C. Cherryh - Cyteen

"Yes," Grant said in a faint voice, azi-like: yes.

"The Krugers won't betray you. Tell them I said sink the boat if they have to. It's Emory's. Merild will handle everything else."

"Ari will call the police."

"That's fine. Let her. Don't try to go past the Kennicutt. If you have to, the next place on down the Volga is Avery, overnight, maybe more, and she could intercept you. Besides, you'd get caught up in Cyteen-law and police down there, and you know what that could be. Krugers is it. It has to be." He looked back at Grant's face in the faint glow of the chart-light, and it struck him suddenly that he might not see him again. "Be careful. For God's sake, be careful."

"Justin." Grant embraced him hard. "You be careful. Please."

"I'll push you out of here. Go on. Dog the seals down."

"The other boat—" Grant said.

"I'll take care of it. Go!" Justin turned and ducked out of the door, hopped up on the deck and onto the echoing grating. He cast off the ties then, threw them aboard, shoved the big boat back with his foot and with his hands till it drifted clear, scraping the buffers.

It swung round sideways, inert and dark, then caught the current off the boathouse and drifted, following the sweep of the main channel, turning again.

He opened up the second boat and threw up the cover on the engine.

The starter was electronic. He pulled the solid state board, dropped the cover down, closed the hatch behind him, and dropped the board into the water before he made the jump between the boat and the metal grid of the dock.

In the same moment he heard the distant, muffled cough of Grant's engine.

Solid then, chugging away.

He cleared the boathouse, latched the door and ran. It was dangerous to be down here on the river-edge, in the dark, dangerous anywhere less patrolled, where something native could have gotten in, weed in the ditch, stuff carried in the air—God knew. He tried not to think about it. He ran, took up on the road again, walking as he caught a stitch in his side.

He expected commotion. He expected someone on night shift at the airport to have seen the boat, or heard its engine start. But the work at the hangars was noisy. Maybe someone had had a power wrench going. Maybe they thought it was some passing boat from Moreyville or up-Volga, with a balky engine. And they had the bright lights to blind them.

So far their luck was a hundred percent.

Till he got to the House and found the kitchen door locked.

He sat down a while on the steps, teeth chattering, trying to think it through, and gave it a while, time for a boat to get well on its way. But if he sat there the night, then it was unarguable that it was conspiracy.

If he gave them evidence of that—

It would land on Jordan.

So there was nothing to do finally but use his key and trip the silent warnings he knew would be in place by now.

Security showed up to meet him in the halls by the kitchens. "Ser," the azi in charge said, "where are you coming from?"

"I felt like a walk," he said. "That's all. I drank too much. I wanted some cold air."

The azi called that in to the Security office; Justin waited, expecting the man's expression to change then, when the order came back. But the azi only nodded. "Good evening, ser."

He walked away, weak-kneed, rode the lift up and walked all the lonely way to the apartment.

The lights came on inside. "No entries since the last use of this key," the dulcet voice of the Minder said.

He went into Grant's room. He picked things up and hung them back in the closet and put them in drawers. He found small, strange things among Grant's belongings, a tinsel souvenir Jordan had brought back from holiday in Novgorod, a cheap curio spacer patch of the freighter Kittyhawk that he had brought back from Novgorod airport, for Grant, who had not been allowed to go. A photo of the pair of them, aged four, Grant pale-skinned, skinny, and shockingly red-haired, himself in that damned silly hat he had thought was grown-up, digging in the garden with the azi. Another photo of them, at a mutually gawky ten, standing on the fence of the livestock pens, barefoot, toes curled identically pigeon-toed over the rail, arms under chins, both grinning like fools.

God. It was as if a limb had been cut off, and the shock had not quite gotten to the brain yet, but it had hit his gut, and it told him it was going to get worse.

Ari would call him now, he had no doubt.

He went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, hugged his arms about himself and stared at the patterns in the veneer of the table, anything but shut his eyes and see the boat and the river.

Or think of Ari.

Only Grant? Merild would ask, when he got that phone message. Merild would take alarm. Merild might well call Reseune and try to talk to Jordan; and he could not afford that: he tried to think what he would say, how he would cover it. Grant could tell Merild enough, maybe, to set Merild working on a rescue of some sort; but, oh, God, if something got to Jordan about Ari and him, either from Grant, from Merild, or from Ari—and Jordan blew up—

No. Jordan was too cagy to do something without thinking it out—

The time passed. The air of the apartment felt cold as the chill outside; he wanted to go in to his own bed, and pull the covers about him, but he asked the Minder for more heat and kept to the living room, fighting to stay awake, afraid he would sleep through a Minder call.

None came.

Small boats went out of one port and never got to another, that was all. It happened even to experienced pilots.

He thought about every step he had taken, every choice he had, over and over again. He thought about calling Jordan, telling him everything.

No, he told himself. No. He could handle it with Ari. Jordan needed help, and Jordan not knowing was the only way it worked.

A plane flew over. Grant heard it even above the steady noise of his own engines, and his hands sweated on the wheel as he ran down the clear middle of the river, his meager speed boosted by the current. He had no lights on, not even the small chart-light on the panel, for fear of being spotted. He did not dare increase the speed of the engines now, for fear of widening the white boil and curl of wake that might show to searchers.

The plane went over and lost itself in dark and distance.

But in a little time it circled back again: he saw it coming up the river behind him, a searchlight playing over the black waters.

He put the throttle up full, and felt the easy rock of the boat become an increasing vibration of waves as the bow came up. To hell with the wake, then, and with the floating snags that had sunk many a boat in the Novaya Volga.

If they had sent boats out from Moreyville, or from the other end of Reseune, and if someone on those boats had a gun, shots could go through the cabin, breach the seals fatally even if they missed him, or go through the hull and maybe hit the fuel tanks—but they had rather put a hole in the boat and slow it with waterlogged compartments. They would not, he was sure, want him dead if they had a choice.

He did not intend to harm Justin, that was his first determination: not to be used against Justin, nor against Jordan. And beyond that, even an azi had a right to be selfish.

The plane roared directly over him, throwing the decks into bright light, blinding glare through the cabin windows. The beam passed on a moment, leaving him half blind in the sudden dark. He saw it light the trees on the far side of the river, pale gray of native foliage against the night.

Suddenly the bow fell off to starboard and that floodlit view of the bank turned up off the bow, not the beam. In a moment's fright he thought the propeller might have fouled, and then he knew it was current he had run into—the Kennicutt's effluence into the Volga.