in the midst of some bizarre assignation.

  Miza hurried forward, but before she could reach the spot, she felt herself caught, spun, and thrown against the trunk of a tree, with Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin pressing the business end of a blaster into the flesh of her throat.

  I was wrong, she thought. He did have enough time to get it out.

  "Are you with these people?" he asked. His blue eyes had a dangerous brightness to them. "Is there a good reason why I shouldn't stun you now and leave you here while my cousin and I make our complaint to local security?"

  Miza drew a deep breath. It wouldn't do to have her voice squeak with fright like a Roti's breakfast. A few feet away, she could see Faral going through the pockets of the fallen men. Both the strongarms were lying quite still, though their chests were moving. The woman had, apparently, recovered herself and fled, leaving her flowers scattered broadcast across the pavement.