The January Dancer

Goltraí: Down the Rabid Whole

In the thirteen metric days since her acquisition of the STC records, the scarred man says when he resumes the tale, Bridget ban’s ship had become something of a convent, from which she spurned the enticements of the profane world and within which she had busied herself with conventional duties. There was never a shortage of administrative tasks. Her report on the Delphic was still unfinished and there were one or two other matters of a similar nature. Now and then, she prodded Pulawayo about the STC records, to maintain the pretense that she did not already have them. Still, the stall could not be prolonged forever. What she needed was a plausible reason to abort her search for the phantom fleet, and she sat tight in the hope that something would come up.

Instead, something came down.

Bridget ban did not expect her dilemma to be so neatly solved by a deus ex machina, but it was not the deus that surprised her. It was the machina. The Spiral Arm is vast and the Kennel thinly spread. So when her communicator announced the arrival in Peacock Roads of a ship of the Service, she did not at first believe the machine. Yet, surely it was beyond the skills of the ’Cockers to emulate the Blue Code; and it was this that finally convinced her. Greystroke, the beacon informed her—Fir Li’s chief apprentice, sent to seek a Confederate Agent on Jehovah—returning now, she assumed, with the intelligence desired.

She decided to use this unexpected crowbar to pry herself from the surface of the planet.

She sent a message in the Red Code telling him to pretend that he had come with a new assignment for her and, in case he had heard of it on Jehovah, warning him not to make that assignment the Cynthian ambush.

The Pup’s response was as minimalist as the Pup himself. It read: “?”

This led to a series of time-lagged exchanges, in the excruciating course of which they laid out a plan. Bridget ban learned to her astonishment that Greystroke, too, was in search of the Twisting Stone and had come to Peacock Junction holding the other end of the same tangled skein of events.

The coincidence did not astonish the Pup. “It was fated, Cu. You followed one end and I followed the other. The Friendly Ones used the Molnar as their woof to weave this rendezvous; but we never see their tapestry, save in hindsight.”

“The past is always inevitable,” she grumbled. “I’ll believe in yer Fate, when ye know of it aforehand.”

Peacock STC could not be unaware that deeply encrypted communications were flowing between the two ships of the Service. So Bridget ban called Pulawayo at STC and, when the elf’s visage had appeared on the comm, told him—or her—that there’d been a change of plans. “Greystroke’s brought a new case. He and I are tae rendezvous at Lunglopaddy High an’ discuss it. So I’m needing a traffic window as soon as yer folk can arrange it.”

Pulawayo made a pout. “I thought we might have another rendezvous of our own,” he said. If he meant to lure her into another ambush, it did not show on his face.

“Oh, darlin’, I’d hoped so, too,” Bridget ban replied with all the feeling she could fake. “But, Hound’s business, ye know. I’ve been tied up here with admin work on four cases while I waited…Which reminds me…Hae ye no got the STC records, e’en yet?”

The Director appeared both devastated and embarrassed. “No, they’re in such a mess. Heads will roll over this, dear, I promise.”

Bridget ban repressed a shudder, suspecting the statement as more than a metaphor. “Well, there’s nae time for it the now. The ambush is bumped tae a lower priority. Greystroke an’ I are for Xhosa Broadfield—and I cannae say more o’ that—but I’ll be back when we’ve finished our business there—say, in two or three metric months. Ochone! We gang where the Little One sends us, but the trail will wax muckle cold by then. I imagine ye’ll have the information properly organized before I return.” The last, she said in a chastising tone.

Pulawayo nodded, puppy-eager. “Oh, yes. Surely. Yes. By then. We must look like such sillies, to let our database grow corrupted like that, and the bureaucratic confusion—not to mention the diplomatic implications. We are an independent state, you know, and we can’t just turn our records over to anyone who asks.”

“Silly” was not the word that occurred to Bridget ban. She brought the conversation to a rapid and superficially friendly close before Pulawayo could lay any more excuses on the barricades. Shortly after, she received her clearance to lift for the geosynch station. Even if the ’Cockers remained uncertain about the night of her visit to Pulawayo, they would dare nothing with Greystroke now watching from the high ground. A Pup’s field office was no battle cruiser, but it had more than enough fire-power to avenge any treachery.

Never had a departure so pleased her as her departure from Peacock Junction. Hedonism, incompetence, and treachery made a deadly mix, for each quality led inexorably to the next. Just before breaking the connection with Pulawayo, the limpid eyes of the gentle boy-girl had hardened for a bare instant into black adamantine, and she had glimpsed the viper coiled within the paradise.

Lunglopaddy High was, for obscure reasons, called a “twenty-four.” It circled Peacock in a geosynchronized orbit midway between Shalmandaro and Malwachandar Spaceports. Bridget ban arrived first and waited for Greystroke in the Dapplemoon Lounge, where she watched the ballistic ships through the broad view-window. It was an early hour in the station’s cycle and the Lounge was nearly empty, which in theory should have ensured attentive service, but did not.

Several ballistic ships had decoupled from the passenger dock to fall toward the atmosphere when the Hound became aware that the Pup was sitting at the table with her.

Greystroke smiled. “Have you been waiting long?”

“A couple of hektominutes.”

“Newton is a cruel god.” He snagged a passing attendant by the sleeve and ordered a pot of tea. “Chanterberry Lace,” he said.

