Flight of the Vajra (54 page)

—
Cioran, I thought you said you were here for
some business with him—or did I just slobber all over that?

—
Not a bit. I’ve been talking shop with him the
entire time you were ogling that little antique. He owes me favors, plural,
which are to be satisfied at my discretion based on what kind of goodies he’s
been able to dig up for me.

—
What’s he offering?

—
He claims he has some wild find from an estate
sale.

—
As good as this p-knife, or better?

—
Worlds better than that trinket, if he’s to be
believed.

—Is
he to be believed? I had some pretty grand
things in mind for this “trinket”.

—
Such as?

—
I’ll trade you. I’ll tell you what I had in
mind for this p-knife, and you tell me about the goodies.

—
If he’s right, give us a few and I won’t have
to tell you. I’ll be able to
show
you.

“And there.” Arsèni returned to the workbench and
handed Enid a mirror-sided cube chased with thick chrome trim, rounded corners
and an extrudable handle. A miniature cargo box, right down to the CL-keyed
lock to which she was given a passcode that was geographically triggered: she
couldn’t open it until she was within a private residence, like the villa itself.
She took the box in one hand, shook Arsèni’s with the other.

At some point during Enid’s p-knife play, the
sight of the extrusions slithering back and forth set me digressing on the code
scraped from the wreck of the
Kyritan
and the Cytheria coup. Of the
various throwaway theories that had washed up in the back of my mind about what
this code was, the one that had beached itself there most solidly was:
it’s
a tool
. A utility of some kind, which involved a chamber about the size of
an adult human. It wasn’t for first aid, though.

“Were you saving that one for someone in
particular?” Enid asked. “You look a little unhappy to be parting with it.”

“Eh. Something like this happens to me every time
I make a sale, really. Lot of hard work went into that. I keep tellin’ myself,
if I’m that broke up about parting with any of it, I shouldn’t put a pricetag
on it. But at the same time, I can’t just lock it up. I know I’m not gonna do
anything with it except sit on it and pretend I can do something more than someone
else can.” He detached one of his hands at the wrist and put it on the bench,
where it sprouted extrusions like bug’s legs and walked in circles. “This hand
here—the toolwork I could do with it, I could do just as easy, more so maybe,
with a CL-direct job. I did that early in my career—I’d have five of ‘em
uplinked to me, all buggin’ ‘round on their own inside whatever chassis or
other thing I was restoring. Then one time the motivator locus on one of ‘em
broke down, so I got fed up ‘n attached it right to my hand socket and just got
back to work that way. I got into the habit of working like that, up close. And
when you get up close like that, you get attached to your work.”

—
Henré, you’ve been dead silent,
Enid CLed.
Talk to me.

I had been, in big part because Kanthaka II had
just finished being assembled, and she was a beauty. I was watching her emerge
from the delivery bay of the manufaxture, one which emptied straight out into
the street. Her lines were drawn in tighter along the sides now, more elegantly
than in the previous instance, and her red-gold-and-black tattooing was even
more elegant and stark than ever. But I’d also been listening to Arsèni’s
words—in particular his line about being attached to one’s work, which I’d been
prepared to ruminate on before Enid had spoken.

—
Just preoccupied,
I CLed.
You did a
great job of shaking Cioran down, by the way.

—
Some great job! All she did was stall me right
back.
(It got easier to call Cioran “she” when the moment demanded it.)

—
No, she’s opened up a bit. Odds are whatever
it is she’s sniffing around for, you’ll get to see it before anyone else does.

As we talked, I’d stepped into the delivery bay,
slid into Kanthaka’s saddle and fired up the engine. I didn’t even have to
bring her up to speed to feel proud of my work; she was a pleasure to ride in
even at only a few kilometers an hour. And it wasn’t like I was in a hurry,
either—my plan was to just wander on over to the same block where the warehouse
sat. That same block was most likely crawling with an entire IPS detachment in
disguise by now.

“Now—your turn.” Arsèni reattached his hand and faced
Cioran. “You sure about doing this out loud?”

Cioran pouted. “Of
course
I’m sure about
it.”
—And you don’t have to get uptight about her; she’s smart enough to say
nothing.

That last bit had been CLed to Arsèni, but also
echoed one-way to Enid—and, in turn, echoed to me as well.

Two of the display cases rolled out of the
way—most likely at Arsèni’s CL command—and in rolled a case that resembled a
coffin more than anything else, with its heavy hinged lid and solid black body.
Inside were three other cargo boxes akin to the one Enid’s p-knife had been
packed in—a bit larger, some slight differences in design and color (brushed
chrome instead of mirroring), but clearly the same type of container. All were
closed and locked.

