CHAPTER TWENTY
Nikki didn’t talk during the ride back to the ship. But she was clearly starting to recover from her ordeal, and by the time we arrived she was able to work her way out of the runaround with only little help from me. Nevertheless, she accepted my arm around her waist as we negotiated the zigzag. At the entryway I turned her over to Selene, told Selene to lock the hatch behind me, and went back to return the runaround to its stand.
Selene had Nikki settled down on her cabin bed when I returned. “Any trouble?” I asked, watching as Nikki tried to get her boots off. With her fingers still not entirely up to speed, the task was apparently presenting some difficulty.
“No,” Selene said. “Any sign of Trent?”
I shook my head, watching Nikki fight with her boots. The whole scene was awkward and clearly annoying to her, but from my vantage point I had to admit that it was also rather entertaining. “If you didn’t smell him out there, he must have decided to call it a night. You want any help with those, Nikki?”
She didn’t answer, but simply focused harder on the task. Two tries later, she managed to pop the fasteners and get them off. “No, thank you,” she said. She dropped the boots on the floor beside the bed and somewhat reluctantly looked over at me. “I suppose I owe you some thanks. I walked into that like a novice.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “But how about we skip the thanks and instead tell us the story of tonight’s adventures?”
“Sorry,” she said. “Most of the details are confidential.”
“Of course,” I said. “I assume we’re talking about details like how you got your targeting implants from the Patth? And how someone left a message in your mail drop telling you they needed adjusting, and how lucky you were there happened to be a qualified tech right here in Barcarolle? And how he warned you that some nasty people were out to get you, so you needed to leave your phone on the Ruth? And how you were barely to the spot when one of those nasties jumped out of the shadows—”
“Enough.” Nikki’s voice was quiet, but there was something in her tone that instantly cut off my blather.
“Right,” I said. “Sorry. On second thought, I guess we don’t really need to discuss it. Unless there was something you wanted to add?”
For a long moment Nikki just stared at me. I held her gaze, wondering distantly how accurately she could shoot while hung over from Trent’s drugs. “To you,” she said at last. Her eyes shifted to Selene. “Just you.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Selene stir. But she remained silent. “Sure,” I said. “Selene, would you mind fixing us something to eat? I think we could all use a good meal.”
“And some wine,” Nikki added. “Or something stronger if you have it.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Selene said evenly. I wanted to turn to her, to look into her pupils and find out how she was taking Nikki’s abrupt dismissal. But there was something about Nikki’s expression that warned me not to look away.
Selene went out, I closed the hatch behind her, and Nikki and I were alone. “Okay,” I said. “I’m listening. Did I get anything wrong?”
“Nothing important,” she said evenly. “Tell me about your part of the evening.”
I shrugged. “We figured out what was going on and followed you,” I said. “Then—”
“Tell me everything.”
I clenched my teeth. It had been a long evening, following an even longer day. My muscles were stiff and aching, I was hungry, and there was still someone out there gunning for me. “We rescued you,” I said. “What more do you need?”
Her throat tightened. “The reason.”
I frowned. “Reason for what?”
“You don’t like me, and you hate what I do,” she said. “So why did you save me?”
I sighed. “Because you needed saving,” I said. “You mind if I sit down?”
She nodded toward the fold-down seat. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” I walked over and dropped into the seat. Even at rest my muscles hurt. “Okay, look. No, I don’t like your job. I don’t necessarily dislike you, but that’s because you mostly keep to yourself and don’t give us a chance to form an opinion of you as a person.”
I paused, but she remained silent. “You’re aboard my ship,” I continued. “Anything that happens while you’re here reflects on Selene and me. I don’t want you killing under these circumstances, but I also don’t want you getting killed. Does that make sense?”
“Not really,” she said, studying my face. “So the three bounty hunters I killed on Vesperin don’t count? Or the thug Selene shot an hour ago?”
