Eat my dick, the head whispered, and an involuntary smile caught at the ends of Bridget ban’s lips. One thing you had to grant the barbarians of the Hadramoo: they died in style.
A Hound can construct marvels out of odds and ends, and in the remonstratorium she found all she needed. The preparation rooms downstairs contained a dye with which she darkened her entire body from gold to brown, save on the palms and soles. She had known Megranomers who styled their bodies so. A knife in the same room cut off the longest part of her hair, and a thong bundled the rest of it atop her head. A bit of charcoal from the machine shop added lines to her face and aged her appearance in subtle ways, and two small coins found in a drawer and pressed into her nostrils altered the shape of her nose.
Finally, she wound her srong about her waist. It was possible that the enforcers had gotten a picture of her clothing. But she had been in the dark between two lamps when she slid away, and they had been sauntering complacently behind, thinking themselves clever and undetected. At best they might recall the srong having “many iridescent colors,” which would narrow the sartorial odds not at all. She dared not try to alter the pattern, because she had purged the cache and most of the memory in the fabric was now taken up by the STC database. She contented herself with turning the fabric the other way out, which reversed the pattern and presented a slightly more muted version.
Ponchos, however, were not native to this world and they would notice hers immediately. She could not discard it, since part of the copied database resided in its mems; but she did manage to tighten the neck hole into a headband—the old-fashioned way: there was needle and thread in the prep rooms—and she wrapped the whole thing above her head in a fair imitation of a Chettinad turban. This served the double purpose of concealing the remnant of her red hair.
She still looked like an outworlder, but she might be an older Chettinad or a Megranomer or at any rate not the fleet young golden Hound who had fled from them the night before. “Ah aim abutt mahyõ bizz,” she said aloud, practicing a Megranomic accent from the Eastern Isles. Best not lay it on too thick. The idea was to be unnoticed.
Finally, it could not be good for any outworlder to be found too near the remonstratorium. So, as the eastern sky grayed just a little, she worked her way through still, silent gardens toward the maglev line. There, she found a copse in a public park and concealed herself. Outdoors, the waning night was chilly and she wrapped her arms about herself, wishing she hadn’t had to disguise the poncho.
In the morning, as people began to gather at the Uasladonto Street maglev station for the ride into town, Bridget ban spotted a mixed trio of touristas. She slid from concealment and crossed the walkway so as to come smoothly into line with them. As she expected, they were delighted to find “another real woman,” the man in the group being especially appreciative. He was from High Tara itself, and sported checkered kilts, a fringed cloak, and an admiring glance. The Jugurthan woman with him was robust of physique and carried an umbrella matching the pattern of her srong. She introduced a Valencian woman she had met in a nearby restaurant.
And so, in this chatty company, to all appearances boon traveling companions, Bridget ban sauntered past the weary enforcer standing by the entry with a digital image in his hand and the upcoming shift change on his mind. He was looking for a younger, more athletic woman, traveling alone.
Entry to her ship was simple. She contacted the intelligence over her implant and the guards that had been placed about the ship were knocked out by a sonic burst from the ship’s defenses. She then slipped aboard, locked up, and let them wake up naturally. Later, she would call the hotel and have her belongings shuttled over, tell them she had spent the night aboard “on Hound’s business.” If the events of last night were brought up, she would profess ignorance. Yes, she had been wearing her “undress greens,” because Pulawayo had seemed much taken with her uniform. Yes, she had left Nolapatady at such and such an hour: they could ask Pulawayo. With only a little luck, they would feel so foolish at chasing some other red-haired tourista through the streets of Nolapatady that they would not press matters further. That would only attract the interest of the League and, more dreadfully, of the other Hounds. There would be no trace of her download of the STC database, and the Director would corroborate all the important details.
They might wonder what had happened to the other redhead, but everyone would pretend to believe a story that held together so wonderfully.
In the meantime, the data in her anycloth had better hold a damned good secret to make the whole effort worthwhile. What reason could Peacock have for protecting the phantom fleet that they would risk attacking a Hound?
She pulled off her srong and turban and linked them into her shipboard ’face, gave the intelligence the local dates for the ambush of the Cynthians, and asked it to track the ambushing fleet forward and backward. Then she showered and restored her appearance, produced a fall to complete her hair. When she returned to the ’face, the analysis was finished.
She studied the results. Then she asked for similar traces on all traffic, deleting first local in-system traffic, then traffic on the Silk Road and Route 66. Finally, she highlighted the points of origin and termination.
The results made her whistle.
The sky was full of holes.
An Craic
“You have to admit,” the scarred man says, “to an element of farce to all this. The Hound had come sniffing after one secret and flushed out two others quite by chance.”
The harper plays with her strings, tuning them for her first set. Her head is bent, her ear close to the clairseach. She plucks an A, listens, turns a key to tighten the cord. “That’s the way of it among secrets,” she replies without looking up. “One thing leads to another. The secret of the Dancer to the secret of the phantom fleet to the secret of Peacock’s hidden holes. Sometimes I think there is only one secret, and all others are but manifestations of it, and if only we learned what that one secret is, we would know everything.”
The scarred man screws up his face. “That’s too mystical for me. I prefer the irony of chance to the certainty of myth. It was luck, not fate. When you have your eye fixed on one thing, it’s easy to stumble over others.”
The harper sets her harp aside. “The ‘certainty’ of myth?”
“Of course. You can have supreme confidence in a thing only when you don’t quite know what that thing is.”
“Really.” The harper considers that: what it may say about the universe; or at least about the part of it the storyteller occupies. “I’d have thought the opposite.”
“No.” The scarred man grows animated. His hands accentuate his words, fluttering, chopping like a meat cleaver on the tabletop, causing the morning bowls to dance. “The more you know a thing, the more you know how it can fail you. That’s why we fall in love with strangers—and grow estranged from our closest companions. ‘Ignorance begets confidence,’ an ancient god once said, ‘more often than does knowledge.’”