Diamond Sphere

by F P Adriani

  *

  When we got back into the bar, the navigator and the doctor were no longer around; they’d gone to get the gas delivery set up and to get some supplies to make repairs.

  Tan, Hu, Chuck, Shayla and I all sat down at a big booth table set into one of the bar’s corners. The owner or someone, a large jolly sort of person—he came over to our table and made a very big deal over pleasing Hu. But he called her Perry. He winked at her a couple of times: clearly, this was Hu’s friend, and they had a prior understanding. How strange that she effectively had a celebrity status on Diamond….

  Another strange thing: we got along quite well that night at the table. Even Tan relaxed. Apparently, the fine booze worked some mood-magic on the five of us. Looking around at all their good-mood faces, I could almost believe we were, of all things, friends.

  We sat there for hours. We listened to music, we drank, we even talked—not about much. Just about the people in the room, just people-watching. Then we discussed the wall posters depicting various things in the popular Diamond culture. I started forgetting why we were there.

  Then, two things happened: the table conversation grew darker, and someone new showed up in the place. Or he had been there for a while but I hadn’t noticed him at first.

  So far I’d only seen him in profile for a brief moment. Now I stared at him as he stood near the crowded bar trying to order a drink. His blond hair fell to his shoulders, a new-looking thin scar horizontally bisected the side of his face. He had a tall, muscular build….

  Hu’s back was facing the guy, but she must have spotted my staring. She glanced over her shoulder now. “Who’s got your attention, Pia?”

  Tilting my head a bit, I said, “That guy there—he looks familiar to me…. But I can’t remember where I saw him. I’ve only seen his profile tonight. Black shirt, long blond hair, muscles.”

  “I see him. That looks like Ronin,” Chuck said.

  Now Hu nodded. “Yeah, Ronin Greg—er, how do you say it?” Her head shot over to Chuck.

  “Gregorievina,” he said then. “He’s got terrible teeth. I’d know him anywhere because of them. He thinks they look good. He’s pretty notorious in the underground. He freelances for the HRA on Hera and other scum.”

  I looked at him. “I don’t know any HRA.”

  “Pia, he probably means the Heran Resources Alliance,” Tan put in. “They control the gas production and distribution.”

  Hu’s fake dark head turned to him. “Yeah, you think so, Tan? Ask yourself: who controls them?” She continued talking—or more correctly, she and Tan began debating.

  Then, suddenly, his face looking annoyed, Tan shot off his seat, said he had to use the bathroom, and stormed away.

  But I barely paid attention to him: my mind had wandered because the first object of our discussion had finally turned his head in our direction more. And now I stilled—except for my hands, which gripped the table’s edge.

  The man wasn’t looking at us seated there; he was looking to our left. But his face was unmistakable now: The Festival bomber.

  “Goddammit. It’s him,” I growled, almost shooting up from my seat.

  But Chuck said, “Hold it,” as his right hand shot out and grabbed my wrist hard, preventing me from bolting.

  “Chuck’s right, Pia,” Hu said. “Don’t mess with Ronin. He’d kill his own kids, if he had any. But—who is he to you?” She looked up at my face.

  I shook my arm free from Chuck’s fingers. “Like you don’t know? He bombed The Diamond Sand Festival last year.”

  Hu’s eyes narrowed very sharply at me. “Oh not that again…” she said. And she added some more words, but I didn’t hear them. I was counting—in my head. One, two, three….

  I cut off Hu in mid-sentence of whatever the hell she’d been saying. “You got a pen and paper? I need something to write on—fast!”

  Why the fuck hadn’t I added up all of this sooner? Now I remembered that Festival report from Tan’s box, the bit about the liquid-fuel explosive in the bombs. Then there was that other report….

  Hu slipped a hand into her bag; then she shoved a pen and paper toward me along the tabletop as I yanked my case pack-straps back onto my shoulders.

  “Spell his name for me,” I said fast to Chuck. So he did, shrugging at Hu as he started saying the letters.

