LINKS
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The Christa Affair
Chapter Thirty-Four
"Squire DeCarlo?! You've got to be kidding!" Rang couldn't stop laughing.
"What's so goddamn funny?" demanded Mowii indignantly. "The asshole tried to \buy\ her, and you're laughing?!"
"Wait... Wait..." he gasped between fits of continuing laughter. "You don't understand..." his laughter faded as she stormed from the control room, ignoring his protest. Mowii's attitude was getting worse by the day, in spite of regular doses of Happytab; the stuff didn't seem to be working any more.
At last Rang regained his breath, though his face remained flushed. "Manuel Don-Delo Cortez, indeed! That's Licti's half-brother! He's a head-case. Multiple personalities, the whole bit. I met him once during the blockade litigation. Let's see... What was it he was calling himself then? 'Ambassador Robinoff Zorkenski, Personal Attache to His Royal Highness, King of Falturon', or some such foolishness. Licti humors him -- it was their mother's dying request -- but you can make a bet that there was somebody breathing down his neck when he was giving us landing clearance... This is unbelievable. One guy, in a city of half a million!"
"Well, he told the truth about being rich anyway..." said Karli, sounding a bit disappointed.
"Oh, he told the truth all right," Rang assured her, pouring himself another drink -- the rest of the crew had had their own party while Jashi and Karli were planet-side. "He \is\ the Squire Whatever! He's whomever he wishes to be, as long as Licti allows it. He's held \that\ title for three years that I know of."
"He was on the level?" Now she sounded surprised, apprehensive. "Gods of the Fourteen Planets! What if he \can\ deliver Princess Katya?"
"The real question is, how do I get her without trading you in?" Jashi's lame attempt at humor fell flat. Karli laughed lightly in his head -- but it was weak, lacking enthusiasm; no one else even cracked a smile.
Jashi was suddenly very tired. Let-down had begun to set in as the distillate and the effects of the smoke wore off, and he knew he would feel like hell in the morning. He needed his wits about him -- they were walking a fine line, a hair's-breadth from disaster. He poured himself a drink from the bottle on the table without bothering to check the contents, and tossed it; the Terran whiskey stung his throat and made his eyes water. "I hate that stuff!" he gasped, struggling to catch his breath. "Come on, Karli, before someone has to carry me!"
*********
For a long time Karli lay awake in Jashi's arms, her head pillowed on his shoulder, feeling the roughness of his body against her bare skin, listening to the sound of his slow, regular breathing as he slept. His dreams were erratic, threatening, and he stirred repeatedly in his sleep, sometimes moaning aloud. Each time, she entered his mind, manipulating the dream, neutralizing the threat, caressing him with her thoughts; each time his breathing again became slow and regular. At last she drifted off to sleep; they dreamed the same dream -- of their day together on the tiny isle of the L'sa'rian lake.
*********
When Karli awoke, Jashi wasn't there. She sat bolt upright in the bed and her head pounded; moaning, she sank back to the soft mattress, desperately willing the room to stop spinning. Her mouth tasted like warmed-over goat manure.
"Hang on, Karli," Jashi called from the fresher. "I'll be there in a minute." (.... "Oowh! What a hangover! Hold still or I'll never make it in there with this....")
A few moments later Jashi emerged from the fresher, dripping wet, clad only in a towel. Karli turned her head toward the door and the room swam. Jashi staggered as her dizziness rushed in like a tidal wave; quickly he damped the contact. He made it safely to the bed and sank down beside her, handing her a glass of foul-smelling, pale-pink liquid.
(.... "I'm not drinking that! What is it? ....")
(.... "Another creative concept of his knowledgeable-ness, the Keeper. Instant hangover cure. But it does taste rather bad I'm afraid....") That was a gross understatement -- the taste was a hundred times worse than the smell.
She managed it all in one long drink, and sank back to the bed shuddering. "Aghhh! Nothing could taste that bad on purpose. That's gotta be an accident!"
"Fraid so, Kitten. When I asked the Keeper to whip it up, I just told him what I wanted it to \do\; I forgot to specify that it taste good... Sorry. It works, though... Five minutes and you'll feel almost normal."
It \did\ work. She could feel the discomfort of the hangover being drained from her body. A mild euphoria began to set in and the taste of the concoction faded, taking with it yesterday's goat-dung. She reached for Jashi, pulling him to her, and kissed him tenderly. "Make love to me, Jashi... Please?"
He held her close and kissed her deeply, running his hands down the length of her body, pressing her close to himself. "I can't, Karli... Not now. Our new landingcraft is on the way up -- compliments of your favorite Squire."
"What?!" she shrieked, hurting his eardrum. She pushed away and scrambled from the bed. "You traded me for a \landingcraft\?!" The remnants of the hangover caused her head to pound anew; the potion was more or less instant, but the \cure\ part left a bit to be desired.
