TEN

Wink did his research on a stretch of river east of the city, where the average windspeed during the day in this season was 50 kph, and his main informant was a kiter who was also a medic.

Well, she had been a practicing medic. He had done a background on her.

The woman had been board-certified in microthoracic surgery, an expert cutter who could make the lasers dance well enough to carve her initials onto a white blood cell if she wanted. But she’d discovered kiting, and it took her over. She sold her practice, bought an industrial fabber, set up shop next to the river in a small town, and began making rides and gossamers. She was good at detail work, her gear was first-rate, and pretty soon, she was earning twice the money running the shop as she’d been fixing vessels and nerves. This spoke well of following one’s passion.

Vanyu was her name, and also the name of her windrunning product line. Boards, gossamers, the best this world had to offer.

Wink had fallen in love with kiting ten years back, and any world that had enough wind and water, he usually found a way to get into the air there.

Kiting was a combination of surfing, parasailing, gymnastics, and cliff diving. How a run worked was, you got your board up to speed, using a gossamer kite, sailing before the wind. The lift, you left the board and went up. You ascended to whatever height you could handle, popped the kite loose, and then finished with a dive that could range from a pure swan to a nine-trick tumbling fall. After you were done, the autopilot would home in on your beacon and deliver the board to where you came up, using a small inboard capacitor motor, charged by solar. An autocompactor would close your kite and let it fall not too far away—though sometimes the wind would take even a gossamer ball the size of your head some distance, so you had to use the locator to find it.

It was dangerous. Mistime it, and you could smack the water crooked from forty meters up and break half your bones, drown if your emergency floats didn’t inflate properly. It was right up there with underwater cave spelunking and netless high-wire racing for serious injury and death. Which, Wink knew, was part of the appeal for him.

He wasn’t galactic-class at it, but he was better than average. He didn’t see it as a competitive thing but as a personal challenge. Mostly, he was a feetfirster, but he had a few head-down entries.

When he saw Vanyu do her first pass, he realized she was as good as he was and then some. She had the body for it—she was slim, short, and tight—and she did a triple front with a half twist, a branny, and hit the water nicely. A little angle on the slosh, not much.

Wink waited his turn and, on his run, did his mount, got thirty meters up, and did a quadruple flyaway ending in a feetfirst entry. Not the greatest routine, but solid, and he lucked out on the entry, going straight in and not making much splash.

When he got back to the shore, he got some nods of approval, including one from Vanyu. He drifted over close to her as they waited for their turns.

“Haven’t seen you before,” she said.

“Just got here, from offworld. I’m Tomas Wink.”

“Vanyu.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. I’m using your gear.”

She smiled.

“We have something else in common,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“I’m a medic. Working with CFI.”

“CFI?”

“Private military. Here on a contract.”

“The Rajah’s missing daughter?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. Well, that was a pretty good run. Great entry.”

“Thanks.”

“What are you doing next?”

“Front one-and-a-half in a layout.”

“Height?”

“Forty.”

“Really? That’s a tricky height for it.”

“Guy who taught it to me had it down pretty good. Won the SC with it.”

“Graffinger? Graffinger taught you?”

It was shameless name-dropping. Hego Graffinger was a three-time champ in Open Class Kiting, who retired after an unbeaten final season. He was a Terran and he stuck close to home, didn’t like to travel, but skill-wise? He was to Wink as Wink was to an asymmetrical brick. Anybody who knew squat about kiting knew who Hego was.

“I patched him up once after he broke an arm. He said he owed me one.”

She looked at him. “He won his last Systems Championship with a bonded arm, if I recall correctly. Upper-right humerus.”

“Yep. Just distal to the deltoid tuberosity. My orthostat glue.” He mimed using an injector.

“Wow.”

“So, I’m a stranger here. Mind if I pick your brain about local stuff?”

“Go ahead. But if you land that front sommie-and-a-half clean? I will want you to teach it to me.”

“Deal…”

Kay checked, but there were no other Vastalimi in the Rajah’s realm. That would have been her preference, to find her own kind, but her own kind tended to stay home. Galactic civilization had so many rules about the smallest things, it was difficult to avoid running afoul of them. Swat a pest, and it died? Humans sometimes got all excited.

Failing that, she went looking for Rel, and it didn’t take her long to find them.

Rel were pear-shaped herbivores, bipeds about the height of an average human, but half again as heavy. They were hairless, had a spongelike grayish flesh, and they liked to decorate themselves with assorted paints or dyes, ranging across the visible spectrum. They were clever, did a brisk trade business, and when they came into contact with a Vastalimi, they became prey, an instinctive reaction that made them want to run away. They could control it, but they couldn’t hide it, and when one of her kind met one of theirs, she owned that Rel, body and spirit.

Rel preferred to gather in dark, cool places, since their homeworld was dark and cool through much of their habitable territory.

It was but a matter of a few moments for a hunter of her skill to locate her prey.

The public house was dim, and the air inside it moist and considerably cooler than outside. Both were to Kay’s liking.

There were a dozen or so of the aliens in the place, gathered together in the back, and when she entered the room, she heard their collective intakes of breath:

Carnivore! Freeze!

Kay smiled and walked directly to the nearest table of Rel.

Nobody got in her way.

She sat, uninvited, and smiled at the Rel nearest her, a male with his skin colored in a rainbow of shimmering, pulsing colors, faintly phosphorescent in the dim lighting.

She spoke her True Name aloud, a sound neither Rel nor humans were particularly adept at reproducing. “And you are?”

