Hellflower (v1.1) (26 page)

Olione was underwhelmed too. "But you have the chobosh for delivery."

"Got ticket-of-leave right here," I said, not showing it to him. It didn’t look like I could follow Paladin’s plan just now, so I guessed I’d better go back to following Rimini’s. But I didn’t see anything that looked like a aerosledge, or room for it in land-yacht.

"Yet you have also brought Errol Lightfoot," Olione said. "Wrong. He tried to jack my kick; blew my ship out of space. Lucky you showed up. Uh, where are you putting cargo, Olione che-bai?" Olione’s hand dropped to where good little headhunters keep their heat, and for an instant I thought it was the end of my favorite darktrader. Then his eyes flickered up and he stopped.

"Butterfly, there is something-" Paladin broke in on this tender moment, and Errol started waking up behind Olione, and Olione turned away without doing anything I’d regret. "No, it’s gone now. Scanner echoes." Paladin’s timing was off. Whatever it was’d keep.

"Olione? About the cargo? I haven’t got forever. You going to dance it, or I leave it to rot?"

"Your contract specifics delivery of the cargo at the spaceport, Captain-Owner St. Cyr," said Olione like he was reading it off a prompt. There was definitely something damn funny going on. He wanted the chobosh; he’d come for the chobosh-and now he wanted to play "Mother-May-I" with my delivery specs? Besides, he was lying. "Contract specifies damn-all about delivery site, bai. What’s wrong with here?"

"Unfortunately we are not prepared to take delivery of the cargo here. If you can get it to MhonePort, my principal will take delivery. If not. . . ."

"You out of your mind?" I yelped. "Get it there how?"

"If you wish, you may forfeit your right in the cargo now. Your ship is obviously disabled. You will be unable to finish your run."

"Hell, I hit the right hemisphere of the planet, didn’t I? You want to walk this one through Guild arbitration, you cold-blooded
noke-ma’ashki?
Tell Parxifal-" Olione suddenly took on the look of a sophont with something on his alleged mind involving me being dead, " -that I be right in, couple hours, with cargo and all." I watched Errol out of the corner of my eye, hoping he’d finish distracting Olione for me. "After all, I still got one ship-" I gestured at the
Lady.

"You are leaving your own ship here and claiming the Fenshee ship to finish your run?" Olione asked.

"You can’t do that!" Errol choodled, E above F-flat sharp. He attempted to climb through Headhunter Number One and renew our friendship, bless his heart. Olione gave the high-sign, and Errol won a gun butt in the back of the head. Olione’s goons dropped him in the back of the yacht and looked hopeful.

"Light Lady’s
mine by right of salvage," I said loudly. "You can tell Parxifal that." Which’d amuse hell out of him since Parxifal, unlike Olione, knew something about stardancers. Anybody with half a synapse’d know I hadn’t the least desire to kyte
Light Lady,
but least it distracted Olione from his clever idea of saving the transport fee by executing me.

"I’ll put the chobosh aboard and bring it to MhonePort-and you better be ready to dance then, Olione-che-bai babby." It was almost too bad about Errol, but Parxifal’s nightworld machine’d tune him up and let him go. A pilot was a pilot, even if the pilot was Errol.

"As you say, Captain-Owner St. Cyr." Olione bundled his disappointed goons and Errol and various odds and ends into his flashy bus and left. I walked over and sat down with my back against
Firecat’s
hull and wondered how the hell I was going to get my cargo off her.

I had one ship that probably flew-
Lady
-one ship that didn’t-mine-a damaged load of illegal veg, the kidnapped heir to an alMayne GreatHouse, an illegal and immoral Old Fed Library, and I was out in the inhospitable center of nowhere on an Outfar planet.

Business as usual. I moved over to where paladin could punch a signal through
Firecat’s
open hatch.

"Well, so much for the plan. Got any more bright ideas?"

"It can still work, Butterfly. Just get me to where I can access the MheriPort computers.
Firecat
does not matter now.
Light Lady
will convey you to MhonePort, and then we will find a suitable small hypership for you and Valijon to fly. Forget
Firecat. "

Firecat
was my pet. The first ship I’d owned-the first
thing
I’d owned-free, clear, and all found. And she wasn’t ever going to fly again. Because of Errol.

