Hard Bargain, page 10
How did she explain that to the man? Wait, she supposed, until he came around to it himself.
There was nothing more she could do right now, except pay him back for the loan, and start carving herself a place on the other side of the law.
15
Valentinian
Valentinian watched Dave lead Kyriaki away to get new clothes. As he turned back, Bayjy was eyeballing him. It looked like she was grinning inside that scarf, but he didn’t feel like asking. It was still too complicated for an outsider, and Bayjy still was.
The Sheriff and Stephaneria extracted a promise of dinner and gave him the address, before walking off. Stephaneria left him with an extra warm smile first, though. Then he was left with Bayjy and her damnable smile.
“I accept,” the woman said.
It took him a moment to process her words. She was accepting his apology, hopefully.
He nodded, grateful.
“I had a long, rather angry conversation with the Sheriff after you left,” she continued. “He actually came and found me. Told me part of what was going on. At least the boring, public bits. Still looking forward to hearing the rest. Already figure I’ll be an accomplice, since I plan to be sailing with you.”
Valentinian sighed.
“Not in public,” he promised, starting to move off back to the ship for now. There wasn’t much traffic on the promenade, but enough. “Even here, there will be ears. Were you able to score me a cargo going somewhere?”
“Yes, depending,” she said, following.
Once they were both aboard, Valentinian sealed the hatch back up for now and led her into the larger cargo bay. The forward hatches were all sealed up and would stay that way.
“Talk to me,” Valentinian turned to her with a grim smile.
“So the planet exports tropical fruit,” Bayjy said. “The whole equatorial band down there is pretty much island paradise for people like you.”
“Like me?” he was lost.
“Eighteen degrees in the winter, maybe twenty-seven at the peak of a summer day,” her eyes grinned at him. “You wanna impress me, take me to a desert planet somewhere.”
“Oh, right,” Valentinian nodded. Too cold for her. A little too warm for him, most seasons.
Given his preference, Valentinian would have settled in an alpine zone somewhere, a valley that only got maybe a meter of snow in the winter, and barely melted it off by the end of summer. But he knew most people thought that was weird.
“So I talked to the Sheriff, and he talked to some people,” Bayjy continued, her smile evident in her voice. “You apparently impressed the hell out of the right people, because they offered us three different deals. First: they pay us straight FOB to haul a load of tropical fruit and stuff to Begzatlari. Second: we go halves on costs up front and take half on the back. Third: we buy as much as we can carry at a damned nice rate that looks like about a ten percent discount, and do whatever we want with it at the other end.”
“What’s the best, in terms of long-term storage refrigerated?” Valentinian asked. “I can stow boxes in here and turn the temperature down to just above freezing, but we have a different problem long term.”
“I presumed that, from the way you had to light out,” her voice got more serious. “The Dominion’s after you?”
“They were after Dave,” he said. “But now it will be expanded to me. Once they know you and Kyriaki are aboard, they’ll come after you as well.”
“That bad?” she asked.
“Let’s just say that I have no intention of ever letting them take me alive,” he felt his face grow hard and fierce. “What they would do to any of us is worse than death. That’s what you’re signing up for, as well, because they’ll torture you for information you won’t have until we trust you more.”
“And how long’s that going to be?” she got sharp. “If I’m signing up for death, I deserve to know why.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” he leaned forward just a little. “We finish our first run successfully, and I’ll let Dave tell you. More fun that way.”
“Wow,” he finally heard doubt creep into her voice.
This woman was an unbridled optimist, as near as he could tell. It would be nice to dent that.
Valentinian shrugged.
“Kyriaki used to be a White Hat before this,” he said. “That’s the Dominion’s Internal Security troops. And she’s a wanted outlaw with the rest of us now.”
“Shit,” Bayjy’s voice got small. “You people are intense.”
“I am serious,” Valentinian said. “And you deserve to know that much before you sign on. I’ll let you back out right now with no hard feelings. But once we make this first run, we have to disappear.”
“Why?”
“Because if we start running a circuit, if someone has an idea where to find us, there will be gunships on our flank one of these days,” Valentinian said. “This cargo is to get us some cash and some distance. Maybe it buys us some gear for you and Dave, since I’m pretty sure my one armored cargo-lifter might not fit you across the chest, and is way too short for Dave. Right now, the only thing between me and a life of piracy is that map from the poker game.”
“Damn, Valentinian,” she said, voice all happy and snarky again. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
Valentinian smiled at the joke. Anything from here wasn’t going to be solely his fault. He had warned her. If she chose to ignore those warnings, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
And he knew she was getting desperate. Not much in the way of jobs on this station, and that would eventually mean she had to drop down to the surface and find something, where the odds of her getting back into space would get worse every day.
He’d been there. But for luck and a crooked poker game…
“Okay,” he said. “So let’s go talk to your dealers about prices and cargo. I’ve got a little while before the Stationmaster rips me a new one, and then a complicated dinner with the Sheriff, where we have to keep him mostly in the dark while staying on his good side. Hopefully, his niece was able to narrow our map down some, so we know where we’re going after all this.”
“And if she doesn’t?” Bayjy followed as he started towards the airlock.
