The Wind After Time: Book One of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (2 page)

“Yoruba, eh?”

“Three, maybe four hours, full power away. Across the mountains, then northeast up toward the coast. What isn’t in or around Yoruba isn’t worth buying. The reason they don’t fancy a landing field is they like to see their visitors coming. From a ways off.”

“I didn’t think Ben would change his ways.” Joshua nodded thanks. Innokenty Khodyan was running as if he were on rails. “Three other questions, if you will.”

“You can ask.”

“Is there any other way to get to Yoruba? If a man was in a little more of a hurry.”

“You can wait, see if somebody’s headed there in a lighter. Somebody generally is, once a month or so. That’s about it. Second question?”

“How did Khodyan pay for his room?”

“
That’s
something you won’t get answered. Try again.”

“The two men with the lim? What’d be your call on them?”

“Same sort as you, mister. Except their iron wasn’t out in the open. But they had the same kind of … call it serious intent.”

“Thanks.”

Joshua was at the door.

“Now I have a question,” Diggs said. “Will somebody be looking for
you
in a couple of days?”

“Not likely,” Joshua said. “Not likely at all.”

• • •

Lil had her blouse off, eyes closed, her feet splayed on the dash. She’d slid the worthless dome back into its housing. Joshua took a moment to admire her. Her breasts were still eighteen, nipples pointed at the invisible sun. She looked clean, and Joshua didn’t mind her perfume, even if it made him think he was trapped in a hothouse.

“You stayin’ here?” She didn’t open her eyes.

“No.”

“Do I have a roomer … or is it back to the field?”

“Lil,” Joshua said, “what shape is this bomb in? I mean its drive. I can tell it’s not up for best custom finish.”

“It hums. Phan makes sure of that. He says he don’t want me to break down out in the middle of nowhere. But I think he just loves turbines. He’d rather wrench than screw.”

This time the gold was dropped on the woman’s stomach. Five coins, larger than the two he’d given Diggs. Joshua thought about letting his fingers linger but decided not to. Lil lazily opened her eyes.

“Now, that’s the sorta thing that
really
makes a girl smile. I
was
gonna rape you for the transport, but not that bad. Or are we talkin’ about other possibilities?”

“We are. I need transport to Yoruba. Leaving now. After I get a few things from my ship. That’s the retainer.”

“Yoruba, huh? You just want me to drop you off … or will you be coming back through here?”

“Maybe a day. Maybe longer. I can’t say. Maybe I’ll need transport when I get there, maybe not. Depends. But if you’re available, that might simplify things.”

“You just hired yourself a pilot. Ten minutes at my place, then we can flit.”

“Just like that?”

“Phan, Mik, me, we don’t tie each other down or make rules. They can fiddle their dees while I’m gone, anyway. Build up energy for when I get back.”

Joshua went around to the other side of the lifter and over the low hull into the seat beside Lil. She started the primary and let it warm.

“You planning on getting dressed?” Joshua asked. “Or did I just hire my first nude chauffeur?”

“I could put it on, I could take the rest of it off. Whatever you want, since you’re paying.”

Joshua made no answer. Lil shrugged and pulled the blouse back on. “At least I got your attention.”

• • •

The track through the mountains had been roughly graded so a gross-laden heavy-lifter wouldn’t high-side, but it still was more an exceptionally wide path than a roadway. Joshua asked Lil to take the lifter to max altitude, which gave him a vulture’s-eye perspective at about 150 feet constant.

The land was savage, dry brown earth running into gray rock. The scraggly trees and brush were perhaps a little taller than they’d been on the flats, but not much. Lil and Joshua overflew a couple of abandoned, stripped lifters and one thoroughly mangled wreck but saw no other sign of travelers.

There were shacks, but he couldn’t tell if they were occupied. Once or twice he saw, higher against a mountain face, scantlings, survival domes, and piled detritus where some miner had tried to convince himself there must be some value to be torn from this waste.

Joshua spotted to one side a sprawling, high-fenced estate. Beyond the walls there was Earth green and the blue of a small lake. There were buildings, big ones, a dozen of them, white in new stone.

“Who belongs to that?”

“Nobody knows,” Lil answered. “Somebody rich. Or powerful. Somebody private. He — or she, or it — gets supplies once every couple months. Curiosity don’t seem welcome.”

