“You’ve got a lead on the settlers’ ark?” Mother Ramona turned to her screen. “I’ll check it out.”
A short while later she looked up. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” Cara asked.
“Vraxos seems to be the most likely place.”
“Vraxos?”
“Jake Lowenbrun calls it home when he’s not working. Montego is the main spaceport. There are a couple of bars where freelancers hang out along Sunshine Strip. You’ll need to watch your back.”
“We always do, these days,” Ben said.
“There’s a man called Solpek who acts as an unofficial agent for freelance flight crews. Word is that he can be bought for the right price, allocates crew for jobs according to sexual favors or how much they’re willing to tip him over and above his fifteen percent, and he gets tough with anyone, crew or hirer, who tries to cut him out of a deal.”
“Pleasant individual, then,” Cara said.
“Not very, but if you want a cover you can do some recruiting for Crossways while you’re there. See if he’s got any jumpship pilots available.”
“When do we go?” Cara asked as they rejoined Hilde in the tub-cab.
“As soon as we can,” Ben said. “Within the hour if Gen can get herself ready.”
“You can’t keep using Gen to pilot for you. She’s twenty-five weeks pregnant.”
“I know.”
“When are you—”
“I don’t know.” The muscle in his jaw twitched. “When I’m ready.”
She nodded, tight-lipped. His talk with a void dragon was way overdue and the longer he left it, the worse it would be.
*Report!*
Remus again. His intrusions were getting painful. Luckily, this time Kitty was on her own, kneeling over a new raised bed filled with compost, smoothing it and firming it down with her hands, getting honest dirt under her fingernails.
*Etta Langham.*
*She’s under close watch,* Kitty said.
*You have orders.*
*She’s weak. The situation might resolve itself.*
*See that it does.*
Kitty opened the seed packet. Poppies, fast growing. They’d continue flowering for months and self-seed, providing a riot of color from the palest moon-yellow through oranges to fire-red. The seeds were mixed, from simple, single-headed cornfield poppies of Earth to the heavy-headed double varieties cultivated in the glasshouses of Kemp’s World, which were every shade from white to deep damson.
Etta Langham had been kind to her. If the woman had any chance of recovery after what had been done to her on Sentier-4, she should be allowed it. Besides, Ben and Cara had taken off this morning in Solar Wind with Gen. They hadn’t told her where they were going, but they’d taken Hilde and Gwala, and that meant business. It seemed likely that they’d still be hanging around if they were waiting for Etta to produce some useful information.
So either Etta had told them something, in which case killing her was pointless, or they’d decided she wasn’t going to, in which case killing her was equally pointless.
And it was just plain wrong.
But orders were orders.
She tried to weigh Etta’s life against her mother’s future security.
Chapter Thirty-Two
VRAXOS
BEN RELAYED BASIC INFORMATION ACROSS Solar Wind’s screens. Vraxos was a mining planet in the Straw Bear System affiliated with Dominion, a subsidiary of the Arquavisa Corporation. Copper, iron, and tin were its main exports, in addition to a small but significant amount of platinum—significant enough that the spaceport had a high-security freight section.
Montego and its hinterlands suffered from a hot and humid climate except when the monsoon hit, and then it was slightly cooler but miserably wet. According to the data the worst health hazard was a particularly nasty fungal infection, though one of the main causes of death, statistically, was accidental. Mining was still a dangerous business.
Gen settled Solar Wind, carrying false ID as Cruel Sister, into a berth on the edge of the spaceport on the south side of Montego.
“Stay with her, Gen,” Ben said.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not intending to go anywhere.” Gen patted her belly. “Bump and I are happy with the quiet life for a change.”
“Ronan said I wasn’t to let her out of my sight,” Jon Moon said from systems.
“Funny, he said the same to me about you,” Gen said.
They left a crew of five to guard the ship. Ben, Cara, Hilde, and Gwala, dressed for business in anonymous flight suits, paused at the top of the ramp. Humidity hit them like a hammer, a soggy, wet, warm hammer.
