The Burning Ground

Chapter 4

The dancer on the highwire spun and leaped, feet light as feelers, flying the taut burn of the wire…

Shadith looked at what she’d written, wrinkled her nose. The image still wasn’t right. Apt enough but overused. She struck out the word dancer, held the stylo above the sheet of paper and stared at the words, trying to force a new form out of the black lines…

“Shadow, drone’s just in from Digby, come on up.”

She made a face at the speaker, snapped the stylo into its slot, slid the paper into the drawer of the foldout desk, and shoved the desk into the wall. “On my way, Rose.”

Shadith put out a hand to steady herself as the ship seemed to hiccup, then steadied. “Course shift?”

Autumn Rose swung her chair round. “Right. As per Digby’s instructions, I’ve switched the ship’s internal ID to one of his Face Companies and we’re now heading for a world the locals call Ambela. He’s identified your little oddity. And agrees with your conclusions. A medkit came with the flakes, tailored to the ghost’s species. First you catch her-and it is a her-then you tickle her lifestory out of her.” She swung back as Shadith crossed the small bridge to the Co chair, tapped on the feed to the screen. “He’s now set to lecture us on his conclusions.”

Digby’s simulacrum was in full professor mode, the tassel to the fez bobbing with every move of the image’s head. He folded his legs in his favorite sit-in-the-middleof-the-air stance, rested his virtual hands on his virtual knees, and smiled at them.

“Splendid work, my children.” He lifted his hands, set fingertip to fingertip. “As a treat I’m going to tell you exactly what the gadget is our little ghost has lifted.”

Autumn Rose sighed. “Dear Digby, if you didn’t pay so well…”

Shadith snorted.

“I see that your curiosity has been tormenting you.” He paused, stroked the pointed beard he’d assumed for the occasion, and dropped his hands to his knees again.

“It is an opener of ways,” he said. “A thief’s wet-dream. An instrument for merging with a forcefield and insinuating a hole into it without informing the incorporated sensors that something drastic is happening. Among themselves our friends at Sunflower call it a disruptor, though that is an entirely inappropriate name. Inappropriate or not, disruptor we shall call it.” He coughed and tilted his head to get the tassel out of his eyes. “Your supposition was quite correct, Shadow. Sunflower bought themselves some tempting loot of dubious ownership. And you will be interested in the source. Omphalos Institute.”

“Tsah!”

Having paused for the expected reaction, Digby went on, “Yes, indeed. Our old friends, the Omphalites. Which brings up a point. I think none of us are happy with. the thought of an Omphalos op walking through walls wherever he feels an urge to roam. We are contracted to return the disruptor to Sunflower, but I wouldn’t be too disturbed if it were… mmrn… damaged in the process. My source tells me the being who led the team that developed the gadget poisoned his aides, wiped the test data and specs from the lab kephalos, and went off with the only prototype. Before he sold it to Sunflower, he was careful to let nothing out of his head. Which is the major source of their agitation since he was killed very shortly after turning over the prototype and before he could dictate the specs. Probably Omphalos, but not necessarily. Which is why we were hired to get their toy back to them. Me, I’m seriously pissed because they didn’t bother tell ing me Omphalos was involved. Maybe they didn’t know, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” He tapped his nose, nodded, and paused to let them comment if they had a mind to.

Shadith chuckled, met Autumn Rose’s eyes, and said, “You’re a gambler, Rose. How much would you wager that even if we do retrieve the gadget intact, it has an accident on the way to Sunflower?’

“There’s little pleasure betting on sure things.”

Digby’s image cleared its throat, the small sound meant to reclaim their attention. “The inclusion of the disruptor in the theft gives strong support to your first choice of thieves, Shadow. Which I will explain in a moment, after I’ve dealt with the other two possibilities.

“The Matriarch’s crew person is most unlikely. They’re too paranoid to buy stolen drugs and would be most upset by the presence of the disruptor on their world. Something that could bore silent holes in the shielding of all those little interlocking enclaves? No way, children. And no one they took off planet will have anything like free will.

“As for the mouse who calls himself a jeweler, he has more blotches on his record than freckles on a lass from Vallon and no evidence of any unusual abilities beyond a fast mouth and faster fingers. He steals things immediately salable, mostly gems, and wouldn’t go within light-years of anything touching on Omphalos.

“Shadow, I knew about Sabato, of course, and have a list of his Face Companies which I thought was complete, but Mavet-Shi wasn’t on it. When you get back, I’d like to know your source for this. Hm. And a long chat about other bits of your life.

