Michael Flynn: In the Lion’s Mouth

Oh, the harper will know, said the girl in the chiton. She knew we were coming before we did.

“It was going to be a surprise,” the Fudir whispered.

No surprise now. No expectation of the harper’s broad and welcoming smile. No possibility that the daughter’s smile would infect the mother. The fellowship in his hologram had been broken, and broken by his own actions. He had abandoned them, had abandoned Bridget ban, with no word and no explanation. One such desertion might be reparable; two would never be, and even the harper could lose her smile.

Unless he could take the ship from Ravn Olafsdottr.

Snug in his bunk, neatly boxed into the wall, Donovan discovered that the bed was not especially user-friendly. Between the thin pad and the short length, he turned and twisted in pursuit of an elusive relaxation. Perhaps a thicker pad would have settled him; perhaps not. But one of the twists—or one of the turns—brought him against the panel that formed the inner side of the bunk; and the pressure must have been just right, for something went snick or click and the panel slid aside, and Donovan fell off the bunk on a side that he hadn’t known it had.

He found himself in a narrow passageway between the wall of the ward room and the wall of the utility room next to it. There were pipes, ducts, and cable runs, as one normally finds in walls; but there was also crawl space and, here and there, shelves and bins. Inner Child glanced quickly fore and aft, saw nothing in the darkness, but kept watch—for seeing nothing in the dark was hardly a comfort to him.

Oho, said the Sleuth. The Rightful Owner was a smuggler. There are probably caches, passages, and hidey-holes like this all through the ship. Tyrants and democrats had escaped the people’s wrath cocooned in such ships. Secret treaties and covert agreements had traveled secure in their bosoms. Prototypes and patents had been hustled to subsidiaries—or competitors—on sundry worlds.

After this fortuitous discovery, the scarred man took to wandering the monoship at odd hours, investigating its nooks and crannies. He wondered how long the ship had been in Olafsdottr’s possession. She might know of the nooks, but perhaps not of the crannies.

Using the secret passages, he could make an end-run around Olafsdottr’s security and come upon her from an unexpected direction. Her reflexes could not be markedly inferior to his own, nor her mastery of the arts mortal. His main advantage was that she did not wish to damage him, and this might cause her to hold back if it came to that.

But not every imagined possibility is a real one. The two places where Olafsdottr spent most of her time were the two places where the passages did not run. First was the pilot room, which was in any case too small and cramped for a struggle that included a survivor. The second was her sleeping quarters, where she was most vulnerable, but which was inaccessible from the hidey-holes that otherwise swiss-cheesed the ship. Not all the caches connected. To approach her sleeping quarters meant crossing the spinal corridor, and that was alarmed by her ad hoc security system. It was not an impossible task to circumvent the system, but it would require deactivating several sensors; and that deactivation would in itself constitute an alarm.

It irritated Donovan considerably that such a wonderful discovery could not be put to immediate use.

Olafsdottr continued to be wary in his presence, and when they ate together, it was at arm’s length. In exasperation at the blandness of her cooking, Donovan one day programmed a dinner of Chicken Joe Freezing that had a bit of a bite to it, but Olafsdottr would not taste of it.

“Who knows what wicked spices you have rubbed into that poor hen?” she asked. And never mind that the meat from the protein vats had never gone through the formality of actually having once been a hen.

But even when he had divided his own serving in two and offered her the choice of halves, she demurred, and he wondered if it was not the spiciness itself rather than the possibility of being drugged that put her off.

“I am wounded,” he said, “that you do not trust me.” Later, he vomited the poison in the ward room’s lavatory. Taking the antidote beforehand was risky in any case, and he resolved to find another tactic.

Olafsdottr allowed him some limited exercise time. “Idle hands, devil’s tools,” she explained, and led him to a fitness room equipped with a variety of machines. Donovan expressed his amazement and gratitude and did not hint that he had already seen the room. The mirror on the back wall was one-way and provided anyone in the passage behind it with an excellent view.

Olafsdottr stood as usual in the doorway, and made helpful suggestions for his exercise regimen. The Brute especially enjoyed the activity; and the Silky Voice used it to work on her enzyme control. But at the conclusion, as he was toweling off, he noticed a handled insert used as a shim for changing clearances on the machine beside him. Save that it was not sharpened, it would make a fine knife. He pulled it out as if to change the forces on the pulley, and found that it had good hand-balance.

Without turning, he threw it at Olafsdottr. The Confederal twisted sideways and snatched it out of the air. She examined the slug of steel in her hands, then looked at Donovan and grinned. “You like play catch?” She slung it back at him on a flat trajectory aimed at his face. “More fun with knives,” she added.

The Brute dropped into a crouch and, thrusting his hand up, grabbed the handle as it passed overhead. Careful,he said. Ya don’t want ya should break the mirror. That’s bad luck.

As he rose, he sent the shim spinning back to Ravn. The courier spun to her left and somehow directed the pinwheeling slug back toward Donovan with barely a twitch to its motion.

Inner Child heard a sound behind them and stepped aside, so that the Brute very nearly missed catching the projectile. He tossed the shim up, caught it by the flat of the blade as it fell, and threw it on a long, lazy turn-and-a-half toward his captor.

“Oh, excellent move,” the Confederal applauded. She had to sidestep and reach behind, since the shim was coming at her blade-first. She returned the shim the same way. “But ‘crouching-ape’ catch better.”

On the next round, though, as the shim hurtled toward her, an alarm tripped and a series of sharp chimes sounded through the ship. The Ravn jerked her head around, remembered in time the deadly projectile, and dropped “boneless” to the floor, striking with the flats of her hand to reduce the impact. The shim shot through the space her skull had occupied and rang against the wall across the hall from the doorway.

She had rolled on falling, of course—the body has reasons the mind stops not to ponder—and she came out of the roll into a crouch onto the balls of her feet just as Donovan reached her. Her teaser halted the scarred man an arm’s reach away.

“Ooh, that was very clayver, sweet. You play me friendly game of threw-the-knife and betray me at crucial mooment. You play me, and not shim.”

Donovan held his hands where she could see them. “What betrayal? I ran over to see if you were all right.”

“Not even scratch, my sweet. How you kick oof mootion sensor from here?”

Donovan shook his head. “Must have been a malfunction. Your whole system is jury-rigged. I’m surprised you haven’t had false positives before now.”

By the guarded look on Olafsdottr’s face, he judged that there had been previous false positives, perhaps while he had been in suspension. He said nothing, preferring that any doubts about system reliability be spread by her own mind.