The Baba Yaga (17 page)

Walker stood up. “Thank you for your time,” she said stiffly. “Can I make that donation?”

The priest sighed. “I think you should save what money you have,” she said. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.” She glanced at Failt. “Stay close to that one. He’s a keeper.”

They left the bar. Walker strode off back to the dropchute, Failt at her elbow and Yershov trailing behind. “What did she mean,” said Yershov, after a few minutes, “by ‘your condition’?”

Failt shot the pilot a scornful look. “You stupid? The missus is going to be a mama! Soon there’ll be a baby!”

“Failt, no!” Walker raised her hand to quieten the child, but it was too late. Yershov had pulled up short, and was staring at Walker in horror. Failt turned to Walker in dismay. “Missus Dee!” he cried. “Missus Dee, I’m sorry!”

“It’s all right, Failt,” Walker said. She turned to the old pilot. “This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?”

“A
problem?
Are you
mad
, woman?”

“I assure you I am quite sane.”

“A
baby?
Out here? Don’t you understand what kind of place this is?”

“That’s my problem.”

“Not if you’re flying on my ship!”

“A ship which I’ve hired.”

“I don’t need your damned money!”

“Yes, you do,” said Walker coldly. “And you certainly need my drugs.”

For a moment, she thought Yershov was going to hit her. But he turned away, cursing under his breath, and strode on. Failt tugged at Walker’s arm. “Missus,” he said, awkwardly. “I’m so sorry. Thought we all knew.”

She patted his arm. “It’s all right. It wasn’t your fault.” She frowned. She didn’t think she was showing yet and, besides, how would a Vetch child know about human pregnancy? “How
did
you know?”

“There’s mamas on Shard,” Failt said. His tentacles twitched. “They have a smell.”

A smell. Walker shook her head and decided not to press further. She followed Yershov towards the dropchute. That explained Failt, she supposed.

But it didn’t explain Heyes. And Heyes had definitely known.

How?

I
T WAS SURELY
testament to the great sums of money that Merriman Fredricks paid his bodyguards that they noticed the black-clad figures across the street at all. They were not amateurs and they really were extremely well-paid. Even so, they noticed the figures far too late to be able to do something about them. However professional and well-remunerated, they were well out of their league. Both men lay dead before they could raise the alarm.

Which left Fredricks, sitting in his counting house, completely vulnerable. An easy target, in fact, and the people coming to visit him today took full advantage of the opportunity. There were four of them altogether. Three of them stayed in the great vestibule to tidy away the bodies. The fourth strolled upstairs, completely at her ease, and went into Fredricks’ office.

The man known as Fredricks looked up from his accounts. There was a woman in his office, standing with her hand resting on the eagle’s cage. “That’s a nice necklace,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?” said Fredricks.

Quite some time passed between this and the moment when Fredricks, at last, fell face down dead, blood pooling quietly across the papers on his desk. Three minutes after Fredricks died, the four-person team was lost in the murk that hovered permanently over the sad little city of Roby. About an hour later, they were in flight and readying to enter the void, taking full advantage of the lax border controls at Roby’s main spaceport.

It’s a sad fact that people like Merriman Fredricks tend not to have warm personal friendships, and as such, it was another two days before his body was found. He missed a meeting with a fellow scoundrel across the city and, since the scoundrel had been expecting to shell out a large amount of protection money to Fredricks, it seemed unlikely that the slaver would miss the meeting—and, more importantly, he didn’t want to find himself in the frame for whatever had happened to Fredricks. So he raised the alarm. The authorities—such as they were on Shard’s World—sighed, pulled on their uniforms (they were all part-timers), took a nose around his offices, sighed again, arranged a clean-up, and moved on to the next thankless, underpaid task. Fredricks’ body lay in the morgue for a couple of weeks, and then, unclaimed, went to the incinerator.

Perhaps someone, somewhere, would mourn him—he must, after all, have had a mother, although perhaps she had not regretted the day he left home. On Shard’s World tears were few and far between, and the best that his business associates could say of him was that he never cheated you for the sake of it. As for all the money—who knew where it went? No doubt someone, somewhere, was getting rich.

