by Chris Bunch
“Interesting,” von Baldur said, his hand sliding into his suit coat, coming out with a blaster.
“Here now,” the driver said. “That’s a gun! We have laws about things like that!”
“We have laws, too,” Goodnight said, the small gun appearing in his hand, “starting with self-preservation.”
“Perhaps it’s just a follower,” Grok said, as the charabanc turned back onto the main road. “And we don’t care who knows we’re headed for the spaceport.”
“Negative,” Riss said, seeing two more vehicles — one a heavy lifter, making the same turn they had — up ahead. “I count three, which makes it a crash team.
“The truck to stop us thoroughly, the front tailer to do whatever they’re thinking of — which I don’t think is a simple snatch, since there isn’t room enough for us all in either the front or rear vehicles — and the last for a blocker.
“Somebody in this pig has nice friends.”
“What’s going on?” one of the girls asked. “Are those guns real?”
Star Risk ignored her.
“Just like that?” Jasmine asked. “No negotiation, no cheap threats or anything.”
“Guess not,” Riss said.
“Then I think we should mess with them severely, to quote Mr. Goodnight.”
Sims, looking scared, tried to make soothing noises to the girls.
“How far’s the nearest decent-sized burg?” Goodnight asked the driver.
“Five, maybe ten minutes,” the driver managed. “And I want you to know I didn’t bargain for this.”
“We’ll drop you off, then,” Riss said. “Or we can figure it into your bonus.”
“I’ll have none of that,” the driver said indignantly. “I’ve got my life savings in this here charry, and I’ll not have anyone pottering about with it.”
“Then shut up and drive,” Goodnight said. “We’ll need a blocker, M’chel, assuming we’re going for a nice, simple, tidy thing, without too many bodies.”
“I figured that,” Riss said. “And it’s my turn. Dig out some cash. We won’t have time to mess around with cards.”
“Aw shit,” Goodnight said, obeying. “You get to have all the fun.”
• • •
There was, thankfully, some traffic in the small city they flew through, which gave them a little cover. Goodnight saw a man in a rather strange uniform, wearing what looked like a blue multiple-user chamber pot on his head.
The driver looked hopeful when he saw the cop.
Goodnight leaned forward and jabbed him in the ribs with his gun. The man’s face fell and he went on.
“At the edge of town,” Riss ordered, “we’ll do it.”
“No kid,” Goodnight said. “And there’s your spot for the blocker.”
“When I tell you, turn left,” Riss said to the driver. “Not this street … not this one … now!”
The driver obeyed, and Riss went out the door, landing crouched, almost falling, then recovering. A passing kindly old lady looked shocked. Riss hid the gun sheepishly as the trio of followers went past, intent on the charabanc.
M’chel went back a block to a sign that read LIFTERS TO LET over a small lot with economy lifts in it.
In a few minutes, she came in a nicely polished economy lifter, smiling at the still-babbling agent and calling, “We’ll check it back in London, with a full fuel cell.”
Muttering at her tendency to pull to the right lane, like all proper drivers should, she found an open space, pulled over to the side, and waited.
In about five minutes, the easily noticed charabanc came back through, then its followers. The driver of the lead lifter was looking slightly vexed, and was on a com, no doubt upset at being led onto a roundabout.
Riss pulled out, following behind the heavy lifter and the blocking vehicle.
The road opened up, but still stayed at two lanes.
They passed a school, then two large houses.
Riss decided it was time.
Quite illegally, ignoring the signs about the town’s height limitations, M’chel punched full power, and took the lifter off to a height of three meters.
Someone on foot shouted at her, but she paid no mind. She increased lift, took her lifter over the rear blocking car, then over the heavy lifter. Paying no mind to the shriek of collision alarms, she cut power, nosed down and slammed her lifter into the lead follower.
Her vehicle bounced off the follower’s hood and skewed sideways as it crashed — which she hadn’t intended, but at least she was definitely blocking the road.
Her lifter almost rolled, then settled back on its landing struts, engine screaming.
Riss rolled out her door as the charabanc ahead grounded, and the Star Risk operators jumped out.
The driver of the following car lolled against the steering wheel, unconscious, blood dripping from his mouth.
His partner was digging for a gun, saw Riss’s leveled blaster, and froze.
That lead vehicle wasn’t going anywhere soon, but to make sure, M’chel put a bolt into its engine compartment.
She spun, crouched, and put two more rounds into the front end of the heavy lifter behind the two wrecks.
She dimly heard shouts and a scream, but Riss was running back to the charabanc.
She jumped in, and the others followed.
“Drive it, buster,” she ordered.
The driver fish-gaped, then obeyed, lifting with a speed that suggested he must have something on his conscience.
“I would suggest you take off as soon as you can,” von Baldur said mildly. “There may be some people coming around wearing uniforms who will have questions.”
The driver obeyed.
Riss turned around in her seat.
All eight children, and their minder, had eyes like saucers.
“Now,” Riss said, calming her overactive lungs, “that is Lesson One on one way to deal with drivers who follow too closely.”
