The road to the spaceport lay just ahead.
Fast money,
Klea thought wistfully.
Easy. Nobody just off a ship is going to care whether you’re seeing things or not.
“No.”
She turned her back on the port and walked as fast as she could in the other direction, without caring where her footsteps took her. She knew the route to Freling’s Bar so well by now that she could walk it in her sleep, anyway—she almost had, more than once.
This time, in her haste to leave the port district behind her, she must have taken a wrong turning. By the time she noticed her surroundings again, she had come to a part of town that she didn’t recognize. The streets here were narrow and shadowy, mere alleyways crowded between tall buildings that could have been warehouses or manufactories or even offices for all Klea could tell; the grime-smeared names and logos painted on their looming walls gave her no clue. All of them were dark-windowed and deserted.
Klea begun to feel afraid, and this time she was sure it was her own emotion, not someone else’s. She could get her throat cut in one of these alleys, and nobody would know until tomorrow morning when people started showing up for work. She cast a nervous glance down the nearest side street, half-expecting to see the smiler with the knife already waiting.
Instead, and worse, she saw the body of a man, lying on his back in the mud.
Let him lie there, she told herself. He’s probably just another drunk.
But she hadn’t seen any bars in this district, or even a store where a down-and-outer might get enough cheap booze to put himself out for the night. She turned and headed down the alley toward where the man was lying.
When she reached him, a tremor of shock ran through her. This was no derelict, or even an unknown victim of the violence she had feared for herself. It was the young man who had spoken to her in the corner grocery—and once again in the midst of her nightmare—now sprawled unmoving at her feet, his tawny hair matted and slick with blood.
Klea squatted beside him, balancing awkwardly on the spindly heels of her working shoes to keep the mud from soaking the hem of her dress. From this close up, she could see his chest rising and falling under the beige coverall. He was still alive, but he looked like he needed serious help.
She glanced over her shoulder and frowned. She couldn’t even see the mouth of the alley.
Wait a minute … how did I spot him from where I was standing? That big garbage bin is in the way.
You’re seeing things these days, remember? So this time you saw something that turned out to be real.
“Hang on,” she whispered. “Just hang on. I’ll call Security and they’ll take care of you.”
The man’s eyes snapped open. Fever-bright, they glittered in the reflected light from the city around them and the last rays of sunlight before full dark. “No! No Security.”
He’d raised his head a bit in his agitation; now he let it fall back and closed his eyes. “No Security,” he said again, his voice barely audible. “Just take me home and I’ll be all right. Please.”
“If you say so. Where exactly do you live?”
There was no answer.
Damn,
thought Klea.
Now what do I do?
It wasn’t any of her business. She should just call Security and walk on.
But he was in my nightmare, trying to help me … . He said in the store that he could help me … .
It was too confusing. The aqua vitae she’d drunk earlier was fuzzing up her brain, making it hard to decide things. And Freling would be wondering where she was by now.
“Hell with Freling,” she muttered, put an arm under the man’s shoulders, and hauled him to his feet.
He was light, and the years on the farm had left her stronger than she looked. Bracing him on her shoulder and hip, she guided him to the street, then started walking him back to her apartment. She didn’t need to work tonight. The rent was paid to the end of the week.
In the captain’s cabin aboard
Warhammer,
everything was quiet. A metallic clink came from outside the vacuum-tight door. The “sealed” light above the lintel cycled from red to green, and the door slid open.
Another moment, and Vorgent Elimax slipped through the open door in a quick sidestep. The low lights of the chronometers and readouts reflected from the respirator he wore over his nose and mouth. Elimax looked for a moment at the two people asleep on the bed: Doc on his back, breathing softly, and Tarnekep Portree lying stretched out beside him, the left side of the captain’s face resting on the tall Khesatan’s shoulder, and one arm flung across his copilot’s chest.
Elimax raised his blaster. The ugly snarl of the weapon filled the cramped space as he sent two high-power beams on tight focus into the heads of the sleepers.
In the silence that followed, another sound erupted—the buzz of a single-shot needler, fired at close range. Elimax crumpled forward; his blaster fell to the deck.
