by Timothy Zahn
And with that, we suddenly went from a dit rec actioner to a dit rec comedy. There he stood on one leg, making small hops with his remaining foot as he fought desperately to maintain his balance. He swung a couple of times at me, but I was well out of punching range. “Are we finished yet?” I asked mildly, watching the rest of his group out of the corner of my eye.
Again, none of them was making the slightest attempt to back up their leader. There would likely be some unpleasant words passing between them later.
“Enough.”
I turned my head. While I’d been preoccupied elsewhere, the white-haired man had left the tavern doorway and come up behind the three teens. Like them, he was watching me, an intent look on his face. “Yes?” I asked, keeping my grip on the teen’s leg.
“You armed, friend?” he asked.
“I carry the sword of truth and the shield of virtue,” I told him.
His expression didn’t even flicker. “I was talking about the gun under your jacket,” he said.
“Oh—that,” I said. “So why bother to ask?”
“Just wondering how honest you were,” he said. “Why didn’t you draw it?”
“What, against these?” I asked, waving at the line of teens. My gesture shifted the leg I was still holding, forcing its owner to hop a little more if he didn’t want to fall over. “Hardly necessary. Besides, guns are dangerous.”
“True,” he agreed. “That was aikido, wasn’t it?”
“There was some of that in the mix,” I confirmed, eyeing the old man with new interest. Average citizens, despite the glut of hand-to-hand fighting in dit rec actioners, were generally pretty tone-deaf when it came to distinguishing one martial-arts style from another. The fact that he’d picked my aikido move out of the crowd lifted him somewhere above the average. “My instructors had a kind of grab-bag style.”
I dropped the teen’s leg, allowing him back some of his dignity. “As I see you’ve been doing with your bird dogs here. They still need work, though.”
“Give them time,” he said, a faint smile finally creasing his face. “They’ve only been at it a couple of months. My name’s Usamah Karim. Former sergeant major, Afghan Army.”
I inclined my head to him. “Frank Donaldson. Former nothing in particular.”
A muscle twitched in Karim’s cheek. “Frank Donaldson?” he asked, lowering his voice. “Or Frank Compton?”
Sometimes, I thought I might just as well wear a leather jacket with my name emblazoned across the back in metal studs. “Whichever,” I told him.
Glancing casually around, Karim stepped though the line of teens and walked up to me. “Prove it,” he challenged, gazing unblinkingly into my face.
For a long moment, I gazed back at him, searching for any trace of the Modhri behind his eyes. But if there was a polyp colony in there, he was being very quiet. “You want to see my ID?” I asked.
“No,” Karim said flatly.
“I didn’t think so.” Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out Lorelei’s ring and necklace. “How about these?”
Karim’s hand reached up to mine, closed around the pieces of jewelry. “That’ll do,” he said quietly. “Let’s get inside,” he added, nodding back toward the bar. “We need to talk.”
At Karim’s instruction, the four teens returned to their positions by the abandoned house. The one who’d attacked me nodded gravely at me as I passed, with no hint of animosity that I could detect. He’d done his job of smoking me out; more importantly, he’d done it without taking any of it personally.
The signs of a good soldier. And of a good instructor.
The tavern was largely deserted, with three of the small tables occupied by lone patrons. Karim led Bayta and me past the nicked and stained wooden bar at the back of the establishment, nodding once to the scraggly-looking bartender as we passed, and through a door into a small office.
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a couple of folding chairs propped against the wall as he circled the paper-strewn desk and sat down behind it. “Afraid I don’t have anything more comfortable to offer you.”
“This is fine,” I assured him, unfolding the chairs and setting them down where we were mostly facing Karim but also had a view of the door.
Under cover of the activity, I also slipped the kwi out of my pocket and onto my right hand. It was always possible Karim’s reason for bringing us in here was to get rid of us quietly, out of view of potential witnesses. Just because I hadn’t been able to sense a Modhran colony behind his eyes didn’t mean there wasn’t one there.
