Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  “Time? For what?”

  In answer he pulled the video surveillance device out of his pocket and opened it. Now the ship sat on its landing pad quite alone, with no evidence of the two RilSec officers—if that was really who they were—having ever been there.

  “They’re gone,” she said.

  “I thought they might be.”

  “But if the police have left, maybe we should head straight there and get the ship out while we can.”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m sure the kidnappers are still watching the landing pad. In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  Miala crossed her arms and glared at the mercenary. “So are you going to let a poor naïve Iradian girl in on your little master plan?”

  Her plaintive question elicited a faint chuckle. “I don’t think you’ve been naïve for a long time...if you ever were. Anyhow, I’m pretty sure our friends from RilSec haven’t gone far. They’re probably checking their leads, and will come back with a warrant. I’m also fairly certain that the kidnappers are planning to get the drop on them the second they try to gain entry to the ship.”

  Although Miala knew logically that she and Thorn should stay as far away from any such a confrontation as possible, something in her felt distinctly uneasy about allowing the two officers to walk right into a trap. “Shouldn’t we do something? Warn them?”

  “Guess I was wrong. You really are naïve.”

  An angry retort rose to her lips, but then she stopped when she saw the wicked gleam in Thorn’s dark eyes. So she settled for making an exasperated “hmph!” and waited for him to explain himself.

  “If we try to warn them, we risk giving our position away. Right now the one thing keeping us safe is that the kidnappers don’t know where we are. Sure, they probably know you headed out to New Chicago today, but we wanted them to know that. They need to think that you’re going along with their plan, that you’re cooperating. Right now whoever is surveilling the Rilsport Plaza is probably waiting for you to return...which you’ll do eventually. In the meantime, though, our main problem is that we don’t know who they are, or where their base of operations is.” He paused, all hint of amusement gone from his face. “The best way to find Jerem is to use our friends there as bait. They draw the kidnappers out, I grab one of them, and we’re set.”

  “Set for what?” Miala asked, although she had an uneasy feeling she wouldn’t much like the reply.

  For a few seconds he didn’t answer. Then he gave her a ferocious smile and said, “For me to extract a little information.”

  And even though Miala would have said she didn’t much care what happened to any of the kidnappers as long as she got Jerem back, she couldn’t help feeling a sort of uneasy sympathy toward whoever ended up as Thorn’s victim. A bit of the impenetrable façade had dropped there, and she got the distinct impression that the mercenary was truly looking forward to the interrogation.

  She wished she could say the same for herself.

  It wasn’t the enclosed spaces so much, Jerem reflected, pausing at the intersection of two ducts. It was what might be enclosed in there with you.

  He could handle the dust and the odd smell, even the overwhelming, unrelieved blackness, which was so absolute that it felt almost like a weight on his eyeballs. Even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything, he still found himself staring into the dark, as if he tried hard enough he could make out some sort of detail.

  Worse than that, though, were the noises, like the skittering of small feet. Probably the place was infested with tarns, small rodent-like creatures that liked dark, confined spaces. His mother always said they didn’t really hurt anything, but even she’d called the exterminator when a nest of them had been discovered in the basement of their house. Then there were the webs left behind by some of Nova Angeles’ more ambitious arachnids. Again, all the poisonous species had been eradicated ages ago, but it still was no fun to get those sticky webs caught in your hair. He’d broken through one that stretched across the width of the duct and had blundered through it in a panic, wiping at his face and hair with terrified fingers. After he’d gotten the worst of it off, he’d lain flat on the floor of the durasteel tube, breathing heavily. It was only after a few minutes had passed that he was able to calm down enough to chide himself for acting like a baby. It was just a few webs, after all. It wasn’t as if a fer-snake had come crashing through and tried to eat his head or something.

  He really couldn’t tell how long he’d been stumbling through the blind dark. Jerem supposed he should just be glad that the kidnappers hadn’t heard his blundering around and started poking holes in the ventilation system at random intervals to track him down.