Beka stepped out of the shadowed corner where she’d stood watching, and switched off the miniature holoprojector clipped to the bulkhead. The sleeping images on the bunk—unchanged in spite of the blaster bolts that had charred the pillows beneath them—winked out and left only rumpled sheets behind. She slipped the holoprojector back into the cabin’s tiny entertainment locker, and brought the lights up to full.
“A useful device, that projector,” commented Jessan from the other side of the cabin. As he spoke, he pocketed the single-shot needler that had brought down Vorgent Elimax. “And better than anything I’ve seen on the regular market. I’m surprised the Professor never tried to sell it anywhere.”
“He didn’t need the money,” said Beka. She bent over Elimax’s body, checking the unconscious passenger for concealed weapons and stripping off his respirator. “He put together that sort of thing just for fun. Elimax, on the other hand—I wonder what he was after. Was he an independent piece of lowlife trying to get a ship of his own any way that he could, or was he working for someone else?”
“We could always ask him when he wakes up.”
“I like that idea,” Beka said. She started to smile. “I like that idea a
lot
.”
Jessan looked down at Elimax and his mouth tightened. “Better move him out of the cabin, then. Things could get messy before we’re done.”
By the time they had the passenger bound hand and foot to a chair in the
’Hammer
’s common room, he was already starting to twitch. Jessan pulled the last strap tight and stepped back.
“You keep an eye on him,” he said. “I’ll go get the Professor’s question-and-answer kit.”
“Nyls—wait.” She caught him by the wrist as he turned to go. “If you don’t want to do it, I can always ask the questions myself.”
“The old-fashioned way?” Jessan shook his head. “That’s no good. We need answers we can trust.”
“If you’re certain.”
“It’s your brother Ari who doesn’t like using chemicals,” Jessan said. “Not me.”
“Good.” She let her hand fall back to her side. “Go get whatever you need.”
Jessan left. Beka watched Elimax mumbling and jerking against the restraints as he came up through the final stages of the needler’s effect. By the time his eyes were open and fully aware, she had drawn the double-edged dagger from its sheath up her sleeve and was testing its point against the pad of her index finger. A slight tilt of her wrist, and the light from the overhead glow-panel glanced off the blade directly into Elimax’s face.
He flinched. Beka smiled down at him.
“Hello, Elimax,” she said. “Somebody should have told you that the ventilation systems on this ship aren’t cross-connected any more.”
“But you’re dead—I
saw
—”
“Don’t believe everything you see,” Jessan said as he came back into the common room. He carried a black metal case in one hand. “An important lesson, but one I fear you’re learning a little bit too late.”
He took a position at the common-room table just out of Elimax’s field of view, and set the case down within easy reach. “Are you ready, Captain?”
“Absolutely,” Beka said.
She set the point of her knife under Elimax’s chin and put enough pressure behind it to dimple the skin and force his head up against the back of the chair.
“My friend,” she said, “it’s like this. You tried to kill me, and I intend to find out why.”
Elimax attempted to shake his head, and stopped the movement when she pressed in harder with the tip of the knife. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you,” Beka told him. “I believe my monitoring systems, and they tell me it was Sonoxate gas you released into the ventilation system. Sonoxate’s a proprietary brand—Nine Worlds Chemical makes it for dirtside Security forces—and not only is it expensive, it’s sold exclusively on the Republic side of the Net.”
She pulled the knife away and pointed at Elimax with it, moving the blade gently back and forth at the eye level of the bound man.
“And then there’s your lockpick,” she went on. “Already set up to work with the standard cipher keys for a
Libra
-class freighter. It was your good luck that the door mechanisms are about the only things on this ship I haven’t modified. But I’m afraid your luck wasn’t quite good enough, because that lockpick tells me you weren’t waiting for just any ship to turn up in Gefalon Spaceport. You were waiting for mine.”
Free of the knife’s pressure, Elimax shook his head violently. His voice was a hoarse croak. “No!”
“Yes,” said Beka. “Somebody hired you, and I intend to find out who. Now, I’d be perfectly happy to work on you myself until you’re ready to tell me things—but Doc, here, doesn’t care for that idea. He says he’s got some chemicals that’ll do the same thing, only faster and with less blood to clean up afterward. I want to see if he’s right.”
