Linesman

by S. K. Dunstall

  Rossi inclined his head. He understood. Clearly.

  • • •

  HE considered, momentarily, keeping it between himself and Rickenback, but House of Rickenback couldn’t take on Sandhurst on its own.

  “Book me a meeting with Naidan,” he ordered Fergus when he was back in his rooms. “A private meeting. And I want you to come.” If anyone could find out what Sandhurst was doing, it would be Fergus.

  He should have stipulated no food, but by the time he realized it was in the same private dining room as their initial meeting, they were there. Let Fergus sit near the wine spray then.

  “You’re becoming as bad as Grimes,” Naidan accused when she saw Fergus. “Bringing members of your own house to every meeting.”

  “Hardly.” Rossi felt better than he had in months. Maybe this was all he’d needed—something to take his mind off the confluence. “He has no lines, remember. Besides, I want him to do something for us, and I see no point repeating everything.” He smiled, and raised his glass of Lancastrian wine in salute. “Why don’t you invite Eda? Save you repeating everything later, and she might be of use to us as well.”

  So they waited while Naidan’s assistant was called and came in from what looked to be a formal function. Rossi ordered another glass of wine while they waited and had nearly finished that by the time she arrived. He raised his glass to her. “Sweetheart.”

  She scowled at him.

  “You finally made it.”

  “This had better be important, Jordan.” Eda was like her boss, not one to suffer fools.

  “We shall see,” Rossi said, the wine making him mellow. “We shall see.”

  He summarized for them what he’d learned. “We’re not the only ones worried about Sandhurst’s trying to take over the cartels. Gate Union is worried, too, because there is a faction inside Gate Union helping them.”

  He could see that the news had rocked them, except Fergus, who always knew things weeks before anyone else did and had already pointed out Hurst’s new friendship with Roscracia.

  “Gate Union doesn’t get involved in cartel business,” Naidan said frostily and almost sounded as if she believed it.

  Rossi didn’t even bother to deny it. “They are also very interested in Rebekah Grimes’s whereabouts.”

  “Half the galaxy is looking for the ship she’s on,” Naidan said. “The media will find her, and soon.”

  “Plus they knew she wasn’t coming here even though she omitted to tell us where she was going.”

  “Do you think she knew she wasn’t coming here?” Eda asked.

  She’d known. Part of it at least. Otherwise, she would have met Lady Lyan at the confluence itself, and why would Gate Union have seeded Lady Lyan’s ship with three spies? Which must have been quite a feat in itself, given Commodore Galenos’s reputation.

  Rossi ordered himself another glass of wine. “The union offered us a deal. We provide information about the whereabouts of la Dame Grimes as soon as we know it, plus any extra information about what she is doing, and it will help us defeat Sandhurst.”

  “How?” Eda demanded, and Naidan asked at the same time, “So what did you tell them?”

  The wine arrived. Green Lancian wine. It was the only wine that would do given their conversation. He raised his glass.

  “I accepted the deal, of course.”

  NINE

  EAN LAMBERT

  EAN HAD AS much luck with the ship as Rebekah, which was absolutely none.

  “Maybe you should put me in a lifeboat and send me closer,” he suggested.

  Bhaksir, who turned out to be in charge again, vetoed his suggestion. “Not unless Commodore Galenos okays it first.”

  Maybe he would, but not while the media was here. For the moment, the media knew it was a ship, but they didn’t know what it could do. Seeing a ship fried—no matter how small the ship—would change that.

  • • •

  HE was quiet on the trip back. He’d wanted to prove himself, to show that he could be useful. If he was honest, he’d wanted to prove he was better than Rebekah, that he could do things she couldn’t. That wasn’t going to happen.

  And why should it? If he was even more honest, he had no real right here. Rebekah was the one they had chosen. He was just lucky to be alive. Michelle had gone in intending to kill him. Let him not forget that. Michelle might appear kind and personable, but she had deliberately set out to kill a man in cold blood for revenge.

  Yet Ean still wanted to impress her. Impress Abram, too. Even though they were Lancastrian, and he had never expected to ever want to impress someone from his home world.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. The medic wanted him off the ship before the next jump. The captain wanted him gone, too. Both his employers—Abram and Michelle—were hard enough and realistic enough to do it. And they were prepared to destroy him as a linesman in pursuit of their goals. Even if he did come up with something, would anyone believe him anyway? Rebekah thought he was crazy. Even his stupid thoughts about the way the ship sounded like the confluence had turned out to be wild fantasy. Radko had proven that when she talked the same way about the normal lines Ean had sung.

  Bhaksir came over to sit beside him. “No one expects the linesmen to work this far out.”

  Ean managed a smile. Was he that transparent? “Thanks.”

  • • •

  ABRAM gave them an hour. “Eat first, then we’ll discuss what’s happened so far before we send Rebekah out again.”

  It turned out to be a major mealtime. Breakfast, Ean realized. He’d been up all night. No wonder he was so depressed. He should wash, he supposed, or at least shave—or depilate—but he went in to get something to eat instead.

