Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  Renner found a bench in the small, ten-square-meter green patch that someone had audaciously labeled as a “park” and ensconced himself on it, as if bound and determined to enjoy a day outside without the ubiquitous rain. Dixon had trained him to stand, so sitting for any length of time hurt his hips and back, but the bench gave him a clear view of the building’s ground-level entrance across the busy roadway. Wherever he could, he zapped the image-capturing abilities of the annoying flying cameras that swarmed like mosquitoes throughout the media district. He hated having his picture taken. His collar ratcheted, but he hardly noticed. He was testing the limit of his talent, to see if he could insinuate a tendril into the building and use the building’s current to feel for Charrascos’s unique energy signature. He couldn’t tell if it worked or not, but it helped pass the time.

  At a few minutes before fifteen hundred, he felt the building’s systems energize. It took him a minute to realize it was some sort of alarm. If the fire suppression system failed, people would evacuate, and maybe he’d have his chance at Charrascos after all. He stood and stretched, then took the pedestrian bridge to the other side of the road. By the time he got to the building, a few groups of people had exited, but not as many as he’d have thought. He smelled fresh blood from his neck. He pulled up his scarf and drifted toward the closest group.

  “…three drills in thirty days isn’t going to…”

  “…bomb warning tone sounds just like the fire tone…”

  “…don’t care… gets me out of the building…”

  The stream of people exiting the wide double doors increased. He moved to the side of the building and leaned against the wall, head down but talent up, feeling for Charrascos. What he got instead was the feel of two recognizable energy sources, moving closer from the walkway behind him. More tendrils of his talent told him two people carrying multiple weapons were headed his way. Energy weapons weren’t common in Ridderth. He chanced a brief glance up but didn’t see the police uniforms he’d expected. Instead, he saw a man and a woman in tourist clothes, who slowed when they came upon the first clusters of people standing on the walkway. Their body language said they were more alert than they pretended, and their upright stance suggested military or mercenary. The woman, subvocalizing into an almost invisible earwire, slowed to a stop almost directly in front of him. She grabbed her companion’s sleeve.

  “Let’s wait here,” she said.

  The man stopped and turned. He pulled a tablet-style percomp from out of the small bag strapped across his chest and looked at its display, but didn’t power it up.

  From fifteen meters away, the unique energy signature he’d been waiting for exited the Novo Granica building.

  The man put his tablet away and reached into the pocket of his puffy pink vest. The unmistakable signature of a beamer weapon lit up Renner’s talent. A moment later, he felt a second beamer power up from inside the woman’s frilly jacket pocket. A few seconds later, they began purposefully walking toward the Novo Granica entrance. They were clearly a hit team, probably mercs.

  It would be just Renner’s luck that their target was Charrascos. She’d made new enemies with her stories on construction kickbacks to politicians. The mercs presented another dilemma. If he let them do the job, Charrascos would be dead, but the well-known reporter’s splashy death would be the opposite of quiet and discreet, and Dixon had emphasized no headlines. If Renner intervened, he risked calling attention to himself in a crowd of curious journalists, and the scars on his neck alone made him memorable. After a moment, he pushed himself off the wall and checked that his scarf was still in place as he followed the man and woman. He sent tendrils of his talent to search for other weapons in the crowd, and found one other powered beamer signature, moving toward the door from the opposite end of the walkway. Mercs relied heavily on technology as a force multiplier, so maybe he could defuse the situation. He reached out to the farther solo merc and pulled the stored energy out of every power source he could find, including the communications earwire. He did the same for the pair he followed. He could tell the moment they lost their communications because they both faltered and reached up to tap their earwires. He risked moving closer.

  “Abort or go?” the woman asked.

  “Go. We can’t leave Trout hanging. I’ll track Cha… the target.” The man pulled out his tablet again, then swore a vile oath in Arabic. “My percomp is dead.”

  The two mercs slowed even more. After a moment, the woman said, “So is mine. New kind of targeted tech suppressor?”

  “Too many unknowns,” the man replied, then shook his head. “I say we find Trout and abort.”

