by Mel Keegan
As he spoke, the comm whispered with van Donne’s voice, a terse announcement that the spaceplane was on launch standby. Marin was surprised. “You trust van Donne and Byrne in your hangars?”
“Tully’s with them, and they don’t know it, but Etienne’s got tracers on them,” Richard told him. “They can’t make a move without me knowing about it.”
“And me?” Ramon wondered. “Your AI has a tracer on me too?”
“Oh, yes.” Vaurien dropped one large hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “Forgive me if I don’t trust you. It’s nothing personal.”
“You’ve done nothing yet to make him trust you,” Travers said to Ramon as Vaurien thumbed for the lift. “And if you’re running with Sergei, he’s twice as likely to be suspicious. You know the history they share.”
The shooter tossed back the cape of blue-black hair and regarded Vaurien with a darkly speculative expression. “I know about it. Sergei tells it differently.”
“I imagine he does.” Richard’s tone was bland. “Doesn’t mean he’s remembering it like it happened.”
“And you are,” Ramon retorted.
“Between us, Barb, Tully and myself have a pretty good grasp on the reality of being infiltrated, spied on, robbed blind, played for fools.” Richard paused as the wide cargo doors opened, and stepped into the car. “If you don’t believe me, ask Paul Wymark the next time you see him.”
Wymark was the Arago specialist aboard the Wings of Freedom, and Marin knew Ramon was itching to know what had happened to the ship. It would be weeks or months before she pulled out of the Rabelais Drift, put her nose outside the absolute seclusion of Alshie’nya, and Wymark would be at liberty to tell some fraction of the work he had been doing. Lai’a was back there, already refitting after the battle at Ulrand.
The mission for which the old Intrepid had been resurrected was imminent. The moment the Colonial War was over, and won, Harrison Shapiro would be free to divide his attention between his Ulrish partner, handsome young Jon Kim – who should be well on his way to Velcastra, invisible in the political arena – and the shift of power in the Deep Sky. On that day, with Shapiro exploring the first personal relationship he had permitted himself in far too long, Mark Sherratt would be glad to focus his interest elsewhere.
Hellgate. Elarne.
The sound of the Resalq word made Marin shiver. He stepped into the service lift after Vaurien, leaned against the brushed steel wall with Travers, and listened to the pulse beat in his ears as he thought of Lai’a, and the greater purpose for which it was designed.
“Sergei likes to paint you the villain,” Ramon was saying to Vaurien, and Marin forced himself to listen, to anchor himself in the present.
“No, really?” Richard mocked as the elevator dropped down the four decks to the smaller hangars. “I guess it’s easier to rationalize putting a bullet in somebody when you’ve decided he’s your enemy.”
“You put a bullet in him, too,” Ramon said pointedly.
“I put three in him,” Richard corrected. “Self defense. Barb Jazinsky offered to send him home in a box, and you’d better believe she can do it.”
“I do. I saw the fight, back in Marak City.” Ramon chuckled. “She’s a thing of beauty, isn’t she? Byrne says she’s as good in the sack as in the lab. They have a little bit of history, as you called it.”
Richard looked tired. Marin watched him close his eyes for a moment and then force himself to wake up. He pulled his shoulders back, worked his neck around to ease the stiffness in his muscles. “What Barb does on her own time is her business. And she doesn’t have a lot of her own time, lately. None of us does. If you have Sergei’s ear, you might tell him to mind his manners. No one has much patience left. We’re only pulling on the same team to get this job done fast, and get the hell out.”
For a moment Ramon studied Vaurien in silence. “Sergei says the same thing. If he’d been able to take Zwerner without you, we’d have been gone before you got here. This is all about last chance bullshit.”
With an obvious effort, Vaurien pushed away from the wall and straightened his spine. “So, what’s the story with Sergei and this bastard, Zwerner? We never even heard the name before CL-389, but Sergei’s obviously known him for long enough, and closely enough, to owe him a kill shot – or think he does.”
“He does,” Ramon said quietly as the lift opened onto the cold, windy hangar level.
The whine of the machine shops, the rumble through the deck of heavy equipment, reached them, but the passages leading to the fabrication bays were closed off. Sergei would have been eager to peek into them, see what kind of work had Vaurien at full stretch, but the doors were code sealed, and the keycodes were privileged information.
