Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  Finally, the white-covered feet were together and facing away from her. She couldn’t wait any longer, or shivering would give her away, and her half-cybernetic knee might fail. She flicked on her aftermarket ramp-up and rode the rush of power flushing through her Jumper systems as she gripped Renner’s unexpected gift, the handle of the open multitool with a sharp blade. Slowly, so she wouldn’t rustle the petroplastic, she raised herself to a sitting position, then got her feet under her. She waddled one step backward, then another, grateful Renner hadn’t taken her socks. Her luck ran out when one of her would-be dismemberers turned and noticed their package had arisen from the dead.

  She launched herself up and sideways to avoid his grasping lunge. The man with goggles swore and reached for his waist, but the coverall blocked his fingers. He spun and fumbled for something in a case on a table. The first man tripped on a fold of the petroplastic, giving her the opening she needed to quickly turn and side kick his unprotected face. Her attacker went down in a tangle of flailing limbs, causing her to leap awkwardly aside to avoid stumbling, but she slipped when she landed and lost the multitool in her effort to regain her footing. She took two long strides toward the man in goggles to grab his shoulders to pull him backward. A beamer ray scorched a line up the wall and onto the ceiling. She grabbed his wrist and squeezed until something crunched. He cried out and dropped the beamer. She spun him around and kneed his jaw, then flung him backward on top of his companion. She grabbed the heavy portable bone laser from the case and thumped the shooter’s head, thereby ensuring the man would stay down and the laser would need repair. She scooped the biometric-protected beamer off the floor and hurled it with ramped-up strength to shatter against the far wall.

  She shivered with cold and adrenalin as she picked up Renner’s multitool. Her sports bra and socks would be poor protection against the weather, but at least she was alive to feel the discomfort. She pulled a large, clear trash bag from one of the crates and used the multitool’s blade to cut rough holes for her arms and head, then pulled it over herself. She left the building through the side door, staying only long enough to make sure it closed behind her.

  The empty, gently glowing road and walkway were shiny wet from the light, misting rain. She tried to orient herself based on the holomap of the area Renner had displayed using the hauler’s onboard comp, but all she could see were tall buildings and reflections of the glass roadway’s markings. She pushed her hair back as she walked as quickly as she could on the rain-slick surface to the closer intersection to her left and crossed it diagonally, then turned right. She locked away the awful, sickening memory of Jess collapsing and focused on her survival checklist. She couldn’t hold the ramp-up much longer, and she needed safe shelter for a few hours. Her life, and probably Renner’s, depended on her completely disappearing. Based on Davidro’s questions and side comments, he didn’t yet have a trace on Jess, but Tuzan’s shadow railway for escaping minders was blown, or soon would be. Davidro hadn’t learned anything about it from her because, miraculously, the mental shields she’d barely learned to operate had held up against sustained assaults from a high-level telepath, a shielder, and a cleaner. She had a vice-like headache, but her mind was her own. She wished she knew who to thank.

  The ground-level businesses on this block were shuttered tight, but animated, colorful reflections at the intersection ahead suggested establishments that stayed open at night, likely frequented by people who might remark on a tall, bloody, half-naked woman in their midst. She started to speed up so she could sprint across the intersection, when she noticed a narrow, black doorway that gaped open. From the smell, even through the light rain, something had burned. The sound of an aircar overhead made her decision for her, and she slipped inside.

  The wet floor was solid, but the acrid stench pervading the place made her eyes water, which hurt like hell in the swollen one. She used the weak light on Renner’s multitool to pick a path through the piles of burned debris. She listened intently as she moved farther in, wanting to avoid a territory fight with any sheltering street rats. She supposed she was one now, too.

  A dull cramp in her stomach warned that her ramp-up was running on empty, so she released it. She stumbled and clenched her jaw against the flood of pain messages that her ramp-up had masked. Along with everything else, her right foot felt like she’d fractured it in the fight. At least the cold, wet sock would keep the swelling down.

