“Krys, what is it?”
Krystin Drake blinked once, then put a hand on Edith’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Edith … you’re pregnant.”
Chapter 21
Stacks Fischer • Imprisoned in the Belt
I have to admit, the accommodations weren’t bad. I had a bed almost long enough for my feet. The space paste they fed me tasted like oranges. The water was wet enough. The toilet flushed down. As prisons go—not bad.
Daisy had betrayed me, which suggested Adriana Rabh was throwing in her lot with the Dutchman. But I’d had two days in resort-like comfort to think about that—up, down, and sideways—and it didn’t make sense. The pirates were skimming gas off haulers like the Starwind in flight, in the relative, camouflaged comfort of the Belt, hoping no one would notice. Now, Adriana Rabh’s the bloody Regent of Jupiter. If she wanted to skim a little Jovian treasure for herself, she could just hook up a hose when the scooper ships docked at Valhalla Station’s orbital ring, before the gases are transferred to the tankers. Extraction records would be easy enough to fake on the front end. No one would be the wiser.
Maybe Daisy was working for herself. She’d announced herself as Adriana’s envoy, but maybe that was just for my ears. And that doesn’t square with her job description. Assassins always work for someone else, someone who can afford to pay them for the wet work. Skimming gas for pennies isn’t our style.
I was turning over the situation in my mind for the thousandth time when the door to my cell slipped aside. The guard motioned for me to stand and exit. Time to meet the landlord.
“Right, then,” I said.
The hallways were crude, carved out of the regolith of an asteroid. The facility maintained an Earth-standard atmosphere, though, so someone had stopped up all the right holes. Gravity generators kept the little-girl enthusiasm in my step from bumping my head against the rock overhead. This wasn’t a penny-ante operation. You think of pirates, you think catch-as-catch-can. Not these people. The infrastructure was colony quality.
A few rights here, a couple lefts there, and we entered a large room with—I shit you not—what looked like a throne raised on a dais facing half a dozen screens lining the wall. Okay, maybe more a control chair than a throne. The screens monitored the Belt outside the facility.
Daisy Brace stood next to the seat of power. She turned as the guards escorted me in, then leaned over and whispered in the ear of whoever was in the chair. The Dutchman, I assumed.
The chair turned around.
“You’re the Dutchman?” I said, surprised.
A strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-twenties stood up. Her face was a deep brown, though it almost glowed with a golden undertone. Her skin could have been manufactured on Callisto. Indian, I thought, if I had to guess its origin. Hers was a face I knew I should recognize but couldn’t quite place. Her short-cropped hair made her look military.
“Some call me that, yes,” she said. Her accent was pure Earth common, no hint of the Indus at all.
“Someone forgot to look under the hood before they hung a name on you, huh?”
The Dutchman stepped down from the platform with a gait that was graceful, athletic even. She approached slowly, a catlike smile spreading her dark lips. It was like she was pouring syrup on pancakes. And I was the pancakes.
“So you’re Stacks Fischer, Tony Taulke’s assassin to the stars.” She stopped in front me and reached to cup the silver scrabble of my jawline. Her lips put on a pout. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“That’s okay,” I said, determined not to notice how soft the skin of her palm was, or the mischief behind her almond-colored eyes. “I thought you’d be male.”
Her lips turned up again at the corners. “I’m glad you have a sense of humor. Assassins can be so dour, so serious.” Her thumb stroked my cheek. I did my best to think of baseball and why the fields have to be so much bigger in low gravity. “It’s a shame I have to kill you.”
Yeah, that was a shame. She turned away and walked back to her throne, pulling at the air with an index finger for me to follow. I followed. Wouldn’t want to be rude.
Who was this woman? Damn it, her face was on the tip of my tongue!
It’s basic physics, you see, the need for a bigger field. The balls fly farther in low-g.
No, I’m still talking about baseball.
I stood in front of her tech-throne and gazed up at her. That’s why thrones are always set up high. So the common folk have to look up.
“Your friend here’s been telling me all about you,” she said, nodding Daisy’s way. “And, of course, there are the stories everyone hears.”
