Price of Ransom Read online

  No one answered him.

  “So what do you want me for?” he asked finally, resigned.

  “A simple trade,” said the first man, still temperate. “You bring us in a few people, and we restore your license—without the revocation clause.”

  “What?” Korey retorted, disbelieving. “You want me to bring in the queen of the highroad, or something? It can’t be done.”

  The first man chuckled. “We do not interfere with the privateers. No. Here is a display—some likenesses.”

  To the right of the three shadowed forms a console lit up, and eight faces appeared on a screen.

  Korey stood up. “No!” He strode straight forward to the wall and slammed it with a closed fist. “I won’t hunt my own down, you bastards.”

  “On the record,” said the woman smugly, “it states that when you were first granted your license you agreed that if any saboteurs had broken codified law they would be an acceptable bounty. And you did bring in one ex-saboteur named Trueblood. Seventeen years ago.”

  “Trueblood deserved what he got. He went sour after the war ended, and no matter what you think, there weren’t any of ‘us’ who condoned rape. We killed a guy once—a nice, respectable stationmaster—who we caught trying to do some poor underage Kapellan female who was a refugee from Betaos. Actually,” he grinned, a predator’s look, “we didn’t kill him. We just got him drunk and convinced him to sleep with a sweet je’jiri girl, and let her clan do the rest.”

  So close to the glass, he could see their bodies react, if not their faces. The second man shuddered, obvious. The woman stiffened, tense and disapproving.

  Only the first man remained unruffled. “I am relieved to hear that there is still honor, of a kind, among thieves. Shall we return to the screen? The alternative, you realize, is that you will be arrested under inter-League law as adopted at the Second Concordance Postwar Convention and immediately sentenced to life in the prison station here at Concord, from which, I might remind you, there have been no—and I mean zero—escapes since its installation.”

  “That’s it, huh? What about my partners?”

  “Their visas will be revoked, and they will, of course, be allowed passage to the nearest Ardakian embassy so that they can return to their home planet.”

  “And I’ll bet you know damned well that they’re not welcome there.” Korey opened his fist, tapped his index finger twice on the shielding wall, and moved to get a better look at the screen.

  Eight faces. He examined them one by one.

  “Apple? He’s dead. You’re Intelligence. I thought you would know that.” He chuckled, low. “Though it makes me feel better to know you didn’t. Jewel. Can’t help you there. She signed on with Yi about six years back and I’m not going to tangle with him.”

  “Ah,” said the first man. The first two pictures flicked off into blackness.

  “Eboi. I don’t know what happened to him. He was as decent as they come, by any standard, and he must be going on old by now. If anyone deserves some peace, he does.” He glanced back at them, scornful. “But I guess you just can’t chance that he might have some latent savagery in him, can you? And you certainly won’t trust my word.” This said with mockery. “And who’s this? Katajarenta?” He laughed, frankly amused. “You’ll never find her.” Dismissed her by moving on to the next photo. “Wing.” He grinned again. “Serve you right to bring her in. She’d cut you to pieces just with her tongue.” He shook his head briefly. “She disappeared a good twenty years ago.”

  “But,” interrupted the woman, “she’s always been closely linked with—”

  “Gwyn?” exclaimed Korey, disbelieving. “You expect me to bring in Gwyn? You’re crazy. Even if I could find him—”

  “We have a less than two-year-old location on him,” said the woman sharply. “He was last going under the name of Heredes.”

  “You’re crazy,” Korey repeated. “I’m not qualified. Nobody is. He’s the best.”

  “If I may,” interposed the first man smoothly. “I understood there was reason to believe that Gwyn was dead.”

  “Dead? Right, and I have four arms.”

  “I want it substantiated,” said the woman in a voice made more cold by its implacability. “And everyone associated with him tracked down.”

  Korey glanced through the glass again, wishing he could make out her face. A tone in her voice caught at him, and he felt it important that he identify her. He shrugged and looked at the last two pictures. “Hawk? What’s he doing here? He’s in prison.”

