Merisa was with Shara when Zyan got to her quarters. He'd agreed with her that they would mention nothing to his cousin right now, so it was supremely difficult to not talk about what they'd just learned.
Shara had been given a spacious, airy guest suite with a view over the river – unlike Saito's, her windows were unfrosted.
"What did you get from Saito?" It was Merisa that asked, after he walked in.
Zyan abruptly decided not to lie. "A great deal – but I had to agree to secrecy on pain of lots of jail time, so I can't tell you. I wish I could, and maybe when this has all blown over I'll be able to come back and fill you in, but right now I can't say anything. Sorry, Merisa," he apologised.
Merisa waved that away. "I understand, cousin. I wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the FSP Secrecy Act either."
"Thanks. In related news, you're already pushing your luck holding her. How much longer can you get away with it?" Zyan asked.
Merisa bit her top lip and raised both eyebrows. "We haven't heard anything from Exigency or the FSP, believe it or not. Saito's use of our intersystem network was encrypted, and purged from the message logs according to FSP protocol, so we don't know what she said or to whom, but she must have sent a message to her superiors."
Privately, Zyan wasn't certain Saito had told her superiors a sharding thing – she didn't trust them. She'd communicated with someone, though.
"Something can't be far off turning up or otherwise making a move, then," Shara said, evidently thinking along the same lines.
"Have to assume so," Zyan nodded. "I think it's time to get back to securing transport for the next leg of the trip. Shara, did you fill Merisa in on what we were intending to do?"
"Yes – are you still up for roleplaying a princess kidnapped by an unscrupulous renegade crystal singer who just happens to be so hot it hurts to look at her, Meri?" Shara asked Merisa.
"I am totally up for that," she confirmed with a wicked grin.
"The actual plan, Shara," Zyan sighed.
"I know that, idiot, and so does she," Shara rolled her eyes.
Merisa stifled a giggle. "Yes – we can point you in the direction of some likely candidates."
"Then I think you better do that ASAP," Zyan said.
- o O o -
Maxim, unlike New Babylon on Chalice Prime, was a reasonably normal city – it had sprawled outwards, rather than upwards. The dominant architectural styles throughout the centuries had all favoured lots of steel and plasglas in bright, primary colours. From orbit, Maxim city looked like someone had loaded an antique cannon with handfuls of random jewels and shot them into the ground around the river. It didn't have much in the way of murky depths, either figuratively or literally. Merisa's colleagues in Planetary Security harboured no illusions about human nature, and therefore the city was quite tightly policed – albeit in an expertly unobrusive sort of way.
Maxim's criminal element, when organising illegal gambling sessions, therefore had to think creatively vis-a-vis both definitions of 'underground'. This was why Zyan and Shara found themselves in what could only be described as a pop-up casino which had been set up in the midst of a suite of rooms currently being redecorated. The work crews had been diverted for a few hours, but they had left multiple indications of their ongoing presence in the form of stepladders, power tools, paint guns and, importantly, sound dampening fields intended to prevent the noise of honest work from inconveniencing the neighbours. The proprietors of the flat-pack casino were clearly hoping they would also prevent the noise of dishonest work from inconveniencing the police.
In this they were very much mistaken – Merisa was aware of it's existence and the only reason it still operated was that she was waiting for them to turn up in person so she could arrest them. They had, so far, failed to oblige – they sent minions in their stead. These minions ran the tables and games, provided a basic level of security which ensured that if any cheating was going on then they sharding well saw a percentage of it, and collected debts owed to the house. Sometimes this last function required a certain degree of persuasion, and thus a subset of the minions were heavyworlder gentlemen who had not chosen a career in the FSP Marines but had instead opted to be all they could be in a different walk of life.
The pop-up casino offered all the staples of gambling – card tables, roulette, and feeds of sporting events throughout the galaxy upon which wagers could be placed. These purported to be live, via black crystal communications. If you believed that, Zyan thought, you'd believe anything.
In any case he and Shara were seeking a poker game. Poker had acquired some new variants and discarded some old ones, but the essentials of the game remained unchanged, and it had spread throughout the galaxy along with humanity, as popular beyond Terra as it had ever been upon it.
Zyan knew enough to get by in a game, even if he probably wasn't going to be winning any tremendously massive hands. He wasn't here to win, though, he was just here to be in the right place at the right time.
Zyan and Shara approached a doorway – the door to which was currently missing. It had been reinforced, however, with a pair of heavyworlders who seemed more than capable of regulating access. It had also been upgraded with a sensor arc, about which Zyan had no worries whatsoever: he was quite confident that BlackTalk was in a completely different league to whatever third-rate tech the arc could boast.
"Afternoon. This the poker?" Zyan asked.
The heavyworlders appraised Zyan and Shara. Shara appraised them right back, no doubt mentally picking out where best to shove something sharp for maximum effect. She was lithe and athletic, but also slim – the two men before her were mountains in comparison – but Zyan knew where he'd put his money if it came to betting on something more confrontational than cards.
