She-Wolf and Cub by Lilith Saintcrow

Author:Lilith Saintcrow [Saintcrow, Lilith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Chapter Six

He’s Taken

Carsona was a corporation town. It was also close enough that the skimmers could have been raiders picking through its refuse, or even inhabitants out for a joyride. Geoff and I would have avoided the place, but whoever had taken him would have come through here.

Or at least, so I hoped. Whoever it was, they hadn’t left a trace. Not even a thread of scent. Had Geoff surfaced from sleep and gone outside to find me? Unlikely in the daylight, but it could have happened. I hadn’t even left him a note—not that we had any paper, anyway.

I shouldn’t have left him.

To top it all off, he’d been right. It started raining.

The clouds raced in like greased cargo containers down a magchute, and a wall of water crashed down on the desert. Rivers poured off slanted solarcatch panels, gullies opened up in the sand, the three streets—because Carsona was bigger than Vega by a long shot—became quagmires, and the entire township staggered under the weight. The late afternoon was a steam-hell, the sun doing its best to reassert its primacy but unable to reach through a pall of heavy, blackening skyveil. Thunder rolled, and it was my first time hearing sky-collisions without a City’s muffling dome of stat-veiling.

It was also my first time feeling raindrops untainted by City smog or condenser-wash. The reflexive chemtesting in my skin returned some interesting results I might have wanted to explore, if the furious little black worry-mice hadn’t been running around inside my head.

I should not have left him.

The convoy station was a tall, ramshackle affair, drips and rivulets working through its presswood ceiling and falling into a sad collection of slop-pots in every conceivable shape and size. Crowded, too, because a convoy—bellowing fourpads, shouting people, a collection of feral township youth selling snacks and small cheap things—had just arrived. It was the perfect time for me to infiltrate and blend, and it was also the perfect time for whoever had taken Geoff to exfiltrate.

Assuming I wasn’t too late.

The corporate logo was a red globe on a blue background, not one I’d seen before. GeoNara. Pasted on everything, from the bleached buildings lining the thoroughfares to the sodden pieces of trash chucked into rusting cans. It took me less than two minutes to figure out the town was part of a mining and prospecting constellation, and that its last boom cycle had been a while ago. The veins for precious metals might be tapped out, but there were other layers in the strata around here that might be worth something.

Whoever took him was good. Damn good.

Agent good.

It was a fine time to wish I had some Agency backup. Running trace on someone in the middle of a desert is a thankless fucking task.

That was what I’d been counting on to help us. Probably what whoever snatched him was counting on too.

How didn’t matter at this point. What mattered was finding out who. That would give me where, and when it did, they would see just how creative a flex liquidator could get at taking apart everything in her way.

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