Chapter 25 #2
They finalized their deployment in the shadow of a stalled gravcart.
Tōn Ko and Minan would flank Arco as her visible crew.
N’Dwama, who navigated the sprawling spaceport like it was her own backyard, slipped away to find a better vantage point for surveillance, using her sifter talent to identify what kind of minders were backing up Wutala.
At exactly one minute before the agreed time, Arco stepped up to the double doors of the launch pad’s dock space and pinged the wallcomp. The doors slid open with a gritty screech, revealing a cluttered room that looked like it hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned since the fall of the Central League.
The far wall was constructed of thick, scarred glascrete, offering a sweeping view of the attached launch pad and the skeletal gantries of its neighbors.
Outside, the spaceport’s blazing floodlights fought a valiant, losing battle against the blinding blizzard.
A behemoth tracked tank with a massive shovel attachment was currently scooping snow and shunting it into a trailing hopper.
Somewhere out in that frozen mess, Arco prayed her independent trader friend was still waiting for them.
She pulled her attention back to the room.
Three people waited amidst the scattered crates.
A woman in a heavy coat with electric-blue hair piled high on her head.
A slightly taller man wearing gloves and a face-obscuring hood.
And Tycall, the ramper with the tawny lion’s mane and feline-predator body mods Arco had read about in her hasty research.
Dismay tightened Arco’s chest. Gezi Wutala wasn’t here. Had she decided a midlist journalist wasn’t worth her personal time?
Suddenly, an icy pressure scraped against Arco’s mind.
Her newly installed mental shields flared, holding firm against the telepathic intrusion.
The days of relentless, aching headaches were finally paying off.
From the slight, almost imperceptible shifts in Tōn Ko and Minan’s stances beside her, she could tell the telepath was probing them, too.
N’Dwama’s voice crackled softly over the secure earwire. “Muscle-mod Tycall is a ramper. Blue-haired woman is a sifter. Hooded man is a telepath. Three more in the office. No eyes on them, but one is a normal, and one is a shielder. The third is telepath immune. Brenner, maybe?”
Arco kept her expression blank, carefully giving no sign that she had heard anything. After a long moment of silence, with no one in the room moving, N’Dwama spoke again. “Shielder and immune coming your way.”
The inner office door slid open. Gezi Wutala stepped out, accompanied by a tall, rangy man in a loose gray tunic and pants.
Even in the dingy dock space, the crew chief commanded the room.
She wore a close-fitting red jacket, dark pants, and fur-lined snow boots that accentuated her lush figure and smooth dark skin.
She looked exactly like a woman who ran a ruthless criminal empire and enjoyed every minute of it.
Gezi stopped about eight meters away, her dark eyes locking onto Arco. “You have something for me?”
“Depends,” Arco replied, keeping her voice perfectly even. “Where is Faraday Brenner?”
Gezi’s gaze drifted to Tōn Ko, then Minan, lingering on the bags slung over their shoulders. “You all have bags. Going somewhere?”
Arco knew a shark’s game when she saw one, but knew she had to play it. She forced a breezy, conversational tone. “Rotten weather we’re having. Pays to be prepared.”
Another probe, harder this time, slammed against Arco’s shields. It felt like a laser trying to burn through incalloy. She hid her wince as the hooded man leaned slightly toward Gezi and subvocalized something. Gezi cast a newly speculative look at Arco.
“I’m told you have shields,” Gezi mused, her tone dangerously soft, “but you’re not a shielder. What are you?”
Arco’s patience, already stretched paper-thin by exhaustion and adrenaline, began to fray. “On a schedule. Where is Brenner?”
Gezi raised a beautifully sculpted eyebrow. “Perhaps a sample of your goods first.”
Arco took a breath and delivered the first piece of the puzzle. “Orkutta Bryt. Telekinetic. Institute-trained. Has an expensive bodyshop habit. Experienced with explosives. Where is Mr. Brenner?”
The blue-haired sifter to Wutala’s left tapped her gauntlet-style percomp, her eyes losing focus as she subvocalized into her own comms. The room held its breath. After a long, agonizing moment, the sifter gave Gezi a sharp nod.
Wutala’s eyelid twitched — a microscopic break in her composure that Arco almost missed. Wutala turned to her crew. “Open the package.”
