Her Robot Wolf: Gift of Gaia Page 5

  The video resumed.

  Seymour grabbed the barman by his shirtfront and dragged him closer, despite the bar between them. The edge of it pressed painfully into the barman’s stomach. He was young, slim and trendy with spiked blond hair and a frightened expression. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

  “Where is Ivan Mishkin?” Seymour was right to the point.

  “Not here.”

  The barman’s response won him a violent shake. His stomach slammed into the edge of the bar, and he groaned.

  Among the bar’s patrons, no one stirred.

  “Tell me where Ivan is.”

  “I don’t know.” It was a wail.

  Another shake slammed him into the bar, again.

  “The apothecary’s,” the barman gasped. “They send supplies on to Ivan. They’ll have an address.”

  Seymour shoved the barman back hard into the shelves behind him. Bottles and canisters rattled. The barman slumped bonelessly. “If you’re lying, I’ll be back.” Seymour swaggered out, a satisfied smile curling his mouth as patrons flinched back from him.

  The video vanished and the viewscreen once more showed the people moving past the Orion on the space dock.

  “Did Seymour go to the apothecary’s? Are they all right?”

  Vulf frowned at me. “It’s too late to change anything. This happened yesterday. I assume Seymour did learn something of interest at the apothecary’s since there’s no video of him returning to the Spotted Toadstool.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  He stood. “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to follow a different trail.” He stared down at me challengingly. We—him and me. “Or will you bet Ivan’s life on Seymour not catching up with him?”

  An hour later I stood beside Vulf in the Spotted Toadstool. He’d bought me boots, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to cross the bar’s questionably clean floor in flip-flops.

  Daisy watched us approach the bar, and her eyes widened as she identified me. “Jaya?”

  Her tone held shock, but also an unexpected note of joy; as if I was not only known here, but wanted. She ignored the customer she’d been chatting with.

  The man didn’t like it. He turned to see who had stolen Daisy’s attention, and saw Vulf. His protest died unspoken. He slid off his stool and retreated further down the bar to watch.

  I was lured irresistibly closer by Daisy’s obviousness eagerness to meet me. Few people felt like that about me.

  She leaned over the bar and hugged my shoulders. “Are you here willingly?” she whispered in my ear.

  Evidently, she hadn’t realized that Vulf was a shifter, and could hear even that soft sound.

  I nodded, and she released me from her surprisingly tight hug; a hug like a mom would give a child home from roaming. I had to take a moment to swallow my emotions. “Ivan said to contact you if I ever needed to reach him in an emergency.” I glanced sideways at Vulf. “I think this is an emergency.”

  Daisy’s mouth compressed. “But is it yours or his?” She didn’t wait for an answer, and despite her implied disapproval of Ivan’s actions, she invited us to join her in the manager’s office. “Ava, watch the bar,” she called to one of the waitresses, who nodded.

  The office door shut out the noise of the bar. Daisy rounded her desk and dropped into a shabbily comfortable chair. A creeping ivy grew in a brass pot on a bookshelf behind her, a grow light positioned near it.

  Vulf nudged me to take the sole visitor’s chair, and then, stationed himself to the side where he could observe both of us.

  Daisy ignored him. She studied me. Her slow smile held a tinge of sadness. Then she turned my world upside down. “You look so much like your mom.”

  I froze.

  Vulf moved fractionally toward me, instinctively protective.

  Daisy’s smile vanished. “You didn’t know? But you must have seen photos of Sonya? You’re taller, but…”

  “Her name was Sonya?”

  Daisy shook her head in obvious bafflement. “Didn’t Ivan—” She broke off when I started to tremble. Her next words were vivid curses.

  I was beyond cursing Ivan and his secrets. “He told me my mom—his daughter—was dead. He wouldn’t tell me anything more.”

  A big hand rested on my shoulder. Vulf crouched down and I leaned into him. I didn’t consider what I was doing. I just responded to his strength. “I looked,” I said to him and Daisy. “But I couldn’t find anyone using the Romanov name and I had no idea which station or planet I was born on.”

