Use of Weapons (11 page)

Sma
breakfasted, was shown round the ship - though there was little to see; the
ship was almost all engine - and spent most of the rest of the day reviewing
her knowledge of the Voerenhutz cluster's history and politics.

The
ship sent formal invitations to each of the crew, and specified a strict rule
of No Shop Talk. It hoped that this, plus the narcotic wealth of the
consumables, would keep everybody off the subject of where exactly they were
heading for. It had toyed with the idea of just telling people there was a
problem here and asking them not to talk about it, but suspected there were at
least two of the crew who would take such a proscription as a challenge to
their integrity requiring them to raise the issue at the first possible
opportunity. It was on occasions like this that the
Xenophobe
tended to consider changing its status to that of an
unstaffed ship, but it knew it would miss the humans if it did decide to ask
them to leave; they were fun to have around, usually.

The
ship played loud music, showed exciting screen holos, and set up a fabulous
surrounding holo landscape of lush green and blue, filled with floating bushes
and hovering trees where strange, eight-winged birds capered and beyond which a
glowing white layer of mist plied by tall, feathery cloudships extended to
neck-stretchingly tall cliffs of pastel-shaded rock, set about with further
small clouds, draped with blue and sparkling gold waterfalls, and topped by
fabulous cities of spires and slender bridges. Ship-slaved soligrams of famous
historical figures wandered about the party, adding to the illusion of
numbers, and were only too happy to engage the disguised revellers in
conversation. More treats and surprises were promised for later.

Sma
went as Xeny, Skaffen-Amtiskaw as a model of the
Xenophobe
, and the ship itself produced yet another remote drone;
an aquatic one, still brown and yellow, but looking like a rather fat and
large-eyed fish, and floating in a field-held metre-diameter sphere of water
which drifted through the party-space like some odd balloon.

'Ais
Disgarve, who you've met before,' the ship drone said, voice sounding rather
bubbly as it introduced Sma to the young man who'd greeted her in the hangar
the day before. 'And Jetart Hrine.'

Sma
smiled, nodded at Disgarve - making a mental note to stop thinking of him as
Disgarb - and the young woman at his side.

'Hello
again. How do you do?'

'Heddo,'
said Disgarve, dressed as some sort of ancient cold-climate explorer, all
swathed in furs.

'Hi,'
Jetart Hrine said. She was quite short and round, very young looking, and her
skin was so black it was almost blue. She wore some ancient - and surprisingly
brightly coloured - military uniform, and sported a smooth-bore projectile
rifle slung over one shoulder. She sipped from a glass and said. 'I know
there's no shop talk, Ms Sma, but frankly Ais and I have been wondering why our
dest -'

'Aah!'
the ship drone said, its water sphere suddenly collapsing. Water crashed all
around the feet of Sma, Hrine and Disgarve, all of whom jumped back a little.
The fish-drone fell to the red wood deck and flapped around. 'Water!' it
croaked. Sma picked it up by the tail.

'What
happened?' she asked it.

'Field
malfunction. Water! Quickly!'

Sma
looked at Disgarve and Hrine, both of whom seemed rather bemused.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw, in its starship disguise, wound quickly through the
party-goers towards them. 'Water!' the ship drone repeated, wriggling.

A
frown gathered on Sma's brow, inside the brown and yellow suit. She looked at
the woman dressed as a soldier. 'What were you about to say, Ms Hrine?'

'I
was - oof!'

A
one-in-five-hundred-and-twelfth scale model of the very fast picket
Xenophobe
thumped into the woman, making
her stagger backwards, dropping her glass.

'Hey!'
Disgarve said, pushing the offending Skaffen-Amtiskaw away. Hrine looked
annoyed, and rubbed her shoulder.

'Sorry;
clumsy me!' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, loudly.

'Water!
Water!' yelped the ship drone, struggling in Sma's furry paw.

'Shut
up!' Sma told it. She went close to Jetart Hrine, putting her own body between
the woman and Skaffen-Amtiskaw. 'Ms Hrine; complete your question, would you?'

