by Logan Jacobs
“Oh, I don’t,” Grith said. “I’m just hiring you.”
I grinned and sat back in my chair. We were finally getting somewhere. Favian Grith had more than earned the right to drag things out just as much as he pleased. After all, I would do the same thing once I had my own floating city I could orbit around anywhere I damn well wanted to. But if the test had been hotwiring a ship and disabling the bomb planted on it, I needed to know what the actual job was.
“There’s a ship,” Grith started.
“There always is.” I smiled, ready to hear the details of whatever shiny new toy he wanted me to get for him.
“It’s called the Skyhawk. Owner is a man by the name of Leon Cotranis.” Grith played with the end of his thick mustache. “Have you heard of them?”
“Oh, I’ve heard of them,” I muttered.
By all accounts, Leon Cotranis thought he was the greatest thing since the invention of hyperdrive. I hadn’t ever met the man, but I’d been around enough to hear about the smuggler with a soft spot for paramilitary operations.
“He does have the fastest run time through the Strait of Jiltar,” Honey Bee chimed.
That was true, but only because he was the only asshole who had timed his own run down the infamous shipping lane. And by all reports, he was also the only asshole who had completely emptied his ship of cargo before he made the timed run. If that was the only way your outdated piece of shit ship could make the run, you could hardly count that as a record.
“You want that old block of floating space garbage?” I asked. “Not something on it, or some part of it to use in something else? But that ship itself?”
“I do,” Grith said.
“Aren’t you worried it’s gonna dirty up this pretty space station of yours?” I waved my arms at the gleaming metal around me. “From what I hear, that thing’s a relic.”
“Perhaps.” The crime lord clasped his hands in front of his face and tapped his index fingers together. “But I like to think of myself as something of a relic hunter, and this one is… special.”
“Hey, everybody’s got their own tastes.” I shrugged. “So, any idea where the Skyhawk is docked right now?”
“I take it that means you’re up for the job.” Grith glanced at the door to the dining hall, but there was still no sign of his cream or the extra salmon.
“That depends,” I answered. “What’s the pay?”
“How much did you get paid for the race job?” the crime lord asked. His eyes had that same hard glint they did earlier.
I told him the number but inflated it by a quarter.
“You sure about that?” he laughed. “I tell you what. I’ll match that price, even though I know it’s more than you got from that greasy-faced fool on Deltulu.”
Favian Grith really did have eyes everywhere.
“You sure about that?” I asked now. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take it, but I think you’re getting the raw end of the deal. From what I hear, the Skyhawk’s not even worth half that. It’s just a big piece of metal rattling around and waiting to fall out of the sky.”
“You let me worry about the price.” The mustached crime lord smiled, but it was less than friendly this time. “So, do we have a deal?”
“Two questions,” I said and set my drink down. “First off, what’s the timeline for all this? When do you need the ship by?”
“I’m not on a tight deadline,” the blue-suited man answered. “I think a month should be enough time. Two, if you run into trouble. So long as you bring the Skyhawk here without a scratch, we won’t have any problems. Just send a message when you’re on your way. I’d prefer my crew not panic the next time you come almost crashing into my hangar.”
“And the owner? What do you want me to do with Leon Cotranis?” I asked. For that amount of money, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Grith had said he wanted Leon hogtied, mummified, and glued onto the prow of the Starhawk.
“I don’t much care.” The crime lord shrugged and adjusted his silk bandana. “Kill him, ditch him, throw him in the hold. Whatever you like. It’s only the ship I care about.”
“Easy enough,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any tales of where this Leon Cotranis and his ship can be found, have you?”
“Does that mean we have a deal?”
“It does, and we do,” I answered. I shook his hand across the table, and we both damn near crushed each other’s fingers to cement our agreement.
“Good,” Grith said as we released our handshake. “So last I heard, Leon Cotranis was spotted on Ineocca. Shouldn’t take you but a few days to get there.”
“So just somewhere on the whole planet of Ineocca,” I said dryly.
“Mhm.” Grith grinned. “I suppose you might have earned an extra bit of information, what with all the bomb defusing you did to get here.”
“Oh, you’re too kind,” I laughed.
The waiters began to file back in with trays of salmon and cream and extra eggs, despite the fact that Grith hadn’t ordered any.
“Try the city of Thage,” the crime lord whispered and twirled his mustache again. “Distract of Imbara.”
After the waiters deposited their mountains of fresh food, I pushed back from the table and stood up.
“Going so soon?” Grith asked with an unnerving smile.
“Only if you’ll excuse me, of course,” I said.
I pushed my blond hair out of my face as the chip chimed a wordless warning in my head. It was dangerous to try to leave early from a man’s table when that man was someone the caliber of Favian Grith. But it felt more dangerous to overstay my welcome by even a second. After all, we weren’t friends. I wasn’t even his employee. I was just a contract worker, and my value was in whatever work I did for him.
“Of course,” the crime lord echoed, but his eyes still shone with a hard light. “In fact, I’ll even give you a ship, to show my good faith. Why don’t you just take that pretend medical transport you flew in here? I’ve had my crew stock it with supplies and refuel it, so you should be all set to go.”
