The network traffic had been routed through various servers, but her software had traced it to a building on the outskirts of Shophia. The city seemed to have grown from a central core, but not exactly organically. Rings of new development spread out from the old city like tree rings. And they had not exactly been planned, more put up as needed, so there would be a residential circle with huge industrial plants filling the sky on both sides. A survey done twenty years earlier had rated Shophia the least pleasant city on the planet to live in, even though its residents all tended to fall into the upper income brackets for the world. Shil could see why.
This district was part of an industrial circle, but one more devoted to light industry. Four storeys of offices, disused, with a large rear yard. Maybe some sort of haulage firm which had gone out of business. There were no lights showing, but the windows on the ground floor had all been painted over from the inside, and she could see heat pouring through the glass. Why heat an empty building? Because it was not empty. She had been watching the place from various angles for two hours and the same two men had been having a cigarette break outside the rear door all that time.
As light began to colour the sky, she moved in. Dawn was a good time for this kind of assault. People were usually tired, and the light tended to make it harder to see than the darkness. The shadows played tricks. You were never sure of exactly what you were seeing. She went over the fence and hugged the wall anyway, coming up behind one of the guards and keeping him between her and the other. The first fell, his body limp, as she jabbed her sword hilt into his back, and the second had no time to draw the pistol in his belt before he joined his friend on the concrete.
The shock effect was not going to keep them out of it forever, but she was not really interested in them. She wanted Namva. With him out of the way and all the other leaders dead at his hand, it was likely that Teladin Maccaro would fold in on itself. She opened the door, checked there was no one behind it, and stepped inside.
The lower floor was fairly open once you got past a short corridor with a couple of empty offices on it. There were shelves, some of them with boxes and crates on them, and not much else. According to the building plans Shil had lifted from the Planning Commission servers, there was a reception area at the front and stairs up to the offices on her right. She was quite sure she would be intercepted before she got to the stairs because the upper-floor windows had not been painted over and were showing no lights, but she walked through the ranks of shelves, acting as though she were heading up anyway.
A man stepped out from between a set of shelves ahead of her. He was not especially tall: she probably had two inches on him even without her boots. His skin was the usual armil brown, but his hair was almost white and he had pale, blue eyes. It was a genetic aberration the armil found distasteful; she wondered whether Nuril Namva had been bullied at school.
‘You are making this far too easy,’ she said, smiling at him and laying her sword on her shoulder. ‘I was kind of hoping for more of a challenge.’
‘As you wish,’ Namva said. He did have a good voice, rich and resonant. If he had been bullied, he had probably talked his way out of a lot of fights.
Six men emerged from the stacks, each carrying some form of automatic firearm. Namva had an energy weapon, a pistol which remained in its holster. Lasers were not common on Armilin, and Namva had kept the best weapon for himself. The men moved in, encircling her.
‘Oh. Well this is awkward. Look, I know I’m supposed to have some glib-sounding dialogue rehearsed for this kind of thing, but I’m kind of new at this and I just haven’t had time. So… Well, I’m Shil and I’ll be your bounty hunter for this event.’ She smiled brightly at the two men standing directly in front of her.
‘Are you insane, woman?’ Namva asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. ‘You’re surrounded by six men with guns who are going to shoot you dead.’
‘If you say so.’ She moved, leaning out to stab the butt of her sword into one man’s chest while her foot smashed into another’s groin. Neither of them were getting up for a while. Bullets were fired, but they were just flying through empty space and the man firing them fell an instant later as Shil’s sword jabbed into his shoulder. There was a fist to the face which shattered bone and dropped a man in his tracks, a kick to the chest which punched her boot heel through skin and the organs beneath. Everyone her sword touched fell instantly, and they would not fire for fear of hitting a friend.
Shil straightened, facing Namva once again. She smiled. ‘So, just you and me.’
