Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“No,” Quale said. “No, we won’t take Slancy anywhere near that thing.”

“Swar.”

“Kri?”

“Kinok says don’t be so spooky. If there was anyone onboard who really knew how to operate her, she would have picked us up the moment we came this side of the Limit and ashed us before we knew what was happening.”

“That’s supposed to be comforting?”

Kumari hiss/rattled her amusement. “Ve says, we’re alive, aren’t we. Why should we need comforting?”

“Teach me to argue with a Sikkul Paem.”

“I doubt it.”

“Mmh.” He watched the screen a moment longer. “Looks like there’s a fair amount of traffic out this way.”

Pels extruded his claws, began picking away old horn. “There’s some mining the next quadrant over. Not a lot, mostly rare earths, things they might be short of on Four. And there’s some trade between Five and Four. Mainly gemstones, furs and ivory.”

“From the readings, those ships aren’t much bigger than the tug. Say we left Slancy out here, we might be able to use the cargo carriers as stalking horses, make believe we’re one of them. What you think, Kri?”

She tilted her head, listened a minute. “Kinok says maybe so, but ve needs more time to analyze the emissions.” She studied the screen. “The touchy moment is when we have to break loose from the pattern. Pels, I don’t see any satellite traces. Is that right, or were you too leery of the Warship to hunt for them?”

He rumbled a mock growl deep in his throat. “I’m not putting a pip near that world until I absolutely have to.”

“You absolutely have to fairly soon, furface. I can’t plan if I don’t have data.” She listened again, eyes closed, nodding at intervals. “Got it.” She swung her chair around. “Kinok says ve needs to watch say four or five of those ships landing; ve says, Pels, lay out some passive EYEs, ve swears on the drives the Warmaster won’t eat you.”

Pels growled again. “And you tell ve to go twist veself; ve makes any more little jokes like that and I’ll have ve for salad my next meal.

Kumari listened again, shook her head. “No, Kinok, I’ll let you tell furface that yourself, save it for the next time you see him. Swar, Kinok thinks as long as we keep the tug to local speeds, the Warmaster won’t get nervous about us. Ve says, though, it’s very important before we do anything, that ve has the landing data. Ve can handle salad threats, but ve has no desire at all to achieve vaporization.”

Adelaar watched impatiently, her fingers tapping a jittery rhythm on her thigh. Now that she was so close, her blood was on fire to finish it. Her mind told her that this careful probing and planning was essential, her body told her GO. If she were doing the observation, if she were directing things, she could be crisp and calm and efficient and all that. She wasn’t. She was more useless than the baggage in the hold. And it was driving her crazy.

“Right. Pels, you’d better get started with those EYEs. The sooner you slide them into orbit, the sooner you can fetch them back so we can read them off and get on with this.” He watched the Rau pad out, then gazed at Adelaar, his fingers poking in his beard again, then he turned his head to Kumari. “I suppose it’s time.”

“Might as well get it over with.” Kumari turned her pale gray eyes on Adelaar, sat with her hands folded, cool and disengaged.

Adelaar forced the tension out of her hands and arms; as cool as Kumari, she said, “I’m paying freight here, I have a right to know what you’re doing.”

Quale pinched the end of his nose. “You heard us talking about ti Vnok.”

“So?”

“Jaszaca ti Vnok. Agent. Among other things, he’s been handling offers from relatives and so on of people who’d dropped down a hole somewhere. They want them back. Most of them couldn’t afford Hunters Inc., but they did the next best thing and put a reward offer in ti Vnok’s files. He gets his cut if he manages to connect with someone who’ll do the digging, the rest goes to the digger if he’s lucky enough to find one of the disappeared. A few years ago he tried getting us interested, but we couldn’t afford to waste time on a cause as lost as that with no payback unless we actually produced the body. Not our kind of project anyway. Then you come along and it begins to look like some of those lost might have gone down the same hole your daughter did.” He scratched at his jaw, fingers digging through the short soft black beard. “We have a partial list which we’re going to try matching against the one in those files Pels was talking about. You said it yourself a while back, two flights a year for fifty, sixty years, maybe more, that adds up to a lot of bodies. We match ’em, snatch ’em, take ’em back to Helvetia and go home with a nice fattener for the pot.”

“Earned with information I collected, information I nearly got killed for. My information.”

“You might say that.”

“Might!”

“You’ll get your daughter back. That’s what you hired us for. Don’t you think it’s a bit premature getting steamed over a side bet that hasn’t paid off yet? That might never pay off?”

He was being so sweetly reasonable he couldn’t know it made her want to tear his throat out. Kumari stirred. “Swar, behave yourself.”

His brow shot up, he looked amused and rueful and he stopped talking.

Kumari stroked her fine white hair. “You don’t think we’re cheating you.” It wasn’t a question.

Adelaar clamped her lower lip between her teeth and said nothing.

“You are a rational being, aici Arash,” Kumari went on. “Use your brain, not your spleen. There is another aspect to this worth considering. The more witnesses we return to Helvetia, the safer you and your daughter will be. If we find even a tenth of them, you and Aslan won’t be the only ones telling the tale, your credibility won’t be attacked so vehemently and probably destroyed, your lives won’t be put at risk. Some of those on the list have powerful connections. If I were you, aici Arash, I would pray to whatever gods I recognized that we locate a goodly number of them and get them safely away.”

“I can’t dispute that,” Adelaar said, her anger ashes in her throat. “But you should have told me before this.”

Kumari’s pale rose mouth curved into a slow smile. “Would you have done so, Adelaar Adelaris-na? Would you have told us about the attacks on your life before the bargain was made if Fate had given you that choice?”

It wasn’t a question Adelaar felt like answering. She said instead, “So, what happens now?”

So what happens now, she said. That was a good question. The answer for the next six days was nothing much. The Tutor poked the local language into us and we practiced it on each other, Adelaar went back to work on Slancy ’s defense systems, Kumari and I dredged up what we knew about Hordaradda and the Hordar, compared it with what Pels had picked up from Five; we spun out plans without data, knocked them down without data and generally fooled ourselves into thinking we were actually doing something. Made the time pass and that’s about all it did.

On the sixth day Kinok announced that he didn’t see any reason we couldn’t take the tug in, the Warmaster just lay there in orbit like a sleeping whale while the little fish swam around her carefully but undisturbed; most of them landed at the field outside the capital; the rest came down on the continent below the equator. After plotting line-of-sight, ve said that the southern field was over the bulge of the world and out of the Warmaster’s viewcone, which meant we could swing round that way without surprising anyone. So we loaded up the tug and started the tedious trip downsystem.