Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (32 page)

Not that Mason had any right to be vexed. Floyt had been drawing information out of the various computer systems, raiding and collating, with increasing skill. Mason's game was blackmail, or at least pressure politics; Floyt was making himself as useful as possible.

As he strolled, he kept his tunic collar up straight, hiding the iron slave collar Pollolo insisted he wear. It wasn't that Floyt could keep the guards or Betters from realizing his status; his bracelet gave that away when it slid down his wrist, and so did his plain clothing, although he was still wearing the mask Mason had gotten him that first day. But now staff members in the outer rooms of the computer facility were used to his upturned collar, so that they never noticed when he entered wearing a neck shackle and left without one.

He browsed along displays in the shops of the main concourse. At one infocenter he scanned the Whereabouts. Among the images there was a face he recognized from the Grapple.

This time Janusz, the Rasputin lookalike outlaw, appeared in a forthright Wanted blurb. The blurb had been sponsored by the Langstretch Detective Agency, which in turn started Floyt fretting over Alacrity file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (167 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

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and wondering what was happening to him.

Preoccupied, he wandered past the display case of the infoemporium a few steps before registering what he'd just seen. He paused literally in midstep, one foot in the air, then backed up.

There were piles of them in a mountain range display: hardback books, info-wafers, and a half-dozen other formats. The mountain range was flanked and fronted by holopromos and subliminal pulsers, pyrotechnic flashers and computer-generated dramatizations of selected passages.

The window was just about filled with
Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh in the Castle of the Death
Addicts
and
Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh Challenge the Amazon Slave Women of the Supernova.

Oddly enough, Floyt's first coherent reaction was,
Great and Holy Spirit of Terra! Didn't Sintilla even
tell them what we really look like? That's not me; it's some triathalon champion with eye makeup!
The Alacrity figure was an even more perfect specimen, slightly younger, and had nicer hair.

The illustrators had pulled out the chocks. Floyt, mesmerized by one of the promo loops, had to admit he didn't recall attacking a fangster with his bare hands and teeth. And if Alacrity really
had
participated in something called the Ecstasy Ritual of the Vortex Viragos, he'd neglected to invite Floyt along.

The ads proclaimed the books instant smash hits. As Floyt watched, the proprietor of the shop retrieved a microfiche edition from the window display for a masked Better.

Floyt gawped, wondering what Sintilla was going to do with all her money. He was speculating idly on where she might be and what she might be doing when he felt a tap at his shoulder.

He knew instant dread. He whirled, prepared to look up into the face of one of the outsize guards, stuttering an excuse for his loitering. But he was looking into empty space. He panned downward past a mop of brown curls, two of the merriest eyes he knew, and a sunburst smile on a round-cheeked face.

"That collar just does not become you, Hobart. I don't think iron's your look. Have you thought about a twillsilk ascot?"

"
Tilla
!" Looking around apprehensively, he recovered from the outburst. Few guards were around right then; most of the Betters were either at the compounds or out on the Wild Hunt. He'd gone unnoticed.

He contained himself, his questions and relief and joy, and drew her over into the half concealment of a spa doorway, making sure no one was watching.

"How did you get here? How did you find me? What—" He had all the same questions Alacrity had.

Sintilla grinned smugly, smoothing the material of her frilly, daringly translucent dress rompers. Floyt couldn't help noticing that she wasn't as chunky as he'd always thought, was actually rather shapely, in a file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...aley%20-%20Jinx%20on%20a%20Terran%20Inheritance.htm (168 of 320)19-2-2006 17:12:30

[Fitzhugh 2]-JINX ON A TERRAN INHERITANCE

compact kind of way.

"I got here because I followed you two." She inclined her head in the direction of the infoemporium.

"Sales are jumping; you're both gonna be famous and make me rich! I can't afford to lose you now."

"Heh!" They'd fled her without so much as a good-bye, he recalled guiltily. He'd never been so happy to see anybody in his life. "But how did you find me?"

