Hellflower (v1.1) (10 page)

He took the key to the tradelocker and tossed it up and down a bit before he tucked it away, hoping I guess to terrify me into special pleading. "Wouldn’t want you to lose it, sweetheart. Stop by my office before you lift and I’ll give you the payoff."

Or half of it, maybe, if I was that lucky. I would of cried myself to sleep for sure if the locker key was where the money was this trip. Fine. I been shookdown before. But Dommie still didn’t leave.

"Rokeach botanicals, eh? Pretty odd cargo to pick up on Wanderweb, isn’t it? Not a lot of money in it. Hardly enough to cover expenses, I’d say. I wonder what else you might have-found-on Wanderweb."

For once in one of these sweet scenarios, I was stone innocent. Or ignorant, anyway.

"When you figure it out, Dommie, let me know. What you see is what you get."

"Maybe I just ought to impound your ship, Gentrymort. I’m sure I could find enough violations to put you down on the ground with the rest of us for a real long time."

Terrific. A bored bent Teaser-my favorite veggie.

"Then bring on the hellhounds, Dommie, and let us all in on the fun. And while you’re at it, o’nobly-born, you might start thinking about how much fun you’re going to have patterolling the Chullites in a twoman jaeger."

"Careful, Butterfly," said Paladin in my ear.

Dommie slugged me back against the bulkhead like a man with something on his mind.

"You wouldn’t be threatening me, would you, you hack Indie?" He tightened up, and it was an effort to breathe, but I made it. "Wouldn’t threaten
legitimates,
Dommie-or even you. Just want to mention you pull my ticket and I sing like a well-tuned goforth to Guild, to Board of Inquiry, to many-a-many." Paladin had enough notes on Dommie’s fun-and-games to at least start a official inquest. It was one of those happy thoughts that keep you warm on those cold galactic nights.

After awhiles Dommie let go. I dropped to the deck and leaned back against the crash pads, rubbing my throat.

Dommie didn’t much care for my expression, and I didn’t much care for what came next. Good fellowship slid over his face like a cheap paint-job under pressure.

"Hey, St. Cyr, you got me all wrong. I’m on your side. I’ve seen what happens when a small-time smuggler like you gets mixed up in something too big for her. You’re in way over your head, stardancer; if you back off now, maybe you and me could get together; do some business. You should think about it."

"Je, Dommie. I’ll surely do that," I said from the deck.

He left with my locker key in his pocket, and I buttoned up my Best Girl real tight and thought hard.

We had started out with the traditional wondershow between the Bent Teaser and the Noble Gentrymort-the one as usually ends up with me taking a few shots to the ribs and Dommie walking off with his vigorish-of-choice-but somewhere along Act Two we got sidetracked. I was just about willing to bet Dommie wanted to get on my good side. "Shall I place the file on Trade Customs and Commerce official Dominich Fenrir’s extortion racket on Kiffit in the open banks of the Kiffit Palace of Justice computers when we leave?" said Paladin.

"Oh, sure, why not? Make up some extras, while you’re at it." If the Office of the Question did a personapeel on him looking for proof of Paladin’s farcing he’d be cleared, of course, but by then there wouldn’t be much left.

I sluiced Kiffit-Port’s metered water over my head and neck and thought about Dommie’s visit until I decided it’d make less sense than a hellflower’s logic. Then I went to get tools to peel up my deck.

"Dommie-bai wanted into
Firecat
because he thought he was going to see something," I said to Paladin while I worked. "And when he didn’t see what he was after he tried to shake it loose. What am I mixed up in, Pally-che-bai, that’s too big for me?"

"Valijon Starbringer," Paladin said flatly.

He hadn’t told me about Tiggy’s safe arrival at the Guildhouse-or arrest-yet, and I guessed I’d have to wait until we got back to angeltown to hear it.

"That Dommie knows about," I amended. "Anyway, Pally, Tiggy’s old business." It didn’t sound true, and I wondered why.

"Dominich Fenrir does not know about Valijon Starbringer," said my silent partner, back from a jaunt in the Port computers to make sure. "However, Customs Officer Fenrir has recently undertaken a clandestine alliance with the saurian crimelord Kroon’Vannet. Fenrir is being paid a retainer for unspecified duties. There is no mention of you in connection with any illegality." And Paladin was not going to take this glowing opportunity to tell me Tiggy was restored to the bosom of his one-an-onlies. Sigh.

