Discretion (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 2) Read online

  DISCRETION

  SCATTERED STARS: EVASION BOOK 2

  GLYNN STEWART

  DISCRETION

  SCATTERED STARS: EVASION BOOK 2

  GLYNN STEWART

  Discretion © 2022 Glynn Stewart

  Cover art by Elias Stern

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Published by Faolan’s Pen Publishing Inc.

  Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

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  Chapter 1

  Space Carrier Avalon by Glynn Stewart

  About the Author

  Other books by Glynn Stewart

  1

  Shopping had never been a major part of EB’s life. Then he’d acquired a teenaged daughter, and every trip aboard a space station ended up either going shopping with Trace or for Trace.

  Today’s trip aboard Nigahog’s primary orbital station was primarily business. Captain Evridiki “EB” Bardacki, shareholder and commander of the armed merchant ship Evasion, was scheduled to meet with a potential client on the station.

  At that moment, however, the solidly built fifty-five-year-old captain was watching his chief engineer and his adoptive daughter poke through the sample holograms for educational artificial stupids—the semi-sentient programs that they would need to help Trace keep up her education aboard ship.

  He trusted his engineer, Ginerva “Ginny” Anderson, to make sure that the software they picked up served their needs. Trace would pick it—the student needed to be able to tolerate the teacher, after all—but Ginny would make sure the blonde thirteen-year-old picked one that would work.

  EB was spending most of his energy and time watching the crowds around them. It hadn’t been that long since Trace, now Tracy Bardacki according to the paperwork he’d filed, had been sought by every bounty hunter in this civilization-forsaken chunk of space in the Beyond.

  The person who’d set that bounty was now rotting in a Nigahog high-security prison, but Nigahog was the center of operations for the local Trackers’ Guild. In a region with limited maps and interstellar communication or cooperation, the only means of law enforcement between star systems was the bounty hunter—a situation with definite flaws, in EB’s now-educated opinion.

  His headware pinged with a message from his engineer as he surveyed the mall.

  I’ve got this, you know. There’s a jewelry store over there you should check out.

  Ginny’s message came with a localized highlight that marked the store in question in EB’s vision. The computer in his brain, his headware, was well integrated with his vision and optic nerves.

  It couldn’t, however, explain hints to particularly obtuse starship captains.

  And why would I be checking out a jewelry store?

  The store looked less gaudy than many he’d seen. It was the kind of sedate-looking place he would go if he was searching for jewelry, but so far as EB knew, he wasn’t.

  Are you planning on being a single space dad forever?

  EB was quite sure that his engineer was making a specific point, but he sighed and shook his head at her as she looked back over her shoulder at him.

  I’m not. His silent message flicked across the space between him as he arched an eyebrow at Ginny. The spiky-haired engineer was closer to his age than to Trace’s—barely—but was of a height with the teenager.

  And not because Trace was overly tall for her age, either.

  That’s my point, yes. You and Vexer are her dads. Might want to lock him down before someone gets twitchy.

  Now EB got her point, and his arched eyebrow turned into a cautionary headshake.

  Vena “Vexer” Dolezal was Evasion’s navigator, a not-quite-refugee from a feudal system where even highly trained technical professionals were still mostly serfs, bound to the nobles who’d paid for their training.

  He was also EB’s long-standing on-again, off-again, boyfriend, a relationship that had solidified with the involvement of Trace. But boyfriend was enough for everyone involved, so far as EB knew.

  They were gay space dads together and that was plenty. Even if Ginny didn’t think so.

  He walked over to join his daughter and engineer as his headware produced a soft chime only he could hear.

  “Time, ladies,” he told them. “Are you two good to keep poking around while I go to my meeting?”

  “Unless you’ve seen any dangerous bounty hunters lurking in the shadows to whisk us away, the only risk is Trace spending all of your money.”

  Ginny’s comment drew a sharp glance from the teenager.

  “I have some discipline,” she observed.

  “When you choose to.”

  EB sighed at them both.

  “We’re here for a teaching stupid. Nothing else.”

  “You’re loosing a teenager on a station mall and expecting her to buy one thing? Brave man.”

  Trace ignored the engineer and grinned at her dad.

  “I mean, some kind of allowance or budget would be nice,” she told him.

  After everything Trace had been through to end up with them, it was good to see her being an ordinary teenager. EB was well aware she was using that against him…but she was doing that because it worked.

  “Fine!”

