"Step back, Jeremy," Stephen ordered. His arm kept me from stumbling on the wood floor that I'd forgotten.
I was shaking with effort and my tunic was soaked. I'd been holding the cutting bar as though it supported me over a chasm. I pulled the kerchief off so that I could breathe freely, then mopped my face with it.
There were three black-edged holes in the silk. I wouldn't have thought of covering my eyes.
Stephen kicked the door with his bootheel, aiming for the concealed lock. The plate rang. This wasn't a real safe, just a protected hiding place. The second time Stephen stamped down, the back of the lid where I'd sheared the hinges sprang up.
The lid was more than two centimeters thick. Stephen lifted it by the edges with his fingertips. He tossed it past me into a corner of the shed.
"We didn't have anything to do with this!" Patten cried. Vantine hugged herself, shaking as if in a cold wind.
Stephen reached into the opened stash. He came up with a mesh bag of microchips in one hand and what looked like the core of a navigational AI in the other.
He walked out into the sunlight. "There's fifty kilos of chips here!" he shouted to the crowd. There were shouts of awe and surprise, some of them from the local spectators.
I came out with Stephen. "Lightbody," I called loudly, "release these women at once."
Patten tried to hit me. I stepped close and embraced her. I caught a handful of her short hair to keep her from biting my ear in the moment before I backed clear again. Lightbody still didn't understand, but Piet held both women's free elbows from behind so that they couldn't move.
I waved the hundred-Mapleleaf coins so that they caught the sunlight. Vantine was numb. Patten spat at me, but nobody at any distance could see that. Certainly not the locals at the back of the crowd.
"And here's your pay," I said, dropping both coins into Vantine's breast pocket.
There was sick horror in Vantine's eyes. I didn't much like myself, but I'd done what I'd needed to.
At least the pay was fair. The Sanhedrin had only paid thirty pieces of silver to finger a victim for crucifixion.
"Everybody's aboard, sir," Dole called over the clamor of men claiming bits of shipboard territory after days of freedom to move around. "Smetana was sleeping it off behind Gun One so I didn't see him."
Piet nodded to me. I ran two seconds of feedback through the tannoys as an attention signal, then announced, "Five minutes to liftoff."
I'd told Stephen he should take the right-hand couch since Guillermo was in the Iola, but he'd insisted I sit there instead. At least I could work the commo as well as the Molt could, and it wasn't as though the process of lifting to orbit required a third astrogator.
Piet's screen echoed the settings that Salomon had programmed. Salomon flipped to an alternate value, then flopped back to the original, all the time watching Piet.
"Either," Piet said with a smile. "But yes, the first, I think, given the Iola's present orbit."
The Oriflamme's displays were razor-sharp, though the lower third of my screen was offset a pixel from the remainder ever since we'd come through the Breach. The population of New Troy watched from buildings and the road.
I could have expanded any individual face to fill the entire screen. That probably wouldn't be a good idea.
Stephen knelt beside my couch. "Have they let Duquesne out of his cage yet?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I don't see any of that lot," I said. I slewed and expanded the slave pen in the field. The prisoners were still there behind razor ribbon. "Maybe the locals are afraid that he'll start shooting and we'll flatten the town."
"Maybe they just don't like the bastard," Stephen replied. He laced his fingers and forced them against the backs of his hands. His face was empty; that of a man you saw sprawled in a gutter. "Lightbody says the pair of women you released stole a boat and headed upriver."
He raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.
Piet leaned toward me. "We've made a preliminary examination of the database you found, Jeremy," he said.
I turned away from Stephen. "Was it valuable?" I asked. "I don't see why it was part of Duquesne's stash."
"Valuable, though perhaps not in market terms," Piet said. "It's a courier chart. It has full navigational data for the Back Worlds and the longer route to the Solar System. The value to us is. ."
He smiled like an angel. "Perhaps our lives."
"Shall I initiate, sir?" Salomon asked sharply.
Piet's attention returned to the business of planning liftoff. "One minute!" I warned over the PA system.
I swung the magnified view on my screen sideways a touch, focusing on the woman at the wicket beside the Commandatura.
"We couldn't bring her along, you know," Stephen said in a low voice. "Anyone female."
"She didn't ask, did she?" I said. I didn't realize how angry I was until I heard my tone. I started to blank the display, then instead expanded it further. The discontinuity fell just at the point of Alicia's chin.
"It wasn't a clever plan, Stephen," I said softly. "I didn't ask her about anything. She volunteered. . She volunteered everything that she gave me."
Stephen put his hand on my arm. "Best I get to my hammock," he said as he rose.
Salomon engaged the AI. Our roaring thrusters drew a curtain of rainbow fire across the face of a woman I would never see again.
ABOVE QUINCY
Day 127
Men in hard suits were around us in the forward hold, though our cutter's optics were so grainy they suggested rather than showed the figures. Clanks against our hull were probably restraints closing; chances were the ramp had locked shut since I didn't feel the vibration of the closing mechanism anymore.
"All right, you lot," Lightbody ordered as he lifted himself from the pilot's couch. "Open her up! Ah-"
He remembered I was alone in the back of the cutter, "Ah-sir!"
Baer rose from the attitude controls. I'd already freed the undogging wheel by bracing my boots against thwarts and slamming a spoke with the shoulder of my hard suit. I spun the wheel fully open, then let Baer help me slide the hatch back over the dorsal hull.
The two sailors Piet gave me to crew the cutter were solid men, either of them capable of piloting the vessel alone in a pinch. Lightbody wasn't used to thinking of a landing party as two sailors and a gentleman, though.
The crew of the Oriflamme was at action stations. I'd been sent down to the settlement on Quincy to gather information. I could be spared if Our Lady of Montreal appeared while the cutter was on the surface.
I floated out of the cutter's bay. Maher, one of the sailors who'd locked us into the hold, grabbed me with one hand as he hinged up his visor with the other.
"Captain Ricimer's waiting on you forward, sir," he said. He aimed me toward the companionway, then shoved me off like a medicine ball. A sailor waiting there absorbed my momentum and redirected me up the tube.
Dole hugged me to him as I drifted into the forward compartment. He kicked off, carrying us both to the navigation consoles-skirting the 17-cm plasma cannon with a neat carom from the ceiling gunport, still for the moment closed.
I didn't know whether the men were obeying Piet's orders or if they'd simply decided on their own that Mister Moore in free fall was clumsy as a hog on ice. Maybe the process was demeaning, but it'd halved the time I would've taken to negotiate the distance on my own.
I gripped Piet's couch to stay in place. I'd expected to see Stephen, but I realized he would be with the assault party in the after hold.