“Somehow I might be more encouraged if I knew it was an agent who didn’t have a hidden agenda. Last time we met, I recall, you attempted to intimidate me.”
He had? The last time he’d seen Leonard Wickmore had been three months before he’d left for Zell. He’d linked Tamati Woden to three possible companies—Eaglehawk was one of them—and he’d gone around to see executives at each of the three. Alistair would have said the meeting was quite civil. It was interesting that Wickmore remembered it as otherwise.
Or maybe he was out-and-out lying.
Cam laughed. “I didn’t think anyone could intimidate you, Executive.”
Wickmore’s gaze swiveled to Cam for the first time, although Alistair was sure he’d been observing him. “I did say attempted, Agent Le-Nguyen.”
Alistair hadn’t given Cam’s name to any of the assistants. “You were at Rik Terri’s studio on the day of the explosion. Can you tell us what you were doing there?”
Wickmore hid a sigh. “Agent Laughton, I have told the Justice Department what happened. Three times, if I recall.”
He recalled correctly.
“Maybe you should read the reports.”
“I’ll do that. Meantime, can you tell us what you were doing there?”
“You really should read the reports. It would save you a lot of time.”
They didn’t have time to play word games. Alistair couldn’t stop his gaze drifting to the wall. He forced his attention back to the executive. Why not try the crazy approach? Get the weird ideas out of the way, and Wickmore might relax enough to give him some real information.
“So, body swapping, Executive. What do you know about that?”
The red tones of Wickmore’s body intensified. Increased heart rate, for sure. A massive adrenaline surge. Certainly not the reaction Alistair had expected. Did Cam see a change in color too?
Alistair pulled his eye-covers on momentarily. Wickmore looked more relaxed, if anything.
“I have no idea what you are talking about, Agent Laughton.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Alistair said. “Executive Shanna Brown, murdered by Tamati Woden, who borrowed Nika Rik Terri’s body to do it.”
Wickmore laughed, but there was something off about the sound. “Agent Laughton, I fear your time in exile has turned your mind. That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it?” and Alistair’s gaze locked onto his.
Wickmore refused to look away. “I have never heard anything so unlikely in my life and I have heard many unlikely things. If only something like that were possible. Think of the opportunities. The possibilities.”
Like using someone’s body to commit murder.
“You were at Nika Rik Terri’s studio a month after the alleged incident, Executive. Right at the time her studio was blown up. Maybe you planned for it to blow up after you left.”
“Agent Laughton.” Still matching stares. “I hope you aren’t insinuating anything. Words like that could get you a visit from company lawyers.”
Alistair held up his hands in mock surrender. “No,” he said. “I am sure that if you planned to bomb a place, you wouldn’t do it yourself. You’d pay other people to do it.”
Wickmore’s eyes narrowed.
“What were you doing at Nika Rik Terri’s studio, Executive Wickmore?”
“If you cared to read your reports, you will find I was there with one of my staff. Alejandro Duarte. Alejandro and Nika were partners. She was also his modder. I admired his mod, was thinking of using her next time. He offered to introduce me.”
All of that was in the report.
“What did she say when you met her?”
“Say, Agent Laughton? She wasn’t there. I did not get to meet her.”
“But you waited inside her studio?”
“Alejandro had access to her rooms. She lived upstairs.”
That, too, was in the report. “And Alejandro Duarte? Where did he live?”
“I’m not sure why that’s even a question, but if you read the report, I’m sure the address will be there. He is dead, you know. He was at the studio with me.”
“But Rik Terri wasn’t.”
“You think she might have taken refuge at his apartment?” Wickmore’s smile chilled. “I’ll have our personnel department send any known addresses through.”
Alistair stood. “Thank you, Executive. You have been most helpful.” More helpful than he knew, with his adrenaline-fueled reaction at talk of body swapping. Maybe Paola had a reason to worry.
Wickmore escorted him and Cam to the door. The weapons swiveled to follow them. Alistair’s back prickled all the way.
7
ALISTAIR LAUGHTON
Paola came down to Alistair’s office when he got back. “Most people’s underlings have to go up and see them, you know. Not the other way around.”
“You could have called me.”
“Then waited while you did whatever you thought was more important before you came up. You never did have any respect for authority, Alistair.”
“I’m hardly in a position to ignore you.” She’d given him the only lead he’d had in a fruitless month of searching.
“No, and you won’t be after I give you this.” Paola looked around the office. “Where’s your striking assistant?”
“Gone down to the desk to collect dinner.” Living on takeout wasn’t much different to what he’d done in the old days, but he had to admit, Cam took takeout to a whole different level.
“Alistair, don’t get involved in the companies. They suck you in and spit you out.”
Had she waited till Cam was out of the room to say that? “I’m not sure I—”
“Even when it’s legal. They still dump you when you’re done, and Santiago is almost as bad as Eaglehawk or MGK.”
Only almost?
