“They use the holograms for anonymity.”
“I see,” Sanna said slowly. “We’ll get real IDs on these two, then,” she concluded with a gesture. “The blasters are unregistered and unlicensed, which would be enough to put them behind bars for a bit if they were still breathing.
“As it is, well.” She sighed. “Captain Zamorano is claiming that both kill shots were him and in self-defense. I’ll be reviewing the footage, but I understand his logic. What happened, Em Riker?”
“They shot me in the back,” Kira said quietly. “My jacket has dispersal matrix and armor layers, so I lived. Then they…kept shooting.”
“Probably saw the thermal bloom from the dispersal net on optics and realized you were still alive,” Sanna noted. “GAS does not approve of assassination attempts, Em Riker, though I’d love to know why they’d have taken a shot at you.”
Kira could guess. If she’d been IDed, there was still a significant bounty for turning her body—or even a recording of her death—in to a Brisingr embassy. That was almost certainly accompanied by an active kill order in Brisingr covert ops.
And it made sense there’d be Brisingr spy cells operating near the Crest. She hadn’t anticipated that.
“I don’t know, Lieutenant,” she lied to Sanna as the white-painted emergency pod hurtled to a stop near them. Two white-uniformed medics were checking on O’Mooney within seconds, and Kira sighed in relief.
“I’m going to hope that whatever you’re not telling me means that I won’t be seeing further incidents on my station,” Sanna said coldly. “I do not like other people’s trouble coming to my station, Em Riker.”
“I don’t like being in trouble anywhere, Lieutenant,” Kira replied. “Not sure if they’re after me or Konrad over there.” She gestured to her lover, currently also going by Riker. “He’s from Brisingr.”
If they did have any grudge against Konrad, she was glad the Shadows had shot her. She knew he was wearing an armor vest, but it was more in line with what O’Mooney was wearing—and O’Mooney was being loaded into an ambulance.
“I’ll take a formal statement while we walk to the clinic,” Sanna told her, producing an official-looking recorder. “From all three of you,” she noted, gesturing at Konrad and Bertoli.
“What about Zamorano?” Kira asked, looking around for the Captain.
“I know where to find Zamorano,” Sanna said calmly. “Baile Fantasma is under lockdown until I’m satisfied that we don’t need to lay charges. He’s not going anywhere without his ship.”
Treatment in a clinic on the primary orbital station of a planet well over a hundred light-years from your current residence and health insurance was neither free nor cheap. Kira had yet to meet any clinic that wouldn’t treat most injuries first and sort out payment afterward—but she also recognized the blatant relief from the human administrator when she asked how to pay.
That worthy was leaving, looking reassured—not least by the material amount of crests Kira had transferred to the clinic at his request—when Sanna stepped back into the waiting room.
“Well, we’ve IDed the pair of bodies cooling in my morgue,” she told Kira. “I believe your spiel about Brisingr Shadows, sadly, but they’re not Brisingr. They’re local—born on Actual, in fact. No criminal record, nothing.
“My guess is that they were local assets recruited by Brisingr to watch our shipping,” the security officer continued. “But that will take a lot more investigation. Not least since the one your people stunned never arrived at our lockup.”
“What happened?” Kira asked.
“Paperwork mix-up; they were transferred to the surface,” Sanna said crisply. “Where they appear to have disappeared.”
“Ah.” Somehow, Kira wasn’t surprised that whatever cell of Brisingr’s far-flung intelligence operations she’d run into had a way to get their people free. “That’s unfortunate.”
“Yes. It does support your theory, though,” the Lieutenant noted. “I have nothing on your people, Em Riker, if you’re worried. You were attacked, responded with an entirely rational level of force and, thankfully, escaped mostly unharmed.
“I have words for Captain Zamorano and his hero complex,” she said, “but even there, I expect the footage to be open-and-shut. I need to go through the process because there are two bodies in my morgue, but everything I’ve seen suggests they deserve to be there.”
