Cal Dorick had managed to spring Nadashe Nohamapetan from prison, for exactly eight hours.
“The judge finally agreed to give us a hearing on your mental state,” Dorick told her, at their weekly meeting. “I’m making the argument that your time here is an assault on your already fragile mental state, and that you need to be placed in a secure mental facility instead. The prosecution is fighting this, obviously, so the judge has asked for you to be present so he can evaluate you himself, because who needs an actual medical degree in psychiatry when you have a law degree and an oversized opinion of your own importance.”
“And we think that being in a mental institution is going to be better than being here?” Nadashe asked.
“It’s not optimal, no. But it beats being somewhere people are trying to stab you with spoons.”
“I thought we were sticking to the story that the lady with the spoon and the lady with the toothbrush just happened to be stabbing each other as I was innocently walking by.”
Nadashe could see how heroic Dorick was in his effort not to roll his eyes. “Fine. It beats being somewhere people are spontaneously trying to shiv each other whenever you just happen to be walking by. What became of the toothbrush lady, anyway?”
“I believe she’s still in solitary. Apparently it was not her first toothbrushing.”
“You meet such interesting people, Lady Nadashe.”
“And yet here I am with you.”
Dorick raised a finger as if to say, A touch, I do admit it. “To get back to business, we’re up in front of the judge in two days, so you know the drill. They’ll come and shackle you up, take you up the elevator to the surface level and chain you up in the overland wagon. I made noise about your security, so you’ll be happy to know you’ll be solo in your chariot, and by ‘solo’ I mean you’ll only have three armed guards with nonlethal but, I am promised, nevertheless extraordinarily painful stun sticks and shock guns. This is apparently a precaution for if you have a burst of adrenaline and burst your chains, or smuggle a lockpick into the wagon by some method I am not paid enough to imagine. Which reminds me that you’ll be searched on both ends of your journey, on both ends of your body. Sorry, that was a nonnegotiable.”
Nadashe shrugged. “I was groped worse in college.”
“I don’t know what to do with that information. I will say that if you do actually wish for the judge to seriously consider that your staying here is detrimental to your fragile mental state, it might help to evince a look of, say, detriment.”
“You’re saying I don’t look sufficiently fragile.”
“I’m saying that while I think your flat affect is generally a great look for you, for this particular audience this one particular time you might want to try a different tactic. Or don’t, it’s fine, you be you.”
Nadashe considered her lawyer. “Remind me again why I hired you.”
“I honestly don’t know, Lady Nadashe. But inasmuch as you’ve already paid me, in advance, for roughly the next forty years—thank you for that, by the way, my wife loves the new dining room set probably more than she loves me—you might as well keep me.”
“We’ll see.”
“Moving right along, assuming the hearing about your mental state does not take up the entire day, and it won’t, as your judge rarely spends more than fifteen minutes on anything if he can avoid it, I’ve arranged for you, along with your honor guards, to have use of my office conference room. I’ve arranged several meetings for you, including one with your mother, the Countess Nohamapetan.”
Nadashe winced at this.
“Is this not to your liking?” Dorick said. “I can have her moved off the schedule. I live in fear of her righteous fury when I do that, but you are my client, not her.”
“No,” Nadashe said. “I’d rather meet her on what’s nominally my turf than on hers.”
“If I don’t schedule you, you wouldn’t be meeting her at all.”
“I think it’s nice that you believe that.”
“Do you have any particular requests for when you’re meeting her?”
“Have her searched for spoons and toothbrushes before she enters the room.”
“I have no idea if you are actually joking, so I’m just going to make a note of that.” Dorick made a note.
“If you actually try to have her searched you’ll probably be thrown out a window by her bodyguard.”
“Good to know.” Dorick erased the note.
“What about the other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“The other thing.”
Dorick stared at Nadashe blankly for several seconds before realizing what she was saying. “Oh, that. Well, I regret to say that those endorsements you’ve asked for from your friends, relating to your character, have been hard to come by, and I think a few of your friends are actively avoiding me. So I’m still working on that. Unrelatedly, you may be interested to know that several news sources have been coming up with very intriguing information regarding your late and beloved brother Amit.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes, apparently your brother had been talking to several prominent underworld figures about the possibility of an insurance fraud on some of the house ships. It seems he had been embezzling from the house funds and needed to replace that money before it was noticed. Nothing a good ‘destruction of a multibillion-mark spaceship’ scam couldn’t solve.”
Nadashe nodded. “What did I tell you?”
“I can scarcely believe it myself,” Dorick said.
Nadashe smiled at this. The little dance Dorick just had to do to make it look like he didn’t know about her agreement with Deran Wu, on the grounds it was a criminal scheme and he would be implicated in it up to his eyeballs, was sad and a little pathetic, but necessary. “Who else am I meeting with, aside from my mother?”
