by Timothy Zahn
“They might,” I said, wondering what kompri was. Some Craean drink, probably. “What about you, Ixil?”
“I want to get the fuelers started first,” he said. “I’ll try to join you later.”
“Okay,” I said, pretending to believe him as I swung around and started down the ladder. He most certainly would not be joining us; he would be staying here and watching Everett and Shawn like an iguana-faced hawk. “We won’t be long.”
It was an eerie walk down the deserted access walkway, our footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. I looked into each doorway and alley as we passed it, half expecting to see dark men or aliens waiting in the darkness to ambush us. But the doorways were just as deserted as the rest of the place.
We reached the taverno without incident, to find it was indeed the Baker’s Dozen. The others close behind me, I pulled open the door and looked inside.
The place was quite large, a bit on the dark side, but otherwise surprisingly homey, with heavy wooden tables and chairs, a traditional Earth-style wooden bar running the length of the left-hand wall, and even a sunken fireplace, currently unlit, in the center of the room. It was also severely underpopulated. There was a group of a dozen scruffy-looking aliens gathered around three of the tables near the bar, a pirate gang if ever I’d seen one; a pair of young human females sitting together at a table near the right-hand wall; and three robed and hooded figures with faces hidden hunched over a table in the far back corner. And that was it. Behind the bar, a furry-faced Ulkomaal was leaning on the countertop gazing morosely at the dead fireplace. He looked up as I walked into the room, his bony eyebrow crest turning a faint purple with surprise. “So that was another ship I heard,” he said, straightening up. “Welcome, patronae, welcome.”
“Thanks,” I said, glancing around at the other customers. The pirates had looked up as we entered, but after a quick assessment had turned back to their drinks. The two women were still eyeing us; the robed threesome in the back hadn’t even bothered to turn around. Maybe they were already too drunk to care, though the collection of empty glasses traditionally associated with sleeping drunks wasn’t in evidence. On the other hand, I could see that none of the tables had menu selectors, which meant the barkeep also doubled as a waiter, and from the looks of things he certainly wasn’t too busy to keep the place tidy. “You still serving?”
He sighed. “For what good it does,” he said. “Everyone else has already fled.”
“Fled from what?” Tera asked from behind me.
The barkeep sighed again. “The Balthee,” he said in a tone that managed to be both angry and resigned at the same time. “We received a report late this afternoon that they were on their way for another spraymarker raid.”
“A what?” Tera asked.
“It is an example of Balthee guilt-by-association law,” Chort spoke up as I led them to a table near the door and away from the other patrons. I took the chair that put my back to the wall, where I could watch the entrance and also keep the rest of the customers at least within peripheral vision. Nicabar chose the chair to my left, which would put the pirates in his direct line of sight, while Tera took the seat to my right, where she couldn’t see much of anything except the door and me. If the two of them had been deliberately planning to corral me, they couldn’t have done a better job of it. “Consorting with known criminals is itself a crime under Balthee law,” Chort continued, easing himself delicately into the remaining chair.
“You are very knowledgeable,” the barkeep complimented him. “Knowing Morsh Pon’s reputation—which is wholly unjustified, I assure you—they periodically come and spray a molecularly bonded dye over all ships on our landing pads. Any such marked ship that enters a Balthee-run spaceport is immediately impounded and searched and its crew held for questioning.”
“I can see why your clientele wouldn’t want that,” I agreed, nodding toward the pirate gang at their tables. “They not get the message?”
“Their captain tells me they do not fear the Balthee,” he said, lowering his voice as he glanced in their direction. “However, another crew member confided that they plan to have all their hull plates replaced soon anyway.”
He gestured to the other two occupied tables. “As to the females, they are employees of one of the guesthouses, Shick Place. And, when the word came, the gentlebeings in back were already too inebriated to try to leave.”
He straightened up and cocked his head at me. “And what is your story?”
I frowned up at him. “What do you mean?”
“You are here,” he said, waving a hand at us. “Yet there is word of an impending raid.”
