Nimbus

by Jacey Bedford

  “Olivia. Gen’s not expecting me back.” Max slumped, elbows on his knees. “She’s made it quite clear she doesn’t want me hanging around her and the monster.”

  “Max—”

  “Don’t call my daughter a monster? Is that what you’re going to say?”

  “She’s hardly a monster.”

  “What would you call her, Doc? She’s a little tyrant—and already developing telepathy.”

  Ronan sighed. “To my knowledge there has never been a baby born in foldspace before.”

  “With a void dragon looking on.” Max hiccupped and stared at the liquid in his glass. “I know. I know.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  Ronan shrugged.

  “Damn it! You don’t know, do you? You don’t know whether she’s normal or not.”

  “It means we do our best to adapt and learn.” Ronan pointed at the glass. “Sip it.”

  Max did, then looked suspiciously at the glass. “Is this the best you can do?”

  “In this mood, you wouldn’t appreciate the good stuff. Besides, Jon heard you were coming and hid the best bottle before he went out.”

  “See, Doc, you and Jon . . . well . . . you’re not likely to be having a family any time soon, are you? You know what I’m talking about medically, but you’re not a parent, so—”

  “No, I’m not a parent. Though Jon and I have talked about it and, well, maybe, one day . . . when the space station isn’t disintegrating around our ears and we can offer a kid a stable life, we might find a nice surrogate mom, and have a three-parent child. I’d like kids. We’d both like kids. Thing is, Max, I know being a parent isn’t easy, and new fathers sometimes find the adjustment difficult. They suddenly have to share their loved one with another person, one whose demands come before their own—”

  “It’s not that. I was ready for that. I wanted this baby as much as Gen did. But I didn’t expect . . . the mental thing. I expected Gen to be totally absorbed.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t expect the kid to reject me.”

  Ronan frowned. “Reject you how?”

  “With her mind, Doc. She pushes me away.”

  “Have you had your implant checked? You’re a strong Finder, but I didn’t think you registered on the empathy scale. Even if you did, you shouldn’t be picking up emotions from a toddler.”

  “I’m not picking up emotions. It’s not like that. She’s sending them. Loud and clear. You can’t hear anything?”

  Ronan shook his head. “I’m as good an Empath as you’re going to find on this station, except perhaps for Jussaro. I should be picking up emotions from her if anyone should.”

  “And?”

  “Well, as her doctor, I’ve picked up nothing except—”

  “Except?”

  Ronan shook his head. “Actually, nothing. I’ve picked up nothing at all.”

  “There! That’s what I mean. Is that normal? You can pick up emotions even from deadheads. Is it likely you’d pick up nothing at all from an unguarded baby? Wouldn’t you get—say—contentment or hunger or who-are-you-you’re-not-my-mom kind of feelings?”

  “Well, sometimes babies give off those feelings.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Okay, often.”

  “But never Liv?”

  Ronan pressed his lips together.

  “See, Doc, that’s what I mean. She’s blocking you.”

  “She’s too young, Max. How can she—”

  “Foldspace. Void dragon. Mental powers. How normal does that sound to you?”

  Ronan took a sip from his own glass and grimaced. “You’re right, this stuff is foul.” He went into the adjoining bedroom and retrieved a small bottle, emptied both glasses, and refilled them. “Try this.”

  Max sipped. The golden liquid trickled down his throat, this time without choking him. “Better.”

  “Yeah.” Ronan sipped from his own glass. “Maybe . . . maybe we could get Jussaro to take a look at Liv.”

  “It’s a step in the right direction.”

  Garrick was at his desk. This wasn’t unusual. Garrick was married to his desk lately. Mona kept after him to delegate and he would—when he felt there was someone capable to delegate to. He’d had high hopes for Benjamin. He would have drafted him in a heartbeat, but Benjamin would never leave the Free Company. Besides, the Free Company was an excellent resource in itself. Benjamin always went above and beyond.

