“Not until our new Liaison Officer got into the act did anything get done. I heard the Port CEO say to the guy in charge of our maintenance sector that he wasn’t quite sure what kind of magic that Leigh guy was using on the City Fathers, but it sure as hell was coming in handy. He got them to zone the empty scrubland that had been left over after the Port was built, for housing. Then he pushed them to decide on the form the development ought to take, and to put out tenders for the work. So now the housing shortage is being addressed, by the Kordeans themselves, in a manner which should suit their tastes.”
“I know how Coryn did it,” Jillian crowed. “I was in on the process! I helped him do the research about suitable sites, whom to approach, and the best way to approach them. Then he went off to the Civic Building with his most charming face on! He’s taking this liaison stuff really seriously; he says that doing so will help him accomplish his Agency objectives, too!”
“He’s a smart guy,” said Texi. “Always trying to do things in a way which annoys fewer people than it makes happy.”
With the talk having turned to Coryn, Sarah decide to take a moment to do another quick mental sweep of the area, more to avoid listening than because she expected trouble.
But she found her feelings suddenly assaulted by something: a fury directed at her and her companions, so strong that she reeled for a second, and loosed the hold on her amarto.
“Sarah!” Jill was on immediate alert. “Are you okay?”
Sarah swallowed, and straightened herself.
“I don’t want to freak you guys out, but I just did a little mind sweep like I’ve been taught to at Ferhil Stones, and there’s someone within my mental reach who is projecting hate at us! I don’t know why, or what it means! I don’t even know if I should try to probe more, but I am sure that we better be on our guard!”
“Shit!” muttered Jillian. “But forewarned is better than not. Stunners at the ready, everyone. And Texi, can you take a quick look around us, and determine if anything—or anyone—looks wrong or out of place. You’re the one most likely to know if there’s something detectable by ordinary senses.”
Texi immediately set about to do as asked, trying to be as unobtrusive about it as he could be, pretending to point out sights to his companions.
“Did you get a direction, Sarah?” he asked, pitching his voice low.
“Behind us, I think,” Sarah replied. “Not more than a hundred metres from us, is my guess.”
“That’s too close for my liking,” Joe murmured. “A person projecting hate, did you say, Sarah?”
Sarah took a deep breath:
“More than one person, and hate and fury, is what I sensed. Maybe only at me. If it’s those Organization Hounds, how did they know that I’d be here, right now? And shouldn’t they be trying to lull me into a false sense of security, not blast negative emotions at me?”
“Pick up your speed everybody, but don’t run—not yet, anyway,” Texi who had given the street behind them a scan, said in a low voice. “One of the baby stuff stores is very close. But there are two big off-worlder guys coming towards us. They’re moving at a faster pace than the general foot-traffic, and they’re being rather careless about bumping into folks as they advance. They’re also ignoring the curses coming their way as they rush. My guess is that they’re our problem.”
Marika’s Infant Apparel—Sarah read the words above the double doors with relief. Joe, behind her, pushed the door open, and she tumbled in, with Jill on her heels. She heard a quick exchange of words between Joe and Texi; then Joe followed his wife into the brightly lit shop. It was quite large, filled with all kinds of baby necessities, not just clothes. There were customers, too, but not enough to hide among, and Sarah hoped that the pursuers had not seen which store they entered.
“Texi’s going to walk past this building,” Joe said in a low voice to the women. “He’s going to see where the guys he’s suspicious of, head. He’ll stay close enough that if they come in here, he can dash in to help; if not, he said he’ll follow them for a bit, to see what they do.
“You ladies may as well get on with the shopping for Sarah’s niece. The more normal we act, the better, is my guess.”
Jillian nodded.
“And, Sarah, try not to even think about that Stone hanging between your breasts,” she said. “If your use of it is what alerted those dirt-bags to your presence....” She did not finish the thought.
Sarah nodded. She inhaled deeply.
