by Jody Wallace
“Gullim Vex?” Her astute gaze demanded that he attend her almost as arrogantly as a cat. “I want to know what’s in this safe.”
Lincoln breathed in and out until his pulse slowed enough to control his own hands. Vex’s thick, gnarly hands. Would it feel as perfect to beat Steven with his own fists as it had with Vex’s?
He joined the tiny director in the stall and rapped out the combination Mighty had taught him. The toilet did not flush and the bidet did not spew. Was that what Pumpkin had been attempting to do? Manage the switch in Steven’s office without opposable thumbs? Had it been in time for Mighty?
If they opened this safe and Mighty’s poor, pitiful body was inside, he would have to bear it. He must. And he would do anything, beg, borrow, steal, give Tank Union his lifelong service, if they would sell him the power converter his brave friend had died trying to obtain.
But when the smallish safe eased out of the wall and the door swung open, the only thing inside it was a fist-sized silver tin.
“What is this?” Nelda reached for it, but Lincoln gently stopped her from touching it.
Vidal coughed behind them, his voice hoarse with discomfort. “That’s my… Well, that’s mine.”
Lincoln unrolled a fold of toilet tissue, used it to pick up the chefo tin, and handed it to Nelda. She hobbled out of the stall with it. “How did your…possession…end up in Steven Wat’s safe?”
“I’ve never seen that before,” Steven croaked. Axel stood over the bloodied director, its silver face expressionless. But its sturdy foot rested lightly on Steven Wat’s chest, as if at any moment it might crush the human’s ribcage.
“It’s what he poisoned her with,” Lincoln said. Not one cat had emerged to whisper in his mind, to let him know Mighty had escaped. That Mighty would survive. But the piece hadn’t been in the safe—and the poison he’d hidden on top of the stall divider had. “You’ll also find traces of it in his refrigerator.”
“Traitor!” Steven screamed. Axel pressed. Steven whimpered in pain and continued anyway. “How could you? After all I did for you. I made you rich, you bristler fucking son of a muck dog!”
“I need to take her to her…people,” Lincoln said, indicating Briar. That scanner the medic was using—could it detect that her DNA had been altered? “Is she stable enough for me to carry her?”
“Were you in on this with her the whole time?” Steven ranted. “You and Tim. That’s why he’s gone.”
“And the piece?” Nelda asked. “She mentioned something from a zheng ship.”
“Guess he sold it to someone else,” Lincoln suggested. “He does that. Check with Unker, your strip team foreman. He may have a list.” If Unker ended up getting swept into the crimes of Steven Wat, it served him right for picking Steven over Briar just because Briar had kicked Steven in his broken arm.
“He’s lying,” Steven said. “He’s been stealing. And Tim Danger.”
“We don’t have an employee at any garage or factory named Tim Danger,” Axel corrected. “Director Wat, you would be advised to remain silent.” Axel’s round eye sockets gleamed with pale light.
“You be silent,” Steven barked.
“I am under no obligation to obey orders from you anymore.” Axel leaned down, not in a human fashion, and cuffed Steven’s wrists behind his back. Blood dripped from Steven’s many facial abrasions, and Lincoln’s knuckles tingled from the pleasurable memory.
Trash Planet had no prisons, no police force. Its only way of enforcing justice was personal. Some unions had security, and some just trained everyone to fight.
Tank Union had Axel.
“Gullim…Vex,” Axel said. “Rufaid Ah Tel has finished the exam and treatment. The patient will recover. You may swiftly transport Jenna Banu safely to her next destination.”
Lincoln scooped her up with more ease than expected, as if escaping here alive had given him strength. Then he noticed the palms of his hands turning pink, and the creases bleeding into a darker shade.
His DNA mask was nearly gone as well. So his tingling hands indicated something else.
Without speaking to anyone, he rushed Briar out of the restroom. “Vex, she’ll sleep for hours,” Director Vidal called after him.
The door outside in the foyer stood wide open. For whatever reason, the directors, the medics, and the other employees who had come to help followed him down the stairs, huffing and puffing. Axel carried Steven Wat over its shoulder, and the man cursed nonstop until Nelda whacked him in the ear.