“Lord Teran Assan has asked for a meeting.”
“For what purpose?”
“He said he wants your wisdom about certain members of the executive committee. He’s apparently finding a few of them difficult to reach a rapport with.”
“It’s because he’s an asshole.”
“That would have been my guess, too. Nevertheless, given his position on the committee he’s someone worth cultivating.” Dorick raised his eyebrows at this last part, to indicate to Nadashe that in fact Teran Assan was a useful tool, so maybe throw him a bone.
Nadashe groaned. “Make the meeting as short as humanly possible.”
“You got it. Also Lady Kiva Lagos’s office called and was curious if you might make time for her.”
“Good lord, why?”
Dorick looked at his notes. “She apparently has some questions about financials.”
“The house’s financials were Amit’s job, not mine.”
“Lady Kiva’s office anticipated this objection and says they suspect you might have some insight that would be useful to her.”
What is that woman up to? Nadashe thought. She and Kiva were never close in college, even when they were in the same dormitory and Kiva was banging Ghreni. They both instinctively understood that the way to harmony was to stay out of each other’s business. Now Kiva was all up in Nadashe’s business and she didn’t like it one bit. “You haven’t already scheduled that.”
“No, I was waiting on your approval.”
“Then don’t bother. Whatever she’s doing with our financials, I don’t want to be part of it or anywhere near it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I will work hard to make sure you are untroubled by Lady Kiva’s look into your company’s finances,” Dorick said, blandly, which meant he understood that the order encompassed rather more than just not taking a meeting. Then he looked at his watch. “And that’s all our time for the day. I’ll see you in two days, Lady Nadashe. Avoid toothbrushes and spoons until then. And work on your sadness.”
“It doesn’t take much work,” Nadashe assured him. And that much was true, at least. Gallows humor or not, flat affect or not, the prison life was getting to Nadashe. The prospect of this, all day, every day, for the rest of her life was not one Nadashe wished to entertain. If it meant faking a little mental breakdown in front of a judge, that was a thing she was willing to try.
One way or another, she was getting out of here.
* * *
“What I’m saying is, it doesn’t taste like fish,” one of the guards was saying to another one as the transport bumped its way across the airless surface of Hub. The two guards had been talking about food for the last half hour; the third was slumped in a seat, snoring. Nadashe envied the third guard.
“Of course it tastes like fish,” the other guard said. “Fish always tastes like fish. That’s why it’s called ‘fish.’”
“Right, but what I’m saying is that it doesn’t taste fishy like most fish.”
“So it’s not as fishy.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Then it still tastes fishy,” said the second guard. “Just in a different way.”
“No, you’re not getting it,” the first guard said, and then turned to Nadashe to include her in the pressing debate about what constituted fishy fish.
Don’t do it don’t you do it don’t you fucking dare, Nadashe thought furiously at the guard, willing the goon into silence.
“So, let me ask you about this fish,” the guard began, and then there was a hideous bang and the transport launched itself into the air and tumbled violently to the side, and all Nadashe could think about was how grateful she was that her final words would not be some asinine discussion about aquaculture.
A few seconds later she realized she wasn’t dying, but that she was now hanging off the ceiling of the truck, because what was now the ceiling used to be the side, and she was strapped in and chained up. Her restraints had held up admirably, so she wasn’t dead, and that was good, but the low, violent whistling she was hearing was telling her that the air was leaking out of the transport cabin, which meant she would soon be dead of asphyxiation, and that was not great.
Nadashe looked down and saw the third guard crumpled in a heap, neck at an unsurvivable angle. Went sleeping, she thought. How nice. The other two were on the floor that used to be a side, dazed.
“I need a mask!” Nadashe yelled at them. “Hey! Do you hear me? I need a mask!”
One of them—the one who was convinced that the fish was not fishy, or what the fuck ever—looked up at her, confused, and then nodded and started looking on the wall for the emergency oxygen masks.
“That’s not the wall!” Nadashe said. “They’re at your feet!”
This took a few more seconds for Not Fishy to process, and then lo and behold, enlightenment came and the wall-mounted case that was now the floor-mounted case with the emergency oxygen masks was found. Not Fishy put one on, gave another to No Actually It Is Fishy, determined guard number three would not be needing one, and then handed one to Nadashe, who put it on with some difficulty, her hands being shackled.
“You stay there,” the guard said, and Nadashe was incredulous, because what else was she going to do, shackled and strapped as she was. “We’re going to radio in.”
There was another hideous bang, and the rear doors of the transport flew away and all the guards, living and dead, were sucked out into the airless surface of Hub. Nadashe grabbed desperately at her mask to keep it from flying off her face; just before the view fogged up she saw Not Fishy and No Actually Fishy had lost theirs and were simultaneously gasping and freezing to death.
