The Snare (Huntress of the Star Empire Episodes 4-6) Read online

  In spite of herself, a short, involuntary laugh escaped. His tawny eyes searched her face, then moved to her body, taking inventory of her equipment most likely. “Ah, but I see from your wrist apparatus that you are indeed no damsel in distress. A Mark VI dual-chambered Impenetratus Limited Edition 6000, only forty-seven of them ever made, and only ever issued to Union Government Special Affairs Personnel, so that would either make you a very high-clearance administrative assistant who chose to vacation on a backwater moon known widely for its lack of diversionary destinations—or you are one of the special governmental agents known as a Vice Hunter, in which case, you clearly do not need my assistance to extricate yourself from any predicament you might find yourself in. Ahh, such a disappointment, and yet—”

  She blinked, just barely following the rapid-fire flow of data coming from the odd feline man. “Dead on,” she said. “So if you want to keep your little operation running here, you won’t cross me.”

  “Of course not, Lady Vice Hunter. Such a disappointment.” His eyebrow ridges went up and his pointed ears perked up. “Unless of course, you wouldn’t mind pretending to be a damsel in distress, would you? Just long enough for me to rescue you from something inconsequential…purely for truth in advertising purposes, you understand?”

  She laughed again. “Sorry, mister. I’ve been helpless enough in the past two days.”

  “Ah, a pity,” he said. “I wouldn’t have minded de-stressing you at all.” His feline face widened into a fang-bearing smile. “Our species are quite romantically compatible, you know. I’ve got all the working parts you need, and as you can see, if I don’t have it, the odds are quite favorable that my salvage pile does.”

  “I—” Was everyone on this dump of a moon obsessed with sex? First the people in the marketplace, then Brezeen, then her goons, and finally this feline oddity. “No. Just—no, no, and I don’t even want to think about that junk pile. Who are you, anyway?”

  “Forgive me, madam, for not extending my credentials upon our initial greeting, but I was indeed so overcome by the delightfulness of your scent that I found myself quite unable to access the mannerly parts of my psyche—you might say I found myself sacrificing the mannerly parts in favor of the, ah, manly ones.”

  She hadn’t realized how close he’d come to her until he bent his arm at the elbow and held up a small card of responsive flimsiplast between their noses. Her eyes crossed and she jumped back, far enough to be able to read the words that appeared courtesy of an electronic ink microdot in the corner.

  The Mauw didn’t stop to allow her time to read. “I am, of course, the individual of contact in these parts. Guerre’s plains are no place for hapless individuals, and I have aboard my dirigible no less than five haps at any one time, plus various and sundry articles of necessity and exceeding usefulness to any traveler.”

  “I—er—” The Mauw’s speech patterns left no opening for interruption, but even if they did, she was tempted to let him ramble on for a standard year, simply for the entertainment factor. “I still don’t know who you are.” There was no name on the card, just the words she read aloud. “Salvageable wreckage salvaged, mis-directed travelers re-directed, lost items located, found items re-located, trade items traded—” She glanced up at him. “Haps for the hapless?” His whiskers twitched. As she glanced back down again, the responsive material received an update and displayed another line. “Damsels in distress de-stressed.” She raised her eyebrows. “What the hells. If you’ve got food that isn’t e-rations, consider me a damsel de-stressed.” Her brows came back down. “For advertising purposes. And for sun’s sake, tell me who you are.”

  “Why, I would think that was obvious.” The Mauw motioned to the dirigible and she could now see letters painted on its balloon. “I’m Enlightenment.”

  Enlightenment

  Treska stepped into the swaying gondola with her hand on the Mauw’s furry arm. Reluctantly, but firmly, since the first time she attempted to climb over the railing without assistance, the giant balloon swayed and ended up dragging her a meter, one leg in and the other out. The feline who called himself Enlightenment took her hand and placed it on his shoulder. “Although I am sure you do not require my help, indulge me in chivalry. Anything less would be uncivilized.” She’d shrugged and tried not to be grateful to the odd cat-man for his species’ well-known propensity for polite mannerisms.

