Songs of Love & Death

own cargo? He’s working with you, isn’t he?”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her forward. “I don’t know, and no, he’s not,” he said, putting the decoder against the door. “Jonas had no idea we’re tracking his cargo. Yours is one of several shipments the DIA tagged at the source. Some ended up at Able-Trade, some went to Fortune Exports, and some to Widestar.” The door unlocked with a low pinging sound. “We didn’t know where the problem was. Now I think we do.”

“But why would he want his own cargo stolen?”

He ushered her through the door into a dimly lit room that wasn’t a room at all, but an open, hangarlike area crisscrossed with catwalks, ladders, maintenance tunnels, and accessways that comprised the station’s core.

“I can think of a dozen reasons ranging from kickbacks to idiotic corporate backstabbing,” Nic said, shoving his handbeam and decoder back onto his utility belt. “But what worries me more is whether Jonas knew you were piloting the Pandea.”

She followed him toward a descending catwalk that she hoped was sturdier than it looked. “He was at the depot when we took consignment. But he didn’t stay long. I thought he was still uncomfortable around me.”

“My guess is he was uncomfortable with your Skoggi partner, who might sense something was wrong. Like the fact Jonas was targeting you.”

Targeting? She grasped the handrail on the catwalk to steady herself. “Why would he target us?”

“We need to keep moving.” He touched her shoulder gently. “Again, I don’t know. It could be he’s still pissed because you walked out in the middle of his fancy engagement party.”

After she’d tossed photos around the party of Rez and Janna writhing on top of a Widestar boardroom conference table. She’d heard later he almost lost his job. And she never did figure out who to thank for sending her the damning images.

“And yours is the only ship under threat of impound,” Nic was saying.

“That could be Filar’s doing.”

“All our intelligence to date shows that Filar is just the front end. Rez wanted you and Quin to do the Jabo run. He wanted you here today.”

Serri saw that so clearly. “Filar had the seizure papers waiting for me.”

“My point. Rez knows you’d fight forfeiting your ship, and also knows you don’t have the money to pay Filar’s ransom. The banks were probably told to deny you a loan. Our mistake—and it was a big one—was that we didn’t even try to get the funds. Filar now knows you have no intention of paying. So he’s wondering if you’re going to break dock and take a chance the ion cannons just might miss.” He hesitated, then: “Or maybe that’s exactly what Jonas wants you to do.”

“Rez wants me dead?” Her voice sounded suddenly hollow.

He turned and looked back at her, his eyes dark. “I have no intention of letting that happen.”

She realized that she’d stopped again. She quickened her steps to catch up to him, her boots clanging dully on the metal gridwork. Saints help them. Quin. What if Filar or whoever Rez had here on station made a move against the Pandea? But Quin could sense anyone entering the bay, sense their intentions. Granted, only in a general capacity: He was Skoggi, not some magical, mystical creature. But Serri had to believe that someone intent on killing would be broadcasting very intense emotions. Still… “I need to warn Quin.”

“If they’re monitoring transmissions you might be endangering—”

A sudden clanking sounded above them. Serri’s heart rate spiked. Nic shoved her to her knees, then dropped down beside her, pistol out. She drew hers and stared up toward the sound, peripherally aware of Nic checking all around them.

He was right. This was far more dangerous than Scout-and-Snipe. And immeasurably more important. The security training Widestar put all their pilots through seemed woefully insufficient.

A few more clanks and pings, punctuated by bootsteps. Through the uneven lighting dotting the stairlike catwalks, Serri could discern a form moving on a platform about two levels above. She didn’t know whether to hunker down and make herself appear smaller, or tense her body and get ready to run.

After another series of pings, Nic leaned toward her, mouth against her ear, “Repair worker. Should leave —”

A loud clang.

“Now.” He rose, one hand on her arm, bringing her with him. “If you’re going to contact Quin, make it quick.”

She pulled out her transcomm as Nick trotted carefully back down the catwalk. She moved as he did, and kept her voice low. “Quintrek, Captain Beck here. Ran into Thuk-zik. I think you’ve locked up the market on gossip. You were dead-on right about those rumors.” She cut the transmission, praying Quin would pick out the keywords in her unlikely and uncharacteristic message.

Praying he was still alive and on board to even receive it.

THREE MINUTES. WELL, maybe five, but no more than that. Nic had five minutes to open the auxiliary maintenance compartment without setting off any alarms. He went down on one knee, running the small decoder over the door’s locking mechanism, which was housed about six inches below the palm pad and ident reader.

“Anything?” Serri asked softly behind him.

“It’s a Drammond Six-K-One.” He swept the decoder in an arc. “Good antipick deterrents, double-back code verifier. Nice.”

“Nic, we’ve got twenty minutes.”

“We have four. If I can’t get this open in four, the rest of those minutes won’t matter.” He brought up a sequence but the 6K-1 wasn’t interested. Damn it. He tried a second, then a third. He could feel Serri’s concern and impatience. She was worried about Quin.

He was worried because he was working blind, and not just because he couldn’t get a damned code fix on the damned 6K-1. It was because he had no clear concept of what Rez Jonas was up to. Only that it wasn’t what either he or his boss had expected. But without filing a sitrep, he couldn’t get answers from agency intel.

Of course, filing a sitrep now would set off more alarms than sloppily picking the damned lock would.

Pay attention, Nicandro.

“Reverse those two parameters.”

He glanced to his right and almost bumped noses with Serri. “What—”

“Those two.” She pointed to the small screen. “Have you forgotten what you taught me back at Widestar? That’s a loop created by an inaccessible exit command.”

He wasted another second to stare at her in amazement—and admiration—then reversed the two parameters and got to work.

“We’re in.” The snick-click of a well-picked lock never sounded so good. He would have kissed her, but there was no time. Plus, she was angry enough at him as it was. “Ten minutes, max.”

The room was little more than a dimly lit narrow closet, about twelve feet wide. It wasn’t the usual auxiliary control system, but an unmanned maintenance substation that serviced nonenvironmental systems. Newer stations no longer used them because of their potential overall vulnerability, but Jabo had been here for more than a half a century, and Filar and his predecessors were kept busy with rival pirate factions zapping each other in the corridors. The fact that someone might be able to compromise a few of the station’s nonenvironmental systems was farther down on the list of concerns.

Nic hoped.

Serri had already angled a console screen around that displayed system status. “Three intruder traps.”

“I see them. Can you—”

“First one’s already diverted.”

He realized then that she had a slim strafer pen in her fingers. Later, he’d ask her just what a nice girl like Serenity Beck was doing with such a delightfully illegal device. He prayed they had a “later.” For now, he let her work. Her record for unraveling code traps in Scout-and-Snipe had been damned near flawless.

“Shit!” She pulled the pen back abruptly, angling it away from the screen.

A searcher worm. Someone had upgraded the station’s security programs recently.

“I can create a subprogram to distract it,” she said, “if we have enough time.”