Beka Rosselin-Metadi rapped her knuckles against the clear plastic window in the Pleyyeran branch office of General Delivery—“open thirty-three hours a day, organic sapient on duty guaranteed.” The two chronometers on the far wall read 1824 Standard and 2520 Local, and the day clerk was drowsing in her chair, with her feet up on the bulk-mail bin and her back to the door.
If she’s sapient, thought Beka, I’ll eat my pilot’s license.
After a twelve-hour stretch of tough realspace navigation through the Web, as starpilots called the Pleyver system’s fluctuating magnetic fields, Beka didn’t feel inclined toward sympathy for the bored and planetbound. Even with Warhammer securely docked in orbit up at High Station, her tension and exhaustion had yet to dissipate.
Once her business on-planet was taken care of, though, she had hopes. Commercial shuttles lifted regularly for High Station from the surface port, which meant that she and the Professor could relax in Flatlands for a few hours after they’d finished their dirtside business.
Not that the high life in this town is anything to write home about. If the Prof hadn’t gotten word that Flatlands Investment, Ltd. has some stuff in their data banks that we ought to sneak a peek at, I’d have taken the ’Hammer straight on to Innish-Kyl. I hope whatever’s in there is worth it . . . . With no cargo to pick up or deliver, we’re going to have to eat the docking fees.
Beka rapped on the barrier again, louder. The day clerk unplugged her earphones—from the tinny music that drifted across the comm link to the outer office, she hadn’t been using them to monitor General Delivery’s data net—and turned her chair around.
“Name?” the clerk asked, looking up for the first time at her customer. The pupils of her eyes widened, and after a couple of seconds she wet her lips and added, “Sir.”
“Tarnekep Portree,” said Beka. She ignored the clerk’s hesitation. Tarnekep’s face, with its red plastic patch covering the entire left eye socket from brow to cheekbone, could unnerve people sometimes. The fact that Tarnekep’s angular, thin-lipped features (eye patch and dyed brown hair excepted) were also her own was something that Beka tried not to think about too often.
“Tarnekep Portree,” she repeated, “captain, Pride of Mandeyn. Any messages for me or my ship?”
The clerk blinked and came out of her momentary trance. “I can’t check until you enter your password, sir.”
Beka picked up the stylus on its plastic leash and scrawled a sequence of letters and numbers on the counter’s datapad. The line of script glowed for a second as the office comps matched handwriting and pressure patterns against her samples on record. The datapad beeped.
“Will that do?”
The clerk dropped her eyes to the inside comp screens. “Searching now, sir.”
After a moment she shook her head. “Nothing up on the bulletin board or in the private message files, sir.”
“Try the bulk mail.”
The clerk turned her chair around and burrowed through the bin full of cartons and envelopes. “Nothing that I can—wait a minute, how about this?” She held up a thin envelope. “Marked ‘Hold for Pride of Mandeyn,’ no return address.”
“That’ll be mine.”
The clerk put the envelope into the security lock and cycled it through. Beka picked up the stiff envelope and pried at the seal with one close-trimmed fingernail. No luck; she shrugged, and drew out the knife she always carried these days, a double-edged blade in a forearm sheath. The ruffled cuff of her white spidersilk shirt fell back over her wrist as she slit open the envelope and pulled out the thin sheet of paper inside.
She eased the dagger back out of sight up her sleeve and scanned the paper, frowning:
Re your last message: Gilveet Rhos, freelance electronics expert, out of circulation past Standard year. Current status unknown. Break; new subject. If you need a bolthole sometime, the Space Force Medical Station and Recruitment Center in Flatlands has its own shuttle pad. The officer in charge is reliable and discreet.
“I need to send a reply,” she said, folding the paper and jamming it into a trouser pocket. “Where’s your keyboard?”
The clerk nodded toward a pull-out shelf set into one wall of the little office. Beka activated the keyboard, punched in a series of access codes and a single sentence of text—Message received; info noted—and signed off again.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Twenty . . . wait a minute. There’s a message for you now. Must have been flagged when you signed on. Make that twenty-five, with a printout. Do you want it charged to your account?”
