Black Holiday (The Black Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Does she really expect me to go to Albion, with all those millions, billions of people, without it? Is that why she waited to ask until it was too late to back out?

  Lady Emily either guessed at Morgan’s thoughts, or perhaps read them on her face, as she held up her hand in a conciliatory gesture and quickly elaborated.

  “Of course you would want to be armed wherever you go. I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of that, now least of all. But there are legal concerns to take account of and get ironed out.”

  Emily paused to see if Morgan had any specific questions, to which Morgan simply raised her eyebrows and gestured for the stern woman to continue.

  “Legally any subject of Albion can carry a concealed weapon, once they are of age and assuming they haven’t committed any crimes that would disqualify them from such. Since we have records of who has forfeited the right it is an easy matter to track, and we don’t require licensing or other such measures.”

  Gertrude glanced at Morgan, no doubt noting that Morgan’s mouth was still pressed in a grim line, displeasure practically radiating off of her small frame.

  Let them see I’m mad, Morgan thought, as Gertrude asked the obvious question.

  “And foreigners?”

  “Generally visitors are not allowed to go armed, since they cannot be easily be checked for background criminality, or for medical issues that might make someone a danger to themselves or others.”

  Now Morgan did speak, terse angry words.

  “So why not say something before?”

  “Because, that is only generally. There is of course a method for visitors to get permission. The most common method is to request their government send the appropriate records to Albion ahead of them.”

  “Which there wasn’t time for, given the hurriedly planned nature of this trip,” Gertrude said, though she didn’t sound entirely sure of her reasoning.

  “Quite. Governments do very little truly well, and they do nothing quickly. They are necessary, but that doesn’t make them easy to work with. The other method is for someone to vouch for the visitor, which may or may not suffice dependent on the status of the subject doing the vouching.”

  “And if a baroness was the person in question?” Gertrude said, snorting in amusement.

  “Next time, start with that,” Morgan said, grumpily, but she could also feel the tension start to ease up in her shoulders.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. I am used to completeness of information being preferred to focusing on the important points, since in military matters one does not always know which pieces of the puzzle are the key ones.”

  “Then let’s get it done,” Morgan said, stretching in her seat.

  “There is one final wrinkle,” Emily said, motioning over one of the guards, a somewhat short man who was nearly as wide as he was tall, though none of it looked to be fat.

  “Such permissions must be asked for in person. There is an office setup for this and other regulatory purposes at any spaceport of sufficient size, but they are all on the surface.”

  Morgan glanced at the bodyguard, guessing at why he had been called over. She was definitely getting annoyed again.

  “And you want me to give him my weapon until we get there?”

  “One minor correction,” Lady Emily responded, “We need you to, rather than I wanting you to. This will only be necessary the once. We can also set up a request for the files to be transferred while we are there to give the pair of you permanent permission.”

  “I do not like this,” Morgan said, but as she said it she stood up to allow easier access to the pistol in her pocket. Carefully keeping it pointed at the deck Morgan hit the release to eject the magazine, then cycled the slide to eject the chambered round onto the chair. She locked the slide open and handed it to the guard so he could see it was empty. “Do you need the other magazines too?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Emily responded with a nod. “By themselves the bullets aren’t a danger, but you could conceivably empty them of the powder and fashion a small explosive device.

  Rolling her eyes, Morgan fished the spares out of the opposite pocket and handed them over. The bodyguard slid them all – comically undersized in his massive hands – into a single pocket of his skinsuit. His suit had a strapped on holster for his own, much larger, weapon.

  Lastly Morgan picked up the stray round from the seat and dropped it into his waiting hand.

  “Don’t lose that.”

  The bodyguard’s expression didn’t waiver, but just for a moment Morgan thought she saw a flash of irritation cross his face.

  Don’t like me suggesting you’d be that unprofessional? Morgan thought. Too bad, I don’t like giving you the most important tool I own.

  “Wait a minute,” Gertrude said, cocking her head in confusion. “If you have to ask in person, but can’t come armed, how is anyone who gets permission this way supposed to carry once they have permission?”

  Emily smiled, slightly.

  “That is an excellent question, and one I myself asked when the law in its current form was passed through the Lords. They were not swayed by my arguments, pointing out that it would not be a burdensome expense to purchase a new pistol from the merchants on Albion.”

  “And do any of the Lords who pushed for this law own any gun stores?” Gertrude asked.

  “The Lords would be positively shocked at such a suggestion of corruption and graft.”

  Morgan thought through this statement, shaking her head and adding.

  “But that isn’t a denial, is it?”

  “You catch on quickly, Morgan.”

  From across the room Haruhi called out, her face pressed against the window.

  “It’s doing something funny!” she said, unable to help herself from bouncing up and down, just a bit.

  Leaving off their conversation the trio turned to look at the excited youngster.

  “Nothing quite like the first time,” Gertrude said, walking over to join her daughter.

  Emily gestured for Morgan to precede her, which Morgan did after a moment’s hesitation. She made sure to note where the guard with her gun was stationed. She’d need to be sure to keep an eye on where he was, at least until she got her pistol back.

