Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  “Depends on who we can locate?”

  “You’re looking for specific people?”

  “We’ve got a list of names we’ve matched up with names from the mainBrain. Rewards, aici Adlaar, rewards; when we get them back to. Helvetia, my crew and me, we collect some hefty gelt.” He rubbed at his jawline… “Couldn’t take ’em all even if I wanted to.”

  “I have some people I’d like included in your collection. They might not be on that list, but if what I heard about your fee-structure is reasonably correct, what Adelaar’s paying you for this means you can tuck in a couple of extras without straining yourself.”

  “Getting a little hostile, aren’t you?”

  “I like to think of it as being practical.” Damn, damn, damn, knee-jerk, foot-in-the-mouth, what am I doing? Shoving him in a bag with Mama’s shithead friends. Maybe he belongs there. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m reacting like an adolescent. Brain damage? Or are stunners aphrodisiac?

  “Quale.”

  He got to his feet with a loose, easy shift of his long body that reminded her of Xalloor, the same sort of physical competence. He strolled to the table, toed up a chair and sat.

  Elmas Ofka frowned at him. For a moment she didn’t say anything. She has too much riding on this, Aslan thought and felt a touch of sympathy for the woman, a sympathy she didn’t usually have, Elmas reminded her too much of her mother. “You’ve had a week to look these over,” she tapped the case of filled flakes. “Well?”

  “Price is right, conditions aren’t too tough, far as I’m concerned, we can go.”

  “When?”

  “Thirty days.”

  Elmas Ofka looked down at her hands, drew a deep breath. “Done,” she said. “How many can you lift?’

  “Around seventy, eighty in a pinch. Should be enough for that lot.” He nodded at the case. “Something else, you’ll need to find someone who’s been up there recently, I suggest one of those Fiveworld guards; he’ll know things no one bothers to record.”

  “Yes. We have acquired such a person and he’s being questioned.” She broke off, looked away from him. Aslan thought, this next is going to be important. She’s not sure of him, she could be a little afraid of him, which is something I never thought I’d see. “The Warmaster must be destroyed,” she said, “You agree to that?”

  “Why not. I don’t want it.”

  She relaxed. “Your reasons?”

  “Impossible to handle without a huge crew, I couldn’t afford the fuel, I’d have my sleep wrecked by the horde of would-be heroes plotting to take it away from me.”

  “I see. You understand my reasons?”

  “Simple enough. As soon as Slancy berths at Helvetia, Horgul’s on the map. People will be heading here to take back their relatives, whatever, to trade, raid, generally poke about. The Warmaster’s a target that’d tempt too many of them. You’d have some self-proclaimed Emperor running your world before you blinked twice.”

  “What about her stingships?”

  “They’re parasited on her. Once you get rid of her, they go inert. If you’re worried about the crews, you can use your systemships to pull them out.”

  “One last question. How do we destroy something that big and that powerful?”

  “As I see it, you’ve got two options. You can sink her in the deepest part of one of your oceans. That’s the quickest method. Leave some ports open and she’ll die fast. Only thing is, there’s a fair chance in a few years you’ll have a pollution problem; it’ll clear up in a century or two, but you’d better make sure you keep people away from the place until then.”

  “No!” The word exploded out of her. “Not the ocean. Never.” She drew her hand across her mouth, a quick nervous gesture, straightened her back with a jerk and stared at him, almost daring him to come out with something equally impossible.

  “So, send her into the sun.

  She thought that over. “How? Wouldn’t someone have to stay with her? Only two minutes ago I read that the shipBrain is programmed to save her if all aboard are killed; if you aim her at the sun and leave her, she’ll break away before she reaches it. And what happens then, do we have a runaway killing machine hitting back at the ones that tried to kill her?”

  “Adelaar? That’s your field.”

