Hard Bargain, page 7
Valentinian keyed the camera live in the airlock as the door continued to open. He silenced the alarms, and put a hand on Dave’s arm before the big guy could finish unbuckling his harness.
“Hang tight,” Valentinian said, keying a couple of commands he hadn’t told Dave about earlier.
In the wall, a little switch opened and cut power to the inner airlock hatch. Someone could still open it manually, by twisting the wheel that would push the inner hatch in, but they weren’t getting in quickly that way. And he and the killer next to him were armed.
“What just happened?” Dave asked.
“I added a breaker override to the power lines on all the airlocks after the last time someone tried this exact trick,” Valentinian said. “Except I was docked to a station at the time. He thought he’d be cute, but didn’t quite understand how Anuradhan tech works, so managed to lock himself out of the bridge when he thought he was unlocking the hatch instead. There’s a reason you see me with a shock pistol, even aboard the ship.”
“Firefight inside Longshot Hypothesis?” Dave asked.
Most of the time, Valentinian didn’t really like that look of glee that came into Dave’s eyes when they talked about gunfire. Now, however…
“Yup,” Valentinian answered him. “So there’s a second set of alarms on all the airlocks. And some overrides.”
“Can they still manage to get in?” Dave asked, almost hopeful from that gleam.
“Only manually, with the wheel, Dave,” Valentinian nodded.
“Fish in a bucket,” Dave smiled.
Valentinian shrugged and toggled some external cameras to try to see what was going on. The cockpit stuck out from the Y at the center of the ship, and that airlock was back a little ways, so he supposed that maybe one of them could push his nose up against the windshield and maybe see what was back there, but whoever it was had been trying to hide or they might already have been seen.
Probably thought they were still invisible, since the primary alarm hadn’t gone off.
He looked and sure enough there was an override in place on the system alarms. One he didn’t recognize, but Longshot Hypothesis did.
Like maybe the White Hats had insisted that all Dominion ships have a secret back door buried in their code base? Interesting.
Maybe he’d see if Dave was good enough to locate it, once they got rid of the pest.
Finally, Valentinian found a view that showed a single figure, suited up and lurking under the starboard wing, near where the landing gear pistoned down. Good spot to hide.
He would need to add a few more external cameras at the next planetary landing.
But there was only one figure.
And the door was fully open now, so the figure slid along the skin of the ship and got himself into the airlock professionally enough. Couple of buttons and the hatch began to seal itself up.
“How close are we to a warpbubble?” Dave asked.
He tapped the screen between them to show that Dominion-427 had backed away from the station and was in the process of turning around to give chase.
“Close enough,” Valentinian decided. They were just getting away from the station, so he didn’t need that accurate of a plot for the Overdrive systems. Just enough to miss big things at FTL speeds for the next few hours.
He punched the button and the stars suddenly streamed into lines as the warpbubble took hold and cast them across the galaxy.
Longshot Hypothesis, running for the border.
In his forward airlock, their new passenger had gotten the outer hatch locked shut and an atmosphere inflated. Valentinian switched his view to the interior and watched the figure reach up and open their faceplate enough to test the air.
Valentinian was in a bad mood.
“You’re trespassing,” he announced into the airlock, after dialing the volume on the speakers up a few notches, just in case the intruder wasn’t paying attention.
The intruder turned to face the inner hatch with his faceplate closed again and studied the barrier. He had a holster on his right thigh, with a weapon in it, but made no move to draw it.
Moments passed while the figure stood perfectly still. Valentinian couldn’t detect any radio transmissions, but they were inside a warpbubble right now, so his friends couldn’t help him anyway.
He surprised Valentinian by reaching up and undocking his helmet, rotating it enough to detach, then hanging it from the lanyard that kept suit and helmet together at times like this.
Oh, shit.
Inspector Apokapes.
“Is that…?” Dave asked, almost as shocked.
“Yup,” Valentinian replied.
He dialed the volume back down to normal conversation and keyed the button.
“What are you doing here, Inspector?” he asked.
She grimaced. The camera was good enough to watch, in spite of a slight fisheye.
“Saving your life, Dave’s life, and mine,” she replied in a flat, almost angry tone. “Permission to come aboard?”
10
Kyriaki
With a spacesuit fully inflated inside a regular atmosphere, the skin will frequently act like a drum. Kyriaki discovered that the hard way.
Her head was ringing with Valentinian’s words. At least he had turned it down the second time, or she might be facing an audio migraine later.
“Are you insane?” Valentinian asked, shock at war with anger in his voice.
“I can explain, but you need to get into warp right now,” she replied. “Otherwise, we’re all dead.”
“Three steps ahead of you, lady,” the captain snarled.
Good. His paranoia hadn’t deserted him. Maybe they could all survive this, at least long enough to sort it all out.
“Is Dave still with you?” she asked, finding the camera on the inner wall he was probably watching through.
There was a long pause. She attributed it to the comm being off and a conversation on the other side of the wall on her right.
“He is,” Valentinian was back. “What’s going on?”
“Dave, have you told him the truth yet?” Kyriaki asked in a hard voice.
