CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Cherno’s thugs had made sure the remaining aircar was locked down before they left their borrowed mansion. Between Floyd and me, it didn’t stay locked down very long.
I didn’t know if there were any speed limits in this part of Kanaloa. If there were, I was pretty sure Floyd broke all of them.
We’d passed over the outer edge of the city of Bachar Lune and were about ten minutes out from the Colonnade Center when a sudden thought belatedly struck me. The Center itself might be comm-locked to keep the assembled dignitaries’ attention from wandering away from the organized festivities, but there was a chance that Nikki was outside that zone. I pulled up the number she’d called me from back on Niskea and punched it in.
I could hear the rhythmic buzz as the phone signaled. No answer. I disconnected and tried again. Still no answer. “I can do this as long as you can,” I muttered under my breath, and keyed it again.
This time, on the ninth buzz, she answered. “If you called to try to talk me out of it, don’t bother,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “You don’t have to do this, Nikki,” I said, putting every gram of persuasion that I had into my voice. “Gaheen’s a better man than Cherno. He deserves—”
“You think I don’t know that?” Nikki cut me off.
I flinched. Even through a phone speaker the bitterness and frustration practically reached out and slapped me in the face. “I just meant—”
“Trust me, I know way more about him than you do,” Nikki said. “But I took the job. I accepted the contract. There’s no way left for me to back out.”
“Sure there is,” I said. “You say you’ve changed your mind, you give back his money, and you call it even.”
I heard her quiet sigh. “That’s not how this works, Roarke,” she said, her voice calmer but still on the edge of despairing. “You held my only chance to do that. Only you blew it.”
I frowned. I’d held the only chance? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“I suppose I can’t blame you,” Nikki continued. “But I took the contract. I have to do this.”
“Nikki—”
“You won’t see me again, Roarke,” she said. “Say good-bye to Selene for me. I know you both hate me, but you still made me feel welcome aboard the Ruth. That takes a special sort of person.”
“It’s still not too late for me to stop you, Nikki,” I said. “You said I could have done that once. Tell me how, and I’ll do it now.”
“You saved my life twice,” she said. “I appreciate that. But this is the life you gave back to me. This is what I have to do.”
“Damn it, Nikki—”
The phone went dead. I punched the number in three more times before I finally gave up.
“Well?” Floyd asked as I put the phone back into my pocket.
“It’s like talking to a brick wall, if a brick wall had a ridiculous code of ethics,” I told him, glaring across the lights of the city rolling past beneath us. “How much longer?”
“Two minutes,” Floyd said. “I just hope I can get Mr. Gaheen or one of his people to let us in.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him grimly. “One way or another, we’ll get in.”
* * *
As my father used to say, Persuading people to do what you want first requires you to find out why they don’t want to do that. This will often involve loud voices or gunfire.
In this case, the voices weren’t loud at all. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” the chief door warden at the Center’s main entrance said calmly. “If you don’t have invitations, you can’t come in.”
“I’m one of Mr. Gaheen’s men,” Floyd said, trying to match the other’s tone. “He sent word that he needed me here.”
“Mr. Gaheen left us no such instructions,” the warden said. His voice was still calm, but I could sense that it could go from quiet to loud at the snap of a finger. I could also sense that the gunfire my father had warned me about was also waiting in the wings.
“I understand,” Floyd said. “But if you could send someone to ask him—”
“You’re welcome to wait in your vehicle,” the man said, still maintaining his civility. “If Mr. Gaheen happens to inquire about you, I’ll be sure to tell him where you are.”
Floyd turned to me, and I could see in his eyes that he was three beats away from hauling out his Skripka and opening fire on anyone and anything that stood between him and his endangered boss.
Which wouldn’t be a completely insane idea. A sudden burst of gunfire would put everyone in the Center flat on the floor, which would surely ruin Nikki’s timing and fire lines. Unfortunately, she was committed to this job, and she’d already told me that if she didn’t succeed the first time she would keep trying until she did.
