Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Partway there, it paused in watchful silence and the Fudir noted a club of some sort in its hand. Then, apparently satisfied, it backed away and strode to the holostage, where it seated itself at the play deck. The scarred man slipped up behind it in the dark and placed one hand over its mouth and with the other plucked the club from its hand.

  “Rigardo-ji Edelwasser, I presume,” he whispered into its ear.

  Donovan felt the man stiffen, try to turn. “Nu, nu, nu,” he said with the Silky Voice. “Gentle, my good sir. Be not afraid. You are Rigardo-ji, the rightful owner of this vessel? Nod your head.” The head bobbed once in his grip. “I will release you, but you must make no move nor cry. I have destroyed all the Eyes in this room, citing my modesty, and she has assented by not replacing them. But we will speak in whispers, in case she has salted this room with ears. She is accustomed to my self-conversations, but speak too loudly and she might wonder if I speak with too many voices. Do you understand?”

  Again, a single, spastic nod of the head.

  “Good-good. We are in the same boat, you and we. There is no need to struggle.”

  When Donovan unloosed his hold, the shadowy figure turned the operator’s chair to face him. “Are you a madman? I’ve been watching, and I think you are mad. That’s why she locks you in here.”

  “Wouldn’t that make y o u mad? Why have you been lurking in the wainscoting all this time?”

  “Am I a fool? A poor, honest smuggler, me, just trying to make a living. I’d been drinking and, when I heard her bang through the lock, I hid in one of my . . .”

  “One of your hidey-holes. Go on.”

  He shrugged. “And I passed out. Came to after we were under way. Guess she never realized I was still aboard. I figured out what she was, toot sweet, and I ain’t no match for a Confederal shadow. I didn’t dare try to take her on myself. ’Sides . . .” The smuggler flipped his hands. “She was going the right direction, so there wasn’t no rush. I come out now and then just to check the headings. I figured if I just waited, something would come up.”

  “And something did.”

  “Yeah. You.”

  “But you’re not sure about me, or you would have approached me sooner.”

  “It was pretty clear you were her prisoner. That made you her enemy, but it didn’t make you my friend. For all I knew, you were Confederal bound, too, and you’d gang up on me if I showed myself. I overheard some of what you and her was saying, but I don’t speak birdsong, and I wasn’t always in a position to eavesdrop.”

  Donovan stroked his chin and considered the man before him. He could see, even in the dim-lit darkness, the tightness of his mouth and eyes. “Why did you come out tonight?”

  “I thought . . . it was time we made contact.”

  Liar, the Sleuth said. He checked the bunk to make sure we were sleeping—and had a club in case we weren’t. But Donovan did not voice the thought. “You didn’t wake me. You went to the console,” he suggested.

  “I’ve been dead reckoning. I needed to check our position, and it’s safer to do that here than in the control room. I been out a coupla times, but sometimes I have to cross a hallway and that sets off her damn motion sensors. How does she bear? The ship, I mean.”

  “Four days out from the Megranome Road.”

  “Oh.” The smuggler’s concern was palpable. “That ain’t good. We need to take the Biemtí to the Cynthia Cluster.”

  “To deliver a gee-gaw to the Molnar.”

  Donovan felt hesitation in the smuggler’s posture.

  “You read through my work orders,” Rigardo-ji said. “I thought I snatched them in time. Look, that’s top secret—need-to-know—and the penalty clauses Foreganger lays down . . .”

  The Brute tightened his grip on the smuggler. “Keep the voice down, I toldja.” Then Donovan said, “I promise not to tell the People. I scanned your current invoices, to see if you had anything aboard I could use as a weapon. Short of breaking a vase over her head, I didn’t find anything.”

  “There may be something we can use,” the smuggler allowed. “There’s a consignment aboard what I can read between the lines. With two of us, we got a chance. I’ll go get it out. Then you distract the ’Fed and I pot her. No offense, good buddy, but you’ve had three chances already to kill her and passed up each one.”

