Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3

by Luther M. Siler

  "I had a feed into his base," Aisra said. "I was watching them. My son. I woke up and everything was cut. What happened?"

  "Like I said, he seems to have been on to you," Rhundi said. "A backdoor into your backdoor, or something. I don't know, I don't speak hacker."

  Darsi started laughing.

  Rhundi shot her daughter a glare. "Not a word out of you, child, I don't care how I phrased it."

  "I'm glad you two can laugh about this," Aisra said. "I'm paying you. A lot. I expect you to take it seriously."

  The glare faded from Rhundi's face, and suddenly she was all business again. "And we are," she said. "Like I said, my people are finding them right now. And my daughter and I raced out here to save you. Which you should consider being at least a little grateful for. In the meantime, check your bank accounts. You should probably make sure you still have that money that you're planning on paying us with."

  Shit. If Parson was on to her, he could have cleaned her out by now. She hooked into Rhundi's boat's comm connection and checked. About half of her accounts were gone— alarming, but not insurmountable.

  "Give me a few minutes," she said, and worked on saving the rest of her money. There would always be time to steal more, if she needed to. She just needed enough right now to show Rhundi—

  Oh.

  "Change of plans. I was going to pay you 90% of what I've stolen. Parson's found some of my accounts, it looks like. I'm transferring everything I have left into a holding account for you."

  "What are you going to live on?" Darsi asked.

  "I'll be fine," she said. "Money's easy."

  "Maybe you should speak hacker, Mom," Darsi said. "I've never heard you call money easy."

  "There's all sorts of things you've never heard me say," Rhundi said. "I'm thinking about saying several of them right now. Find your father and get a status report out of him."

  "He's ignoring subcomms," Darsi said. "I tried a few minutes ago. They might be out of range, though. Want me to try to get ahold of the Nameless?"

  "That'd be the next step, yes," she said.

  "You heard them, Bellie," Darsi said. "Find the Nameless."

  OPENING A COMM, the boat said.

  "Bellie?"

  "The Bellicose Witness," Darsi said. "I dunno who named him. But I kinda like the nickname."

  "A little busy over here, dear," a voice said over the comm. Aisra recognized it. It was Brazel.

  "What's going on?" Rhundi asked. "I'd think you wouldn't answer if you were getting shot at."

  "We're getting shot at," Brazel said. "But not very well. You have the hacker with you?"

  "I'm here," Aisra said.

  "If your son survives the next half hour we're going to hire him," Brazel said. "But somebody probably ought to convince him to stop shooting at us when we're trying to rescue him."

  "Darnel is shooting at you?" The boy had flown before, but she'd never let him near anything with guns on it.

  "Um … a bit?" Brazel said. "And some others? He doesn't seem to know who he's shooting at."

  "How many other ships are there?"

  "Haven't had time to count, dear!" Brazel shouted, suddenly sounding quite a bit more frazzled. "The boy escaped on his own right before we got here, and since then we've all been shooting at each other! Kind of trying to keep us and him alive right now, and he hasn't noticed! Mind if we comm you back?"

  "Shoot everybody you're supposed to and get back to me," Rhundi said. "Ten minutes enough time?"

  "Oughtta be," Brazel said. "Right back."

  He cut the connection.

  "Did he say my son escaped on his own?" Aisra said. "As in, stole a ship? Are the rest of my kids with him?" The mix of parental pride and utter horror she was experiencing was something she was certain she'd never felt before. Usually the two didn't go together like this. She stood up, pacing haltingly around the ship's small cockpit, trying to ignore the shooting pains in her ankle.

  "You heard everything we did," Rhundi said. "Might be that boy deserves more credit than he's been getting. If Brazel's right I really will hire him."

  Aisra nodded, leaning against a bulkhead and trying not to think too hard.

  It'll be okay. Everything's going to be fine. Darnel's a good kid. They won't shoot him down. They won't.

