CHAPTER NINETEEN
McKell called his technique hiding the tree in the forest. I called it work the new guy until he drops.
As my father used to say, The new guy always gets the pointed end of the stick. Try not to be the new guy.
The concept was straightforward enough. We had a big, brand-new hole that might as well include a banner inviting the Patth and everyone else to take a closer look. McKell’s solution was to seal up the portal, ladle enough dirt on top to hide the metal and make it look like we’d given up, then dig three more holes roughly the same size and depth elsewhere in the field.
It was a reasonable enough plan, I had to admit, especially as sundown approached and Ixil suggested McKell and I just start a fifth hole as if planning to come back the next morning. With four and a quarter major pits, the promise of more to come, and a whole field full of the pilot holes McKell’s team had dug earlier, the Patth could spend days trying to find whatever it was we were looking for.
The downside was sweat, fatigue, and the promise that a lot of previously underutilized muscles were going to ache the next day.
“I assume you want us to come back tomorrow and do more digging?” I asked as we loaded the shovels back into McKell’s runaround.
“No, I’ll put our other people on it,” McKell said. “They might as well earn their keep. You and Selene should focus on how you’re going to play things once your new gadget is ready.”
“With special emphasis on how to stay alive once Cherno knows his Gemini is functional,” Ixil added.
“It’s at the top of our list,” I promised. “Let us know when the gizmo is ready.”
My arm and back muscles were already stiffening up as we returned our runaround to the stand and walked back to the Ruth. My rumbling stomach reminded me that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and for a moment I enjoyed a private fantasy of Nikki, freshly back from the StarrComm center, surprising us with a hot meal laid out on the dayroom table.
Sadly, there was no meal awaiting us.
Neither was there a Nikki.
“She was here, though, wasn’t she?” I called back to Selene as I looked into the dayroom. There was no sign that she’d cooked or eaten anything in there since our departure, or for that matter had even dropped in.
“Yes,” Selene called back from her own inspection of the engine room. “Her scent is fresh.”
“So, a few hours?”
“Less,” Selene said. “Probably less than an hour.”
“And no notes?” I asked, opening the hatch to her cabin for a quick peek inside. She hadn’t answered a knock when Selene and I had first arrived, but I needed to make sure she hadn’t been taken ill or was otherwise incapacitated. No one inside. I started to close the hatch—
And stopped. Lying on her bed was her phone.
“Selene?” I called, stepping into the cabin. As far as I could remember, Nikki had never left the ship without her phone riding securely in its holder on her left hip. Why would she break that pattern now?
Selene appeared in the hatchway. “What is it?”
“This,” I said, pointing to the phone. “Did she have it when she left this morning for the StarrComm center?”
“Let me see.”
She stepped over to the bed and knelt down beside it. Leaning over the phone, she sniffed, nostrils and eyelashes working as she sampled its scent. “Is there a Zulian restaurant near the center?”
I pulled up the memory of my last visit there. Across the street from the center was a short row of restaurants . . . “Yes,” I said. “There’s a Zulian, a Bulgrenist, and a Yavanni.”
“Yes, I can smell all three,” Selene confirmed. “The Zulian spices are more pungent, and adhere better to a phone’s casing.”
“So she made it to the center and back again,” I said slowly, trying to think it through. “And then left again, but didn’t take her phone. Why would she do that?”
“Are you sure she had her phone all the other times she left the ship?” Selene asked.
I thought back, pulling up mental image after mental image. Nikki on Balmoral . . . on Vesperin . . . on Lucias Four . . . on Niskea . . . “Yes,” I said. “Every single time.” I waved at the phone. “Until now.”
There was a short pause. “You and I have traveled places without our phones, too, on occasion,” Selene reminded me. “Usually when we were concerned that someone might track us.”
“Right, but that’s us,” I said. “Nikki surely has the best track-and-hack-proofing in the Spiral.”
“Unless she’s concerned she could be facing something new.”
“From where?” I countered. “If no one on Vesperin or in the Niskea Badlands has the kind of fancy gear that can punch through her guardware, there sure as hell isn’t anyone on Meima who can.”
Abruptly, Selene stiffened. “Yes, there is,” she said. “Jordan McKell.”
I stared at her. “Are you saying that the Icarus Group . . . ?”
