by Steve Perry
The local augmentor’s voice was quiet, nearly a hiss: “Shiva!”
“You get faster with practice,” Formentara said.
Then zhe was into the flow, the sensoria of hands-on, mind-on VR that programmers and benders used to access the complexity of augmentation.
Time went away. There was only the now ...
Zhe glanced at the timer’s inset automatically as the fugue ended. Preop done. Six minutes. Not bad. Not hir best, but it was a borrowed board and a scan zhe’d never seen before. And crappy gear. One had to allow for that.
Behind her, the local man stood as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Sweet Durga’s Taut Titties,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Who the fuck are you?”
“I have a little skill,” Formentara said. Hir smile was as sweet as zhe could make it. Had the hook been set?
“Can you show me how to do what you just did?”
“I can.”
“How much? I’ll sell my house if I have to.”
“I just want to ask a few questions, is all.”
“Questions? Shit, ask. If I don’t have the answers, I’ll find somebody who does.”
“Sit,” Formentara said. “Watch, and learn ...”
~ * ~
Gunny had changed into civilian threads, not that anybody who’d ever spent any time in the military would be fooled by that. She knew she had the look, but she softened it a little. If somebody thought she was GU military? She could make that work in her favor.
The gray-on-black synthetics draped in the right places to showcase her body—muting the musculature and accentuating the feminine curves, such that they were. Tight here, loose enough there to hide her SOB-carry, a small pre-charged air pistol. She wore calf-length boots of faux ostrich leather, with a dagger in the right and a hand wand in the left. She’d like a little more hardware, but she was going to a pub, and if things got spewey, she was going to retreat, and all she needed was enough to clear a path. A bunch of pub patrons was not the Chinese Army ...
Not some kind of drop-dead gorgeous fem they’d be lining up to get at, but not so ugly they’d turn away in disgust. Especially after a few ales or hits of herb.
The first pub she’d picked was near the port, but a little off the tourist lanes. Mostly locals, she figured, but the odd soldier or businessperson who went for the booze and food. A good representative place.
She arrived around 2100. The pub, called Lakshmi’s Lair, was moderately crowded. Room for eighty or so, maybe sixty-five there, all humans that she could tell. The place was two cuts above poor, four below rich, a working soul’s watering hole. There were small oval tables and seats, a long bar of what looked to be flame-grained, dark wood, with a line of stools, and rows of bottles, bulbs, nebulizers, and vaporizers behind the three tenders working the bar. Lot of wood construction, what with all the forests on this world.
It smelled like dopesmoke, a pleasant, burning-leaves scent.
Gunny made her way to the bar, ordered one of the tap ales, and turned to look at the room while she sipped on her drink.
Ventilators sucked out much of the smoke from those who indulged in lit hemp or other herbals. There was a mostly happy walla from the patrons, noisy, but not overly so, people having a good time. In her experience, the drunken brawls, if there were going to be any, would generally start later in the evening.
There were two bouncers working the floor, easy to spot from how they moved around, watching for trouble. One of them was short and built like he had molded armor on under his shirt—thick, heavy, but light on his feet.
The other bouncer was taller, muscular, but lithe, and very smooth as he drifted this way and that, making a circuit through the tables and patrons, looking for possible trouble.
Both men had zappers in palm-lock pockets on their right hips.
Good bouncers would get to trouble and shut it down before it cranked up far. A smile, a word, a free drink, and failing those? Fast and economical violence and hustle the offending party out the door.
Gunny sipped at her ale again. Well. Another planet, another pub. Might as well get to work.
She started sizing up the patrons, looking for one she could get into a conversation with. It would be easier as the night wore on; drink loosened a lot of tongues, and the thing was to pick the right talker.
There were official channels but the vox populi was hard to beat for a lot of things. Not always the most accurate information but a feel for what people believed, that was important. What the woman-on-the-street thought went past statistics and got to applied sociology. What do I think? Hey, sister, let me tell you what I think...
There was a trio of soldiers near the back, in street clothes, but obviously military. Not them, she decided. If they mistook her as one of them, it wouldn’t take long to get over that notion—she didn’t know the local postings well enough to fool them. And they’d want more answers than they’d supply.
Hey, you with the cutthroats? What are you really doing here—?
Hey, I hear you are supposed to be hard-asses, is that right? Let’s see how tough you are—
Hey, I never screwed a cutthroat before, want to give it a go—?
Beating the crap out of or shooting three XTJC troopers would be fun, but it wouldn’t get the job done, would it?
