Whatever it was, it had to be something exceptionally valuable, at least as far as M-H security was concerned. How else to justify the substantial life premium to be paid out in the event of his live capture?
Roon sighed. She felt as if she was trying to put together a puzzle with only the framing pieces. Sure, she knew where the picture began and ended, but what it contained was anybody’s guess, including her own.
Perhaps that was why her eyes kept drifting to the top of the file, toward the security photo accompanying it. Somehow she felt there was more to glean from it than the scant information she had been given. She tried to remind herself she dealt in cold, hard facts, not the abstract. And yet, without access to the former, could she afford to ignore anything that might give her some measure of insight into the man and his motives? (Or, in Fenton’s case, the lack thereof?)
In his face she saw none of the hallmarks of the typical corporate criminal. There was none of the studied heartlessness of the hired hit man; none of the shifty-eyed chicanery of a corporate spy on the take; not even the blind rage of the aggrieved employee striking back at the system. So, if not any of that, then what? What could have driven him to risk drawing the wrath of one of the most resource-rich conglomerates in the Sovereign Corporate Systems?
Protection, she realized with an almost blinding flash of clarity. Fenton was protecting something. But what? What could be worth everything it had cost him? His career, his life… everything.
A sudden burst of chatter between Ensign Cassel and Orbital Station Tau’s flight deck shook her out of her speculative funk.
“Approaching vessel, this is M-H Orbital Station Tau requesting identification and authorization. Please acknowledge receipt of transmission, over.”
“Receiving loud and clear, Tau. This is Ensign Ohana Cassel transporting Advocate Roon McNamara, authorization Delta-Delta-Cassel-Five-Six-One-Six-One-Zero-One-Beta-Gamma. Requesting permission to dock and discharge cargo, over.”
Discharge cargo, Roon thought. How charming.
“Roger that, Ensign Cassel. Authorization Delta-Delta-Cassel-Five-Six-One-Six-One-Zero-One-Beta-Gamma confirmed. Proceed according to indicated course, over.”
“Roger, over.”
“Roger, Tau out.”
Ensign Cassel laid into the course indicated on her helm. Moments later they were being drawn into Tau’s executive landing bay. At Ensign Cassel’s okay, Roon gratefully let slip the five-point harness pinning her to the seat. Smoothing her hands down the wrinkled front of her outfit as she stood, she frowned at the result of her efforts. Hopefully her frumpish look wouldn’t cause Fenton to think anything less of his appointed advocate.
Then again, it’s not like he had much of a say in the matter either way.
They were met on the executive landing bay by OS Tau’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Harlan Garrity. For a man who wielded authority in disproportionate quantities to his size—at five-foot-four he had to incline his head to meet Roon’s gaze—Garrity seemed surprisingly tolerant of her presence aboard what he considered to be his station.
“Advocate McNamara,” he greeted her with a nod of his balding, egg-shaped head. She couldn’t help but give the man credit for being either so utterly self-confident or so lacking in self-awareness that he made no attempt to hide the rapid recession of his hairline. “Welcome aboard Orbital Station Tau. Commander Orth would have been here to greet you personally had not other pressing matters demanded his attention.”
“Of course. The job of a commander is never done, I suppose.”
“Indeed. How was your flight?”
“Uneventful,” she responded, “and I say that with the utmost praise for Ensign Cassel.” Beside her, Ensign Cassel stood rigidly at attention. “I do hope someone will make a note of that in her dossier.”
“I shall see to it myself,” Lieutenant Commander Garrity confirmed. He nodded in Ensign Cassel’s direction. “At ease, Ensign.”
Cassel relaxed visibly, though not entirely. “Thank you, sir.”
“Now, Miss McNamara, if you’ll just follow me, I shall show you to your quarters—”
Roon balked as politely as she could. “Actually, Lieutenant Commander, I feel it’s in my client’s best interests if I’m given access to him immediately. I’d like to start planning his defense as soon as possible.”
