by Steve Perry
“Did it bother you? To kill her?”
“Some. I gave her a chance to surrender. She chose not to take it. She was trying to kill me.” He shrugged. “It was on her head.”
Excited, she decided. She moved her hand down his belly to his groin. He was ready. She scooted down and took him into her mouth.
She saw his triumphant grin as she began fellating him.
He had conquered her, so he thought.
But now, he was hers . . .
21
On the way back from the forest, with a most enjoyable and exciting stop in the public fresher before they left, Mourn sat and watched Sola as she drove. She had a light touch with the flitter, which was a middle-of-the-lane sedan, not a particularly racy transport.
“That was fun,” he said.
“What, peeing?”
He laughed.
“So, this is where I came from,” he said after a moment of silence. “What do you think?”
“Everybody has got to be from someplace, so the man said. Better than some, worse than others,” she said. “It’s not where you were born that matters, it’s where you end up. Only one you can control.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“You came from somewhere. Want to share that with me?”
She thought about it for a few seconds. “Sure. Why not? I was born at a very young age,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Sorry, old joke.”
He waited, and she began to tell him her story.
There was never any question but that Cayne was going to be a medico, just as her father, uncles, and grandfather had all been, and as her older sister was training to become. It was the family tradition, and on her homeworld of Tembo, in CinqueKirli, tradition was no small part of the culture. The caste system was not legally enforced, but it was customarily observed, especially if you were of the upper classes, which full medicos were. If you were born working-class, you would almost certainly stay working-class, barring some stroke of fortune. If your father or mother dug shinies at the Strother diamond mines, then when you got old enough, you would, too—unless you found enough spare time to go prospecting in the Big Sands and happened across a vein nobody else had found. If you could circumvent all the obstacles in your way and file a valid claim, the Strothers would immediately buy you out, and you would be one of the storied people:
“Y’heard about Thistlewaite? Hit a meterwide seam two hundred meters long out past Dry Wells, sold out for six million stads.”
“No feke?”
“Yar, a lucky bastard, him.”
Yar, indeed. The lucky bastards were, however, few and far between on Tembo.
Being part of the elite was the chance of birth, and one of the advantages of high caste was that you had access to things the poor did not. Sure, everybody got basic entcom and edcom piped to their dwellings, and everybody had a shot at a mandated Confed-primary-level education. But if your father and his father were doctors, your caste got the perks: best neighborhoods and housing, high income, prestige. Plus access to First Tier education and full entertainment ’proj. More width, more depth, and that was what did it for Cayne.
At thirteen, she realized that the galaxy was a much bigger and grander place than even the highest castes on her planet could achieve there. There seemed to be no limits to what was possible away from her two-planet outback system.
By the age of fourteen, she was focused on the possibility of leaving her world.
By sixteen, she knew what she was going to do with her life. She was going to travel the galaxy as a reporter, go places, see things, taste foods that nobody in her family had ever eaten or even had the opportunity to consider. Her life was not going to be an endless ministering to miners coughing and wheezing from militant silicosis; nor delivering babies; nor doing cloned liver transplants on rich alcoholic retirees. No way. That didn’t call to her in the least.
She began taking journalism and video-production courses via edcom, keeping them secret from her family. She found time to talk to people who worked in the news industry locally, made media contacts, all surreptitiously. The more she learned, the more interesting it became.
For a year, she got away with it.
Two months after her seventeenth birthday, her father came to her room. He closed the door behind him, and Cayne knew that she was in trouble.
Her father had never been one to dissemble, he came right to the point: “What the hell are all these edcom classes you have been taking, Cayne?” He waved a printout.
“They don’t cost anything,” she tried.
“That isn’t the point! You should be studying premed science by now—anatomy, physiology, pharmacology—not wasting your time on such trash.” He held up the printout as if the sight of it would wilt her into helplessness, like some entcom vampire confronted by a holy relic.
And in truth, she felt like wilting. On some level, she had known her parents would find out about her plans sooner or later. She had rehearsed what she would tell them, gone over it in her mind a hundred times, but she wasn’t ready to deliver that speech yet. She had it in her thoughts that she would be eighteen, legally able to do as she wished, and that by then, she’d have a job waiting on a planet far away from this one. They’d be upset, but eventually, they’d accept it. That had been the plan.
“Baba—” She stopped.
“Go on.”
“I want to be a reporter. A documentarian.”
He blinked. Then he tried to put her statement into a framework to which he could relate: “Medical or surgical? There’s not much call for medical cataloging or training vids here. Perhaps on the surgical end, but you’d need at least a fourth year of residency to become a good enough surgical diagnostician to know what to record—”
“No,” she cut in. She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to practice medicine. I want to report news!”
He stared at her as if her hair had burst into flame. “What? Don’t be stupid, of course you’ll practice medicine!”
She had never been particularly confrontational with her parents.
