by Kris Delake
Meaning they couldn’t easily track it and they certainly couldn’t turn this behemoth ship around to catch her. This ship had to keep going to its destination and trust local authorities to find Rikki.
Only, if she had escaped in the NetherRealm, there was no one authority, and no one to contact.
Despite himself, he felt admiration for her. She was right: she didn’t need his training. He would never have tried something so daring on his own. The Guild frowned on theft in the commission of a job, even if that theft wouldn’t have had many consequences, because the theft added something illegal to something legal.
And there weren’t a lot of consequences if she vanished into the NetherRealm. Even the stolen lifeship wasn’t that serious. Interstellar cruisers had learned through their own disasters to have twice the number of emergency lifeships on board than they needed, ostensibly because one part of the ship might be impossible to reach. But in reality, they wanted to show that they had no liability should something go horribly, awfully wrong.
He swung his legs off the side of the bed, not caring that he nearly kicked the security woman, or that his movement had forced a third guard (whom he hadn’t noticed until now) back into the corridor. Misha wasn’t quite willing to think of Rikki being missing yet. She had said something to him, and he needed to remember what that was.
“If she’s gone, and she clearly drugged me, then what are you doing here?” he asked. “I think this would count as a personal matter.”
“It would, Mr. Orlinski, if not for one little thing.” The Windham woman’s emphasis on the word “little” didn’t make the little thing sound so very little.
She had his attention whether he wanted to give it to her or not.
“And what would that be?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, her gaze steely, “I thought I’d better ask the only assassin we had on board if he had ever heard of someone named Elio Testrial.”
Misha resisted the urge to close his eyes in disgust. Damn that Rikki. She had pulled it off again. She had gotten Misha blamed for her work—and not in a good way.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard of Elio Testrial. I suppose you’re going to want to discuss this in the security office.”
The Windham woman smiled for the first time since he met her. It was not a pleasant smile.
“Now you’re catching on, Mr. Orlinski. We’d like you to come with us.”
Part 2
Chapter 25
It took most of a week for Rikki to make her way to Krell, a grimy little space station at the end of nowhere. First she had to get off the interstellar cruise ship, which proved easier than expected. The emergency lifeship she had scouted had enough provisions to get her to Centaar, a small planet at the edge of the NetherRealm.
She docked in low orbit around Centaar on a docking ring known for theft and graft. She was giving them a gift: they could dismantle the lifeship for parts, so long as the folks running the ring brought her down to Oyal, a city on the surface. And they did.
Rikki hadn’t been to Oyal before, but she had heard about it, and the place was as corrupt as she expected. The rich were very rich here, and lived in a protected dome outside the city—not because the atmosphere was tough for humans to breathe, but because a dome was difficult for armed gangs to easily breach.
She carried enough cash on her to pay off muggers, and searched for a place that would rent a ship, no questions asked. Most places had a few questions or wanted a huge financial guarantee that she would bring the ship back.
She knew she’d never get her guarantee back, so she wanted to pay the smallest guarantee possible. She found a ship-rental place on a back alley in Oyal that made her skin crawl.
But the place let her inspect the ship, and while its interior was shoddy, its equipment was in top shape. Still, the interior would have made Rikki hate the ship, except for one thing: She knew she was heading to Krell. She needed a clean and relatively safe place to sleep while she was there.
Krell was a short distance back the way she had come from, in the NetherRealm, a place for people who didn’t want to be noticed. Krell didn’t ID anyone or question them or even track its arrivals and departures. Security was nonexistent, theft was rampant, and cleanliness—well, that had gone out the window as well.
It hadn’t been her idea to come to Krell. She had set up a meeting with an old friend, and he had chosen the venue.
The fact that the venue was Krell either meant he was afraid of something or he had done something particularly horrible. And knowing Jack Hunter, it was probably both.
Rikki had met Jack in that fateful year after her father died. Jack was the long-term survivor of government child care. Jack pretended nothing mattered, but he had protected her, even though he was a scrawny kid, one year younger and not even close to his adult growth.
In fact, she still saw him that way, even though he wasn’t scrawny anymore, and his adult growth had made him into one of those men who was too big for comfortable space travel.
Jack was six foot six, a bear of a man. He was trim for his size, but out here, in the realm of space stations and starships, his height made him a giant.
Most men—most people—who spent a lot of time in space were lean and not much bigger than Rikki. Misha—Mikael. Dammit. Mikael—was a case in point. Slender, deceptively strong, and not that tall, but perfect—
And as usual, she had to wrench her thoughts from him. She had no idea why she was so obsessed with him. He wanted to hurt her—he had hurt her—he had used her, and she was like those pathetic people who sometimes tried to hire her to kill the object of their obsession just so that they wouldn’t obsess any longer.
She refused those jobs, knowing that those people were borderline bugfuck crazy. And now she felt borderline bugfuck crazy too.
Because she couldn’t keep Misha (Mikael!!) out of her head.
