Sharrow checked the screen. In the hangar space they’d been shuffled to, there was a tired male official in Port Inspection overalls holding a clipboard.
“Aw, penetration, man,” Choss said. “Ain’t payin the Ik’s fuckin import dues on this spit.” She started fishing bottles of trax spirit out of her kitbag and leaving them in the corridor by the lock door.
Sharrow watched as the official in the hangar outside yawned and then spoke to his clipboard; his voice carne out of the screen. “Hello, persons on the vessel Wheeler Dealer,” he said. “Transport Standards and Customs check; please have your vehicle documentation ready and baggage prepared for inspection.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tenel said, finger on the screen transmit button. “On our way.”
“One at a time, please,” the official said, sounding bored. “Crew first.”
Tenel flicked a data chip out of the screen slot and, shaking her head, stepped into the lock; the door slid open. The air lock was a standard single-aperture rotating-cylinder design that meant you couldn’t have both doors open at once. The door rolled closed again and they heard the inner sleeve and the outer door rotate together.
Sharrow and Choss watched the official nod to Tenel when she stepped off the external access ramp, take the data chip and stick it onto his clipboard, then inspect her kitbag and wave the clipboard up and down her body a couple of times. He tapped an entry on the clipboard. “Next,” he said.
“Loada shit, man,” Choss muttered. She made a farting noise with her mouth and stepped into the lock. Sharrow was looking at the HandCannon, trying to recall if Ikueshleng required a licence for bringing weaponry in. She couldn’t remember, and she wasn’t sure that going to pick up the gun she’d deposited with Left Luggage here was such a good idea. She shrugged. The worst that could happen would be they’d confiscate it. She stuck it back in her satchel.
“Next, please,” the man’s voice said. The lock door opened; she stepped in. The lock half rotated, then stopped.
She stood there, trapped in the metre-diameter space. She pressed the control patches. Nothing happened. She got the gun out of her satchel, slung the satchel over her head and crouched down.
She thought she heard something, then the lock started to rotate very slowly. The craft’s hull metal came into view at the leading edge of the lock’s aperture. The lock stopped again. She aimed the gun at the edge of the door.
The lock shifted suddenly, opening a gap about ten centimetres wide to the outside. She glimpsed a vertical sliver of unoccupied hangar.
The gas grenade came in from the top of the door, hitting the deck to her right as the lock rotated back, trapping her.
She stared, horror-struck and paralysed, at the grenade clicking away on the floor.
For an instant she was five years old again.
A warm rain fell on Ikueshleng. Ships came and went, flying in on wings or relying on the shape of their bodies for lift, or landing vertically, engines screaming. Other sporadic roars were ships taking off, while every now and again a near-subsonic pulse of sound followed by a great whoop of noise and then a distant bellow of igniting engines announced an induction tube hurling a craft into the atmosphere.
Near one edge of the port’s artificial plateau, a long rectangle of concrete hinged down, producing a shallow ramp into a brightly lit space. Rumbling up from the port’s depths and out onto the rain-slicked surface apron came a tall, boxy vehicle running on four three-metre high wheels; it was joined to another which followed it up into the drizzle, leading another carriage behind it, and another and another.
The twenty-section Land Car started to turn before the final carriages had risen onto the concrete surface. The vehicle’s front wheels ran through puddles on the apron, sending waves washing out to the edges of the shallow depressions. The grimy water surged back in as the wheels passed, only to be pushed out again and again as tyre after tyre of the accelerating Car rolled its intersecting tread over exactly the same path its predecessors had taken.
The Land Car came to the edge of the concrete, where a gate in Ikueshleng’s perimeter fence gave access to the bedraggled scrub beyond. The drop was two metres or more, but the Car didn’t pause; its front section described a graceful arc as it drooped towards the damp ground and the links with the section behind tensed to support it. Its wheels met the ground and took the section’s weight again as the rest of the Car followed, each carriage bumping gently down in a ripple of movement that swept back along the vehicle’s two hundred-metre length like a snake moving from one branch to another. The vehicle rumbled off through the fine veils of rain towards the line of darkness a kilometre away, where the artificial noon of the port gave way to the pre-dawn gloom of a cloudy tropical morning.
Sharrow watched the rain collect on the window of her cell, beyond the plastic-covered steel bars. The raindrops became little slanted rivulets as the Car increased speed. The landscape beyond the thick glass and slip-streamed moisture was flat, covered in scrappy bushes and patches of flail-grass that looked as though they could use the rain. She looked down at the paper note the warder had slipped through the food-hatch in her door.
Heard you’re aboard too. Court Police picked us up in Stager on some nonsense about assassinating Inv19. Next stop Yada, apparently. Who got you?
Love and kisses, Miz and the gang.
She had nothing to write with. She crumpled the note up in her hand. Outside, the reflected sunlight disappeared as though switched off. The Land Car rumbled through the dark beyond.
The hunters who’d caught her were a mother-and-son team; the son had worked for the Ikueshleng Port Authority and had contacts in Trench City’s space port. The Huhsz had leaked the fact she was travelling as Ysul Demri into a data base used by contract security personnel, licensed assassins, bodyguards and bounty hunters. Finding out which craft she was on and arranging to borrow the relevant uniform had been comparatively easy.
The vehicle she was on was one of a fleet of World Court-licensed Secure Goods and Detained Persons’ Surface Transporters, though everybody just called them Land Cars. This one, the Lesson Learned, made regular runs between Ikueshleng and Yadayeypon with goods and people the airlines, rail services, road authorities and insurance companies preferred not to handle.
The Lesson Learned was run by the Sons of Depletion, one of an increasing number of secular Wounded Orders that seemed to be part of a new Golter meta-fashion. Each of the Land Car’s crew had voluntarily been made deaf and mute. Several of the warders she’d seen had gone even further and had their mouths sewn up; Sharrow assumed they had to be drip fed or have a tube put down their nose.
Others had had one eye sewn up too, and one man, an officer by his uniform, had had his mouth and both his eyes surgically closed. He had to be led around the Car by a sighted helper and his only mode of communication was through the Order’s private touch-code, the sender’s fingertips playing over the back of the receiver’s hand as though on a fleshy keyboard.
A Land Car. She remembered Miz mentioning he’d had some cargo stolen from one, but that had been on Speyr, in bandit country. This was Golter, and nobody attacked a Court-licensed vehicle unless they were suicidal or mad. Even Geis couldn’t help her now.
The bounty hunter son came to see her after dawn. Close up he was a pasty-faced, unhealthy-looking individual. He grimaced as he sat down on the fold-down seat across the soft-floored padded cell from her. He kept a stun-pistol pointed at her. She sat cross-legged on the bunk, dressed in the Land Car’s prison overalls. She still had a headache caused by whatever gas they’d used in the grenade.