Longshot Hypothesis

by Blaze Ward

  Many of the girls saw him and smiled. A few waved.

  Madame Cleray was talking to Fahrettin about something when he entered. She turned his direction with an enormous scowl on her face that only slightly lessened when she saw who was causing the interruption.

  “Ah, Captain Tarasicodissa,” she said, causing Valentinian to double-take.

  Captain Tarasicodissa was his father. Still, she was talking to him. And at least mildly happy that he was here, if the complicated play of emotions in her eyes was any hint.

  It had only been an instant, but Arcades was all about reading a person’s soul in that pulse when they first spied their seventh card, the Build card always dealt face down. To know if they’ve built their arcade, or are frantically calculating the final round of betting and whether than can stay in or drop out.

  Lianearia Cleray had drawn a run of Stones, and not even across the colors. Maybe she could win if she pushed her bluff hard enough and everything else fell apart for everyone else?

  What the hell had he done to piss this woman off?

  Valentinian rolled quickly backwards over the last three days in his head as he advanced to shake her hand, but nothing jumped out as a trigger than he should watch his kidneys for a knife. Maybe he had just timed it to arrive on the heel of bad news?

  “I won’t stay long,” Valentinian smiled as brightly as he could. “Just wanted to thank you for the invitation and let you know Dave and I are out front if you needed us to do anything or run back to the ship for something you forgot.”

  Her face cracked as she numbly shook his hand. It was like an avalanche spalling off the front of the mountain, being replaced by a wholly different woman, this one smiling.

  Either she had suddenly remembered to put on her Valentinian face for lying, or whatever it was wasn’t his fault.

  Valentinian wasn’t going to stay long enough to press the issue.

  “Thank you,” she said neutrally. “It has been helpful, having the two of you around,”

  Weird, but sure. Maybe the stress of opening night was making the woman apocalyptic, but that sure sounded like the sort of brush off he had used a few times, when some woman looked like she wanted him to settle down and get a real job, as opposed to doing what he loved.

  “Ma’am,” he nodded. He turned to the rest of the troupe. “Good luck.”

  Valentinian turned and took a step before he registered that there was someone standing in the doorway.

  And holding a stunner pointed right at his chest.

  “Going somewhere, Captain Tarasicodissa?”

  Nash? Her old partner?

  Here?

  Shit.

  “Nash?” Madame Cleray’s voice sounded almost as surprised as Valentinian felt. “What are you doing?”

  No. She was honestly surprised. Valentinian was just pissed.

  Talk about your rookie mistakes. They didn’t come much worse.

  He should have expected this. Shouldn’t have assumed Nash would take a night off to scout them before moving

  Should have brought Dave. Nothing would have snuck up on the big guy.

  “Why, I’ve come to have a chat, darling,” Nash oozed false bonhomie over his words, like cream that had gone bad. “Don’t do anything stupid, boy.”

  That last a threat to Valentinian as he tensed.

  The shock pistol was tucked in under his jacket where he could never get to it in time to be useful.

  At least that was a stunner the man held, and not anything heavier. Maybe he did just want to talk, but Valentinian couldn’t imagine anything Nash wanted to say that was worth hearing. There would still be a ration of pain later, most likely.

  Unless the man just wanted to get them someplace private before he got lethal. Too many witnesses here, like he had expected. Or maybe there were more people in on it than he or Cleary had expected.

  “There is nothing to talk about, Nash,” Madame Cleray’s voice was cruelty itself, distilled down to a fine brandy and served mulled. “We’re no longer in business together, so you are free to do whatever it is men like you do when they’re alone.”

  Valentinian blinked hard at the words, and they weren’t even aimed at him.

  Nash turned nearly purple, with some bizarre alchemy of rage and embarrassment.

  “We’ll just see about that,” the man snarled.

  He reached into a pants pocket and pulled out his card-reader, thumbing it live.

  “Arturious,” he said conversationally. “Could you join me in the back room?”

