"Interesting," she said. "I hadn’t thought of that. It did seem staged—I thought it was merely for effect."
Jellico shrugged slightly.
"If it was a warning, to whom?" she asked.
He returned no answer, and their conversation reverted to speculations about what kind of cargo they might raise.
But when they left a short while later, the question was answered when the quiet snick of a weapon made both instinctively duck for cover, and a high-velocity pellet whined right past Rael’s ear.
10
Someone shot at them again. Jellico’s gaze flicked back and forth, then he motioned Rael back into the restaurant towards a flowering hedge, and followed swiftly behind her.
They shoved their way through the thick shrubbery and ran headlong down a narrow accessway, dodging servitors with trays and paying no attention to the mix of Kanddoyd chirps and humanoid yells of outrage in their wake. The corridor terminated in a narrow service exit; just outside, Jellico caught at a decorative pole and swung around and up to the plant-bedecked platform about six feet above them. As Rael watched with interest, the law-abiding captain of the Solar Queen placed his booted foot against the rim of a potted tree, and shoved.
The pot tipped majestically toward the doorway they’d just quit, moving slowly in the lower-than-standard acceleration of this level. "Run!" Jellico commanded.
Rael turned and ran. Moments later she heard the smash of ceramic behind her, and shortly thereafter a cacophony of yelps, curses, and squeaks as their chasers hit the dirt pile.
"Humans and Kanddoyds," she said. His lips parted—he had been about to say the same, she realized.
He grinned instead, and flicked a salute.
Shots whizzed by both their heads right then. Rael ducked and began
stagger-running, fighting the urge to sneeze. The analytical part of her brain recognized the distinctive burn in her nostrils given off by the pellets: retching agents colloquially known as taste-agains. They were illegal almost everywhere in human space, and with good reason. If the pellet actually hit any portion of their skin, they’d be writhing on the ground in seconds, unable to see or hear, and miserably rejecting the excellent food they’d just eaten.
They dashed deeper into the structures of the North Pole, turning into one of the recreational concourses ringing their end of the habitat, Jellico leading the way. He dodged around passersby with an efficiency that made it plain somewhere in his past he had been trained for action.
Rael recognized the signs, because she had as well.
Together they vaulted over a low bench and a little stream. Then she stopped when Jellico suddenly turned back. Bending down, he dog-paddled water from the stream onto the glassy concourse deck, then straightened up, grinning. She choked on a laugh as they whirled and ran; seconds later they heard the first of the chasers vault over the stream—and let out a whoop of despair, followed by a satisfying crash.
My turn, Rael thought, fumbling in her pocket. She found what she sought, a credit chit, and as they sprinted down the concourse, dodging people and ducking round objects, she saw a row of automats. Putting down her head, she pounded into the lead and skidded to a stop, threw her chit in, and hit a combination.
A moment later into her hands poured a stream of the hard little ball candies that Kanddoyds were so partial to. Cocking her wrist, she threw them back down their pathway, where they bounced and scattered.
Yells and curses rose as people inadvertently trod on the tiny candies and nearly overbalanced; the runners, barely glimpsed through the crowd, were not so lucky. One, two, three figures flailed arms and shot up into the air, cursing, clacking, and howling. Rael felt that howl down her spine. It was a Shver voice, and the naked fear was probably an instinctive reaction to finding oneself in midair. Shver didn’t jump; no one would, in their heavy grav, and habit was too ingrained to make it easy for them to go leaping about even in micrograv. Probably instantly dizzy, she thought, the analytical part of her brain always observing. Shver inner ear arrangements had to be even more sensitive than humans’.
Jellico slapped one finger to his palm: one to you.
He looked around as they curved toward another bridge-way, one that would take them back toward the interior face of the North Pole, overlooking the inside of the habitat. The customary austerity of his face was eased by a curious little smile. He's playing the game, she exulted, and waited happily to see what he would come up with.
Zing! Another pellet sang between them, and they ducked, turned, pounded up a bridge toward a smile-shaped slice of sky with strange hook-shaped clouds hanging in it below the dazzle of the radiants. Rael became aware of a slight alteration in the pattern of her run, and realized they were losing gravity as they ran higher. She lengthened her strides, trying to keep from bounding up, and was immediately rewarded with an incremental increase in speed. Soon she’d be leaping and not running at all—but she knew how to run in low grav.
So did Jellico.
The captain ran without slowing straight toward the edge of the concourse, and as she followed Rael saw the deck fall away before them, vanishing under the slender railing that was all that barred them from a sheer ten-mile fall to the distant surface. He altered his step, running now along the edge, the light of the radiants filtered into a green flicker of dappled light across his uniform by the foliage clumped in pleasing arrangements along the edge.
In a flash of curious detachment, Rael took in the awesome view to one side, trying to fight the tendency to veer away from it. The vast green walls of the habitat, curling up and overtopping them like the waves that had whelmed legendary Atlantis, were studded with the huge Kanddoyd towers that lanced up from the surface at the crazy angles made possible by spin gee. The haze of distance blurred the vertiginous landscape into the semblance of impossible mountains.
Then her throat spasmed as Jellico veered suddenly and vaulted up onto the back of a bench like a free-fall gymnast. With both hands he caught the high branches of a tall, thin napuir tree. Scrambling up into its heights, he was obscured by the branches weighted with fuzzy purple fruit. Rael saw the tree shake—he was going up, rather than coming back down, up to a higher concourse!
She looked about, saw not a tree but the fine-mosaic crenellations of an ornamental pillar, no doubt disguising a tangle of cable and piping, and jumping as high as she could, she caught hold and scrambled up.
They both swarmed over the rail above at the same time, and Jellico tossed her an armful of fruit.
Holding her breath, trying not to choke from laughter and a pungently nasty smell, she popped her share of the weird fruit and threw the squashy pulp down on their chasers. Howls of rage came from below the trees—but with it the clatter of fast-climbing Kanddoyds.
"Those Kanddoyds are too good at climbing," gasped Rael.
Jellico nodded, looking around. "We’ll have to go down, then." He suddenly seemed to see something and ran forward, deeper into the concourse along a V-shaped gash that bulged the inner cliff edge of the concourse inward here, toward a complex glitter of metal and plasglas with garish laser beams and actinic light points flaring from it.
TORQUEMADA’S DELIGHT, the sign announced, THE GALAXY’S STEEPEST SPINBOGGAN.
"You can’t be serious," she said, slowing somewhat. Jellico glanced back at her, then past her. She shot a look back along their path: several Kanddoyds were already climbing over the railing.
"There’s no faster way down," he said.
And, Rael saw, there weren’t any Kanddoyds waiting in the line that snaked toward the entrance to the establishment. No wonder, she thought, given that the toboggan terminated on the surface ten miles below, in 1.6 standard gees, intolerable to them.