by M. D. Cooper
Chief Kang had also made the point that her force ought to be involved in the operation, as they knew the world far better than Erin and the Marines.
She’d also brought a half dozen of her officers along and one of her pilots was at the helm of the ship.
Erin spread the holo image wider with her fingertips. The light that identified the cave entrance shone out from a wide opening in the mountainside. A clearing lay in front of it where pinnaces and shuttles could land, though there was just the one at present.
The map didn’t identify any other installations or habitations nearby. The area was just a tourist zone.
“They’re spelunking?” Erin said to Usef. “At night?”
“Night or day,” he replied. “It’s all the same underground.”
“I guess,” she said. “But caving at night isn’t what you would normally do after work, is it? Or directly after arriving on a long flight from another planet?”
“No,” the major agreed.
“Any guesses why they’ve come here specifically?” Erin asked the room.
Neither Chief Kang nor her officers had any answers. Onyx had already related all the details she had on Samuel Jefferson, Rahmin Butler, and Ada Grey. All three had arrived on Tyre soon after leaving stasis, and from that moment onward, they’d done nothing to interest the authorities. They seemed to be upstanding citizens, following their professions of vintner, servitor specialist, and sanitation engineer.
Onyx—who was tied into the pinnace’s audible systems—spoke up,
Erin recalled Martin’s message that Isa had been in some kind of incident and had been taken to hospital. That must have been the same rescue Onyx had just referred to, and now it formed another link to Pippa’s Tyrian acquaintances. The connection seemed too much of a coincidence to be meaningless, but she couldn’t imagine how Isa could be involved with Pippa’s machinations.
“I’m going to reach out to Isa,” she said to Usef. “I wasn’t going to tell her I was here, but it won’t hurt just to speak to her. Maybe she can tell us something about Pippa’s friends.”
Erin connected to the planet’s public networks and searched for Isa, but couldn’t find her. She tried Martin next, but he seemed to be missing also.
said Erin.
“Maybe the planetary engineer, Tony, might have some answers,” said Chief Kang. “I’d like to know why he was interested in those people.”
“That doesn’t have to be a problem,” Usef said.
“You’re right,” Erin said. “We can send him our questions via a packet.”
“Do that,” he suggested. “I’ll also send a message to the ship to come back and drop him off. Given his knowledge of Tyre, it would be good to have him on hand, and we will have only delayed the passengers for half a day.”
“Okay,” said Erin, rather enjoying the Marine’s ability to simply order civilian ships to do his bidding. “Let’s do that. And while we’re waiting for Tony to return, what do we do about Pippa and company? Do we follow them into the cave system and try to find out what they’re doing?”
“We could go in with stealth suits,” Usef said, “but caves are often hard to navigate without making a lot of noise, even with military-grade stealth. For the moment, it’s best if we stick to surveillance. If they hear us, they’ll immediately be suspicious; it doesn’t seem like many others come out here.”
“So then what are they doing in there?” Erin asked in frustration.
The knowledge that Isa, and possibly Martin too, had somehow become involved with these dangerous people made her deeply uneasy. What had been a professional investigation was morphing into something much more personal.
“They’ll have to come out sooner or later,” Usef said. “Maybe what they do next will give us some more information we can act on. In the meantime, all we can do is wait.”
“I guess so,” Erin said, resigning herself to the fact. “While they’re doing whatever it is they have to do, I’m going to go over everything we have on Pippa’s friends. I might be able to read something between the lines.”
Erin went to a seat in the corner of the pinnace’s central cabin and settled in for the wait.
She studied the details on Samuel Jefferson first. Like Pippa and the other two Tyrians, he was originally from Earth. Before booking passage on the Intrepid, he’d been a renowned carpenter-sculptor who had created functional works of art from driftwood. He’d also been a vocal member of a movement that advocated population control and a return to a simpler style of living.
The popularity of Samuel’s artwork and his stated interest in teaching others was a part of his acceptance to the colony, but it still seemed odd to Erin that he’d elected to go outsystem. He seemed like a real traditionalist, more the type to remain in Sol.
That he’d chosen Tyre as his home when he’d come out of stasis made total sense; as the least-altered planet, it was closest to its original state of the four habitable worlds of New Canaan. Erin guessed that it had appealed to the man’s conservative sensibilities. But Tyre’s low population meant that Samuel Jefferson wouldn’t be able to recreate his lucrative artistic living there, however much driftwood was freely available along the planet’s extensive coastlines.
