by Jake Elwood
"We haven't even landed," Cassie muttered, "and I'm already bored."
The land grew more interesting as they neared a jagged coastline. The square farms ended, replaced by uneven strips of cultivation that wound among rocky, forested outcrops. The town of Swan Bay looked downright sloppy, a straggle of buildings strung along a wild, rocky indentation in the coastline. Roger found a radio beacon for airborne craft and followed it in to a little landing field on the outskirts.
"If I'm not back in an hour," Cassie told him, "it means I've slid into a boredom-induced coma. Track me down and wake me up." She left the landing craft, feeling the unaccustomed pressure of the laser pistol against her ankle. She felt naked without her usual pistol. Still, she was probably the most heavily-armed person in the entire town.
"It'll have to do," she muttered, and trudged across the asphalt surface of the landing field. There were landing strips and circles marked off here and there, but the whole field was really a vast, paved square with paint on it. There were no other off-world craft, just a flitter and a pair of skimmers.
The air was a bit chilly, and scented with plant life. She couldn't identify any of it. The air just smelled green, a mix of the surrounding cropland and the trees and grass and hanging flowerpots that decorated the streets of the town.
A fence surrounded the landing field, and an AI interrogated her at the gate, demanding to know her name and contact information. She had to pay a small service fee before it allowed her to leave.
More money went into the little electric car parked outside the gate. She would have liked an enclosed cab and a heater, but the taxi was just a platform with four wheels and a couple of bench seats. She sat down, slid a credit crystal into a slot in the rudimentary dash, and gave it the professor's address.
Every building in the town was beige. She turned it into a game as she rolled along, trying to find an exception. Private homes, restaurants, stores, even bars were pretty much the same bland color. She rolled through what passed for a business district, then into residential neighborhoods. The people were few, often young couples with one or two small children. Everyone looked happy and ordinary and plain.
Every house had a fence, but the fences were less than waist-high, there to mark property lines, not keep people out. She wondered what it would be like to spend year after year in a place like that, to forget how nasty the galaxy could be, to never be in danger.
"The local teenagers must just love this place," she said aloud. "It's about as exciting as a funeral."
The taxi followed a coast road, with houses on one side and a cliff on the other, falling away to an endless blue-green ocean. It might have been nice to watch the vast expanse of rolling breakers, but Cassie's long-established habits of paranoia kept her watching the streets, the people, looking for anyone who didn't fit in.
She was the only misfit in sight, though. If there was a mercenary team staking out Swan Bay, they were keeping a low profile.
The professor lived just beyond the outskirts of town. His house was a few kilometers in from the coast, on an upthrusting spur of brown rock that would give him a view of the ocean. He had no close neighbors. There was a narrow, twisting strip of cropland a few hundred meters from his house, but for the most part the land around was too rough for farming.
The taxi dropped Cassie off at a gate separated from the house by a long, twisting driveway. She recorded the taxi's call code, then dismissed it. It would make a lousy getaway vehicle, and in the meantime she didn't want it sitting at the gate, advertising her presence.
She found herself chuckling at her own paranoia as the car rolled away. She was in no danger. Once she was done talking to Sykes she would have to stand shivering beside the gate, waiting for the taxi to come back, and for what?
Still, with the bounty on her head at a hundred and twenty thousand creds and still rising, paranoia was a good habit to maintain.
The gate AI was curt and to the point. "Professor Sykes is not receiving visitors at this time." It offered no further information and didn't ask if it could take a message. Not that she wanted to leave one. Any sort of appointment would give her enemies a chance to set up an ambush.
The professor's fence extended only a few meters in either direction. After that, the rocky, broken ground provided a better barrier than a fence. She clambered over bulging lumps of brown igneous rock, edged past the west end of the fence, and dropped onto the driveway. From there it was an easy stroll to the house.
Sykes' home was a single-story building the same beige color as the nearby town. It followed the chaotic contours of the rock spur it sat upon, which gave it a split-level design. By the looks of it, nearly every room would be a meter or so higher or lower than every adjacent room. There were plenty of big windows, especially on the ocean side, and a broad front door protected by a wide portico. A hovercar sat under a little protective roof, dust thick on the windshield.
The driveway rose toward the house, and Cassie paused to look around. To the east, the land smoothed quickly into a perfect quilt of farmland with the occasional road making a dark line between fields. To the south was the town of Swan Bay, the streets looking like a disordered tangle from here as they curved to follow the coastline and avoid outcrops of rock. The ocean dominated the west, and she stood for longer than she meant to, watching the play of sunlight on the ever-changing water. She couldn't see the waves that hit the base of the cliffs, but she heard the distant rumble of water against stone.
"Focus, Cassie." She turned and hurried toward the house, rubbing her upper arms with her hands and shivering a bit. "The old codger better let me in. It's chilly out here."
Her boots thumped on the portico floor. Wood, by the sound of it. It seemed extravagant to build such a broad floor out of wood cut from living trees, and then cover it in white paint so that it might as well have been plastic. Still, she supposed wood was plentiful on these long-established worlds. But it hardly seemed right.
