Even as Mari’s brain hummed, Heron looked up, over her shoulder, and she felt Kellen’s approach from that direction. Oh, thank God—something to distract her. She sure needed it.
Mari reached out when Kellen handed her drink down, and she thanked him kindly for the fizzy, rummed coffee. She pulled a swig off the top and licked the froth from her upper lip. Almost immediately, she could feel the double hit of caffeine and booze streak down her nerves. Settled them a smidge.
Kellen seated himself on the low cushion, his long legs spiking up at the knee. He had a beer in his hand, but he didn’t drink any of it right away. Instead, he took his Stetson off and set it, brim up, by his hip. He avoided the increasingly vigorous fellatio to his right, which took some doing the louder those folks got. But Mari wasn’t looking at them anymore either. The distraction had worked: she studied Kellen with a frown.
She didn’t know Kellen well, had only just met him, but he didn’t seem at all comfortable. He’d been okay in the airlock, but the higher this lift got, the more fidgety he got. Mari watched him palm one hand over his jeans-clad knee. Starched jeans. White-knuckled hand.
“Can’t help but noticing you’re gussied up fine, Kellen. Got big plans tonight?”
He looked down at his drink. Mari’d thought to ease Kellen’s nerves, but he seemed even more edgy at her words. He didn’t reply for a long time, and even when he did, his voice was so low, Mari wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. She tucked her feet up closer on her cushion and leaned toward him. Not because doing so brought her that much closer to Heron. Nope, not because of that at all.
“Word came in from our UNAN Senate contact. Meetin’ with her tonight, on vid. I got to tell her what happened.” Kellen looked right at her when he said it, and there wasn’t any mistaking his words.
Mari froze. “Wait, the UNAN Senate knew about this job? In advance?”
Kellen nodded. “Government’s a big thing, and not all the parts talk to each other as much as they should. Our contact helped y’all confirm that the Daniel Neko you were targeting was, in fact, the mech-clone.”
But he hadn’t been. So had this UNAN contact been part of the betrayal, or had the federales somehow been suckered, too? Mari couldn’t see how, but this day was making her paranoid. She felt like she was standing on quicksand. Everything she thought she knew kept shifting and sucking her down.
Heron settled a hand on the small of her back, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Kellen. “You want me to do it, buddy?”
Kellen shook his head, and a shock of dark blond hair fell over his forehead. He didn’t fight it off. “Nah. Seeing my face might make it all go down better. Plus, if she’s really pissed, she ain’t likely to come down too hard on me, our history being what it is. Better she don’t get a gander at Mari, though. Not for a long time.”
Mari squirmed away from Heron’s hand and reared back, full of questions.
Heron preempted them. “I should explain. Mari, I established a lot of go switches for our job. I even contacted Daniel Neko’s wife, and she confirmed that her husband, her whole-organic husband, was right there in the capital with her. On that assurance, I let us proceed. All I can figure is that the mech-clone must be unholy good, better than any we’ve seen before, if it was sleeping next to a woman and she didn’t know it wasn’t her husband.”
“No shit.” She swallowed. “But…does she know now? What I did?”
“That’s what Kellen’s going to do tonight. He’s going to tell her.”
Mari sucked in a breath. “Oh, no. That ain’t right. I’ll do it, Kellen. Seriously, you don’t need to take the fall for me. Oh, lordy hell, she’s going to be a wreck.” Mari’d gotten bad news about her mom dying, though most of that part of her life was a blur now. She could recall what the message looked like clearer than how she’d felt. Same with hearing that Dad was missing, presumed captured. Those memories just left her cold and confused. She had to imagine that losing a spouse was worse. Seriously, loving somebody enough to hitch fates with them was rare enough these days, but then to have it all taken away… God. She couldn’t even swallow the thought.