  Adelaar ran a hand over her hair, smoothing it down where the wind outside the shelter had teased it into spikes. “While I was inside the interface, I set a trap into the groundlink; it hasn’t been found and it won’t be. Since then I’ve been using odd moments to explore the shipBrain through it. That Brain is big, it’s powerful, and oh my, it’s dumb. It’s old. We’ve learned considerable since that ship was built. Some of us. I kept away from the defense areas, but I don’t expect trouble when I go after them, though I’d rather handle that up there. Working through a tap is too… um… limiting. As soon as we lift off… hmm, that’s something we haven’t arranged yet, Hanifa. Where do you want us to pick up you and your people? I think it’s best we come to you, rather than you to us. It’ll be easier and faster.”

  Aslan looked from her mother’s intent face to Elmas Ofka; one expression mirrored the other; it was like a glimpse into the future, maybe a year or two after this night. Read the changes, where the world goes when the Outside wanders in.

  “I can’t say without knowing a lot more about who’s coming and what the Council thinks. Perhaps you could supply some way of communicating that the Huvved couldn’t tap into? If so, we can settle arrangements without having to find time for another meeting.”

  Quale tapped on the table. Both women started, swung round to face him. “I’ve got some handcoms in the skip,” he said, “they’re linked to the satellites I inserted when we got here, should have no trouble bridging the distance between our Base and yours.” He turned his head. “Pels, bring in a couple of those handsets, will you?”

  “Wait,” Elmas Ofka said.

  “Hang on a minute, Pels, huh?”

  “When we talked before, you needed to know where to find locations inside cities. I didn’t forget that, I brought you a small gift,” she glanced past him, met Aslan’s ironic gaze, “another small gift to help you with that problem. Har cousin, take the Hunter down to the boats and bring back our passenger.”

  Aslan watched the chunky isya valve out after Pels. What’s going on here, she thought, there wasn’t anything about this in the report she made or in any of the hours of records I plowed through. She rubbed at her eyes, remembering with regret the watersac she’d left hanging on the yizzy pole. Her mouth was dry and she was wrung out, sleepy, her head ached. She wasn’t interested in these games Adelaar and Elmas were playing with each other, she’d left home years ago to get the smell of greed off her skin. She gazed at the back of Quale’s head; his hair brushed his collar, black, soft, fine, curling a little; she wanted to touch it, let it bend over her fingers. Damn, oh damn.

  The valve hummed. Pels came in; his black lips were curled into an odd grin, his ears were standing straight up and twitching a little. He was humming, she could hear a rumbling brumbrum as he trotted to the table, dumped the comsets onto the memplas and swung around to watch the exit.

  Harli Tanggаr ducked through, stepped to her place beside the valve as the man following her straightened and looked around.

  Parnalee, Aslan thought, good god, what’s she think she’s doing? How’d she get hold of him?

  “Parnalee Tanmairo Proggerd,” Elmas Ofka said. “In the course of his work, he has visited most of the cities of the Littorals. When he joined us two days ago, I saw him as the answer to your need.”

  Maybe, Aslan thought, but that’s not the whole story. What are you up to, Dalliss? Smiling, urbane, wearing his public face, Parnalee walked to the table, touched hands with Quale. He wants this, she thought, why? He looked over his shoulder at her and she saw the beast in his black eyes, hungry beast promising her silently what he’d promised in words. Undercut me and you’re dead. She shivered and made up her mind she wa
s going to be very very sure she was never alone with him any time anywhere.

  Quale got to his feet. “That’s it, then. Call us when you’re ready, Hanifa. You want to leave first, or shall we?”

  Elmas Ofka closed the lid on the case, snapped the latches home. “We’ll go. Don’t get yourself killed.”