She must have read their report on Zell. The one they’d made to divisional headquarters on New Capy on their way to Lesser Sirius, back when they’d both thought it was a simple matter of going to Rik Terri’s studio and asking for help. Back before they’d seen her burned-out studio and realized how hard the task would be.
“I can’t not be involved.”
“I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself, Alistair.” She held up a hand to forestall him. “The other thing you asked. The condition.”
She was going to say she couldn’t do it.
“A ship has been organized.” Paola pushed a code through. “This is the authorization. Use it wisely.”
“Thank you.” Alistair leaned back in his chair, suddenly drained. “Thank you, Paola.”
“I don’t know what mess you’ve got yourself into, Alistair.” She stood up as Cam came in, nodded at him, and made for the door. “Just don’t drag me into it.”
“What was that about?” Cam asked.
“Paola can get us a ship if we need it. To get everyone off Zell.” If they could get around the not-so-minor issue of the warship orbiting it.
“Including the Ort?”
“A hundred people.”
Cam served out exotic beans and a bright-red vegetable Alistair had never seen before. “Paola’s going to have cats when she finds out about the Ort.”
* * *
• • •
It was Mayeso who finally gave them the clue to finding the Ort.
Alistair had been woken by a distress call. It had come through at 03:34 standard time, four minutes to midnight local time. Even though there was nothing he could do, Alistair pulled on the pants and fleece-lined jacket of his company uniform—and the totally non-company felted boots—and padded outside.
Zell, the world he was on, was four light-minutes away from the Vortex. He linked in to check the ship. It was an old prospecting ship with four people on board. They’d been there two weeks, risking the Vortex to mine
some of the asteroids caught in the Vortex’s gravitational field.
Dicing with death for two weeks now.
They all thought they could do it, but the Vortex got everyone in the end.
When Alistair had arrived on Zell, the Vortex had been a writhing gray hole that took up most of the northern sky. Nowadays he saw it as a full-colored, writhing spiral in that same space. At night it was bright enough to light up the whole area. At least it did for Alistair.
They’d already be dead, those four miners who’d risked their lives to make money. Pulled apart by the stresses of the Vortex as their ship accelerated in an attempt to break free from forces they had no hope of escaping from.
That was how he imagined it, anyway, for no one lived to tell what the Vortex did to you, and Alistair certainly wasn’t going close enough to find out. He shuddered. Did the forces literally pull you apart, as some scientist theorized? It certainly pulled the ships apart.
Alistair gave a last nod of acknowledgment to the now-dead miners and turned to go inside. They’d all been putting in long hours lately. They were so close to making bonus, and they only had two weeks to do it in.
Two more weeks. It was hard to believe their time in this hell was almost over. And yet—he had friends here.
He’d signed on because he’d been running. Running from a broken marriage, running from a destroyed career. And so was everyone else on Zell. From poverty, from failure, from despair. A group of broken people who’d forged a community together.
The whisper of noise that had been in his head ever since those first months cleared momentarily, turned into words he imagined he could hear. “Mutated again,” heavy with disappointment, and a resigned, “Start over.”
It did that occasionally.
A light went on in the residency building.
There were two buildings on Zell. A massive machinery shed—five hundred meters long and two hundred meters wide—and the one where they lived: offices, common rooms, and food hall on the ground floor, living areas on the second and third. This light was on the third floor.
Another light went on. Then another.
Trouble.
He took the steps three at a time, could hear Yakusha’s voice before he reached the third floor.
“What’s the problem?”
“Mayeso didn’t come back from her run,” Yakusha said.
Mayeso jogged after work, before dinner. She should have been back hours ago.
“And no one noticed until now?”
“She had a call from her daughter earlier today. It upset her.”
There’d been a few of those calls lately. This close to the end of the project, people were making plans for going home—and finding their families had moved on without them. People who chose to spend two years on an isolated world away from their families were unlikely to have families who missed them. Alistair supposed he should be grateful he didn’t have the illusion of family to go back to. His ex-wife was in jail; none of his former colleagues would want to see him.
“We assumed she ate dinner in her room,” Yakusha said. Which was understandable when you wanted to brood about a family who didn’t have time for you. “But I thought around now she’d be wanting to talk, so I went to see her.”
No one locked their doors here on Zell.
“Her clothes are all strewn on the floor, you know like she does when she gets back from the mine.”
There was no privacy, either, and after two years everyone knew everyone else’s habits and rituals. Mayeso came in from work and changed into her running clothes. She left her dirty mining clothes on the floor of her bathroom. When she got back from her run, she tossed all the dirty clothes—mining and running—into the washer, showered, and changed into one of the many weird outfits she’d made herself out of local materials. If the clothes weren’t in the washer, it meant she hadn’t come back from her run.
“We checked inside the first bounds.” The first of two electric force fences that protected the settlement. “We couldn’t see her.”
Alistair nodded. “Let me look, anyway.”
Everyone was there. They parted, making a narrow path for him to walk through.
