The Baba Yaga (13 page)

Telepathic scans of all senior staff, to check for infection by Weird mind-parasites, had been carried out within days of Grant’s ascendance. Kinsella still shuddered at the memory: sitting in a small, chilly white room while a hatchet-faced official telepath went through the contents of his mind and memory in orderly fashion. It was not that the experience had been brutal, but it had been brisk, bloodless, and horribly efficient. It had lacked everything that had made one loyal to Gusev: courtesy, subtlety, humanity. Afterwards, Kinsella had retreated to a cubicle in the toilets and wept silently for some time. It had been a few days before the fragments of memory dislodged and brought to the surface by the experience had been coaxed back to sleep.

There was another effect of Grant’s sovereignty that Kinsella was now struggling with. The Bureau was now a place in which no meeting between colleagues, however casual, went unmissed. Finding a quiet corner in which speak to Larsen was proving a near-impossibility. Using any technological means to contact her was obviously out of the question: all communications were being openly monitored by Grant’s new Information Transparency Task Force, and anything untoward suggested possible infection and invited yet another and deeper scan. As known associates of Walker—and protégés of Andrei Gusev—Kinsella did not doubt that Grant had her eye on both him and Larsen. There was no shortage of people lining up to curry favour with the power behind Latimer, and junior staff at the Bureau were learning quickly that offering to monitor the activities of a more senior colleague was an easy way up the ladder. Chance encounters walking along the waterways or buying coffee, even happening to find themselves in the same dropchute, were going to be noticed and recorded.

While Kinsella did not fool himself that even a doctor’s surgery had the privilege of privacy, it was the best he could think of. A couple of faux migraines set the groundwork; after that an appointment to speak to one of the Bureau’s approved doctors was not only reasonable, but in fact required by his contract. Sitting down in Larsen’s office, he let her test his eyes and blood pressure, and then he lifted out the small black and silver device that had come in so handy so often during the course of his career, and placed it on the table between them.

“We have about two minutes,” he said.

Larsen stared at him in horror. “Are you
insane?
” she hissed.

“This works with every bugging device I know—and trust me, I know more than a few.”

“And what if they have ones you don’t know about?”

“Then we’re in trouble.” He tapped his watch. “One-and-a-half minutes. Where’s Delia, Kay?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you know how they found out about the baby?”

She hesitated. “I’d assumed it was you.”

So she had known. That made three of them, and he hadn’t told anyone, and Delia, he was sure, hadn’t told anyone else... He let the imputation of guilt pass because he knew now what he needed to know: that Kay Larsen was probably not to be trusted. She meanwhile was looking down at his blocking device as if deciding whether or not to trust it, and therefore, him. “Have you heard from Andrei?” she said.

As if he would tell her anything. “Not a dicky bird,” he said cheerfully.

“I assume he has something up his sleeve.”

Fishing, he thought. She was fishing. Well, she wasn’t going to hook a damn thing. “I doubt it. The last time I saw Andrei Gusev he was emptying his desk and he looked about fifteen years older.”

For some reason, that seemed to terrify her. But why would she care, if she’d informed on Delia? He didn’t believe that Larsen was one of Grant’s people, but he did believe that she had seen which way the tide was turning, and that she had chosen to protect herself. Still, he was...
surprised
. He had liked Kay Larsen; had thought—briefly, a long time ago—that he might even have loved her. They had been very close. And then she had pulled away. He had put it down to experience, but he had always remained fond of her, and he wasn’t used to thinking of himself as a bad judge of character.

“Andrei must have
something
in mind,” she said. “He wouldn’t give up...”

“Well, he has,” Kinsella said, bitterly, and clearly startling Larsen with the venom of his response. “And if even the savviest, the smartest, and the most enduring of us aren’t clever enough to beat this lot, where does that leave the rest of us, Kay? Have some of us been making some tough choices?”

She frowned at him. “What are you saying...?” she started, but he pointed to the device on her table, and lifted his finger to his lips.

“Time’s up,” he murmured, and slipped the little device into his pocket. “So what do you prescribe, Doctor?”

