*Okay.*
Serafin was an aching absence.
*Where’s Wenna?* Ben asked.
*Here, Boss. Bastard shot my arm.*
*Which one?*
*The one that doesn’t bleed, but it’s hit the servo. Bloody useless unless I take it off and beat someone to death with it.*
Cara released the lobstered helm from her buddysuit collar pocket. It unfolded and covered her ears and brow. She flicked an ultrathin face mask into place. She felt Ronan turn his concentration on Serafin, pouring willpower toward him to try to hold body and soul together.
One of Serafin’s bots scuttled along the ceiling. They’d be dead if he was. She felt relief prickle her scalp. The bot dropped suddenly and there was a yell from behind a crate. Those little devils were tiny, but they were equipped with drills and cutters big enough to go through a man’s skull or into his eyeball.
She ignored the wave of panic from the bot’s victim and reached out with her mind to seek the other attackers. Her Empathy could at least tell her how many and where they were. *Three more plus Mirakova,* she broadcast. *One of them is psi.* A weak Psi-4 Telepath at best. Cara could do something about that one. *I can put him out if you all let me draw some whammy.*
*Go for it,* Ben said.
She felt Max begin to question what they wanted of him, but she figured he’d get it soon enough as she took over their combined power, channeled and aimed it at the man’s implant. She wouldn’t have been able to do this before experiencing what it was like to be at the mercy of Donida McLellan’s ruthless mind manipulation, but now she used it without a qualm.
See how easily the abused becomes the abuser.
She kept that thought to herself, or hoped she had.
As she bored into the mind of the assassin she learned that he was supposed to let someone know as soon as she and Ben were dead. This was a trap made for two and the assassins had been dismayed to find themselves five against seven.
Five against six with Serafin down, and all of them weaponless. Damn, they were stupid for obeying Crossways’ rule of not carrying sidearms in the street. She guessed Ben had his parrimer blade, but that was no good against a bolt gun and projectile weapons.
She pressed on the Telepath’s mind and choked off his ability to get a message out, then heard him gurgle, just off to her right, as she slammed him into unconsciousness. There was the sharp sound of a weapon clattering to the floor.
*Ben, he’s close to you,* she said. *To your left.*
*Got it.*
Cara relinquished the borrowed power, taking a few seconds extra to make sure Max hadn’t been completely freaked out.
*I’m okay,* Max said.
*Good. Keep down and keep Gen down. You’re the only two not wearing buddysuits. We don’t want to lose anyone else.*
She was aware that Ben was on the move. A moment later there was another grunt as a second attacker fell.
*Two weapons, now,* Ben said. *All I have to do is pinpoint the bastards.* He fired off several rounds on a spray burst to cover Ronan, who was working his way over to Serafin. *Catch.* Ben slid the second gun skittering in Ronan’s direction with an urgent shove. *Max, can you get a fix on Mirakova?*
*There.* Max wriggled close to where Cara crouched behind a stack of packing crates and pointed.
*Take this.* Cara detached the cuff-light from her left wrist. *Point the light, and then get down.*
Max closed his eyes and directed the beam. It stabbed through the gloom and straight at Mirakova’s eyes. Two of Serafin’s bots dropped from the ceiling into her hair. She flailed at them, unable to quell the usual human reaction to bugs, and staggered forward.
Ben moved and fired as she stepped into range. Mirakova gave a ragged shriek and dropped.
Ronan, covering Serafin’s body with his own, fired randomly in the direction of the other two attackers to keep them down. Cara ducked back behind her crate.
Five combatants were now two. With Mirakova down the odds suddenly became much more favorable, but a fair fight was too much to hope for. There was a dull clunk and the sound of something rolling.
*Grenade!*
It didn’t take Ben’s warning to have Cara twisting away from the opening and pushing Gen and Max down even further, covering as much of them as she could with her body, hoping that the armor built into her buddysuit was enough to deflect the worst of the blast. But instead of a bang there was a hiss.
*Gas!* she warned.
