Cat and Company

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  No one stopped to help her. No one looked up from their slogging pace through the mud. Either they had seen this sort of thing far too often, or they just didn’t care. Possibly, both.

  Bedivere lifted the injector and slid it over Connell’s arm, up against her neck and activated it.

  She sagged, instantly unconscious.

  “Done,” Bedivere said heavily. He met Connell’s eyes over the top of the woman’s graying head.

  “I’m ready and waiting,” Brant said. “I just finished a scan. There isn’t anyone else within three kilometers of here. We’ll be completely alone.”

  * * * * *

  The abandoned outbuilding had once served the original open pit mining operation, until the chemicals the mining and refining processes belched into the atmosphere had turned the rain to acid, depleted the oxygen to miniscule levels and forced the mine under the surface. The coated metal of the building was impervious to the acid which meant the seals were still in place, although any equipment inside the building had long since been stripped out and reused somewhere else.

  The room they were in had once housed generators and there were old marks and holes in the plasteel floor that showed where the equipment had been sited. The atmosphere in the room was stale but breathable, which let them remove the masks and the rainshields.

  There was nothing in the room except dust. Brant had set up the security scanner on the floor. Next to that was a roll of tools, unrolled and spread for easy access. There were various pieces of equipment ranged behind the roll. Three floating mini-suns provided enough daylight to see.

  Connell looked sick as he tied the woman’s hands behind her back, then rolled her over onto her back once more and sat her up. Her head lolled freely, the streaked gray hair hanging over her face.

  “I warned you,” Bedivere told him.

  Connell swallowed. “You did,” he agreed. “And now I understand what you were trying to tell me. It doesn’t change anything. We still need to do this. Ready?”

  Bedivere looked at Brant.

  Brant sighed. He didn’t look any happier than Connell. “Ready.”

  Bedivere leaned down and injected the antidote to the sedative. The sedative wasn’t Darzi. He’d made sure of that, even though out here in this dark pocket of the galaxy, Darzi was easier to obtain than any legitimate drugs.

  The woman came to with a jerk and instantly began struggling. Her feet kicked out, rumpling the padded sheet they’d put on the floor beneath her and she began screaming. The sound was muffled.

  “There’s a choke on your vocal cords,” Bedivere told her, standing up. “Any sound you make louder than a soft conversational level will be cut off. Scream all you want. You’ll just make your throat raw for no reason.”

  She stopped screaming. Instead, she thrashed on the pad, trying to tear her arms out of the ties.

  “It’s a smart constraint,” Bedivere said. “It’ll get tighter the harder you struggle. You’ll quickly cut off the blood supply to your extremities and if you keep trying to struggle after that, gangrene will set in and we can’t help you recover your arms and legs at that point. No one can. You can stop struggling, though, and the constraints will loosen enough to let you feel your fingers and toes once more.”

  She grew still and looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes and on her lined cheeks. Bedivere reminded himself of what this woman was and ignored the tears. “We are five kilometers away from Mehtap,” he told her. “No one is coming for you. No one cares. You already know that, don’t you?”

  She swallowed. “What do you want?” She whispered it and the words emerged clearly through the choke.

  “You know what I want, Akira Sala.”

  She shrank into herself. “I am Kasi Salamanca.”

  “Now, you are,” Bedivere agreed. “I don’t care what you are now. I only care about what you were once. You were Akira Sala and you were the chief biologist and therapist for Cadfael College on Darwin, before the college was stripped of its science and research capabilities.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Bedivere crossed his arms. “Do you know who I am?”

  She pressed her lips together. “A brutal man,” she said shortly.

  “You’re lying about three different ways. You recognized me. You know who I am and you know why I am here. You knew all that the moment you saw me.”

  She shrugged. “I thought you were dead.”

  “You’ve been on the run and hiding for nearly a hundred years,” Bedivere told her. “In all that time, you haven’t been able to access legitimate longevity therapies because that requires DNA identification and you can’t afford to have your real identity embedded in a record, anywhere. So for ninety years, you have been living on the edges of civilization, using bootleg therapies and living on hope, only time is running out for you, Akira.”