She pointed. Joshua had already seen the two gravlighters that had lifted away from one building and now flew parallel to the lifter’s pattern. He wasn’t close enough to see how many gunnies each lighter held. After they’d passed, the lighters returned to the estate.

“You were in the war?” Lil asked.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Figured, by your rig. My dad … anyway, the guy Ma said was my father was some kind of soldier, too. Ma kept a holo of him on a dresser, wearing some kind of uniform. Took it with her when she hooked, I guess. I don’t remember seeing it … afterward.” Then: “Any damage in my asking about what happens once we get in range of Yoruba? I mean, I can nap-of-the-earth insert you without anyone noticing. Their sensor techs couldn’t hear a fart on a field phone.”

“No need,” Joshua said. “As far as I know, we can parade right in the front door looking beautiful and getting kissed.”

“There’s more’n one front door,” Lil went on. “You ever been there?”

“No. And my travel agent couldn’t seem to find a brochure.”

“You better think about cannin’
that
yonk, you get back from your, uh, ‘vacation.’ ‘Kay. There’s a whole patch of front doors. Outside the gates there’s cribs. Shantytown. Bars. Cafés. Independent-run. If you’re looking for sanctuary on the cheap or if whoever you’re lookin’ for is down on his credits, that’ll be where you want to go. Somebody’ll be around to collect the tariff sooner or later. Everybody pays at Yoruba.”

“I was never much of an alley cat. Except when I had to be. What’s the next level?”

“The next stage is straight into the main resort. Up there, what you get depends on what you got.”

“That sounds like a good place to start.”

“You called it,” Lil said. “You want to spend, I’ll put you in Ben Greet’s lap, if you want. He’s the one who owns Yoruba. He says frog, everybody turns green and starts pissin’ swamp water.”

“Glad to see my friend’s doing so well,” Joshua said. “Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about the old days.”

“I hope you aren’t bein’ cute and Greet really
is
your friend,” Lil warned. “Greet’s nothin’ but bulletproof.”

Joshua smiled.

Something ahead caught his eye. “Well, I shall be damned,” he said. “What an utterly
charming
little place.”

A nicely paved roadway led up from the main track, a freshly painted white fence on either side of it and demarcating the deep green pasture around the sprawling red-brick house. There was a sign on the road below. Lil took binocs from the dash box and handed them across. Joshua focused. The sign read:
TRAVELER’S REST.

“Does anyone actually fall for that?”

“They surely do. Pretty regular we hear of some gravlighter that ‘just happened’ to crash around here. Crash and always burn, real bad, since nobody ever finds the pilot or swamper. Or cargo.

“We call that the gingerbread house. Except you don’t have to bring Gretel. The owners’ll provide her … and anything else that’s asked for, or so the story goes. Until you stop payin’ attention or go to sleep.

“They got themselves a cargo ship back at the field, and every now and then it lifts, but nobody’s ever seen a cargo manifest.”

“Most places I’ve been,” Joshua said, “after a while people would see to something that wide-open, law or no law.”

“Not on Platte, mister. ‘Sides, as far as we know, the only people that get done are fools or off-worlders, and none of us took either to raise.”

They rode in silence, not uncomfortable, as the track crested the mountain and then wound down across a valley a bit more fertile than the wasteland. There were more buildings, some rich, some poor, no order to their location. A mansion would be next to a hovel, and sometimes there would be a clump of buildings, almost a failed village. Sometimes there would be a paved road, and twice he saw automated ways. The roads, like everything else, started and stopped arbitrarily, as if the builder had built until he got bored or had quit when a completely invisible requirement had been met. There were farmhouses, but each sat in desolation. Occasionally there would be the gleam of a few light manufacturing buildings. Farther on, with no road or track to them, would be a group of buildings that might shift for a marketplace. It was as if an angry child had hurled his elaborate toys across a sandbox.

“I guess,” Joshua mused, “when you’re studying anarchy hard, logic doesn’t come knocking much.”

Lil frowned, not understanding, then looked ahead at the track. The frown persisted. She spoke, again without preparation but as if she’d been waiting for him to speak first:

“You know, when I shook my tits at you back there … there was a reason.”

“I didn’t figure it for a sudden impulse,” Joshua said.

