"Madam Veldt wishes to make something clear before we proceed," the attendant said. "She can both hear and understand you. She does not speak but that does not make her deaf. You will speak to her, not to me. Do you understand?"
"We understand," Rhundi said, and Brazel nodded. Madam Veldt gestured to her attendant and the girl produced a datapad from somewhere under her clothes and handed it to Rhundi. She began signing again.
"This is your contract," the attendant said. "You are to break into a certain home and remove a certain item from the library. Once you have removed the item, you are to take it somewhere no closer than five light-years from this location and then destroy it, as completely as you are able. The datapad also contains detailed maps and schematics of the home and the neighborhood surrounding it."
"This is Madam Veldt's home," Rhundi said. Madam Veldt's hands stopped moving, a clear expression of her shock.
"What?" Rhundi asked. "You didn't think I was going to meet with you without figuring out who you were first, did you?"
The old woman sneered and began signing again. "The home is not precisely hers," the attendant said. "It belongs to her husband. They are … estranged." Madam Veldt seemed to disagree with this word and began signing directly to her attendant, and the two of them directed their communication at each other for a moment.
"Estranged," the attendant said. "Madam Veldt is not welcome in the building where the item resides, and is physically unable to enter the library. Thus her preference for bringing in a third party."
Brazel couldn't resist. "Physically unable to enter the room? Is she married to a gnome?"
"She is," the attendant confirmed. Brazel's mouth dropped open. This job had just gotten a lot more interesting. He'd never heard of any such thing. He found that he had quite a few questions.
Rhundi shot him a look. "Physically unable? The room's built for us, then?"
Veldt and the attendant exchanged a look. "There may be more to it than that," the attendant said, and Brazel noticed something interesting: the girl was talking on her own now, not waiting for her mistress to sign a response. Madam Veldt, in fact, suddenly looked quite depressed. "The room is sized for gnomes, but Madam Veldt is not an especially large woman. Any door too small for her to enter through would necessarily be rather uncomfortable for gnomes as well. She is literally unable to enter the room. The mere thought has been known to produce rather violent nausea."
Madam Veldt was, in fact, starting to look rather green. She put a hand on her attendant's knee, then made a curt gesture with her other hand that Brazel had no trouble interpreting. It meant wrap it up.
"How's that work?" Rhundi said.
"We do not know," the attendant said, again without waiting for Veldt to answer the question.
"If there's magic involved, the price is going up," Rhundi said.
"You will find yourself well-compensated," the attendant said pointedly. "For one so focused on research, it is surprising that you have yet to finish reading the contract."
"And I suppose you've got some way of knowing how far away we are when we destroy the item," Rhundi said. "Speaking of, you haven't told us what it is yet."
Madam Veldt began signing again.
"We do not," the attendant said. "But Madam Veldt is concerned that her husband may. The library, and the item itself, has immense value to him."
"Again with the word item."
Madam Veldt paused and took a deep breath, then responded.
"It is a stuffed animal," the attendant said. "Specifically, a large, meat-eating quadruped common to human worlds known as a bear."
Brazel decided the best thing for him to do was to continue eating without making any comments. Rhundi managed to keep a straight face, a ripple in her fur the only sign of her reaction to their target.
"You want us to steal a stuffed bear. From a library, in your house. And blow it up," she said.
Madam Veldt nodded.
"And you want us to be far away when we blow it up. We can't just blow it up on-site. Or set it on fire."
The attendant began translating again. "Madam Veldt believes there may be one or more tracking devices embedded in the bear. Her desire is that her husband remain permanently uncertain as to whether it still exists or not. The hope is that you will be out of range of any method he might use to track his possessions when you destroy it."
"And if we aren't?" Rhundi asked.
"There are provisions in the contract that will be activated if you do not survive an attempt to recapture the bear," the attendant deadpanned. Brazel coughed, a morsel of meat suddenly stuck in his throat.
"And if we have to kill him to get away with it?" Rhundi asked.
"In extremis, you are to destroy the bear on site, then escape by any means short of killing Madam Veldt's husband," the attendant translated. "If he dies, your contract is void."
"Of course it is," Rhundi said, making eye contact with Brazel.
Who, for his part, had rarely been happier. This job looked like it was going to take a few days at a minimum. That was much better than a date.
* * *
Madam Veldt's contract didn't specify a time frame, so they spent a full five days on surveillance and planning before taking any action. Veldt's home— her husband's, at least— was in an older section of town, a neighborhood that once was the crown jewel of the area but had started to trend toward run down and abandoned in the last decade or so. Most conveniently, the building next door was unoccupied. Rhundi had a dozen nanocloud cameras keeping tabs on the property at all times, and she and Brazel took turns keeping physical eyes on the place as well. Grond stayed in the abandoned house full-time, providing a second set of eyes and trailing Veldt's husband whenever he left the house. Conveniently, the gnome— Paschal was his name— seemed to have a steady job and left the house on a predictable schedule.