“Order it ‘to go,’” said Bridget ban.

He raised an eyebrow. “It’s been three and a half weeks since the Cynthians were ambushed. The trail is as cold as space. What do a few minutes matter?”

“It grows a mickle colder.”

“Hah. Did you know that ‘weeks’ and ‘months’ are old Terran tempos? The ‘month’ is how long it took their moon to make one complete circuit.”

“A month is forty metric days. What moon was ever turned in so neatly divisible a manner?”

“Fudir says the metric day is a little shorter than his Earth’s day, but that the one was based on the other, back in old Commonwealth times. The Terran day was divided into twenty-four ‘hours’ instead of the ten horae we use now, and their week had seven days.”

“A prime number? Awa’ wi’ ye! And why not a nice divisible ten?”

Greystroke shrugged. “Or twelve, like they use on the Old Planets. Fudir said there were seven moving lights in the skies of Old Earth. Each one was a god, so each one was given a day in his or her honor.”

She thought a chance assortment of planets a foolish standard against which to mark the passage of time. Too many suns crossed too many skies to privilege the motion of any one of them. “Ye ken a muckle o’ glaikit knowledge today, Grey One.”

“Oh, Fudir is the fountainhead. He can be entertaining when he puts a hand to it. And more entertaining still when he doesn’t.”

“An ye bear a regular geggie o’ folk wi’ ye.”

“Cu, you’re challenging my translator’s tolerances. Can we use Gaelactic Standard? Ah.” This he added to the attendant, who had brought a teapot and cup. “Thank you, old ’Cock.”

Bridget ban sighed and spoke to him, this time in the Yellow Code. “He of Fir Li and I are not rivals. He seeks no place at the court; and the God Alone knows I seek no place by the Rift. And even were we rivals, our interests converge the now on this strange scepter. Ye serve him better by joining me.”

He smiled. “You are even more attractive than the stories pretend.”

“And you, even more drab. Shall we pass over my beauty for more weighty matters?”

But Greystroke shook his head. “I never said you were beautiful.” He poured a cup of tea and, placing a lump of honey-sugar between his teeth, drank the hot liquid. “Shall we continue this conversation in your office?” he said when he had set his cup on its saucer. “I’ve asked my deputies to join us there.”

“Deputies! A geggie I said, and a geggie, I mean. Next, an’ it mought be stray cats yer takin’ in. I’ll be speaking tae each of them before I agree tae travel wi’ ’em. Send them to my office. Then go and see about the supplies we’ll be needing.”

Bridget ban called her ship Endeavour and unlike Greystroke’s wildly exuberant interior, it was a model of form and function, the one following the other in orderly fashion. There were no beasts on her control knobs, thank you very much, nor even much in the way of adornment, although the few pieces that were displayed might have been revealing to anyone perceptive enough to read them. She had a custom of keeping some memento of each case that she worked.

She had donned a dinner jacket of pure white in which to conduct the interviews. On it, she wore beside the insignia of the Particular Service only the Badge of Night. It pleased her that Greystroke was taken aback by the sight of it, and by what it said about her and what she was prepared to do when necessity had won the field.

Someday, she thought at him, you may earn this badge yourself, and wish you hadn’t.

Little Hugh O’Carroll proved a well-built young man: self-confident, and with an easy smile. He had been forced upon Greystroke at Eireannsport, but the Pup had kept him on when he could have left him on Jehovah. The Pup was much given to whimsy, and one never knew what would catch his fancy. Bridget ban had supposed that it was only because O’Carroll had become Sheol to the Fudir’s Jehovah—a satellite carried along by its primary. The Pup was not about to let the Terran go until he had been led to Donovan, and that meant keeping O’Carroll, too.

But Hugh was certainly a potential asset to the team. His skills in the deadly arts were useful, but his tactical sense and his ability to marshal and organize resources could prove invaluable. No one rises to assistant planetary manager without considerable talent in those fields.

His air of patient competence reminded her of a jaguar lounging on a tree limb. He was not a schemer, to arrange circumstances to his own advantage, but he was ever aware of what those circumstances were, and could spring quickly and unexpectedly when an opportunity appeared among them.

“What do you think we should do with the Dancer?” she asked him at the conclusion of their interview.

“Me?” he said. “Frankly, I never believed the old legend. The Fudir was only a way to get back to New Eireann. Now…?” He shrugged. “If the Dancer is just a funny brick, then this whole expedition is a fool’s errand. But if it is what the legends say…I didn’t like the idea of the Cynthians having it. Still less, whoever had the stones to take it from them.”

“You don’t want the Dancer yourself, then, to regain control of New Eireann?”

O’Carroll threw his head back and laughed. “No.”

He said it far too easily, given that he had waged a guerilla for just that purpose. “You’ve kept your office-name,” she pointed out.

“It was the name the Fudir met me under, and Greystroke, too. Why go back to my base-name?”

“Because it’s your true name?”

He looked away a moment. “That, it is not.”

At first, the Hound had thought to use O’Carroll’s friendship with the Fudir as the handle to control him; but she had seen in certain glances he had sent her way during the interview that there was an older and far more reliable handle for that.

It would be only a matter of providing the right opportunity for him to seize.

