Flinx in Flux (5 page)

At the conclusion of the game some joker had repositioned the halo projector so that a large, carnivorous reptile had dropped down on Flinx from the direction of the ceiling. The result was just what the practical joker had been hoping for. Flinx had been startled and frightened.

Unfortunately, that had caused Pip to react, defensively. Her highly caustic venom had burned right through the holo projector’s lens, at considerable cost to the establishment’s owner. With Pip hovering nearby, the chastened pranksters had paid the full cost of the damage.

He angled toward the only crowded table. The man seated facing him boasted a handlebar mustache that tapered to waxed, glistening points. They quivered like the needles on a praxiloscope when he laughed. His name was Jebcoat, and he hailed from Hivehom, a human born and raised on the thranx capital world. He was no stranger to heat and humidity. As near as Flinx had been able to tell from their initial brief contact weeks ago, when he had first arrived in Mimmisompo, Jebcoat had done a little of everything. If you asked him a question there was a fifty-fifty chance you, would get an answer. The odds on truth were lower.

Flinx did not recognize his female friends. Jebcoat saw him approaching and broke off his conversation with the ladies to give the young man a broad smile. One of the women turned curiously to inspect the newcomer. She was a shade under two meters tall and wore implants that gave her pupils a silvery cast.

“This kid a friend of yours?” she asked Jebcoat without taking her eyes off Flinx.

He stiffened momentarily until he realized she was trying to provoke him. That was one way of taking the measure of a stranger on a world like Alaspin.

“He’s no kid.” Jebcoat chuckled softly. “I ain’t sayin’ he’s a man, either. Frankly I don’t know what he is, but you’d best watch your word footing around ’im. He wears death for a play-pretty.”

As if on cue, Pip stuck her head out from beneath Flinx’s collar and Scrap stirred on his wrist. The woman’s eyes flicked from mature minidrag to adolescent. Flinx sensed no fear in her, which might mean either that she was as bold and confident as she appeared, or simply that his damnable talents weren’t functioning at that moment.

The other woman was tall, but no giantess like her companion. “Go easy on him, Lundameilla. He’s kinda cute, though a bit on the skinny side.” She laughed, a short jittery sound that would make anyone in the vicinity grin. “You and him going together sideways wouldn’t fill up a decent doorway. Care to join us?”

Flinx shook his head. “Just a question or two. I’ve been out in the Ingre, and I need to find out about somebody I ran into out there.” The giantess’s eyebrows rose.

“Find anything while you were out there?” Jebcoat eyed him speculatively.

“What I was looking for.” Flinx saw that his approval rating had risen another notch. It was not considered impolite to ask questions of a stranger on Alaspin, but it was considered foolish to reply straightforwardly. Sometimes it was worse than foolish.

“Found something I wasn’t looking for, too. About a hundred centimeters, slim, female, twenty-two to -five, pale blond with a weird haircut, and blue eyes, though they might’ve been dyed recently. Very nice.”

“How nice?” the other man at the table asked, speaking for the first time. He was broad and burly and had not depilated in days.

“Extremely. She was wearing shorts and a thin shirt, one only.”

“In the Ingre?” The giantess made a face.

“Millimite and drill bug bites everywhere.” Flinx eyed the other man. “Also somebody had worked her over real careful and professional-like.”

The heavyweight’s smile disappeared, and he sat back in his chair. “Deity, what a world!” He turned to Jebcoat. “Spark any circuits?”

Jebcoat considered, the mustache temporarily stilled. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t know a soul who’d be caught dead outside in the shorts, much less the shirt. How’s her condition?”

“Improving. I emptied my crawler’s first-aid kit into her. It was full when I started.”

“Damn well better have been, or you could sue the renter.” He glanced at the giantess. “Call up any memories for you, Lundy?” The tall woman shook her head.

“I don’t know anybody that pretty or that stupid.”

“What about ID?” he asked Flinx.

“Nothing. I looked.” He eyed the other man, but that worthy was properly subdued. The situation was not amusing anymore.

“We’ll ask around. Won’t we, Blade?” The giantess’s companion nodded agreeably.

“So will I,” said Jebcoat, “but I haven’t heard tell of anyone missin’ local, and you know how fast that kind of news travels hereabouts.”

“Nope, nobody missing,” the other man muttered. “Nobody. Would’ve heard. When’d you find her?”

“Few days ago,” Flinx told him.