“Okay, Jill, help me pick out something for the baby, and if they have something that would serve a new mother, I’ll get that at the same time, and we can run home to Papa at the Port before you guys get hit over the head with something, and I get abducted.”
She wanted to weep. To feel so helpless in the face of—what, exactly?—was dispiriting. What did she have to do to stop being a target?
*****
“What the frig?” Texi heard one of the men say in Terran Standard speech. “Where’d she go? I’m sure I caught sight of her—she’s a pale, little black-haired thing, and there were three people surrounding her: one brown-skinned off-worlder woman, and two big guys that I didn’t get a good look at. An elusive brat, she is, that’s for frigging sure!”
He was not using swear words—Texi had heard enough of those from Joe, and other Port workers, to know most of them—but his tone of voice was such that he might as well have been.
“Have you got the little detector thingy on?” his companion asked. “Can’t it zero in to her witchy stone? Isn’t that the whole point of it?”
“Only when she’s using it,” the first fellow replied. “That’s how I picked up on her in the first place—I guess that she decided to do some witch work while walking around on city streets, the stupid femme. Thinks that she’s safe as houses on the streets of Trahea! Then she used it again, and that’s when I was able to pick her out—I wasn’t guessing any more. That was her, the Mackenzie girl; I’m sure of it. It was no regular Witch; those creepy ladies always wear their robes when they’re out in public!”
“And we’re not to interfere with them,” the other man said. “Too dangerous. That could bring down the wrath of the Seven Circles upon us. But they’re not likely to care much about one part-Terran girl. And the Confederation men are all cowards, Agency or no Agency.”
“She and her buddies probably went into one of the shops,” the first man muttered. “Well, maybe if we wait around for a while, they’ll come out. And, surely, she’ll make the mistake of activating her stone again. Be ready to pounce, Rammer.”
So the jerks had not got a good look at Joe or himself, Texi thought. He had pressed his fair-sized bulk into an alcove beside a shop door, to listen, when he had realized that the two men were slowing down to a stop. It ought to be okay, then, for him to casually retrace his steps to Marika’s, to warn Sarah not to use her amarto, and to find out if Marika had a back door which she’d allow her customers to use to get out without being seen.
After a moment’s thought he dropped the confident demeanour that he had developed since training as a flyer pilot and mechanic, and took on the slightly shuffling persona of a servant who worked for one of the wealthy locals. Then he stepped out of the alcove, and walked by the two men, looking up at them slyly, like a curious member of the underclass. The off-worlders glanced at him contemptuously, while he did the best job of memorizing their faces that he could manage. Then he shuffled on up to the Infant Apparel store. Once inside, he straightened his form to its usual contours.
“What the hell?” Joe asked. “Playacting something, Texi?”
Joe had been guarding the door, keeping an eye on all who came through it.
Texi grinned.
“Just making sure that those jerks didn’t recognize me—though I heard them say that they didn’t get a good look at you or me, only the women. But we better warn Sarah not to use her Stone; those louts have some gadget that can zero in on her when she’s attuned to it.”
&nb
sp; “Jill already mentioned the possibility that the use of her Stone had drawn those jerks to her, and she agreed that it might be so,” Joe said. “I think that she’s going to avoid activating it. Did they leave, or are they coming in here?”
“Neither. They don’t know which store she’s in, so they’re waiting outside, and plan to surprise us when we step out. So we’ll have to persuade Marika to let us go out her back door, and detour a ways to avoid a nasty set-to.
“Hope the ladies manage to finish their shopping here at Marika’s. Seems like it’s not the best of days for Coryn’s protégé to be out on the streets of Trahea.”
*****
“I don’t know how much more I can take,” Sarah said when the foursome had arrived at Coryn’s office for a debriefing. “I’ve begun to feel like the proverbial bird in a gilded cage—with the cat snapping at my feathers just outside.”
Coryn who had left his desk to pace the floor, stopped beside her chair and gave her shoulder a quick pat.
“Hang in there, Sarah,” he said. “You’ve manoeuvred your way out of more difficult situations.”
