by Debra Doyle
In the center of the plaza, a massive bronze statue identified in the Wind's data files as the last ruler of independent Sombrelír brooded over the scene below. The vendors in the booths shouted their prices, and hoarse-voiced barkers outside of closed tents promised live entertainment and surpassing pleasure to be found within. A man spewed flames from his lips at one booth, two women wearing nothing but oil and glitter juggled frightening-looking knives in front of another, and in a third a short creature of indeterminate species offered to tell fortunes.
Faral was hard put to keep from staring—the jugglers in particular were like nothing he'd encountered on Maraghai— but he was unwilling to betray his lack of sophistication in front of Miza. Huool's student-courier was pushing through the jostling mass of people with an undiverted singleness of purpose.
Maybe they see this sort of thing all the time on Artha, Faral thought.
He glanced over at his cousin. Jens was looking bored, which was some consolation—Jens never looked bored, except when he was trying to cover up some other, and potentially more embarrassing, state of mind. Faral turned back to Miza.
"We're meeting our, um, freetrading captain here?" he asked. "In public?"
"Safety," Miza replied. "We meet if we both want to. Otherwise we don't bother to recognize each other."
They walked deeper into the maze of booths, twisting and dodging through a wild variety of goods being offered for sale. Tables loaded with farm produce stood beside racks of jewelry, while nearby an artisan turned a block of what looked like gold into a series of tiny naked figures linked together in unlikely but educational poses. High above the press, the massive central statue grew ever closer.
"You're seriously expecting to find one specific person in all of this—this collection of oddities?" Jens asked Miza.
She scowled at him. "Look, I know what I'm doing."
The pedestal of the statue came in sight past the booths. And there, leaning against the carved stone, was a man. He wore bright red and black garments cut in the free-spacers' style, and high, polished boots. At his waist he wore a pair of blasters, rigged with the grips forward for a cross draw.
"That's him," Miza whispered. "Stay here a moment."
Without looking to see if anyone was following her suggestion, she continued forward. The crowd was thinner here at the base of the statue, and the pathway wider. Faral had a good view as Miza first passed by the gaudily dressed fellow, then returned and leaned against the pedestal next to him. The two of them talked for a little while. When Miza came back to where Jens and Faral waited, the man came with her.
"I'm Captain Amaro," he said. "I won't ask for your names, so don't bother making any up. Now come with me."
The four of them walked away from the base of the statue, into the shadows among the tents and booths. After a few minutes, Amaro halted them with an upraised hand.
"Listen carefully," he said. "Here is a cargo carrier." He nodded toward a looming object that Faral recognized after a few seconds as a wheeled conveyance. Dark cloth stretched over arched poles made a screen to hide the contents. "On the carrier, inside where none may see, is a crate. Enter the crate, and make no sound until I myself open it. What luggage do you carry?"
Faral hefted the carrybag in his hand. "You're looking at it."
"Good," Amaro said. "Recall what you are buying: food, water, air, and a passage. No questions until high orbit, and no memory later. Agreed?"
"Agreed," said Jens, before Faral could say anything.
Amaro gave a curt nod. "Good," he said again. "One thing more. Once we hit high orbit, if I don't like where you're going, back you come. No questions, no refund."
"Wait a minute—" Faral began.
Miza touched his arm, silencing him. "It's a fair bargain." she said. "For him, the danger is in leaving port and in landing. The payment is for that."
"If it's customary," said Jens, "then we agree."
"Until high orbit, then," Amaro said. He made a florid bow, and turned away. A moment later he was lost in the crowd.
"I don't like it," Faral said. He regarded the carrier with suspicion. "No telling where that crate's going to be when it's opened, if it ever is opened."
"Amaro has a reputation for honesty," Miza said. "In his own business, at least. Trying a double-cross would ruin him."
"Trust her judgment, coz, and relax." Jens's eyes were once again very bright. "She's climbing into the crate right along with us, after all."
Miza didn't make any protest—possibly she realized that anyone who'd remained in their company for as long as she had been was now also a target for their enemies.
