B00BFVOGUI EBOK (14 page)

Bridget shook her head as
Lopez-Herrera helped maneuver Gideon’s stretcher out of the auction hall. The
other members of the team didn’t know, but she had found Gideon in an Argentinean
prison, serving life for his behavior at a football riot. He hadn’t even known
what teams were playing, a fact that had given him a wider range of targets. In
eight months of confinement, he had brought the penal system to its knees. To
settle complaints lodged by her guards, Gideon’s final warden had agreed to
give him over to Quaestor for deportation off world.

It was a miracle that he’d
survived as long as he had. Bridget had only put him in charge of the second
team to make good on a threat two years earlier; she was trying to wake up a
third-class, inattentive squad. It had worked pretty well. She’d convinced him
to secretly agree to never order anyone else to do what he was going to do, but
his squad mates didn’t know that, and it had kept them on their toes ever
since. It was hard to resent getting a dangerous job when the squad leader was
taking all the rough assignments himself.
The
things I have to work with
, she thought.

And
now here’s another
,
she thought, seeing Jamie approach through the disarray. He had recovered his
briefcase, she saw, and was accompanied by one of the Leelites.

“We’re back in business,” Jamie
said, pointing back to the Q/A, who was kneeling next to a pair of large
dodecahedrons while another Leelite floated nearby. “Trovatelli brought in the spare knowglobe,
and Vremian here’s got us patched back into theirs so
we can talk.”

Bridget brightened as she heard
the auctioneer’s name. “I’m glad you made it,” she said. “But I’m sorry about
the others.”

Vremian shimmered. “I am too,” he said,
his voice again filtered and translated. “But this is why we always conduct our
business here in a short window, to avoid the jorvil.”

Bridget nodded. “If I can ask,
why didn’t you fly closer to the ground to get away from it?”

“Why,” the Leelite
said, “we were trying to keep it away from you. It may not have cared for the
taste of humans, but you weren’t having a good time of it when it was down
there thrashing around.” The creature expressed something that the knowglobe audibly interpreted as a sigh. “I know now that
it was the act of those scurrilous competitors of yours, those Xylanx, in firing at our hall that awakened the brute. This
kind of activity is simply unknown around here.”

Trovatelli stepped up, accompanied by the
other floating alien that had been helping her. “It looks like Jamie was right
about our squatters,” Trovatelli said.

“What?” Jamie gestured as if he
was adjusting his helmet’s audio volume. “Excuse me? Did someone say I was
right?”

“Yeah,” the Q/A
said, smirking.
Her expression didn’t last long. “These Xylanx are
definitely aliens,” she said, her tone serious. “Vremian’s
aide was just showing me some things on their knowglobe’s
monitor. The Leelites encountered them more than
sixty years before any humans went through the whirlibang.
That’s why they had a file on their language.”

“Sixty years?” Bridget asked.
“That means—”

“Yep,” Trovatelli
said. “Bipedal aliens. That pretty much settles it.”

It was almost too incredible for
Bridget to accept. For thirty-five years, humanity had been looking for
anything that looked remotely similar to itself. And
now they had not only encountered such a people, but fought with them?

“Who were they, Vremian?” she asked. “How come you haven’t shared anything
about them with anyone who’s come around?”

The hovering jellyfish seemed to
blush. “I’m…ashamed to say that nobody really ever comes around much anymore.
You’re the first bidders to arrive here since the last time the Xylanx appeared here. We’ve had no one to share the
knowledge with.”

Trovatelli interceded. “But who are they, Vremian? Your data over there doesn’t say much.”

“We don’t know much,” Vremian admitted. “Our encounters with anyone are
necessarily brief. And they shared almost nothing about themselves — as they did
this time.” His tone changed. “Did they really do all this just to steal your knowglobe?”

“It looks like it,” Bridget said.
“But I can’t understand why.”

Behind Trovatelli,
the Leelite who had assisted her chimed in. “Vremian, that sounds like the Luk’a.”

“Don’t be silly,” Vremian replied.

Trovatelli’s interest was piqued. “Wait. Who are the Luk’a?”

“The Luk’a
were another bipedal species like yours,” Vremian said. “Back even before my time. Forty thousand
years ago, it must have been.”

“They were thieves,” his aide
said.

“Don’t be unkind, Torquin.” Vremian’s shreds wriggled.
“It is true, though, that they had a poor grasp of how commerce worked.” He
gestured to the humans’ knowglobe. “I’ve instructed
my aide to provide you with all our information about the species we’ve
encountered. I don’t think we even have a language file on the Luk’a, but you can have what we do know on them — as well as
our files on the Xylanx. The next time you encounter
those reprehensible people, perhaps you can talk them into behaving better at
public events.”

Behind the
alien, light appeared from the doorway leading downstairs. Vremian
noticed it. “And now,” he said, “we can conclude our business.”

Bridget looked around the
devastated atrium. “What business?”

“Did you forget?” Vremian said. “The auction. In
fairness, I’m going to declare the Xylanx’s bids null
and void — so we’ll accept your opening amount. Congratulations.”

