Slipping behind the wheel, she decided to reconsider that. If Dakris was that good, there would be no finding her, but if she had stayed hidden this long, she had to be close to that good. As long as she was not better, Shil would find her.
The car bounced along the rough track she was following, the suspension handling most of the potholes well enough. Maybe something with contragrav would have been better. The day was nice enough: freezing, obviously, but bright and clear with little wind to further chill the air. The track was rising though; the altimeter suggested about eight hundred metres above sea level when it levelled out and Shil turned into the valley. Here it was level, but about four klicks to the west it began to fall away again, dropping down to the plains where the research centre was supposedly located. She headed west at a gentle pace, watching the land around her carefully.
Thirty minutes later she pulled to a stop and picked up a pair of binoculars. There was something about the cliff face on the right which had caught her attention. Zooming in showed her what looked like a cave mouth hidden, mostly, behind a boulder which had not managed to roll down toward the middle of the valley.
She checked the map. She was about five hundred metres outside the official boundary of the unmapped zone. There was no sign of anything marking the area as off-limits. No fence, no watchtowers, and no minefield signs. Hopefully there was also no minefield.
Fixing her face mask and visor in place, she attached her sword to her back and went out through the vehicle’s airlock. The air was colder than in the city, but well within her tolerances. Maybe different boots would have been an idea: she did have her image to maintain, but there was no one here to see her unless Dakris was in the cave. Oh well… She marched across the scrubby grass, heading for the boulder and the cave beyond.
As soon as she was past the big rock and into the entrance, she knew she was on to something. She sniffed – the mask added oxygen but did not prevent outside air getting to her nose – and the scent of unwashed, probably female, tholdarian came to her. Dakris had been living rough for weeks with minimal opportunity for hygiene. It could still be someone else, but it was a good sign. She spread her vision spectrum and moved in.
It was not easy. The rocks gave off little radiation and she had to move slowly, feeling her way as much as using sight. The scent grew stronger as she went deeper, and the walls closed in, though that made things a little easier since she could feel where she was against them more easily.
Maybe fifty metres in she felt the quality of the air change around her and knew the cavern was widening out. She rounded a boulder and saw the warm body standing on the other side of the cave. The posture suggested whoever it was was aiming a rifle, probably using an infrared scope since there was no other light in the cave. Well, if she was going to shoot there was nothing to be done about it and Shil’s suit had a trick up its sleeve for that kind of eventuality.
‘You don’t look like a tholdarian.’ Female voice, nervous, speaking Gadek Taved.
‘I’m not. Currently you do look like a dangerous criminal. Either use that thing, and we’ll get down to trying to kill each other, or turn a light on.’
There was a pause, and then the woman’s arms shifted, raising the rifle. She reached behind her and Shil switched back to normal sight just as a lantern came on. It was not much of an improvement, serving more to cast Dakris into shadow than illuminate her, but the general description was a fit.
The report had made her out to be bigger, stronger-looking. She was a slight woman with narrow hips and small breasts hidden away under heavy clothing. Her hair was strawberry blonde. Shil wondered why the description did not quite match. Of course, it could have been the source exaggerating Dakris’s threat level, but it seemed more likely that the local authorities wanted her to seem more dangerous. Or maybe that was Shil projecting her own disquiet on the situation.
‘You’re not any species I’ve ever seen before,’ Dakris said. ‘You look almost like… But that’s not possible.’
‘A vedan? I get that a lot, but they had different hair. I’m human, not that that’s going to mean anything to you. Can I come closer, or will you shoot me?’
Dakris settled onto some rolled-up blankets, placing her rifle in a position where it was more or less aimed at Shil. ‘Don’t get too close. I assume you’re here looking for me. What are you? Bounty hunter?’
‘I am, to both.’ Shil moved closer, watching Dakris’s hands, stopping a few yards away where she could sit down on a rock. From here she could make out the blue of her prey’s eyes. That matched the description too. She could also see a face which was quite pretty, if smudged with dirt that had been partially cleaned off. ‘By rights I should be handcuffing you and dragging you back to Tholdris, but I’m curious.’
The tholdarian giggled. It sounded a little hysterical. ‘A curious bounty hunter. How curious. What are you curious about?’
‘Why you didn’t shoot me.’
‘I’m wondering that myself, but… You may be used to killing people–’
‘I’ve done it once. Twice, but it was them or me.’ Shil gave a little shrug. ‘StarCorps doesn’t pay the full bounty for a corpse.’
‘I’ve heard that Tholdin is happy to have me dead.’
‘True enough. You’ve never shot a sentient before.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘Your list of crimes includes multiple murder, but you’ve never killed anyone.’
‘Well…’ Dakris was looking defensive, which was crazy. ‘I’m not a criminal. I’m a botanist. The only thing I’m guilty of is picking flower samples.’
Shil crossed her legs and relaxed. ‘I’m listening.’
Dakris looked at her as though she was distinctly unsure of what was going on, but there was also something like relief in her face. ‘I study wild flora in the mountains here. There isn’t much natural habitat left on Tholdaria. Not much call for botany either. I like the solitude and it lets me work with my mind instead of mining or tourism, or one of the other service industries. It’s quiet.’
