The January Dancer (17 page)

“Am I supposed to feel all warm and grateful, now that you’ve pulled a splinter from my paw? Thank you, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“I don’t care if you’re grateful or not. We shouldn’t have a disputed leadership when there’s a world needing reconstruction.”

Jack picked up the splinter and studied it. Hugh watched how dexterous he had become with only one arm, and wondered that he didn’t wear a bionic one. Or maybe he did, but preferred to use his infirmity in public. “We didn’t have one,” Jack said judiciously, “until a few days ago.”

“He means before you came back.”

Handsome Jack and Little Hugh turned to face the back of the room, where a bookcase had slid aside to reveal a hidden doorway in which the Fudir stood. Behind him, a flight of stairs spiraled downward.

“Who in Lugh’s name are you?” Jack demanded. “You keep popping up, but…”

“It’s gone,” the Fudir told Hugh.

“He’s a Terran I met on Jehovah,” Hugh said. “He helped smuggle me back here.”

Jack took in the Fudir’s worn, dun-colored clothing, the stoop-shouldered stance. “I’ve you to thank, then.”

The Fudir bowed and tugged his forelock. “I point out, sahb, that zero divided by two is no less than zero divided by one.”

Jack’s face puckered up as he considered that; then he laughed. “You’ve a lot of nerve for a fookin’ Terran.” Then he pointed a finger at Hugh. “Keep in mind what I’ve said. What you and I had, that’s history. It’s all songs now. We don’t need you showing up now to add a discordant note. I liked you better as an enemy than an opportunist. And tell your
Terran
friend, we shoot looters.”

The Fudir grinned. “Hast thou heard from the Red Sweeney, yet?”

“Sweeney?” Jack said in irritation. “No friend of mine. He’s one of your lot.” With that, he folded his data-slate and stylus, tucked it under his one arm, and marched from the room.

When he was gone, the Fudir grunted. “There’s your answer.”

“Which one? That Jack didn’t send Sweeney, or that he lies so well? I take it that the Dancer is gone. How can you be sure it’s not hidden somewhere?”

The Fudir tossed his head toward the stairwell. “It was. That was the hidey-hole.”

Hugh followed the Terran down the staircase. “You’ve been busy,” he said. “Jack thinks you’re looting.”

“He thinks the Molnar left any loot?”

“It’s not a joke.” But the Fudir had pressed on ahead.

At the base of the stairs lay a broad room lined with shelves and storage racks that had been tumbled about. A contour chair, attached to a post embedded in the cork-soft flooring, had been slashed and the frame bent. It faced a wreath on the farther wall. Debris was everywhere. The walls were made of a spongy material through which ran twisting veins of pallid yellow. Cartons and strongboxes were cut or pried open, their contents vanished or smashed. The vault door at the far end of the room hung twisted on one hinge.

“They were thorough,” Hugh said. Somehow the despoiling of the ICC vaults did not move him as much as had the destruction aboveground, though he knew some wealthy Eireannaughta had kept their valuables stored here rather than in Down Bank and Surety.

“I found Jumdar’s aide-de-camp in the field hospital, the poor beggar,” the Fudir explained. “He said they tortured her until she told them where the Dancer was; then they fashioned the Blood Eagle. They made him watch the whole thing—and burned his eyes out afterward so Jumdar’s body was the last thing he’d ever see. He doesn’t understand why they let him live.” Fudir stepped into the vault and looked around at the empty racks and safe-deposit boxes. “That’s because he doesn’t understand the depths of their cruelty. He said Jumdar brought the Dancer down here personally. That was a mistake. People began to question her orders after that. Not the ICC folk, who were oath-bound; but the Volunteers, who thought their experience with assassination and mob violence gave them an insight on military strategy. Not that Jumdar was a military genius, and not that it mattered. They should be thankful—Voldemar and Jack—that the Cynthians hadn’t come to
occupy
this world. Your guerilla campaign only worked on the Rebels because there were boundaries neither of you would cross.”

Hugh stepped around a shattered wooden box lined with chesterwood and decorated with enough artistry that it might have been worth something in itself. He lifted a paperboard sheet. A pallet separator, he thought. “I didn’t think there were too many boundaries left, at the end.”

“Did either of you target women and children?”

Hugh looked up sharply, let the separator fall to the floor, dusted his hands. “No.”

“Pull one of your ambushes on a Cynthian, they don’t even try to track you down. The next day, they round up a dozen civilians and kill them. I take that back. They don’t recognize the concept of a civilian. If you try again, it’s two dozen. How long would you have pressed your campaign?”

