by Anthology
On the screen of her secluded library, she presently watched a great port shuttle swing in from Evalee to meet the hovering Dawn City. It would bring another five hundred or so passengers on board and take off the few who had merely been making the short run from Maccadon to Evalee in style. Solidopic operators were quite likely to be on the shuttle, so she had decided to keep away from the entry area.
The transfer operation was carried out very expeditiously, probably to make up for some of the time lost on the surface. When the shuttle shoved off, the loudspeaker announced that normal space flight would be maintained till after the stopover at Garth. Trigger wandered thoughtfully back to her cabin. She closed the door behind her.
Then she saw the man sitting by the ComWeb cabinet. Her breath sucked in. She crouched a little, ready to wheel and bolt.
"Take it easy, Trigger!" Major Quillan said. He was in civilian clothes, of rather dudish cut.
Trigger swallowed. There was, too obviously, no place to bolt to. "How did you find me?"
He shrugged. "Longish story. You're not under arrest."
"I'm not?"
"No," said Quillan. "When we get to Manon, the Commissioner will have a suggestion to make to you."
"Suggestion?" Trigger said warily.
"I believe you're to take back your old Precol job in Manon, but as cover for your participation in our little project. If you agree to it."
"What if I don't?"
He shrugged again. "It seems you'll be writing your own ticket from here on out."
Trigger stared at him, wondering. "Why?"
Quillan grinned. "New instructions have been handed down," he said. "If you're still curious, ask Whatzzit."
"Oh," Trigger said. "Then why are you here?"
"I," said Quillan, "am to make damn sure you get to Manon. I brought a few people with me."
"Mihul, too?" Trigger asked, a shade diffidently.
"No. She's on Maccadon."
"Is she--how's she doing?"
"Doing all right," Quillan said. "She sends her regards and says a little less heft on the next solar plexus you torpedo should be good enough."
Trigger flushed. "She isn't sore, is she?"
"Not the way you mean," he considered. "Not many people have jumped Mihul successfully. In her cockeyed way, she seemed pretty proud of her student."
Trigger felt the flush deepen. "I got her off her guard," she said.
"Obviously," said Quillan. "In any ordinary argument she could pull your legs off and tie you up with them. Still, that wasn't bad. Have you talked to anybody since you came on board?"
"Just the room stewardess. And a couple of old ladies in the next cabin."
"Yeah," he said. "Couple of old ladies. What did you talk about?"
Trigger recounted the conversation. He reflected, nodded and stood up.
"I put a couple of suitcases in that closet over there," he said. "Your personal stuff is in them, de-tracered. Another thing--somebody checked over your finances and came to the conclusion you're broke."
"Not exactly broke," said Trigger.
Quillan reached into a pocket, pulled out an envelope and laid it on the cabinet. "Here's a little extra spending money then," he said. "The balance of your Precol pay to date. I had it picked up on Evalee this morning. Seven hundred twenty-eight FC."
"Thanks," Trigger said. "I can use some of that."
They stood looking at each other.
"Any questions?" he asked.
"Sure," Trigger said. "But you wouldn't answer them."
"Try me, doll," said Quillan. "But let's shift operations to the fanciest cocktail lounge on this thing before you start. I feel like relaxing a little. For just one girl, you've given us a fairly rough time these last forty-eight hours!"
"I'm sorry," Trigger said.
"I'll bet," said Quillan.
Trigger glanced at the closet. If he'd brought everything along, there was a dress in one of those suitcases that would have been a little too daring for Maccadon. It should, therefore, be just about right for a cocktail lounge on the Dawn City; and she hadn't had a chance to wear it yet. "Give me ten minutes to change."
"Fine." Quillan started toward the door. "By the way, I'm your neighbor now."
"The cabin at the end of the hall?" she asked startled.
"That's right." He smiled at her. "I'll be back in ten minutes."
