Galactic North (37 page)

“Nicolosi’s right,” said Ingrid Sollis. “If we’re going to learn to live together on this planet, we have to put the law above all else, regardless of former allegiances.”

“Easy coming from a deserter,” I said. “Allegiance clearly didn’t mean very much to you back then, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t mean much to you now.”

Martinez, still standing at the head of the table, smiled tolerantly, as if he’d expected nothing less.

“That’s an understandable misapprehension, Dexia, but Ingrid was no deserter. She was wounded in the line of duty: severely, I might add. After her recuperation, she was commended for bravery under fire and given the choice of an honourable discharge or a return to the front line. You cannot blame her for choosing the former, especially given all she had been through.”

“Okay, my mistake,” I said. “It’s just that I never heard of many people making it out alive, before the war was over.”

Sollis looked at me icily. “Some of us did.”

“No one here has anything but an impeccable service record,” Martinez said. “I should know: I’ve been through your individual biographies with a fine-tooth comb. You’re just the people for the job.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, moving to stand up. “I’m just a retired soldier with a grudge against deserters. I wasn’t in some shit-hot freeze/thaw unit, and I didn’t do anything that resulted in any commendations for bravery. Sorry, folks, but I think—”

“Remain seated.”

I did what the man said.

Martinez continued speaking, his voice as measured and patient as ever. “You participated in at least three high-risk extraction operations, Dexia: three dangerous forays behind enemy lines, to retrieve two deep-penetration Southland spies and one trump-card NC defector. Or do you deny this?”

I shook my head, the reality of what he was proposing still not sinking in. “I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about Jax—”

“You don’t need to. That’s my problem.”

“How are you so sure he’s still alive, anyway?”

“I’d like to know that, too,” Nicolosi said, stroking an elegant finger along the border of his beard.

Martinez sat down on his own stool at the head of the table, so that he was higher than the three of us. He removed his glasses and fiddled with them in his lap. “It is necessary that you take a certain amount of what I am about to tell you on faith. I’ve been gathering intelligence on men like Jax for years, and in doing so I’ve come to rely on a web of contacts, many of whom have conveyed information to me at great personal risk. If I were to tell you the whole story, and if some of that story were to leak beyond this office, lives might well be endangered. And that is to say nothing of how my chances of bringing other fugitives to justice might be undermined.”

“We understand,” Sollis said.

I bridled at the way she presumed to speak for all of us. Perhaps she felt she owed Martinez for the way he’d just stood up for her.

Again I bit my lip and said nothing.

“For a long time, I’ve received titbits of intelligence concerning Colonel Jax: rumours that he did not, in fact, die at all, but is still at large.”

“Where?” Sollis asked. “On Sky’s Edge?”

“It would seem not. There were, of course, many rumours and false trails that suggested Jax had gone to ground somewhere on this planet. But one by one I discounted them all. Slowly the truth became apparent: Jax is still alive; still within this system.”

I felt it was about time I made a positive contribution. “Wouldn’t a piece of dirt like Jax try to get out of the system at the first opportunity?”

Martinez favoured my observation by pointing his glasses at me. “I had my fears that he might have, but as the evidence came in, a different truth presented itself.”

He set about pouring himself some tea. The pisco sours were going unwanted. I doubted that any of us had the stomach for drink at that time of the day.

“Where is he, then?” asked Nicolosi. “Plenty of criminal elements might have the means to shelter a man like Jax, but given the price on his head, the temptation to turn him in—”

“He is not being sheltered,” Martinez said, sipping delicately at his tea before continuing, “He is alone, aboard a ship. The ship was believed lost, destroyed in the final stages of the war, when things escalated into space. But I have evidence that the ship is still essentially intact, with a functioning life-support system. There is every reason to believe that Jax is still being kept alive, aboard this vehicle, in this system.”

“What’s he waiting for?” I asked.

“For memories to grow dim,” Martinez answered. “Like many powerful men, Jax may have obtained longevity drugs—or at least undergone longevity treatment—during the latter stages of the war. Time is not a concern for him.”

