“Want to. Might. They come when they come, you know.” She fluttered her fingers at him and went on her way.
Act II, scene 1 The spy walks down the street, greeting everyone she knows and spreading her story about, hoping she’s, soothing the jitters of the little worm who’s tailing her.
She stopped in at Cara’s cook shop. “Two of your meat pies, hm, Cara my love. Wrap them up tight and throw in a couple of napkins, I’m going for a sail in a flit and the Tinkerman gets snarky about stains.”
The older woman shook her head. “You’ve blown a circuit, Shadow. Anyone who’d go voluntarily out over that stinking soupmix…” She clicked her tongue, then went to work wrapping up the pies.
“Act III scene 1,” Shadith chanted to the wind as she took the flit in a sweeping curve across the water. “The spy has fooled them all and says an unfond farewell to Haundi Zurgile the chief city of the colony world Hutsarte”. And Grinder Jiraba can go suck eggs.”
As she tonic the flit low and finished the curve, she saw that she’d celebrated a bit too soon. There was a dark speck over near the horizon, almost out of sight. “Stinking Grinder, doesn’t trust anyone. Let’s see. Might as well open up my pies and have my meal while I’m thinking this over. Hm. Wonder if I can get him so bored watching me play around doing nothing, I can catch him on the hop when I take off.” She chuckled. “Act III scene 2: The spy has her dinner and leads the tail round in circles.”
When she finished eating, she sent the flit skimming across the whitetops, the lift effect churning the water into cream beneath her. It was dangerous and she was riding her luck hard, but it kept the watcher dithering in the distance, especially since she was careful to keep circling back toward the shore so he wouldn’t have to worry that she was stupid enough to try escaping to the Wild Half. And while she played out that scene, she programmed a course into the autopilot, getting ready for the time when she had to ditch the flit.
After half an hour of skittering about like a waterbug with the fidgets, she went up to a safer height, set the auto-p on hover/drift, and let the wind blow her toward the string of islands. She put, her feet up, stretched out and began to sing, fragments, phrases, repeating them over and over with enough changes to suggest she was trying to weave them into a song should the watcher have a sound pickup aimed at her.
When she reached the first island, a rocky dot that barely broke the surface, she sat up and began dancing the flit around and between the islands. Half the time the tail was out of sight completely. To her intense satisfaction he didn’t seem to mind and didn’t try to get closer.
She flew faster, swinging up into sight, dipping low again; she circled the big island, then took the flit skimming low over the place where the metal mass had registered on Digby’s detec. Lylunda had set a camou cloth over her ship and the vegetation had helped her conceal it, a tangle of vines crawling across the porous cloth, the broken trees and withered foliage swallowed in the damp fecundity of these latitudes. Without the evidence from a powerful detec no one would know that anything nested there.
She turned the flit in a tight circle, brought it down and set it on hover/pause, the programmed course to kick in after seven minutes. She lowered the harp and Digby’s Trick Kit, then dropped overside herself. Using the cutting rod from the kit, she sliced through the camou cloth and let herself down beside the shrouded ship, wrapping herself in a mind spray of don’ttouch-me to keep the bugs off while she worked her way along the ship’s side until she reached the area below the lock.
She crouched beside the ship, sheltering under the curve of the hull when she heard the ascending whine as the flit revved up and took off. “Act III scene 3: The spy tries the old decoy trick. Gods, I hope this works. I need time to pry open this can.”
10
“Act IV scene 1,” Shadith chanted as the lock slid open. “Digby does it again. The spy enters the smuggler’s ship. Huh! Enough of that, it’s getting stupid now.” She moved cautiously inside and started for the bridge. “I do hope you were counting on concealment and your folks’ loathing for these waters… and planning for a hot jump if the Kliu were chasing you… after what happened at the Market, were I you, that’s how I’d leave things… mmmm.”
She settled herself in the pilot’s chair and inspected the controls. “Well, you’re old, but she keeps you up well. New kephalos, I see. Out of the Hegger Combine, looks like. Ah, yes. I know your kind. Let’s see what the sequencer gives us.” She whistled breathily through her teeth as she peeled the interface and clicked home the jacks. “You’re a clever child, Lylunda, but rather conventional, I think. This shouldn’t take long. Meantime, I’m going to have a look through your ship. Don’t expect you’ll be leaving notes to yourself in your writing desk like that idiot jock-pilot Autumn Rose told me about, but maybe there’s something you forgot.”
It was a compact little ship, swelling around the belly like a proper smuggler should, plenty of hold space with cells for handling tricky items and a mazy confusion of interior walls which was probably meant to conceal abditories used for really hot cargo. Nothing there that she could see, only the ghosts of old scents.
The single cabin was tidy and tucked up, clothing stowed in a narrow closet and a few shallow drawers, the foldaway cot made up with clean sheets. The only extravagance was a flake player with hundreds of selections ready to go at a touch. When she glanced through the index, Shadith was astonished and flattered to find her own recording there, something she’d made as the final exam for one of her courses. It’d gone into University’s library collection and had brought her a few small but much appreciated royalty payments. “Well, now, if I needed an incentive…” She laughed. “Anyone with such excellent taste should never be thrown to the execrable Kliu.” Still chuckling, she went back to the bridge to find that the sequencer had done its job, brought the controls alive, and gotten the kephalos ready for work.
She buttoned up the interface and settled into the pilot’s chair. “Read new ID code.” She watched the string flash across the screen. Smooth. Coming through clear and intact. “Read status of code.” Good. Show me control configurations.” And, here’s where it starts to be work. I’ve got to know your jigs and jags before I dare take you ’splitting… which reminds me, I don’t know your name yet. Well, that little frill comes later. Focus, Shadow, focus. You need to know this stuff…
The sea was, buzzing with flits when she took Lylunda’s Dragoi up through the camou cloth and went running for the line where the atmosphere officially ended, the point where dirt law supposedly ceased to rule. Of course, all that generally meant was that whoever was chasing you was free to nail you without going through the time-wasting formality of a trial.
Someone in the flits had acquired launchers and the missiles that fed them, but one of Dragoi’s neater tricks was an ability to shield herself while projecting an image off to one side, so the shooter blew a hole in the air but did the ship no damage at all, and by the time he discovered this, Shadith was long gone.
11. Bound on Bol Mutair
Lylunda blinked. The sudden brightness made her eyes wafer. She closed them again-and grew aware of the nearly intangible vibration humming through her bones. Cabin. Ship. In the insplit going who knew where. For a moment she didn’t question this; then the oddity of it struck her and she jerked upright on the cot, swiveling around as she came up, her legs sliding over the edge.