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Luka laughed. “You know you live for petty office politics, Seshulla.”

“Bite me,” she said with mock irritability.

Luka laughed again. “I’ll accept her. She’s got the social skills of a cactus, but she’s a better driver than Velasco, and she’s definitely not stupid. She’s observant, too.” He described how she’d seen the mercs coming in the food court long before he would have, and how her early alert had given them time to watch the mercs interact with the informant.

“My one-eyed, deaf great-grandmother would have seen them before you did,” Zheer said. “That’s part of why I’m assigning you continuous detail for this case. Once you get focused on your work, a heavy hauler could crash into the building and you’d never notice.”

“Bite me,” said Luka.

Zheer laughed as she ended the call.

He wasn’t looking forward to a constant parade of company. He liked time alone, and he needed it when his talent muddled his thought processes. Velasco was barely tolerable, and Luka hadn’t been impressed with other Security Division employees Malamig had sent before.

On the other hand, spending more time with Morganthur wouldn’t be half bad. From what he had seen, her observational skills were on par with a scanning telepath. That night at the warehouse, she’d probably saved them from an uncomfortable night with the police, and after seeing her today, he suspected it might have been more than luck.

His hot mess of a talent went blessedly cool around her, and he had no idea why, but he wanted to find out. He made a mental note to ask Zheer to confirm that Morganthur’s security background check had actually been done. His experience with her so far said she was much more interesting than her record suggested.

* * * * *

In between avoiding the worst of Etonver’s inevitable traffic congestion areas, Mairwen berated herself all the way from the spaceport to the La Plata campus to return the company vehicle. She’d been firmly in the “do your job, nothing more” mindset from the moment she’d picked up Foxe, right up until her senses told her the mercs were converging. Or perhaps earlier, when she’d thought Foxe had been in some kind of trouble during his conversation with the woman called Green, and the distressed, almost haunted look was coming back to his face. In any case, Foxe had somehow read her when she’d sensed the threat and it was good they evaded what might have become a problem.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t stopped there.

From the bridge, when Foxe had said there were too many inconsistencies, she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to find out if he was right. She’d turned up her senses to listen to the conversation between Green and the merc leader. She was four years out of practice, and it had been a challenge to filter out the cacophony of light, sound, scent, and sensation, and to hear only the voices she was interested in. She’d gotten lucky with acoustics and the merc leader’s naturally resonant voice, or she’d have missed half of it.

Green explained to the merc leader that she’d signaled when it became clear that Foxe wasn’t biting, then Foxe had left abruptly for no reason she could tell. The merc leader asked where Foxe had gone, and Green shrugged. The merc leader told her and the other two mercs they were done for the day, and he’d report in.

Even then, Mairwen couldn’t leave well enough alone. After she’d gotten free of Foxe, she’d ghost-shadowed the merc leader through the port. Her blandly corporate clothes and the crowds made it low risk, she’d rationalized. She’d ruthlessly suppressed this part of herself for a long time, even made herself forget she knew how, so it was unsettling how easily it came back to her, and how good it felt. Still, she caught herself making small mistakes that might have cost her in a higher-risk hunt, such as not taking smaller reflective surfaces into account where he could have seen her if he’d been looking.

The merc leader ended up at a bank of pixcons. She didn’t know why he bothered with a secure connection when anyone nearby, even with normal senses, could overhear his side of the conversation, conducted in standard English, no less. Eavesdropping yielded nothing until the end, when he’d mentioned payment from Loyduk Pharma. The makers of the vaccine being stolen.

Her first impulse had been to tell Foxe, but her cautious, rational brain that had kept her well hidden the past four years crushed the idea immediately. She’d have to tell him how she got the information, and she couldn’t do that. Security guards who showed initiative or extraordinary skills got noticed, and that would be the first step in a trail that would inevitably lead to her exposure and death. Or if the universe was really malicious, her recapture and reconditioning.

Foxe would have to find the connection on his own. He probably would, anyway, as smart as he was. It would just take him longer.

