Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  Kumari reported that when she reached him to change the time of our meet, he looked unusually fidgety and wouldn’t commit to anything over the com, said he’d get a message round to her. Which he did about an hour later. One of the street kids that infested the undercity like mites on a dog’s belly got past tel security somehow and up to the floor where our unit was, hand-carrying a flashnote, time and place scribbled on it and a reminder I was to come careful and alone; the flash was quicker than usual, she just had time to read the thing before it dissolved.

  I left the trucetel an hour early, spent a good part of the time jumping flea runs, mixing that with trots around the block up top where the sun was hot and the mirrors busy. Several times I wished I had Pels along, times when I was almost but not quite sure I’d dropped my ticks, but regret only gives you ulcers and Adelaar needed him more than I did. When she’d crawled out of the medicell and into bed, Kumari, Pels and I had a short confa about the morrow, I played them over the duel and the parade to the jits afterward and the shadows rustling round us-we’d ’ve had to scramble to reach the jits if it weren’t for Barker and the rest. It was clear enough that Bolodo wasn’t giving up, just changing tactics. The most likely next step was pointing assassins at us. “Remember Bustus?” I said.

  “I remember something closer to a Crawler’s soul,” Kumari said, “Bolodo has more money than god herself.”

  “What, pay out all those golden gelders, those slippery succulent little darlins just for me? No, the Prime target’ll be Adelaar.”

  Bolodo wouldn’t sic Crawlers on me unless they had to, because it’d cost them a lot. Couple years ago I was after a University contract advertised on Helvetia and this character decided it would make a good cover for some other things he was doing and I was his only serious competition, so he dropped their price on a NightCrawler cobben and pointed them at me. I got seriously annoyed at this interference, also at having the hair singed off half my head. A lethal friend of mine happened to be on Helvetia right then, arguing an Escrow Closing; she’d just finished a Hunt and was getting the fee released, a complicated business since her fees tended to be in the range of the gross yearly income of your average world economy. Lovely gentle woman, she gets upset when she kills someone or maims them a little, but not when they target someone she’s fond of. She’s redheaded and has the temper to go with it. We did some bloody housecleaning and she laid down a warning, mess with her friends and she’d come Hunting without a commission. Since then the NightCrawlers walk wide of me, so like I said, Bolodo might have some trouble recruiting a cobben, a reputation’s a handy thing. But like Kumari said, Bolodo’s got the gelt; they’ll buy some nerve and stuff it up some Crawler’s spine. What else is money for, eh?

  By now Adelaar and my crew were in the City also, sitting in an office at Del’s bank, temporarily safe from attack. Or so I hoped. As shipsecond and official MOM and holding my signature, Kumari could endorse the contracts for me and stamp the escrow agreements; she usually handled that kind of thing, she was sharper than either Pels or me when it came to words and the twists that gentlebeings could put on them. Adelaar would be imprinting the contracts with her bank, the Register Circuit and the Escrow Board. It had to be done in the proper office, with the proper officials in attendance, everything fotted and entered in octuplets or more. Helvetian rules. She intended to evoke Privacy on the terms, but I had more faith in Bolodo’s persistence than in Helvetian tech, so I figured the local execs would know what we were after in a few hours. And when they did, when they discovered I was agreeing to rescue the daughter, they’d really get serious about taking us out. That’s all they needed to be sure I either had their stinking secret or was so close to finding it, the little bit left made no difference at all.

  Ti Vnok was waiting at the back of one of the larger arbors; it was close to ground level and had enough exits to satisfy a claustrophobic paranoid. I’d felt clean the past five minutes or so and I’d pulled every trick I knew to test the feeling out, so I strolled into the cool and shifting shadows and wandered about a minute or so longer. No bells rang. I drifted over to Vnok’s alcove and slid onto the bench across the table from him.

  He sat mantis still, his eyes expressionless as obsidian marbles, but the two short feathery antennas that served as eyebrows were doing a nervous dance.

  “Far as I can tell, I’m clean,” I said. “I spent the last hour getting that way.”

