Gareth looked up as Talyarkinash came down the secret stairs three at a time. He hadn’t noticed before, because he was always studying her face for clues, but she was wearing shoes with no heel and barely any cushion, instead of the two to four inch heels most women, most human women, wore in public as a matter of course. And baggy, maroon pants that gathered at the ankle, vaguely like harem pants, plus a long, green tunic.
But the shoes were what threw him off. She wasn’t human, so applying human fashion standards to the woman felt wrong. Off.
And human women wore skirts, not slacks. Right?
“We’re made,” she called out as she came into sight.
Gareth had found another room beyond the dentist chair and the music studio. There was a whole suite of rooms through there, as a matter of fact, but he was in a common room right now, seated on one end of a couch reading about the history of the Accord of Souls on a space tablet Talyarkinash had gotten for him.
Morty was on a barstool that telescoped down for a Yuudixtl and up to a Nari-height bar. Xiomber was at a low table, eating a sandwich he had made from ingredients in a refrigerator in the kitchen, down the north hall.
Gareth had slept in a room down the south hall. At first, he had been concerned that the woman might try to slip into his room, in spite of his commitment to Pippa. He had locked the door just in case. But after that first afternoon, if she was going to do that, Gareth was pretty sure she’d be bringing a gun.
“What do you mean, made?” Morty asked. “We watched you on the screen. You did great.”
“I don’t know how, but that cop saw through everything,” Talyarkinash said. “There should have been far more questions. Intrusions. Inspections. Annoyances. The last time the city wanted to check something, I had people in here for three days.”
“She gave up too easily,” Gareth observed, calmly powering off the magical book and placing it on the end table. Something had not felt right, but he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it until Talyarkinash said something.
“Yes,” the woman said. “I don’t know why.”
“She already knows you’re guilty,” Gareth said. “She left so that she could call for reinforcements to seal off the building without you being aware that the trap was closing.”
“How would you know that?” Xiomber asked and then stuffed the last two bites into his mouth at once.
“That is how I would do it,” Gareth said. “And I’m a cop. We need to run. Right now. If we’re overreacting, we can come back tomorrow, but I doubt the building will still be an option in an hour. I’ve done this too many times to folks like you. I know what it feels like.”
He rose and stretched. Action made him hungry, but there wasn’t time to make a sandwich, and instinct told him their freedom might be measured in minutes.
“Fardel,” Morty suddenly yelled, punching his pocketcomm. “We’re screwed.”
“What just happened? “ Xiomber mumbled around his chewing.
“Two things,” Morty snarled, lowering his chair and leaving the pocketcomm behind on the bar. “One, I tried to call a taxi, and the map somehow shows no available vehicles anywhere, in the middle of the afternoon. Two, the credit account I had been charging everything to suddenly locked up and shut itself down.”
“Oh, crap,” Xiomber rose.
“Yup,” Morty agreed. “Normally, losing a credit account is nothing. We go through them all the time. Timing is exceptionally bad right now. Rather suspicious.”
Gareth turned to see Talyarkinash pulling a duffel bag from a previously-closed cabinet.
Good idea. Gareth raced to his bedroom and grabbed his own bag. Everything had been cleaned and folded, ready to go.
Or run, as the case apparently was.
Amazingly, both of the brothers had also already grabbed bags, a soft sided satchel case for Morty, and backpack for Xiomber.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
Three days with these folks, and he had not really spent a lot of time on possible escape routes.
At first, sitting in that damned dentist’s chair three more times and getting his brain psionically drilled had left him fuzzy for hours afterwards. Then watching as Talyarkinash and the brothers sketched out designs for a suit he could wear. Except it wasn’t a suit, exactly.
Gareth hadn’t really come to terms with what they had come up with.
But they had started designing something.
And now the clock was about to expire.
Its midnight, Cinderella.
“Yuudixtl are pretty common on this planet,” Morty said. “If we split into two teams, Xiomber and I should be able to blend into a crowd well enough. Vanir and Nari tend to congress, so you two won’t raise that big of an issue together. Talyarkinash, I’m sorry that we blew your cover with this. Do you have a bolt hole we can make?”