She pulled out her breathing tube and pushed her facemask seal tight to her skin. It covered her eyes and nose, but not her mouth. She clamped her lips together. These guys were out to kill so this wasn’t going to be a simple knockout gas. Gen and Max didn’t have buddysuits. She had to get them out.
*Cover us.* She rolled to her knees and shoved Max hard. *Get out now. Don’t speak, don’t breathe. Quick.*
Gen was already on her feet crouched low over her belly. The three of them scuttled between obstacles while bolts splintered crates around them. She heard Ben and Ronan returning fire, but she couldn’t stop to see what was going on. Max stumbled and Gen grabbed him by the arm. Cara heard his breath rasp. Oh shit. Hopefully the concentration of gas was less this far from the grenade or Max was a dead man. He coughed and doubled over. Cara grabbed his other arm and she and Gen hauled him bodily back toward the main doorway.
Guards wearing Garrick’s colors boiled out of two tubs as they reached the street.
“Gas!” she yelled, and they pulled out breathers.
Max dropped in a heap at her feet and Gen doubled over coughing. She must have caught some of the gas, too.
“Medic!” Cara yelled, trying not to lick any residue from her lips.
A woman wearing a full protective suit stepped forward, scanned them with a sensor and slapped a blast pack to the side of Gen’s neck then to Max’s. “Clothes,” she snapped at all three of them.
Cara knew the routine. There could be enough gas trapped in the folds and creases of her buddysuit to kill. Especially in the confines of a space station. She peeled off the suit and dropped it into a hazmat bag, shivering in her singlet and briefs.
*Ben, help’s coming.*
A loud bang and flash from inside the warehouse ended the sound of bolt guns. Ben and Wenna ran from the warehouse and started stripping off their gas-coated suits. A medic jumped in to help Wenna when it became obvious that she only had the use of one hand. Garrick’s guards emerged a few moments later, prodding along two of the would-be assassins at gunpoint.
A gurney team, with Ronan in attendance, brought out Serafin, already hooked up to a drip. Not dead, then. Cara felt dizzy with relief.
Garrick’s medic waved Ronan back. “He’s in good hands, Doc. Let us take care of you for a change.” They whisked Serafin off in a tub with Gen and Max.
Wrapped in foil blankets, Cara, Ben, Wenna, and Ronan piled into another tub and let themselves be given the antidote.
“Taking you straight to Dockside Medical,” an orderly said as he squeezed into the tub with them and punched the locator pad. “It’s closest, and also the best.”
The tub whirled them toward the traffic lanes.
“What was all that about?” Wenna asked, clutching the blanket about her with her good left hand. “Van Blaiden’s dead. I thought we were in the clear.”
“But Alphacorp isn’t dead,” Cara said.
“And neither is the Trust,” Ben said. “That could have been either of them. And if it was both of them working together, gods preserve us.”
Cara suffered the indignity of thorough decontamination, every crack and crevice being cleaned and swabbed. Once out of the final head-to-toe dunk in something slightly more pleasant smelling than the previous three solutions, she gratefully accepted a robe and followed a young woman to a separate unit for an extensive checkup. It might have
been any medical facility in any part of the known universe. They all smelled the same and looked the same, every corridor in the ubiquitous hospital green, only marginally better than plain gray medonite.
The orderly left her with a polite instruction to wait and pointed her toward a sitting area dominated by a holographic mural depicting a beach scene on some planet with a red sun, yellow sky, and black sand.
Ben and Ronan were already waiting, freshly scrubbed and gowned in white.
“Efficient here, aren’t they?” Cara said as Ronan moved along the bench to make a space for her next to Ben.
“Very.” Ronan wriggled in his seat and screwed up his face. “I’m usually not on the receiving end of this kind of treatment.”
Ben turned to Cara. “All right?” he asked her.
“I think so. I feel all right, anyway. Is all this really necessary?” She nodded to the exam room.
“Let them do your bloodwork again,” Ronan said. “Make sure the gas is out of your system.”