D
ESPITE HER EXHAUSTION,
Maria spent a restless night tossing and turning under the coverlet on the big sofa. She could not get comfortable. She woke, feeling terribly hot and thirsty, and looked around. A single lamp, casting a small amount of yellow light, glowed in one corner of the room. Jenny was fast asleep beside her. Amber was nowhere to be seen, although she could hear the other woman’s breathing from beyond a small door. Carefully, not wanting to wake anyone, Maria slipped round Jenny and then picked her away over to the little kitchen space where Amber had cooked their supper, and got a glass of water. Then she settled herself in the armchair where Amber had sat the night before, and fell into a deep sleep.

Her dreams were vivid, almost hallucinatory. She dreamed of Kit, on their wedding day, a handsome young sergeant whose courage under fire had won him commendations. He stood at the desk of the registry office, paper-white with nerves at the sight of his wife-to-be. There was a strong smell of roses which, even in her dream, Maria thought was odd, as her bouquet had been violets (after her dead mother), purple and pretty and synthetic. Real flowers had been well beyond their means. Before she could reach Kit the dream shifted, becoming odder and less comfortable. She relived their flight from their little home; the escape from Braun’s World; the sight of the planet on fire behind them. At one point she thought she heard a woman speaking—“
No, no idea...
”
—
and a man’s voice, rumbling indistinctly in the background. Waking, she realized her arms felt empty, so she slipped back onto the sofa next to Jenny, pulling the little girl closer to her, and she fell back into a deep sleep which lasted the rest of the night, and was undisturbed except, briefly, by the woman’s voice again: “
On the run...
”

Maria woke suddenly, with a very dry throat. Jenny was still asleep beside her, so she shifted round her until she was free to stand, moved the little girl more comfortably back onto the sofa, stood up and stretched.

The lamp was still burning. There was no sign of Amber. Maria got up and rattled round the kitchen for a while. She drank some more water, but couldn’t find any food. She sighed, deeply, and once again thought she caught a scent of some perfume; something she couldn’t quite name, but which seemed familiar. The scent seemed to be coming from beyond the other door. Maria stepped closer: there were voices, in quiet conversation. Amber must be awake. She would offer to make breakfast, as a gesture. Padding across the room, she tapped on the door to give advance warning, before pushing the door open and going through.

“Could I make some breakfast...?” she began, but she stopped when she saw what lay beyond the door.

The room was entirely dominated by the bed, to the extent that there was hardly room for a person to get round on either side. Amber was there, lying under crumpled bright orange sheets. Her shoulders were bare and one arm was flung behind her head. She was not alone. Her companion was a man in his forties, unshaven and with lanky brown hair. His most distinguishing feature, however, was the little scar that cut through his left eyebrow. Maria gasped. It was one of the men from the previous night; one of the three who had tried to assault her. Springer. He looked at her for a moment or two, and then he began to laugh.

Amber seemed completely unconcerned at being found like this. “Ah,” she said. “So you’ve discovered my little secret.” She stretched, lazily, like a cat in sunlight. “I’d have liked a day or two more to bed you in properly, but I suppose there’s no real need. It’s all done.”

Springer was rubbing her hand. “You always get the job done,” he said. “There’ll never be another like you, Amber. But this one might have a few years in her.”

Maria stood frozen in the doorway. Her tongue was completely dry in her mouth.

Amber smiled lazily, her golden smile glinting. “I hope you slept well. You, and the little girl. How is she? Still sleeping, I should think. She’ll sleep for a while yet.”

Maria tried to pull back, to run, but something seemed to be stopping her from moving. She stared at Amber, who was rising now from the bed, wrapping a robe around her, and moving closer and closer. Maria couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, she couldn’t do anything at all, apart from stare at the woman coming towards her. The smell of roses was now overpoweringly strong.