Even when she was looking at Jack.
Jack sat in the middle of what was ridiculously called an “open-air” restaurant.
There were buildings inside the space station, although on most places, like a planet, these “buildings” would more properly have been called “rooms.” The rooms were attached, like row houses, and they had entrances, and some of them—again, ridiculously, she thought—had windows that looked into the “open air.”
The corridor between all of these “buildings,” these rooms, was the open-air part. It couldn’t be leased. It belonged to the station itself, which sometimes granted permission for a restaurant or a store to spill into the corridor.
And the spill area was the place Jack had chosen. It was part of a restaurant named Starcatcher, and Jack, courageous man that he was, was actually eating something off the menu.
Rikki approached, opened the ridiculous little gate that separated the “open-air” part of the restaurant from the rest of the corridor, and stopped beside Jack’s table. Without saying a word, she picked up a spoon and looked at it in the dim light.
Something was caked onto the handle. She made a face and set the spoon down.
“I can’t believe you’re eating here,” she said as she grabbed a cloth napkin and used it to wipe off the chair. Then she swiped a napkin from the table next to her and spread it across the chair’s seat.
“I can’t believe you’re going to sit on that,” he said, his voice so deep that it rumbled. The voice still surprised her. It suited him, but she had met him years before his voice changed. “I’m sure they wash the napkins less often than they wipe off the chairs.”
Her stomach flipped, just like he knew it would. He knew everything about her a brother would know—how to twist her stomach, how to make her blush, how to make her laugh. He would defend her to the death and he would always ride to her rescue and he would love her forever.
Their relationship was so purely platonic, so deeply familial that whenever a friend would ask why the two of them didn’t get together, they would grimace in unison, and one of them would say,
“Last I checked, it’s against the law to sleep with a family member.”
That made people think they were related, and they left it that way. Because it felt like they were related, and it always would.
“Then I’m just going to stand,” she said.
“Hover,” he corrected, his mouth full. “You’re just going to hover.”
“Whatever.” She almost wiped her hands on her black pants, and then changed her mind. The very thought of getting that crap on her clothes made her vaguely queasy. “You could be a gentleman and give me your jacket to sit on.”
“My jacket has been staying in this hellhole for the past three days, waiting for her ladyship to arrive.”
“Oh, gross,” she said. Then she gave up and sat down. She would have to shower when she got back to the tiny ship anyway, and she had brought clothing that she would never ever ever wear when she was in Krell.
God knew what was in the air here. The environmental system supposedly filtered things, but this being Krell, the filters probably hadn’t been changed in two centuries.
“Is there a reason we’re here?” she asked Jack.
“Triple cheese bacon burger,” he said, his mouth full. “The best in the sector.”
She looked at the thing in his hand. It vaguely resembled a burger. The meat (if it was meat) was burned to a crisp, with something flat and bacon-shaped hanging off of it. The cheese was such a bright orange that it hurt her eyes.
“I don’t even want to think about it,” she said.
He burped, wiped a hand over his mouth, and then grinned at her. “You know, for a death-dealer, you are unbelievably fastidious.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. He wasn’t supposed to say that “death-dealer” thing. He had picked up that phrase after she had weaned him off “killer” and “assassinator.” She was beginning to think “assassinator” was the best choice.
“Violent does not mean messy,” she said to him for maybe the thousandth time.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “If there wasn’t a component of messy, you wouldn’t have sent me that emergency message from wherever the hell you were. Oye? Oyick?”
“Oyal,” she said. And technically, she hadn’t been there yet when she contacted him. She had contacted him from the docking ring above Centaar. Apparently, the comm system on that ring masked its signature as Oyal. “You could’ve come to me.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I couldn’t.”
She glanced at him. She had been so involved in her own little adventure that she didn’t even think about him. Was he here because of something he needed? Or because he thought she needed the privacy only Krell guaranteed?
“You want to tell me what scared you?” Jack asked.
“You mean besides that bacon cheese blackened thingie you’re eating?” she asked. “Maybe the fact that you are actually eating it.”
He took another bite just to irritate her and then he grinned, his mouth full. She had to look away.
He chewed very deliberately, swallowed, took a sip of the water the restaurant had provided in a dirty glass, and said, “You were scared when you contacted me.”
“I’ve never been scared,” she said, and she wasn’t sure she was scared now. But she was angry, and she did feel betrayed, and she still felt off-balance.
Misha (Mikael. For God’s sake) had seemed sympathetic and vulnerable in that corridor, and he didn’t deny the murder of her father. Yet he seemed to think she wouldn’t mind. Was that because he had thought she had no scruples? (Wonder who gave him that idea—or what part of the night they spent together convinced him of it.)
Jack gave Rikki a tender grin. They both knew she lied about never being scared. In that first year, she used to hide under his bed, as far back in the corner as she could get, and sleep there so no bad guys could find her.
