by Isaac Hooke
“Great,” Tane said. “These dwellers sound like real sports.”
“Oh, they certainly make great sport all right,” Jed said, patting his sword hilt.
An alert flashed in the lower right of Tane’s HUD. He expanded the notification until it filled his entire vision. It was a city-wide News Alert of some kind. He enlarged the live video and was shocked to see his mugshot displayed next to a female reporter.
“A planet-wide warrant has been issued for Tane Ganeth and his parents, Bill and Wilma Ganeth.” The photos of his parents appeared above his own. “All three are wanted for questioning in connection with an incident that took place at their farmstead. If you have any information regarding their whereabouts, please contact Kalindor Police at the ID listed below. Thank you.”
The video clicked off.
Tane shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Did you see that?”
“It seems someone has notified the local TSN office about the incident at your farm,” Lyra said. “Probably one of the police robots. I’m almost surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Trent is good at suppressing the robots that serve underneath him, but they do have minds of their own.”
Tane realized the shuttle hadn’t left the sky lane. “Why isn’t the cab’s AI heading toward the nearest police station?”
“I masked all of our IDs before entering the craft,” Lyra said.
“Oh,” Tane said. “So you’re going to have the AI change course, right?”
“Why would I do that?” Lyra said.
“I’m not going to turn myself in?”
“Of course not,” Lyra said.
“But the TSN will protect me,” Tane said.
“Ha!” Jed said.
Lyra gave Tane a look that was almost pitying. “If they capture you now, you’ll be held in a brig until a TSN battle cruiser arrives. The dwellers are counting on something like that to happen. They have the ability to monitor our communications feeds. Once they realize you’re being held in a relatively insecure facility, they’ll strike. You’ll be helpless.”
“I’m sure the TSN won’t hold me an insecure facility,” Tane said.
“Trust me, whatever combat robots and battle mechs they have protecting the facility won’t be enough,” Lyra told him. “Your best bet is to continue with the original plan, and come with Jed and myself to Talendir.”
“But if I surrender, you two can stay with me,” Tane said. “You can help the TSN guard me until the battle cruiser arrives.”
Lyra glanced at Jed. There was an amused glint to her eyes. “The two of us aren’t all powerful, despite what you may have heard or believe. We can hold back some dwellers, yes, but we’re ill-equipped to fend off a swarm.”
“A swarm?” Tane asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Jed said.
Tane thought back to his experience in the ventilation duct. “I faced a swarm of tiny robots the dwellers sent into the vents at my farm.”
“Dwellers swarms are similar to that,” Lyra said. “Except replace the tiny robots with standard-sized units.”
“Oh,” Tane said. After a moment: “What about your powers? Can’t you work wonders with the Essence?”
“Wonders, yes,” Lyra said. “Miracles, no. The dwellers may have Essenceworkers with them, too. And Graaz’dhen.”
“Graaz’dhen?”
“Yes. Dwellers enhanced with the Dark Essence. They are stronger than ordinary dwellers, and can reach into a human’s mind. Because of their telepathic abilities, they’re essentially the commanding officers in a typical dweller army, with lesser dwellers bound to them in cohorts. Take down a Graaz’dhen, you take down all the dwellers linked to it.”
“Why is that name familiar to me...” Via his chip, Tane mentally replayed the conversation between himself and the dweller in the corridor. “The dweller I talked to at the farm, it said the Graaz’dhen was coming. The dweller implied the Graaz’dhen wanted to talk to me.”
“All the more reason why what happened to you is so disturbing,” Lyra said.
“You think the Graaz’dhen was there, too? At the farm?”
“It must have been. Probably waiting in the desert nearby.”
“Why didn’t it come inside?”
“My guess is the Graaz’dhen was being cautious,” Lyra said. “It wasn’t sure what sort of prey you were. It wouldn’t want to risk going down and taking any linked dwellers with it. Besides, as I told you, the Graaz’dhen is more like a commanding officer, used to staying back while its underlings work.”
