“Yeah, uh, about that…” Eliard shrugged, before a nervous grin spread slowly across his features. “It’s still sitting in one of the aft lockers.”
“What!?” The woman coughed her drink over the bar. “We now owe twenty thousand because you decided to double-cross…” She looked around quickly and turned her angry shout into a fierce hiss. “You decided to double-cross the most feared smuggler on this side of Andromeda!? Eliard! What in the blue were you thinking?”
“Oh, I don’t know…That we could make some money, maybe?” he said. “Which we can, now. We can sell the cargo ourselves somewhere, make a profit maybe, do a few other little jobs while we’re at it, and return to pay off Hogan…”
“Why don’t you just give it back?” she hissed at him. “No harm, no foul, right?”
The captain winced. “I don’t think Hogan sees it quite like that. I told him I jettisoned it past the Betel 9.” The captain licked his lips nervously. “And uh, the original cargo is only worth ten K. Hogan added another ten because he’s a fan of my sparkling personality.”
“Urgh.” Irie slammed her drink down on the counter and signaled for two more.
“Thanks, I could do with a stiff drink after today…” Eliard started to say when they arrived.
“Uh-huh, fly-boy. They’re not for you.” The woman downed one immediately, then picked up the other to sip more slowly. “I will not be buying you a drink for a looong time, Captain.” She scowled at him. “You know that we can’t sell whatever it is on Charylla, right? Hogan will only find out about it…”
“We’ll get the money, I promise,” Eliard said, before wondering just how many promises he had made already today. It had been a water-tight plan. It shouldn’t have backfired like this.
“You’d better get the money, you mean.” Irie finished her drink with another disgruntled shake of her head and reached for her patched leather jacket.
“Hey. Where are you going?” the captain said. Is she walking out on me? On the Mercury? I need my engineer!
“I’ve got a guy searching for parts in Level 9,” Irie flung over her shoulder. “I want to get those parts and get them stashed away before you do anything else stupid, and maybe get my home taken away from me!”
Eliard watched her storm off into the crowd and groaned. Well, at least it hadn’t been our gunner that I ran into first.
“Do you want to die!?” roared the very large, blue-skinned Duergar, with a broad, wedge-shaped head and tusks emerging from his lower jaw. He was the Mercury Blade’s gunner.
Val Pathok was large even by Duergar standards. His shoulders were broad and thickly corded with visible muscle—Duergars, thanks to their greater body mass and double-layer of thickened skin, rarely wore much more than part-armor and trousers—and his long arms would reach down almost all the way to his knees, were they not currently grabbing the lapels of Captain Eliard’s green duster and shaking him violently.
“Did you not hear me, human!” the Duergar roared again. El could clearly see the row of large, grinding fangs in the big mouth. “You gamble with all of our lives! You clearly want to die!”
“Uh… I think the whole bar heard you?” Eliard managed.
“Fool. Typical human.” The Duergar released him with a shove, causing Eliard to crash into the nearest table, much to the annoyance of the patrons there. When Eliard had finished apologizing and wiping spilled drinks from himself, he had to run after the Duergar making his way through the bar and out into the Charylla Markets beyond.
“Hey, Val, wait up!”
The markets were a dazzle of light and noise. Instantly, the captain was surrounded by the bustle of traders and smugglers, and even worse types, pushing and shoving as they fought their way to their preferred shop. There were neon-lit stalls selling every manner of street food imaginable, as well as booths that specialized in rare nuts and bolts and wire-mesh storefronts who specialized in guns and ammunition.
There was a flash of light as a drone passed by overheard, blaring its advertising messages for some particular trader or another. Higher balconies of the market displayed more shops, and more consumers laughing, shouting, or haggling.
“Val!” Eliard shouted again, struggling through the crowd to him. “I can explain!”
The Duergar were not known for their forgiving nature, it had to be said. As one of the many up-lifted races, they had entered the arena of universal politics much earlier than the self-made humans had—only to find that they were the lowest of the heap, and expected to work as slaves for the ‘higher’ ancient life forms once known as the Valyien. Some claimed that this made them (rightly) distrustful of everyone.
“You can explain, can you?” Val Pathok, one of the largest blue-skinned Duergar you might ever see, stopped and turned in the river of bustling traffic, which parted around him like a rock. He never had to worry about being offered space in a transport. The smaller humans just naturally moved away from him at the nearest opportunity.
“Yes!” Eliard caught up with him, enjoying the momentary eddy in the street that the large blue-skin made for a moment. “You see, it was a water-tight plan…”
“I do see, El,” Val thundered. “I see only too well. You were stupid, and greedy—just like always—and you thought that you could gamble the lives of your crew for profit. So, you must have a death wish.”
