Jinx On a Terran Inheritance Read online

  Jinx on a Terran

  Inheritance

  The Terran Inheritance

  Book II

  Brian Daley

  Ballantine

  Random House Publishing Group

  Published January 1995

  First Edition: December 1985

  Copyright@ 1995 by Brian Daley

  ISBN-13: 9780345472694

  ISBN 0-586-20678-7

  I think this one's for the house-apes: Eileen, Kevin, Danny and Mike, and Erin and Nicholas

  CONTENT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About The Author

  Version History

  Chapter 1

  Pardon Us

  "Hold it!" Alacrity yelled, grabbing for the controls. "That's her!" He yanked the corridor tram out of autoguide and changed course so fast that Hobart Floyt had to clutch frantically to keep their scant luggage from flying down the corridor. The tram came to an abrupt stop behind a huge pilaster—the stronghold Frostpile was built on the grand scale in every way—nearly throwing them both off.

  The robes they'd worn to the funeral of Cazpahr Weir, and in which they'd nearly been killed an hour earlier, hung limply, bedraggled and ridiculous. Floyt bruised his hip against his Inheritor's belt, a waistband of heavy reddish alloy plaques.

  "Who'd you see?" Floyt demanded in a whisper. "What's going on? We should've demanded that Governor Redlock give us back our guns, that's what!" Until a few weeks earlier, Floyt, native of preterist, isolationist Terra, had refused to so much as touch a firearm. But then again, he'd been through a lot recently. "Hey, watch where you're stepping," he added as Alacrity clambered over him.

  Alacrity winced at the pain from the rib he'd cracked that morning in an airbike crash. He peered cautiously around the pilaster, motioning Floyt to silence. Alacrity's big, oblique eyes, their great irises a radiant yellow streaked with red and black, were wider than ever.

  His baggy robe had slid back off his shoulders, revealing a mane of slate-gray hair, shot through with strands of silver, growing in a sharp V down the muscular channel of his back. He was a lean 197 centimeters tall.

  Floyt left the tram, padding up behind in soft tabi. More than twenty centimeters shorter than Alacrity, he had close-trimmed brown hair and a beard going to gray. Recent events had left him less stocky than formerly. "Who is it? Did you see Heart?"

  "Heart? Why would I be hiding from Heart? I'm in love with her! No, I thought I saw Sintilla."

  Floyt snorted exasperatedly. "Sintilla went to one of the lesser wakes before Weir's last rites, remember? She'll be gone for hours. Now, stop being such a worrywart and let's—"

  "A what? Wari-what?" Alacrity babbled.

  "Hah? Not wari, 'wari-wart!' I mean, wari-what! Goddammit, worrywart, wart! Floyt gibbered.

  "Keep it down, Ho! That's all we need, for Tilla to spot us now! Or d'you want her tagging along all the way to Blackguard?"

  Floyt drew a slow breath between clenched teeth. A patient and reasonable man, he was near his limits. He eased around the pilaster just below his friend, whispering, "Even if it is her, she won't be looking for us yet. And by the time she finds out that we've—"

  He straightened up suddenly and shouldered past the rangy Alacrity. "That woman's a food technician! Couldn't you tell from the Suit of Lights, or whatever that outfit's called? She's twice Sintilla's size, besides! Now, will you come on, before the Blue Pearl leaves without us?"

  "Looked like her at first; same hair. Listen, Ho, we can't be too careful. We've got enough trouble as it is."

  "No argument there," Floyt conceded. Their Earthservice behavioral conditioning was eating at them—they had to take this mysterious bequest from Weir, a starship called the Astraea Imprimatur, back for the enrichment of the Earthservice Resources Bureau.

  That meant going to a planet called Blackguard—about which they knew slightly more than nothing—to claim her. Provided they could get out of Frostpile alive.

  "Trouble?" said a voice behind them.

  The two leapt up into the air, colliding with each other, Alacrity clawing for a sidearm he was not carrying. Dincrist, Heart's father, stood watching them.

  He'd already changed from funeral robes to the heavily decorated uniform of a commercial starship captain. He didn't seem to be armed. But if looks really could kill … Alacrity thought.

