Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  Right on time, Tuzan’s small ground hauler arrived and parked near the diner’s back entrance. Jess checked his camera feeds one more time, then pinged the “all clear” signal to Tuzan. After a moment, the hauler’s back panel opened. Tuzan and Kerzanna got out, both wearing shapeless, hooded coverall jackets and carrying boxes of supplies. They closed the hauler’s doors, then entered the diner.

  The metro maglev train arrived at the stop, screeching to a halt. Maglev trains were ordinarily fast and quiet, but not in Ridderth. In case he had an audience, he glanced up at the train’s designator, then back down at his tablet, as if he hadn’t expected it to be the train he wanted. The waiting passengers boarded, and none got off.

  He took advantage of his temporary solitude to direct the flying cameras to hide themselves but still keep watch. He stowed the tablet and headed toward the ground-level metro stop close to the diner. They’d agreed Kerzanna was more vulnerable and should be the first to get the permanent shields. Jess found it hard not to demand details, but the less that had to be cleaned out of his memory, the better. He was no happier than Kerzanna was at the thought of telepaths mucking about in his mind, even though Tuzan had so far proved trustworthy.

  Forty-five minutes of no visible activity and no news left Jess jumpy and with a pounding headache. Only Jess-the-bomber had the patience to sit and watch the camera feeds. Jess-the-medic wanted to monitor Kerzanna, and Jess-the-military-gunnin wanted to be in the diner, leaving Jess himself to worry about the myriad things that could go wrong.

  For example, the unexpected appearance of an automated medevac capsule that floated down to rest on the walkway behind the diner. A man in a medic’s white jacket with a red armband arrived by groundcar. Instead of going into the restaurant, he stayed near the capsule.

  Jess pinged Tuzan with the news immediately, but got no answer.

  After another agonizing minute of waiting, he hastily directed the cameras to still hide but watch and record all the exits. He rolled and stuffed the tablet in his coat pocket as he all but ran toward the back of the diner. When he got close, he made himself slow down, and reached for Jess-the-engineer, whose natural body language made him look old and tired. Jess slouched and trudged around the corner of the building, gave the man dressed as a medic and the medevac capsule a dull, incurious glance, then entered through the diner’s back door as if he’d done it a thousand times before.

  Once past the entryway, he hesitated. He knew where he wanted to go, but he couldn’t reconcile the noisy, bustling, hotter-than-blazes kitchen with the diner’s floor plan. A harried line cook used his meat cleaver to point to one of the two wide, arched doorways. “Customer seating is through there, pal. Use the front door next time, will ya?”

  Jess shrugged an apology as he opened his coat and threaded his way through the kitchen and into an empty hallway with several closed doors. The end of the cooler hallway led out to the customer seating area, where the tables he could see looked full. When he was certain no one was watching, he palmed open the first door on the left and slipped into the room.

  Tuzan and Kerzanna sat in two of the private dining room’s chairs. Kerzanna looked surprised, but Tuzan looked annoyed.

  “Goddammit, this isn’t the–”

  Jess cut him off. “There’s a medevac out back. That wasn’t part of the plan, either.” Kerzanna stood, and he caught her eye. “I thought it might be for you.”

  She smiled and moved around the table toward him. “I’m good, Jess.” She slipped her hands inside his coat and wrapped him in an embrace, and he tightened his arms around her. His body had been starving for the feel of her, and her low, velvety voice got him every time. He inhaled her scent, and the world stood still for a moment.

  “Enough,” barked Tuzan as he got to his feet. “Time to go.”

  Jess let Kerzanna go so she could step back, and he stifled the impulse to close his coat against the sudden loss of her warmth.

  The door slid open, and Tuzan turned, then jerked and fell stiffly backward.

  Jess spun around and glimpsed a short, brown-haired, sallow-skinned man in a corporate suit as Kerzanna launched forward but stumbled and fell to her knees. The man looked at Jess’s face, then gave him a wide, happy grin. “Jackpot!” he said.

  Jess’s internal bioware suddenly woke up and flared. The fire illusion danced along his skin. He gritted his teeth and took a step toward the little man, but his bioware seized control of his body and froze him in place.

  “Nighty-night,” said the man.

