Rebels and Lovers (8 page)

Except that Devin knew what he was looking for.

Dock Five was where he’d thought Trip would head, anyway, based on his previous conversations
with his nephew. Plus, if one wanted to get somewhere illegally, Dock Five—a convenient distance from the Calth and Stol borders—was the most logical port of embarkation in Baris.

Chances were good that whoever was trailing the Guthrie heir knew that too. All Devin could hope was that he and Barthol got to Trippy first.

“It appears accommodations might be a bit difficult to come by with the current trader embargo in effect,” Barthol said, glancing at his microcomp as they threaded through the crowd. “My first two hotel queries have come back negative.” Barty’s microcomp wasn’t a Rada like Devin’s but a military-issue DRECU. Given Barthol’s ImpSec background, Devin suspected Barthol’s microcomp might be as sophisticated as his own, but he could never remember what the acronym stood for other than Decode, Reception, and Covert.

Traveling by GGS transport that included the usual elegant cabins would have solved the lodging problem, but they hadn’t traveled by GGS transport. That was one of the many Guthrie rules already broken. Devin adjusted the weight of his duffel on his shoulder. Another Guthrie rule to fall by the wayside. He was carrying his own luggage, despite the fact that Barthol wasn’t happy about it. “If we find Trip quickly enough, that won’t matter.”

Barthol shot him a sideways glance. “Do you have any idea how large and convoluted Dock Five is?”

He’d looked over the schematics—and, yes, they were highly irregular—but not yet committed them to memory. “I know it ranges from six to ten levels, all coded by color. And it utilizes numbered corridors in an odd–even sequence. But it’s a station, essentially. How many places—”

“Dozens, Mr. Devin. And all are equally within play. Yes, I know you’re used to thinking city, region. A station’s contained environment seems more manageable. But consider Mr. Ethan’s twin girls chasing each other around the main living area of your parents’ estate, going in concentric circles—or, in this case, rectangles—each never quite catching up to the other. Then imagine that there’s a bank of elevators on either side, so that they’re now not only going in continuous rectangles but on different levels. That’s not unlike what we have here.”

A bark of laughter followed by a high-pitched squeal halted Devin’s response. He turned toward the sound and saw a squat, balding man and a taller woman with bright yellow hair leaning against an area of gray bulkheading next to what appeared to be a bar or dining establishment, judging from a flashing menu on the right of the doorway. The woman’s pink shirt dangled from her fingers; the man’s hands massaged her bare breasts. The woman giggled. Devin, embarrassed by the crude display, looked away.

“Nor can we,” Barthol continued, “expect assistance from the local authorities.”

The groping man wore brown pants with a stripe down the side and a gun belt. Those facts surfaced in Devin’s mind as he followed Barthol down the corridor. Security striper. No, the local authorities seemed to have their hands full.

“At the very least we need a hotel room,” Barthol said. “Someplace we can secure. When we find Master Trip, we may not be able to book passage back to Aldan immediately. I would not want to wander these corridors with him until transport becomes available.”

They’d be targets, likely more than they were now. Devin didn’t miss some of the appraising—as in,
your
clothing is worth far more than mine
—glances sent his way. He’d already pulled down the cuff of his sweater to cover his wristwatch. It wasn’t that he felt he couldn’t defend his person or his property. It was just that he didn’t want to be in a position where he had to do so.

A soft pinging sound came from Barthol’s DRECU. “Ah, good,” Barthol said after a moment. “We’ve acquired rooms. One level up on Blue. If memory serves me, there should be an escalator around the corner here … Well. Something of one.”

It was an escalator, Devin noted. Only it no longer moved, and more than a few stair treads were missing. People hurried up and down it anyway—human people and nonhuman people. Tall, furred Takans in grimy coveralls. Almost as tall bluish-skinned Stolorths in nondescript shipsuits.

GGS had been considering a trade deal with a respected Stolorth merchant clan as recently as four months ago. Devin exchanged messages with their senior financial officer. But he couldn’t remember the last time he was in the same vicinity as a live Stolorth—no, he could. He was twelve years old and felt distinctly queasy upon realizing the imposing woman’s neck was ringed with gills and her fingers connected with webbing. The fact that she was his aunt’s friend and colleague at the university did little to reassure him. When he was twelve, his aunt Pelagia—Dr. Pelagia Lang Javeiro, head of his family’s multisentient Harmony-One Project—had the ability to disconcert him too.

