Leaving the hotel the next morning, Kira found Bertoli attached to her by a far shorter metaphorical leash than normal. Even Konrad was hovering, and her boyfriend generally knew better.
“Clinic, then Captain Zamorano’s ship,” she told them. “We probably don’t need to be a six-legged creature for the trip.”
“Someone shot you yesterday, Com—Riker,” Bertoli told her, cutting off his use of her rank before he really shoved his foot in it. “My job is to keep that from happening.”
“And your jacket is a write-off,” Kira’s lover added, glancing around the thoroughfare corridor as he spoke. “Get me the tools and I can fix the armor layers, but even if I get the tools and materials, I have no idea how to patch leather.”
“I’m still wearing armor,” she pointed out to the two of them. “And I’m not exactly comfortable using either of you as a layer of ablative meat. So, some space, please.”
Konrad was already moving back a step, but Bertoli leveled his most mulish gaze on her as they continued.
“I’m also armored,” he reminded her. “And, bluntly, ablative meat is part of my job description. I’m supposed to keep you safe—if I come back and you don’t, Milani will kill me.”
Kira’s ground-troop commander did not glory in the title of “the terrifying fucker in the dragon armor” without reason, she knew. On the other hand, she was reasonably sure they wouldn’t shoot a subordinate for failure.
Reasonably.
“Bodyguarding is fine,” Kira told Bertoli. “Being more intimate with me than my clothes or my lover, that’s a bit much!”
Konrad didn’t even bother to conceal his chuckle at that. They were currently claiming to be married, both using the false surname Riker, though she suspected they were a long way from making that a reality.
Neither of them had ever been married, and at their age, it didn’t seem like something to rush into.
That was apparently the right tack to take, and Konrad’s chuckle probably helped. Bertoli nodded, his face still set in a stubborn cast, and stepped back a single pace. He was still closer than he’d been the previous day, but she couldn’t argue with that.
He was, after all, correct. She had been shot…and she was more than a bit surprised by how little that bothered her. The first time she’d been shot, she’d followed it up by the entire chaotic mess of evacuating every surviving member of her former nova combat group from Apollo.
She’d assumed her blaséness about the shooting had been pure adrenaline. This time, though, she had no such excuse for brushing off that someone had nearly killed her. She was used to that in space combat, but she could count on her fingers the number of times she’d been shot at without a nova fighter around her.
“Come on,” she told her companions. “Let’s go collect O’Mooney and then see about getting on with the job.”
* * *
O’Mooney was up, dressed and walking around her room in the clinic when they arrived. A young Black man in scrubs was asking her questions and getting her to go through careful motions, looking up as Kira and her companions reached the door.
“Good morning,” he greeted them. “I’m Dr. Tygan. I took over Em O’Mooney’s care this morning.”
“How are you feeling, Aleifr?” Kira asked. “Not every day you get shot in the gut.”
“Stiff and I don’t want to do push-ups,” O’Mooney replied. “Otherwise decent. They do good work here.”
“We try,” Tygan said cheerfully. “The wrap we’ve put over your stomach should stay in place for at least the next forty-eight hours. After that, you can take it off to shower, but we recommend putting it back afterward for at least another week.”
He looked the group over, clearly taking in the shipsuits all of them wore.
“I’m guessing I can’t get you to come back for a checkup in nine days?” he asked.
“We’re shipping out as fast as we can find transport, Doctor,” Kira told him. “I’ll make sure we find a doctor for Em O’Mooney wherever we are in nine days, though,” she promised.
“And you’ll go to the doctor we find, right, Aleifr?” Bertoli said firmly to his subordinate.
“I got shot,” O’Mooney said brightly. “Believe me, I’m going to be good about the doctors!”
“That’s a good plan,” Tygan told her. “Be careful with abdominal movements of any kind until you’ve had that check-in. We’ll download all of your treatment details to your headware.”
“Thanks, Doctor.”
The Guadaloop doctor studied O’Mooney’s posture for a moment, then gestured for her to sit on the bed as he turned to look at Kira.
“She’s had a full regen pass over her abdominal muscles,” he told them. “Dr. Lionel also did some regen work on the intestine and stomach, just to be sure, but there was minimal burning there.
“Currently, though, all of that is being held in with plasti-skin. Between that and the wrap, her skin will naturally regrow properly and quickly, but we’re still talking days, not hours,” he warned. “The lighter she can take it for at least the next two weeks, the better.”
