by Jason LaPier
He frowned and moved his jaw around for a few seconds before saying anything. He looked at his armband. “The shuttle from the Royal #3 is due to arrive in ten days, fourteen hours.”
“Good.”
He fidgeted. “Doesn’t that make us a little early for the hand-off?”
She nodded. “Yes. But I suspect Mr. Hill is already here. He’s either a resident on Terroneous, or he’s coming in from somewhere else, and moving that kind of cash, he’d want to check the place out first.”
This seemed to ease the tracker slightly, and he slackened his stance. “Good call. So what’s our move?”
Dava smiled. “You do what you do and I do what I do. Let’s see if we can sniff him out.”
“Sunderville is a pretty good-sized town, and we don’t know what he looks like.”
“Because I killed Sandiego,” she said. Dan was always beating around the bush, but she could usually tell what he was driving at. One of Jansen’s mysterious informants reported that Mr. Sandiego perished in ModPol custody due to excessive internal bleeding.
“Yes, that’s true,” he said quietly. “It would have been … useful … if Sandiego had survived.”
“Well, he didn’t,” Dava said, hopping into the driver seat. “The Misters are still new to the organized crime gig. I’m counting on them being flashy with their cash. So we’re going to hit the most expensive places we can find and keep our ears open and our mouths shut.”
* * *
By the second night, they’d caught a whiff of Mr. Hill. He wasn’t alone. There was a Mr. Guy and a Mr. Pellinarri also in Sunderville. The three of them were not shy with their money, and not shy with their affiliation: they were more or less advertising that the Misters had arrived.
“Well, so much for tracking,” Dan said with a sigh.
They were sitting in a dark corner of Angry Candy watching the table of Misters boisterously order drinks and rank female patrons. Not that the garish pink and purple-lit bar had much in the way of dark corners, but that didn’t hinder their stealth. The way these idiots were partying, they clearly had no idea that Space Waste was hunting them.
“I thought they would at least try,” Dava admitted.
“So what’s next? There’s three of them. Maybe we should get Thompson.”
She rolled her glare from the Misters to Bashful Dan.
He coughed. “On the other hand, there’s only three.”
Several bottles made their way to the table and Dava sighed, thinking it was going to be a long night. But then it appeared that they weren’t opening the bottles, they just wanted something to take with them. They were ungracefully getting out of their chairs and rounding up their goods.
“Come with me to the street,” she said. “We’ll tail them. Once we find out where they’re staying, I want you to hang back.”
Dan nodded wordlessly. She figured he was grateful to be left out of the action.
The three drunk men wound their way through the streets of Sunderville, occasionally stopping to hoot at someone on the street, or to spat with each other about whatever bullshit one of them was trying to pass off as “a true story”. Eventually they came to the Hotel Vitis, which would be expensive for Terroneous, but was probably not all that much in reality. The doorman nodded as though he recognized them, and gave them a wide berth when they stumbled past.
She motioned a sign to Dan, pointing to her ear and mouth with her thumb and pinky and then pointing to the hotel. He nodded and drifted back the way they came. She went down the side of a nearby shop, all closed up for the night, and found a back alley that led to the rear of the hotel.
Her arm buzzed with Dan’s coded message. He’d called the front desk and found they were in room 405, top floor. Dava looked up. She would get to scale a building. She hadn’t done that in a while. She almost felt good, then noticed that there was an old-school drainpipe leading up the brick-surface walls. So much for a challenge.
She tapped at the armband to let Dan know she was going in. After a moment of hesitation, she added, Update Thompson.
Minutes later she was clinging to the side of the building and peeking into an unlit room. Music thumped from somewhere nearby. The Misters were still partying. She took out her light and dialed it down to a soft red. She pointed it into the dark room and saw a made bed in a very large room. No one had booked this suite tonight, and if she had to guess, probably none of the other suites on the top floor were booked. None but 405.
