by Rick Partlow
10
Kathren Margolis wondered sometimes if she was ready to be a Commander. The promotion had come with success, and with success and promotion, more responsibility and expectations. How long could it be before she rose to the level of her own incompetence?
Take this mission, she thought, trying not to let her hand move toward her gun with every possible threat that passed in the packed corridors of G-level. What the hell am I doing in here anyway? I’m a pilot, not a spy or a commando. Why do I keep insisting on putting myself into these situations?
Mostly because she didn’t like being told what she was and was not qualified to do. She knew the answer, but that didn’t make it any less ridiculous.
Stop whining, she adjured herself. It’s not like Logan was trained for this any more than I was.
Or Kurtz, for that matter. If anything, he looked more lost and out of place than she did, head swiveling around like an owl on the hunt. They were spread out in a tight wedge moving through the crowd, with Logan at the point of the arrow, Acosta and Kurtz spread out to the right and left and her and Lyta at the rear. It was a Ranger thing, she assumed, and she wondered what was wrong with just walking in a straight line.
It must not be tactical enough.
She knew Lyta was always concerned about proper tactics and formations, but honestly, she was more concerned about how the hell they were going to find anything in this rat-maze of a station. Maybe it had started out neatly organized, but now there was a business or a kiosk squeezed into every nook and cranny, and half the time, the people who ran the business lived next door to it or in the back room.
What she didn’t see were any children. Maybe they were kept in schools or daycares on different levels, but she couldn’t recall seeing anyone younger than a teenager the whole time she’d been on the station.
Curious. Of course, the criminal low-lives who came here to do business with other criminal low-lives wouldn’t bring kids along, but if people moved here to run businesses, you’d think at least some of them would take their families with them. She shrugged it off; it wasn’t pertinent to their situation.
Logan had stopped again, speaking in low tones to a frumpy, tired-looking woman who was sitting behind a table stacked high with counterfeit datalinks probably fabricated off black-market patterns stolen from the Shang Directorate. He held out the screen of his own ‘link—a Spartan model, much more reliable in her opinion—with an image of Terrin on it, and she shook her head, waving negation. Logan sighed and his shoulders seemed to sag just a fraction. They’d been at this for hours with no luck, and Katy was getting discouraged, too. At this rate, they could be here for days and never find a clue about what had happened to Terrin.
“Excuse me, miss?”
Katy nearly jumped right out of her skin, did pull her gun halfway from its holster until she saw the young woman wasn’t armed.
“Jesus lady,” she breathed, pushing her pistol back down into the hard-plastic sheath of the holster and trying to slow her heart rate back down. “You scared the shit out of me.”
The woman was young, her clothing simple and hand-made, too roughly-sewn to be the product of a fabricator. Dark robes hid all but her hands and face, but the face seemed unlined and far too innocent for one who lived in such a place.
“Are you with the ones they call Wholesale Slaughter?” she asked, her voice tiny and tentative.
A cold, electric shock went up her back and she waved at Lyta without looking away from the woman.
“We are. Who are you and what do you want with us?”
The young woman checked aside each way, as if making sure no one was watching.
“Meet me in G-42 in ten minutes,” she said quietly, then was gone, merging into the crowd before Katy could get another word out.
“Who was that?” Lyta asked, coming up on Katy’s right shoulder, staring after the young woman. “Does she know something?”
“Maybe.” She caught Logan’s eye from across the corridor, where he was about to accost a worker sweeping up the floor, motioned to him to come back to her. “Let’s find out.”
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Logan wondered.
The room designated G-42 was empty, picked clean to the bare walls, even the door stripped off its hinges. Lyta and Acosta were searching every corner for any trace left of whoever had once occupied the space, but the effort seemed wasted. All that was left were the light fixtures embedded in the ceiling, and those probably would have been taken as well, if anyone had the time and tools for it.
