Empire of Dust

by Jacey Bedford

  DAW Books proudly presents

  the novels of Jacey Bedford:

  The Psi-Tech Novels

  EMPIRE OF DUST

  CROSSWAYS*

  *Coming soon from DAW Books

  Copyright © 2014 by Jacey Bedford

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Stephan Martiniere.

  Cover design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1672.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One: FLIGHT

  Chapter Two: OPPORTUNITY

  Chapter Three: EGRESS

  Chapter Four: BETRAYAL

  Chapter Five: CROSSWAYS

  Chapter Six: DISGUISE

  Chapter Seven: CHENON

  Chapter Eight: INTRODUCTIONS

  Chapter Nine: GRAPPLING

  Chapter Ten: ARI

  Chapter Eleven: FAMILIES

  Chapter Twelve: DEPARTURE

  Chapter Thirteen: OLYANDA

  Chapter Fourteen: REVIVAL

  Chapter Fifteen: DISCOVERIES

  Chapter Sixteen: RESURFACING

  Chapter Seventeen: TRUST

  Chapter Eighteen: COLLUSION

  Chapter Nineteen: STORM

  Chapter Twenty: TRIAGE

  Chapter Twenty-one: COUPLING

  Chapter Twenty-two: RIOT

  Chapter Twenty-three: SEARCH

  Chapter Twenty-four: DOUBTS

  Chapter Twenty-five: CONFESSION

  Chapter Twenty-six: ESCALATION

  Chapter Twenty-seven: CONSEQUENCES

  Chapter Twenty-eight: ABANDONED

  Chapter Twenty-nine: CLASH

  Chapter Thirty: JOURNEY

  Chapter Thirty-one: CONFRONTATION

  Chapter Thirty-two: RACE

  Chapter Thirty-three: DEAL

  Chapter Thirty-four: PREPARATION

  Chapter Thirty-five: TURNING

  Chapter Thirty-six: MCLELLAN

  Chapter Thirty-seven: TAKEN

  Chapter Thirty-eight: TERMINAL

  Acknowledgments

  I wish I could say that this book sprang from my pen fully formed, but it didn’t. Like any book it’s a team effort, though any and all mistakes are mine.

  My thanks to all at DAW and especially to my editor, Sheila Gilbert, for ideas, patience, gentle guidance, and for commissioning Stephan Martiniere to do the cover. Thanks also to my agent Amy Boggs, and all at Donald Maass Literary Agency, for enthusiasm and expertise.

  Without a series of serendipitous connections from the folk music community (via Felicia Dale) to writer Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, who gave me my first encouragement and short story sale, I might never have got this far.

  Many people, possibly too many to mention individually, have contributed information, ideas, and encouragement. They include writers from the annual Milford UK Writers’ Conferences, the Recog email crit group, and from the r.a.sf.c. and r.a.sf.w usenet newsgroups for SF writers and readers. You know who you are.

  Special thanks for connections and corrections above and beyond the call of duty to: Liz Williams, N. M. Browne, Tina Anghelatos, Carl Allery, Helen Hall, John Moran, Sue Thomason, Jaine Fenn, Kari Sperring, and Hilary Spencer.

  Technical thanks to knife-throwing expert John Taylor, to Mike O’Connor OBE for small aircraft design, to Rory Newman for medical advice, and to Alastair Reynolds for invoking Einstein at Milford back in 1998 when I would happily have fallen into the trap of FTL travel.

  Last but never least, an extra-special thank-you and much love to my husband, Brian, and offspring, Ghillan and Joe, for their forbearance and for getting their own dinner more times than I care to admit, and to my mum, Joan Lockyer, whose encouragement unleashed my writing demon at the tender age of five.

  Chapter One

  FLIGHT

  I’m dead if I don’t get out of here.

  Cara Carlinni stared at the display on the public terminal. She gripped the edge of the console, feeling dizzy and sick. Too many cups of caff, not enough food.

  Her fellow workers erupted from Devantec’s packing plant, one or two trying the other terminals in the bay just off the main walkway, and discovering, as she had when she first took the dead-end job, that this was the only functioning link.

  She’d scooted out ahead of the crowd to grab it.

  Good that she had. At least she was forewarned. What the hell was an Alphacorp ship doing here if not looking for something, or someone? What were the odds that someone was her?

  She’d been barely one jump ahead of them on El Arish, and on Shalla colony she’d spotted wanted posters and moved on quickly, thankful that she’d ducked port immigration by hitching a flight with a smuggler.

  She’d spoken to a man on Shalla who’d once been a low-grade Psi-Mech for the Rowan Corporation, and who was now living off the grid, with a new identity furnished by an organization that was definitely not the right side of legal. On his advice she’d come all the way out to Station Mirrimar-14 chasing rumors of a breakaway group of psi-techs, but she hadn’t found them. If they were here, they were well-hidden and well-shielded.

  She swallowed bile and checked the screen again, focusing on the immediate problem—a light passenger transport—a ship design she recognized as an unmarked Alphacorp Scout. It threaded along the flight corridor toward the passenger terminal, past the heavy freighters lined up for docking in the space station’s commercial bays.

