He’d never seen Nan helpless before.
The thickset guard lifted her from the chair and deposited her on the freestanding bed, then unlocked and pulled down a narrow bunk from the wall, which took up almost half of the remaining floor space. “This is yours, now, kid.”
Ricky ignored the furniture. “What have you done to her?” He tried to keep his voice strong and level but it wobbled right when he didn’t want it to.
“Fixed her leg,” the scary woman said.
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“Same thing that usually happens to criminals.”
“We’re not criminals!”
“Helping Ben Benjamin commit murder. That’s a criminal offense.”
“It’s not . . . We didn’t . . .” Shut up, Ricky, before you say something stupid. Deny everything. “Uncle Ben’s not a murderer.”
He saw the look in the woman’s eye and shut up.
When they’d gone, Ricky turned to his great-grandmother.
“Nan?”
She continued to stare at the ceiling.
“Nan?” He touched her shoulder lightly.
No reaction.
“Nan?” He shook her with a little more determination.
Nothing.
Again. Nothing. More shaking.
“You wake up, now. I need you.”
He heard himself shouting and realized he was gripping her shoulder too hard and shaking her. What was he doing? He stepped back, balled his fists, and took a deep breath.
“Okay, Nan. It’s okay.” This time he patted her shoulder gently. “I’ll think of something. I’ll get us out of here. Don’t worry.”
He looked around the room. What resources did he have? What would Uncle Ben do?
Stefan hadn’t been able to find a thing on Louisa Benjamin. Crowder almost fired the young man on the spot, but assistants with discretion weren’t easy to find. Sure that he could do better himself, and that Stefan would be abjectly apologetic when he did, Crowder accessed the link and found . . . nothing.
Nothing more than her basic identity, that is: name and address, the will left by Ben’s parents, deeds to the farm, and her date of birth, which surprised him because she didn’t look anywhere near her age, but almost nothing else of any value. In these days of information overload to have a record that was so devoid of detail and nuance was almost unheard of.
Maybe she did have connections.
He’d assumed she was bluffing, but what if she wasn’t?
Oh, hell, there were two alternatives. She’d either paid a lot of money or had a lot of influence to have her identity scraped from public view, or she’d never been anywhere, done anything, or met anybody important in her whole life. She was a farmer living off the grid.
Which was the most likely?
He began to smile.
He wasn’t in the habit of waging war on old ladies, but Louisa Benjamin was fair game. Ben had never offered much detail, but it was pretty obvious that he loved his Nan. Why sit around waiting for Ben to pay him an unauthorized visit? Why not take the initiative? His grandmother and nephew would be the perfect bait for a trap.
Crowder heard voices in the outer office.
“Come in, Danniri,” he called, still finding it rather odd to be using the name of his onetime bodyguard who had died trying to take down Benjamin.
Crowder tried not to stare at Pav Danniri. She looked so much like her dead brother that it was uncanny. He had wondered whether using her to capture and guard Louisa Benjamin was a good move, since she harbored such a grudge against Benjamin himself, but she’d been completely cool and professional with both the boy and the grandmother.
Crowder waved her in. “You’ve done well.”
Pav scowled. “The old woman’s broken leg was unfortunate, but it’s responding to treatment.”
“Hardly a major disaster given that her only role in this affair is as bait in a trap.”
“Were you aware that she has a psi implant?”
“No.” Had he misjudged Louisa Benjamin after all? “What’s her specialty?”
“I don’t know. I put her on reisercaine as soon as I realized, so between that and the pain meds she won’t have been able to get a message out even if she’s the strongest Psi-1 Telepath ever. I checked her handpad. Not much on it that I could find.”
“What about the boy?”
“He’s just a kid.”
“Any psi abilities?”
“Too young.”
Crowder smiled. Everything was under control.
The first time he tried to escape, Ricky barely got twenty strides down the corridor before the thickset guard, Minnow, caught up with him and hauled him back. But escaping hadn’t been the point. Getting to the bend in the corridor had been his objective, to see what was around it: an emergency staircase, leading both up and down; a grav shaft that may or may not be switched on. A comms device on the right-hand wall.
And now he also knew Minnow wasn’t as slow as he looked.
With that information Ricky went happily back to the cell where Nan dozed the hours away, sometimes almost lucid and other times freshly doped and quiet.
The second escape attempt fared little better, but he got to see that the corridor in the opposite direction looked less promising. Long and featureless, it dead-ended in solid looking double doors. It wasn’t Minnow he slipped past this time, but a wiry older chap whose name he didn’t know. For this attempt he received a couple of hard slaps on the side of his head that left him reeling. He was lucky that it wasn’t any worse than that. He hoped that meant they didn’t take him seriously. With Nan still doped it was up to Ricky to get out and get help.
The scary woman, Danniri, had said they were in trouble with the law, but they hadn’t allowed him to call Dad. He had some vague notion from old reality vids that anyone detained for any kind of suspected crime was allowed one call, whether a lawyer or a family member, but Danniri wasn’t a Monitor or even part of Chenon’s planetary police, she was Trust. Ricky wasn’t sure whether the Trust had to play by the same rules.
