The January Dancer

by Michael Flynn

  “I know. That’s what makes this so hard.”

  And with that, like a black mamba striking, he poked Hugh in the brisket with his bunched fingers, bending him double, and followed it with a blow to the side of his head.

  Hugh collapsed and the Fudir caught him before he struck the steps, eased him back to a sitting position, and replaced the bag of nuts into his hands. He felt the neck for a pulse. He stood and studied the unmoving figure bleakly. It was difficult to know how hard to strike.

  There was a man watching from the pedestrian walkway across the city rail that ran down the center of the public way. He was slouch-shouldered, with a hangdog look. His clothing seemed slept in and none too new before that. “You mess this man,” the Fudir told him, “and some people in that building will hunt you down and kill you. That’s if you get away from me.”

  “I believe you,” the man said, holding his palms up. “Just minding my business, me. You got a ruby or two? I’m powerful thirsty.”

  The Fudir studied him. “Don’t go anywhere yet.”

  When neither Hugh nor the Fudir appeared in the morning to plan their infiltration of the Watkins Yard, Bridget ban went to fetch them.

  “They’re nae in their rooms,” she reported.

  The three Kennel agents looked one to the other. Grimpen said to Greystroke, “You trusted him.”

  Bridget ban said, “They may only have stepped outside for the air.”

  “Air’s worse outside,” Grimpen said. He rose like an uplifted mountain range. “I’ll look.”

  When Large-hound had left the room, Greystroke turned on Bridget ban. “What was the purpose of all that cuddling if not to keep his leash short?”

  Bridget ban had no answer. She turned away and looked into a corner of the room, her thoughts all in turmoil. “Maybe Hugh went looking for the Fudir,” Bridget ban suggested.

  Grimpen came back in carrying Hugh over his shoulder. “If he did, he found him.”

  The others jumped to their feet in alarm. “Is the wean a’right?” said Bridget ban.

  Grimpen deposited his burden on the sagging couch and straightened his limbs. “He’s not dead, but he’s taken a bad blow to the head. He’ll have a headache when he comes to.”

  “He’ll have more than a headache,” Bridget ban told him. “He liked the Fudir. He thought he was a nice old man, underneath that bitter act.”

  Greystroke’s face was grim-set. “The bitterness was no act. The nice old man was. The Terran word is ‘bonded.’ It’s something to beware of, Bridget ban.”

  “Aye? An’ ye’ve lost yer lead to the Donovan, haven’t ye?” Then she straightened. “The Other Olafsson! Maybe she snatched the Fudir so she could find Donovan and carry out the mission.”

  But Greystroke said, “No. Hugh would have tried to stop her and the Ravn would have killed him. The Fudir is Donovan. I suspected it when he didn’t keep the sex straight of his next contact. After I followed him into the Corner of Jehovah, I knew. And he knew I’d puzzled it out. But he wanted out of the Great Game. He’d been hiding from the ’Feds, hoping they would never call on him. We had a silent agreement.”

  “Wonderful,” said Grimpen. “The problem with silent agreements, Pup, is that they’re no different from silent disagreements.”

  “I’m no fool, you great lump of flesh! The Red-hound and I programmed aimshifars into the clothing we gave him. We can track him through the anycloth. Bridget, where is he now?”

  Bridget ban had already been studying her wrist strap. “Nearly out of range o’ this mickle thing. Let me…Ah, there I have it. Sou’-sou’west. Half a league.”

  Grimpen grunted. “Not much of a head start, then.”

  “Not heading toward the Navy Yards,” said Greystroke. “Nor the Corner. I thought he would have bolted there like a rat to its hole. What’s his plan?” He activated his wristband. “Synch with me, Bridget. I’ll find him and bring him back. No, both of you stay here. It was my error; it’s my corrective action.” He checked the charge on his teaser and tucked it into his waistband.

  Greystroke hurried through the streets of the Fourteenth District wondering how he could have miscalculated so badly. What would Fir Li say when he graded the exercise? It was no excuse to say that the stakes had escalated from the routine task he had originally been set. He had failed at that, too. He should have minded his own assignment, left the Dancer problem to Bridget ban, and taken Fudir prisoner back to Sapphire Point. He had allowed ambition to seduce him.

