by Jo Zebedee
All were possible; all would force Merenilo to make a move. But the right move?
If only, thought Finesz, she knew what it truly was she were investigating.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Do you honestly think this is going to work?” asked Kordelasz. He stared down at the battered data-freighter, his elbows on the viewing-gallery’s railing.
Rinharte didn’t answer. She stared at the ship, technicians and boat-bay staff clambering over her narrow aerodynamic hull, and it struck her that her plan was foolish in the extreme. How could she have been so deluded? Kordelasz and herself were trapped, and there was no way off Tanabria Station.
“She’s certainly the most… disreputable-looking ship I’ve ever seen,” added Kordelasz, “but does that mean the captain will smuggle us to Darrus?”
“How am I supposed to know?” snapped Rinharte.
The data-freighter was indeed a sorry example of her class: her hull was pitted and corroded, and liberally streaked with scorch marks; and some unidentifiable, viscous liquid dripped from several of her umbilical connections.
There was a moment of silence. At length, Kordelasz remarked in a soft, non-accusatory tone, “It was your plan, ma’am.”
Rinharte opened her mouth… and just as abruptly closed it. She let out a low sigh. “I know that, lieutenant. It seemed like a good idea at the time— No, it seemed like we had no other choice.” She turned about slowly, taking in her surroundings.
The boat-bay was a vast rectangular box, one side seemingly open to space: a slot of darkness pin-pricked with the lights of stars and interplanetary bodies. A force-curtain tuned to be impermeable to atmospheric gases prevented the air from escaping.
Kordelasz turned from regarding the starship parked below, and settled his rear on the rail. He crossed his arms. Rinharte ignored him. Two levels below her were twenty ship-berths in a semicircle. Only four were occupied, a typical number for a station as little-used as Tanabria: a small and powerful private yacht, a well-maintained merchantman in gleaming livery, an intra-system cutter, and the data-freighter. Even now, the cutter was trundling from its berth to take position before the huge vent placed centrally below the gallery. The wash from its gas-rockets would be funnelled out of the bay through that vent, through turbines to top up the station’s fuel-cells, and into space. Only when a sufficiently safe distance from Tanabria would the boat use its drive-tubes.
Leaning out over the rail, Rinharte tried to see the rear of the gallery below, but the overhang made it impossible: the entrance to the nobles’ hall was invisible. Likely the knight stalwart’s body had been found, and the station constables had begun their investigation. But no announcement had been made, no news posted—
“I wouldn’t worry about the body you left down there, ma’am,” Kordelasz remarked conversationally.
Rinharte pulled back and glanced at the marine-lieutenant sharply.
“They’ll know you killed him,” he continued. “But given the identity of the victim, they’ll be too scared to do much.” He paused. “Well, not until they’ve heard from the knights stalwart. Or from the viscount’s seneschal on Darrus.”
“There’s still a knight stalwart loose on the station,” Rinharte pointed out.
Kordelasz gestured dismissively. “A serjeant.”
“He’s still dangerous.”
“He has to find us first, ma’am.” The marine-lieutenant shrugged. “I very much doubt the knight-captain told him more than he needed to know. And when the constables discover that the forensic evidence points to the killer as a naval officer who was posted ‘missing in action’ years ago, well…”
“‘Killer’,” repeated Rinharte, grimacing. “It was self-defence.”
“Ma’am,” said Kordelasz, “forgive me, but if it was really ‘self-defence’, you would be the one lying dead in that hall.”
“He was going to kill me!”
The marine-lieutenant shook his head. “He had orders to take you alive, ma’am. If he’d wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be standing here now.”
There was a moment of strained silence.
“Don’t be so punctilious, Mr Kordelasz,” snapped Rinharte. “I’m grateful for your timely arrival, but you were ordered here to help me—”
“To protect you, ma’am.”
