Patrimony (8 page)

“Very well. I accept the recommendation and thank you for your help. Where and when can I meet this gentleman?”

More airy emoting accompanied a reprise of the previous amused gargling. “Bleshmaa is notnot gentleman.”

There were indeed, he noted a few minutes later as the escort he had agreed to engage left her workstation and ambled over to join them, subtle differences between male and female Tlel. In contrast with humans, sexual dimorphism was not as blatant but, once understood, was easy to recognize.

Clad in the by now familiar transparent vest and elaborately decorated leggings, Bleshmaa had a neck shorter than those of the Tlel whom Flinx knew to be male. An unobtrusive difference, but one that he learned was common and consistent among the locals. Though just as flat as those of her male counterparts, his escort’s skull was not as wide. Personal adornment was restricted to the same kind of cosmetic fur-tinting that was practiced equally by both sexes. The lower portion of the body tended to broaden out as it approached the upper legs.

“I am Bleshmaa.” Like a loading bucket on the end of a small crane, one cilium-tipped limb rose toward him. A handful of worms encircled his proffered fingers to complete the approximation of a primate handshake. The gesture was not unexpected. Humans, he knew, had been living alongside the Tlel for a long time. The cilia contracted gently. It was like shaking hands with a warm-blooded squid. When it was over, the digits did not so much withdraw as slide off his fingers.

“Nice to meet you.” He hesitated, then added helpfully, “You can call me Flinx. It’s an old nickname.”

“Claladag,”
she responded. “Like a title.”

“No, not a title,” he corrected her. “Something less…” He shrugged. The definition was not important. “Yes, like a title.” Looking down at himself, he indicated the iridescent green triangular-shaped head that was regarding the new arrival attentively from its resting place within his partly open jacket. “This is Pip.”

Bleshmaa’s eyeband regarded the minidrag. “Fur its size, very strongstrong
flii,
” she commented.

Flii
was the Tlelian term for an entity’s individual electrical field, he recalled from his intensive pre-arrival research. Another word cemented in his slowly but steadily expanding vocabulary. “I need to go north to interview another of my kind,” he told her. “How soon can you be ready?”

“I am not partnered. Can leave now.” She turned to the patient, watching officials. “They will see tu it that the necessary forms are appropriately flooded using my values. I will report total billable time upon returning.”

Flinx would have thanked the pair of helpful bureaucrats again had they not turned and walked away, returning to their work. He found himself alone with his escort.

“Yu have coordinates?” she asked him. He nodded. Pivoting, she started for the exit. “Then time spent talking here is useless evaporation. Also costing yu money.”

Appreciating her concern while trailing in her wake, he could not have agreed more.

Not only did Norin Halvorsen not look like what he was, he did not even look like his name. He was short and bald except for scattered, fitful swirls of dark brown hair that clung to the side of his head, with a paunch that was just large enough to demand attention. This was complemented by a puffy face, a bulbous and perpetually sunburned nose, eyes that might have twinkled were they not set in a permanent squint, and a mouth that unaccountably appeared frozen in a perpetual grin. He looked more like a badly out-of-shape elf than a scavenger of other people’s miseries, which was a polite way of defining what he did for a living.

Halvorsen tracked down those who owed money, services, or bits and pieces of themselves to sometimes honest, sometimes less-than-reputable concerns. He did this with absolute disregard for the designated unfortunate’s personal situation. To Halvorsen, the term
mitigating circumstances
was an oxymoron. Those unlucky enough to come to his attention might lose a vehicle, a business, a home—or a significant body part. He was not above employing physical violence to carry out his work, up to and including threatening bodily harm to otherwise innocent spouses and children. To Halvorsen, a guiltless child was just another correlated asset, albeit an irritatingly noisy one. Moreover, children’s bones were easier to break than those of the adults he was employed to chase down, and they rarely fought back.