“No, I’ll pay cash.” Beka shoved across two twenty-credit chits, and took the sheet of flimsy and her change. For a second, she thought the brief message might be word of a cargo—even though none of the Pride’s usual contacts had known about her side trip to Pleyver—but the printout made no mention of freight charges or shipping dates.
Captain Portree, she read, our firm desires to retain your services on a matter of grave import. Our representative will meet you in Florrie’s Palace at 2100 Standard.
“Damn,” she muttered. “There goes the R and R.”
She was still frowning as she left the General Delivery office and headed back toward the shuttle dock to link up with the Professor. The appointment at Florrie’s came uncomfortably soon after the hours when she and the Professor intended to be rummaging through FIL’s computer system. But we can’t afford to ignore the invitation . . . We’ve put too much effort into giving Tarnekep the sort of reputation that gets him mysterious offers like this one.
Outside at the shuttle dock, she paused to lean on a railing overlooking the landing zone half a mile away. Another of the regular shuttles had just come down and let off its passengers. After a few minutes, the Professor came out of the the dock office to join her. She turned away from the activity on the pad.
“All set?”
“Set.”
They headed for the arches leading into the tunnels of the Flatlands transport grid. The Professor, as usual, walked a discreet few steps behind and to her right. From that position he could guard her back; and while neither of them would interfere with the other’s field of fire, they remained close enough together for conversation.
“Anything turn up in the way of a cargo?” she asked as they came out of the tunnel onto the platform for the inbound transitway. “Or do we have to lift empty?”
Another, unexpected voice cut across the Professor’s reply. “Spacer—hey, spacer. Could you help me out with a couple of credits? Just a couple of credits, and I’ll tell you something you want to know.”
The voice had the wheedling tones of a dirtside panhandler, and the pitch was an old standby. Beka turned.
Her brother Owen stood half-in, half-out of the shadows at the end of the transit platform.
Beka looked at him for a moment, saying nothing. She hadn’t seen Owen since the night after her coming-of-age party eight years ago, when they’d gone down to the port quarter in Galcen Prime and found her a junior pilot’s berth on the Sidh. He’d been an apprentice in the Guild for three years then, almost ready to take an Adept’s vows although seemingly in no hurry to do so. She wondered if he’d ever taken them; he’d never spoken of the matter in their occasional brief exchanges of correspondence. He certainly didn’t look much like an Adept; even eight years ago he’d possessed the knack of making himself, at need, into an unnoticed fixture of the local landscape, and at the moment he looked like a spaceport bum.
And what do I look like to him? she wondered. Does he see his little sister, or does he see Captain Tarnekep Portree?
Or would he tell me there’s no difference?
She didn’t like that idea at all. Living inside Tarnekep’s skin for so many months had already brought the Mandeynan gunfighter’s personality too close to her own comfort. The last thing she wanted to hear was that she’d pulled Tarnekep out of herself in the first place.
She kept her eyes on her brother. “All right, spacer—start talking.”
Owen nodded. “You’re looking for the portside office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd. Is that right?”
Startled, Beka forced herself to maintain Tarnekep Portree’s cool regard. There was no point, she knew, in trying to figure out how her brother had come by his information.
He’d say he had a dream, or a feeling, or something.
And it might even be true. Or maybe Master Ransome eavesdrops on the same messages the Professor does.
“What if I am looking for them?” she asked.
“Then you shouldn’t go there tonight.”
She stiffened and looked down her nose at him. “I don’t even know you, spacer,” she said, very much in Tarnekep’s voice. “Who the hell are you to say what I should and shouldn’t do?”
“Gently, Tarnekep,” murmured the Professor. “Gently. The young man wishes you well. Our appointment can be as easily kept by one as by two—wait for me at Florrie’s, Captain, and I’ll handle our business at FIL alone.”
“No,” she said flatly. “I take my own risks.”
“Not this time,” said Owen. Her brother paused, as if weighing how much he ought to say next. “There’s more going on here than you know, or than I can tell you. I have a visit of my own to pay FIL.”
“Ah,” said Beka. Guild business, she thought, but knew better than to say it out loud. “I need the information FIL has in its computers,” she told Owen. “I was counting on getting it out of there tonight.”
“I think I can guess what you’re after,” said her brother. “I can get it for you if you let me.”
