by Blaze Ward
Maybe it was because he was an outsider, and therefore safe if she wanted to fool around? Woman like that could never have a fling with a crewmember and keep her place. She’d have to beat them all up at that point. Probably could, if pressed. Best to remember that.
But yeah, Jorge had bounced right off.
“We should do something about that immediately,” Rob took the glass from her hand and made his way to the bar.
Because Rob was the one paying the bills, the bartender reached under the counter and poured him two glasses of the good whiskey. Neat and room temperature, as was the only way to imbibe something so smooth.
Somehow, Rob found himself in a quiet corner of the room with her. Jorge and Roxy and the Governor apparently had things nailed down, when he glanced quickly at the room.
“I’ve been meaning to ask your captain,” Rob said. “Since you’re here, I’ll try you.”
“Is that what you had in mind?” she grinned up at him. “Trying me?”
Rob smiled and gave her a quick tilt of the head, as if to ask silently.
“Maybe,” he offered carefully. “But here’s my first question. I remember you saying you were bothering someone called Berger or something. That Wild Duck was being paid to, anyway. But who actually pays the bills?”
“Their name is Bergier,” she corrected him absently. “And you’d have to ask Okonkwo on that one. Not my business to talk about.”
“Understood,” Rob nodded and sipped, as if thinking. “We’ve talked. Jorge and I have talked about maybe hiring the two of you, and maybe the ship itself to provide some really authentic flavor to things. Problem is, Bergier is a Salonnian Syndicate so Jorge’s concerned that we might be getting into cross-border political issues we don’t want to bite off.”
“It’s not exactly cross-border,” she replied, sipping and shifting her weight in such a way that she was suddenly half-again closer than she had been.
Rob had to be careful not to breathe on her. Or spill if he took a sip without watching his elbow.
“Come again?” Rob asked.
“Maybe later,” she smiled. “Not even there the first time yet.”
Rob grinned down at her and the banter.
“I meant, how is it not cross-border?” Rob clarified.
“Oh, the people paying the retainer are another Syndicate,” she murmured.
Rob noted that she didn’t mention which one. Rumors floating around town had nailed it down to either Black Aurora or Ahearn & Toledano, but even the locals weren’t sure.
Which might still be a problem, since it was the Ahearn & Toledano syndicate who had built themselves a secret base just across the border from Lincolnshire, from which they had engendered so much panic that the Service had offered up Handsome Rob as a ritual sacrifice.
So on the one hand, she might know that base really well. She might also be working for the very people Rob was trying to kill.
Not exactly the way to make small talk with a woman.
“So you aren’t from Corynthe? Wild Duck, I mean? ” Rob decided to play dumb.
His mom swore by the technique.
“Oh, we are,” she chuckled. “Better, Salonnian money is flowing right into 6940 Draconis, every time we order supplies or go drinking in bars.”
“And the other captains don’t get up in your face about it?” Rob let his voice grow to surprised, especially as she had shifted again and they were pretty much dancing while holding highball glasses at this point.
“The first rule of Corynthe is mind your own business, Segura,” she growled in a playful voice. “Or should I call you Handsome Rob, like Royo does?”
“What would delight you, Lilijana?” Rob decided to push back.
Just a little. See if this was a setup or just an invitation for a casual romp.
“If you’re a good boy, I might show you later,” she purred now. “But I wasn’t done. Second rule, Wild Duck can take anybody else in the area, if push comes to shove. We’ve got the heaviest flight wing and the best pilots around. You’d have to go to one of the 4-Rings at Petron to find better fliers.”
“So you’re a woman who can just take anything that catches her eye?” Rob dangled the bait out there.
Not even delicately.
“We’re pirates around here, Handsome,” she leered at him in the same way he had probably done to women he had encountered.
Most of those women couldn’t knock him down and hold him against his will, though.
“I shall keep that in mind, Lilijana,” Rob leaned back just enough to allow some daylight between them. “For the next two hours, I’m required to be on stage for these people. After that…?”
She leaned back as well. Sucked down a hard smell of his aftershave, which was the same one Jorge used.
I mean, if you’re going to learn, learn from the best.
It was interesting watching her pupils dilate, just a little, as she sipped some more of that really excellent whiskey.
She turned first, taking a step away, then turning back to fix him with a look that promised he had only escaped her for a little while.
“We’ll see,” she murmured back over her shoulder.
Rob caught his breath and moved counterclockwise to the woman as she walked away, just so he could mingle with some of the guests. A few had noted the interaction. Many of them apparently approved.
Or Lilijana Kozel frightened them, which was always a possibility.
They had come out here to recruit some pirates to do something piratical.
But he might be in trouble if Wild Duck was working for the bad guys.
16
Levi checked the clock on the amp as the last notes of the song faded. Getting close to dawn, if he had the latitude and season correct in his head. Stone cold sober didn’t make up for utterly freaking exhausted.
But damn, this felt good.
Naomi had quietly put out the call for some help to jam and record. The result had been a handful of her friends in the industry. In eight hours, they had learned one new track well enough that this last run through had been with the machine recording.
A beep filled the room, indicating that the recorder was off and they didn’t have to remain silent any more.