  Garrick’s administrative staff had expanded beyond the capacity of his offices in the Mansion House basement and now occupied the upper floors of the block on the corner of the square, opposite Hub Park. Estelle Cray, once his secretary, had become his senior administrator. Captain Syke’s militia occupied the lower two floors. Syke had so far resisted relegation to the role of desk jockey in favor of taking an active role in policing the station.

  The circulating air felt cool on Garrick’s face and forearms. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves sometime earlier. Now he tugged them down again and reached for his jacket, which he’d thrown over one of the two visitor chairs. As he shrugged into it, his comm began to bleep.

  It was a message from Akiko Yamada.

  Garrick blinked rapidly, smoothed down his jacket as if she could see it, slid into his chair and hit receive.

  Yamada’s head and shoulders appeared on his screen.

  “Mr. Garrick, greetings.” She flattened her palms together and inclined her head politely. “It is Alphacorp’s desire to lay old business to rest and discuss the possibility of new business. To that end, I would like to arrange a meeting on neutral territory to discuss the possibility of Crossways providing Alphacorp with jump drives suitable for retrofitting into ships of our courier and small freighter classes. Part of any such agreement might include the retrieval of our thirteen ships and their crew currently stranded in Amarelo space—all in exchange for suitable remuneration and a nonaggression pact between Alphacorp and Crossways. I hope we can work together. I await your reply.”

  Garrick had to hand it to the woman; she had nerve. Fifteen months ago, her ships had been trying to pound Crossways into surrender. He knew it was as much about the platinum on Olyanda as it was about old grievances against Crossways. Now she was looking for a deal. She’d struck a good tone, though. She’d found the right balance between ingratiating and overconfident.

  He watched the message again. The time code showed it had been prerecorded and sent in a data packet via the jump gate system. It had taken thirteen days to reach him, which meant she’d sent it soon after Benjamin destroyed the most recent attempt at rebuilding a jump gate in Amarelo space. Coincidence? He thought not.

  He tried to look beneath the offer. What did she want? Was it what it looked like on the surface? She must have her research and development division working around the clock to develop their own compact jump drives. It was only a matter of time before they did. Garrick was under no illusions. Kennedy had been the first past the post, but it wasn’t a one-horse race. Crossways had a head start on the megacorps for now, but for how long?

  Should he sell Kennedy’s jump drive to Alphacorp? Once they had a working prototype, they could reverse-engineer it and produce their own. On the one hand, he didn’t want Crossways to lose the advantage; on the other hand, if it was only a matter of time before it happened anyway, Crossways, and Kennedy, herself, should get something out of it.

  He resisted the urge to reply immediately. This wasn’t a decision he could make alone. He might be the titular head of Crossways, but he needed wise counsel on this: Mona, Ben, and Cara, for starters, plus Oleg Staple and Leah Nolan who were responsible, between them, for Olyanda’s safety and the platinum production. If those five were his inner cabinet, he also needed the best expert he could find on economic networks and someone who could take apart Alphacorp’s last published account
s and maybe also crack their systems to get a true picture of their current state.

  And, if they were going to seriously talk about a legitimate business deal, Garrick needed to clean his own house and get it in order. The likes of Roxburgh would have to go.

  Then there was only one more problem. She’d asked for a meeting somewhere neutral. There was no way Garrick was going anywhere that involved flying through the Folds. She would have to come here.

  Would she be willing to do that?

  And if he was willing to sell the jump drive plans, what could he get out of her in return? If she agreed to a nonaggression pact, could he rely on it to hold?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  SMACKDOWN

  THE WOMAN IN THE JAPANESE KIMONO, MISSING since the night of the auction, was missing no longer. Her frosted body, still in the kimono, bumped gently against the outside of the clear observation dome, tied on a short tether. Her mode of death obvious by the spike thrust through her left eye, deep into her brain, pinning to her face a flimsy with a familiar casino logo on it. The message was explicit: don’t mess with Roxburgh.

  “It’s time,” Garrick said, a soft catch in his throat as he and Ben stood looking up at the woman. A squad of militia had cleared the viewing deck of gawkers, and Syke had sent a crew to retrieve the body.

