Finder

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Not technically,” Graf answered as the other two Luceatans crowded into the room.

  Shit, Fergus thought. I’m in trouble.

  “I know you’re Harcourt’s hired assassin sent to kill me,” Gilger said, stepping forward and looming over him. “And now you’re mine.”

  “Hold him still,” Graf said to his men. He pulled a thin sharp knife out of his boot.

  Okay, make that in a lot of trouble, Fergus decided as the Luceatans reached for him.

  Chapter 13

  His body returned to him one agonizing note at a time, as if his mind needed to acknowledge and assimilate each individual blaring arc of pain before the next could join the orchestra. Something hit his face, slamming his head to one side. “Open your eyes, damn you,” a voice said. Gilger. So he hadn’t hurt himself in some miraculous escape he couldn’t remember. Damn.

  Fergus tried to open his eyes, half out of determination to do it, half out of fear of being struck again, and finally managed. The blurry world swam in front of him.

  He was upright in a chair. For all the pain, his body felt remote, like his brain was merely an audience to, rather than the conductor of, its screaming chorus. His bloodied hands were loosely bound to the chair’s armrests, but it hardly mattered. No matter how furiously he demanded a shake, a twitch, even one miniscule tremor of a fingertip, his hands remained resolutely unreachable. Some sort of paralytic drug, he decided. At least he could breathe, although the ladder of pain up and down his chest meant he didn’t dare try to do it with any enthusiasm.

  “Mr. Anders,” Gilger said, “is still with us because he’s going to give us a hand with our Wheel problem.”

  Fergus tried to work his lips, get that simplest of F-words out between them, but he managed little more than numbly rolling spittle down his own chin. Good job, Fergus. Dignified resistance, there.

  Gilger was walking away toward a large black backdrop. Startled, Fergus realized it was the forward screen of Venetia’s Sword. He was on the bridge. The bridge! If only he weren’t tied up, paralyzed, and full of broken bones and ruptured things.

  He convinced his eyeballs to cooperate long enough to focus on the screen. Venetia’s Sword must still have been parked beside Gilgerstone because he could see Harcourt’s blockade arrayed in the distance, looking as much like solid a wall as it had before. Hope began to rise in him that despite the vicious beating and drugging, he hadn’t been out very long. He tried to remember how much time he’d had left when he’d set out with Blue Eight, but his head hurt, and trying to count back to when he’d left Leakytown with Mari made his brain choke on mathematical bile.

  Gilger sat in the captain’s seat and swiveled around to look at Fergus. “You’re lucky Graf didn’t cut you up despite my orders. The only thing he hates more than damned soulless clones are Marsies, and I don’t blame him for that one bit,” he said. “The arrogance of you people amazes me, thinking you can go wherever you want and interfere with the social order and a man’s business with impunity, as if you own the universe.”

  The defiance on Fergus’s face must’ve shown, because Gilger leaned forward, fingers interlaced on one knee. “It’s not like you made it hard to add up,” he said. “Only a Marsie would have hair such a ridiculous shade of red.”

  Fergus blinked. He thinks I’m from Mars because I have red hair? Then: My hair is red? The nanites he’d used to color it black prior to the Governor’s hearing should have lasted around forty-eight hours, just about the same window of time before the handshake expired.

  His reflection on the shiny surface of the console beside him showed him an almost unrecognizably swollen and bruised face, his hair and beard red streaked with a few fading remnants of black.

  Shit.

  It hit him in that instant that, for the first time, he was going to lose.

  “Well,” Gilger said. “I guess we’d better get on with this. Try to look pretty in the background for me, okay?” He turned around. “Marrick, make the call.”

  His pilot ran his hands over his console, then nodded. “All comm scramblers are off and the channel’s open, sir. Public local broadcast.”

  Gilger stood up, tugged on the collar of his tunic to make sure it was straight, and then clasped his hands behind his back like an elder statesman. “This is Arum Gilger with an open message to Henry Harcourt. I have something of yours that you may want back.”