Namva went for his gun. Shil plucked a thin, metal spike from the top of her boot with her left hand and flicked it through the air. Namva let out a shriek as the shuriken sank into his right bicep. His eyes widening, he turned and bolted for the door behind him.
Shil walked after him. She was in no hurry; the door led to stairs which only went up and she had his scent now. He was bleeding, wounded. He would probably manage to get that gun of his out by the time she caught up with him, but he was right-handed and she was fast, and he had no idea what he was dealing with.
‘You could make this a lot easier by just giving up,’ she called up the stairs as she walked. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’d rather you kept fighting.’ She reached the top of the stairs and looked around, shifting her vision to include infrared. She saw blood on the handrail going up, warm against the plastic-wrapped metal. She could smell him in the air: sweat and the metallic tang from his wound. ‘Seriously, this is fantastic and I don’t want it to end too soon. Keep running.’
On the next landing she saw the heat signature through the door on the opposite side. It was difficult to really resolve shapes this way, but he seemed to be holding something in his left hand. He had managed to get the gun out. Turning at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, she took three steps up before she heard the scrape of wood on concrete which would have been inaudible to most people.
She vaulted the rail, winging over it with acrobatic ease. Sheila could have done that; perhaps not with the same fluid grace, or perfect timing, but she could have done it. There was the crack of the beam splitting the air, the scent of ozone, a tiny detonation as concrete was superheated into exploding. She was on him before he knew he had missed, her sword hilt smashing down on his forearm, shattering the bone. He screamed, the gun falling from his hand, and backed into the room, stumbling to the window where the light was growing in the sky.
‘Go on then,’ he mumbled, clearly biting back hard on the pain, ‘kill me and get it over with.’
‘Why would I do that? First, you’re worth more alive and I have expenses. Second… I won’t make a martyr out of you, Nuril Namva. You’ll stand trial and go to prison. And you’ll be forgotten.’
‘I’ll never be forgotten. We will never be forgotten. The Teladin Maccaro will–’
‘Oh give it a rest.’ And she jabbed the hilt of her sword into his stomach and watched as he crumpled to the floor.
Orbital 3.
Shil marched into the StarCorps office pushing Namva and Turnil ahead of her. Both had their hands tied behind their backs with plastic tape cuffs, but it was doubtful that it made much difference to Namva even after she had pulled out her shuriken and sealed the wound. His left arm needed resetting, and maybe surgery.
Poll was sitting behind the desk again; did the man ever take a break? His eyes widened as he saw the white-haired man Shil was pushing in. ‘You… You caught him!’
‘I see why they gave you a job here, Corpsman,’ Shil replied. ‘You have excellent observation skills. I’d like someone to take this bag of shit off my hands, and my money. In that order by preference.’
Laral appeared through the inner door as though she had been shot from a gun. Maybe she had been watching the surveillance cameras. ‘I’ll take care of the first part. Corpsman Poll will handle the second.’
‘Great.’ Shil pushed Namva toward her and dug something out of her boot, tossing it onto the desk. ‘That’s a data slug wit
h the locations of about fifteen of their safe houses on it. No extra charge. I know it’s not your job to run them down, but I figure you can get it to the right people.’
‘I can do that,’ Laral replied, nodding. ‘Pay the lady, Mister Poll. What was the name again? For the arrest report.’
‘Shil,’ Shil replied, smiling. ‘Shil the Huntress.’
Part Four: Power Corrupts
I recall people saying that the world would be better if only women ran it. While this is a self-evident truth, there are degrees of ‘better.’
– The Memoirs of Shil the Huntress.
The Cantarvey, 23rd December 2015.
Shil lay in the comfort of the gravity hammock, limbs spread lazily as she floated amid a cloud of data. Her eyes were the only part of her moving as she flicked them from one feed to the next, apparently at random.
Concentrating was not easy given that Cantarvey had the cleaning robots at work on her, but she did not want to concentrate. She was unsure of what she did, or how she processed the information, but she had fallen into this way of working and it seemed to pay dividends: have the data stream pass through her vision field, watch it as it went, never paying too much attention to anything until it called out to her, and her next target would swim out of the cloud when it was ready. The less she concentrated, the better it seemed to work.