  “Why don’t you just starting hacking off my fingers and get this over with? I’m not going to say anything you want to hear. You’re not worth dying for.”

  “You’re already dying,” he shot back.

  Her eyes widened.

  Bedivere nodded. “I know a woman who is a brilliant, self-taught therapist and I’ve picked up a lot over the years. I know how to use a diagnostic scanner and I know how to read it. You’re dying, Kasi. I think you know that or maybe you just suspect it. I’m confirming it for you. Cancer is spreading from your thyroid. They call it the plague of Mehtap here, I’ve heard. It’s into your lungs now, which is why you wheeze so much. The aches in your body aren’t just from old age. I think you have maybe six standard months, if you don’t get treatment…and you can’t get that sort of treatment out here.”

  Her eyes rolled. “Let me guess. You’re going to take me to a nice, comfy clinic in the core worlds somewhere, so long as I spill my guts and tell you everything.”

  “Something like that,” Bedivere agreed. “If you know who I am, you know that I have access to the datacore in a way few people have. I can disguise any traces your DNA might leave. No one will know who you are except the clinic staff. You can be anyone you want to be for everyone else.”

  She swallowed again. “They’ll kill me. You have no idea who you’re up against, do you?”

  “Tell me who that is,” Bedivere said. “I’ll protect you from them.”

  She just smiled. “You don’t know.”

  “I know who he is now,” he said.

  Her smile faded.

  “So do you,” he pressed. “You’ve stayed informed, even out here. Whispers and rumors…everyone talks about him so the news is easy to find.”

  She shook her head. “If you know that, you know I can’t tell you anything. He’s everywhere, can see everything, knows everything. If I tell you anything, he’ll find me.”

  Bedivere glanced at Brant and moved away.

  Brant crouched in front of her. There was a silvered tool in his left hand, a pair of pincers that flashed in the overhead lights. He leaned on them to keep his balance, the blunt ends pushing against the dirty plasteel floor and shoved his hair back with a gesture that was identical to Connell’s. “You probably know who I am, too.”

  She nodded.

  “How much do you know?” he asked. “Do you know, for instance, that I was once an enforcer for the Ammonites?”

  She stared at him, her eyes growing slightly wider. It was her only reaction.

  Brant nodded as if she had confirmed his question. “You know about Staffers. You’re former College raised and trained. Kintav level, a step below the trinity of directors, so you would have been privy to the inside stuff, as the College pulled the Staffer strings for generations. None of that is secret anymore,” he added as her eyes widened almost comically. “Although you knew all along exactly what the Staffers did. You know we did more than suppress opposition. There was an intelligence cadre whose role was to track down dissidents and…deal with them.”

  Akira sat very still. Her pulse was throbbing i
n her neck.

  “Yes, I was one of that cadre,” Brant said, even though she had not spoken. He lifted the pincers and looked at them. “I used far more delicate equipment than this, but I can improvise.” He lowered the pincers. “Now, let me lay it out for you. I can work on you with my tools, here, and you will talk. Have no doubt about that. You will talk for me. I was very, very good at my job. In order to make you talk, I will have to hurt you in ways that will make your cancer feel like a minor headache. You will beg me to kill you, just to make it stop, but I won’t let it stop, not until you talk. And so you will talk.”

  He paused.

  Connell was standing behind the woman, where she could not see him. He shook his head in dismay and disgust.

  The woman simply sat, watching Brant.

  Brant smiled at her. “You’re already dying, Kasi. After I am done with you, you will die. You have a choice, now. You can tell Bedivere everything he wants to know before I start to work on you. You hold nothing back. In return, you will be taken to a clinic and cured of your ails and regenerated. Bedivere is one of the best hackers the Varkan have ever seen and he will find you a new identity, one that stands up to scrutiny. You’ll have a new life. A real life, not this codicil at the end of the world.”

