Cat and Company (30 page)

She turned and ran as if her life was on the line, because it was.

* * * * *

Bedivere picked himself up out of the mud, swearing heavily.

“I could have told you she’d shoot first,” Brant said in his ear.

“Connell, she’s coming your way,” Bedivere said. He rubbed his chest under the shield. “I’m a few meters behind.” He started to run, too.

“A few?” Brant asked, dryly.

Bedivere ignored him. The more fun Brant was having, the more sarcastic he grew. Connell had managed to avoid picking up
that
trait. It was bad enough they looked alike, especially right now.

He concentrated on weaving his way among the damp workers making their way home from the mine head. The primary shift had just ended. As everyone in the colony was an employee or contractor for the company, that meant all seven thousand workers were either heading home or going to work for the next shift.

He battled his way upstream against them all, trying to keep the woman called Kasi in sight. He spotted her just ahead. She was making slow time, too. He at least had some height and could force his way through shielded bodies if he needed to. Kasi Salamanca was a slender woman and shorter than most.

Plus, she wasn’t thinking right now. Panic was driving her and she was making bad decisions, getting tripped up by mud and feet and trying to ram her way through, instead of sidling and turning and ducking, which would have been faster.

There were no side streets or alleys here. Every building was attached to every other building in two long rows lining the narrow street. Each building looked exactly like every other building, too. It was a depressing place and for the three days they had been scouting the mining town, Bedivere had been fighting off insistent flashes of memory and the cravings that came with it.

He had never been on Mehtap before. Connell had confirmed that. Yet, he had been in places just like this. Too many of them.

So he kept Kasi in sight but didn’t try to close the gap. That would frighten her even more. For now, he didn’t want her trying to turn and double back on him.

Just over a hundred meters later, she spotted a break in the flow of workers and dived into it, moving fast. Connell took two big strides and grabbed the back of her shield and yanked. The sudden halt almost took her off her feet.

Bedivere hurried to where she was struggling in Connell’s arms. He had an elbow around her throat, the only vulnerable point in the rainshield. He was holding her easily despite her struggles.

When she saw Bedivere she began to fight furiously, screaming her fear aloud. The sound was muffled against Connell’s arm.

No one stopped to help her. No one looked up from their slogging pace through the mud. Either they had seen this sort of thing far too often, or they just didn’t care. Possibly, both.

Bedivere lifted the injector and slid it over Connell’s arm, up against her neck and activated it.

She sagged, instantly unconscious.

“Done,” Bedivere said heavily. He met Connell’s eyes over the top of the woman’s graying head.

“I’m ready and waiting,” Brant said. “I just finished a scan. There isn’t anyone else within three kilometers of here. We’ll be completely alone.”

* * * * *

The abandoned outbuilding had once served the original open pit mining operation, until the chemicals the mining and refining processes belched into the atmosphere had turned the rain to acid, depleted the oxygen to miniscule levels and forced the mine under the surface. The coated metal of the building was impervious to the acid which meant the seals were still in place, although any equipment inside the building had long since been stripped out and reused somewhere else.

The room they were in had once housed generators and there were old marks and holes in the plasteel floor that showed where the equipment had been sited. The atmosphere in the room was stale but breathable, which let them remove the masks and the rainshields.

There was nothing in the room except dust. Brant had set up the security scanner on the floor. Next to that was a roll of tools, unrolled and spread for easy access. There were various pieces of equipment ranged behind the roll. Three floating mini-suns provided enough daylight to see.

Connell looked sick as he tied the woman’s hands behind her back, then rolled her over onto her back once more and sat her up. Her head lolled freely, the streaked gray hair hanging over her face.

“I warned you,” Bedivere told him.

Connell swallowed. “You did,” he agreed. “And now I understand what you were trying to tell me. It doesn’t change anything. We still need to do this. Ready?”

Bedivere looked at Brant.

Brant sighed. He didn’t look any happier than Connell. “Ready.”

Bedivere leaned down and injected the antidote to the sedative. The sedative wasn’t Darzi. He’d made sure of that, even though out here in this dark pocket of the galaxy, Darzi was easier to obtain than any legitimate drugs.

