“I have business here of an unpredictable nature,” Kief said to the pilot. “I may need you to stay in port for quite some time.”
“It’s your money.” The pilot leaned back in the control chair and put his booted feet up on the console. “I’ll be sacking out on board ship, but there’s flophouses in town if you’re tired of sleeping in back like cargo.”
“Thanks,” Kief said. “I think I’ll see what the port has to offer.”
Actually, he’d found the quiet of the empty cargo bay a good thing. He’d spent most of the Void-transit in its echoing space, part of the time occupied in meditation, and part in teaching his new body the moves and forms of combat with a Mage’s staff. Intent counted for much when dealing with the eiran, but it was skill that gave a working its highest intensity and drew out of it the greatest power.
“You might want to take this with you, then.” The pilot fished around in the storage drawer under the main console and extracted a small but menacing-looking handgun, which he held out to Kief butt-first. “Ninglin Spaceport isn’t Hanilat, and if you run into trouble you can’t count on Fire and Security to pull you out.”
“Thank you,” Kief said, although he privately considered the handgun unnecessary. Ninglin Spaceport was unlikely to harbor anything that could take out an Eraasi-trained Mage.
“Yeah, well … portside nightlife can get rough. If you have to come back to the ship in a hurry one night, you won’t be the first person it’s ever happened to.”
Kief thanked the pilot again, pocketed the handgun, and headed into town. The pilot hadn’t mentioned any ships from Eraasi in port; perhaps he had beaten Vai to Ninglin in spite of her head start. That was good; it meant that he could wait and keep watch, and take her unawares.
Nobody looking at him would realize that he was a Mage. He’d taken pains not to look like one, wearing ordinary street clothes and a long loose coat that did well enough to hide the staff at his belt. It might have been wiser to forgo the staff altogether, but he found himself no more willing to leave it behind than Iulan Vai had been.
The main street outside the Ninglin landing field was wide and muddy, a grey silty mud that splashed up onto the wheels and sides of the boxy little locally made groundcars. Somewhere else on Ninglin, Kief assumed, there must be paved roads for the groundcars to run on properly—maybe there was even a pavement here, somewhere under all the mud.
A block past the port gate, his aesthetic senses reeled under the assault of a large, gaudy, internally lighted sign, so big it covered one whole wall of the building it advertised:
HANILAT LOUNGE—HOSTS AND HOSTESSES TO SERVE YOU ANYTIME —BAR AND CAFE—GAMES OF CHANCE—ROOMS BY THE HOUR, THE NIGHT, OR THE WEEK.
Kief looked at the sign in stunned appreciation and began to smile. He hadn’t had much time to know Iulan Vai before the Demaizen Circle split in two and she followed Arekhon sus-Khalgath across the interstellar gap, but he remembered her peculiar sense of humor. She would find the façade of the Hanilat Lounge intensely amusing—he was certain of it.
Today, or tomorrow, or another day, that horrible sign would draw her in without any need for him to work the eiran at all.
Then I will ask her where to find Arekhon, and she will tell me.
By the time Fire-on-the-Hilltops reached Ninglin, the former sus-Dariv contract carrier had acquired a new name, a new port of origin, and a new ID transmitter. Zeri was impressed by the high level of technical knowledge her cousin Herin and Iulan Vai brought to the process of making the forgeries. She was convinced by now that Vai had been somebody’s confidential operative before she became a Mage—which explained a good deal about Herin’s former life as well. She’d always wondered what it was he did for the family; the dilettante act had never struck her as all that convincing.
Me, though … I really was a dilettante. At least I could tell when somebody else wasn’t.
Making the forgeries had proved simple, compared with the job of convincing the Fire’s ship-mind to agree to the disguise. The ship-mind was old and cranky, and not fond of change; it required many iterations of the new data before the Fire would agree to answer, for public purposes, to the new name Once-Over-Lightly.
