by Mel Keegan
With a word to his comm, van Donne brought his people in, and as Byrne and Ramon drifted back to the corner farthest from the doors, Vaurien followed. Jazinsky gave Byrne a nod of greeting. She knew him from somewhere, Travers realized. But it was Ramon who thrust one hand at Vaurien to shake. He was a striking figure, not much taller than Tonio Teniko, but worlds different. Small stature had turned Ramon deadly; he carried a pair of big guns, wore his raven hair in a long sleek cape, and the rings in both his ears were gelemerald, priceless. He did not have Tonio’s incredible looks, but he was one of the exotics; he could have named his own price as a Companion, a courtesan. Ramon preferred to be deadly with hands, feet and weapons, and earn even more on the security staff of men like Wang.
“Richard, always a pleasure,” he was saying in a thick Velcastran accent. “You want to tell me, yet, what happened to the Wings of Freedom? I been trying to call Paul Wymark … no joy. And I’ve been missing the pleasures of him in every port from Sark to Marak.”
“Not yet, Ramon,” Jazinsky said over the noise. “When the time is right, Paul will be glad to sit down and tell you himself. In fact, he’ll expect to be wined, dined and humped on the story for months.”
Ramon’s sable eyes narrowed. “It’s something big. Bigger than the shindig you guys organized at Ulrand.”
“Far bigger,” Vaurien affirmed pleasantly, “and if you don’t get your nose out, kiddo, you’re likely to get it slammed in a door.”
For a moment the shooter blinked up at him, and then he laughed. “Message received and understood, man. Hey, Jazinsky, you’re lookin’ good enough to eat … and unless I miss my guess, you’re not getting’ any.”
“I’m too busy to even notice,” she admitted, though she was focused on van Donne by now.
The copilot had returned to Sergei’s shoulder – Rafe Byrne, not thirty years old yet, with ebony hair and vast ice-green eyes, pale skin, and a deceptively reed-slender body. Rafe had the wiry strength of the endurance athlete. And if he was in the sack with van Donne, Travers thought, he would need it. Sergei was much bigger, much stronger, as alpha a male as Travers had ever seen on a carrier crewdeck. He had snaked an arm around Byrne’s narrow waist and pulled him in close, perhaps as a gesture: see, we’re all chilled here.
“Vaurien.” He looked Richard up and down rudely. “You look like you need to get some sleep. And Jazinsky, with the shadows under the eyes and the knuckles rubbed raw on the heavy bag. Been beating on something, trying to relax?”
“Perceptive,” she allowed. “Get on with it, Sergei. I don’t have time for you to waste.”
His nostril flared as he looked on, past her, and recognized Travers and Marin. “And if it isn’t Harrison Shapiro’s little lapdogs in person. Captain Travers, Captain Marin.”
“Major,” Travers corrected with a hint of smugness.
“Likewise.” Marin folded his arms on his black linen shirt. “And we’re guessing you’re here for blood … not ours, for a change.”
It was the first time they had actually seen van Donne since the scene on the Oberon science platform, and Travers studied the man closely. The military buzz cut had grown out, but the effect of the longer hair was to make him look even harder. The pale blue eyes were like flint as he glared at Vaurien, and it seemed to Travers that he was still wrestling with some decision, perhaps whether to trust them – or to involve them.
And then he stepped aside, beckoned them to follow, and vanished through a door to the right of the table where several glasses and an ashtray attested to how long he had been waiting for them. Vaurien shared a glance with Travers and Marin, and slid the handy from his pocket once more. If they were walking into an ambush, it would pick up the heat signatures of people, the chemical reek of drugs or explosives, the resonance of metals, weapons.
Travers leaned closer to see, but it was just a room. To left and right of it, other rooms were occupied. Figures were locked together, undulating in unmistakable, beating rhythms. The scanner reported thermal hotspots and the toxicity of chemical clouds, the chimera and angelino.
The room was black, save for its mirrors, and empty save for the butcher block bed. Dim lights bobbed away into the corners, red, gold, purple, casting grotesque shadows. Rings and chains hung from the ceiling; the air was sweet-rotten with the odor of spent gryphon. Sergei ignored it all, turned to face Vaurien, and waited till the door slid over, shutting out enough of the noise for a man to hear himself think.
