Learning the Hard Way 3

by H. P. Caledon

  Mike kept his eyes closed, embarrassed as hell at what he was about to disclose. “When we went looking for Misery, do you remember I stayed out late one night?”

  “You hooked up, yeah.”

  Mike kept his eyes closed as he nodded and pointed at the pad.

  “Are you telling me you drilled someone tracking us?” Keelan exclaimed.

  Mike nodded, still keeping his eyes closed, because he didn’t want to see Keelan’s expression.

  “I don’t know your preferences, but she didn’t manage to place a tracking device somewhere you wouldn’t find anytime soon, right?”

  Mike popped his eyes open and glared at him. “No!”

  “And you weren’t stupid enough to tell her anything.”

  To Mike’s relief, it sounded like a comment, not a question, and Keelan didn’t even look to him for confirmation. Yet Mike contemplated whether or not he’d said anything. No. The closest to anything useful was that he was between assignments.

  “Alice said for us to stay away from Verion Four, right?” Danny asked.

  “Yes.” Keelan smiled. “But I’ve never been good at obeying orders.”

  “You didn’t promise her?” Mike smiled as Keelan shook his head. “Good, because I think we should lock down and star jump a bit.”

  “Good luck with all of that.” Danny hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the common room.

  “Every time we star jump, we take two to three days off our journey, and we need to get there, fast,” Mike said.

  Danny sighed, nodded, and returned to the common room.

  * * * *

  Misery sat in the kitchen and tried to get a feel for the knife Keelan had helped her make. It wasn’t sharp yet, but she’d learned to hone the steel correctly.

  There were still little details in the blade that she wished she could redo. Inconsequential flaws, because the blade was well-balanced and strong. It was made to be practical—the only thing that Keelan had said really mattered.

  Mike came into the kitchen and smiled at her before rummaging for a snack. “You’ve gotten good at that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you and your dad talk more about this shape-shifting ability he has?”

  “No. He said he just shifted when he became sixteen. He explained it all to me. How it feels but... I can’t find that feeling.” She sighed heavily. “Maybe I can’t even do it.”

  Mike placed a mug of soup in front of her and sat opposite. From a pocket, he withdrew a small transparent cylinder. “I’ve made new retina lenses, like I promised. We checked your dad’s under... a borrowed form, and even the retinas change. Which is pretty slick.” Mike placed the cylinder on the table between them. “Every time you leave the ship, you have to wear them. Every time you go to a place with retina scanners. I’m looking into fingerprints. When they revoked our SWIS access, they also took away my abilities to download the right ones for the retina lenses, and a hacked access would just make them flag those identities. I did find some that don’t match the retinas, but that’s not important on Verion Four.”

  “So, I get to be two people at the same time?” she asked, grinning.

  “Something like that. I only made IDs to fit the retinas, and they don’t tolerate close scrutiny, since the fingerprints won’t match.”

  Misery nodded and reached for the cylinder.

  “Isn’t there something about lenses showing up under light?”

  “UV, also known as black light, yeah, but those aren’t sensitive to it. If someone asks if you have lenses in and have a light in their hand, just say you don’t have lenses in and they might not check.”

  Misery fingered the cylinder, wondering what it would be like to step back onto that planet. Circumstances were so different now. Life was so different.

  “When will we arrive on Verion Four?”

  “Five weeks or so.”

  “I hope I get to meet my mom.”

  Mike smiled and reached across the table to squeeze her hand.

  Back in her room, Misery began leafing through a new book she’d picked up in Mike’s room.

  Five weeks. Mike had said five weeks before they were on Verion Four. She hated that planet. What she’d done to get away from it, and especially Churchburrow.

  With thoughts of that slave farm came memories of the other children there, and especially the ones she’d managed to escape with. She was so happy to hear that Jasper had gotten away, too. That her dad and Mike had helped him. But what about the others?

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

  “Yeah?”

  Keelan popped his head in. “Wanted to hear if... what’s on your mind?”