He’d thought he’d outgrown that. But as he approached Dock Five’s version of an escalator, a female Taka in dockworker’s coveralls leered down at him,
her thin smile revealing a row of sharp, pointed, and very stained teeth.

Devin tightened his grip on his duffel. Maybe not. “Lead the way,” he said, with far more enthusiasm than he felt.

What little enthusiasm he had left died when he saw the entrance to the hotel, which could easily be mistaken for a cargo bay, in Devin’s estimation. In fact, as he stood before it, inspecting the wide double doors and the triple-thick plating over which
The Celestian
was stenciled in three Imperial languages, it looked—and smelled in an oily, musty way—as if it had at one time been a cargo bay.

Wonderful.

An antigrav pallet loaded with small duro-hards blocked their way. The pallet was malfunctioning, a painful whirring noise coming from underneath as two human workers—dockworkers or hotel employees, Devin didn’t know—pushed and pulled on the pallet’s arched handles.

“Goddamned slag-headed piece of shit!” the taller worker rasped loudly.

“The primary differential regulator’s jammed,” Devin said, stepping closer, recognizing the pitch of an AG unit in distress. “It—”

“You here to fix it?” The frizzy-haired woman on the other side of the pallet barked out the question.

“No, but I—”

“Then get the hell out of the way.” She lifted her chin toward the man. “Sergey, push!”

“Mr. Devin.” Barthol touched his shoulder. “It’s probably best if you don’t—”

The high whine of laser fire interrupted Barthol’s words. Devin jerked around as a scream sounded somewhere behind him, back in the direction of the
escalator. A few people reversed course, heading for the commotion, but most kept walking away, intent on their own business and not interested in anyone else’s.

“Don’t,” Barthol repeated, his grip tightening on Devin’s shoulder.

Devin shrugged him off. Any commotion could potentially center on Trippy—or draw his nephew’s interest, just as it drew his own. “I’ll be right back.” He strode forward, breaking into a trot as a knot of stationers near the top of the escalator came into view. There were voices, hard shouts, and someone speaking rapidly in a clipped, odd-sounding language. A Stolorth male and two Takan women stood heads above the rest of the crowd, the Stolorth hanging back, the Takans—in dockworker brown coveralls—pressing forward.

Devin craned his neck, scanning the crowd, hoping to see his nephew’s dark head but also discerning the crowd’s focus. He didn’t see Trip, and almost everyone was glancing down. Except for a staggering, wrinkle-faced man who, as Devin watched, tried to slip his long fingers into the back pocket of a shorter man’s sagging coveralls.

The short guy spun. “Hey!” He grabbed the old man’s arm. A creased green wallet fell to the decking, and now there was a new commotion—new shouting, new shoving and pushing.

Devin sidled his way through the raucous crowd until he leaned against the metal railing overlooking the open area around the escalator. Two stripers stood on either side of the body of a red-haired woman who was sprawled facedown, her left arm bent at an angle human arms didn’t bend. A third striper was locking cuffs on another woman, whose short black hair held
a wide streak of white on the left. Both women were in what appeared to be black leathers—typical spacer attire. A battered cylindrical security servobot circled the scene’s perimeter about four feet off the decking, orange warning lights flashing around its middle.

“Looks like Nula finally caught up with Gudrin,” the man standing next to Devin told the woman on his left.

“Drugs or weapons?” the woman asked.

The man shrugged. “Probably both. Or could be gambling again. Nula’s done work for Orvis before.”

The woman said something low and harsh that Devin couldn’t hear, then the pair moved away.

Barthol took their place. “Any sign of Master Trip?”

Devin shook his head.

“Chances are good,” Barthol said, dropping his voice, “that whoever is after him will not chance a public confrontation. Master Trip is not like them.” He jerked his chin to the scene below. “People here know who belongs here and who doesn’t. In that lies one of our best chances of finding him.”

“We don’t belong here either.”

“In that lies one of our biggest problems.” He touched Devin’s arm. “We should return to the hotel now, before the price for accommodations climbs any higher. Or before that rather unsavory fellow leaning against the pylon—no, please don’t look—erroneously decides we’re easy marks and tries to relieve us of our duffels. I believe this area has had enough excitement for one day.”

