First she took a few minutes to assemble the robots. She set them out to clean while she got settled. Then she went into the bedroom and opened her walk-in closet door. A wardrobe of comfortable clothes faced her. She had missed them. She stepped through the closet to the bathroom, took a quick shower, and then put on a soft shirt and pants set, leaving her feet bare.
Her bare feet told her that the robots were doing their job.
Once she was comfortable, she went to her office. It was not too far from the entrance, with a secret passage leading to that entrance. She had built it herself so that no one else would even know it existed. If someone was spying on her through the amazing windows, the office itself would look like the necessary four walls in the middle of the apartment, at least one of them a bearing wall.
Only someone who came inside would know that these walls were spaced just a little too far apart, that there had to be something inside them.
What was inside them was a windowless, soundproof room that doubled as a research station and an armory. She had more weapons in there than anywhere else—and she did have a few other bolt-holes, not nearly as nice as this one or as centrally located. The research station allowed her to check on her own jobs, to make certain she wasn’t being hired to do the wrong kind of work.
She had followed Jack’s instructions on how to set this all up, but not even Jack had seen this place. Jack knew it existed—just like she knew that he had bolt-holes all over the sector—but he didn’t know where it was or how to find it.
But he did know how to contact her, and he would as soon as he finished digging into Misha’s (Mikael’s) background. Rikki trusted Jack, and she knew he would dig as deeply as he could to find out everything there was to discover.
She also knew that on the subject of Misha (Mikael, dammit, she couldn’t stop thinking of him that way), she wasn’t entirely rational. So she was relying on Jack to be rational for her.
Besides, she had work to do.
She slipped inside the office, and reinstated her own links.
Rikki traveled with a variety of linking devices, but never had any permanently attached to her body (although she owned several that looked like they were attached—because not having obvious attached links often was a sign of an assassin).
But her best links stayed here. For anyone who wanted to give her work, she set up a program that told the person she would get to them when she got to them, weeks, maybe months later.
In this era of instant communication, not carrying her best links automatically trimmed her jobs down to the ones that could wait for her or the ones that needed someone of her caliber.
She had other ways to check these links—the information sent to them got copied by a system she had set up, and remained in a holding web in this sector, something she could access from any sophisticated enough link—but she had learned not to do that unless she couldn’t return here within a few months.
Too easy to track her whereabouts, something she didn’t want.
Particularly now that Misha (Mikael…) was out there.
She made herself shake off the thought as she stepped deeper into the room. Of all the places she owned, this was the one that was most hers. Its dark walls were covered with retired versions of her favorite weapons. It had a teak bar/shelf which she usually kept clean and polished that went all the way around the room. Right now it had a bit of dust on it, but she didn’t mind. The cleaning bots would get to it by the end of the day.
In the center of the room, she had placed a gigantic love seat made of a shiny leather-like substance. Real leather no longer existed (or so she was told) but human beings kept imitating it because it felt so very good to sit on. The love seat had two ottomans that snapped into place.
She had seen a lot of offices with desks. She saw no point in a desk, not when she worked on her wrist links or on a special tablet. Instead, she curled onto the love seat and sat comfortably beneath a beautifully designed light fixture that could give her every spectrum from sunlight to the perfect spotlight.
Right now, she had it on sunlight. She slipped onto the love seat, and spread out over the ottoman. Then she leaned her head back and sighed.
What a horrible last month. She hated all of it. She hated her impulsiveness and what she had become. She hated asking for help. But most of all, she hated that momentary fear she had felt in the security office.
Jack was right about that: it was unusual, and it colored her thinking. Just not in the way he assumed.
Maybe it was time to get out of the game. Try to live a real life somewhere.
But that frightened her too. She wasn’t cut out for a life without some kind of purpose, a life that followed the same routine day after day. She didn’t even drop into that here, where it would be easy during her off times.
She needed some kind of adrenaline high—she needed something to keep her occupied.
Plus, she needed money if she was going to retire. She had more than enough to take the next few years off (if she watched her spending), but she didn’t have enough for the next eighty years or more, however long she was going to live.
And in the first few years of that, she would need mobility. She would have to be able to afford a ship rental and several transports like she had just done on this trip to see Jack. Because someone might come after her. Someone who actually thought revenge was viable.
She sighed, opened her eyes, and grabbed one of the tablets. She clicked it on. Fifteen messages. The first few were for jobs that had since vanished. She deleted those.
That left five requests for work. She double-tapped the screen. Five people that other people wanted dead. Five people whose deaths other people believed would be justified.
This moment in her job, when she looked at the faces of people she didn’t know, people whose lives might intersect with hers in a very dramatic—and usually violent—way, always astonished her. She had no idea who these people were, so she didn’t know what they had done.
They were just faces, pleasant faces primarily, and they peered at her from their various attached files, smiling softly as if they all held a secret.
Well, she held the secret. Someone wanted them dead.
And if she was just a bit less honorable, she could take one job, and then contact the other four. She could get money from them to reveal the person who contacted her.
Behavior like that was against Assassin Guild rules, and she understood why. But she also understood the temptation. She knew dozens of operatives who supplemented their incomes that way, making her job—and the jobs of other legitimate assassins—much harder.