Gareth watched the woman pass through the stages of death in a few, quick seconds, lingering on anger for perhaps a touch too long, before she reached acceptance. She gave the brothers an address and fixed Gareth with a hard scowl.
“You better be worth it,” she said.
“If I don’t stop Maximus, I’m not sure anybody else can,” he replied calmly. “The only price you’re risking is jail.”
That got through the woman’s hard façade. The ears flickered forward and her whiskers even relaxed.
“We should go first,” Gareth continued, turning to Morty and Xiomber. “If the Constables don’t know you two, they’ll key on me and you might be able to escape in the confusion.”
“Where are we without you, Gareth?” Xiomber asked.
“Go back and build a new machine, Xiomber,” he replied calmly. “Any Field Agent of the Sky Patrol you kidnap will be on your side as soon as you explain the situation to them. Invoke my name when you do.”
“You’re nuts, kid,” Morty said.
“I’m Earth Force Sky Patrol, Morty,” Gareth said. “That means something.”
“Let’s go,” Talyarkinash snapped peevishly, pulling open yet another hidden door and stepping into the hallway only a few steps from the drop-tube.
“Second floor,” she called, rather than first, and dropped from sight.
Gareth was right behind her.
The second floor of the building was a mezzanine that ran all the way around the outside of the building like a balcony. It was apparently made of glass, or aluminum that was functionally transparent, because for a moment Gareth thought he was floating in the air.
Talyarkinash had slung her bag’s strap over a shoulder and added a jacket in the same rich maroon as her pants. Gareth was wearing what he thought of as his cowboy outfit: black pants, plaid shirt, blue denim jacket, no hat. The bag holding his clothes was more of a soft suitcase, so he had it by the handle, an oversized, pine-green briefcase as he walked.
The beautiful scientist had paused long enough for Gareth to come up on her left. She held out a hand and grabbed his. Bright blue eyes with a hint of fear in them looked up at him.
“Pretend we’re on a trip together,” she said calmly as she started to walk. “Maybe a honeymoon on a new planet. Walk like I’m your girlfriend.”
He stared to say something, but swallowed it when he saw the abject terror in her eyes.
Being arrested and thrown in jail forever still didn’t frighten her anywhere near as much as being this close to a human.
What in the nine hells did people in the Accord learn about humanity? Sure, we could be a rough folk. And probably too violent, especially since all species in the Accord had an empathic bond to them, but we aren’t that bad.
Are we?
But he was Earth Force Sky Patrol. If nothing else, he had a duty to uphold the highest standards of conduct.
Gareth smiled at her and set off at a normal pace. Her ear tips were about as tall as he was, and their legs were roughly the same length. Her hand was clammy in his, and he didn’t hold too tight.
Two young lovers, just landed and walking to a hotel. He could do this. And not even blush all that hard, because his heart was still true to Pippa, no matter how beautiful or forward some of the women of this new galaxy were.
Like he would have expected at home, there was an escalator to the ground floor. Six of them, in fact, one at each corner of the building. She led him to the one farthest from the front of the tower.
The atrium wasn’t completely empty. It was mid-afternoon, and there were people coming and going. Tourists standing around. Messengers delivering packages.
Cover.
They rode the escalator down in the immediate wake of a Warreth mother and three chicks just about of an age to start school, back on Earth. They were full of questions about everything and kept their mother distracted.
Rather than stare, Gareth leaned against the side of the escalator and looked around the interior of the building. The architecture was unlike anything back home, with soaring, curved ribs like a giant whale holding the building up, instead of the normal squat pillars a human designer would have used. Curved panes of glass all around the outside made the inside feel like an aquarium, with him a prized fish on display.
Or a piranha.
Something drew his eye to the northeast corner of the ground floor. A tea shop was doing a brisk business this afternoon, catching people at that point in the day when they needed a jolt to make it through the rest of the work and then get home safe.
Someone was seated at the closest table to the center, sipping tea and amiably watching the crowds ebb and flow around her.
He had never seen her in person, only through a remote camera hidden up in Talyarkinash’s lab, but he had no doubt that the figure was Constable Eveth Baker.
Even across more than one hundred yards of space, Gareth felt her eyes lock on to him.
Gareth turned to Talyarkinash and nodded back to indicate the Constable. His eyes turned deadly serious.
“Run.”