Scavenger's Mission (The SkyRyders Book 1)

by Liza O'Connor

  With nothing more to do, her focus shifted to the pleasure of his embrace. Other than flying, life had so few pleasures. What was the crime in enjoying an unexpected moment of affection, if it caused no harm?

  ***

  Logan woke fully rested and content. Holding Alisha in his arms seemed so familiar and right that it took him almost a full minute to realize its wrongness. He checked his location on the bed, afraid that in his sleep he had crossed over and violated her personal space. He sighed with relief to discover he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Alisha had trespassed, not him.

  For several minutes, he watched her sleep, snuggled so tightly against him. She looked young—younger than he had thought her last night.

  Too damn young for me. He forced himself from the bed. What the hell am I doing? Bringing that girl into the Ryders was going to require all sorts of favors pulled. This was no time to let matters get personal.

  Disgusted with his lack of self-control, he left his room in search of DC. He found his captain in bed with both Ginnie and Jersey. Logan shook his head and left the room. They’d probably been up most of the night doing… He didn’t even want to think about their sexual tryst.

  He went to the equipment room, deciding today was a good day for a surprise inspection of his crew’s gear. Gear always looked good during planned inspections. The real test was how they treated their gear on a normal day. That would determine how long they’d survive on the job.

  ***

  Alisha woke at the click of the bedroom door. She opened her eyes in horror. Early daylight shone through the skylights in the ceiling. She rose from the bed and checked the bathroom. She was alone, but she didn’t know for how long.

  She cursed herself for falling asleep but had no time for regrets. The colonel might be back any second, or he might be gone for hours. However, colonel aside, the faster she got out of there the better, because soon other people would be up and wandering about the compound, and they could interfere with her escape just as easily as the colonel.

  Having made her decision to escape ASAP, she donned her flight suit, unrolled two hundred dollars from her roll of money, placed it on the counter, then gathered up her pack and bio scan machine and headed out.

  ***

  Logan didn’t bother inspecting DC’s equipment. It was always perfect. He began with Philly’s gear. The boy tended to be careless and unfocused on the parts of the job that had nothing to do with photography.

  Sure enough, Logan found the beginnings of a small tear in the right panel of his windcatcher. A strong gust could blow it out, and that would be the end of Philly. Logan sighed, slapped a red label on the tear, and made note of the incident on the equipment chart. He was deciding how many demerits the rip warranted when something raised his internal alarms. He moved into the hall and viewed the wall of monitors. Nothing going on outside…or in the commons…or the crew’s sleeping quarters. He glanced at the perimeter cameras. To the east, he could see a small speck—a windcatcher, perhaps. With growing unease, he returned to his room.

  The girl was gone. No way could she have escaped a locked room with no windows, yet she, her flight suit, and her windcatcher were unquestionably gone. He sat down at the computer and punched playback on the external cameras.

  He watched on digital replay as she left his rooms by his private entrance and ran to the far west wall. Pulling the windcatcher from her pack, she arranged it in a round heap. After placing the empty pack on her back and the slats on her feet, she reached down and tossed a small object with tether lines up in the air.

  Logan expected the object to go up a bit and then fall back to the ground. The walls around the compound were twenty feet high. She’d never get enough wind to raise a catcher. However, to his surprise, the small ball did rise far enough to catch the wind, and instantly blossomed into a miniature catcher that pulled her true catcher above the wall’s dead zone.

  Logan stared in amazement as he watched the windcatcher soar up and fill with air. Still he didn’t see how this was going to work. The windcatcher was fully inflated above the east wall, but she remained on the ground. The catcher would move westward and smash her into the west wall, going almost sixty miles an hour.

  Instead, the windcatcher shot up vertically, just as he had seen on the Cully River video. He had thought the slats had caused the vertical climb, but that no longer appeared to be the case. Somehow, she could make a catcher climb vertically.

