Liaden Universe 18: Dragon in Exile Read online

  “That one had no honor.”

  “If you say so. Thing is, this way—she knows our faces; she knows we’re Port Security. If she comes in tomorrow with a complaint, as drunk as she was? She wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a lineup.”

  “She would, me.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Maybe I should partner with somebody less obvious.”

  This was Tolly’s humor, Hazenthull had learned. She was meant to laugh and forget. But, she had another question. A serious question.

  “Why do you not?”

  He grinned up at her, blue eyes glinting.

  “’Cause I like you, Haz. We make a good team. Were you really going to cane that drunk?”

  “I was getting bored,” she said, which was her humor.

  Tolly laughed.

  “Next time, I’ll make it march,” he said. “C’mon, let’s take a walk through the Emerald; get out of this wind.”

  The Emerald Casino had its own security. There was no reason for Port Security to perform a walk-through or any other check, there.

  Tolly liked the place, though, and every shift made sure that they walked through at least once. More often than less, he would meet someone he had known from a previous duty cycle or on another world, and they would exchange some words, or a bow. Early in what Port Security insisted was their partnership, of an evening when they had met no less than eight of Tolly’s acquaintance on their casino walk-through, she had demanded to know if he had held duty down the length and breadth of the galaxy.

  “Near enough,” had been his answer. “I started young, see.”

  “I, too, started young,” Hazenthull had replied, pleased to find this similarity between them, and thinking of the tests that had brought her out of the creche for extended training, in addition to basic weapons work. When at last she had achieved it, her rank had been Explorer, which had as its counterpart among Liadens, Scout. She had never heard that there were Terran Scouts, but she had lately learned that the troop had not known everything there was to know.

  “What was your rank?” she’d asked Tolly, this notion of Terran Scouts in her mind.

  He’d given her a smile, blue eyes flashing in what she had already known was mischief.

  “Specialist.”

  Explorers and Scouts were Generalists—they knew a little about a vast number of things. Specialists knew a very great deal about a very narrow field. They were important to the troop, and especially to Explorers. She had herself consulted numerous Specialists in the pursuit of her duty, but found that they were uninterested in anything beyond their narrow vision. They were not, perhaps, quite as stupid as Common Troop, but there could be no real camaraderie, as between Explorers.

  Or as between Scouts and Explorers.

  Despite his rank, Tolly continued to act more like a Generalist than a Specialist, and Hazenthull had at last come to terms with the discrepancy by deciding in her own mind that Command had required a Specialist and Tolly had tested weaker than the rest of his cohort in Generalist tendencies.

  “Afternoon, folks,” Herb, the midday bartender, waved them over to the bar. He often did so, to offer hot coffee and tea, “for their trouble,” as if this pleasure of Tolly’s was of service to anyone save himself.

  “Good afternoon, Herb,” Hazenthull said, looking down at him from her height. Herb, a sturdy Terran male, was broader than Tolly, but much of a height. She, a former Yxtrang Explorer, female and undergrown, still overtopped both.

  Tolly smiled, but she refrained, having noticed that, while Tolly’s smiles calmed, hers unnerved. She didn’t wish to unnerve Herb; she liked Herb, and respected his abilities with the blackjack he kept under the bar. He was not a soldier, but he knew his weapon and used it effectively.

  “Afternoon, keeper,” Tolly said, speaking the Surebleak dialect, which Herb did. “Every little thing going fine?”

  “I got no complaints. Wanted to let you know though, there’s a fella askin’ after a Tolly Jones. If that’s you, you’ll find him at dice.”

  “He got a description, this fella?”

  Herb shrugged. “Liaden.”

  Tolly laughed. “That narrows it down.”

  The barkeeper grinned. “Yeah, don’t it? Redhead, ain’t missed any meals lately, got a glitter-bit in his left ear; limps a little off the right leg.” He paused, considering. “No leather.”

