by Blaze Ward
“How long can we run?” Xiomber asked, calming enough to go through the implications.
“We spent a month setting this gig up,” Morty reminded the man. “Once we realized that Maximus wasn’t going to just settle for being the kingpin of the criminal underground but wanted to rule everything. It was only a matter of time before he brought in more humans to help. I’ve got eight more credit accounts we can access right now, and connections to a couple of brokers for more, so we’re good for money. I know a few places we might could hide, but it depends on the Constabulary now. I’m expecting random, armed raids on a number of them tonight, expressly looking for any of four known fugitives. We cleaned up Talyarkinash’s lab well enough, but we were in a hurry and the cops will find enough.”
“So hiding in plain sight at a restaurant is a good idea?” Xiomber rolled his eyes.
“Cops aren’t going to roust this place,” Morty replied. “And there are probably thirty other Yuudixtl in here right now, so we don’t stand out. This buys us another couple of hours, then I know an all-night tea house in a nice part of town, over by the university. We can hang out there, as long as you don’t mind open mic poetry night.”
Xiomber rolled his eyes again, but Morty expected that. His egg-brother was not a bohemian by any stretch of the word. But cops would never look in a tea house filled with weird kids playing guitars and chanting bizarre performance art to total strangers.
In the morning, if they were still able and the idea still sounded good, they could make their careful way to where Talyarkinash was hopefully hiding with Gareth, and move on to the next step. Or just run and find themselves another place to hide while they worked on a different plan to save the universe.
Damn the Constables for being good enough, smart enough, or maybe lucky enough to have broken things so wide open, so early. Morty had been counting on having at least a another week, and then it would have been someone from the old gang sniffing around.
Talyarkinash could have deflected them long enough, and then Morty and his brother could have unleashed an avenging angel on people who seemed to want to take the whole damned Accord of Souls down.
Didn’t those fools understand that you had to have a working society first?
Morty could see a dark future where Maximus got himself made over into an emperor. He would have to institute a reign of brutality to keep power, which would mean more humans, until all of the old species of the Accord, bound by their psionic empathy, became a permanent slave class to a caste of humans and other murderous criminals.
If Morty had realized all this a year ago, when Cinnra decided he needed a personal killer to keep power, Morty might have quit and turned state’s evidence then. Better jail than the sort of dystopian future Morty might have personally helped give birth to.
He could only hope that it truly was possible to fight fire with fire.
At least he and his egg-brother had managed to destroy the wormhole station back on Zathus. Maximus wouldn’t be able to bring in more humans until he built a new one, and that would take time, especially if the cops were watching, and the overlord had lost his two best physicists to crises of conscience.
The waiter came and took their orders. Morty had wanted some wine, just to help with his nerves, but Xiomber overrode him. And he would let his brother do that. It was only fair, if he was going to drag Xiomber to a poetry slam later.
“I hate you, by the way,” Xiomber mentioned as the waiter left.
“What did I do this time?” Morty asked.
“You’re going to turn me into one of the good guys, you bastard,” his brother snapped. “All our lives we’ve wanted to be criminals, you know. Could have gotten legitimate jobs, but that was too staid. And now I’m running for my life from every goomba and cop in this town.”
“Sorry,” Morty offered.
“Is it ever going to get better, you suppose?” Xiomber asked.
Morty shrugged.
“We have to save galactic civilization from a madman first,” Morty replied. “And then deal with a human cop that we’ve turned into a god, and a criminal underworld that won’t forgive us, either way. I’m happy enough to be in the frying pan right now, because the alternative is the fire itself.”
“Do we turn ourselves in?” Xiomber asked. “Tell the cops everything, including what we plan for Gareth, and see if they can stop Maximus?”
“They won’t believe us,” Morty said. “We’ve already shredded the law books at this point. Fardel only knows how many centuries we’d be sentenced too, even with time off for good behavior. Gareth would be in the cell with us, or a zoo, which is the same thing. Maximus would dance right around any traps they thought they could set to catch him, and then end up grand poohbah of everything.”
“No,” Xiomber countered. “I mean everything we know. The crooked cops. The suborned prosecutors. The Constables Maximus secretly recruited. Everything.”
“We wouldn’t live to see the inside of a jail cell, brother,” Morty replied mournfully.
“It might be worth trying,” Xiomber said.
“We’ll give Gareth a shot first,” Morty said. “I think he has what it takes to do this.”
“And if he succeeds, brother?” Xiomber snapped. “We’re still guilty of breaking just about every law on the books. You think they’ll just kiss us on the snout and send us on our way?”
“I think that I would enjoy spending the rest of my life in the next cell over from Maximus,” Morty retorted. “At least the rest of the Accord of Souls would have survived, at that point. That’s way better than some of the options I can see right now.”
Xiomber wanted to say something sarcastic and biting to that. Morty could see it in his eyes, almost taste it in the scent his egg-brother gave off. But Xiomber held his silence.
Morty knew why.