The Fudir was in many ways the more intriguing of the two. In her private bestiary, she labeled him a “fox.” She suspected from his conversation that he was a clever man. From his silences, she knew he was. Indeed, she thought he might be the cleverest one on the team. Certainly, he thought so, and that could be used against him, should the need arise.

“So,” she said. “’Twas yourself who started all this.”

The Fudir sat at ease, with a small tight smile lightening his otherwise morose face. His eyes had fallen on her badge, and she saw in the briefest of flickers that he had recognized it for what it was and that, in some fashion, he approved. “I wouldn’t say I started it,” he said. “Maybe King Stonewall started it millennia since. But the quadrille was already spinning before I heard tell of it. January had consigned it to Jumdar, and the Cynthians had seized it from her before I even reached New Eireann. So I arranged for Greystroke to take me off New Eireann—”

She interrupted. “That’s not the way he tells it.”

Again, that taut smile. “He has his perspective and I have mine. Greystroke is good, but I’m glad you’re leading this team and not him.”

“You think him deficient as a leader?”

“It’s not that. Men can’t follow a man if they lose track of him too often.”

Bridget ban could not prevent the laugh.

“To lead,” the Fudir volunteered, “a man must inspire, and to inspire requires a certain vividness, wouldn’t you say? Now, yourself…Well, vivid is too pale a word. Men would follow you into the coldest parts of Hel.” His smile broadened and his expression lost some of its habitual furtiveness. “You’d warm the place up nicely.”

“Awa’ wi’ ye,” she said, reverting to her native accents. “Ye’ll turn my head.”

“And why not turn it? Your profile is a fine one.”

Bridget ban continued to smile, but no longer laughed. “Don’t be too clever. The blarney will nae get ye snuggled wi’ me…”

“Why, thanks for the offer, but there are women a-plenty in every port of the League, and their price isn’t near as high as the one you’d extract.”

Bridget ban, who had been about to put him off as a first step to reel him in, was slightly nettled by this preemptive refusal. “So, ye’ll follow me, but nae too closely? Is that it?”

“Cu, you listen to what people say. That’s a rare gift, and it more than compensates for the nose.”

Her hand had started involuntarily toward that member before her training stayed it. Instead, she drummed her nails on the desktop. “You think a great deal of yourself.”

“And everyone else thinks little; so, it averages out.”

“Yes, and that works to your advantage, doesn’t it?”

The Terran smiled mockingly and spread his hands palm up. “In my work, it pays to be underestimated.”

Bridget ban leaned forward over the desk. “That is not a mistake I will make. Tell me. What do you propose we do with the Dancer, once we’ve obtained it?”

The Fudir chuckled and wagged a finger. “That’s another thing I like about you. You don’t use that awful word.”

“What word…?”

“‘If.’ Let me turn the question ulta-pulta. I suppose your plan is to give it to the Ardry. Tell me why.”

“You saw New Eireann. And you must know of the Valencian Interregnum or the awful line of Tyrants on Gladiola. There was a terrible rieving two years back on Tin Cup, not by pirates, but by the People’s Navy in a dispute over an uninhabited system that lay between them. If the Ardry had the Twisting Stone, he could put an end to that.”

“Could he?” the Fudir asked. He sat back and crossed his arms. “How?”

“How? By using the power of the stone.”

“You disappoint me, Cu. You are so entranced by the idea of the Dancer that the details escape you. But that’s where the Devil lives. The scepter may confer the power of obedience, but how far? The Reek Guides on New Eireann never succumbed to Jumdar’s charms because, living the Simple Life, they never heard her broadcasts. Text doesn’t carry the…the manna; only the voice. And how far does that cover? A single system, at best, if you narrowcast to the farther stations and allow for the light-lag. But broadcast ‘frog’ to the nearest star and years would pass before they’d jump. So, in practice, the Ardry could bend the Grand Seanaid to his will and tighten his grip on the capital. But a good Ardry can do that now—if he has stones of another sort.”

Bridget ban scowled, aware that the same thoughts had been niggling at her hindbrain. Grimpen had always told her that she leaped to conclusions, though it wasn’t the leaping so much as the distance leaped. “He could travel the Avenue and carry the scepter with him,” she said, but she already saw why that would not work.

The Fudir nodded. “Right. The Ardry would carry a sphere of obedience wherever he went; but whenever he left—”

“—Matters would eventually revert.”

“Aye. As happened to January’s crew and to the Eireannaughta. And how could Ardry Tully have stopped the Cynthians from rieving New Eireann? By the time he heard of it, it would already be over. No, Cu, there’s but one way to use the scepter to the League’s advantage.”

Bridget ban cupped her chin in her hand. “And what may that be?”

“Entrust the Dancer to me, and I’ll have Terra in rebellion with the garrison on our side. Four years later, the Century Suns will join us; and in ten years, Dao Chetty herself will fall.”

“But you said…Ah.”

“Aye, Cu. Those suns lie close to Terra, and our broadcasts will crawl through Newtonian space and reach their ears. A slower, but less bloody conquest than sending out an obedient fleet.”

“Surely. Ye’d not dare leave Terra, lest they all come tae their senses. The legend on Die Bold was that after the Earth was cleansed, it was resettled with people from the Century Suns, the Groom’s Britches, Dao Chetty herself. Maybe it was once your folk’s world, but others have lived there for an old long time, and they’d nae take kindly to all of the ‘Sons and Daughters of Terra’ coming back.”