  "You have all the trouble you can handle, and far, far more." Dincrist was the picture of a patrician-sportsman, even taller than Alacrity and very fit, white-haired and deeply tanned.

  Alacrity, at twenty-two a working spacer—a breakabout—for many years, held himself ready. He and Dincrist had already mixed it up twice, more or less to a draw, but Dincrist hadn't been through any airbike disasters or murder attempts yet that day, and was in excellent condition.

  Still, Alacrity bristled. "What, you again? Shouldn't you be off flogging a real breakabout someplace?"

  Dincrist flushed slightly. The head of a powerful shipping and shipbuilding empire, he'd had only a minimum of actual experience in starship service—had only the technical right to be wearing his magnificent uniform.

  "I heard about Endwraithe's trying to kill you," he said, tight-lipped. "I'm very glad that he failed; I mean to see to you myself, Fitzhugh."

  "See how good the guy is at that kind of talk, Ho?" Alacrity said out of the corner of his mouth.

  "Very effective facial expressions, too," Floyt replied lightly. Inside, though, he was fighting dread and despair. Dincrist was a man to be feared.

  "I've no time to waste on nitwits." Dincrist took a half step toward them, and Alacrity braced for a dustup.

  Instead, Heart's father pointed a finger at them and proclaimed, "Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt, I, Captain Soft-coygne Dincrist, declare myself to be your sworn enemy and you both to be mine. By the Bans and the Pandect, by word and by deed, I swear to harm and to hinder you, to break and to kill you. I call down upon you misfortune, reversal, calamity, and affliction."

  The rolling cadence of the avowal was so hypnotic, Dincrist's tone so orotund, it took them a moment to realize that he'd finished.

  "Oh, oh yeah?" Alacrity parried weakly. "Well, don't count on it."

  "Right!" Floyt jumped in, surprisingly ferocious. "If you give us any trouble, we'll spin your head around like a weathervane!"

  Alacrity took heart. "That's right; we'll stomp you flatter than a month-old road-kill!"

  "Kill you faster than anything in the pharmacy!"

  "Polish our shoes on your balls!"

  Their uncouth counterspell took Dincrist by surprise. Too furious to retaliate in kind, he turned and strode away quickly. They called parting incantations after him.

  "Dog your dong in a hatch!"

  "Do the Dance of Death on your face!" Alacrity lowered his voice. "Did you hear that, Ho? He, he jinxed us!"

  "The way things have been going, how will we know if it takes?"

  "We'd better get moving."

  They reboarded the tram and resumed the trip to the tower roof. From there, Governor Redlock's opulent shuttle, the Blue
Pearl, was to depart. The governor had a lot of things on his mind, including the death of his father-in-law, First Councillor Inst, who'd attacked Alacrity and Floyt during the airbike race, and the discovery that his wife, Queen Dorraine, wasn't quite who he'd always thought she was.

  The two companions-in-adversity doubted Redlock's willingness to delay lift-off just for them, so they put on all speed.

  Then, too, there was Sintilla, the lively, determined little free-lance journalist who'd become something of an ally to them at Frostpile—in part for her own gain. They'd discovered, only minutes earlier, that she planned to write a series of lurid and completely fictionalized adventure books about them.

  Anonymity and a certain freedom of movement were just about the only things they had going for them, but Sintilla meant to bandy their names around in purple-prose penny dreadfuls with the most sensationally absurd titles Floyt had ever heard.

  "Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh Challenge the Amazon Slave Women of the Supernova." Floyt groaned to himself.

  Alacrity shook his head dejectedly. "I know, I know. But don't let yourself think about that now, Ho. Just stay alert. Endwraithe might've had some backup. Or Dincrist could try something, High Truce or not. Scheisse, I wish Redlock had given us back our persuaders."

  They cruised past security checkpoints manned by Invincibles, elite troops of the Weir forces in dress uniforms of crimson and gold. The Invincibles had been ordered to insure that no weapons were smuggled into Frostpile during the High Truce. Their searches were quite thorough. Yet they'd somehow missed Endwraithe's. Why a top officer of the powerful Bank of Spica should want to quiz Floyt about his inheritance, then try to shoot him and Alacrity, was still a puzzle.

