Текст книги "Harbinger"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

The same pervasive mood of gloom greeted him around every corner and on every face. No music issued from Manón’s club; conversation in the recreation areas was subdued or nonexistent. People passing by in the hallways seemed to be turned inward.

When he arrived at his usual watering hole for a drink, he understood why. Adorning the huge mirror behind the bar counter was a hand-painted message on the glass—a simple outline of the Bombay’s ship emblem with a black band across its center. Above it was the Latin inscription In Memoriam. Below it, in capital letters, was stenciled U.S.S. BOMBAY.

“Sweet lord in heaven,” he muttered. The sentiment sprang from him without warning, like the shock that had provoked it. Though the ship’s crew had been strangers to him, he was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of kinship and bereavement for the fallen Starfleeters.

He sat down at the counter and nodded to the bartender.

“Tequila,” he said. “A double.”

The bartender eyed a long row of bottles on the shelf behind him, then looked at Quinn. “What kind?”

“Anythin’ cheap that ain’t green.”

Anticipation kindled on his taste buds as the aroma of agave liquor reached his nose. He imagined savoring the sweet and sour notes on the sides of his tongue and the warmth of the alcohol in the back of his throat. Memories of fine tequilas in years gone by were stoked by the promise of a new drink….

A beefy hand clamped down on Quinn’s left shoulder and clenched shut like a vise. From his right a slender, glossy black hand gently plucked the double-shot glass of tequila from his grasp. The diabolically polite voice of Zett Nilric was alarmingly close to his ear. “Welcome back, Quinn.”

Quinn remained still as Zett’s hulking Tarmelite enforcer, Morikmol—whom Quinn had once barely survived describing as a “walking life-support system for a pair of fists”—spun him around on the rotating barstool to face the white-suited thug.

Zett was grinning. That was never a good sign.

“We were beginning to think you weren’t coming back,” the archly condescending Nalori assassin said.

Fingering the man’s lapel, Quinn said, “New suit?”

Morikmol grabbed the back of Quinn’s jacket collar and hefted him several centimeters off the floor. Zett lifted the glass in a mocking toast, then downed the double in one gulp. He put the glass back on the bar. “Mr. Ganz is expecting you.” Without waiting for Quinn’s next retort, the slender man walked toward the exit. The enforcer let go of Quinn, who landed on his feet. The hulking thug gave him a push toward the door. Taking the hint, Quinn squelched his impulse to order another drink.

The Omari-Ekon’s gambling deck was just as Quinn had left it a few weeks earlier—noisy and full of losers who had yet to figure out that this house always won. Zett led the way up the curving staircase to Ganz’s oasis, and Morikmol followed close behind Quinn, his heavy footsteps sending tremors through the otherwise solid stairs. Knowing the routine by heart, he ambled to his spot between the two obelisks, which he had seen disintegrate a few people over the years, though none so far while the ship was docked at Vanguard.

“Mr. Quinn,” Ganz said. “You’re late.”

Quinn shrugged. “Complications.”

The muscular Orion boss took a pull from his hookah nozzle, savored the smoke a moment, then exhaled two thick plumes from his nostrils. He reminded Quinn of a green Brahma bull, except twisted and cruel. The lazy coils of smoke lingered, spreading an odor of burnt cherries with an acrid, metallic bite.

“Complications don’t concern me,” Ganz said after puffing out his last mouthful of smoke. “My merchandise does.”

Though Quinn couldn’t see the assassins gathered behind him, he heard the soft rub of several leather holster straps being loosened. He kept his hands steady and open at his sides. “Hence the complication,” he said.

He fully expected the next thing he felt would be a pair of disintegrator beams tearing him apart molecule by molecule.

Instead, he watched Ganz formulate a reply. Though he spoke quietly, no one ever missed a word the Orion merchant-prince said. “The explanation you are about to provide had better be phenomenally good.”

“The device was too large to move by myself,” Quinn began.

