More entertaining by far, the Fudir was able to use the play deck to hack into the ship’s navigational system, from which he learned that they would be a fortnight on the Newtonian crawl through the high coopers of Abyalon. Olafsdottr would not resume the pilot’s saddle for a while. What better time for taking the ship?
Of course, if he realized that, so did his adversary. She would be more alert than ever during the next week and a half.
And so, Donovan set himself to learn about the Rightful Owner. He had no guarantee that such an education would gain him an advantage, but there was a chance that the monoship had additional capabilities of which Olafsdottr was as yet unaware, some capability he could use against her. A weapons cache, perhaps. As far as he knew, Olafsdottr’s teaser was the only formal weapon on board.
Of informal weapons, there were of course a plenty.
Time was growing short. After Abyalon, came the Megranome crawl. And after Megranome, the Tightrope branched off and it would be too late to turn back. There was no exit off the Tightrope until it debouched onto Confederate space at Henrietta.
The evening after the Fudir had ferreted out the name of the Rightful Owner—Rigardo-ji Edelwasser of Dumthwaite, Friesing’s World—and the refreshingly honest name of his company—Bonded Smugglers, LLC—Donovan won the game of waiting.
“It does not grow, does it?” Olafsdottr said from her usual cautious post at the door between the refectory and the pilot’s saddle. She had of course eaten earlier, and stood by now while Donovan did the same.
The scarred man had programmed a meal of tikka and naan, and ate noisily and sloppily, using the naan as mittens to pick up the chicken pieces. He looked up at her. “What doesn’t?”
“Your hair. It never grows.”
Donovan scowled and ran his hand along the tufts that spotted his scalp. “Oh, yes missy,” he said in the Terran patois. “Names very budmash fella, but save him this-fella plantion haircuts.”
Olafsdottr nodded gravely. “I have heard this tell. You have soofered much.” She reached forward, almost as if to touch the scars in Donovan’s hair; but he pulled back, and she was not so foolish as to lean closer.
“Great harm,” she continued in doleful tones, “and I speak as one expert in great harm. You are not the only shadow agent to feel the nettles of their whims. It is a poor master who beats his dogs. Beat them too much and they will turn on him, as some of us now have. There is a struggle in the Lion’s Mouth.”
Donovan grunted and applied himself to his naan.
“Do you understand what I have said?” Olafsdottr said.
He looked up, his mouth dripping. “And what is Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?”
His captor seemed uncertain of the Terran reference. “Do you know the Lion’s Mouth? I have been told that your memory is . . . uncertain.”
“You mean ‘wiped.’ It’s your version of the Kennel where the Hounds train, except you breed rabid dogs.”
Olafsdottr crossed her hands over her breast. “You wound me, Donovan-san. Am I a mad dog? Well, perhaps so.” She spoke more intently. “Some of us are mad enough to challenge the Names. There is civil war among us.”
Donovan returned his attention to his meal. “Good luck then to the both of you. Let me know how it turns out.”
“We are bringing home all agents from the Periphery.”
“You’ve made a mistake then. We’re not an agent. We’ve been retired.”
“Ooh. Our retirement plan is very singular. There is oonly one way to retire.”
Donovan did not ask her what that one way was. “You forget that Those of Name discarded us.”
“Then when you join with us you may take your revenge for that, and sweet will be the taking, I think.”
“Very sweet, but I had it in mind to watch from the sidelines. Revenge is a dish best served cold—and by someone else.”
Olafsdottr shook her head. “No sidelines this fight. No boundaries, no rules.”
Donovan wiped up the last of his sauce and stuffed the naan in his mouth. He had gotten hints of this last year from Billy Chins. “How many of you are in it?” he asked around the bread.
“Almost half have lit the lamp.”
“Almost half . . .” He swallowed. “Oh, that’s encouraging. Half the Lion’s Mouth against a regime in power since the cows came home, with total control of the police and the . . . What of the ‘boots,’ the military? Where do they stand?”
