by E. R. Paskey
Her last image of Thabati and his first mate was of the two of them tied to their chairs, cursing Lobai through their gags.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded as the henchmen hustled her through the dark warehouse.
“Quiet,” said one of them, “or you’ll be gagged too.”
That was the last thing she needed. Anna obediently fell silent, but she kept her eyes and ears peeled for anything and everything. As they neared a door, however, one of her captors thrust a black bag over her head. She inhaled sharply, but managed to keep from doing anything other than squeak in surprise.
She did yelp when one of them abruptly picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. Oh, great. Not again. Her heart began to pound in her chest; her breath quickened. Oh, God, I hope there’s not another lake around here.
It was probably irrational—probably—but she couldn’t help the thought.
After what felt like an eternity of being jostled along in such an undignified position, her captor stopped and set her on her feet again. She swayed, readjusting her balance, but her arms were immediately grasped again and they hustled her off down a long hall.
By the time she was pushed through another door into a room that seemed to echo faintly, Anna was thoroughly discombobulated and disoriented. The smell of gasoline and oil assaulted her nose; her brow wrinkled beneath the hood. A garage?
She heard the sound of a hovercar door being opened, and then the strong hands holding her were escorting her into the vehicle. Just before the hovercar door slammed shut, one of them yanked off the hood.
“What the — ” Frizzy-haired and still disoriented, Anna found herself blinking owlishly at Lobai from the backseat of a completely normal hovercar with dark, tinted windows.
He had propped both hands on the head of his cane, and was regarding her with something akin to faint amusement.
Irritation and astonishment vied for chief emotion; she glared at him before tossing her head. “You never did answer my question.”
Lobai needed no reminding; he merely arched a bushy gray eyebrow at her. “Your idea of matters requiring the most pressing answers still astounds me.”
“It’s not that off the wall,” Anna grumbled, scraping a stray lock of hair out of her face with her still-bound hands and tucking it behind her ear. “If you hadn’t thrown me into the lake, I wouldn’t have met Col—Captain Dupree,” she corrected herself, “and I most certainly wouldn’t have ended up here.”
He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, before inclining his head. “Considered from that angle, I suppose your question has merit.”
Anna just looked at him, waiting—not so patiently, she admitted—for him to continue.
Lobai just tapped on the glass separating them from the driver and settled comfortably back into his seat. He nodded to her restraints. “I would remove those, Miss Anna, but I’m not quite confident yet that you won’t attempt bodily harm.”
“Oh, galaxies.” Anna rolled her eyes. “Let me list the many reasons why you might have to worry about that.”
Instead of frowning at her—as she expected, quite frankly—one corner of the old man’s mouth quirked in an impish smile. “You have spirit, dearie. Always admired that in you.” He rested both hands on his cane again. “That’d be why, in case you were wondering, you ended up in that lake. I figured you wouldn’t give up.”
Chapter 35
HE’S LOST HIS MIND. ANNA stared at him, fighting the urge to press back in the corner where her seat met the vehicle’s door. “Of course I couldn’t give up. My options were escape or drown.”
“Which would be where our dear Captain Dupree figured in.” Lobai’s smile widened. “I know something of his character, y’see, and he’s the sort of man who would help a woman like you in that particular situation.”
Anna went very still as the implications of that sank in. “You mean you deliberately chose to throw both of us down there? As opposed to somebody else?” She’d suspected as much, but to have it confirmed…
For the first time, impatience flickered across the old man’s wrinkled face. “Well, of course, I did it on purpose.” He shook his head. “You don’t double-cross business partners on a whim, dearie.”
Had her hands not been bound in front of her, Anna would have folded her arms across her chest. As it was, she fixed him with her best matronly glare. “And was it also your purpose that the two of us should accidentally get married on Plimus after Bear ratted Vik and our ship out to the local police?”
Genuine surprise slackened Lobai’s features, before he broke out into soft chuckles. “No, no,” he held up a beringed hand. “That was never part of the plan. You managed that yourselves, dearie.”
Anna just scowled at him. “Why did Bear rat us out? It would’ve taken Vik a while to find me—you had plenty of time to get away.”
“Ah, but then you and Captain Dupree would have parted ways.” Lobai’s dark eyes glittered. “And that wasn’t part of the plan.”
“You keep mentioning this plan,” Anna said testily. She thought she’d figured part of it out, but none of the rest of the pieces of information she possessed seemed to fit. “Were Scarlet and Lacy’s deaths part of that plan?”
“No.” Lobai took a breath, his face going solemn and grave. “No, they were not.”
“Right. So you expect me to believe you had nothing to do with that?”
“Not a bit. They, like you, were supposed to follow the trail I’d laid out.” His mouth twisted. “Unfortunately, the same men who hired your friend Thabati got to them first. You heard the results.”
The hovercar took a sharp turn, and Anna realized belatedly, that she had forgotten to ask where they were going. One thing at a time. She decided to go for broke—at this point, if he was going to ultimately kill her because she knew too much, a little more information wouldn’t hurt. “Why are you doing this?”
