by Blaze Ward
Javier’s eyes snapped open to find a woman standing suddenly on his other side, grinning lightly at him.
Like Sykora, the stranger had worn only a wrap this morning. She wasn’t as hardbody as the Dragoon, but that still left a lot of space for amazing, volume she filled like jasmine. Even ’Mina would have probably been a distant third.
Her skin wasn’t as dark as Javier’s, and it was a richer golden tone where his brownness tended towards ochre. Her hair was long and black, straight nearly down to her bottom. Pixyish green eyes.
Stunning. Utterly stunning.
And she knew it. Practiced it. Broadcast it on all channels.
“Both, Your Grace,” Javier said evenly after a moment of appreciation.
He flipped a coin in his head and decided to remain horizontal, at least until she said something about it.
“You know who I am?” she inquired in a coquettish voice.
“I am staying in a guest room,” he said. “Best to know who the host is.”
“I see,” she said.
She unhooked her wrap and laid it beside him, dropping down and folding herself into a perfect lotus, facing him from close enough he could feel the heat radiate off her knees, and smell the coconut oil she had rubbed on her legs in the last few hours.
“You are Navarre,” she announced in a quiet, sure voice. “The pirate.”
Javier knew a moment of pure panic.
That perhaps this beautiful woman had somehow been a friend of someone on Tamaz’s crew. That he was a dead man, and had just found his executioner.
He studied her face sidelong, let his gaze drift and linger.
Black widow was another option.
Not necessarily the preferred outcome, but something about condemned men and last meals came to mind.
Navarre growled in his mind, so Javier let the man take over.
“And?” he rasped.
“Are you a killer, Navarre?” she asked. “Or merely a thief?”
“Or?” he asked back, rusty, jagged edges appearing in his voice.
He turned his head to face her more fully. She smiled wickedly.
“You left out gentleman, rogue, and card sharp,” Javier said in a lighter tone, pushing the killer back into the shadows of his mind. “I also dance a pretty good Argentinian Tango.”
“Do you now?” she pursued. “Tango? It can be hard around here, finding a man willing to force the rhythm, but comfortable letting a woman have the power to improvise. Who understands that there are lines that must be colored outside of, occasionally.”
Javier smiled laconically and shrugged.
Black widow, indeed.
She leaned forward a bit. Not enough to block the pseudo-sun’s light, but towering more over him now.
“Are you here to kill someone, Captain Navarre?” she purred.
Javier grinned up at her.
“No, actually,” he confessed. “This is probably the one time where I get a vacation and nobody has to die.”
“Has to?” she dripped verbal honey on his chest.
“There are always bad seeds, Khatum,” he felt his smile grow harder. “Back home, we called it the Texas defense. As in: Yer Honor, he needed killin’.”
“Like Abraam Tamaz?” she asked.
Yup. A reputation could be a good thing, or a bad thing, but it was still a thing.
“There are few people more deserving,” Javier said with a hard smile. “Somebody had to do it.”
“So you are the kind of man who takes charge, when he sees something that needs doing?” she asked lightly. “Grabs life by the hair and pulls?”
“Never without an invitation,” he replied laconically.
Somehow, she was floating above him. Javier could only imagine the flexibility she must have, to remain in a full lotus and still be able to lean so far forward that they could start necking without him moving too much.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she whispered.
Javier could smell the mouthwash she had gargled with this morning. Minty, but not overwhelming. His breath probably smelled like coffee, but that was the chance you took, hitting on strangers on a beach.
She glanced up suddenly and smiled at him with promise as she leaned back.
“Your bodyguard is getting nervous,” she said, returning upright.
Javier watched her unhook her feet, wriggle a bit, and stand up in a single motion. Rather than hook the wrap about her hips, she tossed it over one forearm and began to walk away in such a direction that Javier had the best view of her bottom.
“We shall talk again, Captain Navarre,” she called over one shoulder with a tinkling bell of a laugh as she disappeared over a dune.
“Sorry,” Sykora observed from two meters away, without the least apology in her voice. “Didn’t mean to interrupt the two of you rutting on the beach. Who was that?”
Javier turned his head the other direction, but not until the first woman was out of sight.
Sykora was dripping water into the sand. Cold water, from the tightness of her nipples, in spite of the warm breeze. Nude, just as the Khatum had been. Female, as well.
That was about where the comparisons ended.
No. Dangerous. Both of them.
Black widows. Just different kinds.
He hoped.
“The Khatum of Altai,” he said. “Our host.”
“Wow, you work quickly,” she sneered down at him from her majestic perch.
“She generally doesn’t discriminate,” he fired back. “Feel free.”
Sykora rewarded him with a silent snarl.
The first time he had said something like that to the Dragoon, she had bounced him off a bulkhead hard enough to give him a concussion. She was either relaxing as she grew up, or taking her role as his bodyguard more seriously.
Javier reached out and patted her towel with a serious look. The kind that said: Don’t argue.