  The wristband told him that the Fudir had gone to the right, and he slipped around the corner onto a street even less inviting than the one the hotel was on. The morning sun barely warmed him, as if it too avoided these decaying tenements.

  Few people were about. Lost souls with nowhere to go, and no idea how to get there. He paid no attention to them, or they to him. If they noticed him at all, they saw another early morning wraith living out his defeat.

  As he passed an alleyway, the direction indicator on the wristband flipped. Greystroke drifted back to the opening and looked down a dead-ended cobblestone passageway lined with trash barrels, dustbins, and odds and ends of discarded appliances. Drainpipes ran from roofs five stories above to gurgle their burdens nowhere near the sewer grates. But the weather had been dry this season, so the pools of water were small and survived largely because the sun did not venture into this narrow lane.

  Greystroke moved silently down the alley, looking behind each dustbin and trash can as he passed. The aimshifars reported that the Fudir was deeper in, but Greystroke did not discount the possibility of a confederate—or even a Confederate.

  But there was no one. And when he came at last to the spot where the locators in the anycloth proclaimed the Fudir to be, he found a smelly, ragged man wearing clothing far too good for him, who was slug by slug putting himself outside of a bottle of white spirits. When he saw Greystroke suddenly before him, the derelict shrieked and raised his hands, saying, “I never touched him! I swear it! I never touched him!”

  Few organizations are sufficiently feudal as to subsist in complete self-sufficiency, and this is especially so for those that are themselves military service organizations. External suppliers can be increased or decreased as the volume of business requires; whereas the same functions performed by cadre would require full-time expensing and general administrative overhead.

  And for the most menial work, who better than Terrans? They work cheap, when they work at all, and with sufficient supervision will actually get the job done. That is because they are paid for performance rather than for their time. Slacking off only delays payment.

  One service farmed out by ICC Peacekeeping Navy Yard Number Three—called Brisley Watkins Yard, after some forgotten hero—was victualing, for which Heybob Brothers—a local Terran firm—had low-balled the bid with the usual financial cunning of their people. At least, so the Yard Captain had reasoned. The Terrans, for their part, saw an opportunity for an easy ruby. If the prices they charged Watkins Yard were low, the cost of the provisions were lower still, and a dip of the beak went, as it always went, to the Terran Brotherhood—for the good of the Corner, the eventual liberation of the homeworld, and the more comfortable lives led by the Vanguard of the Struggle.

  One way to keep costs down was to hire laborers by the day in the morning call-out at the hiring hall. Drivers and other skilled workers must be lured with wages and benefits, and were permanent employees; but day labor did not carry overhead when there was no labor that day.

  The Fudir who presented himself at the Hall did not appear nearly as old as the Fudir who had traveled all the way from Jehovah. Certainly, he had no problem lifting the heavy sacks of potatoes and rice and beans. Besides, a particular hand-clasp and the passage of a wad of rubies had ensured him a spot with Heybob’s morning victualing run—along with a promise to Himself and the Forsaken Committee of Seven that nothing ill would rebound on Heybob from whatever scramble the Fudir planned to carry out.

&nb
sp; If there were anything known as “base security,” it had been largely forgotten by the guards at Watkins Yard. The routine is the ally of the unexpected, and it had been a long time since there had been an enemy of the ICC on Old ’Saken. The goods lorry pulled into the Yard with a wave of the hand and the driver parked behind the Yard Refectory. The Terrans “schlepped” the vegetables into the storerooms, singing a work song about carrying sheaves that the Chief Victualer and his petty officers thought wondrously droll. “I hain’t rejoicing, was I doing that scut work,” the Fudir overheard one of them say.

  Nobody at the gate bothered to count the number of laborers in the goods lorry when it left, let alone compare it to the number who had entered.

