Rebels and Lovers (5 page)

Petra Frederick nodded. “I’ll have them on property in a half hour, Mr. Devin.”

He signed off, turning his attention to Ethan, Hannah, and their children, confirming their locations with their personal security. From there, aunts, uncles, and cousins were alerted. And all GGS offices in Aldan and Baris.

A less specific message, with perfunctory regrets, was sent to the Embersons, as well as to Tavia’s personal pocket comm:
Family emergency requires delay of your visit
. The Embersons didn’t need to know details at this point.

Devin didn’t need to add more people in the line of fire.

It hadn’t escaped him that Trip’s disappearance might be only the beginning of someone’s move against them—corporately, politically, or both. He didn’t share his father’s paranoia, but threats had been made, even before Philip changed allegiances.

He also knew Ben Halsey wasn’t one to go down without a fight. A burly man in his late fifties, Halsey was ex-ImpSec—and Imperial Security Forces had a well-earned reputation for excellence and ruthlessness. For someone to get a jump on him … Devin could only liken it to a handball match where an unassuming and unknown player suddenly decimates a known athlete with years of experience.

He needed to see Rallman’s log and the Aldan Prime police reports. And he needed the holos of Trip’s
apartment at Montgomery. The answers to all the questions would be there.

Halsey was tough, experienced, but Jonathan Macy Guthrie III was no idiot. Trip had made a point of studying every combat holo then-Captain Philip Guthrie ever authored. Philip was more than the ship driver he often joked he was. He’d graduated top of his class in the academy and he was an acknowledged authority in several forms of combat and tactical reconnaissance. When Devin was Trip’s age, Philip—ten years his senior and already a respected Fleet officer—had put him through a grueling boot-camp survival course on one of the Guthrie game preserves on Sylvadae. They’d both done the same thing for Trip, just last year.

Devin didn’t have Philip’s love of weapons, but he could handle a high-powered Carver laser pistol. So could Trip.

J.M. tried to protect the Guthrie clan through fortuitous marriages. Philip did so by teaching Guthrie boys how to survive. And, if necessary, kill.

If someone had come after Trip, Trip would have fought back; Devin had no doubt of that. So he needed to see the police holos. He needed to follow the trail of blood.

Kaidee threaded her way through the noisy crowd packed in Trouble’s Brewing, looking for a seat at the bar. Hell, she’d be satisfied to even
see
the bar. The throng was easily four deep, in various shades of gray, dark blue, and green—all standard freighter-crew uniform colors. She waved to three gray-suited crew from the long-hauler
Wiznalarit
. Another few steps and she nodded at more familiar faces, including Corrina and Rae from the
Solarian Wolf
, and received raised ale
mugs in a silent toast. Tables in the popular pub on Dock Five’s Blue Level were packed, with patrons sitting on armrests, laps, anything.

Trouble was, it wasn’t just Trouble’s Brewing.

Dock Five was packed, with about every bay or berth taken. Even the regular shuttle and passenger transport docks were filled with cargo ships, captains moving their freighters only to allow the next transport to unload or retrieve passengers.

As soon as the passenger transport departed, the captains moved their freighters back into the dock again.

No one she knew was out in the lanes.

Six hours ago, Tage had added another destroyer at Dock Five’s outer beacon and shut the lanes down—again—to all traffic other than scheduled passenger transports and the Imperial Fleet. Even the jumpgates were blockaded.

So freighter captains and crew did the only thing they could do when there was no work: they drank. And Trouble’s Brewing always had a more-than-decent supply of ale, because it maintained a small brewing facility in its kitchen.

But if Trouble’s ran out of grain, real troubles would begin. She could almost feel an undercurrent of tension, ready to explode.

“Kaid! Makaiden Griggs! Over here!”

Kaidee turned at the sound of her name, recognizing the voice of the bald-headed, pale-skinned older man whose hand splayed in the air. His brown coveralls bore the glowing-wrench logo of Popovitch Expert Repair Service. She dodged a ’droid server with two trays full of dirty glasses and headed for the corner table where Pops, his office manager/daughter Ilsa, and his repair techs often lounged.

Garvey—she didn’t know his first name—was leaning over the back of a chair that was empty except for one of Pops’s scuffed boots. Next to him was Aries Pan, a tech Pops had hired a few weeks back. A small screwdriver tucked behind her right ear held her pink and purple hair back from her face. She smiled as Kaidee approached, her face impish yet intelligent.

