“Do you remember being nineteen?” Harcourt asked. The man’s accent was a little bit Cernee, a lot something else, something familiar, but Fergus couldn’t place it. “Trust me, if she hated you, everyone this side of the Halo would know it. As for Arum Gilger . . . I maintain a careful neutrality with him. You need to be aware of that. I also want to be sure to explicitly clarify that my neutrality is not out of any fondness for Gilger.” He stood and walked over to desk, took out some tubes of amber liquid, and handed one to Fergus. “Scotch. I’m assuming that’s to your taste?”
“When anything is,” he agreed.
“If I took on Gilger directly, the damage he’d do to me before I was done with him would be significant, and he’d head right here to the Wheels to do it. For my own safety and that of the Vahns, I leave Gilger alone, and he is mostly smart enough to recognize the value in staying away from me. That said”—Harcourt took a sip of his scotch—“Mother Vahn wasn’t just a neighbor but a good friend and a damned good advisor at times. Someone taking away Gilger’s spaceship would make me a happy man.”
Harcourt’s comm chimed, and he raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Ferguson,” he said, and he stepped out of the room.
Fergus sat in one of the armchairs and took a tentative sip from his bulb of scotch. That old familiar warm burn in his throat made him smile. If Harcourt’s scotch wasn’t the real thing, it was the closest thing he’d ever encountered outside of Earth’s system. He took another sip. In fact, it reminded him a lot of a particular Martian distiller—
Harcourt’s accent clicked. However long he’d been here at Cernee, it wasn’t enough to cover up his Ares roots. Fergus had spent more time in and out of the domed cities of Mars than anywhere else since leaving Earth. He wondered if they’d ever unknowingly crossed paths.
The door slid open, and Harcourt came back into the room, his face grim.
“What happened?” Fergus asked, rising out of his chair.
“Minnie Vahn took it upon herself to go to Blackcans for a few supplies while Mauda was sleeping. One of my crew went with her—Roale. She’s worked for me since she was barely a teenager. Someone caught them both just inside the platform airlock. Knife. No witnesses. It has the signature of Gilger’s man, Graf, all over it.”
“Shit,” Fergus said. Had he met Minnie? He didn’t know. “Why the hell is Gilger so intent on wiping out a bunch of lichen farmers? They can’t possibly be a threat.”
“It’s Graf who cares,” Harcourt said. “Cloning is an abomination to Faithers because clones cannot have souls. And they’re independent women on top of that. It gets under the skin of the Luceatans like a little sliver of glass in the sole of your foot, reminding you it exists every time you step outside your door. That Gilger has let it go this far means he’s not afraid of consequences, which is bad for all of us. I still can’t afford open war, Mr. Ferguson, but I’m interested in hearing your plan.”
“I have to explain a bit first,” Fergus said. “I have a device called a doorkey. It sends a coded signal into the ship’s security subsystem—”
“—and the ship returns a list of nonsense words,” Harcourt interrupted. “We’ve tried it.” At Fergus’s look, he shrugged. “You know my line of business, Mr. Ferguson, or you would not be here. I am not a pirate, and I don’t prey on the innocent, but I am a businessman in a field with unscrupulous competition and often unscrupulous customers. One does what one needs to do.”
Fergus took another sip of scotch. “The nonsense is a return handshake, another code.”
“An uncrackable one, at least for any of the computing power I’ve thrown at it, and that includes at least one class-three I had occasion to borrow.”
“I have everything I need to crack it up here.” Fergus tapped his forehead. “But I need to get the handshake first, and then I need a little time to work through it.”
“But you can’t get close enough to the ship,” Harcourt guessed.
“Yes. From my preliminary survey, Gilger has at least two dozen sentry bobs patrolling the outskirts of his territory.”
“Three dozen, plus fifty zero-heat-emission mines arrayed inside the sentries.”
Even if nothing else came of it, that information alone was worth the visit, Fergus thought. “I can’t infiltrate his crew for obvious reasons,” he said.