Kellen drew on his longneck, then pressed his lips together, sucking the beer drops off. He moved his shoulders against the cushion like he was trying to get comfortable. Wasn’t any hope for it, though. “Actually, she might not be. Angela is a special kind of tough. It won’t be easy on her, but I can guarantee it won’t be what you’re imagining, Miss Mari.”
“Good.” She almost relaxed against the synthfiber cushion, almost sucked on her rummed coffee, but a thought walloped her upside the head. “No. Wait. Angela Neko?”
“Yup.”
“Senator Angela Neko?” How had she not put that together before? Neko wasn’t the most common name on the planet, after all. How many could there be?
“You see part of the problem,” said Heron.
“Oh, holy hell.” Mari wilted against the cushion, but not out of relief. Hot coffee splashed on her wrist, missing the fancy silk by a hair. “That puppeteer said I’d fucked up, but I didn’t grasp the…the depth of fuckitude till just now. Senator Neko was all over the vids a couple weeks back, saying how UNAN and Texas are getting close to a compromise. Peace, after all this blood. But now…does she know who wrote our contract? What if she blames all this on the secessionists? What if…” Mari choked. “Did I just start a war?”
“We. Always we.” Heron reached out and squeezed her hand. “And I certainly hope not.”
Chapter 9
Mari didn’t know what else to say. She huddled over her rummed coffee. The grunting of the threesome at the other end of the sofa, the low hum of the nano ads, and the chatter of other patrons all pressed in on her ears, but the clamor in her thoughts drowned out actual sounds. She studied Kellen and Heron in her periphery but didn’t have the courage to ask any other questions.
Which freaked her out a bit. The fear. She didn’t really know what to do with fear. She hadn’t felt true fear since…when? Not today, when it probably would have been useful. Not when those mercs had busted into Heron’s flat. Not even when the drones had swooped in on them in the Pentarc. Now that she thought about it, Corpus Christi was probably the last time she’d been afraid of anything. Jobbing had sure calloused up her nerve.
But she was scared shitless now. And not even at the thought that she might get caught and punished for what she’d done, for killing poor Angela Neko’s husband. No, what scared her when nothing else had was the swift, charged look Heron and Kellen had shared. She’d seen it, and it turned her blood to pure ice.
This kind of craziness was nothing new to them. They were ready to take the fall. For her or with her. And it didn’t matter to them whether the sin was murdering one man or destabilizing peace for the entire region. These two were set on their course. She could hear it in their voices, see it in their faces. Kellen for love of his captain, and Heron…why, exactly?
For love of her?
That was the second scariest thought she’d had all day, and lord, had it been a day.
The platform settled at the base-level promenade of the station, and the other passengers stood up, gathered their stuff. When Mari got to her feet, she was careful not to push off too hard against the floor. Equal and opposite reaction, right? But even standing up felt…fine. Normal. Weird.
She’d expected low gravity to be more pronounced on a space station, like people floating or the rum in her mug forming perfect spheres she’d have to catch with her tongue. But the first thing Mari noticed about this particular station was that there wasn’t anything to notice.
“Whoa. Gravity.” Little kids used the exact same tone when pointing out fire trucks on the road.
Heron rolled his eyes. “Another secret she insists on keeping. The queen is proud of her engineered singularity, but not enough to tell the downland governments about it. There’s
no way you could have known.”
Singularity. As in mini black hole. That would explain not only the gravity but also some of the huge amounts of power this station was able to generate. It wasn’t all nanotubes and solar radiation harnesses. Cool, but also intimidating. Sciency folk had been trying to harness singularities for decades, but this queen—or the people working for her—had apparently accomplished the impossible. And even more unbelievable, had kept it out of the newsfeeds.
“More likely she don’t want the downland militaries to know about it,” added Kellen. “She’s kind of a pacifist, which is why she calls herself ‘queen’ instead of ‘beloved overlord’ or ‘benevolent dictator.’”
