She beckoned me into the apartment, and closed the door to stop the light from the hall from shining in on Lucy. “Are you going to stay?” she whispered.
I was tonguetied. I looked at that Christy-shaped dent in the duvet and I yearned to lie down with her there. Not to make love, no. I just wanted to hold her in my arms and breathe in the clean scent of her.
I was wearing a buttondown I’d had in the truck, as I hadn’t wanted to walk around for another minute in Parsec’s Ursa Major t-shirt. Christy hooked one finger between the second and third buttons. Her nail delicately scraped my chest, making me shiver. She tugged gently. I took a step towards her.
I felt the heat coming off her body, palpable in the air-conditioned apartment. I could see her nipples through the thin material of the short nightie she wore.
“Where’ve you been, anyway?” she whispered.
“In jail. Don’t worry, I’m not in trouble. It was a misunderstanding.”
“Is this a misunderstanding?”
“This?”
“This.”
Out of nowhere, I started trembling. I kind of lurched forward and grabbed her. I wrapped my arms around her and put my face on her shoulder.
“Mike …”
She smelled so normal. It worked on the chaos inside me like an antidote. “Sorry,” I muttered. “You just feel so good.”
A small sound came from the bed. I leaped back from Christy as if I’d been shot.
“She’s grinding her teeth,” Christy whispered. “She’s been doing it all night. It’s a common childhood response to stress.”
Lucy was still sleeping soundly, though gritting her teeth. I licked my lips. Smoothed down my clothes. “I’d better go. She’ll be calmer in her own bed …” I remembered that Lucy didn’t have her own bed anymore. Our entire apartment was in biohazard bags. “And you can have your bed back,” I added.
“OK,” Christy said. “But for your information, I’d rather share it with you.” She wasn’t teasing. That’s what enchanted me. She simply put that out there.
I gazed down at her, trying to match her seriousness. “Just so there are no misunderstandings,” I whispered, “what I really want to do right now is fuck you as hard as you need.”
She flinched back with a little toss of her head. Had I gone too far? The rough language didn’t come naturally to me—I’d thought it was what she was looking for, but …
Christy moved over to the bed without looking back at me. “Lucy.” She gently shook Lucy’s shoulder. “Wake up, doll. Your daddy’s come to take you home.”
When I saw my daughter’s sleep-dazed face, I knew for sure I was doing the right thing. I helped her stumble to the door and put her shoes on. The last thing Lucy needed was to catch her father in bed—or on the floor—with the student life coordinator. I had to take her back to Shiftertown, where we belonged.
“I owe you,” I said to Christy. “I’ll call you.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
It could have been a brush-off. But a little smile at the corners of her mouth gave me hope.
I carried a half-asleep Lucy downstairs and into the truck. Screw the budget, I decided, and instructed the truck to drive to the Majesta Ponce de Leon. It’s not exactly the best hotel in Mag-Ingat; in fact it’s the kind of place tourists go for color, not comfort, way down at the Millhaven boundary of Shiftertown. But with layers of security between us and the outside world, I felt safe enough to crash on clean sheets and sleep.
59
The 9 PM rain shower pounded the spaceport. My truck drove sedately through the puddles on the intraport roads, staying five klicks under the speed limit. Dolph slumped against the passenger side window. We had waited for the rain to start before we got rolling. Clouds blind observation satellites.
Light glowed through the condensation on the inside of the windscreen. It came from a hangar identical to mine but a bit smaller. Freight Terminal 927.
“He’s there,” I said.
“Good.” Dolph uncoiled from his slouch, stretched, and took his Koiler out of the pocket of his raincoat.
I drove across the sheet of water covering Evan Zhang’s landing pad, and parked just outside the entrance of the hangar, in front of the nose of his ship, a battered 90-tonne freighter called the Margharita. Hull plates had been replaced so often that the ship was more patch than original steel. Wings stretching to the walls of the hangar would give it excellent in-atmosphere maneuverability. Zhang presumably did a lot of in-atmosphere maneuvering. Dodging rockets and such. The Margharita’s patched, scorched hull bore witness to his business niche of shuttling cargoes to the Hurtworlds.