“Everyone’s a son or daughter of Terra,” the Fudir said. “It’s just that some of us haven’t forgotten.”

“Then what difference does it make who lives there? You maun be wary o’ dreams, Fudir. They’re like rainbows.”

“Pretty.”

“An’ only fools chase them. But there are some few things about the Twisting Stone legend that puzzle me.” She rose and walked to the sideboard, where she poured a fruit nectar for herself and her guest. In the burnished metal that framed the sideboard, she could see the Fudir’s eyes caress her and knew that he had lied about his desires. About how much else he had lied, she was not certain. A blow struck into the very heart of the Confederacy? The plan might work—if she could trust him. “The version I heard as a wee bairn told of a great struggle for its possession between Stonewall and his rivals; and in the end, Stonewall was imprisoned by the victors in a crypt deep within the earth and guarded by monstrous horses. But if the scepter compels obedience, how could anyone have struggled with him? And if its power is limited by the crawl of light, why would anyone have bothered?” She handed him the nectar.

He took a long swallow. “Pears!” he exclaimed. “I’ve always loved the nectar of pears. Cu, that a legend contains a core of truth does not mean that all its embellishments are true. On Terra, we have many legends of ancient rulers who sleep beneath mountains. Holger Danske, Barbarossa. Arthur sleeps on the Blessed Isle. Philip Habib slumbers in a cave within the cliffs of Normandy. Our Dark Age ancestors applied some of those same themes to the prehumans. As for the struggle for the scepter, don’t expect logical coherence from myth. Heroes behave as their stereotype demands.” He handed the cup back to her and contrived to touch hands as he did. “Alla thankee, missy,” he said. “Nectar good-good.”

“We ought to talk o’ this further,” said Bridget ban, “but the team’s tae meet in a few minutes and, after, ye’ll fare on the Gray One’s ship.” She favored him with an appraising look. “I’d rather ye fare wi’ me, for I’d fain know ye better, but…”

“…but Pup hold leash tight-tight,” the Fudir said, miming a grip around his throat with both hands. “No let go poor Terry, now he got ’um. Too bad. You-me samjaw.”

“No, you’re wrong. You-me don’t ‘understand’ each other. I don’t know, for one thing, why you tint your hair gray.”

The Fudir passed a hand along the side of his head, brushing the wild curls flat. “O Missy! Old man, he harmless. Get close-close sliders, clean ’um pockets good.”

The Hound shook her head. “And yer lying the now. Ye never pulled a con so low as that. It’s the high line for you or none at all. Someday, ye’d maun tell me the sooth ahint that little show on Eireannsport Hard. ’Twas too well choreographed, I think. Ye cozened the Memsahb. Ye cozened Hugh. Ye cozened January. Maybe ye even cozened Greystroke. But don’t think you can cozen me.”

The Fudir placed his left hand on his heart and raised his right. “Of all the things I might dream of trying with you, I would never include lying!”

Bridget ban wondered at his inflection. She could take “lying” two ways. The great gengineers of ancient legend—had they ever crossed a fox with an eel? For the Fudir was as slippery as the one and as clever as the other. “Tell me,” she said. “When this is o’er, will ye really lead Greystroke to Donovan as ye promised?”

Eyes wide, the Fudir said, “Greystroke-me, samjaw. Follow me into Corner, him. And what I owe Donovan or his Confederacy? I spit on they. Ptooey!” He mimed spitting. “We Terrans have become wanderers,” he said, reverting to Standard, “living everywhere; at home nowhere. Our holy cities—Mumbai, Beijing, and others—are home to people to whom they mean nothing. We were tossed into the sea of stars and—as the stone said in the proverb when tossed into the ocean—‘After all, this too is a home.’”

At Hugh’s request, they first reviewed everything they knew, from the old legend to the present circumstances, while he took extensive notes in a pocket-base she had lent him. The Fudir told the story he had heard from January about the discovery in Spider Alley and the transfer to Jumdar at New Eireann. Greystroke told of the Molnar’s first transit of Sapphire Point, and Hugh and the Fudir filled in the details of the resulting raid and the plundering of the ICC vault. Bridget ban related the Molnar’s Last Stand and what he had said of the ambush at Peacock Junction. Finally, she described the uncharted roads in Peacock space.

“So we chase this phantom fleet of yours down an uncharted hole,” said Greystroke.

“They’ve got the Dancer,” she pointed out. “What other choice do we have?”

“Follow their mind,” suggested Hugh. “If you know which way their thoughts run, then you know where they’re bound. Then you get there before they do. During the Troubles, I once…But you’d not want to hear that, and I don’t see how we might get ahead of them. Not if this uncharted road is a shortcut to the Old Planets.”

The others turned to his end of the table. “The Old Planets?” asked Bridget ban.

Hugh gestured to the pocket-base he’d been filling. “The ICC runs through this like the drone of a bagpipe. They took the Dancer from January with little more than a promise. An incautious remark by one of their factors sent the Molnar on his doomed quest. They refurbished the engines on January’s freighter, and now he’s vanished. The Chettinads told you of incautious remarks they overheard. Either your phantom fleet represents a new player entirely, or the ICC recovered their stolen property—and the god Ockham prefers the latter. Who else but the ICC would have known why the Molnar left the Hadramoo, and been in position to intercept his return?”

