Crystal Heat

5

When Shadith reached the breakout point at the Matta System, the alarm signaled ships too close. She hovered at breakout until the clear-light blinked green at her, then emerged to find she’d just missed a line of three sting ships prowling inside the Limit-Agregossa guards on what was essentially an attempt at embargo on the cheap.

If Agregossa sowed breakout beepers in a globe inside the Limit and kept a dozen interceptors ready to move when one of the alarms was triggered, they might be able to slow the smuggling to a trickle.

Even pulling the patrol back until it didn’t activate a clutter warning on the incoming ships might work. A nose to tail procession hard up against the Limit-like the one she’d just avoided-looked more like punishment detail than guard duty.

Passive receptors as wide and sensitive as she could crank them to prevent other, possibly fatal surprises, worrying about having to drag Lylunda’s ship along beside;her, she slipped into the shadow of a gas giant, then went scooting toward the asteroid belt, the sublight shield drawn tight about the twinned ships, though the hot tail on the Backhoe was impossible to camouflage completely; all the field-sculptors could do was extend the emanation block backward in a slightly flared tube to narrow the chances of detection.

After a few hours of heavy sweating, she edged the linked ships into the Belt, crept along it according to the plan she’d worked out on her way here. When she reached the point closest to Sauva Kutets, she settled into the shadow of a large rock, locked onto it with fore and aft lines, then reconfigured the shield, turning the ships into a craggy node of the asteroid, both to the eye and to most detec systems. The locals were most likely to choose a meeting place that gave them the least possible exposure to Agregossan patrols.

“Spla! I need a bath. That was a bit more sweat-making than I expected. First, though, I see if I figured right about how to locate our happy arms dealer.”

According to her data file, Sauva was the larger twin, the one with the most people. There was no mthing or heavy industry because the world was expected to produce food for the homeworld and nothing was allowed to distract from that task. Sauva was divided into huge salashi owned by the Families that ran Agregossa and by their friends; the salasheri rented the land they worked from those Families and paid taxes to the colonial government. They also had to buy hardware and machinery from the owners at what they knew were inflated prices. In spite of this triple drain, the salasheri prospered-to no small degree by growing speciality crops of various kinds and smuggling the harvest offworld.

The rebellion came with the last increases in the rent and in the tax laid on the salasheri by the homeworld, which convinced them that the absentee owners would squeeze them dry in their greed and ignorance. They sent a delegation across to Kutets to protest. The members of that delegation were arrested, convicted on the spot of insurrection and signed into Contract Labor, their families were thrown off the land they thought of as their own. Outsiders were brought in to work it. It didn’t take much deliberation for the rest to figure out where that road led.

Most of Kutets’ population belonged to one of three groups-the Agregossa colonial government with its mix of politicians, police, land agents, and bureaucrats; security forces; the Contract Labor used in the mines and factories. No rebellion there according to the report.

“Dumb system all around. Almost guaranteed to generate dissatisfaction on Sauva. I expect Agregossa figured it had the high ground here and the Sauvese would follow orders, like it or lump it. Hm. High ground in this case depends on who’s got the most bang in hand. Hence Harmon. Gods be blessed, I don’t have to plunge into that mess, just locate old Harmon and squeeze out of him where he dumped Lylunda Elang.”

Her chosen rock was on the inner side of the Belt and in good viewing range. Sauva Kutets was between her and the sun,, the dark side toward her with similar crescents of daylit world on the trailing edge. No city lights shone in the larger of those velvet black ovoids, but here and there she saw the flashes from explosions and in several places wide swathes of fire. All so very pretty from way out here even with amplification, and nicely silent, no screams from the burned and dying. She shivered and blanked the screen, though she left the pickups working and transferring data to memory cells.

“From the lack of fooforrah, I got here first,” she said. “Well, I was closer, if I did start later. Digby said Harmon left The Accord with a nicely vicious assortment of their products three days before I ’splitted from University. Interesting that he could get that kind of information. Spooky. Digby as a virus in the corn system. I’m starting to wonder more than a little where he’s aiming. More stuff to think about later.

“So where’s Harmon? At a guess his ship’s not all that much faster than this one. If he came directly from The Accord… and I’d say that’s likely with the load he has… and if he had no more problems than I did getting here, then he may have arrived around six hours ago. So it’s just possible he could have dumped his cargo and got away before I stuck my nose through. Not likely, though; he’d have to spend some time making contact with his buyers. It’d go faster if he grounded the ship on planet, but setting down in the middle of a war is a gamble. Me, I’d do the trade up here. Let the buyers dance with the Agregossan patrols. Get your pay and get out. So if you’re around here like you should be, you little weasel, you’re doing just what I’m doing, playing least in sight and waiting for the Sauvese to signal their arrival.”

She tapped the screen on again, pulled most of the receptors away from Sauva Kutets and set them mapping the local asteroid configurations. She get more precise data once Digby’s pooter moles were deployed, giving her a delicate web out there collecting data about everything that happened in this area of the Belt.

She smiled as she watched the moles creep away from the ship. When she was testing out the abilities packed into Digby’s fleet, she asked the tech why they were called that. He told her to watch the screen. She did and saw this nebulous little object doing a quick odd jig across the space between the ship and the rock that was its target. Yog see? he said. Like it’s farting its way across. Slow enough to get you chewing on your elbows, but they don’t trigger alarms and when they’ve got their paint on they don’t show up on most search screens, so they’re useful little buggers. And you can pickaback them if you have to show some speed, let the carriers draw the fire after the moles have dropped.

Twenty minutes later when she was scrolling through the data from the mole web, examining hundreds of medium-to large-sized rocks floating in the middle of nothing, the alarm beeped at her and threw the readout off the screen. She found herself looking at an insystem ship that seemed to be coming straight for her. When it passed one of the larger asteroids, though, she saw the nose begin to turn away; the battered craft was creeping along-very slowly, almost as if it were tiptoeing across a creaky floor. It nestled up against that rock with a delicacy of increment that suggested the pilot was probably a smuggler or perhaps an asteroid miner recruited to the cause. Hm. Close enough to be handy, far enough to be safe.

As she watched it power down and set its mooring lines, Shadith played with the controls, pinning the location and maneuvering the pooter moles into a mosaic for a beacon watch. No need to go looking for Harmon; there was the bait to draw him here. “There’s an ego booster-setting my piece on the board just right.”

Bmmmp cwmmp, the beacon watch told her, then went silent. Bwnunmb. Very short-range signal-faint and so low it was a basso mutter rather, than the usual beep.

“Lovely. Now we wait for him to come to the call. And sit here sweating till I know if I was careless and he spotted me or if he was focused insystem and not worrying about the Belt. University says he’s missed the last two drops he set up, barely got away with his life and no cash. Reduced to ferrying cargo to pay expenses and burning the papers on his ship for this load., Only way to get them back is make good on the sale. He’ll come. Oh, yes. Sweet if he can. Nasty if he has to.”

She waited.

The beacon did its pattern every twenty minutes. And she waited.

Nothing else to do. Her gear was in the lock, ready to go, the plan was made during the trip here, tweaked a little to suit local conditions, no need to go over that again.

Two hours. Three. Four.

Bmmmp cwmmp. Bwmmmb.

Thwop thweep. Thwop thweep thweep.

She shook herself out of her half doze, began watching the screen intently. At first she saw nothing; then she noticed that the glimmer of the Belt dust was occluded by a roughly spherical object moving counter to the general direction of rotation. “Hello, Harmon.”