“You know a lot about them.”

“I looked them up in
Fou-chang’s Gazetteer of the Spiral Arm
while
New Angeles
was coming downsystem.”

“Why bother? They’re long gone.”

The Fudir came out of the vault. “Clean as gnawed bone,” he said. “No question Jumdar gave it up. It’s on its way to the Hadramoo.”

Hugh had paused before a large sculpture attached to the wall. A wreath of ceramic composite tendrils that twisted and twined around one another in a complex pattern that his eye could not follow. He turned away and stared at the Fudir. “Oh, no. You’re not thinking of chasing this fable into the Hadramoo, wherever to hell and gone that might be.”

“North-by-spinward of the Old Planets, out near the Palisade,” the Terran replied with a cheerful grin. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t thinking of a frontal attack on Cynthia. And you needn’t come with me.”

“Oh, needn’t I? Thank you. I thought we were hunting the Dancer because it would help me restore the rightful government here.”

The Fudir shrugged. “You never believed that. You told me so yourself.”

“Yes. But I’d wondered if you believed it.”

“By the time I can fetch it back from Cynthia, it’ll be too late to matter much here. Beside,” he added quietly, “there are other worlds needing their rightful governments restored.”

And there always had been. Hugh did not voice the comment; there was no need to. It had always been a mistake to trust the Fudir. He’d never had expectations from this far-fetched scheme, so he ought not feel betrayed.

“The rievers didn’t take everything,” Hugh said, pointing to the wreath on the wall.

The Fudir, who had been standing with his head slightly bowed, looked up, blinked. “Yeah, I noticed it earlier. It’s the Ourobouros Circuit—not the original, a replica. Too much trouble to rip it off the wall, I suppose; though not for lack of trying. You can see the marks from the lasers and the saws. Not worth stealing. Look, if you want to come with me to the Hadramoo, you’re welcome.”

The invitation startled Hugh and he cocked his head. “Why?”

The Fudir shrugged. “It’s a barbarous region, and I could use some civilized company.”

The harp thunders savage chords and the men and women in the Bar of Jehovah sing and roar with it. The harper has abandoned her table with the scarred man and resumed her place in the corner. Fists pound tables; voices join in chorus. She stops, and voices boil in protest. One more! Just one more! The Bartender watches with approval.
This
is more like it! Geantraí. Something glorious and triumphant to lift the spirits!

But, instead, she gentles them with suantraí for a horse ridden hard must be cooled afterward by a hot-walker. Peaceful strains soothe excited nerves; tones of bliss bless dreamy joy. These, too, the Bartender regards with favor, so the harper improvises a transient motif from the goltraí solely to wipe his smile away with a finger’s brush of loss and desolation. But it is a trick sorrow, not the real thing. The Bartender sees that it is a joke, and grins across the room. They understand each other. She closes with a rollicking march and once more the spacers in the Bar respond with stamping feet. But it is lagniappe and she has gentled them and now when she rises from her stool, they let her go.

The scarred man is waiting in his alcove with a smile she had not thought his face capable of making. “You know how to work them, darlin’,” he says with admiration. “There is something of the Dancer in you, I think. You command, and they respond. Is that why you play? For the sense of power?”

“You confuse consequence with intention. My talent lets me pluck their hearts with my own nails, but I don’t play to play with their hearts.”

“I should hope not,” says the scarred man. “Nails leave scars.”

The harper turns and makes a sign to the Bartender. “I’ll play once more before I go.”

“Yes. It’s hard to put the scepter down.” He smiles as if at a secret joke: his lips stretch and his eyes turn inward.

The harper thinks suddenly that her companion might have been a handsome man in his youth, before what had happened happened, and that within this sour old man had once lived a sour young one. (Sweetness was something she would not credit.) Almost, she asks what tragedy had reduced his body to such ruin; and she forbears only because prowling old ruins can be dangerous. They are full of deadfalls and uneasy masonry; and wild things have crept inside.

“So the Fudir did believe in the Dancer, after all,” she said.

“Why suppose he believed in anything?”

“No one chases off to the Hadramoo on speculation. I confess, I thought at first he wanted only high-level access on New Eireann for some criminal plan—a ‘scramble,’ they call it—and Hugh was his tool to gain it.”

“And the legend was his tool to gain Hugh? No, the Fudir was as twisted as the Dancer, but in those days there were still a few things he believed in. If one belief was a mad fancy, what of it? Tell me you’ve no mad fancies. Tell me you’d no other motive in coming here than to pick the tale of the Dancer off my teeth.”