Zyan's sole concession to formality for this little side excursion had been to ensure his boots were reasonably free of dirt from the ranges. Shara, on the other hand, had raided Merisa's wardrobe and armoured herself in a figure-hugging black dress and heels. Her hair was held up with a pair of metal sticks she'd also borrowed from his cousin, and then modified with an angle grinder until the ends hidden within her bright ginger hair were murderously sharp.
The bouncers weighed up his appearance and hers.
"Buy in is 5000 credits, with a fifteen percent rake – you wait for a seat and if one doesn't come up before we close, then you're not getting it back. Any fardling about, you're out and you lose your chips. She playing?" One of them rumbled.
"She can answer for herself, and no, she isn't," Shara replied.
"In that case you stay at the bar. You talk to him, wave at him, even blink at him after he takes his seat, you're both out. We think you're running anything, you're both out. We just feel like it for whatever reason, you're both out," the man explained the exhaustive house rules.
"Whatever," Shara replied.
"Fine," Zyan confirmed, and held up his wrist unit. The other bouncer waved a wand over it, and the magic 5000 credits were transferred.
"Enjoy your game," the bouncer grunted, and waved them through.
The sensor arc was as impassive as Zyan had expected – either it wasn't up to the job of detecting BlackTalk or it was just window dressing to deter chancers.
Within was an actual, proper bar – recently installed, Zyan presumed. All the optics were empty, and the shelves barren: punters could choose from a pair of plastic boxes, one with beer, one with bottled water – on the plus side you didn't seem to be expected to pay for either.
There was also a table, overseen by another pair of generously-proportioned security. Each of the six chairs was occupied by a poker player, only one of whom Zyan and Shara cared about: Milo Vadansky, gambler and – the important bit – owner and captain of the Ludlow, an independent prospecting vessel.
Vadansky looked just like the holo in his police file – a middle-aged man with a lined face and greying hair, his eyes deep set and perpetually fixed upon the next game. He was a competent spacer and prospector – he could have been comfortably well-off and running his own fleet of ships at this point in his career – but he was nowhere near as competent at poker as he was at finding valuable minerals and resources in deep space.
"Remind me again why we can't just pay this guy for a lift?" Shara asked. "He looks like his needs the money."
Shara was right – Vadansky's stash of chips was just a few pathetic stacks, and whatever poker face he might have normally possessed had been melted away by signs of desperation.
"Because, for all that he's here playing in this absolutely 100% legitimate and above board poker game, he's not a criminal. We need leverage over him if we don't want him to immediately head back to the nearest FSP outpost when things get hairy – we need him to be more scared of letting us down," Zyan answered.
"I can do scary," Shara reminded him.
"I know you can, but you go away after a while. A debt hanging over his head to the likes of this lot -" Zyan indicated the heavyworlder security, "- will keep him on task without us having to lift a finger."
"Or cut one off," Shara added.
"You had to go there, didn't you?" Zyan winced.
"Yep," Shara smiled her slightly feral, worrying smile.
As it panned out, Zyan wasn't even required to take a seat and play. Another prospective player was admitted and took a place at the bar. Vadansky exhausted his supply of chips, negotiated somehow for more, burned through them in short order, and then was escorted by the heavyworlders through an exit behind ther bar. Zyan waved the other player in the queue into his seat, and Zyan and Shara followed Vadansky and his hulking shadows into the next room.
The heavyworlders hadn't wasted any time: Vadansky was already doubled over from a blow to the stomach when Zyan pushed the door open and stepped inside. They weren't alone with the spacer: another man was in there with them, a normally proportioned man in an unassuming grey shipsuit, with black hair and a sneering look to his face, as if nature had permanently installed something with an unpleasant odour just under his nostrils. Zyan disliked him on sight. The room was otherwise empty, apart from shelves around the wall – presumably where booze was stored. It had another entrance on the far side, a larger, metal door - presumably where booze was delivered.
"I'd close that door and walk away, if you know what's good for you," Sneery advised, from where he was leaning against a shelf watching Vadansky get a working over. He had a sneering tone to go with the look.
"Never was my strong suit," Zyan admitted.
Sneery grunted in irritation. "Glyd, re-establish our privacy in here, there's a good lad."
Glyd was the heavyworlder currently not tasked with hitting Vadansky, who turned around with ponderous implacability to make good on his boss's instructions.
Zyan wasn't entirely sure what happened next and in what order. He'd been about to hit Glyd as hard as he could, hopefully enough to make the point that he wasn't going anywhere until he'd had the chance to talk to Sneery. He didn't, however, get the chance.
There was a swishing noise from behind him and the sudden movement of air ruffled his hair. A few moments later, Glyd was on the ground, twitching slightly, with a high-heeled shoe embedded into each arm and a number of other small puncture wounds about his person. He gave vent to a tiny, pathetic wheeze quite at odds with his monumental physique and looked with terrified eyes at Shara, who was now barefoot, loose-haired and rather smug. She held her blood-stained hair pins in one hand and a large pistol in the other.
Zyan was amazed, and found himself unable to stop an involuntary "Shards!" from escaping his lips.
