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Dramatis Personae

Lin’yi

The biggest problem with independent contractors was the fact that you could never guess how independent they actually were. Some of them would rely on you a lot. They stayed in continuous correspondence with the home office and never took an action without a clear idea of how they were getting paid for it. Lin’yi Wen found she far preferred these kinds of contractors to the alternative. Her current problem child, Malaki Skorkowski, rarely contacted her at all and when he did insisted on using an arcane series of code phrases that barely communicated anything.

Elisha Hammer fell into a comfortable middle ground. When one of her other contractors had gone missing Hammer had let her know as soon as he turned up the Wayfinder. He’d included enough details to imply there was another interested party and convinced Carter, the formerly missing man, to lay low at the local BTL branch office. The office manager’s report said Hammer was still there, keeping an eye on things. That made it easier to sit through the short trip back to Wireburn.

She intended to tip the Thieftaker very handsomely for his work and perhaps offer to put him on longterm retainer. BTL didn’t have an information gathering department so that was the best she could offer. However if that situation ever changed Hammer having a record of achievements would make it easier for her to justify offering him a position there. If such a thing could be arranged she stood to benefit a lot.

Malaki was giving her a blithe, unimpressed look. She realized he’d been watching her mull over these ideas for the last ten minutes as Lavanya worked to land the Skybreak. He looked like he’d read all her thoughts on her face and found them wanting. He often looked like that so maybe it meant nothing. But he also had a knack for working his way into other people’s heads so he might actually have guessed what she was thinking. That was what made him valuable.

“No, I’m not going to fire you for the Wireburn detective, Malaki.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” He turned his attention back to the piece of flexiplast he was folding into some kind of abstract shape. “Do you want me to listen to your talk with this Wayfinder? Or do you think it’s unrelated?”

“He’s not a geneticist on the side, if that’s what you’re asking.” Lin’yi pulled her dataveil down and started looking through the information coming up from the branch office. “There’s still no sign the Hutchinsons are engaged on this planet and we’ve been looking. But you invited yourself along so if you want to be a part of this conversation you’re more than welcome.”

“Much obliged.” Malaki’s fidgeting had produced a long tube and he stuck a finger in each end of it and pulled. Somehow the thing clung stubbornly to the digits.

She shook her head and ignored him and his toys, continuing to go through the updates until they made planetfall. It took longer than normal because they had to navigate the domes. The entirety of Wireburn’s major settlements were under some kind of flexible pressure dome made from the fibers of the giant vines they were anchored to. These were just one of the potential lines of commerce BTL was looking to exploit. It was slow going at the moment but most planets had large bodies of water that could use similar pressure domes and the gas giant had no shortage of the vines available. Lin’yi had several small labs running experiments with the dome polymers. The early results were promising.

The mechanisms for the pressure locks that separated the domes from the rest of the atmosphere were kept highly classified by the local governments. It was an understandable security concern but a frustrating one. Lin’yi found herself staring at them as they passed through, wondering what could be done to improve and miniaturize the huge constructs. There had to be a use for that, too. Possibilities bounced around in her mind as always but soon enough she had to set them aside as the Skybreak landed at the branch office’s private hanger.

Lin’yi headed down the gangway with Malaki as Lavanya locked down the ship and scheduled maintenance. The hanger’s six bays were half full and they were able to cut across several of the empty landing cradles to the entrance. As they were crossing the last empty berth she realized someone was waiting for them. Elisha Hammer was leaning against the wall beside the main door, half in the shadow of a stack of barrels containing enriched reef water and quietly smoking a cigarette. He dropped it and ground it out as they got within a half a dozen meters then came to meet them. “Miss Wen.”

“You look like you’ve had a rough time of it, Mr. Hammer.” Someone had applied a compress over the bridge of his nose and he seemed to be favoring his side a little.

“I’d like to say it’s nothing out of the ordinary but I don’t like lying to my clients.” He glanced around the hanger, his gaze slowing for a second or two as it swept over the various techs and pilots puttering around the ships in their landing cradles. “Do you think we could discuss this somewhere a little more private? Before we speak to Mr. Carter.”

“Of course. We can hijack the security room.”

Given how much cash moved through BTL’s hands on a given day there was always a need for a full security team in their offices, even if it was a branch office on a relatively backwater planet, and since most of that money was in cargo the security center wasn’t far from the hanger. It wasn’t necessary to empty the entire room, of course. Lin’yi just borrowed the shift leader’s small office. There was barely room in there for the three of them and the desk but they piled in and got comfortable. As soon as he sealed the door behind them, Hammer started talking.

“You case has two highly unusual aspects to it, Miss Wen. First, there was another player looking to locate Mr. Carter when I found him and, regretfully, I have no idea who they were or who they worked for.” Hammer leaned his back against the door and folded his arms in front of him. “I can tell you their heavy was formidable.”

“Is that what happened to…” Malaki made a meaningful gesture to his own nose.

“Yes. I’m not in the habit of loosing fistfights but the kinds of jobs I work tend to petty crime or crimes of passion so it happens now and again. This was different. Someone shelled out enough cash to bring in a made man of some sort.” Hammer flicked his long coat so it fell a bit further back and revealed the etheric lash coiled at his hip. “He wasn’t carrying one of these, I can tell you that. Graduated lethality was nowhere in his MO. He was ready to kill whoever he ran into, possibly up to and including Mr. Carter, and he wasn’t being shy about it.”

“Any idea who he was?”

Rather than answer Malaki’s question Hammer gave Lin’yi a curious look. “I assume since you didn’t leave him outside you want this guy here but… can I ask who he is?”

“He’s my chief meddler,” Lin’yi said. “I sick him on problems I can’t solve with people like you.”