“You said Nikki has the best available guardware for her phone,” Selene said. “But surely the admiral has high-level resources of his own.”
“I would if I were sitting on an Icarus-size keg of dynamite,” I agreed. “But how would Nikki know—oh.”
“Yes,” Selene said “Ixil’s outriders. Nikki saw them.”
“Well, she saw Kalixiri outriders,” I said. “But there’s no reason for her to think they belonged to Ixil, or to any Kalix in particular.”
“Unless she knows more about Icarus than she’s let on.”
“Or was recently told more about Icarus than she’s let on,” I said.
And with that, the rest of the pieces I’d spent the past few weeks poking at suddenly fell together. “Oh, hell. Come on.” I grabbed Selene’s arm and hurried us down the corridor toward the entryway. “If he hasn’t got her now, he will soon.”
“Who?” Selene asked, catching up with me.
“Who else?” I retorted. “Trent.”
* * *
McKell answered on the second vibe. “Trouble?” he asked without preamble.
“Triple helping,” I said. “Nikki left the ship without her phone, and I think Trent’s got her.”
“I thought we’d convinced him that his plan was a nonstarter.”
“We were convinced,” I said, keying the entryway and ushering Selene onto the zigzag. “Him, apparently not so much. What kind of tracking resources do you have available?”
“I’m not sure you’re allowed to know about—”
“Stop it!” I snapped. “This is no time to play protocol. Nikki’s in danger, which means Selene and I are in danger. What kind of tracking can you do?”
There was the soft hiss of a sigh. “There are a couple of things we can do with phones,” McKell said reluctantly. “But if she left hers behind they’re worthless.”
“How about tracking runaround rentals? Can you do that?”
“Yes, but not in real time. There would be a ten- or fifteen-minute delay to get that data.”
“Good enough,” I said. “As long as you can do it—and as long as Nikki knows you can do it—that’s all I need.”
“Wait a minute,” he objected. “How would Nikki know that?”
“From Trent,” I said as we reached the bottom of the ramp. “We’re heading out now. Call you later.”
I keyed off. “Where are we going?” Selene asked.
“We’ll start with the runaround stand,” I said, settling into a brisk walk. No point switching to a sprint until we had some idea how long a race we were looking at. “Can you smell her?”
“Yes, she came this way,” Selene said. “No more than half an hour ago, either. I’m sorry, I should have said something on our way in. I assumed I was getting her scent from when she returned to the Ruth.”
“Not your fault,” I said. “I’d have assumed the same thing. The crucial question is whether she grabbed a runaround this time. I’m guessing she didn’t, but we won’t know until we get there.” A sudden thought struck me, and I pulled out my phone and punched again for McKell. “Question,” I said when he answered. “Do you still have that bounty hunter persona you used on Brandywine?”
“Yes, but it would take way too long to get into the makeup and prosthetics.”
“Don’t need you to,” I said. “What I need is for you to put out a bounty notice on Nikki offering five million commarks.”
For about five of our hurried steps he didn’t reply. I listened to the silence, lining up my reasoning, arguments, and pleas for when he turned me down.
I frowned, listening closer. Was that traffic I was hearing in the background? Or was I just combining his silence with the sounds coming into my other ear? “McKell?” I prompted. “I really need—”
“Done,” he said. “Five million commarks for delivery alive, reply and confirm to the attached mail drop. I assume you wanted me to use the same sketch you brought from Niskea?”
“Yes,” I said, mentally tossing my prepared speech out the airlock. Even now, McKell could sometimes surprise me. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay up.”
“The admiral will be glad of that,” McKell said dryly. “Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of,” I said. “We strained Trent’s budget when we confiscated his blood money. Hopefully, the news that Nikki’s life is worth five million to him will buy us some time. Thanks.”
I keyed off as we trotted up to the runaround stand. “Okay, Selene. Work your magic.”
There were half a dozen vehicles parked in the stand. Selene walked past them, sniffing at each but not bothering to stop, until she reached the end of the group. She took four steps past it, paused—
“She went by,” she said, picking up speed. “This way.”
“Good,” I said, smiling tightly. So, warned that someone might be able to track runaround rentals, she’d opted to walk. “Hopefully, we’ll still be in time to save her.”
