[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: hogs.
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair, a variety of others
Prompt: celeloriel: "the low drone of air conditioning"
Word Count: 5869. WTF.
Notes: followed by soon to be finished business.
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The resonance singer was military issue, modified from its original form. Her human typically wore it against the bone behind his left ear, and she'd heard men dismiss the faint colouration differences between pale human skin and tinted plastic as stemming from the same incident that had left her human partially blind. That her human wasn't blind was obvious in the midst of any fight; everyone aimed for the 'blind' side, whether it was with weapon or fist, and no one had ever connected. He moved too fast for most humans to register what proximity offered them for detail, and if he allowed any human that close without the exchange becoming a fight, he did so where she couldn't see.
She, of course, knew the singer for precisely what it was, though she hadn't when he first used it. His voice echoing out of nowhere into her main pickups had been . . . jarring. She'd snarled at him for stealing tricks from the witches, and still wanted to know why that of all things had made him laugh.
Practice--and boredom--had showed that if she split the input levels carefully enough on her end of the connection, she could hear the breathy barely-there hum of the eyepatch, so soft she suspected even her human didn't feel it against his skin. Doing so took care: the first time she'd tried it he'd spoken unexpectedly and she'd nearly reared out of the gravity cradle in her stall at the feel of her own overloading speakers. The incident proved to her that paltry human hearing ranges were no reason for a machine not to register vibrations, and she'd kept that in mind every time she eased herself into someone else's systems. Their human designers and users confined their recordings to what humans could hear--or what machines could modify to allow humans to hear--and she could trick the recordings if she was careful.
Her human hadn't asked, when she'd first sent him into the immense bones and capillaries of a terem's body. She was still weighing probabilities that he knew what she was doing, if not precisely how, or if he was merely trusting that she knew what she was doing. If he asked, she would explain. He might even have suggestions for improvements.
In the meantime, she could hear her human's slow, deliberate breaths inside the louder drone of the terem's metal lungs. It made a comfortable sort of background noise as she worked, more so than the gentle scrapes and quiet thumps of her human squirming into his current location had.
She'd been pushed out of the eyepatch again last month, and hadn't successfully shoved her way back in, so she couldn't see what he was seeing. There were no watching eyes or ears placed within the ducts, and the few sensors monitoring air quality were easy to subvert into thinking that a minor increase in carbon dioxide wasn't worth reporting. When she heard him take the slightly deeper breath he always did, the one that would activate the singer for a human's hearing range, she shifted more attention towards him, just in time to hear him mutter "Are you sure about this?"
"Oh, stop complaining, human," she replied just as softly but dismissive all the same.
"I have spent," he informed her, accompanied by a thump as he changed positions, "more time in small spaces in the time that I've known you than in the previous years of my life put together."
"It's not my fault human data systems make me itchy," she muttered back, not bothering to add that she wasn't exactly fond of him crawling around inside her bones. She'd spat him back out onto her floors enough times for him to know that already.
A door opening, then sliding closed beneath his perch redirected her attention. Her human fell obediently silent when she clacked the 'Be quiet, I'm listening' tones she would have to sent to a colt. She resplit the input channels from the singer, adjusting the gain on the human-hearing range section to avoid deafening herself if he did speak, and listened intently to accented Russian voices talking. Two men's voices danced across her input channels, accompanied by the crackle of short-distance small-network singers, and the scrapes of chairs across a floor, then a called "All clear--tell him he can come in" and a door closing again.
"Now," she ordered, and unlocked the access panels that connected the air duct and the room, choking off the yelps of surprised locks as she did. Her human shoved himself forward with the heels of his boots, sliding through the first access panel headfirst, and hooked the hatch back up close enough for her to re-lock with a toe as he pushed the second panel open. That one forced him to make a ninety-degree turn as he left the transitional duct and entered the vertical shaft that would drop him onto the conference table, and she heard him grunt a curse as he made it. Bracing both feet and one elbow on the walls of the vertical shaft, he reached up and closed the second hatch. She locked it, listening to him slide down the shaft, boot-soles complaining every centimeter of the way.
There would have been an easier transition if she'd kept him in the duct above, but she couldn't stop the fan without setting off alarms, and she refused to put her human that close to a fan sturdy enough to ruin whatever it grabbed.
Two solid bangs, a scrape of protesting metal, and a thump told her he'd gotten through the third panel--the grill in the ceiling of the conference room--and the lock's relief as its mate-section got within tolerance ranges again told her he'd reached up and closed it again behind him. If she'd been human, she would have smirked.
Faint squeaks of reinforced fabric on polished metal sent her searching for explanation, but the sound of a chair scraping back and a body falling easily into it told her there was no urgency. After a moment, probability informed her he'd used a glove to clear away the scuffed marks of his boots meeting the table before he'd sat down. She gently retuned the singer, no longer needing the air-duct information. If the conference room had watching eyes, they were purely mechanical and not slaved to a system; her entire feed was from her human's tiny singer. When she felt around in the surrounding terem system, she met only blank silence, as she had when she first tried to get a look at Sergei Vamvakidis' leased quarters.
She couldn't see what her human saw, couldn't subvert someone else's system to forget what it had just seen. Of course, that meant there was almost no way Vamvakidis knew what he'd see when he walked in.
The door cycled, and her human's chair creaked slightly as orderly marching shattered into a cacaphony of startled men. "Ah, Gospodin Vamvakidis, wonderful of you to join me," her human remarked pleasantly. "Would you be so kind as to close the door?"
Faint worry curled through her as metal shifted in fabric surroundings, and tense men's voices hissed "Sir?", but it faded when Vamvakidis' deep, rough voice echoed through the singer.
"Captain Sinclair," he said, and she wanted to strip out all the components of his vocal cords all over again, to get the gunk and rust out. "Gentlemen, you are dismissed," he continued, and she could hear someone's boot scrape the floor as its owner tensed.
"Sir?" the boldest whispered, and Vamvakidis coughed dryly. "Captain Sinclair knows leaving is at my good graces, Mikhail. Do tell Gospodin Ioannovich's party that I will need to reschedule, and apologise for the short notice."
"Sir," a different one of his guards acknowledged, and clomps followed by a door closing reverberated through her internal speakers.
"Captain Sinclair," Vamvakidis repeated, that time with more emotion in his grinding voice, "I'm quite certain this room was cleared not three minutes ago."
"You didn't really think you could put me off forever, did you?" her human replied, a smaller creak from his chair telling her he'd sat up straighter.
"A foolish hope," Vamvakidis said, not indicating whether it might have been his hope, or merely an idiotic subordinate's. Another chair creaked, by the faint echo one across the body of the table from her human's seat.
"I don't enjoy couriering, Seryosha," her human growled, the diminutive a verbal punch to the nose. "Are you going to accept custody of your man's possessions and pay me for the trip or not?"
