Paradise Drift Read online

  Kalad led them onto a section of the floor decorated with a complex mandala. As the last of the party stepped onto the pattern the mandala lifted silently into the air, so smoothly that they felt no jar as it accelerated down the long hall that ran alongside their ship. Occasional viewscreens overhead gave them glimpses of the Drift as they passed, both outside views and tasteful advertisements for the various emporia.

  The trip was accomplished quickly; at the other end waited a Than with a dark green carapace that everyone recognized as signaling one of the warrior caste, and a young human woman wearing a long white robe much like the Perseids’ preferred wear.

  As they stepped off the mandala, this Than ran a wand over each of them as the young woman said, “Please forgive the security check, but it is a part of our contract. No weapons permitted on the Drift.” As she spoke, she glanced with pale gray eyes at the force lance hanging at Dylan’s side.

  “It is part of my dress uniform,” he said.

  The young woman touched a control on her sleeve, her eyes in-focused as she subvocalized, and then listened, and she said, “If you will remove the power cell, and surrender it to Resplendent Are the Seasons here, he shall take it into his own charge, to be returned upon your departure.” She indicated the Than.

  Dylan unclipped the force lance, clicked it open, removed the power cell, and laid it into the Than’s insectoid grippers. The young woman’s relief—and the Than’s—were almost palpable.

  Rommie stood, unobtrusive, deferential, at Dylan’s shoulder, and no one gave her a second glance once she’d been wanded; all the wand showed was the readout of a flesh-and-blood young human woman, temperature 98.6° F.

  “I shall conduct you to the Reception Chamber,” the woman in white said, bowing. “Please to come this way.” She hesitated when she saw Rommie step forward at Dylan’s shoulder.

  “My aide,” Dylan said, smiling, his hands open. “No captain goes anywhere without one, at least in my day.”

  The young woman glanced at the Than, then nodded once, and led the two away.

  The Than fell in behind them as escort.

  Kalad said, “Are any more of you coming to the Drift?”

  “Not on this cycle. You’ll be contacted for permission if any more are released from duty,” Beka said before Trance or Harper could speak.

  Kalad’s smooth gray face showed no change of expression as he reached inside his robe to an inner pocket. He gave them each an object that looked and felt like a coin, except for the tiny inset lights around the stylish Paradise Drift design, which featured a view of the planet Rigos.

  “This is the standard goods-and-services chit, cleared for diplomatic access, which includes communications.”

  Free corns. Beka and Harper exchanged covert looks, as Trance sweetly thanked Kalad. Just as Rommie had figured, but it was odd they’d not asked for names. Beka glanced at the chit; it had, of course, digital signatures for her retinal scan and DNA, but as yet there was no name or world of origin listed, only the ship, and a code series that she guessed indicated diplomatic clearance. Evidently that included anonymity in public—they could choose any ID they wanted, but the system would know their real identity. The system, and anyone with enough clout.

  “We can go everywhere?”

  “Except Star Chamber,” Kalad said, gesturing over their heads; they already knew it was the most elite of the gaming levels, a gambling den in which the stakes were usually amounts of money that could buy and sell entire planets. “If you desire access, you have only to apply to your captain, or to one of the directors’ aides, and furnish assurance of adequate credit.”

  Beka strictly repressed a grin when Harper, just behind Kalad, mouthed the words Like that’s gonna happen!

  “But I hasten to assure you that diplomatic clearance affords visitation rights to all but the purely functional levels of the Drift. Your chit will warn you when you accidentally venture near one.” His mellow, fluting voice was devoid of expression. “Have you questions? I am designated to accompany you if you so wish, or you may choose to explore on your own.”

  “I think we’ll explore,” Harper said, with a glance at the others.

  “Thanks,” Beka added, smiling as she pocketed her chit.

  Kalad placed his smooth gray hands together, bowed just enough so that his long, bony chin touched his breastbone, and then he stepped back onto the mandala and glided away, vanishing around a corner.

