by David Drake
"There'll be time for that after we've taken the Montreal," Stephen said. "Or it won't matter."
Piet gave a nonchalant shrug. "We'll take her," he said. "And return home, with the help of God."
He looked at Alicia, smiled, and bowed slightly. "I think I'll go aboard and see how the repairs are coming," he said. "Mistress Leeman, I've appreciated your company."
"I'll go along with you, Piet," Stephen said. "Maybe I'll bunk in the ship tonight."
He gave me a wan smile. The two of them walked in step toward the Oriflamme, though I'm sure neither was attempting to match strides. They were as different as an oyster and its shell; and as much akin.
I opened the wicket into the Commandatura garden for Alicia.
"Captain Ricimer really believes in what you're doing," she said softly. Roses perfumed the air. There were lights in the far wing of the building, but the garden seemed to be empty. "But Mister Gregg doesn't."
"I think Stephen believes the same things as Piet does," I said. "I just don't think he cares very much."
"He frightens me," she said.
Stephen would never kill anyone by accident, I thought; but Alicia understood too much for that to sound reassuring to her. "He's a good friend to Commander Ricimer," I said. "Not a very good friend to himself, though."
I paused to twist off a rose. Its deep pink glowed like a diamond's heart with the last of the sunset. I broke the thorns off sideways with the tip of my thumb, then handed the flower to Alicia.
She giggled and put the stem behind her ear. Flying creatures as big as gulls swooped and climbed over the river. Their calls were surprisingly musical.
Alicia turned at her cottage's new door—a panel of raw wood that Molt workmen had fitted the evening before. "You're a very gentlemanly pirate, aren't you?" she said. "You could easily have forced me to—whatever you chose."
I shrugged. My skin was tingling. "I respect you too much for that," I said. I respect myself too much. Again, though I don't lie when I can avoid it, one chooses the particular truth he speaks aloud.
"A girl doesn't always want to be respected quite so much," Alicia said. My arms were around her by the middle of the sentence, and my lips muffled the final word.
* * *
Near morning, as I was starting to dress to be gone before dawn, Alicia told me about Secretary Duquesne's personal cache of chips in a pit beneath the floor of the garden shed.
TREHINGA
Day 114
"Here's the whores you wanted, Mister Moore," Lightbody said in a tone that could have been forged on an anvil. He gestured Patten and Vantine into the walled office I'd taken for this interview. Baer stood behind the women with a cutting bar.
Because the Federation soldiers wore trousers and had hired on to fight, Lightbody called them whores, thought of them as whores. He treated Alicia with the deference due a lady; and she was a lady, as surely as I was a gentleman, but the twists of Lightbody's mind disturbed me at a basic level nonetheless.
The Oriflamme fired a matched pair of attitude jets in the field outside. The hull repairs were complete. Piet and Guillermo were doing the final workup. We'd lift by evening, so it was time for me to act.
"You can take their hands loose, Lightbody," I said. The women were filthy. Facilities in the slave pen were limited to a trough, buckets, and mud. Twice so far we'd had rain before dawn, and the yellow adobe clay was everything I'd expected it to be.
Were conditions reversed, Secretary Duquesne would have us hanged out of hand—unless he directed Patten and Vantine to torture us to death instead. I didn't think of this pair as whores. More like vicious dogs, to be trusted only in their malice.
Lightbody looked doubtful, but he opened the knots on the women's wrists with the spike of his clasp knife. He held his shotgun out to the side where the prisoners couldn't easily grab it. "You'll want us to stay in here with you then, sir?" he suggested.
I shook my head. "No," I said, "I want to have a friendly talk in private. Close the door and wait outside."
The two sailors obeyed, but I could tell they didn't think much of the idea. To reassure them, I laid my cutting bar on top of the desk I was using, with its grip ready for my hand.
I'd chosen the office of the Clerk of Customs because the room was private and it had a large window. I wanted the light behind me for this interview. The clerk—the older of the pair who'd come out to the cutter initially—had decorated the walls with wood carvings. Molt workmanship, I supposed. The pieces were intricate, but I didn't find them attractive.
