Heart of the Spider's Web

by JC Hay

  Rayan’s gaze hardened, and he was somewhere else. Someplace far from the hangar, or even the Nobu. “It’s the least I could do. I owe her. So, I do the stuff that needs doing, and she keeps her hands clean.”

  His dour tone told her he had a hell of a lot of dirt on his hands, but she didn’t push the issue. Everyone did stuff they regretted for the causes they believed in. Look at her. She shifted his omni to a back pocket instead of the front where he'd had it and patted his chest. “Whatever happens, play along. Let’s go.”

  She moved toward the bay with purpose, tugging her omni out of her pocket as she did. One of the guards intercepted them, and before the guard could even ask, Sheri was shoving her omni in his face. “C’mon! Log me already. Bad enough my cousin kept me late.”

  “You are...?” the guard started.

  “Not about to tell you my name, that’s for damn sure.” She huffed and waved her omni again. “Chief Garuda said we could pick up some extra hours as long as we kept quiet about it. Now scan me in.”

  The guard pulled a scanner out of his pocket and held it near her omni. The systems she had on board did the rest, hacking into the basic clock system to return a positive result. The screen flashed green, and it offered up a cheerful tone to announce she was clear.

  Sheri immediately turned to Rayan. “How do you not have your omni out already? I told you this was a favor for your mom, and you weren’t supposed to embarrass me. Don’t you know time is money?” She sleight-of-handed her omni into a sleeve only to tug it out of Rayan’s front pocket as though it was his and gave it back to the guard. “I mean, he’s big, but he’s not exactly calculating flight paths, if you know what I mean.”

  The guard chuckled and nodded, not paying attention to the omni she presented. “Just as well he’s being paid for his back.”

  “Right?” Sheri laughed. “That’s what I tell my aunt all the time. He’s meat. They don’t pay him to think.”

  The scanner beeped again, and Sheri tucked her omni in Rayan’s pocket as the guard waved them past. A few steps into the bay a viselike grip crushed down on her shoulder. “Pretty fancy bullshit there, dockrat. But I’m not going to forget that little dig you got in with the guard. I could be a genius for all you know about me.”

  She tugged her omni out of his pocket and snorted as she squirreled it away. “Worked didn’t it? Cheer up. At least I didn’t tell him to throw you out.”

  “You said you needed me.”

  “Damn straight I do. I can’t sell this shit myself. I need your contacts. And your big, beefy arms if things get dangerous.” She smiled again and slipped out of his grip before turning to the skiff in the bay.

  The skiff already looked half-unloaded, with crates piled up on the MagLev carts that were used to move supplies around the inside of the station. It looked like any other trader’s off-load but for the near silence in which the crew worked. Normally, you couldn’t put three stevedores together without the group devolving into some combination of taunts, one-upsmanship, and bawdy jokes. But not here. It didn’t seem related to the workers being from all different shifts, either. Everyone just seemed in a hurry to get done and get out.

  The crew finished loading the first of the MagLev carts, and two of the stevies led it off, syncing the cart’s system to their omnis so they could drive it remotely as they walked alongside. She and Rayan stepped into the opening they left behind, and for a time they lifted and stacked alongside the rest of the dockworkers.

  She grabbed the third cart as soon as it was loaded and tapped on the control panel to synch it against her omnidevice. As she and Rayan started to move, one of the plainclothes soldiers signaled to her, hand on his pistol. “I’ll take that one.”

  “You can walk alongside if you want,” she replied. “But it’s not going anywhere unless you’ve got a union chit on your omni.” In truth, the cart could be set for manual. The guy certainly looked big enough to muscle it around by hand if he had to, but she counted on him not knowing or wanting to do that.

  His hand twitched, and for a moment Sheri worried that things were about to go off script, but the soldier backed down with a shrug. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  She had to admit; it was a nice touch. A bit of extra flare to help sell the con to Rayan, and hopefully, his captain when he reported back in. Then again, IntCom hadn’t gotten good at their job by doing things in half-measures.

