"Don't say I didn't warn you, Carter," Jukin said, stepping closer to them and ignorant of the war inside of Razia. "This pirate may have protections now, but we'll see how long that lasts. And when that happens, you may want to reconsider your alliances."
"Well, this is our stop," Lizbeth said, as the shuttle slowed. She grabbed onto Razia's arm tighter than was probably necessary as she dragged her off. "Pleasure, as always, Captain Peate—"
"See ya around, Jukin!" Razia said icily as the door closed and the shuttle left the station.
"Why do you have to do that?" Lizbeth asked, exasperated. "He could have recognized you!"
"Let him," Razia said, eager to talk about something else. "What did you mean back there about him not wanting to help you?"
"A few weeks ago, when you so maturely stormed into his office, I was there giving him all of my findings to date. Spent an hour showing concrete proof that pirates were involved in major insurance fraud, and he said he wasn't interested."
Razia stopped in her tracks, all previous thoughts about Lyssa and Razia gone from her mind. "Hang on…Jukin wasn't interested?"
"That's what he said before he threw me out of his office. I thought it was because a certain sister had just pissed him off, but he refused to see me again when I tried to schedule another meeting."
"But he's always looking for something to arrest pirates for," Razia said, watching the empty hole the shuttle disappeared through. "That's his thing?"
"That's what I thought too," Lizbeth said, stepping out into the city streets above. "So that's why I'm not willing to share any more information with anyone else until I get some top-cover."
***
"Name?"
"Razia."
She handed over her C-card with a scowl. Since the Intelligence Agency where Lizbeth worked was a secure facility, Razia had to be cleared for entry into the Investigative Division offices. This was after walking through four metal detectors, five key-carded doors. Now she had to receive approval for a visitor's badge from an annoyed, gray-uniform-clad security guard.
"That's not a name," the woman sighed, looking at the card closely. "And this isn't a valid identification. There's not even a last name on here!"
"Give her your other one," Lizbeth said impatiently. "I only have half an hour before my meeting, and I need to stop by my desk and prepare."
"Come on," Razia whined. Lizbeth elbowed her roughly, and Razia handed over her Lyssa Peate C-card. The woman took it and began typing furiously in her computer.
"Who are you visiting?" she snapped.
"Me, Lizbeth Carter," Lizbeth replied, hopping from one foot to the other. "MC-IF-PIR."
"What in Leveman's does that mean?" Razia asked.
"Acronym for my office code," Lizbeth replied, more focused on the woman in front of them.
"And what is your purpose for visiting?"
"Meeting," Lizbeth said. "And she'll be here for just one day."
The guard handed Lizbeth a tablet which she signed and placed her thumbprint on. The tablet shone green, and she handed it back to the woman.
"You will have to leave your mini-computers here, please," the woman said to Razia.
"What?" Razia looked to Lizbeth in horror. "Why do I have to give up my mini-computer?"
"It's not a cleared device," Lizbeth said, taking the aforementioned device out of Razia's hand and giving it to the woman. Razia leaned forward with a pained look on her face, as if a piece of her soul had just been ripped away.
"But…!"
"You'll get it back," Lizbeth said, handing Razia the red visitor's badge and dragging her down the hall into a room filled with dark blue cubicles. She weaved down one aisle, then another, then took a left, then a right, until she reached a desk covered in neatly arranged stacks of papers.
"Okay, stay here," Lizbeth ordered. "I'm going to go pre-brief my boss before I bring you in. Isaac, if anyone comes by, just say she's with me." She nodded to the man across the cubicle hall, who turned to examine her.
"Okay?" Lizbeth pressed to the man, who seemed about sixty. He grunted in response, returning to his computer, slowly reading through the bottom lens of his thick glasses. With an exasperated noise, Lizbeth disappeared in a blaze of curls.
Razia suddenly became aware of the sterile office environment she now found herself in. All around her, the quiet click of fingers on keyboards, the soft conversations and ringing of communicators, with the occasional ding of an incoming message. There was a man on the other side of the cloth wall, as Razia could hear him coughing every few minutes, a loud, throat-clearing garble that was annoying the first time she heard it.
