Quiet Knives (7 page)

"Don't come," she snorted, leaning back in
the chair in the aftermath of her laugh. "Tell me another one,
Kore."

Shaking her head, she got up, went down the
short hall to the galley and drew herself a cup of 'toot, black and
sweet.

Sipping, she walked back to the pilot's
chamber and stood behind the chair, looking down at the message on
the screen.

"Now, of all the things he
might've expected me to remember, wouldn't that have been one of
'em?" She asked her ship. There was no answer except for the smooth
hum of the air filtering system. But, then, what other answer was
needed?
Skeedaddle
knew Kore as well as she did.

As well as she
had
.

Twenty-six years ago, Midj Rolanni had been
taken up as trader by Amin Zar, and working beside the least of
Amin's sons, one Korelan, who also had a head for trade. Their
eighth or ninth stop, they were set to meet with one of the Zar
cousins, who was a merchant on the port. Taking orbit, they
collected their messages, including one from the cousin: "Don't
come."

Amin Zar, he took a look at that message,
nodded, broke open the weapons locker and issued arms. They went
down on schedule, whereupon Amin and the elder sibs disembarked,
leaving Kore, Midj, and young Berta in care of the ship.

Several hours later, they were back, Amin
carrying the cousin, and a few of the sibs bloodied--and Midj still
had bad dreams about the lift outta there.

After it all calmed down, she'd asked Kore
why they'd gone in, when they'd clearly been warned away.

And he'd laughed and told her that "Don't
come," was Zar family code for "help."

She sipped some more 'toot, took the
half-empty cup over to the chute and dumped it in.

The time, she thought, going back and
sitting in her chair, had come to face down some truths.

Truth Number One: She was a damn fool.

Truth Number Two: So was the Korelan Zar she
had known, twenty Standards ago. Who but a damn fool left the
woman, the ship and the life that he loved for a long shot at
changing the galaxy?

And who but a damn fool let him go
alone?

What came into play now was those same
twenty Standards and what they might have done to the man at his
core.

She noted that he never had said he'd
changed his mind, in that first, brief call for her to come get
him. The Kore she knew had never been a liar, preferring
misdirection to outright falsehoods. It looked like he'd kept that
tendency, and its familiarity had been the one thing that had
convinced her the letter was genuine; St. Belamie giving her a
second.

And this--this was the third validation, and
the most compelling reason to continue on the course she had
charted, in case she was having any last minute doubts.

"You gonna die for twenty Standards ago?"
She asked herself, and heard her voice echo off the metal walls of
her ship.

You gonna turn your back
on a friend when he needs your help?
Her
ship whispered in the silence that followed.

No,
she thought. No; she'd done that once, and it had stuck in her
craw ever since.

One good thing--she could go on her own
time, now, since the way she saw it, "don't come" trumped St.
Belamie.

Smiling, she reached to the board and opened
a line.

"Tower, this is
Skeedaddle
, over at
Vashon's Yard. How soon can I lift outta here?"

* * *

THERE WERE RESTRAINTS this time,
uncomfortably tight, and a violent headache.

So
, he thought, laboriously.
You wanted
to make the guy with the gun use it, and he did.
Quitcherbitchin.

"He's back," a man's voice said breathlessly
from somewhere to the left.

He'd managed to land some blows of his own,
which didn't comfort him much, since he was still alive.

A man hove into view, his right cheek
smeared with blood and a rising shiner on his left eye.

Good
, he thought, and then saw the injector.
Not good
.

He tried to jerk away, but the cords only
tightened, constricting his breathing--some kind of tangle-wire,
then. He might be able to--

"No, you don't, fly-boy," the man with the
injector snarled, and grabbed his chin in an iron grip, holding him
immobile while the cold nozzle came against his neck.

There was a hiss, a sharp sting, and the
injection was made. The man with the black eye released him and
stepped back, grinning.

He closed his eyes.
Fool
, he
thought.

The drug worked fast. The irritation of the
wire was the first to fade from his perception, then the raging
headache. He lost track of his feet, his fingers, his legs, his
heartbeat, and, finally, his thoughts. He hung, limbless, without
breath or heartbeat, a nameless clot of fog, without thought or
volition.

"What is your name?" A voice pierced the
fog.

"Korelan Zar," another voice answered,
slowly. Inside the fog, something stirred, knew the voice and the
name. Recognized, dimly, peril.

"Good," said the first voice. "Where is the
High Judge?"

"I don't know," he heard himself say.

"I see. Why were you going to your
ship?"

"Orders."

"What orders?"

He was listening in earnest now, interested
in the answer; expecting to hear another, "I don't know....."

"Orders to get out, if it
looked like going to hell."
Well
, he thought, inside the thinning
fog,
that certainly makes
sense.

"And things in your opinion were going to
hell?"

He'd said so, hadn't he? "Yes."

"Ah," said the voice. That not being a
question, he found himself speechless. Time passed; he felt the fog
growing dense about him again.

"What," the voice said, sharp enough to
shred the fog and cut him where he hung, defenseless. "What was the
text of the last message you sent to the High Judge?"

"Situation stable," he heard himself
answer.

"When was that?"

"Four weeks ago, local."

More silence; this time, he found he was
able to concentrate and thin the fog further. He could feel the
shadows of the tangle-wire binding him to the chair; a breath of
headache....

"You were at the comm when we located you
earlier this evening. Who did you send to?"

A question had been asked; the drug
compelled him to answer with the truth, but the truth had
facets....

"An old girlfriend."

"Indeed. What is your old girlfriend's
name?"

The answer formed; he felt the words on his
tongue, swelling, filling his mouth, his throat...

"Impressive," the voice didn't-ask,
releasing him. Exhausted, he fell back into the fog, felt it close
softly around him, hiding the restraints, the pain, the sense of
his own self.

