CHAPTER THREE
The dayroom was deserted when I arrived. I took a few more steps down the corridor, confirmed that the water in the shower was running, and headed back.
Up to now, I’d timed Geri’s showers as running between ten and fifteen minutes. I planned to be out of the dayroom in five.
He’d packed light, as I’d already noted, and the search didn’t take very long. He had four changes of clothing—self-cleaning, as I’d suspected—plus a toiletries kit, which I’d seen on the shelf earlier but was probably back in the bathroom with him right now. There was an odd-looking but clearly high-end phone, a music player/recorder, a flashlight, and a couple of tubes with the cheerful labels of pain-relief tablets. And, of course, a wallet stuffed with multiple-thousand-commark bank checks.
It wasn’t until I noticed the barely discernable seams running up the flashlight’s cylindrical sides that I realized something wasn’t right. Keeping an ear out for Selene’s signal, I made a second pass through everything.
Two minutes later, I was back on the bridge.
“He has a gun,” I told Selene grimly. “Specifically, a breakaway dart gun, compressed-air powered, with two curare darts and six vertigos. I didn’t see any serial numbers, so I’m guessing it’s a custom job.”
“I see,” Selene said. The words were calm enough, but her pupils showed her emotions were on a real spin-dizzy of a ride. It had been a long time, after all, since either of us had been shot at.
And neither of us would ever forget what had happened at that last shooting.
“So what do we do?” she asked.
“Right now?” I shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. He hasn’t pulled a weapon on us, or even threatened us. Actually, considering the amount of money he carries around, I’d probably find it surprising if he wasn’t armed.”
“I suppose,” she said reluctantly. “So we continue on as if nothing has happened?”
“Nothing has happened,” I reminded her. “And yes. We go to Ringbar, we give Geri a hearty handshake and a cheerful wave goodbye, and we get the hell off the planet. Whatever else he might have in mind, we’re done.”
***
Geri was big, muscular, and reasonably chatty. He also at least made an effort to smile at people, even if he wasn’t very good at it.
His partner, Freki, was pretty much the polar opposite. He was short, barely taller than Selene, with a thin and wiry build. His face seemed to be set in a permanent scowl, and aside from acknowledging Geri’s introductions he hadn’t said a word as we spread the final hardcopy results of our Bonvere survey across the low coffee shop table and went through the analysis with them.
“Yes, very interesting,” Geri said, picking one of the ampules out of the collection basket and peering through the glass side. “So everything there is amino-based?”
“So it appears,” I said. “We were able to get a partial sequencing on two of the samples—one was a feather, the other a spore—and it looks like we’re starting with a fifteen percent chance that the fauna and flora will be human-digestible.”
“A more complete analysis will almost certainly raise that number,” Selene added.
“Absolutely,” I said. “You can take the samples to a Trailblazer Class One—I think there’s one on Ringbar—or to a lab of your own choice.”
“Yes, we could certainly do that,” Geri agreed. He raised his eyes to look steadily at me over the ampule. “Or we could take them to whoever is going to analyze your stolen sample.”
I swallowed a curse. I’d have bet heavily that there was no way he could have spotted the extra ampule while we were bagging the samples. “What do you mean?” I asked, shoveling on all the puzzlement I could manage.
“I watched you load twenty of this type of seed,” he said, wiggling the ampule he was holding. “There are only ten in here.”
I shook my head. “No offense, but you’re mistaken.”
“I don’t think so,” Geri said. “So let’s cut to the chase. Option One: You sit here while I call up the badgemen and the local Trailblazer rep, file my charges, tell them I think you stole some of my samples and insist they do a full search of your ship. When they find the lost seeds—and they will find them—you’ll lose your license and probably your last chance at any kind of a decent life.” He raised his eyebrows. “Of course, that doesn’t factor in your private buyer’s penalty for failing to deliver his merchandise. Does that option sound like fun?”
I looked at Freki. He looked like he was choosing which part of me he would hit first if I tried anything. “Not really,” I said.
“Good,” Geri said. “Here’s Option Two.”
He tossed the ampule carelessly onto the table. “We forget all this nonsense, ashcan this garbage, and move on to the real job. That sound better?”
“Probably depends on what the real job is,” I said cautiously, the warning bells in the back of my head all going off at once. What the hell was going on?
“Trust me, you’re going to like it,” Geri promised. “Are you familiar with a ship called the Icarus?”
Nine years spent as a bounty hunter interrogating suspects, conning bureaucrats out of information, and bluffing criminals and law-enforcement officials had given me a pretty good poker face. But even with that depth of experience it was a near thing. “I’ve heard a little about it,” I said. “It came and went, what, six years ago?”
“About that,” Geri said. “What else do you know?”
“I don’t actually know anything,” I said, stalling. How much did they know? More crucially, how much were they expecting me to know? “All I’ve ever heard are rumors. I’m guessing you’re all hot and ready to enlighten us?”
