by Jucha, S. H.
Christie sent.
Amelia said.
Christie sent.
* * *
Boker needed to disappear, but first he had to stop the bleeding. Within moments and much to his relief, Boker discovered his attacker’s blade wasn’t poisoned
“Sorry, Jessie,” Boker murmured in apology to his big partner. He hurried down a couple of corridors, holding a hand over his wound. At a small air vent, he pried off the cover and removed the stash Jessie and he stored for an emergency exit. From inside the carryall, Boker removed a small med bag, which held some quick-patch, which he applied to the wound. He hissed as the medicant fused the skin together. A quick injection of meds for infection and pain cleared his mind. The bloody shirt was stuffed up into the vent and the cover replaced. He yanked a clean shirt from the carryall and quickly donned it.
Throwing the bag over his shoulder with its readers, containing hefty reserves of anonymous credits, a criminal’s favorite form of funds, Boker walked calmly but quickly along the utility corridor to a freight storage room where he could hole up and devise an exit plan — not an easy task, considering he was trying to escape from a collection of domes surrounded by vacuum.
While he sat in the dark, Boker came to the conclusion that he was a dead man if he tried to engineer his escape to safety by himself. He was working through his list of acquaintances, wondering who he might enlist to help him. That it had been Barber who tried to off the two of them meant Toyo had given the orders. “Those fems,” Boker hissed, realizing the kill orders had something to do with the three Haraken women, and that’s what gave him the idea.
Boker crawled between some enormous packing crates, ate a meal bar, sipped some water, and fell asleep. His reader app buzzed softly five hours later at 3 hours, local time. Wincing as he sat up, Boker loaded another hypo with meds and waited until the pain subsided.
Sliding out of his hiding place, Boker made for the landing bay. Even though it was the middle of the night, dome service personnel were still moving around, and it took Boker over an hour to navigate the few hundred meters until he had a clear view of the freighter’s shuttle, which he had piloted with the fems aboard.
Watching from behind a stack of crates, Boker waited until the path was clear, pulled his cap low on his head, slung his bag over a shoulder, and walked nonchalantly to the shuttle. He punched in his access code, hoping no one had thought to change it. The access light blinked green, and the hatch slid open. Boker ducked inside and slapped the oversized button to close the hatch.
In the cockpit, Boker ran through a short routine to power his comm panel. He had no desire to fly the shuttle out — he had nowhere to go, not yet. Selecting a frequency for a mining operation on Udrides, a moon larger than Jolares, which also orbited Ganymede, Boker made his comm call.
“Udrides Resources, this is the shuttle from the freighter, Bountiful.”
“This is Udrides Resources, pilot. Are you declaring an emergency?” a lovely voice replied.
“Yes, but not the kind you’re thinking. I need to speak to Mr. Kadmir immediately,” Boker said.
“Mr. Kadmir is not in the habit of taking comms at this hour of the morning, pilot. Call during working hours and I will connect you with Mr. Kadmir’s assistant, who will make an appointment for your comm call.”
“Listen carefully, fem. Get Mr. Blue on the comm now, or he’ll be stripping the meat from your flesh when he finds out you didn’t put this call through.”
Dead silence greeted Boker’s threat, but after several moments he heard a man clear his throat.
“This is Mr. Kadmir’s assistant. What is the emergency, pilot?”
Not there yet, Boker thought. “Listen, Mr. Assistant. I have information Mr. Blue wants to get his hands on if he wants to hurt Craze. So you wake him up or I take this hot news to Sniffer,” Boker threatened, referring to the third criminal boss, Roz O’Brien, whose domes were on Desmonis, the next moon farther out in Ganymede’s orbit from Udrides.
Again the comm went silent and Boker waited for the better part of a half-hour.
“Talk quick,” a deep, sleep-deprived voice said.
“I used to work for Toyo, until his number two and some crew tried to take out my partner and me,” Boker explained.
“What do I care if you idiots kill one another?” the voice growled.
“I was loyal to Toyo’s organization … been with the man eight years. The only reason he would want to kill my partner and me is because of what we’ve just seen. I think Toyo is scared.”
