Free Where the Ships Die by William C. Dietz Page B

will pay the finder's fee."
    The fishermen took the voice literally, threw Dorn into a cell, and slammed the door behind him. Still tied, and unable to break his fall, the youngster hit hard and skidded across the muck-covered floor. He came to rest next to a man so emaciated he looked like a living skeleton. Sores covered his face, blood flecked his lips, and his eyes seemed dim. They blinked, blinked again, and closed. The words were so weak, so insubstantial, they seemed like ghosts. "Hello, son. Welcome to hell."

6
    What the parents sow, their children shall reap.
    The Alhanthian Book of Truth
    The Planet Mechnos
    The offices where Natalie had played as a child, and where her parents had hatched their multitudinous schemes, were silent now, emptied of people, machines, and furniture. The next tenant would arrive soon, causing the halls, offices, and conference rooms to hum with a different purpose.
    The guard was a former Voss Lines employee who had found temporary employment with a security firm. She greeted Natalie with a hug and allowed her to roam the building. Just for old times' sake, so she could look around, and remember how things had been.
    And remember Natalie did, bursting into unexpected tears when she entered the office her parents had shared, empty now except for cables that poked up out of the floor, and the remains of a once bushy plant.
    Like any officer, Natalie was theoretically ready to handle anything from burnt toast to a runaway reactor. Nothing, however, had prepared Natalie for the death of her parents. She sat where the toy box had been and leaned on the wall. Tears trickled down her cheeks, and she used a sleeve to wipe them away. The only thing worse than watching her parents die was the feelings that had plagued her since. Sorrow, not for them, but for herself. Because they had abandoned her. How stupid. Especially in light of the fact that they had never been there to begin with.
    It seemed as if they'd always been on the com, locked away in meetings, or traveling somewhere. Building toward what? A burst of bright light, followed by a sparsely attended memorial service and an empty office. She thought about Dorn, wondered how he was doing, and wished she could be with him.
    How typical of her parents! To die at the same exact moment, so there was no room to squeeze between them, to know even one a tiny bit better. They'd been a unit for as long as she could remember, a single force that made its own rules and placed Voss Lines before everything else.
    That's the way things were ... and there was no use whining about it. No, she had responsibilities, not just to herself and what remained of her parent's empire, but to Dorn and his future. The kind of responsibilities she had left home to avoid.
    However, like all officers, good ones anyway, Natalie understood the concept of duty. And duty dictated that she secure the one asset that remained, get as much for it as possible, and invest the money in a sensible manner. Then, and only then, could she return to the life she wanted for herself.
    The problem was that you can't sell something you don't have, and Natalie needed the coordinates for the Mescalero Gap. An extremely valuable piece of information that her parents never divulged to anyone, even to the point of programming the adjunct memories themselves. For it was the AMs that, when connected to a ship's navcomp, provided the computer with the wormhole's coordinates, and erased the data one microsecond after use. More than a dozen would-be thieves had died testing their wits against the booby-trapped boxes.
    Yes, there were other ways to locate gaps, but given that the wormholes were invisible to ordinary optics, such efforts depended on indirect evidence such as the influence they exerted on the matter that surrounded them, the radiation they produced, and the X rays they emitted. All of this might or might not lead the would-be traveler to the correct hole. And mistakes were fatal.
    So,