Speaking of which, the cold immediately began to bite into Nadashe’s skin. Theoretically the overland road to Hubfall was in the temperate twilight zone of the tidally locked planet, but “temperate” meant different things when there was a 500-degree temperature range. “Temperate” here meant “blisteringly cold.”
There was a light in Nadashe’s face and then two people in space suits were all up on her, cutting through her shackle chains and restraining straps. Nadashe fell from the ceiling into their arms and was immediately sealed into a clear, bulky full body suit that instantly flooded her with warmth and oxygen. Nadashe stood for a second, basking in warm, and then was hustled out of the shattered transport wagon. As she exited, she saw the bodies of the guards, all dead, and the wreck of the transport. This transport was manually driven. Given the shape of the transport, Nadashe assumed the driver was in the same shape as the guards, if not worse.
Nadashe was drag-walked to what looked like a storage container with an airlock. She was pushed into the airlock and sealed in. When the airlock pressurized, the interior door opened and two more people pulled her out, replacing her in the airlock with a body missing a head, and sealing the door to allow it to cycle. That done, they returned their attention to Nadashe, peeled her out of the full body suit and took the oxygen mask off her face.
The entire operation of cutting her down from the wrecked transport to unshucking her in whatever this was had taken less than sixty seconds.
“Lady Nadashe,” someone said to her. She turned and saw it was Lord Teran Assan, kitted out in his own suit. “Lovely to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” Nadashe asked.
“Just managing your rescue,” Assan said. Nadashe opened her mouth to say more, but Assan held up a hand. “Hold that thought,” he said, and headed to the airlock, which by now had recycled. “Your mother sends her regards, by the way.”
“Does she?”
“You’ll be seeing her soon.” Assan gave a little salute at that and then disappeared out the door.
* * *
Lord Teran Assan was not going to lie: He was absolutely fucking delighted that his prison break scheme was working out as well as it was.
And it was his plan; he was the one who had pitched it to the Countess Nohamapetan. “Look,” he had said, presenting the countess with a visualization on a tablet screen. “This section of the road to Hubfall is only lightly surveilled, and that surveillance is easily compromised. I’ve already had my pet hackers at it. I can make a five-minute window where all the ground surveillance is down.”
“That leaves the drone surveillance that comes with the transport itself,” Tinda Louentintu said. The countess’s chief of staff, as usual, was doing the heavy conversational lifting for the two of them. “They send a constant secure video feed back to the correctional facility.”
“Yes they do,” Assan agreed. “And that feed is both jammable and fakable. You just need the encryption keys for the individual drones, which I happen to have because the supervisor of the drones likes money more than she likes security.”
“And then there is the satellite surveillance,” Louentintu said.
Assan smiled. “That was a harder nut to crack. For that, I needed someone who could give us access to the satellite itself. Which means access to the military. The good news is, between Jasin and Deran Wu, the countess in her wisdom has chosen Jasin for her favored Wu cousin. In return Jasin has agreed to help, as part of his thanks for the countess’s favor.”
“You’re going to hide a snatch-and-grab from a military satellite,” Louentintu said. “Because when it doesn’t show up on the satellite feed, that’s not going to look at all suspicious.”
“It is going to show up on the feed, of course,” Assan said. “We’re not going to hide the transport exploding. But we are going to fake the explosion, and make it look like the transport is running slower than it is, so by the time anyone looks at the satellite feed, we’ll be long gone. And we run the same simulation to the drones and the security cameras. No one will know to look for us because no one will see that we were there. They will only see what we want them to see. And what we want them to see will be a tragic freak explosion of the transport.”
“They’ll notice if Nadashe is missing.”
“I’ve accounted for that.”
“How?”
Assan looked directly at the countess, rather than at her chief of staff. “You might prefer not knowing the details of that.”
“How long will this take?” Louentintu asked.
“With the right people, less than four minutes on-site. Obviously more time on either side, but those moments are going to be away from prying eyes.”
“And you’re confident you can manage this.”
“With your help and Jasin Wu’s, yes.”
“What do you need from us?”
“Your assent, and money.”
“How much money?” the countess asked.
“Countess, this will need to be done quickly, and it will need to be done well. Doing it cheaply is not part of the equation.”
Assan got his assent, he got his access through his own and Jasin Wu’s connections, and he got his money, in amounts that allowed impossible things to happen so quickly and smoothly that it was almost magical. Assan was no stranger to vast sums of wealth, of course. He was the director of his family’s holdings in the Hub system. More wealth moved through his office on a daily basis than some entire human civilizations had had in their entire existence. But there was a vast difference between the daily and mundane exercise of commerce, and the expenditure of frankly ridiculous piles of cash in the service of malfeasance.
