Escape (25 page)

“Yeah. ‘Ummm.’ And either way, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do if Da Shon Oribtal finds Dimmi locked up in our brig.”

“Why would they look in there?”

“Searching for contraband?”

Kieran grinned. “No such thing here, my naïve friend. You can have a cargo hold full of glit and stimsticks, and they’ll just ask you if you’ve got a light.”

* * *

“Who's she?” The orbital patroller pointed through the bars to Dimmi and turned to Kieran, expecting an explanation.

Kieran shrugged, keeping a careful eye on the patroller's face. Like the other three patrollers that had boarded his ship, this one was dressed from head to toe in gun metal gray armor with a yellow-tinted faceplate for his helmet. He wore a hefty-looking side arm in a holster on his belt
—
no doubt some form of neural disruptor. From the patroller's black on white armbands, Kieran could tell that this one was a sergeant, first-class. The others were all corporals.

“She's a mutineer.”

“I see. Is she sleeping, or unconscious?”

“Unconscious,” Kieran replied. He was peripherally aware of Ferrel stiffening beside him, and he explained: “There was a struggle
—
she hit her head pretty hard.”

The patroller nodded. “What were you planning to do with her?”

“Put her on the fastest charter flight home, what else?”

“Not planning to press charges?”

Kieran shook his head. “Too much trouble.”

“Well, unless one of you has a bounty hunter's license you'll have to turn her over to me. And either way, I'm going to need to ID her. Open the cell, please.”

Kieran obliged, fiddling with the control panel on the wall between the cells. The cell door rattled aside, and Kieran followed the sergeant into the cell.

The patroller spent a moment gazing at Dimmi, then said: “She's alive. Good. You just saved me a mountain of paperwork.”

Kieran smiled. The sergeant must have checked her vital signs with the telemetry in his helmet.

Unclipping a scanner from his belt, the sergeant bent down beside Dimmi, took her hand in his and pressed her thumb against part of the scanner. Kieran felt a sympathetic stab of pain in his thumb. The sergeant was taking Dimmi's bloodprint. The patroller had already taken his and Ferrel's and discovered utterly clean rap sheets
—
a handful of charges had been pressed against Ferrel for slicing jobs he’d pulled, but he'd never been convicted. The sergeant had also used the bloodprint to find a host of other data about them
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addresses, netmail accounts, comm numbers, registered vessels
—
anything which had ever been officially logged by the Union. Da Shon had access to that data, because the Union was trying to cooperate with them to catch their criminals.

“This is interesting,” the sergeant said. “Three counts of murder, 36 counts of theft, 27 counts of reckless endangerment, and 17 counts of aggravated assault
—
” The sergeant turned from his scanner to look up at Kieran with a grin that was visible even through his yellow-tinted faceplate. “Allegedly, anyway.”

“Allegedly?”

“Like your friend here
—
” The patroller pointed at Ferrel. “
—
she's never been convicted, though in this case that's probably because she's a known member of the Carloni clan.” The sergeant stood and walked up to Kieran. “Did you know that?”

Kieran's eyes wandered to Dimmi. “Yeah
 
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.
”

“A reward has been posted for her rescue.”

Ferrel, who had been waiting quietly outside the cell, said: “Shakra!”

“I'll be escorting her out of here.”

Kieran shrugged. “Please do. I'll be grateful to get her off my hands.”

The sergeant's lips began moving, but no sound came out of his helmet speakers. He was speaking into his commlink, probably summoning backup.

Ferrel came to stand beside Kieran. “We're not in any kind of trouble, are we? Because you know we didn't actually do anything to her
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.
 
.
 
.
”

The sergeant turned to Ferrel. “That depends. Do you have any idea what the Carloni clan does to its enemies?”

Kieran caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye and sent a quick glance to the three patroller corporals who came clanking into the brig. They stopped, lined abreast in the entrance of the cell.

“Right, but who says we are enemies of the Carloni clan?” Ferrel said.

“Actually, they do. Apart from the reward for Dimmi Dothali’s rescue, there’s a sizable reward for the capture of one Ferrel Catrel and one Kieran Hawker.” The sergeant's gaze skipped smugly between Ferrel's and Kieran's shocked faces.

They barely had time to register the soft clicks of safeties snapping off behind them before the crackling bursts of neural disruptors split the air.

The stun bolts slammed into them, and they collapsed in a heap of involuntarily jittering limbs. The last thought Kieran had before the bottom dropped out of his consciousness was: just my luck to get searched by a patroller who’s on the Carloni payroll.

Chapter 11

J
illy stood in the customs line inside the vast hangar of the Da Shon orbital transfer station, waiting her turn to be searched and questioned. Standing beside her was Kieran's brother, Reddick. After receiving Kieran's message that clanners were going to come looking for her as a way of getting leverage over him, she'd known that they would come looking for his brother
—
her boyfriend
—
as well. She'd gone to his quarters in the middle of the night to warn him. They'd left for Da Shon an hour later aboard his sabre-class corvette.

“I'm going to kill my brother when we find him,” Reddick said.

Jilly sent him a reproachful frown. “I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for all of this.”

Reddick looked skeptical.

When they got to the front of the line, the customs officer
—
an automaton
—
began questioning them:

“Purpose of visit?”