Devin had a feeling the kind of excitement he’d just witnessed happened more than once a day on Dock Five. He followed Barthol. It was time to check Trip’s accounts again and try to pin down where his nephew
was accessing his money. That would mean hacking into the bank’s datagrids—something he’d never done.

But he had designed security programs to prevent exactly what it was he would attempt to do, so all he had to do was outsmart someone like himself. And pray that someone smarter than he was wasn’t watching.

As she moved around the edges of the crowd gathered at the escalator, Kaidee caught a glimpse of the morgue personnel in their light-blue biohaz suits, sealing the shiny black body bag around Gudrin’s corpse. A chill ran up her spine like a warning. She didn’t know Gudrin Vere personally, but she’d heard of the itinerant navigator—and her gambling problem—only because any mention of that kind of thing caught her attention these days. She didn’t know Nula either. At least, she didn’t know the name. Not everyone on Dock Five used their real name, though, and as the reported shooter was no longer on the scene, Kaidee didn’t know if her face might be familiar. But Kaidee heard enough in the conversations around her to note that Frinks’s and Orvis’s names were mentioned along with Gudrin’s and Nula’s.

That made her close her fingers around her L7 and quicken her pace past the crowd, including a pair of robed Englarian nuns whose heads were bowed in prayer—for the dead, she guessed with fair accuracy. The Englarians had been busy lately. Orvis was collecting his debts, and she could feel her name rapidly inching its way to the top of his list. It made her palms sweat and the back of her neck prickle.

And made her rethink the wisdom of trying to find Trip Guthrie. Being associated with Captain Makaiden
Griggs, ex-wife of Captain Kiler Griggs, might not be the safest option for him at the moment.

Better she get back to the
Rider
and see what else she could sell. A galley table and chairs, maybe. They were in decent condition and deck-locked with only a latch system, not bolted. She loved the small overstuffed couch in the captain’s cabin, but, hell, maybe she could get a few hundred for it.

After a quick check over her shoulder to be sure her Takan shadow wasn’t following, she cut down a side service alley. At its end was a set of lesser-used stairs that led to freighter docks two levels down on Orange.

Two human women in yellow shipsuits were leaning against the bulkhead by an open office door, talking and laughing. They glanced disinterestedly as she passed, their voices fading as a coverall-clad balding man and a wheezing AG pallet approached.

Kaidee sidestepped out of the way, her mind refusing to let go of the problem of Trip Guthrie. She could at least send his father a transmit that she’d seen the kid on dock. She still had Jonathan Guthrie’s office comm code. Devin Guthrie’s too—somewhere. If not, there was always the main GGS office comm code. She could leave a message—

A loud thud, then another, then a hard grunt slowed her steps. A fight in a cross corridor just before the stairwell, or another of Orvis’s henchmen doing his job? She palmed her L7, flicking it to low stun as more grunts and thuds echoed. She’d make a dash for the stairwell doorway but at least be able to counter anything that might come her way—without incurring a fine if she had to defend herself. Stripers let you off with a warning if you zapped someone with low stun. Full stun meant fines and jailtime.

If that’s Orvis, it might almost be worth it
.

She bolted through the intersection, skittering to a halt at the last moment—heart leaping to her throat—because she saw Trip Guthrie and he saw her. Just as he delivered one hell of a good punch to some bearded guy’s face.

Fuzz-face staggered back, slamming against the bulkhead. But Fuzz-face had a friend—big and bald—who even now reached for Trip’s shoulder.

She fired the L7.

“Trippy!” she called, as the guy next to him hit the decking like a bucket of bricks in max-G. Even low stun put you flat out, though not for long.

“Captain?” Trip’s blue eyes were wide in surprise. A thin trail of blood leaked from his nose. He swayed slightly.

She lunged the three steps it took to reach him, grabbed his wrist, and tugged. “This way!” Fuzz-face was straightening, shaking his head, reaching for a pistol holstered to his thigh. … But there was another sound coming closer. Boot steps. Stripers or backup, she didn’t know. Either was big trouble, and with a dazed, bleeding kid by her side, she didn’t want to wait around to find out.