The New Space Opera 2 (24 page)

He had a few gifts—mostly from the staff, because he had been such a good patient and because he had been so close to death. She had brought some entertainments in, and she had bought him clothing and a blanket that had some kind of soothing cloth woven into its strands.

She was folding the blanket and was about to place it into the bag that she had brought. “Who are you talking about?”

“Geninka.”

She kept the blanket folded over her arms. It might not have the soothing properties advertised, but its softness kept her calm.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“Please.” He was holding the shirts she had bought for him, all made of the same material as the blanket. “I know what you do.”

She felt cold. She had asked Yuri not to speak of her work. “Do you?”

“You're a hired killer,” he said.

Her breath caught. Some thought of her work that way. But mostly, she prevented deaths. Her training specified that: she took lives to save lives.

“Who told you that?” she asked.

“You work for Kazen Intelligence, but not as an analyst,” he said. “Analysts analyze. Everyone else kills.”

She had no idea how to answer his accusation. If she explained exactly how the Intelligence Service worked, she was confirming his information. If she denied killing, she would be lying—which was not always the best way to start a relationship.

“I no longer work for them,” she said.

“Of course.” He shoved the folded shirts into the bag, disturbing their folds. The movement was an angry one, but weak. His arm shook as he moved it.

“Honestly, I don't,” she said.

“Dad said you'd never tell me what you do.” Misha grabbed the loose pants that she had brought him and shoved those into the bag without even trying to fold them.

She wanted to ask what Yuri had told Misha. She wanted to know how her son found out about her work.

But she didn't ask. She wasn't sure how to handle this at all.

“I refused to do my last job,” she said. “A refusal is like a resignation.”

Only worse. A refusal was notice that she had left the service, that she had secrets they had given her, that she had gone rogue.

Her only comfort, until the cruise ship arrived, had been that she hadn't asked to defect. She hadn't offered her knowledge anywhere else, and she wasn't trying to actively destroy the government that raised her.

She had hoped that might protect her.

Misha was staring at her. He was almost as tall as she was. Twelve. She actually had to look up his age. Twelve.

Which meant that he was tall now, and might get even taller. About to enter the difficult years, or so the information feeds she looked at had told her. Years in which he should have fought and separated from the parent who raised him.

But now that parent was dead.

And he had her, a woman he didn't know. A woman he couldn't know.

There was so much she couldn't tell him, so much she didn't dare tell anyone, so much she didn't dare think of, even to herself.

“So you're not working for them anymore,” he said. “Who do you work for?”

She hadn't thought of it in those terms. She'd been part of a secret society for so long, working as a solo agent, that she still felt like she was employed.

“I guess I work for myself,” she said.

“Or for whoever hires you,” he said.

She shook her head. She wasn't going to be that person. She had promised herself that decades before, when she realized that her only options, should she find a way out of the service, was to go freelance or to go rogue.

Instead, she had banked her salary. Slowly she had invested it in unusual places, finding ways to hide most of it.

Only later did she realize she should have sent it to Yuri, to help with raising Misha. But Yuri had his own salary from his teaching job and it always seemed like enough to take care of him and the boy.

She didn't even know what would happen to his possessions now or his bank accounts.

Particularly if she took Misha with her.

She looked at him, this boy she had to care for now, this boy she had made decisions for, and she realized she didn't know how to plan for their future. She needed to choose something that would work for both of them, and something that would keep them safe.

“No,” she said. “I don't work for anyone.”

She almost said she didn't hire out, echoing his words, but that would have been admitting to him all that she had done.

She wasn't ready to do that.

“So I can't hire you to take him out,” Misha said.

She looked at Misha in surprise. “Where would you get the money?”

He shrugged, then sat on the side of the bed.

She had been so cautious up until now, but that last bit sounded like an admission.

“He killed my father,” Misha said. He was looking down. “He
murdered
my father.”

“Yes,” she said.

“He should pay for it.” The boy's voice shook.

She nodded. “He should, yes.”

“So make him,” Misha said.

“I'm not the law here,” she said.

“No one is, right? That's why everyone comes to the NetherRealm. They warned us when the ship left port. They said we had to stay in groups in the NetherRealm because it's a lawless place, and we were safer in numbers.”

She almost smiled. Scare tactics to keep the tourists in line. “They exaggerated. The NetherRealm has its own government.”

But what happened on Misha's cruise ship wasn't subject to the NetherRealm's laws. The laws only applied to crimes committed on the starbase, and only then to major crimes, the kinds worth prosecuting—major theft, murder, rape, certain kinds of extortion.

Even if this Geninka were arrested, his lawyer would argue jurisdiction. There was no one left alive—not even Misha—who would know where the crimes were committed. If they were committed outside of Kazen Sector, or in the region of space around the NetherRealm, then they'd been committed in a no-man's-land, a place where no laws governed.

And this Geninka would get away with mass murder.

Of course, if he had been sent to warn her—
Tell the bitch she's a walking corpse
—then he had known what he was doing, and he had pulled out that laser rifle once the cruise ship was outside the sector.

“Dad was right, wasn't he?” Misha said. “You don't really care. You're already dead.”

She looked at her son. His hair flopped over his face. His thumb and forefinger rubbed at his eyes. He looked too thin, shaky, vulnerable.

That was why Yuri hadn't put her in the will. He considered her dead to them.

Maybe she had been.

But she was dead to them no longer.

“I'll see what's being done,” she said.

