Open Skies

by Yolande Kleinn

  The hand light was a small, focused thing, and it gave off almost no ambient glare when she turned it on. It lit only a square patch of ground directly where she aimed it. Ilsa swept the floor quickly but methodically, not entirely sure what she was looking for.

  She stopped when she found it. Dantes's gun lay abandoned not far from where Ilsa remembered leaving him. It was equipped and active, and the barrel was warm to the touch. He must have been shooting when he dropped it. If it weren't for the deafening assault of more immediate gunfire, Kai and Ilsa would have heard the sounds of combat.

  There was blood two feet from the fallen weapon, slicked across the hard ground.

  "Red," Ilsa reported in low, cautious tones. There was enough of it to make the puddle impossible to mistake, but not enough to indicate a mortal wound. She hoped not, anyway. It was difficult to be sure.

  "Probably his." Kai was a short distance from her, peering at the walls despite the dimness of the hall. "I didn't see any humans in the posse on our tail." He paused, peered closer at a stretch of wall that looked not at all special at a distance, and then announced in the same low voice, "There are half a dozen scorch marks here, and at least one shot went clean through the wall. Looks like Dantes went down fighting."

  "Of course he did." Ilsa tried to picture the man meekly surrendering, even for his own good, and couldn't conjure a convincing image. "I suppose we'd better find him and make sure he's alive."

  "And rescue him," Kai agreed. He sounded lighthearted enough, but there was grimness tucked beneath the words. Ilsa picked up her own weapon, secured and deactivated it, and slipped it into the pocket of her long coat. She kept the coat on—it was dark and discreet, and she didn't need the same maneuverability that Kai required—and she didn't want to leave her weapon behind despite the fact that it was running fatally low on power. She'd rather have those two or three remaining shots in a pinch, and even an empty gun could work as a bluff.

  Before she stood, she took Dantes's gun in hand, gauging the balance in her grip. It was a bulky weapon, heavier than it looked, but she had practiced on bigger monstrosities. She felt confident her aim would hold true.

  "Here." Ilsa handed the light to Kai. She would need both hands to manage Dantes's gun. "We'll need it to follow his trail." Assuming he had left them one.

  He had left a trail. The infrequent patches of blood became scanter with every turn and corridor, but they were enough to guide Kai and Ilsa along a steady course. Dantes was still bleeding as his captors directed him... Where? Ilsa wasn't familiar enough with Depsis to know where they were going without the advantage of a map, and they were well beyond the commercial portions of the facility. There were no directional kiosks here. And they were only moving deeper, into dull-sided corridors where doors were labeled only with strings of numbers. They were underground too, Ilsa realized. They had descended more than one flight of stairs along the way, and the air had grown cooler. There were no more windows offering illumination from outside.

  There was other light now, though. Not just safety lights, but the occasional overhead panel set to a default night setting. This wasn't the deliberate gloom of sabotaged halls. These were simply corridors disused at so late an hour, minimal lighting designed to save power. It was enough for Kai to put the hand light away, and Ilsa immediately felt less exposed.

  She caught sight of brighter light ahead before she heard any voices, but in a few more paces, she could make out words—Terran standard—in angry conversation.

  "—the hell are you doing with that thing?" Dantes's unmistakable voice cut through the quiet with surprising calm. "Is that a recording device? Can't we just get this over with, clean and quick?"

  Ilsa and Kai exchanged a look, eyebrows high. They had reached the source of the light, an empty door frame midway down the spartan hall. Ilsa reached the door first and crouched beside it, Dantes's gun held steady in both hands. She leaned just far enough to get a look inside, praying their quarry was overconfident enough to not be watching the door too closely.

  There were only three figures in the room besides Dantes, and none of them seemed to notice her. Two were feathered fellows, round and disconcertingly pillow-like. They wore matching gray bodysuits that looked uncomfortable over their dark feathers, and each held a shock rifle in hand as they stood at stiff attention. They loomed behind Dantes, where he knelt with wrists bound before him.

  Execution style.