“If anybody digs down into the deep files, we’re gone,” Herin said. The Fire’s new paperwork had already convinced inspace control, port control, and the local customs office, as well as the desk clerk at their lodgings, but he still looked dissatisfied.
They’d locked up the ship after landing, and taken a quartet of rooms at the Far Call Guest Home, a faded but respectable rooming house at the edge of the port district. The windows in the Far Call’s bedrooms were uncurtained, and the bright lights of the strip cast flashing patterns on the walls: an uncomfortable reminder that ships came and went daily even on Ninglin, and that any one of them might bring pursuit.
On the other hand, while the mattresses on the guest home’s narrow beds were thin and lumpy-looking, at least the rooms had beds instead of acceleration couches. Zeri felt guilty about having been granted the relative luxury of bunking in the captain’s cabin during the transit from Eraasi, and was glad the others would have a chance at some comfort.
“Don’t worry about the deep files,” Len advised Herin. “Anybody who gets close enough to read those will have already spotted the old serial numbers on the outer hull. And we can’t fix those without spending time in a repair yard.”
“You cheer me unspeakably,” Herin told him.
“Stop it, both of you,” said Zeri. “I want to know what we’re going to do on Ninglin now that we’re here. We’ve been running nonstop ever since I climbed out of that window in Hanilat, and I’m tired.”
Iulan Vai answered her. “What we’re going to do on Ninglin is lie low, get some rest, and wait for the hue and cry to die down. The last thing we need is one of Lord Natelth’s operatives following us out of here to the rendezvous point.”
“No,” said Zeri. “We definitely don’t want that.”
The upcoming rendezvous was another thing that was causing her to fret, and she already knew that spending time on Ninglin in forced inactivity was going to make the fretting worse. At least as long as they were on the run, nobody had expected her to make decisions on behalf of what remained of the independent sus-Dariv.
And a pitiful lot we are, too, she thought darkly. A handful of ships and a fine-arts dabbler who’s only alive now because she couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to business in the first place.
On the other hand, while she might not have much by Eraasian standards, Ninglin was currently doing a good job of reminding her that Eraasian standards weren’t the only ones around. On a world like this one, three cargo ships, two shuttles, and a fast courier would look like a star-lord’s fortune. Given time, they might even be able to bring the sus-Dariv remnant back to … well, maybe not wealth, as they’d known it before, but something like comfortable prosperity.
The trick, of course, was going to be finding somewhere out of reach of the sus-Peledaen.
And where in the galaxy is that going to be, she wondered, when we can’t even trust someplace as backward as Ninglin to be safe?
Cold-Heart-of Morning had been in orbit over Ninglin for almost a week by the time the merchant ship Once-Over-Lightly landed at the port below. Egelt and Hussav were passing time at playing flipsticks in the Cold-Heart’s wardroom when word of the Lightly’s arrival came in.
“Think this one’s our boy?” Hussav asked.
Egelt studied the message on the table display. “Hard to say. The configuration’s pretty close, but he’s got a sus-Oadlan contract ID and the ship’s log says he’s come straight here from Ayarat.”
“Damn. I’m starting to think we outsmarted ourselves by coming here, and the pretty sus-Dariv and our mystery man are somewhere else laughing themselves silly at our expense.”
“They’re coming to Ninglin,” Egelt said. “Care to place a bet on it?”
“We already have.”
“You think that’s going to be worth the trouble?” Hussav was disposed to be gloomy—the last round of flipsticks had not gone well for him, and he was usually better at the game than Egelt. “Those chase-and-go-homes are some of the wonkiest pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long, long time. Expensive sons-of-bitches, too.”
“But if they work,” Egelt said, “and our guy runs again, this time we can follow him without having to make a blind jump and take a wild guess at the dropout.”
