The City Who Fought (72 page)

The complaint was ten years old, but might as well have been centuries old for all the effect it'd had. It had been filed by Channa Hap and Simeon, the Brain and Brawn of the SSS-900-C on behalf of their adopted daughter, Joat Simeon-Hap.

Bros sat up and leaned forward. The warrant had been signed out against a Nom Selkirk, Joat's uncle. It seemed the man had lost his seven-year-old niece in a poker game with the captain of a tramp freighter.

The child had subsequently been viciously abused and then abandoned on the SSS-900-C. Both Channa and Simeon had demanded some sort of action. They'd gone so far as to post a reward for information.

Nom Selkirk was one of Nomik Ciety's aliases, one of his oldest, perhaps even his real name.
If he has
any real name other than
vermin,
or something of that kind.

The hair crawled on Bros's neck.
And I sent her after him,
he thought with horror. An image of Joat's smile rose in his mind; and the memory of holos taken during the Kolnari occupation of SSS-900-C.

Most of which Joat had spent in the ventilation system, planning and executing—literally—her ambushes.

During which she'd used a monofilament dispenser to give a whole new layer of meaning to the ancient saying "Cut them off at the knees."

If Ciety
was
her uncle, his life wasn't worth spit from the moment Joat landed on the same surface. Not that Ciety would be any loss, but the consequences to the mission . . .

"Outsmarted yourself again," Sperin muttered to himself. "Tell me I'm not as stupid as a vid-series spy.

Please!
"

* * *

The customs corvette was a slender needle next to the
Wyal
's torpedo, built to transit atmosphere and fast in space as well. An unpleasant beeping sound echoed over the bridge as the merchantman's sensors picked up the lock-on of the gunboat's particle beam weapons and single torp tube. The corvette came around sharply to match vectors, reached zero-relative velocity, and extended a docking tube.

Joat's eyebrows rose when the airlock door swung open to show the corvette's commander; of course, the crew was only six people, but she'd expected a junior officer.

* * *

Commander Chang-Yarimizu stared, nonplused, at Captain Simeon, who stood with her arms outstretched to block his entrance to her hold.

"This device is perfectly safe," he insisted. "Stories of its destructiveness are mere superstitious nonsense."

"Nevertheless," she insisted, "I've got a hold full of extremely delicate electronics. I
can't
afford to take the risk. I'm within my rights Commander, and you know it. I'm not denying you the right of inspection, I'm merely refusing to let you use that instrument."

"But if we do the inspection by hand, Captain, it could take all day, or longer!"

"I'd rather arrive late with a clean cargo than on time with a hold full of trash. This is a freighter, not a garbage scow dumping radioactives! If it takes time, it takes time. I've got nothing to hide, so we'll go through the whole shipment, one item at a time. But I'll tell you this, Commander," Joat waved a stiff forefinger under his nose, "I'm going to protest this! Nothing in my record or reputation could give you reason for this. Nothing!"

"You're going to Rohan, ma'am . . ."

"Captain!"

"Captain. After a conference with a woman who has a reputation a lot less pristine than yours. You're known to have a crushing debt to New Destinies. All in all, it's really not unreasonable to assume that you might have been tempted off the straight and narrow."

"Well, Commander," Joat said, crossing her arms over her chest, "put down that gadget and we'll go discover the truth about that. Shall we?"

* * *

Several hours later, Joat and the two luckless sailors assigned to inspect her cargo had finished examining the electronics, now twice reopened and sealed, and were beginning on the laser crystals.

"Lasers?" the Commander said.

"Mining laser crystals. As you'll note, they aren't milspec."

If I have trouble selling those electronics, can I make a claim against customs for making me open up the containers? Joat wondered.

"My fingers hurt," one sailor complained.

"Yeah," Joat agreed, "my cuticles are beginning to peel back." She sighed. "I'm really sorry to put you through this, guys. But what could I do? I don't care what he says about that instrument, too many people have warned me against it."

"I don't think it really causes problems, ma'am. But I can see where you wouldn't want to take a chance," the other sailor said.

They'd gone through several hundred boxes and were beginning to close in on the hidden cache of crown rubies.