  The first time EB had met Lear Naumov, they’d been trying to pretend that the older Nigahog man was a normal civil bureaucrat. EB had suspected, even before the “cargo” had turned out to be a smuggling mission, but they’d met in a quiet coffee shop on a private corporate station.

  This time…this time, Naumov was making no pretenses. One of the reasons EB was comfortable leaving Ginny and Trace to their own devices was that they were on Nigahog’s main orbital fortress.

  While the hollowed-out armed asteroid paled in comparison to the defenses EB would expect in more-civilized space, it stood head and shoulders above many defenses he’d seen out there in the Beyond.

  Nigahog was well outside the roughly three-thousand-light-year sphere considered civilized space, the region mapped and cataloged by the interstellar megacorporations. Out there, the only maps were the ones people sold you—and without maps and the nova points they contained, a ship couldn’t jump between the stars.

  But these worlds still had resources. The Nigahog System, with some hundred and fifty million souls, was one of the more prosperous in the region—as shown in its orbital defenses, its complex mix of elected government and control by trade guilds, and, EB suspected, an extremely capable intelligence service.

  He’d guessed that Lear Naumov was an important member of that service when they’d met before. Now, as EB good-humoredly tolerated the trained glares of Nigahog Orbital Security Command troopers and approached the entrance to one of the battle station’s many secured areas, he was quite certain of it.

  “This area is off-limits, ser,” the NOSC sergeant in front of the door told him. The woman had a hand on her stunner, in case he underestimated the sincerity of her message.

  “I know that, Sergeant,” EB confirmed. “I have an appointment.”

  He flicked her the data card with the information and directions he’d received. The digital file contained multiple layers of verification and authorization he could barely tell were in it, let alone access.

  The stony-faced commander of the four armed guards outside the door—overkill, unless NOSC’s automation and artificial stupid security were far worse than EB thought they were—hopefully could access those authorizations.

  “Ah. Captain Bardacki,” she greeted him, with absolutely no warmth or enthusiasm in her voice. “Your authorization checks out.”

  She considered him like he’d grown approximately ninety extra legs.

  “Your weapon, Captain,” she snapped.

  EB considered arguing, but from the sergeant’s body language, he was lucky she was letting him through at all. Whatever this section was, it wasn’t the regular no-civilians-allowed section of the station like, say, the plasma-cannon turrets.

  He unbelted his stunner and blaster and proffered the weapo
n to the noncommissioned officer. She briskly slung it over her left shoulder, then gestured for him to follow her.

  Whatever commands she’d given her fire team and the door were silently transmitted from her headware, but the three other NOSC troopers remained outside and the door slid open ahead of her.

  “I didn’t catch your name, Sergeant.”

  Normally, the woman’s headware would have been transmitting a beacon that told him her name, rank, serial number, preferred pronouns and any other pertinent information she wanted. A soldier on duty wouldn’t usually have much in the last category, but all her beacon was currently transmitting was a confirmation that she was a E-5 Sergeant in the Nigahog Orbital Security Command.

  “I didn’t give it,” she replied. “Follow. Don’t talk.”

  EB obeyed, glancing around him as he did. Despite the excessive security at the door, this section of the station looked like nothing so much as a law firm’s office. The hallway was well lit and lined with evenly spaced doors.

  Presumably, if he had the correct authorization, the local beacons he could sense but not access would tell him who was in each of the offices—but there were no visible nameplates, no publicly accessible beacons, and no windows into the offices themselves.

  The whole quiet section of the station screamed Intelligence Operations to him, but he suspected that the locals thought they were being subtle.

  2

  Lear Naumov’s office was at the far end of the hallway, past at least three dozen other identical doors. EB was given no warning, either. The nameless NOSC sergeant stopped and gestured him to a door before leaning against the wall opposite it.

  “Go in.”

  EB arched an eyebrow at her, but she said nothing else, just settling against the wall like she was planning on being there awhile.

  Trying not to let her get to him, he approached the door and received a verification request in his headware. He replied with the same file that he’d sent the guards and waited.

  Even a door should have had enough processing power to make validating his identity a matter of moments, and he began to worry after he’d been standing there for easily ten seconds. Only the fact that the sergeant didn’t seem to be preparing to shoot him seemed positive.

  Eventually, with no notification or other response, the door slid open.

  “Come in, Captain,” a familiar voice told him. “I’m glad you could make it.”