Ravn cocked her head. “Some among them,” she allowed, “may know a civil war is broken out. But if so, they have not wagered sides. We conduct this war as we always have—with stealth, with intrigue, with assassination. There are no bloody battles; no planets bombarded. No great stupid mobs rushing about shooting at one another . . . and missing.”
“Not yet, anyway.” Donovan tossed his napkin into the fresher and took his dishes to the sink, where he scraped the remnants into the recycler. He turned abruptly and faced her. “Why me?” he said. “What good would I do the rebellion? I’m a broken old man.”
“Not so old as that; and broken pieces have the sharpest edges.”
A facile response, but Donovan thought it sounded rehearsed. That her people meant to use him in some manner, Donovan had no doubt; but in what manner, he was as yet unsure. Perhaps as no more than a knife thrown by one side at the other.
“You think on what I have told you, Donovan,” Olafsdottr said as she marched him back to his nominal prison cell. “You will see it is the right thing to do, and you and I will be famous comrades.”
That argument, more than any of the others, planted caution in the heart of Donovan buigh. For he had never heard an agent of Those of Name cite “the right thing to do” as an argument in favor of anything.
The next day, the Fudir broke Rigardo-ji’s security code and entered the smuggler’s files. These proved as dull as any collection of legitimate invoices, as the sundry planetary and state governments around the Periphery were notional in what goods they chose to blockade. During the Great Cleansing, the peoples of Terra had been scattered widely on the hither side of the Rift and unequally gifted as regards terraformation. Some worlds had in plenty what others lacked entire. Thus, it was worth a rich man’s purse to smuggle boxes of oatmeal cookies from Hawthorne Rose to Ramage, or tobacco sticks onto Gladiola. The lascivious art of Peacock Junction was forbidden on Jehovah, while ’Cockers read Jehovan tracts by flashlight under their blankets.
The smuggler’s most recent invoice was for the delivery to Foreganger Prime of a secret protocol entered into by Abyalon with the People of Foreganger. He had been returning to Abyalon with the chopped protocol—and a gift called “the Frog Prince” from the People to the Molnar of the Cinel Cynthia.
THE PEOPLE’S NAVY SWORE REVENGE ON THE PIRATES OF THE HADRAMOO, THE PEDANT REMEMBERED, AFTER THE HIJACKING AND MASSACRE OF THE TOUR LINER MERRY V STARINU, FOUR STANDARD YEARS AGO.
Perhaps the gift is a peace offering.
The Fudir was doubtful. “The People of Foreganger make peace on their own terms, usually after some notable vengeance.”
“One way or the other,” Donovan said, “Foreganger won’t be happy that their present was hijacked along with the courier’s ship. Pedant, where was the Starinu hijacked?”
OFF ABYALON.
How much you want to bet, said the Sleuth, that this “Frog Prince” is some sort of vengeance weapon that Abyalon hired from the People to use against the Cynthians?
“No bet,” said Donovan.
A bomb, do you think?
“Wonderful,” said the Fudir. “A bomb on board. We didn’t have near enough problems.”
If we can find where it’s stashed, the Brute suggested, we maybe can use it to knock off Olafsdottr and take the ship from her.
“If it’s a big enough bomb to take out the Molnar,” Donovan pointed out, “it’s too big to set off aboard a monoship. A take-over weapon has to be one that can kill or incapacitate the Ravn without killing or incapacitat
ing us.”
The scarred man swung abruptly away from the holostage, saw nothing, turned the other way.
More nothing. The ward room was empty.
Where did you see it, Child?
“Sleuth, you and Fudir check it out.”
The Fudir took control of the scarred man and went to the back wall, where the nautical instruments were mounted.