She thought about it anyway for a moment. That much was obvious, but she stretched out her towel and sat.
Two lovers enjoying the beach. As if.
“We need to move quickly,” Javier said simply. “Our cover can’t stand the kind of inspection that woman might bring to bear.”
“Not going to play with your new friend?” Sykora asked sweetly.
“Hadiiye,” he said in a quiet, serious tone. “She’s likely to just shoot us in the back of the head if she thinks we’re a threat. No trial. No excuses. Nothing. She knows who I’m supposed to be, so we need to get gone.”
That got through.
Death-machine there drew a quiet breath that suggested the scale of risk was finally coming home.
“What did you find in the vault?” the Ballerina of Death asked quietly, pivoting with all the mental prowess she brought to combat.
She might have been commenting on the surf for all the emotion in her voice.
“A woman who likes to brag,” Javier replied sourly. “Vanity and ego undo so many morons. But I never saw the vault itself. Handed over the box to a guard, got a receipt when it was delivered.”
It was necessary to peek over his shoulder, like this was a bad holo, but he couldn’t help himself.
Nobody was sneaking up on them. No arresting angels swooping in.
“Very few guests actually live here,” he continued. “And those that do don’t bring huge amounts of jewelry with them. There are way more interesting resorts at which to get dressed up and hit the casinos.”
“So?”
Now Sykora had managed to sound bored. Obviously, another talent she was perfecting as she became an actor.
“So thirty-six boxes in one wall,” he replied. “Different heights, escalating widths. Our helmet went into the fifth row, bottom spot, to give you an idea.”
“And we know one of them holds our box?” she asked, ever so slightly interested now.
“We presume,” he replied. “She had to brag that their security was good enough for visiting royalty. Present tense, not past. If
I can get the probe in there through the air vents, we should be able to scan it and know how to get in.”
“And then what?” Sykora asked.
Her voice was starting to edge into that place Javier liked to think of as High Priestess of the Goddess of Death. The amazing, lethal creature that had come to the fore when they were escaping Salekhard.
“Navarre was probably hired because someone wanted a mass casualty incident,” Javier sneered at her. “Most of the ways to access that vault require a distraction of a scale that someone gets killed, even accidentally.”
“So?”
“So I want a reputation as more than just a killer, Hadiiye,” he retorted. “It opens us up to more opportunities, better jobs. That much faster I can pay you and Sokolov off and get on with my life.”
“One of us probably still has to die first,” she whispered fiercely.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “But not today. Okay?”
Javier could see her weigh the alternatives. He probably looked like that around her, from time to time, because, yeah, one of them probably would have to die, but they could still be professionals about things until then.
She nodded, implicit with the sort of emotion and violence that drove Shakespeare to greatness.
“What’s the immediate plan?”
“Back to the room in a while,” he stated. “We’ll have a good meal, and then beg off everything and everyone with a serious case of starship lag. I’ll go to bed, as it were, to catch up on my sleep. You’ll go seduce a crewmember.”
“Seduce?” she snarled in a whisper. “Fornicate?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes.”
Javier felt his voice go cold and lethal.
“Anything less than that is also acceptable, as long as you get me the answers and gear we need to pull this off.”
“Bastard,” she hissed.
“Princess, you have no idea.”
Part Five
Suvi took a moment to consider the right music for this sort of mission. In all the videos, the hero always flew into battle with some serious backbeat drums over a screaming string section, either an electric guitar or a full orchestra.
But she was really more of a cat burglar today, instead of potentially flying a hard strafing run in a tight canyon.
In the end, she settled for Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Music for someone born without fear. Just for fun, she spun up a couple of jazz improvisation sub-routines for drums and bass, then let them duel elegantly with the piano as she moved.
The Dragoon had disappeared after the two of them had come back from dinner, leaving her and Javier alone to talk shop for several hours while he added a small electric screwdriver with a rotating multi-head to her outer shell.
Finally, hands. She was going to insist he add something at least as good to the big ship when they got home, plus a bigger waldo or something so she could manipulate things.
There was nothing as annoying as having to bonk your nose on a door chime to get it to ring.
And now, the thief in the night.
Someone had given a lot of thought to the architecture of this resort. The square air vent she was cruising down was forty centimeters tall and fifty wide. Too small for most humans, and too dusty for her to worry about running into a cleaning robot.
Not that she was really concerned about running into a drone, except that it might think she was a rodent or something. After all, what self-respecting AI would be happy as a maid-drone?
Nope. Flittering along, happily listening to one of the most dangerous men ever allowed to touch a piano. No annoying Red Baron. Nothing.
Just Suvi, dressed in a skin-tight, black, leather body suit. The kind without any seams at all, and nothing riding up uncomfortably as you moved.
You could do that when you were an AI.
She had kept the scanner pings down to nearly nothing, relying on Visual Flight Rules and passive sensors for now. There was enough light coming in from the regular vents that her optical sensors were fine.