“You should have brought help.”

“So I separated the valuable part from the worthless part,” he continued, ignoring the interruption.

“Clever. Where is it?”

“I tripped and it fell…” He mustered all the contrition he was capable of emoting: “…and it broke.”

Ganz’s voice took on a dangerous edge. “You dropped it?”

Behind Quinn the crowd moved closer. The heat of their collective breath and attention was oppressive. He tuned them out. “People were shooting at me.”

That seemed to pique Ganz’s interest. “Who?”

“Judging by the phasers they were using, I’d say they were Starfleet security.”

A nervous susurrus of whispers circled the room in both directions and lapped itself. Ganz passed the moment by taking another long drag off his hookah and blowing a lazy smoke ring in Quinn’s direction. “How did they detect you?”

“Cutting the device’s power supply tripped an alarm.”

Tsk-tsking and waggling his index finger like a reproachful grandmother, Ganz said, “You should always scan before you cut.”

“I did scan,” Quinn said. “Nothing showed up—it was a sensor screen. Wouldn’t be much good if it let you scan it to see if it’s on.” That got a few stifled chuckles from the crowd.

“True,” Ganz said. “Did they identify you?”

“Considering I didn’t get arrested when I landed an hour ago, my guess would be no.”

Ganz put down his hookah nozzle and sprawled across his mountain of brightly colored cushions until he found a more leisurely pose. “Quinn,” he said, shaking his head. “What am I going to do with you? You’ve put me in quite a bind.” Having learned not to put questions to Ganz, Quinn kept his mouth shut and waited for the green man to elaborate. “The sensor screen would have fetched a nice profit on the black market. I already had inquiries from potential buyers.” Oh hell, Quinn thought. He’s going to make up some insane imaginary number, call it his lost profits, and put me in debt for the rest of my damn life. Ganz slowly folded the fingers of his right hand, one at a time, beneath his thumb and pressed down until each knuckle made a satisfying pop. “But my real disappointment is that I had big plans for that pretty little machine. Plans you just ruined.”

“I can’t begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am, sir.” It was the truth; Quinn couldn’t tell him, but only because he wasn’t really sorry at all. It was a botched job, part of the game, and everyone knew it. Unfortunately, people at Ganz’s level of the game, Quinn had learned, rewrote its rules to suit themselves whenever they saw fit.

This, apparently, was going to be one of those times.

Ganz sat up, stood, and walked slowly toward Quinn. “Let me tell you how you’re going to make this right,” he said. “You owe me a debt. Not money—a favor. A job to be named later. When I ask it of you, you’ll do it, no excuses.” He stood mere centimeters away from Quinn, towering over him, his dark eyes glaring down with cruel intensity. “Do we ‘reach,’ Mr. Quinn?”

“Sure. How can I refuse?”

“You can’t.” Leaving his warning implied, Ganz turned and padded casually back to his mountain of comfort. Reclining into its lush embrace, he snapped his fingers, and a pair of lissome young women—one human, the other Deltan—sprang to his sides and began doting affectionately and silently on him.

Choking back the bile of his envy, Quinn stood and waited patiently for his dismissal. After a minute or so frolicking with his sylphlike courtesans, Ganz made an exaggerated show of noticing that Quinn was still there. “One last thing,” he said. “In case you think you’re getting off easy…you’re not.”

Oh, no.

Closing his eyes, Quinn braced himself, and the beating commenced. A sweep kick took his legs out from under him, dropping him on his back. Punches rained down, battering his face and knocking the breath out of him with a few well-placed gut shots. Someone pulled him to his feet and held him steady, but he knew not to say “thank you”; he had taken enough stompings in his life to know they were propping him up only to use him as a punching bag. His vision was hazy and bloodred, so all he saw before each new jab or cross to his head was a dark blur. The hands gripping his arms released him, but he didn’t get his hopes up; it just meant whoever had been behind him was moving out of the way, for the assailant who now kicked him in the groin. Nausea swelled inside him, and he dropped to his knees, which probably was very helpful for whoever it was who pistol-whipped him across his temple.