The more immediate downside, of course, being that such a move would probably get both Floyd and me killed.
Which left only one option.
I didn’t want to do this. It was surely illegal, and could very well offer the same odds for my demise as a barrage of Floyd’s 4mm slugs. But we needed to get in there, and this was the only card we had left to play.
Very literally.
“Enough,” I bit out in the best official badgeman-style voice in my repertoire. “This is official Patth business. Mr. Floyd and I need to get in there, and we need to get in there now.”
Mentally crossing my fingers, I pulled out Trent’s Patth Expediter ID card and shoved it into the warden’s face.
He stiffened to full military attention. “Yes, sir,” he said crisply. He gave the backup crew loitering behind him a hand signal, and they moved out of our way. “Do you need me to send some people with you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said as Floyd broke from my side and hurried past the guards and through the entryway. “But stay alert,” I added as I followed him through the door into the brightly lit ballroom beyond.
I’d noted once before that the whole planet was a convenient meeting place for the sector. That fact apparently made the opening of a new conference facility a bigger deal than it might have been elsewhere. The Colonnade Center’s ballroom was packed with elegantly dressed humans and aliens, and the whole place was ablaze with glow and pomp and glitter. There were refreshment islands scattered throughout the room, each boasting a color-shifting spotlight blazing straight up like the end of a leprechaun’s rainbow. Along a ninety-degree curve on the far side of the circular floor were a set of serving tables, with a similar arc of two- and four-person tables arrayed along the other two hundred seventy degrees. The lowest three meters of the ballroom’s walls were made of intricately carved stone, at which point the stone gave way to crystalline glass that formed a dome above the whole room. Some clever trick of the dome’s material or curvature allowed the starlight above to blaze through unfiltered without being dimmed or washed out by the city lights around us or even by the ballroom’s own illumination.
Floyd was standing near the middle of the room when I caught up to him, methodically turning his head back and forth as he tried to locate his boss. “You see him?” he demanded. “You see him, Roarke? I don’t see him.”
“So let’s run it backward,” I suggested, turning my attention to the dome and the city beyond. “Nikki’s new weapon is an Ausmacher missile-slug sniper rifle. Let’s try to figure out where she’ll be shooting it from.”
“How the hell will that help?” Floyd gritted out. “She can see the whole room from anywhere out there.”
“So we make sure she can’t,” I said, matching his same slow turn. As he’d said, there were several tall buildings out there, platforms from which someone with Nikki’s skills could launch her attack. With the right style Ausmacher, in fact, she could theoretically hit her target from anywhere in the city that gave her the proper line of sight.
But the timing necessary to make Gaheen’s murder look like an accident was going to be critical, and the farther out she was the more lag time between her squeezing the trigger and the missile reaching its target. A close building, then, something no more than a block or two away. One of the shorter buildings, maybe, where her subsequent retreat would be quicker.
“Does Mr. Gaheen wear body armor at things like this?” I asked Floyd as I did another slow rotation, this time focusing on the closer buildings.
“Yeah, but just a light shell,” Floyd said. “Something that’ll fit under formalwear—”
“There!” I snapped as something caught my eye. Not the lights of one of the taller buildings, but the total absence of lights in the more modest structure directly across the street from the Center.
The kind of blackness that would not only encourage a searching eye to skip past the building completely, but would also provide additional shadow for a hidden shooter.
“She’s there,” I said, turning to Floyd.
But he was no longer beside me. I craned my neck and saw him elbowing his way through the crowd toward one of the serving tables. Apparently, he’d finally spotted Gaheen.
I turned back toward the darkened building, looking around the ballroom. Lines of sight worked both ways, and there were a lot of glittering lights right in here with me. If I could get one of them turned toward Nikki’s sniper nest, maybe I could blind her enough to make the shot impossible. All we would have to do then would be to get Gaheen out of here and try to make sure she didn’t get a second shot at him.