  “Jasper.”

  “Ah.” Keelan stepped in and closed the door behind him before perching on the edge of the bed next to her.

  “I thought about the others, too. You found some of them, didn’t you?”

  Keelan nodded solemnly.

  “Are they okay?”

  “Where did you leave them?” The look in his eyes left no opening for happy endings. For a second, she tried to picture his life growing up. And her mother’s. Most of all she tried to picture her own life had the Churchburrow couple not stolen her from her mother and put her dad in jail.

  If she tried to forget what she knew about him now, she wondered how she’d see him. The answer made her smile, which brought about a curious expression on Keelan’s face.

  “Can’t believe I thought you were some pedo freak the first time I saw you.”

  “Thanks. My leg healed fine, in case you wanted to know.”

  Misery giggled. “And Mike’s arm?”

  Keelan chuckled. “That too.”

  They shared a moment of silence, and she found it strange that Keelan seemed content with it. He didn’t look directly at her, and she didn’t get the sense he wanted to be somewhere else. She just felt like... he was there.

  “One time on Verion. Jasper and... there was four of us. There was this soup bar which we broke into after closing hour,” Misery said. Keelan looked at her, and she felt so relieved that there really wasn’t a Keelan and a Kaleb because she wasn’t sure the latter would have understood the concept of old hunger.

  “Did you get in?” Keelan asked, and she realized she’d stopped in the middle of her story. She smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah, and we ravished that place, eating everything.” She laughed at the memory of their fortune that night. “But there must have been an alarm or something, because a security company arrived, and Jasper really got a kicking. I actually think he tried to keep them occupied so we had time to fill our pockets.”

  Keelan smiled and nodded, as if it was a trait he could recognize in Jasper.

  “When we came out the back door, there was this man standing there. The last guard saw us and ran to us to beat us up, too, and the man just got completely aggressive. He lunged at the guard and... I’ve never seen anyone get stomped like that. We just stood there and stared. Even when the other two guards came out, he didn’t stop. He just sneered at them and told us to leave.”

  “And then what happened’?”

  “Well, we left. We didn’t ask questions, we just... left.”

  Keelan pulled a face like he hadn’t understood the point to the story.

  “I thought it was you... or something,” Misery said.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the way he looked at me. I wasn’t as afraid of him as the others. There was this strange sensation about him. And something he said. My blood. It’s mine... and then he kicked and hit the guard some more.”

  “And why did you think it was me?”

  “It was just this feeling.”

  “And your first feeling when you met me was that I was a pedo freak?”

  “No, I just saw a guy taking his clothes off while I was in bed.”

  “Did you see this man since?”

  “Once. And then he just looked at me like I was a turn under his shoe.”<
br />
  Keelan snorted but smiled. “Yeah, I’ve had that feeling once or twice, too.”

  Mike suddenly hollered something out in the hallway, and Keelan was out of the room in three long strides. Misery followed closely.

  “Ratkins just contacted Lewis. He found that little trick with my number as an assistance code too, but he doesn’t know what they want with it. Ratkins says that there are twenty-three bounty hunters, thirteen mercenaries, and a whole platoon of soldiers after us. The soldiers are on Kanakoon, the rest are spread out all over. On Verion Four, too.”

  Keelan’s jaws tightened rhythmically.

  “Do they know about mom?”

  “Yes,” Mike and Keelan said in unison.

  “We warned her,” Danny said, joining them in the hallway. “I’m gathering resources, but what I can’t reach with a computer, I can’t really do anything about.”

  “What can you do?” Mike asked.

  “A virus? But I need to know who they are.”

  “Not too safe, since the military is in on this. They’re on our side... without knowing it,” Mike said.

  “I know where they won’t find us,” Misery said. Everybody looked at her. “Churchburrow.”

  “Forget it!” Keelan exclaimed.

  “No one will look, Dad.”