  ***

  Given Emily’s status on Albion, her ship was able to dock quickly and quietly with Clapham Station, the main station above Albion’s capital of Ena. Unfortunately, it was still quite a walk from the ship docking ring over to where the shuttles waited to ferry travelers down to the planetside spaceport.

  At least they had a chance to change out of their skinsuits before heading in, and since they’d be returning to Takiyama Station the same way, they were able to just leave the suits in the cleaning unit on the Graverose.

  Morgan was certainly used to wearing skinsuits by this point, and she had been wearing coveralls pretty much her whole life. But she jumped at the chance to wear something the breathed a little better. Sandals and a sundress were just the ticket, though she did add a light jacket. She wasn’t terribly self-conscious about her scars, but that didn’t mean she wanted people gawking at her as they went through the very public transit spaces.

  For her part, Emily seemed more interested in telling her guests about the various aspects of the station itself, the architecture and the refits it had gone through. This was no doubt because of Morgan and Gertrude’s background in the mechanical side of space travel.

  It was a good idea. Normally Morgan would have been fascinated by the history, especially the compromises and workaround they had been forced to adopt to update the station while still using it continuously. Still, Morgan couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the information.

  She was just too distracted.

  By the time they had walked from the Graverose’s airlock to the main ring of the station Morgan realized what was bothering her.

  Obviously, it was her missing pistol. But the specific feeling it evoked was what had eluded her.

  She felt expose
d.

  It was more than that, though. She felt naked.

  Oh, she would have felt it even more strongly were she actually stripped of clothes and sent out into public. The difference was one of intensity, not kind.

  Lady Emily paused before a hatch that was larger than the ones they’d come through previously – this one took up the whole corridor and looked like it rolled into the wall rather than swung out or in.

  “There is a strong tradition the nobility of Albion holds, that we not appear as separate from the people of our beloved planet. It is a tradition I agree with.

  “That said, Morgan, I know you aren’t really used to large crowds, the press of people.”

  “Does Isa count as a ‘press of people’?”

  The city she’d lived in after escaping Hillman and before being hired by the merchant house was large and populous by Morgan’s standards, but she didn’t have many other cities to compare it to.

  Actually… it was the only city Morgan had been to, let alone lived in. Unless she counted travelling through Hillman’s capital while hiding in a large toolkit.

  Morgan also knew, though only intellectually, that Isa was quite small by modern standards. The ground underneath the city wouldn’t support the two-hundred plus story towers that were most commonly built.

  Oh, hey, I’m not so worried about being ‘naked’ anymore, Morgan thought, almost twitching at the thought of how many people might be on the other side of the hatch. Now I’m worried about being crushed in a mass of bodies.

  “Just how many people are there on this station?” Morgan asked before anyone could answer her previous question, unconsciously taking a step back from the hatch.

  “There’s probably just less than a half million people on the station at any given moment,” Emily answered.

  That is more people than live in Isa, was Morgan’s first thought. That’s a lot more. The second was that she had hadn’t completely ignored the details about the station, and that the station – allowing for storage, areas without an atmosphere, and so forth – only had a few million square meters of floor space for people. Given how much of that was empty, for example all the areas they’d walked through so far, and Morgan was starting to seriously wonder how they had enough space between them for the air they breathed.

  “And there isn’t any way to go, you know, around them?” Morgan asked.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Gertrude said, patting Morgan on the shoulder to get her attention, and then pointing slowly at the bodyguards. “We’ll be going through them, but not quite so closely. Guys like them don’t really appreciate it when people get to close to their charge, you understand.”

  “It will be crowded yes,” Emily said at last. Her calm, collected bearing still did not waver. “There will still be many people, and even with my men’s help getting anywhere will take time. It will probably be worse once we land. It might be trying, but it won’t be difficult. Come, we don’t want to dawdle. The shuttles wait for no man,” Emily said, nodding at one of the guards to open the hatch.

  I probably should learn their names, Morgan mused as he did so.

  The space immediately beyond the hatch was empty, but it was clear to Morgan that was only because of a lack of need, not a lack of people.

  The crowd rushing about in the main corridor was literally dizzying for Morgan, so much movement that she couldn’t even begin to guess how many people were represented in that one little slice of the station she could see.

  Without noticing it Morgan stepped a bit closer to Emily, who was the natural center of their group, given the positions her men took up around her.

  The bodyguards were remarkably good at their jobs. Everyone was jostling each other, rushing to and fro with barely a centimeter between them, but it only happened sporadically to the guards, and never to their charges.

  The going was quite slow, but soon enough they were in the waiting area for shuttle departures to the surface. They destination was the capital, Ena, which naturally had the largest share of arrivals and departures.

  Morgan was almost ready to relax her steady gaze on the floor and look about her again when someone startled her with his shouting.

  That she could even hear the man over the general din of the crowds was noteworthy. That the shouting seemed directed specifically at them was downright alarming.