  Donovan thought about it and reluctantly agreed that it had to be that way; not for the smuggler’s smug reasons but because if Rigardo-ji suddenly appeared from nowhere, Olafsdottr would recognize it precisely as a distraction. The element of surprise would be irretrievably lost.

  “You’ll only get one shot,” Donovan said.

  “I’ll only need one. But it’s got to take her by surprise. I would have tried something already, but I got no illusions. A microsecond’s warning and I wouldn’t even get the one shot.”

  Donovan did not know how good a shot the smuggler might be. Yet many an eye and hand, steady on the range, grew uncertain when a living person was in the target hairs. Rigardo-ji sat rigid, Donovan’s arms upon him, eyes wide, stinking of sweat. Slowly, as if disengaging, the scarred man released him, stepped back.

  “It will have to be soon,” he said. “Before we enter the Roads.” And before you lose your nerve, he thought but did not say. Words like that would conjure what they sought to allay.

  “Tomorrow,” the man said. “After dinner. There’s a T-intersection where she takes you here . . .”

  “I know it.” It was where the false alarm had been tripped the other day.

  “There’s a panel, a storage space behind the cross hall. Sometimes, they bring containers aboard, up the long hallway, and I open the panel and they can dolly them straight in. It’s empty right now. I can make my way into it, wait there. You come past, turn up the long hall like you do. Your backs are to the panel. You stop her, get her to stand still. I slide the panel open and . . .” He made a gun of his fingers. “Pop. Pop. I got her.”

  Donovan said nothing, and after a moment the smuggler looked at his fingers and self-consciously wiggled them, as if throwing the imaginary gun away. “That’s the important thing,” he said. “You gotta distract her while I open the panel or else she’ll hear it. I mean these are like cargo doors; they ain’t exactly stealthed.”

  “In the back,” Donovan said.

  “Safer, that way, don’t you think? I don’t wanna give her the chance. Confederal Shadows, they’re ruthless. I’ve read the stories.”

  “Do you have something non-lethal, something to disable her instead? I know some people on Dangchao who wouldn’t mind getting her as a sort of house-present when I visit.”

  “Dangchao . . . Who do you know on the Waypoint that would keep a Confederation agent as a house pet?”

  “People who ask Questions.”

  Rigardo-ji shrank from him and made Ganesha’s sign to ward off bad luck. “I shoulda known you was no ordinary prisoner. Yeah. Yeah, sure. There’s something in my stock. It’ll knock her out, but not kill her, if that’s what you want.”

  Inner Child heard the scraping of a steel bar. “Quick,” he whispered through the scarred man’s lips. “She’s coming!” Donovan added, “Agreed. Tomorrow, after dinner.”

  The smuggler vanished like smoke. The panel beside the holostage clicked shut. Donovan threw himself into one of the chairs and sat twisted on the cushions.

  Olafsdottr opened the ward room’s door and entered just behind her teaser. Her left hand slapped the lights on and Donovan pretended to be flustered by the sudden light. He raised his head, as if he had been dozing in the chair, and shielded his eyes with his arm.

  The Shadow, for her part, looked about the room, grinned, and said, “Good night, Doonoovan-buoy. You have a very crowded head, boot noo moor whisper. Sleep tight.”

  The next day, Donovan waited. He read a book from the ship’s virtual library, but afterward he could not have explained what it was about. He participated in a simulation of the battle of Mushinro, taking the part of the doo
med Valencian general Kick. It was widely assumed that Kick had the battle won and it was only his hesitation at a crucial juncture that had permitted the victory by the Ramage-led coalition. But Donovan’s attention was not on the simulation and his own hesitation at a different juncture lost the battle yet again. Only when the dinner hour at last approached did the scarred man realize the root of his unease.

  He did not trust the smuggler, Rigardo-ji.

  It was a small thing, but the devil, it was said, lurked ever in the details. There had been a hint of thuggishness beneath the fear, and there had been that moment when, simulating a gun with his fingers, Edelwasser had said, “Pop. Pop.”

  Two shots.

  A second shot just to make sure? Or a second shot to tie up the other loose end?

  Or was Inner Child reading too much into it?

