“I’m relieved to hear it,” Slade said. He did not sound particularly relieved, merely thoughtful, and Heikki hid a frown of her own. I have a nasty feeling, she thought, that I’ve just defined all too precisely just how far I’m willing to compromise. It was not a pleasant thought.
“Well, it was a possibility that had to be mentioned,” Slade said, with sudden affability. “I’m glad you think it can be discounted. And since you don’t think this is necessarily connected with our crash….” He let his voice trail off. When Heikki did not respond to the invitation, he smiled and continued, “I don’t think we need be concerned unless further evidence turns up.”
It was virtually an order, and Heikki could not quite hide her frown. “As you say,” she answered, but knew the other heard the insincerity in her voice.
Slade touched the shadowscreen that lay discarded on his desk, and a few moments later Neilenn tapped discreetly at the door.
“Ser Slade?”
“Would you see Dam’ Heikki back to her ‘cat, please, Jens?” Slade smiled. “Thank you for being willing to see me on such short notice, Dam’ Heikki.”
Despite her best intentions, Heikki choked on the formula of polite response. “Not at all,” she managed at last, and saw Slade’s smile waver. It was only for a fraction of a second, but she winced inwardly. Slade had never been less than an enemy, of that she felt sure, but now she had pushed him into something more than mere passive opposition. Damn all ‘pointers, she thought, momentarily all Iadaran, and then common sense reasserted herself. She had obliquely insulted him, true, but she had also obliquely agreed to back him in his desire to keep the planetary police from connecting the attack on Sebasten-Januarias with the downed latac. Even if she’d annoyed him, he needed her for that—and that should be enough to hold him, she thought, at least until we can get back to the Loop. Still, she was frowning as she followed Neilenn back to his runabout, and the sense of unease did not leave her as she restarted the fastcat and eased it slowly out of the compound, moving against the stream of traffic arriving for the day shifts.
Her uneasiness did not abate as she brought the ‘cat into the underground workbay. There was no point in it, she knew—she could not change what she had already done—but she could not help wishing she knew more about what had happened, and why Slade cared. Well, maybe Sten’s picked up something, she thought, and levered herself up out of the ‘cat. The underground level was relatively crowded, she saw with some relief, perhaps half a dozen vehicles of various types drawn into the bays, each one attended by a driver or two in loose-fitting coveralls badged with company logos at throat and shoulder. One or two looked up as she made her way toward the connecting archway, but no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to her arrival. As she reached the arch itself, however, she was joined by a stocky, good-looking woman whose dark-blue coveralls bore a silver crescent at the neck. Heikki gave her a polite smile, and was remotely pleased when the woman smiled back.
“Dam’ Heikki?”
Heikki hesitated, and knew by the look in the other woman’s eyes that it was too late to deny the identification. “That’s right,” she said, and wished she were carrying the blaster that was locked in her personal safe. Her hand crept toward the slit of her shift, and the knife sheathed at her thigh.
“Jan asked me to give you this.” The woman lifted her arm fractionally, moving from the elbow, palm turned toward the floor. Heikki held out her own hand, and felt a thin packet, about the size of a minidisk but lighter, slip into her own palm.
“Thanks,” Heikki began, but the other woman had already lengthened her step, was striding away toward the lobby. Heikki’s eyebrows rose, but she suppressed the temptation to examine whatever it was she had been given, slipping it instead into the inner pocket of her belt. By the time she reached the lobby, the other woman had vanished. Heikki sighed, and made her way back to the suite,
Djuro was gone, as she had more than half expected he would be, only a light flashing on the message cube in the center of the main room. Heikki picked up the remote she had left by the door, and triggered the message, sighing to herself.
“I contacted Jock and Alexieva,” Djuro’s voice began, without preliminary. “They are returning as soon as it’s light, taking all precautions. Jock estimates they’ll be on the ground in Lowlands by the fourteenth hour. I’m heading down to the field myself, you can reach me through the beeper if you need me.”
