Chains of Mist (5 page)

For once, Roger’s thoughts were not on his search for his past. The quest that had driven him ceaselessly, since the moment five years ago when he had woken up with no memories aboard an abandoned freighter drifting powerlessly through deep space, had been pushed to the periphery, shunted aside by a far more powerful and primal need. One word ran endlessly through his mind, a silent command binding him to a single purpose.

Survive.

Roger didn’t slow as he wove through the crowds, sending beings of all species scrambling for cover. His path carried towards a large building in the distance.
Please be there
, he thought. If she wasn’t here, he wasn’t sure what he’d do; there was nowhere else for him to turn.
Please—

Roger tore down the street, veering towards his target. The front door was locked, and his panic spiked. He tried to pick the lock, but his fingers were shaking too badly. He took a step back, then charged at the door just as he had Arakk’s Shalator guard not too long ago. He was in luck; the frame was made of wood rather than reinforced duranthium, and it shattered under his weight. The door flew open.

Roger barely slowed, dashing through the tiny reception room and onto a yawning field of cementcrete covered with dozens of spaceships and other vehicles in various states of disrepair. Meg!” he yelled, looking around wildly. The piles of storage containers, which had still been there when he’d left about ten hours ago, were now gone, and there was no sign that anyone else was here. Roger remembered that Meg was leaving Pattagax—could she have shipped out already? Panic came over him, magnified by his desperation.
No—she has to be here! She
has
to be! Fires of Muntûrek, where are you?
“Meg!”

Then Roger heard footsteps, and relief flooded through him. “Rog?” said a voice. “Roger, is that you?”

Thank the stars!
“Yeah, it’s me. Meg, I need your help—”

“Again? Well, what else is new?” Meg Tarroshan appeared out from behind a rack of engine repair modules. The senior mechanic for Lomana Corporation, the multiplanetary resource extraction conglomerate that ran the mining colony on Pattagax, she was nearly as tall as Roger and solidly built. Her skin was cracked and reddened from years of working a little too close to u-drive engine casings. Her hands—both her flesh-and-blood left hand and her gleaming metallic right one—were slick with black grease, and her short golden hair was also liberally splotched with dark oily patches. “By the way,” Meg continued, wagging a metal finger at Roger, “I got a call from Gree. Said you just up and left in the middle of your conversation. The poor guy’s inconsolable—he thinks he offended you. Come on, Rog—you should know better than that. You’ve dealt with Erigion before; you can’t just
leave
on one—”

Roger had been trying to get in a word edgewise ever since Meg had cut him off, and his patience finally snapped. He had slightly more important matters on his mind than the soft-spoken Erigion in charge of Lomana Corporation’s cleanup crews. “Shut up, Meg! Let me finish—forget about Gree, okay? We’ve got bigger problems right now!”

Meg’s expression sobered immediately. “Uh-oh—I know that voice. What did you do this time—?”

“Nothing, I swear—okay, that’s a lie,” added Roger hurriedly, seeing Meg’s eyebrows arch all the way up her forehead. “It’s all my fault, and I know that. I’m in trouble, Meg—big trouble. The SmugCo—they’re coming for me—”

“And you led ‘em
here
?” Meg swore. “Fires of Muntûrek, Rog’, what were you
thinking
—” She broke off, taking a deep breath. Her face grew calm. “Never mind; it doesn’t matter now. How’d they find you?”

Roger winced.
A series of bad decisions, Meg. Really,
really
bad decisions.
“Well, once I figured out that Gree couldn’t help me, I started poking around a bit and heard about a guy named Arakk—”

“Arakk?” Meg’s eyes grew wide. “You didn’t—goddamn it, Roger!” She threw up her arms in frustration. “Why didn’t you talk to me first? I coulda told you that Arakk’s bad news—”

“Yeah, I get it, I messed up!” Roger didn’t mean to sound angry, but he could practically feel the hunters—both Arakk’s and D’mact’s—drawing nearer with every second. “D’ya think I don’t already know that? D’ya think I haven’t already been cursin’ myself out over it? So are you gonna stand there tellin’ me off or are you gonna help me!”