  The third figure was almost certainly the Gaiminn female Kai had first spotted. She was shorter than average, her skin loose and sleek and faintly purple. She stood directly in front of Dantes, fussing with a small piece of equipment that hovered on a blurry sheen of air. Ilsa didn't need a good look to be sure Dantes was right. That was some sort of recording-and-transmission device.

  "Cease talking," the Gaiminn snapped. At last she stepped away from the tripod, clearly finished with her work.

  Dantes surprised no one—clearly not even his captors—by continuing to speak instead. "Bad enough you intend to blow my brains across the floor. Do you really need to document the event for posterity?"

  The Gaiminn made a clucking noise with her tongue. It sounded eerily like laughter. "Sir Iain Merck insists on proof the job is done. Therefore proof he shall have. You do not have any say in the matter."

  "Iain Merck, eh?" Dantes sounded unimpressed. "And here I'd hoped you were working for someone with a legitimate grudge."

  Whatever else Ilsa might have hoped to glean from the conversation, she realized her time was fast running out. The Gaiminn was moving away, presumably out of range to let her feathered companions work, and the two toughs were beginning to raise their weapons. Ilsa hefted Dantes's gun. She sent a quick, silent prayer to gods she'd never bothered to believe in, and then pulled the trigger.

  She dropped the first tough more by luck than skill. Dantes's gun erred to the left, and she was damn lucky to still catch her target high in the chest. A weaker gun or lower setting might have left her target alive from such a glancing blow, but the residual charge packed too much kick. The figure fell hard, convulsing just long enough to give the appearance of pain before falling permanently still.

  The second tough squawked in startled protest. He whirled for the door, searching her out, but Ilsa dropped him too, efficiently and without remorse. Unlike the first, her second shot landed with cold accuracy.

  She searched, found that the Gaiminn had retreated to the far side of the room and was now struggling with a locked door. It was more practicality than pity that made Ilsa aim for the wall beside instead of the Gaiminn's head, a warning shot across the enemy bough. If they took the ringleader alive, perhaps they could get further answers. At minimum they would have someone to turn over to the authorities rather than having to hit the road in order to avoid an ugly cleanup.

  But the Gaiminn didn't surrender at the violent warning. Instead she dropped to one knee and pivoted, drawing a compact weapon from beneath her vest.

  Ilsa recognized the gun as a Mirror Line 56G—a gun Ilsa was partial to herself—before she had to duck behind the doorframe to avoid the shot that scorched past her face. Ilsa swung forward once more, leading with Dantes's weapon and exhaling as she moved, taking quick, deadly aim. She pulled the trigger and the Gaiminn fell, leaving the room empty but for Dantes himself and the guilty dead.

  It was Kai who darted into the room to cut Dantes loose, leaving Ilsa to destroy the recording device before it could catch their faces. They vacated the premises in a hurry, retracing their steps in grim silence. As far as Ilsa could tell, Dantes wasn't bleeding anymore. At the very least he was well enough to keep his mouth shut, and that suited her just fine for the moment.

  It wasn't until they had recovered their belongings and reached a more populated district that Kai turned to Dantes and asked, "Who is Sir Iain Merck?" Kai's voice was strained and tired. With his coat on, there was no visible sign of his injury, but Ilsa knew he was beginning to bleed through the bandage. She was carry
ing both her own bag and Kai's, despite Kai's attempt to insist otherwise. He looked too pale, unsteady on his feet, and Ilsa refused to let him push his luck. She barely listened now as Kai questioned Dantes. She was too busy looking for an open clinic as they moved from dockside to more of a market plaza, where merchants were just beginning to prepare for the morning.

  "Iain Merck was a competitor of mine," Dantes answered without apparent evasion. "He exercised many of the same leveraging tactics as I did during the war, but he did it on my turf. He lacked the capital to back up his maneuvering. When I drove him out of the system, I absorbed all his holdings. I suppose he harbors some bad feelings."

  Kai laughed, a strained sound that was more dry than amused. "And this you don't call a legitimate grudge?"