Tane watched the buildings pass by below.
“What about my mom and dad?” Tane asked. “We have to go back for them. Right now. The first places I’d check, if I was working for the star navy, would be the B&Bs and hotels. I’d pull the rental history for all the short termers listed on the mixnet, both private and public.”
“Your parents are safe for the time being,” Lyra said. “I’ve checked them in under an alias, and taken care to blur the faces of you and your family from the hotel security cams to avoid tipping the facial recognition algorithms.”
“You can do that?” Tane asked.
“It’s is a skill of the Essence,” Lyra said.
“Wish I had skills like that,” Tane said. He thought of something: “Won’t Officer Trent tell the TSN where to find us?”
“He works for me, essentially,” Lyra said. “He’ll do what he can to put them off our trail. Besides, he doesn’t know which hotel your family checked in to. I never told him.”
“And what about the listening devices in this cab?” Tane said. “It is a public vehicle.”
“I’ve disabled them, of course,” Lyra said.
Tane shook his head. “To be a Volur.”
He wanted to tell his parents about the city-wide alert, and he tried to call Dad but was directed to voicemail. The same thing happened with Mom. Still napping, apparently. They must have been more tired than he thought.
Something about what Lyra said bothered him.
“You mentioned Dark Essence, something the dwellers use?” he said.
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“I didn’t even know there were other kinds of Essence,” Tane pressed.
“You don’t kneed to concern yourself with Volur matters,” Lyra told him. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“But I’m curious,” Tane said.
“Then be curious,” Lyra said.
He sat back, folding his arms. He stared out the shuttle window. Beneath the neat lines of the drones and personnel transports that seemed to move almost with a casual bearing through the skies, on the ground the citizens rushed to and fro, frantic in comparison, looking like disorganized ants. Busy lives. Busy people. Working day jobs so they could afford the luxuries basic pay simply couldn’t offer them. Men and women oblivious to the aliens lurking somewhere in their midst.
“I wonder if I was caught on camera when I went to the city...” Tane said.
Lyra looked at him crossly. “I told you to stay in your room.”
“I know. But you said I could go out as long as I kept my face hidden. I wore a hood... raised, close around my face.”
“If you were caught on camera, wherever you were would have been immediately cordoned off,” Lyra said. “So I doubt you and I would be having this conversation right now.”
“There you go,” Tane said. “I kept out of the limelight then.”
The cab broke away from its position in the sky lane and banked toward a large terminal situated at the top of a skyscraper. The vessel landed on a shuttle platform adjacent to one of the smaller hangars connected to the terminal. The platform was covered in scorch marks and small craters. The nearby hangar was similarly dented, and had definitely seen better days, its doors bearing the marks of ships that had braked a little too late.
The red exit light in the shuttle turned yellow.
“Please dispense payment,” a sweet voice chimed. “Please dispense payment
.”
“I got this,” Jed said, eyes defocusing.
“Please dispense payment,” the sweet voice nagged.
The exit light turned green and the shuttle doors opened.
“Thank you for flying with Bodacious Cabs,” the voice said. “Have a nice day!”
Tane and the others got out and the cab immediately took to the air. They’d be able to catch a return flight to the hotel from one of the other shuttles queued in the arrivals area.
“Stealth mode,” Lyra told Jed.
The man nodded. The glowing runes on his armor faded, and exterior stopped changing color, becoming a fixed, dull brown. The surcoat blended in entirely, so it seemed he wasn’t wearing one at all. He closed a leather flap over the hilt of his sword, and flipped down a similar flap over the stock of his pistol, hiding the glow emanating from both weapons.
The runes disappeared from Lyra’s dress. At the same time, her sleeves elongated so that her hands and the jewelry she wore were covered entirely by the flowing fabric. Her velvet cloak melded with the back of the dress, becoming the same color, and the silver trim disappeared. A hood grew out of her back collar, and she lifted it over her head to hide the circlet on her forehead. She no longer looked like she was wearing a dress but a robe.