  A black hulk in front of her turned out to be a slagged piece of machinery. Behind it, she found a doorway leading to a smaller room. Fatigue made her hand shake as she shined the light on scorched, deformed crates and a relatively unscathed padded heavy gravcart. The room smelled like an incinerator, but it was dry, and the gravcart was a damn sight better than resting on the sooty floor. She fished several charred segments of insulation out of the debris piles and took them to the small room. She folded her thankfully still attached limbs onto the gravcart, pulled the insulation pieces over her, and let exhaustion take her to oblivion.

  CHAPTER 24

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.023 *

  JESS BLINKED AND rubbed his neck, trying to keep his focus on the percomp in front of him. His brain ached from the inside; the new, mysteriously acquired mental shields felt raw and weird, like replacement teeth implants. Even his strongest bleedovers were subdued. The events of the past eighteen hours still had his head spinning.

  “You’re supposed to be resting.” Tuzan’s exasperation was plain as he came in and put a sack of food down on the counter near where Jess sat in front of a large display and two linked percomps. “Watching the trends isn’t going to make them converge any faster.” He took his dripping coat to hang it near the front entry and turned on the solardry.

  “Couldn’t sleep. Medic exam tables are hard. And short.” And they didn’t have cats or Jumpers in them, either.

  When Tuzan returned, already barefoot because he hated shoes, Jess pointed to the holo display to his left. “The sniffers found another unmonitored interstellar comm relay, so I cracked it and added our packet.” Incoming ships sometimes forgot to turn off their packet drop comm systems, and Jess was exploiting them, based on what he’d learned from the Faraón Azul. The more off-planet data sources they could seed, the harder it would be for the CPS to kill them all. The packets contained his clouds of unsegmented code that would temporarily assemble long enough to inject damning Charisma data into vulnerable systems, then fall apart and drift, looking for the next system. Tuzan not only understood it, he’d given the code snippets the ability to recognize each other and repair the inevitable coding replication errors that crept in.

  He glanced up at the old-fashioned clock on the clinic wall that displayed a flat map of the planet, with creeping daylight and night zones to represent the passage of time. Galactic Date and Time said it was more than halfway through the day, but it was the break of dawn in Ridderth. He swiveled his chair to face Tuzan, who was lifting containers out of the damp, waterproof sack and putting them on the counter. “Targeting journalists with the Charisma data was a good idea. They like to gossip, so it’s showing up in least thirty more feeds, none of them our insertions. I also tracked the reporter, Charrascos, who broke the Mabingion Purge story. She’s been all over the galaxy before and since then, and has a lot of prime bylines for investigative stories. Guess who returned to Ridderth the day before the Faraón Azul limped into Mabingion system space, and published first on the planetary headquarters debacle?” What had started out as garden-variety mismanagement of a public works project had blossomed into a juicy tale of greed and corruption that seriously threatened the economy of the whole continent for the next thirty years.

  “Let’s hope Charisma is her type of scandal.” Tuzan pushed a hot cup toward Jess and took the other one himself. “How’s your head?”

  “Improving,” Jess said, more out of optimism than certainty. “How’s yours?” Tuzan had taken a full stunner shot the day before, right before Jess had gone down.
Stunners temporarily paralyzed the voluntary nervous system for a few minutes, but were particularly effective against most minders because they played havoc with their talents for hours.

  “Clear as ever.” He set his cup down and put his hands in the pockets of the vest he wore over loose, baggy pants that weren’t in style but were perfect for him. He looked exotic even when he wasn’t trying. “The shadow railway is closed for now, but we haven’t connected with all the volunteers yet. My sister says we still have ‘guests’ in the system.”

  Something in Tuzan’s face made Jess realize he’d been so focused on his own problems that he’d been oblivious to the needs of others again. Tuzan was worried. “Tell me about your sister.”