“Which we obviously didn’t know about, did we?” I said.
“Were no other ships leaving as you arrived?” the barkeep countered. “Some must still have been on their way out. Did no one transmit a warning to you?”
“Yes, there were other ships leaving,” I said, putting some impatience into my voice even as a quiet warning bell went off in my ear. I’d never been on Morsh Pon before; but the criminal hangouts I had had occasion to visit had not been known for overly inquisitive waiters. This kind of interrogation was way out of character, even given that the barkeep was probably bored out of his skull. “And no, none of them bothered to give us a warning. Why do you think this is any of your business?”
“Don’t mind him,” a soprano voice came from my side.
I turned. One of the two women at the far table had gotten to her feet and was coming toward us. She was medium height and slender, and her step was just a bit unsteady. I wondered briefly if she could be Uncle Arthur’s information courier, but the skintight outfit she was wearing couldn’t have concealed a spare poker chip. At least, I thought incongruously, that also meant we didn’t have to worry about her being an assassin. “I’m sorry?” I said.
“I said don’t mind him,” she repeated, flipping her hand toward the Ulkomaal in the more or less universal gesture of contemptuous dismissal, the dim room light glinting momentarily off the large gaudy rings she was wearing. Now that she was facing us, I could see she was wearing the display scarf of a bar girl knotted around her neck, the particular tartan pattern advertising what services she offered and the charge for them. I wondered distantly whether Tera would know about such things; I rather hoped she didn’t. “Nurptric the Nosy, they call him,” the woman continued. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Business slow?” Tera asked, her voice frosty. Apparently, she knew all about the scarf.
The woman gave her a smile that was a good eighty percent smirk. “Yours too?” she asked sweetly, snagging a chair from the next table and hauling it over. With a hip she deftly shoved Tera over, to Tera’s obvious consternation, and planted her chair squarely between the two of us. “I’m just being sociable, you being strangers here and all,” she added, dropping into the seat and swiveling to put her face to me and her back to Tera. “Any law against that?”
“Not too many laws against anything here,” Tera countered pointedly. “Obviously.”
“And like you say, business is slow,” the woman added, wiggling her hips and shoulders to carve a bit more room for herself. “I’m sure not going to get any decent conversation out of anyone else in here. My name’s Jennifer. How about buying me a drink?”
“How about you going somewhere else?” Tera said, starting to sound angry. “This is a private conversation.”
“Noisy, isn’t she?” Jennifer commented, an amused smile playing around her lips. “Unfriendly, too. You come here often?”
Tera half rose to her feet, sank reluctantly back into her seat as Chort put a gentle hand on her arm. “I’m afraid we’re pretty much broke, Jennifer,” I said diplomatically. “We’ve got barely enough money for the fuel we need. Nothing left over for incidentals.”
She eyed me speculatively. “Gee, that’s too bad,” she said, looking over at the Ulkomaal still hovering expectantly behind Chort. “Give me a small vodkaline, Nurp.”
His eyebrow crest tu
rned a brief magenta, but he nevertheless nodded. “Of course. And for the rest of you?”
“Have you kompri, by any chance?” Chort asked.
“No, nothing like that,” Nurptric said. “We have no Craean drinks.”
“We might have some back at Shick Place,” Jennifer volunteered. “We cater to all sorts of vices there,” she added, giving Chort a sly smile. “It’s not far away if you want to go see.”
Chort looked at me uncertainly. “If we have the time—?”
“No,” Nicabar said flatly, his tone leaving no room for argument. “As soon as the ship’s fueled, we’re out of here.”
“He’s right,” I seconded. I didn’t especially like the thought of spending any more time out in the gloom than I had to, and I certainly wasn’t going to let any of the group go wandering off on their own. “We’ll take three caff colas and a distilled water,” I added to the barkeep.
His eyebrow crest went a little mottled, either a sign of resignation or possibly contempt for such miserliness. “Yes, patronae,” he said and turned back to his bar, muttering under his breath as he went.
