Ghosthunt, p.1
Ghosthunt, page 1
Ghosthunt
Diadem, Book #7
Jo Clayton
DAW BOOKS INC.
ALEYTYS …
hated Company worlds … planets owned and ruled solely by the inbred elite descendants of those who had first found and exploited them. Company worlds were like slave plantations in too many ways. Everything for the owners and crumbs for everyone else.
But on one such set of linked worlds, the owners were running scared. A kidnapper of superhuman cunning had already collected ransom on their class kinsmen. And their own security agencies had proved helpless. So they had finally called on Star Hunters—and Star Hunters had called on Aleytys of the Diadem ….
The Hunt Proposed
“How’s the ship working out?” Head’s bright blue eyes moved over Aleytys, amused and assessing. “You’re looking fit.” She leaned back in her chair, her hands resting lightly on the wide arms, not fiddling with the fax sheets piled neatly on the desk in front of her.
She’s cooler than usual, Aleytys thought. Why? Aloud, she said, “Grey tells me I’m worse than a silvercoat with a sickly cub.” She smiled. “He was getting a bit testy when you called him for his Hunt. He said to me, we’re together maybe two months of any year and he wants my attention on him, not on some stupid ship.”
“I take it you’re satisfied with its performance.” Head was growing visibly impatient with these chatty exchanges.
“Hah!” Aleytys chuckled. “Sly, that’s you. My fuel bills. Madar!”
“Then you’re ready for a new Hunt.” Head straightened, the chair hummed forward. She bent over the desk, her eyes fixed on Aleytys.
“Ready enough. Depends.” Aleytys eyed the fax sheets warily. “You’re in an odd mood. Should I worry?”
“Mmm, there are things you’re not going to like, but they’ve got little to do with the Hunt itself—that’s relatively straightforward. Cazar Company wants you to chase down a ghost who’s been oozing through their security and walking off with clients of theirs. By the way, you mind having a trainee along?”
“Me? You’re joking.”
“No.” Head shifted away from Aleytys, a faint flush staining her cheeks. Aleytys waited.
“My daughter.” Head stared at her hand for a moment, closed it into a fist. “She finished her classes at University a few months ago.” She separated four sheets from the others, pushed them across the desk toward Aleytys. “Her report summaries. I want … no.” She shook her head, with a rueful smile. “If she finds out I finagled this, she’ll kill me. She wants to make her own way. Read the reports. Favor to me. Think about taking her—up to you, Lee. Has nothing to do with this Hunt.” She began fiddling with the sheets, let the silence stretch between them. Finally she lifted a hand in a quick impatient gesture. “Lee, take her with you and look after her a little. And, damn it, don’t let her know what you’re doing.”
“That’d be a good trick.” Aleytys wrinkled her nose. “She knows you too well, I suspect.” She folded the sheets into a small square packet and put them in her shoulder bag. “Ghost?”
“The Hunt.” Head slid open the cover over the sensor plate and touched one of the squares. This first bit is background, what makes the Cazar so nervous.”
The wall screen lit as Head’s fingers moved through a short sequence. A star map appeared, showing a section of one of the spiral arms thickly populated with stars. The focus altered until five suns filled the oblong screen, arranged in a ragged oval, highlighted so they stood out starkly against the dusting of stars behind them. “The Aghir suns, so called because their Lords descend from the five sons of a pirate—” Head grinned—”though they’d object vociferously to the term, a bloody old pirate called Aghir Tarn. Less than a light-year apart in a heavy drift area, each with a minimum of three planets, each of those rich in heavy metals. Not good for the health and long life of anyone unfortunate enough to live unprotected on the surface on any of those worlds though they have oxygen atmospheres and near one-normal gravity. The present Aghir tejed are sixth-generation survivors. Suspicious, careful, almost prescient in their ability to sniff out danger. Vindictive grudge-holders. Makes them chancy guests.” Her blue eyes fixed on Aleytys. A silver-grey brow rose and her mouth curled into a tight smile. “They use contract labor,” she said and nodded at the disgusted hiss from Aleytys. “Morally scabby, but there’s nothing you can do about it, Lee. Out of every batch imported there were a number who couldn’t take the mines and ran away into the wild. Most of them died in. a few days but some lived, not only lived but took women from the villages and bred. In five hundred years that could add up to a lot of people in spite of the appalling conditions they lived in and the constant threat from the hired guards of the tej. These people have started fighting back. Within the past ten years they’ve gotten organized somehow, all five worlds. Looks like one of the tejed imported a leader. The rebels have taken to raiding the metal shipments and supply shipments. They’ve gotten translight transmitters somewhere, energy weapons, other things, apparently have managed to get in touch with an enterprising smuggler.”
