by Brian Daley
Best of all, because Blackguard was a port of call anyway, the cost of passage for Floyt and Alacrity would be within their means.
"What I don't understand is why Sile should send in his pet pneuma and then leave him high and dry," Alacrity said.
"Cold feet?" Floyt hypothesized. "Or perhaps a foulup in communication?"
"Either way, I've had it with Sile." Merrywell exhaled wearily. "The next time I see him I'm doing the universe a good turn and putting him out of it."
"Captain Merrywell, we don't want you getting embroiled in a vendetta because of us," Floyt objected.
"Will you please just let the man kill somebody if he feels like it?" Alacrity yelled.
"It needs doing anyhow," Merrywell contended. "Are you lads ready to go? You've just got time to see Amarok before Skate gets underway."
"Just one thing, Captain," Floyt began tentatively. "The pneuma—don't give me that look, Alacrity; I'm all right!—what did you do with him?"
"We took the autostyrette and gave him the shot he was going to give you," Merrywell said, stolid and yet sad. "Funny; it didn't kill him. It went right to work on his nervous system; he won't be any use in his old line of work, ever. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with him."
The Earther stroked his beard; whatever it was would no doubt have killed Floyt.
"Want to hear something sad?" asked tired old Merrywell. "Under that mask-hood thing, he was a kid, maybe sixteen, seventeen or so. Anyway, we figure we'll get some information out of him sooner or later."
Alacrity and Floyt had just fetched their gear. With no idea what they were getting into, the two companions had packed along most of the things Dorraine and Redlock had given them, but had agreed to bequeath a part of Alacrity's seasoning and spice hoard.
"We flagged some recipes that were in the Pihoquiaq's data banks," Alacrity was telling Amarok a few minutes later. "Ho found them. Y'know, it's not a terribly hard thing to learn, cooking."
"Better than going back to mealtrays," Floyt added.
"True." Amarok smiled slowly. He was suspended in a flotation field, his knee and various other parts of him swathed and strapped. His throat was encased in an assist collar, to spare his damaged larynx.
"And we're both very, very sorry for the trouble, Amarok," Floyt said.
"Ah, well; One should expect surprises if He decides to be a breakabout, eh?" He didn't have the strength to laugh. "Keep This One in mind, if you two are ever looking for jobs."
Alacrity promised to do just that, but Floyt's conditioning gave him a twinge. As the two left, Professor K'ek scrambled up to perch in a high chair next to Amarok, holding a textscreen in his lap and preparing to read aloud from one of the professor's favorites, Riders of the Purple Sage.
The Mountebank was yet another step down in transportation, two thirds the size of Pihoquiaq and in an advanced state of neglect. But, because she carried little cargo, she had more living space than the monitor.
Urtho Skate turned out to be an effusive character about Floyt's size but portly, his dressy outfit of glittering buttons and raffled cuffs looking like he'd slept in it—several times. Gathered in the ship's tight little combination mess-lounge were Skate, Alacrity and Floyt, and the other two passengers who were making the trip.
It was difficult to tell anything about the last two, gender included. They were costumed as grotesques, their heads encased in monstrous casques that were contorted and painted in demonic expressions and fitted with red compound eyes. They wore burnooses with exaggerated shoulders and platform shoes. One wore dress gloves; the other had fingernails bitten down to the quick.
The masks contained devices that disguised their voices; their greetings came out eerie and synthetic. Word from Merrywell was that such disguises were common in Blackguard.
Alacrity and Floyt were wearing disguises too, improvised ones they'd scrounged up on the Magus. In place of casques they had crash helmets, visors adjusted to full reflectiveness. In response to the greeting, Floyt only nodded, while Alacrity gave a barely intelligible answer in crosstalk. The four seated themselves in a messbooth.
Skate went forward to cast off and begin the trip, without offering any blastoff cocktails. Alacrity wasn't surprised; people on the run could hardly expect Red Nova class service.