“Grimpen!” said Bridget ban.

The others looked at her blankly, thinking it another of the odd words in her dialect. But Greystroke said, “What has Large-hound to do with this?”

“After the fight with the Molnar, Grimpen said that he was going to the Old Planets. He’s a methodical sort, not given to sudden flights of fancy. But what nugget of thought did he pluck out of the Molnar’s tale?”

The Fudir spoke up. “Chop and chel, folks. First first,” he said. “Alla bukkin where hole goes—bhōlā. Big dhik, miss front end. Alla blink-blink.”

“A pity,” said Hugh, “that translating implants are so expensive.”

“They’re no great edge when it comes to Terran,” the Hound said. “The patois is a pidgin of a dozen languages. But you’re right, Fudir. If we cannae go in the front end, we’ll ne’er come out the back. So let’s cover that first. Look here.” She activated a lenticel in the conference table and projected the chart she had recovered from Pulawayo’s files into a cubic that hovered above it. “People,” she said, “if you would come around to this side, please? Thank you. This is the point of view from Peacock at this time of their year. These stars I’ve highlighted in red form the constellation they call The Assayer; and this nebula is the one they call His Tail. D’ye see them?” They all nodded, Hugh and the Fudir with agreement; Greystroke because he had navigated through these skies many times.

“Here is where the phantom fleet disappeared. Peacock claims they lost track of the fleet, that it had entered a segment of sky that they did not monitor, or that their equipment failed, or that their STC controllers were distracted by the havoc on the Silk Road.”

Greystroke looked up. “Well, which was it?”

“It was hard to keep track o’ the excuses as they flittered by. Now, here are the tracks of a couple of dozen freighters over the past hektoday. As ye see, and correcting for sidereal drift, they all vanish or appear at the same locus.”

“Not too many points off the entrance ramp for the Silk Road if you take your heading off the Greater Fops,” said Greystroke.

“Aye, and that works tae our advantage. We can heigh as if for the Rift—Xhosa Broadfield lies off the Palisades—but turn aside before the final approaches and pull for the farther point.”

Greystroke pulled his lip. “And if you’re wrong, and we try it, we’re all blinked. Your STC records show us where the entrance was and a certain amount of calculation can approximate where it’s gone; but ‘approximate’ isn’t good enough. Sidereal drift is sensitive to initial conditions and the equations have no analytical solution. ‘The Ricci tensors are all agley,’” he added, imitating her dialect.

“A ramp acts as a gravitational lens,” the Fudir pointed out. “You can pinpoint its location without an ephemeris by checking for parallax shifts and the doubling of background stars behind it.” When they all turned to look at him, he shrugged. “I really do hold a rating as an instrument tech.”

“Then after we’re in the groove,” Bridget ban added, “we maun track the phantom fleet from their fossil images, to learn where they turn off. Who knows how many side channels this road has?”

Greystroke knew which ship had the better imaging equipment. The Fates were subtle indeed, for they had led him to take up the hobby years before in preparation for this day. “Then I take the point, and Fudir stays with me,” he said.

Bridget ban agreed to take Little Hugh O’Carroll with her, and she tried not to smile at the prospect and made sure that Hugh saw that she had tried not to smile.

During the long climb toward Electric Avenue aboard the Hound’s ship, Hugh amused himself by preparing lists; and Bridget ban by preparing him. While he tabulated and crossreferenced everything that the team had learned about the Dancer, she tabulated in a more quiet way everything she learned about him. It was far too easy. She saw that in Hugh’s sometimes self-conscious behavior in the confines of her ship. All that wanted was the right moment for him to seize, and she set about providing it.

Their first day out did not bring them together until dinnertime. Bridget ban stayed in the control room coordinating the magbeam booster schedule with Peacock Roads Traffic and fine-tuning the ship’s onboard power reception. Later, she went belowdecks to the power room and ran the readiness tests on the alfvens. She emerged finally to find that Hugh had prepared a dinner for the two of them.

Nothing exotic: a type of fish called a “colby,” found in the great freshwater sea on Dave Hatchley. He had assembled the filet from the vats, coated and broiled it, and served it with an assortment of familiar vegetables. Like her, he seemed to prefer the plain and simple.

“I don’t know why you bother going down to the power room to run the tests,” he said when they had settled to the table. “Can’t the intelligence run them for you?”

Bridget ban separated the flakes of the colby with her fork. “This will be a tricky approach. There are no marker buoys, no quasar benchmarks to steer by; so the engines must be as finely tuned as possible. The intelligence knows only what the instruments tell it. It can nae ken if the instruments are agley.” She waved the fork. “Always run the standards,” she admonished him.

“I shall,” he said, “should I ever grow daft enough to try for astrogation.”

Bridget ban laughed more than the wit warranted and touched him briefly on the back of his hand. She made careful note of how he responded to the touch and on what his eyes involuntarily fell. By the next day, she had programmed her anycloth to accentuate those areas, arranging everything a little tighter, a little higher, and a little lower.

At his request, she pulled up a map of the South Central Periphery and displayed it on the holowall in the conference room, which consequently took on the aspect of infinite depth. She also gave him access to the ship’s open-source databases. “Just be careful,” she said, rapping her knuckles on endless space, “not to walk into the wall.”

