High Flyer - Michelle Diener Page 0,44

door was opened.

“Careful.” He recognized the driver's voice, and felt a prickle of fear run down his spine. The man sounded concerned.

Hana's foot had been badly hurt, but she'd seemed to be coping fine when she'd walked down the path to the lander.

She'd wanted him safe, though. Had wanted him to hide, and he could see her downplaying the pain to get him to comply.

Rescuing her might be a little more difficult than he thought, he realized. And the odds were already not ideal.

He'd spent a considerable part of the journey looking through the crates again, but he had yet to find a weapon.

They were obviously a lot harder to steal than food or clothing.

It made him feel like at least some parts of the system were working.

Not everyone they'd encountered who was part of this plot had had a weapon and there was no reason to assume it wasn't the same here.

They might even specifically not want the camp workers to have any. Just in case someone decided to take over from what the driver had called the top tier.

Or maybe he had it all wrong, and everyone here had a SAL in a hip holster.

He needed to stop speculating and get outside.

Find Hana and get out of here.

The doors to the back opened.

“I need to tell you something, Bret,” the driver said.

“Yeah?”

“We were robbed.” The driver's voice was loud enough that Iver could hear him clearly, and he thought there might have been a sudden quiet, all conversational buzz cut off.

“By whom?”

“Smugglers. They ambushed me in the valley. Set rocks across the road. Made it look like a rockfall. As soon as I stopped, they surrounded me.”

“That woman in the front have something to do with this?” Bret asked.

“Partly. I was negotiating my way out of it, trying to promise as little as possible while getting them to let me go, when they told me I had two stowaways who'd climbed out the back of the lander at the part of the road where you have to almost stop to get over the rocks, and that they were watching us.”

“And?” Bret didn't sound as dismissive as before.

“When they realized I didn't know about the two who'd been hiding in the back, they chased them down for me. They caught the woman in some kind of nasty metal trap. The man with her got away. While I was questioning the woman, one of the smugglers doubled back around, took what he could from the lander.”

“How do you know it was just him?”

“I don't, but he was the only one who wasn't with me when I was questioning the women.”

“So there could be more of them?”

“Could be.” The driver was standing right outside the door, now. “But if there were more of them, my guess is we would have lost even more stuff. I think he could only carry so much, and needed to hide it quickly. Either from me, or from his own friends, or both.”

Bret gave a snort. “So what did you promise them to get away?”

“That I'd let you know they wanted in on the action. Their parting shot was a threat that I could stop where they ambushed me and pass along any message you had for them. Because someone would be watching.”

“Shit.” Bret started moving away. “Who were they? Did you get names?”

The driver's answer was hard to hear as he moved away with the camp leader.

Iver picked up the box he'd chosen and carefully moved out from behind the crates, down the narrow pathway between the supplies, to the open doors.

There was no one that he could see in front of the lander, and he jumped down lightly and looked around.

Two men were ambling toward the lander from the left, coming out of what looked like a semi-permanent structure made of wood and plasti-cast. The driver and the man he'd called Bret were walking toward them. They stopped to talk and Iver turned away from them, grateful for the distraction.

He'd been holding the box up, using it to hide most of his face, but he lowered it slightly to better see what lay in the other direction and stumbled a little as he took in a massive ruin.

If he hadn't been so focused on the threat of being seen by the driver and his companion, he'd have noticed it immediately.

It rose up, four or five stories high, made of a dull gray material that looked metallic. The roofline was haphazard, as was the facade,