Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

“Four days out from the Megranome Road.”

“Oh.” The smuggler’s concern was palpable. “That ain’t good. We need to take the Biemtí to the Cynthia Cluster.”

“To deliver a geegaw to the Molnar.”

Donovan felt hesitation in the smuggler’s posture.

“You read through my work orders,” Rigardo-ji said. “I thought I snatched them in time. Look, that’s top secret—need-to-know—and the penalty clauses Foreganger lays down…”

The Brute tightened his grip on the smuggler. “ Keep the voice down, I toldja.” Then Donovan said, “I promise not to tell the People. I scanned your current invoices, to see if you had anything aboard I could use as a weapon. Short of breaking a vase over her head, I didn’t find anything.”

“There may be something we can use,” the smuggler allowed. “I can read between the lines when I gotta. With two of us, we got a chance. I’ll go get it out. Then you distract the ’Fed, and I pot her. No offense, good buddy, but you’ve had three chances already to kill her and passed up each one.”

Donovan thought about it and reluctantly agreed that the roles had to split that way. If Rigardo-ji suddenly appeared from nowhere, Olafsdottr would recognize it precisely as a distraction and the element of surprise would be irretrievably lost.

“You’ll only get one shot,” Donovan said.

“I’ll only need one. But it’s got to take her by surprise. I woulda tried something already, but I got no illusions. A microsecond’s warning, and I wouldn’t even get the one shot.”

Donovan did not know how good a shot the smuggler might be. Many an eye and hand, steady on the range, grew uncertain when a living person was in the target hairs. Rigardo-ji sat rigid, Donovan’s arms upon him, eyes wide, stinking of sweat. Slowly, as if disengaging, the scarred man released him, stepped back.

“It will have to be soon,” he said. “Before we enter the Roads.” And before you lose your nerve. He did not voice that thought.

“Tomorrow,” the man said. “After dinner. There’s a T-intersection where…”

“I know it.” It was where the false alarm had been tripped the other day.

“There’s a storage space behind the cross hall. Sometimes, they bring containers up the long hallway, and I open the panel and they dolly them straight in. It’s empty right now. I can make my way into it. You come past, turn up the long hall like you do. Your backs are to the panel. You get her to stand still. I slide the panel open and…” He made a gun of his fingers. “Pop. Pop. I got her.”

Donovan said nothing, and after a moment the smuggler looked at his fingers and self-consciously wiggled them, as if throwing the imaginary gun away. “That’s the important thing,” he said. “You gotta distract her while I open the panel or else she’ll hear it. I mean these are cargo doors; they ain’t exactly stealthed.”

“In the back,” Donovan said.

“Safer that way, don’t you think? I don’t wanna give her the chance. Confederal Shadows, they’re ruthless. I’ve read the stories.”

“Do you have something nonlethal, something to disable her instead? I know some people on Dangchao who wouldn’t mind getting her as a sort of house present when I visit.”

“Who do you know that would keep a Confederation agent as a house pet?”

“People who ask Questions.”

Rigardo-ji shrank from him and made Ganesha’s sign to ward off bad luck. “I shoulda known you was no ordinary prisoner. Yeah. Yeah, sure. There’s something in my stock. It’ll knock her out, but not kill her, if that’s what you want.”

Inner Child heard the scraping of a steel bar. “” he whispered through the scarred man’s lips. “” Donovan added, “Tomorrow, after dinner.”

The smuggler vanished like smoke. The panel beside the holostage clicked shut. Donovan threw himself into one of the chairs and sat twisted on the cushions.

Olafsdottr opened the ward room’s door and entered just behind her teaser. Her left hand slapped the lights on and Donovan pretended to be flustered by the sudden light. He raised his head, as if he had been dozing in the chair, and shielded his eyes with his arm.

The Shadow looked about the room, grinned, and said, “Good night, Doonoovan-buoy. You have a very crowded head, boot noo moor whisper. Sleep tight.”

The next day ran slow. Donovan read a book from the ship’s virtual library, but afterward he could not have explained what it was about. He participated in a simulation of the battle of Mushinro, taking the part of the doomed Valencian general Kick. It was widely assumed that Kick had the battle won and it was only his hesitation at a crucial juncture that had permitted the victory by the Ramage-led coalition. But Donovan’s attention was not on the simulation and his own hesitation at a different juncture lost the battle yet again. Only when the dinner hour at last approached, did the scarred man realize the root of his unease.

He did not trust the smuggler, Rigardo-ji.

It was a small thing, but the devil, it was said, lurked ever in the details. There had been a hint of thuggishness beneath the fear, and there had been that moment when, simulating a gun with his fingers, Edelwasser had said, “Pop. Pop.”

Two shots.

A second shot just to make sure? Or a second shot to tie up the other loose end?

Last meals, it is said, are consumed with greater gusto than any other. Dinner conversation ranged from the various modes of mayhem he and Ravn had mastered to the craft with which Aloysh-pandit arranged colored oils on the surface of still pools. Were it not for the fact that Ravn was dragging him into a civil war of which he wanted no part and in which he would likely find his doom, he would have found her an agreeable companion.

On the other hand, years before, she had been tasked to kill him if he failed his mission. A close relationship, an intimate relationship; but not a cuddly one. Olafsdottr had a most pleasant smile. But she would smile while she cut him down.

They left the refectory together and walked down the short hallway in their usual parade: Donovan to the fore, Olafsdottr behind with her teaser to the ready. She no longer held it shoved into his back, but neither had she relaxed to the point of shoving it into her holster. “But I suggest you are wrong, sweet,” she said, continuing their conversation as if they had been amiable companions on a stroll. “The Roomie tradition of opera was much too bombastic. Their drama was too melo. The Nipny tradition was more spare, more elegant, more minimal.”

The scarred man allowed the Pedant to hold up the other end of the conversation. “You misunderstand the criteria. Grand opera and Nō have not the same objectives. One may as well assail the lemon for lacking the sweet of sugar cane. Each may excel—but toward different ends. It is only the values we place on the ends themselves that make one means seem less than the other.”

“Ah, but sweet, are not the weights we place upon our goals what matter most in the end?”

They had reached the T-intersection and had turned down the long stem of it. Donovan paused and said, “For me, the overthrow of the Names pales against one hour with my daughter in her home.” When he closed his eyes, he saw Méarana’s face before him, puzzled and hurt. He turned and faced his captor. “Make me one promise, Ravn.”

Olafsdottr stopped a pace short of him and tilted her head, birdlike, to the side. “And what is that, my sweet?”

“Promise me that if I go with you, you will go to Dangchao afterward and tell Francine Thompson and her daughter Lucia why it was I never came.”