Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  She chuckled. “I sync that. I spend more hours on flitter and shuttle upkeep than flying them. That’s why I rented…” Her voice trailed off and she frowned. She caught his eye. “Could you crack my business domain and leave no trace? It’s a standard commercial perimeter, nothing special.”

  He shrugged. “Probably. Why, do you think it’s been cracked?”

  “No, I want you to crack it so I can change my entire fleet’s status to ‘down for maintenance.’” She flattened her palms against her thighs. “I don’t want any of my contract pilots going near anything until someone checks every one of them for sabotage.”

  In his mind, Jess-the-bomber sent him a rare wave of approval for Kerzanna’s new prudence, even though Jess himself thought she was more worried about her pilots’ safety than her own personal security. “Give me your company ping ref and ten minutes.”

  He passed control of the flitter to her, remembering her opinion that autopilots were programmed by amateurs. He used his percomp to bounce a set of code fragments through a few hundred entry points before letting them assemble and slither through Drasmilik al Haq Mining Transport Service’s layered security. He took the opportunity to copy the financial account IDs she’d probably use to transfer funds to him later, so he’d know to let the transaction through. She’d hunt him down if he didn’t.

  “I’m in. Do you want to wirejack into my percomp, or do it manually?”

  “Manual,” she said, holding out her hand, palm up. “No offense, but I don’t jack into strange percomps.” She gave him a sly grin. “I bet yours is stranger than most.”

  He nodded and handed her his unit. He liked that she respected his skills, but he wished she trusted him. That would take time. Considering the twisted memory of him in her head, it was a wonder she was still speaking to him.

  She passed flitter control back to him and turned her attention to the percomp. In the meantime, he used the flitter console’s side net to check for traffic in the area, but prevented it from uploading any data to the artificial intelligence that ran the planetary traffic control system. The AI would alert a live person if it noticed their present vector was perpendicular to their claimed destination.

  “Done.” She rubbed her neck and leaned her head back with a wince. “While I’m in, can I do anything to stop intruders?”

  “Not with your setup. Branimir business security services are a cut above most planets, but they’re not state-of-the-art.” He tilted his head toward the percomp in her hand. “I could customize something for you.”

  She glanced at him then looked away, her face scrunched in thought. “Maybe later.” She focused on the interface for a few more moments. “Okay, so here’s another question. Can you tell if someone else has been here before us?” Her grim expression belied her calm tone. “Because my calendar for the week is as blank as my memory.” She showed him the display with no entries.

  He had the absurd impulse to pat her shoulder or hug her, anything to comfort her, but he knew the timing was bad. “Sorry. I’d need an hour or two for a forensic deep dive.”

  She sighed and handed him the percomp. “I assume you need to sign off.”

  He repaired the holes he’d made and exited her system, then put his percomp back on his wrist.

  She laced her fingers together in her lap, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then did it again. “I keep looking at my internal chrono because I have no frelling idea what time it is.” She pointed her chin toward the flitter’s console. “The local readout says we’re five hours from the Islands, but I know the spaceport is maybe three hours away.” She drew up one leg to put her foot on the seat and rest her elbow on her knee. “My last clear memory is waiting for the rental company to get me a new flitter, because they couldn’t find the one I’d reserved. That was a little after eight in the morning. Now it’s nearly fifteen hundred hours, and it feels like two days have gone by.” She shook her head and turned her seat to face him. “How’s your headache?”

  He must not have hidden it as well as he thought. “Gone.” He shrugged. “I don’t usually get them any more. Farm life is peaceful, and I don’t get many visitors, except Bhalodia’s lunatic family, who have boundary issues.” He twitched a small smile at her. “Today has been exceptionally challenging.”

  She smiled back. “That it has.” Her smile faded and she turned away from him.

  The silence felt less comfortable than it had before, but he didn’t know what to do about it. She deserved time to sleep and heal before they tackled the big issues between them, like what the hell had really happened four years ago, and if it was connected to who was manipulating them now, and why. Not to mention figuring out who wanted her dead.

  “Could I borrow your jacket?” She pointed her thumb over her shoulder toward the bins.

  “Sure.” He should have thought to ask if she was comfortable. He really needed to learn to think of other people again. She’d been good for him, though he hadn’t appreciated how much at the time.

  She swung out of her seat and headed toward the fresher, which was little more than a shallow cabinet for short people, but got the job done.

  Jess resolutely trained his eyes on the console, the sky, or his percomp, to keep from staring at her, wondering how much else had changed.

  She returned to her seat carrying a blanket with the rental company’s logo and wearing his jacket. She webbed herself in, then pulled the blanket over her and muttered something about a nap.

  To ward off the deluge of memories, he passed the time sending a ping to Bhalodia to hire him and his family to watch the farm and handle the spring planting. Bhalodia had managed the farm before Jess had moved to Branimir, so it would be in good hands. And even though he knew it would torque Kerzanna’s jets to overload when she found out, he created an interplanet escrow account in her name that only needed her biometrics and a challenge response she’d know for her to receive it. He owed her a lot more than a fluxed bank balance, but it was a start.

