Against A Dark Background (45 page)

I’m sorry, sir,’ the elderly guard said, glancing at her.
The dinner this evening; the train is waiting.’

Girmeyn looked genuinely annoyed. He held his hands palms up towards her. `I must go, Ms Demri. Can I persuade you to accompany me? Or wait for me here? I would love to talk longer with you.’

I think it would be best if I left,’ she said.
I have to leave the Ghost very soon.’ There was a voice inside her screaming, Yes! Yes! Say yes, you idiot! But she ignored it.

He sighed.
That’s unfortunate,’ he said, rising. She got up too. They shook hands. He held her hand while he said,
I hope we shall meet again.’

`So do I,’ she said. She smiled, still holding his hand.
I don’t know why I’m saying this,’ she said, feeling her face, neck and chest go warm,
but I think you’re the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.’

He made a small, snorting laugh and looked down. She let his hand go and he put them both behind his back. He looked up at her again.
And you are the first person to make me blush in about ten years.’ He bowed formally.
Till the next time, Ms Demri,’ he said.

She nodded. `Till then.’

He started to turn away, then said, `Oh, you may have your records.’

`Thank you.’

He turned and began to walk away. She watched him stop, a couple of steps away. He turned back to look at her, his hands still clasped behind his back. `Why did you really come here, Ms Demri?’ he asked.

She shrugged. `Something I just couldn’t get out of my head,’ she told him.

He considered this, then shook his head once and walked away through a door set in the wall behind the desk, followed by his functionaries and attendants.

She stood there for a while, wondering exactly what it was she was feeling. Then the elderly guard approached, handed her a data chip, the HandCannon’s magazine and extra round, and saw her to the exit. As she walked towards the doors she looked out at the silent, glittering cavern on the far side of the glass.

For a few minutes she had quite forgotten it existed.

She caught the next tube to Trench City and sat on the train with a big grin on her face, awash with a strange, exhilarating feeling that she had just experienced something consummately important whose meaning was still hidden from her, but growing. It took an act of will to run the data chip she’d been given through her wrist-screen.

The records told her nothing. If there had been anything exceptional about the hospital where she’d been treated, or its staff or systems, she couldn’t find it. The First Cut mine itself had been just another mining complex, owned by the usual anonymous Corp which rented the shafts and remaining deposits out to the smaller cooperatives, collectives and entrepreneurs.

She gave up on the chip and just sat there, thinking of that enormous cavern and its mysterious, time-encrusted machines, the dark subniveal space they inhabited resonating in her like some awesome chord.

She dragged her all-girl ship crew out of an all-boy sex-show joint in Trench and left for Golter that evening.

`Hi, doll. Just replying to your message. Sure got us beat. We’ve made some inquiries into this Keep agency and got precisely nowhere. Looks brand new; no previous jobs, contracts . . . nothing. Best set of commercial references you’ve ever seen, but no pattern to them. Rumour is they put in a loss-leader tender for the book contract; had the other agencies changing their underwear on the hour, but nothing’s been heard of them since. No physical address and no record of who’s working for them, either. How the grisly twins you met in the tanker came to be on the pay-roll, we can’t work out. Can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t ask the Sad Brothers why they employed that particular agency, like you suggested, but something tells me you won’t get any joy there. Whole thing stinks. Much like the Sea House, come to think of it.

`None of us had heard of this Girmeyn guy or the Commonwealth Foundation. The public access records all look innocuous enough. I’ve started a legal look-see, but so far it’s coming drier than a bar in Temperance City.

`The info chip they gave you; if it’s that data-dense and unsorted, the only thing we can think of is hand it over to an AI; hire one or ask your cousin for a favour . . . though I guess you’d have to tell them what you’re looking for, which might not be so smart. Suppose you’ve already thought of that, though.

Sorry this is all so unhelpful. Umm . . . We’re all fine; there doesn’t seem to be any monk-like activity nearby. We’ll be leaving soon. See you at the arranged place. Love from all. Well, apart from Cenny, maybe. Ah, shit . . .’ Zefla made a pained face then shook her head.
Just call me Ms Tactful. What the hell; have a safe voyage. See ya, doll.’

