Dragonfly (28 page)

A voice called from a dusty screen door and a bent old man emerged. He hobbled over to touch hands with Dragonfly, who grinned and clapped the old guy’s thin shoulder like they’d known each other for years. A rapid conversation in Espan ensued, before Dragonfly nodded and moved on.

I cocked an eyebrow in question, and he shrugged sheepishly, stuffing his hands back into his pockets. “He wants me to take a look at his alphaspace link. Says he can’t get the sports syndication. I told him I’d be by later.”

I laughed, though in truth his bleeding heart kind of impressed me. “That old guy sure saw you coming. You ever hear of saying
no
to people?”

His eyes shadowed, defensive. “They’ve given me a lot. I can do things they can’t, so I help out where I can.”

More people filled the street now: mothers trailing children, young men in groups of three or four, an old woman with a walking stick and a wheeled basket, the occasional rusty motorbike rattling past in a cloud of dust and oily smoke. All of them knew Dragonfly and wanted to talk to him or touch his hand or even just return his smile. He took his time with everyone, stopping to chat, play with the kids, make a sullen teenage girl laugh. Clearly he had somewhere to be—long minutes had passed since the visiting ship landed—but not once did he show impatience or brush someone aside. His smile flashed readily, his eyes were shining and direct, his conversation animated. Either he was a consummate politician, or he genuinely gave a shit.

I watched a dark-haired young woman lift her toddler up for him to hold, and I wasn’t sure if I was touched or horrified. Had he engineered a little anti-Imperial personality cult here? They all sought him out, deferred to him, wanted to touch him. Maybe they just liked him because he could fix their pirate alphaspace array. Or maybe they respected him, this man who risked his life to get their kids clean water and a hospital, who could have any life he wanted but chose this.

He glanced up, and I ripped my gaze away, but too late. My cheeks burned. He kissed the little girl’s dirty cheek softly before returning her to her mother with a smile and a
gracias
.

I hugged my wrap tighter as we walked on. “They look up to you.”

He shrugged, but his gaze slipped. “Like I said. It’s bigger than me now. Walking away from this isn’t an option for me.”

“Not now. But before?”

“You’re asking whether I sought this out? Saw it coming? No. Would I have done things differently had I known? Honestly, I have no idea.”

“But doesn’t it bother you? The way they … you know.” I squirmed.

A fleeting smile. “Yes. But I’ve got so much they don’t have, Carrie. I’m educated, I’m practical, I know how to get things done. They’re just simple people. If I don’t do it, who will?”

I glanced at the broken shopfronts, mended with jagged weld and rivets; the cracked icelights on poles, the missing ones replaced with electric tubes wired by hand. I remembered the water purifier, leaching heavy metals from the ground supply and alien spores from the storage tanks. This forsaken rock had nothing. No resources, no saleable commodities. They couldn’t even grow anything here. Without him—without the money he made, fair or foul—lives would be poorer.

Could I say the same about myself? Nikita? Mishka? Anyone I knew, in fact?

I’d always thought I could. I’d left General Shadrin’s employ for Axis secure in the certainty that the Empire brought order to chaos, and that without Axis, the Empire would crumble. I needed to do all I could to shore it up in the face of mindless anarchy, and beavering away at obscure encryptions in military intelligence just wasn’t close enough to the edge for me any more. But the Empire had done precious little for the people here—it had simply abandoned them when the mining stock fell—and it had taken an anarchist, far from mindless, to set things right and make their lives worth living once more. What difference had Axis ever made to them?

I kicked at a loose rock, skipping it across the dust. “We all end up in prison or dead, right? Isn’t that what you said? What happens to them when one day you don’t come back?”

He scraped wind-mussed hair from his face. “I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it. Do you?”

I looked away, my throat tight. I’d never had to worry. All that would happen if I didn’t live up to Aragon’s legend was that I’d die. He had so much more at stake than I did.

We turned the corner down an alley leading toward the hardstand. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to show me?”

He gave a little laugh, clearly not amused. “That was it. Haven’t you seen enough?”

We walked the rest of the way in silence.