Slim, automated oxygen and nitrogen tankers stood near the ship’s tail, connected to it with high-pressure hoses. Their presence suggested that Zhang was prepping for a long run right now. You only need to go that heavy on air if you’re planning to be in the field for weeks, or months.
Two men were working on the ship’s engine. They saw the truck. One of them walked suspiciously towards us, carrying a wrench. He was medium height, fifty-ish, with a cybernetic eye that looked like the lens of a camera stuck in his head. I recognized Evan Zhang from Independent Shipping Association events we had attended together.
Dolph climbed out of the left side of the truck. I climbed out of the right. Rain beat on my head and shoulders. I walked into the hangar, wiped my hair out of my eyes, drew my Machina, and pointed it at Zhang’s face. “Hi,” I said. “Were you thinking of going somewhere?”
A suppressed phut and a smashing noise punctuated my words. Dolph had shot out the free-standing floodlight that the men had been using to illuminate their work. We were not planning on having our little chat recorded by the Margharita’s external cameras.
Darkness engulfed the hangar. My truck’s headlights prodded in under the ship and found Dolph stepping on the other man’s kidneys while he ground his gun into the back of the guy’s head.
Zhang glanced at his crewman. Then he looked back at my gun. “What do you want?”
“Looks like you’re getting ready for a run.”
“Got that right,” Zhang said. “Twenty tonnes of machine parts for Mittel Trevoyvox.”
Mittel Trevoyvox was the furthest-away of the Hurtworlds. I’d visited it once before. It was not a pleasant memory. “When are you leaving?” I said.
“On the second.”
“No, you aren’t. You’re leaving tonight.”
“Can’t. I ain’t got my cargo yet.” The chump had the nerve to look at me as if I was an idiot, even though I was the one with a gun. Then again, he flew to the Hurtworlds. He was probably used to people using firearms to make their point. That could be how he ended up with a cybernetic eye.
“Would you rather have your cargo, or your life?” I snarled.
Less than 24 hours had passed since I was in police custody. I was stiff and aching all over, various muscle strains and bruises catching up with me after the fact—a sign of age, I gloomily reflected. I had to lower my gun arm so that the Machina was pointing at Zhang’s knees.
Zhang raised his head. Red reflections glinted on his cybernetic eye as he charged me, swinging his wrench. He was not holding the wrench. His hand was the wrench. I didn’t properly understand that until I shot the wrench off, leaving him with a socket on the end of his arm.
“Fuck,” he cried. “Whyn’t ya just kill me?”
I skipped back and levelled the gun at him again. My pulse galloped. Thank God for the drumming of the rain on the hangar roof, which would have disguised the noise of the shot. The Machina didn’t make a lot of noise, anyway. “You fucking idiot,” I said. “I’m not trying to kill you!” There was a reason I had not brought Irene along. “I’m trying to save your ass. Buzz Parsec is in jail, and that’s where you’re going to wind up if you don’t get off of Ponce de Leon right now, do you hear me?”
The danger, of course, was that Zhang would tell the police that Parsec had not ordered Mr. Brains
from him. That would blow a hole in d’Alencon’s case against Parsec. The fact that they hadn’t come looking for Zhang yet told me that they didn’t really want to know, but if Zhang stuck around, he would end up getting pulled in to give testimony at some point. I was actually surprised he was still here.
He clutched his wrist, whimpering. Even if his implant didn’t have synthetic neural transmitters, that must have stung. “That attachment cost me 70 KGCs.”
“Waste of money.” I risked a quick glance into the hangar. Dolph had let the other guy up. They were talking.
“That Shifter bitch works for you, doesn’t she?” Zhang said.
“That’s no way to refer to a lady.”
“I could tell you a few things about her.”
Before I could succumb to curiosity, Dolph prodded the other guy towards us. “According to this one,” he said, “they can’t launch without their cargo, on account of being broke. They can’t even pay their port fees until they get the customer’s advance payment.” He spat. He had advocated for the forty grammes of lead solution.