Heikki nodded as though Djuro could see her, and switched off the machine. Jock was coming in, and Sten was linked to her by the standard emergency channels: now that they were accounted for, she could turn her attention to the message Sebasten-Januarias had sent. If, of course, he did send it, she thought suddenly, and paused with her hand just touching the tight little packet. She shook herself, dismissing the thought as too fantastic even under the circumstances, and pulled out the message. It was not a disk, as she had expected, but a much-folded square of paper. She unfolded it, and frowned over the labored handwriting. Need to talk to you, she deciphered after a moment’s study. Will be at Uncle Chan’s till midnight. The signature was even less legible than the message itself, but at last she recognized Jan and the interlaced S and J.
She leaned back in her chair, chewing at her under-lip. Sebasten-Januarias had to be worried, to send a written message rather than a disk or use the existing communal lines—unless, of course, it was a forgery. She shook her head slowly, unable to decide. She had never seen Sebasten-Januarias’s handwriting, except for his signature on their contract. She pushed herself to her feet then, and went into the workroom, reaching for the disk file. She rifled through them until she found the one she wanted, and fed it into the reader. Her desk screen lit, and she touched keys to summon up the file she needed. Sebasten-Januarias’s rather baroque signature filled the display window. She studied it, glancing from it to the written message and back again, then, still frowning, dismissed the file. They looked close enough to her, but she was no expert, and knew it. She stood for a moment longer, staring at the empty screen, then turned away abruptly. She was tired of waiting, of calculating and of caution.
“I’m going,” she said aloud, and turned to unlock the safe before she could change her mind. The machine beeped softly to itself, and then released the lock. She slipped her blaster into its boottop holster, and laid Sebasten-Januarias’s message in its place. Then she relocked the safe, and returned to the main room.
“Sten,” she said, and touched the record button on the message cube. “Sten, if I’m not back by the fifteenth hour, take a look in the safe.” She released the button and swept from the suite before she could change her mind.
Like anyone who’d spent any time on Iadara, she knew Uncle Chan’s Bar. It stood in the heart of FirstTown, a low, windowless, pink building just off the main through road. It was the meeting place as much as anything that had made her decide to believe the message, she realized, as she swung the ‘cat back out of its bay. Not even Lo-Moth could expect to get away with murder in Uncle Chan’s. Always assuming, a small, rational voice reminded her sourly, that Lo-Moth—or someone—does want to attack you, and that they’ll wait until you get to Uncle’s.
Traffic was light through the city—most of the day workers were already on the job, and it was too early for the leisured classes to be out of bed. Even so, it took her the better part of two hours to reach FirstTown, and another dozen minutes to find a safe place to leave the fastcat. At last she found a lot where the guard looked as though she wouldn’t sell the vehicles for spare parts, and slid the ‘cat into a space between two ho-crawls. She gave the guard the fee in local scrip—credit was non-existent in a place like this—and started down the main street toward Uncle Chan’s.
Purely by chance, she had chosen clothes that blended in with the prevailing Firster styles. No one seemed to be paying any particular attention to her; she relaxed a little, but kept a wary eye on the passers-by. She did not turn off the main street until she wa
s sure no one was following her.
The pink-walled building looked as blank and foreboding as it ever had in her youth, and Heikki had consciously to remind herself that she was now of age, a legal patron of the bar. She was smiling rather wryly as she pushed through the door, and stood blinking in the sudden red light. The main room was not particularly crowded. Most of the private cubicles stood empty, curtains laced back, and the central tables were equally unoccupied. There were perhaps a dozen people still sitting at the wide bar, hunched over glasses and falqs: workers from the night shift, Heikki guessed, finishing a last drink before heading home to bed. There was no sign of Sebasten-Januarias. She frowned, and started for the bar, when a voice said, “Heikki?”
It was Sebasten-Januarias, and Heikki turned to see him standing in the arch of the nearest cubicle, the curtain held back with one hand. There was a bandage around his other hand, and a shiny patch of synthiskin on his forehead. Heikki winced in sympathy, and turned to join him.
“Are you all right?” she asked, and at the young man’s nod slipped past him into the cubicle.
