Bring me the dead, p.1
Bring Me the Dead, page 1
焍
Bring Me the Dead
By Becky Black
Published by JMS Books LLC
Visit jms-books.com for more information.
Copyright 2023 Becky Black
ISBN 9781685505769
Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com
Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.
All rights reserved.
WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.
This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
* * * *
Bring Me the Dead
By Becky Black
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 1
“This makes me nervous,” Beau said, looking through the clear shell of the shuttlecraft. It skimmed only a few meters over a sea as green as moss. Everything but the engine housing at the rear was transparent. It was a useful craft for sightseeing. If you could get past the feeling you were about to plunge to your death.
“What, were you never in a glass-bottomed boat?” Marz asked him.
“Not the invisible floor,” he said. “I mean the fact we have no control over this thing.” There was nothing inside the craft except their chairs, also transparent, and themselves. No controls. Their course had been set at embarkation. Marz shrugged.
“Don’t complain—relax.” She leaned back in her seat, crossed one leg over the other, and folded her arms. The tails of her coat hung down at each side to brush the floor. Beau harrumphed but settled in his seat and tried to follow her advice.
In a moment they saw a blur on the horizon that quickly resolved into an island. If you could call it an island when it hovered several hundred meters above the sea’s surface. For a guy who owned a planet entirely covered in ocean, King seemed to prefer not touching the water.
The shuttle rose from its course not far above the waves as it approached the floating island. Soon they were looking down on it, and Beau could almost believe it was a normal island in the sea, not hovering over it. Ronald King had built it so he never had to experience bad weather when staying at what he called his weekend pad. If a storm blew up, he could float off to better weather. Meanwhile in the sea below, his robotic undersea trawlers harvested the fish that made him a fortune when exported back to Earth. But this piscine fortune was one of the more minor enterprises in the vast holdings of one of the richest men in the galaxy.
“Please remain seated,” a softly reassuring voice intoned from behind them. “This craft is now under remote-pilot control. Approaching landing area.”
A moment later they were settling gently onto a landing pad, a cushion of air holding the craft off the ground until a couple of workers adjusted protective pads under it to keep the transparent skin from being damaged.
“You may now disembark,” the voice said. Definitely artificial. Beau remembered it from his last visit, and every inflection had been exactly the same. “We hope you had a pleasant flight.”
A seam appeared in the skin of the craft, forming a rectangle, which slid aside, allowing them to step down out of the shuttle. A flunky came to greet them, smiling politely.
“Mr. Johnson, Ms. Jankowski, welcome back to Chu Rai Island. If you’ll follow me, Mr. King has instructed me to bring you to the solar.”
The solar was also made almost entirely of transparent walls. But at least the floor and furniture in it were more conventional. As they entered the room, the flunky took their coats.
“Ronnie,” Beau said, hurrying to greet the man rising from the couches near the panoramic windows, which looked out on ocean from one horizon to the next.
“Beau, you reprobate,” King said, grabbing his hand and pumping it. “And Marz.” He shook her hand with as much enthusiasm. “Wonderful to see you both. You haven’t met Lila, have you?”
Lila had followed him from the couches. A stunning woman, a good twenty years younger than King, with long honey-blonde hair, a face and figure some artist could become obsessed with, legs to die for. She wore a simple and elegant white dress—the fiendishly expensive type of simple Beau’s mother also excelled at—which set off her golden-brown tan. Beau had to remind himself that Ronnie King was a generous client and sort of a friend, and stopped himself from staring.
“My dear, this is Beau Johnson and Marzena Jankowski, who I told you about. Beau, Marz, my wife, Lila.”
“I read about the wedding,” Beau said after they all finished shaking hands and exchanging greetings and congratulations. King sent off the butler for refreshments and took Beau and Marz to the couches. “Kept it pretty low-key, didn’t you?”
King shrugged. “Just a few close friends and a band.”
Seven hundred close friends, a symphony orchestra, and a small artificial ice rink, from what Beau had read. All taking place in Rome’s Coliseum, which he’d rented for the occasion. But that was low-key compared to his first marriage. He’d rented Central Park for that. The whole park.
The butler came back with drinks—Long Island Iced Tea, Pimms, and other summery drinks. Lila offered around cigars at King’s request. As she bent to trim the end of Beau’s with a diamond-studded platinum cutter, he avoided looking down her dress. Marz took a cigar too. Lila snipped it for her and moved on, after bestowing a dazzling smile. Marz frowned. Beau knew she was more used to people staring at her, rather than smiling, being nearly six feet tall, with purple-streaked black hair falling almost to her waist. Her purple-tinted skin usually grabbed attention too.
