by Brian Daley
"First of all, who could afford to stay here that long, Ho? Besides, I guess the management would get some new stuff in here if it came to that. Novelty, y'know; big selling point. What good's money if you're bored?"
After a time the column stopped at a higher level with a giant round door like an old-fashioned camera shutter before it, a genuine antique. They were in a vaulted rotunda with friezes, niched statuary, paintings, mosaics, and lightshapes, its ceiling open to the sky, and a marquetted floor that was a study in exotic woods. Here and there around the walls discreet illuminated symbols marked accessways to quick-transport systems for guests in a hurry.
Alacrity was opening his uniform collar and unbuckling the Sam Browne. The senior bellhop and his four assistants, in uniforms as elaborate as Alacrity's, stood by at attention. Them Alacrity tipped lavishly too, with just about all that he and Floyt had left. The bellhops were all smiles as they disappeared into a service chute.
Floyt stared glumly at the sad little sum they had left. "We may have to walk from here on in."
Alacrity brushed that aside as the shutter door unspiraled for them. "From here on in we don't pay for anything, Ho. We sign for it."
"What happens when the bill comes due?"
Alacrity halted, looking around. He wasn't sure the place was wired; the Isle also had a reputation for scrupulous discretion, and most wealthy guests' staff-members would routinely sweep and debug their accommodations. Still, it was wise to be careful. He tapped his proteus. "They know an Interested Party's always good for it, and I am."
Floyt understood then that Alacrity already considered Hecate's inactive shares to be his own. Alacrity went on, "Besides, they know we've got the Whelk, and a starship's sound security anywhere. And you can bet that crate's not moving a millimeter until we settle our tab."
They entered the foyer of their suite, the western half of the Imperial Domain tower's top seven floors, as Alacrity slung his gunbelt over his shoulder. "And what's more, our luggage is here."
The windows were ten meters high, a whole wall of them showing glorious Spica and Nirvana's capital city, Avalon. The drawing room was just a short hike from there, considerably bigger and brighter, with an exactingly flawless formal garden overlooking the city. The whole place was done in sinister, unrelentingly expensive Vantasm-Robotique-Noir. A lot of the furniture was built to heroic scale: chairs big enough for two; beds of triple length and quadruple width.
They explored, and found the place easy to get lost in, especially up by the sybaritorium and down in the servants' quarters. The main kitchen, pantries, various bars, and room larders were stocked to capacity. There were no guides or directories, since there was supposed to be a full-time staff of five. Alacrity had insisted that they be absented from the suite, more of his natural wariness. The concierge made it clear that the rate was the same regardless, but that full-time personal assistance was available by hotline, round the clock, to do, explain, obtain, or assist in anything.
Their clothes and other luggage had been unpacked and stowed. Floyt found that funny. The closetsful of offworld garments, many of them only generally Floyt and Alacrity's size; the safelike security modules and lockboxes loaded with paperweights and gravel; esoteric alien artifacts—all those had been bought only that afternoon in pawnshops, thrift exchanges, and recycling operations along Rocket Row, outside the starport.
"The sight of a mountain of luggage gives your hotel people a nice, secure feeling," Alacrity had explained during the shopping spree.
"What's next?" Floyt asked, loosening his snowy bowtie and undoing his top shirtstud, the wing collar flapping open. "Do we take care of—you know … "
"First item. I've got a few calls to make. Maybe you could find out why the White Ship board's so jumpy."
Floyt began accessing and orchestrating in the main information studio while Alacrity disappeared to find another commo terminal. By the time Alacrity got back twenty minutes later, his jacket open, Floyt had not only reviewed and winnowed down a large body of information about items of interest but had also located the studio's autobar and had it mix him a meltdown. Alacrity requisitioned a double and joined him.
"There's absolutely no word on what that Heavyset's doing here," Floyt updated him. "But people are worried because nothing like this has ever happened before. Heart and Dincrist haven't arrived yet, though there are still references to a falling-out between them.
"And there's something else. It appears a person by the name of Reno Magusson has died, a major shareholder—"
"The major shareholder," Alacrity said flatly. "He didn't like Dincrist, but I think his heirs do. Bagaya-ro!" He took a long pull on his drink.