The harper does not answer for a while and she brushes her strings gently with the back of her nails and they sigh in glissando. “And what of January,” she says. “Surely, he had more right to the Dancer than the Fudir.”

But the scarred man shakes his head. “What has
right
to do with any of it? If only they’d wondered about the chair; or if Hugh hadn’t had, as the Terrans like to say, ‘a big mouth.’”

“What chair?”

The scarred man signals the bartender for another bowl. The harper is paying, so why not? “One player is nearer his goal, at least,” he says when the drink has been delivered.

The harper cocks his head. “You mean Little Hugh?”

The scarred man laughs.

You may recall, the scarred man says, taking up the tale once more, that Fir Li had called to Hounds…

…with the thought of penetrating the Confederacy, to confirm on that end what he had sent Greystroke to confirm on the other. But Hounds are few and space is large and travel through the creases sufficiently slow that in the three and a half metric weeks since he had sent the call only three Hounds had proven near enough to respond.

The first to arrive was Grimpen, who by chance had been passing through Peacock Junction when the swift-boat sang its summons. He was a large, rough-hewn man who resembled nothing so much as a nickel-iron asteroid garbed in colorful tunic and pantaloons. Yet he had remarkably soft and gentle lips and an easy way about him. His colleagues regarded him as “slow and ponderous,” although he preferred the term “methodical.” If Fir Li was a fleet wolfhound straining at the leash, Grimpen was more the St. Bernard: careful, helpful, resourceful, intelligent. Not the sort on whom to bet in a race—unless the race were one of endurance.

A few days later, Francine Thompson arrived from Wiedermeier’s Chit, where she had just resolved a string of serial murders by a man calling himself “the Delphic.” Breezy, and confident to the point of arrogance, she used the office-name of Bridget ban, and she strode the gangways of
Hot Gates
like the queen of High Tara. Her hair was red and her skin was gold and she was living proof that deadliness could decorate. She had a voice like the bursting sea—rushing and crashing and with just a taste of salt.

A week after that, Gwillgi passed through Sapphire Point on his way to the Lesser Hanse and, intercepting Fir Li’s broadcast, decided to lay over and consider the matter. The problem that awaited him on Hanower was important, but not urgent, and might already be settled by financial auditors before Gwillgi arrived with Plan B. In either case, the suspect would be brought to accounts. Gwillgi was a banty man sporting a thin moustache, and seemed somehow to be wound from razor wire. He did not grow hair so much as bristles, and his eyes were a deadly topaz in color.

Fir Li did not think that any others would appear soon enough to matter, and so he called a pack meeting shortly after Gwillgi’s arrival, sweetening the affair with a fine board of wines and fruits and dates and a main course featuring a roasted haunch of satin tiger, prepared after the fashion of Valency with a chutney of mangoes and chilies. The crew of
Hot Gates
gave the Hound’s quarters wide berth, for much of what transpired within was not for outsiders to know.

In theory, they were a band of brothers, anatomy notwithstanding, but neither competency nor collegiality can entirely overcome ambition and human nature. The four Hounds who gathered in Fir Li’s private suite after the meal respected one another and worked with one another, but they did not always like one another, and kept one eye focused always on their own advantage. They were reluctant to accept orders from a peer; so, Fir Li fell back on logic and reason.

Logic might have persuaded Bridget ban—she was the sort for whom a well-constructed narrative is worth a thousand detailed facts, and on occasion she was known to discard a fact or two to save the narrative; but Grimpen was a man unimpressed with theories. From any finite collection of facts, he was fond of saying, one may construct an infinite number of theories, and the probability approached zero that any one of them was true. As for Gwillgi, fact and theory alike meant nothing; the deed was all.

“Why don’t you go in yourself?” Gwillgi asked Fir Li. But the dark Hound waved his arm broadly, encompassing
Hot Gates
and her squadron beyond the hull, patrolling the exit ramps of Sapphire Point.

“I would. But I’m committed to this duty. And I’ve been across before. Some there might remember.”

“We all have duties,” Gwillgi replied, “save Grimpen, here. He seems at liberty.”

“We don’t even know,” rumbled the big man, “that your disappearing ships are more than a statistical anomaly.” Having arrived first, he had already reviewed the data.

“I showed you the analyses,” Fir Li protested. With his left hand, he crooked a finger and a junior Pup approached with a flagon of channel wine from Greatthorp. Fir Li held his cup out. Both Gwillgi and Bridget ban eyed the boy speculatively. Gwillgi ran a nail—it was very nearly a claw—along the lad’s forearm as he passed. Fir Li, seeing this, chuckled. “You won’t fluster him. I’ve taught him the falconer’s art.”

