Crystal Heat

8

“Eh, Shadow, you look like the world treating you good. Where you off to?”

“Eh, Getto, taking a flit out for a sail. Want to come?”

“Different strokes, Shadow. Me I get seasick if I even look at water. Gonna make another song?”

“Want to. Might. They come when they come, you know.” She fluttered her fingers at him and went on her way.

Act II, scene 1 The spy walks down the street, greeting everyone she knows and spreading her story about, hoping she’s, soothing the jitters of the little worm who’s tailing her.

She stopped in at Cara’s cook shop. “Two of your meat pies, hm, Cara my love. Wrap them up tight and throw in a couple of napkins, I’m going for a sail in a flit and the Tinkerman gets snarky about stains.”

The older woman shook her head. “You’ve blown a circuit, Shadow. Anyone who’d go voluntarily out over that stinking soupmix…” She clicked her tongue, then went to work wrapping up the pies.

“Act III scene 1,” Shadith chanted to the wind as she took the flit in a sweeping curve across the water. “The spy has fooled them all and says an unfond farewell to Haundi Zurgile the chief city of the colony world Hutsarte”. And Grinder Jiraba can go suck eggs.”

As she tonic the flit low and finished the curve, she saw that she’d celebrated a bit too soon. There was a dark speck over near the horizon, almost out of sight. “Stinking Grinder, doesn’t trust anyone. Let’s see. Might as well open up my pies and have my meal while I’m thinking this over. Hm. Wonder if I can get him so bored watching me play around doing nothing, I can catch him on the hop when I take off.” She chuckled. “Act III scene 2: The spy has her dinner and leads the tail round in circles.”

When she finished eating, she sent the flit skimming across the whitetops, the lift effect churning the water into cream beneath her. It was dangerous and she was riding her luck hard, but it kept the watcher dithering in the distance, especially since she was careful to keep circling back toward the shore so he wouldn’t have to worry that she was stupid enough to try escaping to the Wild Half. And while she played out that scene, she programmed a course into the autopilot, getting ready for the time when she had to ditch the flit.

After half an hour of skittering about like a waterbug with the fidgets, she went up to a safer height, set the auto-p on hover/drift, and let the wind blow her toward the string of islands. She put, her feet up, stretched out and began to sing, fragments, phrases, repeating them over and over with enough changes to suggest she was trying to weave them into a song should the watcher have a sound pickup aimed at her.

When she reached the first island, a rocky dot that barely broke the surface, she sat up and began dancing the flit around and between the islands. Half the time the tail was out of sight completely. To her intense satisfaction he didn’t seem to mind and didn’t try to get closer.

She flew faster, swinging up into sight, dipping low again; she circled the big island, then took the flit skimming low over the place where the metal mass had registered on Digby’s detec. Lylunda had set a camou cloth over her ship and the vegetation had helped her conceal it, a tangle of vines crawling across the porous cloth, the broken trees and withered foliage swallowed in the damp fecundity of these latitudes. Without the evidence from a powerful detec no one would know that anything nested there.

She turned the flit in a tight circle, brought it down and set it on hover/pause, the programmed course to kick in after seven minutes. She lowered the harp and Digby’s Trick Kit, then dropped overside herself. Using the cutting rod from the kit, she sliced through the camou cloth and let herself down beside the shrouded ship, wrapping herself in a mind spray of don’ttouch-me to keep the bugs off while she worked her way along the ship’s side until she reached the area below the lock.

She crouched beside the ship, sheltering under the curve of the hull when she heard the ascending whine as the flit revved up and took off. “Act III scene 3: The spy tries the old decoy trick. Gods, I hope this works. I need time to pry open this can.”