The women glared at me with caged fury. Their white tunics were sallow with dried mud, and their faces weren't much cleaner.
I waited for the next pair of jets to finish their screaming test, then said, "You can sit down." I gestured to the chairs against the wall behind the women.
"What do you want from us?" Vantine demanded in a voice which broke with anger.
"Help," I said. "For which I'm willing to pay."
They were making it easy for me, though I'd have carried through in any case. I'd seen this pair in action the morning we arrived. No amount of feigned contrition now would have changed the decision I'd made.
"And if we don't agree, you're going to threaten us with that toy?" Patten said, nodding toward my cutting bar. "I ought to feed it to you!"
"No threat," I said. I picked up the bar and waited a moment. If Lightbody and Baer heard the blade whine, they'd burst in on us.
The Oriflamme fired two more attitude jets. I triggered the bar and shaved the corner off the desk. I laid the weapon down again.
"This is so that you won't make the mistake of attacking me," I said. "If you did, I'd—"
Another part of my mind started to fog my conscious intelligence. My voice was husky and very soft.
"—cut you into so many pieces that they'd have to fill your coffins by weight." I swallowed. "And I don't want that, I want a friendly conversation, that's all."
The part of me that hid behind the red fog, the part that had been in control at the Molt temple and was almost in control just a moment before—that part very much wanted another chance to kill.
The women had straightened as I spoke. Their faces were expressionless, and the earlier bluster was gone.
"What do you want?" Vantine repeated quietly.
"We'll be lifting for Quincy soon," I said. I was all right again, though my hands still trembled. "We're hoping to meet Our Lady of Montreal there." I smiled. "If not there, then we'll catch her farther on. It depends on how long she lays over on Fleur de Lys. But before we leave Trehinga, I'd like to find the treasure stored here."
The women looked at one another cautiously, then back to me. Patten massaged her right thigh through her dirty trousers.
"There's no chips, no artifacts here," Vantine said. She was more afraid of keeping silent than of speaking. "Trehinga wasn't settled before the Collapse. There's nothing but wheat."
"I can't imagine that a man like Secretary Duquesne doesn't have a private hoard," I said. "I don't know what sort of favors he's trading to the ships' captains who land here, but there'll be something. He'll be building up a store so that when he retires to Earth he has something better than a Federation pension to support him. Chips are the most likely, but maybe pre-Collapse artifacts smuggled from other planets, sure."
"We don't," Vantine said very carefully, "know anything about that." She watched me the way a rabbit watches a snake.
Attitude jets—the last pair of the morning, unless Piet saw a need to retest—fired. The sound wasn't so loud that I couldn't have talked over it, but the three-second pause was useful.
"I'd pay you each a hundred Mapleleafs if you showed me where the cache was," I said. I held up a pair of twelve-sided coins bearing President Pleyal's face toward the women.
The paymaster's safe on the opposite side of the Commandatura contained a fair amount of currency. As Piet had promised, we weren't robbing the businessfolk of Trehinga, but the Federati
on government was another matter.
The women stared at me. Patten began to laugh. "Are you crazy?" she said. She regained her composure. "Do you think we're crazy? We lead you to Duquesne's personal stash, and then you go off and leave us here? Do you have any idea what he'd do to us then?"
I shrugged. "I've got a notion, yeah," I said. "Open the door, would you please?"
Vantine obeyed. Her companion's laughter was half bravado, but Vantine was clearly terrified. She'd sensed . . . not, I think, what was about to happen, but that something was about to happen.
Lightbody raised his shotgun's muzzles when he saw everything was calm. "Baer," I said, "go out and gather as many of our off-duty people as you can in five minutes. Into the garden. And tell the locals to come, too. There'll be some entertainment."
"What are you doing, sir?" Lightbody said as Baer ran down the corridor shouting.
"For the moment," I said, "you and I wait here with the ladies. Then we'll go out to the garden too."
