Dragonfly (25 page)

At the thought, fatigue clawed me. I hadn’t slept for two days, not since before Vyachesgrad, and my body ached. I’d never sleep now. I was too furious—at him and at myself.

But I must have drifted off at last, because next thing I knew his hand lay warm on my shoulder.

I jerked up and shoved him away, grit blurring my eyes. “Get off me.”

He lifted his hands and backed off. “Relax. You wanted to know where we’re going.”

I registered the slower vibrations under the floor and the absence of the tiny whistle from the gyros. We hadn’t merely jumped out of slipspace. We’d stopped.

My guts wriggled, warm. How could I face him, after last night? I’d revealed far too much. If he said anything, I’d die of embarrassment. I had to keep to the plan. Pretend it was nothing. Get him back on the defensive.

It wasn’t such a disaster, now I thought about it. He’d tasted me now, and liked it. Maybe he’d want more. I could use this to my advantage, so long as I could keep from punching him.

I sucked in a calming breath and took a moment to slot my thoughts back into mission mode. Forget Spider and
LightBringer
and Vyachesgrad. Forget kissing my enemy. Surov the cat-man had screwed me. I needed to keep Dragonfly alive, at least until I knew I had Director Renko’s support. A billion rubles, locked in the vault at Esperanza. How would he get them out? And what was he really up to?

I stood and scraped my loose hair back, wishing I could shower or at least wash my face, but Dragonfly had already hopped down the steps to the airlock. He’d shut the console down and shuttered the clearview, so I couldn’t glimpse any coordinates or see outside. I couldn’t even guess with much accuracy how far we’d traveled from Vyachesgrad. Guess I’d just have to ask for directions. I checked that my ESE was safely hidden, reholstered my pistol and followed him out.

Bright reddish sunlight streamed through the plastic airlock, dazzling me for a moment. I heard one door slide and Dragonfly tugged me forward. Cold air hissed in, repressurizing, and by the time my eyes adjusted the lock had opened.

The sun shone small and scarlet, the pale sky bleeding pink and deepening toward a bleak desert horizon broken by blackened buildings and towers. A massive ring-streaked crescent planet loomed, close enough to touch. A cold wind blew, and red dust thickened my nostrils with the smell of rust and crushed concrete. Dead vegetation skittered in tangles across the barren ground, tossed into dancing motion by aimless dust devils. Bumps broke out on my skin in the chill. I’d visited nicer places.

He’d put
Ladrona
down on a cracked bitumen hardstand, her four steel legs biting into the softened tar. Must have been a soft landing if I hadn’t even woken up. Next to us squatted a fat frog-like moonhopper, its bubble hull dented and tarnished under a coating of dust; and across the hardstand hulked a heavy freight variant Wolf-class utility, small and ancient, its broken steel bulkheads half-repaired with rivets and misshapen scrap metal.

Dragonfly kicked open a set of black plastic steps and swung down, holding his hand out for me. I glanced coolly at him and climbed down on my own, my boots hitting the tarmac with a sticky thud. The gravity felt weak, less than I’d expected, and for a moment my balance lurched, adjusting.

“So where are we?”

He wouldn’t look at me as we circled the ship in its pale shadow and headed toward what remained of the flight line, a dented row of square iron buildings and a hangar with the door missing. “This is where I live. Don’t ask too many questions.”

Dust coated my lips and I wiped it away roughly. “Hey, you brought me here.”

“Because I don’t know what else to do with you. Okay?” He rounded on me, and I nearly ran into him. “Believe me, I’d rather get rid of you, but there’s no time to take you anywhere else. Just stop asking questions.”

His arrogance made me bristle.
He
was shitty with
me
? He was the one who’d brought kissing into it. “Get
rid
of me? Why didn’t you just leave me on
LightBringer
then?”

“You want the truth?”

“Ha. That’d be a change.”

“Because I don’t want your death on my conscience. That doesn’t mean I want you following me around.”

“Don’t go out of your way, hero. First chance I get, I’m out of here.”

I pushed past him, resisting the temptation to elbow him in the guts. Like a jungle fungus under my skin, the bastard just kept itching.

He touched my shoulder, and grudgingly I halted. “What?”

He sighed. “Look. I’m sorry you had to get into this. Once it’s over you can go. I just don’t want you to …”

I swallowed. That looked like guilt in his eyes. “Don’t want me to what?”