All the same, he reflected, it would have made life a lot easier all around if they could have used the chase-and-go-home technology on ships leaving Eraasi—but Hanilat’s port security was too tight, and its groundside crews were too honest. Ninglin, on the other hand, with its low traffic and its lax standards, was an ideal place for deploying the Cold-Heart’s limited store of the devices.
The door of the wardroom slid open and admitted the captain of Cold-Heart-of Morning, with a message pad in his hand. The captain approached the wardroom table with a purposeful stride, causing Egelt and Hussav to look at each other with barely suppressed apprehension. Anything that had a full guardship captain doing message delivery—a job usually given to fleet-apprentices, in order to further their general ship-knowledge—could only be bad.
“Message for you, Syr Egelt.” The captain of the guardship handed over the message pad to Egelt as he spoke.
The display screen on the message pad showed the Eyes Only sigil.
Egelt entered his personal passcode, and the sigil dissolved and reformed as blocks of text. The message itself wasn’t the most shocking that Egelt had ever read, but it came close.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said. “Have you decrypted this?”
“No, of course not.”
“You will have had similar instructions?”
“I wouldn’t know, Syr Egelt, not having seen that.”
“Blast it, did you receive any eyes-only messages? And where did this one come from?”
“A message drone just now dropped in-system from Eraasi,” the captain said. “This was part of its payload.”
Egelt blanked the screen of the message pad and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Make the Cold-Heart ready to leave orbit on my word. We need to shape a course back to Aulwikh.”
“Those are your orders? May I see them?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Egelt said, making no move to retrieve the message pad. “These are eyes-only. But I will have more for you before we jump. Meanwhile, my partner and I require the services of one of your landing shuttles—we have business to transact in port before we leave.”
“What’s all this about?” Hussav asked as soon as the captain had left. “Why are we going back to Aulwikh?”
“We aren’t,” Egelt said. He pulled out the message pad, then brought up the text and extended it to Hussav for his perusal. “We’ve been recalled to Eraasi and our unlimited letter of credit has been canceled.”
“Then what in the name of the Six Fountains do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m not sure yet. But you and I are going to go down to Ninglin Spaceport and have a talk with the captain of Once-Over-Lightly. I have a very good idea where the blushing bride went, and I think he does, too. Now—” and here Egelt blanked the pad’s screen again, and entered a string of numbers instead “—take this codefile to the ship’s registrar and tell him it’s the accounting data he’ll need to use for paying fees and making purchases on our next jump.”
“And this number really is—?”
“Accounting data,” Egelt said. “For a different family ship, one that’s currently outbound in the Void. No one will notice that the Cold-Heart’ s been accessing the wrong line of credit until that other ship makes it all the way back to Eraasi.”
“You’re planning something, I can tell.”
“Let’s say I’m not quite ready to give up and head home. Even if Lord Natelth has decided to declare his lady bride dead and dispense with the morning after.”
“You’re crazy,” Hussav said. “But what the hell, I think I’m going crazy, too.” He took the pad full of numbers and departed.
Several hours later, Lenyat Irao sat at a table on the roofed-over dining porch of the Far Call Guest Home, drinking cold beer and waiting for the cook’s helper to bring him the afternoon special. They didn’t have aiketen to wait on tables on Ninglin, and the afternoon special was something whose name he couldn’t even read—only the prices on the menu had an Eraasian translation—but he was looking forward to the meal. Even if the main dish turned out to be broiled tree-rats on toast points (which hadn’t been all that bad, the one time he’d had them), at least it wasn’t going to be ship’s rations again.
Of the Fire’s passengers, Zeri was the only one whose exact whereabouts he currently knew. She was upstairs in her room, having expressed the intention of standing under the waterfall in the necessarium until either she felt clean again or the water ran out, whichever came first. Cousin Herin was off lurking somewhere, or at least that’s what it had sounded like he’d been planning to do … soaking up local gossip along with, probably, a distressing amount of the local beer. And Iulan Vai had gone to try her wiles, Magish and otherwise, on the officials at the port.