“I’m sorry for the headache we’re giving you,” Kira murmured. She’d taken off her jacket and was surveying the damage to the back. “Does your station have any leatherworkers?”
“Not subtle, Em Riker,” Sanna replied. “I’m not certain about the leatherworkers—probably not any who can work with plasma-dispersal nets and particulate armor. I get the impression that’s a specialized combination.”
“Fair,” Kira said with a chuckle. She’d managed to get the jacket fixed after the first time she’d been shot wearing it, but this time, she wasn’t sure she had the resources. “I’ll see what I can find.”
A white-uniformed nurse stepped into the room.
“Are you the folks waiting on Em O’Mooney?” he asked.
“They are,” Sanna told the nurse, gesturing to Kira and her companions. “I’m done here, I think. Good luck, Em Riker—but I hope you forgive me when I say I hope you find your way off my station sooner rather than later!”
Kira turned her attention to the nurse.
“Yeah, we’re waiting on Aleifr O’Mooney,” she confirmed. “How is she?”
“She’s out of reconstruction and in recovery,” the nurse told them. “Doctor says she’ll be fine. Between the armor she was wearing and the near-immediate plasti-skin application, there was no serious damage to her intestines.
“We had to rebuild the abdominal muscle wall and she won’t be able to engage in heavy activity for at least six weeks, but she’ll be fine,” the nurse concluded. “She’s asleep now; doctor wants to keep her unconscious for at least eight hours and then in the clinic overnight for observation.”
“I’m not arguing with medical professionals,” Kira said. “Thank you.”
22
Leaving the hotel the next morning, Kira found Bertoli attached to her by a far shorter metaphorical leash than normal. Even Konrad was hovering, and her boyfriend generally knew better.
“Clinic, then Captain Zamorano’s ship,” she told them. “We probably don’t need to be a six-legged creature for the trip.”
“Someone shot you yesterday, Com—Riker,” Bertoli told her, cutting off his use of her rank before he really shoved his foot in it. “My job is to keep that from happening.”
“And your jacket is a write-off,” Kira’s lover added, glancing around the thoroughfare corridor as he spoke. “Get me the tools and I can fix the armor layers, but even if I get the tools and materials, I have no idea how to patch leather.”
“I’m still wearing armor,” she pointed out to the two of them. “And I’m not exactly comfortable using either of you as a layer of ablative meat. So, some space, please.”
Konrad was already moving back a step, but Bertoli leveled his most mulish gaze on her as they continued.
“I’m also armored,” he reminded her. “And, bluntly, ablative meat is part of my job description. I’m supposed to keep you safe—if I come back and you don’t, Milani will kill me.”
Kira’s ground-troop commander did not glory in the title of “the terrifying fucker in the dragon armor” without reason, she knew. On the other hand, she was reasonably sure they wouldn’t shoot a subordinate for failure.
Reasonably.
“Bodyguarding is fine,” Kira told Bertoli. “Being more intimate with me than my clothes or my lover, that’s a bit much!”
Konrad didn’t even bother to conceal his chuckle at that. They were currently claiming to be married, both using the false surname Riker, though she suspected they were a long way from making that a reality.
Neither of them had ever been married, and
at their age, it didn’t seem like something to rush into.
That was apparently the right tack to take, and Konrad’s chuckle probably helped. Bertoli nodded, his face still set in a stubborn cast, and stepped back a single pace. He was still closer than he’d been the previous day, but she couldn’t argue with that.
He was, after all, correct. She had been shot…and she was more than a bit surprised by how little that bothered her. The first time she’d been shot, she’d followed it up by the entire chaotic mess of evacuating every surviving member of her former nova combat group from Apollo.
She’d assumed her blaséness about the shooting had been pure adrenaline. This time, though, she had no such excuse for brushing off that someone had nearly killed her. She was used to that in space combat, but she could count on her fingers the number of times she’d been shot at without a nova fighter around her.
“Come on,” she told her companions. “Let’s go collect O’Mooney and then see about getting on with the job.”
