It all sounded well and good until it became clear that the new employee wouldn’t survive the year. Testrial sent people into mines that couldn’t be mechanized. Nothing human beings invented could work inside those mines for long. Neither could humans. But the human body was resilient and survived longer than anything with cogs and wheels and drives and bits. Not a lot longer, but long enough to actually do some valuable work. Besides, paying those families their lost funds was cheaper than building an android with the same specifications as the humans who ventured into the mines.
It was icky, it was gross, and it was entirely legal, because Testrial’s string of mines were in Yhgred Sector, where human life was generally not valued like it was elsewhere in the galaxy. The laws were lax there, so lax that she never traveled into that sector, not even for a job.
If Testrial hadn’t had business in Litaera Sector, she would never have taken this job in the first place.
She sighed. Thousands and thousands of families destroyed by Testrial. If she searched for a Misha among them or a Rafael or a slender blond man, she would find thousands of them.
This wasn’t the way to figure out who he was. Or if he had lied to her.
Because she wasn’t sure about that either.
Maybe he wasn’t a licensed assassin. Maybe he worked for Testrial or Testrial’s cohorts. Or maybe he was after her for a different reason.
She stretched, and shut off the tablet, setting it back in the tiny excuse for a closet.
She should just get off at the next port. Or, if things got really bad, steal an escape pod.
And maybe she would do those things.
But not yet. So far, no one had knocked on her door and demanded her identification. No one had accused her of unjustly killing Testrial.
Probably no one except this Misha guy even knew that Testrial was dead.
The problem with leaving now was that Misha—or whoever the hell he was—would still be tracking her. She wouldn’t know how to get him off her back or even why he had been interested in her.
If she wanted answers, she needed to stay. For a while, anyway.
At least until Misha gave her a few answers—whether he wanted to or not.
Rikki worked best when she had a course of action, even if she abandoned it later. After much pacing inside her little cabin, she decided on a plan. (“Pacing” being a hopeful, delusional word. “Pivoting” would have been more accurate.)
What she needed to do first was figure out if Misha was actually a member of the Assassins Guild or if he had lied about that to put her on the defensive. And there was an easy way to figure it out: Guild members had DNA on file. If she put his DNA into the right database, then she would find out not only if he was a member of the Guild, but what his real (or at least his admitted) name was.
Her plan was to get his DNA—which was stupid. Because if she had thought of this plan earlier, she would have had a much easier time of it. After all, he had given of his DNA freely—and frequently—last night.
If she was half a step dumber, she would go back to his suite, rip his shirt off, slide her hands down his pants, and have her way with him.
The problem was, she wasn’t sure if she could get out of that suite again. Not because of the sex. She could control herself enough to stop after one go. (She hoped.)
No, she figured he might try to keep her in that suite for good, especially now that she had left. She had surprised him at that breakfast table. He had thought she was some kind of sex-crazed bimbo, and while she had done a reasonable impression of one (or at least, had let the sex-crazed bimbo side of her personality have sway over the rest of her [much more reasonable] personality), she really wasn’t one.
She was smart and competent, and she had survived a long time because of it. He finally realized that.
So if he thought she was a threat before, he really had to think she was a threat now.
Her only option, then, was to find him in a public place. She knew he didn’t spend his evenings in the ship’s casino, because Testrial had, and she had been with Testrial every night as his “good luck charm.” (Heh. That hadn’t turned out well for him.) She hadn’t seen Misha at all—and she doubted she would have missed him.
Although she had missed him up until last night, and he made it sound like he had been following her. Still, if he had been in the casino, she would have seen him. She had made a point of sizing everyone up, including the people who were trying not to get noticed.
So, assuming he wouldn’t be there and assuming he would be out of his gorgeous suite—which, she had to admit, was a hell of an assumption given how damn comfortable that suite was—then he would either be in the pubs, the restaurants, or the ballroom.
She would haunt them all until she saw him again. Then she would get just a bit of DNA, and figure out a way to get it to the Assassins Guild’s database.
Civilians didn’t have access to that database, but she would solve that problem after she had solved the others.
She slipped a DNA holder on the tip of her little finger. The holder looked like a part of her, but if she flicked it on and then swiped, she would get a few skin cells or a tiny strand of hair. That would be all she needed.
The DNA holder was the easy part of her wardrobe. She stood in front of her tiny closet for what seemed like eternity while she figured out what to wear for the evening.
She had brought along a variety of fancy dresses, all but one of them revealing a lot of skin. The one that didn’t had seduced her with its material. It was made of a watery silk, and had cost more than she usually made at her highest paying job. It was black and silver, with long sleeves and a high neckline, both of which she needed on this night. It had no slit along the side, so her legs didn’t show at all.
She wore it with pointy-toed silver heels that made her taller, and she wound her chestnut hair around the top of her head. She looked expensive and a lot more seductive than she planned. The silk was thin and the silver panels looked more like white skin peeking through the black.
Only up close did the material appear as what it was: a soft silver, as smooth to the touch as the black silk itself.
The dress made her feel beautiful, and she needed that after her humiliation in front of Misha that morning. She wouldn’t have needed it at all if she hadn’t thought that his passion was based in more than lust, but his words had convinced her otherwise. He was probably one of those sexually insatiable men, the kind who could perform no matter who the woman (or the man or the android) was.
