by R. M. Olson
One day, she’d find the person who’d planned this. And then she would kill them.
It would be easy. She’d killed plenty of people before.
It wouldn’t soothe the ache. She knew enough to know that. But maybe it would make it easier to sleep at night, rather than lying awake, her arms around the woman she loved, staring at the ceiling with silent tears running down her cheek.
“My love?” Tanya whispered. “I believe the children will be busy for a while. And if I recall correctly, we had some business we left unfinished this morning, in the bedroom.” She lifted her head and gave Ysbel that smile that still made her weak in the knees. She managed a smile in return, and as Tanya leaned in for a lingering kiss, she kissed her back, clutching her as if Tanya was the only thing keeping her from drowning.
CHAPTER THREE
Jez’s muscles hummed with tension as she lowered the Ungovernable gently to the planet surface.
It wasn’t the landing that balled a tight knot in her stomach—that was simple as breathing.
It was the fact that the copilot’s seat, usually occupied by Lev, contained the woman in the long pilot’s coat who seemed to think she was Jez’s damn boss.
Masha’s expression was bland and pleasant, her eyes straight ahead. She didn’t even deign to glance over at Jez as the ship settled onto its landing gear.
Jez stood abruptly, for the first time in her life actually looking forward to leaving her beautiful cockpit, since it meant leaving plaguing Masha behind as well.
“Jez,” said Masha, without looking at her, and there was a hint of ice in her voice. “I expect no trouble on this stop.”
“Yeah? Well, guess you’d better not cause any trouble then, you bastard.” Jez smirked, and flipped Masha a rude gesture as she sauntered out the cockpit door.
Damn that woman to hell.
When she reached the main deck, the others were waiting. Lev gave her a small smile when he saw her. “You and me today, I guess,” he said. “Ysbel and Tanya are staying back on the ship with the children, and Masha’s going with Tae.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t need a babysitter, genius-boy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Jez. We’re going into a zestava where none of us knows anyone. We just got shot at yesterday by ships none of us recognized, someone is after you, and, if you recall, you have—”
“I know, I know, four broken ribs and a broken arm and a broken damn jaw,” she grumbled. “Fine.”
He looked like he was biting back a small smile of amusement. She rolled her eyes and hit the control for the landing ramp. It lowered with a faint hiss.
“Be careful out there, pilot-girl,” called Ysbel. “I don’t want to have to blow this place up to rescue you.”
Jez shot the woman a jaunty grin. “If I remember right, I’m usually the one rescuing you.”
“Yes, well, it might be nice if nobody had to be rescued, for once.”
“Sounds kinda boring to me.”
Lev shot her a look. She grinned at him, and made her careful way down the loading ramp.
She couldn’t hide her wince as she stepped off the ramp and onto the soft ground of the small outer-rim planet. Still, it had only been four days, and much as she hated it, it always took more than four days to get over being beaten.
The wind was chilly, cutting across what looked like a wide grassland. In the distance, mountains rose, blue against the darker blue of the sky. It was early morning here, apparently, and the cool of it cut through her jacket and the thin material of her trousers, and her boots had already sunk a few centimetres deep in mud.
She shivered slightly, and pulled her jacket a little closer around her.
“Reminds me a little of outside of Prasvishoni,” said Lev beside her.
She glanced over at him. He was looking out over the grasslands towards the small town, and there was an expression on his face, half wry, half wistful.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a small university on this planet. Not in this town, farther east. One of the women I met in prison taught there.”
“Yeah.” She looked down. “I’m … sorry.”
He turned to her, and this time his smile was genuine. “You know, my whole life I wanted to teach at a university. But in the last few weeks—” he shrugged. “I’d never understood how much I’d enjoy flying.”
She met his eyes, and for a second her heart did its customary jump. She swallowed hard, and managed a grin back at him.
“Guess that means you can learn something after all.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “For the record, I did almost throw up yesterday when you were dodging those shots.”
She gave a snort of laughter. He tried to look stern, but the glint of humour in his eye ruined it.
“Come on, genius-boy. Let’s go, before it starts to rain and Masha blames me for breaking the plaguing clouds.”
They made their way down the rutted dirt path towards the town gates. The intricate carved wood of the gates must have been recently painted, because the colours practically glowed against the dark blue-grey of the sky. There was a guard at the gate, but she stepped back and gestured them inside as they approached.
“You’re lucky. Gates opened five standard minutes ago,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Lev. “We’re looking for ship parts. Which side of town?”
The guard gestured with her chin, and Lev nodded his thanks.
They wandered through the narrow, almost-deserted packed-dirt streets. The air smelled like rain, and the boardwalks were liberally caked with mud. The houses and apartments were tumbledown constructions of prefab, but even in this backwater they’d managed to paint the carved wooden shutters on the buildings brilliant jewel tones.
It was easy to tell when they reached the merchants’ sector. The buildings were smaller, closer together, and if possible, even more tumbledown, some of the doorways nothing more than a rough space-blanket pinned between the blocks of prefab forming the doorway, but all with a small sampling of their wares laid out in a neat heap on tables along the boardwalk.
And ... there. At the end of one of the streets.