The woman came to with a jerk and instantly began struggling. Her feet kicked out, rumpling the padded sheet they’d put on the floor beneath her and she began screaming. The sound was muffled.

“There’s a choke on your vocal cords,” Bedivere told her, standing up. “Any sound you make louder than a soft conversational level will be cut off. Scream all you want. You’ll just make your throat raw for no reason.”

She stopped screaming. Instead, she thrashed on the pad, trying to tear her arms out of the ties.

“It’s a smart constraint,” Bedivere said. “It’ll get tighter the harder you struggle. You’ll quickly cut off the blood supply to your extremities and if you keep trying to struggle after that, gangrene will set in and we can’t help you recover your arms and legs at that point. No one can. You can stop struggling, though, and the constraints will loosen enough to let you feel your fingers and toes once more.”

She grew still and looked up at him. There were tears in her eyes and on her lined cheeks. Bedivere reminded himself of what this woman was and ignored the tears. “We are five kilometers away from Mehtap,” he told her. “No one is coming for you. No one cares. You already know that, don’t you?”

She swallowed. “What do you want?” She whispered it and the words emerged clearly through the choke.

“You know what I want, Akira Sala.”

She shrank into herself. “I am Kasi Salamanca.”

“Now, you are,” Bedivere agreed. “I don’t care what you are now. I only care about what you were once. You were Akira Sala and you were the chief biologist and therapist for Cadfael College on Darwin, before the college was stripped of its science and research capabilities.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bedivere crossed his arms. “Do you know who I am?”

She pressed her lips together. “A brutal man,” she said shortly.

“You’re lying about three different ways. You recognized me. You know who I am and you know why I am here. You knew all that the moment you saw me.”

She shrugged. “I thought you were dead.”

“You’ve been on the run and hiding for nearly a hundred years,” Bedivere told her. “In all that time, you haven’t been able to access legitimate longevity therapies because that requires DNA identification and you can’t afford to have your real identity embedded in a record, anywhere. So for ninety years, you have been living on the edges of civilization, using bootleg therapies and living on hope, only time is running out for you, Akira.”

“Why don’t you just starting hacking off my fingers and get this over with? I’m not going to say anything you want to hear. You’re not worth dying for.”

“You’re already dying,” he shot back.

Her eyes widened.

Bedivere nodded. “I know a woman who is a brilliant, self-taught therapist and I’ve picked up a lot over the years. I know how to use a diagnostic scanner and I know how to read it. You’re dying, Kasi. I think you know that or maybe you just suspect it. I’m confirming it for you. Cancer is spreading from your thyroid. They call it the plague of Mehtap here, I’ve heard. It’s into your lungs now, which is why you wheeze so much. The aches in your body aren’t just from old age. I think you have maybe six standard months, if you don’t get treatment…and you can’t get that sort of treatment out here.”

Her eyes rolled. “Let me guess. You’re going to take me to a nice, comfy clinic in the core worlds somewhere, so long as I spill my guts and tell you everything.”

“Something like that,” Bedivere agreed. “If you know who I am, you know that I have access to the datacore in a way few people have. I can disguise any traces your DNA might leave. No one will know who you are except the clinic staff. You can be anyone you want to be for everyone else.”

She swallowed again. “They’ll kill me. You have no idea who you’re up against, do you?”

“Tell me who that is,” Bedivere said. “I’ll protect you from them.”

She just smiled. “You don’t know.”

“I know who he is now,” he said.

Her smile faded.

“So do you,” he pressed. “You’ve stayed informed, even out here. Whispers and rumors…everyone talks about him so the news is easy to find.”

She shook her head. “If you know that, you know I can’t tell you anything. He’s everywhere, can see everything, knows everything. If I tell you
anything
, he’ll find me.”

Bedivere glanced at Brant and moved away.

