“My throat will still feel the dagger,” she said, eyes filled with sudden anguish. “A few days ago I would have gladly died with my honor intact, but you prevented it, and now—now I want to live, but honor may not allow it.”
“You people use honor like a crutch,” Hal snapped, “like you’re afraid to take responsibility for yourselves! If you want to live, then live, and to hell with your honor!”
Dayuki shook her head in dismay. “Den Tun may only suspect that I helped you, but when he finds the seppuku kupiga—the suicide box—he will know! He will offer me the choice of completing the task or facing his justice. Seppuku is quicker.”
“He wouldn’t kill you out of hand,” Hal countered. “You are his own flesh and blood. You said yourself that he saved you, offered you the opportunity to help your people.”
“Den Tun took me from my village to make a gift of me—for your father!” She saw his shock and quickly made amends for the perceived offense: “Your father was an honorable man.” She rose and sat on the edge of the pool. “I was happy enough to go; better to live as the property of the Onjin than sold to a brothel like the other half-breed girls. Your father was dismayed at Den Tun’s gift, to say the least. I was provincial and ignorant, even by our standards. He made it clear to Den Tun he had no interest in a young kahaba.”
“So he never…”
“He never took me to his bed. I worked as his house girl, learned your language. He had me educated, to Den Tun’s consternation. He gave me authority over his affairs at the base while he was absent. Den Tun had no choice but to commission me, to give my people an excuse to tolerate my presence.
“I earned enough status to rate third wife of most of Den Tun’s officers. One even offered me a marriage as his second.”
“Why didn’t you accept?” Hal asked.
“I could not, until your father abdicated his ownership.”
“Which he did not do before he died,” Hal concluded. He thought of something else: If Dayuki was considered chattel, without the rights to even enter into marriage by her own will, it could mean—” Dayuki, did I…inherit you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she smiled. “I feared you would not be as noble as your father but you never treated me like a servant. You let me walk at your side, Hal-san; you were always kind to me. It is for that I will give you all I have, little as it is.” She touched his face lightly with her fingertips as she spoke, a gesture of fondness that cast their relationship in an entirely new light, as if drawing a shade from his eyes.
Hal had never really seen her until that moment: she was nonpareil, a product of countless random paths and unique circumstances bound to him by an honor system he could not claim to understand, brilliant, deadly, and unremittingly lovely. He drank up the sight of her: strands of ebony hair plastered across her breasts, beads of moisture clinging to eyelashes and taut, glowing skin, the tight, flat stomach and sensual, curvaceous hips.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful, Dayuki?”
Her eyes dropped. “No.”
Hal tilted her chin up with his finger until their eyes met again. “You are beautiful.”
The world dropped into her bottomless eyes. Her lips brushing against his, trembling, then urgent with a hunger never experienced, never recognized, until that moment. The kiss lasted three seconds, five. Heat burgeoned in his chest and he reached for her.
Dayuki pulled back and stood, walked away, leaving him flustered and unsteady, head ringing with endorphins and hormones that suddenly had nowhere to go. She looked back at him over a perfect shoulder, one eyebrow arched.
It wasn’t just any look.
It was the look, as much a challenge as invitation, the final notice of the first and last chance, the look that all men longed for but few received and fewer still found the courage to act on. Hal followed her to her bedroom, trembling like a schoolboy, where she turned and let him take her in his arms.
“Are you sure you want this?” he asked huskily. “It might not be what you expect.”
Dayuki smiled at his chivalrous attempt to protect her. “You think I do not know sekkusu because I have never shared a bed? Minzoku mothers tell their daughters everything they need to know.”
Despite her confidence in her sophistication, she found herself innocent enough to be surprised at the number of things her mother left her to discover on her own.
God’s Saucer: 2709:05:05 Standard
A bitter knot settled in the pit of Cormack’s stomach as the scrap truck bounced through his gate. The wad of cash in his hand was barely a tenth the value he might otherwise have received for the material had he sold it off as functional components, but those who dealt in second-hand instrumentation would easily recognize their own property.