Still, at moments like this, when they were just faces, people she could possibly empathize with, she thought about the different ways her life could go.
Imagine what would have happened to her if she had turned down the Testrial job.
She set the tablet aside and sighed. After the whole Testrial experience, she was going to have to do even better research on the people who might become her targets—and spectacular research on the people who wanted to hire her.
All the way back here, she was wondering if she should hook back up with the Rovers. That loose affiliation of rogue assassins provided all kinds of vetting services and some partnering services as well, so that she wouldn’t be working alone.
Although the way Jack had looked at her when she asked if he was still with the Rovers bothered her. He had said he was no longer with them in a tone that brooked no further discussion.
And that meant she should have probed.
She sighed and went back to the tablet. Right now, she would just have to do a lot of extra research.
And if she chose the wrong target for the wrong client, the blame would be all hers.
Just like it had been with Testrial.
The blame would be all hers.
Misha hunkered in the apartment two and a half blocks away from Rikki’s. He couldn’t believe she had such a glamorous hiding spot. Not that hiding spot was the right word. Nothing about that apartment hid. It was on the top floor of an elegant building in a relatively upscale neighborhood.
Although he suspected the neighborhood hadn’t been upscale not too long ago, considering the place he was sitting in. This apartment had ruined walls, a carpet that smelled like pee, and windows so filthy he wasn’t even sure they would work for his nefarious purposes.
He managed to clean the windows, though, with some kind of nanosolution—he didn’t need to hire exterior robot cleaners after all—and then he had set up.
He was going to spy on her for a few days and figure out what she was doing.
He realized he had set up this surveillance the way he would set up a hit, and somehow that disturbed him. He liked to think he was setting up this way because that was the only way he knew, but he also realized that wasn’t true. He had other ways of conducting business.
Hell, he could just grab Rikki’s arm and pull her into one of the many restaurants that overlooked the lake, have a conversation, and get it all over with.
Except that he didn’t believe a single conversation would solve anything.
He had tracked her relatively easily, and that wasn’t her fault. She was more than cautious enough. No one who had just started looking for her would find this particular hiding place.
He had to admit, she was very good about concealing herself and her identity.
Her big mistake, after stealing that lifeship, was going back to the ship rental on Oyal. She had returned the ship, gotten her deposit back (which had shocked her and him both; he wondered if it had happened because the owner knew that Misha had enquired about her), and then had traveled to Nety.
She seemed to sense him, and she looked over her shoulder more than once. But he used a variety of ways to track her, sometimes renting his own ship to trail a transport she was on.
She took an amazing number of transports, and a lesser assassin would have lost her. He had come close a couple of times. But he kept telling himself that it didn’t matter, because he had access to her real name and several of her aliases. And he had yet another piece of information: He knew how to send her money—or at least one way to do so.
That conversation with Liora had bothered him, though. Not because Liora had shown up on Oyal (which bothered him in a different way) but because of her mention of the Rovers. Then he learned that Rikki had gone to Krell, of all places.
Everything the Guild had on a rogue organization of assassins called the Rovers said that they often used Krell as a base for their operations. So she had been reporting in to someone.
And that had made Misha angry.
But he had tried to keep his focus, working hard at tracking her. It almost got impossible, as she changed names and looks on each transport she took. But the one thing she didn’t do was book passage with someone else. So he looked for a female of the right age and same general look, knowing she would occasionally wear lifts to make herself taller, pad her clothes to look heavier, change her hair and eye color, and alter the way she wore clothing.
The one thing she couldn’t—or, to be more accurate, didn’t—change was the way she moved. She probably hadn’t even thought of it. That was one of the many drawbacks of not having formal training. He had learned quite early in his Guild classes that changing movement was as, if not more, important than any elaborate disguise.
So as he watched vids of the various transports, he mostly watched for a very familiar (and very attractive) walk.
A walk he was seeing now, just outside Rikki’s building.
He had placed high-powered lenses over his irises. The lenses were thicker than most zoom lenses, which usually ran on nanotech, but that was because they were better than any other he had ever seen.
He had complete control over distance and could see something as small as a piece of gravel from six blocks away.
These weren’t surveillance lenses; these lenses were specifically designed for snipers. He had never been a sniper—even if he had been a good enough shot, he didn’t like killing from great distances—but he loved these lenses.
They allowed him to see the main entrance to Rikki’s building, and the nearby ground transport stop. He had checked visual footage from around the building for the last year before he even set up here—that’s how he knew this was her building. The building itself didn’t save its footage (or at least, it didn’t make the footage available to people like him), but several other nearby buildings did. Plus the Lakota Transport Authority was more than willing to help a police officer from a nearby town on a particularly vexing case. They showed him their footage for the past year, and that she appeared repeatedly.
Plus he had an entrée into the law enforcement echelons of Lakota society now, something that might come in handy on a future case.
He had known she would arrive here, since her last space transport ended up on Unbey, but he wasn’t sure if she would come here directly. It seemed that she had, however, if that rather dumpy woman with Rikki’s walk getting off the ground transport was any indication.