  “She’s a CPS refugee, like me. The railway was her idea. She doesn’t get out much, and it gives her the chance to feel like she’s making a difference.” Tuzan’s too-bright smile covered more complex emotions that Jess couldn’t read. “She’s not good at saying ‘no.’”

  “Sorry,” Jess said, feeling guilty. Jess-the-bomber persuaded Tuzan that they had to assume that the shadow railway was in jeopardy because Kerzanna had been forced to talk, or that her shields had failed. Jess covered the wave of despair that threatened to swamp him by reaching for the coffee Tuzan had brought.

  Tuzan said she’d taken the shields well, but only had ten minutes to practice with them before two men had stuffed her into the untraceable medevac unit. Jess’s motley fleet of cameras had recorded the action, but had been too far away to read the capsule’s designator or discern faces.

  Luckily for Jess, Tuzan had managed to get a distress call out to a telepath friend in the diner, who stopped the man trying to shove Jess’s inert body into a serving cart. A telepathic interrogation of their attacker revealed he was a CPS Minder Corps sifter who had recognized Kerzanna because of a detailed description in an official detain-and-restrain order for her, but planned to get the reward money first, then tell the CPS where she was. When he’d made his move and found Jess, who he also recognized, he’d thought it was his lucky day.

  Tuzan was vague on the details of what happened after that. The attacker was neutralized, which Jess took to mean he’d been cleaned or twisted. Tuzan had called in favors to have Jess awakened by a healer and stim drugs, which Jess remembered, because it was about as fun as being struck by lightning, and for Jess to get full minder shields, which he didn’t remember at all because Tuzan had thoroughly cleaned the memory. Tuzan was able to show him how to use the shields because he had them, too. Despite his deep curiosity, Jess didn’t ask for more. He understood more than most about the need to keep secrets, and he didn’t want to force his new friend to lie to him.

  Since then, Jess had spent every minute searching for evidence of where Kerzanna’s capsule had gone, and the location of Dixon Davidro’s temporary base of operations, because he’d bet anything the two were connected. Kidnapping instead of killing her meant Davidro wanted to interrogate her first. From what Jess recalled, Davidro had several contractors who would be delighted to inflict pain on his orders. Kerzanna’s ignorance was as much a shield as the new ones in her mind, but Davidro behaved erratically when he couldn’t control things, and once a sharp professional journalist like Charrascos dug in, the Charisma project’s secrecy didn’t stand a chance. Every hour without any news about Kerzanna added to the icy weight in his stomach. The coffee tasted like acid.

  Tuzan took the cup from him and gave him one of the containers. “You’ll be no good to anyone if you run yourself into the ground. Eat.” He handed Jess a fork. “Now.”

  Jess complied with bad grace, bolting the food, while letting Jess-the-bomber in to help him think of other places he could look for Davidro and his circus. He owed Tuzan a lot, from calling in multiple favors to figure out how to revive Jess from the Kameleon failsafe shutdown, to finding a closed-for-vacation private medical clinic for Jess to stay in, to personally delivering high-powered comps and warm food. Not to mention, dropping everything to help Jess by using nova-hot skills with comps and networks that were probably better than his own.

  Jess fed the empty containers to the recycler, then found Tuzan in the office he’d temporarily commandeered. Tuzan’s habit was to stand and pace as he worked. Jess deliberately moved close and put his hands on the smaller man’s strong shoulders. People tended to shy away from cleaners and twisters, meaning they didn’t get much physical contact, and Jess had the impression Tuzan thrived on it. “Thank you. Sorry I’m a flatliner jerk.”

  “You’re welcome, and forgiven.” His face lit up with a wide smile. “I’d kiss you, but I think you’re a one-lover-at-a-time kind of man, so I won’t tease.” His eyes twinkled as he rose up to the balls of his feet, which put the top of his head even with Jess’s collarbone. “Besides, I’d need to stand on a chair to be tall enough.”

  Jess smiled, but couldn’t hold it as he stepped back. “It’s only ever been her.” He looked up with a sigh. “I wish I’d told her that.”

