The Frog Prince

Michael F. Flynn

Sometimes a “handicap” is an advantage. . . .

* * * *

The scarred man awoke muzzy-headed in a dark, close room, confused at where he was, and tangled in wires and tubes. The last clear thing in the jumbled closets of his mind was his buying of a ticket to Dangchao Waypoint, and for a fuddled moment he wondered if he might be within that very ship, already on his way.

But if so, he were grossly cheated, for he had purchased third class fare on a Hadley liner and, of the many things his present accommodations were not, a third-class cabin on a Hadley liner was one. The room was barely large enough to contain the thin, hard bunk on which he lay and, when that bunk had been stowed into the wall, the room grew paradoxically smaller: a pace-and-a-half one way; two-and-a-half the other. It was the halfpace that galled. One always came up short against a wall.

It was a room for keeping prisoners.

“Fool,” said the Fudir, once he had removed the catheters and intravenous feeding tubes that spider-like had webbed him in his cot. “We’ve been shanghaied.”

“How long were we asleep?” Donovan asked.

There is this one thing that you must know about the scarred man; or rather, nine things. It is not his hooked chin, nor his sour humors, nor even the scars that interlace his scalp and leave his preternaturally whitened hair in tufts. It is that he is “a man of parts,” and those parts are the pieces of his mind, shattered like a mirror and rearranged to others’ whims. It is in the nature of the intellect to reflect upon things; and so a mirror is the proper metaphor, but the scarred man’s reflections are more kaleidoscopic than most.

The singular benefit of paraperception is that the paraperceptic can see different objects with each eye, hear independently with each ear, and quite often the right hand knows not what the left is doing. This has advantages, and would have had more had the scarred man’s masters not been ambitious or cruel.

Early in Donovan’s service to the Confederation, the Secret Name had gifted him with a second personality, the Fudir, which enabled him to live masqueraded as a petty thief in the Terran Corner of Jehovah while Donovan ran Particular Errands for Those of Name. But if two heads are better than one, ten heads must be better than two, and the Names had later, after Donovan had displeased them in some small matter of galactic domination, split his mind still further. Using the sundry paraperceptic channels as tap holes, they had slivered his intellect. They had made of him something new: a paraconceptic, able not merely to perceive matters in parallel, but to conceive ideas in parallel, as well. This was the ambition.

It was also the cruelty. They had imprinted each fragment with a complete, if rudimentary, personality, expert in some particular facet of the Espionage Art. The intent had been to create a team of specialists; though the consequence had been instead a quarreling committee. For the hand that split his intellect had mis-struck; and the blow had split his will as well.

Though perhaps the blow had been true, deliberate, a part of his punishment. Perhaps at the last Those of Name had flinched from the prospect of too great a success. Those had made an art of punishment, and the connoisseurs among them would often contemplate the intricacies of a punitive master-work with something close to aesthetic joy. Kaowèn, they called it. The scarred man had been conceived initially as a human weapon. But who would build such a weapon without a catch?

“Fool,” said the Fudir. “We’ve been shanghaied.”

“How long were we asleep?” Donovan asked.

I’m not sure, replied the Silky Voice. I seemed to fight the drugs forever.

The Pedant rumbled and blinked gray, watery eyes. IF ASLEEP, NO MORE THAN THREE DAYS. IF SUSPENDED, AS LONG AS THREE WEEKS.

The Sleuth eyed the life support equipment from which they had so recently disengaged. We were in suspension, he deduced, not asleep.

That could be. Suspension would affect even me, back here in the hypothalamus.

<Ravn Olafsdottr!> remembered Inner Child. <She slipped up behind us. And slipped something into us.>

Yeah? said the Brute. And where was you? You’re supposed to be the lookout.

Now is not the time for recriminations, a young man wearing a chlamys told them. We must start from where we are, not from where we might have been.

The Brute grunted, unmollified. He tried the door, found the jamb-plate inactive, and struck it in several likely places. Donovan did not expect it to open, and so was not disappointed when it failed to do so. A young girl in a chiton squatted nearby on her haunches, her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. We can get out of here, she said.

Donovan turned control over to the Sleuth, who went to their knees for a closer study of the jamb. The Pedant recognized the locking mechanism from his repertoire of sometimesuseful information.

A YARBOR AND CHANG LOCK, the Pedant observed. THIS SHIP IS PERIPHERAL-BUILT.

“Probably hijacked by our gracious hostess,” muttered the Fudir.

Which means this room was not designed as a prison cell, said the girl in the chiton, whom Donovan liked to call “Pollyanna.”

So. Retrofitted ad hoc, said the Sleuth, and likely in haste. Yarbor and Chang . . . So what?

ITS CENTRAL PROCESSOR HAS A DESIGN FLAW. A NOTICE WENT OUT FROM THEIR CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS ON GLADIOLA TWO METRIC YEARS AGO. I REMEMBER READING IT.

You remember everything, the Sleuth complained. He took the scarred man’s right arm and pointed. Pedant’s design flaw indicates that an electrical current passed across these two points—here, and here—will set up a magnetic field within the processor that resets the lock to zero.

“That’s nice,” said the Fudir. “So if we had a generator in our pocket, or a batter y, and some wires, and could maybe do a bit of soldering, if we had a soldering gun—and some solder—there’s a chance we could get out of this room.”

“At which point,” said Donovan, “we would find ourselves in a ship. A bigger cell, is all.”

Hey. At least we’d have room to stretch.

“And where would we find wiring?”

<There’s an Eye in the wall just above the door.> And it’s not pitch dark in here.

He means there is a power source.

“I know what he means. Sleuth always has to be clever and elliptical.”

When he ain’t bein’ obtuse! The Brute laughed.

That the Brute was making obscure geometric puns irritated Donovan. Sometimes he didn’t know his own mind. Ever since his sundry selves had re-integrated, they had been learning from one another. The Brute was no longer quite so simple as he once had been; though it was not as though he had blossomed into the New Socrates.

The Fudir climbed atop the bunk, studied the Eye, unscrewed a housing with a convenient tool he kept cached in his sandal, detached the live leads—See? We didn’t need a power source—and pulled the cable, while simultaneously Donovan and the others considered what they might do once they had broken free of their prison.

“Take over the ship, I suppose,” Donovan said. “Slide to Dangchao Waypoint.”

<How many does Olafsdottr have in her crew?>

Don’t matter.

“Well, it might, a little.”

ONCE I’VE IDENTIFIED THE MODEL OF THE SHIP, I CAN PROBABLY REMEMBER THE STANDARD LAYOUT. BUT ONE CLOSET LOOKS LIKE ANY OTHER.

I wonder why she shanghaied us, said the Sleuth.

The lamp that was lit has been lit again.

What’s that mean, Silky?

I don’t know. Something I remember from a dream. Pedant? You remember everything.

The corpulent, watery-eyed version of Donovan shook his massive head. FACTS ARE MY MÉTIER, NOT DREAMS.

The Fudir applied the leads from the Eye to the door jamb, one above, the other below the point that the Pedant had identified. This ought to work, the Sleuth commented.

Of course it will, said the girl in the chiton.

Current flowed. Magnetic fields formed. Somewhere inside the door, registers zeroed out and reset.

Or were supposed to. The door remained shut.

The Brute stood and, perforce, they all stood with him. He pressed the jamb-plate—and the door slid aside into the wall. The scarred man felt a huge satisfaction.

<Careful> warned Inner Child, who took control and peered cautiously into the corridor. To the left it ran four paces, ending in a T-intersection.

To the right…

To the right stood Ravn Olafsdottr with a teaser in her hand and a splash of white teeth across her coal-black face. The teaser was pointed at Donovan’s head. “Ooh, you nooty buoy,” she said in the hooting accents of Alabaster. “Soo impatient! I wood have let you oot in the ripeness of time. Now you have brooken my door!”

“You should stop somewhere for repairs, then,” suggested the Fudir. “On Peacock, or Die Bold. Actually, I was on my way to Dangchao, so you can drop me off on Die Bold if you’re going that way.”

Olafsdottr patted him gently on the cheek with her free hand. “You are a foony man, Doonoovan.”

Olafsdottr fashioned him a dinner of sorts. Food preparation was not her forte, and the results could best be described as workmanlike. However, three weeks in suspension had honed an edge to the scarred man’s appetite, and he ate with surprising relish.

The refectory was small: essentially a short hallway with a door at each end, a table running down the center, and a bench on either side built into walls of a dull, ungracious gray. “This is not the most comfortable ship,” the Fudir complained.

Olafsdottr stood in the aft doorway, a double-arm’s reach distant, and her weapon still ready in her hand. She said, “One seizes the moment.”

“And the ship.”

THE VESSEL IS A MONOSHIP, THE PEDANT DECIDED. BUILT FOR HANDLING BY A SINGLE PILOT.

She’s alone, then.

That’s good news, said the Brute.

What?

Means we got her outnumbered.

There were few personal memorabilia aboard that he could see, but they were not Ravn’s memorabilia. Confederate agents traveled light and took what they needed when they needed it. The Sleuth thought he could eventually identify the Rightful Owner from the bits and pieces remaining on board. It was the sort of puzzle he lived for, but Donovan saw no reason to care.

The Fudir waved a spoonful of a chicken-like puree at the bench across from him. “Have a seat,” he told his captor. “You look uncomfortable.”

“Do I also look foolish?” she replied.

“Afraid I’d try to jump you?”

“No.”

“Then . . . ?”

“I meant I was not afraid, not that you would not try.”

Donovan grunted and returned his attention to his meal. So far, he had not asked the Confederate her reasons for kidnapping him. He was a past master at the game of waiting. Either Olafsdottr wanted him to know or not. If she did, she would eventually tell him. If not, asking would not win the answer.

“I will be missed, you know,” he told her.