—
So how is it that this guy comes to owe you a
favor?
Enid asked Cioran.
I never did get that part straight. He doesn’t
seem like someone who thinks a whole lot about gratitude.

—
He supplied some antique pieces for a stage
design, for an act that I shared some stage time with a while back. Heard he’d
dug himself into a bit of a financial hole, so I gave him a chunk of my take
for the night. All right:
all
of it, actually. It was one of those
things when I realized I hadn’t done anything that impulsive in a while. I had
no idea it would lead to such undying gratitude. He may grumble and sound like
gratitude is the last word in his dictionary, but he really does mean well—and
he’s been breaking his back trying to repay me properly ever since. I didn’t
want money from him; I wanted to see what sort of hoops he’d jump through to do
a favor that wasn’t
about
money. He surprised even me.

—
Remind me not to owe you any favors!

—
Hah! Don’t worry, he enjoys this. He wouldn’t
have been at it this long if he didn’t.

“Start with the one in the middle,” Arsèni said.
“That one’s the weirdest of the bunch. You like weird.”

“You misquote me. I like
distinctive.
That’s
a
term of endearment. ‘Weird’, that’s a pejorative.”

The case opened. Nestled in the middle of the
die-cut insulator foam that lined in the inside of the case was a
steel-jacketed cylinder with squared-off endpieces. I recognized it: an
extension module for an entanglement engine. It had the appropriate socket
type, the engine load labeling along the side, everything.

“Oh,” Cioran said, sounding a good deal more
interested than I expected her to be.

“Something caught your eye?” Arsèni said.

Cioran didn’t respond right away, but reached in
and lifted—hefted, more like—the module out of its case. I didn’t think I’d
seen her show anything that much close attention save maybe for one of Enid’s
performances.

Arsèni tried to get her talking again. “I take it
this’ll pay off at least some of the favor?”

“Try
all
of it.” Cioran turned the module
in her long fingers, rolling it slowly and letting its weight register with
her.

“All of it?” Arsèni was smiling for a change.
“Good, good.”

Two things happened at once, neither of which any of
us were prepared for, least of all me. The first was when both of Arsèni’s
middle fingers spontaneously amputated themselves at the second knuckle, with a
little pop and a hiss. The second was when he rammed what was left of his right
middle finger into the small of Cioran’s back.

I sat straight up
and came within a
hair of plowing into the guardrail on the bridge I was crossing. I could feel
Enid coil, ready to throw herself across the top of the display case, but Arsèni’s
words stopped her.

“Just sit,” he said, “and keep your mouth closed.
CL off.” He had seized Cioran by the hair and was lowering her to the floor.

—
Henré!

—It’s OK, just do it. It’s already too late for
him—Kallhander and every other IPS officer on the whole damn planet is going to
be there in seconds.

“I said CL
off
!”

What happened next didn’t make sense to me until
later. For a moment I thought the connection
had
dropped—I wasn’t
getting anything but a link indicator, no data at all—and then I felt a violent
lurch from Enid’s side, like I’d been falling and then had my descent suddenly
broken by a rope wrapped around me. I’d experienced something akin to this once
or twice before. The usual cause was a violent blow dealt to whoever was on the
other end, which caused the signal to automatically cut out as a protection measure.
I yanked Kanthaka over to the side of the street I was on and ground my
knuckles into my forehead.

My heart didn’t do much pumping for the four or
five seconds it took Enid’s vision to clear and for the vertigo I felt from her
to level out. Objectively I knew she was alive and well, even if her bodily
telemetry had also stopped coming through.

—
Enid, come back
, I said, expecting
nothing.

“It’s—okay! I’m still here,” she panted out loud.
Like she’d been running, I thought. “It’s okay.” She wasn’t just talking to me,
it seemed, but whoever else was nearby.

The moiré patterns that darkened everything in
front of her eyes finally lifted. Cioran was hanging onto the side of one of
the display tables, trying to get her legs to push him back up, but they didn’t
seem to be up to the job. On the floor about two meters away, Arsèni lay
face-down, writhing back and forth, both hands pressed against the top of his
head. I watched as Enid stumbled forward and snatched up a cube-shaped
something that had been sitting half a meter away from him. It was the
mirror-sided box with the p-knife locked into it.

—
It all happened so fast
,
she CLed.
He
said, ‘CL off,’ and then I turned on The Escapist, and . . . you
weren’t kidding about that thing being dangerous. I had the box in my hand, and
I just lobbed it right at his head. I wasn’t even trying to do it; I was just
thinking
about it, and . . . bam. That thing is
heavy
! . . . And
then after he fell down I ran over and kicked him in the throat. Well,
it
made me do that. I turned it off after that, though.
She was still panting,
her heart still kicking hard enough to make her inner ears and her fingertips
throb.