  “Agreed,” said the woman. The pair abruptly veered right and picked up speed. Renner stayed on his straighter course and tracked them with a tendril of his talent. He pulled up his scarf as he extended another tendril, trying to find the merc named Trout again.

  He ran into someone and reflexively murmured a raspy apology. His talent flared unexpectedly. He ducked his head and doggedly sped up to a fast walk, because he’d just run into Charrascos herself. Calling himself brain dead in a dozen languages for not keeping a tracking tendril on her, he nearly ran into a tall, beefy man with the electrical signature of the missing merc. Trout’s companions evidently hadn’t found him in time to stop him from going after Charrascos.

  Dammit, this was the clusterfuck he’d been hoping to avoid. He stepped around an oblivious clump of people, then turned so he could watch with his peripheral vision. The mercs were pissing him off, because Dixon would probably blame Renner for their meddling.

  Trout pulled his beamer out from under his coat and dropped his hand to his side. He was smart enough to avoid looking directly at his target, but his body language said he was primed for action.

  From out of nowhere, a young woman from Charrascos’s usual coterie of coworkers grabbed onto Trout’s left arm. He reacted instantly, raising his beamer to shoot her torso. He didn’t even get the chance to find out that it had no power, because another of the coworkers, a slender, bearded man, reacted with blinding speed and knocked the beamer out of the merc’s hand, then followed up with an elbow jab to the throat. Trout’s knees buckled, and the slender man, obviously a ramper, held the larger merc up by main force.

  People in the crowd were starting to register the events. Renner stepped back and to the side, then turned and walked away at a leisurely pace, not the quick march his instincts urged on him.

  He figured his failure in achieving Dixon’s objectives was worth the possible recriminations, because he’d learned that whoever was providing security for Charrascos was subtle and thorough, and obviously had no prejudice against hiring minders. Trout’s fate could easily have been his if he’d been similarly rash. He’d have to come up with another way to get Charrascos, who was probably a minder herself, if he wanted to survive the encounter.

  A vibration on his arm startled him. He’d forgotten about the percomp. He rounded the corner at the end of the block, then waited for a lull in foot traffic to read the ping telling him to call in immediately.

  He found a nearby ground-level parking garage and used his talent to kill a monitoring camera eye, then ducked into a corner and pinged. Dixon answered.

  “Hello, Mr. Renner. You haven’t ended Charrascos yet, have you?” In the holo, Dixon looked happy and relaxed.

  “No,” said Renner warily, wondering what had brought back the old, confident Dixon.

  “Good.” He beamed broadly. “I want you to come home immediately. One of our new friends caught our elusive fish, and we’ll have him soon. I’m having him delivered to the warehouse. Xan and Zerrell will find him a much easier nut to fracture.”

  “Do you really need to interrogate Orowitz?” asked Renner. “Kill him and let’s get out of here.”

  “We don’t need to be hasty. The story Charrascos published today proves her Charisma information couldn’t have come from us. It turns out a project special investigator has been here for days,
tracking the problem.” Dixon waved airily. “While I’d like to be on the next interstellar out of the Mabingion system tonight, we must be thorough.” Dixon’s thoroughness usually correlated to the proximity of his bosses. “I still need to know how Nevarr found out about the project, and if we’re lucky, how a non-minder got those very interesting shields.” He smiled and made grabby motions with his fingers. “I want me some.”

  Renner didn’t like it, but Dixon would dig in his heels if he thought Renner was raining on his parade. “What does Georgie say?”

  “Oh, Georgie’s been much better ever since I told him Nevarr was dead. He even had a shower this morning.” Dixon looked thoughtful. “But just to be safe, I’ll mention Orowitz to him and see what he says.” He smiled again. “Once we clean up the little Charisma mess we left back in Lhionine, the fugitive minder ring information will be my ticket to finding a new project suited to my skills.”

  All Renner could do was nod. When Dixon was giddy with imagined future glories, there was no denting his confidence in his own judgment. Renner was afraid he knew the future all too well. He was dismally aware that his only good deed to honor the friendship of Neirra Varemba and the courage of the Jumper had likely doomed them all. After being dragged all over the galaxy, it was darkly poetic that he’d end up dying on the planet of his birth.

