He was only a couple of steps along the path when the door opened and Bayta slipped hurriedly back into the room. “There’s a police car coming this way,” she announced tightly.
“Under the cloakcloth,” Fayr ordered her, reversing direction back to the couch. Taking the edge of the cloth from me, he pulled it over and up. Bayta sat down beside me and he sat down on her other side, draping the cloth over all three of us.
And a taut silence descended on the room. “What is this?” Bayta whispered, gingerly touching the inside of the cloth.
“Cloakcloth,” Fayr told her, his voice low, his eyes on a row of small red lights built into his edge of the cloth. “It absorbs our infrared signatures and shifts them so that detectors will read us as Tra’ho’seej.”
“Clever,” I murmured. Of course, these particular Tra’ho’seej were supposed to be out of town. I hoped this wasn’t one of those areas where citizens had to register their travels with the local police database. “What about your own sensors?” I asked, nodding toward his row of lights.
“Passive detectors only,” he assured me. “Slender wires pressed into the ground in various places around this neighborhood. Virtually undetectable.”
The uncomfortable silence resumed. I looked sideways at Bayta’s profile, at her tight cheek muscles and her eyes focused on the piece of cloakcloth directly in front of her.
Make the time
, Fayr had all but ordered me. And he’d been right. Conflict between allies was potentially disastrous. “Bayta—”
“He wouldn’t have hurt her,” she interrupted me, her voice as stiff as her expression. “He wouldn’t risk losing the advantage she gives him. You should have just kept quiet.”
I sighed. So now we had two problems to deal with. “You’re mad at me for caving in so easily?” I asked, deciding to deal with the simpler one first.
“The oathlings have already begun the search,” she said. “The effects of
Korak
Fayr’s sunburst grenade won’t interrupt that. By now probably hundreds of nonwalker oathlings will have joined the effort.”
“Good for them,” I said. “The more of Ghonsilya’s official attention is tied up looking for a mythical Human named Daniel Mice, the less they’ll have left to focus on us.”
Her eyes flicked reluctantly sideways toward me. “Are you saying Mr. Stafford’s
not
on Ghonsilya?”
“Oh, he’s here, all right,” I assured her. “Or at least, he was—it’s possible he’s flown the coop. But he’s not traveling under the name Mice.”
“A modification of the word, then?” Fayr suggested.
I shook my head. “I don’t think Künstler was trying to give me Stafford’s traveling name,” I said. “I think he was going for something else.”
“What?” Bayta asked.
“Think about it,” I said. If the Chahwyn were going to kick me out, Bayta needed to work on her detective and deduction skills. “Stafford’s supposedly been spinning his wheels through umpteen years of college, taking every class in the catalog, refusing to graduate, and meanwhile spending buckets of money along the way. What sort of parents put up with that?”
“Rich ones,” Bayta said. She still sounded cross, but I could hear a growing interest in her voice. “Agent Morse’s report said his father was one of Mr. Künstler’s business managers.”
“Who undoubtedly has better things to do with his money than support a lazy professional student,” I said. “But the report also said Stafford continues to have a good relationship with his parents, with no indication they’ve ever given him any graduate-or-else ultimatums.”
“Someone else is funding his education,” Fayr said suddenly.
“Exactly,” I said. “And once we have
that
, we can look at his course work with a new eye. Bayta, do you remember the list of the majors Stafford’s gone through?”
“Agent Morse’s report listed business, economics, electronics, medical technology, history, psychology, art appreciation, alien sociology, and advertising,” Bayta said, frowning in concentration.
“What do all those taken together add up to?” I prompted. “Considering especially that Künstler’s business empire includes medical equipment and a wide range of electronics products and services.”
“That Mr. Stafford is being prepared to be a manager of an interstellar business?”
“Bingo,” I confirmed. “Only he isn’t being prepped to be
a
manager. He’s being prepped to be
the
manager.”
Bayta swiveled around to look at me. “Are you saying…?”
“I am indeed,” I said, nodding. “The whole Stafford name and family identity have been a scam right from square one. Probably a deal Künstler worked out with his manager before Daniel was born.”
“Mr. Künstler wasn’t saying
Daniel Mice
,” Bayta said, her voice tight. “He was trying to say
Daniel, my son
.”