  Yup. Bringing friends. This conversation just got a whole lot less friendly. It was like a storm front suddenly passing with a rain squall.

  Somewhere, a door opened loudly. Possibly the back door where the bus had dropped Madame Cleray and the girls off earlier. Heavy feet slapping loudly on the concrete floors.

  Half a dozen men suddenly appeared behind Nash. Big men.

  Valentinian didn’t recognize any faces, but there was no doubting their purpose.

  More bully-boys. The same sort that had nearly kicked his ass back on Dominion Prime. Except Dave wasn’t here to bail him out this time. And two of them also had stunners.

  Charmingly, Nash turned enough of his attention to Kostantina and Fahrettin.

  “The show must go on,” he instructed them, adding a cruel and vengeful edge to his voice. “I’ll have Lianearia back to you after your performance, hopefully none the worse for wear. You will take charge of the girls and make this first show memorable. Am I understood?”

  Valentinian heard silence.

  “I am not trifling here,” Nash roared. “Am I understood?”

  Somewhere behind him, Valentinian caught voices mixing curses with assents. Possibly some weeping.

  “Good,” Nash turned his gaze back to Valentinian. The pistol had never wavered. “I’m just going to make this easier on everyone.”

  And the bastard shot him.

  26

  Kyriaki

  “I need to see Lianearia Cleray,” Kyriaki repeated. “It’s urgent.”

  “Sorry, lady,” the bouncer with the clipboard said. “You ain’t on the list.”

  “You let me back there earlier,” she tried a different tack.

  “You were with her then,” the man smiled cruelly.

  “Will one of you at least go get her for me?” Kyriaki asked. “Let her know I’d like to talk to her?”

  “No,” the bouncer was smug now. “You call her yourself and she’ll come up. But we’ve got instructions. Go away.”

  There was one card left to play at this point, and she was debating it when the screams started. They were faint, but recognizable, even through the heavy door.

  Terror. Possibly the sound of beamfire as well, but it was hard to tell over the sound of the music.

  The four bouncers heard it. That much was obvious from the grimaces that passed over their faces. The set of shoulders suddenly hunching forward.

  Whatever was happening back there, they had at least expected trouble. And been told to stay out of it. Not one of them so much as glanced back.

  Kyriaki growled and reached for her card-reader and her stun pistol.

  Suddenly, the four of them were armed as well. Two shock rods and a pair of shock pistols appeared.

  Standoff.

  “I have my instructions,” the lead bouncer said. “It’s not worth getting fired over.”

  She activated her card-reader carefully and turned it to show her identcard to the man.

  “Dominion Internal Security. Is it worth going to prison?” she asked.

  From the looks on at least two of them, they already knew what the inside of a jail cell smelled like. But nobody wavered.

  And she couldn’t take on four of them.

  The screams had peaked and were starting to receded now. And you had to be this close to the door to hear them, so most of the crowd would be ignorant, regardless.

  Kyriaki set her jaw. She would shoot the leader, the one ho
lding one of the shock pistols, and then try to use the nearer goon with the rod as cover while she tried to get through them.

  Nash was up to no good. Possibly Cleray had set him up. And Valentinian.

  Maybe the woman was a black widow, and using the whole thing as cover to clear decks. She had looked that dangerous.

  The bouncers tensed as well.

  “I don’t think you understand,” a new voice suddenly called out. “We’re going through that door. Your only choice now is if we go around you, or over your bodies.”

  Kyriaki slid a little sideways so she could glance back as the bouncers suddenly reacted to something behind her.

  Dave Hall stood there.

  Big. Angry. As dangerous as a Kodiak roused mid-winter.

  The two with shock pistols ignored her and aimed at the sudden intruder.

  Dave Hall’s next words would haunt her nightmares for years.

  “What?” he asked in a cruel voice. “You don’t think I can’t take all four of you at once?”

  She watched him snap his right hand out and down suddenly.

