CHAPTER TEN
Three days of boredom later, we landed at Poccoro Spaceport on Huihuang.
Floyd had already told me that Mottola would be handling the details of the Ruth’s refueling and equipment check. I stayed in my room that whole time, listening to the soft thunks as people connected hoses or opened and closed access panels on the various equipment bays, itching at the thought of people messing with my ship without being able to see what they were doing.
Once, I poked my head out into the corridor to ask our seemingly ever-present guard Cole if they wanted my help with anything. He assured me that they were fine, and that if he saw my face again before we were back in space he would do his best to shoot off one of my ears.
The ship had been quiet for a couple of hours, and I was dozing in the bioprobe bay, when I was jolted awake by tense voices and rapid footsteps approaching along the corridor. I’d just managed to blink the sleep out of my eyes when the hatch slid open to reveal Mottola, his Skripka 4mm gripped tightly in his hand. “Get up,” he ordered, half turning to slap the release on Selene’s hatch. “Both of you—get up. Now.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, sliding out of the bay onto the deck. Luckily, I hadn’t gotten undressed, but had just taken my shoes off. “Where are we going?”
“Dayroom,” Mottola said, half turning again to peer into Selene’s room. “You hear me?”
“Yes,” Selene’s voice came back. “Just let me get my shoes.”
“You don’t need to do this,” Fulbright’s voice came from somewhere forward of where Mottola was standing. “I can stay—”
“Yes, I need to do this,” Mottola bit out, turning a brief glare that direction before looking back to me. “The foldout only has two sets of restraints, right?”
“Yes,” I said, finishing with the shoes and crossing to him.
“I can stay and watch them,” Fulbright insisted. “You can just go.”
“Another word out of you and you’ll stay here with two slugs in your legs,” Mottola said. “You two—dayroom.”
He took a step aft to let Selene and me into the corridor. Fulbright was standing in our way, his face working with frustration and annoyance. “You heard the man,” he said. Spinning around, he headed forward.
The dayroom looked the way it usually did, except that the two sets of hack-proof magnetic shackles and their chains had been pulled from their compartments behind the foldout. “Sit,” Mottola said tartly, gesturing with his Skripka.
“What’s going on?” I asked as Selene and I did as ordered. “Where are Floyd and Cole?”
“In trouble,” Mottola growled, gesturing at the restraints. “Lock yourselves in.”
“Did something happen with the job?” I persisted as we fastened the shackles around our wrists. “Because I was a bounty hunter—”
“You want the slug in the leg I just offered Fulbright?” Mottola demanded.
“And I was probably better at it than he was,” I added as the look on Fulbright’s face suddenly made sense. “If you need him, you need me more.”
“I don’t need him at all,” Mottola said glowering at Fulbright. “Just isn’t any safe way to leave him here. Anyway, he’s on Mr. Varsi’s payroll. You’re not.”
“You need someone here to watch them,” Fulbright insisted. “I don’t trust them.”
“They’ll keep until we get back,” Mottola said. He confirmed that our restraints were properly locked, then waved Fulbright toward the hatch. “Let’s go.”
“What about my gun?” Fulbright asked.
“You’ll get it when we get to the square,” Mottola said. “Go.”
“Good luck,” I called after them.
Fulbright sent a last frustrated look in my direction. Mottola didn’t bother with even that much of an acknowledgment. I listened as their steps faded down the corridor, heard the main hatch open and close.
And Selene and I were alone.
I took a deep breath and turned to face her. “What do you think?”
“It’s bad,” she said, her pupils simmering with concern. “I don’t know what’s happened, but Mottola’s very worried.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said sourly. “Floyd talked about him and Cole going up against this Gaheen fellow like it would be a run to the local market.”
“You think Gaheen knew they were coming?”
“If I was poking Varsi with a stick, I’d sure expect trouble,” I said. “Are they gone?”
Her nostrils flared and her eyelashes fluttered. “Yes,” she said. “Both of them. Do you want me to get the key, or shall we wait a little longer in case they come back?”
“If they come back, we’ll hear them,” I said. “Get it now.”
