Hunt the Heavens: Book Two of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (20 page)

The second scoutship showed no sign of damage, and Wolfe opened the lock and entered. There was still air in the ship. As the inner lock cycled open he wrinkled his nose, smelling what he’d expected, an echo of the familiar sweet stench of an unburied corpse.

This man had died more quickly than the others. A blaster bolt had cut him almost in two. Over the years the body had decayed slowly, the ship’s conditioner system fighting against corruption: skin pulled tight against bone, ripped, tore. Fingernails, hair grew as flesh vanished. The corpse leered at Wolfe.

Wolfe went to the controls, touched sensors, and the panel came alive. He scanned it.

“Plenty of fuel … air … we’ll take this one back with us.”

He spun around in the chair. The two Al’ar stood on either side of the corpse, their eyeslits fixed on him.

“First,”
he said,
“is we get rid of
that
.”

Joshua found a thick plas tarp, rolled the remains into it, and the three lifted the tarp to the lock and cycled it out into space.

He found his lips moving in almost-forgotten phrases as the body orbited away aimlessly.

“Now, Joshua Wolfe,” Jadera said in Terran. “Tell us what happened.”

“It’s pretty obvious,” Wolfe said. “These scouts have four-man crews for most missions. Two men and one kills the other, three and it’s two against one, five is cost-ineffective.

“They send them out in three-ship elements.”

“Ah. There is one ship and one man missing.”

“This is what I think happened,” Joshua went on. “Possibly these scouts came on the Lumina craft by accident, although I find that almost impossible to believe. They’ve got good sensors, but space is pretty big the last time I checked.

“Maybe the Lumina ship radiated some kind of signal that could be received by someone, and they were just being curious as to the source of this signal. Or maybe they were following up on something Naval Intelligence picked up on one of the Al’ar homeworlds.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

“I do know that at least one member of the crew was Chitet — maybe the man that’s missing, although that’s not likely.

“They found the Lumina carrier ship, boarded it, saw the Lumina. The biggest goddamned jewel any man could believe. Somebody got greedy. I’d guess …”

Wolfe stopped, thought for a time.

“Jadera,” he asked slowly, “if someone, someone who had never been trained, concentrated on the Lumina, what would he
see
? Anything at all?”

“That is almost an impossible question to answer,”
the Al’ar Guardian said.
“But I can hazard a thought. If someone saw the Lumina as what you said, a jewel of inestimable value, and he gazed into it, the Lumina would most likely reflect what he brought to it.”

“Dreams of glory,” Wolfe said.

“This is so. I would imagine he would suddenly find his mind filled with all manner of possibilities.”

“So we have,” Wolfe went on, “our dreamer, whom the Lumina has just taken to the roof of the temple. So he arranges a conference on some pretext aboard one ship. One man — or woman — is left on each of the other two. Standard policy.

“Our villain arranges to be the last to arrive, waits until he knows everybody’s unsuited, then blows the lock safety and the inner door open.

“He goes to this ship, kills the man here, and then, or maybe later, shoots the man on the third ship and pitches him out the lock.

“At leisure, he tries to make sure he — or she — is going to be able to disappear, and destroys all the crew IDs and the ship’s log so, he hopes, nobody can know which of the twelve did it.

“Then he vacates for parts unknown, and fame and fortune, in the third ship with the Lumina.”

“Why did he not use the ship’s weapons to destroy the other two, and leave a completely clean trail?”

“I don’t know,” Wolfe said. “But I can make a pretty close guess.

“Murder doesn’t come as easy as people think it does. Especially the first time out. It scrambles the brain a trifle. I remember serving a bounty once on a woman who murdered her family for the death benefits and then forged their names on bank records after it was already known they were dead.

“Our friend managed to commit eleven murders successfully. Now he’s suddenly up to his bellybutton in gore. These were people who were his shipmates, maybe even his friends until a few hours ago.

“All he wants is out and away.”

“I do not understand all of your words,”
Jadera said.
“But it appears you are making sense.”