"I could tell you I already have that information from another source," Vamvakidis growled back. "Runner-up in a race won't earn you a purse."
If she'd been officially present at the meeting in the guise of her own engineer, she'd have laughed long and loud and hard. Her human's derisive bark was an adequate substitute, she acknowledged grudgingly, knowing the face that accompanied that sound from vast troves of archives. "Vamvakidis," he said, chair creaking as he slouched back into it, "if you had two men out Sol'tsy way, why is only one of them dead?"
The chair creaked again as he sat up, bare fingers tapping the surface of the metal table. "One man finds what you're looking for, doesn't tell his companion--assuming his companion ever knew about him in the first place, are you accustomed to setting your men to spy on one another?--buys himself horse-passage back here, and departs. All more than a week before his companion finds the same information--by his word untouched by a copyist's hand--comes to me, and gives me a quarter-payment to keep his place, with a promise that you, the great Sergei Vamvakidis, would render the rest when we arrived. Half a day later, his luggage shows up--your man's in a hurry, closing up his affairs and all but running to get to you--and I have my crew load it into the horse. Another three hours pass, your man's pushed our departure time up and he's done a decent job of bribing the stablemaster, because there's nary a peep of protest when I check your man's word with the schedule. One more hour passes, and your man's going to miss his own deadline--" her human clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "--and there he is at the stall door, bleeding like a market hog."
A rustle of cloth told her her human was shrugging or Vamvakidis was shifting uncomfortably. "We do what we can, but he dies on the way. He wouldn't let me haul him to Sol'tsy's excuse for a medsestra's station before we left. Said he had to get to you, at any cost. So we did our best--and once our departure date catches us up you'll know just why I'm estimating your imaginary second man left a week before mine did--and got here. And you won't even acknowledge he was your man, let alone give me the money he promised me or a reward for doing it so quickly."
Her human sprang to his feet, the chair's protesting squeak overlaid by the noise of his boots on the floor as he began pacing along one of the walls. "I don't know what he found, and I haven't gone looking. We sponged the blood off, but he and his clothes are sitting next to my horse's ice, and I locked his room when it was obvious he'd never use it. Your man's dying wish was to get what he'd found to you," he was growling again, and she wondered a little at his vehemence. It might be manufactured for Vamvakidis' sake--her human hadn't sounded angry when they'd been spending days trying to see the man. But it might be real, and brought out only because it would be useful, too.
"And you won't even acknowledge he worked for you," her human continued, the anger tamped down to something cold in his voice. "A man dies for you, and you're leaving me with little choice but to feed his body to my horse, in an attempt to recoup my losses here."
If she'd had access to the eyepatch she would have noted that she still didn't want to eat the man. She'd gotten quite a taste of him while they'd cleaned off all the surfaces he'd bled on.
"He was," Vamvakidis began, then paused. "Intemperate," he eventually decided. "Moving as quickly as he did--as you said, his gifts to the stationmaster were both generous and less than subtle--he drew attention to himself. It cost."
"A life is a high price," her human agreed easily. She wondered if the other human could hear the mockery.
"It cost him his life," Vamvakidis ground out, "but it also drew all eyes to him, and from him to me. If it comes out that he stole information--no, I'll make no bones about it, he was spying for me, and he gained access to several of my rivals' secrets," he talked right over her human's indrawn breath, and she was faintly amused to hear him let it out again. "--well."
"Pretending the information doesn't exist isn't going to make it happen. There's not a spell that can do that," her human replied, "especially not when the information's sitting around on a horse."
Vamvakidis grunted. "You can't be seen delivering anything to my doors."
"If I order supplies to be delivered to my horse, is there a third party you'll trust to collect for you?"
"No," Vamvakidis said, and her human made a frustrated noise so softly she was nearly sure Vamvakidis couldn't hear, "but I do have a . . cousin, shall we say, who doesn't wear my name."
"Fine," her human growled, throwing himself back into his chair and skidding himself nearly a meter in the process. She turned down the input briefly to muffle the shriek of the protesting floor.
When she turned it back up again, her human was continuing "--but I get paid first. I know you won't be giving me an image of your 'cousin', so you'll have to tell us both how we're to keep from showing our hands. I do not want to hand over your man to someone I shouldn't have."
"What makes you think I have the sort of cash on my person to pay for a fast horse's run from Sol'tsy province to here?"
"You're Sergei Vamvakidis," her human replied, voice dry as dust. "If I wouldn't need to worry about it being recognised, I could take two of your rings and that knife up your sleeve and be up about seventy rubles for my trouble."
Vamvakidis coughed, nearly laughing before he got his voice back under control. "My jewelry aside, Captain Sinclair, it's too bad you're not looking for a job. My security could manifestly use some improvement."
"I don't think you'd care for me as an employee, Seryosha," he drawled, curling the vowels of the diminutive around the room. "May I have my payment and your 'cousin's pass-phrase?"
Metal clinked against metal in her speakers, echoing in overlapping patterns until she adjusted the gain again. Vamvakidis had been nearly throwing coins and a heavier bar onto the table, towards her human. "He'll tell you his cousin sent him for a hog," he bit out. "Ask him which cousin. Nobody else would have the balls to claim 'Seryosha' in regards to me."
Her human laughed; she could hear him slipping the coins into his pockets. When he was done, she'd be able to tell he was carrying something new by the shift in his weight on a set of coils, but no human would. His favourite skin hung stiff and heavy without anything in it, and it overlapped his belt by a crucial handspan of centimeters that disguised the small of his back. She'd watched him pull anything from a small shield to firecrackers in the past. She didn't need to see him. She still wanted to.
"Should I expect him today?" her human asked as the last clinks faded from the smallest input channel.
"Within four," Vamvakidis replied in a tone she assigned as 'grudging'. "I'll need to get a message to him and arrange secondary transportation. Use Andreyev's for your supply order. He doesn't work for me--or any of my rivals, directly. His prices are reasonable but he can't depend on us for transportation and it makes him slow."
"It's a pleasure doing business with a professional," her human told Vamvakidis, his boots telling her he was heading for the conference room's door.
As it slid open, her human said, loudly enough she eased the gain down a little, "I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. It was very kind of you to meet with me to correct it."
"Not at all," Vamvakidis demurred, the rasp in his voice growing more rust as he raised his voice, too. "Show Captain Sinclair out, Vadim."
The terem had eyes on all of Vamvakidis' doors; as her human's footsteps moved through the big blind space that was Vamvakidis' quarters to her sensor-systems, she discarded doors until she found the one he was being led out of. Vadim exchanged a few words along the way with various others of Vamvakidis' minions, nothing in his voice making her twitchy for her human's safety.