Instead, he’d become a vintner. Erin checked the procedures. He’d claimed the maximum allocation of suitable land, and soon afterward, he’d purchased more.
Erin paused. Where had Samuel Jefferson gotten the money to buy more land?
It took two or three years to bring wine to market from scratch, even when farming genetically enhanced, fast-growing vines. Where had the money come from that had allowed Samuel to expand his operation? Erin searched the Link, but couldn’t find any records of accounts for his business.
Erin sighed, wondering how long that would take.
Given the location of the two planets in their orbits, that could take about forty minutes. Erin hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
She brought up a map of Tyre and input the coordinates of his vineyards. The pin-prick dots of light lit up in a
range of locations—an extremely wide range. Samuel Jefferson owned land on nearly all the landmasses of the planet.
Erin studied the location data, looking up information on the soils and climates. Were these viable vineyards or not? She didn’t know much about grape-growing, so that was something she queued up to query Onyx about.
But the facts were that the man not only owned far more land than he should, but the land was also spread across most of Tyre. Erin couldn’t think of a single reason why it might make sense to grow grapes in so many different areas of the planet. Logistically and economically, the practice held no advantages that she understood. She had a strong suspicion that if she were to visit any Jefferson vineyard, it would be devoid of vines.
So what was the real reason for Samuel’s land holdings?
Erin opened it, hoping that Anwen had given some useful info, but more worried that it was some new dire news.
‘Erin, sorry to have so much bad news. We found Max Rasner, or rather, his body. A cargo handler out at Sparta had a nasty surprise when she unpacked a crate. It wasn’t pretty. Someone had caved in Rasner’s head before tucking him away.
It looks like the crate was taken out of the warehouse by an autolift just as the racks all came down on top of you. It wasn’t logged properly, so no one checked the ship it was delivered to.
Anyway, I think you’ll agree that the list of suspected killers is just one name long.’
‘Pippa Dhami is now wanted for murder. I understand that you might want to delay arresting her to uncover more information about the missing antimatter, but please keep a close watch on her. She mustn’t be given the opportunity to kill again.
Good hunting, Tanis Richards out.’
Erin leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. The scenes at Landfall’s Excelsior Spaceport flashed through her mind. Pippa’s fight with Max, her running after him, both of them disappearing into the warehouse, the search for them, and Pippa’s reappearance.
While they were both missing, Pippa must have killed Max and hidden his body. What else had she done when no one was watching? After Erin had told her to go to meet her sister at the warehouse entrance, how long had it taken for her to arrive? Had it been during that time that Pippa hacked the security system and commanded the warehouse portage devices to push over the shelving? Or had she fixed it all up directly after killing Max? And had she intended the chaos to make it seem likely that Max had escaped and perhaps to help cover up what Pippa had done, or had Pippa been trying to kill Erin too?
Erin was now certain that when Max had run from Pippa, it was because she’d been the one to attack him, not the other way around. What had happened in the waiting room? Up until the moment Erin interviewed him, he’d thought the sabotage was an accident. While he sat and fumed, had he realized something that told him Pippa was to blame? It would be just like Max to blurt out something to accuse the engineer rather than keep his cool and tell Erin what he knew.
Erin sat up. The packet from Tanis threw a whole new light on things, though it still didn’t explain the bigger picture. Pippa really was very good at deceiving people. Erin wondered if Anwen knew the truth about her sister. From what Erin could tell, she didn’t think Anwen had any idea what Pippa had been doing, but maybe she was just as good at deception as her twin.
A shadow loomed at Erin’s side.
“This is a significant development,” Usef said.
“You can say that again,” she replied. “The worse of it is we still don’t know what Pippa’s intending to do with the extra antimatter. The most obvious possibility is that she brought it here. She came to Tyre directly after the briefing aboard the Eos. I’m guessing that the low population makes it easier to move around unseen.
“Given that she’s a murderer, should we move in on her and her crew, or should we carry on watching them? I’m worried they might have more accomplices lurking on Tyre. If someone else has access to that antimatter and they hear that Pippa and the others have been arrested, they might go to ground, and we’ll never find them or the antimatter.”
Usef’s brow lowered, and he pursed his lips. “If we rush in, they may be killed in the altercation and we may not find the antimatter. The strongest possibility is that they’ve hidden it here and are retrieving it. We should wait a little while longer.”
