by Chloe Garner
The LaVelle was nothing like that.
It didn’t matter how worthwhile what you wanted was; if you weren’t going to show up on time, if you weren’t going to make use, if you were going to drop the ball somewhere down the road, they wanted to know about it now, so they could avoid wasting their limited resources on you.
Sarah liked that about them.
It meant, though, that she needed to be on her game when she got the time in front of the committee. She would buy a good screen for working out a presentation once they got to Intec, but for now, she worked on the content. It didn’t matter how good your graphics were if you weren’t pitching a good idea, and it didn’t matter how good your idea was if they probed it and discovered that you didn’t really know how it was going to work.
Sunny left her to work, taking in the scenery, as far as it went, all the way to Tyrew. They got a hotel room in Tyrew where they both showered and they got a good night’s sleep before they started up the coast. This where was Sarah started to get more alert.
The last time they’d been on the coast, she and Jimmy had been running from Pythagoras’ people who were trying to kill Jimmy under the mistaken impression that he was the one who knew how to find absenta. Sarah was guessing - and Jimmy was, too - that Pythagoras knew better, by now. Sunny was good at blending in and not drawing attention, so it was just a question of not having their identification taken into any system that would log it and not going to the wrong restaurants or bars. That was mostly easy enough, because Sunny had no interest in going to high-end entertainment or dining of any kind, so they ordered in or went to hotel restaurants. It took three days to get to Intec.
They took a cab to the space port, where the LaVelle would take up and put down a pod every few hours as it orbited overhead. There were many other places around the world where pods would come and go, but this one was fixed. Every time by, the LaVelle swapped pods. The one free swap Sarah could count on happening.
It didn’t mean it was easy to get on. The pods had limited space and everyone competed for it aggressively. If Jimmy hadn’t managed to get a reservation for them, they would have wasted the trip, and it was always possible to get bumped at the last minute. Unlike the cargo manifests, they did play politics in Intec.
Sarah looked over at Sunny as they sat in the back of the cab.
“They’ll have been watching for us from Preston, but there’s no reason to expect they aren’t watching for us, here, too.”
“So they already know we’re sitting here and we should get moving,” Sunny answered. Satisfied, Sarah gave her a firm nod and got out of the car, going to the trunk to get out their bags. Sunny met her and took the hard-sided bag from her, walking toward the port without hesitation.
“Whatever happens, you keep moving,” Sarah said.
“I don’t fight,” Sunny said. “I plan on it.”
Sarah nodded, checking her guns mentally, not wanting to point them out to anyone who might be watching, and they started across the street.
“They don’t like conflict outside of the space port,” Sarah started, when she saw the man up the sidewalk from them change how he was moving. She cut herself off and pointed. “Go. Fast.”
Sunny was already running and Sarah stepped quickly toward the building by the gate that was the entrance to the port. The man had been drawing a gun - her mind had known that even before she’d actually seen him - and she checked behind her for pedestrians. He was less likely to pull the trigger if there was someone behind her. With another moment, she would have decided whether or not she was trying to keep people in his line of fire, but they were both moving too fast for it to be an active decision. She hit the corner of the building and pressed her back against the fence, gun in hand, looking around the corner at him as he ran toward her. A bullet whinged off of the chain fence and she kept her head back, taking aim and returning fire.
He was moving, and she wasn’t.
It was as simple as that.
She hit him and put her head back again, watching the street. She had about four inches of brick for cover against her left shoulder, and a chain-link fence behind her. She was completely exposed, otherwise, and if someone came from anywhere other than her left, she had no cover at all. Two other men were moving funny, but it was an odd standard, at that moment, because everyone was moving funny, reacting to the pair of shots and the body in the sidewalk. These two were funny because they were watching her and not the body.
Port security, behind her, was buzzing, words and electronics as men sprung to action, and she hoped they’d let Sunny through rather than try to stop her, but Sarah had bigger problems than whether or not Sunny made it through the gate.
Both men watching her were armed, and they were coming at her from her weak side. Added problem was that now she was the one with pedestrians and cars to worry about, as both men were coming through relatively crowded sections of street, and even if she hit them clean, it was possible she’d hurt someone else.
Now there was a problem you didn’t often come across in Lawrence.
The closest man reached into his coat to pull out a gun, and Sarah dropped to a knee. Wall wasn’t doing her any good, so being smaller might help. Moving was better, but the only way she was willing to go was closer to the both of them, and that was worse than doing nothing. She took aim, then something about the shouting resolved in her head and she realized there were four armed men on the other side of the fence yelling at her to drop the gun.
Six more came running into view through the gate, hand guns drawn, and the two men turned shoulder and blended. Sarah put the gun down on the ground and put her hands out and up, watching the two men as they disappeared around a corner. The six guards on her side of the fence ran toward her and she held still as they formed a ring around her.
“My name is Sarah Todd,” she said. “I’m supposed to be on the list to go up to the LaVelle today. I was defending myself.”
