Hard Bargain, page 4
There was a treasure map he would want to research. And that would take a couple of days, and maybe buying and installing a new travel zone or two into the nav computer. And Vee had just won three thousand Union Krodageni playing poker, so he had money burning a hole in his pocket, or at least enough to goof off for a few days.
And a willing accomplice, if he wanted. If they wanted.
Valentinian would ask him, but Dave hadn’t seen anything about the woman that would cause him to veto her. Plus he had developed those senses pretty well, in the Dominion Household where everyone wore masks both physical and metaphorical.
He had wanted an adventure. And he was pretty sure Vee did as well.
Bayjy was good enough people. At least for now.
Dave could always kill her himself if she decided to double-cross them later.
5
Valentinian
Valentinian was just glad he was by himself as he walked into the compact space and looked around. It wasn’t a flashback to Dominion Prime, but maybe the exact opposite of déjà vu. Whatever that was.
He had never been here before, but he suddenly remembered sitting in that bar, just before Dave and Lianearia had blasted into his life, complaining to himself how all adventures seemed to start in bars and not libraries.
And yet, here he was, standing in the library, looking for adventure.
It had taken him a good part of a day to find this place, as the entire space station almost seemed to be built to obscure the fact that they even had a public library. He put that down to more things that the local middlemen could charge you for, as Laurentia was generally a friendly-enough place.
Just poor. Not all that many planets with tremendously valuable resources to export, except people. Plus, having the Dominion not all that far away had something to do with the fact that most planets maintained an active military reserve of every able-bodied person between sixteen and sixty training regularly. And a willingness to throw the entire planet at you if you tried to invade them.
Even the last couple of Dominators had finally taken a hint and gone after easier game than a pack of rabid chipmunks.
So places like this station traded what they could. And imported what they had to. A good chunk of cash came from training up people in excellent schools and sending them off to be doctors, nurses, or mercenaries somewhere else, with money sent home to support the extended families.
Not every place was poor, but Laurentian culture had a streak of vicious egalitarianism to it. You helped your neighbors, or they might decide you weren’t part of society any more. And do bad things to you, perhaps with a mob of their poor friends.
Which brought him to a small, public library, hidden away. The locals, Valentinian was sure, all knew how to find it, but didn’t want to tell the outsider, because then they could charge him for information that they could get for free.
Worse, there were a lot of books in here. He was positive that most of the information he needed would be electronic, but even then, there would probably be cultural references that would obscure things.
At least there was a woman seated behind a round counter, on a small dais, in the exact center of the space. Hopefully, the librarian. All of the computer screens faced in towards her so she could look over shoulders. She even looked like a librarian, straight out of central casting.
Somewhere in her mid-forties, was his first guess, with a decade possible either direction. Brown hair worn up in a bun. Reading half-glasses perched on her nose as she looked at some book he couldn’t see from here. White shirt, buttoned up and starched to the point he thought he could smell it from here.
And maybe just the slightest hint of perfume underneath it. Maybe just left over from someone who had read a lot of books earlier.
She looked up with brown eyes that focused on him like a tracking sensor.
He expected a sniff of disapproval to find a stranger here, but she kept her feelings to herself for now.
They were alone in a space that would have held fifty comfortably.
“May I help you with something?” she asked in an arch, disbelieving voice.
Not entirely unfriendly, but not all that warm and welcoming, either.
But this was Laurentia. He did have one guaranteed way to get her attention.
“I hope so,” Valentinian said earnestly as he approached. Might as well play dumb and polite. “I have a section of a larger star map without the normal triangulation coordinates, and was hoping that I might be able to use the computer systems here to find a close-enough match. That way I don’t have to spend a lot of cash buying unnecessary additions to my ship’s nav database.”
As he got closer, Valentinian pulled out a forty Union Krodageni note and rested it on the counter between them.
“If you have some time available, might I be able to pay you for some expertise and assistance?” he asked in a straightforward, businesslike tone.
This was Laurentia. Money was always short, except for the pampered few. He didn’t figure a librarian would be in the latter category.
She fixed him with a hard stare, glancing at the cash long enough to note that it was almost as much as she was getting paid today, if he had done the conversions right.