She nodded and pulled the vacuum toilet from its hiding place in the wall. As she busied herself with the maintenance panel, I reached to the upper end of my artificial left arm with my right hand, pressing my thumb and first two fingers into the flesh at the three quick-release points. A squeeze and twist, and the forearm came free, the artificial skin unweaving from the real skin of the elbow and upper arm. “I’ll be on the bridge,” I told Selene, standing up and laying the arm on the cushion. “Bring the arm when you come.”
I looked toward the nearest air vent. “Ixil, come on up and join the party,” I called.
I was sitting in the pilot’s seat, staring at nothing in particular, when Selene arrived with my arm. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. “Why haven’t you started the prelaunch?”
I waved tiredly at the control board. “Because Mottola was smarter than I am,” I said. “He’s locked down the whole piloting board.”
“Actually, it was Fulbright, not Mottola,” a new voice came from behind her.
I turned to see Ixil step into the hatchway, Pix and Pax riding his shoulders. “Fulbright, huh?” I said.
“Yes,” Ixil said. “A seven-digit code. Unfortunately, Pax wasn’t in position to read the numbers.”
“He also put a cascading repetition delay on top of it,” I told him. “No way we’re going to clear it without him.”
“Interesting,” Ixil said. “He hadn’t struck me as being that clever.”
“Even the least clever occasionally have their moments,” I said. “I suppose I could try an overcat. But if it bursts, it’ll be locked down even tighter.”
“Will that make a noticeable difference?”
“Point,” I conceded. “Okay, here goes.”
I keyed in the overcat program, a hack system I’d picked up during my bounty hunter days. “So what was going on back there with Draelon?” I asked as the thing started chugging its way through the Ruth’s computer system. “What were you and McKell even doing on Brandywine?”
“We had returned to the job we interrupted to come to New Kyiv,” Ixil said. “I’m afraid the details are still classified.”
“Even from us?”
Ixil shrugged. “I’m sorry. Still, our presence there, even if coincidental, turned out to be highly useful. When Selene told Tera that your captors had talked about Brandywine and that she thought there was a strong possibility you’d be taken there, we decided to see what we could do to help.”
“And to see if our presence shook anything loose?”
He shrugged again. “You know how this business works.”
“Not as well as I’d like to,” I said pointedly. “So what’s this Jordan McKell, famous bounty hunter thing?”
“You laugh,” Ixil said. “But the admiral and Jordan have been developing and nurturing the Algernon Niles identity for several years now, precisely for this sort of situation.”
“So what, he pops out in disguise a couple of times a year, parades around the Spiral and then disappears again?”
“Actually, this is the first time he’s shown up with a visible face,” Ixil said. “All his other appearances have been masked or otherwise shrouded.”
“Well, he certainly went to the nines on it here,” I commented. I’d used my fair share of aliases over the years, but I’d never carried the prosthetics or makeup to nearly that extreme. “So why did he butt in? If Varsi had wanted me dead, Floyd could have shot me anywhere along the line.”
“That was our initial assumption as well,” Ixil said, his voice going dark. “In fact, Draelon seemed almost casual when he first ordered Floyd to help Fulbright track you down a few weeks ago. But sometime in the hours before you arrived his mood changed.” He cocked his head. “Did you do anything during that time that might have upset him?”
I winced. “Aside from just being hard to catch, I sort of clobbered Mottola with his own gun,”
“And then drugged him,” Selene murmured.
“That, too,” I said, a chill running up my back. “I guess he takes employer-employee loyalty very seriously.”
“So it would seem.” Ixil gestured. “Anything?”
I looked back at the board. The overcat had run its course, with no results. “No,” I said. “The only other approach would be to replace several components, which we don’t have, or dig very deeply into the programming, which I can’t do. Looks like we’re here until Floyd says we’re not.”
“It would seem he really wants to find Easton Dent,” Selene added.
“Or at least doesn’t want us finding him by ourselves.” I frowned back at Ixil. “So what exactly is going on out there?”
“As Mottola said, Floyd and Cole are in trouble,” Ixil said. “From what Pix was able to overhear, there’s a secret tunnel entrance leading from Two Degree Square into the Varsi organization’s operations center, which is located in Gaheen’s personal mansion. They were going to use the tunnel to bypass Gaheen’s security.”
“Convenient for someone,” I said. “Sloppy for everyone else. So what’s the plan?”