Without being invited, Byrne and Ramon sprawled on the bed to watch, listen. Their job was done, but Travers saw at once, they were privy to van Donne’s business. Vaurien leaned on the closed door; Jazinsky surveyed herself disgustedly in the mirror and then deliberately ignored her reflection.
“You want to deal?” Vaurien invited. “We’re here. What’s on the table, Sergei? Make it quick. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I want to get the hell out of this dive before I pick up fleas.”
A thin smile widened van Donne’s mouth. “What brings you back to Halfway, Richard?”
“None of your business,” Vaurien said levelly.
“Isn’t it?” van Donne was hot in the closeness of the room. A sheen of sweat had broken out on his skin, and he shrugged out of the jacket, threw it onto the bed.
The man’s hard, muscular physique, with the thick arms and sculpted pecs, reminded Travers of the late Roy Neville; but van Donne actually had handsome bone structure, good features. In a fair bout between them, Travers would have given absolutely even odds. And off duty, out of uniform? All he knew of Neville was that he was a bastard who liked to hurt, as many newcomers to the crewdeck learned. What he knew of van Donne was even less, but Rafe Byrne seemed none the worse for wear, and Ramon was watching van Donne with hot, dark eyes.
“There’s two things that ought to draw you to this place like flies to dead meat,” van Donne was saying. “One of those two things, I don’t give a shit about. If you or Shapiro or Mark Sherratt want to get sentimental about a bunch of Middle Heavens grunts shipped out of Ulrand and sold off as goods and chattels, that’s your crusade. Me? I see the bastards for what they are. Trigger-happy goons with Confederate allegiance. You know what they used to call them, way back when? Warprizes. They’re for the buying and selling, and they’re going to cover some of the price we paid at Ulrand in blood.”
“We?” Vaurien echoed.
“Crews and clans out of Halfway,” van Donne sad harshly. “A lot of us were killed. You used to be a Freespacer yourself, Vaurien. You’d have called yourself part of ‘we’ before you went legit. Soon as you signed with Shapiro, you lost your right to call yourself a Freespacer.” His fair brows quirked in Jazinsky’s direction. “Is that it? You’re here for the Shanghai prisoners? A bunch of live cargo? Rafe and me, we’ve been betting this is what brings you back to Halfway.”
Vaurien’s temper was simmering. Travers saw it in his face, heard it in his voice. “It’s a large part of what brings us here … and although you don’t give a shit about human lives, you could still turn a profit out of it. Information is worth money. You point us in the right direction, Sergei, you can get paid. This is the deal you threw on the table?”
Surprise ambushed van Donne for a moment. “No, but I’ll play the hand, if you want to deal it to me,” he mused. “You need intel on the Shanghai prisoners, I can get you there. I didn’t get the chance to grab myself a piece of that action – I was too busy setting salvage beacons and keeping the hell out of the way of the big guns. But Fernie Wang picked up a whole bunch, at least twenty I know of.”
“Then, Wang knows where they went,” Travers began.
But van Donne made negative gestures. “Fernie wouldn’t soil his fair hands with the trade, even if he had the time to deal, which he didn’t. The prisoners went straight to an agent. Right, Ramon?”
“Yeah. An agent on Ulrand,” Ramon said doubtfully. “A Freespacer, not an Ulrish merchant. He headed out fast with the whole cargo, like a freight consolidator.
” He frowned at Vaurien. “Your live cargo came to Halfway, no doubt about it. But tracking it down won’t be so easy. You want intel you can trust. You need a contact.”
“And nobody on Halfway trusts you anymore,” van Donne said with rich satisfaction. “So you need me, don’t you? Well, now. That makes things interesting.”
“Fascinating,” Vaurien agreed caustically. “So, Sergei, we do business. Set a price and let’s get it done.”
Once again, van Donne made dismissive gestures. “Sure, we’ll deal. But I don’t want your money, or Shapiro’s.”
“Then, what do you want?” Jazinsky wondered. “If you’re angling for our tech, you can forget it.”
He shot her an ice-cold, lopsided and humorless grin. “When I want your tech, lady, I’ll steal it.”
“You’ll try.”
“Whatever.” He took a step closer to Vaurien. “I want Zwerner. I want Boden Zwerner jettisoned in a bodybag. That’s what I’m doing, kicking my heels on Halfway. Wasting my time – because you can’t get within a hundred meters of Zwerner. I know. I’ve tried.”