The wood paneling was genuine, and done up in a basket weave pattern of vertical and horizontal slats, so that the wall seemed some vast sort of wickerwork. The Fudir glanced toward the console’s swivel chair. If Inner Child had glimpsed something in this direction . . . The Sleuth did the geometry . . . it would have stood approximately—here. He ran his hands along the interstices.
You’re thinking a secret door, ain’t ya, Sleuthy.
It was a logical deduction, and logic was the Sleuth’s forte. A smuggler’s ship would be riddled with such things. The Fudir’s explorations had already found secret cabinets with jewels and stolen artwork intended for clandestine delivery in the Old Planets. Nothing to use as a weapon, except perhaps for the Peacock vase.
I just thought of something, said the Sleuth.
And you’re gonna tell us.
The road to the Hadramoo splits off here at Abyalon. What happens if we don’t deliver this “Frog Prince” thing to the Molnar?
Who cares?
No, I don’t mean what will the Molnar do. Or even what will the Abyalonic Council or the People of Foreganger do. I mean, what will the “Frog Prince” do?
The scarred man paused in his examination of the wall. If the Abyaloni and the People were deploying a vengeance weapon against the Cynthians, there might be a delicate matter of timing involved.
As in time bomb?
“Foreganger might,” Donovan replied, “without telling Abyalon.”
Wonderful. If the Frog Prince were a bomb set to detonate when it reached the Hadramoo and Olafsdottr took the ship to Megranome Road instead, the thing would detonate instead when they were on the Tightrope.
Who says it’s on a timer? asked Pollyanna. Or even that it’s a bomb?
If Silky had not heightened the scarred man’s senses with a cocktail of enzymes, he might not have felt the light puff of air that wafted from between two vertical slats. If Inner Child had not mentioned poison gas, he might not have flinched from it. The Sleuth explored the slats with his fingertips and identified the edge of a door; once he had the edge of it, the rest of the outline followed easily.
No obvious handle. The Fudir began to push and twist the various instruments fastened to the wall.
It’s probably not booby trapped, Pollyanna said.
The scarred man hesitated.
“Pollyanna!” said Donovan.
She’s right. What sort of fool booby traps his own ship?
Inner Child suggested.
Nah. He’d set locks, not bombs. The Brute twisted the chronometer, jiggled the barometer, pushed the binnacle. It was only when he turned the knob on the compass that they heard a click and the panel swung gently inward.
“You can come out now, Ravn, dear,” he cooed.
But no one stepped forth and, when Donovan entered he saw it was not a cache but a passage. The back wall was a blind. To the right a short connection joined a second passage that seemed to run lengthwise up the ship—probably the one behind the cabinets. To the left was a narrow corridor and it was from that direction that he heard the soft sound of a closing latch.
Inner Child edged around the blind, saw that the passage was empty, and crept gingerly through it. The Fudir made no sound with his footfalls; even his breath was still as death.
Was this an elaborate ambush? But Olafsdottr had no need of ambushes. She could have executed him at any time since bringing him aboard. She was keeping him alive because her side wanted to use him in their civil war. So what was this about? Just playing stealth games? There were more exercises than the merely physical, and boredom was a wondrous motivator.
The passageway made a dogleg and, passing through a second door, Donovan emerged into the cold well of the pantry, surrounded by cuts of harvested meats, vegetables, and juices in rows of low-entropy receptacles. The door he had come through had masqueraded as a rack of shelves.
Leaving the cold well, Donovan passed into the pantry. A wintermelon, an arm’s length long, sat on the carving board. Succumbing to impulse, he pulled a carving knife from the scabbard and holding the blade by the point, threw it from the far side of the pantry. The blade performed a satisfying somersault before sinking to its hilt into the melon.
By now, the motion sensors would have alerted Olafsdottr to activity in the pantry. But he had stayed out of the ambit of the room’s Eye. He re-entered the cold well and thence returned to the ward room.
“Well, that was entertaining,” the Fudir said when they had seated himself again at the play deck. “It seems our Ravn is a bit of a tease.”