  X

  1. About ten days after the meeting on Gerbek.

  Karrel Goza in Ayla gul Inci: Waiting for the Lift-Off

  Karrel Goza forked slimy rotten leaves from the second stage vat into a tiltcart. The stench that eddied around him crept through his stained overall and nestled against his skin, oozed through the overage filter on his mask. The stink was the least of his problems, the mist that stank would open ulcers in his skin and rot his lungs if he stayed in it long enough. The Huvved Kabrik who owned this shed had the patronage of the Fehdaz and the manager was under orders to squeeze the last thread of use from the gear. And more, if he could get away with it. The manager before him had been fired for being too easy on the workers; she was local, some of her employees were cousins and affiliates, others belonged to the Families of friends and associates. Herk’s crony didn’t make that mistake twice. The new manager came from a Guneywhiyker Daz, he had no family in Inci, no pressures on him to look to the safety of the workers. Karrel Goza didn’t bother complaining; it wouldn’t do any good and there were a hundred more desperate and thus more docile workers to take his place. He had too many small accidents, had called in sick too often in his need to cover absences when he was flying for Elmas Ofka, he was growing more marginal a worker as the weeks passed, a complaint was all the manager needed to boot him out. His Family was one of the poorer septs, small business folk living on the edge of failing, clerks and such; they needed twice what their earners were pulling in to pay the fees and taxes and all that Herk was squeezing from folk like them. A few years ago his pilot’s pay tithed had brought them comfort and a degree of security they’d seldom known. He’d sponsored and paid Guildbond (Pilot) for his cousin Geres Duvvar, he’d sponsored and paid Guildbond (Skilled Trades) for three score other cousins, sisters, brothers, affiliates. That was finished now. Drive, talent and a large dose of luck gave him a chance at a profession not usually open to boys from his class. Bondfees in the Pilot’s Guild were far too great for a Family with the income his had; even stretching they couldn’t afford such an expense, nor could they afford to tie up so much coin so long in a single member. When he was a middler near the end of his schooling, he earned his first coin flying soarwings on the Garrip sands in the semiformal races sponsored by a coalition of merchants and Sea Farmers. The purses were big, the entry fees small; he and an uncle who was a carpenter built his wingframe and an aunt who was a weaver made the fabric cover. He’d found his talent the moment he got his first kite up and when he was old enough to enter the races he made it pay. Time after time he won. There was danger in this racing; fliers crashed-misread aircurrents, were crowded offlift, showed bad judgment in their turns or were victims of sabotage. Men and women came from a dozen Dazzes to watch and wager on the fliers, there was a great deal of money floating about and the temptation to goose the odds was strong and seldom resisted. Orska Falyan of Sirgыn-Falyan was a devotee of those contests; he began betting on the agile boy who seemed to feel the air with every sweaty inch of naked skin, who slid again and again from traps meant to break him; he was elated when the boy continued to win, sometimes by huge leads. The old man more or less adopted Karrel Goza; he sponsored him to the Pilot’s Guild, paid his Guildbond, and when he gained his pilot’s rating, hired him on at Sirgыn Bol. Orska Falyan continued to take an interest in Karrel Goza, had him teach some Sirgыn and Falyan youngers how to soar, left the boy a small legacy when he died ten years later.

  Karrel Goza finished filling the cart, wishing as he’d wished so many times before that the slave techs would finally come up with a machine capable of that noxious work; the fibers were tough, slippery, treacherous and finer than a woman’s hair; every mechanical forker they’d tried jammed after an hour or two. It took a man’s dexterity to manage the transfer. He kicked the gong to let the handler know and the cart purred off, a new one clanking into its place. Around him other forkers were working with steady minimal swings; another gong clanged, and a third after a silence so short that it seemed more like an echo than a sound in itself.

  He coughed, felt a burning in his throat and lungs. The fumes from the vat were beginning to get to him. He looked around. The overseer was out of the room. That figured. The lazy bastard spent most of the day in his office, a glass-walled room raised fifty meters off the floor. He could sit in comfort and watch the forkers sweat. Karrel coughed again, cursed under his breath and climbed off the platform. There was a naked faucet waist-high on the wall near the only door. He turned the faucet on full so the water beat into the catch basin. Holding his breath, he slipped the mask off and slid the filterpack from its slot. He looked at the discolorations on both surfaces, swore again; he held the pack in the stream of water until some of the overload was soaked out of it. That only took care of the grosser particles, the absorption of the wad was a joke; he shook it, wondering what he was putting into his lungs. He swished it back and forth in the water, shook it again and clicked it home. The wetting was weakening it, he could see pulls and a small rip. He’d been asking for a replacement for three weeks now. Oversoul alone knew when he’d get it. Likely he’d have to buy a pack on the black market. If he could find one. Elli might be able to do it for him, get a filter from her Family. He splashed water on his face, coughed again, felt like he was trying to rip the lining from his throat. He pulled the mask back on; as bad as it was, breathing that miasma over the vats without any protection at all was a thousand times worse. He went back to work. Not much longer, he told himself. Hang on, Kar; twenty days. Twenty days and Elli will get her chance at Herk. Ah, to see him dangling head down in that vat.