Chapter Eleven
SETTLING
RION BENJAMIN PACED ACROSS THE KITCHEN, turned and paced back again. He glared at the pan, still half-full of an egg and paruna grain mixture he’d cooked, but couldn’t face eating.
Two days.
He stepped out onto the balcony of their energy-efficient pit house. The dome of the inner atrium was open to the sky and gentle rain splashed down onto the tomato plants growing two floors below. He couldn’t think in here, even with the fresh air filtering down from above.
He grabbed his work-worn jacket and took the steps up, two at a time, emerging into the barnyard where the brisk breeze funneled between the byre and the barn, spattering his face with raindrops. The sweet smell of the farmyard always steadied him.
Something was very wrong.
Nan had vanished just like Ricky. She’d left him strict instructions not to follow her to Arkhad whatever happened, but to send the message she’d stored on her machine. It was to her friend Lucy on Earth, a person with some influence, Nan said, but Rion knew no more than that. He’d done it, though.
Rion had called Kai, still on Tobar, Chenon’s smallest moon.
“No, Dad, I’ve not had any contact with Ricky since the day he told me what he was planning. You need to get a message to Uncle Ben.”
“Even presuming I can get hold of him, what can he do? If Crowder is using Nan and Ricky as bait he wants Ben to trade himself for their safety, and Ben is damn fool enough to do it. And there’s no guarantee that Crowder would release your Nan and Ricky even if that happened.”
“Uncle Ben could probably rescue them.”
“Oh, sure. We don’t even know where they are.”
“Uncle Ben’s got the resources. Psi-te
chs. Telepaths, Finders. Didn’t he once rescue Crowder from pirates when he was in the Monitors?”
Rion resented Ben rather more than he should. He was still the exciting brother, and still young. Their age gap, a mere three years officially, had increased significantly with all the cryo Ben had done. What was the gap, now? Eighteen, no, nineteen years. Rion had gray hairs, a family, and the responsibility of running the farm. What responsibility did Ben have, roaming across the galaxy, here, there, and all over?
And this was all about one of Ben’s scrapes. Nan had gone haring off to find Ricky. That should have been Rion’s job, but Nan had been a negotiator. Her Empathy could tell her whether she was being fed a line of bullshit or not. It made more sense for her to go, but he felt impotent, stuck here at home, letting his grandmother attempt what he could not.
“This is the only time I wished I had an implant,” Rion said. “If we could contact Ben or Cara direct . . .”
“I know, Dad. Didn’t they give you any idea where they were?”
“No.”
“Didn’t Nan get copies of Uncle Ben’s arrest warrant? Is there a clue in there?”
“She did. It’s worth a try. Well done, Kai. Good thinking.”
He had a whole heap of reading to do.
Four hours later he looked up from Nan’s screen, bleary-eyed. He had a clue. Ben had apparently sold Olyanda’s mining rights to Crossways, some kind of criminal organization. He looked up possibilities and found records of a space station that went rogue a century ago, supposedly the home of several criminal gangs. That sounded about right. How did a person go about getting a message to anyone on Crossways? When in doubt, ask.
Rion had never been fond of social networks. He kept in touch with other local farmers on farm-net, but that was all he had time for. Once more he called Kai.
“Have you ever heard of a space station called Crossways?”
“Rumors. Some folks say it’s real, others say it’s one of those tales that grows in the telling.”
“Well, according to the warrant, one of the things Ben’s accused of is selling the rights to mine platinum on Olyanda to criminals on Crossways. If Ben’s not there, someone should know how to get a message to him. I don’t know where to start, though.”
“The university’s net usually has good access to information. Let me ask a couple of contacts.”
Rion felt relief wash through him. “I can leave it up to you?”
“I’ll let you know how it goes.”
As Rion reached to power Nan’s screen down he noticed a message waiting from Lucy. He opened it. It simply said: Investigating from this end. Stand by. Please keep me updated. There is already some concern about Trust activity.
He responded: Thank you. Trying to get a message to Ben Benjamin to apprise him of the situation. I believe he can be contacted via Crossways. Can you help?
It would be at least a couple of days before he could hope for a response, but he’d done all he could do for now.
Ben stared at the schematics for Blue Seven. The warehouse space had been neatly divided into accommodation, storage, work, and recreational space. Archie had managed to link directly to the external docking cradle on Crossways’ upper deck and Max had arranged for secure connections to the banking hub. Marta had sourced kitchen equipment from a dubious restaurant that had gone out of business, and Ada Levenson, the formidable cook that none of them dared to cross, had declared it usable and set about cleaning and sterilizing it to provide food for the hungry workers, none of them so appreciative as Morton Tengue’s mercs, now rebranded as Blue Seven Security.
All of Tengue’s injured were out of danger now, though Fowler, the young woman Ben had carried through the airborne attack, would need reconstructive surgery. Ronan planned to move her to his new med bay in Blue Seven so he could keep an eye on her personally.