  The next fifteen minutes were the longest of her life. She tried to open comm channels to each of her children, without any luck— their comms had all been physically disabled by Parson when he took her family. A software block she'd have been able to find a way around, but there was nothing she could do with a broken comm. If Darnel had thought to steal one, he hadn't bothered to contact his mother yet.

  The one thing she refused to do was ask Rhundi or her daughter to open a comm back up to Brazel. Darsi looked on the verge of offering a time or two— the girl kept making fleeting eye contact with her and then finding something, anything else to look at anywhere in the room— but Rhundi was as calm as could be imagined. She set a course for the boat (back to Arradon, Aisra assumed) and left the cockpit as the Bellicose Witness soared through tunnelspace. Everyone acted like waiting around to find out if their loved ones had survived a space battle was entirely routine.

  Aisra laughed, surprising herself. It probably was entirely routine. And Rhundi had near-perfect confidence in her husband and his halfogre partner. Darsi did too, for that matter. The girl seemed a bit stressed out, but that was on Aisra's behalf, not her own.

  I do not lead the same kind of life as these people, she thought.

  And then a ping, and her son's voice over the Nameless' comm.

  "Mom? Is that you?"

  "It's me," she said, relief flooding through her. "Is everyone okay?"

  "We're fine," he said. "Everyone's fine. We got away."

  "Are you safe? Where are you?"

  "The halfogre says he knows you. I'm hoping he's telling me the truth, because otherwise we're captured again. They took out our engines and he boarded. I'd be more worried but I figure most kidnappers don't put you on a comm and tell you to call your mother?"

  Aisra broke into tears and started laughing at the same time. "That's Grond," she said. "He's a friend. Tell everyone to do what he says. Where are your brothers and sisters?"

  A chorus of shouts and cheers, as the younger kids all weighed in. Aisra glanced at Darsi, who had a broad smile on her face, with just a trace of tears in her eyes as well.

  "Do what they say," she said to them. "They'll get you home."

  Grond cut in. "We'll put the kids somewhere they can sleep and get them something to eat," he said. "We need to talk about Parson."

  "What about him?" she asked.

  "Just a minute," he said, and the connection briefly went dead. When it came back again Aisra couldn't hear her children any more. Grond had either sent them from the room or left himself.

  "Rhundi there?" he asked.

  "I'm listening," she said. She hadn't returned to the cockpit, so she must have been listening to their conversation from a different part of the ship.

  "He's gone," Grond said. "Parson, I mean. The kid's got great timing— he got him and his sisters out just as we were getting into the system, and when we took a few shots at the base it went up like the Benevolence had bombed it. We're gonna debrief the boy to figure out exactly what he did, but I'm assuming no one thinks laced the place with explosives is anything on the list, right?"

  "Right," Aisra said, rather shaken by the idea.

  "Okay. Then Parson's covering his tracks, and didn't want us following him. I think he figured out fast that you'd flown the coop, Aisra, and decided to cut his losses rather than risk Braze and I coming after him. He dispatched a few of his people to try and either shoot us down or the kids, and got out some other way. Point is, he's in the wind somewhere. What do you want us to do, boss?"

  "Bring the kids back," Rhundi said. "Don't waste any more time on Parson. I've got somebody else in mind for that job."

  "Got it," Grond said, and
dropped the connection.

  Rhundi walked back into the cockpit. "This is the part where you say who else did you have in mind to me," she said.

  "Me, I'm assuming," Aisra said.

  "Yep," Rhundi said. "Your first job is to find him. Your second job is to ruin the fucker, any means necessary short of hiring someone to murder him, and only because I'll handle that part if it comes to it. Your budget is whatever you can steal from him along the way. Get started."

  "And my kids?"

  "We'll find you a suite," Rhundi said. "Or move you offplanet, whatever you'd prefer. Although I think your son impressed my husband. You may want to stick around and see if we can find something for him to do, too."

  "I'll talk it over with him," Aisra answered.

  "You do that," Rhundi said. "Until then? Get to work."