  A long few minutes passed. Fergus flexed his lips, breathing gently through them, trying to take back by force at least his power of speech. His feet, somewhere kilometers below, had begun to tingle and itch. I wonder, he thought, if they took into account my size when they dosed me with the paralytic? Certainly no one had been worried he’d regain control of his physical body, or they’d have tied him down better. As it was, the ties seemed more to keep him from falling out of his chair than running away.

  Not that he was running anywhere. If that tingling spreads, he thought, I can surprise the shit out of them by suddenly flopping over.

  Gilger began shifting impatiently from foot to foot. Finally he spoke up. “The channel is open, right, Marrick? I’d have expec—”

  “Response incoming, sir,” his pilot interrupted.

  “Is there a visual?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then display it,” Gilger growled.

  The view switched from the blockade to the familiar face of Harcourt, in his chair by the fireplace, leaning nonchalantly on one armrest. “Gilger,” he said. His eyes briefly flitted to Fergus, but his expression didn’t change.

  “I have something of yours,” Gilger said. “And I want to know what it’s worth to you to get back.”

  Harcourt shrugged. “Mr. Anders is no concern of mine. His machine didn’t even work.”

  “We both know that was a sham.”

  “Alas for the optimistic investor, not all new technologies pan out,” Harcourt said. The nonchalance didn’t crack, but Fergus knew better than to read anything into that; he would have played it the same way. There was too much on the line.

  “The arrogance you have, to think you can introduce me to your assassin right in front of everyone, in public, as if you have nothing to fear from me.” Gilger strode back to Fergus and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his face up toward the screen. “And yet here’s your assassin right here. He failed.”

  “If he was my assassin,” Harcourt said, “and he failed, what makes you think I’d want him back?”

  “Oh, I don’t expect you want this piece of trash,” Gilger said. “I just wanted you to know that I broke him. And since you were thoughtful enough to send your fellow Martian trash after me, I thought I’d repay the compliment and send my own team to Mars for you. Or rather, for your brat.”

  Harcourt’s expression didn’t overtly change, but the careful ease was gone. “Arum . . .”

  “Make your calls, Harcourt,” Gilger interrupted, “but make them quickly. You’ve got one hour to get that blockade out of my way and three to stand down completely if you ever want to see her again. You never should have gotten in my way, much less left your red-sand shithole in the first place.”

  Gilger made a gesture across his throat, and Marrick cut the connection.

  One hour wasn’t enough time to get a message to Mars and back, even paying absolute premium jump-transfer packet rates. Harcourt would have to bounce the call through Crossroads to Haudernelle, then take the long six-step back to Jupiter, which was the nearest active-FTL transmitter to Mars. In the meantime he’d have to pull back and stand down until he heard back, giving Gilger time to cement every possible advantage. That was the same calculation Cernee’s security chief Katra had made back during that first ambush at Mezzanine Rock, Fergus realized, and the trap she’d spared the Governor from at the cost of her own life. Harcourt had no such easy way out.

  Forty-two deeply boring and equally tense m
inutes later, the blockade began to spread out, backing off slowly. Shit, Fergus thought. He moved his lips, managed something halfway between a stuttering exhalation and an actual word. He couldn’t imagine Gilger had much use for him now that he’d made his point.

  Graf must have been thinking the same thing. He nodded his head toward Fergus. “Can I finish this?”

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Gilger said. “Get us underway before that Marsie asshole finds a new way to make problems for us. Call up Scikan and Thord to deal with him. You get down to the cargo bay and make sure the shuttle is ready.”

  “Yes, sir,” Graf said. He seemed disappointed, but left the bridge.

  Gilger turned to the pilot. “Is Harcourt out of our way yet?”

  “They’re moving aside to give us a passage, sir.”

  “And Blackcans? Is it secured?”

  “Enough, sir. There’s some fighting in the halls, but it’s limited to a few interior areas. Cable-cutter crew is in place and ready.”

  “Good. Have them stand by. Any rats jump hab from the Wheels or get in our way, cut them down. No one gets out.”

  Venetia’s Sword began to move forward, sailing gracefully through the gap in the blockade. Come on, legs—move a little. Let me do something here! Fergus thought. Instead his head flopped forward, chin on his chest. Great.