“Or captain.” Heron said that with a smile, poking fun at himself but also as if he knew exactly how the queen’s politics might freak out a gun girl like Mari. Warning taken. She was just happy she’d come up here unarmed. She could, of course, take most unaltered folk apart without using any weapons at all, but packing anything visible on this station was like to get her sent down. Or worse. She didn’t mean to advertise her more lethal skill set here.
Just one more thing that made her nervouser than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but she tried her best to look calm. Blend in.
Other passengers disembarked and poured out over the promenade, scattering like bugs when a light comes on. Metal-jacketed tubes twisted off from the core like tentacles. She counted ten, but they all looked exactly the same. They even had identical rows of polycarbon doors along either side, stretching off farther than she could see. All of them were wall-to-wall crammed with free-fae ads: moving, cajoling, lights and music and texture and chaos. Some reached out and touched potential customers, but the passengers didn’t seem to mind. A few stroked back.
Each tube led to a different section, presumably, because signs over the entrances indicated shipping, receiving, transactions, entertainment, lodging, corporate, and so on. Those signs were printed in Mandarin, English, Farsi, and some binary numeral thing that looked about as far from a real language as Mari could imagine. There wasn’t a map anywhere she could see, but everybody seemed to know where they wanted to go. Chiba Station’s promenade looked like it had been pulled out of Mari’s most chaotic, unsettling, and dirty dreams.
The sex worker from the platform ducked into the entertainment tube, followed by a gaggle of folks. Good for him.
The glut of free-fae graffiti gave the whole area a cool blue tint, but that was the only illumination. Mari wondered why a station with this much latent power would skimp on the lights. Unless, of course, the queen here just liked having the free-fae hang out all over her walls. It was possible the decision had nothing to do with logic, but in Mari’s experience, folks with IQs high enough to play at quantum physics didn’t do illogical things.
“I sent y’all the berth number of the med lab,” Kellen said, shifting his boots on the platform, hesitating to step off. He looked so out of place, it might have been worth pointing out…if he hadn’t also looked like a man going to his execution. “It’s down the med tube over yonder, but y’all probably want to grab a starside berth in lodgings for the night. I’ll be, uh, off to corporate. And remember what I said: you take care of my captain, Miss Mari. I got a lot invested in that fool head of his.”
Even when he was tense and distraught, Kellen could roll out a smile. A disarming one, too.
“Promise.” She ought to tell him, again, to stay the hell here and let her do the apologizing. It’d been her mistake, after all. But she couldn’t make the words come out. Coward.
“Ten tomorrow, then.”
Kellen tipped his black hat, and she couldn’t see his face beneath the wide brim. Then he went off to break the bad news to Angela Neko. For a moment, Mari damn near followed him, but then Heron’s hand clasped hers.
“He wasn’t lying,” Heron told her. “Angela trusts him. If she feels a need for vengeance, she won’t take it out on him.”
“She’ll come lookin’ for me.” Mari swallowed. “And she ought to.”
“Nobody’s going to find you. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
His words warmed the whole goddamned space-cold station. Startled her a bit. She looked up at him.
And caught him staring back at her. The look on his face turned the air molten. She could hardly breathe. His mouth pressed into a line, and his eyebrows got all fierce—that wasn’t annoyance or disapproval. It was sincerity, devotion. Possession.
She moistened her lips. “That in our contract, partner? The keeping me safe thing?”
“Not currently. Shall we renegotiate?” He peeled his gaze off her and watched Kellen waltz off until the cowboy disappeared around a bend.
She tightened her fingers around his. With all the flirting she’d been doing, she hoped he wouldn’t misinterpret that touch. Wouldn’t think it was a little thing, this burn she had for him.
“How about we agree to terms from here on out, just the two of us?” Heron wasn’t even looking at her. “I mean, without Texas or the UNAN or any third party intruding.”
Sounded intimate. She liked it.