"Kroon’Vannet," I said, remembering. Vannet was one of those nighttime men that give lizards a bad name. He wanted a piece of everything that wasn’t nailed down and didn’t think he shouldn’t have it just because he slid off the cold end of the Chernovsky scale. The Phoenix Empire, Paladin tells me, is real accommodating as long as your B-pop hits somewhere in the middle, like mine would if I wasn’t a dicty, and real hostile if you’re a wiggly. That’s why the Outfar is full of wigglies pretending they’re citizens. Some don’t want to just pretend. Vannet was two of them.

"So what am I supposed to back off of, babby-bai?"

"I don’t know," said Paladin. That made two of us, but Pally always says organics aren’t very bright.

T’hell with Dommie Fenrir and his live talkingbook theater. I pulled the money-load out on the deck and wished I could believe it was what Dommie was after, but that didn’t fit with the "friendly warning." Ignorance was part of what I was being paid for, but stupidity isn’t my hobby. Paladin and me’d scanned them back on Wanderweb and found we was shipping gems of some kind. Boring.

"N’portado. Pally, soon as we toss this lot, we’re making for Coldwater, deadhead, and get t’hell out of the way of Teasers with brain fever."

Have always said that if I ever get the chance to follow my own advice I’ll be dangerous.

It is fortunate that Interphon, the lingua franca of deep space, is not as universal as its adherents believe, and that while Valijon Starbringer and Butterfly St. Cyr were both speaking Interphon, they were not speaking the same language.

This interface of bewilderment was entirely to Butterfly’s advantage, since so long as Valijon could not determine precisely what she had said, he could not determine whether he needed to "purify his honor," and thus he left her without making any decision.

From the moment of its standardization Interphon had begun to break down into dialectical forms. This breakdown, unlike previous linguistic breakdowns, is occurring along lines of profession, not lines of astrography. In a few centuries, it is entirely likely that a commercial pilot, or "stardancer," will not be able to understand the Interphon of the inhabitants of the planets he visits. The end of the Empire is foreshadowed by the fact of a universal language being worried into rags by a dozen jealous peoples.

The scope of the disintegration is sharply indicated in the division between "bonecracks" and "bodysnatchers" -i.e., physicians who treat mercenaries and ground-based personnel and physicians who treat pilots and noncombatant exo-planetary personnel. Why should two branches of the same discipline-medicine-polarize to the extent of evolving two incompatible specialized vocabularies of mutual incomprehension to deal with the same subject? I believe the answer has to do with the organic love of novelty for its own sake, even when not particularly desirable.

I also believe it will eventually destroy this Empire. No astropolitical body can be properly administered without a common language. In fact, the Phoenix Empire is decaying now. Within living memory Kiffit was a thriving settlement in the center of Imperial trade. Now it is ,m outpost, without sufficient population to support an expanding economy. Any check of uncensored statistics will prove this: each year more people leave Kiffit than settle or are born there. But in the Phoenix Empire statistics are not uncensored.

It is the same everywhere. The frontiers contract, more and more fringe worlds break away from the central government. It has been going on for centuries; the war that destroyed the Old Federation shattered a community of worlds far larger than the Empire. The Hamati Confederacy and the Believers Sodality were once both part of the Federation. The Empire has lost control over them, just as each century if loses dominion over more of its frontier.

Someday a war will come that will drive the Empire into a fragmented barbarism, and even the name of Empire will perish. The technology that supports its economy will be lost, and all that will remain will be apes scavenging in a boneyard, looking up at the stars.

Kiffit’s one of the few places in the Outfar where the port city was there before the port-a ancient and valued member of our varied and colorful Empire. Paladin says Kiffit used to be bigger and thriving, but it was fine with me if it wasn’t now. The parts of it I was interested in still seemed in good enough shape to me.

By now the horizon’d risen and cut off Kiffit’s primary, and the Kiffit-Port security lighting wasn’t on yet. Bad light’s saved more lives than bodysnatchers in my line of work, so that was the time I picked to head out.

###

The Elephant and Starcastle in Borderline is where the Gentry on Kiffit hang their heat. Like any other hooch servicing a port, the Starcastle’s on a full-rotation sked. Stardancers on the up-and-out aren’t going to rearrange their circadians every time they downfall.

