Shooting the Rift - eARC (15 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In which I unexpectedly renew a previous acquaintance.

In the event, I had far less than five hours rest: stray thoughts kept colliding like icebergs, and when I did manage to fall asleep at last it was in fitful, dream-haunted snatches, punctuated by trips to the head to relieve my aching bladder. When I finally gave it up as a bad job, rolled my pounding head off the pillow, and staggered down to the galley, it was scant comfort to find that most of my shipmates seemed hardly better off than I was.

“Drink this,” Sowerby said, handing me a mug full of something which looked and smelled as though it had just leaked from a pipe somewhere on the lower decks.

I took it, in a hand that hardly trembled at all. “What is it?”

“Better you don’t ask,” Remington told me cheerfully, sitting down next to the engineer with a plate full of bacon and eggs, which, to my hypersensitive stomach, hardly smelled any better than Sowerby’s mug full of glop.

“If you don’t want it, I do.” Clio lurched in looking even worse than I felt, grabbed the beverage, and downed it in one, not even pausing for breath. She pulled a nauseated expression as she put the mug down on the tabletop, waited expectantly for a heartbeat or two, then visibly relaxed. So, I noticed, did everyone else in the immediate vicinity. My puzzlement must have shown on my face, because as she sat down next to me, she explained. “If you’re going to throw up, it’ll be in the first couple of seconds.”

“Lovely,” I said, resolving to stick to my habitual hangover diet of toast and black coffee. But Remington had other ideas.

“Drink it,” he said, handing me another mug of the stuff. “I want you sharp this morning.” He looked me up and down, thoughtfully. “Or at least not tripping over your own tongue.”

“Aye aye, skipper.” The sarcasm was, perhaps, unwarranted, but you have to remember I wasn’t exactly at my most chipper. Following Clio’s example, I gulped it down before the gag reflex had a chance to kick in; though I have to admit it did its best, trotting up panting as soon as the thick sludge had disappeared down my gullet. It wasn’t the taste so much, although that was foul enough, but the texture, and the way it seemed to wriggle on the way down.

I held my breath, waiting to feel it on the way up again, but to my relief it stayed put, gradually filling my stomach with a warm, contented glow, as though I’d just finished a satisfying meal. Even the drumming in my temples seemed to quieten a little, and my eyes felt slightly less as though someone had spent the night diligently filling the sockets with sand.

“Feel any better?” Sowerby asked, and I nodded reflexively, without feeling as though the floor was shifting beneath my feet for the first time that morning.

“Much,” I admitted, to my honest surprise. Even Remington’s breakfast seemed less nauseating than it had done, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle a similar plateful myself.

The engineer nodded. “It’ll soak up the toxins. Couple of hours and you’ll feel like a new man.”

“I quite liked the old one,” Clio said, and grinned at me, with more than a trace of her old insouciance. “He certainly knew how to show a girl a good time.”

“Did he?” Rennau asked, appearing at my elbow with a similar breakfast to the Captain, although augmented with a thick slice of black pudding and a couple of pieces of fried bread, glistening with fat. My newly pacified stomach thought about rebelling again, decided it couldn’t be bothered, and subsided into quiescence. He regarded me thoughtfully. “You seem to have a Guilder’s knack of twisting trouble your way, I’ll say that for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, unsure if it had been meant as a compliment, but determined to take it as one. I smiled at Clio. “I’ve had a good mentor.”

“I’m sure you have,” Rennau said, eyeing me narrowly, before moving to a less crowded table.

By the time Remington and I set off into town I was feeling almost normal, apart from the faint echoes of a headache, and a persistent fluttering in my inner ear, which left me concentrating a little harder than usual on the business of maintaining my balance. Even our cab’s typically erratic maneuvering did little to affect my equanimity, although that might have been helped by its relatively sedate progress compared to the wild ride I’d been on the night before. The weather had improved, too, which probably went some of the way towards lightening my mood, the cloud cover moderating to a blanket of white and lighter gray, through which a faint haze of sunlight seeped in intermittent patches.