  They left the docking bays for the warren of hallways that made up the warehousing district, where supplies were stored prior to loading or prior to sale. Normally, the place was a bustle at all hours. Now, though, they seemed to be the only souls around. Her nerves lit up like a landing beacon, every part of her primed for action. It was now or never.

  She popped her hip into Rayan’s, and he nodded. A heartbeat later, he whistled and hummed at the same time, a polyphonic noise that set her teeth on edge. A familiar trill sounded in response, then Darcy dropped from the ceiling onto the soldier, and all the hells broke loose.

  The guard didn’t scream, to his credit. Sheri wasn’t sure she could have maintained the same sense of composure if she’d been jumped by a meter and a half of angry, four-eyed lizard. He scrambled back, pistol forgotten, as he tried to pull the goanna off of himself. Darcy’s climbing claws had hooked into his clothes, however, and the lizard wasn’t about to let go so easily.

  Rayan stepped in as though the entire process had been planned for months, one arm locking around the soldier’s throat in a sleeper hold, while he levered his hips up to keep the soldier’s weight off the ground. The soldier scrabbled for purchase, but the outcome was as quick as it was inevitable.

  The soldier slumped in Barr’s arms, but he kept up the hold. Panic gripped Sheri’s brain, and she leaned in close to whisper, “Don’t kill him!”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, either offended at the suggestion or angry that she’d stopped him. She couldn’t tell; she just knew she couldn’t let him kill the soldier when they had other options available.

  Sheri slipped a pair of plastic restraints out of her pocket and locked the soldier’s hands and feet together. She followed it up by shoving her cloth hat into the soldier’s mouth as a gag. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it should buy them time to get out of the area.

  She dragged the soldier into a maintenance hallway that ran perpendicular to the hall where they stood. It made for a lousy hiding place, but time was of the essence now. No sooner had she gotten the guard settled then he groaned and struggled against the restraints. It was the downside of a sleeper hold—once blood flow had been restored to the brain, the victim came back around quickly. With a quiet apology, she pulled the tranq-applicator out of her other pocket and shot it into the soldier’s neck.

  He gave her a panicked look, fighting against the drug for a moment before it won, and he drifted back into unconsciousness. To be safe, she curled him onto his side and slipped out of the room.

  The look on Rayan’s face as she turned the corner could have crushed worlds.

  Darcy had draped himself over Rayan’s shoulders, tail hanging across his chest like a red and black bandolier. One of the crates had been opened, and Rayan’s voice was more of a growl than a human sound. “We have a problem.”

  Her pulse jumped to double-time. She remembered the ease with which he’d choked out the soldier, the willingness he had to take it from unconsciousness to fatal, and his captain’s ominous instructions. If it looks shifty, dump her. She tensed for a fight as she leaned in to inspect the contents of the open crate.

  Underneath a layer of packing straw sat racks of hypos, ready to be used. She pulled one out and read the label, stomach clenching. So much for this being the shipment from IntCom. “Spectrivax.”

  “Yeah, Spectrivax.”

  He said it with a level of bitter familiarity that made her curious to know more. But she had to focus on the facts in front of her. Spectrivax had been designed as an immune system booster, specifically for the close quarters and low-defense e
nvironments of long-haul space travel. Unfortunately, it had two side effects that made it unsuitable. First, it tended to make habitual users short-tempered, which created problems in cramped quarters where everyone was in each other's space. Worse, it created a physical dependency in most users, which made coming off it hard once you got where you were going.

  The Three Systems would have discarded the drug completely, but it was exceptional at treating one particular scourge. Lung fungus.

  With the infection running rampant through the dockworkers, and everyone’s respirators on the fritz, she and Barr might as well have been sitting on a solid-gold asteroid. She checked the cart’s destination in her omni. They were headed to C-level, near the heart of Ariadne's domain. Medical was on L, close to the docks and maintenance where most of the accidents happened.

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered. Her anger at the kind of operation that could deny basic care to people doing back-breaking labor, in the name of squeezing even more money from them, felt like a white-hot sun in her chest.