  Flame. Shadows. Blackn…

  CHAPTER 22

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.022 *

  THE SOUNDS AND smells of Ridderth woke long forgotten memories in Renner. It surprised him, because none of his previous visits as part of Dixon Davidro’s circus had done so. The drumming of evening rain on the uneven glass roadway, the scent of stagnant water, the steady, insidious drip overhead that signified a hole in the roof, the nose-stinging acidic stench of the antimicrobials used to combat mold in the walls, all evoked images from long ago. Dixon seemed to have forgotten that Renner had grown up in the hard streets and crumbling waterways of Ridderth. He remembered random names, places, and faces, and his own cocky sense of having the world by the tail, right before he lost it all.

  The small, rented distribution warehouse had newer smells, too. Sweat, not his own, and blood, also not his own. The sweat came from Dixon, who had worked himself into a fury. The metallic blood scent came from the tall woman who was zip-tied to a metal chair in the center of the space, where the interior lighting was brightest.

  Renner stood by the warehouse’s regular door, hands in his jacket pockets. He had tendrils of his talent on every control in the building, from the door lock to the power bars, and he already knew which neighborhood grid batteries in a half-kilometer radius had charge he could use if needed. Just that afternoon, Dixon had made Lamis and Vahan rent a new townhouse for the group because Georgie had gone off the deep end again, insisting that fire would end them all if they didn’t leave. In his new room, Georgie had collapsed into a deep sleep. Either that, or Dixon had drugged him to keep him quiet for a few hours.

  Except for the battered, bloody Jumper in the chair, the tableau looked like one of Dixon’s rare staff meetings. Sachin, the chalk-skinned cleaner, leaned against the wall, worriedly watching Dixon pace. Renner didn’t blame her. If Dixon decided to withhold the uniquely customized drug cocktail that kept the helio poisoning in check, she’d be dead in a month. Xan, the telepath, sat on the foldout table. He held his sleeve up to stanch his bloody nose, a sign that he’d seriously overused his talent. The young man had little sense of self-preservation. Lamis bel Doro sat on a chair at the other end of the table, as did the prim shielder, Vahan, in her customary black corporate suit. Lamis looked bored, as usual. Renner didn’t know Vahan well enough to tell if she was uncomfortable or not.

  Renner sure was. On the rare occasions when Dixon actually lost his temper, instead of just modeling the behavior, his judgment got sucked out the airlock. Renner hated Dixon with the white-hot heat of a million super-giant suns, but his life depended on the man not getting himself caught by his CPS bosses, the internal inquiry auditors, or the very dangerous people he often did business with.

  “Mr. Renner,” said Dixon, “please persuade Subcaptain Nevarr to be more forthcoming.” His angry tone belied the politeness of the words.

  To each of Dixon’s questions about the Charisma project, where Orowitz was, and who was helping her in Ridderth, she’d responded with inane, trivial questions of her own, such as asking if he preferred summer or winter, or if he’d considered meditation to control his dyspeptic temper. Dixon brought out his whole arsenal of tricks—cajoling, bribing, lying, flattering, threatening—but he didn’t know which buttons to push. It wasn’t like him not to have figured out her weakness in advance.

  Renner had known Dixon’s order was inevitable from the moment that Nevarr had awakened and proved t
o have mental shields that high-level telepath Xan couldn’t penetrate, no matter how hard he tried, even though Dixon had “softened her up” with physical violence. Xan and Sachin both said they were shields, not a natural immunity. Vahan insisted that even if the shields had been placed by a top-level shielder, they should have faded after Nevarr was chemmed by the medevac capsule, and especially since Nevarr wasn’t a minder. Unsurprisingly, Nevarr hadn’t been forthcoming about her shields, either.

  “We aren’t waiting for Zerrell?” Renner asked. Xan had only recovered enough to connect briefly with Zerrell to tell him to come home.

  “No.” Dixon sucked on his bloody knuckles. He rarely indulged in personal violence, so he didn’t know how to punch a face without hurting himself. “The local who found her may believe she was all alone, but I’m not waiting around to find out. I want to keep Zerrell on task tracking down that ring. Besides, her shields will probably hold against a sifter, too.”

  Renner stepped toward Nevarr and allowed his ever-simmering rage to flow, and with it, his talent. He didn’t need emotion to fuel his talent, but it was easier.