To my relief, Remington seemed disinclined to conversation, spending most of the journey meshed-in, and dealing with messages. As he was connecting to the wider datascape through the cab’s node I could quite easily have eavesdropped, but decided not to; for all I knew he was waiting for me to try it, and although I’d only promised not to muck around with the node on the
Stacked Deck
he might not see it quite like that. After all, I was a Guilder now, and my word was supposed to be a sacred trust.

“Here’s where we’re going,” Remington said at last, punting the data over to my ‘sphere. I glanced at it, noting the position on the city map—not too far from the area Clio had taken me to the previous night. That made sense—most of the brokerages would be close to the docks, where the cargoes they traded came and went, and the skippers of the ships they dealt with could find them easily. “Farland Freight Forwarding.” I tried to keep my expression neutral, although this was an unexpected development I meant to take full advantage of. All right, by now I’d managed to convince myself there was nothing particularly sinister in the presence of the
Eddie Fitz
, but I could at least mention it to Mallow, and ask him to pass the information on to Aunt Jenny. She might notice signs of a wider pattern that was invisible to me, and it would show her I hadn’t yet gone sufficiently Guilder to neglect the commission she’d given me. “They’re small, but they get cargoes from all over.”

Which, thanks to my earlier researches, I already knew. As well as Numarkut and Avalon, they had offices in a couple of the neighboring systems, and even handled cargoes bound for a few of the nearer League worlds. If we got one of those next, there was no telling what I might be able to ferret out within the borders of the League itself; although I tried not to get my hopes up too much. Remington would go with whatever he could make the most money on, and I was sure Farland wasn’t the only firm of brokers he was talking to.

“Sounds good for us,” I said, doing my best to project naive enthusiasm.

The city looked different in daylight, though no less crowded, a steady stream of vehicles moving above, below, and around us in all directions. It was more colorful than it had seemed the previous night, when I’d seen it washed out by the artificial lighting and the haze of water droplets hanging in the air, many of the buildings turning out to be faced in subtle pastel washes which had merely seemed drab in the rain. The warehousing district was even busier than before, laden cargo sleds arriving and departing every second or two, and the cab slowed to a crawl for a while before rising into a clearer lane, skimming over a few of the lower-lying rooftops as it did so; to my surprise, most of them were filled with neatly laid-out gardens. From directly above, the city would look like a patchwork of smallholdings, arranged in an unusually regular pattern.

“Are they ornamental, or for food crops?” I asked, and Remington shrugged.

“Depends on the owners. Either way, this is Numarkut; no one’s going to grow anything they can’t sell to someone.”

“Of course.” That went without saying. The cab skimmed a roof full of grape vines, startling a small flock of chickens scratching around their roots, and dived back into the traffic stream.

“Here will do,” Remington said, a couple of blocks from our eventual destination, and the cab pulled over, dropping to the sidewalk in a quieter side street, over which the backs of two huge storage facilities loomed. “Bit of fresh air to help clear your head before we get there.”

“Right,” I agreed, clambering out while he fed coins into the payment slot, and taking a deep breath of the nearest equivalent to fresh air the city had to offer. The tang of ozone from the passing traffic sliced into my sinuses, scattering the residual headache, and I swayed a little on my feet, feeling faintly light-headed.

Remington looked at me critically. “If you’re not up for this . . .”

“Of course I am,” I said. I took another deep breath, and set off with a purposeful stride, which elicited a small smile from Remington.

“Oh, you look raring to go.”

Once we’d passed the blank walls of the warehouses, we found ourselves in what was clearly a business district. Almost every door we passed was graced by a polished metal plaque, or something meant to look like one, although the mixture of architectural styles was even more eclectic than the one I’d noted on my first visit to the city the night before. Some appeared to be old town houses, abandoned as the well-heeled began to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the wellsprings of their wealth, others newer, purpose-built temples of commerce, proclaiming their tenants’ material success by outdoing their neighbors in either blocky functionalism or garish over-ostentation, according to taste (or lack of it). The cafes and food stalls scattered amongst them were pale shadows of their exuberant counterparts in the area I’d visited with Clio, being not so much a place to enjoy a meal with friends as a necessary refueling stop for the battalions of clerks infesting the surrounding buildings like termites swarming through a collection of mounds.