The three of them scrambled into the back of the cargo carrier. Under the cloth covering, the vehicle's interior was as dark as the inside of a rockhog, and Faral located the solid metal crate by stumbling against it. After a few seconds of fumbling, he located a button near the top edge. He pressed it and a wave of stale air washed across his face as the lid of the crate groaned open.
"Here we are," he said. "Who goes first?"
"After you, coz."
"I was afraid you'd say that." He grasped the edge of the box and vaulted over. There was less room inside the crate than he'd expected—most of the space was taken up by what felt like pads and safety webbing. Captain Amaro had obviously taken passengers into orbit this way before. "Give Gentlelady Lyftingil a boost, then."
"Here she comes."
"I don't need—" Miza's protest began on the other side of the crate from Faral, and finished when a warm and surprisingly solid body landed in his arms. "—any help!"
Jens followed her into the crate a few seconds later. The fit was tight for the three of them, but after a certain amount of fumbling they got all of the straps and webbing sorted out and began to buckle themselves into place.
"Do you need—" Faral began.
"No," Miza said. "I don't need any help with this part, thank you."
"We're crushed," said Jens. "Absolutely crushed. Who's nearest the button to close the lid?"
"You are, I think," Faral said.
"So I am. Here goes."
The lid groaned shut. Faral experienced a brief surge of panic—I only thought it was dark in here before; now it's dark— and nothing but the awareness of Jens and Miza listening inches away kept him from gasping for air in terrified mouthfuls. It was impossible to stay frightened forever, though. When nothing happened for some time, boredom supplanted fear and eventually he went to sleep.
In the hours after midnight, the outskirts of Nanáli were all but empty of traffic. The occasional delivery van bumped past the Nanáli Starlight Family Hotel on straining nullgravs to deliver fresh grain or vegetables into the city before morning. Now and again a night-laborer on his way home went by on foot, or an early shift worker coming in. But aside from those few, there was nobody awake to notice the hovercar with a Sombrelír traffic-control sticker parked behind a nearby building.
Kolpag and Ruhn stood in the upstairs hallway of the hotel. Kolpag had the master keycard in his hand. He'd obtained the card from the desk clerk through the persuasive efforts of a large wad of cash, and had already used it once to unlock the bathroom at the end of the hall. The bathroom had been empty.
Now, outside the room assigned to Brix Gorlees, Kolpag and Ruhn paused for a moment to draw their blasters and thumb the settings to Stun. Then Ruhn took up a position on the right side of the door, and Kolpag stood on the left.
Kolpag swiped the keycard through the door's built-in scanner, then touched the cycle button.
The door slid open.
As soon as the door had opened all the way, the two men fired their blasters—each man aiming for the corner of the room diagonally opposite, so that the fiery streamers crossed paths in midair. Then Kolpag threw himself onto the floor in the center of the doorway with his blaster in front of him. Ruhn stood behind him, shooting straight ahead at the center of the far wall.
They had fired at least three shots before
they noticed that mere was nobody else in the room.
"Oh, damn," Kolpag said. He pulled himself to his feet and allowed the door to slide the rest of the way shut behind him. "Missed them again."
Ruhn was already searching the room. "No luggage, no personal articles. Our birds have already flown."
"Maybe they're out at a restaurant or something?" Kolpag made the suggestion mostly for form's sake.
Ruhn snorted. "At this hour? Hardly. Think they'll be coming back?"
"Not likely," said Kolpag. "But we'll have somebody from the local office put a watch on this room all the same. Not that they'll find anything you didn't."
Ruhn nodded. "The beds have been slept in, it looks like, but they've gone cold. I'd say our packages have about a two-hour lead on us by now."
Kolpag holstered his blaster and pulled a comm link from his jacket pocket. He keyed it on and said, "Message to watchers at spaceports, case five niner. Heads up, they're coming."
"What about us?" Ruhn asked. "Where do we go next?"