Head chuckled. “No, Lee, I’m not going to ask you to hunt the smuggler. Point of all this is, the tejed have tried dealing with their local problems themselves, but there’s just too much land to patrol, not enough ships to set up a search for the smuggler. About three years ago, one of the tejed, Kalyen-tej of Liros, started pressing for a conference to set up a joint force since they were obviously getting nowhere on their own. Took a lot of shuttling about before he got an agreement to meet, but he did get it One year ago. Then he had to find a place they’d agree on; they were far too suspicious of each other to meet on any of the Aghir worlds. He found that too. Cazarit.” Head broke off and tapped another sequence on the plate. A new star system appeared on the screen. The focus swooped inward past a pair of gas giants and hovered over a world that was water except for a band of large islands circling it like a linked belt. “Cazarit. Where company execs play their favorite games served by programmed people and androids, whose minds are wiped when the exec departs. One island set aside for common folk who come to pretend they’re seeing the depths of depravity, or spend a little time skiing or hunting or lying about in the sun. Everyone tagged who sets foot on soil, visitors get a medallion, employees a bit of metal screwed to a shoulderblade. Cazar brags about the security they provide their favored customers.”
“Blackmail?”
“They guarantee privacy and mean it.”
The focus changed again, hovered over one of the islands. “Battue. Whoever named the islands had to’ve had a literal sort of mind.” The point of view passed over grazing herds, a few prowling predators. Head was silent as the flying eye circled a large structure, a lodge built like a fortress. The screen flickered as if some of the record had been cut out, then the eye circled a mountain whose peak had been lopped off. A squat massive structure occupied the center of the man-made mesa, tall bronze double-doors in each of the five walls, a landing stage beside each of the doors. “The Conference Hall,” Head said. “The other was a specially built lodge where one of the tejed will be housed; there are four more scattered about. In about three weeks the tejed with their guards, women, whatever, will be settling into those lodges.”
“How long from here to Cazarit?”
“One day short of two weeks,” Head said, her face carefully expressionless.
“They waited a long time to panic.” Aleytys blinked slowly. “It occurs to me I still haven’t got much idea why they’re in a panic. The Aghir tejed are coming to Cazarit. So?”
Head touched the sensor plate. The screen flickered and split into three sections, two men and a Yaln-tie pair. “This is what has its teeth sunk in Cazar. Three snatches in the past year. Each time they tightened security, each time the ghost didn’t wiggle a needle but got his man or, in the last case, tie-pair. After the ransom was collected in the same … um … unobtrusive way, those—” she nodded at the screen— “were picked up wandering about in a haze on some world a long, long way from Cazarit with no idea how they got there. Cazar would like to cancel the Aghir conference, but stirred up such an uproar when they tried it, they had to back off. With this ghost slipping through their security as if it didn’t exist and with the Aghir. tejed refusing to let the Cazarit people put any men on Battue, refusing to wear the medallion tags, refusing to let Cazarit security check out anyone in their entourage, the Governors of Cazar Company are about to jitter out of their skins. They want you to find their ghost and turn it over to them before the Aghir arrive.”
“They don’t want much. One week? Madar!” Aleytys grimaced. “Am I also supposed to guarantee nothing happens to the tejed at the Conference? I don’t see how. One determined suicidal rebel could take them all out and me with them.”