A panel beside the door lit up as she approached. "Professor Sykes is not receiving visitors," said a smooth electronic voice. "Bypassing the gate was not appropriate."
"I need to speak to him," Cassie said impatiently.
"Professor Sykes is not—"
She stepped up to the door and knocked, hard. There was a little metal handle set into the door at chest-level, and she looked at it for a moment before recognizing it as a perfectly obsolete door knocker. She shrugged and banged the knocker vigorously, the metallic impact echoing through the portico.
"I must insist that you leave the premises," the AI said. "I would prefer not to summon local law enforcement."
Most of Cassie's tools and equipment had been lost with the Raffles or abandoned back on Blix, but she still had an AI lockpick. Normally she preferred a lot more planning before she tried a break-in, but with the sleepy nature of Elander Nine she was pretty sure she'd get away with using a generic pick. She slid the little strip of metal and plastic into the data port under the panel beside the front door.
"Welcome," said the AI, and the front door slid open.
Cassie left the pick where it was and walked into the house. "Professor Sykes?" she called. "Professor, are you in? Your door just opened when I walked up. Hello?"
Her voice echoed around the house. She had only seen the entry hall so far, but already she was sure the house was empty. It had a feeling to it, a lonely abandoned aura that told her the professor was gone, and had been for a while.
The room she was in was paneled in pale wood and lined with a couple of low benches to help people take off their shoes. There were hooks for coats and little cubbyholes for dirty footwear. She could see a blue jacket on the wall and a pair of boots in a cubbyhole. She was tempted to pull on the jacket. The house wasn't much warmer than outside, but if the professor turned up, she still hoped to win him over. If she was wearing his coat it would make her job all the more difficult.
"Professor?" She walked through a doorway into a homely kitchen, the
n past that and down a short flight of stairs to a living room with a view of the distant ocean. There were moving landscapes in frames on the walls and deep, comfortable-looking chairs. It was the nest of a scholarly hermit, simple and functional, with no ostentatious displays of wealth. She decided she liked this professor she'd never met.
The first hint of trouble came when she entered the bedroom. The contents of drawers were strewn on the bed. She stood in the doorway for a time, just looking, interpreting what she saw. The room wasn't ransacked, she decided. The drawers in the dresser were open, but she could see socks in tidy stacks in one drawer, and a couple of shirts, still folded, on the bed.
No, what she was seeing was the aftermath of someone packing and leaving in a hurry.
She returned to the kitchen and opened the coolbox. There was a sandwich on a plate, the bread dried out, wilted lettuce poking out from between the slices. More lettuce filled a bowl under a clear dome. The leaves were a mix of green and brown. He'd been gone several days, then. No longer.
The rest of the kitchen was tidy. The whole house was organized and well-kept. Sykes seemed to be a neat, orderly man. Not the sort of man to leave drawers open and food spoiling.
He'd left in a hurry. She was sure of it. There was no proof, but she felt it in her bones. The question was, why?
"Did it have anything to do with my little collection of toys, Professor?" she said, looking around the empty kitchen. Her instincts said it did. A lot of eight-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-year-old artifacts had suddenly become urgently important, and Sykes was the galaxy's leading authority on Ancients tech. "I'm not the only one who came to see you, am I?"
She called Roger, and had him splice into the house AI through her lockpick. The house would know how long he'd been gone, and it might know a good deal more. Her lockpick had the house convinced that she was an expected guest, but getting the AI to answer a lot of nosy questions was a little more difficult. She got Roger connected, then found herself with nothing to do as he began the long, slow process of slicing into the house AI.
Prowling through the rest of the house used up several minutes. After that she picked through the bowl of lettuce, eating the freshest bits. When she started to shiver she put on the professor's jacket.
"Once you slice in," she told Roger, "get the house to keep us informed of any future visitors." A disturbing thought occurred to her. "Better check and see if anyone else had the same idea." She went to the front door, opened it, and scanned the driveway. Nothing moved. She walked through the house, looking out every window. There was no sign of activity closer than a farming machine rolling placidly through a field a good five kilometers away.
She found a package of toffee in the jacket pocket and sucked on a piece as she thought about the best ways to reach the landing field. The Goose was a clumsy vehicle with chemical thrusters powerful enough to be dangerous. There would be no rooftop rescues from Roger this time. The Goose didn't hover, and it was hard to maneuver. Getting back to the landing field would be her best bet.
"I'm over-reacting," she told herself. "Nothing's going to happen." The words sounded hollow even as she spoke them. "Roger? Do you need me here for the slice? Maybe I should head back to the landing field."
Before he could answer she heard a faint murmur of voices.
"Hush," she said as Roger started to speak. She tugged the little laser gun out of her boot and crept closer to the faint voice.
"Professor Sykes is not receiving visitors at this time." The AI's muffled voice was coming from the speaker on the outside of the front door.
Cassie faded back, moving deeper into the house. If the visitor tried a lockpick, he would see Cassie's pick, still sticking out of the port by the front door. She hurried through the kitchen, past a small office, and found the back door. She had a hand on the knob when she heard the front door slide open.