  He rubbed his wrists together, the callus patches there making a faint skrikking sound; the expression came back into his eyes and his monkey face dissolved into the sort of grin that makes you want to grin back. “I’ve got some cover for meeting you, Swarda, a man came to see me last night, said he had a message for you.” He didn’t waste time asking if I wanted to hear it. He leaned forward, the weight of his torso balanced on his forearms. “Drop this business and certain people will see you won’t be hurting for it. One hundred thousand gelders. No bidding, please. That was the deal.”

  “No deal,” I said. “You bring the list?”

  “Only the freshest names.” He thrust two fingers in his throat pouch and brought out a small black packet. “The whole list would herniate a bumphel.”

  “Even flaked?”

  “Even flaked. I thought you’d better stay mobile. I hear a cobben’s been activated.”

  “Pointed at me?”

  “Pointed at your client. I don’t touch that kind of negotiation, so I don’t know who paid the price. There’s a lot of chat in the underways, I’m hearing this and that…” His dust lids slid slowly over his eyes, then retreated beneath the outer lids; he waited. Gossip bought gossip in his view and he had his own reputation to consider; he was supposed to know everything going by on Helvetia and a long way beyond.

  “Trade you something that’s not for chatting yet.”

  “What for what?”

  “A packet giving chapter and verse, signatured and attested by me and the client, set in Escrow pending release to someone with a passpartout for that account. And a verbal outline of what’s inside for your ears only.”

  “For…”

  “For a squirt link. I want the Seven warned of trouble, who it’s from and what’s behind it.” I tapped a finger on the packet, watched it wobble, then tucked it into a beltslit. “If this works out like I think, Slancy’s coming in with a heavy load and a fragile one. I want a welcome waiting.”

  Vnok rubbed his wrists together again, the skrikk like the purring of a sated cat; odd how many different inflections he could get out of that idiot sound. “There are two names on that list. Leda Zag. Ilvinin Taivas. They are… um… of special interest to the Seven. If you can find them and let me know you have them, I guarantee a vigorous welcome.”

  I looked round; I didn’t spot anything, but Vnok wouldn’t be talking this freely without his own distorter making mishmash of our words. I swung around so I was facing the back wall just in case someone was out there flaking this. “Distorter on?” I said. Logic was all very well, but what I had to say, well, I wasn’t going to take any chances I could avoid.

  “On,” he said. His antennas wriggled his surprise.

  “When you hear, you’ll see why.” I rested my arms on the table and leaned in close as I sketched out what was in that packet, everything Adelaar had found out about Bolodo, dates and the data she’d flaked from the mainBrain on Spotchals, what I thought had probably happened to the disappeared on the list he’d given me.

  8

  By the time I got back to the trucetel, Adelaar and the others were waiting for me. There was a burn on one of Adelaar’s arms, the tip of Pels’ left ear was flat instead of round, but Kumari looked cool as mountain water. “Crawler,” she said. “We stayed in the bright instead of taking the tube run, put his timing off.”

  “Business finished?”

  “All done.”

  “We paid up here?”

  “More than paid, if you count the deposit.”

  “Good. Order dinner for�
�” I frowned at my ringchron, surprised to find it was barely the third hour past noon. Seemed like it should’ve been closer to sundown. “Eighth hour. What’s the shuttle schedule like?”

  “Midday, it’s usually fairly light. You want to take a chance?”

  “Yeh. The paperwork’s done, the squirt link’s set up and Vnok is primed, better we leave before Bolodo thinks up something new.”

  “Terminal,” Adelaar said suddenly; she’d been listening and looking peeved at being left out of things. Couldn’t help that, I wasn’t going to tell her about Vnok’s list until I had to and that wasn’t till we got wherever it was we were going. “The dinner ploy’s so old it stinks, it won’t fool anyone.”

  “No problem. Remember Barker and his friends? I hired them to hang around the transfer point until we showed up. Gave us a discount, they did. Don’t like Crawlers any better than I do.”

