Open Skies

by Yolande Kleinn

  There was nothing unreasonable in Kai's suggestion, but Ilsa shot him down hard every time. At the beginning she would cite the high rents that always came when space was at a premium. But she and Kai had learned each other too well since those early days. A lie, even one as silly and harmless as this one, couldn't continue to fool her partner, and Ilsa had ultimately—sheepishly—admitted the truth. She needed ground and sky. Weather and wind and proper air, not oxygen filtered through reclamation systems until it smelled more of metal than of anything green.

  Their layovers between clients could last weeks, sometimes months at a time. A short matter of days in space invariably made Ilsa feel antsy and wrong in her own skin. She hated to think of what several weeks might do.

  Now, despite the lack of viewports to show their progress, Ilsa knew the liner was mooring alongside Corriah Mor. She could tell from the minute changes in momentum and gravity, barely discernible shifts that were all the sensation that managed to carry through the ship's powerful inertia buffers. There was a brief but jarring catch as the vessel's main docking ports bracketed themselves to the station.

  "All right?" Kai asked, quietly enough that the words were only for her. Dantes stood to Kai's other side. They had all three abandoned their bunks in favor of joining the early crowds in the embarkation lounge, all passengers impatient to exit from ship to station the moment the docking ports slid open.

  "Fine," Ilsa answered just as quietly. She hoisted her rucksack more securely over her shoulder. The standard disembarkation announcements filtered over the lounge's speaker systems, a repetitive sequence of messages echoed over and over in two dozen different languages. Wait for the warning lights to deactivate before approaching the portals. Do not step through until all exits are completely open. Mind all guidance panels and security officials. Have customs documents at the ready. Ilsa understood some half-dozen languages well enough to decipher the instructions and recognized familiar snatches from several more.

  She knew Kai had a firm grasp on far more languages than she did, and she wondered if he could decipher the murmur of conversations surrounding them. The majority of the waiting crowd was human, but nearly a quarter of the throng was composed of a patchwork of different species, and Ilsa could make out very little of what these others were saying.

  The exit portals themselves were enormous, each large enough to permit comfortable egress to figures three times the size of an average human. Few races stood tall enough to need such accommodations, but strict regulations mandated the dimensions. Licensed vessels above a certain class had to be equipped for all Alliance passengers. Even in the wake of war, these regulations had been strictly enforced. Ilsa felt dwarfed as she watched the intricate metal panels smoothly dilate, allowing the waiting passengers through in a mostly orderly line.

  The arrivals bay they stepped into was enormous, with widely spaced bulkheads and a staggeringly high ceiling. Massive ramps led from the vessel to the bay floor far below, and Ilsa felt Kai crowding behind her as she fell into step with the disembarking crowd. She let her eyes and mind wander as she followed the dull and ceaseless flow of travelers. Ilsa struggled to keep her attention focused outward on her surroundings, forced herself to pay sharp attention to the rhythm and trudging progress of the surrounding crowd.

  It wouldn't do to drop her guard in such an arena. She and Kai were certainly nobody special, and they faced no greater dangers than the clever pickpockets hidden throughout the dense crowd. But Eleazar Dantes was another matter entirely. His was a face that might be recognized, and a name that certainly would be. Ilsa had done some extra digging on him over the course of their journey, and had discovered that he was accustomed to traveling with an entourage of attendants and security personnel.

  Dantes was alone now but for Kai and Ilsa. And though they were under no contractual obligation to protect him, they would have little choice if someone took a hostile interest. Helena Kanne was only one potential danger, and Ilsa didn't enjoy unknowns. She didn't much like the exposed feeling that came of knowing Dantes was somewhere at her back.

  It took them nearly two hours to navigate all three security checkpoints and enter the station proper. The din was quieter here as fellow travelers dispersed about their business. They had reached a smaller corridor than the enormous docking port behind them, but it was still an impressive space, especially when one considered the tightly measured architecture of Corriah Mor. The high ceiling actually slanted upwards far ahead, the natural curve of the station coming visible with distance.