He flopped sideways onto the floor, a thick stream of bloody spittle gushing from his split lip and loosened teeth. Blinking slowly, he fought to see through the heavy swelling around his eye sockets. He recognized the bespoke white fabric of the pant leg standing in front of him.

Overcoming the hideous pain in the vertebrae of his neck, Quinn turned his head slightly and looked up at Zett. “Nice shoes,” he gurgled, causing red-tinged saliva bubbles to froth over the corner of his mouth.

“Thank you,” Zett said. Then he pulled back his foot, snapped it forward, and broke two of Quinn’s ribs.

“That’s enough,” Ganz said, and the beating ceased. Morikmol gingerly lifted Quinn’s disheveled, sagging bulk into a crude facsimile of a standing position. He turned him toward Ganz, not that Quinn could see the Orion boss—or anything else right now, for that matter. Ganz’s foghorn of a voice resonated in the tense hush. “If anyone should ask…”

“I slipped in the shower,” Quinn said.

“Very good…. We’ll be in touch.”

Borne away in the hands of the Tarmelite, Quinn’s exit from Ganz’s ship was a swish-pan of blurred vision and an ordeal of pain. The corridor lighting was harsh and bright after the dim, smoky haze of the Orion’s lair, but squinting stung his swollen eyes. He was actually grateful when his chin struck the deck back in Vanguard’s docking wheel, and he heard footsteps recede back inside the Omari-Ekon. The hatch scraped shut. I’m alone, and I’m still alive, he realized. It took a few moments for him to believe it. He rolled slowly onto his stomach and drew one shallow breath after another.

He crawled forward. Every muscle and joint burned. When his arms and his legs and his back all finally gave out, he slumped onto the deck for several minutes, then peeked around himself to gauge his progress. To his dismay, he had moved less than twenty meters. Marshaling the atrophied vestiges of his youthful survival instinct, he forced himself to put one hand in front of the other and go on dragging himself forward.

It’s a long way to the bar, he told himself. Keep crawling.

Diego Reyes gazed out into the endless void beyond the main window in Dr. Fisher’s quarters, and he wished for a moment that he could just lose himself in all that comfortingly silent darkness. “It’s just been one of those weeks,” he said.

Behind him, the doctor sat on his sofa, sipping at the gently spiced, half-decaf coffee he had brewed for the commodore’s impromptu, late-evening visit. “Meenok’s disease is about as bad as it gets,” Fisher said. “I wish I could put a silver lining on your mother’s situation, but…well, I’m just damn sorry, Diego.”

Reyes glanced at Fisher’s reflection, half-spectral against the stars on the other side of the transparent aluminum window. The older man’s heavy-lidded eyes projected serenity. It was an emotion that Reyes could only envy this evening.

“I spent the last four days thinking about how awful it must be to get a death sentence like that,” Reyes said. “To have a few months to contemplate the end of your life…. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Then we lost the Bombay.”

“Two months or two minutes, doesn’t make much difference,” Fisher said. “No matter how ready we think we are for death, no one’s ever ready. Not really.”

“Maybe not. But there’s a big difference between getting a terminal illness and getting killed in an ambush.”

“You sure about that? Are there degrees of dead?”

“I can’t take revenge on Meenok’s disease. I can hunt down the bastards who attacked the Bombay.”

“Hang on, Diego. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.” Over the years, Reyes had learned to heed Dr. Fisher’s advice. The old physician, despite being an irascible curmudgeon, was known to dispense some fairly sound philosophy in his spare time. Regardless, tonight his notes of caution sounded naïve.

Reyes’s voice simmered with anger. “It was a milk run, Zeke. Simple as it gets. Except they aren’t coming back.”