  I wrote them down. R-o-n-i-n G-r-e-g-o-r-i-e-v-i-n-a. Five letters in the first name, twelve in the last. Blank Gblank—it had to be. My parents, the bomb, the bomber.

  Just as this knowledge hit me, Ronin’s head turned again, right to me. We both stilled, our eyes on each other’s eyes, and we remained stunned like that for a long tense moment.

  …Then, slowly, his lips slid into his evil and brown-toothed grin; then he raised his right hand above his eyes, sarcastically saluting me.

  This time, Chuck couldn’t stop me. I jumped onto the bench seat then onto the table, rushing off the table’s front in Ronin’s direction, my eyes on his back as he bolted out the front door.

  I couldn’t get far enough fast enough; the place was too fucking crowded. I shoved people out of my way, but it was no good—by the time I got outside, my gun poised for action, Ronin was gone. My feet pumped in three different directions, checking around corners and around buildings—but no goddamn luck.

  “Where the fuck did he go?” I said, shaking with rage as I walked back up to the bar’s door—

  —where Tan rushed out. “Pia!” he shouted. “What the—they said you took off—”

  “It was the bomber from The Festival—the one who almost killed me. I saw him—HERE. His name—it’s seventeen letters, last name starts with a Geeeeeee.”

  “So what?” Tan asked, his dark brow lowering.

  I just stared at him at first. “My parents, the bombing—don’t you fucking remember?”

  Now Hu and Chuck came out the doorway. “What have you got—a deathwish?” Chuck said in his baritone way.

  My head shot to him and Hu. “So how the hell do you know Ronin?”

  Hu frowned. “Who said I know him? I know of him. He’s a known gun-for-hire—he’s worked for Heran gangsters. I’d never deal with him. I don’t hang around with indiscriminate killers,” she finished, pointing her words at me with a turn of her head and her now-cold face.

  “I should have never agreed to this deal,” I said in an icy voice, walking away from the bar and away from all of them.

  However, they only followed me. I spun back around and faced Hu. “You led me on to him—I think he’s the one—he killed my parents. The bomb, in the file you gave me. His name was blacked out. But you conveniently didn’t tell me who he was.”

  “You think I knew that? I did not. I gave you what I thought was relevant in general. I knew only what was there. And what makes you think it’s him anyway?”

  “His name, the letters in it. The fuel in that explosion and The Festival bombing—oh I just know it’s him. Where is he now?”

  “Well, he was here only moments ago—“

  “No, I mean usually—what’s been his path?”

  “How am I supposed to know—” Hu began saying. But Chuck pressed a hand to her wrist, silencing her.

  “He’s Earth-born,” Chuck said to me. “I know he was on Crayton two years ago. The brown teeth—they chew a leaf there that permanently stains them. But he’s been floating in and out of Diamond for twenty years, at least.”

  “Goddamn this planet,” I said fast as I suddenly walked away from them all once again.

  *

  I felt one of the hottest angers I’d ever felt in my whole life: my parents had left Diamond in an act of violence at Ronin’s hands, I had been forced to leave Diamond because of that act of violence, but apparently that creep and his violent hands had been enjoying Diamond almost the whole time. It just wasn’t fair….

  I stood alone on a back street and pulled my scanner from my case; Tan suddenly ran up to me.

  “Pia, what the hell are you doing running of
f like this!”

  “I’ve got to go back to the bar,” I growled, not at him, just at the Universe in general.

  “Duh, gee, that’s great—so what?”

  Pulling a face, I shook my scanner at him as I kept moving.

  When we reached the bar, I saw that the others had gone back inside to the same table. The doctor was sitting there too now. Apparently, they’d either been waiting for Tan and me, or we still couldn’t go back into the transport, or maybe both those things were true.

  I stood just inside the place’s door and began surreptitiously moving the scanner everywhere, including along the bar’s edge. I pushed the buttons to run the matching program, then I shoved the scanner into my jacket pocket and went back over to the table.

  “So you’re still in one piece,” Hu said to me then, slowly shaking her fake head up at me.