"Sombrelír," said Kolpag. "I want to pay a visit to Gentlesir Huool."
Chapter IX.
Ophel; High Orbit; Hyperspace; Galcen
« ^ »
Faral awoke in absolute darkness. Only the lessons he'd learned in the forests on Maraghai— stay silent, don't move, no good comes of noise—kept him from shouting and flailing about. Then he remembered that he was closed up with Jens and Miza inside a padded crate, being smuggled into high orbit like so much untaxed aqua vitae.
Before he could make inquiries about his companions' state of mind, however, the crate began to vibrate around him. A huge roaring filled his ears, and shortly afterward came the feeling of immense weight that meant a launch. A little while later, gravity first vanished, then reappeared in the opposite direction, so that he felt like he was hanging up instead of falling down, and the safety webbing began to pinch him in a number of awkward places.
More time passed, and the crate's lid groaned open. Faral blinked at the sudden light—there wasn't all that much of it, objectively speaking, but even a dim cargo hold was too bright after several hours spent in complete blackness. Miza exclaimed something in a language he didn't know— probably Arthan, though he supposed she could have picked up an Ophelan catchphrase or two during her internship—and put up a hand to shield her eyes. Jens yawned.
Captain Amaro waited outside the crate. "Welcome to Dust Devil," he said. "Now it's time to talk about where the three of you are planning to go."
"No," Jens said. "First my friends and I remove ourselves from this fascinating receptacle of yours. Then we talk."
"Of course," Amaro said. The smuggler waited without speaking while the three companions unbuckled themselves and clambered one at a time over the side of the padded box.
Except for perhaps half a dozen smaller crates griped down to the deckplates in the same manner as their larger one, Dust Devil's cargo hold was empty. On top of one crate stood a hotpot of cha'a and a stack of interlocking mugs. Amaro unstacked the mugs and began pouring cha'a like a gracious host.
"All of my passengers," he said as he passed around the steaming mugs, "are going somewhere, even if it is merely 'away.' I will not lie to you—'away' is the simplest, because I get to choose the destination. But if you have a place in mind, this is the time when you say truthfully what it is."
Faral sipped at the bitter, reenergizing cha'a and didn't say anything. Let Jens handle it, he thought. He's the one with all the plans.
Jens waited a moment before answering—for effect, Faral was certain. "Where I want to go," he said finally, "is Khesat. Will that be a problem?"
"Khesat." Amaro looked thoughtful. "That's a sticky one. I don't run anything through there, as a general rule."
"Understood," said Jens. "But are you persuadable?"
"It all depends. Do you have a valid passport and a visa?"
"Ah… no. In the haste of our departure from Ophel, we didn't have time to observe the diplomatic niceties."
"In that case," Amaro said, "we've got a problem. Either pick another destination, or resign yourselves to going back dirtside."
Jens bit his lip and glanced at Faral and Miza.
Faral shrugged. Khesat had never been all that attractive to him as a place to look for fame. "There's always Eraasi, like we were planning."
"Like you were planning. I don't want—"
Miza said hastily, "How about Sapne?"
Both Faral and Jens turned to stare at her.
"Sapne?" Faral said, and Captain Amaro said, "That might work, yes."
"I don't see how," Faral said. "Everybody I've ever heard talk about it"—which was mostly his Aunt Bee, who claimed to have traded on Sapne during her free-spacing days—"says there hasn't been a real government on-planet since the Biochem Plagues."
"That's the whole point," Miza said. "I learned all about it while I was working for Huool. People use Sapne for a cargo transfer point a lot, because you don't need anything to do business there except a good autolander set. There's no inspace control on Sapne—there's no port at all, really—and there's definitely no customs office."
"We're not trying to smuggle salt," Jens said. "We're trying to get from Ophel to Khesat without a visa."
"Let the gentlelady finish," said Amaro. "She knows her business, I can see."
Miza looked flattered. "That's the other thing," she said. "From Sapne you can get a visa to anywhere."
"How?" Faral asked.