  He leapt lightly onto the railing and over, lifting her with his other hand around her waist to follow up and over after him. Almost like formal-dancing, she thought, and wondered where the comparison had come from since she didn’t remember ever formal-dancing. “Now then,” he said, letting go of her waist and pulling a pair of actual antique spectacles from his shirt pocket. “Let’s have a better look at you.” He placed the spectacles on the end of his triangular nose. The wire frames, designed for a human or near-human head, stuck out uselessly, having no ears to rest on.

  His curiosity about her had an odd sort of soothing effect on her. He seemed—harmless. She knew that was likely the exact image he wished to project, especially if he was some sort of predator, but there was something genuine in his topaz eyes that made her curious as to how he came to know so much about Vice Hunter affairs.

  “From your appearance, you are indeed a rare curiosity known as the female Vice Hunter. Which means you can be either Treska Sivekka or Bridanna Nadega.” The names he rattled off shocked her. Vice Hunters were supposed to be discreet with their identities. Encourage fear through the reputation rather than the identity.

  Unaware of her shock, Enlightenment continued. “Since I assume you are not, in fact, dead, I can only conclude that you are none other than the Huntress, also known as Treska Sivekka. Miss Sivekka, I presume?” He clicked his heels and bowed to her from the waist.

  Her jaw worked, but she couldn’t make sounds right away. “Ah—ah-er, yes.”

  “Excellent. My powers of deductive reasoning haven’t withered in this wasteland after all.” He turned from her to the dirigible’s control pad and began keying in commands.

  “Wait!” she said as the balloon began to rise. The whoosh of hot air created a dull roar in her ears. “Where do you think you’re taking me?”

  “In a wasteland such as this, the social niceties are all the more significant, don’t you think? Civilization is at its most precious when it is at its limit. I am offering you the hospitality of my home, according to Mauw custom. And of course, if you have anything to trade, it is far better to conduct business in a place more suitable than an open campsite. Come and enjoy the view,” he said, flinging out a hand as the gondola rose above the canyon wall.

  The flat plain stretched out before her, dotted here and there with large mounds of rock and shards of pointed crystal. I don’t remember seeing any of this on the way to Shiba City, she thought. Of course, they’d been traveling at supersonic speed on a windowless mining transport. The wind swayed the gondola and the cables securing it to the large, patchy dirigible above creaked in a gentle music. She breathed in the air and realized that up here, it was much less gritty. Enlightenment opened a square container she discovered was a cooler. From it, he pulled self-heating foil pouches.

  She turned from the panorama at the snap of the heat-seal of the pouches. Moments later, the scent of real food overwhelmed her. The Mauw handed her a pouch and she glanced down and burst out laughing. “Cluck-bird? On Guerre?” She tilted her head and sized him up. “Any sent willing to eat cluck-bird on Guerre probably doesn’t have much to fear from anybody.”

  “The irony is not lost on me, but carnivores require carnivorous sustenance, and syntha-meat is best described in polite company as an insult to Mauw sensibilities.”

  Her lips quirked up. “Have you ever had a protein cube?”

  Enlightenment’s whiskers shivered. “Ah, yes. ‘all the nutrients required for a medium-sized biped to survive a full diurnal cycle,’ including the motivation for said biped to develop religiously-held taboos against ever
eating one again?”

  She laughed again. The sound came out rusty. Probably from the dusty air and not at all from misuse of her vocal cords for such activity. “You’re familiar with them, then.”

  “Familiar enough to go to great lengths to ensure I never need one. Eat up, my honored guest, lest you insult your host’s hospitality.”

  She didn’t need to be told twice. She dug into the pouch. Roast cluck-bird with root vegetables went down fast, given her other experience with real food on this moon. She was proud of herself for listening to the diplomatic sense that told her not to lick the wrapper.

  Well-fed for the time being, she peered up into the dirigible’s envelope. In addition to the rigging and mechanical rudders she spotted the soft glow of anti-gravity nodes for times when the Jovian’s gravity worked against lift. They weren’t active now, and only the wind and the craft itself broke the peaceful silence.”I’ve never traveled this way before. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “I should think it would be a memorable experience,” the Mauw said.

