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Vila Restal opened his private locker in the secondary hold and paused, puzzled. Where there should have been a bottle of Bryndian sherry, a souvenir from their last supply run to the independent colony, there was a conspicuous absence. The locker was distressingly empty.
Vila frowned. He had been sure no one on the crew knew of this private stash, but evidently, someone did. Someone who not only knew where it was, but was capable of opening the locks he’d installed. Admittedly, they weren’t the best of locks, he himself could have opened them easily, but he hadn’t thought any of the others had anything like the skills necessary. Evidently, he was wrong about that too. “Goddamn Avon,” he muttered under his breath, and set out in search of an errant computer tech.
Avon wasn’t on the flight deck. He wasn’t in his quarters. He wasn’t in his laboratory. He wasn’t in any of the three computer rooms, or any of the engine rooms.
It took quite a while, but eventually Vila found him. “What do you want, Vila?” Avon was a shadowed figure, sitting alone on the long bench in the darkened observation gallery that curved over the top of Liberator’s central module.
Vila spotted the sparkle of starlight on the glass in Avon's hand. “I wanted a glass of Bryndian sherry to make a farewell toast to Gan,” he replied peevishly, “but someone stole my bottle.”
“There must be a thief on board. You should tell the commander about that.”
“I doubt he’d care.” Vila sat down on the other end of the bench and poured himself a drink from the bottle he’d brought with him. “Fortunately, it wasn’t my only bottle.”
“Fortunate indeed.” Avon raised his glass. "To Gan."
"To Gan." The two men sat in companionable silence, drinking, watching the unchanging stars overhead. Finally, Vila could stand it no longer. “Thanks for coming back for us on Horizon.”
“It was my pleasure.”
“No it wasn’t. You were thinking about leaving us all down there to die working in the mines.”
“That would never have done. Far too ignoble a death for Blake, dying of radiation poisoning on some backwater colony planet. His death will have to be far more impressive, more inspirational. Heroes must become martyrs, you know.” Avon’s enunciation was even sharper and more precise than usual, and Vila realized, to his great surprise, that the computer tech was drunk. Really, really drunk. Drunker than he had ever seen him before.
Vila pressed on, intrigued by an Avon in this state of mind. “I talked to Orac. He told me the calculations you had him run while we were all down on the planet.”
Avon paused. “Ah. I shall have to program some more discretion into Orac. It talks too much.”
“If you hate Blake so much, hate the rest of us so much, why did you come back for us?” Vila asked flatly.
“If you talked to Orac you know what it said, that there were three pursuit ships coming. Alone I could not have fought them all off. So I needed the rest of you. Pure self-interest.”
“I know what he said.” Vila left that hanging, but Avon did not respond.
The silence stretched on.
“Why didn’t you stay on XK72?”
Avon turned slightly towards him, and Vila saw starlight glitter in his eyes. “After Dr. Kayn called the Federation on us? Don’t be stupid.”
“Ferron offered you sanctuary. You could have stayed there and let the Federation take the rest of us.”
“Not with Kayn there. Or Renor. And how long would that sanctuary offer have lasted if I’d killed them both to keep them quiet?” Avon sighed. “One less bolthole.”
Vila nodded, conceding the point. “But you have others, don’t you?”
“Why do you stay with Blake, Vila?”
Vila sighed mentally. Trust Avon not to answer a direct question, “I told you. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
Avon's tone was strangely bitter. “Don’t be disingenuous. You are an unusually talented thief. You could drop out of sight on any of a hundred planets and resume your criminal career in peace and safety. Well, relative safety. Blake’s revolution is going to get us all killed, you know. Just like Gan.”
“So why don’t you leave?”
The silence that followed was so long that Vila wondered if Avon had fallen asleep. “I can’t.”
Avon’s soft admission stunned Vila into silence.
"I’m a wanted man, Vila. Under sentence of death.”
“So am I,” Vila retorted. “So are we all. You’re a top-notch computer expert. You could drop out of sight on any of a hundred planets and resume your embezzlement career in peace and safety. Well, relative safety.”
Avon’s teeth gleamed in the starlight as he smiled ruefully at Vila’s parroting. “I stole a half a billion credits from the Federation, Vila.”
“Tried to steal. You got arrested. I remember, I was there.”
Avon shook his head. “Not quite. I don’t have the money. But neither do they. In a sense, those credits are locked into the internal transactional networks between the Federation banking system and other empires - in their business relations with the Vandor Confederacy and the Abrogillion Domain, and others. From outside the Fed I can’t get to it… but neither can they.” He finished his glass, refilled it. Vila could tell by the sound that it was the last of the bottle. “And they want it back. They want me to get it back, because I’m the only one who can.”
“That’s why they were sending you to Cygnus Alpha,” Vila realized. “Instead of just executing you.”
“Yes. Their… interrogations were unsuccessful at convincing me to return the money. I expect they thought time on Cygnus Alpha would change my mind. Who knows, it might have... But they’ll never stop trying to get it back. There is nowhere I can go that they won’t hunt me down. Onboard the Liberator, with Orac’s capabilities, is the only place I can be safe from the Federation banking cartel.”
Vila turned his shrewd gaze on Avon’s silhouetted profile. “That doesn’t mean you have to stay with Blake and his rebellion. I know there’s any number of times and ways you could have gotten rid of him. Gotten rid of all of us.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “You could have let Blake and Jenna asphyxiate on that capsule full of homicidal maniacs. Could have left all of us on that miserable ice planet where we rescued Avalon. You could have left us all on Horizon and taken off with the Liberator and Orac before those pursuit ships ever got there. Blake knows it too, you know,” he added pointedly. “So don’t you be disingenuous. Why haven’t you?”
Avon turned his gaze to the sparkling starscape outside the viewing portal. “Logically, it would not suffice. This very distinctive ship, that distinctive computer, would be invaluable to the Federation. Even if Blake abandoned his crusade today,” he paused, considering, “even if I had marooned you all on Horizon, they will never stop trying to capture the Liberator, and Orac.”
Vila couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he leaned over and refilled Avon’s glass for him. Avon turned to meet his gaze, and the depth of misery in his dark eyes stunned the thief.
“Alone, I’m less visible but more vulnerable. Here I’m more visible but less vulnerable. One way or the other, I will eventually lose.” He drained the glass, set it carefully aside. “We’re all going to lose, you know. Sooner or later. Sooner, if Blake keeps on. The Federation is always right on our tail.”
“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” muttered Vila.
“Precisely.” The clipped voice was filled with an indescribable bleakness.