CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Traveling for eleven days at plus-30 wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded. At that power output the engines had an enhanced tendency to go off-synch, and I spent a lot of time on the bridge tweaking them back on track again. I also discovered that running them that hot added an additional harmonic to their usual rumble, an odd sound that cost me a few hours of sleep over the first couple of days until my brain learned to recognize it and edit it out.
As I’d told Nikki, I’d factored the additional time that would be required for fuel stops into my eleven-day estimate. Finding planets that were on our least-time vector as well as offering a fast fueling turnaround was something of a challenge, but our spaceport data files were up to date and Selene was mostly able to find exactly what we needed. Six days into the trip we unexpectedly ended up spending an extra four hours at one of the ports when a routine mid-fueling status check turned up three engine components that our mad dash across the Spiral had stressed to the point of unreliability. Fortunately, the port had the parts we needed and piling an additional three hundred commarks on top of the regular bill bought us the expedited service we needed.
Nikki kept mostly to herself during the trip, locked in her cabin for hours on end with whatever was inside her fancy new case. Occasionally she would emerge and ask for something from the Ruth’s stock of tools and analysis instruments. I would get whatever she needed, accept her perfunctory thanks, and watch her disappear back into her cabin. Occasionally she would have meals with us, but her earlier talkative phase seemed to have passed and most of the time she simply chose what she wanted from the dayroom’s pantry, heated it if necessary, then once again disappeared into her cabin.
She also seemed to be going out of her way to avoid interacting with Selene, though that might have been my imagination. Whether or not the snubbing was deliberate, it was clear that Selene was more than happy to keep their mutual distance.
We were fifteen hours from Meima when I decided it was time Nikki and I had a private talk.
It took nearly a minute and three separate sets of knocks before she finally unlocked the cabin hatch. “Yes?” she asked, her face and voice making it clear that she wasn’t in the mood for interruptions.
“I wanted to tell you we’ll be on Meima tomorrow,” I said.
“Thank you.” She reached for the hatch control—
“I also wanted to talk to you about a job,” I added.
Her hand paused, hovering over the control. “What sort of job?”
“The kind you get paid for.”
She snorted. “Right,” she said. “Like you have the means—”
She stopped in mid-sentence, her gaze shifting from my face to the fan of ten hundred-thousand-commark certified bank checks I held up in front of me.
For a moment we stood that way, silent and still. Then slowly, reluctantly, she returned her eyes to my face. “Come in,” she said, her tone subtly changed as she stepped aside out of the hatchway.
“Thank you.” I walked over to the fold-down desk and chair across from the bed, laid the checks on the desk, and sat down. Nikki closed and sealed the hatch and, after a moment’s hesitation, went over to the bed and seated herself on the edge.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“You said earlier that your fee was half a million,” I said. “I have twice that here.”
“So I see,” she said. “Let me guess. This Trent bounty hunter?”
“No, I can handle Trent,” I said. “I have something more interesting in mind. First of all, let me make sure I’m clear on how exactly this works. I hire you for half a million and give you a name, and assuming he or she isn’t on your untouchables list I’m permanently immune from anything anyone might want you to do to me?”
“A name and all the rest of the necessary data,” she corrected, her face taking on a knowing expression. “You can’t just say John Wong and put yourself on the list while I try to figure out which of the millions of John Wongs you’re talking about.”
“Sure, obviously,” I said. “But I hand you money and specify a target, and that does it?”
“Yes,” she said, the knowing look deepening. “Though as you said, that target can’t be on my list. So who do you anticipate is going to hire me to take you out?”
“Me? No one,” I said. “I mean, really. Can you see anyone in my circle of acquaintances having a spare half mil lying around?”
“You have a full mil,” she said, gesturing to the checks on the desk. “Where did you get it, anyway?”
“An anonymous benefactor,” I said. “I can’t say anything more.”
“Not a problem,” she said. “Just bear in mind that it’s only the person who hands me the money who goes on my list. Just because you’re on it doesn’t mean your anonymous benefactor will be. Who’s the target?”
