Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure Read online

  She could feel him, though, his hot breath against her neck, moving to her mouth. Her throat spasmed, and she wondered if she was going to be sick then and there, and what he would do if she did vomit.

  “That’s it,” he whispered, lifting his lips from hers for a second. “Nice and quiet.”

  Oh, no. Not even if he did blast a hole in her side. She’d rather be dead than — than —

  Despite her earlier vow, she didn’t scream. Almost without thinking, she brought her knee up into his groin with as much strength as she possessed. He let out a piercing howl, jerking the gun, which fired harmlessly into the wall instead of straight into her gut. She kicked him, too, for good measure, this time driving her booted foot into his side. He doubled over, breaths coming in tearing gasps, and she realized now was her best chance to escape.

  If she’d had more experience with that sort of thing, she might have tried to get the gun away from him, but Miala decided it was better for her to use her knowledge of the streets to flee, running at top speed down the opposite way from where they’d originally come. She didn’t dare go home — he was sure to follow her there — but she could head straight to the local garrison offices. Captain Malick wouldn’t be on duty, not at this hour, but most of the soldiers posted to this district of Aldis Nova knew her by sight if nothing else.

  She hadn’t gotten more than a block, however, when she saw a tall figure standing in the street, and skidded to a halt as she realized who this new stranger was.

  The tall, lavender-skinned man who had accompanied her would-be rapist to that meeting with her father.

  Shit. Miala looked frantically to her right and left, hoping that an alley would offer itself as a viable means of escape. But this street was lined with warehouses, blank-faced and unfriendly.

  Then his cool gaze seemed to move past her, to a spot somewhere behind her, and she risked a quick glance over her shoulder to see what he was looking at. Despite the warm night, ice flooded her veins. Because there was the lavender-skinned man’s partner, limping toward her with fury in his eyes.

  Before she could do anything, could decide which one was the lesser of two evils when it came to trying to get past them, the lavender-skinned man lifted the pulse pistol he held and fired. Miala’s entire body clenched.

  The pale blue pulse bolt lit up the dingy street as it flew past her and struck her erstwhile attacker in the chest. He fell onto the sandy ground, blank eyes staring lifelessly at her.

  “Well, then,” said the lavender-skinned man. “Let’s get you back to your father, Miala.”

  * * *

  She walked next to him in silence. What the hell was she supposed to say? “Thank you” seemed woefully inadequate. He didn’t seem inclined to talk, either, only accompanied her back to the flat she shared with her father, then waited politely while she opened the door and went inside. The biometric lock had been shorted out, obviously by the man who’d assaulted her, but the door mechanism seemed to be working more or less normally. She supposed they’d have to find the money to fix the lock as well.

  The lavender-skinned man followed her. Strangely, she didn’t detect any menace from him. At least, none that was directed at her.

  “Lestan!” she called out. He’d never wanted her to call him “Dad” or “Father” or anything except his given name, and she’d never asked why. And after everything she’d just been through, she wasn’t about to scruple at interrupting him, no matter how involved he might be in his work.

  No reply. Despite herself, Miala couldn’t help darting a quick, worried look at the part-Eridani stranger. He waited in the living room, impassive, his elegant dark suit and fine-boned face strangely at odds with the shabby surroundings.

  The hell with it. She hurried to her father’s combination bedroom/office, and pushed the button to open the door. Once upon a time, it had a working lock, but that had failed years ago, just like so many other items in their flat.

  At least the door itself still functioned. It slid into the wall, wobbling slightly, and she ran into the room, then stopped dead.

  Her father was slumped over his keyboard, face pressed against the flat plastic in much the same way she’d envisaged herself an hour or so earlier, when she knew she had to get up or fall asleep. But his face was gray, almost as lacking in color as his hair.

  Oh, my God.

  She hurried to his side, then reached for his wrist. She wouldn’t let herself think about what she’d do if she couldn’t find a pulse.

  It was there, though. Weak, and erratic, but some faint life still moved through his veins.

  A slight rustle made Miala turn her head. The lavender-skinned man stood in the doorway, that same unreadable expression on his face.

  He’d helped her before, but would he help her now?

  “I think he’s had a heart attack,” she said, marveling a little at how calmly the words came out. “Can you call a med transport?”

  “I think you had better do that,” the man replied. “You are his daughter.”

  “But — ”

  “You know I cannot be connected to him.” This statement was made simply, as if Miala should have thought of such a thing.

  She didn’t have time for arguments. Lord knows how long her father had been passed out like that, and time only kept slipping by. Without speaking, she pushed past the stranger and went to the comm unit in the kitchen. At least there was a one-button push for emergency services — although those services came at a price. Nothing on Iradia was free.

  The voice answering her call was so flat and monotone, it could have belonged to a mech. Not that she much cared. At least someone was there to get the details of her situation, to tell her that a medi-transport would be there soon, and to have her credit voucher ready.

  Damn. That request sent a stab of panic through her, until she remembered that her father had put some of the deposit money for their current job in their credit account, and so there should be enough to pay for the transport. As for the rest of his hospital stay….

