Vanguard,BookOne

by David Mack

  “I never pictured you as the earth-tones type,” Quinn said.

  “Mr. Quinn, I am in no mood to carry you up those stairs. Please do not force me to break your legs.”

  “Can’t keep him waiting, can we?” Quinn made a sweeping arm gesture toward the stairs. “Lead on.”

  The march up the stairs seemed, in Quinn’s estimation, to lack the pall of dread that had marred his previous visits. Then he realized that he might have allowed T’Prynn’s interventions on the Kessik IV job to make him overconfident; he had no reason to think he was still enjoying her protection. On the other hand, if I’m worth that much to her, she’d be a fool to let me walk in here without taking some kind of precaution. It was a comforting thought. Ignoring the prudent inner voice that told him not to count on it, he clung to his new cocky attitude and followed Zett up the stairs to the “sweet spot” in front of Ganz’s two disintegrator obelisks. Immediately, Quinn noticed that the usual inward push of gawkers was not in evidence. The coterie of retainers seemed to be keeping their distance today.

  Lounging on his scatter of bright pillows, Ganz enjoyed a long, deep pull from his hookah. The air on the quiet upper level was dense with grayish violet pipe haze. Opening his eyes, Ganz smirked at Quinn. “Heard you had some trouble.”

  “I don’t have your dilithium,” Quinn said.

  Ganz’s voice was quiet, deep, and dangerous. “Why not?”

  “I made your delivery to Broon. He didn’t want it.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said, “but don’t worry.” Using an old sleight-of-hand trick his uncle had taught him, Quinn produced a Federation credit chip from his right palm. He snapped his fingers and flicked it forward, onto the floor directly in front of Ganz’s bare green feet. “I got you a better deal.”

  Ganz sat up, leaned forward, and plucked the chip off the floor. Holding it between his thick fingers, he stared at it for a moment. Then he looked at Quinn…and stood. Walking toward Quinn, Ganz’s every step projected strength and power. Lying down he merely seemed bulky; on his feet, in motion, the rippling movement of his muscles became much more apparent. He was heavyset in his torso, but not in a way that suggested softness; the added mass only made him more imposing.

  The Orion merchant-prince’s chin was level with Quinn’s eyes. He spoke very quietly, but the deep register of his voice was such that Quinn felt every word tremble the air around him. “You know I sent you there to die, right?”

  If street-fighting as a boy had taught Quinn anything, it was when not to blink or back down. “Yeah, I figured.”

  “But you came back anyway.”

  “You told me to sell your cargo,” Quinn said, quiet bravado masking the sick swirl of fear that was turning his guts to mud. “I sold it. Money from the job is yours. Deal’s a deal.”

  “Good answer,” Ganz said. “I don’t know how you made it back here alive. I don’t even know how you got that hardware through Starfleet customs. I don’t want to know.” Leaning down, he filled Quinn’s ear with the most unnerving whisper he had ever heard. “But either you’re smarter than you look, or you’ve got powerful friends. Either way…you just made yourself useful.” Ganz withdrew and backed up half a step. “Come back in a few days,” he said. “I might have some work for you.” The Orion turned and walked back toward his mountain of pillows.

  Taking that as his cue to leave, Quinn ambled casually away and descended the stairs like a man with nothing to fear. Less than halfway down, Zett was once again at his shoulder. “You’re probably feeling proud of yourself,” the Nalori said.

  Quinn made a point of eyeing Zett’s suit again. “Have you considered patterns? Solids are very last year.”

  “You should have killed Broon and his men when you had the chance,” Zett said.

  “I don’t kill unless I have to,” Quinn said. “And I’ve yet to see a profit that was worth a man’s life.”

  “That’s because you live small and have no imagination,” Zett said. “You humiliated Broon then sold guns to his rival. He’ll send people after you. Assassins. There’ll be nowhere you can go that he won’t find you.”

  “You’re wrong,” Quinn said, bounding off the stairs and onto the gaming floor. “I have a very rich imagination.”

  Zett sneered. “Your insolent japes won’t save you when Broon’s men come calling.”

