"Get in, get in!" cackled a voice from inside. Exactly the voice I’d heard in a junior-school play, when Lynn’s ten-year-old Barry got cast to play an old man: cartoonish, nasal, enthusiastically cracking every other syllable. The old-man voice people use in dirty jokes.
"Faye Smallwood," Ramos said, "this is Ogodda Unorr. Our getaway driver."
"Call me Oh-God," he grinned. "As soon as I start driving, you’ll know why."
The man was a Freep. A native of the Divian Free Republic: the closest habitable planet to Demoth, a mere six light-years away. The Free Republic started much like Demoth — a Divian billionaire bought a planet and commissioned a custom-engineered race so he could create his own Utopia. This particular utopia was intended to be staunchly libertarian but had too much wired-in greed to maintain any higher principles; it nose-dived into dog-eat-dog anarchy for three centuries after its founding, then calcified into a corporate oligarchy run by rich trade barons. Cartel capitalism. The Freep plutocracy chanted the mantra of "free markets" while making sure their markets were only free for those who played the right game.
By the looks of it, the Freep driving the skimmer had got himself out of the game by joining the navy — he wore black fatigues, faded and gone shiny in places, but still recognizable as a uniform of the Explorer Corps. The uniform had several circular spots darker than the surrounding cloth: places where insignia must have been sewn on. Oh-God’s badges were gone now, leaving no sign of his rank or ship assignment. He must be that rarity, an Explorer who’d lived long enough to retire.
I looked at Oh-God more closely. Yes, he was old. Cracking ancient. Like all Freeps, he was short, stocky, and cylindrical… a chest-high tree stump with arms. His skin was pale orange at this moment, the way all Freeps go orange on Demoth. Back on their home planet, Freep skins can chameleon all the way to black, a tactic for shutting out the barrage of ultraviolet that comes from the smaller of their two suns; but on Demoth, especially on a winter-spring night in Great St. Caspian, the UV was too weak to demand pigment protection.
"Come on, come on, come on," Oh-God said. "Stop gawking and get yourself belted in, missy. We don’t want to hang around here."
His voice still had that all-over-the-octave cackle, as if he was intentionally parodying his own age. Except that Divian voices get lower in their senior years, not higher. Then the truth struck me: Ogodda Unorr was an Explorer. And like all Explorers, he’d have some physical quirk that made his fellows edge away in disdain. Oh-God must have become an Explorer by virtue of that odd voice — a grating, googly, whistly voice that had marked him as different his whole life.
Ramos buckled me into place beside Oh-God and took the next seat herself. The skimmer was rising even before she had her safety belts fastened — a whisper-silent vertical ascent followed by the breakneck whip of acceleration as we bolted forward just above the treetops.
I’d never ridden in a skimmer that made so precious little sound. It must have been running state-of-the-art stealth engines — maybe even military grade. Looking at Oh-God’s control panel, I saw a slew of other quaint additions to the usual equipment… including a readout labeled radar fuzz. Radar fuzz = nano on the skimmer’s hull, dutifully (and illegally) making the craft invisible to groundcontrol traffic stations: a Class IV misdemeanor that often got argued up to a felony, "willful disregard for the safety of others."
"Hot," I said, pointing a wobbly finger toward the read-out. "Bad."
"Aww, missy," Oh-God wheedled back, "I only turn it on in emergencies. Like now. If there’s Admiralty scum on the prowl, you don’t want them seeing us, do you?"
He’d got me there. But this skimmer still had Smuggler written all over it. Silent and undetectable, big enough to haul a bumper load of questionable goods from Great St. Caspian halfway around the world without paying transport tax or trade-region import fees.
Oh-God might have left the Free Republic, but he hadn’t abandoned their "free enterprise" mentality.
Three minutes later, we were flying along another creek gully, making no sound but the occasional whip of brush against the skimmer’s undercarriage. Taking a deep breath, I mustered my best enunciation to ask, "What now?"
"If I were you," Ramos replied, "I’d scream like a banshee to your civilian police. Report you were kidnapped, and the perpetrators are now lying unconscious, ready to be arrested. I’ll gladly testify to what I saw."
"Or," Oh-God said, "you could get a bunch of boyos with blunt instruments, to go back and conduct your own interrogation. All private-like."
Ramos chuckled. "Oh-God disdains subtlety."
"Subtlety’s fine, it’s police I hate," the Freep corrected her. "Not cuz I’ve done anything wrong," he added quickly. "Just on general principles. Always coming up with rules and regulations to hamper an honest businessman." He jinked the skimmer up over a rock outcrop, then bellied it down again close to the dirt.
Something scraped loudly against the lower fuselage. "Sorry," he mumbled. "Hands are cold tonight."
"Then warm them up!" Ramos growled. "What’s the point of stealth equipment if you make noise hitting things?" She gave me a "See what I have to put up with?" look. "Officially," she told me, "Oh-God is a hunting guide. That’s why he needs all these gadgets for skulking. In case your local deer ever develop radar."
"You never know," Oh-God said. "Demoth’s already got beasties with sonar."
Ramos smiled. "If you get dragged in front of a judge, you stick with that story." She turned back to me. "Unofficially, Oh-God does a lot of things I don’t want to know about. But he survived fifty years as an Explorer, and he’s still loyal to the Corps. Whenever something noteworthy happens on Demoth, he passes on a report which eventually lands on my desk. That’s why I came here in the first place — I’m interested in political assassinations. All those proctors getting killed."
"What does that have to do with Explorers?" I asked. It was getting easier to speak, even though the words still sounded too thick.
"Nothing directly," Ramos answered. "But if the killings were just the start of a bigger mess, someone in the Admiralty ought to be interested."
"Like the dipshits?" I asked.
"Those pukes," Oh-God said. He jerked the skimmer sharply to the right, not to avoid an obstacle but just for emphasis. He was the worst kind of driver: someone who talks with his hands. "You gotta recognize the difference between the High Council of Admirals — the inner circle who run the dipshits — and our Festina here. She may wear a gray uniform, but she’s not a real admiral."
"Thanks so much," Ramos told him.
"It’s true," Oh-God insisted. "Who ever heard of a lieutenant admiral? They jury-rigged that title just for you." He turned to me, both hands off the controls. "See, she got the council in hot water with the League of Peoples…"
"Do you mind?" Ramos said, shoving his hands back toward the steering yoke. "We’re in the middle of a heroic rescue here. It’ll look bad if we wrap Faye around a tree."
"Won’t look bad," Oh-God muttered. "The antidetection nanites’ll automatically camouflage the crash site. Won’t see nothing at all."
"That’s not comforting!" Ramos snapped. She glanced at me. "We should be clear of the dipshits’ jamming field by now. Do you want to call the police?"