The Dangerous Type

by Loren Rhoads

  “I’m Fiana,” she said in response. “Here’s a picture of me.” She borrowed space on his site to put the picture up. It showed a slim black-haired girl astride an old-style jet-bike. She had on a black catsuit that hugged every curve, as slight as they were. She wore gargoyle goggles, complete with spikes around the smoked lenses. Below them, her mouth was a delicate warm pink.

  “What color are your eyes?” he asked.

  But she was gone, signed out of the web. While he lingered over her photo, it evaporated.

  Jimi cursed. He hadn’t thought to save it or print it or make any sort of copy. He’d just assumed she’d given him the image to keep.

  Furious, he slammed out of the web himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  When Sloane returned to the hotel room, he intended only to collect his things and clear out. He was surprised to find Ariel asleep on the bed, stretched out like old times with nothing on but the sheet. Raena was curled up in the big armchair with the comp spread across her lap. He just about turned around and walked out, rather than face them again. Apologizing never crossed his mind. He’d had too much to drink to go backward.

  Raena smiled and some of the fury melted out of him. “Finally,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “What are you still doing here?” Sloane asked, not entirely ready to drop the argument. “You are free to go.”

  “I’ve known that all along.” Raena stretched, gesturing over her head with one hand, then the other, fingers splayed. “I wanted to make it clear to you that I am here solely because I choose to be.”

  “All right then. Let’s not fight.”

  “Okay.” She said it as if it didn’t matter to her one way or another.

  The comp screen drew him like a magnet. He came over to see what she was looking at. “Shopping?” he asked hopefully.

  “Sort of.”

  On the screen, a two-dimensional scan of a hologram showed a family group, all with black hair and silvery eyes. All, except the sole woman: a slim, strong matriarch with green eyes and prematurely white hair streaming over her shoulders. Her face and body were eerily symmetrical, as if she’d been manufactured rather than born. Something in the shape of her oval face reminded Sloane of Raena.

  Except for the obvious differences in maturity, the boys might have been a time-lapse series of the same child over and over, complete duplicates of each other. They all had the same long straight nose, the same strong sharp chin.

  In the center of the group sat a man dressed in a black suit of some elaborate brocade. His carefully trimmed black beard was silvered by streaks trailing down from the corners of his mouth.

  Sloane groaned. “Thallian has a family?”

  “The boys are clones. I’m not certain how many of them there are.” The corner of Raena’s mouth quirked upward. “Some people grow their bodyguards in vats.”

  Sloane reached past her to shut the system down. “So he’s raising a private army.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Raena said. “I’ll kill them all, if I have to.”

  “Unless they kill you first.”

  “I’m a ghost,” she said, her voice hollow and empty enough to make him consider it. “I’m already dead. They can’t do anything to me that hasn’t already been done.”

  “Then leave it be.” He grabbed her arm, fingers meeting around her wrist. “You’re weak. You’ve been sick. They don’t know you exist. Keep it that way.”

  He would have shaken her—wanted to, in fact—but she’d set herself and he couldn’t budge her. That made her point more effectively than anything she might have said. Still, Sloane didn’t want to accept that, didn’t want to believe it, and most of all, didn’t want to lose her again.

  “You know there’s nothing you can do to keep me here,” she reminded him quietly. “You gave me permission to go. I’ll go when I’m ready.”

  “I could drug you. Lock you up. Put a chip in your neck like a dog and follow you.”

  “You could,” she agreed. “And you’d be no better than him.” Her smile was icy. “You are better than Thallian, aren’t you, Gavin?”

  His fist clenched and he wanted nothing more in the world than to hit her, snap that smug smirk right off her face. She watched his eyes, not his hand, ready to take the blow and turn it against him. Something cold shot down his spine. He knew she would kill him if he stood in her way. He knew it as surely as if she’d planted the thought in his mind. More than he didn’t want her to go, he didn’t want to die to prevent her.

  She watched the fight go out of him and stretched up to kiss his cheek. “I’m disappointed,” she whispered. “I thought you were going to test me.”