  Floyt delicately felt at his nose, broken—in the same crash that had cracked Alacrity's rib—and still smarting despite medical treatment. His tongue probed at the gap where Alacrity had knocked out two of his teeth.

  "What's the point of watching out for assassins?" Floyt grouched. "The underhanded bastards are always sneaking up on us anyhow."

  With the Willreading and other ceremonies over and the High Truce near its end, a good deal of traffic, mostly departing guests, was traveling the cyclopean corridors of Frostpile. Floyt, who'd only met a small fraction of them, stared at the dignitaries who'd converged on Epiphany, Weir's seat of power, from dozens of worlds. Weir had been a major power in that region of space; reapportionment of his domain was an important event. He doubted that his family and friends back on Earth would be able to believe him when—if—he got back to describe the hodgepodge of racial subtypes, costumes and finery, and babel of tongues.

  Alacrity raised his arm to see how much time remained before the Pearl was due to lift and realized that his wrist was bare.

  "Damn! Ho, our proteuses! We left them with Tilla!" Alacrity was racked by indecision but leaning toward writing off the proteuses. The two had little money, and Blue Pearl was their only ticket offplanet.

  With a magician's flourish, Floyt drew the two instruments from the pocket of his robe. "I spotted them while we were, um, visiting Tilla's rooms."

  "Searching" was more the word. But Alacrity took his proteus gratefully; he had very few possessions, but it was just about his most treasured, a commo device, databank, systems accessor and more, in a wrist torc of overlapping, chitinous black metal plates tinged with verdigris. He ran a quick check. "It's okay; she didn't tap into the protected stuff. I guess Tilla didn't mess with it."

  "Same here." Floyt's was a very cheap, simple model provided for his off world mission by the Earthservice. Alacrity hid a grin. There was little enough anyone could learn from Floyt's proteus, but some of the secrets stashed in Alacrity's could command serious amounts of money and bring down upon him enemies prepared to do a lot more than jinx him.

  Just then the tram floated out onto the tower roof under the night sky of Epiphany. Frostpile lit the sky, a shining faerie city. It was too bright to see many stars, but Epiphany's two moons, Guileless Giles and the Thieving Magpie, were visible.

  They were on the same roof where they'd disembarked from the Blue Pearl only four and one half days before. The acreage of formal carpet was still in place, lustrous black, worked in thread-of-gold with Weir insignia and symbols, the broken slave collar most prominent among them. The Pearl was nowhere to be seen.

  "Do you think they left without us, Alacrity? Redlock and Dorraine invited us along, after all. I mean, even if Inst did get killed when we crashed the airbike, I thought—"

  "They're still here, Ho." Alacrity pointed to where the shuttle was poised on the tip of a spiral resembling a unicorn's hom, at the far side of Frostpile. It might have been the tower where Endwraithe had cornered them before Alacrity shot the banker with one of Floyt's teeth.

  Redlock's shuttle deserved her name. She was a glassy-blue sphere with a nacreous sheen, forty meters in diameter. She was lit from within; inside, shadows moved about.

  "You two going with the gov'nor?" a ground crewman called from a low service dome.

  "Yeah, what's the holdup?" Alacrity shot back.

  The man trotted over to them. "The Pearl's waiting for the Severeemish, Queen Dorraine, and one or two others. Then they'll light here for you two. You're that Earther groundling and the other one, right?"

  "I'm the Earther; so what?"

  Alacrity frowned, knobby fists clenched. He was lean but surprisingly broad through the shoulders; for all the gangliness, there was a lot of muscle to him. He didn't like people giving his friends a hard time.

  "I'm the other one." Floyt went along with it.

  "Just checking, just checking. No offense meant. You can wait out here or inside, as you like." The ground crewman seemed to recall something urgent, and left.

  The two looked up to where the incandescence of Frostpile met the night of Epiphany. Air cabriolets and sky gondolas, hover pavilions and skimmer pods, glided and drifted overhead, elegant and graceful.