  To left and right stood shop fronts and inviting doorways, businesses inviting new arrivals to spend their money on food and fanfare and comfort.

  "I reserved lodgings on deck twenty-three," Ilsa announced, loud enough for both Kai and Dantes to hear her over the bustle of commerce. She looked to Kai and found his gaze drifting across the variety of offerings that filled the expansive space.

  "Dinner first?" he asked without looking at her.

  Ilsa rolled her eyes, though only Dantes seemed to catch the gesture. "You can bring me dinner. I have work to do." The sooner she settled in and started digging, the sooner they would have what they needed and could decide their next move. Kai might be content to linger aboard Corriah Mor longer than necessary, but Ilsa had no intention of wasting any extra time.

  Kai hit her with an easy grin, clearly untroubled by Ilsa's brusque insistence on getting down to business. He doffed an imaginary hat at her, then nodded politely to Dantes before retreating into the milling crowd. Ilsa kept easy track of him as he moved farther down the wide corridor. His height and broad shoulders made it easy to track him amid the flurry of activity. When she lost sight of him behind a vendor's cart, she turned at last to Dantes.

  "Shall we?" she asked, indicating a different direction. A smaller hall branched off from the main corridor, and as they moved into it, some of the heavy clamor muffled and eased. Dantes kept pace with her as Ilsa navigated several turns that, though unfamiliar, she was confident led in more or less the right direction.

  "What happens next?" Dantes asked. He moved with casual grace, and carried no luggage except a small case with stiff sides, the handle clasped securely in one hand. He seemed to be taking in their surroundings with wordless distaste. His bland expression wasn't quite blank enough to mask the frown that threatened at one corner of his thin mouth. He looked meticulous and out of place in the dully functional hallway.

  Ilsa shrugged her unencumbered shoulder. "Next, I see what I can dig up on the local network and use the station's resources to patch into the wider data stream for the whole sector." She shifted her gaze forward once more. "Kai will start asking around on foot, see if he can find anyone who remembers talking to Abigail when she came through."

  Dantes gave a disbelieving start beside her. Neither of them slowed, but Ilsa could feel his stare when he said with obvious skepticism, "That was almost five years ago. Even if Mr. Othen can find someone who was here, how can he hope to learn anything about Abigail? For God's sake, there was a war going on. He can't possibly hope to find reliable information."

  Ilsa felt impatient ire flare up, alongside an urge to come snappishly to Kai's defense. She knew how valuable his contributions were to their efforts—how lost she would be without his practical smarts and people skills—and it irked her when clients tried to dismiss him as simply the brawn of their partnership. Their division of labor was hardly so simple. Kai had brains aplenty in that smugly handsome head of his; and Ilsa might not be the best hand-to-hand fighter the sector had ever seen, but she was damn near a crack shot with the small firearm tucked securely in her pack.

  She moderated her tone so that no hint of irritation leaked through when she answered, "You'd be surprised. People remember better than you think."

  "Hmm," Dantes murmured in reply. It was neither argument nor agreement, and Ilsa let the matter drop.

  *~*~*

  Kai crossed paths with his two companions only in passing once they
settled in. Their rented quarters were all located in the same narrow hall, and Dantes cornered him to demand updates that very first evening. Despite several hours' extensive legwork, Kai had nothing to report.

  The truth was, he hadn't been all that surprised to come up empty-handed on day one. Kai had a solid system, and he had spent his first day in the busiest commercial districts of the station. The high-end shops, the expensive restaurants, the well-lit bars and licensed gambling establishments that peppered the tourist-centered levels. The fact that this wasn't his first visit to Corriah Mor didn't change his preferred methods. Kai always began searching in the noisiest neighborhoods before narrowing his field in quieter directions.