“We can manage light duty for Em O’Mooney for at least that,” Kira said with a glance at Bertoli. Most of what they were doing right now was light duty, after all. No heavy lifting or anything like that.
“Good.” Tygan sighed. “She’s as fine as anyone who took a blaster bolt to the guts yesterday can be. Her armor clearly served its purpose, though; as you can imagine, we didn’t exactly salvage it intact.”
“That’s expected,” Bertoli rumbled. “I have a spare vest for her, though I’d hoped we wouldn’t need it.”
“That’s the thing with armor,” Kira noted. “You rarely even expect to use it—and you always hope not to.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Dr. Tygan replied. “She’s clear to be discharged. There’ll be a long list of things she’s to do and avoid doing, but she’ll have that in her headware. I recommend against walking for more than ten minutes,” he reminded O’Mooney over his shoulder.
“For the next forty-eight hours, at least.”
“We can make sure of that,” Kira promised. “Though that means I’ll need to sort out whatever this station has for taxis.”
“Talk to the artificial stupid at reception,” Tygan told her. “It can summon a pod for you.”
* * *
The reason Kira hadn’t noticed the transit pods, it turned out, was because they were almost completely silent—and ran on the ceilings of the triple-high main thoroughfares. Using antigravity coils, the pod dropped to the ground to pick them up outside the clinic.
“Destination?” a chirpy artificial stupid asked. This one didn’t have a holographic representation, since its designers had probably assumed the pod itself was enough of a “body” for the AS.
“Baile Fantasma, please,” Kira instructed it.
There was a momentary pause—probably as much for effect as anything else, the AS should have been able to identify the dock Zamorano’s ship was at instantly—and then the cylindrical pod smoothly rose back to the ceiling and shot away.
“Which one’s that?” O’Mooney asked.
“The three strangers who helped us out yesterday have a ship,” Kira told the trooper. “I believe Zamorano is the owner-operator, and security had them at least temporarily locked down. I’m hoping they’re the right kind of hauler for our needs.”
She figured it was fifty-fifty, but she owed Zamorano for helping them and was happy to repay that by overpaying for the transport she needed.
“Baile Fantasma is a small mid-distance freighter,” Konrad noted, his tone absent in the manner of someone mostly in their headware. “Sixteen thousand cubics… Wait, the fuck?”
“Konrad?” Kira asked.
“Tau Ceti–built,” her lover told her. “That ship is fourteen hundred light-years from the yard that built her. Don’t get me wrong, she’s old, but I don’t expect to see even old SolFed ships out this far.”
“Well, isn’t that fascinating?” Kira murmured. “Now I’m more curious about Captain Zamorano than I already was. On the other hand…” She shrugged. “We have our own secrets, people. Unless Zamorano turns out to be an Institute operative, I don’t think we need to know his.”
Further conversation was interrupted by their arrival at the dock. The ceiling-mounted taxi pods were fast—though Kira noted that they had not yet descended to the floor and had a moment of concern.
“Payment, please,” the AS chirped, and she realized why they were still stuck on the ceiling. That was one way to make sure no one tried to stiff the computerized taxi—with the doors locked and a seven-meter drop to the gravity plates, refusing to pay was not an option.
* * *
Josue Ramirez was standing next to the airlock door leading to the ship, his casual slump masking his rapidly tracking eyes and the slight tension to his muscles.
Kira hadn’t really had the time to study their helpers yesterday, but the concealed readiness of the dark-skinned man guarding the ship added to her impression of something hidden. Baile Fantasma was more than she appeared to be at first glance.
She just didn’t think their secrets were going to matter to her.
“Ah, Em Riker,” Ramirez greeted her, unfolding from his slump. “I’ll ping the Captain and let ’im know you’re here.” He looked over Kira’s companions. “I hope the doctors took good care of you, Em,” he told O’Mooney, giving the younger mercenary the slightest of bows.
O’Mooney wasn’t Kira’s type, but she recognized that the trooper was attractive as her own gender went. So, it seemed, did Josue Ramirez.
“They do good work here,” O’Mooney replied with a nod that was just a touch too lingering.
Kira kept her chuckle silent. Neither of the pair were the kids she wanted to label them—O’Mooney was thirty-two and Kira would eyeball Ramirez around the same age—and Kira figured they knew exactly what they were doing.
“Captain says he’s pleased to hear from you and asks if you’d like to join him aboard for coffee,” Ramirez said after a moment of calm silence.
“We’d be delighted,” Kira said. “I want to talk to him about that debt I owe him…and maybe some work.”