Assassins in Love
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover illustration by Aleta Rafton
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
Portions of this novel previously appeared in different form as the short stories “Defect” and “Drinking Games.” Both stories were published under the name Kristine Kathryn Rusch. “Defect” appeared in
The
New
Space
Opera
2
edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos, 2009. “Drinking Games” appeared in
Love
and
Rockets
edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes, Daw, 2010.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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For my husband, who inspires me
more than he will ever know
Chapter 1
Hands fumbling, fingers shaking, head aching, Rikki leaned one shoulder against the wall, blocking the view of the airlock controls from the corridor. Elio Testrial leaned against the wall at her feet. She hoped he looked drunk.
Things hadn’t gone as planned. Things never went as planned—she should have learned that a long time ago. But she kept thinking she’d get better with each job.
She completed each job. That was a victory, or at least, that felt like one right now.
The corridor was wide and relatively straight, like every other corridor on this stupid ship. Every floor looked like the last, which had caused problems earlier, and all were painted white, as if that was a design feature. She didn’t find it a design feature. In fact, it was a problem feature. Because any dirt showed, and blood, well, they said blood trailed for a reason. It did.
So far, though, she’d managed to avoid a blood trail. Of course, she’d thought about avoiding it, back when Testrial really was drunk. And because she thought about avoiding it, she had.
But there was no avoiding this damn airlock.
Her heart pounded, her breath came in short gasps. If she couldn’t get a deep lungful of air, her fingers would keep shaking, not that it made any difference.
Why weren’t spaceships built to a universal standard? Why couldn’t she just follow the same moves with every piece of equipment that had the same name? Instead, she had to study old specs, which were always wrong, and then she had to improvise, which was always dicey, and then she had to worry that somehow, with one little flick of a fingernail, she’d touch something which would set off an alarm, which would bring the security guards running.
High-end ships like this one always had security guards, and the damn guards always thought they were some kind of cop which, she supposed, in the vast emptiness that was space, they were.
Someone had fused the alarm to the computer control for the airlock doors, which meant that unless she could figure out a way to unfuse it, this stupid airlock was useless to her. Which meant she had to haul Testrial to yet another airlock on a different deck, one that wouldn’t be as private as this one, and it would be just her luck that the airlock controls one deck up (or one deck down) would be just as screwy as the controls on this deck.
She cursed. Next spaceport—the big kind with every damn thing in the universe plus a dozen other damn things she hadn’t even thought of—she would sign up for some kind of maintenance course, one that specialized in space cruisers, since she found herself on so many of them, or maybe even some university course in mechanics or design or systems analysis, so that she wouldn’t waste precious minutes trying to pry open something that didn’t want to get pried.
She cursed again, and then a third time for good measure, but the words weren’t helping. She poked at that little fused bit inside the control, and felt her fingernail rip, which caused her to suck in a breath—no curse words for that kind of pain, sharp and tiny, the kind that could cause her (if she were a little less cautious) to pull back and stick the offending nail inside her mouth.
She’d done that once, setting off a timer for an explosive device she’d been working on, and just managed to dive behind the blast shield (she estimated) fifteen seconds before the stupid thing blew.
So she had her little reflexes under control.
It was the big reflexes that worried her.
“Need help?” Male voice. Deep. Authoritative.
She didn’t jump. She didn’t even flinch. But she did freeze in place for a half second, which she knew was a giveaway, one of those moments little kids had when they got caught doing something wrong.
“I’m fine, thanks,” she said without turning around. No sense in letting him see her face.
“Your friend doesn’t look fine.” He had just a bit of an accent, something that told her Standard wasn’t his native language.
“He’s drunk,” she said.
“Looks dead to me,” he said.
She turned, assessing her options as she did. One knife. (People were afraid of knives, which was good. But knives were messy, hard to clean up the blood, which was bad.) Two laser pistols. (One tiny, against her ankle, hard to reach. The other on her hip, obvious, but laser blasts in a corridor—dangerous. They’d bounce off the walls, might hit her.) Fists. (Might break a bone, hands already shaking. Didn’t need the additional risk.)
Then stopped assessing when she saw him.
He wasn’t what she expected. Tall, white-blond hair, the kind that got noticed (funny, she hadn’t noticed him, but then there were two thousand passengers on this damn ship). Broad shoulders, strong bones—not a spacer then. Blue eyes with long lashes, like a girl’s almost, but he didn’t look girly, not with that aquiline nose and those high cheekbones. Thin lips twisted into a slight smile, a
knowing
smile, as if he understood what she was doing.
He wore gray pants and an ivory shirt without a single stain on it. No rings, no tattoos, no visible scars—and no uniform.
Not security, then. Or at least, not security that happened to be on duty.
“He’s drunk,” she said again, hoping Testrial’s face was turned slightly. She’d managed to close his eyes, but he had that pallor the newly dead sometimes acquired. Blood wasn’t flowing; it was pooling, and that leached all the color from his skin.
“So he’s drunk, and you’re messing with the airlock controls, because you want to get him, what? Some fresh air?” The man’s eyes twinkled.
He was disgustingly handsome, and he knew it. She hated men like that, and thought longingly of her knife. One slash across the cheek. That would teach him.
“Guess I’ve had a little too much to drink myself,” she said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” the man said as he approached her.
She reached for the knife, but he caught her wrist with one hand. He smelled faintly of sandalwood, and that, for some reason, made her breath catch.
He slammed the airlock controls with his free fist. The damn alarm went off and the first of the double doors opened.
“What the hell?” she snapped.
