I kept staring at him for a moment. Then I strode smartly across the room, grabbed Warden by the arm without slowing, and pulled her out into the hallway, slamming the cabin door closed behind us as she did a stumbling pirouette into the head.
“Stop that!” she demanded, pulling her arm away. “McKeown—”
“Tell me that’s not who I think it is,” I growled.
She brushed down the creases in her suit jacket and sniffled. “Who do you think it is?”
“I think it’s Malcolm Sturb.”
“You’d be thinking along the right lines, then.”
I clutched my temples and paced back and forth a few times, although with the lack of space, it was more like turning around on the spot. “Okay. That’s my limit. I’ve had enough. You and your little evil plying bracket support group can meet somewhere else. I’m not working with Malcolm plying Sturb.”
“So Derby was right,” she said, firing the words from her mouth like bullets to my most sensitive parts. “I believed you when you said you were trying to move on from the star pilot lifestyle, but you’re still clinging to the childish hero-villain narrative . . .”
I pointed a finger in her face. “I can tell when you’re trying to do the plying clever-clogs manipulation thing. It’s not going to work this time. Malcolm Sturb is dangerous.”
She stared contemptuously at my finger for a moment, then looked away. “Malcolm Sturb has come a long way since he disbanded the Malmind. You saw it yourself, back on Cantrabargid. He had released most of his cybercollective and begun play-acting a version of himself for tourists.”
“ ’Cos he had to,” I pointed out. “After Quantunneling killed space adventuring. Not out of the goodness of his heart. Don’t tell me he wouldn’t go right back to slapping slave crowns on everyone he met the instant it became financially viable again.”
“Look, I’ve been working closely with Malcolm ever since I started at Salvation Station. He’s been instrumental in getting the tech infrastructure in place.”
I let my head slowly cock to one side as my brain did some quick calculating. “And was he doing this around the time Robert Blaze was exposed to Ecru Death, by any chance?”
She spat out a couple of gasping sighs as her hands wobbled in front of her. She was starting to look as exasperated as me, which was slightly gratifying. “No, he wasn’t, as it happens. He hasn’t shown the slightest inclination to enslave anyone in all the time I’ve known him. I happen to genuinely believe that he’s reformed.”
“Oh, how convincing. A character reference for Hitler. From Satan.”
She fixed me with her glare again. “And need I remind you that this isn’t for me or Malcolm Sturb. It’s for Robert.”
“Robert?”
“Blaze.” She flushed.
I treated myself to an impish smile, followed by a defeated sigh. I was kidding myself by pretending I wasn’t already committed to this, between wanting to save Blaze, meeting my scientist quota, and having signed up for the convention. “All right. Fine. But if he so much as puts his wristwatch within clamping range of my brain, then we’re done.”
“Of course.” She stood up and marched huffily away before I could decide if the conversation was officially over or not.
Back in the passenger cabin, where Malcolm Sturb and Davisham Derby were engaged in a fiercely awkward silence, Warden straightened one of the shutters until it provided a decent-enough surface to project onto, then glanced around. I could tell she was trying to decide if it was worth dimming the lights; my batteries were well overdue for replacing, so probably not.
“Gentlemen,” she said, projecting a blank screen onto the shutter to draw everyone’s attention. “This will be the official briefing for this venture. Some of you may already know each other.” She gave me a pointed look as she emphasized the word some. “But for clarity’s sake, let me make introductions. Davisham Derby is our acquisitions specialist, in charge of the actual physical recovery and movement of the object we seek. He is a highly experienced professional thief.”
“Burglar,” corrected Derby, hoisting his nose in the air for a mighty sniff. “Cat burglar. I sometimes prefer ‘cracksman,’ but I am no mere pincher of rubbishes.”
Malcolm Sturb, who was sitting in the middle of a bench with hands clasped interestedly in his lap, caught my eye with a conspiratorial look and a brief grin of amusement. I replied with a scowl.
