On a Pale Ship Read online

  “Good. Glad we're avoiding awkward," Luc said, palming the credit panel and closing his tab. "Like I said. I'm not in a good place. I’m trying to work through some personal issues."

  “At your training partner's expense, it would appear.”

  Luc smiled, feeling embarrassed. “Cyril is a good friend with whom I should be more careful.”

  “What about Emilie Bastion?” Dorian Anino’s eyes narrowed, her pleasant face assessing Luc with hawkish focus.

  “Look. I don’t know what you know or what you think you know,” Luc said, taking his bokken from her as he stood abruptly from the table. “Lieutenant Emilie Bastion was my friend and I would do anything … give anything to have her back.”

  “Wait,” Dorian said, but Luc could barely hear her over the rushing in his ears.

  He fled the bar, leaving his gym bag at the table. He raced down the stairs, calling for an elevator as he half walked, half jogged to the center of the otherwise abandoned level.

  “You’re a runner?” Dorian Anino’s surprised voice echoed down the hall behind him, just as the elevator door began to open.

  Luc stepped into the car and turned, hoping he had sufficient time to escape. Unfortunately, Dorian was close enough to place one foot into the lift door. Deftly, she pivoted, her other leg swinging easily out through the slit in her long dress. The front-kick took almost no time to execute and he barely had the presence of mind to deflect it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Alternative interview technique.” Grunting, she regained her balance and spun, bringing an elbow back into his chin. This move he failed to block and stars formed in front of his eyes.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he chuffed, focusing on the muscles along her slim waist, the origin of all worthwhile strikes.

  “Good. I’m not a big fan of being hurt,” she mocked as she brought a fist in tight, punching at Luc’s ribs.

  Without thinking, he shifted the bokken in his hand and pushed it sideways, striking her on the wrist and causing the next punch to lose its force. Luc then brought the hilt up, but couldn’t bring himself to strike the elegant woman.

  “Please. Stop,” he begged, deflecting her next blow. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Answer my question then,” she responded, bringing her knee up.

  In the confined space, Luc had to resort to a subset of the sword skills available to him. Removing offensive strikes limited him even further. He’d always been a big believer in the fundamentals of defense, so he continued blocking and slipping away from the woman’s blows. In the corner of his mind, he wondered why the elevator hadn’t started moving, but pushed it aside.

  “You think I should have been more careful with Emilie?” he asked. The very mention of her name was painful.

  “Why are men so dense?” Dorian complained, while keeping up her offensive onslaught. “I know you’ve been looking into Sandlot Enterprises. Why else would you do that if you weren’t looking for Emilie Bastion?”

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Luc stopped resisting entirely and allowed Dorian’s next strike to land on his face. “No, I don’t,” he agreed, looking into her fierce brown eyes.

  “Good. Now, will you talk to me without running away?”

  “You want to talk about Emilie?”

  “Did you think I was trying to ask you out on another date?” she said. “We tried that. It didn't work.”

  Luc gave her a lopsided grin. “It worked a little. What about Emilie?”

  Dorian grinned back at him and nodded. “Perhaps we could go to my ship where it’s more private? My personal security devices are good, but as we speak, someone in Nuage intelligence is attempting to breach my privacy screen,” she said. “I could stop them, but then I’d have to admit I know they’re there.”

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Level 2, please,” she instructed.

  “Nice trick with the elevator, by the way,” he said. “I didn’t know it was possible to override them.”

  “Not difficult if your family owns the patents.”

  “Seriously?”

  She waggled her eyebrows, but didn’t answer. Luc noticed the lift didn’t stop at any of the forty floors on their way down.

  “What kind of ship?”

  “Corvette class,” she said. “Twenty-five meters. Custom built. I call her Little Deuce.”

  They exited the elevator and walked through an arched opening that was protected by a plasma pressure barrier onto a landing pad. The ship was long and wide, but not particularly tall. To the aft, a superstructure sat in front of four large engines. Forward of the superstructure were long twin hulls scooped toward the front and connected by a short bulkhead that ran along two-thirds of their length.

  “What’s with the pontoons?” Luc asked.

  “She’s designed for all environments,” Dorian replied. “As a Falcon pilot, you’d be disappointed. She utilizes gravity technology over airfoils while in atmosphere.”

  “Seafaring?”

  “That’s possible, but with the gravity lift, it’s more comfortable to float above the waves than it is to rest on them. No, she’s designed to be submerged up to a hundred meters or eleven hundred kilopascals of pressure.”

  Luc followed Dorian as she approached the ship. “Her lines are beautiful.”

  Dorian placed her hand on a hidden security panel and a hatch opened in the side of the ship beneath the squat superstructure. The brightly lit spotless passageway they entered was wide enough for one and a half people abreast and two and a half meters tall — comfortable by most standards. Following Dorian, Luc passed several slightly recessed hatches sculpted into the bulkheads on either side. It was a far cry from the sparse, industrial engineering he was used to.

  “Follow me,” she said, stopping atop a slightly discolored panel in the floor.

