Far Frontiers Part 21

The tavern grew suddenly silent.

Over the transceiver in his ear, his hidden partner's voice spoke with benedictive authority. "But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most a.s.sured, his gla.s.sy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.

North heard the cautious shuffle of footsteps and stuck his head up, pistol ready. A tall figure moved among the carnage, nudging at bodies with a booted toe, at pieces of broken furniture, shaking his head. The light gleamed on his face, his hands, revealing as much circuitry and metal as flesh, and eyes that burned with disgust.

'Thanks for the bottle," North said as he surveyed the destruction. He moved to his friend's side; except for them the tavern was empty, everyone else either fled or dead. Slipping the transceiver from his ear, pocketing it, he made a face. "Now, Yoru, here's an argument for gun control."

The Technalien, a full head taller than North's own six feet, looked around and shrugged."He that dies pays all debts," Yoru murmured. He stared down at the fallen War Hound.

North mouthed a silent curse. His white-haired contact lay sprawled between a couple of overturned chairs. An unmoving hand still grasped the small box. "Here's a debt we won't be collecting," he muttered. Kneeling, he retrieved the scarred box, fingered a catch, and flipped open its lid. "d.a.m.n!" A thumbnailsized smear of melted black plastic was all that remained of a delicate data chip he'd been hired to retrieve and deliver to the Eridani Compact. The energy blast that had cut his contact down had fried the delicate chip inside its box. "No charge pistol did this," he muttered.

Yoru pointed across the room to the body of the stripper. "She shot him," he said, "deliberately, then tried to escape in the confusion."

"A Separatist agent?" North cursed again. "The Compact will not be happy."

The chip represented five years' worth of undercover investigations into Veil Separatist Movements, reports that Compact spies had worked at great risk to obtain. To see it turned to slag in a barroom shoot-out... He flung chip and box into the b.l.o.o.d.y shadows.

Sirens sounded. There were few police in Obsidian Bay, and fewer who ventured, even under orders, into this part of the Waterfront. Still, a major incident like this would attract attention. North couldn't afford to be caught.

"We have other worries," Yoru murmured, nodding toward the fallen bounty hunter.

'There will be more Warhounds. His kind run in packs."

North sighed as he rose. The night was not going well. His ship, the Warlock Knife, was in dry-dock undergoing upgrades, and he'd counted on the advance payoff for the chip's delivery to finance those modifications. With Yoru close behind, he leaped over the bar, stepped over the bartender's body, and slipped through a rear door into the rising wind of a cool night.

A familiar click warned him. In the shadows, someone released a charge pistol's trigger safety. North froze. He was growing tired of that sound, tired of his whole d.a.m.ned lifestyle, growing angry, too, and tired of people pointing guns at him. Yoru stopped half a pace behind North.

"Are you really Colonel North?" The voice was feminine, nervous. She stepped into the thin light that spilled through the tavern's half-open door. Within the folds of her cloak's black hood, violet eyes looked up at him from a heart-shaped face whose flawless skin was framed in half-hidden locks of bronze-colored hair. There was an unmistakable hardness to her features,however, a certain cast that both attracted North and put him on his guard.

He eyed the expert way she held the charge pistol, aware of the sirens drawing nearer.

Then, eyes narrowing, he took a closer look at her face. "Katrin?" The name whispered from his lips. "Katrin Janot?"

Yoru spoke warily. "This woman threw the bottle that distracted the War Hound."

North half-turned in surprise. "I thought you...

The Technalien shook his head, causing light to glint on the circuitry and bits of metal implanted in his scalp and along his face. "I'm a pacifist, remember? I merely warned you to duck."

"What are you doing here?" North said, turning back to the woman, relaxing only a little.

"You didn't save me in there just to shoot me in this alley?"

Hesitantly, she lowered the weapon. "You'd deserve it," she answered. "I came to recruit some help from the roughnecks who hang out here, but you've chased everyone off. The way I see it now, I saved your b.u.t.t. I still need help, and you owe me."

North stared at her for an amazed moment, recalling the Katrin Janot he'd known years ago. They'd shared a juvenile crush. She'd given him his first kiss, and then she'd slapped his face and laughed. Even as a child she'd been tough, independent.