"I wouldn’t take that flying coffin out of atmosphere for the Phoenix Throne gift-wrapped! You know what the great Captain damn Lightfoot’s idea of hyperdrive maintenance is? A new paint job, that’s what! He doesn’t care-" I shut up. Errol didn’t care about his ship any more than he cared about people.

He was going to care. I was going to make him care. Before he died. Errol Lightfoot was going to care about something-and I was going to smash it.

I wished.

"There is no point in mourning the obvious," Paladin observed dispassionately.
"Firecat
will never fly again. You cannot remain here. You have told Olione you would bring in Parxifal’s cargo, and it is reasonable that you do so. If you wish to rendezvous with the
Pledge Of Honor
before it enters Throne satrapy space-"

"Damn it." The Pledge was at Royal in tile Tortuga sector now; Tiggy’d said her next stop was Mikasa-and High and Low Mikasa was close enough to Grand Central that I could never get there.

So Paladin was right. And
Firecat
didn’t care. Not any more than Tiggy’s damned
arthame
cared. Not ship nor knife cared what Tiggy and me’d done to keep them.

###

I went back into
Firecat,
and the scent of chobosh was enough to make the deck go up and down. I found my med-tech and taped myself back together, then finished uncovering Tiggy and dragged him outside.

All Tiggy’s brain waves made the right spikes on the medkit scanner when I found it and hooked it up, and Bonecrack St. Cyr diagnosed chobosh intoxication on top of a helluva knock, which’s same thing I figured without technology. Then I put on a breather mask and went back inside and got down to work. The first thing to do was unship Paladin and put him in
Light Lady
while Tiggy was in la-la land.

Ah, the glamorous free airy life of the spaceways. Is better than dirt-farming on the downside, but how much is that saying, really? After some scuffling, I found my tools and got the mercy seat out of the cockpit well, but that was all I got. T bent a pry-bar and the rest of my temper out of shape before I gave up.

"Babby-bai, you stuck."

" ‘Stuck’?" Paladin sounded outraged. "Perhaps if you-"

"Don’t teach your grandmother how to kyte starships, Paladin. You and me rebuilt
Firecat
together, remember? Cockpit well’s designed specifically to hold you. Well, the landing warped the deck plates. You’re lucky you’re still alive. And you’re not going anywhere until I can cut the deck plates up."

Which meant I was actually going to have to deliver the chobosh. I didn’t know how long I was going to be stuck in RoaqPort, but I bet I’d better have the chobosh when I got there. I went over to look at
Light Lady.

Say what you will about flying phone booths and anything else you want to hold against my Best Girl; she’s clean, and she’s maintained.
Light Lady,
smelled, and not like any canned air that ever cleared DelKhobar customs, either.

She had two two-place cabins-one of which was full of useless junk-a common room, sonic fresher, galley, and two cargo holds. Tile holds was filthy and disorganized. I couldn’t imagine where Errol wanted to sell half that stuff, or why, and I hated to think what’d happen the first time his para-gravity and inertial compensators blew. Then I came to something that changed my mind about a lot of things.

"Paladin?" But he was two hulls away and couldn’t hear me.

It looked like a piece of dirty glass-what you get sometimes when you take off from sonic rinky-dink Port in the Outfar that’s too cheap to floor the landing rings. It had flecks of color embedded in it, and black lines that seemed to twist off at right angles from everything at once. And floating on the Surface like fuel slick was the loops and whorls of Old Federation Script, in gold.

I was holding a Old Federation Library in my hands-or part of one anyway. This was what Paladin looked like inside when you opened him up. I knew.

I wanted to break it, or take it . . . somewhere. Instead I put it back in the box where I’d found it and left the hold.

Errol made a damned unlikely Librarian. And it was even more unlikely that him having this had nothing to do with the High Book investigation opening up on Kiffit. There was a fine silver thread connecting Point A and Point B. Silver Dagger.

I’d thought she wanted me to kill Errol, and much as he needed killing, now I wasn’t sure. And there was still the question of how he’d found me. You can’t track a ship through hyperspace. If Errol was in the Roaq, it was because he knew where I was going. . . .

...
Or because he was going here anyway. To explain that the cargo he was supposed to bring had been hijacked.

