The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “Says she’s authorized,” the younger guard said.

  “We didn’t hear anything,” the second guard said to her.

  “Clearly you didn’t,” she said, “although your docking authority did, or I wouldn’t have the codes. Now, check my identification before my hand falls off and I have to sue someone.”

  The second guard reached into a pocket built into the waist of his uniform and removed a thumb-sized scanner. She hadn’t seen one like that before—it looked older and clunkier than those she was used to.

  But she also knew things were different here, often on purpose. The starbase might have been building its own scanners, since so many manufactured ones sent information back to the manufacturer as a matter of course.

  He held the thing over her swollen skin, then touched the robotic hand. It let go.

  She couldn’t actually feel that the grip was gone, but her hand fell to her side, banging into her thigh before she grabbed her right elbow with her left hand, stopping the movement. Pain echoed through her hand, exacerbated by the blow to her leg.

  She winced, because she was expected to.

  “Sorry,” the second guard said, even though he didn’t sound in the least apologetic.

  “Don’t know what you’ll find,” the first guard said, nodding toward the berth and, by extension, the ship. “They won’t answer our hails. They’ve been berthed for thirty-six hours now, and no one has come in or gone out. After the initial contact, we haven’t heard a thing.”

  She pretended that all of this was new to her, even though it wasn’t. First, she had located the ship within the nearest sector of space—which had been hard enough; chartered cruise ship companies didn’t like to reveal their high-end yachts’ locations, especially to someone not in the database. Then she had to identify the ship’s registry and docking number, actually hacking into the docking agent’s database during the fifteen minutes he’d allowed her alone.

  That was when she discovered the ship had arrived but hadn’t moved or done anything except an automated contact before landing.

  “If that’s true,” she said to the guards, “then why haven’t your inspectors contacted the ship?”

  “Base law. We’re not to try for 168 hours.”

  Everything on this base was done in Earth hours. Earth days didn’t exist. It was just another way that the NetherRealm established its independence, and it was annoying.

  Apparently base law didn’t let them establish contact for an entire week.

  A lot could go wrong in a week.

  She rubbed her wrist, partly for show, and partly to remind them they’d imprisoned a woman who was simply trying to do an authorized job.

  “We got word that they were smuggling weapons on this ship,” she said. “The base has given me permission to inspect. You’re welcome to help if you’d like.”

  They looked at each other. The younger guard seemed eager—more confirmation that he hadn’t done much in his life besides guard the docking ring—but the older guard shook his head.

  “Your people, your problem,” he said. “You realize that we have a different list of contraband items than Kazen does, right?”

  “I know,” she said. “But if I find contraband on the ship before anyone leaves, it’s still in my territory.”

  So long as no one had disembarked, a ship in the NetherRealm was subject to the law of the sector it had come from. Which was why most ships sent at least one member of the crew into the NetherRealm immediately upon arrival.

  “Okay,” the second guard said in a voice he clearly meant as official. “We got that on record. You’re entering before they disembark, so you’ve got jurisdiction.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The first guard pressed the secondary code into the docking door. It rolled open, revealing an empty airlock, coated in bright yellow light which, on the NetherRealm, meant all-clear.

  She stepped into the airlock, and stopped for a moment to steady herself.

  Things inside that ship had to be bad. No one had gotten out. Weren’t cruises all about stopping and seeing places? Even starbases. Especially starbases as famous as the NetherRealm. There had to be an approved track for the tourists to go on, one that prevented them from getting mugged while still allowing them to shop in the NetherRealm’s black market.

  The airlock closed behind her, and then she hit the comm. She identified herself as an inspector, just in case the guards were listening. Besides, that should get a quicker response from the ship itself.

  What it got was a lot of nothing. No static, no answer. Not even an attempt.

  She tried three times, gave up, and punched in the override code the docking agent had given her. He wasn’t even supposed to have it. Only the NetherRealm’s Security Force—their police force, in essence—was supposed to have it. But in a place this corrupt, it didn’t surprise her that the override codes had trickled to several nonapproved personnel.

  The interior doors opened and the stench nearly knocked her backward.

  Corpses. Rotting corpses. She’d recognize that smell anywhere.

  Her stomach clenched. She put a hand over her mouth and nose, breathing through her fingers. Then she stepped into the ship and nearly tripped over a body.

  She looked down.

  He was young, thin, with a shock of white-blond hair and skin the color of porcelain—at least, on this side. On the back, his hair was matted and black with blood. But the blood hadn’t seeped, which either meant the head wound was superficial, or he had died before bleeding out.

  She crouched. She pushed the hair away from his face, noting that while his skin was clammy, it was also still warm to the touch.

  His lashes were long, his cheekbones solid. He was a boy, just at the cusp of his teenage years.

  “Misha,” she whispered.

  She felt for a pulse, found it, thready and weak. He was nearly dead. If she’d waited for the required week for contact, he would have been dead.

  She scooped him in her arms and tossed him over her shoulders, his arms flapping against her knees. Her knees buckled at his weight; she hadn’t expected it of such a thin body.