“It’s like breathing soup,” Cara said.
“Cabbage soup,” Hilde said. “What’s that smell?”
The smell, a cross between rotting vegetables and a laundry, lingered all the way through the main terminal, but at least the air conditioning inside the building took care of the humidity. They exited through a wide, low-ceilinged foyer dominated by a bronze sculpture representing, according to its plaque, Everyminer, a muscular, androgynous figure wearing a hard hat and sleeveless vest top perched on the back of a vast trepanner with a series of spiral drill bits sporting cog-like teeth. Vraxos was either very proud of its mining industry or it was trying to prove something to new arrivals.
They took a shuttle pod into the town. First stop: Sunshine Strip, a long street, lit even in the daytime. A heavy cloud layer held in the humidity and filtered out the light. It probably didn’t get any better than this.
“Hey, Manny, remember that summer we did on Vortigern?” Hilde asked.
Not many people, even in Tengue’s tight-knit bunch, got to call Emmanuel Gwala “Manny.” These two must have worked together for a long time.
“I remember the leech-alikes. What were those things called?”
She pulled a face. “Quillias. Nasty things. Was it hotter than this?”
“Hotter than hell, not sure it was hotter than this, though. Sure wish we hadn’t decided on coveralls instead of buddysuits.”
They sauntered down the strip, checking the bars whose names Mother Ramona had given them. Trojan Solpek worked out of a bar called Rangoon. Midstrip was the best address they had, so despite the heat, they trudged past a few run-down stores selling everything from clothing to antifungal powder, past restaurants that made the pot stall outside Dido Kennedy’s place look like high cuisine, and from bar to bar, some advertising liquor—get drunk for under five credits, dead drunk for under ten—some selling sex as well.
“Ladies, we got the best boys in town,” one pimp called from the open doorway of the Mother’s Ruin. “Money back if you’re not completely satisfied, at least twice.” She laughed. “And something for the gentlemen, too. Got a herm who specializes in couples.”
“Maybe another time,” Ben called out. “Looking for Solpek.”
“Flyers.” The smile left her face, but she didn’t quite spit on the ground. “Other side of the street. Keep walking, ’bout ten minutes.”
“Thank you, lovely lady.” Gwala gave her a low sweeping bow. “Maybe we’ll return when we’re in funds.”
“Go on with you.” She half-smiled. “And watch out for Solpek’s cat. Evil beast.”
They found Rangoon as directed, an unprepossessing frontage leading to a dingy interior populated by a few knots of people at tables, men and women of all ages, sizes, colors, some drinking, some eating. One table of four was deep into a board game of some kind. The miasma of cabbage and laundry was overlaid in here with beer and something spicy.
“Cinnamon.” Cara inhaled. “That’s more like it.” She elbowed her way to the bar between two lone drinkers who looked to have planted themselves permanently. “Four cinnabeers,” she said, tossing a credit chip onto the counter.
“Coming up.�
� The bar man took her chip. “You want change or are you starting a tab?”
“Start a tab. Why not? Looking for Solpek.”
“Should have known you was flight crew when you ordered cinnabeer.”
“Yeah. Dead giveaway.” Cara passed full glasses back to the others. Cinnabeer had a fiery kick without being alcoholic or intoxicating. “Solpek?”
“’Tween you and me, ain’t no one been hiring for the last month. Solpek’s over there, in the corner.”
“Might be able to change his luck,” Ben said.
“You hiring?” The drinker on Cara’s right, an androgynous individual, suddenly took notice.
“Could be. Depends.”
“You know the rules,” the bar man said, waving at Solpek. “Do it right.”
“Yeah, I know, only I don’t pay the little shit more than his fifteen percent, so I never get the best jobs.”
“Well, that should tell you something, Esterhazy.” They hadn’t even seen Solpek move, but suddenly there he was, his hand descending on the out-of-work flyer’s shoulder.