“Pleasure,” Jilly answered.

“Duration?”

“One or two days.”

“Place your thumbs on the scanner, please.”

Jilly and Reddick complied, wincing one after another as the scanner pricked their thumbs and checked their bloodprints. After a brief second of checking every officially registered detail about them, the automaton waved them on and said, “Next.”

Before proceeding into the scanning corridor beyond the customs desk, Jilly asked, “I wonder if you could help me find a friend of mine
—
he should have arrived this morning. Could you check if he’s been through customs yet?”

“Name?”

“Kieran Hawker.”

The automaton appeared to do nothing for a moment
—
he was plugged directly into a data port beneath his desk. “Mister Hawker has been detained for questioning by Da Shon Orbital. You may find him on level 4, cellblock A. Please move along.”

Jilly’s brow was thoughtfully furrowed. “Thank you,” she said.

As she and Reddick stepped onto the moving walkway inside the scanning corridor, their carry-on luggage hovering along behind them, Reddick turned to her.

“Whatever he did, I'm not posting bail for him.”

“Will you at least wait to hear his side of the story before you cast your judgment?”

Reddick shrugged. “I can guarantee you, whatever it is, he's guilty of it.”

Jilly frowned and turned away from him. “And I can guarantee you that you're wrong. I know Kieran. He wouldn't break the law
—
not on purpose.”

Reddick snorted. “We'll see.”

* * *

“You can't hand us over to the Carloni clan. You're a patroller.” Kieran's knuckles whitened around the bars of his cell. “There's a record of our arrival. You'll be forced to explain our disappearance.”

The sergeant who had taken them in was standing on the other side of the cell, his yellow-tinted helmet visor raised, revealing his grin in all its smugness.

“That's true. Unfortunately, you've committed crimes against the Union. I even have a recording where you admit your guilt. A bounty hunter will be arriving in a matter of hours to pick you up and deliver you to Union Enforcers.”

Kieran frowned. “Maybe we can work something out. You and I both know that Da Shon is no friend of the Union, and we still have a very valuable ship which we came here to sell
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”

The patroller raised his eyebrows. “Keep going like that and I might have to add attempted bribery to your charges. Besides, I'm not doing this for the Union. Something tells me the bounty hunter coming to collect you could have a conflict of interest
—
if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don't know what you mean. What
—
”

Kieran heard Ferrel groan. He was lying on one of the sleeping pallets. “He means that the bounty hunter is a Carloni.”

The patroller's grin returned. “Well, I wouldn't know anything about that. I'm sure any respectable bounty hunter wouldn't want to risk losing his license over a couple of cretiches like you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my patrol.”

Kieran watched the sergeant walk away, his mind churning. He walked over to the empty sleeping pallet opposite Ferrel, and sat staring distractedly out through the cell bars.

At some point he became aware of what he was staring at. It was a holoscreen mounted above the cellblock guard's desk. The guard had his chair turned away from them, watching the screen. The program was Union News. Somehow he could read the tiny words of the news ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screen. In bold letters it read:

Breaking News: Union ships appearing along the Frontier, leaving garrisons behind.

The volume was very low, but somehow Kieran could hear anyway. He reasoned that it was because his and Ferrel's cell was the one nearest to the guard's desk, just four or five micró-astroms away.

“
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people are starting to ask questions: is this the beginning of martial law, or some new defense strategy? Is the Union finally stepping up to its responsibility to protect the Frontier? If so, then perhaps the question we should be asking is: protect us from what? Fleet Commander Mathos Sereki addressed some of those questions this morning in a press conference.”

The screen switched to a view of a long desk, skirted by a black tablecloth with the Navy Sentinel’s logo
—
a white shield with a halo of gold stars
—
emblazoned on it. Seated behind the table were a panel of high-ranking fleet officers. Intermittent flashes from cameras were periodically casting the officers’ faces into sharp relief.

The camera zoomed in on the center of the desk, where the fleet commander was seated. He had a silver crew cut and a hard, angular face that was years younger than his hair. He looked down at the desk and shuffled a few papers. Apparently he had a prepared statement to read. Looking up from the desk, the fleet commander spoke:

“There is nothing to be concerned about. What you've been noticing are just routine maneuvers. These so-called garrisons will move on soon. We apologize for any inconvenience their presence might cause in the meantime.”

The voice of a reporter cut in immediately after: “Can you tell us what these maneuvers are about?”

“As I said, they are routine, and the deployments are temporary.”

“So this isn't an attempt to better police the Frontier?”

The fleet commander was shaking his head. “We have to rely upon the patrollers and enforcers to do their jobs. The Sentinels are neither equipped nor trained for law enforcement.” The fleet commander picked up the papers in front of him and stood up from the desk. “Thank you, no more questions.”

The room erupted with a thousand more questions that all blurred into a deafening roar. The commander ignored them, and the screen cut back to the newscaster.

“These may officially be temporary deployments, but not everyone is convinced that they will be moving on. Drethel Shegarin, the president of DrethelWorks Independent Shipyards has raised some concerns about the garrisons landing on his stations.” The screen split to show the young newscaster and old gray-haired Drethel side by side. “Drethel, could you explain your concerns?”