***

Chilly wind blew across the black hardstand, dry grass tumbling. I shivered, bumps rising on my scalp. The new ship was a mid-range Pharaoh class, a flat steel trapezoid with six blunt landing legs and massive arcfuel boosters on each side, built for heavy freight and atmospheric tug work. The gangway gleamed dully in the bleak red sun, marred by scratches and gouge marks from countless loadings and unloadings. Inside, I saw rows of steel crateholders, stacked to the ceiling with white plastic freezeboxes.

From between the crates squeezed Fat Bastie, sucking in his extensive gut to ooze down the narrow aisle. He popped out with a squelch and a curse, rubbing his unshaven chin.

“Sash, ya stinky rebel,” he boomed in his Brit-flavored Rus, his bald scalp spraying sweat even in the chill. “Whatever you’re paying me to drag ass out to this forsaken shithole, it ain’t enough.”

My interest was piqued. The mysterious cargo from Vyachesgrad. Would I find out at last?

“It’s more than you’re worth, Sebastian.” Dragonfly hopped lightly up onto the gangway to meet him and got a cuff over the head for his trouble. He ducked, shaking his hair back. “Did you bring what I asked for this time?”

Bastie stuck out his greasy bottom lip. “To the core, my friend, to the very core. Of course what you asked for. Come see.” He shot me a grin. “Hello, lady friend. You’ve lasted forty-eight hours with him? Congratulations. When’s the wedding?”

I winked at him to cover my blush. “Like you’d be invited.”

Dragonfly held out his hand to me, and I took it and climbed up onto the gangway. His hand felt warm in mine despite the chill, and I didn’t want to let go. He squeezed, almost imperceptibly, before he pulled away. Damn. He could read me like a plaintext dataflow.

Bastie rubbed stained hands on his stretched flight suit and leered at me. “Helping us unload, tough girl?”

“Sure.” If it got me a look at whatever Dragonfly was hiding in this shipment, I’d heave a few crates. I tugged off the woolly wrap, wrapping it over the gangway rail so it wouldn’t blow away.

“Capital. This way, darlin’. Mind your head.”

Bastie jammed his fat bulk between the crates again, squeezing through to the main cargo bay, which had septurium alloy bulkheads and blue icelights denting the flat ceiling. Crates and piles of stuff were stacked up the walls, leaving a narrow path along one side that was cluttered with tools hanging from hooks and the long burned nozzle of an old handheld fusion welder.

The hydraulic loader—a fat steel plate set flush with the floor—was already stacked with pallets of ion drive parts, their weird metal shapes strapped under steelcore plastic nets. The weight alarm bolted to the loader still flashed blue, and Bastie’s offsider was shoving crates on beside the pallets one by one. Curiosity tugged at me. Dragonfly’s stuff. But what?

Bastie wiped his sweaty forehead. “Maxim, my boy, it’s your lucky day. Told ya this job was fun.”

The lights on the weight alarm flickered, and Maxim surveyed me with pale blue eyes. I remembered Bastie saying he’d take on crew at Vyachesgrad. Black-haired, he looked fit in his smudged flight suit; like countless other flyboys in space haulage, he was probably a pilot as well as a back-ender. He heaved the last crate into place, his suit pulling taut over an unnatural angular shape against his ribcage. A short-range atomflash handgun, from the triple corners. Looked like Max did more for Bastie than ping the autopilot and kick crates around.

“Hop on,” Max said, and I jammed my foot in beside a pallet and grabbed the steelcore net for balance. The old hydraulics groaned, and with a tart whiff of leaking fluid we rode the loader down, the steel juddering beneath my feet. I saw him steal a professionally appraising glance at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. Women have better peripheral vision than men. Sweet young Max should remember that.

Chilly wind gusted into the gap as the loader descended inside the ring of the ship’s landing legs, fat hydraulic arms creaking as they elongated. Dragonfly had fetched the truck from the hangar, its tire tracks in the dust already blowing away across the hardstand. Max eased the platform to a stop level with the tray, red sun glinting on the steel. We each kicked a floating lever at a pallet’s base, lifting the weight onto the slides, and shoved together, sending the pallet skidding with a screech onto the back of the truck.

The second pallet soon followed the first. Next came the crates, the sharp white ultraplastic freezeboxes digging into my hands as we swung them off. The molded lid of the last but one had been pressured loose in transit, and I stole a look. Airtight foil packages, jammed in like shells in a magazine. Freezedried food, most likely, or pharmo for the hospital.

