by Dan Moren
The door to the restroom slid open, and the man stepped in, somehow looking both confident and totally unsure of himself. Addy turned, leaning against the sink and gave him what she hoped was a come-hither smile.
It apparently worked, as he closed the distance in what seemed like record time, enveloping her in the acrid mix of his sweat and some cologne that he’d poured on way too thick. Something about the scent was familiar, but before her mind could place it, he was pressing up against her.
Her heartbeat spiked. Cornered. She was cornered. Her vision started to tunnel and she felt her forehead turn clammy. No. Not now. Keep it together. Adrenaline flooded her system as everything told her to pummel this guy within an inch of his life. I did not think this through.
She forced herself to unclench the tight fist of her left hand, and put it on his chest, spreading her fingers and turning her head to one side as he leaned down to kiss her. Drums pounded in her ears.
“Wait…”
“Huh?”
“I’m not sure I want this.”
His brow creased. “Oh?” His tone was playful, but there was an undercurrent of frustration underneath. “What do you want?”
She thrust him firmly away. “You’re probably not going to like it.” In her other hand, she raised the KO-gun she’d snagged from his holster and pulled the trigger.
The stun field splashed out, catching him mid-gape. His eyes rolled back into his head and he went down like a marionette with the strings cut, collapsing into a heap on the marble floor.
Addy’s breathing came in ragged gasps, and she clutched the sink with her free hand. Easy. Easy does it. No threats here. Not anymore. She toed the man, but he seemed down for the count.
Her assessment of his muscled build had been spot on: he was pretty dense in every sense of the word. With some effort, Addy was able to drag him into a stall and prop him against one wall. Fortunately, the door and the partitions went all the way to the floor, so he wouldn’t be spotted unless someone opened the stall.
Patting him down didn’t reveal much beyond his sleeve – a generic burner model widely available on Jericho Station and elsewhere – and a connected earpiece.
As she searched him, she got a whiff of the cologne again, and this time, without the distraction of him pressing against her, it registered sharp and vivid in her memory. Mathis had worn the same brand back at the base on Nova: Illyrican cologne. Something about wearing the scent of your enemies to trick them. He’d bought it on the black market, bragging that it had cost a fortune.
Illyrican cologne. The military bearing. Back against the wall. Watching everyone in the room.
Oh. Shit.
Doing her best to jimmy the stall closed from the outside, Addy left the man – Illyrican agent? – within. Yes, she’d blown her cover, but if he’d been watching her there was a good chance he’d already known, or at least suspected, who she was.
Which didn’t bode well for the rest of the team.
This wasn’t the kind of thing you left for a dead drop. She needed to tell Kovalic and she needed to tell him now.
She weighed the KO-gun in her hands. Holding onto it would be the best play, but her slim pantsuit didn’t exactly provide a lot of places to conceal a bulky weapon. Fortunately, she was able to mostly shove it into her clutch bag, which she could tuck under her arm. As long as nobody looked too closely.
Turning to the mirror, she touched up her makeup and mopped her brow. Fortunately, her short hair was already in the “artfully tousled” style, so her encounter hadn’t left her too bedraggled. Satisfied, she stepped out of the restroom and back into the lounge.
She returned to the table at which she’d been playing. The man in the loud suit had departed in her absence, leaving only the woman in the green dress, who was playing the dealer with an air of boredom. Signaling to the dealer, Addy indicated she’d like to cash out and an attendant appeared to total up her winnings, minus the requisite gratuity. He presented her with a tablet, complete with her bar charges, and the balance of her chips credited to her room account.
She was about to press her thumbprint to the reader when there was a sudden change in the room’s atmosphere, as though everyone in it were suddenly holding their breath.
It wasn’t hard to see why: a woman in a floor-length red dress, striking against her dark black skin, was descending from the staircase opposite the lift. A pair of White Star personnel, weapons holstered at their waist, trailed several feet behind her.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the floor itself shimmered, rippling outwards. What had a moment before been a drab, camel-colored carpet sparked to life, explosions of color flaring outwards from the woman’s dress.
