12
“Let’s get going.” Zero nudged her arm and they started walking.
It didn’t take them long to reach the comms tower, just a few minutes’ walk, but by the time they’d reached it, all her senses were on high alert. Unfriendly eyes watched them. She just hadn’t worked out yet if it was the kind of unfriendly that would start shooting at them. If so, the new alien laser-blasters strapped to her hips were a reassuring weight. Even if they weren’t actually laser-blasters. Zero and the other Warborne had rolled their eyes when she’d insisted on calling them that. And she’d joined them, ignoring Sparky making pew-pew-pew sounds back in the ship’s airlock.
She slid her arm through Zero’s, cuddling up close as though they were a couple. Well, she guessed they were, really, but that wasn’t why she’d suddenly gotten all touchy-feely. He smiled down at her, the pleasure in his expression genuine, but she spotted the awareness there anyway.
“We’re being followed,” she murmured under her breath, smiling up at him as he held the door to the comms-tower office open for her. Pantomiming a curtsy, she swept inside like some gracious old-world lady, but she made sure to scan the room circumspectly in the same movement.
“Roger that,” he replied, his voice relayed by the comms unit hidden in her ear. It felt low, intimate and she winked at him over her shoulder. He followed her through the door at a slower pace, a mock-leer on his face as he ogled her ass. She laughed and headed for the clerk’s desk, stripping off her goggles, scarf and gloves as she went.
The office was the same as thousands of stream offices the galaxy over. Office beige panels covered the walls, the fake potted plants painted on in an attempt to create a calm and productive environment. The floor was plasti-concrete, a track of ingrained dirt leading her right to the clerk’s desk. Like the call booths lining the walls, it was bolted to the floor. Rough neighborhood then.
“Hey there!” she said brightly.
The clerk looked up. His expression—somewhere between bored, and “when does my shift end?”—didn’t change as he looked at her.
“Welcome to K-Comms streaming. How can I help you today?”
The greeting was delivered in a dull monotone until the last word, which had a lilting up tone as out of place as a high society debutante in a marine barracks.
She gave him a winning smile. It was best never to piss off people like this. If you did, a routine thing like redeeming a message could become an hour-long task. “I’m here to collect a message? Message code—”
“Name?”
She blinked. Okay, that wasn’t normal. She’d expected to input her code and a grunt as he waved her toward a booth. Normally these people wanted as little to do with you as possible. You were lucky if you got anything past the required company greeting.
“I have a redemption code?”
“Yeaaaah,” the clerk clicked the top of his pen a couple of times. Rapid-fire. His expression didn’t change, but the movement said everything she needed to know about his unusual request. Someone was paying him on the side. Had to be. “I’m gonna need your name. New rules.”
“Kasra Emerton.”
He frowned. “Kasra?”
“Uh-huh.” She gave him an innocent, wide-eyed expression. Two could play games. “Name I was born with.”
She sighed, thrusting her hip out and pouting as she studied her nails. “Now d’ya want this collection code or not? Cause my ship’s gonna be putting in at Centaris in a couple of weeks, so I can just hit up the stream tower there…”
She let the sentence trail off, watching his expression out of the corner of her eye. Comm relay companies only got paid on collection, so if she went with a rival service, he’d lose the commission on the message. And in a place like this, every script counted. The question was, was that commission worth more than whatever he was being paid to find out her name? Or would he go for both...
“No…” he caved with a sigh. “No, that won’t be necessary. Redemption code?”
She tried not to give him a smug smile. Probably failed. Made no difference either way. A couple of minutes and they were out of here. “Sierra-seven-three-four-nine-echo.”
He tapped the code into the screen in front of him and then nodded toward the booths. The light above one of them turned green.
“You’re in four.”
She nodded her thanks, ambling that way. Zero leaned against the wall by the door. He gave the tiniest nod. Given his… unique abilities, she was sure he was monitoring the street outside. Good, at least she had a little time to recover this message.
Opening the door into the booth, she avoided the gaze of the guy in the next cubicle. Leaning against the glass, he was obviously hooked into one of the porn-streaming services, his shoulder shaking from the action of his hand behind the screen. He leered at her, so she slapped the privacy button, and the glass frosted.
“Asshole,” she muttered to herself as she faced the screen. Words scrolled over the screen in green.
Message redemption in progress. Identification code: Sierra-seven-three-four-nine-echo. Please enter confirmation sequence.
Her hands raced over the keyboard as she keyed in the code she’d memorized. The keys were sticky. She tried like hell not to think why, especially with the current activities of her neighbor in the next booth… Suddenly she wished she’d left her gloves on. She’d need to bleach her hands when they got back to the ship.
“Come on, come on…” she muttered under her breath, watching as the logo on the screen circled. And circled. And circled.
The longer it took, the more her shoulders tightened. Something was wrong. It shouldn’t be taking so long. Perhaps the clerk hadn’t been paid to find out her name, but to keep her here long enough to call for backup.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Like… SO13 backup.
The door to the booth behind her
