by P. R. Adams
“But your mother appreciated what he did.”
Javika nodded. “As a child, she told me he had the ability to see things no one else could.”
“Did it bother him that she was more well-known?”
“Her skills were in demand throughout the Outer Sphere. The Inner as well. It is a different life, the life of a warrior.”
“But it’s artistry of its own sort, isn’t it?”
She cocked her head slightly. “Is it artistry to spill blood?”
“There are times where your blade is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Then it is artistry.” The wiry assassin wrinkled her nose. “This air smells.”
“Yeah, I think they’ve worn this world down just a little bit.”
“They have the science to go to the stars. They lack the science to clean the filth from the air?”
“Some damage can never be undone.”
“Or they care more for the money it would take to return beauty to the world.” She shivered, for a second looking almost vulnerable instead of lethal and unbreakable. “You will recover your strength soon?”
“Usually just takes a day. Maybe two.”
“They need you. Inside, where there is warmth.”
Now it was his turn to shiver. “I know.”
“It is that weight, that sense that you are the only one who can protect them—that is what fatigues you?”
“I guess. I mean, if I don’t protect them, who does?”
“You would have preferred they all take the option to be released. You would have been the one released.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t think that would’ve been enough. I would still see them as my responsibility. A parent never stops worrying about children, even after they’re adults.”
“This sounds more like a monster than being a leader.”
“A monster? It is, I guess. All these obligations and concerns—they’re like the muscles in the connective tissue that hold the beast together.”
“That is how you describe family? A beast?” She tried a smile on for size. It seemed awkward and out of place for her, but there was sincerity to it. “We have strange families, you and I.”
“We do.” He massaged his brow. “But they’re still our families, and I still have to protect them.”
“They are adults. They can protect themselves. You must let them. You must make them, or they will not grow.”
“Yeah? Like Tawod?”
“He was sloppy.”
“He was still my obligation, my responsibility. I failed him. I can’t fail the others.”
“We will get by.”
“You can’t know that. You can’t know anything, not without me securing a constant payday. I may not be very educated, but my mother made sure I knew my numbers. I can math the shit out of things. That’s my burden. That’s all I ever see on the horizon: our fate.”
She set a hand on his. “Come inside. It is warm.”
He followed her, leaving behind the bright sparkle of light above and the black depths below. Inside, the others had gathered around the kitchenette, where platters of food had been laid out. It was more of Yola’s care-taking, a demonstration of her limitless wealth. The aromas were both exquisite and alien, matching the food on display. There were sauces—white, gold, a rich red—and brown gravies; there were strange leaves and stalks of vegetables cut into different sizes and shapes.
And there were fine slivers of fire-roasted meats.
He preferred a different sort of fare: simple, salty, earthy.
This would have to do.
He wandered over to the bar separating the dining area from the kitchen and grabbed a darkened bottle he recognized. There were plenty of the strange brews favored by the people of the Inner Sphere, but he’d found a place that had the real drinks he enjoyed and had stocked up on those. He unscrewed the lid and took a long drink of the amber fluid.
Like home.
The suite also felt like home now, warm as Javika had said. The plush sofa and seats were filled, travel bags stacked on the ochre-colored tile floor. Even the scent of his team had sunk in already.
Lonar had settled in the biggest of the cushioned chairs, massive hand gripping a too-small plate piled high with meat and bread. There were several empty bottles stacked beside his chair. Hirvok was spread out on a small sofa, balancing two of the small plates that had come with the catering on his knees. Naru had squeezed herself into the small space to his left. She eyed him as she munched on vegetable slices drenched in a white sauce. And while she watched the sergeant, Tawod watched her from a darkened corner of the room closest to the outer door.
Was it going to be a problem? Something to watch, certainly.
Quil and Symbra sat at the table, almost hidden behind the platters of food. She seemed as at home with the cuisine as Quil seemed out of place.
Riyun waited until Javika had a plate herself, then held up his bottle of beer. “All right, listen up. You’ve seen the information. You know this is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever done.”
Hirvok snorted. “Easiest job we’ve ever had.”
Lonar belched. “I could get used to this, Lieutenant.”
“Well, don’t.” Riyun took another drink. He could understand being drawn in by the luxury, but that wasn’t what they’d been born to, not most of them, and it wasn’t what they were destined for. “We’ve got an extremely tight window to get this resolved. This is a mother who desperately wants her child back.”
Quil’s head came up from his barely touched plate of food. “I thought this one was an adult?”
That seemed to draw Naru out of her infatuated gazing at Hirvok. She glanced at the pseudo, then at Riyun, who nodded. She softly cleared her throat. “Twenty-four.”
Quil’s strange eyes blinked. “That is an adult, is it not?”
“It is. But she hadn’t started her life yet. She was still in school.” The hacker set her plates aside, licked her fingers, and pulled out a computing tablet. Her eyes flipped through whatever she had open, then stopped. “Um, decent grades at a really tough school. Pretty active in clubs. Definitely high potential based on her testing.”
