During the long climb toward Electric Avenue aboard the Hound’s ship, Hugh amused himself by preparing lists; and Bridget ban by preparing him. While he tabulated and crossreferenced everything that the team had learned about the Dancer, she tabulated in a more quiet way everything she learned about him. It was far too easy. She saw that in Hugh’s sometimes self-conscious behavior in the confines of her ship. All that wanted was the right moment for him to seize, and she set about providing it.
Their first day out did not bring them together until dinnertime. Bridget ban stayed in the control room coordinating the magbeam booster schedule with Peacock Roads Traffic and fine-tuning the ship’s onboard power reception. Later, she went belowdecks to the power room and ran the readiness tests on the alfvens. She emerged finally to find that Hugh had prepared a dinner for the two of them.
Nothing exotic: a type of fish called a “colby,” found in the great freshwater sea on Dave Hatchley. He had assembled the filet from the vats, coated and broiled it, and served it with an assortment of familiar vegetables. Like her, he seemed to prefer the plain and simple.
“I don’t know why you bother going down to the power room to run the tests,” he said when they had settled to the table. “Can’t the intelligence run them for you?”
Bridget ban separated the flakes of the colby with her fork. “This will be a tricky approach. There are no marker buoys, no quasar benchmarks to steer by; so the engines must be as finely tuned as possible. The intelligence knows only what the instruments tell it. It can nae ken if the instruments are agley.” She waved the fork. “Always run the standards,” she admonished him.
“I shall,” he said, “should I ever grow daft enough to try for astrogation.”
Bridget ban laughed more than the wit warranted and touched him briefly on the back of his hand. She made careful note of how he responded to the touch and on what his eyes involuntarily fell. By the next day, she had programmed her anycloth to accentuate those areas, arranging everything a little tighter, a little higher, and a little lower.
At his request, she pulled up a map of the South Central Periphery and displayed it on the holowall in the conference room, which consequently took on the aspect of infinite depth. She also gave him access to the ship’s open-source databases. “Just be careful,” she said, rapping her knuckles on endless space, “not to walk into the wall.”
He chuckled. “It does look real. Can I shift the point of view?”
She moved inside his personal space. “Just tell the ship the origin and direction of the view you want. For fine-tuning, use this glove and watch where its icon appears in the wall. Then, push or pull on the image. When you shift your point of view, the stars change to account for light-lag, up to my last gazetteer update. Here, do you see that star?” She touched it with her virtual finger. “Watch what happens when I zoom toward it.” She curled her finger and pulled the view forward and they seemed to race through Newtonian space faster than the speed of space. Hugh staggered a little, his balance confused, and Bridget ban placed her left hand on his waist to steady him. “It takes some getting used to,” she said, meaning the cascading stars, not her hand. Hugh opened his mouth to say something—and the star suddenly blossomed.
What had been a red pinpoint became unbounded fury as the star tore itself apart. For a moment, it was as bright as all the other stars combined. The interstellar gases glowed as they were swept along with the wave front.
And then they were through the shell of expanding gases and where the star had been there was nothing but a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. Hugh blew out his breath. “Quite a ride!”
There is a trick well known to those who practice it, of invading another’s “personal space” like a smuggler nestling into a friendly cove. She stood very near to him, not quite touching, and told him, “The supernova is out past the Jenjen, in the Roaring Fork nebula. It appeared five years ago in the skies of Hanower and the intelligence back-dates everything from that; but it won’t be visible from Peacock for centuries. If you watch the backdrop under ‘hyperfast evolution,’ you can see the spiral galaxies age and spawn seyfert pairs and the seyferts spit out matched quasars. It’s quite beautiful, the underlying structure and design. There”—she pointed again, leaning a little across him—“that’s Andromeda, our mother galaxy. There’s a twin Milky Way on the farther side, so the legends say. Andromeda spawned us as quasars when she was a mere slip of a seyfert…And that is Virgo, our grandmother. The sky is our family tree.”
