Once I left the Bazaar I’d be an easy mark-easier, is to say. And for all I knew they was legit heat and had the
legitimates
on their side. But I’d been in the Danbourg Strail, and I didn’t think so. And I didn’t think they was going to put me down easy if they got their hands on me, either. Then I looked around and saw salvation.
I slowed down and waited for the garden club to catch up with me, and while I was doing that I purely accidental came to a stop by a cookshack. The owner was deep-frying something unidentifiable in several liters of liquid grease and offering it to the helpless fellahim that wandered by.
"How much for to buy your kick, che-bai?"
I repeated it in a couple of dialects, cant, and patwa, before he got the idea. He named a figure and laughed.
"Butterfly, are you thinking?" Paladin sounded more worried by that than he had by anything so far tonight. "I am tracking you in the Grand Bazaar. I will counterfeit a civil disorder there, and when the Peacekeepers move in you can escape safely. All you have to do is—"
"Ne, let be, I’m inspired," I said.
I put credit plaques on the counter side-by-each and watched the cookshop owner’s eyes bugout. Then I watched the hellflowers. They saw me see them and thought it was a fine joke. One of them was female; both together was pretty as hunting birds and just as far from human. I stood flat-footed and watched them come.
The owner scraped up his credit and started to leave. I grabbed a handful of his shirt and stopped him. Just let them get a little bit closer and he could go where he wanted. After they was set. After they was committed.
Just a tad bit closer, kinchin of the Void.
###
Your basic blaster is a lovely toy-Paladin says it contains the basic technology for our entire culture. That means given a working blaster, smarts, and lots of free time, a person could deduce and build everything from highliners to palaceoids.
You see, a blaster don’t throw a inert projectile. Blaster fires ittybitty controlled fusion reaction wrapped in a magnetic envelope. Unwrap it, and all you have’s a flash of light. But let the envelope hit something, and all that heat and force comes out along the rupture-line in a coherent directed star-hot pulse that is one reason I’ve lived to be as old as I am. Fusion reaction + magnetic bottle = culture. Simple.
###
The hellflowers split up when they reached the cookshack and started coming around it from both sides. I dropped the cook and he started running. Then I drew my blaster and fired at the deep-fryer.
The grease had been hot. Now it was incandescent. It exploded in a boiling fireball over my head and going west, and I snapped off a shot at the hellflower as hadn’t been flash-fried and ran:
Two down. How many more? And would Prettybird #2 follow me or stay with her well-done partner?
I cut off High Street as soon as I could, and two turns had me lost in the back street warren. I wanted height; I’d aced one ‘flower by not being where he expected; why not do it twice?
No joy getting onto the roof one-handed but I managed. I felt safer here but it wasn’t going to last. I was sweating hot and cold at once and my hands was shaking so hard I couldn’t shoot myself in the foot to save my life.
"Butterfly, what have you done?"
I could see smoke rising over the Grand Bazaar. Somewhere down there-if I was lucky-was two cooked hellflowers, and probably a crowd giving a inaccurate description of the crazy stardancer to assembling
legitimates
at this very moment. So I needed to stop looking like a stardancer, or at least get back to where they was thick upon the ground. And right now I didn’t even think I could stand up. "Butterfly, are you there?"
"Someday, Pally, you going to tell me where and t’hell else would I be? ‘Sponder’s in my jawbone, too reet?"
He ignored that. "What happened?"
"Two more ‘flowers. Dead, I think. What do they want with me, Pally? I didn’t frag their kinchin-bai—"
"Stay there," said Paladin, so I did.
###
I don’t know where he stole it, or how he made it fly outside of the New City grid. And it was probably as conspicuous as hell, but right now I didn’t care. The floater touched down on my rooftop and I pulled myself inside.
"Back to
Firecat,
Paladin. We gone." To hell with Moke Rahone’s cargo. If hellflowers wanted me, I wanted out.
"I don’t think that would be wise. There is an unknown person here at
Firecat.
I believe he must have used your last delivery as cover. He is between your supplies and the docking ring fire wall."
"Oh, bai, needed to hear that, forbye." My hand felt like it belonged to somebody else, and I felt limper than a simple evening’s brawl would cover. "Starcastle?"