  “No, but they’ll make my death eminently quotable.” They passed a man who was facedown on the cards table, weeping into an empty stretch of felt where his chips used to be. Quinn adroitly snagged the man’s untouched cocktail, which even from more than a meter away Quinn’s nose knew contained tequila. He sipped as he stepped inside the turbolift. Making a broad shoulder-roll that sloshed booze on Zett’s perfect tan shoes, Quinn added, “Why’re you so worked up? Afraid I’m gunning for your job?”

  “You could not do my job,” Zett said.

  “Yeah, I hear being head waiter is hard work.” He guzzled the last of the booze and lobbed the empty glass at Zett. “Think fast.” The man reflexively caught it in one perfectly manicured hand. “Good catch,” Quinn said. As the lift door closed, he snuck in one last gibe: “Table four needs menus.”

  The muffled crash of the thrown glass against the other side of the closed turbolift door brought a malicious smirk to Quinn’s face. Exiting through the airlock a minute later, he looked up at the two doormen, nodded his farewell, and received two polite nods in return. Sauntering away, he fished a cigar from his inside coat pocket, then found his lighter and ignited it. A thick plume of smoke lingered around him as he made the long walk back to the upper levels. I’m forty-nine, four times divorced, and one mistake away from waking up dead. But I’m still breathing, so here’s to me.

  Several minutes later, he was ambling through the middle of Stars Landing. He ducked down a shortcut, a long and narrow sliver of space between two buildings. He was almost at the end when a large humanoid silhouette blocked his path. A stray shaft of light glinted off the man’s pistol, which was steadily leveled in Quinn’s direction. He considered turning tail and making a run for it, but it was a skinny straightaway with no cover and no doors. I’ll never make it, he knew. Damn, and this was a good cigar.

  Quinn straightened his posture and chose to meet death with his eyes open. He put his cigar in his mouth and braced himself.

  The gunman tensed, as if he had suffered a full-body muscle cramp. His knees wobbled, he crumpled downward, and then he fell on his face with a dull thud—revealing a tall and slender feminine silhouette behind him, one hand still extended to where the man’s shoulder had been. The woman stepped over the fallen assassin and strode forward, elegant and purposeful.

  Grinning broadly, Quinn took another puff of his cigar.

  T’Prynn emerged from the anonymity of shadow and looked at him with the most intense and beguiling dark eyes he had ever seen. “I have need of your services,” she said. “Come with me.”

  Tim Pennington stepped through the door into his apartment. The sight of his wife smiling at him scared him half to death.

  “Hi, honey! Surprise!” She stood in the middle of the living room, holding an ugly knickknack in one hand and his favorite pint glass in the other. Dozens of tiny bits of her tourist-trap junk from around the galaxy now littered his once-pristine shelves and tables. He stared at her, expressionless, like a man fresh from a difficult session at the dentist.

  “Lora,” he said, shocked into a monotone. “You’re here.”

  “I got a spot on an earlier transport,” she said, then tossed her bit of junk and his pint glass on the sofa and flung herself on top of him. Draping her arms over his shoulders and behind his neck, she said with a lascivious grin, “I insisted.”

  His smile looked and even felt genuinely happy. It was a reflex. “And how could they say no, right?”

  “Exactly,” Lora said. She kissed him, hard and hungry, with a passion that he was sure would swallow him whole unless he pulled back. He f
ought the urge and threw himself into the moment. The hesitation in his actions felt obvious to him, and he expected to be taken to task for it any second now. Instead, Lora broke away first, did a small pirouette, and laughed. “I saw a lot of cute little shops along the boulevards when I was coming in,” she said. “Restaurants, too. Want to get dinner?”

  “I’m not really hungry,” he said, his melancholy slowly rising to the fore despite his conscious effort to suppress it.

  “Quick, call security,” she said. “Someone must’ve stolen your stomach. You’re always hungry.” She shrugged. “Later, then. Whenever you like.” She began moving around the room, rearranging all her little bits of junk in ways that subtly eclipsed what few personal items he had chosen to adorn his living room shelves and tables with. It was as if he suddenly didn’t exist in the apartment he’d occupied alone for more than three months. “You’ve certainly settled in,” she said. Obliviously shifting and moving his life around, she prattled on, “If I know you, you’ve already got your routine all worked out. Up early, swimming laps, then somewhere obscure for a café con leche. A hard day chatting people up and trying to trick your editor into reimbursing your dinner checks.” She stopped messing with his things long enough to cast a playful, simmering glance in his direction. “Am I right?”

