by Mel Odom
Opening it a crack, she looked at Hawke’s stained and ripped clothing, and took satisfaction in knowing the big man didn’t look any better than she did.
“We need to figure out what we’re going to do,” he said.
“About what?”
“You.”
That caught her off guard, but her anger had been waiting just under the surface. “I thought you already had that figured out. I’m some kind of prize you get to trade in for a reward.”
“That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I didn’t get the chance to discuss things with you before Aztechnology started shooting. Everything I knew changed when the corp brought out the big guns. I’m looking at options.” Hawke paused. “For all of us.”
Even though she was afraid, Rachel didn’t want to let it show. She also didn’t want to believe him, but his words sounded true. She told herself that a professional abductor was probably also a skilled liar. “Why? So you can demand more cred for kidnapping me?”
The big man didn’t blink. “That’s one of the options, sure, but that’s not the deal I’m offering.”
“Now I get a deal? After you kidnap me?” Rachel couldn’t reel in the anger coursing through her. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the jewel glowing strong enough to be seen through her backpack. She calmed down with an effort, knowing it was responding to her on some emotional level.
Hawke frowned. “Kidnapping you wasn’t part of the arrangement. I agreed to meet with you, talk with you, and get you safely out of Aztlan. But only if you agreed to leave. I don’t kidnap innocent people.”
“Really? Who do you kidnap?”
His answer came immediately. “People who’ve stolen things—cred or tech—that doesn’t belong to them. Those people are criminals, and I don’t have a problem taking them.”
“But you’re not a criminal?”
“I provide a service—what some consider an illegal service—but I don’t just work for anyone, and the jobs aren’t just about the cred.”
Rachel considered what she knew about shadowrunners, how they targeted corps and wealthy people. “You and your . . . what do you call the guy that hires you?”
“Mr. Johnson, typically.”
“Mr. Johnson, right . . . so, you and he are on a first name basis?”
Hawke took in a deep breath and let it out. “Do you want a vote in what’s done with you or not? This is your only chance.”
Unable to think of a casual dismissal for the question, Rachel nodded. “I do. Should I wake Professor Fredericks?”
“No. He’s not part of the package.”
Immediately feeling traitorous, Rachel shook her head. “No. You’re not just going to throw him overboard—”
Hawke winced in displeasure. “We’re under water. We’re not throwing anyone overboard.”
“—or jettison him, or fire him through a torpedo tube or anything. I want to know he’ll be okay.”
“All right, but let’s you and I talk first.”
“Flicker’s not going to be part of this conversation either?” Rachel didn’t care for that. She felt like she’d get more sympathy from the female rigger. The woman was probably the only reason Hawke was there now.
“Flicker goes where I go on this run. I make the decisions. That’s the only way we operate when everything’s in play.”
“All right.” Rachel stepped through the door and closed it behind her. She followed Hawke as he strode through the narrow passageway, nearly filling the entire space with those wide shoulders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“What do you know about NeoNET?” Hawke sat at a small table in the Scorpionfish’s top-of-the-line galley and studied Rachel Gordon sitting on the other side. Between them, a Renraku white noise generator provided privacy from the sailors eating, drinking, and talking at other tables.
“Not too much.” Rachel shook her head and sipped her cup of coffee; not soykaf, but the real drink, made from real coffee beans. The scent was delightful to Hawke. “I’m aware of the corp, of course. Their ads are all through the media. I’ve got some of their entertainment devices. They help fund some of the programs at the university. Other than that, I don’t know much other than what you see in their advertising.”
“But you knew they funded Professor Fredericks’ dig.”
“I did.”
“Fredericks didn’t talk to you about that funding?”
Rachel smiled, and it was easy to believe she was telling the truth. Hawke’s onboard deception reading software suite and his own personal experience agreed with his impression.
“Professor Fredericks talked to me about NeoNET just long enough to tell me the funding had come through. That’s all. After that, there were brief mentions of packing, travel arrangements, and passports. Most of his communication with me was about the dig and what he hoped to find.”
“What did he hope to find in Guatemala?”
A quick smile and a shrug covered her slight hesitation. Even without the deception reading software, Hawke knew he wasn’t about to get the whole truth. She was holding something back. That was natural.
“He hoped to find what we found,” she answered. “Artifacts.”
That was mostly the truth. Hawke chose to stay with it, see if he could ferret out what she was holding onto.
“He wasn’t looking for anything special?”
“No.”
“Did NeoNET know what artifacts you people were supposed to find?”
“Hoped to find,” she corrected. “You never know for sure you’re going to find anything. You go to a dig in the hopes of finding something. I helped write Professor Fredericks’s grant proposal. He laid out his research into the area, the faint mentions of a small village that might have been there thousands of years ago. There wasn’t anything substantial. We were just hoping to find some record of those people.”
“Where did he find out about the possible location of the village?”
“In Mayan records we were able to translate.” Rachel took a breath. “If you want to know more, I’d have to get my deck and show you.”