The refreshment islands’ spotlights weren’t the brightest lights in the room, but they would be the easiest to turn around. I headed toward the nearest one, keeping an eye on the building.
I was nearly there when there was a single, soft flash from the middle of the darkened building. An instant later came an equally subdued crack of breaking crystal.
But there was nothing quiet or muted about the scream that erupted from across the room.
Earlier, Floyd had had to shove his way through a milling crowd of meandering partygoers. My trip was instead through a petrified forest of stunned and horrified witnesses to a murder.
Or maybe not. As I broke through the last circle of onlookers I saw there were two men in medic tunics kneeling over the body lying motionless on the floor. Their hands were red with Gaheen’s blood, their clipped voices eerily loud in the silent room as they worked feverishly on the victim. Floyd was standing just behind one of the medics, as silent and motionless as Gaheen himself.
At one edge of the circle, I noted peripherally as I crossed the gap, was a white-haired man slumped on the floor, his face ashen as he clutched a small wet spot on the outside of his upper arm. Senator Gilles, probably, with a tiny flesh wound to show where Nikki’s supposedly missed shot had scratched him.
I also noted with vague satisfaction that no one seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to him or his injury. Maybe he wasn’t as big a fish in this pond as he thought he was.
I stopped at Floyd’s side. “How is he?” I asked quietly.
“Still alive,” Floyd said, his voice shimmering with anger and despair and hatred. “Don’t know for how long.”
“Are you two with him?” the medic we were standing beside asked as he finished connecting Gaheen to a compact artificial heart.
“Yes,” Floyd said. “What can we do?”
“You can get back and give us room,” the other medic said tartly. “Give it to them.”
He pointed to a steel-clad data stick sitting in the blood beside Gaheen’s phone and wallet. The medic we were standing behind picked it up and handed it over his shoulder toward us. “Here—it says to give it to his chief assistant in case of accident. Can you two do that?”
“Yes,” Floyd said. He took the data stick, peered briefly at the small lettering on the side, and slid it into his pocket.
I glanced around the circle, stomach tensing as I spotted a couple of familiar faces. “Cherno’s men are here,” I murmured to Floyd. “Time to make ourselves scarce.”
Floyd hesitated, then reluctantly nodded. “Service door behind the serving tables,” he said. “Come on.” With a final lingering look at Gaheen, he circled the medics and headed through the crowd on the other side of the circle. I kept an eye on the thugs I’d spotted, but they were making no move to follow.
But of course they didn’t know that we’d figured out the truth. As far as they and Cherno were concerned, we were still dancing to his tune, off to tell the sad tale of Gaheen’s tragic demise.
We were back in the aircar before Floyd spoke again. “Where to?” he asked.
“The mansion,” I told him. “That’s where Cherno has to bring Nikki to make this scheme work. We have to make sure we get there first.”
“Don’t worry, we will,” Floyd said grimly as he got the aircar up off the ground. “I just hope he doesn’t bring his whole crowd with him.”
“He won’t,” I assured him. “You may not have noticed, but we barely got out of there ahead of the badgemen. They’ll have the place locked down for hours while they question everyone inside. No, Cherno and Nikki will be the only ones who’ll be coming.”
Floyd grunted. “Good.”
We were burning the air over the city when another thought suddenly occurred to me. “By the way, did you leave a sparkler on the Colonnade Center door?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry about it,” Floyd said. “I’ve got more.”
* * *
I figured Cherno and Nikki would be forty-five to sixty minutes behind us. In fact, I heard the sound of the trapdoor opening barely forty minutes after Floyd and I settled into concealment in the narrow space between the receiver module and the warehouse wall. Nikki, I guessed, had probably been driving.
I waited until the sound of their footsteps and tense conversation put them about midway between the trapdoor and the portal entrance. Then, tapping Floyd on the shoulder, I stepped out into view. “Hello, Nikki,” I called calmly. “Mr. Cherno. Party end early?”
