"So he just wants us to dump it all?" Henry d'Amcourt demanded. "Jays, Commodore—that's almost a billion credits out the airlock!"
"I didn't say Control wants it dumped, Henry." Shu disliked interruptions almost as much as she disliked d'Amcourt personally, and her voice was chill, but Howell understood his quartermaster's anguish. The surviving shuttles had returned with an unanticipated fortune in tissue cultures, experimental animals, and an entire arsenal of new and advanced gene-splicing viruses, not to mention apparatus researchers on most Rogue Worlds (and not a few Incorporated Worlds) would have killed for. Henry wasn't so much affronted by losing the money involved as he was by losing the potential in supplies and ammunition it represented.
"All right, Rachel," the commodore interposed tactfully. "From what you're saying, I gather Control has something specific in mind?"
"He does, sir." Shu turned to face him, just incidentally turning her back on d'Amcourt, who only grinned. "He suggests we distribute it through Wyvern—preferably via a series of cutouts which can't be traced directly to us but guarantee at least some of it turns up here in the Franconian Sector and, if at all possible, in the Macedon Sector, as well."
"Ah?" Howell leaned back and smiled, and she nodded.
"Exactly. We can realize perhaps seventy percent of its open market value in the transaction, which should please some of us," she very carefully did not look at d'Amcourt, "but he's especially interested in having some of it spotted as far away from the Core Sectors as possible."
Howell nodded. Throwing some fourth or fifth-stage patsy out here to the Ministry of Justice or its Rogue World equivalent would divert attention from their real backers, and it could serve as a wedge into Macedon at the same time. They'd been looking for something to suggest the "pirates" were turning their attention towards the Franconian Sector's neighbors. But coupled with the sheer value involved, that meant this particular shipment had to be handled very carefully indeed. He glanced at Alexsov.
"Greg? Can Quintana handle it?"
"I believe so," Alexsov replied after a moment's thought. "He'll want a bigger cut if he has to arrange to burn a customer, but he'll go along. And he certainly has the contacts and organization to make it work."
Howell toyed with his stylus a moment, then nodded. "All right. But I want you to set it up in person, Greg. It's about time you checked in personally with Quintana again anyway, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir. I can go ahead in a dispatch boat and have everything set by the time the transport arrives."
"I don't think so," Howell mused. "I hadn't thought about how useful this could be until Control pointed it out, but he's absolutely right. So no slipups are allowed. I want the arrangements made and triple-checked before we hand Quintana the first flask of this cargo. And I don't want you wandering around in an unarmed dispatch boat, either. Take one of the tin cans, make your arrangements, and then meet us at the AR-Twelve rendezvous."
"If you say so, sir. But should I really be absent for that long?"
"I think we'll be all right. Control hasn't sent us a fresh target yet, and we'll be meeting his next courier there, anyway. You should be back in plenty of time to coordinate the next op."
"Yes, sir. In that case, I can leave this afternoon."
Chapter Twenty-five
"So, Captain. You have a delivery for me, I understand?"
Alicia looked up sharply at the first-person pronoun. She stood at the foot of the shuttle's ramp, the turbine whine of other shuttles at her back, and the fellow before her was dressed almost drably. She'd hardly expected Quintana to appear in person the moment she landed, nor had she expected to see him so simply dressed, but her second glance confirmed his identity. The match with the holo image Fuchien had shown her was perfect.
"I do—if you have the documentation to prove you're who I think you are," she said calmly, and he gave her a faint smile as he extended a chip.
She slipped it into a reader, checking it against Fuchien's original and watching him from the corner of an eye. She didn't even look up when four heavily-armed bodyguards blended out of the crowd to join him; her free hand simply unsnapped her holster. He saw it, but his eyes only twinkled and he folded his arms unthreateningly across his chest.
Her reader chirped as she completed her examination, and she ejected the chip with a nod.
"Everything checks, Lieutenant Commander," she said, returning it to him. "Sorry if I seemed a bit suspicious."
"I approve of suspicious people—especially when they're being suspicious in my interests," Quintana replied, and extended his hand.
She clasped it, and the familiar sensation of heat enveloped her. The merchant was still speaking, welcoming her to Wyvern, but all Alicia truly "heard" was the soaring, exultant carol of the Fury's triumph.
-=0=-***-=0=
The Quarn freighter Aharjhka loped towards Wyvern at a velocity many a battle-cruiser might have envied. For all its size and cargo capacity, Aharjhka was lean, rakish, and very, very fast, for the great Quarn trade cartels competed with one another with a fervor other races lavished only on their ships of war.
The bridge hatch opened, and the being a human would have called Aharjhka's captain looked up as a passenger stepped through it.
"Greetings, Inspector. Our instruments have detected the ship you described." The Quarn's well-modulated voice was deep and resonant, largely because of the density of the atmosphere, for Quarn ships maintained a gravity more than twice that of most human vessels. But the Standard English was almost completely accentless, as well, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem hid a smile. He couldn't help it, for the sheer incongruity of that perfect enunciation from a radially symmetrical cross between a hairy, two-meter-wide starfish and a crazed Impressionist's version of a spider never failed to amuse him.
He crossed to a display at the captain's gesture. Whoever had reconfigured it for human eyes hadn't gotten the color balance quite right, but there was no mistaking the ship in Wyvern orbit. Star Runner had made a remarkably swift passage, actually passing Aharjhka en route—not that he'd expected anything else.
"So I see, sir," he said through his helmet's external speaker, and the captain turned the delicate pink the Quarn used in place of a chuckle at the choice of honorific. Ben Belkassem grinned, and the captain's rosy hue deepened. Quarn had only a single sex—or, rather, every Quarn was a fully functional hermaphrodite—and humanity's gender-linked language conventions tickled their sense of the absurd. But at least it was a shared and tolerant amusement. Different as they were, both species understood biological humor, and humans gave back as good as they got. The prudish Rishatha were another matter. If the Quarn found humanity's sexual mores amusing, they found those of the Rishatha uproarious, and the matriarchs were not amused in return. Worse (from the Rishathan viewpoint), the highly flexible Quarn vocal apparatus could handle both human and Rishathan languages, and they found it particularly amusing to enter a multi-species transit facility, make sure Rishatha were present, and ask one another "Have you heard the one about the two matriarchs?" in perfect High Rish.
Ben Belkassem had been present when one of those jokes led to a lively brawl and an even livelier diplomatic incident—not that the Rishatha were likely to press the matter too far. On a personal level, nothing much short of a six-kilo hammer could hurt a Quarn, and even a fully mature matriarch fared poorly against two hundred kilos of muscle and gristle from a 2.4-G home world, whether the possessor of that muscle and gristle was officially warlike or not. On a diplomatic level, the Terran Empire and Quarn Hegemony were firm allies, a fact the Rishathan Sphere found more than merely unpalatable yet was unable to do much about. It wasn't for want of trying, but even the devious Rishathan diplomatic corps which had once set the Terran League at the Federation's throat had finally given up in disgust. What was a poor racial chauvinist to do? Bizarre as each species found the other's appearance, humankind and Quarnkind liked one another immensely. On the face of it, it was an unlikely pairing. The Rishatha were at least bipedal, yet they and humans barely tolerated one another, so a reasonable being might have expected even more tension between humanity and the utterly alien Quarn.