Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Hell, this was why he’d resigned his Concordance Command commission and left criminal investigation. Before last year, he could have focused his talent on her to get a sense of whether or not to trust her. Then he’d forced his talent to burn bright to catch a predator. It had nearly cost him his own life, and now he couldn’t make it stop. He could see a lot more and deeper, but once he started, his own thoughts got swamped and he drowned.

  A stark memory of Leo, curled like a child in death, rocked Luka. If he didn’t take a chance, he’d never get justice for his friend. Maybe with so many people nearby, he’d be able to use them like a white noise generator to counter the input from his talent.

  For the first time in months, he hesitantly tried to see the essence of the woman in front of him. His initial impression was that Green was sincere and worried, maybe with a thread of vengeance, but there was an unexpected layer under it, and it was nothing he recognized. It was almost like looking at pieces of a mosaic without being able to see the whole, and seeing the whole was the core of his talent. He’d never felt anything like it, and didn’t want to now or ever again. His stomach turned leaden.

  Needing to get away from the disturbing fractures in her, he dragged his focus to the young man at the next table. It helped some, but now he was starting to sense the man, and cold visions started to form around the details that told stories of the possible. In growing desperation, he looked around as casually as he could. His eyes lighted on Morganthur, who was leaning one shoulder against the pillar of the huge clock, looking like a bored passenger with time to kill. He focused his talent on her, keeping her in his peripheral vision as he looked down at his hands resting on the table.

  To his relief, the images in his mind began to mist away and his talent cooled. For whatever reason, focusing on someone he knew, however slightly, was helping him regain control. He returned his gaze to the woman in front of him, while still keeping Morganthur in his sight as his talent quieted. Green had stopped talking, and he quickly replayed in his head her last few words, something about being scared of the vengeful man who had nothing to lose. She was fidgeting nervously with the beads of her necklace-style percomp.

  He opened his mouth to speak reassuringly, but movement from Morganthur caught his attention. She’d straightened up and gone from being still to... not still. It was subtle, but if he had to describe it, he’d say she was looking antsy. It reminded him of how she’d looked in the warehouse when she’d thought she’d heard something, and turned out to be right. Even though the food court was large and open, he was suddenly feeling claustrophobic.

  That was enough for him. He stood up, and Green did, too, though with obvious reluctance.

  “I don’t blame you for being cautious,” he told her, not meeting her eyes. “You deserve the reward you were promised, so don’t give me the man’s name right now or my boss might think he doesn’t need to pay you.” He handed her a La Plata comm card. “I’ll do what I can on my end, so ping me tomorrow.” He didn’t care if she thought he was rude, but he had to get away.

  He strode quickly toward the moving stairs with the pace of someone running late. To his relief, his talent quieted fully as the distance increased. On the stairs, he turned to check the local time on the big clock, giving him the chance to confirm that Morganthur wasn’t far behind him. She was seemingly focused on her percomp, but the immobility of her shoulders said she was still on alert. At the bridge level, he threaded himself in and between clumps of people until he got to a safe vantage point from the pedestrian bridge. Keeping his face in shadow, he looked at the food court to see if Green was still there. She was, though she was now closer to the clock pillar.

  He felt Morganthur’s approach behind him without having to look. “What now?” she asked softly. He was grateful not to have to explain his actions to her. Velasco would have been on his twentieth question by then.

  “We watch Green,” he said. “Too many inconsistencies.”

  Once he’d gotten away from the woman, away from the threat of losing control, he’d had the chance to consider why his intuition was giving off warnings. Mostly little things, like her uniform had been too new, her makeup too expertly applied, her English accent too precise, and her percomp too delicate and expensive for a maintenance worker. The story about a vengeful man sounded like the plot from a tri-D detective drama. Not to mention that nauseating fracturing of her that he’d sensed, though his talent wasn’t exactly reliable these days.

  Morganthur stepped forward and leaned her elbows on the railing. Though she was looking down at the food court, she looked like she was lost in thought, not really seeing anything.

  After only a minute, one man, clearly a mercenary even when seen from a distance, approached Green, and two other mercs converged on her from two other directions. Green talked, the merc nodded and talked, Green shrugged, the merc talked more. Her body language said she knew the man and wasn’t afraid of him. Green walked away, and the first merc said something to the other two that had them heading in the same direction Luka and Morganthur had taken, toward the moving stairs. Luka had to force himself to keep in mind the possibility that Green had hired the mercs to protect her, not target him.

  He was startled out of his thoughts by Morganthur, who had turned to look at him. “I need to run an errand.” Her expression was unreadable. He suddenly realized he hadn’t given a thought to how her schedule had been disrupted because of him, and he felt guilty for not asking.

  “Sure, go ahead. We’re done here.” He looked at his percomp for the time. “I’ll catch a flitter. That should get me back in time to do some running on an actual planet for a change.”

  She nodded and strode off, but into the port instead of toward the exit. Out of curiosity, he’d have liked to see where she was going, but decided it wouldn’t be prudent to chance running into the two mercs who’d headed for the moving stairs.

