The January Dancer (43 page)

It was not easy to surprise the Fudir, the scarred man says, but Little Hugh O’Carroll managed it now and then. In that early hour of the morning, he managed it for the last time.

Hugh was sitting on the stoop just outside the ragged hotel tossing nuts to the equally ragged birds. The Fudir froze at the sight of him. Hugh looked up.

“Ready?” he said.

The Fudir pointed to the nuts. “You give them those things and they’ll come to expect it. They’ll circle the doorway waiting and shit on the people going in and out.”

Hugh looked along the street. “And that would be different?”

“You sit out here alone and you’re bait for every thief in the Fourteenth District.”

“It’s too early for thieves. They like to sleep in. How do you plan to get into Watkins Naval Yard?”

The Fudir ran his hand along the fringed anycloth he wore, took a tassel between his fingers, wondering what to do about this latest complication. “What were you waiting for out here?”

“You. I know you haven’t given up on liberating Terra. But now the Kennel folks have a new reason to give the Dancer to the Ardry.”

“By me, a new reason to keep it from him. I like his reign; I wouldn’t like his rule.”

Hugh nodded. “And that means you have to go in without the others.”

“‘Others.’ That would include you. But I don’t think you’ve given up on your own plans.”

Hugh shook his head. “I’m not going back to New Eireann.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

Hugh stood and brushed at the knees and seat of his trousers. “Let’s go and save the galaxy. Unless you want to eat breakfast first.”

“You’ve grown a bit since we first met.”

“I’d hate to think otherwise. Only the dead never grow. You and me, Fudir, we’ve been through a lot since Amir Naith’s Gulli. We were in this together almost from the beginning. It’s only right that we’re together at the end. Just you and me.”

“I know. That’s what makes this so hard.”

And with that,
like a black mamba striking,
he poked Hugh in the brisket with his bunched fingers, bending him double, and followed it with a blow to the side of his head.

Hugh collapsed and the Fudir caught him before he struck the steps, eased him back to a sitting position, and replaced the bag of nuts into his hands. He felt the neck for a pulse. He stood and studied the unmoving figure bleakly. It was difficult to know how hard to strike.

There was a man watching from the pedestrian walkway across the city rail that ran down the center of the public way. He was slouch-shouldered, with a hangdog look. His clothing seemed slept in and none too new before that. “You mess this man,” the Fudir told him, “and some people in that building will hunt you down and kill you. That’s if you get away from me.”

“I believe you,” the man said, holding his palms up. “Just minding my business, me. You got a ruby or two? I’m powerful thirsty.”

The Fudir studied him. “Don’t go anywhere yet.”

When neither Hugh nor the Fudir appeared in the morning to plan their infiltration of the Watkins Yard, Bridget ban went to fetch them.

“They’re nae in their rooms,” she reported.

The three Kennel agents looked one to the other. Grimpen said to Greystroke, “You trusted him.”

Bridget ban said, “They may only have stepped outside for the air.”

“Air’s worse outside,” Grimpen said. He rose like an uplifted mountain range. “I’ll look.”

When Large-hound had left the room, Greystroke turned on Bridget ban. “What was the purpose of all that cuddling if not to keep his leash short?”

Bridget ban had no answer. She turned away and looked into a corner of the room, her thoughts all in turmoil. “Maybe Hugh went looking for the Fudir,” Bridget ban suggested.

Grimpen came back in carrying Hugh over his shoulder. “If he did, he found him.”

The others jumped to their feet in alarm. “Is the wean a’right?” said Bridget ban.

Grimpen deposited his burden on the sagging couch and straightened his limbs. “He’s not dead, but he’s taken a bad blow to the head. He’ll have a headache when he comes to.”

“He’ll have more than a headache,” Bridget ban told him. “He liked the Fudir. He thought he was a nice old man, underneath that bitter act.”

Greystroke’s face was grim-set. “The bitterness was no act. The nice old man was. The Terran word is ‘bonded.’ It’s something to beware of, Bridget ban.”

“Aye? An’ ye’ve lost yer lead to the Donovan, haven’t ye?” Then she straightened. “The Other Olafsson! Maybe she snatched the Fudir so
she
could find Donovan and carry out the mission.”

