Skeen's Search (15 page)

The Guards left after three days, dumping Momak back on Hadda Adda though he begged them to take him away. He didn't survive the night. Official records said accident; he fell into a pool in the city park and drowned before anyone found him.

Kleys came to Ross a little later and they spent the night talking.

“Two years,” Kleys said. “You can afford the time, Rosta. What'll you be then, fourteen? See how you like it. Just don't let them put the warp on your head, don't believe the line they shovel out. You owe it to your family to give it a try. Maybe serving the Imperials will suit you. Me, I don't think so, you're no Momak. Learn everything you can stuff into your head. Not just the technical side, get history and art and economics and martial arts, anything you're interested in and be interested as wide as you can. Shove it in your head, kid. They'll send you home for a visit every couple years, unless they've changed things since I went that route, I'll drop by and we'll talk again. I'm getting old, starting to move slow and think three times where I did once before. Time I had a younger head helping me think. If you want to scramble with me, I'll teach you the steps. And no, you can't come now, you're too damn ignorant.”

At the end of two years Ross was torn. He hated life at school, but he liked what he was learning. He went home for his breakvisit, talked with Kleys, had a miserable time with his family because he'd lost the art of fitting in, lost the threads of daily life that once had woven so thick and warm about him. It took him most of his vacation to learn how to play the clan game again, pretending what he couldn't feel, but when he left he was comfortable with his kin and rather smug at how easy it was to fool them.

The smugness was quickly stripped away when he got back to school. He was starting to stand out from the crowd. The breadth of his studies (far beyond the usual specialization) began to pay off in ways that were not obvious, not startling breakthroughs into new insights, mainly an ease in understanding concepts and a capacity for thinking beyond his current knowledge. All the separate disciplines began locking together in ways he found little short of magical. His teachers talked about him, put pressure on him, showed increasing interest in him. His few friends melted away, most of the students turned hostile. The thing that brought envy, anger and contempt together like a boil was the clearly evident fact that he didn't care about all this preference; the good opinion others coveted came to him and he wasn't interested. He was regularly attacked by one group or another during the first year of this two-year session; one of those beatings nearly killed him. Nothing was done about it; he didn't expect anything would be. Instead, he nosed out a handfight instructor who was willing to work with an enthusiastic and talented student; he was naturally coordinated, came from a 1.2 g world, had unusually quick reaction times and applied the energy and concentration he used with his studies to learning everything the instructor could teach him. He was attacked once during his fourth year. He didn't quite kill them, but broke several important bones and tore loose a number of ligaments. No body shots, no ruptured testicles or spleens, nothing lethal; instead, a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a cracked jaw, broken toes and fingers, all quickly repairable and all painful enough to discourage any further attempts to harass him.

At the end of the fourth year he was recommended for advanced political training and offered eventual work in the Heart of the Empire. He accepted with suitable humility and went home for his scheduled breakvisit.

He told his mother about the offers. He was sixteen now and somehow grown much closer to her after the long absence, just as he'd grown impossibly far from his father. They couldn't even talk to each other any more, his father talked and Ross listened and inside he said no no no.

Two weeks before he was due to leave for school he took a jitt to the coast, rented a day sailer and didn't come back. Four days later the boat drifted onshore, belly up. They didn't bother looking for the body. The Imperials didn't try because of the heptopods infesting that part of the ocean, huge, carnivorous, faster than most jetboats. The Fahan didn't try because most of them knew quite well (though it was never spoken of) that Rosta had gone off with Uncle Kleys.

For the next three years Kleys and Ross did this and that (giving the Imperials a bad case of heartburn), visited Hadda Adda when they wanted a taste of home, generated a whole new set of fabulous stories for the clan to whisper when they were elsewhere. Ross was well on his way to joining the list of disreputable heroes the Fahan threw up every generation or so.

But Kleys for sure was getting old; he made a mistake. Ross pulled him out with luck, energy and quick thinking, but the Imperials got close and stayed there; flutter how they would, Ross and Kleys couldn't break loose; then the Imperials started driving them toward what had to be a trap. In his struggle to shake them, Ross too made a mistake and Kleys got spattered across a cloud of comets along with half the force herding them; in the confusion that followed, Ross managed to take over a cruiser which had some minor damage that knocked out most of the crew; with the help of ship remotes he dumped the crew into lifeboats, shot them out and took off. On the way out of the Cluster he was chased into the Veil and went to ground on a world called Rallen where he traded Imperial hardware for help altering his ship and acquired by stealth and accident his first Rooner's load of artifacts.