She studied him for a moment. Then she reached for pen and paper and wrote out a prescription. “We’ll try you on these first. One at the onset of symptoms. Come back if they continue.”

She shoved the slip of paper towards him. He turned it over to look on the back. She had written:
You need something for your head.

S
HULOMA
S
TATION WAS
pretty much what Walker had been expecting from the Reach: colourful, chaotic, and unresponsive to any official-looking card that she might have chosen to flash about. Perhaps it was to the good that her privileges had been revoked. It would have been frustrating to have her authority ignored. Here on Shuloma Station she had no more sway than anyone else—and no less.

They passed through a cursory customs check, and she found a booth where she was able to change some of her Expansion units into local scrip. She handed a bundle of these over to Yershov, and left the pilot safely ensconced in a bar on a thoroughfare along from the docking bays, almost happy with his lot. She didn’t think he would leave: the cash in hand had mollified him, and the threat of finding himself stuck in space with no pain relief would hold him a while yet. If anything, it was tempting to find a new ship and pilot here on Shuloma—but Yershov clearly knew how to fly under the radar, and that might well come in useful on this quest.

“Better the devil you know,” she muttered to herself.

Failt, skipping alongside her with his odd gait, looked up. “What’s that?”

“Nothing. Thinking through my options.”

“We ditching that slavey pilot here?”

Walker smiled. “Not yet.”

“He wanted to space me, Missus Dee.”

“Well, let’s keep our eyes open in case we see something else we like, hey?”

Soon, however, they had left the docking zone, and were heading by dropchute and moving walkway into the heart of the bustling space station. When they had come out of phase into local space to make their approach to Shuloma, she had taken the opportunity to make an appointment with Fredricks’ friend DeSoto. On a hunch, she had not mentioned the connection with Fredricks, merely presented herself as a trader looking to open offices here, where the Expansion met the Reach.

They navigated the station with ease, passing big open markets where anything, it seemed, could be bought or sold. Bright clothes for alien bodies; sweet and sour scents of food for alien mouths. Brash music that must signify beauty to someone here... Failt was in seventh heaven. He must never have seen anything like this in his whole short life, only the grim caverns and grimy hangars in which he had laboured. Did he even remember open skies, Walker wondered? Had he ever felt rain on his face, or sunshine? Perhaps that was something they should remedy, when this was all over...

When this was over. As if she had any idea how this was going to end. As if she had any clue what was going to happen. Apart, of course, from her body’s agenda, progressing towards its inevitable endpoint, completely beyond her control...

They found the thoroughfare on which DeSoto’s offices were located. Walker, sticking her hand into her pocket, gave Failt a little pile of notes and told him to explore the nearby market. “Don’t go far,” she said. “Keep within sight of this place.”

He nodded, and then skipped off immediately to a little booth selling something bright and sticky. Walker smiled at the sight of him. Did children of all species always manage to find their way straight to the sweetshop? She left him to enjoy himself, and turned to the business in hand.

DeSoto was a small man, round, with curling moustaches of which he was plainly proud. “I have to confess, Mr DeSoto,” she said, after the pleasantries were over and she was sitting opposite him in his office, “that I have come to you rather under false pretences.”

He eyed her cautiously. “Oh, yes?”

“I’m not in any kind of trade. I’m from the Expansion, where I specialise in... information retrieval. A mutual friend of ours passed on your name.”

“Mutual friend?”

“He goes by the name of Merriman Fredricks.”

DeSoto stood up and gestured towards the door. “Could you go now?”

“Fredricks said you’d be able to help me.”

“Anyone who is a friend of Fredricks is very far from being a friend of mine.”

“Then let me reassure you on that score. As far as I’m concerned Fredricks is a necessary evil.”

“Evil?” DeSoto snorted. “You’re right there. But necessary? We can argue that.”

“We could, but we’d be wasting our time. Let me speak plainly. I’m looking for information about someone called Heyes, who I believe came here some time ago from Shard’s World. If you can help—that’s good. If not”—Walker nodded to the door—“If not, I’ll leave and trouble you no more. You’re a busy man, I’m sure.”

“I
am
a busy man,” he said, petulantly. “And information isn’t free, you know.”