  “No, but I promised Lewis not to go back there and make trouble, and me and the Churchburrow couple face to face will be trouble. And not in the dimensions that can be overlooked.”

  “But—”

  “Next suggestion, please,” Mike said. Misery looked at him and gave up. Not because he looked as stubborn as Keelan, but because Mike’s gaze seemed to support the theory of just how bad an idea of Keelan and the Churchburrows in the same room was.

  “Give me a list of all the bounty hunters and mercs Ratkins mentioned,” Daniel said. “I’ll do some background checks on them and see what we’re up against.”

  Mike handed him the pad, and Danny returned to the couch.

  “Since you’re a merc, Mike, are there any chances you know some of them?” Keelan asked.

  “Maybe. Didn’t have time to look through the list that thoroughly.” Mike sighed and leaned against the wall, a worried frown on his face.

  “Come on, let’s go to the kitchen and look at the rest of those pads,” Keelan said, motioning for Misery to follow.

  They sat silently across from each other and read through the information. Once done with a pad they put it to the right of them.

  “What was the name of that space station where we landed for Mike to buy me clothes?” Misery asked.

  “Something unpronounceable with a lot of p’s in it.”

  “Mike is listed as seen.”

  Keelan snatched the pad from her and looked over the information. “Mike!”

  Mike showed up at the door moments later.

  “That set of siblings you ran into in that lots-of-P’s station, how much did you talk to them?”

  “Just about the target.”

  “And then you went into a launderie store?”

  “Launderie? Yeah, I went into a lingerie store to buy... she saw that,” Mike mumbled reflectively.

  “Yeah, ‘cause it says so right here.” Keelan handed him the pad. “Wonder if they suddenly got interested in a kid on the Keelan profile when the Kaleb-identity crashed and you’re buying launderie or lingerie or however it’s pronounced.”

  “There’s no gender, but they could have just hidden that information,” Mike noted.

  Danny came in and handed Mike a pad which he fumbled to place on top of the others. He finally sat next to Misery and placed one of the pads on the table.

  “Gat Max? That’s not a lot of targets in our end.”

  “Is that relevant?” Keelan asked.

  “He’s the only one on the list Ratkins sent us that doesn’t fit in, because the rest have a reputation for being very competent at what they do,” Danny said, then hip-bumped Keelan’s shoulder to get a seat. Keelan scooted in.

  “And I know Gat Max,” Mike said. “We were in the same platoon for about six months. He can do anything. Theoretically, but once he’s asked to prove it there’s always some external, disturbing factor to explain away why it didn’t work for him on precisely that day.” Mike smiled and shook his head.

  “In other words, his ass couldn’t handle what he yelled for,” Danny said.

  “Something like that,” Mike mumbled and scrolled through the list. “I know a few of the others but not someone I’d ask to join me for a cup of soup.”

  “We think they know about Misery.” Keelan handed Danny the pad with information she’d found.

  “Bad. I can’t find an address and track a conversation from this. And I can’t go into the pathways from here.”

  “What are pathways?”

  “IGW and satellite communication tracks and stuff like that. You have to go in that way and backtrack a conversation. I’m not the expert in the pathways, but I have a friend on Verion Four who is.”

  “A Chiromancer?” Mike asked.

  “Yes! A Chiromancer!”

  Mike held up his hands in surrender. “Just asking to know what level of expertise we’re talking here.”

  Danny sighed and nodded before returning his attention to the pad in his hand. “Is there anyone on that list we need to be extra vigilant about?” Danny pointed to the pad Mike was sitting with.

  “Yeah, Gat Max.” Mike handed the pad to Keelan, and Misery stretched to see the man in the photo. He was Mike’s age, not as handsome, and his eyes were weird. Not like birth-defect weird, but just looking at him gave her a sense he was not to be trusted. Keelan gave the image a lot more attention than she did before he scrolled through the profile’s information.

