Fall of the White Ship Avatar

by Brian Daley

  There was no reference to any of that though; the companions tried to convince each other it was a good sign. Then one split-second image as Alacrity was fast-forwarding made them both gasp.

  "Alacrity, go back!"

  "I saw it, I saw it! Sports news; why didn't I think of it?"

  Then it was before them again on the holoimager: Celeste Aida, the gorgeous racing staryacht of Captain Softcoygne Dincrist, the Nonpareil's father.

  The last time Alacrity and Floyt had seen the ship, Celeste Aida swept past them rather than blowing Astraea Imprimatur to component forces, not because Dincrist couldn't do it, or didn't want to because his daughter was inboard, but because he was, though behind, a strong contender in the very prestigious Regatta for the Purple.

  The newsspew showed Dincrist standing proudly before his ship, accepting the first-place trophy, a racing starship carved from a single, enormous fire-drop.

  "Zhopa's ruchkoi, that bastard," Alacrity breathed. "We should've killed him when we had the chance."

  There were scenes from the race as a commentating talking head went on about Dincrist's brilliant performance, particularly during the solar sailing leg of the dangerous race.

  "I hate to give him this," Alacrity grudged, "but either he's an awfully good racing skipper or he had one inboard with him, ghosting."

  The shot switched back to Dincrist, surrounded by wealthy, powerful Regatta Club members whose friendship he'd been courting for so long. He was taller than Alacrity, deeply tanned, white-haired, and fit. His gleaming smile was frozen in place.

  Floyt recalled the contempt in which club members held newspeople. The fact that a press opportunity was being tolerated showed that Dincrist, as winner, had impressive new influence among the august and mighty members.

  Alacrity wondered if the irony was eating at Dincrist's liver—being compelled to give up the vengeance he wanted so badly in order to win the trophy, the only thing he wanted more.

  "When will Celeste Aida take to the stars again, Captain?" a fawning interviewer asked.

  Dincrist chuckled regretfully. "My first love is sailing the stars, of course, but unfortunately I have weighty responsibilities to my family and to my business and financial affairs."

  Another newsghoul, one who didn't sound so friendly, elbowed the first aside. She was young, barely postadolescent, and wore a fetching strawberry-color coat of dermal frosting over bare skin.

  "Salome Price, for the Uncensored Network! Captain Dincrist, aren't you referring to the meeting of the Board of Interested Parties of the White Ship? Haven't there been persistent rumors that you'll face opposition at the upcoming meeting and perhaps a drive to unseat you from the board? Isn't it even said that much of that opposition will come from members of your own family and from your daughter, the so-called Nonpareil, in particular?"

  Dincrist glared at Salome Price furiously, then his eyes flicked around the crowd and into the pickups. For a moment Alacrity felt like he was eye to eye with Dincrist again and about to throw some hands and feet.

  Floyt was certain Dincrist was wondering if he could get away with swatting the female newsghoul in front of all those people and recording devices, and concluding only with great reluctance that he couldn't.

  The smile froze back into place. "Those are vicious and unfounded lies, as I suspect you know, foisted off by malicious people on the gullible and foolish, my dear. As proof of that, my business associates and family—and most particularly my daughter—will be backing me all the way at the meeting."

  His mouth smiled wider; his eyes were chilling. "Backing me all the way."

  Alacrity came halfway out of the big pilot's seat to bark at the projection, "Liar! Dincrist, you limbic case!" He turned to Floyt. "You don't think he found her somehow, do you?" Alacrity replayed the interview, but there was nothing more to learn from it.

  "Something's happened to her." Alacrity was staring numbly at the spot in the air where the projection had vaporized. "Ho, we've got to find her." He was keypadding up new astrogational data from the computers, not sure where he wanted to go or what he would do there.

  "Alacrity, we don't even know where to start. Look, she must be all right, otherwise Dincrist wouldn't have promised that she would attend the meeting, isn't that logical? That's where we have to go, Alacrity." Floyt was fond of Heart too and owed her a lot; she'd risked her life to save him as well as Alacrity.

  "I don't know; if he's hurt her I'll tear his head off, and shit into it." But he stopped the dataflow and left the Lightning Whelk on course.

  "I guess you're right, Ho. And to get into the board meeting I have to claim my share from Marcus. Right, we go to Windfall, as planned."

