CHAPTER SEVEN
My first thought was to wonder how the hell I could be a traitor to people I’d never even met. My second thought was that I’d better figure out a way out of this, and fast.
All three of them were armed, of course. That much was obvious from the way their hands were hovering near belts or half-open jackets. Even if it hadn’t been three-to-one odds, the right flap of my jacket and the plasmic concealed beneath it were currently trapped by my arm and the ferret currently lounging there.
The only thing that was keeping them from drawing right then and there was the presence of the steward at the garden door behind me, and my assailants’ obvious suspicion that he, too, was armed. Given the garden’s clientele, I would bet heavily that way myself.
Unfortunately, I would also bet that he had instructions not to get involved unless he or one of his patrons was in imminent danger. As someone who’d just been inside I might qualify for that protection; as someone who’d only been in there as someone else’s guest, I might not. Either way, it wasn’t a hill I wanted to pitch a tent on.
“Have we met?” I called, keeping my voice pleasant. Aside from the fact that I needed more intel on this situation, I’d found that most people didn’t like to talk and shoot at the same time. If I could keep them talking, I might be able to forestall the shooting part.
“Name’s Fulbright,” the spokesman said. “And yeah, a long time ago. You poached one of my targets.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. So, a fellow bounty hunter. “If it helps, I probably didn’t know you were after him, too.”
“You mean like Jasper didn’t know when he went poaching my targets?”
“What does Jasper have to do with it?” I asked, frowning. “I have nothing to do with him.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Fulbright said sarcastically. He strode to within a couple of paces of me, glanced furtively at the steward, and stopped, his buddies stopping along with him. “You’ve got nothing to do with the butt-brain you were just talking to.”
“Okay, look, let’s back up a minute,” I said, easing a casual step backward toward the garden. “You called me a traitor. How am I a traitor?”
“You know damn well,” Fulbright said, countering my backward step with a forward one of his own. “You and Jasper. Don’t deny it—I saw you talking to him.”
“Yes, we’ve established that,” I said. “How does talking to Jasper make me a traitor?”
“Don’t play stupid,” Fulbright bit out. “The Patth offer a hundred thousand commarks for this Tera C flooz. Varsi comes along and says if we hand her over to him instead of the Patth we get two hundred thousand.” He jabbed a finger at my chest. “Only you and Jasper already work for him. So if you find her he doesn’t have to pay anyone. Poaching my target. Again.”
“Yeah, well, just wait a second,” I said, frowning. Given what Geri had said about the Icarus being some sort of new stardrive, it had been pretty obvious that the Patth were behind the hunt.
But Varsi was in the business of selling weapons and illicit drugs, not personally flying them around the Spiral. Why in the world would he shell out two hundred thousand for Tera, especially when he could sell her to the Patth for only one? Was he hoping to buy himself some goodwill?
If so, he was sadly mistaken. I’d dealt with the Patth on occasion, and they didn’t have any goodwill to sell. “He’s offering to pay double the Patth bounty?”
“Yeah, except you’re going to—”
“Yes, right, right,” I cut him off. “Then what? Varsi turns around and hands her to the Patth?”
“Or sells her to someone else,” Fulbright said, his tone going all dark and ominous. “Or just kills her to make sure no one steals her back from him.”
“Why would he kill her?” I asked. “Two hundred thousand is a lot of pocket change for a corpse.”
“Then why don’t the job specs say he wants her alive?” Fulbright countered. “Man wants a target alive, he says so right in the specs. Man doesn’t say, you figure he doesn’t care.”
I frowned. That was indeed the way the bounty business worked. “Maybe it was just an oversight,” I said. “So what exactly do you want me to do? Deliver a message of protest to Mr. Varsi?”
Fulbright grinned, showing me a mouthful of crooked teeth. “Oh, yeah, we want you to deliver a message,” he said softly. “The message is that sometimes you get corpses without having to pay for them.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “Well, here’s the thing—”
Spinning around, I took off at top speed toward the Zen garden door.