“I’ve never been scared as an adult,” she said through gritted teeth. “And I’m not scared now.”
“That you’re willing to acknowledge,” Jack said. “Even to yourself.”
She hated this kind of circular argument. He specialized in it, and she could never win it. He always started from a faulty premise, said she didn’t agree with the premise consciously, and then argued with her as if she held that faulty premise close to her heart.
And that irritated her. He irritated her. But in a good way. She had missed him. She smiled at him, and he clearly recognized the fondness in her smile.
He took another bite, then shoved the burger toward her. “You really should try this.”
“Have you ever wondered how they got meat out here? Or what kind it really is?”
“I don’t think about my food,” he said.
“You should,” she said, annoyed that he kept foisting this thing on her. “Maybe I killed it.”
That got him. She only took jobs involving humans.
“Ew,” he said, putting the burger down. “Not fair.”
He grabbed his napkin, looked at it, and set it back down again. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You’re the person who picked Krell,” she said.
“Because you’re the person who sounded like she was in trouble.” He set his plate aside. “You want to tell me what’s going on? We are the only ones in this restaurant.”
“For obvious reasons,” she said.
A servo-bot floated up to them, and displayed a drop down holographic menu that looked like it went on for pages.
Rikki waved a hand at it, and hoped it would go away, instead of nag her to pay for the seat by eating food.
It did.
Maybe there were some benefits to Krell after all.
Still, she looked around. The corridor was mostly empty, and no one sat in the other open-air restaurants. She was sure someone was recording this conversation, but she was equally sure that Jack carried some kind of jammer. He’d been carrying one since he was thirteen and learned how to build one on his own.
Rikki hadn’t carried a jammer to this meeting because she knew Jack would have one. And two jammers would occasionally interact with each other, occasionally creating a high-pitched noise that was both obvious and painful. And that high-pitched noise defeated the purpose of the jammer.
“Are you still doing that investigative thing for the Rovers?” she asked.
The Rovers were a group of loosely affiliated assassins. They did not want to join the Guild, but they had discovered it was hard to work alone. So two decades before, some Rovers set up a floating office, and hired a few non-assassins to vet the jobs.
Jack did freelance vetting for them. Or he had the last time that Rikki checked.
“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t work for them anymore.”
She looked at him in surprise. Not because he didn’t work for the Rovers, but because he sounded so emphatic about it.
“What happened?”
“Politics,” he said in a way that closed off further discussion.
“So you’re not vetting clients?”
“For you, I’ll vet. What happened? Did you get yourself in trouble?”
“Yeah,” she said softly.
All the humor had left his face. Trouble, in her profession, could mean a lot of things. “Someone after you?”
She held up her hands. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“You ki—um, do, um… you know… take on the wrong guy?”
Yes, she had done the wrong guy, but not in the way that Jack meant. “On my last job, the target was legitimate.”
And then she thought about it, thought about the way Jack might interpret that phrase.
“Or at least,” she said, “the target was justifiable. I…don’t feel bad about finishing the job.”
Jack nodded. He was frowning. They both knew it had been a long time since she had been so inarticulate about a job.
“Then what happened?” he asked softly.
“There’s a good chance I was targeted,” she said.
He tilted his
head. “Why would that happen? A disgruntled target family?”
He sounded confused. He knew that she had had problems before and they hadn’t rattled her.
She was shaking her head even as he spoke. “It’s not that. It’s probably me.”
“You’re confusing me, Rik,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not happy about this myself.”
He grabbed the plate, probably because he needed to do something with his hands. They migrated toward the remains of that burger. Normally, she would have made a comment, something to put him off the food again, but she was no longer in a bantering mood.
“I think this might have something to do with my dad,” she said.
She didn’t have to explain that to Jack. He had lived through the aftermath with her. He had only been eleven, but he tried to keep her together. He managed pretty well, considering.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“The guy who hired me,” she said, “is the son of the assassin who killed my father.”
Jack nodded. He put his hands down, no longer fiddling with the plate. Now she had his full attention.
“He was on the ship, Jack. He hired me so that he could track me down, so that he could find me.” Her voice shook. She hadn’t expected her voice to shake.
“Did he know who you were?” Jack asked.
“He said he did. We were—” God, how much should she tell him? She couldn’t decide. She’d been thinking about it the whole way here, and she couldn’t decide. “—talking, and at one point, he said he knew who I was.”
“Talking about what?” Jack asked. He had noticed her hesitation.
She shook her head. She couldn’t admit how badly Misha had used her. She shook her head again.
“I just want to know,” Jack said gently, “if he was referring to your job or your history.”
He knew how upset she was. He was treading lightly.
She swallowed hard.
“I don’t know. It’s a mess, Jack,” she said, and then she told him everything. Or almost everything. As much as she dared tell her little brother, in a public place, about a man who still confused her. A man who wouldn’t leave her thoughts, no matter how hard she tried to get rid of him.