In other cubicles, Razia saw other government workers—including one woman who had come to work in sweatpants. Most of the workers didn't even give her a passing glance, too engrossed in working as slowly as possible. She even saw one woman working on what appeared to be a novel while her messages inbox remained empty.
Razia felt bad for Lizbeth, who was a veritable fireball of energy compared to these slowpokes. When Razia was at the Academy, she had to deal with some idiot professors and lab partners, and it was always frustrating. Lizbeth was probably bored out of her mind working here; it was no wonder she spent so much time in the field.
With nothing else to do, Razia sat down at Lizbeth's desk and began leafing through the papers piled in the corner. Every one was the same format, a Form 2875 used to report on pirate activity. These weren't related to the big case that Lizbeth and Razia were working on, but seemed to be smaller open-and-shut cases. Razia found a couple of humorous ones that reminded her of some of the jobs Tauron used to do. One featured a woman who had reported a set of her husband's expensive sculptures missing only to discover them in her lover's bedroom. Another was a case where one sibling had hired pirates to steal a family heirloom, and then the other sibling was hiring pirates to steal it back.
Another report was about a business claiming that all of their shipments had been hijacked, but it turned out the business had just encountered a bad string of luck and the case wasn't insurance fraud after all.
Razia pulled a thick folder at the bottom of the pile and found the stash of background information on the pirate meeting. She was slightly impressed with Lizbeth's formality and attention to detail. She documented detailed conversations with Sage about the upcoming secret pirate meeting and discussed a meeting on D-882 between Cree Hardrict and a man named Alfr Jos, and another meeting between Jos and Krishna Harman.
Harman was the bald man, Razia reminded herself. The one who was guarding the shipment of guns Relleck was delivering.
The guns were more concerning to her than anything else she'd found so far. Pirates didn't use guns. It put a damper on the whole "game" aspect of piracy if there was a chance a pirate could be killed in the process (Jukin's aspirations aside).
Razia flipped through the case studies again, searching for Relleck's name on any of the reports. She paused at one from over six months ago. Relleck had commandeered a shipment from G-245, a shipment owned by Salazar Shipping. Without her mini-computer, she couldn't verify it, but she was pretty sure Salazar was the same company that owned the ship Relleck hijacked the day before. She wondered if the hijacking described in this report had been as easy as the one she saw yesterday.
Her attention was quickly diverted when she heard loud stomping coming up the cubicle aisle.
A red-faced Lizbeth came flying into the cubicle.
"This is…Ugh!"
"Bad meeting?" Razia asked lightly, quickly putting the manila folder down.
"They told me to leave it alone!" Lizbeth screamed, drawing the attention of nearly all of her cube-mates. "They said, 'Oh, if it's pirates, you should leave it alone.'"
"But…isn't that what you do?"
"Yes!" Lizbeth exclaimed. "I work for the Goddamned pirate division!"
Razia nodded and shrunk down into her seat as Lizbeth continued pacing in the small cubicle.
"They won't a
pprove any more travel funds for this effort, they told me I have to work on some other case now," Lizbeth continued, throwing more papers into her bag. "God in Leveman's Vortex, I hate working for the government!"
Razia wasn't sure how to respond, so she sat in silence.
"Leveman's!" she cried, on the verge of tears. "I need a drink. Let's go get a drink. I can't stand to be here any longer."
"But we just got here?" Razia said, following Lizbeth out the door.
***
Lizbeth was still fuming when they stepped off the shuttle in her neighborhood, but Razia finally felt as if she'd cooled off enough to be able to speak without biting Razia's head off.
"So what happened?" Razia asked cautiously.
"So I get in there," Lizbeth said, her voice shaking, "and I tell my boss about the guns and about everything we've found out to date, about Hardrict, about the meeting, all of that. And he listened for a minute and told me to sit down, that he was pulling me off this case."
"Did he say why?"