“I’m from the Dominion, originally,” he said with a polite smile. “Passing through. And I won a treasure map in a poker game.”
If nothing else, he might entice her with that kind of a story. It was a pretty good one, for all that it sounded cliché.
“How good is your map?” she finally asked.
She still hadn’t moved a hand to touch the money.
“Within parameters, pretty good,” Valentinian said. “Seventy stars set in three dimensional relation to one at the center, with reasonable vectors.”
“Then what seems to be the problem?” she asked, prim and superior finally starting to wake up and get a good look at him.
“That’s a thirty-light-year sphere,” Valentinian smiled back at her. “In a cube possibly five thousand light years across. With no idea how old the original of the map itself might be, so some of those stars may have drifted pretty hard since the map was laid down. Not much, but enough to not be a match, if I were to purchase that big of a nav database and then set my nav computer to crunching numbers for a month.”
“What’s at the center of the map?” she asked. He could see the first hints of intrigue in her eyes, a librarian with a mystery to solve and a lot of books handy.
“I have no idea,” Valentinian let his weight shift to one side. “Like I said, I won it in a poker game yesterday. Farmer kid wasn’t in a mood to talk, as the sheriff was in the process of arresting him and sending him somewhere else.”
“That was you?” she asked, suddenly acting like a person and not a dismissive schoolmarm.
“If you mean, was I the guy that the sheriff used to clean the kid out in a semi-crooked poker game? Then yeah,” he said. “Took all the kid’s money, and he lost this map on top of it.”
“So that’s what he was trying to do,” she said.
Valentinian looked at her curiously.
“Trouble maker,” she said with an anger directed elsewhere, relaxing so much that he thought she might slump out of the chair. “Big and dangerous looking, but extremely young. Laurentian, so I had to offer to help, but he was so secretive and positively rude. Would always hide the screen and curse at me.”
“Yup, that’s him,” Valentinian said. He pulled out the map and rested it next to the still-untouched money. “This.”
She opened it and studied the map for several seconds.
“You won this in a poker game?” she asked, disbelieving.
Valentinian could see the woman reevaluating him as she did. He wasn’t sure if he was moving up or down the scale, but he just needed her brains, not her undying love or resolute friendship. Any addition to his nav computers was going to be expensive. Buying more than one was an ugly cost to consider. Best to do this right the first time.
So he told her about the game. Explained the sheriff’s role. The stacked deck. That last hand. The raise over the top of the kid’s pile that brought out what might have been his most valuable possession, and the one that brought him to town from the farm.
“And you gave him two hundred Union Krodageni?” she asked, shock evident in her tone.
“Well, one hundred to get him off the station, mostly to protect me from having to look over my shoulder,” Valentinian corrected. “But yeah, the other hundred was because I’ve been there. He could at least eat for a month or six weeks if he was careful.”
“For a total stranger?” she asked, eyes boring in.
“I had already made more money playing poker that night than I expected in a place like this, so it wasn’t really my cash,” he said truthfully. “I’m even happy to bribe you with his money, so we can solve the mystery of the map.”
She paused and considered the bill sitting on the table.
“Okay,” she decided. “Let’s see what we can do here. Are you willing to let me scan it so I can run it through some systems?”
Valentinian considered that. It sounded like a perfectly reasonable request, but it also let the treasure out of his control, whatever it was. And he was feeling a little greedy, truth be told.
“How about you scan just this part?” he pointed. “Can I steal some tape and plas-paper?”
She handed him supplies, and Valentinian covered over the stack of numbers on the right side. Those were only useful once you found your target system, telling you where to actually go. Without them, nobody could get closer than the star system itself.
She scanned it and handed him back the map, which went into an inner pocket.
“Okay, let’s see,” she mused absently as she brought up the actual map and began letting some graphics program pull out the dots and vectors and translate them into relative grid coordinates.
She looked up, almost surprised to still find him standing there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Got a little too into the process. I’m Stephaneria.”
“Valentinian,” he smiled. “Guesstimate on how long this will take?”
“A couple of hours for the automation to pull everything out and run a few smoothing routines to get close on the estimated locations,” she sighed. “Then we can push it into a stellar repository system and ask for matches. I’m not sure how long that might take.”