“I do,”
Taen said.
“He is.”

“So our man flees with the Lumina. What would he do with it? Sell it?” Wolfe asked.

“He might think of doing that,”
Jadera said.
“But it would certainly take a measure of time to do. Particularly if any of the details were known in the Federation. But more likely he would, especially if he spent some time considering the stone, thinking into it, and understanding what it was
telling
him, realize it could be used to get him far greater riches than just selling it could ever bring.”

“What could it give an unskilled man, one untrained in using a Lumina?” Joshua asked.

“It could give him certain insights, feelings that he could follow. What someone intended, what someone was really planning, really thinking. It is likely that a man who would think of killing, who did kill, would be encouraged by the Lumina to go in evil ways. It, of course, is unconstricted by human or Al’ar customs or laws.”

“So he’s gone to ground somewhere and is busy trying to become the Great Nefarious Something-Or-Other. I can think of a couple of ways to go looking for him,” Wolfe went on. “But first we’ve got to worry about the Chitet.

“I said before that I thought there was a Chitet mole — sorry for the slang, an agent — among the men and women on these ships. Some time between the discovery of the Lumina aboard the ship and the killings, he or she managed to dump a report off into N-space.

“The Chitet got that report. That’s what put them in motion, looking for anything resembling a Lumina or anything like an Al’ar, since they were specifically interested in the Mother Lumina.

“Now, if they believe this is the root of all Al’ar power … no wonder they’ve been getting a little testy lately.

“Next the Federation hears about all this activity, and it’s wandering around trying to figure out what the hell is going on. That’s why they came to me.”

“Yes,”
Jadera said.
“That makes uncommonly logical progression. So what we must do is find out more about this scout team so we are able to track the murderer and recover our Lumina. You said you knew of some ways.”

“I do. That’s why we’ll need this ship. It’ll give me a starting point — inside the Federation. I’ll start by — ”

A warning shrilled in his speaker.

It came from the
Serex.

“Jadera … our sensors report transmissions coming from the ship you are aboard, being broadcast into N-space.”

“Son of a bitch,” Joshua swore. “Somebody booby-trapped this goddamned thing.”

Taen and Jadera looked about, as if they would be able to see the source of the transmission.

Breathe … feel … reach out …

The Lumina was warm against Joshua’s skin.

He
saw
the vibrations their hurried questions made in the air,
felt
the waves the transmission from the Al’ar ship, and something else.

He pushed past the Al’ar and pulled the inner lock door open. He reached under the sill of the outer lock door and pulled out a black, soft cylinder about a foot long that had been worm-curled out of sight.

“Kill it!”
he ordered, and threw it on the deck.

Taen’s sidearm came out, and he touched the firing stud.

The air shattered with the blast as the bolt struck the transmitter, and the metal deck seared.

There was silence.

“Back to your ship, Jadera, Taen,” Wolfe ordered. “Somebody already found these ships and set a little alarm between the time you Al’ar came here and now. Maybe they were hoping the murderer’d come back to the scent. I’ll bet the bug was set by the Chitet.

“That transmitter’s shouting for backup, and I’ll bet it’s not far away. The Chitet have everything riding on this card.”

“What will you do?”
Jadera asked.

“They’ll want to track whoever was here. They can’t know about the Guardians. You two return to the planet. I’ll hang on here and give them something to chase.”

“You are being foolish,”
Jadera said.
“We can fight them with the
Serex.
”

“They’ll be coming in something big, too big for you. Goddammit, they’re buying battleships! Let them chase me around for a while. If I could run rings around your watchdogs in the war, I know I can play the fox with these sobersides.”

Jadera hesitated, then closed his faceplate.

“Come on, Taen,” Wolfe said. “I’ll get back as quickly as I can.”

“No,”
the Al’ar said.
“My life, my death, my doom are with you. I shall remain.”

Wolfe started to snarl something, then stopped.

After a moment, a smile came, went.