“If we can’t get the Ruth out, we’ll have to find another way off Huihuang,” Ixil said. “We’ll start with a runaround to the aircraft side of the port and put some distance between us and Poccoro Spaceport. We’ll then need to find a ship that will to take us to—”
“No,” I said, turning back to the frozen pilot board. “We’re not leaving. Not yet.”
“Gregory?” Selene asked, her pupils gone wary.
“We’re not leaving,” I repeated. “We’re going to get Floyd and the others out of whatever mess they’re in, and then we’re all flying out of here together.”
“Why?” Ixil asked calmly.
I chewed at the inside of my cheek, trying to pin down the sudden rush of thoughts swirling around my brain. So far it wasn’t even close to coming together.
But it would. Deep down, I knew it would.
The only question was whether it would come together in time. As my father used to say, An important part of being right is being right fast.
“Fulbright wanted to stay behind and guard us just now,” I said. “You heard him. Mottola was just as adamant that they both go and told him that we’d be fine here on our own.” I looked back at Selene and Ixil. “So why didn’t either of them remind the other that the pilot board was locked? Or even just tell us about it so we would know it was useless to try to escape?”
For a moment both of them were silent. “Mottola doesn’t know about the lock,” Selene said at last. “And Fulbright doesn’t want him to know.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said, shifting my eyes to Ixil. “Was Fulbright alone in here when he locked down the board?”
“Yes,” Ixil said, eyeing me closely. “What do you think he’s up to?”
“Damned if I know,” I said frankly. “But I can’t shake the feeling he’s playing an entirely different game than the rest of us. And I don’t like the idea of him being alone with men who are supposed to be guarding me. If something happens to Floyd and the others . . . well, Fulbright’s story will be the only one Varsi and Draelon hear.”
“Which could be awkward,” Ixil agreed thoughtfully. “You realize that if Fulbright’s planning to pin something on you and you’re seen off the Ruth you’ll be playing directly into his game.”
“I know,” I said. “But even if he never says a word, the fact that I disappeared after Floyd ran into a buzzsaw will have Varsi on my tail forever. The only way to keep that from happening is to wade in on Floyd’s side.”
“You think helping Floyd will persuade Varsi to back off on your death sentence?” Ixil asked.
“No idea,” I admitted. “But it can’t hurt.”
There was another short silence. “All right,” Selene said, handing me my arm. “Where do we start?”
“We retrace Floyd’s steps,” I said, lining up the arm and starting to reattach it. Like most things in life, it was harder to put back together than to take apart. “Ixil, you said there was a tunnel from Two Degree Square?”
“Yes,” Ixil said. “Floyd had a map marking its location, but he and Cole took it with them. Floyd called Mottola from inside Gaheen’s mansion, but before he could give him the location his phone call was jammed.”
“Jammed, or the call broken off?” I asked.
“From the sound, I’d say it was jammed,” Ixil said. “It sounded like the two of them were trapped somewhere inside the building, but hadn’t been captured.”
“Let’s hope they can keep it that way,” I said, wincing at the unpleasant tingle as the arm’s artificial nerves and motor systems linked back up with the flesh-and-blood ones. “How far away is this square?”
“A little over half a kilometer from the edge of the landing field,” Ixil said. “I gather the mansion itself is only another two hundred meters away.”
“Sounds about right,” I said. “Your typical criminal mastermind wants his emergency exit tunnel long enough to put him outside whatever cordon his enemies have set up, but not so long that it takes him forever to get through it and snag a runaround or aircar. Do you know where Floyd stashed our stuff?”
“Top left-hand cabinet in the dayroom.”
“Selene, get your info pad and check on the traffic and terrain between us and the square,” I told her. “Find us the best runaround route in.”
“Right,” she said, and hurried from the bridge.
“You’ll need a weapon,” Ixil said, reaching into his tunic and pulling out a little four-shot derringer-style DubTrub 2mm. “Your Fafnir is still on New Kyiv.”
“And my first backup is with Varsi’s people on Marjolaine,” I said, eyeing the weapon. DubTrubs were far more sophisticated than they looked, their projectiles not simple chemical-driven slugs but tiny missiles that vented from the back and gave the gun no more recoil than a plasmic.
But that very sophistication carried with it a hidden risk. DubTrubs and their ammo were expensive, which suggested the person carrying one was either wealthy or else sponsored by someone with cash to spare.