Fardles! she thought, Doesn't that nardy Commander have anything better to do? We've been at this for hours! Surely someone, somewhere is committing a vicious crime that these guys should be trying to stop!

She reached out and grabbed a box that she knew contained one of the doctored Crown rubies. She could feel the difference in weight. The two sailors reached for two more ruby filled boxes. Her heart began to pound as she readied the lie she'd been preparing.

"What the hell is this?" one of the men asked.

"It's slag," Joat told him taking it out of his hand. "It's what's left over when they've cut the crystals from the matrix they're grown from."
Please,
she thought,
be ignorant about laser crystals. Be dumb, please!

"Here's another one," said his companion.

Joat opened her box and dumped out the disguised ruby.

"Fardles! I'll bet the rest of the shipment is like this! I should have known better! There's no such thing as a bargain, just deals you regret. I bet I end up paying top dollar for every good crystal I've got." She slammed the ruby back into the box in disgust and tossed the box contemptuously over her shoulder.

"Pereira, Benavides, heads up! We're moving out."

The two sailors put down their boxes with sighs of relief and rose. Stretching to get the kinks out, they smiled at Joat.

"Sorry about the mess," one said.

"Don't worry about it," Joat told them, grinning. "Perils of passage," she assured them.

She rose too and escorted them to the lock that connected her ship to theirs.

The Commander was there and he and Joat gave each other a fish-eyed stare.

"Sorry for the inconvenience," he said stiffly.

"Not at all," she said, smiling. The hatch clanged shut. "You meddling, officious twit!" she added with a snarl, kicking the hatch-cover.

Joseph and Alvec had stayed carefully on the bridge, on the general principle that absent faces generated no awkward questions. Joseph handed her one of the glasses of Arrack he held and Joat took it solemnly. The three of them clicked glasses and drank.

Joat smacked her lips. "I never thought I'd live to say this, but I needed that."

"We better clean up this mess," Alvec said, "and get underway before we attract any more attention."

"Attention," Joseph mused. "True, I am from a backward planet, but still . . . in my trade—" he made a gesture of apology "—which for the moment is yours, Joat . . . drawing attention to oneself is not a good thing."

"Yeah," Alvec said. "And the way we've been going, we've got a great big holo sign reading
Hurrah,
We're Here!
welded to the bow of the ship."

Joseph sighed. "I am haunted by the feeling that we have just refused to grasp a lifeline that fate has thrown us. Whatever happens now, my friends, I pray that the God is watching over us, for I fear we are utterly outside of human help. And too many depend on us for failure to be tolerable."

Joat nodded. If Joseph was right, Amos and his party were in the hands of the Kolnari. She shuddered.

A fate that makes death seem like a fun alternative.

CHAPTER TEN

"Don't tell me!" Seg said, his long multijointed fingers dancing over the control console. "You set the customs corvette onto them!"

"Yes," Bros sighed.

Remember, he's a romantic, but not necessarily a complete idiot.
Not intellectually; emotionally yes, but he could still figure things out. He probably even had a gifted amateur's grasp of the profession—just enough to make inspired guesses about thirty percent of the time, including some occasions when a professional wouldn't see the unlikely. The rest of the time he'd be dead wrong and unwilling to admit it.

"Why? Ahhhh . . . to convince their next contact that they're on the wrong side of the law! That they have no choice but to descend deeper and deeper into the depths of crime. And meanwhile, you'll be closing in! Fiendish!"

Bros frowned.
That
is
my plan, stripped of the adjectives.
And put like that, it sounded pretty lame, particularly now that he knew about Nomik Ciety's link to Joat. Or did it just sound bad because the Sondee was saying it, with mezzo-soprano warbles of excitement on the vowels?

Too late to do anything about it now. "Let's go," he said. The next move would be up to Ciety. Just enough of his shipping capacity had disappeared for one reason or another to make him pretty desperate; in his line of work, clients didn't really deal well with delays. On the other hand, there hadn't been enough to make him suspect Intelligence was onto him. Bros hoped.

* * *

Silken lay back with a delighted little purr and Nomik laid his head on her bosom. She reached down and stroked his dark blond hair, damp from his exertions.

