The New Space Opera 2 (22 page)

But it wasn't a mission; it was a cruise ship her husband and son had booked a year before, a cruise to see a different solar system, a long-haul trip to celebrate—what? She couldn't even remember.

She barely remembered that they had planned the trip. She tried to keep track, but she often forgot—so many more important things on her mind.

Then, when she realized she was leaving the service, she checked on the ship. She did not contact Yuri. To do so would put him and Misha in danger. She hacked into reservations, looked up their names, and checked their itinerary.

She got dates and times of all of their shore calls, including this one, and she knew she would meet them here.

They hadn't known it.

No one had known it, except her.

“You realize you should have gone through quarantine.”

It took her a moment to realize that a young doctor was talking to her. He looked like a baby with his hair tied back and his clean-shaven face. Only his eyes were old, the age that came with the type of work he did, in the place he was, instead of from actual age.

“They tried to make me go through quarantine,” she said, “but Misha was dying. So I brought him here.”

“You were lucky,” the doctor said. “All of this could have been caused by a virus.”

“It wasn't.” She let impatience into her voice. She knew most of the lethal viruses out there and none left the victim looking like Misha.

“That's right,” the doctor said. “He has laser rifle wounds. There was some kind of firefight on that ship.”

She felt a coldness run through her. “The others?”

“So far, no one has brought us any more injuries.”

It took a moment for her brain to process his words. “What have they brought you?”

But she knew the answer before he spoke.

Corpses.

They had brought him only corpses.

 

She sat at Misha's bedside, afraid to leave him. Someone had found her a change of clothing and forced her to wash the blood off her face.

They'd shaved off his hair so that they could work the wound on the back of his head. They said he'd be unconscious for a while now, maybe forty-eight, maybe seventy-two hours.

She wanted them to say “two or three days,” but they wouldn't. Damn this place, they wouldn't tell her anything.

No one talked to her, either. About the ship, about the losses, about her.

Until the Director for Starbase Security Services showed up. He announced himself as if he were an emperor. So she had asked for identification, even though her internal scanners had already checked his hand chips.

He was gaunt, with whitish-gray skin and haunted eyes. His lips were too thin, his nose too large. He wore a black suit with silver trim, much like her now-ruined tunic outfit.

He came into Misha's room and closed the door, making her bristle without even saying a word.

“Halina Layla Orlinskaya,” he said.

She nodded, no longer used to the name.

“Also known as Elena Elizarova, Anna Ilyinichna Valentinov, and Alina Yaroslavsky.”

She didn't acknowledge those names, although she'd used them, many times.

“I have found sixteen warrants in your various names,” he said. “I'd like to say they were all for murder, but they're not. Some are murder with special circumstance, some are for egregious homicide, others are for inciting murder. And that's just under the names I know.”

She didn't move. An innocent person might protest. But she had lost the right to pretend innocence when she had used her current identification to go into that cruise ship.

Misha stirred. She reminded herself that he had moved off and on throughout the long night, that the doctors said it meant nothing, he was still unconscious and would remain so for a few more hours at best.

The Director saw her staring at Misha. He looked at Misha too, probably wondering if the boy was waking up.

She was wondering if, on some level, Misha could hear this.

It was one thing to know that your mother worked for Kazen Intelligence. It was another to hear the results of her job so bluntly described.

“I should send you back,” the Director said, “but I'm not sure to where. Do I send you to the place with the most recent charges or the one with the worst? Or do I send you to Naut? Because your identification—which is older than this child—claims you work for the Secret Police in Chuleart.”

She waited, not answering anything. She had worked for the Secret Police in the city of Chuleart. She had gotten her start there, as a college student. Then she had moved up from the local branch to the regional and then to the Empire's main branch.

Then she'd had Misha and retired, or so she thought for those few weeks they gave her with her family. But the case that brought her back sent her into Intelligence, and that led her to places she never thought she would go, as a naive twenty-year-old who wanted adventure and secrecy and romance.

She had had adventure, she had had secrecy, but she had never had romance. It was blood and fear followed by weeks, maybe months, of tedium, accented with moments of panic.

The Director crossed his arms. “But you know that we never send anyone back, not without cause. Or you would not be here. I'm amazed you haven't asked for asylum yet.”

She hadn't planned on asking for asylum. She certainly didn't want to live out her life on a starbase between sectors, unable to travel, vulnerable to whomever was on the ships that ventured into the NetherRealm's docking ring.

The Director leaned back against the wall. “If we want it,” he said, “we do have cause to send you away. You were careless in that docking ring. You boarded without permission. I have a hunch you stole codes. Because you didn't follow procedure, you could have loosed a virus onto this base.”

She folded her hands together, then wished she hadn't. He might take that as a nervous gesture.

Maybe it was a nervous gesture.

“Did you think,” he asked, “that you might have set a killer free?”

She hadn't. She knew that much. A killer wouldn't have trapped himself at the docking ring, waiting for someone to find him.

The Director was just trying to scare her.

The killer was long gone.

She took her son's hand. It was warm, but limp.

“What happened on that ship?” she asked.

Her voice sounded rusty. She hadn't spoken to anyone except Misha since she came into this room, and even then, she hadn't said much.

“We don't know exactly,” the Director said. “The position of the bodies suggests that the killer started in the dining room. He killed most of the passengers there, along with most of the waitstaff. The rifle wasn't set high—it didn't penetrate walls, just flesh.”

Which was why her son had serious wounds, but hadn't died.

