Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (38 page)

"And you, Hobart. I look forward to what is to come with great anticipation."

"Make sure they deal all your cards from the top, Gute," Alacrity said. "See you around, one of these days." He cycled the lock.

"I will, Alacrity. Thanks for everything." As the hatch closed, Gute, his Spican atlas under his left arm and jot unit in that hand, waved with his right.

Inboard
Harpy,
Heart took the pilot's poz again. She deactivated all systems except stealth gear, cut loose from the
Mountebank
and drifted toward Blackguard.

"Are you sure they won't pick us up down there?" Sintilla asked anxiously from her jumpseat.

"Sile's got stuff I've never seen before," Alacrity said. "I don't see how anybody can pick us up except maybe on visual."

"In
Mountebank,
I was monitoring transmissions at the compounds before," Heart said. "They don't have time to worry about us."

"What about your father?"

"He was trying to get in touch with
Mountebank,
Hobart. But the transmissions were coming from
Lamia,
so I think he's all right."

"It sounds like it's turned into a four- or five-way whatchamacallit—a Siamese standoff," Alacrity put in.

"The way I have it scanned, they'll all slowly disengage, try to get the hell away before anything else happens."

"And that leaves Parish," Sintilla said, "where you ask after this starship of yours, Hobart? Terrific; maybe there'll even be a way to undo your conditioning. I've been worried about that since the first day I met you two duds."

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"The hell you say!" Alacrity hooted at her.

She smiled sweetly. "It must've been a fast course of treatment, hmm? You get that kind of dose and you know what happens? You can't make overt admissions, but you're likely to let it slip without thinking about it. Like you did, Alacrity."

"I never! When?"

Sintilla leaned forward, saying to Heart, "Hobart was warning him that a romantic entanglement with
you
was not part of their mission; I was standing right there, at Frostpile. And do you want to know what the soul of discretion here said? He said there just wasn't enough conditioning to keep him away from you, that's what he said."

Heart kept an eye on her instruments but blew Alacrity a kiss. "It's mutual."

"Like I always say," Alacrity claimed, "it pays to have witnesses."

CHAPTER 17—LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES

"All this swag—what was with Sile? Didn't he trust anybody?"

Sintilla was picking through the loot they'd amassed from hiding places throughout the
Harpy.
She was wearing great ropes of warm, luminous lava pearls from Amadla, all of them flawless "eight-way-rollers," studying one through a cyberscan jeweler's loupe.

"Manifestly not," Floyt replied, "and it was mutual." He had resumed the bush fatigues he'd gotten on Epiphany and now wore the Webley in a shoulder holster discovered among the plunder. His all-purpose survival tool was on his belt.

They were sitting in the deep pile of the main cabin deck carpeting, sipping cups of Irish coffee. Around them were stacks and cannisters and accordion-folded blisterpacks, heaps of bottles and vials, hermetic cartons, tubes, rolls, and bags of drugs and other recreational substances. Sile and Constance had eccentric taste in music, but Floyt had located some glass harmonica recordings, and those were playing.

Spread on the carpet were sets of encrypted memory wafers and locked data packets, keys to unspecified safe deposit boxes, articles of jewelry, bundles and purses of assorted currencies in large denominations, and sheafs of Spican banknotes. The fugitives had turned up weapons and a lot of epicurean food and drink.

They'd also found all sorts of rigged gambling equipment and fake identification.

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"I didn't get a real good look when we were at the Grapple," Alacrity said, coming back from a search of the power section. "But I think Sile had a special boatlock for the
Harpy,
away from the regular ship's boats in
Lamia.
That way he could make a fast getaway if he ever had to, with the pick of his loot."

He was wearing his faded shipsuit, blue bandanna and pathfinder boots again. He sank down into an adjust-lounger. "But at least he didn't booby-trap this tub. As far as I can tell, that is."

Heart came aft from the bridge. She looked like a jetskate racer in Alacrity's dress skinsuit of high-sheen ice blue, with silver trim. She wore her own boots; no other footgear in
Harpy
fit her right.