“It’s the address she gave me,” Katy told him, shrugging. “I can’t say whether she was wasting our time or not.”
Kurtz was leaning in the frame of the vacant doorway, gun in his hand but held down low by his leg, watching their backs. He craned his head back around inside, snorting ruefully.
“I think everyone in this damned place is wasting our time. Seems t’be their hobby.”
“We need a fallback plan if this doesn’t pan out,” Lyta said quietly, crouched over what seemed to be a trapdoor in the floor. She pulled it open, but the spider-hole beneath it was as empty as the rest of the room. “Maybe we could try to penetrate their security systems and see if anything was recorded.”
“Bribes are always popular,” Acosta commented drily from the opposite wall, feeling at a section of it as if he was about to find a hidden chamber. “It sounds as if Salvaggio already has a deal with Starkad though, so we might be pitting greed up against fear, and Mithra alone knows what wins that battle.”
“Boss,” Kurtz said, the tone of his voice changing, tense and expectant. “Someone’s coming. I think it’s that girl.”
Lyta and Acosta came to their feet, the Ranger officer edging to the side of the room, putting her back to the outer wall.
“Back off and put the gun away,” Logan told Kurtz, motioning the man away from the door. “We don’t want to scare her off.”
“Ain’t nobody been worried about scaring me,” Kurtz murmured, but did as he was told.
Logan hadn’t seen the woman who’d spoken to Katy, but the one who stepped through the door matched the description: same clothing, same age and appearance. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of them gathered inside, staring at her, and she jerked away and nearly bolted when she spotted Lyta against the wall, but Katy stopped her with an upraised hand.
“You wanted to talk to us?” Katy prompted.
“Which of you is Jonathan Slaughter?” the woman asked, stuttering the words, furtive and frightened.
Logan bit back a sigh, wishing he could say “None of us.” Despite what his father and General Constantine wanted, he was fairly sure he’d never be Jonathan Slaughter again.
“I am,” he said instead. “I’m Jonathan. Who are you and what can we do for you?”
“My name is Mira.” The woman’s spine seemed to stiffen with the pronouncement, as if her name were a magic spell to regain her courage. “I worked for Ms. Kane, the broker whose shop this is….” She winced. “…used to be, I mean. She left a message for me to give to you.”
“Did she record it?” Acosta asked her.
“Lana—Ms. Kane—told it to me.” Mira shook her head. “She doesn’t like to record things. She says anyone can hear a recording. She told me she has the thing your brother, Terrin brought with him. He left it for her to give to you in case something happened to him, but it was too dangerous for her to stay, even after the Starkad soldiers had left.” She grimaced and added, “Colonel Grieg, the man who led the soldiers, made a deal with Momma Salvaggio’s people to find her and what she carried, so she had to run.”
“Run where?” Logan asked her. “Where did she take the…” He paused, unwilling to give away information the woman didn’t have. “…the thing my brother brought with him?”
“She said she was going home, to Revelation.”
“Is that a planet?” Katy wondered. Logan noticed Acosta frowning, as if he was trying to remember something; fi
nally, he pulled out his datalink and began tapping on the control screen, but Mira was already answering.
“It’s only two jumps from here. It’s the closest living world to this place, and most of us who work on Trinity live there.” Her expression went harder. “Or, we used to, before Momma forced us here, to work off our debt.”
He wanted to ask her what debt they were working off, but now wasn’t the time.
“A planet’s a big place. How do we find her?”
“There’s only one real city on the planet. It’s called Revelation City.”
“Of course it is,” Acosta mumbled.
“Maybe people out here are more interested in surviving than coming up with imaginative city names, Lt. Whatever-Your-Name-Is,” Kurtz chided him. A grin tugged at the corner of Logan’s mouth as he remembered the man’s home planet and its capitol city shared the same name, as well.
“It’s actually ‘Major Whatever-My-Name-Is,’ Captain,” Acosta corrected him, then fell silent.