She popped her multitool from her belt and scanned for a sensor. Nothing. Well, it was Terroneous. There was a metal-latch lock on the window, and that was probably all that was needed in a place like this. She flicked the tool until she got the hook she wanted, then used the micro-vibration mode to slide it into the space between the window panes. The lock gave way without complaint, but the window didn’t glide open. The elements had been harsh to the hotel and the wood had swollen. She had to force it open, which took a few minutes and caused a bit of a ruckus, at least by her standards. But the music was still pulsing through the walls and soon she was floating into the darkness of the empty hotel room.
She went to the door, then stopped, putting her ear to the surface to listen. Her nose twitched as she smelled something that raised the hairs on her neck, but she couldn’t place it. Breathing deeper only brought her musty smells of mold and the sharp, chemical citrus of cleaning supplies.
Through the peephole, the hallway was empty. As best she could tell, there were six rooms on the floor. It was obvious where 405 was now: the end of the hall, the source of the music.
Slowly she opened the door. The hallway was dimly lit by yellow ceiling lights. She found the switch and turned them off. Froze and counted to one hundred to ensure her eyes were adjusted. She risked blindness if they had bright lights in the room, but her plan was to get the door open and then get to the side and wait for them to come out.
From her belt, she took the jackpop, a small, sticky, directional explosive, perfect for blowing the locks off of doors; or the whole knob assembly, in most cases. She affixed it just below the doorknob of 405 and tapped the timer and stepped back to position herself.
Thirty seconds.
She held a stunner in her left hand and a knife in her right.
Fifteen seconds.
She closed her eyes and counted.
Pop.
The volume of the music doubled as the door swung open. The light coming through was bright, which was good for her because it meant they wouldn’t be able to see once they came into the dark hall. She aimed the gun and gripped the knife.
“Now!”
She heard the sound of multiple doors opening at once. Down the hall, figures sprang out of the other rooms. She swallowed, realizing someone came out of the unoccupied room she was just in. That smell she had smelled. The faint whiff of cologne.
“Fucking Misters,” she whispered and got down low. The hallway was still dark, but so were all the other rooms.
“Don’t move!” The voice came from 405. “We’ll cook you right here in this hallway!”
She fired her stunner at the figure closest to her and while it broke into spasms, she spun around it and through the open door. Shots rang out but she felt nothing, no one had hit her – yet. She slammed the door shut, but it stopped inches short. The convulsing body had an arm draped through. She ducked behind the wall as more shots were fired, then realized she didn’t trust the walls of the wooden hotel to be bulletproof, and she hit the floor.
If she had a real gun, she might be able to shoot them right through the walls. But no, she had her stungun and her blade. Had intended on sending a message, one that was slow and painful, not quick and loud. She cursed her carelessness, wanted to reason out how they had managed to ambush her, but pushed the thoughts aside. Survival was all that counted at the moment.
“Get the fucking lights on. All of them. She loves the dark.”
The hallway lights sprang dimly to life. A hand appeared above
her, finding the switch next to the door. Instinctively, she plunged her blade through it before the owner had a chance to flick the switch.
He screamed. She yanked the knife out, and he screamed louder.
“Get the hell out of the way, Mr. Guy!”
Someone behind the wounded man shoved him off to the side and fired wildly into the room. She sprung along the floor, rolling to a position behind a heavy couch. Heavy or not, bullets would make short work of the furniture. She needed out of the room.
She glanced at the window. Four stories up. The gravity on Terroneous was almost a full G.
The room. Furniture, desk, a chair, a bed, a lamp – a floor lamp. She swung out to grab it by the base, flipped it around. The base was heavy. She launched it like a javelin at the window. The old glass smashed to pieces, and she caught the top of the lamp before it passed all the way through. Raked the makeshift pole around the edges of the frame once to clear as much glass as she could in those few seconds.
The light came on. She spun and fired the stunner repeatedly. The man in the doorway jittered but the gun was drained. She dropped it and went out the window.
This room wasn’t close to the drainpipe. She considered the drop. Too far. Turned her head up.
“Don’t let her get away!”
