“Oh,” Cara said. “I see.”
“Yeah,” Kris said, downing the drink she’d poured before Cara arrived. “I may have billions of good Wardhaven dollars in my portfolio, but I’m just a scat-lugging hireling on Madigan’s Rainbow.”
Kris considered that as she poured her next drink. After surveying the smooth flow of liquid from bottle to shot glass, she made a command decision.
“Barkeep, a drink for my short friend here.”
“I’m not that much shorter than you,” Cara snorted under her breath. And she spoke the truth. Her last growth spurt, fueled by good food on the Wasp, was carrying her close to Kris’s own six feet.
Further discussions of altitude and attitude was cut short by the bartender’s curt, “What will you have?”
“A Shirley Temple,” Cara beamed proudly, “with three cherries.”
The bartender set to work at his end of the bar.
“Where’d you learn about a Shirley Temple?” Kris demanded after downing her own poison and refilling her glass.
“Auntie Abby told me to order one if you insisted I drink something.”
Unlike “Auntie Kris,” Abby really was Cara’s aunt, and only living relative in human space. Not that following a Longknife around both in and out of human space made it all that easy to stay a living person, relative or otherwise.
Abby was nominally Kris’s maid. She was also a whole lot more, some of which helped Kris stay alive.
Sometimes.
Barely.
At the moment, no one could help Kris stay alive but Kris.
Maybe.
“So,” Kris said, belting down another shot, “why’d Abby send you to get me?”
“Because she already had one black eye and doesn’t want another,” had the kind of innocent truth that one mumbled under one’s breath, not expecting a teenager to pick up on it and pass it along.
It was also true.
Last night, Kris had objected to being dragged off to bed before her liter was a truly dead soldier. Surprises of surprises, Kris had caught Abby off guard and landed a good one. Shocked, whether at what she’d done or that Abby had actually dropped her guard for a second, Kris went docilely to bed.
And had to suffer through today with more attention and less of a headache.
Sending a kid, and a girl at that. Abby was really playing dirty.
Kris managed to get three more shots in while Cara polished off her drink and openly relished the taste of each bright red cherry.
Last cherry gone, Cara hopped off her chair and grinned at Kris. “Time to go.”
“Why?” Kris answered belligerently.
“I got a surprise for you.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise,” had the kind of logic even a three-year-old could understand. A three-year-old or a drunk.
Kris was neither. At least the lack of the trembles seemed to say so. After weighing her options only slightly less carefully than Kris weighed starting a war between the entire human race and some really nasty aliens, Kris decided to follow Cara.
The young woman led: out of the bar, out of the hotel, and out into the streets of Elysian Fields. It was late, and the streetlights had already been dimmed. It was an obvious encouragement to all the worker bees that management expected you to be early to bed and early to rise.
Few here held out any hope of being healthy, wealthy, or wise. You either made it before you got here, or you did what you were told and were grateful for the chance.
There were a few exceptions to that policy. Do something that really won the approval of management, and you might be rewarded with a significant bounty.
Kris suspected that catching one Kris Longknife in an escape attempt had a very high bounty on it. No one had told her, but the looks she got, the questions she was asked whenever she varied one millimeter from her normal schedule fairly shouted a bounty with a lot of zeros and commas. Kris might be wanted for crimes against humanity on 150 planets, but she wasn’t dumb, or any less observant than she’d been when she got herself into this mess.
Tonight, as they made their way back to Kris’s nearly palatial quarters . . . after all, she was a Longknife and she did command FastPatRon 127, the main defense Madigan’s Rainbow had against smugglers and the odd alien scow that might wander by . . . Cara gabbed up a blue streak. She talked about how this or that reminded her of that place or the other on New Eden.
Kris hadn’t spent that much time on New Eden before the government invited her to go elsewhere in a hurry. But Elysian Fields did not look at all like Eden’s main city. New Eden was run-down and shabby, in need of urban renewal or at least several new coats of paint. Fields was washed and scrubbed, planted and flowering . . . or else.
Kris let the teenager babble while walking a straight line to prove she could.
Then Cara took a turn that Kris normally didn’t take on her walk home. It wasn’t a turn that would make her miss Kris’s quarters, it was just that Kris had fallen into a habit of always taking the more scenic route. The one next to the park. It left her in easy reach of a bush if the Scotch suddenly demanded to vacate the premises.
Cara turned away from the park and onto a road lined with four-to-eight-story walk-ups.
Pickled brain or no, Kris checked for her service-issue automatic. It was in its usual place in the small of her back. This could just be a new kid in town taking a shortcut through a bad part of town.
Officially, Fields had no “bad” part of town. Still, there were places that fell well below the medium income. Some of the old codgers living here had reputations. There were whispered stories of how they’d made their billions without benefit of law and in ways the courts would have frowned upon if they’d come to their attention. Kris had picked up hints that things were not always as calm as they seemed among the owners.
There had to be someplace on the planet where one could procure that which wasn’t displayed in the gleaming windows of the stores.
Cara made another turn, still talking like a magpie. The alcoholic buzz was gone. Kris was on full alert. Cara was now walking away from their quarters.
Inconspicuously, Kris’s eyes roved, looking for a friendly cop, who would most solicitously tell Kris she was not going the way she should and ask why.
Or a thug looking for a big payday and finding a spectacular one. Just the value of the raw components of the computer at Kris’s neck would make the thief a billionaire.
Not that Nelly had said a word to Kris in over three weeks.
There was, of course, always the risk of an assassin. Kris had dodged plenty of them. Some genius had cut her security detail here to zero . . . well, Abby . . . insisting that Madigan’s Rainbow was a totally benign planet.
Like there would ever be one where Kris was concerned.
There was a reason Kris was wanted on 150 planets. And a lot of people going through worse stages of grief than she was would gladly see her dead.
Fear blew a cold wind through Kris’s brain, driving the final wisps of whiskey’s self-induced fog before it. Still yapping, Cara stooped to check her shoe. “I got this huge rock in it,” she insisted.
Kris ground her teeth. They had stopped in front of a narrow alley. The smell of garbage and urine assailed the air. More proof that these Elysian fields had an ugly underbelly. Kris peered into the dark of the alley but could see nothing.
Cara stood up and huffed “I’m glad that’s taken care of.”
THE DECEPTION IS GOING FINE, Nelly said, speaking in Kris’s head for the first time in almost a month. NOW GET YOUR DRUNK ASS UP THAT ALLEY, YOUR STUPID HIGHNESS.
2
Kris fled up the alley, stumbling over trash and garbage, bouncing first off the right wall, then the left. A door opened, showing little light. The shadow of an arm reached out and grabbed for Kris’s shoulder.