*****
An
hour after his call, Shasti Rainhell’s two-meter-plus shadow fell on the gantry
leading to the silent
Sidhe
.
The frigate lay in a takeoff cradle, secured
by the Marsport Authority.
Shasti gave
them a wide berth, having already passed a security checkpoint and as always,
wary of police.
A few dock workers
labored on the cradle or the ship.
One,
she noted, appeared to be watching her sidelong.
Men often did.
It was not unusual for one to be
surreptitious about it.
Her size and
obvious strength kept catcalls stilled, but she sensed other intentions and
trusted her instincts.
Shasti
paused on the catwalk leading to the ship.
Leaning back against the slim metal rail she looked up, pretending to
study the ship.
Not that she needed
to.
The vessel had been her home since
her escape from Dua-Denlenn cutthroats.
Sidhe
sat with her four hundred and
eighty meter, blood-red hull engulfed in the launch cradle’s embrace.
Wings, set far back on the hull, held two
black
Wildcat
fighters.
Far over her head, hung the turrets for the
chain guns.
Sidhe’s
big punch, the mass acceleration driver, ran the length of
the horizontal interior axis of the ship.
Her crew of two-hundred fifty was largely
dispersed through Mars by now.
The
spot she’d stopped at allowed her to study her watcher from the corner of her
eye.
He was using some hand tools to
work on the scaffolding, bolting and unbolting the same piece of decking.
Confed
police
, she thought,
and that means
big trouble
.
Maybe coming was a
mistake.
What the hell has Fenaday done now?
And why do I keep staying to save his ass?
When
she had seen enough of the man’s face to remember it, Shasti started back up
the gantry.
A personnel lift took her up
to the main gangway.
She used her ship’s
officer pass to enter the secured airlocks and boarded the turbovator.
The door to the spade-shaped bridge opened.
*****
Fenaday
looked up from his command chair as Shasti walked onto the bridge and cocked an
eyebrow at him.
He didn’t rise or reach
out a hand.
Shasti hated to be
touched.
For a while, he’d thought her
uninterested in men, until she proved otherwise one spectacular night.
“I’ve
checked the ship out,” he said.
“I’ve
got every anti-bugging and white noise device we have working,” he said, “I
think it’s secure.
No guarantees.”
“In
this or anything else in life,” she replied.
“I assume you didn’t bring me here for a sparring rematch.”
She dropped into a bridge chair at her
security station with an easy grace.
“No,
no rematch,” he replied.
It took him ten
minutes to lay out the details of the meetings with Duna.
“Enshar?
Why would you even consider this voyage?” she
asked, looking at him as if he’d gone mad.
“I
had another visitor later, a man, calling himself Mandela.
He’s with Confed Intelligence.
He knows about the day we met.
Someone talked.”
Shasti
did not yell, scream or curse the unfairness of the world.
“Inevitable,” she shrugged.
“Three people can keep a secret if two of
them are dead.
I’m surprised it didn’t
come out earlier.”
“There
were too many eyes,” he agreed, standing and stretching.
“You never would tell me how you ended up a
prisoner on a Dua-Denlenn pirate vessel.
Shoddy treatment for the man who rescued you.”
She
cocked her head.
“You had no idea I was
aboard.
You were after a bounty as
always.”
“And
for my troubles, you nearly brained me, ran off my guards and shot up my hold
full of valuable prisoners.
Next thing I
know, my landing force is running, I’m looking at a pile of dead Dua-Denlenns
and the barrel of my own pistol.”
Shasti
leaned back in her chair looking pleased with herself.
“It showed you why you needed to hire
me.
As for the rest, my solution took
care of the need for paroles.”
“Yep,”
Fenaday agreed.
“Less paperwork,
clearly.
I suppose you had your
reasons.”
Something
flickered in her eyes, quickly suppressed.
“I was working as a bodyguard,” she finally said, “when the Dua-Denlenn
struck my employer’s compound.
Someone
hated her to have commissioned such an expensive raid.
The cook drugged my food and they took me
alive.
My patron and her children died
badly.
I had to watch.”
“My
only regret about the Dua-Denlenn,” she continued, “is that I didn’t have time
to kill them slowly.
Torture is part of
the Dua-Denlenn culture, almost an art form.
I’d have made each one of them into a masterpiece.
But with you there, I had to settle for just
dead.”
He
looked at her sidewise.
It was the most
she’d ever said on the subject.
“I don’t
disagree,” he replied, “but it put us in the trap we’re in.”
He drew a deep breath and came to a sudden
decision.
“Or at least, it’s the trap
I’m in.
I’m too well known to run and
where would I go?
I put most of my
family into bankruptcy when I sold off the Shamrock.
I have some money in a small emergency
fund.
It’s not enough to lift ship, but
it’s enough for you to run.”
Shasti
stared at him.
“You’d do that, for
me?
They’ll jail you on that basis
alone.”
He
shrugged.
“There are worse things.”
She stared
at him, then shook her head.
“No, I’ll
stick with you.”
“Shasti,
I’m going to die on Enshar.
There’s no
chance.