  Treska’s lips twisted wryly. “If I’ve had memorable experiences, my brain’s misplaced them.”

  “Indeed? A Vice Hunter, well-traveled throughout the system protecting the Union’s New Morality, and no memorable tales to tell?”

  She could have demurred. She could have made something up, or told the Mauw about the psypath pirate. But all she could think of was her last hunt. Of Wenn DiVrati. Not the clever prey leading her through a battle of wits and cunning, but a desperate, terrified man run to ground and more willing to die than surrender. “Nothing about Vice Hunting is anything I want to remember.”

  “What of the time before? Surely you didn’t spring fully-formed from the Union’s bosom.”

  “Actually, I sort of did.” She found herself telling the Mauw about being found in the rubble after the attacks. “I didn’t spring fully-formed, but the Union rebuilt me as best as it could.” She looked out at the landscape, and the long, distorted shadows created by the sun and the Jovian. “They just couldn’t rebuild my past.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Whatever else we may disagree on, the Union’s technology is beyond compare.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “It’s unimportant. My future is what’s important. My past—” she closed her eyes against images of silk hangings mixed with Jump-dreams, “—is dead.”

  The drive across the plains gave Micah plenty of time to think about the status quo, changes in circumstances, and the stupidity of chasing after the woman he ought to be escaping. Out here, the idea of assaulting the Capitol made less and less sense. And lest he run out of that limitless resource from the Restoration, the further stupidity of arguing with Brezeen. He wasn’t comfortable, thinking about the way she’d been prepared to gut him, or the way he’d been prepared to shoot her with the zapgun. He still couldn’t say who’d come out the victor in that conflict. He hadn’t shot, and she hadn’t gutted. He got his way—earned his freedom from her will—but she’d left him a souvenir in the form of a cut low on his abdomen. It was hardly more than a scratch, but it stung something fierce now that he was sitting in a transport and half a day had passed. And the wily raptor dismissed it as carelessness. “I didn’t mean anything by it, lad. It’s been some time since I’ve had to fight a battle of my own and my control’s not as good as it once was.”

  Brezeen had given him coordinates after the non-apology, which he didn’t buy for a minute, but it still took him several hours to reach Treska’s last known destination. Once he crossed the strait and entered the southern continent’s grasslands, he stopped wondering if the hunch he had and the quest for answers was worth the risk that it would all lead nowhere but a dead-end prison cell on Prime. Instead, he focused on the growing buzz in the back of his head. Absently, he reached up and scratched his neck underneath the neuro-collar.

  Guerre’s high crystal content was documented to have strange effects on psypath powers. The times he’d been here before, Guerre had played havoc with his senses in varying degrees of effect. Shiba City and its environs produced a mild “white noise” effect on him, while the southern plains of the Northern continent produced a stronger effect. The Southern continent, however, had huge quantities of untapped, untuned crystal, and he had no idea what so much crystal would do to his brain. Or how the neuro-collar would interfere.

  Their journey to the city through the tunnels had already shown him his mind’s weakness against the crystal. Even with a neural inhibitor, the crystals plagued him with hallucinations both sleeping and awake, confused his reality with painful memories that should have remained well-buried. Zara was in his past. He’d gone through grief and regret enough before sealing away his youthful mistakes and trying not to make any more of them. Thanks to Guerre crystal, the ghosts wouldn’t stay buried.

  He tracked Treska through the grasslands towards a rocky mesa and set his course for the land feature. She would be looking for shelter, and the mesa was most likely to provide it. As he approached the rocks, a faint sighing began to whisper in his ears. At the entrance of the narrow cleft, he parked the transport and armed the security system. With the transport’s anti-grav system no longer humming counterpoint, the sighing took on a melody of its own, and the moment he entered the shadows of the canyon, his feet splashing in the water, he understood why.

