Chapter 4
The dark man in Asher’s cabin was the only October Adept on the ship, the Digger and Kerla had found out at last. So Kerla undertook a project.
“There’s your pigeon,” Kerla hissed. Asher bent around the conner and looked. A fat, balding man leaned against one wall of the starship, chewing something like gum.
“Go” Kerla said, prodding him sharply with her thumb. Asher was propelled forward into the main corridor, back arched in pain. If the Digger was somewhere around, he couldn’t see him.
“Use the Cloak, you idiot!” Kerla’s voice hissed. The man had seen Asher’s movement out of the corner of his eye, and was already glancing in his direction.
Asher threw the Cloak around him. The man blinked and straightened up, rubbed his eyes and looked again. He had seen something, he was sure, but he noticed nothing there now.
“The Adept . . .” Asher mouthed at Kerla.
“On the other side of the ship,” Kerla whispered back. “Trust us, you little fool.”
Asher recalled the Digger’s Sight, and was somewhat calmed. The alien seemed to have the ability of shielding them from the restless Adept outside. But Asher’s mind still held unease; he hated the turmoil inside him, the uncertainty, the fear. He also hated what he was about to do.
“Your life is the most precious thing you possess,” the Guild training had taught. “When it is threatened, do anything, short of the Three, to save it. Lie, cheat, steal, bribe, deceive, injure, destroy—anything to stay alive. Life is hope. Nothing can be done without it; everything is possible with it.”
He was about to cheat and steal, for fear of the ruthless woman behind him.
Under the veil of the Cloak he sidled up to the man. The latter’s teeth were a sickly black from whatever he was chewing. Behind him was a row of vending machines, any of which a wrist computer could activate by passing money from one’s own account into that of the ship.
This was the third-class part of the ship, at least for oxygen-breathers. Yet the man, Kerla had told him, was one of the richest of all the passengers. He certainly didn’t show it.
Kerla had prearranged the meeting. She had sensed this man’s furtiveness as she circulated around the ship and used her Skill to probe him.
Asher waited until the corridor was empty. Then he faced the man and said loudly:
“Money!”
The man looked wildly around. He wore a black pencil-thin mustache, straight as a ruler on his upper lip. He was a short man; Asher felt tall next to him. Could this, Asher wondered, be a subchieftain of a criminal syndicate that spread across forty planets? Kerla had said so. Asher was amazed.
“Money!” Asher shouted. The man jumped as if jabbed with a pin.
But then he seemed to take control of himself. He shrank down, muscles relaxing, and then he spat black spittle onto the deck.
“Reveal yourself, wizard-man,” he said then. His voice had a sort of badgering quality, as if he were used to pushing people around.
Asher dropped the Cloak. To the fat man, it seemed as if he popped into view out of thin air. The man scowled angrily.
“I don’t like that,” he said. He took one long step and his nose was less than a centimeter from Asher’s. In later days Asher would know this as a way of intimidating someone, a movement into someone’s space. Now he felt the effect without knowing why, yet he wanted to maintain his ground at all costs,
“Look,” he said. He brought what was in his hand slowly up between their bodies until it forced their faces apart.
What he held was a four-sided plastic chamber, transparent, with a conical top and an opaque black base perhaps two centimeters high. The whole thing rose in height to perhaps ten centimeters, and inside it was a crystal.
It was not just any crystal. It drew fire from the ambient light around them that showed images within— hypnotically moving images, wisps of figures that could only just be recognized. Almost.
That’s how it looked to the fat man, anyway.
He held a long silence, while Kerla somehow closed off both stretches of corridor with a psionic wall that made people and alien alike uneasy and inclined them to head the other way. Far across the ship, the Adept named Ghulag roamed restlessly forward, sensing Asher’s use of the Power.
Finally the fat man spoke:
“I didn’t believe it,” he breathed, the badgering quality gone for a moment from his voice.
“I trade you it,” Asher said formally, “for fourteen million credits in irrevocable transfer into the account I designate.”
“If it is a Captor Crystal,” the man said, the badgering note returning, “you have a deal. If not, no wizardry can protect you . . . now!”
The man’s hand slapped forward and Asher felt the slightest pinprick on his ann. He recoiled backwards.
“Whaa . . . ?” But then, in a flash, he knew what the man had done. He had heard about such things.
There was now a little machine in Asher’s blood. Not sticking in his skin where a razor might dig it out, but thrust into his bloodstream, floating down through his veins, through the capillaries, upward along the arteries to the heart, pumped through the lungs . . .
“What is it?” Asher quavered. In most stories he had seen, the tiny machine was filled with some sort of poison, set to be released within a certain number of hours if the host didn’t or did do something, whatever the blackmailer demanded. If the deed were done, a signal on a frequency known only to the blackmailer would he sent, and the machine would become harmless, to be ejected from the body with other routine wastes.
The man smiled, black teeth making his mouth look empty and old.
