Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  She clung to the mercenary, feeling the heat of his body in the darkness, and when she finally cried out, Thorn held her until the last wracking shudders had worked their way through her frame. Then he continued to hold her until she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep...

  The chime of the comm woke her. Miala sat up in bed, blinking, at first uncertain of where she was. Then the unfamiliar surroundings of the hotel room fell into place around her, and memory came rushing back. Jerem kidnapped. Her home destroyed.

  And across the room from her, Eryk Thorn sitting calmly in a chair, sipping at a cup of coffee. His dark eyes met hers for a second, and then he nodded toward the comm unit. “It’s them.”

  Panic gripped her stomach. “How do you know?”

  “Who else would have this number?”

  “Who else?” indeed. No one could possibly know Miala was here in this hotel. She would have to contact Risa soon, because Miala had the feeling that Risa was probably climbing the walls with worry at this point—Risa was listed as Miala’s emergency contact, and someone had to have called her about the fire. But first things first.

  With shaky fingers she pushed her hair back behind her ears, then gathered up her discarded nightshirt. She hated the thought of answering the comm in such disarray, but at least her appearance would make it fairly obvious to the kidnappers that she had gone straight from the destruction of her home to the hotel. Then she slid out of bed and went to the comm unit, jabbing the button to accept the incoming call.

  The screen stayed dark; obviously they had blocked the visual stream. Miala wished she’d had the presence of mind to do the same, but it was too late for that now. Whether by happy accident or design, the chair Thorn occupied was well out of camera range.

  “Who is it?” she asked. At least she thought she sounded reasonably calm.

  “That’s not important,” the caller replied.

  Male, of course, but not noticeably alien. Not that that meant anything. Murgan hadn’t had much of an accent, either, as Miala recalled.

  “What do you want?” She wished that she and Thorn had had the time to discuss how best to handle this conversation before the kidnappers called, but after their hurried lovemaking she had passed into the heavy sleep of exhaustion, and probably he had decided it was more important for her to rest and regain her strength than to spend the time speculating on the kidnapper’s demands.

  A pause. “I like a woman who knows how to get to the point,” said the kidnapper. “It’s very simple, really. You give us fifteen million units, and you get your boy back.”

  Miala tried to school her face into impassivity, but she knew she’d felt her eyes widen for a second before she could catch herself. Fifteen million. If she liquidated everything she had, including her business, and somehow managed to get the insurance to pay up quickly on the house, then she might have enough. Barely. Not that it mattered. She’d give up more if it meant getting her son back.

  “I want to talk to him,” she said. “How do I know you even have him?”

  A pause. Then, “Speak up, kid.”

  “Mom—”

  It was Jerem’s voice, and, wonder of wonders, he didn’t sound all that scared. Relief washed over her, cool as the waters down in Rilsport Harbor. “Jerem, are you all right? Where—”

  “No questions,” the kidnapper broke in. “He’s alive. That’s all you need to know. Give us the fifteen million, and he stays that way.”

  “That’s going to take me some time,” she said, thankful that somehow she’d managed to adopt the cool, precise tones she always employed when nailing down a deal with a prospective client. It would be useless to ask to speak to Jerem again; she could tell the kidnapper wasn’t about to let her son say anything else. “My assets aren’t that liquid.”

  “You have two standard days,” came the immediate reply. “Fifteen million in Gaian units. We’ll contact you at this number for further instructions.”

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’ll need to speak to my son again before any money changes hands.”

  “Agreed.” A pause, and then the caller added, “If you care about your son, you won’t bring the mercenary into this.”

  The red light on the comm went out, indicating that the kidnapper had hung up.

  Miala turned and looked at Thorn, who gave her the same impassive stare he always did. Don’t bring Thorn into this, she thought. That’s like telling the sun not to rise in the morning.

  Then Eryk Thorn asked, “Do you really have it?”

