Her expression by now was a mixture of pity and horror. ‘Still trying to get yourself killed?’
‘Still playing amateur psychologist?’
‘Only a couple more months, and you’ll know if Deanna and your daughter are still alive, Saul.’
‘And if they’re not?’
She sighed, and shot a glance at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. ‘It doesn’t take a shrink to figure you out, Saul. First you let Mitchell talk you into that insane orbital jump, then you started drinking too much, like you were deliberately trying to kill yourself.&rsququo
He glared at her. ‘I was
‘Just what?’
He fingered his drink and, noticing the way she looked at it, gulped it down as if in defiance. It coated his tongue with a sticky numb fieriness.
‘There was more to the jump we made than that,’ he said firmly. ‘You remember Mitch’s brother?’
She nodded. ‘Danny? I only met him once.’
‘You know he died?’
She nodded.
‘Mitchell blamed himself for it,’ Saul continued. ‘Felt he hadn’t been there for him. Do you know the actual details?’
She hesitated. ‘In the sketchiest sense, yes. But all of that happened after . . . after us. After you’d moved on from the Jupiter station.’
Saul had first met Olivia on being assigned, along with Mitchell, to security on the Jupiter orbital platform. The station had been huge even then, constantly growing as pre-assembled units were shipped there via the Inuvik gate back on Earth. Her husband, Jeff, had worked on experimental helium-dredges dropped into the Jovian atmosphere, while Olivia herself had served as the platform’s communications specialist. The sheer scale of the station made it easy for the couple to avoid each other once they’d decided to separate.
‘Mitchell and Danny both grew up near the DMZ in post-partition Chicago,’ Saul went on, and Olivia nodded to signify that this much she knew. ‘It was still a pretty rough place, even a couple of decades after the war. Mitch joined the ASI just to get away from the gangs, but . . .’
‘Danny didn’t?’
‘No.’ Saul could feel a sour taste building in the back of his throat. ‘Danny disappeared, and Mitchell was frantic. He asked me to help try and find him. I was already doing undercover work, so had an idea how to track him down. To cut a long story short, I was the one who found him.’
Olivia had that faraway look that told Saul she was accessing public records on the incident. ‘He got himself involved with traffickers,’ she said, glancing back at Saul a moment later. It was a statement, not a question.
‘I eventually found him in an illegal gene-lab that had been set up in an abandoned apartment building. The traffickers Danny had been working for were all long gone when I discovered him.’
‘They killed him?’
‘That’s whatthe coroner’s report said.’ He could clearly picture Danny’s lifeless face, still twisted up in anger. ‘The lab had been developing customized embryos for unregulated off-world labour markets. Slaves, essentially.’
‘Jesus. And you’ve no idea why they killed him?’
Saul shook his head. ‘Let’s just say it was all pretty rough on Mitchell, so when he said he wanted me to go along on that jump, six months later, I didn’t really feel up to saying no.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s like you said. We were all moving in different circles by then.’
Saul stood up and gazed down at her. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the way things worked out for us both, but talking to you this way brings back too many bad memories. Deanna would never have gone to live on Galileo if it hadn’t been for us two.’
‘Saul—’
‘Please,’ he insisted, ‘just hurry the hell up and tell me whatever it is you came here to say, otherwise I’m gone.’
She crumpled slightly, and he could see lines around her eyes showing how much older she’d become since he’d last set eyes on her.
‘Just give me one minute.’ She patted his vacated stool.
He slid back down on to the seat with evident reluctance, keeping one foot planted on the floor. ‘Make it quick.’
‘Like I said, I’m here because of Jeff. We had a reconciliation, just in the last year or two.’
Saul couldn’t hide his surprise. ‘Seriously?’
‘I know.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Took both of us by surprise, too. Most of that time he’s been involved in some kind of off-world research that takes him away for weeks or even months at a stretch, so it’s not like we really get to see that much of each other.’ She licked her lips and took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, now he’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
