Jinx on a Terran Inheritance

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

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JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

Brian Daley

I think this one's for the house-apes: Eileen, Kevin, Danny and Mike, and Erin and
Nicholas

CHAPTER 1—PARDON US

"Hold it!" Alacrity yelled, grabbing for the controls. "That's her!" He yanked the corridor tram out of autoguide and changed course so fast that Hobart Floyt had to clutch frantically to keep their scant luggage from flying down the corridor. The tram came to an abrupt stop behind a huge pilaster—the stronghold Frostpile was built on the grand scale in every way—nearly throwing them both off.

The robes they'd worn to the funeral of Cazpahr Weir, and in which they'd nearly been killed an hour earlier, hung limply, bedraggled and ridiculous. Floyt bruised his hip against his Inheritor's belt, a waistband of heavy reddish alloy plaques.

"Who'd you see?" Floyt demanded in a whisper. "What's going on? We should've demanded that Governor Redlock give us back our guns, that's what!" Until a few weeks earlier, Floyt, native of preterist, isolationist Terra, had refused to so much as touch a firearm. But then again, he'd been through a lot recently. "Hey, watch where you're stepping," he added as Alacrity clambered over him.

Alacrity winced at the pain from the rib he'd cracked that morning in an airbike crash. He peered cautiously around the pilaster, motioning Floyt to silence. Alacrity's big, oblique eyes, their great irises a radiant yellow streaked with red and black, were wider than ever.

His baggy robe had slid back off his shoulders, revealing a mane of slate-gray hair, shot through with strands of silver, growing in a sharp V down the muscular channel of his back. He was a lean 197

centimeters tall.

Floyt left the tram, padding up behind in soft tabi. More than twenty centimeters shorter than Alacrity, he had close-trimmed brown hair and a beard going to gray. Recent events had left him less stocky than formerly. "Who is it? Did you see Heart?"

"Heart? Why would I be hiding from Heart? I'm in love with her! No, I thought I saw Sintilla."

Floyt snorted exasperatedly. "Sintilla went to one of the lesser wakes before Weir's last rites, remember?

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She'll be gone for hours. Now, stop being such a worrywart and let's—"

"A what? Wari-what?" Alacrity babbled.

"Hah? Not
wari,
'wari-wart!' I mean, wari-what! Goddammit, worrywart,
wart
! Floyt gibbered.

"Keep it down, Ho! That's all we need, for Tilla to spot us now! Or d'you
want
her tagging along all the way to Blackguard?"

Floyt drew a slow breath between clenched teeth. A patient and reasonable man, he was near his limits.

He eased around the pilaster just below his friend, whispering, "Even if it is her, she won't be looking for us yet. And by the time she finds out that we've—"

He straightened up suddenly and shouldered past the rangy Alacrity. "That woman's a food technician!

Couldn't you tell from the Suit of Lights, or whatever that outfit's called? She's twice Sintilla's size, besides! Now, will you come on, before the
Blue Pearl
leaves without us?"

"Looked like her at first; same hair. Listen, Ho, we can't be too careful. We've got enough trouble as it is."

"No argument there," Floyt conceded. Their Earthservice behavioral conditioning was eating at them—

they
had
to take this mysterious bequest from Weir, a starship called the
Astraea Imprimatur,
back for the enrichment of the Earthservice Resources Bureau.

That meant going to a planet called Blackguard—about which they knew slightly more than nothing—to claim her. Provided they could get out of Frostpile alive.

"Trouble?" said a voice behind them.

The two leapt up into the air, colliding with each other, Alacrity clawing for a sidearm he was not carrying. Dincrist, Heart's father, stood watching them.

He'd already changed from funeral robes to the heavily decorated uniform of a commercial starship captain. He didn't seem to be armed.
But if looks really
could
kill …
Alacrity thought.

"You have all the trouble you can handle, and far, far more." Dincrist was the picture of a patrician-sportsman, even taller than Alacrity and very fit, white-haired and deeply tanned.

Alacrity, at twenty-two a working spacer—a breakabout—for many years, held himself ready. He and Dincrist had already mixed it up twice, more or less to a draw, but Dincrist hadn't been through any airbike disasters or murder attempts yet that day, and was in excellent condition.

Still, Alacrity bristled. "What,
you
again? Shouldn't you be off flogging a
real
breakabout someplace?"

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Dincrist flushed slightly. The head of a powerful shipping and shipbuilding empire, he'd had only a minimum of actual experience in starship service—had only the technical right to be wearing his magnificent uniform.

"I heard about Endwraithe's trying to kill you," he said, tight-lipped. "I'm very glad that he failed; I mean to see to you myself, Fitzhugh."

"See how
good
the guy is at that kind of talk, Ho?" Alacrity said out of the corner of his mouth.

"Very effective facial expressions, too," Floyt replied lightly. Inside, though, he was fighting dread and despair. Dincrist was a man to be feared.

"I've no time to waste on nitwits." Dincrist took a half step toward them, and Alacrity braced for a dustup.

Instead, Heart's father pointed a finger at them and proclaimed, "Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt, I, Captain Soft-coygne Dincrist, declare myself to be your sworn enemy and you both to be mine. By the Bans and the Pandect, by word and by deed, I swear to harm and to hinder you, to break and to kill you.

I call down upon you misfortune, reversal, calamity, and affliction."

The rolling cadence of the avowal was so hypnotic, Dincrist's tone so orotund, it took them a moment to realize that he'd finished.