  Luc looked up and noticed the ceiling above was open. Before he could grasp the implications, Dorian gently leapt into the air and sailed to the deck above. Just before hitting the upper deck’s ceiling, she reached out and pushed off, deflecting herself away onto the lip of the second deck. She turned and looked down expectantly.

  Luc hadn’t realized he’d already lifted slightly from the passageway. When he tried to push off, he didn’t connect with the floor. He’d spent enough time in zero-g environments to recognize what was happening. Grabbing a handle on the wall, he pulled hard, causing him to glide upward.

  “Looked better when you did it,” he said.

  “Lots of practice,” she replied with a smile.

  They’d arrived at the back of the ship’s small bridge. There were a total of five seats in two rows. Closest to the back were three that fanned out to form a semi-circle with the two pilot's chairs closer to the forward bulkhead. A meter high, armored-glass screen wrapped around the entire seating area, giving all crew a good exterior view.

  Dorian walked to the portside forward chair and sat. The slit in her dress parted at the knee, revealing long shapely legs. Luc promptly looked away.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s gorgeous, but I’d be claustrophobic with the limited view,” he said.

  “Sit, my dear man,” she said softly. “You should never judge a woman by the limited amount you see.”

  Luc smiled, enjoying her playfulness, but no longer completely sure if she was talking about the ship or herself. He took the seat next to her.

  “Tactical view,” she ordered. No sooner had she said it, than the forward bulkhead became translucent and he had a full view of everything in front of him. For reference the AI generated wireframe outlines where the forward hulls fell below the horizon of the armor glass.

  “Amazing. Is she fast?”

  Dorian gave him a wry grin. “Surely you jest. I own an entire research and development company dedicated to starship manufacturing. Here’s a much better question. Would you like to take her out f
or a spin?”

  “Would I? It would be the perfect day,” he said.

  “Perfect day?”

  “Drinks with a friend. Flirted with and beaten by a beautiful, powerful, wealthy woman who happens to build starships for a living and …”

  “Beautiful?” Dorian asked, interrupting him before he could continue. "Oh, how I've missed you."

  “Yes. Ridiculously beautiful. And you offer to let me sail your one-of-a-kind, experimental Corvette. Hey, I get it.” Luc held up his hands in mock surrender. “There’s a big ask at the end of all this, but I haven’t had a lot of good days lately and I’m trying to learn how to go with the flow.”

  “Let’s get that big ask out of the way,” she said.

  “I kind of wish you wouldn’t. If I don’t like it, you might not let me sail Little Deuce here.”

  “We’ll go sailing either way,” she said. “I think I can make your day even better.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I believe Emilie Bastion is alive and I want to hire you to find her.”

  Chapter 5

  Killer

  System: Bethe Peierls, Planet: Vermeer, City: Fariza, Population: Eighteen Million

  "Let's grab coffee sometime," Katriona said, skipping away from Marek and slipping onto Fariza's public transportation. As with all things in the city, the unmanned vehicle was spotless.

  "Kat. We're not done here." Marek hustled after the tram as it rolled away, gaining speed.

  "I believe you know how to reach me," she called, smiling demurely as Marek gave up the chase.

  What was it about men who found the chase more interesting than the prize? Katriona wondered as she sat on the firm, brightly colored cushion. With Marek, she'd let her guard down more than she was comfortable with and now she felt the need to put distance between them.

  Laughter from a trio of business people grabbed her attention as the tram reached speed. She marveled at how uniform they looked in their crisp dark suits, white shirts, and perfectly groomed hair. Uninterested, she scanned the remainder of the compartment as was her long-standing habit. The only other passenger was a blonde teenager wearing a white and blue sundress. Next to her, a glossy shopping bag sat on the floor, ignored. The girl was animatedly engaged in a virtual conversation. The very audaciousness of someone so young riding unaccompanied on public transportation struck Katriona as lunacy, especially given that the girl had no sense of her surroundings. Such was the isolation of the fair citizens of Fariza, she thought. Only a few kilometers away, on a tram in the slums, the girl would last no more than a few minutes.

  From her position, Katriona could just see into the top of the girl's shopping bag. A blonde-haired doll, wearing a white and blue sun dress, poked its head just over the rim of the bag. Katriona’s grimace held a flash of annoyance at the girl's privileged lifestyle.

  Having assessed the danger to be low, Katriona leaned back and rested her head against the high back of the seat. A scant few minutes later, a ping sounded in her ears and she reopened her eyes, smiling in anticipation. Twenty thousand credits had been deposited across five aliased accounts in different banks.

  Part of her had never believed Marek would come through with the money, which was one reason she'd abandoned him in the hotel room. Forty thousand seemed a huge sum for the security lens she'd stolen. Katriona had completed much harder jobs for far smaller payouts. Until now, she had little left to show for all the hard work. A life of crime had turned out to be more expensive than she'd ever imagined — every job requiring bribes, equipment and new clothing. Of course, she also helped support her sister and niece, who happened to be about the same age as the little blonde girl sitting only a couple meters ahead of her.

  She sat forward in her chair as the train slowed, arriving at the next stop.

  "I'm here," the blonde teen announced to her virtual friends. She stood and picked up her bag from the tram's floor. Katriona tuned her out and stood in anticipation of the tram coming to a full stop. She stepped back, almost colliding with the girl who’d come up behind her and brushed Katriona’s back with a sharp elbow.