She tucked her necklace and the ruby hanging from it into her front collar, hiding it.
“You look like a traveling Oratory Monk and her mercenary for hire,” Tane said.
“That’s the idea,” Lyra told him.
Tane followed Lyra and Jed toward the main terminal entrance. The three of them scooted around parked shuttles that were crowded so close together they essentially abutted one another; Tane was sure the craft were breaking some sort of legal code by doing that. To get around them, the trio were forced to walk a bit closer to the edge of the platform than Tane would have liked. He didn’t dare look down. He already knew it was a long drop thanks to the view he’d had before the shuttle had landed. It didn’t help his nerves that the wind was particularly strong up here, and threatened to sweep him right off the platform if he wasn’t careful.
He kept his hood raised, holding it in place with one hand, fighting the air currents. Even if Lyra could blot out his image from the security cameras he didn’t wanted to rely on her skill alone. What if there were too many cameras for her to blur them all?
They entered the terminal and got out of the wind. A large glass window formed the far wall, and overlooked the hangars and launch pads. The window itself looked foggy, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in ages. As he stared past the blurry panes, he saw an array of fancy ships squatting on the different open-air launch pads. All were relatively small. They had to be, in order to operate both planet-side and in space.
A pair of rifle-carrying security droids marched past. Tane kept his head bowed and prayed the robots wouldn’t catch enough of his features to make a positive ID.
Digital advertisements popped up over his vision as Lyra led them across the terminal. Tane noticed that Jed was constantly scanning the terminal, watching for trouble no doubt.
Lyra passed a purchasing kiosk, where a small queue of people waited, and entered a bar beside it. The Portly Scuttle, the digital signage proclaimed. Inside, the bar had a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the launch pads, and the city beyond.
“Welcome to the Portly Scuttle,” a sleazily-dressed synthetic said at the entrance. “Just the three of you?”
Lyra ignored the hostess and continued into the bar.
“How rude,” the synthetic said.
Tane gave the hostess an apologetic look as he passed. Inside, the floors, walls and every piece of furniture seemed coated in a layer of soot. “You’d think they couldn’t afford cleaning robots.”
“They can’t,” Lyra said. “Operating margins are thin for a place like this.”
“Don’t the terminal owners provide any?” Tane asked.
“You saw what the windows looked like outside…” Lyra said.
Lyra steered through the mostly empty seats, heading toward the far side of the bar. Jed followed behind her, scanning the room.
Tane stayed close to them, and spotted the smuggler immediately. The man sat at a table with his back to the floor-to-ceiling window, his chin bowed, a wide-brimmed hat hanging over his head. One arm was visible on the table in front of him, next to an empty shot glass; the other was hidden underneath the table. He wore a dark trench coat over a white button down that was open enough to reveal a good portion of his hairy chest. Black leather leggings above tall boots completed his outfit.
Tane immediately wondered how the man skirted the city’s gun laws, because a pistol was strapped to his right thigh, clearly visible on the leg thanks to his rather shrewd positioning at the edge of the table. That wasn’t the only weapon, either. His trench coat was open down the middle, the lapels pushed back to reveal the edge of a sawed-off plasma rifle hanging from a holster on his rib cage.
“Tripp Nebula,” Lyra said when she and the others reached him. Tane could smell the alcohol from where he stood. The man must have already had three or four shots at least, of the hardest stuff available.
The smuggler looked up then, smiling, revealing a weathered but unlined face. His eyes held a mixture of mischief, amusement, and cunning.
Tane pulled up the man’s public profile.
Name: Tripp “Nebb” Nebula
Race: Human
Level: 8
Class: Interstellar Trader
Arrested for smuggling illicit goods in the Trizar and Yanator Systems. Rapier class ship “Red Grizzly” impounded in Erant system for possession of the banned substance Mindpipe. Currently wanted in Agricul, Rantan, and Zoolastian systems for failing to pay customs fees.
