Flight of the Vajra (13 page)

“Why?” she muttered back. (So did she, apparently.)
“You don’t think she can take it?”

“No, I think she takes it just fine. But she shouldn’t
have
to take it.”

“What are you on
her
side for, all of a
sudden?” She wasn’t muttering anymore; she was doing something a whole lot
louder than that. I flinched and
sh-sh
’ed her, and was on the verge of
just saying cosm take it and going to CL, but I stood my ground.

“I’m not . . . taking sides.” I lowered
my hands slowly and kept my voice low. “I’m just trying to make the time we’re
forced to spend cooped up in here pass as easily as possible. And you’re not
helping. So do me a favor until we put into port:
stop baiting her.
Even
if you think you can get away with it because she’s a nice person. And yes,
even if you think she can take it. She just put up with more shit in a day than
you’ve put up with in your whole lifetime.”

She dilated the shower door and stuck her face
right into mine. “
Like you would know how much I’ve put up
with!”

“You went to some length to tell me, remember?
Let’s face it—you’ve got a ways to go before you’re in her league.”

She did a good job of almost shutting the door on
my neck. I sat back down and told the
Vajra
not to let her use more than
five liters of water.

Angharad’s voice wasn’t much louder than the
drizzling sounds coming from the shower unit. “She still aims so much of her
frustration at me.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, still pretending to be
busy with the news.

“You mustn’t apologize. None of this is truly
aimed at me personally. And I . . . how to put this? I find it
refreshing to wrestle so directly with someone, after spending endless amounts
of time with heads of state and diplomats who never speak their true minds.”

“Yeah, but since when is that an excuse for her to
be a sullen little brat?”

“You mustn’t stand between us for either of our
sakes, Mr. Sim.”

“Well, you want an honest answer? It’s more for
my
sake, because I can’t concentrate when one of my passengers is taking cheap
shots at the other.”
Especially
when that other passenger is one of the
galaxy’s living cultural treasures, I wanted to add, but I kept that to myself.
“If she was my daughter, I’d smack her. —Then again, maybe not. She fights
back.”

Angharad put her fingertips over her mouth and
covered up her laugh.

“I know. It
is
funny, isn’t it?” I said,
shaking my head. “You know how we met? She more or less waltzed up to me in
broad daylight and started ingratiating herself. That’s how she ended up
tagging along for my audience with you. Somewhere along the way I got it into
my head that it would be more trouble getting rid of her than letting her stick
around and burn herself out, but look how well
that
turned out.”

“You must be a very lonely man,” she said after a
long moment.

I turned
all
the way around in my seat and
spent a good ten seconds trying to spit something back out at her. I ended up
turning back around with my mouth still closed, which was a giveaway all by
itself.

She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look all
that remorseful either. I turned back around, cleared the panel in front of me,
and set the entanglement engine up to engage after a mandatory ten-minute
self-test countdown. I’d stalled enough.

For the most part, space travel is dull stuff.
That’s the good news. It’s almost entirely automated, and it consists mostly of
sitting and waiting for the entanglement engine to find a lock with your target—typically
a star, since they’re big and unambiguous. Once that happens, the jump takes
place, and you then either very slowly close distance to your final destination
via conventional repulsor propulsion or set up for the next jump.

It’s all about as dramatic as watching clouds go by.
And in many cases, about as interactive. Most ships of any size are designed to
give the crew and passengers as much to do in the interim as possible, since
these days the single greatest hazard of space travel is dying of boredom. I
was obliquely grateful for the company, contentious as it could be: when you’re
alone there’s only so much reading you can get caught up on, only so much
thinking you can do by yourself.

The
Vajra
had been patterned after one of
my own personal-class luxury ships, with a default passenger complement of four
and a malleable hull. Add more protomic substrate to the hull and you could
expand it to about twice that without overtaxing either the null-g or
entanglement systems. I’d chosen to not mess with it too much, at least not
outwardly. I had a few mods that only showed themselves when needed, like the
self-defense extensions that we’d put into effect when leaving Cytheria. A
casual inspection of the hull’s protomics wouldn’t turn up anything illegal—the
illegal extensions were themselves designed to be annoyingly difficult to
detect—but I also had a protomic “deprogrammer” extension also tucked away. A
dose of that and within an hour or so all the illegal programming in the hull
would be burned clean out, leaving nothing but a factory-stock product
. . . which I would then need to replenish on the black market, that being
something I really didn’t want to deal with at this stage in my life. I was
hoping I wouldn’t have to rely on that before we docked, but the possibility
loomed very large in my mind.