  He shook his head in disbelief as he watched her rise even as the catcher moved her west. In the few seconds it took to reach the wall, she lacked only a few inches to clear it. She made up this difference with the slats, virtually skiing over the top.

  And then she was gone.

  Logan watched the tape several more times until only one puzzle remained. How the hell had she gotten out of his room?

  For privacy reasons, he had never installed cameras in his personal room. Therefore, the only way to find the answer to his question was to track her down and ask.

  He rose from the PC and walked to his desk for a map of Capital. His eyes focused instantly on the curled money she’d left.

  Chapter 7

  Given the rocky start to the escape, Alisha was amazed how well it went off. The bio-scan worked perfectly. The compound area was empty. Her newly designed air-catcher worked exactly as planned, and most importantly, she’d managed to pull sufficient vertical lift not to slam into the west compound wall clocking sixty-five miles per hour.

  She should be exhilarated with her success, but truthfully, all she felt was an odd sense of guilt for betraying the colonel’s trust.

  He didn’t trust you, idiot! He left you in a room he thought was escape-proof. Besides, you never said you wouldn’t escape. In fact, he hadn’t officially charged you with anything, so you didn’t escape; you just left without saying goodbye.

  Still, she felt bad.

  Taking advantage of the circular wind pattern, which some called a stationary hurricane, Alisha picked up altitude and then coasted down through the dead zone over the Dead Rock Mountain ridges. On the other side, she picked up westbound winds that would take her back to the Capital.

  She stopped first at Colby Cotton to retrieve her pay from yesterday’s job. If she didn’t get it now, she’d probably lose it. The colonel could confiscate it to pay her fine, or if he was really pissed, he could stake out the place and arrest her when she showed up to claim her money.

  The second possibility concerned her. He had to know she was missing by now. What if he called the Capital SkyRyders to arrest her? She didn’t think he’d do that. He wouldn’t want to admit he’d let a young girl slip through his fingers. No, due to the way she’d left, he would make this personal and come after her himself.

  Alisha remained cautious as she entered Colby’s from the employee entrance instead of the front reception. When the secretary didn’t hand over her check but asked her to wait so Mr. Colby could speak to her personally, Alisha grew concerned. She studied the secretary’s face. The young woman didn’t seem any more stressed than the last time Alisha had seen her. Surely if she had just notified the Ryders of Alisha’s presence, she’d betray something.

  As the minutes passed by, Alisha was torn between forfeiting the money and getting out while she still could, or risking the chance this was nothing more than an executive running behind schedule. She knew from her occasional visits to see her father that leaving unimportant people waiting for hours was a common policy.

  Alisha glanced at her watch. If she didn’t leave soon, the colonel might show up personally to arrest her. She walked over to the secretary. “Look, I can’t wait any longer. Is there any way I can just get my check and leave?”

  Just then, the door opened, and Mr. Colby came out with another man. Once he finished seeing the man off, he turned to Alisha. His smile was radiant.

  “That was excellent work yesterday. Come on in.”

  “I’m on a tight schedule today. I really stoppe
d by just to pick up the check.”

  “But I have another job for you.”

  “I’m booked at the moment. Can I call you later about it?”

  Mr. Colby’s forehead furrowed. “Of course…” he said, and pulled two envelopes from his vest pocket. “Here’s what we agreed upon, and here’s a bonus for being able to do what you said you could.”

  The bonus stunned her. Executives weren’t known for their generosity. “Thanks, that’s very kind of you.”

  “You don’t know how much the bonus is,” he teased.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that counts.”

  “Well, it does matter, and I hope when you open it, you’ll call me about the new job I have for you.”

  Alisha nodded and pocketed the envelopes unopened. She had mixed emotions about the fact she’d never be able to work for Mr. Colby again. He paid in cash, and evidently he paid bonuses, but his jobs were dangerous and in a gray area of the law. Yes, the fabrics were his, but she had to break and enter to retrieve them. Had she been caught, she doubted he would have acknowledged their contract, leaving her to take the fall.