Fisher leaned forward with a soft groan of effort and rested his mug on the antique cedar coffee table. “That’s the job,” the doctor said, the gritty edge of his drawl a bit more pronounced than usual. “Sometimes things go wrong. But it doesn’t matter how many times life knocks you down; what matters is how many times you get back up.”

“Spare me the pep talk, will you? I know risk is part of the equation,” Reyes said, the twin demons of doubt and regret wrestling in his gut. “But the Ravanar system was well charted. No anomalies.” In one gulp, he downed the rest of his own mug of black, unsweetened coffee. “If this wasn’t an attack, why is my ship missing?”

Fisher folded his hands together. “A lot can happen to a starship, even under the best of circumstances. There’s still a lot of things in this galaxy we don’t understand.”

“Here’s what I understand,” Reyes said, turning away from the window. “A good ship with a great captain isn’t coming home.” He stalked into the kitchenette and poured himself another cup of coffee. A faint scent of cinnamon and nutmeg rose on its wisps of steam. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question on the table is, who did it? The Klingons or the Tholians?”

“Why not declare war on both? Could save time later.”

Reyes scowled at the doctor as he picked up his mug and gave it a cooling puff of breath. “Ravanar’s a long way from the Klingon border, and we’ve had Endeavour patrolling that for a few weeks now. But the Tholians haven’t shown any interest in the Taurus Reach, so I can’t figure out why they’d do this.”

Stroking his goatee, Fisher said, “The Tholians might not have rattled their sabers as loudly as the Klingons, but I’d hardly say they welcomed us with open…well, open whatever it is they have.” He leaned forward and picked up his mug. “And ever since the Tholian delegation’s bizarre collective seizure last week…let’s just say they’ve been acting oddly.”

Reyes pointed at the coffeepot and cast an inquiring glance at Fisher, who nodded. The commodore carried the coffeepot over to Fisher and refilled the doctor’s mug.

“Thanks,” Fisher said.

“De nada.” Reyes put the coffeepot back on its warmer pad. He had just taken another modest sip of the warm, soothing beverage when Rana Desai’s voice issued from the overhead speaker.

“Captain Desai to Commodore Reyes.”

Reyes went to the intercom panel on the wall and thumbed open the channel. “Reyes here. Go ahead, Captain.”

In an effort to keep their romantic relationship private, they made a point of hailing each other formally and responding formally when third parties were present—even if, like Fisher, the person already knew about their status as a couple. Though Reyes felt awkward when using ranks to ask Desai over to his quarters for dinner, the strict observance of protocol had already averted a few potential embarrassments for them both.

“Commodore, I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”

“Of course, Captain,” Reyes said. “Shall I drop by your quarters?” He cast a wry grin at Fisher, who shook his head resignedly.

“Actually, Commodore, I need to see you in my office.”

The smirk left Reyes’s face.

“Understood,” he said, his tone turning serious. “I’ll be with you shortly. Reyes out.” He moved toward the door.

Fisher followed him and exuded sympathy. “Her office?” He shook his head. “That’s not good.” At the door, he gave Reyes a firm clasp on the shoulder. “Look on the bright side: If this is trouble, at least the JAG boss is your girlfriend.”

“Just what I always wanted,” Reyes said with a humor-less half-smirk. “A girlfriend who can court-martial me.”

Reyes’s shout was like a bullhorn. “You’re court-martialing me?”

“No. Stop overreacting, Diego.” Ensconced behind her office desk, Desai could only hope that Reyes wasn’t as angry as he looked. “It’s a board of inquiry.”

“This is the biggest load of—” Reyes caught himself, then pressed his palm over his sandpaper-stubbled chin and upper lip.

“I don’t have a choice,” Desai said. “The Bombay was lost in the line of duty. There has to be an inquiry.”

“Give me a break, Rana.” Reyes was pacing now, quickly and with mounting agitation. “This is what you do to a captain who comes home without his ship.”

“The inquiry is standard procedure.”