  “Faust,” Daisy said. She snatched up a tissue and pressed it to her eyes, saving her mascara from tears. “I roomed with Sonya for a couple of years while I was there.”

  Faust was a fringe planet.

  “You were such a good baby.” She looked at me with old memories and fresh pain. “When Sonya died I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t making much money. I was a waitress. Sonya had been a singer, so she’d earned a bit more.”

  “How did she die?” I interrupted. The woman across the desk had answers to questions that had haunted me my whole life.

  “She caught the flu, one of those virulent strains that travelled faster than the medical response. You had already started showing signs of shamanic ability. Sonya recognized it. She asked me to get you to your grandfather, to Ivan. It took her savings and mine combined, but I managed it.”

  And Ivan had repaid her by buying her the Spotted Toadstool.

  She considered me hesitantly, her regret almost tangible. “I thought he told you about Sonya, and that you chose to stay away. I don’t have any photos of her. My data drive was corrupted. But I have stories.”

  “I want them,” I choked out.

  Her smile wobbled. “You really do look like her. You’re taller, but you have the same long, black hair that gleams like a crow’s wing, and those lovely dark brown eyes. She would be proud of you.”

  An explosive sob escaped me. I turned blindly and hid my face against Vulf’s shoulder. He rose and brought me with him, pulling me into a hug. I struggled not to cry. The office was silent apart from my ragged breathing as I brought myself back under control.

  “Sorry,” I muttered and sat back on the chair, grabbing a tissue and blowing my nose, signaling the end of my emotional breakdown.

  Vulf stayed by my chair.

  “You’re a bounty hunter,” Daisy said to him. “One of my customers recognized you.” He didn’t respond, and she continued. “I learned about the bounty issued for Ivan. A million solidus. A fortune. I had another hunter in here, yesterday. I owe Ivan loyalty for years of friendship, but there are other people to consider as well. My staff. Myself. Jaya. If I knew where he was, I would tell you.”

  She looked at me then, and there was pity in her eyes. Pity and something else. “You know how Ivan is. I’m sorry I can’t help you, but if you want to talk about Sonya, you can find me anytime.”

  “I will,” I said huskily. “But for now, I think Ivan needs help.”

  Her expression hardened. “He probably does. That doesn’t mean you should throw yourself headlong into his troubles.” She stood and the conversation was over.

  The noise of the bar surged in as she opened the door.

  Vulf put a hand at my waist as I walked past him and out.

  I didn’t draw a full breath till we were outside and on the street, with the aroma of the spicy fried chicken stall nearby settling over everything. My hands still trembled from an overload of emotion.

  Vulf bought a basket of chicken pieces and carried them back with us to the Orion. Neither of us spoke. We ate our belated lunch and drank coffee, and finally the cold inside of me melted, or went back to the core of my soul—the part of me that knew I was forever alone, and accepted it—and I was able to function.

  I met his watchful eyes. “I’m sorry we didn’t get any useful information from Daisy, and I apologize that you got caught up in my personal issues.”

  “Did Ivan really not tell you
your mother’s name?” Vulf now knew the secret of my relationship with Ivan, a secret known by no one else other than Daisy. Even as a lone wolf, his shifter instincts to value family and pack probably couldn’t comprehend the crazy mess of my isolated, untethered existence.

  I nodded. I even managed a tight smile. “He did better than that. There’s no official record that he ever had a daughter at all.”

  He stood abruptly and dumped the remains of our lunch in the waste disposal.

  I listened to the crunch of bones as the disposal unit chewed through the chicken. “I should have pushed Ivan harder for answers. I was a coward. I was scared that he’d vanish, too, and then I’d have no one.”

  Vulf swore. He gripped the edge of the counter, the muscles in his chest and arms flexing.

  “Sorry,” I apologized again, embarrassed. “You don’t need to hear about my emotional failures.”

  “They’re not your failures,” he growled. His eyes were the icy blue of the wolf he couldn’t shift into. “Do you have any idea who your father is?”