"Idle down, Karli!" he laughed. "It was a gift. He's trying to soften me up... I \had\ to accept it. After the appropriate polite noises of protest, of course."
"Of course," she agreed sarcastically; her voice made her head hurt again. "I thought you said 'total cure'?"
"Well... Maybe not 'total'. A few minutes under the hood will get rid of the rest of the cobwebs. I suspect this stuff only fools your mind into \thinking\ you're not hung-over... Twenty minutes with the Teacher and you \won't\ be. I feel \great\!" He stretched, muscles rippling beneath tanned skin, and bent to pick up the towel from where it had fallen. "Better hurry, it'll be here in half an hour." He ducked back into the fresher just in time to avoid the flying shoe.
*********
It was beautiful, like the ones they had lost, but the latest model -- larger, faster, more heavily armed -- and the luxury of the interior was positively sinful. A ferry pilot made the delivery; Karli kept carefully out of sight, but DeCarlo wasn't on board. Jashi took the pilot back down to the surface himself. On the way back up he put the new boat thru its paces; the performance was exhilarating.
The on-board computer was standard issue, something he'd have to fix at the earliest opportunity. Idly he wondered if the Squire had access to any of the really exotic military computers floating loose around the galaxy -- an Illysian Flight-Director... What \was\ the latest model?... Thirty-four? Thirty-five? That would do nicely! Or maybe a Cray-Lambert Mark-22.
They added one custom feature immediately. It took the better part of two days, and was an intricate operation. When it was finished, the cabin was twenty-four inches shorter than factory specifications. They had painstakingly removed the exotic hand-woven wood-fiber panelling and the luxurious ornaments from the original bulkhead; these now graced a new false wall, and the entire contents of the interior had been moved forward proportionately. The job was done with such precision that the deception was undetectable, unless someone decided to measure the cabin; behind the new rear partition were two, activated, single-person transport cases of the type Toko had first demonstrated to them on the outskirts of the L'sa'rian city.
*********
Three days passed with no word from DeCarlo. By day Jashi and Karli strolled through the marketplace, gawking at goods from worlds scattered across the galaxy, occasionally purchasing an item that especially appealed to one or the other of them. By night they made the rounds of the pleasure district, keeping up appearances for any that might be watching. They were approached by no one, and if they were followed, neither could detect it.
Each time the two of them went down alone. Jashi would have felt more comfortable in greater numbers, but he was loath to reveal the size of the crew. For Rang to go down was out of the question; he had dined with the Squire during the negotiation phase of the blockade litigation. They were all getting restless, and Mowii had been complaining loudly since the second day. Rang had been forced to double her ration of Happytab.
Cradle rental for their new landingcraft in the crowded spaceport was outrageous, and the glitter and glitz of Extasy had quickly worn thin. They were tired of the place, weary with the suspense of waiting, and on the fourth day, Jashi decided to stay aboard ship; His Squire-ness knew where to find them -- if the whole thing wasn't just one of his fantasies. The call came thru a little past noon, Extasy time.
"I have found what you desire, Captain." DeCarlo smiled at him from the screen, coming straight to the point without social amenities. "May I suggest a meeting?"
*********
Jashi and Roi faced one another across a scarred, heavily-stained table that obviously hadn't been cleaned since being vacated by its former occupants. The room was hot and noisy; smoke and the odor of not-recently washed bodies -- Human and alien -- hug thick in the heavy, humid air. The place had no atmospheric conditioning, just a couple of portable circulators suspended from the flaking ceiling by thin pieces of dirty, woven cord.
Outside, a driving rain pounded the pavement, and water ran from the roof of the building in a solid sheet that blocked their view of the street beyond. "He's half an hour late, Jashi," said Roi, looking at his chronometer for the tenth time in the past five minutes.
"Don't panic. It's just the rain," responded Jashi, taking another long pull at his mug of what was supposed to be beer -- it tasted more like horse-piss. "We barely made it before the bottom fell out; I'm sure he'll be along as soon as it lets up." He had to lean close to be heard above the noise.
"If it ever does! That was a big storm center -- we were lucky to get around it on the way down."
"Can't rain forever. How's things at the boat?"
"Everything's quiet," Roi answered after a moment's hesitation. "Lito says no one's been around since the ground shuttle picked us up. Rain's stopped there."
"Good. Tell her to stay alert. If anything goes wrong she'll have to make pickup on us... The \Klondike\ won't be in position to receive the synchronization signal." They both carried PRDs programmed to the newly-installed transporters in the landingcraft; Jashi reached inside his coat and felt his as he said it, as if to reassure himself that it was still there. "I only hope we can get outside so we can use them," he thought, then became even more worried as an unbidden picture flashed in his mind -- a picture of the spaceport, thrown into total pandemonium by Lito's unauthorized takeoff. He pushed it aside and emptied his mug.
