"Copy that." Luc slid the package into a pocket on the inside of his cape. "Any other gizmos?"
"Your cloak’s pockets have many of the amenities you might require. You must leave now. Your shuttle departs in fifteen minutes." Victor pulled something from his HUD and flicked it to Luc. The electronic ticket authorized passage to the surface city, Nannandry. Victor then pressed his hand on a security panel, opening the exterior hatch to one of Léger Nuage's landing pads.
"Be sure to tell your girl I'm coming back for her."
Victor looked startled for a moment and then glowered. "I certainly will not and you'll speak of Madame with respect while in my presence."
Luc wasn't sure if it was the long cape he now wore or the fact that his bokken was strapped onto his belt like a pirate, but for the first time in a couple of weeks he felt ready to take on the world. He looked up to where he was certain Dorian watched on a video sensor, blew her a kiss, and spun on his heel. He grinned as the cloud city’s always-present winds billowed his cape out behind him.
In contrast to Nuage Gros, Léger Nuage was the smallest of the nine Nuage cities. Feeling well rested, Luc strode confidently past the tall, open archway that led into the city. After stepping through the transparent pressure barrier, the wind abated and he took a moment to run a hand through his hair, straightening it. Focusing on a menu within his HUD, he pulled down instructions on where he was to meet the shuttle to Nannandry. He was two levels below where he needed to be. Instead of walking to the center of the city where he could catch a lift, Luc decided to run the stairs which wound their way up just inside the armor-glass exterior of the city. Breathing hard at the top of his short run, he turned back and followed the outside wall to a landing pad where the Nannandry shuttle sat waiting for him.
The shuttle wasn’t much to look at, a rectangular box with chamfered corners and twin tubular General Astral three-fifty engines bolted unimaginatively just below a row of windows. The captain was equally unimpressive, hunched over from living a hard life in Grünholz’s heavy gravity and constantly wet environment. He’d seen the shuttle departing Léger numerous times in his career and wondered if it was possible the captain would recognize him.
“Your ticket, sir.” The shuttle’s captain stepped back as a wet coughing fit caused him to retract the scanner he’d held forward.
When he finally recovered, Luc pinched the virtual ticket his AI projected onto his HUD and flicked it at the man.
“Baron Serikov, we’re honored,” the man said through what looked to be the start of a fresh coughing fit. “This dak dry air,” he explained as Luc waited for confirmation. “Always gets me.”
“When will we leave?” Luc asked impatiently, working on his character. He’d seen more than one of the so-called free men of Oberrhein and knew they would not put up with the weakness displayed by the man.
“You are our last passenger. I’ll clear a seat for you.”
Luc followed the man up the stairs and watched in private horror as he pulled a ragged woman and her child from the front seats and pushed them into the aisle.
“But there are no more seats,” the woman pleaded.
“Then stand. Now move off or I’ll leave you with the pigeons. Learn your place, woman. We have a free man aboard.”
When Luc’s eyes fell on the woman she looked away and down, cowering as if she expected him to strike her. She hurried to the rear of the shuttle. Luc’s eyes narrowed as he looked back to the captain who was smiling, expecting to have gained favor. He sighed and sat heavily in the seat. To come to the woman’s aid would be completely out of character.
“Do you intend to fly this piece of dakshite or stand around talking?” Luc’s lip curled as he glowered.
The smile moved off the man’s face and he scurried forward, disappearing into the cockpit just as the stairs flattened and retracted against the side of the shuttle’s hull.
Moments later, the shuttle lifted and dropped over the side of the landing pad’s lip. Looking out the window, Luc watched Léger Nuage disappear from view as the shuttle was swallowed by puffy white clouds. The shuttle’s engines whined as the winds increased, rattling the interior of the cabin. White clouds gave way to dark gray, and lightning flashes were preceded by peels of thunder.
“Hold on, folks. We’re in for some weather,” the captain said, cutting off the last of his sentence as he coughed.
