Harbinger

A few minutes later, Pe

“Great,” Pe

“Fine by me,” Sozlok said.

“Just one thing: I forgot my jacket, and it’s going to be colder than hell frozen over in there. Got a spare I could borrow?”

“Probably,” said Sozlok, who lumbered away into a back room to scrounge up a loaner coat.

The moment Sozlok was around the corner and his footsteps began to recede, Pe

It took only seconds to coax the data from the intuitive interface. Staring at the compartment number, he committed it to memory. During his third pass of mnemonic reinforcement, he heard the growing clap of approaching footfalls. Resetting the interface and turning the monitor back to its prior facing, he slithered in reverse across the countertop and landed softly on his feet. He was standing tall and looking utterly trustworthy as Sozlok returned.

The hirsute alien handed Pe

“Thanks.” He slung the coat over his duffel and hefted both over his shoulder while Sozlok encoded a key card for him.

Handing the card to Pe

“Sounds good.” He tucked the key in his pants pocket. “Back in a bit.”

“Take your time,” Sozlok said, then sighed. “I’m here all night.” He wore the fatigued mien of a person trapped in a job he wasn’t yet prepared to spurn.

“Hang in there, mate,” Pe

Pe

Continuing down to the refrigerated-storage area, he kept telling himself that. He expected to believe it any minute now.

An hour. An entire hour.

That’s how long it had taken Cervantes Qui

Hand over hand, with a mighty effort and labored breaths, he lifted himself from the floor and climbed, one exceptionally careful motion at a time, on to the first empty barstool he reached. Sitting upright, he felt the tug of gravity against his body shift. He steadied himself, licked the blood from his own teeth, swallowed, and croaked out a one-word request: “Tequila.”

The bartender—a heavy, profusely sweating, and ill-mooded middle-aged Bolian—shot Qui

It took a few seconds for the question to sink in.

Disgust and indignation lurked behind Qui

“Yeah, I know,” the bartender said. “But you also look like you just got rolled. No offense, but you don’t strike me as a good credit risk right now.”

Qui

A hand clamped on to the collar of his jacket.

He had just long enough to think the word damn, but not long enough to say it, before he was yanked backward off the barstool and dragged toward the doorway—his precious and fully paid-for glass of tequila abandoned on the bar, which grew farther away with each passing moment.

Turning to see who had delivered this injustice upon him for the second time in one evening, he looked into the passionless face of Lieutenant Commander T’Pry

“Be quiet,” she said, and he could tell that she meant it. “We are going to speak privately. Until then, I would prefer you did not speak at all.”

“Can I at least do my own walking?”

T’Pry

He collapsed in a heap on the ground.

“Okay,” he said. “Dragging’s fine.”

Breaking into Oriana’s storage locker was proving more difficult than Pe

It had been a while since he had needed to call upon these less-than-respectable skills, which he had learned from Unez, his Scoridian journalism mentor in Edinburgh. Working his way through the lock, he thought of an incident several years ago, when Unez had snickered smugly while Pe

The last interlock released with a soft clack.

He picked up his duffel bag and opened the door, which swung outward, expelling a stale gust. The storage unit was about two meters high and as narrow as the door. An overhead light glowed automatically to life, revealing a shallow space. It was only slightly deeper than he could reach without leaning over the frontmost row of stacked plastic containers.

Like a stevedore, he hauled out the boxes and opened each one in turn. Rooting swiftly through their contents, he plucked out items that could link him to Oriana. A photograph of them he had taken with his FNS recorder. Some small handwritten notes of the exceptionally trivial variety—“Stepped out for coffee,” or “Missed you this morning,” or “Saw these and thought of you”—that he had left for her when their schedules had failed to synchronize as pla

He stuffed all of it into his duffel and tied it shut. Slack and half-filled when he’d come here, it now bulged full.

Once all the boxes were resealed and neatly put back in their places, he swung the door closed. It moved slowly, its hydraulic hinges designed to prevent slamming. As it neared the doorjamb it slowed further, inched into place, then suddenly was pulled inward by the magnetic bolts. Whirring and clicking sounds overlapped for a few seconds while the other locking mechanisms automatically secured the heavy gray metal portal.