The Ravn’s answer was a flash of teeth. “I think noot. The Bartender, he is already sailing your drinks to oother lips. ‘Tis noo skin oof his noose who buys them.”

“I was on my way to Dangchao. The Hound, Bridget ban, is expecting me. When I don’t arrive . . .” He allowed the consequences of his non-arrival to remain unspecified. A Hound of the League could be many things and anything, as adroit and dangerous as a Confederal Shadow, and Bridget ban not least among them.

But Olafsdottr only smiled and answered in Manjrin. “Red Hound missing many years. Some associates claim credit, though I believe their bragging empty.”

“You were right to doubt them. She has returned and awaits me even now at Clanthompson Hall.”

“Ah. If so, associates much red-faced.” Olafsdottr laughed and switched to the Gaelactic that was the lingua franca of the League. “But she hardly awaits you, darling. Detestable in the ears of Bridget ban falls the name of Donovan buigh. Old grudge, no?”

The Fudir grimaced. “Old love.”

“Same thing, no?”

Donovan shrugged and smiled, as if to say that even old grudges had expiration dates. Olafsdottr might not believe that Bridget ban would come looking for him. Neither did Donovan, but why not sow doubts?

The Long Game between the Confederation of Central Worlds and the United League of the Periphery might be played on a chessboard of suns, and in it this agent or that might be as a grain of sand on a broad beach; but where the agents stood “in the blood and sand,” matters were more particular, and interstellar politics only the medium in which they swam. Personal loyalties mattered. Personal grudges mattered. In the sudden flash of the barracuda’s teeth, what significance has the vast and swirling ocean?

After Donovan had eaten, Olafsdottr locked him into a sort of ward room. It was decorated to resemble the cabin of an Agadar sloop, a sailing vessel much favored on that watery world. It was longer than it was wide, and paneled in light woods. A holostage with a play-deck and swivel chair adorned one end. To its right hung a set of wall-mounted nautical instruments which, the nearest ocean being rather distant, were certainly more decorative than functional. Cushioned benches and cabinetry ran along the walls, including a bunk recessed into the wall. Two comfortable chairs occupied the middle of the room. The overall effect was “taut.”

“Stay poot,” Olafsdottr said, wagging a finger before she closed and locked the door on him. “Plainty in there to amoose you,” she added from the other side.

And so there was. The Fudir’s primary amusement on Jehovah had involved the opening of locked doors.

The Fudir set to work. “Not very difficult,” he judged.

It’s a monoship, the Sleuth reminded him. Why would a one-man ship have high-end locks?

“Why would it have locks at all?” wondered Donovan.

WHAT IS THE SECOND MOST-FREQUENT USAGE OF MONOSHIPS? asked the Pedant.

What is the most frequently annoying personality we have to share a head with? the Sleuth answered.

Funny that you should ask, the Brute said.

Private yacht?

SECOND-MOST FREQUENT, SILKY.

Friends, said the young man in the chlamys. We’re all in this together.

Donovan sighed. Sometimes his head seemed a very crowded place. On occasion, he remembered that he had been the original and the others remained in some sense tenants, and he remembered that he had once been alone.

Perhaps, said the young man in the chlamys. But the “I” that cooks up schemes, and the “I” that remembers everything, and the “I” that is master of every martial art, and . . . all the rest of us . . . We are all the same “I,” aren’t we? We’re closer to you than your skin.

Donovan said nothing. He was not especially fond of his skin, which stretched sallow and drumhead tight across his bones. He still owned that gaunt and hollowed-out look that long years in the Bar of Jehovah had given him. He wondered if he might have always looked that way, even in the flush and vigor of his youth. Assuming he had had a youth, or that it had been flushed with vigor.

We’ll remember someday, Pollyanna assured him.

Donovan was less sure. Sometimes matters were lost past all retrieval; and maybe deservedly so. Some memories might best remain covered than recovered. “I liked it better when you had all fallen silent,” he said, and wondered if the drug that Olafsdottr had given him had also upset the delicate truce he had reached with himself the previous year.

“Smuggling,” snapped the Fudir, distracted from his inspection of the lock. “Smuggling and bonded courier work. All right? Now quiet down and let me work.”

BONDED COURIERS. PRECISELY. THERE IS A POPULAR SHOW ON DUBONNET’S WORLD CALLED SAMPLES AND SECRETS, IN WHICH THE UNNAMED PILOT OF A MONOSHIP BRINGS EACH EPISODE SOME PACKAGE—A SECRET, A VISITOR, A TREASURE—THAT CHANGES THE RECIPIENT’S LIFE FOR GOOD OR ILL.

It’s why they’re sometimes called “schlepships” the Sleuth said.

The Fudir pulled his special tool from the hidden cache in his sandal and set to work on the lock mechanism. The Pedant had been right. These were not high-security locks. The door opened onto the main hallway.

Ravn Olafsdottr was waiting outside. “Really, Donovan, where do you expect to go?”

The Fudir grinned. “Admit it, Ravn. You would have been disappointed if I hadn’t come out. If you wanted me to stay put, you would have had better locks installed.”

“I was in a hurry. But I may do so, if you do not behave yourself. You were not supposed to awake so soon. Annoy me too greatly and I will soospend you once more.”

“And forego the pleasure of our company? You’d be lonely.” He looked up and down the corridor. “You have Eyes all through the ship, don’t you?”

The Confederate shrugged a little, as if not to belabor the obvious. “And motion sensors for your restlessness. You move about, I hear the ping of your processions.”

“Then what does it matter if I stay in one room or not?”

Olafsdottr scratched the bright yellow stubble of her hair. “Who can say? Perhaps you sneak up behind me, garrote me, have your wicked way, and take ship back to Jehovah.” A foolish notion, her smile said. “We will be good friends some time, you and I; but that time is not yet.”

“Don’t be so sure I would want my way with you,” the scarred man grumbled. “I’ve been with more toothsome wenches than you in my time.”

“Ooh! Boot do they bite so wail with those tooths?” She gnashed the dentition in question and switched to Manjrin. “You stay ward room now. We past Dangchao. Be on Tightrope soon. Not jog pilot’s elbow on such road.”

Inner Child chirped with alarm, but Donovan maintained the scarred man’s composure. “The Tightrope,” he said casually. “No wonder you snatched a monoship. Anything bigger couldn’t take that road.”

“A narrow way, but correspondingly swift,” his kidnapper said in Gaelactic, “as Shree Bernoulli commanded. And speed is of the essence. Urgent matters await us on Henrietta, and the game is worth the candle.”

Donovan cocked his head attentively, but Olafsdottr did not elaborate on the nature of the candle. The Pedant volunteered that Henrietta was the sector capital of Qien-tuq, in the Confederal borderlands. Once in the Confederation, escape would become problematical. Some prisons were as large as a Spiral Arm.

“I’ve heard it said,” Donovan suggested, “that the speed of space on the Tightrope is so great that one can cross the Rift standing still.”

“Ooh, that is exaggeration, I am thinking! But the walls are close and the subluminal mud encroaches on the channel. It is a bad way and a treacherous one. But one unpatrolled by League corvettes.”

“Sounds like a good reason to seize control of the ship before you get us on it.”

“Ooh,” said Olafsdottr, “you are a foony man, for sure. Should I kill you now and save myself soospense?”

Donovan grinned. “You won’t do that. You went to all that trouble to sneak into the League, nab me, and commandeer a handy ship when you could have injected me with something fatal and been done with it. That means you plan to keep me alive, and that means you’re taking me somewhere. I’m a valuable cargo.”

“Valooable,” Olafsdottr admitted, “but noot priceless. Doon’t make your inventoory coost greater than you be woorth.”

That evening, before he turned the lights out, the scarred man removed a particular hologram from his scrip and studied on it.

Four figures sat at an outdoor café table on the sun-lit cobbles of the Place of the Chooser, the great public square in Èlfiuji, in the Kingdom on Die Bold. Bridget ban sat in the middle turned at three-quarters but with her head fully facing the imager. Her smile, broad; her eyes seducing the viewer; her red hair captured in mid-flight, as if she had just then tossed her head to look at the artist. Her left arm draped Little Hugh’s shoulders; her right hand covered The Fudir’s on the table. Greystroke’s hand rested on her shoulder.

A fellowship, and a good one. He missed them all terribly. The four of them back then had been in search of the Twisting Stone, and the singular tragedy was that they had found it.

“She’s not expecting us on Dangchao, you know,” Donovan told himselves after restoring the image to his scrip and speaking the lights out. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit her. She won’t know it when we don’t show up.”

Oh, the harper will know, said the girl in the chiton. She knew we were coming before we knew it.

“It was going to be a surprise,” the Fudir whispered.

No surprise now. No expectation of the harper’s broad and welcoming smile. No possibility that the daughter’s smile would infect the mother. The fellowship in his hologram had been broken, and broken by his own actions. He had abandoned them, had abandoned Bridget ban, with no word and no explanation. One such desertion might be reparable; two would never be, and even the harper could lose her smile.

Unless he could take the ship from Ravn Olafsdottr.

Snug in his bunk, neatly boxed into the wall, Donovan discovered that the bunk was not especially user-friendly. It was a little short, for one thing, and not very comfortable for another. Of course, the Rightful Owner would not have dossed here, so its discomforts mattered little.

Except to the scarred man. Between the thin pad and the short length, he turned and twisted in pursuit of an elusive relaxation. Perhaps a thicker pad would have settled him; perhaps not. But one of the twists—or one of the turns—brought him against the panel that formed the inner side of the bunk; and the pressure must have been just right, for something went snick or click and the panel slid aside, and Donovan fell off the bunk on a side that he hadn’t known it had.