Techs finished installing the matrix, and with the addition of the datacrystals Wenna had preserved from Olyanda, the new offices, though still a little raw around the edges, became fully operational.
“I like it!” Max said as he polished an imaginary scuff off the surface of his new desk with his sleeve. “My own office right next to Wenna’s. Do I get an assistant?”
“Do you need one?” Ben asked.
“I’m going to be in charge of company accounts. I shouldn’t be the only one who knows where all our money is.”
“Good point. Pick your own team, but have Ronan do a psych eval.”
“He hasn’t done one on me.”
“Another good point. Does he need to?”
“No, I trained as a tax accountant. I’m always going to fail a psych eval.” Max grinned.
Ben may have been feeling more comfortable in Blue Seven, but Norton Garrick wasn’t happy. And when the de facto head of Crossways wasn’t happy, headaches cascaded down the chain of command like birdshit from a tree branch. Though he wasn’t in the Crossways chain of command, the problem had landed at Ben’s feet.
The good citizens of Crossways were protesting the temporary closure of their stadium while the Olyanda refugees were in residence.
Protesting loudly.
“You see my problem?” Garrick leaned over the balcony, which jutted out from an upper reception room of the Mansion House.
“I’ve got problems of my own,” Ben said, glancing down at the throng of protesters. It said a lot for Garrick’s style of governance that the gathering was not being dispersed with extreme prejudice.
“It should be the grapple quarterfinals next week and at the moment the game’s on hold until we get those damned settlers out of there.”
“You promised—”
“I know, that I would resettle them, but that man—”
Ben knew he was talking about Victor Lorient by the way Garrick’s mouth tightened when he spoke.
“That man has turned down four perfectly suitable planets, so far. I’m running out of time. What more does he want?”
“He wants to be absolutely sure that there are no hidden platinum deposits, and he wants a planet that is completely independent of any of the megacorps.”
“We’ve done a thorough survey of all of them. They’ll support human life. They don’t have any native sentient beasties above the level of a cockroach. There’s no more platinum than there was on Earth—not on any of them. As for independence, that’s up to him to turn away anyone who comes knocking, but we can hack the central systems of all the megacorps to show whichever planet they choose as uninhabitable.”
“Have you explained all this to him?”
“I have, and I’ve offered him all the help he needs to set up.”
“Well, then, what else can he possibly want?”
“He wants you.”
“Huh?”
“He wants the set-up team he had on Olyanda.”
“He hated us. He thought we were deliberately trying to make life difficult for him and never accepted genuine offers of help if he could do something the hard way. This is the man who thinks psi-techs can take over his mind and use him like a puppet.”
“I know all that, but he says better the devil he knows. Will you at least talk to him?”
“I’ll talk to him.” Ben could feel himself being manipulated. “But if he wants me to find his missing settlers, I can’t go back to babysitting duties.” He frowned. “Though . . . maybe there is a way.”
Cara sat with Ben, quietly sinking into the luxury of the sofa, which adjusted beneath her for maximum comfort. Conducting business in the Mansion House was all padding. First drinks, then dinner, and only after good food and fine wine had induced an air of relaxation and cordiality did Garrick start to negotiate what surely must have been his most pressing business.
“Here are the choices, Director Lorient.” Norton Garrick dropped four slim folders onto the low table by Lorient’s chai
r. “Robinet, Jamundi, Darwen, and Lexolan. Four planets all guaranteed as close to platinum-free as can be. Two of them are virgin, so they come with all the attendant risks you were prepared to face on Olyanda. One is already thinly populated, but there are unsettled continents and the current incumbents would be happy to share. There are, of course, no sentient or developing life-forms to endanger, though the planets are by no means empty of life. Darwen has some rather interesting flying herbivores and Lexolan is nine-tenths ocean. Robinet’s gravity is heavier than Earth’s, but not beyond human tolerances.”
Garrick paused to top up Lorient’s glass.
“In fact,” he continued, “the folks on Lexolan would be eager to welcome you as your goals match theirs in most respects. They’re New Amish and your back-to-basics philosophy fits neatly with theirs.”
Cara had drunk sparingly. Excess alcohol inhibited a psi-tech’s implant. Mother Ramona had taken Rena Lorient, Jack Mario, and Saedi Sugrue to show them the garden so that Garrick could have Victor’s undivided attention. Cara had all her powers of Empathy turned toward Victor, ready to nudge him toward any of the possibilities he seemed interested in. They had to have a decision soon or Garrick was going to have a meltdown, and his sports fans were going to openly rebel.
Garrick cleared his throat. “Jamundi is interesting as well. It was one of the early terraformed planets. Already atmosphere and gravity compatible, it was successfully seeded with Earth flora and fauna some two hundred years ago. There was a brief attempt at colonization a hundred years ago, but the colony failed due to bad management and internal strife. It was one of the Shorre Company projects and its demise went unremarked while the Ramsay-Shorre Alliance was being negotiated.”
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