  At forty minutes out from the spaceport, he nudged her awake.

  “I’m connecting with the Branko traffic system in about five minutes.” He pointed to the foldout platform, where he’d put the unopened mealpack and another water pouch. “That might be better than anything we can find at the spaceport.” Branimir’s only spaceport, owned by the planetary government, was infamous for outrageous prices and horrible food.

  She triggered the mealpack’s heater. “What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Not now.”

  She snorted. “Still think mealpacks taste like cardboard, huh?”

  He lifted his chin superciliously and affected a prissy tone. “Jumpers have no standards.”

  She tossed him a cheeky grin. “Civilian.”

  She unsealed the mealpack and ate all of it, even the beige lumps that purported to be spinach dumplings.

  The traffic system connected to the flitter without complaint, meaning he’d successfully mimicked the planetary system’s transfer sequence.

  Another twenty minutes had them in the queue for one of the dozens of spaceport flitter stackers. They were old and slow, and looked like giant tractor treads, with lifts for humans to ride down to ground level. Branimir’s miserly planetary government rarely upgraded anything unless it broke. As he took control of the flitter and landed it on the stacker’s pad, Kerzanna carried their trash to the recycler, put the borrowed blanket back in its bin, and moved her bags up front.

  “I’ll put your coat in with the medical supplies.”

  “Thanks.” He waited for the stacker forks to grab the flitter so he could make note of the stacker slot number. He’d paid for a ten-day rental, but he could ping the rental company with the flitter’s location if it turned out they’d be gone longer.

  He started to remove the wirejack from the console, then belatedly remembered he needed to remove all evidence that he’d been tinkering around with the flitter’s control systems. That kind of sloppiness wasn’t like him.


  “Jess…” Her voice trailed off. She was kneeling right behind his seat, so he couldn’t see her face.

  “What?” He started tracing the redundant system logs, to make sure they weren’t stealthily recording things he didn’t want them remembering.

  “Forgive me,” she whispered, then pressed something cold and clammy to the exposed back of his neck.

  He jerked in surprise as the overlays in his head fought viciously to take control and respond to the perceived threat. He twitched spasmodically as he fumbled with the seat web, even though Jess-the-medic told him not to bother, because two dormo patches at once were already swamping his synapses and sending him to twilight.

  Her face appeared in his line of sight. Her expression was raw pain, regret, and determination as she palmed his cheek.

  “You don’t deserve to have your life go chaotic again because of me. Four years ago, you said separating would keep us alive.” She caressed his rapidly numbing cheek with her thumb. “I didn’t believe you then, but here we are, alive. You were right.”

  “Wasn’t…” His fingers found the seat web release. “Not… safe…”

  She gently pushed his flailing hands into his lap. “I’ll be careful. I’ve learned a lot. You taught me well.” She covered him with his jacket and tucked it under his chin.

  His peripheral vision narrowed. She leaned forward to kiss him gently on the forehead. “You deserve peace.”

  Jess was reaping the whirlwind for which he himself had sown the seeds when he’d abandoned her four years ago instead of combining their strengths. Although he’d given up his beliefs long ago, he suspected that somewhere, the relentless, judgmental god of Fate, the one that ruled the childhood he’d barely survived, was savoring the delayed justice.

  He lost his battle with shadowed fog and surrendered to oblivion.

  CHAPTER 7

  * Planet: Branimir * GDAT: 3242.002 *

  KERZANNA'S FIRST STOP in the spaceport was to use one of the ubiquitous net kiosks to fund an anonymous cashflow chip, then use it to buy an overpriced, disposable percomp. She sealed herself in a fresher stall and queried interstellar ship departures.

  A lot of people must have wanted off Branimir that evening, because regular berths were booked solid. Wincing at the cost, she booked the last business-class slot on a passenger liner that left in three hours. She was tempted to look into ship staff positions, but it wasn’t smart. While she could hide in the crowd of a big liner’s manifest of tens of thousands, she’d stand out as a pilot. For the first time since moving to Branimir, she regretted leaving her alter ego, Malory Solis, behind, because Solis’s bartender license would have been an effective cover.

  She looked at herself critically in the mirror. Her bruised and swollen face looked like she’d been in a fight, meaning she’d be memorable. She could hide her Jumper tattoos with her hair if she kept it loose. She was glad she hadn’t gotten around to going to the body parlor to have it cut. She wished she had some temporary color for her hair and eyes, and dermaskin to cover her tattoos, but quick-change cosmetics were another thing she’d left behind with Malory Solis.

  Kerzanna wasn’t presentable enough to wait in the passenger lounge area for an uplift shuttle, but she couldn’t stay in the fresher for hours, either. The port police were attuned to undesirable persons loitering in the paying passenger facilities. They’d ask pointed questions and run an ID check, meaning she may as well announce her presence to the entire city. The safest place for her, although safe was a relative word, was in Branimir’s dirty little secret, the slums below.

