The Reaches

much for that to sound reassuring to her. 'He's a good friend to Commander Ricimer,' I said. 'Not a very good friend to himself, though.'

I paused to twist off a rose. Its deep pink glowed like a diamond's heart with the last of the sunset. I broke the thorns off sideways with the tip of my thumb, then handed the flower to Alicia.

She giggled and put the stem behind her ear. Flying creatures as big as gulls swooped and climbed over the river. Their calls were surprisingly musical.

Alicia turned at her cottage's new door-a panel of raw wood that Molt workmen had fitted the evening before. 'You're a very gentlemanly pirate, aren't you?' she said. 'You could easily have forced me to-whatever you chose.'

I shrugged. My skin was tingling. 'I respect you too much for that,' I said. I respect myself too much. Again, though I don't lie when I can avoid it, one chooses the particular truth he speaks aloud.

'A girl doesn't always want to be respected quite so much,' Alicia said. My arms were around her by the middle of the sentence, and my lips muffled the final word.

Near morning, as I was starting to dress to be gone before dawn, Alicia told me about Secretary Duquesne's personal cache of chips in a pit beneath the floor of the garden shed.

TREHINGA

Day 114

'Here's the whores you wanted, Mister Moore,' Lightbody said in a tone that could have been forged on an anvil. He gestured Patten and Vantine into the walled office I'd taken for this interview. Baer stood behind the women with a cutting bar.

Because the Federation soldiers wore trousers and had hired on to fight, Lightbody called them whores, thought of them as whores. He treated Alicia with the deference due a lady; and she was a lady, as surely as I was a gentleman, but the twists of Lightbody's mind disturbed me at a basic level nonetheless.

The Oriflamme fired a matched pair of attitude jets in the field outside. The hull repairs were complete. Piet and Guillermo were doing the final workup. We'd lift by evening, so it was time for me to act.

'You can take their hands loose, Lightbody,' I said. The women were filthy. Facilities in the slave pen were limited to a trough, buckets, and mud. Twice so far we'd had rain before dawn, and the yellow adobe clay was everything I'd expected it to be.

Were conditions reversed, Secretary Duquesne would have us hanged out of hand-unless he directed Patten and Vantine to torture us to death instead. I didn't think of this pair as whores. More like vicious dogs, to be trusted only in their malice.

Lightbody looked doubtful, but he opened the knots on the women's wrists with the spike of his clasp knife. He held his shotgun out to the side where the prisoners couldn't easily grab it. 'You'll want us to stay in here with you then, sir?' he suggested.

I shook my head. 'No,' I said, 'I want to have a friendly talk in private. Close the door and wait outside.'

The two sailors obeyed, but I could tell they didn't think much of the idea. To reassure them, I laid my cutting bar on top of the desk I was using, with its grip ready for my hand.

I'd chosen the office of the Clerk of Customs because the room was private and it had a large window. I wanted the light behind me for this interview. The clerk-the older of the pair who'd come out to the cutter initially- had decorated the walls with wood carvings. Molt workmanship, I supposed. The pieces were intricate, but I didn't find them attractive.

The women glared at me with caged fury. Their white tunics were sallow with dried mud, and their faces weren't much cleaner.

I waited for the next pair of jets to finish their screaming test, then said, 'You can sit down.' I gestured to the chairs against the wall behind the women.

'What do you want from us?' Vantine demanded in a voice which broke with anger.

'Help,' I said. 'For which I'm willing to pay.'

They were making it easy for me, though I'd have carried through in any case. I'd seen this pair in action the morning we arrived. No amount of feigned contrition now would have changed the decision I'd made.

'And if we don't agree, you're going to threaten us with that toy?' Patten said, nodding toward my cutting bar. 'I ought to feed it to you!'

'No threat,' I said. I picked up the bar and waited a moment. If Lightbody and Baer heard the blade whine, they'd burst in on us.

The Oriflamme fired two more attitude jets. I triggered the bar and shaved the corner off the desk. I laid the weapon down again.

'This is so that you won't make the mistake of attacking me,' I said. 'If you did, I'd-'

Another part of my mind started to fog my conscious intelligence. My voice was husky and very soft.

'— cut you into so many pieces that they'd have to fill your coffins by weight.' I swallowed. 'And I don't want that, I want a friendly conversation, that's all.'

The part of me that hid behind the red fog, the part that had been in control at the Molt temple and was almost in control just a moment before-that part very much wanted another chance to kill.

The women had straightened as I spoke. Their faces were expressionless, and the earlier bluster was gone.

'What do you want?' Vantine repeated quietly.

'We'll be lifting for Quincy soon,' I said. I was all right again, though my hands still trembled. 'We're hoping to meet Our Lady of Montreal there.' I smiled. 'If not there, then we'll catch her farther on. It depends on how long she lays over on Fleur de Lys. But before we leave Trehinga, I'd like to find the treasure stored here.'

The women looked at one another cautiously, then back to me. Patten massaged her right thigh through her dirty trousers.

'There's no chips, no artifacts here,' Vantine said. She was more afraid of keeping silent than of speaking. 'Trehinga wasn't settled before the Collapse. There's nothing but wheat.'

'I can't imagine that a man like Secretary Duquesne doesn't have a private hoard,' I said. 'I don't know what sort of favors he's trading to the ships' captains who land here, but there'll be something. He'll be building up a store so that when he retires to Earth he has something better than a Federation pension to support him. Chips are the most likely, but maybe pre-Collapse artifacts smuggled from other planets, sure.'

'We don't,' Vantine said very carefully, 'know anything about that.' She watched me the way a rabbit watches a snake.

Attitude jets-the last pair of the morning, unless Piet saw a need to retest-fired. The sound wasn't so loud that I couldn't have talked over it, but the three-second pause was useful.

'I'd pay you each a hundred Mapleleafs if you showed me where the cache was,' I said. I held up a pair of twelve-sided coins bearing President Pleyal's face toward the women.

The paymaster's safe on the opposite side of the Commandatura contained a fair amount of currency. As Piet had promised, we weren't robbing the businessfolk of Trehinga, but the Federation government was another matter.

The women stared at me. Patten began to laugh. 'Are you crazy?' she said. She regained her composure. 'Do you think we're crazy? We lead you to Duquesne's personal stash, and then you go off and leave us here? Do you have any idea what he'd do to us then?'

I shrugged. 'I've got a notion, yeah,' I said. 'Open the door, would you please?'

Vantine obeyed. Her companion's laughter was half bravado, but Vantine was clearly terrified. She'd sensed. . not, I think, what was about to happen, but that something was about to happen.

Lightbody raised his shotgun's muzzles when he saw everything was calm. 'Baer,' I said, 'go out and gather as many of our off-duty people as you can in five minutes. Into the garden. And tell the locals to come, too. There'll be some entertainment.'