“Then everybody’d know by now if she was known around here. Must be a newcomer,” Jebcoat suggested.

“That’s the way I see it.”

“I know the agent at Alaspinport. If you like, I’ll give ’im a call, take a copy of the last couple of shuttle passenger manifests, tridee the ID. We can run ’em through my processor.”

“That might give us something,” Flinx said gratefully.

“Not if she was brought in by private shuttle,” Blade pointed out.

“Unlikely,” Jebcoat said.

“Unlikely, yeah, but not impossible. If that’s the case—” She eyed Flinx evenly. “—there’ll be no record of her arrival.”

“Maybe,” Flinx said softly, “that’s what the people who beat her up had in mind.”

The woman stared back at him, then turned to Jebcoat. “You’re right; he’s no kid. You been around, boy,” she told Flinx.

“That I have—girl.” He braced himself, but all she did was smile approvingly.

“Come on, Lundy.” The two women rose to depart. Lundameilla towered over every man in the room. Both drew appreciative stares. “We’ll ask around for you, like I said. Meantime we got to get back and check on our dredge. Lundy and me, we got a claim up in the Samberlin district.” As she came around the table, she bent quickly to whisper in Flinx’s ear.

“You ever get up that way, stop by and say hello. Maybe we’ll show you how we operate together, Lundy and I. You might say we could show you the long and the short of it.”

“Leave the guy alone, Blade.” Jebcoat was grinning hugely beneath the mustache. “Can’t you see he’s blushing?”

“I am not blushing,” Flinx insisted. “Redheads’ skin is naturally flush.”

“Okay, okay.”

As Lundy strolled past, Flinx felt a distinct sharp pinch on his left buttock. The giantess left him with that and a wink as she followed her companion out. He made a face at Pip.

“I’m attacked and you do nothing.”

The flying snake stared back blankly. Not for the first time Flinx found himself wondering exactly what the minidrag’s intelligence level was.

Jebcoat put both hands flat on the table. “Let me make one quick call.”

He did not have to leave the table to do so. Flinx watched him work the communicator that was built into the table. Thousands of fine hardwoods filled the jungle surrounding them, and someone had gone to the expense of importing a plastic table made to look like wood. No wonder the thranx found their human friends a constant source of amusement.

Jebcoat chattered away at the pickup. Finally he shrugged and let the headphone snap back in place. “I tried the obvious: local cops, immigration records, a couple of friends. No one matching your description has arrived on Alaspin in the past two months, much less been reported missing. We still have to check Alaspinport records, of course, but I ain’t optimistic.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Lemme get ahold of my buddy at the port. Lundy and Blade will spread it around the backcountry. But right now, as far as the authorities are concerned, your battered acquaintance don’t exist. Since she’s in your room, she’s your responsibility.”

“All
yours,” the other man said cheerfully.

“But I’m just on my way out.”

“Offworld again?” Jebcoat was still trying to figure his young friend. “For somebody your age with no visible means of support, you manage to get around pretty easy.”

“I have an inheritance,” Flinx explained. Though not the kind of inheritance you’re thinking of, he added silently. “I can’t take her with me, and I don’t want to just abandon her in the room. She’s got no credcard, either.”

“So?” Jebcoat asked. “The hotel owner would be delighted to put a claim on her.”

“Hell,” the other man said, “if she’s as pretty as you say she is, I’ll take her off your hands myself.”

“Ain’t you forgettin’ something, Howie?”

“What’s that?”

“You’re married.”

A cloud shadowed Howie’s face. “Oh, yeah. I’d kinda forgot.”

Jebcoat eyed him mercilessly. “With kids.”

“Kids. Yeah,” Howie muttered disconsolately.

Jebcoat smiled back at Flinx. “Howie here’s been out in the Ingre too long. No, she’s yours, my friend. You can do what you want with her. Wait till she gets well, take her with you, or just scram. But it’s your decision. I don’t want anything to do with it.” He indicated the resting minidrags. “I don’t have a couple of lethal empaths to keep an eye on me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve other business to attend to. I’ll get back to you if I find out anything about your mystery lady. Howie and I are discussing the price of a theoretical load of Sangretibark extract.”

Flinx said nothing. It was illegal to export Sangretibark. For some it worked as a powerful aphrodisiac. In others it had unwanted side effects—such as cardiac arrest. But then, it was none of his business. Jebcoat was a friend so long as you treated him with respect. He would make a bad enemy.