The image faded inside the holo-screen. Sharrow realised she’d tensed up a little as she’d watched the signal; she let go of the seat’s arms, letting her body float within the chair.

The control and data-screens of the Charter Spaceship Wheeler Dealer glowed gently around her. The bridge, like the rest of the ship, was unusually quiet; the vessel was just past the mid-point of its journey to Golter, in free-fall a couple of hours before it would turn its engines back on to begin braking. Equally conducive to the relative hush was the fact that the ship’s two crew-women, who favoured heavy-duty industro-thrash music, were both soundly asleep in their bunks.

Sharrow stared into the unreal grey depths of the holo-screen for a while, then sighed.

`Ship?’

`Ready, client Lady Sharrow,’ the computer toned.

`You’re not an AI, are you?’

`I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I am a semi-’

`Never mind. Okay; thanks, I’m finished here.’

A warm rain fell on Ikueshleng. The private spacecraft Wheeler Dealer buttoned down through the darkness of Outer Jonolrey towards the fifty-kilometre diameter patch of sunlight that presided over the port. The ship lanced through the encircling clouds of drizzle, its dull-red glowing hull leaving a trail of steam behind it in the dark air, then glinting watery gold as it entered the cloud-filtered shaft of reflected sunlight beamed down onto the enclave from the orbiting mirrors.

The craft puffed vapour as it adjusted its fall and flexed stubby legs. It thumped onto and rolled along a concrete runway on the outskirts of the port. It braked and turned, trundling towards a slowly pulsing holo showing continually descending red and green horizontal lines, stopping when it was in the centre of the holo.

The square of concrete beneath dropped slowly away, taking the ship with it.

Shit,’ Tenel said, glancing at the screen beside the lock door.
Spot check.’

Sharrow checked the screen. In the hangar space they’d been shuffled to, there was a tired male official in Port Inspection overalls holding a clipboard.

`Aw, penetration, man,’ Choss said. ‘Ain’t payin the Ik’s fuckin import dues on this spit.’ She started fishing bottles of trax spirit out of her kitbag and leaving them in the corridor by the lock door.

Sharrow watched as the official in the hangar outside yawned and then spoke to his clipboard; his voice carne out of the screen.
Hello, persons on the vessel Wheeler Dealer,’ he said.
Transport Standards and Customs check; please have your vehicle documentation ready and baggage prepared for inspection.’

Yeah, yeah,’ Tenel said, finger on the screen transmit button.
On our way.’

One at a time, please,’ the official said, sounding bored.
Crew first.’

Tenel flicked a data chip out of the screen slot and, shaking her head, stepped into the lock; the door slid open. The air lock was a standard single-aperture rotating-cylinder design that meant you couldn’t have both doors open at once. The door rolled closed again and they heard the inner sleeve and the outer door rotate together.

Sharrow and Choss watched the official nod to Tenel when she stepped off the external access ramp, take the data chip and stick it onto his clipboard, then inspect her kitbag and wave the clipboard up and down her body a couple of times. He tapped an entry on the clipboard. `Next,’ he said.

`Loada shit, man,’ Choss muttered. She made a farting noise with her mouth and stepped into the lock. Sharrow was looking at the HandCannon, trying to recall if Ikueshleng required a licence for bringing weaponry in. She couldn’t remember, and she wasn’t sure that going to pick up the gun she’d deposited with Left Luggage here was such a good idea. She shrugged. The worst that could happen would be they’d confiscate it. She stuck it back in her satchel.

`Next, please,’ the man’s voice said. The lock door opened; she stepped in. The lock half rotated, then stopped.

She stood there, trapped in the metre-diameter space. She pressed the control patches. Nothing happened. She got the gun out of her satchel, slung the satchel over her head and crouched down.

She thought she heard something, then the lock started to rotate very slowly. The craft’s hull metal came into view at the leading edge of the lock’s aperture. The lock stopped again. She aimed the gun at the edge of the door.

The lock shifted suddenly, opening a gap about ten centimetres wide to the outside. She glimpsed a vertical sliver of unoccupied hangar.

The gas grenade came in from the top of the door, hitting the deck to her right as the lock rotated back, trapping her.