In short—and he very nearly was—Norin Halvorsen the person was as disagreeable as his profession: a noisome if fitting match. He was a foul and forlorn person to be around, unless he had just been paid. The rest of the time he had little use for humanity and even less for other sentients. He was proud of the fact that for each and every known nonhuman species he had invented a personal, unique, and highly offensive slur.

Unlike many others who practiced the same odious occupation, Halvorsen prided himself on his professionalism. Not a day went by that he failed to scan every available form of media, legal and otherwise, for prospective business. He also paid close attention to local and planetary gossip, no matter how lowly its nature or disreputable the source. The infrequent overlooked diamond, he was wont to reflect philosophically, was occasionally to be found buried in piles of excrement. He had no compunction about rooting through the latter in search of the former.

Take the surreptitious appeal his highly specialized search software had recently finished decoding, for example. Concealed within a line of the mundane greater Commonwealth news that was diffused daily via space-minus transmission, it consisted of a sizable reward that was being offered by some eccentric outfit calling itself “the Order of Null.” This was to be paid for the verifiable demise of an apparently unremarkable citizen name of Philip Lynx, who sometimes went by the terse nickname of Flinx. Halvorsen had never heard of the individual in question or the faction that wanted him dead. His ignorance in these twinned respects, the fact that he knew nothing about either, troubled him not a whit.

What he did know was figures. The one promised by the Order of Null was substantial, electronically escrowed, and waiting for whoever could deliver certifiable proof of the unknown Mr. Lynx’s death. As to the nature of the individual who had been thus perversely singled out—his character and morality, family and dreams, personal probity or individual worth—this in no wise whatsoever impinged on Norin Halvorsen’s conscience. The gentleman in question might be a saint, a sinner, or representative of the 99 percent of imperfect humankind whose makeup fell somewhere in between. It made not the slightest difference.

The great majority of such automated reports offered their diligent reader nothing more than interesting reading and occasional unexpected entertainment. Only rarely did they augur anything substantial. This new one focusing on the citizen Lynx certainly did. Halvorsen sat up a little straighter as he studied the floating image his desk unit had automatically generated in the air before him. This just might be, perhaps, one of those rare instances.

Because his expensive, well-maintained, continuously updated custom programming had, quite unexpectedly, made a match.

A recent arrival to Gestalt, the individual his instrumentation had sculpted out of the air above the desk went by the name of Skua Mastiff. Other than that, he fit the details and imaging supplied in the illicit appeal flawlessly. The straightforward visual reconstruction was a perfect equivalent. Height, build, hair and eye color, skin tone—other than adopting an alias, this Flinx person had made no attempt to disguise himself. The presence of a rare winged Alaspinian pet, also visible in the sybfile Halvorsen’s instrumentation had illegitimately pilfered from Port Immigration via illegally accessing certain supposedly secure portions of the Gestalt planetary Shell, provided the clincher when it came to making the identification unconditional.

Such apparent indifference to personal appearance on the part of an individual others of his kind badly wanted dead suggested a number of possibilities, every one of which raised a warning flag within Halvorsen the professional. For example, this Flinx might not be aware that a sizable reward had been offered in return for his termination. Or—he might know of it, and feel he was safe on a world like Gestalt. Or he might know of it, and feel so sure of his ability to defend himself that physical disguise was a safeguard he could safely forgo. As he picked up his communit, into which the information from his desk had automatically been transferred, Halvorsen was equally confident in his ability to claim the pledged payment. In the course of his ignoble career he had run to ground and successfully dealt with wanted families, groups, and teams. One individual, no matter how self-assured or well-trained, no matter how lethal the implied capabilities of his exotic pet, inspired little trepidation.

Idly, he wondered who this Flinx was, what he might have done, or whom he might have offended to inspire such a splendidly hefty incentive for his demise. Halvorsen did not waste more than a minute or two on such speculation. The only raison d’être he required to justify his intermittently murderous dealings was the number of zeros that followed the initial number on an offer of remuneration.

