CHAPTER FIVE
Dinner that night was our special official first-night meal that we always provided for our passengers.
Or at least, that was what I told Piper. In reality, most of our recent fellow travelers had been unfriendly toward us to one degree or another, while back in our bounty hunter days any spare bodies aboard the Ruth were in restraints and a long ways south of unfriendly.
But inventing a special occasion would give us an excuse to spend some time with our guest, and hopefully let us learn more about her.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t also get her angry and get us shot.
I’d frankly expected Piper to decline my invitation and instead insist on eating her meals alone in her cabin, where she could keep her face permanently out of our sight. To my mild surprise, she accepted without hesitation. She arrived in the dayroom on schedule dressed in a casual jumpsuit, all smiles and cheerful conversation, her veil nowhere to be seen.
As my father used to say, When an otherwise secretive person voluntarily shares something with you, it’s either of no value or it’s a trap. Either she didn’t expect us to recognize her face, or she was deliberately putting it on display in order to see if we knew her and to gauge our reactions.
Something of a gamble, probably, for a person in her profession. But in this case, the house paid out the bet. I didn’t have the foggiest idea who she was, and I could tell from Selene’s pupils that she didn’t, either.
Not that Piper was reticent about her profession. On the contrary, she was strangely, even disturbingly, open about it.
“Mr. Floyd tells me you’re crocketts when you’re not transporting killers around the Spiral,” she said, as she took another spoonful of Selene’s chicken tetrazzini onto her plate. “From what I’ve read, that’s a pretty dangerous job.”
“I suppose,” I said, sipping at my drink. I usually had a little wine with this type of meal, but I’d sworn off all such indulgences for the duration of Piper’s stay. Alcohol didn’t usually affect me very much, but I had no intention of opening myself up to even the smallest lapse of judgment or thinking. “But every job has its downsides.”
“And of course bounty hunting is even worse,” she said, slicing off a bit of chicken with the edge of her fork. “I did that for a while myself before I switched to my current job.”
“Ah,” I said, my brilliantly inventive way of verbally stalling while I tried to figure out whether she was baiting us or merely chatting. “Was hunting easier, or harder, do you think?”
“It was pretty similar,” she said, popping the chicken into her mouth and chewing carefully. “Same prep work. Much the same leg work.” She paused, considering. “About the same risk of getting shot at. You don’t approve of what I do, do you?”
For some inexplicable reason, I hadn’t been prepared for that question. “Pardon?” I asked.
“You don’t like professional assassins,” she clarified. “Actually, Floyd tells me you’re not big on killing of any sort.”
“It’s not my favorite thing in the Spiral,” I admitted. “I figure you have fewer ghosts haunting your dreams when most of those spirits are still attached to their bodies.”
“Even if those united bodies and spirits get out of prison someday and come after you?”
I shrugged. “The people I hunted usually had a lot of names on their vengeance lists ahead of mine,” I said. “It’s also a lot harder to track down a hunter than someone who’s more settled in their ways and habits.”
“Especially when those hunters have become crocketts?”
“Especially then.”
“Mm,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s not illegal to be an assassin, you know.”
“It is in most of the places we travel,” Selene spoke up quietly.
Piper shifted her attention to her. “Never seen your type before,” she commented, looking Selene up and down. “May I ask?”
“Kadolian,” Selene said.
“Never heard of you, either,” Piper said, scooping up another bite. “Interesting. But you’re misinformed. Murder is illegal most places, as you say. Being an assassin isn’t.”
“Isn’t that a distinction without a difference?” I asked.
“Depends on where you are,” Piper said. “Take me, for instance. I’m registered on one of the handful of planets that allow professional assassins, the same way most of the Spiral allows professional bounty hunters. On all the other worlds, as long as I don’t actually kill someone on their soil they more or less tolerate my presence.”
“So you can be an assassin as long as you don’t actually do your job?” I asked.
“More or less,” she said. “But it’s less an oxymoron than it sounds. While my job is technically illegal in most places, there are a surprising number of governments—local and planetary—that turn a blind eye to my activities as long as my targets are criminals.”
“Or political figures they consider a threat to their own interests?” Selene asked pointedly.
“One of the many definitions of criminal,” Piper said with more than a hint of irony. “There are also officials who directly hire me—very informally, of course—to eliminate their opponents.”
“And you’re all right with that?” Selene asked, a hard edge of challenge in her tone.