  In her peripheral vision, Ilsa saw Dantes shrug. "I don't make kind choices, Mr. Othen. A successful man accumulates enemies."

  Ilsa snorted, but didn't comment beyond asserting, "We'll need to book a flight straight out of here once we find someone to mend Kai. There's too much chance authorities will connect us to the mess if we stay."

  "What about the local data stream?" Kai asked, speeding his steps to walk beside her.

  "I'll manage with the next one. It's not a static trail we're following. I know what I'm looking for now. It's no disaster if I don't get access to one link in the chain." It could make her work more difficult, but only for a short while. She'd rather have to manage digital gymnastics to fill in some blanks than get them all arrested by insisting they stay.

  "There." Kai pointed to a pale blue sign bearing an empty circle—the universal symbol for Alliance-licensed medical care. The door beside the sign was shut; the doctor clearly wasn't open for business yet. Ilsa altered course anyway, making straight for the sign.

  She didn't care what time of day it was. She would bang on that door until someone answered, and then she would pay whatever tender was required. She had no intention of watching Kai bleed to death.

  "Relax," Kai murmured for Ilsa's ears only. "I'll be fine."

  "You goddamn better be," Ilsa retorted and pounded on the door.

  Chapter Five

  Lanniah Ceti Three was the largest of Lannis's habitable moons, and it boasted the busiest port in the solar system. It was also far enough from Depsis that Kai felt better for the distance, even if his mended shoulder did ache and itch every moment of the journey. Ilsa reminded him more than once that the discomfort was entirely in his head; the medic had done a professional job patching the deep wound, not just with needle and thread but with respectable technologies to speed the body's natural repair processes.

  Kai didn't care. It itched. And it wouldn't stop itching until he could take the damn bandage off and put the entire ordeal behind him. It didn't help that Dantes seemed to consider it perfectly natural that Kai should have been injured in his service. Dantes seemed to take the fight and rescue for granted, never once thanking them for hauling his ungrateful ass out of harm's way. Kai rankled at the presumption. If Dantes had remained behind from the start and simply allowed Kai and Ilsa to follow their usual procedure, working alone and reporting progress from a distance, they could have avoided the situation entirely. There would have been no attack in the first place if Kai and Ilsa had been traveling alone.

  He silently conceded that there was no point confronting a man like Eleazar Dantes about ingratitude, and he swallowed his irritation silently. Ilsa seemed to be doing the same. They would have to make do with Dantes's reassurances that they were already traveling beyond Iain Merck's sphere of influence.

  They arrived at port during the midday rush and exited their small passenger frigate into regulated chaos. There were large crowds disembarking from other vessels standing parked in an orderly row along the same airfield. The port facilities were a short distance away, a building so wide it looked squat despite stretching nine stories tall.

  Sections of the ground were marked off, designating moving walkways, and elsewhere there were hovering carts offering rides toward the main building. The walkways were overcrowded, and the carts demanded payment for services—up front, no free rides—but Kai and Ilsa didn't mind the longer walk. Ilsa especially seemed in no hurry to leave the open air, crisp and cool with a vividly clear sky overhead.

  More surprising was Dantes following them meekly without complaint, and without requisitioning one of those passing carts. Perhaps he felt guilty for endangering them after all. It was the only explanation Kai could muster for the silent concession.

  Two days later, Kai was bandage-free. The unmarked skin of his shoulder gave no indication that he had almost bled to death on Depsis. Kai recognized his near miss more from the frantic fear in Ilsa's eyes than from his own lightheaded memories of pain, but at least he felt at home in his own skin once more.

  He also felt restless, as two days had passed without any useful task on which to spend his focus. Their search was no longer following Abigail's physical trail. The pressure was now entirely on Ilsa as she honed in closer and closer on the traces of capital Abigail had been so keen to hide. Kai doubted Abigail had physically set foot in most of the ports they were passing through now, and the truth was it didn't matter if she had. The trail they were on was all investments and business portfolios. Dantes was of some use when Ilsa had questions about the meaning of what she was finding. But it was all far beyond Kai's purview and even farther beyond his skills. It wasn't the first time he'd landed on this side of a labor disparity in their usually efficient partnership, but it was the first time the lack of utility had thrown him quite so hard off his stride.