He found himself in a narrow passageway between the wall of the ward room and the wall of the utility room next to it. There were pipes, ducts, and cable runs, as one normally finds in walls; but there was also crawl space and, here and there, shelves and bins. Inner Child glanced quickly fore and aft, saw nothing in the darkness, but kept watch—for seeing nothing in the dark was hardly a comfort to him.

Oh-ho, said the Sleuth. The Rightful Owner was a smuggler. There are probably caches, passages, and hidey-holes like this all through the ship. Tyrants and democrats had escaped the people’s wrath cocooned in such ships. Secret treaties and covert agreements had traveled secure in their bosoms. Prototypes and patents had been hustled to subsidiaries—or competitors—on sundry worlds.

After this fortuitous discovery, the scarred man took to wandering the monoship at odd hours, investigating its nooks and crannies. He wondered how long the ship had been in Olafsdottr’s possession. She might know of the nooks, but perhaps not of the crannies.

He began to plan his takeover of the ship.

Using the secret passages, he could make an end-run around Olafsdottr’s security and come upon her from an unexpected direction. But this was easier imagined than executed. Her reflexes could not be markedly inferior to his own, nor her mastery of the arts martial. His main advantage was that she did not wish to damage him, and this might cause her to hold back if it came to that.

But the two places where Olafsdottr spent most of her time were the two places where the passages did not run. First was the pilot room, which was too small and cramped for a struggle in any case, or at least for any struggle that included a survivor. The second was her sleeping quarters, where she was most vulnerable, but which was inaccessible from the hidey-holes that otherwise Swiss-cheesed the ship. Not all the caches connected. To approach her sleeping quarters meant crossing the spinal corridor, and that was alarmed by her ad hoc security system. It was not an impossible task to circumvent the system, but it would require de-activating several sensors; and that deactivation would in itself constitute an alarum.

Olafsdottr continued wary in his presence, and when they ate together, it was at arm’s length. In exasperation at the blandness of her cooking, Donovan one day programmed a dinner of Chicken Joe Freezing that had a bit of a bite to it, but Olafsdottr would not taste of it.

“Who knows what wicked spices you have rubbed into that poor hen?” she asked. And never mind that the meat from the protein vats had never gone through the formality of actually having once been a hen.

But even when he had divided his own serving in two and offered her the choice of halves, she demurred, and he wondered if it was not the spiciness itself rather than the possibility of being drugged that put her off.

“I am wounded,” he said, “that you do not trust me.” Later, he vomited the poison in the ward room’s lavatory. Taking the antidote beforehand was risky in any case, and he resolved to find another tactic.

Olafsdottr allowed him some limited exercise time. “Idle hands, devil’s tools,” she explained, and led him to a fitness room equipped with a variety of machines. Donovan expressed his amazement and gratitude and did not hint that he had already seen the room. The mirror on the back wall was one-way and provided anyone in the passage behind it with an excellent view.

Olafsdottr stood as usual in the doorway, and made helpful suggestions for his exercise regimen. The Brute especially enjoyed the workout, and the Silky Voice used it to work on her enzyme control. But at the conclusion, as he was toweling off, he noticed a handled insert used as a shim for changing clearances on the machine beside him. Save that it was not sharpened, it would make a fine knife. He pulled it out as if to change the forces on the pulley, and found that it had good hand-balance.

Without turning, he threw it at Olafsdottr. The Confederate twisted sideways and snatched it out of the air. She examined the slug of steel in her hands, then looked at Donovan and grinned. “You like play catch?” She slung it back at him on a flat trajectory aimed at his face. “More fun with knives,” she added.

The Brute dropped into a crouch and, thrusting his hand up, grabbed the handle as it passed overhead. “Careful,” he said. “Ya don’t want ya should break the mirror. That’s bad luck.”

As he rose, he sent the shim spinning back to Ravn. The courier spun to her left and somehow directed the pinwheeling slug back toward Donovan with barely a twitch to its motion.

Inner Child heard a sound behind them and stepped aside, so that the Brute very nearly missed catching the projectile. He tossed the shim up, caught it by the flat of the blade as it fell, and threw it on a long, lazy turn-and-a-half toward his captor.

“Oh, excellent move,” the Confederate said. She had to sidestep and reach behind, since the shim was coming at her blade-first. She returned the shim the same way. “But ‘crouching-ape’ catch better.”

On the next round, though, as the shim hurtled toward her, an alarm tripped and a series of sharp chimes sounded through the ship. The Ravn jerked her head around, remembered in time the deadly projectile, and dropped “boneless” to the floor, striking with the flats of her hands to reduce the impact.The shim shot through the space her skull had occupied and rang against the wall across the hall from the doorway.

She had rolled on falling, of course—The body has reasons the mind stops not to ponder—and she came out of the roll into a crouch onto the balls of her feet just as Donovan reached her. Her teaser halted the scarred man an arm’s reach away.

“Ooh, that was very clayver, sweet. You play me friendly game of threw-the-knife and betray me at crucial mooment. You play me, and not shim.”

Donovan held his hands where she could see them. “What betrayal? I ran over to see if you were all right.”

“Noot even scratch, darling. How you kick oof mootion sensor from here?”

Donovan shook his head. “Must have been a malfunction. Your whole system is jur yrigged. I’m surprised you haven’t had false positives before now.”

By the guarded look on Olafsdottr’s face, he judged that there had been previous false positives, perhaps while he had been in suspension. He said nothing, preferring that any doubts about system reliability be spread by her own mind.

The Confederate waved her weapon. “You go before me. Left at refectory.”

The scarred man did as was told. Idea, the Sleuth said.

I hope it’s better than playing catch with a blunt instrument.

Quiet, Silky. The Ravn’s got a “no-not-me.” It damps the motion sensors in her vicinity. If we can steal it, or the Fudir can duplicate it, we can sneak up on her when she’s asleep, not set off the alarms.

Oh sure, thought the Fudir, Olafsdottr will give me the run of the machine shop.

They had reached the T-intersection. The long stem of the T ran past the ward room and the closet in which he had first awakened all the way to the exterior air locks. The crossbar led to the refectory and, beyond that, the pilot’s saddle. Olafsdottr looked down each corridor, pursing her lips.

The alarm came from here, the Sleuth concluded. There must be a location code in the alarm pattern. The long and short beeps.

Dissatisfied, Olafsdottr marched Donovan back to the ward room. “You be a good buoy,” she said, “and stay in room.” And she closed and uselessly locked the door.

Travel time between stars was long—weeks, sometimes even months, depending on the local speed of space—and there was little to engage the attention save when entering and leaving the Roads. Consequently, the ward room was well-stocked with what the great ‘Saken philosopher Akobundu had called “the grand continuum of culture”—literature, music, art, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanities, and the intoxication of the senses—though the Rightful Owner’s tastes seemed to have run more to the lower strata of that continuum. There were seven cardinal sins, Bridget ban had once told him—and the entertainment center catered to no less than five of them.

More entertaining by far, the Fudir was able to use the play deck to hack into the ship’s navigational system, from which he learned that they would be a fortnight on the Newtonian crawl through the high coopers of Abyalon. Olafsdottr would not resume the pilot’s saddle for a while. What better time for taking the ship?

Of course, if he realized that, so did his adversary. She would be more alert than ever during the next week and a half.

And so, Donovan set himself to learn about the Rightful Owner. He had no guarantee that such an education would gain him an advantage, but there was a chance that the monoship had additional capabilities of which Olafsdottr was as yet unaware, some capability he could use against her. A weapons cache, perhaps. As far as he knew, Olafsdottr’s teaser was the only formal weapon on board.

Of informal weapons, there were of course a plenty.

Time was growing short. After Abyalon, came the Megranome crawl. And after Megranome, the Tightrope branched off and it would be too late to turn back. There was no exit off the Tightrope until it debouched onto Confederate space at Henrietta.

The evening after the Fudir had ferreted out the name of the Rightful Owner—Rigardo-ji Edelwasser of Dumthwaite, Friesing’s World—and the refreshingly honest name of his company—Bonded Smugglers, LLC—Donovan won the game of waiting.

“It does not grow, does it?” Olafsdottr said from her usual cautious post at the door between the refectory and the pilot’s saddle. She had of course eaten earlier, and stood by now while Donovan did the same.

The scarred man had programmed a meal of tikka and naan, and ate noisily and sloppily, using the naan as mittens to pick up the chicken pieces. He looked up at her. “What doesn’t?”

“Your hair. It never grows.”

Donovan scowled and ran his hand along the tufts that spotted his scalp. “Oh, yes missy,” he said in the Terran patois. “Names very budmash fella, but save him this-fella plantion haircuts.”

Olafsdottr nodded gravely. “I have heard this tell. You have soofered much.” She reached forward, almost as if to touch the scars in Donovan’s hair; but he pulled back, and she was not so foolish as to lean closer.

“Great harm,” she continued in doleful tones, “and I speak as one expert in great harm. You are not the only shadow agent to feel the nettles of their whims. It is a poor master who beats his dogs. Beat them too much and they will turn on him, as some of us now have. There is a struggle in the Lion’s Mouth.”

Donovan grunted and applied himself to his naan.

“Do you understand what I have said?” Olafsdottr said.

He looked up, his mouth dripping. “And what is Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?”

His captor seemed uncertain of the Terran reference. “Do you know the Lion’s Mouth? I have been told that your memory is . . . uncertain.”

“You mean ‘wiped.’ It’s your version of the Kennel where the Hounds train, except you breed rabid dogs.”

Olafsdottr crossed her hands over her breast. “You wound me, Donovan-san. Am I a mad dog? Well, perhaps so.” She spoke more intently. “Some of us are mad enough to challenge the Names. There is civil war among us.”

Donovan returned his attention to his meal. “Good luck then to the both of you. Let me know how it turns out.”

“We are bringing home all agents from the Periphery.”

“You’ve made a mistake then. We’re not an agent. We’ve been retired.”

