The only other thing I need to worry about is that Aurora might find a way to get me killed after we capture Rama so that she can collect the whole six million credit fee for herself.
But first things first: we still have to capture Rama.
Until then, she needs me. And unfortunately, since I don’t have a ship, I need her, too.
Shutting down my access to the terminal, I push out from the desk. I have on eye on the feed from the amidships corridor, but the cockpit still hasn’t opened up.
Sneaking back out of her quarters, I head down to the end, then back up the other side to the room I share with Violet.
She’s still fast asleep when I walk in.
I go back to my bed, kick off my boots, and lie down. Then I set the ship’s security cameras back to their live feeds.
I’m right back where I started when I interrupted those feeds with closed loops of past footage, so even if Aurora is watching the cameras, all she’ll see is me lying in bed, right where I’m supposed to be.
While I wait for sleep to come, I go back to checking my offline databases for possible leads on Rama Drakos. In the end I find exactly three people—all three are new hunters, all female biologicals, and all are rising through the ranks unreasonably fast for novices.
Any one of them could actually be Rama Drakos re-inventing herself with a new alias and ID. I’ll compare notes with Aurora in the morning and we can decide who to go after first.
By this point, it’s well after midnight, and my eyes are growing tired from staring at my holoscreen, so I turn it off and wait for my racing thoughts to slow.
I got less than seven hours of sleep last night, so I’m already tired. While I’m waiting to drift off, I remember to connect to the door jacker and lock myself in for the night. After snooping around in Aurora’s room, she’s gained a modicum of my trust, but it still pays to be cautious.
I didn’t get to this age in a biological body by being a scrigg.
Chapter 36
The next morning after breakfast I leave Violet and Bry to watch another holovid in the rec hall while I go up to the cockpit to speak with Aurora; it’s still sealed, presumably with her inside.
I rap lightly on the doors. Wait.
The doors part in the middle and I step through. The pilot’s seat turns to face me. Aurora’s hands are folded in her lap. Images are flickering rapidly over her orange eyes, but they quickly clear, leaving her to stare at me rather than her digital displays.
“Ready to talk business?”
I nod and move to take a seat in the nearest of the two passenger’s seats behind the pilot’s and co-pilot’s stations.
“What did you find?” I ask her.
“Three possible identities for Rama.”
I incline my head to her. “Same here. You go first.”
“Freya Monteya, Tavea Urban, and Xima Sevris.”
I nod along with that. “Those are the same three that I found. Who do you think we should track down first?”
I want to see if Aurora’s logic is tracking mine.
“None of them.”
My brow tenses in a frown and I begin to shake my head.
“Think about it,” Aurora says. “Six million credits, and it’s an open contract, so she’s got to have every hunter in the galaxy after her. What are the odds that no one else thought of her picking up a new identity and going right back to hunting? It’s too risky, working among the people looking to capture her.”
“What’s her alternative?”
“Keep her head down until she’s old news. Until the contract expires.”
“Mohinari will just renew it.”
“Maybe, but by then his temper will have cooled, and he’ll drop the fee.”
I lean back in my seat and stroke my jaw. “That’s possible.”
“It’s what I would do,” she says, echoing my own reasoning back to me.
“Let’s say you’re right. It leaves us chasing our tails. If she really wants to hide, it’s not that hard. Just fly to the nearest uncharted world and pitch a tent.”
“Assuming she likes camping.”
I shrug. “It’s the safest bet. Fly off the edge of the map and disappear. If her plan is to hide until things settle down, that’s the way to do it.”
“The contract expires in one year,” Aurora says. “You’re telling me she’s going to hide for an entire year in some Deus-forsaken alien swamp? That’s a long damn time to spend talking to xenos and hugging trees. She’ll never last that long.”
After spending just a few days stranded on Bry’s homeworld, I’m inclined to agree. And I’m a loner, so I should be able to get by just fine without seeing another human face. Someone more sociable than myself will get a lot more anxious in a situation like that.
“That’s why I assumed she would get back to work under a new identity.”
“Too dangerous,” Aurora argues. “There is a compromise between the two extremes. Use a fake ID and take an extended vacation on some backwater. Maybe even somewhere where she’d blend right in with the rest of the tourists.”
“An interesting theory. You have any evidence to back it up? Or are you suggesting we visit every tourist destination in colonized space and start doing background checks on the guests?”
A slow smile curves Aurora’s lips and she shakes her head. “Say I’m right. Where would you start your search?”
“I’d check all of her known aliases, then pay a visit to ID traders in the Alliance and the Neutral Zone, starting with the biggest ones first and working my way down. I’d either bribe them or jack into their records to find out which of them sold the aliases to her, and then figure out which ones she’s never used.”
Hunters have a veritable collage of faces and IDs. Sometimes we’ll have as many as one per job. I’ve purchased over a hundred myself, but we always keep a few in reserve—never to be used except in case of a dire emergency. One of my emergency IDs is that of Erin Thul, whose face I’m wearing now. But I didn’t buy it from a trader. I stole it from a dead man, and that makes me almost impossible to track right now.