'I
just wanted to know why...'

The
floor shook, the entire landscape around them trembled; light flashed from
high above, and as they looked up, they saw the fabulous gleaming cities of the
cliff tops far above disappear in vast blooms of light, which slowly faded,
leaving falling clouds of debris, crashing towers and disintegrating bridges.
The mighty cliffs split asunder and kilometres-high tsunami of seething lava
and boiling grey-black clouds of smoke and ash burst out, exploding over the
quivering landscape below, where the cloudships were sinking and the
eight-winged birds were spinning so fast their wings were coming off, sending
them spinning into the blue-green shrubbery in squawking explosions of feathers
and leaves.

Jetart
Hrine stared in disbelief. Sma grabbed the woman's collar with one paw and
shook her. 'It's trying to distract you!' she yelled. She turned to the
fish-drone in her other paw. 'Cut it out!' she screamed at it. She shook the
woman again, while Disgarve tried to pry her paw away from the woman. Sma shook
his hand off. 'What were you trying to
say
?'

'Why
don't we know where we're going?' Hrine shouted into Sma's face, over the noise
of the earth splitting open in a gout of flame. A huge black shape reared from
the chasm, red-eyed.

'We're
going to Crastalier!' Sma yelled. A vast silver human baby appeared in the sky,
shining, beatific and be-rayed, spun about with glowing figures.

'So
what?' Hrine bellowed, as lightning zapped from mega-baby to earth-beast and
thunder assaulted the ears. 'Crastalier's an Open Cluster; there must be half
a million stars in it!'

Sma
froze.

The
holos went back to the way they had been before the cataclysms. The music
resumed, but it was quieter now, and very soothing. The ship's crew stood
around, looking mystified. There was much shrugging.

The
piscine ship-drone and Skaffen-Amtiskaw exchanged looks. The ship drone, still
held in Sma's paw, suddenly became the holo of a fish skeleton.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw projected the model of the
Xenophobe
tumbling disintegrating and trailing smoke to the deck. They both flashed back
to their previous disguises as Sma turned slowly and looked at them both.

'An...
Open... Cluster?' she said, and took off the brown and yellow head of the
fancy-dress suit.

Sma's
mouth was in the shape of a smile. It was not an expression Skaffen-Amtiskaw
had learned to view with anything other than extreme trepidation.

-
Oh shit.

-
I think we are in the presence of one annoyed human female, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

-
You don't say. Any ideas?

-
None whatsoever. You can field this; my fish-like ass is out of here.

-
Ship! You can't do this to me!

-
Can and am. This is your prototype. Talk to me later. Bye.

The
fish-drone went limp in Sma's paw. She let it drop to the water-slicked floor.

The
drone dispensed with the warship disguise; it floated in front of her, fields
on clear. It dipped its front a little, held it there. 'Sma,' it said quietly.
'I'm sorry. I didn't lie but I did deceive.'

'My
cabin,' Sma said calmly, after a brief pause. 'Excuse us,' she said to Disgarve
and Hrine, and walked away, followed by the drone.

She
floated on the bed in the lotus position, naked but for the shorts, the Xeny
suit discarded on the floor. She was glanding
calm
and she looked more sad than furious. Skaffen-Amtiskaw -
expecting a fight - was feeling awful, faced with such measured disappointment.

'I
thought if I told you, you wouldn't come.'

'Drone;
this is my job.'

'I
know, but you were so reluctant to leave...'

'After
three years, with no warning, what do you expect? But how long did I actually
hold out? Even knowing about the stand-in? Come on, drone; you told me what the
situation was and I accepted. There was no need to keep quiet about Zakalwe
giving us the slip.'

'I'm
sorry,' the drone said, very quietly. 'This is inadequate, I know, but I really
am sorry. Please say you might be able to forgive me one day.'

'Oh,
don't take the contrition bit too far. Just tell me things in future.'

'All
right.'

Sma
let her head drop for a moment, then brought it back up. 'You can start by
telling me how Zakalwe got away. What did we have trailing him?'

