B00BFVOGUI EBOK (4 page)

Bridget’s mind went perversely back to a childhood rhyme before she took a second look at the floor. Yes, she had indeed stepped on a crack. The surface inside ASPEC station was smooth and gray, created from the same mixture of local aggregate and imported starcrete as the overhead dome. With Alabeyd’s low gravity, it should have been close to invulnerable. And yet, right outside the entrance to the personnel receiving area there was a tiny fissure where one had not been before.

She punched the communicator at her collar before remembering no one was home in Structural Engineering. Falcone had evacuated everyone until the last Spore recon was complete, and only he could order them back. While Bridget waited, she and her teammates had gotten some time in on the power excavators working salvage. But as fun as those contraptions were — and Bridget loved machines more than anything — the work hadn’t served to relax her at all. She’d have gone with Falcone in a heartbeat…if it hadn’t involved going to the Solar System.

She wouldn’t be ready for that for a while. Too many memories. Bad ones, of a terrible day eight years earlier — and all the terrible days that had followed. They had chased her out here, to the only outfit that would hire her. But while ASPEC was a marginal operation on the best of days, she wasn’t about to let anything hurt it. Anything else, anyway.

A sound woke her to the present. In the next room, massive hinges turned. Bridget forgot about the floor and brushed herself off.
Okay
, she thought.
Let’s see what they’ve brought me.

The shuttle was in, the inner door closing behind it. Bridget walked in to see O’Herlihy and Dinner debarking. She thought for a second they were alone — until O’Herlihy stepped to the right. There, invisible in the soldier sandwich, walked a man roughly her age in a gray business suit. Slicked-back hair mussed from the ride, he looked around, surveying the area as if he owned the place.

Maybe he thought he did. After years with the security teams, Bridget had grown to loathe the pixel-pushers back home. But what this one had done put him in a whole new class. “This him?” she asked O’Herlihy.

“Chief Yang, I give you Jamison P. Sturm, Esq.,” her teammate said, stepping out of the way.

The suit looked her over. “Call me Jamie,” he said, somewhat wary. “I’d shake your hand but you’re holding a very large gun. Is this normal?”

Bridget didn’t look down at the rifle. She hadn’t even remembered she was carrying it, but she already knew she didn’t like his reedy voice. “You never know what’ll come out of these containers,” she said stiffly.

Jamie stepped off the ramp and looked around. “So, Chief, I saw there was some trouble here. I hear you saved a cargo unit?”

“Yes,” she said icily. “This way.”

Bridget led the trader and his escorts into another dome. In the middle of the round room, the battered ’box recovered from the crater sat beneath powerful lights. They’d patched the gash with sealant after finding it, but that had rendered its main door unusable. A gantry had been positioned next to it, with a staircase leading to the container’s flat topside.

Jamie studied it. “I can’t make out an ID number.”

“It’s been through a lot,” she said, leading him up the metal steps. “But we were able to save what was in it.”

Eagerly, Jamie followed her up to the open top hatch. She stepped aside so he could look into the wide circular hole. Jamie squinted, puzzled. “It looks — green?” He pointed to the portable lamp behind her on the roof. “Can you bring that closer? I want to get a better look.”

“Certainly,” Bridget said. She stepped back behind him — and delivered a solid roundhouse kick to the trader’s backside. Jamie tumbled face-first into the opening and splashed into an emerald pool below.

“
Gah!
” Jamie said, surfacing in the goop. Exploded plastic containers protruded from the morass beside him, and the ooze pulsated like a living thing as he wallowed. Hair caked with green, Jamie looked up to see Bridget and her teammates above looking down the hatch and smiling. “Help me!” Jamie yelled. “
It’s the Spore!
”

“Calm down, genius.” Bridget laughed heartily for the first time in days. “Open your mouth and taste.”

The financier had no intention of doing anything of the kind, Bridget saw. But struggling in the mass started him sinking again, and he got a mouthful anyway.

Jamie coughed, choking. “That’s…that’s—”

“Guacamole,” Bridget said. Her teammates laughed. “Seven metric tons of it, to be precise — minus whatever vented to space earlier.”

The trader gulped and gagged.

Bridget rolled her eyes and kicked a cable into the container. “You can haul yourself out,” she said.

Jamie sat, verdant and pungent, at the foot of the ’box. Suit encrusted with green, he clawed clumps from his hair. Dinner and O’Herlihy stood guard over him, clearly amused. “What are
you
looking at?” Jamie said, aggravated.

“A dip,” the Hawaiian said.

O’Herlihy laughed. “Yeah, too bad the Spore ate all the chips.” He plucked a finger’s worth of the stuff off Jamie’s shoulder and tasted.

