“On your couch?” Cara asked, knowing Mother Ramona’s method of sealing business deals.
“As it turns out, yes.” She smiled. “And I ended up giving him my access code for the next time he passed through Crossways.”
“Thornhill Renaissance.”
“That’s the one. Next time he came with a boatload of Burnish refugees, artisan glassmakers, jewelers, and metalworkers and their families, displaced by a land tussle between Eastin-Heigle and Arquavisa. His orders were to take them to a subsistence camp on Dounreay—a pretty inhospitable place by all accounts. He wanted new idents for them so they could settle on Scarra where there were opportunities for artisans.”
“And you provided them?”
“For a consideration.”
“Money?”
“An exchange. I needed someone taken to safety. Scarra was as good a place as any. I wouldn’t have asked Ben if I hadn’t known his word was good.”
“His word was always good,” Cara said. “And we have to make it good again. His Nan’s in trouble and there’s still Lorient’s settler ark to find.”
“We may be able to solve the problem of his grandmother. Crowder’s got her as hostage, right?”
“We presume.”
“So once Ben’s declared legally dead, why would Crowder need to keep her?”
“You think it’s that simple?”
“It’s worth a try. We’ve got a lead on the perps, the Alphabet Gang. Garrick thought we should give them time to report their mission a success before we terminate them with extreme prejudice. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Don’t you want to see them dead?”
Cara nodded.
“The Alphabets have worked for me and Garrick, and I introduced Ben to them. They turned against me and mine for money. That’s not something we can forgive. We’d never be able to trust them again. There’s a code and they stepped beyond it.”
“I should—”
Mother Ramona shook her head. “This job’s ours. On the house. Garrick and I agreed that having you all on Crossways would be an advantage. Garrick wants to spruce up our reputation as a free-trade port, play down the shady side, attract legitimate business. You don’t do that by letting incidents like this happen without sending a clear message. The Alphabet Gang is toast, but we’ll give them time to be useful first.”
“Crowder sent them.”
“We don’t know that for sure, but if he did, then he’s yours.”
Cara nodded. “Mine.”
She understood why Ben had been reluctant to kill Crowder in cold blood when they last met. Ben and Crowder had been friends for a long time. Maybe Ben didn’t want to believe that Crowder was irredeemable. Cara didn’t feel any need to give him the benefit of the doubt. Crowder was a dead man. He just didn’t know it yet.
Kitty avoided Cara as much as she could. There was only so much grief she could take and Cara’s was palpable. In fact Blue Seven was a big old pile of grief. It was Ben this and Ben that. Did any of the psi-techs care about Wes and the other dead guards?
Kitty found her feet taking her to the cab lane and she automatically programmed in the coordinates for Port 22. The hangar was empty except for the little Dixie Flyer and one of Mother Ramona’s smuggling ships docked in one of the repair gantries. Yan Gwenn and an odd-looking woman in half a buddysuit had the drive casing off the Dixie. Yan waved and Kitty waved back but didn’t go over to start a conversation. She’d come down here to get away from psi-techs.
Syke nodded an acknowledgment, almost a formal bow. He was going through the motions, but even behind his usually impassive expression Kitty recognized emotion. It was tightly constrained, but it was there.
Ellen Heator pulled off her half-helm and scrubbed her hair just like Wes used to do, except Ellen had considerably longer hair. “Kitty, how are you?”
“All right, I guess. Well, no, not all right if I’m honest. You know.”
“I do. I’m not sure I can do this anymore. I’m thinking of resigning.”
“I heard that, Heator,” Syke said. “Come into my office.”
“You don’t have an office . . . sir,” Ellen said.
“I’ll have to make one, then.” He led her gently into the guard post and thirty seconds later the four guards who’d been in there came out and stood looking at each other.
When Ellen came out again she still wore Garrick’s colors on her sleeve.
“Not leaving, then?” Kitty asked her.
Ellen just shook her head. “Syke said if I really wanted to go I could, but give it a few months. He didn’t want to lose anyone else from this team. He said I might feel differently if I waited. Said I’d gain perspective. I might, I suppose. But what if I don’t want to?” She cleared her throat. “You should come over and help me clear Wes’ apartment.”
“I was thinking . . .” Kitty said. “Is it up for grabs? I wouldn’t mind staying there . . . for a while at least.” She jerked her head over her shoulder. “Then we wouldn’t need to clear it.”
“As far as I know the rent’s paid up two months in advance. Are you looking for perspective, too?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
Ricky watched the big guard, Minnow, slap a blast pack to the side of Nan’s neck, then quickly looked back down to the slate he was pretending to read.
Minnow had dropped the slate off after Ricky’s last escape attempt with a gruff, “Here, kid, this’ll keep ya occupied.”
Ricky had plenty on his handpad to keep him occupied. He’d even caught up on all his homework and had worked ahead on a bunch of math problems and done some of the extra reading for his project on pre-meteor Earth history, but Minnow’s slate, a basic model with no connectivity, sadly, was a welcome distraction.
“Look, kid, I know it’s hard, but settle down and ya won’t get hurt and neither will Granny.”
