Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (20 page)

I pointed at Howard. “You keep out of this! R and D Spooks aren’t real Spooks. So stop defending them.” Then I paused and sighed. I said to Bill, “You could have asked me.”

Bill shook his head. “You would have told us to go to hell.”

Jude smiled. “He’s right. You would have. And we’d have no idea where Aud was right now.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. You know where Planck is. Do the Ferrents know?”

Bill shook his head again. “Must not. Or he’d be dead.”

I said, “I’ve got days to kill while the Duck presents my credentials. Aud Planck’s my friend. I want to see him.”

Bill shook his head. “You’d just lead the Ferrents to him. And they’re just old-school enough to shoot a roving diplomat first and ask questions later.”

I held out one hand, palm up. “Oh, come on! You said it yourself. Ferrent trade craft is straight out of the Cold War. You can’t shake a Ferrent tail?”

Bill the Spook shook his head at me. “I never said we couldn’t shake a Ferrent tail. But you can’t, General. Without help.”

FORTY-THREE

I SPENT THE EVENING IN A STUDIO in the consulate’s subbasement, along with Jude. The Spooks holo’d us reading, walking around, climbing stairs. Then we did it all again wearing different clothes. The next morning the Spooks snuck us out of the consulate using a Cold War shell game with hats, dark glasses, and similarly clothed doubles. The surveillance Ferrents, who, like other Tressens, were barely accustomed to tintype photographs, would see our holos through windows or in the courtyard and be fooled into thinking we were still in the consulate.

Disguised as a fishmonger, authentic down to the smell, I arrived at a tenement apartment in the old town before Jude. The apartment was furnished with one bentwood chair and an equally talkative, stubbled Iridian resistance bodyguard armed with a kitchen knife.

Ten minutes later, Jude, in coveralls over his civvies, carrying a merchant’s basket of bread, stepped through the apartment door. As the silent Iridian stepped around him to leave, Jude held out the basket.

“For your family.”

The man stared at the basket, then at Jude. “If my family was alive, I wouldn’t risk this. You two stay put and shut up.”

Jude frowned as he watched the man go.

“Still think the RS is just restoring order?”

Jude double-locked the door, then stepped alongside me. After a minute, he wrinkled his nose.

“You stink.”

After sunset, another resistance fighter, this one, young and holo-star handsome, gave us coats to wear, then drove us toward the coast in the backseat of a custom-bodied phaeton, top up against the cool night. Sometime in the next couple hours we would cross what had until the Armistice been the Tressen–Iridian border, and would thereafter roll through what had until recently been the Unified Duchies of Iridia. I nodded off, leaning against the phaeton’s padded-leather door frame. Two hours later, brake squeal snapped me awake.

FORTY-FOUR

“YOU TWO SHUT UP!” Our driver slowed as his headlights lit a trench-coated Ferrent, who stood in the middle of the road ahead of us waving his arms. The flank of a sedan angled across the pavement behind him, and two helmeted infantry regulars, rifles unslung, leaned on the roadblock’s fender. The Ferrent stepped alongside our car’s open driver’s-side window, propped one foot on the running board, and gazed up and down our phaeton’s flanks. Segmented chrome exhaust headers as thick as a woman’s thigh snaked out from beneath a hood as long as a wet-navy cruiser’s. “I know this car. From party rallies. It’s Commissioner Kost’s.”

“He’s my uncle.”

The Ferrent raised his eyebrows beneath his slouch hat’s brim. “Oh, really? Papers.” He extended a leather-gloved hand, palm up.

Our driver pulled three folded documents from inside his jacket, then handed them to the Ferrent. The Ferrent jerked his thumb at the two infantry grunts behind him. “We’re after the bastards that ambushed the chancellors.”

In fact, the bastard they should have been after was Zeit, the remaining healthy chancellor. The saving grace of this mess was that my godson was seeing the reality of the Republican Socialist utopia that he and Planck thought they served. It was actually hell with better cars. Our driver nodded. “Bastards. They should be shot.”

“Oh, they will be.”

Behind the Ferrent, one GI worked his rifle’s bolt. I swallowed.

The Ferrent didn’t unfold the papers, just poked his head through the window at us. “Who are you two?”

I fingered the white silk scarf drawn up around my throat, beneath a fur-collared coat that made me look like an organ grinder’s monkey. Bad enough to speak with an offworld accent. Worse, a translator disk’s rasp might not pass for natural speech.