  “Get out,” Sloane said wearily. “I don’t want to fight with you. You’re going to do what you’re going to do and there’s nothing I can do to stop you, so just get out. I’m going to hammer myself into unconsciousness.”

  He watched her struggle with whether to stay and placate him. It occurred to him that Raena had been a slave or a prisoner for nearly thirty years. Little wonder she didn’t know how to act when offered freedom.

  “I’m serious,” he said, sinking onto the corner of the bed. “Take Ariel, go out and have some fun. Buy yourself a party dress. All I want now is to be alone.”

  * * *

  No one noticed she had come into the room. Eilif stayed near the door, in the shadows, holding as still as possible. Sometimes she just wanted to be near her sons, basking in their camaraderie, without acknowledging the distance that she felt when being called their mother.

  The boys were channel surfing, paging one after another through the news feeds. Only Jamian knew what he was looking for, but the others jeered and argued as the channels zipped by. Their interests were so diverse that they seldom agreed on watching one show en masse. Usually, she found them huddled together in the same room, each curled over his individual screen.

  “That’s it,” Jamian said and paged back a few stations.

  The room on the screen looked like an abattoir. It had been a little featureless transient single-occupancy sleeper, all hard surfaces that could easily be hosed down. Now, crimson painted it in directional splatters, as if artery after artery had been opened. The newscaster chattered nervously about the smell that lingered in the room. He apologized that the body had been taken away before the news cameras had been allowed inside, but he assured that the station would obtain the autopsy images by 03 Galactic Standard Time.

  Jamian paused the playback so the boys could feast their eyes.

  “Uncle Revan wouldn’t have made such a mess,” one of the boys said in an awe-struck voice.

  Eilif thought it was Jarad, but then he guessed, “It was Jain, wasn’t it?” Jarad’s voice held its familiar note of envy.

  “It was Jain,” Jamian agreed. “His first kill.”

  And then the room exploded in cheering and laughter, all of them talking at once, voice layering over voice until Eilif’s head hurt and she had to slip away before they noticed her there.

  * * *

  Ariel hadn’t smoked in years, but she missed it now. Maybe it was the atmosphere of the casino’s game room, thick with various incenses and inhalant vapors. Maybe she just needed something to do with her nervous hands.

  The dimly lit room flickered with the lights of gambling machines from dozens of peoples. Like Raena, many of the players wore shaded glasses, fine for facing the bright games but which caused them to bump into each other in the darkness. Although fights were rare, snarling was common. Ariel wasn’t sure why Raena had chosen this place, except that its owners had left the cavernous Templar architecture more or less unchanged. There wasn’t anything flat for Ariel to put her back against.

  When they were kids, Ariel’s friends wouldn’t allow Raena to gamble with them. No one trusted her. They couldn’t ever catch her cheating, but she could keep angles and numbers in her head well enough that she didn’t bet without confidence in her superiority. It made it spooky to play against her.r />
  Raena cruised past the gaming tables, but chose not to play against anyone directly. Like old times, she ended up at a pachinko machine, feeding in balls with mechanical precision. Somehow she had figured out the sound these particular machines made when nearing a payout. Twice she took chairs recently vacated by losers only to win in ten rounds or less.

  Any time now, casino security would catch onto her and 86 them both.

  “Relax,” Raena counseled. “This is supposed to be fun.”

  “Gambling’s only fun when there’s a risk,” Ariel argued.

  “There is a risk. We could be booted out.”

  The current machine sang a happy song, then spat out streams of shiny metal bearings. These were the same color as the catsuit Raena had picked out earlier in the evening. She looked dipped in mercury, flashing with the reflected lights from the games. She might as well have been naked for all that the suit concealed, but the reflected glare made Ariel’s eyes hurt when she stared at Raena’s figure. With Gavin hogging their hotel room, Ariel wondered where they might go to be alone. Her racer wasn’t really large enough for company. Maybe a room in a different hotel?