The silence between them was punctuated by the heavy beat of music from the bar. The atmosphere in the tiny room crackled with electricity. Travers’s pulse rate picked up, and with a glance at Marin he saw the wide eyes, compressed lips, intense interest.
The Boden Zwerner assignment had been given to Curtis specifically. The contract was Shapiro’s, but Mark Sherratt would accept no payment for it. Dendra Shemiji would perform this execution as a service to the whole Deep Sky. Zwerner should be well aware his life would be forfeit if his involvement in the CL-389 incident were ever uncovered – he might even be aware, via his own covert channels, that Dendra Shemiji had returned the data.
Even Byrne and Ramon sat up now. Both had a vested interest in van Donne – one was already in his bed, the other wanted to be, which made Sergei’s business their business. For several elastic moments Vaurien seemed to freeze, weighing every syllable van Donne had said. And then he turned slowly toward Curtis Marin.
“Your play, I believe,” he offered, and stepped aside.
“Marin?” Now van Donne’s pale eyes narrowed. “You came here to kill Zwerner, the way you went into Mawson to kill that bastard, Reece Clyma? Damn, that’s rich. Dendra bloody Shemiji! Whose contract? Shapiro? Well, fuck me rigid.” He looked down at Rafe with an odd, ironic smile. “What odds would you have put on it – me and Shapiro on the same team.”
Only Travers would have known how swiftly Marin’s hackles had risen. He was on his guard, alert to every nuance of van Donne’s expression, every twitch of his muscles, while Curtis’s own face betrayed nothing. “You want Zwerner dead? You’ll have to stand in line, van Donne. The man has so many enemies, it’s a wonder he’s still alive.” He cocked his head at van Donne. “You said you tried your luck. No joy?”
“You’re kidding around, right?” The mercenary accorded Marin a piercing glare. “I just told you, you can’t get near the man. Well, I can’t. But Dendra Shemiji’s a whole ’nother ballgame.” He flicked a glance at Vaurien. “I’ll tell you this much for nothing: Zwerner knows I’m here, and he must know what I want, because he’s taken two cracks at me since the Mako docked on, and he’s been close both times.”
Vaurien’s lips compressed. “How close?”
In answer, van Donne turned around, lifted up the pale gold teeshirt to display his back, and Travers gave a low whistle. The scar was finger-thick, from his side to his spine, level with the bottom of the shoulder blade. It had not been well treated. Someone with rudimentary knowledge had used the right tools, tissue welding without finesse. Unless he intended to wear the scar like some badge of honor, van Donne would need cosmetic work.
“The first time, it was concussion and a crushed arm,” van Donne was saying sourly. “A demolition charge, down in the cargo bays off the east side of the rink. I barely made it out with my brains intact. The second time they didn’t get fancy. Heavy cal, short range. I was lucky.”
“He was close to dead,” Rafe Byrne said quietly, in an accent still resonant with a trace of the Irish. He stood, peered so closely and critically at the scar that the repairs were obviously his own handiwork, and then he deliberately smoothed the shirt down over van Donne’s wide back.
“You pulled him out?” Travers was guessing Byrne had to be first generation out from Earth. He was colonial by an accident of fate, yet he had found his way out beyond the frontier, where the Deep Sky unraveled into regions uncharted – or at least uncharted by humans. Mark Sherratt’s people had been out here a thousand years before the first human.
Sergei slid an arm around Byrne and pulled him in close. “I never came so close to gone before.” His brows arched at Travers and Marin. “You two clowns on Oberon? Not even in the same neighborhood. Last thing I knew, I was face down, bleeding out. This kid hauls me into cover, calls for help, and when Fernie Wang’s people look like they’re going to stand back and watch me die, he grabs the med kit and does the job himself.”
“Fernie,” Ramon said in amused tone, “wants the Mako.”
“Fernie,” Sergei said mock pleasantly, “can go fuck himself. He’ll get the Mako when I’m cold and dead, and I’m not ready to roll over yet.” He pinned Marin with blue eyes like gimlets. “So, Dendra Shemiji. You’re here for Zwerner?”
And Marin nodded slowly. “I’m here for Zwerner.”