She waited as the men shouted at each other and into comm devices, looking over to see Sunny watching her dispassionately from the inside-side of the guard booth. Traffic was stopped on the street next to her, and Sarah wondered just how gutsy Pythagoras was. It would have been possible for someone to shoot her from inside one of the cars and then drive away, if they picked their moment.
A rifle from a building would have been her technique, but she hadn’t seen any heads above the skyline yet, and all signs indicated Pythagoras’ men were all ground-level.
Someone came forward, grabbing Sarah by the wrist and flipping her roughly to the ground. She let it happen, breathing evenly as they tied her wrists and hauled her onto her knees.
“Are you armed?” one of the men asked.
“Exhaustively,” she answered.
He patted her waist and thighs, finding the matching handgun to the one she’d dropped and the smaller one on the inside of her leg. He took the knife from the inside of her boot and the one from her pocket.
“Two between my shoulder blades,” she said. Tempting as it was to let those two stay hidden, looking cooperative was her best currency, right now. “And the one behind my hip.”
He knew about that one, but he’d been looking for guns when he’d found it. He took that one, too, then nodded to the two men at her elbows to pull her up onto her feet. It took some work.
“Say your name again,” he said.
“Sarah Todd,” she answered, looking at the shorter of the two men. Insulting, a little bit, to be held by a man that she could have bashed to pieces against the fence, even with her hands tied. He at least had the decency to swallow. The man who had searched her talked into a comm for a minute, then waved the rest of the group forward.
“We’ll have this conversation inside,” he said. “She is on the list.”
She walked through the gate, four thick steel posts in the ground for stopping cars, and Sunny fell into step somewhere off to her right as they went toward the first space port building. Sarah had only been here a few times. Once up
, once down, and twice to get the paperwork figured out. And it had been a long time. It looked like they’d updated the buildings slightly.
“I want my weapons back when this is all done,” Sarah said.
“You know you aren’t allowed to be armed on the LaVelle,” the man who had her guns said. “You’ve been up there before.”
She nodded.
“I know I’m allowed to keep them in a locked case,” she said. “You might have noticed that I need them.”
“Not up there, you don’t,” the man said. “And that’s if they even let you up, after that.”
“Check your cameras,” Sarah said. “I didn’t start that fight.”
“You fired a gun directly in front of the port building,” the bigger of the men at her elbows said. “We’ve imprisoned people for that.”
She considered it. The number of people who had done what she’d just done had to be vanishingly small.
“She with you?” the man with her guns asked, indicating Sunny.
Sarah looked over.
“I guess I’ll claim her,” Sarah said. “There ought to be a guest with my reservation. That would be her.”
“She’s not getting up without you, anyway,” the man with the guns said, telling her something Sarah already knew. “Is she armed?”
“I’d guess no, but you ought to ask her.”
The man indicated and someone went over to talk to Sunny as the man with Sarah’s guns opened the door to the building and let her, with her two guards, walk through ahead of him. They took her to a small room with a solid door, leaving Sunny outside, and they sat her down in a chair. She waited there, alone, for about ten minutes, and then a women in low-cost professional wear came in with a stack of papers.
“Your name is Sarah Todd,” the woman said.
“Yes,” Sarah answered. “I told them that.”
“You are a graduate of the exchange program?”
Sarah had never understood why anyone had called it an exchange program; the LaVelle didn’t send anyone down when the students went up. No point calling attention to it, just this moment, though.
“Yes.”
“And why are you going up, now?” the woman asked.
“I have a proposal for the crew to consider,” Sarah said. “I’d like to get a satellite launched.”
“Any reason that men would be trying to kill you for that?” the woman asked.
“Nope,” Sarah said. “They’re here for a different reason.”
“And what is that?” the woman asked.
“None of your business,” Sarah said.
“I’m afraid that’s not true,” the woman said. “You brought a gun fight to the space port, which means that I now have to investigate it. If you are unwilling to cooperate in that investigation, I’ll have to arrest you and take you to a prison facility for further questioning.”
There were various agreements among the cities about how to treat people, how to deliver justice, but every city had its own intricacies for navigating the law, and Sarah hadn’t lived in Intec; she didn’t have the knack to know what was true and what was posturing.
“The ground in front of the port isn’t yours,” Sarah said. Fully a guess, but she wasn’t just going to roll over and let this woman with her forms and her glasses tell her what to do.
“But you put the space port and its staff at risk,” the woman said. Sarah frowned.
“Do you even have the authority to come out onto the street with guns and arrest someone?” Sarah asked.
“We do if our personnel are in danger,” the woman said. “We’re interrogating your friend as we speak.”
Sarah laughed.
“Good luck getting anything out of her,” she said.
The woman recrossed her legs, leaning forward.
“If you’re the innocent party, I need to know that,” she said. “I can do something about it.”
“Not that kind of situation,” Sarah said. “You don’t need to be involved at all. I just need to get up to the LaVelle on the next pod.”