He was right.
In the end, if the Accord didn’t survive, being outside the jail wouldn’t mean much of anything.
Because Morty had been the one who had done the most to tear it down.
Safe
Gareth opened the door first, Talyarkinash standing off to one side in case somebody was waiting inside and opened fire. Not that there was much of anything he could do if the game was indeed up, but it made him feel better.
In addition to a couple of bags of takeout food they had grabbed a few blocks over, she still had the pistol she had taken off the thug, to replace Constable Baker’s sidearm. That punk wouldn’t be needing it again. It was in her hand now, only shaking a little bit as the toils of the day took their toll on the Nari woman.
Talyarkinash wasn’t nearly as fragile as the human women he had known. Most of them, anyway. Pippa might have had a heart of gold, but there was still a spine of titanium. She and Talyarkinash might have seen eye to eye on many things, although they would never meet.
Thinking about his beloved helped him frame the Lynxwoman scientist better. Women in the Accord weren’t soft creatures that needed to be protected at all costs. That cop had almost been tough enough to take him singlehandedly, after all.
And Talyarkinash hadn’t shrunk from shooting the Warreth in the alley to save his life.
Gareth took a deep, confused breath, and pushed the door open. It was made of some light but extremely durable plastic and swung inward on silent hinges.
Inside, he found a traditional flat, with a compact kitchen and dining area on his right, and a long, skinny salon on the left. The furniture in here was odd, but Gareth put that down to Talyarkinash’s personal tastes.
The couch was an open, wooden frame with a single pad that folded in the middle, rather than the sort of thing he had known growing up, overstuffed and upholstered, with lace doilies on the back.
A chair in the front corner appeared to be a square, metal-tube frame with a kickstand back. A single piece of black canvas had been sewn around the frame in such a way as to form a person-sized hammock, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Ins
tead of a big wooden armoire to hold the entertainment system, there was a single flat panel thinner than his thumb, maybe a yard across, hung from the wall across from the couch-thing, with odd-looking shelves below it. Each shelf appeared to be a wooden box about eighteen inches deep and eighteen or thirty-six inches wide. They were stacked up and leaned against the wall, providing a variety of flat spaces to put books and other knick-knacks.
Down the left side of the center wall, Gareth could see a door he presumed was a restroom, and another to her bedroom.
Nobody was visible when Gareth entered the room. He quickly confirmed the other two spaces were what he thought, and empty, returning to find Talyarkinash standing in the salon, arms wrapped around herself and shivering.
Gareth wanted to walk up and wrap his own arms around the woman to help comfort her, but that didn’t sound like a good idea. It might remind her she was supposed to be afraid of him.
Instead, he moved to the counter where she had set the food and began unpacking things onto the table. Protein and calories would be a good idea right now, as he had missed dinner while they slunk through back alleys and quiet streets, making sure they didn’t have a tail of any kind.
“Food?” he asked, trying to break through the wall of frost that had seemed to settle itself around the scientist.
She visibly shuddered once, drawing a deep breath, but she joined him, pulling two bowls from a cabinet and filling glasses with water.
They sat at a low table that reminded Gareth of ancient Japan. Pillows on the floor in various colors instead of chairs, so he kicked off his shoes and knelt. The table itself appeared to be a two foot by four foot sheet of three-quarter inch plywood, painted black and enameled over. Looking underneath, it was held up by an overturned, red milk carton.
Weird.
Gareth presumed it was an artistic statement of interior decorating, rather than poverty. Maybe a cover as a poor student, since this was where she went to hide, expecting the police to be waiting at her regular apartment.
She joined him, digging into the food with chopsticks. He had never learned the trick to eating with two sticks, so Gareth had to settle for an odd, plastic device that combined a spoon with short tines from a fork.
“Do we know when Morty and Xiomber will arrive?” he asked after selecting a random mix of colors and shapes into his bowl.
She shrugged and chewed. After a moment, she took a drink and fixed him with a focused gaze.
This was when a medusa would turn him to stone. Fortunately, his associate tonight was a Nari, and not a Grace.
Gareth surprised himself by not freaking completely out to be surrounded by aliens of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pastor Jacob would probably expect that they were all going to hell, but they really were good people, the ones he had met so far.
“We can’t even be sure that they will join us,” she said in a cold, hard voice. “If we get caught, you told them they had to build a new machine and get another human agent to help. They might have gone off to do that as an insurance policy.”
“Oh,” Gareth commented neutrally. “I had not considered that.”
“And I think we should move quickly ourselves, regardless of when we see them,” Talyarkinash continued. “I have all my notes, even if I had to destroy everything at the lab. And it will be extremely experimental, beyond anything I’ve ever tried before, and dangerous, but I’m not sure what I can do to mitigate that, so we don’t gain much time by waiting.”
“You were ready when the Constables showed up?” Gareth asked. Nobody had told him that.
“Close enough,” she admitted. “The next step was to mix reagents and test them against human DNA, and I can do that first thing tomorrow.”
