Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

By now, the motion sensors would have alerted Olafsdottr to activity in the pantry. But he had stayed out of the ambit of the room’s Eye. He reentered the cold well and thence returned to the ward room.

“Well, that was entertaining,” the Fudir said when they had seated himself again at the play deck. “It seems our Ravn is a bit of a tease.”

“She’d be a fool if she hasn’t kept inventory; and the motion alarm will pique her curiosity. It may puzzle her to find the knives all accounted for and the wintermelon assassinated. I can only hope it drives her mad wondering what else might be missing.”

He awoke the holostage and noticed immediately that the files he had been reading were gone. A few minutes of searching failed to relocate them. Not just closed, but gone.

The Fudir stared purse-lipped at the hidden door, now also closed. “A roundabout means to get me away from the console,” he muttered. “She could have waltzed in, held her teaser to my head, and taken the files any time she pleased.”

Something does not add up.

At dinner that evening, while Donovan ate a concoction of soybeans and bilberries, Olafsdottr announced that they would enter the Abyalon–Megranome Road in four days. Abyalon’s network of Space Traffic Control lasers was already pushing the ship toward the Visser hoop that was its entrance ramp. In the final sprint, the ship’s onboard Alfven engines would engage, grab hold of the “strings of space,” and vault the ship over the bar into the superluminal tube. That would be a bad time to bother the pilot. Were the ship to miss the hole, it would pass Newton’s-c in flat space and go out in a Ĉerenkov blink.

The ancient god Shree Einstein had decreed that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. But he had also decreed that space had no objective existence. And so, since it was no thing, space as such could move faster than light. At this concession, his rival, Shree Maxwell, had loosed his demons, and created convection currents within the æther of Ricci tensors, shaping the network of Krasnikov tubes known as “Electric Avenue.” So while a ship hurtling down such a tube was still constrained by the speed of light, within the tube local-c might be arbitrarily high.

Nor could Shree Einstein see how his commandments had been flouted. The tube walls formed a Visser Skin, laminas of progressively slower space called the subluminal mud, which decoupled the interior causally from normal space. In a sense, a ship in the tube network was no longer “in” the universe, but “underneath.”

All this had been understood in ages past, in the old Commonwealth of Suns; and being understood, had been well engineered; and being well engineered, understanding no longer mattered. The formulas worked, and machines could be taught to work them. That was all a man need know.

On his return to the ward room, Donovan noticed that a steel bar had been welded to the outer door and, when turned on a pivot, would prevent the door from opening. Donovan raised an eyebrow to his captor.

“Simple means often best,” she announced. “Have not had good night’s sleep since you awoke.”

“If you don’t like my company, you can drop me off at the transit station in Abyalon’s coopers and I’ll catch the next liner back to Die Bold.”

Olafsdottr smiled. “You be a foony man, Doonoovan. I have said soo many times.” Then she ushered him in and closed the door behind him. Donovan heard the steel bar slide into place. A metric minute later, the door opened again and Olafsdottr stuck her head in. “Peekaboo,” she said. “Joost checking you stay poot.” She grinned, closed the door, and shortly the steel bar slid into place a second time.

The Fudir arranged pillows on the bunk and pulled the sheets up over them. Then he took up a station in the corner beside the hidden door and waited.

One reason why the scarred man excelled at the game of waiting was that most of him could sleep while the rest took turns on guard. Inner Child and the Brute stood sentry while the Silky Voice marshaled and concentrated the requisite enzymes. Genistein and isoflavonoids from the soybeans, anthocyanocides from the bilberries, she sent them off to fortify the night vision of the retinal rods. It would not be fair to say the scarred man could see in the dark, but “you are what you eat,” and it would not be right to call him blind, either.

After some time had gone by and the night was well advanced, the door slid open and Inner Child nudged the Fudir awake. A figure slipped into the room, paused to assess motion, and flowed swiftly toward the bed on which the scarred man ought to have been lying.

Partway there, it paused in watchful silence and the Fudir noted a club of some sort in its hand. Then, apparently satisfied, it backed away and strode to the holostage, where it seated itself at the play deck. The scarred man slipped up behind it in the dark and placed one hand over its mouth and with the other plucked the club from its hand.

“Rigardo-ji Edelwasser, I presume,” he whispered into its ear.

Donovan felt the man stiffen, try to turn. “ Nu, nu, nu, ” he said with the Silky Voice. “ Gentle, my good sir. Be not afraid. You are Rigardo-ji, the Rightful Owner of this vessel? Nod your head. ” The head bobbed once in his grip. “ I will release you, but you must make no move nor cry. I have destroyed all the Eyes in this room, citing my modesty, and she has assented by not replacing them. But we will speak in whispers, in case she has salted this room with Ears. She is accustomed to my self-conversations, but speak too loudly and she might wonder if I speak with too many voices. Do you understand? ”

Again, a single, spastic nod of the head.

“ Good, good. We are in the same boat, you and we. There is no need to struggle. ”

When Donovan unloosed his hold, Rigardo-ji turned to face him. “Are you a madman? I’ve been watching, and I think you are mad. That’s why she locks you in here.”

“Wouldn’t that make you mad? Why have you been lurking in the wainscoting all this time?”

“Am I a fool? A poor, honest smuggler, me, just trying to make a living. I’d been drinking and, when I heard her bang through the lock, I hid in one of my…”

“One of your hidey-holes. Go on.”

He shrugged. “And I passed out. Came to after we were under way. Guess she never realized I was still aboard. I figured out what she was, toot sweet, and I ain’t no match for a Confederal Shadow. I didn’t dare try to take her on myself. ’Sides…” The smuggler flipped his hands. “She was going the right direction, so there wasn’t no rush. I come out now and then just to check the headings. I figured if I just waited, something would come up.”

“And something did.”

“Yeah. You.”

“But you’re not sure about me, or you would have approached me sooner.”

“It was pretty clear you were her prisoner. That made you her enemy, but it didn’t make you my friend. For all I knew, you were Confederal bound too, and you’d gang up on me if I showed myself. I overheard some of what you two was saying, but I don’t speak birdsong, and I wasn’t always where I could eavesdrop.”

Donovan considered the man before him. He could see, even in the dim-lit darkness, the tightness of his mouth and eyes. “Why come out tonight?”

“I thought … it was time we made contact.”

Liar, the Sleuth said. He checked the bunk to make sure we were sleeping—and had a club in case we weren’t. But Donovan only said, “You didn’t wake me. You went to the console.”

“I’ve been dead reckoning. I needed to check our position, and it’s safer to do that here than in the control room. I been out a coupla times, but sometimes I have to cross a hallway and that sets off her damn motion sensors. How does she bear? The ship, I mean.”