“She’s no friend of mine,” I growled. If I’d had my way, Daisy’s corpse would be stinking up the place by now. I’m sure I could find an exception to my rule about killing women somewhere if I looked hard enough.
“Don’t be too hard on Ms. Brace,” Queen Buzzcut said. “Business is business, right?”
“Speaking of that,” I said, “what’s with the Nazi brand on the armed faithful over there.” I jerked my head at the two guards by the door.
“Nazi brand? What are you talking about?”
“The mirrored-S logo. Reminds me of the lighting-S emblem Uncle Adolf used to brand terror during his Thousand-Year Reich that lasted twelve years.”
Her expression showed she didn’t like the comparison. “We are the Soldiers of the Solar Revolution.”
“Ah, there is a military component, then.”
“Only as a means to an end. And that end is to return the solar system to a state where mankind and the universe exist as one—a mutual existence of giving and receiving. Right now, mankind takes and gives nothing back.”
Now my déjà vu really was firing on all cylinders.
“You sound like the New Earthers on steroids,” I said. The Neos were a religious cult that, thirty years before, had wiped out millions on Earth in pursuit of their goddess, Cassandra’s, goal to return a planet suffering climate-change convulsions to a simpler age. When humans weren’t so wasteful. Or plentiful. Tony’s pop, Anthony, had made a deal with their leader, Elise Kisaan, that brought her into the Company and stopped the mass destruction on Earth. Cassandra—an artificial intelligence, not a goddess, it turned out—had been unplugged by way of explosion.
“We have embraced Cassandra’s teachings and taken them to their natural next stage,” she said. Her words were reverent and tonal, like a priest’s chant. When she invoked Cassandra’s name, something clicked. I mean, like, universal-tumbler-snapping-into-place clicked.
“Which one are you?” I wondered aloud. It was the skin color, the eyes, the canary-fed smile. But I can’t fault my recall, for once. I’d been trying to reconcile the woman’s face in front of me with thirty-year-old memories without even knowing it. That’s what had caused the short circuit. I was looking at a young, smooth version of Elise Kisaan, the current Regent of Earth’s factory farms and former New Earther high priestess. Only, Elise Kisaan was in her fifties now.
Buzzcut’s eyebrow arched. She knew I knew. A quick glance at Traitor Daisy confirmed it.
“I’m Elaena,” she answered.
“A Kisaan clone,” I nodded. “One of ’em, anyway.”
Her face hardened. “We prefer to be called daughters. You make me sound inhuman.”
I shrugged. “If you dropped out of Elise Kisaan’s DNA, I’d say that’s a given. How many of you are there, really? I know three’s the rumor, but really…”
Elaena took a breath before answering. Cats don’t like it when the rat snaps back. “I’m the oldest, the First among Three.”
The first created in a test tube, she meant. Company gossip had it that, decades earlier, Elise Kisaan—paranoid that one or another of the factions would assassinate her, a fair bet by the way—had cloned herself. There were three so-called daughters, trained as assassins in their mother’s killer image, whose first duty was to protect their human progenitor’s life.
/> “First among Three, huh?” I said. “Well, I guess that makes you executrix of the will.” I do my best thinking on my feet, so I began to walk. “So, let me see if I can put this pirate puzzle together. Elise is finally making a move to take over SynCorp from Tony. She sent you out here to play Pirate Queen, to steal resources to fuel the coup. But what do you need all that fusion fuel for?”
“You don’t know half what you think—” Elaena began.
“To take out Tony, you’ll first have to defeat Galatz and the corporate fleet,” I interrupted. “That explains the need for the fuel. For the fleet you’re building.”
Elaena’s silence told me I was on the right track.
“Where is the corporate fleet, by the way? How have you managed to avoid Admiral Galatz? The rock-ships are clever, I’ll give you that. But he should have sniffed you out by now.”
Elaena tilted her head, deciding if it mattered to give away secrets to a dead man.
“We randomize our intercepts,” she said. “If we’re pulling gas near Jupiter, we seed chatter on the Undernet days ahead of time that something’s up near Mars. It’s just encrypted enough that the navy boys have to work to break the code. While we’re siphoning here, they’re looking there.”