  Floyt had found himself enjoying traveling with Alacrity in the Bruja and Pihoquiaq. Misery and peril, interspersed with some matchless good times, had gotten the two used to one another: Alacrity knew that Floyt disapproved of hearing the punchline of a joke repeated; Floyt had learned that breakabouts, like ancient submariners, should not have the habit of whistling or humming. The trip in the Whelk was something Floyt greeted as a welcome chance to rest, collect his thoughts, and increase his readiness to venture through the Third Breath.

  But now Floyt dreaded the voyage, fearing it would be like sharing a cage with an angry tiger. Floyt had another preoccupation aside from the one for Heart's safety though, a gnawing apprehension about the shadowy occupant of that giant, reinforced bunk.

  Alacrity backed up the recording and projected the scene again.

  "Backing me all the way." Dincrist beamed smugly.

  * * * *

  The Lunar port supervisor sweated a bit before repeating his lie. He glanced aside to make sure the guards in the outer office were keeping an eye on the situation; they were watchful and stonefaced, intimidated.

  "All I can tell you is, they had the proper documents and they had the code-key for the Lightning Whelk," the supervisor said again. "So they had every right to receive clearance and lift-off, sir."

  The man-mountain on the other side of the desk didn't move or speak. The night-black eyes bored into the official, who thought, Hell, would even gunfire stop this ogre?

  His ID gave his name as Gentry Standing Bear. He was from the largely Amerind planet called Four Smokes and had an unsurpassed history in mayhem, crime, combat, bounty hunting, and frequently insane excess of all kinds. The sullen goliath had left a trail of carnage across the Third Breath, gouging eyes from gene-engineered champ gladiators, smashing in the ribs of giant, neutered Spican death-guards, tearing tongues from huge Sumo wrestlers on Fukuoka. The two liters of Old Four Smokes Wallop he'd drunk had him in an evil temper.

  The port official and even the tough guards betrayed the fear he aroused in just about anyone he met. Gentry Standing Bear was too big for most doorways, networked with scars, calluses, puckered blasterburns. He had thick, horn-hard fingernails, gargantuan fists. The lumps under the skin of his chest were shotgun pellets he'd never bothered having removed. The end of his nose had been bitten off, with it not mattering to him enough to have it repaired. His gaze made it clear that he enjoyed violence, and no preamble required.

  "Honestly," the supervisor said, licking his lips. "Look, maybe I can find out something for you—their flight plan, or something."

  He damned himself for accepting the very considerable bribe—just about everything the two had, he'd assured himself—for letting Floyt and Alacrity board the Whelk and depart despite inadequate documentation. The vessel had arrived on someone else's shift, and if the supervisor had known this creature was part of her compliment, he'd have told the Earther and the breakabout to go suck vacuum.

  Standing Bear offhandedly considered caving in the supervisor's face and, if necessary, wringing the guards' necks. But there were more important things to do. He held out a photoflat blowup of a newsshot of Floyt and Fitzhugh, one of the few ever taken.

  "That's them, that's them!" the supervisor babbled. He reached for his commo button, grate
ful to have something to do, staring in fascination at the enormous hand with its alpine knuckles.

  But the walking catastrophe turned to go without any word. For trying to take Floyt and Fitzhugh while he, Standing Bear, was following up a lead on another case on the opposite side of Luna, the fool Plantos deserved what he'd gotten. Not that the two targets should've been any problem. But Plantos went into an unfamiliar place without correct preparation, backed by a few local sods, and so had gotten what he deserved. More, Plantos tried to cut Gentry Standing Bear out of the hunt, and so received nothing as bad as what Standing Bear would've done to him.

  If Standing Bear's contacts at Langstretch were angry about the death of Plantos and the theft of the starship, they weren't likely to demonstrate it to Standing Bear. The losses meant nothing much to him, unless Langstretch irritated him with complaints, which would be unprecedented. His services—when he deigned to sell them to the detective agency—were too valuable; more important, his anger was to be avoided.

  Which left only the need to contact Langstretch for a new means of transportation and new leads—for someone who would look after details, as Plantos had.

  Because Gentry Standing Bear cared only for the hunt and the kill.