That was all she could do.

 

Only she couldn't leave Misha alone. There were ways to use him to send her another message, ways that wouldn't be illegal in the NetherRealm. A fist to the gut, a knife wound across his healing flesh, all of which would have been too minor to warrant prosecution here.

So she took him with her to see the Director of Security, making Misha wait in the well-protected outer office while she went inside.

She was glad she went alone. Misha would have been angry because her supposition was correct: the security forces on the NetherRealm, such as they were, had decided the crimes occurred in the space outside the NetherRealm and weren't part of their jurisdiction.

“Surely you investigated something,” she said.

The Director shrugged. He was sitting behind a big black desk, built of the same material as the floor and the walls. Both the desk and the room looked indestructible.

He did not. If anything, he looked even thinner here, a great deal more gaunt.

“We investigated you,” he said.

She suppressed a sigh.

“No one wants you,” he said. “We're welcome to keep you or so they say. But if that ship is any indication, we don't want to keep you. You're trouble.”

Tell the bitch she's a walking corpse
.

Yes. She had become that.

“We've also been told that no one is responsible for what happens to
you should you leave the NetherRealm.” He folded his hands on the top of the desk. “But once again, that's not our concern.”

“But what about the actual person who has committed a crime here?” she asked. “What about the man who slaughtered everyone on that ship?”

The Director shrugged again. “Perhaps someone will find him and prosecute him. Perhaps he will get away. You did.”

She looked at him, wondering if it was a bluff or if he knew how many times she had gotten away.

But she had never committed mass murder. She had killed individuals at the instruction of her government, all of whom had been guilty of something—or so the documentation on them said.

The one and only time she had been ordered to kill a large group of people, she had refused.

Refused.

Which was how she ended up here.

“What happened to the ship?” she asked.

“The parent company is sending a representative for it,” the Director said. “We don't expect him for another month.”

“So you've just left it docked?”

“What else could we do?” he asked. “They pay for half a dozen berths on a rotating five-year contract. We're not out anything.”

She nodded, thought for a moment, then frowned. “You had to have done some kind of investigation, something to prove you're not liable here. You made sure the shooter was gone, right?”

“We checked the video and audio logs, followed the flight plan, checked the timing. We've done what we could.” He sounded like he didn't care. He probably didn't. She wouldn't have, in his place.

She knew better than to ask him if he would let her see the logs or any of the other fruits of his investigation—if, indeed, there were fruits.

Instead, she walked toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped as if she just remembered something.

“My son, Misha, had some personal possessions on that ship,” she said. “In fact, most of what he has from his father is there, since I doubt I'll be taking him home. May we board and remove his possessions?”

The Director's eyes actually widened. She wouldn't have thought that possible if she hadn't seen it for herself.

“The boy shouldn't go on that ship,” he said, showing more humanity than she expected from him.

“Nonetheless,” she said. “I need him to help me sort through their possessions, see what he wants and what he doesn't.”

The Director shook his head. “I can't approve the boy,” he said. “But you can remove the possessions from their cabin and let him sort through them in the docking ring.”

She paused. It was more of a concession than she had expected. She had planned to tell Misha they couldn't go on board to investigate.

“I don't want to leave him alone and unprotected,” she said.

“I understand,” the Director said. “You bring him here. I'll keep an eye on him myself.”

She didn't like favors. She didn't trust them.

But she also knew she didn't have much of a choice.

She took a deep breath. “If something were to happen to him,” she said pointedly, “I wouldn't be thinking clearly. I might fall back on my training.”

The Director's eyes narrowed. “Nothing will happen to him,” he said. “In this office or on this base. You have my word.”

And that, she knew, was the best she was going to get.

 

Because she didn't trust the Director entirely, she left the office and went straight to the ship. Misha protested being left behind. He felt he should go along, and up until the moment she stepped through the airlock doors, she agreed with him.

Then the smell hit her through the thin mask she wore over her nose and mouth. Stale and old and ripe, the smell of rotting corpses. Nothing would get the stench out of this ship. They would have to strip it down and use its parts in something else.

She doubted any of her son's possessions would be salvageable either.

But she hadn't come here for them.

She had come to do some investigating on her own.

She had done investigating off and on for years. Sometimes her government needed more information; sometimes it wanted her to guarantee that the person she was targeting was the right person. Sometimes she spent months gathering what seemed like random information to her, for purposes she never discovered.

This investigation was the kind she liked: she wanted to find how Geninka had gotten off the ship, if, indeed, he had.

First, she completed her stated task. She had promised Misha she would
remove his father's things (he seemed to care about them more than his own), and she did. She cleaned out his father's room and Misha's, putting what she could find into two bags.

She left those near the airlock doors, then went back into the ship. Its layout was simple: a wide corridor that branched into the passenger areas and the staff areas. Normally, she would have needed some kind of identification to let her into the staff areas, but base security had already broken through those seals.

She slipped through a reinforced door into a much smaller corridor. This area had no decoration—the walls were standard-issue gray, without any paint or portholes. The few doors had numerical designations.

Still, it only took a minute to find the cockpit, which was surprisingly utilitarian, given the size of the ship. The smells were fainter here. She saw no blood stains.

The captain and crew must have gone into the dining room to stop the shooting, and ended up dying themselves.

The cockpit was divided into function areas—piloting and navigation, ship support systems, and monitoring. She went to the small console that worked the monitors, finding without much effort the security vids of the end of this flight.