Following lunch, he instructed his exclusive and highly sophisticated instrumentation to embark on a planetwide scan for the newly arrived visitor. Even taking into account this Flinx-Lynx person’s lack of any serious attempt to disguise himself, the search was concluded absurdly soon. Moreover, his objective had been in Tlossene itself as recently as the previous day. I might have passed him on the street, Halvorsen reflected as he rose from his chair. The hotel where the visitor had stayed was only a short hop away by public transport. If they had any information on the intentions or habits of a guest who had so recently checked out, this was going to be a quick job indeed. Quick and clean—that was how Halvorsen liked them, his professional life being so very different from his private one.

Of course the hotel management could not possibly think of releasing nonauthorized personal information on one of their recent guests. The human clerk Halvorsen spoke with did, however, let slip in the course of the conversation with the pudgy and squat albeit polite figure confronting him the number of the room where the guest in question had stayed. It was a harmless morsel of information. Though regretful at not obtaining what he sought, a smiling Halvorsen voiced his thanks. Simultaneously, he amused himself by mentally flaying the handsome and barely contemptuous young clerk until not an inch of skin remained on his red, raw, screaming body. Keeping his fury to himself as always, he left the reception area and settled himself in one of the several thick, highly responsive chairs that dotted the outer lobby.

Pretending to view a local tridee cast, he utilized his customized communit to remotely riff the files in the hotel’s subox. Preset to make a match should it find the appropriate one, it did so within seconds, generating a sybfile that a grunting Halvorsen swiftly devoured. Every detail of the guest’s stay, from the food he had ordered into his room to any communications that had been passed on to him via the hotel’s subox to how often he had used his room’s facilities to sanitize his clothing, lay open to Halvorsen’s perusal.

Of particular interest were multiple contacts with several rental agencies. Inventing and feigning a relationship to the now departed guest “Skua Mastiff,” Halvorsen contacted each of these enterprises in turn, claiming to be holding something of importance that his good friend Mr. Mastiff had left behind at his hotel. Both less protective of their client’s privacy and more concerned with their respective reputations for helpfulness, each agency responded with appropriate concern. Only one, however, acknowledged having had commercial intercourse with the young visitor in question.

Visiting that agency in person, Halvorsen killed time until his ever-questing instruments had quietly and furtively extracted the information he needed from the agency’s subox. Whether owned by an individual, a company, or various branches of government, every skimmer in use on Gestalt had a location tracker integrated into its instrumentation. Found commonly in skimmers used on Earth or Hive-hom or any other highly developed Commonwealth world, trackers were of proportionately more importance on wilder, less populated worlds such as Gestalt. They allowed the location of each vehicle to which they were affixed to be pinpointed from multiple sources by satellite relay at any time of day irrespective of inclement weather or awkward terrain, and continually updated the craft’s position.

According to its integrated tracker, Halvorsen noted as he once more studied the readout on his communit after leaving the agency, the skimmer the visitor had rented was presently occupying a stationary position in the northern town of Sluuvaneh.

This was going to be almost too easy, he reflected contentedly. The Tlel community in question was located less than a day’s travel from Tlossene. Considerably smaller than either of Gestalt’s twin capital cities, it would offer a tall redheaded offworlder little room in which to hide even if he realized there was reason for him to make himself inconspicuous. While Halvorsen made it a point not to dally when engaged in business, neither did there appear to be any untoward urgency in pursuing this particular quarry. The unpredictability of the weather on Gestalt also had to be taken into account. For that and other reasons, whenever it could be avoided he preferred not to fly at night.

There was no rush. He had plenty of time. Judging by his actions subsequent to his arrival on Gestalt, this Flinx individual plainly had no idea anyone local might have more than a passing interest in him. Halvorsen could take it easy, check out his equipment, enjoy a proper supper, and start out first thing tomorrow morning. By evening of the next day at the latest, he would have in his possession incontrovertible, verifiable proof of a corpse to pass along via space-minus beam to the group called the Order of Null. He could expect the pertinent hefty credit transfer to follow directly.