Stealing Life

by Antony Johnston

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2018 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Sam Gretton

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne & Maz Smith

  Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-091-9

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HE’D BEEN TOLD the apartment would be empty while he robbed it.

  In fact, it was the young woman sitting on the edge of the bed who’d said it. She was pretty, with long, dark hair, a slim boyish figure and dark brown eyes on pale skin. Her figure was a little too straight, perhaps—her mouth a little too large—but it suited her.

  “Hello, Nicco. Right on time.”

  But Nicco wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the fat man sleeping next to her.

  Nicco reached through the hole he’d made in the glass and opened the window, then swung his legs over the windowsill and tip-toed toward the woman across a deep pile carpet. “Keep your voice down,” he whispered. “What in the fifty-nine hells are you doing here? What’s he doing here?”

  “Relax, lover.” She wore a silk slip that barely covered her, and as she spoke she crossed her legs and looked up at Nicco. “I drugged him. He’ll be out for about four hours. I wanted to see you. I never see you at work.”

  Her name was Tabathianna, but everyone called her ‘Tabby.’ She and Nicco were what he called ‘part-time’ lovers, which meant they slept together occasionally, but he didn’t return her calls. And she was also a hooker.

  “I could have just walked through the front door if I’d known,” said Nicco. “You were supposed to take him out! What if he wakes up?”

  Tabby gripped Nicco’s collar, pulled him down and kissed him. “I told you, he’s drugged. I put enough dope in his beer to keep him out for hours. He just didn’t want to go out. Not even for a romantic walk on the harbour.”

  Nicco looked at the sleeping man and thought of Azbatha’s northern harbour front, a ghost town of empty warehouses and docking platforms punctuated by rusting cranes and shipping cartons. The only major business still operating there was an old shipbuilding firm that had diversified into airships just a couple of months before the bottom fell out of the surface cargo industry. All the other shipbuilders had gone under, and with no ships there was no cargo, and no work for the docks. The city council was desperately trying to reinvigorate the area with ‘business incentives’ and backhanders, hoping that surface trade would pick back up in these unfamiliar times of peace. But the smart money had already moved to airships. Azbatha International, the city’s central airship station, saw hundreds of vessels packed with cargo come and go every day.

  By this time of night the harbour’s regular inhabitants would rob a man like Tabby’s client blind, deaf and dead. Nicco wondered about her idea of romance, and figured the man had gotten off lightly.

  Nicco gently removed Tabby’s hands from his collar, stood up and looked around the apartment. He was here now, so he may as well steal whatever he could. He certainly needed the money, and the whole thing would be a waste of time if he left empty-handed. Besides, it would upset Tabby, and he didn’t want that. Whatever the state of their relationship, Nicco had known her since they were both children.

  He opened the bedroom door and walked into the lounge. Tabby followed him, pulling the door closed again behind her, and together they looked around at the sumptuous decor.

  “Was I right?” asked Tabby. “It’s all worth something, isn’t it?”

  She was right. Nicco could see the man had spent a lot of money to make this place look legitimate. But for a thief, everything had a catch. Two original paintings by the famed Varnian painter Arno Ven Ladall hung on the walls, one above the fireplace and one adjacent to the window. They were worth thousands... but would be hard to fence. Nicco was no expert, but the design on the hearthrug looked like a hand-woven depiction of the Three Praali Mountain Kings myth, worth almost as much as one of the paintings... but Praali rugs were thick and heavy. Nicco had brought a backpack, not a truck. Next to the holovid unit was an art deco statuette in the central Varnian style, a high-foreheaded caricature carved from the region’s famous white, heavy stone... but the stone was just as famous for its brittleness. It would take at least two men to remove it safely, and there was only one of Nicco.

  His mind turned to smaller things, looking for jewellery, valuable books, cash. But if there was anything like that in the apartment, it wasn’t in this room. He glanced in the kitchen, but as he’d suspected, there was as much chance of this man lighting an oven as Nicco marrying a cop.

  “It’s not looking good,” he said. “It’s all worth a lot, but I can’t take any of it. This isn’t a home for him, it’s a place he visits. It’s got about as much soul as my mother’s corpse.”

  Tabby tutted. “You shouldn’t say things like that. It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead.”

  Nicco ignored the admonition. He’d spoken ill of his mother often enough when she was alive; he didn’t see what difference it would make now that she rested at the bottom of the Nissal Straits.

  He moved through to the bathroom. The bath had gold taps, which could fetch a tidy sum, but with the man still inside the apartment Nicco wasn’t about to wrench them off and flood the place. Drugged or not, some things just made too much noise for a thief’s comfort. He settled for the bath plug and soap dishes, also made of gold.

  He heard Tabby calling in from the lounge. “What about this?”

  Nicco walked back to see her pointing at an enchanted orb, floating three feet above the coffee table. It was a couple of inches in diameter and pulsed with a soft, blue-green iridescent light. The enchantment was beautiful, subtle. Probably not from Turith itself. Varn, perhaps? Or Praal, like the rug? One of those weird places where everyone used magic, no doubt.