I stopped myself from asking why. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. Even if it looked like that gift horse might bite you in the ass. Grith might try to double-cross me or stiff me on my pay in some other way, but I’d handle that the same way I’d handled the bomb and the gravity beam.
One goddamn number at a time.
“You know, I think I will take you up on that offer,” I answered with a smile. “I guess you know your ship won’t make it back, if I’m acquiring the Skyhawk for you.”
“I do indeed,” the crime lord answered. “It’s just a ship, and I have a dozen like her.”
“But you don’t have the Skyhawk,” I finished for him. “Got it.”
He escorted me back to the hangar without even touching the piles of food the waiters had brought back for him. Once I made sure there was no ticking timer on the ship’s hull, I stepped through the cargo doors.
“See you in a month or two, then,” I announced. “And thanks for breakfast.”
“Can I get you anything to go?” the blue-suited crime lord asked. He fidgeted with his silk bandana again. “Coffee? A drink? More salmon pastry?”
“I’m fine, but thank you, really.”
“Then safe travels,” Grith told me and smiled his sinister smile beneath his mustache.
I took one step deeper into the cargo bay and closed the doors.
It was easier getting off the space station than it had been getting to it, that was for sure. Grith hadn’t lied when he said the ship was refueled and the galley stocked with provisions, so I felt pretty at ease as I shifted my grade 4 transport ship, now a medical vessel, into hyperdrive on a course for the planet Ineocca.
Hyperspace was by far the most efficient form of travel, especially between planets, but it was also one of the most boring. There wasn’t even much need for me to be at the controls, since we weren’t in regular space where I had to look out for othe
r flying objects and government ships just hanging about.
I mostly slept to gear up for whatever waited for me on the planet of Ineocca, and I fixed myself something in the galley whenever I was hungry. Of course, all the food was meant for long travels through space, and that meant none of it was fresh and none of it was particularly tasty. It was more like eating nutritious cardboard.
Finally, a few days later, the ship came out of hyperspace as we entered our final approach toward Ineocca. I locked onto the coordinates of the city of Thage, district of Imbara, on the planet below and started our descent toward the desert planet.
Even before we burned through the atmosphere on entry, I swore I could feel the heat of the planet. The terrain stretched out below in shades of gold and orange, and the buildings in the city of Thage itself were the same color as the surrounding desert. I started my approach to one of the city’s larger shipyards.
“Medical ship 4812,” a voice said from the shipyard’s control tower, “describe the purpose of your visit.”
“Just here on business, friend,” I answered.
“State the nature of your business,” the control tower responded.
“Honestly?” I sighed. “I’m here on leave between jobs, and I thought I’d take in a little gambling. I hear you’ve got some great gambling spots down here.”
“We do,” the control tower laughed, “and I don’t know if you know this, but it’s mostly unregulated.”
“Sounds perfect,” I answered. “Permission to dock?”
“Permission granted,” the control tower replied. “Dock number 43 is open. Descend on runway two. That’s the yellow lights, and then just follow those same yellow lights into the section with docks 40-60. Dock 43 will be on your left.”
“Got it,” I said.
“If you need us to repeat the information, just say the word,” the control tower added.
“Nope, got it,” I said again. “Runway 2, yellow lights, dock 43 on the left. Wish me luck on the gambling, boys.”
“Best of luck,” the voice laughed. “Try not to spend all your money in one place.”
I guided the ship into dock 43 and collected all the supplies I thought I might need. After I powered her down, I adjusted my shielding glasses to make sure they were on tightly. I didn’t want anything to knock them loose, and I knew that as a desert planet, Ineocca was bound to be a bright motherfucker. I headed toward the exit.
I might have taken my time a little more if I had known what was waiting for me on the shipyard dock outside. My chip pinged as I opened the cargo bay, but before I could ask her what was wrong, I had already stepped foot off the ship.
Right into the middle of a whole platoon of Dominion androids that turned, as one, to scan me.
Chapter 5
This was so much worse than the Deltulu cops and their gravity beam. At least those assholes asked questions before they just started shooting. If these androids figured out what I was hiding behind my shielding glasses, I’d be more full of holes than a slice of Swiss cheese.
“Excuse me,” I said politely and tried to sidestep the two androids closest to me.
They sidestepped right in front of me and blocked my path. I felt more of the platoon fill in the empty space behind me, so I couldn’t retreat back onto the ship and try to find another shipyard: one with decidedly less of a Dominion presence.
“Cease movement,” the android closest to me said. “Hands up.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got somewhere I need to be,” I said. I kept my tone polite but still put my hands in the air. These run-ins with the law were beginning to get a little old.
The Dominion androids all took a step closer to me, so I was surrounded on all sides. I still had room to draw my guns, but I wouldn’t be able to take very many down with me if I didn’t get somewhere with a little more breathing room. The androids were eerily human. Their skin was made out of some kind of polymer that was a little too shiny but still passed as human. Their movements were stiff but no more than an under-caffeinated human’s, and their guns were as genuine as mine.