She still didn’t like the idea. “How will you know what’s important and what isn’t?”
“We can rely on the young man’s judgment, I think,” the Professor cut in. “If I’m wrong, another chance can always be found, or can be made.”
Beka made up her mind. “You’ve got it,” she told Owen. “I’ll be having dinner at Florrie’s.”
“At Florrie’s,” echoed her brother. He stepped back into the shadows as a glidepod slid up to the platform, and then he was gone.
Florrie’s Palace was what the Professor in one of his primmer moods would have referred to as a house of ill repute: the biggest, busiest, most red-plush-and-gilt-trim-bedecked whorehouse in Flatlands Portcity. Upstairs, the Palace’s employees plied their specialized arts. Downstairs, however, the Portcity’s finest chef supervised a restaurant crew whose expertise made respectable hoteliers weep with envy.
So you might as well relax and enjoy your dinner, Beka told herself. And remember to thank your brother for the favor someday. You wouldn’t have had time for a meal like this if Owen hadn’t shown up.
At the dinner’s end, Beka poured the last of the wine into the crystal goblets and leaned back in her chair.
“This is good . . . I’m glad we got the chance to relax and take some of the edge off things.” She gave a tired sigh. “That Web approach is a bad one. My father claims he made it in six hours once, but I wouldn’t like to try. And I wish whoever’s meeting us knew enough to let a pilot get some rest after a run like that.”
“The message you received sounds like someone is hiring for a professional assignment,” said the Professor. “We can’t afford not to show interest.”
“I’m a merchant-captain,” complained Beka. “How did I get myself into somebody’s files as a hired killer on the side?” She held up one hand to stop the Professor before he could speak. “Never mind, I already know who to thank. And our contact’s about to show up.”
The contact—a florid, beefy type—plopped himself down at their table without invitation. “You boys enjoying yourselves?”
Beka turned Tarnekep Portree’s piebald gaze—one eye bright blue and the other a blank patch of red one-way optical plastic—onto the newcomer, and watched him wilt a little under that unspeaking regard.
“I’m Captain Portree,” she said, after the silence had drawn out long enough. “You sent a message about a job?”
“Sure did,” said the contact, recovering his enthusiasm. “We’ve heard all kinds of good things about you—a real pro, is the word—and I’ve got a sweet deal lined up for you.”
The Prof’s rumor-machines certainly have been busy, Beka thought. She smiled, and let their contact sweat for a few moments. “Indeed,” she said finally, without inflection. “What exactly is your deal? And who are ‘we’?”
“This isn’t the best place to talk,” said the contact. “Why don’t you come along upstairs?”
Beka drained the last of the wine, and set down the empty glass. A stray drop slid down the stem to stain the white tablecloth. She pushed back her chair, stood, and was obscurely pleased to find that she was taller than the stranger by a head or more.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Come on, Professor.”
“No,” said the contact hurriedly. “My principal wishes to deal with Captain Portree alone.”
Beka glanced over at her copilot. He looked concerned—he’d told her many times, during the past few months of training and practice, that splitting up a team was not a good idea. But the meeting upstairs sounded important, maybe even bigger than the data banks at FIL, and she couldn’t afford to let the chance go by.
“Good enough,” she said to the beefy type. “Professor, you wait here. Buy yourself some more wine—I’ll be back to help you finish the next bottle.”
She followed the contact up the Palace’s broad curving staircase to a bank of lifts on the second level. The lift took them up to a penthouse office: plush-carpeted, wood-paneled, and soundproof. A closed door set into the paneling behind the desk led to somewhere deeper within the office complex.
A quick, automatic count showed her six men lounging about the room. One or two had the slab-jawed look of hirelings who only thought when the boss told them to think, but the others had the quick, dangerous air of freelance operatives. Few of them carried blasters openly, but she knew that appearances meant nothing.
The banker or lawyer or whatever who rose from behind the desk had a smile like a holovid hero. “Well, Captain Portree—it’s a pleasure to see you in the flesh at last.”
He held out his hand, and Beka met it with hers. The holovid hero’s grip turned out to be firmer than she’d anticipated, but that was all right. Hours of work at Warhammer’s control’s, or helping the dockworkers shift cargo, had put more strength into her own long fingers than most people expected, whether from Beka Rosselin-Metadi or Tarnekep Portree.