But Greystroke said, “No. Hugh would have tried to stop her and the Ravn would have killed him. The Fudir
is
Donovan. I suspected it when he didn’t keep the sex straight of his next contact. After I followed him into the Corner of Jehovah, I knew. And
he
knew I’d puzzled it out. But he wanted out of the Great Game. He’d been hiding from the ’Feds, hoping they would never call on him. We had a silent agreement.”

“Wonderful,” said Grimpen. “The problem with silent agreements, Pup, is that they’re no different from silent disagreements.”

“I’m no fool, you great lump of flesh! The Red-hound and I programmed
aimshifars
into the clothing we gave him. We can track him through the anycloth. Bridget, where is he now?”

Bridget ban had already been studying her wrist strap. “Nearly out of range o’ this mickle thing. Let me…Ah, there I have it. Sou’-sou’west. Half a league.”

Grimpen grunted. “Not much of a head start, then.”

“Not heading toward the Navy Yards,” said Greystroke. “Nor the Corner. I thought he would have bolted there like a rat to its hole. What’s his plan?” He activated his wristband. “Synch with me, Bridget. I’ll find him and bring him back. No, both of you stay here. It was my error; it’s my corrective action.” He checked the charge on his teaser and tucked it into his waistband.

Greystroke hurried through the streets of the Fourteenth District wondering how he could have miscalculated so badly. What would Fir Li say when he graded the exercise? It was no excuse to say that the stakes had escalated from the routine task he had originally been set.
He had failed at that, too.
He should have minded his own assignment, left the Dancer problem to Bridget ban, and taken Fudir prisoner back to Sapphire Point. He had allowed ambition to seduce him.

The wristband told him that the Fudir had gone to the right, and he slipped around the corner onto a street even less inviting than the one the hotel was on. The morning sun barely warmed him, as if it too avoided these decaying tenements.

Few people were about. Lost souls with nowhere to go, and no idea how to get there. He paid no attention to them, or they to him. If they noticed him at all, they saw another early morning wraith living out his defeat.

As he passed an alleyway, the direction indicator on the wristband flipped. Greystroke drifted back to the opening and looked down a dead-ended cobblestone passageway lined with trash barrels, dustbins, and odds and ends of discarded appliances. Drainpipes ran from roofs five stories above to gurgle their burdens nowhere near the sewer grates. But the weather had been dry this season, so the pools of water were small and survived largely because the sun did not venture into this narrow lane.

Greystroke moved silently down the alley, looking behind each dustbin and trash can as he passed. The
aimshifars
reported that the Fudir was deeper in, but Greystroke did not discount the possibility of a confederate—or even a Confederate.

But there was no one. And when he came at last to the spot where the locators in the anycloth proclaimed the Fudir to be, he found a smelly, ragged man wearing clothing far too good for him, who was slug by slug putting himself outside of a bottle of white spirits. When he saw Greystroke suddenly before him, the derelict shrieked and raised his hands, saying, “I never touched him! I swear it! I never touched him!”

Few organizations are sufficiently feudal as to subsist in complete self-sufficiency, and this is especially so for those that are themselves military service organizations. External suppliers can be increased or decreased as the volume of business requires; whereas the same functions performed by cadre would require full-time expensing and general administrative overhead.

And for the most menial work, who better than Terrans? They work cheap, when they work at all, and with sufficient supervision will actually get the job done. That is because they are paid for performance rather than for their time. Slacking off only delays payment.

One service farmed out by ICC Peacekeeping Navy Yard Number Three—called Brisley Watkins Yard, after some forgotten hero—was victualing, for which Heybob Brothers—a local Terran firm—had low-balled the bid with the usual financial cunning of their people. At least, so the Yard Captain had reasoned. The Terrans, for their part, saw an opportunity for an easy ruby. If the prices they charged Watkins Yard were low, the cost of the provisions were lower still, and a dip of the beak went, as it always went, to the Terran Brotherhood—for the good of the Corner, the eventual liberation of the homeworld, and the more comfortable lives led by the Vanguard of the Struggle.

One way to keep costs down was to hire laborers by the day in the morning call-out at the hiring hall. Drivers and other skilled workers must be lured with wages and benefits, and were permanent employees; but day labor did not carry overhead when there was no labor that day.