Piper was silent a moment. “Did you ever hear of a man named Ajagavakar on Golden Bough? He was governor of Brachnell Province.”
“Name’s not ringing any bells,” I said, searching my memory. “Selene?”
She had her info pad out and was running the name. “He’s not in the general personnel listing.”
“No reason why he should be,” Piper said. “Minor planet, small province, highly forgettable man. You’d have to dig deep into that sector’s archives to find even a mention of him. He’d been governor for a year and a half when a mysterious explosion killed him, his wife, his four children, and six workers on the floor of the hotel where they were staying.”
My stomach tightened into a painful knot. “That was you?”
“No,” Piper said, the word wrapped in anger, her face stiff with contempt. “Absolutely not. If I’d been hired for the job, his family and the others would still be alive. I would have taken out the target, and only the target.”
“Unless you missed,” Selene murmured, her pupils roiling with contempt.
“I never miss,” Piper said flatly. “Ever. Political and business killings will always happen, Roarke, whether or not there are people like me in the business. My point is that many of those killings are handled by butchers. I’m a surgeon.”
“Congratulations,” I said, swallowing back as much of my own revulsion as I could. She was still our passenger, she was still our responsibility, and I had no evidence besides her own word that she had ever killed anyone. There was nothing I should do, or indeed nothing I could do.
Not to mention that she was a killer and was undoubtedly armed.
But not even all my skill at self-control could fully suppress my emotion. “You don’t like me,” Piper said. She took a final bite of tetrazzini, then laid her fork at the side of the plate. “That’s all right. I don’t ask for acceptance or even understanding. I’ve chosen this path, and whether my reasons are valid or not is my burden to bear. Thank you for your hospitality, and I’ll be out of your lives as soon as I can.” She stood up, nodded to each of us, and walked to the dayroom hatchway.
“Why Vesperin?” Selene called after her.
“As I said earlier, it’s close and convenient,” Piper reminded her. “We can also see if there’s any news—”
“Why Vesperin?” Selene repeated.
For a moment Piper stood there, silent and motionless. “There are one or two things I need to look into,” she said at last. “Nothing either of you need concern yourselves with.”
She turned her head just far enough to put me in her peripheral vision. “I should also mention that there’s one other reason some governments allow me on their soil. They give me free rein in hopes that I’ll slip, they’ll catch me in the act, and they can then take me out of circulation for good. If that soothes your cynicism toward our dedicated governmental leaders any.”
“Not really,” I said. “But to be honest, Ms. Piper, you’re only a small part of that cynicism anyway.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Life is much brighter when you look on it with calm eyes.”
“So we’ve heard,” Selene murmured.
“Yes.” Piper seemed to hesitate, as if working through a decision. “And Ms. Piper is far too formal for our current situation. Call me Nikki.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good night, Nikki.”
She gave me a half flash of a half smile, then walked through the hatchway and disappeared down the corridor toward her stateroom.
I turned to Selene—
“Are you going to order me to be polite to her?” she asked stiffly before I could say anything.
“No one’s ordering you to do anything,” I assured her, frowning at the emotional intensity in her pupils. She’d been more than a little pushy toward Nikki during dinner, but I’d had no idea that whatever the problem was went that deep. “In fact, you don’t have to deal with her at all if you don’t want to. You can stay out of her way and let me handle everything.”
She looked down at her plate. “No, that’s all right,” she said. “I can’t let you carry this by yourself.”
“If you’re sure,” I said, standing up. “Why don’t you go and relax for a while? I can clear the table.”
“I can help,” she said, standing up as well and starting to stack the plates. “Gregory . . . do you think she’s going after someone on Vesperin?”
I winced. “Could be,” I conceded. “I doubt she’s going handbag shopping.”
“You realize that if we’re giving her transport we’ll be accessories after the fact if she kills someone.”
“Possibly,” I said. “Though that’ll depend on how Vesperin law is written. Actually, there are enough autonomous regions on the planet that it’ll probably depend on exactly where it happens.”
“I meant morally, not legally.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“Yes,” Selene murmured. “I just thought I should mention it.”
We worked in silence for another minute, Selene loading the plates and flatware into the cleaner, me sealing up the leftover tetrazzini and putting it away. “Tell you what,” I said as I wiped the table. “When we land, you stay here and handle the refueling paperwork while I follow her and see what she’s up to. How does that sound?”
“It sounds dangerous,” she said, the private brooding in her pupils now taking on an edge of concern. “I don’t think she’d want you watching her work.”