If she'd been human, she would have been hovering anxiously over the mirror that showed the door, until her captain emerged. As it was, when visuals finally, finally re-engaged, she did the immediate spot checks for signs of their agreed 'trouble, find me somewhere to hide', but found nothing out of place. Even his braid hadn't frayed from his trip through the ducts.
"Tell Gospodin Vamvakidis I apologise again for the misunderstanding," he called in to the door-guard, loud enough to be overheard, and tossed off a freetrader's excuse for a salute before turning his back.
Examining him through the terem's eyes, she couldn't put better than twenty-percent probabilities as to the exact locations of the payment he'd been given. She thought the bar was probably in one of the sealed compartments hidden in his boots. But that was only because she'd watched him remove a couple of knives earlier so they wouldn't catch on access panels.
Ten minutes' lazy walk brought him back to the stable, and she unlocked the stall door when the eye above it saw him turn the corner.
"Nag of mine," he said as he settled down at the kitchen table, kicking his boots up to rest on the surface, "the next time you tell me you can get me at someone who's avoiding me, you're going into a little more detail."
"If you'd asked, I would have told you," she informed him. "What did he pay you?"
"Less than we deserve, more than I was betting on. He may try having me killed later," he added casually, and ignored the tiny fluctuation in the gravity coils around him with the ease of long practice. "Depends on whether he's smarter than he is vindictive."
She silently added a subroutine to letting him out of the stall; if she couldn't tell he'd put on armour, he wasn't allowed out. She didn't think he'd risk trying to override a hatch on her, and she should be faster than he was at rewriting the stall door.
After emptying his pockets--she'd been right, the gold bar had been in his left boot--he took himself off for a long nap. While he was sleeping, she built a list of supplies for a human crew of four on a five-man horse, including a couple of sorts of treat food, and looked up Andreyev's supply shop. Illegal market, only just barely. It was enough to keep him on the flagged internal directory, not enough to give him a word-of-mouth location.
She gave her human enough time after waking to comb out and rebraid his hair--she ate the shed strands absently as she rewrote the list for his eyepatch, adding asking prices and expected haggling results to the plain version he'd be carrying for the supplier--but spoke before he was wearing more than shirt, trousers and boots. "Am I the sort of engineer who would threaten you bodily for oranges?"
Pausing in the middle of shrugging into his black skin, he contemplated the wall between two of her eyes, and then shrugged. "If you'd like to be."
"I think I am," she decided. "If he offers pomegranates instead, try to get one of each. I heard a rumour about a vezha trying to raise them in the black."
They argued for five minutes about the list before she stole back the mouse she'd left on the kitchen table for him to revise that version, too. He was right, she'd figured for too long in the black for the time they'd spent and the crew they were reporting.
While he established that the mouse wasn't of a capacity that would allow her to sneak back into the eyepatch, they argued casually about how he'd transport money to the supplier, what weapons he'd show while doing it. She won that one. All the money he'd be counting over for Andreyev went into an embroidered pouch that rested in in the pocket opposite the handle of the fighting knife hidden in his black skin. He put a knife in his right boot, and sealed the container below the hilt, so it showed. It wasn't enough of a weapon to attract what passed for the local militia's attention, but it would give pause to anyone hearing the dinner-bell jingle of a captain supplying a horse alone.
She shaded her tone to 'smug' as they bid farewell for the stable's audience. She'd worked out how to sound like she was physically closing the stall door behind him, and they made use of that trick--and her ability to project images to any mirror she liked--to strengthen the illusion that he was captain of a crewed horse, not its sole crew. He'd developed a fondness for knifing anyone who tried breaking into her stall she was still trying to cure him of.
The meeting with Andreyev's clerk and then the man himself after her human passed along his engineer's 'request' went as they'd expected. Some of the haggling-triumphs went to her human, some to the supplier, and her human left the shop with a handful of kopecks for change and an estimated date for shipment. They spent the rest of the afternoon shifting their former client's possessions and corpse into a cooled box labeled--after some tweaking--for perishable foodstuffs.
She still wanted to know exactly what the man had died for. They rehashed the argument, but he won again and the container was closed--not yet sealed, so Vamvakidis' minion could confirm he wasn't picking up an actual hog--with the electronics untouched.
Two days passed before four men and a loaded sledge knocked at the stall door. She'd gotten bored enough to be going over her old footage of the crabs, and he'd gotten in three fights and managed to slice five people in the process. He'd actually been in the process of cleaning blood off one of his holdout knives--the ceramic one that passed metal detectors--when she hooked the door's speakers to her internal feed and responded to the knock.
"Delivery for le Chevalier de Grammont from Andreyev's," the man sitting at the front of the sledge driving repeated, sounding bored.
"One moment while I find the captain for you," she replied. "Is this the whole order?"
"Should be," the man said, as her human hurriedly tucked the weapons and cleaning supplies out of sight, then pulled his black skin back on. She opened doors before he reached them, spreading her interior from its usual configuration of closed compartments to the more standard in-stable open. It was a show of trust; the terem wouldn't lose pressure, the horse didn't need to conserve warmth with sectional heating . . all of them things she hadn't been raised to see and her human didn't bother trusting.
"The captain's on his way," she announced as he opened two hatches and rotated them down to form ramps to the stable floor. The first was for the supplies they'd bought. The second was where they'd put the not quite false perishables box. She'd been keeping the room cold purely from habit, and her human's breath steamed as he moved. She flagged the visual with a note for showing gases in a controlled atmosphere, and unlocked the stall door as her human touched it, opening it so smoothly it looked like he'd been the one to unlock it.
"Half a day ahead of schedule," he remarked as the sledge slid over the threshold, trundling over to her side. She resisted the urge to lift out of the cradle holding her in place as two men hopped out of the sledge and walked towards her.
"We had a contract fall through and the sledge was available early," the driver explained, stepping down himself. "Everything up in the main section?"
"My crew's getting lazy," her human agreed. "It'll do 'em good to stow themselves."
"Glad you're not my captain," the driver said, laughing. "Dima, Roman, 'Veshko, you heard the man."
Practiced movement brought a smaller sledge off the back of the big one, and all four men made themselves busy unloading a marked-off portion of the big sledge into the center of her belly.
After a while, the driver stepped aside from the hauling line--the other three took up his slack with hardly a grumble--and inclined his head to her human. "I think I'm in the right place. My cousin said there was a captain down this way with a hand-butchered hog available for sale. His daughter's getting married--he wanted me to look at it and decide if it was worth his time."
"Which cousin?" her human asked neutrally, not taking his hands out of the pockets of his black skin.
"S-seryosha," was the reply.
"You're in the right place," her human informed him, suppressing a grin expertly enough she barely glimpsed it. "Tell your men they can get some tea from the kitchen--the samovar's hot--and borrow the sledge."
