“Who’s Vato?”
“My boyfriend,” Lilah muttered. By her tone she might as well have said “my tax auditor.” Zane had just opened his mouth, trying to find a way to frame a question about Vato that wouldn’t be offensive, when the dock doors started to slide open with a rumbling groan. He faced the tunnel leading to the street.
“Here we go,” he said with a superstitious touch on the lucky medal made from blue Denicorizen clay that was fixed just above the travel screen in the dash. If all went well, they would be back inside these doors within an hour, the Forrest kids tucked safely in the rear seats.
Once in the street, Zane parked the transport in full view of the surrounding building, waiting for further instructions. The text comm from his father appeared only a minute later on the travel screen. Lilah read the words aloud: “They sent your map. Good luck.
“They’ve got eyes on us,” she said warily, staring out the taxi windows and scanning the neighboring buildings. Of course she couldn’t see anyone. But if they knew exactly when to forward the destination map, then they were watching. Or worse, Zane realized bleakly, they still had a traitor within their own security who was feeding the kidnappers information. Lilah sighed, as if the same thought had crossed her mind, and then she brought up the attached map file.
“We’re going into the Bodera district,” she said unhappily. The Bodera district was one of the most turbulent areas of the Red Zone. No big boss had control of it, and turf wars in the streets were common.
“Fantastic,” Zane said with a scowl. He wondered if the exchange would be interrupted by interlopers who knew nothing of the situation but only saw an opportunity to potentially destroy an enemy. Keeping two young kids safe might be very difficult indeed.
He commed his father back. “Did you copy the map? Are you sending support to Bodera?”
“Yes, I’m scrambling as many men as I can. They’ll stay out of sight,” his father confirmed. “Don’t allow yourselves to get too far from your transport. You’ll have the resources you need if you can get back inside.”
Zane acknowledged the advice and ended the comm. He didn’t let the computer plot their course based on the map but instead manually drove the transport through the warren of narrow streets that would take them to Bodera.
“Did you comm Jimmy and let him know about the kids?” asked Lilah. “I didn’t have a chance.”
“No, but his father is trying to charter a ship to bring him from Tarentino Bay. I assume he talked to Jimmy.” Zane hoped he sounded nonchalant about it, as if things had been mended between him and Jimmy, but he had just been too busy to comm him also.
But Lilah didn’t buy it. She cocked an eyebrow. “He still won’t talk to you, will he?” she asked. “He still doesn’t trust you.”
“I haven’t tried him,” Zane admitted. “He might have gotten over it.”
Lilah snorted. “Right. Because what exactly might have changed his mind?”
“Logic?”
“Logic,” Lilah repeated dryly.
“Well, if he stops to think about it logically, he’ll realize that not only do I have no motive to kidnap his family, but that it was impossible for me to be involved. The day Jenna disappeared, I was stuck escorting an off-planet VIP around the QE. I never even left the resort that day. Besides, I didn’t even know that they lived in Tarentino Bay, for Harrah’s sake! How could I have planned to abduct his children from there?”
“Zane.” Lilah’s tone turned pitying. “Maybe you wanted revenge. Maybe you’d nursed a grudge against them both and as soon as you got back from Kirtuth, you saw your chance. You’d only have to pay the right crew to do it for you and then step back and watch it all happen before your eyes.” Zane stiffened as an idea bolted through him. Lilah raised a placating hand. “Don’t get offended. This is all hypothetically why Jimmy might not trust you. Nothing personal.”
Zane waved her apology away excitedly. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? “Lilah, you’re exactly right! This whole time we’ve presumed that whoever carried out the kidnapping was also the mastermind behind it, a rival Red Zone boss. But what if someone merely paid a crew to do it so they could sit back and watch Quintan-Forrest Enterprises tear itself apart without having to lift a finger personally?”
Lilah wasn’t impressed. “We’ve already considered that, Zane.”
“Yes, but who of our enemies doesn’t have a Red Zone presence of their own? Who has hired a crew in the past to try and sabotage Quintan-Forrest Enterprises? Not steal from us or usurp our business position. But has tried to destroy us.”
Lilah sucked in a breath. “You’re talking about Logistitec.”
“Yes.” Logistitec was a multiplanetary shipping company, one that would shortly find their livelihood under serious attack when the local gate testing was finished. They had been behind the attack on Quintan Tower that had killed dozens of Quintan Security officers and destroyed the first prototype gate. However, no matter how hard his father had pried, he hadn’t been able to definitely connect Logistitec with the attack. His best guess was that the company had hired a very experienced crew to carry out their dirty work. But the crew was like a shadow. They’d never been able to trace anyone. No source in the Red Zone seemed to know anything about them.
“Zane, Logistitec pulled out of shipping on Zenith two years ago,” Lilah protested. “They aren’t here anymore.”
“Yes, I know. After the attack on Quintan Tower—” here Zane swallowed thickly, because his own idiotic behavior had probably allowed the attack to be so successful—“Jay Forrest brought his political and financial clout to bear on the company.”
“He wasn’t too happy about his boys nearly getting killed,” Lilah said matter-of-factly.