I’d only started with a couple of meters’ head start, but I gained another three before Fulbright’s brain was able to switch from threaten to chase. I heard them belatedly scrambling after me as I ran, keeping my eye on the steward. His expression changed from startled to alarmed to determined as the pack of us raced toward him. He reached into his jacket, not toward the upper lapel that held the door buzzer, but lower down on the other side where a holster would be—
Grabbing the ferret around the ribs with both hands, I lobbed him straight at the steward’s face.
The man was quick. Seeing the squirming mass of fur and claws flying toward him, he dropped instantly into a crouch, abandoning any effort to draw his gun in favor of putting both forearms protectively in front of his face. I veered out of my path just far enough to stiff-arm my left palm into his shoulder, toppling him backwards out of the ferret’s arc, and just long enough to dip my fingers into his jacket and key the door release. I kept going, hitting the door shoulder-first and shoving it open, then spinning back around on my heel to shove it closed before Fulbright and his playmates could charge in behind me. I got a look into three angry faces at eye level, plus a glimpse at ankle-level of the ferret darting through the closing gap behind me—
And then the door closed, and the lock clicked, and three shoulders slammed into it just a fraction of a second too late.
“Dammit!” I heard Fulbright’s breathless curse over the wall. “You two, go around—there’s another door back there.”
I muttered a somewhat breathless curse of my own. So much for sprinting across the garden and slipping out that way. Though maybe if I hurried, I might still beat them out.
But no. There was undoubtedly another steward on that door, and with all the noise back here he was unlikely to be taken by surprise the way his fellow guard had. I had no idea what kind of marksmen Fulbright and his buddies were, but a door steward at a place like this would likely be very good with a gun.
So that door was out. So was this door, at least as long as Fulbright was on the other side of it.
Unfortunately, staying put also wasn’t an option. Even if Fulbright hadn’t seen how I got the door open, it probably wouldn’t take him long to figure it out. Unless I could learn how to teleport in the next thirty seconds, there was likely to be a gun battle in my near future.
The ferret was nosing at one of the fern clumps at the edge of the rippled sand field, a larger patch than the one he’d been hiding in earlier. Looking for something to eat, probably, his tiny brain completely oblivious to the predicament we were in. Another wave of luminosity swept over the sand…
The lasers.
I was at the ferret’s side in an instant, carefully digging into the ferns. The kind of laser or UV light that would be used for the garden’s visual effects would be too weak to be an effective weapon. But Fulbright wouldn’t know that. Besides, all I needed was something that looked mean and dangerous enough to draw his attention for a couple of crucial seconds.
There it was, buried beneath three layers of fronds: a flat, black box with a projector lens facing the sand and a power cord snaking out of the other end. Shooing the ferret away, I pulled the box up out of the ferns and started fiddling with the power cord end.
I’d barely started when I heard the door lock click open behind me.
I stayed where I was, crouched by the ferns, balancing the box on my right hand and pulling at the power cord with the other, making sure the lens was pointed away from the door. I heard Fulbright’s steps as he charged across the short stretch of ground toward me, hoping he was looking at the box and wondering if it was dangerous. As he trotted to a stop a couple of meters away, I half turned toward him, letting my eyes widen with surprise and chagrin at the Clandise 4mm semiauto in his hand. I took my left hand off the power cord, turning it toward him with the fingers spread wide, showing it was empty—
And as his eyes reflexively shifted from the box to the empty hand, I let the box roll back to the ground and hurled the sand that had been hidden in my right hand into his face.
He bellowed a roar of pain, his gun hand flailing, his free hand clawing at his eyes. I was already in motion, leaping sideways away from the sand, trying to get out of his line of fire.
I needn’t have bothered. Fulbright might be loud and angry, but he was smart enough not to shoot when he couldn’t see what he was shooting at. He was still trying to clear the sand out of his eyes when I rolled back up to my feet and introduced him to the ground.
