Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (23 page)

It was easy to open his eyes; Alacrity found himself looking up at the underside of a ship's bunk. He could also see part of a grimy compartment. He didn't look around because nobody had told him to.

His body informed him that he was strapped into a lower bunk that was, like most, too short for him. A deeper sense let him know he was inside a starship in Hawking. Blank of thought, he registered that and file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (118 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:29

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nothing more.

Fixed above him was a compact piece of audiovisual gear. No mystery there, although he was too vacant to think about it much; he'd seen equipment like it before in teaching facilities and in the Earthservice's conditioning bailiwick.

Seated beside the bunk, just at the edge of Alacrity's vision, holding a pneumodermic injector, was Skate.

An arm was hanging down from the upper bunk, recognizable as Floyt's by the cheap proteus it wore.

The Earther could've been asleep, unconscious, or dead. Alacrity absorbed that in a detached way; emotions seemed far off, and he wasn't even worried about his
own
well-being.

Skate took Alacrity's chin in his hand and shook it a little. "Pay attention now, eh, high-mover? We have to have a talk."

Skate's face was sweating and his breath smelled of Perkup; a random thought crossed Alacrity's mind, that the man had been at his backpack of travel accessories.

Skate drew his floatcushion closer, leaving Alacrity's face pointed toward the AV unit overhead.

Without resentment or much curiosity, Alacrity obediently paid attention, as ordered, watching the thing.

Skate activated it, and it began projecting hypnotic light patterns, reinforcing them with subsonics. The unit scanned Alacrity, carefully adapting itself. The subject slipped quickly and readily into a deeper trance state.

"Now, we start with your name," Skate said. "Tell me your real name."

"Alacrity Fitzhugh."

"Eh? Is that an alias?"

"Yes."

"
I want you to tell me your real name, the one you were born under
!"

Alacrity began to answer, but then something clicked in, deep inside. His mouth stayed shut; he just looked at the machine, at peace, with the command short-circuited.

"Tell me your real name," Skate ordered again patiently. He looked as if he was both angry at Alacrity and nervous about something. He glanced over his shoulder at the dogged and locked hatch. Alacrity watched the flashing gyrations of the lights, felt and listened to the pulsations.

"Your
real
name, son," Skate resumed. In spite of his harried expression, his voice was soothing and friendly, a sign that he'd had a lot of experience at that sort of thing.

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That same short-circuit removed the question from Alacrity's train of thought again, before he could even bring the answer to mind. Skate saw, and didn't waste more time on that line of attack.

"Why can't you answer? Tell me what's stopping you."

But each such question brought Skate up against an impenetrable wall that protected Alacrity's past. He gnawed his lower lip, fuming, not realizing that it had nothing to do with why he was there or how he'd run afoul of Sile, or why Floyt was important to them.

But Skate knew when to abandon a fruitless line of inquiry. "Now I want you to tell me why you want to go to Blackguard, Alacrity. What's there?"

Again Skate ran into a blockage; this time it was the one put there by the Earthservice behavioral engineering team, part of the programming that bound him to Floyt and the
Astraea Imprimatur
mission.

It wasn't nearly as deeply planted or all-embracing as what Skate had touched in probing Alacrity's deeper secrets.

Skate saw that Alacrity was near answering, the programming weakened by the traumas and stresses of the journey, and the effects of the drug, and the AV barrage.

The identity merchant bit his lip once more in indecision, then put the pneumodermic to Alacrity's shoulder again and gave him a megahit.

Alacrity could barely focus on the AV. His mouth was very dry and his skin acutely sensitive. Strangely, sound was a distant and not very important sensory input.

"Do you feel the blockage that's there, Alacrity? The one around you and your friend and what you're involved in?"

Alacrity did indeed, and nodded; it was the one Earthservice had implanted. He knew every twinge and twist, every train of thought that would set it off. He'd mapped his lost freedom against it, plotted and triangulated it laboriously over the past weeks, finding its shoreline in terms of spasms and sharp jolts to his free will.

"That's good, Alacrity," Skate said into his ear. "Hold the shape of it in your mind, because we're going to take it away. Now, I want you to think of the pain you feel when you try to go against this prohibition.

Think of the very instant it hits you, but
don't feel it
!

"I'm not going to ask you any questions; I just want you to get that prohibition clearly in your mind. I'm going to take it away … "

It went on like that for a while. Skate was good; under his guidance, the whole structure of the file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (120 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:29

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conditioning simply began to fade. A part of Alacrity watched it approach the vanishing point.

Then, with a calculated prod, Skate diminished it to a mist. Alacrity, in stuporous amaze, felt as if he were looking over someone else's shoulder, watching what was going on within him.

Skate repeated the sequence. The conditioning dwindled to nothingness, gone altogether from Alacrity's cerebrum and gut. Along with it, it took the artificial underpinnings of his partnership with Floyt.

"Now, son," Skate crooned, hunkering forward, eagerness edging into his voice. "Back to the beginning again. We'll begin with Sile's patron, Captain Dincrist. Do you know Captain Dincrist?"

"Sure." Alacrity felt exactly as if someone else were speaking for him.

"Good! Tell me, why did Dincrist order Sile to—"

Skate stopped as the hatch controls were tried. When the person seeking entrance found out it had been secured, there was a hammering and railing from the other side.

Skate suddenly looked terrified. "Go to sleep!" he rasped at Alacrity. "Close your eyes!"

Alacrity did. But the drug had him parsecs from true sleep, so he simply lay there, an unfocused void.

He heard the AV unit being whisked away. He heard Skate cross to the hatch and open it, heard the fury in Constance's voice as she charged into the compartment.

"What're you doing? Why was this hatch locked?
Answer me, you slimy toad
!"

