Hellflower (v1.1) (5 page)

· I looked around and Tiggy was halfway back down the corridor, stopped dead and sight-seeing. I turned back.

"Ain’t time to sightsee, ‘flower. Grab sky!" I took him by his wrist and pulled. It was like trying to shift a neutronium statue.

"My
arthame, chaudatu.
I must have it."

Just what I needed. More hellflower gibberish.

"My Knife," Tiggy expanded. "I cannot leave without my Knife. They have taken it from me; do you know where it is?"

There wasn’t anybody around to see or hear but there would be soon. "Look; I’ll buy you a new one; c’mon!" I gave one last yank, which meant I was still holding on when Tiggy took off in the opposite direction. Ever been dragged down a empty hall by a hellflower oblivious to threats, comments, and reasonable objections? I don’t recommend it.

Paladin picked up on what was going on from listening to me and started doing a nice counterpoint; telling me to ditch the glitterborn and kyte.

"Hold it, hold it-hold it!" I yelled, stopping one and shutting up the other. "Look-goddammit, ‘flower, will you slow down? Just hold it a minute, forbye."

Tiggy Stardust stopped and glared glacially down at me from severalmany centimeters up.

"I will listen."

"You telling me you gonna throw it all away and go charging back inside to get yourself totally dusted and iced at least twice-for a
knife?"

"I will not leave without it. I cannot. It is not a ‘knife.’ It is my—" "Don’t start. Won’t make any more sense’n anything else you ever said. Whatever it is, you’re going the wrong way. Your knife’s in Property with the rest of your kit. I’ll help you get it. Then we leave, je, che-bai?"

"Dzain’domere."

Right.

And they say
hellflowers
are crazy.

We dogged it back the other way and all of a sudden instead of empty the place was full of enough securitronics to reassure me that Wanderweb PortSec still had the good numbers. We had to blow them away before they could use gas, or ticklers, or anything else, and Paladin was so disgusted he didn’t say damn-all. Real Soon Now I figured City Central Computer’d change the securitronics’ programming from "Contain" to "Destroy." I’d sort of intended to be gone before that happened, but you know how it gets. It’d been a while since I’d had this much homegrown fun, and only the fact that it was me and a hellflower doing the utterly unreasonable against a bunch of tronics saved our bones.

###

Tiggy’s knife was in Dead Storage, which was somewhere between Receiving and Records (being public-access for financial reasons) and I wanted to get there before we ran out of grenades, blaster-paks, and luck. I’d of liked Paladin’s input on which door to choose, but he was still on strike and they all looked alike to me.

The high numbers was on City Central evacing organics from this section, sealing it, and calling up a shift of coked wartoys from the Det levels to finish us. Fine. I always did want to live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.

On the other hand, if I could just find Dead Storage, I’d lay credit I wouldn’t have to die at all. I said so.

"You should be in a corridor where the doors have colors. The colors will be red and blue. Attempt all doors which have the same color as the corridor walls," said Paladin in my ear. He sounded resigned.

There was a door like that just ahead. I blew the lock, it opened, we went in. I dogged it shut with the emergency manual controls. Tiggy looked around. I looked around.

"Here you go, ‘flower. Knife is somewheres in here."

The room was too-damn big-although even a phone booth would of been too big right now-too-damn dark, and too-damn full with too-damn many things. It looked like every hock shop in the universe.

"What you should be seeing, Butterfly, is a large room. All walls except the one behind you are lined with cabinets. There are rows of display cases containing weaponry along the floor. There is no other access to the room except the one you entered through. From what the City Central Computer is saying to the Justiciary computers, I do not believe your current location is known. I suggest you find the hellflower’s
arthame
quickly."

"Yeah, yeah," I muttered.

###

Wanderweb justice is run on the profit motive. Commit a crime here, and you get sentenced, which means the Justiciary sets a price on your head. You meet the price, you walk. You don’t meet it, you’re contract warmgoods, with your contract time equal to your price. Short-timers go up for auction in the city. If your contract time runs longer than the projected life span for your B-pop, you’re a slave. Slaves are factored directly to Market Garden. A few crimes call for execution-like Tiggy’s.