  He'd known going in that he was unlikely to catch a break on the first day. It was a necessary step—he refused to jump ahead and risk missing vital clues—but it was also usually futile. There was too much turnover in employment within high-profile businesses. Beyond that, the sheer volume of travelers made it almost impossible for a single face to stand out in the crowd, especially when the face belonged to a woman who had been doing her damnedest to go unnoticed.

  All day Kai had spoken to employees, some human but most not, and all day he had met with the same brick wall of nothing. Can't remember, can't tell you humans apart anyway, wasn't anywhere near Corriah Mor during the war. Experience kept him from indulging in the frustration that might have wrapped itself around him otherwise, but Kai could tell Dantes was unimpressed with his report.

  "I'll start with the lower decks tomorrow." Kai wasn't thrilled at having to explain himself, but the fact that Dantes was here meant Kai probably owed him more than a brush-off. "If Abigail was trying to keep a low profile, she'd have kept to the less-populated commercial areas." What he didn't bother to explain was that he had significantly higher hopes for tomorrow's efforts. While the lower decks offered a lot more physical ground to cover, they were also slower and quieter, filled with business owners who had long ago settled in for the long haul. Not all of those businesses would have been around five years ago, but plenty of them were long-term fixtures, with employees who had made the station a permanent home. The people working the lower decks were no transient crowd. They were lifers, aboard Corriah Mor to make a living.

  There was still no guarantee anyone would recognize or remember Abigail Dantes, but Kai liked his chances a hell of a lot better.

  He got only two or three words out of Ilsa when he stopped by her room with dinner, but there was nothing unusual there, either. Ilsa had patched her own more powerful equipment into the room's standard access terminal, and had spread screens and amplifiers and encryption nodes across the desk and chair and part of the bed. The room was small to begin with, sparse and tidy, but it looked exponentially more cramped with Ilsa's equipment sprawling across every available surface. Even knowing how tightly all that equipment could be packed, it always impressed Kai just how much Ilsa insisted on keeping with her, and how efficiently she managed to fit it all in the single rucksack she carried. That she managed to carry a necessary variety of clothing as well was a marvel Kai had given up on questioning.

  There was literally no furniture available for him to sit on—even the bed on which Ilsa perched cross-legged had no space left over—so Kai simply handed over one of the small containers of food and sat himself on the floor. He settled with his back braced to the wall and his feet propped against the side of the bed, fitting himself awkwardly into the narrow aisle.

  He opened his own takeout carton without a word and began to eat in unobtrusive silence.

  Kai knew better than to interrupt Ilsa when she had that particular sheen of focus in her eyes. She didn't touch her dinner right away, but Kai went ahead and dug into his own, eating with his fingers for want of utensils. The food was dry, crumbly balls of vegetable matter and some protein he didn't analyze too closely. The Treeme vendor who had sold him the two cartons had called them maskail, but they tasted eerily like falafel.

  Eventually, without taking her eyes off the screens of rolling data, Ilsa reached for the carton beside her knee. She ate with the kind of distant distraction that spoke of tenuous data trails and a long night ahead. Kai didn't bother waiting around to see if she would eventually surface. He took his leave as silently as he had arrived, pausing at the door to throw a fondly exasperated look over his shoulder.

  Ilsa didn't notice him watching her, any more than she had heeded his company while he ate, or his movement as he rose from the floor. She was dressed in dark pants and a loose shirt that hung low at the collar, comfortable attire for stationary work. Her long hair was tied carelessly back, giving a clear view of the smooth line of her jaw and the freckles that dotted her dark skin. Her expression was drawn tight in unassailable concentration.

  Kai smiled as a warm rush of affection filled his chest. He exited the room without a word.

  Right from the start, his second day of digging went better than the first. When Kai reached sub-deck six, he found himself in a space he only recognized as a commercial sector by dint of having visited the station once or twice before. It was an uninviting neighborhood, dingy and rough around the edges. Even the air felt heavier here, weighted with a scent like laundry that had sat too long between cleanings. There were more human businesses here than above. The corridor was lined with restaurants and narrow shops, plus a handful of liquor stores selling wares that weren't exactly brand-advertised or license-approved.