"It seems the safest choice. You can tend to your injuries while I attempt to discover who is waiting for you here."
I lay back and let the breeze blow over me. Whatever it was I was in the middle of, I wanted out.
Gang-war? Nighttime men don’t frag stardancers.
Hellflower honor? Only hellflower I knew was Tiggy Stardust, and Tiggy his own self hadn’t known where I was going in Borderline. He hadn’t looked like he cared, neither, true-tell.
Fenrir? Why would Fenrir want to hire somebody to kill me when he could do it himself for free?
Nothing I could think of made any sense at all.
###
It was the middle of Kiffit’s dark period, and good little fellahim were buttoned up in their racks. I could tell when the floater hit wondertown by the way the streets filled up. Nobody paid me or my blood no nevermind when I got out at the Starcastle.
Maybe there are bars that won’t sell you an Imperial battle-aid kit along with a box of burntwine, but I’ve never been in any of them. I clutched the box with the Imperial Phoenix on it to my bosom like hard credit on payday and made it to my cubie on habit alone.
Somebody’d been here. I rolled the door back and the first thing I t hought was there was no point to come back here because I’d been set tip. But Paladin could hear inside and said there wasn’t anybody here.
I barred the door again and blanked the windows and decided it was just a tossing and farcing. But my lockbox was still cherry, and the rest of my kit was all there, spread from core to rim by somebody who had no interest in mere worldlies.
Then I saw the coin, and what it put into my system almost made the battle-aid kit unnecessary.
###
As previously noted, all members of the Azarine Coalition have their little quirks. You can noodle the alMayne in the street by the way he lives in a world all his own and carries a knife to help him do it. Felix, now, are real organized-they form companies, wear matching uniforms, and are cuter’n hell. Dedicated.
Ghadri are individualists. They got another real recognizable genotype-short, wide, and overmuscled-file their teeth, tattoo their faces, and work in groups of five. They’re found in High Jump crews, special weapons merc teams, and-more’n any other Coalition race-assassins. Ghadri are solid on the credit standard, got no honor I ever heard of, and like to coast on their rep. It’ll stand the weight.
###
I picked up the coin. It was round, metal, thick; greasy to the touch and unstable, like it was liquid inside. Ghadri like to pay you off to stay out of their way. I was being paid off. Oricalchun coin’d redeem in any Azarine Guildhouse in the Empire for a bribe indexed to the importance of the job the Ghadri were doing. I could even check it there before deciding whether to accept.
I dropped it and dumped the battle-aid kit on the bed. "Yo, Pally, you there?"
"As the great philosopher of the eleven-hundredth Year of Imperial Grace once said, where else would I be?"
Right. "How’s houseguest?"
"Still there. And before you ask, there is still no report that Valijon Starbringer has been recovered."
"Got problems of my own-Ghadri wolfpack tossed my crib and warned me off. Only didn’t tell me from what."
"Perhaps from the same matter Dominich Fenrir wishes you to avoid?"
I sat down on the bed next to the battle-aid kit and popped the locks. All that lovely illegal battletech glittered back at me.
"Bai, would love for to avoid it-tell me what."
"Perhaps from meeting Moke Rahone?" Paladin didn’t sound convinced.
"Wolfpack must’ve been tossing this place about when Brother Rahone was getting illegal chop-an-channel. Even I am not dumb enough to warn body to not do something after they gone and done it."
I pulled out some designer alkaloids in the vial with the Intersign glyphs "Eat Me First" on it. The room snapped into sharp focus and all the pain I’d ever had went away.
"Imperial Armory, I love you," I said out loud.
Battle-aid kits is better than money some places; everybody wants what the Imperial Space Marines carry into battle to make sure they carry on in battle. The metabolic enhancers alone are worth the price of admission. I sliced my makeshift bandage off and poured sterile wash over the wrist, then disinfectant.
"So what we got here is your common-or-garden three problems: Fenrir wants me to get lost, Ghadri want me to stay out, and some hellflowers sliced Moke Rahone and just plain want me. And why is one of the many things I don’t know." I wondered if my old sweetheart Silver Dagger was still on Kiffit, what she knew, and what she’d tell. While I was talking I squeezed out a dollop of slow-set molecular glue and smeared it all over the hole in my wrist. That started it bleeding in good earnest again, but in a minute or so it wouldn’t matter. I hunted around in the kit for the right size pressure-seal adjustable biopak.