But Floyt was shaking his head angrily. "Will you listen, for once? Magusson was sick for a long time, some neurological thing they couldn't pin down."
"Ah, the old sod lived twice as long as he should've anyway," Alacrity said, then made a hasty placating gesture to Floyt. "Sorry! What else?"
"He didn't leave his White Ship stock to his family or any of those, that's what. There was a therapist-holician with an experimental treatment, and she'd kept him alive for almost a year through constant work. All the shares went to her."
A face appeared on a screen, a brown-skinned woman who appeared to be past middle age but still struck Alacrity as strong and canny, even a little fierce, with peppermint-striped hair cut short. It looked like a shot out of a professional journal or 'cast; she wore a pearly clinician's tunic with doctor's insignia and red-starburst medical patches.
"You're looking at Dr. Sibyl Higgins, specialist in pansystemic therapy, behavioral allopathy, and neurological wholism healing."
"Doesn't sound very specialized to me, Ho."
"I confess not to understand what it means either," Floyt replied. "But Magusson's revised will was held valid and impervious, so it appears that Dr. Higgins is the new power to reckon with. I'm pulling all relevant data now—"
He was interrupted by an autosignal, the suite's private landing stage being requested for clearance. Alacrity gave it. "C'mon; we can go through that stuff later. I've got somebody you're gonna like knowing."
The main landing stage was just outside the drawing room. It was chilly and the wind snapped and tangled their hair. Floyt would've described the man who emerged from the robocab as unhealthily vibrant. His movements were quick but jittery, skin pale and papery although his cheeks were ruddy. His eyes were animated but glassy.
The cargo compartment of the cab was loaded with equipment cannisters and automachinery, and the new arrival carried a shoulder bag. "Still burning that candle bright, huh, Doc?" Alacrity asked him, offering his hand.
The man didn't take offense; the hand that grasped Alacrity's was thin and white, glittery with rings and bracelets. "They're executing you at dawn? I can't think of another reason you'd be getting this treatment, Alacrity."
"I won an election bet. Oh, and this is Hobart Floyt. Good man."
The doctor eyed Floyt. "That's not what the erstwhile Prosecutor-General said when they flash-fried him for being a Camarilla member. Nice to meet you, Citizen Floyt."
His hand was moist and very warm, its tremble broadcasting misgivings directly into Floyt's brain. Alacrity grinned. "Ho, say hello to Nils Van Straaten, the only MD I know who gives refunds. Providing you're well enough to sign a receipt. Nils, can we give you a hand with your ballast there?"
Van Straaten took a deep breath of something from an inhaler. The twitching lessened at once. "To be sure; I also brought that, ah, special gear we discussed. Where shall we work?"
"Um, what about the drawing room, there?"
"No objections. Shall we spread a dropcloth or do you think bloodstains will come out of the carpet?"
The three men muscled the cargo inside. Under Van Straaten's direction, they set up medical apparatus all around the drawing room, but no dropcloths. The cab was ordered to wait, a command it was programmed to accept on a Sceptered Isle landing stage. The good do
ctor had also fetched along a variety of debugging modules and seekers. The seekers cruised off through the air like so many levitating spider crabs while Alacrity and Floyt and Van Straaten plugged scan modules into all the suite systemry.
The place read clean; the trio got down to cases. Van Straaten scanned the two friends with a selection of detectors and analyzers. "Nasty." He clucked.
"We already know," Alacrity replied tightly. "Can you find 'em and can you get 'em out?"
The doctor looked surprised. "But of course. And I don't even have to dissect you to do it. All I meant was, whoever implanted those actijots in you two was devilish." He was pulling long, baggy white skinfilm gloves up past his elbows, like opera gloves.
Van Straaten looked from one to the other. "Who's first in the barrel?"
"Her name was Constance, and she was sicker than most people I ever saw running around loose," Alacrity said. "And I'm first. Jacket and shirt off?"
Van Straaten had activated the gloves' microfields. They tightened up, lumpy over his sleeves but like a coat of spraypaint on his hands, his jewelry sharply outlined. "Take it all off if you care to, but it's the pants that have to go. This Constance really had it in for you, eh?"