  She carried him back through the airlock, trying not to think of the damage she might be doing to him.

  But she couldn’t call for help—not here. The ship wasn’t NetherRealm territory. It still belonged to the Kazen Sector, and she didn’t know the protocols to get NetherRealm authority here.

  So she had to take him into the NetherRealm proper.

  The docking door opened. The guards peered in, looking stunned. They didn’t expect an inspector to be carrying a young boy over her shoulder like a sack of clothing.

  “People are dead in there,” she said, “but he’s alive. There may be others who are still breathing.”

  Like Yuri. Maybe Yuri was still alive.

  But she couldn’t go back and look for him.

  Not with Misha so close to death.

  She didn’t dare.

  In the hospital wing, she had to give them a name she hadn’t used in nearly seven years. Technically, it was her name, although it didn’t even sound like her name anymore:

  Halina Layla Orlinskaya.

  Yes, she kept saying over and over. Yes, this boy is my son.

  My son.

  Misha.

  Once she’d cradled him, skin wrinkled and red, covered with blood then, too, but her blood—the blood they shared. She had wiped his eyes with her fingers, then his little mouth, and he had started to suckle on her thumb.

  Then her work called her back and, like a fool, she went.

  Yuri raised him. Yuri loved him. Yuri would have protected him.

  Yuri, whom she hadn’t been able to go back for.

  If it had been a mission, she would have dumped the boy on the passageway and gone back, found someone else alive, brought that person out, and kept going back, back, until others arrived to help her.

  But it wasn’t a mission; it was a cruise ship her
husband and son had booked a year before, a cruise to see a different solar system, a long-haul trip to celebrate—what? She couldn’t even remember.

  She barely remembered that they had planned the trip. She tried to keep track, but she often forgot—so many more important things on her mind.

  Then, when she realized she was leaving the service, she checked on the ship. She did not contact Yuri. To do so would put him and Misha in danger. She hacked into reservations, looked up their names, and checked their itinerary.

  She got dates and times of all of their shore calls, including this one, and she knew she would meet them here.

  They hadn’t known it.

  No one had known it, except her.

  “You realize you should have gone through quarantine.”

  It took her a moment to realize that a young doctor was talking to her. He looked like a baby with his hair tied back and his clean-shaven face. Only his eyes were old, the age that came with the type of work he did, in the place he was, instead of from actual age.

  “They tried to make me go through quarantine,” she said, “but Misha was dying. So I brought him here.”

  “You were lucky,” the doctor said. “All of this could have been caused by a virus.”

  “It wasn’t.” She let impatience into her voice. She knew most of the lethal viruses out there and none left the victim looking like Misha.

  “That’s right,” the doctor said. “He has laser rifle wounds. There was some kind of firefight on that ship.”

  She felt a coldness run through her. “The others?”

  “So far, no one has brought us any more injuries.”

  It took a moment for her brain to process his words. “What have they brought you?”

  But she knew the answer before he spoke.

  Corpses.

  They had brought him only corpses.

  She sat at Misha’s bedside, afraid to leave him. Someone had found her a change of clothing and forced her to wash the blood off her face.

  They’d shaved off his hair so that they could work the wound on the back of his head. They said he’d be unconscious for a while now, maybe forty-eight, maybe seventy-two hours.

  She wanted them to say “two or three days,” but they wouldn’t. Damn this place, they wouldn’t tell her anything.

  No one talked to her, either. About the ship, about the losses, about her.

  Until the Director for Starbase Security Services showed up. He announced himself as if he were an emperor. So she had asked for identification, even though her internal scanners had already checked his hand chips.

  He was gaunt, with whitish-gray skin and haunted eyes. His lips were too thin, his nose too large. He wore a black suit with silver trim, much like her now-ruined tunic outfit.

  He came into Misha’s room and closed the door, making her bristle without even saying a word.

  “Halina Layla Orlinskaya,” he said.

  She nodded, no longer used to the name.

  “Also known as Elena Elizarova, Anna Ilyinichna Valentinov, and Alina Yaroslavsky.”

  She didn’t acknowledge those names, although she’d used them, many times.

  “I have found sixteen warrants in your various names,” he said. “I’d like to say they were all for murder, but they’re not. Some are murder with special circumstance, some are for egregious homicide, others are for inciting murder. And that’s just under the names I know.”

  She didn’t move. An innocent person might protest. But she had lost the right to pretend innocence when she had used her current identification to go into that cruise ship.

  Misha stirred. She reminded herself that he had moved off and on throughout the long night, that the doctors said it meant nothing, he was still unconscious and would remain so for a few more hours at best.

  The Director saw her staring at Misha. He looked at Misha too, probably wondering if the boy was waking up.

  She was wondering if, on some level, Misha could hear this.

  It was one thing to know that your mother worked for Kazen Intelligence. It was another to hear the results of her job so bluntly described.

