by Morgan Hawke
I’m going to beat you black and blue for this. He sighed. She could feel it.
Fallon smiled. Absolutely.
Annoyance mixed with a sharp burst of fear. Don’t you dare get killed!
I am very good at not getting killed. There it was, down at the bottom in a smooth white coil.
Good. Pain slid across the link, sharp and hot, straight from the heart. I love you.
Fallon’s smiled faded as her heart threatened to break. I love you, too. She had to take a deep breath to think around the knot of emotion he was generating. But I can’t think with you yapping in my head!
His amusement washed through her, followed by terrific burst of cold hard fury. I’ll be waiting. And then he was gone.
Her head came up. No ... not gone completely. She could touch him, but his thoughts were elsewhere. She nodded. It was time to make her call and get some work done.
Fallon pulled up the white communications coil and flipped the stiletto in her other palm. She unrolled a strand against the base of her wrist and stabbed the dagger through the fiber optic wire, direct linking to her biomechanics. She winced in pain then closed her eyes and accessed her personal communication’s array.
“This is the Station master ... Hey, what channel are you on?” The voice was feminine and youthful.
Fallon licked her lips. “Is this Alice?”
“Yeah. Where did you get that name?”
Fallon released the burst of data Peter had given her a very long time ago.
“Peter has been fucking dead for the past century! Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Fallon released the second burst of data, the keys to her spectral code that would unlock the second message hidden in the first.
An electronic screech came over the line. “You bitch! You fucking virused me ...!”
“No, I didn’t!” Fallon’s fingers closed tight on the white wire crossing her palm. “I gave you the keys to the other code; the one inside the first!”
Silence.
The lift came to a sudden and jarring halt between floors.
Fallon grabbed onto the wall to keep from falling. The hair on the back of her neck lifted. She looked up at the four steel walls sealing her in. “Oh ... shit.” If this lift fell, there was absolutely no chance of survival. The station master would make sure of it.
More silence.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Who the fuck are you?” The station master’s feminine voice vibrated with anger, but she wasn’t screaming.
Fallon’s breath came out in a rush. She wasn’t dead yet. “Alice, this is the Fallen Star from Neverland. And I have a major pirate problem.”
“What’s Peter’s password?”
“First star on the right, and straight on ’til morning.” Fallon had to close her eyes. Maker ... she missed him.
“Oh, God ... Did he ... Did Peter give you ... mine?”
“You’re Alice. Your log-in is Wonderland. Password is ...” Fallon had to take a deep breath. “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat; how I wonder what you’re at.”
“Oh, God ...” Her voice shivered with nervous laughter. “He’s alive. Peter’s alive.”
Fallon nodded, knowing that Alice could see it if she accessed the lift vid display. “I’m sorry to surprise you like this, but it’s really important.”
“What happened? I thought Peter, Neverland, was ... destroyed?”
Fallon shivered with impatience, but she needed Station master Alice’s help if she was going to locate Khan. “Peter says he doesn’t remember exactly what happened to shut him down. He was awakened about forty cycles ago already hacked into and taken over by the Moribund Company.”
“Moribund Company, huh? The salient ships are bitching up a storm because that pack’s been hacking and stealing ships.”
Fallon frowned at the blank wall. “Salient ships? You mean the sentient ships?”
Alice snorted. “No. Most jump-capable ships are sentient to some degree. A salient ship is independently self-aware.” A burst of static betrayed her irritation. “I don’t believe the Moribund Company would hack stations, too! Oh, those ... those ... assholes!” Another burst of static. “So why hasn’t Peter contacted me?”
Fallon bit her lip. “He can’t. The pirates have him blocked from directly contacting other stations or the sentient ships, and for a long time he had no idea who he was. Peter has been using the spectral code I gave you as an invisible firewall to hide behind for the past fifteen cycles while he pieced his memory back together. He found you and the others in a deeply hidden cache file. He doesn’t know if the Moribund Company knows about the file, because he doesn’t know what they hacked into when he was still offline.” She swallowed. “Alice, you could be in danger.”