“You are one conspicuous bastard,” Harcourt agreed. “That’s not your natural color, is it?”
“Redhead, born true.”
“Huh. That puts us back to: you can’t get to the ship.”
“Right. So I plan to make Gilger bring the ship to me.”
“And this would be the plan Mari so enthusiastically described as ‘extraordinarily idiotic’?”
“It would,” Fergus said. “Gilger will be at the hearing on the cable accident—”
“He can’t bring the ship into Central,” Harcourt interrupted. “Even with one main line down, the closest he could get is Mezzanine Rock.”
Fergus smiled. “That’s as far as I need him to get.” He held up his databall. “Do you have a schematics display? Also, more scotch. Blódstormur—am I right?”
“You are. You’ve spend time on the Fourth World?”
“Off and on, yeah. Although I have enough stuff in spaceport lockers all over the planet that I probably qualify for residency. Or at least taxes, if they caught up with me.”
“Don’t get me started on that,” Harcourt said. “Mars Colonial Authority and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye on taxes. Or much else, for that matter.”
“As near as I can tell, the MCA exists solely for the purpose of being disagreed with.”
Harcourt nodded, and his shoulders relaxed. He held out a hand, and Fergus dropped the databall into it. “Let’s see this infamous plan, then.” Harcourt touched his comm. “Bale? Bring me the holo cart, if you please.”
* * *
—
Two hours later, Harcourt and Fergus were sprawled on the couch, empty scotch bulbs on the floor beside them. “You are a sad, stupid madman,” Harcourt was saying, tears of laughter streaming down his face. “The things we could have done if I’d had you with me back on the red sands! We’d have been unstoppable. Legends!”
“That’s why it’ll work,” Fergus said. “If we were going to lie, we’d pick something more believable, right?”
“Sir—” Bale interrupted from the doorway.
“What?” Harcourt asked, frowning.
“This list . . .” Bale held up a small handpad. “Is this a joke?”
“Yes,” Harcourt said.
“Oh.” Bale looked relieved, his eyes darting across the empty bulbs on the floor. “Okay . . .”
“I still need the items assembled and delivered to Mr. Ferguson’s place over in Bugrot within the next six hours, and I need it to go unnoticed.”
“What?! ‘Whatever workshop scraps we have that’ll fit in a box’? What the hell, sir?”
“It’s a secret,” Harcourt said. “Six hours, Bale.”
* * *
—
Fergus took a short detour on his way back to Bugrot, stopping at a comm kiosk in a hab named Catchcan to send a short but very expensive message to a black market identity broker in Lunar Three. He got to his rent-a-room only a few minutes ahead of Harcourt’s people. Four of them pounded on his door, and when he cautiously slid it open, they pushed him out of the way and shoved a cargo sled inside. “Being followed, three Goldies behind us,” the leader said. “Can’t stop for tea.” They were gone without a word before the sled had even bumped the far wall. He shut and locked the door quickly.
The Governor’s hearing on the cable “accident” was starting in a little over five hours. Fergus cracked the seals on the top case, pulled things out one by one, and set them carefully loose in the air around him.
The handful of working com
ponents had been assembled by Harcourt’s chief engineer, and Fergus was impressed by how quickly the man had put them together. He plucked the doorkey out of the air and carefully slid it into a fitting at the back of the largest component. It clicked in and left no gap. Perfect.
A small handpad at the bottom of the crate included notes from Harcourt’s engineer. Range up to half kilometer; farther out, target must be still.
If everything went right, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Fergus floated cross-legged in the center of his room and began piecing parts together. An hour later, a half-assembled machine floated in front of him. Powering it on, he checked the readings on the pad he’d tethered into the back and made a few more adjustments. Everything looked good. Either it would work or it wouldn’t, and there wasn’t much other testing he could do. And if Gilger didn’t play along . . .
Then I’ll have to come up with an even stupider plan, Fergus thought, and hoped it wouldn’t come down to that.