They hadn’t stepped off like everybody else, and now the platform started to rise. Mari was fixing to get off, but Heron drew her back down to the cushion, and she folded herself into it again. Comfortable. Protected. He couldn’t make all her wibble go away, but it was sure sweet he tried.
“The keeping me safe at all times and from all threats would have to be in there,” she said. “Lord knows a girl doesn’t want to worry about danger and shit when she’s trying to blow somethin’ up.”
“Done.”
“Also, ain’t fair for you to know what I’m thinking while I have to guess what’s in your head. So I’d press for a full-disclosure clause as well.”
“I can’t always read your mind, you know. What happened at the Pentarc was unusual and unexpected. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Pity. “So right now, you ain’t peekin’ up my…”
“No.” He paused. “You make it sound perverse.”
She couldn’t tell whether he liked that or not, but the air on this station sure was getting warm. And he was still holding her hand, sitting real close. That had to be some kind of win. “Nah. I make it sound fun.”
He grimaced, but he didn’t pull away, didn’t make her stop touching him. “You always do.”
The platform ascended into a hole at the roof, and dark encircled them for a moment as they went through to the next level of the station. The low hum of people and music and adverts retreated, replaced by machine sounds more appropriate for a space station. As they went further up, an eerie sort of stillness settled around the elevator shaft. They passed through a level decorated in earthy tones, tasteful, with discreet signs in languages Mari didn’t recognize. Was one Arabic? There might have been music in the distance, but it teased just beyond the reach of her ears.
Each level up had fewer corridors leading off from the elevator shaft, sparser signage, until at last, they passed through a level that had no adverts at all, just pictures. The artistry of free-fae picked out a garden in glowing blue relief, flowers giving way to pale sunlight and an idyll of nature that probably hadn’t ever existed outside of dreams. Sure as shit didn’t exist now, not even in nature sanctuaries like Dakota or Amazonas. The vine pattern on that level twisted in on itself as the platform went up. Watching it made Mari a little sick to her stomach, and she had to force herself to look away. No problem, though; she’d much rather ogle Heron anyhow.
“Hey, partner, you still with me?” She nudged him with her shoulder. His biceps felt unusually tense, but hell, he might be that stressed out all the time.
“Sorry.”
“You thinking deep thoughts?”
“I was parsing the data I retrieved from my brief time in your mind and positing several paths your thoughts might have taken since
then. Lots of maths. See? Knowing my thoughts would be terribly dull.”
“Depends on what you were mathing.” She thought of the binary-looking language above the entertainment tube on that first deck where Kellen had gotten off. Who knew? Maybe there was a math word for fun. One for frisky. For sex.
She snuck a glance at him, not for the first time wondering what he was thinking. He looked so pensive. So serious. She’d always thought him expressionless, but now she knew she just hadn’t been watching close enough. Now she could see he was worried. It was so clear. How could she have known him more than a year and never seen him? Even lately, when she’d started thinking about licking him all over and how nice that might be, she’d still fallen into considering him merely a thing. A pleasure thing, granted.
But he was more than that. Somehow, without her realizing it, he’d become damn near everything. And how did shit like that even happen?
“We’re almost there,” he said.
Mari didn’t reply right away. All that light behind his head reminded her of a halo, and her throat tightened.
“There where? Thought Kellen told us to go to lodgings, but looks to me like we missed our floor.” She looked down, but the lift platform obscured the lower level.
“We will go to lodging later, also to entertainment—I did promise you a night out, but…” He looked uncomfortable. “We received a summons, so we probably ought to visit her first.”
“Her the queen?”
“Yes.”
Mari wished for gum, didn’t have any, and swallowed anyhow. A wad of panic clogged her throat. “Uh, I gather you’re friends with the queen and all, and I don’t have anything against her, don’t get me wrong, but that don’t mean I need to meet her. I’m not exactly royal court material.”
Heron tilted his head slightly, like he was sighting her in. “Didn’t I say you look beautiful?”
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