She looked over at Jessan. “Okay, Doc. He’s all yours.”
Jessan opened the black box. The click of the latch was sharp and distinct in the silence. Elimax strained his head sideways, trying in vain to see what Jessan was doing. His eyes were wide and dark with panic, and his breath came in ragged, choking gasps.
Then Elimax screamed. The scream ended in an ugly ripping noise like nothing Beka had ever heard before, and a fountain of red burst out through the front of his chest, soaking his shirt and running down into a puddle at his feet.
Beka swallowed hard. “What the hell did he
do
?” she demanded hoarsely.
“Blew his own heart out,” said Jessan. “And no, I don’t know how he did it.”
“Damn. I wanted him alive.”
“We’ve still got six minutes of brain function left,” Jessan told her. His hands were already moving as he spoke, pulling more items out of the black box—items she didn’t recognize but didn’t like the look of at all—and fastening them to the dead man’s head and throat. “Whatever questions you have, start asking them now. You won’t have a second chance.”
NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT; SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION
T
HIRTY-SEVEN HOURS before he left Nammerin for good, Ari Rosselin-Metadi took the regular Med Station bus into Namport. He got off at the next-to-last stop on the outbound run—an arcade of moderately expensive stores near the spaceport proper—and walked the rest of the way to his destination.
Strictly speaking, Namport’s old quarter wasn’t off-limits to Space Force personnel, but nobody in authority had ever seen any point in making it easy to get to, either. It was a district where old buildings crowded together along muddy streets, and worn canvas shop awnings cast blue-grey shadows over the wooden sidewalks; and the community’s rougher elements found in it their natural home.
Nobody bothered Ari, however, and he found the place he was looking without much difficulty. A flatsign over the door, still relatively new, identified the establishment as FIVE POINTS IMPORTS in bright red letters picked out in gold paint. Munngralla, the big Selvaur who owned the shop, had lost no time in getting started again after the loss of his previous store in a fire; the odd bit of arson was just one of the hazards of doing business as the main on-planet operative for the Quincunx. This neighborhood was much the same as Munngralla’s old one, or possibly a trifle more prosperous, and the contents of the new shop were almost identical with the old.
Ari pushed open the door and went in, threading his way between tall stacks of locally woven grain-straw hats and dangling strings of musical seashells from Ovredis. Munngralla himself was working at the rear counter, saving Ari the trouble of waking him up from a midday nap.
Waking up a Selvaur was not something to be undertaken lightly. Like all of his kind, Munngralla had a thick, scaly hide covering his massive body from head to foot. His front teeth were a carnivore’s pointed fangs, and the pupils of his yellow eyes were vertical black slits. At almost seven feet tall, not counting the crest of emerald scales atop his rounded skull, the big saurian was one of the few people in Namport who could look Ari directly in the eye.
Nevertheless, even honorary membership in a gang of smugglers and black market traders carried with it certain social obligations, and Ari had been properly brought up. Neither his late mother, the Domina, nor his father, the General—and most especially not his Selvauran foster-father, Ferrdacorr son of Rrillikkik—would have allowed him to commit the social and business gaffe of leaving Nammerin without first paying a farewell visit to the local boss.
The Selvaur came out from behind the counter to envelop Ari in an embrace that might have crushed a smaller man.
*Welcome!* he growled, in the deep, rumbling tones of Selvaur speech. *You could have come here in uniform,* he added. *Everything you see out here is legal.*
Ari forced his own voice down into the bottom reaches of its range. Not many humans could manage the hoots and rumbles of the Forest Speech, but Ari had been blessed with both the voice and the ear—and he’d grown up on the Selvauran homeworld of Maraghai.
*It’s safer for both of us if I show up in civvies,* he told Munngralla. *You don’t need a rep for talking to the Space Force—and I don’t need to give the service a rep for dealing with you.*
Munngralla chuckled, a low booming sound that caused some of the more fragile bits of bric-a-brac to rattle slightly on the shelves. *Neither of us needs trouble like that. *
He was telling the truth. Five Points Imports, regardless of how much legitimate business it did, was primarily a front. The Quincunx boasted that it could supply a customer with anything—from the merely hard-to-get, like tholovine, to the strictly illegal—as long as the customer was willing to meet their price.