Her sister, Terah, had gone through a phase in which she and their mother were so irritated with each other over Terah’s low-caste suitors that they barely spoke. And Terah and their father had yelled at each other about it more than once, full-volume shouting matches that sent Cayne scurrying to hide in her room, afraid her father would do something violent. Even so, those waters had calmed. Her sister’s choice in male companions had provoked anger, but she had come to see the light about that and found a young man in the proper caste. Being mated to one of the elcee trash was not the same as using him to piss off her parents. And, of course, Terah had gone off to do her internship and residency at Tembo Medical on schedule, too—that had never been in question.
That was nothing compared to what Cayne was offering.
Cayne didn’t want to upset her parents. But she also knew that their lives were not going to be hers. Knew it to the depths of her being. Either they were going to be disappointed or she was; they had chosen their lives, she was going to choose hers.
“You don’t understand. I want to travel, to see the galaxy.”
“You can do that as a doctor! I have attended conferences on a dozen planets, we have all taken vacations on other worlds!”
Her temper flared. “No! I don’t want to have a few hours off from a conference on lung rot to hurry to some tourist gape, or spend two weeks a year trying to relax from fifty weeks caring for patients! It’s not me, Baba!”
“You are seventeen years old, you have no notion of what you want!”
“I know what I don’t want! I don’t to be stuck on some galactic hind-arm smiling all day at people who are sick or injured or dying until I become one of them!”
It only got worse after that. They both said things that couldn’t be taken back, hateful words that burned and cut and crumbled whatever relationship there was until there was no
bridge left between them. Her father had stomped out, declaring that as long as she lived under his roof, she would do as he damn well said. And she had yelled after him that she wouldn’t be living under his roof any longer than it took to pack her clothes.
So much for the plan and their grudging acceptance.
In the end, she had stayed until she was eighteen, her mother trying all the while to patch things up and bring her back to the family’s path. But there had been slammed doors that couldn’t ever be opened again. It didn’t matter to Cayne. Her course was set, and wherever it might lead, however she might fail or succeed, it would be under her own direction, and not there . . .
The giant crop circles passed underneath the flitter as she finished her story. In the distance, a rain cell gathered into thunderheads, soon to offer water to the grains below.
“Sounds familiar,” Mourn said.
“Doesn’t it?” Sola said. “After a few years on the lanes talking to people, interviewing them, I realized that my story—and yours—aren’t unique, not even unusual. Maybe one person in five or six has a similar tale. Gave the parents a good-bye wave and hit the road for their grand adventure.”
“And has that been what it was for you? A grand adventure?”
“I’ve had my moments,” she said, smiling. “I’d prefer to be a little further along my chosen path than I am, but I’m still making progress. Still better than the alternative.”
“Let me guess. Someday, you plan to space back home and wave your success in your father’s face,” he said. “Pound him over the head with your credit balance.” It didn’t come out as a question.
“Pretty much.”
“I wanted to do that, too, once upon a time. First week I hit the Teens as a player, I got a couple of nice contracts, some sponsors. I wasn’t exactly rich, but all of a moment, I was making maybe three times as much a year as my father ever would in any year of his working life. I could have made him eat his words about never amounting to anything.”
“But you didn’t. Why not?”
He considered it for a second. “Because by the time I got there, it didn’t matter. I’d been my own man for fifteen years, earning my way, enjoying my life, no regrets. Wouldn’t have been any point to it.”
She raised an eyebrow at him.
He continued: “Year before I left this world, I had an arm-wrestling match with my da. We used to do that a lot. As a kid, he could easily beat me, but sometimes he let me win. Once I got to be about sixteen, he had to work harder, and the matches were for real. By then, I had been lifting weights and doing exercises for a couple years to build myself up for the Flex when I got there. I had also begun learning how to box and wrestle with some of the locals, and I was almost as big as I am now and no weakling. He could still beat me, though. He was proud of his strength, but he was getting older, and he wasn’t working out as much as he once had.
“Just before I turned eighteen, we had a match. There came a point during it when I knew I had him, I could win, no doubt about it. Knowing I could was enough for me, I didn’t have to do it. It was important for me to know; it didn’t matter so much to me that he knew it.”
“You let him win?”
“It seemed right, for all the years when he pretended that I had beaten him. My father wasn’t a bad man, he was just who he was, and that was limited to a world I didn’t want to be part of anymore. Later, we had more harsh words, and I left with both of us angry. I might have been able to go back and smooth it over, but I never did. I regret that. Even though I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade, when I found out he was dead, it was a shock. Once you realize your father can die, it changes things, even if you are in a job where you see a fair number of dead folks.”
She nodded, and Mourn felt as if she were doing so unconsciously.
“You’ve been your own woman making your way in the galaxy for what, eight, ten years? You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, you know.”
“Yes. I do know. But he won’t want to see it.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe you might be surprised. Not as if you have anything to lose, right?”
She looked doubtful. “Maybe.”