"Nerve clusters," Shara shrugged. "He won't lose too much blood and he'll be on his feet in a few minutes, well, not unless I've missed and hit a major artery, in which case, well, there's a mop and bucket over in that corner which'll probably come in handy."
The other heavyworlder started to reach into his jacket – Shara raised her pistol and said: "Uh-huh, big guy. Leave it where it is."
"Where'd you get that?" Zyan asked.
"Off of Glyd here. You really ought to invest in better holsters, by the way, this thing practically jumped into my hand," Shara advised Sneery.
"You're going to seriously regret this. You know who you're about to turn over here?" Sneery asked, aiming for 'menacing', although given that half his hired muscle was in a twitchy pile on the ground and the other half was slowly backing up against a shelf looking extremely unsure of himself, he fell a bit short of the mark and simply sounded desperate. Vadansky, for his part, was trying to make himself as small as possible.
"I'll be honest here, there is no way I am ever going to regret that," Shara nearly purred, then looked down at Glyd. "You really were an exceptional victim, thank you. Let's do it again sometime."
Glyd's eyes went even wider and he shook his head in a frantic no.
"Nobody's ripping anyone off," Zyan said, getting a grip on himself. "We're here to talk. If we can come to a satisfactory arrangement, then money will be flowing in one direction only, which is away from me and towards you."
"Why didn't you say so then?" Glyd asked, in a thin, hoarse and plaintive croak.
Zyan winced. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that. You can't take this one anywhere. I feel bad about this – I'll pay the medical bill."
"Oh! No, I'll pay it," Shara said, as if she'd forgotten her manners and hadn't stood her round at the bar. "I got to stab him, after all, so I'll foot the bill. Fair's fair."
"Moving on," Zyan said. "I'd like to buy this guy's marker off you. Fifty percent of what he owes upfront, and sixty percent on completion of a little bit of work I need him to do for me."
The so-far-nameless heavyworlder looked puzzled. "That's a hundred and ten percent," he said.
"Not much gets past you, does it?" Zyan replied.
"Apart from us," Shara said.
"He sharding knows it's a hundred and ten percent, Korin," Sneery sneered.
"Indeed. The extra ten is to compensate your organisation for the, um, trouble - " he indicated the fallen Glyd " - and allay any worries you might have about the unconventional nature of this transaction," Zyan said.
"And where is this large amount of credit to be sourced from, may I ask?" Sneery enquired sarcastically.
"Oh, I dug it up here and there," Zyan replied – truthfully, for a given value of truth.
"Say we say yes – how do we know you'll make good on the second payment?" Sneery narrowed his eyes.
"You don't, but you can keep the first one no matter what, and then restart whatever procedure we interrupted when we walked in here to recover the rest, or, y'know, don't – I don't care, to be honest," Zyan shrugged, then checked his wrist unit. "Kinda need an answer sharpish, though – things to do, places to be."
"People to hurt," Shara added.
Zyan rocked his head from side to side. "Probably, yeah, it does seem likely. So…?" He looked at Sneery.
Shara indicated the large pistol she was holding. "How about we revise the first payment upwards by an extra 3 grand, if we can keep this and whatever Korin was going to pull out of his jacket. I kinda like the heft of it, feels quality. You can keep the holsters, though."
Sneery nodded. "Okay then – let's see the colour of your creds."
- o O o -
"Eyes," Shara told Vadansky, a few minutes later, as they bought the shaken man a stiff double in a nearby legitimate bar. She was cleaning under her fingernails with the sharpened tip of one of her large hairpins.
"Uh, what about eyes?" Vadansky asked her, unsure of himself and worried.
"They're...squishy," Shara replied, using her own to peer at the pointy end of the hairpin to see what she'd extracted. They didn't look squishy right now – they looked hard and determined. She moved the pin down to point directly at Vadansky's left eye. "Do you think they go pop if you stick something in them?"
On 'stick', she suddenly thrust the tiny spear forward, then pulled it back again. Vadansky looked terrified, as well he might.
"Okay Juliet, I think Milo's in a suitably receptive mood to consider our offer," Zyan interceded. They'd agreed to go back to their Chalician monikers for the duration of their mission.
"Like little wet balloons," Shara said quietly, then used the clean end of the hairpin to stir her drink.
"We're in need of a ship with FTL capabilities and a decent sensor package," Zyan told Vadansky. "The Ludlow fits the bill. Should be quick – we go to a nearby system, have a good look round, retrieve something if we find it, come back, you never see us again. If you play nice and Juliet and I get back here safe, I'll pay off the rest of your debt, and even throw in five thousand for you. If you don't, I won't, and you can take your chances with sneering bloke and his pet mountains when the rest of their cash doesn't turn up."
"Also: pop!" Shara said, waving the hairpin like a wand.
Vadansky blinked. "Legal, is it?" He asked. He had some sort of weird dialect, kind of like Marin but even more chopped up. His file had said he was Aurigan.
"It's not an interdicted system, and nobody else has laid claim to it," Zyan replied.
"Salvage tip-off, is it? You'll need something bigger than the Ludlow, if you're planning on hauling a cargo out," Vadansky told them.