“May I rest?” Angharad asked, after Enid had
started the shower.

“Absolutely you may. You want me to wake you up
when we’re down to the last jump?”

“Please.”

I set her seat to sleep mode: it flattened out,
lengthened a bit, softened up and grew a privacy canopy that could be tuned to
various translucencies. She stretched out on her side and was asleep by the
time Enid came out of the bath, fluffing out her still-slightly-damp hair.

“Did I use up all the water or something? It just
cut out on me all of a sudden.”

I was tempted to lie; I compromised with half of
one. “It’s set to five liters a person.”

“Well, I got most everything done. I was just
surprised, that’s all.” Her clothes were also damp; she’d probably rinsed them
out and programmed them to dry themselves off. “Are we already on the way?”

“Made the first jump a few minutes ago. It’s
taking a bit longer to do the next triangulation than I thought, but that
happens sometimes. Worst case, we add another one or two hours to our trip. You
wanna read the news? I got what there was to read before we split.”

“Sure.” She eyed Angharad in her cocoon. “She OK?”

“Just resting. After all that I’m sure she could
use it.”

“You really do like her, don’t you?”

I had to look at her after she said that, given
the vaguely accusatory tone she used. She did indeed have a skeptical look to
match.

“There’s not enough people out there who walk it
like they talk it,” I said. “You’re on that list too, you know.”

“Yeah, but compared to
her
—”

“Nobody’s comparing you to her. It took some nerve
to do what you did—confronting her like that, and then sticking your neck out
for her when they had guns pointed at it. The
good
kind of nerve. The
kind of nerve I wish more people had. If I didn’t say it before, it’s only
because I was still a little ticked off. But beyond that, I’m impressed. I’m
not blowing sunshine up your nose, I mean it. Even if you do drive me crazy.”

Her smile was small, but still held plenty of
triumph. “Does that mean you’ll stop treating me like a tadpole now?”

“As long as you don’t act like one, sure.”

She took that without flinching, which to me was a
good sign.

“The real question mark,” I went on, “is what
happens when we bring Angharad back home. We could be received as heroes, or
IPS could come knocking and we could end up in jail.” I saw her swallow. “Well,
to be scrupulously honest, it’s
me
that they would come after hardest. I
was the one flashing around a lot of protomic contraband down there. They might
grill you a bit but I don’t think they’re going to look at you with one-tenth
the suspicion they would bring to bear on me. So don’t freak out. And let’s
face it—given the circumstances, I’m betting they’re not going to do more than
give me the limpest of wrist-slaps. It’s more how it’ll look for
her.
”

“I’m not freaking out. I’m . . . okay
with all of it, really. It means for the first time in a long time I’ve made my
own
mistakes.” She was looking at a spot somewhere over my shoulder, her
eyes distant with surprise. “I
wanted
something crazy to happen,
something
really
crazy.”

“Yeah but were you expecting something of
this
magnitude?”

She pressed her mouth down into a little line,
trying hard not to look too rueful. “Well—it’s not like I can go back, right? I’m
stuck with you now.”

I think she’s savoring that, I thought. She’d
gotten her way, and in big part because I let her. I’d been in situations
before where I’d wondered whether or not I had the wherewithal to pull off the
things I had in mind, but most of them had involved a) violent deaths or b) a
long period of cooling-off in an isolation ward. None of them had
ever
involved c) a fifteen-year-old girl attaching herself to me as a would-be
chaperone while d) escorting home the Sixteenth Kathaya. And if people kept shooting
at us, we’d have the luxury of experiencing those a) and b) scenarios after
all.

But again, I thought: whose fault is that? You
went and stuck your neck out for these people—not just once, but over and over
again. And you liked it, dammit. You felt something while doing it that you don’t
get anywhere else. You felt the rush that comes from doing something that you know
only you can do in the moment you’re in. You savor that, too, the same way Enid
savors how she allegedly roped you into making you her “bodyguard”, and the way
you actually did live up to the role. You were waiting all this time for
something like this to come along and smack you in the face—something to
justify having ditched your old life. Now you have it, and you aren’t even sure
what to do with it.