Mira’s expression pinched with annoyance at the interruption, and there was a reproving tone in her voice when she continued.
“She told me you should try to find the house where her family used to live. If you go there, she would see you.”
“Well, that sounds so damned easy,” Kurtz commented. “I’m sure a bunch of insular colonists out here on the Periphery are going to be really trusting of strangers coming into their town and asking about a local.”
“I only know what she told me to tell you,” Mira insisted.
“What about my brother?” Logan wanted to know. He’d restrained himself, waiting for the girl to relay her message, but he couldn’t contain it anymore. “Where is he? Did the Supremacy take him?”
“I didn’t meet your brother,” Mira said, but her eyes glanced away as she spoke, and General Constantine had taught him long ago the motion was a sure sign of deception.
“But you know what happened to him, don’t you?” Lyta asked, undoubtedly picking up the same signals since she’d been trained by the same man.
Mira wouldn’t meet Lyta’s eyes either; she began edging back toward the door, but Lyta stepped to block her way. The younger woman fell into a deeper stance, a motion inside her loose clothing that seemed to transform the very shape of her body. Her head swiveled as she tried to watch them all, as if expecting an attack from any side.
“We won’t hurt you,” Logan promised, holding his hands up. “But this is my brother. I need to find him. If you can help us, we’ll repay you however you want. I swear.”
The girl seemed to relax, or at least she relaxed in her stance, straightening back to a normal posture. Her dark eyes finally met his, searching for the truth of his words. Finally, she seemed to cave in on herself just slightly in what might have been a surrender to her circumstances.
“If I tell you,” she said, her voice so low Logan could barely hear her, “I can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be safe for me anymore. I’d need you to take me back home to Revelation with you, and I’d need enough money to pay off my family’s debt.” She eyed him with obvious doubt. “It’s a lot of money.”
“It won’t be a problem,” he assured her. “We’ll take you wherever you need to go and give you as much as you need.” Logan took a step closer, hands pressed together almost in prayer. “What happened to my brother?”
“He was taken,” she said slowly, the words seeming as if they had to drag themselves out of her, “but not by Starkad. It was Salvaggio’s bounty hunters. And he could be anywhere.”
Morning light filtered in hesitantly, reluctantly through the thick glass of the narrow window, as if it didn’t want to be in the dingy cell any more than Terrin Brannigan did. He moaned and covered his eyes, rolling over on the cot and setting off a cacophony of protesting creaks and groans from the ancient bed. Dull pain flared behind his eyes at the intrusion of the light and it seemed to pierce through the haze over his thoughts. He opened his eyes wide and pushed himself up.
Sunlight?
“Where the hell are we?”
He’d meant for the words to be a loud exclamation, but they came out a dry rasp and he coughed fitfully, trying to clear the cotton from his mouth. Wait…we?
Francesca was lying on an identically old and beat-up cot across the room, eyelids fluttering, hands moving to her face, touching it almost experimentally like she wasn’t sure what she’d find there. She looked as bad as he felt, squinting from a face scrunched up in pain, hair matted and sticking up at angles away from her head, her clothes wrinkled and—he judged after a careful whiff—smelling of days of body odor. But at least she seemed unharmed and, he decided after a careful assessment, so did he.
“How did we get here?” Franny mumbled, rolling over and trying to find the floor with a boot before she committed to sitting up. “Weren’t we on the station?”
“Here” was a cell. He’d never been in a cell before, but he knew one when he saw it. The walls were a rust-colored brick, sandstone maybe, the offensive windows too narrow to squeeze through even if he could have broken the centimeter-thick glass. And it looked like real glass, not polymer, which wasn’t rare on Periphery worlds. Plastics required petrochemicals, refineries, plants to manufacture the plastic, machinery to shape it…which all could be had, but not without a prohibitive monetary investment. Glass was much simpler and cheaper to produce.