Well, that was going to be cosy! Trigger found the dress, shook it out and slipped into it, enormously puzzled but also enormously relieved. That Whatzzit!
Freshening up her make-up, she wondered how he had induced the Elfkund ladies to leave. Perhaps he'd managed to have a better cabin offered to them. It must be convenient to have that kind of a pull.
12
"Well, we didn't just leave it up to them," Quillan said. "Ship's Engineering spotted a radiation leak in their cabin. Slight but definite. They got bundled out in a squawking hurry." He added, "They did get a better cabin though."
"Might have been less trouble to get me to move," Trigger remarked.
"Might have been. I didn't know what mood you'd be in."
Trigger decided to let that ride. This cocktail lounge was a very curious place. By the looks of it, there were thirty or forty people in their immediate vicinity; but if one looked again in a couple of minutes, there might be an entirely different thirty or forty people around. Sitting in easy chairs or at tables, standing about in small groups, talking, drinking, laughing, they drifted past slowly; overhead, below, sometimes tilted at odd angles--fading from sight and presently returning.
In actual fact she and Quillan were in a little room by themselves, and with more than ordinary privacy via an audio block and a reconstruct scrambler which Quillan had switched on at their entry. "I'll leave us out of the viewer circuit," he remarked, "until you've finished your questions."
"Viewer circuit?" she repeated.
Quillan waved a hand around. "That," he said. "There are more commercial and industrial spies, political agents, top-class confidence men and whatnot on board this ship than you'd probably believe. A good percentage of them are pretty fair lip readers, and the things you want to talk about are connected with the Federation's hottest current secret. So while it's a downright crime not to put you on immediate display in a place like this, we won't take the chance."
Trigger let that ride too. A group had materialized at an oblong table eight feet away while Quillan was speaking. Everybody at the table seemed fairly high, and two of the couples were embarrassingly amorous; but she couldn't quite picture any of them as somebody's spies or agents. She listened to the muted chatter. Some Hub dialect she didn't know.
"None of those people can see or hear us then?" she asked.
"Not until we want them to. Viewer gives you as much privacy as you like. Most of the crowd here just doesn't see much point to privacy. Like those two."
Trigger followed his glance. At a tilted angle above them, a matched pair of black-haired, black-gowned young sirens sat at a small table, sipping their drinks, looking languidly around.
"Twins," Trigger said.
"No," said Quillan. "That's Blent and Company."
"Oh?"
"Blent's a lady of leisure and somewhat excessively narcissistic tendencies," he explained. He gave the matched pair another brief study. "Perhaps one can't really blame her. One of them's her facsimile. Blent--whichever it is--is never without her face."
"Oh," Trigger said. She'd been studying the gowns. "That," she said, a trifle enviously, "is why I'm not at all eager to go on display here."
"Eh?" said Quillan.
Trigger turned to regard herself in the wall mirror on the right, which, she had noticed, remained carefully unobscured by drifting viewers and viewees. A thoughtful touch on the lounge management's part.
"Until we walked in here," she explained, "I thought this was a pretty sharp little outfit I'm wearing."
"Hmmm," Quillan said judiciously. He made a detailed appraisal of th
e mirror image of the slim, green, backless, half-thigh-length sheath which had looked so breath-taking and seductive in a Ceyce display window. Trigger's eyes narrowed a little. The major had appraised the dress in detail before.
"It's about as sharp a little outfit as you could get for around a hundred and fifty credits," he remarked. "Most of the items the girls are sporting here are personality conceptions. That starts at around ten to twenty times as high. I wasn't talking about displaying the dress. Now what were those questions?"
Trigger took a small sip of her drink, considering. She hadn't made up her mind about Major Quillan, but until she could evaluate him more definitely, it might be best to go by appearances. The appearances so far indicated small sips in his company.
"How did you people find me so quickly?" she asked.
"Next time you want to sneak off a civilized planet," Quillan advised her, "pick something like a small freighter. Or hire a small-boat to get you out of the system and flag down a freighter for you. Plenty of tramp captains will make a space stop to pick up a paying passenger. Liners we can check."
