Derelict For Trade

10

Someone shot at them again. Jellico’s gaze flicked back and forth, then he motioned Rael back into the restaurant towards a flowering hedge, and followed swiftly behind her.

They shoved their way through the thick shrubbery and ran headlong down a narrow accessway, dodging servitors with trays and paying no attention to the mix of Kanddoyd chirps and humanoid yells of outrage in their wake. The corridor terminated in a narrow service exit; just outside, Jellico caught at a decorative pole and swung around and up to the plant-bedecked platform about six feet above them. As Rael watched with interest, the law-abiding captain of the Solar Queen placed his booted foot against the rim of a potted tree, and shoved.

The pot tipped majestically toward the doorway they’d just quit, moving slowly in the lower-than-standard acceleration of this level. "Run!" Jellico commanded.

Rael turned and ran. Moments later she heard the smash of ceramic behind her, and shortly thereafter a cacophony of yelps, curses, and squeaks as their chasers hit the dirt pile.

"Humans and Kanddoyds," she said. His lips parted—he had been about to say the same, she realized.

He grinned instead, and flicked a salute.

Shots whizzed by both their heads right then. Rael ducked and began

stagger-running, fighting the urge to sneeze. The analytical part of her brain recognized the distinctive burn in her nostrils given off by the pellets: retching agents colloquially known as taste-agains. They were illegal almost everywhere in human space, and with good reason. If the pellet actually hit any portion of their skin, they’d be writhing on the ground in seconds, unable to see or hear, and miserably rejecting the excellent food they’d just eaten.

They dashed deeper into the structures of the North Pole, turning into one of the recreational concourses ringing their end of the habitat, Jellico leading the way. He dodged around passersby with an efficiency that made it plain somewhere in his past he had been trained for action.

Rael recognized the signs, because she had as well.

Together they vaulted over a low bench and a little stream. Then she stopped when Jellico suddenly turned back. Bending down, he dog-paddled water from the stream onto the glassy concourse deck, then straightened up, grinning. She choked on a laugh as they whirled and ran; seconds later they heard the first of the chasers vault over the stream—and let out a whoop of despair, followed by a satisfying crash.

My turn, Rael thought, fumbling in her pocket. She found what she sought, a credit chit, and as they sprinted down the concourse, dodging people and ducking round objects, she saw a row of automats. Putting down her head, she pounded into the lead and skidded to a stop, threw her chit in, and hit a combination.

A moment later into her hands poured a stream of the hard little ball candies that Kanddoyds were so partial to. Cocking her wrist, she threw them back down their pathway, where they bounced and scattered.

Yells and curses rose as people inadvertently trod on the tiny candies and nearly overbalanced; the runners, barely glimpsed through the crowd, were not so lucky. One, two, three figures flailed arms and shot up into the air, cursing, clacking, and howling. Rael felt that howl down her spine. It was a Shver voice, and the naked fear was probably an instinctive reaction to finding oneself in midair. Shver didn’t jump; no one would, in their heavy grav, and habit was too ingrained to make it easy for them to go leaping about even in micrograv. Probably instantly dizzy, she thought, the analytical part of her brain always observing. Shver inner ear arrangements had to be even more sensitive than humans’.

Jellico slapped one finger to his palm: one to you.

He looked around as they curved toward another bridge-way, one that would take them back toward the interior face of the North Pole, overlooking the inside of the habitat. The customary austerity of his face was eased by a curious little smile. He's playing the game, she exulted, and waited happily to see what he would come up with.

Zing! Another pellet sang between them, and they ducked, turned, pounded up a bridge toward a smile-shaped slice of sky with strange hook-shaped clouds hanging in it below the dazzle of the radiants. Rael became aware of a slight alteration in the pattern of her run, and realized they were losing gravity as they ran higher. She lengthened her strides, trying to keep from bounding up, and was immediately rewarded with an incremental increase in speed. Soon she’d be leaping and not running at all—but she knew how to run in low grav.