The male shivered but managed to control his voice.

“I am Zeth, of the Hallows. My lineage—”

“—is, I am sure, replete with deed-doers and appropriately famous kin,” she said. “But I have no need of that information.”

“Wh-wh-what is it you want from m-m-me?”

She smiled.

Time for a strategy-and-tactics meeting.

Cutter stood near the doorway in the temp HQ, leaning against the wall. There was a story to that, Jo was sure, why he liked to stand, and by the door, but he’d never told it. Just like there was one about why he was called Rags. Gramps knew that one, supposedly, but he wouldn’t tell it, he’d just laugh and shake his head.

The place still had a faint chemical odor the air coolers hadn’t filtered out, and the air was too dry, but it was comfortable enough.

It was her show, and she nodded at the core group. “Okay. What you found out, what you think it means. Gramps?”

Gramps said, “There are people whose pockets fill with NDs if the Rajah is occupied. I got a list and ran checks on them, but I don’t see anybody who leaps out. The Rajah is apparently an easygoing sort, but not when it comes to his family. If he finds who is responsible for his daughter’s being grabbed, they are dead, their families are going to forfeit any property they own in his kingdom, and their asses will be kicked across the continent. You’d need to make a shitload of money to make that risk worthwhile.

“Meanwhile, I got some stuff on the Thakore Ilmay Luzor. While Rama might consider him vile and despicable, he doesn’t seem to be much worse or better than any of the rulers on this world. Prince of a fellow or scum of the galaxy, depends on who’s telling the story and their connection to it.

“Luzor has several palaces in his country, and a couple of them are far enough out of the way that he could stash somebody there without the locals catching it. Pretty much it.”

Jo nodded. “Formentara?”

“The state of augmentation on this world is primitive. Most of the locals don’t hold with it—manly men and womanly women consider it a crutch they’d rather not use. If Brahma had wanted them to see into the infrared, then he would have given them different eyes, blatha-blatha, that kind of crap.”

Zhe smiled. “What this means is that Luzor’s Army is basic stock, and save for a few bodyguards, whose identities are kept secret, the chance of running into somebody faster or stronger than we are is small.

“However, Luzor, it is rumored, has had some modification of his sexual gear, so that he is somewhat larger and more potent than once he was.”

“Still hope for you, Gramps.”

Gramps looked at Gunny and shook his head. “I can give you testimonials, kid.”

“From your paid companions?” Her smile was sweet as it could be.

Gramps laughed.

Point to Gunny.

Jo said, “Gunny. You’re talking. Keep going.”

Gunny nodded. “My contact allows as how the marriage between Rama and Indira is political. If it follows custom, they will smile and hold hands in public, wave at parade-goers and festival attendees, produce a couple of heirs, but have private lives behind closed doors if they want. She seems to like him more than she needs to, though Ah can’t tell how he feels. Word is, he’s a bad boy, and the fems line up to fall under him.”

“Yep, us bad boys, we get the women,” Gramps said.

It was Gunny’s turn to laugh.

“Makes you wonder if Rama’s rage against her kidnappers is anything other than his ego being stepped on.” That from Wink. “How dare somebody insult me thus!”

“Something to consider,” Jo said.

Gunny continued: “Rama is apparently a bully, hides behind his rank.

“Luzor has a couple of favorite watering holes, one of which is next to his summer palace in the highlands. Somebody spotted him there day before yesterday.”

“Could mean Indira is nearby if he has her,” Gramps ventured.

“Or that she’s across the country, and he’s giving us something to look at,” Jo said. “Table that, we’ll get back to it.

“Doc?”

“Luzor seems to be in good health. His vices are mostly those of heteromale adults. Has three wives and four mistresses, ten kids. No animals, aliens, nor children in his bed. He drinks a little, tokes some, eats well enough so he’s carrying a few kilos padding. Like to gamble, bets on windskiff races, and has a distillery where he likes to tinker with liquor, mostly blended whiskey.”

Jo waited, but Wink was done. She turned to look at Kay.

Kay said, “The kidnapped girl is supposedly being held at a hunting lodge in the foothills of the Rudra mountain range along this country’s borders with Pahal and Balaji. I do not have the PPS coordinates, but I have the name of a nearby body of water, Lake Om.”

“What?” That from Rags.

It was followed by a chorus of overlapping fuck-me and aw-shit comments from the rest of the group.

“You couldn’t have just said that before we all prattled on?” Wink said.

“It was not my turn to speak,” she said.

Jo chuckled, and most of the rest of them did the same, or at least grinned. Good that the deadliest being on the planet was so polite, hey?

“How did you get this?”

“There are Rel here. I asked one of them, and he told me.”

“You believe him?”

“Yes. Rel are prey.”

“Oh, well, sure, I guess that explains it,” Gramps said.

“Prey cannot help themselves. They will give up anything to avoid being killed and eaten. The Rel knew that had I caught him in a lie, he would be in trouble.”

“Would you have done that?” Jo asked.

“I would not have eaten him. I do not care for the taste of Rel.”

Jo didn’t ask the obvious question: How Kay knew what Rel tasted like.

Some of the others exchanged amused looks. Yeah. They heard what she said, and understood the implications. Must have eaten at least part of one…

“Any information about who is holding her?”

“The Rel did not have details. He had the basic information from a fellow Rel who got it somewhere unknown. That one is no longer in the area, else I would have questioned him.”

I bet you would have. “Well, then,” Jo said. “We have a focus. Let’s find out everything we can about this hunting lodge.”