“The Ort have taken her.” Cadel Jones had initially scoffed at tales of the Ort, but after he’d been taken, he started blaming them for everything. Even things they couldn’t possibly have done, like the big generator going down. As mine supervisor, he should have known better, but the pressure was getting to them all.
Melda pushed her way through. “We all know it’s the Ort, Alistair. I’m not wasting staff to go look for her.”
“She could be hurt.” Worse case the salynxes had caught her unaware, not that they came this side of the cutter bushes anymore. If they had, all he’d find would be bones. He didn’t mention that.
“We’re two weeks off finishing up, and we’ve a bonus to make. Mayeso will call in a couple of hours. We can’t afford to waste the time.”
Melda fiercely protected every one of her crew. This was out of character for the camp boss.
“Melda,” Alistair said. “I’m going to look for Mayeso. Come with me.” If he didn’t get her away from this muttering crowd, she’d likely be lynched. “You’re right. We all need to work tomorrow.” He looked at the others. “I know where she runs.” Inside the second bounds. That force fence went all the way down to the lakeshore and for a kilometer either side of the camp. It was the one safe place she could run.
He wouldn’t find her there, not if the Ort had taken her. “She’ll be in shock, no matter what’s happened. Can someone prepare a warm drink and something for her to eat?”
“I’ll do it,” Yakusha said. “Look after her, okay?” And they all pointedly didn’t look at Melda.
Alistair took Melda’s arm. There were advantages to being tall and bulky and your boss being short and skinny. You could drag her along, even lift her at times, and it wasn’t noticeable.
Except for the sound of her dragging feet.
“Get your hands off me.” Melda sounded as if she’d clenched her teeth. At least she’d said it quietly.
He made his reply soft as well. “Not until you revert to being sensible. Honestly, Melda. You’d think you’d had bad news from home the way you’re acting.”
He felt her arm stiffen.
Alistair sighed. Melda’s had been the only stable family group in the whole fifty of them. He should have realized that stability was only in Melda’s mind. He gave her arm an encouraging shake. “Hey, they’ll get over it.” Whatever it was. The only knowledge he had of both her partners was from Melda herself. Bob sounded like a company sycophant, Angel little better.
He didn’t say anything further until they were out in the aircar. “You want to watch the left or the right?”
“Left.”
He set the autopilot as slow as it would go—little more than walking pace—and close to ground. He kept the lights on full—for Melda’s sake—beaming out around the car the whole 360 degrees.
There was nothing inside the force fence. Alistair called Cam. “No sign of Mayeso inside the bounds. I’m going to try outside.”
“I’ll tell the others.”
He lifted the aircar high enough to hop over the fence, then came down again and resumed his path.
The Vortex colored the sky in front of them. Alistair shivered and pulled his jacket closer. The soft clop of the propellers and the fan recycling air around the cabin were the only noises in the silence. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was the sound of the Vortex, because you could see it swirl. Back when his eyesight had first changed, he’d watched the center till it made him giddy.
Nowadays he only looked at it when he had to.
Small creatures scurried away from their lights. Off to the right an enormous bovine turned one head to look at them; the other head conti
nued feeding.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked eventually.
“This bonus is our future, Alistair. If we can get it, everyone will be set for life. I know Mayeso is gone, but we all know where she is, and we know she’ll be all right. And if she isn’t, then there is nothing we can do.”
Melda truly was thinking of the future for them. She looked on these fifty contractors as her own personal family, wanted them to succeed. But she was in charge. She was paid to make the hard decisions.
“Every time someone disappears, we lose two days’ work from them. And from whomever you set to watch them. When you find Mayeso, you’ll set Yakusha to mind her. Yakusha’s our best miner.”
The two women were friends. Yakusha was the logical person to sit with Mayeso, and she wouldn’t get much work done if she was sitting on a float in the middle of the lake, wondering how Mayeso was doing.
“I meant did you want to talk about your family.”
“If you weren’t so big, Alistair, I’d hit you.”
No. She didn’t.
The aircar crept on through the night.
Melda’s link beeped. She brought the call up on the aircar screen. Angel, one of her partners.
“Melda.” Angel had been modded. She looked nothing like the image of the three of them that Melda kept on her bedroom wall.
How must it be to have a partner you wouldn’t recognize when you went home?
Her voice was the same, though. A hard voice, Alistair had always thought, with no warmth. But then, that was a prejudice, because he didn’t like the woman.
“Angel.” Melda’s voice was guarded.
Angel smiled. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You clicked off earlier.”
Definite accusation in the tone. Or was Alistair reading that into it because he wanted to?
“We’ve a problem here. One of our miners disappeared on a run. We’re searching for her.”
Melda didn’t normally tell her family about the problems they had on Zell. Only about the positives—like the fact that they were about to make bonus. She pointed, blindly, to nothing on the side of their path. “Over there.”
Stars Beyond Page 10