“Then he killed the kitchen staff and proceeded to the cabins. He moved quickly enough that no one got warning. He saved the captain for last, probably to pilot the ship into the dock, but we don't know that for certain.”

“Misha was by the main door,” she said.

The Director nodded. “We think he was trying to get out after the docking, and just passed out.”

Her son had been trying to leave the ship? That didn't make sense to her, not if the killer escaped before the ship arrived at the docking ring.

Misha's position inside that ship didn't suggest it either. He had fallen in front of the door, not in front of the control panel.

He lay where anyone who tried to get into the ship couldn't miss him.

The Director crossed his arms. “What do you know of these deaths?”

“Me?” She looked at him in surprise. “I had nothing to do with this.”

“No?” the Director asked.

“No,” she said as firmly as she could. But she was lying. She had been worried about a connection to her from the moment she learned that the
ship had docked and no one had disembarked. “If this was meant for me, Misha would be dead now.”

Although he had been left for dead.

And he had been left in front of the doors, like a message.

The Director watched her. He couldn't read her. No one could.

“I've heard about Lysvista,” he said. “Everybody has.”

Really? How could anyone have heard of Lysvista? It was supposed to have been a secret op.

Had Intelligence leaked the information?

“You fled after that,” the Director said. “Lysvista convinced you, didn't it?”

Convinced her? Of what? She hadn't needed convincing.

Lysvista had defeated her.

Lysvista had provoked a failure of will.

 

Lysvista, a tiny mountain town on the planet of Lys on the far side of the Nechev System. One of the prettiest places she'd ever seen. Lysvista was on the top of the tallest mountain peak in the Godinger Range. The town was surrounded by four spectacular lakes, none of which bled into the other, all of which were a very bright and very deep blue.

If you stood in the very center of town, you could see for kilometers. It felt like you could see the entire planet, even though you couldn't.

The refinery on the far end of town made some of the deadliest bioweapons known to man. All she had to do was get inside, steal the formulas, and then use the weapons on Lysvista.

She'd done similar things in the past.

Only Lysvista itself made this job harder.

Strangers were either spies or tourists who couldn't be trusted. She had to move in. She had to become part of the town.

And she did.

She even managed to get a job at the refinery. She stole the formulas, and had a plan for setting the weapons loose all over the town.

In the past, she would have set the canisters, she would have programmed the timers, she would have left with no regrets.

But she had talked to people, actually had a few meaningful conversations, the first in years. She had sat beside the lakes she would destroy and watched the sun creep over the mountain range in the mornings. She had had the best beer of her life, made from the fresh lake water, and she had had ice cream like none she'd ever tasted, made from the nearby snowcaps.

She had breathed air so crisp that it had a flavor all its own.

For the first time in her life, she had fallen in love—but with a place, not a person.

Instead of killing the town, its people, its lakes, and its fresh, crisp air, she left. But not before leaving the formulas with the mayor and the town council, along with a message:

Check the canisters at these coordinates.

She had stolen the weapons, placed the canisters in their assigned places, but had not programmed the timers. In fact, to make sure nothing went off accidentally, she had included no release device at all.

Just the canisters, their deadly contents, and the threat that they posed.

On each one, she added:
If I can so easily breach your security, so can someone else
.

Because she knew, once her failure came back to Kazen Intelligence, they would send someone else. And if that person failed, someone else would come.

She couldn't go back to Lysvista.

She couldn't go back to Kazen.

She couldn't go back to Chuleart and her family.

She had to find a new home, a new life, one in which she could make a living.

One in which she could survive.

 

The NetherRealm was the first step in that survival. She had used the NetherRealm as a base before. She knew its layout and its limitations.

She couldn't live here, but she could stay here, unnoticed and unmolested, for a few weeks while she made plans.

She had several options. She could book passage on a ship going away from Kazen, maybe back to the Nechev System or to some other sector, extremely far away. Or she could hire onto a cargo vessel under a false name. She could take a longship heading out of the galaxy and going to—what was for her, at least—the great unknown.

Those were only a few of her options. She had known she would learn of other options when she arrived at the NetherRealm.

No matter what she did, she wasn't sure if she would take Misha and Yuri, but she would give them the choice to join her, and new identities if they chose not to.

Because news of her failure would get back to Kazen Intelligence, and
they would try to find her. If they couldn't find her, they would send someone after her family.

But she had timed everything so that she could meet Misha and Yuri at the NetherRealm before news of her failure hit.

Yet the Director said he knew of Lysvista.

He said everyone did.

What else had he said?

Lysvista convinced you, didn't it?

She had been thinking so hard of the events, she hadn't quite realized what he actually said. She thought instead of correcting him, not understanding him.

“Lysvista convinced me of what?” she asked.

It had seemed like hours since he asked the question, but only seconds had gone by.

“Lysvista convinced you that you were in the wrong,” he said, “that you worked for the wrong side and always had.”

Good and bad. She had encountered a lot of believers in good and bad while she did this work. They had always been too rigid to negotiate with.

She hadn't expected to find someone in the NetherRealm who believed in good and bad, or to even use the phrase “wrong side.” The NetherRealm was renowned for having no sides.

Its citizens—if they could even be called that—preferred the existence between sectors. Thieves, killers, spies—all sorts stayed here and never had to fear arrest, unless they broke the laws of the NetherRealm, what few laws there were.

The Director had his arms crossed.

“Wrong side,” she repeated slowly. “How can the Director of Security for this starbase believe in one sector over the others?”

“I'm allowed opinions,” he said.