  “I’m past this,” Raena said, gathering up six plastic cups dangerously full of little silver balls. “Let’s cash out and find something else to play.”

  They wandered a little, trying to locate the cashier’s window. Ariel noticed the three apparently simian bruisers trailing them.

  “Do they work for the casino?” she whispered to Raena.

  Her sister didn’t turn around. “Maybe. If so, they’re there to make sure I don’t get mugged on the way to cash out. They’ve got nothing on me.”

  She put the cups into the window and turned the permaglass so that it faced the cashier. A moment later, the window turned back toward her. On its shelf lay a gold chit.

  “Are you looking for another game?” This morning’s waiter—the boy with the topiary facial hair—cut smoothly between the security men and Raena, so that Ariel blocked him from their view.

  “Yes,” Raena said, plucking the flyer from his fingers without breaking her stride.

  He kept moving on his original trajectory, so fluid that the security guards didn’t even know there had been a conversation.

  Glancing over the flyer, Raena asked Ariel, “Want a drink? It’s on me.”

  She led the way to an alcove in the wall. Folded inside was an even more shadowy bar. Six video screens showed different views of a race taking place overhead in the Kai City towers. Pilots in jetpacks zoomed between the skyscrapers on some kind of treasure hunt. Raena slipped her chit into the robot waitress and requested two glasses of xyshin. “Just can’t get enough of this stuff,” she confided. “I was drinking it the night Gavin contacted me. He ever tell you about that?”

  “Not in much detail.”

  “I thought he was another bounty hunter. Instead, I was only one of the errands he was running that night. The other stop we made was to visit a dealer called Outrider.”

  “No!” Ariel gasped. “The Messiah dealer?”

  “Think about it,” Raena encouraged. “It was probably galactic news. Government destabilization on Nizarrh, right about the time I was arrested?”

  Ariel shook her head apologetically. “It’s too far back. I’d have to research it.”

  Raena shrugged. It was hard for Ariel to decide if her sister actually cared. Raena continued her story, regardless. “One of the reasons Gavin was so hot to find me on the Arbiter afterward was that the soldiers who pistol-whipped him left him for dead in a broken bag of Messiah. They assumed that the drug was powdery and would float, that he’d inhale it and die. Instead, the gummy drug practically glued Gavin to the floor, but he didn’t ingest any of it. So he had a score to settle, when he came after me.”

  Ariel laughed. “Here he got all high and mighty on me when I brought up the Dart. He didn’t do drugs, never had any traffic with them, he said. Now to find out he’d been running Messiah . . .”

  “Ask him about it,” Raena urged. “I bet he thinks I don’t remember.”

  A commotion drew their attention out toward the game room. The boy with the exuberant facial hair suddenly sailed across the casino floor. His feet touched a gaming table and launched him upward. He pegged a stone pillar, bounced off a bank of slot machines, caught a chandelier, and swung above the gaming floor. Behind him trailed a motley assortment of creatures, also bouncing from any surface that didn’t move out of their way.

  Raena tossed back her drink. “Here’s my game,” she said. She tucked her winning chit into an internal pocket in her catsuit and hurled herself after the leader. Ariel could only gape at the chaos unfolding in the wake of the passing game of tag. Gamblers sprawled on the floor, tripping up the security force. Drinks spilled on gaming machines, causing sparks and short-circuits and spewing acrid smoke into the cloudy air. Everyone was shouting or laughing or calling for help.

  Ariel could have taken all the tag-players down with one little gun, but of course, even the security on Kai went unarmed. She wondered if that was what Raena had wanted to find out.

  * * *

  The comm chimed repeatedly, a trilling sequence of notes that hauled Sloane out of his determinedly sought oblivion. Rubbing the knife-point twinge in his forehead, he flailed at the connection to acknowledge the call. He expected he was being summoned to bail Ariel and Raena out of some kind of trouble, probably for inappropriate public affection.

  Instead, Kavanaugh’s craggy face filled the screen.

  Sloane growled, “How did you find . . . ?”