“Naming the ship’s captain is standard procedure,” Reyes shot back. “Not the captain’s supervising officer.”

She leaned forward and placed her fingertips on the desk. “The Starfleet JAG wants me to depose living witnesses. It’s not like you’re the only one on the list.” His sidelong glance bristled with hostility. She continued, “What did you think I was going to do? Mark the file ‘case closed’ without doing an investigation? I have my orders.”

“History’s greatest excuse,” Reyes said, rolling his eyes.

“I hope you’re not this funny with your judge. You might get that court-martial for contempt.”

A retort seemed on the verge of escaping Reyes’s mouth, when he hesitated. His indignation turned to confusion. “I thought you would be the judge.”

“No,” Desai said. “I can’t.”

He was staring hard into her eyes. “Why not?”

She looked down and moved a few random items around on her desktop. “I’ll be recusing myself.”

Reyes’s face hardened into a frown. “Because of us.”

“Yes,” she said. “It would be unethical for me to—”

“You can’t do that,” Reyes said. “Don’t recuse yourself.”

“Diego, I have to.”

“If you do, you’ll have to say why.” He shook his head with frustration. “We…us…our relationship—it’d be public.” She wondered if he had any idea how stupid that sounded. “I think that came out wrong,” he added.

“You think?”

Exasperated and exhausted, he rubbed his eyes. He folded his arms and thought for a few seconds. She kept him in her accusatory glare and waited patiently to see how he planned to dig his way out of this faux pas. “I’m just not ready to add grist to Vanguard’s rumor mill,” he said. “We’re in high-profile jobs. People will talk.” He reached down and picked up a large, polished hunk of blue volcanic glass from Desai’s desk. “I know that we’d hardly be the first or even the most glamorous couple in the officer corps…but I value our privacy.”

She couldn’t deny that she sympathized with him. Being the topic of lurid gossip was a notion that made her feel ill. And part of the thrill of their romance so far had been in the hiding of it. But this was not about their relationship. “I feel the same way, Diego. But I’d rather recuse myself than give people reason to question my ethics.”

Studying the hunk of blue glass in his palm, Reyes drew a long breath then exhaled slowly. He seemed much calmer than he had just minutes earlier. For Desai, one of the most difficult aspects of being romantically involved with him was the volcanic quality of his temperament. His fury could lay dormant for the longest time, then, without warning, boom. When he was truly angry, he frightened her a little. At the same time, once he vented his rage, it subsided quickly. Just to complicate the situation further, she was still learning which irritants were most likely to trigger his explosions.

Finally, he broke the tense hush with a dejected-sounding sigh. “I trust you to be a fair and impartial judge, no matter who’s standing in front of you.”

That makes one of us, Desai reflected.

He put the chunk of glass back on her desk. “Use your best judgment. Let my yeoman know when you need to see me.”

Reyes turned toward the door, which hissed open, letting in the soft murmur of whispered conferences between members of her JAG office staff. The commodore walked out without looking back. When the door closed, Desai eased herself into her chair. She imagined what it was going to be like, sitting at a table with her lover, watching him be deposed about his role, however peripheral, in the deaths of more than two hundred Starfleet personnel. I’m going to hate this case, she brooded.

On her desk was the report of the loss of the Starship Bombay. To her eye, the file looked very, very thin.

Starting tomorrow, she knew, that would change.

Pennington dropped his duffel on the floor. “I need a storage unit,” he said to the quartermaster, Senior Chief Petty Officer Sozlok. The dark-furred, vaguely simian-looking noncom seemed in no hurry to service the frantic journalist’s request.

Sozlok slid a data sheet on an automated pad across the counter to Pennington. “Fill this out.”

The form was long, and it was complicated, and it was everything that Pennington had no time for right now. Keeping up the pretense would be essential, however. “Could you check to see if you have any units large enough to hold a dozen cases of Loperian reelkot?”