So did Jellico.

The captain ran without slowing straight toward the edge of the concourse, and as she followed Rael saw the deck fall away before them, vanishing under the slender railing that was all that barred them from a sheer ten-mile fall to the distant surface. He altered his step, running now along the edge, the light of the radiants filtered into a green flicker of dappled light across his uniform by the foliage clumped in pleasing arrangements along the edge.

In a flash of curious detachment, Rael took in the awesome view to one side, trying to fight the tendency to veer away from it. The vast green walls of the habitat, curling up and overtopping them like the waves that had whelmed legendary Atlantis, were studded with the huge Kanddoyd towers that lanced up from the surface at the crazy angles made possible by spin gee. The haze of distance blurred the vertiginous landscape into the semblance of impossible mountains.

Then her throat spasmed as Jellico veered suddenly and vaulted up onto the back of a bench like a free-fall gymnast. With both hands he caught the high branches of a tall, thin napuir tree. Scrambling up into its heights, he was obscured by the branches weighted with fuzzy purple fruit. Rael saw the tree shake—he was going up, rather than coming back down, up to a higher concourse!

She looked about, saw not a tree but the fine-mosaic crenellations of an ornamental pillar, no doubt disguising a tangle of cable and piping, and jumping as high as she could, she caught hold and scrambled up.

They both swarmed over the rail above at the same time, and Jellico tossed her an armful of fruit.

Holding her breath, trying not to choke from laughter and a pungently nasty smell, she popped her share of the weird fruit and threw the squashy pulp down on their chasers. Howls of rage came from below the trees—but with it the clatter of fast-climbing Kanddoyds.

"Those Kanddoyds are too good at climbing," gasped Rael.

Jellico nodded, looking around. "We’ll have to go down, then." He suddenly seemed to see something and ran forward, deeper into the concourse along a V-shaped gash that bulged the inner cliff edge of the concourse inward here, toward a complex glitter of metal and plasglas with garish laser beams and actinic light points flaring from it.

TORQUEMADA’S DELIGHT, the sign announced, THE GALAXY’S STEEPEST SPINBOGGAN.

"You can’t be serious," she said, slowing somewhat. Jellico glanced back at her, then past her. She shot a look back along their path: several Kanddoyds were already climbing over the railing.

"There’s no faster way down," he said.

And, Rael saw, there weren’t any Kanddoyds waiting in the line that snaked toward the entrance to the establishment. No wonder, she thought, given that the toboggan terminated on the surface ten miles below, in 1.6 standard gees, intolerable to them.

Then Jellico slowed—he was gauging the timing as they pushed forward, ignoring protests from the humanoids and Shver in the line.

Then, as one of the iridescent pods, open on top like a kayak, shot out of an opening and glided to a stop at the front of the line, he hissed: "Now!"

They dashed forward, pushing aside the two Rigelians waiting their turn, and dove into the pod. Rael oofed as she hit the heavily padded interior, cushioning her fall with her hands and then lying facedown on

the humped control chaise. The screen only inches from her face lit up as she grabbed the control handles to either side, and she felt the restraints lock in over her back and legs.

Then the pod rocked under Jellico’s weight and lurched forward; he had taken the forward steering position, leaving her the even more critical weight-balancing controls. A surge of pride, of delight, of emotional intensity at his unspoken confidence in her abilities helped her to orient swiftly and make ready for what was to come.

The concourse suddenly slipped back as the pod shot forward and the cries of the cheated Rigelians dopplered away behind them. As it cleared the edge of the concourse it veered sickeningly to run along the cliff edge for a time, past a series of restaurants whose tables gave diners a close-up view of the Delight’s victims. She tried to ignore the dizzying perspective plucking at her peripheral vision over the low sides of the pod and concentrated instead on the stress and acceleration vectors graphically represented on her screen. A smaller window within the screen echoed Jellico’s screen as he chose their course: the controls of spinboggans were deliberately set up to mimic starship navigational metaphors—the trick was to map them to the varying gee field and Coriolis force of a habitat.