Tane stared at that last bit. Yup, definitely a smuggler. And that was only his public record.
“There you are.” The man tipped his hat. “Tripp Nebula? That’s what my public profile says, but friends call me Nebb. Though whether I allow you that honor is another story. Have a seat.”
Lyra and Tane sat across from him. In his bulky armor, Jed had to slide a chair far away from the table just to fit.
The smuggler smiled widely at Jed, as if he thought what the big warrior was doing was the cutest thing. Jed ignored the smuggler, his eyes continuing to roam the bar vigilantly. He was doing it in such a way that wouldn’t draw attention to himself.
“So, I sent you my quote,” Nebb told Lyra. “Did you get it?”
“I got your ‘quote,’ yes,” Lyra said. “Seems a little high.”
Nebb smirked. “For a Volur and her Bander? Not so high, I think.”
Bander. So that was what Jed was. Tane had assumed he was a bodyguard or hired mercenary of some kind, but Tane hadn’t thought to look into it in any detail, but now that he heard the word, thanks to his chip, Tane automatically knew that his assumption was essentially correct: a Bander was a warrior trained to protect, and would fight to the death, sacrificing himself for his Volur. Jed was linked to Lyra in some way, and could instantly receive different buffs during times of need, such as speed, protection, and so forth, whatever she chose to bestow. Not all Volur kept Banders, but Lyra was one of those who did, apparently. A Bander who trained with his Volur for battle could cause extensive damage in a fight, working in tandem and dealing death like a cohesive, well-oiled machine.
Now Tane just had to figure out why he wasn’t able to properly ID Lyra and Jed as a Volur and Bander. Maybe Nebb couldn’t, either, and merely recognized them for what they were on sight.
Tane noticed he was subconsciously referring to the man as “Nebb” already. Friends call me Nebb. Tane certainly didn’t want to get on his bad side: the smuggler didn’t seem like a man anyone would want as an enemy. The fact that he seemed unafraid of a Volur and her Bander spoke volumes as far as Tane was concerned.
“Well lookee here,” Nebb said, drawing Tane out of his reverie. The smuggler was looking right at him; Nebb bent over slightly as i
f to better peer under Tane’s hood, and he lifted his wide-brimmed hat a tad. “You think you can hide under that them there thing?” He returned his attention to Lyra. “His face is plastered all over the city’s mixnet. The authorities are going to be rushing in here any second now. You’d be wise to leave before they do.”
“Unless you’ve called them in,” Lyra said, “there will be no authorities.”
“Ha! I don’t have to call them in,” Nebb said. He nodded toward the small globe in the ceiling.
“The cameras won’t ID him,” Lyra said. “Or any of us.”
“Really…” Nebb said. He sounded doubtful. He glanced at Tane. “Even if that were true, that doesn’t change the fact your passenger is wanted.”
A synthetic server skinned up as a pretty girl came to take their orders. Tane hid his face in his cloak.
“Hello, and welcome to the Portly Scuttle!” the synthetic said. “I’m Molly! Can I get you anything to drink?” She was wearing a skimpy skirt and top that revealed ample cleavage. Tane couldn’t help but notice her skin was falling off in patches, revealing the shiny memory metals underneath.
“Water for all of us,” Lyra said.
“Water it is!” Molly said with a big smile. She turned around to go, and Tane once more ducked his head.
“No water for me, Molly,” Nebb said. “I’ll get another one of these.” He raised the empty shot glass.
Molly smiled seductively. “You got it boss.”
“And keep up the sexy smiles,” Nebb ordered.
Molly giggled. It was all so fake to Tane, but Nebb seemed to be enjoying the attention nonetheless.
“They’ll kick you out, you know,” Nebb said when the synthetic server was gone. “You can’t just order water and expect the management to be happy. Not in a joint like this.”
