Her smile was most unpleasant, and Howell hid an inner shiver. He'd served under Gomez, and while he was willing to admit she might have to be eliminated, he didn't look forward to it. Shu obviously did. He didn't know whether she had some special reason to dislike Gomez or if it was simply the professional neatness of using an enemy's death to advance their own ends which appealed to her so, and frankly, he didn't want to know.
"All right," he said, deliberately breaking his own train of thought. "What did Control have to say about the physical take from Ringbolt?"
"Quite a bit, Sir. In fact, that was my next point." Shu flipped quickly through screens of data, then nodded. "He was a bit surprised by how much we got away with, and, of course, we lack the facilities to transport cargo, as opposed to data, directly to the Core Sectors. Moreover, our backers have specifically asked that we not send it to them. Control believes they're nervous about having traceable hardware and experimental material in their labs, not to mention the potential for interception en route."
"So he just wants us to dump it all?" Henry d'Amcourt demanded. "Jays, Commodore-that's almost a billion credits out the airlock!"
"I didn't say Control wants it dumped, Henry."
Shu disliked interruptions almost as much as she disliked d'Amcourt personally, and her voice was chill, but Howell understood his quartermaster's anguish. The surviving shuttles had returned with an unanticipated fortune in tissue cultures, experimental animals, and an entire arsenal of new and advanced gene-splicing nanites, not to mention apparatus researchers on most Rogue Worlds (and not a few Incorporated Worlds) would have killed for. Henry wasn't so much affronted by losing the money involved as he was by losing the potential in supplies and ammunition it represented.
"All right, Rachel," the commodore interposed tactfully. "From what you're saying, I gather Control has something specific in mind?"
"He does, Sir." Shu turned to face him, just incidentally turning her back on d'Amcourt, who only grinned. "He suggests we distribute it through Wyvern-preferably via a series of cutouts which can't be traced directly to us but guarantee at least some of it turns up here in the Franconia Sector and, if at all possible, in the Macedon Sector, as well."
"Ah?" Howell leaned back and smiled, and she nodded.
"Exactly. We can realize perhaps seventy percent of its open market value in the transaction, which should please some of us," she very carefully did not look at d'Amcourt, "but he's especially interested in having some of it spotted as far away from the Core Sectors as possible."
Howell nodded. Throwing some fourth or fifth-stage patsy out here to the Ministry of Justice or its Rogue World equivalent would divert attention from their real backers, and it could serve as a wedge into Macedon at the same time. They'd been looking for something to suggest the "pirates" were turning their attention towards the Franconia Sector's neighbors. But coupled with the sheer value involved, that meant this particular shipment had to be handled very carefully indeed. He glanced at Alexsov.
"Greg? Can Quintana handle it?"
"I believe so," Alexsov replied after a moment's thought. "He'll want a bigger cut if he has to arrange to burn a customer, but he'll go along. And he certainly has the contacts and organization to make it work."
Howell toyed with his stylus a moment, then nodded.
"All right. But I want you to set it up in person, Greg. It's about time you checked in personally with Quintana again anyway, isn't it?"
"Yes, Sir. I can go ahead in a dispatch boat and have everything set by the time the transport arrives."
"I don't think so," Howell mused. "I hadn't thought about how useful this could be until Control pointed it out, but he's absolutely right. So no slipups are allowed. I want the arrangements made and triple-checked before we hand Quintana the first flask of this cargo. And I don't want you wandering around in an unarmed dispatch boat, either. Take one of the tin cans, make your arrangements, and then meet us at the AR-Twelve rendezvous."
"If you say so, Sir. But should I really be absent for that long?"
"I think we'll be all right. Control hasn't sent us a fresh target yet, and we'll be meeting his next courier there, anyway. You should be back in plenty of time to coordinate the next op."
"Yes, Sir. In that case, I can leave this afternoon."
Chapter Fifty-Seven
"So, Captain. You have a delivery for me, I understand?"
Alicia looked up sharply at the first-person pronoun. She stood at the foot of the shuttle's ramp, the turbine whine of other shuttles at her back, and the fellow before her was dressed almost drably. She'd hardly expected Quintana to appear in person the moment she landed, nor had she expected to see him so simply dressed, but her second glance confirmed his identity. The match with the holo image Fuchien had shown her was perfect.
"I do-if you have the documentation to prove you're who I think you are," she said calmly, and he gave her a faint smile as he extended a chip.
She slipped it into a reader, checking it against Fuchien's original and watching him from the corner of an eye. She didn't even look up when four heavily-armed bodyguards blended out of the crowd to join him; her free hand simply unsnapped her holster. He saw it, but his eyes only twinkled and he folded his arms unthreateningly across his chest.
Her reader chirped as she completed her examination, and she ejected the chip with a nod.
"Everything checks, Lieutenant Commander," she said, returning it to him. "Sorry if I seemed a bit suspicious."
"I approve of suspicious people-especially when they're being suspicious in my interests," Quintana replied, and extended his hand.