Erin nodded, though half her mind was on the fact that Isa had been hanging out with people who were the friends of a murderer.
She tried to contact Isa again, and then Martin, but to no avail.
The pinnace was beginning to feel like a cage. She desperately wanted to find out if Isa and Martin were OK, but there was no way to leave without disrupting the operation to stop a killer and a terrorist.
Erin bit her lip and nodded to Usef. “OK, a little while longer.”
CRYSTALS
STELLAR DATE: 03.22.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mount Ida Caverns
REGION: Tyre, New Canaan System
There was little Isa or Martin could do except wait for whoever was approaching to arrive. The idea of escaping in their current condition was laughable.
As the voices grew louder, Isa recognized Samuel, Ada, and Rahmin, but she thought she could also hear a fourth person. A stranger. A woman.
The voices were slightly muffled, and Isa guessed that their captors were still in the tunnel that led to the cave. That was good; it meant that she and Martin weren’t far from the cavern’s exit. Now all they had to do was get there.
Suddenly, the voices were louder and clearer. The Tyrians were almost upon them.
“It’s boiling down here,” said the new woman. “Are you sure they’re still going to be alive?”
“Probably,” Samuel replied. “They’ve only been here a couple of hours. Besides, it doesn’t matter too much if they’re dead. The point was to stop them snooping. If we can find out something useful from them now it’ll be a bonus, but I’m almost certain we don’t have anything to fear. We did a good job of keeping the Noctus bitch’s nose out of our business.”
The sound of tramping feet accompanied the voices.
“Where did we put them?” Ada asked. “I thought it was round about here.”
“No,” Rahmin replied. “It was further in. I remember I had to guide the a-grav transporter around that big crystal.”
“Yeah,” said Ada. “That’s right. So they should be somewhere over there.”
Isa wished she could use the Link to speak to Martin. If this was to be their last few moments of life, there were some things she wanted to say to him. She rested her forehead against the warm, wet, hard floor and smiled grimly to herself. Of all the possible outcomes of her work project, this wasn’t one that she’d anticipated.
“Huh?” said Samuel. He was very close by, though Isa still couldn’t see him or any of the others. “I could have sworn we left them here. Where have they gone?”
“Have they escaped?” the strange woman asked. “Didn’t you tie them up?”
“Of course we did,” Rahmin said. “There’s no way they—”
“I see them,” Ada exclaimed. Her footsteps came closer. “They’ve moved a bit, that’s all. They must have woken up.”
Though Isa craned her neck, her captors remained out of sight. Then she heard Martin grunt as they moved him
. She looked down, and a moment later, a hand grasped her shoulder and roughly turned her over. She cried out as her arms twisted under her back. Rahmin’s face was in hers, staring down at her cruelly.
“There you are.” A grin settled on his lips, but it was not a pleasant one.
Ada was with him. Their expressions were so different from what she remembered, Isa hardly recognized them. Their features were hard and stony. For the first time, she felt like she was seeing them as they truly were.
She heard scuffling and looking down beyond her feet again, she saw that Samuel and the new woman were dragging a struggling Martin further away, toward an open area. The woman was strong-looking and tall and wore her hair in a single pigtail.
Isa’s observations were interrupted by Ada grabbing her ankles and tugging her in the direction the others were taking Martin. The back of Isa’s skull hit rock, and her hands scraped against the rough floor.
“Are you going to help or not?” Ada asked Rahmin, her voice strained with effort.
The shaggy-haired Tyrian gripped one of Isa’s ankles. She kicked out at both of them, momentarily freeing her legs. Her freedom was short-lived, however, as both Ada and Rahmin grabbed her calves tightly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Isa yelled. “Let us go!” She twisted out of their grasp.
Ada made another grab for Isa’s ankle, but Isa kicked the woman’s hand away. Her restraints meant that she couldn’t lash out with any significant force, but she’d be damned if she was going to let these people do whatever they wanted without putting up a fight.
“Dammit,” Ada exclaimed. “Maybe we should just shoot them now. Can’t you do something to stop her fighting?” she asked Rahmin irritably.
He stumped the two steps it took to reach Isa’s head, drew back his leg, and kicked her in the ear. The force snapped her head around, and for a few seconds, she was senseless. When she came to herself again, her head ached so much that it almost masked the throbbing agony in her limbs. Ada and Rahmin were dragging her over the ridged floor. The wet, slick sweat that soaked her hair was being replaced by viscous blood.