“Malcolm Sturb is our tech specialist,” continued Warden. “His role will be managing the equipment we use, and finding a way around the Henderson Tower security system.”
“And he can do that, can he?” I interjected.
“Artificial intelligences were the first thing I learned to control, actually,” said Sturb, with a sudden nervous glee that made words start spilling out of him like turds from a sewage outflow pipe. “Much easier than the organic ones. Principles are actually surprisingly similar. See, it all comes down to isolating the nodes involved in decision making and applying some kind of staple to certain pathways, and actually you probably aren’t that interested right now.” I had been giving him another warning look.
“Lastly, Dashford Pierce.” Warden pronounced my new name with obvious distaste. “The inside man. Jacques McKeown impersonator and, if necessary, getaway pilot.”
“Once! I impersonated Jacques McKeown once. I do not consider myself a ‘Jacques McKeown impersonator.’ ”
“I hardly expect you to put it on your business cards,” said Warden dryly. “But I doubt anyone else could lay claim to the title.”
“This plan is foolhardy,” piped up Derby, who clearly felt he had gone without attention for long enough. “We could insert someone as an attendee or member of staff if we need an insider. None will be under greater scrutiny than the guest of honor.”
“Well, yes, that is a good point,” said Sturb diplomatically. “But on the other hand, no one else would have complete run of the place.” Warden pressed a few buttons on her tablet, and the display was filled with rows of thumbnails. “And no one else would have access to the penthouse level. No one else would have had the chance he had today to take these reconnaissance pictures.”
I squirmed a little in my seat when I noticed that about one-third of every picture was devoted to a blurry green smear that I assumed was the flap on my flight jacket breast pocket.
“Incomplete at best,” groused Derby. “Incomplete views of the exterior. Nothing of the show floor, nothing of the maintenance infrastructure . . . it would only be adequate if we were planning a raid of your jacket pocket.”
“Come on, Mr. Derby, be fair,” said Sturb. “You have to remember, not everyone is a professional thief.”
“Yeah, really,” I said, before realizing who I was agreeing with and reestablishing my threatening stare. “Some of us managed to get through life with honest careers.”
“And what a shining advertisement for the lifestyle you are,” sneered Derby, doodling in the dust on his nearest armrest. Warden sensed a gap in the conversation into which she could lever some relevance. “No matter, we have enough to formulate a plan. During the night, the object is stored in the unlocked meat freezer of the northern penthouse apartment, and Jacques McKeown is being granted use of the southern apartment for the duration of the show. He can let Derby in, and Henderson’s apartment can be accessed from the balcony.”
“Pfuh,” pfuhed Derby. “This is beginning to sound unstimulating in its simplicity.”
“Security will almost certainly be light in the southern apartment if McKeown requests privacy.” Warden pointed out the pictures I’d taken of the apartment in question, which was virtually identically furnished to Henderson’s, minus the star pilot artifacts and omnipresent bodyguards. “The difficulty will be in getting through the northern apartment unnoticed by guards.”
“Just leave that to me,” said Derby. “I know
the object. I know the location of the object. It is practically already in my grasp.”
“Having it in your grasp is one thing,” countered Warden, “bringing it to Salvation Station is another. Mr. Sturb has a solution in mind for that.”
“I’ve been playing around with a portable Quantunnel kit.” Sturb sounded modest, but his excitement was building again. “It’s made from a simple light alloy and I can put a gate together in just under ten minutes. If I can get the parts into the freezer, I can assemble the gate there, and we can theoretically transport the cylinder anywhere in the city via Quantunnel.”
“What?” I piped up. “Can you do that? I thought Quantunnels had to be fixed in place?”
“Do you star pilots actively try to live behind the times, or does it come naturally?” Derby smugly looked around at the others for agreement.
“Mobile Quantunnels are perfectly possible,” said Warden. “They are, however, illegal.”