But they still manage to lose money, so what does a cost-effective bureaucracy do to defray expenses? It confiscates the personal effects of offenders who can’t meet their fines and sells them at auction.

Hence Dead Storage. Hence us.

###

"So what’s this knife look like?" I asked Tiggy. I looked around for the display case that held heat-for-sale. Might as well help him look. "You saw it when I held it to your throat, three days past."

"Oh, too reet-all we’re looking for is inert-blade sword as long as my arm. In all this."

Being as they’re what keep Wanderweb Fiduciary in the green, weapons are prominently displayed. Didn’t see any inert-blades, but I zapped the lock off the case anyway and started looking through it.

"You have just set off every intruder alarm remaining untriggered in the entire Wanderweb Justiciary," Paladin said.

"Great," I told the immediate world, hefting an Estel-Shadowmaker handcannon too pretty to leave and wondering where I could put it. I tucked it into my shirt and added a necklace of grenades.

I started to throw away the comlink, then thought it might be handy if Paladin could hear the hellflower too, so I kept it.

There was a wrenching sound, and I looked up to see Tiggy Stardust ripping open the locked cabinets on the wall with his bare hands. Some B-pops have it, some don’t. Hellflowers have more of it than most. The first drawer held jewelry, and he threw it down.

"Would it do any good at all to tell you to abandon the alMayne and leave now?" asked Paladin. "They know where you are, Butterfly. The alarm has been raised, the CityGuard has been mobilized Port wide, and quarantine has been declared-the spaceport has been closed."

Closed Port. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. I tried to remember if there were any tractors or pressors on the section of the field where I was docked.

"All this just for us," I said, and Tiggy shot me a funny look. I expect he was thinking I meant the glitterflash he’d just dropped, but it reminded me that one does not talk to one’s beaucoup-illegal Library in front of a witness-even if the witness had no way of knowing who or what or even where I was chaffering with.

I waved. He went back to vandalism. "No," I said to Paladin’s question.

Tiggy’s coke-gutter had to be in one of the cabinets because it sure and t’hell wasn’t in any of the display cases. We found it in the last drawer of the last cabinet of the whole wall and Tiggy grabbed it like it was hard credit on payday and stuffed it into his waistband. I’d took the time to find a couple of rifles to replace the last set we’d emptied and was just handing him one when we both heard the teeth-edging whine of a fusion-cutter setting to work.

"Well hell," I said. "J’ais tuc. You and your damn knife." Paladin’d said there was just one way out of Dead Storage, and the fusion-cutter was in the middle of it.

"It is not a ‘knife.’ It is my
arthame.
We will die nobly and with honor, and they who have unjustly attacked a son of the Gentle People will weep when the vengeance of my clan—"

"I don’t want to die with honor! I don’t want to die at all if I can help it-and I certainly don’t want to die here, with you, after you futzed up your own rescue, you dumb
noke-ma’ashki
alMayne!"

He might not of known what the words meant, but he sure followed the tune. He had The Knife Worth A Afterlife out and pointing at me, which did not bother me half as much as the fusion-cutter did.

"Butterfly!" Paladin shouted in my ear. Tiggy took a step toward me. I wondered if that thing could slice as well as he obviously thought it could.

"Not now," I suggested without hope. They both ignored me: "The plans I have of that level of the Justiciary show an air vent leading out of Storage and Receivables that should get you past the sealed section. And if you keep talking to the alMayne like that you won’t have to attempt it-you’ll be dead."

Thank you, Paladin. "Death is least of my worries," I said aloud. On the other hand, Paladin did have a point.

"Look here, hellflower, how’d you like to live and grow old and raise up a whole garden of ‘flowers instead of buying real estate?" Tiggy continued looking earnest. Fusion-cutter continued upping the ambient temperature in Dead Storage by leaps and boggles. Paladin continued wringing his hands in my ear.

"We can get out through vents. There’s one in here-see? And you look skinny enough to fit."

But oddly enough Tiggy Stardust did not look like escape was high on his list of life goals. I said how ‘flowers drop everything for a good old honor-bashing session, and here I was getting one free for nothing. The fusion-cutter was just about in with us, the door was as pink and glowing as an Imperial sub-lieutenant, and I gave up and decided it was time to play ace-king-trump.