  But for some reason they hadn’t, and even though he didn’t really believe in such things, maybe God or something else was guiding him in the right direction. Maybe there was a power in the universe that looked out for little boys who had gotten in way over their heads.

  He hesitated, reaching out with shaking fingers to feel each of the ducts. Down the left-hand one the air felt stuffy and warm, and it smelled funny. But the right-hand passage seemed a little more promising. Jerem thought he felt a slight draft in that one, and he almost fancied he could smell a faint tang of salt, as if the air were coming in from off the ocean.

  Well, that settled it. Jerem turned down the rightmost shaft, still inching his way forward. The feel of the air against his face cheered him a little. Maybe it meant he wasn’t too far away from a vent that opened to the outside. If he managed to make it that far unnoticed, then maybe he would have a good chance of getting away entirely. Unless, of course, they had the perimeter staked out with force fields and infrared scanners and all the other nasty stuff his mother used to trot out for the really high-paying clients. Then again, these guys seemed pretty cheap, at least based on what they’d fed him and the room they’d given him to sleep in.

  The sound of people speaking stopped him dead, and Jerem pressed himself flat against the floor of the air duct. A few inches from his noise was another smaller duct that left a gap about a half-meter wide. If he hadn’t halted so suddenly, he might have pitched right down into it.

  A man’s voice that sounded vaguely familiar said, “So she made it back from New Chicago all right.”

  “Looks that way. She disembarked at approximately nineteen-thirty local time.”

  “What about this man you spotted with her, Chaddick?” Jerem thought he heard something that sounded suspiciously like a growl, and he realized it was probably the Stacian who was speaking. “I thought we told her to leave the mercenary out of it.”

  The other man gave a derisive laugh. “That guy’s no mercenary. Probably her accountant or lawyer or something. I mean, who ever heard of Eryk Thorn wearing a suit?”

  A silence. “Maybe...maybe not. Any trace of them?”

  “Took a cab, but we’re not sure where they went after that. It’s mealtime—maybe they went to get something to eat. She knows she’s not going to be contacted until tomorrow anyway.”

  “But you’re sure she got the money.”

  “Oh, yeah. I tell you, Korvan, she’s so scared we’re going to send her precious ickle boy back to her in a box that she’s not going to do anything to risk his skin.”

  Korvan—the Stacian, Jerem decided—laughed unpleasantly. “I’d like to see the look on her face after she gives us the cash and then finds out the kid’s already dead.”

  The other man chuckled as well, and Jerem felt the gluey meal he’d consumed earlier turn over in his stomach. Well, at least his instincts had been right. He’d done the right thing by getting out of that holding room when he could.

  Barely daring to breathe, he reached out across the duct opening and scrabbled for purchase on the other side. It was a stretch for his short arms, but he’d heard enough. He knew he had to keep going and not look back.

  A quick question, the words sharp with suspicion. “Did you hear that?”

  Jerem immediately froze, fing
ers clutching the slick metal of the duct surface, the toes of his shoes threatening to slip off the edge of the far side of the gap.

  “Just more of those fragging tarns. Told you we should’ve fumigated this place before we moved in.”

  The Stacian made another one of those low rumbling noises, and Jerem took advantage of its cover to kick off with his rear feet, propelling himself across the gap and then scrabbling down the tunnel as quickly as he could, his heart an overwhelming drumbeat in his chest, body slick with nervous sweat even though it was relatively cool in the air duct.

  He wondered how many more close calls like that he could have before his luck finally ran out.

  Warrant safely stored in his tablet, Creel still forced himself to read the corroborating information several times, just in case his overactive imagination had somehow gotten the better of him. Sure, the ship had set off alarm bells in his mind the second he’d laid eyes on it, but he’d never expected to hit pay dirt quite this spectacular. Jessa hadn’t argued with him when he said he wanted to call in for a warrant, but her pointed silence had told him she thought he was grasping at straws. Now, however, he thought he had the data he needed to convince her he hadn’t completely lost his mind.