  Terrans go everywhere and no one makes much remark. Thus, the Committee of Seven had a decently accurate map of the Yard from the observations of those who had previously been inside. The Fudir had memorized this map and knew exactly where Commodore Saukkonen had his office. The next problem was to transform a ragged Terran laborer into someone who looked like he might actually belong in a Navy Yard. For that, the Fudir slipped into a supply shed and emerged wearing a maintenance coverall of dull black, and carrying under his arm a “cliputer” and a paperboard tube such as those in which engineering flex-screens are kept. Armed in this fashion, he could go almost anywhere on the Yard without being questioned.

  He paused and slipped into his ears a pair of the buffers that Greystroke had fabricated en route from Die Bold. The theory was that he could still hear what was said, but the voice would be so distorted by the micro-intelligence that the Dancer’s effect would be nullified.

  The theory had yet to be tested, of course.

  Walking across the Yard, he traced out the cables linking the buildings with the practiced eye of an instrument tech. Those would be the secure channels, less vulnerable to intercept. Private voice calls and proprietary data went by “hard wire.” He whistled the song about the sheaves as he located the bundle from 3rd Fleet HQ, narrowed it down to the commodore’s office, and followed it to a junction box. Waiting for a moment when no one was nearby, he unscrewed the cable and let it dangle so that the contact was intermittent.

  He returned to the headquarters building at a slow hurry and walked boldly inside. “This where the comm link complaint came from?” he asked the petty officer at the desk. He waved the cliputer at her. “Got a ‘right-now-and-I-mean-it’ repair order while I was heading for the mess. Says…Commodore’s office. That’s 145?”

  “Right down the end of the hall,” the young woman told him. “Wait. You have to sign in. Security.”

  The Fudir kept a straight face while scrawling a randomly chosen name into the register. “What time you off-duty, ma’am?”

  “You’re a bold one,” she answered with a smile.

  “‘Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,’” he told her, “‘but good men starve for want of impudence.’”

  She laughed. “I don’t expect you’ll starve,” adding, “I’m off in nine ares.”

  The Fudir did not miss a beat. ’Saken used dodeka time, and an are was forty-eight minutes Earth-standard, or slightly more than a half hora in metric time. He gave her his best smile. “Maybe I’ll see you then? By the Refectory?”

  The Fudir proceeded down the hall, content that the receptionist harbored no suspicions. Bold knaves thrive indeed, he thought.

  The plaque on Room 145 read BAKHTIYAR COMMODORE SAUKKONEN, VANGUARD SQUADRON, 3RD PEACEKEEPER FLEET. Following the protocols he had observed earlier, he knocked once, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  “Sah!” he said, touching his cap. “Is this where…” He pretended to consult his cliputer. “You have an intermittent system connection?”

  Saukkonen regarded him with calm, liquid-brown eyes. He was a broad man, wide in the shoulders and with large hands. His desk was a marvel of disarray. It was foolish to form an opinion of another man, especially a man of power, from a single glance; but the Fudir thought that, under other circumstances, he might have liked Saukkonen.

  Of course, if he wanted to rule the galaxy, that would count against him.

  The commodore’s gaze shifted over the Fudir’s shoulder. “Is that one of them?”

  And the Fudir heard a voice say, “He is; and my particoolar prize.”

  The sentence was not even completed before the Fudir had run to the door; but two black arms wrapped around him like iron bands. “Noo, noo,” whispered Ravn Olafsdottr, “do noot flay so soon after we meet.”

  The Fudir relaxed in her grip and waited his moment. “So,” he said to the commodore, “you’ve sold out to the Confederacy!”

  The commodore smiled like a bear. “Hardly. Which is he?”

  “He calls himself thee Foodir,” said Ravn.

  Saukkonen reached below his desk and his hand emerged with a sand-colored brick. It was bent into a quarter arc, like a live actor taking a bow.

  “Listen to me, Fudir,” said Saukkonen. “You are a bold and competent man, and I need bold and competent men, so I am asking you to throw in with me and work in my Special Squad.”

  The Fudir felt no desire to do any such thing. He smiled broadly and said, “Of course, sah.”

  But Saukkonen frowned and shook his head. “You hesitated. Ravn, check his ears.”

  The Fudir felt his head turned roughly and the buffers plucked ungently from his ears.

  “Now,” said Saukkonen, “let’s try that again. Fudir, will you join me on my Special Squad?”