I leaned forward. “This ship—you think it’ll just be a matter of boarding it and taking him alive?”

Martinez looked surprised at the directness of my question. He blinked once before answering.

“In essence, yes.”

“Won’t he put up a fight?”

“I don’t think so. The Ultras that located the vessel for me reported that it appeared dormant, in power-conservation mode. Jax himself may be frozen, in reefer-sleep. The ship did not respond to the Ultras’ sensor sweeps, so there’s no reason to assume it will respond to our approach and docking.”

“How close did the Ultras get?” Sollis asked.

“Within three or four light-minutes. But there’s no reason to assume we can’t get closer without alerting the ship.”

“How do you know Jax is aboard this ship?” Nicolosi asked. “It could just be a drifter, nothing to do with him.”

“The intelligence I’d already gleaned pointed towards his presence aboard a vehicle of a certain age, size and design—everything matches.”

“So let’s cut to the chase,” Sollis said, again presuming to speak for the rest of us. “You’ve brought us here because you think we’re the team to snatch the colonel. I’m the intrusion specialist, so you’ll be relying on me to get us inside that ship. Nicolosi’s a freeze/thaw veteran, so—apart from the fact that he’s probably pretty handy with a weapon or two—he’ll know how to spring Jax from reefer-sleep, if the colonel turns out to be frozen. And she—what was your name again?”

“Dexia,” I said, like it was a threat.

“She’s done some extractions. I guess she must be okay at her job or she wouldn’t be here.”

Martinez waited a moment, then nodded. “You’re quite right, Ingrid: all credit to you for that. I apologise if my machinations are so nakedly transparent. But the simple fact of the matter is that you are the ideal team for the operation in question. I have no doubt that, with your combined talents, you will succeed in returning Colonel Jax to Sky’s Edge, and hence to trial. Now admit it: that
would
be something, wouldn’t it? To fell the last dragon?”

Nicolosi indicated his approval with a long nasal sigh. “Men like Kessler are just a distraction. When you crucify a monster like Kessler, you’re punishing the knife, not the man who wielded it. If you wish true justice, you must find the knifeman, the master.”

“What will we get paid?” Sollis asked.

Martinez smiled briefly. “Fifty thousand Australs for each of you, upon the safe return of Colonel Jax.”

“What if we find him dead?” I asked. “By then we’ll already have risked an approach and docking with his ship.”

“If Jax is already dead, then you will be paid twenty-five thousand Australs.”

We all looked at each other. I knew what the others were thinking. Fifty thousand Australs was life-changing money, but half of that wasn’t bad either. Killing Jax would be much easier and safer than extracting him alive . . .

“I’ll be with you, of course,” Martinez said, “so there’ll be no need to worry about proving Jax was already dead when you arrived, should that situation arise.”

“If you’re coming along,” I asked, “who else do we need to know about?”

“Only Norbert. And you need have no fears concerning his competency.”

“Just the five of us, then,” I said.

“Five is a good number, don’t you think? And there is a practical limit to the size of the extraction team. I have obtained the use of a small but capable ship, perfectly adequate for our purposes. It will carry five, with enough capacity to bring back the colonel. I’ll provide weapons, equipment and armour, but you may all bring whatever you think may prove useful.”

I looked around the cloister-like confines of the room, and remembered the dismal exterior of the offices, situated at the bottom of Threadfall Canyon. “Three times fifty thousand Australs,” I mused, “plus whatever it cost you to hire and equip a ship. If you don’t mind me asking—where exactly are the funds coming from?”

“The funds are mine,” Martinez said sternly. “Capturing Jax has been a long-term goal, not some whimsical course upon which I have only recently set myself. Dying a pauper would be a satisfactory end to my affairs, were I to do so knowing that Jax was hanging from the highest mast at Bridgetop.”

For a moment none of us said anything. Martinez had spoken so softly, so demurely, that the meaning of his words seemed to lag slightly behind the statement itself. When it arrived, I think we all saw a flash of that corpse, executed in the traditional way, the Haussmann way.