"We're not," Zyan answered. "We're also not answering any more questions. The trouble we're getting you out of is way worse than any trouble this might get you into," he lied.
Vadansky snorted. "Crooked, this is," he said.
"But it's the only game in town," Zyan completed the saying.
This raised a grim smile from the prospector. "When are you wanting to be leaving, then?"
"Yesterday," Zyan told him. "My associate here'll go get our stuff, and we'll be off. You've got an hour tops, if you've got anything needs tying up planetside."
"Only an hour?" Shara asked, clearly disappointed. "I've got goodbyes to say."
Zyan sighed. "Fine – ninety minutes."
"I suppose that'll have to do," Shara pouted, and left.
"And I should file a flight plan for where, exactly?" Vadansky asked.
Zyan shrugged. "Anywhere not here."
- o O o -
The Ludlow was not a particularly prepossessing ship to look at. It had neither the sleek lines of the Are We There Yet? or the deadly implacability of a warship – it didn't even have the form-denotes-function neatness of a freighter. Instead it looked like someone had welded every sensor array, dish and antenna they could find onto a cargo pod, and then retrofitted a singularity drive to it – because that's exactly what Vadansky had done when he decided to break into the prospecting game. He hadn't bothered to paint it an uniform colour or even to erase the name of the cargo line that had owned the pod, which was still visible beneath the profusion of sensor gear.
Zyan had flown any number of spacegoing 'technicals' - civilian craft hastily converted for military use – and regularly flew the skies of one of the most dangerous planets in the FSP in a sled he'd literally cobbled together from spare parts, but even he had standards.
"Is that sharding thing even survivable, Vadansky?" He asked the prospector.
The man shot him a sour look from behind the controls of his small shuttle – itself a repurposed life pod from the same defunct cargo line. 'Sour' was pretty much the only kind he ever gave. "She's a well-found ship," he grunted.
"I was wondering why someone hadn't taken it from you to cover gambling debts," Shara commented. "Now I know."
"I can take you back to the surface right now, you know. Find another ship if you don't like mine," Vadansky told her.
Zyan grinned and patted Vadansky on the shoulder. "I'm glad somebody loves her, Vadansky," he said.
Vadansky was unmollified by that, but on the other hand he was afraid of Shara, too, so he said nothing more and guided the shuttle into the Ludlow's tiny bay, which was crowded with unmanned probes, remotely operated vehicles and another bodged shuttle conversion. Docking was achieved with a great deal of clanking, jarring and worrying graunching noises – the hatch itself lacked servos, and was opened manually by energetically rotating a handle. Vadansky's method of checking for a good airtight seal was simply to open the hatch a few millimetres and listen for hissing.
"Shards Vadansky," Zyan commented. "You really are a natural gambler."
"Getting nervous, Hamlet?" Shara asked, with one of her trademark smirks,
Vadansky judged the hatch to be viable, and continued to spin the handle. "The made up names you don't have to bother with," he said. "I recognised you from the news, Black Zyan."
"Well, that's that particular cat out of the bag," Zyan replied breezily. There was no way he was going to be able to maintain anonymity anyway, in the long term. "I'll be honest with you, Vadansky, I'm kind of glad. I never liked being called Hamlet. Always made me think people were referring to me as a small ham."
"So sorry," Shara said. "Next time we'll go with King Lear."
"No need to be sarcastic, Juliet, but would Henry or Richard have been out of the question?" Zyan shot back,
"We tended not to go with the normal-sounding names," Shara explained.
"Says the woman called 'Juliet'," Zyan pointed out.
"I was a special case," she replied.
"How come?"
"I was a lot scarier than the woman who ended up with 'Volumnia', that's how," Shara answered.
"Going to be like this the whole time, is it?" Vadansky asked gloomily, still cranking the handle.
"Yup," Shara replied. "Sue me."
"Don't worry, Vadansky, we won't be imposing on you for long," Zyan reassured the man. "Best case scenario, we'll be back here today."
The hatch handle suddenly started to whirl round faster than Vadansky could turn it, prompting Zyan to instinctively reach for the emergency seal button (there wasn't one) and Shara to pull out the stun pistol she'd bought from Sneery and level it at the hatch. It was a cheap copy of a knockoff FSP service stunner, but would work well enough for all that.
"Please, don't shoot," came a familiar voice. "I'm not here to stop you."
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa," Vadansky said, as he saw the stun pistol and heard the voice from the darkness beyond the hatch.
"Brendan, what the shard are you doing here?" Zyan demanded, as a drone lit up it's green-featured face and peered through at them.
"Offering my assistance," the drone said. "There was no way I could refuse a compliance order from Exigency, for which I'm very sorry, but now that I'm a free agent again things are quite different. Can I help you aboard?" A metallic arm was extended down into the shuttle.
"Get that arm out of my face before I shoot it off, drone boy," Shara growled.
"I'm backing away – but please, hear me out," Brendan requested, whirring up out of sight.
"What in the desolate frontier is that?" Vadansky asked.
"Never you mind," Zyan said. "Get up there and prep this bucket to break orbit."