  “Hey, Carlinni, you coming to Sam’s with the rest of us?” Jussaro, her packing line partner, broke his stride.

  He was always friendly, but she kept her distance outside of working hours. A purple-black-skinned, genetically engineered exotic from the Hollands System, he’d once been a high-grade Telepath until being busted for some misdemeanor he wouldn’t admit to.

  They’d killed his implant. He was alone and silent.

  Permanently.

  He was the thing she most dreaded becoming.

  She’d stepped out of line, bigtime, but they hadn’t caught her yet. If they did, she’d be damn lucky to end up like Jussaro. More than likely they’d just fry her brain from the inside out and have done with it.

  “Not tonight.” She forced a smile and edged in front of the screen so Jussaro couldn’t see what she was checking.

  “Why not? Got a hot date?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ha!” His laugh was more like a bark. Then he frowned, the hooded ridges above his eyes drawing together in a serious case of monobrow. “You in trouble, Carlinni?” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “You are!”

  Your average decommissioned psi-tech went nuts, but Jussaro was a rare survivor. Had he managed to retain his underlying telepathy? If so, that was a minor miracle in itself. Tonight he was entirely too quick on the uptake.

  She curbed the ne
ed to switch on her implant. They could trace her as soon as she used it. Keep it powered down. She was so integrated with her tech that whatever natural talent she’d started out with had been subsumed. It might still be there, but she hoped she’d never have to find out the hard way.

  “Quit my case, Jussaro. You’re not my dad.”

  “Maybe I should have been, and then you wouldn’t be in trouble in the first place.”

  “I told you, I’m not . . . I . . . Look, I can handle it. All right?”

  “All right. All right. I get it. Keep my nose out.” He stepped away, both hands up in a gesture of surrender.

  She shrugged. “Look, Jussaro, if ever I need a dad, I’ll adopt you, okay?”

  “It’s a deal. Don’t forget.” He waved at her as he rejoined the flow of workers.

  She returned her attention to the screen. The Scout had joined the docking tailback. That gave her a couple of hours at most. The temptation to pop a tranq prickled her scalp while she waited for the passenger manifest to load into the system. It flashed, and she pulled up the information. Rosen, Forrest, and Byrne—three names she didn’t recognize, listed as businessmen. She checked the crew. The pilot was Robert Craike.

  Shit!

  Her heart began to race, and her skin turned clammy. To hell with it! She popped a tranq anyway, and felt it buffer the hunger to connect with her implant.

  Shit! Shit! Shit!

  She fought down panic. Avoiding Alphacorp’s regular security was one thing, but Craike was a psi-tech Finder.

  There had to be a way out. Think!

  “You finished with that terminal or do you want to marry it?” A dumpy woman in a red coverall had come up behind her.

  “Finished. It’s yours.” Cara eased up on her death grip, blanked the screen, and turned toward the go-flow station, her thoughts firing in several different directions at once.

  Craike was the brawn to Ari van Blaiden’s brain. Going up against him would be almost as bad as facing Ari himself. What were his orders? Would he be trying to kill her on-station, or would he be trying to take her back?

  She had history with Craike—bad history. Torrence had called him a dangerous crazy, but that wasn’t the half of it. He might well be psychotic, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. If Ari had sent Robert Craike, she’d never get a fair trial.

  Craike was bad news.

  Had always been bad news.

  She got his attraction to Ari. The emotions he thought he hid so carefully behind a tough scowl and a clenched jaw might fool most deadheads, but even though she barely scored on the empathy scale, she could read Craike. Most times she wished she couldn’t.

  His jealousy had piled a personal grudge on top of everything else when she’d challenged his authority on Felcon.

  If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the hot sand, taste the planet’s salt-caked air, feel its oven-intense heat through the sunblock on her face. Her rebellion had killed five people as surely as if she’d put a bolt gun to their heads herself, but she hadn’t known, then, how far Craike would go. The memory came back, vivid and painful. Torrence choking his life out, lungs all shot to hell.

  Her fault. Her fault!

  Craike pulled the trigger, but if it hadn’t been for her . . .

  Don’t go there.

  Was it the memory of Felcon that made her blood pound in her ears, or the thought of what was to come? The last time she’d seen Craike was down the barrel of a bolt gun. Now he was here on-station.

  As she waited in line for the go-flow behind an elderly man in a technician’s coverall, her right hand closed involuntarily over the handpad on her left. If she wasn’t careful, the small, flexible sheet of film held her life—and possibly her death—within its memory. Ari’s files were as dangerous as a bomb on a short fuse. She’d had the opportunity and had grabbed them without thinking it through. If it had just been her, he might have let her slip away, but he’d never let her keep the files.

  She rubbed her forehead to ease the headache and breathed away the faint feeling of dizziness. She’d rather not think about the files right now. She had them; she daren’t use them. Part of her didn’t even want to.