Every second she was out here they were all at risk, but Valentinian could just kill her easy enough. Blow open the airlock in warpspace and it might suck her out and deposit her in the permanent darkness between stars, never to be found. She would become a frozen asteroid for some future archaeologist to discover. And none of this would be her problem anymore.
More silence. Longer this time. She could imagine the two men getting a little testy, but they might as well have it all out now, if they hadn’t before.
Too much was at risk if Valentinian still thought Dave was just a fugitive. Or an assassin.
“Hello, Kyriaki,” Dave’s voice came on the line. “Why is that important right now? What’s going on that puts you here and us there?”
“I rode out here on a Dominion Diplomatic Courier, Dave,” she said matter-of-factly. Dave didn’t need to know her opinion of several weeks with Athanasia. He probably shared them.
“And?” Dave asked.
“And the woman giving orders on that vessel went by the name of Athanasia, Dave,” she replied.
Again silence. Probably Dave explaining what that name meant to Valentinian.
Kyriaki considered putting her helmet back on, but what good would that do her? Dying in hours instead of minutes? She could always just pull one of those detonators out of a pouch and end it all right now. The airlock was probably going to be reinforced to the point that it would hold.
All she would accomplish was splattering her own blood all over the walls and making one of those men have to come clean it up.
She was going to have to live or die on their decision.
“Describe her,” Dave ordered in an angry, taut voice.
“Valentinian’s height, give or take,” Kyriaki replied. “Blond braid down to her kidneys. Broad shoulders and hips. Narrow waist. Shrill harpy of a woman. Said she knew you from the old days. Knew you rather well.”
“She did,” Dave said. “Stand by.”
More silence.
This airlock had the look of little use. Probably only ever got opened when the ship was on the ground and Valentinian didn’t feel like going out the main airlock aft.
Four suits of various sizes hung from racks and were locked in tight to their plugs. Three of them were simply skin suits, while the last one had the semi-plate, armored look of a cargo lifter. Valentinian’s size, so they hadn’t found one to fit Dave. Those would be hard to find. Probably have to custom order it.
The walls in her new prison were a cold, stark white, with lightbars on all eight sides of the octagonal tube. Why this one was octagonal instead of square made no sense to her, but this ship wasn’t Dominion tech. They might have had a logical design, those people. Or a cultural one.
Kyriaki wondered about the conversation those two men were having right now. She apparently still knew more than Valentinian did about who Dave Hall really was.
All she had to do was kill both men, so that the truth could never get out.
Easy, right?
That was why she had spent so much time on the flight out here trying to find an outcome that didn’t end up with either of them taken prisoner and subject to truth serum.
She’d be dead if they were. Plus, thoughts of Valentinian Tarasicodissa still haunted her in ways that set her body at war with itself. Killing him, as much as she might occasionally want to wipe that damned, smug smile off his face, wouldn’t fix that.
So she had to destroy her old life. And hope she could figure out how to create a new one. Something that no longer involved the burgundy and white that had defined her for the last decade.
Out of the frying pan…
“Inspector?” Dave’s voice intruded on her before she managed to squirrel in on that line of thought and get lost inside.
“Yes?” she asked as his voice trailed off.
“While we’d like to believe you, Valentinian still has some hard-held concerns, and I sort of agree with him,” Dave said.
“Okay?” Kyriaki said, expecting the outer door to open to space on her.
At least it would be swift.
“In order to let you aboard the ship, we’re going to need you to strip completely, and then we’re going to jettison your suit,” Dave said. “That way we’re comfortable you don’t have any weapons, and there is no tracking signal, even one you’re not aware of.”
She hadn’t considered that Athanasia might have put a beacon on her suit. In addition to the regular emergency transmitter she could have used had she blown up the bridge and perhaps killed the two men. Or at least Valentinian’s horse.
It made perfect sense. Without a beam weapon and surprise, she was probably no threat at all to Dave, and not much of one to someone as keyed up as Valentinian was going to be, at least until she convinced him she meant no harm.
What did she mean?
She still didn’t know that either, and that left her raw and a little angry.
Kyriaki shrugged at herself and began to unhook latches and seams. It would be a pain in the ass, doing this by herself, but they weren’t going to let her aboard the ship if she had a bomb hidden, which she did.
This took away all temptation to just kill them both and try to get her life back on track. Not that she ever would have. Letting Dave go on Tartarus had been the right thing to do. Nothing would change that. Even her second thoughts.
And she wasn’t going to lie to herself about her attraction to Valentinian. Not that she might ever tell the man, if he didn’t figure it out on his own.
Worst case, she could always walk away at their next landfall and steal someone’s identity herself, like Dave had done.
By the time she got out of the suit and all the plumbing bits detached, Kyriaki was shivering with cold. She told herself that was it.
Not emotions, no.
Not barely-controlled rage. Not embarrassment at meeting these two men completely nude, to be inspected like a side of meat and maybe disposed of just about as emotionally. Not fear at what the hell she had done, leaving both detonators in the suit, along with the pistol, and surrendering herself to two of the most wanted fugitives in the galaxy.