“In a minute,” I said. “First, I’m curious. Why did you let Selene and me see your face when you’ve worked so hard over the years to stay anonymous?”
“Not really any of your business.”
“Actually, I think I can make a case that it is,” I said. “Now that your secret is out, at least among some of the bounty hunter community, Selene and I have the same bull’s-eye painted on our backs that you do.”
Nikki gave a little snort. “Hardly. What would anyone gain by taking you out?”
“What would anyone gain by taking you out?” I countered. “As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there are only six planetary warrants on you, and you have to be physically on those worlds before a hunter can make a move. Just hauling you in from somewhere else won’t work.” I raised my eyebrows. “Especially given the likelihood that such a brazen hunter would get himself killed en route.”
“Could be revenge, then,” she said, ignoring my little addendum. Probably figured it was obvious. “There are people out there who blame me for killing their friends or business associates.” She considered. “Considerably more people than are, in fact, justified in that belief. If that matters to you.”
“It does,” I said, though offhand I wasn’t sure how much. Whether she’d murdered ten or a thousand, she was still a murderer. It was something I needed to remember. “A name like yours probably attracts copycats.”
“Along with people who are too cowardly to take responsibility for their own actions,” she said, her lip twisting with contempt. “You had something of a name yourself back in the day. You must have dealt with some of that.”
“Not really,” I said. “When you’re swapping out warm bodies for cold cash you have to physically show up at a badgeman office. We have more of a problem with other hunters slipping in to poach a target.”
“Especially for you, I’d guess,” she said, eyeing me curiously. “I understand you were more of a throw rug for that sort of thing than most other hunters.”
“You mean because I wouldn’t shoot a poacher on sight or suspicion?” I countered, feeling my stomach tighten. “Yeah, I probably lost more than my share of targets to the opportunists. But as my father used to say, Just because you let someone live doesn’t necessarily mean he’s happy with that life. A lot of the poachers I ran into had bigger problems than just me, and I doubt most of them ever worked them out.”
“In other words, they eventually got themselves killed, only not by your hand?”
“I’m sure some of them did.” With a couple of them, I certainly hoped that was the case. “But that reputation had a few side benefits that I doubt any of the poachers ever understood. I got at least two dead-or-alive targets to surrender instead of shooting it out because they knew I wouldn’t kill them in cold blood as soon as they showed themselves.”
“Probably figured they could find a way to get the drop on you along the way to the payment.”
“I’m sure some of them thought that,” I agreed. “Didn’t do them any good, as it turned out. But as my father used to say, Sometimes one of the rewards of being a nice guy is that the other guy’s not-so-nice hopes get dashed that much harder.”
“That’s cute,” Nikki said. “Enough stalling. Who’s my target?”
I braced myself. Here was where it was going to get tricky. “The name’s in here,” I said, pulling out a sealed envelope and setting it on top of the bank checks. “My one condition is that you not open it until I tell you to.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?” she said, her tone gone suddenly ominous.
“You’ll have the million and the envelope,” I said, fighting to keep my own voice casual against that look and voice. “When I say the word—”
“No,” she cut me off. “No, let me be clearer. Hell no. Who do you think I am, some stock-manipulating futures broker?”
“I’m offering double your usual fee,” I reminded her.
“I don’t care,” she said. I’d expected her to start getting angry at this point, but she was still projecting that ominous calm.
Which, in its own way, was more terrifying than black disdain or even loud fury would have been. “Will you at least think about it?” I asked.
“This conversation is over,” she said. “Take your money and your envelope and go.”
There was clearly no point in continuing. Silently, I picked up the envelope and the bank checks and put them back in my pocket. “Thank you for your time,” I said, and left the cabin.
Selene was on the bridge when I arrived. “Everything all right?” she asked, her pupils wary as her nostrils flared a bit in my direction.
“Just had a talk with Nikki,” I said, keeping my voice casual. So far I hadn’t shared any of this plan with Selene, nor had I told her about the million commarks I’d talked out of Nask. If I was lucky, she’d never have to know about either. “Told her we were about to hit Meima.”