Luc looked for and found the seat restraints, wondering if using them would ruin the free man image he’d been working to build. When the shuttle dropped unexpectedly and he struck his shoulder on the window he decided his reputation wasn’t worth a cracked skull. The restraints used an unfamiliar mechanism that his AI had to demonstrate on his HUD before he finally understood. For what seemed like hours, he wrestled with the pieces until finally clipping them together on his lap.
Rain pelted the skin of the shuttle just as the captain dropped below the clouds. Luc searched the rain-soaked sky, looking down and trying to make out the sea below. Grünholz was ninety percent water covered. One of the features he was particularly interested in seeing were the lightning vines that grew out of the shallow waters around Nannandry. The plants rose a hundred meters in the air during violent storms, looking to attract lightning strikes. Luc had heard firsthand how these vines had brought down a ship much larger than the shuttle in which he was currently flying.
“No storms where you’re from?” a man’s voice asked from across the aisle.
Luc’s AI displayed a quick answer on his HUD. “Not at all,” he improvised. “More rain in this storm than we’d get in a month. I was hoping to get a look at a lightning vine.”
“Grable knows better than to get anywhere near the vines,” the man replied. “They’re a good twenty kilometers south of here. Not too many people seen ‘em are still walking about.”
Luc nodded his head in understanding and sat back in his chair, tired of fighting against the shuttle’s constant shaking.
“True what he said? You a free man?”
“Not what we call it,” Luc replied, appreciating his AI’s prompts. “I’m a citizen of Vermeer. Are you a free man?”
“Merchant from Nannandry. We’re allied with Oberrhein, but not in the Kingdom. I take it you’re headed out to one of the fiefs.”
“Cauldron,” Luc said. “I’ll be looking for passage when I get to Nannandry. Any suggestions?”
The color drained from the man’s face. “There is a trader in the market. Haik Torigan. He would know of such things. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”
Luc turned back and looked out the window, not surprised by the man’s reaction. Cauldron was one of the worst of the many fiefs that made up the Oberrhein empire. It had been Emilie Bastion’s bad luck to have crashed near the dark city.
Slowing of the shuttle’s engines was Luc’s first indication that they’d arrived at their destination. It wasn’t until the ship had very nearly sat down on the moss-covered landing pad that he was able to see anything but rain.
Built atop the thick, interwoven branches of a leadwood thicket, Nannandry had been formed by German settlers at about the same time Léger Nuage had been built. Growing from the peat box, the Germans had discovered a solid, albeit unconventional, foundation for a city. The thicket stretched for several kilometers and rose more than nine hundred meters from the surface. The branches, having grown slowly over centuries in the 1.2g gravity were purported to be nearly as strong as steel.
“I trust your flight was satisfactory,” the captain said, twisting a manual release on the exterior hatch.
A wind gust carried a blast of rain into the cabin as the hatch fell outward, converting to stairs. Luc stood, closed his cloak and pushed his bokken into its scabbard at his waist. The rain was warm, his AI registering it at twenty-six degrees, although blowing rain obscured the projection of the HUD onto his retina. Pushing the man from his path, Luc stepped down the stairs, grateful for the sure grip of the boots Victor had provided.
Luc set off, eyes searching the leaf-obscured wall for a break. It wasn’t until he was right next to the plant growth that he realized he was seeing the opening, but the vegetation was so dense he had to push it aside to enter. The path that led downhill was anything but flat and he worked to keep his footing on the slick logs. Fortunately, the overgrowth deflected the rain and the storm’s fury was reduced to a roar behind him. The sounds grew quieter as he moved further down the twisting path.
Shouts ahead grabbed Luc’s attention as two barefooted, thickset kids rounded a corner and pulled up short before running into him.
“Shite. Free man,” the shorter of the two said, careening into the vines that ran beside the path. His companion looked up, surprise awash on his face. Without another word, they jumped into the vines and disappeared, struggling as they pulled themselves expertly through the twisted mass.