And even if he wasn’t a walker, he might have reasons of his own to seriously dislike me. There were plenty of people like that left over from my Westali days.
“I remember when Oved gave these to her,” Karim commented, turning Lorelei’s ring over in his fingers. “He was taking classes from the jeweler over on Seventh, and they were the first things he made that actually looked decent.”
“Oved was her boyfriend?”
Karim shrugged. “He wanted to be,” he said. “Lorelei had that effect on people. There was just something about her that made you like her.”
He set the ring and necklace on the desk in front of him and looked up at us. “He’s the one who attacked you just now, by the way.”
“He shows promise,” I said.
Karim nodded agreement. “He was the one who first approached me about getting some sort of paramilitary training. He knew Lorelei was in danger from somewhere, and wanted to be able to help her when she got back here with you.” A hint of a frown crossed his face. “She is here somewhere, isn’t she?”
I grimaced. I hated this part. “I’m afraid she won’t be coming back. I’m sorry.”
A corner of Karim’s lip twitched. “What happened?”
“Someone caught up with her a couple of hours after she left my apartment,” I said, carefully skipping over the fact that she’d left because I’d thrown her out. “A couple of someones, actually.”
“She said there were people hunting for her,” Karim murmured, his eyes drifting away. “Oved volunteered to go with her. So did I. But she said she had to do this alone.”
Abruptly, his eyes came back to focus squarely on my face. “Why you, Mr. Compton?”
“Good question,” I acknowledged. “I wish I had a good answer to go with it.”
“You weren’t somebody she already knew?” he persisted. “A friend, or the friend of a friend?”
“Not that she ever mentioned,” I said. “All she said was that her sister Rebekah was in danger, and that she wanted me to get her out.”
“Is Rebekah still safe?” Bayta asked.
Karim’s eyes shifted to her, his forehead creasing in a frown. “As safe as we can make her,” he said. “And you are . . .?”
“This is Bayta,” I told him, frowning in turn at his reaction. Were we going to get into the royal bugaboo of cultural problems here? “Is it inappropriate for her to speak in our company?”
“No, no, not at all,” Karim assured me. But he was still staring at her, that odd look still on his face. “It’s just that there’s something about her. Something . . .” He shook his head abruptly. “Never mind. Tell me how you plan to get Rebekah off New Tigris.”
“Not so fast,” I cautioned. “I’m not doing anything until I know more about the situation. Let’s start with who exactly was hunting Lorelei, and are they the same bunch who are also hunting Rebekah.”
“We don’t know who they are, exactly,” he said. “The police may be involved—I know Lorelei didn’t trust them, and didn’t want us to, either. There have also been other people, too, mostly non-Humans, who’ve come to New Tigris for a week or two at a time.”
I thought about the other two torchyachts we’d seen on the field north of town. “Tourists?”
“Some were,” he said. “Upper-class ones, who threw a lot of money around traveling out into the wilderness areas. But there were also some who seemed to be here on business. Tha
t group stayed pretty much in the city.”
I looked at Bayta, saw my same conclusion reflected in the tightness around her lips. Rich non-Human tourists and businessmen were prime candidates for Modhran walkerhood. And, of course, we were assuming Lorelei died in the company of Human walkers.
Which seemed to point to the slightly absurd conclusion that this ten-year-old Human girl was the Abomination the Modhri was so worried about. “Do the police have anything official to do with Rebekah?” I asked. “Any warrants or protection formals out on her?”
“None that I know of.”
“How long have all these non-Human tourists been wandering around?”
“They started arriving about three months ago,” Karim said. “At first, Lorelei didn’t seem to be particularly worried about them. Then, about five weeks ago, she suddenly started getting nervous. She said she needed to go to Earth for help, and asked me to hide Rebekah while she was gone.”
“Where’s Rebekah now?” Bayta asked.