"He gave me some bullshit excuse about needing to spread cases amongst the team, and told me that I was doing too much." Lizbeth shook her head. "You know, I should just quit. Nobody ever listens to me anyways. I get up there and I talk about these cases, and my boss just asks these inane questions that have nothing to do with what I just spoke about. And I put together these fifteen-page reports every day, and nobody ever reads them. Then they have the audacity to say, 'I have no idea what you're talking about.' Read the damn report I sent you!"
Razia nodded, unsure of what to say or how to react, but was quite sure Lizbeth needed to vent. When her father would go off on angry tirades, it was usually best to pretend like she didn't exist.
"And I feel like I'm doing all this work…and nobody's supporting me," Lizbeth finished, sounding more defeated than angry as they walked into the lift. "I know there's something going on here. I just know it."
Razia said nothing, still waiting for the rest of the rant to come before she tried to say anything.
"You know what?" Lizbeth snarled. "Screw it. I'm going to continue this investigation on my own. I'm going to find out what's really going on here and shove it in their fat faces. I don't care if they fire me, I know I'm—"
Lizbeth's breath caught in her throat as her eyes stared ahead.
"My door is open."
The hair on Razia's neck stood up, and she threw a protective arm in front of Lizbeth. She knew they had gotten away from the warehouse too easily. They shouldn't have come back to the apartment; they should have gone to a hotel or…
"We should call the police," Lizbeth whispered.
"Stay here," Razia whispered back, creeping up to the door and quietly pushing it open with her foot. She checked for any sign of movement or a weapon or a Dal-Jamus-sized goon, but with a flick of the light, she found the living room completely empty.
Ransacked, but empty.
"Oh Leveman's," Lizbeth said, rushing past Razia into the apartment and helplessly taking in the mess around them. "This is a mess…"
"Anything stolen?" Razia asked, peering into the bedroom to make sure no one was hiding in there. She peered into the closet as well, not completely satisfied that they were safe until she'd checked every nook and cranny.
"Lyssa…" Razia heard Lizbeth's shocked voice in the living room and came running.
"What is it?" Razia said, dashing into the living room, fists up. She saw Lizbeth staring blankly at the empty dining room table, a broken coffee cup at her feet.
"They took my laptop," Lizbeth murmured. "They took all the paperwork, my computer—all the evidence I'd been amassing….it's gone."
"Don't you have a backup?" Razia asked.
Lizbeth began to laugh frantically. "Oh sure, there's backups of my computer. But they'd need to order me a new computer, which will take up to two months. Then they'd need to submit a ticket to get the computer re-imaged, which could take another month." She gave a half-smile. "Government efficiency at its finest."
"Well, maybe—"
"Lyssa, you don't understand," Lizbeth said, looking around the house nervously. "Nobody's ever known where I lived before. This is…this is…"
"They're just trying to scare you," Razia replied, opening the kitchen pantry.
"And they're doing a good job of it!" Lizbeth exclaimed.
"Oh come on," Razia said, walking back into the living room. "I thought you said you'd been shot at before—"
"This is my house!" Lizbeth cried. "I'm not safe here anymore. I…no one's ever known…I don't know how I'll ever be able to sleep in here…"
To Razia's complete and utter shock, Lizbeth sank down onto the dining room chair, placed her head into her hands, and began sob. Razia watched her moan and cry into her hands and felt an odd urge to comfort this stranger. Rarely the recipient of comfort herself, she had no idea what to do.
"I can't stay here," Lizbeth moaned, shaking her head. "I can't…what if they come back for me? Oh Leveman's, what if they follow me?"
"Well look," Razia said, finally able to speak, "why don't we head back to my ship on D-882? I think I know of a place we can go where they won't be able to find us."
"Yeah?" Lizbeth sniffed. "Okay…"
"Bring your running shoes."
CHAPTER TEN
Lyssa came trotting up to the ship, panting and sweating something fierce. The fifteen miles went a bit slower than when she would run with Vel, who had a habit of goading her into running faster. But this planet was flat, the grasses low, and the temperature perfect—just as she had expected it to be. She personally felt in a much better mood than before, but she couldn't say the same for Lizbeth, who had barely said a word since they left her apartment on S-864. She just kept staring ahead in blank defeat that Lyssa knew all too well.
