by Brian Daley
"We didn't expect to meet you!" Alacrity protested. "We came looking for the real Hecate! You gonna have us killed for a thing like that?"
"I may have to." But her hands hung at her sides. Alacrity and Floyt relaxed minutely. There was a knock at the door.
"Well?" she yelled.
Another of Cerberus's heads poked into the room. "Crowd's gone and we're closing down the house, Hecate. The landau's ready, but some o' those lover folks are still hanging around the back exit."
She thought for a moment. "I have business to talk over with these two. Wait about ten minutes, then drive around to the front. I'll let us out the main entrance and meet you there."
When he showed hesitation, she stamped her heel. "I said get going!" He got.
The woman who claimed to be Hecate was hooking a travel pouch on her gunbelt and swirling an expensive spectralux evening shawl around her shoulders. She fastened a proteus, a pricey bracelet thick with lava pearls and ardors, around her wrist over her long bodysuit sleeve.
"All right, what's this about? When you said Ship you were talking about the White Ship, right?"
Floyt looked to Alacrity for a cue. Alacrity thought it over. "We were gonna lock down a deal with the real Hecate; mutual profit, and all of that."
She was looking at him thoughtfully. "Well now, maybe we can still do a little business here. After all, I am Hecate, hmm?"
But he was shaking his head. "This kind of con will get over on a bilge-class world like Lebensraum, but fooling the people I have in mind would be just about impossible. They'd run a full I.D. scan on you, and you'd need access codes and computer passwords. The only thing you'd get us is shot straight into the Null Set. Sorry."
"Don't be so hasty!" She pounced at him. "Give me a second to think about it, here, mystery man!"
"Perhaps you could tell us what happened to the real Hecate?" Floyt suggested delicately, to head off what would most probably have been a snide rejoinder from Alacrity.
She shrugged again, the layered flaps over her shoulders rising. "Take your pick of the rumors. Most have her dying, or heading offworld never to come back. Some say she never returned from her last expedition into the wilds. She was supposed to be pretty dough-brained by that time anyway. My guess is that the marrowbugs and drillworms recycled the last of her a long time ago."
"Any heirs?" Alacrity asked.
"None that I ever heard of. Except that I cashed in on her name."
"And you appear to have done quite well," Floyt commented.
She put on a half-pleased, half-ironic smile. "It's not easy. But I grew up on a saroo ranch, and I put in a stint with the First Mounted Rifles on Mephisto. Oh, I've been here and there. I taught dancing and survival skills and I picked up quite a bit of cash modeling. It all seemed to come together in the Wickiup."
They followed her out and waited as she locked her dressing room, then fell in three abreast—with Alacrity taking the center, naturally.
"What happened was," she resumed, "I was a little too smart for my own good, or a little too choosy. I thought I had myself a free ride with a high-roller who had his own starship. But when we got here, out at a company executives' retreat, he told me my end of the bargain. Gentlemen, I'm all for a good time, but there are some games this dame doesn't play. So he stranded me. No money, no way home, no documents.
"But I did meet the house surgeon. He was a sharp old duffer, a Hecate buff from when he was a kid, and he had a plan. I was a pretty close match as it was, and he tailored the rest to fit."
"So you just pretended to wander in from the wilderness?" Floyt asked. "And they bought it?"
She paused as they came to the entrance to the arena. "Doc pulled a few strings and got some company records altered so I scanned out as Hecate. And what the hell, people loved the show, even when we started out small. You can see how things've been going."
She gestured around proudly at the Wicked Wickiup, then saddened. "Only the good life was a bit too much for old Doc. The pile he made by being my silent partner was enough for him to whoop it up all the way to the mortuary." She thought for a moment. "I'll say this for him, though: he went out laughing."
"Well, good," Alacrity said, "but all that doesn't help us very much."
"Wait, now," she said. "Don't rush me; I'm thinking. It's time I got off Lebensraum anyway."
That brought Alacrity up short. "Yeah? Why? And why'd you think we were someone the company sent around to give you problems?"
She gave him a guileless look. "Because men tell me things."
"Oh?" Floyt asked, uncomprehending. She put her hands on her sleek hips, arching her back, holding her head just so, the shawl falling open. The effect was devastating.
