But there were more; other names, lurking just beneath the surface like smooth stones, ungraspable.
“The resonance is getting stronger.” I said.
“I know.”
I turned to Melano close beside me, feeling the tension in her face with my hand. Our faces were still the same, despite everything we’d put ourselves through.
“You dreamt too?”
Melano nodded, reluctantly.
“It seemed like more than a dream. It was like really being there again. But different. Like …”
“Like you were someone else: me, or Tjssin.”
“Yes.”
“Then you know as well as I do that Tjssin isn’t anywhere within a million miles of Parker.”
“... yes.”
It wasn’t about the money. We had money; as much as anyone could want. We’d heard about Tjssin and Phjolca through the sort of channels you might expect. Heard they were good. Some said the best. And so, we just had to see for ourselves, didn’t we?
It was supposed to be an easy hit, just a warm up. Only a little Wydhiji funeral urn, barely worth ten million drossi. It would have been easy too, if it weren’t for the fucking security guard being where he wasn’t supposed to be.
The guy was supposed to knock off at three; go home to his wife and kids, and leave the place running on automatic until his replacement came in at half five. Supposed to—except of course that his wife had taken the kids, the house and the car the week before and left the poor bastard without so much as a thousand drossi for a hotel room. He’d been sleeping in the museum—just until he managed to get together enough for the deposit on a room somewhere, you know. The morning guard sympathised with his situation and promised not to tell the management; even helped him hang his fucking hammock and woke him each morning at seven so he’d be out before the boss arrived.
It was hard not to feel sorry for the guy, really, when the police chief explained it all to us afterwards. The stress of it all was bound to take its toll.
His first shot took Phjolca clean through the gut; split her damn near in two.
The second missed me by a hand’s width and reduced the Casaguan marble behind me to a long streak of expensive rubble. I threw myself behind a bulletproof case of 4th Colony silverware, feeling frantically for the pistol at my ankle, and realised the third shot had been a lot closer than I’d have liked.
The pistol was gone, along with my right leg from six inches below the knee.
The case exploded above my head. Whatever he was carrying, it sure as shit wasn’t standard issue.
From across the hall I heard the report of return fire; the whang of Melano’s miniature coil gun chewing through several million drossi worth of ancient tapestry. I saw her crouched behind a pillar ten feet away. Her almost-invisible suit was sugared with marble dust; the guard systematically blowing chunks out of the pillar above her head, working his way down one shot at a time.
I spun and scrabbled in the rapidly spreading pool of my own blood, scanning the space between me and the ex-sculpture. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.
I ripped the pistol from its sticky-patch on the severed leg and aimed with both hands, rolling out from behind the cabinet.
Thought jolted.
“Home sweet home.” said Melano, tracing a system of sluggish black fjords with a thick finger.
The canyons passing below us looked painfully familiar, but then canyons often do. I shivered anyway; shook my still huge-feeling shoulders and launched myself towards Melano.
The ship had changed us while we slept: our bodies were shorter, broader; bones strengthened with carbon fibre, roped with high density muscle to take the brunt of Hancock’s punishing gravity. In fact it was only a little over two gees, but it would have been enough to definitively incapacitate the lithe, micro-grav adapted incarnations that had sustained us thus far.
Hancock was a carbon planet—a chemical peculiarity common to dwarf star systems. The nebula which had given birth to Gillespie and its companions had been statistically rich in carbon, while relatively poor in oxygen. Whereas oxygen rich systems might produce familiarly friendly masses of water and silicate rock, carbon ones tended toward structural analogues that were at once superficially reminiscent of earth-like worlds and yet mercilessly inimical to life.
Hancock’s iron core, though long since sapped of rotational momentum by its proximity to Gillespie, was kept alive by the harsh tidal stresses that same mass exerted on it. This tidal energy maintained seismic processes which still periodically ruptured its graphite mantel, spewing forth mountains of silicon carbide and sending geysers of diamond shrapnel shooting high into the planet’s thick, carbon monoxide atmosphere. This same smog of atmosphere was responsible for the photochemical synthesis of long-chain hydrocarbons, which regularly rained down on the planet’s surface, crazing it with a network of rivers and lakes of liquid petroleum.
Hancock’s one moon had turned out to be a completely un-remarkable chunk of captured asteroid, barely twenty kilometres long. It had taken us less than an hour to discount any possibility of Tjssin hiding beneath its surface; then we turned our full attention to the nightmare landscape spread below.
“No thermal, gravitational or electromagnetic anomalies that I can see.” I said. We had let ourselves slip into a low, decaying orbit, still high above the atmosphere proper; still small and dark enough not to trigger any potential automated defences.
“I wish we knew how long we’d been out for,” said Melano for the tenth time, her voice almost a whisper. “For all we know he might have been here centuries already; more than enough to hide a maser cannon in every crack on the planet if he wanted.”
I shook my head wearily.
“Do you think we would have weaponised the whole planet just to be on the safe side? He doesn’t want safe, Melano; he’s a player, just like us.”
“He’s nothing like us,” she snorted. I abandoned the broken loop of conversation, and honed into the viewscreen. We were seeing by real light for the first time in millennia, by some measurements. The computer had upshifted the infrared until Gillespie spilled a sickly glow across Hancock’s crumpled face, defining peaks like dying embers.
“What’s that?” Melano pointed.
“What’s what?”
I amped the mag; applied a half dozen filters and enhancement algorithms.
“That.”
Melano escaped without a scratch; the security guard wasn’t so lucky. By the time the dust settled, Tjssin was nowhere to be seen. The cops scooped up what was left of Phjolca; patched me up and gave me a disposable prosthetic. I didn’t complain; I wasn’t going to need it where we were going anyway.
We bought our way out of police custody in under twenty-four hours, but by then Tjssin had already made for orbit. Nobody had stopped him.