After Lila trimmed Ronnie’s cigar, he caught her hand. “I’m going to talk some business with Beau and Marz,” he said. “Would you leave us to it, please?”
“Of course, dear. I’ll go and check on lunch.”
That was a polite fiction, Beau thought. King had a personal gourmet chef who traveled everywhere with him and didn’t need the new lady of the house checking up on anything. Lila left the room. When the door closed, Beau got comfortable in his seat and took the excellent cigar out of his mouth.
“You’ve got a job for us, then, Ronnie? One you wouldn’t give me any specifics about in your message.”
“I couldn’t risk any chance of interception,” King said. He leaned forward in his seat, voice dropping lower. Beau and Marz couldn’t help but imitate him and leaned in. “My investigators have turned up a lead I want you to follow up for me.”
“An artifact?” Marz asked.
“The artifact,” King said, voice almost a whisper. “The Eltique Enivakara.”
Beau barked out a laugh. “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie, come on. You’re a serious collector. You’re an expert on the empire. You know the Enivakara is a myth. It’s…the Holy Grail. It’s Excalibur. It’s not real.” He was genuinely surprised. Though King hadn’t studied the ancient Zalronic Empire at the Carver Academy and Institute, as Beau and Marz both had, he was pretty damn knowledgeable for a nonacademic. That he’d fall for something that was the equivalent of Helen of Troy’s brassiere was almost disappointing. “Look, we’ve got a lead too, on some very nice statuettes from the tenth Aftatar regime. Exactly the kind of thing you love. We could—”
Ronnie dismissed the statuettes with a wave of his hand. “I knew you’d say that. But the lead is solid. I’d like you two and Professor Reynolds to take a look at it at least, before you judge. I’m sure you’ll want to check it out.”
Beau took a few puffs on his cigar and glanced at Marz, who shrugged. “Ronnie, even if we found something, it’s probably not going to be what all the legends say it is. I mean…a device to communicate with the dead? We’re rational people, aren’t we? Y’all can’t believe that’s possible, surely?”
“I don’t know that it’s not.”
“Other artifacts that were supposed to perform…magic or miracles of some kind have been found,” Beau reminded him, “and they all turned out to be trickery. Miracles on demand.”
“I know all that. I’m prepared to take the chance. Even if that’s all it is, then it’s still the most sought-after and precious artifact in the empire. And probably the l
Left us was an odd way to put it, Beau thought. The Zalronic Empire had already fallen when humans were still learning to bang rocks together for fun and profit. They almost certainly didn’t give a thought to who might one day come and pick over the remains of an empire that had spanned several star systems, its ever-expanding population colonizing world after world, until something stopped it. Theories of plague and civil war abounded. But nobody knew for sure.
“Even if you don’t find it, I’ll pay you five hundred thousand credits just for looking. If you do find it, whether it’s what the legends claim or not, I’ll pay you ten million.”
Marz went still, unblinking, like a cat. A purple cat. She waited, poised.
“Ten million cash. Not shares or some such…” Beau nearly added bullshit, but this was a client.
“No, all hard currency you can take away in a bag and do what you like with.”
“God,” Marz muttered. “Ten million.”
Beau didn’t need money. He had plenty back home. His family, anyway. But the rest of the crew didn’t come from Louisiana founding families with old, blood-soaked fortunes. With a share of ten million credits, they’d be set up for life. But then again, there was no chance of finding this thing. It didn’t exist.
“Make the fee for looking seven-hundred-fifty thousand,” Marz said. Maybe she’d recovered from that ten million and was focusing better on the fact they wouldn’t find this thing, so should make sure the fee for looking was as good as they could get.
“Deal,” King said immediately. An extra two-hundred-fifty thousand was pocket change to him.
“Can we have a few minutes to discuss it?” Beau said, glancing at Marz.
“Sure,” King said. “I have to make some calls. Take as long as you need.”
* * * *
After he left, Beau nodded at the French doors through to the terrace, and they strolled out there. The wind snatched at their words but covered them too.
“That’s better,” Beau said. “Place is sure to be bristling with listening devices. Nobody becomes as rich as Ronnie King without some flexible ethical values and leverage over everyone he does business with.” They leaned on the parapet and looked down over the sea below.
“Speaking of ethics,” Marz said. “He wants to pay us to search for something we know doesn’t exist. If we take that gig, it could be considered a tad questionable ethically.”
“We’re taking the job to follow up the leads. When it’s a dead end, then we’re done. As long as we make it a definitive enough dead end that he’ll be satisfied we tried our best.”
“That’s worth three-quarters of a million?”
“That’s chump change to him.”
