“I’m not asking for one of the passenger berths,” the Fudir explained. “I’ll ship as an instrument tech. You still need one.”
“Do I, now?” January remarked, as if in surprise. “Bill, do I need an instrument tech?”
Tirasi looked up from the screen he had been checking, glanced briefly at the Fudir. “Not while I’m aboard.”
January smiled at the Fudir. “Port Eireann tells me, because I’m running an ‘errand of mercy,’ they won’t insist on a full crew—not that they ever were sticklers like Port Jehovah.”
“With me along, you won’t have to work watch-and-watch,” the Fudir pointed out.
Without looking up from her console, Maggie B. said, “We’ll manage.”
“Beside,” said January, “your certificate reads ‘Kalim DeMorsey of Bellefontaine,’ and if I’ve learned nothing else since landing here, it’s that whoever else you might be, you’re not him.” He picked up a thinscreen and began checking preflight items against his database.
“The name was a convenience,” the Fudir admitted, “but the qualifications were real.”
January glanced at him. “Were they. How do I know? Your word?” His tone implied what that word was worth.
“No, my work. On the trip out here.”
But the captain shook his head. “If I took you on knowing your certificate was false, I could lose my own license. Hogan, have Chaurasia’s technicians finished the quality check on our alfvens?”
“Not yet, Chief.”
“Remind them they’re under warranty from Gladiola yards. I know it wasn’t ICC’s fault that New Eireann’s magnetic cushions were off-line, but I only want to know if my alfvens are still up to Yard specs after that emergency brake.”
“Can you take me as a passenger, then?”
January seemed surprised to find the Fudir still in the control room. “A passenger? If you have the fare, I can put you on the waiting list. At number…”
“Fifty-seven,” said Maggie B. “We can fit him into our third trip; but another ship will probably come along before then.”
“You can have my wages back from the outbound voyage. I can pay you the rest when I get to Jehovah.”
Maggie B. said, “You shore seem dang eager to run out on your buddy.”
January shook his head. “Sorry. No money, no ticket.”
“How am I supposed to get off this place, then?”
January grunted and frowned over his checklist, running his finger down the screen. He showed it to Tirasi. “You see there anything about helping an imposter and petty crook back to Jehovah?” Tirasi shook his head. “No sir, I surely do not.” So January shrugged and pointed, as if helpless, to the checklist. “Sorry, it’s not my problem. Look, ‘Fudir,’ you and that ‘Ringbao’—that O’Carroll—tricked your way on board my ship to come here and start that bloody civil war up again. I don’t like being tricked and I don’t like being used.” He slapped the thinscreen checklist on his console. “Now, leave my ship before I call up Slugger.”
The Fudir complained of this later in the office Hugh had appropriated in Cargo House. “He was playing with me. It’s that eternal smile of his. He makes you think he’s in on it, that he’s on your side. Then—wham—he blindsides you.”
Hugh made no reply and did not even look up from the reports he was reading until the glaziers at work on the window began to put their equipment away. “Finished?” he asked them.
The senior glazier tugged his forelock. “That we are, O’Carroll. And bulletproof, too.” A knuckle tap on the pane demonstrated this property. “No one’ll be pot-shotting yer honor; not through this here window.”
Hugh thanked the men and they left, and he stood and walked to the window, where he gazed down on the carpark, from which the wrecked vehicles had already been cleared. A bicyclist appeared, racked his bike in a row of other requisitioned bikes, and ran into the building. Another messenger, another report. Hugh hoped it was for one of the other ministers on the United Front.
Farther off, in New Down Town, repair parties were razing unstable structures with wrecking balls and dozers. While he watched, the Fermoy Hotel fell in on itself, raising a cloud of debris, gray and white and black, that seemed for a moment a smoky outline of the building itself, as if its ghost had survived the building’s demise. That’s where the gardy first raised the Loyalist flag, he thought. Work gangs spread out and began hauling the debris into wagons, some horse-drawn, others motor vehicles brought up from the relatively unscathed south. From this distance, the work gang looked like children at play.
“It’s good to know,” the Fudir said, “that when someone does pot-shot you, it will be through another window entirely.”
Hugh turned from his melancholy survey to face the man who had brought him back to this. “You think January was putting on a happy face to fool you? I’d not expect you to complain of deception.”
“I’m a ‘scrambler.’ Deception’s what I do. January’s supposed to be ‘on the square.’” The Fudir joined him by the window. “I didn’t think there was an unbroken pane of glass in all New Eireann.”
“They came up from the Mid-Vale,” Hugh explained, missing the humor. “Handsome Jack organized the plants down there that make the crystal tourist souvenirs to switch to window glass. There’s a plastic plant in County Ardow doing the same.” He rapped the new window with a knuckle. “Maybe this should have been plastic. But Jack and I agreed it was important that I do business with Mid-Vale suppliers, not only with the Loyalists in the Ardow.”
“Politics,” said the Fudir.
Hugh shrugged. “You say that like a dirty word. But—cut deals or cut throats. Your pick.” He crossed his arms. “Who’s on my list today?”
The Fudir had appointed himself the task of separating from the chaff of those eager to meet with Hugh the wheat of those who actually needed to. It was not a very arduous duty—it consisted mostly of telling people “no” without obviously telling them “no”—and if the Fudir was practiced at any one thing, it was at not being obvious. The work would keep him busy while he awaited a ship. He opened his notebook and toggled the calendar with his stylus. “Kiernan Sionnach, from the Reek Guides, is your ten o’clock. He wants to know how you plan to rebuild the tourist trade.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, I think people have no sense of priorities.”
“It’s that politics thing, again,” Hugh told him.
The window shook to a dull thud and both men looked up. Over Lower Newbridge Street, on the far side of town, a plume of smoke rose. Hugh sighed. “Another fine old building down.”
But the Fudir frowned and shook his head. He laid his notebook on Hugh’s desk and came to the window. “No. No, that was a bomb.” Even as he spoke, the banshee wail of distant sirens arose and the gang dismantling the Down Hotel paused in their work and looked off to the west.
“A bomb…?” Hugh said. “But…Who…? Why…?”
The Fudir crossed his arms and studied the ragged cityscape at the base of the hill. “There is a Terran saying attributed to the Auld Deceiver. ‘Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.’ Some people”—and he pointed with a toss of his head toward the black plume that now curled in the distance—“will first create the Hell over which they mean to rule.”
That evening, a space yacht entered the Eireannaughta system out of Port Jehovah. That meant a few more berths for refugees, and the Fudir was determined to secure at least one of those berths for himself. So a few days later, when the yacht had reached Low Eireann Orbit, the Fudir took a bicycle from the rack in front of Cargo House and pedaled down to the Port. Others on the street, assuming he was on some errand for Little Hugh—by now his close association with the Ghost of Ardow was common knowledge—made way for him. A few waved, and one wag shouted, “On to the Hadramoo!”