So she’d been aware enough to at least follow some of the clinic fight. Good—that meant I wouldn’t have to repeat any of it for her. “I’ve killed my share over the years, too. Killing in self-defense is different from killing in cold blood.”
“Is it?”
I shrugged. “It’s different enough not to trigger the same gag reflex in my conscience. Maybe I’m not being consistent, but the law mostly agrees with me.” I shifted in my seat, wincing as new aches reverberated through my body.
Nikki was silent another moment, her eyes still on me. “Did you find the portal?” she asked. “Trent said that once you found it you wouldn’t need me. What did he mean by that?”
“No idea,” I said. “Besides, what either of us wants or needs is irrelevant. It’s Cherno who’s calling the shots.” I winced. “So to speak.”
Nikki gave a small snort. “You do like to push the limits, don’t you?”
“It just slipped out,” I assured her. “Did Trent say anything else?”
She shook her head. “It’s all still pretty fuzzy. Maybe I’ll get some of those memories back when this stuff wears off.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said. “When I thought he was a hunter targeting you, I at least had a handle on him. Now that I know he’s an Expediter, I have no clue what he’s going for.”
“He’s an Expediter?”
“Yes,” I said, frowning at her. “You hadn’t figured that out?”
“No,” she said grimly. “But now all that soap he pitched about my implants and Patth techs makes sense. I should have realized there was no way he could have set me up without inside information.”
“That was what I figured, anyway,” I said. “The only part I don’t have yet is what he wants with you. You sure he didn’t say anything about that?”
“Only that you wouldn’t need me,” she said.
I stared at her, a sudden horrible realization flashing across my mind. Some of the things Trent had said . . . had done . . . had not done . . .
“Anyway, I should probably let you get some rest,” I said, standing up as casually as my aching body would permit. “Selene should be here soon with some food and drink for you. Best thing for you is to eat up and then get some sleep.”
“I agree.” She closed her eyes. “Roarke?”
“Yes?”
This time she was silent long enough for me to wonder if she’d fallen asleep. “That envelope you showed me,” she said, her eyes opening again. “You still have it?”
It took me a moment to remember what she was referring to. “The one with the name inside?”
“Yes,” she said. “Get it. And the money.”
“Sure,” I said, backing to the hatch. “Be right back.”
Selene wasn’t in the dayroom when I arrived, but the three meals she’d prepared were waiting on the table, one of them arranged on a tray. I grabbed the envelope and money from my locker, then picked up the tray and returned to Nikki’s cabin. “Here’s your meal, too,” I said, setting the tray down on the nightstand. “Hope it’s okay—looks to be one of our prepacked stews.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said. “The envelope?”
I handed it to her, followed by the ten hundred-thousand-commark bank checks Nask had given me. “Understand that I’m not promising anything,” she warned, running a quick count of the notes and then slipping both them and the envelope under her mattress. “I still don’t trust you enough to take any of this at face value.”
“No problem,” I said. “When the time comes . . . well, let’s just leave it at that.”
“For now.” With an effort, Nikki pulled herself up into more of a sitting position and transferred the tray to her lap. “Good night, Roarke.”
“Good night,” I replied. “Pleasant dreams.”
Her throat worked briefly. “Always,” she murmured.
* * *
Selene was waiting for me on the bridge, seated in the pilot’s seat and gazing thoughtfully at the monitor boards. “You heard?” I asked as I eased down into the plotting table seat.
“Yes,” she said. “I gather she didn’t notice the intercom was on?”
“If she did, she didn’t say anything,” I said. “I assume you turned it on when you were helping her into bed?”
“Yes,” she said. “When did you take out the indicator light?”
“On the way to Meima,” I told her. “One of the times she was showering. Since she’d never yet used the intercom to call either of us, I figured it was safe. Oh, and I turned it off again when I set down her tray. Any thoughts on our conversation?”
