Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (29 page)

Ash was being modest about his informational pipelines. Stemp had not yet been apprised of the starship's arrival; it would have been regarded as a routine matter by some, but not by the Alphas, who'd taken a worried interest, a little too late, in the Floyt-Fitzhugh business.

"I have no news of any recent developments," Stemp answered with unusual honesty.

"Ah. Then I've wasted your valuable time, I'm afraid, Citizen."

After the executioner left, Stemp dove to make an encrypted, max-classified commo connection with another Alpha.

The image of Cynthia Chin, rival and adversary in the councils of the Alphas, stared at him with venomous satisfaction. "Why, yes, we've had word," she confirmed innocently. "I was just about to call you."

Liar
! "Well? Out with it!"

"Endwraithe's dead. Apparently Floyt and Fitzhugh killed him. They were subsequently sighted at some sort of underworld rendezvous, something called a 'grapple,' but they disappeared somehow. We still have no idea what the Weir bequest was, or where they've gone. That adorable little Bear woman of yours has brought on a crisis situation. Congratulations."

He fought to keep his temper. "The Custodians on Blackguard should be contacted and warned, just in case. It's just possible the Weir legacy is connected to the Repository."

"That's being done, and Camarilla agents are hunting for Floyt and Fitzhugh. I think we really must have a full Alpha conference on this issue."

He broke the connection rather than give her the satisfaction of seeing him lose control. In moments he had Supervisor Bear on his screen in a similarly shielded call. Despite Chin's characterization of her as

"little," she was tall and epicene, a woman of forty or so, her most attractive feature being her longish auburn hair.

"Have you any idea what you've done? You and your bloody Project Shepherd?" he practically shrieked.

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[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

"B-but it was such a cost-effective, propagandistically sound project."

"Stop babbling and pay attention. I want you to double-check and make sure there are no leaks or exploitables in your coverup of the Machu Picchu incident. If there are, I'll see to it that
you
are the one thrown to Citizen Ash. Do I make myself clear? And begin dismantling whatever remains of Shepherd at once. Blank all incriminating data. You will not surrender any of it to anyone, particularly other Alphas, do you understand? By this evening it's to be as if Project Shepherd never existed."

"But—but it was so
cost-effective
!" She was still blubbering as he cut the connection. Then he stood gazing out at wandering clouds, wondering how the devil that imbecile Endwraithe could've let himself be beaten by a bumbling functionary and a shiftless piece of space trash. He calmed himself with the thought that other, more capable agents were moving against the two now and that they couldn't hide for long.

Besides, in the final analysis, the two were still subject to the conditioning given them by Earthservice.

They would be drawn, sooner or later, back to Terra, to be dealt with.

The thought of the conditioning filled Stemp with relief. All was well.

CHAPTER 13—THE COMPANY WE KEEP

"All right, pay attention now, Gute," Alacrity said, settling the deck of cards into a modified mechanic's grip. He shooed away some circling bloodgnats with his free hand and brushed a snail-slow, stupidly curious dustball spider off his leg. "I'm gonna show you how to deal seconds and win at blackjack."

Gute, sun-dappled by the shade of the whiffer bushes, sitting cross-legged in the little clearing waiting for the summons of the Wild Hunt, beetled his brows. "Is this legal, what you're teaching me?"

"Huh? Hell, no, it's not
legal.
I'm not trying to teach you how to enjoy the game, dammit; I'm trying to teach you how to
win
."

They were conversing in tradeslang, which Gute spoke rather well. "Ah," he said enthusiastically, resettling himself and paying greater attention.
"Winning.
Fine!"

Alacrity was about to continue this lesson, but from nervous habit they both checked the sky again. They were part of the big, supposedly safe—though dreary and gruesome—body-tagging detail, theoretically immune from attack; but it paid to be careful. Members of the hunt were capable of anything when their blood was up, and the fact that Gute had no actijot and Alacrity's wouldn't trigger a quarry-tracer was no guarantee.