  Now I asked, “Don’t you think staying here is unsafe?”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice. We need a few more hours before we can safely go inside and lift off.”

  “You don’t think it’s strange that he showed up here? This is supposed to be a nice place. Why would someone like him be floating around in a nice place near The Grasslands?”

  For a long moment, no one responded, during which they either stared down into their drinks or up at me.

  Then Hu said, her eyes narrowing at the room, “It could be a coincidence.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said in a very dry voice. I heard the scanner’s tinkling electrical sound. Then I pulled it out and saw the match.

  I held up the video screen at Hu. “This is from a partial print at the Castano house. It matches prints I just took from here. Still think tonight’s just a coincidence?”

  *

  That hadn’t been the only match: the scanner yielded the same one for TNI. Ronin had been there too.

  In the bar still, Hu debated with me about my discovery. “It could be someone else’s prints both here and there….”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely.”

  “Pia’s trying to tell you something important and you’re not listening,” Tan said in an annoyed voice, finally speaking out for me.

  “Yep. I’ve just got another match for….” My voice died when I looked at the table’s occupants and spotted Chuck’s frowning face. If I gave them this information, he certainly wouldn’t like it—I was sure of that.

  I slid my scanner back into my jacket pocket. Then I said, “It doesn’t matter. I know what I know. You crowd can ignore that or trust me for once.”

  Hu’s eyes were a mixture of both curiosity and wariness. “All right. Let’s say you’re right. What does this mean?”

  “I…don’t want to talk about this right now. Maybe later.” I gave Hu a meaningful glare that I hoped she interpreted correctly as saying, Let’s You And I Talk Privately.

  *

  About two hours later we were back on the transport ready to take off. Everything had gone well there; the ship had been repaired and refueled.

  I moved down the hall, but before I could walk into the bunk room with Tan, Hu pulled me aside and asked me-only to come to her room.

  When we got there, she turned to me. “So what did you want to say to me in the bar?”

  “Do you know The Neon Institute?”

  She blinked a little, her light-brown eyes looking surprised. “Somewhat. I know of it—yes.”

  “At the bar you wondered who was behind the HRA. I think it might be TNI, or maybe the HRA’s behind TNI. Don’t know which is which, but maybe one’s the tail, the other’s the head.” I thought back to when I was on the Heran rail and I’d mentally drawn that line containing TNI, Amy and John. But maybe I’d had that wrong: maybe it was really a wheel, with TNI at the central hub and the others a single spoke each around the hub. There could also be other spokes I wasn’t aware of….

  “You’ve mentioned Heran gangsters to me.” I gave Hu a pointed-with-sore-feelings-attached look because she’d first mentioned gangsters while holding me in that cave. “Like maybe they cross planets, like with The Festival bombing, which Ronin did.”

  Hu suddenly snorted. “Pia, Ronin’s always for hire, and there’s more than one gangster organization on Hera. It’s definitely true that TNI’s very very wealthy. But they’re a private organization. And the HRA’s supposed to be publicly owned.”

  “…So? Human societies have a long history of private organizations secretly buying out public ones. Back-scratching and pay-offs—you name it. What’s to stop a group of people who want a monopoly on something where that isn’t allowed? They invent a public company or they buy up controlling interest. They use a whole bunch of individual people—alive, dead—whatever—to buy shares in each of their names. But the one group behind it all is the real owner. Monopoly by stealth.

  “Maybe the HRA’s a front. TNI’s got an amazing museum with some amazing specimens. And that’s only what they show the public. Maybe both places, TNI and then effectively the HRA, are on the hunt for new treasure. And they fixated on Amy for that.”

  “That’s an incredible story,” Hu said. Then she sighed hard. “If only we had proof, and people would believe it.” Her thoughtful eyes shifted to the ceiling for a moment. “Whatever the case, I’m thinking that maybe this isn’t caused by one thing. Even I’ve been trying to pinpoint that lately. But maybe multiple motives are involved here.”