But in the lobby the sight they expected—the aftereffects of a ship rat infestation with wounded employees in triage units—was not what they encountered.
A wiry, surly, muddy Edge was waiting in the center of the empty lobby with a large, oblong bag at his feet. The bag, too, was nearly as muddy as Edge, and the foyer smelled of mota smoke and the swamp.
Are there any cats anywhere who can help me get out of here? Lincoln called out plaintively in his head. Is everyone all right?
No answer from any cats, but Edge, at least, seemed glad to see them.
“Good. You’re here. Got something to show you people,” he said.
“Do we have an appointment?” the director with the very good water bottle aim asked.
“Nah, but you’ll wanna see this.” Edge leaned down, unzipped the bag, and a corpse rolled out. A somewhat well-preserved corpse of a large, old woman who bore a strange resemblance to Vex. “That director you been looking for? This one here, over the robot’s shoulder—he and some helpers dumped her in the Mire ‘bout six weeks ago.”
“That’s Director Ficus!” Nelda said, her hand pressed to her breast. The other directors gasped and clustered around Edge and the body, shock evident on all their features.
The taller of the medics knelt beside the body and activated the robo-doc. He looked up and gave a short, affirmative nod. “It’s Director Ficus.”
“Director, I do not like the elevation of your blood pressure,” Axel said to Nelda. “Medic Rufaid Al Tel?”
The medic who’d treated Briar hastened to Nelda’s side. Lincoln watched as the attention shifted from the drama that had played out upstairs to the drama about to play out in the lobby. It was a drama Vex had been involved in personally, so this might be a good time for him and his face to exit.
As he was quick-stepping through the busted glass door with Briar, the cold of the outside blasted him in the face. But voices carried after him.
“And you saw Steven Wat do this?” Director Vidal asked Edge. “This man here?”
“Oh, yeah. Steven and his… Hey, where did that big guy go?”
Lincoln broke into a run down the sidewalk, rounded the corner, and ran smack into Su and Wil, who had a ground car revved and waiting.
A ground car full of excited, exhausted cats, with just enough room for him and Briar in the back.
Meows and purring and voices and brushes against his mind felt like the cats all reaching toward them and taking them into their embrace.
“Me and my gun were about to come in there myself and bust you out,” Su said. Su clipped the compact silver EE-rifle back into the crease in her prosthetic leg while Wil jumped behind the steering column. The car sped down the street. “Wil talked me out of it.”
“Lincoln?” said a very small voice in the cargo area behind the passenger seat. “Is that you?”
Lincoln buckled Briar into the seat restraint and turned around. Curled around a Mozim power converter was Mighty Mighty, and curled around him were three white kittens and a long, lean light brown cat with a dark mask around her mysterious blue eyes.
“Oh. Oh.” Tears welled in Lincoln’s eyes, and he let a couple of them fall. He barely noticed that they trickled down smooth cheeks, his disguise gone as if it had never existed. “I was worried you didn’t make it.”
“I got the part.” Mighty didn’t raise his head, and the tip of his tail didn’t curl, but his ears did perk forward as he regarded Lincoln with his vibrant yellow eyes. �
�I was worried you wouldn’t make it.”
“I got the girl,” Lincoln said, and slipped an arm around Briar, who flopped against him in deep sleep. She, too, had regained her true form, which meant that when she woke, and when he kissed her, he wouldn’t be kissing Jenna Banu.
That was good. Maybe now, everything could finally be good.
Chapter 18
“We could dump the body in the Mire.”
Briar, standing beside Lincoln, looked over at Su and frowned. Jenna Banu regarded the three of them with an expression both defiant and pleased as she stood over the corpse of Gullim Vex.
“I told you I was going to kill him if you didn’t separate us,” Jenna said. The cats and humans guarding the prisoners hadn’t been able to stop her—or hadn’t tried—when she’d finally exploded and snapped Gullim Vex’s thick neck. Somehow. No one quite understood where she’d gotten the upper body strength. “I’m not a liar.”