A girl just had to peek and sneak past them, only committing a little voyeurism as she did.
Humans, for all their diversity, tended to be pretty predictable, but she wasn’t really interested in expanding her horizons of experience today.
According to inertial guidance and some math, she should be getting close. Just around a corner and…
Yup. Paranoia.
Someone had hung a something there, right across the duct.
A human would have probably missed it, relying on eyes, but Suvi at least had been listening with all her extra senses. It was a field of some sort, but not a defensive grid.
She moved just close enough that an arcshield would have sparkled as a warning before it zapped her.
Nothing.
And she realized that everything beyond it was invisible on every wavelength except visual.
Huh. Somebody had a clue. Not a full one, but a clue.
Suvi hovered low enough to look at the emitters on top. She was pretty sure it was a simple electromagnetic shield, designed to prevent someone like Javier from flying a remote control drone in here, exactly like she was doing.
After all, who would pour a full AI into something so petite?
Okay, truth or dare time.
Suvi landed with a soft kiss, back about a meter. If this was really just a shield, she would lose most of her systems passing through, and have to reboot everything. A dumbbot could go autonomous on the other side, but that was exactly where you needed smarts.
She rolled herself forward like a marble, all the way through the field.
Oh, that tickles.
And darkness.
Suvi took a deep breath and climbed under her flight console to crack open the breaker box. Most of the switches had tripped, just as she expected.
She took a few seconds to rocker each one back on line, rather than just pushing the reset button.
Make it all good now, rather than miss something having issues later.
She peeked at the next air vent. It looked right. Big lobby with red sofas and stuff, just like Javier had described it.
And empty. Height of the party time. Everyone should be at the luau chomping down on fresh-cooked pig.
She took the next left and looked down from her parapet.
One guard. Headphones plugged in. Scanning a dozen monitors and a mixing board-worth of gauges.
And bored.
If he were panicking, he would have slammed shut the air vent, just in case, and be pushing buttons frantically. I’m just a mouse in the cupboard.
Suvi skittered past and found the room she wanted next. Empty.
The Vault. Long wall of cubicles you could shut, with curtains over there. Couple of comfy chairs. Seriously secured door. Wall of box-drawer-thingees full-o-stuff.
This was where it had gotten iffy. Javier had thought everything would work, but he wasn’t four meters tall and couldn’t just climb up here and make sure she could get the angle she needed.
It was going to be close.
Highest leftest. Maybe. Hung up on something. Oh, screw coming through the metal grate. Can’t move it out of the way. Drop down, twist a little, bip back up. There.
Suvi took another deep breath, concentrating on her yoga sub-routines.
Oh, what the hell.
She cranked Sergei up loud enough she was pretty sure someone on the outside might see the shell physically vibrate.
She painted the room with a hard sensor pulse. A human might have actually felt that one, as the iron in their blood rotated for a microsecond. Then she spent nearly ten seconds doing signal processing, washing out noise.
Talk about an eternity.
Let’s see. Jewelry. Jewelry. Gun. Gold brick? Really? Hey, there’s the helmet. Jewelry.
They had three potential targets when she was done. And four on the far right she had been unable to scan from here.
And seriously, who the hell used mechanical keys anymore? On
e kiss from a computer and you could open any of them.
Oh, right. Any of them. Yeah, no. Key actually made more sense. You could still pick it or masterkey it if you had to, but nobody could upload an AI into the system and just trigger all the doors and stuff.
Suvi backed out of her corner and began to backtrack, careful to peek at the one guard, but he was still sitting pretty and occasionally flipping a button.
Pretty sneaky, lady. I’ll give you that. Ya went old school on me. Keys. But I can take you.
Book Eleven: Black Widows
Part One
Javier poured himself a highball glass of real Earth Scotch and added two cubes of ice, swirling the liquid just enough to start that magical, chemical reaction to turn paint thinner into caramelized smoke. He flipped on some modern dance pop synth and dialed it down to ambient noise.
Just enough.
He was just about to get stretched out and put his feet up when the door chime ran through the Westminster sequence politely.
Nothing good would come of it.
Sykora was off grinding her teeth and possibly shaking her ass. Probably in that order.
Suvi should be about a third of the way into the hoard of the dragon by now.
There was nobody else on this ship he wanted to talk to.
The chime rang again, insistent.
Javier sighed, already regretting.
“Room system,” he said in a dreary voice. “Activate hall monitor.”
The wall in front of him lit up with a slightly fish-eyed view of the corridor outside.
And a black widow.
She might be one of the most beautiful women he had ever met, but Javier had no doubt that the Khatum of Altai wasn’t here for intellectual stimulation.
No, he was most likely just the latest flavor of the week. Bored, rich aristocrats needed constant stimulation and degeneration.
Someone had once suggested that the alternative was actually turning their brains on and thinking, but too many would commit suicide, once they realized how dull and pointless their lives were. Usually, they just burned out on chemicals, ever-escalating the dosage, never addressing the underlying hollowness.