Topaz eyes caught the light. “You launch falcons aboard
Hot Gates
?”

Grimpen rumbled like an earthquake, signifying laughter. “He didn’t say that.” But turning to his host, he said, “You yourself admitted the conclusions were subject to an alpha risk of…”

“O! dear, large Grimpen,” said Bridget ban, who drank nothing but water. “Were the world an equation, we’d ha’e solved it ere now.”

“Nonetheless,” Fir Li insisted after an appreciative sip, “we’ve reason to suspect that ships crossing into the Confederacy disappear too often. Now we’ve intelligence that the Confederacy harbors the same suspicions about ships crossing into the League.”

“What of the second courier?” asked Grimpen. “I assume there was one.”

Fir Li shook his head. “Hanseatic Point saw nothing unusual. I haven’t heard from the farther crossings. If there was a second courier, he likely made the crossing as a crewman on a freighter, jumped ship once over here, slipped surveillance, and hijacked a small ship to use. I’ve sent out a request that any recent hijackings of personal yachts be reported to my office.”

“If your fish was sent in order to be caught and spill disinformation,” said Gwillgi, “why bother sending a second?”

“And why would they spread such disinformation?” Bridget ban asked. “I mean, that
particular
disinformation? Suppose we were to believe it. How does the Confederacy benefit?”

Gwillgi scratched his chin with his forefinger. “The ICC and the Chettinads and the rest grow spooked about crossing the Rift. Stop sending ships across. Fewer nosy strangers, hey?”

“Our trade ships may dock only at Gaphavn,” Grimpen pointed out, “and their movements are tightly controlled.”

Gwillgi struck the arm of his chair. “Then the Confederates are doing something at Gaphavn. Don’t want us to know!”

“Then they’ve only to abrogate the Treaty,” said Bridget ban. “They’d nae let our ships in aforetimes, and need no ruse to be keeping them out once more.”

“Blather,” said Grimpen. “It’s pointless to speculate on Confederate motives for doing something before we’re quite sure they’re doing it. Either Olafsson’s mission was genuine, or it was disinformation. Start from there and ask what facts you’d need to—”

Fir Li turned to his door, where stood Graceful Bintsaif, who was senior Pup now that Greystroke was on the scent. “Yes.”

Bintsaif bowed. “Your pardons, Cuin,” she said, and turning to Fir Li, “Cu, the commodore has asked for you. His pickets report the Cynthian fleet returning.”

Fir Li cocked his head. “And this interests me, how? Must I listen again as the Molnar mocks the Ardry and the rule of law?”

“Cu, the commodore said to tell you that they number only half as many ships.”

Fir Li drained his glass and placed it on the salver proffered by the junior Pup. “Now,
that
is interesting,” he told the other Hounds. “A pirate fleet going and coming is no great thing in these wretched times; but a fleet going and half a fleet coming—
that
has a story.”

Fire Control greeted Fir Li when he entered the command deck deep within
Hot Gates
by saying, “
Now,
can I take them? They’ve only ten corvettes, and each badly damaged.”

“Not yet, Fire Control. Let’s hear the story first.” He nodded to Commodore Wildbear, who had replaced Echeverria in the rotation. “Bring the alfvens to standby.”

“Cu?”

“Which word was unclear? Do it. Comm, compress this and squirt.
Cuin,
if you would, stand within the field of view. Thank you. Record. ‘Cynthian ships, this is ULS
Hot Gates,
Cu na Fir Li commanding. State your business.’ End.”

Several minutes went by as the message packet penciled out to the Silk Road exit. Overhead, Traffic Control displayed the positions of the ships as they crossed the high system to the Palisades Parkway. Red lights indicated the observed positions; green lights, the projected real positions, corrected for vector and Newtonian light-lag. Fir Li told Fire Control to show dead lines. “One for kinetic weapons; one for energy beams. Localize to ship-centered coordinates, by ship.”

Just in case. Fire Control grinned. Commodore Wildbear scowled. Technically, the commodore had operational control of the squadron, but
Hot Gates
was Fir Li’s personal property and he sometimes forgot the protocols, or pretended to.

When the reply came from the Cynthians, the Molnar put on a brave front. “Hey, doggy, you got yourself a reg’lar pack there. Just on my way home, now, me. Don’t want no trouble. You keep watching for Confederates, okay? And better watch that Silk Road exit, too—might be followed, me.”