Cormack glowered at the tiny baffle-rider gathering dust in its cradle. None of the offers he received for the vessel came close to covering his costs—the wealthy could buy a brand-new custom ship for a few thousand more than the price he asked and traditional ‘Riders generally couldn’t afford it. At this rate it was destined to end up some brat’s in-system hotrod after the bankruptcy court sold it at auction.
The cash he’d just received and the payment due for repairing the Ladybird’s cargo sled could keep the credit hounds at bay for another few weeks, or pay the freight charges to get the little ship boosted into orbit with a little left over for outfitting. He owned significant equity in the lease on his shop; the price he locked into twenty years ago was a steal by present standards and the owner would be more than happy to cash him out in order to free it up. The windfall would permit him to add upgrades to the baffle-rider that would make life in the lanes just a bit more tolerable.
Unfortunately, both options favored the likelihood of ending up a penniless beggar: he’d lose everything if he stayed; the little cash left wouldn’t last long if he ran, and soon he’d be one more space hobo trying to lie, cheat and steal his way across the Commonwealth until he ended up like Stoyko.
Submit to bankruptcy or to save what he could by returning to the life of a vagabond he’d sworn off so many years earlier? There must be another course, if he could only find it!
His attention drifted to the cargo sled, which Ben Grogan was coming to retrieve the next morning. The reward for turning in the poachers wouldn’t do much to get him out of his hole, but there was more than one way to use the discovery. The knowledge might be enough to leverage additional payment—a small gratuity for his silence—but an attempt to blackmail the wrong sort of people could land him in an awkward position.
A crew unscrupulous enough to be vulnerable to extortion might turn out to be unscrupulous enough to cut his throat. Cormack couldn’t determine that based on meeting a single crewman; he’d have to use other means, starting with the public record.
That evening found Cormack in his aerogel pilot’s seat brooding over the choices left to him, none of them obviously the right one. He’d found out less about the Ladybird than he expected: no one on her crew belonged to any of the local spacer unions, she claimed no alliance with any independent shipper’s guild, and was a non-entity as far as the local organizations that tracked merchant vessels’ reliability, performance and consumer complaints were concerned.
The Ladybird was on the large side for an independent, but the few consignments he managed to associate with her were all low paying, space available freight, hardly enough to meet typical operating costs even factoring in poaching income. Such circumstances might not be unusual for a startup operation, but the Ladybird had been in and out of the Nivia system for nearly four years and what he found during the repair of the cargo sled suggested that the same small cadre of mechanics had been maintaining it for longer than that.
A once-successful independent fallen on hard times? Maybe, but Ben Grogan’s private account held at least enough to cover the costly repair and he hadn’t hemmed and hawed like someone about to take a fatal hit in the pocketbook. The ship obviously had income—it jus
t wasn’t legal, above-board income.
None of it added up, and Cormack knew better than to ignore that. Knowing the Ladybird was deep into something illegal, however, didn’t do him any good if he didn’t know what that something was. It would take hands-on detective work to figure that out, but he couldn’t just bang on the lock and ask for their itinerary and manifests, nor could he afford the cost of commercial passage necessary to trail them.
He needed some clue to suggest whether or not it was even worth considering, and at the moment the only possible source of that clue lay with the Ladybird’s cargo sled.
Cormack entered the craft again, searching more thoroughly this time. It had been well sanitized; nothing left behind could link the sled to a person or a ship. However, any device used to house or transport human beings held tiny caches of artifacts, a history of travels and occupants that often escaped cleaning and tidying-up because cleaning and tidying-up were visual activities. The nooks and crannies not immediately visible accumulated crumbs and coins, buttons, orphaned jewelry, scraps of paper, writing instruments, drugs of varying quantity and legality and, not infrequently, weapons. The larger the vehicle, the larger the voids and the larger the artifacts, a rule of thumb that occasionally led Cormack to the discovery of lost and forgotten contraband and, once or twice, a mummified corpse.
