by Timothy Zahn
Emendo Torsk was there as promised, standing in front of a short cabanalike shelter, his squat Drilie shape almost hidden behind the complex multimusic box he was playing with both his hands and the set of short prehensile eating tentacles ringing the base of his neck. A crowd of perhaps twenty admirers were standing in the rain in front of him listening to the music.
I let the driver take the cab out of sight along the street and had him pull to the curb. I paid him, told him to wait, and walked back through the now pouring rain to join the crowd. I wouldn’t have guessed there were that many beings on the whole planet who liked Drilie di-choral anthems, even when they were properly performed, which this one emphatically was not. But then, I doubted any of those in attendance were there for the music, anyway.
Fortunately, the piece Torsk had chosen was a short one, and I silently thanked the downpour for whatever part it had played in that decision. Amid the smattering of totally fraudulent applause he passed a large hat around for contributions. I’d made the necessary preparations while careening about in the cab, and as he waved the hat in front of me I dropped in a small package consisting of three tightly folded hundred-commark bills wrapped around a piece of paper with the word “borandis” written on it. Most of the rest of the audience, I saw, had similar donations for him. He finished taking up his collection and gave out with a set of guttural barks that were probably a traditional Drilie thank-you or farewell, then disappeared through the flap into his cabana. At that, the audience faded away, splashing away in all directions to disappear down the streets and alleyways or into the dark and anonymous doorways fronting on the streets.
All of them, that is, except me. Instead of moving back, I moved forward until I was standing directly in front of the long-suffering multimusic box. There I planted myself, facing the flap Torsk had disappeared through, and waited, doing my best to ignore the cold drips finding their way beneath my collar and dribbling down my back. I had no doubt he could see me perfectly well through his cabana; there were several different one-way opaque materials to choose from, and a person in Torsk’s profession couldn’t afford not to know what was going on around him at all times. I just hoped he’d be curious enough or irritated enough to find out what I wanted before I was soaked completely through.
He was either more curious or irritable than I’d expected. I’d been standing there less than a minute when the flap twitched aside and I found myself looking down into a pair of big black Drilie eyes. “What want?” he demanded in passable English.
“Want borandis,” I told him. “Have paid.”
“Wait turn,” he snapped, waggling a finger horizontally to indicate the now vanished audience.
“Not wait,” I told him calmly. Pushing him this way was risky, but I didn’t have much choice. The standard pattern seemed to be that you placed your order and came back for it later, probably at Torsk’s next performance, and there was no way I could afford to hang around that long. Particularly not if it required sitting through a second concert. “Want borandis. Have paid.”
“Wait turn,” he repeated, even more snappishly this time. “Or get mad.”
“I get mad, too,” I said.
Apparently I’d been wrong about the whole crowd having vanished. I was just about to repeat my request when a large hand snaked over my shoulder, grabbed a fistful of my coat, and turned me around. I blinked the rainwater out of my eyes, and found myself looking fifteen centimeters up into one of the ugliest human faces it had ever been my misfortune to see. “Hey—trog—you deaf?” he growled. His breath was a perfect match for his face. “He said to wait your turn.”
There was undoubtedly more to the usual speech, probably something along the lines of what would happen to me if I didn’t go away immediately. But as I’d long since learned for myself, it was hard to speak when all your wind has been suddenly knocked out of you by a short punch to the solar plexus. I ducked slightly to the side to avoid his forehead as he doubled over without a sound, wincing at the extra dose of bad breath that blew into my face; and as his head dipped out of my line of sight I saw that three more men stamped from his same mold were marching purposefully across the street toward me.
I hit the first man in the same spot again, folding him over a little farther, and half a second later had my plasmic pointed over his shoulder toward the three newcomers. They stopped dead in their tracks. I kept my eyes and the weapon steady on them while I kept hitting the halitosis specialist in selected pressure points with my free hand, trying to make sure that when he went down he would stay there.
He finally did, but it took several more punches than I’d expected. I definitely didn’t want to be around when this lad felt like his old self again. I gazed at the reinforcements for another couple of seconds; then, leaving my plasmic pointed their direction, I deliberately turned my head around to face Torsk again. “Want borandis,” I said mildly. “Have paid.”
“Yes,” he said, his face an ashen shade of purple as he stared down at the lump at my feet. Apparently he’d never seen anyone beaten up with one hand before. “Wait short.”
He disappeared back into the cabana, but not before I got a glimpse of reflected movement in those big Drilie eyes. I turned my head around, to find the Three Musketeers had tried advancing while I wasn’t looking. They stopped even more abruptly than they had the first time, and we eyed each other over the barrel of my plasmic until there was another rustling of wet fabric behind me. “Take,” Torsk hissed, jabbing something solid against my shoulder. I turned, half-expecting to see a gun; but it was only a music cassette prominently displaying Torsk’s face and name on the front. The Best of Emendo Torsk, apparently, with the borandis concealed inside. “Go,” he insisted. “Not come back.”
“Not come back,” I agreed, taking the cassette and tucking it away in an inside pocket. “Unless borandis not good. Then make small wager you hurt plenty.”
