Read Online The Baba Yaga by Una McCormack - Free Book Online Page B

your own business.” Walker shifted slightly forwards in her sling to show him her handheld. “Here’s where we’re going.”
    He nodded at the coordinates. “Shard’s World.” He grunted, and she watched as his gnarled hands scampered over the flight controls, and then he leaned back in his sling and fixed the flight jacks into place. “Get yourself comfortable, lady,” he said. “This might be bumpy.”
    The beautiful starscape of her home system gave way to the empty grey swirl of the void. Walker closed her eyes. “Remember, Yershov,” she said, “I’m no lady.”
     
     
    A BOUT AN HOUR later, Yershov lay snoring in his pilot’s sling, exhausted from the rigours that the phase had demanded of his shrunken old body. The three or four shots he’d drunk right after must have helped too, Walker thought. Still, it was better than having him awake and his small dark eyes following her and inching across her body, judging and appraising. In the half-light and the quiet, the Baba Yaga was almost peaceful. Walker felt alone for the first time in an age: without a communicator buzzing, or a colleague needing urgent answers, or Kinsella, sending her love notes... her mind inevitably turned to the inescapable fact that she was not alone. She was...
    She stood up abruptly, banishing the thought and its implications. She stretched each limb carefully, then worked the muscles of her neck, trying to get sensation back into the top of her spine. Her work in recent years had kept her on Hennessy’s World, and she had forgotten how space travel constrained one’s body. It would be several days before they got to their destination in the Reach: the mining planet Shard’s World. A former asset was there, pretty much the only person Walker knew within the Reach, although it had been some years since they had met face-to-face. Still, she doubted that he would have forgotten her. You didn’t forget a brush with the Bureau, and his brush had been particularly unpleasant. A petty thief, he had fallen in with some fairly nasty gangsters whose rackets the Bureau had wanted closed down. Walker had been the one to question him, to run his undercover operation, and then to provide him with the cover identity that sent him out of the Expansion and away, they all hoped, from the reach of his former paymasters. She had heard nothing from him since she had put him on a shuttle for Shuloma Station, one of the crossing points between the Expansion and the Reach. All she knew was that he was now going by the name of Fredricks, and that he was on Shard’s World.
    She punched his codes into the comm. An automated service tried to prevent her from getting through to him, until she said her name, very clearly. Then his face appeared on screen. He looked older than when she had last seen him (but then, who didn’t?), but his time away from the Expansion had clearly been good to him. He looked slick, and prosperous.
    “Hello, Fredricks,” she said.
    The man now known as Fredricks blanched. “ Hell’s bells, Walker. Is it really you? ”
    “It’s me.”
    “I didn’t think you were going to darken my days again. Where have you sprung from? ”
    “Your dreams.”
    “ My nightmares, more like. ” He looked at her anxiously. “ You’re not here, are you? ”
    “On Shard’s World? No.”
    “ Thank Christ for that. ”
    “Not yet.”
    He took a deep breath and ran his hand across his eyes. “ I see. ”
    “I’m passing through in a few days. I won’t stay long.”
    He studied her thoughtfully. “ What do you want from me, Walker? ”
    “Let’s save that for when we meet.”
    “ I paid my debt to you, you know. I put myself in danger for you. Cost me everything I had back in the Expansion— ”
    “You seem to be doing pretty well out in the Reach.”
    “ I’ve worked hard. I started with nothing, and I’ve earned everything I’ve got— ”
    “I’m not coming to take any of that away from you,” she said. “I won’t