I looked over at Angharad, still asleep in her
cocoon-seat. Next to her, Enid had nodded off too; her chin had touched her
chest and her eyes were closed. The earlier chaos, the shower, the drink and
the meal had all done their work on her. They both looked like they needed
someone to watch over them.

If that someone is me after all, I thought, then
we’re
all
in real trouble.

The entanglement drive’s countdown had long since
expired and had been waiting silently for me to approve the next jump. I gave
the word and imagined for the thousandth time that the little tug I felt in the
pit of my stomach was the feeling of being thrown across thousands of
light-years. It was always fun to pretend that.

I nudged Angharad with my mind.
You
should get up
, I “said”, my voice copied out through my CL and fed into her
couch canopy as a plain old audio signal.
We’re one jump from home.

I’d let it slip my mind that I could use my CL
again, now that we weren’t surrounded by all kinds of gross restrictions about
such things. But Angharad didn’t have one—oldest of the Old Way, after all—and
from what I could tell Enid didn’t seem like she had been raised to use it
compulsively.

That said, I gave Enid a poke as well,
experimentally. I linked my CL right to hers.
Up and at ‘em,
I told her.

—Ugh—what did you wake me for? It’s not like
you
— Her eyes opened. “—need me for this part anyway.” She yawned and sat
up, then grabbed her toes and began flexing vigorously this way and that.

“They might need to talk to us sooner rather than
later,” I said. “I figured you’d want to be completely awake for something like
that.”

“Yeah. For shame I should sleep through being
yelled at for kicking the Cytheria security guy in the shoulder.”

“That
was
unnecessary, you know. I glued
him pretty good.” I decided to rib her, see how far I could push it.

“Why? Did you figure it would be a good idea to
let him keep running around in front of us with a
gun
?” She grunted and
bent herself far enough over that she almost put her face flat against the
couch between her ankles. “Maybe you don’t think being shot in the face is such
a bad thing, but—”

“Okay, okay. Point made. Personally, after a
faceful of pixie dust, most anyone’s going to be preoccupied with cleaning the
glue out of their eyes and nostrils first.” Especially since my own particular
formula for same had a decent parts-per-million share of capsaicin. I kept that
part to myself, though; she needed to feel like she’d done something useful.

I unstrapped myself and flexed everything that had
gone stiff. On her couch, Angharad was also doing her own stretches and bends.
I felt like I was running an impromptu exercise class. Then again, Enid had
probably been doing a regimen like that, more than once a day, every day, for a
good seven years now at least. When you not only had tools like NKF at your
disposal, but social settings that let you explore them to your heart’s
content, it was easier than it had ever been in history to devote more of your
life, and to devote it sooner, to something that demanding.

Probably best for me to ease off from any morbid
discussion, I thought. Now that Angharad was awake in front of us, it felt
wrong to be joshing back and forth about those few moments in which two of her
most devoted people had been killed.

“I thought about your offer,” I said to Angharad. “The
diplomatic one. Maybe I should spell this out for everyone to hear, because the
implications of this are gonna be . . . messy.”

They both looked up from their calisthenics. Now
that I had the class’s undivided attention, I went on.

“Okay. Protomics. Comma, contraband. Everyone here
knows this ship’s made from ‘em and that I was toting around a whole suit of
clothes made from ‘em back planetside. No surprises there. I didn’t get busted
when I went through customs because, well, I cheated.

“What most folks don’t know about unlocked
protomics—read: illegal—is that you can hide any illegal programming from
prying eyes by encrypting it. That renders the illegal stuff inert, and leaves
the legal stuff functional. You decrypt the illegal stuff on demand, as long as
you have the right key, and when you’re done you use the key to turn it off
again.