  The lavender-skinned man was watching her carefully. “It’s a good thing this is a lucrative contract, isn’t it?”

  She blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

  A faint smile touched his thin lips. “Your father told me that you would not be working on the project, but we all know the truth there, don’t we?”

  “I — ”

  He came closer, and Miala flinched. Not again. She didn’t have the energy to fight or run. She couldn’t run, not with her father lying near death in the next room and the medi-trans on the way.

  But the part-Eridani man only lifted his elegant shoulders and said, “Why do you think I killed Nilson? Your person means little to me, but your mind — that is important. The contract is important. So don’t linger too long at the hospital, Miala Fels. You have work to do.”

  With that parting shot, he turned and headed out the front door, even as the night began to be lit up with flashing orange lights, and the harsh sound of a siren rapidly approached the flat. And Miala could only stand there and watch him go, and wonder what the hell she was supposed to do now.

  * * *

  First to the hospital, where the medi-mechs worked on Lestan and got him stabilized. He even recovered enough to blink up at her and ask weakly, “What happened?”

  And then stared at her in puzzlement as she began to laugh and laugh.

  She couldn’t stay long — just enough to see her father slip into sleep, real sleep, not anything brought on by drugs, and then she knew she had to go home and get to work. The lavender-skinned man hadn’t precisely threatened her, but she knew what the price of failure would probably be.

  Her father’s computer had automatically locked itself down, of course. Luckily, she knew the codes and got in without too much trouble. She couldn’t allow herself to feel relieved, though, not when she looked at the volume of work still left to be done. It had been daunting enough when she’d thought she and Lestan would be sharing the burden of
the project. Now, though….

  His face came to her, pale and strained, wires and leads attached to his arm, his heart, his temples, mussing his already tousled gray hair. When had he gotten so gray, anyway? It seemed as if it had only been a few days ago when his hair was dark as the nighttime sky.

  Tears pricked at her eyes, but she wouldn’t allow them to fall. If she started to cry now, she feared she would never stop. She had to focus. Her father couldn’t do the work, but he’d been training her for this moment ever since she was old enough to set up her own passphrases. There was no reason in the world why she couldn’t handle this particular task. It wasn’t intrinsically difficult, only complicated. True, there was that little matter of getting some rest. She’d have to go back to the hospital to check on Lestan at some point, which meant choosing between catching a few precious hours of sleep or seeing her father.

  No contest, really.

  Sleep is highly overrated, she told herself.

  Miala had seen too many people combat the drudgery of life on Iradia with drugs — and lose themselves in the process — to be tempted to use illegal stimulants to keep herself awake. Nala, after hearing a carefully edited story of what had happened to Lestan, promised to provide Miala with as much free coffee as she needed, and sent home carafes of her strongest brew.

  Even so, by the end of the sixth day of working on the project, Miala’s eyelids felt so sore and irritated, she might as well have scooped up handfuls of her home world’s fine white sand and rubbed them all over her eyes. She’d caught snatches of sleep here and there, just enough to keep herself from completely losing her mind. But she knew she couldn’t stop; the lavender-skinned man was expecting a completed product to be delivered at the end of the week.

  Besides, there was the hospital bill to consider. The deposit for the project had been enough to cover the transport to the hospital and Lestan’s first night there, but they’d expect payment in full before they released him. And because he’d seem to stabilize, and then lose heart rhythm again, they wouldn’t let him come home before a full week had passed. There was even talk of implanting an artificial heart. Miala prayed it wouldn’t come to that, because there was no way she could afford that kind of surgery. She’d have to get three more projects just like the one she was currently working on to even begin to afford it. And then there was the physical therapy afterward….

  With an effort she could actually feel, Miala pushed those thoughts far to the back of her mind where they couldn’t interfere with the self-replicating algorithm that was her current focus. She couldn’t make her father’s heart magically heal itself, but she could make sure this damn code did what she needed it to do.

  It seemed to compile correctly, so she sent it over to her test server and ran the routine that would simulate its real-world installation on multiple workstations, each with their own separate logins and security protocols. She hadn’t questioned why the lavender-skinned man’s boss needed something so sophisticated. Asking questions only got you into trouble. Besides, there were only a few men on Iradia with the sort of organization that would require this level of complexity, and she now had a fairly good idea of who she was working for. Gared Tomas, a man who’d never met a backroom deal he didn’t like. She’d never say the name out loud, though. The only good thing about the whole situation was that at least Tomas had a reputation for paying his debts, rather than killing off his service providers once he no longer needed them.

  As the automation churned away in the background, Miala got up from the chair at her father’s workstation and went to pour herself yet another cup of coffee. Cold coffee that had been sitting in the refrigeration unit, since it was now midday and the flat was as stifling as the inside of an oven.

  The bitter liquid made her want to gag, but she forced it down anyway. To think she used to like the stuff.