“Cazar wanted that.” Head chuckled. “Even Hagan wouldn’t go along with that It’s impossible. After some haggling I got the Hunt limited to the ghost. Get him before the snatch if you can, no, be quiet a minute, get him after the snatch if you have to, but get him.”
“Head, what in the world …. before the snatch? He could be anywhere, anyone, he could be she, who the hell knows? Their security must have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours, days, months on trying to locate him, to get some kind of clue to who or what he was. I’m supposed to stick my finger in that pie and tease him out? Tell me how, I swear I haven’t the faintest idea how to start.”
Head grinned, her eyes twinkling. “They’ve promised complete cooperation. Which means whatever you can make it mean.”
“Hah! There’s another thing. I have to give him up to them if I catch him?” Aleytys moved her shoulders, grimaced. ‘I won’t do it, I wouldn’t give a slime mold into the hands of Company security.” She shook her head. “It’s not my kind of Hunt. I’m no analyst. How does he pick his targets? How does he take them? How does he slide through alarm systems and past the eyes of guards ….” Her voice trailed off; she blinked again. “I knew once …. no, too strained a coincidence. Never mind. What makes them think he’s still operating? If he’s smart enough to fool them three times, he’s smart enough to stop when he’s ahead. Luck is bound to turn sour sooner or later.”
Head tapped her fingers on the top of the desk waiting for Aleytys to run down. “You finished? Good. They’re snatching at straws. Ever heard of a scarecrow? Yes? Well then, that’s you. The power of the word. Exaggerated stories about you that get more grandiose the farther they spread. The hearings on the Haestavadda Hunt took six months. You saw how many visitors trailed through the hearing rooms. That was over a year ago, word’s had time to travel far. Your name alone ….” Head smiled, “nowadays your name alone lets us double and sometimes triple our fee.” She sobered. “Doesn’t make my job any easier. Bruised egos for my Hunters and disgruntled clients when they can’t boast of hiring you.”
“I take it I’m still on probation.” When Head nodded, Aleytys pressed her lips tightly together and stared past her at the wall. After a minute, she said quietly, “I have to thank you for the ship, my friend. I’ll take this Hunt I don’t want to but I will. It’s the last I’ll take under these circumstances. Either I belong here or I get out. You can put that to them more tactfully if you want, but I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Damn, I hate this kind of thing. By the way, when Grey and I were out testing the new ship, we had a long-distance escort. RMoahl hounds.”
Head nodded again. “They’re still sending periodic demands that you be turned over to them. They want their property.”
“So I can expect to be followed whenever I venture out of Wolff space.”
“Did they crowd you?”
“No, not really. Just hung on and followed.”
“They won’t. Not after what you did to those tikh’asfour ships. The chief arbiter turned pale when you got to that part and offered to demonstrate if they didn’t believe you. Very naughty for you, Lee.” A corner of Head’s mouth twitched up into a half-smile. “But effective. Well, now, back to the business at hand. On Cazarit you’ll be dealing with people who got where they are by the ruthless use of power. To cap this, the kind of people they deal with have accumulated enormous wealth and power also, usually by means that won’t stand light. Cazar Governors can promise all they want, it will be Cazar local execs who have to do the performing. They’ll give you just as much as you can force from them, even if, in the end, that undercuts their own positions. The nature of the beast, get it now, tomorrow I may be dead. Use whatever means you have to pry what you need out of them, your reputation gives you a bit of added leverage. Our fee, by the way, has been set on an ascending scale according to what you accomplish. We get paid something if you just show up and sit around. More, if you pick up information but nothing happens. Most, if you actually catch the ghost.”
Aleytys sighed. “This whole thing stinks. The sooner the rebels kick the tejed out of their holds, the better, far as I’m concerned. And any being clever enough to bleed the Companies has me cheering for him. I know I said I’d take the Hunt, but, dammit Head, I can’t turn the ghost over to them if I luck out and catch him, her or it. Couldn’t live with myself after. Do this for me, will you? Screw out of Cazar Governors an agreement that says I decide what to do with the ghost.” She smiled, her lips trembling a little. “At least you got me a ship, my friend, thanks for that, whatever happens.” She stood, tapped the side of her shoulder bag.. “I’ll read these. And I’d like to talk to Tamris, send her to my house when you’ve got the agreement—or not got it as the case may be. If I think we can get along, I’ll take her with me. If I go.” She passed her hand back over her hair, sighed. “Might as well have one friendly face around.”