Nikki had dropped her long gun case on the ground and drawn her Jaundance 4mm before I finished my question. “Easy,” she warned, her eyes above her veil steady on me, flicking briefly to Floyd as he joined me out in the open.
“Likewise,” I said, showing her my empty hands and nudging Floyd to follow suit. “We’re just here to talk.”
“Well, we’re not here to listen,” Cherno bit out. In contrast to Nikki’s eyes, his were blazing with anger and frustration as he jabbed a finger up toward me. “Kill them.”
“No,” Nikki said.
I hadn’t yet seen Cherno truly surprised. The expression alone was worth everything we’d been through. “What?”
“Roarke hired me for a job,” Nikki told him coolly. “Same deal as with you.”
Cherno’s eyes narrowed. “What job?”
“I don’t know,” she said, tapping her wrap. “He gave me a name in an envelope. I haven’t looked at it.”
“Why not?”
“He asked me not to.”
Cherno shot me a confused look. “And you took a contract like that?”
Nikki didn’t answer. Cherno muttered something vicious and shifted his pointing finger to Floyd. “Fine. At least kill him.”
“Certainly,” Nikki said. “I’ll need the five hundred thousand up front.”
“What the hell?” Cherno took a step toward her and grabbed for her gun. She countered with a similar step in the other direction, twitching the weapon out of his reach. “Give me that, you lousy—Hold it!” Cherno interrupted himself as Floyd crossed behind me and started circling toward Cherno’s left. Abandoning his attempt to get Nikki’s gun, Cherno jammed a hand warningly into his pocket. “Just hold it.”
“Yes, hold it,” Nikki agreed, shifting her aim toward Floyd. “You’ve put me in an awkward position, Roarke.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I doubt it,” Nikki said. “But I’m curious. When exactly did you sabotage my Ausmacher?”
“Sabotage?” Cherno bit out, his eyes still on Floyd.
“Sabotage that kept me from completing my job,” Nikki said. Her voice and eyes were still calm, but I could sense the turmoil roiling beneath the surface.
Cherno snapped a look at her, then back to Floyd. “Are you saying he’s still alive?”
“He was when we left,” Nikki said. “I saw his fingers moving just before I closed down.”
“And you just left him that way?” Cherno demanded. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Come on, Cherno, be reasonable,” I soothed. “How do you expect her to take another shot with all those people standing around gawking? Besides, you’d never have been able to pass that one off as a misfire. Actually, Nikki, it wasn’t me who fiddled with your Ausmacher. I don’t even know what he did to it.”
“It was quite clever, really,” she said. “Whoever did it knew I’d check the mechanism and rounds before the job and would certainly make sure the barrel was clear. So he put a thin coating of jellied snarling paste on the inside. Nothing I could see, and nothing my normal cleaning would clear out, but a layer that the missile had to dig through on its way out.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding understanding. “And since some of the paste clung to the tips of the stabilizing fins even after the missile left the barrel, there was an extra drag on it the whole way.”
“Exactly,” Nikki said. “Not much, but enough to slow it to the point where it wouldn’t have enough momentum to fully penetrate Gaheen’s body armor and the bone beneath it.”
“So that’s it?” Cherno demanded. “The great and terrifying Nicole Schlichting, who never misses and never fails, is just giving up?”
“Of course not,” Nikki said. “Even with the snarling paste the round would have gotten most of the way through his sternum, so unless those medics were extraordinarily good he could still die. If he didn’t . . . ” She gave a small shrug. “I took your job, Cherno. I’ll complete it.”
“When?” Cherno countered, shifting his glare from Floyd to her.
“Never,” Floyd said quietly. He reached casually into his jacket cuff—
And the edge of the trapdoor exploded in a scream and a blaze of sparks.
Cherno twisted his head to look. But Nikki knew better than be taken in by an obvious diversion. Even as Floyd snatched out his Skripka, she shifted her Jaundance toward him. The criminal enforcer versus the professional assassin, and in that frozen second I wondered distantly which of them would win the race.
