Harlan cast a glance at Ravindra. It was the first time she could remember Harlan being short of words. Actually, it was the first time she could remember him not being in control of the situation.
‘No?’ Ravindra suggested.
‘Well, I’ll tell you. I probably have a lower standard of living than you. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad – but I do not live the swashbuckling high-life of a frontier space pirate. Do you know what I do?’
‘Obviously not,’ Ravindra said through gritted teeth, tiring of this game.
‘I go to PTA meetings. Now, you’ve got a child, haven’t you, Captain Khanguire?’ the Veil asked. Ravindra almost pulled the trigger. ‘Seventeen years old, called Ji, right?’ Ravindra swallowed hard. ‘Have you ever been to a PTA meeting’ All Ravindra could see was the silhouette of his facial features through the white silk-like material of the veil, the movement of his mouth. ‘No, of course you haven’t. It’s the social equivalent of root canal surgery, if the surgeon went in through the anus. That is how boring my life is. Unless, of course, I have to take two heavily armed ships full of military-contractors, hired through a bewildering set of blinds, and jump out to the absolute middle of less-than-nowhere to retrieve something that I’ve already paid for.’
‘Good speech’ Ravindra said.
‘You like it?’
‘I think you just made all that up.’
‘That would seem likely, wouldn’t it? I want my cargo.’
‘I’m sure we can work something out here, we’re all civilised people,’ Harlan said. Ravindra could make out the shadow of the Veil’s face contort under the silken veil.
‘No,’ the Veil said, his tone suggesting it took a real effort to control his anger. ‘If we were civilised people then we’d be in a civilised place, doing civilised things. Clearly, that is not what we are doing. We are going to get what we want and then we are going to remind people why they do not mess us around like this.’ He was shaking his head. Then he turned to Ravindra. ‘About two thousand years ago they used to use these clips to hold eyes open for surgery.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like two twists of wire. ‘So the patient didn’t blink. Now, you’re going to want to shoot me, and I have two children so, believe me, I can empathise with that want, but it is in your best interest not to do so. You see, you’ll be wearing these when I have your son raped to death in front of your eyes, and your head will be in a vice so you won’t be able to look away.’ Ravindra swallowed. She felt her hand go numb. She tried not to squeeze the trigger. ‘It’s hard to imagine a more complete failure as a parent than one who would allow that to happen.’
‘Newman tried to burn us,’ Ravindra said.
‘I don’t care,’ the Veil told her.
‘You might not,’ Ravindra said, trying to control her anger. ‘But you can see how we’d maybe respond in a certain way to that, right? As far as we’re concerned the deal hasn’t changed. We get paid, you get the cargo and everyone walks away … well, less than happy. There is no need for any of this.’
‘If you weren’t pulling a burn then why’d you dump the cargo? Good job, by the way, we couldn’t find a thing in the nav’s memory. The only thing on the table is the life of your crew and your son.’
Ravindra realised that the Veil couldn’t have known that the cargo was still on the
Song
in a very well-hidden smugglers’ compartment. In fact, somebody had misled him, made him think that they had dropped the cargo somewhere else. She just couldn’t work out why.
‘Okay, this is how it’s going to go down—’ Ravindra started.
‘Do you really think you’re in charge of anything?’ The Veil was shaking his head. ‘You care about everyone involved. I’m here on a matter of principle.’
‘Expensive principle,’ Harlan said. The Veil’s head shot around. He must have been staring at Harlan. The station boss didn’t flinch.
‘I’ll shoot her in the head,’ Ravindra said nodding at Jenny. ‘To spare her your tender mercies, and then take my chances.’
The Veil turned to look at Jenny. The engineer just glared at him defiantly.
‘Ask around, she’ll do it in a heartbeat,’ Harlan told him.
‘Then what do you have to bargain with?’ Ravindra asked.
‘You know you can’t run far and fast enough, right?’ the Veil asked her.
‘You know you’ve always got to leave people with something to lose, right?’ Ravindra asked. ‘You’re going to take Jenny, there’s nothing I can do about that, but you had better treat her good because I’ll want proof of life. I set the rendezvous point, just one ship.’ Her comms link icon started blinking in the corner of her lens. Ji was trying to speak to her. She severed the link. ‘I go get the cargo, we meet, you put Jenny in a pod and eject her and I’ll need proof that’s happened. I eject your cargo. We pick up Jenny, you pick up the cargo, and if you’re quick enough then you get to try to kill us when we make a break for it.’