That Assan was doing this while being a director of his house and a member of the executive committee was just icing on the cake as far as he was concerned. The ancient phrase “getting away with murder” had come to mind more than once. He was getting away with murder. And jailbreaking. And at least seven other felonies.
It was delicious, and Assan had never felt more alive in his life.
It was a given to Assan that he would be on-site for the extraction. It was a high-risk, high-reward mission, or so he told the countess. He felt honor-bound to make sure that it was executed within the razor-thin tolerances of time and competence that the entire endeavor required. He’d already spoken to the leader of the mercenary team that would be executing the mission, and she’d agreed that he would need to be present, and to oversee the final few minutes of the extraction, and the execution of the finishing touch that Assan had brought to the party.
Louentintu had been correct, of course. If Nadashe’s body was missing from the transport then no one would believe it was a freak accident. Everyone knew the Nohamapetans had money, and power, and the belief that rules were more like guidelines and optional at best even then. Everyone from the Hubfall police department up to the Imperial Ministry of Investigation would stick their noses in if Nadashe’s body went missing.
So Assan discreetly let it be known, through agents untraceable to him, what he was looking for: a woman, Nadashe’s height, weight and coloration. Assan made it known he was not looking for a murder. That was splashy and would draw the wrong sort of attention. But if a woman just happened to show up dead, well. Assan would be happy to know about it.
It didn’t take very long at all. The medical examiner who collected the reward assured Assan’s agent that the woman wasn’t a murder, but a slip in a tub, which, sure, why not. The woman was single, a drifter with no real friends and no immediate family. There was no one to miss her, including the medical examiner’s office files, from which she was conveniently scrubbed.
The woman, whoever she was, ceased to exist outside of the utility for which Assan had planned for her. She was delivered to the extraction mission without a head or fingerprints. Her circulatory system had been flushed and her blood replaced by an oxygen-optional, DNA-destroying accelerant, which was kept inside her body by the use of wax caps at the neck and fingertips.
She was beautiful, and she would go up like a firework. There would be a body of the same size and weight as Nadashe’s, but if everything worked to plan, it would be almost all ash. Even if it didn’t, what was left would be almost impossible to identify as anyone, much less Nadashe Nohamapetan.
In his space suit, Assan watched as his mercenaries put the woman’s body into the remains of the transport, along with the bodies of the guards. The whole truck would then be flash-incinerated again, in exactly the manner that it would burn if the battery pack went up because of internal structural issues. The battery pack didn’t need oxygen to burn, which was convenient on an airless world. It was its own fuel, and, to be sure, the battery pack would be made to go up. It would just have a little help to make the bodies burn more completely.
There was a tap on his shoulder; his merc commander was signaling him to check his communicator circuit. Assan checked it; he had forgotten to turn it on.
“Sorry about that,” he said, over the circuit.
“We’re patching a secure call to your suit,” she said. “It’s the countess.”
Assan nodded, and when the call came through he turned away from the commander to give himself and the countess a little privacy. “This is Assan,” he said.
“Lord Teran,” the countess said. “How goes the extraction?”
“Exactly as planned, and right on time. We’ll be up and out of here in the next two minutes.”
“That’s a remarkable bit of planning.”
“Thank you, Countess. I am glad to be of service.”
“You have been,” the countess assured him. “But I don’t think we’ll be needing your services any longer, Lord Teran.”
Assan was about to ask what she meant by that, but then was distracted by a knife sliding into his right kidney and slicing right. The air in Assan’s suit immediately started bleeding away into the vacuum, along with his actual blood. Assan turned, knife still in, to see his mission commander holding another knife. This one went into his stomach and was likewise slid across to the right. Assan’s suit started spilling oxygen prodigiously into his helmet to compensate for the loss elsewhere, which meant Assan could still hear the countess speaking to him.
“You were acting as the middleman between me and the Wu cousins,” she was saying. “And I was wondering why I needed a middleman at all. So I met with them both. Turns out you’ve been playing both for a fool, and they didn’t like that. We came to an alternate arrangement we were all happy with. We also decided that this little escape plan of yours would look better if it looked like it failed, and you went up with it when it did. We’ve already framed Nadashe’s lawyer as your accomplice. It’s very detailed. We’ve had to tweak your video plans. It shows something different now.”
Assan fell stiffly to the ground.
“Well, I imagine you’re almost all out of oxygen now, Lord Teran, so this is where we say goodbye. Thank you for being useful. There’s just one last thing left for you to do.”
There was a thin rustle, and Assan felt himself being lifted, carried, and thrown, into the transport.
The last thing he saw was the headless women he’d been so proud of. In the cold, her fingers had contracted up toward her palm. It occurred to Assan that it looked like she was flipping him off.
He would have laughed at that, but he burned instead.