“Ooh. Our retirement plan is very singular. There is oonly one way to retire.”

Donovan did not ask her what that one way was. “You forget that Those of Name discarded us.”

“Then when you join with us you may take your revenge for that, and sweet will be the taking, I think.”

“Very sweet, but I had it in mind to watch from the sidelines. Revenge is a dish best served cold—and by someone else.”

Olafsdottr shook her head. “No sidelines this fight. No boundaries, no rules.”

Donovan wiped up the last of his sauce and stuffed the naan in his mouth. He had gotten hints of this last year from Billy Chins. “How many of you are in it?” he asked around the bread.

“Almost half have lit the lamp.”

“Almost half . . .” He swallowed. “Oh, that’s encouraging. Half the Lion’s Mouth against a regime in power since the cows came home, with total control of the police and the . . . What of the ‘boots,’ the military? Where do they stand?”

Ravn cocked her head. “Some among them,” she allowed, “may know a civil war is broken out. But if so, they have not wagered sides. We conduct this war as we always have—with stealth, with intrigue, with assassination. There are no bloody battles; no planets bombarded. No great stupid mobs rushing about shooting at one another . . . and missing.”

“Not yet, anyway.” Donovan tossed his napkin into the fresher and took his dishes to the sink, where he scraped the remnants into the recycler. He turned abruptly and faced her. “Why me?” he said. “What good would I do the rebellion? I’m a broken old man.”

“Not so old as that; and broken pieces have the sharpest edges.”

A facile response, but Donovan thought it sounded rehearsed. That her people meant to use him in some manner, Donovan had no doubt; but in what manner, he was as yet unsure. Perhaps as no more than a knife thrown by one side at the other.

“You think on what I have told you, Donovan,” Olafsdottr said as she marched him back to his nominal prison cell. “You will see it is the right thing to do, and you and I will be famous comrades.”

That argument, more than any of the others, planted caution in the heart of Donovan buigh. For he had never heard an agent of Those of Name cite “the right thing to do” as an argument in favor of anything.

The next day, the Fudir broke Rigardo-ji’s security code and entered the smuggler’s files. These proved as dull as any collection of legitimate invoices, as the sundry planetary and state governments around the Periphery were notional in what goods they chose to blockade. During the Great Cleansing, the peoples of Terra had been scattered widely on the hither side of the Rift and unequally gifted as regards terraformation. Some worlds had in plenty what others lacked entire. Thus, it was worth a rich man’s purse to smuggle boxes of oatmeal cookies from Hawthorne Rose to Ramage, or tobacco sticks onto Gladiola. The lascivious art of Peacock Junction was forbidden on Jehovah, while ‘Cockers read Jehovan tracts by flashlight under their blankets.

The smuggler’s most recent invoice was for the delivery to Foreganger Prime of a secret protocol entered into by Abyalon with the People of Foreganger. He had been returning to Abyalon with the chopped protocol—and a gift called “the Frog Prince” from the People to the Molnar of the Cinel Cynthia.

THE PEOPLE’S NAVY SWORE REVENGE ON THE PIRATES OF THE HADRAMOO, THE PEDANT REMEMBERED, AFTER THE HIJACKING AND MASSACRE OF THE TOUR LINER MERRY V STARINU, FOUR STANDARD YEARS AGO.

Perhaps the gift is a peace offering.

The Fudir was doubtful. “The People of Foreganger make peace on their own terms, usually after some notable vengeance.”

“One way or the other,” Donovan said, “Foreganger won’t be happy that their present was hijacked along with the courier’s ship. Pedant, where was the Starinu hijacked?”

OFF ABYALON.

How much you want to bet, said the Sleuth, that this “Frog Prince” is some sort of vengeance weapon that Abyalon hired from the People to use against the Cynthians?

“No bet,” said Donovan.

A bomb, do you think?

“Wonderful,” said the Fudir. “A bomb on board. We didn’t have near enough problems.”

If we can find where it’s stashed, the Brute suggested, we maybe can use it to knock off Olafsdottr and take the ship from her.

“If it’s a big enough bomb to take out the Molnar,” Donovan pointed out, “it’s too big to set off aboard a monoship. A take-over weapon has to be one that can kill or incapacitate the Ravn without killing or incapacitating us.”

<Someone in the room!> cried Inner Child.

The scarred man swung abruptly away from the holostage, saw nothing, turned the other way.

More nothing. The ward room was empty.

Where did you see it, Child?

<From the corner of our eye. To the right of the stage.>

“Sleuth, you and Fudir check it out.”

The Fudir took control of the scarred man and went to the back wall, where the nautical instruments were mounted.

The wood paneling was genuine, and done up in a basket weave pattern of vertical and horizontal slats, so that the wall seemed some vast sort of wickerwork. The Fudir glanced toward the console’s swivel chair. If Inner Child had glimpsed something in this direction . . . The Sleuth did the geometry . . . it would have stood approximately—here. He ran his hands along the interstices.

You’re thinking a secret door, ain’t ya, Sleuthy.

It was a logical deduction, and logic was the Sleuth’s forte. A smuggler’s ship would be riddled with such things. The Fudir’s explorations had already found secret cabinets with jewels and stolen artwork intended for clandestine delivery in the Old Planets. Nothing to use as a weapon, except perhaps for the Peacock vase.

I just thought of something, said the Sleuth.

And you’re gonna tell us.

The road to the Hadramoo splits off here at Abyalon. What happens if we don’t deliver this “Frog Prince” thing to the Molnar?

Who cares?

No, I don’t mean what will the Molnar do. Or even what will the Abyalonic Council or the People of Foreganger do. I mean, what will the “Frog Prince” do?

The scarred man paused in his examination of the wall. If the Abyaloni and the People were deploying a vengeance weapon against the Cynthians, there might be a delicate matter of timing involved.

As in time bomb?

<That could kill the messenger.> “Abyalon wouldn’t agree to that,” the Fudir muttered.

“Foreganger might,” Donovan replied, “without telling Abyalon.”

Wonderful. If the Frog Prince were a bomb set to detonate when it reached the Hadramoo and Olafsdottr took the ship to Megranome Road instead, the thing would detonate instead when they were on the Tightrope.

Who says it’s on a timer? asked Pollyanna. Or even that it’s a bomb?

<Right. It could be poison gas. Something, you give it to the Molnar and he opens it, and—poof—he’s dead.>

If Silky had not heightened the scarred man’s senses with a cocktail of enzymes, he might not have felt the light puff of air that wafted from between two vertical slats. If Inner Child had not mentioned poison gas, he might not have flinched from it. The Sleuth explored the slats with his fingertips and identified the edge of a door; once he had the edge of it, the rest of the outline followed easily.

No obvious handle. The Fudir began to push and twist the various instruments fastened to the wall.

It’s probably not booby trapped, Pollyanna said.

The scarred man hesitated.

“Pollyanna!” said Donovan.

She’s right. What sort of fool booby traps his own ship?

<A smuggler who has left for a night carousing in the Bar of Jehovah?> Inner Child suggested.

Nah. He’d set locks, not bombs. The Brute twisted the chronometer, jiggled the barometer, pushed the binnacle. It was only when he turned the knob on the compass that they heard a click and the panel swung gently inward.

“You can come out now, Ravn, dear,” he cooed.

But no one stepped forth and, when Donovan entered he saw it was not a cache but a passage. The back wall was a blind. To the right a short connection joined a second passage that seemed to run lengthwise up the ship—probably the one behind the cabinets. To the left was a narrow corridor and it was from that direction that he heard the soft sound of a closing latch.

Inner Child edged around the blind, saw that the passage was empty, and crept gingerly through it. The Fudir made no sound with his footfalls; even his breath was still as death.

Was this an elaborate ambush? But Olafsdottr had no need of ambushes. She could have executed him at any time since bringing him aboard. She was keeping him alive because her side wanted to use him in their civil war. So what was this about? Just playing stealth games? There were more exercises than the merely physical, and boredom was a wondrous motivator.

The passageway made a dogleg and, passing through a second door, Donovan emerged into the cold well of the pantry, surrounded by cuts of harvested meats, vegetables, and juices in rows of low-entropy receptacles. The door he had come through had masqueraded as a rack of shelves.

Leaving the cold well, Donovan passed into the pantry. A wintermelon, an arm’s length long, sat on the carving board. Succumbing to impulse, he pulled a carving knife from the scabbard and holding the blade by the point, threw it from the far side of the pantry. The blade performed a satisfying somersault before sinking to its hilt into the melon.

By now, the motion sensors would have alerted Olafsdottr to activity in the pantry. But he had stayed out of the ambit of the room’s Eye. He re-entered the cold well and thence returned to the ward room.

“Well, that was entertaining,” the Fudir said when they had seated himself again at the play deck. “It seems our Ravn is a bit of a tease.”

<Will she wonder if a knife is missing?>

“She’d be a fool if she hasn’t kept inventory; and the motion alarm will pique her curiosity. It may puzzle her to find them all accounted for. I can only hope it drives her mad wondering what else might be missing.”

He awoke the holostage and noticed immediately that the files he had been reading were gone. A few minutes of searching failed to relocate them. So. Not just closed, but gone.

That was encouraging. It likely meant that there was something about the ship he could use against Olafsdottr, and he had been close enough to finding it that she had pulled it from him.

The bad news was that he did not know what he had almost found.

On the other hand . . . The Fudir stared purse-lipped at the hidden door, now also closed. “A roundabout means to get me away from the consol,” he muttered. “She could have waltzed in, held her teaser to my head, and taken the files any time she pleased.”

And that meant . . .

Something does not add up.