For a moment Geri just looked at me, maybe trying to decide if he’d made a mistake in picking me for this scheme, whatever the hell it was. I held his gaze, staying quiet, watching Freki out of the corner of my eye. Both of his hands were visible, so if he went for a weapon I’d at least have some warning. Maybe only half a second, but it was better than nothing.
“You wouldn’t be much use to us otherwise, I suppose,” Geri said at last. “All right. Six years ago, a freighter named the Icarus left a planet called Meima and headed to Earth. It never made it.”
“Lost?”
“Disappeared.”
“Any idea where?”
Geri shrugged. “Somewhere in the Commonwealth, we think.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s helpful,” I growled. “What are we up to now, two-hundred-odd inhabited systems?”
“It’ll be exclusively human, with no significant alien presence,” Geri said, ignoring the sarcasm. “That cuts the numbers down considerably. It’ll probably also have a significant military presence, which means military supply lines and data trails.”
“Theoretically, yes,” I said. “Unfortunately, six years is more than enough time to set up a post from scratch, and not enough time to guarantee its existence will leak out to the Spiral at large.”
“Do you always start a job sounding like you don’t want it?” Freki asked softly. “Because we can still go back to Option One.”
“It’s not that we don’t want the job,” I explained patiently. “It’s that the task your partner here has laid out is physically impossible. There are too many worlds, and way too much empty space between those worlds.” I looked back at Geri. “Plus the fact that the price the Patth put on the ship had every bounty hunter in the Spiral on the lookout for it. If they couldn’t find it then, we’re not likely to find it now.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything about the Icarus,” Geri said.
“I didn’t think it was worth belaboring the obvious,” I said. “So what was it carrying?”
Geri shook his head. “Irrelevant. Now—”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, folding my arms across my chest. “If you want me to find your missing ship, I get to decide what is or isn’t relevant.”
“We don’t want you to find—” Geri broke off, throwing a glower at Freki before looking back at me. “Fine. The fact is, we don’t know exactly what the Icarus was carrying. It had something to do with a supposedly revolutionary new stardrive, but whether it was just something that would boost a normal drive to be equal or better than the Talariac or something entirely new has never come to light.”
“Hence, that other rumor,” I said, nodding as a minor mystery from the past finally clicked.
“What other rumor?” Geri asked.
“The one you mentioned yourself a few days ago,” I said. “The Patth plan to license their drive to other species and corporations who didn’t want to have to hire Patth babysitters. I’m guessing they were worried about the Icarus stardrive and wanted to shore up their clientele before something new hit the market.”
“Only it never did,” Selene said.
“Which was why the plan was never more than a rumor,” I agreed. “So if you don’t want us to find the Icarus, what do you want us to find?”
Again, Geri and Freki exchanged looks. Then, Freki pulled a photo out of his pocket and pushed it across the table toward me. “This is one of the people we know was on the Icarus,” he said. “We want you to find her.”
The picture was that of a young woman: collar-length black hair, hazel eyes, lightly tanned in an outdoorsy sort of way. She was reasonably attractive, but there was a depth to her expression that suggested she was more than just a pretty face. “Nice looking lady,” I said, passing the photo to Selene. “What’s her name?”
“We know her as Tera C,” Freki said. “Last name unknown. We think she was the Icarus’s computer expert.”
Definitely not just a pretty face, then. “It’s nice when young people have careers,” I said. “So how is finding a single human female supposed to be easier than finding a single missing ship?”
“Because she was seen three days ago in Havershem City on Pinnkus,” Geri said.
I felt an unpleasant chill run up my back. Havershem City was the tourist and business destination for Pinnkus and most of that surrounding sector. But underneath the glitz it was about as corrupt a place as you could find anywhere. “What makes you think she’s still there?” I asked, noting out of the corner of my eye that Selene was working at her pad.
“We don’t,” Geri said. “But that’s where she was seen, so that’s where you start.”
“Okay,” I said. “So to summarize. You want us to find someone who might have been wandering around a city of—” I looked at Selene and raised my eyebrows in question.
“Eight million humans,” she reported. “Three million aliens.”
“—but who might or might not still be there,” I finished. “That about cover it?”
“Be thankful she’s not still on Melayse,” Geri said. “The rat-holes there are just as crowded as Havershem City and not nearly as civilized.”
Civilized and Havershem City. Right. As my father used to say, Beware of people who put two words that don’t belong in the same breath together, whether it’s grammar or unhinged logic. “I’m always grateful for small favors,” I said. “But it seems to me we’ve just moved from the job of lifting a whale with our bare hands to only lifting an elephant. It’s progress, but it doesn’t make the job any less impossible.”
Geri leaned back and gave me a thin smile. “Please, Mr. Roarke. You don’t seriously think we didn’t check your reputation before we hired you, do you?”
“You don’t seriously think you can believe bounty hunter reputations, do you?” I countered.
“Of course not,” Geri said. “Why do you think we ran that little test back on Xathru with the bank checks and the Grumpfers?”
I felt my eyes narrow. “And then on Bonvere Seven with the seeds.”
