by Timothy Zahn
For a handful of beats Thrr't-rokik was sorely tempted. To look into Thrr-pifix-a's face again and have her look into his. Not merely to secretly watch and listen as she went about her normal life, but to reallybe with her.
But no. Thrr-pifix-a didn't want just to speak with him. She wanted him to touch her, and hold her, and embrace her. Wanted things he could never again provide for her.
And if she couldn't have it all, she would have none of it. She'd made that more than clear.
"We can't afford the risk," he told Thrr-tulkoj, turning resolutely away. "Thrr-pifix-a knows she's outside my anchorline range here. If I go to her now, I'll have to explain about that"-he jabbed his tongue at the box riding in Thrr-tulkoj's pouch-"and admit that I've been watching her."
"She'll understand."
"She most certainly will not," Thrr't-rokik retorted. "On the contrary, she's likely to make a three-tentharc stage drama out of the whole thing. And if she does, you can bet it won't be our little secret for long. You saw all those Elders loitering around her house-one wrong word picked up by one wrong ear slit, and clan and family leaders will be falling on us like hailstones."
He looked down at the pouch, tasting the faint memory of a sour flavor beneath his tongue. "And if you think you're in troublenow, just wait and see what happens when they find out I talked you into taking a private cutting from myfsss organ.And then got you to bury it behind Thrr-pifix-a's house."
Thrr-tulkoj flicked his tongue in resignation. "I suppose you're right," he conceded.
"Of course I'm right," Thrr't-rokik said. "And if you're locked up somewhere and I'm stuck at the family shrine, we're not going to be able to find those lying split-tongued illegits who did this to her."
Thrr-tulkoj threw a quick look around them. "Well, at least we've some names to work with now."
"For all the good that'll do us," Thrr't-rokik grunted. "It hasn't helped the Overclan Prime's office track them down."
"You assume the Overclan Prime's officewants to track them down," Thrr-tulkoj pointed out. "Remember, Overclan warriors were waiting here ready to pounce as soon as Thrr-pifix-a had herfsss in hand."
"True." Thrr't-rokik flicked his tongue in a grimace. "I wish I'd been able to listen in on that conversation Thrr-gilag had with the Overclan Prime back at the house."
"My guess is that it was unrelated," Thrr-tulkoj said. "Weare in the middle of a war, you know."
Abruptly, an Elder flicked into view. "Are you Protector Thrr-tulkoj; Kee'rr?" she said.
"Yes," Thrr-tulkoj confirmed.
"I have a message for you from the Vehicle Registry Department. The transport you specified has an index number of CW-556499 and is currently registered to the Dhaa'rr office of the Overclan Seating."
"Understood," Thrr-tulkoj said. "Thank you."
The Elder flicked her tongue in a five-hundred-cyclic-old Hgg gesture of salute-she must have dated back nearly to the Third Eldership War, Thrr't-rokik realized-and vanished. "So it's a Cvv-family vehicle," Thrr-tulkoj commented. "Interesting."
"Is this the transport I saw Korthe and Dornt escape in?" Thrr't-rokik asked.
Thrr-tulkoj nodded. "I contacted the floater-engine manufacturer and had them look up the identification numbers you were able to read before the transport got out of range. Looks like the trail not only leads to the Dhaa'rr clan, but possibly straight to the Speaker for Dhaa'rr personally."
For a hunbeat neither spoke. Thrr-tulkoj broke the silence first. "We're going to need a lot more proof before we can make this public," he said. "At the minimum we need to track down Korthe and Dornt and establish a connection between them and the Dhaa'rr clan in general or Speaker Cvv-panav in particular."
"That won't be easy," Thrr't-rokik warned. "Speaker Cvv-panav would have to be crazy not to bury them away somewhere."
"Not necessarily," Thrr-tulkoj said, "Remember, as far as anyone knows, the only person who can identify them is Thrr-pifix-a, and she's sitting out here four thousand thoustrides from Unity City. Speaker Cvv-panav might well be arrogant enough to still have them there with him."
