The icarus job, p.3
The Icarus Job, page 3
part #3 of The Icarus Series Series
“Lest he be snatched and the secret wormed out of him?”
“Or lest he take that information to a higher bidder.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But Floyd’s always struck me as being the loyal type.”
“When he’s working for someone who deserves it.”
“There’s that,” I conceded. “So try this one. Let’s say it’s Trent, or Trent’s boss, who actually has the portal. In that scenario Cherno may be trying to hire us, not with the patently ridiculous story of wanting us to cart someone across the Spiral, but in hopes that we’ll find the portal and figure out how to steal it for him.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Selene said slowly. “But it also works just as well the other way. Trent has already said he wants to hire us for a hijacking. Could the plan be to steal Cherno’s portal?”
I shook my head. “Trent already has portal scent on him.”
“Maybe he’s got the other half of Cherno’s Gemini.”
I stared at the message still hovering on the StarrComm display. That one hadn’t even occurred to me. “Oh, now wouldn’t that be a treat and a half?” I murmured. “Cherno and Trent fighting over the same Gemini. Bonus amusement points if neither of them knows they have the two ends of the same portal. So why pick on us?”
“Floyd will have told Gaheen about Fidelio, who will have told Cherno,” Selene said.
“And Trent?”
“Maybe he has a spy in Gaheen’s organization.” She hesitated. “Or, as you suggested earlier, maybe he’s working with the Patth.”
I huffed out a sigh. “Would it really unbalance the universe for us to someday fall in with people who didn’t wish the worst for us?”
“Well, there is the Icarus Group.”
“Yeah. Like I said.” I stuck a data stick into the jack, copied Trent’s message, then blanked the screen. “Fine. Let’s get out of here, then call Floyd, then get back to the Ruth and grab whatever we’ll need for this little jaunt. I’m guessing we won’t be back for a while.”
* * *
The last time Selene and I had been given an upper-class ride it had been aboard the Odinn, Sub-Director Nask’s private Patth transport. It had been impressively luxurious, but given we’d been his prisoners at the time we didn’t get to see very much of the ship. Floyd’s yacht was smaller and not nearly as impressive, but at least here we had more or less the run of the place.
Except for the cockpit, of course. And the nav station, engine room, security stations, armory, Floyd’s private stateroom, and a couple of additional compartments that came with no specific designations but plenty of veiled warnings. But at least we could walk through the corridors and stretch our legs.
The food was good, too.
It was a nine-day flight, and for the last six hours of it Selene and I were confined to our stateroom with the viewports opaqued. We landed and emerged from the yacht to find ourselves on a single-pad landing field in the middle of a forest of blue-green conifers. We got to look around for only the couple of minutes it took to cover a hundred meters at a brisk walk before Floyd hustled us into a waiting four-person aircar. He got us settled in the back seat and climbed in beside the pilot, and as the repulsors lifted us off the ground he reached over to the control panel and opaqued all the windows except the windscreen. Given that the only thing Selene and I could see in that direction from our angle was sky, I was cleverly able to deduce that our destination world had a blue sky and occasional clouds. Apparently, Cherno didn’t want us getting even a hint of where we were or how we’d gotten here.
Given the unique value of his prize, I couldn’t really blame him.
The aircar ride lasted about an hour. We landed again, this time in a private hangar, Floyd waiting until the retractable roof had closed above us before escorting us to a van with the by-now-familiar opaqued windows. We started this final leg of the trip with the noises and stop-go pattern of city traffic, which faded into a quiet and steady drive after about fifteen minutes. Wherever we’d landed, we’d apparently been somewhere near the outskirts of town.
Of course, there was caution and there was paranoia, and in my private opinion this level of security had already overshot that line. There were dozens of habitable worlds out there, and so many different locales, climates, cultures, towns, and peoples on each of them that I’m pretty sure I could have stared out the window the whole way and still not had a clue as to where we were.