She wandered over, drawn almost by gravity.
The speed capacitors.
She ducked through the blanket-doorway and into the small, cramped, dimly-lit shop, and Lev followed.
The Ungovernable was her perfect, beautiful angel. But there wasn’t a ship in the world that couldn’t use a couple extra speed capacitors.
She could get a couple, too, as long as that damn Masha hadn’t been too stingy with the credits on her buying chip. Of course, last time Masha’d given her credits, she’d staked the whole chip on a game of fool’s tokens … she smiled fondly to herself at the memory of the bastard’s face when Jez had told her.
Some memories were worth more than all the credits in the world.
She ran her hands along the jumble of capacitors, the metal surfaces smooth and gleaming under her fingers.
“Jez,” Lev whispered. She jumped, winced, and swore.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m going to see if I can find some specs on those ships we ran into, and maybe some newscom broadcasts I can upload. Never a bad thing to know what’s going on. Will you be OK here?”
She looked at him in mild incomprehension. He sighed and rolled his eyes.
“Fine. You sit here and make sweet love to the ship parts, and I’ll meet you back here in a standard hour, OK?”
She grinned. “Sure, genius-boy. You know where to find me.”
He started to turn, stopped, and shot her a suspicious glare. “No kabaks. I don’t want to have to haul drunk Jez anywhere. I’ve done it before, and it’s not an experience I want to repeat.”
She smirked. “Guess you’d better come back before I get bored then.”
He sighed. “Jez—”
“Fine, genius. I won’t get drunk.” She paused. “Too drunk, anyways.” She paused again. “Unless—”
“Jez—” he was speaking through his teeth. She laughed.
“Relax. It’s way too early in the morning for sump. If I’d wanted to be drunk now, I would have started hours ago.”
He shot her a look of complete exasperation. She grinned to herself and turned back to the speed capacitors.
She wandered up and down the aisles for a while, ignoring the people who came and left as the shop grew busier, letting her hands slide over the ship’s parts and smiling dreamily to herself at the thought of what she could do with her angel-ship if she had unlimited credits and a little bit of time. She was handling an inline capacitor, running her fingers over its smooth surface with a sort of rapture, when she realized the light reflecting off the dull, polished-metal surface was coming from much higher on the horizon than she’d expected. She tapped the com on her wrist.
It had been almost three standard hours.
She frowned, glanced around the now-crowded shop, and hit Lev’s private line.
“Hey, genius. Where are you? Thought you were coming back two standard hours ago.”
There was no response.
“I’m heading for a kabak, if you want to come,” she said. That should get him to answer, if nothing else did.
Still, nothing. She tapped the general line.
“Hey Tae, you seen Lev?”
“No.” Tae’s reply came instantly. “I’m with Masha. We’ve just about done getting supplies. I thought he was with you.”
“He was, but then he ran off to go look for something.”
“What was he looking for?”
She rolled her eyes. “How am I supposed to know? I was looking at speed capacitors, OK? I wasn’t actually listening.”
Tae gave a long-suffering sigh. “Ysbel? Did Lev end up back at the ship?”
There was a moment’s pause. “No,” came Ysbel’s voice. “I have not seen him, and nor has Tanya.” There was another pause.
“Dirty plaguer!” came a small boy’s voice from what sounded like she ship’s com. There was the sound of a scuffle in the background.
“Tell our pilot that I am going to have a word with her when she gets back to the ship.” Ysbel was speaking through her teeth.
Jez grinned and hit her com. “Hey Ysbel, know I’m hot and all, but you probably shouldn’t flirt with me in front of your wife.”
“Piss off.”
“So to be clear, no one knows where Lev is,” said Tae in a flat voice.
Jez glanced around quickly. The small shop was filled with men and women in dirty peasant smocks or worn flight clothes browsing through the small stock of parts, but none of them had the relaxed but still slightly formal posture or the disheveled black hair of the absent Lev. She narrowed her eyes and slapped the com.
“Don’t worry, tech-head. I’ll find him. I’m good at finding things.”
“Yes. Things like gambling games and places they sell sump,” grunted Ysbel.
“Those too,” she said, grinning, then slapped off her com.
She glanced around the shop one last time. Despite herself, a small tendril of worry snaked through her gut.
What had he said? Something about newscoms, she was pretty sure.
She’d spent nine years as a smuggler. She knew her way around a backwater zestava.
When she ducked out through the low shop door, a light rain was falling. She pulled up the hood of her jacket and hunched her shoulders against the wet, squinting through the greyish haze.
Where would he have gone? And why the hell wasn’t he answering his com?
She wandered down the boardwalks, the wet, muddy wood glistening in the dim light filtering through the rainclouds, and scowled at the world in general.
She was supposed to be the irresponsible one.
He’d probably just found something on an information chip and got distracted.
She was getting close to the edge of town, and the buildings here were shabbier, the colourful shutters on the windows crooked, paint blistered with age and neglect. There was a distinct air of lawlessness to this part of town, and she relaxed slightly. This was more like her kind of place. Across the street from her, muffled voices came from inside a dimly-lit kabak. Then there was the distinct sound of a fist hitting flesh. She grinned to herself, then stopped suddenly.