Nikki.
The double boom blasted through the warehouse, briefly drowning out even the scream of Floyd’s sparkler. To my left, out of the corner of my eye I saw a small cluster of sparks as Floyd’s slug ricocheted off the portal’s hull; to my right, I saw Floyd jerk violently as Nikki’s 4mm slug slammed into his body. He twisted halfway around to his right and toppled backward onto the ground, his Skripka flying out of his hand and skittering to a stop a couple of meters closer to the trapdoor. Nikki shifted her gun warningly toward me; I raised my empty hands a couple of centimeters to remind her I was still not holding a weapon.
She and I were still facing each other in standoff mode when Cherno took a long step toward her, pulled his hand out of his pocket, and jammed a push knife into the inside of her forearm.
The attack was so unexpected that my brain never unfroze enough to grab for my plasmic. I just stood there, gawking like an idiot, as Cherno wrenched the Jaundance from Nikki’s suddenly loosened grip and backed a quick step away from her. “You won’t kill him?” he snarled. “Fine.” He leveled the gun at me—
“Ah-ah-ah,” I warned, holding up a finger. “Remember, your best shot at getting off Kanaloa is via the portal. And I’m the only one who can show you how to do that.”
For a long and tense moment he stared at me, his eyes narrowed. I stared back, mentally crossing my fingers that Nikki hadn’t told him how ridiculously simple it was. His eyes flicked to Nikki—“What about her?” he said. “She knows.”
“You really think she’s going to help you?” I countered. “Or Floyd? They both need medical attention, by the way.”
Cherno’s eyes shifted again, this time to Floyd, and I saw the crime boss’s narrowed eyes widening briefly as he saw that Floyd’s eyes were wide open and glaring in rage and pain as he held his left hand against his shoulder wound. “You didn’t kill him?” he demanded.
“I only kill when it’s a contracted job,” Nikki said, her left hand similarly clutching her right arm around the grip of the embedded push knife.
“Or when it’s personal,” I added. “You want to tell him, Nikki, or should I?”
Cherno looked back at me. “Tell me what?”
Nikki remained silent. “Me, then,” I confirmed. “It came from something she told Selene and me when she first came aboard the Ruth. She mentioned the death of Governor Ajagavakar of Golden Bough as a case study of how to botch an assassination. Ring any bells?”
There was a subtle shift in Cherno’s face. He glanced at Nikki, turned back to me. “What, you think she gave a damn about a jerk like Ajagavakar?”
“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t,” I agreed. “Which was really the point. Of all the deaths in the Spiral, why bring up that one? So Selene and I did a little digging. Did you know that six hotel employees also died in that bomb of yours?”
I looked back at Nikki. “Which one of them was it?”
For a couple of seconds Nikki didn’t speak. Then, she seemed to stir herself. “She was one of the cleaners,” she said quietly. “My partner.”
Cherno’s breath caught in his throat. “Your partner?”
“Partner, spotter, recon expert,” Nikki said. Her voice was still calm, but I felt a shiver run up my back. “Friend. There was a notice out on Ajagavakar, and I sent Amy to scout his hotel.” She paused. “And you killed her.”
“Not on purpose,” Cherno insisted, an edge of nervousness creeping into his voice. Even with the only visible gun in the room firmly in his own hand, he’d also caught some chills from her voice. “He needed to die, and no one else was doing anything about it.”
“Nikki was,” I reminded him. “So was Piper, by the way. I assume Piper’s the one who told you all this?”
“Yes,” Nikki murmured. “On Balmoral, when we were switching places. I’d never heard how that went down, or who was responsible. Piper knew both.”
For a moment no one spoke. Cherno possibly trying to find something conciliatory he could say, Nikki maybe working through the old memories, me waiting for the drama to work its way to a conclusion.
And so, naturally, that dead silence was the precise moment when the soft thud of an arriving passenger came softly from the receiver module.