But it could have been worse. Floyd could have made us wear bags over our heads.
We came at last to the end of our journey in a windowless garage that had room for at least ten vans like ours, half again as many regular cars, or probably eight multi-passenger aircars. The place was empty except for our van—again, our host eliminating any clues as to where we were—and we were led through a door and up a short staircase to a large and nicely furnished ground-floor foyer. There we were met by three other bodyguard types, who gave Floyd respectful nods and Selene and me the quick once-over that men in their position learned in order to check for hidden weapons.
In this case, a waste of time. At Floyd’s insistence we’d left all our weapons aboard the Ruth before we boarded his yacht.
We passed the guards and Floyd herded us up to the next floor, this time via an elaborate open curved staircase that led to a balcony overlooking the floor we’d just left.
The wall behind the balcony had three doors. Floyd steered us to the middle one and knocked. There was a muted reply from inside, and he opened the door and gestured us through.
Inside, seated in one of the chairs of a conversation circle set beside a floor-to-ceiling window with a panoramic view of forests and distant snow-capped mountains, was Cherno.
I’d never seen any pictures, and Floyd hadn’t given us any descriptions. But even so there was no doubt in my mind as to who he was. Even seated comfortably in an overstuffed chair with a drink in his hand and a relaxed body language the look in his eyes was that of a calculating, ruthless, soulless predator.
Our former boss, Luko Varsi, had had much that same look. Mr. Gaheen, Varsi’s successor and Cherno’s boss, had a lot of the same cunning, though my single meeting with him had left me with the impression that he had at least a partial soul left.
As my father used to say, There’s a fine line between ambition and maniacal insatiability, and it’s frighteningly easy to cross that line without noticing.
Briefly, I wondered which side of the line Cherno was on.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Roarke; Ms. Selene,” he greeted us as we walked into the room. His voice was measured and urbane, as calculating and soulless as his eyes. “I’m Mr. Cherno. I trust you had a pleasant journey?”
“Quite pleasant,” I assured him. “Though air and car trips do get a bit tedious when all there is to look at are your fellow passengers.”
I’d wondered if the mild criticism would get any kind of pushback from him. But he merely gave me an easy smile. “I imagine so,” he agreed. “Though certainly Ms. Selene is easy enough on the eyes. I’m sure you understand the need for absolute secrecy in this matter.”
“Of course, sir,” I said, ducking my head in an abbreviated bow. Varsi would have been annoyed by my comment, possibly dangerously so, and would have made no effort to hide it. Cherno’s less irritated response put him at least a step above my former boss in the walking-on-eggs department.
Still, now that I’d performed my test, it was time to back off. Just because Cherno was less volatile than Varsi didn’t mean it would be safe for me to cross him. “Especially since those precautions will also have stymied any attempt to keep track of me personally.”
“Are there people trying to keep track of you?” Cherno asked, his smile slipping just a bit. “Aside from the obvious, of course?”
For a split second I considered asking him who he thought these mysterious stalkers were. But Floyd would have told him about McKell and Nask, and playing innocent at this point would probably be a bad idea, as well as being pointless. As my father used to say, Playing coy usually only works if you’re a large goldfish. “Aside from the obvious, not that I know of,” I said. “But one never knows when a new player is going to pop out of the woodwork.”
“Indeed one doesn’t,” Cherno agreed. He eyed me a moment, then gestured to two of the conversation circle chairs across from him. “Please.”
“Thank you.” I walked to one of the chairs, reflexively noting the various ventilation grilles and doing a quick evaluation of the room’s air flow. Neither of the seats he’d indicated would be ideal, but one was clearly situated better than the other. I picked the less useful one and let Selene settle into the other. Floyd, I noted, stayed back by the door where he could oversee the scene.
“So tell me, Mr. Roarke,” Cherno said as we settled into our seats. “How exactly did you get into all of this?”