“It puts out a signal,” he said. “We’ll find you then, as easy as finding a dog in a flea circus.”
The man chuckled. He held all the cards, he thought.
“In fact,” the man said, “I think I’ll just take the Captor Crystal now. No point in wasting credits . . .”
Then Asher let the man see the crystal as it really was. To the fat man, the image wavered and changed and, all at once, the crystal was a cube of ice, melting obscenely in its plastic housing.
“No!” the man screamed.
“I herewith overlay that Image on top of the crystal. Not even the October One Herself can break it,” Asher Tye said.
“Bring it back. Bring it back!” the man wailed, black spittle spraying from the corners of his mouth. To such as he, a first water Captor Crystal was worth at least fifty million credits. No treachery was worth losing a profit such as that.
Asher brought it back. The man mopped his forehead with a red and white handkerchief. “Don’t do it again,” he said. It never occurred to him that the overlay image was what he was now seeing.
It had been a stroke of unbelievable luck that this man was aboard the Pride of Caldott, Kerla had told the Digger, with Asher looking despondently on. What could be more normal than a fugitive from the Guild trading something valuable for credits with which to flee? And who would care how unlikely it was that a failed Apprentice held something so valuable as a Captor Crystal? It was the “reality” of the crystal that would impress the fat man beyond all else, she had argued. They were the only ones in the Guild of Thieves who could put this over, she had urged—the only ones with psionic power.
“What? What did you say?” Asher had demanded.
Kerla had looked at him with hostile eyes, but the Digger had known what he was asking.
“The Guild of Thieves,” he had burbled.
“But what . . .” Asher had begun. Kerla had moved as if to slap his mouth closed, but the Digger’s voice had stopped her: “We will talk of it later,” he had said. And Asher had shut up.
The Digger had turned to Kerla then and argued. With Loblolly only two days away, he had said, why cause the enmity of another power beyond October—the sheer physical power of the interstellar underworld?
“But we are also of the underworld,” Kerla had said. “Why else do they call us the ‘Guild of Thieves’—among other names?”
Asher had made as if to speak, and then had stopped.
“And so we pit one thief against another,” Digger had buzzed bitterly, ignoring him.
“Yes, and it’s beautiful,” Kerla had said, “because this guy is a hired hand, albeit an important one, and when he finds out what a fool he has been, he won’t be running to Security, you can he sure. He’ll have one thing in mind, and that’s how his boss is going to react when he finds himself out fourteen million credits. Once that thought sinks in, he’ll be thinking how to get away, and squealing on us will be the farthest thing from his mind.”
Oh, she was a persuasive arguer, was Kerla; and besides, both the Digger and Asher sensed that she was going to barge ahead regardless of what either of them had to say. Indeed, when she came to Asher, she put it very simply: do it, or we give you to the October Guild. And with that Guild, Asher would die.
“We are obliged by our own Guild’s laws,” the woman had finally argued to Digger. “‘When thief faces thief: Steal little, steal big, but at every opportunity, steal.’” And Asher had shuddered. The Guild of Thieves. He had never heard of it, and now he had to find some way to escape it.
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Now the fat man drew from his cloak a small instrument and pointed it at the plastic box. The instrument began to whir.
Asher felt his mind enter the instrument. No, not his mind alone, but that of himself and the Digger, with the woman hovering behind and feeding them energy and power. The visual image in the fat man’s brain became the actual light photons striking the instrument’s sensors, the actual molecular vibrations setting up harmonics within the device. Never had Asher manipulated something so delicate.
When it was over, his own face was drenched in sweat, his body shaking, all his Power fed into that one, rigid hand holding a box with a cube of ice, while inside him, a machine swam and sang. He wondered why he was bothering, with such a fail-safe mechanism at work on the fat man’s behalf.
The sensing instrument sent the right message to the fat man’s wrist computer, which in turn reported into the man’s ears. The pencil mustache seemed to relax as the lips smiled.
“The account number . . .” Asher said, and recited the number that Kerla had given him.
The man whispered into his wrist.
“Done,” he had said at last. “Done and irreversible.” Asher checked with the wrist computer he was wearing; it was Kerla’s, borrowed, while his own sat in the woman’s cabin, turned off and inert against a security check. The transaction had been recorded. The account was fourteen million credits richer.
Asher was momentarily staggered. That much money seemed impossible to grasp. What would anyone do with so much, other than give it away?
He left the fat man gazing rapturously into the plastic case at the melting cube of ice, and wrapped the Cloak around him. Although he did not know it, Ghulag was still some distance off. The Adept felt the tremor in energy that the use of the Cloak entailed, and knew that Asher was active somewhere ahead, but by the time he reached the area, there was no trace of Power anywhere.
In Kerla’s cabin, the Digger traced down the tiny machine in Asher’s blood and squeezed it into slag.
In another cabin, a fat man saw a puddle of water in a plastic case and screamed.