Zane nodded. “Well, according to my father, Logistitec suddenly found that investors were making demands they couldn’t meet and that no bank on Zenith would lend them a diezmo.”
“So they cut their losses here and pulled out.”
“Yes. They focused on building their business up on planets where our company doesn’t have any reach.”
“Then why would they be here, bothering with all of you still?” Lilah asked, skeptically.
“Fear that the success of the gate will spread to the other planets? Or like you suggested before, maybe it’s just about revenge.”
Lilah considered this thoughtfully for a moment. Zane glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if she would agree with him. Then a large object hurtled from the side of the street and collided with the front of the transport. The front windshield groaned but held firm. Zane flinched as another projectile crashed into the glass right in front of him. Fortunately, the original windshield had been replaced with a stronger plexiglass that held firm without even any pitting. Focusing on the road, he swerved around two large dark masses that could have been random piles of debris or deliberate obstacles and flipped a switch, activating the engine booster that had originally powered a rocket sledge. The transport shot forward, and Zane tightened his grip on the controls, his nerves humming as they raced down the street and away from the attack.
Three blocks later, he slowed again, looking over at Lilah. She had her weapon out now, and she was tapping at the travel screen, the view changing every few seconds to positions around the transport. “I think we’re clear,” she said, tapping at the screen. “Probably just some local kids hoping to salvage the taxi if they could get us to crash.”
Zane shook his head, just the barest movement without taking his eyes off the street. He knew better than to let his defenses down while traveling in the Red Zone. Anything could happen out here, and the fact that Lilah was sitting next to him without shouting at him was no reason to get distracted. The next several blocks passed in silence. Zane vigilantly kept his eyes on the road and the surrounding buildings, noting where figures emerged from the s
hadows and what could be used as a weapon against the taxi. It was Lilah who finally broke the silence.
“What was Kirtuth like?” she asked idly.
Zane shot her a brief look of surprise before quickly turning his attention back to the street. “Very cold,” he said shortly. But Lilah wasn’t put off by his brusque tone.
“The whole planet? Or the monastery where you lived?”
“Well, the whole planet. It’s pretty far from its sun. The monastery is located in one of the temperate zones, if you can consider year-round icy cold ‘temperate.’”
“How did you eat, then? Can they grow food there?”
“The planet’s population is very, very small. Some scientists. The people living in the monastery. A really hardy bunch of settlers who wanted to get away from it all, I guess. Almost all the food is grown in special greenhouses.”
Lilah processed this silently. Zane remembered for a moment the sheer loneliness when he had arrived on the planet. A pampered boy used to having things his way. A young man going wild with an addiction he couldn’t feed.
There was no nanospeed on Kirtuth. No way to get it, no matter how much money you had.
He had nearly gone crazy.
“Look out!” warned Lilah.
“I see it,” he murmured, swerving the transport until they left the magnetized street surface altogether. The transport’s all-terrain stabilizers took up the slack as they hurtled around the looming barricade someone had erected right through the street. Zane only hit a few random crates and bins of rubbish before they were around the barricade and could return to the street. Luckily no one had been on the sidewalk. They would have been hit for sure, and in this area you didn’t stop to find out if they were all right.
“I wonder if that was set up for us specifically or just meant to trap any random transport coming down the street,” Lilah wondered aloud. Zane didn’t answer. It was anyone’s guess out here. But if someone was intentionally targeting Zane when he was trying to meet up for a kidnap exchange . . . that didn’t bode well for their negotiation.
Ten minutes later they reached the Bodera district. Zane slowed the transport, powering up all the system’s defensive mechanisms and extending the monitoring out from the transport as far as it would cover. This was where things could get very, very hairy.
“We’ve got visitors up ahead,” Lilah noted, pointing at a trio of openly armed men on motorcycles. The travel screen beeped a warning. “And behind us,” she confirmed. “Another transport. Following at about fifty meters. Quintan Security?” she asked, her tone businesslike.
“I doubt it,” Zane said edgily. “They are supposed to stay undercover.”
“So then the million-senine question is are they part of our official welcoming committee or locals protecting themselves from an unknown threat?” Lilah mused aloud.
“Or locals sensing an unknown opportunity,” added Zane, flicking the travel screen to their mapped destination. “We’re about two minutes away. This could be a problem. I think you should stay in the transport and let me make the exchange. Then you can cover us with the taxi’s fire support if we need it.”
Lilah snorted. “That defeats the whole purpose of me being here, Zane. The kids, remember? They are not going to trust you.”
“It doesn’t matter if they do or not,” Zane pointed out heatedly. “And we do not have time to argue this right now. We will have threats all around us, and I need someone to cover us, or the kids may not make it back to the transport alive!”
Lilah groaned. “Fine.” She pulled up the weapons display for the transport. “This is definitely not standard on a taxi,” she said as she swiped through her options.
“Just be ready,” Zane demanded. “There won’t be much time to react. I don’t know how far away my father’s backups are, but anything farther than about a meter is too far in this kind of situation.” Lilah just coolly raised an eyebrow, and Zane let it go. Of course Lilah didn’t need lectures from him. She knew exactly how risky this whole situation was.