“And what about when you come back?” the woman asked. “They’re going to know where you are. You’re pinned in, here. You need my help, or they’re just going to come back and do it again.”
Sarah turned the corners of her mouth down, mocking.
“Nice city like Intec? I’m sure that doesn’t happen that often. Surely not.”
The woman tipped her head.
“I could scrub you from the list. I could arrest you. I need more cooperation from you.”
“You really don’t,” Sarah said. “There’s nothing you can do, and I was defending myself. You can prove that with your own two eyes. Sunny wasn’t involved at all.”
“Sunny what?” the woman asked. Sarah grinned. Big, honest grin.
“You haven’t even got a last name out of her?”
“I want to help you,” the woman said. “You’re one of us. All of the graduates are. I have authority.”
“Put me on the pod,” Sarah said.
“Again, what are you planning on doing, when you get back?”
“I’m not worried about that until I get back.”
“You don’t have a return trip on file yet,” the woman said. Sarah shook her head.
“You know as well as I do that they’ll hear me when they’re ready to hear me.”
The woman narrowed her eyes.
“If I took your blood pressure right now, what would I find?”
Sarah blinked. That hadn’t been a question she would have guessed.
“Don’t know. Don’t ever get my blood pressure measured, where I’m from.”
“And where is that?” the woman asked. Sarah smiled.
“Little town called Lawrence. You won’t find it on a map or in any of your screens.”
The woman frowned, writing it down. Sarah didn’t see any harm.
“Are you from Intec?” Sarah asked as the woman looked up again.
“Born and raised,” the woman told her. Sarah nodded.
“If you named the five or six most influential people in this city, I guarantee at least two of them were involved in the fight outside,” she said. “You don’t want to get in the middle of it, because you have a conflict of interest. Represent the space port, make sure that I’m not a threat to the crew or mission of the LaVelle, and walk away. You don’t have any further obligation than that.”
The woman frowned.
“I’m sorely tempted to arrest you for your own good.”
Sarah shook her head.
“The minute you try to walk me off the port grounds, I’m dead. The people who want to kill me won’t mess with the port, because they need it, the same as everyone else, but as soon as I’m gone, they’re going to come for me again.”
“What did you do?” the woman asked. Sarah shook her head.
“Which pod list am I on? The next one or the one after that?”
The woman pressed her lips.
“I can’t just let you go up there without answering any of my questions. Port personnel were in the line of fire of a gun fight that you were involved with. That isn’t something you just walk away from.”
“Jimmy Lawson,” Sarah said.
The woman paused. The way she froze was a tell, but Sarah didn’t have all the information necessary to read it. Sarah folded her arms across her chest and waited, watching. The woman’s eyes flicked up at Sarah.
“Is he trying to kill you?” she asked. “I’d heard he left town.”
“What do you know about him?” Sarah asked.
The woman shook her head. Trying to clear her mind, get back on her script. This was personal. Much more personal than Sarah would have guessed. Sarah smiled, grim.
“You were one of his groupies, weren’t you?”
The eyes flicked again.
Bingo.
Sarah allowed herself the fantasy of smashing across the table at the woman, then put it away. It was a lever. Jimmy had handed it to her. She
would use it.
“How does a woman like you get security clearance to work a job like this when you’ve mooned around after Jimmy Lawson?” Sarah asked. Another guess, but this was a good one. The woman twitched. Better question: what fraction of the city had Jimmy bedded that Sarah had stumbled across one completely at random, like this?
“Is he trying to kill you?” the woman asked.
Sarah shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. I have a right to go up to the LaVelle. My name is on the list. You aren’t going to stop me.”
The woman straightened.
“I’ve disclosed my relationship with Mr. Lawson as part of my security clearance,” she said. “There’s nothing for you to use against me, there. That’s why they do the deep background checks that they do.”
Sarah nodded slowly. She knew about those. They’d done one on her. Problem was, there wasn’t much to find about Lawrence, and they’d missed most of the grayer activities she was using to fund her tuition. All of it was paid cash. They just didn’t know that Jimmy had only given her the first semester’s worth.
They’d tried.
But Lawrence was a black hole, to them, of history and data. She’d interviewed well, she was prepared to take the spot on extremely short notice, and someone high up in the selection process had been advocating for her because she was from a nontraditional background.
She watched the way the woman moved. Still halting, the way someone moved when they were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Sarah licked her lips, feeling for the pressure point.
“They had lots of parties, before they all disappeared,” Sarah said. The woman’s eyes changed, her face going stone cold.
Yup.
Sarah nodded.
“That bedroom of his,” Sarah said. “Purpose fit, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said.
That was worse than a tell. That was an outright admission.
No one ever used that phrase as anything other than a truthless denial.
Sarah bit the inside of her cheek, then stood.
“Please let Sunny know that we’re going to be on the next pod,” she said. “I need my weapons back from the guard who confiscated them.”