He chuckled. “It does look real. Can I shift the point of view?”

She moved inside his personal space. “Just tell the ship the origin and direction of the view you want. For fine-tuning, use this glove and watch where its icon appears in the wall. Then, push or pull on the image. When you shift your point of view, the stars change to account for light-lag, up to my last gazetteer update. Here, do you see that star?” She touched it with her virtual finger. “Watch what happens when I zoom toward it.” She curled her finger and pulled the view forward and they seemed to race through Newtonian space faster than the speed of space. Hugh staggered a little, his balance confused, and Bridget ban placed her left hand on his waist to steady him. “It takes some getting used to,” she said, meaning the cascading stars, not her hand. Hugh opened his mouth to say something—and the star suddenly blossomed.

What had been a red pinpoint became unbounded fury as the star tore itself apart. For a moment, it was as bright as all the other stars combined. The interstellar gases glowed as they were swept along with the wave front.

And then they were through the shell of expanding gases and where the star had been there was nothing but a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. Hugh blew out his breath. “Quite a ride!”

There is a trick well known to those who practice it, of invading another’s “personal space” like a smuggler nestling into a friendly cove. She stood very near to him, not quite touching, and told him, “The supernova is out past the Jenjen, in the Roaring Fork nebula. It appeared five years ago in the skies of Hanower and the intelligence back-dates everything from that; but it won’t be visible from Peacock for centuries. If you watch the backdrop under ‘hyperfast evolution,’ you can see the spiral galaxies age and spawn seyfert pairs and the seyferts spit out matched quasars. It’s quite beautiful, the underlying structure and design. There”—she pointed again, leaning a little across him—“that’s Andromeda, our mother galaxy. There’s a twin Milky Way on the farther side, so the legends say. Andromeda spawned us as quasars when she was a mere slip of a seyfert…And that is Virgo, our grandmother. The sky is our family tree.”

She stepped away, then, but he contrived to let his hand brush against her, and she pretended not to notice.

One element of the art of conversation is to ask the other about himself. Since this is often their favorite topic, or at least a topic on which they are reasonably well informed, it seldom fails to draw them out and put them at ease. It was over a game of shaHmat that Hugh told her of his terrifying childhood on Venishànghai and Bridget ban nearly wept to hear of it.

“They hunted you?” she said in disbelief. “The shopkeepers hunted you? Like animals?”

“But never alone,” he said with his teeth, but Bridget ban thought it was a false grin, or one of pain. “Understand. We used to vandalize their shops and rob them. I can’t say they’d no reason to hate us.”

“But still…”

“And it did school us in agility and quick-wittedness, and that stood me well in the Glens of Ardow. I was accustomed to being stalked. But, sometimes…” He paused and fiddled with one of his hounds, moved it, changed his mind, and restored it to its position. “Sometimes I wonder how long I could have kept it up. Not in the Glens; in New Shanghai. There were no old vermin-boys.”

“You shouldn’t call yourself that. Look at what you’ve accomplished. You’re a certified planetary manager. You’ve run entire government departments and, from all I’ve heard, run them well.”

He smiled thinly. “And I ran a guerilla, too. Don’t forget that. There is a part of me that knows what I’ve accomplished. But there’s one small sliver of my brain—somewhere back here in the old cerebellum—that still thinks those shopkeepers were right. It’s not something you can hear for years and years when you’re young and ever entirely forget. And what was my guerilla but another and vaster case of vandalism? That’s why I’m fit for—” But he stopped then, and did not say what he was fit for. Instead, he smiled. “And you, a vawn Chu? I’ve told you my base-name.” He managed to bow sitting down. “Ringbao della Costa, bēi rén. How did you become Bridget ban? Was it your childhood dream to go to the dogs?”

“Are you going to move that piece or not?”

Hugh looked in surprise at his hands and saw that he was playing idly once more with the princely hound. He replaced it on its square and moved a councilor up the white diagonal. “Sorry,” he said. “We should concentrate on the game.”

“It takes the mind off…” She bit her lip as he looked up.

“Off what?”

“Off entering an uncharted road.”

“Greystroke knows what he’s doing. And the Fudir’s a licensed charts-man.”

“Aye…” Bridget ban blocked his councilor by advancing a minion. “But, well…Alright. My base-name is Francine Thompson. There’s no secret in that. I never wanted to be a Hound, though. Oh, I read all the stories growing up. About Efram Still or Moddey Dhu and the others. But I never wanted to be one. I only wanted to be regular Francine Thompson. You see, I grew up on Die Bold, and the most important thing in the world was to be ‘regular.’ At least in the Pashlik of Redoubt, where we lived. All I ever heard was ‘communal solidarity’ and ‘the fingers work together make a fist.’ Things like that. So I studied for my assigned career and worked at perfecting my character for it. I was to be a nurse-practitioner in the Kentwold Hills. It was a good assignment, one worth doing. The hill towns are scattered far between and don’t see a medico very often. But…” She watched Hugh slide a fortress slowly up the leftmost file, as if doing it surreptitiously. But she had expected the move and immediately castled her emperor. Hugh frowned over the board.

“But try as I might with the character-building exercises,” she continued, “I couldn’t enjoy nursing or, more importantly I think, I couldn’t do it well. So, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I lacked the plasticity to mold myself to the type that society needed me to be.”