  These were establishments where owners kept their own shop fronts and did their own business. A couple of them even recognized Abigail Dantes when Kai showed her picture around.

  "Sure, I remember her," said a man—human—whose thin face seemed pressed into a permanent leer. "Pretty little thing. Didn't rightly belong in these parts, you could tell just lookin' at 'er. Must be three years back at least."

  Kai slipped the picture back into his jacket pocket and asked, "What can you tell me about her?"

  "Why you asking?" the man countered, a sheen of interest creeping into his dull expression.

  Kai kept his own face bland, allowing no hint of eagerness or even curiosity to show through. "Doing a favor for a friend. I'm hoping to discover where she went after she left Corriah Mor. If you don't know anything else, I'll just..." He gestured towards the door of the tiny dive and turned as if about to head that way.

  "She didn't exactly say much," the proprietor declared before Kai could make good on his bluff. "Came in for food a couple times, tried a little too hard to keep 'er head down. I kept an eye on 'er where I could. Nice girl, wouldn't a' wanted to see her robbed or worse."

  "And she gave no hint of where she intended to go?"

  The proprietor gave a lazy shrug. "Not to me, she didn't. We weren't chums, you see." He hesitated, fell into a considering pause, then added, "She didn't always sit alone, though. Girl kept some interesting company."

  "What kind of interesting company?" Kai was careful to keep any hint of impatience out of his tone.

  Again that pointed shrug preceded the shopkeeper's answer. "The kind a person might go to if they needed to disappear but good. Can't go anywhere without the right documents, see. And those documents leave a big, bright trail, don't they? But 'round here there's plenty of folk willing to provide alternatives for the right price."

  "She planned on going completely to ground," Kai realized. "She was meeting with local data forgers."

  "I'm not saying I know any such thing," the man hedged, but he sounded calm and confident. "I'm just saying she was meeting with some particular faces."

  "Do you have any names?" Kai fished in his pocket for the few loose credit chips he was carrying.

  But the proprietor shook his head and admitted, "None as'd do you any good. Most of that lot cleared out when the war got too close to the station. There's plenty of shady types to be found hereabouts, don't get me wrong. But none of them's been aboard Corriah Mor anywhere near long enough."

  "I see." Kai drew one of the chips from his pocket desp
ite the disappointment. He handed it over, slipping it discreetly into the cafe owner's palm. "Thank you for your time, sir."

  The man pocketed the chip, perpetual leer slipping into a stiff attempt at a smile. Then he nodded, indicating the hall outside with the gesture, and said, "You might as well try that Karikeau place just up the way. Gaudy bar with all the green lights out front. Been around even longer than I have, an' I'm sure I saw your little miss go in there a time or two. Usually with that interesting company of hers."

  Kai blinked in surprise. "Thank you," he repeated, more genuinely this time, and finally took his leave.

  He didn't bother with the handful of establishments that lined the hall between the cafe and the bar in question. Most were restaurants of some variety or other, with offerings that ranged from nauseating odors to scents that might have seemed mouth-watering in a more savory locale. Not everyone digested the same food—not everyone digested food period—and a neighborhood like this catered to all biases and species.

  He knew when he'd reached the right place partly from the unmistakable blocks of lettering on the sign above the door. Kai couldn't read any of the dozen or so written Karikeau languages, but he would recognize their distinctly ornate zigs and swirls anywhere. Even without the sign he'd likely have known this was the place. Green lights indeed. They formed a surreal pattern about the open doorframe and along the facade of the establishment, distinctive pinpoints of light too dim to cast any real illumination down the corridor. Kai didn't linger looking at them, darting instead through the open archway and into the establishment.

  The place had a high ceiling and a twining bar that wrapped along two entire walls. Jangling music played just shy of too loud, and a truly impressive array of drinks lined ornate racks behind the bar, bottles and boxes and cartons and jugs. There was something for every palate.