She stepped away, then, but he contrived to let his hand brush against her, and she pretended not to notice.
One element of the art of conversation is to ask the other about himself. Since this is often their favorite topic, or at least a topic on which they are reasonably well informed, it seldom fails to draw them out and put them at ease. It was over a game of shaHmat that Hugh told her of his terrifying childhood on Venishànghai and Bridget ban nearly wept to hear of it.
“They hunted you?” she said in disbelief. “The shopkeepers hunted you? Like animals?”
“But never alone,” he said with his teeth, but Bridget ban thought it was a false grin, or one of pain. “Understand. We used to vandalize their shops and rob them. I can’t say they’d no reason to hate us.”
“But still…”
“And it did school us in agility and quick-wittedness, and that stood me well in the Glens of Ardow. I was accustomed to being stalked. But, sometimes…” He paused and fiddled with one of his hounds, moved it, changed his mind, and restored it to its position. “Sometimes I wonder how long I could have kept it up. Not in the Glens; in New Shanghai. There were no old vermin-boys.”
“You shouldn’t call yourself that. Look at what you’ve accomplished. You’re a certified planetary manager. You’ve run entire government departments and, from all I’ve heard, run them well.”
He smiled thinly. “And I ran a guerilla, too. Don’t forget that. There is a part of me that knows what I’ve accomplished. But there’s one small sliver of my brain—somewhere back here in the old cerebellum—that still thinks those shopkeepers were right. It’s not something you can hear for years and years when you’re young and ever entirely forget. And what was my guerilla but another and vaster case of vandalism? That’s why I’m fit for—” But he stopped then, and did not say what he was fit for. Instead, he smiled. “And you, a vawn Chu? I’ve told you my base-name.” He managed to bow sitting down. “Ringbao della Costa, bi rén. How did you become Bridget ban? Was it your childhood dream to go to the dogs?”
“Are you going to move that piece or not?”
Hugh looked in surprise at his hands and saw that he was playing idly once more with the princely hound. He replaced it on its square and moved a councilor up the white diagonal. “Sorry,” he said. “We should concentrate on the game.”
“It takes the mind off…” She bit her lip as he looked up.
“Off what?”
“Off entering an uncharted road.”
“Greystroke knows what he’s doing. And the Fudir’s a licensed charts-man.”
“Aye…” Bridget ban blocked his councilor by advancing a minion. “But, well…Alright. My base-name is Francine Thompson. There’s no secret in that. I never wanted to be a Hound, though. Oh, I read all the stories growing up. About Efram Still or Moddey Dhu and the others. But I never wanted to be one. I only wanted to be regular Francine Thompson. You see, I grew up on Die Bold, and the most important thing in the world was to be ‘regular.’ At least in the Pashlik of Redoubt, where we lived. All I ever heard was ‘communal solidarity’ and ‘the fingers work together make a fist.’ Things like that. So I studied for my assigned career and worked at perfecting my character for it. I was to be a nurse-practitioner in the Kentwold Hills. It was a good assignment, one worth doing. The hill towns are scattered far between and don’t see a medico very often. But…” She watched Hugh slide a fortress slowly up the leftmost file, as if doing it surreptitiously. But she had expect
ed the move and immediately castled her emperor. Hugh frowned over the board.
“But try as I might with the character-building exercises,” she continued, “I couldn’t enjoy nursing or, more importantly I think, I couldn’t do it well. So, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I lacked the plasticity to mold myself to the type that society needed me to be.”
“And what was it,” Hugh asked, “that you most loved hearing about in those days?”
Bridget ban closed her eyes and became young Francine Thompson, sitting before the televisor in the block community center. There had been a terrible arson in Ark Alpikor. Two hundred people had died. “When the public inquiry agents caught the bastard who did it, everyone was pleased to hear it; but I was…‘ecstatic,’ I suppose is the word. After that, it seemed that every time I opened a newscreen or picked up an idle book at the center library, it was something about policefolk, and more often than not it was a story about one of the Hounds. It was almost as if the idea of being a Hound was tracking me, hunting me down.”