  The three looked around. Not that there was much to see. A bank of lift-tubes lay directly across from them; a holo display above, activated by their chits, furnished a directory of what they’d find on each level. Leading off to both sides were hallways, down one of which Kalad could be seen speeding away, when they ventured forward.

  Harper jerked his thumb down the opposite hallway, and snickered at the sight of Dylan’s stiff figure just vanishing into a lift. “Seems to me we’ll know just what Dylan will look like if he ever has to face a firing squad.”

  “R-i-i-i-ght.” Beka rolled her eyes. “Looks to me like this is the VIP level.”

  “VIB,” Harper corrected as Beka thumbed her chip and signaled the elevator. “Very Important Bores. We don’t want to hang with the vibbies. Dylan has that covered. Part of his job description, along with the force-lance and the stuffed-shirt uniform and attitudes—”

  “—not to mention command of the toughest battle cruiser in the Known Worlds. Our side, that is,” Beka put in wryly.

  “That too. Though I really wonder about that ‘our side’ part. No I don’t. That’s too much like work, and we’re here to have fun. My guess is, if we get busy now, we can be in and out of at least half a dozen fantasy-lands by the time he’s heard half the speeches, and drunk one glass of bad Champagne.”

  Beka laughed as the door slid open.

  “Why is the Champagne bad?” Trance asked, following them in.

  “It’s old Earth traditional at receptions, same as the rubber chicken,” Harper said, and when Beka snorted, “trust me on this.”

  “You wouldn’t know good Champagne if you fell in it,” she retorted. “Now, let’s leave Dylan to his rubber chicken and decide where first.”

  “Got it. Let’s check out the fantasy-lands Rommie promised us.”

  “How about a general scan,” Beka suggested. “Just to get an idea of the layout.”

  Harper shrugged, tapped his chit, got an invitation for “general index” and hit it.

  Lights flashed before them—lights and whiffs of an astonishing variety of smells. Beka, used to the relentlessly pure air of the warship, whose superpowered scrubbers had been calibrated for a crew of four thousand—often going into action—sneezed three times, and Harper snuffled absently as he gazed around.

  “Whoa.”

  Harper put his hands on his hips, staring as tiny nanolights offered a steadily changing list of pleasure emporia, from gambling dens to restaurants to a stunning variety of types of interactive theater, all in 3-D light images formed in midair.

  Trance quietly observed the other two as Beka and Harper tried to assimilate the astonishing number of choices. Finally, Beka said, “Look. There. ‘Main concourse.’ Everything else seems to branch from there. Let’s do that first.”

  “Great idea,” Harper said, waving a hand through the airy words. They promptly vanished. “Glad I thought of it.”

  The lift-tube engaged, the machinery so silent they knew they were transiting fifty levels only by the flickering of the location light above, plus the subtle sense of gathered acceleration in their midsections. But before they’d drawn more than a couple of breaths the elevator stopped, opened—

  Thunk! The sound hit first, a solid wham of low-bass musical judder that reverberated through chests, bones, and teeth as they stepped into a galaxy of whirling, glittering, dazzling lights.

  Harper opened his mouth, but no sound came out—at least, nothing Beka could hear. Both gazed around in stunned amazement, not just at the three-dimensional disp
lays but at the variety of people around them. Every imaginable variation on the human form strolled by, interspersed between Than with painted, glowing, light-blazing carapaces. Even Perseids, usually known for the uniform sobriety of their dress, wore elaborate masks and costumes of impressively different design.

  Harper craned his neck, hoping to catch sight of a Perseid clanking along in medieval plate armor, but so far, that was the single lack. Then a cluster of talking, laughing people approached the lift so they hastily moved away, still busy trying to comprehend the sensory assault around them.

  Harper assimilated it fast; Beka decided not even to try. She pulled up her chit and realized it was still registering “general index.” She thumbed swiftly through a few filters, then watched with a smile as most of the lights and noises vanished, leaving only a range of restaurants, choices in games and entertainment that might look interesting to her.