“Exactly.” Geri looked at Selene. “I presume you’ve already determined that Freki was the other person who touched those checks?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Selene said, her pupils showing uncertainly.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “It sounds like they already know.”
“Thank you for not belaboring the obvious.” Geri inclined his head to Selene. “You have a remarkable talent, Selene. Even better, a remarkably well-hidden one. I doubt more than one person in a billion has ever even heard of Kadolians, and only a few of those know how incredibly keen your sense of smell is. If anyone can pick up Tera C’s trail on Pinnkus, it’s you.”
“A trail that’s three days cold and still cooling,” I reminded him.
Geri looked at Freki and gestured in invitation. “Freki?”
“I held the checks for one minute, a week before Geri handed them to you,” the little man said. “If you can still smell my scent there, you won’t have any trouble with Tera’s.”
“And as you said, the trail goes colder with every minute you sit here trying to weasel out of the job,” Geri said. “So. We have a deal?”
I looked at Freki. Once again, he looked like he was deciding which part of me to break first. “I’m not a licensed bounty hunter anymore,” I reminded them.
“I think you’ll find you are,” Geri said. He gestured, and Freki slid an envelope from inside his jacket and pushed it across the table to me. “Freki is quite good at cutting through bureaucratic paperwork.”
“So I see,” I said, opening the envelope and peering inside. The bounty hunter ID and license had my picture and all the pertinent data. Freki had even gone the extra mile and gotten Selene a hunter’s assistant ID. “We’ll also need traveling money.”
“You won’t need any,” Geri said. “Besides, we’ve already been more than generous.”
“I’m sure you think so,” I said. “But I don’t think you have any idea of the kind of costs a job like this can generate.”
For a moment he just eyed me. Then, with a small shrug, he opened his wallet and pulled out three more ten-thousand-commark checks. “That’s your up-front payment. Seven more of them when you hand her over to us.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I murmured as I put the checks away. Between the two payments, a total of a hundred thousand commarks. Whoever Geri and Freki worked for, he really wanted Tera C found. “I’m almost afraid to ask why we won’t need traveling money.”
“It’s not that hard a concept,” Geri assured me. “Obviously, you’ll want that final payment as soon as possible. For our part, we don’t want you to have to hold Tera any longer than necessary once you’ve caught her.”
My stomach knotted. That was exactly where I was afraid this conversation was going. “You’re already seen the Ruth has barely enough room for one extra person, let alone two.”
“On the contrary,” Geri said. “All we need to do is pull the exam table out of the clean room. There should be plenty of space on the deck for a roll-up bed.” He nodded sideways at his partner. “Especially for someone of Freki’s size.”
“It’s not open to negotiation,” Freki added quietly.
“Oh, come on, don’t look at us like that,” Geri admonished me with another of his forced smiles. “A day to get there, a day or two tops to locate Tera, and you can settle back and take a well-earned rest. It’ll be a simple moonlight walk.”
“Shall we go?” Freki prompted.
A simple moonlight walk. I looked back and forth between them, my left arm aching in memory. Did they know the rest of the story? If they’d really checked us out, they surely knew what had happened five years ago, a year after Icarus’s disappearance, when Selene and I tried to collect on the bounty.
But even if they did, it was abundantly clear they didn’t give a damn. “Sure,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
***
Removing the examination room table wasn’t nearly as straightforward as Geri had seemed to think. There was a complete set of storage cabinets underneath it, and the contents of all those cabinets had to find homes elsewhere in the ship. The whole project took a couple of hours, which was probably a tenth of the time it would take later to put everything back together and bring it up to Trailblazer code.
But at this point, tables and cabinets and codes were the least of my concerns.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Selene asked when we were once again in hyperspace.
“Talk about what?” I asked.
“Whatever it is that’s bothering you.” She paused, and looking over at her I saw her nostrils flare twice as she sampled the air and my scent. “You’re worried. You’re fearful.” She hesitated. “You’re angry. Are you angry at me?”
“No, not at all,” I assured her. “I’m never mad at you.”
“But it has to do with me,” she persisted. “I know it has something to do with me.”
I turned back to my control board, feeling a fresh dose of old pain and anger swirling inside me, knowing that Selene was riding that same wave as my odor subtly changed in time with the turmoil.
What could I tell her? What should I tell her?
She didn’t remember the last few hours of that day. As far as her memory was concerned, her life went straight from us heading out into the city to chase down our target to waking up in a hospital pod three days later with slowly healing holes from a pair of 3mm slugs in her left lung and a bad case of retrograde amnesia.
I’d been deliberately vague about the incident, mainly because the whole thing had been traumatic enough for her without piling on details that her brain had clearly tried to hide from her. In fact, I wasn’t even sure she remembered who it was we’d been chasing.
But I remembered. The man’s name was Jordan McKell, and he’d been one of the crew of the Icarus.
And now, one of his partners had surfaced. Tera C, the Icarus’s computer expert, was apparently strolling through Havershem City as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Geri and Freki were welcome to the Icarus. All I wanted was for Tera to lead me to McKell.
So I could kill him.