  However, the choice was no longer hers to make. The moment she’d told the colonel about this job, she had ruined any chance of more jobs with Colby Cotton. She had no doubt Colonel Logan could strong-arm the fellow into assisting with her arrest.

  She chose a different employee entrance to leave the building. She saw nothing to alarm her, but just to be certain, she took a circuitous route through the city, finally sneaking into her grandfather’s building through a rarely used tunnel system, created back when there were subways and railroads. Back in her mother’s youth, they still worked. And given they ran on electricity, they could still work, but in this section of Capital, too many people were being robbed and killed on them, so the politicians had declared them unsafe and shut them down.

  She pulled up her grandfather’s handprint on her bio-scan and pressed it against the security panel. The door to his room opened, and she walked in. “Sorry I’m late, Gramps,” she said to her grandfather, who was slumped in his chair watching TV. She dropped her pack in the corner, went over, and gave him a hug and kiss.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “I’m feeling good,” he assured her.

  “Liar,” she scolded softly, seeing all too clearly the decline in his health from the week before. “But you’ll feel better soon. I got paid today, so I’ll go get your medicine.”

  “It’s too expensive,” the old man complained.

  “Not for me. I get it cheap,” she assured him. Changing out of the flight suit into street clothes, she went into the kitchenette area of the room and pulled out the envelopes to count her money. “I’m going to pick up some fresh fish too,” she said as she counted the money in her bonus envelope. Damn if Colby hadn’t doubled her pay!

  “You get that cheap too? Fish cost way too much.”

  “Well, we’ll see. But I’ll bring you something good to eat. Did you eat last night?” She pulled on a jacket hanging in the closet, tucking the money into its inside pocket.

  “Wasn’t hungry.”

  “You gotta eat, Gramps.” She knelt down beside him. “I know rations don’t taste like much, but they are supplemented with vitamins and nutrients.”

  “Tastes like shit,” Gramps grumbled. “That’s the problem. I can still remember what real food tastes like.”

  “I had real food last night,” Alisha said, hoping to distract him from the bitterness of his memories.

  He brightened up. “You had a date?”

  “Not a date. But a very nice man provided me a shower, food, and shelter after I had a little mishap with my windcatcher.” Alisha immediately regretted mentioning the “mishap”. “Don’t look so concerned. I wasn’t hurt. I was going along fine when the wind stalled and down I came, right into some wet marshlands.”

  “You sure you aren’t hurt?”

  “I’m positive. The guy was a medic, and he looked me over. I’m fine.”

  “He sounds like a nice man.”

  Alisha sighed. “He was.”

  “So why do you sound so forlorn?”

  “Because nothing can come of it.”

  “Why not?”

  Alisha paused. She refused to out-and-out lie to her gramps, but she also didn’t want to tell him the complete truth in this matter. His career with the SkyRyders had ended badly, and the mention of the Corps always made him angry, even after twenty years. “There’s already a woman in his house.”

  “He’s married?”

  Alisha shrugged.

  “Then why did he invite you home?”

  “Because beneath a gruff exterior, he’s a kind man.”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Young men are rarely described as gruff. How old was this fellow?”

  Alisha blushed. “I don’t know. I didn’t have sex with him, Gramps. I just ate his food, used up a month’s ration of water in the shower, and slept, unaccosted, in a very soft, clean bed.”

  The old man patted her hand. “I think I like this man too. Shame about the wife. You deserve a kind person in your life.”

  “I’ve got the kindest man in the world,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him.

  “I’m barely alive; that hardly counts…”

  Reminded of his ill health, Alisha rose. “I’ll go get your medicine now. And I’m going to bring you back something good to eat, so get your taste buds ready for a treat.”

  Chapter 8

  It didn’t take long to isolate the address of Daniel Kane, the most likely original owner of the girl’s flight suit. He’d been a general of the SkyRyders. The records didn’t say why he’d left the Corps, but evidently someone still kept tabs on him, because the changes of address were up to date.