“And what was it,” Hugh asked, “that you most loved hearing about in those days?”

Bridget ban closed her eyes and became young Francine Thompson, sitting before the televisor in the block community center. There had been a terrible arson in Ark Alpikor. Two hundred people had died. “When the public inquiry agents caught the bastard who did it, everyone was pleased to hear it; but I was…‘ecstatic,’ I suppose is the word. After that, it seemed that every time I opened a newscreen or picked up an idle book at the center library, it was something about policefolk, and more often than not it was a story about one of the Hounds. It was almost as if the idea of being a Hound was tracking me, hunting me down.”

“Not all policers are worth the aspiration,” Hugh told her. “The People’s Police on Megranome wouldn’t have cared if the man they caught was the true arsonist or not. And if I’d fallen into the hands of the New Shanghai pleetsya, I wouldn’t be here today.” As if to underline the point, he took one of her minions with a counselor and swept it from the board.

“That might be the other question: What did I most hate to hear of? It wasn’t anything like the arson itself. That was only tragedy. They rebuilt the dormitory, named it ‘The House of Sorrow,’ assigned new families to live in it, and life went on. No, what I hated most was when I read of innocents wrongly prosecuted.”

“You should have been a Robe, not a Hound. They were always on about ‘justice.’ So when did you—Pay no attention to the counselor. He’s innocent and you’re wrongly prosecu—Damn.” Bridget ban had sent one of her hounds leaping across the field to take the piece. “You weren’t supposed to see that line of attack.”

“If you don’t want me to see your line of attack, you shouldn’t pursue it. Unless you want to play in the dark,” she added in a playful voice. “What was I…? Oh. When I was fourteen, local, the County Planning Board sent me to a medical school across the border in the Kingdom.”

“The Kingdom of what?”

“Just ‘the Kingdom.’ The odd thing is that they don’t actually have a king, just a regent. The story was that they’d had a king once who had been so just and wise a ruler that no king after could hope to measure up. So after he was gone, they set up a regency to await his return. The Kingdom’s medical technology was more advanced than Redoubt’s; so I was supposed to learn what I could and bring it back to the Pashlik. But after a month at the Université Royale, I asked for asylum and was granted it and I transferred my major to criminology. And then one day while I was walking past the Eglantine Traffic Star to my classes, I passed the League Consulate and, purely on a whim, I walked in and asked them how I went about becoming a Hound.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“‘If you have to ask, you’ll never be.’ I don’t think they really knew and were just brushing me off. So I insisted they send an inquiry to High Tara.” She smiled in self-deprecation. “Obstacles harden my whims. Well, I didn’t think much about it afterward, but a couple of doozydays later, when I was sitting under the great fir tree in the university Green, a shadow fell across my textbook—and there stood Zorba de la Susa, the greatest Hound of them all. He had come personally to evaluate me. Yes, of course I recognized him. He could have become the Little One Himself, had he wanted the post, but he preferred the field. ‘The Spiral Arm’s a more spacious office,’ he used to say, ‘than the Little One’s palace suite.’ He examined me, ran me through a battery of tests, and must have seen some hope, because he made a place for me at the Kennel School.”

“‘He must have seen some hope,’” Hugh repeated, as if to himself.

“I was nineteen, local. I didn’t know if I could ever measure up to the likes of de la Susa or na Fir Li.”

Hugh laughed. “And now you’re almost single-handedly chasing an entire battle fleet down an uncharted hole because of a fanciful legend.”

She had made sure that they exercised together in the fitness room, running in tandem on the slidewalk, spotting for each other on the mass machines, and afterward sitting side by side on the floor mats. The day before they were to enter the uncharted road, he asked her what her most difficult case had been.

“I can tell you what the most frightening one was. I’ve never been tasked with governing a planet or with disaster relief like Black Shuck carried out on Kamerand. Those would be frightening, but in a different way.” She described her escape from Pulawayo’s house, her discovery of the monstrous exhibits in the remonstratorium, and the artful disguise she had used to elude the guards at the maglev station.

“So there I was,” she said, laughing, “striding proud as ye please along Uasladonto Street with my breasts stuck out for everyone to see.”

Hugh could not help but drop a glance toward those now-concealed treasures and said, “I wish I could have seen that.” He laughed a bit to show he had meant it as the sort of light double entendre that was almost mandatory after a story like that. She laughed back at him and laid her hand for just a moment on his and said carelessly that she wished he could have seen it, too.

That evening, she left the door to her quarters ajar just a wee bit and waited until she heard Hugh’s footsteps in the hallway before she began disrobing for sleep. The footsteps halted and she knew he had noticed her reflection in the mirror, visible through the crack in the door. How could he not? She had aligned everything with the utmost care. She paused awhile after removing the blouse, as if in thought, and then stepped out of his view.

She wondered if he would barge into her quarters after that. It was not unheard of for men of his age to lose all control of themselves under such circumstances. But the Ghost of Ardow had not survived as long as he had by losing control under any circumstance. There was no doubt in her mind that he would “seize the moment,” but he was, to use a term lauded on some worlds but derided on others, a man of honor. She found, in spite of herself, a certain admiration for him.

That was the problem with using affection as a weapon. Like a knife, it cut two ways.

