“Is he hurt?” Ben asked.
“It’s all part of the job.” Bravo said, and the ramp swung up as the door swung down. “There’s an exit point nearby; he’ll make it.”
“I suggest we go now,” Echo said to Ben. “Speed would be good.”
Ben set the power levels at maximum and released the docking clamps.
“Papa?” he asked.
“Clear of your thrusters. Bravo, Delta, Oscar, and Sierra are all on board,” Echo said. “Just get us out of here.”
“I hope your man in control has done his job.”
Ben lifted the Raider on its antigravs and slotted it into the access tube with barely a meter to spare from fin to wall. As the shield doors closed behind them, the outer doors opened up in front. He felt the mass of the craft, slower off the mark than the Dixie would have been, and compensated.
Without warning, the outer doors began to close.
“Strap down,” Ben yelled.
He kicked in the aft thrusters and the Raider sprang for the door, screamed sideways onto its wingtip and through with barely a whisker to spare.
“Shit!” This from Sierra, but the rest of the company were professionally cool.
“Rendezvous in nine minutes,” Echo said.
Ben put some space between him and Crossways before someone filled it with pulse-cannon bolts.
The Dixie hung in space at the appointed place. A second transport hovered nearby. Ben maneuvered so that the Dixie was beneath the Raider and then sent out the grapple and brought it safely into the hold. When the air had cycled, the door opened and a sixth anonymous thief appeared, dressed in a plain, black buddysuit like the others. He tossed his cargo of evac suits onto the deck, one each and a spare since Papa hadn’t made it.
The five thieves didn’t remove their masks. Ben could pass them on any street, any time, and never recognize them.
“My thanks,” Ben said. “Your transport awaits. I suggest you make a move. I don’t want a send-off party from Crossways catching up with us.”
“Air lock ready to cycle,” Oscar called across.
Oscar put on his helmet, the last of the thieves to finish suiting up. He clicked the seal closed.
Ben watched the six of them transit to the waiting transport.
As they safely slid inside the transport, he checked out the ship. This was no runabout; it was a fleet cruiser big enough to store the Dixie in the hold, but it could still be flown by a single pilot plumbed into its nav and tech systems.
He felt the hum as he connected to the ship, and one by one the ship’s systems opened up to him. “Oh,” he said out loud as he found the weapons modifications, and then again, “Oh, yes.” He grinned to himself. “Thank you, Ari van Blaiden.”
He’d asked for a ship with a jump drive, but he’d got much more. This baby had weapons systems, a stealth-net and crew quarters for thirty. She’d certainly been a black-ops ship and he wondered whether she’d been one of the ships that had attacked Hera-3. All the better if she had; she could make amends now. He let his mind wander deeper into the ship’s systems. Oh, sweet.
He tried not to think of her as stolen goods. A little worm in his brain said: Maybe you’re doing the galaxy a favor if she’s a black-ops ship. This ship was a perfect toy. He briefly entertained fantasies of rescuing Cara and roaming round the galaxy in the Solar Wind, free of the Trust, taking jobs for the good guys only. Ack! Crowder had been right; he did have White Knight Syndrome.
He felt his way deep into the ship’s system, set a course, fired up the jump drive, and watched for the telltale no-star blackness sitting like an octopus with tendrils of nothing misting out from its rim. At times like this he envied those with a belief in the afterlife. Jumping without the gate beacons needed a certain kind of madness or desperation. Some adrenaline junkies did it for fun. He shuddered.
The Folds beckoned, loomed. Then with a rush that took his breath away the Raider was inside the nothing, a place that didn’t exist. In the deepest Folds of space the fabric of space-time was stretched very thin and compressed like pleated paper. At that point, even the finest of on-board AIs became erratic. What demons might he find this time?
In the intense blackness, amorphous gossamers of color and light swirled briefly and vanished again. The Folds were unfathomable. It was as if they carried the whole history of the universe plaited into a single strand. Sometimes it was random; sometimes he saw, quite clearly, the double helix of human DNA. One infinitely small part of the strand was Ben’s own.