“Yes,” Selene murmured, her eyelashes going into their flutter. She could tell something was off with my current emotions, and was trying to figure out what it was. “Did she happen to mention why she’d been spending so much time in her cabin?”
“I assumed she was playing with her new toy,” I said, frowning. “Was there more to it than that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her pupils frowning in turn. “It’s just . . . that cleaner/enhancer you use sometimes on your arm?”
Reflexively, I flexed the fingers of my artificial left arm. The prosthetic was mostly self-maintaining, but the manufacturer recommended that its electronic and mechanical systems be looked at and maybe cleaned or tweaked once or twice a year. “The Tixi 455, or the CorroStop?”
“The one for the sensors and the sensor leads.”
“The Tixi 455,” I said. “What about it?”
“I smelled something similar a few hours ago when I happened to bump into her in the dayroom,” she said. “It wasn’t the same thing you use, but it was similar.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I said, running the possibilities through my mind. “She’s way too good a shot to get it all from long practice and clean living. A prosthetic arm, maybe with an exotic targeting sensor setup in the knuckles of her gun hand, would go a long way to explaining it.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Does she have a prosthetic arm?”
“I don’t know,” Selene said. “The scent from yours is a permanent part of the Ruth’s air filtration, which makes it nearly impossible to sort out whether any of it is coming from her. The only way to be sure would be to run a close-scent examination.”
“As in sniffing up each of her arms?”
“Yes,” she said, apparently missing the utter ridiculousness of the picture her comment had created in my mind. “If you can come up with an excuse that will persuade her, I’m willing to try.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “But as my father used to say, It’s easy to persuade someone to do what he already wants to do. The tricky part is convincing him he wants what you want. But we’ll keep a prosthetic arm as our working assumption. You find us a landing field yet?”
“There are three possibilities,” she said, pulling up a map of Barcarolle and the Trandosh archeological dig, a vast area a few kilometers southwest of the city that included about five square kilometers of hills, woodlands, and a small creek. “Perhaps more like two and a half.”
“Half a spaceport?”
“A moment,” she said, touching a spot in the northwest part of Barcarolle proper. “This is the city’s main spaceport. It’s a fair distance from the dig, but it will be easier for the Ruth to sit there without drawing unwelcome attention.”
“Especially if we use one of our fake IDs,” I said, nodding. “Next?”
“The dig also has its own landing field,” she said, pointing to a much smaller spot at the southern end of the dig’s boundary. “It’s generally only for people from the three universities who’ve been working the area for the past fifteen years, but we might be able to come up with a story that will get us in.”
“That might be tricky,” I said. “Even if we could, the Ruth would stick out pretty badly among those boxy midsize freighters universities usually pick up on surplus. What’s the half port?”
“Here,” she said, pointing to a wide, deep pit just west of the dig area’s center. “It’s not listed as functional, but you can see the mountings for a pair of perimeter grav beam towers.”
I frowned at the image, an unpleasant chill running up my back. “Just one pair?”
“Yes.” She looked at me, and I could see in her pupils that she had tracked to the same conclusion I had. “Do you think . . . the Icarus?”
“Why else would there be a couple of grav towers out in the middle of nowhere?” I asked. “That must be how they got the thing off the ground. I assume the towers themselves are gone?”
“I don’t see them on the satellite views,” Selene said. “But they could have just been folded down and buried under a loose layer of dirt and plants.”
“Or disassembled but still nearby,” I said, studying the image some more. “Either way, they might be quickly available if someone finds something else that needs to be lifted. I presume the main focus of the dig has moved somewhere else on the site?”
“Yes, it seems to be over here,” she said, moving her finger to a raggedly forested area half a kilometer west of the grav tower mountings. “The terrain there seems to be mostly small hills.”