  Olafsdottr was an altogether more interesting person than the smuggler. At dinner, their conversation ranged from the various modes of mayhem they each had mastered to the craft with which Aloysh-pandit arranged colored oils on the surface of still pools. Were it not for the fact that the courier was dragging him into a civil war of which he wanted no part and in which he would likely find his doom, he would have found her an agreeable companion.

  On the other hand, years before, she had been tasked to kill him if he failed his mission. A close relationship, an intimate relationship; but not a cuddly one. Olafsdottr had a most pleasant smile. But she would smile while she cut him down.

  They left the refectory together and walked down the short hallway in their usual parade: Donovan to the fore, Olafsdottr behind with her teaser to the ready. She no longer held it shoved into his back, but neither had she relaxed to the point of shoving it into her holster. “But I suggest you are wrong, sweet,” she said, continuing their conversation as if they had been amiable companions on a stroll. “The Roomie tradition of opera was much too bombastic. Their drama was too melo. The Nipny tradition was more spare, more elegant, more minimal.”

  The scarred man allowed the Pedant to hold up the other end of the conversation. “You misunderstand the criteria. Grand opera and Noh have not the same objectives. One may as well assail the lemon for lacking the sweet of sugar cane. Each may excel—but toward different ends. It is only the values we place on the ends themselves that make one means seem less than the other.”

  “Ah, but sweet, are not the weights we place upon our goals what matter most in the end?”

  They had reached the T-intersection and had turned down the long stem of it. Donovan paused and said, “For me, the overthrow of the Names pales against one hour with my daughter in her home.” When he closed his eyes, he saw Méarana’s face before him, puzzled and hurt. He turned and faced his captor. “Make me one promise, Ravn.”

  Olafsdottr stopped a pace short of him and tilted her head, birdlike, to the side. “And what is that, my sweet?”

  “Promise me that if I go with you, you will go to Dangchao and tell Bridget ban and her daughter Méarana why it was I never came.”

  “I am to walk into the enemy’s lair on such a lark? You ask much of me, Donovan-buigh.”

  Indeed, he was. He could see down the length of the corridor the blank wall where the secret panel must be. The expression f i s h in a barrel came to mind. Rigardo-ji would have a clear shot down the entire length of the corridor, all the way to the cargo lock at the end. No one in the corridor could escape, unless they made it to the ward room, or into the closet where he had first been kept.

  And that included him. A steady eye might pick off the Confederate without also hitting her prisoner, but Donovan knew in that moment of clarity that the smuggler meant to kill them both.

  “Let’s go,” Donovan said, turning to resume their trek.

  Perversely, it was now Olafsdottr who held him back. “What is the hurry, Doonoovan? You ask me to venture into the heart of the Oold Planets to accost a Hound? From sooch a journey even I may noot return.”

  “Fair is fair, then. Isn’t that what you’re asking of me?”

  “Ah, but I am not asking. Your condition is not a conditional.”

  Donovan could not take his eye off the wall at the far end. He waited for the panel to open and death to emerge. “We can discuss this in my room,” he said.

  And still, like an ancient hero, ankle tied to a stake in the ground, Olafsdottr remained in the line of fire. “Ooh. Soo anxious! Do you have a trap led for me in your room? What cleverness have you been oop to?”

  But then she noticed that his attention was not fixed upon her, but upon the far wall. She spun and aimed her teaser down the hallway. “What is it, sweet? What wickedness have you wrought?”

  In turning away, she had turned her back on Donovan buigh. The Brute took charge of the scarred man’s body and leapt for her, mounting her, pushing her to the floor. She buckled under his sudden weight and went to her belly and the breath woofed out of her. A moment, she lay still; and then she twitched and Donovan felt a burning tingle in his side.

  And came to lying on the cramped bunk in the ward room. Olafsdottr sat, chin cupped in one hand, in one of the two soft chairs that gave the room its center. “Clever move, O best one. How you lulled me these past days! And had I lost my grip either on my teaser or my wits, success might have been yours. That would have been no good thing, either for me or for you, for behind me lurks another, my ‘second,’ who will act if I fail.”