  Tuzan’s expression became determined. “Then let’s do our damnedest to see you get the chance.”

  Jess stood and stretched his suddenly screaming back. It had probably been complaining for the last hour, but he’d only just noticed it. The wall clock said it was well past local noon, and he’d barely budged from the clinic chair, sending out new sniffers whenever he came across another social web whose members might know anything. Jess-the-bomber helped him design the algorithms that pinged alerts when they found promising patterns in the vast oceans of ephemeral data. One unexpected benefit of having his Kameleon reset button pushed, as Tuzan had characterized it, was the bleedover headaches were less intense than before. It probably helped that all the bleedovers loved the idea of having minder shields, even though Tuzan had warned that the shields might fail if a top-level sifter could get past them and trip the failsafe again, or because of some other hidden surprise in his Kameleon bioware.

  He used the fresher and cleaned his mouth and teeth with the odd-flavored sample squib of orajet he found in the cabinet, then poured himself another glass of water.

  He jumped when Tuzan’s head appeared around the corner. “Got him!” Tuzan gleefully made a beckoning motion. Jess hastily put down the glass and followed him to the office.

  The room was full of holo displays. “I remembered something you said, or maybe it was in Neirra’s memories, that Davidro is a creature of habit, and monstrously egotisical. And he’s tightfisted. I’d been thinking he was deviously clever and thorough like you, with your completely new IDs for each occasion, but that takes time and money.” Tuzan pointed toward the big holo display. “A ‘Dave Dixon’ rented a business condo for a week, but left the next day and demanded a refund. The owner is a janitorial customer of mine.” Tuzan rotated the holo. “Meanwhile, a ‘Dax David’ rented a ground-level warehouse a couple of blocks away and complained about having to pay for a whole month when only a week was needed, and yesterday, a ‘David Rodix’ rented a corporate short-stay townhouse with six bedrooms in the high-rise around the corner from the warehouse. One of my staff has a second job there as a maintenance tech. The two women who dealt with the site manager were as corporate as they come. Their coworkers were anything but, including a big man with a badly scarred neck.”

  “Sounds like Davidro’s circus.” Jess memorized the address of the warehouse, because Jess-the-bomber insisted Kerzanna would be there, rather than the townhouse. “Send me any data you can—cashflow accounts, ping refs, whatever—for my tracers.”

  Late the previous night, Jess had vetted and selected several discreet merc companies that could mobilize quickly. He’d also discovered that his and Kerzanna’s primary financial accounts on Branimir had been frozen, undoubtedly Davidro’s work. Fortunately, one of Jess’s first acts of rebellion during his Kameleon service had been to siphon funds away from his official, CPS-monitored financial accounts and invest them elsewhere, because his childhood had taught him the devastating cost of being at someone else�
��s mercy. Seeing how Davidro treated his contractors in the later years had made him redouble his efforts to ensure his financial freedom. The temporary unavailability of his Branimir accounts was a minor inconvenience.

  Jess all but ran back to his comp setup in the clinic area to rent transportation and send the requests for fast bids to the merc companies, using various untouched but well-established and well-funded identities he’d created just for this. He also checked the other arrangements he’d been readying, such as a private medic clinic, and multiple avenues out of Ridderth and off the planet. As much as he disliked Mabingion, he was now grateful for its status as a major transportation hub. The CPS would find it difficult to interdict outgoing traffic in time.

  He ordered his ragtag collection of stolen camera eyes to fly to the warehouse location, but it would take them at least thirty minutes to arrive, and he’d probably lose some to accidents and equipment failures along the way. He kicked himself for not thinking of buying and programming his own fleet. And for not remembering Davidro’s habits. Once his handler had decided Jess was zero-witted, the man had been carelessly lax in conducting non-Kameleon business in Jess’s presence.

  He went to Tuzan’s office again. “Where would I go to hire local crew for a hostile pickup and delivery job?”