Nan was his great-grandmother, but he didn’t bother to correct Minnow. It was only a halfhearted attempt at a veiled threat and Ricky paid it no mind. He’d already figured out that they weren’t in any immediate danger, but the uncertainty was eating at him. Surely Dad had reported them missing by now.
Ricky had only a vague idea of how the police might go about looking for them. Was kidnapping serious enough to call in the Monitors? They mostly operated on newly established colonies where there wasn’t such a good local policing system. Chenon had been the first colony. The founders had left Canaveral Spaceport pre-meteor, so it was a point of pride that Chenon considered itself culturally superior. It had the oldest uninterrupted strand of human history. North America had been smashed back to the Stone Age by the meteor, but the Chenonites had preserved the best of it: a pioneering spirit, democracy, education, and law.
“What ya readin’ today?” Minnow asked, shoving the remains of the blast pack into his pocket.
“The Curse of the Chinese Whisper,” Ricky said. “It’s set on Earth, before the meteor strike, before jump gate travel, even. What’s a Chinese Whisper?”
“Something ’at comes from China, I expect,” Minnow said. “China was a town once, way back, a big town somewhere near Australia and they had black and white bears. Got flattened by the meteor. I ain’t read that Chinese Whisper one yet but my wife finds all this quirky old stuff an’ puts it on my slate.”
“Nan read me Don Quixote once. That’s quirky and old. From before people even got off the planet.”
“Donkey Hoeteh? Ain’t even heard o’ that one. I’ll tell Ginny to look for it.”
“It’s weird, but good weird.”
He thought Minnow was softening toward them. He’d brought Ricky an extra blanket and the slate, stuffed with a weird selection of books, and had told him the Arrows had beaten the Rockets fifty-nine to forty-three in the grapple quarterfinals. He’d laughed then and said, “Tickets twenty creds each, an’ I got
to watch it for free. This job’s done me a favor.”
“How so?” Ricky had asked.
But Minnow had just laughed and tapped his nose with his index finger.
Ricky had puzzled over that and then remembered a couple of nights ago, after Minnow had delivered the evening blast pack and departed, he’d heard the low rumble of some kind of engine. Well, not so much heard it as felt it in his bones. He’d put his hands against the wall and his fingers had tingled, then he’d put his ear hard to the wall and heard a low hum. He’d felt it in his teeth, too.
It was an antigrav drive. He’d felt funny. It was possible they were close to, or maybe even beneath, a grapple arena. It couldn’t be the Arrows’ home arena because that wasn’t allowed in quarterfinals, semis, or finals. They had to be close to the De Barras Stadium, the only independent stadium on the planet. Independent because it was owned by the Trust, not a team. Of course, and the De Barras Stadium was on the edge of the Trust compound.
Yes! Ricky knew where he was now. All he had to do was get out, or get a message out.
The smile that was starting to form died unborn. How was he going to do that?
He so needed to talk to Nan.
“Dead?” Crowder received the news with mixed feelings. He put his plate down on the table and stared at the screen on the wall of the penthouse’s small kitchen. Dammit, he wanted Benjamin dead, didn’t he? Of course he did. He needed him dead, but Ben had been . . . Like a son, kept coming into Crowder’s head. Families had disagreements, chose different sides; it didn’t make them not care about each other.
He touched his ear, newly grafted and still very tender. Ben could have killed him, but he hadn’t.
“What would you like me to do about the Alphabet Gang?” Stefan French asked.
“Release the rest of the payment.”
Stephan nodded. “There’s a message from Crossways, from Norton Garrick’s office. Someone called Ramona.”
“Mother Ramona?”
“That’s the one. Says she has a proposition for you.”
“I’ll come down and take the call.”
Briefly Crowder considered removing the damper that isolated his receiving implant, but even though Benjamin was dead, there was still Carlinni to reckon with, and three hundred psi-techs, his former employees, who all had good reason to carry a grudge.
He stood up slowly and stretched the knots out of his back. He put his coffee cup and breakfast plate into the cleaner and headed for his private antigrav shaft in his shirtsleeves, then thought better of it and went to get his jacket from the bedroom closet. He didn’t always wear the Trust’s uniform, but today he would, whether out of respect for a dead frenemy or to keep up appearances, he wasn’t entirely sure. It just felt right.
Stefan nodded to him as he entered the outer office. “The call’s on your screen now, sir.”
“Thank you, son.” Son? When had he started to call his secretary son?
Mother Ramona’s hologram hovered a few inches above his desk. Her eyes followed his approach.
“Gabrius Crowder. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of a direct link before.”
“Mother Ramona. I’ve heard a lot about you, and heard from your lawyers, of course.”
There was a delay while the call routed through jump gates, then the screen sprang to life again. “I thought this deserved a face-to-face conversation. Ben Benjamin’s dead, though you probably know that already if you were paying the Alphabet Gang.”
“Dead?” Crowder thought he injected just the right amount of surprise into his expression. “I’m sorry to hear that. We may have had our differences, but he was like a son to me before he went rogue.”
Another delay.
