by Rick Partlow
I closed my eyes and tried to stifle the moan that wanted to escape from somewhere deep in my chest. She was working for my mother.
“When?” Was all I could say in response.
“Did you really think a professional like Van Stry would bother attempting chemical interrogation on me?” Divya laughed again, either pleased with herself or pleased with my cluelessness. “No, she was rightly certain that I would be safeguarded against such things. Instead, after making a show of it for a while, and then finding an excuse to send Calderon and the others out, she made me an offer. She knew exactly what the Sung Brothers were sitting on here, and she played me a recording from Patrice Damiani offering me a position of my own choosing if I made sure she received the location of this planet and not her brother.”
The jets screamed back to life, sending a rumble through the deck and I tried to think of some way, any way out of this. I’d been in more dire situations, and I’d certainly faced more dangerous enemies, but Divya had managed to catch me at just the right time, with just the right version of a knife in the back. And that seemed to make it feel so much worse, somehow…
“Yo, bitch.”
I could turn my head even if I couldn’t move anything else. Kurt Simak was standing in the cockpit hatch, buck naked except for the pistol in his big fist, his long hair still plastered back to his head from the biotic fluid of the auto-doc. I knew he hadn’t been scheduled to come out of it for hours yet, and then I abruptly understood that Kane had seen death coming, because it had to have been him that gave the command to the ship’s computer to start the process of waking Kurt up early. The look on Divya’s face was one of annoyed surprise, like someone out for a nice walk who’d just stepped in a big pile of shit.
She made a move towards the controls, maybe trying to get us in the air so he wouldn’t dare shoot her for fear of crashing the ship. It wasn’t fast enough. The sound of the gunshot was a high-pitched crack that I could feel in my sinuses in the confines of the cockpit, and the impact snapped Divya’s head forward. Her life spilled over the control panel and she slumped against her seat restraints, fingers twitching reflexively towards her goal but coming up just short.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“That’s your story, is it?”
Cowboy wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out across Springbok Canyon towards the distant Edge Mountains, the place where it had all started, over a hundred and fifty years ago with the discovery of the wormhole map. Proxima Centauri was setting over the canyon and the stretched-out rays bathed the landscape in a beautiful, red-gold glow. I didn’t know why Cowboy had chosen to meet for the debrief on Hermes, except that it was where Bobbi and Sanders spent their down time, and I really had no clue why he’d dragged me way outside Sanctuary City to have our after-action report in person. Unless he was planning on killing me somewhere nice and secluded.
“That’s what happened,” I confirmed, trying not to let my hand stray too close to my shoulder holster. Even after the upgrades I’d had, Cowboy could be on me before the weapon cleared my jacket and he could stick that pistol up my ass sideways if he wanted to.
He was a tall, rangy man with brown hair swept back into a pony tail, and a rugged, craggy face tanned and weathered by dozens of worlds. His black jacket and gloves were real leather, probably hand-made in some colony craft shop from an actual animal, rather than grown in a vat and sold in a boutique on Earth for premium prices. The holster at his waist was real leather as well, and the rocket pistol that filled it was heavy iron, made about the same time those first explorers set foot on Hermes. It was an antique compared to mine, but I had no doubt it was just as deadly despite its age.
“So, you managed to catch up to the Cultist lighter before they got to minimum safe jump range,” he restated the report I’d given him, “then disabled their engines and boarded her to try to find this mineral scout captain…”
“But they doubled back on us,” I repeated, using every trick I’d learned to make my voice stress, heartbeat and respiration consistent. “They sent a squad back to the auxiliary repair dock where we’d moored the Nomad and tried to take her. I left Kurt, Kane and Divya on the ship for security, and they managed to stop the attempt, but Kane and Divya were both killed.” I paused, not having to affect the stab of pain I felt at the thought of Kane’s death. At least Vilberg had made it, after a few days in the auto-doc.
“We cleaned out the rest of the Cult crew, including their High Priest, but they killed Marquette, the mineral scout, before we could get to him.” I shrugged. “I guess they decided if they couldn’t have the Predecessor tech, no dirty infidels should have it either.”
“I could check your logs, you know?” He turned away from the failing light, his gunmetal grey eyes piercing me with a discerning stare. “When I gave you that ship, I made sure I could keep tabs on it.”
“Check it,” I invited him, waving in the general direction of the spaceport. “You won’t find anything that contradicts my report.”
Mostly because Kane had hacked the spyware West had left on the ship’s computer well over a year ago and substituted his own programming that let us enter data manually and make the logs say whatever the hell we wanted.
West held his stare for a moment more before shaking his head and grinning ruefully.
“Aw hell,” he muttered. “You accomplished the mission anyway.”