  Leather on a Liaden meant Jump pilot, or Scout. Or both. Usually. There were those who were unwise enough to wear leather they had not earned. Port Security was sometimes called to officiate at the disputes between those false troops, and the pilots or Scouts they had insulted.

  But Tolly—Tolly had gone still; and his face had lost what she had considered, when they first were teamed, the smile of an idiot.

  She felt a prickle of energy between her shoulder blades. It had been . . . a long time since she had seen serious action. Though she enjoyed her sparring matches with Nelirikk Explorer and Diglon Rifle, there was a satisfying savor to facing a real opponent on the field that was absent from pleasant practice sessions with comrades.

  “Well, he don’t sound like anybody I know, nor anybody I got a hankerin’ t’meet,” Tolly said, smile back, and lean muscles loose. “Might be we’ll just go out the way we come in. That okay by you, Haz? If Herb’ll forget he saw me?”

  “No trouble there. Worst memory on port. Known for not being able to remember my own name, hardly.”

  “I have no objection to leaving,” Hazenthull said, disappointment replacing the pleasant anticipation of battle.

  “Great, then let’s do that. Thanks, Herb.”

  She held her tongue until they were outside, heading for the Surebleak Bazaar. “I will be pleased to stand at your back, when you meet your enemy.”

  Tolly looked up at her, frowning briefly before the smile flashed back into being.

  “Now, that’s real nice of you, Haz. But I don’t know that guy.”

  “You knew him,” she said, with certainty. “You froze like a soldier taking cover from a drone.”

  He gave her another look, neither frowning nor smiling.

  “It’s not a good thing, to lie to your partner,” he said slowly. “Especially when she’s smarter’n you.” He sighed. “Sorry, Haz; you’re right. I knew him. He used to have the ordering of me, but he doesn’t now, which is a fact he finds harder to accept than I do. It’s not a dueling matter.” A pause, then, “That’s what you thought I was going to do? Set up a duel?”

  “Or an ambush,” Hazenthull said. “I did not know in what way he had earned your displeasure.”

  “Oh, about a thousand ways,” Tolly said, in the light tone that meant he considered the topic closed. “But maybe none of ’em were killing offenses. Look fierce, now.”

  They went in by the Bazaar’s public door, showed their badges to the scanner, and entered.

  Though it, too, staffed its own security, the Bazaar and Port Security thought it wise that there be multiple patrollings up and down the busy aisles.

  “The more cops they see, the less trouble there’ll be,” said Port Security Chief Lizardi. It was a theory not entirely supported by fact, but Hazenthull had learned long ago not to quibble with Command.

  And, she enjoyed the Bazaar, with its distinctive aroma that was the roiling together of many diverse aromas, and its bright displays of foodstuffs, and carpets, and metalworks, juices, and wines. It was said that the planet Surebleak had nothing to offer anyone who did not live on Surebleak, but that was plainly not so. There were things here that the troop would pillage for; that soldiers would duel to possess.

  The aisles were crowded this morning; though way was made for herself and Tolly, and they completed a circuit in good time and order.

  It was then that they entered the second area: a common room, where those who had purchased samples of local food and drink might consume them, and where others might sit down and work out arrangements of sale, or where still others might rest quietly for a moment.


  The common room was considerably less crowded than the Bazaar floor. Hazenthull went to the left, Tolly to the right, marching in truth, making a show of detailed scrutiny of each occupant.

  “Yxtrang!” The scream was as raw as a war cry, and she reacted to it as she would have done, had she been on the field of honor.

  She spun, knees flexed, sidearm in her hand, scanning the crowd—it was all instinct and reaction; her body completed the moves before her brain recalled that she was no longer Yxtrang, she was a member of the yos’Phelium House Guard, serving under Captain Miri Robertson and Scout Commander Val Con yos’Phelium.

  She had him in her eye now—a man past the prime of his life, with lank grey hair, dressed in an insulated orange coat.

  “Yxtrang!” He yelled again. “Killer!”

  Carefully, she straightened to her full height, and slid her gun into its holster.