Splitting her attention evenly between the two groups of humans as the haulers took a relieved break and her human conducted the other one--and his sledge--through to the storage compartment, she thought she would have scowled. It would have been simpler to use their own sledge, allow the haulers to keep offloading as the other business was transacted. But he was in charge for face-to-face interactions, and he wanted the haulers to take tea in the kitchen.
The samovar--which ordinarily didn't even have water in it, since he didn't usually bother with tea on his own--was indeed hot and ready for the haulers when they checked. They laughed, wondering where the rest of the crew were--one theorised a brothel, and wasn't shouted down for the idea--and took their tea standing, leaning against the kitchen walls.
Shifting her main attention back to her human and his companion, she found the lid on the box just been lifted, and the driver was looking down into it. Recording the way the man paled, she suddenly realised why her human had bothered to shroud the body in semi-translucent plastic. She would never have thought of that.
"That's my cousin's hog?" he stammered after a moment.
"Sadly, yes. Everything's in there--I included a copy of the manifest on top of that bag--" her human pointed, not visibly concerned by the body. "and if he has any questions, he knows where to find me."
"Yessir," the driver replied, brain on pattern like a blinkered horse. "Uh, can you lock that?"
Her human closed the lid, gently activating the seals that would preserve a real perishable from damage. He even affixed one of their spare inspection chops across the lock's faceplate.
It took both of them to get the box up onto the sledge. She couldn't afford to tweak the gravity to help, with guests watching. But they got the box down and mixed into the big sledge's cargo without needing even the most subtle assistance, and the driver collected his companions without complaint. One of the men--Roman, she tentatively assigned--thanked her human for the tea, which her human shook his blond head over.
"It's just hospitality," he demurred. "Unfortunately you're still unloading my bread and salt."
That caused laughter, and the haulers went back to work singing. She recorded the tune for later analysis, and her human bid them a polite farewell as they finished.
She locked the door behind them, closed up her open spaces--all but the ones they'd need immediate access to--and staticked a gentle current through her speakers. Done.
Her human climbed back up into her belly, unhooked her personal sledge from its compartment, and got to work himself. It took him one trip between kitchen and belly to shed his black skin, and she eventually lowered her internal temperature several degrees to prevent him from steaming. She still wasn't sure what to make of that and in the meantime wanted no more evidence.
Supplies stowed--he set aside the majority of the food to sell off, somewhere out of the way and desperate for terem-processed kasha and tea--their duty finally carried out, they set themselves to finding a new job. She dove into the systems, even bothering to send arguing local-mail messages with several of the prospective clients to establish parameters.
Her human, being her human, left her to the posted jobs, and went to go listen for an unlisted one. He came back to sleep, or to change weapons to keep people from getting complacent, but she didn't see him with her own nets regularly for several days.
"Excuse me," a man crooned softly into her human's ear, startling them both. She instantly went for the terem's systems, found them in time to watch her human jerking away, elbow rising, but paused when the man threw his hands up, showing them empty.
"What," her human ground out, elbow lowering. The other human would probably assume a lowering of tension. She knew it was only because it was easier to break something with the armoured cap with a longer striking distance. The short arc described by bringing his arm around would startle an opponent. The longer one of bringing his elbow up before striking would do damage. The terem's system's offered her a good look into the interloper's face--her human was a blur of mostly-turned-away face and the front of a shoulder at the edge of the mirror. She took a still, then flipped on a subroutine, wondering if her human had completely forgotten he was still wearing the resonance singer or if he knew he wasn't alone.
"Heard a rumour," the stranger announced carefully.
The terem couldn't cough up an official id, and she switched over to the militia's systems. Seconds trickled by, and she had yet to see a positively identified image. Not good.
"It's my engineer who can be courted with oranges, not me," her human replied sharply. "What."
"Sorry, sorry!" the man flapped his hands. "Was a friend of a friend of a friend--said you'd had one of Vamvakidis' guys for a long run. That kind of run, men get to talking--"
"No," her human interrupted. "Thought I had, but the guy lied through his teeth. Took Vamvakidis five minutes to set me straight. I've got nothing anyone would be interested in, unless someone wants to buy my last hog before my engineer gets her hands on it. Leave us alone."
It took a few minutes for him to get away from the man, and felt like much longer before he reached the safety of her stall and her belly. She'd been impressed with his restraint; if she'd been placing bets, she'd have lost. Her human was really much too fond of knifing people.
It was good he hadn't. As he ducked up underneath her to pull himself in the open hatch, she put up the images and notes she'd finally extracted from the militia's systems onto the big mirror. When he came in, he paused in the doorway, staring.
"We have a problem," she told him. "That's not one of Vamvakidis' runners, making sure we're not getting stupid."
"No," he agreed, coming in to examine the notes she'd projected next to the image. "Unless he's a very dedicated double. Alright. Minimise that and give me a stylus. We've got planning to do."
It was past local midnight, well over two shifts since he'd last slept, when he broke off in the middle of a thought, frowned at her closest eye, then, speculatively "Can you keep yourself from kicking a man for putting a knife in your flank?"
She flicked on one of the unoccupied mirrors to glare at him. Her best example was a recording of a Siberian woman with a tangle of pale dreadlocks crowning her head that spoke of mixed parentage, staring down a news recorder who'd asked her opinion of the end of the war. She used a variety of images to portray her responses, normally female but she used male if she had no female examples. The last time she'd used that particular one her human had been distracted from his line of reasoning long enough to actually say "Did someone just ask if she named her favourite reindeer 'Lunch'?"
This time he didn't react to the glare directly. "Not anywhere really vital," he continued, "though on an ordinary horse it might be a problem."
"Why, in the name of ice and air," she'd adopted the human phrase for her own, "would we let someone stab me?"
"It would give you a chance to lure someone out and then kick them with your real hooves," he replied.
She paused. Thought it over, giving due weight to her frequent, if no longer voiced, desire to trample the occasional human. Eventually, she decided " . . . I'm not happy with this plan, human."
"Do you have a better one?" he asked, in the reasonable tone she used on him when he was being particularly . . human.
"No," she growled, annoyed, because she was trying to do what he wanted. "But we don't know who's looking."
"We'll stagger out past the mirrors," he said, sketching a wandering trajectory out of the stable in Staraya Russa towards Velikiy Novgorod. "They'll think our loss can be attributed to the lake and the damage we took in the stable. They'll follow."
"And if I don't see a mirror?"
"Mare, if they're close enough to see you clearly, you'll see them, too. I'm not willing to bet you wouldn't melt the glass in their mirrors, for that matter."
Snorting at him through the nearest speaker, she repeated "I'm still not happy with this plan, human."
He leaned back, tilting his head farther back to look up at an eye. "Would it help if I made sure the human who hurt you didn't get away with it?"
She blew discontented static at him in surround-sound. If he'd been another horse she would have stomped away to recover her temper.
It was hard to get away from one's own body.