  In the absence of ways to make himself useful, Kai had too much time to think. Ilsa was never far from his mind—she was his partner, after all, and his closest friend—but after the loading bay on Depsis, he found her distracting in ways he usually managed to avoid.

  He didn't want to admit he might be in love with his partner. Love was complicated and difficult, and in Kai's limited experience, it tended to end badly. But he had kissed Ilsa. A fleeting, ill-timed kiss that taunted his memory and left him wanting more. There was no point pretending he didn't want the chance to kiss her again, and this time do it properly.

  In two days of inaction, the wanting had only gotten worse.

  It was midmorning the third day on Lanniah Ceti Three when he acknowledged the truth with painful clarity. There was no uncertainty left in this equation. He was in love with Ilsa Vance.

  Partner or not, he couldn't keep the revelation quietly to himself.

  Ilsa's room was in the same hall as Kai's, on the seventh floor of a massive building that did double duty as a hostel and dockside business nexus. The upper levels were all rooms for rent, and Dantes had booked himself a larger suite on the nineteenth floor despite the fact that the smaller rooms on the seventh were perfectly pleasant and well equipped. Kai hadn't made any effort to talk Dantes out of his course. It was a relief to have their intrusive client a little farther out of reach. Dantes still managed to make a nuisance of himself along the way, turning up, checking in, pinging them over the building's personal communications network. But he wasn't right next door, and in this moment especially, Kai was glad for the reprieve.

  In the narrow hallway, he had only one corner to turn before he reached Ilsa's room. For the first time in years, he hesitated. Neither of them had any qualms about barging through the other's door unannounced, but this was different. This wasn't business as usual. This was a conversation apt to change all the rules.

  Kai pressed the panel beside the door instead.

  He could just barely hear the low-pitched tone announcing his presence, and a moment later the door slid open. Ilsa stood on the other side, a look of forced patience on her face. She was clearly expecting Dantes. When she caught sight of Kai, her expression changed to one of mild confusion.

  She stood back and gestured him inside. Kai took a step across the threshold, painfully aware of the nervous tension simmering beneath his skin. The door slid aut
omatically closed behind him, leaving him beside Ilsa in a spacious single room with wide windows. Ilsa had raised the transparent panes despite the intense afternoon heat, and the room's climate adjusters were audibly struggling to compensate for the inhospitable open air.

  "Everything okay?" Ilsa asked. There was uncharacteristic wariness in her voice, and Kai felt a twinge of guilt for having put it there.

  He suddenly wished he had rehearsed this before storming his way to her door. Ilsa's question demanded a better answer than the disingenuous, "Fine," that was all he managed to muster up. He looked at her with new awareness, taking in familiar lines and curves, and wondering how he'd ever been able to pretend his feelings away. Ilsa favored comfortable clothing, fabrics that didn't cling too tightly or restrict her movements, but there was still no mistaking the pleasant shape of her figure. She was dressed now in a shirt with a low neckline and barely any sleeves, concession to the dry heat of their current layover. Her hair was wet from a recent shower, and damp curls clung to her neck and draped between her shoulder blades.

  Ilsa took a cautious step toward him, dark eyes searching his face. "You don't look fine," she said, eyeing him warily. "You look like you've seen something frightful. What's wrong?"

  Kai had to bite his lower lip to prevent a bark of laughter. Ridiculous that realizing he was in love should feel so much like terror. The sliver of mirth vanished almost as quickly as it had arisen, and Kai drew a slow breath that did nothing at all to steady him.

  Ilsa was standing directly before him now, paying no heed to Kai's personal space. Their difference in height was even more pronounced at such close range, and she had to tilt her head back to peer sharply into his eyes. She set a hand to his shoulder and spoke his name with a low edge of fear.