  “This must be worth something,” said Tabby, “and you can easily carry it out. You could probably fit it in your pocket.”

  Nicco hesitated. “I’m not sure... I only know one wizard who’s a fence, and frankly I don’t trust him that much.”

  Tabby frowned. “It could be worth a fortune!”

  “Magic just gives me the creeps. You can’t touch it and half the time you can’t see it. How can you trust something like that?”

  Tabby giggled. “Big Nicco Salarum, frightened by a little magic. Come on, it’s not going to bite you, is it? It’s just a bit of glass.”

  Nicco supposed she was right. He sighed and reached for the orb.

  It shrieked.

  Nicco let go, but the loud, high-pitched whine didn’t stop. Some kind of alarm.

  It was the final straw for Nicco. With a silent vow never to take job suggestions from Tabby ever again, he headed back to the
bedroom door. Then he realised it was slowly opening.

  Naked as the day he was born, Tabby’s client opened the door and blinked at Nicco.

  IT HAD BEEN Tabby’s idea. She’d been with the mark before, a wealthy industrialist from Jalakum, in the centre of the Turithian archipelago. A wealthy married industrialist, more to the point, and so he came to Azbatha—famed city of vice, the ‘Pit-on-Stilts,’ the most dangerous and overcrowded city in Turith—to satisfy his lust. Which was often enough that he’d bought an apartment in Riverside, Azbatha’s wealthiest neighbourhood, to use while he and his libido were in town. He’d bought the apartment under the guise of needing a place to stay while doing business in Northern Turith, and certainly no-one would argue that in Azbatha, an apartment was probably more secure than a hotel. In fact, he really did use it for legitimate business sometimes, so the apartment was filled with expensive goods. From the art hanging on the walls to the gold bath taps, from the Praali hearthrug to the enchanted floating orb in the lounge, when Tabby had seen the apartment she figured a good thief could turn its contents into a tidy sum of money.

  And Nicco Salarum, as Tabby well knew, was a very good thief.

  She’d told Nicco about the businessman’s apartment four months ago. He’d come to town and called on Madame Zentra, asking for a young woman with dark hair. Madame had sent Tabby, one of the brothel’s more experienced girls. The john had picked her up on a crowded street corner in a hired groundcar and taken her back to his apartment. It was forty-five stories up, but when Nicco went to case it, he figured the building was eminently scalable with monofilament wire and omnimag grips.

  (Nicco knew some burglars who used enchanted tools to get them up Azbatha’s ubiquitous skyscrapers—floating boots, sticky gloves, even light-bending cloaks that rendered the wearer invisible—but he was a traditionalist at heart. He preferred technology to magic. Even in Azbatha, the paths of thieves and wizards crossed often enough for Nicco to know he wouldn’t trust any of them as far as he could kick them. What happened when your floating boots suddenly stopped working at the fourteenth floor? Even assuming you survived, wizards didn’t exactly hand out receipts.)

  That evening, Nicco also saw what Tabby hadn’t told him... That it really was about the most expensive place you could find in Azbatha, complete with high-tech security and a permanent guard patrol. Getting in via an apartment window would be easy, but doing so without tripping an alarm was an altogether different challenge. Social engineering to disable alarms, like the old ‘unexpected electrician call-out’ ruse, worked well enough... on the lazy, the gullible and the downright stupid. But no Azbathan security firm got very far hiring stupid people.

  So Nicco decided to pass. Good thief or not, he didn’t think the profit margin was high enough to risk being target practice for a bunch of bored, trigger-happy ex-cons playing at guards.

  But the reason Tabby hadn’t told him about the security was because she hadn’t seen it. It transpired that the businessman had an arrangement, no doubt an expensive one, with the in-house security firm to preserve his dignity and minimise the risk of wagging tongues. When he was in town and ‘entertaining,’ the security patrols ignored him and anything going on in his apartment. Cameras were switched off, patrols innocently missed out his corridor, and guards made themselves scarce when they saw him walking up the steps to the lobby. The apartment was extremely secure—but only when it was vacant.

  Nicco found all this out the next time the businessman visited Azbatha, six weeks later. Six weeks was a long time in crime, and Nicco had all but forgotten about the man by then. But that night he was casing a warehouse on the other side of town, clambering around in the eaves doing his due diligence, when a dark blue groundcar pulled up at the roadside and waited. Nicco froze. It wasn’t a part of town known for streetwalkers or kerb crawlers, and for a moment he thought perhaps he’d missed a security camera, that he was about to be chased down by an over-eager guard.

  Then Nicco heard the clatter of high heels. He craned his neck out and saw a tall, dark-haired woman in a long coat and evening dress walk toward the car. Nicco didn’t recognise the woman—some high-class escort from the other side of town, by the look of her—but he did recognise the businessman’s face as he opened his car door and invited her in. Nicco wasn’t an overly spiritual man, but he could take a hint from the cosmos. He followed them, this time focusing on any changes in the security pattern when the man was at home. That night, he observed all the deliberate lapses. But he still wanted more certainty of the arrangements before he’d consider the job a good one, so he shrugged it off and moved on.