"Nothin' I ever did," Alacrity grumbled, dropping his trousers. Van Straaten, running a sterilizer over his gloves, laughed.
On their way to Blackguard, a kind of perverse sporting preserve owned by certain Third Breath notables, Floyt and Alacrity had, while unconscious, been furnished with the tiny internal actijots that let them be traced, punished, and controlled with all-embracing pain, and that would have executed them if things had gone a little differently.
The companions-in-mishap had no idea where their jots were located. Every muscle spasm, nerve twitch, and itch was a possibility, inviting the crudest kind of surgery. There were horror stories about people lopping off a foot or tongue or whatever, hoping to escape, only to find out they'd guessed wrong.
Dincrist, Heart's father and sworn enemy of Alacrity and Floyt, was one of Blackguard's rulers. Possibly other White Ship shareholders were as well. It would only take the brush of a jot control unit's beam to kill them both or, probably worse, make them slaves again. The jots had to go before they could come to grips with the White Ship meeting.
The doctor picked up a thing like an ultratech puppeteer's handset, instrumented and fitted with complex controls. Radiant, infinitely fine wires issued from it, curling and corkscrewing and straightening again as though alive. Alacrity held still while Van Straaten beamed a desensitizer on the subject area.
Floyt decided he didn't want to watch and sat over at the bar, prescribing himself another meltdown. Van Straaten donned an involved goggle-headgear affair and jacked its leads into the handset, concentrating on his work.
"What d'you know about this Sibyl Higgins, Nils?" Alacrity asked, to pass the time.
"Stop talking or I'll knock you out and lock you in clamps," Van Straaten said distractedly. A moment later he added, "A tough old bird, Higgins. Director of the Nirvana Med Institute and became incensed over some new policies, so she quit and went back into private practice. And made that Magusson connection, of course."
Van Straaten straightened, pushed the visor up, and switched off his handset. "She spent ten years as night-shift supervisor in the penal system behavioral allopathy clinic, that's how tough Higgins is, kiddo! All right, Hobart; we're ready for you now."
As Alacrity hoisted his dashing trousers back up again, Floyt put down his drink and steeled himself, putting a hand to his second shirt stud, his open collar wings bobbing. His forehead glistened. "Where—ahem; what shall I, ah, remove?"
"Mmm? Oh, nothing, nothing. Keep your clothes on and just come sit down over here in front of me and don't jump around, that's all."
In another moment Van Straaten had fitted an intricate servomounted mask device over Floyt's head, making it fast. Floyt sat, seeing nothing, hearing perfectly, experiencing no pain but knowing tiny fibers were probing and worming within his eyes.
"So what's the penal alleotropic whatchamacalut?" Alacrity demanded.
Van Straaten's voice had that distracted sound again. "The behavioral allopathy clinic? Let's just say the cases nobody else can handle end up there. And if an aide or restraining mechanism is even a millimeter too far away, they're sufficiently far away to get you killed. So all clinicians take continuing martial arts training from the Strike Recondo masters and get combat enhancements. The works. I was consulting there one time and I saw this tiny ward nurse who probably bought her clothes in the kids' department fold up a brain-scrolled berserker like she was just pushing buttons. Dispassionate precision and, oh my, was she ever fast! And your Dr. Higgins, well, she was—"
"—shift supervisor, nights, ten years," Alacrity anticipated. "But I mean, what about her? Herself?"
The mask pulled away and Floyt was silently elated that his eyes worked again. Van Straaten scanned him, then patted his knee. "You're clean, sir."
He turned to Alacrity, accepting a frosted martini glass. "I don't have a clue, really, about Higgin's setup. Bit of a martinet, I seem to recall." He pulled out a different inhaler and took a wheeze off it. His eyes grew brighter.
"Um, Doctor, might I have that jot as a souvenir?" Floyt asked.
Van Straaten's grin was very wide as his thumb caressed the inhaler. "I could sift it out from the disposal unit for you, I suppose, but—where would you keep it? You could lose it in a pore, dammit, Mr. Floyt."
"Ah. Anyway, thank you; you know how much you've done for us."
Alacrity was at the nearest transactions terminal as Floyt and Van Straaten shook hands. "Business for a second, here. What d'we owe you, Nils?"