There were other strands, too. His parents, shriveled to dust, floated across his vision. His Nan, two brown boys in her embrace. A group of men, lost in a swamp, and a stringy boy leading them to safety. The dawning realization that they didn’t feel the certain pull of home like he did. The letter granting him a place in the Academy. His first active command in the Monitors during the Garnier insurrection, bending orders so he could save civilians. The smuggler vessel apprehended on the Rim with eighteen hysterical Burnish refugees in its hold, destined for the illegal exotic trade. The fight with Columbar to keep mercenaries out of the mine dispute. The confrontation over bribes with Sergei, his boss. The hollow realization that his file was marked E for “expendable.” The surge of anger as Sergei came at him with a tangler; the satisfying crack as he broke both Sergei’s arms. Crowder’s job offer. I need a man with brains who knows which way is up.
Cara. In a shimmering dress so fine it left nothing, and at the same time everything, to the imagination. Cara. Strung out and helpless. Cara. Unbearably angry, her fist swinging toward him. Cara.
The ship burst out into realspace and the visions faded, leaving an ache of emptiness.
Chapter Thirty-four
PREPARATION
Wenna’s news that Ben was approaching Olyanda brought Cara to her feet in the middle of the dining hall.
Rain poured down, but she rushed out into the compound with no thought for getting wet. For once, she wasn’t wearing her buddysuit and within minutes her uniform was drenched. She grabbed a groundcar from outside the LV, shaking rain droplets out of her eyes, and headed for the ship. While she drove, she took a deep breath and reached out with her mind.
*Ben!*
*Cara!*
The emotion nearly overwhelmed her. She echoed it back to him, leaving him chuckling.
*Our personal life will have to wait.* She caught the mental equivalent of a sigh. *We need to talk to the settlers.*
She heard the Raider before she saw it emerge from a cloud bank and land on the edge of the plain. Ben had barely reached the bottom of the ramp before Cara ran into his arms. They stood there together in the rain.
“Oh, I’ve missed you,” she said.
He didn’t reply, but he held her so tight she thought he was never going to let her go.
“You’re wet,” he said at length.
“It’s raining.”
“So it is.” He grinned and kissed her again.
It was easy to get lost in the sensation, but when Cara came up for air, she sighed and stepped back, looking closely at the Raider for the first time. Solar Wind. Her knees turned to jelly and her head began to buzz.
“Where did you say you got the ship?”
“I didn’t. Mother Ramona . . . sourced it for me.”
“On Crossways?”
He nodded.
“Ben, that’s Ari van Blaiden’s ship.”
He grinned. “Payback.”
“What was it doing at Crossways?” Cara’s heart was fluttering like a butterfly’s wing. Mr. van Blaiden wants to know . . . Breathe. “Ben, is Ari on his way here?”
“How could he be? With Crowder’s plague let loose, this planet shouldn’t be open for business for at least six months.”
“I just have a very bad feeling. If Ari has access to Crowder’s files, he’ll know about me and about the platinum. If he doesn’t know about the virus, what’s to keep him away? He’s coming.”
“Get in the car.”
Ben propelled her into the front passenger seat and slid behind the control panel. They rose on antigravs over the uneven ground. Cara stared at the inside of the front screen without really seeing it, trying to reach some connection that was lying just behind her eyelids. Ari van Blaiden was coming.
Whichever way she looked at it, she arrived at the same answer. “Follow my logic, Ben: Crowder and Ari have been working together, but it’s a devil’s bargain. They hate each other.”
Ben looked at her sideways.
“Isn’t it obvious? Am I adding two and two and making six? Look, who’s Crowder’s biggest rival in Alphacorp? If Crowder could somehow entice Ari van Blaiden to Olyanda, the plague rids him not only of the colony and the Hera-3 witnesses, but of one more big problem—Ari himself. It’s very sweet. Crowder gets two birds with one rock. Profit and revenge combined.”
Ben shook his head. “That theory only works if you presume Crowder has made the connection between you and Ari and can use you as bait.”
She nodded. “Worrying, isn’t it?”
“We need to talk to Mother Ramona.” Ben’s face was drawn and a muscle danced along the side of his jaw, betraying his tension.