The last crate felt heavier. I let it slip from my fingers on purpose, and it slapped onto the truck bed with a satisfying crack as the lid popped free.

“Sorry.” I sucked an imaginary cut on my palm. Already dust collected on the freshly exposed plastic from the sharp wind.

“No mind. Watch yourself.” Max rubbed his own palm with his thumb, his white skin reddened from lifting.

He turned away to hop back onto the loader, and I glanced up to make sure Dragonfly wasn’t watching, then swiftly inched the crate lid aside.

An array of shiny black metal oblongs gleamed up at me, stacked in a clear plastic framework to stop them rattling together. A micro-ether receiver was soldered neatly on the side of each. Like sinister beetles with short crablike legs, but the diode where the beetle’s eyes should have been was dull and dead.

Sub-band detonators, rigged for chain reaction. Sixty-four in this crate alone. Perfect for ripping apart a semi-sedentary deep-space structure like Esperanza, so long as you had enough explosive and knew where to put it to exert the correct force.

And Dragonfly knew exactly where to put it, and how much force he’d need. I’d helped him steal the grav schematics.

Chill settled in my blood, my fingers stinging. I didn’t want it to be true. I’d liked him better when he just wanted the money; and I realized I didn’t care about the billion sols any more. I’d let him steal it from under Shadrin’s nose, let the Empire lose face, let Renko’s superiors itch until their skin peeled off if it meant Dragonfly’s people could live their forgotten lives in peace. But this was very different.

Hydraulics hissed behind me as Max activated the loader lift, and quickly I snapped the crate lid back on and grabbed the loader pole to ascend. It still didn’t add up. What was in it for Dragonfly? What point was so important that he needed to kill so many people—innocent people, as far as complacent Imperial citizens could ever be innocent—to prove it?

I just didn’t buy it. The Dragonfly I knew—the one who’d rescued Natasha from
LightBringer
, who’d kissed me in Esperanza’s docking ring when he could have just shot someone—wasn’t that kind of criminal.

Maybe Nikita was right. The detonators were for something else, and I’d missed the point entirely. Or maybe, I just saw what I wanted to see. What Dragonfly wanted me to see. Damn, when had this gotten so difficult? Curse him for being so attractive, for being human. Hating him had been so much easier from a distance.

The sun filtered out again as the loader slotted up into the cargo bay, and I sighed, checking it so Max wouldn’t question me. Maybe I just didn’t have enough hate in my heart. Now there’s something to scribble under “Personality” in my security file. Hatred is practically the Axis virtue.

If Nikita was here, he’d scoff and taunt me into doing what he thought needed to be done. Mishka would smile, ruffle my hair with his big gentle hand, and shoot Dragonfly for me before I could change my mind.

From beside the loader, where he and Bastie unpiled crates under pale blue icelights, Dragonfly glanced at me with that little smile I’d become so used to, and my insides warmed, making up my mind. I wasn’t Nikita or Mishka, and I’d blindly believed the line Axis had fed me for long enough. I’d get to the bottom of this my own way; make sure of all the facts before I did something that couldn’t be undone. And if that meant failing Director Renko’s test, I didn’t give a shit.

31

Scarlet midday sun slanted through the downstairs window, and dust motes swirled on the breeze, bringing the smell of warm dirt and rust into Dragonfly’s cluttered study. He kicked a stack of old laser viewscreens aside and I dropped the crate with a sigh, puffing loose strands from my face. “That where you want it?”

“Good enough.” He put down his end and eyed me warily, wiping his dusty hands on his coat. I watched him back, awkward, wanting to bite my lip. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d seen what the crate contained, and I waited for him to shrug, offer some excuse, make up some story about why he needed sixty-four sub-band detonators to fix some guy’s alphaspace array.

The cat scooted in, tail sparking, and wrapped around his ankles in a puff of orange fur.

“So … want to help me with this?” he said.

I swallowed. “What?”

He tossed his golden hyperchip into the air and caught it, flipping it over his knuckles. “I’ve still got data to sort, a game space to build.” His eyes twinkled, betraying that inner puzzle obsessive I’d connected with on
Ladrona
. “We’ll make a mocha and some
churros
, sit up all night, invent a few new vector geometries. It’ll be just like high school.”