“Vishnu, that was smooth,” Dutch said from behind his standing, electric bass. “Two or four slot on the album?”
Longbow shrugged. Organizing the tracks was the job of the producer, a petite blond named Alicia on the other side of the glass who had piped in some of her own backing vocals, along with Naomi on rhythm guitar.
“Aiming for two right now, Dutch,” Alicia replied over the intercom. “We’ll do number one tomorrow night, if everyone’s free to do this again.”
“Count me in,” Wolfgar stood up from behind a drum set so large it sat on a rotating platform with an motor that could spin it in place.
“Got a gig with some other folks tonight,” Pepe said as he closed his keyboards. “Gimme a couple of hours and I’ll send over a tape of the synths before I rack out. You want track three or five if I’m on a roll?”
“Five then three,” Alecia opened the door and joined them in the main recording studio. “I’m thinking we’ve got nine or ten songs that should make the cut, depending on solos, intros, and orchestral overdubs I’ll work out later. In a hard week, maybe ten days, we ought to have a rough cut you can use as a set for live gigs, with an eye towards rerecording everything in a month for a final album. Plan accordingly.”
Levi noted that she hadn’t asked anyone if that schedule worked for them. Just announced it to the group and apparently expected them to make whatever adjustments they needed to do, like Pepe clearing his other band, or bands.
There was an assumption that everyone in here played regular gigs with at least one other band. Four in the case of Wolfgar, but good drummers were usually worth their weight in whatever medium of exchange you wanted to offer.
It felt good to Levi, though. Everyone here was roughly his age at
the youngest, up to Dutch, who looked older than the moon overhead. But they had all come in like pros. Learned their bits after only a couple of passes through, then ran their expertise over the simple things he and Naomi had showed them.
It wasn’t as good as the Longbow album, but this was one night jamming and recording with complete strangers. Idly, Levi wondered if they should delay the real mission long enough to actually finish recording. He’d worked with a number of recording techs in his time, and Alicia was in the top three all time.
He might actually generate a followup to Longbow that would sell maybe half as many copies, which was impressive, considering how heavy that first album had dropped.
Fast enough, everyone was gone, leaving him, his guitar, and Naomi. Somewhere, the sun might be rising soon.
“I can’t figure you, man,” she said, still facing him from across the circle with that cherry red guitar in her lap. “Most people would either be all in right now, or just humoring me with a polite pat on the head. You’re somewhere in the middle.”
“Honestly?” he unplugged and rested his guitar on a rack, standing and stretching as he did so.
“Yeah,” she fired back, mirroring him. “Honestly.”
“I keep expecting to wake up and all this will be gone,” Levi replied, gesturing to the room around them. “Poof. Not the first time I’ve been in a studio trying to record a follow-up to Longbow. All of them fell apart at some critical juncture, right when it might have worked.”
“So we should grab this while we have the chance?” she asked in a voice with traces of something under it he couldn’t name.
Levi turned and found her suddenly closer than she had been. Not touching, but not that far from it either.
“It’ll be gone like morning dew,” he said simply. “Nothing to ever show we were here.”
For a moment, her eyes got a faraway look, like she was about to kiss him. Levi had wondered which of them would make the first move. They had danced around it for a week, never talking, but it had been there in the back of her eyes, so he stood perfectly still, mirroring her.
Her lips moved, like she was talking to herself, but no words came out. Like she was standing in an empty stadium. After a moment, he shrugged and stepped towards the refrigerator to grab a beer.
She was still standing perfectly still when he twisted the top off the bottle, a statue carved in chocolate opal. Levi wondered if he had turned into some sort of medusa accidentally and had turned her to stone.
Something in the woman clicked, like lightning. She turned and strode to the front room on a mission. Levi followed. There, he found her at her desk, scribbling furiously in the notebook where she wrote her songs, so Levi went back and grabbed a second beer, resting it nearby on the desk, but she was oblivious to him.
He found a chair and sat, watching the woman commit art in her own world like he was a ghost or something. It was interesting. He didn’t do lyrics, but if you handed him some, and if they worked, he could hear the music under them almost immediately.
She surfaced after about five minutes of writing, thinking, and fidgeting.
“You’re still here,” she observed absently, like that was a surprise.
“We’re all ghosts if you aren’t looking,” Levi replied.
He wasn’t sure where those words came from, but once spoken, her eyes got huge and she started writing again, diving headfirst back into the notebook.
Poof. Gone.
Levi finished his beer and studied the instruments on the room. Almost every kind of string you could play, along with a few woodwinds and some brass. Every culture he could think of and several that eluded him completely, unless that one was a contrabrass clarinet.
“Sorry,” her voice brought him back to the present. “Something you said. Things you said.”
“Gathered that,” Levi smiled. “Want to share?”
She surprised him by standing, walking over with the notebook in hand, then more or less draping herself across his lap. Writing that must have been an even more exciting experience for her than it had appeared from over here.
Levi read the words. Heard the rhythm underneath. The breathing.
Notes appeared in his head. He looked around, almost frantic.
“What do you need?” she asked, not moving.
