By the evening, a servo has delivered a packet to the ship at the docks, a twist of silk containing a data carrier. Annotated maps of the system, response codes, an anonymised message routing address for Ion Twelve Horizon to communicate with "her employer", and credentials forged to a precisely-judged degree of plausibility, which say she is known as Ink-Coloured Mouse.
Heavy Snow could do better, but there's such a thing as conspicuously too good to be doing the kind of work she'll be doing. The port system, its officials and criminals alike, are accustomed to a certain level of bored, lazy mutual recognition. Where things squeak, they're greased with bribes. So the machinery of the world turns.
She plucks a single job out of a stream she is otherwise batching and efficiently matching between those offering and those hungry to undertake. Simple: a transfer of certain people from one vessel in the space around the ports to another, bypassing any inconvenient landfall, eyes, or paperwork. The newly-minted Ink-Coloured Mouse need only command her ship to path between docking ports, let it synchronise its affairs with local traffic control, and be paid. There's so little to it, it can't go very wrong; and if it does go wrong, well...perhaps ship courier was simply not in that woman's destiny.
A test. And any of the port's actual employers who might find amusement — or the jaded cachet implicit in owning a dangerous and unsuitable pet — in employing a fleeing Apparat, would surely also administer such a test. The Ink-Coloured Mouse must surely expect it; and so it must be an excellent choice, its verisimilitude satisfactory from all angles.
Heavy Snow transfers the details of the job, the whens and wheres of it, and pays it no further particular mind — tries, at least.
This lasts four hours.
After the audio connection — angry demands to speak to the Ink-Coloured Mouse's fictional ultimate employer, which Heavy Snow simply, coldly refuses, and fragmentary accusations, which settle cold in her guts and which she answers with equally simple and cold observations; not lies, perfectly true things, which sound extremely relevant, and even would be, if the ultimate employer were not a fiction — she rocks in her chair for long minutes, newly aware that she has self-inflicted a terrible risk for no reason she can admit.
And then she chirps a public transportation service and requests a conveyance-servo; chirps a restaurant near the docks with an order, to be picked up shortly; armours herself in a long coat and flat boots; selects a sturdy umbrella from among her few effects, and sets out.
Before the matte black circle of the ship's airlock, Heavy Snow finally asks herself what it is she is doing. But she doesn't know, so it really cannot make any difference. She chirps the ship, only the dark and passive insystem of a mechselfless device, requesting to board.
After a long, silent while, the lock opens. The Ink-Coloured Mouse stands in the round doorway, stiff and upright and central and dark with the light behind her; as if Heavy Snow is staring into an illuminated power symbol, as if she has activated some mechanism she is unprepared for the operation of.
Heavy Snow stands neatly, one arm shielding herself with her umbrella, the other at her side holding a heavy paper bag, feeling helpless and endangered.
"May I enter?" she says, and the other woman, hand on her heavy belly, silently retreats, foot behind foot, eyes never leaving Heavy Snow.
A member of the high Apparat, she no doubt has unimaginable self-defence training, against the possibility of kidnap or assassination. Heavy Snow swallows and walks forward, carefully matching her pace. When she has walked far enough forward, into the lock, the ship closes the outer hatch behind her.
Within the inner hatch, the ship's layout is simple, and follows the lines of its dart-shaped exterior. Redundant airlocks port and starboard, of which the starboard they have just entered, abut mirror-twin corridors running fore and aft. Both of these join the bridge, forward; a small general cabin, amidships. Aft of that lies the head, bunks for four, and the access gangway to the ventral engine pod.
The high Apparat retreats backward, all the way to the general cabin, silent. In the centre of it is a small table, a rectangular surface with an off-centre hole punched through it, which clamps around a cylindrical strut passing from ceiling to deck, in such a way that it can be swivelled around it, raised and lowered. A recess in the floor allows it to be stowed completely; raised and turned ninety degrees, its short end reaches a bench seat on the port side of the cabin, allowing two people to sit elbow to elbow and use it, perhaps, to eat or pore over charts. It is currently in this configuration, although if the Ink-Coloured Mouse was using it for an activity, she has cleared all trace of it before allowing Heavy Snow to intrude.