“Actually, you’re a colossal liar.” Lincoln sighed and walked away from the metal mesh door, leaning against the block wall beside it.
“I don’t see the problem.” Su joined the two of them out of sight of the makeshift cell. “We didn’t know what to do with him, anyway. Now we’re just left with her.”
It had been two days since Mighty had skipped the Mozim power converter out of Steven Wat’s safe. Lincoln had immediately switched the two parts on the Catamaran, and the system had accepted the replacement. The cats and humans were on constant watch to see when—and if—the wake-up process for the sleepers would begin after their three-thousand year nap. Su had frowned on the betting pool that sprang up amongst her staff and the cats, but since Pumpkin was the one running it, she couldn’t do much about it.
To say that the cats were in a tizzy was an understatement, and they were lucky any of them were still willing to help guard Jenna Banu and Vex.
Just Jenna now.
“You need to get this stinking corpse out of this cell,” Jenna called after them. “This is inhumane treatment of a fellow galactic citizen.”
Briar popped back into view of the mesh door. “Talk to me about how you treat the humans you kidnap for slaves.”
“They are well cared for so as to provide the highest…” Jenna trailed off when Briar drew her EE-pistol, dialed the setting higher, and pointed it at the other woman. Only one person had shot Jenna so far, but Briar wouldn’t mind being the second. “There’s no call for violence.”
“If you die here, your people can trace you to this planet but not to us,” Briar said. Jenna had reminded them many, many times of the fact that Selectstar would send people looking for her any day now. Any minute now. “What do you think you deserve after all the lives you’ve destroyed?”
And the lives her deal with Steven Wat had nearly destroyed, all the lives on the Catamaran, though she couldn’t be blamed directly for that.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Jenna said.
“A lie,” Lincoln called from his position holding up the wall. “Can’t be trusted.”
“He has a point.” Briar, happy to be back in her own body with no repercussions so far from the DNA mask, watched the woman she’d so recently impersonated vibrate with frustration. If she’d been with anyone who’d known Jenna for longer than a minute, they would never have been fooled. But it had worked, and that was all that mattered. “Why would we trust you on anything? Anything at all? Considering what you did to Lincoln in Oka? Considering what you do every day? How can anyone trust you?”
“You can’t,” Jenna admitted. “Even if you paid me a hundred thousand DICs for pain and suffering and let me go, I could still bring an army back here and crush you. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing about it.”
“Is that so?” Briar asked, clicking the gun setting all the way to kill. Could she really kill someone?
A shocked expression contorted Jenna’s face. “I don’t know why I told you that. I’m going mad in here.”
Must be a cat nearby. Sure enough, when Briar checked Lincoln and Su, Mighty had arrived and was batting Lincoln on the leg to be picked up.
As she watched the cat and the man, she realized that she didn’t know the answer. She wanted to believe she could kill someone who threatened her planet, the man she loved, and all the cats and people about to wake up on the Catamaran to a life they never expected. But she’d had the opportunity to kill to protect herself and others in the past several days, and she’d chosen the less murdery path. Like Lincoln would.
But she wanted Jenna to believe her death was a distinct possibility.
So Briar nodded in agreement with Jenna. “I guess you need to die, then. It’s sad, since the only thing we did was prevent you from getting one stupid piece of a zheng ship.”
“I wanted it, and it was none of your business,” Jenna said.
Javier and two people carrying a stretcher arrived to fetch the corpse of Gullim Vex. Jenna’s expression turned very self-satisfied when they opened her cell and removed the body.
“I knew you wouldn’t torture me,” she said. Slavers were like that—assuming people would respect their humanity the way they respected no other humans in the galaxy. They traded on it, as Jenna had, at one time, traded on Lincoln’s humanity to hurt so many people.
Was Jenna right about them? Or was she wrong? What would Briar do to keep the people here safe? What would Su and the others do?
And most of all—what would the cats do?
As Javier and the stretcher disappeared around the corner, Mighty nudged Lincoln’s hand to encourage pets.