Rael had never tried it. She hoped Jellico had; otherwise their ride down would merit the rather sadistic anticipation she thought she could glimpse on some diners’ faces when she looked up for a moment.

PING! Rael sneezed again and, after a moment’s fumbling, windowed up a rear view. A short distance behind them, two of their pursuers glided along in a pod, the one in the rear propped up on one arm to fire at them.

Their pod slowed abruptly. There was an agonizing pause; then, even though the course plots echoed from Jellico’s controls were still evolving, its nose tipped down, bringing the distant surface into view, and the bottom dropped out of the world as the mechanism threw them into free fall down the track.

The wind whistled past the fairing like a chorus of screams—in fact, Rael noted, the edge of the pod appeared to be fluted precisely for that effect. It didn’t help her stomach.

At least they won't be able to shoot at us anymore.

They were falling along an excruciatingly attenuated spiral, following a path that precisely matched the effect of the Coriolis force at every point along their path.

KATHUMP! The pod jolted violently.

"Switch point!" yelled Jellico. "Next one we’re going inward, gain some velocity before we hit the Toaster."

Toaster? Rael realized she wasn’t as familiar with this toboggan as she’d thought. She’d never heard of anything on these rides, popular throughout known space, called a Toaster. She flexed the controls, watching the moire patterns of stress and acceleration shift, trying to correlate them with what she was feeling.

And soon, with a kind of rarefied delight, she realized that the way a spinboggan worked had more to do with orbital mechanics than she had thought. Grounders never got used to the fact that in orbit, you decelerated by firing your rockets to move into a higher, slower orbit, and accelerated by using your retros to drop into a lower, faster orbit. Here, due to the combination of track friction, the ’boggan’s rotational motion, Coriolis acceleration—the tighter the spin, the faster one spun—and varying gee levels, it was the same. She wondered if their pursuers knew this.

PING!

Evidently, they did.

But the pod was gaining speed, the scream of its fairing rising in pitch, mirroring her heart rate. On Jellico’s screen echo, their position point inched nearer a huge annular region in the mid-gee levels, crisscrossed by bright lines graduated in yellows and reds.

"Be very careful with the spoilers in the Toaster!" yelled Jellico. "You can pop up right out of the slot if you’re not."

Working frantically, grateful that, for the moment, the track seemed sufficient to keep them on course, Rael labored to call up a help screen.

KATHUMP! Her stomach lurched, and not just from the sudden swerve onto a faster track. Gees pulled upwards at her recumbent body, but she

hardly noticed, staring in fascinated horror at the readout about the Toaster.

"Here we go!" shouted Jellico as the pod bucked violently. Then the noise of its progress changed to a smooth hiss as it shot into a slot, like a tube open at the top, the opening angled slightly toward the Spin Axis high above. The only thing holding them in the slot was their acceleration; it was up to her to keep them there through whatever course changes Jellico initiated.

Moments later she heard a faint scream, and realized that they were drifting up—the fluted fairing was an audible warning device triggered by its rising above the edge of the slot, not just a nerveracking embellishment!

Then there was no time for thought, only reaction, acceleration, counterreaction, deceleration, in an increasingly dizzy ballet of pursuit and flight.

But their pursuers continued to gain.

"Hold on!" Jellico’s voice held suppressed merriment.

"To what?" she yelled back, glad her voice, at least, sounded as unconcerned as his.

"Your stomach!" he called back with a laugh.

His screen echoed a complex twisting maneuver, chosen from among the maze of possibilities offered by the crisscrossing slots of the Toaster. She started to gasp a protest— surely their pursuers would catch up!

But it was too late. With a shattering thump the pod swerved into the first chicane and she compensated frantically as the scream of the fairing rose to a desperate pitch. In her peripheral vision she saw their pursuers in a parallel track, closing in—and their courses were intersecting.