  “Of course, sah,” the Fudir said, surprised that the commodore would even ask. Even as he spoke, a part of him knew he had been compelled. Yet he felt that his agreement was entirely rational and the use of the Dancer wholly unnecessary, almost an insult. He favored his new boss with a questioning look.

  “Oh, yes,” Saukkonen said. “It’s more seamless when the subjects don’t know. Then, they only think they’ve changed their minds. Leftenant Olafsdottr, for example, does not approve of my plan, but she will help me carry it out with every fiber of her being. Won’t you, Leftenant?”

  “With every fiber, sah!”

  “You see? I haven’t sold out to the Confederacy. I’ve only recruited a Confederate to work for me. Oh, don’t worry, Specialist Fudir. You haven’t become a zombie. You still have your own will. It’s only that you also have my will. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but there are no two ways about this! Haha.” He hefted the brick. “Together, we can move with the same purpose, with a minimum of debate and compromise.”

  The Fudir nodded. It made sense. “And what is that purpose, if I may ask, sah?”

  The commodore stroked the Twisting Stone, which now had the aspect of a screw. His smile bespoke contentment. “The Periphery grows weary of the constant vigilance needed against the Confederation. It is time we put an end to it, so the children of the border—of Abyalon, of Megranome, of all the Old Planets—may sleep peacefully at night. I will take the Mighty 3rd across that trackless waste and strike Those of Name and Bring Them Down!”

  The Fudir’s heart swelled with those words. He could fairly see the ships lifting, the Names cowed, Terra free! “Yes!” he cried. Terra free. How absolutely marvelous that this man would lead the charge!

  Beside him, the dreams of Lady Cargo paled. Yet, this was far too grandiose for military contractors. Peacekeepers were usually hired to separate belligerents, interdict aggressors, patrol an exit ramp, or maintain order in the aftermath of catastrophe. Seldom could they go up against a planetary government, and never at any sort of profit. Saukkonen, of all men, should know how mad a scheme it was. Even with the Ourobouros Circuit, how did he imagine the “Mighty 3rd” would fare against the entire might of the Confederation of Central Worlds? He had barely escaped from his own flotilla when they had cut communication with the flagship.

  “I’m a humble man,” Saukkonen said. “I have always followed my orders honestly and to the best of my abilities. But lately, it has grown on me that this i
s not enough. Honor and ability demand more of me than that.”

  The Fudir saluted him. “Yes, sah!” And in a flash, he knew. And he knew what he must do.

  And he dreaded it almost as much as servitude.

  He turned to Lieutenant Olafsdottr. “What say you, Ravn. Will you help our Leader destroy you own Confederation?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you don’t like it.”

  The Confederate shrugged. “We do what we must, not what we like.”

  “I know how you feel,” the Fudir said. “I’m also of two minds about the project. Do you understand me? But the Fudir is utterly convinced.”

  He saw the light in the Ravn’s eyes, the understanding that she was free to act where the commodore’s instructions ran not to the contrary.

  “Hear me, Donovan,” she said in the harsh birdsong of Confederal Manjrin. “‘Your duty past is your duty now.’”

  Donovan grinned at her. No matter how enslaved the execrable Fudir may have been to the commodore’s will, the slumbering Donovan had not been affected. He turned to Saukkonen and said, “I’m ready to do my duty, sah!”

  As Saukkonen briefed him regarding the proposed raid, Donovan found himself falling more and more in sympathy with it. He had never had much love for Those of Name and thought bringing about their downfall a good thing. Saukkonen has not reduced Donovan to obedience, he thought, but that does not reduce the persuasive power of his voice. He knew he must act quickly, without warning, lest he soon become a willing ally on this gallant but foolhardy mission.

  His chance came when Saukkonen asked for suggestions. Ravn told him the Confederate fleet dispositions and suggested alternate routes into the Central Worlds, but the commodore disagreed. “Sapphire Point, it must be.” And Ravn and Donovan assented.

  “But, Bakhtiyar,” Donovan said, “if you take the entire fleet across the Rift, the ’Feds will shoot first, not open a discussion. Missiles will be launched before you can win over the master of each enemy corvette, and you cannot persuade shrapnel.”