Our driver tossed his head toward us. “Wounded veterans. Mute due to their wounds. We’re bound to my uncle’s place on the coast, for a holiday with him.”

The Ferrent raised his eyebrows. “So late?”

“The night air helps their throats.”

I bit my lip and waited for a bullet. It was the stupidest lie I’d ever heard. The Ferrent handed back the papers as he stepped off the running board. Then he turned and waved the two soldiers to roll the blocking car back.

Five minutes later, as we drove on toward the coast, I leaned forward and said to our driver, “I can’t believe that Ferrent bought that story!”

Our driver said, “He didn’t.”

“But you stole this car from a party wheel?”

The young man shook his head. “I drive this car all the time. Everybody in Tressen knows Waldener Kost is a blatant homosexual. He isn’t my uncle, he’s my boyfriend.”

I cocked my head. “But we—”

“Waldener’s taste runs to ménage. That Ferrent knew when to look the other way.”

I squirmed in my seat. Ménage? Espionage may make strange bedfellows, but not this one. Jude leaned forward, too. “If a party ranker is your boyfriend, why are you helping us do this?”

“I don’t know what ‘this’ is, and don’t tell me. It’s enough that I know that you two are doing something to bring down the RS. The RS has sent hundreds of thousands of homosexuals north to the death camps. Including the man I loved. Kost signed his papers himself. I will bide my time with that despicable man until the day that the RS falls. On that day I will slit Waldener Kost’s throat with a razor. Then I will watch the hypocrite bleed to death.”

I leaned toward Jude. “The anecdotal evidence is mounting.”

Jude sat back, silent, and stared out the phaeton’s window until sunrise. For the trip up the coast, another partisan took us off the driver’s hands at the dock behind Waldener Kost’s weekend cottage. It was a spired granite seventy-nine-room chateau “purchased” by the RS from an Iridian duke whose family had built it six hundred years before but who recently felt the need to make a new life on the northern frontier. Nobody was actually at Kost’s place, least of all Kost. That suited me, because my taste doesn’t run to ménage, even het.

Our new guide could have made me reconsider.

FORTY-FIVE

THE WOMAN AT THE STERN of the boxy pole boat leaned on her pole to steady the boat as it bobbed four feet below us alongside Kost’s dock. She looked to be Jude’s age, and she stared up at us from a dirty face beneath a broad-brimmed hat, with the deep green eyes common to full-blooded Iridians. A lober fisherman’s scuffed leather armor shielded her slender frame.

I pointed at the skiff’s pitching bow. “Just jump down?”

She swiveled her head, peering across the waves, one hand on a holstered pistol. “Shut up!”

I get that a lot from partisans.

She hissed, “You think rhiz hunt only at night?”

Jude had already hopped into the skiff, as lightly as a landing gull. I followed, and would have stumbled into the slop that sloshed the boat’s bottom boards if he hadn’t caught me. The woman motioned us to sit, facing her, on a plank shelf while bilge that stank of shellfish lapped around our ankles.

She poled us out into the current, which ran toward the sea, then shipped her pole and whispered,

“You two watch behind us. You spot a wake, speak up.” She pointed. “There’s a big, bad-tempered one that’s lived under a ledge over there for thirty years.”

Jude leaned toward me and whispered, “A rhiz won’t attack a boat almost as big as it is. But the water’s so shallow here that if one swam beneath us he’d capsize us. Once we went in the water…”

The warmer brackish swamps of this continent’s south coasts were still ruled by aquatic scorpions big enough to crush a man in one claw. Here in the continent’s north, a sea colder and clearer than the scorpions liked lapped raw, bald granite. The near-shore shell fishing in tidal pools was spectacular. Trilobite done right makes lobster taste like Meals, Utility, Dessicated. The lobe-finned fishes that flopped across the tidal flats to feast on the trills were, in turn, feasted on by lifeboat-sized lobe fins that mimicked the rhizodonts of Earth’s Upper Paleozoic.

We drifted with the current for an hour, past a landscape as gaunt as skulls, greened only by algae and lichen that invaded cracks in the continent’s ancestral granite. The greenery was the same stuff that the Tressens cultivated, then refined, to run their cars.