For a moment she thought she detected a scowl boiling beneath Lieutenant Commander Garrity’s lukewarm features. Just as quickly he flashed a flimsy smile and nodded. “As you will. This way, please.”
After bidding farewell to Ensign Cassel, Roon followed Lieutenant Commander Garrity to the bay’s lift. From there he led her wordlessly through a branching series of corridors that took them deeper and deeper within the station, the antiseptic smell of treated and recycled air ever-present in her nostrils. At length he stopped before an unmarked door guarded by a hulking sergeant. Despite Garrity’s diminutive stature, the sergeant snapped to attention in the presence of his superior and saluted crisply. The unspoken exchange demonstrated the volume of respect Harlan Garrity commanded as executive officer of the station.
“Has the subject regained consciousness?” he asked.
“Regained consciousness?” Roon echoed in surprise.
The sergeant didn’t so much as acknowledge her. It was as though she wasn’t even there. “No, sir.”
Lieutenant Commander Garrity nodded. He gestured for Roon to follow as he walked to a second, unguarded door just a few feet away and pressed his thumb to the biometric reader set into the bulkhead. A light at the top of the reader flashed green and the door whooshed open automatically. Inside, a wall-sized monitor displayed the image of a lone figure slumped awkwardly atop a steel chair affixed to the floor. Other than a combination toilet-sink unit in the corner behind him, the room was empty.
Just like a prison cell, she thought. Which is of course exactly what it was. In the sanitized corporate-speak of her superiors, it was a holding area or—even more inanely—a ‘cooling off’ room. But she knew better.
A gasp caught in Roon’s throat as her eyes focused upon the prisoner. Her client, she reminded herself. Fenton Wilkes. His head had lolled forward at an angle that prevented her from seeing his entire face, but what little of it she could make out was covered in blood. Whatever had happened, his capture clearly had not been free of incident.
Briefly it occurred to her she need no longer worry about the wrinkled state of her clothing. Fenton would be lucky to see anything through that much blood, let alone her rumpled blouse and jacket. Then she was right back in advocate mode, the obvious question springing to her lips. “Why is he unconscious?” she asked sharply. “Why does he look like that?”
Lieutenant Commander Garrity narrowed his eyes, regarding her as if to remind her who was in charge here. Instead, he said simply, “The subject attempted to resist capture. Given that he was in possession of a firearm, I’d say the huntrex pursuing him exercised considerable restraint.”
Roon’s mouth set in a hard line. Save the arguing for the hearing, she reminded herself.
“So, as you can plainly see,” Garrity continued, turning to address her directly, “Mr. Wilkes is in no condition to be interviewed at the moment. Now, if you would like to get settled in, I can have you sent for when he begins to—”
Roon held up a hand, cutting him off midstream.
On the monitor, Fenton was beginning to stir.
03 • THE HUNTREX
Xenecia prowled the confines of her quarters, a caged lioness ready to strike.
She was hungry.
Her blood was up.
She wanted—no, she needed more.
Of course, she was not truly caged. Not like that pathetic specimen locked several decks below. For all intents and purposes, though, she was a restless, starving beast. The hunt had come to fruition too soon. She was a predator without her prey.
It always felt this way after a hunt, no matter how satisfying the resolution.
She had first picked up Fenton’s scent, as it were, some three weeks earlier. He’d been careful to that point. Surprisingly so, for an amateur runner with no criminal history. Going off the grid was no mean feat, yet somehow Fenton Wilkes had accomplished it. He hadn’t accessed his biowire account in months. He hadn’t once succumbed to the temptation of the system’s many sanctioned brothels—the only kind not regularly raided by corporate enforcers. He had not even contacted any family or old acquaintances, easily the most predictably stupid of all the amateur mistakes in the book.
Yet all animals, human or otherwise, have certain biological imperatives that cannot be explained by logic. For Xenecia, it was the hunt. For Fenton, the need to mark his territory.