“Then what?” Aurora asks.
“Then I’d check the Syndicate’s registries to see which of those IDs have been used recently and where.”
Every guild has its own illegally purchased access to the Customs Enforcement databases, so it’s easy enough to find a person if you know who to look for. The Neutral Zone doesn’t register shit, but there are other ways to track people there. For one thing, there will at least be a record of the person leaving the Alliance or Coalition, and a record of where they were supposedly headed when they did.
“What if you don’t get any hits?”
I can feel a scowl coming on. “Enough rhetorical questions. Get to the point.”
“If you don’t get results in any of the databases, then the target in question either executed a blind jump and made their way to the Neutral Zone, or else they were traveling under another ID that you didn’t find.”
“I really hope you’re going somewhere with this.”
“I am. I already tried the angle with the ID traders and searched for Rama’s other aliases. I got nothing. The last time anyone saw her was in Kepler-186.”
“That’s a long way from here,” I point out.
“It’s a long way from anywhere. Over a thousand four hundred hours travel time at average FTL speeds. Two whole months, one way. Her ship is a Baron-class heavy fighter. She was last seen sixty-two days ago blind-jumping out of Kepler-186f’s orbit. Her ship is known to have a state-of-the-art FTL drive. That means 0.65 light years per hour. So right now, Rama could be anywhere within nine hundred and sixty-seven light years of Kepler-186.”
“Assuming she’s spent this entire time in FTL.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of space. You’re not narrowing things down.”
“Wait. How many Baron-class fighters do you think there are in the galaxy?”
“
Thousands.”
“Two thousand, four hundred and six.”
Understanding dawns. I get it now. “You tracked them all?”
Aurora nods. “Tracking all of their registered ingresses and egresses for the past sixty-two days across both Alliance and the Coalition space.”
She must have had to check tens of thousands of movements. That’s a lot of work considering she only took on this job around the time we met, less than a week ago now.
But it’s all meaningless. Rama will have a SID code scrambler, so it will be impossible to know which of those ships is hers.
“Once I knew where all of those ships came and went, I filtered the data. I confined it to ships with anomalies in their flight histories that could indicate arrival from an unknown or undisclosed location.
“Then I checked those movements against the time of Rama’s departure from Kepler 186 to take into account the maximum speed of her ship.”
Makes sense. If a Baron-class fighter was spotted over a hundred light years away from Kepler, and in the time since her departure she couldn’t have flown farther than fifty light years, then we can rule out those movements.
It sounds like Aurora has already done most of the work of finding Rama. For a novice hunter, she’s actually stunningly good at this. I’m quietly impressed, but I’m not going to tell her that.
“And?” I prompt her.
But she just smiles smugly. She seems to be waiting for me to recognize and acknowledge her genius.
And if I can’t, then she’ll realize she’s actually better at this than me. I could let her think that. It might even be smart to make myself look dumber than I am. But that would probably just invite betrayal, so Aurora needs to know that we’re playing on the same level—at least as trackers, we are. I’d wager that the spread between our respective Guild ratings will become evident in combat.
“You found a trail that leads back to Kepler 186.”
Aurora nods, and a data transfer request pops up on my holoband. I send the transfer to sand-boxed storage in my neuralink. Just in case. I wouldn’t put it past Aurora to infect me with a neuravirus. Once the data has been scanned, I open it up and see a star map on my display. It’s zoomed way out and crowded with stars that have been enlarged and shaded both red and green to highlight them. The red ones are all over the place and mostly focused in Alliance Space, in a relatively tight radius around the Eden System and the Alliance capital of Terra Novus.
But all the way up at the top of the map is one highlighted green star: Kepler 186.
The next nearest shaded green star system is more than two hundred light years from there—the Firaxis System. Mentally selecting it, I check the associated ship movements from Aurora’s data set. Another Baron-class fighter with a different SID code from Rama’s ship was seen jumping in there from an undisclosed origin. The time of Rama’s departure from Kepler 186 and the time for the arrival of the mystery ship in Firaxis mostly lines up with what it should for the ship in Firaxis to have come from Kepler. It’s a few days off of her top speed, but that probably just means that Rama dropped out of FTL for a while to throw off exactly this kind of scrutiny.
But if she’d wanted to do that, she should have waited around in deep space for a month or more.
A couple days either way isn’t enough to throw anyone off your trail.
Checking the rest of the green-shaded star systems, I see a similar story throughout. Ships with undisclosed flight plans and unknown origins. The SID codes are all different, but that just means Rama has a scrambler.
All of those green-shaded star systems paint a zagging line across Alliance space to a discrete destination.
Aquaria.
I feel my brow furrow at that. “Aquaria?”
“Can’t get much more touristy than that, right?” Aurora asks. “Where better to take an extended vacation?”
“Right...” A frown is etching my features. I can feel it turning all of my facial muscles into knots.
Suddenly I’m catapulted back twenty-five years, watching the side of an air car explode as my bomb goes off. It careens into the shallow turquoise ocean below and explodes into a million glittering fragments. An old familiar knot rises into my throat, threatening to strangle me.
