by Carl Sargent
"Then again, having come so far, what are four miles?" he said in a voice far more cheerful than he felt.
The spirit followed him. It knew better than Niall how the delayed shock would affect the elf, who would need everything Mathanas could give in the form of concealment until he was able to rise and use the power he had gained. Mathanas loved Niall, feared for him, drew power of his own into that cloak around the cauldron. Within days they might yet be utterly destroyed.
"Frag off," Serrin growled sleepily, throwing a pillow at the door. If that fraggin' Englishman doesn't stop banging on the door, he thought angrily, I'm going to strangle him.
"Look, come on. The flight's in two hours. Be a good elf and get out of bed," the sniggering voice came from outside.
Serrin hadn't gotten much rest. Pumping music had kept him awake half the night, and clicking roaches most of the rest of it. Michael's idea about staying here might have been fine in theory. In practice it had turned out to be bad news. The clock said it was nine in the morning, his body told him it was still somewhere around midnight. And somewhere in between those times, Serrin remembered, was the commonest hour of death from natural causes, when the body just gave up on the struggle. It felt like it, too.
He felt slightly nauseous as he dragged his legs out of the bed and sat up. He wasn't entirely sure why; he'd drunk little and eaten still less the night before, happy to sit and listen to Kristen offering scraps of her past history, almost incredulous that he could possibly be interested in it. And, in all honesty, it was a small life; a drunken father, early abandonment, drifting and scavenging. In terms of significant events, it wasn't a footnote on a page. But she described people in ways that made their faces come alive in his mind's eye and she seemed to lack even a shred of bitterness or malice. Even when dismissing someone with that back-of-the-throat hiss she had, it was to mark them as an individual to avoided for the sake of survival and never as an object of revenge or even a grudge.
There hadn't been as long to talk as he'd have liked; she had to get the passport which looked like a decent enough fake, though Serrin doubted it would pass muster back in UCAS and unbeknownst to him, get a crash course in the hazards of the bush.
Halfway through brushing his teeth in the sterilized water from the jug beside the sink, he relented and opened the door. As usual, Michael was immaculately groomed. For that too Serrin could have strangled him.
"Everything's arranged. I've booked one of those tourist packages, camping in the veldt, that kind of thing. It'll give us the chance to ask questions when we get there. I've hired vans along the way as well. If we ever need to make a run for it, we'll have transport arranged. Here's
your copy of the paperwork," he said, stuffing a wad of paper into one of Serrin's back pockets.
"Fangyur," Serrin said through the toothpaste. He rinsed out his mouth, avoiding the tap water as Michael had urged him to do, then picked up a towel and headed for the bathroom. Opening the door without checking for occupancy first, he suddenly found himself with his arms full of the mostly naked girl stamping her way out of it. Startled, he began to mutter some apologies just as Kristen arrived at the top of the stairs.
The girl flounced past him, leaving him looking mortified. Michael creased up with laughter behind him.
"I didn't know it was occupied," he pleaded.
"So was Norway in the last World War and it put up a bit more resistance than you did," Michael shot back and vanished into his room, leaving a clear corridor between Serrin and Kristen. She hissed down the stairs at the girl, then glowered at him. He took refuge in the bathroom and drew the latch against her.
What the hell is this? he wondered, wetting his face and working up the soap. I'm thirty-five years old and she's half that. It's not lustful, not on my part. Is it a big-brother thing? Why does it feel like I've always known her when I don't feel that way with most of the people I have known for a long time?
Why the frag did I just cut my face?
The morning passed in a whirl of preparation, packing up, checking all the papers twice, then spending the inevitable extra hour hanging around the airport for the delayed flight.
This certainly wasn't any suborbital. More like the pride of Federated Boeing's 777A fleet, circa 2020. All that was missing was an ad for International Scrap Recovery Inc. adorning its tail.
"Oh swell," Serrin said miserably. "Did you dig out any data on aircraft disasters out here?"