“You have a lab here?”
He was shocked. Just in case, Gareth had examined every room, but detected no sign.
“The back of the linen closet has a hidden door,” she said. “I own the next flat over on this floor and I converted it into a small lab, just for this exact circumstance, the need to do something when I couldn’t work downtown.”
“Wow,” Gareth managed.
For a Field Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, he was certainly getting a first-class education in the criminal mind this week. The bad guys back home were never going to escape him. If he ever found a way to return.
Dinner went quickly. Gareth watched her put a few containers in the refrigerator and the rest into an incinerator slot on the wall. He moved to the weird-looking sofa and decided it was wide enough. He grabbed a blanket from the linen closet in the bathroom while she watched and took off his boots.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Going to sleep,” Gareth replied. “I’m tired and tomorrow already feels like a busy day.”
“But on the couch?” Talyarkinash pressed.
Gareth fixed her with his own, serious gaze.
“Yes,” he said firmly.
As a contest of wills, it was over quickly.
Gareth thought he detected a sag in her otherwise-rigid spine, and then she walked past him.
“Okay,” she said mildly. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he replied, stretching himself out as much as he could.
When his weight shifted, Gareth discovered that the back and bottom moved on sliders built into the sides. He got up, tugged experimentally on the bottom, and was rewarded when the entire thing slid out and flat, providing him a bunk wider than he had back at the Arsenal, and long enough, if he slept diagonally, to stretch out.
Lovely invention.
He got horizontal and started to relax.
Up the hallway, the light under Talyarkinash’s door went out after a few minutes and the apartment fell into silent darkness.
Gareth knew he should be sleeping. However, the day had been too much for him to unwind quickly, so he listened to the building creak. The walls themselves were thick enough to obscure the sounds of neighbors, but fans blew warm air about, and the refrigerator hummed to itself occasionally, keeping his mind too alert.
After fifteen minutes or so, Gareth heard the bedroom door open, and bare feet pad quietly across the carpet. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness, so he could see Talyarkinash, dressed in a pair of long, silken pajamas, walk into the center of the room.
Rather than speak, Gareth waited, unsure what was going through the beautiful alien’s mind. At least she wasn’t holding a gun.
She knew he was awake. Her eyes were better than his in this light, and his were open, watching her.
He would be true to Pippa. Period.
Nothing could change that rock-solid conviction.
“I’m cold,” she said in a soft voice just above a whisper.
Cold? Then add another blanket, or turn the heat up.
But he didn’t say that.
Because it wasn’t a physical chill that had gripped her.
No, this one was spiritual. The sort of things he had been grappling with for four days, lost on an alien adventure in a land he had never dreamt of.
Gareth was fully dressed, except for his boots by the couch and his denim jacket hanging on a hook by the front door. Talyarkinash was wearing silk pajamas with a floral print on them. In the darkness, he would have guessed the fabric to be salmon, with crimson designs.
It might cover the body, but it left almost nothing about her shape to the imagination.
Still, they were both fully dressed. And it said a lot that she might trust him that much.
Gareth pulled the blanket back as an invitation for her to climb in with him.
She did, pulling the blanket around her and sliding backward into him. Gareth rolled onto his side, one arm under her head and the other wrapped around her arms to give her heat, even though he could feel the woman’s warmth through the layers of clothing separating them.
After a few minutes, she fell asleep, astounding Gareth.
After another few minutes, he joined her.
Part Three
> Heroes
Morning
Gareth awoke to light leaking past the curtains in the front of the flat. He was alone on the sofa, which helped. He had no idea how he would have dealt with the beautiful Nari woman waking up in his arms.
But she had wakened first and managed to slip out with rousing him. He heard her now, making tea in the kitchen, on the other side of the central wall, metal spoon clinking on a porcelain mug.
Gareth threw back the blanket and stood, taking the time to fold the thing back into a sofa and fold the blanket up.
“Gareth?” she called quietly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t meant to wake you.”
“You didn’t, I don’t think,” Gareth recalled. “This is my normal time to wake up.”
“Tea’s almost done,” she appeared around the edge of the wall. “Or you can take a quick shower in the sonic fresher first.”
Gareth nodded and headed to the bathroom.
That had been the single coolest thing he had found about the Accord of Souls. Instead of walking naked into hot water, he could step into a small booth without taking off his clothes, just stand there for sixty seconds while the device bombarded him with some sort of sonics and radiation, then stay there while another machine vacuumed him in a way that left both him and his clothes completely clean. He hadn’t even had to do laundry once since he got here.
Taking that technology home to Earth might put a lot of people out of work, but it would save so much time that everyone should come out way ahead.
The only thing that had been a problem was that he didn’t have a razor. Morty had brought one before, made for a Vanir male, but they’d forgotten to stop at an all-night grocery where they could get a new one. Fortunately, his stubble was blond, so it wouldn’t show up for a few days. He felt bad being out of uniform.