It’s a fool’s errand.
They’re sending my ship because they have to
send something and no one cares if we die.”
To
his surprise, she gave a small smile.
It
was the first he could recall.
“If we
don’t survive,” she said.
“I’ll never
have a chance to meet this wife of yours.
A woman who could so obsess a man might teach me a thing or two.”
He
laughed ruefully.
“If that happens, I
may end up with some explaining to do.”
“Is
that why you stopped?” she asked, catching him off guard.
Her expression closed up again; the glimpse
into the depths suddenly shuttered.
Now
he was in uncharted space.
“I don’t
know,” he sighed.
“I thought our affair
meant I was giving up.
After all the
things I did to start my search, I can’t do that.
A lot of people were hurt when I sold the
company.
My cousin’s father shot
himself...
Then there’s all I’ve done
since.
Maybe some of the people I’ve
dealt with had it coming, but that doesn’t seem to square somehow.
If I give up, then I did it all for nothing
and I’m not sure I can live with that.
“There’s
something else,” he hesitated, then plowed ahead.
“I wasn’t sure if you were with me because
you felt you needed to be...”
She
shook her head; her long, glossy, black hair shimmered.
A
knot released in his chest.
He hadn’t
realized it until then, but it was important to him that it had been more than
business.
Vanity, he supposed.
“I’m not free to give more.
I felt bad about that.”
Shasti
smiled again.
It seemed the day would be
full of such surprises.
“You’re
an anachronism, Robert, a throwback to the days of white knights.
Even now, with Enshar staring us in the face,
you’re thinking of ways to keep looking for her.
Why?
Tell me why?”
He
looked at her blankly for a second.
“She’s my wife.”
“Wife,”
she said with surprising bitterness, “just a word.
It tells me nothing, Robert.
You’ve searched for years for a woman whose
ship disappeared in unknown space.
When
the ship doesn’t come back, the crew doesn’t.”
“Yes,”
he replied.
“I know all the
sayings.
Your life is the ship’s plus
the air in your suit.
I’ve heard them
all.”
“Yet,
you continue,” she said.
He
looked at her intent face and gave a small sad smile.
“Do you know what I was before I met Lisa?”
Shasti
shook her head.
“Lonely,”
he said.
“Living a life without purpose
or passion.
Never had to struggle for
anything, everything was handed to me because of my family’s wealth.
I never knew if someone loved my wallet or
me.
“Then
I met Lisa.
She wasn’t impressed with
the name Fenaday.
I found I had to be
more than a spoiled rich kid to keep her.
She told me once that I was her world.
That’s a lot to live up to.”
“When
her ship disappeared, I wasn’t prepared to just stand there and take it.
I wasn’t prepared to be reasonable.
“I
may not be the toughest or the brightest.
God knows nothing I’d done before prepared me for this life.
I’d be dead a couple of times if it wasn’t
for you and dumb luck.
What I am
though,” he added with a grin, “is what the Irish are best at, stubborn and
unreasonable.”
She
stared in frustrated incomprehension.
“Words and words.
They mean
something to you, born-human.
To me,
created and engineered, they convey nothing.
The meaning seeps out of them.
All I have left is the sounds.”
Fenaday
looked at her tentatively.
Created?
Engineered?
Her past was something she’d never discussed, a place barred and
warded.
Today, Shasti seemed so
different, so much more approachable.
“You’ve never told me about your life on Olympia.
All I know is the same wild rumors—”
She
stood abruptly.
Too far,
he thought.
Damn.
He waited, dreading that she would storm out.
After
a long, dark moment, Shasti sat back down, as if she’d forgotten the reason for
rising.
She dusted imaginary lint from
her sleeve.
“Sorry,”
he ventured.
She
nodded, not looking at him.
“For
now,” she said, before the silence could lengthen again, “since neither of us
wants to spend the rest of our lives in a cell, we need to focus on how to do
this and survive.
You know they’re
watching the ship.”
“Yes,”
he said, equally anxious to get back to neutral territory.
“I’ve spotted several of them on the external
monitors.
As obvious as they are being, I
suspect they want us to know they are there.”
“We’ll
need a crew,” she said.
“We are not
going to find a lot of people in our situation.”
“How
about you taking the executive slot?” he asked.
She
shook her head.
“I don’t have the
navigation math or the certifications but I wouldn’t want the last fool back
even if he wasn’t locked up.”
“No,
I don’t want him back either,” Fenaday mused.
“I’m promised a number of people by this Mandela, specialists he said,
and better than what we could find, but still...”
“We
don’t want them in charge,” she warned.
“God knows their real agenda.”
“Agreed.”
“We need
an X.O. who isn’t in their pocket,” she continued.
“I
met a hot pilot with Belwin Duna,” Fenaday said, “navy-trained and a Wing
Commander.
For some reason—and it is
just a hunch—I feel he is trustworthy, at least where it doesn’t cross
Duna.
His name is Telisan, a Denlenn.”
She
stiffened.
“Denlenn,”
he said, “not Dua-Denlenn.”
“They
look much alike,” she growled, “but a hot pilot you say?”