The hangars were harshly lit, in strips of blue and mauve neon which made a man look leprous, hollow eyed. The deck was blue-black steel, and the vast hangar doors, mounted in the deck itself, were outlined in yellow chevrons. Red spinners were revolving before the lift opened, and Etienne’s voice murmured over the loop, constant warnings that Hanger 4 was on alert. In the middle of the deck, bathed in floodlights, the Yamazake Capricorn stood in a haze of heat from its own engines. The sterntubes still glowed from the testfiring not two minutes before. The side ’lock was open, and Marin saw faces in the cockpit – Sergei, Byrne, and Tully Ingersol, who gave Vaurien a wave as he saw them coming.
“Three years ago, Zwerner was legit.” Ramon checked both his sidearms as they walked out to the Capricorn. “He’s from way back in the Middle Heavens, so I heard, and I got the scuttlebutt right from the horse’s ass, citybottom, rinkside, Marak City. He made big, big money in freight logistics. Then he invested the whole shebang in homeworlds industry – shipyards, what else? Fleet construction contracts. Think about this: a yokel colonial boy with his eyes set on owning half of Earth, or Mars, if he couldn’t manage the Big E.”
“Audacious,” Marin observed. “So what the hell brought him out to Marak? It’s not exactly the brightest part of the Deep Sky.”
Ramon chortled with something very like glee. “He was busted. Tax evasion! Soon as he started earning big, big money out of his investments in Fleet construction back in the homeworlds, he comes to the attention of the Confederate government. He gets audited, and – guess what? They dig back through five or seven years, and they come up with a big, fat discrepancy. Now, Zwerner swore up and down there was never any such discrepancy, and it was all invention.” Ramon’s slim shoulders lifted in an elaborate shrug. “Could be he was telling the truth. I never liked Earthers … present company excepted, Richard.”
“Thanks,” Vaurien growled. “And you’re probably right about the audit. If you have enemies, and you want to hurt them badly and stay on the high side of the law, fiddling a tax audit is the easiest way.” His face creased in derision and distaste. “I never cared much for Earthers either. What do you think I’m doing way out here, putting my neck on the line for the freedom of the colonies?” He came to rest at the Capricorn’s open ’lock. “So Zwerner copped a fine so heavy, it crippled him – and, what? He went rogue?”
“Understandable,” Travers said thoughtfully. “And I guess the rest of it starts to fall into place. He’s an ambitious, social climbing Middle Heavens yokel who wants to be homeworlds nobility, so when he goes rogue it’s colonials who get shafted. And when some senator’s office way back on Earth had him set up the CL-389 deal, he grabbed the chance.”
“And now he’s consolidating,” Marin went on, “raking it all into one pile, ready to pull out. Next stop Earth, where he’ll expect to get protection because they owe him. What we need is the data, even a hint of the data, connecting Zwerner back to Senator Rutherford. And you know the only mouth it’s going to come from is Zwerner’s own.”
“Or Rutherford’s own,” Travers said pointedly. “Speaking of whom, where is the bold Charleston Aimes Rutherford?”
“In custody on Ulrand, buried so deep, he’s ungetatable,” Vaurien stepped up into th
e Capricorn and stood back to watch the others board. “So how did Sergei wind up wanting Zwerner dead? Another double-cross?”
“A deal that went so wrong, people died,” Ramon said soberly. “Sergei lost two in the same bust-up. Both partners, both lovers. Christ, it’d be like me and Rafe flying with him for years, and then –” He snapped his fingers. “Both of us gone in one hit. Sergei’s wanted blood for a long time, and this is his last chance.” He looked from Marin to Travers and back. “It’d be like Richard losing the two of you in one hit, and maybe Jazinsky too. Fuck, there’d be blood!”
“There would.” Vaurien palmed the ’lock control, and the hatch slid shut, armed, pressurized. “Zwerner’s time has come, Ramon. Stop fretting about him.”
“Me? I’m not fretting,” Ramon protested, making his way forward. He plopped into a couch and spread his arms on the back of it.
“Then, tell Sergei to stop fretting about the man,” Travers advised.