Karim hesitated, his eyes shifting back and forth between us. “Come on, Mr. Karim,” I coaxed. “You either trust us right now, or else you don’t trust us at all. There’s no way to get you any more proof as to who we are or whose side we’re on.”
Karim snorted. “My father once warned me never to trust people who urge you to make a quick decision on an important matter.”
“Whether to veer left or right as you barrel toward a cliff could be considered an important decision, too,” I said. “It’s also not one you can afford to ponder too long.”
“Point taken,” Karim said. But his eyes were still troubled.
“Maybe I can make it easier for you,” Bayta offered. “If we were your enemies, we’d thank you for your time and leave. Then we’d come back with reinforcements.”
“Reinforcements for what?” Karim asked, frowning.
“To get Rebekah,” Bayta said. “She’s here in this building.”
Karim was good, all right. His face and body language didn’t even twitch.
But even through his dark skin, I saw some of the color go out of his face. “Bayta’s right,” I said, putting a casual confidence in my voice even as I wondered how in hell’s name she’d figured that out. “You want to take us to her? Or are you the sporting type who’d rather make us find her ourselves?”
“No need,” he said, his shoulders sagging microscopically in defeat. Standing up, he moved his chair out of the way and ducked down to the floor. I was halfway around the side of the desk when there was a soft creaking sound.
And as I finished rounding the desk, I saw him pulling open a half-meter-square trapdoor. “She’s down there,” he said, straightening up and gesturing down the shaft.
I leaned over for a closer look. The shaft was completely framed with wood that looked like it had been there awhile. There was a ladder fastened to one side, disappearing downward into the darkness. I pulled out my flashlight and shone it into the hole, revealing a dirt floor about four meters down. At the bottom a passageway led off from the desk side of the shaft, heading in a direction that would take it under the main part of the bar. “Interesting accommodations,” I commented.
“Part of the storage cellar,” Karim told me. “We walled it off from the main cellar when Rebekah went into hiding.”
“How obvious is the dividing wall?”
“Not at all,” he assured me. “It also has ten beer barrels stacked against it.” He gestured to the shaft. “Shall I go first?”
There was a subtle challenge to my pride hidden in the question: the big, bad, former Westali agent afraid that a simple little colonist might pull a fast one and seal him away down in the deep, dark hole.
But I was way past the point of letting pride make my decisions for me. “Yes, thank you,” I said, gesturing him toward the ladder.
Without a word he knelt, got a grip on the edge of the hole, and started down the ladder. Motioning Bayta to stand watch, I followed him down.
He was waiting just inside the passageway when I reached the ground. The passageway itself, I saw now, ended at a dark dirt face only a couple of meters away. “What now?” I asked.
“This way,” he said, turning and starting down the passageway.
Again, I followed. He reached the end, and as he pushed the “dirt face” aside to reveal a soft light beyond I realized that it was just a light-blocking curtain that had been set across the passageway. He stepped through, holding the curtain open for me. Bracing myself, I stepped through after him into a small, low-ceilinged room.
The furnishings were Spartan in the extreme. There was a cot, a small folding table and chair, and a drying rack that held both neatly folded clothing and a collection of ration bars. In one corner of the room a sink/toilet combination nestled up against a section of the wall that had been gouged out for access to the bar’s plumbing system. Stacked neatly along one of the other walls were twenty gray metal containers about the size of standard Quadrail lockboxes, about fifty centimeters long and twenty centimeters high and deep.
And sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cot with her back against the wall, gazing at us with an unreadable expression, was a young girl.
“Hello, Rebekah,” Karim said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said gravely, unfolding her legs and standing up. Her voice was definitely that of a ten-year-old, but at the same time there was also something very adult about it.
But then, she was apparently being hunted for her life. That sort of thing could age a person very quickly.
“Are you Frank Compton?” she asked.
“Yes, I am,” I confirmed, shaking away my musings and giving her a quick once-over. She seemed healthy enough, though her long confinement had left her a little thin and pale.
