by Alex Stewart
“I told her about my mother,” I said, my mind, once again, only half on the conversation. It seemed as though Jas’s visor was equipped with a comms package after all, and she’d started to receive a message through it. I rifled frantically through the datanomes I’d scavenged, trying to find something that matched the protocols.
“You did what?” Clio stared at me in astonishment: so much so that she seemed to have forgotten she was mad at me. “Why would you do something as stupid as that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sounding a bit lame even to myself. “It just sort of came up while I was talking to her.” I could hardly admit I was distracted by having successfully merged with Jas’s eyeware for the first time.
Then I finally found a set of datanomes which meshed with the incoming communication she was receiving, and the datastream resolved at last. It was a simple voice message, nothing more, clipped, and so riddled with jargon and acronyms it might as well have been in Ancient English for all the sense it made to me. I could have kicked the fountain with frustration, but all I’d gain by that was a throbbing foot, and Clio would probably notice, so I restrained the impulse.
“I’ll just bet it did,” Clio said grimly.
“We were just talking about our families,” I explained, still trying to make sense of the strange voice in my dataflow. But before I could extract any kind of meaning from it, the transmission abruptly ceased.
“Roger that,” Jas said in response, her voice crisp and efficient. “We’ll be waiting.”
I infiltrated a tendril into the outgoing message, and felt it being carried deep into the heart of the base. There was a node nearby, a big one, I could feel the crackle of concentrated data pulsing like the heart of a distant sun, but before I could reach out towards it, she cut the link. I snapped back into myself, feeling momentarily disorientated, as I had done when the roadblocks descended in the examination hall back at the Naval Academy on Avalon.
“So you just happened to mention to a League squaddie that your mom’s the captain of a Commonwealth warship, and your sister commands a platoon of Marines? God in heaven, Simon, what were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I admitted, glancing across to the gate in what I hoped was a casual manner. Something was going on, I’d overheard enough to be sure of that, and if it was going to happen before Jas went off duty, it was going to be soon. But nothing looked any different from the way it had before. Jas and the other trooper were still mooching about like school teachers in the lunch break, keeping a desultory eye on us all, and their counterparts by the other hatchway seemed no more engaged than they were.
Clio snorted. “No change there, then.”
“And I never mentioned Tinkie,” I added, acutely conscious that I sounded as though I was clutching at straws. Which was fair enough, as essentially I was. “Do you think I should tell John?”
“Absolutely not,” Clio said emphatically. “It might not come to anything,” although she didn’t sound as though she thought that was any more likely than I did, “and if it does, everyone’ll just assume they found out about your family through regular background checks.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed, with a faint sense of relief. I’d been beginning to make a new life for myself aboard the Stacked Deck, and if it wasn’t too late, I wanted to carry on doing so when we left here. There was certainly nothing to be gained by undermining whatever good opinion Remington may have had of me by jumping the gun on confessing.
“What’s going on over there?” Clio asked, abruptly, and I seized on the sudden change of subject with alacrity. Jas and the trooper with her were turning to face the pressure hatch, and bringing their weapons up; not on aim, but with the air of people who knew what to do with them, and liked to have them ready just in case they needed to prove it. Clearly, whatever the message I’d overheard the end of had been about, it was starting to happen.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, and began strolling casually in that direction, my sneakware poised to exploit any further communication through Jas’s visor. To my faint, and welcome, surprise, Clio fell in at my elbow, no doubt as curious as I was about what was going on. And we weren’t the only ones. By the time we got to the hatchway, over a dozen people had drifted over there to see what was happening. Remington was among them, and greeted us cheerfully.
“Any idea what this is all about?” he asked, addressing me as we approached.
“No.” I shook my head, wondering if he’d deduced anything about my attempts to access a node. He probably hadn’t really expected me not to try, despite his and Rennau’s orders to the contrary; but to anyone else in the cavern with neuroware there simply wasn’t a node within reach, and that was that, so he’d have no real reason to suspect that I’d persevered. “Why would I?”
“I thought you might have a little inside information,” Remington said, glancing in Jas’s direction with a meaningful nod, and a faint smile.
“Step back, please,” Jas said, in a tone of voice which made it perfectly clear that this wasn’t a request. To my relief, everyone complied, with a shuffling of feet and some exaggerated slouching which made it very clear that they were treating it as one anyway, and acceding to it purely because they felt like it, not because they recognized the authority of her uniform or were intimidated in any way by the weapon she carried. Once she seemed satisfied that we’d all moved far enough away not to be underfoot, she turned to the other trooper and nodded. “OK. Send them through.” The last in a quick transmission, which, like the previous one, was too brief for me to tap into the distant node, although it certainly confirmed that it was there.
“On their way,” the voice at the other end responded, and the thick metal hatch began to crank open. I craned my neck to see what was behind it, but, somewhat anticlimactically, saw nothing more exciting than a long, dimly lit corridor, pretty much identical to the ones I’d seen on the way here, with a sled parked at the other end. There were people walking down it, about halfway along, and the first thing to catch my eye was a glimpse of Naval Infantry uniforms. I’d just made up my mind that it was nothing more exciting than Fledge and his people swinging by for a snap inspection and an early guard change, when Clio nudged me, apparently forgetting she was supposed to be mad.