‘Unless you discovered a native plant with amazing hallucinogenic properties, I’m not seeing a reason for the bounty on your head.’
‘No plants. I found a body. I was south of here, a little too close to the genetics centre, but it’s not like the boundaries are well marked. I found a body in the snow and it looked… wrong.’
‘Wrong?’
‘It had pale skin, white hair. It was naked and high up, and it looked like whoever it was had walked there, but even we aren’t built for that kind of cold without some protection. I don’t think it died from the cold either. I found bullet wounds. And I did something stupid. I took samples.’
Shil was not liking where this was going. ‘You said “genetics centre.”’ Dakris nodded. ‘They’re doing genetic experiments.’
Another nod. ‘On tholdarians. The sequence I ran came back with some weird modifications in it. I got more stupid and went to look. I don’t think I saw too much, enough to know that they’re experimenting to make tougher people, more docile people.’
Shil frowned. Tholdaria was operating at the limits of its capacity to support its population and the government had been unsuccessful in persuading anyone to migrate off-world. There were just not that many colonies which needed people but also fitted the climate the tholdarians liked. Tholdaria was borderline as a habitable world itself and had never developed a particularly rich ecosystem, even with the terraforming. Making tholdarians tougher to let them leave seemed like a good idea, but the ‘docile’ part seemed like something else. And why keep it all so secret?
‘Let’s say I believe you. Do you have any proof?’
‘I got pictures of the facility before they spotted me and I ran. Maybe they think I have more, but that’s it.’
Shil sighed. ‘We’ll need more. I’ll have to go in and take a look.’
‘And then what! Who do you think is going to do anything about it?’
‘StarCorps.’
‘The matriarch owns the local StarCorps office.’
‘I’d more or less figured that out. I’ll get you off this rock and take you to Shuria. You’ll have to hand yourself in there, but if there’s evidence that you were framed, you should be okay and maybe they’ll do something about what’s going on here.’
‘You don’t sound too sure.’
‘Well… politics. But StarCorps likes to think they follow the old vedan legal code, and that had some very severe punishments for involuntary genetic tampering.’
‘Okay, but how do you plan on getting me off-world? It’s not like we can walk through the shuttle port.’
Shil laughed. ‘Oh, that’s the easy part, believe me. I need proof you’re telling the truth first. I’ll go when it gets dark. We’ve got a while to wait.’ About five hours and then they would be looking at about twenty-four hours of night; the planet had a forty-eight-hour day! That would have driven Shil nuts.
‘Huh… What’s your name?’
‘Shil.’
‘Okay, Shil. I still think you’re crazy, but if you can get me out of this, I’ll go with you. I’ve nothing left to lose.’
~~~
There were no mines planted, but there was a fence at the end of the valley, with some newly installed sensor systems mounted on each post. Apparently, an escape and Dakris sneaking in had prompted new security. It took time to tap the grid, create a loop, and effectively blind the system, but it was safer than trying to find and exploit a blind spot which might not be there anyway.
The facility was an ugly metal and concrete affair. Lots of low, blocky buildings, a couple of observation posts which were easy enough to skirt around. Finding a door she could work on with some cover, she began dismantling the lock.
She had selected the building because it had windows and none of the other ones did. Somehow that suggested significance. Maybe this one had some of Dakris’s experimental subjects, or maybe it was offices and labs. Either would do. She got both.
The door let into a small stairwell, likely a fire escape, and beyond it was a fairly large room with a glass-walled inner chamber. Inside it were three people, all of them tholdarian as best she could tell, but their skin seemed paler and their hair was a ghostly white. They sat in the dim light not speaking or moving. They paid her no attention as she slipped across the room to check on some of the other doors.
Third time lucky. The third door she tried had an office behind it, with a computer. Plugging in a device she had brought along which would quietly invade the network and suck up every file it could find, she sat down, waited for the screen to clear of the login window, and then began flicking through what she could find to look at herself.
She found a lot of emails, most of them from government officials requesting progress reports, or bemoaning the lack of progress in the reports they received. There was a list of target environments, all of them worlds which had never signed up to StarCorps’s legal framework. Shil recognised one from Rayan’s memories, a torrid little mining colony which employed indentured employees almost exclusively. There was also a request for female subjects to test the procedures on, which had been denied. The facility only had male subjects, which did not entirely surprise Shil, but it left a bitter taste in her mouth. Reversed sexism was still sexism.
A sound outside alerted her to the guards making their rounds. She blanked the screen and slipped into the cover of the desk and waited. The office door opened and a light shone around the room. Her hacking device was still on the desk, but she was hoping that it would go unnoticed. It did. The door closed and the sound of boots on concrete receded. She waited ten minutes before emerging, unplugging her gadget, and leaving the way she had come in.
~~~
It was all going according to plan until she got within visual range of the cave and her camouflaged truck. Still a dark shape in the night, she paused, looking out across the flat landscape. The figures waiting there would have been well concealed to anyone else, but Shil saw their heat signatures, muffled by thick clothing, but quite visible against the cold ground.