*Come here to say good-bye, have you?* Munngralla continued before Ari could draw breath for his carefully thought-out speech of leavetaking.
“You’re not supposed to know that!” Munngralla snorted. *Don’t make me laugh, thin-skin. We’ve got our sources.*
“Why am I not surprised?” Ari said. Then he dropped back into the Forest Speech. *And you know better than to call Ferrdacorr’s fosterling a “thin-skin”—so don’t go making
me
laugh, either.*
Unlike his membership in the Quincunx, Ari’s clan status among the Selvaurs was anything but honorary. He’d spent more of his childhood and adolescence among the saurians than he had with his human family. And once Ferrda had realized just how big and strong Jos Metadi’s firstborn son was going to grow, Ari had gotten the same education as any other youngling among the Forest Lords.
He’d earned his full adult status the traditional way—by stalking and killing barehanded a
sigrikka,
one of the great predators of Maraghai—and still carried the scars of that fight on his back and arms. As far as Selvauran law and custom were concerned, trifling details of species and skin thickness made no difference: Ari was a Forest Lord like any other. And he was not inclined to let pass without comment anything that might imply otherwise.
That, also, was good manners among the Forest Lords. Munngralla made the breathy
hoo-hoo
that served as both approval and wordless apology, then changed the subject. *Where are they sending you?*
“You mean you don’t know that, too?” Ari sighed. “Never mind. I’ve got duty on RSF
Fezrisond,
off in the Infabede sector.”
*Infabede. We have people there.*
“Not on shipboard, I hope.” Ari held up a hand to stop Munngralla from replying. “Don’t say anything. I mean it. I can stretch my oaths to the service and the Republic far enough to keep quiet about things that happen off-base and out-of-uniform. But if you’ve got stuff going on any closer to me than that, don’t even think about telling me, because I’ll have to turn you in.”
*Don’t try to teach an old wrinkle-skin his business, youngling,* said Munngralla. *You need the Brotherhood out there in Infabede, you’ll have to make the contact yourself. *
“I don’t expect to need anything.”
*You did before,* Munngralla pointed out. *On Darvell.*
“Darvell was a fluke.”
*Darvell was a mess,* corrected Munngralla. *Not your fault, though. We heard about how you took care of our problem there for us.* “I’m surprised anybody in Darplex is talking,” said Ari. He switched again to the Forest Speech—always better for talking about a good fight. *They got their noses pretty well bloodied that day, and I can’t imagine them wanting to brag about it.*
*News gets around. And the word from higher up is that the Quincunx is grateful.*
“What was I supposed to do? Leave the bastard alive so he could keep on using the Brotherhood’s name as bait for a Security trap?” Ari bared his teeth. *Come on—Ferrda taught me better than that.*
*Looks like he did,* said Munngralla. *And like I said, we’re grateful. If you’re ever in the sort of trouble that your buddies in uniform can’t help with, come to us.*
“I’ll keep you in mind,” Ari said. “Meanwhile … this is my last day here, so I came by to let you know I’m gone.”
Munngralla’s crest flared briefly in surprise. His local contacts must not have mentioned that Ari would be leaving quite so soon. *Somebody’s working fast,* he said. *The little Adept—is she going tomorrow, too?*
“No. She’s staying here.”
*Funny. I thought … never mind. You tell her, she isn’t Quincunx, but she’s not bad, for a thin-skin. She can call herself a friend of Munngralla’s any time she wants.*
“Right,” said Ari. “I’ll pass the word along.”
He stopped talking for a moment, to cover the sudden tightness in his throat.
I’m supposed to be glad I’m leaving
, he thought unhappily.
I ought to hate this place, after everything that happened while I was here.
But his feelings had never answered to reason before, and they didn’t answer now. He’d been stationed on Nammerin during some of the most desperately unhappy months of his life, a time when not even the chance to strike out against a deserving target had been able to lift the weight from his spirit for very long. Nevertheless, Ari discovered, he was going to miss Nammerin. He’d lost, and found, too much on this world ever to forget it.
