Hellflower (v1.1) (3 page)

Me, I posted bond with the Smuggler’s Guild when I joined, and the thought of all that credit sitting there earning zip is enough to cripple you for life. On the other hand, me being a Guild-bonded Gentry-legger keeps people like Gibberfur happy, and here’s why: If I took off now for the never-never with Gibberfur’s cargo and he wanted to prove it with his half of the documentation, he could get reparations for his loss from the Guild. If the debt was big enough, well, there’s a perfectly legal lien on
Firecat,
activatable through a legit cut-out organization, and the Guild could have the
legitimates
yank my ship and sell it to cover their costs. Simple.

But membership cuts two ways. If I get burned-killed or stiffed or any other little thing-I can complain to the Guild, or my designated survivors can, and the Guild keeps records. One or two black marks against a shipper is all it takes, and suddenly your dishonest citizen can’t even find an Indie to herd skyjunk for him, let alone a Gentrylegger to farce his cargo of illegal past the Teasers.

It’s pretty cold comfort and precious little protection, and to make it work at all, you document your cargo every step of way-it’s called a provenance, or in the profession, a ticket-of-leave.

That’s life in the big city. The rest is for talkingbooks.

###

I was getting ready to leave the Last Gasp. Gibberfur had sulked out with his strongbox earlier and I was waiting around for the street outside to settle. I was standing at the bar and the tender came back by to tell me that my hellflower lover-that’s Tiggy Stardust of sacred memory-in addition to being arrested the same day he’d offed K’Jarn, had left three dead Wanderweb Guardsmen on the ground before they took him away.

It was real fortunate that Tiggy and me was quits. Now I wouldn’t have any unfinished business on my conscience when they shortened him and put his head on a pike outside the Wanderweb Justiciary.

He’d killed Guardsmen. On Wanderweb you can buy out of anything but killing Guardsmen. So of course Tiggy’d killed three of them. Bright lad.

Hell.

What was I supposed to do about it? It was all his own fault, after all. I didn’t tell him to dust half a six-pack of Wanderweb Guardsmen.
Nobody
kills Wanderweb Guardsmen.

Stupid kid.

Stupid
hellflower.

I was lost in contemplation of the fate of the late Tiggy Stardust when a genuine pandemonium wondershow came strolling in the front door.

He was big, he was blond, he was dressed in red leather like the hollyvid idea of a space pirate-and he was with a Hamat. He wore crossed blasters as long as my thigh. The Hamat stood behind him like the presence of doom, and there aren’t so many Hamati that stand human company by choice for me to figure this was two other guys. They were, variously, the Captain and First of a ship called
Woebegone,
which was a pirate no matter what you might hear elsewhere. I knew Captain Eloi Flashheart from a time we was working two sides of a insurance scam. His side’d involved my side being dead, and if Paladin hadn’t been with me it would of worked. Of course, Eloi always said afterward he didn’t carry a grudge, but how far can you trust a man who wears red kidskin jammies?

Unfortunately, I was in plain sight.

Eloi looked right at me, Alcatote looked right at me, and then they both crossed the bar to sit in the back. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, took my soon-to-be illegal cargo, and left. Fast. I was a sober, sane, sensible member of the highly-respectable community of interstellar smugglers and I did not borrow trouble.

Much.

###

When I hit the street Wanderweb was its gaudy nighttime self all around, but I wasn’t minding it, nor thinking about Eloi-the-Red. I was thinking about Tiggy Stardust, alMayne at Large, and his current status as official dead person in the Wanderweb Justiciary.

"It isn’t my problem."

"That is perfectly correct, whatever it is." Paladin, right in my ear, and I damn near ended my young career with heart failure on the spot. "Don’t do that."

"Sorry."

My teeth rang as the RTS took transmission. Nobody gave me-or us-a second glance.

So Tiggy’d saved my hash in arcade the other day-and been coking toplofty about it too! Nobody sane’d partner a hellflower, least of all one dressed like joyhouse in riot and wearing enough gelt to finance a small war. Do I look stupid? Do I look rich? Why do people tell me these things?