“Three colas and a water, huh?” Jennifer said, shaking her head. “You really are the big spenders.”
“As he said, we’re short on cash,” Tera said firmly. “So you might as well stop wasting your time.”
Jennifer shrugged. “Fine. You know, though, there’s an easy way to make some fast money.”
She leaned in toward the middle of the table, beckoning us in conspiratorially. “There’s a ship out there somewhere—no one knows where,” she said, dropping her voice to a murmur. “You find it, and it’s worth a hundred thousand commarks to you. Cash money.”
A matched set of Kalixiri ferrets with cold feet began running up and down my back. “Really,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “How come it’s worth that much? And who to?”
“I don’t know why they want it,” she said, half turning and snagging a folded piece of paper from the next table over that had apparently been left behind during the earlier mass exodus. “But it’s all right here,” she said, handing it to me.
I unfolded it. To my complete lack of surprise, it was the same flyer James Fulbright had waved in my face back on Dorscind’s World.
With two unpleasant differences. First, as Jennifer had said, the reward had been jumped from the original five thousand to a hundred thousand. And second, instead of my old Mercantile Authority photo, there was a much more up-to-date sketch. An extremely good sketch.
“Sounds like a con to me,” I commented offhandedly as I folded the paper again and dropped it on the table in front of me, my skin crawling beneath the fake scars on my cheek. So that was why the Patth agent on Dorscind’s World had surrendered without even token resistance. Letting me get off the planet had been less important in his eyes than making sure he stayed alive to take back a proper description to his masters. Suddenly my disguise didn’t seem quite so comforting and impenetrable anymore. “So why show it to us?” I asked.
She waved a hand around. “You can see how it is,” she said, her eyes and voice starting to drift toward the seductive. “I’m stuck down here. But you’re not. You might run into this Icarus out there.”
Chort made a strange sound in the back of his throat. “What ship did you say? The Icarus?”
“I guess no one knows what it looks like,” she said, ignoring him, her eyes still on me and growing ever more seductive. “But they say that guy on the flyer is aboard it. You might spot the ship; you might spot him.”
“And then?” I prompted.
She leaned close to me. “Then you could call me here,” she said, breathing the words straight into my face now. The perfume mixed with the alcohol on her breath was definitely from the lower end of the price spectrum. “I know who to get the word to, and who to collect the bounty from.”
“You say they just want the ship?” Tera spoke up. She had picked up the flyer now and was looking at it, and in the admittedly inadequate light I thought her face had gone a little pale.
“They want the ship and crew both,” Jennifer said, still gazing at me. “What, can’t you read?”
“What for?” Tera persisted, handing the flyer off to Nicabar. “What do they want them for?”
Reluctantly, Jennifer leaned back again and looked at Tera over her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she growled, clearly annoyed at the interruption in her sales pitch. “And I don’t care, either. The point is that there’s money to be made, and we could be the ones who make it.”
“And how would you propose we split it?” I asked.
She smiled at me again. The seductress role was apparently all she knew how to play. “All I want is passage back to Earth and a couple thousand to help me get set up there,” she breathed, leaning toward me again. “That’s all—you’d get all the rest. Just for one little StarrComm call. I’d even pay you back for the call.”
“Why do we need you at all?” Nicabar put in, looking up from the flyer. “Why can’t we just call this number ourselves?”
“Because I know how to get you an extra fifty thousand,” the woman said, breathing her words into my face again. “Private money. Revenge money. See those three in the back?”
I turned my head. The three robed figures were still hunched over their table; but as we all looked that direction, as if on cue, one of them stirred, rolling his shoulders to the sides as if adjusting them in his sleep, then falling silent and still again. But the movement had been enough to drop his hood partially back, revealing his face.
It was another of the Lumpy Clan.
From my left, from Nicabar’s direction, came a faint but sharp intake of air. I turned to look at him, but by the time I got there he had his usual stolid expression back in place.
But the stifled gasp alone was very enlightening. Clearly, somewhere along the line, Nicabar had run into these lads before.