  Rebekah, of course, ignored him. He only looked for her the once. It would have been nice to know what she thought of her trip. He’d find out in an hour, he supposed. Sometimes it would be nice to talk to someone who was experiencing the same things he was.

  Because he was feeling lonely, he joined Katida and Heyington again. They were watching the vids, two big screens on at the same time, one showing Galactic News, the other showing Blue Sky.

  “Are they back already?”

  Line communication within a sector was instantaneous, but if you wanted to transmit between sectors, you either had to wait for regular communications jump ship—which out here would probably be every ten days, at best—or jump into a more populous sector. For a story like this, the media ships would jump and come back afterward.

  “They haven’t been yet,” Katida said. “Which is somewhat worrying. They should be back by now with more reporters in tow.” She frowned at the screen. “I wish we knew what was keeping them here.”

  Ean had a horrible feeling he might know, and it had to do with the deal he’d made with the ships. Both ships had agreed not to move past the boundary. Maybe they took that as “don’t move at all.”

  “The ships are broadcasting,” he said. “Maybe they have a comms ship elsewhere in the sector.”

  “Their news is not going out of this sector,” Katida said.

  How did she know that?

  “They’re preaching to the converted. Us and any space tramps this far off the usual routes.”

  “Space tramps?”

  “Free traders. We are so far off the regular lanes here, I’m surprised anyone found the ship to start with.”

  He’d never heard them called space tramps, but it suited. Free traders lived on the edge of civilization, digging through out-of-the-way places, always hoping for the next big find. They had their ships—mostly old and patched together—but they couldn’t get regular work. Ean had heard that some of them didn’t even have lines above six on their ships.

  A free trader would probably have found the ship and sold that information to Haladea. Was he rich now? More likely dead. It wasn’t infor
mation anyone wanted spread around.

  Katida put an arm around his shoulders. “I haven’t seen you all night,” she said. “And you and I are both going off duty soon.” How did she know that? “Why don’t we use some of that recreational time profitably?”

  He wasn’t sure she even wanted to. There was none of the spark of the first night. Tarkan Heyington, ever faithful by her side, was exhibiting more sexual tension. And he was dressed for it, too, in a tubular top that came around under his arms and laced up at the front, leaving his arms and shoulders bare. It would have looked good on someone like Michelle, but on the Tarkan it just bulged. Why did some people dress for fashion even when it never looked good? One of the twos at House of Rigel had dressed the same way when she went out. On her it had been because she genuinely didn’t know what looked good or bad. But then, who was Ean to talk? He didn’t know much better although he did know what looked bad on Tarkan Heyington. Maybe Heyington still saw himself as thin.

  Katida smiled at him. A curve of her lips; the warmth didn’t reach her eyes.

  Ean thought about calling her bluff but knew she would go through with it whether she wanted to or not. She was that sort of woman.

  “Why do you do it, even when you don’t want to?”

  She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “You’re a ten.”

  She was an eight even though she didn’t wear eight bars on her pocket. He could hear the lines vibrating in her now. She was more nervous than she had been last time he’d spoken to her. More worried.

  “So why not nines?” If she slept with them because they were higher lines than her, then why didn’t she sleep with nines as well? One of the threes at Rigel’s house slept only with fours and above. Ean had never slept with her although he’d heard tales of others who had. Wild tales.

  Katida’s eyes narrowed.

  Ean bit into eggs and toast, so he wouldn’t have to answer if she asked anything.

  “Because they are tens,” Heyington said. “Because they’re the ultimate line.” He put a soft hand onto Ean’s knee.

  Ean moved it off.

  Katida pretended to watch the news after that, but Ean knew she wasn’t paying any attention to it because the tea in her glass didn’t go down at all.

  Or maybe, he thought, as he helped himself to another glass to go, it was simply that the tea tasted bad. It was the first bad food he’d had on the whole ship. It was so bad it made him queasy. He placed the glass on one of the clearing trays as he left the room.

  • • •

  THE meeting didn’t turn up anything new.

  Ean found it hard to concentrate. The night, and the day before, were catching up with a vengeance. All he wanted to do was sleep.

  The tea had left a bitter taste in his mouth. He ran his tongue around his teeth to try to clean them. It didn’t work. Finally, he had to excuse himself to go to the bathroom so that he could wash the taste out of his mouth. That didn’t work either. He leaned his forehead against the basin. Maybe he could go to sleep here, and when he woke up, the awful taste would be gone.

  He took so long Michelle came to find him.

  “Sorry.” Ean straightened up. “Just tired,” he said, and wished there was some way to stop making a fool of himself in front of Michelle and Abram. “Everything’s catching up.” He followed her back to the meeting room and knew he was walking like a drunkard.

  After the meeting, he made straight for his room and was asleep before he even fell onto the bed.

  • • •

  EAN dreamed that a monster of noise came out of nowhere and swamped the ship. It was aimed at the lines, at line six in particular, but was indiscriminate and sliced all the other lines from one to seven as well.

  He dreamed that he couldn’t wake up to stop it.

  Line six was destroyed, and in his dream all Ean could do was sing the fragments of noise together and place them somewhere safe, for later. “I’ll fix you when I can,” he promised. They came, because they trusted him, because he had fixed them before, and waited where he told them to wait.