Nothing so dramatic turned up this time. He returned to his shop with a small bag full of the usual detritus and dumped it out on a bench. The pile didn’t hold anything incriminating: the average collection of coins, a dried-up stylus, assorted small hardware, a black metal button and a dozen scraps of paper lacking any significant annotations. A dirt-encrusted memory plaque turned out to be a cheap pornographic novel that Cormack had already read.
Defeated, he picked out the coins, tossed the hardware into one of dozens of small containers full of the same, and pushed the rest off the bench into a trashcan. The button bounced off the edge and skittered across the floor, emitting a high-pitched ring each time it struck the concrete.
Intrigued, he dropped to his knees and groped through the dust and fuzz beneath the bench until it came to hand again. It was heavier than it had any right to be, and Cormack realized that the black coating was tarnish. It was a silver button from an officer’s dress uniform. The outer surface bore a sigil or coat of arms.
He buffed it against his shirtsleeve until the contrast between the oxidation and polished silver brought the details into relief. The sigil depicted a human hand grasping a crown. Tiny lettering curved along the top and bottom, so small that Cormack had to use a magnifier to read it clearly. The writing on the bottom was four words in a language he didn’t know: Maher Shalal Hash Baz. The writing at the top was a single word that Cormack suspected was the name of a vessel: Embustero.
Nothing suggested that the button was related to the Ladybird, other than that it was on the Ladybird’s lander, but it was the only possible clue he had to go on. After a few more hours of research he found considerably more information about the Embustero than had turned up about the Ladybird.
The Embustero was a privately-owned and operated general transport hull of the same class as the Ladybird. She had a long history of unremarkable service as a trader and charter cargo carrier and had been registered with the Merchant-Trader Guild for most of that time. Feedback on file with the Guild was good to excellent, the few complaints lodged against her no worse than anyone would expect of a ship with her length of service.
She’d even received a Commonwealth governmental transport contract, and it was at that point things appeared to go bad. The details of the contract weren’t available, but it was rescinded a few months after the award, the only official comment being that the ship had failed to meet certain prerequisites.
A shipyard on Spencer filed a formal lien claiming that the Embustero had failed to pay for services rendered and the account had gone to collections. The last entry in her record was nearly three years old, stating that the Guild had revoked the ship’s membership for failing to respond to the complaint.
The collection agency listed in the Guild file had offered a percentage of any monies recovered to anyone with information leading to the Embustero’s successful apprehension. He had yet to prove that the Ladybird and the Embustero were one and the same, but it gave him an avenue to pursue and either outcome stood to solve his financial woes. If the Ladybird was willing to pay for his silence concerning her poaching, the Embustero would certainly pay for his silence concerning her location and alias. Failing that, the skip-tracer’s bounty would satisfy Cormack just as well.
There wasn’t much time to gather the proof he needed; the Ladybird was scheduled to depart Nivia’s orbit three weeks hence and wouldn’t return for at least four months if her established pattern held. He hated to spread his finances any thinner but it was necessary to get the baffle-rider into orbit to track the freighter.
NINE
Beta Continent: 2709:05:05 Standard
The call began as a gentle tone: a mere peep, an audible itch that Hal chose to ignore in favor of the warm, soft bedding and silky female body curled in his arms. The call repeated insistently: loud and ragged, a discordant irritation that he had to ignore very hard.
The third call exploded from the bedside panel as a continuous, deafening claxon that vibrated Hal’s teeth. He sat bolt upright, stabbing at the device until the sound stopped and McKeon’s face appeared. Dayuki stirred beside him in the sudden lonely chill, but McKeon spared her barely a glance before Hal whisked the blankets back over her.
“What!”