“She’s not awake yet. When can you come?” Mighty asked, referring to his human on the Catamaran. He’d regained enough energy to skip this morning and begged Lincoln to stand watch with him. He was very excited for Lincoln to meet his engineer, and vice versa. But they had the Jenna quagmire to handle before their attention could turn to what the cats were calling the second awakening.
“Who said that?” Jenna pressed up against the mesh and tried to look down the hall. “Is that another kid? The ones living here… Well, some of them are really mean.”
“Pumpkin,” Mighty said in a low voice, “participated in some of the guard shifts.”
Briar didn’t know all of the cats yet, but Pumpkin was definitely the one most likely to offend. Who knew what the orange menace had whispered to Jenna in the dark of night?
She’d like to know, though. So she could whisper it, too.
“I will definitely remember a brat named Pumpkin.” Jenna whirled away from the mesh door and sat down as far from the scene of the recent murder as she could get. Which was about three meters. “But since my life is obviously on the line, I will make a deal.”
“You can’t be trusted,” Briar repeated. And it was true. The cats could only erase so much from Jenna’s memories, and many were still exhausted from the swarm two days ago. Half had been transported physically to the Catamaran when Lincoln had flown up to switch the parts. “If you were the one making this decision, you’d already be dead.”
Jenna leaned her head against the wall and sighed. “That is no lie. Lincoln wouldn’t do it, but the rest of you… You’re not Lincoln Caster.”
“I might do it,” Lincoln offered, rejoining Briar at the door. He still cuddled Mighty Mighty. As the black cat had been spotted at the Tank Union HQ by too many people to hide his existence, they’d spread the rumor that Wil Tango had adopted both cats to keep the cats together. “I’ve changed.”
“A man like you will never change.” Jenna propped her arm on her knee and regarded the three of them. “In this business, you learn to read people. You learn what they’ll do when pushed. You learn how far they’ll go and how much they’ll fight. And you, Lincoln Caster, aren’t a killer. You’re so upstanding it makes me a little sick. That’s why I picked you in Oka.”
Ironic that Jenna Banu saw the same thing in Lincoln that Briar did. For Jenna, it made him a target, and for Briar, it made him her hero.
Lincoln didn’t
respond immediately, which was his way. He’d not spoken to Briar more about Jenna Banu, but she knew how he felt.
“You picked me because you knew you could manipulate me,” he reflected. Briar slipped an arm through his and leaned against him. Mighty purred loudly.
“Yes and no. I knew you’d do the right thing,” Jenna corrected. “And I knew you’d never dream someone would do…what I do.” Her mouth twisted into a half-smile. “I also know you won’t let these people kill me.”
“He isn’t the boss of this place,” Su sang from down the hallway. “Not his call, slaver.”
Jenna closed her eyes and hid a yawn as if the situation and Su and everything here no longer concerned her. They were discussing whether she lived or died, and she assumed she already knew the answer. “You’re going to have to make a decision, Lincoln Caster. What to do about your old friend Jenna, who inspired you to strike out on your own and find a better life. And a cat. Of all things.”
“That’s one way to look at it.” Briar would never have met Lincoln if it hadn’t been for the dreadful scam Jenna had pulled on him, depriving Oka’s poorest citizens of essential ship components. Lincoln would never have identified the problem with and repaired the Catamaran if the Oka Council hadn’t banished him from the Conglomerate. “Another way to look at it is that you’re the one thing standing between him and that better life. You’re the one threat left.”
She thinks you will let her go in exchange for your lives. She hopes you will give her the part and will definitely try to get revenge if you don’t, Mighty whispered to them. Let her try. Let her try to bring her people here. We will—
“What a pretty kitty,” Briar interrupted, firmly petting Mighty from head to toe. His mental rant ceased when he started to purr.
“You should have allowed me to go about my business,” Jenna told them. Under the cats’ influence, Jenna hadn’t become suspicious about why they wanted the Mozim power converter. She believed they simply intended to prevent its use in her operation.