  A shout called up the hall, and she turned to see two soldiers striding toward them with guns out. She put the hypo back in the crate and slammed it shut. “Time to go!”

  But Rayan wasn’t listening.

  He barreled down the hall, and the soldiers struggled to get their pistols up in time. They clearly hadn’t expected someone to charge them when they were armed. Panic fire caught Barr in the arm, but if he felt it, the wound didn’t slow him down. When he reached them, he was a bear among livestock—huge, savage, and lethally effective.

  She found herself drawn into the fluid grace of his violence. The way each strike flowed into the next in a symphony of destructive rage. Still, even if they were vermin, she couldn’t let him kill the soldiers. If for no other reason than because it increased the heat on them. Even more than robbing Ariadne already would. As he sent one of the men stumbling backwards, Sheri danced in and hit the soldier with her tranq.

  As the first soldier collapsed, she shifted position to catch the second by surprise. She grabbed his pistol as the tranq took effect and he dropped to the floor. “Playtime’s over, Barr. We need to go!”

  Rayan switched the cart to manual and shoved it up the hall, shoulders bulging. She trotted along behind, pistol covering their backs as they retreated. He stopped so suddenly that she bumped into him and was about to complain, but he was tapping a code into a door panel on a warehouse.

  The door slid open, and Rayan maneuvered the cart into the dark beyond. Sheri hesitated, checking over her shoulder again, when he snagged her arm and tugged her in after him. Before she could scream, the door slammed shut, and she was alone with Rayan Barr in the dark.

  “You have thirty seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.” His growl of rage was a physical thing in the small space.

  Sheri resisted the urge to turn on her omnidevice’s light. Without it, he likely couldn’t see her, either. “I had no idea. I just knew Ariadne was bringing in something expensive. I assumed it would be Old Earth artifacts or something.” It wasn’t a complete lie, at least. And the easiest lies to keep had a kernel of truth.

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  “You have to believe me! My colleagues are dying of the fungus. I wouldn’t have hit a shipment if I knew it was for them. Not that it is, you’ll note. It’s supposed to go to C-Level.” She hoped he knew the station well enough to know what that meant.

  “We can’t cross Ariadne.”

  “So what? We give her the Spectrivax?” Sheri couldn’t blame his reluctance. The woman posed as a legitimate businessperson, maintaining establishments at all levels of Nobu Station. It was also an open secret that she ruled the black-market trade on Nobu with an iron fist. IntCom half-suspected she was one of the Triumvirate that ran Triptych itself. Getting on her bad side wasn’t an act people tended to survive.

  “Never.” Again, his tone belied a more personal connection than she had time to get into. She didn’t remember anything from his files about an involvement with the drug, but sometimes things slipped through IntCom’s fingers when they built a dossier.

  “Then we need to figure out what to do with it.”

  “Easy,” he replied. “We take it to medical, let them give it out.”

  It was her turn to cough out a bitter laugh. “Fat chance. The Med Chief, Cochran, is so deep in Ariadne’s pocket that he doesn’t shit without her permission. Taking it to him is like handing it to her directly.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” he said at last.

  Shit, so was she. Things were so far off course from her original plan, that she could barely glimpse the old flight path. IntCom had told her to gather allies and information, explicitly told her not to make a move against Ariadne. And the self-styled Spider Queen was too well connected to not figure out what had happened to her shipment, which meant Sheri needed to get off of Nobu Station before Ariadne arranged for her to take a suitless spacewalk.

  She took a deep breath. At least she thrived working under pressure. “Two things. First, we need to ditch these crates. They’ve likely got tracking on them, so it’s only a matter of time before Ariadne’s goons find them again.”

  “And two?” He took a deep breath, and she felt his presence shift in the dark. If he didn’t like that first idea, he was going to hate the second. Unfortunately, it was her lifeline.