Yet this was a different Katrin. Not just older, but different. Not just tough, but hard in the way war makes people. He read that in her posture, her expression, heard the smoldering anger in her voice, the bitterness that had nothing to do with him. He looked at the gun she held and tried to reconcile this Katrin with the child he remembered.

"Don't worry," she said. "I pay well."

Snapped back to the present, he smirked and rubbed a hand over his chin. To some people, the three most important words in the world were, I love you. But to a man like himself, on the run and unexpectedly broke. . . "I pay well," he repeated, ticking his fingers. He raised two more fingers. "How well?"

A too-familiar roar sounded inside the tavern. North and Yoru whirled together. Through the half-open door, they saw a pair of Warhounds standing over their comrade's body. Armored police officers charged in behind the mutants.

"Negotiations later," North said. He eased the door closed while Yoru lifted a heavy trash can which he positioned firmly under the door's handle. North bowed to Katrin. "Do you have acar?"

She holstered the charge pistol. "Better," she answered. "A skip-boat."

North glanced at Yoru. The Technalien rolled his eyes; his kind hated water. But following their newfound employer, they ran without further debate down the alley, driven to greater haste by angry growls, the splintering of wood, the can's crash and clatter, and a lot of feral curses.

Katrin stood in the gla.s.s-shielded bow at the skip-boat's control console, cloakless, steering the vessel manually with a consummate skill through the rolling seas. The onboard computer could have done the work, but she preferred to drive. "What made you turn deserter, Ryder?" she asked, breaking a long, uncomfortable silence. "You were a war hero. You had it all."

North didn't answer. He stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the glimmering waves, by the moons that lit their way, by the black, jutting spires of sharp rock. He watched the rounded swells and cliff edges, the glittering beaches of unnamed islands where neither human nor alien had yet set foot.

Dom, though settled, was still a new world in many ways, little explored, a young frontier. He cast his gaze upward again to a milky firmament of stars. Here in the Veil, on the edge of the galaxy, a man could make a new life for himself, get a fresh start, maybe strike it rich with hard work or cleverness or luck.

He could stay here, he thought, settle down. Take another name.

Find a new line of work.

Gripping the taffrail, he leaned outward to feel the sting of clean, cold wind on his face, the play of it in his hair as the boat raced above the water. Yet, it was to the stars his eyes turned.

A nice fantasy, to think of settling down, but after two hundred years, the Orion Wars were ending. Soon the various factions would remember the Veil worlds and return to claim neglected territories or try to stake new claims.

The Warlock Knife was his home now. Only among the stars, flying free from sun to distant sun, could he hope to stay one step ahead of governments, police, bounty hunters. Only upthere could he escape his past.

He forced a weary smile. Turning from the rail, he reached into his pocket and drew out his packet of cigarettes. As he leaned back and lit up, he admired Katrin's ship again, a sleek little skip-boat, powerful, fast.

Too fast. His professional eye noted modifications to the controls, the customized line of the hull, other curious details. "Why didn't you go to the authorities for help?" he said, affecting disinterest.

Her back stiffened. "Not an option."

He drew on the cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke. "What kind of cargo did you say you lost?"

Katrin shot a hard look over her shoulder. "Ruby salts," she answered, naming one of the rare minerals mined from Dom's seas. "But I told you, I don't care about the cargo. It's my sister, Annin, we're looking for."

According to Katrin, her sister and a crew of nine had lifted off in an old-style Tychus Leviathan cargo cruiser on a simple delivery run to the Mephisto, a Compact warship converted for trade and diplomacy, which was now pa.s.sing just beyond the borders of the Veil worlds. The Mephisto was incidentally the same ship to which he'd have delivered the prized data chip.

Before the Leviathan had broken atmosphere, though, its gravity induction engines had mysteriously shut off. The ship had fallen back to the surface. There had been no communication from the crew at all.

Katrin had continued her story with a marked reticence as she showed them a blinking light on the skip-boat's console. The Leviathan contained a private tracking beacon that operated on a frequency designed to avoid detection by Dom's authorities. They'd been making straight for it at top speed for the past three planetary hours.

