Odd Girl Out

bar and threw a handful of wooden splinters into my face. Before I could get back up into firing position, the entire bar began to come apart as the Fillies regained both their balance and their aim.

'Get down!' I yelled at Karim, ducking a little lower myself. He ignored me, his hand stretched up over the bar as he fired blindly in the general direction of our attackers. Bayta started to lift her hand, probably planning to do the same with her kwi. I grabbed her wrist before she could get there and pulled both the arm and Bayta herself low to the floor. The barrage was deafening, the rounds from Karim's military weapon adding a slightly deeper counterpoint to the Fillies' lighter police weapons.

And then, suddenly, Karim's gun was firing alone.

'Hold your fire!' I shouted. 'Karim?'

Karim squeezed off two more rounds and then stopped. The silence seemed to ring in my ears as I carefully lifted my head above the bar.

The two Fillies were sprawled unmoving on the floor, bright red blood flowing across the floor from beneath their bodies, their guns still held loosely in their hands.

I looked at the side of the room. McMicking was still lying among the oblivious sleeping drunks, his gun and gun hand hidden behind one of the other men. His half-closed eyes rolled to catch mine, and his head nodded microscopically toward the guns.

I nodded back. 'Stay here,' I told Karim and Bayta, both of whom had risen cautiously to check out the situation. Squeezing past them, I circled around the end of the bar and headed for the Fillies.

I was still two steps away when the guns and gun hands suddenly twitched upward.

I jerked back, reflexively squeezing off a round into the nearest Filly's torso. But the guns weren't coming up in some last-gasp attempt by the Modhri to nail me. Before I could even shift my aim to the other Filly both guns broke free of their late owners' limp grips and skittered back toward the windows. For a moment the weapons bounced around and through the barricade chairs' legs, giving me just enough time to wonder what would happen if one of them bumped hard enough to go off Then, with one last bounce, they disappeared out their respective windows into the night.

Behind me, Karim spat something vile-sounding. 'Tethered guns,' he growled. 'The favored ploy of those who value their weapons more than their men.'

'That's the Modhri in a nutshell,' I agreed. Cautiously, I stepped to the nearest window, hoping to see which direction the tethered guns had gone. But both weapons had vanished. Returning to the relative safety of the bar, I retrieved my comm from the floor where I'd dropped it. 'Mr. Veldrick?' I called. 'You still there?'

'Donaldson?' Veldrick's voice came back. 'What the hell's going on there?'

'The more important question is what in hell's going on there,' I countered.

There was a short pause. 'What do you mean?' he asked warily.

'You know what I mean,' I said, putting an ominous edge to my voice. I still wasn't a hundred percent sure I had the situation figured out, but I was sure enough to try playing the odds. 'The situation with you and your illegal coral. You want to give me the details, or would you rather deal with the mess on your own?'

My hearing had recovered enough from the gun battle to pick up his long, sibilant sigh. 'Someone's been in my house,' he said. 'He came to the door and shot me—snoozers—and then just walked right in.'

'Did he steal anything?' I asked.

'No, but he was going to,' Veldrick said grimly. 'He had my shipping boxes out, the ones I used back when I brought in the coral.'

'But he didn't actually take any of it?'

'You don't get it, do you?' he snapped. 'You don't burgle someone's home and not even touch a fortune in illegal merchandise. Not unless you've decided it would be safer to turn in the owner and claim the reward.'

'Maybe,' I said, appreciating the irony of the whole situation. The last thing this particular home intruder wanted was for Veldrick and his eight million dollars' worth of Larry Hardin's coral to fall into official hands.

'Of course I'm right,' Veldrick said. 'So what do I do?'

'You start by not panicking,' I told him. 'For one thing, the police don't usually break their necks rushing to investigate anonymous tips. For another, they're all tied up at the moment with some kind of fire or something.'

'An accident, actually,' Veldrick corrected me. 'At least, that's what Isantra Golovek says. He says we should have time to get the coral boxed up and hidden over at his place—'

'Wait a second,' I said. 'Who's Isantra Golovek? One of your Filiaelian business contacts?'

'You know any Juriani with Filiaelian titles?' he countered sarcastically. 'He and Isantra Snievre are on their way now to give me a hand loading the coral.'

A cold chill ran up my back. Earlier this evening, when the Modhri had had a murder frame-up planned for me, he'd been willing to sacrifice the coral outpost rather than risk losing track of Rebekah and her stack of boxes.

So why was he now apparently willing to pull his walkers away from his attack on us in order to protect that same outpost?

Unless protecting the outpost wasn't his plan.

I looked out one of the broken windows. The Modhri's earlier murder frame-up of me had failed, leaving me alive and well and unjailed. And I was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Unless the Fillies were on their way to Veldrick's to arrange another frame-up. Possibly for another murder.

Possibly Veldrick's.

'Listen carefully,' I said to Veldrick, pitching my voice low and earnest. 'Go lock your doors and windows—right now—and don't let anyone in. Understand? Anyone. Not Golovek, not the police—no one.'

'What are you talking about?' Veldrick asked, his verbal tension level starting to rise, his voice bouncing a little as he headed off on a jogging tour of his house's entry points.

'I'm talking about barricading yourself inside your house,' I said, thinking fast. 'Don't you get it? Officially, that coral doesn't exist. They can walk right into your house and take it …provided you're not around to squawk to the police afterward.'

'You mean …they'd actually kill me?'

'For eight million dollars in untraceable coral?' I countered, praying he would be too rattled to think straight. Since he couldn't complain to the cops without bringing a mandatory prison sentence down on his own head, there was no reason for a would-be thief to even rough him up, let alone kill him. 'People kill for a lot less than that.'

'But that's insane,' he protested, sounding more bewildered than frightened. 'These are well-respected, highly positioned Filiaelian businessmen.'

'How do you know?' I asked. 'You've only known them a few weeks.' And he'd only known me a few hours. I hoped he wouldn't remember that. Or if he did, that the Hardin Industries security card I'd come in on would matter more than our length of acquaintanceship.

'You're right,' he said, his voice shaking openly now. 'All right—I've got everything locked down.'

'Make sure you didn't miss any of the windows, even small ones,' I warned. 'I'll call you when I've figured out what we're going to do. You'd better wait in the meditation room, where there aren't any windows.'

'What about the coral?'

'You may have to abandon it,' I said.

'No,' he said flatly.

I rolled my eyes. People and their possessions …'Fine,' I said. 'Then go ahead and start packing it for travel. Don't touch it, though. I've heard of people getting badly poisoned with scratches from Modhran coral.'

'I've got some gloves right here,' he said. 'But it's going to take a couple of days at least to work up the documentation to get it off-planet.'

'Even given the fact you've already got that documentation started?'

There was another short pause. 'How did you know?'

'Because you were clearly the one who swore out that arrest warrant for me,' I told him. 'You were hoping the cops could keep me off your back long enough for you to sneak your coral off New Tigris. How far did you get on the paperwork?'