I
T WAS NOT
that Kinsella deliberately delayed leaving Hennessy’s World in pursuit of his former colleagues, not least because he did not want to place himself under further suspicion, but still almost a week passed between his meeting with Grant and his eventual departure. It was true that he did not want the mission—who would want to have to confront two former colleagues (both ex-lovers) about their possible treachery, with their potential summary executions hanging in the air? But Kinsella was trying not to think about where this journey might end. He justified his delay to himself as being solid preparation for a difficult and potentially dangerous journey: he had no intention of setting out blindly towards Satan’s Reach; any operative worth his salt took the time to prepare their missions carefully; only an idiot would set out on a journey to the Reach without a clear plan of action.

An idiot like Delia Walker, for example.

They’d known each other well, Kinsella had thought, as well they might after years of working together under Andrei Gusev. He had loved her too, after a fashion, or perhaps, he admitted to himself now, grudgingly, he had loved the
idea
of her—confident, cool, undemanding, and a tremendous boost to his self-image. But her most recent actions, never mind her sudden disappearance, had been a complete enigma to him, and the shock of the news of Andrei’s death and Kay’s disappearance had done a great deal to undermine his sense of himself as a man of good judgement. Still, a part of him hoped that there had been a terrible misunderstanding, that Delia and Kay had not, between them, cooked up this madcap story of a world where the Weird lived harmoniously with humans, not to mention a pregnancy of all things, in order to get away from the Bureau with Andrei Gusev’s money. But what else could have driven both women to such desperate actions? He was willing to assume that they both were acting rationally—or thought they were—and so he struggled to find some solid reason for their departure. As he searched through Walker’s most recent files to see what he could discover—a clue to where she might have headed, some trace that she might have left as she passed out of Expansion space and into the Reach—he rehearsed a conversation with her in his head, in which she agreed that she had misjudged him, that she had acted in haste, that she agreed it would be all to the good if she returned with him to Hennessy’s World and set the record straight...

After the best part of a week sifting through Walker’s files, he had to concede that Walker knew her business at least as well as him, and probably better. She had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared into a puff of smoke, round about the same time that an unlicensed freighter, the
Baba Yaga
, had also disappeared from the rundown old St Martin’s docks on the far north-west side of the lagoon. Of the
Baba Yaga
, Kinsella could discover a great deal when it came to its history: decades of respectable service hauling cargo around the inner worlds, followed by a sudden and undignified retirement when a fault was discovered in its secondary drive; its purchase by one Sasha Yershov, who, it appeared, had had an equally sudden and undignified retirement from the merchant fleet (Kinsella didn’t dig too deeply there). Of the
Baba Yaga
’s movements in recent weeks, Kinsella could find nothing. He had no idea what might have brought Walker and Yershov together, but he suspected the hand of Andrei Gusev in this—and, of course, Andrei was not there to ask, although Kinsella thought he could hear the old man’s quiet laughter in his ear.
Struggling again, Mark? Has our dear lady outclassed you again?

By necessity, Kinsella cast his net more widely, setting up searches for any unusual information traffic in recent weeks. A pattern... He was looking for a pattern... Eventually he found one. A number of internal requests (originator unclear) calling up all files related to a certain Merriman Fredricks.

Kinsella rocked back in his office chair, almost reeling in surprise. Now that was a name from the past, and one that Kinsella could not help but associate with Walker. Their encounter with Fredricks had been the first time Kinsella had understood Walker’s hidden depths. Cold depths, which Kinsella personally hoped he would never have to navigate. Fredricks, certainly, had nearly drowned there. But Walker had decided that a live Fredricks in debt to her was more useful than a dead one, however tidy a resolution that was, so she allowed him the unusual distinction of leaving the lower levels of the Bureau’s headquarters alive and, largely, intact. There had been some paperwork, all of which Walker handled, and Fredricks had been parcelled off, new identity and all, to a quiet world on the very edge of Expansion jurisdiction. From there he had clearly decided to put as much distance as possible between him and Walker, and the murderers that had been employing him and whom he had betrayed. Fredricks’ last known location, according to the search results that Kinsella found, was a mining planet in the Reach called Shard’s World. Kinsella nodded to himself. Yes, he thought, that was the place to start.