How Dark the World Becomes (12 page)

TEN

I woke up and could hear giggles. I blinked sleepily and looked around. Marfoglia was reading a book, but beyond her Barraki and Tweezaa were sticking their heads up and looking at me, and giggling.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You snore,” Marfoglia answered without looking away from her book.

“Varoki don’t snore?”

“Not like that, they don’t,” she answered, frowning. Barraki whispered something to Tweezaa—probably a translation—and they both giggled again.

“How much longer to burn’s end?” I asked.

Marfoglia looked up at the chronometer on the ceiling—the opposite wall, actually.

“Seventeen minutes.”

“Good.” I yawned, stretched, and scratched my belly. “Let’s talk.” 

Our cabin was like any other in the big wheel—well, bigger and nicer than most, but functionally similar. As long as we were accelerating, “down” was toward the ass end of the shuttle, and the back wall of the cabin became the floor. There wasn’t much furniture on it other than the acceleration couches, which the purser’s staff had helped us into back in orbit, when we’d been at zero gee. All four of us had had some experience with weightlessness, but none of us were experts, so you relax and let the purser’s staff move you around and strap you in. Then the long burn started to move us out to the gas giant. Once the burn was done, we’d be weightless again, but the big wheel would start up, and once it got up to revs, “down” would be toward the outside of the wheel, the normal orientation of the furniture secured to the cabin floor. 

What would be the floor later was a bare wall right now, except for the furniture permanently affixed to it. There weren’t a lot of unattached things, and no
heavy
unattached things, in a spacecraft. 

I could have gotten used to the whole setup. The cabin made my condo back in the Crack look like a flophouse. There was a decanter of cold water and a drinking glass in secure sockets beside each of our couches, and just the way the light sparkled in the cut glass told me they weren’t just plastic pieces of shit. Personal cut glass water decanters in case we got thirsty during the burn? I’d booked luxury accommodations—because it was Marfoglia’s nickel—but I had no idea luxury accommodations were this . . . luxurious. Of course, when it came to my own experience with interstellar travel, all I had to compare this against was hot bunking with a bunch of bad-smelling Crack Trash grunts in a troop transport. 

This was nicer.

The big wall screen—which right now was on the temporary ceiling, to encourage everyone to remain supine during the burn—showed the aft external view. It was partly obscured by the rocket flare, but you could see gray dead-looking Peezgtaan, already filling less than half the screen. They were piping in a violin concerto, and it went well with the view. 

“Okay, here’s the deal,” I started. “We know somebody wants to . . . well, stop you two from getting home. They’ll know there are four of us—two Human and two Varoki—and there won’t be many travel groupings like that, so we’ll be fairly obvious. What I did was make similar travel reservations on almost every ship leaving the system over the course of the next five weeks. Kolya doesn’t have enough reliable people to put someone on every ship.”

Marfoglia translated for Tweezaa, and then turned to me.

“Won’t Markov know we’re on this ship, once you aren’t—active?”

I nodded.

“Sure. He may even have had eyes at Needledown, but it’s too late for him to do anything about it. Unless he already has somebody on board—which means one of the passengers that came up the Needle with us—we’re in pretty good shape. For now. We’ll have some other issues to deal with later, but right now our biggest concern is someone hired by the assassins, on the shuttle, and interested in hurting us.”

The “other issues” involved Kolya sending a message via the C-lighter’s public data dump to our destination, for dissemination from there. He probably didn’t have anyone on the shuttle, but every scheduled stop we made, our odds went down. 

I let Marfoglia translate what I’d said, and watched the kids while she did. They were scared, but interested, too. Tweezaa’s skin coloration was darker than Barraki’s, and the iridescence seemed stronger, so sometimes when the light hit her just right, it was as if she were jewel-encrusted. There was something so serious, and so self-possessed about her, I’d started thinking of her as the Dark Princess. 

My two charges—the Dark Princess and Weasel Boy.

“So what we’re going to do,” I went on, “is mingle, and try to find out as much as we can about the other passengers. In particular, we want to know if there were any last-minute changes in travel arrangements. Now, I don’t want to minimize the danger, but someone is less likely to make a move against us while we’re actually on the shuttle or the C-lighter.”