A minute later I had his hands and feet secured with the same kind of plastic wrist restraints Boff had used on the Ulkomaals back at the taverno. My new ferret friend came up while I was working and sniffed at the restraints, and I watched to see if he would settle down for a snack the way he had back there. But he just sniffed the plastic once and hopped off Fulbright’s back. Apparently, the brand Boff used tasted better than mine.
“You’re dead, Roarke,” Fulbright snarled as I finished and stood up. “You and Jasper and Varsi. You’re all dead.”
“Eventually, yes, that’ll happen,” I agreed, reaching down and scooping up the ferret. “But if I were you I wouldn’t try to hurry the process along. Be good and maybe I’ll let you know when I’ve delivered Tera C to the Patth.”
The steward was pulling himself groggily off the ground as I slipped out the door, some blood trickling down his cheek. Apparently, Fulbright had wanted to make sure he had me all to himself once he got into the garden. I dropped Fulbright’s gun on the ground beside him, then made quick tracks out of there.
I reached the main street grid without further trouble and turned back onto the thoroughfare Selene and I had walked after leaving the taverno. I had no idea whether I would find anything useful in that direction, but at least it had the virtue of taking me farther from all the various people and groups who were currently mad at me.
I’d gone three blocks and still hadn’t spotted either a runaround or a decent food cart when my phone vibed.
I thought it might be Fulbright, freshly freed by his buddies and mad as a scorched cat. Second guess was that it was Varsi wanting to know if I’d found Tera yet.
Instead, it was Selene.
“Where are you?” I asked, trying not to show my annoyance at having been left behind and knowing I wasn’t completely succeeding.
“We’re back at the spaceport,” she said. “I’m so sorry we abandoned you. Geri said we had to convince everyone we’d found Tera, and the only way to do that was to make a big show of leaving. He said you’d be fine, that Mr. Varsi wouldn’t be a problem once the rest of us were gone.”
I glared at the world. But there was a certain level of logic to it. Though I would have felt differently if Varsi had decided to be a problem. “So you just circled the planet and landed again?”
“Yes, but we came in with a different ship’s ID,” she said. “Kifri’s idea. We’re the Sleeping Beauty now.”
“Who’s Kifri?”
“He’s the Kalix,” she said. “He said he left one of his outriders behind when you were captured so he could keep an eye on you. Did you find him?”
“More like he found me,” I said. I looked down at the ferret, who’d given up looking around at the cityscape and had settled in for a nap. Not exactly the kind of bodyguard I’d have offered if our situations had been reversed. “But yes, I’ve got him. So what now?”
“Geri says you need to get back here so we can figure out how to continue the search,” Selene said. “Can you find a runaround, or should I get one and come pick you up?”
I looked around the nearby streets, trying to spot any of the flavors of quick-rent vehicles we’d seen tooling around the Havershem City streets. Nothing. No runarounds, no vans, and no trucks.
But there was a large building halfway down the next block that I hadn’t spotted before. A building sporting a very familiar logo.
“Let’s go with option three,” I told Selene. “No point in me coming there when the hunt is here. I’m on the main street, four blocks due west of where we were when all the smoke bombs went off. Call me when you get close and I’ll guide you in.”
“But Geri says we need a plan.”
“We have a plan,” I said patiently. “I do, anyway. If Geri wants to stay there and plan, he’s more than welcome. But you get yourself over here. I’d like to have Tera in hand before sunrise tomorrow.”
There was a brief pause. “Really?” she asked.
“Really,” I assured her.
“All right,” Selene said, still sounding a little uncertain. “We’ll be right there.”
As my father used to say, When you lie down with dogs, you risk being picked up along with them when it’s time for the neutering. Between Fulbright, Varsi, and the Patth, I had no intention of hanging around this case and this planet long enough for that to happen.
