she was talking to, hunter-captain, mahe with mahen interests very much at
stake. She felt Jik’s arm shift across the seatback.
“Move,” he said to the driver in the mahen tongue. The car leapt forward with a
burr of the motor, wheels bumping on the plates like a panicked heartbeat.
Not a word from Jik, only a shifting of his eyes from one side to the other,
watching everything along the sides.
Pyanfar watched him, among the rest. Friend. Companion. Along with Rhif Ehrran.
The car thumped along, dodged pedestrians.
Jik took out his pistol and thoughtfully took the safety off in his lap, no
small piece like her pocket gun, no, nearly as long as his forearm, with a
black, wicked sheen. The mahe on the other side drew hers and kept scanning the
surrounds, the whisk of gantries past, of lines, machinery, canisters, all
places for ambushes.
Berth five passed. Jik spoke to the driver in something mahen and obscure. “We
go close,” Jik said. “Want you go fast up ramp.”
“Gods rot it, my whole lower deck’s occupied.”
He pressed her knee. “Same good get you safe in ship.” The car veered: a ship
access and guards loomed into the way and the car veered again, bringing the
door even with the access. The door flew up and Pyanfar scrambled out with Jik
and the crewwoman close behind.
Up the ramp then, a slower pace, the long, chill walk through that yellow gullet
with the L bend to the lock. Pyanfar looked back, looked round again as they
reached the lock and Jik laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Safe. Safe here.”
“Sure. The stationmaster’s handpicked aides–”
“Listen. I know you safe.”
“You know. What’s in that ID, Jik? Who are you? Who are you working for?”
Both hands settled on her shoulders. There was nowhere to look but dark mahen
eyes, a plain mahen face. “You got watch on you deck, understand, got number one
good watch.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Jik’s lips went tight. “Mahe take orders somewhere else. Same good tech, a? Not
make mistake.”
“Like that aide? Safe like that?”
“I fix.”
That left cold after it. Jik lifted his hands from her shoulders, held one
finger up.
“Then,” Jik said, “get good sleep.”
“Ayhar’s jumped,” Khym said, who sat monitor on com, and the board checks paused
for the moment. He scribbled furiously on the lightpad and his florid scrawl
came up on screen three as Haral punched it through, a string of numbers
meaningless to him, but he got them down with speed.
Heading, velocity, strength of field.
“It’s on its way,” Tirun muttered, and Pyanfar felt a twinge of relief as the
full scan input went to the number two: no pursuit.
There was a tc’a out. T’T’Tmmmi. Outbound on the same heading, none too quietly.
TC’A TC’A TC’A TC’A TC’A TC’A TC’A
transmission said, with ship-function babble in all its harmonics, a tc’a ship
fully occupied with tc’a business and the speaker thinking only of its/their
jobs. Tc’a did not lie, so the story ran, could not. Once a tc’a began to
output, the underminds had to be there or the harmonics failed and the whole
matrix fell into gibberish.
So someone non-tc’a had reckoned, from what gtst thought tc’a had claimed, a
hundred years ago.
She went back to work, running checks through the systems, resetting failsafes
and running them again and again, putting comp through one and the other
simulation as it re-programmed itself.
“Pride.” Khym’s low voice, answering some call, in the profound silence, the
click of keys, the sometime shift of a body in a leather seat. “First is busy.
Can you–” The shift of a heavier body. “Ker Tirun. It’s Vigilance. They want a
crew member.”
Tirun muttered something and took it. “Gods rot,” she said. “You don’t need to
go up the line for that, Ehrran . . . . That was a crew member.”
Pyanfar turned around.
“Fine,” Tirun said, and punched the contact out. “That’s a confirm on the Ayhar
jump.”
Pyanfar said nothing. There was nothing to say. Tell Khym to stand his ground
and ignore a request for higher authority? But next time it might be something