  She leaned forward and patted Donovan’s cheek, and when he struggled to grab her arm he learned that he was strapped into the bunk. “You stay here some few day, I think. Review error of ways. Soon we enter AbyalonMegranome Road. You no jog elbow.”

  After the Shadow had left, Donovan engaged in some experimental struggles, but Olafsdottr was a professional. He did not expect much to come of it, and was not disappointed when not much did.

  “You did not want to see her killed,” Donovan told himselves. “Why?”

  It’s called a “stock syndrome,” the Silky Voice said. The captive comes to love his captor.

  I don’t love that stick, said the Brute.

  EDELWASSER PROMISED HE WOULD NOT GO FOR A KILL, said the Pedant. DID YOU NOT TRUST HIM?

  “And our lack of trust was justified,” said the Fudir. “He didn’t show.”

  “Yes, why did he not show?” asked Donovan.

  A) He lost his nerve, suggested the Sleuth. B) We had the time or place mixed up. C) We were early. D) We were late. E) He couldn’t find the weapon he planned on using. F) He found it, but it wasn’t loaded. G) He . . .

  Shaddap, suggested the Brute.

  It doesn’t matter. Brute didn’t want to see her killed. Why?

  Who sez? Was me that jumped her.

  No, you shoved her to the floor to knock her out of the line of fire. Olafsdottr may realize something of the sort when she has thought about it further.

  “It wouldn’t have worked,” the Fudir told them. “Rigardo-ji would have kept on shooting. He would have shot us, too, I think. I think he was planning to all along.”

  Who says so?

 

  You never trust anyone, Child.

 

  “What do you say, Pollyanna?” Donovan asked. “You always see the silver lining in every dark cloud.”

  The girl in the chiton was sitting on the floor next to the bunk. And you see the dark cloud around every silver lining, she said. This will all work out. Wait and see.

  Donovan expected that the smuggler would return that night, using the secret panel through which he had originally entered, so Inner Child and the Brute kept watch through the scarred man’s half-slit eyes and listened through his ears. Some explanation would be forthcoming for the failure to act as promised, but Donovan was no longer sure he was unhappy with that failure. And some instinct had urged the Brute to protect their captor. The Brute was not a keen thinker, b
ut his instincts were sound.

  He heard a sound behind the wall, a banging or a clatter, and he pressed his ear against the bulkhead to make it out more keenly. It came at intervals, distant at first, toward the rear of the ship, but it seemed to draw closer, come adjacent to him, and then pause. There was no sound for a time and the impression slowly grew within the heart of Donovan buigh that something lurked on the other side of the panel, and that this something sensed his presence.

  Suddenly uneasy, Donovan pulled away from the panel as far as the straps would allow. He exhaled as softly as he could, made no move, no sound.

  Moments dripped by.

  Then there was a clattering by his head and a moment later intermittent impacts receding down the hidden passageway. The scarred man began to breath normally. The sounds reminded the Silky Voice of a bouncing ball—if the ball were metallic and could hesitate from one bounce to the next.

  A little later that evening, Inner Child heard the same sounds returning. He passed the sensations on to the Sleuth to puzzle over and continued to wait for the smuggler to appear.

  But no one came to them that night, nor all the next day, nor the night after that.

  He wondered if the smuggler had acted on his own after all. Maybe he had ambushed Ravn and taken control of the ship, and was content now to keep Donovan strapped into his bunk for the foreseeable future.

  But on the third day, after the ship had entered Megranomic space and had begun the Newtonian crawl toward the Palisades Parkway, it was Ravn Olafsdottr who came to release him at last from his bonds. “Coome now, sweet,” she said, “you moost be hoongry.” She unlocked one hand, gave him the key, and stepped back.

  “It’s a psychological trick,” the Fudir told her as he worked the key into the lock that held the remaining straps together. “That Alabaster accent is a comic’s affectation. Most of us in the League have been conditioned to regard hooters as flighty. That’s not exactly fair to the Alabastrines, who are as sharp or as dim as anyone else; and it is especially unfair to you. But it helps if your adversary underestimates your wit. And helps even more if they do so subconsciously.”