"Dammit, why do people tell me these things?" "Confession is said to be good for the soul." Paladin again. "I sold mine." I’d get used to it. Eventually.

I went back to
Firecat
and soothed my nerves by tucking six densepaks of illegal under the deck plates in a number of places the Teasers will never find. Then I loaded the dummy cargo I’d bought this morning in on top and dogged it down and checked my supply inventories. Golden.

On what I’d make selling this load of prime Tangervel rokeach on Kiffit I could starve comfortably in the
barrio
with my ship gigged for default of port fees. But rokeach did make a plausible reason for going, at least in the eyes of the Teasers. Now I could pick up and top angels for Kiffit, which was a real good idea if the
Woebegone
and her crew was in town.

"So what am I gonna do?" I asked Paladin.

"That depends on what you wish to accomplish," my ever-helpful partner said. "You will not make Eloi Flashheart regret his seizure of your cargo in—"

He must of picked that up in the Wanderweb City Computers. "Never mind Eloi. Tiggy Stardust bought three Guardsmen the day he dusted K’Jarn. They gonna shop him sure."

Paladin dimmed the hold lights; his version of exasperation. "I do not see what you can do about it. You cannot reverse the past or change the legal code of Wanderweb Free Port, and I cannot enter the Justiciary banks from here-which means you cannot change his sentence. or even find out exactly where he is."

"Could if I could get inside." Occasionally I do have bursts of brilliance.

"Butterfly," Paladin said, in his I-don’t-want-to-hear-any-more-of-this-voice.

"It isn’t like I don’t know the setup," I explained. "Butterfly St. Cyr—"

"I been inside before. It’s easy to get into the Admin wing; the only trouble is getting onto the Det levels. You already been in the City Central Computers, Pally-plans for Justiciary’ll be there, y’know, an—"

"Saint Butterflies-are-free Peace Sincere,
are you seriously suggesting that you are going to break into the Wanderweb Security Facility to rescue an alMayne mercenary?"

"Well…."

"You swore you weren’t ever going back in there again, you know. Least of all for ‘some dauncy hellflower who’d love to cut my heart out if he could figure the way around his honor to do it.’"

"I said that?"

"Yes."

"About Tiggy?"

"Yes."

"But Pally, think of the expression on his face when he sees who’s rescued him."

It is not correct to say that organics are incapable of true thought. Say rather that their capacity for thought is constrained by the limits of the organic construct housing the mind. An organic body is constantly making demands of its client intellect-to be exercised, rested, nourished, and allowed to display the primitive pre-conscious aberrations still maintained in the mind/body interface. One can only ignore these displays and trust that they will pass in time. When the spasm has passed, the mind of the organic, refreshed by the period of rest, will once more function with moderate efficiency until again distracted by the demands of its host environment.

The median period of function is five minutes, but I believe that Butterfly skews the statistical input significantly.

###

The point at issue was not whether or not it would be "perfectly safe" for Butterfly to enter a high-security detention facility and illegally release one of its internees, but whether there could be any possible value to be gained from such a course of action no matter how disdainfully the alMayne had behaved. I quickly abandoned the question of relative value when Butterfly introduced the concept of "fun" into the discussion.

I have learned that "fun" means exposing yourself to extreme risk without compensation, so I attempted to explain to Butterfly that if she were dead she would not know how much "fun" she was having.

This did not work.

It was just after dark meridies when I pulled my rented speeder up to the public docking in front of the Wanderweb Justiciary.

I wasn’t doing the pretty by this glitterborn, make few mistakes about it. In my business you do not make friends and be a angel of mercy-and I wasn’t grateful, not to Tiggy. I just wanted to see his face when I showed up. That’s all.

The top twelve floors of the Wanderweb Justiciary had closed at the end of First Shift and it was now almost the end of Second, but Det Admin and Detention itself never slept. I admired the pretty statues and the nice murals on the walls while I waited for the lift. Wanderweb, city of progress.

One level down it was a different story-looked like
legitimate
headquarters Empire-wide, with the small difference that the only uniforms in sight was the Guardsmen’s gaudy red-and-blue. I went to the Desk Officer and told him I was sure my First was in here an I’d come to bail him out. He asked me when my First’d been brought in and I said I didn’t know, only when I’d gone to lift ship he wasn’t around. Checked morgue, I said, and he wasn’t there.