“Now, when it’s encrypted, even a customs agent is
not going to see much worth raising dander over. There are plenty of legitimate
scenarios where you would have protomics with an encrypted data segment. Clothing
with a proprietary design, for instance. Or . . . a designer
spaceship hull.” I gestured around the space we were sitting in. “Me, I could
invent any number of reasons why the
Vajra
had big, fat gobs of
encrypted space in its protomic memory: my personal diaries, designs for other
ships I was tinkering with using the
Vajra
’s hull as a prototype, my little
girl’s baby pictures, you name it. Heck, I could even take
that
stuff,
encrypt it, hide the
real
illegal stuff inside it, and throw them off
that way.

“My point is this. There’s going to be any number
of eyewitnesses who can testify that I was using illegal protomics, which means
no amount of encryption will help. The two of you, for starters, but if they
get testimony from, say, the security-0ps guys we sauced, coup or no coup
. . . ”

“Well, you
did
leave them alive,” Enid
scolded.

“Yes, because I’ve learned by now that when you
kill someone, most of the time you just solve one problem at the expense of
creating fifty-eight more,” I scolded right back.

“No, but it’s a damn good way to
make sure,
don’t
you think?”

“I don’t know.” I gave Enid a suitably phony
smile. “What do you say I ask you about that after
you’ve
killed
someone? I’m betting by then you’ll have a real good perspective on the
subject.”

Enid’s ears turned the color of a pomegranate.

“Mr. Sim—your original discussion,” Angharad said,
mercifully.

“Yeah. —So: I’m guessing it’s not going to take
them more than ten seconds to know what’s up. If we go in there waving
diplomatic immunity flags, that’ll keep us off their backs for a bit. And if it
was just me in here, I’d do it in two seconds. I’d do it, I’d thank you, and I’d
get right on out.

“But it’s not just me in here. It’s me and the two
of you, and that changes everything. You decide how wise it would be for us—
me
—to
do that. You know the people we’ll be dealing with; I don’t.” It was my way of
saying
I’m at your mercy, Your Grace.
“But you know how it’s going to
make you look in the long run, right?”

“No, I do not.”

Not the answer I was expecting. I tried to pull
together a response, but she was faster:

“I offer my protection knowing full well that it
may have consequences for both of us. I cannot guarantee that you will be
immune from prosecution, but I can certainly advocate for more lenient
treatment if they choose to press charges. And in my case, it may well seem
like favoritism, although . . . it would not be the first time I was
accused of that.” She shook her head and smiled. “No, not the first time at
all.”

I’m glad that amuses you, I thought.

“I offer my protection knowing full well it may do
me no good,” she went on. “I offer it for both your sakes.”

“Offer it for
her
sake,” I said, pointing
at Enid.

That made Enid raise her read from where she had
gone back to flexing her hamstrings. She looked at both of us like we’d said
she was about to be slathered with duck sauce.

I kept pointing. “By what you say,” I went on, “if
anyone needs to get out of this unencumbered, it’s her. She’s got things to do,
remember? As long as she can continue on to where she needs to be, that’s what
matters.”

Both of them looked at me, with Enid still
manifesting the lion’s share of the surprise.

“Look.” I shook my head at them. “I’m a grownup. I
knew what I was getting myself into when I started bumbling on down this road.
If they yell at me, they yell at me. Odds are they’ll just fine me or impound
my ship or both. Big deal; it’s not like I can’t get another ship.”

Or build an even harder-to-detect one, I said to
myself. The one thing they couldn’t impound was my mind. And as far as my
reputation went—well, there was reputation, and there was honor. From what I’d
seen, if you have to choose one, you choose the latter every time.

“Henré—!”

I shushed Enid. “If you’re worried about how you’re
going to pay me back, outside of money, pay me back by getting to your dad, any
old way you can. This’ll all make a great story for him over lunch.”

Enid still looked like
she was ready to
twist my nose off by the time we’d completed the last jump. Angharad had removed
her wimple, smoothed back her black hair and washed her face at the mini-sink.
She didn’t look all that disheveled to me, but in the short time we’d already
shared, it wasn’t hard to sense her pride. Not haughty pride, but something
upright
:
she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a near-kidnapping and the deaths of
some close friends throw her off.

Surfaces at every seat showed a map: we’d popped
out within two solar days’ travel of Kathayagara—way out of the plane of the
ecliptic, but it didn’t matter. Nobody had any way of knowing precisely where
they’d pop out near their target after a jump.
Vajra
did the math and estimated
1.6 days’ time at half speed, so I bumped it up to full. The engine was nowhere
near the end of its estimated service lifetime (as it came with its own
internal, non-user-replenishable fuel source), and the less time anyone was
waiting, the better a chance we’d have at making our own case.