Brant crouched in front of her. There was a silvered tool in his left hand, a pair of pincers that flashed in the overhead lights. He leaned on them to keep his balance, the blunt ends pushing against the dirty plasteel floor and shoved his hair back with a gesture that was identical to Connell’s. “You probably know who I am, too.”

She nodded.

“How much do you know?” he asked. “Do you know, for instance, that I was once an enforcer for the Ammonites?”

She stared at him, her eyes growing slightly wider. It was her only reaction.

Brant nodded as if she had confirmed his question. “You know about Staffers. You’re former College raised and trained. Kintav level, a step below the trinity of directors, so you would have been privy to the inside stuff, as the College pulled the Staffer strings for generations. None of that is secret anymore,” he added as her eyes widened almost comically. “Although you knew all along exactly what the Staffers did. You know we did more than suppress opposition. There was an intelligence cadre whose role was to track down dissidents and…deal with them.”

Akira sat very still. Her pulse was throbbing in her neck.

“Yes, I was one of that cadre,” Brant said, even though she had not spoken. He lifted the pincers and looked at them. “I used far more delicate equipment than this, but I can improvise.” He lowered the pincers. “Now, let me lay it out for you. I can work on you with my tools, here, and you will talk. Have no doubt about that. You will talk for me. I was very, very good at my job. In order to make you talk, I will have to hurt you in ways that will make your cancer feel like a minor headache. You will beg me to kill you, just to make it stop, but I won’t let it stop, not until you talk. And so you will talk.”

He paused.

Connell was standing behind the woman, where she could not see him. He shook his head in dismay and disgust.

The woman simply sat, watching Brant.

Brant smiled at her. “You’re already dying, Kasi. After I am done with you, you
will
die. You have a choice, now. You can tell Bedivere everything he wants to know before I start to work on you. You hold nothing back. In return, you will be taken to a clinic and cured of your ails and regenerated. Bedivere is one of the best hackers the Varkan have ever seen and he will find you a new identity, one that stands up to scrutiny. You’ll have a new life. A real life, not this codicil at the end of the world.”

Her tears flowed silently. “You don’t understand. He’ll find me anyway. No one is as careful as he is, not even him.” She jerked her toward Bedivere.

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a gamble, isn’t it?” Brant replied. “For sure, you will have a longer and more comfortable life if you speak now than you will if you do not.”

Her tears didn’t stop. “What do you want to know?” she whispered.

Brant got to his feet and moved away.

“The man called Devlin Woodward,” Bedivere said. “He’s Varkan, using a tether and a body that he stole from a man called Askatell Lanzo. You were the therapist who inserted Devlin into that body.”

She stared at him. Then she started to laugh. It was a soft sound, quickly gaining in volume, until the choke muffled the sound. She was still laughing, anyway, her body shaking with it.

“Hysteria,” Connell said softly. He reached for her.

“Wait,” Bedivere said, just as quietly.

Akira got herself under control by small degrees. Still shaking with her humor, she looked at up Bedivere. “You
really
don’t know! All this way you’ve come. You find me, you got this far along the trail and you still can’t see it! All this time, I thought that if anyone found me it would be through
him
! You don’t even know!”

“Don’t know what?” Bedivere demanded. “Who is Devlin Woodward?”

“The critical question!” She almost lost her balance because she was laughing so hard. Connell propped her back up and held her steady.

Bedivere glanced at Brant. His hands were clenched by his sides as he stared at the woman.

“Who is he?” Bedivere roared at her, over the top of her laughter.

“Oh dear…” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “Of course I know who you are, Bedivere X. I’ve been watching you ever since you found Interspace, long before he came to me and demanded I put him into the body he stole. Well, it wasn’t him, exactly, but I knew who he was, just the same. Only he had the ability to order Nephele around like that.” She shook with silent laughter again. “A Varkan
….
”

“
Nephele
?” Bedivere repeated.

Akira looked up at him again. “You poor little machine,” she said derisively. “Devlin Woodward isn’t Varkan. He’s human. A human inserted into another human body, to hide his real identity, so yes, he has the tether because he must have it to survive in that body, just as you do. And you can’t see what is shouting at you, yet, can you?”