“And small depressions,” I said absently, a fresh plan beginning to form in the back of my mind. My original thought had been to get us downwind of the dig and then move in from there, hoping Selene picked up a trace of portal metal. But if those hills were what I was starting to suspect they were . . . and if my current theory on Nask’s missing Gemini portal was correct . . .
“Gregory?”
I snapped my attention back to Selene. She had the nostril-and-eyelash thing going again. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’ve been working on a theory, that’s all. And I think I just figured out where to start testing it.”
“In the Trandosh dig?”
“That’s the place,” I confirmed. “Go ahead and ask for a slot in the main Barcarolle spaceport. We’re going to have to travel no matter where we put down, and we might as well go for as much anonymity as we can get.”
“And Nikki?”
I rubbed my cheek. I didn’t really want her along with us on this one.
On the other hand, I didn’t really want her alone on the Ruth, either. “We’ll let her decide what she wants to do,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll want to go off and sample the Barcarolle nightlife.”
“Yes,” Selene murmured. “Because Nikki wandering around a city by herself never leads to trouble.”
I huffed out a sigh. “Yeah. Good point.”
* * *
The landing in Barcarolle went smoothly and, as far as I could tell, without anyone paying any untoward attention to us. We put down in our assigned pad—it was flat rather than a cradle, which meant having to deal with the zigzag instead of the much easier ramp—set up a schedule for the fuelers and the maintenance people, and got ready to head out.
Nikki wasn’t really interested in staying with the ship. Nor was she particularly excited at the prospect of coming with Selene and me. She absolutely wasn’t interested in investigating whatever passed for entertainment on Meima. In the end, she somewhat reluctantly opted to tag along with us.
As we walked down the zigzag, I tried to figure out whether or not I was happy with her decision. By the time we reached the runaround stand, I gave it up as not worth the effort.
With the wind currently consisting of light and variable breezes from the northwest, I took us in a looping path around the southeast side of the dig. Finding a low but promising ridge in the middle of the airflow, I ushered Selene up the grassy slope to the top.
Given the sheer size of the grounds, I didn’t really expect her to get anything at that distance. Still, I’d held some private hopes, and couldn’t help feeling a bit of a letdown when her efforts came up dry.
“I’m sure the view here is lovely for people who like this sort of thing,” Nikki said in a muffled voice. She’d passed up her usual city-strolling wraparound for a pair of rugged jeans and a fleece-collar jacket more suitable for tramping around the countryside, plus heavy boots and gloves, and she’d swapped out her fashionable veil for an allergy mask. The mask was a better overall match for her ensemble, but the thickness of the material made her a lot harder to understand. “Whatever you’re hoping to accomplish out here, I don’t think it’s working.”
“Don’t worry, this was just Act One,” I assured her as we retraced our steps down the hill toward our runaround. “Act Two should be much more interesting.”
“It had better be,” she warned. “Otherwise, I’m taking the runaround back to the ship and you two can find your own way home.”
“Trust me,” I said. “You remember me telling you about the portals? Let’s go see the spot where the very first one was found.”
* * *
I hadn’t expected there to be a plaque, or a collection of personal and historical items, or scribbled notes from the archeologists and techs who’d found the portal and built the Icarus around it. Even so, the site was something of a letdown.
“So where was the portal?” Nikki asked as we gazed into the tiered hole from our chosen spot at the crater’s southern rim. The ground on this part of the rim was a good six meters higher than the surrounding terrain, higher even than the ridge we’d just climbed to the southeast. Apparently, this was where the original digging party had piled all the dirt they’d dug out.
“It was somewhere down there,” I said, looking once into the pit and then turning my attention to the surrounding terrain. Selene had said the archeologists were currently working to the west, among the hills and dips we’d noted earlier. Unlike the area immediately around the pit, the ground in that direction boasted a sparse covering of maybe a dozen varieties of trees and bushes. From our current vantage point I could also see there was more bumpy ground to the southwest, though the hills there seemed fewer and farther between. But they were definitely there.
I shifted my attention northward, then east. Fewer trees in both directions, plus flatter ground—pretty much the same as the landscape we’d just driven through south of the Icarus pit.