“I talked to Xuyalix about the Caan Cerex. He was somewhat reluctant to chat on the topic. Turns out Cerex is some sort of relative who had a patch of bad luck. Got caught with smuggled goods on a world with a low opinion of smugglers. Pulled a term in contract labor and was sold offworld. His kin put together a fund and tried to redeem him, but the Labor Service wouldn’t cooperate. I’d say the ananiles are meant to buy his contract with enough left over to get him home to Acaanal.

“Woensdag is on the way to Acaanal to check with Cerex about how close you got to the way the theft was worked, but I don’t see any reason to make more trouble for the poor schlup. He’s not important enough to bother with. I’ll send a drone your way with a report on the interview. It should reach you before you make Ambela.

“The little one is the convincer. She’s got impressive reasons for needing that disruptor.”

In the screen a planet swam against a star ground while Digby’s image sank to Thumbelina size. The turning world was mostly water with polar icecaps, two largish continents, one with a tapering tail of islands that came close to joining it with the third continent which was about half the size of the other two. A single moon drifted past in the stately gravity dance of satellites.

Icon Digby set fingertip to fingertip, tilted his head so the fez tassel brushed along his jaw. “What the original state of Ambela was no one knows, but sometime after it developed rudimentary flora and maybe fauna, the folk generically called Impix arrived-even they don’t know where they came from. They settled in and mauled the world in the usual way, had some wars, lost hold on the tech that brought them there, began slowly building it back. They’d reached steam power and rudimentary electrical services, rediscovered radio, when the Ptak arrived as part of the outpouring when the Ptakkan Empire broke up. Ptaks are not a bloody lot, but they have their peculiar ways. They don’t like being overlooked by strangers or having outsiders controlling any of their space. As an aside, that’s one of the reasons their neat little empire broke up-too many non-Ptakkan species kept resolutely away from any touch of power.

With that in mind, they uprooted every Impix they could catch, hauled them to the continent they called Impixol, and set up a satellite-controlled force field around the continent to make sure none of the Impix got loose to bother them.” The Digby icon tapped finger against finger. “Unlike the Impix, they kept contact with the outside, and with a low birthrate and the resources of a basically untapped world behind them, particularly the drajjul opals, they were a comfortable if not a wealthy society for their first millennium on-planet. When the drajjul mines began to play out and the shipping companies started dropping away, they opened casinos and used the third continent as a hunting preserve, pulling in hunters and gamblers. Fads and fashions being what they are, revenue from this started big, but tapered off considerably until two factions of Impix began fighting each other and the Ptaks found they had a new tourist attraction.

They set up flights of cameras to track the battles and keep the action crackling for their War Viewing tours.”

The image on the screen changed, and Shadith found herself watching hand-to-hand fighting on the banks of a river with a burning boat in the background. The fighters were a good match with her favorite in the ghost stakes, though somewhat larger and more muscular. Males, perhaps.

The scene changed-a city being bombarded-changed again, fighters overrunning a nomad camp-changed a third time-a group of seven males roasting bits from a smaller, darker version of themselves over an open fire.

“By arming and supplying both sides, some judicious prodding, and sending assassins after those arguing for peace, the Ptaks have kept the war going for more than a decade and have prospered from it enormously.” The Icon wagged a finger. “I put this in just for you, Shadow. If the Ptaks suspect you want to interfere with that war, they’ll slide you down a black hole, so mind yourself. And when you get to Impixol, do your best not to get yourself photted by one of those cameras, hm?”

The image on the screen shifted again, swept down to water level and hovered around wavetop, focusing on a series of flickers moving horizontally along an invisible surface.

“The Fence.” Digby’s voice was prim and disapproving. “An essentially simple force field that kills whatever comes near it. Near being approximately two meters. Easy maintenance, almost no moving parts. By using the disruptor, your little ghost-candidate could punch a hole-in the Fence without starting up all kinds of alarms, a hole big enough to let a boat through, if that happens to be what she wants. Not that it will do her much good, the power differential between Ptak and Impix is just too great. What she should do is go after the ground controls of those satellites. When you locate her, Shadow, you might mention that little notion-as long as you’re sure no one else is listening.

“Rose, tact not being one of our Shadow’s gifts, I strongly suggest you provide cover and maintain the link to the ship. Their orbital facilities are crude at best and definitely not secure, so you had better groundside the ship and secure it against ordinary probes. You’ll have to let Ptak security probes find their way through, but give them a tale to play with, hm?

“I’ve encoded into a zipfile all we know of Ambela, the Ptak and the Impix war, so this lecture is essentially unnecessary, but it pleased me to make it.” The world image vanished and Digby was floating before them again, a mischievous grin on his, simulacrum’s face, a sparkle in his bright green eyes. “Happy hunting, my dears. And be ready to tell me all when you get back.”