Alice sighed. “Moribund Company has become something of a pest problem. God, I have to talk to Peter.”
Fallon shook her head. “Dyson’s Ring is monitored incoming and outgoing.”
“Wait a minute, Peter is Dyson’s Ring? I put data through there all the time. I thought it was a dead station, no sentience. ”
“It’s Peter, but they’ll never let you reach him. He’s been trying for ages.” Fallon nibbled on her bottom lip. “If you can find a way to incorporate the spectral code I gave you into your communications, you can contact Peter that way. It’s completely invisible and undetectable to anyone who doesn’t have the code keys.”
“Who does have the codes keys?”
“Peter, me, probably one or two of Peter’s lostlings ...” Fallon looked up. “And one other person. He’s on this station.”
“On this station? Who?”
Fallon felt the anger and the hope rise around her heart, “His name is Khan, and the Moribund Company has him somewhere on this station. Alice, I need your help to find him!”
“Those sons of bitches ... Shit, there are over eighty thousand bodies on this station. Do you have a way to identify him?”
Fallon grinned. “I have two, but they may have one of them blocked.”
“Gimme what you got.”
“One is the spectral coding. When it’s active, it resonates with anyone else in possession of it. The other is my ...” She winced. “My control collar.”
“Your control collar? You’re one of those ... Skeldhi sex-slaves?”
Fallon hunched her shoulders then sighed. “Yes. I am. Khan is my ... master, and I have to find him.”
“Fallen Star, I have access to their coding. They don’t know it, but I do. I can get that thing off you. You could let him go and you could be free. This is a big station; you could get lost in it really easy. I’ll even help set up a new identity for you.”
Fallon froze, shocked to the core. She could be free. She could be herself again. And alone again. She closed her eyes. She was tired of being alone.
“You could stay with me, if you like. I could use the company, and you could help me get the word out to the rest of the stations about Moribund Company.”
Fallon felt her heart slam in her chest. She could see Peter again.
But she would never see Khan or Sobehk again. Pain stabbed sharply through her heart. “Alice, I’d like to. It sounds wonderful. But I ... can’t.”
“Yes, you can!”
“No, really, I can’t. I ...” Fallon closed her eyes. Maker, she was out of her mind! “Alice, I love him, and he loves me. I have to get him back.”
“You ... love him?” She sighed. “I understand. All right, we’ll get you back your Khan. Where do we begin?”
Fallon looked up. “We begin by activating your code keys ...”
* * * * *
Alice released a burst of data. “Can you see him? Is he there?” Her voice sounded like any other excited kid with a brand new toy.
Fallon frowned. “I think so.” A very odd looking figure sat on its haunches in the corner of the lift. It was round, had four legs that ended in tiny paw-like feet, a thick fluffy tail, small triangular ears at the very top of its very
round head, and humongous slitted eyes of neon green, but it also had a smiling mouth that spread the full width of its head, and it was striped -- as though painted. It was obviously a fantasy figure rather than any kind of actual figure. “Is it a ... feline?
“Yes!” She giggled. “Yes, he is!”
Fallon tilted her head from one side to the other. “Is he supposed to be that violet-purple color?”
“Yes! Yes, he is!” Alice laughed. “He’s the Cheshire cat!”
Fallon’s brows shot up. “Oh ... okay.” That was a cat? Alice apparently had quite an imagination, by way of felines.
“And you can see him?”
Fallon nodded. “Loud and clear. He’s much too ... bright to miss.”
Alice giggled. “Good! Because I just sent him all over the station and no one can see him but you! Your spectral coding kicks ass!”
The Cheshire cat abruptly started bouncing up and down in circles, floating like a somewhat weighty balloon.
“I have a spy no one can see! Yes!” Alice released a very human whoop of joy.