A lot of small hills to the west, occasional ones to the north and southwest, nothing at all anywhere else. Exactly what my current theory predicted.
Which didn’t necessarily mean I was right, of course. I’d charged off in the wrong direction many times before.
But if I was right, the end of the rainbow ought to be due west, just beyond the hilly section.
“Interesting,” Nikki murmured.
“What is?” I asked, turning back to her. She was gazing west, her eyes tracking down the edge of the crater ridge we were currently standing on. As far as I could tell, there was nothing down there but dirt, some scraggly bushes, a couple of broken retaining walls, and a whole bunch of random chunks of concrete.
“That bush down there, the set of three about a hundred twenty meters away,” she said, nodding toward the cluster. “There’s an animal lurking beneath the middle one.”
I frowned. The bushes’ branches had decent overall coverage, spreading out a good half meter to all sides. But even though they were slender and their associated leaf complement was somewhat sparse, I couldn’t see anything in there except the ground itself. “What kind of animal?” I asked. “We talking something dangerous, like whatever the local equivalent of a wolverine or rattlesnake is?”
“Depends on what you consider dangerous,” Nikki said. “I think it’s a Kalixiri outrider.”
I felt my mouth go suddenly dry. A Kalixiri outrider? As in maybe one of Ixil’s outriders?
Silently, I cursed my own stupidity. Of course it was one of Ixil’s. The fact that Meima hadn’t been on the admiral’s list of possible portal locations was, in retrospect, an obvious indicator that the Icarus Group was doing something here and didn’t want Selene and me crashing their party. Especially not with someone like Nikki in tow. And depending on the seriousness of the project, it might reasonably include one of the group’s chief troubleshooters, Ixil or Jordan McKell or both.
And of course, the fact that we’d come in under one of the Icarus Group’s fake IDs would have been an instant flag for whichever member of their team was monitoring the local traffic. We might as well have brought a bullhorn and maybe shot off a few flares.
Still, as my father used to say, When you get that dazzling flash of insight, make sure the other guy doesn’t know you’ve gone temporarily blind. “A Kalixiri what?” I asked.
Nikki gave me an incredulous look. “You seriously don’t know what Kalixiri are?”
“Of course I do,” I said with the proper edge of offended professionalism. “Scaly, lizard-faces, smarter than they look. Are you talking about the furry ferrets some of them carry around as pets or something?”
“They’re hardly pets,” Nikki said, her bemusement edging into scorn. “They’re called outriders, and they act as the Kalix’s scouts.”
“Really?” I asked, looking back down at the bush. This time I spotted a small movement from beneath the leaves.
“What could someone possibly be scouting here?” Selene asked. “We’re not doing anything illegal.” She looked pointedly at me. “We’re certainly not doing anything very interesting.”
“Just because there’s nothing here doesn’t mean we won’t find something somewhere else,” I said stiffly, silently giving thanks for a partner who was smart enough and quick enough to play a deflection when the situation called for it. If that was Pix or Pax down there, he probably wasn’t so much scouting as he was keeping track of us. “As for the thing down there, whatever the Kalixiri think it’s good for, it’s still just an animal. Probably out hunting grubs or plants or whatever.”
“It’s stupid assumptions like that that usually get a person killed,” Nikki said tartly. “Let’s follow it and figure out what it’s doing.”
“Yes, but—fine,” I conceded with an air of irritated resignation. “Whatever. Go on, we’re right behind you.”
We headed down the ridge, Nikki taking the lead, Selene following, me bringing up the rear. If that was Pix or Pax, and if he’d been ordered to find us, he ought to be on his way back to Ixil by now to report.
But he was still crouched unmoving beneath the bush. Was he not, in fact, watching us, but on some other mission entirely? Or had Ixil’s instructions to him missed the possibility that we would spot him?
Abruptly, Selene’s stride faltered. “Northwest,” she said urgently, pointing toward another set of bushes fifty meters away. “Brown and gray with white spots.”