As Mountebank got underway, the passengers took a final look through the viewbleb. The Grapple was still a lightshow of strobing beacons and flashing holosignals, but fewer ships were moored than when the Pihoquiaq arrived.
Floyt thought with a little regret about rejuvenation and antigeronic clinics, and wondered if the temptation would present itself again, unsure whether he wanted it to or not.
Alacrity turned to their fellow passengers. "Either of you have any idea where we should stow our bags?"
"There'll be plenty of room for them in the hold," said one of the flat-voiced demon masks. "And for you, too." Empty handed, Alacrity half rose from his seat. At Skate's insistence, both he and Floyt had packed their guns in their bags.
Before Alacrity could do more, muzzles appeared from the billowing reaches of the burnooses. One spat at Floyt, who only had time to yip and slap the spot where the dart hit him before his eyes rolled up in his head and he keeled over.
Alacrity froze as both guns trained on him. First one mask came off, then the other, with Alacrity covered the whole time. Sile and Constance smiled at him.
"We just wanted to welcome you inboard, dear, dear boy," Sile caroled. "Did you really think Captain Dincrist wouldn't find out that you and Floyt shipped with Amarok? And sourpuss Amarok—there was just one place he could be taking you!"
Merrywell said these two crawlies have a secret patron, Alacrity remembered. When Dincrist jinxes somebody, he sure makes it stick.
"We're going to have such fun!" Constance added, gnawing at a thumbnail, eyes practically bursting from her head with excitement.
"Do you know how much trouble you've caused me?" Sile asked. "First Amarok taunted Tah-Skass into coming after him on his own, without my orders, and almost spoiled everything. Then you beamed poor Tah-Skass down like an animal, didn't you? My most valuable man, my pneuma."
"But everything's right as rain now," Constance said brightly. "We've got you, and you're going to pay."
She shot Alacrity just as he was making a last-option lurch across the table, and he hit it hard, thinking, There's just no justice!
Alacrity began to come around again, realizing foggily that things were getting a little coherent, expecting gradual improvement. There was none.
Instead, he rose to a certain depth just above unconsciousness and below real thought. He drifted, drifted, registering distantly that he was still under something—a drug, maybe, or too much drink. But he couldn't recall what or how, and lacked the will to pursue the point.
Someone peeled back his right eyelid, letting in an unforgiveable light. Alacrity heard a half-recognized male voice.
"Can you hear me? You hear me? Answer!"
Alacrity achieved a sort of moaning slur, making no sense.
He wanted to swat the hand away but his arm wasn't working. His eyelid was permitted to fall back into place; he forgot his pique, lapsing into a comfortable void, looking around for images with his mind's eye, unable to make any appear.
Someone was unsatisfied with that. There was an insignificant sensation in his shoulder. After some time, he was again aware, but less able to think.
"Let's give it another try, go-blood," the voice said. "All right, open your eyes!"
It was easy to open his eyes; Alacrity found himself looking up at the underside of a ship's bunk. He could also see part of a grimy compartment. He didn't look around because nobody had told him to.
His body informed him that he was strapped into a lower bunk that was, like most, too short for him. A deeper sense let him know he was inside a starship in Hawking. Blank of thought, he registered that and nothing more.
Fixed above him was a compact piece of audiovisual
gear. No mystery there, although he was too vacant to think about it much; he'd seen equipment like it before in teaching facilities and in the Earthservice's conditioning bailiwick.
Seated beside the bunk, just at the edge of Alacrity's vision, holding a pneumodermic injector, was Skate.
An arm was hanging down from the upper bunk, recognizable as Floyt's by the cheap proteus it wore. The Earther could've been asleep, unconscious, or dead. Alacrity absorbed that in a detached way; emotions seemed far off, and he wasn't even worried about his own well-being.
Skate took Alacrity's chin in his hand and shook it a little. "Pay attention now, eh, high-mover? We have to have a talk."
Skate's face was sweating and his breath smelled of Perkup; a random thought crossed Alacrity's mind, that the man had been at his backpack of travel accessories.