'Verse/characters: le Chevalier de Grammont; Grammont, Sinclair, a variety of others
Prompt: celeloriel: "the low drone of air conditioning"
Word Count: 5869. WTF.
Notes: followed by soon to be finished business.
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The resonance singer was military issue, modified from its original form. Her human typically wore it against the bone behind his left ear, and she'd heard men dismiss the faint colouration differences between pale human skin and tinted plastic as stemming from the same incident that had left her human partially blind. That her human wasn't blind was obvious in the midst of any fight; everyone aimed for the 'blind' side, whether it was with weapon or fist, and no one had ever connected. He moved too fast for most humans to register what proximity offered them for detail, and if he allowed any human that close without the exchange becoming a fight, he did so where she couldn't see.
She, of course, knew the singer for precisely what it was, though she hadn't when he first used it. His voice echoing out of nowhere into her main pickups had been . . . jarring. She'd snarled at him for stealing tricks from the witches, and still wanted to know why that of all things had made him laugh.
Practice--and boredom--had showed that if she split the input levels carefully enough on her end of the connection, she could hear the breathy barely-there hum of the eyepatch, so soft she suspected even her human didn't feel it against his skin. Doing so took care: the first time she'd tried it he'd spoken unexpectedly and she'd nearly reared out of the gravity cradle in her stall at the feel of her own overloading speakers. The incident proved to her that paltry human hearing ranges were no reason for a machine not to register vibrations, and she'd kept that in mind every time she eased herself into someone else's systems. Their human designers and users confined their recordings to what humans could hear--or what machines could modify to allow humans to hear--and she could trick the recordings if she was careful.
Her human hadn't asked, when she'd first sent him into the immense bones and capillaries of a terem's body. She was still weighing probabilities that he knew what she was doing, if not precisely how, or if he was merely trusting that she knew what she was doing. If he asked, she would explain. He might even have suggestions for improvements.
In the meantime, she could hear her human's slow, deliberate breaths inside the louder drone of the terem's metal lungs. It made a comfortable sort of background noise as she worked, more so than the gentle scrapes and quiet thumps of her human squirming into his current location had.
She'd been pushed out of the eyepatch again last month, and hadn't successfully shoved her way back in, so she couldn't see what he was seeing. There were no watching eyes or ears placed within the ducts, and the few sensors monitoring air quality were easy to subvert into thinking that a minor increase in carbon dioxide wasn't worth reporting. When she heard him take the slightly deeper breath he always did, the one that would activate the singer for a human's hearing range, she shifted more attention towards him, just in time to hear him mutter "Are you sure about this?"
"Oh, stop complaining, human," she replied just as softly but dismissive all the same.
"I have spent," he informed her, accompanied by a thump as he changed positions, "more time in small spaces in the time that I've known you than in the previous years of my life put together."
"It's not my fault human data systems make me itchy," she muttered back, not bothering to add that she wasn't exactly fond of him crawling around inside her bones. She'd spat him back out onto her floors enough times for him to know that already.
A door opening, then sliding closed beneath his perch redirected her attention. Her human fell obediently silent when she clacked the 'Be quiet, I'm listening' tones she would have to sent to a colt. She resplit the input channels from the singer, adjusting the gain on the human-hearing range section to avoid deafening herself if he did speak, and listened intently to accented Russian voices talking. Two men's voices danced across her input channels, accompanied by the crackle of short-distance small-network singers, and the scrapes of chairs across a floor, then a called "All clear--tell him he can come in" and a door closing again.
"Now," she ordered, and unlocked the access panels that connected the air duct and the room, choking off the yelps of surprised locks as she did. Her human shoved himself forward with the heels of his boots, sliding through the first access panel headfirst, and hooked the hatch back up close enough for her to re-lock with a toe as he pushed the second panel open. That one forced him to make a ninety-degree turn as he left the transitional duct and entered the vertical shaft that would drop him onto the conference table, and she heard him grunt a curse as he made it. Bracing both feet and one elbow on the walls of the vertical shaft, he reached up and closed the second hatch. She locked it, listening to him slide down the shaft, boot-soles complaining every centimeter of the way.
There would have been an easier transition if she'd kept him in the duct above, but she couldn't stop the fan without setting off alarms, and she refused to put her human that close to a fan sturdy enough to ruin whatever it grabbed.
Two solid bangs, a scrape of protesting metal, and a thump told her he'd gotten through the third panel--the grill in the ceiling of the conference room--and the lock's relief as its mate-section got within tolerance ranges again told her he'd reached up and closed it again behind him. If she'd been human, she would have smirked.
Faint squeaks of reinforced fabric on polished metal sent her searching for explanation, but the sound of a chair scraping back and a body falling easily into it told her there was no urgency. After a moment, probability informed her he'd used a glove to clear away the scuffed marks of his boots meeting the table before he'd sat down. She gently retuned the singer, no longer needing the air-duct information. If the conference room had watching eyes, they were purely mechanical and not slaved to a system; her entire feed was from her human's tiny singer. When she felt around in the surrounding terem system, she met only blank silence, as she had when she first tried to get a look at Sergei Vamvakidis' leased quarters.
She couldn't see what her human saw, couldn't subvert someone else's system to forget what it had just seen. Of course, that meant there was almost no way Vamvakidis knew what he'd see when he walked in.
The door cycled, and her human's chair creaked slightly as orderly marching shattered into a cacaphony of startled men. "Ah, Gospodin Vamvakidis, wonderful of you to join me," her human remarked pleasantly. "Would you be so kind as to close the door?"
Faint worry curled through her as metal shifted in fabric surroundings, and tense men's voices hissed "Sir?", but it faded when Vamvakidis' deep, rough voice echoed through the singer.
"Captain Sinclair," he said, and she wanted to strip out all the components of his vocal cords all over again, to get the gunk and rust out. "Gentlemen, you are dismissed," he continued, and she could hear someone's boot scrape the floor as its owner tensed.
"Sir?" the boldest whispered, and Vamvakidis coughed dryly. "Captain Sinclair knows leaving is at my good graces, Mikhail. Do tell Gospodin Ioannovich's party that I will need to reschedule, and apologise for the short notice."
"Sir," a different one of his guards acknowledged, and clomps followed by a door closing reverberated through her internal speakers.
"Captain Sinclair," Vamvakidis repeated, that time with more emotion in his grinding voice, "I'm quite certain this room was cleared not three minutes ago."
"You didn't really think you could put me off forever, did you?" her human replied, a smaller creak from his chair telling her he'd sat up straighter.
"A foolish hope," Vamvakidis said, not indicating whether it might have been his hope, or merely an idiotic subordinate's. Another chair creaked, by the faint echo one across the body of the table from her human's seat.
"I don't enjoy couriering, Seryosha," her human growled, the diminutive a verbal punch to the nose. "Are you going to accept custody of your man's possessions and pay me for the trip or not?"