“I don’t understand,” Selene said as we picked up our pace. “Nikki knew someone was trying to kill her. Why would she let Trent lure her out of the Ruth?”
“By offering her something she needed,” I said. “Or maybe something he just convinced her she needed. Remember the Tixi 455 you smelled in her cabin earlier? That was her fiddling with her enhanced targeting prosthetics.”
“You think so?” Selene asked doubtfully. She paused, crouched down to sniff at the pavement, then straightened up and continued walking. “Those enhancements require an optical component, and facial inserts are usually quite visible.”
“The key word being usually,” I said. “Nikki was smarter than the average assassin, or maybe just had more money or influence. For her inserts she went to the best in the business: the people who’ve been doing facial grafts for nearly thirty years.”
Selene spun around, and even in the dim light I could see the shock in her pupils. “Are you saying . . . the Patth?”
“Who else?” I said, hearing an edge of bitterness in my voice. I really, really should have seen it sooner. “How else could Trent know about Icarus and its capabilities? How else did he know enough about Nikki’s inserts to be able to lure her out with a promise that a tech was available in Barcarolle to work on them? For that matter, how did Nask’s associate Muninn even know what she looked like when she’s been so careful to keep her face hidden?”
I looked past Selene at the darkening city beyond the spaceport. “Trent’s not a bounty hunter, Selene. He’s a Patth Expediter.”
* * *
I’d been worried that we might have to traipse halfway across Barcarolle on our unexpected errand of mercy. Fortunately, Nikki’s trail looked to be ending much sooner, at a medical building only a couple of kilometers from the spaceport.
A big medical building, naturally, with three floors and covering half a block’s worth of real estate. But that was okay, because there was only one likely destination in there for her.
“Here,” I said, pointing to the listing on Selene’s info pad as we walked toward the building’s main entrance. “This optometrist suite on the second floor at the south end of the building. Trent will have told her he had a place with full optical and eye-treatment equipment. She’d have been suspicious of anywhere else he tried to send her.”
“All right,” Selene said, taking a lingering look at the building’s layout and then putting the pad away. “How do we get in?”
“Hopefully, the same way she did.” I nodded toward the main entrance, a pair of glass doors beneath a large but tasteful sign proclaiming the place to be the WHISPER PARK HEALTH CENTER. “We’ll start with the front door.”
Sure enough, Nikki’s scent trail led straight to the doors. “Is this where she went in?” I asked, trying the handles. Both doors were locked down solid.
“No,” Selene said, sniffing at the doors. “She knocked on this one—right here. But then . . . ” She took a few steps to her left, then backtracked and headed a few steps to her right, checking the scents in both directions.
I looked up at the sign over the doors. It was mounted a couple of centimeters away from the outer wall on slender but sturdy-looking spacers. If the sign and spacers were strong enough to hold Selene’s weight, and if I could get her up there, she should be able to get to the nearest set of second-floor windows. If the tenants of those offices had been a bit careless with their external security, that might be our way in.
Of course, that further assumed that none of the pedestrians or motorists traveling the nearby streets noticed or cared that their local med center was being broken into. Would Trent risk Nikki’s entry being observed by those same potential witnesses? Or would he use another entrance?
Sure enough. “She went this way,” Selene said, heading off to our right toward the south end of the building.
“Got it,” I said, catching up with her. “So Trent was probably waiting inside, and when she knocked he waved her to a side door where the whole thing would be less visible.”
“Yes, that makes sense,” Selene agreed.
Abruptly, she stopped. “Gregory, there’s a dead person somewhere over there.”
I clenched my teeth and drew my plasmic. Or maybe stealth hadn’t been Trent’s only reason for getting Nikki out of the public eye. “Show me.”
Selene led the way to the end of the building and around the corner. Midway down the side, slumped against the wall in a pool of darkness and blood, was a dead man.
I felt a flicker of relief that the victim wasn’t Nikki. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like it was Trent, either. Trying to watch every direction at once, I knelt down beside him and played my flashlight’s lowest setting across his blood-soaked shirt. “Knife wound, looks like,” I told Selene.
“Instantaneous?”
“Pretty much.” I straightened up and again looked around. He couldn’t have made it very far with a wound like that, and there’d been no blood trail along the ground as we came around the building. Unless his death and Nikki’s presence at this same time and place were pure coincidence, I was guessing that either she or Trent had done this.