At dinner that evening, while Donovan ate a concoction of soybeans and bilberries, Olafsdottr announced that they would enter the Abyalon-Megranome Road in four days. Abyalon’s network of Space Traffic Control lasers was already pushing the ship toward the Visser hoop that was its entrance ramp. In the final sprint, the ship’s onboard Alfven engines would engage and grab hold of the “strings of space” and vault the ship over the bar into the superluminal tube. That would be a bad time to bother the pilot. Were the ship to miss the hole, it would exceed Newton’s-c in flat space and go out in a Cherenkov blink.

The ancient god Shree Einstein had decreed that nothing could move faster than the speed of light. But he had also decreed that space had no objective existence. And so, since it was no thing, space itself could move faster than light. At this concession, his rival, Shree Maxwell, had loosed his demons, and created convection currents within the aether of Ricci tensors, his Dark Materials shaping the network of Krasnikov tubes known throughout the Periphery as “Electric Avenue.” So while a ship hurtling down such a tube was still constrained by the speed of light, within the curl local-c might be arbitrarily high.

Nor could Shree Einstein see how his commandments had been flouted. The tube walls formed a Visser Skin, laminas of progressively slower space called the subluminal mud, which decoupled the interior causally from normal space. In a sense, a ship in the tube network was no longer “in” the universe, but “underneath.”

All this had been understood in ages past, in the old Commonwealth of Suns; and being understood, had been well-engineered; and being well-engineered, understanding no longer mattered. The formulas worked, and machines could be taught to work them. That was all a man need know.

On his return to the ward room, Donovan noticed that a steel bar had been welded to the outer door and, when turned on a pivot, would prevent the door from opening. Donovan raised an eyebrow to his captor.

“Simple means are ooften best,” she announced. “I have noot had a good night’s sleep since you awook.”

“If you don’t like my company, you can drop me off at the transit station in Abyalon’s coopers and I’ll catch the next liner back to Die Bold.”

Olafsdottr smiled. “You be a foony man, Doonoovan. I have said soo many times.” Then she ushered him in and closed the door behind him. Donovan heard the steel bar slide into place. A metric minute later, the door opened again and Olafsdottr stuck her head in. “Peekaboo,” she said. “Joost checking you stay poot.” She grinned, closed the door, and shortly the steel bar slid into place a second time.

The Fudir arranged pillows on the bunk and pulled the sheets up over them. Then he took up a station in the corner beside the hidden door and waited.

One reason why the scarred man excelled at the game of waiting was that most of him could sleep while the rest took turns on guard. Inner Child and the Brute stood sentrygo while the Silky Voice marshaled and concentrated the requisite enzymes. Genistein and isoflavonoids from the soybeans, anthocyanocides from the bilberries, she sent them off to fortify the night vision of the retinal rods. It would not be fair to say the scarred man could see in the dark, but you are what you eat, and it would not be right to call him blind, either.

After some time had gone by and the night was well advanced, the door slid open and Inner Child nudged the Fudir awake. A shadow slipped into the room, paused to assess motion, and flowed swiftly toward the bed on which the scarred man ought to have been lying.

Partway there, it paused in watchful silence and the Fudir noted a club of some sort in its hand. Then, apparently satisfied, it backed away and strode to the holostage, where it seated itself at the play deck. The scarred man slipped up behind it in the dark and placed one hand over its mouth and with the other plucked the club from its hand.

“Rigardo-ji Edelwasser, I presume,” he whispered into its ear.

Donovan felt the man stiffen, try to turn. “Nu, nu, nu,” he said with the Silky Voice. “Gentle, my good sir. Be not afraid. You are Rigardo-ji, the rightful owner of this vessel? Nod your head.” The head bobbed once in his grip. “I will release you, but you must make no move nor cry. I have destroyed all the Eyes in this room, citing my modesty, and she has assented by not replacing them. But we will speak in whispers, in case she has salted this room with ears. She is accustomed to my self-conversations, but speak too loudly and she might wonder if I speak with too many voices. Do you understand?”

Again, a single, spastic nod of the head.

“Good-good. We are in the same boat, you and we. There is no need to struggle.”

When Donovan unloosed his hold, the shadowy figure turned the operator’s chair to face him. “Are you a madman? I’ve been watching, and I think you are mad. That’s why she locks you in here.”

“Wouldn’t that make y o u mad? Why have you been lurking in the wainscoting all this time?”

“Am I a fool? A poor, honest smuggler, me, just trying to make a living. I’d been drinking and, when I heard her bang through the lock, I hid in one of my . . .”

“One of your hidey-holes. Go on.”

He shrugged. “And I passed out. Came to after we were under way. Guess she never realized I was still aboard. I figured out what she was, toot sweet, and I ain’t no match for a Confederal shadow. I didn’t dare try to take her on myself. ‘Sides . . .” The smuggler flipped his hands. “She was going the right direction, so there wasn’t no rush. I come out now and then just to check the headings. I figured if I just waited, something would come up.”

“And something did.”

“Yeah. You.”

“But you’re not sure about me, or you would have approached me sooner.”

“It was pretty clear you were her prisoner. That made you her enemy, but it didn’t make you my friend. For all I knew, you were Confederal bound, too, and you’d gang up on me if I showed myself. I overheard some of what you and her was saying, but I don’t speak birdsong, and I wasn’t always in a position to eavesdrop.”

Donovan stroked his chin and considered the man before him. He could see, even in the dim-lit darkness, the tightness of his mouth and eyes. “Why did you come out tonight?”

“I thought . . . it was time we made contact.”

Liar, the Sleuth said. He checked the bunk to make sure we were sleeping—and had a club in case we weren’t. But Donovan did not voice the thought. “You didn’t wake me. You went to the console,” he suggested.

“I’ve been dead reckoning. I needed to check our position, and it’s safer to do that here than in the control room. I been out a coupla times, but sometimes I have to cross a hallway and that sets off her damn motion sensors. How does she bear? The ship, I mean.”

“Four days out from the Megranome Road.”

“Oh.” The smuggler’s concern was palpable. “That ain’t good. We need to take the Biemtí to the Cynthia Cluster.”

“To deliver a gee-gaw to the Molnar.”

Donovan felt hesitation in the smuggler’s posture.

“You read through my work orders,” Rigardo-ji said. “I thought I snatched them in time. Look, that’s top secret—need-to-know—and the penalty clauses Foreganger lays down . . .”

The Brute tightened his grip on the smuggler. “Keep the voice down, I toldja.” Then Donovan said, “I promise not to tell the People. I scanned your current invoices, to see if you had anything aboard I could use as a weapon. Short of breaking a vase over her head, I didn’t find anything.”

“There may be something we can use,” the smuggler allowed. “There’s a consignment aboard what I can read between the lines. With two of us, we got a chance. I’ll go get it out. Then you distract the ‘Fed and I pot her. No offense, good buddy, but you’ve had three chances already to kill her and passed up each one.”

Donovan thought about it and reluctantly agreed that it had to be that way; not for the smuggler’s smug reasons but because if Rigardo-ji suddenly appeared from nowhere, Olafsdottr would recognize it precisely as a distraction. The element of surprise would be irretrievably lost.

“You’ll only get one shot,” Donovan said.

“I’ll only need one. But it’s got to take her by surprise. I would have tried something already, but I got no illusions. A microsecond’s warning and I wouldn’t even get the one shot.”

Donovan did not know how good a shot the smuggler might be. Yet many an eye and hand, steady on the range, grew uncertain when a living person was in the target hairs. Rigardo-ji sat rigid, Donovan’s arms upon him, eyes wide, stinking of sweat. Slowly, as if disengaging, the scarred man released him, stepped back.

“It will have to be soon,” he said. “Before we enter the Roads.” And before you lose your nerve, he thought but did not say. Words like that would conjure what they sought to allay.

“Tomorrow,” the man said. “After dinner. There’s a T-intersection where she takes you here . . .”

“I know it.” It was where the false alarm had been tripped the other day.

“There’s a panel, a storage space behind the cross hall. Sometimes, they bring containers aboard, up the long hallway, and I open the panel and they can dolly them straight in. It’s empty right now. I can make my way into it, wait there. You come past, turn up the long hall like you do. Your backs are to the panel. You stop her, get her to stand still. I slide the panel open and . . .” He made a gun of his fingers. “Pop. Pop. I got her.”

Donovan said nothing, and after a moment the smuggler looked at his fingers and self-consciously wiggled them, as if throwing the imaginary gun away. “That’s the important thing,” he said. “You gotta distract her while I open the panel or else she’ll hear it. I mean these are like cargo doors; they ain’t exactly stealthed.”

“In the back,” Donovan said.

“Safer, that way, don’t you think? I don’t wanna give her the chance. Confederal Shadows, they’re ruthless. I’ve read the stories.”

“Do you have something non-lethal, something to disable her instead? I know some people on Dangchao who wouldn’t mind getting her as a sort of house-present when I visit.”

“Dangchao . . . Who do you know on the Waypoint that would keep a Confederation agent as a house pet?”

“People who ask Questions.”

Rigardo-ji shrank from him and made Ganesha’s sign to ward off bad luck. “I shoulda known you was no ordinary prisoner. Yeah. Yeah, sure. There’s something in my stock. It’ll knock her out, but not kill her, if that’s what you want.”

Inner Child heard the scraping of a steel bar. “Quick,” he whispered through the scarred man’s lips. “She’s coming!” Donovan added, “Agreed. Tomorrow, after dinner.”

The smuggler vanished like smoke. The panel beside the holostage clicked shut. Donovan threw himself into one of the chairs and sat twisted on the cushions.

Olafsdottr opened the ward room’s door and entered just behind her teaser. Her left hand slapped the lights on and Donovan pretended to be flustered by the sudden light. He raised his head, as if he had been dozing in the chair, and shielded his eyes with his arm.

The Shadow, for her part, looked about the room, grinned, and said, “Good night, Doonoovan-buoy. You have a very crowded head, boot noo moor whisper. Sleep tight.”