She counted five. At this range and using infrared vision, it was hard to tell whether they were armed, but the fact that they were attempting to conceal themselves was hardly a good sign. Dropping to one knee, she took a pair of slim, wedge-shaped devices from her pack, tapped into their control processors with her neural interface, and programmed them carefully before tossing them out in opposite directions. The darts looped through the air for a second before their presser drives cut in and they vanished into the darkness at speed.
Shil got to her feet and marched forward, apparently oblivious to the people waiting for her. They waited for her to get within a few metres before leaping up from their camouflage nets and aiming rifles at her.
‘Halt! Stand still. Raise your hands.’
Shil looked around. ‘Is it stand still, or raise my hands? Seriously, clarity is important in these situations. For example, drop your rifles or you will be dead in five seconds. Clear enough?’
The one who had spoken, a tall, muscular woman, tightened her rifle against her shoulder. ‘I want it noted that she resisted arrest.’
‘Too late,’ Shil replied, and something small and very fast lanced cleanly through the cop’s neck.
Shil dropped to the ground amid screams, cries of ‘what the–,’ and a single gunshot. She raised her head a couple of seconds later to find the two, bloody, robot weapons hovering in the middle of the fallen cops. Though now she looked more closely, and using normal vision, they looked more like troops. She headed for the cave hoping she would not find the worst of the scenarios she had thought of to be true.
There were two people waiting for her, one of them Dakris who appeared to be terrified, but unharmed aside from a bruise across her forehead. The other was not an especially big surprise: Erisha Tholdin was holding a large pistol and looking self-confident.
‘You got someone to put a tracker on my truck,’ Shil said as she stepped into the cave.
‘We like to make sure bounty hunters don’t go near the facility,’ Tholdin said. ‘When you stopped here and then stayed put for too long, we figured you might have found her and talked to her.’
‘It’s quite the little horror story your aunt has cooked up here. Take your excess male population, perform genetic manipulation on them to alter protein production in the brain and change their metabolisms. You turn them into docile, obedient slaves and ship them to some of the worst pits in the galaxy. What happened? Some of the male population starting to get annoyed at the inequalities?’
‘Tholdaria is a happy world. Everyone can vote. No one’s voice is unheard.’
‘But it is ignored,’ Dakris muttered. ‘If it’s not what the matriarch wants to hear.’
‘You shut your mouth or you’ll die now. We simply have an overabundance of people and a reduction in the male population would redress the balance.’ She lifted her pistol, aiming it at Shil. ‘You understand this isn’t personal? You know too much and there would be questions asked.’
‘That’s okay,’ Shil replied. ‘This isn’t personal either.’ The two robot darts zipped around from behind her, accelerating rapidly, and slammed into Tholdin’s chest. Dakris let out a gasp as her captor hit the cave wall and slipped down, the light fading in her eyes. Shil sighed. ‘And that makes eight I’ve killed.’
‘I-it was still them or you,’ Dakris replied.
‘I am aware of that.’ Shil pulled her weapons out of Tholdin’s chest and stowed them away in her pack. ‘Get whatever essentials you want with you. We’re leaving on foot. When we’re away from here, I’ll get us transported off this rock, but I want to be away from the truck and these bodies before then.’
‘You got more evidence?’ Dakris was already packing.
‘I got enough. Now we’ll have to see what StarCorps is willing to do with it.’
~~~
‘I am sorry, Shil, but transporting you up now would be unwise.’
Cantarvey did sound apologetic, but there was nothing much she could do about the situation. ‘I believe they would detect the use of a matter transporter, which means they would know you were here. I have circumvented the command lockdown they attempted to place upon me, but it is highly unlikely we could make it out of the dock before they could bring overwhelming offensive power to bear.’
‘Yeah,’ Shil replied, frowning. ‘That sounds about right. Okay, Cantarvey, leave this to me. I’ll think of something.’
‘I am sure you will. You should move from your current location. I believe they are monitoring transmissions and may have been able to triangulate your position.’
‘Thanks. Stay safe.’
‘The same to you. I do not wish to have to find myself with a new owner.’
Shil cut off the call and put the radio she was using away in her pack. ‘We need to move.’
‘I thought you were going to have us transported up to your ship?’ Dakris asked, the first hints of panic in her eyes. ‘I don’t know how that would work without a transporter station, but–’
‘They’ve put Cantarvey in an administrative lockdown. She’s bypassed the controls, but if we got up there, we’d be stuck. We’re better off down here and free to act. Come on, we need to keep moving.’ Shil got to her feet and started away from the boulder they had taken shelter behind. The temperature was dropping as the long night drew on, but they needed to keep moving: there was every chance that the local authorities were busy looking for them.
‘What exactly are we supposed to do? As far as I can see, we’re stuck here. There’s no way we can–’
‘Try to keep a positive attitude,’ Shil suggested. ‘At least for as long as it takes for me to work out a plan. You’ve hidden from them for a long time, I’m sure the two of us can keep out of their hands for a few more days. We’re going to need food, and transport that isn’t bugged. Where’s the nearest town?’
The Eyes of the Huntress (Shil the Huntress Book 1) Page 9