He tried a couple of other contacts, with equal lack of success. No one knew anything about the woman he described. Once his query was met with an openly hostile response, but only verbally. Pip’s presence prevented anyone from dealing Flinx anything stronger than a harsh word.

That afternoon he wandered back to the hotel, discouraged and puzzled. The woman lay where he had left her. At the moment she was lying on her back. As he eyed her, it occurred to him that while he had done wonders for her wounds, her appearance remained unchanged. She still wore plenty of dirt and grime.

He spent an hour cleaning her face, shoulders, arms, and legs with a washcloth. Thin red streaks had replaced the weals on her legs where the millimite bugs had dug, and the drill bug holes were already closing. The worst of her bruises were almost gone.

He lay down for a short nap, exhausted from the journey out of the Ingre and his efforts on her behalf. He might have slept through the night if the screaming had not awakened him.

Chapter Four

Instantly he was up and searching. Looking every bit as beautiful awake as she had while asleep, his guest stood across the room. In her right hand she clutched a small but wicked little knife. Her eyes were wild.

Pip hovered before her, little more than a couple of meters from her face and well within attack range. Scrap flew nervous circles around his mother. The young minidrag’s constant movement was unsettling the woman more than Pip’s hovering.

Flinx took it all in in a second and wondered what the hell was going on. The knife did not make any sense. Neither did Pip’s threatening posture, unless you assumed the knife had been aimed at her master. But why would she want to threaten him while he slept?

That was when she noticed him sitting up on the bed. Her eyes barely flicked away from the flying snake. “Call them off, damn you, call them off!”

Flinx did so with a casual thought. Pip darted back to the bed.

The woman’s breathing slowed, and the arm holding the knife dropped. “How did you do that?”

“All Alaspinian minidrags are emotional telepaths. Sometimes they’ll bond with a person. Pip is mine—she’s the adult. The adolescent’s name is Scrap.”

“Cute,” she said tensely, “real cute.” Then she shuddered and lowered her head. “I don’t know how you found me. What now? Are you going to beat me up again? Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with? I’ve answered all your questions.”

Flinx’s gaze narrowed. “I didn’t beat you up, and I have no intention of killing you. If I held any malign intentions toward you, d’you think I’d have fixed you up?”

Her head came up quickly. She studied him for a long moment. “You aren’t one of them?” she asked hesitantly.

“No I’m not, whoever ‘them’ are.”

“Deity.” She let out a long sigh, at which point her legs turned to rubber and she had to lean against the wall for support. The knife clattered silently on the hardwood floor.

Flinx slid off the bed and started toward her, halting when she stiffened. She still did not trust him, and after what she had been through, he could hardly blame her.

“I’m not here to hurt you.” He spoke slowly, soothingly. “I’ll help if I can.”

Her eyes shifted from him to the flying snake. Slowly she bent to recover the knife, placed it on the antique dresser nearby, and laughed nervously.

“That doesn’t make any sense, but neither does anything else that’s happened to me in the past few weeks. Besides, if half of what I’ve heard is true, a knife’s pretty useless against a minidrag.”

“Not half,” Flinx corrected her. “It’s all true.” He kept his distance. “Would you like to sit down? You’ve been unconscious for several days.”

She put a hand to her forehead. “I thought I was dead. Out there.” She indicated the window that looked over the town. “I was never so certain of anything in my life. Now I’m not sure of anything anymore.” She blinked and tried to smile at him. “Thank you. I will sit down.”

There was a lounge chair made of epoxied lianas. Under the epoxy, the wood flashed a rainbow of colors. It was the only brightly colored piece of furniture in the room. Flinx sat down on the edge of the bed while Pip curled herself around one of the short bedposts, looking like a carved decoration. Scrap settled in his lap. He stroked the back of the small flying snake’s head absently.

“How old are you, anyway?” the woman asked him as she slumped into the chair.

Why do they always ask that? he wondered. Not “Thank you for saving me” or “Where do you come from?” or “What’s your business?” His reply was the same one he had been using for years.

“Old enough. Old enough not to be the one who was lying out in the Ingre making a meal for the millimite bugs and dying of exposure. How’d you end up like that?”

“I escaped.” She inhaled deeply, as if the cool air in the room was an unexpectedly rich dessert. “Got away.”

“I didn’t think you ended up there by choice. You weren’t dressed right. Alaspin’s not a forgiving place.”

