CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We left the Ruth at five minutes to six the next morning. Kreega was already waiting for us outside, in full uniform in her official patrol car. “I assumed you wanted this car instead of my private vehicle?” she asked, eyeing my backpack and coil of rope as Selene and I climbed in.
“Yes, perfect,” I said. “Okay. Out of town, and up the road to Cavindoss.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “Are we going to Cavindoss?”
“No, only partway.”
“Are we going to Seven Strands?” she persisted, her eyes flicking again to our equipment. “Or the Loporr colony?”
“Neither,” I said, looking casually around. A few cars were visible at the edge of the spaceport, along with a van I didn’t recognize tucked away around a corner just within view. “I could tell you where we’re going, but it would be easier just to drive there.”
She held the look another second, then shrugged and turned back to the wheel. “All right,” she said, pulling away from the curb. “I’ll play. It just better be good.”
“It will be,” I promised, watching in the mirror as the van pulled out and slipped into tailing position behind us. So far, exactly as I’d predicted. “Meanwhile, let’s just enjoy the morning air.”
“Fine,” Kreega said. “As long as that air doesn’t smell like burned Patth.”
I swallowed hard. “Definitely not the plan.”
Which didn’t necessarily mean it might not happen. But it definitely wasn’t the plan.
* * *
No one spoke much during the drive. I gave directions when necessary, but Kreega seemed content to just sit back and wait for whatever performance I had planned.
Selene’s thoughts during that time were her own business. But I was pretty sure a lot of those musings were on Tirano. The Kadolian child she’d hoped to save from himself.
The child who was probably lost to us forever.
Changeling.
I had Kreega pull to the side of the jeep trail at the same place I’d parked the day before. “Okay,” I said as we all got out. “That way”—I pointed west—“is a quick-set fence a group of Patth put together to wall off about seventy-five square kilometers of forest area. “That way—”
“Since when do the Patth get to put up fences in an Alainn forest preserve?” Kreega interrupted.
“Since they’re Patth and figure they can do anything they want,” I said. “The point is that they’re holding a very important and very private Easter egg hunt in there. That way”—I shifted my pointing finger to the east—“is a tree we can climb to a footbridge that will take us over the fence without triggering the alarms and straight to the aforementioned Easter egg.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “You game?”
Kreega peered west, then east, then straight up. “Where in all of this do we get to the murderer you mentioned?”
“If we’re lucky, at the end of the rainbow,” I said. “If not, we may have to shake the bushes a little more. Again, are you game?”
Kreega squared her shoulders. “Lead on.”
The climb up the tree, as always, was pretty straightforward. Kreega was a little leery of the footbridge, but she took it in stride without serious argument. A few minutes later we reached the end, and a minute after that we were back on the ground. Resting my hand on the grip of my plasmic, I led the way through the trees and bushes to the clearing.
Only to find there was no rope leading from the trees down into the portal.
I stopped short, staring at the empty hatchway. The rope had to be here—it was the only way the pieces of this puzzle fit together, the only way this made sense. Galfvi was here in the Patth enclosure—last night’s excursion had all but proved that. The portal was the obvious place for him to take refuge, and if he wasn’t here then the three of us would never find him, not with this much wilderness to search.
But then why had he taken my rope? What other use could he have had for it?
I turned to Kreega, wincing at her increasingly dark expression. I looked back at the clearing, shuffling through my stack of theories—
“Burned rope,” Selene murmured. “I smell burned rope.”
I frowned at her . . . and then, suddenly I had it. Not a puzzle piece I was expecting, but one that in hindsight fit perfectly with all the others. Smiling reassuringly at Kreega, I headed across the clearing to the open hatchway.
There it was, just as Selene had indicated: the burned end of a rope. Burned, moreover, by a distant plasmic shot. The remaining bit of rope, the part lying on the ground, had been woven painstakingly beneath the viny ground cover, and I followed it to where it had been securely tied around one of the trees, the loop and knot concealed by a bush and some carefully positioned branches.
Kreega was right beside me. “So?” she asked.
“So he’s in there,” I told her, nodding toward the opening.