"I don't think we can make this much more straightforward," Rhundi said, reviewing their plans. "There's mechanical locks on just about all the entry points on the house. The house is old-school enough that it's almost totally analog on the outside. There's some 'bot presence on the inside— Veldt says they have a lot of servants— but nothing electronic at all keeping the place locked up. So we get in through this window—" she indicated a ground-floor window in the back of the house on the blueprints that Veldt had provided them, the closest entry point to the library— "and we go to the library. If we get spotted by one of the 'bots, we disable it as quietly as we can. We steal the bear. We go out the same way we came in. If that's blocked, we go out the back door. If that's blocked, the front. Worst-case scenario, the library's got a skylight, but we'll have to shoot it out and then climb up to it so it's going to be really noisy."
"And then Grond picks us up," Brazel said.
"And then Grond picks us up," Rhundi repeated. "He'll monitor from the ship, a few minutes out. There's a spot nearby for him to pick us up if we need him to, otherwise we get out of the neighborhood first and meet him somewhere less likely to get noticed. We hop over to the next system and drop the bear into a star and collect our money. Any questions?"
"Not a thing," Brazel said, pointedly avoiding saying the words This looks easy, or anything else that might turn their luck against them. It did look easy— a simple theft; he did a job like this nearly every week— but he knew better than to say so out loud.
* * *
They broke in in the morning, opting to make their move when the house was empty and risk being seen going into the house rather than caught inside it. Brazel came prepared to pick any lock he'd ever encountered and nearly dropped his tools laughing when he discovered their chosen entry point had been left unlocked. It took just a few moments to shove a screen out of place and then they were inside. The window opened into the end of a simple corridor, the floor covered in shabby carpet. Two doors on the left led to bedrooms, according to the floor plan, and a pair of double doors at the end of the corridor led to the library. The walls featured framed artwo
rk, with vases and other decorative items scattered on narrow tables on either side of the corridor. Everything was sized for gnomes; a human would have been quite uncomfortable in this part of the house.
Rhundi took a deep breath. "Do you smell something odd?" she said.
Brazel inhaled too.
"Plaster," he said. "Fresh plaster. Where's that coming from?"
"The ceiling," Rhundi said after a moment. "Look. They've lowered the ceiling recently. Why the hell would they do that?"
Brazel looked up. Rhundi was right; the ceiling was distinctly lower than it ought to be even in a gnome-sized home, and what's more, it was clearly new. The walls had been white at one point but years of neglect had yellowed them somewhat. The ceiling was a flawlessly clean white.
"Look," he said, pointing. "Panels. Three of them." There were three square panels, perhaps a meter to a side, spaced evenly down the corridor. "What do you think those are for?"
"Decorative?" Rhundi said.
"Doesn't match anything," Brazel said. "Doesn't really add anything. Maybe, but only if Paschal is a terrible decorator. Let's keep going."
"Anything not matching the blueprints we got makes me nervous," Rhundi said.
"We can cut out right now," Brazel said. "Window's right there. All we lost is some time."
Rhundi stood still, thinking.
"Nah," she said. "I just don't like unknowns. Let's get the bear and get out of here."
* * *
The library was locked, but Brazel had them inside in moments. The room was the first genuinely impressive thing either of them had seen since entering the house; the room was round, bookshelves ringing the entire outer edge. There were two balcony levels above the ground floor, with an enormous skylight taking up most of the ceiling. Across from the entry doors was a fireplace, with three overstuffed chairs, all sized for bigs, sitting in front of it. In the center of the room, a silver orb sat atop a pedestal.
Rhundi whistled. "Grond's gonna be so pissed that he missed this."
Brazel was incredulous. "He reads?"
"We'd never get him out of here," Rhundi said. "Where's the bear?"
"I don't know," Brazel said, walking further into the room. "What's the— oh."
"Oh?"
"I think I found the bear," he said, pointing at one of the chairs.
Rhundi walked around the chair. She'd found a picture of a bear while researching the job, and this … thing looked at least mostly like one of those? It was a shocking turquoise in color, with stubby arms and legs, and a much friendlier look than the actual bears she'd seen, which sported sharp teeth and long claws. The expression on its face might have been meant to be a smile. Its eyes were a shiny dark blue, with a vaguely surprised look painted onto them.
It sat perched in the center chair, facing the fireplace. The chair faced away from the door, so it hadn't been visible until they came all the way into the room.
It was twice as big as either of them. It was almost as big as Grond.
"That's not gonna fit out the window," Brazel said. "Was I the only one picturing something we could carry?"
"You'd think Veldt would have mentioned this little detail," Rhundi said, clearly infuriated.
"Maybe she didn't know," Brazel said. "She did say she wasn't able to get into the room. And, speaking of that, do we think this has anything to do with it?" He pointed at the orb. "I think it's buzzing."
"That's alarming," Rhundi said. She waved a hand over the orb, coming close but not quite touching it. "Any idea what this is? You're right, it's vibrating. And … do you hear that?"
Brazel listened carefully. The orb was emitting a low moan, just at the edge of what he was able to perceive.
"You think humans can hear that?" he said.
"No idea," she answered. "But I know I don't like it. Maybe it would be a lot worse if we were human, who knows. You think this was what was keeping her out?"
"Best guess," he said. "So how do we get the bear out of here?"
