“Enough!” Cara screwed up her eyes to look at her handpad. “It’s four in the morning, station time. What’s that Chenon-time?”
He could probably work it out, though Arkhad time was two hours adrift from Norro time.
“Does it matter?”
“No.” She wriggled around to face him and stroked his naked chest with one hand. “I believe I might be embarrassed if I could remember much. Did we . . . ?”
“No.”
“Ah, pity.”
“Pity?”
“Yes, well, it would have eased us past that awkward moment when we both remembered that this is our first time since I slept with Ari van Blaiden. Willingly if I remember rightly, though I’m not sure I do. It was all a little confusing.”
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“About Ari van Blaiden.”
“Yes, Boss.”
He drew her to him and cupped her cheek and neck, feeling her pulse jump under his touch, kissed her on the mouth, chin, throat, shoulder, breast.
She hissed as he found the hardness of her nipple with his tongue and caressed the length of his leg with the sole of one foot. She pulled him between her thighs and worked a minor miracle with her fingers.
Rational thought left him.
Cara had never felt more comfortable than here in this strange room in Ben Benjamin’s arms.
“Are we good?” he’d whispered after their second bout of lovemaking.
“Better than good, we’re fucking fantastic.” She’d laughed out loud. “Though I may not be able to walk straight in the morning.”
They’d dozed together until nearly eight and then she’d slipped out of bed for a pee and a shower. He joined her as she stepped into the steaming jets of water and they soaped each other all over. He kissed her as he soaped her breasts and down her belly and slipped his hand between her legs. One thing led to another and they made love again, pressed against the massage wall of the shower unit, the vibrations at her back chiming with the waves washing through her.
Ben could have stayed in the hotel room for the rest of the day, possibly for the rest of his life, but sex made him hungry.
“Eat here or—”
“Blue Mountain,” Cara said as they dressed. “I need good coffee.”
After breakfast, during which they put away a large stack of pancakes between them, Ben took Cara’s hand and they walked into Blue Seven, past the new facade and into the central atrium.
“Good morning.” Jussaro passed them heading in the opposite direction. “I gather everything went well and now I presume you’ve slept off your euphoria, had coffee, and are ready to greet the day.”
“Something like that.” Cara tried not to smile and failed.
“Good, then the three of us should get together sometime soon with Civility Jamieson.”
“Not more bloodwork,” Cara said.
“Not at all. We need to talk about the future. Do you realize what a remarkable breakthrough this is for psionics?” He tapped his head. “Some people I used to work with will be very interested, but I won’t talk to them until we’ve agreed a strategy.”
“Strategy?” Ben said as Jussaro exited Blue Seven whistling happily. “That’s something I don’t really have. I seem to lurch from one near-disaster to another, getting no closer to finding these missing settlers while life catches up with me. We’ve got enough criminal warrants to send us all to the toughest prison planet for three lifetimes; mounting debts until Olyanda starts to produce; a potential fortune in platinum, but only if we can hold on to it; the Free Company; finding Lorient’s settlers; and now I have the problem of what to do with my displaced family.”
He didn’t say, and I’ve lost my nerve and can’t fly the Folds anymore. Cara had been in no state to notice that it was Gen who’d brought them home safely.
“Your displaced family probably has to decide for itself.”
He shrugged. “Yes, but Rion won’t want what Ricky wants, Kai will have his own ideas, Nan will try to find a compromise, and when that doesn’t happen she’ll lay down the law. Have you ever heard one of Nan’s this-is-how-it’s-going-to-be speeches?”
Cara shook her head.
“Trust me, you don’t want to.” He’d been much younger the last time he’d heard one of those.
“So we need to make plans . . .”
“We do. We need to be ahead of the game, not half a step behind. The Trust—”
“Not just the Trust, Alphacorp as well,” Cara said. “Crowder claimed he didn’t send the Alphabet gang. I didn’t entirely believe him, but while I was inside his head I found that Akiko Yamada and Ari were lovers.”
