by Timothy Zahn
Considering my current relationship with the man and his organization, I could only hope that none of those eager badgemen found him anytime soon.
The screen cleared, and a broken-nosed thug with perpetual scowl lines around his eyes and mouth peered out at me. “Yeah?” he grunted.
“This is Jordan McKell,” I identified myself, as if anyone Brother John had answering the phone for him wouldn’t know all of us indentured slaves by sight. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Ryland, please.”
The beetle brows seemed to twitch. “Yeah,” he grunted again. “Hang on.”
The screen went black. I made a small private wager with myself that Brother John would leave me hanging and sweating for at least a minute before he deigned to come on, despite the fact that fielding calls from people like me was one of his primary jobs, and also despite what this vid connect was costing me per quarter second.
I thought I’d lost my wager when the screen came back on after only twenty seconds. But no, he’d simply added an extra layer to the procedure. “Well, if it isn’t Jordan McKell,” a moon-faced man said in a playfully sarcastic voice, looking even more like a refugee from a mobster movie than the call screener had, his elegantly proper butler’s outfit notwithstanding. “How nice of you to grace our vid screen with your presence.”
“I’m amazingly delighted to see you, too,” I said mildly. “Would Mr. Ryland like to hear some interesting news, or are we just taking this opportunity to help you brush up on your badinage?”
The housethug’s eyes narrowed, no doubt trying to figure out what “badinage” was and whether or not he’d just been insulted. “Mr. Ryland doesn’t appreciate getting interesting news from employees on the fly,” he bit out. The playful part had evaporated, but the sarcasm was still there. “In case you’ve forgotten, you have a cargo to deliver.”
“Done and done,” I told him. “Or it will be soon, if it isn’t already.”
He frowned again; but before he could speak, his face vanished from the screen as a different extension cut in.
And there, smiling cherubically at me, was Brother John. “Hello, Jordan,” he said smoothly. “And how are you?”
“Hello, Mr. Ryland,” I said. “I’m just fine. I’m pleased everyone over there is so cheerful today, too.”
He smiled even more genially. To look at Johnston Scotto Ryland, you would think you were in the presence of a philanthropist or a priest or at the very least a former choirboy—hence, our private “Brother John” nickname for him. And I suspected that there were still people in the Spiral who were being taken in by that winning smile and clear-conscienced face and utterly sincere voice.
Especially the voice. “Why shouldn’t we be happy?” he said, nothing in his manner giving the slightest hint of what was going on behind those dark and soulless eyes. “Business is booming, profits are up, and all my valued employees are working so wonderfully together.”
The smile didn’t change, but suddenly there was a chill in the air. “Except for you, Jordan, my lad. For some unknown reason you seem to have suddenly grown weary of our company.”
“I don’t know what could have given you that impression, Mr. Ryland,” I protested, trying my own version of the innocent act.
“Don’t you,” he said, the temperature dropping a few more degrees. Apparently, innocence wasn’t playing well today. “I’m told the Stormy Banks docked on Xathru not thirty minutes ago. And that you weren’t on it.”
“That’s right, I wasn’t,” I agreed. “But Ixil was, and so was your merchandise. That’s the important part, isn’t it?”
“All aspects of my arrangements are important,” he countered. “When I instruct you to deliver a cargo, I expect you to deliver it. And I expect you to take it directly to its proper destination, without unscheduled and unnecessary stops along the way. That was our agreement; or do I have to bring up—again—the five hundred thousand in debts I bailed you and your partner out of?”
“No, sir,” I sighed. Not that I was ever likely to forget his largesse in that matter, what with him reminding me about it every other assignment. “But if I may be so bold, I’d like to point out that another of your standing instructions is that we should maintain our facade of poor but honest cargo haulers.”
“And how does that apply here?”
“I was offered a position as pilot on another ship for a one-time transport job,” I explained. “A thousand commarks up front, with another two on delivery. How could I turn that down and still pretend to be poor?”
