Star Risk - 01 Star Risk, Ltd

Star Risk by Chris Bunch

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ONE

The woman was blond, tall, green eyed and beautiful. Her nearly nonexistent bathing suit, and her shade-hat looked and were expensive.

She was stretched on a poolside chaise lounge, on the roof of the ultra-luxury Shelburne Hotel. The pool wound and curveted through a garden, and every bend gave the illusion of privacy.

Scattered around the rooftop were a handful of hotel guests, and their guests, enjoying the late afternoon sun. There were a few livee stars, a singer or two, a gaggle of lawyers, some managers, and five or six rich, butter-and-egg out-of-towners, being heavily charged for the privilege of gawking at, and pretending to be one of, the current crop of beautiful people.

Forty stories below, unheeded, was the moil and bustle of Trimalchio IV, its citizens busy doing� or being done.

Trimalchio IV was a very lucky world, in that it had no history. It was originally settled by a handful of Alliance plutocrats, who found its mild climate, islands, kilometers of beaches, and craggy mountains very much to their liking. At first, they allowed only enough riffraff in to be their servants and run the luxury shops they swarmed. Later came the restaurants, bars, hotels, and others who catered to the well-to-do. Population was very low, no more than fifty million. Surprisingly, taxes were low, mainly because the social envelope consisted of a one-way ticket to another system. It was a wonderful world, if you had money. If you didn't� starvation was always an option.

A security guard wandered around the fringes of the pool, feeling fat and over fifty. His gun sat heavily on his hip, although why management insisted he carry it was beyond him.

Bad things didn't happen to rich people.

He looked at the sunbathing woman, chanced a smile, and felt older as she looked through him and returned to her book. He glanced at its title, expecting to see some lurid potboiler, and saw A Guide to N-Space Mathematics and a Theory of Their Unification.

Way, way, way out of his league.

He went to the lift, dropped down to the lobby, and went into the security room, where a dozen vids blinked at him, showing various hotel exteriors and corridors.

The guard decided he'd spend the rest of his shift here, where he wouldn't be reminded of his age and paunch.

The primary sun moved down the horizon; the secondary, barely a flaming planetoid, had already set.

The people around the pool drifted to the lift, and to their rooms.

Yawning, the woman, M'chel Riss, checked her expensive watch, widened her eyes theatrically as if she was late for a meeting with a lover, got up, stretching her almost two-meter height, picked up her real leather bag, and strolled toward the lift. Behind her sunglasses, she was watching the scattering of monitors, waiting for when the two pickups covering the lift entrance swept away.

Then she moved, very, very fast, like a professional athlete, behind the lift entrance, into a tiny cubbyhole between the edge of the roof and the small building.

She waited, but no alarm came.

This was her third night in the Shelburne, and she had only credits enough for one more. She was sorry she wouldn't be able to tip the room maids, but a working girl only had so many options.

She was waiting for full darkness.

Down below, streetlights flickered on, various hues intended to give the city a perpetual mardigras feeling.

Twice a lifter flew past, close enough to make Riss want to duck down. But she knew better than to move. Eight years as an Alliance Marine, and Major Riss (Retired) knew all of the tricks and traps of soldiering.

It finally got dark.

Riss opened her bag, and took out a chameleon suit, pulled it on, and ran her fingers up the sealer, turning the suit on. It took a few seconds to warm up, then, except for her hands and face, she became part of the adobe-colored wall.

Riss slid out from the cubby, and put on a pair of kletteschues, climbing shoes, and jumars. She sprayed a blob of climbing thread on the wall, and tucked some other items from her bag in the suit's pouches. The last item, a very natty cocktail dress, would be needed for her extraction. At least, if she was able to take the easy way out.

She unfastened straps, and the bag now became what might have been a backpack, except with little holes for feet like a child-carrier, which she pulled on.

Riss looked over the edge, and shuddered a little. No belay, no climbing partner, and she'd always disliked it when the training schedule sent her troop to the mountains.

But there weren't any options.

She dipped the jumars into the climbing thread, and eased over the edge of the building, determined not to be a dummy and look down again.

If you fall, you fall, she thought. And then a nice raspberry splotch will go nicely with those tinted streetlights.

There was a bit of a wind, and she swayed back and forth as she descended.

Counting windows, she abseiled down three stories to a small window, let out more thread and brought it back to the main line and sealed it. Now she had a loop to stand in.

She took a tiny cutting torch out of one pocket, and cut around the window plas. Unlike the other windows in this suite, security hadn't seen any necessity to rig this window for an alarm, sure that no one could ever weasel through it, especially at this height.

The torch's flame was blue, and very tiny, but to Riss it looked as if she'd set off a flare.

The plas was cut on all four sides. She shut off the torch and put it away. Riss tapped with a finger on the plas, and it fell inward. She grabbed fast, barely caught it, and eased it down until it hit� a washroom basin.

Good. Very good. Just like the bribed room service waiter had told her.

Riss turned in the loop, and acrobatically eased her head and shoulders through the hole.

She thought about having to go back out, having to jumar back up the thread, and didn't like the idea.

If her intel was correct, she could take the easy way, and just stroll out of the suite, hand in hand with the kid.

But since when was intelligence ever right?

A bathroom, dimly lit by a nightlight in the next room.

M'chel pulled herself into the room, stood, waiting.

No alarms went off.

Tiny gun in hand, she paced into the room. It was bigger than her whole house, growing up, had been.

There was a little girl, nine years, three months, two days old, or so the client's fiche had told her, asleep, illuminated by the nightlight. She was surrounded by animatronic toys, and, clutched to her chest, a raggedy doll that could have been her grandmother's.