He had his gun out now, too – Korin had possessed another stun pistol along the same lines as the unfortunate Glyd, heavy and overpowered. He climbed up through the hatch, then a small airlock, and into a shabby equipment bay lined with crates, a bevy of spacesuits that had seen better days, and about eighteen metric tonnes of random junk. Seemed that Vadansky was a hoarder as well as a gambler.
Vadansky scurried off forward, up a ladder and through another hatch, hopefully to bring the Ludlow on line rather than summon the authorities. Zyan aimed his pistol at Brendan's green face. He didn't know if stun bolts would be effective against a drone, but it made him feel slightly better.
"You double-crossing son of a garbage scow," Zyan grated out. "You followed us!"
Brendan's drone-face adjusted itself to appear contrite, and the drone tilted it's body forward. "Yes, I'm sorry – but it was the only way to figure out where you were, with Maxim orbital security parked right over me enforcing a comms silence."
"How the hell did you manage to tail us with a shiny metal robot? It's not like you blend in," Shara demanded, also coming up through the hatch and training her weapon on the drone.
"I have a number of smaller units, for reconnoitering hard-to-reach places – I sent a few down with Moran and Saito. One of them reported your intentions to me, and the name of the vessel, so I despatched a slightly larger, more capable drone here, to intercept you," Brendan explained.
"And we're back to 'what the shard are you doing here'," Zyan stated flatly.
"Like I said, Zyan – offering my assistance. You can't seriously be considering a singularity jump in this rusty deathtrap?"
"I heard that!" Vadansky called down from the compartment above.
"Well, this rusty deathtrap won't be hiding extra passengers from us," Shara replied.
"Exigency aren't calling the shots anymore," Brendan said. "I want the chance to make up for that – straighten up accounts. The Guildmaster and CS Ree trusted me and, even if I didn't want to, I abused that trust: but you can trust me this time, Shara. Zyan, talk to your cousin planetside or the Queen, get her to call off the customs cutter, and I'm at your disposal for as long as it takes to get Guildmember Falkstrom back to Ballybran."
"Thanks for identifying literally everyone involved in this to the guy with a gambling problem in debt to the local mob who's already shouted down that he can hear you, by the way, Brendan," Zyan exhaled hard.
"Oh – sorry. I'm really not a spy," the drone apologised.
"Evidently not, yeah," Shara growled. "In fact, shard it, I'm going to shoot you on general principles."
"Uh, get up here, you two really need to!" Vadansky shouted.
"Go see what he wants, Juliet – and make sure he stays focused," Zyan asked. With all this kicking off on his ship, Vadansky had to be wondering whether it was time to call the authorities. Shara nodded and left.
"Brendan, for what it's worth, I know you had to go along with Moran and Saito. We weren't exactly 100% honest with you either, although in our defence that was mostly to keep you out of trouble," Zyan lowered his voice. "So, for the same reason, you're staying here now: this whole thing has got extra, ridiculously dangerous and weird. We're out of 'is this legal?' territory and into 'is this sane?' territory. Shara and I are in this to the finish, but we're not dragging you in too. Go back to your ship – there are no hard feelings: and nobody will feel you've let us down."
"I will," the drone said, "and in any case it would be tantamount to murder to allow you to go anywhere in this hacked-together crate."
"I wasn't asking, Brendan, I was telling," Zyan told it.
The drone's features went white and impassive, and it simply hovered in the centre of the compartment, motionless.
"Um, I meant to take the hardware with you," Zyan added.
The drone made no reply.
"Um, hello?" Zyan approached it. "Anybody home?"
"Greetings," the drone replied, in a passive, metallic tone.
"What happened?" Zyan asked.
"This unit has become temporarily separated from the operator," the drone stated.
"Why?"
"Unknown. Recommend contacting the BX Are We There Yet? for further information," the machine supplied.
Helpful.
"Zyan, get up here!" Shara called down.
"Stay put," Zyan told the drone, holstering his weapon (they had taken the holsters, despite the ease with which Shara had pickpocketed Glyd's weapon) and heading forward.
"This unit will comply," the drone said.
Zyan shimmied up the ladder and onto what must have been the Ludlow's bridge – and bridge was a fair word, it was much larger than he'd been expecting. While there was only one pilot's seat and console, there were a great many other workstations, each with it's own seat, presumably so Vadansky could multi-task without dragging his chair around with him – on spacecraft, bolting things down was usually a good idea, because the gravity was just another system that might fail or need attention.
The main viewport told Zyan why Vadansky had called them so urgently. It was filled by the hulking might of an FSP cruiser.
"I guess we know who she called, then," Zyan said.
"Uh-huh," Shara agreed. "Just translated in a few moments ago."
"Get us out of here Vadansky," Zyan told the captain. With an FSP cruiser now in orbit, it wouldn't be long before Saito was released and issuing orders to stop them leaving Maxim.
"Now hold on a vacuum-damned minute," Vadansky said. "Nothing about this being dangerous or insane was said, nor that the FSP and the Heptite Guild were involved."
"Who said the Heptite Guild were involved?" Zyan asked.
"What other Guild is based on Ballybran?" Vadansky replied.