The next day, Donovan waited. He read a book from the ship’s virtual library, but afterward he could not have explained what it was about. He participated in a simulation of the battle of Mushinro, taking the part of the doomed Valencian general Kick. It was widely assumed that Kick had the battle won and it was only his hesitation at a crucial juncture that had permitted the victory by the Ramage-led coalition. But Donovan’s attention was not on the simulation and his own hesitation at a different juncture lost the battle yet again. Only when the dinner hour at last approached did the scarred man realize the root of his unease.

He did not trust the smuggler, Rigardo-ji.

It was a small thing, but the devil, it was said, lurked ever in the details. There had been a hint of thuggishness beneath the fear, and there had been that moment when, simulating a gun with his fingers, Edelwasser had said, “Pop. Pop.”

Two shots.

A second shot just to make sure? Or a second shot to tie up the other loose end?

Or was Inner Child reading too much into it?

Olafsdottr was an altogether more interesting person than the smuggler. At dinner, their conversation ranged from the various modes of mayhem they each had mastered to the craft with which Aloysh-pandit arranged colored oils on the surface of still pools. Were it not for the fact that the courier was dragging him into a civil war of which he wanted no part and in which he would likely find his doom, he would have found her an agreeable companion.

On the other hand, years before, she had been tasked to kill him if he failed his mission. A close relationship, an intimate relationship; but not a cuddly one. Olafsdottr had a most pleasant smile. But she would smile while she cut him down.

They left the refectory together and walked down the short hallway in their usual parade: Donovan to the fore, Olafsdottr behind with her teaser to the ready. She no longer held it shoved into his back, but neither had she relaxed to the point of shoving it into her holster. “But I suggest you are wrong, sweet,” she said, continuing their conversation as if they had been amiable companions on a stroll. “The Roomie tradition of opera was much too bombastic. Their drama was too melo. The Nipny tradition was more spare, more elegant, more minimal.”

The scarred man allowed the Pedant to hold up the other end of the conversation. “You misunderstand the criteria. Grand opera and Noh have not the same objectives. One may as well assail the lemon for lacking the sweet of sugar cane. Each may excel—but toward different ends. It is only the values we place on the ends themselves that make one means seem less than the other.”

“Ah, but sweet, are not the weights we place upon our goals what matter most in the end?”

They had reached the T-intersection and had turned down the long stem of it. Donovan paused and said, “For me, the overthrow of the Names pales against one hour with my daughter in her home.” When he closed his eyes, he saw Méarana’s face before him, puzzled and hurt. He turned and faced his captor. “Make me one promise, Ravn.”

Olafsdottr stopped a pace short of him and tilted her head, birdlike, to the side. “And what is that, my sweet?”

“Promise me that if I go with you, you will go to Dangchao and tell Bridget ban and her daughter Méarana why it was I never came.”

“I am to walk into the enemy’s lair on such a lark? You ask much of me, Donovan-buigh.”

Indeed, he was. He could see down the length of the corridor the blank wall where the secret panel must be. The expression f i s h in a barrel came to mind. Rigardo-ji would have a clear shot down the entire length of the corridor, all the way to the cargo lock at the end. No one in the corridor could escape, unless they made it to the ward room, or into the closet where he had first been kept.

And that included him. A steady eye might pick off the Confederate without also hitting her prisoner, but Donovan knew in that moment of clarity that the smuggler meant to kill them both.

“Let’s go,” Donovan said, turning to resume their trek.

Perversely, it was now Olafsdottr who held him back. “What is the hurry, Doonoovan? You ask me to venture into the heart of the Oold Planets to accost a Hound? From sooch a journey even I may noot return.”

“Fair is fair, then. Isn’t that what you’re asking of me?”

“Ah, but I am not asking. Your condition is not a conditional.”

Donovan could not take his eye off the wall at the far end. He waited for the panel to open and death to emerge. “We can discuss this in my room,” he said.

And still, like an ancient hero, ankle tied to a stake in the ground, Olafsdottr remained in the line of fire. “Ooh. Soo anxious! Do you have a trap led for me in your room? What cleverness have you been oop to?”

But then she noticed that his attention was not fixed upon her, but upon the far wall. She spun and aimed her teaser down the hallway. “What is it, sweet? What wickedness have you wrought?”

In turning away, she had turned her back on Donovan buigh. The Brute took charge of the scarred man’s body and leapt for her, mounting her, pushing her to the floor. She buckled under his sudden weight and went to her belly and the breath woofed out of her. A moment, she lay still; and then she twitched and Donovan felt a burning tingle in his side.

And came to lying on the cramped bunk in the ward room. Olafsdottr sat, chin cupped in one hand, in one of the two soft chairs that gave the room its center. “Clever move, O best one. How you lulled me these past days! And had I lost my grip either on my teaser or my wits, success might have been yours. That would have been no good thing, either for me or for you, for behind me lurks another, my ‘second,’ who will act if I fail.”

She leaned forward and patted Donovan’s cheek, and when he struggled to grab her arm he learned that he was strapped into the bunk. “You stay here some few day, I think. Review error of ways. Soon we enter AbyalonMegranome Road. You no jog elbow.”

After the Shadow had left, Donovan engaged in some experimental struggles, but Olafsdottr was a professional. He did not expect much to come of it, and was not disappointed when not much did.

“You did not want to see her killed,” Donovan told himselves. “Why?”

It’s called a “stock syndrome,” the Silky Voice said. The captive comes to love his captor.

I don’t love that stick, said the Brute.

EDELWASSER PROMISED HE WOULD NOT GO FOR A KILL, said the Pedant. DID YOU NOT TRUST HIM?

“And our lack of trust was justified,” said the Fudir. “He didn’t show.”

<A different sort of betrayal than the one we feared . . . > “Yes, why did he not show?” asked Donovan.

A) He lost his nerve, suggested the Sleuth. B) We had the time or place mixed up. C) We were early. D) We were late. E) He couldn’t find the weapon he planned on using. F) He found it, but it wasn’t loaded. G) He . . .

Shaddap, suggested the Brute.

It doesn’t matter. Brute didn’t want to see her killed. Why?

Who sez? Was me that jumped her.

No, you shoved her to the floor to knock her out of the line of fire. Olafsdottr may realize something of the sort when she has thought about it further.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” the Fudir told them. “Rigardo-ji would have kept on shooting. He would have shot us, too, I think. I think he was planning to all along.”

Who says so?

<I do. I never did trust him.>

You never trust anyone, Child.

<I can’t see where trusting has gotten us much so far.>

“What do you say, Pollyanna?” Donovan asked. “You always see the silver lining in every dark cloud.”

The girl in the chiton was sitting on the floor next to the bunk. And you see the dark cloud around every silver lining, she said. This will all work out. Wait and see.

Donovan expected that the smuggler would return that night, using the secret panel through which he had originally entered, so Inner Child and the Brute kept watch through the scarred man’s half-slit eyes and listened through his ears. Some explanation would be forthcoming for the failure to act as promised, but Donovan was no longer sure he was unhappy with that failure. And some instinct had urged the Brute to protect their captor. The Brute was not a keen thinker, but his instincts were sound.

He heard a sound behind the wall, a banging or a clatter, and he pressed his ear against the bulkhead to make it out more keenly. It came at intervals, distant at first, toward the rear of the ship, but it seemed to draw closer, come adjacent to him, and then pause. There was no sound for a time and the impression slowly grew within the heart of Donovan buigh that something lurked on the other side of the panel, and that this something sensed his presence.

Suddenly uneasy, Donovan pulled away from the panel as far as the straps would allow. He exhaled as softly as he could, made no move, no sound.

Moments dripped by.

Then there was a clattering by his head and a moment later intermittent impacts receding down the hidden passageway. The scarred man began to breath normally. The sounds reminded the Silky Voice of a bouncing ball—if the ball were metallic and could hesitate from one bounce to the next.

A little later that evening, Inner Child heard the same sounds returning. He passed the sensations on to the Sleuth to puzzle over and continued to wait for the smuggler to appear.

But no one came to them that night, nor all the next day, nor the night after that.

He wondered if the smuggler had acted on his own after all. Maybe he had ambushed Ravn and taken control of the ship, and was content now to keep Donovan strapped into his bunk for the foreseeable future.

But on the third day, after the ship had entered Megranomic space and had begun the Newtonian crawl toward the Palisades Parkway, it was Ravn Olafsdottr who came to release him at last from his bonds. “Coome now, sweet,” she said, “you moost be hoongry.” She unlocked one hand, gave him the key, and stepped back.

“It’s a psychological trick,” the Fudir told her as he worked the key into the lock that held the remaining straps together. “That Alabaster accent is a comic’s affectation. Most of us in the League have been conditioned to regard hooters as flighty. That’s not exactly fair to the Alabastrines, who are as sharp or as dim as anyone else; and it is especially unfair to you. But it helps if your adversary underestimates your wit. And helps even more if they do so subconsciously.”

“You very clever, friend. How transparent this unworthy one, that you see through her so!”

“And the Manjrin makes you seem sinister.” Donovan, now loosened from his straps, stood up and rubbed his arms. Olafsdottr held out her hand and, after a moment, Donovan laid the key in it. “You didn’t have to pull them so tight, you know.”

“Yes,” she said gravely. “I did.”

“Anything interesting happen while I was tied up?”

Olafsdottr cocked her head nearly sideways. “Should something have?”

“Never mind.” He stepped past her. “I’m hungry. Let’s do lunch.” He didn’t wait to see if she followed, or if she held her teaser aimed at the small of his back. A teaser wouldn’t kill him anyway; not like a dazer would. But it could hurt like hell, and make you wish it would.

The scarred man rustled his own lunch: daal and baked beans and sautéed mushrooms, with scrambled eggs and cold, fatty bacon drawn from the cold well in the pantry. Olafsdottr recoiled from this concoction when he brought it to the refectory.