"Saved your life, o’noblyborn — at least you should have the good manners to cooperate in your own rescue."

That got him. He looked real pained-not as fried as me for having had to push his honor buttons but miffed all the same-and put his sacred ferrous oxide butter-spreader away.

"Very well,
chaudatu.
I will cooperate. What is it that you wish?"

"The damn air vent. It’s got to be around here somewheres, and then you an me can—" There it was-about halfway up the wall and probably just as hard to get the grille off as the last one was. "Can climb wall, ace cover off vent?"

He looked up, nodded, and went back to glaring at me with pellucid raptor-blue eyes. Damn but don’t I love having cannon-fodder to do the heavy work.

"So do it. And get in. I’ll follow you." I turned my attention to covering our retreat.

###

The
legitimates
should of been a tad bit more cautious. I mean, the confiscated weaponry in Dead Storage would do credit to an Imperial Armory, and a whole lot of it was catch-traps and explosives of one flavor or another.

I climbed up a .cabinet using the open drawers for footholds and played ringtoss with some grenades for hoops and the door for a spindle. By now the door was yellow-white. The grenades stuck, and a mo ment later they blew, and I fell off the cabinet but rallied dazzling-like in time to catch a glimpse of Wanderweb Guardsmen in full powered armor lying in a tangled heap around their fusion-cutter. Then it was up in the sky junior birdmen time for yours truly, and being dragged up a wall by a cross hellflower with your lungs full of caustic perdition is another experience I don’t recommend.

###

"Hellflower?" I said to some of Tiggy’s more interesting backbones a while later.

"Ea, chaudatu?"

"You can shoot organics now."

"Thank you,
chaudatu. "

I figured by now that my choices on Wanderweb was death or lifecontract slavery, so it didn’t really matter now how many people I shot on the rest of the way out. Over the RTS Paladin was getting as close to using harsh language as he ever had, saying how I should of dusted Love’s Young Dream about six firefights ago, that I thought with my internal organs, that Wanderweb Free Port was going borneo trying to figure out what was going on, and, oh yes, I’d started a nice oxy-fire on the Admin level I’d just left and had I thought about how I was going to get to the lift to the surface?

I wanted to tell him I was sure he’d think of something, but Tiggy already thought I had fusion for supercargo and I figured one more toy in my attic and he’d shop me sure. So I concentrated on making time and distance through the vent and telling Tiggy where to head in, and regretting the impulse that made me pick up all that hardware back in the duty free zone we’d just left. My bruises had bruises, and on top of that, the vent was starting to fill with smoke.

It was getting to look like Pally’d picked the wrong grid for a first-and-last when I started to see a faint light on the walls that ought to be the main Receiving station. When we_ got up closer I tapped Tiggy and asked what he saw.

"A room. A desk. Many armed men in blue livery with Wanderweb City service marks. I count twelve
chaudatu
and six mechanicals, all armed and armored. Beyond these is a lift door."

"That is the lift you want," Paladin said, having listened in on this deathless chat by way of my comlink. "It will take you directly to ground level. There is a barricade on the lift, but it is lightly manned. Your speeder is still outside. I am doing preflight warm-up on
Firecat.
And I still think that this is not an intelligent form of recreation."

And sometimes I wonder why I keep him. "We want the lift," I said to Tiggy. "They’re trying to keep us down here, so they won’t have too many slugs at ground level. Burn the grille and drop these through it." While we was talking, I was trying to get some grenades out of my vest and into his hands-no cheap trick in a vent a little wider than my shoulders. "And hold your breath when you do-is riot-gas, je? Riotgas-bad stuff." I hoped he was getting the idea, since Tiggy didn’t seem to be real ace with Interphon. For that matter, neither was I. "Get to lift and be ready to come out other side blazing. I got speeder. When we’re out, we heading for spaceport."

"I have a shuttle there," said Tiggy.

"No hope. By time you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll, you’ll be took. We get up side in my ship."

"Just the three of us," Paladin murmured in my ear. "I thought you didn’t carry live freight, Independent Captain-Owner St. Cyr."