“More or less,” Sebasten-Januarias answered, and let the heavy curtain fall behind him. He seated himself on the banquette opposite, favoring his bandaged hand. “So you heard what happened?”
“Part of it, at any rate,” Heikki said. “Tell me anyway.”
Sebasten-Januarias managed a wry grin, though the synthiskin crinkled painfully. “There’s not much to tell, I’m afraid. A friend of mine came down sick, he has a mail run out to a couple of the mid-size farms, and he asked me to take the flight for him. I owe him a favor, so I said I would, and when I was on the last leg—the longest one, up to the edge of the massif—someone fired a seeker at me.” He shrugged. “I caught it on the scanners in time, looped out and away, so it wasn’t a direct hit. It knocked out most of the systems, though, and the main powerplant—I think a chunk of the casing holed it—and I had a hell of a time putting it down. I ended up in the treetops, spent the night in the bush, and walked out. The bus’s irrecoverable.”
Heikki nodded, impressed. It took a damn good pilot to survive at all, and a confident one not to brag about his brilliance afterward.
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” Sebasten-Januarias said. He reached for the almost-empty glass in front of him, and Heikki saw that his uninjured hand was shaking. “A couple of days ago—a couple of days before Antoan asked me to take over for him—a man came out to the Last Shift looking for me. He said he wanted to hire me to do some mapping flights—he said he was a private surveyor, working for one of the truck farms.”
Heikki nodded encouragingly. The massif, and the lands below, were still imperfectly surveyed, largely unsettled. More than one medium-scale farmer had made his fortune by clearing a secondary tract in the lower forests.
“What he really wanted was to know about the wreck, what we’d found.” Sebasten-Januarias stopped, shook his head. “I thought at first he just wanted gossip, but then he got nasty, and I lost my temper.”
“What do you mean, he got nasty?” Heikki interjected.
The other shrugged, rather painfully, and did not meet her eyes. “He started saying we hadn’t done the job right, that—well, that you’d been bought off, like FourSquare. And, like I said, I lost my temper and told him to go to hell. That’s what I think caused all this.”
Heikki’s eyes narrowed. “Just what did you say to him, Jan?” she began, and Sebasten-Januarias cut in quickly.
“I said I had half a mind to go back out there myself, before the corporate goons could start messing around with the evidence.” He made a face. “I know, it was a dumb thing to say—” He held up his bandaged hand. “—I mean, tell me how dumb!—but he made me mad.”
“And the first time you flew out of the Lowlands control perimeter, someone took a shot at you,” Heikki said slowly.
“Yeah.” Sebasten-Januarias looked embarrassed again. “I was going to take some time off, figured I owed myself a vacation.”
“Are you sure your friend—Antoan, was it—was really sick?” Heikki asked. There was a vague picture forming in her mind, the details fuzzy, but the outline unpleasantly clear.
“Yes,” Sebasten-Januarias began, but broke off. “I didn’t check. Why should I?”
Heikki didn’t bother answering, staring instead at the menu displayed beneath the table top. It was too early to be drinking, but a part of her wanted a glass of the harsh local whiskey, and the false calm it would bring.
“Antoan’s one of us,” Sebasten-Januarias said, a little too emphatically. “He wouldn’t set me up.”
“Maybe not intentionally,” Heikki said, her mind elsewhere, and Sebasten-Januarias swore softly.
“How couldn’t he intend it?”
Heikki looked up, belatedly remembering her responsibilities, and said, “He wouldn’t’ve been told why—if he did fake being sick, that is—just offered money to do it. If I were setting it up, I’d say something like I wanted to see what kind of a pilot you are, without letting you know I was interested in hiring. That would work.”
The younger man nodded grudgingly, somewhat appeased. “I guess it could happen that way.”
“More important,” Heikki said, “is what you do now.”
“I somehow didn’t think this was the end of it,” Sebasten-Januarias muttered. “I was thinking I’d hole up with my cousins, out toward Retego Bay—”
“How were you planning on getting there?” Heikki asked.
The pilot shrugged, and swore, clutching his ribs with his good hand. “Fly myself, or hitchhike. All right, it wasn’t that great an idea, but you know what Lowlands is like. Nothing’s a secret here.”