“Not all policers are worth the aspiration,” Hugh told her. “The People’s Police on Megranome wouldn’t have cared if the man they caught was the true arsonist or not. And if I’d fallen into the hands of the New Shanghai pleetsya, I wouldn’t be here today.” As if to underline the point, he took one of her minions with a counselor and swept it from the board.
“That might be the other question: What did I most hate to hear of? It wasn’t anything like the arson itself. That was only tragedy. They rebuilt the dormitory, named it ‘The House of Sorrow,’ assigned new families to live in it, and life went on. No, what I hated most was when I read of innocents wrongly prosecuted.”
“You should have been a Robe, not a Hound. They were always on about ‘justice.’ So when did you—Pay no attention to the counselor. He’s innocent and you’re wrongly prosecu—Damn.” Bridget ban had sent one of her hounds leaping across the field to take the piece. “You weren’t supposed to see that line of attack.”
“If you don’t want me to see your line of attack, you shouldn’t pursue it. Unless you want to play in the dark,” she added in a playful voice. “What was I…? Oh. When I was fourteen, local, the County Planning Board sent me to a medical school across the border in the Kingdom.”
“The Kingdom of what?”
“Just ‘the Kingdom.’ The odd thing is that they don’t actually have a king, just a regent. The story was that they’d had a king once who had been so just and wise a ruler that no king after could hope to measure up. So after he was gone, they set up a regency to await his return. The Kingdom’s medical technology was more advanced than Redoubt’s; so I was supposed to learn what I could and bring it back to the Pashlik. But after a month at the Université Royale, I asked for asylum and was granted it and I transferred my major to criminology. And then one day while I was walking past the Eglantine Traffic Star to my classes, I passed the League Consulate and, purely on a whim, I walked in and asked them how I went about becoming a Hound.”
“And what did they tell you?”
“‘If you have to ask, you’ll never be.’ I don’t think they really knew and were just brushing me off. So I insisted they send an inquiry to High Tara.” She smiled in self-deprecation. “Obstacles harden my whims. Well, I didn’t think much about it afterward, but a couple of doozydays later, when I was sitting under the great fir tree in the university Green, a shadow fell across my textbook—and there stood Zorba de la Susa, the greatest Hound of them all. He had come personally to evaluate me. Yes, of course I recognized him. He could have become the Little One Himself, had he wanted the post, but he preferred the field. ‘The Spiral Arm’s a more spacious office,’ he used to say, ‘than the Little One’s palace suite.’ He examined me, ran me through a battery of tests, and must have seen some hope, because he made a place for me at the Kennel School.”
“‘He must have seen some hope,’” Hugh repeated, as if to himself.
“I was nineteen, local. I didn’t know if I could ever measure up to the likes of de la Susa or na Fir Li.”
Hugh laughed. “And now you’re almost single-handedly chasing an entire battle fleet down an uncharted hole because of a fanciful legend.”
She had made sure that they exercised together in the fitness room, running in tandem on the slidewalk, spotting for each other on the mass machines, and afterward sitting side by side on the floor mats. The day before they were to enter the uncharted road, he asked her what her most difficult case had been.
“I can tell you what the most frightening one was. I’ve never been tasked with governing a planet or with disaster relief like Black Shuck carried out on Kamerand. Those would be frightening, but in a different way.” She described her escape from Pulawayo’s house, her discovery of the monstrous exhibits in the remonstratorium, and the artful disguise she had used to elude the guards at the maglev station.
“So there I was,” she said, laughing, “striding proud as ye please along Uasladonto Street with my breasts stuck out for everyone to see.”
Hugh could not help but drop a glance toward those now-concealed treasures and said, “I wish I could have seen that.” He laughed a bit to show he had meant it as the sort of light double entendre that was almost mandatory after a story like that. She laughed back at him and laid her hand for just a moment on his and said carelessly that she wished he could have seen it, too.