Van Straaten, putting his equipment away, stopped to look at him. He said very slowly, almost unwillingly, "I would say that I am still in your debt, Alacrity."
Alacrity's mouth curved down, bracketing. "Or my father's, huh? Look, it's all on the tab, Nils, but the hotel will pay you up front and give itself a healthy service fee. Besides, I'm an Interested Party in the White Ship."
Van Straaten rubbed his hands together, going for the terminal. "Well, in that case … "
A few minutes later they'd shaken hands all around, Van Straaten admitting, "I don't even know what to caution you about, Alacrity; Hobart. But do be cautious. And I'll tell you one other thing I heard about La Higgins: Precursor sects, White Ship Company, crime aparatchiks—she's got her reasons to hate them all, and she does. That Reno Magusson, he must've had some sense of humor!"
Just like Weir, when he named me in his will, it occurred to Floyt.
"And there's that Heavyset starship and the whole Dincrist/Heart square-off," Van Straaten was saying. "Don't forget what I'm telling you, boys: the fangs are showing, and you're not a very big bite, I think."
Then the cab was lifting away over Avalon, which was coming alive with light as dusk came on. "More news updates?" Floyt proposed.
"Let's take a break and let the programs rummage around some more. What d'you say we abolish pain out in that big formal garden?"
They each got another meltdown and wandered out across the obsessively faultless garden, which ran down a gentle slope to a picturesque pond. A bare, pristine-white flagpole stood there, flying Earth's globe-and-olivebranch in Floyt's honor, though he had no idea how the hotel had found one and gotten it up there on such short notice.
The sward was blue-green, softer than fleece; Floyt couldn't name any of the flowers, shrubbery, or trees. Spica's glow still brightened half the horizon, and Avalon looked like a photon refinery, some huge petrochemical plant pumping out splendor.
They paced along beside an intricately detailed wall topped by big, jagged sawteeth. "When there are enough shares represented, the meeting will be convened, Alacrity?"
"Yes." Alacrity looked up to where several of Nirvana's sister planets had already appeared. "And then we get ferried up to the Ship, and if we live through that, things really start to boil. Th
is Sibyl Higgins—I just don't know how she's gonna change the equation, here."
"It would seem to me, Alacrity, that anything that changes the status quo could very plausibly work in your favor." My god! If he proves the causality harp wrong there'll be no living with him! But no; I'd welcome that kind of exasperation.
"True enough, Ho. Now, I figure that if we stay alive long enough to get there and start intriguing without any more surprises—"
A sound—a full, contralto bellow, actually—had been rising in the background. "Tim-ber-rrr!" Something heavy and metallic bonged down on the wall right by the spot where they stood, with a death-toll sound like the universe's time was up, breaking off the top of one of the sawteeth, knocking fragments and dust every which way.
Chapter 16
Put 'Er In The Longboat Till She's Sober
Alacrity was hugging the turf, the xanthous eyes wide. Floyt, aside from shielding his face, had stood his ground.
"Goddammit, Ho, geddown!"
"Why? Are assault troops generally in the custom of crying 'Timber!' when attacking, in your experience? Or, for that matter, 'Yoo-hoo!'?"
Alacrity grudgingly shook his head no, but "Yoo-hoo!" was undeniably what that same rich, sultry, high-decibel contralto was calling out.
"You win; you're right." Alacrity stopped trying to recall where the Captain's Sidearm was and scrambled to his feet. The thing that had crashed down on the wall sawteeth was a thin, snow-white cylinder that looked troublingly familiar until Floyt placed it: a flagpole just like the one in their own garden, only its red, white, and blue flag displayed a coiled-rattlesnake emblem. The voice sounded louder, lilting and huskily coy.
"Yoo-hoo! Neighbuhs! Ay!" There was a piercing fingers-in-lips whistle.
Floyt looked at Alacrity and Alacrity looked at Floyt; they both stepped over to a wall planter filled with lush blossoms, climbed up into it, and waded across to peer over the wall. The flagpole ran from their rampart to that of the Imperial Domain's east wing, a matter of a mere ten meters at that point in the figure-eight floorplan.