Zyan grunted. Bloody Brendan and his shouting. "You've got good ears. If you wanted an easy life, though, you shouldn't have decided to blow all your creds in illegal poker games, shardwit. Fire this bucket up and get us moving."
Vadansky bristled. "Look, you can't just-" he started, then stopped as he noted a flashing light on his instrument panel. "That's an all-ships emergency broadcast."
"Probably just a coincidence," Zyan told him. "Break orbit, Vadansky."
"A federal offence it is, to ignore one!" The man protested.
Shara moved, and suddenly she was holding a knife, with the point mere millimetres from Vadansky's left eye. The man froze.
"Do it," she said. "I'm betting your ship doesn't have a medbay capable of putting in a replacement if I cut this one out."
"I can't! You wouldn't!" Vadansky protested. "I refuse - can either of you fly a ship?"
This was a good point which Zyan had, in all the fuss, temporarily forgotten. Yes, he could fly a ship.
Shara pressed the point of the knife closer. "Three, two, o-"
Zyan had no doubt she'd do it. "Okay, Juliet, leave the man's eye alone," Zyan said.
"Aw," she said, "you're no fun sometimes."
"Get up," Zyan said to Vadansky.
"No!" Vadansky snapped, desperation and the removal of Shara's blade lending him a spine. "Too far has this gone! I might act like a fool in front of a pile of chips, but an honest fool I am, and-"
"I'd quite like Captain Vadansky to be unconscious for a little while, please Juliet," Zyan said over the top of him.
"Happy to oblige," Shara replied, and, with a lightning fast jab to the jaw, did exactly that. Vadansky slumped in the pilot's chair and fell silent.
Zyan dragged him out of it, sat down, and started laying in a least-time course to Maxim's hyper limit: the Ludlow, fortunately, had a fairly generic set of controls. He eased the thrust on – producing a worrying vibration from the deckplates - then hit play on the emergency broadcast. No harm hearing what the FSP had to say, after all.
"This is Captain Delisle of the FSPS Sassinak," the message played. "A compulsory medical care order is hereby issued for CS Zyan Jarvis and CS Sharazebel Ferozacorazon of the Heptite Guild. No ship is to leave orbit with these individuals aboard. If you are carrying either or both of these individuals, you are directed to immediately heave to and signal this vessel. There is concern for the medical welfare of both of these individuals, and they should not be approached except by trained naval medical personnel."
"Clever," Shara observed. "A shady captain might ignore an arrest warrant for the right price, but they'll think twice when they hear 'medical welfare' and 'do not approach'. Nobody wants a viral outbreak on their ship."
"Sharazebel?" Zyan asked.
Shara winced. "I hated that name - I thought I'd had it changed. If you repeat it to anyone, I will make your life a living hell for the next three centuries. If it's Tornaz you mention it to, make that four."
"I'll trade it off against you never mentioning the cavorting thing," Zyan responded, using the navigational computer to run a few calculations on the relative positions and velocities of the Ludlow and the Sassinak.
"Deal," Shara agreed readily.
The calculations came back with the answer Zyan had been hoping for – barely. The cruiser could not overhaul them before they were far enough out to perform a singularity jump: but that in itself raised it's own set of issues. Zyan was perfectly capable of piloting a ship in-system: he even had a qualification. Unfortunately he'd never acquired the full set of skills necessary to plot a Singularity jump, at least not in Vadansky's unconventionally assembled vessel, which appeared to lack the automated systems that other, more user-friendly ships would possess. Vadansky was currently out cold on the floor, and thus not in a position to help them.
"I don't suppose you've been hiding any FTL navigational qualifications along with the extra letters in your first name, Shara?" Zyan asked.
Shara shook her head. "No, sorry. Can't you plot a jump?"
"I know enough to try," Zyan answered, "but probably not to get it right. Can you wake up our gambler?"
Shara peered at Vadansky, and lifted an eyelid critically to examine it. "No - I hit him pretty hard, sorry."
"Shard it," Zyan muttered.
There was a whirring from behind them – the drone floated up the hatchway, with Brendan once again in full charge. Shara immediately pulled out her stunner, as did Zyan. Brendan's drone put it's hands up.
"Hold your fire!" It said.
"You're back, then. Where the hell did you go?" Zyan asked.
"The arrival of the Sassinak demanded my full attention, sorry. Her captain is most keen to know your whereabouts, and those of Agent Saito. I have not provided her with an answer to her first question, but I'm afraid I was not able to prevaricate regarding the latter. She'll be released very soon, I fear – and I now have little choice but to remain here too. I'm afraid I can no longer be of much use to you," Brendan replied.
Zyan had a brainwave. "Not so sure about that, Brendan. You say you want to help? Float over here and plot us a jump to-"
"Wait," Shara cut in. "Don't involve Brendan any more than we have to."
"We haven't got much choice except to trust him," Zyan told her. "He's the only one aboard right now who's both awake and capable of getting us where we need to go."
Shara's voice sounded in his ear. "Jammer. Now. Trust me."
Zyan reached into his pocket and flicked it on. Brendan's drone, bereft of the link to the brainship, immediately went white.
