“But—”
“Leave the window running. I don’t want anyone to think we’re hiding something from them.” Louis stood and turned away.
“Louis, I weary of your not listening to me!”
Louis took two more steps. But he’d refused to listen to the Hindmost for eleven years, and he found apologizing tanj awkward … so he turned back and resumed his seat on the boulder. “Speak,” he said.
“I have my own medical facilities.”
“Oh, yes.” The Hindmost would surely be protected against any conceivable [sic—should be “conceivable”] accident or malaise. Nessus had lost a head and neck on their first visit, and Louis had seen it replaced. “Surgery for a Pierson’s puppeteer. What would that do for a human?”
“Louis, this technology was of human origin. We bought it from a Kzin law enforcer on Fafnir, but it appears to have been an ARM experiment of more than two hundred years ago, stolen from Sol system. The system uses nanotechnology to make repairs inside the cells themselves. No second was ever built. I’ve had it modified to heal humans or kzinti or my own kind.”
Louis was laughing. “Tanj, you’re careful!” Most of what was aboard Needle was of human manufacture, and what wasn’t had been carefully hidden. If the Hindmost were caught while abducting his crew, he wouldn’t implicate the Fleet of Worlds.
“Pity I’ll never see it.”
“I can move it to the crew deck.”
Louis felt cold running up his spine like river water. He said, “You’re not serious, and I’m too tired to think. Good night, Hindmost.”
Louis parked his stack of plates next to the guest house. Dry brush rustled as he stepped down. He spoke to the night, not loudly.
“When you’re ready to talk, I’m here. And I bet you’re wearing an embroidered kilt.”
The night had no answer.
Sawur barely stirred when he crawled into the tent. He fell asleep at once.
Chapter 10
Stair Street
A whiff of corruption pulled her half awake. Pointed fingernails pressing hard into her elbow pulled her the rest of the way. Vala sat up with a yelp. Harpster ducked below the gun she managed not to fire.
“Valavirgillin, come and see.”
Flup. “Are we attacked?”
“You would smell vampires. I’m surprised they haven’t come to look at us. Perhaps they’re distracted.”
Vala stepped out onto the running board.
Rain was falling in fat drops. The awning kept her half dry, but visibility was low. Lightning played to antispin-starboard, the direction of the vampires’ stronghold. Lightning and something else. Downslope, toward the river, a steady white light.
After all their talk, had Tegger lit a fire? But fire wasn’t quite that color, and fire would have flickered.
Grieving Tube was above them on the rock, on sentry duty. Harpster said, “Will you wake Warvia?”
“Yes.” Vala slipped into the payload shell. No point in waking anyone else, but Warvia could see details; she might even see something that would tell her this was Tegger. “Warvia?”
“I’m awake.”
“Come and look.”
Rain came and went at random, permitting glimpses of the light. The glow wasn’t a dot, she saw presently; it was a tilted line.
The light blinked off, then on again. Warvia said, “Tegger likes to fiddle with things.”
“Is it him?”
“How would I know?” the Red woman snapped.
They watched. By and by Harpster said, “Light could keep away the vampires, if it’s bright enough.”
Warvia was slumped against a rock, asleep. Vala said, “Wake me if something changes. I’ll be out here, but I want a blanket.” She started to climb into the payload shell, thinking, Get two. One for Warvia.
The light began to jitter. Vala paused to watch.
Then a bright dot separated from the tilted line and went straight up.
The hauler was shuddering, shaking, trying to tear itself apart. Tegger clung to the seat as he would have clung to Warvia. Could he free a hand to pluck the strip of Vala-cloth away from the contacts?
Did he want to? The shaking wasn’t killing him, only jarring his teeth.
What was doing this? Some half-ruined motor? Or else a motor doing just what it was told to, trying to lift a cargo hauler, along with the riverbed it was buried in.
And while his mind toyed with such notions, Tegger’s fingers toyed with toggles.
Flup, that was the lights again. That one didn’t do anything, nor that one. That one turned the wind off, then back on. An ominous grating sound from somewhere below had been the response to this one, but now it did nothing.
Something protruded from the shadowed recess where the skeleton’s knees would have gone. A big two-pronged handle … that didn’t move under his hand.
Tegger gritted his vibrating teeth, gripped the chair with his knees and the handle with both hands and pulled.
Nothing. Fine. Push.
Push and twist.
It lurched under his hands, and his head banged hard into the controls. He was being hurled into the sky.
The twist of cloth! Get it out of there—
He dared not let go of the chair, and perhaps that was a good thing. Dark as the night was, he could see the riverbed dwindle. A fall from this high would kill him.
If he could free a hand or a toe from its death-grip on the chair … there must be a way to steer this … bubble. As the river wheeled past him he glimpsed a half-buried square plate with a notch missing at the high corner. He’d torn the control bubble loose from the hauler.
Then he was falling. He felt it in his belly. Falling, falling, surge, twenty to thirty manheights above the river and moving inland. Moving toward the City.
A way to take control, there must be a way—
Did he trust Whisper?
Whisper had led him to the cargo hauler. Whisper had put Vala-cloth into his hands. What would Whisper have done if Tegger hadn’t experimented on his own? But Whisper had never suggested he steer the hauler—or its ripped-away control bubble, either—anywhere but where he was going now. The damaged machine was going home to its aerial dock.
So, Whisper’s minimal guidance was taking him where he wanted to go. To trust Whisper was to let it happen. But he didn’t know Whisper’s nature and had never known Whisper’s motives …
Rain running down the windows had Tegger half blind. By flickering lightning and glimpses of Archlight he saw a flat-topped mass approaching. He could see no motion. Wait, the rain was swirling, wheeling … suddenly he was in a cloud of screaming birds.
Could vampires fly? But even in the rainy dark he knew them. Bluebelly makaways, no different from the makaways of his own turf. Wingspread greater than his spread arms; good gliding ability; raptor beaks. Maks were meat eaters, big enough to carry off a herder boy. He’d never seen so many together.
He couldn’t navigate through that. He kept his hands where they were, gripping the chair back.
The birds withdrew to a wheeling pattern.
The window bubble had come to rest, still in midair.
Plainsman that he was, Tegger had once boarded a barge to trade stock with another tribe. He was familiar with docks. He was floating a manheight from the edge of what might have been a riverside dock hung in midair. Floating boats would ride against this buffer rim. Those cables hanging over the rim would tether them. Cargo in those big buildings, behind those vast doors …
The birds were losing interest, returning to roost. Makaways weren’t nightbirds.
The bubble’s doorway was facing out from the dock. Was there at least a way to turn it around? Maybe if he twisted something … Tegger was reluctant to experiment this high in the air.
What should be happening here? The hauler might be waiting for the City’s signal to land. Might be sending a signal of its own. Maybe one of those cables was supposed to reach out and secure the hauler, pull it in. But none of it was going to happen, because the dock was as dead as anything else that had died in the Fall of the Cities.