“Guitar,” he said.
She probably didn’t realize he was strong enough to do it until he actually stood up, lifting her, and carried her back into the studio, like crossing a honeymoon threshold. Down she went onto her stool.
Levi grabbed his axe and plugged it back in. Closing his eyes, he read the words aloud in his head, plucking. Somewhere in the back of his mind, something compared how oblivious he was to the outside world right now with where she had been five minutes ago.
A second pass, with notes plucked as he spoke the words aloud. Yes, there.
Third pass, he changed the key down a note. This was a power ballad, it needed to be slower and deeper than the rockers.
Fourth pass, he was actually playing the song now when the bass line suddenly intruded into his conscience. Naomi setting the backbeat.
Yes. Later, keyboards and maybe a whole string section, but right now, just raw, stripped completely down to the two of them.
“From the top,” Levi said absently, utterly lost in the magic of music making.
The last notes faded.
“And cut,” Naomi said, breaking the spell of concentration that had fallen over him.
“You recorded that?” Levi asked, looking up for the first time in however long.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I absolutely wasn’t missing that.”
She stood and racked her bass. Walked over and racked his guitar. Straddled his lap on the stool and wrapped her arms and legs around him.
“Now you’re going to take me home and bang my brains out, understand?” she explained as she kissed him.
“Yes,” Levi agreed, breathless.
He stood, with a spider wrapped around him, and carefully made his way to the front room. She unwrapped herself but kept hold of a hand as the shut the lights and locked the hatch.
Walking away, Levi knew that there was a pretty good chance the version Naomi had just recorded might be the one song on the mythical album that maybe never got made, if Jorge took the whole planet sideways with his madcap mission.
But he might also need to sneak back here and finish it. That nameless song probably had as much power as the original Longbow did.
Pity they might put a price on his head before he finished recording it.
17
Rob leaned back with his coffee mug in one hand and smiled at the afternoon sunlight streaming in from the patio. Life was good.
Longbow seemed to agree. They toasted silently with coffee mugs as the others filtered in from elsewhere.
“Vishnu, do I end up looking like that?” Jorge asked the room as he sat at the head of the table with a martini glass in hand. “After a night of excellence?”
“Like those two?” Roxy asked. “Yes. Frequently. But both those boys look like they got their coals thoroughly raked last night. Am I right?”
Rob just smiled at her. Felt Longbow do the same.
“Jorge, you’re like that all the time,” Roxy interjected. “Good for you to see what the rest of us have to suffer through.”
Jorge harrumphed sourly, but didn’t offer any more commentary. His exploits in the bedroom were legion and legendary.
“Nigel, where are we?” Jorge asked instead as the cowboy made his way into the room.
Rob noted that the dude was carrying some sort of personal-scale scanner today, one that played both white noise and quiet, instrumental music in the background as he walked all the way around the room. The doors were all closed, but the curtains were open.
It was weird, being on the top floor of a tall building that only stuck one story above ground. At least triple-thick windows kept the temperature nominal in here.
“
So far, so good,” Nigel replied. “No bugs. You bribed the maid with enough money and threats that nobody has been able to outbid her.”
“Yeah, but that’s likely to change when we get down to end-game,” Jorge snapped. “Calculations change.”
“Are we?” Roxy asked. “Getting to end-game?”
“Maybe,” Jorge sipped at his endless martini and watched Rob and Levi with near-disgust on his face, mixed with grudging jealousy. “Had long talks with both of the captains Handsome invited last night. Got some of what I needed to know from Nakano. Handsome, did you managed to gain any useful intelligence while you were interrogating that midget chick?”
“She’s not a midget, Jorge,” Rob smiled serenely at the man. “Might be able to outlift Mrs. Jones, if we wanted to stage a competition. She had needs, and I provided a useful outlet.”
“No, I did not want to hear the gory details,” Jorge growled. “Yes or no?”
“She won’t confirm anything except Bergier, but I got the impression that Black Aurora was more likely the Syndicate than Ahearn & Toledanoi,” Rob answered. “They’ve managed to keep that secret from everyone around here.”
“Yes,” Jorge agreed. “Nakano danced around the topic as well. I’d hate to try to hire the man to attack his own base. Not even pirates are usually that crazy. But we’re also not under the gun for time here, like we were before. Longbow, where are you at with our overarching distraction?”
Rob liked the way Levi’s eyes lit up. He wasn’t sure he’d seen the man actually happy. Like, ever. Always either totally locked in on his mission, or melancholy about things he never mentioned.
Today, the man positively glowed. Rob wondered if the two of them might blind everyone else. Again, the quick toast with coffee mugs, celebrating that everything was all right in the world.
Then Levi dropped the bon homie like a blanket and turned into someone else. This was the character Rob remembered. Intensely focused. Lethal.
It was like holding a razor-sharp longsword in your hands.
“The Governor’s wife? Aoki Fukui? She’s deadly serious,” Longbow said. “They’ve cranked the seduction up to eleven on this one, although I’m as surprised as the rest of you that I’m the target. She came through with a studio, a recording engineer I’d like to kidnap and take home with me, and a lyricist who might make me famous again.”
