New Edinburgh

Lothian, Stewart

Prefecture VIII, The Republic

15 July 3134

Snow hugged the shadows like a lover desperate for the warmth of an embrace. Yet the shadows betrayed as easily as they saved; danger came.

Moving down Fourth Street of the lower Eastside, Snow found a moment in the desperation to chuckle. The Earl of Stewart tried so hard to ignore this part of his beloved city and yet it sat like a canker sore, irritating and infectious. If he didn’t do something about it soon, he’d find it a lot more than just irritating, especially now that the local economy was going bad. Then again, it made her life easier, so she shouldn’t look a gift branth in the mouth.

Coming to the intersection of Fourth and Harold, she paused with her back against the wall, waiting. The blare of a far-off horn sliced through the night; a baby’s cry drifted from a nearby apartment complex; machinery hummed (the ever-present vibrations every city created but that citizens failed to notice); a night trawl screeched close by, almost causing Snow cardiac arrest. But her pursuers had not discovered her latest backtrack.

They’d be on her trail soon enough.

Moving onto Harold, she passed Fifth and then crossed the street in the dim light of an equidistant point between two streetlights; if she held one wish in the world, it would be that whoever created streetlights burned a long time in Hell.

Passing an alley entrance, she froze as a sound caught her attention. She flattened against the wall. Her black clothing—thick wool to mask her heat signature without announcing the depth of her resources by the blatant use of a sneak suit—blended well into the depths of the alley’s blackness.

Closing her eyes, she marshaled her will and centered herself as she’d been taught. Choosing one distraction after another, like a master weaver whose nimble fingers pick apart the skein of a complex weave, Snow pulled herself loose until only the twin threads of her hearing and the sound remained. In practice, such trancelike concentration would allow a person to strike her and she’d not immediately feel it. As such, she played a dangerous game in an alley where any wino might come looking for a dime and find easy prey, leaving her beaten… or worse.

The thumping of her heartbeat came from a remote location, but served as a metronome for the passing of time. No other sounds intruded, but she knew; she’d dealt too often with these particular people to not know they hunted her as surely as a Sea Fox who smelled blood in the water when a good deal materialized. She’d tried flight before and that failed. Only made her sloppy. For just a moment her concentration shifted and a third strand tugged: the caress of the plastic-coated verigraph scraped against the taut skin of her belly.

After another long pause, during which a minute or five might have passed, when no sound vibrated along the thread Snow held, she slowly began to reweave the skein of herself, gradually retwining existence. In another few moments she breathed deeply and released a small, pent-up sigh of frustration. She snorted, moved to the entrance of the street and began making her way once more down Harold, to the waiting DropShip several kilometers distant and her future meeting; by her calculations, her invitee should already have made planetfall and might be just a little agitated if he could not find her.

A fiery fist of pain hammered into her shoulder from behind; she lurched forward and dropped to one knee as her concentration momentarily splintered into a prismatic stream of a thousand points of light. Damn! Sloppy again.

No need to be on your guard one hundred percent where SAFE is concerned. The intelligence branch of House Marik is a joke, a cakewalk. There might have been some truth in that myth at the upper levels. But on the mean streets of the back end of a dark hole, those agents were every bit as dangerous as any she’d dealt with. More, they seemed almost desperate to prove themselves. As though they felt responsible for the splintering of their realm and were out to prove they could match any agency, any individual, that might cross their path.

Snow thought she’d learned her lesson. Obviously more, and painful, lessons were yet to come.

She tugged hard once and regained her concentration, leaving out the thread of pulsing pain that sent lances of agony down her arm, numbing it into uselessness. She immediately dropped to the ground, rolled toward the alley mouth and heard the cough of a well-made silencer, the tang of ricocheting rounds bouncing off pavement; a hot chip of the street sliced her cheek.

Once in the alley, she rolled, pushed against the wall with her good shoulder and levered herself quickly to a standing position. She looked down the alley and muttered a curse that would’ve curdled her mother’s ears—blocked. They would know they’d hit her and more than likely they knew the alley offered no outlet. After all, she’d discovered quickly enough the world of Stewart might be part of The Republic of the Sphere in a geographical sense, but in every other sense it belonged to the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth. SAFE agents roamed freely on-planet, and they would know this city, know this street, know this exact alley. The unexpected. She needed to do the unexpected.

If they knew they’d hit her, they’d be expecting a strike from the alley floor. Attempt to hide behind a Dumpster, or break into an alley door and try to slink away. The sound of the silencer had come from some distance, so she still had a few precious seconds.

Unbuckling her belt, Snow pulled it loose and then swung it around her chest, catching it between herself and the wall. As though she’d practiced the move a hundred times, she quickly bound her now-useless arm to her side. She ran to the large drainage pipe mounted against the wall, where she squeezed between the wall and the pipe. She began to make her way up the pipe. Her fear it might rattle or creak with her movement proved unfounded. Six meters up, she found a ledge and dismounted from the pipe, latching on to a windowsill and edging farther out toward the mouth of the alley.

Sweat dripped down her face and began to plaster the wool clothing to her stocky body. The thread of pain could not be refocused and it became a hot pincer grinding against her concentration as she made her way along the ledge. She began to pant from the effort and tears slowly leaked from the corners of her eyes. Almost at the edge of the alley, she stopped. Listened. The inferno of her shoulder threatened to flare out all other considerations and black spots swam in front of her eyes as oblivion opened its embrace to accept her surrender.

The verigraph crackled against her skin.

Her eyes narrowed and the indomitable spirit that had dragged her from the ugliness of Talitha, which made this slum look like the lap of luxury, blossomed in her smoky gray eyes.

Irregular sounds intruded. The slow steps of a cautious man. The steps of a man who wished not to be seen or heard.

They drew closer. With a wrenching twist, she realized she could not reach the needler snugged up against her left breast, the handle positioned for a cross-body draw. She cursed silently; it had been a mistake to immobilize her arm. Still, no going back now. Flow with the blow. How to take him? The information she held could not be lost.

The man’s head appeared and disappeared like the flicking tongue of a lizard around the corner. Once again, appear-disappear, this time at a different level. With a large-bore handgun (she couldn’t make it out clearly from this distance in the dark, but it looked like a Sternsnatcht Python; leave it to a SAFE agent to try and silence such a monster) held out in classic shooter style, the man edged around the corner. He moved to the other side of the alley, eyes, body and gun covering every angle.