Lyssa knew better than to bother the girl; at least, she hated to be bothered when she was frustrated. So she'd extended her run to a couple of hours, even stopping to do a bit of excavation on a particularly interesting field with multi-colored flowers, hoping that Lizbeth would have cooled off enough to be ready to work again.
But when Lyssa saw her sullen compatriot, Lizbeth was anything but relaxed.
"Oh, so glad you decided to come back," she snapped cattily. "Thought you were going to leave me here."
"As you are sitting on my only mode of transportation off this planet, that's highly unlikely," Lyssa replied, trying not to rise to the bait.
Lizbeth angrily slapped the side of her face. "Goddamn bugs!"
"Oh, what's the matter?" Lyssa chuckled, walking by. "You can't handle a little camping?"
"I hate camping," Lizbeth seethed, slapping her arm. "I hate this planet and I hate you!"
Lyssa ignored her tirade and made her way onto the ship, and over to her silver cabinets. She dug around for a moment, tossing aside salves and aloe for sunburns, until she found the antihistamine and the bug spray in her first aid kid. She strolled back outside and tossed the tube to Lizbeth.
"What in Leveman's is this?" Lizbeth grumbled, carefully reading the tube.
"It'll help with the bites," Lyssa said, placing the can of bug spray next to her.
Lizbeth's face softened slightly and she carefully unscrewed the cap on the antihistamine. "Thanks…"
Lyssa sniffed in response and bent over to stretch out her sore hamstrings.
"So what in Leveman's are we even doing here anyways?" Lizbeth asked.
"I needed money," Lyssa grunted and popped back upright. "Since I'm not getting reimbursed for the enormous parking bill I racked up yesterday."
"Oh, great," Lizbeth snapped, holding her breath as she doused herself in bug spray. "So we're out in the middle of nowhere because you need money. Meanwhile, pirates are out hijacking ships filled with guns and taking them to the capital, and we have no idea why."
"Well, and I thought a run would be nice, but you didn't want to go," Lyssa said. "So I was giving you some space…"
"Yeah, space is all th
at I need," Lizbeth continued. "Everyone just wants me to relax and calm down and give my projects to other team members because that's the team spirit. I've been bringing in five times as many case reports as everyone else, but am I even seen as a team lead yet? No!" She had clearly begun to rant again, pacing around the small clearing in front of Lyssa's ship. "And you! Bringing me out to the middle of nowhere just so you could…could…well make money!"
"Being out here always…it always makes me feel better…clears my head…." Lyssa stammered. "I thought…"
"Just because you like it, doesn't mean that I…" Lizbeth trailed off, having a realization. "Is this…all of this is your way of trying to make me feel better?"
Lyssa's face reddened and she stared at the ground awkwardly. "I mean, you said that you didn't feel safe…and when I don't…I mean, no one knows we're out here…'cept for my stupid boss brother…but he's not gonna come all the way out here to…"
"God in Leveman's Vortex," Lizbeth gasped, some of the life coming back to her face. "You actually are trying to be nice?"
"It happens sometimes."
"Well, next time you want to be nice, you gotta let me know," Lizbeth laughed. "Because you sure confused the crap out of me."
"It's not just about you," Lyssa said defensively. "It's about…I mean, I am doing a planet excavation, because I do need money, and—"
"Say no more. I won't tell a soul that you're really a big softy at heart."
"Whatever," Lyssa sniffed angrily, marching back onto the ship to wash off the sweat and embarrassment.
***
After her shower, Lyssa wanted to take some more samples from the surrounding area, and Lizbeth decided to come along. Even though Lizbeth was no longer moping, Lyssa could tell that she was deeply preoccupied with her stolen laptop and stagnant investigation.
"So what's next?" Lyssa asked, trying to be conversational as she stuffed another leaf into her sensor and waited for the read-out. "You told your boss about the guns and he didn't care. Can you go around him?"
"Maybe," Lizbeth said. "I've done it before, but only when I had a tight case and I could definitely make an arrest."
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