He emptied out the second crate, all items scrounged from the dead parts bin in the engineer’s workshop. The rest of this was strictly art and camouflage but no less important for it.
Some time later his door chimed. He opened it to find Mari outside. She floated in, a small wrapped parcel under one arm, and hung just inside the door as he pushed off back into the debris cloud that was his work area. She looked tired and angry.
“I’m really sorry about Minnie,” Fergus said.
“Roale was a friend too.” She took the package out from under her arm and gave it a gentle push in his direction. It floated across the room and bapped him gently in the chest. “That’s for you from Mr. Harcourt. He said to tell you that even though the parts are on him, he expects to be paid for the suit on general principle.”
“I already have an exosuit,” Fergus said. Two, if he counted the wedge-master he’d almost stuffed in the recycler when he’d gotten back to his room.
“Not that kind of suit,” she said. “He said you need to look the part if you’re going to sell this to Gilger and, even more importantly, the Governor.”
Fergus unwrapped the parcel just enough to check it—as if he knew anything about suits that weren’t deep space survival gear, which he absolutely did not—but even he could tell the suit had style.
“Well,” he said. “I might actually look respectable in that.” She opened her mouth to comment, then shook her head and closed it again.
Tucking the suit safely back in its wrapping, he returned to rummaging through the spare parts and junk. His hand closed on some sort of generic relay device sprouting cables like a robot Medusa. Snagging a mini touch-welder, he quickly attached the relay to the top of his machine, then trimmed the cables. Mari watched as he stuck a nut on the end of each and tacked them down in a semicircle so that they looked like they disappeared straight into the body of his machine.
Around the central cylinder amp enclosing the doorkey, he had mounted six large coherent-beam spotlights. They were in turn surrounded by dials and readouts that only monitored leaking signal activity between themselves. He turned the spotlights on and off again just to double-check they still worked after all his fiddling. From the front he couldn’t make out any of the individual lights in the overwhelming brilliance.
“You’re pretty good at the no-grav thing for a dirtsider,” Mari said.
“I left Earth when I was fifteen,” he said. “Been a lot of places since then, both in gravity wells and out.”
He turned the machine off again, purplish spots swimming in his vision from the light. “So, how does it look?” he asked.
“Like something cobbled together in a junkpile,” she said. “While drunk. In the pitch dark.”
“It’s supposed to look like a prototype.”
“Well, whatever. You’ve got a little more than an hour before Mr. Harcourt comes to collect you.”
“Wait, what? He’s coming? Personally?”
“He said it was to lend you credibility, but I think it’s more that he’s really, really mad. I wanted to see you try to pull this off, but now you’ve dragged Mr. Harcourt into your craziness, and I’m not happy about that. It’s a good thing you two idiots’ll have me to keep you from doing anything truly stupid.”
Fergus closed his eyes, trying to recalculate that unwanted complication into his plan. “Look,” he said. “There’s a good chance this won’t work or that Gilger will figure out what we’re up to, and then things could get dangerous. Will get dangerous. Harcourt can take care of himself, but you don’t need to be in this fight.”
“I want to be in it,” she said.
“And that’s an even better reason to keep you out of it,” he said.
“Why? Because you think I can’t take care of myself? I do just fine, and I don’t need some ugly dirtsider I’ve barely met thinking he has to protect me.”
“Maybe I’m trying to protect Harcourt, Mauda, and myself from someone’s reckless disregard for everyone else around her,” Fergus said. “It might surprise you to hear that I’ve known other people just as determined to go out with a bang as you are, and some of them took friends with them when they did. So while you’re trying to think up exactly which rude gesture that warrants, why don’t you get yourself back home before someone misses you? Like, leaving now.”
“You’re throwing me out?”
“Yes,” he said. “I need to take a shower and put that suit on, and if I’m going to carry off the whole confident entrepreneurial businessman act, I don’t need your snide mockery ringing in my ears the whole way to the hearing.”