“Isn’t that the Freebooters?” she asked.
I nodded. “I think you’re right,” I agreed, becoming more certain by the second. “Some of them, anyway.” There were three civilians in the middle of the group, none of them looking particularly happy, and one of whom I definitely recognized: the green woman Remington and I had met on our way to our meeting with Ellie at Farland Freight Forwarding. I tried to recall if either of her companions, a burly man with short graying hair and no visible tweaks, or a younger fellow, whose eyes glowed green in the reduced light of the corridor and had the vertical slit pupils of a cat, had been with her when Clio and I first caught sight of her entering the bar in Dullingham, but I couldn’t remember. Maybe I’d ask Clio later, if it seemed important.
“Where have they been all this time?” Clio asked. We’d seen the System Defense Boat which had crippled the Poison 4 moving in to pick up the survivors shortly before Neville and his team had boarded us, so they couldn’t have been in transit for as long as we’d been here: the Guild representative had made the round trip from Freedom two or three times in the interim. The only possible explanation was that they’d been held somewhere else on the base; where and why I’d have to try to find out.
“The hospital, probably,” Remington said. “At least to start with.” Which made sense—hardly anyone came out of a rift bounce feeling entirely chipper, and serious injuries were common. “After that . . .” He trailed off, and shrugged. “I don’t imagine our hosts were quite as concerned about their welfare as they have been with us.”
I nodded, feeling a tight knot growing in the pit of my stomach. Cutting and running, as the Poison 4 had attempted to do, would be taken as a taci
t admission of guilt from the outset, and a Freebooter crew didn’t have the economic and political clout of the Guild standing behind them. No doubt their interrogation had been a good deal more rigorous than ours, and I had no desire to find out how much so: but if the Leaguers ever got wind of the secrets I was carrying around with me, I wouldn’t get any choice in the matter.
“So why are they putting them in with us now?” I asked.
“Because they finally got tired of asking the same stupid questions, and they can’t be bothered to shoot us,” the green woman said, overhearing, and turning to glare at me. Clearly a couple of weeks of sustained interrogation, not to mention having her ship shot out from under her, had done little to improve her disposition. Then she looked at my face properly, and her expression softened a little. “Simon something, right?”
“Forrester,” I said, introducing my companions. “This is Clio Rennau, and—”
“John Remington, master of the Stacked Deck.” Remington stepped forward, nodded a greeting, and smiled a little tightly. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands.”
“I never shake hands with Guilders. I need all my fingers.” She returned the nod coolly. “Carolyn Ertica, mistress of a gutted hulk.” She indicated the older of the two men accompanying her. “Baines was my engineer.” That made sense: he was the only one of the three with neuroware, his datasphere shrunken and closed off with privacy protocols. He nodded slightly, regarding us all with suspicion, and an almost-healed flash burn became visible on the side of his face as he turned in our direction. Ertica tilted her head towards the young man with the cats’ eyes. “And that’s Rollo. Does a bit of everything.”
“Don’t we all,” I said, faintly surprised to receive a friendly grin from him in return.
“What about the rest of your crew?” Clio asked, with a glance back down the empty corridor. “Where are they?”
“I suppose that depends on what their religions were,” Ertica said shortly.
“Some of ’em’ll be lucky to make cockroach next time round,” Rollo added cheerfully, before being silenced by a glare from his captain.
“That’s enough.” Corporal Fledge stepped in to exert a little of his fondly imagined authority. He gestured with the barrel of his gun. “Your quarters are this way.”
“Not too close to ours, I hope,” Deeks said, shouldering his way through the crowd, a couple of his shipmates tagging along behind him. “Don’t want ‘booters stinking up the place.” Which pretty much explains why I’d never really taken to him, despite his affable greeting the first time we’d met. I’d never quite been able to shake the feeling that it was my Guild patch he was being friendly to, rather than the person wearing it.
“Ooh, aren’t you adorable?” Ertica said, with a patently insincere smile. Before anyone could react she leaned in, and planted a flirtatious kiss on his cheek. “I could just eat you alive.”
“What?” Utterly taken aback, Deeks stood in stupefied astonishment for a moment, before his hand went up to his face. “Aaagh!” Blisters began erupting across the skin, just as they had done when she’d been accosted in the street back on Numarkut. But it seemed to me that the effect was far less pronounced than it had been on that occasion, when Ertica’s would-be attacker had been completely and instantly incapacitated. “What did you do?”
Fledge barely glanced at the spreading lesions, before gesturing to one of the guard detail. “Holby. Take him to the infirmary.”
“Corporal.” She saluted, in a fairly perfunctory manner if I was any judge, and led the loudly complaining Deeks away up the corridor, passing through the cordon of guards blocking the open hatch in case anyone was bored or stir crazy enough to try making a completely pointless run for it.