“Is there anything I can do, besides be in your way?” Valentinian asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “It will be up to the computers to find anything, once I give it the parameters.”
“Okay, then can I take you out to dinner as a way of saying thank you for your help?” Valentinian asked. “It’s the kid’s money, and I feel like spending it around here if I can.”
“You’re already paying me,” her eyes got that look a woman’s did when they thought you were on the verge of getting a little too personal.
“That was for your expertise,” Valentinian let his own voice get a little sharp in response. “This is for your friendliness. I’m hoping to make this station something of a new base as my crew and I run cargo around. It would be pleasant to know some friendly people around here. You people can get a little insular around outsiders.”
“Oh,” she suddenly blushed. “I’m so sorry. I had thought-”
“I know what you thought, ma’am,” Valentinian interrupted that thought. Not that it hadn’t crossed his mind, but that wasn’t why he was here. She was a nice-looking woman, even if she might be his mother’s age. “I’d rather have friends around here.”
“Yes. Sorry,” she was utterly flustered now.
Did no man on this station have a librarian fetish? What was wrong with these people?
Before Valentinian could say anything, his card-reader beeped.
Dave.
Valentinian nodded to the woman and stepped back from the desk.
“What’s up?” Valentinian asked as he opened it and keyed in the radio channel.
“I think it would be a very good idea if you returned to the ship right this moment,” Dave said in a voice so utterly without emotion that Valentinian reached his other hand into his jacket to make sure the shock pistol was still there.
“Who just showed up?” Valentinian asked, making sure he had his map tucked away safely in a pocket and stepping backwards from the librarian as his flight or fight signals ramped up.
“Kyriaki Apokapes,” Dave said, like a trumpet announcing the end of the world. “She is not alone.”
Valentinian felt the bottom drop out of his soul, like a black hole pulling you down into eternity.
“I’ll be along,” Valentinian said. “Keep the ship locked up. Detach if you have to and come back for me later.”
“Seriously, Vee?” Dave asked.
“They want you more than they do me, Dave,” he replied, cutting the channel before the man could reply.
Stephaneria was looking at him with an odd mixture of humor and concern.
“Can I suddenly turn that dinner into a rain check?” he asked, backing another step away.
“Old girlfriend?” Stephaneria asked with a slight grin.
“It’s complicated,” Valentinian replied, hating himself for something so cliché being also so dead accurate. “She’s also one of the Dominion’s White Hats. The Internal Security Bureau. If someone comes here, my suggestion is you deny talking to me. Safer for you that way.”
“That bad?” she asked, more concern coming to the fore. “You just told someone to take your ship and run.”
“We’re outside of Dominion space, so they have no legal jurisdiction,” Valentinian said. He was clear to the door now. “And they know it. So anyone here has to be treated like a potential assassin instead.”
“What did you do?” she asked before she caught herself. She had a really pretty blush that made him reconsider some things.
“The right thing,” Valentinian finally answered over his shoulder as he opened the hatch and exited. “And they’ll never forgive me for it.”
6
Valentinian
He had made it about halfway to the ship when Valentinian’s sneakier instincts woke up and poked his conscious brain. It was an idea so utterly daft and diabolical that he laughed out loud in a mostly-empty corridor.
Hopefully, nobody noticed.
Valentinian paused long enough to pull out his card-reader and call up a map of the station. Good, it wasn’t that far out of his way. Hopefully, this would work.
Valentinian opened a channel to Dave as he started to jog down a side corridor.
“Where are you?” his first mate asked.
“In route,” Valentinian answered. “You locked up tight and safe?”
“For the moment,” Dave said. “Can you talk now?”
“In a corridor, heading to see if I can recruit some help,” Valentinian replied. “Do you know where she is?”
“No,” Dave admitted. “I paid a little extra to get the full data pull from the port authority on an automated basis, and then programmed some subroutines and set them to looking for certain names and locations, just so it would send us an alarm if it saw something.”
“You can do that?” Valentinian was so shocked that he stopped moving.
One, that it could be done, although thinking about it, all that data was public somewhere. He had just never needed something like that before. Still wasn’t used to thinking like a fugitive from justice. Or from an assassin, which was almost the same thing.