  “Not anymore.” Fury underlay the words. The woman turned her head to look at the screen, revealing in that movement the careful, traditional coiffure of her hair: it took him a moment, but then he identified it: Indian subcontinent, neo-Hindi. “He was last seen with Gwyn.”

  “Well, good for Hawk,” muttered Korey under his breath. Louder, he said, “I don’t recognize this last one. Never seen her before.”

  “She was also seen with Gwyn,” explained the first man. “We suspect her to be a new recruit.”

  “Well, I never thought of Gwyn as a recruiter.” He hesitated examining the six photos left and then his three inquisitors. “What’s her name?”

  “We believe it to be Heredes also. Lily Heredes.”

  “All right,” said Korey, stepping back from the wall. “I’ll bring her in. In trade for my license back.”

  “That wasn’t the deal.” The woman dismissed the suggestion with a brusque wave of her hand.

  “Listen. I bring her in, she’s got current information on Gwyn, and maybe on Hawk. You make a deal with her, and you won’t be asking me to break old loyalties.”

  “He’s got a point,” said the second man.

  “Anjahar!” snapped the woman. “Are you suggesting that we bargain with—with this?”

  “My dear—”

  “No,” broke in Korey. “He seems to be suggesting that revolutionary notion that we saboteurs might yet have some semblance of human loyalty. I know you’re ready to lock what’s left of us in the zoo and let the kids come down on the holidays to get a gaze at the old throwbacks to the days when we’d just as soon rip each other’s throats out as rip out the throat of the local rabbits for food, but hell, even back then before fire was invented we ran in packs. So don’t push me.”

  The woman rose from behind the console. “You’ve got no ground on which to threaten me.”

  “My dear.” The first man’s voice had not lost its evenness, but it was firm. She did not sit down, but she stopped speaking. “Agreed,” he said, looking back at Korey. “Bring in Lily Heredes, and we’ll restore your license.”

  “Without the revocation clause?”

  “Agreed as well. You’re a good bounty man, Windsor. We’d hate to lose you.”

  “I’ll just bet you would,” muttered Korey. “You don’t find many people these days willing to track out into The Pale. So where do I find her?”

  “You’ll start by going to Diomede.”

  “It is The Pale, then.”

  It might have been his imagination, but through the shadowy glass he thought he saw the man smile. “No. It’s a little farther out than that.”

  After the guards had removed the prisoner, the three agents sat in silence for only a few moments before the woman turned, abruptly and with anger, on the first man.

  “I can’t believe you bargained with him like that.”

  “Maria, my dear, we are civilized human beings. I hope. And he is, I think, also human.” His tone was gently reproving.

  “Yevgeny, that we approved cruelty, violence, and aberrant behavior in our long and frequently sordid history does not mean we should continue to tolerate those in our midst who are—as Windsor himself quite rightly put it—throwbacks to the very worst in human nature.”

  “I think you exaggerate, Maria.” Yevgeny tapped his vest slate, reading the time display, and rose. “I have an appointment. We’ll meet again next week?”

  She nodded, curt,
but respectful. But as the door slipped closed behind him, she turned to her other companion. “Just think, Anjahar, the eight saboteurs on that screen are known to be collectively responsible for five thousand deaths. Officially recorded ones, that is.”

  “Maria,” protested Anjahar, “you know I dislike them as much as you do, but after all, all but seven of those deaths were during the war. And most were Kapellan casualties.”

  “The war,” she repeated sarcastically. “That excuses everything, doesn’t it? And maybe, just maybe—although I’m still not convinced—that was the only way to free the League from the Empire. Or at least the most expedient one. But they’re inured to killing now, to destruction, to that entire mind-set of using violence as a way to solve conflict. We might as well reinstate human sacrifice. I won’t let that happen. I’ll use every means I have to see that every last one of Soerensen’s terrorists is put in prison.”

  “You’re not going to get them all in prison,” he replied, standing and going to the door. It slipped open. “Are you coming? I’m going to get something to eat.”