“Reelkot?” Sozlok looked intrigued. “You’ll be needing refrigerated storage, then.”

“Yes, exactly.” Why the hell did I say reelkot? He kicked himself for mentioning something so unusual. This was the kind of visit he would prefer be forgotten. Instead, he’d made it bizarre enough for this guy to tell someone else about it tomorrow over drinks, and interesting enough that it might be repeated.

While he busied himself completing the form, Sozlok clicked through several screens of data, apparently on a search for an available refrigerated storage unit of unusual size. There was no point in falsifying the form, Pennington knew. The noncom would ask for his identification before finishing the rental. For a moment he wondered how he might avoid leaving a trace of his visit, until he remembered that there was nothing inherently suspicious about his actions. People do this all the time, he reassured himself. Nothing to worry about. Calm down.

A few minutes later, Pennington’s form was filled-in, and Sozlok seemed to have settled on an appropriate unit for him. “Here we go,” he said. “Level forty-nine, section three, quad two, unit fourteen-echo.”

“Great,” Pennington said. As if it were an afterthought, he added, “Do you mind if I check it out before I commit to it? You know—just to make sure.”

“Fine by me,” Sozlok said.

“Just one thing: I forgot my jacket, and it’s going to be colder than hell frozen over in there. Got a spare I could borrow?”

“Probably,” said Sozlok, who lumbered away into a back room to scrounge up a loaner coat.

The moment Sozlok was around the corner and his footsteps began to recede, Pennington all but launched himself across the counter, until he was lying on top of it. Reaching over, he turned the noncom’s monitor toward himself and started deftly keying commands into its control panel. He knew time was short, but his need was simple: He wanted to know which storage unit belonged to Oriana.

It took only seconds to coax the data from the intuitive interface. Staring at the compartment number, he committed it to memory. During his third pass of mnemonic reinforcement, he heard the growing clap of approaching footfalls. Resetting the interface and turning the monitor back to its prior facing, he slithered in reverse across the countertop and landed softly on his feet. He was standing tall and looking utterly trustworthy as Sozlok returned.

The hirsute alien handed Pennington a bulky, fur-lined parka. “Keep it. It’s from lost-and-found.”

“Thanks.” He slung the coat over his duffel and hefted both over his shoulder while Sozlok encoded a key card for him.

Handing the card to Pennington, Sozlok said, “This card is single-use only. Go check out the unit. If it’s what you want, we’ll start an account for you.”

“Sounds good.” He tucked the key in his pants pocket. “Back in a bit.”

“Take your time,” Sozlok said, then sighed. “I’m here all night.” He wore the fatigued mien of a person trapped in a job he wasn’t yet prepared to spurn.

“Hang in there, mate,” Pennington said. “Back in a jiff.”

Pennington pushed away from the counter and walked away quickly, before he found himself lassoed into another round of depressive banter. Quickening his pace to the turbolift, he told himself for the hundredth time that he wasn’t breaking into Oriana’s storage unit for selfish reasons. If her husband found those mementos, it’d be a disaster, he rationalized. Bad enough to hear that your wife is dead, but, “Oh, yeah, mate, she was cheating on you, too.” That’s just beyond the pale.

Continuing down to the refrigerated-storage area, he kept telling himself that. He expected to believe it any minute now.

An hour. An entire hour.

That’s how long it had taken Cervantes Quinn—battered, bloodied, and crawling like a wounded animal—to arrive at a bar that would still let him in to drink. The revulsed stares and the horrified gasps that he’d endured from passers-by hadn’t bothered him. Nor had he allowed himself to be upset by the creeping suspicion that more of his blood was soaked into his favorite shirt than was coursing through his veins. He was glad he had saved his ire for this moment.

Hand over hand, with a mighty effort and labored breaths, he lifted himself from the floor and climbed, one exceptionally careful motion at a time, on to the first empty barstool he reached. Sitting upright, he felt the tug of gravity against his body shift. He steadied himself, licked the blood from his own teeth, swallowed, and croaked out a one-word request: “Tequila.”