“You’ve got it,” I said. “Daniel Stafford is, in reality, Daniel Künstler.”
There was a long moment of silence as Bayta and Fayr did their individual siftings through the potential implications of that revelation. “We must make certain the Modhri never learns that truth,” Fayr said at last.
“Absolutely,” I agreed. Whenever the Modhri decided to make a full-bore move against humanity, the young heir to a trillion-dollar estate would be high on his list of potential targets. “A more immediate concern at the moment is that it will eventually occur to him that all he has to do is get the cops to haul in every Human on Ghonsilya for a visual check against Morse’s picture. There can’t be
that
many of us here.”
“You might be surprised,” Fayr said thoughtfully. “According to the official numbers, there are over eight thousand Humans on this planet.”
“Eight
thousand
?” I asked. I’d been ready to guess no more than a few hundred.
“That is correct,” Fayr said. “There are also twelve hundred Bellidos, if you were wondering.”
“What in the world are they all doing here?” I asked. “The Humans, I mean?”
“Most are skilled workers,” Fayr said. “Humans have a manual dexterity beyond that of Tra’ho’seej, especially for detail work. There are also many artists.” He cocked his head to the side, one of those gestures the Bellidos had picked up from us. “Many of that group are right here in Magaraa City.”
I thought about the hotel lobby where the Modhri and I had had our brief fight. The place had been literally strewn with cheap art. “Working for the local trade, I take it?”
“Indeed,” Fayr confirmed. “In Ancient Seejlis,
Magaraa
means
Labor of Artisans
, and the residents take that title quite seriously. They cherish all levels and forms of artwork, from inexpensive wall mountings and table settings to masterpieces designated specifically for contemplation rooms.”
And Stafford had come here to buy a piece of alien sculpture. “I don’t suppose there’s a particular restaurant or tavern where these artistic types hang out?”
Fayr smiled. “We think along the same path,” he said. “In fact, I can do even better than that. Come; I’ll show you.”
He lifted the edge of the cloakcloth and climbed out from under it. The lights on the display strip had gone out, I noted, apparently indicating that the police patrol had moved on. “You think it’s safe to travel?” I asked as Bayta and I also climbed out.
“I believe so,” he said, refolding the cloakcloth onto the edge of the couch, ready for its next use. “I’ve spent some time studying Tra’ho police procedure. Once they’ve swept an area, they seldom return to it. Not unless a serious crime has been committed.”
“You don’t call a double killing a serious crime?”
“Not in this case.” Fayr rumbled deep in his throat. “The victims weren’t Tra’ho’seej.”
I grimaced. Sometimes I forgot how much specism there was lurking beneath the surface civility of the Twelve Empires. “And neither were the killers.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Disputes between aliens are hardly a matter of importance unless they also threaten the local citizens.”
“What about the sunburst?” Bayta asked. “It specifically targeted the oathlings.”
“All of whom will do everything in their power to downplay the effects and the investigation,” Fayr said. “The last thing the Modhri wants is for the Lynx to fall into official hands not directly under his control.”
He stepped over to the other couch and pulled another of the ubiquitous hooded rain ponchos from beneath it. “Still, we don’t wish to make it too easy for them,” he said. Handing it to me, he bent down again and busied himself with something else beneath the couch.
The poncho was a shade on the small side, and I had to work a little to get it over my head. By the time I finished settling it into place and could see again, I discovered that Fayr had pulled out a new gun.
Not one of his usual shoulder-holstered handguns this time, but a Rontra 772 submachine gun, a large military snub-nosed multiple repeater with double-clip magazine, midline cooling chamber, integrated underslung grenade launcher, and a sensor-click sighting capability that could pinpoint a target at two thousand meters. The thing looked about the size of the cannon Gargantua had been talking about earlier, and could probably make nearly as much of a mess of anyone who happened to be standing in its way. “Still not wanting to make it too easy for them?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Fayr said. Hiking up his poncho, he slung the Rontra’s strap over his right shoulder, letting the weapon hang down alongside the holster there. He hesitated a moment, then drew the handgun from that holster and handed it to me. “Lest it be in my way,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said, checking the safety. “Killrounds?”
His nose twitched a bit. “Clip two has snoozers.”