Kadmir leaned onto his desk and punched the vid cam button on his comm panel to access the shuttle’s cockpit, and Boker accepted the request. The two men stared at each other for a moment, sizing the other up.
Kadmir’s thought was that anything that could scare Craze interested him. “Go on,” he said.
A spark of hope soared inside Boker, and he chose his next words carefully. Too much information and Kadmir would have no need for him; too little information and the comm would end in a bad way for Boker — a grisly death at the hands of Toyo himself.
“My partner, Jessie, and I loaded three fems onto our freighter, the Bountiful, and delivered them here to a private suite on Jolares.”
“That’s it?” Kadmir asked, staring hard at Boker.
“We took them from Espero.”
“Three tourists on Haraken, so what?” said Kadmir, his voice hardening.
“They were metal-meshed to prevent implant communication and two are Méridien-built.”
“Harakens,” Kadmir said, his eyes widening just slightly. If Craze kidnapped three Harakens, then not only was Toyo’s organization in trouble, but maybe all those who ran pleasure domes were about to attract more attention from the adz than the politicos could deflect. “You have pics?” Kadmir asked.
“I have pics, but you get those when you get me off Jolares.”
“If you’ve got a way to make orbit, maybe we can deal. I certainly can’t set down a shuttle in Craze’s landing bays.”
“If I make orbit in this freighter shuttle, it won’t take long before I’m discovered.”
“Okay, good enough. What’s your name?” Kadmir asked.
“Boker.”
“Well, Boker. You look like a lifer, so you know how this works. You got something good for me, then you got a job on my crew. You don’t …” Kadmir ended by holding up his hands as if there was nothing he could do for Boker under those circumstances, and his blue eyes held a deadly, cold stare. “Monitor this frequency. You’ll be commed when we’re close … twenty-four to twenty-six hours.”
When the comm ended, Boker faced his next decision — return to his hiding place in the freight storage area or remain in the shuttle. His brain was starting to frazzle from the pain and he felt warm. Digging into the shuttle’s more extensive med-kit, he loaded
a hypo with some heavy-duty pain killers and antibiotics.
At that moment, Boker would have loved a dose of medical nanites, and there was a medical emergency station at one of the real mining concerns not 400 kilometers from Toyo’s domes, but there was no way he could reach it undetected in the shuttle.
Boker ransacked the galley for a quick-heat meal and water. Shoveling down the hot food, he came to a decision. If he went back to the storage space and other pilots took the shuttle to return to the Bountiful or he was locked out by a change in the hatch access code, he was a dead man. This shuttle was his only way off Jolares, and it was the only one that he had the code to access.
In the cockpit, Boker changed the access codes for the twin hatches and set an alarm if the old code was entered on the hull panels. Then he crawled onto a worn-out bunk and fell asleep.
A noise intruded on Boker’s dreams, and it wouldn’t go away. In disgust, he struggled awake just to escape the irritation and realized it was a comm call. He leapt off the bunk, biting his lips at the pain, and ran to the cockpit.
“Boker, here,” he said, accepting the comm signal.
“Just about gave up on you, Boker,” a voice said.
“Yeah, well, you take a blade in the side and see how well you do afterwards.”
“Can you still make orbit?” the voice asked.
“Yeah, when and where?” Boker asked.
“Now. Lift off and you’ll get a beacon for the direction. Climb into a suit. This will be a shuttle to shuttle walk.”
The comm was abruptly cut and Boker hurried to get ready — another heavy hypo shot, stripping the necessities from his carryall and stuffing them into his pockets, and climbing into an environment suit. In the cockpit, he signaled for liftoff, and the bay manager sounded the warning to clear the bay. Sweat began running down Boker’s face and underarms even though the cockpit was chilly. He expected to be discovered at any moment.
“Cleared for lift, pilot,” a bored voice came over the comm.
Rather than speak, Boker hit the acknowledgment icon on his panel, a standard practice for shuttle pilots, and applied power. Boker wasn’t the best pilot in the system, as the girls could attest, but he managed to clear the dome without incident. Reaching several hundred meters in elevation, Boker’s tracking panel lit with a small blinking contact 200 kilometers away, and he aimed his shuttle for it.