“Cara . . .” Ben looked uncomfortable. “The Telepath you took out . . . he never woke up again.”
“I killed him? How is that even possible?” She turned to find both Ben and Ronan, the two men she trusted most in all the universe, looking at her as if she was a stranger. “No.”
Their silence said yes.
“Perhaps he had a bad heart.”
Ronan shook his head.
When she didn’t speak for a few moments Ben asked again. “All right?”
Was she? She’d killed a man with her mind for fuck’s sake! It wasn’t supposed to be possible. No one had ever warned . . .
She took a deep breath.
A man who’d been trying to kill her and her friends.
She nodded. “I’ll have to be.”
*Counseling?* Ronan asked on a tight band that bypassed Ben.
She jerked her head once in a brief nod.
The double doors opened and Wenna entered in a float chair, saving Cara from continuing the conversation, though it didn’t stop her gut from churning.
“Wenna?” Ben’s voice held a hint of alarm.
“It’s okay, Boss. Not sure why they don’t trust me to walk. It’s my arm that’s busted, not my legs.” She waited for the float chair to settle and stood up, her right sleeve hanging loose.
“Miss Phipps.” A nurse in an antiseptic-looking ice-blue coverall came out of the treatment room and called Wenna in first.
“No Gen or Max yet?” Cara asked, trying to sound normal.
Ben shook his head.
“Want me to find out how they’re doing?” Without waiting for an answer she reached out to Gen. *You all right?*
*Yeah, but Max is making such a fuss. They want to keep me in overnight for observation, just to make sure the baby’s not been harmed. I feel fine, now, but I think we’d better stay.*
*Good plan. Be safe.*
Cara passed on the information.
The beach mural changed to a mountain scene. This time it looked vaguely familiar. Matterhorn, Cara thought. She focused on it and tried to calm her thoughts. Every now and then I killed him with my mind surfaced, but she fought it down. The thought was abhorrent, but beneath it there was the strangest tickle of a thought: she’d never have to be afraid of another Telepath like McLellan again.
As the Matterhorn cycled to a forest scene, the double doors opened and Mother Ramona wafted in on a cloud of expensive perfume, looking very different from the last time they’d seen her, kitted out in combats and body armor. Cara never washed up that well. She spent too much time in a buddysuit and boots to feel comfortable in high heels, but Mother Ramona’s sure had an effect. Even Ronan—comfortably gay—seemed to appreciate the clingy black dress, which showed off her girlish figure.
How old was she? Older than she looked, Cara thought. Her refined features and her smooth skin, delicately marbled in shades of blue and gray, showed no wrinkles, not even laugh lines. Her hair, a vibrant cerulean blue, had white highlights and was cut fashionably spiky. Maybe the clue lay in her crone-like cackle.
Cara ran her hand through her own cropped mop wondering if she should make more of an attempt to look feminine and then realized what she was doing and self-consciously sat on her hand.
Most exotics were genetically engineered to enable them to survive on a less than hospitable planet. Cara’s friend Jussaro, from her time on Mirrimar-14, had purple-black skin, heavy brow ridges, and even nictitating eyelids, all to combat the high radiation in the Hollands System. Marta Mansoro, the supply officer on the Olyanda team, had scaly skin and gills that enabled her to function on the water planet of Aqua Neriffe. But Cara couldn’t begin to guess where Mother Ramona came from or what her physiology might be adapted for, other than looking gorgeous.
“Dreadful business. You kids look shattered. You need sleep.” Mother Ramona pulled up Wenna’s empty float chair and sat down opposite.
Ben started to protest, but Mother Ramona cut him off.
“Garrick sends his apologies, he has business to attend to, as do I, but you can go and rest up at my place. It’s a bit less ostentatious than Garrick’s Mansion House, but don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. I don’t spend much time there now. I’ll send Syke with you, our captain of security.”
“My team . . .” Ben began.
“Already recalled to the Solar Wind, and the dock’s been secured.”
“That’s where we should go.”