  “Yes. Maybe. I think so.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  Crossing her arms, she snapped, “It’s not that simple, Thorn. Some is tied up in investments. I can get it out, but I’ll have to pay penalties for early withdrawal. I haven’t had my business appraised lately, but I know it’s worth a good four to five million. I doubt I’d be able to sell it in that amount of time, though—I’ll have to try and take out some sort of loan against it. And I’ll have to contact the insurance company about the house—”

  “There’s my money.”

  The comment was so unexpected that Miala stopped abruptly, staring at the mercenary in surprise. “What?”

  “The funds on New Chicago. My half.”

  She had completely forgotten about that. For so long she’d had only her own resources to depend upon that it had never occurred to her Thorn might be willing to pitch in to meet the ransom. “You’d do that?”

  “He’s my son, too.”

  The simple declaration almost brought tears to her eyes. But she blinked them away. She couldn’t dissolve into a mess now.

  Eryk Thorn watched her carefully, and she thought she saw a flicker of approval cross his features.

  “Thank you,” she said, after a moment.

  “No problem,” he replied. “We’d better get moving. We need to get outfitted, and we need to get over to New Chicago.”

  Since the two planets shared the same system, that wasn’t much of a problem. She and Thorn could travel to Nova Angeles’ sister world and back within the space of the same day. But there were still a lot of details to attend to—not the least of which would be contacting Risa and letting her know that Miala had survived the fire which claimed her home.

  “I’ll find some way to make this up to you,” Miala ventured, and Thorn gave her one of his quick downturned grins.

  “I know you will,” he said. “Besides, just because I’m giving the kidnappers this ransom doesn’t mean I’m going to let them keep it.”

  I should have expected that, Miala thought. I should have known Thorn wouldn’t go along with this so easily. Still, the thought of the mercenary bringing his considerable skills to bear on the men who had taken his son brought a smile to her own lips. They were expecting payment, and what they were going to get instead was payback.

  “Is that a promise?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Thorn replied. There was something in the cool voice that made a shiver run down her spine. “And you know I always keep my promises.”

  They were somewhere near the ocean. Jerem was almost sure of it. The men who had kidnapped him made him stay in this boring little room, but he’d grown up within sight and smell of the sea, and the air that blew in whenever they opened the door was moist and cool, smelling of salt and jagos, the giant seaweed that grew off the coast of Rilsport. He’d tried to peer past them to see what was outside, but they’d been quick enough that all he’d been able to catch of glimpse of was a flash of white sunlight and the edge of another building—one that looked to be an improbable combination of orange and blue.

  Even that one brief look had set something tickling at the back of his mind, as if he should somehow know where he was. But try as he could, Jerem couldn’t figure it out. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of time to sit and think about it. Truth was, sitting and thinking were about all he could do. You’d think these guys would at least have given him a handheld game console or a tablet or something to while away
the hours. But no. They seemed to think he shouldn’t do anything except sit on his bed and wait for his mother to pay up.

  The worst punishment his mother could give Jerem consisted of forcing him to sit in his room and do nothing while he thought about what he did wrong. This was even worse, except that he was pretty sure he really hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe there had been one moment back in his room where he could have thrown a chair at his assailants or something, but Jerem had the idea that there wasn’t much he really could have done to prevent them from taking him. Sure, he’d turned out to be Eryk Thorn’s son, but he was still just eight standard years old, after all.

  Cameras mounted in two of the corners of the room kept watch on him at all times. After he’d woken up this morning, he’d spent about fifteen minutes making faces into one, just to irritate his captors, but they’d made no response, and the game got dull after a while. It was one thing to twist your face into inventive grimaces to get a rise out of your friends or to upset your mother so she’d snap, “Do you want your face to freeze like that?” It was an entirely different proposition to do it for an uncaring audience.

  He’d slept badly the previous night; the cot had proved to be just as lumpy as it looked. Breakfast actually wasn’t too bad—they’d fed him the sort of over-sweetened packaged meal he’d always bugged his mother to buy for him but which she’d always claimed was unhealthy and full of sucrose. Now he felt the sort of edgy energy that always followed an over-consumption of sweet things—the precise reason why his mother avoided feeding him that kind of stuff in the first place.