  "You got it, boss," Aisra said. Parson had likely disabled her access to his systems, and was probably hiding his funds as fast as he could. Well, good. She liked a challenge, and revenge made for a pretty decent job description.

  * * *

  The Ursine Abduction

  The apartment smelled good. That was about the only thing it had going for it.

  Gnomes had an exceptionally good sense of smell. This planet, mostly inhabited by humans, was full of plant life that wasn't pretty enough to be used ornamentally by the locals, but smelled absolutely wonderful to Brazel. Otherwise, the apartment was damp, dark, and far too hot for anyone with fur to ever be comfortable.

  But it was cheap. And cheap was about the best Brazel could afford right now. Every scrap of funds he made was going toward a rather large debt he owed. And every scrap of funds he made and could hide was going toward buying a ship that could get him the hell off of this planet without having to pay any more of that debt.

  It was a delicate balancing act, especially since most of his jobs were coming from the person he owed the money to. And he suspected that guy hadn't been keeping very accurate books.

  Brazel took a deep breath and dropped his bag on the floor by the door. The bag contained a number of important tools: lockpicks, both physical and digital, a hand console with a suite of hacking programs, and a small number of easily-concealable weapons. He preferred to avoid violence whenever possible— on a planet where nearly everyone was half a meter or more taller than you, it was the most intelligent policy— but the world didn't always conform to his policies.

  His stomach was grumbling. He thought about it and couldn't remember the last time he'd brought any food into the apartment. Hopefully there was something somewhere. Now that he was home, hot and unpleasant or not, the impetus to not leave again was damn near overwhelming.

  There was a note on the table in his kitchen.

  There hadn't been a note on the table when he left. There hadn't been anything on the table when he left.

  That was bad.

  He froze, breathing deeply and listening carefully. The apartment didn't smell like anything other than pora plants and gnome. If there'd been any humans in the room, they'd have left some traces somewhere, wouldn't they?

  The only thing he could hear was his heart hammering. And then he caught it— a hint of perfume. A very subtle hint. The wearer had bathed a time or two since wearing it, and hadn't been wearing very much to begin with.

  And then he recognized the scent, and a broad smile crossed his face. Dropping any pretense of caution, he crossed the apartment and picked up the note from the table.

  There were just two words— "Goblin's Thumb"— and a time written on the note. Underneath them, the letter R.

  Brazel smiled. The time was two and a half hours away.

  Just enough time to get cleaned up and decide what to wear.

  * * *

  The Goblin's Thumb was a local bar, famous— or at least known— for one thing, and one thing only: a massive jug of what was presumably some sort of liquor kept in a place of pride behind the bar, prominently featuring a severed goblin's thumb at the bottom of the jug. Brazel had been there a few times and had seen shots served from the jug— the owner of the bar was an ogre and easily able to handle the thing, which was nearly as big as Brazel was— but the level of the liquid in it never seemed to go down. Brazel suspected that the staff was in the habit of simply pouring off any alcohol left in cups around the bar into the jug every night, assuming that anyone willing to drink anything seasoned with the body parts of a sentient being probably had an iron constitution to go with their disgusting taste in liquor.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Brazel wouldn't be seen dead in the place. Ogre bars weren't his favorite to begin with, and this one was less hygienic than most, even though the clientele was nearly all human. He'd have to wash his clothes more than once to get the smell out.

  But a chance to meet up with Rhundi was worth it. She'd broken into his apartment without leaving a trace— he'd checked every entrance to the place and hadn't seen so much as a scratch that wasn't there before— and there had to be a good reason for it. She could have just commed him, right? She had his frequency. This was practically flirting.

  He'd chosen his clothes carefully: not his best outfit, which she'd seen before anyway, but still something first-tier, still as close to in-style as he was able to afford, and in damn near perfect shape. He'd had to mend most of his clothes at some time or another. Not these. He'd lost a bit of weight since he bought them, what with most of his spare money funding debt instead of food, but everything still fit well enough.

  He was still overdressed for the bar, though.