“We need to check with Mother Ramona to see what they’ve extracted from Ari’s files.” Ben frowned. “Crowder’s gone, but the Trust won’t let up, and now Alphacorp is out to get us as well. Cut off one head and another two grow in its place. I’m not stupid enough to think we can take down two of the biggest megacorporations that have ever existed, but we can seriously inconvenience them and maybe teach them to leave us alone. Let’s go see Mother Ramona now. There’s something I have to show you.”
“Dad, you’re just not being fair!” Ricky jumped to his feet and balled his fists, aware that his voice had squeaked. At home he would have run to his room and slammed the door, or gone out into the yard and saddled up for a long ride, but here in the Solar Wind’s mess, there was nowhere to run to except to Uncle Ben’s quarters, and that wasn’t fair either.
“Sit down, Ricky. Sit down, Rion. Kai, pour the tea. Let’s start over.” Nan had abandoned the antigrav leggings and was pacing the room, round and round the long refectory table, somewhat slowly for her, and with frequent rest stops. She lowered herself onto a chair at one end and leaned on her elbows, breathing heavily.
“Are you all right, Nan?” Kai asked.
“I will be,” she said. “Thanks to Ben and his friends. We all will be.” She turned to Rion. “Admit it. Your brother just saved your intransigent ass. Sure, he didn’t do it politely. Was there any way he could have talked you into leaving the farm voluntarily?”
Dad sat down. “Probably not.”
Nan pushed a mug of tea toward him and took one herself. “You slept through foldspace. He did you a favor.”
“I dreamed . . . Things.”
“What did you see, Dad?” Ricky asked. “I saw otters swimming through the air like it was water. One of them kept whirling around my head. It was awesome.”
“You weren’t scared?” Nan asked.
“Uh, no. They were playing.” Ricky sat at the head of the table. “Can we go and look around Crossways? We’re in space, but I haven’t seen anything yet, just the inside of the Solar Wind. I didn’t even get to see what she really looked like on the outside.”
“Shut up and settle down, Squirt,” Kai said without animosity. “Time you started thinking about other people for a change. This isn’t a tourist trip, it’s serious business. Life-changing serious business, for all of us.”
“Oh . . .” Yeah, okay, Ricky got it. It wasn’t just about him and Nan. Dad had been dragged off the farm that he’d given his life to, and Kai . . . He looked at his brother’s usually smiling face and saw strain lines around his mouth. Kai had spent three years at university and been dragged away just days before his final exams. And the farm—that was as much Kai’s as Dad’s.
He sat down and pressed his lips together.
“Time enough to see everything later, Ricky,” Nan said. “Everyone’s busy right now. Let’s try not to give them any more headaches.”
“I wonder how Cara is,” Kai said.
“She’s fine.” Uncle Ben spoke from the doorway. “Or will be as soon as she gets used to her new implant. How are you all?”
Dad stood up, took a couple of paces forward and glared at Uncle Ben.
Ricky had never appreciated how alike they were, Dad older, of course, and a bit heavier, but they had the same profile as they stood almost nose-to-nose.
“If you’re going to take a swing at me, get it over with,” Uncle Ben said.
Ricky held his breath.
There was a long pause, during which neither of them said anything, but then Dad hugged Uncle Ben in that back-slappy way of men who find hugging unnatural. Suddenly everyone was talking at once and Kai was pouring an extra mug of tea for Uncle Ben and it looked like everything was going to be all right.
Chapter Twenty-Six
STRIKE AND COUNTERSTRIKE
“WHY DIDN’T YOU SHOW ME THIS BEFORE?” Cara sat stiff-backed on the edge of her chair while Ben leaned back against Garrick’s office wall. She hadn’t known this existed. This was their proof that Crowder had tried to wipe out the Olyanda settlement. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it was barely two months. Ben had left her on Olyanda while he flew back to Chenon to confront Crowder. She knew what had happened, but seeing it was different.
“I left a copy with Mother Ramona when I returned to Olyanda,” Ben said. “She knew how to use it if . . . things didn’t work out well. I’m not proud of it. I killed two men.”
