It was impossible to be confident that everything was clear in the Pent, or that Jie wouldn’t pull us away as soon as we got back to our rooms, but the same could be said about anywhere else on Station 26, and at least the rooms Jie’d offered us were nice.
If you were going to be in danger either way, you might as well be in luxury too.
Once we’d gotten back, Victoria had gone straight to bed. She might not have spent her time fighting today, but it had still been a long day of stress for both of us. For my part, I wouldn't be able to sleep until I ensured that there weren’t bugs in this place that could get past my jamming equipment.
After checking almost everywhere and burning another two hours I should have been sleeping, the only conclusion was that, if there were bugs like that, they were strong enough to keep any of my scanners from finding them, and I certainly wasn’t going to find anything microscopic under a pillow.
Hell, I’d checked the fish, and after touching several of them I only knew that they were live and the aquarium was easier to open than I expected.
I flicked open my datapad for what must have been the twentieth time since Victoria had gone to bed. I wanted to do something aside from wait for Tash in the morning. I wanted to get off this Station and away from it.
But our ship was on the upper floors, which meant that everyone up there was being pair too much for me to bribe them into fixing us before Jie, Tash or someone important I didn’t know told them to get it done.
Hell, I wasn’t sure that Tash counted as important here anymore. If she did, she might have just thrown it all away for Collings.
And Collings was dead anyway. He’d been a stupid thing to throw it all away for.
On the twenty-first time I opened the datapad, there was a notification. Sevita had added me to her contacts by finding my business information.
I smiled at that. Sometimes you made a decent connection in my line of work. Of course, like most acquaintances I made on the job, it all started with me pointing a gun at them. It was either that, actually shooting them, or needing something from them in the first place.
The only other one on this job had been Musc, but I didn’t think that he considered Victoria and I people he wanted to see again.
Maybe Victoria, but certainly not me. He understood who was pulling the trigger and setting off explosives on Mythellion.
I mean, they’d been Yinde’s explosives, but he was trying to kill me with them.
A lot of people had tried. Nobody had gotten death to stick yet. At least that was a constructive thing I was decent at.
Just as I was going to try and look up ways to fix a laser hole in my own ship, there was a polite knock on the door. The kind you did when you didn’t want to wake someone if they were asleep.
I grabbed the Hammerhead before speaking up. “Coming.”
I didn’t have a chance to get the door, because locks didn’t matter if the building owner was the one at the door.
“Hello, Kingston.”
“Hello, Jie.” I put the Hammerhead down on the table beside Nurse.
“You sound so happy to see me,” she mused as she strode into the room. Her long dress made it look like she was almost floating around the room. She’d certainly changed her brand over the years.
“Ecstatic,” I lied without trying to hide it, “it’s been a long day as you can imagine.”
“How was that medical attention you needed?”
“Just sythskin in the end. Not sure it’s going to match.”
“I can send someone to correct that for you.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Jie nodded and stepped further into the room, eventually taking the seat beside me, the one that Victoria had been using for discussion earlier today. She stared out the window like we had before the difference being that she was surveying her kingdom. “Did you enjoy your first evening back?”
“I don’t think the place has changed,” I pointed out.
“It certainly has. Perhaps you’re the same and you’re just seeing what you’re expecting from Station 26.”
“Songlai,” I corrected her.
Jie didn’t glare at me as I expected, instead she let out half a chuckle. “I take it your Fotuan friend has left you alone.” She accentuated Fotuan like it was close to a curse word.
“She’s asleep.”
“Then if we’re alone, I suppose I can allow you to refer to the city by her dead name. There are few who earned the privilege. Most of them are invested in killing it.”
“Not a profitable name?”
“People do occasionally ask what it means, and then you get wrapped in a conversation with a species that doesn’t understand that humans use many languages.”
I shrugged. I’d been in that conversation before, humans were weird that way.
“Instead we call it what it is.”
“Just a mining station?” I suggested.
“Just a mining station,” Jie confirmed.
“Why are you here?”
“That’s a very hostile question to your host Kingston,” Jie commented as she stood up and crossed the room to the cabinets. “I may be where I want to in my home.”
“Excuse the curiosity.”
“You’re excused,” she answered as she opened the cabinet and took out a bottle of amber liquid and two glasses. If I hadn’t already scanned the liquid in my frantic search for bugs I might have assumed she’d just grabbed the poisoned bottle.
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Frankly Jie didn’t have a reason to kill me, but I certainly didn’t have a reason to trust her.
“How was your outing with Tash?”
I didn’t answer that.
“The girl isn’t good at keeping secrets. And Carr is even worse. I dropped you off there for a reason.”
“What would that be?”
“I assumed that, should she try and sell out all of our hard work that you’d stand up for it,” Jie suggested, “even though I do understand that you don’t agree with all of the methods I used to achieve our goals.”
Calling them ‘our’ goals was rich, but that was a conversation that Jie and I had already had, arguing my points again was just going to get us in trouble. “Well, she didn’t.”
“And the Viedesshai ship that landed on my station?”
“They came about something but–”
“Don’t bother keeping things from me, you know I’ll find the information I want.”
“There’s a difference between me telling you and you learning about it,” I pointed out.
“Yes, my favour. Which is somewhat of a currency on this Station,” she put the empty glasses and the bottle on the table. I poured for us and she tapped two fingers on the table as a thank you. “We deal in two things on this station. Aside from Lithium of course.”