“In where?” she asked, frowning back at it. “What’s down there, a cave or something?”
“More the or something,” I said. I unlooped my own rope from around my shoulder and tied it to the tree above Galfvi’s remnant, again putting in the most solid knot I could. Midway through the final cinching I pulled three pairs of ascenders and three pairs of gloves from my backpack. “Here,” I said, handing one of each set to Selene and Kreega. “Might as well put these on now.”
A minute later, fully geared up, we crossed to the opening. I squatted down beside it, peering cautiously in. Most of the receiver module was in darkness, but at the bottom I could just make out a faint and diffuse glow. Someone with a light was camped out inside the launch module.
The simplest approach would be to drop the rest of my rope loop down the rabbit hole and slide down after it. But as Selene had pointed out earlier, a length of rope hitting the bottom of the portal would make a distinctive thud, and the last thing I wanted was to alert our quarry. Instead, I fed the rope into the opening, meter by meter, until it was all in.
Now came the tricky part.
“I’ll go first,” I said quietly to the others. Basic safety protocols dictated that I should lock my ascenders onto the rope and use them to make a controlled descent. But that would take longer, and at the moment I was more interested in surprise than with playing by the rules. “Join me once I’m down.”
Maneuvering my legs into the opening, I got a firm grip on the rope with my gloved hands and pushed off.
Proper rappelling involved a climbing harness with a friction-braking descender setup and a whole lot more practice and experience than I had. Unfortunately, we didn’t carry the necessary gear aboard the Ruth, and taking a few practice runs was clearly out of the question. But I had good gloves, and strong hands, and boots that could squeeze against the rope for extra safety.
The overriding concern was to get down fast enough that no one could take a shot at me and safely enough that I wouldn’t be lying helpless at the bottom with a pair of broken ankles while that same someone shot me at his leisure.
Fortunately, neither of those worst-case scenarios played out. I landed at the bottom of the receiver module with ankles intact, and quietly enough that there was a fair chance he hadn’t heard my landing. I turned to the opening between the receiver and launch modules, a part of my brain noting the makeshift rope climbing ladder that had been set up between the two spheres—
I had just enough time to see the mesh twitch when a shadowy figure suddenly loomed up in the opening against the muted lighting and the flash of a plasmic shot scorched its way past my left arm.
I flinched away from the heat, trying to get to my own weapon before he could line up his second shot. But the very nature of the sphere’s curvature meant I was flinching uphill, with all the limitations inherent in that geometry. I wiggled around, trying to at least make myself a moving target, finally getting my plasmic clear of my holster. A second burst of fire lit up the receiver module.
Only this one wasn’t from my attacker. It was from the tiny lighted rectangle above me.
“Gregory!” Selene’s anxious shout came faintly as her second shot burst against the portal metal.
“I’m all right,” I shouted back, rolling up onto hands and knees as she fired a third time. “Keep him pinned!”
I got to my feet and headed up the slope. “Stop!” I shouted to Selene, and scrambled up the rope ladder. I reached the top, leaning slightly to the side to hopefully throw off my attacker’s aim, and brought my plasmic to bear—
Galfvi was standing motionless in the center of the curved floor, his plasmic on the deck in front of him, his empty hands in the air. “I surrender,” he said quickly. “Don’t shoot. I surrender.”
I took a deep breath. “Clear!” I shouted toward Selene and Kreega. “Come on down.”
“As for you, Galfvi,” I continued, lowering my voice to a more conversational level as I got one leg over the cusp, “it’s time we had a long conversation.”
“Just make it quick,” Galfvi warned with a sort of dark smirk. “As you humans say, Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.”
* * *
I had him lying on the deck, his plasmic secured in my belt, when Selene and Kreega arrived. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Kreega said as she sat him up and looped a set of plastic restraints around his wrists. “Looks like you were planning for the long haul.”
“Oh, he was,” I agreed, eyeing the bags of food and water bottles, the inflatable mattress, and the chemical toilet he’d set up on the mesh around him. “But this wasn’t his original plan. He didn’t actually set up shop here until last night or this morning, after he found the entrance Selene and I opened up yesterday. Until then, he was just sort of lurking around, hoping none of the Patth working west of here would run into him.”