“This way, please.” Jas took Ertica by the elbow, and got her moving with polite but insistent pressure. Once more reminded of the incident in Dullingham I began to shout a warning, before turning it into a face-saving cough as I realized that Jas seemed completely unaffected by whatever toxin Ertica had in her skin. Another of her invisible tweaks, perhaps, or was Ertica able to control its potency by an act of will? Another question to try and find the answer to.
But at least I’d have time to do that. I raised a hand in farewell, as Ertica and her friends were escorted away.
“Be seeing you,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In which I reveal a secret in order to keep one.
And of course I did, although it took longer than I expected. I’d already resolved to wait a day or two before contriving a chance meeting with one of the Freebooters, which would be difficult enough to begin with; they kept themselves to themselves as assiduously as Freebooters always did, ostentatiously ignoring Guilders and shipping line crews alike. To be fair, the antipathy was mutual; word about what had happened to Deeks got around almost at once, growing in the telling to those who hadn’t seen it, and no one seemed at all keen to attract Ertica’s attention after that. Which had probably been the point in the first place.
The one exception to the Freebooters’ universal disdain, surprisingly, was me, perhaps because our meeting on Numarkut had convinced Ertica of my good nature—or possibly naivety, which in her view was pretty much the same thing. At any event, on the rare occasions we caught sight of one another, she would nod, almost imperceptibly, instead of pretending I was a human-shaped hole in the air, as she and her companions did with everyone else.
Something which hadn’t escaped Clio’s notice. “You’ll have to watch that,” she remarked, a little frostily, after one such exchange. “Soldier Girl will be getting jealous.”
I had no idea why she’d think so. I had to admit I found Ertica attractive in the abstract, although I could hardly be blamed for that: like most men, and quite a few girls, I was biologically programmed to respond in certain ways to the sight of a scantily clad woman, however corrosive her personality. I was hardly in a position to do anything about it, though, even if I’d wanted to: I’d seen what the consequences of getting too close would be, even if I didn’t annoy her. And it wasn’t as if there was anything romantic in my friendship with Jas either, come to that; although, if I was entirely honest with myself, she was precisely the kind of girl I’d have had those kinds of feelings for under more propitious circumstances.
And the circumstances were far from propitious. As I’d expected, her sense of duty far outweighed whatever value she might have put on our fledgling friendship, and she lost no time in reporting my family connections to her superiors. Something which became almost immediately apparent the following morning, with the arrival of a lieutenant commander in the League Navy, whose uniform was tellingly devoid of any insignia denoting his service branch.
“Simon Forrester, isn’t it?” he asked, as I entered the room in our quarters which had become so familiar through previous interviews. It had obviously been intended as a conference room, containing a table, lined with chairs on both sides, with a single, more generously padded, one at the head. My interlocutor had seated himself about halfway down one of the long edges, facing the door, and smiled affably as I came in.
“Don’t you know?” I asked, as I took the seat opposite, and placed a mug of coffee and a plate of cookies on the table in front of me. He had a similar plate in front of him, next to his own beverage, which came as no surprise; if this interview followed the pattern of the previous ones I’d sat through, his next move would have been to offer me one, to put me at my ease and persuade me to open up. Bringing my own was supposed to send the clear message that I realized that, and wasn’t going to be quite so crudely psychologically manipulated. I really was beginning to think like a Guilder. “That doesn’t say a lot for the League’s intelligence service.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The polite smile congealed a little, although his voice remained relaxed. “I’m Paul Wymes. With a y, not double e.” He waited for a conventional polite response, like “Pleased to meet you,” or something like that.
“You’re expecting me to write it down, then?” I said. “Am I going to have to report your conduct to the Guild?” Although if I did, I wouldn’t have to write anything down, of course: my neuroware was recording the entire conversation.
“I sincerely hope not,” Wymes said, the pose of affability getting steadily more frayed around the edges. He smiled, a little disingenuously. “And speaking of the Guild, I gather that the intermediary appointed by the system Guildhall to deal with this unfortunate situation has had to return to Freedom.” Of course he had: the DIR, or whoever else this clown reported to, wouldn’t want a senior member of the Guild getting wind of this latest development. It would complicate things far too much. “Perhaps you’d like to have your captain sitting in on our discussion instead.”
“Not really.” I shrugged, to his evident surprise, and bit into one of the cookies—chocolate chip, which I’ve always thought goes particularly well with coffee. “I don’t want to have to pay him a cut if we reach an agreement.” I pushed the plate across the table. “Help yourself.”
“An agreement,” Wymes repeated, taking a cookie with the air of a chess player reaching for a sacrificial pawn. “And what kind of an agreement would you have in mind, Mr. Forrester?”
“A business one, of course,” I said. I’d had some time to think, since inadvertently revealing part of my family history to Jas, and I’d come up with what I hoped was a workable strategy to limit the damage. The key was to play up the fact that I was a Guilder, rather than a former Commonwealth citizen, and play that role to the hilt. “You think I might have some information you can use. I’m willing to talk it over, and find out if you’re right. And how much you’re prepared to pay for it if I do.”