Jamie looked up. “Wait a minute.
Our opening bids on everything? Every lot?”

“And more,” Vremian
said. “Remember, we haven’t made any sales lately. There are quite a few
superconductor columns in stock. More than will fit on your ship, to be sure.”

Bridget and Jamie looked at each
other. “Is there time to send another transport back?” Jamie asked.

“If you’ll supply the forces to
guard against another jorvil rising—”

“Another jorvil?”
Jamie blurted.

Vremian seemed to shiver at the words. “Distasteful,
I know. But you seem to have the answer for them. I was going to say, if your
firm would be willing to put a trading post here with a garrison protecting us,
we could trade year round. And you would have the best terms in exchange, of
course.”

Jamie’s eyes seemed to bulge.
“Can we do that?” he asked Bridget.

“We do it all the time,” Bridget
said. “We can detach the bauxite ’boxes, encamp Surge Two here temporarily, and
send another transport back with permanent staff from the depot.”

“You really want to leave Gideon
here? The building’s still standing — barely.”

“You really want him to come back
with us?”

“Good point,” Jamie said.
Smiling, he turned and opened his briefcase before the Leelite.
“If we can just step into anything you have resembling an office…”

Indispensable
was a nub, now — a single bangbox transiting through the nonspace
between whirlibangs. The passenger segment would have
been the only piece of the ship the riders had access to in any event: vessels
were dismantled into components small enough to fit in the rings. But while
Indispensable
had arrived at Mu Cassiopieae as an unconnected chain of many units, it was
going back to the Dragon’s Depot as a singleton shuttle. The other units
remained back at Leel, along with Surge Two’s living
quarters.

For all his troubles in his
earlier flights, Jamie felt he was getting the hang of interstellar travel.
There wasn’t gravity in the vessel whether inside the whirlibang
or not, but he’d found a way to strap himself in so he could rest as he used to
at his trading desk — sprawled across the chair, with his back against the
armrest and his legs hanging over. If only he had his cowbell.

“This is starting to work out,”
Jamie said to Bridget, who was seated across from him and sipping from a food
packet. He went over the figures on his hand. “This Leel
contract is worth a lot — and it all goes to taking care of what we—”

“Of what
you
—” she interjected.

“Of what is
owed
,” Jamie said. “And there’s plenty of time until the end of the
quarter.”

“Not so much as you think,”
Bridget said. “Remember, while we’re in the whirlibang,
time outside is passing at a different rate. By the time we get back to Sigma Draconis, we’ll have just over seven weeks left. And how
much money do we need to make?”

“Tens of billions still,” Jamie
said. The air went out of him.

“I thought you knew the time
calculations by heart,” she said between sips. “Wasn’t it part of your job?”

“Yeah. But I was never the one doing
the traveling before.” He sighed.

The whirlibang
transit was a brief ride, but the flight from Leel to
the jumping-off point was long enough that the rest of the crew was sacked out,
with the exception of Trovatelli. Jamie had tried to
engage her in conversations several times, but she seemed intent on studying
the data she’d gotten from the Leelites.

“There’s a lot here we should
send home,” Trovatelli said, hovering nearby.

 Jamie liked what zero gee did to women’s
bodies. Her dark hair floated freely, and if he had never considered
upside-down to be a fetching pose before, now he was considering it. He watched
her brow furrow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Were you saying something?”

She growled, aggravated. “About the Xylanx. We’ve got to
alert the authorities back home.”

“We will,” Bridget said. “It’s
policy. All our encounter data gets uploaded to the knowglobe
of the next ’box going home. You know that.”

“I’m still very concerned,” Trovatelli said. “Particularly about this
Luk’a reference. Here’s this ancient
species — and yet the other Signatory races have told us precious little about
them. And they’re supposedly a bunch of interstellar thieves?”

“Thieves we know something
about,” Bridget said with a wink that Jamie easily saw. He groaned. “Get some
rest, Lissa. We’ll figure it out.”

Reluctantly, Trovatelli
returned forward and resumed her vigil over the knowglobe.
Jamie leaned toward Bridget and whispered. “She seems more intense.”

“New on the job, wants to do
well,” Bridget said. “And you’re really one to say when someone’s being
intense.”

Jamie gritted his teeth. “Will
you lay off me? I’m playing the game here, aren’t I?” He waved his hands in the
air. “And what was that ‘thief’ stuff?”

“Oh, right. Just because you got
us into all this trouble, putting the whole expedition at risk, why should we
pick on you?”

“I get it,” he said. “Kick me.
All of you do. But I’m here.”

 “Yes, you are.” Bridget crumpled the food bag
and stored it. She studied him. “Look, maybe it would be easier for us all to
accept you if we knew why you wanted all this money in the first place. I mean,
a hundred billion dollars—”

Jamie pointed his finger in the
air. “My cut was only forty.”

“Still!”

Jamie stared at her for a moment,
trying to decide whether to explain. “Okay,” he said, finally. “When did you
last live on Earth?”