As my father used to say, Nothing in this universe is completely pure, be it motives, coincidence, or luck.
“She went in here.”
I looked up. Selene had continued on another five meters past the body to a discreet side door and was sniffing the handle. “You sure?” I asked.
“I’m sure.” She tried the handle. “This one’s locked, too.”
I frowned down at the body, trying to work through the logic. If Trent had killed the man before Nikki arrived, he would hardly have directed her to a door where she had to step over a corpse to get there. Ergo, it was likely that this was Nikki’s handiwork. Moreover, her choice of a knife instead of her Fafnir or Jaundance suggested a reluctance to draw attention with either the plasmic’s flash or the firearm’s bang.
“He must have been right up in front of her,” Selene murmured thoughtfully. “Why would she kill instead of just disabling him?”
“Because she felt threatened,” I said, nodding as the scheme came together. “Because Trent told her she was being threatened. Odds are this is another of his local-talent thugs, only this one masquerading as an Icarus troubleshooter.”
“Trent shouts a warning as he opens the door for her,” Selene said, her pupils showing understanding and revulsion. “Tells her to run, that he’s Icarus and that he’s going to attack her.”
“Only instead of running, she counterattacks,” I said, opening the bloody jacket and starting to check the pockets. “Clever, really. Telling her there are enemies outside focuses her attention out here instead of on him.”
“I thought you took all of Trent’s thug-hiring money,” Selene said.
“I expect Expediters have access to a pretty generous credit line,” I said. Nothing in the jacket. I shifted to his trouser pockets. “Let’s just hope he wants to get some of it back.”
“Is that why you asked McKell to put out a bounty notice?”
“Exactly,” I said, smiling as my fingers found what they’d been looking for. “And once again, Trent doesn’t understand what happens when you hire local talent. Local talent wants to be versatile, so that you’ll remember them fondly afterward and maybe hire them again. So when you tell someone you want them to act threatening, they don’t just bring a gun and attitude to the table. They want to be ready for anything else you might decide you want from them.”
I held up the dead man’s compact burglar kit. “Such as a little break-and-enter. Let’s see how good a lock the medics put on their private entrance.”
Not a very good one, as it turned out. Thirty seconds with my new lockpicks and I had the door open. We slipped inside, found the stairs, and headed up.
There was a soft glow coming from the frosted glass on the optometrist suite door as we emerged from the stairwell. We eased over to it, and Selene got down on the floor to sniff the air coming through the narrow crack beneath the door. She lay there a few seconds, then stood back up and pressed her lips to my ear. “Trent, Nikki, and two other men,” she whispered. “In the room just off the entry foyer, I think the one to the right.”
I nodded, noting that the door’s hinges were also on the right-hand side. Setting up in the room on that side meant Trent would see the door opening well before an attacker could either see what was going on in there or get a weapon into firing position.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t other, less intrusive options available for intel, especially since our late benefactor’s burglar kit included a snoop-ear auditory enhancer. I pulled it out, put the earphone into my ear, and pressed the business end against the door.
“—see why you even want this slug’s money, anyway,” an unfamiliar and rather surly voice came into my earpiece. “You wanted her, you got her, so what’s the deal? Off her, pay up, and we can all get out of here.”
“Leave whenever you want,” Trent’s voice came back, calm but with an air of distraction about it. “You can go too, Basher, if you want. Your money’s right there. Go.”
I nodded to myself. So our old taverno friend Basher was back on the job.
And if he and his thug friend took Trent up on his offer, that would reduce the opposition from three to one.
Once again, luck wasn’t angling my direction. “Thanks, but I think we’ll stick around,” the thug said, his voice going heavily suspicious. “Anyway, that stack looks a little light.”
“Ten thousand each,” Trent said. “That was the deal.”
“That was the deal before she offed Frog,” Basher’s voice put in. “I figure his share should go to Cron and me.”
“You’ll both get the same share she gave Frog in about a minute,” Trent bit out. “Now both of you shut up. I’m trying to negotiate.”
There was the brief, high-pitched squeak of chair legs shifting on a tiled floor. “Sure,” Cron said. “Whatever you say, boss.”