I found the selector and switched it over. Fayr may have worked out the difference between Modhran walkers and soldiers, but I wasn’t nearly so ready to make that kind of delicate distinction.
Besides, I didn’t need anything else for Bayta to be mad at me about.
I stuck the gun into my belt. Fayr and I both resettled our ponchos—his was barely long enough to conceal the Rontra’s muzzle—and then I turned to Bayta.
She was watching us with a mixture of disbelief, distaste, and disapproval. It was the same look I remembered my mother giving me when I used to play soldier with my friends when I was six. “Would you like one, too?” I offered.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, not even bothering to answer the question.
“We’re ready,” Fayr said. “Follow me.”
The rain had increased in intensity while we’d been inside, but the lack of wind kept it from blowing beneath our hoods into our faces or otherwise being particularly unpleasant. The neighborhood immediately around us seemed to have reacted to the precipitation by closing down for the night, most of the houses showing cheery lights through their curtained windows as their inhabitants settled in for the evening. There were still a few pedestrians in sight, but none was closer than half a block away. There were also a fair number of cars out and about, but the drivers all seemed intent on taking care of their business and getting back home.
We walked without speaking, surrounded by the sizzle of the rain on the sidewalk and the hissing of tires on wet pavement as cars went by. The homes and other buildings around us gradually changed from our original middle-class neighborhood to a slightly lower-middle-class area, then reversed itself and started up the social scale again. By the time we reached the museum grounds, the houses had become full-bore estates, with the sculpted facades and manicured lawns and fenced perimeters to prove it.
The art museum itself left them all in the dust.
It was as if the designers couldn’t make up their minds whether they wanted a museum, a mansion, or a Greek temple, so they’d compromised and made it a combination of all three. The place was as imposing as the Rock of Gibraltar, had the solid look of a structure built to last into the next millennium, and was big enough to lose a small army inside. Apparently, the people of Magaraa City took their reputation as art lovers very seriously.
And it was currently lit up like Times Square on VI Day. “I thought you said they’d closed early tonight,” I said in a low voice as we walked toward it.
“They did,” Fayr confirmed. “The staff must be preparing for the auction.”
“Auction?”
“An art auction tomorrow evening,” he explained. “The objects for sale will be on display during the day for potential buyers to examine.”
“This sort of thing happen often?” I asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Fayr said. “The fifty percent commission the museum will be charging for each sale will be put toward repairing the damage caused by the intrusion. Come—there’s a side door we can use.”
The side door turned out to be a service entrance built to accommodate forklift-sized vehicles and their cargoes. It was locked, but apparently not all that seriously, and in less than thirty seconds Fayr had it open wide enough for us to get through. “Stay here,” he murmured, and slipped inside. Nudging Bayta back into what limited shadows there were near the door, I drew my gun, keeping it ready but hidden beneath the edge of my poncho.
Two minutes later Fayr was back. “Come, but quietly,” he said.
Beyond the door was a wide service corridor with the utilitarian look of service corridors everywhere. Fayr led us through a maze of several more, each getting progressively narrower as other corridors branched off the main one to other parts of the museum.
Finally, we reached one that dead-ended at a normal-sized door. Fayr eased it open, looked inside, then gestured us in.
Up to now all we’d seen of the museum’s interior were the staff and worker sections. With this room we’d finally made it into the public display areas, and I saw that the same people who’d designed the exterior had extended their schizophrenic triple architectural theme inward. The gallery we were in was quite large, with curved marble walls and a cupola-type ceiling with moldings and frescoes and whatnots thrown in everywhere by the shovelful. The carpeted softfloor had an embedded pattern of tiny starlights that could probably be programmed to give a viewer a customized tour, while strategically placed benches allowed the serious art connoisseur to linger in his or her contemplation.
It was truly a place of elegance and beauty. Or at least it had been. Now, squarely in the center of all that splendor, the gallery had become a blackened, ruined mess.
“The damage I spoke of,” Fayr said. “Tell me what you make of it.”
I walked across the floor, eyeing the destruction as I ran through my mental list of things that go bump in the night. It had been caused by an explosion—that much was obvious. But the radius of the blast and the progressive damage pattern didn’t match anything I was familiar with. “What did the police report say?” I asked.