  Long ago, he’d reveled in his unique minder talent and used it often and unwisely for bad people, which got him caught by someone far worse. Dixon had an uncanny ability to set the right hooks to motivate and punish people, and had molded Renner into a weapon. Renner had fought his fate, and gotten himself a lethal mechanical collar around his neck for his trouble. After that, he’d lost himself in rage and grown numb to using his ability to control and direct electricity to punish, torture, or kill at Dixon’s command. Then Neirra Varemba, Dixon’s second oldest and most trusted pet, had decided he was more than a monster. She’d taught him how to think strategically and play the long game, how to manipulate Dixon and subvert his will. Unfortunately, those skills didn’t help him avoid a direct order.

  He met Nevarr’s gaze. Despite her swollen eye, bruised cheekbone, and torn lip, she was a handsome woman. “This is going to hurt.” He doubted she’d understand it was his way of apologizing. He admired her spirit, even though her mocking defiance goaded Dixon to the point of making impulsive, stupid decisions that endangered them all.

  Renner had never worked on a Jumper before, so he sent a tendril of talent out to get a sense of her. In addition to the unique electrical signature that all animals had, her bioware systems hummed with latent energy, powered by the small but surprisingly powerful batteries for her cybernetic thigh and hip. He’d like to have explored further, but he had a job to do. Since the goal was to cause pain, not cripple her, he avoided her main systems and gave the nerves along her spine a sharp shock. Her back muscles contracted involuntarily, thrusting her shoulders back and chest forward. Her throat pressed hard against the tie round her neck, and her Jumper tattoos lit up briefly. He pounded her with four more pulses of increasing intensity.

  She screamed an obscenity on the last one. When she lifted her head, she smirked not at him, but at Dixon. “That was fun. Can we go again, Daddy?”

  Dixon frowned in irritation and waved at Renner to continue.

  At the end of twenty minutes, with similar results, Dixon threw up his hands in disgust. “This is pointless. She’s not going to give up an atom’s worth of data. We don’t have time to find the right leverage.”

  Renner relaxed his talent and let go of the current he’d been pulling from the city power node down the street, rather than draining the storage batteries that their warehouse and surrounding neighborhood depended on for powering building systems and comps.

  Dixon stood and put his hands on his hips. “Ms. Sachin, ping the local disposal specialists you hired and tell them we have a package for immediate delivery.” Sachin nodded and used her percomp, then asked Lamis for paper to write the location ref down, since Renner couldn’t keep a percomp alive for more than a day. “Mr. Renner, after you take out the trash,”—he waved dismissively toward Nevarr—”your number-one priority is to find Orowitz and get him in here for a chat.” Dixon turned and spoke to the rest of his staff. “That goes for all of you. We have to find the Charisma leaks and stop them, or there will be hell to pay.” His glare said he’d make sure they’d be the first ones paying.

  He stomped to the door and slammed his palm against the release, then stormed out into the night. The rest of the staff followed like remoras after a shark, leaving Renner alone with Nevarr.

  After he checked the zip-ties to make sure she wasn’t going anywhere, he opened the big loading door and ducked out into the wet night to retrieve the rented panel-sided ground hauler and move it as close as he could. He’d already found out the hard way that Nevarr was a lot heavier than she looked, and he didn’t want to have to carry her and her chair through the rain.

  He muscled her into the hauler, then strapped the chair to the holdfasts to keep it from bouncing around. He was done causing her more pain than was necessary. After strapping himself in, he fed the coordinates to the hauler’s comp and told it to sync with the Ridderth traffic control system. He used the hauler’s comp again to send a ping to the crew Sachin had arranged and told them he’d be there in twenty minutes with one package for disposal.

  The collar around his neck ratcheted tighter, the click audible in the sound-insulated hauler. The next click would draw blood, though the scar tissue prevented him from feeling it, except as pressure on his throat.

  Swiveling his seat, he turned back to look at his passenger. She seemed calm, almost serene. He didn’t think he’d ever been there. Even now, his temper simmered, knowing her death would be pointless, and the failing Charisma project wasn’t worth it.

  She met his gaze, then dropped her focus to his neck. “That’s a unique fashion statement. Your idea?”