The pseudo leaned toward her. “But what did she do for a job?”
“I told you—she was a student.”
“At twenty-four?”
Naru rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Some people take time.”
Tawod set a piece of bread down on his plate. “Well, some people don’t have that kind of option. Most of us were out of the house by seventeen. In the Outer Sphere, it’s easier. You know pretty early on what you’re doing for the rest your life.”
Riyun finished off his beer. Something about the explosives expert’s attitude seemed to invite a challenge. But this wasn’t the time. “Right. And that’s why we need to know who this kid really is. Who were her friends? What did she do when she wasn’t at school? That club she was at—what’s the story with that?”
Symbra raised a hand. “I can help. With the club and such.”
“Good. And we need to know the same about her mother. Why didn’t she hire another investigator? Why did she fire the first…four?”
Javika set her plate down and rubbed her hands with a towel. “I will take Lonar and Hirvok with me, and I will conduct research on this woman.”
Hirvok groaned. “I was planning to catch some sleep.”
“Drunkenness can wait until we have completed our investigation.”
“Whatever.”
The big weapons expert’s eyes lit up. “Hey, if you’re sober, we could get in some games of Crown.”
“No, thanks. Try the pseudo. You like beating Lonar, don’t you, Quil?”
Quil blinked. “His strategies are an interesting challenge.”
“There you go.”
Riyun nodded at Naru. “All right. That leaves these investigators and making sense of what they found before they were fired. I think you and Quil can wor
k with me on that.”
The pseudo studied his plate. “I have examined the folder. There are no names associated with this investigation. Are we even sure the investigators are real?”
“Why would she bring us in if she hadn’t hired someone in the past?”
“But investigations usually have audit trails. Investigators log their discoveries through official channels. It is how they are protected from charges of fraud.”
Naru set aside a half-eaten chunk of a serpent carved from an emerald vegetable stalk. “Unless she paid them not to log what they were doing.”
That would have been consistent with Yola’s behavior so far.
Riyun put his bottle down. “Let’s assume that’s the case. What next, then?”
“Well—” The hacker stared at her tablet for a second. “We should still be able to find…”
“Go on.”
The young woman sucked on her teeth. “Well, it’s just, no trail can be completely wiped out.”
“So we find out who these investigators were. And we talk to them.”
Lonar pushed off from his chair, which groaned, then took his empty plate back to the food trays. He piled on a second round. “You sure she’s gonna be okay with that? Since she had their identity from the start, seems like she’d want to keep it all secret. Right, Lieutenant?”
Riyun opened another beer bottle. “We’ve got some money. We’ll pay them to keep it quiet, just like she did.”
“Still can’t figure why she’d do that, though.” The big man shoved a spoonful of meat into his face and chomped. “Why hide that you hired someone to look for your kid?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Lonar.”
“Oh! I thought we were trying to find this girl.”
“That too.”
Riyun took the beer bottle back to his bedroom and closed the door. He would let them eat for an hour, then it would be time to go. Maybe one of them would come up with an idea while they were chatting amongst themselves. There had to be an explanation for Yola’s strange behavior—the secrecy, hiring out mercenaries to do an investigator’s work, and all the money she was throwing around.
He lay on the bed and shut his eyes. For now, he needed to focus on regaining his strength, and that meant rest.
And getting his mind off the past.
He had to focus on the present, or he would leave them all exposed. That was the last thing he could afford to do.
8
Riyun woke from his short nap with a pounding headache. He washed his face and tried to rinse the sour taste of beer from his mouth. In the kitchen, Lonar was busily washing dishes while Hirvok and Javika wiped the table down. Naru and Tawod were huddled close together in the same corner the demolitions expert had been in when Riyun had headed into his room. Quil stood at the glass sliding door that opened onto the balcony.
Riyun shuffled over to the pseudo’s side. “It’s…cold out there.”
“The clouds are pretty.” Quil pressed his fingers against the glass. “This life they lead—such luxury and ease—is alien.”
“You’d know better than me.”
“My time as a bodyguard was very short and limited. Due to my inexperience, I mostly protected lesser dignitaries. They did not live…” He nodded toward the luxurious hotel room.
“It’s still a better life than we’ve ever known.”
The pseudo bowed his head. “Is it a life that you would want?”
Was it? A life of fighting through proxies and maneuvering the labyrinth of corporate politics? “No.”
“But you resent them this life.”
“I resent the way their lifestyle diminishes everyone else’s. If they could accept their success and the wealth they’ve attained without desperately seeking more and more of it and denying any hope to the rest of us, there wouldn’t be anything to hold against them.”
“Then it is the greed you resent.”
“I guess attaining something must trigger that in some people. Maybe it’s just the taste of wealth becoming something you can’t resist.”
“But you do not resent success.”