Then he turned to Texi:
“You said that you heard the two guys—I assume that they are, in reality, Organization Hounds—talk about a little detector thingy, that can attune to an amarto when it is being used?”
“That’s what they said,” Texi iterated. “That was after Sarah, Jillian and Joe had slipped into the shop, and I’d decided to find out whatever I could. The men had realized that Sarah was no longer in sight, and were trying to figure out where she had gone. One of them asked the other if the detector thingy was on, and the other one said that, yes, of course, but that it only ‘picked up the Mackenzie girl when she was using her amarto’. She had used it twice; that’s what had alerted them to her presence.”
“And you avoided using it after that,” Coryn said to Sarah. “What were you doing with it in the first place?”
“Just the sort of a simple scan that I was taught during my lessons. Something the Witches do when they assume that they are in hostile territory.” Sarah bit her lip. “A mental scan of the environs, you could call it.
“The first time I got no result, and, therefore, was expecting the same the second time. But then I got a blast of hate coming at me, from behind us, so strong that I nearly stumbled.”
“Texi figured out the most likely source,” added Jillian. “I asked him to check things out visually, since he knows Trahea, and could judge if something looked not right.”
“Those two guys’ behaviour was definitely off,” Texi said. “They barrelled towards us, but then they rushed right by Marika’s door after my companions had slipped inside. I stayed outside and watched them. When they started talking to one another, it sounded to me like they were cursing, but they actually weren’t—they were very careful not to use swear words. I think I know all, or, at least, most, of the Terran Standard cuss words, having hung around the Port workshops for a long time, and not a single one of them came out of those mouths.”
“Low level Hounds, then,” Coryn said, leaving off his pacing, and throwing himself back into the chair behind his desk. “Careful to follow The Organization rules of conduct—no swearing permitted at the lower caste levels. It likely would have been a real coup for them to abduct the very amarto-sensitive Sarah Mackenzie off a Trahea street, and to spirit her off to the main home world, to be harnessed to some machine.
“They aren’t what worries me; I expected to run into at least a few of their kind, sooner or later. What is troublesome is the fact that they had the detector. There must be lots of those in existence, for two Hounds, cruising the streets of Trahea, to have one in their kit-bag.”
“You’re saying that you don’t like the speed at which The Organization technology seems to be developing?” Jillian asked. “They’re forging ahead too fast, you think?”
Coryn nodded.
“You got it,” he said. “There’s the Camin 001 doppelganger, for one thing. And the amarto-detector that the Hounds were using on the Planet of the Amartos was a primitive-looking thing. For The Organization to have made the leap from that to having a bunch of small gadgets, each one of which can zero in on a talent using her Stone, is, at the very least, surprising.”
“Maybe it’s time to stop assuming that they’re not capable of creative thinking,” commented Jillian. “That’s been kind of the received wisdom all over the Confederation,” she added for Texi’s benefit. “A comment you always hear is that ‘The Organization originates nothing; all its advances are stuff they’ve stolen from us’.”
“We’d be fools to depend on conventional wisdom,” Coryn agreed. “The Organization is probably less of a monolith than the powers that run it would ever acknowledge. There are, I’m confident, corners where original thought thrives, and for all their attempts to deny the existence of such, one thing you can be sure of, is that The Organization powers-that-be will embrace anything useful to them that may come out of those corners.
“What we need is to get our hands on one of those gadgets. Only, how do we go about that? And even if we succeed in getting one, can we make a useful study of it?”
“It occurred to me to wonder if the detector wasn’t, maybe as a side-effect, amplifying the emotions of the person using it,” Sarah said, the matter-of-fact tone of the discussion having eased her tension somewhat. “Because what I got that second time I used my Stone, was just a really strong blast of hate and anger. Way more than what Texi’s description of their behaviour warrants.”
“Yeah, the two of them didn’t strike me as more than normally loutish,” Texi concurred. “Assholes, yes, but no worse than many I’ve run into before this.”