"I could tell you I already have that information from another source," Vamvakidis growled back. "Runner-up in a race won't earn you a purse."
If she'd been officially present at the meeting in the guise of her own engineer, she'd have laughed long and loud and hard. Her human's derisive bark was an adequate substitute, she acknowledged grudgingly, knowing the face that accompanied that sound from vast troves of archives. "Vamvakidis," he said, chair creaking as he slouched back into it, "if you had two men out Sol'tsy way, why is only one of them dead?"
The chair creaked again as he sat up, bare fingers tapping the surface of the metal table. "One man finds what you're looking for, doesn't tell his companion--assuming his companion ever knew about him in the first place, are you accustomed to setting your men to spy on one another?--buys himself horse-passage back here, and departs. All more than a week before his companion finds the same information--by his word untouched by a copyist's hand--comes to me, and gives me a quarter-payment to keep his place, with a promise that you, the great Sergei Vamvakidis, would render the rest when we arrived. Half a day later, his luggage shows up--your man's in a hurry, closing up his affairs and all but running to get to you--and I have my crew load it into the horse. Another three hours pass, your man's pushed our departure time up and he's done a decent job of bribing the stablemaster, because there's nary a peep of protest when I check your man's word with the schedule. One more hour passes, and your man's going to miss his own deadline--" her human clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "--and there he is at the stall door, bleeding like a market hog."
A rustle of cloth told her her human was shrugging or Vamvakidis was shifting uncomfortably. "We do what we can, but he dies on the way. He wouldn't let me haul him to Sol'tsy's excuse for a medsestra's station before we left. Said he had to get to you, at any cost. So we did our best--and once our departure date catches us up you'll know just why I'm estimating your imaginary second man left a week before mine did--and got here. And you won't even acknowledge he was your man, let alone give me the money he promised me or a reward for doing it so quickly."
Her human sprang to his feet, the chair's protesting squeak overlaid by the noise of his boots on the floor as he began pacing along one of the walls. "I don't know what he found, and I haven't gone looking. We sponged the blood off, but he and his clothes are sitting next to my horse's ice, and I locked his room when it was obvious he'd never use it. Your man's dying wish was to get what he'd found to you," he was growling again, and she wondered a little at his vehemence. It might be manufactured for Vamvakidis' sake--her human hadn't sounded angry when they'd been spending days trying to see the man. But it might be real, and brought out only because it would be useful, too.
"And you won't even acknowledge he worked for you," her human continued, the anger tamped down to something cold in his voice. "A man dies for you, and you're leaving me with little choice but to feed his body to my horse, in an attempt to recoup my losses here."
If she'd had access to the eyepatch she would have noted that she still didn't want to eat the man. She'd gotten quite a taste of him while they'd cleaned off all the surfaces he'd bled on.
"He was," Vamvakidis began, then paused. "Intemperate," he eventually decided. "Moving as quickly as he did--as you said, his gifts to the stationmaster were both generous and less than subtle--he drew attention to himself. It cost."
"A life is a high price," her human agreed easily. She wondered if the other human could hear the mockery.
"It cost him his life," Vamvakidis ground out, "but it also drew all eyes to him, and from him to me. If it comes out that he stole information--no, I'll make no bones about it, he was spying for me, and he gained access to several of my rivals' secrets," he talked right over her human's indrawn breath, and she was faintly amused to hear him let it out again. "--well."
"Pretending the information doesn't exist isn't going to make it happen. There's not a spell that can do that," her human replied, "especially not when the information's sitting around on a horse."
Vamvakidis grunted. "You can't be seen delivering anything to my doors."
"If I order supplies to be delivered to my horse, is there a third party you'll trust to collect for you?"
"No," Vamvakidis said, and her human made a frustrated noise so softly she was nearly sure Vamvakidis couldn't hear, "but I do have a . . cousin, shall we say, who doesn't wear my name."
"Fine," her human growled, throwing himself back into his chair and skidding himself nearly a meter in the process. She turned down the input briefly to muffle the shriek of the protesting floor.
When she turned it back up again, her human was continuing "--but I get paid first. I know you won't be giving me an image of your 'cousin', so you'll have to tell us both how we're to keep from showing our hands. I do not want to hand over your man to someone I shouldn't have."
"What makes you think I have the sort of cash on my person to pay for a fast horse's run from Sol'tsy province to here?"
"You're Sergei Vamvakidis," her human replied, voice dry as dust. "If I wouldn't need to worry about it being recognised, I could take two of your rings and that knife up your sleeve and be up about seventy rubles for my trouble."
Vamvakidis coughed, nearly laughing before he got his voice back under control. "My jewelry aside, Captain Sinclair, it's too bad you're not looking for a job. My security could manifestly use some improvement."
"I don't think you'd care for me as an employee, Seryosha," he drawled, curling the vowels of the diminutive around the room. "May I have my payment and your 'cousin's pass-phrase?"
Metal clinked against metal in her speakers, echoing in overlapping patterns until she adjusted the gain again. Vamvakidis had been nearly throwing coins and a heavier bar onto the table, towards her human. "He'll tell you his cousin sent him for a hog," he bit out. "Ask him which cousin. Nobody else would have the balls to claim 'Seryosha' in regards to me."
Her human laughed; she could hear him slipping the coins into his pockets. When he was done, she'd be able to tell he was carrying something new by the shift in his weight on a set of coils, but no human would. His favourite skin hung stiff and heavy without anything in it, and it overlapped his belt by a crucial handspan of centimeters that disguised the small of his back. She'd watched him pull anything from a small shield to firecrackers in the past. She didn't need to see him. She still wanted to.
"Should I expect him today?" her human asked as the last clinks faded from the smallest input channel.
"Within four," Vamvakidis replied in a tone she assigned as 'grudging'. "I'll need to get a message to him and arrange secondary transportation. Use Andreyev's for your supply order. He doesn't work for me--or any of my rivals, directly. His prices are reasonable but he can't depend on us for transportation and it makes him slow."
"It's a pleasure doing business with a professional," her human told Vamvakidis, his boots telling her he was heading for the conference room's door.
As it slid open, her human said, loudly enough she eased the gain down a little, "I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. It was very kind of you to meet with me to correct it."
"Not at all," Vamvakidis demurred, the rasp in his voice growing more rust as he raised his voice, too. "Show Captain Sinclair out, Vadim."
The terem had eyes on all of Vamvakidis' doors; as her human's footsteps moved through the big blind space that was Vamvakidis' quarters to her sensor-systems, she discarded doors until she found the one he was being led out of. Vadim exchanged a few words along the way with various others of Vamvakidis' minions, nothing in his voice making her twitchy for her human's safety.