“I’ll make sure she doesn’t see me, then,” I said. “Okay. I’m going to do a quick status check, then settle down for the evening. I’ll probably crash out a bit early, actually, so if you want anything from in here you should get it now.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine. Sleep well.”
Three hours later, I was still reading everything on my info pad about Vesperin, its people, and its laws when I finally fell asleep on the dayroom foldout.
* * *
Vesperin was one of the more unusual colony worlds in that it had been started by a joint consortium of three different alien groups—Ulkomaals, Yavanni, and k’Tra—for the express purpose of inviting other interested species to come in and set up their own enclaves and trading centers. The call had been enthusiastically answered, and while Vesperin had started out somewhat off of the main travel lines, the presence of so many other groups had spun off other nearby colonies, some of them single-species, others following the consortium’s original vision and building coalitions, to the point where traffic had ended up bending toward it and turned Vesperin into a substantial hub for that part of the Spiral.
Of course, the subsequent arrival of the Patth and their super-fast Talariac Drive hadn’t hurt Vesperin’s rise any.
Nikki had specified which spaceport I was to land at, which turned out to be one of the seven fields in and around the sprawling city of Mikilias. From my earlier research I knew Mikilias was largely a k’Tra city, though it had sizeable minorities of other species. More interesting was the fact that it bordered on both a human and an Ihmis enclave. I called Planetary Control, was assigned a slot, and dropped us smoothly onto our landing cradle.
I’d barely gotten the engines shut down and the rest of the systems on their way to standby when Nikki was gone.
“I was running the thruster diagnostic when she left,” Selene said, her pupils showing a mix of anger and embarrassment. “I’m sorry—I never expected her to get out so quickly.”
“That’s all right,” I assured her, punching up a city map on my info pad. “I’ll catch up with her.”
“You don’t even know where she went,” she retorted. She paused, and I saw her brace herself. “I’d better come with you.”
It was the logical approach, of course, given that Selene’s incredible sense of smell could track Nikki’s fresh scent even through a crowded alien city. But given her feelings toward the assassin . . . “Thanks, but I can handle it,” I told her. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure I do know where she’s going. Be sure to lock up behind me.”
I grabbed my phone and plasmic, hurried through the entryway and down the ramp, and headed into the spaceport traffic.
Nikki was a human. We’d landed in a city bordering a human enclave, and in fact had taken a slot in the spaceport closest to the crossover point to that enclave. What little I knew about professional assassins suggested that they, like bounty hunters, tended to target members of their own species, if for no other reason than that it was more difficult for members of one species to positively distinguish between the members of another. In addition, someone going undercover naturally wanted to be able to blend in as much as possible, which again meant sticking with one’s own species. Taking all of those together, rolling them into a loaf and baking in a medium cooker, you ended up with the obvious conclusion that Nikki was heading for the human section.
But Nikki didn’t strike me as the obvious type. More than that, all those indicators were so one-sided that I didn’t buy the logical conclusion for a second. So instead of heading toward the HUMAN signpost hovering ten meters above the streets that marked the entrance to the human enclave, I turned toward the IHMIS one.
I did expect Nikki to at least follow the blending-in part, which included the dictum to travel at the average traffic speed. I made sure to keep my pace a bit higher than that, and kept my eyes open.
Sure enough, ten minutes later I spotted her striding along a block ahead of me.
I dropped back a little, slowing to match her speed, trying not to be too conspicuous among the nonhumans crowding the walkways. She was dressed in the same identity-concealing outfit she’d been wearing back on Balmoral, and had the satchel she’d brought aboard the Ruth slung over her shoulder.
In theory, tailing someone through a bustling crowd was relatively easy. Here, though, the practice was a bit trickier. The local k’Tra, as was typical with their species, had a tendency to form instant clumps in the traffic flow as two or more of them spotted acquaintances or business associates and stopped dead in the middle of the walkways to chat. Such instant roadblocks presented a hazard to navigation, especially when your eyes were mainly focused a block away.
Nikki, with no such split attention, was always able to maneuver gracefully around the obstacles without bumping into them. More interesting was that as I watched her I realized she wasn’t just seeing the clumps forming ahead of her, but sometimes seemed to actually anticipate them. That suggested that not only was she scanning a ways ahead of her, but was reading the k’Tra facial and body cues before the aliens stopped for their conversations.
The woman was smart, knowledgeable, and nimble. And, given the presence of the satchel on her shoulder, she was also undoubtedly armed.