  “I should send you back,” the Director said, “but I’m not sure to where. Do I send you to the place with the most recent charges or the one with the worst? Or do I send you to Naut? Because your identification—which is older than this child—claims you work for the Secret Police in Chuleart.”

  She waited, not answering anything. She had worked for the Secret Police in the city of Chuleart. She had gotten her start there, as a college student. Then she had moved up from the local branch to the regional and then to the Empire’s main branch.

  Then she’d had Misha and retired, or so she thought for those few weeks they gave her with her family. But the case that brought her back sent her into Intelligence, and that led her to places she never thought she would go, as a naive twenty-year-old who wanted adventure and secrecy and romance.

  She had had adventure, she had had secrecy, but she had never had romance. It was blood and fear followed by weeks, maybe months, of tedium, accented with moments of panic.

  The Director crossed his arms. “But you know that we never send anyone back, not without cause. Or you would not be here. I’m amazed you haven’t asked for asylum yet.”

  She hadn’t planned on asking for asylum. She certainly didn’t want to live out her life on a starbase between sectors, unable to travel, vulnerable to whomever was on the ships that ventured into the NetherRealm’s docking ring.

  The Director leaned back against the wall. “If we want it,” he said, “we do have cause to send you away. You were careless in that docking ring. You boarded without permission. I have a hunch you stole codes. Because you didn’t follow procedure, you could have loosed a virus onto this base.”

  She folded her hands together, then wished she hadn’t. He might take that as a nervous gesture.

  Maybe it was a nervous gesture.

  “Did you think,” he asked, “that you might have set a killer free?”

  She hadn’t. She knew that much. A killer wouldn’t have trapped himself at the docking ring, waiting for someone to find him.

  The Director was just trying to scare her.

  The killer was long gone.

  She took her son’s hand. It was warm, but limp.

  “What happened on that ship?” she asked.

  Her voice sounded rusty. She hadn’t spoken to anyone except Misha since she came into this room, and even then, she hadn’t said much.

  “We don’t know exactly,” the Director said. “The position of the bodies suggests that the killer started in the dining room. He killed most of the passengers there, along with most of the waitstaff. The rifle wasn’t set high—it didn’t penetrate walls, just flesh.”

  Which was why her son had serious wounds, but hadn’t died.

  “Then he killed the kitchen staff and proceeded to the cabins. He moved quickly enough that no one got warning. He saved the captain for last, probably to pilot the ship into the dock, but we don’t know that for certain.”

  “Misha was by the main door,” she said.

  The Director nodded. “We think he was trying to get out after the docking, and just passed out.”

  Her son had been trying to leave the ship? That didn’t make sense to her, not if the killer escaped before the ship arrived at the docking ring.

  Misha’s position inside that ship didn’t suggest it either. He had fallen in front of the door, not in front of the control panel.

  He lay where anyone who tried to get into the ship couldn’t miss him.

  The Director crossed his arms. “What do you know of these deaths?”

  “Me?” She looked at him in surprise. “I had nothing to do with this.”

  “No?” the Director asked.

  “No,” she said as firmly as she could. But she was lying. She had been worried about a connection to her from the moment she learned that the ship had docked and no one had disembarked. �
��If this was meant for me, Misha would be dead now.”

  Although he had been left for dead.

  And he had been left in front of the doors, like a message.

  The Director watched her. He couldn’t read her. No one could.

  “I’ve heard about Lysvista,” he said. “Everybody has.”

  Really? How could anyone have heard of Lysvista? It was supposed to have been a secret op.

  Had Intelligence leaked the information?

  “You fled after that,” the Director said. “Lysvista convinced you, didn’t it?”

  Convinced her? Of what? She hadn’t needed convincing.

  Lysvista had defeated her.

  Lysvista had provoked a failure of will.

  Lysvista, a tiny mountain town on the planet of Lys on the far side of the Nechev System. One of the prettiest places she’d ever seen. Lysvista was on the top of the tallest mountain peak in the Godinger Range. The town was surrounded by four spectacular lakes, none of which bled into the other, all of which were a very bright and very deep blue.

  If you stood in the very center of town, you could see for kilometers. It felt like you could see the entire planet, even though you couldn’t.

  The refinery on the far end of town made some of the deadliest bioweapons known to man. All she had to do was get inside, steal the formulas, and then use the weapons on Lysvista.

  She’d done similar things in the past.

  Only Lysvista itself made this job harder.

  Strangers were either spies or tourists who couldn’t be trusted. She had to move in. She had to become part of the town.

  And she did.

  She even managed to get a job at the refinery. She stole the formulas, and had a plan for setting the weapons loose all over the town.

  In the past, she would have set the canisters, she would have programmed the timers, she would have left with no regrets.

  But she had talked to people, actually had a few meaningful conversations, the first in years. She had sat beside the lakes she would destroy and watched the sun creep over the mountain range in the mornings. She had had the best beer of her life, made from the fresh lake water, and she had had ice cream like none she’d ever tasted, made from the nearby snowcaps.