"Do you have the ‘gimcrack’ you removed from the body?" Paladin wanted to know at that inopportune moment.
"Uh je. S’here. Justaminnit." The biopak went on like a glove; wrapped my wrist and palm and left fingers and thumb free. I set it in place and flipped the switch. It settled in with a huff of air and a compression that hurt even through "Eat Me First." I waited until the built-in timer turned green and then drank what was in the "After-Fix" bottle. When that hit I couldn’t feel the wrist anymore. So I pulled out the wand and described it for Paladin.
"I cannot be certain without seeing it, Butterfly, but what you seem to be describing is a
pheon -
an alMayne vendetta wand."
Paladin spends his spare time knowing everything about everything.
"So Rahone insulted a hellflower?" I hoped.
"No."
"Pally-che-bai, has been long night and is going to be longer one, and I’m sure and t’hell not going to play Twenty Questions with you."
"The
pheon, "
recited Paladin the way he does when he’s reading something else, “or alMayne vendetta wand, is normally only employed among the alMayne, the Gentle People, themselves. The
pheon
may be engraved with from one to seven rings. One ring indicates that the subject of the vendetta is a sole individual, seven rings indicates that the subject’s entire family to the seventh remove of kinship is to be eliminated. Outside scholars generally agree that formal initiation of the vendetta occurs when the designated subject sees the
pheon,
which is commonly presented in the ritually-murdered body of a servant or dependent of the subject. This servant is, however, considered not subject to the rules of vendetta and reprisals for his or her murder may be exacted irrespective to the progress of the vendetta.
"It is considered extremely bad form in high alMayne culture to begin a vendetta antecedent to the formal presentation of the
pheon,
which display is the signal for the commencement of the stylized hostilities which mark the highest flowering of—"
"Fap," I said, looking at the wand. Up near the dry end it had a groove carved in deep, all the way around. One ring vendetta. Just me. And meant for me, if Pally was true-telling, not for Rahone.
"Tiggy was really mad?" I suggested. But he didn’t know where I was going on Kiffit, and besides. . . . "But I ain’t hellflower, Pally." "In certain rare cases vendetta will be declared against non-alMayne. Such declarations nearly always occur in conjunction with a criminal proceeding initiated by alMayne under the laws of the Codex Imperador. If the subject has committed no act illegal under the Codex Imperador, he, or more commonly, his estate, can prosecute the entire matter as—"
"I got a new rap on me I don’t know?"
That got Paladin to shut up while he checked the hot-sheet traffic that had come in to Kiffit over the last two weeks and I tried to think of something I’d done to a hellflower that was actually illegal. Kidnapping.
But Tiggy didn’t know where I was going, dammit. . . . "Nothing, Butterfly."
Well, scratch that idea. There was a big supply of metabolic enhancers in the aid-kit; I reached for them and hesitated. Better not. I didn’t need them if it was just a matter of boarding
Firecat
and having Paladin Thread the Needle for me.
"Nevertheless, the probability is higher that you are being pursued by Valijon Starbringer’s retainers than by a group of unrelated alMayne. It would also explain the ease with which you eluded them."
"Ease!"
"If the alMayne who. pursued you had been professional killers, you would be dead now, Butterfly."
If they’d been professional. If they hadn’t been cocksure and overconfident against a poor helpless
chaudatu.
If two of them’d come into Rahone’s office instead of one. I ran my hand over the biopak and shuddered.
"Any news on the boyfriend out at
Firecat?"
"He has moved out of range of the hatch pickup, which is the only component of
Firecat’s
external sensors useful in a planetary atmosphere."
"In other words, no."
"I believe I said that, Butterfly."
I was starting to get hungry, now that I knew I was going to live, but there was things more important than food. I went and pulled the lockbox out from where the Ghadri had shoved it in their smash-and toss. Moke Rahone’s cargo was Undeliverable As Addressed, and that meant all bets were off.