‘You’re not in a position—’
‘You don’t like it then let’s roll the dice, right here, right now.’
The Veil looked at her for a moment and then glanced at Harlan.
‘You don’t gamble, Captain Khanguire,’ he said.
‘You’ve left me with a zero sum game.’
The Veil gave this some thought.
‘Agreed,’ he said finally.
‘This only works with you off my station,’ Harlan told the Veil.
The Veil walked past them followed by his security team, dragging Jenny with them and carrying Harnack’s body on the stretcher. Ravindra stared at the body bag as it was carried past.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ the Veil told her.
Ravindra lowered her pistols. Her arms were aching, the muscles felt as if they were on fire. She had no idea how she had managed to stop her arms from shaking.
‘They shouldn’t have gotten in as easily as they did. Someone sold us out.’ Ravindra changed the subject, shouting over her shoulder as she started running towards the ship. ‘If it’s one of your people—’
‘You can talk to them before I kill them!’ Harlan shouted after her as she ran up the ramp into the
Song
.
Ravindra was in her home now. She all but fell over Jonty. He was lying in the corridor that led from the cargo bay to the cockpit. He had his burst pistol in his hand. Ravindra reckoned he had heard something and been heading towards the ramp when they jolted him. He was going to be out for a while. They had jolted him pretty extensively.
She found Orla coming to on the bridge.
‘You okay?’ she asked. Orla nodded, her expression grim.
The comms icon in Ravindra’s lenses started blinking. It was Ji again.
‘I just turned around and they were there. I don’t understand how …’ Orla started.
No, none of us do
, Ravindra thought suspiciously. ‘They’ve got Jenny,’ Ravindra told her, then opened the comms link to Ji. His image appeared in a window on her lenses. He was looking into the camera on his comp ring. He wanted her to see how angry he was. Ravindra kept her side of the conversation voice only.
‘What the fuck, mum? You just shunt the call? What do—’
‘Are you in the apartment?’ she demanded, interrupting him.
‘No, I’m at Alice’s,’ he said. Ravindra mentally ran through her list of Ji’s friends.
Shit!
She was pretty sure that Alice was one of Merkel’s crew, a pirate groupie that Merkel kept around to make himself feel good.
‘Okay, stay there until I come and get you. Where is it?’
‘What? You’re not coming here—’
‘This is important, Ji.’
‘It always is when you’re talking, mum, never when I am. Well, fuck you!’
‘Don’t talk to m—’ Ravindra snapped, the tension finally getting to her as she felt her temper start to slip.
‘Want to know what it feels like?’ Ji cut the comms link.
‘Shit!’ Ravindra screamed.
Orla was staring at her. Ravindra shook her head.
‘I’ll be back,’ Ravindra said.
‘We need to talk,’ Orla told her. Ravindra acknowledged this while striding out of the bridge. As she walked through the ship and out onto the berth past the remaining station security personnel, those that weren’t escorting the Veil and his people off the station, there was still something nagging at her mind. Someone had sold them out to the Syndicate that was clear. She hadn’t wanted to say anything that would reveal her ignorance, show her hand, but what she didn’t understand was why they wanted Harnack’s body.
Usually Ziva kept most of the
Dragon Queen’
s cargo hold fitted out with a collapsible internal fuel tank and a holding cell for the bounties she took. The
Dragon Queen
had collapsed the tank and jettisoned the cell when it had swooped in to snatch the elevator and so Ziva was left with no option but to keep Newman in the
Dragon Queen
herself; not that there was very much room in a Fer-de-Lance once you replaced the factory-fitted luxury cabins with more fuel space and warheads. She let the ship drift while she pulled Newman, unconscious, out of his escape pod and floated him down the forward passageway that ran between the two tiny cabins, the head, and the cockpit. She put a tag on him, and a bracelet and a collar so that the moment he did anything she didn’t like she could shock him into unconsciousness, dosed him with so much Antimatter that he wouldn’t know who he was when he woke up, and locked him into the half of the spare cabin that she’d rigged as an emergency containment cell.