He gritted his teeth. “Forget it. Come on.”

The concrete hangar floor was marred with old oil stains and stacks of rusty junk. Dust crusted the clear ceiling panels designed to let in light, and in the shadowy steel rafters, clumps of soft little grey animals hung by their feet, long jointed limbs twisted together. Space bats: vermin that lived in the bowels of freighters, feeding on the cargo and spreading to every inhabited world. A flat-pallet loading truck sat in the corner out of the weather, its tires fat and clean and the windows wiped free from dust.

Opposite us, a door opened, and a man and a small woman emerged. The man was tall, thin, older than I was, his grey coverall smeared and patched with silver duct tape. The woman wore a long, soft black dress and boots, with a thick midnight blue wrap around her slender shoulders. They carried no weapons that I could discern.

Dragonfly grinned and quickened his pace to meet them, touching hands briefly with the man and folding the woman into a tight hug.

I hung back, watching, the man’s suspicious stare crawling my nerves. The woman had smooth brown skin and curly black hair forced into a thick braid, and she smiled and closed her eyes as Dragonfly kissed her. I chewed my lip, wishing I wore normal clothes instead of showing off everything I had in sweaty skintight black. Was she his girlfriend? He sure hadn’t acted taken.

The man touched his arm, pointing to me, murmuring something in rapid Espan. Dragonfly’s mouth tightened, and he replied with a headshake and a dark glance in my direction. I strained my ears, but my Espan’s not that good and I couldn’t catch it. The woman squeezed his hand and gestured to the door, and the two men walked away, leaving us alone.

She approached me with a toothy grin, her brown eyes glinting with amber highlights. Beautiful eyes, more so than mine. Her breasts looked bigger than mine too. I caught myself checking out her ass, just to see, and gave myself a hard mental smack over the head.

Mine was better, though.

She gave me a little wave. “
Hola. Soy
Isabel. Jandro say I make you out of his way.”

Inwardly I winced, wishing I’d blocked my ears. So his name really was Sasha. Alex in Brit; Alejandro in Espan. Way, way too much information. I wondered how much Isabel knew about what he did for a living.

“
Lo siento
,” I said, exhausting much of my polite Espan. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I just hitched a ride.”

“Is no problem. Come, eat, rest. Jandro make you awake
toda la noche
, huh? He make all us awake. Madman.” She smiled fondly and ushered me toward the door.

Outside, cheerless red sunshine lit a dusty road that was separated from barren, rock-strewn ground by a chainlink fence lined with weeds. In the distance, buildings clustered, maybe a town.

Isabel yanked her pick-up truck’s passenger door open with a screech, and I climbed in. Springs poked into my behind from the worn seat. I couldn’t see the others. Perhaps they had another vehicle. She revved the engine, grinding the gears in, and we rattled off. Dust clouds puffed through the missing passenger window, making me sneeze.

“So,” she said as we left the hardstand behind and passed a scrapmetal yard filled with exhausted spaceship and vehicle parts and vast knots of barbed wire, “you like
Ladrona
, eh? Good ship, good name.” She shot me a sidelong glance.

I wondered what she was insinuating. I didn’t know what Dragonfly had told her about me. “There’s no shame in it. We all have to make a living.”

“
Allí
,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, and pointing to a massive rusted water tower concreted into the dirt. “How to say? For sick water?”

“Purifier.”

“
Sí
, purifier. Empire shit, him no work any more. We pay to fix, him work. Money no grow from dirt. We got hospital now too. No doctor, but we learn.”

So Dragonfly didn’t steal for personal gain. But I already knew that. I’d watched him gamble away half a million sols at tarocchi, and even a bunch of fight-for-fighting’s-sake psychos like Spider’s crew weren’t rolling in cash. Still, Dragonfly could have fixed a lot of water purifiers for what it cost him to steal those Esperanza grav schematics. I guess he thought the billion rubles in the vault were worth taking a few risks for, and I wondered if the people who drank this water thought the same.

It occurred to me that the money Nikita and I had won from Dragonfly still sat on
RapidFire
. We’d cashed the chips, and Nikita would probably take the money before long, spend it on oblivion crystals or random gifts for people he wanted to impress, or gamble it on a single faro hand to get off, or even give it back to Axis on a whim. It all seemed shallow, compared to cleaning up a colony’s drinking water.