  “We smuggle it out. Get the Spectrivax on your ship until we can decide what to do with it. If we move fast, we might even be able to be gone before Ariadne learns she’s been robbed.” He hesitated, and Sheri hoped she hadn’t misread him. “Or you walk away. Like your captain said, dump me. Nothing changes. You keep doing what you do. Ariadne makes a mountain of cash selling the Spectrivax on the black market. And I get killed. Because, she’ll figure out I tried to rob her eventually.”

  Rayan growled again, then slapped on the light in the storage area. “This is the Sentinel’s warehouse.” He nodded toward a large crate for hauling engine parts. “Get that unloaded, then get the hypos in there.”

  She did a quick calculation. “It’s too much room. They’ll break.”

  “You’re going in there with them. Don’t let them.”

  Three

  Barr groaned and steeled himself for trouble, but the two guards just nodded as he floated the cart past them and out onto the Sentinel’s long boat. He’d been prepared to fast-talk his way past them, but apparently everyone was on high alert for a skinny dockrat with a stack of crates, not a known smuggler with one big one.

  He wasn’t about to question his good fortune. He closed the door as Mira slipped behind the controls and eased the long boat out of its bay. Once they had passed through the ship lock and glided out into space, he let himself take a deep breath. Explaining this to his captain was going to take some doing, but once she knew about the Spectrivax, she’d likely agree. She knew how he felt about people stepping on the necks of others.

  The dockrat was going to take a little more explaining.

  Still, leaving her to die felt like a bad idea. Not that he hadn’t been responsible for plenty of deaths over the years. As he said, he took care of the dirty work so Mira didn’t have to. He owed her that much. But the way that dockrat—stars and fire, he didn’t even know her name—looked at him almost made him believe that the blood on his hands didn’t matter. Like she understood sometimes doing the right thing meant doing a lot of wrong ones first.

  He made sure the cargo was secure and settled himself into the other seat in the long boat’s cockpit. Up above them, pinned in the lights from Nobu Station, the Sentinel of Gems glittered quietly. It was the only home he’d had for the last half-dozen years, and every time he saw it, his heart thudded out a welcome. Barr buckled himself in and leaned back in the chair for the slow return trip to their ship.

  Free of the mass of the station, and its aggressive MagLev, Barr felt the familiar weightlessness of microgravity. Captain Barnes flipped a switch, and the main engines cut off, lea
ving them gliding toward the Sentinel on inertia.

  After several long seconds of silence, she finally spoke. “When are you going to tell me why there’s a stowaway on my ship?”

  Barr’s heartbeat tripled, suddenly slamming against his ribs hard enough to be painful. He never crossed Mira. They had been through too much together; she was too important to him. Then again, that would explain why she knew him well enough to jump to conclusions now. He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw and composed his answer. “As soon as it was safe enough to do so.”

  “That might not have been until we were under transit,” she said. “You really think bringing her aboard was the only choice?”

  “I think that leaving her behind was a danger to her. Let’s just say that there were some complications dockside that made me suspect that her life would be forfeit if she stayed. Helping her seemed the best option.”

  Mira’s grunt of acknowledgement was somewhere between If you say so and I wonder, but he couldn’t allow himself to worry about that. Once they had a chance to discuss things, she’d understand his choices. At least as well as he did himself.

  “Put her in the empty berth above the gym. And she’s confined to quarters until the crew is aware of her and I change my mind. Understood?”

  He nodded. “Aye, Captain.”

  Four

  Okay, Sheri, think! There’s got to be a way to turn this to your advantage. She paced the floor of the too-small cabin and tried to identify the positives in her predicament.

  There were none. In the last twelve hours, her whole mission had flown well past bad and established a thriving colony in a totally new system on the far side of horrible. Nobu Station was supposed to have been her refuge, a chance to recover from a few indiscretions with a basic undercover job and report everything back to her superiors at Intelligence Command.

  She went to the cabin’s small recycler unit and splashed some cold water on her face. Surprisingly, the water looked clear and smelled fresh. Someone kept the ship’s filters up to date. It said a lot about the captain’s priorities—usually the water filters were the first thing to slip when a ship was losing money. Either Captain Barnes had better priorities, or her crew was doing well for themselves.