  Honesty wouldn’t hurt him. Who was she going to tell? “Nope.”

  She nodded. “I saw something like it on the back of a remarkable woman I met in the Branimir spaceport.” She shook her head and snorted, spraying a little blood down the front of her ripped and stained thin blouse. “Your boss is one massively warped control freak.”

  Long experience kept his thoughts off his face, but her words told him more than Dixon had gotten out of her in the past two hours. He only knew one person on Branimir with a mechanical leash on her back, which meant Nevarr was one of Neirra’s children, as she liked to call the people she’d co-opted for her very long and deep game.

  Which put him in a dilemma. He wasn’t as dimwitted as he let Dixon believe, but he had no hope of figuring out all the pieces Neirra had put into motion, or what she hoped to accomplish. She’d told him he’d know when he was ready. Nevarr was a lot smarter than he was, and probably smarter than Dixon, so he asked her. “Are you supposed to live or die?”

  “According to who?” she asked. She turned her head and looked at him with her good eye. “Are you religious?”

  “No. The woman on Branimir.”

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “Live, I think, at least until the message gets delivered.” She gave him a sardonic smile with the less damaged side of her mouth. “I’m the hope of PTVS Jumpers everywhere, don’t-cha know.”

  He had no idea what the rest of it meant, but he understood hope. It had been Neirra’s greatest gift.

  He closed his eyes to think.

  Renner grunted with effort as he carried the chair with Nevarr’s limp body through the door of what turned out to be some kind of automated distribution center. Ceiling-high shelves took up half the space. Bots roamed the narrow aisles and used delicate metal fingers to select items to put in shipping bins.

  Twin men, dressed in white protective gear that covered everything but their identical faces, closed the door behind him, then led him to an open office area. The desks and furniture were draped in shiny petroplastic, the material of choice for body disposers across the galaxy.

  “Dead?” asked one as he pulled on a pair of safety goggles.

  “She’s big,” said the other. “Might cost extra.”

  Renner grunt
ed again as he set the chair down with a thud. He stood and pointed to her feet. “Need her boots and blouse.”

  The twins looked at each other and shrugged. The goggle-wearing man crossed to a table and opened a case that contained a medical bone laser, while the other began unfolding the first of a stack of collapsible crates on a gravcart.

  Renner pulled his multitool out of his pocket, selected a blade, and sliced the ties at her ankles, then pulled off her boots. He sliced the wrist ties and started to pull off her blouse, then realized he’d have to release the zip-tie around her neck, too. The white-suited man setting up the crates sniggered at his predicament of having to support her floppy torso and limbs while he wrestled the blouse off her, and without the ties, her body wouldn’t stay on the chair. One more task, and he’d have done all he could for the evening.

  He collected her clothes and left her lying on the hard, frigid floor.

  CHAPTER 23

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.023 *

  KERZANNA WOKE TO miserable cold and the sound of a mechanical clicking. She’d had to let Renner use the hastily-purchased dormo patch to knock her out so the wetwork crew would think she was harmless. True to his word, he’d removed it when he’d removed her tunic and boots. They’d gambled she’d wake up in time before the disposal crew noticed or removed parts of her she was fond of.

  It had been a surprisingly easy decision to trust Davidro’s brutal-looking enforcer, once she’d seen beyond the massively ugly scars on his neck and the frosty eyes that seemed to barely restrain madness. He’d looked familiar from the first moment she’d seen him, but it wasn’t until Davidro said his name that she realized she’d seen him in Neirra’s packet of memories. She’d never heard of a talent like his before, but it packed a powerful punch. No wonder a cowardly twist like Davidro needed the cruel leash.

  Even though her internal chrono said she’d only been there ten minutes, the freezing floor under her had already numbed her mostly naked chest, and her bones and biometal ached. She chanced a quick glance through the loose locks of hair covering her face to see the clicking sound came from a portable power supply, where a figure garbed in white repeatedly pressed a switch, to no avail. A gift from Renner, she guessed. The white-suited man swore vile oaths in Mandarin about the painful things he planned do to the lying, cheating monkey who’d assured them the unit was fully charged. Another man with a similar voice asked the first if he was doing it right, which engendered a bickering exchange about whether or not they could use the borrowed business’s power and not trip any alarms.