"Yes, but I didn't want to worry you. There's a much higher chance of being murdered for your wallet on the cross-country trains anyway," Michael said coolly. Not sure whether or not the Englishman was joking, Serrin picked up his hand luggage and ambled through the heat haze toward the van offering to convey them the last hundred yards to the waiting flying coffin. It seemed singularly pointless. He could have walked it in a minute, but instead had to sweat it out for twenty inside the superheated van interior waiting for the last of the puffing tourists to board.
Then they were walking toward the plane, Kristen gripping his arm as they reached the collapsible metal stairs up to the hatch. It suddenly hit him that she couldn't have ever flown before, and he led her by the hand to a window seat beside him. In front of them sat Michael and Tom. As the engines began to roar to life, Michael craned his head around the side of the seat.
"Oh, and we got the medical kit delivered," he said. "All the usual things and one or two specialties. We have Kristen to thank for that; her doc did us well. Didn't overcharge, either." He turned back to the front and she smiled happily. Kristen didn't have much idea of where she was going or what these people were seeking, but her new clothes felt just fine and she hadn't ever expected a chance to fly.
The plane jolted into movement and accelerated with agonizing slowness along the runway. Serrin wanted to close his eyes against the mounting panic, but he had to try to seem relaxed for Kristen's sake. Her fingers, stub-tipped with nails bitten almost to the quick, were dug deep into his arm. She was terrified.
With all the elegance of an expiring hippopotamus, the plane finally lifted off the ground with a groan, then rose steeply into the clear sky. Seatbelts unclicked all around and suddenly Michael turned around toward them again, his face a mask of fear.
"Look out! Terrorists!" he hissed. There was a sharp bang from just ahead, the sound of a gun going off. Serrin through his body over Kristen, looking wildly around for the gunman. Michael's face turned to an evil smile as he raised the neck of the bottle toward Serrin, a little wisp of gas still curling from it as the first foamy bubbles began to pour out over the sides of the neck. His other hand proffered paired champagne glasses.
"You bastard," Serrin growled at him. "I might have had a heart condition for all you knew."
Michael hesitated and gave the elf a long, knowing look before Serrin finally took the glasses, blushing a little, leaning forward so Kristen couldn't see his reaction. The Englishman filled them and sat back to sip his own.
"Are all Englishmen champagne addicts?" Serrin asked, trying to think of a suitably childish revenge.
"Obligatory, dear boy. It's one of life's little ironies that even though, as every decent Englishman knows, the French are the most dastardly and treacherous nation of bounders in the history of the world, we buy three times as much of their fizz as any other nation does. More than they do themselves these days, but that's because they're too lazy and indolent to be able to afford it," he replied cheerfully.
"You're a clone. Of Geraint," Serrin groaned.
"Not quite, term. Not quite. I don't have that romantic Celtic thing. At Cambridge, he made out and I made computers. Anyway, enough of that. Read the tourist brochure. Make sure you can identify all the poisonous critters."
By the time the descent to New Hlobane came, Serrin had assumed his familiar dozing-in-flight posture, with Kristen, light-headed from champagne she'd never before tasted, tucked against his shoulder. Michael craned around at them again and nudged Tom. Turning to see their peaceful face
s, Tom smiled. Michael looked thoughtful, even a little sad.
"I don't know how this is going to end up, Tom. I don't know what illusions she's got. He doesn't know himself well enough to figure her out," he said fretfully.
The troll looked at him uncertainly. He tended not to like this man who was so sure of himself, so quick with a smart answer to everything, so seemingly devoid of instinct. All of which Michael had sensed from the very beginning.
"Give me a break, Tom. Just because I don't wear my heart on my sleeve doesn't mean I haven't got eyes to see and ears to hear. I just do what I'm good at, and that's this," he said, tapping his temple with a finger.
That made the troll uncomfortable. Maybe that's me too, the troll thought, trying to be good at something and disliking someone because he's so much better at his craft than I am at mine. And if that's it, I'm being small.
"Sorry, chummer. I just take some time to get used to very different folks, that's all," the troll mumbled.