“As Mr. Floyd may have told you, I used to be a bounty hunter,” I said. “When I lost my arm, Selene and I joined the Association of Planetary Trailblazers and have been crocketts ever since. As to the portals . . . ” I shrugged. “Actually, we fell into it mostly by accident.”
“Mostly?”
“Well, it was accident on our part, anyway,” I said. “But I’m sure your time is valuable, Mr. Cherno. Mr. Floyd’s thumbnail description of your proposal was quite intriguing. I’d like to hear more.”
“Certainly,” Cherno said. “You take my passenger where she needs to go, and the portal is yours.”
I waited a couple of heartbeats. Apparently, that was all he was prepared to say. “Understood,” I said. “Nice and succinct. Also pretty much what Mr. Floyd already told us on Xathru. I was hoping for a few more details.”
“Such as?”
“Such as who this passenger is,” I said, ticking off fingers. “Where she is now, where she needs to go, where the portal is, when we get possession of it.” I lowered my fingers. “And why us.”
He took a sip from his glass. “You’re an oddly curious sort, Mr. Roarke,” he said. “I’d think that one being so handsomely paid for his time and effort would be content to work within certain restrictions.”
“Ah, but you see, I’m not actually getting paid,” I pointed out. “It’s the people I’m working with who’ll get the portal. All Selene and I get out of this is, as you say, the chance to put in some time and a lot of effort. More importantly, I’d kind of like to know what the chances are that this project will involve us getting shot at.”
Cherno raised his eyebrows slightly. “Really? That’s your big concern?” His eyes flicked to Floyd. “Floyd didn’t mention that you were the squeamish type. How in the Spiral did you survive as a bounty hunter?”
“I almost didn’t,” I said, wincing a little as the ghost of that memory briefly overshadowed the room. “Which is the point. I don’t mind a little gunplay on occasion, but I like to know the odds of it going in. Especially since our recent history of taking on passengers hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing.”
“I see.” Cherno took another sip of his drink. “Very well. To your questions. I can’t as yet give you the name of your passenger, but she shouldn’t be a burden to you. I can definitely assure you no one’s likely to draw down on her. You’ll be picking her up on Balmoral; the drop-off point is as yet undetermined, and your colleagues will be able to take possession of the portal as soon as your part of the bargain is completed. As to why you, I believe Floyd already explained that you’re the only people who would be interested in such a trade.”
“So he did,” I said, the mental image of Nask and his presumably galactic-sized budget hovering in front of my eyes.
“As to where it is . . . ” He took one last sip and stood up. “Let’s go take a look.”
CHAPTER THREE
We left the office, Cherno in front, Floyd at the rear, Selene and me sandwiched between them. Cherno led us to an unobtrusive elevator discreetly tucked away in one of the hallways near his office. We went down an undisclosed distance to an underground tunnel, rather like the secret passage that led to Gaheen’s own mansion headquarters on Huihuang.
Back when we’d used that one, Floyd’s fellow enforcer Mottola had suggested that the tunnel might be a leftover from some previous owner, and that Gaheen might not even know about it. Now, with a second secret tunnel connected to a different local boss’s headquarters, I was beginning to wonder if whoever first started this organization had simply liked secret tunnels.
If so, he’d had a much bigger budget to work with on Huihuang than he had here. Instead of leading to a hidden entrance with an elaborate opening mechanism, this tunnel merely took us to a narrow flight of steps, up through a trapdoor, and into a huge, windowless, warehouse-sized building.
There, looming high over our heads, were the conjoined spheres of a Gemini portal.
The things were monstrously huge, bigger than anything I’d ever seen that wasn’t a space station, a Class X freighter, or a ground-side building. The larger sphere, the receiver module, was a good twenty meters across, while the smaller sphere, the launch module, was slightly smaller at fifteen meters and was attached to the receiver’s side like a mismatched cell starting to undergo mitosis. Five wide, thick bundles that looked rather like bales of hay nestled close to the sides of the spheres, which puzzled me until I realized they were the rolled-up ends of cargo straps that the portal was resting on, probably what Cherno had used to bring the portal here. The structure around us was just barely big enough to contain it, with no more than a couple of meters’ clearance around the ends of the portal and a slightly less claustrophobic ten meters on the end that housed our trapdoor. It was, I thought as Cherno led the way toward the portal, almost as if the place had been built specifically to house it.