"Just keeping an eye on these two," Skate explained smoothly. "I was just making sure they—"

"You can't open your mouth without lying, can you?"

Alacrity heard her cross to the bunk and felt her lift his arm to examine his shoulder. Again his eye was peeled back; he had a bleary glimpse of light, nothing he could fix on.

Constance let his eyelid fall. "Open your eyes. Open them!"

Alacrity complied. Constance was standing there, having shed the burnoose disguise, wearing a chiaroscuro fleshpeel. She turned to Skate without warning and fetched him an open-handed clout across the ear that sent him toppling against the bulkhead; she'd changed from a teasing sextoy into a homicidal maniac with mad eyes.

"You just get them ready for cachesleep. And if you try anything else, I'll kill you," she whispered.

Skate, rubbing his face and glowering at her, whined, "I was only trying to get some straight answers out of them—for Sile."

"
I'll kill you
" she repeated tightly. "And you've never done anything for anyone except yourself in your file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (121 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:29

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life."

She looked to Alacrity. "In fact, we might as well put them both into cachesleep right now."

"What? Why?"

"So that you won't be able to get to them again. We'll have the extra space that much sooner and I'll have that much less to worry about. And you'd better not so much as cross my path these next few weeks.

Poustis
! I can't believe Sile stuck me with this job! With you!"

"It won't be so bad, Constance.
Mountebank's
got plenty of entertainment, 'cause she's a little slow-going," Skate tried to placate. "And in any case, we'll get to Blackguard before Sile and Dincrist."

"It's not the trip; it's being cooped up with you." Reaching out of Alacrity's field of vision, she produced a pneumodermic kit. "Go aft and get the cachesleep wrappers ready," she ordered. "I'll prep them myself."

Another pneumodermic touched Alacrity's skin.

CHAPTER 10—FLEEING FROM THE WOLF TO THE TIGER

The ironic thing about the slave collars was, you could take them off if they got uncomfortable.

They were several centimeters wide, like circlets of hammered strap-iron with rings and hinges, like something out of a history text. And they weren't welded, lasered, or riveted onto the necks of the recipient; they were
issued.
They were mainly for show and to give the Betters of Blackguard a thrill.

Blackguard had much more businesslike and effective means of keeping its chattels in line, and they'd been put into place during the long weeks of cachesleep in
Mountebank.
Alacrity and Floyt noted the collars from a distance, registering them along with other evidence of disaster.

Nauseous, stripped of every possession, desperately depleted from cachesleep and its attendant drugs and resuscitating equipment, Floyt and Alacrity blinked and winced stupidly under the mauve sky and amber sun of Blackguard. They'd come to, lying on a cargo skid not far from Skate's vessel, with mouths dry and caked, eyes filmed, feeling as though they'd been racked and knouted.

They had lost a great deal of weight—making Alacrity, in particular, look emaciated—an awful lot of which had been moisture.

Moreover, Skate hadn't been too particular about keeping them clean. They stank, caked with filth, and both had bedsores. Floyt realized dully that the dental space retainer was missing from his mouth, and his new teeth had grown markedly.

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"Are you all right, Alacrity?" Floyt somehow compelled his leathery mouth to say.

"
Ghurk
."

People and machines were moving around the spaceport structures in the distance. The landing surface was a small one, a few dozen hectares or so. The nearest ship on the field, aside from the
Mountebank,
looked to Floyt like a chambered nautilus made of glazed ceramic. It was unloading itself with articulated metal tentacles, another oddity of the Third Breath. From the ship, four people had just emerged, two men and two women. They were pointedly nondescript, dressed in the drab denim worksuits and blue skullcaps of achievement coordinators from Egalitaria.

Around the field's perimeter were a variety of structures—hangars, offices, servicing facilities, and so forth, Floyt supposed—done up in elaborate rococo. Standard employee attire appeared to be maroon.

Beyond the field was a ring of tall pylons maintaining the ghostly backdrop of an energy curtain.

The sky was busy with local traffic, as Frostpile's had been. But where there'd been variety in Frostpile's assorted vehicles, here there was something more like disparity: a glassy swanboat and a primered replica P-38 fighter; a flying chariot drawn through the air by stallions that Floyt took to be robotic; and a modern fast-attack patrol flier weighted with the latest in weaponry and detectors.

As Merrywell and others had mentioned, Blackguard was a place of masks, at least for the ruling class.

A woman floated by overhead on a graceful vehicle that was a cross between a speakers' rostrum and an abstract sculpture, her face concealed behind a winged veil of gauze and sequins. The long, filmy train of her gown rippled and swayed ten meters behind her. Nearby, the occupant of a hovercoracle wore such a massive headdress that it was impossible to gauge sex, size, or anything else.

The two revivees labored to sit upright on the skid, trying to focus, looking around. Ground personnel and other members of the lower orders were for the most part unmasked. They were, as far as Alacrity could see, a cross-section of human types, some identifiable, some not. Except for one or two cargo vessels, starships grounded on the field ran to pricey private executive craft and luxury yachts.

Even in the midst of his suffering, his conditioning stirred Floyt and he tried to spot the
Astraea
Imprimatur.
He could see no vessel with that marking.

Steadying his gaze and straining to focus, Alacrity studied the other captives—slaves, prisoners, whatever—moving around the spaceport. It was easy to tell who they were; they were unmasked and doing menial jobs and manual labor, some wearing those collars, none in maroon. And as Alacrity watched, one looked around, made sure nobody of any significance was watching, and opened his slave collar. He rubbed his neck and wiped the sweat away from beneath it, then clamped it shut again.

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The typical local ran to Floyt's height or less and was inclined toward obesity. They were all well tanned from exposure to Invictus, Blackguard's primary, but looked to be of fair-skin stock, with light hair often bleached to yellow-white.