“Good weapons?” I asked. “Not some reconditioned black-market shit?”

“Only the best.”

“Technical specs for the ship?” Sollis asked.

“You’ll have plenty of time to review the data on the way to the rendezvous point. I don’t doubt that a woman of your abilities will be able to select the optimum entry point.”

Sollis looked flattered. “Then I guess I’m in. What about you, Salvatore?”

“Men like Colonel Jax stained the honour of the Northern Coalition. We were not all monsters. If I could do something to make people see that . . .” Nicolosi trailed off, then shrugged. “Yes, I am in. It would be an honour, Mister Martinez.”

“That leaves you, Dexia,” Sollis said. “Fifty thousand Australs sounds pretty sweet to me. I’m guessing it sounds pretty sweet to you as well.”

“That’s my call, not yours.”

“Just saying . . . you look like you could use that money as much as any of us.”

I think I came close to saying no, to walking out of that room, back into the incessant muddy rain of Threadfall Canyon. Perhaps if I’d tried, Norbert would have been forced to detain me, so that I didn’t go blabbing about how a team was being put together to bring Colonel Jax back into custody. But I never got the chance to find out what Martinez had in mind for me if I chose not to go along with him.

I only had to think about the way I looked in the mirror, and what those fifty thousand Australs could do for me.

So I said yes.

Martinez gestured towards one of the blank pewter-grey walls in the shuttle’s compartment, causing it to glow and fill with neon-bright lines. The lines meshed and intersected, forming a schematic diagram of a ship with an accompanying scale.

“Intelligence on Jax’s ship is fragmentary. Strip out all the contradictory reports, discard unreliable data, and we’re left with this.”

“That’s it?” Sollis asked.

“When we get within visual range we’ll be able to improve matters. I shall re-examine all of the reports, including those that were discarded. Some of them—when we have the real ship to compare them against—may turn out to have merit after all. They may in turn shed useful light on the interior layout, and the likely location of Jax. By then, of course, we’ll also have infrared and deep-penetration radar data from our own sensors.”

“It looks like a pretty big ship,” I said as I studied the schematic, scratching at my scalp. We were a day out from Armesto Field, with the little shuttle tucked into the belly hold of an outbound lighthugger named
Death of Sophonisba.

“Big but not the right shape for a lighthugger,” Sollis said. “So what are we dealing with here?”

“Good question,” I said. Martinez was showing us a rectangular hull about one kilometre from end to end; maybe a hundred metres deep and a hundred metres wide, with some kind of spherical bulge about halfway along. There was a suggestion of engines at one end, and of a gauntlet-like docking complex at the other. The ship was too blunt for interstellar travel, and it lacked the outrigger-mounted engines characteristic of Conjoiner drive mechanisms. “Does look kind of familiar, though,” I added. “Anyone else getting that déjà vu feeling, or is it just me?”

“I don’t know,” Nicolosi said. “When I first saw it, I thought . . .” He shook his head. “It can’t be. It must be a standard hull design.”

“You’ve seen it before, too,” I said.

“Does that ship have a name?” Nicolosi asked Martinez.

“I have no idea what Jax calls his ship.”

“That’s not what the man asked,” Sollis said. “He asked if—”

“I know the name of the ship,” I said quietly. “I saw a ship like that once, when I was being taken aboard it. I’d been injured in a firefight, one of the last big surface battles. They took me into space—this was after the elevator came down, so it had to be by shuttle—and brought me aboard that ship. It was a hospital ship, orbiting the planet.”

“What was the name of the ship?” Nicolosi asked urgently.

“Nightingale,”
I said.

“Oh, no.”

“You’re surprised.”

“Damn right I’m surprised. I was aboard
Nightingale
, too.”

“So was I,” Sollis said, her voice barely a whisper. “I didn’t recognise it, though. I was too fucked up to pay much attention until they put me back together aboard it. By then, I guess . . .”

“Same with me,” Nicolosi said. “Stitched back together aboard
Nightingale
, then repatriated.”