“So, your victim proved too tough a nut!” Fir Li tried to show that he was trying not to smirk.

Lag-and-reply and: “New Eireann? Naw, they was pussies. Like the sages say: ‘The strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.’ Was ambushed at Peacock Junction, Deceiver take ’em! Ever see a ship hit caltrops at high-v, you? Shredded my vanguard coming off the ramp. Took the damned Twister, after all the trouble we went through to fetch it.”

This time Fir Li did not try to hide the smirk. “The strong take what they can,” he answered philosophically. Gwillgi, behind him, began to laugh, but Fir Li waved him silent and awaited the Cynthian’s reply.

“Don’t be such a smart mouth. Fight anybody, me; and if I lose, I lose.” He actually struck his chest. “Gods decide. But sneakin’
ambush,
that’s no fight. Hey, doggy, they come through the Road after us, they make recycle outta
your
punky squadron.”

And
they would have the Twister. Fir Li pondered that for a moment before he formulated his next squirt. “Did they know about the weapon when they took it?”

“Weapon? What weapon?” The Molnar’s replies came faster as his ragged flotilla approached perihelion with Sapphire. “Oh! Naw, that Twister was just some old prehuman rock. The ICC factor on Cynthia was fulla crap.”

Fir Li relaxed, a movement undetectable to any but his colleagues and senior Pups. The idea of a new weapons system had worried him, but…Only an artifact. Valuable, to be sure, but
only
valuable.

Before he could respond, the Molnar added, “They musta had a spy in the New Eireann system what sent a swifty through the Road ahead of us, ’cause nobody else knew we even had it. They laid for us at Peacock, hijacked the loot, after
we
did all the work gettin’ it! They took a whole treasure ship, doggy. Matched our course, boarded, demanded the Twister.” A bitter, sly look came over the Molnar’s face. “Someday, I find those hijackers, me. Then we show them Cynthian justice.”

“Justice!”

“Yah, justice. That’s where the boss gives everyone what they deserve; an’ these hijackers deserve everything I’m thinking to give them.”

Fir Li was astonished at the man’s wink, as if he and Fir Li were partners complicit in the same enterprise. “And what of
the Ardry’s
justice?” he demanded. “Should
he
give out what everyone deserves?”

The Cynthian ships were accelerating toward the Palisades Parkway, approaching the dead line for kinetic weapons. Fire Control turned with an appeal on her face.

“He can try,” the Molnar told them. “A man has whatever power he can grab.”

Fir Li said, “I will take your advice.” He nodded to Fire Control, and the ships of the Sapphire Point squadron unleashed a timed barrage, each ship firing her kinetics so that all would arrive simultaneously on-target.

It was exquisite pleasure to watch the image of the Molnar khan Matsumo first puzzle over Fir Li’s comment, then a moment later react to his watch officer’s cry. “Oho! Doggy wants to bark,” and he ordered counter-battery fire.

The Cynthian fleet dispersed at high-v, adding jitter to their projected course. Targeting computers guessed at likely course alterations, compensated, and fired again even before new images had been received. Sensor images were seconds, or even minutes old, so Fir Li’s ships had to fire at where the targets would be, based on glimpses of where they had been. Only ULS
Justiciar
was close enough to see the Cynthian corvettes in “real time,” and flashes on the display showed where her weapons found the alfvens on two corvettes slow to maneuver. Crippled, the corvettes skated off onto the Newtonian flats at the system’s edge, unable to grab space and slow down.

A third Cynthian jittered too much and entered the Palisades at the wrong angle. A hoop of false color on the overhead screen highlighted the Cerenkov radiation that marked its disintegration. A fourth Cynthian encountered kinetics loosed earlier by ULS
Victory
. “Cu,” said the battle-space manager, “
Justiciar
has taken damage.” Fir Li nodded. Close enough for precision fire, she had been close enough to receive it. Grimpen leaned toward him to whisper.

“What can we do for
Justiciar
?”

Fir Li said, “Nothing. Once the dice are cast, they tumble as they will. No one manages a high-v battle space.”

Comm called out, “Cu!” and Fir Li saw the snarling face of the Molnar fill the screen. Behind him, his control room smoldered, alarums clanged, and men and women rushed to their tasks. “Now, doggy, you see how a
man
dies! Aye-yiii!” And with that cry, he cut communication. A minute later, Traffic announced that the Cynthian flagship had changed course.

And a moment more, the new course had been extrapolated. “He’s coming directly toward us, Cu. He means to ram.”