'A
knife missile.'

'A
knife
missile?' Sma looked suitably
amazed. She rubbed her chin with one hand.

'Quite
a late model, too,' the drone said. 'Nanoguns, mono-filament warps, effector;
point seven value brain.'

'And
Zakalwe got
away
from this beast?'
Sma was almost laughing.

'Not
just away; he wasted it.'

'Shee-it,'
Sma breathed. 'I didn't think Zakalwe was that smart.
Was
he smart, or just incredibly lucky? What happened? How did he
do it?'

'Well,
it's
very
secret,' the drone said.
'So please don't tell anybody at all.'

'My
honour,' Sma said ironically, palm on chest.

'Well,'
the drone said, making a sighing noise. 'It took him a year to set up but, on
the place where we dropped him - after his last job for us - the local
humanoids shared their planet with large sea-going mammals of about equivalent
intelligence; quite a viable symbiotic relationship, with much cross-cultural
contact. Zakalwe - using the exchange we'd given him as payment for his work -
bought a company which made medical and signalling lasers. His trap involved a
hospital facility the humanoids were setting up on the coast of an ocean to
treat these sea-going mammals. One of the pieces of medical equipment being
tested was a very large Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Scanner.'

'A
what?'

'Fourth
most primitive way of looking inside your average water-based living being.'

'Go
on.'

The
process involves the use of extremely strong magnetic fields. Zakalwe was
supposedly testing a laser attached to the machine - on a holiday, when there
was nobody else around - when he somehow got the knife missile to enter the
scanning machine, and then turned on the power.'

'I
thought knife missiles weren't magnetic.'

'They're
not, but there was just enough metal in it to set up crippling eddy currents if
it tried to move too fast.'

'But
it could still move.'

'Not
fast enough to get out of the way of the laser Zakalwe had set up at one end of
the scanner. It was only supposed to illuminate, to help produce holos of the
mammals, but Zakalwe had in fact installed a military strength device; it
grilled the knife missile.'

'Wow.'
Sma nodded, staring down at the floor. 'The man never ceases to amaze.' She
looked at the drone. 'Zakalwe must have wanted away from us awful bad.'

'It
looks that way,' agreed the drone.

'So
maybe there's no way he'll want to work for us again. Maybe he never wants even
to hear from us again.'

'I'm
afraid that must be a possibility.'

'Even
if we can find him.'

'Quite.'

'And
all we know is that he's somewhere in an Open Cluster called Crastalier?' Sma's
voice sounded tinged with disbelief.

'It's
a bit more focused than that,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. 'There are maybe ten or
twelve systems he could be in by now, if he left immediately after stiffing the
knife missile, and took the fastest ships available. Thankfully, the tech level
in the meta-civilisation isn't
that
high.' The drone hesitated, then said. 'To be honest, we might have been able
to catch up with him, if we'd gone in fast and strong immediately... But I
think the controlling Minds were so impressed with Zakalwe's trick they thought
he deserved to get away. We kept a very general watch on the volume, but it's
only in the last ten days the search has become serious. We're bringing in
ships and people from wherever we can now; I'm sure we'll find him.'

'Ten
or twelve systems, drone?' Sma said shaking her head.

'Twenty-plus
planets; maybe three hundred sizeable space habitats... not including ships, of
course.'

Sma
closed her eyes. Her head shook. 'I don't believe this.'

Skaffen-Amtiskaw
thought the better of saying anything.

The
woman's eyes opened. 'Want to pass on a suggestion or two?'

'Certainly.'

'Forget
the habitats. And forget any planets that aren't fairly Standard; check out...
deserts, temperate zones; forests but not jungles... and no cities.' She
shrugged, rubbed her mouth with her hand. 'If he's still trying hard to stay
hidden, we'll never find him. If he only wanted to get away to live his own
life without being watched, we have a chance. Oh, and look for wars, of course.
Especially wars that aren't too big... and
interesting
wars
, know what I mean?'