Read Hellflower (v1.1) for Free Online Page B

the City Central Computer is saying to the Justiciary computers, I do not believe your current location is known. I suggest you find the hellflower’s arthame quickly."
    "Yeah, yeah," I muttered.
    ###
    Wanderweb justice is run on the profit motive. Commit a crime here, and you get sentenced, which means the Justiciary sets a price on your head. You meet the price, you walk. You don’t meet it, you’re contract warmgoods, with your contract time equal to your price. Short-timers go up for auction in the city. If your contract time runs longer than the projected life span for your B-pop, you’re a slave. Slaves are factored directly to Market Garden. A few crimes call for execution-like Tiggy’s.
    But they still manage to lose money, so what does a cost-effective bureaucracy do to defray expenses? It confiscates the personal effects of offenders who can’t meet their fines and sells them at auction.
    Hence Dead Storage. Hence us.
    ###
    "So what’s this knife look like?" I asked Tiggy. I looked around for the display case that held heat-for-sale. Might as well help him look. "You saw it when I held it to your throat, three days past."
    "Oh, too reet-all we’re looking for is inert-blade sword as long as my arm. In all this."
    Being as they’re what keep Wanderweb Fiduciary in the green, weapons are prominently displayed. Didn’t see any inert-blades, but I zapped the lock off the case anyway and started looking through it.
    "You have just set off every intruder alarm remaining untriggered in the entire Wanderweb Justiciary," Paladin said.
    "Great," I told the immediate world, hefting an Estel-Shadowmaker handcannon too pretty to leave and wondering where I could put it. I tucked it into my shirt and added a necklace of grenades.
    I started to throw away the comlink, then thought it might be handy if Paladin could hear the hellflower too, so I kept it.
    There was a wrenching sound, and I looked up to see Tiggy Stardust ripping open the locked cabinets on the wall with his bare hands. Some B-pops have it, some don’t. Hellflowers have more of it than most. The first drawer held jewelry, and he threw it down.
    "Would it do any good at all to tell you to abandon the alMayne and leave now?" asked Paladin. "They know where you are, Butterfly. The alarm has been raised, the CityGuard has been mobilized Port wide, and quarantine has been declared-the spaceport has been closed."
    Closed Port. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. I tried to remember if there were any tractors or pressors on the section of the field where I was docked.
    "All this just for us," I said, and Tiggy shot me a funny look. I expect he was thinking I meant the glitterflash he’d just dropped, but it reminded me that one does not talk to one’s beaucoup-illegal Library in front of a witness-even if the witness had no way of knowing who or what or even where I was chaffering with.
    I waved. He went back to vandalism. "No," I said to Paladin’s question.
    Tiggy’s coke-gutter had to be in one of the cabinets because it sure and t’hell wasn’t in any of the display cases. We found it in the last drawer of the last cabinet of the whole wall and Tiggy grabbed it like it was hard credit on payday and stuffed it into his waistband. I’d took the time to find a couple of rifles to replace the last set we’d emptied and was just handing him one when we both heard the teeth-edging whine of a fusion-cutter setting to work.
    "Well hell," I said. "J’ais tuc. You and your damn knife." Paladin’d said there was just one way out of Dead Storage, and the fusion-cutter was in the middle of it.
    "It is not a ‘knife.’ It is my arthame. We will die nobly and with honor, and they who have unjustly attacked a son of the Gentle People will weep when the vengeance of my clan—"
    "I don’t want to die with honor! I don’t want to die at all if I can help it-and I certainly don’t want to die here, with you, after you futzed up your own rescue, you dumb