CHAPTER FIVE
Given the festival’s ongoing security needs, I hadn’t expected the badgemen to have the personnel to spare to post a guard at the Ruth’s hatch, even given the heinousness of my supposed crime. I had expected them to set up a monitor camera on the ramp, though, and probably another one or two hidden off to the side somewhere in case I disabled the obvious one.
I was right on all counts. There were four cameras in all, pointed at the hatch and the walkways leading up to it. There was also probably a good chance that the badgeman tasked with watching the monitors all night was the hapless officer I’d drugged during my holding tank escape.
Unfortunately for the hounds, the hares had another way into their burrow.
Getting to the far side of the ship unseen was straightforward enough, involving just a couple of other ramps, a small maze of cargo pallets, and one short section of crawling to avoid one of the port annex’s permanent security cameras. It was the same route Selene had taken in reverse when she’d sneaked out of the ship earlier that evening, and certainly no worse than we’d done many times during our bounty hunter days.
Once we were there, it was simply a matter of sliding down the curved surface of the cradle to the Number Two equipment bay near the Ruth’s bow. That particular bay held electronics for the hyperspace cutter array, equipment that was only supposed to be accessible from the outside while the ship was on the ground. I reached past the neat rows of wires and modules, unfastened the hidden catches on the inner hull plate behind it, and swung open the panel.
Selene went in first, climbing through the opening and into the service crawlway, from which she could get back to the midship hatch where she could climb up into the Ruth’s main deck. I followed, sealing the outer equipment access panel and the hidden inner door behind me. Every bounty hunter occasionally needed to get a prize past official scrutiny; this was our way of dealing with that particular obstruction.
Selene was running the pre-check when I arrived on the bridge. “Any news?” I asked, going to the nav table and starting to set up our course.
“The ship seems all right,” she said. “No locks or barriers, and everything reads green. I also found the seven o’clock impound order McKell set up.”
“Good,” I said, finishing the nav details and then looking over Selene’s shoulder to make sure she hadn’t missed anything in her review. She hadn’t. “That gives us five hours. I’m thinking we grab four hours of sleep, then get back here for the big moment.”
“All right,” she said, her pupils troubled. “Gregory . . . that body you found in the morgue. Is it possible that was the same person as the one in the photo Easton showed us?”
I shook my head. “That man was already dead, remember?”
“Are you sure?” she countered. “We really don’t know when either of them died. What if Easton had already killed him, showed us his picture to see if we could identify him, then went back and destroyed his face?”
“Or it could have been someone else who did that last bit,” I said reluctantly. The hell of it was, she could be right. Easton’s photo had been physical, without the time stamp a dij would have had. And with the photo having been stolen from my wallet, there was no way to do a facial reconstruction. On top of that, with the photo only showing the dead man’s head a body profile was out of the question. “Like maybe the Iykams. I get the feeling they would enjoy doing something like that.”
“They don’t usually carry plasmics,” Selene pointed out. “Would their corona guns create the same pattern of damage?”
“Not from what I’ve seen of them,” I conceded with a shiver. “But just because they don’t normally carry plasmics doesn’t mean they couldn’t use one for special occasions.” I frowned as her pupils suddenly showed fresh consternation. “You disagree?”
“No. I just . . . ” She winced. “We know the Iykams don’t usually carry plasmics. But we do know someone who does.”
“We know lots of people who do,” I reminded her. “Including me.”
“And McKell.”
I stared at her. “You’re not serious.”
“Aren’t I?” she asked. “He and the others lied about the dead man.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, still eyeing her. But really, McKell as a murderer was a ridiculous and outrageous suggestion if I’d ever heard one.
Or was it?
We knew the lengths Graym-Barker and the rest of the Icarus Group went to to keep their secrets. If someone threatened those secrets, would the admiral hesitate even a minute before ordering him dealt with?
And if McKell got that order, would he hesitate to carry it out?
I liked to think both of them had a little more moral integrity than that. But then, I’d never seen either of them pushed all the way against the wall.
“Though it doesn’t make much sense for McKell to get me hauled in for murder just to send Ixil in to haul me back out,” I pointed out.
“The frame-up might not have been his idea,” Selene said. “McKell could have killed the man, then the Iykams or Patth found the body and used it to set you up.”
I glowered at the universe at large. “I wish to hell I had that photo back,” I muttered. “I’m pretty sure he and the guy in the morgue had different facial shapes, but I only got a quick look at the photo and don’t remember enough detail to make that call.”
“The plasmic burning could also have affected that.”
“I know,” I said. “Still, I’m leery of a scenario that requires one party to kill someone while another party steals my wallet—and Easton’s—on the off chance they’ll be able to use them. You start making things too complicated, and they start collapsing under their own weight.”