She clasped it, and the familiar sensation of heat enveloped her. The merchant was still speaking, welcoming her to Wyvern, but all Alicia truly "heard" was the soaring, exultant carol of the Fury's triumph.
***
The Quarn freighter Aharjhka loped towards Wyvern at a velocity many a battlecruiser might have envied. For all its size and cargo capacity, Aharjhka was lean, rakish, and very, very fast, for the great Quarn trade cartels competed with one another with a fervor other races lavished only on their ships of war.
The bridge hatch opened, and the being a human would have called Aharjhka's captain looked up as a passenger stepped through it.
"Greetings, Inspector. Our instruments have detected the ship you described."
The Quarn's well-modulated voice was deep and resonant, largely because of the density of the atmosphere, for Quarn ships maintained a gravity more than twice that of most human vessels. But the Standard English was almost completely accentless, as well, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem hid a smile. He couldn't help it, for the sheer incongruity of that perfect enunciation from a radially symmetrical cross between a hairy, two-meter-wide starfish and a crazed Impressionist's version of a spider never failed to amuse him.
He crossed to a display at the captain's gesture. Whoever had reconfigured it for human eyes hadn't gotten the color balance quite right, but there was no mistaking the ship in Wyvern orbit. Star Runner had made a remarkably swift passage, actually passing Aharjhka en route-not that he'd expected anything else.
"So I see, Sir," he said through his helmet's external speaker, and the captain turned the delicate pink the Quarn used in place of a chuckle at the choice of honorific.
Ben Belkassem grinned, and the captain's rosy hue deepened. Quarn had only a single sex-or, rather, every Quarn was a fully functional hermaphrodite-and humanity's gender-linked language conventions tickled their sense of the absurd. But at least it was a shared and tolerant amusement. Different as they were, both species understood biological humor, and humans gave back as good as they got.
The prudish Rish were another matter. If the Quarn found humanity's sexual mores amusing, they found those of the Rish uproarious, and the matriarchs were not amused in return. Worse (from the Rishathan viewpoint), the highly flexible Quarn vocal apparatus could handle both human and Rishathan languages, and they found it particularly amusi
ng to enter a multi-species transit facility, make sure Rish were present, and ask one another "Have you heard the one about the two matriarchs?" in perfect High Rishathan.
Ben Belkassem had been present when one of those jokes led to a lively brawl and an even livelier diplomatic incident-not that the Rish were likely to press the matter too far.
On a personal level, nothing much short of a six-kilo hammer could hurt a Quarn, and even a fully mature matriarch fared poorly against three hundred kilos of muscle and gristle from a 2.4-G home world, whether the possessor of that muscle and gristle was officially warlike or not.
On a diplomatic level, the Terran Empire and Quarn Hegemony were firm allies, a fact the Rishathan Sphere found more than merely unpalatable yet was unable to do much about. It wasn't for want of trying, but even the devious Rishathan diplomatic corps which had once set the Terran League at the Federation's throat had finally given up in disgust. What was a poor racial chauvinist to do? Bizarre as each species found the other's appearance, humankind and Quarnkind liked one another immensely. On the face of it, it was an unlikely pairing. The Rish were at least bipedal, yet they and humans barely tolerated one another, so a reasonable being might have expected even more tension between humanity and the utterly alien Quarn.
Yet it didn't work that way, and Ben Belkassem suspected it was precisely because they were so different. The Quarn's heavy-gravity worlds produced atmospheric pressures lethal to any human, which meant they weren't interested in the same sort of real estate; humans and Rish were. Quarn and human sexuality were so different there were virtually no points of congruity; Rish were bisexual-and the matriarchs blamed human notions of sexual equality for the "uppityness" of certain of their own males. There were all too many points of potential conflict between human and Rish, while humans and Quarn had no conflicting physical interests and were remarkably compatible in nonphysical dimensions.
Humans were more combative than the Quarn, who reserved their own ferocity for important things like business, but both were far less militant than the Rishathan matriarchs. They were comfortable with one another, and if the Quarn sometimes felt humans were a mite more warlike than was good for them, they recognized a natural community of interest against the Rish.
Besides, humans could take a joke.
"We will enter orbit in another two hours," Aharjhka's captain announced. "Is there anything else Aharjhka can do for you in this matter?"
"No, Sir. If you can just get me down aboard your shuttle without anyone noticing, you'll have done everything I could possibly want."
"That will be no problem, if you are certain it is all you need."
"I am, and I thank you on my own behalf and that of the Empire."
"Not necessary." The captain waved a tentacle tip in dismissal. "The Hegemony understands criminals like these thugarz, Inspector, and I remind you that Aharjhka has a well-equipped armory if my crew may be of use to you."