The sound hadn’t come from the kabak. It had come from the small, tumbledown building beside it.
And she was almost certain she’d recognized one of the voices, words crisp and cultured and not even a little bit at home in a place like this.
She sucked in a quick breath.
Not good.
Heart pounding, she pulled out her modded heat pistol and crossed the muddy street, holding the weapon inconspicuously behind her leg. The muffled sound of her boots on the wet wooden boardwalk were loud in her ears, even over the faint morning sounds of the kabak next door. She put her back against the dirty, splintery siding of the building, and crept cautiously towards the closed doorway.
From here, she could hear the voices more clearly.
“I told you. I have no idea who you’re talking about.” Lev’s voice was strained, but his tone was as calm as ever, if slightly irritated. Someone else spoke, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then the voice raised slightly. It was unfamiliar, but she recognized the meaning in his tone instantly.
“—better damn well hope this will refresh your memory.”
She kicked the door hard, swinging up her heat pistol as it slammed open, and glanced quickly around the bare room.
Three unfamiliar figures, all dressed in the nondescript flight clothes she recognized instantly as smuggler gear. All three had weapons. And in the back of the room—Lev, tied to a chair. He was frowning, and blood trickled from the corner of his lip, and a woman stood beside him, heat pistol raised as if to hit him a second time.
Suddenly, Jez was very, very angry.
“Back the hell off, you bastards,” she ground out through her teeth, holding her pistol level. “That’s my damn copilot.”
All three of them turned to face her. The man who appeared to be the leader gave her a long, speculative look.
They were standing too close to Lev for a shot with this thing—beam wasn’t narrow enough.
“You Jez Solokov?” the leader grunted. She gave him a dangerous grin.
“Don’t see how that’s your business. But that scholar-boy you have tied up over there, he is my damn business. So unless you feel like a heat-blast to the face, you might want to let him go.” She shrugged. “‘Course, someone as ugly as you, heat blast to the face might not make that much of a difference.”
“It’s her,” the man said to his companions. “Must be. They said she had a mouth on her.” He turned back to Jez with an unpleasant smile. “Looks to me like you lost the last fight you were in.”
“Guess I need practice,” she said. “Don’t usually fight with people as plaguing stupid as you, but hell, this time I’ll make an exception.”
Lev shot her an exasperated look. She winked at him, then pointed the modded heat gun at the floor in front of the three smugglers and squeezed the trigger. The boards erupted in an explosion of air-blistering heat and light, and then sizzled into ash, small flames licking at the edges of the hole she’d just blasted in the formerly-wooden floor. She grinned.
Ysbel was a damn marvel with guns.
“Now, you dirty plaguers,” she said in a friendly tone. “You feel more like talking?”
“Jez, they have a—” Lev began in a strangled tone. The woman standing next to his chair cuffed him hard alongside the head, yanking out a small cylindrical tube with her other hand and pointing it towards Jez. Jez’s brain recognized it at the same time as she pulled the trigger a second time.
It clicked uselessly
Damn.
“EMP blocker,” Lev finished unnecessarily. She drew back her arm and flung the useless heat-pistol as hard as she could directly into the face of the leader, cursing breathlessly as her bro
ken ribs protested. He stumbled back, cursing and clutching his face, and she braced herself and lunged forward, grabbing the woman guarding Lev by the front of the shirt. She jerked the woman towards her, grunting at the pain, kicked her legs from under her, and shoved her backwards. The woman’s head hit the wall with a satisfying crack, and Jez ducked on instinct as a heat-blast sizzled through the air above her.
“Jez! What are you—” Lev hissed.
“Busy now,” she snapped. The leader was coming at her, heat-pistol drawn.
This was going to bloody hurt.
She yanked a knife out of her boot, shoved it at Lev, then gritted her teeth and spun, kicking out with her booted foot. She hit the man’s hand and he grunted in pain, the pistol spinning away across the floor, and for half a moment she thought she might black out. The man on the other side of the room stooped and grabbed for it, but before he could shoot, Jez yanked the leader around in front of her, between her and Lev and the heat guns, spots dancing before her eyes.
“May as well stop,” said Lev. He’d managed to jam the knife blade between the magnetic cuffs. They’d popped open, and now he was holding the EMP blocker he’d snatched from the disoriented woman on the floor. Jez raised an eyebrow. For a soft-boy, he moved fast when he had to. The man thrust the heat-guns back into his belt, but as he lunged at them, Jez shoved the man she was holding forward. He stumbled, and both men went down in a heap. She grabbed Lev by the arm and shoved him ahead of her out the door.
“Run!” she hissed, and they took off down the narrow streets.
Every step jolted through her ribcage, and her head spun with the pain, but on the other hand, getting caught by whoever was chasing them would probably hurt a hell of a lot worse.
“What the hell were you doing?” Lev panted, irritation clear in his tone as they ducked around a corner into a dirty alley. She could already hear shouts behind them. Whoever it was after them, they must really want Lev.
“Saving your damn life. What did it look like?” She was still grinning.
The broke back out onto a larger street, and he shot her an wry glance. “I was in the middle of convincing them I’d never heard of you.”