If she'd been human, she would have been hovering anxiously over the mirror that showed the door, until her captain emerged. As it was, when visuals finally, finally re-engaged, she did the immediate spot checks for signs of their agreed 'trouble, find me somewhere to hide', but found nothing out of place. Even his braid hadn't frayed from his trip through the ducts.
"Tell Gospodin Vamvakidis I apologise again for the misunderstanding," he called in to the door-guard, loud enough to be overheard, and tossed off a freetrader's excuse for a salute before turning his back.
Examining him through the terem's eyes, she couldn't put better than twenty-percent probabilities as to the exact locations of the payment he'd been given. She thought the bar was probably in one of the sealed compartments hidden in his boots. But that was only because she'd watched him remove a couple of knives earlier so they wouldn't catch on access panels.
Ten minutes' lazy walk brought him back to the stable, and she unlocked the stall door when the eye above it saw him turn the corner.
"Nag of mine," he said as he settled down at the kitchen table, kicking his boots up to rest on the surface, "the next time you tell me you can get me at someone who's avoiding me, you're going into a little more detail."
"If you'd asked, I would have told you," she informed him. "What did he pay you?"
"Less than we deserve, more than I was betting on. He may try having me killed later," he added casually, and ignored the tiny fluctuation in the gravity coils around him with the ease of long practice. "Depends on whether he's smarter than he is vindictive."
She silently added a subroutine to letting him out of the stall; if she couldn't tell he'd put on armour, he wasn't allowed out. She didn't think he'd risk trying to override a hatch on her, and she should be faster than he was at rewriting the stall door.
After emptying his pockets--she'd been right, the gold bar had been in his left boot--he took himself off for a long nap. While he was sleeping, she built a list of supplies for a human crew of four on a five-man horse, including a couple of sorts of treat food, and looked up Andreyev's supply shop. Illegal market, only just barely. It was enough to keep him on the flagged internal directory, not enough to give him a word-of-mouth location.
She gave her human enough time after waking to comb out and rebraid his hair--she ate the shed strands absently as she rewrote the list for his eyepatch, adding asking prices and expected haggling results to the plain version he'd be carrying for the supplier--but spoke before he was wearing more than shirt, trousers and boots. "Am I the sort of engineer who would threaten you bodily for oranges?"
Pausing in the middle of shrugging into his black skin, he contemplated the wall between two of her eyes, and then shrugged. "If you'd like to be."
"I think I am," she decided. "If he offers pomegranates instead, try to get one of each. I heard a rumour about a vezha trying to raise them in the black."
They argued for five minutes about the list before she stole back the mouse she'd left on the kitchen table for him to revise that version, too. He was right, she'd figured for too long in the black for the time they'd spent and the crew they were reporting.
While he established that the mouse wasn't of a capacity that would allow her to sneak back into the eyepatch, they argued casually about how he'd transport money to the supplier, what weapons he'd show while doing it. She won that one. All the money he'd be counting over for Andreyev went into an embroidered pouch that rested in in the pocket opposite the handle of the fighting knife hidden in his black skin. He put a knife in his right boot, and sealed the container below the hilt, so it showed. It wasn't enough of a weapon to attract what passed for the local militia's attention, but it would give pause to anyone hearing the dinner-bell jingle of a captain supplying a horse alone.
She shaded her tone to 'smug' as they bid farewell for the stable's audience. She'd worked out how to sound like she was physically closing the stall door behind him, and they made use of that trick--and her ability to project images to any mirror she liked--to strengthen the illusion that he was captain of a crewed horse, not its sole crew. He'd developed a fondness for knifing anyone who tried breaking into her stall she was still trying to cure him of.
The meeting with Andreyev's clerk and then the man himself after her human passed along his engineer's 'request' went as they'd expected. Some of the haggling-triumphs went to her human, some to the supplier, and her human left the shop with a handful of kopecks for change and an estimated date for shipment. They spent the rest of the afternoon shifting their former client's possessions and corpse into a cooled box labeled--after some tweaking--for perishable foodstuffs.
She still wanted to know exactly what the man had died for. They rehashed the argument, but he won again and the container was closed--not yet sealed, so Vamvakidis' minion could confirm he wasn't picking up an actual hog--with the electronics untouched.
Two days passed before four men and a loaded sledge knocked at the stall door. She'd gotten bored enough to be going over her old footage of the crabs, and he'd gotten in three fights and managed to slice five people in the process. He'd actually been in the process of cleaning blood off one of his holdout knives--the ceramic one that passed metal detectors--when she hooked the door's speakers to her internal feed and responded to the knock.
"Delivery for le Chevalier de Grammont from Andreyev's," the man sitting at the front of the sledge driving repeated, sounding bored.
"One moment while I find the captain for you," she replied. "Is this the whole order?"
"Should be," the man said, as her human hurriedly tucked the weapons and cleaning supplies out of sight, then pulled his black skin back on. She opened doors before he reached them, spreading her interior from its usual configuration of closed compartments to the more standard in-stable open. It was a show of trust; the terem wouldn't lose pressure, the horse didn't need to conserve warmth with sectional heating . . all of them things she hadn't been raised to see and her human didn't bother trusting.
"The captain's on his way," she announced as he opened two hatches and rotated them down to form ramps to the stable floor. The first was for the supplies they'd bought. The second was where they'd put the not quite false perishables box. She'd been keeping the room cold purely from habit, and her human's breath steamed as he moved. She flagged the visual with a note for showing gases in a controlled atmosphere, and unlocked the stall door as her human touched it, opening it so smoothly it looked like he'd been the one to unlock it.
"Half a day ahead of schedule," he remarked as the sledge slid over the threshold, trundling over to her side. She resisted the urge to lift out of the cradle holding her in place as two men hopped out of the sledge and walked towards her.
"We had a contract fall through and the sledge was available early," the driver explained, stepping down himself. "Everything up in the main section?"
"My crew's getting lazy," her human agreed. "It'll do 'em good to stow themselves."
"Glad you're not my captain," the driver said, laughing. "Dima, Roman, 'Veshko, you heard the man."
Practiced movement brought a smaller sledge off the back of the big one, and all four men made themselves busy unloading a marked-off portion of the big sledge into the center of her belly.
After a while, the driver stepped aside from the hauling line--the other three took up his slack with hardly a grumble--and inclined his head to her human. "I think I'm in the right place. My cousin said there was a captain down this way with a hand-butchered hog available for sale. His daughter's getting married--he wanted me to look at it and decide if it was worth his time."
"Which cousin?" her human asked neutrally, not taking his hands out of the pockets of his black skin.
"S-seryosha," was the reply.
"You're in the right place," her human informed him, suppressing a grin expertly enough she barely glimpsed it. "Tell your men they can get some tea from the kitchen--the samovar's hot--and borrow the sledge."
