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CHAPTER ONE

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As my father used to say, When you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, odds are you’re hunting someone, being hunted by someone, or been ordered there by someone. The first two someones probably aren’t any happier to be there than you are; the third someone probably doesn’t care.

Alainn wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. I could grant it that much. Actually, the planet as a whole was a reasonably well-respected regional hub, with a couple of Spiral-1 Class landing fields in each hemisphere that ran a brisk traffic in transshipped goods from the planets around the system. When Selene and I had first been ordered there, I’d had visions of decent barbeque and better-than-decent Dewar’s scotch.

Unfortunately, even the most advanced planet had patches of nowhere. On Alainn, that nowhere included the town of Bilswift.

And like my father’s saying went, I was pretty sure Admiral Sir Graym-Barker had the third category pretty well covered.

“Interesting,” Selene murmured as we walked down the zigzag ramp configuration from the Ruth’s entryway. The Spiral-1 Class fields had landing cradles that would let us reconfigure the zigzag into a ramp that much more conveniently led straight across to the edge of the cradle. The Bilswift field, unfortunately, was limited to four flat pads, which meant a lot more climbing if we wanted to get into or out of our ship.

Still, I supposed I should be grateful that Bilswift had even that much. The nearest alternative was a good eight hundred kilometers away, with the nearest fancy Spiral-1 field five thousand kilometers farther than that, on the edge of the regional capital of Tranlisoa. Aside from the daily suborbital shuttle from Tranlisoa to Bilswift I had no idea what kind of long-range transport options the region had. Anyway, the thought of leaving our ship that far out of reach would have made me twitchy even at the best of times.

Which, naturally, this wasn’t.

“What’s interesting?” I asked, looking around as we continued downward. If the spaceport was no great shakes, the town stretching beyond it didn’t look a whole lot better. Bilswift’s collection of low, unimpressive buildings were laid out along a mix of wide and narrow streets, with patches of trees or other greenery popping up at seemingly random locations. It was hard to make definitive judgments from a distance, but it looked like the larger buildings—businesses and some light industry, the data files said—were concentrated along the wider streets while the smaller ones were private homes or small apartment complexes filling in the space along the narrower ones.

“The mix of aromas,” Selene said. “I smell a lot of different cooking styles.”

“Human or other?”

“Mostly human.”

“Reasonable,” I said, nodding. The Narchners and Ulkomaals had been putting colonies on Alainn for two hundred years, starting near the equator and spreading out in both directions, but other species hadn’t really gotten into the game until sixty years ago, with humans bringing up the rear ten years after that.

But unlike most of the others, who were looking for comfortable living space, the human entrepreneurs had targeted locales with a mix of economic expansion possibilities. The Bilswift area had caught their eye, offering lumber, exotic seafood, and possible tourism. The tourism angle hadn’t worked out as well as the developers had hoped, but the other two were keeping the community’s financial head above water.

Still, the city’s history meant it had remained very much dominated by humans, which fit with Selene’s analysis.

Not that I could smell much of anything except the salty ocean air around us. But I didn’t doubt her analysis for a second. The breeze was light, but it was coming from the east, which meant it was carrying traces of the entire spectrum of Bilswift’s aromas toward us.

I was used to Selene’s magic myself, of course. She and I had been together for many years, first as bounty hunters, then as crocketts, then as whatever the hell our official position was these days with the Icarus Group. But Kadolians were extremely rare in the Spiral, and their hypersensitive sense of smell was guaranteed to surprise the socks off most of the rest of the population.

More than once I’d considered parlaying Selene’s talents into bar bets and free drinks. So far I’d resisted that temptation.

“It’s the two unfamiliar ones that concern me,” she continued, an unhappy look in her deep-set gray cat’s-eye pupils. “One of them seems to be Patth.”

Seems to be Patth?” I echoed, frowning. It wasn’t like Selene hadn’t had plenty of experience smelling Patth cuisine, after all. Way more experience, really, than either of us had ever wanted.

“Yes, seems to be,” she confirmed. “There are distinct Patth elements, but there are . . . variations from the ones I’m familiar with.”

“Maybe it’s their version of gourmet cooking,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten as I eyed the low, tree-covered foothills to the east that ran between the higher mountains in the near distance right down to the edge of town. Add in the ocean to the west, a wide river bordering the city to the north, and more encroaching forest to the south, and Bilswift took on a definite sense of claustrophobia.

I’d hoped we could finish the job the admiral had sent us here for and get out of town before the Patth arrived in force. Clearly, we were too late.

Unless . . . 

“Any way to tell from the strength of the aroma how many Patth are chowing down?” I asked. “I’m wondering if what you’re smelling is just the advance team.”

“You mean it might be an upper-class variant?” she suggested.