For badgemen, that logic train would mark the carrier as well above the level of a street criminal. For street criminals, that same train pointed straight back at an undercover badgeman. Neither of those was a profile I especially wanted to fit into at the moment.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to. “You’d better keep it,” I said, waving the weapon away. Shaking off the last of the tingling from my left arm, I reached up beneath the pilot’s board to the hidden compartment and retrieved my second and last backup plasmic, a weapon I’d invested in after the last time someone took all my guns away from me. “You’ll need it if someone decides to take a shot at you while we’re out.”
“He’s not staying here?” Selene asked as she reemerged from the corridor, working her pad. “What if they see him?”
“If they figure out we’re together, there’ll be trouble,” I agreed. “Ditto if he doesn’t make it back before we do and gets left behind. But I want backup handy if Mottola needs convincing that we’re on his side.”
“I agree,” Ixil said. “If for no other reason than that Tera will be furious if I let you get killed. She’s quite fond of you, you know.”
“Hadn’t really noticed.” I stood up, checked the Fafnir’s charge, and tucked the weapon into my belt at the small of my back. “Selene?”
“There’s plenty of traffic out there, but there are a couple of mostly clear routes,” she said. “There are also four runarounds listed as being available two landing cradles east of here.”
“Good.” I flexed my left-hand fingers one final time and nodded. “Let me get my jacket, and we’ll go play white knight.”
* * *
From the name, I’d envisioned Two Degree Square as something out of old Earth history: an open area in the middle of the city, bounded on all sides by quaint, probably ancient-looking stone buildings.
But as my father used to say, Those who don’t know history usually don’t know much about anything else, either. Two Degree Square turned out to be more like a combination park and flea market, with benches, paths, a couple of play areas, and a whole bunch of small vending carts and stalls lined up along the edges.
The carts were clearly moveable, which eliminated them from consideration as the entrance to Gaheen’s bolthole. But the larger stalls were more permanent, built on solid foundations, and a couple of them were big enough to have two or three separate rooms inside. “We’ll start with the big stalls,” I said, pointing Selene toward the closest one. “Ixil, go back and find someplace near where we came in where you can stay out of sight. We’ll call if we need you.”
“Be careful,” Ixil said. “And keep an eye out for Pix and Pax. If they spot anything, they’ll point it out to you.”
“You may not want to send them in,” I warned, eyeing the people milling around. “Those booths are a little far for them to jump between, and I don’t want them to get stepped on.”
“On Kali they hunt tusked animals twenty times their size through forests and rough terrain,” he said mildly. “I think they’re nimble enough to avoid human feet.”
“Be it on your own head,” I said doubtfully. “Come on, Selene.”
We headed in. “You getting anything?” I asked quietly as we maneuvered our way around a knot of people who’d decided to have a conversation in the middle of the path.
“They’re here,” she said, turning her head back and forth as she sampled the air. “Mottola and Fulbright. Somewhere to the north or northwest.”
“How far?” I asked. The next path heading that direction, I saw, angled off past a jewelry cart a few meters ahead of us.
“Not too far,” she said. “Thirty to fifty meters, I think.”
I frowned. Fifty meters would put them right at the edge of the square, back in the wooded areas beyond all the vending stalls. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” We reached the jewelry cart and turned onto the other path.
And I felt a smile quirk at my lips. In the distance, beyond two more rows of booths and carts at the edge of the square, were three dilapidated stone buildings. Their roofs were partially caved in, their walls discolored and pitted with age and erosion, their doors and windows boarded up. Relics of an earlier age, presumably, the sort of place historical societies try to maintain and local kids make up scary stories about.
Bingo.
“I’m guessing they’re in one of those,” I said. “Let’s go find out which one.”
One of the many advantages of a partner like Selene was that we knew the location almost to the square meter of the person we were trying to sneak up on. No need to depend on luck for a glimpse of the target; no need for a muttered word or unwary footstep on the target’s part to give away the game.
Which meant that we were able to pinpoint the house on the right, find the hidden entrance through the supposedly solid wall, figure which of the three rooms Mottola and Fulbright were in, and come up directly behind them as they poked with growing frustration at the walls and tiled floor.
