The Albino Knife Read Online Free PDF Page B

here and that he should stay the hell out of it.

Chapter Two
    KHADAJI HADN'T BEEN offworld in five years, and when he booked passage for himself and Veate, he was mildly surprised. The old Confed-run system had been inefficient on its best days, with no apparent logical reason for various transit times. The Bender-driven ships often seemed to go out of their way to drag things along slowly, and when he'd come to Muto Kato from Earth, it had taken the better part of three weeks, with side jaunts to systems that made no sense whatsoever. Now, the trip to Earth could be done directly, with an elapsed time of just under four days. The deregulation of the star lanes and openingthem to private companies had apparently done wonders for the industry.
    Other things had changed, too. Where once there had been Confederation troopers and military flight controllers, they had been replaced by ship company employees and civilians. Bribes were not necessary, and any galactic citizen with a basic ID cube could travel virtually anywhere he or she wished, with few restrictions save those of common sense.And enough stads, of course. Access to classified military areas was forbidden, as was spacing to a planet where some new disease might be loose. Local restrictions had to be dealt with, naturally, now that the planets could set their own rules, but by and large, few worlds tried to keep strangers from visiting.
    The ship, the Pride of Bocca , was an old deep spacer that had been extensively refurbished. The vessel was the size of a small ocean liner, and could carry five hundred passengers in comfort, with choices ranging from basic accommodations to luxury in the extreme. Years past, when he had waged war upon the Confed, Khadaji had put virtually all of his own money into that battle, keeping out only enough to buy the pub—and a certain reserve, just in case of emergency. The stash was of precious gems and rare metals, easy to convert to stads, and it was upon this fund that he drew to buy passage to Earth. If anything, thefreebizRepublic prices were cheaper than the old government-run ships had been.Very interesting.
    Veate spoke little as they took the boxcar into orbit and rendezvous with thePride . She seemed lost in her own thoughts and Khadaji respected her privacy. Probably worried about her mother, he thought.
    For himself, Khadaji had yet to get over the shock of the young woman's sudden appearance in his life.
    As they left the gravity well of Muto Kato, he turned the new sensation of being a father around in his mind and looked at it from various angles. He would have thought that at his age and after all his experiences, he would not have been rattled by anything. But he was wrong, for this was one hell of a surprise.
    The deep space ship was shaped more or less like a brick, with odd protrusions jutting out along the sides here and there. He watched the holoproj unit built into the back of the seat in front of him as they approached. It would be a few minutes before the boxcar docked. Khadaji turned to Veate.
    "Tell it to me again," he said. "I might have missed something the first time."
    The young woman came back from her long stare. "I was skiing onMountRama ," she said. "I was with four friends and we were in the lodge. I called Juete's cube and got the recorder. I asked that she be paged—she was considering coming out to join us—and the page went unanswered. It worried me."
    "Any particular reason?"
    "Only that my mother was a careful woman. When she wasn't in the casino, she usually was in her cube.
    If she went outside the safety of those places, she always did so with an armed casino guard."
    He nodded. "Go on."
    "I had the cubecomp page security. They didn't know where she was. I got nervous, and I had the cube's recorder give me a recent playback."
    "You had the override code?"
    "Yes. And you heard the recording."
    Khadaji leaned back in the form-chair and sighed. Juete had been abducted from her electronically