The Road of Danger-ARC (30 page)

She smiled mentally. That would be true for a real Principal of Kostroma, and Mundy of Chatsworth on Cinnabar was all those things in spades.

The racket inside the warehouse was punishingly louder than it had been in the street, even with the door open. Fans thrummed in the ceiling, diesel-powered fork lifts blatted under heavy load, and paired elevators—when her eyes adapted, Adele saw a set at each corner of this wing—squealed and groaned. Presumably all the same things were happening on the upper floors, adding their counterpoints.

The light banks in the ceiling were probably adequate, but for the first moments after Adele entered, she had the impression of having fallen into a deep cavern. The massive wooden beams of the ceiling were covered with soot which absorbed any illumination that fell on them. Workmen were wraiths, dwarfed by the machinery and the piles of goods among which they moved.

Adele led the way along the aisle, between the front wall and stacks of large crates which often encroached on the passage painted in yellow on the floor. The section foreman was in a miniature office whose walls were glass from above waist height. The three loading docks were beyond him, and a passenger elevator was just in back.

That elevator, like its larger brethren at the ends of the building, was a platform riding between two pillars without a cage. Again like the freight elevators, it was one of a pair on the same cables; one rose as a counterweight when the other half dropped.

The foreman was alone in the office, glaring at a flat-plate display and growling into a handset cradled between his ear and shoulder. Adele tapped on the glass politely. The foreman angrily waved them away.

Does he think I was asking his permission?
Adele entered and sat down.

She didn’t hear the door close behind Tovera so much as she felt the level of ambient noise reduce. The office must have an active cancellation system.

“Get your bloody asses out!” the man said with a brusque wave of the hand holding a memorandum book. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready to see you!”

Adele brought out her data unit. She shrank the foreman’s display and froze the console. That shut off his phone also, since outside communications were through it.

“I am Principal Hrynko,” she said, her tone coldly polite. “I have an appointment with Master Brock.”

“What in blazes happened to my console?” the foreman said, flipping the external power switch back and forth with no result except faint mechanical clicks from the toggle. “It just cut out!”

It would be nice if I lived in a world in which people were either smarter or more polite
, Adele thought, not for the first time.
But I’ve learned to make do with what I have
.

Aloud she said, “Your equipment will not work until you have taken me to Master Brock. I suggest you do that so that you can go back to your business.”

The foreman stared at her, his lower lip trembling. He was a brawny man in his fifties. A thin scar curved across his scalp, turning the hair white along its track, and he was missing the lobe of his right ear.

“Are you a witch?” he said in hoarse surmise.

Adele blinked.
I thought Cremona was unsophisticated. Apparently it’s simply backward
.

“More like a demon if you irritate her,” said Tovera. “I suggest you do what she says and avoid that danger. Of course—”

Tovera smiled. The expression was inhuman, which was an accurate description of the pale woman herself.

“—I wouldn’t need to be irritated to open your belly and start winding your guts out on a stick. Why don’t you take us to your master and avoid that too?”

“The elevator,” said the foreman, twisting his head enough to suggest the one beside his office. He didn’t turn too far to keep his eyes on Adele, however. “Just pull the cord when you get on and pull it again when you’re at the penthouse.”

“Thank you,” said Adele. The platform would be tight enough for two, so she didn’t object to the plan. She turned on his console and got to her feet.

The noise buffeted her when she stepped out, but she had a direction now and didn’t notice distractions. The foreman was still gaping as she and Tovera walked around the office. He seemed to have forgotten the phone in his left hand.

Tovera stepped onto the platform. It was four feet square and supported by a cast iron double yoke; a chain hung from each arm to a corner. The cord that the foreman mentioned ran up through the hole in the ceiling and presumably to a switch at the roof level; it didn’t move with the platform.

Adele got on also. Tovera held her attaché case half-open with her right hand inside on the concealed sub-machine gun, so Adele tugged at the cord. For a moment nothing happened; then the elevator began to rise with a series of individual jerks as though it was being hauled up on cogs instead of a cable drum.

