Zero Flux, page 5
“Hey, outlander! Get up here, or lose your boss.” The man’s tone was more confident.
Luka liked his odds better if he stayed hidden, but Einar needed him. He owed the man for sheltering him all the times his father came home drunk and raging.
“I’m coming out,” shouted Luka.
He crawled back to the break and stood up slowly, half expecting to be shot.
CHAPTER 6
* Planet: Lumi Silta * GDAT 3240.350 *
The cave looked like a giant toddler had smashed her toys into pieces, leaving only a few standing pillars and smaller suspended icicles here and there. Luka could see the natural cave entrance up and to his right, and daylight gave the icy landscape a surreal look.
The area around the man was lit by a large flotilla of floating bright lights like Einar’s, only more compact. Einar was standing, using his ice wand as a staff to keep his weight off his injured leg. The man with the plasma rifle was huge, half a head taller than Einar, with iron gray hair and braided beard in the classic Lumi Siltan heritage style. His ice wand, one of the new collapsible versions, dangled from a ring holster on his wide utility belt.
“Come here,” ordered the man. He and Einar were standing in the middle of the path the man had carved with his ice wand. His technique had created ridges on either side, and its straightness was evidence that the man had tech that countered the twisted geomarker.
The footing to climb out of the tunnel and clamber over the ice to get to where the man stood was treacherous, and each time Luka stumbled, the plasma rifle pointed at Einar jerked in reaction. When Luka was about three meters away, he purposefully slipped, putting him hard on his ass but closer than the man should have allowed. The man might have superior tech, but he wasn’t combat trained. Luka wasn’t, either, but he’d picked up a few things from his partner. He stayed seated, looking as unthreatening as he could.
“Where’s your co-worker?”
Luka wished he knew. All he could do was continue to play for time. “No clue.”
“Call him.” He tapped the side of his face and glanced at Luka’s earwire. “Tell him who has the fökking plasma rifle.”
Luka shook his head. “No comms. There’s a suppressor around here.” He tilted his chin toward the tech scanner the man wore on his massive chest, which was turned off. “I’m surprised that worked at all.” Of course, his and Einar’s tactics had helped spoof it, too. He wished he’d known the man hadn’t been using it.
The man’s lips pinched as he clenched his jaw.
Suddenly, one of the small remaining icicles crashed down about forty meters away. The man snarled as he swung the rifle around and pulsed a beam, missing by a meter. He had fast reactions, especially for such a big man, but little skill. Luka caught a glimpse of what was probably flexin armor underneath the man’s storm shell jacket, and wondered if he wore leg armor as well. It hardly mattered, since neither he nor Einar had anything to shoot him with.
“It should have been too cold in here for the ice to fall.” He pointed the rifle down at Luka. “What did you do?”
“Investigated a crime scene.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Einar’s beard move, and realized he was subvocalizing, probably with Mairwen. Since Luka had already claimed he had no comms, he couldn’t turn his own back on. All he could do was keep the man from looking at Einar. Luka tilted his head to the west, where the frozen bodies were buried. “So the dead man fell, huh? Landed on a rock and broke his neck?”
The man’s eyes flicked up to the right briefly as he licked his lips. “Yes.”
Luka didn’t call him on the lie. “So who was the woman?”
“Which one?” the man snapped, sarcastically echoing Einar’s earlier question.
“The woman who was stabbed with a phase knife.” Luka shrugged, as if it made no difference to him. “I don’t think we’ll ever find out who the poor Jumper was.”
The man made a scornful noise. “Don’t waste your pity on her. She had enough KemX charges in her chest to blow up a city block. She was a walking bomb.”
“Interesting.” KemX was mostly used in mining and military operations, and Luka would bet good money the man wasn’t military. A mining engineer, perhaps.
Einar shifted his weight and hissed in pain. “My leg fökking hurts.” Einar’s stoicism was usually a point of pride, so he was up to something. “Can I sit?”