"Sorry," Trigger said meekly. "I'm still new at this business."
"And thank God for that!" said Quillan. "If you have the time and the money, it's also a good idea, of course, to zig a few times before you zag towards where you're really heading. Actually, I suppose, the credit for picking you up so fast should go to those collating computers."
"Oh?"
"Yes." Major Quillan looked broodingly at his drink for a moment. "There they sit," he remarked suddenly, "with their stupid plastic faces hanging out! Rows of them. You feed them something you don't understand. They don't understand it either. Nobody can tell me they can. But they kick it around and giggle a bit, and out comes some ungodly suggestion."
"So they helped you find me?" she said cautiously. It was clear that the major had strong feelings about computers.
"Oh, sure," he said. "It usually turns out it was a good idea to do what those CCs say. Anything unusual that shows up in the area you're working on gets chunked into the things as a matter of course. We were on the liners. Dawn City reports back a couple of murders. 'Dawn City to the head of the list!' cry the computers. Nobody asks why. They just plow into the ticket purchase records. And right there are the little Argee thumbprints!"
He looked at Trigger. "My own bet," he said, somewhat accusingly, "was that you were one of those that had just taken off. We didn't know about that ticket reservation."
"What I don't see," Trigger said, changing the subject, "is why two murders should seem so very unusual. There must be quite a few of them, after all."
"True," said Quillan. "But not murders that look like catassin killings."
"Oh!" she said startled. "Is that what these were?"
"That's what Ship Security thinks."
Trigger frowned. "But what could be the connection--"
Quillan reached across the table and patted her hand. "You've got it!" he said with approval. "Exactly! No connection. Some day I'm going to walk down those rows and give them each a blast where it will do the most good. It will be worth being broken for."
Trigger said, "I thought that catassin planet was being guarded."
"It is. It would be very hard to sneak one out nowadays. But somebody's breeding them in the Hub. Just a few. Keeps the price up."
Trigger grimaced uncomfortably. She'd seen recordings of those swift, clever, constitutionally murderous creatures in action. "You say it looked like catassin killings. They haven't found it?"
"No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the ship after they surfaced and combed over the rest of it with life detectors. They've got a detector system set up now that would spot a catassin if it moved twenty feet in any direction."
"Life detectors go haywire out of normal space, don't they?" she said. "That's why they surfaced then."
Quillan nodded. "You're a well-informed doll. They're pretty certain it's been sucked into space or disposed of by its owner, but they'll go on looking till we dive beyond Garth."
"Who got killed?"
"A Rest Warden and a Security officer. In the rest cubicle area. It might have been sent after somebody there. Apparently it ran into the two men and killed them on the spot. The officer got off one shot and that set off the automatic alarms. So pussy cat couldn't finish the job that time."
"It's all sort of gruesome, isn't it?" Trigger said.
"Catassins are," Quillan agreed. "That's a fact."
Trigger took another sip. She set down her glass. "There's something else," she said reluctantly.
"Yes?"
"When you said you'd come on board to see I got to Manon, I was thinking none of the people who'd been after me on Maccadon could know I was on the Dawn City. They might though. Quite easily."
"Oh?" said Quillan.
"Yes. You see I made two calls to the ticket office. One from a street ComWeb and one from the bank. If they already had spotted me by that tracer material, they could have had an audio pick-up on me, I suppose."
"I think we'd better suppose it," said Quillan. "You had a tail when you came out of the bank anyway." His glance went past her. "We'll get back to that later. Right now, take a look at that entrance, will you?"
Trigger turned in the direction he'd indicated.
"They do look like they're somebody important," she said. "Do you know them?"
"Some of them. That gentleman who looks like he almost has to be the Dawn City's First Captain really is the Dawn City's First Captain. The lady he's escorting into the lounge is Lyad Ermetyne. The Ermetyne. You've heard of the Ermetynes?"