Lobai just met her gaze, his expression cool and mysterious.
Frustrated, Anna waved her bound hands in the air. “We eventually figured out that you’d deliberately betrayed us all so we’d come after you. Colin and I even figured that you’re being coerced somehow into building this device.” She swallowed. “And, obviously, you helped Bear get his son back. But what in the galaxy does this have to do with that guy in the DOJ? And why would you bring that device here?”
“Because it’s safest here at the moment.” Lobai smiled grimly. “They don’t want it going off on Ydris, dearie. Too many politicians, heads of corporations, and their families. It’s big enough that it wouldn’t affect just one faction.”
Anna felt like somebody had just dumped a bucket of ice water over her head. “Then why did you build it in the first place?”
“The DOJ has my wife.”
“You’re married?” Anna squawked. She gaped at the old man, trying to picture him with a family instead of being surrounded by minions he sent off to do his bidding.
Lobai gave her a testy look. “Surely it’s not that hard to fathom.”
“I don’t know … ” Anna sat back in her seat, still staring at him. “There are a lot of rumors floating around the galaxy about you, but I’ve never heard anything about you having a family.”
His face split with a sharp smile. “That’s exactly how I prefer to keep it.” The smile vanished as quickly as it had come. “But now they have my Naoko.”
Shock flooded her system as the implications of this finally sank in—followed quickly by horror. She struggled to find her voice. “They’ve got your wife, so you’re just going to hand over a device they could use to blow up half a planet?!”
“Yes and no.”
When Anna just continued to gape at him incredulously, Lobai gave a short, impatient huff. “I am that callous, dearie, I won’t deny it, but my wife would never let me hear the end of it if I traded half a planet for her life.” His face grew grim. “Even though I would in a heartbe
at.”
Still not seeing the upside of this, Anna thought, fighting the hysteria threatening to rise in her throat.
Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Lobai actually rolled his eyes at her. “Think, dearie,” he said sharply. “Bear and Thabati both were working with and for corrupt individuals inside the Federation. Do I look stupid enough to trust them to return Naoko to me unharmed?”
Now her head was staring to hurt. “There have been entirely too many double-crosses over the past few weeks,” she said grumpily. “I’m going to need a flow chart to keep them all straight.”
It was Lobai’s turn to stare, before his wrinkled face split with a sudden smile. “I see your point.” He lifted one hand off the head of his cane and turned it palm up. “To make a long, rather complicated tale quite short, I managed to work out a deal with a faction of the DOJ I’m reasonably sure is not crooked.” His smile sharpened. “Reasonably.”
Anna’s gaze slid past him to the window as her mind kicked into high gear, busily sorting and processing. “Bear,” she said aloud, the pieces sliding into place. “That’s how you helped him get his son back.”
Lobai dipped his head in a nod.
“And that’s why you’re ‘reasonably’,” Anna made air quotes with her fingers, “sure you’ll get your wife back.”
“Got it in one, dearie. Told you I wanted you for your brains.”
Flattery will get you nowhere, old man, Anna thought, but all she said was, “And you think the ‘non-corrupt’,” she made air quotes with her fingers again, “faction of the DOJ can be trusted with the device?”
“They do possess worse,” Lobai said mildly. “Whether you’re aware of it or not.”
Anna instinctively curled her prosthetic hand into a fist. “Trust me, they’re capable of doing plenty with what they’ve got.”
“Some things aren’t for us to change.” A warning permeated Lobai’s tone. “This would be one of them.”
She scowled at him. “It’s not like I can do anything about it. I just think the galaxy would be better off if that device never existed.”
“On that front, dearie, we are in agreement.”
Questions swirled in Anna’s mind, crowding to the forefront. She glanced at the back of the driver’s head, visible through the glass, before gathering her courage and looking at Lobai again. “What happened to your wife, anyway?”
“She was kidnapped, dearie. That’s what happened.” Before Anna could roll her eyes at him for that astonishingly descriptive statement, he continued, “She was on her way home from visiting our son and his wife, and they spirited her away at the spaceport.”
Son and his wife? Anna was hard-pressed to keep her mouth from dropping open again. When she thought she could speak without her voice squeaking, she ventured cautiously, “I take it the…DOJ…or whoever is behind this doesn’t know where your son and his wife are?” Even I know they’d probably have him by the short and curlies if they took his children. That they hadn’t, that they’d only taken his wife, either meant that he was very close to his wife, or else they couldn’t find his son.
The old man’s smile could have cut glass. “They do not. If I have anything to say about it, it’ll stay that way.”
Even as she nodded in agreement, a horrible realization dawned on Anna. Her mouth went dry; her heart stuttered in her chest before pounding in double-time. He’s telling me too much.
“What’s the matter, dearie? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” Lobai made a show of peering around the backseat of the hovercar before settling his hands on the head of his cane again. “As I myself do not see any such mythical creature, I can only assume you’ve managed to spook yourself.” He arched an impatient gray eyebrow at Anna, but she couldn’t have spoken just then for all the gems in the galaxy.