Her day did not improve when she got back to La Plata. Malamig ordered her to report to his office the moment she arrived. She wasn’t used to having to interact with him, or anyone else, on a daily basis. She was very ready to return to the comfortable solitude of the graveyard shift.

He’d obviously had drinks with lunch, because the smell of garlic and grain-based alcohol was unavoidable, and he was seething, and his rural English Isles accent became more pronounced. He ordered her to sit.

“You’ve been assigned to Foxe as one of his security assistants for his ‘special project,’ by direct order of the company president.”

Clearly both Malamig and the universe were highly displeased with her. Malamig was likely feeling threatened by the loss of his authority, and she was a convenient target. The universe had no excuse.

He told her tersely that she and the others assisting Foxe were being assigned company vehicles and pre-authorized use of a company flitter, which not even Malamig had.

Mairwen didn’t want a special assignment or a vehicle; she wanted to be left alone. It was safer than being around Foxe and his sharp intellect and even sharper curiosity. Something of her reluctance must have broken through her usually neutral exterior.

“Is there a problem?” he asked, obviously hoping she’d give him an excuse to sandbag the Investigation Division.

She grasped for something he’d believe. “What about a contract?”

“If you want to renegotiate your contract, you’ll have to ask your new pal Foxe, because I’m sure as shit not doing it for you.” His upper lip twitched in disdain. “What’s this special project, anyway?”

She ignored his question. Malamig’s ignorance wasn’t her problem. By now, even the janitorial staff knew.

Her silence must have goaded him.

“You just don’t understand the concept of loyalty, do you?” he hissed. “When you need a new assignment from me after they dump you, you’ll be wishin’ you did. Are you really that stupid, or just a stubborn bitch?”

Mairwen assumed it was a rhetorical question and waited for him to say something pertinent. He dismissed her with a snarl.

While she was apprehensive about the visibility of working with Foxe, and the disturbing temptation he represented, at least he was vastly easier to put up with than Malamig, who’d grown considerably less tolerable in a very short time. She went in search of her new boss.

CHAPTER 4

* Planet: Gasprélodid Prime * GDAT 3237.028 *

H
ildree Fannar, whose comm card currently proclaimed her to be an independent security risk consultant, firmly told herself it wasn’t good business to kneecap the client’s representative. Even imbeciles like Tamanun Harado, Loyduk Pharma’s vice president of Market Assurance, which was corp-speak for their competitor spying and sabotage division. Other pharma companies she’d worked for had similar positions, though they usually had “strategy” or “intelligence” in the title, neither of which would ever apply to Harado. He’d made insane decisions from the start and gone downhill from then, so she was being paid very highly by Loyduk’s security director to take care of Harado’s “little problem.” Office politics sometimes created lucrative business opportunities for people in Hildree’s line of work.

Her own nice paycheck notwithstanding, Loyduk had a reputation of being stingy, and too many of Harado’s actions reflected it. Unfortunately, she’d been ordered to take direction from Harado, the instigator of all the troubles in the first place.

Now she sat attentively in the splashy top-floor-view suite and pasted a look of supportive interest on her face as he finished reading his report out loud, word for frecking word, with self-congratulatory asides as he went along. The same report he’d sent to corporate; the same report he knew she’d already read. His nasal, singsong tenor voice was grating, especially when he spoke Mandarin, and his delivery was that of someone reading to a dimwitted six-year-old. He finally got to the end of it and asked if she had any questions.

She was sorely tempted to ask why his parents had let him live and who he had blackmail trids on that allowed him to keep his job. Instead, she asked, “What was this ‘special operative’ you got from your silent partner supposed to do, exactly?” She decided to keep the conversation in English, though she spoke Mandarin fluently. She wanted the flexibility that could be blamed on translation errors.

She assumed the silent partner had connections to the chems and alterants blackmarket, although it was equally likely the government’s covert operations organization, the Citizen Protection Service, was involved. They had their fingers in a lot of pies, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. In her experience, the industry was a cutthroat, sleazy tangle of duplicity, corruption, and greed. Fortunately, it gave her many more options.

