I was still considering that when the carriage trembled.
11
DEJAH’S VIEW
Half expecting to find another ravaged corpse among our fellow partygoers, I ran back into the parlor and instead discovered a cautious hope diluting the lingering shock of the Khaajiir’s death.
Monday Brown was downright ebullient for him, which meant a slight upward turn at the corners of lips otherwise as straight as a slit. Vernon Wethers looked white, his eyes scanning the sculpted ceiling as if hoping for the sudden appearance of an escape ladder. Dina Pearlman, who had retreated to one of the lounges with a bottle, raised it in a mock toast, and Farley just looked tired, as if he’d accept any development as long as everybody just left him alone.
“What’s going on?”
Philip seemed to take cruel pleasure in telling me the good news. “Help’s arrived. That’s the sound of the Stanley from Layabout touching down on our roof.”
“Are you sure?”
There was another shudder that tinkled glasses and jarred the balance of anybody not already seated. With an efficiency he didn’t seem to have to think about, Mendez rescued one glass before it toppled over the edge of the bar. “He knows what he’s talking about, Counselor. That’s a Stanley, making contact with the carriage. I know because I’ve been trained to recognize the sound.”
“Then you know what to expect,” I said.
“I’m afraid I don’t. In the simulations I experienced, the pilot always remained in contact with us throughout the rescue operation. He would have warned us to expect that jolt, for instance. But I don’t know what he’s going to do if we cannot communicate with him and assure him that we’re still alive.”
“Don’t worry,” Oscin told everybody. “I don’t know the exact parameters of the local tech, but any low-orbit recovery vehicle would be useless without instruments capable of detecting movement, and therefore life, inside sealed compartments like this one. Now that we’re in direct contact, I suspect the crew of that thing is devoting as much effort to counting heartbeats and voices as they are to determining the nature of the malfunction. Am I right about that, Mr. Bettelhine?”
“That’s the way I understand it,” said Philip.
“That’s the way it is,” said Jason.
Farley Pearlman looked away from his drink long enough to make a single, not very interested suggestion. “What about us? Should we all start yelling?”
He was precisely the kind of criminal I’d never been able to speak to with any degree of professional detachment, but my answer was less for him than for anybody else who might consider his suggestion a good one. “If their instruments are capable of detecting heartbeats through bulkheads and heat shielding, and somebody’s listening, that’s the last thing we want to do. It would be like screaming hello into a stethoscope.”
He gave a sad happy little nod, as if it pleased him to be rendered an irrelevance yet again, and retreated back to his drink.
“Could have been worse,” Mrs. Pearlman cracked. “He could have suggested a singalong.”
Another rumble shook the carriage, this one harsh and metallic and moaning like a prehistoric beast calling for another of its kind.
“They’re moving,” Jason said.
I said, “Mr. Bettelhine? With those safety shields lowered, we’re effectively blind. Is there an exterior monitor of some kind that I can use to monitor its progress?”
Philip regarded me with incredulity. “Why? You don’t claim to be an expert on that, too?”
“Perhaps not,” I told him, “but given everything else that’s happened today, I think it’s best not to put too much trust in procedures operating within their expected parameters. If something goes wrong out there, or if this is just another manifestation of an attack on the people in the room, wouldn’t you like to know?”
He searched my eyes for signs of duplicity, found none, and resisted a few seconds more out of sheer disinclination to cede me even that much ground.
Jelaine said, “It wouldn’t hurt.”
Philip slumped, expressing his surrender with a flip of one hand that did not surrender so much as grant me leave to slink from his presence.
Jason’s expression was gnomic, but tinged with a satisfaction that under the circumstances seemed as ominous as another attack by Bocaian assassins might have been. Despite all logic I half expected him to whisper a confidence in his sister’s ear. He didn’t, but she wore much the same expression.
Mendez said, “There’s a monitor station belowdecks, next to the cargo airlock. It provides a real-time holo feed of the carriage exterior from four perspectives.”
“That’ll do. Give me a second, first.” I pulled Skye over to the wreckage of the dinner table and told her, “You, Mendez, and Paakth-Doy come with me. Oscin stays here with everybody else.”
Skye kept her voice low. “You really are that sure this rescue’s nothing of the kind?”
“Let’s just say I don’t trust easy outs when everything else in the course of the day seems to have been conspiring against us. Why? You think I’m just being paranoid?”
She shook her head. “When you start acting paranoid, I start scanning the rooftops for snipers.”
We returned to the others in the midst of another jarring shudder, the vibration subsiding only enough to become a low-frequency hum hard to hear but resonant enough to hurt my teeth.
Dejah intercepted me before I could connect with Mendez and Paakth-Doy. “Andrea? I’m sick of just holding up the bar. I’m coming with you in case you need any help.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it’s what I’m going to do.”
I tried to think up reasons to object and came up short. Why not. It might give me the opportunity to ask her some questions.
I might have expected Philip Bettelhine to raise some objections of his own, but he just grumbled. It was not a surrender so much as a tactical retreat, as he shepherded his energies for later battles.
Just as we went I made eye contact with Vernon Wethers, who seemed downright disappointed that his boss was letting the matter go that easily. He had opened his mouth, prepared to concur with whatever Philip wanted, but now had to close it, his own unflagging support in flight but bereft of a place to land. I was reminded of a phrase I’d once heard in another context that fit him so well I suspected I’d always see it in connection to his name: not a man, but a spare part. I also wondered if, like Mendez, he’d ever had the potential to be anything else.
It was the one thing that rankled most about my interview with Mendez. This world may have owed everything it had to the Bettelhines, but a suspicious percentage of those who worked closely with them seemed to have given them everything.
I haven’t spent much time on luxury conveyances, but the couple of times I have I’ve found myself needing to explore the areas not meant for eyes for paying passengers. I’d found the polished veneer a thin one, which grew grub-bier and more reduced to the merely functional the farther I penetrated into servant territory. I was not surprised to find that the areas belowdecks on the Royal Carriage followed the same pattern. Once we descended two more decks, past the second level of passenger suites and into the level containing the crew’s quarters, all grandeur fled. There was no vast open area for entertaining here, no great display port overlooking the planet below, just narrow passageways equipped with vacuum doors and lined with sealed rooms labeled STORAGE A, STORAGE B, PANTRY, LAUNDRY, and EMERGENCY.
Beyond that we found a grayer and even more cramped region not so much a place where people lived their own lives as one where they were stored when not in use. Only one of the four compartments in there, the one belonging to Mendez, was labeled with the name of its occupant, and then only in terms of his function: CHIEF STEWARD A. MENDEZ. The other room read CREW QUARTERS A and CREW QUARTERS B.