And Two, that Dave Hall was that facile with programming. The man had never suggested that sort of technical skill. Probably didn’t want to give away too much about his former life, after Valentinian had purposefully not wanted to know. But he could probably use that.
“Yeah,” Dave replied, with just a sniff of smugness that made it all the worse. The man could be a clown, when he wanted to be. “So I just got a flag that the Inspector was inbound, or had just docked. Not sure what the lag is between someone sending information in and it getting rebroadcast on the other circuit. How soon until you’re here?”
“Need to make a stop,” Valentinian said. “See a man about a horse. You keep everything locked down hard and I’ll call before I try to open the hatch.”
“Good enough,” Dave said.
Valentinian tried not to giggle as he started to jog again. This one was about as insane as anything he had ever done in a half-decade of some amazingly bad decisions that should have turned out so much worse than they had.
Playing longshots.
There. Hopefully the man likes me, and doesn’t just arrest me on general principles and hold me for her.
Valentinian opened the armored hatch and stepped into the station’s primary security office. There was a deputy behind a heavy counter, the kind of structure that looked like it would stop any small arms a mob might be able to lay hands on.
Fortunately, Valentinian recognized the man from yesterday. One of the spacers in disguise that had arrested the punk.
The man acknowledged him as well.
“Something I can help you with?” he asked in the breezy tone of an authority figure dealing with a stranger in town.
“Is the sheriff available?” Valentinian asked politely. “Want to ask the man for a favor.”
“Your name?” the deputy asked, nodding politely enough.
“Valentinian Tarasicodissa,” he replied. “Tell him the poker player is here. The other poker player.”
“Have a seat.”
Valentinian moved over to a corner and sat on a bench probably designed to be uncomfortable enough to prevent sleep while you waited. He didn’t fidget, or pull out his card-reader, but tried to work his way through any number of possible scenarios.
Not the least of which was how the hell that woman had managed to find them. He hadn’t run as fast as he could, once they had cleared Dominion space, but they hadn’t dawdled, either. She had to have set out on his trail almost immediately, and then slowly gained ground over the light centuries, only because he had slowed down, thinking he was safe.
And a willing accomplice, if he wanted. If they wanted.
Valentinian would ask him, but Dave hadn’t seen anything about the woman that would cause him to veto her. Plus he had developed those senses pretty well, in the Dominion Household where everyone wore masks both physical and metaphorical.
He had wanted an adventure. And he was pretty sure Vee did as well.
Bayjy was good enough people. At least for now.
Dave could always kill her himself if she decided to double-cross them later.
5
Valentinian
Valentinian was just glad he was by himself as he walked into the compact space and looked around. It wasn’t a flashback to Dominion Prime, but maybe the exact opposite of déjà vu. Whatever that was.
He had never been here before, but he suddenly remembered sitting in that bar, just before Dave and Lianearia had blasted into his life, complaining to himself how all adventures seemed to start in bars and not libraries.
And yet, here he was, standing in the library, looking for adventure.
It had taken him a good part of a day to find this place, as the entire space station almost seemed to be built to obscure the fact that they even had a public library. He put that down to more things that the local middlemen could charge you for, as Laurentia was generally a friendly-enough place.
Just poor. Not all that many planets with tremendously valuable resources to export, except people. Plus, having the Dominion not all that far away had something to do with the fact that most planets maintained an active military reserve of every able-bodied person between sixteen and sixty training regularly. And a willingness to throw the entire planet at you if you tried to invade them.
Even the last couple of Dominators had finally taken a hint and gone after easier game than a pack of rabid chipmunks.
So places like this station traded what they could. And imported what they had to. A good chunk of cash came from training up people in excellent schools and sending them off to be doctors, nurses, or mercenaries somewhere else, with money sent home to support the extended families.
Not every place was poor, but Laurentian culture had a streak of vicious egalitarianism to it. You helped your neighbors, or they might decide you weren’t part of society any more. And do bad things to you, perhaps with a mob of their poor friends.
Which brought him to a small, public library, hidden away. The locals, Valentinian was sure, all knew how to find it, but didn’t want to tell the outsider, because then they could charge him for information that they could get for free.