Reflexively, I dropped my hand to my plasmic’s grip. There was something brown and gray over there, all right. Something three times the size of a Kalixiri outrider, and with the jaws, teeth, and claws of a predator.
And it was moving slowly and stealthily in the outrider’s direction.
I muttered a curse. Whatever orders Ixil had given the outrider, self-preservation probably superseded them. Worse, I couldn’t let the animal be killed or even injured, which meant coming to his defense. Nikki would certainly wonder at my sudden change in attitude, and a suspicious assassin wasn’t exactly an ideal traveling companion.
I was still trying to come up with a plan when Nikki produced her Fafnir from inside her coat and casually fired off a plasma shot toward the stalking predator. It jerked back as the shot splattered on the ground in front of its snout, then turned and bounded away through the dirt and undergrowth until it was lost to sight behind one of the hills.
I took a deep breath. “Well,” I said lamely. “That worked.”
“Couldn’t have it distracting our outrider,” she said, slipping the Fafnir back into concealment. “Now we can watch and see where it goes.”
“Yes,” I said. “Good plan. I thought you never missed.”
“I didn’t miss,” she said, throwing a puzzled look at me. “I wasn’t trying to kill it. Why would I? I just needed to nudge it back. A plasmic shot a few centimeters in front of an animal’s snout usually does the trick.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s reasonable,” I said. Fifty meters away, a precise shot, and as far as I’d been able to tell she hadn’t even taken time to aim. Definitely some kind of sensor-link to her gun hand.
Except that she was still wearing her gloves, which meant my theory that the sensors were in an artificial hand’s knuckles was now out the window.
In or around her eyes, then? But putting sensors in either of those places was notoriously difficult to do without leaving marks, and there was nothing anywhere on her face that I could see.
“There it goes,” Selene said.
I looked back at the three bushes. The outrider was on the move, all right, scampering in a zigzag path away from us toward one of the sections of broken retaining wall.
“Come on,” Nikki said, starting down the slope after him. “Don’t get too close—we don’t want to spook it.”
Privately, I thought it unlikely that getting too close was going to be a problem. The outrider was faster than we were and clearly knew where he was going, while we had to pick our way carefully over the rocks and debris lest one of us twist a knee or ankle.
He reached the retaining wall and disappeared behind it. Nikki muttered something under her breath and picked up her pace. I did the same, catching up with Selene and risking my footing by taking a quick look into her eyes. Her pupils showed a fresh revelation, something no doubt gleaned from a new scent in the air—
“There!” Nikki snapped, pointing. “Hell.”
I grimaced as I spotted the reason for her annoyance. The outrider we’d been following had emerged from the retaining wall right where it had gone in and was now proceeding southwest at a good clip.
The problem was that another outrider had also appeared, this one from beside a bush at the other end of the wall, and was making his way northeast toward the other side of the Icarus pit.
“Which one is ours?” I asked, slowing.
“Good question,” Nikki agreed. “Any idea?”
“That one,” Selene said quickly, pointing at the outrider heading northeast.
A little too quickly, maybe. “How do you know?” Nikki asked suspiciously.
“I just do,” Selene said, her voice again a bit rushed.
“Good enough for me,” I put in. “Selene and I will follow that one—you track the other.”
“Or vice versa,” Nikki said, her eyes narrowed as she looked back and forth between us. “I’ll take that one.” She gestured toward the outrider Selene had tagged, still making his way around the pit. “You two can have the other. What are you waiting for? Go.”
“Yeah. Fine.” With a show of reluctance, I unglued my feet from the ground and headed off after our designated outrider. “Come on, Selene.”
As my father used to say, Your first goal is usually to prove yourself trustworthy. But sometimes it can be even more useful to prove the exact opposite.
* * *
We found Ixil lying in one of the pits a few meters back from the retaining wall where Pix and Pax had set off on their diversionary runs. “We thought the two of you would show up sooner or later,” he said without preamble, sounding rather unhappy with us.
Possibly his unhappiness was just with the current situation. But probably it was with us.