“Did you watch it?” Cara turned to Mother Ramona, sitting on the couch next to Garrick, her long legs crossed elegantly.
“I confess that I did,” she replied. “I wanted Benjamin to use it against Crowder straightaway, but he thought it might do more harm than good while there was potential danger to psi-tech families. With hindsight, he was probably right.”
“Okay, enough. Let’s watch it and get it over with,” Ben said.
The screen flickered into life and Ben’s face appeared. His hair was newly shaved to stubble. “This is Reska Benjamin. I swear that this is a true record. I was lately an employee of the Trust assigned a mission to transport a group of Ecolibrian settlers to the planet Olyanda. On arrival, a detailed survey of the planet revealed considerable platinum reserves which the settlers did not wish to exploit—their right under contract. Unknown to the settlers or my technical team, Gabrius Crowder, Director of Operations for the Colony Division of the Trust, erroneously declared the colony infected by a plague and issued a quarantine order, falsely declaring settlers and crew alike dead, or as good as.
“Here follows a true recording of my confrontation with Crowder.”
Then it flipped into a recording of a room, an office, brightly lit with a Trust motif in the decoration. The angle was odd, foreshortened as if taken from high on a wall, but Cara recognized Ben in the shadow of the doorway. Crowder sat at his desk talking to someone on audio.
Ben stepped into the office and the door closed behind him.
“How did you get here?” Crowder asked. The sound was tinny, but the words were clear enough.
“Not important. Do you want to ask me why I got here?” Ben waited for an answer but didn’t get one. Cara hadn’t seen Ben get angry very often, but when he did his voice went quiet. He was angry now.
“I want to know what you’ve got planned for Olyanda,” Ben said. “I know half of it already. Now you can tell me the other half. Let’s start with why you didn’t trash the platinum data.”
Cara followed the argument while Crowder tried to make excuses.
She gasped as two men came into the room and shot at Ben. If this had been a training video Cara would have given Ben maybe only seven out of ten for style, but ten for effectiveness. Part of her watched it dispassionately while the other half was anxious. Ben was here with her, now. He’d survived it, she told herself. Then why was her heart pounding?
It was almost too fast to follow. Ben snapped a throwing disk from his belt buckle and with a flick of his wrist sent one man reeling back, blood everywhere, Spurting. Spraying. She was watching a man die. Her scalp crawled and it was only when she gulped air that she realized she’d forgotten to breathe.
The other man landed a good kick in Ben’s ribs. Ben went down almost on top of the dead man, grabbed the gun, twisted, and fired. The second man fell.
“Two down, one to go,” Crowder said. “Would it be me next, Ben?”
Cara’s eyes had been on Ben and she hadn’t noticed Crowder pull a gun of his own. It looked like a toy at the side of the hefty guns the two men had carried, but she knew it wasn’t. Ben watched it like it was a snake as he climbed slowly to his feet, hands open, palms toward Crowder.
“Not until I’d wrung every bit of information out of you that I could.” Ben’s voice was low and even. “Go on, then, Crowder. From this range you shouldn’t have any problems, though the blood might stain your shirt. What’s one more life on top of all the rest?”
Crowder’s hand never wavered. His eyes remained steady, but he didn’t fire.
“It’s not quite the same as killing people on another world, is it? Give an order. Make a payment. That’s easy, but this . . . this is messy.” Ben flicked an eye to the bodies on the floor. “It’s messy and very personal. Is it worth it?”
Still Crowder didn’t fire. Eventually he said, “I never intended any harm to you or your team, either on Hera-3 or Olyanda, but . . .”
“But platinum trumps all other considerations.” Ben exhaled sharply and shook his head. “I trusted you, Crowder. I trusted you with my life . . . and theirs. What next? Airborne attack? Neural blast bombs to turn us all to zombies, then send in a mop-up division?”
Crowder didn’t blink. “You’re too late already. Probably . . .”