  The console in front of his chair was an assistant navigator station, locked down but live. He watched the lights flicker across it as Venetia’s Sword’s intelligence processed the pilot’s actions and its own internal systems feedback stream. Little stutters in the lights corresponded to the minutest lags in their acceleration. It was the first indication of the damage that must have done to its mindsystems when it was stolen from the Shipmakers.

  Straining his eyes upward toward the screen, Fergus could see Harcourt’s ships yielding as Venetia’s Sword moved through.

  “They’re falling in behind us, sir,” Marrick said.

  “Let them. If they get too close, fire on them. Take us to where we have a full view of the Wheels and Blackcans.”

  “Almost there, sir. Three minutes. Vinsic’s on the line.”

  Gilger glanced back at Fergus as if just remembering he was there. Then he shrugged as if it didn’t matter. It probably didn’t. “Put audio through to my earpiece,” Gilger said.

  Marrick nodded.

  “Yes?” Gilger said, then, “No. No. Shortly. Well, it’s a bad strategy. I’m not concerned about the Governor. No. No. If you’re that worried about it, you go deal with it.” There was a long pause. “I’ll be at Mezz in a few hours and will evaluate the situation for myself. Yeah.”

  Gilger made a face, then punched a button on his chair arm and threw his headset down. “He thinks he can dictate to me?” he asked. “I don’t care if he’s dying; I’m doing this my way. If he doesn’t like it, he can just die faster.”

  Vinsic was dying? Now that was interesting.

  “We’re there, sir,” Marrick said. “Scikan and Thord are on their way up.”

  Ahead of them, Blackcans loomed large. Harcourt’s people had backed away, forming a last defensive line between Blackcans and the Wheels. “Tell our cutting crews to go,” Gilger said.

  A moment later, Marrick looked up. “Blackcans is severed from the Halo.”

  Gilger touched his own comm. “Graf, launch the shuttle.”

  “With pleasure, sir,” Graf’s response came. “Shuttle is away.”

  A large four-man passed underneath Venetia’s Sword on a trajectory toward Blackcans. Nothing got in its way. It pulled up to the end of the hab and set massive docking clamps against it.

  “Shuttle’s locked on, sir,” Marrick said.

  “How’s our control?”

  “Outside comm jamming is playing havoc with our teams, but the ship’s P2P is talking to the shuttle and payload perfectly. Graf is monitoring from the bay.”

  “Well.” Gilger stood up again, brushed imaginary lint from the front of his tunic, and began punching buttons on his arm console. Fergus could see the locked station in front of him responding.

  “Initiating first burn,” Gilger said.

  The shuttle’s engines lit up, far bigger than should have been in a ship of its size. Gilger’s people must have stripped almost the entire interior to wedge engines that big inside. Blackcans, no longer tethered to the rest of the Halo, began to move, accelerating.

  It’s heading straight toward the Wheels, Fergus realized. Shit. The damage a collision could do . . .

  “Setting sequence control to auto,” Gilger said. In front of him, Venetia’s Sword’s computer took over. “How are we doing?”

  “So far, so good. There’s still some instability in our systems, but nothing that’s going to hurt us,” Marrick said.

  “You said you were going to fix it.”

  “Yeah, well, I haven’t had time,” Marrick said. It had the defensive ring of a repeat argument. “I’ll fix it as soon as we’re not busy using the ship.”

  In Fergus’s peripheral vision, two thick-bodied men strode onto the bridge. Scikan and Thord, he thought. I’d recognize those fists and boots anywhere. In fact, he could probably match them up to bruises all over his body.

  “Master Gilger?” one asked.

  Gilger didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Took you long enough,” he said. “Hang on. I don’t want to miss this.”

  Blackcans was moving fast now. Harcourt’s ships were trying to react, but they were hemmed in by Gilger’s two-mans and had to fight their way out of the trap. Some of the Golds were concentrating fire on the Wheel Collective’s dock, met by return fire from the Wheels itself.