  2

  “What?” Karrel Goza set his cup down, blinked wearily at his Ommar.

  The Parlor was small and by intention intimate; the wallposts, the ceiling and its beams were carved and painted in jewel colors, small angular flower patterns on an angular emerald ground; a fire crackled cheerfully behind a semi-transparent shell guard; ancient tapestries hung from ceiling to floor, colors muted by time, still dark and rich. The Ommar sat in a plump chair, its ancient leather dyed a deep scarlet and mottled by decades of saddlesoap and elbowgrease, its arms and ornaments and swooping clawfooted legs carved from a brown wood age-darkened to almost-black. She was a small woman with a halo of fine white hair about a face dominated by huge black eyes, ageless eyes. She wore a simple white blouse, an old black skirt smoothed neatly about her short legs, legs too large for her size. She’d been a diver before she married into the Goza family, not one of the premiere Dallisses though she shared their arrogance; even now he could see the merm marks on the backs of her hands. She sniffed impatiently, repeated what she’d said.

  “Youngers and middlers from Goza House have been running with the inklins. Gensi, Kivin, Kaynas, it’s an isya, I think, one just forming with Gensi as the Pole. Zaraiz, Bulun and half a dozen boys, they call themselves…” her weary wrinkled face lifted suddenly, lighted by the grin that made him and everyone else adore her when they weren’t afraid of her, “the Green Slimes, or something like that. They were in that hoohaw last night, dropping sludge bombs on the guard barracks. At least it wasn’t fire, they haven’t gone that far, both sets, it’s mischief still, but the inklins they’re mixing with aren’t playing, Kar. Nor are the bitbits. Streetgangs, tchah! what nonsense. You weren’t like that, much more sensible.”

  Karrel Goza thought about a few of his exploits when he was a younger (which he fervently hoped she’d never find out about) and didn’t think he’d been all that sensible. He wasn’t too old to remember the feeling that he and his agemates were alone against a stodgy disapproving world, how they built up a powerful secret world of their own that no adu
lt had access to. He couldn’t see this crop of pre-adults welcoming interference, but the world was infinitely more dangerous these days and the Ommar was right. Something had to be done. “Yizzies? Homemade or borrowed or what?”

  “Gensi boasted she made her own; I suppose they all did, which means they’ve been stealing, there’s no other way they could have got the materials, you know very well no adult in this family has coin to throw away on idiocy like that.”

  “Where are they keeping them?”

  “Not in the House. I’d have the obscenities smashed if I could lay my hands on them.”

  “The boys, do you know which is the leader?”

  “Zaraiz Memeli, as much as any. That clutch of shoks, it’s not even an imitation isya and as for being a gang, tchah!” She leaned forward, urgent and more upset than he could remember seeing her, her tangled white brows squeezing against the deep cleft between them. “I am afraid of them, Kar. I know their faces, but not what they’re thinking, if they’re thinking at all; I look into those shallow animal eyes and I wonder if there’s anything but animal behind them.” She straightened her back. “In any case, they have to be stopped. Bad enough to have those street-sweepings making trouble. Tchah! Do you know what Herkken Daz will do to us if Sech Gorak finds one of our boys dead on the street or shoots one of them out of the sky? Goza House will be translated to Tassalga brick by brick. What’s left of it. I’m talking to you, do you know why? Because everyone here knows what you’re doing and I have this faint hope the boys will listen to you. If they don’t, I don’t know what to do. The girls…” she brushed a hand across her eyes, “the girls, ahh! Kar, they look at me… animal eyes, nothing there. I thought I knew girls, I don’t know these. Talk to them, Kar. If you think it would help, can you get that Indiz Dalliss to see them? You know who I mean.”

  He sipped at the tea to cover his hesitation. After a minute, he said, “That might be difficult. The Huvved put a price on her head and the Jerk has doubled it.”