More pointedly, the need to mark where he had been. The places where he eluded capture.
It was a silly, inexplicably foolish impulse, yet one he apparently found unable to ignore. Call it hubris, call it the human condition—whatever it was, Fenton had bowed to it.
And she had found it.
Anyone who had never been outside the Sovereign Corporate Systems simply would not understand. They would assume the ability to disappear within a given area of space must lie in direct proportion to its size. In fact, unincorporated space and the Sovereign Corporate Systems functioned along a parallel metric: coexistence. Even in unincorporated space, people still had a tendency to gravitate toward one another, to live and work as part of a supportive network that shares resources and provides opportunities to its members. The primary difference, at least for the huntrex, was one of volume.
Simply put, there were far fewer clusters of people to sift through in unincorporated space. Runners rarely made the mistake of retracing their steps, and every waystation eliminated meant one less potential hiding place going forward. As soon as she found the first of Fenton’s marks, Xenecia knew it was only a matter of time.
It was invisible, at least to the naked eye. The barflies verified that a man bearing a striking resemblance to Fenton had recently been seen throwing back the juice. Somewhere, she knew, he had left evidence of his passing in the process.
She checked the place from top to bottom. The tables, the chairs, the glasses, the bar itself. Even the disgusting bathroom. Every visible inch to no avail.
It was only on her way out that she happened upon a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the cracked, filthy sink. That’s when she saw it. A place to look upon oneself. A place to reflect, both literally and figuratively. A place to leave a mark unseen by all but he who made it.
One quick puff of breath was all it took. There, on the bottom right corner of the glass, a familiar set of initials appeared beneath the fog: FJW.
Fenton. James. Wilkes.
A simple hack of the station’s manifest was all it took to confirm no one aboard went by those initials. From there she called in favors across the system, establishing a triangulation pattern that gave her the unique insight she needed to track Fenton to his next most logical hiding place. She still wasn’t sure how Quint had managed to track her, but it was a moot point. He was wounded, two of his posse were dead, and she had secured the bounty. All that was left was to collect the payout—including the hefty premium for bringing him in alive.
Or so she thought.
The first clue something was amiss came in the form of a strident knocking against the door of her quarters. Breaking her stride, Xenecia eyed it suspiciously. This did not augur well, she knew. Still, she had little choice in the matter. If she didn’t answer they would invite themselves in eventually, one way or the other. Nothing about her credentials guaranteed her privacy while quartered aboard the station, after all.
“A moment,” she declared in a tone loud enough to be heard through the door. She may not have been able to deny them, but she could at least delay them. Let whoever it was imagine her making herself decent in preparation to receive the unexpected caller.
“Of course, ma’am,” came a reedy voice from the other side of the door.
Ma’am. How novel.
Suppressing a feral smile, Xenecia counted to ten in her native tongue, then strode to the door. It slid open upon her command, revealing a slender young man clad in the ubiquitous high-collared, hunter green uniform of the M-H corporate fleet. She did not recognize him, yet she had the immediate impression he was anything but another of the several hundred interchangeable young ensigns assigned to work the station and wipe the officers’ asses. That much was evident when she opened the door. Any other wet-behind-the-ears junior officer would have had trouble holding tight their bowels when she all but snarled, “Well?” She towered over him by nearly a full foot, after all. To reach out and twist his head from his spinal column would have required the most minimal of efforts, something he must have known if not from instinct alone.
Instead of wavering, however, he stood fast. The young officer even smiled. “Your presence has been requested in the Commander’s quarters.”
Xenecia narrowed her eyes appraisingly. “I believe I shall pass. Be sure to give Commander Orth my regards.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do, ma’am,” he said before she could wave the door closed. “My orders are clear.”
“And your name is?”
“Ensign Daniel Pruitt, ma’am.”
Lifting a brow, Xenecia committed the young ensign’s face to memory. “Very well. You may lead the way, then.”