“That’s all right.” Hawke didn’t want to look at images of Mayan symbology with Rachel Gordon any more than he wanted to discuss circuit boards with Flicker. Those were just details. He needed to figure out the big picture. The fact that Rachel wasn’t giving him the whole truth was a big piece of that. “Tell me about the blue jewel you found.”
Rachel shrugged again, almost pulling off nonchalant. “It’s blue. It sparks sometimes. There’s a lot of what I think is Mayan inscriptions on it.”
“You think it’s Mayan?”
“Exactly. What’s there is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” That was the truth. Curiosity shone in her eyes.
“Is that unusual?”
“There are a lot of dead languages in the world. Some of them didn’t get rediscovered until after UGE hit the population. Then some of the things that we’ve known about for centuries suddenly became clear. Mostly things in the elven tongues. We still aren’t sure why that is.”
Hawke knew the answer to that one. He’d liberated a tablet in the past that had been covered in a dead elvish script. “Some people think the elves have been in the world before, that they died out, then came back when the virus started mutating people. Others say that the elves have always been with us, just in hiding.”
She studied him. “Which do you think is true?”
Hawke grinned, enjoying her attempt at deflection. She was a fast learner, even if she was only a college student. “I’m no expert, and I don’t care. The elves I know, and I know only a few, aren’t saying. Either they enjoy their mysteriousness, or they don’t know either.”
“It’s my opinion that both of those things are true.”
“Tell me why you can touch the blue jewel, but Fredericks can’t.”
“I don’t know.”
There was just the slightest hesitation before she answered, just enough to reg
ister to Hawke and ping the deception suite. Maybe she didn’t know, but she had her suspicions.
“Is it magic?”
“It doesn’t appear to be technology-based. Your rigger friend seems to agree with that.”
Hawke sipped his coffee, hating that he enjoyed it mostly because Joaquin provided it. “Tell me about Ayumi Sukenobu.”
Rachel’s brows knitted in confusion. “I don’t know that person.”
That sounded like the truth to Hawke, and he let it go. “All right, let’s talk about you. Tell me about yourself.”
The questioning turned awkward for Rachel, especially given she was trying to hide her knowledge of the artifact as well. Even with her backpack sitting under the table between her feet, she could still sense the presence of the being contained within it. Hawke gave no indication he was aware of anything unusual.
Rachel never liked talking about herself, because it always reminded her of how little she knew. But at least they weren’t talking about the artifact, and Hawke didn’t seem as scary now that he was sitting across from her with a cup of coffee in his hand instead of a weapon.
She shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. I’m an orphan. No family to speak of. I was dropped off at a shelter only a few days after I was born. I guess whoever had me couldn’t wait to get rid of me.” Although she tried to mask it, she was sure some of the old bitterness echoed in her words. If Hawke noticed, he gave no indication. “After I aged out of the system, I started college, graduated with my bachelor’s, and immediately started on my master’s.” She heard the emotionless way she said that, so practiced after all these years.
“No records of your birth parents anywhere?”
“None. When I was older, after I’d met a few people who liked to break into things on the Matrix, I had a friend hack into the orphanage’s records. She found nothing in the files that linked me to anyone. I just . . . appeared.” Even now, it was still hard to imagine how that could have happened.
“Did you try DNA files?”
“I did.” Rachel couldn’t help wondering why Hawke was so interested in her. Then she realized he didn’t know why his “Mr. Johnson” wanted her either. That orphan kid part of her that never truly went away was curious and apprehensive, thinking maybe the big man knew something about her past that she didn’t. But she remained afraid to get her hopes up, because that old hurt never stopped aching. “I didn’t find any matches.”
Hawke’s eyes narrowed.
She knew that not finding anything through a DNA link was interesting. Most people around the world were tagged with DNA these days. Drug testing was mandatory for a lot of corps, and other agencies—like Lone Star—kept a prodigious amount of records on everyone they came in contact with.
She was also looking for two parents. The odds of both of them not being in a database somewhere were astounding.
“It’s possible my birth parents were killed in an accident shortly after I was born,” Rachel said, rewinding all the old arguments she’d had with herself over the years. “Maybe their DNA was never registered.”
“If they were accident victims, their DNA would have been on file. The same goes for crime victims.”
And criminals. Rachel knew Hawke was thinking that, and she was surprised he didn’t mention that possibility. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would go easy on someone.
With all the possibilities that were open to DNA recording, Rachel had ended up with only two logical conclusions: either her parents had taken care not to end up in a DNA database somewhere, or someone, possibly someone other than her parents, had expunged those DNA records.
As a child, and sometimes even as an adult, Rachel had felt certain that a choice had been made to deliberately cut all ties with her. Even after all these years, it was hard not to feel that way. Other acquaintances she’d made had always found something about themselves; a trail leading back to a deceased or incarcerated parent, or someone who had left because they were too young and unable to raise a child. Sometimes there were good endings.
She had found nothing. That had made her feel even more lonely.