She nodded. Her long hair flapped in the breeze, and she pulled it out of her eyes. “Imagine if it was real, though.”
“Yeah…”
“I wonder what he’d do with it.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. You remember his first wife and their kid were killed in that accident?”
“That nobody believes was an accident, yeah, I know.”
The cops hadn’t found any evidence of sabotage of Mrs. Nerys King’s luxury personal shuttle, but the thing had been so burned up in the crash, along with the three people aboard—King’s wife and daughter and the pilot—that who knew what clues they’d missed? King was a powerful man, and powerful men had powerful enemies. Someone he’d beaten to a deal and whose business practices were less respectable than King’s?
“What if Ronnie wants to talk to his late wife and his kid? I did hear that after their deaths he had a couple of mediums try to contact them.”
Marz snorted.
“Yeah, I know. But he was devastated. According to what I heard from mutual friends, he was ready to give half his assets to anyone who brought him proof it was murder and the name of the one who ordered it.”
“Mutual friends, huh? You rich folks all know each other. I suppose he’s a fellow Bonesman.”
“No, he went to Stanford Business School. But I vaguely knew Nerys at Yale. I was thinking that Lila looks a lot like the way she did then.”
“Probably specified her that way,” Marz said.
“And he sent her out of the room before telling us about the mission. Can’t imagine the new wife being pleased about him wanting to talk to the first wife.”
“I doubt that would be a problem. Quick tweak solves that.”
Beau frowned at her and thought back to the remark about specification.
“What are you saying?”
“She’s an android,” Marz said.
“You’re kidding me.”
“These eyes don’t lie.” He saw a brief flash of silver as she deployed her ocular implants, then deactivated them. “Her body-heat readings are all wrong.”
“They can’t be legally married, then. I don’t know anywhere that would be legal.”
Marz shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The big wedding was all for show, I suppose. It’s not like she’ll be wanting to inherit his money or insisting on rights a human spouse would.”
Beau shuddered. Beautiful and perfectly human-looking as Lila was, he’d suddenly rather be done over with a bat than touch her.
* * * *
“Director Lindsay will see you now, Agent Park.”
Park Ki-tae stood up from his seat in the director’s outer office when the secretary spoke to him. He wiped his hands quickly on his pants, summoning his nerve and ordering himself to stay calm. Calm was normally Ki-tae’s default state of being, but he was excited today. He might be about to get the chance to make a dream come true.
He tapped at the door and went in at her invitation to enter.
“Director,” he said.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Agent. Take a seat.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He took the chair across the desk from her.
“You’ve put in a request for a crew and ship to travel to the Imperial sector.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve received intel from a reliable source that Ronald King has hired Beau Johnson again.”
She grimaced at both names. The Institute suspected King of having protected artifacts in his private collection, and everyone at the Carver Institute hated private collections that were never even loaned to the Institute for research or display.
“More artifact hunting?” She said it through gritted teeth. The main problem with private collectors was that they were all extremely rich and nigh on untouchable. Catching the treasure hunters who supplied them was usually the only way to regain artifacts that would otherwise have disappeared into private collections, hidden from the world.
“Something more interesting than the usual. He’s sent Johnson after a lead on the Enivakara.”
“What?” She laughed. “You’re kidding me. Are you hoping to catch him in possession of a handful of air? Because that’s all he’ll end with after he follows that lead.”
“I know, but if there’s a chance…”
“The Enivakara is a legend, Park. Hell, you wrote your master’s thesis on the legend. You know better than most how not real it is.”
“I know, but—”
“It also isn’t designated as protected.”
Indeed, why protect something nobody believes exists?
“I’m sure Mr. Johnson will pocket anything else he discovers on the way, before we ever get a chance to see it. The man is a criminal and a disgrace to the Institute.”
“I remember him as quite a charming young man,” she said, taking on the faraway look Ki-tae saw much too often on people not able to see past the charming facade of Beau Johnson to the unscrupulous and greedy man underneath. Not greedy for money—his family had plenty of that. No, he was greedy for the attention and fame that came to those who made important discoveries in the Imperial sector. An Institute archeologist who found an important artifact could be guaranteed a round of congratulatory applause the first time they came into any room at Carver after their return, but Beau Johnson wanted more than that. And to feed that craving for attention, he had turned down the job offer always extended to the valedictorian of the master’s class. That had then been offered to Ki-tae instead, leaving him forever second best to Johnson.
“Johnson is charming,” Ki-tae admitted. He’d certainly found him so after too many drinks at the gala dinner at that conference on Rigel 4. He derailed the train of thought leading him to that night before it could pick up speed.