She had orchestrated the finale for the very day they entered Electric Avenue.

They had fooled Peacock STC for a while, sending swifties down the Sapphire Point ramp as if they were hailing drones. In fact, they were reports to na Fir Li informing him of what they had found and what they intended, as well as more routine reports to be forwarded to the Kennel archives on High Tara.

But Traffic Control had been screeching at them for three days running that they were approaching local-c far off the proper bearing for the Silk Road. Bridget ban did not think that any secret could be kept by a large number of people, and so most of the pleas directed at them were genuine concern and panic. The Border Patrol cutter that altered course to intercept them clearly had a more malign intent. If no one else, those who had dispatched it certainly knew by then where the two Kennel ships were actually headed. They could project a course as well as anyone.

Cutters were fast, but Kennel ships were faster, and it could not catch them before they reached the ramp. If they missed the entrance, however, and braked before they blinked, the cutter would make sure they had no second try.

Now, Bridget ban had never been as nervous about the attempt as she had led Hugh to believe—that had been intended to trigger his protective reflex—but there was always the possibility that measurement error really had mislaid their trajectories. So when they entered the ramp successfully and slid into the Krasnikov tube it was with a sense of genuine relief and when she emerged from the pilot’s saddle, she and Hugh embraced in delight.

And then, as sudden as the shift to superluminal, they delighted in the embrace.

There is a certain jadedness that comes with the considered use of one’s affections. It is not that they lose their edge, but the edge cannot help growing a little dull. She had been prepping him for days during the crawl up to the coopers. With carefully chosen stories, with carefully calculated touches and glimpses, she had readied him, body and mind, for this precise moment. Yet she found his caresses welcome; and later, considering how long he had been celibate, she found him gentle and unhurried. Even so, while they played with each other, she could sense him straining at the leash. But the Glens of Ardow had taught him control.

(But the Glens had taught the Ghost of Ardow many more things than patience and control. He had been schooled in realism, too. He knew when he was being stalked, and could recognize the signs of a well-laid ambush. He was not such a fool as to expect a Hound of the Ardry to kick up her heels for a chance-met stranger; but he tolerated the ambush for the sake of being well laid. Don’t look so shocked, harper. Her actions were calculated; but the Ghost as well knew how to add two and two.)

The two ships proceeded down the road at a moderate pace so that Greystroke’s instruments could tease out fossil images from the shoulders and track the phantom fleet. The shoulders grew narrow along one stretch. Skewing out of the main channel would not put them into the mud; it would smash them against the cliffs! Bridget ban spent many hours in the pilot’s saddle taking bearings, and pricking off the qualities of local space on her charts. Greystroke was undoubtedly doing likewise; but better there be two such charts. Just in case.

The cliffs, however, explained why the road had not been discovered early on. Who knew how many ships had entered it, only to smash upon those steep gradients? And when success finally came, Peacock had seen more safety in secrecy. Too many roads in their system and the ’Cockers would become a target for every planet and pirate in the region.

It was not until the shoulders had flattened out that Bridget ban could relax and leave the steering to the intelligence. Hugh helped her relax, though where he had learned the art of massage he did not say. If only intelligences had judgment, she told him; and he recounted the Fudir’s tales of ancient Terran triumphs, the fanciful hyperbole of which amused her.

And so day followed day. A strange road requires close study, and Bridget ban spent more time in the saddle than on more familiar routes. Occasional messages drifted back from Greystroke. Several times, the shoulders flattened out into ramps, but each time the images of the phantom fleet continued past them. What unknown stars lay at the ends of them?

To maintain the charade of affection for the remainder of the transit, neither Hugh nor Bridget ban could plausibly deny a kiss or a casual touch to the other. But there is this strange property of a simulated affection. Continued long enough, it becomes real enough. There were certain sympathies of character that lay between the Ghost and the Hound that eased the transition and made it all but insensible. Bridget ban discovered herself looking forward to his attentions, which were not by any means entirely sexual. He was, she learned, a literate man, widely read and well spoken, and as attentive as only an assassin can be.

There came a day at last, nearly two metric weeks after they had entered the road, when Greystroke warned that the laminas were broadening once more but that this time the images of the phantom fleet had blue-shifted, which meant they were preparing to exit.

She hurried from the pilot’s saddle to tell Hugh and came to the conference room to find him standing hipshot before his “wall of evidence.” He had one arm across his chest with the other nestled elbow-in-palm and with his hand along his cheek. A tight wrinkle marked the forehead above his nose and his lips were pursed and…She came to his side and he absently draped an arm around her, and the comfort she felt at this small gesture disturbed her greatly.

Hounds sometimes took companions. Most did not last the rigors, but Hugh might be one who did, and the Little One Himself would almost surely have given his grace. She might have chosen Hugh, did she not already love another.

“We’ve come off the ramp,” she said, and he nodded.

“Among the Old Planets,” he said.

“Aye, you guessed that part right.”

“I didn’t guess.” He rapped the surface of the holowall with his knuckle, striking Old ’Saken, and Die Bold and Friesing’s World, knocking on the doors to Waius and ’Bandonope and Abyalon. “Which one?” he asked.

“The intelligence has recognized the Lizard and Winking Arnulf. We’ve come out in the coopers of Die Bold.”

He turned to her and smiled. “Welcome home.”