We’d barely gone ten minutes before we were being
hailed by Kathayagara traffic control. I gave them my tourist visa to stall
them and let Angharad connect to the Achitraka’s internal interface. It took
several minutes for them to verify her biometrics, but once that was done her
couch grew her a headset and she donned it. No CL on her meant she needed to do
her private conversation via the old-fashioned “I only look like I’m talking to
myself” way.

She closed her seat canopy to talk, although I
could still hear a muffled murmur. I probably could have switched on some CL
extensions to figure out what she was saying, but I knew better than to try. I
hadn’t used anything like that in years, and only then in situations where someone’s
life was at stake. The more you’re forced to do without those things as a
matter of course, the less casually you assume their utility.

Exercises done, Enid pushed off from her seat and
went to raid the kitchenette. “You know, back when my mother died, my father
and I were talking about making a pilgrimage to Kathayagara. The three of us
had talked about it on and off, and after she was gone we figured it would be a
good commemoration, that kind of thing.”

“And then Dad ‘lost his way’,” I said.

“Lost his way and went waltzing around after
her
,
along with the rest of that tribe. Yeah.” She settled on one of the
chicken-with-dumplings meals and yanked at the edges of the packaging to start
the self-cooking cycle. “I’ve also done CL virtours of the place, but that was
all before I went my own way. After that, I didn’t really see much point in
going on my own when there was nothing left to celebrate.”

“Did the circus ever talk about going there?”

“Once, twice. Both times it got voted down because
of some logistical issue or another. I kept thinking the real reason was
because most of us didn’t want to
go
there in the first place. I knew by
then I sure didn’t, and nobody else on the team ‘cept for like one, two others had
ever even talked about it being a thing for them. And then not even a big
thing.”

“It’s not like you would have had trouble finding
an audience.”

Her meal popped open and steamed. She extruded a
jumpseat and table from the wall and sat down to what at this point would probably
be late lunch or early dinner, depending on your math. “Although,” she said
around the first mouthful, “we probably won’t see much of it now, will we?”

“That all depends on what kind of treatment we get.”

“Were you serious when you said ‘I know what I’m
getting myself into’?” Hint of a tease in her voice there. “Because it sounds
like you just want to say that now to keep me from worrying.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

She put her fork into a sweet potato, not meeting
my eyes. “You don’t have to pretend you’re some kind of hero, you know.”

“Well, neither do you.” I hunkered down so she’d
have to look me in the face at least partway. “I think we’re past all that now,
don’t you think? So if you want a straight answer from me—yes. I know what I’m
getting myself into. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain amount of risk
involved. They’re not likely to come down too hard on the man—sorry, the man
and
woman—who saved the Kathaya. If they do, they’re risking a PR disaster—and
given how many people have been dropping out of the ranks of the Old Way as of
late, you and me included, you think they’re going to pull something that dumb?”

She looked convinced enough to partially change
the subject. “I thought I heard that after
she
stepped into the seat,
things started to turn around . . . ”

She keeps doing everything she can to not refer to
her by name, I thought. “The defection rate has leveled off,” I said. “That’s
not the same thing as a turnaround in adherents. She’s
helped
, but it
hasn’t been the revolution they hoped for. —You know what? I’m going to eat
something after all . . . ”

I took a meal and was about dig into it when I
heard Angharad’s canopy retract. She had the headset in one hand and was
offering it to me.

“Mr. Sim? Forgive me for interrupting, but Prelate
Jainio wishes to speak to you.”

I kept the headset muted. “Is this going to be a
grilling?” I asked her.

“I don’t believe so. Your reputation is
. . . well, it made it almost unnecessary for me to speak on your
behalf. —Not that I plan on foregoing that part of my promise.”

“No, of course not.”

I covered up my orange chicken, put the headset
on, and stepped to the fore of the cabin. The front panels were giving us a
beautiful panorama of the outside, which meant we had absolutely nothing to
look at save for a single brilliant little hole in the dark that was
Kathayagara’s sun.