  Harper, meanwhile, was busy manipulating his chit; from the way his eyes darted around and he kept grinning, Beka suspected he was seeing a vastly different array.

  “Hel-lo,” Harper exclaimed, stopping.

  Beka looked up in the direction he was staring at, saw nothing, then stepped closer to Harper, touching her chit to his. At once his display rippled into view, overlaying hers: she looked up, unsurprised but considerably amused, at a sign written in extravagant, flowing letters:

  Ali Baba’s Harem.

  Harper chuckled. “Fourteen-course meals—exotic—served by the most beautiful handmaids in the Known Worlds, entertainment by exquisitely trained female musicians famed for their beauty as well as their talents—music, dancing women—”

  “Do I detect a common element here?” Beka asked.

  “Women?” Harper grinned. “I wonder how many dates I can get in before the Dylan’s speeches end. Want to make a bet?”

  “No chance. Put your tongue back in. Those women are probably trained first thing in giving the elbow to slavering maniacs of your type—”

  Harper laid his fingertips over his chest. “My type? There is no ‘my type’ except for me: genius, unique, talented, and tasteful. Therefore I’m just thinking of their welfare—those babes are in for a treat, and as I see it, it’s my duty to expose as many of them as possible to my genius—”

  “Expose. Right. That’s already more information than I wanted to know,” Beka retorted.

  Harper sighed. “Never any respect. So why am I wasting my time here?”

  He had left her holding his chit; he grabbed it back and was gone in the next breath, following directional arrows now invisible to her leading off down one of the halls toward another bank of lifts.

  “You have any preferences?” Beka asked Trance.

  “I like it all,” Trance said, smiling.

  “Whereas I want to finish checking the place out,” Beka said. “Call it ingrained habit.” She thumbed the shutdown on her chit’s retinal displays and popped it into her faraday, turning around in a slow circle to scan what was actually in view.

  Trance’s eyes rounded in surprise. “Are you expecting trouble?”

  “You’re brilliant at outguessing the odds,” Beka retorted. “What do you think are the odds there’s trouble lying in wait?”

  Trance did not scoff, neither did she deny. Instead she frowned slightly as she gazed at the costumed beings streaming past, none of them paying the two women the least heed.

  Beka turned her attention outward, wondering if her paranoia was overdone. She’d grown up on Drifts. Far worse places than the cheapest dive of a level this one had—if it even had any cheap dives.

  Trance put her chit away, and said, “I do think we need to be vigilant.”

  “Which is why I’m paranoid,” Beka muttered. “One thing I’ve learned is that the presence of money doesn’t always buy safety. If nothing else, our brushes with dear Uncle Sid have taught me that much.”

  Trance nodded soberly. She remembered Beka’s uncle Sid, who still seemed a rather smooth pirate even though he was now reported to be a high-level business chieftain.

  “Big money brings out bigger crooks—and more dangerous ones,” Beka said, glaring at a group of people dressed up as Nietzscheans, complete with fake bone spurs on leather gauntlets, their faces masked. What kind of games were they playing? Ugh. She did not want to know.

  They vanished into one of the lift-tubes. Beka mentally shrugged off the question, and continued her scan; old habit kept her from moving down the middle of the concourse. She stayed to one side, always with a wall at her back.

  Trance kept pace, entertained by the amazing variety of passersby She whirled and walked backwards a few steps, the better to take in the sight of a string of Perseids dressed in robes of diamond motley, tiny bells sewn into ribbons jingling sweetly at every step. Then she turned her attention to a row of expensive display windows extolling the delights of exotic foods from strange worlds, served in simulacra of the native habitats.

  Beka, watching the crowd and Trance, still felt the impulse to laugh at herself for her wariness, but even so she moved cautiously, her back to the displays as she scanned the companies of fabulously dressed humans, the brightly carapaced Thans, and now a cluster of scarlet-robed and cowled, whispering Perseids who moved along in a gliding step as if to some internal beat.