  A sword appeared in it, telescoping out from a handle.

  She recognized the style of grip, even if the blade part was a flattened tube of sections rather than a sharpened steel blade.

  Caelon grip. The Dominator’s Assault Cavalry shock troops. The most dangerous, most lethal force in the galaxy.

  And she suddenly knew she was seeing the assassin himself. Up close and deadly.

  The bouncers knew it as well. Something about the man’s casual stance conveyed to them Hall’s utter conviction that he would kill four men before they could even blink, and feel no more remorse than plucking a chicken for dinner.

  “White Hats,” she growled loudly at the suddenly-shaken men. “Stand aside.”

  They did this time.

  Kyriaki burst through the door with Hall on her heels. The screaming was turning into sobs now, so she followed that sound.

  Big room. Filled with frantic women.

  Kyriaki held up her badge card and turned to the oldest woman.

  “What happened?” she demanded.

  This woman had seen worse in her life. She swallowed once and visibly calmed herself,

  “Nash was here,” she said. “Shot Lianearia and Valentinian with stunners. Took them out the back door. They’re gone.”

  Kyriaki pivoted, but Hall was already moving, so she fell into his wake.

  He had nothing more than that pseudo-sword, and somehow she felt out-gunned here.

  But so would Nash and his friends.

  Hall moved without hesitation. His long legs gave him an edge, so Kyriaki put her head down and concentrated on speed. Hall would kill anything they passed that needed killing.

  Of that, she had no doubts.

  Out the back door, a van was just pulling out of the alleyway. She moved around a suddenly-still Hall and saw Nash smiling at her from the rear window.

  “Now what?” Hall rumbled.

  “Now we find out who else knew,” Kyriaki said. “And get them to talk.”

  “Agreed,” Hall said in a voice that made her shiver.

  Kyriaki had always thought she was the hardest person she knew.

  That was yesterday.

  The tall man turned with purpose and strode back into the building. She fell into his wake. It didn’t help that Hall was more than an entire head taller than she was, and possibly twice as broad, and probably outweighed her by double.

  Besides that, he was a stone killer.

  Back inside, the bouncers had followed them deeper into the building. Two of them, anyway. The others were probably still keeping the riffraff out.

  “Where’s the manager?” Hall asked the leader in a voice so quiet that the man had to lean forward to hear it.

  Death probably sounded like that, when he came for you with his own clipboard.

  “I’m the owner,” another voice rang out. “What seems to be going on here?”

  Kyriaki was a strong woman. She worked out regularly with all the machines and ran good distances to stay in peak shape.

  She could have never done this.

  Hall reached out with his left hand, the one not holding the sword, and caught the newcomer by the throat. It helped that the man was Kyriaki’s rough height and size. His bald head gleamed with sudden sweat.

  Dave Hall lifted the man bodily off the ground by his jawbone, holding him aloft until the tiny man’s feet swung like a child’s.

  “You’re going to tell me where they took my captain,” Hall quietly instructed the man.

  Death was probably jealous of that voice as well.

  One of the bouncers took a half-step forward, and stopped when Hall’s sword suddenly came up and centered on his face. Hall never took his eyes off the tiny man he was holding.

  “What makes you think…?”

  The rest of the words were squeezed back down the man’s throat by Hall’s grip, suddenly tightening just enough to get his attention.

  “You will listen to me,” Hall said in a quiet voice. A scary one. “I already have a Death Warrant on my head, so killing you won’t put me in hell any longer than I was already facing. You can talk, or I can ask someone else when you’re dead. Do you understand me?”

  Even the sobs from the girls fell silent. Kyriaki was sure everyone but her had forgotten to even breathe.

  Death Warrant.

  Nothing had come up when she had inspected Longshot Hypothesis and run all their identcards that day. Including Dave Hall.

  Or whatever his name really was.

  She had fallen for the same shell game as everyone else, watching Valentinian and ignoring his first mate.

