The brilliant thing about going straight to jail was that very few people knew Marl, or that he belonged there, if one accepted the authority of a handful of children, a one-horned alien, and a teacher pretending to be a lot better than she should be. Marl did not, of course. Once out of his cell he had no intention of returning. He had a clear idea from talking to his young jailers of where the com center was, and he headed straight for it. There was one closer to the docks as well, but that was mostly for ground-to-ship communication. The place he sought was conveniently situated on the same street as the police station. He wanted to speak with some friends on Kezdet.
He didn’t spare a glance for the plaza/cemetery on the opposite side of the street. The dead didn’t interest him, and, with his current grandiose plans, grave robbing for trinkets was far beneath him. He was not afraid of catching plague from the bodies. The Linyaari do-gooders would have made sure they were all nice and clean, according to his jailers. But it was hard, smelly work, and the population here had not been especially affluent.
The center was situated in a large dome-shaped building entered through a rotunda. It was very grand, with a mosaic ceiling in deep blue with a representation of the galaxy in gold, with the Solojo system at the center. The floor was, he presumed, an artistic topo-map of Paloduro’s surface, with Corazon enclosed in a large heart. Touching, that.
The rotunda was entirely empty. Ah yes, the kiddies would all be in bed.
Good thing he’d brushed up on his Spandard while incarcerated. The lift had a detailed list of the contents of each floor in that language.
The transmissions center was on the top floor, of course. He hied himself there forthwith and entered a room whose entire ceiling was another model of the galaxy but a less Solojo-centered one. Various reception centers on planets, moons, stations, etc. and relay activity were represented. Laser beams of various colors streaked like comets from one to another or ricocheted around a bit showing, he presumed, where transmissions were headed. As he had expected, however, most of the room was operated by computer. A lone minder sat in a semireclining position for an optimum view of the ceiling, shifting around on invisible, presumably antigrav supports, so that the bit the operator was addressing was the one directly above.
Marl started forward, his footsteps making no sound on the rubberized flooring considerately designed to lesson ambient noise in the room. The operator, who appeared to be a girl, did not hear him. Good. But out of the corners of his eyes, both to the right and the left, something made a sudden movement. Then he almost dived for the floor when another operator’s pallet sailed overhead. Where had that come from?
Standing stock-still, he darted quick glances to the right, the left, and up. No one. And the pallet was empty. Why had it moved then? Perhaps the other operator had called it or perhaps it anticipated his own need?
As to the other movements, they were probably nothing but reflections cast by the laser bolts flashing overhead.
No, truly, he and the other operator were quite alone. Good. She didn’t look at all familiar, which meant he would not look familiar to her either. He stared up at the rogue pallet as it zoomed off again. Two others did the same thing, dodging around one another when a midair crash seemed likely. This time the girl sat up, moved her hand a bit, and her pallet sank to the nearest landing pad, a wedge-shaped space with a step leading to it located beside each computer station.
“Did you do that?” the girl demanded in Spandard. She looked to be eight or nine years old but could have been as old as twelve. Marl shook his head innocently and gave her his most ingratiating smile. He could be good with kiddies when it suited him. Girlies especially, though this one was not his type. Too pudgy and spotty, and her hair was thin and stuck out in wisps where it had been splayed out behind her pallet-cradled noggin.
“No! No,” he said. That word at least worked in both languages. Fluency was not actually required though, he thought. The harmless, bewildered tourist with an emergency was more the ticket. In broken Spandard, he explained his plight. He had come to Corazon before the plague to visit relatives of his family on Kezdet. The little ones were orphaned now, but he was sure his own kindly parents, had they survived, would take them in. He had been sick himself and was barely saved by the Linyaari healers, then had dedicated himself to helping arrange things so others could manage. He hadn’t imagined that his family on Kezdet were better off and frankly, until now, had been afraid to face the fact that he, too, might be an orphan. Then he had heard that the plague hadn’t actually got a good toehold on Kezdet before the noble Linyaari came zooming to the rescue, so now he had hopes of a family reunion and could she help him at all?
He was a bit annoyed at how much longer and how many more strenuous charades it required to get his touching story across to her. You’d have thought they’d have put a brighter brat in charge of the com room at night. She kept losing track of what he was saying when another pallet lifted into the air to zoom around of its own accord, or more of those reflections darted past. Perhaps it was the dome shape that made them always seem to move at the periphery of one’s vision. He didn’t notice any of the beams reflecting directly down.
By the time he made the girl understand his request, however, she was whipping about at each little movement, totally spooked, despite what she surely must have seen as his reassuring presence. He found himself starting, too. If the child was this unnerved by the pallets and reflections, it could not be a normal occurrence. It could, however, play into his hands.