*Good hunting,* he said to Munngralla finally, the formal leavetaking of one Forest Lord to another.
*Good hunting to you on the star-trails, brother,* Munngralla replied. *And remember what I told you about asking for help.*
Ari didn’t see Llannat Hyfid until much later that evening. The Space Force contingent at the Medical Station had spent the earlier part of the day decorating the junior staff lounge with balloons and colored streamers. Now they had set up a rudimentary bar at a table in the rear, and were bidding a high-spirited farewell to Ari and the other departing officers. Tree Frog beer was very much in evidence as usual, in both the Export Dark and the Moonlight Pale varieties. Ari contented himself with a large tumbler of aqua vitae instead.
Drink in hand, he made his way through the crowd to the corner where the commanding officer of the Med Station was standing. The CO had brought along his pet sand snake to the party, wearing the creature in a series of loops around his shoulder like a bizarre piece of decorative braid. From time to time, the snake would dip its wedge-shaped head downward, put out a long, forked tongue to taste the CO’s beer, and then curl up again.
The CO himself appeared pensive and faintly melancholy, but Ari felt no particular worry on that account—such a look was the station commander’s usual expression. “Rosselin-Metadi,” he said as Ari approached. “We’ll miss you around here, you know.”
“I’ll miss working here,” Ari said honestly. The sand snake flowed down the CO’s arm, flicked its tongue lightly over the bright purple liquid in Ari’s glass, and then withdrew. Ari chuckled and drained the glass. “Shipboard duty is going to take some getting used to after this.”
“Shipboard duty is what the Space Force is all about,” the CO said. “Everything else is just the fancy trimmings.”
“That’s what my father says.”
“Trust him, Rosselin-Metadi. He’s usually right.”
“Yes, sir.” Ari looked down into his tumbler. Only a faint sheen of lavender remained on the thick glass at the bottom. “At least I’ll be able to put my blaster back into the arms locker where it belongs.”
The CO shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The authorization and the orders are part of your permanent file.”
“Damn,” said Ari without thinking. He felt his face reddening slightly, but pushed on. “I’m sorry, sir … but I’m going to be heading up the medical department on RSF
Fezrisond.
How am I supposed to do that if I’m carrying a piece of hardware that makes me look like Black Brok, the Terror of the Spaceways?”
“Force of personality?” the CO suggested mildly. “You’ll do fine, Rosselin-Metadi. I wouldn’t worry.”
Ari was silent for a moment, warmed by the unexpected compliment. He looked about the room and noticed that Llannat Hyfid had joined the party while he and the CO were talking. Tonight, for some reason, she’d chosen to wear the formal black tunic and trousers of a full Adept. The silver-and-ebony staff she’d carried away from Darvell shone with a soft luster against the dark cloth.
She’s never worn formal blacks around here before,
Ari thought, frowning. He wasn’t certain what she’d meant to show by her choice of clothing, but he found it disquieting.
“Excuse me,” he said to the CO. “I have to talk to Mistress Hyfid.”
He made his way to the bar to fill his glass with more of the purple aqua vitae, then went over and joined Llannat.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Any excuse for a celebration,” she said. “But good-bye parties aren’t exactly my favorite.”
“Mine either. At least this one looks like it’s going to behave itself and not turn into a free-spacer’s wake.”
“Don’t tempt fate by talking. The night is still young.”
“I thought Adepts didn’t believe in fate and luck and things like that.”
“We don’t. But the universe has patterns, and currents that flow through it … and the farewell bash my shipmates gave me before I went off to the Retreat was a real classic.”
“The weather got a trifle drunk out?”
“More than just a trifle. I still had a hangover when I got to Galcen.”
“You?” Ari shook his head in disbelief. “I’ve never even seen you get a little bit looped.”
“That was a long time ago,” Llannat said. “It helped me turn off the voices I was hearing inside my skull. Not the safest way in the world to do it, but the best I could manage on my own.”
She gave him a crooked smile. “Believe me, Ari, I needed to learn everything the Adepts could teach me.”
A good enough explanation of why the Guild has her loyalty now,
he thought.
Maybe that’s why she wore her blacks tonight.