Profiteer

She shouldn’t have taken the Leggett. It was an expensive piece of hardware, and East Godwin was full of maggots.

 

Tetsami cussed herself. The time for second-guessing was before the operation. She had taken the Leggett for a very good reason. The few hours before the payoff were when things were most likely to go bad. It wasn’t that she expected her employer to pull a double cross—if she had, she wouldn’t be here—but it was a good idea to have an escape route, in case....

 

Nice if I had a job where that wasn’t a priority concern. Nice if I had a life where that wasn’t a priority concern.

 

Tetsami put those thoughts out of her mind. Right now wasn’t the time.

 

She concentrated on the meet.

 

The place the execs had chosen for the payoff seemed relatively clean. They’d found a place with one hell of an approach radius. The area around the bunker had been blasted clear for a few city blocks in any direction. Blasted by an artillery barrage or an orbital strike.

 

The bunker she waited by had once been a very secure building. It was the only survivor of whatever had reduced the surrounding blocks. The ruin still had shelter-quality armor, but the façade had been blown off. All that was left was blackened metal in the shape of a truncated pyramid.

 

The only entrance, the loading dock, had been blown inward by a direct hit from an energy weapon.

 

She wondered what this was the remains of. East Godwin had once been a corporate center before a few ugly company wars reduced a lot of the neighborhoods to rubble. The bunker could date from that blowup—around the time her parents had come to this ugly little planet.

 

Why Bakunin, Dad? she thought at her long-dead father. The question occurred to her even though she knew the answer. After Dakota, Bakunin was the only place that would accept their kind.

 

She wished the execs would show up.

 

Every minute she spent waiting for them to show, the data package under her seat got hotter. She wasn’t made of time. The op had gone without a hitch. But that only meant that the spuds in Bleek Munitions weren’t going to discover that their R&D database had been compromised until the next routine cataloging of the user list. In less than fifteen minutes now the spuds would see a red flag next to a user that logged out without any record of logging in.

 

The snag was unavoidable. Bleek’s system was too tight for a dry run. She’d spent over a week planning the break-in, an hour weaving her magic into the system, and ten minutes on-line. After all that, she’d cut out with very little finesse or ceremony when she had what she wanted.

 

What the execs wanted.

 

If Bleek security ID’d her while she still had the data, things could get real hairy. She was a target until she passed the package to her employer. Once the exchange occurred, once she’d been passed the gold, she’d be free and clear.

 

Until then, she was hotter than a megawatt laser with a gigawatt power cell.

 

Think about the payoff, she told herself. Fifty kilos in the Insured Bank of the Adam Smith Collective. Not enough for her to retire on, but it might be enough to get her off-planet.

 

Off this slimy godforsaken rock. A graceful exit, as soon as possible. She wasn’t like some software jockeys who went exponential until they crashed and burned. She knew she was pushing the envelope. If she didn’t realize that, she had Ivor—her adopted father—to tell her she was eight years into a profession that chewed up and spit out most in less than three.

 

More than that, she wanted to abandon the planet that had killed her parents. Leave and forget that Bakunin ever existed.

 

She wished Ivor were in town right now. He was the only honorable, worthwhile human being on this planet, and she sensed that she’d need some handholding when this was all over.

 

There was a flash above her. She looked up.

 

A dead-black stub-winged drop-ship passed overhead, going east. It was a half-second until the bass rumble of the drives reached her. She could have sworn it had just fired something. It continued its stately progress across the night sky until she lost it behind the eastern skyline.

 

And there they were.

 

The execs were coming down a blasted stretch of road, toward the bunker. Three metallic-blue groundcars were weaving through the rubble, dust blowing out from under their skirts. They were armored for the neighborhood. Three cars. Godwin Arms might be slow, but when they show up, they put out the red carpet.

 

Tetsami didn’t like red carpets. They tended to hide godawful piles of dust.

 

She stopped the Leggett and primed the grav unit for a five g vertical acceleration, just in case. Her palms were sweaty again.