“You’re thinking you should have killed Crowder.” Cara put one hand on Ben’s arm. “It’s one thing to take someone out in the heat of the moment when they’re coming at you armed to the teeth, but you’re not a cold-blooded killer, Ben, and I wouldn’t want you to be. Besides, Crowder might have a part to play yet.”
• • •
Victor Lorient eyed the groundcar with suspicion and then looked to its driver. Saedi Sugrue. He’d always been suspicious of the woman, but she’d never been anything but unfailingly polite despite his rudeness. What was she made of?
“Director Lorient. I’ve come to take you to the meeting as arranged,” Sugrue said.
“Aren’t you going to get in, Victor?” Rena stepped round him and climbed into the backseat. “Good morning, Miss Sugrue, very kind of you to come and collect us.”
“Morning, Mrs. Lorient. Is Jack—Mr. Mario—coming?”
“I’m here, Saedi.”
Jack came huffing up the hill dragging his coat on over one shoulder. He didn’t wait for Victor but climbed into the front seat next to the psi-tech. Victor had little choice but to step into the backseat next to his wife. She shuffled over. It might have been to make room, but Victor was pretty sure it was to keep herself separate from him as she had since Danny’s funeral.
“Saedi, I heard about Sami Isaksten,” Jack said. “I wanted to tell you how very sorry I was.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
“Yes, Miss Sugrue, my condolences also,” Rena said. “She did us a great service.”
Was it Victor’s imagination that she gave him a look out of the corner of her eye?
“We saw a large craft coming in, yesterday,” Victor said. “One we didn’t recognize.”
“Commander Benjamin.”
“So what’s this meeting about?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Couldn’t or wouldn’t, it was all the same. The psi-tech set the car on its antigravs and Victor hurriedly strapped in.
The ops room was full, but luckily there was a corner they could squeeze into when Sugrue dropped them at the door. Jack shook a few hands as they entered, and Rena greeted Benjamin cordially. Cara Benjamin pointed to a chair where Victor could sit without being too close to any of the psi-techs.
He looked around. All of the section heads were there. The only one he didn’t recognize was a young woman wearing an insignia of the vet team. Of course, both Tanaka and his wife had died in the fire at the tank farm. Most regrettable. He swallowed hard. It really was most regrettable. How could he have let Taris and Colchek get so out of hand? He was glad, so glad, that Taris was dead and he hoped he might never have to deal with Colchek again. No one, not even Jack, knew that Benjamin’s lot had snatched him. They all assumed he’d been crushed out of recognition in the meeting hall collapse.
Benjamin called the meeting to order. “Back to plan A,” he said. “We need to evacuate. Quickly.”
“I thought we had six months before the Trust made its move,” Victor said.
“So did we,” Benjamin said. “But Cara’s sure, and I agree with her logic, that Ari van Blaiden will arrive first. There’s a significant movement of unmarked ships through the Crossways home space. Mother Ramona was unable to get their identities, and that in itself is worrying because all the regular mercs and criminal gangs are known on Crossways. Half of them are based there.”
“And you think it’s Alphacorp?” Jack asked.
“Not Alphacorp, Ari van Blaiden. We think he’s working for himself,” Benjamin said.
“And has he . . . Do you think he . . . ?” Victor couldn’t find the words. “The second ark ship. Did you find out what happened to it?”
Ben shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Crowder said Arcturus, but Mother Ramona hasn’t been able to confirm that. I swear, Director, I will make it my priority once the Olyanda situation is sorted out. In the meantime I’ve got people out looking. Good people.”
“It’s all . . . too much.” Victor put both hands up to his face.
The room was too small, too stuffy, too . . .
He needed to breathe.
All along he’d treated the psi-techs as enemies while the real enemies were the organizations that were supposed to bring order to the galaxy.
“Are you all right, Director?” Cara Benjamin asked. He looked up, barely seeing her through unfocused eyes. “Director?”
“Someone get the director a drink of water.” He wasn’t even sure who said that, but moments later Jack was pushing a cup into his hands.