Rinharte angrily turned her back on him. She felt a complete fool. It was bad enough the pair of them were effectively trapped on Tanabria Station. For Kordelasz to insist on pointing out that, but for him, she’d now be in the hands of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield, the knights stalwart… True, she did not have his experience in the field—marines were usually first choice for operations ashore—but she had been quite proud at having evaded what she thought was certain death.
“Who told you about the knight stalwart in the waiting-room?” She kept her back to the marine-lieutenant. “And how is it you knew where to find me?”
If there was an accusation in the question, it was not one Rinharte had consciously put there.
“Ah.”
Rinharte stiffened. “Well?” The accusatory tone was no longer implied.
Kordelasz cleared his throat. “When I got to the nobles’ hall, the constables already had it sealed off. One of them was in a talkative mood. Apparently, you made quite a mess of the body. He didn’t say it was a knight stalwart, though. I decided to try looking for you on the concourse… and spotted a knight-captain and his serjeant. It seemed a good idea to follow them.”
Rinharte turned to the railing and gripped it with both hands. A shimmering curtain of heat from the cutter’s gas-rockets rose before her, warming the skin of her cheeks and forehead. She smelt ozone and scorched metal. Hell had manifested below her. She had brought it into being and deserved a place in it for her distrust.
A low and throaty rumble dispelled the illusion. The noise surrounded her, seemed to fill the boat-bay. She opened her eyes. Two parallel tracks of red lights in the bay floor flickered on, leading the way to that letterbox of naked space. The cutter was about to launch. She glanced up:
Far above, the ceiling of the boat-bay—a series of arched roofs running towards the force-curtain—was dark with shadows and the accumulated effluvia of small craft and starship drives. Narrow gantries were just visible in the darkness. The soot coating the ceiling was as much an indicator of Tanabria Station’s age as the smooth-rubbed wooden rail she clutched.
Trapped. On this ageing relic of Darrus’s glory days. Trapped… if Rinharte’s hasty plan to bribe the data-freighter captain to take them off-station failed. She knew she was relying too much on the popular perception of such captains—the shady smuggler-captain was as much a staple of popular entertainments as the dashing knight. But it had seemed her only recourse. Especially now that the station constables had already identified her as the killer of the parole-lieutenant in the nobles’ hall.
Rinharte started towards the ramp to the boat-bay-floor. The technicians had deserted the data-freighter. Now it only awaited a final inspection from the station authorities before departure. After a brief hesitation, Kordelasz quickly caught up with her. “Ma’am,” he said quietly, “I think you should stay out of sight. I’ll approach the data-freighter captain. Alone.”
She glanced at him. “I thought you’d never done this before?”
“I haven’t. But…” He gave an embarrassed smile. “The captain may be a prole, but he’s not stupid. The moment he lays eyes on you, he’ll realise you’re the woman the constables are after.” Kordelasz indicated Rinharte’s soiled dress with an apologetic gesture. “The situation is suspicious enough. Your, ah, appearance notwithstanding.”
“You may remember me telling you, Mr Kordelasz,” Rinharte said, with biting sarcasm, “that I have no change of clothes.”
“There are commissaries on the prole level—”
“I am not masquerading as a proletarian, Mr Kordelasz.”
He grinned, as if taken with
the idea. “You could be my servant.”
“You’re not amusing.”
“It would be a good disguise,” Kordelasz insisted.
Rinharte rounded on him. “Are you being deliberately obtuse?” she demanded. “I have no desire—no desire!—to act the prole.”
Kordelasz grunted. “It wouldn’t work, anyway. You’d only have to open your mouth for them to know right away you’re not one.”
“And you,” pointed out Rinharte, still irritated, “are obviously a soldier.” It was true: the marine-lieutenant was far too… clean-cut, and his bearing clearly military.
Kordelasz was not at all phased. “I can be an ex-soldier, ma’am. You find mustered-out troopers in all walks of life.”
“And you think you can talk like a prole?”
“A good officer,” replied Kordelasz stiffly, “often needs to talk to his troops in a language they understand.”
She smiled. “Ah, the common touch.”