I didn’t have any trouble getting a room with no view and a box with locks sunk into the floor. I’d have to be more of an idiot than even Pally thought I was to cold-call on a total stranger carrying 3K of illegal. The lockbox was the reason I’d rented the room.

I put the densepaks under lock and seal and threw enough of my own stuff around to make it look natural. It was after full-dark when I went down to sightsee in the unregulated planetary air.

The early evening streets was full of fellahim and grubbers tied to planetary rotation. I saw Company men from Directorate ships in their lovely gray leathers, Indie crews trooping their colors like a pack of bandarlog, and the kiddies that catered to both. Borderline’s a planned city, which means that after a certain point the plans give out and there’s nothing but a sprawl of back-alley mazes. If you fight your way through them long enough, you reach Borderline New City, which is also nice and tidy.

I’d checked at the PortServices shop and found where the Azarine Guildhouse was, but Tiggy’d made that none of my concern. The address I had from Gibberfur was for a transient outhostel called Danbourg Strail that was a little farther out. Joytown was on left, and behind me and to the right was the commercial port towers. Company again, rot them, with their stranglehold on Mid-Worlds and Directorate shipping and their nasty way of holing any Indie ship they run into, just for kicks. Guild sanctions don’t mean a helluva lot to them.

I kept going. Eventually I left wondertown behind; I didn’t mind the walk, and it’s always good to know the ground you may have to retreat over later.

I was a couple kliks from the port, and all the way to the thin edge of the city planners’ good intentions. The area I was in now had been razed for new building but no buildings had gone up. It was being used as sort of a open-air market; unregulated and ramshackle. About as thriving as any place in Borderline was, which wasn’t saying lots. My destination was just the other side.

The Danbourg Strail was the kind of outhostel where you usually go to sell things you don’t own. I went on up to the cubie-number I’d been given back on Wanderweb. According to Gibberfur, Moke Rahone kept regular hours here and these were those.

I’d also been told to call before I came. Sure I would. And maybe my kick would waft in here on the wings of song, too.

Punched the bell. The door said it belonged-along Moke Rahone, specialist in curiosa. It wasn’t powered, but it wasn’t locked either. I slid it back and looked inside.

There was a empty waiting area, full of vitrines that were full of junk. I walked in.

"Yo, che-bai, je tuerre? Art t’home, forbye?" I said in broad patwa. Nobody answered this brilliant conversational sally, but maybe Moke Rahone, dealer in curiosa, didn’t like being shouted at.

There was a door with the Intersign glyph for "boss inside" on it, and I opened that one too.

Kiffit is a dry planet. It was wet in that cubie, and dark. I stood there long enough for my nose to tell me what the smell was, and then I backed out. Then I waited a moment, got my torch out of my pocket, and went back in.

I’ve slaughtered pigs and I’ve killed men, but it wasn’t like either one. When I was ten years old a field hand on our farm got caught in the harvester. He was half-shredded before we could stop the team, and the sweet-metal stink was just like this.

Moke Rahone’d been human. Funny how your body knows a smell before your brain does.

Brother Rahone hadn’t got caught in a harvester, though. I turned the torch on him and studied what I saw like my life depended on it, which it might.

Somebody’d nailed Moke Rahone to his desk and butchered him open. It was dainty-like. Real bodysnatcher work, done with something sharp-something that didn’t burn like a pocket laser or chew up the meat like a vibro.

What this meant to me was that Brother Rahone wasn’t in the paying for cargo business anymore, which put me in what Paladin calls your basic delicate moral quandary, because I had to deliver Gibberfur’s cargo to someone or call in the Guild. Terrific.

And there was one other thing. It was sticking up out of Rahone’s insides and it hadn’t been part of his original manifest. Hadn’t noticed it before in the general confusion, but it might tell me who killed him, and who might be interested in taking over his cargo.

"Trouble, Butterfly?" said Paladin through the RTS.

I rubbed my jaw where it felt electric-furry. "Um. Rahone’s retired from darktrade business. Messy."

I pulled off my glove and yanked out the optional extra somebody’d left with Brother Rahone. What I got for my trouble was long and thin, pointed at one end and with feathers at the other. It was mostly red, but where it was dry it was a kind of blue animal bone with carving on it.