“No. We’re all seeking that.” Riyun followed Quil’s gaze to Naru. A blush darkened her face. She alternated between staring deeply into Tawod’s eyes and looking away while brushing her hair back. It was always complicated when teammates became involved. Riyun would have to keep an eye on the two of them. “Quil, why don’t you get us a skimmer?”
“Is this to separate those two?”
“It’s to get us back on the job. A narrow window, remember?”
While Quil arranged for the skimmer, Riyun grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen. There was a plastic-wrapped sandwich thick with the spicy meat and bread resting on a napkin. A quick search located Javika, curled on a chair, watching. She tilted her head.
The message was clear: He needed food, whether he liked it or not.
He held the sandwich up in salute, then unwrapped it and finished it in a few messy bites.
Mission accomplished. It would keep her off his back.
Naru finally seemed to remember she had a job to do, something more than flirting. She scuffed up to his side, head down scraping a thumbnail over the beer bottle she held. “You still want to look into those investigators?”
“Yeah. We’re getting a skimmer now.” He took a long pull from the water bottle. “You think you can shake free long enough to help us out?”
“I guess.” She winced. “Sorry. I thought maybe when you went off to your room…”
“A professional doesn’t just do good work when people are looking.”
She nodded. “I-I did do some research. On th—the investigators.”
“You did?”
“I got a couple names. And I’ve got queries out on the other two.”
Riyun chuckled. “I wasn’t even sure those were real.”
“They’re real. I think we should talk to Tafar Dahlee. He was part of an organization on-planet for fifteen years. Looks like he opened his own business about six years ago. It was highly rated.”
“That’s a good start. You have an address?”
“Sort of?”
“What’s that mean? Either you have an address or you don’t.”
“Well…the address I have is offline. I mean, it’s closed. The business.”
“The business is closed? Since when?”
“Recently, I guess.” She handed her tablet to Riyun sheepishly. “Here, you look.”
Unlike his tablet, hers was new and powerful, the screen sharp and bright. She swiped through the interface remotely, and the device responded without delays.
The first thing that caught his attention were images of a middle-aged man: balding, with a bulbous nose, and intelligent eyes. Tafar Dahlee. There were records of his successes, including recommendations and recognition over the course of his career.
“Seems pretty impressive.” Riyun took control and flipped through some of the cases, hoping he might see a connection or thread, even a tangential one. “Missing persons expert.”
“Looks like it.” She squeezed against him and brought up two files. “That includes some corporate bigwigs.”
The files were security teams’ analyses of Tafar’s work. He’d been hired eight years back to find a missing junior director for a smaller corporation, one Riyun had never heard of. That had resulted in a successful conclusion, some sort of bungled kidnapping scheme for cash. The other one hadn’t been so pretty.
MKK Conglomerate—one of the oldest and biggest family businesses—had lost a regional director.
You didn’t just lose a regional director.
So they’d hired Tafar.
According to the analysis, MKK security had completely missed signals that should have clued them in to what had happened: a promotion that hadn’t come through, a marriage falling apart, and drug problems. It had all been there, if only they’d looked closer.
But security didn’t pay attent
ion to someone like a regional director. The title had cachet. It guaranteed trust.
So when Tafar found the regional director, he walked right into a disaster.
Riyun grunted and handed the tablet back to Naru. “Six weeks in the hospital. Lucky to have even survived that.”
Naru squinted at the tablet screen. “Why would someone hire thugs to fake a kidnapping? I mean, someone like her? Regional directors have a lot of money.”
“She had a better offer. She wanted to get out from under the contract she was on.”
“Why wouldn’t you hire someone professional? They…”
“No amount of money can protect you from animals. You might want to remember that.”
“Do you think it’s related? Do you think that’s why she hired him?”
“Yola? Because she thought he’d found a powerful woman before?”
“A powerful woman who didn’t want to be found.” The hacker flipped through a few more images, then showed one to Riyun. It was Yola’s daughter, eyes cast down, a faraway look, surrounded by happy people.
“Where’s that? A nightclub?”
“Yeah, I think it’s the same one in that video. And I think these are the same people. Friends, maybe.”
“Any luck finding out where that is?”
“I have an address. The place is called Starlight Express. Symbra found it. College kid hangout.”
“Pass everything along to the team checking her background.”
“They know.”
Riyun chewed on his lip. What kind of kid could look so sad with so much ahead of her? She was in a hangout with her friends.
There was no understanding people.
His tablet buzzed: Quil had the skimmer and was waiting for them.
Riyun hooked a finger at Naru. “Time for us to check out your investigative work.”
No one was using the elevators at that time of night. There were parties in the other suites—music that leaked into the hallway, laughter, beautiful people moving from one door to the next. There was a decadent look about all of them. It was the way they dressed in gaudy, extravagant clothes. It was the way their eyes were glassy, and there was no awareness of the world around them. The snippets of conversation Riyun caught before the elevator closed were all meaningless, trivial, self-absorbed.