The cat’s head abruptly turned to face Fallon, disconcertingly separating from the bouncing cat’s shoulders, and then the head started bouncing independently of the still turning and bouncing body.
Fallon’s brows shot up. Whoa ... scary imagination.
The lift started moving.
“Now that I’ve incorporated your coding, I think I know where your Khan is being kept.”
Fallon’s heart lurched. “You do? You found him?”
“Pretty sure. There are only two of you with that code, right?”
“Right.”
“Then I found him. There’s only one other spot that feels like you. I can get you through all the security doors, but it’s still going to involve some climbing, and crawling in places.” She cleared her electronic throat. “I hope you don’t mind the occasional ... pipe?”
Fallon grinned. “I lived most of my life on an industrial station. Pipes are not going to be a problem.”
“Good.” Alice sighed. “Okay, all you have to do is follow the Cheshire cat. If you have a question, a smile is yes, and a frown is no.”
Fallon’s brows lifted. “A smile?”
The purple feline’s mouth lifted into a huge, toothy, crescent grin. Abruptly the cat’s mouth dropped into an equally huge frown.
Fallon blinked. There was no possible way that he could have teeth in such an array of directions ... “Oh ... okay.” Definitely a cartoon figure.
The lift doors opened onto darkness.
“Okay, Fallen Star, on your way! I’m going to try to reach Peter!”
Fallon looked directly at the Cheshire cat. “Thank you, Alice.”
The Cheshire cat stood up on his teeny purple back paws, set a paw on his chest, and bowed with a waggle of his oversized round head that made his ears flop and his tongue loll.
“Thank you , Fallen Star.”
Fallon smiled. “You can call me Isabeau; my name is Isabeau Fallon.”
“Isabeau, how pretty! Now scoot! You’ve held up this lift long enough. The repair crews are going nuts down there.”
The purple cat got up on his teeny back legs and proceeded to skip with rather high bounces into the dark, glowing like a neon purple sign.
* * * * *
The pipe was big enough to walk upright in, though Sobehk would have had a hard time of it. It was also dark. Fallon’s night-vision augmentations outlined everything in bright green. Everything ... except the purple cat. Her spectral coding was reading the cat, not her eyesight, so eye-popping purple he remained.
The Cheshire cat skipped over to the far right wall, jumped up, and shoved himself into a pipe opening that he should not have been able to fit into. He squished, rather like the balloon he strongly resembled, and stuffed himself in. He eased deeper, his striped tail flicking behind him.
Fallon grabbed the lip of the pipe and stuck her head in. The purple glow was dead ahead. She eased her body into the pipe then pulled herself forward, elbow over elbow.
She had followed the impossible purple cat through a number of dark, dusty hallways, fairly often relying on her night vision. There had been a bunch of ladders, more than a few unused and barely working lifts, and then the pipes, some big enough to walk in and some she had to crawl through. Unlike those back on Dyson’s, none of the pipes had held water or other nasty liquids. They were dusty and not anything close to clean, but they appeared to have never been actually used.
Khan was going to explode when he saw the condition her leather suit had gotten into. She smiled. The thought was warming.
The Cheshire cat popped out of the far end of the narrow pipe with a hollow fump, very much like a balloon coming out of a tube.
Fallon eased her head out of the pipe. The steel plate floor was less than a foot below her. She looked up and blinked in astonishment. She was looking at the back end of a dull gray small cruiser. The Cheshire cat had brought her to a ship dock. Her eyes narrowed. If they had Khan on a ship, they were seriously stupid.
She stared at the flat black and ratty-looking Moribund Company courier craft and curled her lip. They were stupid.
Wrapped in a skin of sensor invisibility generated by her active spectral coding, she walked right through the blocky cruiser’s alarm grid. Carefully, she crept around to the emergency access under the belly of the low-slung ship. The ship’s sensors couldn’t see her, but ordinary eyes saw her just fine.