In the last three weeks she had been on five hunts, bringing in four of them alive and one in a body bag. Dead targets usually resulted in a lower pay-out, but that one had been determined not to be taken alive. That was a serial killer, three murderers, and one particularly nasty drug dealer off the streets. It was all working well enough. The only thing she had to worry about was keeping the Cantarvey in antimatter for her jump engine.
A soft moan escaped her throat as the nanobots found a particularly sensitive spot and she realised her concentration had slipped a little too much. The ship had decided that this was an interesting and very fun game, teasing Shil as much as possible to see how far it could be taken before Shil gave in or told her to stop. Today, Shil was not giving in so easily; she refocused, adjusting the speed of the feeds up a little so that she had to work harder to follow them…
‘That one,’ she breathed. Everything came to a stop and one section of one feed expanded before her eyes.
Tholdaria, originally a dromelan colony world though it was now essentially independent. Ruled over, and that seemed to be the right term, by a hereditary matriarchy which had become a signatory of the StarCorps charter. The world was a democracy on paper, but the practice was another matter. It was something of a backwater world, cold with a low-oxygen atmosphere, but a plentiful supply of minerals which formed the basis for its economy. It seemed like a peaceful place, but all was not well in freezing paradise: StarCorps had a bounty out for one Jandia Dakris, wanted for gun-running, trafficking sentient beings, and murder, as well as a few other minor crimes.
Dismissing the displays, Shil closed her eyes and relaxed. ‘Finish what you started, Cantarvey, and then start the jump calculations for Tholdaria.’
‘Of course, Shil,’ the ship responded, and the nanomachines set to work in earnest.
Tholdris, Tholdaria, 18.1.470 Local.
Tholdaria was a good match for dromelans. The average temperature of the planet’s surface was almost identical to their home world, which made it, in Shil’s books, ‘freezing your tits off’ cold. That might have explained the looks she got as she walked from the shuttle terminal to the StarCorps building dressed in her red bodysuit and a face mask.
The mask was there for the oxygen, or lack thereof, in the atmosphere. The natives had received some genetic fiddling to let them breathe the low partial pressure comfortably, and after almost five hundred years they were a true subspecies. Shil needed something to supplement her oxygen intake; the air would not kill an unprotected human, or other off-world visitor, but it would make you fairly uncomfortable.
But then she was dressed in next to nothing, and there was a lot of white skin on display. Anoa could ramp up her body temperature to keep the cold at bay so she had decided not to bother with a heat suit. So far, not hiding her business had worked out pretty well and she wanted to build a name for herself as a bounty hunter. Being recognised was one, key, aspect of that. Under the circumstances, however, she had to be giving off mixed messages: a mask, but no need to keep warm, and pale skin… Actually, that could really work.
StarCorps had a large facility in Tholdris, Tholdaria’s capital city. There were around a hundred and eighty corpsmen and ancillary staff in it, and it was the largest of their stations she had ever been to. Somehow the fact that it was on the planet and situated close to the government buildings made Shil a little edgy, but she needed up-to-date information on her prey.
The woman in charge of the case was a local, Erisha Tholdin. The name gave Shil pause too since the family who ran the world were the Tholdins. She made a note to look up any relationship as she sat down across the table from the moderately young woman.
Tholdarians looked a lot like dromelans, but a little darker. The blue skin had a purple tint, likely due to a variation in their blood: more haemoglobin, perhaps. Erisha Tholdin was a blonde, almost platinum, but the colour was not uncommon, and her eyes were an icy shade of blue. It looked a lot like the cold outside had set up shop inside the woman, but it might have just been attitude. Erisha was a business-like woman.
‘You’re going after Dakris?’ the commander asked.
‘That’s right.’ Shil’s voice was hollowed by the mask but came through clearly.