O’Mooney was up, dressed and walking around her room in the clinic when they arrived. A young Black man in scrubs was asking her questions and getting her to go through careful motions, looking up as Kira and her companions reached the door.
“Good morning,” he greeted them. “I’m Dr. Tygan. I took over Em O’Mooney’s care this morning.”
“How are you feeling, Aleifr?” Kira asked. “Not every day you get shot in the gut.”
“Stiff and I don’t want to do push-ups,” O’Mooney replied. “Otherwise decent. They do good work here.”
“We try,” Tygan said cheerfully. “The wrap we’ve put over your stomach should stay in place for at least the next forty-eight hours. After that, you can take it off to shower, but we recommend putting it back afterward for at least another week.”
He looked the group over, clearly taking in the shipsuits all of them wore.
“I’m guessing I can’t get you to come back for a checkup in nine days?” he asked.
“We’re shipping out as fast as we can find transport, Doctor,” Kira told him. “I’ll make sure we find a doctor for Em O’Mooney wherever we are in nine days, though,” she promised.
“And you’ll go to the doctor we find, right, Aleifr?” Bertoli said firmly to his subordinate.
“I got shot,” O’Mooney said brightly. “Believe me, I’m going to be good about the doctors!”
“That’s a good plan,” Tygan told her. “Be careful with abdominal movements of any kind until you’ve had that check-in. We’ll download all of your treatment details to your headware.”
“Thanks, Doctor.”
The Guadaloop doctor studied O’Mooney’s posture for a moment, then gestured for her to sit on the bed as he turned to look at Kira.
“She’s had a full regen pass over her abdominal muscles,” he told them. “Dr. Lionel also did some regen work on the intestine and stomach, just to be sure, but there was minimal burning there.
“Currently, though, all of that is being held in with plasti-skin. Between that and the wrap, her skin will naturally regrow properly and quickly, but we’re still talking days, not hours,” he warned. “The lighter she can take it for at least the next two weeks, the better.”
“We can manage light duty for Em O’Mooney for at least that,” Kira said with a glance at Bertoli. Most of what they were doing right now was light duty, after all. No heavy lifting or anything like that.
“Good.” Tygan sighed. “She’s as fine as anyone who took a blaster bolt to the guts yesterday can be. Her armor clearly served its purpose, though; as you can imagine, we didn’t exactly salvage it intact.”
“That’s expected,” Bertoli rumbled. “I have a spare vest for her, though I’d hoped we wouldn’t need it.”
“That’s the thing with armor,” Kira noted. “You rarely even expect to use it—and you always hope not to.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Dr. Tygan replied. “She’s clear to be discharged. There’ll be a long list of things she’s to do and avoid doing, but she’ll have that in her headware. I recommend against walking for more than ten minutes,” he reminded O’Mooney over his shoulder.
“For the next forty-eight hours, at least.”
“We can make sure of that,” Kira promised. “Though that means I’ll need to sort out whatever this station has for taxis.”
“Talk to the artificial stupid at reception,” Tygan told her. “It can summon a pod for you.”
The reason Kira hadn’t noticed the transit pods, it turned out, was because they were almost completely silent—and ran on the ceilings of the triple-high main thoroughfares. Using antigravity coils, the pod dropped to the ground to pick them up outside the clinic.
“Destination?” a chirpy artificial stupid asked. This one didn’t have a holographic representation, since its designers had probably assumed the pod itself was enough of a “body” for the AS.
“Baile Fantasma, please,” Kira instructed it.
There was a momentary pause—probably as much for effect as anything else, the AS should have been able to identify the dock Zamorano’s ship was at instantly—and then the cylindrical pod smoothly rose back to the ceiling and shot away.
“Which one’s that?” O’Mooney asked.
“The three strangers who helped us out yesterday have a ship,” Kira told the trooper. “I believe Zamorano is the owner-operator, and security had them at least temporarily locked down. I’m hoping they’re the right kind of hauler for our needs.”