“That there had been an explosion,” Fayr said. “Specific cause unknown.”
“Any witnesses or security records?”
“The security cameras had been shut down,” Fayr said. “Suspicion has fallen on one or both of the two guards on duty that night, neither of whom has been seen since then.”
“Neither
of them?”
“No,” he said. “But traces of their nucleic matter was recovered at the site, along with that of an unidentified Jurian.”
I rubbed my jaw as I measured distances with my eyes. The explosion had caused nearly complete destruction within a three-meter-radius sphere, even chewing up the floor, the subflooring, and the concrete foundation. But outside that radius, the damage dropped off dramatically to the point where the floor, display easels, and pillars ten meters away weren’t even scorched. “The first part seems straightforward enough, anyway,” I said. “The Modhri turned one of the guards into a walker and used him to shut off the cameras and open the door for the Jurian thief.”
“But then what of the explosion?” Fayr asked. “Did the second guard surprise them and a grenade accidentally go off?”
“Does seem awfully sloppy on somebody’s part,” I agreed. “Besides, all short-range grenades I know of leave a lot more body residue behind. Do we know where the Viper was displayed?”
Fayr pointed across the room. “It was in a case against that wall with several other Nemuti artifacts.”
“So the thieves were heading for our service door,” I concluded, a funny feeling starting to grow in the pit of my stomach. “But before they could reach it, the second guard came in and confronted them. Shortly thereafter, the whole group got themselves vaporized.”
There was a long, heavy silence. Bayta broke it first, with the conclusion all three of us had obviously reached. “The Viper exploded,” she said, her voice tight.
“That’s
what the Nemuti sculptures are. They’re bombs.”
“And the Modhri already has seven of them,” I added, the funny feeling in my stomach changing to a knot as the full implications of that began to trickle in.
“Apparently so,” Fayr said. “Still, unless the Modhri can create a more powerful version, I don’t see how this gains him very much.”
“That’s because you don’t know the whole story,” I told him. “I had the opportunity to do a scan of one of the Hawks on the trip here. It turns out the things are sensor chameleons. Put one of them in a bag, maybe even just wrap a towel around it, and it takes on the characteristics of that object as far as sensors are concerned. It might work with liquids, too. I never got a chance to test that.”
Fayr’s facial stripes had gone dark. “Are you saying,” he said slowly, “that they can be taken aboard a Quadrail train without detection?”
“You got it,” I said grimly. “Aboard a Quadrail, through a transfer station, probably even onto a warship. The Modhri doesn’t have to learn how to enhance the effect, Fayr. If he can figure out even just how to duplicate it, this war is about to take a very nasty turn.”
“He’s going to use them against the Spiders,” Bayta murmured, a shiver running through her. “He can’t infiltrate them or take them over, so he’s going to kill them.”
“Actually, he’s not,” I assured her. “Because we’re going to stop him.”
She turned hot eyes to me. “Will that be before or after we rescue Ms. Auslander from him?”
“Why not do both together?” I said tartly. “I
am
capable of thinking about more than one thing at the same time, you know.”
“It’s not the thinking part I’m worried about,” she countered.
“Then what
are
you worried about?” I demanded. “That Penny’s going to steal me away from you?”
I knew the instant the words were out of my mouth that it was the absolutely wrong thing to say. But the words were already gone, and it was an eternity too late to call them back. Bayta’s throat tightened, her eyes again those of someone who’s just been slapped. Without a word, she spun around and stalked away from us across the room.
I started to follow her, paused; started to speak; paused again. Indecision and inertia won out and I didn’t do anything. “That was helpful,” Fayr murmured.
“Thank
you,” I growled back.
“You’ll need to find another opportunity to talk,” he said. Again, ir was more order than suggestion. “In the meantime, the Nemuti sculptures as bombs cannot be the whole story.”
“Why not?” I asked, my eyes and half my attention still on Bayta’s stiff back.
“If he seeks to reproduce the effect, he needs only one sculpture to experiment with,” Fayr said. “He certainly would not need to go to this much risk to obtain the last Lynx.”
Resolutely, I shook Bayta and her anger at me out of my mind. Fayr was right. “Unless he doesn’t think he can duplicate the technology,” I said. “In that case, he’d want every one he can get hold of.”