That had been true twenty years ago, Heikki thought, and some things didn’t change. The Firster community was a small one, and despite its ideology was intricately intertwined with the corporate world. People talked— you didn’t keep secrets from kin, after all—and inevitably Lo-Moth heard. It took time for information to make its way through the crooked channels, perhaps even enough time. “Be careful, Jan,” she said aloud, wishing there was more she could do. “Thanks for telling me.”
“You’re welcome.” Sebasten-Januarias hesitated. “Look, there’s something else you need to know, about Alexieva. First, I don’t like her. I’m saying that up front so you won’t accuse me of being prejudiced. She’s hard to get along with, and I don’t like her. But she’s also very close to Lo-Moth, too close for an independent, and she gets a lot of jobs from them that maybe she oughtn’t on balance to get.”
“We were told she was the best,” Heikki said.
“She may be,” Sebasten-Januarias retorted, “but she’s also expensive, and Lo-Moth doesn’t like paying top money for anything. Not on their own planet, anyway.”
That was true enough. Heikki made a disgusted face, and looked away. I knew there was something wrong when Alexieva agreed to that contract, she thought. I knew it, and I didn’t have the sense to investigate. Damn, I should’ve listened to my instincts and not hired her in the first place. She can’t be the only surveyor on Iadara.
“She may be the only good surveyor on Iadara,” she began, and Sebasten-Januarias cut in.
“That’s just it, she isn’t. There’s Axt, and Karast, and Charlie Peng, for that matter, all just as good. Oh, she’s an incomer, and that helps—not being Firster, I mean. But she always gets the recommendations and then the big jobs from Lo-Moth.” He broke off, grimacing. “All right, maybe I’m not being fair. She is good, and there’s no reason the company shouldn’t recommend her. But she’s just too damn close to them, that’s all.”
“Ciceron gave me one name,” Heikki said, then shook herself. “Damn, I should’ve thought. Well, that explains how a weatherman got to be the Guild rep here. Lo-Moth must’ve put him in place, to look after their interests.” It made sense when she thought about it, too much sense for her to have overlooked it in the first place. Of course off-worlder contrac
t labor would prefer to go to their own guilds to find local help, and, equally, Lo-Moth would want to be sure their temporary employees hired only reliable locals. “Christ, I’ve been stupid.” Poor Jock, she thought remotely. He wont be happy to find out his latest playmate’s a corporate hack.
“I appreciate this,” she said aloud. “Look, is there anything—?”
Sebasten-Januarias grinned. “Don’t worry about me, Heikki. I can manage.”
“I hope so,” Heikki said, and pushed herself up from the table. In the doorway, she looked back, but Sebasten-Januarias was already gone.
By the time she returned to the suite, Djuro was there ahead of her, sitting with arms folded in front of the message cube. He looked up as she came in, his light eyes angry.
“What the hell was that all about?”
Heikki waved away the question. “Later,” she said, and touched the button that would erase the message she had left. “Did you pick up any news?”
“Later, hell,” Djuro began, and Heikki sighed.
“Let it go for a minute, Sten,” she said. “What did you hear?”
The little man grimaced, and ran a hand over his bald head. “A lot of nothing. The Firsters are mad as hell, but no one seems to have any idea of what really happened. I think I must’ve heard half a dozen different stories—I don’t suppose you know what’s going on?”
Heikki gave a twisted smile. “I might.” Quickly, she outlined Sebasten-Januarias’s story, not adding her own suspicions. When she had finished, Djuro sighed again, looking up at her from under down-drawn eyebrows. “You didn’t hear all that from this—Ser Slade?” “No,” Heikki agreed. For an instant, she toyed with the idea of not saying anything more, but common sense prevailed. “I spoke to Jan, at a bar in FirstTown—that’s what the message I left you was all about. He told me what had happened.”
Djuro muttered something through clenched teeth, but not loudly enough to force her to take notice. Instead, she fished her lens out of her belt. The chronometric display showed almost noon, and she went over to the little kitchen to mix herself a stiff drink.
Mighty Good Road Page 20