“And you can bet Zwerner is watching us right now,” Jazinsky added. “We were probed on the way in, Sergei. Somebody was trying to get into every system we have, even before we docked. Zwerner?”
The white-blond head nodded. “He’s been expecting to be hit. He’s an evil bastard, he’s not stupid.”
“And you know where he is.” Marin’s brows arched. “Don’t you? You want to share data in exchange for one good, clean shot at the man.”
A brash grin widened van Donne’s mouth. “You’re psychic. Yeah, I know where he is, not that it does me any good. But you buggers – you have the resources of Dendra Shemiji, and the best tech this side of the frontier, and the power of the Wastrel. You could reach him.”
The truth was, the Wastrel could take Halfway to pieces, spar by spar, rock by rock, if no one cared about the vast loss of life in the bid to take Zwerner. Halfway was curiously delicate, with its daisy-chain of docked hulks, and the complete disregard of this community for even the most basic maintenance work. Perhaps van Donne would not have cared about the loss of life, if the Wastrel took Halfway apart. Travers was unsure. Sergei was an odd character. He was a Freespacer, intensely proud of it, and he might just as easily place as high a value on Freespacer lives as he placed no value at all on the Shanghai ‘live cargo’ of conscripts from the Middle Heavens and Near Sky.
“So.” Sergei released Byrne and thrust both hands into the pockets of the black matte slacks, which stretched the fabric taut across his groin and drew Travers’s eyes in idle speculation. “You want to trade data? I can show you exactly where Zwerner is – where he’s been for almost three months now. And he’s had that long to get himself dug in like a bug.”
“You can tell us,” Vaurien began.
But van Donne answered with a grunt. “I’ll show you. I want in, and I don’t trust you. You’ll get the data you want and cut me out.”
“Would we do that?” Jazinsky demanded fatuously.
“Yeah, you bloody would,” van Donne snorted. “Besides which, there’s way too much to tell. He’d been here long enough to have installed his own surveillance. Drones, autoguns, gas, field projectors, the works. If there was a way through his maze, I’d know about it. You bastards can put tech up against tech. Cut through. I can save you a lot of time and trouble. But I want in.” He looked levelly at Vaurien now. “What about it, Richard? Whaddaya say to partnering up for the duration, like we did at Ulrand?”
“At Ulrand?” Vaurien echoed. “You were a goddamn’ privateer, you were never there when anybody needed you, and as soon as you ha
d your claims staked, you were gone.”
“And you expected me to put myself in the Fleet firing line to save your ass?” Sergei barked a chuckle.
“Asako Rodman might have expected you to be there and cover her ass,” Jazinsky said tartly. “The Harlequin took so much damage, she’s still dry-docked at Ulrand.”
He gave her a pained look. “Rodman’s a big girl. She can cover her own fat ass, and the last I heard of the Harlequin, she’s being patched over with pieces hacked off Fleet wrecks. Guns, hull armor, generators. She’s going to come back as some weird-ass hybrid, half warship. Rodman’s got nothing to complain about. Me? I took more than my share of Fleet pilots at Ulrand, and I got the hell out with my crew and my ship whole.”
Vaurien exhaled through his teeth. “All right, Sergei, we’ll play this your way. You’ll be safer on the Wastrel, anyway. Zwerner’s got to be waiting for another shot at you, and you know what they say.”
“Third time lucky,” van Donne growled. “I know.”
“And then we deal,” Travers added. “Remember the prisoners? The warprizes, if you want to use the term. You said you can steer us in the right direction, for a price. You want to make some calls?”
“You’re joking, right?” Sergei looked at Byrne, and laughed. “You say word one on the air in this place, and Zwerner’s listening. You want to talk to anybody, you go there, buy him a beer, look him in the eyeballs.” He swiped up his jacket but did not put it on. “And, yeah, I’ll deal. You get what you want, Travers … so do I.”
With an expression of some relief, Vaurien was already moving. “Are we out of this place, while I still have my eardrums?”
“We’re out,” van Donne agreed. “This might be a shithole, but it’s one of the few places you can’t be jumped, and there’s so much EM crap, it busts up surveillance. There’s two drones that I know about monitoring me, but with the EM and the background noise, all Boden Zwerner knows about right now is that Vaurien and his people met me and mine. He’ll stew in his own juices, wondering what’s going down.”