He and Marin were right behind Vaurien as he stepped into the cockpit. The light levels were low; most illumination issued from the instrument surfaces. Rafe Byrne was lounging behind van Donne, who sat in the pilot’s seat. Ingersol was busy, fine-tuning some deficiency in the Arago configuration only he could see. He looked up as Vaurien appeared, and tapped the combug in his right ear.
“We’re good to shove off, boss … and I’m reading all quiet and clear on J, around 87, which is the Krait. The Mako’s locked up tight. Etienne reports no sign of the ID traces he’s been following.”
“All right.” Richard slid a ‘bug into his own ear. “Ops room, this is Wastrel 101. Opening Hangar 4.”
The voice responding belonged to Piotr Cassales, the tug’s senior pilot. “Copy that … and I’m watching your back, Rick.”
Without comment, van Donne slid out of the pilot’s seat, and Marin took his place. The hangar was already blowing down to close to zero pressure, and as the red spinner turned blue the doors in the belly of the big ship opened. Marin nudged up the repulsion, throttled forward a whisker and put the nose down.
The Capricorn dropped out of the hangar and skimmed the ventral surface of the Wastrel for a half kilometer, before he rolled her over and headed down the battered gray side of the old Rotterdam Explorer. Docking rings had been tack-welded onto the hull in odd places; pylons jutted at unpredictable angles, giving the Halfway rink the look of a mutated porcupine.
The belly of the ancient ship was a mass of comm arrays and docking adaptors, added seemingly at random over the space of many decades. Marin had never seen anything so chaotic, and he was about to ask how anyone told one berth from another, when he noticed the rudimentary beacon system. Each berth was marked with an auto transmitter, calling its identity on the low civilian frequencies every ten seconds. Low-tech was the answer to everything at Halfway.
He found 87 a moment later. It was the pylon right beside the wide, garish signage proclaiming ‘Gemini cargo dock only.’ The Krait was berthed less than fifty meters from the club, and tucked in another fifty meters along the belly of the Explorer was a hull he recognized from an encounter on the high slopes of Mont Katerine.
The Mako had taken some serious damage at Ulrand. She was patched over, serviceable, but still showing the carbonization of close calls, and the pockmarks of hits which had punched through her Arago screens and were stopped by her physical armor. He might have commented on the ship’s condition, but van Donne said quietly,
“She needs some more drydock time, but she’ll do. If we’d sat in Marak, drinking tequila and listening to hard-luck stories about the prisoners of war, waiting for repairs, we’d have missed Zwerner.”
And he was parched for blood. Marin glanced up at the man, and then at Travers. Neil’s brows rose in speculation, but before either of them could speak Rafe Byrne said,
“There’s 89, close as you want to be. Dock her on while we give Fernie a call. Ramon?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Ramon leaned over Marin’s left shoulder to adjust the comm. “If there’s one thing Fernie hates, it’s surprises.”
The Krait was an ugly ship, Marin thought, but she was powerful far beyond her size, and the girth of the engines, the bulk of the armor, did not make for svelte dimensions or sleek lines. The ship had earned a bad reputation, and according to Vaurien, it was deserved. Fernando Wang was not a man to cross.
Docked at 87, the Krait was big enough to occlude 88, and 89 was the next available pylon. Etienne inquired softly if Marin wanted it to undertake docking procedures, but he declined. Flying a ship with his own hands, eyes and brains was one of life’s pleasures, and he was not about to surrender it to an AI.
As he rolled the Capricorn over to present her docking collar to the adapter on the top side of the pylon, Fernie Wang himself appeared in the threedee. Marin spared him a glance and then returned his attention to the flight systems while Ramon said,
“Yeah, Fernie, we’re coming in, man. Turns out you’re going to come up owing Rick a favor or two. You might want to buy the dude a drink. You want to meet us in the club? We’re looking for Kolya.”
In the dense purple shadows in the threedee, Wang’s face was a macabre twist of disgust. “Kolya’s skulled out, as usual. If you’re hoping to get anything coherent out of him, you better give him an hour. Come over to the Krait. I’ve got a bottle of something very old, very rare. If I owe Rick Vaurien, like you say I do, the least I can do is hand him a real drink instead of the rotgut he’ll get at Gemini.”