“Exactly,” I said. “If we’re talking an organizer or conciliator, maybe even a sub-director if Nask has sent someone ahead, then the archeologists and diggers the admiral said were on their way might not have arrived yet.”

“That’s possible,” Selene said, her eyelashes fluttering as she tried to sift the more elusive aromas from the air. “Either way, there’s no way to tell the number of Patth by the strength of the aroma.”

“Either way, the clock’s ticking,” I said. “I’m thinking maybe we should hit the ground running. A quick drive up into the mountains as soon as we can grab a runaround and see if we can at least figure out whether there’s anything up there that was worth burning through hyperspace at plus-thirty for.”

I peered off to the west. “In fact, with a good four hours of daylight left, we might even be able to finish off the whole thing.”

“We can try,” Selene said, more cautiously. “Uh-oh.”

I followed her pointing finger. A middle-aged and decidedly overweight Ihmisit was trundling toward us at a speed usually reserved for younger members of her species. She was carrying an info pad, and as her arms pumped up and down I spotted the spaceport logo on the back of the pad.

I winced. So something both official and urgent.

Terrific.

We reached the bottom of the zigzag about three steps before the Ihmisit reached us. “Stop,” she puffed as she came to a halt. “No farther. You are”—she paused to look at her info pad—“Gregory Roarke?”

“I am,” I confirmed, focusing briefly on the shiny PERRIFIL nameplate on her collar. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing up toward the Ruth. “You must vacate this spot immediately. It has been reserved.”

“Absolutely,” I said firmly. “It’s been reserved by me. Six days ago, and I have all the proper paperwork.”

“The promise of the paperwork has changed,” Perrifil said, her attitude starting to come back in proportion with her breath. As my father used to say, Never be out of breath if you’re trying to pull rank, especially if you’re a mid-level bureaucrat. It just makes people laugh. “A Patthaaunuth representative has requisitioned this spot for an incoming ship, which may be here at any time. Furthermore, a Ylpea ship is due in three days’ time. You must therefore depart immediately.”

“I see,” I said. So whether the Patth cooking Selene smelled was just the advance team or the team plus some diggers, they had another batch of the latter on the way. I had no idea what the Ylps could possibly want in Bilswift, but unless the Patth had hired them for some reason they weren’t likely to be a problem.

What was going to be a problem, as Perrifil had already pointed out, was that the Ruth was currently occupying the fourth of the spaceport’s four landing pads. If we got chased off, even if the Ylps took the slot away from the incoming Patth, the fact that the Patth were already here meant that us getting knocked that far out of position would likely lose us the race to the pot of gold.

And that could be disastrous. Admiral Graym-Barker and his Icarus Group were currently locked in a quiet but furious race with the Patth to locate and grab more of the portals that had been left behind by a mysterious and long-vanished species Selene and I had dubbed the Icari.

As far as anyone knew, the Icarus Group was currently ahead of the game. They had three full-range Icarus portals in their possession, huge double-sphere devices that could be set to instantly send a traveler to any of potentially thousands of other portals like it. They also had a pair of what we called Geminis, portals that were exclusively dyad-linked to each other. The Patth, in contrast, had only a single Gemini pair.

The big caveat here was that those two Geminis were all we knew they had. There were indications that the mahogany-skinned little rotters had known about the portals and been hunting them a lot longer than the seven years or so since Jordan McKell and his band of misfits had stumbled across the Icarus and subsequently put humanity onto what had once been the Patth’s private playing field.

But one way or the other, that score was likely to change in the next few days. Graym-Barker had intel that strongly suggested there was a new portal half buried in the forests east of Bilswift. The Patth had a team in place and more on the way.

The Icarus Group, in contrast, had Selene and me. And as with any game, sheer weight of numbers would eventually win the day.

But as my father used to say, If you can’t beat ’em at their game, change the game.

Perrifil was still standing there, presumably waiting for me to apologize for inconveniencing her and the entire Bilswift Spaceport operations department and promise to get the Ruth out of there as soon as humanly possible. “I see,” I said again. “I presume both groups want the pad undamaged?”

Perrifil’s insectoid antennae twitched at the odd question. “What? Yes, yes, of course they will. Why such a question?”

“Because if I lift now, it won’t be,” I said. “Our portside thruster is on its way to losing a couple of collimator vents. If even one of them goes, so does this pad. And probably a couple of the others along with it. Not to mention the ships currently occupying them.”

Perrifil looked up at the Ruth. “Why didn’t you report this before you landed?”

“Because it didn’t flag until we were already on the ground and powering down.”

“You did not report it then, either.”

“Because I need to do a complete diagnostic before I can tell the mechanics what I need them to do,” I said, putting as much strained patience into my voice as I could manage. Ihmisits were better than the average alien at reading human vocal nuances, and I needed to impress on her the seriousness of the situation. “The diagnostic is running now. As soon as I get the full report I’ll go to the maintenance office and see what they can do for me.”