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[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

They went back to the cards. "I hope this is of more use than the dice, Shipwreck."

Alacrity had gaffed a pair of dice for Gute, six-ace flats, rather artfully done considering the limited resources available. The problem was that the locals didn't shoot craps, and Gute didn't have much luck instituting the game. Cards would take a lot longer to teach, and Alacrity himself was no expert cheat—

he was much more used to spotting cheats—but there was time.
At least until Dincrist gets here,
Alacrity thought. By then he would either have something worked out or … he had a depressing fallback plan.

"Yeah, yeah;
much
more useful than the dice, Gute. Now watch this."

Alacrity's sniffing and prying around hadn't come to very much except that he'd become passable friends with Gute. Gute had indeed kept him out of the compounds' more dangerous and objectional jobs. Now that he knew more about the compounds of Blackguard, Alacrity appreciated just how fortunate that was.

Plenty of offworld captives had come there only to end up strapped to a surgical unimech or locked in an iron maiden over at Grand Guignol Compound, or been served up as one of the long-pig repasts at Hellfire Club. Alacrity had been on cleanup crew after one of those feats and hadn't been able to eat or sleep very well since.

He'd decided he would give Blackguard no satisfaction beyond his death, if it came to that; he'd already scouted out a cliff, two bodies of deep water and an unguarded maintenance machine, besides a number of toxic substances. In a pinch, any would do for a little improvised suicide.

Having profited modestly from Alacrity's various schemes and cons, Gute seemed content. He'd kept Alacrity's advice in mind, never being too greedy, and also kept his end of the bargain. His joy at owning a Spican atlas was funny and a bit sad. Gute's people, a few small tribes of them, were the only native inhabitants of that part of Blackguard when the Betters expropriated it, and were the only ones tolerated in that hemisphere. Almost all worked for the Betters.

Alacrity still saw no escape from Blackguard, and his luck couldn't hold out much longer. More and more ships were arriving for the Wild Hunt; with each arrival Alacrity's dread grew that
this
would be the starship from which Dincrist would disembark.

Security at the spacefield was just too thorough for anything like a hijack and getaway. As the nerve-fire from the permanent actijot fields there doubled with every step, one attempt to approach the off-limits areas had convinced him of that.

Simply ankling off into the bush was no good either; the jots could be activated through comsats that were part of the all-embracing Mark-X Talos Worldshield defensive system the compounds used to control their planet. The Betters could locate, disable, or kill him anywhere on Blackguard.

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[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

He still held out hope that Floyt could do or find out something of use, but that was fading fast. Nine days had passed since the incident at the Citadel Compound, and Alacrity had heard nothing from the Earther. There was only word that he was working in some capacity or other at the Central Complex, under the aegis of Baron Mason. Alacrity had seesawed between desperate hope and deep despair, praying to see Floyt show up with a pilfered ship, some way of deactivating the jots, a gun or the keys to the complex, but tormented that it would instead be Dincrist, with Sile and Constance, to take him away to a compound room with restraints, nerve rays, and flensing beams, all the obscene paraphernalia to which so many of the Betters seemed drawn.

Still
, a part of him maintained,
the harp, the harp
… He tried to hold tightly to that memory, that affirmation of his life's most important question. He shook himself now, bringing his attention back to matters at hand.

"Okay now, Gute: watch close. Here goes—"

He was interrupted as clumps of palette-ferns parted at the edge of the clearing.

Both men jumped up in alarm, Gute bringing up the fright-light prod, the only weapon they had. At the edge of the clearing stood a young human male, maybe sixteen on the Standard scale. He was weaving a little, and blood seeped from the cuts and scrapes he'd gotten slithering and crawling, running and crouching in the undergrowth.

The kid was marked as a quarry, in a dermal stain that made him look like some kind of animal, a blotchy rust and green with a dotted white midsection. Alacrity supposed it was meant to imitate prey from some Better's homeworld and wondered whether the kid was someone's personal enemy or just unlucky.