The ferret draped along my arm gave an inquisitive sort of squeak. “No, I’m not joking,” I assured him, eyeing the building I’d spotted, the three-story whitestone with the big StarrComm logo over the entryway. “I know exactly how to find her.”
***
I’d planted myself at a nicely shaded outdoor café table and was sipping a cola when a spaceport runaround stopped at the curb and they piled out.
All of them, including Geri and Freki. Apparently, my employers had decided they didn’t need to stay behind and plan after all.
“Are you all right?” Selene asked anxiously as she hurried toward me. Behind her, the Kalix snapped his fingers twice. “I’m so sorry, Gregory. I shouldn’t have let them take off.”
“I’m fine,” I assured her, watching as the ferret abandoned the nut bar he’d been chewing on, bounded off the table, and scurried over to the Kalix. Apparently, a double finger snap was the signal to come. “I doubt you could have stopped them even if you’d tried.”
“Thank you for taking care of Pax,” Kifri said. The ferret reached him, leaped to the top of his boot, then clawed his way up trousers and tunic to the Kalix’s right shoulder. With a contented-sounding squeak, he dug his claws into the tunic and settled down.
“My pleasure,” I said. The other ferret, already settled on Kifri’s left shoulder, leaned forward a little and gave a couple of small squeaks. Welcoming back the prodigal, or possibly chewing him out for desertion. “I wasn’t sure what to feed him, and he seemed interested in one of the café’s nut bars, so I got him one. I hope that was all right.”
“Yes, very much so,” Kifri assured me. He reached up and stroked the ferret’s head, then did the same for the other one. “I trust you had interesting adventures together?”
“Actually, I could have done with a little less excitement,” I said. “What happened with your lady friend at the spaceport?”
“I tried to contact her,” Kifri said with a heavy sigh. “Alas, she did not answer.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m guessing we’ll have her all safe and sound within the next twelve hours.”
He brightened. “We will?”
“I think so.” I shifted my attention to Geri and Freki, who’d been standing silently on the sidelines watching all the byplay. “Welcome back. I hope you didn’t damage my ship.”
“I hope you didn’t damage our chances of finding Tera C,” Geri countered. “So what’s this big exciting plan of yours?”
“Let’s start with why she’s here,” I said. “Actually, as long as we’re using the café’s table let’s start with you ordering drinks or something.”
“Let’s start with the plan,” Geri countered. He waved at the server for his attention, then dropped two hundred-commark bills on the next table, pointed to the money, and gestured for the server to take it and leave us alone. “Not really interested in drinks or company.”
“Fine,” I said. “As I said, why is Tera here? Not on Pinnkus, not even in Havershem City, but why is she here in this particular neighborhood?”
“Why don’t you tell us?” Geri asked with strained patience.
“Because she’s not just hiding.” I pointed at the StarrComm building down the street. “She’s looking for something. Something that requires quick interstellar communication.”
Geri and Freki exchanged looks. “Not something,” Geri said reluctantly. “Someone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Come again?”
Again, they looked at each other. Freki gave a microscopic nod, and Geri turned back to me. “I told you Tera had left the Icarus project,” he said. “What I didn’t tell you—”
“So Icarus is a whole project now?”
“What I didn’t tell you,” Geri continued, ignoring my question, “was that before she left one of the other members also disappeared. We think she’s looking for him.”
“Really,” I said. Which would more than explain my tentative guess that she wanted to stick around a StarrComm building. If she had feelers out on other planets—or if she expected her quarry to try to contact her—StarrComm’s huge communications arrays were the only way to gather information short of hopping a ship and going everywhere in person. “And you didn’t think this was something Selene and I needed to know?”
“It was classified,” Geri said. “Extremely classified.”
“Let me guess,” I said, leaning back in my seat and favoring the two of them with my best cynical smile. “The Patth want Tera alive. They want this other runaway dead, and they want to handle that part of the job themselves.”
“Something like that,” Geri said in an extremely neutral tone. “May I also say that it’s a tribute to your skills that you figured that out without being told.”