I pulled the snoop-ear away from the door. “Trent, Basher, a man named Cron, and none of them seem in a hurry to leave,” I told Selene. “Good news is that Trent seems to be buying McKell’s bounty pitch and is apparently trying to talk up the price.”
Selene nodded. “What’s our plan?”
I drummed my fingers silently on the grip of my holstered plasmic as I looked at the door. It would be easy enough to unlock and open, but I would need a diversion if I wanted to get into the room without getting shot.
Maybe even a double diversion. “Go to the roof,” I said, looking around the hallway. A half-meter-long cylindrical fire extinguisher in a wall recess caught my eye. “Take that extinguisher and find some rope or cable.”
“We’re doing a whiplash?”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “And the timing will be critical.”
“I understand. Buzz coordination?”
“Yes,” I said again. “One-two-three. Signal when you’re ready.”
She stepped over to the extinguisher, pulled it from its nook, and disappeared back into the stairwell. I took a deep breath and returned to the door. It would take a few minutes for Selene to get into position, and I might as well see if Trent was making any progress bargaining McKell up from his five-million-commark offer.
But whatever was going on in there, it was happening without any real conversation. I could hear vague muttering, either from Trent on his phone or from Basher and Cron talking quietly together, and I heard one more of the noisy chair shiftings. I also thought I heard a low moan or two, but that could have been my imagination. I unlocked the door, still listening, then put the burglar kit against the wall where it would be out of the way.
Almost time. I pulled out my phone, confirmed it was on vibe, and slipped it into my top shirt pocket where its quiver would be clearly felt against my chest. Drawing my plasmic, I prepared myself mentally for action.
I’d been crouched there another minute and a half, trying to guess from the suite’s floorplan and the voices I’d heard earlier where Trent and the others might be, when my phone buzzed a single vibration.
This was it. Still listening to the snooper-ear, I rested my gun hand thumb against my phone’s Send key and with the other hand carefully turned the doorknob and eased the door open a crack.
No reaction. I opened it a couple of centimeters more.
There it was: the subtle but unmistakable sound of sharply inhaled breath. Trent or one of the thugs had spotted the opening door.
I tapped the phone key twice. The phone did a quick three-buzz vibe—
And from inside the suite came the crash of breaking glass.
I gave Trent and the thugs a quarter second to react to the sudden noise from behind them, then threw the door all the way open and launched myself into a flat dive through the opening into a spacious reception foyer. I hit the floor and rolled up into a crouch, plasmic ready.
To discover that I’d miscalculated.
The three men—Trent, Basher, and an unfamiliar face I assumed was Cron—were exactly where I’d hoped and assumed they would be. They were on their feet in the middle of a comfortably large examination room beyond a wide archway, the chairs they’d been sitting on shoved back out of their way, all three turned halfway toward the smashed window behind them where the fire extinguisher Selene had pendulumed through the glass was still swinging on the extension cord anchoring it to the rooftop. It was a perfectly executed whiplash, with the extinguisher the second punch of the one-two-three punch of me opening the door, Selene smashing the glass to simulate a commando attacking a criminal’s hideout, and me entering the room while everyone’s weapons were pointed in the wrong direction. Even better, my opponents were nicely grouped together, an easy three-shot that could take out all of them if I so chose.
Except that they were standing on the far side of a lounge-style examination chair that was directly in my line of fire. A chair on which a half-conscious Nikki was currently lying.
And as the eyes and guns started to swing back toward me, I realized my hoped-for high-ground position was suddenly squarely at the bottom of the hill.
But as my father used to say, Sometimes you’ll be dealt the worst hand you can imagine. All you can do is play what you’ve got, and try to have a spare card or two tucked up your sleeve.
I had a couple of such cards. Time to see if I could get to one of them.
My first shot slammed into Basher’s upper shoulder, the lowest spot on him I dared target with Nikki in the way. He jerked violently with the impact, one leg buckling beneath him in reaction and sending him into a twisting tumble out of sight to the floor. My second shot, intended for Trent’s shoulder, missed as he reflexively twitched out of the way. His gun still wasn’t lined up on me, but he was starting to duck down behind the exam chair in response to my sudden appearance. My third shot went into the ceiling above him, shattering the acoustic tiles and raining dust and shards down on him.
My fourth went into the ceiling halfway between Nikki and me, sending a second cascade of dust swirling across the battlefield.