  He lucked out and snagged a piloted flitter to take him back to the office, above the horrendous traffic. La Plata could damn well eat the cost. He paid extra to engage the privacy field, then used his percomp to live-ping Zheer with a quick report of the meeting and Green’s subsequent interaction with the mercs, including the reward request and his suspicion that it was a false lead.

  His intuition still said the Loyduk Pharma vaccine was the target, not the shipping company. “If someone had the right distribution lanes,” he told Zheer, “they could sell a pandemic vaccine for triple or quadruple the price of retail, especially if the theft created the shortage in the first place.”

  “I think you’re on the right track,” she said. “By the way, you have an appointment tomorrow at an independent testing lab to get those samples from the warehouse analyzed.” The live holo of Zheer temporarily faded as it was washed out by the bright autumn sun. “This is getting serious, Luka. From now on, I don’t want you going anywhere without security.”

  “What do you mean by ‘anywhere’? Off hours, too?” The thought of spending hours on end with Velasco had him grinding his teeth.

  “Anywhere, as in working, eating, shopping, running, rescuing abandoned pet-trade creatures, or whatever you do. And think twice about going anywhere with crowds. I’m not taking any more chances with my people.”

  Luka sighed. “Fine, but I approve the personnel.” He knew from her tone that Zheer wouldn’t budge any further on the issue. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was thinking of assigning Morganthur for your personal security detail rotation.” At his frown, she added, “Your choice, of course. Her record is clean, and she’s got basic skills and experience, but Malamig, her supervisor says she’s stupid, difficult, and out of her depth. He made a formal complaint to my office about Investigation Division stealing his staff.”

  Luka laughed. “You know you live for petty office politics, Seshulla.”

  “Bite me,” she said with mock irritability.

  Luka laughed again. “I’ll accept her. She’s got the social
skills of a cactus, but she’s a better driver than Velasco, and she’s definitely not stupid. She’s observant, too.” He described how she’d seen the mercs coming in the food court long before he would have, and how her early alert had given them time to watch the mercs interact with the informant.

  “My one-eyed, deaf great-grandmother would have seen them before you did,” Zheer said. “That’s part of why I’m assigning you continuous detail for this case. Once you get focused on your work, a heavy hauler could crash into the building and you’d never notice.”

  “Bite me,” said Luka.

  Zheer laughed as she ended the call.

  He wasn’t looking forward to a constant parade of company. He liked time alone, and he needed it when his talent muddled his thought processes. Velasco was barely tolerable, and Luka hadn’t been impressed with other Security Division employees Malamig had sent before.

  On the other hand, spending more time with Morganthur wouldn’t be half bad. From what he had seen, her observational skills were on par with a scanning telepath. That night at the warehouse, she’d probably saved them from an uncomfortable night with the police, and after seeing her today, he suspected it might have been more than luck.

  His hot mess of a talent went blessedly cool around her, and he had no idea why, but he wanted to find out. He made a mental note to ask Zheer to confirm that Morganthur’s security background check had actually been done. His experience with her so far said she was much more interesting than her record suggested.

  In between avoiding the worst of Etonver’s inevitable traffic congestion areas, Mairwen berated herself all the way from the spaceport to the La Plata campus to return the company vehicle. She’d been firmly in the “do your job, nothing more” mindset from the moment she’d picked up Foxe, right up until her senses told her the mercs were converging. Or perhaps earlier, when she’d thought Foxe had been in some kind of trouble during his conversation with the woman called Green, and the distressed, almost haunted look was coming back to his face. In any case, Foxe had somehow read her when she’d sensed the threat and it was good they evaded what might have become a problem.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t stopped there.

  From the bridge, when Foxe had said there were too many inconsistencies, she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to find out if he was right. She’d turned up her senses to listen to the conversation between Green and the merc leader. She was four years out of practice, and it had been a challenge to filter out the cacophony of light, sound, scent, and sensation, and to hear only the voices she was interested in. She’d gotten lucky with acoustics and the merc leader’s naturally resonant voice, or she’d have missed half of it.

  Green explained to the merc leader that she’d signaled when it became clear that Foxe wasn’t biting, then Foxe had left abruptly for no reason she could tell. The merc leader asked where Foxe had gone, and Green shrugged. The merc leader told her and the other two mercs they were done for the day, and he’d report in.

  Even then, Mairwen couldn’t leave well enough alone. After she’d gotten free of Foxe, she’d ghost-shadowed the merc leader through the port. Her blandly corporate clothes and the crowds made it low risk, she’d rationalized. She’d ruthlessly suppressed this part of herself for a long time, even made herself forget she knew how, so it was unsettling how easily it came back to her, and how good it felt. Still, she caught herself making small mistakes that might have cost her in a higher-risk hunt, such as not taking smaller reflective surfaces into account where he could have seen her if he’d been looking.

  The merc leader ended up at a bank of pixcons. She didn’t know why he bothered with a secure connection when anyone nearby, even with normal senses, could overhear his side of the conversation, conducted in spoken standard English, no less. Eavesdropping yielded nothing until the end, when he’d mentioned payment from Loyduk Pharma. The makers of the vaccine being stolen.