“Need a seat?” Pops asked, motioning to the bearded dark-haired tech. “Garvey was just leaving.”

“Don’t mean to put you out,” Kaidee said to Garvey, as she returned Aries’s smile.

Garvey wiggled his thick eyebrows. “Meeting up with my little honey. It’s yours, Captain Griggs.”

“And he’ll come back covered with love bruises and a happy twinkle in his eye,” Aries drawled teasingly.

Chuckles sounded around the table. Garvey looked sheepish.

Kaidee nodded her thanks. “You could have probably sold this seat and made some money.”

Pops dropped his foot from the chair to the decking as Garvey disappeared into the crowd. “We’re all going to be needing a new business before long, if Tage don’t let up.”

That was the truth. Kaidee liked Pops. She’d known of his repair facility for more than a decade but had dealt with him for only about a year now. Which meant she didn’t know him well enough to dump her troubles on him. She snagged a bottle of ale from a passing ’droid server, dropping a credit chip in the slot in its left arm, and tried to focus on something other than her personal problems. “You mean that with all these ships on dock, Pops’s Repairs doesn’t have a captive audience?”

“With no one moving goods, no one’s getting paid.
Which means captains don’t want to spend money they don’t have.”

She understood that only too well. “They have to open the lanes soon.” Real soon. She didn’t want to see Frinks on her rampway again.

“Tomorrow.” Pops looked around the table with a snort. “Isn’t that what we hear every few hours? Lanes’ll be open tomorrow.”

Kaidee had heard the same line. Last time Tage pulled this, it had been almost a shipweek of tomorrows. And a shipweek would create serious trouble for her.

“Or we’ll all starve to death, eventually,” Ilsa was saying, leaning against a sandy-haired man’s shoulder. Ilsa was about Kaidee’s own age, the man perhaps a little younger. His hair was pulled back in a long tail, which he had draped over the other shoulder. She’d seen him in Pops’s place before but didn’t know his name. And he didn’t wear tech coveralls but a spacer’s black leather jacket.

She gathered from Ilsa’s posture that this was her current lover.

“You’ll have riots here before that,” the man said. “Heard Trel’s had a big bar fight. Stripers had to fire-hose the place to stop it. Next time they’ll probably use gas.”

Aries nodded. “No one in Aldan would cry big tears if we all got spaced or Dock Five imploded.”

Aldan was the central hub of the Empire, with worlds like Sylvadae, Garno, and Aldan Prime, whose wealthy denizens would, no, not miss Dock Five at all. It had been a gathering place for pirates, mercenaries, and other ask-me-no-questions types for centuries, back when the Empire was just Aldan, Calth was first
being colonized, and Baris sector was some unpronounceable Stolorth name.

Dock Five was also home to a lot of hardworking traders and spacers and ships that did the backbreaking runs the larger shipping companies had no interest in doing. So it was a place where a lot of careers started—and a place where many of them died.

Kaidee wasn’t sure right now which end of the spectrum she was on. But if Frinks had his way, it would be the latter.

“We’re not the only ones the Baris blockades have locked in,” she said, after taking a swig of ale from her bottle. It was icy cold and had a bittersweet tang that suited her current mood perfectly. “There’s Starport Six—”

“Which houses a military base, so they’re getting supplies,” Ilsa’s lover said. “Lots of ’em, now that Corsau Station’s gone over to the Alliance.”

Corsau?
She hadn’t heard. That had long been an active and prosperous station on the opposite end of the B–C. She’d been there dozens of times. No wonder Tage was angry. “When?”

“Shipweek ago, maybe less,” Pops put in. “Depending on which source you hear it from.”

Aries turned her near-empty bottle in her hands. “I heard the Empire took it back again, but I think that’s just what they want us to believe.”

“Like I said, depends who you hear it from.” Pops leaned forward, dropping his voice. “Right now I trust this new Alliance a hell of a lot more than I do our crazy emperor and his flunky. And sources I know
and
trust say Corsau joined up with Kirro, Umoran and the starports in Calth sector, and the rest of Dafir. Tage can’t risk losing more of Baris sector.”

“And locking us in helps him how?” Aries grumbled.