“Then we’ll have to keep trying, getting progressively deeper into Wildspace, Bayjy,” he said. “I don’t think we can even stay in Laurentia longer than absolutely necessary, to say nothing of coming back. Maybe we’ll go visit your homeworld.”
“I don’t have a homeworld, Valentinian,” she said starkly. “My kind are wanderers, born on stations and ships. The Urlan homeworld where they originally created us was one of the ones destroyed during the war.”
“Then you’ll fit right in with the rest of us,” he gave her a grim smile. “None of us are ever going home, either.”
16
Valentinian
It hadn’t turned out too bad. Not near as loud and angry as Valentinian had expected. The Stationmaster sat him down, handed him a list of moving violations with fines attached and then suspended ninety-five percent of them if he could keep from racking up any more trouble in the next fourteen months.
From the wicked smile in her eyes, she had known the chances of him coming back to Bohrne station in the next year were almost zero, so she was apparently writing it off. He had paid her cash out of his pocket on the remaining five percent, promised to be a good boy, and gotten sent home with a brand new, plas-paper pamphlet of the piloting regulations for this station.
Probably a collector’s item she had printed specifically to hand him as a reminder.
Now the fun part.
They were back at that steak house. Back in that same room where he had first taken Bayjy to talk business. Apparently, the room was specifically configured to handle Variant Humanity. He must have missed that the first time.
Tonight, everyone was in their lightest clothing. For Valentinian, a simple T-shirt and his usual pants and boots. And the gun. Dave was in something similar. Even Kyriaki had gotten in the act.
Sitting across from him, he found her distracting. A light shirt, more or less skin tight across the chest with nothing under it, did that to him.
The Sheriff was in a simple button-up shirt, and Stephaneria was in silks that seemed cool enough. Not as sheer as Kyriaki’s and she seemed to be regretting that choice, but Valentinian kept his opinions to himself.
Bayjy was in heaven. That much was obvious. She was all the way down to a heavy Henley, not even bringing her gloves or hat since it was around forty in here. At the same time, the folks at the restaurant had dug out of storage the niftiest piece of kit Valentinian had ever seen. He would be stealing the idea shortly.
The chairs plugged into the floor, and had a local temperature setting. The air around him might be intolerable, but his butt was nicely chilled and that kept the rest of him pleasantly adjusted. He had figured he could get a butt warmer for Bayjy, but this was a small slice of heaven for him, as well.
He presumed her butt warmer was cranked up as high as it would go.
Weird, but it worked.
The fruit salad appetizer had been delightful. The steaks had been fantastic. Small talk about this and that, without ever addressing the dangerous bits, had been charming.
Now they were down to the hard points. The Sheriff set his coffee mug down and speared Valentinian with a hard look.
“Before Dominion-427 left, they filed a fugitive warrant for your first mate,” he said in a calm, straightforward voice. “Accused him of being an assassin, while not getting too deep into the details of who he is accused of killing. Thoughts, young man?”
Valentinian set his own coffee down. He hadn’t been dreading this moment, so much as preparing mentally for it all day.
“So when I first hired Dave, he saved me from getting my ass kicked by five thugs and their pimp,” Valentinian’s smile had no more warmth than the Sheriff’s. “Later, there was a suggestion of certain things. You want to know what I told him?”
“Sure,” the older man nodded, a ghost of a smile as he recognized the storytelling elements.
“I told Dave I’d rather be an ignorant fool, if they ever caught us,” Valentinian smiled, glancing over at Bayjy and seeing how intently she was following things. “I didn’t actually get the honest truth from the man until we were outbound from this station a week ago, and only then because I had Kyriaki standing in my forward airlock asking to come in from the cold. And only then because the two of them required that I know, in order to plan what our next steps had to be.”
“I see,” the Sheriff’s grin turned a mite frosty now. “So you’re suggesting that I don’t want to know?”
Valentinian shrugged.
“You are an Officer of the Courts, Sheriff,” Valentinian said. “That warrant is technically a legal document, and if you spent the time to get clarification from a Dominion representative, they would probably validate it.”
“Would they now?” the man asked. “And you believe I might choose to ignore it, if I did know the whole story?”
“If you did, it would make you a target as well,” Kyriaki spoke up now, from her spot on the man’s immediate right. “I speak from experience, since I used to be a White Hat. Someone would send people after you, if for nothing more than to put you under a truth serum to find out what you knew. And then they would kill you for knowing this. Even that badge won’t protect you.”
Valentinian liked the sidelong look she got for that. He didn’t trust her, not yet, but she was trying. He had to give her that.
“Oh, and they will be back here, once they realize we never made it Meskle, Sheriff,” Dave chimed in. “I’m intimately familiar with the woman in command of that vessel. Tenacious only begins to describe her.”
“So y’all think you have it all figured out?” he asked coldly, leaning forward enough to rest his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands.
“Oh, hell no, Sheriff,” Valentinian laughed. “But hindsight is an exact science. I know every decision that got us here, and I wouldn’t change any of them. Tomorrow’s the dangerous part.”