She showed him a jot tracer. "Some horrible woman named Constance left her jot implanting unit around and one of the servants at Orion Compound noticed the settings—yours and Alacrity's. We don't know where Constance is, but we think she took a ship called the
Mountebank
up into orbit for some reason or other. There're eighteen kinds of hell waiting to break loose around here. Dincrist is due in."

"Tilla, have you seen Alacrity? Can we get out of this place?"

"Heart's here too, that's how I got in. She's out looking for Alacrity now. And, sweetie, we're going to get the both of you out of here just as soon as we can. An hour or two, if we can pull it off."

A pair of the tall guards, a male and a female, in their wide-shouldered maroon suits and pouter-pigeon codpieces, stepped around a distant comer. Sintilla whipped up the smoky green mask she'd been carrying. With the proprietary air of a Better, she took him by the wrist and led him across the broad corridor past a fountain, right by the guards, Sintilla tottering a bit on platform sandals.

She drew Floyt over to an oriental robotique-style settee under a bubbly steeple of skylight tori. Lively brown eyes sparkled at him through a serene giaconda face. "Just let me fill you in, Hobart, because we haven't got much time."

"Less than you think. I should be working. I'm expected."

"All right, but first I have to tell you, I, um, I sort of pulled a dirty trick on you—when you guys gave me your proteuses to hold during the airbike race, remember? Well, I rigged yours."

"Come again?"

"That cheapie model Earthservice gave you—well, it wasn't too tough."

"But—you didn't gain access to any of my protected data files. I made sure of that."

"Of course not, dopey! I put something
in,
so whenever you queried Frostpile's data network, the query would also be routed to my proteus. Get my drift?"

"Whew!" And he and Alacrity had been trying to find out about Blackguard at the terminal on the landing roof at Frostpile while they were waiting for the
Blue Pearl
to pick them up.

"It was devious, I know. D'you hate me?"

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"Only if you leave me here, Tilla."

She patted his knee. "Not a chance. Anyway, I knew Dincrist had some kind of connection with Blackguard; found that out back when Weir was still alive and I was snooping around Frostpile. So I figured Alacrity was off to find Heart and you were tagging along. Only Heart wasn't going to Blackguard. I discovered that just before you two left in the
Pearl.
The obvious conclusion was, you guys were off on a wrong trail.

"I'd heard this and that about Blackguard, but I didn't have the first idea how to get here. So I did the next best thing and tracked down the Nonpareil.
That
took a little doing! When Heart heard what was going on she requisitioned one of her family's ships and we came here. Y'know, I never had a starship at my disposal before. I must say, it's the only way to travel."

Floyt was trying to absorb the newsflood. Sintilla had jumped to completely the wrong conclusion about why Alacrity and Floyt had come to Blackguard, but it wouldn't be smart to correct her now, especially here. Floyt was listening with one ear, calculating variables like Pollolo, Baron Mason, and most of all the actijots.

"We're going to have to time this just right," Sintilla cautioned, "otherwise you two could have a bad time with those actijackti's you're carrying."

"What's your plan?"

"When we're ready, Heart's going to bring Alacrity in from where they're hiding. Then she goes to the spacefield and gets ready for lift-off, and I bring you two along at the last second.

"It'll be a legitimate take-off, and we'll be out of jot range and into Hawking before planetary defenses can—what's the matter?"

Floyt had been shaking his head. "Listen, it's more complicated than you think. Alacrity and I can't get close to a spaceship; our jots would fry us."

"What? But there's got to be some way around that! Hobart, if we're still around when Heart's father shows, we're all in the plopper!"

"It wouldn't be anything new for me." As he had in the vault of the causality harp, Floyt exerted all his will, getting a grip on himself. "We may be able to do this yet. There's a Baron Mason who's trying to gain control around here, and he's interdicted control of the actijot system. I think I can do something in the facility where he put me to work."