“The pleasure is all mine, Gentlesir,” she said. “How can I be of assistance?”
The holovid hero sat down again and waved her to a chair opposite. “To be quite candid, a certain young officer in the Space Force has recently come to our attention.”
Beka leaned back in her chair, and placed her fingertips together. The dandy’s ruffles cascading over her wrists in a froth of pure white spidersilk hid the hilt of the dagger, but her right hand knew in sinew and bone the quick, smooth motion that would bring it into view like a snake striking.
“An entanglement of that kind is likely to draw more attention than the average,” she said aloud. “I suppose you’re prepared to set the price accordingly.”
“We are, indeed,” said the holovid hero, with a smile that dazzled. “My principals have authorized me to offer you five hundred thousand—half in advance, and the other half upon fulfillment of the contract.”
Oily bastard, Beka thought, and smiled back at him over her steepled hands.
“Excellent,” she said. “And the name, Gentlesir?”
“Ari Rosselin-Metadi,” he said. “A Medical Service officer, and a man impossible to mistake once you have his description. Unfortunately, the lieutenant has proved difficult for my principals to deal with unaided.”
Ari, you big idiot, thought Beka, still smiling across her hands at the man behind the desk. What have you gotten into?
“I take it you want him dealt with more or less permanently, then,” she said.
“Permanently,” agreed the other. “You’d have to use the utmost discretion, of course, because of the, ah, previous incident.”
Beka forced herself to keep her voice level and disinterested. “Don’t worry. Blaster-work in full view of the entire Grand Council and the lady’s husband isn’t my style.”
“That whole affair should have been better-managed,” said the holovid hero. “Vosebil was good enough to change the antiseptic at the Medical Center, and smart enough to subcontract out to the best. He could have poisoned the Domina any day of the week with less publicity.”
“The way the holovids plastered that affair all over the civilized galaxy, I’d have said ‘publicity’ was the whole idea.”
“Trust me, Captain Portree. Publicity is the last thing that Dahl&Dahl are looking for. We were not pleased with Gentlesir Vosebil’s handling of his assignment.” The holovid hero’s sculpted lips narrowed in disdain. “We hope, Captain, that you can manage something less flamboyant for the Rosselin-Metadi contract.”
Beka’s fingers ached where she pressed them together. Only a few more minutes of this, she promised herself. Then you can be sick to your stomach in decent privacy.
“My methods are my own choice,” she said. “Or hire a different man to do your killing for you.”
“No, no,” said the banker-or-whatever, smiling yet again, all flashing white teeth and practiced sincerity. “We make it a rule not to dictate to our professional contractors. The choice of techniques is entirely at your own pleasure.”
“That’s better.”
“Then you’ll take the contract, Captain Portree?”
She nodded. “I’ll take it.”
The man from Dahl&Dahl rose and held out his hand for the ritual handclasp that would seal the bargain.
Beka stood up and reached across the desk to return the grip. Don’t flinch, girl. You’re Tarnekep Portree, and you’ve done a lot worse than shaking hands with a smoothfaced, smiling son of a bitch who just hired you to kill your own brother.
The man from Dahl&Dahl was saying something, and she forced herself to keep on listening.
“We’ll send you the background material and the initial payment through the General Delivery drop by thirty-three hundred, Captain Portree, and it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
Beka let go his hand. “That’s it, then.”
“One more thing . . . ”
She paused, tensing. “Yes?”
“There will be an additional payment, of course, equal to that we have already agreed on—but first, there is someone else for you to kill.”
Oh, damn, she thought. How am I going to get out of this one without blowing Tarnekep’s entire reputation sky-high? They’re going to drag in some poor idiot they’ve already decided needs to be dead, and solve three problems for the price of one—check me out, and get rid of the idiot, and give themselves a crime they can put into the data net with my name on it any time they get tired of working with me. Damn, damn, damn.
The Professor, she felt certain, could handle such an execution without a qualm. Whoever these people had on hand for sacrifice was marked for death already, and a full-power blaster bolt was quick and merciful compared to some of the things an ingenious mind could devise.