“She’d be a fool if she hasn’t kept inventory; and the motion alarm will pique her curiosity. It may puzzle her to find them all accounted for. I can only hope it drives her mad wondering what else might be missing.”
He awoke the holostage and noticed immediately that the files he had been reading were gone. A few minutes of searching failed to relocate them. So. Not just closed, but gone.
That was encouraging. It likely meant that there was something about the ship he could use against Olafsdottr, and he had been close enough to finding it that she had pulled it from him.
The bad news was that he did not know what he had almost found.
On the other hand . . . The Fudir stared purse-lipped at the hidden door, now also closed. “A roundabout means to get me away from the consol,” he muttered. “She could have waltzed in, held her teaser to my head, and taken the files any time she pleased.”
And that meant . . .
Something does not add up.
At dinner that evening, while Donovan ate a concoction of soybeans and bilberries, Olafsdottr announced that they would enter the Abyalon-Megranome Road in four days. Abyalon’s network of Space Traffic Control lasers was already pushing the ship toward the Visser hoop that was its entrance ramp. In the final sprint, the ship’s onboard Alfven engines would engage and grab hold of the “strings of space” and vault the ship over the bar into the superluminal tube. That would be a bad time to bother the pilot. Were the ship to miss the hole, it would exceed Newton’s-c in flat space and go out in a Cherenkov blink.
The ancient god Shree Einstein had decreed that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. But he had also decreed that space had no objective existence. And so, since it was no thing, space itself could move faster than light. At this concession, his rival, Shree Maxwell, had loosed his demons, and created convection currents within the æther of Ricci tensors, his Dark Materials shaping the network of Krasnikov tubes known throughout the Periphery as “Electric Avenue.” So while a ship hurtling down such a tube was still constrained by the speed of light, within the curl local-c might be arbitrarily high.
Nor could Shree Einstein see how his commandments had been flouted. The tube walls formed a Visser Skin, laminas of progressively slower space called the subluminal mud, which decoupled the interior causally from normal space. In a sense, a ship in the tube network was no longer “in” the universe, but “underneath.”
All this had been understood in ages past, in the old Commonwealth of Suns; and being understood, had been well-engineered; and being well-engineered, understanding no longer matte
red. The formulas worked, and machines could be taught to work them. That was all a man need know.
On his return to the ward room, Donovan noticed that a steel bar had been welded to the outer door and, when turned on a pivot, would prevent the door from opening. Donovan raised an eyebrow to his captor.
“Simple means are ooften best,” she announced. “I have noot had a good night’s sleep since you awook.”
“If you don’t like my company, you can drop me off at the transit station in Abyalon’s coopers and I’ll catch the next liner back to Die Bold.”
Olafsdottr smiled. “You be a foony man, Doonoovan. I have said soo many times.” Then she ushered him in and closed the door behind him. Donovan heard the steel bar slide into place. A metric minute later, the door opened again and Olafsdottr stuck her head in. “Peekaboo,” she said. “Joost checking you stay poot.” She grinned, closed the door, and shortly the steel bar slid into place a second time.
The Fudir arranged pillows on the bunk and pulled the sheets up over them. Then he took up a station in the corner beside the hidden door and waited.
One reason why the scarred man excelled at the game of waiting was that most of him could sleep while the rest took turns on guard. Inner Child and the Brute stood sentrygo while the Silky Voice marshaled and concentrated the requisite enzymes. Genistein and isoflavonoids from the soybeans, anthocyanocides from the bilberries, she sent them off to fortify the night vision of the retinal rods. It would not be fair to say the scarred man could see in the dark, but you are what you eat, and it would not be right to call him blind, either.
After some time had gone by and the night was well advanced, the door slid open and Inner Child nudged the Fudir awake. A shadow slipped into the room, paused to assess motion, and flowed swiftly toward the bed on which the scarred man ought to have been lying.
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