“Yeah, it tells me I never should have broken my contract with Eastin-Heigle.”
“Navigator as well as pilot?” Ben asked.
Esterhazy straightened up and nodded.
“Recognize this?” Ben held out his handpad and Dido Kennedy’s drawing sprang into being as a hologram.
Esterhazy’s eyes widened. “Jesus! It’s even got the beard talons. How’d you get that?”
Ben smiled. “I think you might have just secured yourself a job, through Mr. Solpek of course.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Why do you think Eastin-Heigle let Esterhazy go so easy?” Solpek scowled, and Esterhazy seemed to shrink back under the man’s disapproval. Then Solpek said, “Come into my office. I’ve got better.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Ben said. “I’m looking for very special qualities.”
Solpek’s office turned out to be the back room of the bar, sparsely furnished with a single table, a few chairs, and a cat. A very big cat, its back as tall as the table, a riotous mix of tiger stripes on its flanks, leopard spots on its face and neck, and everywhere else filled in with brindle. Its ears were tufted like a lynx, and when it saw them it showed sharp fangs in a silent snarl.
“Don’t mind Liana. She doesn’t bite unless I tell her to.”
“Right.” Gwala moved away to the other side of the room, as if the caged window gave him an emergency exit.
“Oh, she’s gorgeous.” Hilde knelt in front of the cat and bowed her head, carefully avoiding eye contact. The cat responded by sniffing delicately at Hilde’s hair and then bumping heads. Hilde raised her head to look at the cat and scratched behind the tufted ears. Liana began to purr loudly.
“How’d you do that?” Solpek said. “It took me weeks to get to that stage.”
“She’s a Gollerian. Grew up with them.” Hilde sat on one of the available chairs and Liana immediately tried to climb into her lap, but settled for draping her front half across Hilde’s knees while Hilde stroked the creature’s short, sleek fur.
“So . . .” Solpek sat back on one side of the desk and gestured to the remaining chairs. “Are you buying or selling.”
“Buying very selectively,” Ben said. “Pilot-Navigators, but I want to interview each one of them personally. Temporary short-term contracts to start off with. Could be long-term if they shape up.”
“How many do you need?”
“How many have you got?”
“In port now?”
“Right now.”
“Maybe thirty. Thirty-five tops when word gets around there’s a buyer in town. And a pair who work together, she’s a Nav, he’s a pilot, but they work in tandem.”
“How do you get so many nonaligned psi-techs gathered in one place?” Cara asked.
“Well, aren’t you the curious one?” Solpek’s snarl matched his cat’s, but the Gollerian was currently far too interested in Hilde to bother with anyone else, including Solpek.
“It’s a fair question,” Ben said. “If we hire any of your people, we need to know they don’t have some angry megacorp on their tail. Fair enough?”
Solpek nodded. “Mining transportation company based here went bust. Spectacularly. Sold off the ships, left the pilots behind. Now they freelance. Once you get a rep for supplying good flyers, no questions asked, other freelancers gravitate in. They all have a slightly different story, but it all points to slipping through the corporate net for one reason or another.”
“So none of them are likely to be traced by their implants?” Cara asked.
“On my honor.”
Cara’s glance told Ben that she didn’t think Solpek’s honor was worth much, but Mother Ramona’s people could check the backstory of any of the pilots they hired when they got them back to Crossways. They already planned to check Esterhazy’s status with Eastin-Heigle.
“Got a list of who’s available?”
“Might have. How much are you paying?”
“A thousand a month, all found.”
“Signing bonus?”
Ben sighed as if to indicate this was stretching his budget, but knew this was what furnished the signees with enough to pay Solpek’s commission. It was customary to pay him fifteen percent of the first two months’ wages in advance.
“Three hundred, tops.”
“How about—”
“A thousand a month and a three hundred signing bonus. Don’t carp. I’ll take all thirty-five if they fit the bill.” He knew very few of them would. “Show me the list.”