The Quarn's rosy tint shaded into a bleaker violet. The Spiders might regard war as a noisy, vulgar, inefficient way to settle differences, but when violence was the only solution, they went about it with the same pragmatism they brought to serious matters like making money. "Merciless as a Quarn" was a high compliment among human merchants, but it held another, grimmer reality, and the Quarn liked pirates even less than humans did. They weren't simply murderous criminals, but murderous criminals who were bad for business.
"I appreciate the thought, Captain, but if I'm right, all the firepower I need is already here. All I have to do is mobilize it."
"Indeed?" The Quarn remained motionless on the toadstool-like pad of its command couch, but two vision clusters swivelled to consider him. "You are a strange human, Inspector, but I almost believe you mean that."
"I do."
"It would be impolite to call you insane, but please remember this is Wyvern."
"I will, I assure you."
"Luck to your trading, then, Inspector. I will have you notified thirty minutes before shuttle departure."
"Thank you, Sir," Ben Belkassem replied, and made his way to the tiny, human-configured cabin hidden in Aharjhka's bowels, moving quickly but carefully against the ship's internal gravity field.
His shoulders straightened gratefully as he crossed the divider into his quarters' one-G field. It was a vast relief to feel his weight drop back where it ought to be, and an even vaster one to dump his helmet and scratch his nose at last. He sighed in relief, then knelt to drag a small trunk from under his bunk and began checking its varied and lethal contents with practiced ease while his mind replayed his conversation with the captain.
He certainly understood the Quarn's concern, but the captain didn't realize how lucky Ben Belkassem had been. Aharjhka's presence at Dewent and scheduled layover at Wyvern had been like filling an inside straight, and the inspector intended to ride the advantage for all it was worth. Very few people knew how closely the Hegemony Judicars and Imperial Ministry of Justice cooperated, and even fewer knew about the private arrangement under which enforcement agents of each imperium traveled freely (and clandestinely) on the other's ships. Which meant no one would be expecting any human-even an O Branch inspector-to debark from Aharjhka. Aharjhka wasn't listed as a multi-species transport, and only a convinced misanthrope or an intelligent and infinitely resourceful agent would book passage on a vessel whose environment would make him a virtual prisoner in his cabin for the entire voyage.
Of course, Ferhat Ben Belkassem was an intelligent and infinitely resourceful agent-he knew he was, for it said so in his Justice Ministry dossier-but even so, he'd almost blown his own cover when he recognized Alicia DeVries on Dewent. It had cost Justice's Intelligence and Operations Branches seven months and three lives to establish that one of Edward Jacoby's (many) partners had links to the pirates' Wyvern-based fence, and they still hadn't figured out which of them it was. Yet DeVries had homed in on Fuchien as if she had a map, and she'd built herself a far better cover than O Branch could have provided.
Ben Belkassem had personally double-checked the documentation on Star Runner, her captain, and her crew, and he'd never seen such an exquisitely detailed (and utterly fictitious) legend. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised, given the way DeVries had escaped hospital security on Soissons, penetrated Jefferson Field, and stolen one of the Imperial Fleet's prized alpha-synths. If she could make that look easy, why not this?
Because she was a drop commando, not a trained operative-that was why. How had she come by such perfectly forged papers? Where had she recruited her crew? For that matter, how did she cram them all aboard what had to be the stolen alpha-synth? It couldn't be anything else, whatever it looked like, but how in the name of all that was holy did she slide blithely through customs at a world like MaGuire? Ben Belkassem had never personally crossed swords with Jungian customs, but he knew their reputation. He couldn't conceive of any way they could have inspected "Star Runner" without at least noticing that the "freighter" was armed to the proverbial teeth!
It seemed, he thought dryly, checking the charge indicator on a disrupter, that the good captain had lost none of her penchant for doing the impossible. And, as he'd once told Colonel McIlheny, he hadn't amassed his record by looking serendipity in the mouth. Whatever she was up to and however she was bringing it off, she'd not only managed to find the link he'd sought but done so in a way which actually got her inside the pipeline. Under those circumstances, he was perfectly content to throw his own weeks of work out the airlock and follow along in her wake.
And, he told himself as he buckled his gun belt and slid the disrupter into its holster, even a drop commando could use a bit of backup, whatever her unlikely abilities... and whether she knew she had it or not.
***
Alicia retina-printed the last document and watched Oscar Quintana's secretary carry the paperwork from the palatial office. The merchant pushed his chair back and rose, turning to the well-stocked bar opposite his desk.
"A rapid and satisfact
ory transaction, Captain Mainwaring. Now that it's out of the way, name your poison."
"I'm not too particular, as long as it pours," Alicia replied, glancing casually about the office. I don't see any obvious pickups, she thought at Tisiphone. How about you?
There are none. Quintana does not care to be spied upon in his own lair-that much I have obtained from him already.
Think we've got enough time?
I know not, but sufficient or no, this may be the only time we have.
Then let's go for it, Alicia said.
She rose from her own chair and walked across to Quintana. He glanced up from the clear, green liqueur he was pouring into tiny glasses, then capped the bottle and smiled.