Arms crossed, Bridget scowled at Jamie. “I wish it was funny.”

Jamie glared right back. “You pushed me in on purpose!” He raised his arms, sending dollops flying. “What
was
all that?”

“I told you,” Bridget said. “Guacamole from a plant in Michoacán, Mexico — one of the exporters Quaestor deals with.” She leaned against the ’box. “As for what it’s doing here, Wall Street, you already know that. It was part of the cargo you requisitioned for my unit’s supply house. You know, the building that’s supposed to house machinery and tools to keep my team operating? Falcone says you were running an export store for aliens out of it!”

O’Herlihy nodded, mouth full. “Them aliens do love guacamole.”

Jamie lowered his head. “I’m finished,” he said.

Bridget stared at him. “Wait,” she said. “You thought there was something else in there, didn’t you?”

Jamie looked up at the woman through avocado-encrusted eyelashes. “Yeah,” he said, resigned. “Forty billion dollars.”

“
What?
”

“It was a ’box full of rhodium from the Regulan mines,” he said. “It’s what I consolidated the profits into after I was done with my trading orders.” One of the rarest substances in the galaxy, it would’ve fetched forty billion easily on Earth. “Why couldn’t
that
one have survived?”

“
Rhodium!
”
Bridget yelled. Jamie saw the woman’s eyebrows flare.

“Rhodium,” Falcone said. The administrator walked into the facility, followed by a tall, slender, black-haired woman. He saw Jamie covered in green and smirked. “I see you’ve met already.”

Bridget didn’t look at Falcone. Instead she walked over and grabbed Jamie by the greasy collar. She shook him. “
Do you know what you’ve done?
”

Jamie’s eyes widened. “What’s the story, lady? You’re just the hired guns! What do
you
care if—”

Bridget slammed him against the side of the ’box. Jamie’s slick clothing sent him sliding off it and onto the floor. He looked up at her, astonished. Bridget turned to Falcone. “
Tell him!
”

Falcone started to speak — but the young woman who’d arrived with Falcone spoke first. “We don’t know much about the Spore,” the olive-skinned woman in her early twenties said. “But we know what it can’t resist. Rhodium.”

Falcone nodded. “Forgive my manners,” he said. “This is Lissa Trovatelli, your new Q/A. She rode back with me.”

Jamie looked up. “Q/A?”

“Quartermaster-Armorer,” Bridget snarled. “She’s my team’s new tech.” Their last junior genius had shipped out just after the Spore attack. Bridget barely looked at the new arrival. “Thanks to you, Wall Street, she’s got no place to work.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Falcone said, staring down at Jamie. “Our genius here has busted out the whole expedition.”

Falcone quickly explained what he’d learned in his hours above Venus dealing with Corporate. The expedition was on the hook for all the cargo lost. “It was never insured, because we never knew it was there!” He looked gravely to Bridget. “You’ll catch hell for this too, Yang. For not protecting the goods—”

Bridget exploded. “We didn’t know it was there!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Falcone repeated. He appeared older than she’d ever seen him. “We’ve got a hundred days before the Quaestor auditor will call it all due.” He looked down at Jamie. “You got a hundred billion dollars on you, sport?”

“I had forty billion,” Jamie said, sullen. “Something ate it.” He smeared his hands on the floor — before realizing that everyone was staring at him again. He looked around, confused. “What? What’s the problem?”

“You are, hotshot!” Bridget shook her fists. “What you’ve done to us. You don’t see it, do you? Sitting back there on Venus, making your millions. You don’t see where it comes from! To you, all the goods the expeditions send back just appear out of thin air. Magic through the wormhole! But somebody has to strike the deals, set up the warehouses, install the factories and keep the traders from getting killed by whatever’s out there. That’s
us
, you moron! Altair is…
was
Falcone’s whole expedition. You didn’t just wipe yourself out. You took us down, too!”

Jamie shook his head, chastened by the barrage. “Look, I know you’ve got a lot to write off. I’m sorry about that—”

“He’s sorry!” Bridget said, laughing.

“—but you’ve got time, and this
is
a trading center. You may be able to square the books in a quarter, if your traders hustle—”

Falcone glared. “And you leave us holding the bag, right? I’ll tell you, Sturm, I don’t care if we all go down, but I’ll sure as hell see you digging sewage lines in the Sahara if we do!”

The new Q/A spoke up. “We couldn’t do it from here anyway,” Trovatelli said, matter of factly. “This station’s done for.”

“We were discussing our careers just now,” Falcone said, annoyed at the young woman he’d brought.