  Since he had this big empty room with nothing much in it except that lumpy cot and a pair of equally uncomfortable chairs, Jerem decided this was a good place to practice walking on his hands. He’d seen a Bathshevan dancer do it once on the vid and had been fascinated by the move ever since. In the past he hadn’t been able to stay up on his hands for more than two paces in a row, but he’d vowed he’d master the skill eventually. The only good thing about it was that Mikhal and Alic were even more hopeless than he was.

  It had to be all in the balance. His hands and wrists were strong enough from years of climbing trees, walls, and anything else he could think of, but it was tricky getting your mass to redistribute itself so you didn’t over-balance and allow the weight of your legs to topple you over.

  Jerem tried a simple handstand, and that worked well enough. Then he reached out with one hand and inched forward. That seemed all right, too, so he shifted his weight to the alternate hand and lurched a few more centimeters ahead. He could feel his legs begin to wobble, so he stayed in that position for a moment until it seemed as if he’d regained equilibrium. Then once more with his right hand—

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The sound of his captor’s voice caused Jerem to jerk his head sideways so he could see who was speaking, and that was the end of the experiment. He collapsed in a messy heap but bounced back up to his feet almost immediately. After all, he’d taken worse falls than that every day of his life.

  Jerem brushed at the dirty knees of his pajama bottoms and said cheerfully, “Walking on my hands. Do you know how to do it?”

  The man scowled at him. He had a sort of rat-like face anyway, with his pointed nose and close-set eyes, and the frown didn’t exactly improve his features. “I’ve got better things to do with my time, kid.”

  “Well, maybe I would, too,” Jerem retorted, “if you guys actually gave me something to do in here. This place is boring.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” the man scoffed. “Sorry if we’re not set up for a full-service baby-sitting business.”

  Jerem wanted to snap, I am not a baby! but thought better of it. Arguing with adults was pointless, anyway. Even if you were right they always came up with something to prove how wrong you were. “So since you won’t even give me a console or anything, I’m walking on my hands.”

  The man looked nonplussed, as if he wasn’t quite sure what leap of logic Jerem had taken to go from playing electronic games to walking on his hands. But since he was an adult, and therefore obviously felt he had to issue some kind of order, he said, “Well, don’t break anything.”

  “What’s there to break?” Jerem asked. “One of those chairs? The bed?” Actually, he might be able to break the bed, if he jumped on it hard enough. Then again, if he broke the bed he wouldn’t have anyplace to sleep. Not that the floor would be much of a downgrade.

  “Listen, kid,” the man said. His tone had turned sneering, as if he’d watched too many vids in which a criminal had to deal with a bratty kid and was taking his cue from them. “You sit in here, you stay quiet, you don’t get in trouble. Otherwise, we’re going to give you back to your mama in a box.” And with that pronouncement he turned and left, giving Jerem another tantalizing glimpse of the world outside before the door slid shut once again.

  Orange and blue, Jerem thought. Orange and blue. To be honest, it was an ugly color combination. You’d think its outstanding hideosity would have jogged his memory, but nothing. Well, either it would come to him, or it wouldn’t. You couldn’t force these sorts of things—you had to just let them come to you in a drift of inspiration. Sometimes he’d bounce awake right in the middle of a dream and would write it down so he wouldn’t forget. His mother always kept a tablet by the side of her bed, too, in case she woke up in the night and had an idea that she wanted to jot down. Jerem thought that was a pretty good idea and had started doing the same thing himself. The only problem was that he didn’t have his tablet here, so even if he did have a stroke of inspiration at some point, he didn’t have any way to save it. Oh, well. If he did think of something, probably it would be important enough that he wouldn’t forget it, anyway.

  Jerem sighed and looked at the closed door, wondering what lay beyond it. Then he stuck his tongue out at one of the watching cameras, pushed himself back up on his hands, and resumed his practice. What else was there to do, anyway?

