Fool's War (3 page)

Al Shei smiled behind her hijab.

“Watch Commander Schyler.” She touched her forehead in brief salute. “And Inspector… ” she held out her hand.

“Davies, ‘Dama Al Shei, and… ”

“And thank you for coming on such short notice, Inspector,” said Al Shei before the inspector could finish his sentence. “I’m extremely sorry to have had to put in a short-notice call and I assure you and the Lennox station that it will not happen again.”

“Well, yes.” The little man fumbled with his pen and managed to tuck it into his pocket so he could shake her hand. “Thank you, ‘Dama Al Shei. Let’s see if we can get this business over with.” Schyler was rubbing his nose again. Al Shei grinned, extremely glad of her
hijab
.

“Of course, Inspector. We won’t take up any more of your time than necessary.” She retrieved the ship’s book from under her arm and wrote OPEN across the cover with her own pen. The memory chip registered her handwriting and unsealed the book. “This is my crew roster and ship specifications,” she said, handing the stack of appropriate films to Davies. “You’ll find it in order, I’m sure.”

He took the pile and sniffed. “What I find is not the real issue, ‘Dama Al Shei.” Davies nodded towards his rovers. “It’s what they find.” He flipped through the films and extracted the ship’s specifications. He slid the stack into the chief rover’s scanner slot.

“Specification recorded,” it said in the bland, neuter voice that belonged to the vast majority of automated systems. “Proceeding with verification.”

The rovers lifted themselves up off the deck and marched in single-file into the Pasadena. They’d go over the ship, checking, measuring, scanning. Davies would do a walk-through and spot check when they were finished, but that was mostly a formality. Al Shei felt her neck muscles tense up. Maybe she should have checked things over first. Tully, for all his scheming, was generally a truthful partner and if he said the ship was in prime working order, it would be.

“The pilot you’re hiring.” Davies looked up from the open book that he held balanced on the palm of his hand. “‘Dama Yerusha, she is from Free Home Titania?”

“That is what her bio file says.” Al Shei realized she’d been staring at the airlock and fiddling with her sleeve.

“She’s a Freer then?” Davies put all of his facial muscles into the frown.

“I didn’t know hiring a Freer disqualified a Lennox rating,” Al Shei kept her voice casual.

Davies shrugged. “Not technically, no, but it can prejudice your security marks.”

Al Shei bit her tongue. It was Davies’ job to be skeptical. If she said anything, she’d just be giving him additional ammunition.

From the recess of her pocket, Al Shei’s pen beeped. She pulled it out and saw Resit’s name on the display. She pulled out a square of film and held the pen against it. Resit’s message wrote itself across the blank surface.

Al Shei: Got the contract with Dr. Dane. Big shipment. Had to check with Communications Chief Lipinski to make sure we’d have room in the hold. Dane’s paying extra. Terms are in storage for your eyes and say-so.

Now the bad news. Your business partner and respected brother-in-law Marcus Tully may have been at it again. Dane wanted to know if this was the Pasadena that pulled the plug out of the Toric Station security code. I’m checking to see if there’re warrants out. Better say a few extra
du’a’s
at prayer tonight.

Al Shei felt her teeth begin to grind together slowly. She glanced across at Schyler. He must have seen the thunder in her eyes because he shifted his weight slowly and jerked his blunt chin towards the inspector.

Al Shei erased the message and tucked pen and film back into her pocket. “Inspector, will you need my seal for anything?”

Davies blinked up at her. “Mmm? No, no, not until the results are in.”

“Good. Watch,” she said to Schyler, “call me when I’m needed back here.” Mindful of her balance, Al Shei turned around. She did not need to fall over right now. What she needed was to find out was if Tully had left the station yet.

Once she was back in the stairwell, she wrote her request for a trace to Tully on a green wall tile and waited impatiently while the station’s AI tracked him down. He was in the Desdemona Hotel module on the outer ring, getting himself a drink in the Othello coffee shop.

Al Shei declined to transmit a message to say she was coming. This time, she took the elevators and moving walkways three modules down and ten sideways until she reached the hotel.

Once coffee houses had been introduced, they had never left human history. When humanity took itself out to the stars they brought their problems, their religions, their arts, and their cafes. Every station that had the room kept a coffee house for its patrons.

The Othello was on the edge of a spacious, plant-filled lobby. The stairwell had been gilded and four different fountains splashed around it. As she made path towards the cafe, ducking and weaving between the other patrons, Al Shei decided that if this module went into unscheduled free-fall, she’d rather be elsewhere.

Tully sat at a wide, round table. He leaned back in his chair with his legs kicked straight out in front of him. In between sips from a bulb of rich, black brew that could have been coffee, sarsaparilla, or Guinness stout, he whistled cheerfully between his teeth.

Al Shei unclenched her fists and waded between tables and server carts to where he sat.

“Tully.” She sat down across from him. Startled, he drew his legs in and straightened his back. Someone in his ancestry had supplied his parents with the genes to allow shockingly blue eyes to shine out of his medium-brown face. “Tully, what have you been doing?”

He set his bulb gently down on the table. “Nothing you need to be worried about, Katmer.”

An alarm bell sounded far in the back of Al Shei’s mind. If Tully had been engaged in his usual petty hacking and cracking, he would have said so. “One day you’re going to remember that I don’t believe you when you say that.” Al Shei leaned forward. “I’ve got a client saying the
Pasadena
pulled a security plug out of Toric’s Stations secured codes.”

Tully glanced quickly around the cafe. “You really want an answer in public?”

Al Shei’s fingertips scraped against the table top. “Marcus Tully, you can run your little civil disobedience racket however you see fit, but if you call attention to the ship I have to fly, I am going to have you in the tightest sling the communications collective can sew together for you!”