In other words, they kept the fleet running all over the Belt by shining a light on the wall across the room and watching the cat chase it. It was so stupidly simple it was brilliant.
“Which leads us to Daisy, here,” I continued. “Adriana Rabh saw an opportunity. Maybe Elise reached out to her to cook some corporate books, provide a little financing for the venture. You’d need massive 3D printing centers to prefab hulls and weapon systems. Not to mention dockyards to assemble the ships. No wonder you based yourself in the Belt. So many places to hide. And Daisy, well, she was the ambassador between traitor factions. Which begs the question—why am I still alive?”
“Because I wanted to tell you personally, before you die, that your patron is already dead,” Elaena answered. “For what you did—for what you tried to do so long ago—justice is finally being served.”
That was unexpected. The Kisaan Faction and I have a history going way back. Before there was a Syndicate Corporation, back when Tony Taulke was still a young man and so was I, I’d been tasked with murdering Elise Kisaan’s child, Cassandra. Don’t judge. The child was the cyborg incarnation of the Neos’ same-named AI goddess. The kid had golden eyes, unnatural eyes—freakish. No one wanted a second act after millions died on Earth at the hands of the Neos. Better to nip the threat in the bud. But I missed the kid, killed a woman instead; a woman who didn’t deserve to die. I’m not sure that’ll weigh much better in my favor when Mother Universe calls me to account.
“So Elise is behind this,” I said. She’d bided her time for thirty years, growing her clones and making the entire system dependent on her factory farms. And now she was making her move.
“Did you hear what I said?” Irritated, Elaena had risen from her tech-throne. “Tony Taulke is dead. And you’re about to chase him into the Long Dark, you murdering sonofabitch.”
When another assassin calls you a murdering sonofabitch, you know you’ve arrived.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. When I get serious, I get serious. I was justice-come-to-town serious now. I enjoyed taking her power away. “I don’t believe Tony Taulke is dead.”
Elaena was apparently unpracticed in the art of being disagreed with. She didn’t know how to react.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” she said. “Because you’re next.” A stunner appeared in her hand.
“Let me,” Daisy said. Her tongue wrapped itself around the words. From the look on her face, they must have tasted good.
I turned my eyes on Adriana Rabh’s lead assassin. It was odd that Elaena Kisaan was striking a deal with Rabh. It was Adriana who’d sent me on the mission to murder the hardwired baby Cassandra. If Kisaan was settling accounts with the gunman who’d tried to kill the kid, why was she making chummy with the woman who’d sent me to do the deed? Maybe the Cause just needed money that badly.
“Why?” Elaena said. “It’s my family he wronged.”
“Because I had to spend two days in a cramped ship listening to the old bastard rattle on about how great he is at his job. About how the new generation of enforcers like me can’t even kill time right. I want to show him how wrong he is.”
“Fine,” Elaena said. “Consider it a sweetener to the deal we discussed. Kill him, and we’ll call it done.”
Daisy had adopted Elaena’s feral expression. She was looking forward to closing the deal.
“With pleasure,” she said, stepping down from the platform.
I prepared myself. There was nowhere to run, and I had no artillery. Two guards were on the door behind me. Two trained assassins—one a pro, the other mostly mouth so far—in front. I suspected Daisy’s reflexes were faster than mine. I was about to find out.
Daisy spread her arms, and I backed up a few steps. She turned my spring blade over in her right hand. Great—stuck with my own blade. There’s killing, and then there’s just rubbing salt in it. Her jacket fluttered. Inside her belt, on either hip, I saw my stunner and .38, grips facing me. One of the oldest tricks in the book. Inviting me to make a grab, get me in close so she could slide the knife in.
She advanced. I gave ground. Daisy didn’t close, instead making a couple swipes at the air with the knife. That was amateur stuff, showmanship, what you did to show off to bosses. Good assassins don’t waste energy. And I knew Daisy by reputation was good. Maybe she was auditioning for Elaena after all.