“Since
your
leaker had already vanished, we needed to give La Plata somewhere else to look besides Loyduk,” he said defensively. Hildree barely suppressed rolling her eyes. Based only on the fact that she’d discovered the leak in his organization, he’d been desperately trying to give her ownership of the missing employee and probable whistleblower who’d been the instigator of the whole mess. He tried for an affronted look. “It’s not my fault the operative didn’t sell it.”

“Of course not,” Hildree agreed in her best sympathetic tone. She wondered with sudden alarm if the delusional pinhead was thinking he could have done better “selling it,” and if she’d have to talk him out of personally playing spy. On the bright side, maybe it would get him killed.

When the theft crew reported the presence of “mercs” in the warehouse, Harado had panicked and ordered the “mercs” killed immediately—then panicked again when the victims turned out to be investigators from a respected security company—and had the crew set up the scene to look like a robbery. The kills had been sloppy, and the crew had forgotten to cleanse the comps and search one of the bodies, so it was a fuckup already.

Hildree didn’t blame the crew, who were professional thieves, not professional killers. She blamed Harado, who would no doubt see nothing wrong in asking plumbers to fix the electrical system while they were there, as long as it saved money.

Harado, as was his habit when his decisions went horribly wrong, tried to shift the blame, this time to the crew for overzealousness, and her for not giving him good advice. He was making a shambles of the whole project, and unfortunately, she was stuck with him.

Loyduk Pharma’s claim to fame was a group of ramper drugs, designed to improve human strength and reaction times, and highly popular with athletes and military personnel. Too bad they didn’t make smart pills for their executives.

She looked at her percomp and gave a show of surprise. “Oh my, look at the time. I’ll miss the ship if don’t get in the lane.” She stood and picked up her coat. “I’ll contact you once I’m on Rekoria.” For whatever reason, Rekoria, and specifically Etonver, had become the convergence for the project, so she’d manipulated Harado into ordering her to go there.

“Yes, you do that, and I’ll give you instructions.” Harado was back in delusion mode, imagining she wouldn’t make a move without him.

Letting the imbecile drone on had served the purpose of distracting him from giving her orders immediately, meaning she’d have more latitude to take more effective remedial action on her own. At least she now knew who La Plata’s new lead investigator was, and not to underestimate him. Fortunately, she’d already found a nice hook into La Plata’s organization, and planned to use it wisely. If she was lucky, she could neutralize the whistleblower and clean up the few loose ends before ever having to check in with Harado. He’d try to take credit, of course, but she’d make sure her client knew who was really responsible for the success.

CHAPTER 5

* Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.029 *

G
round traffic throughout Etonver was legendarily bad, and Luka counted himself lucky that the current traffic snarl was so far making them only thirty minutes late for the afternoon appointment with the independent testing lab Zheer had found. They couldn’t fly a flitter into the restricted medical district air space near the lab, so they were stuck dealing with the chaos on the streets.

He was glad he’d chosen to sit up front with Morganthur. He often lost his temper in traffic, and her imperturbability at the stop-and-go progress made it less annoying to him. Her light overcoat, in boring company gray, hid a navy corporate suit, identical in cut to the green one she’d worn to the spaceport. He had the impression she valued practicality over style. He wouldn’t call her peaceful to be around, because he was too intrigued by her, but she was somehow calming. She was also the quietest person he’d ever met.

“Morganthur, when they assigned you to me, did they tell you not to talk?”

“No.” Her voice sounded low and rusty, as if she didn’t use it much.

A ground skimmer that was weaving through the lanes came within centimeters of scraping their side panel, but she smoothly adjusted their position to narrowly avoid it.

“Good,” he told her. “I’d hate to inhibit your natural garrulousness.”

She glanced at him with a raised eyebrow and quirked a corner of her mouth in what may have been a smile, but said nothing.