But the Prof’s been doing this for more years than I’ve been alive, and I’m still new. I don’t know . . .
Then the door behind the desk opened, and her uncertainty became a purely academic matter. Two more men emerged from the inner chamber, dragging her brother Owen between them.
“Kill this man for us,” said the lawyer, or whatever he really was. “Now.”
She couldn’t tell if Owen was unconscious, or just deeply drugged; he hung limp in the grasp of his captors, and his head drooped too low for her to see his face. He still wore the dirty coverall he’d worn at the port. She looked away from her brother, and gave the lawyer her best Tarnekep sneer.
“Where the hell’s the challenge in something like this?” she demanded. “Any schoolkid could do the job.”
“You’re being paid,” said the man from Dahl&Dahl. He leaned back in his chair. “Call it a sign of good faith.”
The two men propped Owen up against the wall. Bereft of support, he slid down and collapsed in a sitting position on the floor, his chin resting on his chest. The two men backed away. They were well trained; neither one crossed between Beka and her designated victim.
Slowly, she pulled her blaster, and pointed it at the slumped form of her brother. She could feel the other occupants of the room watching her, waiting to see if the notorious Captain Tarnekep Portree could perform as advertised.
“Take care,” said the holovid hero. “We don’t want any accidents.”
Beka glanced in his direction. The handsome lawyer or whatever he really was wore an expression of anticipation—bright-eyed and wet-lipped. No matter what happened next, this one was going to enjoy watching it.
“Accidents, hell,” snarled Beka. Her right foot lashed out in a move the Professor had taught her, catching the nearest of Owen’s two guards in the kneecap. He gave a grunt of pain and collapsed. Beka twisted around and shot his companion in the gut. “I’m doing this on purpose.”
The sound of the blaster echoed in the closed room. She saw Owen push himself to his feet, stumbling a little but definitely not unconscious, and she tossed him her blaster as he came up.
Without waiting to see if he caught it, she yanked out her double-edge blade from its forearm sheath and launched herself across the lawyer’s desk in a low, flat dive. A blaster bolt heated up the air behind her. The man from Dahl&Dahl was standing up and reaching for something as she came at him; she slashed the knife across his throat.
Blood from the cut artery sprayed everywhere. She dropped behind the desk as another blaster bolt seared the polished wood. More blasters fired, the bolts passing close overhead. Then, suddenly, the room was quiet again. Only two men remained standing, one by the wall—her brother—and, by the door through which she had entered, the Professor.
“I took the liberty of following you upstairs,” the Professor said calmly, reholstering his blaster. “When I heard firing, I made what haste I could to lend assistance.”
Beka pulled herself up to her feet. There was blood on her knife, and more blood covering the ruffled front of her shirt; she stood for a moment, uncertain, then wiped the blade clean against her sleeve.
She put the knife back in its sheath and turned to her brother. Owen stood leaning against the wood paneling, with the blaster she’d thrown him hanging loosely from one hand.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He shook his head as if to clear it. “Well enough.” He pushed himself away from the wall and held out the blaster. “Here. You’ll need this before long.”
“You don’t sound all that well.” She took the blaster, checked the charge, and slid the weapon into its holster. “What happened?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It was a trap. I knew that from the beginning, of course, but I thought it was for you.” He gave a faint, shaky laugh. “I was wrong. But they waited a bit too long to spring it—I found what you were looking for.”
Owen fumbled in a pocket of his coverall. “They missed it when they searched me. I was almost all the way under by then, but I held together long enough to make sure of that.”
He held out a plastic disk no bigger than a gaming chip. “Take it,” he said. “It’s got everything you wanted.”
“Thanks,” said Beka. She pocketed the datachip. “You coming with us to High Station?”
Her brother shook his head. “No. I have some unfinished business to take care of first. But if you can draw away the people with blasters—”
“ ‘The people with blasters?’ Who the hell are they?”
“Better if you don’t know,” he said. “I can get away from them, though, if I don’t have to worry about getting my head blown off at the same time.”
She bit her lip. “If I didn’t owe you a big one for getting me that berth on the Sidh . . . all right. Give me and the Prof five minutes. I’ll make certain they spot us leaving by the front door.”