“I was doing it for us, Val! For the Mercury!” the captain pleaded with his gunner. Which was basically true, he thought. It was supposed to be their chance to start afresh. To stop being the heel on everyone else’s boot and start wearing the shoes for once!
“Don’t be mad, Val. We need a good gunner like you,” Eliard said. “The best damn gunner in the galaxy.”
“Flattery will not help you, Captain,” the blue-skinned monolith stated heavily, furrowing his heavy brows. For a dizzying moment, Eliard thought that the Duergar was going to hit him—it would be like getting hit by a building, he was sure, but then the heavy brows slowly unknit, and the gunner just sighed. “But you are my captain, and I took an oath.”
Oh, thank the stars that the Duergar have that weird hang-up about honor, Eliard thought.
“And besides which, where will Mister Nosbert live?” the giant creature grumbled.
“Your cat?” Eliard thought of the white fluffy thing that seemed to do nothing but hiss and spit at him. You would rather risk your neck for your cat than me? he thought in alarm, before he said, “Of course, your cat. Precisely. Where is that beautiful animal going to live if you leave the Mercury? You know that Charylla is no place for a cat!”
“Hmm,” Val agreed, fixing his austere glare on the tides of people around him. “Yes, you are right. This is no place for Mister Nosbert.”
“Excuse me, gentleman? But it seems to me that you may be in a spot of bother?” It was just at that very moment that a third person joined their negotiation—a woman, with rich and luxuriant silks wrapped around her form, but around whose head stretched the many radials of a data-halo, and on her arms were the many nodules and nodes of not-so-discrete implants, some glowing faintly.
Oh great, a Data Smith. Eliard rolled his eyes. In official Coalition space, they were a well-respected and commonplace member of society—able to mine the floating data sphere for information at request, and to offer their research, translation, and advice for a small fee.
Out here in the Traders’ Belt, however, the Data Smiths took on a different role. As information smugglers, they could be asked for leads on profitable sales or the movements of Armcore patrols. People used them as a way of finding out about their rivals, or as means to impress their lovers, but as the quantum network out there was erratic to say the least, their information was often unreliable and sometimes several Sol months, if not years, out of date.
“We don’t need your help, ma’am,” Eliard said.
“You do, Captain El,” the woman said smoothly, inclining her gold and steel halo at him. “You’re not such a nobody as you think, Captain. Half of Charylla ha
s already heard that you messed up with Trader Hogan.” The woman fluttered her hand over the forearm nodes of her other hand. Her eyes started to look far away, but she kept talking. “And desperate men need desperate opportunities, Captain El. Cross my palm with a hundred credits and I may have some data that you need to hear right now.”
“Or you could be about to tell me what the weather was like on Jupiter last Tuesday.” Eliard rolled his eyes at Val beside him. “C’mon, big guy. We don’t need to listen to mumbling soothsayers…”
“No. I want to hear.” Val’s clawed hand moved to his belt, where he produced a roll of gold-shining coins. “One hundred, madam.”
“Thank you,” the Data Smith said graciously, her hands interrogating her controls and her eyes starting to glow an eerie blue. “You are in desperate times, with many men after you…” she began in her sing-song voice.
“Tell me something I don’t know, right?” Eliard muttered.
“…but there is great profit ahead of you, just around the corner,” she said dreamily. “A little piece of data came to my attention just recently, gentlemen. Of an archaeological survey very recently completed in the Tritho System, Epsilon Sector. On the moon of Tritho Prime, there has been discovered ruins. Vast ruins of an unknown origin, although all the evidence points to it being some sort of outpost of the Valyien, before their fall.”
Valyien tech? Eliard’s ears pricked up. And it hasn’t been claimed by the Noble Houses of the Coalition yet? That could be worth a lot of money. That could worth a whole heck of a lot more than twenty thousand credits.
“Okay… I’m listening,” the captain said. “What else?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid, gentlemen. The survey filed their report just this last week, and they have been filtering through the approval and verification process of the academic journals.” The Data Smith shrugged, her eyes slowly losing their shine and returning to normal. “Of course, by the time this data goes public…”
Every noble, military, smuggler, and mercenary will be on their way there… Eliard nodded. It was lucky that he had the fastest ship in the sector, and a crew of two (and a cat) who were no strangers to perilous situations.
“Get your shopping done, Val, because it looks like we got a new job!” The captain suddenly felt a whole lot better.
Read the rest of the story here:
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Double Sharpe Page 11