  “Roxburgh,” Ben said.

  “Before someone gets hurt.”

  “Someone’s already been hurt.” Ben looked up. A space-suited crew was approaching the corpse in slow-mo.

  Garrick nodded. “Before someone else gets hurt, a lot of someones.”

  “If you’re going to go after Roxburgh, it has to be permanent. You can’t leave him free to take another swing at you.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You need to take out his captains as well, or one will fill the vacuum.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll take some planning.”

  “That’s why I called you,” Garrick said. “It would be simplest if he were to die resisting arrest, I can’t deny that, but if we can take him and his henchmen alive, they’ll get due process.”

  “And then you’ll execute him.”

  “Legally.”

  Capital punishment, banned for centuries on Earth, was sometimes the expedient way of dealing with major criminals out in the far reaches of space where the Monitors were stretched thin and there was no access to prison planets. At least with Empaths around to confirm guilt, there was little chance of sentencing an innocent.

  “And what happens if you can’t take him?” Ben gestured upward to where the team had now untethered Kimono Woman and manipulated her into a body bag. “You realize he’s intending to provoke you. He’ll be expecting you and he’ll be ready to retaliate.”

  “I realize. There are risks.” He raised one eyebrow. “I find the older I get, the fewer risks I want to take, but this time I don’t have a choice. Let’s do what we can to minimize them.”

  Four hours later, Ben emerged from the Mansion House with plans buzzing around in his brain. He found Cara in the comms chair back at Blue Seven, tucked away in the cubicle that offered isolation, though more often than not, Cara left the door open to Wenna’s office, not minding the background noise.

  “You’re going after Roxburgh,” she said as he leaned against the doorframe. It wasn’t even a question.

  “Garrick is.”

  “And you’re going with him.”

  “We have to hit all his key operatives at once.”

  “Right now, when he’s ready for you?”

  “No, we’re going to let him stew for a few days at peak readiness until his people are jittery. In the meantime, Garrick’s going to look ineffectual to throw him off balance. Can you monitor the station chat?”

  “Of course.”

  “And do we have a Finder who’s keyed into Roxburgh? We need to know where he is, now and for the next few days.”

  “Better give Max a few credit chips and see how long it takes him to lose them at the gaming tables. Roxburgh tends to keep a close eye on his business. Max can tag him mentally.”

  “Good idea.”

  Ben began to handpick a team from the Free Company and brief them.

  In the meantime, Garrick issued several public notices relating to a reward for information leading to the killer of the unidentified victim.

  Four days later Garrick’s office issued another notice to say they had a suspect in custody.

  On the eighth day, early in the morning, Garrick made his move.

  For the past five days, Roxburgh Heights had experienced several inconvenient power outages, most for a matter of minutes, but one lasted a couple of hours. Between outages, the power supply had flickered ominously.

  Roxburgh had made no representations to Garrick’s office personally. Instead he’d sent Ilsa Marquat, his highly efficient personal assistant, a woman who looked as though she could crack walnuts between the cheeks of her arse.

  Cara had picked up some gossip she’d passed on to Ben. Roxburgh had not been happy with the answer that the power supply problem was his own fault for not allowing access for replacement cables. Miss Marquat was stuck between Garrick’s office and Roxburgh’s wrath, and had grumbled within the hearing of one of the croupiers. The news had spread.

  To appease Roxburgh, Garrick had sent two engineers who claimed to have fixed the problem, while rigging the emergency power to fail after two minutes.

  Roxburgh Heights wasn’t Garrick’s only target. Roxburgh had operations all over the station: his own private port, Port 46, where he kept a small fleet of vessels he preferred to call free traders; a warehouse kept under permanent lockdown in Brown Eight; five brothels scattered around the hub on different levels, and two smaller casinos, one in Green Four and another on the Saturn Ring. The Green Four casino doubled as a strip joint and venue for barely legal cage fights.