In fact, it had. I peered down at the flooring as we walked and spotted the mismatch in the tile pattern. There’d once been a much smaller building here, possibly a panic room or a hangar for an emergency aircar, which had been torn down and this warehouse thing put up in its place.
“The hatch is over here,” Cherno said, leading the way toward the left side of the receiver module, where the edge of a dark rectangular opening was visible at the sphere’s curve. “So far only the portal’s gravitational field is operating.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “I presume you know how to turn it on?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. But I don’t think—”
Cherno stopped short and turned to face us. “Excuse me?” he asked, his voice suddenly gone very quiet.
I stopped, too, a dozen warning bells going off in the back of my mind. “I said we can’t activate it,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “But I’ve already been informed that my associates don’t need to see that it’s fully functional.”
“I don’t care if your bosses want to see it work,” Cherno said in that same voice. “I want to see it work.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, trying to kick my brain into gear. Floyd was somewhere behind us, but I couldn’t tell how close he was without turning to look.
Not that that mattered. He was armed, and I wasn’t. I had my handful of knockout pills in my left wrist’s secret compartment, but unless I could persuade Cherno to take high tea with us they weren’t going to be of any use.
Still, back when Floyd had first pitched this deal Selene hadn’t detected any deception from him. That suggested Cherno hadn’t shared any of these new plans with him. Did that put Floyd on our side?
Probably not. Just because Cherno was suddenly taking an unanticipated left-hand turn on this deal was no reason for Floyd to not stick by his boss.
“It’s not that we’re unwilling,” I continued earnestly, stalling for time. “It’s that we simply can’t.”
“Because it’s the wrong one,” Selene spoke up.
Long and sometimes painful experience had taught me to never show surprise unless it was part of the story or the plan. In this case, Selene’s statement was neither. What in hell’s name—?
“This portal is half of a dyad,” she continued. “What we call a Gemini. You can activate the pair together out of a dormant state, but only from the dominant one, the one called the master.” She gestured to the spheres filling the room. “This one’s the slave.”
“How do you know?” Cherno demanded suspiciously. “And why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“Because you didn’t tell us you wanted a demonstration,” I said, hoping I was picking up correctly on Selene’s play. Whatever it was. “You said you were going to trade this for passenger transport. It didn’t matter to our associates whether it was the master or the slave.”
For a long moment Cherno just stared at us, his eyes flicking between our faces. Once, his gaze went over my shoulder, presumably to Floyd. “Very convenient for them,” he growled at last.
“Not as convenient as you might think,” I said. “Now they’ll have to figure out where the master is and dig it out before they can do anything with this one.”
Cherno’s gaze went over my shoulder again. “Floyd?” he asked, the word a mix of question, demand, and accusation.
“I didn’t see their other portal being activated, sir,” Floyd said. “That was done before we arrived.”
“And you’re sure this is the slave?” Cherno demanded, shifting his glare back to me and ramping up the shrivel power.
“Very sure,” I said.
“There’s an easy way to tell if we go inside,” Selene offered. She looked at me. “The triangles.”
“Right,” I said, clamping down on my surprise for the second time in this same edgy minute. Her pupils were registering a tense agitation way beyond even the danger we were currently in the middle of. Something about the portal had figuratively kicked her in the teeth, and I had no idea what it was. “There’s a row of small triangles etched into the master portal’s status board between the oxygen readout and grav-status panels.”
“About midway from the hatch to the extension arm,” Selene added. “They’re . . . ” She broke off, waving her hands helplessly.