I shook my head and sighed as we drifted. Most places where the Slugs had abandoned humans across the Milky Way, we hairless apes had proved ourselves a wonder of resilience and ingenuity. After thirty thousand years on the naked Paleozoic pebble that was Tressel, mankind had sprawled across this world to build a mining-based early industrial civilization, evolved without beasts of burden, without conventional agriculture, and without fossil fuels. We were, however, also beating the crap out of one another and out of the planet, which killed the wonder for me.

We passed one pole boat like ours, drawn up alongside a tide pool. The skiff’s fisherman waded knee deep, staring down into the pool, his trident at port arms. A net bag at his waist, already half full, pendulumed as he waded.

Jude didn’t notice. He had spent the last hour watching the woman as she mended net bags and sharpened her tridents with hands that looked more like a harpist’s than a fisherman’s. He pointed at her hands and smiled, the way his father used to smile at cheerleaders. “You’ve had practice.”

She kept her eyes on her sharpening stone and shrugged. “My family’s lived here a long time.”

I said, “You don’t like us.”

She shrugged again. “You, you’re all right. You smell like fish.” She jerked her head at Jude. “This one stinks of the RS.”

Jude stiffened.

She snorted at him. “Your pictures don’t do you justice, Vice Marshall. Don’t worry. I’ve learned to stand the smell of Planck. I can stand the smell of you.”

“You know why we’re here, then?”

“I will after I get to know you better. Planck thinks we’re hiding him. But maybe we’re holding him for ransom. I haven’t decided yet.”

I raised my eyebrows. “We” were hiding Planck. But “I” would decide. The pretty girl with the dirty face was calling the shots.

Another hour’s drifting brought us to the sea, where Green Eyes raised a square sail, then let the wind bear us north. I scanned the waves. Bigger water, bigger predators.

The woman sat down behind us, at the skiff’s tiller, and smiled for the first time. “The rhiz hunt where the small fish go to feed, in the shallows. Relax now. Enjoy the ride.”

I glanced over at Jude, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman. He was already enjoying it. I saw no evidence of human habitation on the slick rock coast as we sailed north. The woman was as serious about hideouts as she seemed to be about everything else.

The three of us finally tugged the skiff onto a rocky beach pocked with tide pools as the sun was setting. Fifty yards away, silhouetted against the sun’s orange disk, on fifteen-foot-high stone stilts, stood a peak-roofed fishing shanty bigger than a bus garage.

I visored my hand above my eyes to look at it closer. A chimney extended above the roof, but despite the early-evening chill, no smoke curled from the chimney. From a dark window slit on the shanty’s wall nearest us, something poked out.

Jude reacted before me, knocking the woman and me to the rocks. “Gun!”

FORTY-SIX

THE WOMAN SHOVED JUDE AWAY. “Get off me, you idiot!” Then she rolled back on her stomach and cupped a hand around her mouth. “Pytr, it’s Celline!”

The gun barrel didn’t waver.

She waved at the window slit.

“Ah. It’s you, Miss.”

She got to her knees, brushing sand off her armor. “Pytr, we’re coming up.”

Judging by the algae that painted the shanty stilts two-thirds of the way up their length, we had arrived at low tide. The woman scrambled up the slippery ladder to the broad deck that fringed the shanty, its rails hung with fishing gear, and we followed.

The room inside the shanty door was large enough to park a couple of medium-sized trucks and was furnished with old and simple wood pieces. A stone fireplace at the room’s opposite end ran the wall’s length. Above the fire-place mantel hung a twenty-foot-long fish that looked like a fat moray eel with a head as large as a kitchen dishwasher. The rhizodont’s low-hinged mouth gaped like the dishwasher door was open and had been mounted to display a forest of needle teeth.

Beneath the fish a man with shoulder-length gray hair, wearing a lober fisherman’s coarse cloth tunic, knelt with his back to us. An Iridian military rifle as old as he was leaned against the fireplace. He poked a peat fire, tiny upon the immense hearth, to life and shouted louder than necessary into the peat as it blossomed into flame, “Tea in a moment.”

I crossed the room to the rhizodont and ran my fingers over the cracked lacquer on its scales. “Your fish makes quite a centerpiece for your place, Pytr.”

The old man stood and turned toward me. Beneath the gray hair, his right ear was missing and a scar slashed his right cheek from eye socket to chin. He cocked his head as he tried to read my lips. I repeated myself, louder.

Finally, he nodded. “Not my fish. Not my place.” He pointed at the green-eyed woman who had called herself Celline. “Her grandfather built this place and caught the big fish.”