  “So, our plans,” Danny finally said. “If we land in a repair dock and hide this ship, I can arrange for us to be picked up in a retail transporter. In other words, we just have to hide in the back and make noises like crates. We’ll be delivered directly to the Chiromancer’s facilities and... Keelan trusts you, Mike, I figured that out. But I don’t. I do trust Keelan. If the Chiromancer’s place or identities are ever exposed, I’ll rain so much trouble on you that what we’re in now seems like a single dust particle on all of Verion Four.”

  “Then you’ll hit me, too,” Keelan said.

  Danny, however, did not remove his fierce gaze from Mike. “No, because not everything about Mike’s life is right around him. I’ll bury Lewis, and it’ll be your fault.”

  “I won’t expose the Chiromancers! That I didn’t know shit about you... you’ve proven you can be trusted.” Mike looked down, and Misery felt sorry for him. She reached over to put her hand on his arm.

  “Good, did you two get that out of your system? Then maybe we can focus on getting out of this soup?” Keelan pointed to the pads.

  Danny and Mike nodded.

  “Good.” Keelan grabbed a new pad. Misery smiled and did the same.

  Chapter Ten

  Sitting in the cockpit with his legs up, Mike enjoyed a cup of soup. It was quiet on the ship. Everybody was asleep, and Mike needed the isolation to clear his mind and put his thoughts into a workable order. They had spent the last fourteen days trying to make heads or tails out of all the information Danny had managed to get them. But some just didn’t fit. Like his badge number coming up as an assistance code. No matter what, he couldn’t come up with anything other than their pursuers trying to split them, but how would they know whether they succeeded or not?

  His thoughts changed to the topic of Cecil Hallett, also mentioned in the files. Ratkins had confirmed that some of the mercenaries were in contact with him, but Cecil was, according to Ratkins, not a part of the hoard hunting them.

  Mike smiled to himself. He’d never imagined that floating on a slow route between planets could be so beneficial on a skip. He wondered if Keelan had.

  They’d packed most of their stuff and locked it into the cargo hold so they could change ships quickly
. He just hoped they’d get a good ship in the trade. If it was too small, the cargo hold would be too, and that would make for trouble on long trips. Especially since they’d also have to be around each other all the time.

  Mike enjoyed having a training arena on the ship and used it as a sanctuary when Keelan grated his nerves. Keelan did the same, and luckily Misery was easier to be around than her mother.

  Mike and Danny had tried to keep a distance. Either way, that’s how Mike had phrased it. That Danny practically ignored him was a different matter. One Mike actually liked, but he also knew it was not fruitful on a skip.

  Sighing, he leaned his head back and enjoyed the peace and the fact that they finally had a new ID that none of the lawmen chasing them could find. Out there in the Pilar System, no one could make visual confirmation on the ship and recognize them. They had enough food onboard to make the final preparations and even enough to last them if they figured they needed to delay the landing.

  A low hum broke his train of thoughts, and he looked up. Turning his head, he tried to identify where it came from. Then the radar beeped, and Mike jumped at the unexpected sound.

  The ship shook, and Mike let go of his cup in mid-air to disconnect the autopilot and speed up. But nothing happened. Dread seized him, and he slammed his hand onto the alarm, bathing the entire inside of the ship in blinking crimson. A voice blared from the speakers, taking everybody through an emergency plan.

  He heard Keelan as the first to run through the common area. The ship shook again, and Mike heard a ruckus followed by a foul-mouthed rant.

  Keelan finally emerged in the cockpit, blood dripping down one side of his face.

  “We’re caught by—” The radar beeped sporadically before a ship shimmered into focus in front of theirs. Mike gaped as the huge ship emerged from seeming nowhere, and finally, a detail stood clear in his mind. “Danny!” Mike turned off the engine and stood. “Arm yourself to the teeth!”

  Danny and Misery stood in the hallway wearing their pajamas and looking confused while trying to cling to the walls.

  “Danny, how well do you know the Techno Raiders?” Mike asked on his way to his room to change clothes and arm himself.