"Oh … " Floyt said.
"Knowledge is power," she went on, "and there're a few things I know about the company that'll stand this place on its ear. And I can help you, if you get me off this rock. After all, I'm already Hecate as far as the company's records are concerned."
"There is possibly some angle there that we can exploit, Alacrity," Floyt ventured. Alacrity inclined his head slowly.
She clapped her hands. "We can leave tonight! I know a way I can get to your ship without the cops causing any problems. What d'you say, gents?"
They walked together across the shredded celluline of the empty ring. She was wide-eyed with excitement, practically panting. "I just have to get a few things from my townhouse."
"Nothing that's going to make your bone-breakers or anybody else suspicious," Alacrity cautioned.
"I know how it's done, big boy."
Floyt broke in to head off another exchange. "Ah, what shall we call you?"
She spun on him angrily. "Hecate! Get that through your head; that's who I am: Hecate."
A sudden sound rose, a banshee wail that grew and grew as they realized they weren't alone. Floyt glanced up to the source. In the box was the hooded figure he'd seen before, slowly rising to its feet, pointing down at them like Death itself as the wail got louder still.
"Whatinthehell," Alacrity muttered. And inside the Wicked Wickiup, a wind began to rise.
The hood fell back and for a second or two the trio below couldn't tell if the apparition was male or female. Yellow-white tangles of meters-long hair snapped and fluttered in the gale. Eyes like glowing coals beamed light down upon them. The robe blew back to show layers of crudely tanned skins and furs over tattered synthetics. A moldering gunbelt held a pair of rotting pistol scabbards to its sides.
Then it spoke—an old, cracked voice, incredibly loud and very high. A woman's. It was extremely angry.
"Hecate? You think it's that easy to steal my name? Slut! Puta?"
The young woman Floyt and Alacrity had come to know as Hecate moaned and made to back away. The vengeance demon wasn't having any of that, though, and gestured. Lightning bolts crashed overhead and a cyclonic wind blasted the celluline up around them. The gorgeous evening shawl was torn loose, to disappear into the swirling Jetstream like a crippled highsheen bat. The arena's equipment and rigging swung and clanged like bells. Floyt dimly heard roars from the menagerie.
"What do you know of Hecate? What do you know of the First Ones?" the old woman ranted. "Nothing! Nothing!"
The ground suddenly threw them from their feet. Impossible as it seemed, Alacrity knew, it wasn't seismic activity or a local nuke that was doing it.
"We've got to get outside!" Floyt hollered, but they couldn't even get to their feet. The air was hotter and thinner than it had been, difficult to breathe, charged with ozone.
Of all the rotten breaks we've had, it occurred to Alacrity in a split second, this takes first prize! Getting here just in time to be killed for something we even didn't do!
A tornado funnel of black wind and spitting starflare foamed around the real Hecate. "Do you have any idea how badly you've pissed me off! I heard you; I heard you all! And I heard you on the commo, playing the First Ones' tones!"
Floyt tried to get some words
out, wondering how and why the madwoman monitored the Lightning Whelk's ship-to-ground communications. But she wasn't giving them a chance to answer.
"I'll show you how far short you fall of Hecate, you miserable mortals! I'll show you all!"
She gestured. The dome overhead suddenly lofted away through the air as if were a paper hat lobbed up and out of sight. The cyclonic wind howled louder as arcs and serpents of crackling electrofire snaked and spat. Alacrity grabbed Floyt's shoulder and started a desperate low-crawl escape, but they were yanked up from the floor and sucked into the funnel. Space and gravity didn't feel like they were doing business as usual, and it seemed time might be engaged in a job action, too.
Alacrity heard the fake Hecate's cry and a yell from Floyt that was cut short. And above it all sounded hysterical shrieks and laughter from the woman who'd assumed the name of an ancient night goddess and ruler of the Underworld.
Chapter 8
Wish We Were There
"Wake up! Hey, whatever your name is, snap out of it!"
Alacrity didn't want to. He had the vague feeling it would be a bad move. But somebody was slapping his face. "Wake up, both of you! That crazy woman will be back any second; we've got to do something!"