“If you prefer. Syke will provide protection. Here, wear Garrick’s colors. It would be a very foolish person who interfered with one of his visitors. We should have issued you all with a band on arrival.” She handed each one of them a green armband with Norton Garrick’s distinctive red flash. “In case you’re wondering, Mirakova was a fake. The real Mirakova will take you to the real warehouse tomorrow.”
“We should get off Crossways as soon as possible,” Ben said. “We still have thirty thousand lost settlers to find.”
“And three hundred psi-techs who possibly all have different ideas of what they want to do with the rest of their lives,” Cara said. “Their lives have been turned upside down, too. You—we—can’t ignore them.”
“And you’ll soon have a fortune in platinum stocks to manage,” Mother Ramona added. “You cut your psi-techs in for a percentage, but money has to be earned and then it has to be managed. You’re in business, Benjamin, whether you want to be or not.”
“Hardly,” Ben said.
Mother Ramona cackled. “Better get used to it. You’re not rich yet, though I’ve arranged a line of credit against your expectations. In the meantime you have a debt and a stolen state-of-the-art jumpship to support. What are you going to do, sit back and sip cocktails all day? That’s not your style. The Trust isn’t paying your bills now. You need to make your money work for you, otherwise one day you’ll turn around and it will all be gone. There are crooks on Crossways, you know.”
She winked at them.
Cara watched the beach scene cycle back into view. How would it be to have nothing to think about except the next few hours in the sun, the drink by your elbow, and the book in your lap? It was a long time since she’d relaxed with a novel.
I killed him with my mind. Shut up . . .
But . . .
Shut up!
It was only thirteen days since the showdown with Ari. Even without the new revelation, she needed recovery time. Ronan’s regeneration treatments had helped, but her ribs were still sore and her bruises still livid.
She’d been hurt too much, and not just physically.
Never again.
She could kill with her mind.
She wore that thought like armor.
Never again.
“Thirty thousand settlers.”
Ben’s words cut into her thoughts. He was right, of course. T
hirty thousand missing settlers trumped everything.
“I’m looking for a lead on your settlers,” Mother Ramona said. “My sources are tracking jump gate records. Give me a few days before you go shooting off. It’s been months already, a little more time won’t hurt.”
Cara could feel Ben’s impatience, but he nodded agreement. The missing settlers could be anywhere: dumped on an inhospitable planet, left in cryo, running on automatics on an outbound trajectory to nowhere, fired into the heart of a star, or lost in the swirling black of foldspace. Ben had promised Victor Lorient that if they could be found he would find them. And he would, or die trying. That was Ben. Nothing if not true to his word.
How could she love him and resent him for it at the same time? Life would never be easy with Ben. He’d never do the expedient thing, only the right one.
She sighed inwardly. The settlers were innocent victims of Crowder’s attempt to grab Olyanda’s platinum for the Trust. Maybe the search was futile, but if the ark ship was still out there to be found, she’d give the search her best shot. She owed Ben that much at least. After that, she’d see.
Chapter Four
THE FREE COMPANY
DRESSED IN ONLY A SKIMPY SINGLET AND shorts, Kitty Keely jogged the whole length of Port 22 for the fifth time, pivoted, and jogged back, ignoring the burn in her thigh muscles and the grab in her chest from the dry space station air. She was still questioning her sanity in joining Benjamin’s crew.
What if she’d done the wrong thing?
Ms. Yamada was not, by all accounts, a forgiving person. She didn’t even have a way of reporting securely until Ms. Yamada’s Telepath, Rufus, contacted her, and as yet he hadn’t. She was a respectable Psi-3, but she couldn’t transmit across the galaxy.
She needed to get a message to Alphacorp. They didn’t even know she was here. Did anyone even care that she was missing? Ms. Yamada no doubt had bigger concerns than one missing pilot.
What had happened to her mom’s treatment? It was barely halfway done when she’d left Earth for Olyanda with Ari. Her mom had been cheerful throughout and had nothing but praise for the staff at the Swiss clinic. How cruel if Ms. Yamada withdrew treatment through no fault of Kitty’s.
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