“Yeah? He any good at it?”

Lin’yi made the galaxy’s universally recognized “so-so” gesture. “Did you have any idea who the person that broke your nose was?”

He rubbed the compress absently with his right thumb. “Bruised, not broke. And no, I’ve never seen him before nor does he fit the description of some of the professional back breaker’s I’ve heard about. His partner was also unfamiliar to me. I did stop to look at the car they came in but the transponder was on a rental frequency so not a whole lot to go on there. I might be able to weasel some info out of an agent I know at the spaceport but…” A helpless shrug. “That’s very hit and miss.”

“There was more than one person looking for Mr. Carter?” Malaki asked.

“Yeah. Mind you, I’m not sure they were a team but they definitely seemed coordinated and familiar with each other based on what I saw.”

Lin’yi hit a button on the desk to start recording what was said in the office. “Can you describe them?”

“He was a big guy with a pencil mustache and a strangely cut, olive colored overcoat. Very active, very capable. She was a shorter woman with short hair, wore a red coat and hat.”

“Blond hair?” Malaki asked. “Curly?”

“Yes on the color but straight hair, not curls.” Malaki clicked his tongue and Hammer snorted. “Not who you thought it was?”

“Probably not, although it’s easy to confirm,” Lin’yi said, pulling out a sheet of flexiplast and loading an image on it from the computer. She handed it to Hammer and raised an eyebrow.

He barely had to glance at it before he was shaking his head. “No, no, the face is all wrong. Besides, I’m not such a rube as to not recognize Athena Hutchinson if I met her on the street. She carried herself well from what I saw but her accent wasn’t anything I’ve heard before. It was… short. Clipped.”

“Would you know it if you heard it again?” Malaki asked.

“Probably. Hard to say for sure, since she barely said ten words, but it was a very distinctive sound.”

“Was she from off planet?”

Hammer laughed. “I don’t know who you are, pal, and until you said that I couldn’t have said with certainty whether you were or not. Wireburn’s a gas giant. It’s not exactly a small place, if you see what I mean. Ashland Prominence has a population of about a hundred million all on its own and there are about as many larger populations as there are smaller among the fifty settled Prominences. There are thousands of accents just on this planet. I don’t know them all. No one could.”

Malaki nodded, looking a bit chagrined. “My apologies. So you have no idea whether either of the people you met were from Wireburn or off planet.”

“Oh, the man wasn’t from here or, if he was born in the Helium Seas he’s spent months elsewhere recently. He had a tan.”

“You don’t get a lot of direct sunlight down here, do you?” Lin’yi murmured, her gaze instinctively flicking towards the ceiling. “Not much to go on if we wanted to know where he was from but still a thing to keep in mind. Still, I don’t think that’s why you asked me to step over here for this discussion. What’s bothering you, Mr. Hammer?”

He hesitated for a second, absently sucking on his teeth in the way some habitual smokers did while wishing for nicotine. “I crawled through Mr. Carter’s normal haunts and talked to a lot of people who know him. The most common description I heard of him was ‘normal’ followed closely by ‘regular.’ What I didn’t ever hear was ‘paranoid.’ By the time I found him I’d basically ruled out the possibility that he disappeared because he was running from something. Then I spent a day and a half here with him and now I’m not so sure.”

Malaki leaned forward over the desk. “What are you saying? That he’s a master of deception who hid away his true nature from everyone he worked with? Or that something that happened when he went missing turned him paranoid?”

“With ten years of training and a solid script to work with he might eventually qualify as a bad actor. He wasn’t lying to his friends.” Hammer pulled a flexi out of his pocket and handed it to Lin’yi. It was a picture of a strange, cylindrical object with a strange series of engravings and control surfaces on it that looked etheric in nature. She studied it for a moment then handed it to Malaki. Hammer went on. “The woman had one of those in her handbag and it turns out that Mr. Carter had one on him, too. I thought they were transmitters but I showed one to your comms people and he said it wasn’t. He’s not sure what it does do. Ever seen one before?”

“I haven’t,” she said. From the look of intense concentration on his face Malaki wasn’t that familiar with the device either although he wanted to change that. “I’ve never heard of such a small etheric transmitter either. If you could make one that small it wouldn’t carry very far, I would think. Not unless it had a direct link to a planet’s etheric reserve or some kind of power source capable of running a small town. If I had something like that I wouldn’t need to worry about my market share on Wireburn. I could patent it and live the rest of my life on a luxury planet in the Whirls.”

“That’s what your techie said, too. It’s ether powered so it’s not some kind of supertech about to make someone rich but that makes it even worse.” Hammer took the picture back from Malaki and put it back in his pocket. “Whoever was hunting Mr. Carter has the resources to tie their comms into the planet’s core. That’s a level of power and influence I wasn’t expecting. I suspect BaiTienLung isn’t ready to deal with it either.”

For a moment Lin’yi did feel a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. The laws and traditions regulating the tapping of etheric power were the bedrock of most planetary governments. Circumventing them was no easy task. “It’s daunting but not insurmountable, Mr. Hammer. Wireburn is only one planet, after all, even if it is proving more and more unusual by the day. I suppose you don’t have any idea who could accomplish something like this, do you?”

“No idea.”

She nodded and looked to Malaki. “Well. There’s a third mystery for you to try and sort out while you’re here. Think you’re up to the task?”

He rolled the point of his beard between his fingers for a moment, his gaze lost in thought. Whatever he saw there must have satisfied him because he snapped back to reality, clapped his hands together and said, “Of course. But, then, I always think that. What matters is whether I can prove it. So, let’s go talk to our Mr. Carter, shall we?”

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