"The Ermetyne Wars? Tranest?" Trigger said doubtfully.
"They're the ones. Lyad is the current head of the clan."
The history of Hub systems other than one's own became so involved so rapidly that its detailed study was engaged in only by specialists. Trigger wasn't one. "Tranest is one of the restricted planets now, isn't it?" she ventured.
"It is. Restriction is supposed to be a handicap. But Tranest is also one of the wealthiest individual worlds in the Hub."
Trigger watched the woman with some interest as the party moved along a dim corridor, followed by the viewer circuit's invisible pick-up. Lyad Ermetyne didn't look more than a few years older than she was herself. Rather small, slender, with delicately pretty features. She wore something ankle-length and long-sleeved in lusterless gray with an odd, smoky quality to it.
"Isn't she the empress of Tranest or something of the sort?" Trigger asked.
Quillan shook his head. "They've had no emperors there, technically, since they had to sign their treaty with the Federation. She just owns the planet, that's all."
"What would she be doing, going to Manon?"
"I'd like to know," Quillan said. "The Ermetyne's a lady of many interests. Now--see the plump elderly man just behind her?"
"The ugly one with the big head who sort of keeps blinking?"
"That one. He's Belchik Pluly and--"
"Pluly?" Trigger interrupted. "The Pluly Lines?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Oh--nothing really. I heard--a friend of mine--Pluly's got a yacht out in the Manon System. And a daughter."
Quillan nodded. "Nelauk."
"How did you know?"
"I've met her. Quite a girl, that Nelauk. Only child of Pluly's old age, and he dotes on her. Anyway, he's been on the verge of being black-listed by Grand Commerce off and on through the past three decades. But nobody's ever been able to pin anything more culpable on him than that he keeps skimming extremely close to the limits of a large number of laws."
"He's very rich, I imagine?" Trigger said thoughtfully.
"Very. He'd be much richer even if it weren't for his hobby."
"What's that?"
"Harems. The Pluly harems rate among the most intriguing and best educated in the Hub."
Trigger looked at Pluly again. "Ugh!" she said faintly.
Quillan laughed. "
The Pluly salaries are correspondingly high. Viewer's dropping the group now, so there's just one more I'd like you to notice. The tall girl with black hair, in orange."
Trigger nodded. "Yes. I see her. She's beautiful."
"So she is. She's also Space Scout Intelligence. Gaya. Comes from Farnhart where they use the single name system. A noted horsewoman, very wealthy, socially established. Which is why we like to use her in situations like this."
Trigger was silent a moment. Then she said, "What kind of situation is it? I mean, what's she doing with Lyad Ermetyne and the others?"
"She probably attached herself to the group as soon as she discovered Lyad had come on board. Which," Quillan said, "is exactly what I would have told Gaya to do if I'd spotted Lyad first."
Trigger was silent a little longer this time. "Were you thinking this Lyad could be...."
"One of our suspects? Well," said Quillan judiciously, "let's say Lyad has all the basic qualifications. Since she's come on board, we'd better consider her. When something's going on that looks more than usually tricky, Lyad is always worth considering. And there's one point that looks even more interesting to me now than it did at first."
"What's that?"
"Those two little old ladies I eased out of their rightful cabin."
Trigger looked at him. "What about them?"
"This about them. The Askab of Elfkund is, you might way, one of the branch managers of the Ermetyne interests in the Hub. He is also a hard-working heel in his own right. But he's not the right size to be one of the people we're thinking about. Lyad is. He might have been doing a job for her."
"Job?" she asked. She laughed. "Not with those odd little grannies?"
"We know the odd little grannies. They're the Askab's poisoners and pretty slick at it. They were sizing you up while you were having that little chat, doll. Probably not for a coffin this time. You were just getting the equivalent of a pretty thorough medical check-up. Presumably, though, for some sinister ultimate purpose."