  Her first impulse had been to tell Foxe, but her cautious, rational brain that had kept her well hidden the past four years crushed the idea immediately. She’d have to tell him how she got the information, and she couldn’t do that. Security guards who showed initiative or extraordinary skills got noticed, and that would be the first step in a trail that would inevitably lead to her exposure and death. Or if the universe was really malicious, her recapture and reconditioning.

  Foxe would have to find the connection on his own. He probably would, anyway, as smart as he was. It would just take him longer.

  Her day did not improve when she got back to La Plata. Malamig ordered her to report to his office the moment she arrived. She wasn’t used to having to interact with him, or anyone else, on a daily basis. She was very ready to return to the comfortable solitude of the graveyard shift.

  He’d obviously had drinks with lunch, because the smell of garlic and grain-based alcohol was unavoidable. He was seething, and his rural English Isles accent became more pronounced as he ordered her to sit.

  “You’ve been assigned to Foxe as one of his security assistants for his ‘special project,’ by direct order of the company president.”

  Clearly both Malamig and the universe were highly displeased with her. Malamig was likely feeling threatened by the loss of his authority, and she was a convenient target. The universe had no excuse.

  He told her tersely that she and the others assisting Foxe were being assigned company vehicles and pre-authorized use of a company flitter, which not even Malamig had.

  Mairwen didn’t want a special assignment or a vehicle; she wanted to be left alone. It was safer than being around Foxe and his sharp intellect and even sharper curiosity. Something of her reluctance must have broken through her usually neutral exterior.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked, obviously hoping she’d give him an excuse to sandbag the Investigation Division.

  She grasped for something he’d believe. “What about a contract?”

  “If you want to renegotiate your contract, you’ll have to ask your new pal Foxe, because I’m sure as shit not doing it for you.” His upper lip twitched in disdain. “What’s this special project, anyway?”

  She ignored his question. Malamig’s ignorance wasn’t her problem. By now, even the janitorial staff knew.

  Her silence must have goaded him.

  “You just don’t understand the concept of loyalty, do you?” he hissed. “When you need a new assignment from me after they dump you, you’ll be wishin’ you did. Are you really that stupid, or just a stubborn bitch?”

  Mairwen assumed it was a rhetorical question and waited for him to say something pertinent. He dismissed her with a snarl.

  While she was apprehensive about the visibility of working with Foxe, and the disturbing temptation he represented, at least he was vastly easier to put up with than Malamig, who’d grown considerably less tolerable in a very short time. She went in search of her new boss.

  4 * Planet: Gasprélodid Prime * GDAT 3237.028 *

  HILDREE FANNAR, WHOSE comm card currently proclaimed her to be an independent security risk consultant, firmly told herself it wasn’t good business to kneecap the client’s representative. Even imbeciles like Tamanun Harado, Loyduk Pharma’s vice president of Market Assurance, which was corp-speak for their competitor spying and sabotage division. Other pharma companies she’d worked for had similar positions, though they usually had “strategy” or “intelligence” in the title, neither of which would ever apply to Harado. He’d made insane decisions from the start and gone downhill from then, so she was being paid very highly by Loyduk’s security director to take care of Harado’s “little problem.” Office politics sometimes created lucrative business opportunities for people in Hildree’s line of work.

  Her own generous paycheck notwithstanding, Loyduk had a reputation of being stingy, and too many of Harado’s actions reflected it. Unfortunately, she’d been ordered to take direction from Harado, the instigator of all the troubles in the first place.

  Now sh
e sat attentively in the splashy top-floor-view suite and pasted a look of supportive interest on her face as he finished reading his report out loud, word for frecking word, with self-congratulatory asides as he went along. The same report he’d sent to corporate; the same report he knew she’d already read. His nasal, singsong tenor voice was grating, especially when he spoke Mandarin, and his delivery was that of someone reading to a dimwitted six-year-old. He finally got to the end of it and asked if she had any questions.

  She was sorely tempted to ask why his parents had let him live and who he had blackmail holos on that allowed him to keep his job. Instead, she asked, “What was this ‘special operative’ you got from your silent partner supposed to do, exactly?” She decided to keep the conversation in English, though she spoke Mandarin fluently. She wanted the flexibility that could be blamed on translation errors.

  She assumed the silent partner had connections to the chems and alterants blackmarket, although it was equally likely the government’s covert operations organization, the Citizen Protection Service, was involved. They had their fingers in a lot of pies, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. In her experience, the industry was a cutthroat, sleazy tangle of duplicity, corruption, and greed. Fortunately, it gave her many more options.

  “Since your leaker had already vanished, we needed to give La Plata somewhere else to look besides Loyduk,” he said defensively. Hildree barely suppressed rolling her eyes. Based only on the fact that she’d discovered the leak in his organization, he’d been desperately trying to give her ownership of the missing employee and probable whistleblower who’d been the origin point of the whole mess. He tried for an affronted look. “It’s not my fault the operative didn’t sell it.”

  “Of course not,” Hildree agreed in her best sympathetic tone. She wondered with sudden alarm if the delusional pinhead was thinking he could have done better “selling it,” and if she’d have to talk him out of personally playing spy. On the bright side, maybe it would get him killed.