“Because someone might do what we’re doing,” added Sturb, smiling.
“Which, of course, is of no concern for those of us who live unhampered by the laws of the small minded.” Derby flashed me a devilish grin, and held up his shortened arm, the one with the strange device on the end. “How did you think this worked?”
Despite myself, I was momentarily impressed. “You’ve got a little Quantunnel on the end of your arm.”
He let the cover fall open, and this time, no tool emerged. Instead, the circle at the end of his arm stump was a window looking into a dimly lit storage room with a number of metal shelving units. “I have an assistant prepared to supply me with any tool I might require,” he boasted.
“Hi, everyone,” said a female voice from deep within his arm stump. A slim hand came into view on the other side of the Quantunnel and waved in greeting.
Derby quickly clapped the cover shut again. “A far more intelligent solution than lugging everything about my person.” He self-consciously smoothed his suit. “I simply request tools as required with a system of nonverbal signals.”
“Right, I’m with you. Wiggle your nose for a screwdriver, clench your bum cheeks for a wrench, that sort of thing.” I frowned. “Doesn’t the city council monitor all Quantunnel activity?”
“Well, that’s where it gets really interesting.” Sturb pointed to Derby’s hand. “Tunnels only show up on monitoring at the moment they’re opened, and that one’s continuously open. Not to mention too small for most standard scans to pick up.”
“And the one we intend to use during the heist?” said Warden. “The cylinder is large enough to require at least a human-sized Quantunnel.”
Sturb nodded. “That’s going to be trickier. If we use the Quantunnel to transport the cylinder to anywhere outside Ritsuko City, it’ll light up on monitoring like a Christmas tree. They don’t want you using them to bypass immigration. Now, theoretically, there’s not a lot the police can do about it. They can send units to where the signal is detected, but we could always make a run for it before they arrive. But I’ve been hearing rumors about the new range of top-line Quantunnel detectors that can actually redirect a tunnel as it’s activated, and I’d rather not risk it. Especially if Henderson Tower is paying for additional private Quantunnel security, which they almost certainly are.”
“So what are we going to do?” I said.
“The tunnel will get harder for any monitoring system to notice the smaller the distance between the two points it connects.” Sturb made excited hand gestures like a sign language expert speaking in tongues. “If the exit tunnel is roughly directly above or below the entrance tunnel, physically, they should barely notice it at all, because of the way the standard detection system works. Anyone investigating the theft later could probably trace it, but I should think we’ll be long gone by then.”
“Indeed,” said Warden. “Here’s my proposal. Our inside man can park his ship on the building’s rooftop spaceport. There are no end of plausible reasons why Jacques McKeown might request such a thing. If we place the exit tunnel onboard the ship, we can move the cylinder, fly it away, and be halfway to Salvation by the time anyone notices the theft.”
“Yes, I could fly it away,” I pressed.
Warden swiped across to reveal a poster very much like the one I’d seen in the Henderson Tower lobby. “The convention begins this weekend. It will last for three days, starting on Friday. McKeown will touch down with Derby and Sturb stowing away, to be let out on the night of the theft. That will be Sunday night . . .”
I stiffened myself out of my defeated slump. “No, it plying won’t.”
She blinked. “What is it now?”
“I’m not gonna survive three plying days of a plying meetup for McKeown’s creepy fans,” I said, folding my arms. “I’ll be choking someone to death by Saturday lunchtime. Probably myself. Why can’t we do it on Friday night?”
“You will be expected to leave on Sunday,” said Warden, with her usual patient condescension. “If you disappear before then, suspicion will be raised a lot sooner.”
“Then I’ll just fly us very, very fast,” I said through clenched teeth. I’d given a lot of ground on this whole venture, but I was determined to dig my feet into the last square foot of sod she had left me with.