  The man who had, oh by the way, joined the vessel on Dominion Prime, apparently right after he had assassinated the Dominator.

  For a moment, she considered shooting the killer and taking him in. Leaving Valentinian and Cleray to their fates. But that wasn’t why she had put on the white beret. She was a cop, not an executioner.

  Regardless of how much Hall deserved it.

  She could always shoot him later.

  The man in Hall’s grip gurgled once. Possibly Hall making a point.

  “I’ll talk,” the man whispered hoarsely. “it wasn’t supposed to happen like this at all.”

  Hall lowered the man to the ground delicately, like an antique vase. That display of pure strength was almost more frightening than the rage it took to lift him in the first place.

  Except that it hadn’t been rage. Dave Hall really was that strong.

  Kyriaki moved to watch the bouncers, but they were hollow now, in complete shock.

  Seizing her moment, she stripped the men of their pistols. They didn’t even resist her at this point.

  “Nash wanted to get back together with Lianearia,” the old man said, carefully rubbing the skin of his neck. “Was going to negotiate a new deal, after the old one fell apart. I warned him that contracts were better than intimidation, but he never listens to anyone but himself.”

  “Where are they?” Hall asked in a voice that only sounded friendly when you had heard the alternative earlier.

  “He has an office downtown,” the man said. “I have the address in my card-reader.”

  He started to reach for his pocket and froze like a rabbit when Hall tensed. He moved much more cautiously, in an elaborate pantomime, withdrawing it and bringing it live.

  “Here,” he turned it around for them to read.

  “Good enough,” Hall said after a moment. “I need the keys to your vehicle.”

  “What?” the man’s anger suddenly bubbled back to the surface.

  Kyriaki stepped close enough to get the owner’s attention. She showed him her own identcard.

  “This is a criminal investigation,” she said simply. “You can assist it or become an accessory to the crimes I have already witnessed here. Your choice, citizen.”

  Having a giant killer like Hall handy did wonders to compel obe
dience. The manager pulled a key ring from his front pocket and handed it to her without a word.

  “Bartholomew,” the man said over his shoulder. “Show her where you parked it.”

  Hall surprised her by ignoring the owner and following the lead bouncer without a single glance back. Kyriaki followed, giving Dave the keys.

  Back out into the alley, they walked around a corner to a private parking lot, where Bartholomew approached a sports car, an actual land vehicle that ran on black tires.

  “Thank you,” Hall said to the man as he pressed a button and the vehicle’s alarm system sent back a welcoming chirp.

  Bartholomew left like he had been shot out of a cannon.

  Hall turned to study her. He still had his sword. She had her stunner.

  They were alone in the lot.

  It wasn’t remotely a fair fight, if the man wanted to kill her. And they both knew it.

  “You’re the assassin I’ve been hunting since Dominion Prime,” she said simply.

  Hall surprised her by shrugging eloquently.

  “That, Inspector, is a very philosophical topic to attempt,” he said in a voice that sounded more like a college professor than a Caelon trooper. “In some ways, you are correct. In others, you are not.”

  “How is it possible to be both?” she demanded. “You killed the Dominator. And would have completely escaped justice, but for sheerest luck.”

  Hall stared at her for a long moment. Made some mental calculation.

  “Because I was the Dominator, Inspector,” he said finally. “I woke up one morning after twenty-some years and decided I wanted more out of life, so I faked my own death, as they subsequently termed it. Vanished into the night, leaving only a letter to my wife and another to the head of the Solar Party. Told them I was done and wasn’t coming back.”

  Kyriaki sucked a hard breath in. His raw emotions were shallow enough that she could detect the truth of the words.

  “Does Valentinian know?” she finally demanded, unsure of her own emotions right now.

  “He does not,” Hall admitted. “Nobody does but my wife, and perhaps a few dozen officials on Dominion Prime. And now you.”

  She could take the man in. And prove his story one way or the other. Dave Hall would be executed for it.