The man eyed Einar’s charred, torn pant leg and the blood-colored ice below his boot. He nodded and stepped back, watching Einar closely.
Einar made a show of wincing as he awkwardly sat on the ice next to Luka, placing his ice wand between them, which ended up close to Luka’s hand. Einar was focused on the plasma rifle.
“Samples,” the man said abruptly. He narrowed his eyes and frowned at Luka. “Where’s your equipment?”
“In the facility, I guess.” Luka curled his lip with a hint of disdain, remembering the look from a long-ago military supervisor who’d treated his civilian employees like lackeys. “Not my job to carry it.”
The man suddenly winced in pain and scraped at the side of his head where the earwire was. Einar threw himself sideways and flat. Luka rolled himself the opposite direction, taking Einar’s ice wand with him and fumbled for the switch.
A flash of blue streaked up from the tunnel that Einar had been caught in. The man saw it and triggered his rifle on continuous fire, trying to track it, but he was too slow.
Luka rolled up to one knee and sliced diagonally at the rifle’s focus ring with as much strength as he could muster. The rifle skewed off target, and as he’d hoped, the end of the rifle was cold enough for the ice wand to do some damage. The plasma beam went wide and fuzzy before it stopped.
The man roared and spun toward Luka, who was already staggering sideways on the slippery ice, trying to get over the path’s side ridge and not get shot. Even a weak plasma beam could kill.
Luka scrabbled over the ridge and turned over just in time to see the man being pelted in the face with ice pieces thrown by Einar as he half ran and half slid toward the hole in the tunnel where Luka had come from.
The big man roared again and turned away, planting his feet wide, and aimed the rifle. Suddenly, his head jerked as if he’d been hit in the jaw, then he bent forward at the waist. The rifle went flying up and away from him. Even as he started to react, a light gray figure with red boots was sliding on the ground between his legs, arms moving so fast, they were almost blurry.
Mairwen had found them.
She used her momentum to scissor her legs up into the air, in combat ballet, which pulled the man’s upper body down fast, face first, hard into the ice. She twisted in midair to land with both feet on his back and smacked the back of his head with his own collapsible ice wand, which had somehow gotten from the man’s belt into her hand.
The man groaned and tried to shake her off. She stomped her boot sharply on his shoulder blade and raised the wand again, but held off hitting him. “Vera inni,” she told him clearly in Icelandic, then repeated it in English. “Stay down.”
Luka was already stumbling over the broken ice toward the plasma rifle. From the thigh of her leggings, Mairwen pulled up a strip of brilliant orange flexitape she’d obviously taken from the forensic kit.
“Luka, help me tie his hands.”
Luka veered toward her immediately. She only asked for help if she was in trouble. He kept Einar’s ice wand at the ready as a bludgeon as he lifted one of the man’s arms up behind his back so she could bind it with the tape, then link it to the man’s other arm. Flexitape was removable from everything except itself, where it formed an unbreakable bond.
She was noticeably favoring her right shoulder, but otherwise looked undamaged as she bound the big man’s legs with another strip of tape.
Einar had picked himself up off the ice and limped toward them slowly. Luka handed Einar his ice wand, then retrieved the fallen plasma rifle and brought it back.
Einar looked at the man, then at Mairwen. He opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times, as if he couldn’t decide what to say. “You could have killed him,” he said finally. It was an observation, not an accusation.
“Yes,” agreed Mairwen as she stepped onto the carved ice path, off the big man’s back. He mumbled groggily.
Einar stared at her a long moment, then shook his head as he opened the tab covering the percomp on his wrist.
A splash of orange caught Luka’s eye, and he bent to picked up what turned out to be a mass of flexitape around something squarish and surprisingly heavy. It was probably what she’d used to deliver the opening punch against a man twice her size and mass.
“Where’s your coat?” Luka asked. If she wasn’t cold at that moment, she soon would be, even if she cranked the heated base layer to its highest temperature.
“The tunnel.” She pointed to the same tunnel Einar had been caught in. “Sorry about your cameras.”