Worse, there were a lot of books in here. He was positive that most of the information he needed would be electronic, but even then, there would probably be cultural references that would obscure things.
At least there was a woman seated behind a round counter, on a small dais, in the exact center of the space. Hopefully, the librarian. All of the computer screens faced in towards her so she could look over shoulders. She even looked like a librarian, straight out of central casting.
Somewhere in her mid-forties, was his first guess, with a decade possible either direction. Brown hair worn up in a bun. Reading half-glasses perched on her nose as she looked at some book he couldn’t see from here. White shirt, buttoned up and starched to the point he thought he could smell it from here.
And maybe just the slightest hint of perfume underneath it. Maybe just left over from someone who had read a lot of books earlier.
She looked up with brown eyes that focused on him like a tracking sensor.
He expected a sniff of disapproval to find a stranger here, but she kept her feelings to herself for now.
They were alone in a space that would have held fifty comfortably.
“May I help you with something?” she asked in an arch, disbelieving voice.
Not entirely unfriendly, but not all that warm and welcoming, either.
But this was Laurentia. He did have one guaranteed way to get her attention.
“I hope so,” Valentinian said earnestly as he approached. Might as well play dumb and polite. “I have a section of a larger star map without the normal triangulation coordinates, and was hoping that I might be able to use the computer systems here to find a close-enough match. That way I don’t have to spend a lot of cash buying unnecessary additions to my ship’s nav database.”
As he got closer, Valentinian pulled out a forty Union Krodageni note and rested it on the counter between them.
“If you have some time available, might I be able to pay you for some expertise and assistance?” he asked in a straightforward, businesslike tone.
This was Laurentia. Money was always short, except for the pampered few. He didn’t figure a librarian would be in the latter category.
She fixed him with a hard stare, glancing at the cash long enough to note that it was almost as much as she was getting paid today, if he had done the conversions right.
“I’m from the Dominion, originally,” he said with a polite smile. “Passing through. And I won a treasure map in a poker game.”
If nothing else, he might entice her with that kind of a story. It was a pretty good one, for all that it sounded cliché.
“How good is your map?” she finally asked.
She still hadn’t moved a hand to touch the money.
“Within parameters, pretty good,” Valentinian said. “Seventy stars set in three dimensional relation to one at the center, with reasonable vectors.”
“Then what seems to be the problem?” she asked, prim and superior finally starting to wake up and get a good look at him.
“That’s a thirty-light-year sphere,” Valentinian smiled back at her. “In a cube possibly five thousand light years across. With no idea how old the original of the map itself might be, so some of those stars may have drifted pretty hard since the map was laid down. Not much, but enough to not be a match, if I were to purchase that big of a nav database and then set my nav computer to crunching numbers for a month.”
“What’s at the center of the map?” she asked. He could see the first hints of intrigue in her eyes, a librarian with a mystery to solve and a lot of books handy.
“I have no idea,” Valentinian let his weight shift to one side. “Like I said, I won it in a poker game yesterday. Farmer kid wasn’t in a mood to talk, as the sheriff was in the process of arresting him and sending him somewhere else.”
“That was you?” she asked, suddenly acting like a person and not a dismissive schoolmarm.
“If you mean, was I the guy that the sheriff used to clean the kid out in a semi-crooked poker game? Then yeah,” he said. “Took all the kid’s money, and he lost this map on top of it.”
“So that’s what he was trying to do,” she said.
Valentinian looked at her curiously.
“Trouble maker,” she said with an anger directed elsewhere, relaxing so much that he thought she might slump out of the chair. “Big and dangerous looking, but extremely young. Laurentian, so I had to offer to help, but he was so secretive and positively rude. Would always hide the screen and curse at me.”
“Yup, that’s him,” Valentinian said. He pulled out the map and rested it next to the still-untouched money. “This.”
She opened it and studied the map for several seconds.
“You won this in a poker game?” she asked, disbelieving.
Valentinian could see the woman reevaluating him as she did. He wasn’t sure if he was moving up or down the scale, but he just needed her brains, not her undying love or resolute friendship. Any addition to his nav computers was going to be expensive. Buying more than one was an ugly cost to consider. Best to do this right the first time.