“Hm. That’s definitely something for us to keep in mind. And, possibly, to query the respected ladies of Ferhil Stones on. They might have some idea of how that sort of thing would work.”
Coryn had found his equilibrium again. There was work that needed to be done, regardless of what his emotions—and hormones—were doing. And, after all, one of the objects of the work was to ensure Sarah’s safety.
“Maybe, if we go drinking and dancing later tonight in the Trade City, Texi and I can try to grab that dratted gadget for you, Coryn,” Joe piped up. “If Sarah’s willing to lure those two jerks into whatever bar we’ll be in, and since Texi knows what they look like, he and I could roll those fellows in the back alley, stun them, and empty their pockets. They’d probably think that they’d been attacked by some run-of-the-mill crooks, stealing money for their next hit of dream-leaf.
“What you think, Texi? Are you up for it?”
The two bulky young men grinned at one another gleefully. Obviously they were both up for it!
“You know, that’s just crazy enough a plan that it might work,” Coryn said with a chuckle. “It needs your wives’ okay, though, and I’d like to see slightly better odds for our side than two big guys with stunners versus two other big guys with who knows what weapons. I can’t join you fellows in the hi-jinks, since I’m a rather visible figure, these days. The upshot being that I’ll approve the audacious scheme if the spouses are okay with it, and if we can get another couple of men to act as back-up.”
He sounded regretful about having to pass on the opportunity to get physical.
Jillian, meanwhile, groaned out loud.
“Far be it from me to try to talk sense into a joker who grew up on Paxic IV,” she muttered.
“Hey, Agent Jillian, you’re not the only one in this marriage who has the right to take risks in the course of duty,” Joe protested. “I kind of enjoy my role as an auxiliary to the Liaison Office.”
Jillian groaned again.
“That’s obvious,” she said. “Just be careful, Joe. It so happens that I’m kind of fond of you, and want to keep you around for a long time to come.
“But, Texi, what will Nance say?”
“Nance will be delighted if I bring her along to the bar. She’s okay with all my work; we
’re doing pretty well on account of it, after all.”
“Hey that’s cool if Nance is coming,” Sarah said. “I haven’t had the honour of meeting her as yet.”
“She may seem a little standoffish towards you at first, Sarah,” Texi said. “Kindly take it in your stride. She hasn’t developed Port mannerism, since she works for one of the merchants on Main Street, and doesn’t have many occasions for mixing with the off-worlders. To her you’re an Apprentice Witch, and the Witches are to be held in awe.”
“Oh dear. That’s gonna be a bit tough on the scrawny ship mechanic from the Port of Laurentia,” Sarah sighed.
“But, if we’re more or less finished here, I guess I better go and buy some gift wrap from one of the Port shops, and get my sister’s stuff ready to catch the next shipment in the direction of Earth. It’d be nice if the things got to her before the baby makes her debut.”
She heaved her shopping back off the floor, and onto Coryn’s desk.
“You’ll have to take a glance and give your opinion, though, Coryn. You’re the last person here to have laid eyes on Maris. What do you think, will she be okay with them? I think Jill’s a genius shopper, but then, maybe I’m not the best judge.”
The baby clothes in Kordean patterns were exquisite, Coryn saw. And the knitted shawl for Maris herself was obviously a one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted gem.
“They’re beautiful,” Coryn opined. “Your sister will love them. But....” He hesitated. “They couldn’t have been cheap—are you okay with finances, being a student?”
“Yes, Papa.” Sarah grinned, but there was a touch of defiance in the expression. “I haven’t had much chance to spend the money I earned on XER, or among the Explorers. There was nothing worth buying on XER, and the Planet of Amartos was sorely lacking in shopping opportunities, too.”
Jillian was giggling in the background.
“You’re not going to learn to be a hot-shot shopper in places like that,” she said. “And let me guess; there’s nothing to spend money on at, or around, Ferhil Stones, either!”
Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea Page 6