She glanced up to where her bright blue outer shell was floating about four meters over their heads. She’d taped several of his forensic cameras to the shoulders to get it to fly, as a distraction. The adhesive had probably destroyed the optics.
“They’re replaceable.” He gave her a crooked smile. “We’re not.”
He glanced at Einar, who was subvocalizing and working his percomp, presumably checking in with whoever would be rescuing them. Luka handed Mairwen the damaged plasma rifle, then climbed into the tunnel with no grace, but at least he didn’t fall on his bruised butt. He retrieved her coat and storm pants, as well as the camera controller.
He took off his outer gloves so he could work the seals on the sides of the blue pants. He helped her step into them, then resealed them and connected them to her boots. He took the plasma rifle and collapsed ice wand from her and gave her the coat. He kept an eye on their prisoner while she put her coat on. As she did so, he noticed a number of pinpoint blood spots on the back of her base layer. He suspected she’d scraped her back when sliding on the ice between the big man’s legs. If he asked, she’d tell him she was “fine,” because she had a very elastic definition of that word. He promised himself they weren’t traveling again without their assistant, who also happened to be a healer that Mairwen trusted. As far as he knew, the only healer in the galaxy that Mairwen trusted.
Luka gave her the controller rather than try to figure out what she’d done to get the cameras to cooperate. She fiddled with it a bit, causing the floating blue storm shell to drift gently to the ground. He traded her the rifle for the controller, which he put in his pocket. He peeled the cameras off her shell and pocketed them, too, then helped her put the shell on, careful not to jostle her shoulder. He gently pulled the snow headgear up and over her head and carefully sealed it to her collar.
As he pulled his outer gloves back on, she quirked the corner of her mouth and patted the side of his face. “Comms.”
“Yes, ljósið mitt,” he murmured, as he turned his earwire back on. She was his light, in all things that mattered. “Do we need to retrieve anything else?” He tapped the inside of his wrist to indicate he meant her knives. He didn’t want other people asking questions if they found them, say, in the big man’s body.
She shook her head. “No, just the kit. I left it at the facility’s main entrance.”
They waited a few minutes in silence while Einar finished his conversation. Luka stamped his feet once or twice to keep his cold toes from falling asleep. The best boots on the planet never seemed to keep his feet warm. Mairwen stood quietly as she watched the big man at their feet, although she glanced in the direction of the large cave entrance once or twice. She was probably as ready to be on the next interstellar transit away from Lumi Silta as he was.
Einar cleared his throat. “The twisted geomarker was causing some trouble, but the navigation specialist finally cracked the code, so the custody transport should be here in an hour.” He gave Luka a challenging look. “In the meantime, Certified Master Investigator, care to guess who this big fellow is?” Einar nudged him with his ice wand.
“No,” said Luka flatly. He disliked being a dancing bear.
Einar started to speak as he looked at Mairwen. Whatever he saw in her expression caused him to close his mouth and look away. He looked hurt for a moment before he covered it with a frown.
Luka sighed and relented. “He might have planned to kill us, to protect his lucky find and whoever killed the woman, but he didn’t. He was just being thorough, because his fifteen-year plan is already complete. I’d start with a patent search, if I were you.”
He found himself fidgeting with the collapsible ice wand and stuffed it in his thigh pocket. “I have absolute zero interest in Lumi Silta politics, which is probably what’s ultimately behind all this. You can figure out the rest on your own. I’ll send you all the data from the crime scene, but our part here is done.”
CHAPTER 7
* Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3240.359 *
A warm shower after an outdoor run with Luka was one of life’s simple pleasures. Mairwen stepped onto the solardry and used her toe to turn it on. The quiet unit quickly evaporated the excess moisture on her body.
The brisk but sunny spring afternoon had made promises for the coming summer, and Luka was happiest when it was hot. He’d kept their living area and office below almost tropical for the last few days, ever since returning from frigid Lumi Silta.