  The spaceport was built on a geological anomaly, a series of caves and a massive cavern of a volcano that blew its top millions of years before humans discovered and terraformed the planet. The original settlement company promised to build it out as an interstellar ship dock, but never finished it. Smugglers and squatters moved in and illegally carved out more nooks and crannies, and the slums were born. She only knew about them because she’d lived in them the first two months she’d been on Branimir, until she could reestablish her real identity and get funds transferred into usable accounts.

  Central Galactic Concordance foundation law said people were free to move to or from any member planet, but it didn’t say the planets had to make it easy for people to take up residence. Branimir went out of its way to discourage immigration and prevent non-citizens from buying property or businesses. Flat rentals in Branko, the capital city that sprawled around the spaceport, were highly regulated and expensive. People without money, jobs, or friends on Branimir mostly ended up in the “transient layover district,” as spaceport officials called it. Residents called it untenboden, or the downbelow. Port police called it the shithole.

  She lifted her faded green top to look at the portable bone regenerator still adhered to her sternum. Jess had said six hours, so she didn’t need it any longer, but it was easier to leave it than figure out how to make this model retract and not leave holes. Luckily, her breasts were compact, with smallish nipples, so they wouldn’t be jiggling around, drawing the eye of people who liked such things. Even so, she fished her hooded orange jacket out of her luggage and pulled it on. The frayed hem of her top hung well below it, giving her a scruffy, indigent look. Her pants would have to go, because despite the rips and stains, the fabric was good, and they fit too perfectly. She swapped them out for her baggy blue workout pants, but kept her work boots on. They were good protection, and ten minutes walking through dusty subterranean hallways would make them look old and worn.

  She pulled the hood up, pulled her hair forward to cover her skulljack and tattoos, and slouched like a woman who didn’t want to be tall. When coupled with downcast eyes, occasional jerkiness, and mumbling that suggested she was chemmed, it was a surprisingly effective disguise. She’d learned it from watching Jess, especially when the paranoid part of him was in charge. He preferred corners and shadows, and somehow made people overlook the even taller, very handsome man.

  No more thinking about Jess until she was done with her priority list and safely away, luring whoever was after her away from him. It had been too frelling hard to leave him in the flitter. Two dormo patches would keep him down for four hours or more, and then he could go home and be safe. Her chest felt like someone had hollowed it out with a jagged rock.

  She slung the straps of both her bag and her case over one shoulder and eased out of the fresher. She wandered seemingly aimlessly until she ended up by the north bank of storage lockers. In a lull between other customers, she stashed her equipment case quickly, paid for four weeks’ rental, and keyed it to her biometric and a passcode. The case was distinctive, and she doubted she’d need to test mineral composition anytime soon. She shouldered her bag and slunk away, keeping to the edges of crowds and less convenient hallways, where the always-murmuring, full-wall advertisements that responded to human movement sometimes froze or blacked out.

  Next on her list was a weapon, because she needed an equalizer. She was no longer a healthy woman with ramped reflexes and a hundred more years of life ahead of her, she was an ex-Jumper slowed by the waster’s disease that was killing her, and she wanted every precious day she had left. She’d have preferred a hand beamer or a small railgun, but that kind of firepower was expensive and drew too much attention, and needlers were fussy and too indiscriminate to use in crowds. Her compromise choice was a shockstick, a strong, flexible baton that stunned, and was good for close-in physical combat. If she was lucky, the same stall was still selling them in Level S-4 by the giant northeast solar reflector tube.

  The narrow-eyed gaze of a blue-uniformed port police officer told her that her cover of anonymity was fraying. She drifted to the nearest stairs. Lifts and escalators were for the paying customers.

  Four flights down put her at the first of the transition floors between the commercial transport levels and the carved-out caves of the slums below. They also served as the unofficial marketplace for micro businesses and purveyors of less-
than-legal goods and services.

  She re-slung her bag across her so it protected her abdomen, then sat on a bench—the hulk of a burned-out gravcart—to disguise her height while she got the lay of the land. As usual, unaffiliated mercs hung around in clumps, nodding hopefully at well-dressed corporate types and staring daggers at the competition. The density of the makeshift stalls seemed thinner, and she didn’t recognize anyone.

  After scoping out the area, she got up from the bench, assumed her slouch and mumbled her way through the maze of stalls, listening for news and keeping a wary eye out for opportunists who mistook her for easy prey.

  “…seventeen is my final offer…”

  “…judge zeroed her accounts and sent her to the penal system for restitution…”

  “…dumkopf got himself killed in the popper raid over nothing worth dying for, and now his kid’s being sent off-planet to some…”

  The slum dwellers called the port police “poppers,” who in turn called the slum dwellers a colorful variety of less pleasant names, starting with “subbies,” for “subhumans,” a formerly common and still rude epithet for minders. It was no farkin’ wonder some minders chose to hide their talents from their friends or the CPS Testing Centers. She sure as hell would have, if she’d had any, since the CPS would have immediately forced her out of the Jumper Corps and into the Minder Corps.

  She narrowly avoided a running child and an angry adult pursuer, and ordered herself to quit daydreaming and find the shockstick vendor. Unfortunately, the stalls near the solar collector had been reduced to shards of debris, and the locals avoided the area like it was radioactive. It had probably been a casualty of the recent police raid.