The very thought made her cheeks heat up.
She took one last glance at herself in the room’s full-length mirror. Then she took a deep breath and headed into the corridor.
She would find him, get his DNA, and figure out exactly what to do next.
Misha initially found her through the identi-card the ship had given her when she booked her room. The card listed her name as Rachel Carter. When he first found her, he wasn’t sure that Rachel Carter was the woman he wanted. He had a list of four that he was keeping an eye on.
He had followed the down payment he had sent her for the job, and had watched as she transferred the funds from place to place. By the time she paid for her cruise, he had the amount and the ship’s name, but not her name. She had used some kind of trick to book her passage, a trick he couldn’t quite follow.
So he had to go through the difficult task of eliminating the other passengers. He managed to eliminate all of the wrong gender and the wrong age, but that left him with four single women. He had had to eyeball all of them.
And he had been surprised when he realized who Rachel Carter really was.
Then he switched out her identi-card so that he could follow her. That had taken some work and some planning. If she had a more expensive passage, she would have had a subcutaneous chip like he did. Those expensive identi-chips made it possible for the very wealthy to visit all parts of the ship. The chips got read as the passenger went from deck to deck, lounge to lounge, even if the passenger didn’t touch an identi-circuit.
He liked cruise ships for that very reason. They had to keep track of passengers, and they used a short-term tracking system that he could easily access. He had been doing it for years, and he had become so good at it, he could turn his own identi-chip on and off, something he hadn’t told Rikki when he’d been slamming his fist against the airlock circuitry.
But identi-cards didn’t allow the easy passage throughout the ship. Any identi-card user had to scan the card as she went from section to section. Rikki had altered her card enough to give her access to the parts of the ship she had frequented with Elio Testrial, but she never would have gotten into the B Deck lounge (for example) without Misha.
She couldn’t have done a lot without Misha.
She seemed to think she had completed her job well. She didn’t realize that he had saved her ass, and part of the way he had done so was with his own identi-chip.
When he hit that airlock with his fist, the circuitry had identified him as Low-Level Maintenance Staff, a designation it used in the first few days of a trip, when the new employees hadn’t yet been assigned their exact jobs.
That meant neither he nor she would get caught. Only later, when the security guards would mention seeing them, after someone figured out that Elio Testrial was missing, would the security guards would remember that incident. Then they would find the identi-chip reading and realize that it was suspicious.
Right now, he assumed, the ship’s staff considered that a malfunction, and nothing to worry about, since it had only been a pair of drunks messing with the airlock doors. He had identified himself at that airlock, after all, so as far as the ship was concerned, the mistake with the identi-chip was just that: a mistake, a malfunction, not something to worry about.
Of course, he was (theoretically) one of the richest, if not the richest, passenger on this ship. Had Rikki tried a stunt like that, with her lower-level berth and her cheap boarding pass, then the staff would instantly have been suspicious.
He had protected her, and she hadn’t realized it.
It still galled him. Everything about her galled him.
She had spent most of the day in her room. That had surprised him. He would have thought that she would go all over the ship, trying to be visible after the kill like so many amateur assassins did.
But she didn’t seem to care who saw her—or so he thought until he watched her little identi-card move along the corridor map he had brought up on his wristscreen.
About an hour after the nightly dress ball began, she went into the ballroom.
That surprised him too, since she had spent all of the preceding evenings in the casino.
Apparently the casino had been where Testrial wanted to go, and had nothing to do with her.
Misha had planned to keep a distant eye on her, but he couldn’t stay away. He told himself that he needed to watch her, to make sure she didn’t pin Testrial’s death on some innocent passenger, but he knew that was just an excuse.
He wanted to see her.
He wanted to see if the past twenty-four hours had rattled her as much as they had rattled him.
Maybe coming to the ballroom had been a mistake.
Rikki stood off to one side, holding a champagne flute and watching the dancers. The light was dim to give the illusion of privacy, but there were stage lights on the orchestra in the very center of the cavernous room.
The orchestra was made up of real humans, not some holographic players. She’d been in a dozen different ballrooms over the years and only a few had even bowed to the niceties of a holographic orchestra. Most places simply had music piped in, music the passengers or the dancers or whomever was running the place chose.
This place had more class than she had expected.
Except for the cost. Her stupid identi-card was barely designated for this place. She could get in through a side entrance—no one announced her like they announced the rich and famous guests—and she had to pay for every damn thing.
Like this flute of champagne. She had opted for the cheapest stuff because she didn’t want to pay the equivalent of the cost of her room for the good stuff. Not that she was planning to drink it.
She had had more than enough to drink the night before.
She stood near the wide-open staircases that flowed up the second floor, figuring she could see and hear best from this position. She couldn’t see all of the entrances, but enough of them were visible. Even if Misha entered through one of those entrances and she didn’t see him walk in, she would be able to hear the announcement and glide her way over to him.
Or at least, she would try to glide. She liked to imagine that she could glide in this dress. She knew it looked good because at least a half dozen men (and one quite beautiful woman) had hit on her since she took her position near the steps.
“No, I don’t want to dance, thank you so much,” she had said repeatedly. Six of them went away murmuring regrets, but one guy had parked himself in front of her. He was a bulldog of a man, with a pugnacious face and a tuxedo one size too small. His muscles bulged out of it.