She sat in a small glassed-in alcove, the people passing by glancing incuriously at her, none of them coming in.
She sat.
And sat.
And waited.
This was deliberate. The Directors wouldn’t want to get Digby annoyed at them, but they didn’t like at all having one of his ops show up without his informing them that she was coming. And they were showing their displeasure.
She’d set herself a limit of three hours. If they didn’t see her before then and let her soothe their little minds, she was leaving. Digby could stir his photons and see if he could identify the smuggler from the description she’d gotten from the Taalav. And then she’d have to decide once more how she wanted to play this.
The image of the Kliu Berej slaughtering the odd little creatures haunted her. Somehow she had to find the arrays and get them away, hide them in a place the Kliu couldn’t reach. Couldn’t reach? Why didn’t I think of it before? Vrithian. No, not Vrithian, the next world out. Storsten. It’s a heavy world like Pillory. Vrithian’s sister world. People have been looking for that system for centuries without getting a smell of it and Lee only found it because her Mum came and got her. Harskari… maybe she can help, she likes gardening… I need to talk to Lee… but I have to find the smuggler first. Have to get her to tell me where they are… She sighed. Digby’s going to have kittens… and I have to find something else to do with my life……
After about an hour and a half of the observers watching her doze, a juvenile Blurdslang drove his nutrient bowl into the room and clicked it in behind the desk. He activated the voice cube and fixed-watery eyes on her.
“What is Digby’s interest in the Market and why didn’t he inform us of his intentions?’
“I’m on leave at the moment, that’s why you weren’t informed. I’m doing a favor for the mother of a friend. Adelaar aici Arash of Adelaris Security Systems.”
‘What favor?”
“I’m to find and interview a young woman who left her employ under clouded circumstances. If the interview is satisfactory, I am to arrange passage for her to University. It’s a very simple business. A call to Adelaris will verify this.”
“The young woman’s name?”
“She may not be using it at the moment, but the name I was given is Mink ac Vissyn. A young Fulladerin from Saber Minor.” She slipped a cased flake from her pouch, seta it on the desk. “Her bio data’s here, if you’d like to take a copy.”
After a moment’s laborious cogitation he tapped off the voice cube and shrilled a spate of Blurdsla into the corn, counting as usual on the fact that few people beyond his species could understand his speech. Shadith kept her face still. She couldn’t get everything, some of the sounds were outside her hearing range, but she could pick up a lot of what was being, said. It was hardly.worth the effort because he was announcing they’d all wasted their time stewing in their dishes over nothing. And what was he supposed to do with the flake she was waving at him?
He listened, tapping irritably with the tips of the thready fingers at the end of a tentacle. When the burst of speech from the com was finished, he reactivated the voice cube. “You will remember that any action against a firm established in any Node of the Market will be dealt with severely. The list of Market Laws and the penalties for violations of them are waiting for you in the Mimarose Ottotel. Review them before you begin your search. You may leave now. Take your flake with you, we are not interested.”
The Node diurn was nearing its end as Shadith left the OverSec complex, the bubble darkening, ripples of vermilion and saffron shimmering behind the flat roofs of the other buildings in the Security Complex. She was feeling quite pleased with herself and had to work to keep from grinning. “We are not interested,” she murmured. “And if you believe that, see this phial I’m holding. Those few golden drops are the Vryhh formula for immortality. I swear it’s true. Tsa!”
The street was empty except for a few peacer ’bots returning for an info dump and recharging. This wasn’t a plac’e where people strolled for pleasure. She marched to the chair pen and thumbed on a chainchair, climbed into it and let it click her toward the lock and the pneumo line that would get her into the Ottotel Node. A rain was scheduled in that Node. Nice. Clean the air and wash everything down. “Then I start hunting. Chatting up everyone I can get to talk to me.”
6
Holoas swirled under the velvet black of the Node shell in its night phase, reflected in the wet pavements and the glass of the show windows. Lost in the mix of crew off the visiting ships, labor from the factories, off-duty guards, merchants, gamblers, thieves, smugglers, gun runners, druggies and dniggers, Cousins and non-Cousins of every shape, color and attribute, some raucous, some musical, some silent, Shadith drifted along the Marrata Circle looking for the places she and her Hired Man had visited the one night she’d spent here last year. She’d thought about seeing whether he was still around, but decided against it. He was altogether too observant and no doubt had rather close ties to OverSec. If she were just playing, she wouldn’t care, but working this double-trace was complicated enough without that sort of close observation.
Music drifted into the street when doors swung open, sliding into her blood, changing the way she walked, the set of her head, the swing of her shoulders. She rethembered the hushed elegance of the Hegger transfer station and laughed aloud, reveling in the difference.
She knew where she’d start her trace and how she was going to do it. It was music. It was always music. She laughed aloud. “The key to the universe,” she sang. “Shadow’s songs.”
In the next three hours she went in and out of the smaller clubs, listening to the music, looking at the custom, sampling what was sold there, moving on again when the mix wasn’t quite right, zigging from side to side around the Circle, sliding into all the dark holes where the crews blew their pay.
Shadith wriggled to a table the size of a washcloth, pushed up against the wall and continually threatened by the swing gate as the serving girls coming from a back room pushed past her, their trays loaded with everything from pelar pipes to jugs of obat raw enough that a sip would pickle the lining of the drinker’s throat. Just the smell was enough to pucker her mouth.
The gloom was sporadically and inadequately lit by drifting spheres of psuedo-foxfire. Faces moved in and out of darkness as they were touched by the cold green light. Mostly they were the usual Cousinly variety, though a group of Lorrunertoerkans hunched over a table near the door, the deep creases in their faces puddling shadow as if they were filled with ink, and a few male Caan eyes flashed to silver then dark as the foxfire drifted near then away.
The stage was empty at the moment; the players finished a set as she came in and moved into the back where no doubt they were communing with their souls via whatever substance they found handy. They were the group she remembered.
It was toward the end of her Night Out when she was feeling no pain and an urge to sing. Though she knew well enough what working musicians thought of pushy amateurs in the grip of wish fulfillment, she teased them into letting her join them, and the snatches of memory that were all she retained the next morning weren’t that embarrassing-at least not the ones that dealt with her singing… though other images… the pile near night’s end… sari
The table beeped to remind her she hadn’t ordered the rent drink yet. She ran through the menu, chose a white syntha wine that shouldn’t be too poisonous and started to chuck a handful of Marratorium tokens in the slot.
“Uh! What…” She looked up into a man’s grinning face. The swinging door had shoved him against her, but he hadn’t resisted it all that much and he didn’t move away when the server dashed past and let the door whoosh shut.