“Neither were the people I was with. What did you say your name was?”

“Didn’t, but it’s Flinx.”

“Just Flinx?” When he did not respond, she smiled slightly. It was beautiful to see. “All right. I know there are limits to questions in a place like this.” She was trying to act tough. At any moment she might start cursing him—or burst out crying. He sat quietly, stroking the lethal creature snuggled in his lap.

“You said you escaped. I thought maybe your vehicle had broken down. Who’d you escape from? I’d assume whoever beat you up.”

Her hand moved instinctively to the half-healed bruises beneath her left shoulder. “Yes. It doesn’t hurt as bad now.”

“I’ve been giving you first aid,” he explained. “I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to take care of others as well as myself. My resources were as limited as my knowledge, I’m afraid. You were lucky. No broken bones, no internal injuries.”

“That’s funny, because it feels like everything inside me is busted.”

“Whoever worked you over didn’t want to kill you. What did they want?”

“Information. Answers to questions. I told them as little as I could, but I had to tell them something . . . So they’d stop for a while.” Her voice had grown small. “I didn’t tell them everything they wanted to know. So they kept at me. I feigned unconsciousness—it wasn’t hard, I’d had plenty of practice. Then I got away from them.

“They had me in a place out in that jungle somewhere. It was at night, and I made it to the river. I found a broken log and just started drifting downstream. I had no idea it was so far from anyplace.”

“I found you high up on a beach. You’d dragged yourself out of the water.”

She nodded. “I think I remember letting go of the log. I was losing my strength, and I knew I had to get to dry land or I’d drown.”

“You’d be surprised how far you crawled.”

She was looking down at her hands. “You said I’ve been out for several days.” He nodded as she turned her palms up, inspecting the scoured skin. “I guess you’ve done a good job on me. Thanks. I can’t say that I feel good, but I feel better.”

“Several days’ rest is good medicine for any injury.”

“I woke up and saw you lying on the other bed, and I thought they’d found me. I thought you were one of them.” This time she did not smile. “I had the little knife. It fits inside the middle of my boot. That’s how I got loose. Not much use against a bunch of people, but against one sleeping man . . . I was going to cut your throat.”

“Pip would never have allowed it.”

“So I found out.” She eyed the flying snake wrapped around the bedpost. “When it came at me, I tried to get out the door. It’s sealed both ways. That’s when I started screaming, but nobody came to see what was happening.”

“I sealed the door because I don’t like interruptions when I’m sleeping.” Reaching behind the headboard, he brought out a thin bracelet and touched a stud set flush with the polished surface. The door clicked softly. “I bring my own lock. Don’t trust the ones they rent you. As for your screaming, this is a pretty wide-open town. Not a place where people interfere in their neighbors’ business. Hard to tell sometimes why somebody’s screaming.” He slipped the bracelet on his wrist. “Ever seen a picture of a body ravaged by millimite bugs?”

She looked down at her legs, then ran her fingers along the almost vanished welts. “These?”

He nodded. “They feed subcutaneously. They’re not very big, but they’re voracious and persistent. The first thing they do is eat their way to where the muscles are attached to the bone. They cut through the legs first. Then, when their prey can’t move anymore, they settle in for a leisurely month or so of eating.”

She shuddered anew. “Here I am throwing questions at you right and left, and I haven’t really thanked you.”

“Yes you did. A moment ago.”

“I did?” She blinked. “Sorry. My name. I haven’t told you my name.” She brushed at her short blond hair. He wondered what she would look like with a professional patina of cosmetics on that exquisitely sculpted face. “I’m Clarity. Clarity Held.”

“Pleasure to meet you.”

She laughed, a little less uneasily this time. “Is it? You really don’t know a thing about me. Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t think it such a pleasure.”

“I found an injured human being lying exposed to the jungle. I’d have picked up anyone under those circumstances.”

“I’ll bet you would have. Come on,” she chided him, “how old are you, really?”

He sighed. “Nineteen, but I’ve been around a lot. Listen, what’s this all about? Who beat you up and why were they holding you against your will?”

Suddenly she was looking around the room, ignoring his questions. “Is there a bathroom in this place?”

Flinx put a damper on his curiosity and nodded at the holo of an icy fountain off to the left. “Behind there.”

“Is there a bathtub?” There was an edge in her voice. He nodded, and she smiled gratefully. “About time things started evening out. From hell to heaven in one waking breath.” She rose and started toward the holo.