Splitting her attention evenly between the two groups of humans as the haulers took a relieved break and her human conducted the other one--and his sledge--through to the storage compartment, she thought she would have scowled. It would have been simpler to use their own sledge, allow the haulers to keep offloading as the other business was transacted. But he was in charge for face-to-face interactions, and he wanted the haulers to take tea in the kitchen.
The samovar--which ordinarily didn't even have water in it, since he didn't usually bother with tea on his own--was indeed hot and ready for the haulers when they checked. They laughed, wondering where the rest of the crew were--one theorised a brothel, and wasn't shouted down for the idea--and took their tea standing, leaning against the kitchen walls.
Shifting her main attention back to her human and his companion, she found the lid on the box just been lifted, and the driver was looking down into it. Recording the way the man paled, she suddenly realised why her human had bothered to shroud the body in semi-translucent plastic. She would never have thought of that.
"That's my cousin's hog?" he stammered after a moment.
"Sadly, yes. Everything's in there--I included a copy of the manifest on top of that bag--" her human pointed, not visibly concerned by the body. "and if he has any questions, he knows where to find me."
"Yessir," the driver replied, brain on pattern like a blinkered horse. "Uh, can you lock that?"
Her human closed the lid, gently activating the seals that would preserve a real perishable from damage. He even affixed one of their spare inspection chops across the lock's faceplate.
It took both of them to get the box up onto the sledge. She couldn't afford to tweak the gravity to help, with guests watching. But they got the box down and mixed into the big sledge's cargo without needing even the most subtle assistance, and the driver collected his companions without complaint. One of the men--Roman, she tentatively assigned--thanked her human for the tea, which her human shook his blond head over.
"It's just hospitality," he demurred. "Unfortunately you're still unloading my bread and salt."
That caused laughter, and the haulers went back to work singing. She recorded the tune for later analysis, and her human bid them a polite farewell as they finished.
She locked the door behind them, closed up her open spaces--all but the ones they'd need immediate access to--and staticked a gentle current through her speakers. Done.
Her human climbed back up into her belly, unhooked her personal sledge from its compartment, and got to work himself. It took him one trip between kitchen and belly to shed his black skin, and she eventually lowered her internal temperature several degrees to prevent him from steaming. She still wasn't sure what to make of that and in the meantime wanted no more evidence.
Supplies stowed--he set aside the majority of the food to sell off, somewhere out of the way and desperate for terem-processed kasha and tea--their duty finally carried out, they set themselves to finding a new job. She dove into the systems, even bothering to send arguing local-mail messages with several of the prospective clients to establish parameters.
Her human, being her human, left her to the posted jobs, and went to go listen for an unlisted one. He came back to sleep, or to change weapons to keep people from getting complacent, but she didn't see him with her own nets regularly for several days.
"Excuse me," a man crooned softly into her human's ear, startling them both. She instantly went for the terem's systems, found them in time to watch her human jerking away, elbow rising, but paused when the man threw his hands up, showing them empty.
"What," her human ground out, elbow lowering. The other human would probably assume a lowering of tension. She knew it was only because it was easier to break something with the armoured cap with a longer striking distance. The short arc described by bringing his arm around would startle an opponent. The longer one of bringing his elbow up before striking would do damage. The terem's system's offered her a good look into the interloper's face--her human was a blur of mostly-turned-away face and the front of a shoulder at the edge of the mirror. She took a still, then flipped on a subroutine, wondering if her human had completely forgotten he was still wearing the resonance singer or if he knew he wasn't alone.
"Heard a rumour," the stranger announced carefully.
The terem couldn't cough up an official id, and she switched over to the militia's systems. Seconds trickled by, and she had yet to see a positively identified image. Not good.
"It's my engineer who can be courted with oranges, not me," her human replied sharply. "What."
"Sorry, sorry!" the man flapped his hands. "Was a friend of a friend of a friend--said you'd had one of Vamvakidis' guys for a long run. That kind of run, men get to talking--"
"No," her human interrupted. "Thought I had, but the guy lied through his teeth. Took Vamvakidis five minutes to set me straight. I've got nothing anyone would be interested in, unless someone wants to buy my last hog before my engineer gets her hands on it. Leave us alone."
It took a few minutes for him to get away from the man, and felt like much longer before he reached the safety of her stall and her belly. She'd been impressed with his restraint; if she'd been placing bets, she'd have lost. Her human was really much too fond of knifing people.
It was good he hadn't. As he ducked up underneath her to pull himself in the open hatch, she put up the images and notes she'd finally extracted from the militia's systems onto the big mirror. When he came in, he paused in the doorway, staring.
"We have a problem," she told him. "That's not one of Vamvakidis' runners, making sure we're not getting stupid."
"No," he agreed, coming in to examine the notes she'd projected next to the image. "Unless he's a very dedicated double. Alright. Minimise that and give me a stylus. We've got planning to do."
It was past local midnight, well over two shifts since he'd last slept, when he broke off in the middle of a thought, frowned at her closest eye, then, speculatively "Can you keep yourself from kicking a man for putting a knife in your flank?"
She flicked on one of the unoccupied mirrors to glare at him. Her best example was a recording of a Siberian woman with a tangle of pale dreadlocks crowning her head that spoke of mixed parentage, staring down a news recorder who'd asked her opinion of the end of the war. She used a variety of images to portray her responses, normally female but she used male if she had no female examples. The last time she'd used that particular one her human had been distracted from his line of reasoning long enough to actually say "Did someone just ask if she named her favourite reindeer 'Lunch'?"
This time he didn't react to the glare directly. "Not anywhere really vital," he continued, "though on an ordinary horse it might be a problem."
"Why, in the name of ice and air," she'd adopted the human phrase for her own, "would we let someone stab me?"
"It would give you a chance to lure someone out and then kick them with your real hooves," he replied.
She paused. Thought it over, giving due weight to her frequent, if no longer voiced, desire to trample the occasional human. Eventually, she decided " . . . I'm not happy with this plan, human."
"Do you have a better one?" he asked, in the reasonable tone she used on him when he was being particularly . . human.
"No," she growled, annoyed, because she was trying to do what he wanted. "But we don't know who's looking."
"We'll stagger out past the mirrors," he said, sketching a wandering trajectory out of the stable in Staraya Russa towards Velikiy Novgorod. "They'll think our loss can be attributed to the lake and the damage we took in the stable. They'll follow."
"And if I don't see a mirror?"
"Mare, if they're close enough to see you clearly, you'll see them, too. I'm not willing to bet you wouldn't melt the glass in their mirrors, for that matter."
Snorting at him through the nearest speaker, she repeated "I'm still not happy with this plan, human."
He leaned back, tilting his head farther back to look up at an eye. "Would it help if I made sure the human who hurt you didn't get away with it?"
She blew discontented static at him in surround-sound. If he'd been another horse she would have stomped away to recover her temper.
It was hard to get away from one's own body.