  “Pretty much,” he said with a faltering grin. It felt like a ghastly bore that despite four months away from her he was as stale and predictable as ever. The mystery that came with novelty had long since worn off their relationship. He resented that he was an utterly known quantity to her, hated that she simply knew the minutiae of his life without having to ask. Then he remembered Oriana and savored a bittersweet taste of smug revenge.

  He hadn’t meant to lose himself to his dark mood so deeply. Lora’s tone became concerned. “What’s wrong? Are you upset?”

  “Yes, actually,” he said. Even knowing what she would ask next, he didn’t elaborate, preferring to make her draw him out.

  “About what, sweetheart?”

  “The Bombay,” he said. “I just finished a memorial piece, full of stories from people who lost friends or family. I’ve been working on it ever since the news first came in…. I guess it just got under my skin, is all.”

  “Objectivity was never your strong suit, was it?” She moved close to him and stroked her fingertips through his hair. “You always get too close to your stories and get all wrapped up.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice barely more than a quiet hush of breath. “You know me.” His eyes closed as if magnetically sealed. Something inside him just didn’t want to look into Lora’s eyes right now. He swallowed hard. “I always get too close. And that’s how people get hurt.”

  Sequestered in the unlit cargo hold of the Rocinante, T’Prynn handed Quinn a palm-sized data card. “Take this to residential compartment 2842,” she said. “Hide it somewhere easily described, then send an anonymous message to Tim Pennington with instructions on how to find it.”

  Quinn held the data card between his thumb and forefinger. He regarded it with quiet suspicion. “Why?”

  A decades-old memory of the blunt end of a lirpa rattling her jaw colored her words with aggression. “Excuse me?”

  “This ain’t what I signed on for,” he said. “You said you needed me to get around on planets you can’t go to. You didn’t say anything about me being your delivery boy.”

  “I said I would contact you when I had use for you.”

  “What is this? A joke? Drop a data card? Make an anonymous tip? You could do all this yourself.”

  “Yes, I could.” She suppressed Sten’s katra memory of her elbow shattering the bridge of his nose, while waiting for Quinn to reason out the subtext of her statement.

  “You’re making me do this just to prove that you can.”

  “Correct.”

  “Just showing me who’s boss.”

  She arched one eyebrow at him. “Indeed.”

  He thrust the data card back at her. “What if I say no?”

  “Then next time I will let the bounty hunter shoot you.”

  He stuffed the data card in his coat pocket. “Right. Where’d you say this thing’s goin’?”

  Sleep eluded Pennington.

  Beside him, Lora was deep into a REM phase and sprawled over more than two-thirds of his bed. Inspired by their prolonged separation, she had been unwilling to take “no” for an answer when she had pounced on him. The mood had felt awkward and empty to Pennington; he’d felt like a person whose between-meal snackings had left him with no appetite when dinner came. All the same, he had gone through the motions, indulging her with the pleasures he knew she preferred. Emotion might have betrayed him, but muscle memory had remained true.

  That was two hours ago.

  The ceiling was painted with dappled light filtered through the boughs of trees outside the bedroom window. He had always been fond of the old-fashioned–looking sodium lamps that ringed Fontana Meadow. Tonight, their dusky orange glow mingled with organically shaped shadows to resemble golden camouflage.

  He rolled to his left, away from Lora.

  With slow, cautious motions he rotated his pillow in search of a spot of refreshing coolness.

  A slow, deep breath felt good, but he was no less awake at the end of it than he had been at the start.

  It was 0338, a time that his father had always described as seeming “less real” than other parts of the day. A dark Limbo betwixt the late night and the dawn, it was like a No Man’s Land for the ordinary soul. More and more lately, however, Pennington had found himself stalking leads and drafting stories here in the wee hours.