The Fudir who presented himself at the Hall did not appear nearly as old as the Fudir who had traveled all the way from Jehovah. Certainly, he had no problem lifting the heavy sacks of potatoes and rice and beans. Besides, a particular hand-clasp and the passage of a wad of rubies had ensured him a spot with Heybob’s morning victualing run—along with a promise to Himself and the Forsaken Committee of Seven that nothing ill would rebound on Heybob from whatever scramble the Fudir planned to carry out.

If there were anything known as “base security,” it had been largely forgotten by the guards at Watkins Yard. The routine is the ally of the unexpected, and it had been a long time since there had been an enemy of the ICC on Old ’Saken. The goods lorry pulled into the Yard with a wave of the hand and the driver parked behind the Yard Refectory. The Terrans “schlepped” the vegetables into the storerooms, singing a work song about carrying sheaves that the Chief Victualer and his petty officers thought wondrously droll. “I hain’t rejoicing, was I doing
that
scut work,” the Fudir overheard one of them say.

Nobody at the gate bothered to count the number of laborers in the goods lorry when it left, let alone compare it to the number who had entered.

Terrans go everywhere and no one makes much remark. Thus, the Committee of Seven had a decently accurate map of the Yard from the observations of those who had previously been inside. The Fudir had memorized this map and knew exactly where Commodore Saukkonen had his office. The next problem was to transform a ragged Terran laborer into someone who looked like he might actually belong in a Navy Yard. For that, the Fudir slipped into a supply shed and emerged wearing a maintenance coverall of dull black, and carrying under his arm a “cliputer” and a paperboard tube such as those in which engineering flex-screens are kept. Armed in this fashion, he could go almost anywhere on the Yard without being questioned.

He paused and slipped into his ears a pair of the buffers that Greystroke had fabricated en route from Die Bold. The theory was that he could still hear what was said, but the voice would be so distorted by the micro-intelligence that the Dancer’s effect would be nullified.

The theory had yet to be tested, of course.

Walking across the Yard, he traced out the cables linking the buildings with the practiced eye of an instrument tech. Those would be the secure channels, less vulnerable to intercept. Private voice calls and proprietary data went by “hard wire.” He whistled the song about the sheaves as he located the bundle from 3rd Fleet HQ, narrowed it down to the commodore’s office, and followed it to a junction box. Waiting for a moment when no one was nearby, he unscrewed the cable and let it dangle so that the contact was intermittent.

He returned to the headquarters building at a slow hurry and walked boldly inside. “This where the comm link complaint came from?” he asked the petty officer at the desk. He waved the cliputer at her. “Got a ‘right-now-and-I-mean-it’ repair order while I was heading for the mess. Says…Commodore’s office. That’s 145?”

“Right down the end of the hall,” the young woman told him. “Wait. You have to sign in. Security.”

The Fudir kept a straight face while scrawling a randomly chosen name into the register. “What time you off-duty, ma’am?”

“You’re a bold one,” she answered with a smile.

“‘Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,’” he told her, “‘but good men starve for want of impudence.’”

She laughed. “I don’t expect
you’ll
starve,” adding, “I’m off in nine ares.”

The Fudir did not miss a beat. ’Saken used dodeka time, and an are was forty-eight minutes Earth-standard, or slightly more than a half hora in metric time. He gave her his best smile. “Maybe I’ll see you then? By the Refectory?”

The Fudir proceeded down the hall, content that the receptionist harbored no suspicions.
Bold knaves thrive indeed,
he thought.

The plaque on Room 145 read
BAKHTIYAR COMMODORE SAUKKONEN, VANGUARD SQUADRON, 3RD PEACEKEEPER FLEET.
Following the protocols he had observed earlier, he knocked once, opened the door, and stepped inside.

“Sah!” he said, touching his cap. “Is this where…” He pretended to consult his cliputer. “You have an intermittent system connection?”

Saukkonen regarded him with calm, liquid-brown eyes. He was a broad man, wide in the shoulders and with large hands. His desk was a marvel of disarray. It was foolish to form an opinion of another man, especially a man of power, from a single glance; but the Fudir thought that, under other circumstances, he might have liked Saukkonen.