“Den Tun is massing troops on the other side of the pass,” McKeon said evenly. “I don’t think he bought it.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes; get him on the horn.” He broke the connection and turned his attention to Dayuki, who waited until they were alone again before she emerged from beneath the blanket. “Hell of a way to end a very pleasant evening,” he apologized.
She sat up and stretched with a sigh, disheveled hair spiking in all directions. The sight tempted him to burrow back into the sheets with her, and to hell with McKeon, Den Tun and the rest of the mess, but Dayuki seemed to sense his impulse and steered his attention back to the immediate concerns. “How do you intend to deal with Den Tun?”
Talking business in bed with a beautiful woman he’d just spent the entire night making love to struck Hal as somewhat ludicrous. The morning after usually entailed insincere mutual mooning or awkward small talk until one party or the other made their escape. Neither reaction fit these circumstances, considering that post-coital avoidance wasn’t practical and there simply wasn’t time for affectionate chat. The fact that he regretted the latter suggested that the encounter wasn’t entirely casual on his part, although Dayuki’s detachment left him with the uneasy impression that the same might not be true of her.
“I’m not sure,” Hal replied. “We have limited tactical offensive capability, but he doesn’t know that. What sort of threat do you think would make him back down?”
“None,” Dayuki told him. “The troop mass is a defensive measure. He already believes that the Onjin intend to attack him, or he would not employ it so openly. An explicit threat will only reinforce this belief.”
“We have attacked him, in a manner of speaking,” Hal said. “I don’t know what I can say to convince him that I don’t intend to take it any farther.”
Dayuki tilted her head. “The truth,” she said, as if it were obvious.
Every face in the command post fixed on Hal and Dayuki when they arrived, he in his usual attire while she now wore a rumpled one-piece jumpsuit that fit her passably well after she rolled up the sleeves and pant legs. Some exhibited surprise at the sight of the Minzoku woman, though not enough to assume that rumors hadn’t already started their rounds, but most looked worried. The only means of escape was Hal’s starship, which could by no means evacuate the hundreds of people in the Fort. Left the option of the much vaunted, never used defensive weapo
nry, they found their confidence not nearly as unshakable as when the Minzoku behaved with proper servility.
Tamara Cirilo’s lips pressed together in a thin line on spying Dayuki, but Hal had more to worry about than her opinion of his choice of advisor. Dayuki was most qualified to interpret the nuances of Minzoku speech, with all apologies to McKeon, and she knew Den Tun better than anyone at the Fort. “Do you have him?” He asked curtly.
“Coming on line,” McKeon said. Hal sauntered into position before the projector. Dayuki sidled to the periphery, but Hal motioned her to join him. Den Tun’s eyes narrowed perceptibly when he saw his grandniece.
Hal addressed him before he could speak: “I take it I destroyed your only facility.”
Den Tun hesitated. “I do not—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hal interrupted. “If not, you’ll produce another Tiger Opal. You might even get it off-planet.”
“I—”
“Then the gaijin you conspired with will use it to reverse-engineer the process and discard you like garbage.”
The old man’s jaw set. “Impossible!”
Hal shook his head. “Inevitable. It never takes as long for others to reproduce a technological advance—the battle is half won simply by knowing it can be done.” Den Tun stared back, inscrutable as always. “Clearly you have resources we are ignorant of. You’ll reconstruct your laboratory eventually, in spite of our attempts to stop you, but it will take years and eat resources better used elsewhere. Meanwhile we’ll revisit our old experiments without your interference and we’ll figure it out, too, eventually, but at considerable cost.
“Or we can collaborate and accomplish it in a matter of months. I’m willing to cooperate, Den Tun. As equals.”
Den Tun shook his head. “I know the Onjin for the pale-eyed devils you are.” Dayuki’s spine stiffened with outrage. Hal kept her silent with a squeeze of his hand while her uncle continued: “You can be trusted no more than the gaijin—less so, because you take advantage of our honor! You, who have none!”
Pale Boundaries Page 14