And there were plenty of office drones on the streets, all soberly dressed, even the transgeners, in clothes of formal cut, no doubt intended to add an air of probity to whatever deals they were conducting. Many appeared to be transacting business in the street, meshed-in even as they scurried from meeting to meeting, or grabbed coffees and bun-wrapped sausages of dubious provenance from the street stalls and vending drones impeding their progress. Of course there were plenty of starfarers among them as well, easily identifiable by their more casual mode of dress and the ship’s patches on their sleeves. Most, though not all, wore Guild insignia, a few bore the symbols of a bewildering variety of shipping lines, and one or two had neither.

“Freebooters?” I asked quietly, and Remington looked at me sharply.

“What do you know about Freebooters?” he asked.

“Just what Clio told me.” I shrugged. “Best avoided.”

“Clio’s right. Follow her advice and you won’t be an apprentice for long.” He noticed my attention beginning to wander. “Someone you know?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

A photosynthesising transgener was approaching us from the other direction, weaving easily though the crowd, many of whom were turning to look after her as she passed. And not without reason. Though considerably older than me, almost double my age by my estimate, her muscles were trim, and her feminine attributes disdained gravity, as if it was something that only happened to other people. Typically for that type of transgener she’d dressed in the barest minimum required by public decency, then cut it by half, maximizing the area of skin through which to draw energy from the ambient light. I’d only caught the briefest of glimpses the previous evening, but she had a familiar-looking tattoo on her upper arm, and I was fairly certain that this was the woman who’d prompted Clio to opt for a different bar than the one she’d originally intended.

“Wind your tongue in, lad,” Remington chuckled, misreading my interest completely, although under the circumstances I could hardly blame him for that. “She’d eat you alive.”

“I wasn’t . . .” I felt my face reddening, from shirt collar to hair line.

“Really?” Remington seemed honestly surprised. “I was.”

The green woman seemed unaware of our scrutiny, however, which wasn’t that much of a surprise come to think of it, as she was attracting the attention of the majority of the men on the sidewalk—and a few women too. Not all of it welcome, either, as a few of her admirers made ribald remarks a kindergarten child with poor social skills might have considered witty, although she seemed to have selective deafness down to a fine art, giving no sign of having heard.

“Hey, snotskin, I’m talking to you!” As she drew almost abreast of us, one of her interlocutors, whose good looks matched his mastery of sophisticated repartee, reached out and grabbed her arm, just below the tattooed ship’s patch—which I was now close enough to see was of three vaguely heart-shaped leaves growing in a cluster, above the name
Poison 4,
the number rendered in Roman numerals.

I stepped forward instinctively to intervene—but before I could say or do anything the fellow let go, howling and grabbing his hand, which was erupting in angry, weeping blisters. He looked as if he’d taken hold of the wrong end of a welding torch, rather than a petite woman in her early middle years. Who was now regarding me with a distinct
froideur
, as though she suspected me of intending further incivilities.

“What do you want?” she asked, in clipped, self-possessed tones, which would have sounded more at home in a drawing room.

“I thought that ruffian was attacking you,” I said, with a contemptuous glance in his direction. Which may have redirected a little of his barrage of invective towards me, although his voice was so choked it was hard to be certain.

“You thought right.” The transgener looked at me coolly. “But I don’t need a Guilder’s help. Can’t afford it. Shut up, you tiresome little man.” This last addressed to the ruffian who’d accosted her. He didn’t sound as though he was going to stop yelling any time soon, but suddenly did so abruptly, as she kicked out hard and accurately at the center of his groin.

“No charge intended, I can assure you,” Remington cut in. “Simon here’s still young enough to believe in doing the right thing for its own sake.”

“I’m sure you’ll knock that out of him soon enough.” She turned back to me, her expression softening almost imperceptibly. “Thank you for your concern. But you don’t go out looking like this without some defensive tweaks as well.”