“Mr DeSoto, nobody knows that better than me. Did Fredricks not explain? I am in the information business.”

She waited for the ramifications of that to sink in, and then watched with quiet satisfaction as DeSoto’s features rearranged themselves into something considerably more respectful. He sat down again. The worlds of Satan’s Reach—and the stations which served them—were all well outside the Bureau’s jurisdiction, but the reputation of its operatives went before them. Walker was not going to mention that she had been more on the analytical side—and certainly not that she was no longer in the Bureau’s employ.

“You’re a long way from home, Ms Walker,” DeSoto said, giving her a canny look.

“Our interests”—Walker put a slight stress on that lofty
our
—“stretch well beyond the core worlds.”

“I bet they do. We hear things, you know. Troop movements. Problems on places like Rocastle. Cassandra. Braun’s World.”

She didn’t blink.

“There’s talk of infection—a plague on the loose. I’ve been seeing people wanting to get away from the Expansion—rich people, too; not your usual lot, trying to get away from debt. People much like you, in fact. Seems all isn’t how it used to be back in the Expansion.”

She remained cool.

“And now, here you are, asking for information. Well, Ms Walker—I have to ask myself, how much is it worth to you?”

The reputation of the Bureau went before it, and the tale grew in the telling. The truth was, nobody really had a clue what went on inside the walls of her old organisation, and everyone who worked there was invested in maintaining the shroud of secrecy. There were rumours, yes, and some of them were even true—disappearances, interrogations, dungeons in the deep. But a great deal of the power of the Bureau arose from its mystique, and the beliefs that people held about it.

“My employers, Mr DeSoto,” Walker said quietly, “invest a great deal of time and money in their staff. They don’t like to think of us being threatened, or blackmailed, or otherwise held over a barrel. And so they equip us properly. In my pocket,” she said, tapping her jacket, “I carry a small but very useful device. The moment I walked into this room, it began tracking your vital signs. By now it has a very good picture of what makes you tick. Where the weak spots are. And if I reach into my pocket”—she rested her hand against her chest—“then a little pulse, inaudible to either of us, will start emitting. And within the space of a minute, your brain will be turned to pulp. A minute isn’t that long, really, but I should imagine it feels like eternity.”

It was bullshit, of course. If the techies at Bureau had managed to develop anything close to a technology like that, they certainly hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. But the story was working its magic on DeSoto.

“There’s a bar on blue level, section seven,” he said, quickly. “The Crossed Keys. Heyes is usually in there. Otherwise, try the building next door. It’s the church.”

Walker frowned. “The
church?
”

DeSoto smiled at her. “What?” he said. “Didn’t you know? Heyes is a priest.”

A priest. Well, that might explain him running an underground railroad... “Thank you,” Walker said. “You’ve been most helpful.” She reached into her jacket pocket.

“Hey!” said DeSoto. “What the fuck are you doing? I’ve told you what you want to know!”

“And I’m rewarding you,” said Walker. She drew out the bundle of notes. “Five hundred sufficient?”

DeSoto fell back into his chair, muttering something that might have been
bloody cold-hearted bitch
. She didn’t mind. She
was
a bloody cold-hearted bitch. She counted out the slips of paper onto his desk with some ceremony, and then left his office and went back into the concourse. DeSoto escorted her out—presumably to make sure she really left—and slammed the door behind her. Failt, seeing her, hopped over. “Hey, Missus Dee!” he cried, shoving a stick of shocking pink gunge into her face. “You gotta try this!”

Cautiously, she touched her tongue against the bright abomination—and then spat out, to Failt’s roaring amusement. The damn thing tasted of fish.

E
VENTUALLY, THEY HAD
to leave their tiny room to in search of food. Jenny was ravenous. But where, Maria wondered, wandering through the station in a daze, did you find food in a place like this? It was not like there were the clean but sumptuous palaces of conspicuous consumption that you found on the inner worlds, or even the brisk but well-stocked shops of the Fleet bases where Maria had spent her married life and done her shopping. Yes, there was so much on sale—but she had no idea what was
food,
much less what was safe.