Very good, very easy. Now, put on the dress, wake up the kid, and then we'll�

"Put the gun down," a calm voice said. "Take three steps to the side, and then stand very still. We are both pros, so nobody has to die."

M'chel jerked, then obeyed.

A man stood from where he'd been kneeling, behind an entertainment center, then came toward her.

He was a few centimeters shorter than Riss, looked to be in his sixties, had carefully styled silver hair, a handsome, rugged face, and wore evening dress.

He also had a large Alliance-issue blaster aimed carefully at her chest.

"Very good," he said. "You made a little noise breaking in, which twigged me."

"You were supposed to be at the theater� assuming you're one of his bodyguards," Riss said.

"I was," the man agreed. "But I pride myself in never being just where I am supposed to�"

Riss had been watching his feet, and, as the man stepped on a throw rug, she dug her heel into the rug, and back-kicked.

The man yelped, stumbled, flailing to recover his balance. Before he could shoot, Riss kicked the pistol out of his hand, and snap-punched into his diaphragm, slightly pulling her punch at the last minute.

Air whooshed out of the man's lungs, and he gagged, clutching himself.

Riss took out a small tube of gas, leaned over the contorting man, and, holding her breath, sprayed him in the face. The man jerked, went down, lay still. He would be out for eight hours.

Riss, breathing hard, had the blaster ready. But there wasn't any backup.

"Who are you?" a high voice asked.

The girl was awake, sitting up in bed. She didn't appear to be the slightest bit frightened.

"Hi, Debra," M'chel said, trying to sound calm and cheery. "Do you want to go home to your mother? I'm working for her."

"I figured that out," the girl said complacently. "You're not the first who's come to rescue me, you know. How are we going?"

"I'll put on a dress, and then we're going straight on out, through the suite's service entrance down the hall, and then to the lift and out, as if we were guests, bold as brass."

"We're not going out through the window? I heard you coming down the wall outside, watched you break into my bathroom."

M'chel realized she was going to have to brush up on her stealthy climbing techniques.

"I hope not," she said.

"Oh. Damn it. That would've been icy."

There was silence.

"Well?" Riss asked, ready to gas the child if necessary.

"I'm thinking about it," the girl said. "Mommy wasn't that nice to me the last time, you know."

Little bitch, Riss thought.

"I guess I'll go along with you," the girl decided. "Daddy's been treating me like a real shit lately, not letting me go anywhere or anything."

She got out of bed, still holding the raggedy doll.

"Okay," she said. "Let's get out of here before Daddy and his goons come back."

Riss went to the bedroom door, turned the handle. She knelt, and peered down the hall at ankle height.

M'chel suppressed an obscenity.

There were two beefy men at the far end, wearing protective glasses, chatting casually. Their profession, bodyguard, was most obvious.

It would only be seconds before they missed the man with the white hair, and came looking.

Riss closed the door.

"Change two," she whispered. "You get to go climbing."

"Icy!" the girl said enthusiastically.

Riss had the girl put on her slippers, put the backpack on, and indicated the leg holes. Debra, eyes wide in excitement, clambered aboard.

M'chel stood, adjusting the child's weight. Not even half as bad as an expedition pack.

She started for the window.

"Wait," Debra hissed. "My dolly."

M'chel held back a growl, handed the toy to Debra.

They went back into the bathroom, and M'chel hung a strand of climbing glue to the sill, sprayed out about half a meter, and glued that down.

She eased out of the pack.

"Now, I'm gonna clamber out there, and then I want you to go after me. Stand in the loop here."

Debra nodded. M'chel eeled out the window, clung by her fingers to the far side of the sill. Debra came out backward, got her feet in the loop, and was outside. She looked down, and Riss saw her face change.

"Don't look down, dammit! And if you puke on me, your mother'll buy me a new dress."

Debra, lips compressed, nodded.

M'chel was never quite sure how she got the backpack on again, but she did.

"Now, we're going down."

She clipped the can of thread into one jumar, and locked the spray can's nozzle to its first detent.

Climbing thread came slowly, steadily out the can's spout, and slowly, steadily, the two went down and down and down.

Riss felt fine, other than her arm muscles were stretched a meter or so longer than they had been, and she was sure that when�when, not if�she reached concrete, she'd walk like an earth ape, knuckles brushing the ground.

She chanced looking down again, saw she was within fifty meters of the ground.

"Well," she whispered, "do you like this?"

"Not� not as much as I thought I would," Debra managed.

"Hang on, kiddo," she said. "We'll have you on solid turf in a couple of minutes."

They went on, Riss's toes sliding on the pebbly stone facing of the hotel.

Then there was something under her heels, and she was down.

She cut off the climbing thread, and, just as she started for the nearby alley, where Momma's damned lifter had better be waiting, saw the doorman bow someone out. She didn't look back, but walked a little bit faster.

The lifter was there.

Momma, a fat version of her daughter, squealed, and pawed Debra out of her backpack.

"Oh, you did it, you did it," the woman shrilled, gathering Debra in her arms. The girl submitted limply.

"Of course, I did it," Riss said calmly. "I said I would, didn't I?"

"Oh, I owe you, I owe you so much," the woman burbled. "I'll be cutting you a check in the morning, and believe me, there'll be a sizeable bonus to it.

"You can trust me on that."

Riss started worrying.

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TWO � ^ � Two weeks later, M'chel Riss sat in a canalside caf�considering the croissant and herb tea on the small table in front of her. That would be both breakfast and mid-meal.