Meg froze, and her face darkened with anger. “I’ve half a mind to turn you over to ‘em!” she retorted. “You’re nothin’ but trouble, Roger Warbanks, and you know it! You’re just—gah!” She cut herself off, her hands clutching at nothing, as if trying to strangle Roger with her mind. “You’re gonna be the death of me, you know that?”

“Yeah, well maybe you should’ve just let me die on Valkara, then!” Roger snarled, more from panic than actual rage. “Would’ve made your life a whole lot easier—”

“Alright, alright.” Meg threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender, the anger gone from her voice. “Just calm down, Rog, calm down. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. That was low of me. You saved my hide back on that station, and that isn’t a debt I can ever repay fully. Plus…curse me to Muntûrek, but I can’t say no to that face. Hang on a sec, I’ll see what I can do.” She disappeared into a side room, reemerging later with a par-gun in her hand. “Well, there’s this for a start,” she said. “If I know Arakk, he disarmed you before he let you anywhere near him, so I’m guessing you’ll be needing one of these.”

“Thanks.” Roger took the weapon and immediately felt better. This par-gun was an older model, bulky and far less powerful than either of the weapons that Arakk’s thugs had taken from him, but it was still several orders of magnitude better than his fists. “I owe you.”

“Yeah, you do and don’t you forget about it.” Meg leaned back against a support beam, crossing her arms across your chest. “Alright, you’ve got Arakk’s goons chasin’ you and SmugCo not far behind. So, what’re you gonna do next?”

Roger took a deep breath. For the first time since he’d gone in to speak with Arakk, he finally had a moment to relax, to regroup.
Yeah, that’s the question, ain’t it? Can’t outrun ‘em forever, and I won’t be able to kill ‘em all either—too many for that. Which leaves…?

“Well, you can’t stay here, that’s for damn sure,” said Meg. “You’ll draw the hunters right to you—and, more importantly, to me. I like you, Rog, but not
that
much.”

“No worries there.” Roger had already ruled out that option; there was no way he was letting Meg pay for his poor judgment. “Well, I guess I—”

But before Roger could say any more, Meg suddenly snapped her fingers, her eyes lighting up. “Oh, right!” she exclaimed. “I almost forgot! Well, you can hardly blame me, given the circumstances—I mean, I didn’t think you were gonna come back—”

Roger waved his hands to cut off Meg’s excited rambling. “Meg—Meg! Back up a sec—”

“Don’t move.” Meg dashed away, vanishing into her office. She reappeared a moment later, holding something small in her hand. “It was the strangest thing, actually. It was right after you took off this morning—someone actually came by here looking for you. Nothing like that,” she continued, seeing Roger’s eyes widen in alarm, “Or at least, I don’t think so. He said he had something for you, and when I told him you weren’t here he left it with me. Here.”

She held out her hand, and Roger reflexively took the object lying in her palm. It was a safelock, one of literally billions of little plastic cubes used across the galaxy as three-dimensional keys. Somewhere, set into a door or a storage locker or any of a dozen other kinds of container, would be a lock whose grooves corresponded to those carved into the sides of this safelock. Insert the cube, turn, and the lock would open. They were extremely hard to counterfeit, since there were nearly an infinite number of size and groove combinations.

Roger turned the safelock over in his hand. He was still completely mystified; who else besides Meg did he know on Pattagax?
Except for people who want to kill me, of course
. “Did you recognize the guy who left this?”

Meg shook her head. “Nope. He was a Lynlissian, but he didn’t give his name. But I gather he was just a messenger. He said it was from your furry little friend?” Meg gave him a questioning look. “Do you have any idea what he’s talkin’ about?”

At first, Roger was mystified. Then the pieces clicked into place.
Furry little—Fobeo, you sneaky bastard. I should’ve known you weren’t done with me just yet.
“Yeah, I think I do.” He couldn’t really explain, however. When he had asked for Meg’s help finding the strange alien known as Fa’ix, he hadn’t mentioned the little feline Quelin who had pointed him towards the Grays in the first place. So he pressed straight on, as if his answer was explanation enough. “Any idea what this is for?”