“Is that true?” I asked Zhang.
“Yes.”
And yet he had spent 70 big ones on a cybernetic arm. Well, I should talk. I had blown through twenty years’ worth of fees for assassinations, strategic bombings, and heists with nothing more to show for it than a rented row house and a nanny bot.
“All right,” I said. “What’s the customer’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It went through my agent!”
I’d never seen the point of shipping agents. Why let someone else control your customer relationships, and charge you ten percent for the privilege? “All right, your agent’s name.”
“Timmy Akhatli.”
“Timmy what?”
“Akhatli. He’s an Ek.”
“Oh.” Well, of course. The Hurtworlds were originally, and still largely are, an Ek project. The Eks might not be so keen on flying cargoes into those hells, but they surely would want their cut.
Dolph took out his phone and looked Timmy Akhatli up, while I held my gun on the two men. The Margharita hummed quietly, drinking oxygen and nitrogen.
“He’s for real,” Dolph said.
“All right. Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “Uni-Ex Shipping will take your cargo. I’ll pay you the advance fee and recoup it from your agent later. And you get off Ponce de Leon tonight.”
Zhang agreed. He didn’t have much choice, with a gun pointed at his face. It was a pretty sweet deal, in my opinion: he was getting money for nothing. But he showed no gratitude, even after I transferred 30 KGCs from the Uni-Ex corporate account into his account.
“Now call the Space Authority and change your launch slot,” I said. “Take the first one they got.”
Zhang made the call in a grumpy monotone. “Launching in two hours,” he said. “Good thing we’re already prepped.”
“But where we gonna go?” the other guy said. “We got no cargo, so where—”
“Home?” I suggested. I knew by their accents they weren’t PdL natives. They sounded like they came from the Techworlds.
“Yeah,” Zhang said. He cast a glance past us, out to the wet tarmac of the spaceport, and the city twinkling at the head of the bay, hidden behind the orange-tinted night clouds. “I ain’t even going to miss this planet. It’s halfway to being a Shifter world, anyways.”
I was a trigger pull from putting them down on the wet, greasy floor of the hangar, after all. Mastering myself, I said to Dolph, “Come on, let’s go. These two creeps gotta start their pre-flight checks.”
“All right,” Dolph said. “Just one moment.”
He walked up to Zhang, who cringed.
“Hold your hand out,” Dolph said, and he put a bullet in Zhang’s wrist socket. “I fucking hate cyborgs,” he yelled, as Zhang slumped to his knees, keening, his right hand wrapped around the twisted metal stump. “Shifter planet? I fucking wish! Better than a cyborg planet, anyway!”
We left them there and piled back into my truck, our wet clothes making squeaking noises on the bench seat. I punched the AC on. Cold air roared out of the vents. I put the truck in drive and circled back out to the road.
60
As I drove away from Evan Zhang’s freight terminal, Dolph unloaded his Koiler, removed the suppressor, stuck it in his pocket, and put the bullets in my glove compartment. “So. Twenty tonnes of machine parts for Mittel Trevoyvox, huh?”
“Yup,” I said.
“That’s gonna screw with our schedule some.”
“We’ll make it work.” I opened my pack of cigarettes, lit one, and rolled the window down. Rain blew in.
“Mittel Trevoyvox isn’t far from Yesanyase Skont,” Dolph observed, lighting a cigarette for himself.
“That’s right. Only four light years. A hop, a skip, and a jump.”
I’d discovered the notification this morning when I checked my v-mail. Pippa had been deported two whole days ago. Not only hadn’t she been in Mag-Ingat on Founding Day, she hadn’t even been on the damn planet. Jan and Leaf had received asylum, as I’d never followed up on the request to pay their deportation costs. They were safe in the resettlement center where Christy volunteered. Pippa was on her way to Yesanyase Skont.
“What if we can’t find her?” Dolph said.
“Then at least we tried.”
“What if we can?”
