Why they didn’t have those items wasn’t his concern. Sometimes those items were legitimate heirlooms, truly lost or stolen. Sometimes the items were merely things that the client wanted and couldn’t have, things that might, in the strictest sense of the word, belong to someone else.
Yu’s recovery policy was simple: He never asked the client for proof of ownership for an item he went after. He always assumed the client owned the item and somehow misplaced it. Such a defense had worked when he’d had a run-in with authorities, most of whom couldn’t touch his clients—either because the clients had too much money, too much clout, or weren’t Alliance members.
This client, Magda Athenia, had both money and clout, and she had opted out of the Alliance decades ago. She claimed to be retired, but she kept her hand in a score of businesses.
Yu had researched her before he had taken on the search. First, he wanted to know if she had the kind of money she claimed she had. She did. Then he wanted to know if she honored all agreements she entered into, even handshake deals. So far as he could tell, she did. Never once had a case been brought against her in any existing court for breach of contract. All employees, past and current, had nothing bad to say about her.
He did not take the research much farther. Some of his colleagues—the ones who specialized in large payouts like this one—often tried to find out why the client wanted an item. Sometimes the client was a collector. Sometimes the client needed the item to enhance his business. And sometimes he wanted it to humiliate a rival.
Yu didn’t care why his clients wanted their items. To be truthful, his clients weren’t that important to him. The importance—for him at least—was the hunt. If he were more of a collector himself, he would gather his own items. But he didn’t have a permanent home, and he loved to travel light.
So he used the clients as a way to keep himself fed, and as a way to keep himself active and searching. He got paid when and if he delivered.
For the past twenty years, if he took a job, he delivered.
He hadn’t missed.
Not once.
It was that statistic that had brought Athenia to him in the first place. The high-end Recovery Men (and all but a few in this profession were male, for reasons he never fully understood) had a failure rate of about 50 percent. Some of that wasn’t their fault. Sometimes they found themselves pursuing items that didn’t exist. Even with the legend factor taken out of the equation, though, the high-end Recovery Men failed 25 percent of the time.
Now, standing in this swamp, facing away from the flowering fidelia but still bathed in its light, he wondered why he had ever taken this case. It certainly wasn’t for the money. He had known from the start that he might not get paid.
It was the challenge, the near-impossibility of the idea.
The hunt.
At least one Recovery Man had failed before him. That made this particular hunt even more tempting.
Yu took a deep breath, tasting chemicals. He hadn’t failed yet. Even if he killed this flowering fidelia, he wouldn’t fail.
The very idea soothed him, calming his nerves.
Then, before he had a chance to think, he whirled toward the flowering fidelia, steel blades flashing. With one quick movement, he slashed a circle in the colesis tree—a big circle that cut through the vine as well as a large section of the tree’s interior.
With one hand, he tipped the container upside down, dumping the dried, straight colesis into the murky water. With the other hand, he pried the circular cut off the standing colesis. As the first colesis hit the water, he moved the container, catching the twisted colesis, its vine, and the precious flowering fidelia.
The light continued to pour from the flower.
So far, it seemed, the vine and the fidelia didn’t sense anything wrong.
He slammed the lid on the container and shoved it into his travel pouch. Then he scurried out of the copse of trees.
The Alliance might believe that the colesis weren’t sentient, but he wasn’t going to gamble his life on that fact. He ran through the swamp, hitting the summon button for the skimmer.
He stopped a few kilometers away to make sure the container was stowed properly. When he was certain it was, he took out his scanner, checking for other colesis trees. There were, he remembered, half a dozen that stood alone between here and the swamp’s entrance.
He was going to do everything he could to avoid them.
He was going to do everything he could to survive.
The skimmer reached him twelve Earth hours after he had found the flowering fidelia. He was never so happy to see a machine in his entire life.
The skimmer was long and flat—a costly rental that he never would have splurged for if it weren’t for the fact that Athenia paid for all expenses promptly. The interior formed only when a passenger was on board. As he stepped inside, the once-flat top of the skimmer became a dome made of clear black material. He gave the skimmer verbal orders to find the quickest way back to Bosak City, where his own ship was.
He went into the captain’s quarters—a fancy name for the skimmer’s only sleeping compartment—removed his clothes, and showered not once but five times, finally giving up when he realized the stench of the swamp probably wouldn’t leave his nostrils until he physically left the area.
Then, and only then, did he go back into the main cabin and open the travel pouch.
The container still glowed with that bluish-purple light. As long as he saw that, he knew that the flower was still alive.
He slumped in the pilot’s chair. Relief filled him, even though he knew the journey wasn’t done. He still had to get the flower to Athenia.
The question was, when did he notify her? If he waited too long, the flower might die of its own accord. If he did so too soon, he might lose his one chance at success.
What mattered most was timing.
If he could find out where Athenia was staying and how far it was from Bosak, then he would know if he had time to make certain the flower lived.
He couldn’t make that determination on the skimmer. He might not even be able to make it on his ship. The
The place truly was as far away from the Earth Alliance as he liked to go.
Since he could do nothing except wait, he closed his eyes. He needed the rest.
He knew that leaving a planet with contraband material could be tricky. It could be even trickier when that contraband material was a living plant.
He needed to be alert when he faced Bosak’s version of space traffic control.
The last thing he needed was yet another arrest.
Hadad Yu had been arrested fifty-six times. Forty-nine of those arrests had been within the Earth Alliance and three of those forty-nine had been so serious he thought he was going to have to spend decades of his life in prison.
But he’d managed to slip away each time. Most of the lesser charges he could talk his way out of. The seven times he’d been arrested outside the Alliance, he had used his clients—or his clients’ lawyers—to free him.
But the three serious charges had taken a lot of smarts, a lot of bargaining, and in one instance, a case of bribery that was even more illegal than the crime he’d been charged with.
As a young man, he’d looked on the arrests as part of the game.
Now, though, he hated them—not just for the time they wasted, but for the luck he was using up. Some day,