"We take it through a door," she said. "No choice. We're not going to be able to get it out of a window and neither of us can get it through the skylight. So we go out the back door, nice and quiet, and we're gonna have to risk Grond popping into the neighborhood to get us. We head straight out of the atmosphere and hit tunnelspace the second we can and we're back planetside in a few days. By the time anyone's noticed we're here and figured out it's a problem, we're already gone."
"Works for me," Brazel said. "Let's see how heavy this thing is. It's stuffed. It can't be that heavy."
He pulled the bear out of the chair, and the alarms started.
"Oh, fuck," he said.
* * *
"A pressure sensor. He put a pressure sensor underneath the bear," Rhundi shouted, clearly in disbelief. "Who the hell does that?" The alarms were deafening, almost certainly audible from outside the house, and Brazel could barely hear her. She opened up a comm to Grond.
"Get here!" she shouted, then spent a moment trying to hear the halfogre's response and dropped the connection. If he heard the alarm, he'll figure it out, Brazel thought. He grabbed the bear by a leg and started pulling. It was much heavier than he'd expected. He gestured and Rhundi grabbed another leg. They dragged the bear to the door, which Brazel threw open, and got it halfway into the hallway before the panels in the ceiling slid open and the shooting started. Brazel dove to the right, upending a table and hiding behind it, and Rhundi threw herself underneath the bear. The three ceiling guns kept up a steady stream of blue energy, mostly concentrated at the table Brazel was hiding underneath.
"Stun blasts!" Rhundi shouted. "Or they'd be through the table by now!" Indeed, the energy didn't seem to be causing any damage to any of the objects it was hitting. Brazel's foot was slightly exposed for a moment and went numb as the energy washed over it.
"How the hell come they're focusing on me?" he shouted. "You're the one with the bear! Shouldn't they be shooting you?" Indeed, Brazel was taking the vast majority of the shots, and those directed toward Rhundi were … missing. By rather a lot. Brazel had nowhere to go; if the energy didn't stop he was going to be pinned underneath the table until the authorities came.
Rhundi thought quickly and then smiled to herself as a solution came to her. She pulled a knife from her belt and opened the seam up the bear's back. A few moments of frantically pulling stuffing out from inside the bear left just enough room for a gnome to crawl inside. She rolled over twice, managing to position the cut seam right next to where Brazel was pinned down.
"The guns aren't shooting at the bear!" she shouted. "The trackers must be keeping them away! Get in here!"
Brazel wriggled his way inside the bear and ended up facing Rhundi, each of them with one leg inside each of the bear's legs. The hammerpulse sound of the guns … stopped.
"Unbelievable," Brazel said. "He's got the guns programmed so they can't fire on the bear. I did not think this was how today was going to go.
Rhundi ignored him, opening a comm. "Grond, you there? That window we got into the house through? Blow us a hole we can walk out of. We're inside the bear." She listened for a moment. "Yes, inside the bear. Quit fucking laughing and do what I'm telling you!"
There was a muffled explosion a few moments later.
"I doubt he got the guns," Rhundi said. "We need to figure out how to stand up and walk this thing out of the hole Grond just opened up. You up to it?"
"I can't feel my right foot," Brazel said. "That might make it a bit more difficult."
"Push through, dear," she said, and the two of them wrenched the bear into what was probably pretty close to a standing position.
"You don't happen to remember which way the window was?" Brazel said.
"This is ridiculous," Rhundi said, and pulled the seam a bit wider so that they could see. The air was full of smoke and haze and the one gun she could still see, the one furthest away, was still trained directly on them. They'd dropped down from the ceiling through the square tiles, and th
e way the gun moved around as if trying to position itself for a clear shot was genuinely creepy.
"You didn't bring a gun, did you?" she said.
"One in my waistband and another at my ankle," he said. "I think you can reach the one at my waist. I barely have the room."
She reached around his back, patted him down, and discovered a small projectile gun under his waistband at the small of his back.
"Start walking backwards," she said, and reached past his head to take aim at the furthest of the three guns. Two shots brought it crashing down from its cubbyhole.
"The angles are no good for the other two," she said. "But I think if we can get to the hole in the wall we ought to be all right. How long has it been since we set off the alarm?"
"Can't be more than a couple of minutes," Brazel said, trying his best to walk on his numbed foot. "The nearest constabulary was, what, ten minutes away?"
"So we figure we've got no more than three or four minutes," she said. She reopened the comm. "Grond, the second you see a flash of blue coming out that hole in the wall you snatch us up and get us on board. Yes, that means I'm letting you pick me up. Yes we are both in the bear."
"That's it," she said to Brazel; Grond was laughing so hard that Brazel could hear it over her private comm. "I am not paying him for this job. He's getting his money's worth just out of mocking us."
They only fell twice on the way to the hole Grond had blasted in the side of the house. True to his orders, the halfogre was on top of them the moment he could see them, blowing the other two guns to bits and quickly getting them inside their boat afterwards. He let the two of them struggle out of the bear on their own, opting to head for the cockpit and get them into space as quickly as possible.
"We will never speak of this again," Rhundi said, brushing cotton fibers off her shoulders.
Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 Page 14