“I’m all right.” He took a sip. “All right. Go on.” He circled his right hand. “Please.”
“The good news is that they can’t ignore the laws of physics,” Benjamin said. “Ore carriers and mining barges are too big to route via the faster gates. Since I’ve stolen van Blaiden’s jumpship, hopefully his only jumpship, he’s going to be arriving by one of the regular jump gate routes and that will slow him down. It’s my bet he won’t arrive without backup, so the Invidii Gate is out because it can only take small ships. Even so, we’ve probably only got days, or a few weeks, at most. Mother Ramona is arranging transport to Crossways for all of us, but she’s hampered by the laws of physics as well. The bigger the ship, the longer it will take. She’s sourced two cruise liners, big ones, and a few smaller transports.”
“What about the Solar Wind?” Cara Benjamin asked.
Victor struggled to catch up. “That must be the ship that landed yesterday. Did Benjamin say he’d stolen it?”
“If we cram people into every available space,” Benjamin said, “she can maybe take sixty at a time, ninety if they take turns to breathe in and out. Gen, do you feel up to doing shuttle runs?”
“You’re giving me your new toy to play with? Sure thing, Boss.” Marling was the pregnant one.
“Pick your own copilots. If van Blaiden shows up, get back to Crossways and sit out the fight. She’s armed, so get a couple of Gupta’s maintenance men to work tactical. If you get into a situation, however, I’d prefer that you turn tail and run like hell.”
“Understood. Is it okay if I take Jon Moon? He’s a Psi-3 Navigator. Cara, how about you?”
She shook her head. “I’m staying here with Ben. When he leaves, I leave.”
Ben continued, “If and when van Blaiden arrives, the psi-techs and any settlers still not evacuated will disperse to the forests in small groups, guerrilla style, and be ready for anything.”
This was all going too fast for Victor. “Are you sure all this is necessary?” He spread both hands. “Can’t we just tell them we give up? Tell them we’re leaving?”
“We know enough to be able to identify them. They won’t want witnesses. The object of the exercise is to survive until the new owners get here.”
“New owners?�
�
“Evacuation is a damage limitation exercise at best,” Ben said. “But I think I’ve found a permanent solution.”
“You have?” Victor heard his own voice come out like a squeak.
Ben grinned. “I’ve sold your planet.”
He struggled to sound authoritative. “You’ve done a deal with the Trust?”
“Uh-uh.” Benjamin shook his head. “I’ve sold to the biggest criminal consortium in the sector.”
“You what?” More than one person said that simultaneously and all heads turned to Ben. Victor wasn’t the only one to look shocked.
“Olyanda is about to become a subsidiary of Crossways,” Benjamin said. “Norton Garrick and Mother Ramona are on their way here with a fleet of pirates. Only, in this case, the pirates are the good guys. They get the mining rights for as long as they can hold onto them which, with their firepower, should be a very long time. They’ve had practice.”
Victor’s brain started to catch up with the conversation. “And we get our lives, is that it?” he asked. Had the psi-techs made a grab for the platinum after all?
“Plus you get five percent of the profits,” Benjamin said. “Which, believe me, will make the new Ecolibrian colony—wherever it ends up—very, very rich.”
He’d never wanted to be rich, just safe and free to live the way he believed all men should live. Still—rich—he supposed that was infinitely better than dead. “And can we trust these . . . criminals?” he asked.
“Actually, we can. They have nothing but their reputation and their wits to survive on, and so both are impeccable . . . within their given dispositions.”
“And what do you get out of it?” Had the psi-techs taken the biggest share for themselves?
Benjamin just grinned. “I cut the psi-techs in for one percent. And before you say anything about profit motives, my crew has lost everything, too. They can never go back to what they had. Some of them have families they may never see again. They deserve a stake for their future and they’re going to get it.”
“That’s very fair, Director,” Jack rumbled quietly at his side. “Very fair, indeed.”
“All right,” Lorient said. “You’re not going to get any argument from me this time. Just get my people out of here safely.” He glanced sideways at Rena. “I want my wife on the first ship out of here.”
Empire of Dust Page 49