“Sure, man, we’ll be there in a few,” Ramon told him.
Behind Marin’s seat, Vaurien groaned just loudly enough for Marin to hear him. “You were trying to stay off the Krait?” Curtis guessed.
“And apparently not succeeding,” Vaurien said acidly.
“Not somewhere you like to be?” Travers ducked down to a level with Marin’s shoulder to see Wang’s ship, which was upside down to their perspective, and drifting in the left-side viewports.
“Give you a tip,” Richard offered. “Wipe your boots on the way out.” He glanced at his chrono, and then at Ramon. “An hour, right?”
The shooter seemed amused. “That works for me. Gives me a chance to grab my shit and shove it in a bag.”
“Which is what you really wanted.” Travers chuckled. “You got yourself a ride with van Donne?”
“And I do mean a ride,” Ramon said with a blissful expression.
“Yeah, I thought you were walking funny,” Ingersol muttered.
“Jealousy is unbecoming,” Ramon told him, and forestalled an argument by heading back to join van Donne and Byrne.
“Onward and –” Marin paused as the docking clamps locked on, the collar pressurized, and the indicators shifted to green “– upward. And we’re docked, Richard. Any time you’re ready.”
This was the very keel of the Rotterdam Explorer, as far from the Xanadu heights of Halfway as they could get and still be in the Freespacer colony. The old belly compartments, holds and hangars, were dark, icy. Vaurien knew the place well enough to shrug into his burgundy leather jacket and zip it before they left the Capricorn.
The cold prickled Marin’s skin; the chemical taint of the air burned his sinuses a little as they made their way from the docking adaptor and into a wasteland of abandoned crates and barrels, drifts of litter which had blown against the bulkheads and set like papier mache in the intermittent drizzle of condensation which ran down the walls.
“Oh, nice,” Travers breathed. “Very salubrious.”
“Where the rats hang out,” Marin added. “No offence, Ramon.”
“None taken.” Ramon rubbed his hands together to chafe warmth into them. “I’ll be glad to get the hell out … this is Fernie’s idea of the place to be, not mine.”
They walked fifty meters through dense, blue darkness, where the only light issued from infrequent marker lamps, half of which were long ago burned out and never replaced. The lights marked out 88, which was cold, dead, and the Krait’s berth was the
next, thirty meters further from the Capricorn, and close enough to the club, Gemini, for Marin’s ears to be picking up the first bass of what passed for music here.
The ship’s floodlights were on in Wang’s dock, casting harsh white neon across corroded bulkheads and mounds of trash dumped by ships across the years. A security drone was on sentry duty at the docking ring, a squat little barrel with twenty assorted sensor probes and weapons. Ramon went ahead, showed his face to the machine, and a voice Marin had heard only via the threedee floated out of the Krait.
“Come aboard,” Fernando Wang invited. “Richard, Sergei, how bizarre to see you both at the same time, in the same place, and nobody bleeding. Rafe, you’re looking good. And you are …?”
He was looking at Travers and Marin, two faces he had not seen before, and Marin saw the trace of automatic suspicion in his eyes before Vaurien could get between them and make cursory introductions.
“Neil Travers, Curtis Marin,” he said shortly. “They’re flying with me right now, but before you get the intel from some other source, you ought to know Curtis is on assignment. Dendra Shemiji.”
Surprise widened Wang’s dark eyes. He was Travers’s height and Marin’s weight, slender to the point of thinness, with deliberately unruly red-blond hair and ice green eyes. The hair looked fake to Marin, and the eye color was definitely the result of contacts which augmented human vision, boosting it into the realm of the machine. Wang was far from handsome, but he had a grace about him, an angular way of moving which matched the high cheekbones, the hard line of his jaw.
Like Richard, he was an Earther. Unlike Vaurien, he had headed out to the Deep Sky with Tactical right behind him. He had grown up on the wrong side of the law as far back as the great cities of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and with the freedom of Halfway, all controls on Wang were removed. He forged a dark reputation in a matter of weeks, and nothing had changed.
As they stepped through the docking collar, Marin was recalling Jo Queneau, who had flown a tour with Wang. She had learned to despise the man, but was too wise to fight with him. The ship was named for the creature which was its mascot, and Marin admitted to a dark fascination.