  “Only what my bloodwork revealed. My genetic heritage.” I paused, but I couldn’t scrape together the moxy to put on a confident smile. “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you. According to DNA analysis, my father was a shifter.”

  Vulf pushed away from the counter and prowled back to the table.

  I finally smiled. It was more of a painful grimace. “And because shifters protect their genetic heritage…”

  He finished my sentence for me. “You can’t search a database to identify your father.”

  I nodded.

  His gaze raked over me, a ferocious edge to it. “DNA wouldn’t tell you if he was a werewolf or werebear or rarer breed.”

  “It tells me nothing more than that he existed, and that if we were still on Earth, he’d have been able to shift.”

  Vulf sat down again, moving with the smoothness of a predator on the hunt. “You’re half-shifter. That explains it then.”

  “Explains what?”

  He opened his mouth. Then closed it.

  Abruptly he was up and across to the door that led to the unexplored area of the starship. “Since Daisy couldn’t add anything useful concerning Ivan’s whereabouts, we’ll leave for the Boneyard Sector this afternoon. Ahab, lodge our departure record with the space dock admin.”

  Vulf stepped out of the recreation cabin and the door closed behind him. Presumably he was headed for the bridge to pilot the Orion out from docking. Autopilot could manage it, but a responsible captain liked to be there for landings and launches.

  Alone, apart from Ahab’s observation, I sighed loudly and dropped my head onto my arms where they rested on the table. Face hidden by my unbraided hair, I let the worry I felt show in my expression.

  For all the emotional shocks of our visit to Daisy, she hadn’t let me leave without telling me where to search for Ivan. She’d couched her advice as an observation, You know how Ivan is.

  I did, indeed.

  Ivan gave the impression of being a casual rogue, but when something was important to him, he was relentless.

  The Emperor of Meitj had issued a million solidus bounty for Ivan to be brought to him alive after Ivan had attempted to steal from him. What I had to discover was what Ivan had attempted to steal because Ivan wouldn’t give up. He’d attempt the theft again and again till he either succeeded, or died.

  I shivered, and composed my expression to the blankest one I could manage. Then I got up and crossed to the sofa. I would watch our departure from the space dock, and while we passed the other starships and traversed the starlanes, I’d try to guess why Vulf was heading for the Boneyard Sector, the galaxy’s recycling hub.

  But for all my worry about Ivan’s intentions and the bounty on his head, I couldn’t help but be distracted by Vulf’s fierce response to the news that I was half-shifter. Just what did he think it explained?

  Chapter 4

  The Orion really was fast thanks to its mLa’an design and cold fusion engine. We skipped across the Psy Sector and into the recycling Valhalla that was the Boneyard Sector in mere hours, arriving at 2100 hours. As startlingly swift as our travel time was, I had nearly crawled out of my skin with impatience at the delay.

  Vulf had vanished, presumably to the bridge, and he didn’t return.

  I was left alone in the recreation room with the viewscreen and the table that also functioned to display data on its surface. If I asked Ahab for information on either screen, I suspected he might have Vulf’s permission to grant me the data. But my mere request would reveal my thoughts—and as much as I was growing to trust Vulf, I couldn’t risk Ivan’s life and freedom.

  I had to discover what it was Ivan sought to steal from the Meitj Emperor, find Ivan, and convince him not to steal it. To do so, I’d need to understand why Ivan was stealing the unknown object in the first place.

  The frustrating thing was that Vulf had much of the information I wanted. Although I wasn’t sure that even he could have learned Ivan’s reasons. My grandfather was a complicated man.

  I retreated to my cabin, the converted cargo hold, and used its empty space to run through my three favorite Kung Fu forms, first slowly, then with all the energy of my captivity and powerlessness. Every time I reached for sha energy, the continuing operation of the disrupter burned me.