  The next time he came to Azbatha, the businessman called Madame Zentra’s again. Tabby, by now convinced he was an easy mark for someone like Nicco, was ready to connive her way into the job if she’d had to; but it hadn’t been necessary. The man had asked for her by name. Apparently, the high-class escort had been a little too high-class for his particular peccadilloes.

  A plan was hatched. The john always paid for a full night, so Tabby would get the sex over with, then insist he took her out on the town. A holokino show, a quick drink, a walk along the sea front perhaps; she’d come up with something. And as she explained her foolproof idea to Nicco over several jars of beer in the bar next to Madame Zentra’s, tossing back her hair and giggling about how much money he could fence it all for, Nicco had decided that, by the watery saints, she really would think of something and it really was a foolproof idea.

  When he woke the next afternoon, it was with a clearer and more sober view of Tabby’s plan. But he also knew she was trying to help his current, somewhat dire situation. Nicco was in a sizeable debt to Wallus Bazhanka, the famed mob boss of Azbatha, after losing a trailer full of high-performance skycars. The loss was unavoidable—the only alternative that didn’t involve being arrested was to silence the guard who saw him, a guard who shouldn’t have been on duty in any case. But Nicco had never even seriously injured anyone in the course of his work, much less killed someone. It was a badge he wore with pride, and he wasn’t about to start now.

  So Nicco dumped the trailer in the ocean and made a getaway. To him it was the only viable option, but Bazhanka didn’t see it that way. To Bazhanka it was the careless and unnecessary loss of one hundred and fifty thousand lire; and he expected Nicco to compensate him. Nicco gave Bazhanka sixty thousand straight away, almost everything he had saved. But it wasn’t enough to get the mob boss off his back. Now he wanted the balance, ninety thousand lire, and the deadline was running out.

  Bazhanka offered Nicco the chance to pay it off in kind by working for him, but Nicco refused. Owing Bazhanka was bad enough, but the thought of being on his payroll made Nicco sick. He’d find the money some other way. Nicco had already amassed fifteen thousand in loot, all of it fenced and converted into money as quickly as possible, but if he was going to meet the deadline he couldn’t afford to turn anything down.

  So he decided to go ahead and rob the businessman. Maybe Tabby’s plan would work after all.

  NICCO WOULD NEVER know. Because here he was, having climbed forty-five stories in the sub-zero temperatures of a Turithian winter to get through the poxy window, and not only had Tabby not taken the man out, but he’d already recovered from whatever she’d slipped him.

  Nicco weighed his options. He could clobber the man and make a hasty exit, but that would leave Tabby in potential danger. Nicco couldn’t abandon her, not if the john worked out the scam. He hesitated.

  Too late. Nicco had given him enough time to work out what a black-clad man with a backpack was doing in his apartment. He punched Nicco in the guts.

  Nicco lost his breath in a single gust, and his knees buckled. The bodyweight that had shaken off Tabby’s dope so quickly also gave the businessman’s blow a hefty power.

  Tabby’s voice rose a couple of octaves as she shouted, “Hit him! Hit him!”

  Nicco could barely hear her over the shrieking orb. Was she talking to him? The man lo
omed over him, and Tabby was still screaming. “I got up for a drink of water and I found him in here. He was trying to rob you and he had a gun and I couldn’t scream or he’d kill me!” She backed into a corner as she screamed, circling round toward the holovid box.

  Nicco scrambled backward on his hands and heels as the man advanced on him. Clever girl, he thought. Obvious, but plausible. He only hoped the man would overlook the complete absence of a gun in Nicco’s hands.

  Now that Tabby was above suspicion, he turned to the situation at hand. He kicked upward, driving his foot into the businessman’s groin with enough force to turn the man a darker shade of pink. He also made an ‘O’ shape with his mouth, but no sound came out. Or perhaps Nicco just couldn’t hear him over the screeching from the enchanted orb. He could hear Tabby though—the girl could scream—and suddenly, she stopped.

  Then he saw her calmly walk up behind the john and smack him over the head with the Varnian statuette.

  It smashed into a hundred pieces, covering the floor with fine white powder. The businessman stood stunned and motionless for a moment, then collapsed on top of Nicco, knocking the wind out of him again.

  Tabby helped Nicco out from under the man’s unconscious body, then ran into the bedroom. Nicco paused a moment to grab the orb and throw it down on the floor. Like the statuette, it smashed, and the piercing alarm finally stopped. Nicco sighed, caught his breath and followed Tabby into the bedroom. He expected her to be dressing, ready to make a quick getaway. Which she was, but not in the manner Nicco expected. Tabby stood by the window, still in her slip, ready to climb out.

  “What in the fifty-nine hells are you doing?” Nicco said.

  “Well, we’d better escape, hadn’t we?”

  “We’re forty-five stories up and it’s minus eight out there! No, get some clothes on and leave through the front door. The guards will just think he’s finished with you.” Tabby paused, considering his suggestion, so Nicco pulled her towards him and kissed her. “Trust me.”