“Only that I’m still confused about what Trent is doing here.” She half turned, and I could see sudden awareness in her pupils. “But you aren’t confused anymore, are you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Once again, reading my mood from my scent. “Though it wasn’t until just now, when Nikki mentioned Trent saying I wouldn’t need her, that it finally jelled.”
“And?”
“And for once our highly trained Expediter got it exactly backward,” I said ruefully. “Remember he said he’d seen us pick up Nikki on Balmoral? That was right after we came back from our meeting with Cherno, which I’m guessing Trent also knew about.”
“How could he have known that?”
“Floyd and Cherno would have been messaging back and forth while Floyd tried to get us pinned in a corner while he gave us Cherno’s sales pitch,” I said. “Given the kind of backdoors the Patth have into StarrComm and every other high-tech system in the Spiral, it would have been easy for Trent to pick up on that.”
“Out of trillions of communications every day?” Selene objected. “No, not even with computerized searches. Not unless—” She broke off.
“Not unless he was specifically looking for us or references to us,” I finished the sentence for her. “I submit that Trent’s been stalking us right from the beginning.”
“The thing with Oberon,” Selene said slowly. “He maneuvered us into helping capture him, didn’t he? With the scent of portal metal on his clothing as bait.”
“Which meant he’d been in contact with a portal, which makes sense now that we know who he is,” I said. “We also know now that his description of Nask’s freighter’s hijacking was probably also accurate.”
“So why did he offer you a hijacking job?” Selene asked. “Was he trying to see if you’d be willing to do something like that?”
“If I’d be willing, and if I had been willing,” I said. “I think he suspected me—and by extension the Icarus Group—of hitting Nask’s freighter. I think he was hoping I’d let something slip that would prove it.”
She shivered. “Just as well you didn’t accept the job.”
“And you have no idea how close I came to doing so,” I said, wincing at the memory. “I thought seriously about leading him on, giving him some rope in hopes of squeezing some information about Nask’s portal out of him.” I gestured aft toward Nikki’s cabin. “Either way, I think he’d put enough pieces together to suspect Cherno was involved. Nailing the Icarus Group would just be a bonus.”
“Which was what he thought he’d discovered when he saw us with Nikki?”
“Maybe,” I said. “At least he would have seen it as a lead to follow up on.” I shook my head. “And that was the point where he took his set of dots and connected them in exactly the wrong way. In a nutshell, he thinks Cherno hired Nikki to be my bodyguard.”
Selene turned to face me, her pupils brimming with disbelief. “What?”
“You heard right,” I assured her. “Though again, it wasn’t until today that I had all the pieces myself. When Trent and I were talking out in the Trandosh ruins—I think I told you this—he said there were questions he wanted to ask me. He also asked if my bodyguard was taking the morning off.”
“I assumed he was talking about McKell.”
“So did I,” I said. “Only afterward did it occur to me that he was taking a close look at all the hilltops around us. All of them, not just the close ones. Now, an Expediter will presumably know a lot about Icarus personnel. McKell’s good, but I doubt he’s an expert sniper.”
“If he is, no one’s ever mentioned it.”
“True, though that’s not the sort of topic that gets brought up at parties,” I said. “But we know—and Trent knows—that Nikki is a sniper.”
“So she’s the bodyguard he was talking about?”
“It’s the only way I can make it make sense,” I said. “What’s especially ironic is that when we were waiting for you to send the probe to lure the hunters away from our rooftop in the Badlands, I remember thinking that we were completely exposed up there, and that if a sniper just wanted to take out Nikki he could do it from any of the surrounding rooftops. But I also knew that someone shooting from that distance couldn’t get to the scene before someone else grabbed the body and trotted off to claim the bounty. So I put it out of my mind.”
“But if Trent wanted to get you alone for questioning, that would have been the perfect setup for him,” Selene said.
“Exactly,” I said. “The irony of the situation being that he was busy sleeping off my knockout pill and completely missed his chance.”