Head walked with her to the door. “Don’t count too much on friendly, I’m afraid she’s going to resent Mother manipulating her again.”
Aleytys laughed, touched Head’s shoulder. “Why wasn’t I born to a quiet life?”
“Because you’d die of boredom before the year was out.”
Lilit
In a little over two weeks I am going to kill my father.
Ink like black velvet, thin lines, forceful strokes, a powerful contrast to the delicate ivory of the paper. Lilit smiled at what she’d written, liking the dramatic flow of the script, the drama of the words. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, nipped the mass of it back off her shoulders, dipped the ancient pen into the ink Acthon had made for her of gum and lampblack.
I can’t remember when I started to hate my father. Not fear him, no. That I sucked in with my mother’s milk. Milk. That was all I ever got from her and that grudged since I was her seventh daughter when she desperately needed a son. She was not quite twenty-five when I was born and making heroic efforts to hold my father’s interest, or so I was told much later. In her disappointment she came close to killing me. My sisters made sure I learned that once I was old enough to understand what it meant. I think they were as angry at me as she was—because I turned out to be a girl, I mean. A brother would have given them status. I never really knew my mother, can’t remember much about her though I was nearly two when she died trying to have another baby. The child died too, but no one mourned it—another daughter.
Tapping the end of the pen against her chin, Lilit gazed at what she’d written. She laid the pen down in the tight crease between the pages of the book, pushed her chair back and walked across the room, the fur on the bottom of her long black gown brushing softly against her ankles, the silk of the gown sliding agreeably across her bare skin. Feeling a little like one of the ghosts that haunted her as her unshod feet moved over the thick rug with not a whisper of sound, she crossed to the window and pushed the gauzy drape aside. Holding back her thigh-length sweep of black hair, she settled herself on the windowseat and pressed her face against the glass looking out hungrily past the flicker of the force dome that protected the Hold from the dangerous free air of Liros n. The sun hung low in the west, its light nearly swallowed by the heavy clouds. Colors were more subdued than usual, the rough red firebush lying like velour on rolling hills that swept to the jagged bleak line of the Draghastils, crossed by lines of chalouri that were black in the distance and a rich deep purple up closer, their fleshy stalks and hair-fine foliage hanging limp. The air out there seemed to hang still. Nothing moved—even inside the Hold she could feel the stillness, the sense of waiting became almost unbearable, though that perhaps drew something from her mood.
She looked past the outer wall at the settlement across the sluggish river. Children were running about, in and out of the squat houses built of crumbling mud bricks and the lamina of dirt-lily pads, a dark grey-brown, darker and drabber than ever in the half-light. Some women were gathered at the well. They stood talking, their water jars held on the well coping with one hand while the other gestured with staccato impatience. What was the point, her father had said when she asked him why he didn’t give the village folk a pump and water in their homes. The water in the well was limited, he said, but it was less contaminated with poisons than that in the river. A pump and plumbing would have made them careless, they’d soon exhaust the well and have to turn to the river. This way, having to carry every drop, they were forced to conserve. It made sense in an unhuman sort of way, like much of what her father said and did. A few old men sat on benches outside the houses, some of them bent over chessboards set between them, others were talking or staring out toward the mountains. She counted them. Nine. Two gone, sick or dead, since she’d counted them last. In the distance she could see a line of men trudging back from the small cleared fields where they fought the poisonous vegetation and the stingy soil to wring from it the crops they needed to supplement the basic provided by her father. At the well, one woman dragged a bit of cloth across her face; she glared up at the Hold, picked up her jar and stalked off, the others watching her a moment then closing in again and talking intensely.