  “Take a look at this,” he called out to Jessa, who had walked a few paces away from him and was staring up at the strange spacecraft with a speculative expression on her face. He gestured at the tablet.

  Frowning slightly, she stepped back toward him and looked down at its screen. Then her finely arched eyebrows lifted. “Is this for real?”

  “I think so.”

  Jessa glanced back up at the ship. “What in the seven hells would he be doing here?”

  Well, that was a good question, wasn’t it? Of course the ship had no identifying markers anywhere, but only one Quasar-class vessel of that particular vintage still existed...if the rumors were true. And that unique starship belonged to someone equally unique.

  “Yeah, Nova Angeles isn’t exactly Eryk Thorn’s usual stomping grounds,” Creel replied. “But I’ve got a theory.”

  Crossing her arms, Jessa gave him a questioning yet skeptical look, the sort which plainly said that although she might be willing to listen to his argument, she wasn’t quite sure she was ready to believe him.

  He didn’t know if he believed it himself. The connections were tenuous at best, but at the same time the mercenary’s presence began to explain some of the niggling loose ends in the Felaris case. “Hear me out,” he said.

  The cool green eyes met his. “All right.”

  “So we have one missing woman, Mia Felaris, who hails from Iradia originally. At the same time we have a ship owned by the galaxy’s most notorious mercenary showing up in our spaceport. Coincidence? Maybe at first glance.” He slid the tablet into his breast pocket, trying to ignore how piercingly green Jessa’s eyes were, like the purest chromium beryl. They seemed to glow in the hard, blue-white lighting of the light strips overhead. Clearing his throat, he continued, “However, let’s look at the facts. Thorn’s movements are almost impossible to track, but it’s fairly common knowledge that he was seen on Iradia a little over eight years ago, right around the time the insurrection took hold.”

  Jessa didn’t blink. “And?”

  “It’s also a fact that Mia Felaris, an Iradian native, relocated to Nova Angeles years ago. She has a son whose father she claims is dead, killed in the siege of Arlinais.” Still Jessa’s expression didn’t change, and he began to feel a little impatient. After all, it had begun to seem glaringly obvious to him. “But what if Jerem Felaris’ father isn’t really dead? What if he’s actually Eryk Thorn?”

  At that Jessa gave an unbelieving little laugh. “That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”

  “Is it?” Whenever he got nervous or excited about something, Creel had a tendency to run his hands through his hair. He’d lifted a hand halfway there before realizing that he probably didn’t want to look quite so distracted in front of the apparently imperturbable Jessa Kodd. He settled for fishing inside his pocket for his pack of caffeinated chewing gum, then popped a piece inside his mouth. “Gum?” he asked politely.

  “No, thanks.” Her full lips curved slightly in amusement.

  “Anyhow,” he said, realizing that while he probably could use the caffeine, chewing the gum also had the unfortunate side affect of making him look like a ruminating cow, “as far as I can tell, both Thorn and Mia Felaris—or Miala Fels, if you want to use her real name—were on Iradia at about the same time. He was working for Mast when the crime lord was killed. And Ms. Felaris comes from the closest settlement to Mast’s compound. I couldn’t get much from her records, but one thing I was able to discover was that she was dirt poor. I doubt she could have come up with enough cash to book passage off-world, let alone set herself up in style the way she did here. But our records show that she bought the house only a few standard months after she emigrated here, long before she set up her security business. So where did the money come from?”

  “I have no idea,” Jessa replied, but a wicked glint in her eyes seemed to indicate she had begun to pick up on his train of thought.

  “Mast had a lot of money lying around, or so the stories go. But I wasn’t able to get any information on what happened to it after he departed this mortal coil. Far as I can tell, no one knows what happened to his treasure—which leads me to believe that someone must have made off with it.”