The remark was not well-received, and Rinharte felt absurdly happy at the effect of her words.
If heat and the reek of scorched metal in the boat-bay had put Rinharte in mind of Hell, then this was surely Purgatory. A narrow gangway, stretching the length of the data-freighter’s hull, its walls patched with rust and streaked with oil, its decking spongy with ground-in dirt, its air redolent of past meals, lubricants and the fuggy miasma of the crew. Rinharte tried hard not to seem disgusted by her surroundings, but it was sorely taxing her acting ability. But for her desperate need to leave Tanabria Station, she would sooner wait for a more… amenable starship on which to travel.
She could not, however, afford to do so. It was the data-freighter, Safina, or none at all. With a serjeant of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield and the station’s constabulary hunting her, Rinharte had to leave.
She looked up from her feet, no longer wanting to know on what she was walking, and gazed at the ship’s captain. He had proven all obsequious when Kordelasz demanded passage, and not at all phased when the marine-lieutenant explained that the station authorities were not to know of their presence aboard. Rinharte had not liked the calculating look she caught on the data-freighter captain’s face. He was only a prole, but…
The captain came to a halt and pulled open the sliding-door to a cabin. Smiling unctuously, he gestured for Rinharte and Kordelasz to enter. “You can wait in here, my lord and lady,” he said, “till we’ve left the station.”
They had decided not to masquerade as proles. Neither could convincingly speak like proletarians, and Rinharte was wearing the only clothing she currently possessed: a yeoman’s travelling dress, somewhat the worse for wear.
The marine-lieutenant stepped through the door. Rinharte followed him. They settled on the bunk, and the door slid shut. Faulty flexors on the cabin’s sole light-panel chattered and clattered just on the edge of audibility, ineffectively warping the sheet of illuminating mineral and giving out little illumination. Rinharte glanced across at Kordelasz: the erratic lighting made deep, black pools of his eyes, threw his nose into relief across one cheek, created pockets and rivers of darkness on his jacket and trousers.
Rinharte let out a sigh. How had she come to such an ignoble pass? Aboard a data-freighter that looked and smelt as though its chief cargo were household rubbish.
The cabin was unnaturally quiet. Rinharte sought to break the silence: “So tell me about yourself, lieutenant.”
Kordelasz shifted position slightly. A flash of brightness from his mouth signified a grin. “There’s little enough to tell.”
“Where are you from?”
A shrug. “A minor world in Gromada Province. You won’t have heard of it.”
Rinharte doubted that. Gromada was the first province populated by the inhabitants of Geneza— No, not “populated”. They had conquered every planet they discovered, subjecting the native peoples and imposing Genezi culture—more than four millennia ago. The Empire’s most powerful and oldest noble families all boasted fiefs on worlds in the province.
“They say,” Rinharte said, “that if the Empire has five arms, then the Genezi are the hands and fingers.”
“It’s true enough.” The marine-lieutenant grunted. “It sometimes seems the Empire is still ruled from Geneza and not Shuto.”
“I fail to see how. There’s nothing there. It’s been little more than a planetary park for twelve hundred years ago.”
A thought occurred to Rinharte: “You’re not Henotic, are you?” Chianists still held members of the Henotic Church in mild suspicion, a consequence of the outlawing of the Henotic faith during the Intolerance a millennia ago. Not that Rinharte was particularly religious. She left that to the proletarian masses.
The marine-lieutenant shook his head. “I forget the last time I went into a church… but it was definitely a Chianist one.” He chuckled, an oddly reassuring sound in the dimness.
Rinharte changed the subject before the conversation strayed onto subjects which might cause offence. “You went to military academy?”
“Dear Lords, no. My father bought me a cornetcy when I was nineteen.”
“And he also bought your lieutenantcy?”
There was moment of silence. “No,” Kordelasz said at length. “No, that was someone else.”
Rinharte raised an eyebrow. “You must have impressed someone at an early age.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I gave my oath to a viscount on Aithis, but he was just the last in a long, convoluted chain of patronage and fealty. It was a complicated arrangement.”