“Actually, it’s worse,” Selene said quietly. “He had you, Gregory. Right there and drugged, with me in the Ruth and Nikki halfway across the Badlands. If you hadn’t also drugged him and the others . . . ” She shivered.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little chilled myself. I’d come that close, and never even known it. “I wish I knew what these questions of his are.”
“I wish I knew who he was working for,” Selene countered.
“Whoever it is, he’s not a friend of Nask,” I said ruefully. “Back on Niskea he threw a snarl at me about my ‘tame buddy Nask.’ I thought at the time the phrase seemed both highly conversant and deeply disrespectful. But things happened, and my focus moved on, and I never got back to thinking about the possible implications. He’s probably working for another sub-director who wants Nask’s position.”
“Maybe we can ask him when we catch up with him again,” Selene suggested.
“Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to be the ones doing the catching,” I said darkly. “Trent hasn’t completed his job yet, and he strikes me as the persistent type.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree,” Selene said. “Do we have a plan?”
“Right now, we’re mostly treading water,” I said. “As of this afternoon, we couldn’t move until McKell and Ixil got the equipment I need. As of this evening, we also can’t move until Nikki flushes Trent’s drugs out of her system.”
“Yes,” Selene said. “One more thing. While we were out rescuing Nikki, McKell was aboard the Ruth.”
“Was he, now,” I said, nodding as I finally understood the background noises I’d heard on my second call to him. He’d been in a runaround, coming over to take advantage of the fact that the Ruth was temporarily unoccupied. “Any idea what he was doing?”
“Nothing specific,” Selene said. “But I do know he spent time in Nikki’s cabin.”
“Checking out her gear, probably,” I said. “Certainly taking a good look at her new Ausmacher.”
“You think he might have sabotaged it?”
“I hope not,” I said. “She’s bound to check everything before we get back to Cherno, and if she spots any problems we’re the ones she’ll blame.”
“I’m sure McKell considered that.”
“Well, if he didn’t there’s nothing we can do about it now,” I said.
“No.” Selene paused. “This envelope you got for Nikki. May I ask what was in it?”
“Just a name,” I said with forced casualness, even knowing that the change in my scent would instantly clue her in that it was more important than I was making it sound.
“And the money?”
“It’s something I can’t talk about right now,” I said. “You just have to trust me that it’s important.”
“All right,” she said calmly, her eyelashes fluttering a second and then coming to a halt. “Are you ready to eat?”
“Very ready.” Bracing myself, I levered myself out of the chair. It hurt just as much as the last time I’d done this. “And then I’m going to get some sleep.”
“You look like you need it,” Selene said, standing up. Her version looked a lot more graceful and less painful than mine. “Can you make it to the dayroom?”
“Of course,” I said with what dignity I could muster. “But I may let you handle all the cleanup this time.”
* * *
I slept for nearly ten hours, and when I pried my eyelids open I felt a solid fifty percent better than I had when I’d collapsed on the foldout couch the previous evening.
Which wasn’t to say the aches and stiffness were gone. My body was clearly going to be reminding me of the afternoon’s exertions for another couple of days at least.
Selene was on the bridge, working on a meal bar and breakfast cola she’d managed to sneak out of the dayroom without waking me. “Good morning,” she greeted me as I walked in. “How do you feel?”
“Better than I should, worse than I could,” I said, lowering myself gingerly into the plotting table seat. “Anything from Nikki?”
“She was up earlier, but then went back to her cabin,” Selene said. “I offered her a meal bar, but she said she wasn’t hungry.”
“How’s the internal cleansing going?”
“She still smells a little odd,” Selene said. “But not nearly the way she did last night. I think her body’s well on its way to flushing out Trent’s drug.”
“So she shouldn’t need you to stay here and babysit?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Selene said, her pupils shifting to wariness. “Is there something you need me to do outside the ship?”
“As a matter of fact, there is,” I said, mentally preparing myself. This was not going to go over well, on a number of different levels. “Remember the alien armband you found on Popanilla?”