  CHAPTER 27

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.024 *

  KERZANNA HAD NEW sympathy for the undead.

  She’d done all she could think of to let Jess know she was alive and trying to connect with him, but so far, absolute zero, and it was breaking her heart. It was too dangerous to stay in Ridderth another night. The “Erielle Courchesne” ID might not be on anyone’s scanners, but as it turned out, Kerzanna Nevarr was.

  Some of it was her own fault, for going back to the Canals, because it was the only place she could think of where a beat-up, off-the-grid ex-Jumper could blend in. She’d nearly been seen by someone who knew “Eri” from the charity shelter where she’d asked for a cleaning job, and nearly recognized by an old volunteer for the Minder Veterans Advocates group who thought she looked like Kerzanna. She’d managed to duck one and mislead the other, but the longer she stayed, the thinner her cover got. The reserve on her emergency anonymous cashflow chip could get her a body makeover or a one-way trip off Mabingion, but not both.

  The rare clear day in Ridderth drew people outdoors, meaning that instead of walking, she’d had to stick to sitting in the back of the ground-level metro as she made her way across the city. It was just as well, as she was still recovering from the evening of torture and miraculous escape.

  After awakening in the burned out building yesterday morning, she’d accessed the well-hidden compartment in her cybernetic thigh to get the cashflow chip she’d carried with her ever since she’d left Ridderth the last time. She’d saved it all those years because it had been Jess’s last gift to her before leaving.

  Ridderth abounded with street kids, because the incompetent city government tanked at providing the Concordance-mandated social services safety net. She paid a too-thin, sharp-eyed boy with a recycled shirt, coat, and boots for buying the same for her. The coat’s concealment let her ride the cheapest ground metro to the Canals district, where she’d scrounged a scarf to cover her tattoos, eaten three charity surplus mealpacks, and found a cashflow-only, no-questions-asked medic to treat the worst of her injuries, including the broken bones in her foot and her fractured cheekbone. The bruise-wash ports and portable bone knitters made her look like an evil cyborg from one of the popular adventure sagas, but they did the job. She spent the rest of that day acquiring a disposable percomp to read the newstrends and put out virtual breadcrumbs for Jess’s algorithms to find. She also acquired weapons, because she was still just an ex-Jumper dying of waster’s disease. Probably.

  That afternoon, she’d visited the succession of locations her messages said she’d be at for given time ranges. She’d used a variety of public social nets and the simple “job hunt” references, but adding names and references only she and Jess would know, hoping he’d think to look for them. It was the best she could do. Devious thinking wasn’t in her star lane, much less the subtle data games that would get Jess’s attention the way his tricks had led Tuzan to them. Each failure weighed on her, and added to the fear that Jess might be dead, or have been caught by Davidro. The universe didn’t care whether or not she and Jess stayed together this time, but she wanted it—wanted him—for whatever time was left to her.

  Her internal chrono said it was time to go into the last pub on her list. If Jess or Tuzan didn’t show, she’d take her worldly possessions—the messenger bag slung crosswise over her shoulder and the clothes on her back—to the spaceport and buy an empty berth to almost anywhere but there. Leaving Jess again was the second-to-last thing she wanted to do, but getting either of them caught or killed was the last.

  Kerzanna had never been in this particular pub before, and a second after she passed beyond the boring entryway, she was sorry she’d chosen it. The old-fashioned name, Windrose Point, was innocuous enough, but the decor and memorabilia said it was frequented by Jumpers, which significantly increased her chances of drawing the kind of attention she couldn’t afford. Jumpers were a chummy, inclusive lot. Even if her currently black hair and eyes, and fashionably blue-tinted skin, kept her from being recognized as Subcaptain Nevarr, who’d trained hundreds of pilots back in the day and pulled off a semi-famous combat miracle or two, some well-meaning Jumper would try to buy her a beer or engage her in a darts game, just to make sure she was okay. Jumpers looked after their own, because no one else would.