“That’s not what I mean.” Brown eyes scanned the ceiling. “I saw that crater out there,” Trovatelli said. “Seven-Alpha must have gotten into the substrata.”

Bridget stared. “You can tell that just by looking?”

Falcone waved his arms at Trovatelli. “No, no, no! We did a gravimetric analysis. The asteroid is still sound—”

A low thunderclap rumbled through the dome. Jamie looked up. “Don’t tell me.”

Bridget’s eyes scanned the walls. In the shadows, a thin crack now traced from the floor up the inside of the dome.

Falcone saw it and shook his head. “That’s nothing! We patch bigger than that all the time.”

“No,” Bridget said, walking to the wall. She traced the fissure with her gloved finger. “I saw another one, earlier.”

The new Q/A flipped out her pocket isopanel. “This asteroid may have been just fine this morning,” Trovatelli said. “But Altair’s gas giants are coming around soon. There’s enough mass intact to keep Alabeyd from breaking up, but they’re perturbing this body just enough—”

“I’m already perturbed!” Falcone blanched. He looked off into the distance. “Will we decompress?” he asked, his throat dry.

“Not today,” Lissa said. “But you’ll have to reinforce every surface to keep the place airtight.”

“That means emptying ASPEC,” Falcone said. “We won’t be able to trade out of here for months!”

“Then we’re dead,” Bridget said. She glared at Jamie.

“And you killed us.”

His clothes sticking to his skin, Jamie followed Falcone and the surge team chief to the head office. There was nothing else for him to do now. Yes, the odds had been against the surviving ’box being the right container, but so much had gone wrong he’d clung to the slim hope that his treasure had survived. So much for that.

“I bet his horsing around is how we got the wrong armor,” Chief Yang said accusingly.

Jamie staggered into the meeting room and collapsed in the nearest chair. The woman’s latest accusation could be true, for all he knew; couriers had made all his trades, and something could have gone wrong. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it now — not that it’d stopped the woman from haranguing him further.

He looked up, idly staring into the holographic star chart in the rotunda above the meeting table. Dots and lines, stars and connections. All his life, the network had meant money to him. Now, he wondered if the map held any place to escape to.

Could he run? It was a pointless thought. He wasn’t a pilot. He couldn’t get a ’box to the whirlibang, much less activate it.

Clearly, the chief cared about her team and the operation here: he knew intelligence and spirit when he saw them. Even now, she was imploring Falcone, trying to find a solution to their problems. “There’s got to be a way,” she said. “If they declare us insolvent, Quaestor will cut us all loose!”

Jamie knew it was wasted energy at this point. “What can I do?” Falcone said. “A hundred billion! You know we’ve never cleared a tenth of that in a quarter.”

“There’s always a way,” Bridget said.

“I know how much it means to you, Bridget,” Falcone said. “I know you kind of got stuck working here — and I appreciate your devotion. God knows you try harder than anyone else in this outfit. But I just can’t see a way out.”

Jamie’s ears perked up. “
Bridget?
”
He looked over at the dark-haired woman in disbelief. That face. He’d seen it in the news. She was the right age, too — around thirty-three. “You’re Bridget Yang!”

Bridget looked at him coolly. “Yes.”

“I know you,” Jamie said, trying to recall the historical account of the infamous Overland disaster, years earlier. “You’re Bridget Yang! You started the war!”

“Hey,” Falcone said defensively. “It wasn’t that simple.”

Bridget wasn’t looking at him. But Jamie kept on, remembering the events from eight years earlier. “The Arcturo-Solar War — the first interstellar war we ever got into. It all started because of you!” He looked probingly at her. “Quaestor hired
you
?”

The question sounded worse than he’d intended. But Bridget looked up at him, unruffled. “They hired
you
, too.”

Jamie didn’t know what to say to that. Finding Yang out here was certainly the capper. A lot of people died in that war, and rightly or not, Bridget had come in for some of the blame. He didn’t know the company was into human reclamation projects — but if there was any place to hide someone like Yang, Altair was it. He slumped back down, and Bridget returned to her appeal.

For a place so full of opportunity, space certainly collected a lot of people on their last chance. His father had used all the money the family had — and some it didn’t have — to buy a seat to the stars, back when it cost a fortune. Marty Sturm’s trip, allegedly to clear his head, had ended with the man “going migrant,” as so many had in the early 2110s. The family had never heard from him again.

Was Jamie’s father running a falafel stand on Porrima — or had he perhaps become lunch for a spore? Jamie had spent little time wondering about that over the years. All he knew was that he somehow inherited the black sheep status himself when his mother married into the politically powerful Keeler family. Since childhood, his ambition had been getting ahead on his own — far ahead of his mother and stepfamily.