Mari slid open the door and pushed herself out. Half a second later she stuck her head back around the doorframe. “You just do your part,” she said. “If you can. If you can’t, then I’ll do things my way, and to hell with you and Mr. Harcourt.”
Ah, Fergus thought. So I’m not the only one trying to keep the wayward Vahn in line.
Once she was gone and the door was locked behind her, he grabbed the parcel with the suit in it and pushed off for the room’s tiny closet and tinier pay-by-the-pint shower. There was a comb and a tiny vial labeled “NANOBLACK” tucked into the top.
When Harcourt arrived with Bale and two others, Fergus had already pulled on the business suit and was checking out his reflection in the mirror. He was so unaccustomed to anything other than his usual loose T-shirt and shorts that the strict, formal cut of the suit—tight across his shoulders, almost suffocating his legs in the latest Sfazili fashion—was almost enough to make him forget about how much his scalp and beard itched. Almost. He tossed the empty vial into the flash recycler with a bit more vigor than necessary.
“That’s a better color for you,” Harcourt said. “If only you weren’t so ungodly pale. Seriously, were some of your ancestors dead fish?”
Self-consciously he touched his beard, feeling the faint grit of the colorizer. “My own mother wouldn’t recognize me,” he said. Though that wasn’t anything new; his last few years at home, she’d steadfastly pretended he didn’t exist.
“Machine ready?” Harcourt asked.
Fergus pushed himself to one side of the doorframe, letting them see the fabulously ridiculous contraption floating inside the room. He had already unclipped the doorkey and dropped it into one of the suit jacket’s inside pockets; everything else he was willing to let out of his sight, but not that.
“You two,” Harcourt said, pointing at his men. “Get that out and under wraps, don’t let anyone see it, and don’t break it.”
“No problem, Boss.” One of the crew sailed forward and took hold of an edge, and her partner grabbed the other.
“I’ve got a small car waiting,” Harcourt said. “You ready to go?”
“As close as I can be,” Fergus said. He gave his machine one last look, both dubious and fond, as Harcourt’s people bundled a tarp around it, fastened the corners, and h
auled it out. He swung through the door behind them.
On his way past, Harcourt slapped him on the back. “Try not to worry,” he said. “Just don’t blow it, or Gilger—or the Governor—will kill us both. And one last thing: don’t underestimate the Governor. He’s been in charge of Cernee for longer than either of us has been alive, and that wouldn’t be true if he weren’t smarter than everyone who has ever tried to knock him down. And that’s been a lot of people over the years.”
“Oh,” Fergus said. “Is it too late to give back the suit?”
Harcourt gave a short laugh and didn’t look back. “Just try not to die in it. It’d completely ruin the look.”
Chapter 7
Harcourt’s personal flyer was a four-man about the size of a small old-fashioned automobile, just different enough from standard shape to hint at modifications of the sort Fergus imagined would be useful to an arms dealer. Harcourt insisted on flying it himself. With Fergus wedged in the back, they took off from Bugrot and headed outward first, then “down” toward what Fergus arbitrarily thought of as the underside of Cernee. They slipped back into the Halo through a gap in the lines. There were other vehicles moving through the open channel, surrounded by a thick tangle of cables and ringed by single-dwelling spheres and tiny shops. “The Knots,” Harcourt said.
Halfway through the Knots, Harcourt brought the flyer to a stop and waited as another flyer covered in multicolored lights and bright streamers passed by ahead of them, several dozen smaller craft and flysticks with matching decorations behind it. A stiff flag on the lead flyer bore a symbol of three yellow dots inside an oval.
“Funeral procession,” Harcourt explained, his voice somber. “One last late tour around the Halo before the dearly departed departs us forever. That’s Rattletrap’s mark.”
In the seat beside him, Harcourt’s man Bale cleared his throat. “Seen a lot of those the last two days,” he said.
They reached a checkpoint about a third of the way in, slowing just long enough for some unhappy guy in a yellow-striped exosuit to eyeball their vehicle and wave them through.
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