And here I was, following her on a clandestine job, with no one knowing exactly where I was.
As my father used to say, Recipes for disaster also come in quick-mix versions. Strolling along behind someone on the street was about as quick-mix as you could get.
But I was here, and Nikki was here, and Selene’s comment about accessories after the fact was nagging at the back of my mind. And so, trying not to think about what Floyd and Cherno and Gaheen would say if I got their hired assassin arrested, I kept going.
We’d been walking for about fifteen minutes when Nikki suddenly turned left into a partially completed ten-story building, stepping over the low line of flapping warning tape across the open entrance.
I scowled, my throat tightening. I could see no sign of workers anywhere through the many openings in the half-finished walls, which suggested the place was abandoned, at least for the moment. It was a perfect place to set up an ambush, and as I approached the entrance I found my hand resting on my holstered plasmic. I walked past without stopping, with a half-formed plan of pretending she and I had merely and coincidentally been walking along the same street if I was challenged.
But no one called to me or, more importantly, shot at me as I walked past the taped-off entrance. In fact, as I sent a sideways glance through the opening I spotted her walking toward a construction elevator near the middle of the building.
I continued past the opening, not breaking stride. When I was once again shielded from view by the walls, I reversed direction and headed back to the edge of the entrance. I paused there, gave my left thumbnail the gentle double stroke that turned it into a mirror, and eased it around the corner. I was just in time to see Nikki slide the elevator door closed and start upward.
I glanced around, confirmed that no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to me, and stepped over the tape and into the building.
Even if I could get the elevator to return to the ground floor after Nikki got wherever she was going, it would be beyond even my level of ridiculous optimism to assume she wouldn’t notice the clank as the car started back down. Fortunately, from the entryway I could see three open stairways. Picking the nearest one, I started up.
I stepped carefully, not just out of concerns that Nikki might hear me but also because the wooden stairs seemed rickety beneath my feet and the single railing looked nearly as unsafe as the stairs felt. I made my way to the next floor, easing my head cautiously up as I reached the level of the underflooring, looking first for the elevator car and then for Nikki’s shadowy figure.
She wasn’t on the second floor, or the third, or the fourth. I continued up, feeling my tension rising with each successive level. Had she spotted me and used a combination of the elevator and stairs to slip past while I was working my way up? If she was trying to lose me, such a gambit would be trivial to pull off, and while it would be preferable to shooting me outright it would be a rather annoying slight on my personal pride as a former bounty hunter. I reached the open hole that led onto the roof.
And there she was.
She was at the northern edge of the roof, kneeling behind the low parapet, looking at something in that direction with her back to me. I couldn’t see her hands, but from the way her elbows were bent I guessed she was holding something. A camera? A phone?
A gun?
The smart thing to do would be to turn around, head back down the stairs, and return to the ship. Whatever Nikki was doing, it really wasn’t any of my business—
“If you’re looking to stop me, Roarke,” she called, “you’re going to have to get a lot closer.” She half turned, giving me a profile of her veiled face. “Or were you planning to shoot me in the back?”
Abruptly, I realized my hand was once again resting on the grip of my plasmic. “No,” I assured her, opening my hand and lifting it away from the weapon. “Neither, actually. I was just curious as to where you were going.”
“Selene put you up to this?”
“Like I said, I was just curious.”
Her head twitched with what was probably an unheard snort. “You know what they say about curiosity.”
“Yes,” I said. “Everyone seems to feel I need reminding about that.”
“That should tell you something.” She waved me toward her. “Come on. Join the party.”
Clenching my teeth, wondering briefly how much it would hurt to instead throw myself backward down the stairs out of target range, I walked across the roof toward her. “Here,” she said, waving at a spot beside her. “You might want to get down, too.”
I did as ordered, lowering myself into a crouch behind the parapet. In her other hand, I saw, she was holding the targeting scope of a sniper rifle, the rest of the rifle lying disassembled on the roof between the parapet and her knees.
“Over there,” she said, pointing past a group of lower buildings to another unfinished structure a block away. “You see two Ihmisits, a k’Tra, and four Yavanni gathered around a human holding an oversized info pad?”
“Yes,” I said. Actually, only the Ihmisits and k’Tra were standing close to the human. The four Yavanni were spread out in a classic containment box formation, their eyes and attention focused outward. “Which ones are the Yavanni guarding?”
Her head turned to me, and I saw a hint of approval in her eyes. “Very good,” she said. “I don’t think one hunter out of a hundred would have spotted that so quickly.”