“Much as I hate to admit it, I agree with the pilot.” Derby smacked his lips to dispel the bitter taste of the words. “Davisham Derby will not skulk in this flying plague pit for two whole nights. All the storage units in the universe couldn’t contain enough hand sanitizer.”
Warden looked to Sturb for support. “Actually, I agree with them.”
“Oh, for plying out loud!” I barked. “Will you stop all this being-reasonable and agreeing-with-me bulltrac? Nobody’s plying fooled!”
Sturb stared at me like a kicked dog, his smile quivering and his eyes like twin distress beacons. “Sorry. I just agree. The convention’s gonna be full of hardcore Jacques McKeown fans who know his work inside and out. One of them’s bound to figure you out eventually if you hang around for too long.”
“Oh yeah!” I turned to Warden. “That as well.”
“Fine,” sighed Warden, defeatedly moving some boxes around on her tablet with a motion similar to flicking a bogey. “Friday. Mr. Sturb will construct the first half of the portable Quantunnel somewhere within this ship. At midnight, Mr. Pierce will escort the others from the ship to his apartment. Mr. Derby will jump from the balcony to the Hendersons’, then use his own discretion to neutralize any resistance and secure the apartment. He will then escort Mr. Sturb to the meat freezer and keep watch while he constructs the second half of the Quantunnel. Meanwhile, Mr. Pierce will return to his ship on foot and prepare to take off and fly to the Black as soon as Mr. Sturb and Mr. Derby have brought the cylinder onboard through the Quantunnel. Is everyone clear?”
“It sounds, to use the common man’s parlance, like a plan,” said Derby, idly buffing his wrist device with his sleeve. “I can only pray that I can stay awake long enough to see it concluded.”
I couldn’t help noticing that Warden’s contribution to the plan was mainly sitting on her arse eating sticky buns while we did all the work, but I didn’t raise the issue, as I knew what she would say, and I’d had quite enough of being made to look stupid in front of everyone. If anything could bring Henderson out of his catatonia, her physical presence would. Either that or cause him to angrily explode with enough force to level the building. “Right. What could go wrong?” I said.
Malcolm Sturb frowned in thought, then fumbled at his top pocket for his smartphone, which he held to his face. “Jimi, what could go wrong?”
“Running simulations,” said a placid, gender-neutral voice in reply. “Identified fifty-seven distinct elements that could go wrong. Sorting in ascending order of likelihood. One. Invasion of the surface by hitherto undiscovered race of underground dwellers. Two . . .”
�
��I wasn’t actually asking,” I said.
Chapter 7
Friday morning saw me in the cockpit of the Neverdie, sitting cross-legged in the pilot’s chair with the detachable keyboard from the computer terminal in my lap.
Frobisher. After I send this, I have to pretend to be Jacques McKeown. There’s probably going to be some talk about how I am him, maybe even something in the news, so I’m sending you this to let you know that I’m totally, totally not really Jacques McKeown, and I’m just pretending to be to get one over on some of his stupid bracket fans.
“What are you doing?” said Warden, right behind me.
“Not making the same mistake a second time.” I gave her a dirty look before returning to the screen.
It’ll all be over by Monday, so until then, I need you to make sure that any brackets who talk about coming after me for being Jacques McKeown know what the score is. Just keep it a secret within the star pilot community for the weekend at least. Thanks. Love to the missus.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” said Warden, perching on the radar scanner and folding her arms casually.
I looked over the draft. “Do what? Ensure we don’t get hunted across space by warrior star pilots with big grudges who just live for the days when they have an excuse to fight something?”
“We were hunted across space by more than just those people last time,” she pointed out.
“Granted, but I’d sooner fight two Xagraboran mammoths than three.” I slapped the Enter key, and a festive little animation of a spaceship zooming into an open mailbox informed me that the mail had been delivered.
Warden clicked her tongue. “You may have burned a bridge there. This will get outside star pilot circles within days, and then the game is over. You may one day have a need to impersonate Jacques McKeown again.”
Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash Page 7