Without thinking, her hands were on the top of the trim along the outside of the window. Her feet were each reaching for the sides, gripping along the brick. She was pushing upward, a small leap, her hand finding the half-pipe that ran along the side of the roof. Her legs swinging up and over as gunfire erupted below.
She lay flat on the roof. Ventured a glance over the side. The window below. A head poked out. Mr. Hill.
“She’s on the roof!”
He disappeared.
She went for the corner at the other end where the pipe she came up was. Started to swing a leg over then jumped back when it lit up with sparks from gunshot.
On her back on the roof, she controlled her breathing. She looked at her armband to send a message to Dan, but one was already waiting. Heard gunshots. T-Gun ETA 5 min.
How could she have been five minutes away? She was supposed to be out at the dropship. She must have been in town. Maybe she came as soon as Dan checked in. Maybe she came even earlier.
Dava didn’t like it, the thought of them hovering so close, encroaching on her work. But there she was, outgunned and outmanned. She needed them.
She needed to find a way off the hotel roof.
She was creeping up to each side to cautiously look over to see if there was anything she could grab onto when she smelled the smoke. Before long, she could see the orange light emanating from all around her. They weren’t just going to smoke her out, they were going to burn her alive, even if it meant burning down the whole damn hotel.
Trying to control her breathing, she circled the roof with a deliberate, measured pace. She could hear them inside now, the heavy thump of running feet, growing distant. Going down the stairs to head out the door. She went to the front, unable to get too close as the flames began to spill out and upward, forming a dancing fence of heat along the edge of the roof.
They shouted down below. Whooped congratulations of victory.
Then came a raucous sound. It was unmistakable, the steady rat-a-tat-tat pulse of Thompson’s submachinegun. Dava never thought she’d be glad to hear that obnoxious racket.
The joyous whooping turned to panicked shouts. The Misters were returning fire, but they had not expected their ambush to be ambushed. She could hear the chaos in their efforts. They had no plan. The electric zap of Dan’s stungun making them jump, the cutting punch of Thompson’s gun breaking their bones.
She felt useless, and the flames were getting higher. Temperature rising. She felt sweat trickling down her face. Then the shooting stopped, only minutes after it started.
“Dava!”
They were shouting to her from the far side of the hotel. She went there, but couldn’t see them down below, not without sticking her face into the flames.
“Dava!” Dan’s voice was odd at that volume. It had a projection and an authority she’d never heard before. “Dava! You have to jump!”
“He’s right, Dava.” Thompson’s voice, higher in pitch, cut through the night. “Just take a running leap! You can make it!”
They continued to shout, but she couldn’t make out the words. The fire was growing to the point where the rush of air being chewed away into smoke muted the world around her.
It was Bashful Dan and Thompson. They weren’t stupid. When it came down to it, they were some of the brighter ones. But take a running leap? From four stories up?
She looked up at the sky. The tunnel of smoke billowing upward revealed a cluster of stars through the opening at the end of it.
“Fuck it,” she sighed.
She walked to the opposite end of the roof, turned around, and sprinted.
And leapt.
CHAPTER 14
“Okay, so my friend Stanford and I are on this cruise ship.”
“Wait, you were on a cruise?” Lealina said. “You mean like a Royal Starways thing? Together?”
“Yeah, well,” Jax said. “I mean, we weren’t on a cruise, we were on a cruise ship.” He paused, carefully thinking about how to phrase his time on the Royal Superliner #5. He cleared his throat. “It was a work thing.”
“Oh, okay.”
They’d been out all night, starting before dinner when she took him on a tour to see some of the sights around Stockton. Places he’d already known about, but hadn’t known what they’d meant to her. They went to dinner and he was able to treat, thanks to a generous discount the owner gave him because of a filtration system bug he’d sorted out a few weeks prior. After that they’d planned to go to a holofilm, but the planet, Barnard-5, was almost full and she knew a secret spot for viewing it above the mountain tops just outside of town. They took her car and parked and watched the crimson gas giant drift slowly through the sky.