“Borandis good,” he ground out, glaring daggers at me.
I believed him. The last thing a corner drug dealer wanted was to have attention drawn his direction, and my performance here had already disrupted his cozy schedule more than he was happy with. The last thing he would want would be for me to come back in a bad mood.
He had no way of knowing that I couldn’t come back even if I wanted to, or that I was even more allergic to official scrutiny at the moment than he was. He was rid of me, and that was what mattered to him. Perhaps he’d even learned not to hire his protection muscle off park benches.
My cab and driver were still patiently waiting where I’d left them. I got in and gave my destination as Gate 2 of the spaceport, the closest one to where the Icarus was docked. With visions of another absurdly large tip undoubtedly dancing trippingly through his mind, he took off like a scalded foxbat. Once again I hung on for dear life, my own mind dancing with unpleasant visions of a premature obituary. During the straightaways I managed to break open the cassette and confirm that there were fifteen capsules inside filled with a blue powder that looked like it had come from grinding up the normal tablets that the Icarus’s med listing said borandis came in. Closing the cassette and putting it away again, I pulled out my phone and punched in Everett’s number.
That all-too-familiar feeling that something was wrong began to tingle through me as the fifth vibe came and went with no answer. By the time he did answer, on the eighth vibe, and I heard his voice, the feeling solidified into a cold certainty. “ ’Lo?” he muttered, his voice heavy and slightly slurred, as if I’d just awakened him.
“It’s McKell,” I identified myself. “What’s wrong?”
There was a faint hiss, like someone exhaling heavily into the mouthpiece. “It’s Shawn,” he said. “He got away.”
I gripped the phone tighter, the driver’s maniacal slalom technique abruptly forgotten. “Which direction did he go?”
“I don’t know how it happened,” Everett said plaintively. “He must have slipped the straps somehow—”
“Neve
r mind how he did it,” I cut him off. “The recriminations can wait. Which direction did he go?”
“I don’t know,” Everett said. “I didn’t see him leave. We’re all out looking for him.”
“All of you?”
“All but Ixil—we pounded on his door, but he didn’t answer, and the door wasn’t working right. It’s okay—we locked the hatch—”
There was a quiet sputtering click as another phone joined the circuit. “Everett, this is Tera,” her voice came excitedly. “I’ve found him.”
“Where?” I snapped, pulling my city map out and trying to shake it open with my free hand.
“McKell?” she asked, sounding both surprised and wary.
“Yes,” I said. “Where is he?”
“Outside an outfitter’s store at Ude’n Corner,” she said. “He’s accosting people as they go in.”
“That’s a good way to get all his troubles ended permanently,” I growled, locating the spot on my map. It was only a short block away from Gate 2, where I was headed anyway. “Keep him in sight, but try not to let him see you,” I told her. “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes and we’ll bring him back together. Everett, call Nicabar and Chort and the three of you head back to the ship. Get it ready to fly.”
“Now?” Everett asked, sounding surprised. “What about the borandis?”
“Done and done,” I told him. “Make sure—”
“You’ve got it?” Everett asked. “Already?”
“I’m very good at what I do,” I told him, trying hard to be patient. “Make sure we’ve been fueled and are ready to lift as soon as Tera and I get back with Shawn.”
Another faint hiss. “All right. We’ll see you back at the ship.”
There was a click as he disconnected. “Tera?” I called.
“Still here,” she confirmed tightly. “And I think people are starting to get irritated by Shawn’s ravings. You’d better hurry.”
“Trust me,” I assured her, wincing as I turned part of my attention back to the automotive drama taking place around me. “He must have made good time to be out of the spaceport already. How long since he jumped ship?”
“About an hour ago,” she said. “Just after you left to—”
“An hour?” I cut her off in disbelief, a white-hot flash of anger slicing through me. “An hour? And you didn’t think it worth mentioning to me?”
“We didn’t want to bother you,” she protested, clearly startled by my sudden anger. “You already had the medicine to find—”
“I don’t care if I’ve got the crown jewels to steal,” I snarled. “Something like this happens, you get on the phone and tell me about it. Let me worry about what it does to my schedule. Is that clear?”
“Clear,” she said, more subdued than I’d ever heard her. For a moment I considered taking another verbal slice of flesh out of her, decided regretfully that it probably wasn’t her fault, and kept my mouth shut. Possibly it wasn’t any of their faults. Ixil would have known what to do; but Ixil was in his cabin in a coma, and it was painfully obvious that none of the others had anywhere near our experience with this sort of thing.
Instead, I vented my frustration on the map lying open beside me, folding it back up with far more force than was necessary and shoving it into my jacket’s left side pocket.
“McKell?” Tera said, her voice suddenly tight. “I think I see a police car heading this way. Red and blue, with a flashing blue light on top, moving very fast.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s a cab, and I’m in it. Flag me in, will you?”