Tovera was trying to look in all directions, not forgetting straight up through the hole in the ceiling. Adele was determined not to let her servant’s paranoia make her equally nervous, but it was only by effort of will that she kept herself from gripping the pistol in her pocket.

Adele looked outward as the elevator rose, viewing the warehouse. The second floor looked the same to her as what she had seen at the ground level, and the third as well when the platform rose into it. The warm, nutty odor of pink rice permeated the big building, though Adele didn’t identify any storage hoppers.

Men—and perhaps a few women, as genderless as spacers in dim light and their loose outfits—worked among the vast array. They reminded her of ants, absorbed in their business, and seemed as oblivious of her scrutiny as those insects would have been.

The platform rose into the arched cover—it had no front or back, so it couldn’t be called an enclosure—on the roof. It seemed silent after the cacophony within the warehouse proper.

Adele pulled the control rope firmly. In all probability the elevator would have shut off automatically at the top, but she saw no reason to trust the quality or even the good sense of the engineer—or mechanic—who had designed the system.

Turning to Tovera as they stepped off, Adele said, “I’m sure we could have jumped clear if it hadn’t stopped.”

“Yes,” said Tovera. “But if the elevator destroyed itself, we would have been faced with starvation since we couldn’t have gotten down again. Life is filled with dangers.”

She cocked her head toward the penthouse—actually a shed of structural plastic, large enough for two rooms. “Of course, we could hold out for a little longer,” Tovera said, “by eating Brock and any office staff he has here.”

Adele smiled as she followed her servant to the door. Tovera had no more sense of humor than she had a conscience, but she had learned to imitate the sort of jokes that ordinary humans made. The problem was that a sociopath finds cannibalism just as funny as she does anything else.

So, fortunately, did her mistress.

Adele stepped in front at the door. “You can avenge me if I’m shot down on the threshold,” she said.

Does Tovera realize that is a joke?
she wondered. Not that it mattered, as her servant would find that response as natural as breathing.

The secretary at the console in the outer office was male, though young and attractive enough, Adele supposed. Instead of asking the newcomers’ business, he turned his head toward the open door behind him and called, “Hey boss? That Sunbright lot’s here to see you. They’re women.”

“Well, send ’em in!” said the man within, also shouting through the door. “And tell Herrigord that I’ll get back with him in ten minutes.”

“You heard the man,” said the grinning secretary, jerking his thumb in the direction of the door. “I’d say he doesn’t bite, but I’d be lying.”

Tovera grinned at him as they went past.

Adolph Brock was as squat as a fireplug. If he had been standing, his breadth would have made him look shorter than he was, but even so he probably wasn’t as tall as Adele. He still had his hair, but it was white and cropped so closely that he would have looked bald at any distance.

Tovera closed the door behind them. Brock barked a laugh and said, “You needn’t have done that, because you’re going straight out again. I’m seeing you to tell you to your faces that I’m not giving you a loan. I don’t consider lining the pockets of a monkey from Kostroma to be a good business decision. Now, out!”

Adele sat on one of the straight chairs facing the outfitter’s desk and took out her data unit. The room’s furniture was wooden and attractive, though of a heavier style than the appointments of her own townhouse in Xenos. She had expected functional, mismatched pieces of metal and plastic.

“Since I’m here, Master Brock,” she said, “I’ll explain the aspects of my proposition that I didn’t choose to state on the phone or put in electronic form.”

“You’ve nothing to say!” Brock said. For the moment, he appeared to be more nonplussed than angry. “Look, I know people in the shipping business and ex-Fleet folk too. I put your proposition to them and they say—every bloody soul of them, I mean! They say you wouldn’t stand a prayer against the
Estremadura
. She’s bigger, better armed, and she’s got top Fleet officers and a crew they picked themselves from pirate-chasers when the Peace of Amiens was signed and two thirds of the ships went into ordinary.”

He snorted. “I figure you’re a con man,” he said. “But if you’re not, you’re bloody crazy.”