“Yola, you there, Cade?”
“I’m here,” I say slowly.
“Well, the images on your screen stopped changing and your eyes drifted out of focus. You think I made a mistake?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Pushing the past back where it belongs, I double check the green-shaded systems and their associated movements. I can’t see any flaws in Aurora’s tracking. That ship arrived three weeks ago, and there aren’t any registered movements leading away from the Aquaria system that match the speed of Rama’s ship. Or any of the SID codes it used to get there. That means Rama Drakos is still in the Aquaria System.
And that means we have to go there.
It won’t be the first time that I’ve been back since that mission I executed with the Paladins.
But I’m not exactly looking forward to spending quality time with my ghosts. The reminder of what I did on Aquaria is going to be front and center the whole time I’m there.
But maybe that’s a good thing.
Maybe I deserve it.
“You’re doing it again,” Aurora says.
I blink my eyes to focus them and wipe the map off my screen. “Sorry. Just thinking. That’s her all right. Not bad tracking.”
Aurora smiles. “That’s high praise coming from a hunter like you.”
“Yeah, so why didn’t you lead with this?”
“What do you mean?”
“You let me think we still had to find her, and had me suggest we check the guilds for new hunters that could be her.”
Aurora shrugs. “There is a margin of error in my data. I could still be wrong. Your shapeshifting bounty hunter theory isn’t a bad backup plan. Or, we could both be right. Just because it’s a vacation world, doesn’t mean Rama isn’t there on a job. She could be mixing business and pleasure.”
“Maybe.” I pull up star maps again to check the distance between Alpha Centauri and Aquaria. “Twenty-three light years.”
Aurora nods along with that, as if she’s already done that same calculation.
“Almost two and a half days. My ship flies at point four.”
“Slow.”
“Gets me where I’m going.”
“ETA to reach Alpha?”
“Thirty-two hours.”
Another day and a half.
“I’ll need to stop somewhere after Alpha to buy some new gear.”
“No problem. What happened to your ship, anyway?”
“Mohinari has it.”
Aurora’s eyebrows inch up.
“Don’t ask. He’s trying to lure me in.”
“You’re not planning to ice the client are you?
“Not until the job is done. But he can’t know I’m working this job with you.”
“I’m not an idiot. I’ll handle comms with the client. And payment.”
“Just make sure I get my share. Fifty-fifty.”
“Sixty-forty. We’re using my ship.”
My eyes narrow. “Then you advance me the funds for whatever gear I need.”
“Up to a hundred thousand.”
She has that much? Must come from money. That explains this ship and her life-like body. Those things don’t come cheap.
It’s an open contract, not exclusive, so Mohinari wouldn’t have paid half up front.
“Deal.” At least that solves my liquidity crisis. Still plenty of credits to go around.
Thirty-two more hours to drop off Violet. “Send me what you have on the target. Maybe something in her background or one of her previous jobs will tell us why she’s on Aquaria or where to look once we get there.”
Aurora nods. A moment later, another data transfer request pops up. It goes to sand-boxed storage to get scanned for viruses again. As soon as the
transfer is complete and scanned, I stand up from the chair and leave the cockpit, making sure to keep Aurora in view with my rear cameras. She’s already turning back to her controls. Who knows why. Not much to do in the cockpit while her ship is in FTL.
I guess she likes the view.
Chapter 37
Thirty-two Hours Later...
Alpha Centauri System,
Coalition Space
“Which planet?” Aurora asks.
“Let me get you the exact address,” Violet says from the passenger seat behind me.
I’m in the co-pilot’s seat, watching static points of light in a sea of black. Dead ahead, is the blazing yellow-white eye of Rigil Kentaurus, the largest and brightest star of the three in the Alpha Centauri system.
“There,” Violet declares.
Aurora’s glowing eyes flicker as she checks the location on her personal displays. “Arkania?” she makes a face.
Violet smirks knowingly. “Home sweet home.”
“If you say so...” Aurora gets to work plotting a course. It’s still a long way, so she sets the FTL drive for a short hop.
I consider the destination and the pretty young woman sitting behind me who came from there. Arkania is a rocky, earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri’s second-biggest star, Toliman.
Back when it was first colonized, the planet was just called Ark, like the biblical one, because it was the first truly habitable planet that humans had colonized.
But it’s still far from paradise. The atmosphere is toxic and the air is thin, so you have to wear a pressure suit outside. But gravity is point seven of Earth Standard and the climate is temperate along the equator. It’s also not tidally locked like Margrave. All in all, not too bad.
But plants are scarce and the local fauna is mostly insectoid. The smaller bugs have a nasty habit of chewing through pressure suits to see what’s inside. The larger ones will make short work of habitats, but the locals on Arkania manage to keep the pests at bay. High walls and buzz shields protect their bubbles of high-pressure, non-toxic atmosphere. Within those shielded regions, they’ve managed to re-create familiar biomes from Earth. And the local bugs can’t stand it. Our air is almost as toxic to them as theirs is to us.
The Bounty Hunter (Cade Korbin Chronicles Book 1) Page 17