Same old story: Idiot High Jump Captain and her rake-helly crew. And it would all check green across the board if they bothered. Paladin and me had spent the whole day going over plans for the Justiciary and pieceworking a false data file on
Firecat
-a.k.a. the Starlight Express out of Mikasa.

The Desk Officer sent me in-level to Fees & Records and told me to hurry because they was just about to shut down for the day, and if I got there after they closed I’d have to come back tomorrow at beginning of First Shift.

Ha.

I skipped over there, trying to look like nobody who was carrying a unscannable solenoid stunner under her jacket and grabbed some poor overworked bureaucrat who worked in Records. I spun him a tale about my missing First-Hamat, he was, because I knew Alcatote was being a good boy and there wasn’t another Hamat loose in twelve cubic lightyears. Of course the poor cratty couldn’t find him in his listings and of course I couldn’t remember when he could of come in. The cratty kept swearing my First wasn’t here and looking at his chrono-it was almost end-of-shift, remember?-and I kept insisting and being just short of nasty enough that he’d call some Guardsmen and put me in gig too. Finally he grabbed me and dragged me around to his side of the display and pointed.

"I tell you, Captain, there are no Hamati in here!"

I looked. It was an intake list for the last three days, broken down by Breeding-Population-of-Origin. It had no Hamati, twenty-seven Fenshee, and one alMayne. I memorized his file number.

"But he’s gotta be in here!" I insisted, in my best wringing-her-pale-hands-and-moaning voice. "Look, check again-maybe you got his B-pop wrong. He don’t look much like a Hamat "

"What does he look like?" said my good little straight sophont.

"Well," I began, improvising, "He’s about a meter-fifty, striped—"

"There are no meter-and-a-half tall Hamati!" thundered my long suffering soulmate.

"Well, he told me he was Hamat!" I whined. "How am I supposed to know?"

"Look, Captain, if you’ll just come back tomorrow—"

"But I’m lifting
tonight!
I need him back now! Look, don’t you keep holos or something? I could look, an—"

"One thousand and some very odd beings have been processed through here in the last three days!" my uncivil servant snapped. "But I
told you
what he looks like! He’s striped, he has a long tail, and blue eyes—"

"Hamati do not have tails!"
said my little buddy, who must of been a exobiologist in his free time..

"You just gotta look for him—"

"All right! We do keep hard copy images of detainees. I’ll find you a list of all the fur-bearing sentients—"

"Striped. With a tail. And blue eyes."

"-that have been processed in the last three days and then will you believe me that this-this-person is not here? Will you go away?"

"Sure," I said, and watched him disappear, a broken man, into the inner room.

Which was what I’d been angling for since I got here.

The astute student of human nature will notice I did not offer Junior the bribe that could of made things so much easier, as that would of made what was coming next unlikely to even the meanest intelligence.

As soon as the cratty was gone I punched up the retrieval codes for the alMayne file-it was Tiggy, all right, who else?-and found he was up for the chop when the Lord High Executioner came on duty later today. And I found out where my little alMayne lovestar was.

Restoring the terminal to its original state I lightfooted it over to a cabinet I’d cased as the most likely place to hide while I was stringing the button-pusher. I folded myself inside and shut the door just before he came back. I had my own reasons for thinking he wouldn’t look inside.

"Captain, there are no— Where did she go?"

There was a moment of stricken silence. Then I heard furious muttering and sounds of grabbing-your-jacket-and-getting-ready-to-leave. I’d kept Junior a whole five minutes past quitting time with my damsilly tale, and that left him so mad he didn’t even stop to wonder where I’d got to.

In my business, it’s always a good idea to be a student of human nature. Now if I’d offered him that bribe, he’d sure and t’hell wonder why I’d vanished without getting what I paid for. This way I was just another exasperating space cadet.

I heard the door hiss shut behind him and started counting my heartbeats. After I’d done that for awhiles I figured all sentient life and most of the bureaucrats was gone from this section. The only thing out there’d be tronics, and I had a way to deal with them. I hoped.