"And if he's not?"
"If he's not, then he's probably buried them and the transport in the same place. And particular vehicles are a lot easier to trace than particular Zhirrzh."
"I'll take your word for it. So we start at Unity City?"
"Right. We can take the rail from Reed's Village to the transport field at Pathgate. We should make Unity City by this latearc."
"All right." Thrr't-rokik hesitated. "You realize, of course, that even if you can't recognize them, they can probably recognize you. And they aren't going to want to be found."
"I understand," Thrr-tulkoj said, his voice taking on a hard edge. "And I'm rather looking forward to it. They had their turn back at the family shrine. This time it'll be my turn."
5
It was dark. Dark and silent, save for the chirping of night insects and the whisper of breezes through the trees and stickler reeds surrounding them. Somewhere in the near distance an avci-cubu was snuffling quietly to itself as it rooted around with its snout for young Parra and oldur vines. From much farther away came the variegated whistling of a colony of floravore bats, swarming in battle with one of the forest's hundreds of varieties of recoil creepers.
Lying fully alert on his mattress pad, half seeing, half imagining the protective shelter cloth draped above his head, Lord Stewart Cavanagh stared out into the blackness of the Granparra night, wondering what it was that had awakened him.
His watch, pen torch, knife, and Kolchin's backup flechette pistol were on the ground beside his head to his left. Carefully, he rolled onto his left side, wincing at the ache from a dozen sore muscles.
"Lord Cavanagh?" a quiet voice called from a few meters away.
"Yes," Cavanagh confirmed, snagging the pistol and easing onto his back again. "Sorry-did I wake you?"
"No, I've been awake for a few minutes," Mitri Kolchin said. "I think we've got an intruder."
Cavanagh shivered, the muscle movement sending another wave of aching through him. "I thought you killed everything nearby when we made camp."
"I thought so, too," Kolchin said. "Quiet, please, and let me listen."
Cavanagh grimaced, gripping the pistol tightly as he rested his hand on his chest, breathing as silently as he could. In the darkness he visualized the area around the encampment Kolchin had cleared for them the previous evening, trying to guess where the intruder could be coming from.
And then... "Kolchin?"
"Sir, you have to be quiet-"
"It's over here," Cavanagh told him. "It's moving along my left leg."
He never heard Kolchin get out of his sleeping roll, but suddenly, with a ripple of displaced air, the bodyguard was there beside him. "Hold still," Kolchin murmured. "Watch your eyes."
Abruptly, the shelter was ablaze with light from Kolchin's pen torch. Cavanagh squinted against the glare, his eyes fighting to adjust, and looked down toward the left side of his sleeping roll.
It was there, all right: a slender, segmented greenish-purple vine moving leisurely alongside his leg. Cavanagh didn't recognize the particular species, but like the rest of Granparra's recoil creepers, its tip and sides bristled with barbed thorns. Even as he watched, it moved again, poking mindlessly at the sleeping roll as it tried to get to the source of the heat it was sensing.
"Don't move," Kolchin said quietly. "I'll try to draw it away."
There was a soft hum, and the beam from the pen torch focused down until it was a small, intense spot on the bristling vine head. The creeper seemed to pause, almost as if thinking; and then, as Cavanagh held his breath, the head began to turn toward this new source of heat. "I'll give it a few more centimeters," Kolchin said. "We don't want it twitching back toward you."
Cavanagh gave a microscopic nod, afraid of startling the plant. With what seemed like agonizing slowness the creeper continued veering away from his side....
And then Kolchin's right
hand slashed down, the two edges of his split-blade knife slicing vertically into either side of the creeper, pinning the vine head to the ground. The creeper twitched violently and was still writhing as Kolchin slid Cavanagh's knife from its sheath and sliced off the deadly vine head.
Cavanagh took a careful breath, the pistol sagging against his chest as his hand relaxed its rigid grip on the weapon. "It's helpless now, right?"