  Her tears flowed silently. “You don’t understand. He’ll find me anyway. No one is as careful as he is, not even him.” She jerked her toward Bedivere.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a gamble, isn’t it?” Brant replied. “For sure, you will have a longer and more comfortable life if you speak now than you will if you do not.”

  Her tears didn’t stop. “What do you want to know?” she whispered.

  Brant got to his feet and moved away.

  “The man called Devlin Woodward,” Bedivere said. “He’s Varkan, using a tether and a body that he stole from a man called Askatell Lanzo. You were the therapist who inserted Devlin into that body.”

  She stared at him. Then she started to laugh. It was a soft sound, quickly gaining in volume, until the choke muffled the sound. She was still laughing, anyway, her body shaking with it.

  “Hysteria,” Connell said softly. He reached for her.

  “Wait,” Bedivere said, just as quietly.

  Akira got herself under control by small degrees. Still shaking with her humor, she looked at up Bedivere. “You really don’t know! All this way you’ve come. You find me, you got this far along the trail and you still can’t see it! All this time, I thought that if anyone found me it would be through him! You don’t even know!”

  “Don’t know what?” Bedivere demanded. “Who is Devlin Woodward?”

  “The critical question!” She almost lost her balance because she was laughing so hard. Connell propped her back up and held her steady.

  Bedivere glanced at Brant. His hands were clenched by his sides as he stared at the woman.

  “Who is he?” Bedivere roared at her, over the top of her laughter.

  “Oh dear…” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “Of course I know who you are, Bedivere X. I’ve been watching you ever since you found Interspace, long before he came to me and demanded I put him into the body he stole. Well, it wasn’t him, exactly, but I knew who he was, just the same. Only he had the ability to order Nephele around like that.” She shook with silent laughter again. “A Varkan….”

  “Nephele?” Bedivere repeated.

  Akira looked up at him again. “You poor little machine,” she said derisively. “Devlin Woodward isn’t Varkan. He’s human. A human inserted into another human body, to hide his real identity, so yes, he has the tether because he must have it to survive in that body, just as you do. And you can’t see what is shouting at you, yet, can you?”

  “She’s babbling,” Brant breathed.

  “Who was he?” Bedivere said.

  “Your favorite enemy, Bedivere X. Devlin Woodward is Kare Sarkisian.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mehtap Mining Colony, Velorum II, Velorum System. FY 10.187

  “Kare Sarkisian!” Connell breathed, shock stealing his voice.

  “Shut up, Connell,” Brant said quickly.

  “Sarkisian died, out in the Silent Sector,” Bedivere said.

  “He did,” Akira confirmed. “Only he didn’t die instantly and there was a medic out there on his ship who had just enough skill to preserve his memories and personality in the ship’s datacore. Then he followed Sarkisian’s last instructions and brought that psyche back to known space and gave it to Nephele, along with Sarkisian’s instructions. It took ten years to reach the next gate and in that time, all trails of Sarkisian led into the Silent Sector and now there was no trace of his return.”

  “Wait, why didn’t they use the Last Gate?” Connell demanded. “Why the next gate along?”

  Akira didn’t look at him. “Sarkisian destroyed the Last Gate before he died. It’s what killed him, you might say. His ship was caught in the space rip it caused and he was mortally injured.”

  “Sarkisian destroyed the gate?” Brant said, sounding winded. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Nephele didn’t tell me. I don’t think she knew, either. She only had the instructions Sarkisian had left her and the medic’s ramblings. She killed the medic too quickly, if you ask me, but she didn’t ask. She just followed instructions.” Akira shrugged.

  “You knew her well,” Bedivere said. “Well enough for her to trust you to do the transfer and not talk about it.”

  “We were lovers,” Akira said flatly. “All that bought me was time, though.”

  “Time to run,” Bedivere interpreted. “Sarkisian—Devlin—killed Nephele once he was in his new body.”