Crossing the floor, the woman moved like liquid silk, nodding her head gracefully to the people she passed, though a smile never crossed her lips. Not even hushed tones heralded her passage; there was total silence. A few people gave respectful bows, but most just lowered their eyes, unwilling to look directly at her.
As the woman drew closer, Addy’s breath caught in her throat. Rounded cheekbones flanked an upturned nose beneath eyes so startlingly dark it was hard to tell where the pupil ended and the iris began. Blood red lips stood out against her dark skin, a flash of white teeth appearing between them from time to time. Rubies dangled from her ears, shimmering and glowing in sympathy with the floor’s fireworks display.
Addy froze, gawking, the tablet still held in her outstretched hand, until the woman was right in front of her, studying her with those impossibly dark eyes.
“Ah,” she said, and her voice had a musical lilt to it, no less warming and rich than the whiskey Addy had drunk at the bar. “Just the woman I have been looking forward to meeting. Welcome aboard the Queen Amina, Ms Bell. My name is Ofeibia Xi.”
CHAPTER 13
A hovertruck had backed up right over Kovalic’s head and then dumped a couple tons of debris on top of it for good measure.
Or at least that’s what it felt like. He blinked against the harsh lighting that wavered around him and tried to focus on something, anything, that wasn’t moving back and forth.
He rubbed at his eyes to clear them and noticed that his hands were free. More to the point he noticed that he noticed his hands were free. Why had he expected them to be otherwise?
With a jolt, the last thing he’d seen came back to him: the two assailants in the hallway, the KO-gun. The ache from his knee flooded back, a deep bruise that was probably going to hurt for the next few days, but he didn’t think there was any permanent damage.
As his vision stabilized he realized, with some surprise, that he was in his own stateroom, lolling in one of the armchairs in the main sitting room. It was hard to tell exactly how long he’d been out; he reached for his sleeve, but it was gone.
His eyes went to the end table, where a small black ovoid sat, a single red light pulsing red: his own anti-eavesdropping baffle. Sitting next to it, in a bunched-up pile, was his sleeve.
“I thought we’d want to keep this between us.”
The clipped, precise voice brought back another memory: the woman he’d seen in the split-second before he’d been incapacitated. Her hair was shorter, her clothes less tattered and worn than the last time he’d seen her. But if there had been any doubt, the voice dispelled it.
“Mirza?” he groaned, searching around until he found her, sitting in the room’s other chair, about ten feet away. The KO-gun was held loose in her hand, but not currently pointed at him.
“Kovalic.” She tilted her head, hair falling in a dark curtain on one side of her face. Her clothes could have been taken from Kovalic’s own wardrobe: casual trousers, a military-style jacket, plain white shirt. Simple, functional, efficient. A lot like the wearer.
“I take it you’re not enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Because if you are, you’re doing it wrong.” He didn’t need to ask why she was here. Commander Ekaterin Mirza of the Imperial Intelligence Service’s Special Operations Execut
ive didn’t take days off any more than he did.
Mirza didn’t laugh. He remembered that about her. “Let’s skip the pretense, Kovalic. I know you’re here for the tablet. You know I’m here for the tablet.”
Kovalic rubbed his brow, trying to work away some of the lingering effects of the stun field. As his faculties returned, he became aware that they were alone in the room. Wherever Mirza’s other officer was – posted outside maybe? – she hadn’t felt the need to invite him to this meeting.
That was good.
“So what you’re saying is what happened on Kameral IV stays on Kameral IV?”
Mirza’s lips thinned, her tongue between her teeth. “Our arrangement against those marauders was temporary as you well know.”
“And here I thought we had a special bond.”
Now the KO-gun was pointed at him. “Need I remind you we are enemies?”