‘Dressed like that?’
‘The cold doesn’t bother me.’
‘Your funeral. She’s hiding out in the mountains south of the city, as far as we can tell. It’s one of the few places someone could hide on this planet.’
Shil nodded. It was rough country. The world was a young one – it had required terraforming to make it viable as a colony. There was still a lot of volcanic activity around, and the mountain ranges tended to be high, young, and craggy. You could get lost fairly easily in Tholdaria’s mountains.
‘If you’re going in there, steer clear of the south-west side,’ Tholdin added. ‘The land there is leased to a private research centre. They’re very protective of their privacy. It’s doubtful Dakris would go near it anyway – too much chance of being spotted.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind. It still leaves a lot of ground to cover. I’d better get started. Is anyone else looking for her?’
‘Half the planet, but they don’t stand much chance in those conditions. I’m surprised we haven’t had more people from off-world after this one, considering the bounty.’
Shil frowned. ‘It’s a standard bounty and a difficult hunt.’
‘You didn’t know? The matriarch put up two hundred thousand on top of our standard fifty for multiple murder. Dakris incensed a lot of people and the government wants her nailed. They’re paying that out whether she’s alive or dead.’
‘No,’ Shil said, ‘I didn’t know that. Interesting.’
Tholdrish Range.
‘News on Dakris is not especially informative,’ Cantarvey said over the comms system of the ground car Shil had hired. The vehicle came with a pressurised, heated cabin and all the modern conveniences, which was useful given that it might be home for a few days. ‘I have been able to track down various stories about her from around two local months ago. Planetary police caught an upper-ranking member of her organisation and broke them. The local news agencies and private sites were ablaze about it then, but the story died away after a week or so. Possible sightings keep it from vanishing entirely, but there has been nothing new.’
‘Tholdin said there was a lot of outrage.’
‘Yes, however the additional bounty was posted over a month after the noise died down when Dakris was still at large. Erisha Tholdin is one of Matriarch Melissara Tholdin’s nieces, by the way, and one of the youngest members of StarCorps to reach the rank of
captain.’
‘Oh. I don’t like this. Not at all.’
‘What do you wish to do?’
‘Find Dakris. The only way I’m getting to the bottom of this is to find her and see if she’s the monster they say she is.’
‘There is a lot of ground to cover and I am of no use in the orbital’s hangar bay.’
‘Yes, but they won’t let us scan the surface. Almost as if they want to make finding her hard, really. Tholdin said that Dakris would stay away from the south-west side of the range because of a research centre that’s out there, so I think that’s where I’ll start.’
‘That seems… counterintuitive, Shil.’
‘Well, if I wanted to stay hidden, I’d hide in the place people say I would never hide in. If Dakris has managed to stay out of custody this long, she’s more than up to avoiding some private security people.’
‘Good hunting then.’
Shil cut off the transmission and focused her attention on the road, which was rapidly thinning into a track. This was going to be a difficult hunt, and now she was not sure of exactly what she was hunting.
~~~
The ‘research facility’ was huge, according to the map Cantarvey had supplied which was now being displayed to Shil via the neural interface hidden in her hair. The land leased out to the nameless company was showing up as a grey, featureless circle which cut into a couple of fairly tall mountains. Rather like Area 51, this place did not exist in an official capacity. Cantarvey could have mapped it out, but surface scans were banned, and now there was a reason why.
Shil had been going over the map for thirty minutes, looking for the best place to start her search. She kept coming back to the same place. There was a deep valley cut between the two peaks. A glacier had carved through there at some point, cutting a rut into the landscape. The sides were steep slopes, but the bottom was wide and quite open. Glacial moraine would provide cover even if there were no caves, but someone hiding out there would likely spot someone coming from a good distance. It was where she would have concealed herself and she had to work on the theory that Dakris was that good.
The Eyes of the Huntress (Shil the Huntress Book 1) Page 8