“Ought they to be doing that?” he asked in Spandard, as another pallet passed overhead. She shook her head, her eyes showing white all around the pupils.
Then, as he had hoped, she showed him, with gestures, demonstrations, and simple phrases, how the system was supposed to operate.
“A simple malfunction then?” he suggested. “¿Uh—uno malfunctiamente tecnico? ¿Uno glitch electromagnetimente?”
For a moment she looked at him like he was nuts, and he thought she didn’t understand. Then she leaned closer to him, and whispered, presumably so that all of the hardware zipping about overhead wouldn’t hear. “No,” she told him, “fantasma.”
“Ghosts? Get serious, lovey. No such thing. No fantasma,” he said.
“Sí,” she said, gesturing rather hysterically at the flying pallets, “Sí, sí, fantasma.”
He sighed deeply. No reasoning with someone like this. “Tell you what then, you run along and I’ll deal with them, sí? Uh, make fantasma vamuso pronto.”
She didn’t even look skeptical. He was older, after all, and male, and obviously knew what he was doing, although he was very glad she didn’t.
She jabbered something too fast for him to understand and was out of there before any dust that might have settled in her wake could do so.
Fine. Just him and the fantasmas. Uh malfunctiamente tecnico. He could deal with that. Picking up her control pad, he settled himself into the pallet and was carried toward the ceiling like a baby being delivered by a great bloody stork.
Brilliant. He homed in on Kezdet and microrouted the message to a code that landed him in the middle of a little-known area of the Nanobug Market. The shabby, slightly carnie atmosphere lent by the sights and smells of a plethora of merchandise that was secondhand at the newest actually concealed quite a sophisticated com system undetected by the Federation cops.
It would be midday on Kezdet now, and his friends would be touting their wares to the unwary or at least to those who didn’t mind the wear and tear on some items, even if they knew to beware of the condition of others. Amused with his wordplay, he thought to repeat it to his contact, but the old man wasn’t amused. “I was in the middle of a deal, boy. What the Demos do you want?”
Marl batted his lashes in a coy fashion, if not a koi fashion, since he, of course, had something fishy in mind. “Is that any way to speak to opportunity when it hails you?” he asked. “I’ve a much better deal that should interest you and your team. I have landed in a veritable pot of gold, my friend, and I wish to cut you in.”
“You’re too kind,” the other man said gruffly. “Why?”
“I find myself in need of minions and transport.”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” the man said with a snort and seemed about to switch off the com and go back to peddling Linyaari bobble-headed dollies or whatever.
“You’re right,” Marl said. “It is. That’s all right. Of course I wanted to cut my old pals in first, but if that’s how you feel, there’s plenty around here willing to retire young with a fortune, a mansion, and a harem of buxom teenaged cuties.”
The man shook his head. “I know I’m going to hate myself for asking, but what is it you’re on about?”
Marl told him. Some of it he knew of course, but it was necessary to the buildup to describe all of the properties, the drugs, the riches waiting for a clever operator and his gang to collect. The key, of course, was to do it without catching the plague, but he figured he had that angle covered.
“Here’s the sweet part,” he said, dangling the best bit of bait, “I happen to know one of them rather well.” He made his relationship with Khorii sound much friendlier than it was.
“Who doesn’t? Know some of them all too well indeed. One of them made me give away most of my best stock.”
“One of them?”
“Her ’n’ her family—some kinda Linyaari Mafiosi is my guess.”
“Well, the one I know can not only clear the plague, she can tell if it’s even still there or not. Besides which, she knows the location of a treasure ship from Dinero Grande and is on her way there even now. That’s why I need the ship and the minions. Got to catch up with her.”
“Cut you out, did she?”
“You could say, yeah. So how about it?”
“Just so happens we have agents on their way to Solojo for some of the reasons you mentioned in the first place. If they reckoned it was worth their while, they might agree to an alteration in their plans. Of course, if things is different than what you say, your life expectancy is going to diminish sharpish.”
“Understood,” Marl said. “I’m in the com room now. Give me their coordinates, and I’ll patch us through.”
By the time he’d finished his com-ferring with them all and was ready to descend and go wait for his lift, he was sweating profusely. The agents were unknown to him personally, but he had heard of this kind of person. They’d evidently weathered the plague in good shape because there were several adult males among them, swarthy, with colorful personal adornments both on and in their skins. They grinned at him a lot, which was not reassuring. Their teeth weren’t all in the best shape, but there were quite a lot of teeth among them, and most of them had been filed to sharp points.
He had been so engrossed in conducting his own business that he hadn’t paid much attention to the pallets still zipping around. But as he ended his transmission, he glanced over at one that hovered to the left and slightly lower than his own.
He had been wrong to assume that it was empty. It was not.