  Chapter 4

  We Don't Know, But We Been Told

  The weather wasn't always nice on Windfall, but the planet was axially, geologically, and orbitally stable, with a placid climatic sameness over most of its surface, and so Alacrity's statement wasn't too far off the mark. Its ecology had been in place, with little change, for a long time in a rather benign environment, and so lacked adaptability; humans did rather well there.

  Windfall was settled and peaceful, a languid timocracy with polite but very strict law enforcement for anyone below the top echelons, to make sure things stayed orderly.

  "Which means no guns," Alacrity said regretfully, locking away his own and Floyt's pistols, the pouches and cases on the Sam Browne knocking and creaking.

  "I'm less worried about that than about how good a forger you are," Floyt said, adjusting his throat ruffles fussily. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? If we end up in jail, there's no one to extricate us this time."

  Alacrity was wearing his trusty old ice-blue, silver-trimmed dress skinsuit. He'd altered the Lightning Whelk's ownership records so that she appeared to belong to him and that he and Floyt, in turn, were citizens of Sweet Baby's Arms, the Lunar documents supporting that.

  The Third Breath saw contact among many disparate cultures, and documentation was often hit-or-miss; stealing or laying hands on a starship was difficult under most circumstances, but palming it off as one's own was less a problem if one knew the scams.

  "We're fine for now. We probably won't be here more than a few hours," Alacrity answered. "The odds against this crate being on the Rat-'Stat by now are long, at least here. The bulletin would've had to be right on our tail, in a faster ship."

  The Rat-'Stat was the list of wants, warrants, stolen ships, fugitives, and similar items of interest circulated among law enforcement organizations, Langstretch ops and stringers, bounty hunters, skip-tracers, informers, stoolies, and such. It was nothing if not cumbersome, and rather inefficient, given how out-of-touch many worlds were.

  "But you're on the Rat-'Stat," Floyt pointed out, still adjusting an ill-fitting outfit borrowed from the late Plantos. Since the Whelk offered no auto valet services, Alacrity had showed Floyt how to arrange the suit under his mattress for a very passable prison press. Floyt had shown apprehension on discovering the Golem's huge clothes; Alacrity dismissed them, happy to have a bunk with room to spare, even if it did still smell of Old Four Smokes Wallop.

  "Sure I am, but everybody thinks we're on Earth, m'friend. Not only that, a lot of folks think we look like those illustrations on Tula's books: body builders with perfect hair and eye makeup. Anyway, who could recognize us from the Camarilla hearings? We were behind closed doors just about all the time, besides which Spica and Earth and the Camarilla probably don't mean much to these people. But still, you can wait here in the Whelk if you'd rather."

  "I'd as soon open my wrists."

  Windfall's starport was small and looked more like a campus or park. The customs people were polite but very thorough in searching the two for contraband. Two-day tourist visas were approved without delay.

  Floyt scanned the applicable rules, restrictions, and penalties. For a bucolic sort of place, Windfall seemed oddly obsessed with long terms at hard labor. He and Alacrity converted the last of their cash into local currency and walked out under the red-gold light of Cornucopia, Windfall's primary.

  Alacrity stopped to make a quick call to Lord Marcus Perlez, with Floyt looking on from the side in the little public commo studio. Floyt was relieved to see the cost of the call was low.

  The call went through and the projector showed them a life-size image of a woman standing by a commo terminal configured to look like a nostalgie de le juquebox pedestal.

  "Thermostat alert," Alacrity murmured. "Meltdown imminent!" Floyt clucked angrily and knuckled him in the back.

  But she was special to look at, a toothsome size nine who was all legs and lush curves, tawny skin, and eerily transluscent blue eyes. She was barefoot, wearing an ensemble of burgundy-color glowtulle: wimple, loin bunting, forearm plaits, and thigh-high gaiters. Between her breasts hung a huge, faceted Lillith's eye on a fine silver chain.

  They devoured her with their stares; she gave them a look of resigned good humor. "What do you wish, please?"

  Before Alacrity could pounce on the line, Floyt nudged him again. "To talk to Lord Marcus Perlez," Alacrity supplied. "Tell him Lazlo Twill wants to catch up on old times."

  She put them on hold and her image disappeared from the tiny public studio. Floyt realized his mouth was open and shut it. "Lazlo Twill?"