Ben twisted sideways and leaped over the desk, grabbing the gun and pinning Crowder to the floor.
“Biological strike? What have you released, bacteria, a virus, neurotoxins?” Ben put the gun against Crowder’s neck.
Crowder didn’t need any persuading to talk. In fact, he was positively gabbling, his eyes wide. “A superbug. A weapon from more than one viral source.”
Ben pulled Crowder up from the floor, then shoved him down hard on the float chair, which wobbled dangerously until he jammed it against the wall.
“There’s nothing you can do.” Crowder began to laugh, but it was more like nerves than humor. “A killer. Human specific. Airborne. Virulent as all hell. It’s fierce, but it’s fragile. Lifespan of six months, but that’s enough to do its job. Within a year the planet will be safe again.”
Ben dragged Crowder to his feet. “What about the second ark? What have you done with it?”
“It’s safe. Safe. I’m not a monster.” Crowder started to wheedle. “You’re not stupid, Ben. Forget all this. It’s already too late to do anything for the poor sods on Olyanda, but there’s still time to save yourself. I’m sorry it worked out like this. You were my best man, you know. Your only flaw is your integrity. You’re too honest.”
“There was a time when I would have died for you, but not anymore. You might still be useful, so . . .” Ben put the gun close to the side of Crowder’s head and pulled the trigger. Crowder shrieked and fell back clutching his ear, blood pouring between his fingers. Ben leaned over him and said something too quiet for the recording to catch, then ran out of the office. Crowder rolled onto his knees, tried to get up, slumped to the floor and lay still.
The recorder kept going for another three minutes. The stillness and silence horrific after the violence. Cara felt sick. She looked up at Ben. His face was a stony mask.
“Clearly self-defense,” Mother Ramona said. “That slams right through those two counts of murder on the Monitor warrant. Send a copy to them, too.”
“I maimed Crowder for nothing more than revenge,” Ben said. “That was petty.”
“I’d have killed him.” Cara didn’t mention that if it hadn’t been for Crowder’s implant killer, she would have turned his mind inside out right there on Norro. It seemed a little redundant once Ben had told her about firing the third dart.
“I think it’s ti
me to go public with it,” Ben said. “With Crowder dead, we should be able to get the warrants against all of the psi-techs rescinded.”
“Except for you,” Cara said.
“Except for me,” he agreed.
Garrick scratched his embryonic beard. Its gray stripes made him look older, but it suited him. “Let’s be canny about this,” he said. “We’ve decoded a lot of the information from van Blaiden’s handpad. Akiko Yamada was his lover. That’s filled in one of the blanks. He’s used a code name for her and for Crowder. We can begin to tie it all up together. The Trust and Alphacorp are both in this up to their necks and when we release the information I want them both to take a hit at the same time. Anything that weakens them helps Crossways and protects the platinum on Olyanda.”
“My guys are information specialists,” Mother Ramona said. “Let’s send copies of this vid and some of van Blaiden’s files to the GBC on Earth and CBC on Chenon. I can release it across the space logs on forty different channels simultaneously. You should set up a Mouth account for the Free Company.”
“It’s nothing but idle chatter,” Ben said.
“Idle chatter that influences millions across the known galaxy. The megacorps can’t control it, even though it’s their own Telepaths who sustain it, or at least the transmission from world to world. Cara, is that something you can do?”
“I have been known to participate.” She nodded. “I can do that.”
“Maybe someone out there knows about the missing thirty thousand,” Ben said. “Post a reward.”
Cara set up a Mouth account, “&freec-crossways,” and then sat back and monitored reactions. The initial comment went out via a network of Telepaths and was then transmitted in written or audio form, sometimes both, depending on the sophistication of the various planetary networks. It took longer for the responses to come back because they could only be transmitted by data packet via the jump gates. Half a second to get there, anything from half a day to get back.
She picked up the packet from Chenon and scrolled through. Her own message was at the top and then the replies came thick and fast, some sensible, some just hot air, but the trend was toward outrage. Good.
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