  Rafe Creel of RilSec Internal Investigations stood in the smoking rubble of what had once been Mia Felaris’ home, a frown creasing his forehead. The airvan carrying the bodies of Officers Korr and Rhyse had just driven away, but he remained on-site, secure behind the glowing green barrier that blocked the crime scene from any curious onlookers. There had been a sizable crowd earlier, but finally they’d drifted off. Probably the sight of him standing there making notations on a tablet wasn’t quite enough to hold their interest. Anyway, it was moving on to the middle hours of the morning, and most of them no doubt had to be off to work or school.

  Normally, Internal Investigations wouldn’t have anything to do with a simple house fire, but the discovery of the two officers’ bodies had put an entirely different slant on things. Creel had had his eye on those two for some time now; he didn’t have any concrete evidence yet, but he was fairly certain they were on the take from someone. Who, he didn’t know, but the fact that they had both just turned up dead couldn’t be a coincidence. But why here?

  There hadn’t been a whole lot left of them, but what little physical evidence remained seemed to indicate they had both been in uniform when they arrived at the Felaris residence. Odd, since the roster had them going off-duty at 18:00, hours earlier than the time of the fire. RilSec had strict rules about off-duty officers going around in uniform. Ignoring the regs just once was enough to get you written up, and repeated offenses would result in expulsion from the force. So whatever they had been doing, obviously it was worth the risk to them to be wandering around Rilsport in uniform while off-duty.

  He squinted into the bright morning sunlight, surveying the ruin of what had once been a well-appointed, extremely expensive home. This neighborhood was the best in town; RilSec didn’t usually make too many calls out here, since the people who owned these homes could afford security systems that put whatever protection the police might offer them to shame.

  In fact, security was Mia Felaris’ business. The information on her he’d downloaded to his tablet s
howed that she had a highly successful security firm in downtown Rilsport, and he didn’t doubt that her home had been a high-tech fortress. But obviously the uniforms Rhyse and Korr had worn allowed them entry past whatever safeguards she might have had in place.

  Interestingly, there was no trace of Ms. Felaris in the home, nor of her young son. It seemed fairly obvious that they had escaped the fire somehow, but if they had survived, why was there no further sign of either one of them? One would think that she’d have made contact with the authorities at some point. But she hadn’t—and she hadn’t been in touch with Risa Terrano, her assistant, either. That young woman had apparently called the police as soon as she had gotten word of the fire, but she had no idea where Mia Felaris or her son Jerem had gone. The Fire Control investigators who had already come and left had informed him that the fire, though fierce, certainly hadn’t been hot enough to consume human remains that completely.

  Creel stared at a charred metal picture frame and chewed his caffeinated gum thoughtfully. Nasty habit, but coffee had started to get to his stomach, and he just couldn’t function without caffeine.

  None of this was adding up. If one followed the assumption that Korr and Rhyse were dirty, then it was likely they had been here to put pressure on Ms. Felaris for some reason. Korr had been more circumspect, but it was Rhyse’s sudden acquisition of a Zephyr 3000 aircar—a car way out of Rhyse’s pay grade—and a few other anomalies that had raised Creel’s suspicions in the first place. Careful digging revealed a plump new bank account on New Chicago and a hefty order placed at Rilsport’s top electronics supplier for a variety of expensive consumer goods. Maybe he’d inherited a chunk of change or just got lucky playing the commodities market, but Creel didn’t think so, since further investigation hadn’t uncovered any recently dead relatives or payouts from a brokerage firm. Korr’s sudden influx of new wealth had been more difficult to trace, but eventually Creel uncovered a bank account back on Gaia’s moon, an account with a much higher balance than anyone with Korr’s income would have been able to save in fifty standard years, let alone the fifteen-plus Korr had spent with RilSec. And it wasn’t as if he had a rich wife, either…the man had never married. No steady girlfriends, either, which wasn’t atypical for a career cop.