“We always do.”
“And you know,” he went on, the grin morphing into something less pleasant, “we have a general idea of the sector where Marquette was scouting. And we have a shitload of Corporate Council mineral scouts we can send out to survey it. Losing Marquette will slow things down by a couple years, but Monsieur Damiani is a patient man.”
I nodded, knowing he was right. I was only delaying the inevitable, but it was all I could do, for now.
“If that’s it,” I said, “I’d really like to go home.”
“Sure,” he agreed readily. “I’ll call you when we need you again.” That unpleasant grin again. “After all, I know where you live.”
***
It seemed like months since I’d set foot on Demeter, and just the feel of its dirt under my boots took a weight off my shoulders and made my breath come easier. It was nearly midnight local time when we touched down at the port, and I waved a silent goodbye to Victor and Kurt before I climbed into the utility rover and headed for home.
I didn’t call ahead because I was sure Cesar would be asleep and I hoped Sophia would be too. I liked slipping into bed next to her and surprising her when she woke up to find me there. But when I headed down the drive towards our house, I could already see that the exterior floodlights were turned on; and when I got past the stand of oaks that butted up against our backyard, I saw Sophia standing on the concrete pad where she’d parked her rover.
She was darkly beautiful in ways that went beyond the physical, and I felt a familiar pang in my chest at the sight of her…that quickly switched to concern when the glare of the headlights revealed the agitated look on her face and her nervous, fidgeting stance.
Something was wrong.
I pulled the rover up behind hers and got out, circling around the car and taking her in my arms. She was colder than she ought to have been in the autumn night and I could feel her shivering.
“What is it?” I asked, a cold pit in my stomach from the thought that something had happened to our son.
“Sir,” the voice came from the shadows near the back door of the house, and my pistol jumped into my hand almost of its own accord.
“No!” Sophia said, grabbing my arm. “You can’t.” There was fear in her eyes that I hadn’t seen there since the Tahni occupation. “They have Cesar inside.”
I lowered the gun, the cold pit turning into a bottomless chasm. I put the gun back in its holster and turned to where the man’s voice had come from.
“If you’ll come this way please, sir,” he said, as calm as if I hadn’t just been about to shoot him.
He was a big man, pale and hairless, and dressed in a well-fitted dark suit like he was ready for a business meeting. I didn’t see any obvious weapons, but I knew he’d be armed. He held out a hand and I slowly pulled out my pistol and passed it over to him. Normally, I’d have been confident in my ability to fight my way out of almost any situation, but I trusted Sophia’s judgement; if she didn’t think I could take these guys out without putting Cesar in danger, then I wasn’t going to risk it.
When he’d tucked my pistol safely under his dress jacket, the big, bald man pulled open the door and waved me towards it. I looked him in the eye as I passed and saw no emotion at all in that cerulean stare, just cool professionalism. There were two more in the kitchen who looked enough like him to be his twins, or his clones. I had no doubt there were others stationed in places in and around the house where I couldn’t see. There hadn’t been a car in the drive, so I had to guess they’d come in a hopper.
I moved through the kitchen and into the living room, and that was where I found Cesar. He was the spitting image of his mother with his long, dark hair and tanned skin. He was smiling, his dark eyes lighting up when he saw me. He got up from the couch and ran to me, throwing himself into my arms with a joyous ignorance of what was happening.
“Daddy!” He yelled into my ear, his arms squeezing my neck. “I missed you!”
“I missed you too, buddy,” I said, squeezing him tightly.
But my eyes, my entire being, all of my concentration were focused on the woman seated on the chair next to the fireplace. She was tall and slender and as sharp as a scalpel, and she hadn’t aged a day since the last time I’d seen her, during the war. She smoothed at the front of her perfectly tailored, vat-grown grey business suit and smiled at me with all the sincerity she’d learned how to fake over the last few decades.
“It’s been a long time, Tyler,” she said, as shiny and pleasant as a knife in the ribs.
“Hello, Mother,” I said evenly, nodding to her. I could have ranted and screamed and raged, but what was the point? “Why are you here?”
“To see my grandson, of course!” The ebullience was blatantly sarcastic. Then she sobered, looking more serious than I ever remembered. “And because I think we need each other.”
“Really.” It wasn’t quite a snarl, but it wasn’t friendly either.
“You want out of your little arrangement with my brother,” she clarified, “and I just want my brother out. I’m afraid if he gets his hand on Predecessor technology, that might not be possible.” She spread her hands wide, invitingly, trying to look like a mother ready to embrace her son. To me, she seemed more like some brightly-colored spider trying to tempt me onto a web.
“Let’s make a deal.”
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