  Soundless and discreet, his pager blinked with a soft green light that indicated he had a new message. Grateful for any excuse to slip out of bed, he scooped up the small device, pushed aside the sheets, and stole away to the living room, where he sank heavily onto the sofa with a huff of breath and checked the message on his pager.

  No source ID, he noticed. Odd. Anonymous messages were not difficult to send via the service he used, but few reliable sources ever took that precaution. Information was all well and good, but it was generally not safe to take anonymous sources “at their word.” His editor almost always insisted on either two credible corroborating sources, or lots of rock-solid evidence.

  He opened the message and at first didn’t know what it was.

  It read, simply:

  Compartment 2842. Behind the bedroom ventilation grate.

  Without exception, it was the vaguest lead he had ever been offered. What are they trying to lead me to? A body? A safety violation? He was ashamed to admit that the sheer mystery of it actually intrigued him. Running off in the middle of the night to pursue something this flimsy was absurd.

  From the bedroom, Lora began to make a bizarre wheezing-warbling sound. Pennington asked himself whether he would prefer to go back inside and lie down next to his wife until the faux sunrise, or slip out of the apartment to see what this idiotic tip was all about.

  He got up and started looking for his shoes.

  Zett walked three steps behind Qoheela, a beefy Tarascan hit man. Morikmol had found Qoheela lying facedown in a narrow alley near Quinn’s favorite drinking establishment. On Ganz’s orders, Qoheela had been escorted onto the Omari-Ekon. Qoheela’s plodding footfalls trembled the staircase as he crested its top steps. Moving quickly, Zett passed the bulbous-eyed amphibian and guided him toward the spot between the twin black obelisks.

  Standing and clearly in a foul mood, Ganz glared at Qoheela from beneath a furrowed brow. “You’re one of Broon’s men.”

  “That’s right,” the Tarascan said, his voice translated by a device beneath his tapirlike snout, which waggled as he spoke.

  “Who said you have Vanguard privileges?”

  “It’s a public facility,” Qoheela said snidely.

  Stepping lightly, Zett positioned himself just behind Qoheela’s left flank.

  Ganz’s indignant expression never wavered.
“I don’t like complications on my turf,” he said.

  “Your deal went bad,” Qoheela said. “Broon put a contract on Quinn. End of story.”

  “I’ll tell you when the story ends,” Ganz said. As he lifted his hand to give the signal to disintegrate the Tarascan, Qoheela struck out to either side with his richly muscled arms and hit each obelisk hard enough to crack both bases and tilt them apart. Sparks fountained from the breaks in the stone.

  Qoheela lifted his foot to step forward toward Ganz.

  Zett’s fist struck the Tarascan on his spine, just above the pelvic assembly. A sharp, wet snap of shattered bone was heard by everyone in the room. Qoheela stopped in midstep, then slumped. Zett drew his short, curved yosa blade. Before Qoheela’s knees touched the deck, Zett circled him in a dancelike motion and executed a perfect slash across the creature’s jugular. Black blood jetted out in a fan-shaped spray, just missing Zett, who twirled away. By the time the slender, well-dressed Nalori had finished his well-rehearsed chom pattern, Qoheela had pitched forward. He was now exactly as Morikmol had found him, only dead. A pool of Qoheela’s jet ichor spread swiftly around him on the pristine deck.

  One of Ganz’s more attentive retainers offered Zett a clean towel for his yosa. He accepted it and wiped the blade clean. Handing back the sullied linen, he was offered another, this time dampened with warm water, for his hands. A retainer held his weapon while a young woman draped the damp cloth over his hands. He cleaned them, digit by digit, with the care of a surgeon.

  Morikmol and another large specimen of useful muscle wrapped Qoheela’s corpse in an old rug and ported it away to be immersed in liquid nitrogen until it crumbled into a pile of brittle, grayish dust. Zulo, the resident “cleaner,” was already pouring a small jar of chemicals on the blood puddle to break it down at the molecular level and evaporate it. Within minutes, Zett knew, the floor in front of Ganz would be pristine once more. Only the leaning, splintered obelisks remained amiss. No doubt Ganz will have those replaced by the end of the week, Zett figured.