Looking Hawke in the eye, she lifted her chin and refused to let those old hurts demean or define her. “Whoever my parents were, they chose not to acknowledge me. That’s not a problem for me.”
Hawke nodded and, thankfully, moved on in his interrogation. “Why the interest in archeology?”
“I like old things, the idea of culture and other times.” That was the easy answer and she knew it. The truth was she liked the idea of history, of evidence that things had happened before the here and now. Mostly because that field was so different from her own life. Her life as she knew it had begun twenty-three years ago. No depth. No history. Just a date recorded in the data files of a nondescript orphanage in a small town outside Philadelphia.
Hawke’s gaze flicked from her to the doorway, and Rachel turned to see what had captured the big man’s attention.
Professor Fredericks, bleary-eyed and looking slightly frantic, stumbled into the galley. When his gaze fell on Rachel, he sighed and relaxed slightly. “Ah. There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”
“Sorry. I should have left a note.” Rachel felt only a little guilty about that. During the dig, she’d looked after the professor more than he had looked after her. She couldn’t help feeling he was more interested in the artifact.
“This is a submersible,” Hawke said as he pushed back from the table and stood. “There aren’t many places to go. I’ll leave you two to breakfast. We’ll be making port in another three hours.” He looked at Rachel. “Flicker has arranged for new clothing to be dropped off in your berth.”
Rachel hated the way he could just get up and leave, and the way he could still plan his life while hers had been brought to a complete standstill. Even if she was able to escape Hawke and get off the submersible, the charges presented by Aztechnology still waited out there.
“Are you ashamed of the way I look?” she demanded, thinking she might throw him off-balance. “Maybe you want to tidy up your captured prize?”
He regarded her frankly. “No. I just thought you might like to wash up and get into a fresh change of clothes. If you want to stay looking like that, it’s fine with me.” He turned without another word and walked away.
Rachel watched him go, somehow feeling a little more vulnerable without him there.
She hated that, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When Hawke returned to the cargo compartment with two breakfasts from the galley, he found Flicker lying on a mechanic’s creeper under the ATV. A welder’s torch flared in her hand, illuminating the scarred underside of the vehicle and throwing off sparks. Several other tools hung from the ceiling on electrical cords, and robot arms under her control repaired dents and dings and reapplied ablative armor. She hadn’t told him how much the repairs were going to be, but he knew it’d be costly just from watching all the activity.
“Did you learn anything?” Flicker rolled out from under the ATV, but the suite of robot mechanics kept working, controlled by her neural interface. She switched the welding torch off and the blue flame disappeared with a soft pop, like a bubble bursting.
“Did I learn why Mr. Johnson is so interested in Rachel?” Hawke shook his head, not at all happy with his answer. He handed her the breakfast box and a bulb of orange juice. “No, and I don’t think she knows either.”
“There can only be two reasons.” Flicker ticked them off on her oil-stained fingers. “Either Mr. Johnson wants the girl, or he wants the artifact.”
Hawke sat on the floor across from her, his legs crossed to support the breakfast container as he opened it to reveal eggs, sausages, wheat cakes, and heavily-spiced shredded potatoes. “The artifact hadn’t even been found at the time we accepted the run.”
Flicker took out the disposable fork and dug into her food. He’d guessed right that she’d skipped breakfast.
“That doesn’t mean Mr. Jo
hnson didn’t know it was going to be found.” She was great at playing devil’s advocate. “Look at it that way, omae. We’re always the last people to see all the cards face up on the table. The Johnson might not be the only person withholding intel. Or flat out scheming on us.”
“That doesn’t scan either. Given the way Aztechnology came gunning, they would have nabbed the artifact earlier if they’d known it was there in the first place.”
“If they’d known.” Flicker chewed and thought. “Aztechnology had someone inside the dig team. It might help if we knew who it was.”
“There were a lot of locals on the op. Aztechnology could have had any number of informants.”
“I know.” She stabbed a sausage and popped it into her mouth. “Why doesn’t Mr. Johnson want the professor? Seems like he’d know more than a grad student.”
“Because the professor can’t touch the artifact.”
Flicker nodded as she chewed, then swallowed. “That’s how I had it figured, too. So someone, somewhere knew that the girl would be able to connect with the artifact, then sent Mr. Johnson to hire you.”
“Yeah.” There was no other way to look at the series of events.
“The girl has a connection, whatever it is, to the artifact. But what connects you to her? Why did Mr. Johnson reach out to you? Or whoever’s behind him?” The note of suspicion in Flicker’s words held a sharp edge.
Hawke looked at her. “I don’t know.” He didn’t promise her the truth. He didn’t have to. As deeply as they’d gone into the shadows together, often the truth was all they had between them.
She sighed irritably. “For once, I think I might be happier if you were holding something back.”
“That’s not how I work.”
“I know. But I don’t like how we’ve been zeroed out on this.”
“Neither do I.” Hawke ate a few more bites and let the silence between them stretch. He wasn’t certain which one would be the first to break it.