She stared, horror-struck and paralysed, at the grenade clicking away on the floor.

For an instant she was five years old again.

A warm rain fell on Ikueshleng. Ships came and went, flying in on wings or relying on the shape of their bodies for lift, or landing vertically, engines screaming. Other sporadic roars were ships taking off, while every now and again a near-subsonic pulse of sound followed by a great whoop of noise and then a distant bellow of igniting engines announced an induction tube hurling a craft into the atmosphere.

Near one edge of the port’s artificial plateau, a long rectangle of concrete hinged down, producing a shallow ramp into a brightly lit space. Rumbling up from the port’s depths and out onto the rainslicked surface apron came a tall, boxy vehicle running on four threemetre high wheels; it was joined to another which followed it up into the drizzle, leading another carriage behind it, and another and another.

The twenty-section Land Car started to turn before the final carriages had risen onto the concrete surface. The vehicle’s front wheels ran through puddles on the apron, sending waves washing out to the edges of the shallow depressions. The grimy water surged back in as the wheels passed, only to be pushed out again and again as tyre after tyre of the accelerating Car rolled its intersecting tread over exactly the same path its predecessors had taken.

The Land Car came to the edge of the concrete, where a gate in Ikueshleng’s perimeter fence gave access to the bedraggled scrub beyond. The drop was two metres or more, but the Car didn’t pause; its front section described a graceful arc as it drooped towards the damp ground and the links with the section behind tensed to support it. Its wheels met the ground and took the section’s weight again as the rest of the Car followed, each carriage bumping gently down in a ripple of movement that swept back along the vehicle’s two hundred-metre length like a snake moving from one branch to another. The vehicle rumbled off through the fine veils of rain towards the line of darkness a kilometre away, where the artificial noon of the port gave way to the pre-dawn gloom of a cloudy tropical morning.

Sharrow watched the rain collect on the window of her cell, beyond the plastic-covered steel bars. The raindrops became little slanted rivulets as the Car increased speed. The landscape beyond the thick glass and slip-streamed moisture was flat, covered in scrappy bushes and patches of flail-grass that looked as though they could use the rain. She looked down at the paper note the warder had slipped through the food-hatch in her door.

Heard you’re aboard too. Court Police picked us up in Stager on some nonsense about assassinating Inv19′ Next stop Yada, apparently. Who got you?

Love and kisses, Miz and the gang.

She had nothing to write with. She crumpled the note up in her hand. Outside, the reflected sunlight disappeared as though switched off. The Land Car rumbled through the dark beyond.

The hunters who’d caught her were a mother-and-son team; the son had worked for the Ikueshleng Port Authority and had contacts in Trench City’s space port. The Huhsz had leaked the fact she was travelling as Ysul Demri into a data base used by contract security personnel, licensed assassins, bodyguards and bounty hunters. Finding out which craft she was on and arranging to borrow the relevant uniform had been comparatively easy.

The vehicle she was on was one of a fleet of World Court-licensed Secure Goods and Detained Persons’ Surface Transporters, though everybody just called them Land Cars. This one, the Lesson Learned, made regular runs between Ikueshleng and Yadayeypon with goods and people the airlines, rail services, road authorities and insurance companies preferred not to handle.

The Lesson Learned was run by the Sons of Depletion, one of an increasing number of secular Wounded Orders that seemed to be part of a new Golter meta-fashion. Each of the Land Car’s crew had voluntarily been made deaf and mute. Several of the warders she’d seen had gone even further and had their mouths sewn up; Sharrow assumed they had to be drip fed or have a tube put down their nose.

Others had had one eye sewn up too, and one man, an officer by his uniform, had had his mouth and both his eyes surgically closed. He had to be led around the Car by a sighted helper and his only mode of communication was through the Order’s private touch-code, the sender’s fingertips playing over the back of the receiver’s hand as though on a fleshy keyboard.

A Land Car. She remembered Miz mentioning he’d had some cargo stolen from one, but that had been on Speyr, in bandit country. This was Golter, and nobody attacked a Court-licensed vehicle unless they were suicidal or mad. Even Geis couldn’t help her now.