  Maria remained fixed in her place, staring at the chamber in which Korrigan Windsor, bounty hunter, hell-raiser, and former terrorist, had so recently walked. “Then they’re better off dead.”

  “You really hate them, don’t you?” He sounded surprised. “I dislike what they did as much as the next person, and I certainly want to make sure that their way of thinking is never again fostered in our children, but—you do seem rather vehement.”

  She did not reply immediately, as if she was considering whether or not to confide in him. After a bit he came back into the room and the motion of the doorway sliding shut behind him triggered something in her. She spoke in a low voice. “The saboteurs killed my sister.”

  “Killed her? I’m—I’m sorry, Maria. Was it at Chaldee? That’s the only place I know of that civilians died.”

  “Besides nonhuman civilians? Who don’t count? No. She was seduced into joining them. She was a saboteur. She disgraced our family. And now she’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated helplessly. “I didn’t know.”

  “No one does. My family disowned her, and we never spoke of her again. But I loved her. I’ll never forgive them for her death.” Then, as if this admission ended the conversation, she rose and went to the door, waiting as it opened. “Dinner sounds good,” she said in an entirely different voice, casual and pleasant. “How about Stripe’s cousin’s place, over at Benthic Nexus? She does those great Ridani pastries, dappling tarts.”

  The door, unbidden, sighed shut behind them as they left. On the screen, the remaining pictures flicked off, one by one, into blackness.

  2 Forsaken

  THE CORRIDORS OF THE Forlorn Hope held a luminescence that fascinated Gregori. Dimmed down, the lights revealed intricate, textured shadings on the walls that seemed endlessly interesting to him. He could follow them for hours, aimlessly, or hide in the shadows to listen to the impassioned conversations that brightened the half-lit mess hall or the high banks of Engineering. The only place he never went was the Green Room—that impenetrable mass of growing things—because it scared him.

  Sometimes he even managed to slip unseen onto the bridge, dimmed now like every place else. He would stand in the darkest, most obscure corner and stare at the captain where she sat brooding at the captain’s console, ensconced in a deep-backed chair, the miraculous Bach hovering at her side. It seemed she spent most of her time here the past few days, while they had been drifting in some forgotten tag-end of space; just sitting, staring at the screen of space and stars and one distant sun, a suggestion of brilliance at the edge of the screen.

  The dimness lent her pale skin a luminescence that reminded him of the corridors of the ship, as if she were slowly taking in the essence and reflecting it back. As if she were becoming part of the ship in the same way he often felt he was: knowing it too well, so that eventually one’s own self could no longer be separated from the self, the substance, of the Forlorn Hope.

  He knew that she knew that he was there, hiding in the shadows. The others—most of them—often forgot he existed, or ignored him, but she was always aware of him, at least when he was on the bridge. That she allowed him to stay, or at least did not care if he did, when others might have chased him off, had long since become one of the reasons he admired her with the kind of fierce, proud admiration that only the very solitary can develop.

  But this time there was someone else on the bridge, one of the technicians, busy at a console and oblivious to his silent presence, but the tech’s very shuffling and breathing obliterated the mood of communion he felt had grown in those quiet times he shared with the captain on the bridge: she brooding over their troubles, he absorbing the force of her concentration.

  So he turned and slipped out again and padded by back ways and circuitous routes through the darkened corridors to the mess hall. With power shut down to one-third, it had become the central meeting place and general living area for the crew, and it was here that he found his mother.

  She drew a seat in beside her so that he could sit down, and he did, not wishing to offend her. As usual, the table was too crowded for his tastes—he long since having learned to prefer an empty cubicle or the secret interstices that others passed by. There were six people, and all of them talking, loudly and without any order whatsoever. When the captain presided over a discussion, people never spoke loudly or out of turn.

  “But we’ve been drifting on the edge of this system for three days now, on cut power, cut rations—not to mention the casualties still in Medical who as far as I know are on cut drugs and bandages.”