—
Enid, is Cioran all right? She doesn’t look
too good.

Cioran hauled herself the rest of the way up. her legs
were shaky, but far less so than they’d been a moment ago. With one hand she
rubbed the spot on her back where Arsèni had zapped her, and with the other she
raised the drive module like a barbell and grinned.

—
Cioran’s tougher than you’d think
, Enid CLed.
I think that makes two of us!

I switched away for a moment. —
Kallhander, come
back. Did you get my last send?
I’d hot-plugged him into the conversation
right after Enid had cut out.

—Affirmative. There’s a detachment on its way
to them. I’ll join them shortly. I’d recommend you stay back—the less undue
attention this draws, the better.

I didn’t blame him. I’d had at least one pair of
eyes on me since I’d pulled over to the curb—a young gendermute walking a
gorgeous Lhasan mastiff that sported a pearlescent coat. Both dog and
master/mistress eyed me uncertainly—the former craning its neck to sniff at
Kanthaka’s front tire; the latter, most likely wondering if I was in fact
the
Henré Sim who’d come to town just the other day, and why I was pawing at my face
so vigorously. I was doing my best to stay put and not lose my nerve and run
over to the warehouse in person.

Enid had supplied me with a passively-mapped grid
of the inside of the warehouse as she’d been led through it. Over that grid I
saw a fly-eyed view of the inside of the building, courtesy of her eyes and
those of a number of IPS officers that were snaking their way in (thank you,
Kallhander). From what sensory surfaces were available on the outside of the
building, I saw them cordon off the entrances, and felt the main power and
substrate conduits to the building go offline.

“Get back, please. Stand back.”

Enid did as she was told, backing away from Arsèni
until she nearly augured into Kallhander. Four IPS troops surrounded Arsèni and
pointed the muzzles of live armament at him from the bulging sleeves of their
bodysuits. He was breathing heavy and slow. No amount of CL tinkering with
neural responses will do anything for a concussion, I thought. One guard knelt
down to snap a CL-blocking cuff around his neck. Odds are his CL was modded six
ways to the sky and couldn’t be shut down from the outside so easily, but the
cops had protocol to follow.

—
Henré, Kallhander—are you seeing this?
Enid CLed to both of us.
The power’s out, so what’s going on over there?

“Over there” was a far end of the warehouse that
had been visible only as a narrow stripe—now all but dark—from where she and
the others stood. A quick switch of views brought into sight something that at
a glance looked like one of the other storage shelves, but turned out to be a
shelf with something at its core around four meters tall and that many meters
broad. All the various scraps in display cases that surrounded it served as
camouflage, but they weren’t enough to hide Enid’s Toolkit-enhanced senses as
she jogged closer. There was a power source in there, one radiating a
slowly-mounting amount of wattage in a configuration I knew entirely too well.

Kallhander shoved Enid out of the way and broke
into a full run. I was still connected to him, and on that level one or two
tiers below speech, when two nervous systems share a little space thanks to CL,
we had a conversation:

Me: —
That’s an entanglement engine’s repulsor
field. It’s under its own power. If it fires up in here, everything for meters around,
including those support pillars, are going to be flattened.

Kallhander: —
Send me a schematic. Better yet, show
me where to strike.

There wasn’t time to say no or talk him out of it.
In the next instant, he gave me full access to his body from the inside.

I’d puppeteered others via CL before, but only a
few times in my life. What’s more, each previous time I’d been given plenty of
run-up and prelude before doing it; it wasn’t something that had been dumped
over my head in a split second.

First time for everything, I guess.

Kallhander had enough Type E substrate in one
reservoir of his suit to extrude and harden a single blade about the length of his
forearm with an attached tang. It wouldn’t last, but it didn’t have to. The
power signal was spiking powerfully enough to let me see the resonances for the
ship’s entire grid. It was a tiny thing—one person and an engine, nothing more,
small enough that I was able to find the main power supply terminals and sever
them by helping Kallhander shove the blade through the hull at just the right
spot.

Kallhander pulled his arm back. What was left of
the blade wilted, peeled and leaked out from between his fingers. The tang
followed from it and rang on the floor like a dropped dinner knife.

And with that I was kicked out of Kallhander’s
body and back into my own. I nearly fell off Kanthaka for real this time. Nice
to know he trusted me to guide his hand, I thought, although I guess even that
kind of trust only goes so far.

Enid, a dozen or so long steps behind him, stood
in the middle of the narrow alley between shelves and hugged Cioran’s offered
arm close to her. She draped the other arm around Enid’s neck and almost
accidentally clobbered her with the engine module, but not before one of the
IPS guards reached in and pried open her hand to take it.