"My gods! More stuff?" The Nonpareil toed through containers of opium pellets and love philters, pressure cartridges of blisswhiff and packs of orgasmitropine chewing gum; disguise kits; drugged pomanders and a humidor of hand-rolled narcogel-and-megaweed cigarillos; matched anklets of large, glowing phoenix eggs set in platinum; and a pair of weighted slapgloves with retractable, envenomed claws.

"He even had one of these, Alacrity. I was telling you about it, remember?" Floyt held up an Ouroboros ring, like the one the trader at the Grapple had tried to sell him, and demonstrated how to open the hidden compartments.

"Whoo! Yeah." Alacrity took it and looked it over. "Sile probably loved it; that's how his mind worked."

He handed the ring to Heart, asking, "What's it like outside?"

She slipped the Ouroboros ring on her finger, admiring it. "The rain's letting up. It'll be dark in a few hours, though. If you're going today you'd better do it soon. Are the two bold explorers ready?"

"They
think so," Sintilla said, studying herself in a vanity imager. She'd tried on a pair of plasmanode earrings that grazed her shoulders. She'd put aside her diaphanous rompers for a red velvet dressing gown and matching houseboots from Sile's closet, all of them a bit large on her. Sile's elaborate monogram was picked out on the robe in fire-fancies trimmed with shimmerettes.

All four were feeling better after a night's rest and taking turns at a relaxing cleanup in the spaceboat's compact spa/head. "No sign of pursuit from the compounds?" Floyt asked.

The Nonpareil shook her head. "Detectors picked up three more ships going into Hawking. They're too busy running for cover to worry about us, I guess. And I didn't pick up any locals sniffing around us, or anybody from Parish. I think we got away clean."

"Perfect," said Floyt, trying the heft of a haversack improvised from a large tool bag. It would do, he supposed; they weren't carrying very much. Alacrity would use the big game bag.

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"Not
perfect
," Heart said archly. "Perfect would be if Alacrity came to his senses and admitted that Sintilla and I should come along."

"Hear, hear!" Sintilla chirped. "This splitting up of forces is a bad idea, Bright Eyes."

Alacrity shook his head, pulling on the Captain's Sidearm. "The only lead we have is the Parish Spaceport. Ho has to go because he's the Inheritor. I have to because I know spaceport towns and besides, I'm the one who's supposed to. Look how well it worked last time, you two coming in as reinforcements."

"Look how much better you'd have made out if you'd shown up on Blackguard with us in the first place, instead of in
Mountebank's
bilge," Sintilla riposted.

"
Duh
! Score one for you. But still, we can't just leave the
Harpy
sitting out here in the mud, even camouflaged. And if all four of us get in trouble in Parish there's no one to bail us out. But with this crate's weapons as emergency backup—what's that do, d'you think? Double our chances? Triple 'em?"

"All right, all right!" Heart conceded, crossing to his adjust-lounger. She lowered herself to straddle his lap, facing him, caressing his face as she had now and again through the night, giving him a beguiling look. Her waist felt so good between his hands, she smelted so wonderful and looked so devastatingly good to him—a melting fondness welled up in him, taking his breath away.

"Just don't get your idiot self hurt out there, Alacrity. Now, I'm serious here. And for Fate's sake, listen to Hobart when he's trying to talk sense to you."

"Don't get hurt. Listen to Ho. Could you write all that down?"

She poked him in the ribs. "Time to go; you don't want to hit town in the middle of the night."

The interior hatches were secured and all lights doused when Floyt and Alacrity stepped down from the lock. The sky was a sullen teal color and Blackguard's sun was hidden.

The
Harpy
was grounded in a little dell under some high, thickly leaved spumetrees. To avoid detection they were relying on the fact that the local population was small and scattered, and that the vessel wouldn't be there long.