She looked up at the Ruth again, probably wondering how she was going to explain this to whichever high-level Patth had ordered us kicked out. “Perhaps we could carry it elsewhere?” she suggested.

“That might work,” I agreed, sifting rapidly through my options. If the supposed damage to the collimator vents had also run fracture damage to the longitudinal modulator feed line . . . “I assume Bilswift Spaceport has insurance that will cover any additional damage that might ensue?”

Her antennae twitched again. “Additional damage?”

“As in what lifting the Ruth could do to the longitudinal modulator feed line,” I elaborated. “And of course, if the portside thruster has a problem, chances are the starboard thruster has one, too, in which case that modulator line could also be damaged. Still, a lift and move would probably only run you seventy or eighty thousand commarks. I just want to make sure you’ve got that possibility properly covered before I sign off on it.”

“Yes,” Perrifil muttered. Mid-level bureaucrat, all right, with enough rank to deliver messages and threats but not enough to handle major policy decisions. “If I order expedited repairs, how soon can you leave?”

“Depends on how much is wrong,” I said. “As I said, I won’t know that until the diagnostic is finished.”

“When will that be?”

“I was going to check on it after I touched base with you in the operations office,” I said. “Now that you’ve saved me that trip, I can go do that right now. Unless you have more you’d like to chat about?”

“No,” she said. “Go. Report your damage and repair needs as soon as you can.”

“Absolutely,” I promised, giving Selene a nudge. “Okay, Selene. Back we go.”

Selene waited until the hatch was sealed and we were heading to the bridge before she spoke. “I think she was convinced,” she said. “But it’s difficult to separate suspicion from anxiety.”

“I’m guessing it was probably some of both,” I said as I sat down at the helm. Fortunately, I’d started a diagnostic as a matter of course as soon as I’d powered down the ship, so I wasn’t going to be suspiciously late with my report. Even more fortunately, way back in our bounty hunter days I’d added the capability for planting false readings for alibi purposes and never gotten around to removing that programming. “Whoever the Patth is who’s having dinner out there, I’d hate to be the one to tell him he’s going to have to go to Plan B.”

“I would guess Plan B involves chasing off one of the other three ships,” Selene warned. “If so, that won’t take very long.”

“I know,” I said, scowling at the data scrolling across the display as I considered which set of semi-catastrophic failures I wanted to add in. “And it gets worse. The only way to maintain this bluff is to let the mechanics tear off the collimator vents or something else equally vital. Once they start, we may be stuck here.”

“With a Patth ship on the way.”

“With another Patth ship on the way,” I corrected her grimly. “At least one of our three neighbors has to belong to our gourmet diner across town.” I frowned, throwing her a look. “It’s not Nask, is it?”

Selene’s pupils indicated a negative. “I didn’t smell him.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning back to my board. “Okay.”

Which struck me as odd, because if there was one place Sub-Director Nask ought to be it was here. He held the Patth mandate for portals and portal retrieval, and he was not the kind of person it was safe to lock horns with.

In the old dramas I used to watch as a kid, this would be the point where the hero confidently proclaimed that he and his partner had the enemy outnumbered. But as my father used to say, Don’t pattern your life after media heroes. They always have better writers than you do.

“Maybe he’s on the incoming ship,” Selene offered into my thoughts.

“Or won’t bother landing but will just park the Odinn in orbit and direct the operation from there,” I said. “Or will stay home and recuperate like his doctors probably keep begging him to do.”

“I don’t see Nask as being the sit-around type.”

“You also didn’t see how badly he was injured,” I pointed out.

“No,” Selene said quietly, a quick mix of revulsion and compassion flicking across her pupils. “I wonder if they’ve taken the mandate away from him.”

I shrugged. “After Kanaloa they’d be crazy to do that,” I said. “Still, we’ve seen Patth do stupid things before.” I gestured at the display. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can do to create the maximum repair time from the minimum of damage.”

“And the maximum cost, too?”

I sighed. “Unfortunately, those two factors do often seem to coincide.”

* * *

In the end we came up with a package of one collimator vent, a backscatter sensor cluster, and two modulator feed-line joints. Long on repair time, short on repair parts, and we could probably safely blast our way off Alainn if we absolutely had to. Estimated completion time: three and a half days.

“Five days,” the mechanic foreman said flatly. “If you’re lucky and we can find the parts we need.”

“If we’re not and you can’t?”

“Six days. Maybe seven.”

I made a show of scowling out the office window. In theory, Selene and I should be able to get through Graym-Barker’s job in a day or two at the most. But an additional three to five days’ worth of excuse to stay put might not be a bad thing. Especially since we could get out of here sooner if we absolutely had to. “Fine,” I said, with an equally showy sigh. “Just get the ship working properly again.”