"What," the voice asked, soft now, almost as
if it were part of the fog, "is the code of the last receiver to
which you sent a pin-beam?"

Calmly, his voice told out the code, while
he sank deeper into the fog and at last stopped listening.

* * *

SHE SET
Skeedaddle
down in the general port,
calling some minor attention to herself by requesting a hot pad.
Tower was so bland and courteous she might have been back on Kago,
which didn't comfort her as much as it maybe should
have.

Sighing, she levered out of the pilot's
chair and stretched, careful of her back and shoulders, before
moving down the hall.

She pulled a pellet pistol from the weapons
locker, and a needle gun--nothing more than a trigger, a spring and
the needle itself. Completely illegal on most worlds, of course,
though she'd come by it legal enough: It had been with Berl's body,
when it came back, with his ship, to his sister.

She slipped the needle gun into a hideaway
pocket, and clipped the pistol to her belt. That done, she
straightened her jacket, sealed the locker and went back to the
galley for a cup of 'toot and a snack while the hull cooled.

* * *

THE FACT THAT THEY hadn't killed him
was--worrisome. That they kept him here, imprisoned, but not
particularly misused, indicated that they thought there was more he
could tell them.

He'd had time to consider that; time to
weigh whether he ought to file his last flight now and preserve
what--and who--he could.

The end of that line of consideration was
simply that he wanted to live. His one urge toward suicide had
failed and he couldn't say, even considering present conditions,
that he was sorry on that score. If it came down that he died in
the line of doing something useful, then that was how it was. But
to die uselessly, while there were still cards in play--no.

That decision left open the question of what
he could do of use, confined and maybe being used as bait. Not that
the Judge would fall for bait, but Grom Trogar might not know that.
In fact, Chairman Trogar might well see the Judge's concern for his
household and his courier as a weakness to be exploited. Big
believer in exploiting other people's weaknesses, was Mr.
Trogar.

Having the time, he thought about his life
past, and what he might've done different, if he hadn't been your
basic idealistic idiot. Put that way, he could see himself staying
with Midj, leading a trader's prosperous life, raising up a couple
of kids, maybe getting into politics. There were more ways to
change the galaxy than the route he had chosen. And who was to say
that change was the best thing?

He'd been so sure.

* * *

SHE HAD A PLAN, if you could call it that.
Whoever had done the alias for the pinbeam Kore'd sent his last
message from had been good, and if she'd started with no
information, she'd right now be on a planet known as Soltier,
somewhere over in the next quadrant. Knowing that Kore was on
Shaltren made the exercise of tracking the 'beam something easier,
and she thought she had a reasonable lock on his last location.

Nothing guaranteed that he'd still be at
that location, of course, but it was really the only card she had,
unless she wanted to go calling on the chairman, which she was
holding in reserve as her Last Stupid Idea.

For her first trick, she needed a cab.

There was a cab stand at
the end of the street, green-and-white glow-letters spelling
out
Robo Cab! Cheap! Quick!
Reliable!

Right.

She leaned in, hit the call button, and
walked out to the curb to wait.

Traffic wasn't in short supply this
planet-noon, and the port looked prosperous enough. If you didn't
know you were on galactic crime headquarters, in fact, it looked
amazingly normal.

Up the street, a cab cut across three lanes
of traffic, angling in toward her position, the green-and-white
Robo Cab logo bright in the daylight. It pulled up in front of her,
the door opened and she stepped in.

Mistake.

"Good afternoon, Captain Rolanni," said the
woman pointing the gun at her. "Let's have lunch."

The door snapped shut and the cab
accelerated into traffic.

* * *

IT WAS GOING TO take a bit to disable the
camera, but he thought he had a workable notion, there. The hard
part was going to be getting out the door. After that, he'd have to
deal with the details: scoping out where, exactly, he was, and how,
exactly, to get out.

He'd read somewhere that it was the duty of
prisoners taken in war to attempt to escape, in order, so he
guessed, to make the other side commit more resources to keeping
their prisoners where they belonged. It had occurred to him at the
time that the efficient answer to that might be to shoot all the
troublemakers at hand, and institute a policy of taking no
prisoners. On the other hand, Mr. Trogar having erred on the side
of prisoner-taking, he supposed there was a certain usefulness to
confounding the home guard.

Or, as the Judge was a little too fond of
saying, "Let's throw a rock in the pond and see who we piss
off."

* * *

SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH,
it
was
lunch, and
if there was a guard mounted outside the door of the private
parlor, and her host was armed, nobody had gotten around to taking
the gun that rode openly on her belt, much less searching her for
any hidden surprises she might be carrying.

Lunch was simple--pre-made sandwiches, hand
pastries, coffee, and some local fruit.

To hear her tell it, the host's name was
Sambra Reallen, which was as good as any other name. She professed
herself a not-friend of the current chairman, on which point Midj
reserved judgment, considering the manner of their meeting. Since
she also seemed to hold some interesting information, Midj was
willing to listen to her for the space it took to eat a sandwich
and savor a couple cups of the real bean.

"You're here for Korelan Zar," Sambra
Reallen said, and it was disturbing to hear that fact stated so
baldly, no "am-I-right?" about it.

There being no use playing games, Midj
nodded slowly and sipped her coffee. "Man asked me to give him a
ride off-world. That against the law?"

The other woman grinned, quick and feral.
"At the moment, the law here is the chairman's whim. Given
that--yes, I'm afraid it is."

"That's too bad," Midj said, hoping she
sounded at least neutral.

"You could say that,"
Sambra Reallen agreed. She wasn't drinking coffee, and she hadn't
even bothered to look at the sandwich in front of her. "Captain
Rolanni, do you have any idea who Korelan Zar
is
?"