  I nodded. “Multiple people too.”

  She looked at me now. “Meaning?”

  “The person who took a shot at me in that hotel. You know him relatively well.”

  At first she just stared at me with questioning eyes. Then those eyes finally shifted up to the ceiling again, only this time in frustration. “John. So that’s what you didn’t want to tell me earlier. In front of Chuck, I take it…. Wait a minute—couldn’t all the fingerprints be John’s?”

  My head shook fast. “Not goddamn likely. There were two clearly different sets in the bar. And he was on Hera shooting at me shortly before the Castano house was attacked. But he’s allied with this TNI now—that’s clear. His refinery’s boarded up—must have gone out of business a while ago. Guess he needed the money. Or he got greedy. Lots of people do.”

  “Why the hell didn’t I know all this about him?” she said, sounding furious for the first time that day, furious both at someone else and at herself. That Hu hated making mistakes was becoming obvious….

  “Because you’re here and he was there,” I said now. “No matter how many eyes you might have there, Herans can easily be bought off. It’s a goddamn tradition there…. So, here’s the question: how much do you think he knows? Did you tell John everything Amy told you—all the info you have?”

  “No…though he could have been listening in when I spoke to others. How can I know for certain? I really don’t know what’s happened here. I should talk to Chuck…but I don’t think he’d take this news too well.”

  “It might come out anyway at some point.”

  “Then we’ll deal with it then.” She began limp-pacing the room. “I wonder how Ronin found us here.”

  My back stiffened at the sound of his name. But I didn’t want to think about personally upsetting things in front of Hu….

  For now, I pushed any further thoughts about what-Ronin-did out of my mind. “I don’t know that he found us or just ran into us. Can we be tracked on this thing?”

  “No way,” said Hu, glancing at me as she limped on by. “Everything’s been thoroughly checked for tracking sensors.”

  “Then somehow they found the general location. Maybe they’re just scoping it out.”

  “And now that they’ve seen us here, they have confirmation of the one,” said Hu, looking at me. “So if they have that as correct, they’ll trust any other locations they have are correct too.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  Pressing a hand to her forehead, she rubbed there and sighed. “We can’t stop now. We’ve got to go on to The Astrals. But we�
�ll have to be more vigilant in future. Do you think they followed us to where we were parked here?” In answer to her own question, she moved over to the wall intercom. “Shayla, turn on the scope in all directions and have Van keep an eye on the screen. Keep checking if we’re being followed.”

  “All right, Arlene,” came Shayla’s voice. “But I’ve got to get some rest. It’s Gerry’s shift now, so he’ll stay on it.”

  “Yes, go rest,” Hu said. Then she clicked off the intercom and turned to me. “You too. We won’t reach The Astrals till the morning. Get some sleep. You’ve done enough today. I’ll let you know if there are anymore bad developments before morning.”

  *

  I went to use the bathroom down the hall from the bunk room. Then I went to the bunk room.

  Bare-chested now, Tan was lying on the bunk he’d used earlier; he held one of the fiction books in his hand. But he suddenly tossed it down to the mattress, saying, “Oops—am I still banned from here?”

  I just smirked at him as I unstrapped my case and dropped it to the floor near my bunk.

  His voice softened. “How are you doing?”

  “Oh just great,” I said.

  “You going to tell me what’s been happening?”

  I filled him in on what I thought we were dealing with, or, more correctly, who. And soon he was repeating my “oh just great” back at me.

  I fell back on my bunk, staring up at the ceiling.

  His soft voice filled the room again: “Have you been thinking about your parents?”

  “Hard not to, given the latest development in the bar.” But it wasn’t just that on my mind: it was where we were going. My memories of my parents were limited, but I did have some good memories of our times in the smaller Astrals. Now it seemed that those good memories would soon be replaced with bad ones….

  “Pia, sometimes I think you care more about them than you could ever care about anything—or anyone. It’s unnatural. They’re dead.”

  “So?” I said, bristling a bit. “If both your parents died, you’d stop caring afterward? If I died?”