“I don’t really believe it, if that helps,” Selene said. “The possibility occurred to me, that’s all, and I thought I should mention it.”
“And you were absolutely right,” I assured her. “I don’t believe it, either; but I also don’t necessarily disbelieve it. We’ve also got a lot of unidentified players in this game, and we need to start slapping name tags on them.”
“How do we do that?”
I gestured back to the nav table. “We start by going back to the CR-207-T system. If we’re lucky, our mystery friends will realize we’re heading there and follow.”
“And we’re going to confront them?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “They stole our probe, remember?”
“You’re going to ask for it back?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m going to give them the other one.”
* * *
The scheduled seven o’clock impound order didn’t get underway until nearly seven fifteen, long enough for me to wonder if the badgemen had figured out the listing was bogus but not long enough for me to come up with a backup plan.
Still, once it was actually going, the operation went smoothly enough. The landing cradle repulsors activated, nudging the Ruth off the ground and into range of two of the annex’s perimeter grav beams. Normally, the beams raised a departing ship to an altitude where its thrusters could be kicked in without damaging the surrounding terrain, at which point the spaceport figuratively waved good-bye and the ship handled the rest of its journey up and out into space on its own.
Impound situations, though, were handled a bit differently. Instead of lifting the Ruth up and out to altitude, the grav beams raised us only about a hundred meters off the pad and then guided us sideways toward the impound lot at the edge of the field, each pair of beams handing us off to the next pair as we glided over the rest of the parked ships below.
Some of the Spiral’s fancier fields had designated heavy-lift vehicles, modeled after orbital tugs, that could come together in whatever size group was necessary and use their own grav beams to transport the tagged ship to impound without having to tie up the perimeter system. But smaller spaceports like Glazunov Annex usually didn’t have much call for such specialized equipment, and the bosses had apparently decided an upgrade wasn’t worth the money.
If things went according to plan, they would soon regret that decision. Hunched over the monitors at the pilot station, splitting my attention between the view of the field and the slowly rising rumble coming from the Ruth’s thrusters—a sound that the supervising badgemen would never notice amid the cacophony of other nearby ships also powering up—I waited for the right opportunity.
There it was, on the traditional silver platter: a fancy trimaran-style yacht, a good three times the size and ten times the mass of the Ruth, rising slowly from its cradle about six landing slots directly ahead. Probably loaded to the cutter array with celebrants from last night’s festival, the majority of them asleep or badly hung over, none of them expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen. It finished rising as high as the cradle could send it, and my displays showed the perimeter grav beams in the process of locking onto its hull.
As my father used to say, Never run away from your troubles. Flying is faster, and you present a smaller target. Keying the Ruth’s bioprobe grav beams, I aimed them at the trimaran and fired.
Firing a grav beam at a relatively miniscule bioprobe meant the probe came to you. Firing at something that seriously outmassed you, on the other hand, meant instead that you went to it.
Mostly went to it, anyway. Newton’s Laws being what they were, yanking on the trimaran meant we both started moving toward our common center of mass. Adding in the contributions of the perimeter grav beams, all of which were trying very hard to keep both ships where they were, and you had a neat problem in undergrad theoretical physics.
The real universe didn’t need to bother with pedantic calculations. In less time than it would take the undergrad’s professor to even define the problem, the mix of forces and masses shook out with the Ruth pulling itself straight out of the focus of the beams carrying it across the field and nudging the trimaran halfway out of its own set of beams.
The Glazunov Annex executives might have scrimped on equipment for their impound yard, but they were solidly up-to-date on safety protocols. The trimaran, bigger and way more expensive than the Ruth, would have been assigned a higher spot in the computerized priority stack, which meant that when my maneuver suddenly put both ships at risk of a tumble it was the trimaran that got immediate attention. Even as its own assigned perimeter grav beams scrambled to reestablish a solid lock, the next nearest beams shifted over to the bigger ship to bolster their effort.
Unfortunately for the impound crew, the next nearest beams were the ones currently trying to reestablish a lock on the Ruth.
We actually dropped about ten meters before I got the thrusters kicked in at sufficient power to start us blasting upward. There was a brief window where the perimeter beams could have grabbed us again, but they were too busy rescuing the trimaran. Before any of the human controllers could wake up to what was happening and override the auto system, we were too far out of range for them to do anything about it.
There was another layer of security, of course: the cadre of patrol ships tracing lazy orbital paths around New Kyiv. Unfortunately for them, while McKell was faking the Ruth’s impound order he’d also somehow gotten the majority of the patrol ships reassigned to watch other parts of the planet. Only one of the patrollers was in position to chase us, and we were able to stay ahead of him long enough to activate the Ruth’s cutter array and launch us into hyperspace.