  9

  Maybe it was Vnok pulling strings, maybe it was Luck coming round to kiss us sweet, but we got loose from Helvetia Perimeter in half the usual time and dipped into the insplit clean and lonesome.

  We made Weersyll three weeks later. Security at the port was a joke; getting into the holding pens might have been a problem, but we weren’t going near the place. There was only one ship down and they kept searchlights sweeping the metacrete around it, the flickering light and shadow making ideal conditions for Pels. The guards at the gates had obviously been warned to look out for intruders, but they weren’t really interested in anything except giving the haulers a hard time, making them unload crates and open them up so the contents could be inspected. One time, just for the hell of it, seemed to me, they shot up some crates of frozen poults to the vast and vocal annoyance of the cargomaster waiting for them. No bloodoons or sniffoons, no heatseekers. A joke. Pels put a packet of ticks in his mouth, turned on his camouflage and walked through the gate, then climbed on a flat as it trundled through after him and rode in comfort to the ship. He set the ticks and rode the flat out again, ignored by one and all. And that was that.

  VIII

  1. Eight months std. after Adelaar hired Quale.

  Asteroid Belt/Horgul system/Swardheld Quale et al. With Slancy Orza tucked neatly out of sight on a large stone asteroid.

  Pels scratched at his healing ear. “Four and Five are inhabited. Five looked to me like a penal colony, I saw an insystem ship eject half a dozen pods and leave orbit before they were down; obviously no one cared whether they landed in one piece or not or what happened to the people in them. The Transport went down on Four, so I thought better not send EYEs there yet, I didn’t want Bolodo techs picking up search traces and following them back to us. There’s another reason, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve had EYEs poking about Five since we got here, I figured I could get some idea what we’re facing from the convicts, if that’s what they were. They are. The place has evidently been a dumping ground for quite a while, some of the buildings down there are old enough to have great-grandpups. What we’re facing, mm. Good news and bad news. The good is we’ve got a fair version of the local language in MEMORY. A little updating and we’re home free on that. Remember Hordaradda? You picked up some plants there, the ones you delivered to University the time we met.”

  “I remember. Yes. Hordar?”

  “Looks like.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “The bad news. Bolodo landed on Four. Which means the head whosis is there, government records will be there, including the list of the two-legged cargo Bolodo’s been supplying the past however many years, their names and whereabouts. We need that list.” He dug his claws into the fur under his chin. “Which means we’ve got to go there and get it.” He sucked in a long breath, let it trickle through his blunt black nose. “You know what’s orbiting that mudball, Swar? Riding in synchronous orbit over what’s probably the capital city? A Monarch class Warmaster,” he was speaking slowly, enunciating his words with much care, “and it’s working just fine, far as I can tell; I didn’t hang about long after I saw what she was and felt her start sniffing after who it was making waves around her. She’s old, but those things were built to last. I wouldn’t want to try sneaking Slancy down past her.”

  Quale slumped in his chair, crossed his legs at the ankles and contemplated the screen with its schematic of the system, green dots marking the location of the two worlds they were interested in and some slowly shifting red dots that were insystem ships traveling between those worlds. He ruffled his fingers through the short hairs of his beard, stroked his mustache. Watching him, Adelaar felt like screaming: shave that fungus off if that’s all you can do, sit there fondling it. There were things going on here she didn’t understand, more to getting that list than finding out where Aslan was. I’m paying you, I own you for the next few months, she told herself, but it didn’t help, she was a passenger and he was running the game. I could have done all this myself, she thought, I wouldn’t need him if I had a ship of my own… She swore under her breath, she’d put off and put off buying her own ship, it seemed such an unnecessary expense, what with upkeep and fuel and crew and most of all mooring fees, so much easier to buy space on a freighter or a Worldship. What’s going on here? I won’t be a passenger. I won’t be pushed into a closet and left out of things…

  “No,” Quale said. “No, we won’t take Slancy anywhere near that thing.”

  “Swar.”

  “Kri?”

  “Kinok says don’t be so spooky. If there was anyone onboard who really knew how to operate her, she would have picked us up the moment we came this side of the Limit and ashed us before we knew what was happening.”