  The place went quiet for a moment when he walked in, but only for a moment, and then went back to normal as everyone there either recognized him or decided he wasn't a threat. His eyes adjusted quickly to the dark. If he knew Rhundi, she wasn't there yet. She was going to make him wait for her.

  "This way," a voice behind him said.

  Behind him and above him.

  Way above him.

  The ogre standing behind him was young, but had enough scars for any two or three seasoned warriors already. He was thinner than most of the ogres Brazel had met before— he looked positively unhealthy, at that— but he carried an aura of menace about him nonetheless.

  Brazel spent a moment wishing he'd brought at least one gun, and then realized that it probably wouldn't help him too much against an angry ogre. Nobody would use an ogre as a messenger; this guy had to be hired muscle. He'd been waiting right by the front door to the bar for Brazel to walk in. Brazel hadn't even noticed him. That takes some talent, he thought.

  "Am I in trouble?" he asked. "Didn't see any signs on the door that the bar was just for bigs."

  The ogre laughed, a deep rumble that actually sounded pretty genuine.

  "Nah," he said. "Boss said to come find you and bring you to her. She got one of the back rooms. Said it smelled too bad in here." He took a deep breath. "I dunno what she's talking about. Smells fine to me."

  "Let's go, then," Brazel answered. "Lead the way."

  The ogre shrugged and walked toward the private rooms in the back. There were three on the ground floor and another three on a second-floor balcony. The ogre headed for the stairs and knocked on the middle door on the upper balcony.

  "Come on in," Rhundi said from inside. He opened the door, moving himself out of the way so that Brazel could walk past him. She was sitting behind a table— gnome-sized, surprisingly— piled with enough food for three or four people. Two of the chairs around it were sized for bigs. Rhundi nodded at Brazel, then looked up at the ogre.

  "Thanks, Grond," she said. "Go have a few drinks. You'll know if I need you."

  The ogre nodded and slipped noiselessly out of the room.

  "Didn't know you were hiring ogres for muscle," Brazel said. "Didn't know you were hiring muscle at all, actually."

  Rhundi laughed. "Be glad Grond didn't hear you say that. He's a halfogre. Make sure you find out the difference before you talk to him again."

  Brazel had heard of halfogres, but did
n't know anything about them. "That something to be proud of?"

  "More like something to not screw up," Rhundi said. "He's kinda particular about it at the moment."

  "Mind if I eat?" Brazel asked. "I was actually hoping this was a date. The table's set for a meeting."

  "Yeah," Rhundi said. "I've got a proposition for you. The others will be here in a bit. I wanted to sound you out about it first."

  "So long as I don't have to wait to eat," Brazel said.

  "For the food, no. For the date? I imagine so," she said.

  A dozen responses crawled through Brazel's head and he rejected them all, choosing instead to tuck into the food. Rhundi sat silently for a moment, then laughed.

  "Clients will be here in a minute," she said. "They told me they needed two people for the job, and that it wasn't going to be good for bigs. That means Grond's out. So I thought I'd throw you the chance for a side job that pays better than the mess you're in now. I assume you're all right with the idea."

  Brazel nodded, his mouth full of pastry. The faster he got his debts paid off, the better.

  * * *

  A few mouthfuls later, the clients were there anyway: a pair of olive-skinned, dark-haired human women who perched at the edges of their seats like they were afraid of contracting a disease and gave no indication of even thinking about touching the food. One was dressed like she came from money. The other, much younger, was wearing a nondescript brown blouse and pants and had the look of a servant. Grond let them into the room, nodded wordlessly at Rhundi, then shut the door on his way out. Brazel listened for the halfogre's heavy footsteps as he walked away from the door and didn't hear them. He was staying close during the meeting.

  Brazel didn't speak either, assuming that if Rhundi wanted him to be part of the negotiation— or whatever this was— she'd let him know. He kept eating. The four of them sat in awkward silence for a few moments and then the older woman tapped the other on the shoulder and began communicating with her in rapid sign language.