Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

“He was,” Derebought said, and shrugged. “But I guess they got a bad storm, and it washed out the track. So when he showed up here, I figured I’d put him to work.” She looked down at her desktop. “Did you get the permits straightened out?”

“I think so.” He reached for the secretary cube that stood inside the doorway and ran his hand over the input strip to trigger the output nodes. Images blossomed in the air before his eyes, mixed icons and text, nothing of immediate importance, and the failing connection surged again, sending a wave of cold down his arm. “Have you heard anything about Norssco moving into any of our areas?”

Derebought shook her head. “Not a thing. Why?”

“Tillis Carlon was in Wiidfare’s office when I got there. I thought maybe someone was sending a message.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Derebought said, and shrugged. “Then again, maybe Wiidfare’s dabbling in trade again.”

“Oh, he’s doing that.” Tatian reached for the keypad, used it to move to the next screen of messages, not wanting to risk his implanted control pad. “Reiss is downstairs?”

“Yes. Are you all right?”

Tatian lifted his sore arm. “The damn connection’s getting worse. I’m going to have to get it looked at.”

Derebought nodded. “Good luck finding someone.”

“Yeah. Ask Reiss to stick his head in my office when he gets through in the cellar, would you?”

“Sure.”

“And I bought this on the way in,” Tatian said, and pulled out the uncleaned pod. “It’s hungry-jack, dried whole. Have you ever heard of preparing it that way?”

Derebought frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it dried like that. I’ve seen it whole when it was fresh, but I always thought you had to clean it before you could use it. We always did in my mesnie , anyway.” She held up her cupped hands. Tatian tossed it across to her, and she turned back into her office. Tatian followed, leaned against the door frame. Derebought set the hairy pod on her desk, pulling her maglamp down over it, and peered down through the lens. “Interesting, though.”

“Run a full analysis on it, covering and all,” Tatian said. “See if anything turns up.”

Derebought mumbled agreement, already probing the web of cords with a blunt glass rod, and Tatian sighed, recognizing her absorption. He flicked a toggle on the secretary, setting the sys-tem to forward calls to his desk. “I’ll be in my office,” he said, and pushed open the door.

The desk woke at his approach, sensing his presence, and Tatian flinched as the recognition pulse tingled through his skin. The desktop lit, producing half a dozen working screens scattered through the clear surface, and Tatian scanned them as he sat down. Most were old business, and none was urgent; he reached for the shadowscreen, splaying his hand across its virtual surface to fit his fingers to the current control configuration. He flicked a “button"—a literal hot spot, a bump of warmth under his finger—and a new screen appeared, offering access to Bonemarche’s communications system. It was primitive by comparison to the systems current on most of the Concord Worlds—even now, a hundred years after contact had been reestablished with the rest of human-settled space, most indigenes who lived outside the urban areas didn’t have access to the planetary net; it had only been last year that all the mesnie s had gotten a terminal—but it was at least adequate for communications within Bonemarche itself. He ran his fingers over the shadowscreen’s shifting spaces, summoning contact codes for Norssco and then for Tillis Carlon. That matter needed to be settled now: Carlon needed to be disabused of the notion that he could poach on NAPD’s territories.

A panel slid aside on the wall, revealing a meter-and-a-half-square flat screen. A red dot appeared, indicating the camera position; Tatian slid his finger down another control, fading it to near-invisibility, then flicked the control away. Glyphs swam across the base of the screen, and then a face appeared, a stocky, dark-skinned woman with a Norssco badge at her collar, the camera dot centered like a misplaced caste mark between her eyes.

“Can I help you, ser?”

“Ser Mhyre Tatian, for Tillis Carlon.”

“Ah.” The woman’s eyes flickered as she consulted some internal display. “I’ll patch you straight through, ser.”

That was a good sign. Tatian waited while the screen went blank and then reformed to reveal Carlon sitting at a desk that very nearly matched his own. A line of icons flickered in the upper left corner of the screen—security programs currently running, save-file protocols in effect, nothing out of the ordinary—and Tatian noted them with one corner of his mind, intent on the image in front of him.

“Tatian.” Carlon sounded distinctly relieved.

“You said I should call.”

“Yes. I thought I owed you an explanation.”

Tatian nodded once, and Carlon gave a smile that was almost a grimace. “Wiidfare asked me to come in then, said he’d had some one cancel an appointment. We—I’ve been having a little difficulty with our residency permits lately.”

From Wiidfare, or from ColCom and the IDCA? Tatian wondered. Norssco had always had a reputation for doing trade in a big way. Not that people of Carlon’s rank were involved—at least, not that much—but Norssco employed a good seventy-five or eighty junior staff, secretaries, technicians, backcountry brokers, most of whom supplemented an inadequate income by selling permits to players. But that was none of his business, as long as Carlon wasn’t interfering with NAPD. “So have we,” he said, voice neutral, and Carlon’s smile widened briefly.

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Wiidfare offered me an extra permit, with the usual string attached,” Tatian said. “I hope he didn’t get any ideas about that from you.”

Carlon shook his head. “If there are any extra permits, Tatian, I want them for me.”

“One other thing,” Tatian said. “I will take it very badly if Norssco reps show up in the peninsular mesnie s. Clear?”

“I—” Carlon stopped, closing his lips tight over whatever else he would have said. “Clear enough. I don’t appreciate threats, Tatian.”

“It’s not a threat,” Tatian said, and smiled. “It’s a promise.”

“Clear,” Carlon said, face grim, and Tatian broke the connection. He leaned back in his chair, watching the panel slide closed again over the flat screen. Norssco would bear watching now, at least until after the harvests that were due at Midsummer had all been delivered, but it had been important to state NAPD’s position as explicitly as possible.

He reached for the shadowscreen again, trailed his fingers through the varying sensations, cold and hot, rough and smooth, adjusting the desktop to a more comfortable working configuration. Lanhoss Mats, the shipping wrangler, as well as Derebought’s partner, had left a long, thickly annotated file updating his projections for the weeks following the harvest—storage space available, accessible, and already rented, and the ships scheduled to land and the backup craft available. Tatian sighed, looking at it, but dragged it to the top of the file. The sooner he looked through it, the sooner he could turn it back over to Mats, and he tapped the icon to open it.

The soft sound was echoed, more loudly, from the doorway, and a familiar voice said, “Derry said you wanted to see me?” Tatian pushed the file away with some relief. “Yeah. Come on in.”

Shan Reiss seated himself warily in the visitor’s chair. He was young to be NAPD’s chief driver, and looked younger, so that Tatian frequently had to remind himself that Reiss had been born on Hara, and knew the backcountry as well as any indigene. He was a thin, tall man, all whipcord muscle, brown skin burned darker by the planet’s fierce sun—could have passed for an indigene, Tatian thought, not for the first time, if it weren’t for the vivid blue eyes. At the moment, those eyes were very worried, and Tatian wondered just what he’d been up to. As Wiidfare had implied, Reiss hung out in the trade bars and dance houses; if he was in trouble, it would involve sex. But if he wasn’t selling permits, it was no one’s business but his own.