by Patty Jansen
Thayu said, “I agree with you. It doesn’t look like a particularly well-thought-out attack. It looks like an impulse thing, not planned or carried out with adequate weapons.”
“It could be a diversion,” Sheydu said from the door.
Everyone turned to her. Sheydu was a quiet, thinking person. She could be moody, wasn’t given to niceties, disliked chatter, jokes, children and gossip, but when she made a statement, people listened. Because it meant that she had thought about it for a long time.
“A diversion—what for?” Thayu asked.
But I saw what she’d been trying to say. “Someone trying to buy some time to search his office?”
“But . . .” Veyada hesitated. “Didn’t Reida just get accused of breaking into that office?”
“Not that one. Reida was at his Trading office in town.”
“Federza has two offices?”
“Yes.” And that might have been the reason for some of the confusion.
Because whoever these people were, they were looking for something, maybe even the same thing Reida had been sent to steal. Reida would be able to tell me what it was and whether or not he got it. After I spoke to Nicha.
“Shit,” Veyada said.
I nodded. Shit indeed. “We should go to that office. We probably won’t find anything here.”
Thayu stared at me. She grabbed for her comm reader. Hesitated.
“Should we call for backup?” She meant Nicha, who was a decent shot.
“No time.” I really didn’t want to have to go into my misgivings and tangled-up feelings about Nicha’s loyalty, especially not when Reida’s breaking in was involved. “If we’re right, they’d be trying something right now. We have a chance at catching or at least seeing whoever it is.”
There were nods at that, too.
Veyada tried again. “But wouldn’t the guards have picked up intruders?”
Sheydu snorted. “The fact that the guards can’t see them doesn’t mean that intruders are not there. The security in this place is shit. I’m sure I told you that before.”
She said that almost once every day. This was the part where we would all laugh and someone would tell her to relax, because this wasn’t Asto. Except we all knew that she was right, and we had never thought that it mattered a great deal. The attacks on the gamra island were of the political type, so great amounts of money were spent on bugging and on show. On actual effective security for the island as a whole, not so much.
Thayu unclipped her spare gun from her belt. She undid the straps and rethreaded them through the bracket at the back so that it became an arm bracket. She handed it to me. “You take this.”
I strapped the weapon on while we started walking. At Thayu’s insistence, I had been taking some weapons training. Because we can’t keep relying on someone stupid enough to walk right into your path without seeing you. She’d been talking about Taysha Palayi who hadn’t known I was there until the very last moment, and hadn’t seen me in the semidarkness and chaos of Asto’s central command hub because of the Coldi’s poor night vision. I would not ever be an ace shot, but I felt a bit more comfortable with weapons.
We walked across the island, to the administration building in the forecourt, to the station where Federza had his office. To reach it, you had to go up a stairwell to the first floor, or you could walk along the central corridor that ran through the middle of the building. Thayu chose the corridor.
We walked as quietly as we could, but to me our footsteps still sounded like a horde of elephants approaching. Thayu’s feeder told me that she’d chosen this path because if we flushed out someone, they’d have to flee down the stairs and into the open of the courtyard, rather than into the building, where the chance of hitting them with a shot was negligible.
I had been to this office before, having come up the stairs from the courtyard. I remembered the sophisticated furniture and the bookcases.
Thayu stopped abruptly in front of me. I had expected it, so stopped just as quickly behind her.
The door to the office had been kicked in and stood ajar.
We listened. I stood behind Thayu leaning against the wall, and Veyada and Sheydu against the opposite wall, holding their guns to take care of anyone who might come out. Coldi people had this eerie ability to breathe totally without noise, even if they had been running. I wasn’t so lucky.
Thayu set her scanner to infrared and pointed it at the door. The little screen showed indistinct blobs of green and black. After a while, she shook her head. Sheydu pushed the door but stuff had been thrown against it from the inside and it wouldn’t open.
She gestured Is there another way out?
Thayu shook her head.
Veyada gestured, He’s still in there.
Maybe. Scan is negative. The office was on the first floor and it might be possible to escape through a window.
Veyada came to help Sheydu and together they shoved whatever was behind the door aside so that it would open. Thayu covered them, holding her gun in both hands and pointing it at the door.
There was a lot of stuff on the floor in the office: broken equipment, broken furniture, old documents. Everything had been overturned, all the shelves emptied. That picture of Daya Ezmi that had hung on his wall when I’d been here before going to Asto now lay on the floor.
Thayu scanned the room again. The window was intact. A door in the left hand wall went to a little kitchen and storage area.
Inconclusive, Thayu said of the scan results. Sheydu clicked her gun back into its bracket and exchanged it for the heavier weapon on her belt. Veyada did the same.
They inched forward into the office, backs facing each other, their dark eyes roving over every possible place that might present danger. I pressed myself against the wall in the corridor, knowing my utter uselessness in these situations. I barely dared breathe.
I could see Thayu’s infrared screen, which showed no distinct shapes or heat sources, but they might have shielding. Our own armour wouldn’t show much heat either, especially not when hidden, like in a cupboard. Apparently my body temperature was so low that I barely showed up on scans as all.