So he told her about the game. Explained the sheriff’s role. The stacked deck. That last hand. The raise over the top of the kid’s pile that brought out what might have been his most valuable possession, and the one that brought him to town from the farm.
“And you gave him two hundred Union Krodageni?” she asked, shock evident in her tone.
“Well, one hundred to get him off the station, mostly to protect me from having to look over my shoulder,” Valentinian corrected. “But yeah, the other hundred was because I’ve been there. He could at least eat for a month or six weeks if he was careful.”
“For a total stranger?” she asked, eyes boring in.
“I had already made more money playing poker that night than I expected in a place like this, so it wasn’t really my cash,” he said truthfully. “I’m even happy to bribe you with his money, so we can solve the mystery of the map.”
She paused and considered the bill sitting on the table.
“Okay,” she decided. “Let’s see what we can do here. Are you willing to let me scan it so I can run it through some systems?”
Valentinian considered that. It sounded like a perfectly reasonable request, but it also let the treasure out of his control, whatever it was. And he was feeling a little greedy, truth be told.
“How about you scan just this part?” he pointed. “Can I steal some tape and plas-paper?”
She handed him supplies, and Valentinian covered over the stack of numbers on the right side. Those were only useful once you found your target system, telling you where to actually go. Without them, nobody could get closer than the star system itself.
She scanned it and handed him back the map, which went into an inner pocket.
“Okay, let’s see,” she mused absently as she brought up the actual map and began letting some graphics program pull out the dots and vectors and translate them into relative grid coordinates.
She looked up, almost surprised to still find him standing there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Got a little too into the process. I’m Stephaneria.”
“Valentinian,” he smiled. “Guesstimate on how long this will take?”
“A couple of hours for the automation to pull everything out and run a few smoothing routines to get close on the estimated locations,” she sighed. “Then we can push it into a stellar repository system and ask for matches. I’m not sure how long that might take.”
“Is there anything I can do, besides be in your way?” Valentinian asked.
“Probably not,” she said. “It will be up to the computers to find anything, once I give it the parameters.”
“Okay, then can I take you out to dinner as a way of saying thank you for your help?” Valentinian asked. “It’s the kid’s money, and I feel like spending it around here if I can.”
“You’re already paying me,” her eyes got that look a woman’s did when they thought you were on the verge of getting a little too personal.
“That was for your expertise,” Valentinian let his own voice get a little sharp in response. “This is for your friendliness. I’m hoping to make this station something of a new base as my crew and I run cargo around. It would be pleasant to know some friendly people around here. You people can get a little insular around outsiders.”
“Oh,” she suddenly blushed. “I’m so sorry. I had thought-”
“I know what you thought, ma’am,” Valentinian interrupted that thought. Not that it hadn’t crossed his mind, but that wasn’t why he was here. She was a nice-looking woman, even if she might be his mother’s age. “I’d rather have friends around here.”
“Yes. Sorry,” she was utterly flustered now.
Did no man on this station have a librarian fetish? What was wrong with these people?
Before Valentinian could say anything, his card-reader beeped.
Dave.
Valentinian nodded to the woman and stepped back from the desk.
“What’s up?” Valentinian asked as he opened it and keyed in the radio channel.
“I think it would be a very good idea if you returned to the ship right this moment,” Dave said in a voice so utterly without emotion that Valentinian reached his other hand into his jacket to make sure the shock pistol was still there.
“Who just showed up?” Valentinian asked, making sure he had his map tucked away safely in a pocket and stepping backwards from the librarian as his flight or fight signals ramped up.
“Kyriaki Apokapes,” Dave said, like a trumpet announcing the end of the world. “She is not alone.”
Valentinian felt the bottom drop out of his soul, like a black hole pulling you down into eternity.
“I’ll be along,” Valentinian said. “Keep the ship locked up. Detach if you have to and come back for me later.”
“Seriously, Vee?” Dave asked.
“They want you more than they do me, Dave,” he replied, cutting the channel before the man could reply.
Stephaneria was looking at him with an odd mixture of humor and concern.