The two friends eased through the underbrush resting against the ship. Floyt was still apprehensive about the unfamiliar local flora and fauna; suppose those corkscrew things took a notion to drop off their branches and try to bore into his skull? And what if there was something a wee bit peckish lurking in that spongy clump of whatever-it-was? But Alacrity claimed to have learned a lot about the planet's life forms from Gute. Floyt could only hope, trust, and stay ready.

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They made their way out through splintweed that was still wringing wet with rainwater. Floyt shivered a little, though he wore heavy underwear beneath his fatigues. Alacrity, wearing the thermal insert for his shipsuit, was comfortable. Neither had a jacket; there weren't any in
Harpy.
So they wore the shawls Dorraine and Redlock had given them.

They passed along between sharkthickets and up a treacherous wash of mud and shallow puddles. In the end Floyt was soggy to the knee; the pathfinders had handled the walk with ease. Floyt had begun to understand why breakabouts, who spent so much time in nice, warm, dry starships, made it a point to own gear that would keep them comfortable in inclement weather.

The road was a two-lane gluefused relic of an earlier era. It hadn't seen a real repair crew in decades; cracks and deep ruts had been filled with rocks, deadwood, hardened flickwasp comb, and other debris that had come to hand. They footed off for Parish. Floyt pulled out two bars of chocolate from Sile's snack supplies and they ate as they walked, washing it down with swigs from a water bottle. The overcast was beginning to break up.

"I guess we'd better start looking the part," Alacrity decided. He and Floyt put on the wound-scarf headdresses Sintilla and Alacrity had whipped up, the best they could do in imitating a local garment neither of them had ever seen in real life. The two men wound the dangling ends around their faces, as was the practice. Alacrity concealed his big offworlder eyes behind a reflective wraparound visor he'd found in the
Harpy;
it was cheap and nondescript, nothing that would look out of place in Parish.

The two knew, from what Floyt had managed to find in the data banks, that Parish was the center of a complicated tribal coalition. Lots of different dialects were spoken, although almost everyone spoke the
lingua franca,
which was basically trade-slang with a lot of Terranglish cognates and loanwords and a little neighborhood topspin.

Alacrity was relieved to learn that the natives were peaceable. Nevertheless, he carried the Captain's Sidearm and the bos'un's pipegun, hoping he wouldn't have to use them on anybody.

Parish had once been a city of some prestige, but Blackguard—known in the local tongue as Finders-Keepers, the other being the Betters' name for the place—was one of the many worlds that had fallen out of touch with mainstream humanity in the disruptions after the Second Breath. Large tracts of the town were in disrepair and dilapidation. The population was only two thirds what it had been in the city's heyday and the quality of life was, for most, lower than it had been for their ancestors centuries ago. The benefits of the Third Breath had for the most part passed the planet by, since the Betters sharply limited offworld trade and forbade territorial expansion.

Tribal warfare had done its damage as well, though a fretful peace had been in effect for the last file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (204 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

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generation or so. Parish was really several separate communities: Parish proper, with its tribal precincts, industrial, and commercial zones; the space-field with its boxtown; and Parish Above, a colony of guarded estates and private enclaves in the foothills beyond.

Parish carried on limited offworld commerce. Different tribes maintained separate landing facilities, the ancient, moldering spacefield having been in effect carved up like a pie. Ships came and went via rigidly defined corridors. Straying risked being classified as hostile by the compounds' Talos Worldshield and blasted out of the air. Adding in the fact that Blackguard/Finders-Keepers had nothing truly outstanding or unique to lure profit takers, offworld contact with the place was kept to a minimum, usually no more than a ship every month or two, rotating among the tribal port facilities.

They passed the miserable hovels, huts, and lean-tos at the town's outskirts, then entered Parish itself.

The buildings in the best condition were usually the least ornate; decorative cornices and corbels crumbled and stone facades and gingerbread went dingy and rotted from age and city fumes. Wooden buildings had fallen prey to fire, insects, and weather. The most durable structures were the factories, warehouses, and so forth, plain slabforms, geodesics, and such.