  “I am not an Yxtrang,” she said, trying for Tolly’s tone of calm reason. “I am attached to the household of the Road Boss, and I am employed as Security by Surebleak Port.”

  “Road Boss ain’t nothing but a killer hisself!” the man in orange coat jeered. “Allya oughta be shot for war crimes, or run off-planet. Start with you, since you’re here. Hey! Yxtrang on port! Who’s gonna help me, here?”

  “I’ll help you, friend,” said a calm voice. The sound of a safety being released was very loud in the quiet area.

  The man in the orange coat froze; Hazenthull saw the whites of his eyes.

  Tolly moved, gun pointed at the man’s chest.

  “What you want to do is put your hands on top of your head, slow and easy, or else I might think you were going for a weapon and I’d have to shoot you. That’s my first bit of help.”

  “Yeah, okay, I get it,” the man in the orange coat said with a grin. “Joke’s gone too far. I’ll be gettin’ on.”

  “No,” Tolly said, his voice hard, and sounding so un-Tollylike that Hazenthull turned her head to stare at him. “You’ll put your hands on your head and you’ll stand there while my partner searches you. If you don’t do that, I’ll consider you a high-level threat and I will shoot you. Got that?”

  The man stared, then, slowly, put his hands on his head. He was, Hazenthull saw, starting to sweat.

  “Haz, you wanna search this guy?”

  She moved forward, staying out of Tolly’s line of fire, and divested the prisoner of the weapon on his belt, and the folding knife in the pocket of his pants. Neither weapon was of professional grade, or even particularly clean. She patted him down, not gently, ignoring his, “Hey, watch it there; I need that!” and stepped back.

  “He is clean,” she told Tolly.

  He nodded. “Cuff him.”

  She shot a glance at him, saw his tiny nod, and stepped forward again to cuff the man’s wrists behind his back.

  “Hey, gimme a break! It was a joke, all right?”

  “In fact, it’s not all right to try to call a lynch mob down on a Port Security officer during her rounds. It’s not all right to assert that a Port Security officer in pursuit of her duty is a killer.”

  “Well, fine me, then! Ain’t nothin’ here for cuffs! Just playin’ a joke, like I said. Friend—” He stopped, and Tolly tipped his head slightly.

  “Friend?” he prompted.

  “Nothin’. Slip o’the tongue. C’mon, Security, get these things off me. I’ll pay the fine.”

  “Not my call,” Tolly said. “You can tell it to the Port Security Chief. You might find it interesting to find out how she feels about random port scrum calling down mayhem on one of her officers as a joke.” He moved the gun, very slightly.

  “Let’s go, Haz.”

  “Yes,” she said, and nudged the prisoner. “Walk.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jelaza Kazone

  Surebleak

  “She thanked me.”

  It was the first thing he’d said in over an hour, after a terse report of what had happened with Melsilee bar’Abit. He’d shut down after that. The pattern of him, that she could see in her head, gone dark and . . . off-center in a way she could see and feel, without being able to quantify.

  Not for the first time, she wished that the lifemate link was stronger on the details, and less . . . definite on the emotions. If there’d been anything useful to the punch in the gut she had gotten out of nowhere this afternoon—about the time, so she knew now, that he’d been ambushed—she couldn’t figure what it was.

  Knowing that he was upset—horrified, she guessed covered it—wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though she could probably have figured that out for herself, after hearing him tell it.

  What would be really useful, though, was if she had any clue about what was going on inside that twisty mind of his, while he sat silent, face averted, in the corner of the couch.

  Still, she figured it was a win, that he stayed with her, instead of vanishing into the music room, or the garden—or, worse, down into town—even if he wasn’t talking.

  And now he was talking again—and it was new information, which meant he’d been sitting there turning the situation over and over in his head, sifting through the details again—but that’s what he’d been trained to do, in every part of his life: as a First-In Scout, as the delm’s heir, and, yeah, as an Agent of Change. Details killed. Details saved. A smart man—and let there be no doubt about who wasn’t the dummy in the room—a smart man ignored the details at his very great peril.