“It used to be ammo sticks and shield batteries.”
“Now it is trust, and my attention,” she answered, “I told you the city had changed.”
I took a deep breath before grabbing the drink off of the table. The city hadn’t changed, the corp in charge had said the exact same thing to all of us as an offer back then. Jie knew that.
“Of course, trust is still a rare currency on the Station,” she mused, “so I understand the conversion rate is hostile to me but- Kingston, I did send you down there because I trusted you to do the right thing if it came down to it.”
“Sure.”
“You may think I have no moral integrity, and maybe you’re right, but I am not blind to the fact that you’re trying to have some. I’ve seen the choices you’ve made over the years.”
“You’ve been watching.”
“I watch everyone.”
“I wasn’t coming back to Songlai, you were wasting your time.”
“I don’t consider keeping track of an old friend wasting time, Kingston. Even if the friendship part is more decrepit than old. You’re a curiosity. Most of the others who understand how Songlai was forged found themselves on the wrong side of history at some point.”
It was bold of Jie to refer to herself as history.
“Tash was one of the few others left, and I was worried that she was going to head the same way. Her trust in you was my way of ensuring that she didn’t.”
“So I was insurance?”
“You understandably don’t trust me, but trust you.”
“You trust me?”
“I am unarmed and unshielded,” she explained “and despite the fact that I’ve been here trying to prod you, you haven’t looked over to your weapons on the table once.”
That got a chuckle out of me. “God dammit.”
“Like I said before Diadona, you haven’t changed as much as you wish you have,” Jie was the first one to take a sip of the drink, which confirmed it was safe, “though I’d suggest that you were simply a better person than you think you were then.”
I scoffed at that.
“Whatever your opinions on my ways of running the Station and who I needed to make deals with,” she half trailed off, “you were fighting for a cause and that’s all someone can ask of you.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t need to believe me. I’ll admit it’s beneficial for me if you did. You would still be an asset to Songlai.”
I cracked half a smile despite myself at her using the old name.
“But I also understand that all you’re attempting to do is leave this Station. Which is why I need you to talk to me about what Natasha needed you for. Why the Viedesshai were there, and why she was talking to Carr. I’m sure she had good reasons, but I cannot trust her until I know what they were.”
“And?”
“And until I trust her I will not let her touch your ship, or any ship on the docks, for repairs as I’d need to assume that she is working for Carr, the Viedesshai, or both.”
“I thought you trusted me.”
“The security of the docks requires a more concrete answer than ‘it wasn’t that.”
“And if I answer you.”
“You can be off this Station as soon as the laws of physics allow me to fix your ship, whether Tash was involved or not.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you about that?”
“I’ve been supremely candid about my intentions in this conversation thus far, and I have not said a lie to you since you’ve stepped back onto this station.”
“And that overwrites history?”
“Nothing overwrites history Diadona, but we are more than just ghosts of history. If you don’t believe that then there was never a point to you leaving in the first place.”
I sighed. Being convinced sucked.
“Well?”
“She was making a deal for Collings. Just money.”
“She called the Viedesshai for her waste of a brother?”
“Natasha didn’t call them, that was Carr. Collings owed them money too.”
“So, Natasha was simply trying to broker a deal and, no doubt, using her connection to me to try and pay less.”
I nodded, that was close enough to the truth, and as close as I was going to get to it. I wasn’t going to throw Tash under the bus by admitting that she was planning to turn a blind eye to Carr. Using Jie’s name without permission was a slight, I didn’t want to think about how Jie would react to Tash cutting her income.
“Thank you Diadona,” Jie said after a moment, “I feel better hearing it from you instead of her.”
“Pardon?”
“You were corroborating her story,” Jie revealed.
Shit.
“My Emerald guard caught her shortly after she left the meeting. I was surprised that you weren’t with her.”
“I had to get back to my work.”
“That’s the Kingston I know,” Jie stood up, leaving her drink with only a single sip missing, “though she did swear that my name wasn’t involved at all. Typical of Natasha, bending the truth to cover her skin. Your statement wasn’t quite as clean for her record, but I imagine it was still… kinder than reality.”
“I told the truth,” I lied, though I imagined the remaining shock from Jie’s earlier statement covered any signs of it.
“The truth is relative, and you always did like the assume the best in Natasha, even when she wasn’t being useful.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m sorry for using you without your knowledge, Diadona.”
“Just like old times,” I sighed.
“Your ship should be ready to get you off the Station by the morning.”
I squinted at that, there was no way the damage was repaired tha-
“I ordered the repairs as soon as you landed, Diadona. Like I said, you haven’t changed as much as you thought,” she finished her walk to the door. ”Thank you for your help, both to me and Natasha. I wish you a lovely evening.”
“Goodbye, Jie.”
“Sleep well, I imagine you’ll want to be off the station as soon as possible.”
Jie shut the door behind her, and I swore.
She was right. I wanted off this fucking station. Nothing about the damned place had changed and I wasn’t about to stick around and save it. Fine if I’d been played. As long as it got us on the move again. I didn’t care anymore. I’d been done after five years last time, and now it had just taken me a night.
I was going to bed, then I was getting up with Victoria to head to Ovigaia. I grabbed the glass that Jie had left and sighed looking out over the empire that she’d built.
Tash was screaming as she fell past my window.
I didn’t hear her splatter two hundred feet below.