  “That’s supposed to be comforting?”

  Kumari hiss/rattled her amusement. “Ve says, we’re alive, aren’t we. Why should we need comforting?”

  “Teach me to argue with a Sikkul Paem.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Mmh.” He watched the screen a moment longer. “Looks like there’s a fair amount of traffic out this way.”

  Pels extruded his claws, began picking away old horn. “There’s some mining the next quadrant over. Not a lot, mostly rare earths, things they might be short of on Four. And there’s some trade between Five and Four. Mainly gemstones, furs and ivory.”

  “From the readings, those ships aren’t much bigger than the tug. Say we left Slancy out here, we might be able to use the cargo carriers as stalking horses, make believe we’re one of them. What you think, Kri?”

  She tilted her head, listened a minute. “Kinok says maybe so, but ve needs more time to analyze the emissions.” She studied the screen. “The touchy moment is when we have to break loose from the pattern. Pels, I don’t see any satellite traces. Is that right, or were you too leery of the Warship to hunt for them?”

  He rumbled a mock growl deep in his throat. “I’m not putting a pip near that world until I absolutely have to.”

  “You absolutely have to fairly soon, furface. I can’t plan if I don’t have data.” She listened again, eyes closed, nodding at intervals. “Got it.” She swung her chair around. “Kinok says ve needs to watch say four or five of those ships landing; ve says, Pels, lay out some passive EYEs, ve swears on the drives the Warmaster won’t eat you.”

  Pels growled again. “And you tell ve to go twist veself; ve makes any more little jokes like that and I’ll have ve for salad my next meal.

  Kumari listened again, shook her head. “No, Kinok, I’ll let you tell furface that yourself, save it for the next time you see him. Swar, Kinok thinks as long as we keep the tug to local speeds, the Warmaster won’t get nervous about us. Ve says, though, it’s very important before we do anything, that ve has the landing data. Ve can handle salad threats, but ve has no desire at all to achieve vaporization.”

  Adelaar watched impatiently, her fingers tapping a jittery rhythm on her thigh. Now that she was so close, her blood was on fire to finish it. Her mind told her that this careful probing and planning was essential, her body told her GO. If
she were doing the observation, if she were directing things, she could be crisp and calm and efficient and all that. She wasn’t. She was more useless than the baggage in the hold. And it was driving her crazy.

  “Right. Pels, you’d better get started with those EYEs. The sooner you slide them into orbit, the sooner you can fetch them back so we can read them off and get on with this.” He watched the Rau pad out, then gazed at Adelaar, his fingers poking in his beard again, then he turned his head to Kumari. “I suppose it’s time.”

  “Might as well get it over with.” Kumari turned her pale gray eyes on Adelaar, sat with her hands folded, cool and disengaged.

  Adelaar forced the tension out of her hands and arms; as cool as Kumari, she said, “I’m paying freight here, I have a right to know what you’re doing.”

  Quale pinched the end of his nose. “You heard us talking about ti Vnok.”

  “So?”

  “Jaszaca ti Vnok. Agent. Among other things, he’s been handling offers from relatives and so on of people who’d dropped down a hole somewhere. They want them back. Most of them couldn’t afford Hunters Inc., but they did the next best thing and put a reward offer in ti Vnok’s files. He gets his cut if he manages to connect with someone who’ll do the digging, the rest goes to the digger if he’s lucky enough to find one of the disappeared. A few years ago he tried getting us interested, but we couldn’t afford to waste time on a cause as lost as that with no payback unless we actually produced the body. Not our kind of project anyway. Then you come along and it begins to look like some of those lost might have gone down the same hole your daughter did.” He scratched at his jaw, fingers digging through the short soft black beard. “We have a partial list which we’re going to try matching against the one in those files Pels was talking about. You said it yourself a while back, two flights a year for fifty, sixty years, maybe more, that adds up to a lot of bodies. We match ’em, snatch ’em, take ’em back to Helvetia and go home with a nice fattener for the pot.”