  But a flicker of triumph went over her as she went back to the computer in her father’s room — that machine was far more powerful than her own, and so she’d decided it was better to do the work there — and saw that the simulation had run through its processes and hadn’t thrown up any error codes.

  However, it was far too soon to organize any victory parades. She ran another simulation with a different set of parameters, and then another. Fifteen in all, and as dusk finally began to approach, bringing with it some relief from the relentless heat of the daylight hours, Miala stared at the computer screen and blinked. The work was done. As far as she could tell, the program worked exactly as it should. She’d thrown everything at it that she could dream up, and it had performed flawlessly. For some reason, though, all she could think of was how tired she felt.

  With a small groan, she got up from the chair where she’d been sitting for the last four or five hours, and went to the kitchen again. Not for coffee this time. No, tonight she might finally be able to get some real sleep, and more coffee would only make her jittery and restless. But a long drink of cold water, which refreshed her in a way the coffee couldn’t.

  And then to pick up her handheld and type in the code she’d found buried in her father’s notes. It seemed clear that the lavender-skinned man had been watching her, or he wouldn’t have come to her rescue a few days earlier, but walking out the door, waving her arms, and shouting, “I’m done!” didn’t seem very subtle. Better to enter the code, then see the word “ready” pop up on her screen. She typed “done,” and then hit “enter.”

  The precious code had been transferred to a portable drive not much bigger than her thumbnail. That drive now rested in the pocket of her tunic, giving no sign of what it contained.

  Miala didn’t know how long it would take for the lavender-skinned man to appear, but she figured she had enough time to run to the bathroom, brush her hair, and splash some cold water on her face, all the while doing her best not to look at her reflection. Her previous glimpses had told her the days of no sleep had already taken their toll — features pale and pinched, shadows showing like black bruises under her eyes.

  Not that Gared Tomas’ lieutenant probably gave a crap about those sorts of things. He certainly hadn’t shown any interest in her, beyond her coding abilities.

  And thank God for that, she thought as the front door buzzer sounded and she hurried to answer it. It’s refreshing when a man actually wants to keep it in his pants.

  He stood outside, looking calm and cool. Miala wondered how he managed to pull that off. Yes, the sun had finally set, but it would take hours for the temperature outside to be even remotely comfortable. Was Eridani a hot world? She couldn’t remember.

  She moved out of the way so he could enter the flat, then quickly pushed the button for the door. Yes, he probably had been seen, but she didn’t see the point in letting him stand on her front step for any longer than necessary.

  “You have it?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She reached into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the drive, but she didn’t pull it out. Now that the moment had come, her stomach began to twist with nervousness. What if he’d decided not to pay her? After all, there was very little she could do if he decided to reach out and tear the drive from her pocket…except hope he wouldn’t hurt her in the process.

  Gared Tomas isn’t like that, she told herself. He pays his people. He can afford to.

  But still she hesitated.

  “Is it this what you wanted to see first?” the lavender-skinned man asked softly. Violet-blue eyes fixed on hers, he dipped his hand into an interior pocket of his jacket and withdrew a dark pouch that jingled faintly.

  “Yes,” she replied, then cleared her throat. That single syllable had come out sounding awfully shaky. “Yes, I need to make sure it’s all there.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Miala took the pouch from him and went over to the table in the dining area so she could pour out the money. It glistened in the reflection of the light fixture overhead.

  All there, every last unit.

  She turned back toward the la
vender-skinned man and pulled the drive from her pocket. “I tested it fifteen ways from Sunday. It works.”

  “I have no doubt of that. Otherwise, you would have waited to call.”

  The intimation being that the program had better perform as advertised, or she’d be hearing from him in the very near future.

  “If you run into any problems — ” she began, but he held up a hand.

  “No worries, Ms. Fels. I know where to find you.”

  He slipped the sliver drive into the same pocket that had held the money, then went to the door and let himself out. Miala stood in the middle of the living room for a long moment, not sure if she could allow herself to breathe. What if he changed his mind, decided that he could return and take the money from her, since there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it?

  But the minutes stretched on, and the night turned empty and quiet. She was safe…for now at least.

  Even then she couldn’t allow herself to relax.

  * * *

  Her father’s color had improved. He was still pale, but there was a proud glint in his eyes and the faintest flush along his cheekbones as he looked up at Miala.

  “I can’t believe you did it. And Gar — that is, the payment came through all right?”

  “Everything’s just fine,” she told him. “And I’ve settled up your bill here. You really can come home tomorrow?”

  “That’s what they’re telling me.” He looked down at the tube in his arm with some disgust. “Not a moment too soon.”

  That was for sure. Paying for this one last night would wipe out almost everything they had left. There’d be enough for food for a few days, and Nala had said that Miala could come work at the coffee house and earn a little extra, since Nala’s daughter, who usually performed such duties, was going to a friend’s wedding in the next settlement and would be gone over the weekend. That was something, but it wouldn’t be enough.

  It was never enough.

  From somewhere, Miala summoned an encouraging smile. “The important thing is that you’re going home. I think our client is happy, so maybe there’ll be more work soon.”