The impromptu smoke screen wouldn’t last long, I knew, and Trent certainly wouldn’t expect me to politely remain where I was until he could see clearly enough to shoot. The archway between the foyer and the exam room was the best cover I had available, with the left side the easiest for a right-handed person like me to fire around. Trent would know that, and might figure I’d go for the less obvious right side of the arch instead.
Time to pull out the first of my sleeve cards. Ignoring both sides of the archway, I instead leaped and rolled straight ahead to the foot of Nikki’s chair. Turning onto my side, I curled myself around the base and peered upward along the chair’s other side.
Trent was crouched a meter back from the chair, trying to wave away the dust cloud with his left hand while tracking back and forth across the archway with his gun. Two meters farther back, Cron was wiping furiously at his eyes, his own weapon flailing. I lifted my plasmic, trying to get a bead on Trent’s gun hand.
But my movement had caught his attention. His gaze dropped, his eyes locking onto mine as his face hardened into a snarl. He leaped to the side, getting around behind my head where I couldn’t get a clear shot, his muzzle lowering to point down at me. I twisted back the way I’d come, trying to get around the other side of the chair’s base. But he was on his feet, and I was on my side, and I had zero chance of getting to cover ahead of him. I braced myself, wincing helplessly as his gun steadied on my chest.
“Trent!” a shout came from the broken window.
My eyes flicked past Trent’s side. Selene was hanging outside the building from another extension cord, her head and torso framed in the window, her plasmic pointed into the room in a two-handed marksman’s grip. Trent took another quick step to the side, putting Nikki between him and Selene and taking himself entirely out of my limited range. He swung his gun around toward this new target—
Lifting my plasmic, I once again fired into the ceiling above him.
Through the fresh cloud of debris came the soft crack and muzzle flash of a 3mm gun from where I’d last seen Cron. An instant later the shot was answered by the brighter streak of a plasma blast. Cron gave a sort of gurgle, and fell to the floor. I blinked at the dust swirling around my eyes and shifted my attention back to Trent.
To find that he had disappeared.
I rolled back around the chair and came up onto my feet, squinting through the dust still raining down in the foyer. The suite’s outer door was still open, and there was no sign of Trent.
“Gregory?” Selene called hesitantly.
“Yeah, hold on,” I called back. Keeping an eye on the door and foyer, I backed to the window, brushed away the bits of broken glass with the muzzle of my plasmic, and helped her inside. “Your timing was perfect,” I said. “Thanks for being my second sleeve card.”
“Pardon?”
“Tell you later,” I said. “Get outside—the smell in here can’t be very pleasant for you. I’ll finish up.”
She nodded, her pupils showing the queasiness of being in the same room as plasmic-burned flesh, and headed for the door. “And watch out for Trent,” I called after her. “He might still be nearby.”
She waved a hand behind her in acknowledgment, and was gone.
Basher was lying on the floor, gripping his shoulder where I’d shot him and swearing feelingly. He looked to be out of the fight, but I kicked his gun away from him just to make sure. Reaching into his jacket pocket, I pulled out his phone, punched the emergency call button to summon the medics, and dropped it beside him.
Cron, with Selene’s shot having burned out the center of his chest, was out of not only this fight but all future ones as well. Bracing myself, I turned to Nikki.
My worst fears, that she’d been given a lethal dose of something and had simply refused to indulge Trent with a quick death, turned out to be overly pessimistic. She was still largely out of it, but from her slack face and dilated pupils it was clear she’d simply been given something to keep her quiet for a while. I had no idea what Trent had used, but the usual treatment for such drugs was to let the victim sleep it off. Getting an arm under her shoulders, I lifted her off the chair, shifted her into a fireman’s carry, and headed out.
Selene was waiting just outside the door we’d come in through, plasmic in hand. “There’s no sign of Trent,” she reported as we headed back toward the main street running along the front of the clinic. “There’s a runaround stand a block to our left.”
“Good,” I said. The thought of carrying Nikki all the way back to the Ruth hadn’t been a cheery one. “Let’s try to be gone before the badgemen get here.”
“I’ll go ahead and get one,” she volunteered, shifting to a faster pace. “And on the way back,” she added over her shoulder, “you can explain that reference to sleeve cards.”