"I want a word with you, and not in front of that thing," Shara said. "Follow me."
"Shara, there's an FSP cruiser-"
"Follow. Me. Now," Shara restated firmly.
"Oh-kay," Zyan agreed.
Shara led him to the rear of the compartment, away from the drone.
Out loud, she said: "It's not fair to drag Brendan into this with a sharding FSP cruiser in orbit, Zyan!"
Subvocally, she was telling him a different story: "Brendan's compromised," she murmured.
"How?" Zyan asked, out loud, in response to both questions.
Shara started to give him a lecture on the irresponsibility of making Brendan do anything more for them. Zyan fabricated a few responses on their current lack of choice in the matter. Subvocally, a different conversation was taking place in the pauses.
"Eyes!" Shara said, emphatically.
"What?"
"Eyes! His eye!" Shara said.
"What is it with you and eyes today? Who's sharding eye?" Zyan asked.
"Anderssen's!" Shara told him. "It was Brendan that replaced his eye!"
Zyan frowned. "How do you figure that?"
"Brendan told us, just after we left Shankill, that he'd been near Ballybran nine or ten weeks ago, just before Passover, on 'other business'. That matches up pretty exactly to when Moran and Anderssen came to Shankill to meet Alenda. He also told us, when we arrived at Opal and I was feeling the effects of all the singularity jumps, that he had a 'very advanced med bay capable of complex surgical operations' so finding me a painkiller wouldn't be an issue. Saito didn't know that Anderssen had lost an eye – she reckoned Moran had attacked him. Moran did, I bet – and Brendan performed the replacement in his own medbay when he was taking Moran and Anderssen to Shankill!" Shara subvocalised in a hiss. "Neither Moran nor Brendan told her, or us, about it because Anderssen had compromised them both."
Zyan considered it. It fit. Brendan was, after all, a brain: and if Anderssen had been aboard the Are We There Yet?, he could have influenced him as he could any other human.
"Shards," he said.
"Do you know enough about that," Shara indicated the console, "to stop Brendan from sabotaging the ship, jumping us into a star or whatever?"
Zyan nodded. "Probably. I might not be able to navigate a jump 100%, but I reckon I can spot a deliberate mistake."
"Then we ask Brendan to plot a jump to a nearby system – any random system will do. We make the jump, and he'll lose contact with the drone," Shara suggested.
"Throwing him off our trail – but we still have to navigate to our actual destination," Zyan pointed out.
"Vadansky won't be out forever," Shara reminded him. "When he wakes up, he can plot a proper jump. It's a delay, yes, but we don't have much choice. When we reach the hyper limit and don't make a jump, the cruiser will notice. We have to go now."
"Let's pick a system a long way off, then, and only do the first jump of whatever series would be required. Send him on a wild goose chase," Zyan suggested.
"That would be a geat idea if you hadn't told Vadansky, while Brendan could hear, that we might be back within a day," Shara glowered.
"Oh, shards," Zyan said. "I'm an idiot!"
"Preaching to the choir, Zyan. Any longer and Brendan's going to become suspicious when we turn off the jammer and he checks whatever recordings that drone – and any others – are currently making. Do we have a plan?"
Zyan nodded, and finished off the conversation out loud. "We haven't got any choice – Brendan does the jump for us or this is over right now!"
"Okay, shard it – but I don't like it and it's still unfair," Shara completed her part of the deception.
They switched off the jammer and headed back to the console.
"I want it understood I'm against this," Shara said.
"Against what? What happened?" Brendan asked, going green again.
Does he know the one-eyed man's running him? Zyan thought. He too had been in the man's presence – how long did he need to twist a brain? How did he know he himself wasn't doing the man's bidding? It was a squirmy, uncomfortable reality to face.
"Shara tried to talk me out of this," Zyan told the drone, praying that he was even half the actor Shecherzia was. "Our pilot is unco-operative and now also unconscious, and my grasp of FTL navigation is sketchy to say the least, so can you plot a jump to Zodanga?" Zyan gave the name of one of the systems close to P13205, another uninhabited system - but one with a memorable name.
"With the greatest goodwill," the drone answered, and whirred forward.
The Ludlow lacked any sort of system the drone could interface with directly, which was a good thing as far as Zyan was concerned, because it meant the drone had to use the keyboard, which in turn meant that Zyan could watch it and check it's work. It didn't seem to be putting in any false values, and the screen showed the plot to be, indeed, for the Zodanga system. No warnings were displayed and no alarms went off.
"Done," the drone said. "This singularity drive is old and frankly underpowered, so the strain won't be anywhere near as bad as a burst jump, but even so I'd advise strapping in. I've programmed this drone to be as helpful to you as possible – even without me to control it, it could come in useful. It's unarmed, but capable of limited orbital flight, as you can probably tell from that fact that it's here. It can tell you it's capabilities. And once again – I'm sorry."
The plot showed the Ludlow to have reached the hyper limit. Zyan nodded at Shara, who, contrary to her ruthless and unsympathetic treatment of him when he was awake, lifted Vadansky gently (and easily) into one of the seats and strapped him in, then followed suit herself.