Mairwen didn’t have any reference for childhood memories, since the Citizen Protection Service had completely erased hers when they’d forcibly recruited her for the tracker program, but she knew it had been hard on Luka to revisit his. He hadn’t said anything, but ever since, he’d been more likely to touch her affectionately, or at least be close, even in public. She didn’t know why, but she liked it. She ignored the whisper in her brain that said it made her vulnerable. She hadn’t needed to listen to it for a long time.
Her right shoulder socket twinged as she slid the last of her knives into the sheath at the back of her neck. If their assistant hadn’t already left for the day, she’d ask him to check it again. When she’d fallen down the mountainside in the snow on Lumi Silta, she’d dislocated her shoulder. She’d managed to reset it herself within minutes, knowing from experience she had to do it quickly or be impaired for days. After disabling the attacker’s flitter, she’d ignored the injury while climbing back up to the emergency tunnel, and using full tracker mode to run back through the facility and into Einar’s tunnels to look for him and Luka. When she’d heard the big man capture Einar, she’d retrieved the camera array to set up the diversion. Fortunately, the big man relied on his strength, not skill, and had been easy to subdue without further injuring her shoulder.
Once they were on the passenger ship leaving Lumi Silta, she’d relaxed enough to pay attention to her aches and pains, and her shoulder had bothered her the entire trip home. It had bothered Luka, too, because he somehow imagined it was his fault for taking her to his home planet in the first place. As if he could have stopped her from going with him.
She dressed quickly in comfortable knits and stopped in front of the bedroom mirror to run her fingers through her hair a few times to encourage it to finish drying. Its asymmetrical cut and style took advantage of her hair’s natural tendency to do whatever it wanted.
Since Luka wasn’t in the kitchen or in the exercise room, he was probably still downstairs in the office portion of their little building. He’d ignored message pings while they were out running, but theirs was still a new business, and they couldn’t afford to be unresponsive for long.
She found him in his tiny office, still wearing his running clothes, staring out the window. He looked lost in thought, except he wasn’t pacing. Her first impulse was to give him time alone, but perhaps that wasn’t what he needed. She dithered a few seconds more, then resolutely moved to his side and slid under the shelter of his arm as she wrapped hers around his waist. It felt right.
“I probably stink,” he said with a brief smile, then kissed her temple.
“You smell like you,” she said. The buttery pearwood scent of him curled up into her nose and tempted all her senses. “You smell like home.”
It must not have been an entirely stupid thing to say, because he smiled wider and squeezed her closer. “That’s nice.”
They stood in companionable silence, but Luka’s smile faded. “That last ping was from Einar Norðland.” There was a wealth of emotion behind his statement that she didn’t know how to interpret.
She waited while he gathered his thoughts. He didn’t talk about his feelings much more often than she did, though he was better at finding the words.
“Willum Heiðmundursson is dead.” That was the big man who had chased them in the ice cave. “They were transporting him via flitter to court, and somehow, he got out of the restraints and out the door. Before he died, he confessed to murdering both the woman and my father.”
Luka’s expression said he was skeptical. She trusted his talent and judgment that the big man was a thief, but not a murderer. She knew he wasn’t a fighter.
“Who was he protecting?” she asked.
“Einar thinks, but can’t prove, that it was Sivía Bjartmar, the sister of the dead woman. Willum left Sivía his entire estate, the bulk of which consists of some very interesting, very innovative patents for cybernetic technology, including the last one he filed three weeks ago. It was supposedly his hobby, since he was a construction engineer by trade.”
“Did she love him like he loved her?” Only love would explain the man’s willingness to die before betraying his accomplice.
“I think so, or she’d have simply stolen his find, instead of helping him cover up her sister’s death for fifteen years. Einar says they’ve been voting her family trust shares all this time, blocking the opening of the new continent. He thinks it’s politics and pure Bjartmar family greed, but I think Willum and Sivía were playing a long game, creating an unassailable chain of prior intellectual property for patenting the new power source that no other Bjartmar could touch. Sivía is known for resenting her family members.”