A block ahead, I saw her step to the curb and raise her hand, a vision of loveliness standing there in the downpour in her stylish drowned-rat look. I directed the driver over to her, dropped two hundred-commark bills on the seat beside him as I got out, and pulled Tera quickly away from the curb as he shot off again in a foaming wave. Maybe I’d wasted all that tip money; maybe that was the way he always drove anyway.
“There,” Tera said, pointing across the street.
“I see him,” I said. Considering the way Shawn was bouncing around the store entrance waving his arms at everyone in sight, he would have been hard to miss. Taking Tera’s arm again, I steered us through the traffic flow toward him.
After everything else that had happened, the capture itself was rather anticlimactic. Pleading and screeching and cursing at the passersby, his wet hair plastered half across his face, Shawn was in no shape to see anything happening around him. Tera and I could have driven up to him in an armored personnel carrier without him noticing. As it was, we simply moved in from opposite sides and grabbed his arms. He gave a single terrific lurch, but there wasn’t much strength left in him, and after that one attempt to break free he just stood there shaking in our grip.
We led him away from the door and the pedestrian traffic to the narrow passageway between the outfitter’s store and the next building over, Tera murmuring soothingly in his ear the whole way. When we were as far out of the public eye as we were likely to get, I dug out the cassette and fed him one of the borandis capsules. He seemed to be having trouble getting it down until Tera filled her cupped hands with rainwater and gave him a drink.
The effects were quite amazing. Almost immediately his trembling began to subside, and within a couple of minutes he seemed almost back to normal.
At least physically. “You sure took your sweet time about it,” he growled, breathing heavily as he brushed his wet hair impatiently out of his face. “Where the hell are we, anyway? You said we were going to Mintarius. This isn’t Mintarius. I know—I’ve been there.”
“Change of plans,” I told him shortly, peering closely at his eyes. His pupils, strongly dilated when we’d first grabbed him, seemed to be shrinking back to normal size.
“Yeah, well, that change of plans might have killed me,” he snapped. “Did you ever think of that? This place must be at least three hours farther than Mintarius was.”
“No, just two,” I said. He was well enough to travel, I decided; and even if he wasn’t, we were going. The sooner he was aboard the Icarus and shut away where I didn’t have to listen to him, the better. Taking his arm, I pulled him back out toward the main thoroughfare.
“Wait a minute, what’s the rush?” he growled, leaning back against my pull. His strength was also making a remarkable comeback. “We just got here. How about just for once sticking around some planet more than five minutes, huh?”
“Shut up and come on,” Tera snapped, grabbing his other arm. From the look of surprise that flicked across his face, I guessed she was digging her nails into his skin more than was necessary to maintain the grip. Certainly more than I was; but then, I’d only been irritated by his disappearing act for the past five minutes. Tera had had a whole hour of slogging through the rain in which to work up resentment.
Between her voice, her grip, and whatever he saw in her face, Shawn apparently realized that, too. He shut up as ordered, and docilely followed us down the street and through the spaceport gate. We caught the slideway and headed in.
I kept a careful eye behind us, as well as on the slideways that passed or intersected ours, but I saw no sign of anyone tailing us. I had thought Torsk might have second thoughts about letting me leave so easily, but apparently he’d decided that discretion was the better part of continued employment and had decided to leave well enough alone.
We reached the last freighter parked between us and the Icarus; and finally, it seemed, we were out of the woods. We had the borandis, we had Shawn, and no one had pointed toward me and yelled for the Patth. Now, if the Icarus had just been fueled properly, we would be in business. Hoping distantly that we wouldn’t find the fuelers still trying to figure out how to get the hose into the Icarus’s intake, we came around the side of the freighter.
The fuelers weren’t there. What was there was a group of ten Najik wearing the black-and-red tunics of customs officers. Standing by the entry ramp.
Waiting for us.
>
CHAPTER
10
Beside me, Shawn made a strangled sort of sound deep in his throat. “Oh, God,” he breathed. “We’re dead.”
“Quiet,” I muttered back, taking a second, closer look at the scene, hoping it wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought.
It was. The ten Najik were still there, tall and spindly, with those hairy arms and legs that always made me think of giant four-limbed tarantulas. They were still wearing the customs uniforms, and there was an impatient look in their multiple eyes as they glanced over our direction through the pouring rain.
On the other hand, it could also have been worse. Locks or no locks, customs officers on the prowl normally didn’t bother to wait for the captain before going inside a target ship, but simply popped the hatch and apologized later for the damage if apologies were called for. Now, with my second look, I saw why they were still out here getting rained on.
Standing square in the center of the ramp, looking for all the world like a feathery-scaled Horatius holding the bridge, was Chort. From the water running steadily off his fingertips it was clear he’d been there for a while; from the settled look of his stance, it was equally clear he was prepared to stay as long as necessary.
Normally, the presence of such an obstacle wouldn’t have slowed down a customs officer any more than a locked hatch would. But Chort was hardly your normal obstacle. He was a Craea; and with Crooea and their spacewalker skills so highly in demand around the Spiral, I could understand why the Najik were reluctant to offend him by shoving their way past into the ship. Especially a locked and apparently unoccupied ship.