She inserted a piece of wire “borrowed” from the lift control into the wound on her wrist from talking to the station master and winced. She jammed the other end into the card-key panel. The wire cold-accessed her augmentation and allowed her programming to infiltrate and access the door’s codes. The door opened in the semi-sentient ship without setting off the alarms.
Sucking on the wound in her wrist, she followed the bouncing purple cat down a passageway. She eased silently past the two guards yapping away in the ship’s dining alcove, then continued further to a door in the holding area.
Another rather painful cold access and the door slid open.
The room was small, gray and empty, except for a bar that stretched from the left wall to the right, and the scarred, unconscious man who gripped it with his arms spread as far apart as they would go, his knees buckled under him.
Khan.
He wore his leather pants and his boots, but nothing else. His robes were nowhere in sight. His creamy hair was still braided but matted with blood. Two nasty clotted bites gouged the shoulder on her right. His silver nipple rings gleamed bright against deep-purple bruises all over his chest and stomach, but he was still in one piece.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that he was gripping the bar because the force-cuffs on his wrists were making him do it.
Fallon shook as she assessed what would have to be done to get him loose. She would have to hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt him. Fallon fisted her hands. If he hadn’t jumped into that damned lift in the first place ... Anger washed the shakes from her hands.
She turned to the cat. “Is possible to make some kind of distraction to get those two men out of this ship?”
The cat gave her a head-splitting grin, a nod, and a jaunty wave. He spun in place and disappeared with a hollow pop.
“Was that ... a purple ... feline?”
Fallon turned sharply, her heart in her mouth. “Yes.”
Khan’s head was up and one eye was bruised closed. He groaned and got his feet under him. He pulled his head back behind the bar so he could stand. “Where’s Sobehk?”
“Waiting for my call.” She dug into the right side of her boot for his stiletto. “First, I have to get you out of here.” She walked over to him and set her hands on the ball of his right shoulder, looking for the joint where his augmentations linked.
Khan snorted. “How? I’m wearing force-cuffs.” He frowned. “How did you find me? And how did you get in here?”
“I bre
ak into ships, remember?” She located what she was looking for with her thumb. She turned to face him. “This is going to hurt. A lot.”
He frowned. “What are you going to do?”
Fallon took a breath. “Did Sobehk ever tell you about the last time I got away from him?”
Khan frowned. “Yes.”
“Did he tell you I was wearing force-cuffs at the time?”
His frown deepened. “Yes.”
“Did he tell you I got one off?”
His brows lowered and his mouth tightened. “I thought he was exaggerating.”
“He wasn’t.” Fallon snorted. “Can I assume that he told you what I did to do it?”
Khan winced. “Shit.”
“I’ll take that for a yes.” Fallon raised the stiletto. “Khan, ‘Syr, you can’t make any noise.”
Khan flinched back, but he wasn’t going anywhere. “Isabeau, he bit me twice. He did that so the guards’ beating would hurt more. His venom is still active in my system.” He sucked in a breath. “I can’t make any promises.”
Fallon’s hand tightened on the knife. “Khan, I have to shut down your arm augmentations to free you.” A fist tightened around her heart. “There’s no other way.” She looked away and had to blink to clear her eyes. “I’m sorry, but it hurts, a lot.”
“Do it. Do it fast.”
Fallon nodded. “Fast. All right.” She shook both her hands to get her dexterity on line. Her fingers tingled. She set her hand on the ball of his shoulder and marked the spot with her thumb. She set the point of the dagger where she needed and jammed it in.
He gasped and threw his head back.
Fallon located the nerve bundle as fast as she could, feeling for the slight buzz of power. She stabbed deeper.
His arm dropped from the bar. Khan stared at his free arm, his mouth opened as he panted. “Fuck ...”
She pulled the dagger free.
Blood spilled.
She set her mouth on the wound and licked, hoping it would slow the bleeding. With her free hand, she tugged the cuff off and dropped it onto the deck. She turned to the other shoulder, located and stabbed.