As always, her transit through the station commanded its fair share of gasps and whispers. Clutches of uniformed personnel parted before Xenecia and her escort as if separated by magnetic force. More than a few were reduced to slack-jawed stares at the mere sight of her. Striking though her features were, however, this was not the cause of the wonderment Xenecia left in her wake. These humans were of a generation weaned on tales of the peerless savagery of Shih’rahi resistance to the attempted occupation of their homeworld by the Tyroshi Menace.
Of course, she was but a youngling when all that transpired. Not that she had any intention of reminding them of that fact. In their eyes she was as fearsome as she was exotic.
She found the combination quite agreeable.
Yet her reputation, imagined or otherwise, preceded her only so far. Namely, to the foot of the Commander’s quarters.
Ensign Pruitt thumbed the intercom beside the door. “Commander? I have the huntrex for you, as ordered.”
“Very good, Ensign. Send her in. You may return to your duties.”
The door opened. Pruitt lifted his hand, gesturing her forward. Studying his features one last time, she nodded. He turned and strode down the corridor, his cadence crisp and smart as he rounded the corner.
Entering the Commander’s quarters, she found Knolan Orth seated at his desk. Like the man himself, it was simple and standard issue, lacking the ostentatious affect so prevalent among the higher echelons of the Morgenthau-Hale corporate hierarchy. At sixty-four, he was lean and spry, with bright chestnut eyes set above a slightly crooked nose—evidence of a break dating back many years—and a well managed silver goatee. He was not known to suffer fools gladly, yet bore a reputation for being among the more paternalistic ranking officers in the corporate fleet. He preferred to write in longhand rather than rely on the ubiquitous (and notoriously temperamental) flexpads. True to form, he was busily drafting an executive summary of Fenton’s capture. One of his subordinates would no doubt be required to digitally transcribe the report before it could be distributed to his superiors at Morgenthau-Hale corporate headquarters. “Greetings, Xenecia of Shih’ra,” he said without lifting his head as she approached the desk. “Have a seat.”
“Commander Orth.” She clasped her hands behind her back in deference to the formal greeting but remained upright despite the invitation. “I would prefer to stand.”
Commander Orth’s pen went still. He lifted his head to regard the huntrex. Clearly he was as unaccustomed to having his will denied as she was to taking orders. “Very well,” he said after a short beat. He
laid the pen down to retrieve a seldom-used flexpad from the corner of his desk. “I’ve been going over the incident report regarding the capture of Fenton Wilkes, and I must say, I have some concerns regarding your methods.”
Xenecia’s jaw tightened imperceptibly. “Those are not words I am fond of hearing, Commander.”
“Believe me, I am no more fond of saying them. Yet the fact remains Mr. Wilkes sustained significant cranial damage during the course of your apprehending him.”
“He was in possession of a weapon.”
“Ah, yes…” He scrolled his finger down the screen of the flexpad. “A weapon I understand he came into possession of when you lost control of the subject during a confrontation with one Quint Samuels and his associates.”
“A regrettable turn of events, but unavoidable. I had already taken the subject into custody when Quint initiated the confrontation. He was trying to poach my bounty.”
“Regrettable?” Commander Orth fixed her with what, even for him, was a disturbingly acute stare. “Three men are dead—an innocent civilian and two men bearing security credentials issued under the auspices of Morgenthau-Hale—and you call that regrettable?”
Xenecia stopped just short of a visible double-take. “Commander?”
“Oh yes,” he said in answer of the unasked question hanging between them. “Quint Samuels and his men were all credentialed security personnel, just as you yourself are.” He returned the flexpad to its small corner of the desk, tenting his fingers before him. “Did he or his men announce themselves as such?”
“No, Commander.”
“Did you?”
She suspected he already knew the answer. “No, Commander,” she said flatly. “I did not see the need.”
The Lazarus Particle Page 2