I just hoped that the people who’d been poking fingers into our lives had taken note of the vector we’d escaped on and had drawn the correct conclusions. That is, the conclusions I wanted them to draw.
* * *
The CR-207-T system hadn’t changed much in the few days we’d been away from it. Hardly surprising, really.
What had changed was my ability to do more than one thing at a time. This time around, as I drove us toward the upper atmosphere and the area where we would release our remaining bioprobe, I also kept a close watch on the space behind us.
We were just entering the outer reaches of the stratosphere when I spotted the other ship pop out of hyperspace in the distance.
“They’re here,” I told Selene.
“Yes, I saw,” she said. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“Of course,” I said, frowning. “I didn’t spend the past two days tearing apart the probe and putting it back together just for the fun of it. Why, are you having second thoughts?”
“I’m not sure I ever had any first thoughts,” she said, her pupils showing a hint of nervous humor. “I’m just wondering if they’ll see this as an attack.”
“They might,” I conceded. “But it’s not like they’ll think their lives are in danger. And if they wanted us dead they had lots of chances the last time we were all here together. Not to mention whatever shots they might have been able to line up on New Kyiv.”
Her pupils winced. “Not a good choice of words.”
“Yeah,” I said wincing a little myself. Shots. “Sorry. Look, if you’re really uncomfortable with this I’m willing to abort. We can just lose them here and head back to civilization. Go see if Easton Dent has surfaced yet.”
Her pupils hardened. “No,” she said firmly. “We can’t go back to Dent without some idea who’s coming after him. And after us.”
“Okay, then,” I said, standing up. “You get set here while I go get the probe ready.”
Because as my father used to say, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and you’ve shown a pattern I can work with.
* * *
I stuck with the flight pattern I’d laid down on our first trip here, except that now I was working with only one bioprobe instead of two. Once again, as the probe started to rise from the lower atmosphere, the Ruth began to experience the same buffeting we’d gone through the last time as the poachers once again went all creative with their tiltrotors.
I wasn’t sure whether the primary goal was to keep us busy holding the ship steady or to hide themselves a bit better in the turbulent air. But it didn’t really matter. All I needed to know was what they were planning.
One of the warning lights on my board flashed: the probe was nearing grav beam range. I resettled my hands on the controls, my eyes flicking over the displays as I searched for the poacher. He had to be at the far end of the incoming winds . . .
“I have him,” Selene’s voice came from the bridge intercom. “Eight o’clock nadir, ten kilometers.”
“I see him,” I confirmed as I spotted the dim shape through a cloudy layer of air that was strangely translucent.
As well as also being completely artificial. They weren’t just playing games with their tiltrotors, but were also using some sort of fancy smoke screen to cover their approach.
Which was a good sign. Pulling out all the stops this way meant they’d followed the logical bread crumb trail I’d laid out and concluded that the reason we’d come back so quickly was that there was something here worth a second look.
It was probably killing them that they hadn’t been able to figure it out from the first set of samples they’d made off with. But now they had a second chance, and they were determined to do whatever it took to grab it.
Including letting me sucker them into coming too close.
As my father used to say, Using an opponent’s size and weight against him is fine, but his desires and flaws are much better levers.
Our probe should be visible on the poacher’s scanners now, and I saw him shift position slightly in response, rising upward while staying behind the supposed protection of his smokescreen. I watched him closely, trying to anticipate the moment when he would fire his grav beams . . .
“Now,” I called to Selene.
An instant later the deck dropped out from under me as she sent the Ruth plunging straight down through the atmosphere. We fell below the poacher’s altitude, no doubt startling the hell out of him as we shot past a couple of kilometers away—
And as he fired his grav beams Selene kicked our thrusters back in and brought us to a halt directly between him and the probe.
His beams caught us squarely in our center, just as I’d planned. Even as the Ruth jerked in response to the sudden pull, I fired our own beams back at him. There was a second jolt as we grabbed on, and now we were a pair of wrist-roped wrestlers pulling at each other. The poacher’s beams belatedly winked off, but by then he was thoroughly in the Ruth’s own grip. He twitched violently, trying to break our hold, probably scrambling like crazy to figure out how he was going to handle the boarders he naturally assumed were poised to attack.
Unfortunately, in the midst of all that misdirection and burgeoning panic, he forgot all about our probe.