“I said I had rooms. For a price. Board cost extra, I said. That ain’t all that’s for sale. Not for everybody, though,” she said hastily. “We ain’t that poor. And I’m not that desperate.”

Joshua maintained his silence.

“If you’re gonna be staying on in Yoruba, let me be with you. I won’t charge nothin’.”

The turbine hiss was loud in the dead air.

“I know, in Yoruba, there’s prettier. If you’re really a friend of Ben Greet’s, most likely they’ll be free, too. But I ain’t that bad; give me a little time with a mirror. I won’t let you get bored. I know some tricks. I was in a house for a while, till I had to offplanet and come here. I ain’t just a country dox, not knowin’ anything but flat on her back with her legs up.”

When Joshua didn’t reply, her shoulders slumped. “Didn’t figure that’d fly,” she said in a monotone. “But Jerusalem on a pony, you don’t know what it’s like bein’ in that hellforsaken port. You know everybody, everybody knows you. You know what they’re gonna say, and pretty soon you know what
you’re
gonna say … what you’re even gonna think, day in, day out.

“And all the time people pass through, and you know you ain’t ever gonna be able to go with them. You’re gonna dry and wither, just like this damned planet
grew
you like you were a scatterbush.”

“That’s not it, Lil,” Joshua said. “I’ve got business in Yoruba, and things might become … troublesome. Quite loudly troublesome.”

“Trouble don’t get no cherry off me,” she said defiantly; her hand flashed to her boot top, and Joshua saw steel flash.

The small gun vanished. “Hell with it. I don’t beg. There’s Yoruba, anyway. You want me to sleep in the lifter, or should I find a room somewhere? I’ll have to charge for that, you know.”

Joshua didn’t reply. He blanked her presence as the lifter lowered to the track, which became a paved and marked road with planted greenery to either side. Ahead rose Yoruba, sprawling over half a dozen hilltops, its domes, spires, and cupolas gleaming dully. His eyes half-closed, he let himself flow outward, ahead of the lifter as it moved past a guard shack where a semimobile blaster’s muzzle had been tracking them. Two heavily armed guards saluted casually as their eyes noted, filed, categorized.

“Ship, do you still hear this voice and know from where it sings?”
Again he spoke in Al’ar.

“You are still heard and watched.”

The lifter went up a side road toward a grand series of towers, all glass and multihued stone, surrounded by the exotic plants of half a hundred worlds. They passed through wrought-iron gates and rode over hand-laid flagstones. There were bubbling fountains and, under an archway, two women, smiling as if he were their lover home from his great adventure.

Lil set the lifter down smartly beside the greeters. “Welcome to Yoruba,” they chimed.

“Thank you.” Joshua got out and knelt, one hand touching the pavement. He
felt
Yoruba, felt the danger tingle, the sparkle of wine and laughter, the shout as markers cascaded, the blank despair of the gambler’s loss, the silk of flesh around his loins, the tang of blood and the blankness of death. But not for him. Not yet. He felt no neck prickle. The flurry vanished, and he was touching nothing but a flagstone in a mosaic.

“Is something the matter, sir?” The woman was trying to sound concerned.

Joshua stood. He took a gold coin from his jacket and laid it in the greeter’s suddenly present palm. Lil was staring fixedly at the lifter’s control panel.

“No. Nothing at all,” Joshua said. “It’s just been a long trip. Sorry we didn’t have time to com ahead. We’ll need a suite and a porter. Just one. Neither my partner nor myself has much in the way of luggage.”

A slow smile moved across Lil’s face, as if her muscles found the change unfamiliar but welcome.

Joshua lay flat on one of the enormous beds, eyes closed, half hearing Lil’s gurgles and squeals at their room with its private garden and pond; the autopub with its myriad bottles, flasks, bulbs; the elaborate refreshers with surround showers, deep tubs, saunas; the call panel offering personalized dreams from hairdresser to masseur to escort; and all the rest of the suite’s silk and gold Byzantine appointments.

He was reaching out, delicate as an Al’ar tendril, again
feeling.
Again — no threat, no danger.

There was a soft thump beside him, and he was back in the room. “This’s the biggest bed I’ve ever seen,” Lil announced. Her smile became sultry. “You suppose it works?”

Joshua’s fingers reached of their own volition and ran down the side of her face. Eyes closed, she inhaled sharply and lay back, waiting, lips open.