“The new Alliance has Ferrin’s
and
the shipyards there,” Ilsa said, with a vague motion of one hand, indicating something beyond Dock Five’s hull. “That puts the Alliance in the position to build more ships and then move into Baris from both ends of Calth.” She looked at her father. “Ain’t that right, Pops?”

Pops sighed. “Sounds like you been listening in to my office when you were supposed to be working, girl.”

Ilsa shrugged, then laughed lightly. “And you just figured that out?”

“Just watch what you say and who you say it to.”

Another shrug. “Can they really expect we’ll all sit here, happy as you please, without bitching? Without wondering what’s going on?”

“My feeling is they’re looking for certain people. And they’re listening to the bitching to find out where those certain people are.”

Kaidee could almost hear her father’s voice:
Time to run, girl
. Except the Empire had found him and killed him almost a year ago. No, this was some new project of Tage’s.

Maybe that was why Frinks was suddenly pressuring her for the rest of Kiler’s debt. Orvis was smarmy enough to work for Tage as an agent. Kiler had probably blabbed about his “close personal contact” with the Guthries. It wouldn’t be hard for someone like Orvis to check that out, to verify that they’d flown for GGS for five years.

But that didn’t mean she had Philip Guthrie in her cargo hold and Guthrie funds in her account.

You’re hallucinating, Kaid. This has nothing to do, personally, with you or your family. And the Empire
knows exactly where Admiral Philip Guthrie is: in command of some Alliance warship that kicked the shit out of an Imperial cruiser out by the C-6 jumpgate
. Or so she’d heard about a shipmonth ago.

So who did the Empire want badly enough to damned near bring Baris sector to a halt? Kaidee had a feeling Pops knew, but she wasn’t about to ask him. The last thing she needed was to get involved with volatile Imperial politics. She had enough problems on her own.

She had to come up with thirteen thousand credits—and fast.

They pored over the police reports from Aldan Prime and Montgomery University security for the better part of two hours. Ethan even dug out vids of his and Hannah’s visit to Trip’s apartment only two weeks ago and painstakingly went over every scene of every room, comparing it to the police images, looking for something the police might have missed. They came up with nothing.

They viewed Rallman’s logs, again, in detail. “Professionals,” Jonathan said, as Ethan nodded in agreement. “It was done quickly, neatly.”

Neatly, yes. But other than that, the data made no damned sense at all.

Devin scrubbed at his face with both hands, then slipped his glasses back on. “I’m not ruling out that Tage may have had Halsey killed,” he said, leaning his elbows on his knees as he sat in the high-backed leather library chair near the polished gray stone fireplace. Jonathan, eyes still shadowed with worry, was in the matching chair on the other side. J.M. looked pale, his mouth pinched as he sat behind his large,
ornately carved desk. Ethan lounged tiredly—one leg propped up on the sofa table—on a nail-studded couch catercorner to the desk.

Hannah was upstairs with Marguerite, Valerie, and the children.

A half dozen armed security personnel were milling about the house, their footsteps and occasional low conversations drifting into the library.

“But I have a hard time believing,” Devin continued, “that kidnappers would have cleaned Trip’s apartment, packed his duffel and his bookpad, but left his deskcomp behind. And where’s his pocket comm? Why would they leave him with a means to contact us?”

“Stop playing detective, D.J.,” Ethan drawled. He was the only one who called Devin that, and he knew Devin hated it. But everyone was strained, nerves taut. That was just Ethan’s way of showing his frustration. “The police are trained for that kind of thing. You’re not.”

Devin shook his head and looked at Ethan. His brother’s dark hair was tinged with gold from the sun, his face tanned from the hours he spent sailing. But all the fresh air and sunshine hadn’t been able to remove the dark circles under Ethan’s eyes, the result of hours of drinking. And—Devin often suspected—possibly worse. His brother was in no shape to handle this kind of stress from his family. “It has nothing to do with playing detective. It has to do with logic.”

“People don’t become criminals because they have an excess of logic.”

“If they were criminals, Ethan, they would have taken Trip’s vidcams, comps, everything. Nothing that happened there bespeaks a lower criminal element.”

Ethan snorted. “Bespeaks?”

That rewarded Ethan with a slanted glance from his father. Ethan shrugged and fell back against the couch cushions. There were six years between Ethan and Devin, so for six years Ethan had been the baby of the family. Devin’s arrival didn’t seem to change that. If anything, it made it worse. Or so Devin had heard the servants whisper more than once.