"Right," Kolchin confirmed. He was working his way down the creeper, methodically cutting through the vine at each of the segment lines and throwing the pieces out into the forest. "Just don't touch the vine head-those thorns are probably poisonous."
"Right," Cavanagh said, reaching gingerly past the still writhing vine head for his watch. Still two hours to dawn. "When did Piltariab say he'd be getting back from Puerto Simone Island?"
"Sometime this morning," Kolchin said, coming back from his search-and-kill defoliation exercise and returning Cavanagh's knife to its sheath. Squatting down, he carefully pulled his own knife out of the ground, the twitching vine head still impaled on the split blade. With a quick flick of his wrist he flipped the knife around, sending the vine head spinning out into the darkness of the forest. "He wouldn't commit himself more precisely than that."
"In my experience it's a minor triumph to get an Avuire to commit to even a given day," Cavanagh said, easing himself up on one elbow and peering ahead into the darkness. A couple of kilometers away out there was Sereno Strait, the narrow stretch of water that separated them here on the Granparra mainland from the safety of Puerto Simone Island. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the planet's forty million people lived on the island, dwelling in the literal shadow of the huge Parra vine but protected by their isolation from the rest of the planet's deadly plant life.
Cavanagh and Kolchin, unfortunately, were out here.
None of this had been part of the original plan, of course. Breaking away from Petr Bronski on Mra-mig, they had borrowed a small fighter ship from the Mrach weapons dump in the hills outside Mig-Ka City-the only craft there that could be prepped for flight in under half an hour-and had headed off-planet. The idea was to leave Mrach space as quickly as possible and get back to Cavanagh's homeworld of Avon, where he could set to work on something that could help the Commonwealth defeat the invading Conquerors.
But the universe hadn't proved cooperative. Like courier ships, fighter stardrives were twice as fast as those of larger ships, but they paid for that speed with five times the fuel consumption, and if there was a way to retune the drive for the slower, more efficient drive speed, neither of them had been able to find it. Courier ships had large fuel tanks to compensate. Fighters, unfortunately, didn't.
Which had left them with an extremely limited number of places they could reach without refueling, none of them places where humans flying a fighter with official Mrach markings wouldn't be greeted with raised eyebrows and suspicious questions. With Bronski undoubtedly burning up space behind them, suspicious questions were something to be avoided at all costs.
Which had in turn boiled down their options to exactly one.
Klyveress ci Yyatoor, Twelfth Counsel to the Yycroman Hierarch, had been surprised to see them again so soon. Her welcome had turned noticeably cooler when she'd learned they were on the run. But with a little persistence Cavanagh had managed to work out a deal, and a few hours later they were off again in an old Pawolian mining ship Klyveress had had stashed away somewhere.
With its slower drive the Pawolian ship had more than enough fuel to reach Avon. Unfortunately, what it turned out not to have was a reliable set of reactant infusers.
They'd been able to nurse the ship only as far as Granparra. But as Kolchin had pointed out, as emergency stopovers went, Granparra was a reasonably good one. With virtually the entire planetary population crowded together on Puerto Simone Island, there was no reason for anyone to keep close tabs on space traffic going in or out of the rest of the planet. On the other hand, with a few thousand rough-and-tumble sap miners and prospectors working the mainland at any given time, there were also enough small ships going in and out for one more not to attract particular notice. Kolchin had taken full advantage of that, bringing the ship in toward a mining complex well away from the island-and away from the Myrmidon Weapons Platform that orbited protectively overhead-then flying low over the forests and jungles to a spot only a few hours' hike away from the coastline.
Their problems, according to Kolchin, had thus been reduced to two: how to locate new reactant infusers, and how to raise the money to pay for it without triggering the credit red flags Bronski had undoubtedly set up on the Cavanagh accounts.
Problem three, Cavanagh had privately added, was how to stay alive while they dealt with problems one and two.