  So.

  “She thanked you?” she repeated, soft-voiced.

  He turned his head to look at her straight for the first time in more than an hour.

  “When I first entered her cell, she rose, and bowed in acknowledgment of a debt, and she thanked me, for coming to her.”

  Miri blinked—and blinked again as she suddenly got what he was telling her. “So she knew you were going to kill her?”

  “Her whole intention was that I kill her. She planned the entire thing, meticulously.”

  “How’d she hide it from the Healers?”

  “That is where we see brilliance.”

  She saw tears start to his eyes; he drew a hard breath and looked away. When he met her eyes again, his were dry.

  “Melsilee bar’Abit began to meditate; the Healers report this. Very likely, she was meditating in order to reaffirm her purpose as the Department’s tool. Possibly the discovery of the protocol by which the Department imbeds the phrase that may be used to control . . . recalcitrant agents—possibly that was an accident. I am not, you understand, inclined to accept accident or happenstance with regard to anything touching the Department’s training.”

  “So she could’ve gone looking for it.”

  “Indeed. We cannot know if that was the case, and for the purpose of the final sum, it does not matter. She located the protocol, and she used it to embed a control phrase.”

  Miri nodded. An Agent of Change had tried to use a control phrase to bring Val Con back under the Department’s influence, way back on Vandar. Would’ve worked, too, except Val Con had done some meditating of his own and replaced the Department’s code with his own.

  “Once she had the control phrase in place, she used her meditations to hide what she had done from her waking mind. That procedure produced a trance state, which the Healers saw as tranquility, and calm.

  “When all was firm, she sent a message to me, with the control phrase embedded. She asked, after she had thanked me, if I would remind her why she had wished to see me. Whereupon, I gave her the phrase that released her to action.”

  He closed his eyes again. “I am a fool.”

  “No, you ain’t. She was a smart woman, and she didn’t have nothing to do all day every day except sit and think how was she going to get out of this mess she was in. You’d’ve done the same.”

  He looked at her, face bleak.

  “I would have intended to escape. Her whole intention was to die. She knew my level; she knew that she could not prevail in a confronta
tion between us. It was necessary to her purpose that I not withdraw before the telling blow had been struck. She therefore needed to guide my responses, which she did, until there was only one choice possible. The Fist of Malann . . .” He took a hard breath.

  “It was well chosen.”

  Silence fell again, though he seemed less . . . askew; more centered.

  That was a good thing. Good enough that she decided to push a tiny bit toward normal.

  “You want a glass of wine?”

  He smiled slightly.

  “A glass of wine would be pleasant. Shall we sit out?”

  “Why not? After all, it’s summer.”

  “A joke’s all it was, Chief. Guy gives me twenty cash, says to rib the big port cop. Call ’er Yxtrang, he says, that always gets ’er laughing. She’ll know where it come from, that’s what he said. Ain’t my fault her partner’s got no sense o’humor. You don’t arrest a man for having a joke.”

  Port Security Chief Liz Lizardi considered the man in the orange coat as one might consider an insect found in a half-eaten ration bar.

  “I might not arrest a man for having a joke. But I do—and I require my security officers to—arrest people who are inciting to riot and disturbing the peace of this port.”

  “Riot! I wasn’t no such—”

  “Shut up,” Commander Lizardi told him.

  He did so, his red face getting redder.

  “The actions of my security officers aren’t in question. They saw a clear threat to the peace and security of the Bazaar and they acted to contain it. That’s their job, and they did just fine. You, on the other hand—you’re ass-deep in slush, friend. What was the name of this fella with the sense of humor?”

  He shrugged, and jerked his head at Hazenthull, where she stood at guard by his side, directly before the commander’s desk.

  “Ask her; she’s the one s’posed to know all about it.”

  Commander Lizardi glanced at her. “Security Officer? You know who this guy’s talking about?”