  Still, this pub was her last hope for finding Jess. She might or might not be the farkin’ Jumpers’ hope, but Jess was hers.

  She made her way through the tables, noting the layout as she went and looking for anyone familiar, then asked the bartender for the freshers. She took the long way to look at the rest of the patrons and maybe a quiet booth, but the interior designer favored big communal tables. She stayed in the fresher as long as she dared, then found a barstool at the end of the bar and ordered fizzy water with lime. She didn’t bother to hide her Jumper tattoos, because she still tanked at undercover work, and she’d give herself away in five minutes. She acknowledged friendly nods, and pretended she was just waiting for a buddy, but it wasn’t in her to be rude to a fellow Jumper.

  “Love the blue,” said the tall bartender with a neck full of Jumper tattoos, denoting thirty years of service, and the intention tremor of a man in Stage Four waster’s. He leaned closer. “Hides the bruises well.”

  The subtext of his observation was to ask if she was in trouble and needed help.

  “I’m good,” she said with a smile, then shook her head ruefully. “Too slow to get out of a bar fight that turned into a melee.” All ex-Jumpers knew “slow” meant waster’s disease.

  The bartender nodded and started to speak, but got called away.

  She kept her eye out for the buddy she told everyone she was meeting. At the end of the hour, after being approached three more times by people worried about her bruises, and propositioned for hot-connect sex in an autocab, she pretended to receive a ping that said her buddy had gone to the wrong pub. She pulled on her coat and bag, waved a casual farewell to her new friends, and slipped out the pub’s back door and into the early night.

  She stopped a moment at the top of the ramp to marvel at the stars visible in the sky. It was such a rare event in Ridderth that people were probably out on the rooftops and airpads, flooding the social nets with vids and stills of the stars. She’d seen millions of stars from all vantage points, but they still sparked a bit of wonder in her, the same wonder that had made her chafe at the restricting comfort of her family and sent her out into the universe to look for her place in it. And she was about to create a new exploration log.

  She pulled her scarf out of her pocket to wrap around her neck and hide her tattoos, then ordered her suddenly dragging
feet to get a move on to take her to the nearest transportation stand to order an autocab to the spaceport.

  A small scrape of metal against metal said she might not be alone in the alleyway.

  She casually turned away from the light to put her face in shadow and slid her hand into her large pocket to grab the handle of the concealed shockstick.

  A voice spoke in the darkness. “I hoped you’d come out the opposite way you went in.”

  Her knees threatened to buckle, but she was a Jumper, dammit. “This very clever man I once knew said it was a good habit to get into.”

  She stepped off the ramp toward the voice and watched Jess emerge from the shadows. He pushed his hood back, then flicked a glance toward the bag hanging at her side. “Going somewhere?”

  She held out her hand to him. “Not without you, if you’ll have me.”

  He closed the distance between them and gathered her into his arms. She melted against him, and the imbalance she’d been feeling righted itself.

  “I love you, Subcaptain Nevarr.” His breath tickled her hair and sent a shiver along her back and thighs. “I always have.”

  She pulled back enough to cup his face in her hands, delighting in the chance to look into his familiar mismatched eyes. “I love you, Just Jess. I never stopped.” She kissed him softly, intending it to be a pledge, but the smell and taste of him instantly put her in desperate need of more. He returned her kiss with interest, pulling her hard up against his solid warmth. They only broke off the kiss for need of oxygen.

  “How about we continue this someplace else?” she asked. “Someplace horizontal.”

  “We have to take care of something first.” He brushed a light caress over her still swollen cheekbone, worry crossing his face. “How are you feeling?”

  She leaned into his touch. “Green go, as long as we’re together.”

  He kissed her, nibbling at her lower lip. She met his tongue with hers and reveled in the heady masculinity of him. A rush better than adrenaline fluxed through her. He groaned as he pulled away from her. “I’ve dreamed of this for days. Weeks. Of kissing you, of feeling you. Loving you.” He sighed. “My timing tanks.”