"I noticed. But sometimes I wish I could do some of the things you do," the Englishman said.
Tom was perplexed. "You're slottin' me."
"Well, on second thought, maybe not," Michael laughed. Tom realized that he'd never want to do what this man did for a living either, and began to laugh along with him.
17
It didn't take him long to check things out. Manhattan had plenty of private investigators only too happy to take nuyen for plowing through airline passenger lists, information that was only minimally protected in airlines' matrix systems anyway. Magellan found himself with four possibles for an elf, a human, and troll; flights to Nogoya, Moscow, Cape Town, and Aztlan. Cape Town stuck out like a sore thumb. It surprised him that they hadn't gone directly to New Hlobane until he remembered from Sutherland's profile that the man had spent time working in Cape Town. Magellan reasoned that Sutherland must have chosen that as a first stop, maybe to look up some old friends, perhaps to get some extra muscle for help when they got to the Zulu Nation. He slipped the encrypter card into his telecom and called Jenna, telling her he was going to shadow them. She said little, was probably in one of her more pensive moods, judging by her curt brevity. He made a reservation for Cape Town and amused himself with the thought that he could always report them to the authorities for traveling with forged IDs. Thompson, Randolph, and Swiftwater, indeed!
With a couple of hours to kill, he checked through his own fake cards and chose the best of them. He also carefully packed the platinum credsticks and a fistful of high-denomination bills into a hidden briefcase compartment. They'd be discovered by customs, of course, and he would go through the ritual of smiling and greasing the palms of the pleased Azanians who would pretend that there was something illegal about importing credit or notes. After checking once more to see that he'd packed everything he might need, he called for a cab and waited.
New Hlobane International wasn't what Serrin had expected. He had vague memories of Johannesburg as a grimy, depressingly Americanized city with atrocious poverty in its satellite towns and enough crime to make New Yorkers feel at home. But the Zulu airport, the drive to the city through suburbia, and the rising skyline of New Hlobane itself had a quite different air. Pietermaritz-burg, as it had been known before the Zulu people renamed it and made it their capital in the accords of 2039, even seemed to have chromed industrial plants ringing it. The country was rich, that much was clear; and if there were pockets of poverty, they were damn well hidden. The impression of elegance and style he'd gotten at the airport was strengthened by the sight of the spacious boulevards of the capital city.
"This is amazing," he muttered to Michael. "So much for stereotypes of underdeveloped nations."
"Second highest per capita income on the continent," Michael said matter-of-factly. "Tourism is a huge industry, because it's safe here. No bandits and poachers to shoot you out on safari. They've got coalfields the size of Nebraska to the north, and the King owns half of PWV into the bargain. They've invested their money well. You'll find a surprising number of Swiss banks with branches here, and not just in New Hlobane either."
"PWV?" Serrin couldn't remember what the acronym stood for.
"Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal. The big industrial plex. Pay attention! I thought you'd been here before. It's only the administrative and judicial capital of the Confederated Azanian Nations, after all. It's the one thing that holds them all together, the Cape Republic, Zulu Nation, Oranje-Vrystaat, the Trans-Swazi Federation. No one was prepared to give up the PWV to anyone else."
"Sorry," Serrin apologized vaguely. He was too busy taking in the lobby of the Imperial after the cab ride from the airport. "Is this just the tourist stuff?" He was impressed. The wall hangings, tapestries, and batik-like prints looked good enough to be worth a lot of nuyen.
"Mostly," Michael said. "Any animal skin is fake, of
course. The Zulu Nation is very tough on that one. Poaching carries an automatic death sentence. Being out in the wilds with an unlicensed weapon gets you a minimum twenty years. Death, if they reckon it's a hunting weapon. One of the little quirks around here is that it's less dangerous to have an assault cannon in the bush than to have a grotty little rifle, at least as far as the law is concerned. Heavy weaponry ruins the skins."
"What about rhinos? Aren't they hunted for their horns?" Serrin asked.
"Where've you been for the last thirty years? The only rhinos alive are in zoos, term," Michael replied. "Or on disk."