That evening, she left the door to her quarters ajar just a wee bit and waited until she heard Hugh’s footsteps in the hallway before she began disrobing for sleep. The footsteps halted and she knew he had noticed her reflection in the mirror, visible through the crack in the door. How could he not? She had aligned everything with the utmost care. She paused awhile after removing the blouse, as if in thought, and then stepped out of his view.
She wondered if he would barge into her quarters after that. It was not unheard of for men of his age to lose all control of themselves under such circumstances. But the Ghost of Ardow had not survived as long as he had by losing control under any circumstance. There was no doubt in her mind that he would “seize the moment,” but he was, to use a term lauded on some worlds but derided on others, a man of honor. She found, in spite of herself, a certain admiration for him.
That was the problem with using affection as a weapon. Like a knife, it cut two ways.
She had orchestrated the finale for the very day they entered Electric Avenue.
They had fooled Peacock STC for a while, sending swifties down the Sapphire Point ramp as if they were hailing drones. In fact, they were reports to na Fir Li informing him of what they had found and what they intended, as well as more routine reports to be forwarded to the Kennel archives on High Tara.
But Traffic Control had been screeching at them for three days running that they were approaching local-c far off the proper bearing for the Silk Road. Bridget ban did not think that any secret could be kept by a large number of people, and so most of the pleas directed at them were genuine concern and panic. The Border Patrol cutter that altered course to intercept them clearly had a more malign intent. If no one else, those who had dispatched it certainly knew by then where the two Kennel ships were actually headed. They could project a course as well as anyone.
Cutters were fast, but Kennel ships were faster, and it could not catch them before they reached the ramp. If they missed the entrance, however, and braked before they blinked, the cutter would make sure they had no second try.
Now, Bridget ban had never been as nervous about the attempt as she had led Hugh to believe—that had been intended to trigger his protective reflex—but there was always the possibility that measurement error really had mislaid their trajectories. So when they entered the ramp successfully and slid into the Krasnikov tube it was with a sense of genuine relief and when she emerged from the pilot’s saddle, she and Hugh embraced in delight.
And then, as sudden as the shift to superluminal, they delighted in the embrace.
&n
bsp; There is a certain jadedness that comes with the considered use of one’s affections. It is not that they lose their edge, but the edge cannot help growing a little dull. She had been prepping him for days during the crawl up to the coopers. With carefully chosen stories, with carefully calculated touches and glimpses, she had readied him, body and mind, for this precise moment. Yet she found his caresses welcome; and later, considering how long he had been celibate, she found him gentle and unhurried. Even so, while they played with each other, she could sense him straining at the leash. But the Glens of Ardow had taught him control.
(But the Glens had taught the Ghost of Ardow many more things than patience and control. He had been schooled in realism, too. He knew when he was being stalked, and could recognize the signs of a well-laid ambush. He was not such a fool as to expect a Hound of the Ardry to kick up her heels for a chance-met stranger; but he tolerated the ambush for the sake of being well laid. Don’t look so shocked, harper. Her actions were calculated; but the Ghost as well knew how to add two and two.)
The two ships proceeded down the road at a moderate pace so that Greystroke’s instruments could tease out fossil images from the shoulders and track the phantom fleet. The shoulders grew narrow along one stretch. Skewing out of the main channel would not put them into the mud; it would smash them against the cliffs! Bridget ban spent many hours in the pilot’s saddle taking bearings, and pricking off the qualities of local space on her charts. Greystroke was undoubtedly doing likewise; but better there be two such charts. Just in case.
The cliffs, however, explained why the road had not been discovered early on. Who knew how many ships had entered it, only to smash upon those steep gradients? And when success finally came, Peacock had seen more safety in secrecy. Too many roads in their system and the ’Cockers would become a target for every planet and pirate in the region.
The January Dancer Page 27