Pirates of the Outrigger Rift (28 page)

Suddenly, the number in the air began to change, counting down. Slowly at first, then faster. The figure became a blur until finally it rested on a steady line of zeroes with a credit symbol in front.

“Excellent,” Maxwell said. Then he entered a command into the comlink to display the balance on his accounts. The display did not change. He repeated the process for each of his accounts, but still no change. It was as if the machine wasn’t responding to his commands. “What’s wrong with this thing?”

Sai began to laugh. “It’s working perfectly.”

“What do you mean? The display isn’t changing to show my new balance.”

“Oh, but it is. That
is
your balance, Maxwell. Zero. Nothing.”

“What have you done? Where is my money?”

Sai looked up at Maxwell, her eyes on fire. “I don’t know. No one knows. I had the system randomly distribute it amongst the bank’s account holders, then I wiped the record of the transactions. I just pulled the lever and flushed your goddamned money to hell.”

Maxwell slapped Sai across the face. “Fool! Even this can’t stop me! I started life on the streets. I built an empire from nothing and I can do it again.” Maxwell towered over her bound form. “But what are you? Filth. You are like an insignificant flea. You have taken a small sip of my blood and think you’ve destroyed me.”

He slapped her again, then paused a few seconds and struck her again, then once more—vicious in his calmness and cold brutality. Blood began to flow from her mouth. “You are going to enter that bank again and you will find those funds.”

Sai fought back involuntary tears. “I can’t. I disbursed them randomly.”

“Then take money from random accounts and put those funds into mine!”

“Fuck you,” Sai said.

Maxwell walked to the table and opened a toolbox. He withdrew a fuser. He pressed a button on the side of the slim tool, and the sharp tip turned red with heat. “To motivate you to provide a creative solution with your mind, I will be working on your body with this. I will start with your feet and work my way up to your eyes. And don’t worry, if you can’t get my money back, I will still have considered this a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.”

He pressed the button on the fuser, then bent down and placed it against the flesh on the bottom of her foot. Sai screamed as the red-hot metal broiled her skin and created a sickening hiss and a puff of foul smoke.

The sound of blaster fire erupted over her screams. There was a fight going on just outside the room. Maxwell walked toward the table and reached for a pistol just as the door burst open.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

H
ank, Chandler, and Brock stormed inside Maxwell’s office. Chandler and Brock held pulse rifles while Hank had a blaster pistol in one hand and Sai’s whisperblade in the other. Prepared for battle, they found Sai strapped into some sort of machine and Maxwell reaching for a weapon.

“Don’t move, Maxwell,” Hank said. “We’ve got you covered.”

“Hank!” Sai cried, her voice breaking in shock and exhaustion.

Chandler shot a glance around the squalid room. “Suits you, Maxwell.”

Maxwell smiled and made a small movement, then his body shimmered, fading into the background.

“Shit,” Chandler said. “Stealthcloak!”

The three looked at each other and ducked down, looking around the room, unsure where to seek cover. A stealthcloak was a tricky thing to fight without special equipment. A blaster shot rang out.

Brock fell back, hit the wall, and slid to the ground, clutching his chest.

Hank and Chandler rolled for cover behind some crates. “Where is he?” Hank asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t see anything.” Chandler glanced over at Brock. “Angus, get out of here!”

Brock crawled toward the door, but instead of leaving, he raised his pulse rifle and fired several shots into different parts of the room. The blasts tore chunks out of the wall but apparently missed Maxwell.

Sai craned her neck and scanned the room with her cyber-psi talent, looking for the stealthcloak’s electronic signature. She felt something creeping around the side of the room trying to flank Hank. “Hank! He’s coming around your left side.”

Hank fired his pistol blindly, fanning shots across the room, hoping for a lucky hit.

“Did I get him?” Hank asked.

“I’m not sure,” Sai said. She swept her senses around, trying to again locate the indistinct form.

Maxwell spoke, and his voice seemed to come from everywhere. “I don’t know how you managed to survive, but I’m going to make sure you don’t leave this room alive.”

“What do we do?” Hank asked Chandler.

Chandler shrugged. “You can’t shoot what you can’t see. We need Sai.”

“Hank, he’s behind you!” Sai shouted.

Hank rolled, knocking over some equipment. A blaster bolt slammed into the floor where he’d just been. Chandler rose and started shooting into the area behind him while Hank made his way toward Sai.

“Let me get you out of there,” he said.

“No, you’ll expose yourself,” she said.

“Come on, I’m saving that for later,” he said with a grin.

“I can see him, he’s—” Sai yelled. A blaster bolt came from nowhere and hit her in the shoulder. She cried out in pain.

“Sai!” Hank yelled, rushing forward, heedless of the danger. The wall next to him burst into rocky fragments as he was nearly hit. He tripped and fell, two meters from the mind probe.

Chandler provided cover fire as Hank raced to Sai.

“Hank, throw the whisperblade!” she screamed.

Hank hit the activation button and tossed the weapon through the air, into the middle of the room. Sai took charge of the blade and it changed course, streaking back toward the far right corner, hissing through the air. Maxwell screamed as the whisperblade plunged home, again and again, powered by the thrust of its tiny repulsor beams.

The stealthcloak automatically deactivated when Maxwell’s heart stopped, revealing his body—and bright arterial blood leaking from its many gaping wounds.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
he threat gone, Hank rushed to Sai and loosed the restraints that bound her to the mind probe. The shoulder wound looked painful, but not life-threatening. “We need to get you to a doctor,” he said.

Chandler walked to the other side of the room to tend to Brock, who was barely conscious but seemed to be breathing okay.