“Meanwhile, stealing your rope and trying to trap you in here,” Selene said, looking at Galfvi with an edge of anger in her pupils.
“He definitely took my rope,” I said. “But in all fairness, I don’t think he knew anyone was inside. I was here in the launch module at the time, talking quietly with my light focused on the various equipment bays, and I doubt he could see or hear anything. All he knew was that someone had been in here, that they’d left their rope behind for some future visit, and that until they came back the place would be a good hiding spot.”
“I thought you said it was the Patth who’d put up the fence in the first place,” Kreega said, frowning. “Why would he need to hide from them?”
“Because they’re not his Patth,” I said. “He’s not with them, I mean. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’d prefer to have nothing at all to do with him.”
“That’s a new one,” Kreega commented, eyeing Galfvi. “I thought Patth always stuck together. All kin to all the others, like Kiolven said.”
“I’m sure they like to think that,” I said, straining my ears. Nothing yet. “But there are always exceptions. Galfvi is one of them.”
“How so?”
“We could start with Badgeman Zilor’s suspicions about him,” I said. “He thought our young friend here was running a scam or planning a theft.” I considered. “Actually, it was a little of both.”
Kreega made a sound deep in her throat. “How about we skip the froth and get to the murder part?”
“Okay,” I said. “But I really should add a little context so it makes sense—”
“Who did he kill?”
“Lukki Parsons,” I said hastily.
“And Parsons’ two thugs and the Javersin brothers?”
“Actually, he just killed Lukki,” I told her. “You ready to hear the how and why?”
Kreega gave me a look of strained patience. “Sure.”
“I don’t know how deeply Galfvi was into Lukki’s silver-silk-running business,” I said. “Probably not very—I can’t see her trusting him very much. More likely he found out about it from Tirano, who Lukki hired to help her locate the Vrinks inside the Loporr colony. Anyway, recent events strongly suggested it was time for Galfvi to get off Alainn, and for that he needed a quick infusion of cash. So he—”
“Hold it,” Kreega interrupted. “What events?”
“I’m guessing it was the quiet arrival of the current group of Patth into the Bilswift area,” I said, waving a hand around me. “The ones hunting for the thing we’re currently standing in. Galfvi probably jumped to the conclusion that they were looking for him.”
“I never thought they were looking for me,” Galfvi protested mildly. “They’re my kinsman Patthaaunuth.”
“I keep forgetting,” I said. “But even if they weren’t hunting him—and as it happens, they weren’t—one of them still might recognize him and call it in to the Patth authorities.”
“Why are the Patth authorities mad at him?”
“Actually, I have no idea,” I said, eyeing Galfvi speculatively. “Would you care to enlighten us?”
“I have no idea,” Galfvi said. “It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Whatever he did, he apparently made his family mad enough that they sent a couple of hired guns to bring him home.”
“Kiolven and Venikel,” Kreega murmured. “We identified the charred body as Venikel, by the way. So Galfvi killed him, too?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Galfvi protested.
“Well, you’re half right,” I said. “Like I said, the only one he killed was Lukki.”
“So Kiolven killed his partner?” Kreega asked, frowning. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “But getting back to the story. As I said, the Patth poking around out here had nothing to do with Galfvi or his family, but he didn’t know that. Fortunately for him, he knew that Lukki had just brought in a group of Vrinks from the Loporr colony that she was holding for a Ylpea buyer, and he figured if he could steal them from her he should be able to find a different buyer and sell them for enough cash to get off Alainn and start a new life elsewhere.”
“How did he know about the Vrinks?” Kreega again interrupted. “Not being pedantic, but I need an evidence trail to follow if I’m going to make any of this stick.”
“There are a couple of possibilities,” I said, keeping my voice casual. Odds were very good that she would never need any evidence against Galfvi, but this wasn’t the time to mention that. “Possibly from Tirano; more likely by tapping into the monitor system Lukki had set up in her permanent booth at Panza’s Café. We already know Galfvi put in his own monitor at the Javersin brothers’ fish shop in order to steal the combination to their safe. Once Tirano had tagged Lukki as someone of interest Galfvi would want to keep tabs on what she was doing.”