“We thought it might be a good place to find the other end of Cherno’s portal,” I said, looking over my shoulder. From halfway down Ixil’s pit I could see the top of Nikki’s head as she followed the other outrider. “I’d ask why Trandosh wasn’t on the list the admiral gave us, but we don’t have the time. Who else is here?”
“Jordan and a small dig crew,” he said. “Is that the assassin the admiral told us about?”
“Yes,” I said. “And she’s touchy about her anonymity and can shoot a commark cent off your head, so warn everyone to keep their distance. What exactly are you doing here?”
“Investigating,” he said, the vague word and leave-it-alone tone telling me it was none of my business. “You?”
“Like I said, looking for the missing end of Cherno’s Gemini portal.”
Ixil cocked his iguana-like head. “You’re not joking, are you? Do you seriously expect to find a second portal here?”
“Why not?” I countered. “Fidelio had two Gemini portals sitting practically back-to-back.”
“Yes, but those were Geminis,” he said. “Icarus is a full-range portal. Why would the creators bother putting a Gemini this close to it?”
“The Icari,” I corrected him. “Selene and I are calling them the Icari now. Classier name. I have a theory.”
I looked back around. Nikki had paused and seemed to be searching for something. Had the outrider given her the slip? “Unfortunately, there’s no time for that, either. But if I’m right, the portal will be west of here, probably near where the series of hills and dips ends.”
Ixil looked at Selene. “And you think that why?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Get some ground turned over out there, focusing on area rather than depth. With luck, Selene and I should be able to leave Nikki on the Ruth and come give you a hand locating it. If enough of the scent gets through—”
“A moment,” Ixil cut me off. “You told the admiral your passenger’s name was Piper. You’re on a first-name basis now?”
“Sort of,” I said, taking a step back. Nikki had definitely stopped. “Lot of smoke and mirrors on this one. We have to go.”
We met Nikki about midway from where we’d all started. “Any luck?” I asked.
“No, it disappeared behind some rocks and more of this broken concrete,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was just hunting for food.” She eyed me thoughtfully. “Though that raises the whole question of what a Kalix is doing out here in the first place.”
“Maybe he’s with one of the archeology groups,” I offered. “Or maybe he’s a tourist looking for souvenirs. People collect the strangest things.”
“Maybe,” Nikki said. “We might want to look around a little more.”
“Well, if you want to do it today, you’re doing it on your own,” I warned. “I need to head over to the Barcarolle StarrComm center and check for messages.”
“From?”
From the guy who put out the bounty notice on you. The guy I promised to deliver you to. “No one in particular,” I said aloud. “You just never know when something interesting might pop up.”
* * *
The message I’d hoped for was indeed waiting in my mail drop.
Arrived in Barcarolle on Meima. Will be waiting at Bosling Red taverno every day at nine p.m., local time, until you arrive. Have package ready for pickup.
I scowled at the note. I’d hoped to announce my own arrival and maneuver him into sending a follow-up note suggesting a time and place for our meeting. With only one StarrComm center in Barcarolle, I might then be able to spot him as he went into or out of the center when sending that message.
Of course, that assumed he’d use the Barcarolle facility instead of taking the trouble to fly off to one of the planet’s other half dozen locales. He might be cagey enough to do that. But now even that vague hope was gone. With his proposed meeting schedule already in place, there was no need for him to do anything more than show up and wait for me to make contact. I could either follow up on his terms, or give up and chuck the whole thing.
I thought about Nikki, and what she would say if she found out what I was doing. But this had to end, and tonight was as good a time as any.
I pulled out my phone and punched for Selene. “Everything all right at the ship?” I asked when she answered.
“Yes,” she said. “Is there a problem?”
“Probably,” I said. “We got an answer, and it looks like the game is on. I need you to meet me at the Bosling Red taverno in”—I checked my watch—“half an hour.”
“Do you want me to bring Nikki?”
“No,” I said. “But be sure to pack your plasmic. There’s a good chance we’re going to need all the firepower we can get.”