“If my lady has no pass,” he said slowly, “perhaps my lady will suggest some way to assure the guard that My Lord Marlin is expecting her?”
The veiled lady was a voice in the dark — the guard had sense enough not to shine the light in her face; he had long experience with nobles and fumed. “If you insist on being a fool, call my lord at his yacht! Phone him — and I trust you’ll find you’ve pleased him!”
The guard in the watch room came out. “Trouble, Sean?”
“Uh, no.” They held a whispered consultation. The junior went inside to phone Lord Marlin’s yacht, while the other waited outside.
But it appeared that the lady had had all the nonsense she was willing to endure. She threw open the door of the chair, burst out, and stormed into the watch room with the other startled guard after her. The one making the call stopped punching keys with connection uncompleted and looked up . . . and felt sick. This was even worse than he had thought. This was no flighty young girl, escaped from her chaperones; this was an angry dowager, the sort with enough influence to break a man to common labor or worse — with a temper that made her capable of it. He listened open-mouthed to the richest tongue-lashing it had been his misfortune to endure in all the years he had been checking lords and ladies through their gate.
While the attention of both guards was monopolized by Mother Shaum’s rich rhetoric, a figure detached itself from the sedan chair, faded through the gate and kept going, until it was lost in the gloom of the field. As Thorby ran, even as he expected the burning tingle of a stun gun bolt in his guts, he watched for a road on the right joining the one from the gate. When he came to it he threw himself down and lay panting.
Back at the gate, Mother Shaum stopped for breath. “My lady,” one of them said placatingly, “if you will just let us complete the call –”
“Forget it! No, remember it! — for tomorrow you’ll hear from My Lord Marlin.” She flounced back to her chair.
“Please, my lady!”
She ignored them, spoke sharply to the slaves; they swung the chair up, broke into a trot. One guard’s hand went to his belt, as a feeling of something badly wrong possessed him. But his hand stopped. Right or wrong, knocking down a lady’s bearer was not to be risked, no matter what she might be up to.
And, after all, she hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
When the master of the Sisu finally okayed the loading of the last truck, he climbed onto its bed, waved the driver to start, then worked his way forward. “Hey, there!” He knocked on the back of the cab.
“Yes, Captain?” The driver’s voice came through faintly.
“There’s a stop sign where this road joins the one out to the ships. I notice most of you drivers don’t bother with it.”
“That one? There’s never any traffic on that road. That road is a stop just because the nobles use it.”
“That’s what I mean. One of them might pop up and I’d miss my jump time just for a silly traffic accident with one of your nobles. They could hold me here for many ninedays. So come to a full stop, will you?”
“Whatever you say. Captain. You’re paying the bill.”
“So I am.” A half-stellar note went through a crack in the cab.
When the truck slowed, Krausa went to the tailgate. As it stopped he reached down and snaked Thorby inside. “Quiet!” Thorby nodded and trembled. Krausa took tools from his pockets, attacked one of the crates. Shortly he had one side open, burlap pulled back, and he started dumping verga leaves, priceless on any other planet. Soon he had a largish hole and a hundred pounds of valuable leaves were scattered over the plain. “Get in!”
Thorby crawled into the space, made himself small. Krausa pulled burlap over him, sewed it, crimped slats back into place, and finished by strapping it and sealing it with a good imitation of the seal used by the inspectors — it was a handcrafted product of his ship’s machine shop. He straightened up and wiped sweat from his face. The truck was turning into the loading circle for the Sisu.