"You ever hear of an induction engine failing?" Katrin had said with quick bitterness before North could question her further.

"Only through sabotage," he'd admitted with a cigarette between his lips. Despite her dodge, he'd realized in that moment why she'd gone to the trouble of saving him. Not out of nostalgia for an innocent kiss or a shared past; she hadn't mentioned that once. No, on Dom as elsewhere in the Veil, a willingness to look the other way and a reputation for trouble were marketable commodities.The skip-boat shot like a bullet over the waves, its own small gravity engines shoving the water away in great white wings of salt spray that glimmered with prismatic fire in the stark moonlight. Katrin at last surrendered control to the computer. Stretching, she came to North's side. "How's your friend?"

Yoru sat in the stern, hanging his head over the side. At Katrin's question, he turned a pale face toward them, then looked away again.

"Don't get wet," North warned. "You'll short out a cybernetic kidney or something."

Yoru clutched his stomach and groaned. "Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground."

Katrin's brow furrowed. "Shakespeare from a Technalien?"

North shrugged. "Last year I gave him the Complete Works," he explained. "On a data chip. He ingested it." He shrugged again. "I've lived with his recitations ever since.

They sailed uncharted seas now, well beyond the bounds recorded by any mining crews or exploration teams. The waters turned blacker, sinister, as if some devouring algae reached up from the depths to spread its bloom across the waves. The jutting rocks, so dramatic against the sky, were long behind them. Only a few low islands broke up the vast stretch.

They ate a little from onboard supplies while Katrin muttered curses. Swift as the skip- boat was, it moved too slowly for her. She kept an agitated eye on the horizon. North ceased to doubt that her concern for her sister was genuine.

A guarded friendship grew once more between them over the hours. He watched her, and admired her sureness, her supple strength, the grace of her movements. Entrepreneur, adventurer, smuggler-whatever the years had made Katrin, he found her charming beneath her tough exterior and found it hard to resist the rush of old affection.

He reached for his packet of cigarettes, attempted to shake one out. Empty. His head rolled back on his neck and he let go a quietly despairing sigh as he crumpled the packet and tossed it overboard.No longer sick, Yoru sat unspeaking in the stern, recording with his internal sensors every sight and moment of their strange new journey.

The first of Dom's two bright moons sank in distant waves.

On the console, the Leviathan's beacon grew ever stronger.

One moon down. The second moon floated, red and reluctant, on the rim of the world. In its dim and b.l.o.o.d.y glow, an island rose up. the first bit of land they'd seen for a while, with stony, silhouetted pinnacles that strained to p.r.i.c.k the lingering orb.

The Leviathan's flashing beacon became a constant light.

Yoru rose carefully in the stern as North strapped on the laser pistol he had set aside.

Katrin also rearmed herself. Her face grim with efficiency, she took manual control of the craft once more and guided it onto the sh.o.r.e. Gravity engines whined down to silence, and the boat settled onto soft sand. Taking a moment to bind back her coppery hair, she drew on her cloak and slipped over the side. North joined her.

Yoru moved to the computer console.

Thin, silvery filaments, like spiderwebs, extended from circuit like veins in the backs of his forearms and inserted themselves into the machinery. For a moment, his fingers played over the console's outward controls. Then, the Technalien grew still.

"What's he doing?" Katrin demanded, suspicious.

North gripped her arm before she could interrupt his partner. "He's merging with your computer."

The Technalien species were the greatest machinists and technicians in the galaxy. Over generations they'd made themselves one with their own technologies, changing and adapting even their bodies until they themselves-man, woman, and child-were as much machine as flesh and blood.

For a moment, every control on the skip-boat seemed to activate. The boat itself rose three feet on a gravity cushion then settled back on the sand. Yoru indined his head toward North and Katrin. There was a vacancy in his eyes that slowly faded as he separated himself from the computer.Yoru told Katrin as he joined them on the sand, "All this vessel's sensors were trained forward."

Katrin bristled. "You try running rocks and reefs at top speed with them any other way."

"Like as the waves make toward the pebbled sh.o.r.e," Yoru coolly recited, "so do our minutes to their end." In rougher voice, abandoning Shakespeare, he added, "I prefer to know if something dogs our heels."