“So you must have impressed someone at an early age.”
Rinharte snorted in amusement. “Neither of us exactly lived up to our perceived potential: here we are, outcasts from Imperial society, hunted by knights stalwart, smuggling ourselves onto a world because we can’t travel there openly…”
“I don’t know about ‘outcasts’—that remains to be seen. If the Admiral succeeds…”
“No, when the Admiral succeeds.”
“You’re convinced she will, ma’am?”
“Yes. Perhaps because I have to be— No, that’s not entirely true. Knowing what I do, I find it hard to believe the Admiral will fail.”
“But there’s just us—one ship—against all of them.” Kordelasz paused, then added bitterly, “Whoever ‘they’ might be.”
Rinharte said nothing. Kordelasz was gentleman enough not to expect her to answer that comment.
“Mr Kordelasz?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“It may well be that you will learn something during this mission it would be better you did not know. You are to treat it as privileged information—in fact, you are to treat everything about this mission as privileged.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A pause. “Ah, what exactly is our mission, ma’am?”
“At the moment, there is no need for you to know.”
There was a long moment of silence. Rinharte turned to the marine-lieutenant and saw he was gazing fixedly at the opposite bulkhead. “Mr Kordelasz?”
“Ma’am?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“No, ma’am… Yes, I do!” He twisted to face Rinharte. “There were two knights stalwart after you on Tanabria Station. How can I protect you if I don’t even know what our mission is?”
“Believe me, Mr Kordelasz, the knights’ stalwart presence was as shocking to me as it was to you. What’s more worrying is that they appeared to know I was on Tanabria Station. And how could they have known that?”
There was only one answer, and Kordelasz was officer enough not to voice it. The mere presence of the Order of the Emperor’s Shield on the station could well prove to be the most important piece of information Rinharte learnt during her mission. Its implications were both frightening and far-reaching:
There was a traitor aboard Vengeful.
They came for them an hour into the journey to Darrus. Someone outside slid op
en the door to the cabin and two figures in coveralls rushed in. The first, a huge brute with a wild beard and shaggy hair, reached out for Rinharte. The second, equally large, with dark skin, a shaved head and a gold hoop through his septum, went for Kordelasz.
Kordelasz lifted his regulation sword from where it lay beside him. He jabbed it forward lazily. The shaven-headed crewman stopped, gazed down for a moment in stupefaction at the blade piercing his abdomen… then pulled away, dropped to his knees, and fell to the side.
The second prole grabbed Rinharte’s hair, and yanked her to her feet. She had no weapon. A burning rage overcame her: to be manhandled by a prole. His hand could not be dislodged. She batted ineffectually at his chest. She was tall, over six feet, but he was taller still. He fastened a hand painfully to one of her breasts, and leered at her. She gagged at the reek of his breath.
Rinharte fought to free herself. Her dress hampered her legs: she could not raise her knee high enough. She reached up and managed to lodge a thumb in the giant’s eye-socket. He grunted in pain and threw his head back.
A slim blade slid into the hollow of his jaw.
The point burst from the back of his skull. Skewered on Kordelasz’s sword, his eyes went wide and he let out a coughed gargle. His grip on Rinharte slackened. She pulled away.
“Thank you, Mr Kordelasz,” she said, attempting to straighten her bodice. Her hands shook as she tugged on the material.
The marine-lieutenant glanced across at her. “Can I let go?” he asked casually. “He is rather heavy.”
“By all means.”
The giant crewman toppled as Kordelasz withdrew his sword. As soon as he hit the deck, Rinharte stepped forward, raised her skirts and kicked the corpse savagely in the face. A bone cracked.
Kordelasz left the cabin. Rinharte heard a choked-off cry. After a feeble attempt to tidy up her chignon, she stepped out into gangway. The marine-lieutenant had Safina’s captain pinned against the bulkhead, the point of his sword pressing lightly against the man’s chest.
“Don’t kill me,” the captain begged.