INTERVAL OVER. PICTURE THE LANDER NUZZLING UP TO PICAREFY, BEING SUCKED INTO THE LANDER LOCK. ROSTICO BURN LEG-IRONED TO A SMALL REMOTE THAT ANNOUNCED HIS PRESENCE TO THE SHIP'S BRAIN. TIMKA WANDERING OFF TO SOAK A WHILE IN A HOT BATH WHILE SHE THINKS OVER EVENTS ON PILLORY AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO HER AND ABOUT HER. SKEEN THINKING ABOUT THE AUTODOC AND HER BRUISES, HEADING FOR THE BRIDGE TO GET PICAREFY STARTED FOR RESURRECTION.

Skeen strolled onto Picarefy's bridge. “Where's Tibo?”

“Sleeping. Want me to wake him?” Like the Lander, Picarefy's voice was androgynous, deep, musical, in the chasm between tenor and alto. A remarkably flexible voice, filled with nuance, with character. She tended to be acerbic, independent and ofttimes irritating; she was as close to being an independent entity as any ship in existence and Skeen cultivated that, no matter how annoying it was to have to talk Picarefy into doing things instead of just pushing a button and seeing it done. But Skeen didn't need slaves and the benefits of Picarefy's independence were enormous. She could bounce plans off Picarefy's brain and get ruthlessly honest evaluations, then sometimes reluctant, sometimes exuberantly enthusiastic cooperation. Skeen added to Picarefy's capacity every time she had extra credit and by this time Picarefy had grown like a fungus into every crack and cranny of the ship. Skeen bought her books and tapes and thousands of the smallest, most efficient spy eyes available so she could watch life even if she couldn't get out and experience it; she even established a line of credit for Picarefy on every Pit Stop she patronized so Picarefy could order whatever she thought she needed (within the limits of fiscal prudence which anyway Picarefy was far better at keeping track of than Skeen). If she went overboard now and then on something esoteric and enormously expensive, well, Skeen always paid off. A lot of dealers had become familiar with Picarefy's taste and saved things for her, sending out news of finds through the low ways, the unofficial but efficient grapevine that connected the Pits.

Skeen lifted her shoulders, strained a little, groaned. “Let me have a bath first, I'm not fit company for a mudhog. You'd better get started. We ran into Cidder down there, take it sneaky, you know the scam. If Tib doesn't rouse when he feels us moving, stir him up and send him to the shower-room. Where's Petro?”

“Workshop,” Picarefy said absently, busy with the complex problems of creeping out of the Belt. “Ah! This rock clutter makes me nervous. You're back faster than anyone expected.”

“It didn't seem that fast. Tell her we're back. If she wants to talk to Ross, keep an eye on them but let her see him. Um, he might decide to be tricky; discourage him if you notice anything like that. And let me know about it.”

“You'd better do something about that Cidder; how'd he miss you this time? Never mind. You should eat, Skeen. I'll fix something for you and Tibo.” Sniffing sound, one of Picarefy's minor jokes. “After you take that bath for sure, otherwise I'll have to scrub the air with number two steel wool if anyone's going to feel like eating.”

Timka looked up as Rostico Burn came in, the remote drifting along behind him. She smiled to herself as he strolled over to her and dropped on an electric blue hassock; he was being relaxed and unimpressed by it all. She could remember her own first reaction to Picarefy; Cream's
Slider
hadn't at all prepared her. “Picarefy's been working on the lounge again,” she said. “It wasn't like this when we left to pick you up.” There was a lot of glass and pewter work with accents of brilliant blues and greens. A cool room, the sort of elegance that makes you tuck your elbows in and hold your knees close together. Timka had shucked her shabby clothes and was wearing a sleek coat of silver-gray fur. She was curled up on a long low divan upholstered in a pale blue panne velvet.