“Ah, well,” Cioran said quietly. “Evidence, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” Kallhander said out loud, without
turning around.

“It’s all right,” she said to Enid —and, I
realized now, to me as well—in a far more measured, far less theatrical voice
than one she had ever used. “If you hadn’t all been tagging along so closely, I
would have wondered what was the matter with you.”

Enid let go of Cioran’s arm and turned to face
him. I felt Enid’s throat working, then bottling up as she tried to say
something and failed.

“Let’s not talk about this right now,” she said,
and put his finger across his half-smiling lips.

Enid’s foot shifted. She lifted her leg and saw,
rolling back and forth under where she’d been treading, one of Arsèni’s missing
middle fingers. She didn’t lay her eyes on it for more than a second before one
of the IPS boys scooped it into an evidence can.

That’s the nice thing about the universe:
no matter how far we advance, there’s always another opportunity to practice
patience. Half the time it’s because of humanity himself.

The cleanup and tear-down from the Incident, as I
was already calling it, took an order of magnitude longer than the Incident itself
had. Arsèni had to be bagged, and Enid and Cioran were going to be given a spot
debriefing and then hustled out of there in a ground car.

They didn’t need to tell me to stay away from the
warehouse to avoid any additional attention. I puttered along a block at a time
while they finished sweeping up the pieces. Not one word had come from Enid (or
from Cioran via Enid) since he had shushed her, which convinced me I was
looking forward to a terrible mess back at the villa.

“You needn’t worry about this being a news item,”
Kallhander said via a CL dupe of him in my immediate presence. “I took the
liberty last night of clearing this with the local IPS branch as an undercover
operation.”

“Figured something like that was in the works.”
And also why Cioran and Enid were getting the kid-glove treatment by them on
the way out, I thought.

“It’s the best way to explain everyone’s presence
here, on the official—and private—record. That and it’s not far from the truth.
As for that—” He pointed at the shell of the hidden ship. “—it’s being
officially classified as a ‘safety violation’. The public record will only
reflect that Enid and Cioran were here shopping, that we ran over here when
Enid cried for help, and that dangerous conditions were found.”

“Thanks,” I said, hating the taste of the word in
my mouth just then. “Just how much jurisdiction do you yourself have
planetside, anyway?”

“It varies. For this particular incident, quite a
bit. Outside of it, not much. Here, if needed, I can invoke my authority
situationally, on the spur of the moment, but that brings with it no guarantee
that IPS as a whole will sanction my actions.”

“But for something like this, where you have a
pre-emptive go-ahead, it’s different.”

“Entirely so. And given what might be gleaned from
this adventure, they might well sponsor many more actions like it.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,
Kallhander.”

“I didn’t imagine you would. But that’s why I
chose to share it.”

I got stuck on those words far too long for my
comfort. I didn’t want Kallhander having my back (and Enid’s, and Cioran’s, and
Angharad’s) only because he was waiting for me to supply the IPS with more
inside dirt they couldn’t dig up on their own. And yet the way he’d said those
last eight words sounded just chagrined enough, just un-Kallhander-ish enough
to make me think he didn’t want it that way either.

I took a different route back to the villa than
the IPS van did. Not that it matter, since they didn’t even get all the way
home in it—they parked under a building, were hustled into a helio that
departed from the roof, and landed at the villa’s airpad. The dead silence over
the CL link was almost comforting. I had more than enough to keep my mind busy
until the glass “airlock” for the villa cycled behind me and I was back inside.

Kallhander’s bid to keep the whole thing a secret
had failed miserably. The nosy people of the world were already bombarding us
with requests for comments, for which I had composed a stock statement with a
little input from Kallhander for the wording:
We would like to let the
public know that Cioran and Enid are all fine and that no injuries were
suffered . . ..

Enid wasted no time shutting the bathroom door
behind her and setting the water running. Cioran did the same in his room (he’d
switched to male form on the way back home), so I decided to take the cue and
rinse off myself. Not only that, but my clothes needed replenishing—and
somewhere along the way my jacket had acquired a nasty tear down the back, too.
Probably from when I’d lurched around on Kanthaka’s seat. I threw everything
into the regenerator and cleaned up, but I didn’t want to spend more than a few
minutes stalling. I needed to corner Cioran before he found an excuse to do
something else.

Luck was with me: Cioran came out into the common
area shortly after I did—damper, but in brighter-looking duds and with his polylute
in tow.

I got right to business: “What did Dragoji want
with that little spoil of war, Cioran?”

“I imagine that’s what your colleagues in the IPS
will find out once they finish grilling him, right?” His tone said it
differently:
What are you asking
me
for?
The clown in him was
gone, replaced now by the schemer and the opportunist.