What kind of a moron blackmails someone-at great personal expense-to hijack a cargo and then bring it to the same place and person it was going to in the first place? Parxifal was the Roaq. Any cargo would go through him, no matter who brought it.

I didn’t like any of this. And the farther I tried to get from it, the deeper I got in.

###

Lady’s
cockpit was locked. When I got it open I found the primary ignition threaded through the flight computer with a coded sequence. I could spend rest of my life trying to break the code. Net result: two paperweights and one dead stardancer.

But I didn’t have to break it.

Errol had about a klick’s worth of connector cables, so I cabled
Light Lad
v’s computer up to Paladin so’s he could fool about and then went to look at tile rest of the ship.

I didn’t tell Paladin about the piece of Library in Errol’s hold. What could he do about it, anyway?

And if he asked me to hook it up, I wasn’t sure I would.

###

Errol’s goforths proved that Errol wasn’t just lunatic, but suicide. I spent about eighty minutes resynching what I could, but I couldn’t flush the system because Errol didn’t have any spare liquid crystal. This was the only one of the many things Errol didn’t have, including my respect, which’d mortify him, true-tell.

"Butterfly?"

"Go away, I’m busy." Hooking Paladin up to the
Lady
had the happy side effect of increasing his transmission range again. "Butterfly, there’s something you need to know."

I put down the hardbrush and wipers. "Is Tiggy okay?"

"Valijon is well." Paladin was using the
Lady’s
external sensors to keep eye on my sleeping beauty. "Valijon is not the problem. I have been monitoring system-wide broadcasts through
Light Lady’s
equipment. This provides news of current events; though the information comes from the Office of the Imperial Censor, it is sometimes useful to have the official version of-"

"Spill it."

"The Governor-General has changed his Outfar itinerary. He will be here sooner than expected."

"When?"

"Twenty hours from now-local tomorrow. The Port will close in fifteen hours, Butterfly."

There’s a point past which not only does it not pay to worry no more, but you hardly blink at each new visiting awful. It wasn’t even worth goggling over the fact that the one thing needed to make my life complete had moved Drift and Rift to be here for me. Mallorum Archangel and his closed-Port, martial law, spot ID checks for all and sundry wondershow. If he checked me, I was dead, and Tiggy didn’t even have ID to check. In fifteen hours all three of us had to be off-planet somehow, and Pally and me both knew it.

So I finished doing what I could for Errol’s goforths and then moved one hundred and forty-four cartons of chobosh back into
Light Lady.
By hand. Alone.

Tiggy slept through all this light fantastic. He’d wake up eventually from a round of dreams that hadn’t been factored through any hellflower court of honor, and meanwhile I had to decide whether it was safer to load him in next to the chobosh or leave him at
Firecat
with Paladin. There was three good reasons to leave him here.

One: Parxifal’s people was going to be all over
Lady
, and I didn’t know how recognizable the Nobly-Born Third Person Singular was.

Two: Wasn’t anyplace for Tiggy to run off to out here in case he got a sudden case of honor, and

Three: I didn’t think I could carry him far as Errol’s ship.

All these being equal I dragged my hellflower supercargo into
Light Lady,
just for perversity’s sake. If
Lady
blew up and killed me, I just knew Tiggy’d want to go too. I tucked him in between the red satin sheets of the captain’s bed and he looked lots better there than Errol or me ever had.

Then I went and coiled up Errol’s cables and put salvage beacons all around
Firecat
and went in to give Paladin threes and eights. Already
Firecat
looked like somebody else’s ship. Piece of junk, really-too small, underarmed, nothing but speed going for her. Living conditions rough, cargo space cramped "Well," I said, real original. The hull seemed to echo back, which was damsilly farcing.

"Are you ready to lift ship now, Butterfly?" Paladin asked. I convinced myself real hard that I wasn’t leaving him. I’d come back, I’d get him out, we’d be together in a
new
ship. . . .

"Ready as that tin bitch’ll ever be. Soon as I get her down in MhonePort I’ll come back and get
Firecat.
We can pop you in
Light Lady
at Port and be up-and-out before horizonfall: golden.
Lady’s
good for the hop across the system if her goforths don’t blow here. Or-" But I could suggest to Paladin later that there was space to hide him on
Lady.
Errol’s darktrading compartments were da kine; even the Office of the Question wouldn’t find him in there.