There were a few loners at the bar, looking for pickups. Two women, four men, and none of them hitting on each other, so that probably meant either they’d tried and struck out, or they knew each other and weren’t interested. Might be something there.
Lot of couples or trios of various compositions around the room. Possible, but more complicated and probably not worth the effort.
But before she could decide who looked like the best possibility, somebody eased up behind her at the bar. She felt them more than saw them, and she slowly adjusted her position to have a peripheral look.
It was the tall bouncer.
“Evening, fem,” he said.
She smiled. “That it is.” She raised her glass a hair in his direction.
“First time in the Lair?”
“As it happens. How’d you guess?”
“I would have remembered seeing you before.”
She nodded. It was a compliment. She returned it. “I believe you would.”
That got a tight smile. “You on shore leave?”
She looked at him. Nice-looking kid, midtwenties, and either he’d marked her as possible trouble, or maybe somebody he wanted to get to know better.
Hey. There was no rule said you couldn’t talk to the bouncer, right? And as a local working a pub, maybe he was as good a source as any; plus, he wasn’t hard on the eyes.
“In a manner of speaking.”
He waited.
Sometimes the truth worked as well as anything else. What the hell. “I’m with CFI.”
He nodded. “The Rajah’s daughter.”
“Not exactly a secret, is it?”
He smiled. Good teeth. Really was a nice-looking kid.
“Big news, small planet. People talk.”
“Working a pub, you probably hear a lot of that.”
“More than a little, yeah.”
“You ex-military?”
“No. Ex-police.”
Young, for ex-police. She waited.
“Admin and I had our differences. I quit a step ahead of being fired.”
She nodded. “Happens. I’m Megan Sayeed. My friends call me Gunny.”
“Stavo Parjanya. Mine call me Slick.”
Both of them grinned.
“I don’t want to keep your from work,” she said.
“Rudy’s got it, he’ll call me if something interesting happens. So, what do you need, Gunny?”
“We’re gathering intel. More we know, better our chances of getting the girl back. She well thought of around here?”
“Far as I know. Does charity work, smiles at the camera. I haven’t heard anything bad about her. Father is pretty popular. Nobody�
��s taken a shot at him in years until you got here. There are radicals who don’t like the way things work, but they tend to stay out in the weeds and throw rocks from there,”
“What about the betrothed?”
“Rama,” he said. “Well, he’s something of a dickhead from what I hear. Ambitious, and the scat is, he likes to kick people who aren’t allowed to hit back. The kingdoms are at peace, the marriage will probably help keep it that way.”
“The marriage arranged, or for love?”
“Traditionally at that level, they are arranged for political reasons. They seem to get along okay, nothing I’ve heard says otherwise. She’s rich and pretty, he’s rich and handsome, those kind of people aren’t like you and me. They have other options. They don’t have to love each other, they just have to look as if they do. Word is, she actually likes the guy. Bad boys always have women.”
“I can see that you are going to be very helpful. So, what time does your shift end, Slick? Got anybody waiting at home?”
He grinned big at that.
She gave the grin back. Well, there were a lot worse ways to spend her time, hey?
And really, it was work ...
~ * ~
TEN
Wink did his research on a stretch of river east of the city, where the average windspeed during the day in this season was 50 kph, and his main informant was a kiter who was also a medic.
Well, she had been a practicing medic. He had done a background on her.
The woman had been board-certified in microthoracic surgery, an expert cutter who could make the lasers dance well enough to carve her initials onto a white blood cell if she wanted. But she’d discovered kiting, and it took her over. She sold her practice, bought an industrial fabber, set up shop next to the river in a small town, and began making rides and gossamers. She was good at detail work, her gear was first-rate, and pretty soon, she was earning twice the money running the shop as she’d been fixing vessels and nerves. This spoke well of following one’s passion.
Vanyu was her name, and also the name of her windrunning product line. Boards, gossamers, the best this world had to offer.
Wink had fallen in love with kiting ten years back, and any world that had enough wind and water, he usually found a way to get into the air there.
Kiting was a combination of surfing, parasailing, gymnastics, and cliff diving. How a run worked was, you got your board up to speed, using a gossamer kite, sailing before the wind. The lift, you left the board and went up. You ascended to whatever height you could handle, popped the kite loose, and then finished with a dive that could range from a pure swan to a nine-trick tumbling fall. After you were done, the autopilot would home in on your beacon and deliver the board to where you came up, using a small inboard capacitor motor, charged by solar. An autocompactor would close your kite and let it fall not too far away—though sometimes the wind would take even a gossamer ball the size of your head some distance, so you had to use the locator to find it.