Tully sighed toward his bulb. “The guy got hold of a rumor.” He glanced up at Al Shei, as if to see how she was taking the comment. Al Shei didn’t even blink, and Tully looked down again. “Resit will assure him that your crew and my crew have nothing in common. You’ll get the job and all your profits, and there won’t be a problem. Just like there’s no problem for me when you skirt the regs a little too close.”

Al Shei was glad he couldn’t see the hard line of her mouth. “Tully, what do you think you’re doing?”

He shrugged again. “Keeping the corporations on their grubby little toes, oh-my-sister-in-law. Same as you.”

“I do not break anybody’s law.” Her voice was low and furious.

“I’m not asking you to protect me.” He pulled another long draft out of the bulb. “If I’m careless enough to get caught then I deserve it, and you’ve got the Pasadena and all the remaining payments on it by default.”

His face was blank as a ship’s hull, reflecting her own anger right back at her, but giving away nothing of its own. He knew he could keep pushing her. He knew she would do almost anything before she had to break her sister’s heart and tell her what, exactly, Marcus Tully had turned into. That fact had nagged badly at Al Shei for years.

“Tully,” she said softly. “You don’t get it. As long as you continue to play the lone rebel, the ship is mine, because you have already crossed the line. I can take it away any time I want. Your petty temper tantrums have already taken your freedom. I’m trying to give it back to you. Your freedom, and my sister’s.” She got up and walked away without looking back.

Something hard collided with her back, sending her stumbling against an empty table. She caught herself with both hands, gasping at the sudden pain.

“Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.”

Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut-skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven, can-gerbil.

She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom knew how to reply to a declaration of faith as a response to an insult. During the Slow Burn, when the fires were cooling and the survivors were starting their own wars, thousands of Muslims turned from their religion to save their lives. Al Shei’s family had remained unmoved. Drawing on those generations of pride gave her the strength she needed to stand up to the bigotry that still dogged Islam.

The gerbil sneered, and for a minute she thought he was going to spit, but he just turned and shouldered his way out through the crowd.

Burn-brain
, thought Al Shei after him. Some people had never let up. A Muslim named Faraq Hakiem started the Fast Burn. Never mind that he was Khurdish and she was an Arab from Dubai and that three hundred years had passed since the last ashes had cooled; she wore the veil, and that was enough for those who thought there was still something to be settled. Al Shei suddenly felt very much in need of a shower.

A flash of pink drifted past the corner of her eye and Al Shei looked involuntarily towards it. A blob of yellow floated down and was nabbed out of the air by a quick brown hand and replaced with a scrap of emerald green. The green was nabbed and replaced by the pink. The scene cleared up and Al Shei realized she was looking at Dobbs juggling silky scarves; snatching them out of the air as they fell and replacing them into the cascade so they could fall again. The Fool had a ridiculously intense expression on her face; grab, drop, drop, grab. She saw Al Shei staring and blushed a deep umber.

“Sorry, Boss,” she said with a twisted grin. “Dropped my napkin, and I can’t… ” drop, grab, drop. “ps. Darn it… ”

Al Shei felt a chuckle well up out of her throat and she let it go. Dobbs grinned back, snatched all her scarves out of the air and gave her little flourishing bow from her seat.

“Your contract says you don’t come on duty until tomorrow.” Al Shei watched, bemused, as Dobbs stuffed the colored scarves into her fist.

“At times discretion should be thrown aside and with the foolish, we should play fools.” Dobbs opened her fist, and, as Al Shei expected, the scarves were completely gone.

It was ridiculous and showy and simplistic, but Al Shei found herself smiling anyway. The filthy feeling lifted itself off her skin.

“See you tomorrow, Boss.” Dobbs looked down at her meal total printed out on the table top. Her eyes bulged in their sockets. She let her head fall back until she was staring at the ceiling, opened her mouth and broke into song. “Let’s vary piracy…
 
with a little burglary!”

Al Shei froze. The tune Dobbs sang was the same one Tully had been whistling. “What is that?”

Dobbs smile was a little puzzled. “Don’t share your partner’s taste in music, Boss? That’s from the Pirates of Penzance, a comic show from before the Fast Burn… ”

Al Shei stared across the cafe at Tully, who in turn was staring at his drink. She briefly considered going back there and demanding once again to be told what was going on.

Which will get me exactly nowhere.
Aware that her newest employee was staring at her, but not caring, Al Shei strode back across the lobby. Her stomach had tightened itself into a knot when she heard Dobbs sing out the words to Tully’s tune, and every second it stayed tight she became more convinced that she was right. This time Marcus Tully was doing more than worming corporate secrets out of secured networks and shunting them to public arenas. It would be just like him to find a way to brag about it in public.

Back in the Henry V business module, Al Shei passed right by the bank outlet and went straight into the communications room. Unlike the bank with its open desks, this room was a honeycomb of enclosed booths for private conversations. Al Shei found an empty booth and stepped inside. There was barely enough room for her to stand beside the chair as she jacked her pen into the socket beside the doorway. The booth’s system acknowledged her as a registered station customer with a positive balance on her accounts and shut the door.

She could have just sent a packet, but she wanted to say her suspicions out loud and hear a response to them from the person she trusted above all others. She also could have done this from the
Pasadena
and saved herself the cost of the booth rental, but Davis was probably still not done with his inspection. The last thing she wanted was the Lennox inspector overhearing what she had to say now.

Al Shei lowered herself into the stiff chair and faced the view screen that filled the wall in front of her. She slid the desktop into her lap and checked the credit in her communications account. She stared at it a moment, running through sample conversations in her head before deciding there was enough. With a series of careful commands, she opened a fast-time channel to Earth, Dubai City, Bala House, for Asil Tamruc.