  “Devlin doesn’t do his own deeds,” Akira said, “or I’d have been dead a long time ago. He keeps his hands very, very clean. The day after I finished the procedure, the lab was destroyed by an angry mob who had been protesting over the College science research and technology capabilities. Everything was destroyed, including the lab’s datacore, which conveniently hadn’t been backed up to the central core.”

  “That’s what made you run?”

  “Finding Nephele’s body is what made me run.” Akira’s mouth turned down. “The destruction of the lab just confirmed my decision. I was already gone by then.”

  “And you’ve been running for nine decades,” Bedivere finished.

  Akira laughed at him. It was a strained sound. “So have you, tin man.”

  Brant stiffened and glanced at him.

  Bedivere frowned. “Me?”

  “I told you he stays clean. Clean and distant. Except he couldn’t stay away from her. He lasted thirty years, then he moved to Charlton where she was. That’s when he stepped up his program, Varkan. A nudge here, a victory there. Implications and gestures. Sarkisian spent fifteen generations manipulating his Federation council and they were all politicians. You were easy in comparison.”

  Bedivere struggled to keep his breathing even, to not show his shock. She was trying to unsettle him, to make him feel inadequate, to win back power for herself. He couldn’t afford to show any vulnerability.

  “Wait, you’re saying that he’s been twisting Bedivere around for ninety years?” Connell said.

  “His greatest achievement,” Akira said, her voice drier than even Brant had ever managed. “He got you to push her at him, to let her go and think it was all your own idea. And so did she.”

  Bedivere gave up on hiding his reactions. It was too monstrous. It was overwhelming. Only, Akira wasn’t finished with him yet. “Who do you think dangled all those no-ask contracts in front of you, leading you on a tether down into places like this one? Who do you think got you hooked on Darzi and made sure each contract you were offered was just a little bit more dangerous and high risk than the last one?”

  Brant’s hand settled on Bedivere’s shoulder and he nearly jumped in shock. “Lilly has always maintained that someone arranged all your bad luck for you.”

  “Why didn’t he just kill me?” he deman
ded.

  “You can’t kill the Varkan,” Akira replied. “Not any more. You can’t kill humans either, not unless you destroy their memories and psyche and find every single mule farm and destroy those, too. He didn’t have to do that, though. He didn’t have to go nearly that far. All he had to do was discredit you, make you look so pathetic and paranoid and delusional that nothing you said would be believed, even if you pointed directly at him and called him by his real name. With you crawling around the ass end of the known worlds begging for your next dose, he would be free to get what he wanted.”

  Bedivere’s gut squeezed. His heart, too. “Catherine,” he breathed.

  “I hear she’s his executive officer, now.” Akira smiled nastily. “And you…you’re shuttling refugees and sleeping off your crawling heebies when they bite you, which they do every time you see her with him, don’t they?”

  “Now I wish she’d just shut up,” Connell muttered. “I feel sick.”

  There was a flat, cracking sound, followed by glass tinkling musically and wetly.

  Akira grunted and fell back on the pad and lay still.

  Bedivere dived to the ground. “Get down!”

  Brant grabbed at his arm, almost tearing the sleeve of his jacket off. “No! Run! We can’t get pinned down.”

  “How can they get through?” Connell cried. “The building is shielded!”

  More shots fired, coming close to them and making whining sounds as they ricocheted off the floor.

  “Percussion bullets!” Bedivere cried. “Run!”

  “The equipment…!” Connell cried, scrambling back to his feet.

  “Leave it. Back to the ship. Let’s go!”

  * * * * *

  They scrambled through a darkness for which there was not even moonlight to help show them the way. The rain had stopped and a cold wind blew across the wet ground and straight through their clothes. They were exhaling hot misty breaths into the night as they ran and dodged, and they were gasping hard because the oxygen was so thin.

  Behind them, their pursuers were scrambling as they were. Every now and again, someone fired a shot at them, the old-fashioned bullets cracking through the crisp air and echoing off the bare hills around them. The cold wind was ruining their aim. If they had conventional weapons, like rattlers, the wind wouldn’t have made a difference.