Sai winced as she climbed out of the machine. “How did you escape?”

Hank carried her to Maxwell’s desk and sat her atop it. “Easy. Elsa and I used to sit out gravity storms in the belly of this old derelict freighter. It had a hot, old reactor. Stable enough unless you were stupid enough to shoot at it. The backup plan was for us to meet the
Elsa
at the freighter in the Marauder we stole. We played a little trick on the pirates by blowing up the freighter’s drive. When the fireworks started, we switched ships, then sent the Marauder back out on automatic for the rest of them to chase. They blasted it to pieces so they thought we’d bought it and didn’t even bother to search for another ship.”

“But then how did you find me?” Sai asked.

“Elsa is a smart girl. We knew the planet and port thanks to a jailer on the pirate base, so she just monitored the Grid for new dedicated communications to the Galactic Bank when we reached Port Royal. I guess you use a lot of bandwidth. That led us here.”

A corporate security squad entered the room with pulse rifles drawn. Hank and Sai raised their hands in the air. “Whoa, now. Let me explain what’s going on here,” Hank said.

“No need to,” Randol said as he entered the room followed by Helen. She stared at the destruction in the room, her eyes settling on Maxwell’s body.

“So the cavalry rides in only five minutes too late,” Hank said.

“Believe me, we got here as soon as we could. Keeping the communications secret so that Maxwell wouldn’t catch wind of it slowed us down. I wish I could have been here to kill him myself.”

Chandler called out, “We need a medic over here.”

More security and medics entered the office now that the danger was over. The medics started working on Brock and tending to Sai’s shoulder. Maxwell was a lost cause, but no one cared.

“Careful,” Brock said as a medic cleaned his wound. “That hurts like a son of a bitch.”

Chandler sat back and watched the show. He looked over at Hank. “The way I see it, Brock’s gonna be fine. Randol has his daughter back, you and Sai have each other, and Elsa, too, for that matter, you lucky bastard,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a cigar. He lit it and puffed a cloud of blue smoke into the air. “I got my fee plus expenses, and a great bonus, so I have nothing to complain about. Of course, you didn’t get paid like me, but I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. After all, you’re still breathing. A job is a job, but some jobs I do enjoy more than others.” He sat down and put his feet up on a crate to enjoy his cigar.

Hank and Sai boarded the
Elsa
and took their seats at the main console. Hank started punching buttons to enter the launch sequence. “Where to, milady?” he asked Sai.

“I don’t care,” Sai said.

“Well, even though the Confed didn’t catch Glenn, I doubt we’ll have to worry about pirates for a while. Until they develop a new intelligence network, they’re going to be picking at scraps, so I figure anywhere we go is pretty safe. Either that or we can expect to see Glenn’s Adult Toy Shops start popping up everywhere.”

“I’m still battle-damaged,” Elsa said. “Our first stop needs to be Brady’s Repair over at Matilda next to the Atlas Ship Yards. I want new shields and plating. I also think a second plasma cannon would be a good investment, on the off chance we
do
have to deal with pirates again. Then we’re going to upgrade my nav systems at Kylie’s Upgrade Shop, and—”

“Whoa,” Hank said. “What the hell are you talking about? Do you have any idea how much that will cost?”

“I don’t care what it costs,” Elsa said. “I’m worth it.”

“Of course you are,” Sai said. “Isn’t she, Hank?”

“And how do you expect us to pay for these upgrades?”

“I’ve got money.”

“Well, maybe, but not that kind of money,” Hank said.

“Actually, I have plenty. More than enough to completely refurbish myself from stem to stern,” Elsa said.

Sai nodded and grinned.

“Are you in on this, too? How did you …?”

“When Sai entered that sell order to trigger those accounts to dump their assets into the hidden account, we figured that it would only make sense to charge a tiny handling fee for all those transactions. It certainly isn’t billions, but you’d be surprised at how quickly fees can add up.”

“You sneaky, wonderful, cybernetic wonder woman! You mean we’re rich?” Hank asked, smiling.

“I mean
I’m
rich,” she said. “It’s my own account. We also created one for Sai.”

“What about me? I mean, you made one for me, right?”

“Well, Hank, we were the ones doing all the work. We handled the transfers. We couldn’t really charge a fee for work not performed. That would be unethical.”

“Unethical? Well no, I suppose we would hate to be unethical. So what about me? Am I going to be your butler now?”

“No,” said Sai. “Certainly not. You are a professional pilot and deserve to be paid. In fact, we have agreed that all you have to do is ask us and we will occasionally give you an allowance for approved purchases. After all, we are a family.”

“An allowance? Why not just an account with a big pot of cash in it like you guys have? You can prepay for my piloting services that way.”

“We can’t trust you with too much money. You’d spend it all on liquor and wild parties and drellskin boots and gambling.”

“Hell yeah, I would! What’s the point of being rich if you don’t enjoy it? And what about Chandler and Brock? Did you guys give them accounts, too?”

Elsa laughed. “No. I’m sorry, Chandler is too honorable. He’d want to give it all back or some fool thing like that. That said, he will be somewhat surprised when he checks the balance of the mortgage on his ship. He’ll likely assume that Lord Randol paid it off for him.”

“And Brock?”

“We didn’t know about him then, but even if we had, it seems like a conflict of interest. It would be like offering a Confed officer a bribe. Highly irregular,” Sai said.

“And he might turn you in,” Hank said.

“That too,” Elsa said.

“So, I’m really going to have to beg you for every credit?”

“Well,” Elsa said, “I wouldn’t say
beg
. Just convince me that the purchase is reasonable.”

“In that case, let me tell you about the incredible durability and practicality of drellskin boots …”