The rhodium deal was supposed to do it. Instead, Jamie would be going home. Quaestor would have his hide, and others would want a piece of him as well. The Keelers would deny being aware of his existence.
The end.

Falcone wasn’t listening to Yang’s pleas, Jamie saw. No, he was blowing his nose again and missing the handkerchief. Nauseated, Jamie turned his tired eyes back upward.

They saw something unexpected.

“What’s that?” Jamie pointed at a line heading from Altair’s whirlibang station in Aquila to a lonely point in Draco. “That hub, with all the links coming out of it?”

Falcone looked over his shoulder for a second before returning to his despair. “That’s nothing. Sigma Draconis.”

“Yeah, but it’s in your color,” Jamie said. “The whirlibang, the depot — it’s your territory. Your expedition owns it.”

The gruff administrator chortled. “It’s useless. An old station — God knows who built it. Some white elephant that PraetorCorp picked up in a deal with the Regulans. Nobody else in Quaestor wanted it, so we got stuck. Mothballed. Nobody’s even visited it in years.”

Jamie stared. “But it links into a slew of inhabited systems,” he said. From near the northern astronomical pole relative to Earth, the connections zigged and zagged outward, tracing through the section of the near sky that led toward Orion. “I’ve never heard of those places. Why haven’t you gone prospecting?”

“Because we’re not here to waste our time,” Bridget said, irritated. “The biggest trading power in the Signatory Systems and the biggest conglomerate on Earth couldn’t make a go of that area. Do you really think
we
could?”

Jamie looked around at the meeting room. “No, I guess not,” he said. He didn’t know whether Yang’s surge team was good at its job or not, though Yang certainly seemed to like yelling at people. But he’d known from the financials that the traders of the Altair expedition were third-rate, and the shabby look of the boardroom confirmed it. This was a place to make deals?

Falcone stood, silent, staring into the images. “You know, it might work,” he said.

Bridget looked up, seemingly startled to hear hope in that gravelly voice. “What?”

“He’s right. Not one planet on that whole path has been opened,” Falcone said. He looked at her, bloodshot eyes dead serious. “You know the deal. Any first-contact contracts the expedition writes go to
our
bottom line, not the corporation’s. We find a hundred billion dollars in new business out there, and we erase what’s just happened here.” He fished for his pocket isopanel.

Falcone seemed interested, but the more Jamie thought about it, the more it felt like grasping at straws. The odds weighed against the idea; most trailblazing trips never earned a dollar. “I guess you could try,” Jamie said, sensing Falcone was in the mood to try anything. “But it’s no sure thing. It’d be a hundred-day sales offensive into a part of the Orion Arm humans have never visited—”

“‘Orion Offensive.’ Catchy. You’d better get to it,” Falcone said.

“Me?” Jamie bolted upright.

“Your problem. Your solution,” Falcone said. He started figuring.

“Hold on,” Jamie said, flabbergasted. This wasn’t what he’d intended at all. He stood. “I’m a commodities guy, not some…
traveling salesman
!”

Bridget glared at him, eyes steely. “Some of those salesmen die on this job,” she said, voice dripping with disdain. “And their escorts.”

“All the more reason I’m not going!” Jamie looked at her, flustered. “Besides, I thought your job was to protect these people. How many do you lose?”

“Don’t you ever read your attrition reports? It’s no trip to the beach out there!” She looked directly at him. “No,” she said, reading his eyes. “You don’t read the reports. We’re just numbers to you. Color me shocked.”

Jamie stepped around the table and pleaded with Falcone. “Leo. Really, you don’t want me for this—”

“I don’t,” Falcone snapped. “But thanks to you, you’re what I’ve got. My traders aren’t here and my depot’s falling apart. It’ll take weeks to reposition product for Sigma Draconis. You’re a great hustler when you’re trading across the light years, Sturm. Let’s see how you do in person!”

Bridget laughed. “He’ll be eaten alive by the first thing he pisses off,” she said, smirking at Jamie. “If they can stomach him.”

“I’ve taken that into account,” Falcone said. He passed her the handheld data device. “Here’s
your
new orders, Yang.”

The chief gawked. “You don’t mean—”

“You’re rebased. Surge Altair is now Surge Sigma Draconis,” the administrator said. “I want you headed there to set up shop within the hour.” Wiping his nose, Falcone walked past the stunned pair. He called back from the doorway. “You’ve had to take down some real menaces in this job, Bridget. Let’s see if you can keep this menace alive…long enough to save us!”

“Die, Black Priest!”