“I’m sorry I can’t convince you that investing in my proposal will rid you and your fellow…entrepreneurs, I will say, of a serious overhead expense in the form of the cruiser,” Adele said. “Still, I accept that the only way to change your opinion will be to demonstrate the fighting ability of my yacht. Before you give your final opinion—”

“Listen, bitch!” Brock said; he
was
angry now. “I’ve
given
my final opinion. You couldn’t change it if you offered to suck me off right here in my office! Now, get out or I’ll throw you out. And you’ll be lucky if I don’t throw you right off the roof!”

He isn’t speaking to Mundy of Chatsworth. He’s speaking to a Principal of Kostroma, a group of people for whom I have no more regard than he does
.

But she trembled slightly. Brock had started to get up from his chair but chanced to meet Adele’s eyes. He subsided with a suddenly wary expression.

“I regret that I have to do this, Master Brock,” Adele said, as calm as ice again, “but have you considered the legal situation in which you might find yourself if your activities came to the attention of the authorities?”

Brock blinked, trying to make sense out of what he had just heard. “What are you talking about, woman?” he said. “I’m not violating any laws, and I don’t suppose it’s a secret that the government here—the people in the government, I don’t know how much money trickles through to the treasury—are making a bloody good thing out of the operations of the Wartburg Company.”

Adele completed the operation her wands had just directed. She met the outfitter’s eyes again and smiled, in a manner of speaking.

“I’ve just transferred some information to your console, sir,” she said. “Will you please take a look at it? It will be there when you bring your display up.”

“What the hell?” Brock said, again puzzled. He punched his virtual keyboard, however. His keystrokes were as forceful as Daniel’s own.

“What is this?” he said, shrinking the hologram again to look at Adele.

“That’s the report which will go to the Fifth Bureau if you refuse to provide the loan I request, sir,” Adele said primly. “And this—”

Her wands fluttered like ballet dancers executing a complex routine.

“—is the list of your relatives and associates living within Alliance territory. That’s mostly Pleasaunce, of course, but also Conbay, Mortain, and half a dozen other worlds. That list will accompany my report, though—”

She coughed delicately.

“—in my experience, the Fifth Bureau would be able to compile it very nearly as quickly as they can read my copy. I find the Alliance of Free Stars to be a marvel of bureaucratic organization.”

Brock’s lips moved silently for a moment as he read. He slid the display to the side and looked at Adele.

“How did…” he began in a growl that was barely human. He stopped himself. “It doesn’t matter how you learned this stuff, does it?” he said, more normally. “It wouldn’t matter even it wasn’t straight, not with the Fifth Bureau doing the checking.”

He slammed his right fist down on the desk, the only external sign of his fury.

“Which it is, as much as I say off the top of my head,” he said, almost conversational again.

He paused, his face hardening. “You’re not a monkey from Kostroma, though, are you?” he said. “Who are you? You’re bloody Fifth Bureau yourself, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter whether I play ball or not, it’s over—”

Brock’s hand jerked violently toward his holographic display.

“—for all these anyway!”

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” Adele said calmly. “But it matters a great deal to your off-planet associates that you accept my business proposition. Of that you can be assured.”

Brock said nothing for a moment. He gestured to the display again and said, mildly this time, “Are you going to strong-arm all the trading houses like this? Or is it just me?”

“I have appointments with the other two large houses which have links within the Alliance,” Adele said. “Coincidentally, you three are the largest firms on Cremona. That spreads the risk enough that none of the houses involved needs feel that it’s being backed into a corner. I don’t want anyone to—”

She grinned slightly.

“—be driven to desperate measures.”

“How quick do you need an answer?” Brock said.

“I’ll be back in two days,” Adele said, rising. “After I’ve discussed the proposition with Santina Trading and Loesser Brothers.”

“All right,” said Brock. “I’ll have an answer then.”

Adele started for the door to the outer office. Tovera, who had been standing beside the doorway throughout the interview, said, “Master Brock?”

“Eh?” Brock said, frowning as though his stylus had just spoken to him.