  Fergus thought of Mella, the little girl who was afraid of giraffes, and felt his heart breaking into pieces. They’re not going to get out in time, Fergus realized. Unless they can get their suits on fast enough—

  “Payload has been armed,” Marrick announced.

  “They’re going to see this fireball as far away as Crossroads,” Gilger said.

  No! All that time trying to solve the stupid handshake keys only to be stuck here, tied to a chair, watching innocent people die with no power to do anything more than fall forward and bash himself against the console in undignified protest.

  “Impact in ninety seconds,” Marrick said.

  Ninety seconds was a lifetime. Fergus stared down at the console in front of him. Using every muscle he could, he pushed forward until the upper half of his torso tumbled forward and his face smashed into the console. At the crash, one of the Luceatans looked over, chuckled, then returned his rapt gaze to the impending devastation on-screen.

  Fergus had landed right atop the computer interface. He could see, through swollen eyes, the activation button. Carefully he stuck out his tongue—amazed to discover that was one part of his body that didn’t hurt—and pushed it.

  A small yellow light popped into life right under his eye.

  How many seconds did he have left? Speak, Fergus, he told himself. He moved his lips, trying to desperately summon a whisper: “Venetia’s Sword . . .”

  The console blinked at him. Go, go! Go, you idiot!

  “Access security subsystem,” he said, careful not to slur the words, his mouth parched with the effort. “Serial number gee-four-one-four-bee-queue-nine-nine-oh-oh-emm-five. Verbal handshake, ack.”

  Yellow lights lit up across the board.

  “Fifty-five seconds. What the—?” Marrick was looking down at his console.

  This is all I have, but it’s everything, Fergus thought. My memory: Moose, Syrup of figs, Ring Me, Tot, McFadden’s Row, C’ga A⊄, Pluto.

  He whispered into the console. “Squirrel. Mr. Wigs. Rocket. Captain Tater. Yellow Kid. Mr. Veekee.” That left Pluto, a cartoon dog from the old Earth days, and a trap. He smiled. He knew the Shipmakers. “Planet.”

&n
bsp; The yellow lights went green. “Send halt signal to shuttle,” he said. “Disarm payload. Shut down all consoles except this one and deny access to anyone but me.”

  Marrick gave an inarticulate shout as his console went dead, jumping out of his seat to see Fergus’s face lying on the one live console. “It’s him!” he shouted. “He’s done something!”

  Gilger whirled around, his face red with fury. “You two!” He pointed at the Luceatans. “Break his neck. Now.”

  The two enforcers turned, and one wrapped his meaty hand around his other fist, cracking his knuckles. Fergus was still tied to the chair, unable to do much more than twitch in his own defense. But now he had the ship. “Disengage environmental safeties and reverse all shipboard gravity,” he told Venetia’s Sword. “Increase to two-hundred percent.”

  Marrick went airborne, his safety tether stopping him with a sharp jerk midway to the ceiling. Gilger, untethered, slammed into it headfirst, flopping over on his back like a fish gasping for air with his robes flapping wildly around him. The two Luceatans crashed into him a heartbeat later.

  Fergus was tired. Too tired. It was all he could do to keep his face near the console as the gravity tried to pull him toward the ceiling like a favorite broken doll. “Shut down and disengage all remotely controlled systems and communications jammers. Sound interior alarms except on bridge,” he told the ship, grateful his voice, at least, was growing stronger.

  The muted whoop, whoop of the ship’s alarms started up, loud enough even through the bridge’s blast doors to make his teeth ache. “You fucking Marsie!” Gilger shouted. His nose was bleeding, dripping upward in a way Fergus would have found fascinatingly awful if he wasn’t so close to the edge himself.

  “I’m going to have to add a new tattoo for what I’m going to do to you,” one of the Luceatans shouted.

  “Fuck you,” Fergus replied. “Good luck getting to me from up there.”

  On the screen ahead, he could see that Blackcans was still moving, albeit much more slowly; the shuttle engine hadn’t had quite enough juice left to counter its forward momentum. Harcourt would have to stop it himself, but at least it wasn’t going to explode now. I probably ought to warn him, Fergus thought. That would be nice of me.