The fake Hecate shook Alacrity again and he felt the first stirrings of a monster headache. As he was trying to open his eyes, he heard Floyt moan nearby, stirring. " 'As the world comes back into focus … ' "
"Before I go to the trouble, Ho: is it worth it?"
"Mff! Why … yes, I think you'll find this amusing." Alacrity rolled over onto his stomach to lever himself up. He was lying on a cold flat surface that felt like it was spinning under him and he tried to clutch at it.
The place was enormous. The ceiling was lost in a void, but the smell made him suspect he was underground. It was an indefinable scent he'd first encountered in the subsurface Precursor site on Epiphany.
Floyt was rubbernecking from a sort of front-end pushup pose. They lay on a niellolike surface in an open space two hundred meters across or more. In all directions, rearing up in levels like a jungle, was what Floyt recognized after an addled moment as an intricate, artificial construct of some kind, nothing organic, though that was what its form suggested. The components weren't pipes, wiring, or anything else so obvious and there was a certain flow to everything, like a water sculpture. Some of it suggested shapes Floyt had seen in the causality harp.
"Alacrity, it feels like—back on Epiphany. Are we in another Precursor site?"
"What else?" Aside from the place itself, there was the matter of the real Hecate's astounding powers. What she'd done, especially with no visible equipment, was impossible to any human technology Alacrity knew of. The impact of that brought him around fully. What it meant to his campaign to win—win back, as he thought of it—the White Ship was almost as strong a stimulus as his survival mechanism, which had sweat standing out all over him.
He rolled over to the impostor, who knelt next to him, making a grab for her as she yelped, "Chikusho!" Before she could counter, he snagged one of her handguns. It was merely a lousy flashlight, a low-intensity beamer good only for producing pretty light effects and triggering holotarget detonations. No wonder the Lebensraum cops let her use them.
"Where'd she go?" Alacrity snapped. "How long's Hecate been gone? Did you spot a way out of here?" The Epiphany site had had a wide adit allowing easy access. There didn't seem to be one close to hand at the moment though.
Floyt was sitting up, rubbing his temples and eyes. For the first time he noticed that Alacrity's brolly and the impostor's evening shawl were lying nearby, though there was none of the debris and wreckage the real Hecate had kicked up back in the arena. That suggested an astonishing degree of fine control.
The impostor shook her head, brushing black hair back off her forehead so that the moonpure flashed blue-white. "I only came around a minute ago myself. I heard her off laughing, somewhere in the dark. Over that way, I think. She was moving away from us, by the sound."
Floyt glanced around, saying "Maybe it's best we exit in the opposite direction, eh?"
"Napoleon couldn't have said it any better, Ho. C'mon, angel; we'd better—"
That was all he'd got out of his mouth when Hecate came screeching down at them out of the darkness like a harpy, wild hair fluttering, lit as if by St. Elmo's fire, shedding green flame and comet bursts.
They ducked and Alacrity almost fired at her with the useless target pistol, but thought better of it. As she swooped on them the place grew bright, light coming from the terraced systemry jungle. Hecate pulled up short, barely missing the impostor's head, then soared away again. The smell of her was ozone, unwashed body, and rancid, rotting clothes.
She banked and came rocketing down again, to decelerate and alight without a jar, strobing with power and throwing off multicolored streamers of energy, her aura seething and rotating. The younger woman backed away from her with a desperate look on her face and hands raised for defense. Against his better judgment, Alacrity found himself moving to intervene. He wanted very much to avoid violence. He wanted even more to wrest from Hecate, by whatever means it took, the Precursor secrets the deranged hag had discovered.
"You! Lying cow! What's your real name?" Hecate's voice made the place resound. She set her claws on the butts of her corroded pistols.
The impostor swallowed loudly before she could get out an answer. "Paloma. Paloma Sudan. I haven't done anything to you! Let us go!"
"Not done anything? Only stolen my name! Only traded on my reputation! Only shamed me, you ugly little pendeja!"
Hecate advanced on Paloma Sudan, her long, cracked claws raised. Alacrity automatically took a step to restrain her, but Hecate's aura touched his fingertips and it felt tike every joint in his body was being tractored apart, the flesh sliced from him by flensing beams.