The blue-haired sifter and the hooded telepath crossed to a large, rectangular crate sitting near the office door. They released the seals, lifting off the solid lid and dropping the side gate of what appeared to be a high-end cryo-container used to transport prize bovines.
They hauled Brenner out. Arco’s heart lodged in her throat.
He blinked rapidly, his eyes unfocused and rolling.
His head lolled to the side, and a thick string of drool slipped from the corner of his slack mouth.
If the sifter and the telepath weren’t actively holding him up by his armpits, he would have face-planted onto the dirty glascrete floor.
Arco dug her nails into her palms to keep her professional mask from shattering. Seeing the fiercely competent man reduced to a helpless ragdoll sparked a vicious anger she had to ruthlessly suppress. “What’s wrong with him?”
Gezi glanced at the sifter, who answered with clinical detachment. “Temporary control measures. He’ll be fine in a few hours.”
“Our deal,” Arco said, her voice dropping to a frigid register, “was for Mr. Brenner undamaged.”
Before Gezi could reply, a blinding flash of light erupted outside the glascrete wall, followed instantly by a muffled boom that rattled Arco’s teeth. The floor beneath their boots trembled as a violent shockwave washed over the dock.
Everyone looked toward the reinforced glass.
A spaceship had crashed on the adjacent pad, triggering a chain of secondary explosions.
Plumes of fire roared upward, impossibly bright and hot enough to defy the driving snow, sending a rain of flaming debris scattering across the tarmac and bouncing against the glascrete sliding doors.
No one spoke as the conflagration raged.
Only Brenner remained oblivious, his chin resting on his chest as if he’d simply dozed off on his feet.
A minute later, from the pad directly beside the wreckage, a red-and-yellow starship suddenly ignited its main thrusters.
It launched in a brutal, vertical tear without waiting to clear its connections, ripping gantries and fueling cables loose to flap wildly in the howling winter winds.
Wutala let out a low whistle, genuine admiration coloring her tone. “That pilot is warped beyond all recognition. Find out who they are, and tell them I’m hiring.”
Arco stared at the blazing exhaust trail disappearing into the storm clouds, doing her absolute best to hide the sickening plunge of her stomach. She was pretty damn sure that her ride off Mabingion had just left without them.
Renner’s talent was slowly crawling back online, like a gathering of static instead of a steady draw of power.
It was distant and wispy, but it was there.
The two Wutala crew members hauling him upright expected him to be a brain-wiped invalid, so he happily played the part.
Channeling his memories of the pinzai addicts who haunted the alleys near Kooga’s soup kitchen, he let his eyes roll, blinked out of rhythm, and allowed his knees to wobble like they weren’t speaking to him.
Considering how wrung out he felt, it wasn’t much of a stretch.
He took petty, secret delight in letting a thick string of drool slide onto the blue-haired sifter’s coat sleeve.
He wasn’t firing on all jets, not by a long shot, but he’d give them a fight if they wanted to start something.
Beneath the slack-jawed facade, Renner was being buffeted by waves of emotion.
Anger burned at being a pawn again, especially the sifter woman currently gripping his biceps.
Chest-warming relief that his red angel had actually come for him.
Cold terror when he looked at Minan, Tōn Ko, and Nilsson flanking Arco, realizing they could all die because of him.
For the first time, he understood Arco’s crushing guilt over people who got hurt and died for her.
She was risking everything, giving up her own escape, just for him.
Rage that once again, others controlled his destiny. Stupid fucking universe.
The tall, gray-clad telepath leaned in and whispered something into Gezi Wutala’s ear.
Wutala’s lips curved into a sly smile as she spoke to Arco. “You might like to know that the spaceport is in lockdown and is now refusing all launch requests.”
Renner let his head loll toward the glascrete wall, staring blearily at the stubbornly blazing remnants of the spaceship crash outside and the blizzard’s violent efforts to smother it.
None of this was good. But when he forced his gaze back to Arco, she simply nodded, seemingly unsurprised.
Minan had probably fed her the intel through her earwire, or clever Arco had already deduced it herself.
Arco’s gaze darted from the empty cryo-capsule behind him, to Wutala, and then out to the fiery wreck on the adjacent pad. Renner recognized the slight flicker in her eyes. She was making connections, weaving disparate threads into a fabric.
“Does the lockdown include launches for the landfill moon?” Arco asked, her voice perfectly mild.