It took three tries before the ancient table-console would accept their order, but at last more beer arrived, transported by a malfunctioning robowaiter that had a tendency to swing wide when it made a left turn, bumping into furniture and customers alike. The ailing mechanized maitre-d' stubbornly refused to accept Jashi's new credit card, and he resorted to paying it in Federation currency -- with a twenty per-cent surcharge for cash. Still unsatisfied, it demanded a gratuity, and proceeded to thoroughly shred the wad of ten-credit bills as it inhaled them into its innards -- cursing fluently in four different languages simultaneously.
Under other circumstances it would have been hilarious -- hell, this whole \place\ was hilarious if you thought about it -- but neither Jashi nor Roi felt like laughing. Each took a long pull on his beer and went back to his private gloomy thoughts; the beer was almost room temperature. Roi nervously checked the time again as he returned his mug to the table.
On-stage the act continued. Alien acerbic music assaulted the crowd from overhead sonic projectors; eight naked bodies moved to the beat. Four were Human, two were Bardarani, one appeared to be a young native tribesman, and one was an Al'kani, wearing a fluorine respirator slung from a harness around its body/head. The suggestive dancing had progressed to blatant sexual activity, and the Al'kani appeared to be trying to take on the other seven all at once, or the other way around; it was impossible to tell which. Al'kani have multiple sex organs -- a complete set for each of its six tentacles, both male and female -- but somebody was going to come up short.
The inevitable fight broke out; one of the Bardarani neatly slit the young boy's throat and tossed him from the stage into the crowd. The churning shouting mob of drunken spacers around the stage passed the body overhead from hand to hand until it was behind them, then tossed it to the floor. A robot custodian arrived to dispose of it; smeared blood trailed across the floor in its wake as it retreated thru a rear door near their table.
In the control room of the \Klondike\, Karli recoiled. Jashi noticed, and reduced the contact even further. Neither she nor Lito had desired to experience the place after the first few minutes, and both telepairs were only lightly in touch, except when communication was necessary. (.... "Sorry, Kitten, it's kinda hard to concentrate....") The after-effects of a session with the Teacher remained longer each time, and were more intense; since yesterday, it had taken conscious effort to keep the contact from becoming total any time they were linked. Jashi was starting to wonder if he really liked it.
The storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, and a narrow view into the deep east side of the city appeared again in the open doorway. A dirty ragged Human appeared with a mop and began a futile effort at reducing the puddle that stretched from the door, halfway along the side wall and under the bar. The street brightened as water drained from its circuitry and a used-up glow-fixture above the door sputtered weakly back to life; shadowy forms haunted the fringes of the light.
They were in the old part of the city. Built shortly after Licti established himself as king, it was largely abandoned, with burned-out or crumbling buildings outnumbering the occupied ones. None of the flashily-uniformed police -- so ever-present in the pleasure district -- were to be seen. The Human driver of the shuttle had twice asked them to confirm their destination before departing the spaceport.
*********
The place was called \The Decaying Orbit\. DeCarlo had chosen the meeting site, and briefed them. They were clad in the coveralls of crewmen, needlegun hung on their hip in plain sight.
Jashi had departed the \Klondike\ carrying his cane; it was ludicrous, considering his attire, and he felt rather foolish boarding the ground-shuttle that took them from their landingcraft to the terminal building, and even more so standing in line at the customs desk.
It was the same Bardarani, and he recognized Jashi instantly. They stood for long moments, eyes locked; the Bardarani growled. Jashi raised the cane and offered it, holding it across outstretched palms. "I have reconsidered." The inspector's tail swished back and forth in a long flowing motion as he dropped his stare to the object of his desire; the growl changed to a purrr, a sound indistinguishable from that of a contented Terran house-cat, but louder by a factor of ten.
"My gratitude, kind sir," he said, taking the cane. "Please show your acceptance of my apology for my earlier unkindness by allowing me to accept also the previously-offered bracelet? I found it most desirable!?" To refuse would have been to reject the apology; Jashi found himself promising to bring it on his next trip down. Karli's comment was a bit unbecoming, even for their private thoughts.
They had been granted the status of "Honorary Resident." With their new social level came an official government ID card establishing their obligation to carry a visible weapon at all times ("...except when formally attired, when aforesaid weapon shall be tastefully concealed"), and the status of their bank account -- Jashi now had an unlimited line of credit, subject to settlement before departure.
*********
They neither saw nor felt the approach, but a dirty ragged youth appeared suddenly at their table. Dull lifeless eyes peered through strands of stringy black hair; greasy, and looking as if it had been cut with a dull knife, it hung unevenly to narrow shoulders that were covered by a soiled dirty-grey wrap of coarse Delfinan Mohair. The body below was slender, poised at that awkward moment in life, just at the onset of puberty; it was impossible to tell if the young Human was male or female. "Follow me," it said, and departed at a brisk walk, not seeming to care if they obeyed or not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
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