Not walking away from Kyriaki Apokapes, and never being able to look back.
Never going home again.
In the end, she supposed that put them on a level playing field. Dave Hall wasn’t even really Dave Hall. And Valentinian was going to go down in history as his accomplice, regardless of the actual truth.
The inner hatch began to beep. She stood before it proud, head up, shoulders back, daring the two men to say or do anything when they saw her, even if they had been watching the entire bizarre burlesque on a screen from the bridge.
Valentinian was standing close when the hatch cleared. Dave was clear across the room, watching, but not close enough she could do anything to him if she suddenly went berserk in the confines of the ship’s rec room.
She stepped across the line in the deck and came to rest in front of the captain, naked, cold, and angry.
“You’re insane. You know that, right?” Valentinian asked her with a curious, almost-grin.
He thrust a bundle into her hands and stepped back. It took her a moment to process. One of his T-shirts, plus a warm Henley and heavy ship’s pants. Clothing for her to wear.
The table was up, so she put everything on the surface and pulled the shirt on.
“So I have considered,” she finally replied as she pulled her head clear and reached for the pants. “This is not the logical response to the entire situation.”
“So why?” Valentinian asked. “Why did you let Dave go, knowing the truth on Tartarus? Why volunteer to board Longshot Hypothesis and most likely get killed? Or kill us? What is going on?”
The pants were just the right fit, but that was because he was taller than her, while she was all leg. In fact, everything fit, once she rolled up the sleeves of the Henley two turns.
Dave stepped away from the wall now, handing her a closed mug of something that smelled like coffee. Whatever, it was warm. She needed warmth right now, so she popped one of the seats up and took it, finally relaxing for the first time in nearly a day.
The coffee had been spiked with a little something. Rum, maybe. It settled into her stomach and started to break up the cold spot that had taken root.
“Because I knew the truth.” She finally looked up at Valentinian and nodded to Dave. “Not even you knew. But if they ever caught one of you, the truth serum would sign my death warrant, as well as yours. Every day was one more opportunity for someone to ask why I hadn’t arrested the two of you on Tartarus, since my mission had been to investigate your background and find out why I didn’t believe all the cover stories Dave had assembled.”
She turned to the quiet man, watched him smile down at her and take a seat across the table. Both he and Valentinian were still armed, but she didn’t care.
This might be what rebirth felt like.
“You assembled the most amazingly complicated shell game I have ever seen, Dave,” she told the man. “They would have been years before they finally unraveled it. My own superiors and Athanasia both told me that. I went and ruined it.”
“How?” Valentinian asked. “Why?”
“I wanted to get inside your head and wipe that smug grin off your face,” Kyriaki said to him quietly. “It had nothing to do with Dave, but the more I thought about you, the more the rest of the whole situation rang enough of a false note that I couldn’t let it go. After I learned the truth, I made sure the two of you got off-planet as soon as possible, and disappeared. I had planned to write the whole thing down as the ongoing feud between Cleray and Nash in my final report, but the Ambassador of Dominion Prime and Athanasia showed up the next day, maybe five hours after you lifted. From there, I had no maneuvering room.”
“So now what?” Valentinian asked carefully. “Dave explained to me who he used to be. And you apparently knew. And his wife, ex-wife, widow, something, is now chasing us across the galaxy.”
She was glad that both men missed some of the implications of that speech, or politely stepped past them. She couldn’t explain it any better to them than to herself.
“This is the only place I knew of in the entire galaxy where I might be safe, Valentinian,” Kyriaki looked hard at the man, willing herself to stillness. “Anyone else might turn me in to the authorities, and they’d put me to death. Same as they would you. I can’t go back to my previous life, any more than you two can. Like Dave, I need to find a fresh start.”
“Marvelous,” Valentinian finally took a third seat and more or less collapsed into it as she watched.
His face suddenly looked Dave’s age, drawn and pulled tight over the bones. Those arresting, blue-green eyes were filled with anger, perhaps fighting a touch of despair as she watched.
“Okay,” Valentinian finally sighed. “You’re here, and in this thing as deep as we are. And that woman won’t stop pursuing us, from what both of you have told me. I don’t trust you, Kyriaki. I’m not sure I’ll ever trust you, but Dave does. Tells me he owes you his life, maybe twice over, so I’m willing to accept that on face value and start with a clear deck right now.”
She watched him seem to run out of words. Kind of like she had.
This was what stepping off a cliff felt like, at least until you met water or rocks below. Or, possibly, impossibly, formed wings.
She sipped the spiked coffee and tried to not fidget. Her hands, she knew, were white on the sides of the mug, but it was a metal tough enough she wouldn’t leave dents in it, no matter how hard she squeezed right now. She needed that. Something that could hold up to the things in her mind.
“So what’s next?” she asked after the companionable silence had begun to stretch and pale.
Dave hadn’t moved, but no longer looked like he was measuring her for a shot to center-mass. Much as that might fix most of her problems.
Valentinian eyed her warily from under hooded brows that made him look like a magnificent hawk.