Partway to the rendezvous, Boker’s comm lit, but it registered as the Bountiful so he ignored it. Several times, the comm from the Bountiful was repeated, but by the fourth call Boker was decelerating to slide beside the other shuttle. When Boker was sure he had a zero position relative to the other shuttle, he locked his helmet on, tested his air mixture, and climbed back to the starboard airlock. Slipping on a small jet pack for vacuum transfers, Boker cycled through the airlock.
People wouldn’t know it — to watch Boker professionally and smoothly exit his airlock, guide himself to the waiting shuttle’s open airlock where two men waited, and then decelerate to come to a nearly zero velocity before the men pulled him in — but Boker hated vacuum.
Inside the shuttle, the men stripped Boker out of his suit and patted him down. Boker knew the drill well. If he made Kadmir’s crew, all his possessions would be returned, even the credits. Only foolhardy criminals stole from one another in the same organization, and those never lasted long.
Boker thought he was in for a long ride to Udrides when he was escorted to the front of the shuttle and sat down across from Azul Kadmir.
“Boker,” Kadmir simply said.
“Mr. Kadmir,” Boker answered respectfully. One of the men who patted Boker down handed Kadmir two readers.
“Which one has the proof?” Kadmir asked, and Boker pointed to the one in his left hand, which Kadmir tossed to him.
Boker entered his code and dived into the storage memory for the pics he needed, and then handed the reader back to Kadmir.
The criminal boss of Udrides looked at the first photo and swiped to the second. He selected a play sequence and pic after pic of three young women rolled past. Toyo’s men had taken numerous photos of the women passed out and naked on the cabin floor. Kadmir glanced up at Boker, who replied to the unsaid comment with a tilt of his head and a lift of an eyebrow.
What was evident to Kadmir was that there were two Méridien bodies and one New Terran. He was getting sick of watching innumerable close-ups of body parts before he came to the facial pics. The first were of the Méridiens, which the men obviously found intriguing, but there was only one photo of the New Terran and not a good one.
When the player ended the pic display, Kadmir sat thinking. There was no doubt there were two Méridiens in the shots, but they could have been just posed on Haraken for all he knew. Kadmir began to wonder if he was being played, when he suddenly stopped and ran the reader’s photo directory again. He scrolled to the last image and brought up the facial shot of the New Terran.
The girl was more than a decade older since she was last seen on a New Terran broadcast, but it definitely was Christie Racine. The pieces of Boker’s story clicked together for Kadmir — the reason Craze might be scared and the reason he tried to eliminate seasoned and loyal men. The idiot or his people had kidnapped the little sister of Alex Racine, the man who had defeated aliens and destroyed Earther warships. As sure as Kadmir was about anything in his life, he knew that Racine would be tearing apart this end of the universe looking for her, and, sooner or later, he would make his way to Oistos.
Thoughts rolled through Kadmir’s head about how to use the information, when he noticed Boker looking expectantly at him. “Welcome to my organization, Boker, you may prove quite valuable,” Kadmir said, offering an inviting smile that never reached his eyes.
-12-
“Mr. President, you have the Assembly Speaker on comm,” Julien announced. “He’s aboard the Tanaka, which has just entered Oistos space.”
Alex’s heart skipped a beat, wondering what had brought Eric Stroheim to Oistos, especially since he stressed to Eric that he wished to maintain a low profile while he worked to regain the kidnapped girls.
Standing on the bridge of the Tanaka, Eric began to breathe easier, as the comm remained silent. The lengthening silence meant Alex was pondering what he had said, and a thinking Alex was always a good thing in Eric’s opinion.
Eric smiled and drew a deep breath before he sent,
Julien activated the Rêveur’s bridge holo-vid and displayed the planet positions, adding colored dots for the Haraken ships, the liner, and the sting ship.
Alex was considering his options and the path the Tanaka might take when a dotted line from the sting ship’s present position to New Terra showed it passing perilously close to Ganymede. Alex looked to Julien, who shook his head in negation.
Several more trajectory scenarios appeared and disappeared on the holo-vid, and a small smile formed on Alex’s face. Even Captain Cordova was enjoying the SADE playing with the president’s display without the courtesy of a request.
When the display was returned to Julien’s original setup, Alex waited, but t
he comm was silent.
Julien added.