She figured it was fifty-fifty, but she owed Zamorano for helping them and was happy to repay that by overpaying for the transport she needed.
“Baile Fantasma is a small mid-distance freighter,” Konrad noted, his tone absent in the manner of someone mostly in their headware. “Sixteen thousand cubics… Wait, the fuck?”
“Konrad?” Kira asked.
“Tau Ceti–built,” her lover told her. “That ship is fourteen hundred light-years from the yard that built her. Don’t get me wrong, she’s old, but I don’t expect to see even old SolFed ships out this far.”
“Well, isn’t that fascinating?” Kira murmured. “Now I’m more curious about Captain Zamorano than I already was. On the other hand…” She shrugged. “We have our own secrets, people. Unless Zamorano turns out to be an Institute operative, I don’t think we need to know his.”
Further conversation was interrupted by their arrival at the dock. The ceiling-mounted taxi pods were fast—though Kira noted that they had not yet descended to the floor and had a moment of concern.
“Payment, please,” the AS chirped, and she realized why they were still stuck on the ceiling. That was one way to make sure no one tried to stiff the computerized taxi—with the doors locked and a seven-meter drop to the gravity plates, refusing to pay was not an option.
Josue Ramirez was standing next to the airlock door leading to the ship, his casual slump masking his rapidly tracking eyes and the slight tension to his muscles.
Kira hadn’t really had the time to study their helpers yesterday, but the concealed readiness of the dark-skinned man guarding the ship added to her impression of something hidden. Baile Fantasma was more than she appeared to be at first glance.
She just didn’t think their secrets were going to matter to her.
“Ah, Em Riker,” Ramirez greeted her, unfolding from his slump. “I’ll ping the Captain and let ’im know you’re here.” He looked over Kira’s companions. “I hope the doctors took good care of you, Em,” he told O’Mooney, giving the younger mercenary the slightest of bows.
O’Mooney wasn’t Kira’s type, but she recognized that the trooper was attractive as her own gender went. So, it seemed, did Josue Ramirez.
“They do good work here,” O’Mooney replied with a nod that was just a touch too lingering.
Kira kept her chuckle silent. Neither of the pair were the kids she wanted to label them—O’Mooney was thirty-two and Kira would eyeball Ramirez around the same age—and Kira figured th
ey knew exactly what they were doing.
“Captain says he’s pleased to hear from you and asks if you’d like to join him aboard for coffee,” Ramirez said after a moment of calm silence.
“We’d be delighted,” Kira said. “I want to talk to him about that debt I owe him…and maybe some work.”
23
Like every freighter Kira had served on, Baile Fantasma was cramped in her living quarters. The mess, at least, was a decent size—but the corridors that Ramirez led them through to get there were barely two meters high.
Kira, who was petite by any standard, had no problem with the corridors. Konrad and Bertoli both seemed a bit perturbed by the low ceilings, but everyone was used to starships. It would be fine.
The mess was set up more like a large family kitchen than the traditional cafeteria style. One wall held two stoves and assorted other preparation spaces, and three decently sized tables with chairs took up the rest of the space.
While there were only a dozen chairs in the space, Kira could see it easily being increased to eighteen without much difficulty. Adding another table could get them to twenty-four, though it would be a bit cramped at that point.
She couldn’t see a sixteen-kilocubic freighter needing twenty-four crew—and neither, it seemed, could Captain Zamorano.
“I promised coffee,” that worthy said with a chuckle, laying out small cups on the counter by the kitchen. “Spanish-style espresso. If you haven’t had it, it’ll be a treat.”
“I’m always willing to try new things when it comes to coffee,” Kira said. The cups were definitely sized for just espresso with no fixings—and after the previous day, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see a latte again for a while.
Each of her companions accepted a tiny cup, as did Ramirez.
Ramirez shot back the contents of the cup in one swallow, passing the empty back to Zamorano.
Fortitude (Scattered Stars: Conviction Book 4) Page 13