*Is Lowenbrun on the list?* Cara asked.
*Don’t see him,* Ben said. *Maybe he’s not here. Maybe he’s still en route to somewhere with the ark and the settlers are safe.*
*Or maybe Ari had him killed. One less loose end.*
*One more dead end if he did.* Ben sounded glum.
They were running out of options.
One by one Solpek’s potential recruits came into the office, presented their credentials, answered Ben’s questions and looked at the image of the void dragon. Of the first ten, no one recognized it and all were turned down with the offer of a beer on the tab for the trouble of applying. Then two women, Chilaili and Tama Magena, obviously sisters, recognized the image and were quickly signed up. The androgynous Esterhazy was next, and then a string of rejections.
The couple Solpek had mentioned, Alia and Grigor Kazan, were in their thirties. Alia was tall, black, and handsome. Grigor was short with a pale complexion that spoke of someone who’d spent a lot of his life in space.
“He’s the pilot, I’m the Navigator,” Alia said.
“Combat experience?” Ben asked.
“Some,” Grigor said. “On the wrong side in the Burnish Rebellion.”
“You fought for the Burnish?”
He shook his head. “No, I fought against them. We won, but it was the wrong side.”
Ben nodded. “I was out on the Rim myself at that time. Monitors.”
“You were in the middle of it, stuck between two sides. Bad deal.”
“Yes.” Ben didn’t elaborate, but Cara remembered Mother Ramona’s story of Ben and the Burnish refugees.
“Yeah, I’ve seen him.” Alia gazed at the image that Ben showed her. “Hard to miss.”
“Not for everyone.”
“That’s true. Grigor never sees him. I’ve seen him maybe twice.”
“Job’s yours if you want it.”
“We have to bring our children.”
Ben shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Not on flights, but we have to have a home base.”
“We can provide that.”
“Where do we sign?”
While Ben interviewed the last half dozen candidates, Cara e
xcused herself and went out into the bar. The three Ben had taken on sat together in a corner. The Kazans joined them. Cara wandered over and ordered another round of cinnabeers.
“So what’s the job entail?” Esterhazy asked.
“You didn’t want to know that before you took the contract?”
“A job’s a job.”
“Anything to get off this rock,” one of the Magena sisters said.
“Jumpships, fast response.”
Esterhazy whistled. “Never flown a jumpship before. Don’t you need Psi-1 Navigators for that? I’m only a Psi-4.”
“Your Psi grade isn’t as important as the way you work in foldspace. You all recognized the image.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“It means there’s a good chance we can train you to fly a jumpship.”
“And what if we don’t make the grade,” Esterhazy asked.
“Crossways still has regular ships. You won’t be out of work.” She took a long pull of her cinnabeer, then put the glass down carefully on the table. “Heard there was a freelancer here called Lowenbrun. Jake Lowenbrun. Anyone know him?”
Esterhazy’s head jerked up in surprise. The Magenas looked down at the table and said nothing. She knew she’d asked the wrong question.
“Gotta find a washroom.” Alia Kazan stood up.
Cara recognized a signal when she saw it.
“Where are they?”
“Out this way, I’ll show you.”
Cara followed Alia through a door, down a corridor and into a washroom that had all the charm of a back alley.
“Lowenbrun,” Alia said. “You don’t want him. He’s unreliable. Came back from his last job broken. Must have had a bad deal, a hard look into the Folds, maybe. Been hiding his head ever since. I wouldn’t have known, but Vel, my youngest, saw him buying a crate of booze, the hard stuff. I guess he’s gone off on one. Might come out of it, might not. You know what it’s like for Navigators.”
Cara did. Ben knew even better.
“Where can I find him?”
“Has a place on Lemont, out of town on Top Mine Highway, but you’ll more than likely find him at Sally’s. Cheapest joint in town and Sally’s been soft on him for years. Always good for a pity fuck.”
Crossways Page 46