“Seven years ago or so,” she
said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Jamie said,
scratching his head. “I forgot. You left after things got too hot after
Overland.”

“Yes, and thanks for bringing it
up. But you were saying?”

“Well, if you lived any time in
the US—”

“Canada, mostly,” she said.

“You would have known Senator
Keeler,” he finished.

“Elaine Keeler?” Bridget said.
Her eyes widened. “Yeah, I know her.” Her voice grew cold. “She was on the
Overland committee. She made my life a living hell.”

“Mine, too,” Jamie said. “She’s
my mother.”

Jamie was back in his favorite
bar again. Only he didn’t have the immerso goggles
on, and his bar was a kitchen — and Bridget was sitting in the accountant’s spot.
Norm would be horrified, Jamie thought, pouring her a drink.

They’d both changed to casual
clothes since arriving back aboard the Dragon’s Depot, and Bridget had
completely changed her treatment of him since his admission back aboard
Indispensable
. For the last hour, she’d
been positively human — and completely amazed at the story of his life.

“So what you’re telling me,” she
said, “is that you embezzled all this money so you can get rich and shove it in
your family’s faces?”

Jamie took another swig of his
drink. “Oh, not just my family. There are plenty of
other faces to consider. But the Keelers are right up
there in front.”

The Keelers
. He’d taken to thinking of them
just like that, as a collection, a species. For a century, they’d been the
power brokers of the southeast: Boca Brahmins with too much money and a sense
of noblesse oblige. Only their noblesse had
obliged
them to meddle in other people’s lives everywhere.

 US Transportation Secretary Jacob Keeler had
upended an industry, issuing the regulations requiring all Coandăcars
to be retrofitted onto existing auto chassis to conserve metal. Supreme Court
Justice Loren Swenk-Keeler had cast the deciding vote
prohibiting humans from interfacing cybernetically
with data systems. And European Union Vice-President Olivia Keeler had run the
commission that decided, ultimately, how the whole world would respond to the Regulan gestures at the dawn of the interstellar age.

The Keelers
had sided with no one political party in their sixty years of public life. Their
primary loyalty was to the family, and to the goal of making it richer and more
powerful. If they had not yet added president or prime minister to the family résumé,
it was only because it had served them better at the time to work from
someplace else in the system. They just liked messing with things to show they
could. If there had been a movement to legislate the spelling of ketchup as
catsup, a Keeler would have been somewhere nearby.

It was an old goat of a Keeler that
married his mother not long after Marty Sturm flipped out and went into space.
The aging senator had never adopted Jamie, nor made the slightest move to make
the boy feel welcome. After a few of his antics, Jamie was buried in boarding
school and forgotten. Elaine Sturm — Elaine
Keeler
— did
little to intervene, as Jamie saw it. By the time the old man finally kicked
off and his mother took over his senate seat, Jamie’s relationship with her was
as dead as the old man.

Jamie refilled his glass. “It
would take,” he said, “ten billion dollars to get a Keeler to recognize you as
a life-form. Twenty to really get their attention.”

“And forty billion?” she asked.

“Think thousand-dollar pants with
piss stains.” He clinked his glass against hers.
“Cheers.”

Bridget shook her head. “This is
just dizzying. Your family, these numbers?” She
chuckled. “I grew up in a town of three hundred people on the tundra.”

“Until my mother hauled you
before her committee and ran you off the planet.”

“Yeah,” Bridget said. She shook
her head. “I don’t care. They were going to find someone to hang.”

 “I guess we’re both refugees from Elaine.”

 She emptied her drink and set her glass down.
“Still, this is all crazy, Jamie. Jealousy? Sibling rivalry? This is not exactly what I was expecting
you were going to tell me.”

“What, you thought I was going to
open a children’s hospital with the money?” He shook his head. “Buy a few
billion boxes of Girl Scout Cookies? That’s not me.” He chuckled. “Unless doing so would annoy my family.”

Bridget smiled a little. She
started to say something when her earpiece beeped. Jamie watched her as she
listened.

“It’s Leo,” she said. “The high-grav suits are loaded for Xi Boötes,”
she said, getting up. “Yours too.”

Jamie looked back at her weakly. “Mine too?”

“Well, you’d better have one, or
you won’t be able to move there.”

“Xi Boötes,”
he said, groaning. “I don’t go to stars with umlauts. Sorry.”

She stowed her glass and walked
toward the exit. “I’ll see you at the loading tube.”

“Wait, wait,” Jamie said, head
buzzing. “Oh, so I share everything and you walk out?” He laughed. “Little town
in Canada is all I get?”

“Nothing to know,” she said,
shrugging.

“Oh, really?” He looked at her and smirked. “O’Herlihy told me you killed your boyfriend.”

She stopped in the doorway. “He
did?” she asked, her back to him.

“Yeah,” Jamie said. He stared at
her as she stood there in silence. “Wait. You mean he was serious?”

“We go in an hour,” she said.
“You’d better shower and change. And it’s better to throw up here than in zero
gee, if you’re going to.”

She closed the door.