  “You said you needed to meet somewhere more secure than my ship,” EB replied, stepping through the door into an office that failed to live down to his expectations.

  He’d been expecting a utilitarian box, with plain metal walls and maybe some filing cabinets for actual paperwork. Instead, he stepped into what appeared to be a sailing ship in the middle of a green-tinged ocean.

  Of course, the deck under his feet was still metal roughened for anti-slip, and there was no wind or even moisture. The illusion was shallow at best, but it was more than he’d expected.

  The only thing that looked like it belonged on that sailing ship was the desk, carved from some raw wood with a similar deep green tinge to the water and then sealed with varnish. Sitting on said desk was the man EB had come to meet, a small older gentleman wearing an amused smile.

  “You have a very nice ship, Captain Bardacki; that’s why we’re having these conversations at all,” Naumov pointed out. “Please, take a seat.”

  EB obeyed and an artificial stupid delivery bot rolled over to him with a coffee. The robot made no attempt to disguise its emergence from a door in the wall.

  “And my presence was easier to conceal than other methods of contact might have been, but there was information and details I can’t provide outside a location we control the security of.”

  “We being…”

  At no point in either of their previous two meetings—aboard the corp station where Naumov had first tried to hire EB or aboard Evasion when Naumov had arranged this meeting—had the spy admitted who he worked for.

  “Nigahog’s government,” Naumov replied drily.

  “The one the Guilds own.”

  “The one that cooperates heavily with the institutions that are fundamental to the economic and cultural structure of our society. The one that runs the military and foreign relations.”

  “And you’re not going to ever tell me more than that, are you?” EB asked.

  “I owe you my life, Captain, but I’m not going to betray the confidences entrusted to me by the nature of my service. You can guess enough to serve the needs of the moment…and you can validate our money when the time comes.

  “What more do you need?”

  EB chuckled.

  “Need, perhaps not,” he conceded. “Curiosity is always difficult to sate. I don’t like no questions asked, Em Naumov.”

  “And I will answer any and all question with regards to the job I want you to do. And you know who is behind the task. You don’t need to know exact details of departments and job titles. Does it matter to you if I work for the Department of Agriculture or the Guild of Agronomists, after all?”

  “I presume you wouldn’t present yourself as from the Nigahog government if you were from one of the Guilds.”

  EB found the structure of Nigahog’s government, where the Guilds acted as regulatory agencies, corporate alliances and an effectively coequal branch of the government, odd. But then, he came from Apollo, a world that was explicitly an oligarchy where only those in the highest tax bracket got to vote in planetary elections.

  He was a long way from home and he had no grounds to throw stones.

  “I would not,” Naumov conceded. “But we are rather off-topic. How is the coffee?”

  EB took a sip of the beverage. It was about what he expected for coffee in the Beyond: absolutely terrible. Any planet’s varieties of the standard beverages—coffee, tea, wine, cola, et cetera—were heavily shaped by both the local soil and the strains imported.

  Something about the region of the Beyond he’d traveled through had rendered their coffee uniformly atrocious—and EB was not a coffee connoisseur.

  “It’s fine,” he told the spy. “You visited me on my ship, told me to meet you here and made all of the arrangements for us to have this absolutely secure meeting that is pretending to be on a sailing ship.

  “It wasn’t to thank me for saving your life, you’re not the type for that, so what do you want to hire me for?”

  Naumov waved a hand in concession. The same gesture conjured a holographic map of Nigahog and the handful of settled systems surrounding them.

  “We spoke about the Estutmost System when we first met.”

  “I remember. Ongoing civil war, blockade by a third faction.” EB studied the map and picked out the star. “Central government fighting communist farmers, while the space-habitating faction is trying to keep the neighbors from interfering.”

  “Speaking as one of said neighbors, I’m a bit offended by the Estutmost Spacers’ assumption that we are an enemy,” Naumov observed. “Speaking as a student of history, the Guilds’ structure is surprisingly nonaggressive in terms of hostile mercantile colonialism.

  “Mostly, in all honesty, because the Guilds don’t want to pay the taxes to maintain the Extraterritorial Enforcement Agency at a level that could support colonialism on their part. We are quite isolationist, in truth.”

  “You’re over a hundred light-years into the Beyond. Isolationism is assumed, isn’t it?”

  “You have a point.” Naumov waved his hand and the Estutmost System expanded to show its six planets and its outer asteroid belt.