  “Shut up, Gavin, and listen,” Kavanaugh said sharply enough to make Sloane’s hangover throb. “Lim was tortured to death.”

  Sloane rubbed his head, trying to force the hangover back into hiding. “Lim who?”

  “He was my engineer when we worked for you,” Kavanaugh snapped. “His death was nasty. All sorts of bits of him cut off or burned away. Somebody mean is looking for her.”

  Sloane sank to the edge of the mussed bed. Choking his heart back down into place, he said more calmly than he felt, “I know. I rigged up some of the old scanners on the planet. We checked the feed one night and saw a human crew searching the tombs for her. But before she left the planet, she set a booby trap. Killed some of them a week ago or so. After that, she scrambled feed. She was afraid they’d trace it back to us.”

  “Well, they’ve found another way to link you to the operation. Now they’re hunting down the rest of us that worked for you.”

  He should have killed them himself, Sloane thought wearily. It would have been a mercy; at least he would have made it quick. From the beginning, his plan had been to gas the whole archeological crew in their sleep, then nuke the site from orbit. That was the sort of thinking the Dart encouraged in him. But once Raena appeared and he cleaned himself up, his plans got all scrambled. Instead of wiping out all traces of the operation, he left Kavanaugh to bribe the grave-robbing crew to keep their mouths shut, thinking: This is what Ariel would have done. Too bad money wouldn’t comfort them under torture. Someone would talk, struggling unsuccessfully to save what was left of his own life. They wouldn’t know what Sloane did, that there was no bargaining with Thallian.

  Luckily, none of the crew knew where he’d gone, or so he’d thought. “How did you know where to reach me, Tarik?”

  Wrinkles folded in around Kavanaugh’s brown eyes, but his smile wasn’t amused by Sloane’s tone. “I’m on Ariel’s payroll this week. I was expecting to find her now, ’cause I don’t know what name you’re traveling under. Turns out you’re just the messenger boy.”

  “Great.” Sloane looked around the trashed hotel room—bits of lingerie draped over everything. More importantly, he saw that the bottle of green was empty. “She’s not here.”

  “I’d guessed that.”

  Sloane found one of Raena’s bottles of water tucked between the bed and the chair. He flicked it open and took a long pull.

  “Drinkin
’ water, Gavin?”

  He shook the question off. “Are you hidden?”

  “For the moment. And Doc is safe, too. She thanks you for asking.”

  Sloane chuckled, surprising himself. “Wish she was here to prescribe me something to kill this hangover.”

  “She’d just tell you to have another drink,” Kavanaugh pointed out.

  “Have to get dressed for that,” Sloane groused. “Everything not water in the room is drained dry.”

  “If you’re going out anyway, get yourself some of that Clear stuff we used to take back in the day. It works as well as anything. According to Doc’s research, that is.”

  There was no way to dig his way out of all the bad history between them, so Sloane simply asked, “How’d you find out about Lim?”

  “I’m not on vacation, Gavin. I been watching the galactic news, like everybody else.”

  “This made the news?”

  “It was vicious, like stuff no one’s seen since the War.”

  Sloane reached for the comm, then thought the better of it. Kavanaugh could have simply left a message for Ariel and refused to speak to Sloane at all. Sloane had sobered enough to appreciate the younger man’s decency. “Thanks for the warning, Tarik.”

  Kavanaugh looked pleased. At heart, he was still the boy Sloane had rescued more than once. “Don’t mention it,” Kavanaugh said, but that wasn’t what he meant at all.

  * * *

  Thallian had the boys scanning the galactic news hour by hour, watching the story of Jain’s first kill unfold. Of course Revan was as cautious as Jain was reckless, so the murder scene had been stripped of anything that might identify the family before the body began to cool. Still, Thallian was shocked by how quickly the grave-robber’s death had swelled to galactic news. Didn’t people have more important things to think about?

  Raena had surely seen the story by now. It would flush her out and make her run, just as bad news had done in the old days. Raena had never been one to cower in place, accepting her fate. Even at the end, she’d kept running, aiming for death if not for freedom.