And then there was the Truth. Truth was illegal throughout the Federation, the Empire and the Alliance but every bounty hunter worth their salt carried some. Truth did what it said. No need for long tortuous physical interrogations, no need for psychology, no need for anything except a nice chat over a cup of something hot and sweet and a camera sitting in the background recording it all. The Federation really didn’t like Truth; nor did they like people getting juiced on Antimatter but there wasn’t much they could do about either in an empty system outside their borders. Once she had Newman locked up, Ziva took him out to Witches’ Reach. It was a nothing system and as far as she knew no one had ever claimed it or given it a proper name. There were some basic survey records but nothing more. Simple binary star system with two Sol-like main-sequence stars and a single gas giant for fuel. Every bounty hunter had their backwater systems where they could go and hide for a while, where they could get on and do things in peace and quiet. Every pirate had them too. She’d start with that, she thought: with Newman’s safe systems, with his ship and his crew.
When she was ready for him, she went back to his cell and drone-jabbed him with Wakey-Wakey, then tossed a bottle of water through the bars. This bit was the worst, the first confrontation, the part that always made her nervous. She was careful – extremely careful – when searching the bounties she took before she let them wake up, but she could never be
quite
sure they hadn’t smuggled some trick past her.
She waited for his eyes to focus on her. ‘Hello, Newman.’
He blinked a few times. ‘Who are you?’
‘Bounty hunter.’ That was all he needed to know. ‘You got any threats you want to make, deals you think you can cut, you make them now.’
Newman leered at her. ‘You crossed the Syndicate, bounty hunter. Open this cage and when I’m done with you I’ll put in a good word.’
‘
That’s
your best offer?’ Ziva snorted. ‘No sub-cranial anti-matter bomb? No tailored viruses? Although I do scan for those, of course.’ Newman, as best she could tell, was a proper shit. Some pirates saw themselves as anarchists, as freedom fighters. Most were simply jerks who wanted to have something on the quick and easy. And then, right at the far end, there were the Newmans, the thrill-seeker sadists who took pleasure in what they did and just didn’t know how to stop. The Pilots’ Federation had put a bounty on him for a couple of stop-and-board raids but it was the tip of an iceberg and Ziva had known it as soon as she’d seen what he’d done. There were murders in at least three systems that had his name all over them – bloody, senseless, brutal things. She reckoned she was about to discover a good half dozen more.
Newman shook his head. ‘Threats, bounty hunter? What for? You want my cards on the table? You know who I work for. You know what they’re like. I don’t have a ship anymore, so that Pilots’ Federation bounty on me has gone. I’m worthless to you. I’m just one motherfucker of a liability now, because my people don’t leave loose ends.’
‘What happened to your ship, Newman?’
He stretched out in the zero gravity and pushed himself to the bars, as close to her as he could get. His eyes were wide, dilated from the drugs. He was shaking.
Too much Antimatter.
‘That bitch Khanguire,’ he spat. ‘That’s what happened to it. Ravindra Khanguire.’
Ravindra Khanguire. She didn’t know the name. She asked the
Dragon Queen
to cross-reference but it wasn’t in any of her databases. Maybe that was the way to do it with Newman, then. Disassemble his life backwards instead of forwards. Darkwater would pay if he’d been one of the captains in Stopover, but he was right about the Pilots’ Federation: Whoever this Khanguire was, she’d taken that bounty when she’d taken out his ship. Twenty thousand credits. All that work pissed away. No point in grilling him about what had happened before Stopover.
Backwards, then. ‘The
Unkindness
brought you back to the Black Mausoleum in an escape pod. Where did it find you?’
‘61 Cygni. What’s a nice little girl like you doing hunting bounties? Where’s your boss? I want
him
here, not you.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Ziva. ‘Partly because I don’t have one, and partly because even if I did, you’d still want me. You want to think about how much you could hurt me if you got out of there, don’t you, Newman? How big and strong and tough you are, and how small and fragile I look. You like to imagine how it would be if those bars somehow vanished and you got those beefy hands on me. That’s about right, isn’t it? Luckily for me that clouds your judgement – well, that and the drugs I put in you. But you don’t want someone else. You want to keep thinking about all those things.’ Ziva smiled at him. ‘You do that.’