  "I'll explain later."

  "If you don't, I'll start calling you that."

  A second later a lean, oldish man appeared on the screen. He had stringy, sinewy lines to his face, a ram's-horn handlebar mustache, and great, full sideburns. His smile showed what looked like too many teeth, like chalk tombstones. "Well, well, Lazlo Twill."

  Alacrity was holding up his hand, the commo link being insecure. "Nice to see you again, Lord Marcus."

  Perlez's eyes narrowed as he nodded slowly. "It's been awhile, m'boy; that it has. I've thought of you often. How soon can you get yourself over here?" The image gave Floyt a canny glance.

  Alacrity promised to jump into a hire-flier and get right over to Lord Marcus's estate, Ends Well. Floyt was disappointed that the man didn't offer to send transportation for them; a cab ride might well break them.

  "It's better this way," Alacrity told him as they left the studio. "I'd just as soon not hang around here any longer than we have to, and this way nobody sees some chauffeur picking us up and makes the connection."

  Several robofliers were waiting nearby, just as there were outside customs. Alacrity ignored them and, leading Floyt at a trot, hopped into one that was just discharging passengers at the terminal.

  The cab registered their destination and required payment before it would move. Floyt fed it nearly all of what they had left.

  Edenic cityscape and scenic countryside were hard to tell apart for a while when the cab got out over the wilds—or what passed for wilds on Windfall. Every so often they saw police cruisers among the traffic, even though most vehicles were remote controlled and there weren't many chances to break a law.

  Well controlled, Floyt saw, thinking of Terra with a rebelliousness he'd somehow picked up since throwing in with Alacrity.

  After an hour of modest-speed flying, the cab descended toward an estate that stretched across most of four low river valleys. Part of it was landscaped like an exquisite vivarium around the soaring manor house, but a lot of the place was scarcely prettified at all, a wilderness by Windfall standards.

  "Lord Marcus's got more money than some planets," Alacrity commented, "bu
t for some reason he likes his modest little sanctuary here."

  The manor house reminded Floyt of a gigantic, burnished samovar set among outbuildings, stables, garages, and solaria. It was bigger by far than Old Raffles, the chateau where he and Alacrity stayed on Blackguard. Alacrity stared down at it with furrowed brow; he'd been preoccupied during the flight. Floyt tried not to puzzle over what his friend was thinking, regarding it as a kind of prying.

  When the hire-flier touched down someone was waiting to meet them. Floyt's abrupt prayer was answered by the glint of burgundy glowtulle. The woman who'd taken their call watched them, Cornucopia's rays striking breathtaking highlights from her, her lips playing between smile and not-smile.

  Floyt waited for Alacrity's inevitable response: hardwired glans-penis override to frontal lobes. But when she swayed over to meet them as they emerged, Alacrity slid out straightfaced, reserved, waiting for Floyt to come after. She smelled the way Paradise was supposed to.

  Either he's really worrying about Heart, Floyt concluded, or this meeting with Perlez is serious business indeed. Or else he's ill. Maybe all three.

  She gave them an engaging smile and didn't look offended when only Floyt returned it. Alacrity was staring at Perlez's vaulted artwork of a manor house, thinking things that were impossible to guess.

  "Greetings and welcome, honored guests," the woman said. "I am Lord Marcus's special secretary, Tomasina. He's waiting for you in the kitchen, if you'd be kind enough to follow me."

  The cab rose and sped back for the city before the three had gone half the distance to a pair of ten-meter-high green squeezewood doors set with blue ivory scrollwork, the main entrance.

  The doors opened for Tomasina in silent, stately fashion. The wood was a half-meter thickness of facade; behind it was another meter or so of armor-grade alloy.

  The house was done in Omnimedia Arcade Polyglot, an oddly luminous and happy-go-lucky motif for such an enormous, polished cathedral of a place. Ends Well was quite cheery, not only because of the neon brightness of its decor, but also owing to the many windows and skylights and because all the woodwork was very light, blond or white. Some kind of stately music in three-quarter time was playing over the sound system; Floyt had a vague impression that it was a military polonaise from old Earth, but his knowledge of the subject was shakey. But the music's in keeping with the rest, he told himself, looking around. What we have here is a summer palace.