The expression on his face suggested that working properly was a goal the Ruth probably hadn’t achieved in years. But he just nodded and tapped the spot on the info pad where I needed to sign. I did so, handed over the five-hundred commark deposit, and ushered Selene out of the office.

Next door was the operations office, where Perrifil was back at her desk. On a hunch, I opened the door and stepped inside. “Excuse me?”

She looked up, and from the annoyed twitch of her antennae I could tell she remembered me. “Did you get your repairs set up?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to take several days. I’m sorry about the inconvenience to your Patth friend’s incoming ship. If you could tell me where to find him, I’d be more than happy to explain the situation and apologize to him in person.”

“He is not my friend, and I don’t know where to find him,” she said, a bit frostily. “Perhaps the Panza can tell you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Where do I find the Panza?”

“At his café, of course,” Perrifil said shortly. “Good day.”

Clearly, she was ready to be done with me. “Thank you,” I said again, and beat a quick but dignified retreat.

Selene was waiting outside where I’d left her, working her info pad. “You heard?” I asked.

She nodded, her pupils showing concentration. “Panza’s Café is about three kilometers across town, on the dividing line between the Grymary and Wellington districts.”

“Of course it is,” I growled, looking around. The data files on Bilswift had said there were vehicles available for rent, but the runaround stand at the edge of the spaceport was devoid of vehicles. As we came closer I saw that the price board under the wide overhang carried a CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign that was dated nearly four years ago. I’d spotted a couple of cabs in the distance as we walked to the repair office, but none of them had gotten close enough for me to flag down and there were no cab companies listed in the directory. Apparently, Bilswift’s internal transportation was handled entirely by independent contractors, none of whom we had contact information for. “Were you able to get through to that vehicle rental place?”

“Yes, and I reserved us a ground car,” Selene said.

“No aircars available?”

“No aircars at all,” she said. “He told me the people who rent here mostly want vehicles that can handle mountains and off-road trails. Too many trees up there for aircars to land.”

“Point,” I conceded. Actually, given the admiral’s tentative location for the portal, off-road and mountain was probably exactly what we wanted. “Good enough,” I said. “Better than good enough, really. That’s the rental place in Wellington, right?”

She nodded. “Three blocks past Panza’s.”

I looked behind me at the western sky. Earlier, I’d thought we might get this whole thing finished today. Probably not now. “Let’s get started,” I said, starting down the walkway. “And keep an eye out for a cab.”

There were no cabs, or at least none that came near us. We were about twenty minutes into our trip, and somewhere inside the Grymary district, when Selene abruptly jerked to a halt. “What is it?” I asked softly, dropping my hand to my holstered plasmic as I ran a quick visual three-sixty. No threats, or at least nothing I could see. “Selene?” I asked, looking at her but keeping a grip on my weapon.

I felt that grip tighten. Her pupils were ablaze with shock, disbelief, anticipation, and horror. “Selene?” I repeated.

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “This way,” she said, angling off north toward the river and picking up her pace. “Come. Now.”

We hurried down the street, passing humans and a mix of other species, the general cut of their clothing marking them as working class. Most of them flicked a glance or two at the strangers walking their district’s streets, but it seemed more idle curiosity than anything else. Certainly there was no suspicion or hostility I could detect. A couple of them gave Selene lingering looks, but given that they’d probably never seen a Kadolian before that was to be expected.

Finally, a tense five-minute walk later, we reached a storefront with a heavy aroma and a stock of fish and other seafood in open trays at the counter. A freshly painted sign over the counter identified the place as JAVERSIN BROTHERS SEAFOOD. “There,” Selene breathed. “In there.”

“Got it,” I said, touching her arm reassuringly as I moved ahead to take point. Standing at the counter were two burly humans, chatting with the customers as they industriously scooped up fish from the various trays and stuffed them into travel containers. A few meters back from the counter, in a preparation area with long tables, trash bins, and filleting knives, was something I wasn’t expecting: a Patth in the unmarked gray robe of a commoner, industriously chopping heads and tails off more of the product. Beside him, his back to us, was a shorter figure with a bit of pure white hair peeking out from beneath his knit cap. He was walking slowly past a set of trays with some kind of purplish squid-like stuff in them, his head held low. The Patth said something inaudible, and his companion half turned toward us as he picked up a scoop and handed it to him.

And I felt the same kaleidoscope of reactions flash through me that I’d just seen in Selene’s pupils.

It was a young male, small and thin, probably no more than ten or eleven years old. He was dressed in the same working-class style as most of the rest of people we’d passed on Grymary’s streets.

Only he wasn’t human, or Patth, or Ihmisit, or any of the other species I typically ran into on the streets of the Spiral.

He was a Kadolian.


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