  She glanced just beyond that crowd of black-clad figures so like a troop of crows and, to her amazement, recognized a silhouette familiar from nightmares, so familiar that alarm burned through her muscles and nerves. Steelblade?

  Impossible! She was just mistaking some big guy for…

  Even as her brain yammered, she slid behind a tall Perseid for another peek at the tall figure in dark clothing moving silently down the concourse, his attention on his chit.

  “Oh, bell.”

  Trance gazed at Beka in mild question as she shook her head, evoking the complex muscle command that triggered the nanobots in her hair to change its color to a drab light brown. There were no doors in the vicinity to duck into, and anyway such furtive movement would surely catch the eye of one of the most notorious bounty hunters alive.

  Instead she adjusted her posture minutely, her shoulders rounding just a little, her back hunching, one foot turning inward, hands in her pockets, as she pretended to be absorbed in a display extolling the virtues of fresh warm slimegrubs served 121 ways by experts in Nastasian cookery, famed at San-Ska-Re, the Than home world. Trance stood quietly, her brow slightly furrowed, as though listening.

  A fine polished steel frame round the display holo gave Beka a glimpse of the bounty hunter she’d known only as Ujio Steelblade: yes, it was he. Tall, powerful, a long black coat hanging down to the tops of his boots—a coat probably hiding an arsenal of lethal weaponry even here—smooth copper-colored skin, long black hair clipped back, black eyes drifting over the crowd.

  She felt those eyes, just for a moment: felt the brief, assessing glance at her slouching body, her dull brown hair, and then he moved on. Of course he’d moved on. Why was she hiding? It was stupid to think he was here looking for her, just because they’d had an encounter—a very bad one—years ago.

  Still, she shifted her glance to the other thin steel frame, trying to watch the distorted figure saunter slowly down the concourse in the other direction.

  “Who is that?” Trance whispered.

  “Come on.”

  Beka moved slowly—forced herself not to run, or to hurry, despite that excruciating feeling between her shoulder blades, as if he was creeping up right behind her. She meandered in the opposite direction, even as she mentally berated herself.

  Memory: She’s back on Pilot’s Choice, a sleazy Drift cycling the Gauss system, and everyone in the gambling den has gone silent.

  She looks up. The tough, lawless gamblers are moving moving slowly away….

  She glances toward the door, and there is that tall, broad silhouette.

  And Ujio Steelblade walks in, and in the silence he says, “7 seek a Beka Valentine.”

&n
bsp; It was impossible history was repeating itself. Of course he’s not here hunting her down—

  And yet, she thought as a group of drunken spacers emerged from a noisy restaurant, why invite attention? For a moment warm, spicy scents surged out with the crowd, and she glanced at the sign that promised the ancient, strange cuisine of Scotland on old Earth. With the smells came sounds of strange music, the breathy tweedle of a reed instrument: bagpipes, she recalled, from a CD she’d heard in her childhood.

  From the flushed faces and laughter of this group, that cuisine seemed to include some exceptionally fine drinks. Beka motioned to Trance. The two slid in among the drunken spacers, completely unnoticed.

  Beka tabbed the comlink under her sleeve, and murmured, “Rommie, is there a way you can find out if anyone has been searching on my name?”

  A brief hesitation, and Rommie’s voice spoke directly into her head through bone resonance: “Not yet, not with the limitations on the protocols I’ve been given. And their encryption is better than I expected. But I hope shortly to be able to access more levels. I’ll add that to my queries.”

  “Thanks.” Beka tabbed the communicator off. One good thing about Rommie: she was a warship. She was designed to expect trouble, so there was no need to explain and excuse one’s paranoia.

  Satisfied with Rommie on the trail, surrounded by a crowd of total strangers, Beka finally relaxed.

  Though she still felt the urge to glance behind her, make sure Steelblade was really gone.

  FOUR

  Every stranger is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.