Daisy closed in. She lunged, I sidestepped. Her left hand darted out, grabbed my belt, and pulled me to her. She thrust again with her right hand, and I tried to deflect but was too slow. The knife sliced the side of my shirt and past my left hip. She was in close, and I held her there, keeping the knife behind me and her arm pinned and useless.
“Grab the fucking gun, you moron,” she whispered in the clutch.
When life throws opportunity your way, best not to think on it too much. I yanked the .38 from her belt.
“I can’t kill a woman,” I whispered back. Never again.
“That’s okay. I can.” Daisy pushed me away, turned, and threw the knife. It caught Elaena at the base of the throat, splitting the soft meat between the collar bones. The surprise on her face was just a little bit sad.
Her guards reacted. They pulled their stunners, moving to protect their Pirate Queen a lot too late. The .38 was loud, but it did the job. The first guard went down. I dove forward, grabbing floor. The second guard brought his stunner up, but he was used to shooting at target dummies, not pros on the move.
Gurgling came down from on high, Elaena’s disbelief trying to make itself heard. She coughed and gagged, falling to her knees. Blood ran down the stairs.
The second guard made a sound like a dog whining. I suspected he’d had to think of baseball a lot around his boss, too. Maybe he’d even been in love with her. Or, at least, in lust.
He charged, and that was a mistake. I’d raised my .38 when Daisy’s stunner fired once, then twice—that sharp punk-punk staccato sound, the catalyzer leaving the barrel. The second guard went down, electrocuted by his own EM field. It’d been a good shot, too. He wore MESH armor, specifically designed to repel stunner fire. Except for his face. Enough of a target for Daisy Brace, boy-o.
The throne room was silent save for the pounding in my ears. And Elaena. She was trying to aim her stunner, but her hand had no strength. The blood gouted out of her now. Clones bleed just like real humans, in case you’ve ever wondered. It even smells the same.
“Here,” Daisy said, mounting the dais. Elaena’s eyes followed her up, pleading when she saw Daisy take aim. “I’ll put you out of your misery.”
Punk.
The First among Three stopped coughing. A few seconds later, the heart powering the blood dripping down the dais stopped pumping.
“You’ve got s
ome ’splainin’ to do, Daisy,” I said.
“Later,” she answered, angling for the door. “The Hearse isn’t far. We’ve gotta get out of here.”
Best idea I’d heard all day.
Then the lights went out.
Chapter 22
Ruben Qinlao • Lander’s Reach, Mars
Ruben traced the texture of Mai’s skin with the tip of his middle finger. He focused on the contact, on the supple paleness of her flesh. He admired its softness, full with the privilege of growing up on a planet where water was so plentiful it hung, invisible, in the air.
He drew his fingertip, barely touching, along her right shoulder. Mai gasped with pleasure, the electricity of want arcing through her.
“Ruben,” she sighed. She was turned away from him. Her hand reached behind to grasp his thigh.
Her body fascinated him. It held for him an attraction beyond desire, beyond a hunger for sex and the need for orgasm. Beyond even the excitement of discovering anew that which he’d known before with other women. Every one of them alike physically but also unique, one of the universe’s fascinating paradoxes. Each time he made love to Mai, it was like Ruben unlocked another secret only he could discover.
He pulled the sheet back so he could see her naked body, then resumed his sketching on her skin. Mai shivered again as he drew a line from the lighter skin of her breast down the narrow of her right side, over the curve of her buttocks. Her head arced upward again as her flesh responded. Ruben pressed against her to extend his reach. She was warm and wet and needful.
“Ruben,” she said again, more commanding.
Her hand slipped from his thigh to grip his penis. The hair of his chest brushed her back as Ruben followed her direction. She guided him into her, and his hands encircled her hips. There was a moment of joining, of two human halves making one whole person, and the joy that first moment called forth in each of them. The rhythm of lovemaking took them quickly, a cadence of gasping movement that required no direction, no conscious thought. Connected by a hunger for the connection itself, both driven by the desire for one another like the need for water to drink or air to breathe. Ruben’s hands squeezed, holding her fast to him. Mai’s pliant skin yielded, the bones beneath giving him purchase.
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