That line of reasoning hadn’t impressed Ixil very much back on Meima. It impressed Brother John even less. “You don’t seriously expect me to buy that, do you?” he demanded, the cultured facade cracking just a bit.
“I hope so, sir, yes,” I said. “Because that is why I did it.”
For a long moment he studied my face, and I found myself holding my breath. Brother John’s tentacles stretched everywhere, even to backwater worlds like Xathru. A touch of a button, a few pointed words, and I would probably not even make it out of the StarrComm building alive. A flurry of contingency plans, none of them very promising, began to chase each other through my mind.
And then, suddenly, he smiled again, the chill that had been frosting the screen vanishing into warm sunshine. “You’re a sly one, Jordan—you really are,” he said, his tone implying that all sins had graciously been forgiven. “All right; since you’ve gotten my cargo delivered on time, you may go ahead and take this other ship and cargo home. Consider it a vacation of sorts for all your service these past three years, eh?”
Considering what I’d already been through on the Icarus, this trip was not exactly turning out to be my idea of a good time. But compared to facing Brother John’s vengeance, I decided I couldn’t complain. “Thank you, Mr. Ryland,” I said, giving him my best humble gratitude look. “I’ll let you know when I’ll be available again.”
“Of course you will,” he said; and suddenly the warm sunshine vanished again into an icy winter’s night. “Because you still owe us a considerable debt. And you know how Mr. Antoniewicz feels about employees who try to leave without paying off their debts.”
Involuntarily, I shivered. Mr. Antoniewicz was the head of the whole organization, with a shadowy identity that was even more carefully guarded than Brother John’s. Rumor had it that there were already over a thousand warrants for his arrest across the Spiral, ranging from happyjam manufacture to mass murder to deliberately starting brush wars so that he could sell arms to both sides. The badgemen would probably give any two appendages to smoke him out of his lair. “Yes, sir,” I told Brother John. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint either of you.”
“Good,” he said. His smile shifted to somewhere in early April, glowing with springtime warmth but with the threat of winter chill still lurking in the wings. “Then I’ll let you get back to your new ship. Good-bye, Jordan.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Ryland,” I said. He glanced up over the camera and nodded, and the vid went dead.
I sat there scowling at the blank screen for nearly a minute, trying to sort through the nuances of the conversation. Something here didn’t feel quite right, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.
And I was painfully aware that that life of me phrasing could well turn out to be literally the case. If Brother John—or Mr. Antoniewicz above him—decided that I had outlived my usefulness or otherwise needed to be made an example of, he would hardly telegraph that decision by threatening me on an open vid connect. No, he would smile kindly, just as he had there at the end, and then he would touch that button and say those few pointed words, and I would quietly vanish.
A soft rustling of bills startled me out of my reverie: what was left of my hundred commarks feeding down into the change bin. I collected the bills and coins together, wondering if I should just go ahead and feed them back in. I could give Uncle Arthur a call …
With a sigh, I slid the bills loosely into my ID folder and dropped
the coins into a side pocket. Uncle Arthur had been the conniving benefactor who’d worked so hard to get Ixil and me connected with Brother John in the first place, back when our soaring debts were threatening to land us in fraud court, and I just knew what he would say if I even suggested I might be in trouble with the organization.
Besides, it was unlikely that he would lift a finger to try to help me even if I did call him. In his own way, he was as much a reclusive figure as Mr. Antoniewicz, and he had made it abundantly clear that he liked it that way. It would serve him right if he had to read about my death on the newsnets.
Overhead, the lights flickered twice, a gentle reminder that my call was finished and others were waiting their turn for the booth. Standing up, I pulled my plasmic from its holster nestled beneath my left armpit, checked the power pack and safety, then returned the weapon to concealment, making sure it was loose enough for a quick draw if necessary. Then, taking a deep breath, I unsealed the door and stepped out into the corridor.
None of the dozen or so people present shouted in triumph or whipped out a weapon. In fact, none of them gave me so much as a second glance as I made my way back down the corridor to the main lobby. Aiming for an unoccupied corner where I could have at least a modicum of privacy, I pulled out my phone and punched Ixil’s number.