“Well?” A thread of impatience laced his voice. “Spit it out, dearie.”
“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Her voice sounded raspy; Anna cleared her throat twice before she continued, “Why else would you risk telling me about your family?” Despite her best efforts to maintain an iron control of herself, her voice rose in pitch at the end.
Lobai blinked at her. “Kill you?” He started to cackle, but abruptly checked himself. “Now, why would I go and do a thing like that after all this?” He indicated her presence in the back seat with a wave of his hand. “If I’d wanted to kill you, dearie, I’d have left you with Thabati and his friend. As it stands, you and I are going to help each other.”
Anna just stared at him with narrowed eyes. “Are we?”
“Oh, yes.”
She bit down on the inside of her cheek—almost hard enough to draw blood—before making an abrupt decision. She would trust him—for now. “In that case,” she held out her bound hands, “how about you untie me?”
Lobai considered her for a second before inclining his head in a courtly bow. “A reasonable request.” Producing a pocketknife, he sliced through the ropes binding her hands together. “I trust there’s no need to warn you to behave?”
Anna rubbed her sore wrist with her prosthetic hand. “If we are in fact going to help each other, then no.”
Silence fell over the interior of the hovercar. Anna looked out the window at the shops and houses passing by. As far as she could tell, they were still winding their way through the city, but she had no idea where they were headed.
“I imagine he’ll not thank you for it,” Lobai said abruptly, “but what you did for Captain Dupree was quite brave.”
Startled, she glanced at Lobai. “Bear told you about that?”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “I wanted to know where your captain had gone.”
He’s not my captain, Anna wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat. She could only stare at her hands and shrug her shoulders in awkward embarrassment. “I thought I stood a better chance of making it out alive than he did.”
“Had events unfolded according to our friend Thabati’s plans, that would likely be the case.” Lobai’s dark, glittering eyes grew cold. “His employers have a habit of unceremoniously discarding people they no longer find…useful.” He settled back against his seat. “No, no, your plan was quite clever.”
Anna shrugged again, this time with quiet misery tying her stomach into knots. Viktor has to have found Colin by now. They were probably both steaming mad, but no matter how many times she told herself it shouldn’t matter, that she’d done the right thing, the thought of Colin being angry with her for leaving him behind made her feel worse.
Enough, she told herself sharply. What’s done is done, and you saved his life. That’ll have to be enough. She flipped her braid over her shoulder—and winced when she realized how ratty it had become thanks to the bag over her head. Suppressing a scowl, she unraveled the braid and combed her fingers through her dark hair in an attempt to straighten it before she rebraided it. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe.”
Anna bit back the word that rose to her lips. “I know that. I was hoping you’d be a little more specific.”
Lobai glanced sideways at her before inclining his head. “Well, dearie, as I’m afraid we’ll need your brain, I’ll tell you.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We’re going to the spaceport.”
The spaceport? After all this? Anna blinked at him. “Are you sure about that? You don’t want to — ” she waved a hand — ”hole up someplace where the likelihood of running into somebody out to kill you is just a tiny bit lower?”
That dangerous, glittering grin spread across the old man’s face again. “Oh, no, dearie, it’s quite safe enough for our purposes. I’ll warrant they won’t figure on us doing something this stupid.”
“ … you’re not exactly helping your case, you know.”
“That’s the point.”
He’s lost his mind. But this time, instead of causing Anna to shrink back into the corner of the seat again, the reali
zation brought a surge of annoyance. Flattening her mouth into a thin line, she glared at Lobai. “And, how, exactly, do I figure into this?”
“Didn’t I say?”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously at the too-innocent tone in the old man’s voice.
Lobai chuckled and tapped his cane on the floor. “You’re going to get a message to your brother and ask him to come pick us up.”
~oOo~
As plans went, it was not the craziest thing Anna had ever heard. Not after the events of the past few weeks. Her ire evaporated like a splash of water in the desert sand above the Whirlwind and she sagged back against her seat cushion. “Of course I am.”
Lobai mistook her sudden acquiescence for sarcasm; it was his turn to narrow his eyes. “You planned for this, if you’ll recall, dearie. I’m not asking anything your brother wasn’t prepared to do already.”
Anna brushed his irritation aside. “Oh, no, I get it. Only problem is, Viktor is aboard the Hand of Fate—and I don’t have the comm codes for that ship.”
“Ah.” Lobai’s eyes narrowed. “The Hand of Fate, captained by Indinara?”
“Yes.”
“I have comm codes for him.”
Anna blinked at him, nonplussed. “Of course you do.” Well, that makes things easier. She patted her pockets, before frowning. “I don’t have a comlink. Your guys must have absconded with it after they knocked us out.”
“Ah, yes. Safety precaution, you understand. Couldn’t risk it being traced.”
That made perfect sense. Nodding, Anna extended a hand palm up. “I’m guessing you have a clean vmail account set up. Want me to contact Viktor now or when we get there?”
Lobai’s expression flickered for a second—just long enough to tell Anna he had not expected her to cooperate quite so easily.