22
When Shaw left Azul’s hotel suite, he felt pretty damned good. Nothing quite like great sex with a beautiful, intelligent, and artistic woman who knew exactly what to do to take the edge off your physical tension.
The usual contingent of bodyguards lurked about, disguised as hotel staff and patrons. He took the private lift to the rooftop parking level. When the door opened, Cervo stood there. Shaw smiled, but Cervo’s expression remained blank. He had a puritanical streak, Cervo did. He never joked about sex. Never talked about it at all, come to that.
“Something?”
“We have collected Randall’s op.”
“Ah. And have you questioned him yet?”
“No, sir. I thought you’d want to be there to hear anything he has to say.”
“Good thought. Well. I’m refreshed and relaxed. No time like the present. Let’s go.”
Randall’s agent, whose name, Cervo said, was Belaire Cayliss, was being held at the compound in a room where no cams were installed.
The flight took all of five minutes. Cervo and Shaw went directly to the room.
Cayliss knew who Shaw and Cervo were, of course, and when he saw them his eyes widened, either in fear or surprise. Maybe both.
“M. Cayliss,” Shaw said. He waved for Cervo to go and stand behind the man, who sat in a plain plastic chair in front of a bare plastic table. Shaw pulled the chair from the opposite side of the table, and sat. “Let’s not waste each other’s time,” he said. “You know who I am, I know who and what you are. You have information I want. We need to come to an arrangement by which you will tell me what I want to know.”
Cayliss blinked. He was quite the good-looking young man, if your taste ran that way. Tall, well built, a face that would be considered handsome by most.
“So the only question is, how much will it take for you to become my agent instead of PR Randall’s man?”
Shaw could almost see the wheels turning in Cayliss’s mind. He had been kidnapped and was probably worried about not getting out of the situation alive. Selling out put a happier spin on things.
While he was mulling this over, Shaw said, “I’m a very rich fellow, as you know. What say we just say a million stads, and you take your money and space for a planet far away from here, never to return?”
Cayliss relaxed a bit. Now it had come to dickering, and he understood this well enough. “A million is not that much for giving up my career and worrying that the Confed might be coming up on me from behind for the rest of my life. M. Randall has a lot of friends in high places and a long memory.”
“True. Give me a number.”
“Five million.”
Shaw grinned. “What is it you think you know that is worth five million standards?”
Cayliss shook his head. “I don’t have a pronging clue, sir, but if we are talking about any number of millions, then you must think it’s pretty important.”
“Two million,” Shaw said.
“Four.”
“Three.”
Cayliss considered it. You could bank three million stads and live very comfortably off the interest forever without touching the principal. And certainly a sub-rosa field op would have another identity hidden away he could assume, just in case he had to leave town in a hurry.
“All right. Three million. But how do I know you’ll pay me once you get the information?”
Shaw glanced up at Cervo, who produced a bank encoder. Cervo touched a number, then a record button. There was a small beep! as the device coded a credit cube. The cube was as wide as the tip of a man’s thumb and half as thick. Servo handed the cube to Cayliss, who squeezed all four corners of it simultaneously with his fingertips and the tips of his thumbs. A small holoprojic image lit over the cube, showing a cash-value notation and the number GS 3,000,000, alo
ng with a Bank Galactica imprint holograph. It looked real, because it was real.
“So now you are a millionaire, M. Cayliss.”
Nothing like haggling your way from maybe dying to three million stads to put a smile on a man’s face. “What do you want to know?”
“One of my operatives was killed in an alley near the port recently. She was following you. Did you do it?”
Cayliss shook his head. “No.”
“Cervo, the date?”
The big man rumbled it off.
Shaw said, “Why were you at the port that day?”
“I was working courier. I had an info ball to deliver. A woman arriving at the port from offworld, I don’t know from where.”
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know. I had a temp-holo of her, but I’d never seen her before, and my control didn’t give me a name.”
“You know what was on the ball?”
“No. It was coded.”
Shaw smiled. “You tried to see?”
The man shrugged. “Never know what might be important. But I couldn’t open the file.”
“Tell me about this woman.”
“I only saw her for a few seconds to make the pass. Average height, maybe twenty-eight or thirty years old, plain-looking, blond hair, worn moderately long. Nothing special about her clothes, not carrying a travel case. I passed her the ball. We didn’t speak. I cycled out. If your agent was following me, she was damned good, because I looked for a tail when I left, and I didn’t spot her.”
Shaw considered the information.
“What kind of work do you normally do for Newman?”
“Courier, surveillance, cam-set and collection, bug-sweeps, whatever he needs. Nothing heavy, nothing wet. If somebody on one of our teams killed your op, I didn’t hear a whisper about it.”
Shaw nodded. “Well. I guess we’re done, then. Cervo, take the man to wherever he wants to go.” He flicked a look at the bodyguard.
Cayliss started to stand, smiling. He was young, free, and now rich. Life looked pretty good to him at the moment.