"Something Huool mentioned once. There's a passport office on Sapne that's got the validations and everything, right out where anyone who wants to can walk in and use them."
"There's a catch, right?" Jens said.
"It's at the old spaceport."
Memories of holovid adventure programs stirred in Faral's mind. "Isn't the old port on Sapne supposed to be haunted?"
"Supposedly," said Amaro. "But that's a useful reputation to have in some quarters."
"What fun," said Jens. "Sapne it is, then, if the good captain agrees."
"One-way to Sapne for three passengers," Amaro said. "After we make planetfall, either you're on your own or we can negotiate another deal. Done?"
Jens held out his hand. "Done."
Kolpag and Ruhn left the Nanáli Starlight Family Hotel and walked out onto the street. The two operatives nodded as they passed to the outside men sent over from the local branch. The locals would keep on watching the hotel in case the packages returned, but Kolpag didn't hold out much hope of that.
"Where to?" his partner asked as they unlocked their hovercar and strapped themselves into the seats.
Kolpag thought for a minute. "Let's see if we can touch the beaky-boy. His fingerprints are all over this."
"Do Rotis have fingerprints?" Ruhn asked curiously.
"I suppose they do… no, actually, I think I read somewhere that they've got distinctive quill patterns you can use to identify them by, as long as they've been considerate enough to shed a few feathers for you first."
"We could arrange that."
"Problem with Huool, though," Kolpag said as he started the hovercar. The vehicle rose on its nullgravs and hung there, humming softly, until Kolpag pulled on its control yoke and set it to moving slowly in reverse. "He's political. Can't touch him too hard."
"Politics," said Ruhn. He sounded disgusted. "Let me tell you, I hate politics. As of right now, we don't know if our packages were even here. Someone might have been fibbing to us, and if we can't twist an arm on the beaky-boy we'll never know."
"Maybe we were working on bad assumptions," Kolpag said. He backed the hovercar out into the deserted street and started off in the direction of Sombrelír. It was close to dawn, now, and the sky was faint pink along the distant horizon. "Before we risk messing with Huool and his patrons, let's try getting the information by technical means instead."
"Yeah," Ruhn agreed. "I'll get the division working on it, see what they come up with."
He brought
out his datapad again, and used the comm link to put through a brief, coded request. A few seconds later, the datapad blinked and beeped to let him know that the information he'd asked for had come back through the link. Ruhn scrolled through the text, reading quickly and making notes as he went. After a few minutes, he looked up.
"Hey, check this out. You remember the fighting grannies?"
Kolpag tightened his grip on the hovercar's control yoke. "How could I forget those two? They got Freppys, and he was as good as they come."
"I've got a dossier on both of them. A thorough dossier, this time… and let me tell you, the intel people really screwed this one up. You guys didn't go into that tea shop anywhere close to heavy enough."
"Now the man tells me."
"No," said Ruhn. "What this means is that the whole organization got sold out this time. The big question is, who was it that did the selling?"
Captain Amaro left his three passengers in their quarters and made his way through the cramped passageways to Dust Devil's bridge. So far, the current business deal had been nothing out of the ordinary—he'd smuggled people as often as material goods, if not oftener—but this would be the first time he'd made a freetrading run with the Dusty's actual owners on board.
The Gentleladies Bindweed and Blossom were already on the bridge when he arrived, safety-webbed into the auxiliary seats behind the captain's command and control position. The Dusty's navigator, Trav Esmet, occupied the number-two position on the captain's right.
Amaro glanced at the main console. The telltales shone a reassuring green. "Have all the crew reported in yet?"
"Yes," said Esmet. "All on station and correct."
"Very well." He turned to Blossom. "You were right, gentlelady. They went for Sapne. Esmet—do we have the navicomp data for that one fed in?"
"Fed in and ready."
"Then let's make transit." Amaro picked up the handset for the Dust Devil's external comm link and keyed it on. "Security, Security, Security," he said aloud. "This is Freetrader Dust Devil departing high orbit. Stand by, out."