“Wait a minute. You haven’t answered any of
my
questions.”

“I will. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. After all, I owe you my life.” She glanced back at the doorway. “You sure no one can get in here?”

“I’m sure. Even if they did . . .” He nodded in Pip’s direction.

“All right. I should be working on getting out of here, on getting off this world. Because I’m sure they’re looking for me right now. But I feel, like something that just crawled out of a sludge pit. If I don’t clean myself up, I won’t be able to stand me long enough to answer your questions. Bath first.” She smiled to herself. “There’s always time for a bath.”

He leaned back against his pillow. “If you say so. Nobody’s after
me.”

“That’s right,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Nobody is after you. Do you think you can help me get away from here? Away from this town? What’s the name of this place, anyway?”

“Mimmisompo. You didn’t come through here?”

“No. I was on a big skimmer, for a long time.” She frowned. “Alaspinport, I think. They brought me down drugged, and we got right in the skimmer. I was pretty much out of it except when they brought me around to answer questions. I’ll explain everything I can, tell you all I can remember, but later. Right now a hot bath would be just about the most wonderful thing imaginable.”

“Then go ahead and indulge. I’ll keep an eye on the door.”

She took a step toward him, then hesitated. “Nice to have a friend here.” A quick turn and she was through the holo that closed off the bathroom from the rest of the apartment.

Her passage automatically turned off the image, and she did not bother to reset it, her mind on nothing but the bath. Moments later the sound of running water reached him. Hands behind his head, he lay back on the bed and contemplated the ceiling. Strange. One would have thought she had had enough of water in the river. The peculiar regard women held for hot water was something he did not understand.

By rolling over and stretching ever so slightly he could see her sitting on the edge of the diamond-shaped tub. She was lightly sponging herself. It was hard to estimate another’s inhibitions without first knowing her world of origin, social status, and religious inclinations. She looked up suddenly and saw him watching her, and she smiled. Not invitingly but not mockingly, either. Simply a pleasant, relaxed smile.

Knowing that did not keep him from turning away in embarrassment. Then he was angry at himself for doing so. Pip looked up curiously while Scrap explored the pile of blankets where Clarity had slept. The flying snake reacted to his every emotion, not only those that were threatening.

Clarity Held rose from the bath and begin drying herself. This time it was not necessary for him to stretch to enjoy the view. This time he deliberately did not turn away.

“That was heavenly!” Apparently the society in which she had been raised did not recognize the nudity taboo, a historical development on an as yet unknown world for which he was very grateful. She sang to herself in a voice that was only slightly off key, then put the towel aside without a suggestion of shyness and began to remove her clothes from the room’s autolaundry.

I have talked to the wise men of Commonwealth, Flinx mused. I have spoken with captains of industry and of alien warships. I have made contact when no one else was able with an artificial intelligence thousands of years old and kept my composure in the face of evils both human and otherwise. So why the hell can’t I have a sensible conversation with a single member of the opposite sex of my own race without bumbling and stumbling over every word?

He had heard about verbal seduction but had not the slightest idea where to begin. He wanted more than anything else to ingratiate himself so powerfully that she would forget about his age and start thinking of him as a man. He wanted to persuade her, to reassure her, to dazzle her with his resourcefulness and brilliance, to defuse her fears and activate her senses.

What he said was, “Bath make you feel better?”

“Immensely, thanks.” She was drying her hair now, fluffing out the blond brush, the single flanking pigtail bobbing like a cat’s toy behind her ear. He wondered who had performed the spectrum shift that had given her turquoise eyes. Surely that color could not be natural.

“If you plan on doing any more traveling around here, we’ll have to find you some more appropriate clothing.”

“Don’t worry. The only environments I want to experience between here and the shuttleport are humanxmade. I’m straightlining from here to orbit, if you’ll help me.” She nodded in the direction of the window. “They’re out there right now, wondering how I got away. Hopefully back along the river.” Her hands paused, and her cheerful expression abruptly darkened. A little terror crept back into her voice.

“You , said I left a long trail from the river onto the beach where I crawled out. They could find that. They’d know I was still alive.”

“I didn’t know you’d been kidnapped, so I saw no reason to take the time to obliterate it. But don’t worry. Even if they find it and interpret it correctly, the next thing they’ll do is start searching the immediate vicinity with a heat sensor and image processor.”