Quickly, using the sound of the front door to mask the noise she made, she shoved the back door open. It was an old-fashioned hinged door, and it squeaked as it swung. Cringing at the noise, she stepped outside and then closed the door as gently as she could.
She was in a little rock garden. A few small pots held plants, a couple of them blooming beautifully. There was no back fence, just a sudden drop-off where the knob of brown rock ended. She hurried to the edge and looked down.
There was a drop of a dozen meters or so right beneath her feet, but the rock was uneven, and there were places where the drop was less than two meters. She picked her way along the edge and dropped to a shelf of rock lower down, then turned to peep back at the house. Only the top of her head showed above the rock. She wouldn't be seen.
No one came to the back door to investigate. Either the intruder hadn't heard her, or he had dismissed the sound as nothing important. She felt her lip curl. She was being chased from the house by an amateur.
"Roger," she whispered. "Is the pick still in the front door?"
"Yes. What is your situation?"
"Person or persons unknown inside the house." She thought. "Question is, if they didn't use a pick, how did they get through the front door?"
"If someone forced the door, the local police will be on their way," Roger said. "You should get out of there."
He had a point. She began the laborious process of circling the house, clambering up and down over folds and wrinkles of stone. The road was her best refuge. If she was found in the middle of rough country behind a burgled house she'd never talk her way out of it.
"This planet has unencrypted feeds from their weather satellites," Roger said. "The coverage is spotty and the resolution is mediocre, but it's enough to show vehicle traffic. I should have line of sight on the house within fourteen minutes."
"Roger, Roger." She was at the base of the spur of rock that supported the house. The ground was flatter here, though still far from smooth. She stepped over ridges of rock and moved around boulders, working her way around toward the front. The driveway would be foolhardy, she decided. She'd go cross-country to the road. When she was close, she'd call the taxi to come pick her up.
She glanced up at the house, checking for anyone peering down at her. There was no one. The intruder was blundering around inside, without a thought for other visitors. She wondered who it was. The urge to climb up and take a look was pretty strong. Knowledge was power, after all. Still, getting spotted by an enemy of unknown strength would be pretty stupid.
A long ridge of stone blocked her path on the east side of the house. She followed the ridge outward, and it sank lower and lower until she was able to scramble up onto it. Just before she dropped to the other side, she glanced up at the house. She was far enough out that she could see a section of wall and several windows, and she hesitated, caught between prudence and curiosity.
Hell with it, she decided. I'm going to take a peek.
The little hand scope felt clumsy as she brought it to her eye and fiddled with the controls. She usually used the scope on her pistol for this sort of thing. She zoomed in, found a window, and waited for the optics to adjust to light levels. The dark window brightened until she found herself looking at the back wall of the living room. She zoomed out, then tweaked the zoom until she could see two windows. Every nerve screamed at her to put the scope away and get moving, but she knelt there on the ridge of stone, frozen.
Just as she was about to lower the scope she caught a flicker of movement. A man walked through the kitchen, a dark outline with broad shoulders and pale hair. She zoomed in quickly, found herself staring at the outside wall of the house, and searched frantically for the window.
By the time she found the kitchen window again the man was long gone.
She swung the scope from window to window, knowing she wasn't going to see a damned thing. At last she lowered the scope. It was time to move. She had seen enough, anyway. She wasn't certain – not completely – but she was pretty sure she knew who was in the professor's house.
"Cassie, you need to get out of there."
> "Way ahead of you," she told Roger, sliding down from the ridge of rock.
"I've got three boats inbound from the west. You're about to have company."
She froze. "Boats? The local police are using boats?"
"I doubt it," Roger said. "There are civilian markings on the craft. I believe they are rentals. I can make out armed men and what seem to be combat robots."
"Oh, great." She looked at the pocket where she'd shoved the laser gun. She might as well throw it at the robots as pull the trigger for all the good it would do. "I'm not equipped for combat robots, Roger."
"That's why I'm suggesting a rapid departure," he said.
"Right. There's just one problem."
"What problem?"
"I think Jerry O'Malley is in the house."
CHAPTER 20
She wasted precious seconds standing frozen, weighing her options. The house was a hundred and fifty meters away, most of it uphill on jumbled rock. If only she could signal him somehow, tell him to run! She swung the little laser gun up and aimed at the windows, thinking that a scorch mark on an inside wall would let him know that something was up. It was a hopeless shot, she realized quickly. Even if she could hit a window at that distance, atmosphere would reduce the laser to a warm red dot by the time it reached its target. She could have done it with her pistol, but the hideout gun was a joke at anything but very close range.
Shoving the gun in her pocket, she clambered back onto the ridge of stone and ran along the top, heading for the house. She had no idea how much time she had before the boats arrived. It didn't matter. She had to do her best, and do it as quickly as possible.
The house was fifty meters away and a dozen meters above her when the first black speck appeared in the distance. It was the plume of fire beneath that allowed her to spot it. A dozen more plumes appeared all around it. The specks grew as the distant shapes grew closer.