I swallowed, my throat tight and dusty. When had I grown a conscience? And the memory of Dragonfly’s insult still riled me:
Too bad you think so small
. What was small about a billion sols? He’d practically dismissed it, almost as if …

As if it wasn’t Esperanza’s vault he was after.

My guts tightened, warm despite the chill. Even after all that had happened, I’d gotten nowhere with figuring out what was really on his mind. What was he really doing with those grav schematics? What if the heist was a decoy?

We turned onto a rubble-strewn street between rows of two-story buildings, their cracked concrete walls pink with dust. The low-rising red sun slanted across dirt and gravel patches. More fat grey bats roosted under the buildings’ eaves and little guano piles lined the ground beneath. Somewhere, distant machinery buzzed—maybe an old carbon fuel generator. I studied the streetscape with an experienced eye. No blast damage, no flash-seared edges, no bomb craters gleaming with melted silicon. If Imperial colonists had been here—maybe an abandoned mining project?—they’d left without a fight.

Isabel pulled up with a squeak of brakes before a narrow steel door in a line of old tenements. Dust clouds puffed as we climbed out. I rubbed my arms to warm them, a shiver rattling my teeth. She led the way inside, into a narrow corridor that smelled of sour detergent. Plastic pinboards lined the walls, their papers bright with the fingerpaint smears of tiny hands, and the high-pitched rattle of childish voices and laughter drifted toward us. I stretched my cold limbs, uncomfortable. Was this her idea of keeping me out of Dragonfly’s way? I’d never had much to do with children.

She pulled a soft blue coat from a hook behind the door. “
Aquí
. You cold?”

“Thanks.” I shrugged into it gratefully, reveling in the warmth. It covered me to mid-thigh. A familiar, spicy scent rose from it, a sharp reminder of his body on mine. I wanted to rip the coat off and toss it away, but I wanted to wrap up in it too. I cursed inwardly, hoping I wasn’t blushing. “Are you a teacher?”

Isabel shrugged. “We make them be kids as long as they can. One day, they learn Empire. Not yet.” She grinned, waving a warning finger. “No curse,” she chided, and pushed open the glass-paned door.

The noise level rose to ear-splitting, and I had to hide gritted teeth. Tiny children zoomed around at knee height, shrieking and scattering pastels and thin cyberpaper on the torn carpet, while larger ones banged plastic books on the homemade wooden desks or screeched colored chalk on the blackboard or laughed their heads off at one another.

The room reminded me of the chilly basement where I’d gone to school: dirty, low-tech and cheap, with none of the fancy consoles and virtual kit the Imperials had. Our Mrs. Wilson wasn’t a real teacher, just the best we had, and picture book downloads were censored and expensive, so she spent hours telling us stories, her tired face animated as she described feisty little girls fighting monstrous aliens and escaping evil black-suited soldiers with the help of brave rebel heroes in ultraglass armor. One day, she didn’t show up, and the whisper was that those black-suited soldiers had come for her in the night. We never saw her again.

I sniffed, the scene before me uncomfortably evocative of those dusty memories. This was where Dragonfly lived? I’d imagined him more like Spider, cruising around the galaxy raising hell. I hadn’t expected him to be so … normal.

I didn’t want him to be like me.

Isabel yelled something in Espan, raising her hands. Gradually the noise subsided and the kids ground to a halt, confining themselves to rolling on the carpet or swinging on their grubby plastic chairs.

As Isabel spoke again, I studied them. Dirty, sure, skinny, poor, their hair ratty with lice and their second-hand clothes patched, but at least they weren’t hiding in the street covered in cam paint with laser rifles too heavy in their hands. I wondered if any of them were hers—theirs?—and I bit my lip. Would it make the horrid things he’d done better, or worse?

Isabel ended her speech with a big grin. A bubbling cheer arose, and the little ones tumbled to the front of the room in a rolling clump, ready for story time or pin the bruise on the marine or whatever little rebel kids liked these days. The bigger ones hung back, chewing pencils, kicking idly at table legs, twisting greasy curls around bony fingers.

Isabel sat cross-legged on the floor with a book and winked up at me. “Jandro say you do good math. Want try?”

I looked at the bigger kids. They stared back at me, dull-eyed.