"You pick up something?" North asked, concerned. "Another boat?"

"No," Yoru answered. Yet something in the Technalien's voice put North on his guard.

Katrin gripped the b.u.t.t of her charge pistol and scowled. 'Then why the h.e.l.l are we wasting time?" She touched a tracker strapped watch-like around her left wrist. The crystal glowed with the same light as the beacon indicator on the skip-boat's console.

"The Leviathan's this way!"

She plunged recklessly across the narrow beach into thick jungle growth. North and Yoru overtook her. When she tried to push ahead, branches snapped underfoot. North caught her arm.

"You didn't bring us along for company," he whispered. "If someone sabotaged your sister's ship, we can expect hijackers or worse." His tone hardened. "You've been pretty smart so far; don't disappoint me by being careless now."

"Wisely and slow," Yoru and Shakespeare agreed. 'They stumble that run fast."

"You don't understand!" Katrin hissed. "Annin's the only family I have!"

North looked at her for a long moment. He understood all right. On Jaeger, his birth planet, he'd had a family once; a father who stood as a leader in the House of Equals, a mother known for her research in the mutagenic sciences, and a younger brother. All dead now, killed by Redden Domain warships.

He understood Katrin; he understood well feeling alone in a universe that dwarfed any individual. It made you cling to things, made you value bonds and relationships that a quixotic universe could so easily snap.

He felt Yoru's penetrating gaze, as if the Technalien knew what he was thinking. North twitched, uncomfortable under those eyes. Sometimes, he thought his partner knew him too well.

He seized Katrin's wrist, ignoring her half-hearted resistance, and glanced at the tracker himself. Then, with a stealthy tread, he took the lead.

They didn't go far. The jungle ended suddenly, and the ground became hard, sharp rock,smoothly volcame. A few paces farther, breaths catching in their throats, they stared into the bowl of some ancient impact crater.

The last light from the setting moon glinted on the silvery skin of the Leviathan. The ship lay on its side like a beautiful woman who had fainted.

But North's attention went to the structure beyond the cargo ship. "Are you recording?"

he whispered to Yoru. The Technalien nodded.

Was it a city or a single crazy construction? North couldn't decide. It looked like a child's box of blocks that someone had overturned. All the blocks were shoved up against each other without planning or pattern. The structure spilled across the crater floor and up the shadowed side where the moonlight barely touched it.

Katrin's only interest was the ship. She crouched at the crater's edge, pistol in hand, her gaze searching. "No scattered wreckage, no visible damage, no skid-trail," she whispered to Yoru. 'Tell me someone's alive down there. Can you pick up any bio readings?"

The Technalien shook his head. 'Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news."

He paused. "I can't run that kind of a scan from this distance."

North led the way down the slope, aware that the moon's remaining light exposed them in a red glow. There was nothing to be done about it. Quickly, the three descended and made straight for the Leviathan.

They found the primary hatch wide open, but the vessel was empty of crew. While Yoru ran a check on the systems, North and Katrin slipped into the cargo holds. Nothing indicated a crash or calamity, nor had anything been touched. The huge containers of ruby salts remained neatly stacked and secured.

There was a ghostly quality to the darkened ship. Katrin remained quiet as they searched the crew quarters and galley. In the engineering section, she slipped her hand into North's until, realizing her action, she jerked it away.

Yoru's voice came calmly over the ship's com-systemsystem. 'The induction engines were deliberately shut off," he informed them from the bridge. "Minute traces of an anesthetic gas in the environmental filters suggest the ship was sabotaged, as we speculated."

Katrin spoke up. "The computer logs might indicate who. .

"Crewman Kitaro Keller," Yoru answered. "His attempt to wipe the logs was.. ." ametallic sound, like a chuckle, that might have been the Technalien or a fault in the com-system, followed. ..... amateurish."

"But where's Annin now?" Katrin murmured.

North didn't have an answer. He pursued his lips and wished for a cigarette as he led the way back to the open hatch. North disliked mysteries. Right now, the missing crew and that structure out there on the crater floor represented one big mystery.