“Aw, hell, Cripple’s always in trouble,” the deputy said.
“Your pet’s gotta go,” the sheriff told her.
“No, listen, she’s really in trouble. I think they’re loading her into one of the shuttles, those shuttles that keep getting shot down.”
“Ain’t just the shuttles getting shot down,” the deputy pointed out. “Besides, it’s only illegals sent off in them things. Cat was born right here on Lok. Everyone knows she ain’t illegal.”
“It’s not just the illegals,” Molly said. “They’ve got this Ryn guy, and they’ve got Urg’s family—” Molly wracked her brain to think who else, but that was already stretching the population of Callites she personally knew.
“That’s crazy,” the deputy said. “Why would they—?”
The sheriff waved him off. “You say they’re taking legals?” he asked.
Molly nodded. Even if Pete was lying about them rounding up legal Callites, she needed an excuse to have the sheriff look into it.
“You believe her?” the deputy asked. “She’s obviously on drugs.”
Sheriff Browne walked over to his desk and rested his hand on his newspaper. “Old man Robbins delivered the paper two days in a row,” he said.
“Yup,” the prisoner agreed.
“What’s strange about that?” the deputy asked. “Robbins prints the damn thing. Course he’d be the one to fill in on a delivery or two.”
The sheriff turned and aimed his “hand” gun at the deputy. “Robbins ain’t walked a route in twenty years.” He made two popping sounds with his mouth, and his extended fingers rocked back with the recoil. “Dontcha think it’s odd he’d suddenly deliver it twice in two days?”
“It’s odd enough the fool’s printing that rubbish,” the prisoner said.
The deputy looked to the prisoner, but nodded rather than hush him up. “Yeah, hard to believe he’s running a press with ships dropping out of the sky. Maybe his Callite delivery boy got hurt in the—”
“Cor,” Sheriff Browne said. “Boy’s name is Cor, and Firehawks don’t fall on the likes of him. He’s too clever for that and too good to turn tail without slipping word to me.”
The deputy took off his hat and waved it in front of his face, which sent the shaft of dust by the window into a tizzy. “You don’t seriously think—?”
“I think I wanna hear what this girl has to say. After she puts that pet of hers out in the street, of course. Go open her cell up and get it.” The sheriff pointed his “gun” away from the deputy and toward the lock in front of Molly.
“Sir, I—”
“Open that gate, son, and get that varmint out of there.”
The deputy shook his head. “I’m sorry Sheriff, but I can’t do that.”
Sheriff Browne whirled on the younger man. It seemed he was spun around by the shocking display of obstinacy, like a slug to his shoulder. Molly turned to follow the action and saw that the deputy had drawn his gun. A real one.
“Goddamnit, sir. Why couldn’t you take early retirement like I sug-gested?”
Molly watched the scene from between the bars. Beside her, the prisoner stirred, moving to his own cell door like an eager spectator peering over a balcony. The two of them stood, barely a meter apart, and silently followed the action.
Or inaction, rather.
The sheriff stood there, surveying his deputy with an odd air of detached calm. As for the deputy, the only thing that moved was his hand. It shook, which caused the barrel of his gun to tremble slightly. Molly had no idea what was going on, but something began to perturb the hyperspace out of her Wadi. The small creature crawled around to her collarbone and tried to slither out through the bars. Molly held it back, clutching both hands around the small animal lest it run out into trouble.
After what felt like several minutes of a tense staredown, Molly finally saw a flash of movement from the sheriff: a smile. It slid across his lips and seemed to creep up under his gray mustache.
“Don’t do it,” the deputy said. He extended his gun out toward the sheriff, and the trembling in his hand increased. “Don’t analyze it. Don’t even think about it. And most important, don’t say a thing. I can let you live if I think you don’t know.” The deputy waved his gun toward the door. “If you stay mum, you can just ride out to that farm you’ve been dreaming of and never look back.”