It seemed like it should have been romantic. They’d gotten to know each other in the couple of weeks that followed their first meeting at the TOEB headquarters, when they trekked around the moon with a small team and reconfigured countless sensor systems. But in that moment, in the quiet of the night with the magnificent roiling presence dominating the horizon, they both got very uncomfortable very suddenly. Jax hadn’t felt anything for a woman in quite some time, and he didn’t know what to do with that feeling. He suspected she had a similar issue.
So they had decided to get drunk.
“We were mostly down in the worker quarters of the superliner for those couple of months.” He leaned against the bar at one of his favorite public houses in town, The Wretched Sunrise, gesturing with his ale. “Once in a while we’d make it up to check out the fancy spots, but you know, not to socialize. But one day we decided to borrow some clothes so we could go to a party.”
“You mean, rich-people clothes?”
“Yeah, kind of. But it was a party, with like a period theme. So no one really had expensive clothes, they all just had whatever clothes they could get their hands on that looked the period.”
“What period?”
“Earth, New Year’s Eve, 1999.”
“Wow, really?” Her eyes lit up with her open-mouth smile, then turned upward in thought. “End of the twentieth century, hmm. So like, lots of denim, right? That’s all I can think of.”
“Oh yeah, a lot of that, but some people with shirts that had short sleeves but with the collar that folds over. Or some people just wore T-shirts and black leather jackets. Not animal leather of course, but you know. And there were a lot of those old-timey sports hats where the brim only sticks out of the front. What else …? Lots of fake beards – some with, some without fake mustaches. Anyway, you get the picture.”
“That must have been a riot, seeing all those rich people dressed up.”
“Well it would have been, but seriously, more than half of them didn’t dress up!�
�� Jax had to rein himself in after an arm gesture almost spilled his beer. “It was like some unspoken rich-people code of irony to go to a costume party and not wear a costume.”
“What the hell?”
“Yeah, I think they see it as ascending to some upper-upper class, where they can watch the middle-upper class act like fools and entertain them or something.”
“But you and your friend were dressed up.”
“Of course. And we made up these stories – like these personas, right? So Stanford – well, Stanford’s mom was in ModPol. She was a detective. So Stanford decides his 1999 persona is going to be this undercover cop, which doesn’t really make sense, because he’s telling everyone he’s an undercover cop.”
He lost himself for a split second, thinking back to that night. They were working through their passenger list, trying to get in as many conversations as possible, but needing to fit in at the same time. Given Runstom’s inability to lie effectively, Jax hit on the brilliant idea that he dress up to be an undercover detective.
She laughed. “That’s great! What were you?”
“Oh,” he said with a laugh. “Well, it wasn’t easy finding a costume for someone tall like me. One of the guys in maintenance said I should dress up like a ball player. There was some sport back in the twentieth century where tall guys would wear short pants and shirts with no sleeves, and so that’s what they cobbled together for me.”
She leaned back – which Jax found perilous given her increasing inebriation and the lack of back support on the bar stool – to look him up and down. One of her eyebrows went up. “That must have been a sight.”
“Not pretty. Not pretty at all. Needless to say, Stanford got most of the attention.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” This sounded like sarcasm, but she included a brief hand on his knee, so he accepted it whether she was teasing him or not.
“Trust me, it was great. He’s really getting into the role, see. I mean, we were uh – we were both stressed about … work.” Yeah right, work. Work being that Jax had been wrongly accused of murder and the real killer was still out there somewhere, and they were on that stupid cruise ship trying to track down whoever had transmitted a virus long distance from the ship’s deck to a subdome on Barnard-4. He saw her looking at him, waiting for his story to continue, so he took a drink and went on. “And it’s an open bar, so we’re both drinking pretty heavily. By about his fourth cocktail, you’d think Stanford had been in law enforcement himself, the way he’s cutting loose with the lingo. And by the sixth cocktail, he’s revealing to everyone that he’s really, really undercover and he’s trying to solve a murder. And he’s telling people that I – the half-naked B-fourean who is supposed to be an old-timey ballplayer – that I’ve been wrongly accused of this murder he’s trying to solve.”