Then Rael saw what Jellico intended. She could abort the maneuver, but she had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

She raised her head, looking squarely across at the humanoid filling her position in the opposite pod, and, with a broad, challenging smile, lifted

her hands from the controls.

A look of horror crossed his face as the two slots veered together, the two pods converging at tremendous speed. If they collided, the impact would kill all of them, despite any safety features, and she had lifted her hands from her controls. It was up to her pursuers to decide.

With a wail of despair the other yanked on his controls, and Rael heard the scream of his fairing soar to a shout of mechanical terror as the other pod seemed to shoot backwards, hesitate, and then lift out of the slot into free fall. As it tumbled away towards the approaching surface, she watched in her rearview screen, feeling sick.

Then relief washed through her as a parachute blossomed, to lower them ignominiously to the surface. The unknown crew of the Starvenger had probably perished; best that no more die, no matter their motives.

The rest of the ride was uneventful; Jellico steered them through the rest of the Toaster on a conservative course, and then the track resumed, taking them the rest of the way to the surface.

Rael saw the terminus coming up, surrounded by a crowd of excited Shver, and hauled on the brakes. Here on the surface they worked normally, and the pod stopped several hundred feet from its destination.

On the edge of the Shver she saw three others of their race, their aspect menacing. Two were armed with pellet projectile weapons.

"Welcome committee at ninety degrees," Jellico said. "Must have radioed ahead."

Rael nodded. At first she could barely get up when the restraints snapped away, but then she realized it wasn’t the weakening aftermath of an incredible adrenaline rush, but the 1.6 gees.

"Let’s be quick," she said as the three Shver moved toward them with elephantine grace.

Rael and Jellico toiled as fast as they could toward an exit, and Rael saw that Jellico was familiar with high gee, too: despite their haste he planted each foot deliberately, knees slightly bent to cushion vulnerable knee cartilage.

She was beginning to feel the strain in her thighs when the captain turned aside into a narrow corridor that debouched into a lift station.

There was no one there, and no one in the pod that answered their summons.

With deep, twinned sighs they stood and watched as the crowd of Shver, arriving too late, looked up at them. The pod accelerated, back toward the Spin Axis and the Queen.

For a moment neither said anything.

"The napuir fruit!" she gasped finally.

Jellico’s smile stretched into a grin, and suddenly he was laughing too. "The candy," he said huskily. "Those arms and legs." He motioned in a windmill shape, and Rael bent double.

"The Toa... th-the Toas-s-s..." She couldn’t get the words out.

They laughed harder, reviewing in gasped one-word exclamations their wild trip through the habitat. Each time Rael thought she was going to stop, she’d remember the howls, curses, gibbering wails of dismay, and gusted into new mirth.

They laughed together. They were alone, or she felt they were alone, walled off from the rest of the universe by the experience they had shared, by their hilarity, by the attraction that had never been so strong.

Still laughing, she chanced to look up, to find his gray eyes—alight with merriment—gazing back at her. And then his expression changed. It was nothing dramatic, like in the vids. A slight widening of the eyes, and a catch of the breath, but she felt his physical awareness ringing through muscle and bones, and watched him feel it in his turn, and before either of them could speak, he took a step, and she reached with a hand, and their lips met in a kiss.

It was an awkward first kiss, half awry, both of them still breathing fast, but the singing of her nerves promised much better. For a moment she leaned against his powerful body, and the kiss deepened—and suddenly he broke away. His eyes were now dark, with passion, with confusion, with wariness.

"We’re not safe." he started. His voice was hoarse; he stopped, and faint color ridged his cheekbones.

"Right," she said, striving for balance. "You know ’em?" she asked, when she had caught her breath.

He shook his head. "Not the one or two I saw. You?"

"Nothing from my past," she said. And, glad to have something to look at, she said, "Here we are—change point."

In silence they stepped out of the pod and moved a ways up the concourse toward the maglev that would take them to the docks. Rael had never felt so attuned to Jellico; she listened to the light sound of his breathing, watched the little frown between his eyes, and felt the swiftness of his thoughts.