“No, I don’t think you need to. And yet, I can’t help but notice you stunned me instead of shooting me, and I’m not restrained in any way.” He waved his hands.
Mirza held the gun on him for a moment longer, then lowered it a fraction. “I did not think it was…necessary.”
A chink in the armor. Kovalic would take it. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It wasn’t. Thank you for that.”
A scowl crossed Mirza’s face. “Don’t thank me. It’s merely professional courtesy.”
Kovalic put his hands up. “I understand. And I appreciate it. I’m hoping we can continue to talk this out as professionals.”
Silence hung in the air and Kovalic let it sit. If he could play this just right…
“This is an… unusual situation,” said Mirza. “I… I feel that I owe you. I would not have survived on Kameral IV without your assistance.”
Kovalic inclined his head. “Nor I without yours.”
“So consider this an attempt to pay that debt. A warning. I am here on a mission and I will not let anything interfere with that. If you or any member of your team gets in my way, I will not hesitate to do what needs to be done.”
“Very generous.”
“Don’t mistake me for some doddering old fool, Kovalic. I’m not Harry Frayn, looking the other way while you walk all over the Imperium.”
Kovalic thought about pointing out that he and Frayn working together had managed to stop the Imperium’s crown prince from starting a shooting war, but something told him that Mirza wouldn’t be receptive to the idea.
“Understood. How is Harry, by the way?”
Mirza made a tch of disgust. “Reassigned out of the field. He is a good officer, but his decision-making on the ground lacked judgment. Plus his soft spot for that traitor Adaj–” Kovalic could see the effort it took for her not to spit after saying his name, “–made it unwise to give him too much autonomy. No, he’s better off someplace where an eye can be kept on him.”
Which meant IIS headquarters on Illyrica. “I’m sure your director will be delighted to have him so close.” A little delicate probing never hurt anybody.
Mirza studied him through half-lidded eyes. “I’m sure.”
Oh well.
“So, where does that leave us, commander? I assume you’re aware that I’m not going to just abort our mission.”
Mirza smiled at that, but it was without mirth. “I didn’t think you would. But, as I said, I thought I owed you the courtesy.” She rose from the chair, the gun pointed at him once again. “And whatever else his failings, Colonel Frayn did provide a full report on the Bayern incident. So I know all about Commander Taylor, Sergeant Tapper, and your man ‘Adler.’”
Not great. At least they hadn’t discovered Brody’s real identity – the cover job they’d put in place for Bayern seemed to be holding up. He still had a sister on Caledonia, which was under Illyrican control, and the last thing Kovalic wanted was for her to be put into any danger on their account.
“I can see you’re well informed,” said Kovalic. He scratched his head, something else occurring to him – he blamed the stun field for not thinking of it earlier. “How did you find me, anyway? There are thousands of passengers on this ship; you can’t have been surveilling all of them just hoping to find us.”
Mirza crossed to the door, keeping the KO-gun trained on him. She smirked. “You’re getting sloppy, Kovalic. When we met on Kameral IV you were going by Sam Richardson; on Bayern you were James Austen; and Major Shankar documented his encounter on Caledonia with the mysterious Mr Fielding. It didn’t take a genius to find the pattern. I cross-referenced the passenger manifest with early British novelists, and ‘William Godwin’ was one of only a few possibilities. Once I saw he was traveling with ‘Charlotte Bell,’ well, that confirmed it.”
Kovalic gritted his teeth and cursed himself inwardly. Mirza had him dead to rights. Not reusing work names was the first thing they taught you in covert ops. Using a pattern had been stupid, and too cute by half.
Mirza tapped the door release. “Good to see you, major. I hope we don’t have to meet again.” And with that, she disappeared into the hallway.
This time, Kovalic kept his eyes open for tails.
Mirza was right about one thing: he’d been sloppy. So worried about the rest of the team – Nat’s secondment, Brody’s mood, Sayers’s temper – that he’d forgotten to pay attention to himself. Focused in the wrong direction, just as he’d been with Page.