The bartender—a heavy, profusely sweating, and ill-mooded middle-aged Bolian—shot Quinn a disdainful glare. “Got cash?”

It took a few seconds for the question to sink in.

Disgust and indignation lurked behind Quinn’s soft tone. “I paid my tab here last month.”

“Yeah, I know,” the bartender said. “But you also look like you just got rolled. No offense, but you don’t strike me as a good credit risk right now.”

Quinn dug into his pockets and dredged up one loose bit of currency after another. He piled them haphazardly on the bar. A Federation credit chip, a few Klingon jiQ, and half a dozen exotic alien coins lay scrambled together. The bartender scooped them up in a single swipe of his hand and reached for the good Anejo. It splashed into a low glass, the long legs of it clinging to the sides, its sweet aroma pulling Quinn closer, like the ambrosia of Tantalus. The bartender pushed the glass toward him. With aching fingers, Quinn reached for his drink.

A hand clamped on to the collar of his jacket.

He had just long enough to think the word damn, but not long enough to say it, before he was yanked backward off the barstool and dragged toward the doorway—his precious and fully paid-for glass of tequila abandoned on the bar, which grew farther away with each passing moment.

Turning to see who had delivered this injustice upon him for the second time in one evening, he looked into the passionless face of Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn. “Hey,” he said, his words slurred by pain and loosened teeth. “I’m not this easy, you know. You have to woo me.”

“Be quiet,” she said, and he could tell that she meant it. “We are going to speak privately. Until then, I would prefer you did not speak at all.”

“Can I at least do my own walking?”

T’Prynn halted, looked him over, and let go of his collar.

He collapsed in a heap on the ground.

“Okay,” he said. “Dragging’s fine.”

Breaking into Oriana’s storage locker was proving more difficult than Pennington had expected. The dislodged door-control panel dangled from a lone duotronic cable. With sweaty fingers, he guided the lock-picking tools through the bramble of wires, chips, and capacitors. Taking care not to trip the security alarms, he disabled the door’s redundant lock mechanisms.

It had been a while since he had needed to call upon these less-than-respectable skills, which he had learned from Unez, his Scoridian journalism mentor in Edinburgh. Working his way through the lock, he thought of an incident several years ago, when Unez had snickered smugly while Pennington fumbled with a simple magnetic bolt on a decrepit old building’s service door. As criticism went, it had been decidedly unconstructive, but it was also effective: Pennington had vowed never to suffer that embarrassment again.

The last interlock released with a soft clack.

He picked up his duffel bag and opened the door, which swung outward, expelling a stale gust. The storage unit was about two meters high and as narrow as the door. An overhead light glowed automatically to life, revealing a shallow space. It was only slightly deeper than he could reach without leaning over the frontmost row of stacked plastic containers.

Like a stevedore, he hauled out the boxes and opened each one in turn. Rooting swiftly through their contents, he plucked out items that could link him to Oriana. A photograph of them he had taken with his FNS recorder. Some small handwritten notes of the exceptionally trivial variety—“Stepped out for coffee,” or “Missed you this morning,” or “Saw these and thought of you”—that he had left for her when their schedules had failed to synchronize as planned. The first bouquet of flowers he had ever given to her, desiccated and bundled in a cone of fragile paper. And, most damning of all, a stack of his passionate letters, which had been instrumental in his courting of her.

He stuffed all of it into his duffel and tied it shut. Slack and half-filled when he’d come here, it now bulged full.

Once all the boxes were resealed and neatly put back in their places, he swung the door closed. It moved slowly, its hydraulic hinges designed to prevent slamming. As it neared the doorjamb it slowed further, inched into place, then suddenly was pulled inward by the magnetic bolts. Whirring and clicking sounds overlapped for a few seconds while the other locking mechanisms automatically secured the heavy gray metal portal.