Out of the corner of his eye, even Kyriaki flinched a little, like she had been expecting to be one of those things he considered a mistake. But seriously, she had saved his life at least twice, so far, maybe three times, depending on how you wanted to count it.
It was that hungry expression she occasionally got in her eyes, when she didn’t think anyone was looking, that left him just a few degrees off true.
The Sheriff turned to Dave now, with an appraising eye.
“You did say intimate, Mr. Hall?” he asked. “I heard you correctly?”
Dave shrugged with a slight grin.
“That’s where I think you might be wandering out onto the thinner ice, sir,” Dave replied, almost cordially.
“Uh huh,” the grin came back. “There was an interesting accusation, Hall, accompanying the warrant.”
“I might challenge someone to produce a body,” Dave’s grin back turned cold and savage. “That is, if we were to somehow end up in a Court of Law instead of a firefight.”
Valentinian held his breath while the Sheriff turned and stared at Kyriaki. Her chin came up, but she remained silent. Then the older man turned his direction.
Valentinian felt like he was back across the poker table from the man, knowing in his soul that the Sheriff had just drawn a Perfect Granite Arcade with his Build card. The best hand possible.
“I see,” he said, almost to himself, but his eyes were on Valentinian. “Son, you might be playing the most dangerous game I have ever even known, but I’ll give you credit for audacity and as much honesty as this situation allows you. Hopefully, your Dominion friend won’t decide to start a war here. As you said, I don’t know the truth, unless she deigns to tell me later, but this is Laurentia, not the Dominion. And I’m just an old country Sheriff, easily bamboozled by you city folk. I’ll leave all that complicated stuff to the diplomats.”
Valentinian felt a deep sigh escape his soul. From the way the others around the table slumped in unison, they had also been holding their breath, waiting.
The Sheriff grinned. It was a thing of bright, honest joy on his weathered face. He turned to his niece on the other side.
“So I understand that Valentinian won a treasure map in a poker game,” he exclaimed with the innocence of driven snow.
Stephaneria only slightly rolled her eyes at the man. After all, it was his crooked poker game that caused all this in the first place. And everyone here knew it.
She smiled at Valentinian as if they had an inside joke about her uncle’s behavior.
“So I was able to get what I think was a match for the map,” she began in a careful, deliberate voice.
“That’s wonderful,” Valentinian couldn’t contain himself. “How?”
“It turns out that most of the stars were simply marked with color and an approximate distance from the central one,” she smiled like a detective with one more thing. “But two of them were actually annotated in Urlan, listing the star names themselves. The map itself looked relatively new, but the information inscribed on it dates back at least two thousand years, based on variable drift, once I knew where to look.”
“So back to the war?” Bayjy asked, voice alive with equal amounts of hope and avarice.
Valentinian watched the lavender woman, seeing her face for the first time tonight. She was attractive, if heavy-boned. And completely bald, which was weird. And purple instead of his pink. But still human. Still a woman.
Utterly irrepressible.
“It looks like,” Stephaneria replied. “I can’t be sure, because Valentinian kept a portion of the map secret when I scanned the rest. I think I can get you as close as the right star, and presumably that other column of numbers gets you to the target itself, if it’s still there after all this time.”
“It does,” Valentinian agreed. “Something put into orbit of one of the moons of one of the planets, so presumably safe, assuming they dropped it into a LaGrange point where it was stable. What do I owe you for your time?”
She fixed him with a strange look. Unreadable. Calculating.
“The money I gave you was just an opener, a retainer, Stephaneria,” he continued. “I’m sure you did more work than that, especially if you had to translate Urlan.”
“Pictures of whatever it is,” she finally said, after a long, wistful look he really didn’t want to try to decipher.
“That might be a while,” he said carefully. “We’re going to be wanted fugitives pretty soon. No place in Laurentia is likely to be officially safe.”
“Then you should make sure your transponder doesn’t say Longshot Hypothesis when you return, Valentinian,” the Sheriff got serious now.
That was about as good an invitation as he was likely to ever get, all things considered.
“I’m not going to win this one, am I?” he asked them both.
Stephaneria smiled.
“Stubborn doesn’t run anywhere in the family, Valentinian,” she said, nodding to her uncle.
The older man just nodded.
“In that case, I would be much obliged if you sent the data over, first chance you got, and told me what section of the galactic navigational charts I needed to purchase,” Valentinian said.
He looked around and decided he was done, so he slid his chair back.
“Thank all of you for a lovely dinner and conversation,” he said, turning to his crew. “I’ll see the rest of you in the morning, bright and early, and we’ll see about taking on cargo.”
“Where are you going?” Dave asked, confused.
“Down to the clinic to get my medical records updated,” Valentinian said.
The others hadn’t stirred much as he rose and moved to the door.
The Sheriff had a surprised look on his face, glancing right and left at the two women seated to either side before meeting Valentinian’s eyes with a hint of disbelief. The others were slower on the uptake, but they weren’t spacers yet. Bayjy was the closest, but she was more of a salvager. Still, she caught on second after the Sheriff, fixing him with a good case of stinkeye as he opened the hatch and nodded to her and the Sheriff.