"Your bag looks undamaged," Kolchin said, running his fingers along the material. "No thorns embedded or anything."
"Good," Cavanagh said, studying the young man's dirty and unshaven face. Kolchin was being very professional about this, certainly: inquiring closely after his employer's health, sympathizing with him over foot blisters and sore muscles and venom burns, sharing in his fears about the continual danger there. But beneath it all, despite it all, it was obvious that the young bodyguard was enjoying this adventure immensely.
And Cavanagh could hardly blame him. Kolchin had been trained as a Peacekeeper commando-trained with the best and brightest warriors the Commonwealth had to offer. The job of personal bodyguard hardly ever even scratched the surface of his abilities. Now, for probably the first time since Cavanagh had hired him, Kolchin was getting the chance to actually use his combat, stalking, and survival skills.
Cavanagh could only hope that that wasn't the real reason Kolchin had brought them down in the wilds of Granparra in the first place.
"Good," Kolchin said, checking his watch and then peering up at the sky. "You might as well get a little more sleep. It'll be another couple of hours before we can get moving."
"I know," Cavanagh said, rubbing his knuckles into tired eyes, his hands tickling against two weeks' worth of beard growth as he did so. He desperately wanted to sleep, certainly; this little field trip through the Granparra outback was as physically and mentally exhausting as anything he'd tackled since his own stint in the Peacekeepers thirty-six years ago. "I think I'll do a little work first. I still haven't got the ablative part of the scheme balanced properly, and I want to be ready to hit the ground running when we get back to Avon."
"If you want to," Kolchin said, glancing out into the darkness around them. "There'll probably be several hours after we get to the dock before Piltariab shows up."
"If there are, I can work then, too," Cavanagh growled. "And probably also all of next week, after we find out we still don't have enough money to buy the infusers. Maybe we'll wind up spending the whole war here-then I'd have lots of time to work."
Kolchin's eyes narrowed, just slightly. "I only meant-"
"I know what you meant, Kolchin," Cavanagh sighed, waving a hand in tired apology as fatigue overtook the brief flash of anger. "I'm sorry. I'm just tired."
"Yes, sir," Kolchin said, his voice studiously neutral. Perhaps he was finally getting tired too.
More likely, he was wondering whether his boss was beginning to lose it. Cavanagh wouldn't blame him on that one, either. After all, the whole reason they'd run from Mra-mig in the first place was to avoid the quarantine Bronski had planned for them, a quarantine designed to protect the startling and potentially devastating secret that the legendary deterrent weapon CIRCE didn't exist.
Cavanagh had argued vehemently against any such quarantine. With his daughter and two sons still in deadly danger from the Conquerors, he had no desire to let anyone lock him uselessly away where he couldn't do anything to help them. But Bronski had refused his plea, at which point Kolchin had ended the discussion with a drawn flechette pistol and a quiet promise to use it if necessary.
And so, of course, they'd wound up here on the Granparra mainland. As effe
ctively cut off from civilization as they would have been in any quarantine Bronski could have devised.
"I understand your concerns, sir," Kolchin said. "But this last sale should have us pretty close to what we need. And if Piltariab was able to get your message to Bokamba-andif he's willing to lend us the difference-we could conceivably get out of here tonight."
"Perhaps," Cavanagh murmured. Bokamba was Reserve Peacekeeper Wing Commander Iniko Bokamba, Adam Quinn's former commander in the Copperheads. The one potentially bright spot in all this, and a lingering source of annoyance for Cavanagh that he hadn't thought of contacting the man sooner.
Bokamba had been one of the handful of former Copperhead officers Quinn had considered contacting when the family had first decided on a private mission to try to find and rescue Pheylan from the Conquerors. Cavanagh didn't know whether Quinn and Aric had in fact gone to Bokamba or had instead gone to someone else-he and Kolchin had headed off to Mra-mig before that part of Quinn's plan was settled. But it was a possible opening; and with his children in danger, it was an opening Cavanagh was willing to take a chance on.
