That seemed oddly coincidental.
"I don't like it," growled Pul. "Think I'll go sniff them over."
Hantis nodded, and raised an eyebrow at Hulik and Pausert. "It does seem a bit too convenient, doesn't it?"
"Very," said Hulik. "I believe I'll go do some of my own sniffing."
"What do you think?" Pausert asked the girls.
The Leewit scowled. "Might be coincidence," she said, very grudgingly. "I suppose ships come up short of fuel and cash pretty often in ports like this."
"But you don't like it," said Pausert.
Both the Leewit and Goth shook their heads.
"Good. That makes it unanimous. So as soon as I rell a certain something—"
"And in the meantime," said Goth, looking innocent as a flower, "girls can get awfully hungry when we're still growing. We'll just see how good a cook the new one is." And she and the Leewit strolled off, hand in hand.
Hulik looked after them with an expression of reluctant admiration. "Ah, to be young and reckless again," she said.
"Now Hulik," said Pausert, daring to reach out and pat the back of her hand. "You were never that young."
His theater training was paying off; he managed to duck, just in time.
* * *
"All of them!" growled Pul. "All four of them! I could smell 'spy' from yards off. You ought to let me bite them, Hantis."
When you were being spied on, it was always better to keep on doing things that you'd made habitual. The crew of the Venture always got together for breakfast and supper. Everybody knew they'd arrived together, and still intended to leave together if they ever could, so nobody thought anything of the habit. You ate with your friends; nothing mysterious about that. And the noisy mess tent provided plenty of chatter to cover anything they were talking about.
Pausert shook his head. "Much as I sympathize, Pul, it's better to know who your enemies are and have them under your eye. If we get rid of these four, whoever their boss is will only send new agents, and this time we might not spot them."
"We ought to find out who their boss is, don't you think, Captain?" asked Goth.
He nodded. "Do you think, if we got into the Venture's control cabin, you might be able to find out if they're communicating with someone?"
"Believe so. They're not real bright—they're all even on the same shift. Which means I only need to listen when they're off-shift."
"They'll probably use a code, though."
She shrugged. "A code's a language, too, Captain. We may not have tried it, but I bet the Leewit can use klatha to translate a code."
"You think?" asked the Leewit, looking suddenly alert.
"We haven't anything to lose by trying," Pausert agreed.
"And the Venture's still our ship," Vezzarn said, a little aggressively. "We still use our staterooms, don't we? We've a right to get into everything there but the holds. No reason why a couple of us couldn't be tinkering with the com to see if we can't get it working, either."
It wasn't as if they weren't still living in the Venture. After brief forays into the accommodations provided for the unmarried players and workers on the Petey B—which were, essentially, bunkhouses—they'd all decided they wanted their own cabins back. Even if that meant having their sleep interrupted by props heaving and bumping bits and bobs in and out of the holds at all hours.
"Hmm," said Pausert. "Vezzarn, how are your scrounging skills?"
The old spacer grinned. "The best, of course! And I think I know where you're going. You want me to start scrounging com parts, so it looks like we're trying to repair on the cheap and slow."
"Which will give us a good reason to be in the cabin, and even monitoring chatter if somebody walks in at the wrong time!" said the Leewit with enthusiasm. "Clumping brilliant!"
Hulik smiled. "He has his moments. And so do I; if our watchers happen to be ISS, I'll probably know their code anyway." She sniffed. "This far out, they're probably still using codes cracked and abandoned a long time ago."
* * *
The only problem with the plan was that it left everyone but Hantis and Pul with exactly no spare time—and Hantis and Pul were watching the agents in their own ways. Pausert rapidly began to feel like a man holding down three jobs, which, in point of fact, he was. He was an actor, a sideshow operator, and now a com-tinkerer, because it was possible that the agents wouldn't be using standard channels to talk to their boss.
The young witches were doing just as much, if not more, but at least they seemed to be buoyed up on the excitement of it all. That was a good thing, because the Leewit in particular was difficult to manage if she began to get the least bit bored.
The silvery-eyed little vatch elected at this point to be absent, which was aggravating. Pausert could have used the help, even from a vatch.
Or maybe, especially from a vatch. That one big vatch Pausert had half-shredded had neatly translocated the ship and everyone in it not once, but twice, when they were caught between the ISS and the pirates. It hadn't been hugely far, but then, he hadn't specified where he wanted to be. What were a vatch's upper limits on teleporting, he wondered? If he found a vatch big enough—or Silver-eyes got big enough—could he torment or talk the vatch into taking them all the way to the Empress?
On the other hand, would a vatch even understand time and space as Pausert was used to it? He recalled, belatedly, Silver-eyes being intrigued by the notion of linear time—which it apparently considered "silly." Pausert shuddered to think that even the best-intentioned vatch might teleport them into the distant past or future—or, what might be even worse, into the recent past where they already existed.
Probably not a good idea. He had a vague impression of being told—perhaps on Karres—that if you violated time and space by being two places at the same time, something very bad would happen to you. He made a mental note to ask Goth about it at some point when they weren't heavily involved in keeping their own skins intact. The captain had come to have a great deal of trust in the girl's judgment, and no longer undertook any major change in plans without consulting her.
In the meantime, it was moderately amusing to be watching their watchers.
"I'm sure they haven't yet decided if we're the ones they're looking for," Hulik said, on the day that A Midsummer Night's Dream went into the repertory and they started rotating it with Romeo and Juliet.
That had made a welcome change for Hulik. She hadn't nearly the pressure on her as Third Romantic Lead that she had as First Romantic Lead. Helena was an easy part, really. "Mostly confusion and hysteria," she opined. "And a cat-fight, of course." There wasn't a "cat-fight" in the original script, or at least, not the mud-wrestling match that Hulik and Meren Dall were required to perform. The cat-fight was Himbo Petey's idea. Sir Richard had put it in, but not without a fight of his own.
But like the extended sword fights, the public loved it.
"There's no fights in this thing, so you are going to have to have something in place of a melee!" Himbo had shouted. "I say mud-wrestling, and mud-wrestling it is! Just because your precious Bird—Bart, whatever—didn't put in mud-wrestling in the first place, that doesn't mean he wouldn't have if he'd known there was such a thing! I mean! It even fits the script!"
"And I suppose you want me to put a Blythe gun battle in the Scottish Play?" Sir Richard had shouted back—and had then gone pale with horror at the speculative look on Himbo Petey's face. "No! Forget I said that! You can have your wretched mud-wrestling, just do not ask me for one more change! Not one!"