The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake
head bobbled, that moment of clarity seemingly gone. “My eternal gratitude, my friend,” he said, just before he finished the third drink. “My eternal gratitude.”
* * * *
Hunsaker sat behind the desk and dug through the files. He had his back to the wall and, out of the corner of his eye, he watched the entrances and the stairway. He didn’t want anyone to surprise him for any reason.
He had a pad propped up on his thighs. His personal screen, not the one tied into the resort proper. He had upgraded the pad dozens of times, sometimes illegally. More than once, he’d stolen programs from his guests, and from one—a well connected gambler who liked the odds (and the breasts) in the casino—he had stolen an entire database of shady characters throughout the sector.
He didn’t expect to see any familiar names in that database, but he found one.
Richard Ilykova, aka Yuri Flynn Doyle, Edward Michael Adams, and Misha Yurivich Orlinskaya, Mercenary and Assassin for Hire, believed to be responsible for more than two dozen deaths system wide.
Hunsaker shivered. He had known that Richard Ilykova hadn’t been a common worker on a passenger ship. The man was too competent for that—not too mechanically competent, but too competent in the ways of death. He hadn’t flinched when he had seen Kantswinkle’s body, nor had he seemed too upset by his whole ordeal.
Yet all those deaths—the three on the ship and the fourth here, seemed awfully sloppy for a man who made his living killing people.
Hunsaker sighed softly and exited the illegal database. He felt dirty just thinking about Ilykova’s job. About the man himself, actually. Ilykova hadn’t seemed harmless—Hunsaker wasn’t that naïve—but he had seemed…more efficient than deadly.
A movement caught his eye. Ilykova approached the desk. Hunsaker hadn’t even seen him enter the room.
Hunsaker let out a little squeak. Ilykova raised an eyebrow in amusement. He’d clearly caught Hunsaker’s moment of fear. Ilykova smiled—one of those knowing smiles—and then proceeded as if he had seen nothing out of the ordinary.
“Looking up the guests, are we?” he asked.
“So?” Hunsaker asked, then realized that probably wasn’t the smartest response. Neither, he supposed, would be What’s it to you? Or Get the hell away from me.
“So, does anyone have a history with lack of oxygen?”
“What?” Hunsaker asked, mostly because he hadn’t been expecting that question.
“I realized when I was talking with the captain that all of our victims suffocated in one way or another. The fire would have caused the rest of us to suffocate as well. I was just wondering if we have some sort of revenge scenario going on here.” Ilykova put his elbows on the desk.
“You tell me,” Hunsaker said, his voice wobbling a little.
Ilykova frowned. “I don’t have access to a deep database. You do.”
Then his eyes widened just a little.
“Oh,” he said. “You decided to research me first.”
Hunsaker’s heart was pounding. He had nothing to lose here—if Ilykova was going to kill him, it would happen here, now. So he called up the earlier screen, with Ilykova’s history and pushed it across the desk at him.
“These things are so poorly done,” Ilykova said. “It doesn’t tell you much, does it?”
He looked up, his pale blue eyes twinkling. How could a man laugh about murder?
It made Hunsaker think of Carmichael: Murder really shouldn’t be the subject of casual conversation, now should it?
Nor should it be something to smile about.
Apparently, Hunsaker’s silence caught Ilykova’s attention.
“We all have a past, Grissan,” Ilykova said. “Yours involves embezzlement from every single resort you worked for. Quite creative embezzlement, I might add, the kind that would’ve made you very, very rich if you had kept to your original plan.”
Hunsaker felt a warmth rise in his cheeks. No one knew about this. No one. How did Ilykova find it?
“The problem was, in your profession, that the younger, less experienced members moved from resort to resort, while the older ones got a well-deserved sinecure. That’s the word, right? Sinecure?”
“Sinecure implies a job with little work. That’s not true. To rise to the top of my profession, you must be willing to work at all times.” Hunsaker’s words were curt, showing his annoyance. He felt his face grow even warmer. He had let Ilykova irritate him.
Ilykova smiled slightly. “My mistake. I simply meant that you hit the top of your profession and remained in one place, a resort that became ‘yours,’ even if you didn’t own it. You became the eyes and ears of the place, the face that everyone recognized. The person they associated with the resort. Which was why they bought you this place instead of prosecuting you. Did you know what a dive they got for you? It was the perfect revenge on their part, wasn’t it? An effective banishment away from the populated areas of the sector. Did it embarrass you?”
Embarrassed, humiliated, angered. Hunsaker didn’t say anything, though, although he expected all of the emotions ran across his face.
“Still,” Ilykova said, “you got to keep the money you stole from the other resorts. You could’ve vanished. You just chose not to.”
Too ashamed to leave. Hunsaker simply couldn’t face any of his old colleagues ever again. Ever, ever, ever again.
“We all have a bit of history,” Ilykova said. “I’m sure you had a reason for your sticky fingers. I have a reason for my history as well. My mother was Halina Layla Orlinskaya. Look her up in your little database.”
Hunsaker took the pad back, his fingers shaking, dammit all to hell. He wasn’t as practiced at controlling his physical reactions to his emotions, not like he used to be.
He looked up Halina Layla Orlinskaya. She had half a dozen aliases as well. A high level spy, who defected with some devastating knowledge that changed the course of one of the border wars, she survived her last few years by hiring herself out as a mercenary to various governments.
“What it doesn’t say there, I’m sure,” Ilykova said, “is that she hired me out as well, as an assassin. She thought I had the personality for it.”
“Did you?” Hunsaker wished he could take the words back.
But Ilykova didn’t seem to notice. “Not really. I think one should feel passionate about his work. An assassin’s job requires no passion at all. Don’t you think that one should put his heart and soul into his job?”
“I used to,” Hunsaker said.
“And I’ll bet you miss that emotion,” Ilykova said. “I did. I wanted to do something with my life. Ah, to do something. Of course, now I’m broke and hiring onto ships as a lower level employee just to get across the sector.”
He leaned across the desk. Hunsaker couldn’t lean away. His back was already pressed against the wall.
“So you see, I had no reason to kill those people,” Ilykova said. “I didn’t know them. And I’m certainly smart enough not to set a fire on a spaceship far from the nearest port.”
“But,” Hunsaker said, his voice smaller than he wanted it to be, “you knew Agatha Kantswinkle.”
Ilykova smiled, a real smile, genuinely amused. “Didn’t like her either, huh? No one did, so far as I can tell. But I didn’t have to kill her. She would’ve gotten off the ship at Ansary. And here, on Vaadum, she was your problem, not mine.”
Hunsaker swallowed. “So you’re saying you didn’t do it.”
“That’s