The shockpulse cannon fired, its deadly discharge enveloping one of Kolvax’s true believers. The armored Xylander shook and fell, cooked inside his own armor. The mutineers weren’t playing around. If not for the true believer heroically stepping in to protect his leader, it would have been Kolvax on the deck of the space station.

Simple fool
, Kolvax thought, casting only a glance at the baked entity before dashing down the side hallway. His devotees had saved him again, but he was running out of them.

He’d made a mistake, ordering the heads and bodies of the heretics in the chapel attack marched through the commissary at dinnertime. True, that way led to the atomic furnace, and the Severed were too fastidious to allow a dead body to lie for any time at all. Even now, that fact was helping him as his attackers paused to dispense with his fallen protector. But the provocation had simply set up the next round. Rather than set an example, the sight of the heads had both angered the rest and tipped his hand about the traps in their collars. The devices weren’t responding to his signals anymore. Kolvax didn’t doubt that some smart person had deactivated them.

His followers weren’t
all
incompetent.

Kolvax could always count on Tellmer, though, whom he now found fearfully cringing behind a metal staircase. The alien builders of the space station had crafted ways for many different kinds of creatures to go between decks, expecting traffic that never came. That was the saving grace of the place: lots of ways to flee.

But fewer ways now than there were. “Everything below the transit axis is blocked,” Tellmer said, cradling his newly reattached hand. The surgeon hadn’t done the work right, and this was the first time Kolvax had heard his mawkish aide speak of anything else.

“How many are we?”

Tellmer’s helmeted head dipped. “Just you and I, Great Kolvax. Parrus and Jerroj never made it.”

“Then that’s it,” Kolvax said. “Come on!” The black-armored leader scaled the steps quickly, Tellmer right behind. The transit rings atop the rotating station were the only escape. There was a passenger container loaded in the rings pointed at Xylanx space, where the Dominium’s sentries would likely kill him the minute he arrived. However, there were other rings directed at unknown places. His fellow exiles had refused to use them for fear of emerging someplace unclean. Now, his movement shattered, Kolvax cared nothing for that. But he had to get to the rings quickly, and the long trip up to the hub would only be the start. Shifting a container from one track to another took time—

“
Hold!
”

Kolvax stopped dead — still alive, but maybe not for much longer. He saw his former followers blocking the way into the departure center. Behind, Tellmer turned to run — only to be struck from the side by a fire-bolo launched from cover. Tellmer screamed, his left arm sheared off at the elbow.

Weaponless, the Black Priest looked down at Tellmer’s limb as the Xylanx moved to surround them. “Well, maybe you’ll have a matched set now,” he said sardonically. No one laughed. He looked at the leader of the insurgents. Rumber had become one of his high priestesses, back in the days when he’d felt like doling out titles. Now, she held a hand-cannon on him.

“Will you give me a weapon,” he asked, “to make this fair?”

“No.”

Kolvax smiled. “Neither would I.” He stepped forward, hands outstretched, ready to make a good show of it when above, the crashing bang of an arriving container reverberated through the station. The rebels looked at one another, startled.

“It could be deliverance,” Rumber said. “We’ve been pardoned!”

Promptly forgetting about Kolvax, Rumber turned toward the surveillance monitors behind them.

The leader looked back at Tellmer. “Pick up your arm,” Kolvax said. He joined his former followers before the image.

“It’s not the rings from home,” Rumber said, astonished. “It’s…it’s one of the other portals!”

Inside his helmet, Kolvax’s eyes narrowed. The image focused on the dimly lit receiving area in the hub, where arrivals made their weightless entry into the station. Several space-suited bipedal figures emerged through the airlock.

Two arms. Two limbs. And faces the Xylanx could see through transparent faceplates. The lead figure, checking something on a handheld device, nodded to the others, who began removing their helmets.

The Severed watched the newcomers in awe. Skin. Pale, yellow, brown. And hair, which even the most liberal Xylanx foreswore. Another figure joined the leader, speaking.

“Audio,” Kolvax said, reasserting control. “Audio!”

It was all gibberish. “What are they saying?” Rumber said.

“Shut up,” Kolvax said. “Listen!”

“…two trips in one day,” Bridget said, surveying the receiving area. “You’re racking up the light years, Wall Street.”

“Coral Gables,” Jamie mumbled, looking around fearfully.

“What?”

“I’m from Coral Gables,” Jamie said. “Florida.”

“Well, you’re not there now. Welcome to Quaestor Center Sigma Draconis — also known as the Dragon’s Depot.” Bridget looked behind her. There were lots of shadows here, but it seemed as advertised — big, functional, and unoccupied, if cold. “Standard recons, people, but looks okay so far. Let’s get moved in!”

Kolvax gawked. They were humans. Humans!
Here!