Even with our beams pinning him mostly in place he might have been able dodge out of its path if he’d spotted it fast enough. But he didn’t. By the time it came arrowing straight at his airlock, it was far too late for him to do anything but gape in horror. Even a good string of curses was probably out of the question. The poacher quivered as the probe slammed into the airlock, its momentum driving it through both the outer and the inner doors, its own bow disintegrating along the way.
For about half a second it just sat there, wedged in place, looking strangely like a dog hanging out a runaround’s side window. Then, the poacher’s emergency systems kicked in, the inner backup airlock seal slamming into place and shoving what was left of the probe back out into the atmosphere. I shifted my grav beams from the poacher to the probe, grabbing it away from the damaged ship and hauling it toward the Ruth—
“Go!” I shouted.
Unnecessarily, as it turned out. Selene was paying close attention to the drama, and even as I opened my mouth to give the order she had us clawing for space as fast as we could travel without losing my grip on the probe. I watched the poacher, waiting tensely for him to pull himself together and come charging after us.
But he’d apparently had enough for one day. He stayed put, no doubt watching balefully as we drove through the remaining bits of tenuous atmosphere and into the starlit black beyond. I reeled the probe back into its bay, and without missing a beat Selene activated the cutter array and we were once again in hyperspace.
“Gregory?” she called.
I huffed out a breath as I did a quick double check of the displays. That had worked out better even than I’d expected. “We’re good,” I confirmed. “What course did you put in?”
“Marjolaine,” she said. “I thought it would be a good place to find out if Dent has answered your note.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Come on back and suit up. Let’s see if we can figure out who wants our probes this badly.”
* * *
The probe was a mess, of course, what was left of the bow a tangle of twisted metal, crushed plastic, and shattered ceramic. But that was okay. The important parts, the samplers and collectors, were tucked safely away toward the rear where my two days of sweat and toil had repositioned them.
Admiral Graym-Barker was now going to have to buy us two new bioprobes.
I waited silently while Selene went through each collector, smelling the air and dust and whatever else they’d collected during the probe’s half-second visit to the poacher, then taking them and sealing them in official Trailblazer sample containers. Finally, her pupils looking troubled, she handed me the last container and took a cleansing breath of the clean room’s air. “There were four men aboard,” she said. “Human males. I’m not completely sure, but I think I smelled three of them on New Kyiv.”
I nodded. That made sense, since only a ship that was already at the Glazunov Annex could have gotten its people loaded aboard and charged after us as quickly as the poacher had. “Were they in the Red Poppy or on the street?”
“Two were in the Red Poppy,” she said, gazing at the sample, her pupils focused in concentration. “The third was outside. The fourth . . . I don’t know, Gregory. I’ve smelled him before, I think, or at least a trace of him. But not recently.”
“Okay,” I said cautiously. I’d run into elusive and half-remembered scents with Selene before. Usually it was real, but occasionally she conflated something with something else. “Can you pin it down any better than that? Either by timeframe or location?”
“No,” she said, her pupils showing frustration.
“But you’ll know him if you smell him again?”
“Of course,” she said, as if that was obvious.
“Good,” I said. “Well, at least it isn’t Nask. Now we just have to figure out—” I broke off as her pupils abruptly gave a little wince. “Don’t tell me. Nask?”
“No, not him,” she said with clear reluctance. “But there might have been a Patth aboard. Not aboard now, but earlier, and only for a little while. Or else one of the humans aboard may have simply spent some time with one. I’m sorry. I wish I could be clearer.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to force down my sudden frustration. If the Patth really were involved . . .
But trace smells were trace smells, and if Selene couldn’t track them down any more precisely making her feel guilty about it wouldn’t do any good. “Did you smell any Patth on New Kyiv when we were hunting for Dent?”
“No,” she said, her pupils narrowed in concentration. “I remember thinking that was odd, since we knew there were Iykams in the area.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that, too,” I said as a new thought struck me. “Okay. You said the scent was faint. Could the ship have been built by the Patth, or else owned by one of them, sometime before our four humans took over?”
“I didn’t know they ever sold their ships to non-Patth.”
“I’ve never heard of that, either,” I conceded. “But just because we haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it never happens. Especially when you and I are involved.”
“Or when Dent is,” Selene said, her pupils going thoughtful. “Remember, he’s the one who’s been searching for you and Icarus.”
And Tera had said he might be on the Patth radar. “Well, whatever we’re up against, at least we now have a baseline,” I said. “When we run into these guys again, we’ll know it.”
“I just hope they’re not pointing plasmics at us when that happens,” Selene murmured.
“If they are, it’ll make it even clearer,” I said. “Come on, let’s get everything stowed away. If Dent hasn’t sent a message, we can at least have another nice conversation with the admiral.”