“The one that was stolen from me, and which I never did get back?” Selene asked pointedly.
“Yes, and I’m sorry about that,” I apologized. “I’ll talk to McKell, see if he can retrieve it. My question is whether it had a distinctive smell.”
The wariness in her pupils went a little deeper. “Yes,” she said. “There was a certain . . . It wasn’t portal metal, but it had some of the same flavor. Is that why you thought the people who’d been on the island were Icari political prisoners?”
“Actually, I didn’t even think about asking you about the various scents until a little while ago,” I said. “But the fact that there’s a connection in their scents does tend to support that conclusion.” Once again, I braced myself. “There were bones there, too, the bones of the previous inhabitants. I don’t know if we ever saw any unburied ones, but—”
“We did,” Selene said, a quiet revulsion flicking briefly across her pupils. “I did, anyway. They were . . . ” She trailed off.
“They were long dead, and there was nothing you could have done for them,” I put in firmly. “Did they also have a distinctive smell?”
Selene closed her eyes, her nostrils doing the sort of half-speed twitching I’d sometimes seen when she was searching for a particularly elusive olfactory memory. “Yes,” she said. “But it was faint.” She opened her eyes again, and this time her pupils showed resignation. “You want me to search for bodies out there, don’t you?”
“Actually, I just want you to search for one body,” I said. “One specific body, and it won’t be in the killing lane between the Gemini and the Icarus.”
Her reluctance eased a little. “Limiting the search area will help,” she said. “But it’s still a large area for a single Kadolian.”
“I think we can narrow it down a little more,” I said, pulling out my info pad. A quick search of the Spiral’s archives—“Here,” I said, handing it to her. “This is the Erymant Temple area. Let’s assume the Trandosh ruins followed a similar design pattern, though the complex here was probably bigger and more extensive.”
“All right,” she said, scrolling through the pages of images and schematics.
“Let’s further assume the Icarus portal was about the same place as the Fidelio one we dug out,” I went on. “What you’re looking for is a secure building or section of a building, with no windows, thick walls, and limited access. Your search will be inside that room or building, and between there and the place where they found the Icarus.”
“They were waiting for someone,” Selene murmured, still staring at the Erymant images. “That’s why the Icarus was still active and preset for Alpha. Someone went through, then waited for someone else. Someone who never arrived.”
I felt my stomach tighten. Even as I had visualized the long-past Trandosh killing field, I could now see a distant glimpse of the doomed straggler, falling in a blaze of enemy fire or suffering the more horrible death of being crushed by collapsed walls or ceilings. “That’s what I think, yes,” I said. “He had to be someone important for them to risk their enemies using the open portal to come through behind them.”
I reached over and touched her arm. “The search won’t be pleasant. If you’re not sure you can handle it, just say so.”
She was silent another moment. “I can handle it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ll have your plasmic, and I know there are at least two other archeological teams in the area, so it’s about as public as any open ground can be. You should be safe enough.”
“And Trent is looking for you, not me,” Selene said with a touch of dry humor. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. And if he comes anywhere near the area I’ll know it.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll alert McKell, too. Maybe he or Ixil can keep an eye on you.”
“I’m not worried,” she said. “One question. If I find an armband or bones in the right place, how will I know it’s the person I’m looking for?”
“Trust me,” I said grimly. “If I’m right about this, you’ll definitely know.”
* * *
I’d expected it to be another two or three days before McKell and Ixil were ready with the equipment I’d requested. To my mild surprise, it was late afternoon that same day when Ixil showed up at the Ruth with the gadget in hand.
Nikki was asleep, and Selene was still out at the Trandosh ruins. I left a note for the former, gave the latter a quick call, then threw together a go bag with toiletries and a change of clothing. Half an hour later, Ixil and I were in his runaround heading back to our end of the Gemini portal.
Time to renew acquaintances with Robertine Cherno.