Nat had set the dead-drop location across from a noodle shop on one of the Queen Amina’s lower levels, below the esplanade. Nestled in among machine shops and cargo holds, it was an area frequented by the ship’s crew. Not the kind of place where you ought to find a well-dressed gambler.
So Kovalic had ditched Seiji’s luxurious suits for one of his own inconspicuous outfits: work trousers, a plain gray shirt, and a gray jacket. He’d have swiped a maintenance jumpsuit if he could have, but there just wasn’t time.
Getting down to the maintenance level required a combination of lifts, old school drop tubes, and even a stairway, which let him out in a cramped corridor, lined with conduits and pipes.
The section wasn’t off-limits to guests, per se; it was open to passenger and crew alike, though it counted on the former choosing not to venture far from their comfort zones.
He turned right down the corridor, squeezed past a sweeper drone doing its duty, and walked by a variety of stalls, makeshift affairs compared to the carefully designed stores on the main drag above. Everything seemed to be on sale here, from spare mechanical parts to carefully woven cloth spun from leftover insulation. A micro-economy inside a micro-economy.
There were plenty of food stalls down here too, though only a few were more than a cart or stall. Radomski’s Ramen occupied a coveted corner spot on a junction; half a dozen people sat on stools, slurping away at bowls of broth piled high with a mix of noodles and pierogi.
He’d made a pit stop on the esplanade to buy a new sleeve – the old one he’d tossed into the recycler as soon as he’d left his stateroom, on the assumption that any communications device left alone with an Eyes operative had obviously been compromised.
The new one was still finishing its setup sequence, but that was fine. All Kovalic needed was the encrypted chip reader. He plugged in the key code he’d committed to memory – no safer place to keep it – and leaned against the wall kitty-corner from the noodle shop, just like anybody else sitting around waiting for someone, reading the news. The sleeve scanned for a narrowband low-power signal among the conduits.
An icon on the screen blinked as he located the signal. The dead-drop chip, hidden in the wall, was the safest way to pass information to the rest of the team. Kovalic typed in his message, the codeword they’d designated for an emergency all-hands meet: EXARCH. Nat would relay that to the rest of the team and slag the chip afterwards, just in case anybody found it and tried to pull ghost data off it.
But there was no telling when Nat might actually check the drop; for security reasons, the chip was restricted to low-power local transm
issions, so she wouldn’t be alerted that there was a message for her. He’d hang around for a little bit, just in case she happened by.
He took a vacant seat at the counter of the noodle shop and ordered a bowl of the local specialty. A good meal was one of the better ways to banish any lingering effects of a stun field and he could feel his head starting to clear after a few mouthfuls.
So, Mirza was here for the tablet. No surprise there: the general had said the Illyricans would want it. Right now she had a leg up on them: she had identified his team and even where they were staying, while they were in the dark about her. He had to find a way to level the playing field.
An idea was starting to percolate in his head, but it was in the early stages. And it had a lot of moving pieces, which meant a high degree of risk. ‘Risk is just opportunity by another name’ is what the general would say, with that trademark twinkle. It would be annoying if he didn’t end up being right so often.
Downing the last of the broth directly from the bowl, Kovalic wiped his face with a napkin and swiped his sleeve to pay for the food.
The pad blinked red.
With a frown, he tried again. Same result: charge rejected.
He double-checked his sleeve. There ought to be more than enough credit there to pay for lunch, unless this was the most expensive bowl of noodles ever sold in the galaxy.
Or unless somebody had tampered with it.
Mirza.
It was a nice move; exactly what he should expected after seeing her in action on Kameral IV. Mirza was a pragmatist: she hadn’t teamed up with Kovalic to take on that band of marauders because they were terrorizing the moon’s small settlement of colonists, but because she knew she’d never be able to survive on her own. No atheists in a foxhole, and no enemies when you’re all up against the wall.
Speaking of up against the wall.