  "I'm going to miss this place," Floyt found himself saying. For him, at the very optimum, there would be the claiming of Astraea Imprimatur and the irrevocable return to Earth, where he would live out his life.

  "Me too," Alacrity agreed, throat taut and almost vertical as he watched the gorgeous fliers. "Oh, me too." His gaze strayed to where Weir's catafalque had been and where the late Director's remains had been projected out into the Infinite a few hours earlier.

  Floyt said something Alacrity didn't pay attention to right away. Then it sank through. "What data station? Hey!"

  Long-legged and hurrying, he caught up with the Terran as Floyt entered the dome. No one was around. They confronted the data station.

  "I know Dame Tiajo said she didn't have any information on the Astraea Imprimatur" Floyt said, "but I thought I'd check—in case she, ah, overlooked something."

  "Um. Good idea, Ho."

  Floyt went to work, shooting back his floppy sleeves. A trained Earthservice info accessor, he'd quickly made himself familiar with Frostpile's system. He slipped off his proteus and seated it in a peripheral.

  But there was nothing to record.

  "No registration for a ship by that name," Floyt reported.

  "What's it mean, Ho? Astraea Imprimatur!"

  Floyt worked for a moment. "Latin, of course. 'Imprimatur' is permission to publish, or make known. 'Astraea,' uh … " He scanned some more. "Has to do with the Roman goddess of justice and innocence. Also refers to the stars, naturally. It could mean 'let it be sanctioned by Astraea,' I guess."

  "Let it be … huh." Alacrity shook his head. "But nothing about a ship?"

  "Tiajo said Weir kept everything about it in his head, remember? I guess she was right. At least, there's nothing unclassified about it."

  "How about Blackguard?"

  "Just a tick." The displays flashed. "Not much. Allusions to illegal activities. Someone calls it a 'kleptocracy' here, just like Tiajo did."

  "Big help. Let's get back outside."

  "Wait a seco
nd." Floyt transferred the meager data, just in case, then reached for the proteus, but hesitated.

  "What's the holdup?" Alacrity said.

  "I dunno; some glitch. What's your hurry?"

  "Unless you'd care to stick around here, that's my hurry, there."

  Floyt looked up. The Blue Pearl was drifting in their direction, light as a soap bubble, smaller craft making way for her, an arresting sight even in the aggregate glory of Frostpile's nighttime.

  "Okay; whatever it was, it's all set now." Floyt clamped the proteus back onto his wrist.

  They hoisted their bags as the Blue Pearl settled onto the roof without a jar or a whisper. Nothing happened for a moment, then a circular hatch appeared in her lower hemisphere and a gangplank extended itself as music, laughter, conversation, and the clink of drinking vessels drifted out into the night air.

  They jogged toward the shuttle, slowing a bit as they crossed onto the grand black and gold carpet.

  "Hobart!" It came from afar. "Alacrity!"

  Floyt paused. "Alacrity, did you hear what I—"

  Sintilla, afoot, was just emerging onto the roof through a distant door. She had a small travel bag over her shoulder.

  "Trois fois merde!" Alacrity spat. "Run for it!"

  They pounded across the last meters of carpet to the Pearl, bags tugging and slapping, robes fluttering like disheveled banners. Floyt, almost twice Alacrity's age, stayed neck and neck. They galloped up the plush gangway.

  At the hatch a Celestial waited in dress uniform. As they charged inboard, Alacrity yammered, "Present-and-accounted-for. Let's-get-this-crate-moving!"

  The interior of the shuttle was a striking salon of terraced gardens, furnished alcoves, split-level dance floors, and assorted mingling spots, under a translucent three-quarter sphere. Servants circulated quietly with trays of delicacies, beverages, and other treats.

  Passengers paused in their conversations to stare curiously at the two harried-looking late arrivals. The Celestial—like all the others they had seen, a big, tough specimen—gave them a dubious glance, then signaled the Pearl's bridge, which was concealed in her base.

  The gangway retracted and the hatch swung back into place. The ship lifted away smoothly, without a sound. The chitchat of the passengers resumed.