“Why?” Barraki asked as Marfoglia translated.

“Well, they can’t get away,” I explained. “Any violence on a spacecraft and they just seal everybody up inside until they get to where they’re going, and then the provosts come in and nobody leaves until they’ve figured everything out. Tough situation to wiggle out of, especially with so many security monitors on board.

“I’m more concerned about the layover in the Seewauk system. We’ll be at Rakanka Highstation for a few days, and it’s a big place—almost a small city—and security won’t be as tight. 

He nodded, but he didn’t look completely convinced. Just as well. I didn’t want them thinking there was no danger. 

“That doesn’t mean they
won’t
try something on board,” I went on. “So although we’ll be going out and mixing, I want us all to stay together, always in sight of everyone else. And I’ll be armed.”

Not very well armed, but they didn’t need to know that. No spacecraft line allows anything more powerful than low-velocity slug-throwers—still lethal, of course, but not dangerous to the airtight hull. So it was my old Hawker 10 again. The H&K was in a cargo container someplace—even firing slugs, that cannon was dangerous to delicate things like spaceships. I had a little LeMatt 5mm automatic as a backup, and that was even less powerful than the Hawker. At least I could be fairly sure I wouldn’t be up against anything heavier. Even security personnel—when there are any—don’t carry anything heavier than that, which is why passengers aren’t allowed to carry any body armor at all. Can’t have troublemakers wandering around immune to the security guys, and anything that will punch body armor will let in hard vacuum. 

Once we’d finished the maneuvering burn, the big wheels were spinning, and the steward’s crew had reset the cabin furniture—and I’d tipped them—we explored the suite in its new horizontal orientation. It had a sitting room and kitchenette in the middle, one large bedroom to one side, and two smaller ones to the other. The stewards had put Marfoglia’s and my luggage in the big one, the kids’ in the two smaller ones, so the first thing we did was move everything around. The only door to the corridor outside—other than the one in the sitting room—was from one of the smaller bedrooms, so I took that one, Marfoglia the other small one, and the kids bunked together in the master room. 

Over the next couple of days, we went to all the common meals, got to know the other passengers, and tried to figure out if any of them were Markov plants. To be honest, it was pretty boring work. People are interesting—Father Bill taught me that. Take the time to get to know them, and just about everyone you run into has a story that’s worth hearing, and not just for its entertainment value. People go through life, they have their disasters and triumphs, no matter how big or how small, and they learn stuff along the way. Listen to them, and you can learn something about life, too. 

Father Bill was the closest thing to a real father I could remember, and I didn’t even meet him until I was sixteen, so I guess the damage was done by then. I’d already been living on the streets for nine years, the first six of them as part of a bezzie-pack, and although I’d developed scruples, I had no compunctions, if you understand the difference. 

So Father Bill saw this wild, violent thing, and he liked me. Well, he liked almost everyone. Some people, when they say that, it means they like the
idea
of liking people, but that’s all. Not Bill. He found people really interesting. He’d tell you all these interesting things about other people’s background he’d found out, or about what they thought, and it was stuff that would never even occur to you until he told you, and then it really was amazing. He found everything about me amusing and intriguing and even admirable. I guess he taught me to see a bit of that in other people, too.

But the truth is, if you’re looking for someone trying to kill you, insights about the meaning of life just don’t hold your attention. And that tells you something about the meaning of life right there, if you think about it.

The shuttle had a capacity of 170 passengers, but there were probably only half that many on board—the travel business was in a slump lately. The passenger cabins were in the sternward wheel, along with the common spaces and dining. That way, passengers never had to go up to the spine and grapple with zero gee. The stewards lived forward, in the bow wheel. The flight crew had cabins in the bow wheel as well, and spent their off-duty time there. We passengers never saw any of the flight crew, only the stewards. That old Earth custom of VIP passengers dining at the captain’s table was beginning to be observed on some of the classier routes—there’s that
Terrakultur
thing again—but nobody was likely to call the Peezgtaan in-system shuttle a classy route.