Hecate seized his shipsuit and tossed him aside. Alacrity flew like a sack of clothes, losing the pistol, to bounce across the black floor, nearly out again, seeing motes of light whirl before his eyes. Oo-oo! Lookit all the pretty neuron firings!
Floyt began easing toward the umbrella; bare hands plainly weren't much good.
Paloma tried to dodge but Hecate's responses were down in the single-digit millisecond range. She instantly grabbed a handful of Paloma's hair and let the aura die away. She was oblivious to Paloma Sudan's hysterical kicks and punches.
Winding the handful of hair tightly, Hecate forced Paloma to her knees. Then she threw her free hand up in a grand gesture. The cascading systemry flowed with brilliance and gave off rich, strange tones stopping Floyt in his tracks as he planned his attack. Parts of the instrumentality appeared to be moving.
Alacrity paused in trying to regain his feet, transfixed. No one anywhere had ever done anything to compare with what he was witnessing. Mad Hecate had made a major, probably pivotal breakthrough in penetrating the secrets of the Precursors—the First Ones, as she called them.
"This is Hecate's power!" she trumpeted, coal-eyes blazing. "Take a good look at it, dearie, because in a moment I'm going to cram you into a tiny pocket of limbo and leave you there forever!"
She pointed a finger. A green globe appeared, pulsing like a Cepheid, going from one meter in diameter down to the size of a handball and back up again every few seconds.
And Ho and me are here as witnesses, or will it be cellmates? Alacrity wondered. The hair stood up all along the deep V-mane that grew down his spine, and the blood drained from his face at the thought of being wadded up in some miniverse until the end of time.
Floyt's thoughts were running along the same lines, and he was also concerned for Paloma's life. So he discovered his mouth was shouting a very unwise thing:
"Why should we believe you? This doesn't prove you're the real Hecate!"
The laser eyes swung to him, and he discovered that his knees were knocking. He realized that he had the brolly raised, and brought it down to lean on it.
"So, you don't believe I'
m Hecate, you little germ? Well, I've got a simple remedy for that! In you all go together. The more the squirmier! You'll have eternity to figure out how badly you just fucked up!"
The green globe began to expand, large enough to take three bodies inboard at its maximum, shrinking back to a toy with the same regularity. Winds came up in the far corners of the chamber. The sphere drifted closer to Floyt. Alacrity got set to give Hecate his last, best shot.
But Floyt got a grip on himself and spoke first. "Th-there's a much simpler way, if you are Hecate." The storm died a little; Hecate's eyes narrowed suspiciously, sending out flat, fiery swaths of light.
"The true Hecate owns shares in the White Ship, from long ago when she still went under the name Loebelia Curry. Loebelia Curry, yes, that was her name. Hecate would recall that."
Alacrity held his breath and Paloma froze. The old woman's lips were shaping the name Loebelia Curry over and over, eyes unfocused, releasing orange radiance into the distance, thoughts flung back far through space and time.
Apparently befuddled, she abruptly looked back to Floyt. He followed up on his sally desperately. "You owned voting shares in the Board of Interested Parties, do you recollect that? But you haven't exercised your franchise in a very long time. Er, perhaps you remember the ownership code numbers? And the access passwords?" He activated the pickup for his proteus's sound-recording mode. Alacrity silently did the same, sucking in breath through clenched teeth.
But instead of blurting the codes, Hecate roughly pushed Paloma aside, set her fists on her hips, threw her head back, and shook with high-pitched laughter. It was a partial transformation; there was less demented cackle to it.
Hecate laughed until she was out of breath, until she clutched her middle, slapping her thigh. The captives held their poses. The old woman waved at Floyt, as if telling him to stop. At last she ran down, trying to straighten.
"Hoo! I'd forgotten how it feels, this body, when it laughs." Then she was off in another paroxysm as the others swapped uncertain glances. "That ship, that … White Ship!" Hecate managed after a while. "Are those fools still working on her? I'd forgotten all about her. Oh, that's the funniest thing I've heard in a star's age!" The beams from her eyes danced.