The sheriff moved fast. So fast, Molly flinched and nearly lost her grip on the Wadi. His hand shot up. It seemed to travel through hyperspace to get there, as if it didn’t need to move through the intervening space. Molly peered at his hand and saw it had been formed into the shape of a gun—a double-finger barrel leveled at the deputy. It jabbed forward several times, indicating the man.
“You don’t just know . . . you’re involved,” said Sheriff Browne.
“You dumb fool,” the deputy said. “Just shut your trap and retire in peace.” The metal gun came up and was aimed right down the barrel of the sheriff’s fleshy one.
Sheriff Browne looked to the shut door. “That’s why you brought Paulie in, right? That’s why you wrote this up and took it so seriously. And yesterday, you didn’t act surprised when Mrs. Thrimble came in to report her maid went missing. You already knew about the Callites.”
“Sheriff, I’m gonna need you to cuff yourself to yonder cell.” The deputy glanced down at the sheriff’s hand. “And stop pointing that at me.”
The sheriff raised his arm and sighted past his cocked thumb. “This something you’ve been setting up for a long while? Been waiting for the old dog to crawl down from the porch and go off and die in solitude?”
“Down from the porch? Sheriff, you’ve been cowering under it for damn near a decade. You’ve got no idea what goes on in this town. Hell, while you’re sitting there behind your armored desk reading what’s on page two, I’m out there creating them headlines on the other side.”
“Look at the ruckus you’ve caused,” the prisoner whispered to Molly.
She wished she could, but she had her hands full with the Wadi. The thing had gone bonkers on her, trying everything it could to get away. It practically swam through her hands, pushing forward with uncommon strength. Molly had to keep her arms in motion, reaching forward over and over as if climbing a rope while the Wadi slid ever forward. It was like trying to create an infinitely long tunnel, one section at a time, but the damn thing was running faster than she could keep up.
“Hold still,” she hissed at it, but for once it didn’t seem to heed her voice. A loud bang rang out, breaking her concentration. Molly looked up, expecting the sheriff to be on the floor, but the deputy had just slammed a metal shutter down over one of the windows. He crossed to the other one while both guns maintained their vigilance on one another.
“I always scratched my head over your transfer,” the sheriff said. “Couldn’t reckon why someone’d leave a cushy spot at immigrations for all the political nonsense this job comes with. That shuttle that went up this morning, it’s tied up in this somehow, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got three seconds to put on those handcuffs, old man.”“You think I’m scared of that gun? That’s my gun. You think I’m scared of death? You think that’s why I sit in here and read the funnies?”
“Three.”
“Son, you don’t know half of what I seen in my day. Or why it depresses me to see what’s come of this place.”
“Two. I mean it, sir. I will shoot you.” The other shutter lowered with a bang, startling Molly even as she watched it happen and had anticipated the noise.
“Ain’t my stomach that’s weak, boy, it’s my heart. It done broke long before you came around. That bullet can’t stop what ain’t there.”
“I’m sorry,” the deputy said. He pulled up his gun as the sheriff lowered his own. “One—” he said, looking away.
“NO!” Molly yelled. She leaned against the bars and pressed both arms through them as far as they would go. A shot rang out, and so did a Wadi. The latter aimed true, even as the former went wide, the deputy startled by Molly’s voice, or perhaps by the flash of movement heading his way, or maybe even some internal weakness.
The next scream came from the deputy as a shimmering blur wrapped itself around his neck. Only . . . the Wadi didn’t seem intent on making herself at home there. Unless, of course, making a home required some grisly form of burrowing.
“Drenards in hyperspace,” the prisoner said. “What the flank is that?”
Molly screamed, yelling for the world to stop, for the Wadi to stop, but both kept crawling forward. The deputy sank to his knees, quiet now, pawing at his neck with one hand. The other one brought the gun up and pressed it to the vibrating shape below his chin. It wavered there, contemplating the ridiculous: an end to them both. Molly clawed the air and continued to scream, drowning out the flow of cursing from the neighboring cell. The sheriff dashed forward, his pretend gun put away, his hand nothing but a hand. It swiped sideways with dizzying speed, and when the gun went off, a puff of smoke leapt out of its barrel, and a matching cloud drifted down from the wounded ceiling.