  When she’d started to try and make sense of them, she’d realized that Ari was into all kinds of nastiness, but collating the data would be a massive undertaking. She had, however, found her own name on a red file. That had shocked her beyond measure. She’d seen that he’d personally scheduled her for Neural Readjustment on Sentier-4. She was lucky she got out before they’d taken her mind to pieces.

  The man in front of her reached the head of the lineup, and with grace that showed he’d not slowed down with age, he hopped onto the last individual transfer raft. That left her no option but to climb into a transit pod with seven strangers. She eyed them suspiciously, but they all had the pale skin of long-term space-station residents, and the jaded air of tired workers heading home. As the pod carried them all toward the residential sector, she took a deep breath and considered her options. Going up against Craike, one on one, was suicide. She’d have to run, abandon the search for renegade psi-techs like herself, and find a flight. Any flight.

  Destination? Away from here.

  It should be possible. Security was patchy. Mirrimar-14 was big enough to have cracks that a desperate person could slip through, at least as far as the docks.

  Space stations came in all shapes and sizes. Mirrimar-14, run by Eastin-Heigle, serviced only three jump gates and was happy to embrace any traffic that could pay the docking fees. That meant there would be independent captains she might bribe. Time to go to the transients’ quarter and see if she could find someone who was ready to ship out, someone who might take an unlisted passenger in exchange for credits or—she gritted her teeth—sex.

  • • •

  Ben Benjamin let the comm-link drop. Crowder was pissed with him again, but there wasn’t much either of them could do about the delay. Ben hadn’t been expecting to be recalled to take over the Olyanda mission. It would take at least four days to get back to Chenon, even presuming he could negotiate the inner system gates without getting stuck in a tailback. You’d think the vast deeps of space would be big enough to avoid traffic jams, but since everything funneled through jump gates, they were still inevitable.

  It was a babysitting job for a new colony of back-to-basics Ecolibrians—hard-core separatists. Mixing psi-techs and fundies was a disaster waiting to happen. It had taken long enough for Ben to regain his commander’s pin. Refusing this job would sideline him, and failing would finish his career completely.

  Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet rock. Was someone on the Board setting him up to fail? Could be. Better not fail, then.

  The comm booth felt stuffy. He needed air, even space-station recycled would do. He leaned forward and swiped his handpad through the reader to register the transaction.

  He’d trampled on some sensitive toes after Hera-3, probably enough to get himself retconned, or just plain killed, except for the fact he’d let it be known that he’d filed all his evidence with a certain body on Crossways which was virtually untouchable by any legitimate government or megacorp—at least not without a full-scale war. That evidence, mostly hearsay, might not be sufficient for a court of law, but it would be enough to spark inconvenient questions of people with reputations to protect.

  For the past two years he’d lived with the possibility of someone high up in the Trust deciding he was too much of a liability. He could have walked away at any time, of course, but if he did that, he’d never find the bastards responsible. Crowder had stood by him, kept him on payroll. Without Crowder, he’d have been on the outside looking in. With so many of his regular crew dead and the survivors scattered to other teams, Crowder was the only constant in his life: boss, best friend, and sometimes stand-in for the father he’d lost so many years ago.

  Musing on the value of friendship, Ben stepped out of the booth into the bland foyer of the visitor center and nodded to the des
k clerk. Nice to see a real person in the job, not just a machine. He collected a hotchoc from the barista-bot and sipped it. It was thin and weak, almost tasteless except for the sugar, but at least it was warm and wet. He clipped a lid on the drink, grasped a handloop, and pushed off into the rising stream of the antigrav tube, balancing the cup expertly. He exited at the right floor, gaining weight again as his feet hit the hallway ceramic. He popped the top and sipped the hot liquid again as he walked along to the dining hall.

  It was early. The room was a sea of emptiness with only two tables occupied. A group of four earnest young men sat at one and the other held the redhead who’d brought her courier vessel into port just after him, and had pushed in between him and the port controller as he tried to secure a next-day systems check. He’d been left fuming as she played the old buddies card and waltzed through the formalities, leaving him standing. She looked up, smiled broadly, and indicated the empty place by her side. No way. He retreated. Maybe he’d have a snack in Gordano’s. His belly rumbled. Two snacks.

  • • •

  Back in her cramped quarters Cara made another caff for herself, extra strong so she could almost pretend it was made with real coffee beans. Her hands shook as they clasped the mug. Of all the bloody stupid things, heading for the transients’ quarter desperate enough to latch onto the first captain of the worst bucket-of-bolts mining barge was barely one step up from suicide.

  But staying was suicide.

  Sex with a stranger might be the fastest way to get a favor, but she couldn’t stop her thoughts from turning in circles. There hadn’t been anyone since Ari.

  It had been good once.

  She’d met him just after she’d been promoted to Special Ops and recalled to Earth, to Alphacorp’s facility outside the ancient city of York. Now second in command of a Spearhead Team, she was so proud that she’d broken her self-imposed silence and called her mom, only to be rewarded by nothing more than a vague that’s-nice-dear reaction. So much for trying to rebuild bridges. Dammit, it was a big deal for a twenty-three-year-old. Spearhead Teams were the first into a potential colony world and, when necessary, Alphacorp’s troubleshooters.