Page 65 of Spark Transform

Money motivated Hujuru and her elite hunter team best, even if Jane couldn’t pay as much as the pharmas and corrupt politicians did. They’d have to accept that the rest of their reward was Jane’s convenient blindness regarding their lucrative private-sector freelancing.

A quick check of the newstrend summary showed raw vids and scattered reports from small media outfits, but none had yet commented on the scope or target pattern. Another reason to bless the howling storm.

From her chest pocket, she pulled a stay-awake tab from the packet and downed it with a couple of swallows from her water pouch. She was glad she’d had the foresight to send her wife and the household security to a small military Air Division station on a southern-hemisphere continent. Raneel detested snow, and she worried.

Another of her staff sent an alert ping to her console. Per an intercepted communication, the Ridderth spaceport asked the city traffic control for a temporarily wider flight corridor to accommodate an unexpected surge of orbital launch requests.

Her plan anticipated it, but not so soon. Eight days ago, she’d convinced the Base Subgeneral and the commander of the large military contingent on the Mabingion Space Station to stage flitters, shuttles, and corvettes to support a mock disaster drill that was scheduled to start in fifteen hours. In the meantime, she couldn’t risk letting any of the core Ayorinn cancer metastasize and infect anywhere else.

She tapped her earwire to subvocalize to her whole team. “Execute Task T-5.72 now. Tell Spaceport Launch we’re investigating a security breach. Be vague. Give them a four-hour window, then keep stringing them along with more delays until I countermand. Notify Mabingion TCS as a courtesy. Planetary TCS, too.”

She selected the realtime composite feed from the overhead scanner drones covering Ridderth’s spaceport. Dark shapes that looked like ants were actually behemoth-sized snow movers clearing launch pads. Even as she watched, a shuttle lifted off, leaving the glowing red streak of the heat trail on the scanner’s image.

While she’d been planning to close down the commercial spaceport per her schedule, doing so early would be a public service. No one should be going anywhere in a century cyclone.

Chapter 23

Planet: Mabingion • GDAT 3242.227

Renner’s brain refused to work right. Thumping his head didn’t help. Reality tangled with memory and nightmare. Frost invaded his nose and lungs. Cold deadened his muscles and stiffened his joints. Wind numbed his hands.

In the cratered drain pipe, heavy snow blanketed the bottom, hiding toe-stubbing rubble. Whistling winds threatened to carry it into the service corridor where he huddled. Random adrenaline spikes threatened to pound his heart out of his chest.

In his youth, he’d only had stolen coats when the winter death storms came. This time, he wore heated adaptive boots and a heated camouflage rain cloak he’d never seen before. The bag he’d wedged between his knees and chest looked familiar, but half of its contents didn’t. The unfamiliar, stiff grey pants and soft tunic he now wore fit like they were his.

He remembered waking from an autodoc several hours — minutes? days? — ago. Or maybe it was a nightmare from his days with Davidro, waking early after another full-body makeover, wondering who he looked like now.

Surreal image fragments darted in and out of his mind like sewer rats. Pulling on the nearby clothes he found because he was cold, when he should have been burning hot. Stumbling through Soleil’s studio and finding only empty rooms, abandoned crates, and lurking shadows. The sense of being watched. Trapped in smoking ruins, timing his death with each ratchet of the mechanical collar around his neck. Winds as loud as starship engines, punctuated by distant percussive explosions that hurt his ears. Searching for Arco’s energy and finding only dead space. Endlessly trudging through bands of blinding snow between hulking buildings. Deep dread that he was very, very late.

The memory of lurching into the flattened storm drain pipe and finding the poorly lit but bone-dry service tunnel entrance had to be real, because there he was.

And now that he’d stopped moving, his left calf throbbed, and tender spots stung from recently healed burns. At least he remembered the battle and the triumph of defeating the enemy spider mech.

But he also remembered Arco’s words at the time. “If you get killed, I’m firing your ass.”

Looks like she’d fired him anyway. No other reason for him to have the bag of all his stuff that came from her flat.

In the safe solitude of his shelter, he could admit that it was a forceblade to the heart. She’d done more than give him a life reboot. Her trust healed him. Made him want something better than vengeance.

The brutal truth was that she was right to let him go. He wasn’t doing her any good. He’d just been drafting in her slipstream, pretending it was a deliberate flight plan.

Shifting his weight to ease the pressure on his injured leg caused something in the bag to dig into his sternum. He stretched his aching leg out and moved the bag onto his lap so he could open it.

The hard object turned out to be a new, fully charged shockstick. From Arco, he guessed. While moving it, he found an insulated flexin armor tunic and pants, along with heated gloves that matched the rain cloak he wore. He pulled the gloves out, wishing he’d found them earlier. It had taken long minutes after stuffing his icy hands under his knit undershirt to make them mobile again. The practical cold-weather gear had to be from Arco, too.

At the bottom of the bag, he found a brand-new, shockproof percomp with an earwire and a mysterious packet containing six anonymous cashflow chips. When he brushed the biometric reader on one of the chips, it lit up, meaning someone had keyed it to him. A strong sense of déjà vu rocked him, but his bruised brain couldn’t be trusted, so he ignored it as he checked each chip.

The combined total would be enough to buy into a high-profit criminal crew. Or buy enough explosives to destroy the CPS half of the Ridderth military base.

Or find a new home on any other planet but this one.

He doubted any of his friends would come with him. They all had lives. If he rented a cheap sleep capsule on a slow freighter going to the other side of the galaxy, it might even be enough time to come up with a plan for what to do once he got there.

A howl of wind stirred the snow. The tunnel’s floor vibrated under his feet. He didn’t dare send out a tendril to look for power sources. The effort to trip the service tunnel’s electronic lock, fry the security eyes, and pry open the door nearly made him pass out. All minders paid a price for overusing their talents, and he’d gone way beyond that when he’d destroyed the spider mech. Probably part of what made his aching brain so sluggish now. That and the autodoc hangover. Fucking autodocs never could keep him unconscious long enough.

He put three chips back in the packet and hid the other three in various pockets of his tunic and pants. As he did so, it occurred to him that the percomp could at least tell him the date and where he was.

Distant noise behind him stilled his movements. He’d been away from the tunnels for so long that he’d forgotten how to interpret the sounds. Shifting road glass? Rats fighting? Voices?