  Logan frowned as he skimmed the list of places the man had lived. Mr. Kane’s lifestyle showed a continuing decline since his resignation. Logan knew his current apartment complex. It was about the cheapest place to live in the Capital, and probably the worst value by the dollar. Most of the apartments lacked plumbing or electricity. Often ten to twenty people would cram into a single room.

  A few years ago, the city had promised to improve the conditions, but in the end they only placed bio-locks on the doors, which limited entry to the legal residents of the room. This reduced the number of thefts and murders in the apartments, but it had done little to improve the overall misery of the area. Instead of a twenty percent chance of being murdered inside the apartments, now there was a nineteen percent chance of being murdered outside the apartments, and the corpse would be missing its right hand.

  Logan was glad he no longer had to deal with the whole Capital mess. Being a SkyRyder in Capital was the equivalent of policing Hell. He much preferred policing the River and Ridge sectors. Still plenty of crime to fight, but the crimes were generally more professional and less personal.

  Logan frowned at the address. Why was a retired general of the Corps living in such a hole? SkyRyders had great pensions. Where was all his money going? To the girl?

  Logan pulled up a different database. He wanted to know exactly how much Daniel Kane received each month. The pension system was terribly archaic, but with a bit of luck, he located the file with Kane’s information.

  Well, evidently not, because this Daniel Kane had died ten years prior. Logan was about to close the file when he noticed the address. It was the same location the still-living Daniel Kane had occupied ten years ago.

  While it was possible some bureaucrat had mistakenly declared a pensioner dead, why the hell wouldn’t Daniel Kane have objected? A simple bio-scan would prove he was alive.

  Unless he wasn’t Daniel Kane. If he were an imposter, then he couldn’t protest the loss of his pension.

  With his curiosity over Daniel Kane almost equal to his annoyance at Alisha Kane’s escape, Logan gathered up the various gear he thought would be useful for his day’s plan.

&nb
sp; After taking a few minutes to rip Philly a new hole for his sloppy care of his gear, and giving DC orders for the day, he set off toward the landing pad. The winds were back to normal, so he laid out his windcatcher behind a windbreak, slipped into his harness and caught the thirty-mile–an-hour ground winds. Within seconds, he’d soared forward into the sky, climbing into the higher, faster winds of the massive wind rotation that covered the west side of the Americas.

  By nine a.m., he arrived at a Corps apartment located across from Kane’s current address. Given the dangers and difficulties in this section of Capital, the Corps had apartments rented on almost every block for surveillance purposes. Using heat-imaging radar connected to a three-dimensional grid of the complex, Logan located Daniel Kane’s apartment. He could see one heat image, which appeared to be male, seated in a chair. A short time later, a second smaller heat image appeared.

  Logan smiled, certain this was his girl.

  He watched as she hugged the man in the chair, changed out of her flight suit, and did something at the kitchenette before returning to the man. Logan wished he had sound, but there hadn’t been time to tap into the monitoring system. Besides, it would have made the local SkyRyders curious. Until he understood what was going on, he didn’t want to bring unwanted attention to Alisha and the man who might or might not be retired general Daniel Kane.

  Logan tried to follow Alisha when she left the building. By the time he locked up and exited the complex, the heat image he thought belonged to her was several blocks ahead of him. He hoped he was wrong, for the tagged signal headed toward D Street, where the business of drugs dominated every square foot.

  He cut through a slightly rougher street, which was consequently less crowded, and closed the distance between them. Now he could clearly see her a few thousand feet ahead of him. As he watched her turn onto D Street, he stopped and sighed in disappointment. A woman only entered D Street for one of three reasons. Either she was a hooker, which Alisha clearly was not; or she was a user, which he would have seen signs of the night before when he’d examined her; or she was a trafficker. Given her flying skills…he knew she had to be a drug flyer.