He pulled the transport around the last corner and saw a wide open paved lot. A single small-range ship had landed right in the center of the open space. The square was surrounded by low, crumbling buildings. Zane scanned them quickly, but the dusky light made it too hard to tell if there were snipers on any of the roofs. People watching, for sure. Hopefully soon there would be Quintan Security up there also. It was the only place for them to watch unobtrusively, though with the buildings being at least four hundred meters away from the kidnapper’s ship, they wouldn’t be in a position to help quickly if things fell apart. The hoverships delivering the security would stay in the area after dropping their men, but they would have to stay out of sight too, which meant any air support was at least a few minutes away.
The map beeped, and Zane stopped the taxi, leaving about one hundred meters of distance between their transport and the ship. Not too far, if he needed to run.
“That’s going to be an impossible sprint with two young children,” Lilah observed worriedly.
“Kids are fast,” Zane said.
“Erik is three,” Lilah reminded. “You’re going to have to carry him. And Berry will not be able to outrun any of them unless they are all crippled in some way.”
“Well,” Zane reminded testily, “that’s why you are manning the weapons. To cripple them, if need be.”
Lilah just shook her head. Zane ignored her and made sure he had the pouch with the gate plans chip. He hoped his father knew what he was doing. These plans were valuable; they could easily give a competitor just what they needed to build their own gate.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispered and then stepped out of the transport and started toward the ship. He had gotten only about three steps closer when the motorcycles roared into the square. Instead of coming all the way to the transport, they stopped at the far edge of the open square and waited. Zane glanced between them and the ship. There was no sign of life from the ship yet, but no one on the motorcycles seemed to be aiming weapons either, so Zane took a deep breath and kept moving forward. But he drew one of his guns and held it loosely at his side, just in case.
When he was halfway to the ship, a side door opened and a ramp lowered. Two figures appeared, one of them carrying a squirming child. They moved down the ramp slowly but deliberately, and Zane hoped the camera in the transport was getting a good shot of them.
“Move a little to the left.” It was Lilah’s voice in his earpiece. Zane shuffled a little to the side, hoping it looked natural. Another pause. The trio reached the bottom of the ramp and started across the broken, pitted concrete toward Zane. “They’re holding Erik!” confirmed Lilah excitedly. “But where’s Berry?”
The two masked figures stopped just far enough away that they were out of Zane’s easy reach, but close enough to have a conversation without yelling.
“Zane Quintan?” the one on the left asked. He had a gun in one hand, but he hadn’t raised it yet.
“Yes,” Zane answered, his eyes flicking to Erik. The boy was still twisting, trying to force his captor to put him down. He wasn’t crying at the moment, though his eyes were puffy and his face was streaked. The man on the right kept a firm grip on him, though, and the mask didn’t allow Zane to read his expression at all.
“You didn’t come alone,” the first figure stated flatly. Of course they would have realized that. But was he referring to Lilah in the transport behind him? Or his father’s security that was hopefully surrounding the square right at this moment?
“Did you truly think I would?” Zane answered honestly. The man shrugged, as if it made no difference.
“This deal was for both Forrest children,” Zane said. “Where is the little girl?”
“She is our guarantee of your good behavior,” the spokesman stated. “We will give you the boy now in exchange for the gate specs. Once I have verifi
ed that you have given us the plans we seek, we will bring out the girl.”
“We’re in position, Zane,” came his father’s low voice through the tiny ear transmitter. “Take their offer. Send Erik back to the transport before you let them have the chip, though.”
Zane stood for a moment as if considering their demand.
“All right,” he said evenly. “But let the boy come to me and get into the transport, and then I will give you the chip. You still have the girl to guarantee my cooperation.”
The apparent leader nodded and jerked a thumb toward Zane. The other man dropped Erik abruptly, and the little boy landed in a heap on the ground. He started to cry in earnest, but the masked figures made no move to help. Zane hesitated. If he went any closer, he could be at the mercy of the kidnappers himself.
“Erik!” he spoke urgently, trying to get the boy’s attention. The boy just kept crying, curling into a ball. “Erik!” Zane called loudly. He knew absolutely nothing about little children. How did you get them to listen to you? Erik’s crying was now so loud that he probably couldn’t even hear Zane’s voice. No wonder the kidnappers were willing to send him out first. They were probably eager to get rid of him.
“I’m going to come,” Lilah said into his ear. “I’ll get him.”
Zane shook his head once, curtly. Lilah had to stay in the transport. He moved toward Erik himself. Then the boy suddenly rolled onto his knees, pushed up off the ground and ran—away from both Zane and his kidnappers, the ship, and the transport where Lilah was waiting.
“Erik!” yelled Zane, darting after him. The boy was faster than Zane would have guessed. He sprinted to reach him, grabbing him under both arms and lifting him into the air. Erik lashed out with his legs, and startled, Zane lost his grip, the boy thumping back to the ground again. Zane snatched at the back of the boy’s shirt, trying to hold him in place.
Rift Page 28