You could only really tell that they weren’t human by their eyes. They had pupils and irises, of course, and I didn’t even have that. But there was a deadness to their eyes that gave them away. There was no light behind them, so when they stared at me, I felt like they might see straight through my black shielding glasses.
“And they call us inhuman,” my chip chimed softly inside my ear.
I felt the vents in my glasses open to release a bit of heat before they fell quiet. I hoped the androids hadn’t noticed the tiny movement, but I knew Honey Bee would only have opened them if the heat had been about to fry my brain.
“Look, I don’t mean to be a pain, but--”
“Cease talking,” the android ordered.
At least the police droid on Deltulu hadn’t looked so creepily human. It was like waking up in the middle of the night with your little sister’s doll sitting by your bed and telling you what to do.
I scanned the crowd past the android platoon. There weren’t any other Dominion troops that I could see, but there didn’t need to be. One platoon of androids would give me enough trouble. A scattering of humans formed the rest of the crowd. Most of them were loading goods onto ships or shouldering their way through the mob to get to whatever Thage had to offer.
So far, that was looking like a whole lot of nothing.
I felt my chip whir inside my brain and scan the androids for any weaknesses or information that might help me out. I tried to tell her to go slowly, but I just had to hope she read my mind. It was a good fifteen degrees hotter on Ineocca than it had been on Deltulu, and that meant my shielding glasses were already working overtime to keep the implant from overheating inside my skull.
At the same time, I heard the android who had spoken scanning me. Its lifeless eyes looked me up and down, and I could only hope it couldn’t hear my scanning chip as easily as I heard its own scanning technology. The other androids all stared at the space around me. It was almost like they were staring me down, but they couldn’t quite make eye contact to do the job right. I wondered if that was the fault of their inhuman eyes or my own.
The android took one stiff step closer to me, and my nose wrinkled. I remembered there was one other way to tell androids from humans. It was in the smell. Humans always smelled like something. Sometimes it was blood or piss, but it was often something more subtle like sweat or the garlic from someone’s last meal leaking through their pores.
But androids never smelled like anything except for hospitals. They smelled as cold and sterile as surgical tools, and the smell of nothing made me want to claw off my own skin.
The Vespidae had smelled like nothing too. I had smelled like nothing, when I belonged to them. That had been before I escaped, but the smell of the sterile android made me forget, just for a second, that my time with the Vespidae was in the past.
“No weaknesses,” the chip reverberated inside my skull.
I almost jumped at her voice. That was another reminder of my time with the Vespidae. Even if she was more a part of me than them now, I was never really sure.
“Self-identify,” the android said finally. Its scanners must not have detected anything abnormal on its first pass.
“Trevor Onyx,” I said. As far as I knew, there were no open warrants for me, at least not from the Dominion.
“Remove glasses for further scanning, Trevor Onyx,” the android continued.
“We need a distraction,” the chip observed. Her voice was still quieter than normal, and I wondered if she was also working to keep the androids’ scanners from recognizing me for what we were.
“Tell me about it,” I muttered.
“Repeat?” the android asked. It even inflected the word up to make it sound like a question. Like its whole platoon wouldn’t shoot me if I didn’t do what it said fast enough.
“Uh, no can do, old pal,” I tried. “See, it’s this damn planet. Doc say
s I’ve got the most fubar eyes he’s ever seen. Gotta keep these shades on, or this bright shit’ll burn a hole straight through my damn retinas.”
“We don’t have retinas,” Honey Bee chipped in helpfully. “Not in the technical sense.”
I shook my head to try to keep her quiet. “Anyway, like I was saying, I’m under strict doctor’s orders to keep these babies on, unless the Dominion wants to pay for new eyes for yours truly.”
“Remove glasses for further scanning, Trevor Onyx.” It was like the damned thing hadn’t even heard me.
“Look, I get it, old friend,” I sighed. “You’re just trying to make a living, do your thing, go home at the end of the day to your-- well, go home at the end of the day. So I’d oblige you if I could, but Doc says absolutely no removal of the shades. Fact is, I wouldn’t have come here except my mama asked me to. They say Thage is the place to come for primo--”
“Remove glasses for further scanning.”
I’d lost a name. That couldn’t be good. Either the android was short circuiting, or it was getting whatever was the droid equivalent of irritated.
“Primo ganja,” I continued. “You know ganja? I think it used to have a different name, back on earth-that-was, but damn if it hasn’t burned right out of my head. Probably too much sun exposure, even through the shades.”
“Scanners detect an abnormality in your ocular region,” the android announced. Its voice was flat, and the other androids in the platoon inched half a step closer to me.
“Yeah, it’s called retinas hanging on by a prayer,” I fired back.
“Discuss your knowledge of the Vespidae,” the android changed the subject. “Or remove glasses for further scanning.”
“The Vespi-what?” I pretended not to recognize the word. “I’ve already told you I can’t take them off, buddy, so just do me a favor and don’t make up words my human brain can’t understand. You’re smart, I get it. You don’t have to rub it in.”
As if any of these sterile droids could think as fast as me.