It was dangerous. Mistime it, and you could smack the water crooked from forty meters up and break half your bones, drown if your emergency floats didn’t inflate properly. It was right up there with underwater cave spelunking and netless high-wire racing for serious injury and death. Which, Wink knew, was part of the appeal for him.
He wasn’t galactic-class at it, but he was better than average. He didn’t see it as a competitive thing but as a personal challenge. Mostly, he was a feetfirster, but he had a few head-down entries.
When he saw Vanyu do her first pass, he realized she was as good as he was and then some. She had the body for it—she was slim, short, and tight—and she did a triple front with a half twist, a branny, and hit the water nicely. A little angle on the slosh, not much.
Wink waited his turn and, on his run, did his mount, got thirty meters up, and did a quadruple flyaway ending in a feetfirst entry. Not the greatest routine, but solid, and he lucked out on the entry, going straight in and not making much splash.
When he got back to the shore, he got some nods of approval, including one from Vanyu. He drifted over close to her as they waited for their turns.
“Haven’t seen you before,” she said.
“Just got here, from offworld. I’m Tomas Wink.”
“Vanyu.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. I’m using your gear.”
She smiled.
“We have something else in common,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a medic. Working with CFI.”
“CFI?”
“Private military. Here on a contract.”
“The Rajah’s missing daughter?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. Well, that was a pretty good run. Great entry.”
“Thanks.”
“What are you doing next?”
“Front one-and-a-half in a layout.”
“Height?”
“Forty.”
“Really? That’s a tricky height for it.”
“Guy who taught it to me had it down pretty good. Won the SC with it.”
“Graffinger? Graffinger taught you?”
It was shameless name-dropping. Hego Graffinger was a three-time champ in Open Class Kiting, who retired after an unbeaten final season. He was a Terran and he stuck close to home, didn’t like to travel, but skill-wise? He was to Wink as Wink was to an asymmetrical brick. Anybody who knew squat about kiting knew who Hego was.
“I patched him up once after he broke an arm. He said he owed me one.”
She looked at him. “He won his last Systems Championship with a bonded arm, if I recall correctly. Upper-right humerus.”
“Yep. Just distal to the deltoid tuberosity. My orthostat glue.” He mimed using an injector.
“Wow.”
“So, I’m a stranger here. Mind if I pick your brain about local stuff?”
“Go ahead. But if you land that front sommie-and-a-half clean? I will want you to teach it to me.”
“Deal...”
~ * ~
Kay checked, but there were no other Vastalimi in the Rajah’s realm. That would have been her preference, to find her own kind, but her own kind tended to stay home. Galactic civilization had so many rules about the smallest things, it was difficult to avoid running afoul of them. Swat a pest, and it died? Humans sometimes got all excited.
Failing that, she went looking for Rel, and it didn’t take her long to find them.
Rel were pear-shaped herbivores, bipeds about the height of an average human, but half again as heavy. They were hairless, had a spongelike grayish flesh, and they liked to decorate themselves with assorted paints or dyes, ranging across the visible spectrum. They were clever, did a brisk trade business, and when they came into contact with a Vastalimi, they became prey, an instinctive reaction that made them want to run away. They could control it, but they couldn’t hide it, and when one of her kind met one of theirs, she owned that Rel, body and spirit.
Rel preferred to gather in dark, cool places, since their homeworld was dark and cool through much of their habitable territory.
It was but a matter of a few moments for a hunter of her skill to locate her prey.
The public house was dim, and the air inside it moist and considerably cooler than outside. Both were to Kay’s liking.
There were a dozen or so of the aliens in the place, gathered together in the back, and when she entered the room, she heard their collective intakes of breath:
Carnivore! Freeze!
Kay smiled and walked directly to the nearest table of Rel.
Nobody got in her way.
She sat, uninvited, and smiled at the Rel nearest her, a male with his skin colored in a rainbow of shimmering, pulsing colors, faintly phosphorescent in the dim lighting.
She spoke her True Name aloud, a sound neither Rel nor humans were particularly adept at reproducing. “And you are?”
The male shivered but managed to control his voice.
“I a
m Zeth, of the Hallows. My lineage—”
“—is, I am sure, replete with deed-doers and appropriately famous kin,” she said. “But I have no need of that information.”