The guest home had other customers, of course—it apparently catered to the more respectable end of the spaceport trade, and Len wasn’t surprised to see a man dressed in business drab come up the porch steps and call out to the cook’s helper for a beer. The man’s Hanilat-Eraasian accent did make him somewhat uneasy, but most spaceport cities relied on some version of Eraasian for a common tongue.
All the same, Len reflected, it might be a good idea to give up on the afternoon special and slip off the porch before the stranger noticed him.
He had, unfortunately, arrived at his conclusion too late for it to do him any good. The man in drab had gotten his beer and was heading straight for Len’s table.
“You know, they don’t see many travelers from the Antipodes here on Ninglin,” the stranger said. He took a chair on Len’s left without waiting to be invited. “And people tend to remember it when they do. If I asked if you knew an Antipodean ship captain named Lenyat Irao, what would you say?”
“I might say that I’ve never heard of him,” Len said. If this is a sus-Peledaen agent, he thought, why is he bothering to talk to me when Zeri is alone upstairs for the grabbing? “On the other hand, I might ask why you want to know.”
“‘Why do you want to know?’ is definitely the wiser option,” said the man in drab. “Because it turns out that Captain Irao has made some very powerful enemies.”
“He was afraid something like that might happen,” Len said. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything more specific about those powerful enemies, would you?”
“I know that Lord Natelth sus-Khalgath wants Lenyat Irao dead, and that he sent a couple of top sus-Peledaen operatives all the way from Eraasi to make sure.”
“That’s old news,” Len said. He took a pull of his beer. “Captain Irao would tell you he’s been dodging sus-Peledaen operatives ever since leaving Hanilat.”
The man in drab gave him a tight smile. “In that case, the captain might be interested to know that Lord Natelth has called back his operatives and cut off their credit.”
“That’s a star-lord for you,” Len said. “No patience, and no gratitude, either. If I were one of those operatives, I’d be worrying right now about whether I’d have a job when I got home.”
“The operatives have been worried about that for some time,” said the man in drab. “And they’ve concluded that they don’t want to operate on Lord Natelth’s behalf any longer.”
“Risky,” Len said. “Natelth sounds like the kind of guy who thinks a bullet in the back of the head makes good
severance pay.”
“That possibility has also crossed their minds,” the man said. “That’s why they’re going to tell Captain Irao they want to jump ship and join his team, so they can help him make a clean getaway.”
“All that helpfulness might be a ruse,” Len said. “They could be trying to get him to tell them where he’s got the girl stashed—everyone knows about the girl, too—and it could be that he’s already made a clean getaway and doesn’t need any help.”
“It could be,” agreed the man in drab. He picked up the beer with his right hand, sipped, then put it down using his left hand.
Across the street, Jyriom Hussav was watching. That’s the signal, he thought, and headed over to join Grif Egelt and Captain Irao.
Iulan Vai regarded the main street of Ninglin Spaceport with the jaundiced eye of someone who has just spent several hours on a profitless errand. The hike from the Far Call Guest Home out to the landing field and back had left her boots splotched with slippery grey mud, and likewise her clothing below the knee. The muddiness irritated her. Unrelieved black could be unobtrusive or intimidating, depending upon necessity and her mood; all-black with pale grey mud stains, on the other hand … maybe the guest home had a laundry.
Her visit with the Ninglinese port officials hadn’t yielded much by way of useful information. The disguised Fire-on-the-Hilltops excepted, Ninglin Spaceport had only one Eraasian ship on the field, a contract carrier nominally working for the sus-Radal. Without more data, there was no way to tell whether or not the ship represented a threat. It could well be legit; the sus-Radal fleet-family had maintained regular trade ties with Ninglin ever since the planet’s reunion with the heartworlds.
If we’re still here when they lift, she thought, then we’re probably safe. At the very worst, they’ll have come here looking for us and gone home empty.
A Working of Stars Page 28