No one spoke. Veyada and Sheydu inched very slowly into the room until they were a good few paces in. Sheydu lowered her gun. She walked to the side wall and yanked open a door in a cupboard that stood out of my field of vision. She pointed her gun inside, waited, eying the contents of the cupboard.
Finding nothing in there that interested her, she shut the door, twisted a safe tie around the handles so the cupboard could not be opened from the inside in case she had overlooked something. She turned to the other side of the room and opened another door there, but also found nothing.
Veyada crouched behind the door to examine the debris they’d had to push aside to get the door to open. Veyada rarely shared his thoughts, but I picked up some of his deliberations about how someone could have dragged it with one hand reaching into the room and dropped it against the door to create the illusion that someone was still inside.
Sheydu went into the little kitchen and came out a moment later. Nothing, she gestured.
Thayu lowered her gun and also went into the room.
Now that the three of them had declared it safe enough to enter, I followed.
The office had been well and truly trashed. All of Federza’s elegant furniture smashed to bits. They’d even put gouges in the wall. Why?
I stepped over the debris to the desk. In the wall behind it was a cupboard that had contained electronics. The pieces of equipment lay in fragments on the floor, readers and projectors and timers and Trader-related equipment which I didn’t recognise, even a device that looked suspiciously Earth-made—
There was a tiny noise.
I froze and held my breath.
Veyada, next to me, also stopped and grabbed for his gun.
For several long moments, we stared around the room.
Any cupboard doors that Sheydu had not safe-tied stood open. There was no
way that anyone hid in there. The door in the opposite wall led to a small kitchen where there was a bed along one wall. The little room had no windows. No one could hide in there either. Not after Sheydu had checked.
Thayu scanned the room with her infrared scanner again. I could see the screen over her shoulder—and then remembered the fight in the foyer in front of Ezhya’s private apartment, where attackers had hidden in the dome.
There was a manhole in the ceiling. It was probably not obvious to people—and software—unfamiliar with Barresh architecture. Thayu used an Asto-made scanner.
I met Veyada’s eyes and looked up.
He noticed the manhole. Fuck, he whispered soundlessly.
Sheydu and Thayu now also looked up.
Veyada sneaked around the room, carefully stepping over debris without making a single sound, keeping his gun pointed at the manhole. Thayu dialled up the sensitivity and scanned the ceiling. A very faint and indistinct lighter-coloured blob showed up. She showed it to Veyada, who aimed his gun and fired at the ceiling. The charge went straight through, and left a bright white trail on Thayu’s scanner. It left a blackened hole in the plaster, but otherwise missed the lighter blob. On purpose, because Veyada wouldn’t miss at this distance.
There was another scuffing noise. Now I could see clearly how the grey blob moved.
Veyada shot again, now hitting the ceiling on the other side of the blob. Bits of ceiling plaster rained down. “If you come out now, we’ll let you live.”
Nothing.
Sheydu dragged the desk under the manhole and found a chair that still had enough legs to stay upright. She climbed on the desk, hauled the chair up, put it on the desk and climbed on. She had to bend her head to stop it from hitting the ceiling.
Thayu motioned me to the door with her gun.
I retreated into the corridor.
Then Sheydu punched the manhole cover upwards into the ceiling with both hands. A flash went off from inside. A man shouted and jumped from the manhole, shooting a wild spray of charges into the wall.
Sheydu fired once, a thick, white-hot beam of light that struck the attacker square in the back of the head.
The man hit the ground and crumpled. He did not get up.
Sheydu calmly stuck her gun back into the bracket at her belt. “I never thought those flashy firework shooters were any good.”
She jumped down from the table with a solid thud.
Veyada had turned the man onto his back. His face was slack, his eyes unfocused, open and unmoving. He’d smeared his cheeks with dirt to make it stand out less in the darkness, but his skin was pale.
Sheydu snorted. “Tamerian. Hired muscle. They’re supposed to be good.” Clearly the operative word in that sentence was supposed. “Whoever sent him was even too cowardly to do the dirty work themselves.”
Veyada searched the man’s pockets, but found nothing. No ID, no loot, nothing to say who had sent this man.
“Well, that’s annoying,” he said.
I would call a death more than “annoying”, but we were still wrestling with the question whether to call Tamerians human and if their deaths were real deaths, since they’d been bred for warfare, and their death would qualify as hazards of the job.
“Hmmm,” Sheydu said. “If he’s got nothing on him that means that either he didn’t find what he was looking for, or the thing he was looking for can be sent electronically.”
“We can get the building’s hub logs,” I said.
“Not until office hours.”
“True.”
Thayu had picked up his gun and studied the controls. “That’s an unusual thing. I might keep that for a little investigation.” She slid it into her belt.
As she did so, a flash erupted from a patch on the man’s clothes.
“Shit, what’s that?” Veyada kneeled next to him. The little patch had looked like a decoration attached to his shirt.