“Why?” asked the Fudir. “How do you break your fast?”

Olafsdottr toyed with her teaser, remaining out of reach of her prisoner. “What any sensible one eats. A soft-boiled egg enthroned on a cup with its large end sheared off, a small plate of fruits of varied colors—green melon, yellow pineapple, white wintermelon— arranged as to best effect. A cup of pressed coffee thick enough to stand a spoon upright.”

The Fudir regarded her curiously. “I would think espresso would be the last thing you would need. No wonder you always seem so wired. You should try Terran food some day.”

She regarded his lunch with disfavor. “Perhaps I will. Someday.”

“So, it’s been a quiet couple of days?”

“With you bound in bunk, how could it be other?”

Well, said the Sleuth internally, Rigardo-ji would not have taken her on by himself. He’s lying doggo.

As from a distant room, Inner Child heard the muffled sound that had bounced past the scarred man’s head several times during his detention. A glance at the courier showed that she, too, heard.

Best not pretend we don’t hear it, the Sleuth advised them. Keeping mum would invest it with more significance in her mind.

“What’s that noise?” the Fudir asked, twisting his head as if to locate it. “Something wrong with the ship? Maybe we ought to lay up for repairs here in Megranome.”

Olafsdottr smiled slowly, held it for a moment, then allowed it to fade as slowly. “Always carping the diem, my sweet. Perhaps you have set something rolling about the ship to convince me to stop for repairs and so give you an opportunity to escape. There would be no such escape, of course, but I will withhold the opportunity and save you the frustration.”

“I did all this while tied up?” Donovan said. “If something has broken loose . . .”

“Nu-nu-nu, sweet. You shall come with me to Henrietta. Great deeds await you. Tomorrow,” she added with a sniff, “make a different meal. This one stinks.”

But the malo deur lingered all day and the circulators could do nothing to dissipate it. By the next day’s breakfast both Donovan and Olafsdottr had drawn the same conclusion, very nearly at the same time.

“Not your food,” said Olafsdottr. “Stink come elsewhere.”

Donovan wrinkled his nose. “There is something familiar about it.”

“Agreed. But the nose is the most easily deceived of organs. It remembers well, but will not reveal those memories. Does not one of your shards have memory?”

Donovan was not sure how much Olafsdottr knew of his condition, but saw no reason to deny it. “The Pedant. But he remembers facts, not sensations.”

The Confederate sniffed. “Perhaps that which broke loose has caused something to burn out. Yet, it does not have the tang of burning.”

“It has the smell of rot. Perhaps the protein vats have gone bad.”

Olafsdottr viewed him with suspicion. “If you have sabotaged our food supply, it will be a long, hungry time to Henrietta. You very naughty boy, slip between the quanta of my notice.”

“We could go check the vats.”

“We? I should let you near the vats?”

“Because, darling, you won’t go check them yourself while leaving me free run of the ship.”

The Confederate stood upright from her post at the doorway. “Could tie you up again, but too much bother. Put away your breakfast things and come with me, then, and we see what new surprise you prepare.”

The protein vats were fully automatic and hermetically sealed. In them grew mounds of flesh cloned from highly regarded ancestors known as “esteemed cells.” The judicious metering of flavorings and odorants imparted the likeness and even the texture of poultry and pork, of fish and beef, of legume and root. Like begets like, chemists chanted, and so, fed upon wastes, the “mother” deep in the heart of each vessel enrobed itself in tissues like unto themselves, to be shaved off, harvested, pressed, pumped to the molder, and served.

The vat room was inboard of the Alfven drivers and forward of the impulse cage. The space was cramped and as cool as the cold well in the pantry. Despite the seals on the vats and on the conveyance hoses, odors slipped through the seams and teased the nose with the rich, earthy scent of potato and carrot, with the iron aroma of beef, with the dank stench of fish.

Beneath it all the sweetish smell of something else.

The ship’s architect had not supposed that pilots en route would have much reason to crawl around the vat room. Fresh bulk canisters were installed via external cargo doors at sutler stations and farmers’ markets in the high coopers. But neither was the room non-negotiable, since a pilot might need on occasion to refasten a hose or close a valve.

However, two people squeezing through the space was more than the architect had imagined. Olafsdottr eased matters a bit by reducing the strength of the gravity grids in the vat room by two-thirds, but she still crowded close behind him.

The stink grew worse behind the fish vat, and this was not due entirely to the faux-catfish accumulating inside it. Squeezing between it and the neighboring legume vat, Donovan spied one of the smuggler’s secret rooms, now wide open and lit. He paused in his contemplation to consider what he might tell his captor.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, said the Pedant. KEEP SECRET WHAT WE KNOW.

On the other hand, said the Silky Voice, there are tactical benefits to knowing that your opponent knows what you know.

Ow, Silky! My head hurts.

“Fudir?” said Donovan. “What do you think?”

“It may need all of us together to get through this. That right, Sleuth?”

Some data are still lacking. Add the facts together and there is still a hole in the middle; but . . .

“Ja, but.” The Terran withdrew from his position and sat under Olafsdottr’s calculating gaze. “What is it, my sweet?” she said. “You can tell Ravn.”

Donovan turned to her. “Follow me,” he said, “but keep your eyes peeled for someone else. We’re not alone on this ship.”

“Ah. I had begun to wonder.”

There was a torque wrench clipped to the fish vat for use in turning valves. Olafsdottr said nothing while he unfastened it, and that silent acquiescence to his arming was the loudest thing the Confederate had said so far.

“This is a smuggler’s ship,” the Fudir said, “and it’s honeycombed with secret rooms, passages, and caches. When you hijacked it, the smuggler was aboard, drunk, in one of those rooms. Probably this one. He was afraid to act alone—”

“A man of much wisdom, then.”

“So he solicited my help to retake the ship.”

“And, of coorse, you tendered it. Ooh. I knew you had been a nooty buoy. What befell, then, seeing I am still in charge?”

“He said he knew of a weapon aboard. Something the People of Foreganger were sending to assassinate the Molnar over a bit of piracy and massacre—”

Olafsdottr snorted. “The difference between the Cynthian pirates and the People’s Navy is a matter of the number and quality of the ships at their disposal. But say on.”

“I was supposed to distract you, and he would shoot you from behind.”

Donovan did not elaborate on that and waited to see how the Confederate would react.

Olafsdottr regarded him with the stillness of a serpent. The white of her eyes and teeth, so prominent against her coal-black skin, took on some of the seeming of ice. “So,” she said at last, and patted him on the cheek. “You are a good buoy, after all. When all is said and done, and the struggle is ended, I will personally escort you home and see that you are buried with all honor.” She gestured with her teaser. “Lead on.”

Much became clear when Donovan slipped behind the vats and entered the secret room. It was a small room, but contained a chair and table as well as an open safe. The Fudir thought it might have been used as a sort of den by the smuggler, extra room in an otherwise cramped ship.

I thought the smell was familiar, said the Silky Voice. The Brute and Inner Child immediately assumed guardian positions, listening at the ears, watching through the corners of the eyes.

Rigardo-ji Edelwasser lay sprawled on his back on the floor, arms splayed, mouth agape and bloody, as if he had been punched in the teeth by an iron fist. The wall behind the chair was spattered with blood, and bone, and bits of brain. On the table before the chair stood open a standard bushel-sized shipping container, and beside it a beautifully carved wooden chest, also open.

The chest was Peacock orangewood, from which skilled knifework had brought out vines and fruits and other figures. The interior was lined with silk over shaped foam dunnage, but it was not clear from the shape what it had once held.

Olafsdottr had crowded into the room behind Donovan and, like him, made no move to cotton her nose against the smell. “How long has he lain here?” she asked.

“By the odor and bloating, the Pedant says, four days.”

Olafsdottr nodded slowly. “And now you know why he did not appear at the ambush. A good thing, too, for I think he would have botched it.”

Donovan turned and looked at her. “Why do you say that?”

She pointed to the empty box. “He came to get the weapon and managed to kill himself with it. Such mishandling does not lend confidence.”

Donovan stared at the dead man, wondering if he had been uncharitable in his thoughts. Granted, the ambush site had been too well configured for killing both Olafsdottr and Donovan, but he had only the Sleuth’s deductions and Inner Child’s fears on that. “I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“But it does, my sweet; for where is the weapon that once sat in this wonderful box?”

Donovan had not been paying attention to the kill space, but the Sleuth and others had been.

He was sitting in the chair when he picked it up, said the Sleuth. It fi red upon his mishandling, and he jerked back, then slid forward, feet first. The weapon would have dropped to the floor and perhaps rolled a bit. There is not much room here for it to roll very far, yet there is no sign of it. Conclusion: the weapon is self-mobile. Based on the dunnage in which it nestled, it would be the size of a ruggerball—the ellipsoidal kind used on Hawthorne Rose.

Olafsdottr meanwhile had rolled the body aside, perhaps thinking the weapon underneath. What she found was a gaping wound in the back of the skull, as if that iron fist had punched its way out of the brain. “A bore hole through his head!” she said, bending over and looking through it. “Entry through the soft palate, up through the midbrain and the parietal lobe, and smashing out between the occipital and the parietal bones. Alas, his speech center is destroyed, so he cannot tell us what happened.”

Donovan grunted.

The Shadow shrugged. “I would have liked to question him. What was this weapon that so badly backfired on him?”

“It was called the Frog Prince on the shipping manifest.”

Olafsdottr grinned. “Busy buoy! And what be the nature of this ‘Frog Prince’?”

“We’re not sure. But there are Terran legends,” he said. “It was to be a trap for the Molnar.” He looked again at the smuggler’s body and the piercing wound through his head. “If I were you, and I saw it hopping about, I wouldn’t try to kiss it.”