“No “ Fayr said, shaking his head. “Something is still missing.”
“Maybe we can figure it out once we have the Lynx,” I said. “Earlier you said—”
I broke off as his left hand suddenly snapped up in a gesture for silence. He spun to face the archway leading out of our gallery into die rest of the museum, his Rontra popping into view from beneath the concealing poncho.
I resisted the urge to make extraneous noise by hauling out my own gun, opting instead to freeze in place and listen. The typical sounds of a large, mostly hollow, mostly deserted building whispered across my ears.
And then my ears and brain edited out the background noise, and I heard the slow, measured footsteps coming our way.
Bayta heard the footsteps, too. She turned back toward Fayr and me, her eyes wide with sudden urgency. I motioned for her to stay put, and got a grip on my gun. The footsteps came closer…
“Compton?” a familiar voice called softly from somewhere beyond the archway.
It was Gargantua.
Fayr threw me a sideways look. I threw him one back, making sure mine had a little curdle to it. So much for his sunburst grenade knocking Gargantua and the other Halkan walker out of the game for the rest of the night.
“Compton?” Gargantua called again, a little louder this time. “Please come out. I plan no action against you, but wish merely to talk.”
Bayta was shaking her head, pointing insistently at the service door we’d used on our way in. I looked at Fayr again, saw my own ambivalence reflected there. Bayta’s choice of a fast cut and run seemed the logical response. Certainly it would be the smart military move.
But if the Modhri wanted to take us, he would have cops surrounding the building by now. Actually, he would probably have had them lobbing in sleep gas already. Chances were good that, for once, he was telling the truth.
Fayr was still waiting for my call. Keeping hold of my gun, I gave Bayta a reassuring smile and made my way across the gallery. Carefully, I peeked around the corner.
I was looking into another gallery, this one every bit as elegant as the one I was standing in. More elegant, actually, since no one had set of a bomb in the middle of it.
Seated on one of the contemplation benches about twenty meters away was Gargantua.
He was, to put it bluntly, a mess. His eyes were heavily bandaged, the bandage riding over the top curve of his snout and half covering his ears. The facial skin the bandage didn’t cover had gone a deep purple, the Halkan version of serious sunburn. Gripped in his hands was a sensor cane, its bottom end planted firmly in the softfloor, its aperture swiveling back and forth across the width of my archway.
“Hello, Modhri,” I greeted him as I came the rest of the way around the corner. “You’re looking good.”
“You lie,” Gargantua said calmly. The hand resting on the top of the cane rotated a little, swiveling the sensor aperture to point directly at me. “A very effective weapon, that.”
“Especially against someone like you who shares pain and all the other unpleasantries of life,” I agreed. “How are you doing with the Tra’ho’seej vertigo? I notice you decided to sit down.”
His lips curled back to reveal his teeth. “I’m not in a position to force you to my will, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Still, never forget that I can eliminate that particular effect whenever I choose.”
Translation: at any point the Modhri colonies inside the Tra’ho’seej could simply kill themselves and their hosts, eliminating the vertigo flowing through the local Modhri mind segment by eliminating the central nervous systems that were generating it. Rather like curing dandruff by cutting off your head, except that in this case it would actually work. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I pointed out. “By my count, you’re down to two functioning walkers at the moment.”
“That, too, is easily changed,” he said. “But I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about your Human friends.”
I felt a lump rise into my throat. Penny… “How are they doing?”
“They are in pain,” the Modhri said. “Also frightened. Also very angry.”
I grimaced before I could catch myself. “I imagine so,” I agreed, wondering fleetingly what kind of visual resolution he was getting from his cane. With Humans, it took a month or more of practice before the brain learned to read the input stream well enough to decipher faces and read expressions. I didn’t know how long that adaptation took with Halkas, and had even less of an idea how long it took with the Modhri.
Apparently not as long as I would have liked. “You seem distressed,” he said.
“I’ve seen you in action,” I reminded him. “I dislike the thought of any civilized being falling into your hands.”
“As well you should,” he said coldly. “But at the moment there is no need for concern. The only damage perpetrated on either of them was that inflicted by the Human McMicking.”
“Who?” I asked innocently.