Aside from her build and hair color, though, she didn’t really resemble Lorelei very much. Still, I’d known sisters who were a lot more dissimilar than this. “You ready to get out of here?” I asked, keeping my tone light.
“Very much so,” she said gravely. Her eyes flicked down to the kwi still gripped in my right hand, but she didn’t ask about it. “Mr. Karim told you about my other needs?”
I frowned at Karim. “What needs are those?”
He winced a bit. “The boxes have to go with her,” he said, nodding toward the stack of gray boxes against the wall.
I looked at the boxes and then back at Karim. “You’re kidding.”
“Neither of us is kidding, Mr. Compton,” Rebekah said reprovingly. “It’s absolutely vital that those boxes and I leave New Tigris together.”
I stepped over to the stack and tugged experimentally on the top box. Ten kilos at least, I estimated, maybe as much as fifteen. With twenty boxes, that made for two to three hundred kilos of dead weight.
There were a dozen ways a ten-year-old girl could be smuggled past Customs and off the planet. Adding in a quarter metric ton worth of metal boxes instantly eliminated at least half of those options. “Can we maybe cut it down to two or three of them?” I suggested. “We can try to get the rest out later.”
“No,” Rebekah said, her voice leaving no room for argument. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder at the passageway. “Is the other one with you?”
“The other one?” I asked.
“The woman,” she said.
“Oh—Bayta,” I said. “Yes, she’s just upstairs.” I raised an eyebrow. “But you won’t be able to talk her into this any easier than—”
“A moment,” Karim cut me off, pulling out his comm and holding it to his ear. “Yes?”
He listened for a few seconds, and I saw his throat muscles tighten. “Understood,” he said, and put the comm away. “We have to get back at once,” he said, moving back toward the curtain. “Three police cars are on their way.”
I glanced at Rebekah. Her face was tense, but under control. “Looking for Rebekah?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” he said grimly. “I think, my friend, they’re looking for y
ou.”
SIX
Karim and I were back up the ladder in fifteen seconds flat. “What is it?” Bayta asked.
“Cops on the way,” I told her, moving aside as Karim swung the trapdoor shut. “Possibly looking for us.”
“We need to get out of here,” Karim said as he put his desk chair back into position over the trapdoor. “Meet them out in the bar.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Have the cops been in this office before?”
“Yes, several times,” Karim said, still edging toward the door. “Quickly, now.”
“And they obviously didn’t find the secret entrance?” I asked, not moving.
“No, of course not.”
“Then let’s just sit tight,” I told him, circling the desk and sitting down again.
He stared at me as if I were crazy. “But what if they’re looking for you?”
“What if they are?” I countered as Bayta sat down as well. “We’re honest, upright citizens of the Terran Confederation, here to see the sights of New Tigris.”
“In here?” Karim asked.
“Okay, so we’re also here to sample the drinks,” I said. “Look, nothing ramps up a cop’s personal radar like people under suspicion hurrying to meet him. All that’s happened here is that you took pity on a pair of strangers and invited us in to discuss the best places for tourists to visit. What exactly would those places be?”
“Probably Janga’s Point and the Gilcress Mountains,” Karim said, reluctantly returning to his desk chair and sitting down.
“Scuba and climbing,” I said, nodding as I took the kwi off my hand and slipped it back into my pocket. “Good. Now, where are the best places to buy or rent the necessary equipment?”
We were in the middle of a discussion of climbing styles when the police barged in.
They did barge in more or less politely, though, knocking before opening the office door. “Excuse me,” their leader said, his eyes automatically checking out each of us before settling on me. “Are you Mr. Frank Donaldson?”
“I am,” I confirmed. “Is there a problem?”
“Mr. Veldrick asked us to look for you, sir,” the cop said. “Your autocab record showed you were here in Zumurrud District.” He looked at Karim. “Mr. Karim will tell you this isn’t a particularly safe place for strangers to be, especially with dusk coming on.”