“Oh,” an older woman said as she rounded the corner and stepped out of his way. “My apologies, sir.”
Feeling like a heel, he brushed past wordlessly and found himself at the edge of what his AI identified as the Nannandry marketplace. Vendor booths built from wooden posts and covered in broad leaves were strewn haphazardly at various levels in the spacious but poorly lit opening.
“Fetish for your love?” asked an old woman with wet, gray hair clinging to the side of her head. “Carved it myself, I did.” She hobbled forward from where she stood in front of her shack and pushed it into Luc’s face.
“Get off, Hag,” he said, striking her hand and knocking the idol to the ground. He ground his teeth, hating the image he was forced to portray. The woman scrabbled to pick up the idol.
“A hex on you.” She spat on the ground, not looking back at him.
“Tell me woman, where would I find Torigan?”
“Why would I tell you anything, free man? What can you take from me that you haven’t already?”
Luc pulled out a coin he’d discovered in one of the cloak’s many pockets. Coins as tender were rare and were usually just flattened chunks of raw material like copper or silver. The raw materials held enough value with replicator technology that most accepted the exchange gratefully. And so was the case with the woman who eyed the coin greedily. “Torigan, you say? I know of Haik Torigan. Give me your coin. I will tell you where to find him.”
“Take me to him,” Luc said, pushing the coin into a pocket behind his belt.
“Your word?”
Luc started to walk away, knowing that finding Torigan wouldn’t be that difficult without the woman’s help. He’d appreciate the chance to give her the coin, but he knew well that the free men wouldn’t give their word to an old woman for something so trivial.
“It is my mistake.” The woman bustled around him. “I will take you to Torigan.”
Together, they moved through the marketplace, the crone pushing through the small knots of people who happened to block her way. Finally, she stopped in front of a u-shaped collection of buildings that had been constructed from plastics and steel.
“Narod?” A woman wearing blue robes asked, looking up from a stack of leaves she was kneeling over and tying together with twine into a tight bundle.
“This free man looks for Torigan,” the old woman said.
The blue-robed woman smiled tightly, sitting back on her heels and standing up. “I will fetch him.”
Luc extracted the coin and placed it into the old woman’s outstretched hand. “Do not speak to anyone of my visit.”
“Narod knows how to be quiet.” She turned and bustled away, clearly not wanting anything further to do with Luc.
From the same building the blue-robed woman had disappeared into, a man appeared. From his clothing, Luc could see the man was a cut above the majority of Nannandrites he’d run into so far.
“Sybilla says a free man awaits Haik. Please, let us stand within my warehouse so that the rain of Sparacal is held from our heads. My good woman brings a cup of warm tea.”
Luc followed Haik past the threshold of the barn and pushed his hood back as the insistent dripping from the canopy above desisted.
“What is it that brings a free man to my door today?”
The same woman, presumably Sybilla, approached with two small ceramic cups partially filled with a transparent brown liquid.
“I need transport to Cauldron,” Luc said simply, testing the drink with a sip. A gasp from the woman was hastily covered by the arm of her robe and she hustled away from the two.
“A man’s business is his own, but I feel I must warn you. Cauldron is a city not to be visited lightly,” Torigan said.
Luc pulled a sliver of pure gold from within his cloak. Referred to as a finger, the item’s worth was a thousand credits. “Yours if we leave now.”
“It is a dangerous trip, Mr. …”
“Serikov,” Luc replied. “Baron Roth Serikov. We leave immediately and I will give you a second finger upon our safe arrival.”
Torigan accepted the finger from Luc, placed it into the ceramic cup he held, and set the cup on a bale of leaves next to the open door of his warehouse. “The storm will make for a poor journey, but if one were to wait on Grünholz for clear weather, there would be nothing accomplished. I hope you do not get seasick.”