THREE
They paid off the charabanc outside London and took three cabs to the airport itself.
M’chel was feeling a bit sorry for the driver, who’d have to contend with the law sooner or later, since his unwieldy vehicle wasn’t the least bit anonymous looking. But he was suspiciously cheerful, especially after von Baldur gave him a tip that equaled his fee, which made her suspect he was more used to irregular customers than he let on, or else he had some impressive friends with badges.
She immediately forgot him, and began pondering who was after them and why.
Riss kept coming up with nothings, and so she asked Jasmine, the usual repository of wisdom.
She, too, was drawing a blank.
All Goodnight could offer was that one of the children had clearly irked someone with a criminal mind and a certain organization, which gave them nothing.
While they thought about who the villains could be, they had more than enough to do with their charges.
It started as Jasmine, being the normal paymaster, was shepherding luggage and tipping handlers.
Grok saw something odd, and inquired of the little girl bending over the drinking fountain just what she was doing. The girl was named Lis.
“Making punch,” she said blandly.
“Which means?”
“Which means I’m wedging this bit of chemicals down beside the spout,” she explained.
“Which makes?” Grok inquired.
“Which makes whoever takes a drink have a little taste of my chemicals,” she said.
“Which makes?”
“Them pee bright purple for a while,” Lis said gleefully.
Grok took the chemical block away.
At least, he thought, Lis was honest.
Goodnight was the next up.
Goodnight happened to see Megan holding her right hand very oddly as she strolled close to a prosperous young man wearing a vastly oversized collarless jacket — the current style for men in Britain.
He recognized what she was doing, came in
fast, took the girl by the arm, and moved her into a corner, a forced smile on his lips.
Kel was following closely.
“Bad stance,” Chas hissed in thieves’ cant. “That kind of dip is too easy to go shy, and bump the sucker wise.”
Megan, who’d begun putting on an angry face, lost it.
“What should I be doing?” she asked.
“Not trying to teach yourself pickpocketing,” Goodnight said.
“But I couldn’t find any schools to teach me. Not in England,” she protested.
“Tough. So you can stay straight, before somebody breaks off your ickle pretty fingers,” he said.
“Who would do something like that to a sweet little girl like Megan?” Kel asked.
“Me.” Goodnight said.
The two girls considered the expression on his face, and believed.
Arbra and Jo, looking terminally innocent, were strolling toward a duty-free jewelry shop. Grok intercepted them, and put on what he considered a friendly smile.
The two froze, seeing a face promising incipient anthropophaging and paled.
Grok had no idea what they’d been intending, but they went rapidly back to the main group. Grok himself decided to work on his smile.
Alice Sims was giving Von a severe, if very quiet, talking to, and Von was wailing loudly and contritely. Riss thought the wailing was maybe a little too contrite, theatrical, and eye-attracting. Suspicious, she looked around and saw Erin, in sad-faced conversation with a benevolent-looking elderly couple. She edged closer.
“You see, Reverend,” Erin was saying, “when my beloved parents were dying, they gave me all of their Madagaskee money, which was to pay for my education here in England as a Bible translator. But no bank I’ve found will convert to English money. They tell me that what I need is someone who’ll stand good for the amount until it clears, and I saw your faces, and knew that — ”
That was enough for M’chel.
“Erin,” she said, “it’s time for prayers.”
Erin glared in a most unholy way at Riss.
“In just a minute,” she said sweetly.
“No,” Riss said firmly, taking the girl’s hand. “Now.”
She dragged Erin away.
“I almost had them going!” she protested.
“Maybe,” M’chel said. “And by the way, where were you going to get these Magawhatsit bills?”
“Oh, I’d figure something out,” Erin said. “The important thing was for me to get my hands on their poke.”
“Right.”
Goodnight was watching Jo and Lithia slide down a corridor, past a sign reading BAGGAGE HANDLING.
He went after them, taking his time.
He arrived in a back room. A knot of kneeling men looked up as Jo bent, picked up a pair of dice, and said, “All right, I can deal with any bets up to twenty pounds.”
Bills and coins hit a blanket spread on the floor.
“You covered,” a very light-skinned man said. “But I don’t like takin’ money from a babe.”
As Jo started to cast the dice, Goodnight stepped in, took her hand, and slid the dice out of her grasp.
“Sorry, gents,” he said genially. “Gambling’s against the law, especially for minors.”
“And who the hell are you,” a large, scarred man growled, “nudging in like this?”
Goodnight bounced the dice in his hand.
“I’m a fool protector,” he said. “Watch. A four and a two are faceup. I tap them once, then I let idiots like you put their money down, and then I throw.”
He did so.
The dice bounced a couple of times, and six showed.
“They’ll put out fours and twos all day long,” he said. “Until somebody taps them for another set of numbers. Come, girls. Your warm milk and cookies are getting cold.”
As he herded them back into the central waiting room, ignoring the snarls coming from the gamblers, a speaker came on:
“Passengers with last names beginning with E, T, A, O, I, N are instructed to report to their loading areas, and be prepared to have your tickets checked for auth … authenticity.” The voice sounded very young.