  “That someone being Mia Felaris, I presume.”

  “Exactly. And who better to assist her in such an enterprise than Thorn—who was known to be in the vicinity at the time?”

  “I can’t imagine,” said Jessa. Then she shook her head. “From what I know, Thorn’s a pretty mercenary customer. I can’t really imagine him splitting a treasure with someone, no matter how attractive she might be. That’s not really his style.”

  “True,” Creel admitted. “I think there’s something I’m still missing here. But it does explain the identity of the mystery man who accompanied her to the bank, and since Ms. Felaris’ own company records show that she just returned from a business trip to Iradia, it doesn’t exactly take a genius to put two and two together.”

  At that moment Jessa opened her mouth to reply. She didn’t get the chance to do much more than that, however, since a green pulse bolt whizzed past her left ear, only to bounce harmlessly off the hull of the mercenary’s ship.

  Although both of them had been manning desks for several years, the reactions drummed into them during their cadet days immediately took over. They dropped to the ground, Creel scrabbling to pull the gun out of his shoulder holster, Jessa no doubt doing the same.

  The shot had come from behind them, and so Creel immediately pointed his pistol in that direction and fired, even though he really couldn’t see who he was shooting at. Still, it never hurt to let your opponent know you were armed.

  There were a couple of packing crates less than a meter away from where they had stood, and on instinct he and Jessa had both rolled in that direction. He wasn’t sure how much protection the crates would offer if the firing got really intense, but anything was better than lying out there on the open ground of the docking bay.

  “You all right?” he asked her.

  “Fine,” she said. “A few centimeters to the right, and I would have had a new haircut, but I’m okay.”

  She sounded ferociously cheerful, which didn’t bode too well for whoever their attackers might be. Creel risked a quick glance over the top of the packing crates but couldn’t see much of anything. The attackers hadn’t returned his fire; maybe they hadn’t expected to come up against armed opponents.

  Even as he did so, he heard the sound of another gun going off, this time from the opposite side of the docking bay. The bolts echoed off the concrete walls and made his ears ring.

  “I’m calling for backup,” Jessa said, pulling the handheld out of her jacket pocket.

  “Good idea,” Creel replied, then ducked down behin
d the crate once more. “Sounds like we’ve got two sets of interested parties out there.”

  “Well, you know how I love a party.” The handheld made a chirping sound, and she said, in brisk, businesslike tones, “Dispatch, this is Detective Kodd. I’m at Rilsport spaceport, landing pad eighteen-twenty, with Detective Creel. We are pinned down under hostile fire. Requesting backup units.”

  “Right away,” came the reply, from a kid who sounded so young they must have just decanted him from the academy the week before. “ETA is five minutes.”

  “Oh, don’t rush on my account,” Jessa snapped, then turned off the handheld. Giving Creel a direct look, she asked, “Can we hold them off that long?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  She raised an unbelieving eyebrow.

  He shot her a wicked grin of his own. “They’re not shooting at us,” he went on, and jerked a thumb in the direction of their unknown assailants. Pulse bolts in varying hues were being traded in a dazzling display of rainbow-colored death. Even as Jessa looked on, unbelieving, he began to laugh. “They’re shooting at each other.”

  26

  I really wish Thorn had warned me that we were walking into a firefight, Miala thought, huddling behind a pillar as the mercenary traded potshots with their unidentified assailants. I would have stopped to put on some flats.

  She risked a quick glance past Thorn’s shoulder but could see nothing except three shadowy figures, two human-sized, the other a good deal larger. In a direction roughly forty-five degrees off from where she and Thorn stood, a second set of combatants traded fire with the attackers as well. Miala couldn’t be sure, but she thought they might be the police she had seen on Thorn’s video surveillance unit. She spotted a quick glint of pale blonde hair before the smaller of the two people—who had only the dubious protection of a couple of packing crates to stave off the pulse fire—ducked out of view once more.