“You have my gratitude.
And it’s nice to have another damned fool around. Now get unsuited and strap in as best you can. I’ll try to figure out master pilot tactics in what time we’ve got left. Life’s going to get very interesting.”

Ten minutes after the
Serex
vanished into N-space, something shimmered on one of the scout ship’s screens.

Joshua didn’t need to key the Jane’s-ID sensor.

It was the sleek, mottled darkness of a monstrous battlecruiser, only light-seconds distant.

“Those goddamned Chitet have too much money — or know too many of the right people,” Wolfe swore.

“You know that ship?”

“Know of it. Class of three. Laid down during the war, never finished. It was designed to beat up most of your ships and outrun anything it couldn’t kill.

“Let’s see what kind of legs it’s got after we give ‘em something to think about.”

Wolfe touched sensors and felt the scoutship lurch as two missiles fired, jumped briefly into N-space, emerged and exploded.

Two miniature suns — solar flares — blossomed.

“Now if they’re blinded, they won’t know just where we’re going. I hope …”

Wolfe cut in the scout’s stardrive and sent it into hyperspace.

The familiar sensations came, were gone, and the ship was in another part of the galaxy.

Joshua keyed another jump location, and as he did space blurred and the Chitet warship appeared.

“Son of a bitch! He had time to get a tracer on us! I didn’t know beancounters made good E-warfare types.”

Again he touched the jump sensor, and again the scout went in, out of N-space.

Wolfe swung to another panel, opened the com net, set it to scan.

“Let’s see if anybody out there’s talking. Maybe we can find somebody to hide behind.”

There was nothing but the snarling static of the stars around them, then: “Unknown ship, Unknown ship, this is the Chitet Police Vessel
Udayana.
Please respond.”

“The hell with you, sweetheart,” Wolfe snarled.

“Unknown vessel, this is the
Udayana.
Be advised the pickup in your ship detected Al’ar speech. Stand by for a patch transmission.”

“What is this?”

“I guess their bug was better than I thought,” Wolfe said. “And now they’re getting cute.”

A new voice came over the com. “This is Chitet Authority Coordinator Dina Kur. I have been told there is an Al’ar aboard the vessel I am addressing. You are best advised to surrender immediately. We intend no harm, but rather a mutual sharing of knowledge.”

“Yes,”
Taen agreed.
“I share my knowledge of everything with them, and they share their knowledge of pain-causing with me.”

Wolfe looked at the Al’ar in some astonishment. “I think you just made a joke.”

“Impossible. You are deluded from the strain.”

“That’s twice.”

“You have the word of the Chitet government,” the com went on. “Here is a recorded message, intended for you, made by our Master Speaker.”

Another voice came: “This is Master Speaker Matteos Athelstan, addressing either Joshua Wolfe or a member of the Al’ar race. You have now been contacted by a high-ranking representative of our government and told that we wish to obtain certain data. We will guarantee both of you shelter from your Federation pursuers and sanctuary against any charges by the Federation.

“The Chitet are an old and honorable culture, and we wish to welcome you. Please do as the conveyor of this message instructs you.”

After a pause, Kur’s calm tenor came back. “That was our Master Speaker. You have five minutes to prepare to obey the commands of the vessel that is tracking you. This is the last option to avoid possible violence. Please use logic, and realize there is no benefit to be gained by further resistance.”

“Jump, One Who Fights From Shadows. There is no benefit to be gained from these people.”

Wolfe obeyed.

The next time they came out of N-space they saw the
Udayana
— and three other, smaller ships in a fingers formation.

Wolfe launched a missile, and two of the Chitet ships sent out countermissiles.

As he readied the controls for another jump, the
Udayana
launched. Wolfe slammed the jump button as the missile broke out of N-space and detonated.

The edge of the Shockwave caught them just as they entered hyperspace, and the scoutship rocked and tumbled in reality as well as their hyperspace-altered perceptions.

“The hounds are a little close,” Wolfe said. “I’m not as good a fox as I used to be.”