“Long practice,” I said shortly. “Which one’s your target?”
“As it happens, none of them,” she said, offering me the targeting scope. “Take a look at the human. You recognize him?”
I took the scope and put it to my eye, my senses kicking into instant overdrive. Calm conversation, a casual denial, and a shiny-object distraction—it was tailor-made for an attack on the unsuspecting idiot who’d blundered into her job. This would be the moment where she would stab me, shoot me, or just roll me over the parapet and send me crashing to the street below.
Only she didn’t do any of those things. She just knelt there patiently, waiting for me to ratchet down my nervous anticipation and focus on the man I was supposed to look at.
He was an older man, though with his sun-wrinkled face and pure white hair he probably looked older than he really was. He was gesturing to points on his info pad, his mouth moving with quick conversation, his stance that of a man fully in control of himself, his sales pitch, and his future.
“Nope,” I said, passing the scope back. Still no attempt to kill me. “Never seen him before.”
“No reason why you should have,” Nikki said. Shifting back and forth between knees, she moved half a meter back from the parapet and started putting the pieces of her rifle back into her satchel. “He’s Horace Markelly, a big land developer from Randaire. Clawed his way up to his current exalted position, squashing everyone who got in his way. One of the people currently on his to-squash list decided to move first, and asked me to handle the job.”
I frowned. “And?”
Nikki shrugged. “I have a rule. Just one, really, but it’s important to me.” She paused in her packing to turn those intense eyes on me again. “I don’t take contracts on people who’ve previously hired me.”
For a moment we locked eyes while I ran that totally unexpected statement through my mind a couple of times. It didn’t sound any more believable the third time around than it had the first. “Excuse me?” I asked carefully.
She shrugged again and returned to her packing. “It’s pretty self-explanatory. Markelly once hired me to eliminate one of his rivals. Therefore, I won’t take a contract on him.”
“Ah,” I said. Still didn’t make any sense. “So no matter how bad someone is, all he has to do is hire you and he’s forever untouchable?”
“You got it.” She looked up at me again. “And that’s not hiring me to paint his house or something. He has to hire me for my professional services.”
I looked back across at the distant rooftop. “I can think of a lot of people I’ve dealt with through the years who would have paid good money to get on a list like that.”
“Very good money,” she agreed. “My fee starts at half a million commarks.”
I gave a low whistle. “So only the very rich can afford to stay out of your sights.”
“Yes.” She finished packing away her gun and zipped the bag closed. “But then, most people aren’t worth that much money to have killed. It balances out.”
“Ah.” Offhand, I couldn’t see how, exactly. But it didn’t seem the right time to launch into a philosophical discussion. “So what now?”
She stood up and slung the bag over her shoulder. “I go to the StarrComm center and tell my prospective client I’m not taking the contract. You head back to the Ruth, and I’ll meet you there. Or do some shopping. Whatever you want.”
“And then?”
“According to Floyd, Cherno’s contract is hanging fire and you and Selene are the ones who need to do something about that,” she said. “So I guess you two get to say where we go next.” Her eyes narrowed a bit in thought. “Though if you can’t figure it out, I’ve got a couple of other places that could be more useful than just sitting around somewhere doing nothing.”
“I’m sure there are,” I said. “I guess we part ways, then.”
“For now,” she agreed. She took one last look across at Markelly, then turned and started back toward the elevator. “You joining me? The car has room for two.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like the stairs.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll see you back at the ship.”
* * *
The stairs were just as rickety and unsafe feeling on the way down as they’d been on the way up. Still, they were preferable company to the alternate I’d been offered.
I was halfway down, and the sound of the descending elevator had stopped, when it occurred to me to wonder why work on this building had been abandoned and how Nikki had known it would be a good place to set up for a kill.
But really, those were questions of barely idle interest. The only reason for my brain to focus on them at all was to crowd out all the other thoughts swirling like banshees through my mind.
It wasn’t Nikki’s calm viciousness, or even the almost urbane casing wrapped around it. I’d known plenty of other people like that, and usually tried to steer clear of them as much as I could. It was, rather, the bizarre self-imposed limitation on who she would kill and who she wouldn’t.
Had she come up with that on her own? Had it been suggested by someone else? Had she been faced with a contract on someone she liked or respected, declined the job, then decided to make that refusal a permanent part of her life?
Preoccupied with questions I couldn’t answer, I’d made it three blocks before I realized I was being followed.