Back in our bounty hunter days, I’d enjoyed milking such moments. But this wasn’t the time or place. “Afternoon, gentlemen,” I said in a conversational tone. “Just leave your guns where they are—we’re here to help.”
Mottola obeyed me halfway, his hand snapping up onto the grip of his Skripka but leaving the weapon holstered. Fulbright’s hand managed to get halfway to his own holster before he remembered that Mottola still had his gun. “It’s okay, you can turn around,” I went on. “Like I said, we’re on your side.”
“I told you I needed to stay with them,” Fulbright bit out as they both turned slowly to face us.
“I guess you were right,” Mottola said, his eyes flicking to my Fafnir before settling on my face. “Nice trick, Roarke. How’d you manage it?”
“What, getting out of my own shackles on my own ship?” I countered. “Just because I’m mostly retired doesn’t mean I’ve gone stupid. But never mind that. I take it you haven’t found Floyd’s back door yet?”
“No,” Mottola said, still studying my face. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas.”
“I’ve got the best idea of them all,” I assured him. “Selene?”
“That wall,” she said, pointing to the wall to the left of the one Mottola had just been searching.
“I’ve already looked at that one,” Fulbright growled. Unlike Mottola, his expression as he glared at me was one of pure hatred. “The wall’s not thick enough to hide a secret door.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed. “If the two of you would just step back a bit . . . ?”
Mottola complied, his gaze now shifted to Selene. It took a small twitch of my Fafnir, and a less subtle prompting poke from Mottola, for Fulbright to reluctantly do likewise.
Selene walked over to the wall, her eyelashes fluttering double time. She moved along it, stopped right at the center and crouched down, sniffing the whole way. A moment bent over with her face close to the floor, then back up the wall. She paused about waist high . . . moved over and paused again shoulder high, then straightened and looked back at me. “Here,” she said, pointing to the two spots she’d been sniffing. “The releases are here.”
Fulbright snorted. “What kind of crap—”
“Shut up,” Mottola said quietly. “Roarke? Your idea. You do the honors.”
As my father used to say, Don’t worry about people who think they’re a good judge of character. Worry about those who also think they’re the jury and executioner.
But I had to risk it. Mottola couldn’t go charging into a rescue mission with one eye on his back, and neither could I. If we couldn’t trust each other for at least the next hour, we might as well go home now.
And so, with only the barest hesitation, I returned my Fafnir to its spot behind my belt and walked over to the wall.
As I passed him, out of the corner of my eye I saw him take his hand off the grip of his Skripka.
There was nothing obvious I could see about the two patches of wall that Selene had identified. But she’d smelled Floyd or Cole there, and that was good enough for me. I settled the heels of my palms on the spots, braced myself, and pushed.
Silently, the wall’s base swung up, swiveling on hidden hinges in the ceiling. It pulled a thin layer of flooring tile along with it, the layer sliding up over the top of the flooring in the room behind the wall.
And as the tile layer receded, it exposed a recessed handle in the floor.
“Hold it there,” Mottola said, stepping over and dropping to one knee beside me. As I held the wall in place he angled the handle up and twisted it. There was a soft click; with a grunt, he resettled his grip on the handle and pulled upward.
Across the room, a meter-square section of tile popped up, rising about five centimeters up from floor level.
“I’ll be damned,” Mottola breathed. “Keep holding.”
He stood up and hurried over to the risen section. For a moment his fingers explored the edges; then, with a barely audible creak, it swung up from one edge. “Selene?” I prompted.
“Yes,” she once again confirmed. “They went down there.”
“Big surprise,” Fulbright grumbled. “Where else would they have gone?”
“Good point,” Mottola said briskly. “Okay. Roarke, you go first. Fulbright next, then me.”
“Where’s my gun?” Fulbright demanded.
In answer, Mottola pulled Fulbright’s Balgren from behind his jacket and tossed it over. “Don’t use it unless I tell you to,” he warned. “Selene, will you be able to find Floyd and Cole once we’re out the other end?”
“Yes,” Selene said.
Mottola eyed her for a moment, and I could tell he was wondering how in the world she was pulling this off. But he’d seen her magic once and was apparently ready to take her on faith. “Good,” he said. “You’re up front with Roarke. Okay—let’s go.”