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Continued from Heading For Bleys

For the time being, she left Bleys to his own devices, whatever those might have been.

On the subject of devices, Larissa preferred the streamlined engineering of her home shadow, and correspondingly spent quite some time tuning her Tradespace toys to the infosphere of this new shadow. It was like emerging from a cave into the light, as a sense she hadn't consciously realized she had been missing sprang back to life. Infosense fed a constant stream of data to her--the inconspicuous but never absent display in her eyes, the subtle tactile cues of the wristband, and the alerts the mastoid link vibrated through her skull to her inner ear, inaudible to anyone but her. A deep part of Larissa's mind relaxed that had been tense and unhappy for a very long time, as though she had been sitting with her back to a door for a century.

After that, it was merely minutes before she was able to rent space on an orbital station owned by a certain business concern known to have a less than tender regard for human life. And if it later turned out that the name on the account was not that of a person known to exist--well, as long as the credit cleared, it was no concern of theirs.

Larissa made the changes to the gravitic system herself. It was a matter of ignoring a "no user-serviceable parts inside" sticker, removing a safety governor, adding a small generator to sustain the extra load the grav plates would draw when producing high acceleration, and splicing a slider control into the circuit. She tested the arrangement by standing in the doorway and flipping half-crowns stamped with Merlin's portrait into the room at different gravity settings. A flick of a finger could produce freefall (and send a little silver Merlin tumbling lazily end over end until bumping against the far wall), or ramp the gravity up to the limit of the transformers, a punishing pull that would would kill a mortal (or yank another Merlin to the floor so quickly it was as though the coin had been shot downward from a bow.)

After restoring the gravity to something resembling normal, Larissa arranged her unorthodox receiving room to her satisfaction, making the somewhat sterile space as little like a prison or a hospital as she could (and scuffing half-heartedly with her toe at a dent left by Merlin's head in 15 Gs.) There was nothing she could do about the clinical expanse of one-way mirror that dominated the inside wall, however, and she was unwilling to sacrifice any more of her safety for Johann's comfort. While he might, even from the depths of insanity, be able to shift Shadow enough to break a camera, she doubted he could change the local physics sufficiently to make glass opaque.

Seated in the chair she had chosen and gazing out at the planet below and stars all around, Larissa called Bleys--prosaically, since she was once again somewhere civilized, with lightspeed communication.

He seemed to be in a hot-tub when he took the call. There was the sound of bubbling water and distinctly un-Bleys-like giggles.

"You're ready?" he said lazily. "Patch me your location - I'll be right over."

And he was very nearly as good as his word; it took him less than half an hour to be there, dressed impeccably, his beard trimmed into a fine point. The seediness that have overtaken him these last years in Amber seemed to have been discarded with the place itself.

He inspected her arrangements with a shrewd eye, and nodded his approval.

Larissa inspected him in much the same manner, though she kept her conclusions to herself.

"Ready to start?"

"Nearly," she said, opening a small case and withdrawing a drill with a narrow bit that sparkled in the light. Larissa, uncharacteristically holding the tool in her left hand, tested the settings. Then she shifted it to her right hand and pulled the trigger again--at which point nothing happened. "Inductive power," she told Bleys with a grin, holding up her left hand and waggling her fingers to draw attention to the electronic contact that extended from her wristband to her palm. "Lossy, but I'm not pumping an x-ray laser, and I'd rather not hand Johann a working diamond drill."

Larissa, too, had changed. There was an unforced lightness in her manner Bleys had never seen, and while no less focused than ever, her everpresent intensity had somehow brightened. It was the difference between space and a supernova--both burn, but one with cold and the other with fire.

She restored the drill to its case and produced her sword and The Letter. "Don't be too trigger-happy with the gravity," she warned. "He's contrary on his best days. Given the nature of his delusions, being restrained will only feed his resentment and insanity. I may even express regret for nearly beating his head in, assuming he remembers that part."

Her personal infosphere picked up what little light that made it through the one-way glass, drowned out to normal vision by the reflection from the much brighter light on the mirror side, and provided her a dim and fuzzy awareness of what went on in the observation room. She waited for Bleys to make himself comfortable in an incongruous leather wingback with nailhead trim and claw feet, obtained in a fit of whimsy and at great expense. It was much easier to make impulse buys in a shadow where the currency was virtual, and therefore hackable.

There seemed to be a decanter and a carved crystal goblet on the small side table beside him. Odd. She didn't remember purchasing that.

Larissa did unsettling things to reality, and her arm emerged from elsewhere with a limp Johann draped over it. "Unconscious people are like awkwardly-shaped bags of accel gel," she complained as she corralled a stray leg with manacle, chain, and a bit of dungeon wall still attached. She laid him less roughly than she might have onto a piece of furniture something like a cross between a doctor's couch and chaise longue, then settled into her chair, placed farther than a lunge, even a chain-augmented one, away from Johann's couch, and waited.

Continued in An Altered Reality For Johann