Of the eighty or so passengers other than us, I’d guess that no more than a dozen were Human. Most of the rest were Varoki, but there was a solitary Trand, small and wrinkled and lonely looking, five Zaschaan, and the same gregarious group of eight Katami I’d seen at H’Tank’s Six-Star Club—I guess it really is a small world. All we were missing was a couple Kuran witchlocks for a complete set of the six sentient races, but Kuran don’t get out much, and that’s fine by me. 

Most of the passengers had reservations which predated the original killings—I knew this because I bribed the steward—so they were clear . . . unless Kolya had managed to pull the old swicheroo and at the last minute substitute a silencer for one of the legitimate passengers. I considered that unlikely—he’d have to not only find out this was our real flight, but he’d have to do it far enough ahead to set up the switch—which meant document work, research . . . it just sounded like too many moving parts to me. 

Not that I ignored the possibility—I’d been ass-bitten by long shots too many times. But nobody seemed terribly suspicious, and—much more importantly in my experience—nobody seemed too terribly
non
-suspicious, either. 

There was a Varoki security contractor who got really interested in me once he figured out I was the muscle for our little group, but it turned out he wanted to recruit me. Private security was getting to be a big growth industry, and hard-eyed Humans were the bodyguards of choice for the rich and powerful. Arrie was right about that—the Zaschaan might be bigger and tougher than us, but there was something sexy and cool about Human thugs that the Zacks could just never match. If you wanted to convince people that you were wealthy, influential, and sophisticated, you’d hire a dark elf as your exotic bodyguard, not some bugger-eating troll.

And why was private security getting more profitable? Because we lived in interesting times. Karl Marx dreamt of a day when government would wither because there was no further need for it. A lot of rich guys had the same dream and, unlike Marx, they were used to getting their way. 

There were a couple other guns on board. One of the passengers was the Varoki
wattaak
from Peezgtaan—basically like a senator back in North Am. He had four security people: two Varoki and two Human, and I didn’t know any of them, which was a good thing, because that meant they didn’t know me. 

Okay, civics lesson. The Wat was the upper house of the
Cottohazz
’s assembly—one
wattaak
from each “nation” of the
Cottohazz
. Each home world, which means each of the six races, had twenty-seven nations, because that’s how many national polities there were on Hazz’Akatu, the Varoki home world, when the
Cottohazz
had been formed—so everybody else also got twenty-seven, and how they made that work was their problem. From Hazz’Akatu there was uKa-Maat, uZ’mataan, uBakaa, and twenty-four other Varoki national governments I hadn’t heard of or didn’t remember. With all five of the original sentient races, there had been 135
wattaaki
at first. When Terra joined, they added twenty-seven more—the United States of North America, the Western European Union, the United Arab Republic, the Republic of Canton, India, Russia, Brazil, and eighteen more, some of them pretty awkward political unions. 

The colony worlds were usually part of a nation back on one of the home worlds, but at a certain point, some were recognized as separate nations, with their own
wattaak
. Our guy from Peezgtaan was the newest
wattaak
, and it brought the total number to 171. Peezgtaan had been an uZ’mtaanki colony originally, but we got our nationhood because we raised and sent troops—Human troops—to Nishtaaka, to help suppress the rogue mutiny. Since independence, all us Human Crack Trash had become uPeezgtaani citizens, which was probably an improvement over “stateless alien residents,” which had been our previous status. 

So now we had our own
wattaak
—Varoki, of course—his election campaign paid for by AZ Simki-Traak
Cottos
, all nice and legal. And in its small way, it was good for Peezgtaan economically—it gave us another product to produce and export for hard currency: legislators.

They call it democracy, because there are no hereditary rulers, no kings, and everything is done according to laws passed by elected representatives. You can’t inherit power, or titles, or political office. What you
can
inherit is money, and when a world like Terra, with about nine billion people on it, gets to elect just twenty-seven representatives, money shouts, and everything else murmurs. They call it democracy, but it’s just a puppet show.