"That's it then! You've got to!"

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"Not that simple. There's also an XT there—a creature called Pollolo; he's on watch all the time. I've been working on a scheme, but—I'm dubious about its chances at this point. It may be too soon to—"

"Hobart, it's practically too late! Whatever it is, you've got to do it!"

Floyt took a deep breath. Being torn limb from limb by Pollolo could hardly be worse than whatever Dincrist would have in store for him.

Sintilla was still wearing her proteus. "Give me your contact index and wait for my call," he said. "I'll just have to try my idea. I'll try to meet you here within, say, two hours. If you don't hear from me … good luck. Tell Alacrity I'm sorry for everything he's been through because of this Weir thing—

because of me."

She lifted her mask for a moment, pulling him close, and gave him a sound buss on the mouth. There were tears on her cheek. "Get going, and don't bobble it!"

"I haven't even thanked you yet, Tilla."

"There'll be time for that later. Now, go!"

As usual, the inner sanctum was dim, making the strange projections and corallike decorations on the wall eerie and threatening.

Floyt entered Pollolo's domain warily; the creature liked to take him by surprise just to watch him jump.

But he could see stirring waters in the tank and could by now judge the waterline by eye. Pollolo was still immersed.

Floyt brought his terminal to life and called up Diogenes, so it would look as if he'd been working. He adjusted the worklamp to a fairly low glow then sent it to hover high on its magnetic field, near the ceiling-mounted baseplate. It was a small, adaptable lightshape, a modest miniature version of the grandiose ones in the corridors and esplanade. Right now it had taken on the form of a pale-blue dodecahedron.

Pollolo had been against Floyt's bringing in more illumination, preferring his little kingdom gloomy and quiet. But the creature grudgingly relented rather than bother Baron Mason with the matter. Pollolo warned Floyt to keep the light well over in his corner though, behind the partitioning data banks and stacked modules. That was just perfect with Floyt. The lamp was an important victory, critical to his plan.

Floyt checked an access plate in one of the upper components of a control stack, where it would be awkward for Pollolo to reach without leaning against the sacrosanct systemry. The hair he'd spit-glued across it, a melodramatic precaution, was still in place.

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Floyt quickly opened it and drew out a slave collar he'd hidden in there. Anxiously checking the waters again for the preliminary roiling that usually preceded Pollolo's emergence, he darted to the room's Classified Materials Disposal device.

Wonderful little gadget, when you stop to think about it,
Floyt reflected as he fed the collar into it.

Installed for routine and/or emergency destruction of documents, code matrices, commo and crypto equipment, and so forth, the CMD device also did a first-rate job turning iron slave collars into a pile of filings.

He was grateful to whatever powers there were that Pollolo hadn't noticed that Floyt always entered with a slave collar on—Pollolo's mandate—but often left without one, tunic collar pulled up. Sometimes more than once a day. The collars were easy to come by around the Central Complex, and nobody bothered to keep track of them.

In fact
—Floyt pulled off the one he was wearing and ground it up too. He also threw in the odds and ends he'd collected in his wanderings: a few scraps of this and that, the metal working end of a small utensil, a few decorative studs furtively pried loose from a door. Floyt had recently become a hawkeyed scavenger of iron.

As he worked he cast wistful glances at the Most Secure Module. Thanks to the staff members Mason had co-opted, the jot control system could be reached and manipulated through that ordinary-looking hunk of apparatus, along with spacefield operations and some security ops. Unfortunately, only Pollolo could unlock the Most Secure Module.

Floyt hastily filled his pockets with the filings, wiping and blowing away the remains. There was a slow churning of the waters. He dashed for his place, sliding into his glide-chair just as he heard the surface of the pool break around Pollolo's form.

There were familiar noises as the creature clambered out, shedding water, and donned his interface collar. "Delver Rootnose!" came the synthesized voice, using the alias Floyt had given. "Get over here!"