Skate drew his floatcushion closer, leaving Alacrity's face pointed toward the AV unit overhead. Without resentment or much curiosity, Alacrity obediently paid attention, as ordered, watching the thing.
Skate activated it, and it began projecting hypnotic light patterns, reinforcing them with subsonics. The unit scanned Alacrity, carefully adapting itself. The subject slipped quickly and readily into a deeper trance state.
"Now, we start with your name," Skate said. "Tell me your real name."
"Alacrity Fitzhugh."
"Eh? Is that an alias?"
"Yes."
"I want you to tell me your real name, the one you were born under!"
Alacrity began to answer, but then something clicked in, deep inside. His mouth stayed shut; he just looked at the machine, at peace, with the command short-circuited.
"Tell me your real name," Skate ordered again patiently. He looked as if he was both angry at Alacrity and nervous about something. He glanced over his shoulder at the dogged and locked hatch. Alacrity watched the flashing gyrations of the lights, felt and listened to the pulsations.
"Your real name, son," Skate resumed. In spite of his harried expression, his voice was soothing and friendly, a sign that he'd had a lot of experience at that sort of thing.
That same short-circuit removed the question from Alacrity's train of thought again, before he could even bring the answer to mind. Skate saw, and didn't waste more time on that line of attack.
"Why can't you answer? Tell me what's stopping you."
But each such question brought Skate up against an impenetrable wall that protected Alacrity's past. He gnawed his lower lip, fuming, not realizing that it had nothing to do with why he was there or how he'd run afoul of Sile, or why Floyt was important to them.
But Skate knew when to abandon a fruitless line of inquiry. "Now I want you to tell me why you want to go to Blackguard, Alacrity. What's there?"
Again Skate ran into a blockage; this time it was the one put there by the Earthservice behavioral engineering team, part of the programming that bound him to Floyt and the Astraea Imprimatur mission. It wasn't nearly as deeply planted or all-embracing as what Skate had touched in probing Alacrity's deeper secrets.
Skate saw that Alacrity was near answering, the programming weakened by the traumas and stresses of the journey, and the effects of the drug, and the AV barrage.
The identity merchant bit his lip once more in indecision, then put the pneumodermic to Alacrity's shoulder again and gave him a megahit.
Alacrity could barely focus on the AV. His mouth was very dry and his skin acutely sensitive. Strangely, sound was a distant and not very important sensory input.
"Do you feel the blockage that's there, Alacrity? The one around you and your friend and what you're involved in?"
Alacrity did indeed, and nodded; it was the one Earthservice had implanted. He knew every twinge and twist, every train of thought that would set it off. He'd mapped his lost freedom against it, plotted and triangulated it laboriously over the past weeks, finding its shoreline in terms of spasms and sharp jolts to his free will.
"That's good, Alacrity," Skate said into his ear. "Hold the shape of it in your mind, because we're going to take it away. Now, I want you to think of the pain you feel when you try to go against this prohibition. Think of the very instant it hits you, but don't feel it!
"I'm not going to ask you any questions; I just want you to get that prohibition clearly in your mind. I'm going to take it away … "
It went on like that for a while. Skate was good; under his guidance, the whole structure of the conditioning simply began to fade. A part of Alacrity watched it approach the vanishing point.
Then, with a calculated prod, Skate diminished it to a mist. Alacrity, in stuporous amaze, felt as if he were looking over someone else's shoulder, watching what was going on within him.
Skate repeated the sequence. The conditioning dwindled to nothingness, gone altogether from Alacrity's cerebrum and gut. Along with it, it took the artificial underpinnings of his partnership with Floyt.
"Now, son," Skate crooned, hunkering forward, eagerness edging into his voice. "Back to the beginning again. We'll begin with Sile's patron, Captain Dincrist. Do you know Captain Dincrist?"
"Sure." Alacrity felt exactly as if someone else were speaking for him.
"Good! Tell me, why did Dincrist order Sile to—"
Skate stopped as the hatch controls were tried. When the person seeking entrance found out it had been secured, there was a hammering and railing from the other side.
