“I’ve heard it said,” Donovan suggested, “that the speed of space on the Tightrope is so great that one can cross the Rift standing still.”
“Ooh, that is exaggeration, I am thinking! But the walls are close and the subluminal mud encroaches on the channel. It is a bad way and a treacherous one. But one unpatrolled by League corvettes.”
“Sounds like a good reason to seize control of the ship before you get us on it.”
“Ooh,” said Olafsdottr, “you are a foony man, for sure. Should I kill you now and save myself soospense?”
Donovan grinned. “You won’t do that. You went to all that trouble to sneak into the League, nab me, and commandeer a handy ship when you could have injected me with something fatal and been done with it. That means you plan to keep me alive, and that means you’re taking me somewhere. I’m a valuable cargo.”
“Valuable,” Olafsdottr admitted, “but not priceless. Don’t make your inventory cost greater than you be worth.”
That evening, before he turned the lights out, the scarred man removed a particular hologram from his scrip and studied on it.
Four figures sat at an outdoor café table on the sunlit cobbles of the Place of the Chooser, the great public square in Èlfiuji, in the Kingdom on Die Bold. Bridget ban sat in the middle turned at three-quarters but with her head fully facing the imager. Her smile, broad; her eyes seducing the viewer; her red hair captured in midflight, as if she had just then tossed her head to look at the artist. Her left arm draped Little Hugh’s shoulders; her right hand covered the Fudir’s on the table. Greystroke’s hand rested on her shoulder.
A fellowship, and a good one. He missed them all terribly. The four of them back then had been in search of the Twisting Stone, and the singular tragedy was that they had found it.
“She’s not expecting us on Dangchao, you know,” Donovan told himselves after restoring the image to his scrip and speaking the lights out. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit her. She won’t know it when we don’t show up.”
Oh, the harper will know, said the girl in the chiton. She knew we were coming before we did.
“It was going to be a surprise,” the Fudir whispered.
No surprise now. No expectation of the harper’s broad and welcoming smile. No possibility that the daughter’s smile would infect the mother. The fellowship in his hologram had been broken, and broken by his own actions. He had abandoned them, had abandoned Bridget ban, with no word and no explanation. One such desertion might be reparable; two would never be, and even the harper could lose her smile.
Unless he could take the ship from Ravn Olafsdottr.
Snug in his bunk, neatly boxed into the wall, Donovan discovered that the bed was not especially user-friendly. Between the thin pad and the short length, he turned and twisted in pursuit of an elusive relaxation. Perhaps a thicker pad would have settled him; perhaps not. But one of the twists—or one of the turns—brought him against the panel that formed the inner side of the bunk; and the pressure must have been just right, for something went snick or click and the panel slid aside, and Donovan fell off the bunk on a side that he hadn’t known it had.
He found himself in a narrow passageway between the wall of the ward room and the wall of the utility room next to it. There were pipes, ducts, and cable runs, as one normally finds in walls; but there was also crawl space and, here and there, shelves and bins. Inner Child glanced quickly fore and aft, saw nothing in the darkness, but kept watch—for seeing nothing in the dark was hardly a comfort to him.
Oho, said the Sleuth. The Rightful Owner was a smuggler. There are probably caches, passages, and hidey-holes like this all through the ship. Tyrants and democrats had escaped the people’s wrath cocooned in such ships. Secret treaties and covert agreements had traveled secure in their bosoms. Prototypes and patents had been hustled to subsidiaries—or competitors—on sundry worlds.
After this fortuitous discovery, the scarred man took to wandering the monoship at odd hours, investigating its nooks and crannies. He wondered how long the ship had been in Olafsdottr’s possession. She might know of the nooks, but perhaps not of the crannies.
Using the secret passages, he could make an end-run around Olafsdottr’s security and come upon her from an unexpected direction. Her reflexes could not be markedly inferior to his own, nor her mastery of the arts mortal. His main advantage was that she did not wish to damage him, and this might cause her to hold back if it came to that.
But not every imagined possibility is a real one. The two places where Olafsdottr spent most of her time were the two places where the passages did not run. First was the pilot room, which was in any case too small and cramped for a struggle that included a survivor. The second was her sleeping quarters, where she was most vulnerable, but which was inaccessible from the hidey-holes that otherwise swiss-cheesed the ship. Not all the caches connected. To approach her sleeping quarters meant crossing the spinal corridor, and that was alarmed by her ad hoc security system. It was not an impossible task to circumvent the system, but it would require deactivating several sensors; and that deactivation would in itself constitute an alarm.
It irritated Donovan considerably that such a wonderful discovery could not be put to immediate use.
Olafsdottr continued to be wary in his presence, and when they ate together, it was at arm’s length. In exasperation at the blandness of her cooking, Donovan one day programmed a dinner of Chicken Joe Freezing that had a bit of a bite to it, but Olafsdottr would not taste of it.
“Who knows what wicked spices you have rubbed into that poor hen?” she asked. And never mind that the meat from the protein vats had never gone through the formality of actually having once been a hen.
But even when he had divided his own serving in two and offered her the choice of halves, she demurred, and he wondered if it was not the spiciness itself rather than the possibility of being drugged that put her off.
“I am wounded,” he said, “that you do not trust me.” Later, he vomited the poison in the ward room’s lavatory. Taking the antidote beforehand was risky in any case, and he resolved to find another tactic.
Olafsdottr allowed him some limited exercise time. “Idle hands, devil’s tools,” she explained, and led him to a fitness room equipped with a variety of machines. Donovan expressed his amazement and gratitude and did not hint that he had already seen the room. The mirror on the back wall was one-way and provided anyone in the passage behind it with an excellent view.
Olafsdottr stood as usual in the doorway, and made helpful suggestions for his exercise regimen. The Brute especially enjoyed the activity; and the Silky Voice used it to work on her enzyme control. But at the conclusion, as he was toweling off, he noticed a handled insert used as a shim for changing clearances on the machine beside him. Save that it was not sharpened, it would make a fine knife. He pulled it out as if to change the forces on the pulley, and found that it had good hand-balance.
Without turning, he threw it at Olafsdottr. The Confederal twisted sideways and snatched it out of the air. She examined the slug of steel in her hands, then looked at Donovan and grinned. “You like play catch?” She slung it back at him on a flat trajectory aimed at his face. “More fun with knives,” she added.