I slouched round to face him and said frankly, “I don’t know. She’s got kuru. Nothing we can do about that. But maybe we can take her some stuff … clothes, electronics, I hear they don’t even get enough food out there. Just some things to make her life a little better.”
Something moved in Dolph’s eyes. It looked like fear. Then he said, “Works for me.” He gazed out the windshield. “We haven’t been to the Hurtworlds in ages. Used to be good money to be made out there.”
I had told him about my confession to d’Alencon, and d’Alencon’s coded warning to me not to take any more of those kinds of jobs. Keep it to myself? I wish. I never could keep anything that big from Dolph. But it was so embarrassing to both of us that Dolph had to act like he didn’t take it seriously. He insisted we were untouchable, now that we’d saved the planet and everything.
Right.
At least it looked like Ponce de Leon was safe. No cases of kuru had showed up among the thousands of worried people presenting themselves at clinics. The mall level was still closed for bio-hazard testing, but otherwise, service had been restored. Everything was back to normal … but as I parked in front of my hangar, and splashed in through the rain, it didn’t feel like it to me. My nerves and sinews said this thing was not over. That’s why I’d impulsively said I would take Evan Zhang’s cargo. It would give us an excuse to go and look for Pippa on Yesanyase Skont.
“Lucy!” I yelled. The lights in the hangar were on. I could hear her voice coming from the St. Clare’s top deck. “Lucy!”
A football sailed off the top deck. I dodged. It was a regular inflatable one, not our deep-space ball. It rolled under the ship.
“Sorry, Daddy!” Lucy’s face appeared over the edge of the top deck, next to Martin’s bald, sweating dome. “We were playing football.”
I had followed through on my vow to get rid of Nanny B—actually, I’d given her to the Seagraves. Irene couldn’t believe it. “I was kidding,” she’d said. “This is a million-GC piece of hardware.” I’d said to her, “That’s not even a fraction of what I owe you.” We would be staying with them until I could get our apartment redecorated. I could think of no safer place for Lucy … but she had become clingier than ever, understandably. And after what happened, I plain didn’t want to let her out of my sight. So today I’d brought her out to the spaceport, to hang out and count the baby swallows.
Martin had reluctantly volunteered to look after her while Dolph and I were out on our little errand. Better a snake than a robot … right?
Of
course, we had a robot, too. MF rolled out from under the ship, chirruping about rust spots on the lower truss. I had told him in no uncertain terms to stay away from Lucy. I was pretty sure that an eight-year-old would not read as female to him, but I didn’t want to find out.
“Guess what,” I said. “We’ve got a new run on the schedule. We’re going to Mittel Trevoyvox.”
MF said, “Captain, are we running away from something?”
“No,” I said. “We’re running towards something.” I hesitated. “The truth.”
MF angled his sensor covers thoughtfully. “Would a side trip to Yesanyase Skont be on the agenda?”
“It would.”
“Woohoo,” MF said, quietly. His bendy neck swayed, advancing his head conspiratorially towards us. “I’d like to see Pippa again—and not just ‘cause she’s a sexy little mama! I think she’s hiding something. And it might be something very valuable, if you get my drift. Mucho moolah.”
“Like what?”
MF swayed his head from side to side. “Remember that thing she used to wear around her neck?”
“The crown jewels,” I said. “Rafael Ijiuto had one, too.”
“Yes. I seem to remember seeing those, or ones very like them, before—long, long ago.”
He would say no more, although Dolph and I both begged him to explain. Lucy interrupted the conversation by scrambling down the ladder with Martin close behind her.
“This is why I don’t have kids,” he said, wiping sweat off his head. “Got more exercise in an hour than I usually do in a month.”
“I already finished my homework, so pffft,” Lucy sang, dancing around me.
“Everything go OK?” Martin said.
“Yup,” I said. “And we even got a cargo out of it. Mittel Trevoyvox, here we come.”
“God, not the Hurtworlds,” Martin said. “I hate spending that long in the field.”
Lethal Cargo Page 35