I put my hand on the cutting bar. I was shaking so badly that the blade rattled on the desk and I had to put it down. Patten was silent, and Vantine was as gray as if someone was nailing her wrists to a cross.
* * *
There were easily a hundred people in the garden when we came out—me in front, the prisoners behind, and last of all Lightbody with the shotgun. I'd had him tie Patten's right wrist to Vantine's left while we waited. They couldn't escape, but it was important that they not be seen to try. "Hey, Mister Moore!" Kiley called from the crowd. "Do they take their clothes off now?"
I waved with a grin; but the joke made me think of Jeude, and the grin congealed.
The Molt gardener stood on one leg, rasping the other one nervously against his carapace as he watched people brush his precious roses. Because of the thorns, the bushes weren't likely to be trampled; but sure, some sailor might clear more room with his cutting bar.
Funny to think of a Molt worrying about Terran roses on one of the Back Worlds. In those terms, most of life seemed pretty silly, though. I suppose that's where religion comes in, for those who can believe in a god.
I waved my bar ahead of me to make a path. A lot of those present were locals, as I'd hoped, but they kept to the edges of the courtyard. The central walkway and an arc facing the back of the Commandatura were filled with Venerians. More spectators streamed in through the wickets beside the building and the larger gate onto Water Street.
Baer had done a good job, though I wasn't quite sure how he'd managed it so quickly. I'd wanted a big enough gathering that word would spread at once throughout the community, but this was ideal.
Alicia's jalousies were lowered; she would be watching from behind them. I'd told her she should at all costs stay hidden this morning.
"What are we doing?" Vantine asked over the chatter of the crowd.
"Keep moving, whore!" Lightbody snapped. I suspected he prodded Vantine with the gun as he spoke.
"None of that!" I ordered. "The ladies are helping us."
As I turned my head to speak, I saw that Piet and Stephen had come out the back of the Commandatura. They were following us.
The storage shed was padlocked. I sheared the hasp off in twinkling sparks. A bit remained hanging from the staple. I flicked it away with the tip of the cutting bar: the steel would be just below red heat from friction.
Stephen reached past and slid the door open. He grinned in a way that was becoming familiar, but he didn't ask any questions.
The shed's floor was wooden and raised a few centimeters from the ground. Tools optimized for Molt hands, crates, a coil of fencing, and other impedimenta were stacked around the walls, but the two square meters in the center of the shed were clear.
There'd be a catch hidden somewhere, but I wasn't going to hunt for it. I swept my bar in an arc through the flooring. Nails pinged bitterly within the cloud of sawdust; the head of one bounced from my shin.
I stepped forward, turned, and drew the reverse arc. The crowd outside was pushing for a better view, but Stephen planted himself in the doorway to keep people out of my blade's way. Patten and Vantine watched in dawning awareness.
Stringers gave. The rough circle of floor fell with a crackle under my weight. I kicked the fragments of lumber aside.
A rectangular steel door measuring a meter by eighty centimeters was set in concrete where there should have been bare soil. I gripped my bar with both hands.
"Jeremy?" Piet Ricimer called.
I looked up. Piet handed Stephen the white silk kerchief he'd worn around his neck. "Cover Jeremy's eyes," he said.
Stephen knotted the silk behind my head. I saw through a white haze. The doorplate had no keyhole, but the hinges were external.
"We didn't—" Patten shouted at the top of her voice, but the scream of my bar cutting metal drowned her out.
A rooster tail of white sparks cascaded to either side of the bar's tip, pricking my bare hands and charring trails of smoke from the wood they landed on. A chip of steel flicked my forehead. Momentary pain, gone almost as soon as I jerked my head.
"Step back, Jeremy," Stephen ordered. His arm kept me from stumbling on the wood floor that I'd forgotten.
I was shaking with effort and my tunic was soaked. I'd been holding the cutting bar as though it supported me over a chasm. I pulled the kerchief off so that I could breathe freely, then mopped my face with it.
There were three black-edged holes in the silk. I wouldn't have thought of covering my eyes.