The quarry's flimsy indoor soleskins were in shreds and his feet were in bad shape. He panted for breath, eyes starting from a face with sunken cheeks. He looked at them as if he'd never seen a human being before.

"Hide me?" He said it with the hopelessness of someone who'd suffered Blackguard's cruelties to the end of prayer and endurance.

"Psyche's sake, kid," Alacrity grated, pocketing the cards, "how'd you get here?" The hunt had swept the area earlier, supposedly driving before it or capturing all quarry.

"I hid in a nook in the rocks … doubled back … " The boy panted, shaking so badly he could hardly stand. "You've got to help me."

He took a quavering step forward; Gute swung up the fright-light and gave it a quick burst. It flared, its file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (154 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

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brightness and heat driving the boy back.

"You did not elude them," Gute said. "They only let you live a little longer, to play with you. They do that sometimes. Go on, run! You can't stay here."

The look in the kid's eyes was unbearable. Alacrity pleaded, "Gute, my god, we can't just—"

"
He can't stay here
!" Gute yelled into Alacrity's face. "The Betters will find him. The Betters always find their quarry. Always! Is that what you want, to bring them down on
us
?"

Alacrity couldn't answer. Finally he slowly rippled his hand to Gute, almost a waving motion, a negative gesture—the local equivalent of a shake of the head.

"Please help me," the boy said, but defeatedly, in his oddly accented tradeslang.

"We can't even help ourselves,"Alacrity told him, his voice cracking, knowing it really wasn't an answer at all. A nervous tic moved the corner of his mouth; he was helpless to control it.

"I'm not going to let them take me. I won't let them do those things to me again," the boy said, taking another step toward them. This time even the blare of the fright-light couldn't make him back away.

He was in tears now. "I won't let them
… do …
those things to me ever again!"

With a curse Gute threw down the fright-light and whipped his actijot unit out of his raggedy loincloth.

Setting it, he swept its invisible beam at the boy. Alacrity shied away; the unit would affect any jot it hit.

The boy made a forlorn sound of pain and fell back, sobbing.

"You want us to die too?" Gute was yelling, half mad himself. He gave the kid another jolt. "Go! Run!

Get away from here!"

"Stop it!" Alacrity knocked down the jot unit and went to the kid's side. Gute brought it up again, centering on Alacrity, hand wavering. In the end he held his fire, looking anxiously into the sky.

Alacrity knelt by the quarry. The kid was wailing like a lost soul. He threw his arms around Alacrity's leg.

"Don't let them … don't let them … "

"Listen to me. I said
listen to me, god damn you
!" Alacrity shook the kid until his teeth rattled, held his chin so their eyes met. The quarry was gulping, hyperventilating, saliva and tears and snot mixing on his face.

Alacrity said slowly, "A hundred meters or so over that way there, there's a cliff. The drop's maybe sixty, seventy meters. Take it head first, to be sure."

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At first the boy's face clouded up with incomprehension. Then he understood, and an awful emptiness came into his eyes. He looked to Gute, whose face was like a graven image's.

"Listen!" Gute snapped. They heard it far off: banshee horn, piercing and discordant.

The quarry gave a strangled cry and pulled himself up by Alacrity's shoulder, drawing him off balance and leaving him on all fours in the dirt. The boy staggered off in the direction of the cliff, weeping and moaning but moving as fast as he could.

Gute stood over Alacrity. "Is that why you make sure you know the lay of the land? To know what cliffs are near? What else have you spied out? Rivers? The mires?"

Alacrity pushed himself up. "Among other things."

Gute looked him in the eye. "Don't think too much, Shipwreck. You might make me decide you're too dangerous to know."

They broke off glaring at one another as a rush of air came over the low treetops. Down swooped a single-passenger flier, a rostrum crafted of nielloed metal with a facade in the form of a Niflheim sphinx-face. The man flying it stood upright, hands on the controls.