  He dreamed—distorted through the badly damaged line one—that Captain Helmo was coming for him, rage and grief making their own song as he strode purposefully through the ship. “I am going to kill him.”

  He couldn’t wake up.

  Through the distorted line one dream he saw the captain come into his cabin. He really was going to kill him. It took Abram and Michelle and two more guards together to pull him off.

  “What has he done?” Abram asked.

  He still couldn’t wake up.

  They called the medic.

  Captain Helmo tried to kill him again while they waited, and even with four people holding him off, he nearly succeeded. Ean’s dreaming self pondered that there might be some truth about the story that captains went mad when their ships did. He couldn’t move, even as the captain’s fingers closed around his throat.

  This was one horrible dream.

  Then he did wake up, with the medic’s scowling face above him. “Triphene,” the medic said. “Probably administered it to himself after he did it to give himself an alibi. Although why anyone would use triphene is beyond me. It tastes foul.”

  Ean hardly heard him. The clamor of the damaged lines got into his head. His put his hands over his ears, but it didn’t shut the noise out.

  Line six was silent. It could have been dead, except that Ean could still hear the fragments in that special place he’d put them to keep them safe.

  He wasn’t sure if he was awake or if this was still the dream.

  “I have to fix the lines.” His throat was sore, and he had no voice. Was that from being strangled or from singing line six?

  “You’re not touching the lines.” Captain Helmo’s voice was as raw as his.

  They took him back to the central office Michelle and Abram shared. This time he was definitely under arrest. There were at least ten guards, plus Abram, Michelle, Captain Helmo, and the medic. It was a squeeze. Why didn’t they just take him to the jail?

  Michelle was the only one who sat down. Ean couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “Did you do it?” Abram asked.

  The broken lines of the ship reverberated in Ean’s head, so he could hardly concentrate. He shook his head.

  Captain Helmo seemed to have lost his murderous rage, at least. “Of course he did it. He’s the only person on the ship capable of it.”

  “There is one other,” Abram said.

  “Two,” Ean said. Katida could have done it.

  They didn’t seem to have heard him, and he was glad about that. He didn’t want to get Katida into trouble.

  “She was off ship at the time.”

  “Not that far off ship,” Abram said.

  She was fifty kilometers away from an alien spaceship right now. Then Ean glanced at the time and realized that less than forty-five minutes had passed since their meeting had finished. She had probably just arrived.

  “And since the lines are gone, we cannot ask what Linesman Grimes was doing at the exact time of the impending problem.”

  Rebekah Grimes would never destroy the lines. Not like this. It was against the cartels’ code of conduct. She had a reputation to uphold. Which only left Admiral Katida, Ean supposed, and if Katida had slipped the triphene into his tea, then the medic was right. It tasted foul.

  “It’s hard to believe that someone who refused to break the lines on another ship would do so on his own,” Abram said. He looked tired. “Let’s see the security from his room.”

  Communications was line five. Ean winced at the noise as the damaged line came on. So, too, did Captain Helmo. He wasn’t a linesman, Ean could tell that, but he was definitely sensitive to his lines. Abram and Michelle winced, too.

  “I could fix that,” Ean said. “So it didn’t hurt, I mean.�
��

  If looks could kill. “Engineer Tai is giving it his highest priority,” Captain Helmo said stiffly.

  Abram just shook his head.

  They watched the video. From the time Ean had staggered into his room and dropped onto his bed—he’d almost missed—to where the captain had first burst in with Abram and Michelle behind him.

  Ean didn’t need Abram’s soft, “Attack starts now,” to see when the attack started. He could tell by the way his body suddenly convulsed. He started to shake, knowing what was coming, knowing that he couldn’t stop it.

  The figure on the bed struggled, and Ean hugged his arms close at the helplessness of it. Couldn’t the idiot even move?

  Then—still prone on the bed—he started to sing.

  Ean looked down at the floor. No one would believe what the song was for. Not while they believed he’d destroyed the lines.

  “I’ve never seen anyone do that under triphene,” the medic said. “Maybe he wasn’t under at the time.”

  Abram turned to look at him. “How long does the drug take to kick in?”

  “Why, depending on the dosage up to an hour if he takes it alone. Ten, fifteen minutes if he takes a stimulant.”

  From their point of view, he’d had ample opportunity. He’d even spent such a long time in the bathroom that Michelle had come looking for him. Ean didn’t look at anyone. He didn’t say anything. Anything he said would incriminate him further.

  The whole thing—from Ean’s flopping onto the bed to Captain Helmo bursting in—was over in less than twenty minutes. It had taken longer to get the medic to come and dedrug him to wake him up.

  After it was over, Abram turned to Ean. “And your version?”

  He nearly asked what was the use. Who else could possibly have done it? But that was being stupid, and the longer they delayed, the harder it would be to fix the ship.

  “I drank some tea at breakfast. It tasted foul, so I only had one mouthful. After that, I went to the meeting. The tea left a bad taste, so I went to the bathroom.” He might as well mention that, because they would. “Then, when the meeting was over, I went to bed.”