  No wonder the Union wants Guerre in its loving embrace so very badly. The seams of crystal here were vast. Huge deposits could be seen, shimmering in the morning light, tossing rainbows onto the canyon’s walls. It’s beautiful, he thought. And worth a planet’s ransom in hard currency.

  As soon as he tore his eyes away from the light show made by the crystal, he spotted the remains of a campsite. He pulled the communicator from his belt pouch and activated it. “Brezeen,” he said softly. No answer came back from the other end. “Brezeen,” he said again, “I know you’re there, Brezeen.”

  “Oh, for the sake of the Great Egg, what do you want this early in the morning?” Brezeen’s words were punctuated with exasperated clicks of her beak.

  “And a good morning to you, too, O lovely crested one.”

  “Sod off and tell me what you want. Have you come to your senses? Get your ass back here and I’ll cut that collar off you and have you out of here in no time.”

  “Tempting offer, but if you cut my collar, my head would explode.” He wasn’t kidding. Treska had told him back on the Needle’s Eye that if he attempted to short out the neuro-collar, the failsafes were designed to explode the head of the wearer. She might be bluffing, but he didn’t really want to discover that she was not.

  “You’re still hunting for that worthless Union wench, aren’t you?”

  “I think she might have found Enlightenment. Could you be a dear and patch me through his location?”

  Brezeen grumbled, but coordinates popped up on his handheld. “I hope you know what you’re doing, because if you were just chasing tailfeathers, I’ve got a sassy set right here.”

  “Ahh, Brezeen, if only a humble flightless one like me had the wingspan to handle you.” He smiled, even though the avian couldn’t see it. The avian matriarch made her opinions about the Restoration known, and she wasn’t wrong about the old government they were trying to restore, but she wasn’t above using it to further her own ends, and not completely opposed to the occasional alliance of convenience. The tense moment on the plains still bothered him. Having her as an ally was definitely better than the alternative, but the alternative always waited, just beneath the surface.

  He returned to the transport and moved south, where the mesas became more plentiful until they formed a solid wall that grew in front of him. The coordinates pointed straight ahead and he was almost on top of it before he spotted the crack in the high plateau. He left the transport and continued on foot through the crevasse, following the stream until he came to the coordinates Brezeen had given him. He needn’t have bothered Brezeen, he realized, when he saw the makeshift
dirigible floating in the air, just below the top edge of the canyon. A tether line stretched from the gondola to a narrow opening about twenty meters up, one of a network of several.

  Following the obvious cues, he began to climb, seeking finger- and toe-holds in the sheer rock. The susurration in his head had receded to a dull background noise, but when he placed his fingers on a protrusion of crystal, the hissing intensified. He concentrated on breathing for a few minutes, clinging motionless to the cliff edge, until he achieved a light, passive meditative state which enabled him to remember how to keep climbing. The cliff wall stretched up into infinity but dogged determination propelled him upward. Not for the Capitol, or the Restoration, but for Treska.

  How in the hells of the outer dark am I supposed to find an actuator in this? Treska kicked a pile of parts and watched with juvenile satisfaction as it tumbled over into a disorganized mess.

  The ride in the dirigible was not the destination after all, and Enlightenment insisted on “extending his hospitality” to his home in the high plateaus. Not on the plateau, but in it. The deep crevasses that separated the segments of the plateau were slender canyons, and the cliff faces were riddled with caves and tunnels. But unlike the mine shafts she and Micah had traveled through, Enlightenment’s cave system was a home.

  She’d been a little uncomfortable at using a rope ladder to descend into a box canyon, but the cluck-bird meal and Enlightenment’s gentle encouragement talked her over the side, and she was glad he did. The living caverns were insulated and luxuriously appointed in a neo-primitive style, and Enlightenment glowed at her appreciation as he led her to the lower levels where the salvage was kept.

  Now they sorted through piles of junk in a pattern that was, at Treska’s best guess, ‘following Enlightenment’s nose.’

  “You might try looking at the tags,” Enlightenment said. He lifted a part and showed her the holographic numerals stamped on it. “Look for a flat surface about two fingers wide, and numerals that begin with 853.”