“I appreciate the compliment,” I said. “I appreciate saving time and effort even more. Can I get this walking corpse’s name?”
Geri’s lips twitched. “Jordan McKell. He was the captain of the Icarus when it vanished.”
“Really,” I said, trying to keep my face and tone calm. McKell. And of course, the Patth wanted him dead.
There wasn’t a lot the Patth and I agreed on. But for once, at least, we were on the same page.
Apparently my calm act hadn’t been as good as I’d hoped. “Sounds like you know the man,” Geri suggested. He was gazing closely at me, and it wasn’t just with idle curiosity. Freki was eyeing me, too.
As were Kifri and his two ferrets. The ferrets, especially, suddenly seemed highly interested in the conversation. Or maybe they were just looking at the half-eaten nut bar.
“McKell and I had a run-in once,” I said briefly, picking up the nut bar and handing it to Kifri, noting as I did so that both ferrets immediately lost interest in me. As my father used to say, Food and money always trump news and drama. “But that’s beside the point. The fact that Tera’s on the hunt supports my theory that she needs access to the StarrComm building for her search.”
“So you’re saying she never left for the spaceport at all?” Kifri asked hesitantly. “That I was misinformed?”
“You mean that she lied to you?” Geri said bluntly.
“Probably not,” I said. “There’s another StarrComm facility near the port, but that one probably has way too much traffic for her to feel comfortable going there. Especially since a lot of its clients will be Patth.”
“Good point,” Geri said, nodding. “The average Patth usually doesn’t work very hard at distinguishing between human faces, but two hundred thousand commarks is a great incentive for them to make the effort.”
“So it is,” I said, an odd feeling creeping up my back. According to Fulbright, the Patth were offering only a hundred thousand for Tera. It was Varsi who had supposedly upped the ante to two.
Unless the Patth had decided to match his offer. But I doubted a local official could authorize that kind of monetary jump on his own, and we were running pretty tight numbers for something like that to have worked its way up the ladder and back down again. Odds were that Geri was simply quoting Varsi’s offer.
Varsi, who Fulbright was also convinced wanted Tera dead. “All the more reason we need to get on this right away,” I added.
“About time you figured that out,” Geri rumbled. “Now can we hear your plan?”
“Sure,” I said. “We start with you and Freki hunting down the local quick-rent vehicle records.” That would be a complete waste of time, I suspected, but I’d rather have them poring over date/time listings than standing around looking over my shoulder. “While you do that, Selene and I will head over to StarrComm and look for a pattern of calls.”
“I thought caller information was confidential,” Kifri said, busily offering bites from the nut bar to each of his ferrets.
“All it takes is money,” I told him. I raised my eyebrows at Geri. “Speaking of which…?”
He glared a little harder at me, and I could see the numbers shifting behind his eyes as he updated the running total of just how much cash he and his partner were already into me for. But he dug three hundred-commark bills from his wallet and handed them over without argument. “You’d just better get some results this time,” he warned as I tucked them away.
“Guaranteed,” I promised.
“What about me?” Kifri asked. “What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want,” I said. “Go home, or hang out here. It’s up to you. But I’ll warn that it’ll probably take some time.”
“I’ll wait,” the Kalix decided. “We still haven’t established that your endangered friend is the same as mine, and I’d like to find out for sure. Though it would be an interesting coincidence if there were two such human females in such distress.”
“It would indeed,” I agreed, deciding it wasn’t worth an argument or even an extension of the conversation. In a place like Havershem City, especially this close to a major spaceport, there were probably ten people per block in some kind of trouble.
Though probably not many of them in danger for their lives. “I saw a quick-rent office when I was passing that last side street,” I said, turning back to Geri.
“Yeah, we saw it, too,” Geri said, tapping Freki’s arm. “Call if you find anything.”
“You, too,” I said as they left the table and headed down the street. Standing up, I offered my hand to Selene. “Come on, Selene. Let’s go find our missing lady.”