“Your idea of family isn’t the same as mine. No matter. There’s an outstanding situation. Ben’s grandmother and his nephew.”
“What about them?” Now Crowder tried wide-eyed innocence, thought it might look too obvious, and went back to keeping his expression neutral.
Delay.
“Let’s be straight with each other, Mr. Crowder. Ben was a friend of mine and I would be remiss in my duties as a friend if I didn’t address a situation which I see now is eminently resolvable without any further recriminations. You no longer need the old woman and the boy as leverage. Release them. Get them to sign a confidentiality agreement first, if you like, but let them go.”
“What if I don’t have them?”
Delay.
“With your resources I’m sure you could find them. They might even be grateful for your intervention.”
“Quite. I’ll consider it. In the meantime, the platinum on Olyanda—”
This time the delay was slightly longer than the transit time accounted for.
“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t use Ben’s family as leverage on me. Sure I’d like to see his last wishes carried out, but I don’t have a personal stake in this. You weighed the value of Olyanda’s platinum against a whole colony and your own psi-tech team and found the platinum more valuable. Believe me when I say that one old woman and a boy are not worth a single concession on Olyanda. Our security there has beaten off your fleet—”
“Not mine.”
Delay.
“Whatever.” She waved dismissively. “We’ve repelled everything you’ve been able to throw at us and set up a planetary defense grid that you’d be foolish to try to breach.”
Crowder shrugged. “You can’t blame a person for trying.”
Delay.
“So what about the old woman and the boy?”
“I’ll see what I can find out. Maybe they’ve been taken as hostages by criminals for ransom. I’ll look into it, as a favor . . . in memory of Benjamin.”
Delay.
She nodded. “Thank you.”
Crowder let the holo-image fade. “Stefan!” he called.
“Here, sir.” The young man was already hovering in the doorway.
Crowder adjusted his voice accordingly. “What’s the latest on Louisa Benjamin’s condition?”
“Stable. Still under sedation.”
“Have Pav Danniri report to me. No need to waste resources, we just need to find a way to release the Benjamins without any kind of media fuss. Maybe make it look like I’ve staged a rescue. No need for any more bloodshed now.”
Chapter Sixteen
FOUND
BEN HAS NEVER FLOWN THE FOLDS LIKE THIS before.
He’s supposed to be unconscious. Is this an anesthetic dream or is he somehow aware? He’s always been in control. He’s always known the way out, a thin thread of silver light in the ultimate darkness that leads him to where he needs to go. Now it’s all up to the machine that has control of Solar Wind. An intelligent machine, to be sure, but not a sentient one. It’s programmed to preserve life, but ultimately it doesn’t care if it fails.
He’s come this far. He doesn’t want, “Oops, sorry,” carved on his tombstone.
He searches for the line in his mind.
Gods! It’s always been so easy before.
Inside his head is a fog, thick, black, and tarry, but . . . there’s a pull that favors one direction above all others. If not a line, then at least a faint trail where the fog rolls back to reveal a glimmer.
In his dream he touches the nav plates, one hand is swollen like an overripe plum about to burst, but he can just about move his fingers.
“May I suggest—” the ship says.
“No. We go this way.”
“But—”
“This way, damn you. Go offline. Taking manual control.”
Ben’s wrist throbs. His head begins to pound, but still he follows the pull. He starts to cough again. He tastes blood—iron and salt.
The exit point. There!
Spinning. Out of control. As the ship tumbles into realspace t
he anesthetic kicks in and the blackness takes him.
“Cara!” Max burst into Wenna’s office. “Cara! It’s Ben. I . . . I’m sure he’s out there. Solar Wind. I . . . I can sense her, out there.”
Gen was close behind him. “Don’t get your hopes up. Max is still a beginner, but it’s worth checking. Even if it is the Solar Wind . . .”
“I know. It may just be wreckage, but . . .” Max said.
Cara reached out to contact Ben. Nothing. Was he dead? Did she really have so little faith?
Wenna was already on the vox to Crossways’ traffic control. She looked up, face pale. “They’ve got an incoming object on the extreme edge of scanner range. Unidentified, not answering hails. It’s on a direct trajectory with the station, so if there’s no response by the time it reaches the 1000 klick mark they’ll launch a missile to deflect it.”
Cara was on her feet in an instant. “Get Garrick to call them off. If it’s Solar Wind we’ll do an intercept. Hell, even if it’s not Solar Wind we’ll do an intercept.”
Wenna hit the vox and Cara reached out for Yan Gwenn, bringing him up to speed in an instant, mind-to-mind.
*The Dixie’s ready,* Yan said. *She’s in Port 22.*
*On my way.*
*Not without me,* Ronan said. *There may be someone incapacitated on that boat.*
Ben. Let it be Ben. Oh, please let it be Ben.
*We need a second pilot,* Yan said.
*I’ll come,* Gen said.
“Just a minute, is this dangerous?” Max grabbed her by the arm.
She shook him off. “Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass just because I’m carrying your child. You said yourself it could be Ben.”
“And it could be dangerous.” Cara glanced down at Gen’s twenty-week bump. “More importantly, it could need an EVA and suits aren’t made for two.”
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