Skate suddenly looked terrified. "Go to sleep!" he rasped at Alacrity. "Close your eyes!"
Alacrity did. But the drug had him parsecs from true sleep, so he simply lay there, an unfocused void. He heard the AV unit being whisked away. He heard Skate cross to the hatch and open it, heard the fury in Constance's voice as she charged into the compartment.
"What're you doing? Why was this hatch locked? Answer me, you slimy toad!"
"Just keeping an eye on these two," Skate explained smoothly. "I was just making sure they—"
"You can't open your mouth without lying, can you?"
Alacrity heard her cross to the bunk and felt her lift his arm to examine his shoulder. Again his eye was peeled back; he had a bleary glimpse of light, nothing he could fix on.
Constance let his eyelid fall. "Open your eyes. Open them!"
Alacrity complied. Constance was standing there, having shed the burnoose disguise, wearing a chiaroscuro fleshpeel. She turned to Skate without warning and fetched him an open-handed clout across the ear that sent him toppling against the bulkhead; she'd changed from a teasing sextoy into a homicidal maniac with mad eyes.
"You just get them ready for cachesleep. And if you try anything else, I'll kill you," she whispered.
Skate, rubbing his face and glowering at her, whined, "I was only trying to get some straight answers out of them—for Sile."
"I'll kill you" she repeated tightly. "And you've never done anything for anyone except yourself in your life."
She looked to Alacrity. "In fact, we might as well put them both into cachesleep right now."
"What? Why?"
"So that you won't be able to get to them again. We'll have the extra space that much sooner and I'll have that much less to worry about. And you'd better not so much as cross my path these next few weeks. Poustis! I can't believe Sile stuck me with this job! With you!"
"It won't be so bad, Constance. Mountebank's got plenty of entertainment, 'cause she's a little slow-going," Skate tried to placate. "And in any case, we'll get to Blackguard before Sile and Dincrist."
"It's not the trip; it's being cooped up with you." Reaching out of Alacrity's field of vision, she produced a pneumodermic kit. "Go aft and get the cachesleep wrappers ready," she ordered. "I'll prep them myself."
Another pneumodermic touched Alacrity's skin.
Chapter 10
Fleeing From
The Wolf To The Tiger
The ironic thing about the slave collars was, you could take them off if they got uncomfortable.
They were several centimeters wide, like ci
rclets of hammered strap-iron with rings and hinges, like something out of a history text. And they weren't welded, lasered, or riveted onto the necks of the recipient; they were issued. They were mainly for show and to give the Betters of Blackguard a thrill.
Blackguard had much more businesslike and effective means of keeping its chattels in line, and they'd been put into place during the long weeks of cachesleep in Mountebank. Alacrity and Floyt noted the collars from a distance, registering them along with other evidence of disaster.
Nauseous, stripped of every possession, desperately depleted from cachesleep and its attendant drugs and resuscitating equipment, Floyt and Alacrity blinked and winced stupidly under the mauve sky and amber sun of Blackguard. They'd come to, lying on a cargo skid not far from Skate's vessel, with mouths dry and caked, eyes filmed, feeling as though they'd been racked and knouted.
They had lost a great deal of weight—making Alacrity, in particular, look emaciated—an awful lot of which had been moisture.
Moreover, Skate hadn't been too particular about keeping them clean. They stank, caked with filth, and both had bedsores. Floyt realized dully that the dental space retainer was missing from his mouth, and his new teeth had grown markedly.
"Are you all right, Alacrity?" Floyt somehow compelled his leathery mouth to say.
"Ghurk."
People and machines were moving around the spaceport structures in the distance. The landing surface was a small one, a few dozen hectares or so. The nearest ship on the field, aside from the Mountebank, looked to Floyt like a chambered nautilus made of glazed ceramic. It was unloading itself with articulated metal tentacles, another oddity of the Third Breath. From the ship, four people had just emerged, two men and two women. They were pointedly nondescript, dressed in the drab denim worksuits and blue skullcaps of achievement coordinators from Egalitaria.