Rigardo-ji was stupid, he decided. Like many petty scramblers, he could think from point A to point B, but not beyond it to point C. He had read between the lines and believed Foreganger’s present to the Molnar was a weapon, vengeance for the massacre of the Merryv Starinu, but it had never occurred to the treacherous little beast that the weapon had been meant to kill its user.

“So,” said Olafsdottr. “‘Tis loose.” She looked about the room and went to the door to listen. Save for the normal susurrus and hum of the engines, the ship was quiet. The pork vat, out of sight of the doorway, hissed and a valve turned with a heavy clunk. The Confederate, already strained to hear sounds, jerked a little, though only a little, and her teaser moved fractionally. “But so long as we do not kiss this . . . Frog Prince . . . we need not fear it?”

Donovan shook his head. “I would not hope so easily. It was designed to trick the Molnar into kissing it, but that trick would not have worked more than the once. It must have been designed, after the initial kiss, to seek out targets of opportunity in his stronghold—which I think to the People of Foreganger, that would mean anything on Cynthia that moved, man, woman, or child. It is the sort of boundless vengeance the People are famous for. Abyalon is more gently bred, and if word of this ever comes out, more than one national government there will fall. Meanwhile, we are in a pocket. We best back out and seal off the entry into the main part of the ship.”

In the silence that followed, they heard the distant clang of a leaping object.

“It must listen for sounds of life,” the Sleuth whispered through the scarred man’s lips, “and then home in on them. Quick,” added the Brute. “And quiet.”

It was a measure of the Confederate’s concern that she turned her back on Donovan to leave the hidden room, and he with his knuckles white around a wrench. It was a measure of his concern that he took no advantage. One swipe, he thought, and I will see my daughter, after all. And Bridget ban.

You would see them, said the young man in the chlamys, but could you look them in their eyes?

He slipped out of the room close behind the Confederate, and they moved cautiously from behind the fish vat, pausing to listen at each step. They heard another spring, closer this time.

It must leap like a frog, the Sleuth deduced, maintaining the metaphor. A certain artist’s pride informed the death-techs of Foreganger.

“If we can close the door on it, we may breathe easier,” whispered Olafsdottr. “His Highness may bounce around the hidden passageways to his mechanical heart’s delight, but so long as he is confined there, we need not fear him.”

“At least until it finds its way accidentally into the open part of the ship.”

She turned to look at Donovan. “You are the cheerful one. How?”

“It may not know from doors, but it might strike a jamb-plate by dumb luck. Unless you can deactivate… No? Ah, well, it’s a small ship, but there are too many conduits, chambers, channels, cable runs, hollow spaces. And too many spaces, openings, gaps, apertures give access. Eventually, Froggie will find his way through.”

A relief valve hissed and Donovan jerked, accidentally striking a standpipe with his wrench. The clang reverberated though the piping and, on its diminution, they heard the bounding sounds of the Frog Prince stop, then increase in frequency. It was no longer hunting a direction; it had found one. “Quick,” he said, and pushed Olafsdottr on the rear.

They scrambled now, not bothering with silence. Donovan wondered if the Frog Prince would deduce from the sounds the direction they were headed and cut them off.

Olafsdottr reached the door and pulled herself through. The gravity grids on the other side were set to normal, so she stumbled, and momentarily blocked the exit. For an instant, Donovan wondered if she would slam the door in his face to ensure her own safety.

But it had never been her intent to destroy Donovan. And that explained his own prior hesitations. Had she planned to kill him, he would have had no qualms about striking first. But her goal had been to deliver Donovan hale to Henrietta. That he was disinclined to go there, or that whatever befell afterward was bound to be hazardous, was not grounds enough to justify a cold-blooded killing.

Yer just outta practice, the Brute suggested.

“Hurry, sweet!” said Olafsdottr.

And Inner Child saw to the left his majesty, the Frog Prince.

A squat and ugly thing, like a toad, but gleaming of chrome, with great blue piston legs and adhesive grippers, large black-lens eyes, its deep blue, black-spotted façade gore-spattered with Rigardo-ji’s brains. It leapt atop a conduit three arm’s-lengths off facing the scarred man. Its mouth opened wide, and made a long, deep rippling sound.

The Silky Voice, from her seat in the hypothalamus, flooded the scarred man with adrenaline. Time itself seemed to slow.

Donovan knew that if he turned his back to run through the door, he would be a dead man. His only chance was to face it down. With a wrench. It won’t fire a projectile, said the Sleuth. Trust me. And even the Sleuth’s voice seemed sluggish and drawn out. It will need to leap closer.

As if on command, the Frog Prince leapt again, and landed on a primary lock valve. Its face bore the fatuous, evil smile of a frog. Once more, its lips opened wide, and inside its jaws, a coil of memory metal unwound and shot forth like a lance of steel. Yes, he heard the Sleuth say, I thought as much, The metaphor is complete.

Even under normal circumstances, the Brute had been trained to lightning-fast reflexes. With the boost the Silky Voice was providing, he could move faster still. He swung the wrench—as it seemed, through gelatin. The long, sharp tongue arced toward him.

The wrench connected, and knocked the reddened steel ribbon aside so that it penetrated like a nail into the side of the poultry vat. That’s how it killed the smuggler. There had probably been an instruction: “Kiss to activate.” Rigardo-ji had never had a chance. The steel ribbon would have uncoiled into his mouth and out the back of his head. Likely, he died without ever knowing he had died.

The memory metal remembered and recoiled to its rest state. The Frog Prince leapt, pulled along by its own tongue. When it landed, it would tug itself loose and take another lick.

Donovan turned to the door.

And Olafsdottr was crowding in, blocking his escape.

His cry emerged as high-pitched as a bat’s, so far into overdrive was he. Olafsdottr brushed him aside with her right arm. The Frog’s tongue lanced again. She seized the ribbon with her left hand, pushing it aside, as she had seized the flying shim during their workout, even as she fired the teaser with her right. She screamed.

“Serrated!” She released the tongue of steel, which with a lick swiped her across the side as it rewound.

But the teaser had found its target. A teaser fires a coherent electromagnetic pulse. At certain settings and focuses, it can play havoc with a man’s nervous system. Other settings can fry electronic devices. The Frog Prince flashed and sparked as the induced currents ran along its body and internal circuitry. Its head turned toward Donovan. The mouth opened . . .

. . . and smoke came out.

The Brute threw the wrench and it spun into the frog’s visual sensors, shattering them. But by then this was mere grace, for the bright blue of the Frog’s body was fading with its power source. Donovan found the wrench and used it to beat the machine into scrap.

When Olafsdottr awoke, she was lying on a pallet in the infirmary. Both hands were encased in restoration gloves while regressed cells rebuilt the torn flesh and snapped bones. Her side, where the tongue had swiped it, was likewise bandaged. To inhale sent a stabbing pain through her.

Donovan sat by the pallet reading a book screen. He looked up when she moved.

“Rib?” she said.

He nodded. “Two. And a deep laceration. What possessed you to grab the tongue like that?”

“I thought only to knock it aside. I did not expect a saw blade.” She raised the two gloves. “My hands?”

“The left one was badly sliced up. You must have grabbed at it with your right after you dropped the teaser.”

“I promised Gidula I would deliver you in one piece to Henrietta. Could not let Froggie punch holes through you.” She took another experimental breath. “I must praise your medical skills, sweet.”

“The meshinospida l did all the work. I just zipped you in the basket and followed the instructions. The automatics took cell samples, regressed them, and applied them in the proper course.”

“Ooh, but you had noo oobligation to deliver me whole. Or to deliver me at all. Foortunate, then . . .”

Donovan shrugged, studied his hands. “Look,” he said, “can we drop the Alabaster accent? We’re past that, I think.”

“Fortunate, then,” she said more quietly, “that you spied the Frog Prince in time, or we would both be dead.”

“Inner Child is paranoid. Makes a good sentry.”

Olafsdottr sighed. “It must be a wonderful thing to divide your attentions that way. I was told it had incapacitated you.”

“It does have its drawbacks sometimes.”

“How do you plan to explain the corpse to the Megranomese authorities?” she asked. “Or how you came by this ship?”

“It was his ship. He was giving us a ride. This thing broke out of its box. Missy, if between the two of us we can’t concoct a story to fool a Megranomic copper, we should both of us quit the Long Game.”

Olafsdottr cocked her head sideways. “I thought you h a d quit.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Almost, you tempt me, sweet. But I am unaccustomed to asking for help.”

Donovan grinned. “I’ve had practice. I’ll teach you.”

The answering smile was almost sad. “Sweet, between the two of us, we defeated a Foreganger killing machine. Tell me you are not the man we need for the struggle.”

Donovan sat back so that his head rested upon the wall of the little galley. He closed his eyes and his breath slowly gusted from him. “I’m not the man you need.”

“Sorry I am to hear that, for it would have been entertaining to watch developments. How long before we reach the Megranome way station?”

The scarred man shrugged. “The ‘o spidal had you in suspension for five days. We’re out of Megranome space.”

“Ah. You take me direct to Dangchao, then. Perhaps Bridget ban keep me in clean cage.”

Donovan rose, wiped his palms on his trousers. “You sleep now, ‘sweet.’ Your hands are too badly cut up to pilot the ship. I don’t have a certificate myself, except as a chartsman; but every chartsman is a pilot in training, and certificates are only for officials. We’ll be on the Tightrope in another two days.”

Olafsdottr struggled to sit up, winced at the pain, and slid back prone. “On the Tightrope?”

The scarred man, at the infirmary door, shrugged. “And don’t ask us why, because there’s not a single one of us knows the answer.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The scarred man appeared earlier in “On Rickety Thistlewaite” [January/February 2010].)

Copyright © 2010 Michael F. Flynn