Stephen kicked the door with his bootheel, aiming for the concealed lock. The plate rang. This wasn't a real safe, just a protected hiding place. The second time Stephen stamped down, the back of the lid where I'd sheared the hinges sprang up.
The lid was more than two centimeters thick. Stephen lifted it by the edges with his fingertips. He tossed it past me into a corner of the shed.
"We didn't have anything to do with this!" Patten cried. Vantine hugged herself, shaking as if in a cold wind.
Stephen reached into the opened stash. He came up with a mesh bag of microchips in one hand and what looked like the core of a navigational AI in the other.
He walked out into the sunlight. "There's fifty kilos of chips here!" he shouted to the crowd. There were shouts of awe and surprise, some of them from the local spectators.
I came out with Stephen. "Lightbody," I called loudly, "release these women at once."
Patten tried to hit me. I stepped close and embraced her. I caught a handful of her short hair to keep her from biting my ear in the moment before I backed clear again. Lightbody still didn't understand, but Piet held both women's free elbows from behind so that they couldn't move.
I waved the hundred-Mapleleaf coins so that they caught the sunlight. Vantine was numb. Patten spat at me, but nobody at any distance could see that. Certainly not the locals at the back of the crowd.
"And here's your pay," I said, dropping both coins into Vantine's breast pocket.
There was sick horror in Vantine's eyes. I didn't much like myself, but I'd done what I'd needed to.
At least the pay was fair. The Sanhedrin had only paid thirty pieces of silver to finger a victim for crucifixion.
* * *
"Everybody's aboard, sir," Dole called over the clamor of men claiming bits of shipboard territory after days of freedom to move around. "Smetana was sleeping it off behind Gun One so I didn't see him."
Piet nodded to me. I ran two seconds of feedback through the tannoys as an attention signal, then announced, "Five minutes to liftoff."
I'd told Stephen he should take the right-hand couch since Guillermo was in the Iola, but he'd insisted I sit there instead. At least I could work the commo as well as the Molt could, and it wasn't as though the process of lifting to orbit required a third astrogator.
Piet's screen echoed the settings that Salomon had programmed. Salomon flipped to an alternate value, then flopped back to the original, all the time watching Piet.
"Either," Piet
said with a smile. "But yes, the first, I think, given the Iola's present orbit."
The Oriflamme's displays were razor-sharp, though the lower third of my screen was offset a pixel from the remainder ever since we'd come through the Breach. The population of New Troy watched from buildings and the road.
I could have expanded any individual face to fill the entire screen. That probably wouldn't be a good idea.
Stephen knelt beside my couch. "Have they let Duquesne out of his cage yet?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I don't see any of that lot," I said. I slewed and expanded the slave pen in the field. The prisoners were still there behind razor ribbon. "Maybe the locals are afraid that he'll start shooting and we'll flatten the town."
"Maybe they just don't like the bastard," Stephen replied. He laced his fingers and forced them against the backs of his hands. His face was empty; that of a man you saw sprawled in a gutter. "Lightbody says the pair of women you released stole a boat and headed upriver."
He raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.
Piet leaned toward me. "We've made a preliminary examination of the database you found, Jeremy," he said.
I turned away from Stephen. "Was it valuable?" I asked. "I don't see why it was part of Duquesne's stash."
"Valuable, though perhaps not in market terms," Piet said. "It's a courier chart. It has full navigational data for the Back Worlds and the longer route to the Solar System. The value to us is . . ."
He smiled like an angel. "Perhaps our lives."
"Shall I initiate, sir?" Salomon asked sharply.
Piet's attention returned to the business of planning liftoff. "One minute!" I warned over the PA system.
I swung the magnified view on my screen sideways a touch, focusing on the woman at the wicket beside the Commandatura.
"We couldn't bring her along, you know," Stephen said in a low voice. "Anyone female."
"She didn't ask, did she?" I said. I didn't realize how angry I was until I heard my tone. I started to blank the display, then instead expanded it further. The discontinuity fell just at the point of Alicia's chin.