Somewhat belatedly, Zyan wondered if the drone wasn't unarmed – maybe even equipped with explosives. It was better not to take chances, but he didn't want to tip his hand, either.
"Me too, Brendan," Zyan said, strapping himself in. "Me too."
He hit the jump control, and was immediately subjected to the awful lurch of singularity decomposition, the strange, liquid feeling of the jump, and then the reciprocal lurch as they translated back into normal space. Zyan swallowed back some vomit – the radiant fluid and shielding had evidently helped him more than he knew.
The drone had gone white and impassive again. Zyan didn't know if his stunner would work on the drone, but started to pull it out anyway.
It's features still white and impassive, the drone shot forward, extended one hand and seized Zyan's wrist in – literally – an iron grip. He felt his bones grinding together inside, a really odd and unpleasant sensation. He gave the drone a shove backwards but it was like pushing against a wall, and in any case it then seized his other hand and began squeezing.
Then it suddenly clanked to the deck: a heavy, lifeless weight. It toppled slowly over, faceless and without power.
Shara bent down and, with a nerve-jangling scrape, pulled her knife out from between two metal plates just above the drone's shoulder. A curl of acrid smoke came out with it.
"Sorry Brendan," she said. "Turns out I would stab one of your drones."
- o O o -
The Ludlow, for all her unlovable ugliness and alarming creaks, rattles and vibrations, had two virtues that Zyan was very glad of over the next hour: she wasn't very big, and she was stocked with a very wide selection of handheld, well-maintained sensor gear. Zyan used a selection of these devices to sweep the ship from top to bottom: he discovered another drone – a tiny one, no bigger than the pack of playing cards it was hiding behind – in Vadansky's quarters, and fried it with a stun bolt. If there were any more, they were better hidden.
His wrists returned to feeling normal within a few minutes.
As a prospecting vessel, the Ludlow was equipped with an eclectic, often superannuated, but ultimately capable selection of external sensors too. Some of these could be trained upon the hull, and when Vadansky came to, Zyan set him to the task of using them to determine if Brendan had attached any drones to the outside of the ship. Vadansky reported, in a sullen tone, that he couldn't find anything.
"Thank you," Zyan told the man, when they were done, and sat back down on the bridge. Brendan's dead drone was still on the deck, and still smoking slightly. One of the sensor systems the Ludlow lacked appeared to be internal fire sensors. "Here's the deal: I'm sorry for the way you've been treated. So's Juliet, right Juliet?"
Shara didn't look in the least bit sorry, but then sighed. "The name's Shara, Captain Vadansky – you already heard everything so there doesn't seem much point in messing about anymore. I'm sorry for threatening you and I'm sorry I hit you. I won't promise not to do it again, however, because-"
"Shara, why don't you let me handle the bits where we try to get people to help us, okay?"
Shara glared at him, but then waved her hand in acceptance.
"And as you already spotted, I'm Zyan Jarvis. We have landed you in the middle of something very nasty, I'm afraid, but – and please believe me when I say this – we're the good guys," Zyan explained.
Vadansky snorted.
"There's been a kidnapping," Zyan said.
"I'll say," was Vadansky's response to that.
Zyan's patience snapped. "Know what? Fine. Shard you, Vadansky. Yes we have sharding kidnapped you, and you should be glad, because it gives you the tiniest hope that when the landslide of federal-level hurt comes rushing down on you – and it will come – you'll be able to say that you had no choice. You're only going to be able to even get that far, though, if I make the second payment to your oversized friends and their weaselly little boss. So it is very much in your interests to swallow your pride and help us find the other person who's been kidnapped, a woman I love very much indeed and whose life is in danger, a woman I was not there for when she really needed me, because I was too busy being a sharding idiot. I will do absolutely anything to find her, get her back, and ask her forgiveness for letting her down. Your only chance of seeing the other end of this sharding mess from the right side of federal custody and without having your creditors cutting bits off you is to do everything you can to help me. Do you understand me?" Zyan stood up and nearly snarled this last at him.
Vadansky blinked.
"This is better than how she was going to ask in what way?" He asked dourly.
Shara laughed. "Was that a joke, Vadansky?"
Vadansky just glowered at her. "The Heptite Guild has deep pockets," he said. "Deeper than five thousand credits from a man who may be unable to pay them to me from a FSP cell. Your Guild my debts will settle, a lawyer will provide to see me though the fallout of this, and pay me an extra fifteen thousand on top, as compensation for the ordeal I've been put through by two of it's members."
"I happen to know a good lawyer or two," Zyan told him, "but I'll only go as far as an extra ten thousand. We can knock you cold again and I'll do the piloting without any assistance from you, and you can see how badly I damage your ship afterwards. I can also tell any FSP investigator who'll listen that you were easy to bribe and more than happy to ignore the law."
Vadansky glowered at him. "Ten it is," he agreed.
"Then prep for a jump to P13205," Zyan told him.
"P13205? Nothing there, there is," Vadansky knitted his brows.
"Then you'll be making an easy ten grand, won't you?" Zyan said. "Chop chop."