  I showered, dressed in yet another dark gray utility suit provided by Ahab, laced my boots, and returned to the recreation cabin to eat a dinner of meatloaf and greens. As I ate, the viewscreen changed from resembling the wall it was set into, to showing the passing blackness of space. Then that blankness was broken by the appearance of a courier vessel speeding in the opposite direction. It was a mere flash across the screen, recognizable only because I’d seen such flashes a thousand times.

  “Ahab, where are we?”

  “Approaching the Boneyard Sector. ETA at Station Drill, 21:15.” Which meant the AI had changed the setting on the viewscreen so that I’d have some warning of our arrival.

  “Thanks, Ahab.”

  The question that had been nagging me—okay, one of many questions that had been nagging me—during the journey was what Vulf would do with me on arrival. I was suited up, ready to disembark, but would he allow me off the Orion? He’d done so on Samanth, but then, he’d needed me to jolt a response from Daisy.

  I had to pity Vulf. The big, tough bounty hunter had probably never had one of his leads collapse against him seeking emotional support.

  He hadn’t flinched though. He’d wrapped me up in a strong hug that had helped me to regain my self-control. In a way, I owed him. Not just for the momentary support, but because he’d brought me to Samanth. If I hadn’t seen Daisy in person, would she have merely accepted a message from me and tried to forward it on to Ivan without ever letting slip my mom’s name?

  I was angry at Ivan for what he’d kept from me. Not only my mom’s identity, but the fact that Daisy had known her and could tell me stories of Mom and my own early years. Even if talking about Mom was too painful for Ivan, Daisy was eager to share her memories.

  The traffic visible through the viewscreen became more crowded as we approached Station Drill. I hadn’t heard of it, which meant it was probably one of the thousand or so started up by independent contractors. Sometimes the stations were completely artificial. Other times they occupied abandoned mining settlements on asteroids or co-existed with operational mines. Less often, the stations had staked out part of a semi-hospitable planet.

  The official stations had a Galactic Police presence and abided by the rule of law. Independent stations nominally abided by the same laws, but in fact, tended to adhere to the demands of whichever organized crime syndicate had the most influence. And for influence, read ruthless exercise of violence. Mike Seymour would fit in well on an independent station in the Boneyard Sector.

  The black market thrived in the sector. Stolen starships came in, were broken down or given new, false identification records, and sold on. Oth
er goods flowed through the sector in the same way. Organized crime syndicates used the vast recycling operations to disguise their activities.

  Vulf hadn’t said why he expected to find some trace of Ivan in the Boneyard Sector, but I’d picked at the question all afternoon and had a solid guess.

  Ivan had escaped Tyger Tyger by using a portal, but portals were single use transportation and expensive as heck in terms of sha energy to construct—although, with my sha crystal, Ivan had the energy to set up seven of them. Nonetheless, for non-emergency transportation, what Ivan needed was his own starship. If he didn’t already have one, the place to acquire one without leaving an official record, was on an independent station here in the Boneyard Sector.

  Moreover, to travel from Tyger Tyger to the Boneyard Sector, our brief stop at Samanth was barely a detour. Given the speed of his starship, the Orion, Vulf must have calculated that the chance of learning something new on Samanth, now that he had me as a different kind of leverage, was worth the relatively minor amount of time we spent there.

  But what value could I offer on Station Drill?

  Nothing. I ought to have been happy with that answer, and the thought that Vulf would release me on Station Drill. Even in a criminal backwater, a starship shaman was safe. Disrupters such as Vulf possessed were few and far between. I could protect myself, and negotiate passage to somewhere more salubrious. I would be free to follow up my own ideas on how to find Ivan.

  Unless, of course, Vulf grabbed Ivan right here on Station Drill.

  The Orion landed. Three minutes later, Vulf entered the recreation cabin.

  Without thinking, I stood.

  He was big and dressed for action. He wore a dark gray coat against the likely freezing temperatures of the station.

  I’d visited enough independent stations to know how frugal they were with their energy expenditure. Light and heat were rationed. Economy and practicality ruled. They had few if any beggars, since welfare in such places consisted of exploitation, death, or if the crime boss was feeling kind, being kicked onto the nearest departing starship.