Without another word, Haik turned and walked toward the back of the warehouse with Luc following in his wake.
“What are you doing?” Luc asked as Torigan pushed at a bale in the middle of the floor.
“Help me. There is a hatch beneath,” he said. “I don’t like to advertise it.”
Luc shrugged and pitched in, pushing against the bale which slid easily with the two men working together.
“When will you be back?” Sybilla asked, finding the men looking at a ladder that led down.
Luc could hear the echoes of water lapping against a structure from within the hole, but he was unable to see anything.
“In the morning,” Torigan said. “And please fetch the tea cups I left at the front of the warehouse. I would hate for Narod to have off with them.”
Sybilla gave him a quizzical look, but hustled away nonetheless.
Without hesitating, Torigan stepped across the opening and placed a foot onto the ladder, descending into the darkness. Luc followed suit and soon found himself in an open area beneath the marketplace. From below, the structure seemed like madness to Luc. Branches of the leadwood trees had been cut randomly to make a flat place for people to exchange goods. As his eyes adjusted to the even lower light, they fell upon several locations that had regrown and he could only imagine what would happen to someone who fell through.
“How far?” Luc asked as they continued to descend, his arms tiring quickly in the heavy gravity.
“Cauldron is forty kilometers if we were to go straight across. That’s impossible due to the groglesnouts and lightning vines.”
“Groglesnout is a real thing?”
“Half fish, half lagarto,” Torigan explained, stepping off the ladder onto a wooden dock. “Attracted to motion. Word is one killed a pilot from Nuage a few weeks back. Bad luck, that. They are efficient predators.”
“Big enough to eat a person?” Luc asked in disbelief. He shook out his arms from the exertion and tried not to sound too interested.
“See that Blue Lagarto over there?” Torigan pointed across dock. Fortunately, Luc’s AI figured out what he was indicating and highlighted the otherwise extremely well camouflaged, two-meter-long blue-green lizard. “I’ve seen a groglesnout eat a lagarto twice that size. Worse thing is a groglesnout doesn’t kill you right away. It breaks you. Bleeds you out and then drags
back your pieces to its lair.
“You’re saying someone who got attacked by a groglesnout might have a chance to live?”
“I wouldn’t think so.” Torigan stepped into a boat tied to the narrow dock. Luc watched in anticipation as the lagarto slipped into the water, clearly not pleased at the noise they were making. “Groglesnout would snap off a big chunk of you. No surviving that, I wouldn’t think. You wouldn’t think a lagarto could scream. I’m telling you, they can when they’ve had their back half bitten off.”
Luc felt sick to his stomach. He hadn’t wanted to believe there was any possibility that Emilie had been eaten by the beast. Torigan’s description, however, seemed to fit with the report received from Oberrhein.
“We’re taking this all the way to Cauldron?” Luc asked, concerned with the boat’s size.
“No, this is just a good way to get out of town without folks watching.” Torigan threw a line off onto the dock. “We’ll trade up once we’re clear of the undergrowth. Stay away from the sides. That lagarto can’t cause us any real trouble, but she’ll consider anything dangling over the side to be lunch.”
Luc pulled his arm back and removed his bokken from where it hung at his side. The rigid, wooden weapon wasn’t well suited to sitting in a small boat.
The long, narrow boat pushed forward, powered by a motor unseen by Luc. Deftly, Torigan navigated a confusing set of turns, finally coming free from the tangle of roots in the peat bog beneath Nannandry. Luc pulled his hood up and wrapped his cloak tightly around his body as rain mixed with a windy spray of water. Fifteen minutes later, the boat slowed as Torigan pulled up next to a much larger craft attached to a mooring ball.
“You just leave this out here? Aren’t you afraid someone will take it?” Luc asked as they transferred between the two boats.
“It’s the sort of thing a person buys the right kind of insurance for.”
On a Pale Ship: A Privateer Tales Series Page 9