  This was Finch, whose voice, in Gregori’s opinion, always got a little grating when he was agitated.

  “The casualties in Medical are the least of my worries,” countered Yehoshua. Somehow he always remained calm when emotions rose to their highest. “Whatever other problems or reservations we might have about Hawk, he’s the best doctor I’ve seen work. But we have twelve people on this ship—not counting the casualties who couldn’t be moved, of course—who stayed with us after the mutiny, and their loyalty is not ultimately to the captain but to whatever opportunity she represents, and eventually they’re going to get tired of being refugees and want some tangible proof of that opportunity.”

  “And how are they going to get it,” Finch demanded, “when we’re stuck in this system because we don’t have enough power and basic supplies to leave?”

  “Enough to leave,” interposed the Mule fluidly, “but certainly not enough to assay this fabled ‘way’ to the old worlds, where presumably opportunity lies.”

  The Mule’s comment brought silence. Gregori squirmed restlessly in his chair. Past the tables, he could see the opening through which food was served from galley to mess. In the half-darkness of the galley itself he made out Aliasing’s insubstantial form busy at some task. Normally she would have been out here, sitting beside his mother, contributing now and again to the conversation. But lately, ever since the mutiny, she had kept to herself, as if she were avoiding his mother, even Gregori himself. Some other concern seemed to be preoccupying her, and while it hurt him that she now had little more than an absentminded pat for him when he wandered in to the galley to beg a scrap of sweet between meals, he had long-since developed an ability to hide his feelings, even from his mother.

  He sighed, swinging his legs in the gap between the seat of his chair and the floor.

  “I still don’t see that we have any choice but to sell our services,” said Pinto, breaking the silence. He sounded a little defensive, which to Gregori at least lent his statement interest. “We can transport cargo—”

  “Without permits?” asked Yehoshua.

  Pinto dismissed the caveat with a negatory sweep of one hand. “What permits? Central’s authority is gone. I doubt the new government has had time to institute their policies in such detail, and certainly not out this far on the fringe. I’m sure these systems
need some quick and reliable transports.”

  “Hold on.” Jenny shook her head. “That’s all very well, and probably true, but the incoming comm-traffic we’ve picked up indicates that Forsaken is still under the authority of Central’s troops.”

  “Or what’s left of them out there,” added Yehoshua. “Jehane’s people will be out eventually to mop them up.”

  “And we’d better be out of here before they get here,” Finch snapped. “We can’t hare off doing merchant’s work. It locks us onto roads that will leave us vulnerable to Jehane’s fleet. We’ve got to reprovision, refuel, dump the casualties who don’t want to stay with the ship on the nearest Station hospital, and run. That’s our only chance.”

  “Which brings us back around to the original question,” added Yehoshua drily. “How do we resupply without any means to pay for it?”

  Another pause. Finch shifted restlessly in his seat, lancing a brief, resentful glare at the two Ridanis—Pinto and Paisley—who sat opposite him. Gregori looked up at his mother, but her attention had drifted toward the galley. He could only see her profile, but her expression as she watched the obscure shape of Lia moving along a shadowed counter disturbed him with feelings he had no name for.

  “Sell the Hierakas Formula,” muttered Finch with a mutinous glance at Paisley. “For supplies.”

  Paisley responded by pushing up instantaneously to her feet. “Never! Min Ransome shan’t never sell ya Formula. It be ya wrong, min Finch, never you mind what you think, and it would be ya sore kinnas to insult ya memory of ya man as died to see it made free for all to have.”

  “Then can you suggest what else we have to trade?” Finch shot back, undaunted by her fierce gaze. “Or perhaps you and min Pinto would volunteer to sell your—ah—services to the curious planetside.”

  Pinto jumped up.

  “Finch!” Jenny snapped, rising as well at the same time as she reached out to forestall Pinto from punching Finch in the face. “That remark was totally uncalled for. Pinto, sit down.”

  Pinto did not sit down. Gaze still fixed on Finch, he answered Jenny. “You can’t expect me to just let that go.”