“They passed the word that they were putting another fifty thousand into the pot,” Jennifer continued. Like Chort’s reaction earlier to the name of the hunted ship, she’d apparently also missed Nicabar’s reaction to the Lumpies. Either she was drunker than I’d thought, or else she was putting so much effort into her attempted seduction of me that she didn’t have any attention to spare for anyone else. “I hear the guy on the flyer smoked a couple of their pals.”
“Not a very friendly thing to do,” I said, peering with some difficulty into her face, not because she was unpleasant to look at but because she’d once again moved to a position bare centimeters away from me. Maybe she was counting on her perfume to seal this deal for her.
Inside my jacket, my phone vibrated. “Excuse me,” I said, half turning away from her and digging into my pocket, glad for an excuse to break away from that gaze, even temporarily.
It was, as I’d expected, Ixil. “Everything all right?” he asked.
“Just fine,” I told him as Nurptric returned to our table with our drinks. “We found out why everyone else is gone.”
“Good,” he said. “Whatever the reason, they’re coming back.”
“It seems—” I broke off. “What?”
“I’m reading fifteen ships on landing-approach vectors,” he said. “At least five of them are heading for our spaceport.”
I looked up at the Ulkomaal. “Nurptric, do the Balthee ever actually land to pick up prisoners?”
He seemed shocked. “Of course not. They wouldn’t dare—this is Ulko sovereign territory.”
“Then you’re right, they’re coming back,” I confirmed to Ixil, trying to keep the sudden tension out of my voice. A whole crowd of returning pirates, smugglers, and cutthroats; and probably every one of them with a Patth sketch of me folded neatly in his pocket. Just what we needed. “What’s the fueling status?”
“About half-done,” he said. “We should be topped off by the time the first wave arrives. I presume we’d like to be buttoned down and ready to fly by then?”
“If not sooner,” I
told him. Whatever Uncle Arthur had cooked up for us, he’d better hit the road with it, and fast. “We’re on our way.”
I clicked off and returned the phone to my pocket. “Trouble?” Jennifer asked.
“Just the opposite,” I assured her, lifting my glass to my lips but not drinking any of it. The barkeep might have recognized me and slipped in something special, and I didn’t want to find out about it the hard way. If I hadn’t been a raving paranoid before, I reflected, this trip would very likely do the trick. “Our ship’s almost fueled up, and it looks like we can be out of here before the rest of your clientele start tying up all the perimeter grav beams.”
Her face fell, just a bit. All that effort, and now we were about to leave without letting her finish her presentation. “Think about my offer, okay?” she said, a note of pleading in her voice. “There could be extra benefits, too, not just the money.”
“Oh?” I said, resisting the temptation to look suggestively up and down her tight-fitting outfit. It would have been a cheap shot, and I imagined she got enough of that from the Baker’s Dozen’s usual denizens. “Such as?”
Cheap shots, apparently, were Jennifer’s stock-in-trade. Putting her right hand behind my head, the corners of her ring catching momentarily on my hair, she pulled me the last thirty centimeters still separating us and kissed me.
There was nothing tentative or perfunctory about it, either. It was a full-mouth, full-pressure lip dock, with all the desperate strength of someone facing her absolute last chance. I thought about how she’d spoken of being stuck here, of how she’d asked for passage to Earth for putting us onto the Patth hunt, and for the first time since we’d met I actually felt a little sorry for her. Of all of us at that table, I could empathize most strongly with the feeling of being caught inside an ever-shrinking box.
And then the tip of her tongue pushed between my lips; and abruptly, my twinge of sympathy vanished in a sudden flush of surprise and cautious excitement.
It seemed like a long time before the pressures fore and aft slackened off and she pulled away, though it was probably no more than a few seconds. As her head moved out of my line of sight, I saw that Tera was looking at me with a cast-granite expression on her face. Irreverently, I found myself wondering how many other expressions of surprise, outrage, or disgust she’d gone through while I wasn’t looking. Even a scoundrel as low-class as I was shouldn’t act that way in the presence of a lady.