He answered on the third vibe. “Yes?”
“It’s Jordan,” I told him. “What’s your status?”
“I’ve landed and finished the entry forms,” he said. I had to hand it to him; not a single cue anywhere in words or tone to indicate the surprise he was undoubtedly feeling at hearing from me here on Xathru. I could imagine Pix and Pax were doing some serious twitching, though. “I’ve also made contact with the local representative and started off-loading the cargo.”
“Good.” So we were almost rid of Brother John’s happyjam. Best news I’d heard all day. “When you’re finished, upgrade to a long-term docking permit, lock down the ship, and get yourself over to Dock Rec Three-Two-Seven.”
There was just the briefest pause. “Trouble?”
“You could say that, yes,” I told him. “Our mechanic was killed during the flight, and I need a replacement. You’re it.”
“An accident?”
I grimaced. “At this point I’m not really sure. Better come prepared.”
Once again, he took it all in stride. “I’ll be there in forty minutes,” he said calmly.
“I’ll be there in thirty,” I said, hoping fervently that I wasn’t being overly optimistic. “See you soon.”
I keyed off and, squaring my shoulders, crossed the lobby and headed out into the sunlight, tension and uncertainty mixing together to make the skin on my back crawl. Just because nothing had happened to me in the StarrComm building didn’t mean it wasn’t going to happen somewhere else between here and the Icarus.
“Hey, Hummer,” a crackly voice came from my left.
I jumped, hand twitching automatically toward my hidden gun. But it was only a Grifser, his tiny eyes peering up at me from leprous-looking skin, his spindly paws held out pleadingly. Brother John might use aliens from time to time when they suited his purposes, but he would never use them to discipline one of his own people, even a lowly smuggler in his final disgrace. Like most of the Spiral’s criminal organizations—human and alien both—the Antoniewicz organization was oddly but vehemently ethnocentric. “What?” I asked.
“You got any caff?” the alien asked plaintively. “I pay. You got any caff?”
“Sorry,” I said, brushing past. Grifsers were absolutely nuts for Earth-style caffeinated beverages or snacks—it actually qualified as a drug for them, putting it on the controlled substance list anyplace they had a decent-sized enclave. Elsewhere in the Spiral, they created nuisances of themselves around spaceport entrances and tavernos, but most of them knew how to more or less graciously take no for an answer. Those who weren’t feeling all that gracious were usually at least smart enough not to press the point with beings half again their size and twice their weight.
This particular Grifser was apparently on the trailing edge of both those bell curves. “No!” he insisted, darting around behind me and coming up again on my right. “Caff caff—now now! Will pay for it.”
“I said no,” I snapped, reaching out to push him away. I didn’t have time for this nonsense.
“Caff!” he insisted, grabbing my arm and hanging on to it like a mottled-skin leech. “Give me caff!”
Swearing under my breath, I grabbed one of his paws and pried it off. I was working on prying the other away when a long arm snaked its way around my back from my left to an overly familiar resting place just beneath the right side of my rib cage. “Hello, old Hummer chum,” a voice crooned into my left ear.
I turned my head to find myself gazing at close range into an alien face that looked like a topographical map of the Pyrenees. “If you don’t mind, friend—”
“Ah—but I do mind,” he said. His hand shifted slightly, dipping expertly under the edge of my jacket and then burrowing upward to rest against my rib cage again.
And suddenly the hard knot of his fist was joined by something else. Something that felt cold through my shirt and very, very sharp. “It’s a wrist knife,” my assailant confirmed in a low voice. “Don’t make me use it.”
“Not a problem,” I assured him, feeling chagrined, scared, and stupid all at the same time. Brother John had totally blindsided me on this one, catching me like some fool fresh off the cabbage truck.
From my right another of his species appeared, tossing a four-pack of cola to the Grifser with one hand as he reached under my jacket and relieved me of my plasmic with the other. “Now,” the first said as their decoy ran off gurgling with delight over his prize. “Let’s go have ourselves a nice little chat.”