“Yeah, I do.” Meg pointed at the markings on the side of the cube. “See those symbols? Those are Lomana Corp, and more precisely they’re docking bay symbols. Best I can tell, that opens a launch pad at the spaceport. Your, uh, ‘furry little friend’—whoever he is, and if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, especially since I get the feeling that I don’t wanna know—looks like he just gave you a ship.” She clapped Roger on the shoulder—using her mechanical hand, which rather hurt. “There you go, Rog—problem solved. You take that ship, and you can go wherever you want. No way for them to track you. You’ll be free and clear…until the next time you decide to get on the bad side of a SmugCo Prelatan. Which, knowing you, will be sooner rather than later.”

Meg gave Roger another pat on the shoulder and began to walk away, obviously thinking that the matter was finished. But Roger didn’t move. Even as Meg was speaking, he had suddenly realized what he had to do. Strangely, the knowledge that he now had a ship, and could therefore leave Pattagax whenever he wanted, made his decision easy.
Less than an hour ago, I was willing to die if it meant getting closer to finding my past. I almost did, in fact…and if I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same choice every time.

The danger is irrelevant. The person who holds the key to my past is on this planet…and I won’t leave until I’ve found her.
“Sorry, Meg, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. Y’see, there’s something I need to take care of here first.”

As Roger spoke, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction settle over him—a feeling of
rightness
. He had come to Pattagax for a reason—the same reason he had spent most of the past three years hopping between every planet, moon, and space station in this corner of the galaxy. He needed to know why his earliest memory was of a space pirate sticking a charge rifle in his face, and why everything before that was a black hole of nothingness. He
needed
to find the truth about his past, to find out who he had been, how he had lived, what he could have become. The need was visceral, insatiable, even reckless; the SmugCo hunters were nothing up against that need, and neither were the perils offered by the abandoned district known as the Grays where Fa’ix had hidden herself. The strange, soft-spoken reptilian alien had denied knowing anything about his past, but Roger could not—
would
not—leave Pattagax until he was sure.
Not if there’s even the slightest chance she knows something. I’ve come too far to give up now. I can’t—I
won’t
!

And if I die finding out the truth about who I was, then I will die content.

Meg’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What could you possibly—?” Then comprehension dawned on her. “Oh, no you don’t, Roger Warbanks. Don’t you say what I think you’re about to say—”

Sorry, Meg. But this is the way it has to be.
“I need to get back into the Grays.”

“I knew it, I
knew
it!” Meg threw up her arms in exasperation. “Damn it, Roger! Didn’t we already go over this? It’s too dangerous—”

“Yeah, I remember. But it doesn’t matter, Meg.” Now that he had made the decision, Roger felt incredibly calm. “I need to find Fa’ix—I
need
to, and there’s just no avoiding it. Besides—” he gave a wry smile “—what better way to shake those hunters? They’d have to be crazy to go in after me.”

“Yeah, I guess, but—” She met his eyes, and an odd look came across her face. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

Yeah, I am. And soon, I hope, I’ll be able to tell you why. You deserve that much from me.
“As serious as I’ve ever been about anything. I have to do this, Meg. I’m not asking you to agree with me; I’m not even asking you to understand. I’m just asking you to trust me.”

Meg stared at him without speaking. Her expression changed, and for a moment he thought she was going to yell at him again—but then she stepped forward and hugged him instead. “Don’t die on me, y’hear?” she said, her voice muffled somewhat against his chest. “Don’t even
think
about it. Not until you get a chance to pay me back.”

Roger laughed. “Not a chance. You won’t get rid of me that easily.” He let her go, and she stepped away from him. What might have been a tear wavered in the corner of her eye. “Be seeing you, Meg.”

He turned to go, and as he did his right hand caught the light. “Hey, what’s that?” asked Meg.

“This?” Roger held up his hand. Around the third finger was a ring, carved from some sort of dark stone and engraved with slim runes in some strange spidery script. It was not exactly a fashion statement; instead, it was a souvenir from his last encounter with Fa’ix. More than that, it was a souvenir that he had not asked for and could not remove; the heavy stone seemed to have molded itself against his finger as securely as if they had been welded together.