"Please sit," Heavy Snow says, holding her umbrella point-down and still, carefully without any hint of threatening gesture. Expressionlessly, the woman does so. Heavy Snow approaches the table at the same measured pace they have been using, opting for the midpoint between Ink-Coloured Mouse and the table's far end; puts down the paper bag, and, one-handed, unpacks from it covered containers of sticky rice, dumplings stuffed with minced chicken and vegetables, fried vine leaves rolled around slivers of grilled fish, and a soup cup of savoury garlic-ginger broth.
She sets the cutlery of recycled bamboo fibre out carefully atop the lid of the rice, and one by one, pushes the containers down the table, in front of Ink-Coloured Mouse.
"In your own words and in no hurry," she says, looking down at her own hands as she neatly flattens and folds the paper bag, "please tell me what happened."
The Ink-Coloured Mouse looks at the food, hands clenching and releasing, and her eyes dart from it to Heavy Snow's masked face, turned down unmoving to gaze at the paper trapped against the table beneath her palms. She cannot see the sideways direction of Heavy Snow's eyes inside it, back at her. She makes an abortive twitch in the direction of the meal.
"In no hurry, and in no order," Heavy Snow says. "Food is not withheld to make you talk."
"Are you eating?"
Heavy Snow hesitates. The question seems loaded, in some way she does not know how to read.
"I do not remove my mask," she says finally. "So no."
Whatever suspicion Ink-Coloured Mouse is testing, the cords of her neck stand out for a second, and then she reaches for the soup cup, peels off the lid, lifts it between her palms, and sips direct from it. Her eyes flutter.
Heavy Snow cannot easily trace purchases from the cash token; it's the point of them, after all. She wonders if the woman has made any effort to feed herself since she arrived. If she spent all her means to, on finding someone like Heavy Snow, instead. And then: a member of the high Apparat, alone and frightened, with none of her support systems available to her — does she know how to? Where to begin?
Ink-Coloured Mouse drinks half the broth before investigating the other containers; takes a neat, tentative bite from the end of a vine leaf, then another, less tentative. Her fingers are trembling, slightly. After she picks up another, she says, in an abrupt way: "One of them presumed that the use of my ship included access to — me. I told him that he was not paying enough for anything more than passage."
That seems about right, from the shouting the clients had done about it.
"I do not know if I assumed so correctly," the Ink-Coloured Mouse says, words as neatly bitten as her starved demolition of the wrapped fish.
"I have informed the clients," Heavy Snow says, "that there are traditional demarcation agreements between the major — trade sector employers of the system. And that shipping and — flesh — are run by different interests. And they they would not wish to precipitate any disagreement between these interests about service provision. You are to provide shipping."
Ink-Coloured Mouse takes and releases a quietly audible breath, and eats a dumpling.
"There is a shipboard maintenance tool with a short blade," she says. "I — attacked his hand."
Heavy Snow exfiltrated a report from the medical system that asessed his injury, shortly after the audio call. Attacked is certainly one word for a professionally precise insertion of sharp steel to the joint at the base of his thumb, a strong-wristed twist separating, and perhaps forever ruining the motion of, the digit.
Heavy Snow lifts her shoulders, lets them fall. "They would not prefer the attention of the girl trade," she says, as a matter of fact. She turns away from the table, from the Apparat woman, from the face-to-face sight of the problems she has given herself. "Goodnight, Ink-Coloured Mouse."
The woman says nothing to the measured retreat of her back. Outside the airlock, Heavy Snow opens her umbrella and chirps for a conveyance-servo to take her away.
Heavy Snow has also rotated models of typical examples of the shipboard tool, stared at their basic unsuitability as a weapon. Wondered whether the woman she has renamed had ferreted it out of the ship's toolbox for maintenance purposes, or whether it's the nearest she could find to a weapon, and would not therefore forego. Considers the circumstances under which someone so finely trained as to be capable of boning a man's thumb with an unsuitable tool while eight months gravid, would be so otherwise bereft of weaponry they needed to.
She begins to search for another shipping job to fulfil, somewhat more carefully.