Flanking me on either side like a couple of long-lost friends, they guided me through the usual crowd of spaceport traffic, along a couple of narrow and increasingly depopulated service streets, and eventually into a blind alley blocked off at the far end by a warehouse loading dock. It was a long way to go, I thought, for what was going to be only tentative privacy.
But more importantly, from my point of view anyway, the trip itself was already a major blunder on their part. The ten-minute walk had given me enough time to recover from the shock and start thinking again, and that thinking had persuaded me that my original assessment had indeed been the correct one. Whoever these thugs were, they weren’t Brother John’s enforcers. Not just because he didn’t like aliens, but because his boys would have dropped me right there in front of the StarrComm building instead of engaging in all this unnecessary exercise.
All of which boiled down to the fact that, whatever I wound up having to do to them, no one was likely to care very much. At least, that’s what I hoped it boiled down to.
They settled me with my back against the loading dock and took a prudent couple of steps away. The first was now holding his wrist knife openly: a kind of push knife sticking out from his palm at right angles to his arm, the weapon strapped to his hand and wrist so that it couldn’t be snatched or kicked out of his hand. The other was holding my plasmic loosely at his side, not crassly pointed but ready if it was needed. Both aliens were roughly human in height and build, I could see now, except with simian-length arms and foreshortened torsos. The relief-map look of their faces was repeated over their entire bodies, or at least the parts that were visible sticking out of the long brown neo-Greek tunics they were wearing.
“If this is a shakedown, I’m already broke,” I warned, getting in the first word just to irritate them as I gave their outfits a casual once-over. There were no bulges or asymmetric bagginess that I could see. Either they didn’t have any backup weapons at all—which would be pretty careless on their part—or else they were holstered behind their backs.
“It’s not a shakedown,” Lumpy One said, waving his wrist knife back toward the main docking area. “We want your cargo.”
I blinke
d in surprise. “You want to steal fifty cases of combine machine parts?” I asked incredulously.
They exchanged furtively startled glances. “That’s not what you’re carrying,” Lumpy Two growled.
I shrugged. “That’s what it says on the manifest and the crates. If there’s anything else in there, the Barnswell Depot is going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
For a long second Lumpy One seemed at a loss for words. Then his crack of a mouth cracked a little wider in what I decided was probably his version of a sly smile. “Clever,” he said. “But not clever enough. You are Jordan McKell, you came here from Meima, and you have a highly valuable cargo aboard your ship. We want it.”
“Jordan who?” I asked. “Sorry, boys, but you missed completely on this one. My name’s Ivo Khachnin, I’m flying a ship called the Singing Buffalo, and I’m carrying fifty cases of farm-equipment parts. Here—I can prove it.” I reached a hand into my jacket—
“Stop!” Lumpy One barked, leaping forward with knife held ready. “I’ll get it.”
“Sure, pal,” I said, managing to sound both startled and bewildered by his violent reaction. In point of fact, I’d been counting on it. “Fine. Help yourself.”
He approached at a cautious angle, staying out of his partner’s line of fire, which at least proved he hadn’t picked up his street-mugging technique solely from watching Grade-B star-thrillers. Carefully, he set the point of his wrist knife against my throat and reached into my inside jacket pocket. The probing fingers located my ID folder and pulled it out, holding it cautiously by a corner as if expecting it to be booby-trapped.
And as it came free from my jacket, the bills I’d slipped carelessly inside in the StarrComm booth slid out and fluttered colorfully to the ground.
It was a small distraction, but it was all I needed. As their eyes flicked involuntarily to the floating commarks, I jerked my head back and around, moving it out of contact with Lumpy One’s knife, simultaneously snapping up my left hand to catch his wrist behind the knife strap. Pushing his arm high, I ducked under it and spun 180 degrees around, ending up standing behind him with his knife arm between us, bent upward toward his neck at what I very much hoped was a painful angle.