  “You’re her, aren’t you!” the man yelled. Morgan looked up quickly enough to see a rather forgettable looking man – rumpled suit, short hair, average features – pushing his way through the crowds lined up for a shuttle about to board.

  “Stay back,” one of the guards warned, stepping a pace towards the man.

  “It is her,” he shouted. Morgan couldn’t tell who he was shouting at, the guard, the bystanders, or even Morgan herself, since she still wasn’t sure which ‘her’ he was referring to, beyond it probably not being Haruhi, who was currently dozing on her mother’s lap as Gertrude sat in one of the few open chairs of the rows bolted to the deck.

  “Shove off,” one of the other travelers said, grunting as the man shoved past him.

  “You’re the Butcher of Brighton!” the man yelled, turning about to address the crowd. “The Butcher of Brighton Bay! Look on your ‘savior,’ you bunch of sheep. She killed thousands of men who were trying to free us from tyranny, and she was rewarded for it. How dare she breathe the same air as normal people!”

  Up to this point, Emily, like Gertrude, had been studiously ignoring the raving man. At the mention of Brighton, however, Morgan noticed Emily stiffen ever so slightly, before she stood up and faced the man.

  “I take no pleasure in what I did in that battle,” she said, her voice firm, her back straight. “It was my duty…”

  At this comment, the man lunged forward, stopped by the same bodyguard several meters from Emily, and by extension Morgan and Gertrude.

  “Duty,” he said, practically spitting the word. “A thin excuse from an emotionless murderess.”

  “Yes. It was my duty,” Emily said, holding her ground. “One I was forced to execute by the actions of those men you laud. It was their own choice at rebellion that sealed their fates. I was only the instrument.” She paused for a moment, looking over the rest of the crowd, who had gone dead quiet. Even the station workers had paused in their tasks. “Nevertheless, I am proud to serve the people of Albion. If stopping those who had tried to bring tyranny to our home through violence had required my life, I would have given it. It was spared, by the grace of God, and I strive to live my life in that same service.”

  As if by some unspoken signal (or spoken, Morgan supposed, since it was Emily’s words that caused it) the crowd nodded, looked away, and so forth, and then went back to their lives. Within moments the angry man was only marked by Morgan, Emily… and several anxious looking bodyguards.

  “Mark my words, murderess,” he said, actually snarling, “Justice will find you, sooner or later.”

  “Yes, it will,” Emily said, quitter, not for the crowds to hear. “We will all have to answer for our creator for the things we have done, and the things we failed to stop. My soul is prepared for that meeting. Is yours?”

  With excellent timing, accidental though it must be, the overhead speaker system called for the next shuttle to Ena to board. Turning her back on the man Emily headed for the airlock. While the nobility didn’t want to be seen as apart from the common man, that apparently did not extend to small things like boarding first.

  Then again, that might just be a safety issue, Morgan thought to herself as she moved to follow Emily. Taking one last look of the man, she noted he was already moving off, purposefully, busy typing something in the holographic keys of his uplink. And who do you need to message so urgently?

  CHAPTER 3

  A true conspiracy to kill someone is far rarer than our entertainment would have us believe. The old saying that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead isn’t far from the mark, to be frank. More often
than not the trigger-puller is caught or killed, and either way the investigators have plenty to investigate. Oh, sure, they could get away, but anyone worth assassinating is going to have security. Having someone else kill the trigger-puller is an even worse plan, because that just gives them even more evidence.

  - Investigator Pallin, Keldor Bureau of Security

  EMILY

  THE RIDE down to the planet was thankfully uneventful. Morgan expressed some regret that she couldn’t observe the effects reentry had on the vessel’s hull, but of course the fragile windows were covered with protective screens for the descent.

  Once they were down into the lower atmosphere, the windows opened back up. Haruhi and Morgan moved over to get a good look out the windows, the latter trying - and failing - to feign disinterest.

  Tourists and babes, Emily though wryly to herself, amused at the rapt attention they were giving little more than the sky and some scattered clouds.

  The pair only noticed their approach to the city as the shuttle dipped down below the tops of the towers, the sky abruptly giving way to shadow and artificial lights.

  “Clouds?” Morgan asked, looking up at the sky directly above them.

  “That would be the city towers, actually,” Emily supplied, gesturing for the young woman to look around her rather than above.

  “They’re so big,” Morgan whispered, perhaps to herself. “The spaceport isn’t on one of the roofs?” she added more loudly.

  Emily gave a small shrug; the question was not really something she had given much thought to, despite having grown up in the city.

  One of Emily’s guards, Ms. Hoyt, answered Morgan’s question.

  “Height isn’t really useful for a spaceport. You can only land as many shuttles as you have space on top. Anything below that, beyond what you need for staff and the people coming and going, is wasted space. Additionally, back when the port was built most people were afraid to put anything valuable below spaces with engines lighting off that are powerful enough to reach orbit.”

  “Then why so many buildings around it?” Morgan asked, gesturing to the towers they were passing between. “Surely they would be in some danger to them as well if a shuttle were to crash?”