"Damn," he said presently, indicating the maglev with his chin. "Unless this was random—which I doubt—they know who we are. Which means they know where we dock."

"Which means they might be waiting when we do debark," she said.

Jellico’s mouth was grim again. "We chased halfway up into the light zone and I never saw a Monitor. Convenient, isn’t it?"

"For whom?" she countered lightly. "We did enough damage to guarantee complaints against us."

He gave his head a shake. "At first I wanted to get their attention, but now. it’s hard not to see some kind of conspiracy against us, at least passively abetted by the authorities." He squinted up at the alien tangle of cylindrical buildings, all reflecting light in a way never seen on any planet. The weirdness of the place had never seemed so profound. "Well. You ready for another round?" he asked as they walked back onto the maglev concourse. "Or shall we take the long way back to the docks?"

She shook her head. "As you said, they seem to know who we are, so why bother? We can debark almost in sight of the Queen, certainly in earshot. If they are waiting for us, maybe we’ll learn something this way." She indicated the maglev.

A few seconds later another pod drew up with a hiss, and they went inside and dropped onto a bench. No one was in their immediate vicinity.

Jellico looked about him. He was back in control now, his emotions shut away as effectively as ever. "So you don’t think we’re in danger either?"

She sighed. "They’re either astoundingly rotten shots or else there’s something else going on."

"Most obvious reason is that they don’t want to risk a capital crime—like using blasters. Pellets are nasty, but they’re legal here, and they’re also not fatal. If they wanted to kill us, there are plenty of other illegal weapons that won’t punch holes in the habitat walls."

"If they really wanted us dead, they’d hire the Deathguard," Rael said.

"The Shver outcasts?" Jellico’s brows lifted. "I take it they are nonpartisan about their trade?"

"Whoever pays them the most," Rael said. "Those people after us weren’t trained in that kind of thing, or we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did. And those pellets wouldn’t kill, just make us helpless."

"They might have wanted to get hold of us," Jellico said. "Though why grab us, I can’t guess. We don’t know anything that anyone would want, and as for the usual grab-and-ransom, we’ve got to be the most cash-strapped Traders in the entire habitat."

"Mmmm, just as well they didn’t succeed, no matter what they wanted," Rael said. "There are places on Exchange I’d just as soon not visit, not without weapons of my own and a crew of heavies to back me up."

Jellico nodded. "On the other hand, it could be they didn’t want to hit us at all, but scare us."

"Into leaving Exchange?" she said.

"And abandoning whatever it is someone doesn’t want us finding out."

Rael sighed. "You don’t want to go to the authorities?"

Jellico ran his hand through his short hair, and grimaced slightly. "As I said, I don’t ordinarily have much patience with those who see conspiracies everywhere. I suppose we can go see Ross again. but I think I want to try solving this ourselves. Or at least find out more data as ammunition when we do contact the authorities."

The pod stopped then, and a tall Shver stepped in, sitting on the opposite bench with the great care of heavy-grav beings in light grav.

Rael felt the tension in Jellico, and was not sorry to have the opportunity for talk taken away. She wanted very badly to get back to the Queen, to retire to her cabin and think things through. And, she reflected wryly, unless she missed her guess, the captain probably felt just the same.

When they finally reached their destination, Rael braced herself for anything—but no one at all was on the concourse, and no one appeared. Unmolested, they reached the docks and soon were on board the Queen.

She was about to go straight to her cabin when Mura called, "Captain?"

His voice was angry. Alarm flooded through Rael; she saw Jellico’s jaw harden.

They walked into the galley, to see half the crew gathered there. But they weren’t what drew her attention.

Gripped in Dane Thorson’s big hands was a small, greenish-blue, raggedly clad being with a webbed crest, now sadly fallen, and thin webbed fingers and toes.

"Found a stowaway," Thorson said.

"And a thief," Mura added.

Johan Stotz put in sourly, "And a saboteur."