  The business woman caught Katriona's eye and shook her head, having observed the child's behavior. Katriona shrugged and allowed the young girl to go around, falling in behind her as they exited the tram. The child turned out to be an excellent plow through the small knot of people waiting to board.

  A thirty-meter-high wall separated the beautiful citizens of Fariza from the neighboring slums. The solid barrier sat atop a manmade hill and stretched as far as Katriona could see. The city’s engineers had painted the wall to resemble Vermeer’s sky and it did wonders to mask the crumbling infrastructure on the other side where seventy percent of the city’s population resided. What couldn’t be eradicated, however, was the smell. A mix of putrid odors enveloped her as she approached one of four portals between the two vastly different worlds.

  Unlike most people on the city side of the wall, Katriona welcomed the smells of the slum. For her, they represented the familiar — the safety of home. Certainly, the slums were more outwardly dangerous. In the wrong places, thugs and cutthroats would kill someone for little more than the clothes on their back. The outwardly perfect city behind her had its own dangers, only they were subtler and often accompanied by beautiful people with perfect smiles.

  Portal-3 was identical to the others. A ten-meter-square gate was cut from the wall that grew more massive as she approached. Nervously, her eyes flitted to the permanently mounted turrets pointed away from the city and into the slums. The message was clear; slum dwellers weren’t welcome in the city.

  She stopped while still a hundred meters from the small queue of people moving between the two radically different worlds. After donning dark glasses, she reached behind her head and pulled a thin cowl from the neckline of the simple black dress she wore. In the city, to hide your eyes or cover your head was to invite suspicion. No such social norm was recognized in the slums. Pulling at the hem of her dress, she extended it to mid-calf and ran a finger up the middle, splitting the dress open and completing its conversion to a cloak.

  While changing identities was expensive, it wasn't particularly difficult. Katriona continued her transformation by pulling on a pair of translucent gloves that melded into another set already in place over her skin, changing her palm and finger prints from the identity she'd used during the heist. Katriona grimaced as she ground the comm chip she’d been using beneath her heel, replacing it with the identity she'd used to move through the wall many times before. Finally, she pulled a slim pistol from her pack and placed it on her hip.

  With the same air of privilege as the girl on the train, Katriona approached the queue and promptly cut to the front of the line, stepping ahead of haggard workers returning from their manual-labor jobs. A murmur of annoyance rolled over the line, but quieted as a guard armed with a blaster rifle stepped forward and pushed people back, clearing a path for her approach.

  “You are to hold,” a surly looking guard commanded, stepping in front of Katriona.

  Her heart rate increased as she wondered if her activities of the day had been discovered.

  “Lady Almasev, such a pleasure.” An officer emerged from the barracks embedded in the structure of the wall. “Let her through, Schoffen. Don’t be an idiot.”

  The guard shook his head in disgust but stepped out of her way.

  “Lieutenant Diasev.” Katriona’s heart sank, but she smiled and called back as if responding to a life-long friend. “I hadn’t expected to see you on the wall today. How are the kids?”

  “Please join me. I won’t take but a moment of your time,” Diasev replied, closing the distance between them.

  “I really am in a bit of a hurry today,” she replied. “I have business inside, but I can’t afford to be stuck there.”

  “I insist.” Diasev smiled through clenched teeth and led her back to the barracks by her elbow.

  “Well, I’m sure I have a few minutes,”
Katriona said as he led her into a small office and closed the door behind them.

  “I’ve a mind to call Sec-Force right now. I checked your identity. Lady Almasev is a ninety-five-year-old widow and I would say you’re not a day over twenty-five,” he said.

  “Was it the five-hundred-credit chit I slipped to you last time I crossed that was your first clue?” Katriona asked. Her heart raced but she knew better than to show fear. “Or did you think that was a tip?”

  “Don’t get cute with me, Almasev, or whoever you are,” he said. “It’s my job to keep the city safe and not let your kind in.”

  “If that were true, you’d have already called Sec-Force,” she said. “I’ll assume this is a negotiation.”

  “You’re in no position to negotiate.”

  “No reason for this to turn ugly and you are right to be upset. I should have been more forthright. Let’s call it an occupational hazard,” Katriona said, smiling wanly. “Let me make it up to you.”

  Diasev stepped back and gave her an appraising look. “I imagine we could work something out.” He stepped forward, placed a hand on her backside, and pushed her onto the desk behind them.

  She managed to get a hand on his chest as he kissed her roughly. She allowed the mauling for a moment and then pushed him back. “No. Not like this,” she said firmly. “You want the good stuff, we do it right.”

  “Don’t play me the fool,” he said, pulling her hips to him. “I let you go, I’ll never see you again.”

  “What? Because you want a little … mutually enjoyable action instead of a payoff like the dickheads over at Portal-2? It sounds like an arrangement we could both grow to enjoy.” She emphasized the word grow as she brushed the front of his trousers.

  He tipped his head to the side, obviously not wanting to believe her. “You screw me on this, you’ll never get through the gates again. You know that, right?”