  Ben, Cara, and a team of twenty, all buddysuited and armed to the teeth, were ready to take Roxburgh Heights where, according to Max, Roxburgh himself was holed up. He’d been there since Kimono Woman had been discovered. Even on a station the size of Crossways, there was nowhere sensible to run to. Not that Roxburgh had any intention of running. His intention had been to provoke Garrick into a confrontation and to force him to back down, giving Roxburgh the kind of free hand he’d always enjoyed. His casino was more than a place of business—it was a fortress.

  Syke had smaller teams of uniformed militia heading for each brothel with a close-down order, and he led a larger team to the casino in Green Four. Tengue’s target was Port 46 while Gwala’s team hit the warehouse. Mother Ramona had taken a shuttle to the Saturn Ring in the early hours of the morning. She knew the manager of Roxburgh’s casino there and believed there would be no trouble once Roxburgh himself was safely confined.

  Garrick turned up at Blue Seven as Ben and Cara were getting ready to depart. “I’m coming with you.”

  Ben thought about trying to dissuade him but dismissed the idea. The determination on Garrick’s face was plain. Ben had not been around when Garrick usurped Chaliss’ place as head of Crossways in what had been—in every sense of the word—a hostile takeover, but it had obviously been a successful action. He should be able to take care of himself.

  “You’ll need a communicator,” Ben said. “Everyone else on this trip is a psi-tech of one sort or another.”

  “And that means you’ll all be stuck with communicators as well. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I can appreciate you need to be there. Buddysuit fully armored? Weapons?”

  “Yes, and yes,” Garrick said. “And I know how to use them.”

  “I’m sure you do. But do me a favor and hang back, okay? You’re not a gang boss on the make now. The head of Crossways would be difficult to replace.”

  “Are you going to stand there all day lectu
ring me?”

  Ben smiled. “No, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Cara handed Garrick an earpiece and activated the channel in her helm. “Testing.”

  Garrick nodded. “Let’s go get the bastard.”

  *Stay with Garrick,* Ben told Cara. *I don’t want any accidents because he’s not part of the psi-tech gestalt.*

  *I will.*

  She hadn’t intended to hang back, but appreciated that someone had to, and she could hold open the gestalt as well from the rear as from the front.

  “Do we know whether Roxburgh is at home to callers?” Garrick asked as they piled into the tub cabs specially fitted with priority transmitters that automatically pushed everything else out of their way, like the ambulance cabs and Syke’s militia transports.

  “Max is our best Finder. If he says Roxburgh is in the casino, then he is.”

  Garrick scanned all the figures in buddysuits, helms, and faceplates. “Where’s Max?”

  “Having an early morning coffee inside Hot’n’Sweet, across the square from the casino. He doesn’t need to be in the melee to pinpoint Roxburgh for us and, frankly, he’s not had the extensive training these guys have had. We’ve stationed six more people in there, and in the pie shop next door. They’re watching the front door while we go in at the back. Obviously, we don’t want bystanders involved, but if there’s a general exodus from the casino, we need to detain everyone in case some of Roxburgh’s lynchpin operatives make a break that way.”

  “It should be quiet this early in the morning.”

  “We hope so.”

  The tubs split up. Cara, Garrick, and six psi-techs headed up to the service elevator three levels above the main floor of the casino.

  They waited for the call from the Psi-Mech dealing with the power supply.

  “Get ready,” Cara told Garrick. “Power’s out in three, two, one. Go.”

  The power throughout Roxburgh’s establishment was down, though the corridor lighting was still on.

  Cara hadn’t expected to be back so soon, but at least she had a good memory of the area where the service elevator shaft ended up. There were stairs as well which, of course, they took, knowing the camera eyes were off briefly. They had thirty seconds to get to the bottom of the stairwell, using night-vision goggles. They ran in behind six buddysuited figures led by Alexei Kronenburg, Telepath and combat veteran. They pelted down the steps, acutely aware of the time. Kronenburg’s wingman shattered the camera eye at the bottom of the stairwell with a spider bot. When the emergency power kicked in, that eye would be out, as would the eye where the other group, led by Ben, had entered.