"Oh, oh yeah?" Alacrity parried weakly. "Well, don't count on it."

"Right!" Floyt jumped in, surprisingly ferocious. "If you give us any trouble, we'll spin your head around like a
weathervane
!"

Alacrity took heart. "That's right; we'll stomp you flatter than a month-old road-kill!"

"Kill you faster than anything in the pharmacy!"

"Polish our shoes on your balls!"

Their uncouth counterspell took Dincrist by surprise. Too furious to retaliate in kind, he turned and strode away quickly. They called parting incantations after him.

"Dog your dong in a hatch!"

"Do the Dance of Death on your face!" Alacrity lowered his voice. "Did you hear that, Ho? He, he
jinxed
us!"

"The way things have been going, how will we know if it takes?"

"We'd better get moving."

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They reboarded the tram and resumed the trip to the tower roof. From there, Governor Redlock's opulent shuttle, the
Blue Pearl,
was to depart. The governor had a lot of things on his mind, including the death of his father-in-law, First Councillor Inst, who'd attacked Alacrity and Floyt during the airbike race, and the discovery that his wife, Queen Dorraine, wasn't quite who he'd always thought she was.

The two companions-in-adversity doubted Redlock's willingness to delay lift-off just for them, so they put on all speed.

Then, too, there was Sintilla, the lively, determined little free-lance journalist who'd become something of an ally to them at Frostpile—in part for her own gain. They'd discovered, only minutes earlier, that she planned to write a series of lurid and completely fictionalized adventure books about them.

Anonymity and a certain freedom of movement were just about the only things they had going for them, but Sintilla meant to bandy their names around in purple-prose penny dreadfuls with the most sensationally absurd titles Floyt had ever heard.

"
Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh Challenge the Amazon Slave Women of the Supernova
." Floyt groaned to himself.

Alacrity shook his head dejectedly. "I know, I know. But don't let yourself think about that now, Ho.

Just stay alert. Endwraithe might've had some backup. Or Dincrist could try something, High Truce or not. Scheisse, I wish Redlock had given us back our persuaders."

They cruised past security checkpoints manned by Invincibles, elite troops of the Weir forces in dress uniforms of crimson and gold. The Invincibles had been ordered to insure that no weapons were smuggled into Frostpile during the High Truce. Their searches were quite thorough. Yet they'd somehow missed Endwraithe's. Why a top officer of the powerful Bank of Spica should want to quiz Floyt about his inheritance, then try to shoot him and Alacrity, was still a puzzle.

Floyt delicately felt at his nose, broken—in the same crash that had cracked Alacrity's rib—and still smarting despite medical treatment. His tongue probed at the gap where Alacrity had knocked out two of his teeth.

"What's the point of watching out for assassins?" Floyt grouched. "The underhanded bastards are always sneaking up on us anyhow."

With the Willreading and other ceremonies over and the High Truce near its end, a good deal of traffic, mostly departing guests, was traveling the cyclopean corridors of Frostpile. Floyt, who'd only met a small fraction of them, stared at the dignitaries who'd converged on Epiphany, Weir's seat of power, from dozens of worlds. Weir had been a major power in that region of space; reapportionment of his file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...Daley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (4 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:28

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domain was an important event. He doubted that his family and friends back on Earth would be able to believe him when—if—he got back to describe the hodgepodge of racial subtypes, costumes and finery, and babel of tongues.

Alacrity raised his arm to see how much time remained before the
Pearl
was due to lift and realized that his wrist was bare.

"
Damn
! Ho, our proteuses! We left them with Tilla!" Alacrity was racked by indecision but leaning toward writing off the proteuses. The two had little money, and
Blue Pearl
was their only ticket offplanet.

With a magician's flourish, Floyt drew the two instruments from the pocket of his robe. "I spotted them while we were, um, visiting Tilla's rooms."

"Searching" was more the word. But Alacrity took his proteus gratefully; he had very few possessions, but it was just about his most treasured, a commo device, databank, systems accessor and more, in a wrist torc of overlapping, chitinous black metal plates tinged with verdigris. He ran a quick check. "It's okay; she didn't tap into the protected stuff. I guess Tilla didn't mess with it."

"Same here." Floyt's was a very cheap, simple model provided for his off world mission by the Earthservice. Alacrity hid a grin. There was little enough anyone could learn from Floyt's proteus, but some of the secrets stashed in Alacrity's could command serious amounts of money and bring down upon him enemies prepared to do a lot more than jinx him.

Just then the tram floated out onto the tower roof under the night sky of Epiphany. Frostpile lit the sky, a shining faerie city. It was too bright to see many stars, but Epiphany's two moons, Guileless Giles and the Thieving Magpie, were visible.

They were on the same roof where they'd disembarked from the
Blue Pearl
only four and one half days before. The acreage of formal carpet was still in place, lustrous black, worked in thread-of-gold with Weir insignia and symbols, the broken slave collar most prominent among them. The
Pearl
was nowhere to be seen.

"Do you think they left without us, Alacrity? Redlock and Dorraine invited us along, after all. I mean, even if Inst did get killed when we crashed the airbike, I thought—"

"They're still here, Ho." Alacrity pointed to where the shuttle was poised on the tip of a spiral resembling a unicorn's hom, at the far side of Frostpile. It might have been the tower where Endwraithe had cornered them before Alacrity shot the banker with one of Floyt's teeth.

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in diameter. She was lit from within; inside, shadows moved about.