Sheydu whipped out her knife and cut the section of fabric that held the thing. She held it on her palm. The tiny device was only the size of a button and had a few tiny glass windows at the top. A spy camera?
“What was that?” came the voice of Devlin, who sat in the hub in my apartment and who was in contact with Thayu through the earpiece that dangled from her collar.
Thayu said, “I don’t know. It’s a thing stuck to his clothes. It appears to be some sort of spying device. It has a little glass eye.”
“It just sent out a signal,” Devlin said.
Thayu pulled the gun that she’d taken off the man from her belt again. “Could it be that it’s a warning, slaved to his gun?” She frowned at the controls. “I’m pretty sure I’d turned it off, but this is some damn specialist gear. Look at the suit, too. These are professionals.”
Sheydu snorted. Clearly she did not think so. Then again, she’d spent the prime years of her life guarding the most closely-guarded official in all of the gamra worlds and I’d bet the non-gamra worlds as well.
“I’m getting replies to that blip,” Devlin said, a tinny voice through Thayu’s earpiece.
“Where from?” she asked.
“A few places within the complex. One blip at a time each.”
“Which places?” I leaned over Thayu’s shoulder so that he could hear me.
“One of them was in the courtyard in front of the assembly hall. Another on the other side of our building, but it has since moved to the back.”
“Shit,” Veyada said.
I met his eyes, and we both knew that the problem was bigger than we’d realised. Because there wasn’t just one or two Tamerians, there were loads of them, and likely they hadn’t found what they were looking for, and I was starting to think that maybe Reida might have gotten to this thing first instead.
“We’ve got to go home.”
Chapter 10
* * *
WE WALKED BACK as fast as we could without running.
Back through the building, down the stairs, through the quiet, leafy courtyards bathed in the harsh light from light pearls, past the guards. I had trouble keeping up, and Thayu, Veyada and Sheydu weren’t even breathing fast.
Thayu, next to me, was fiddling with her comm reader.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m warning Evi and Telaris to put higher security on the door, and Nicha to keep an eye on what happens inside.”
I felt cold. I would soon face the ultimate test of loyalty with Nicha.
The guards outside our building looked surprised to see us hurrying back. They hesitated, some reaching for their guns as if to look alert, even if they weren’t sure what they were supposed to be alert about.
“Is there a problem?” their patrol leader asked when we were close enough.
“Have you seen anyone leave or enter the building?” Thayu asked.
There were headshakes to this question. The man gave me a did we notice that you went out? look.
“Have you run infrared scans of the area?”
They confirmed that they had, but had seen nothing abnormal.
Thayu briefly explained what we had seen.
“Several of them, on the island?” their patrol leader said. “Impossible. We’ve been standing here all night. I don’t know where your data came from, but—”
“They’re Tamerians.”
He fell quiet. Met his colleague’s eyes. The colleague pulled out his gun and dialled up the beam strength. The patrol leader nodded.
“Well . . . thank you. We’ll keep an eye out.”
We continued into the building, through the light-filled atrium. When we were climbing the stairs, Sheydu said in a low voice, “Idiots.”
I was beginning to see what she meant.
Evi attended the guard post outside the door. I’d rarely known him to display any emotion and he looked most professional and unflappable, acknowledging us with a tiny nod.
“Everyone still here?” Veyada asked.
“Mashara has accompanied Trader Federza to a room in the g
uesthouse. Mashara received an order from gamra that Trader Federza was considered to be in danger. Mashara was asked to bring him to a safer building.”
“Shit.” Guess that was to be expected. I guess I really didn’t want him in my house anyway. But damn. I’d hoped to have control over him.
The guesthouse was in the middle of the island, so there would be no risk of shooting from outside the exclusion zone. Still, I didn’t like it. He had come to me even though he disliked me a great deal. There was a message in that. If he thought the guesthouse was a safer option, he would have gone there in the first place and would have avoided having to deal with me.
I’m not sure what to think of it either, Thayu said through the feeder. She asked, “Do you want me to go and check on him?”
No. I want you safe with me. “Let’s deal with the issue of Reida first.” I also needed her with me to face Nicha. The chilling suspicion grew that we were dealing with something much bigger than we first thought, and that an ill-considered move could do a huge amount of damage.
We went into the hall, where Yaris came in from the living room and Devlin from the hub.
“Muri, I’ve found some more people hiding in this area. They don’t show up on the infrared scans because they’re wearing insulation suits. But they use the small blips like the ones we saw to communicate. They don’t register as radio waves, but once you know what you’re looking at, it’s obvious where they are.”
“Good work. Make sure you liaise with gamra security.”
“Already doing that.” He moved to go back into the hub.
I asked his disappearing back, “Where is Nicha?”
But Nicha himself came running through the corridor. He stopped when he saw me. His cheeks went red.
His eyes met mine and I stared back at him. He didn’t move. According to his position in our association, he was supposed to make the subservient greeting but I had never enforced the custom because I hated it. And even he had often told me about his dislike of the custom.