Friedrich von Baldur was on his feet, slightly purple-faced, even though he had no idea what crime that announcement was intended to conceal or promote.
“Enough and more than enough!” he almost shouted, and stamped toward a woman in an official-looking uniform.
Money changed hands, and the girls were shepherded into a VIP lounge, where they were the only occupants.
“And, by the Lord who made us all,” von Baldur growled, “no one — but no one — will leave this room until they call our ship.”
Jasmine King immediately got on a com, trying to reach contacts to find out who’d been trying to crash them on the way into London.
M’chel Riss looked around the room, saw a sideboard with bottles on it, poured herself a drink, knocked it back, forced a smile, and said, through her teeth, “Well, well. What a brisk start for a day!
“I wonder what exciting excitement comes next?”
FOUR
The liner was, of course, palatially huge.
It had been designed to look most secure, so the two engine pods were strut-mounted slightly below and behind the main capsule, which resembled an obese, rounded cylinder. In fact, the struts were subject to great stresses in hyperspace, and constantly required inspection and not infrequent replacement.
The design should have dictated that the ship would be used in deep and hyperspaces only. But no one actually thought those who could afford a cabin would stomach — literally — having to use shuttles, the potential of zero g’s and transshipment. Instead, the liner required an inordinate number of ground-mounted antigravity generators to land on a world with the slightest amount of gravity.
There were stories, cheerfully propagated by Interstellar Cunard, that the liner — Imperial Victory — had passengers living aboard who’d given up any land-side holdings to cruise forever and ever around the Alliance worlds.
It had ten decks just for passengers, not including crew, engine, and service spaces. The Victory stretched for almost two kilometers, had wholly redundant power and life-support systems, featured every possible luxury and recreation from gambling halls to swimming pools to theaters to boutiques to exercise salons, could carry nine thousand passengers cosseted by at least five staffers each, crewed by … and the mind was numbed by statistics, regularly reeled off by attendants.
It also cost a baby mint for a ticket.
But that was of little concern to Star Risk, nor to St. Searles, nor to Lady Rosewater-Jones, who would be footing the bill.
Assuming the claims were true of St. Searles’s pupils’ parentage, the girls’ families would have been unutterably shocked — shocked — if the fruit of various loins had been treated in any lesser fashion.
“Not least,” Goodnight told von Baldur, “because this Rosewater-Bilgewater is willing to take all of these little sociopaths off their hands.”
“Do not be so cynical,” von Baldur answered. “Especially when in hearing range of the cash customers.”
More money had changed hands, and Star Risk now controlled an entire passageway on one deck, with the operatives’ and Alice Sims’s suites at either end, to keep rein on their charges.
“Not,” Riss said to Jasmine, “that I think that’ll slow the girls down more than a nanobeat.”
It didn’t.
Since the wealthy have perfected the art of ennui, it was possible to be bored on the Victory. One way to relieve it was to get involved in one of the many pools the ship’s staff ran, betting on the number of meals provided, fuel consumption, ships “seen” in a day’s passage, and so forth.
Grok and Jasmine were initially interested, until they calculated that Cunard was taking a very sizable chunk out of the money wagered — enough to reduce the odds enough so as not to be worth considering.
One of the most popular pools, since it l
asted for days, was guessing the exact time of arrival at the Victory’s next port.
The first clue to the girls’ involvement was when Sims tracked Jo, the gambler, and Arbra, her general companion, to the crew’s quarters, which were off-limits to passengers, especially little girls.
Sims went to Goodnight and asked him what he thought was going on. No one bothered to think or say the word “might.” They all knew better by now. “Your little chickadees are too young to be slamming some handsome steward …” he said, “I hope. So further investigation is warranted.”
A bit of lurking, and then some raw physical intimidation, revealed the scheme:
Jo would bet on a certain time of arrival. This time would have been decided as within possibilities by her contact, a woman in the radar section. A second crewman was also bribed, who just happened to be assigned to astrogation.
That made it easy to minutely jiggle time out of hyperspace, time orbiting destination, and so forth.
Or, rather, it would have been easy.
Goodnight took his information to von Baldur, who put on his best suit and air of indignation and went to the captain.
“Although,” he sighed after the “ring” had been broken up, “it is a bit of a pity that it would have been so imprudent for us to have involved ourselves in the conspiracy.
“There is good, solid money to be made in a scheme such as this. I predict a great future for young Jo.”
“If,” Riss said darkly, “someone doesn’t murder her before she makes it to adolescence.”
• • •
No one ever found out what the girls’ next project was — but it must have been eminently profitable, since all eight of them were suddenly very flush, spending money on everything from cosmetics to candy, with never a credit transfer from any parent having been made.
Alice Sims was disconsolate, feeling that she was nothing but a failure.
Jasmine King, feeling sorry for the woman, arranged to put a bug in Erin’s suite.
The playback depressed every adult even further:
ERIN: Everybody comf?
Chorus of various yesses.
ERIN: Has anybody thought about what we’re going to do on Porcellis?
MEGAN: Get rich, of course. Richer than our parentos.