"You missed me," she said in a pleased little growl.

"You bet I did." He snatched her hand and kissed it. "You're one of a kind, Silky. And there's no substitute for the best."

She laughed and wiggled playfully. He looked up at her and smiled, scooting himself higher in the bed to kiss her. She turned again, sliding out of the bed and padding across the polished black basalt and stark-white Schwartztarr fur rugs to the autobar. She returned with a bottle of champagne and two tall flute cones of carved glass, smoking with chill. He admired the grace of her arm as it curved to pour the priceless Terran wine.

"We
are
good together, aren't we?" she said, slipping back into the satin tangle.

"Especially at times like these," he murmured, winding his arms around her.

The bed rotated and tilted to face the wall that was a single sheet of crystal, giving a view of stark airless white mountains and the banded blue and aquamarine of the gas-giant beyond.

Eventually they leaned companionably against the head of the bed and each other, quietly sipping chilled champagne, filling each other in on their doings.

"I think I may have found a new agent for the organization," Silken confided.

"Oh?"

"I met the most amazing young woman on Schwartztarr. She's about my age and owns her own ship.

Well, she and her bank. Her reputation is crystal clean, she's considered a fair dealer and she gets her cargo to destination on time and in good condition. She's discreet, she's smart," she glanced over at Nomik, "she's got guts. Would you believe it, she went eye to eye with me over something and didn't blink."

"And you did?"

She laughed. "Yes, I did. I couldn't help it, the woman was right."

"You gave in to her, just because she was right?" Nomik had turned to look at Silken, amazement written all over his face. "I don't believe it. What is this woman . . . a witch?"

"Mmmm, no." She chuckled, "Maybe a kindred spirit. And she
did
have the whip hand." Silken shrugged and he kissed her shoulder. "The thing is," she tapped his nose lightly with one slender finger, "she's got a massive debt to New Destinies. They've fined her a hundred and twenty thousand credits."

He frowned. "What did she do, poison the water, blow a hole in the station, ram a passenger liner?"

"According to my source, she took an unauthorized space-walk and entered the station through an emergency repair hatch."

"That's it?'

"That's it," Silken shrugged, grinning delightedly. "Now, here's my idea. What you could do, is, buy up her debt to New Destinies and offer her the opportunity to work it off."

"You think this paragon will go for that?" Nomik raised an eyebrow. "What about that pristine reputation?'

"I think she'll go for it. She's sure to lose her ship if she doesn't and then what good will her reputation do her? Believe me Mik, she'll repay that debt almost double before she's free. Just keep it light until she's in too deep to turn back. After that, who else is going to ship with her but you?"

"You're always thinking of me aren't you, Silky?" He kissed her and gave her a squeeze.

"Mmm hmm. She'll be with us in a day or so and you can check her out for yourself."

"Why don't I check you out just one more time?" he asked. "Make sure you got home in one piece."

Silken giggled as he rose over her.

* * *

The
Wyal
dropped into normal space. Joat blinked at the scanners. For a moment she thought that transition stress had finally gotten to her after all these years.

"There's nothing here!" she said.

"Correction: interstellar gas and micrometeorites," Rand's voice said. "And an F-class star three-point-seven parsecs to the galactic northwest."

"Identify yourself."

Alvec pointed silently to the screens. A ship had been waiting, stealthed, engines on minimal standby to reduce the neutrino signatures of the powerplant. Now it was coming online. Joat glanced at the data.

Nothing standard, not a Central Worlds signature, but the emissions were enough for a very large merchantman . . . or a light cruiser.

Kolnari?
she thought. The tiny hairs along her spine crinkled erect in atavistic reflex.

"I have visual," Joseph said from the navigator's seat. His voice relaxed from tightly controlled fear to mere tension. "Not Kolnari, I think."

"Guardship," Alvec said.

The image on the screen was the conventional cylinder-and-globe of interstellar ships not meant to transit atmosphere, but with a hacked and haggled look.

Rand spoke. "A modified fast freight carrier," it said. "Mass reduced to increase delta-v. Shield generators, lasers, particle beam weapons, and missile launchers here—" a dot appeared on the image