Ross brushed at his trousers. “I've heard a lot about Picarefy.”

Timka sat up, rubbed bare feet into the shaggy gray carpet. “Wait till you learn to know her.”

Skeen came in, looked around, snorted and dropped on the divan beside Timka. “Pic, what the hell?”

“I thought I'd try house beautiful for a while.” There was laughter in the voice that came, it seemed, from the air in the center of the room. “Don't worry, Skeen, I won't expect you to conform.”

“Conform?” Tibo strolled in, glanced at Ross, settled on the rug by Skeen's feet; he smiled up at her, dropped his hand on her booted instep.

Chuckle from Picarefy. “Wear beautiful robes, burnish her body, maybe even comb her hair.”

Snort of indignation from Skeen, soft laughter from Tibo. His hand moved up her leg to her knee. “Pic, oh, Pic, don't waste your imagination on her, play with me instead.”

Ross kept his mouth shut during that exchange, but his yellow eyes (so like Skeen's) flicked from face to face: detached mysterious Timka, annoyed and amused Skeen, relaxed enigmatic Tibo. He lingered on Tibo, curious about the man he'd heard so much about, wondering how these two strong personalities managed to exist in any kind of harmony, wondering too how he could insinuate himself into the project they were working now; he needed more than freedom, he needed funding.

He was sitting with his shoulder to the door so he didn't see Lipitero until she was well into the room. He stiffened, fear rapidly replaced by wariness. Though he maintained an outward calm, he changed his position so he was ready to fight or run, whichever seemed indicated.

Lipitero moved past him and settled into a deep soft chair, its pale green velvet waking an answering green light in her crystal eyes. She smoothed her flightskins and smiled at him. “Relax, Rostico Burn, I'm not Rallen.” She turned to Skeen. “The way he's acting suggests we'd better not take him with us.” Sliding her hands along the chairarms, she considered Ross. “Annoy them that much, did you? I wonder how. We'll have to talk. I need to know every nuance of your relationship with them.”

The stiffness smoothed out of him. He gave her a broad grin. There was a tinge of artificiality to him, but a naive artificiality that offended no one, that invited others to share the game with him; he seemed to be saying, you know it's a game and I know it's a game, have fun with it. “What do I get for scraping my brain for you?”

Skeen sniffed. “I could always dump you into a lifeshell and let you find your own way to a Pit.”

“I thought I already paid my passage.”

“The price has just gone up.”

“Not fair. Not kind.”

“Isn't, is it.”

“Hmm. Illusions die one by one.” He smiled with practiced charm, rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers. “Duty is fine, but enthusiasm is gold and glory.”

Timka stirred, raised herself on her elbow, examined the two faces, so alike and so unlike. Skeen was looking vague, sleepy. Timka waited to see how she'd jump; Ross' position was a lot shakier than he knew. Skeen was generous and unconcerned about power plays—as long as you didn't push her. Now that they knew where to find Rallen (and didn't really need his help talking with the Rallen Ykx), Skeen could easily dump him at the nearest freeport and let him make his way how he could. As the silence stretched on, she watched him become aware of this. Here in Picarefy, Skeen's will was law and there was no appeal. His eyes slid from Tibo who was studying the far wall, to Petro who wasn't interested, to Timka who gave him a feral grin like the cat she sometimes was.

Abruptly, Skeen grinned at him. “Rev up your enthusiasm,” she said, “with thoughts of banking my goodwill.” The smile vanished. “Or the opposite.” She didn't wait for an answer, but got briskly to her feet. “Pic, how we doing?”

“Coming up on Teegah's limit. No pursuit.” A pause. “There's some fuss back around Pillory, no shape to it, no sense of direction.”

“Good. I think we thank you for that, Petro. Um, don't take chances, Pic. What do you think about going a couple AU farther before we hit the insplit?”

“Hard on fuel.” A pause. “We'd have the comet cloud to mask us. I think it's worth the cost.”

“Do it.” Skeen ran a hand through her hair, began pacing about the room, stepping over Lipitero's feet, circling her chair, touching the icicle moire on the walls, kicking at the gray shag of the rug, wandering about looking at the appointments of the room. “This place is dead, Pic, are you going to get in some plants or something?”