He ambled over to the reception desk. Kristen almost had to be dragged along with Serrin, having already received some distinctly hostile looks.
"Thank you so much," Michael enthused as he took the key cards for the rooms, "it's so good to be here. The coach is at ten o'clock tomorrow? Excellent. You're so efficient. Thank you again."
"Pass the sick bag," Serrin muttered as they headed for the elevators.
Michael gave him a sardonic smile. "We're tourists, remember? Behave like one. Divide your IQ by your boot size and just act unnatural."
"Kristen's a tourist?" Serrin asked. It didn't seem terribly plausible, somehow.
"Well, sort of," Michael said as the elevator doors swished open. "You haven't checked all the IDs, I see."
"What do you mean?" Serrin said suspiciously.
"She's a distant cousin, old boy. That's what her ID says. It was my idea," Michael replied smoothly.
"What?" The elf was flummoxed.
"It was the logical thing to do. What better reason for a Cape Town girl to be accompanying a bunch of foreigners. Anything else would look suspicious. I'm afraid one of my male relatives, some licentious old rake or other, must have enjoyed a brief dalliance in the Cape at some time and now I am overjoyed to have discovered my long-lost relative," Michael grinned.
"It's all right," Kristen assured the frowning elf. "He asked my permission to do it."
"Look on the bright side, old boy. If you weren't an elf I'd have had her down as your daughter," Michael sniggered. Avoiding the elf's swat at his head, he ducked out the elevator doors as they opened to deposit the little group on the fifteenth floor.
"I've got to go catch up on some research. See you later," Michael said as he set off along the carpeted corridor.
"I wanted to ask you something about that," Serrin called after him. "I wondered that is, Tom and I had a word I wondered if we, that is you, could identify the other people who might be possible targets. Those with the right genetic makeup."
Michael opened his mouth to begin a reply, and then sighed. "Sure, there must be people I haven't come up with yet. There's a good reason I can't do that now. If I tried to get into the medical databases of every country on the globe, someone would eventually sit up and take notice. So far, I've only checked those on Kristen's list and those from the countries with flights into JFK around the time of Serrin's departure. Which leaves about eighty-five percent of the planet unaccounted for.
"Someone is going to start hearing alarm bells if I set my frames to doing e
verything. And what if it turned out to be the person we're looking for? We don't want him to find us first." Michael sliced a finger across his throat, melodramatically but not without some impact. "Sorry, chummers. What feels right may not be the smartest thing to do." He didn't wait for a rejoinder, but slotted his key card into the door and vanished into his room.
"I guess he's got a point," Serrin sighed. The troll looked darkly at him and mumbled something inaudible before stomping off to his own quarters.
Kristen looked uncertain, not sure what to do with the little plastic card. Serrin showed her how to use it, realizing that staying in a hotel was another thing she'd never done before.
"It's automatic. Just slide the thing in. It has your identity and a code number on it," he said as the door
hummed back and the card popped back out of the slot. "Go ahead and enjoy yourself here. Drink the bar dry if you want to. You don't have to pay." Then he began limping down the hall to his own room. "See you for dinner. Just knock if you want anything."
Five minutes later, there was a soft tapping on the door. Serrin left the trid news service flickering on the screen and opened it to let the puzzled-looking girl in.
"Can I talk to you?" she said, parking herself on the huge bed in a way that said she wasn't taking no for an answer. Looking at her, he was struck by the fact that she was barefoot, her toes curled up, pink soles contrasting with the polished brown of the upper sides of her feet. It was an incongruous perception. But then Serrin always tended to see details when he wanted to avoid the big picture.
"I don't really understand what's going on," she said.
Serrin shrugged. "I wish I could say that I do," he told her. "I've been trying to figure out how a bungled kidnapping got me halfway round the world inside less than a week. All I wanted to do was some quiet research in a library somewhere and now all this."
"Why did you bring me with you? What use can I possibly be? I never expected to see you anyway. Why didn't you just up and leave without me?"