Molly collapsed from the suddenness and shock of it all. She sank to her knees and leaned against the bars with her arms wrapped around them. Hugging them. The sheriff stood over the gurgling deputy, a smoking gun in his hand. The Wadi jumped off and ran in a brief circle around the sheriff’s feet.
“You go on back,” the sheriff said, waving the Wadi away.
The Wadi dutifully obliged, scurrying toward Molly and leaving behind a trail of tiny red prints.
Sheriff Browne turned to her. He slowly placed the deputy’s gun inside his empty holster, then patted it fondly like a son returned home from war. Molly looked up and saw him tip his hat in her direction. The Wadi climbed her shirt and curled around her neck. She could feel the creature vibrating with energy, or fear—maybe even excitement.
“We got us a no-pets policy for a reason,” Sheriff Brown said. He nodded at her Wadi and tapped his temple. “Wouldn’t be so paranoid about critters reading my mind if I didn’t know what was in here, myself.”
48
Cole sat up on the operating table and moved his arm in slow circles. He grimaced from the soreness in his back, his other shoulder, and all the other and older parts of himself.
Penny watched him from behind the tray at the foot of his bed. “Looks like you managed to get that new shoulder you always wanted,” she said as she gathered up surgical instruments and power tools—both specked with blood and hydraulic fluid.
Cole looked up, expecting to find her smirking at him, teasing him, but she wore a solemn, sad, expression.
“Would’ve saved it if I could,” Arthur said. He glanced up from his portable computer. “And the next time you overpower the limiters, it’ll be your collarbone and ribs that give way. So please—on behalf of my spares cabinet—don’t do anything like that ever again.”
Cole nodded, suppressing a grin.
Mortimor walked into the operating room with a towel in one hand, his hair sticking up from having recently been soaked and then dried off. “You are one crazy sonofabitch,” he said, shaking his head.
“We were just going over that,” Arthur said, “and attempting to cor-rect some personality defects.”
Mortimor stepped around Penny and came to Cole’s side. He took Cole’s new arm by the wrist and looked it over. “You shore up the collar-bone?” he asked Arthur.
Arthur sighed. “Yes, but please don’t tell him that.”
Mortimor smiled and nodded.
“How did the salvage go?” Arthur asked Mortimor.
The smile faded. “Not good,” he said. “What’s left of the skimmers, usable anyway, could fit in a bucket.”
“Sorry about that,” said Cole.
Mortimor sat on the edge of Cole’s cot and gave him a stern look. “Apology accepted. Now, I don’t know what you were trying to prove, but you don’t rush off by yourself like that. You wait for help, understand?”
Cole peered down at his lap and nodded.
“No more flying solo, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Alright.” Mortimor patted Cole’s knee and stood up. “Having said that, you did good out there. If those two had gotten clear . . .” Mortimor left the sentence unfinished. He looked from Cole to Arthur.
“Speaking of those two, what were they?” Cole turned to Arthur. “Did you make the metal one?”
Arthur laughed and shook his head. “Above my pay grade, I’m afraid.”
“A Bern?”
“Made by the Bern, from what you described. A tool they like to use.” Arthur finished his adjustments and put the computer away. He turned to Mortimor. “Maybe we should call off this raid and do another sweep through the crew to look for moles. Among the Humans, especially.”
“We can’t abort,” Mortimor said. He rubbed his beard with the towel and leaned back against the wall. “I talked to the Seer and let her know what happened. She said we should go as planned. Seemed insistent, actually.”
Penny finished loading the tools and surgical instruments into a drum sanitizer. She looked up at the mention of the Seer. “Did she say anything else?”
Mortimor glanced her direction, then looked to Cole. “Just that she enjoyed her visit with our new friend here.” He set his towel aside and scanned the room. “And . . .”