“We’ll check on the booth,” Kreega said, nodding. “Enough setup. When do we get to Lukki’s murder?”
“Right now,” I said. “By this time Galfvi probably knew some of the spots where Lukki stashed her kidnapped Vrinks. I’m guessing that after my talk with her that night in the café she mentioned something to Willie or Braun about their location—maybe not a specific address, but just a street or something. Galfvi hoped to get to her apartment ahead of her and get the exact address, but he first had to load his robe with the cash he’d taken from the fish shop, give the robe to Tirano, and send him high-tailing it to the Ruth.”
“So Tirano was with you that night,” Kreega growled.
“Well . . . yes,” I admitted. “But until we knew what was going on, we thought it best to hang onto him.”
“Which didn’t work out very well,” Selene said quietly.
Kreega looked at her, and I thought I could see a flicker of almost sympathy cross her face. “So why did Galfvi send him to you?” she asked.
“Two reasons,” I said. “First, any Bilswift citizen who saw someone in a Patth robe hurrying through the rain would naturally assume it was Galfvi. Not a great alibi, but better than nothing. Second, if Kiolven or Venikel spotted the robe they would hopefully target Tirano and not him and again give him some breathing space.”
“And the stolen cash?”
“An emergency fund,” I said. “Not enough to get him off Alainn in the style he preferred, but he would at least have some running money. Getting it back from Tirano wouldn’t be a problem—he’d already wormed his way into Tirano’s confidence, and figured he could talk him into almost anything.”
I looked at Selene, saw the understanding and quiet pain in her pupils as she remembered Tirano’s unintended role in our near-disastrous trip into the Loporr colony. “Anyway, so after Galfvi sent Tirano off into the rain, he headed for Lukki’s apartment. Unfortunately for her, she got there ahead of him. He still needed that address, and figured he had nothing to lose, so while she was still on the street he hailed her, probably telling her he had a message from Tirano. She knew who he was—she’d seen him at the fish shop with Tirano—and didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, so she let him get close.”
Kreega muttered something. “And he grabbed the weapon she always said she never carried and killed her with it.”
“Right,” I said, my stomach knotting with the mental image. I’d seen my share of killings as a bounty hunter, including the handful I’d participated in. But those had always been the result of a gunfight or a case of self-defense. Cold-blooded murder was a different thing entirely, and it always set my teeth on edge. “Her plasmic, the same one he used to cut the rope up there once he and his gear were down.”
Kreega looked up, her forehead furrowing suddenly. “Wait a minute. He deliberately sabotaged his only way out?”
“Like you said, he was in for the long haul,” I told her. “But he wasn’t worried. He knew that Huginn and the Patth out there—Huginn is the Patth Expediter in charge of the hunt for this thing—would eventually find him, and he figured he could talk his way out from under them. The most important part, the only part that really mattered, was to stay clear of Kiolven and Venikel.”
Beside me, Selene inhaled sharply. “He’s here,” she murmured. “And—”
I frowned at her. There was confusion in her pupils, the look of her trying to sort out a group of different scents. “Speaking of whom, I believe our final guest of honor has arrived,” I said, drawing my plasmic and turning toward the hatchway. “Kiolven? We’re in here. Come on in and join the party.”
“Do not shoot,” Kiolven’s voice came from the other sphere. “I am not armed.”
“Understood,” I said, frowning at Selene. “Be advised that we are.”
“I understand.”
And then, suddenly Selene’s look of uncertainly turned to one of pure dread. “Gregory!” she gasped. “They’re here. Iykams.”
For a crucial half second I just stared at her in confusion of my own. We’d been in Bilswift nearly a week, and never once had she caught a whiff of Iykam scent. Where in hell—?
And then it was too late. Even as I turned back to the hatchway Kiolven appeared, rolling with gymnast-class dexterity through the opening and sliding down the rope ladder toward us.
And behind him, framed in the opening, three vac-suited Iykams appeared.
Their corona weapons pointed directly at us.