“Can I suddenly turn that dinner into a rain check?” he asked, backing another step away.
“Old girlfriend?” Stephaneria asked with a slight grin.
“It’s complicated,” Valentinian replied, hating himself for something so cliché being also so dead accurate. “She’s also one of the Dominion’s White Hats. The Internal Security Bureau. If someone comes here, my suggestion is you deny talking to me. Safer for you that way.”
“That bad?” she asked, more concern coming to the fore. “You just told someone to take your ship and run.”
“We’re outside of Dominion space, so they have no legal jurisdiction,” Valentinian said. He was clear to the door now. “And they know it. So anyone here has to be treated like a potential assassin instead.”
“What did you do?” she asked before she caught herself. She had a really pretty blush that made him reconsider some things.
“The right thing,” Valentinian finally answered over his shoulder as he opened the hatch and exited. “And they’ll never forgive me for it.”
6
Valentinian
He had made it about halfway to the ship when Valentinian’s sneakier instincts woke up and poked his conscious brain. It was an idea so utterly daft and diabolical that he laughed out loud in a mostly-empty corridor.
Hopefully, nobody noticed.
Valentinian paused long enough to pull out his card-reader and call up a map of the station. Good, it wasn’t that far out of his way. Hopefully, this would work.
Valentinian opened a channel to Dave as he started to jog down a side corridor.
“Where are you?” his first mate asked.
“In route,” Valentinian answered. “You locked up tight and safe?”
“For the moment,” Dave said. “Can you talk now?”
“In a corridor, heading to see if I can recruit some help,” Valentinian replied. “Do you know where she is?”
“No,” Dave admitted. “I paid a little extra to get the full data pull from the port authority on an automated basis, and then programmed some subroutines and set them to looking for certain names and locations, just so it would send us an alarm if it saw something.”
“You can do that?” Valentinian was so shocked that he stopped moving.
One, that it could be done, although thinking about it, all that data was public somewhere. He had just never needed something like that before. Still wasn’t used to thinking like a fugitive from justice. Or from an assassin, which was almost the same thing.
And Two, that Dave Hall was that facile with programming. The man had never suggested that sort of technical skill. Probably didn’t want to give away too much about his former life, after Valentinian had purposefully not wanted to know. But he could probably use that.
“Yeah,” Dave replied, with just a sniff of smugness that made it all the worse. The man could be a clown, when he wanted to be. “So I just got a flag that the Inspector was inbound, or had just docked. Not sure what the lag is between someone sending information in and it getting rebroadcast on the other circuit. How soon until you’re here?”
“Need to make a stop,” Valentinian said. “See a man about a horse. You keep everything locked down hard and I’ll call before I try to open the hatch.”
“Good enough,” Dave said.
Valentinian tried not to giggle as he started to jog again. This one was about as insane as anything he had ever done in a half-decade of some amazingly bad decisions that should have turned out so much worse than they had.
Playing longshots.
There. Hopefully the man likes me, and doesn’t just arrest me on general principles and hold me for her.
Valentinian opened the armored hatch and stepped into the station’s primary security office. There was a deputy behind a heavy counter, the kind of structure that looked like it would stop any small arms a mob might be able to lay hands on.
Fortunately, Valentinian recognized the man from yesterday. One of the spacers in disguise that had arrested the punk.
The man acknowledged him as well.
“Something I can help you with?” he asked in the breezy tone of an authority figure dealing with a stranger in town.
“Is the sheriff available?” Valentinian asked politely. “Want to ask the man for a favor.”
“Your name?” the deputy asked, nodding politely enough.
“Valentinian Tarasicodissa,” he replied. “Tell him the poker player is here. The other poker player.”
“Have a seat.”
Valentinian moved over to a corner and sat on a bench probably designed to be uncomfortable enough to prevent sleep while you waited. He didn’t fidget, or pull out his card-reader, but tried to work his way through any number of possible scenarios.
Not the least of which was how the hell that woman had managed to find them. He hadn’t run as fast as he could, once they had cleared Dominion space, but they hadn’t dawdled, either. She had to have set out on his trail almost immediately, and then slowly gained ground over the light centuries, only because he had slowed down, thinking he was safe.