The door was not glass, nor plastic, nor yet local brick. It was metal, dull and thick and featureless except for the lines of a rectangle at about eye level, a viewing slit that could only be opened from the other side.
“We were on the station,” Terrin answered her question after realizing he’d let himself drift off into a haze again for a few seconds. “Someone stunned us.”
“Shock darts,” she agreed, nodding, still holding fingers to her temples, massaging slowly. “I saw them get you and I tried to help but…”
“There was nothing you could have done,” he assured her, trying to be comforting but then noticing a hint of a scowl on her face and realizing that might have sounded condescending. “I mean, I had the gun, right?” He leaned back against the wall, the air going out of him as he realized what had happened. “Which did me not one damn bit of good. Just knowing how to shoot isn’t good enough if you aren’t smart enough to see the threat coming up behind you. I was useless.”
“Neither of us is a Ranger, Terrin,” she reminded him, pushing herself up off her cot and stepping across the small, four-meter-square cell to sit down beside him. Her hand was warm on his arm even through the sleeve of his fatigues. “I think you kept your head pretty good, getting rid of the…”
He hurriedly shushed her with a finger across her lips, flicking his eyes around them to signal the room might be bugged. She nodded…and then he realized he was still holding his finger against her lips and pulled it away quickly, embarrassed. He suddenly wondered if he smelled as bad as she did.
“You did fine,” she said. “I think your dad and brother would be proud.”
He looked away, embarrassed again, and his eyes fell on the blue sky outside the high windows. He stood on top of the cot, steadying himself against the wall to get a look out through the glass. There were buildings at the edge of his vision, not tall or imposing, just one-story brick. Most of what he could see was a dirt road running into low scrub, then on into twisted, stunted trees growing impossibly from sandy soil.
“What do you see?” Franny asked him.
“Not much,” he admitted. He stepped down off the cot and fell back to sit beside her, his legs still feeling weak and shaky. “We’re on a planet, though, and the nearest world to Trinity was at least two jumps away. They must have kept us drugged up for days. Maybe as much as a week.”
Probably catheterized us, too, he realized, horrified. He didn’t want to think about what else they might have done.
“Mithra’s Flaming Horns, I need a bath,” Franny sighed, pulling at her collar. “And some water…”
Terrin forced his legs to work, stumbling over to the door and slamming his fist against it. Three times, a pause to listen, then three more times.
“Come on!” he yelled. “Someone’s got to be there.”
The view-slit slid open so abruptly it almost made him jump. Through it he saw bloodshot brown eyes, the brows over them bushy and shot with grey. He decided he was just as well not seeing the rest of that face.
“What the fuck do you want?” The gravelly voice went well with the eyes, a perfect match.
“Could we get some water?” he asked the man. He wanted a lot more than that, but he had a hunch he should start small.
Red-eyes grunted and slammed the slit shut. Terrin sighed, leaning against the door, trying to catch his breath. Lying around sedated for days took it out of you, and it wasn’t as if he’d been able to do much exercising on Terminus.
“Back away from the door.” It was the same, gruff voice, muffled now by the intervening centimeters of metal. “Get up against the wall.”
He scrambled backwards, falling back onto the cot beside Franny. Her hand slipped into his and he gave it a squeeze, mostly to comfort himself. He heard a bolt being thrown, loud and scraping, telling tales of rust and neglect, before the door squeaked open just enough to admit a small tray made of cheap, orange plastic. It looked just like the ones you could find on shipboard, and he imagined that’s where they’d acquired it, but the pitcher and cups sitting atop it were locally-blown glass, as was the small plate piled with what looked like sandwiches.
The tray scraped across the stone floor, pushed by a thick and calloused hand until it was in far enough for the door to close again. Terrin scrambled over and grabbed it, then had a sudden thought.
“Can you tell me where we are?” he called. “I mean, what planet?”
It was a forlorn hope; he didn’t expect the man to reply and was shocked when he did.
