by Rick Partlow
Smugglers, I corrected myself. Honest spacers wouldn’t be out in the Pirate Worlds. They’d be smugglers, pirates, mercenaries, thieves and probably criminals whose specialties I hadn’t even heard of. I watched them passing by us on the muddy streets, motley packs of individuals, more mangy and ruthless looking than any of the wolves I’d seen on Earth or Demeter. Two meter tall Belters toddled alongside squat, broad-bodied trolls from high gravity worlds, and here, bionics were a rule more than an exception; not surprising given how rare and expensive high-tech medical procedures would be out here. Weapons were also the rule, most worn openly, which was even less surprising. I kept wanting to reach under my jacket to make sure mine was still there, but I resisted the temptation and tried to look calmer and more confident than I felt.
The others seemed to be doing okay. I thought Victor and Kurt might be rubbernecking like tourists, but I guess their time at Belial had inured them to the strangeness and variety. Sanders was looking around, but he’d settled down since Hermes and was at least trying to be cool, and even looked more dangerous behind the mirrored shield of his enhanced optics glasses. Bobbi regarded everyone evenly, quite obviously calculating in her head if she could kill each of them and just as obviously deciding that, yes, she could. Carmen Ibanez seemed coolly fascinated, ready if anything happened but content just to be experiencing something new.
And Yassa…she was stiff-backed and uncomfortable, her left hand hovering around the pistol holstered high on her hip. She wasn’t afraid, I was pretty sure…she hadn’t struck me as someone who was afraid of much. I had a suspicion she was keyed up by the proximity of the bars, and the knowledge that inside were undoubtedly the drugs she’d surrendered to some months ago, and to which she probably still had a psychological dependency if not a physical one.
“There’s the place,” I said, nodding to the biggest, brightest and busiest of the joints on the strip.
It was four stories tall, which made practically made it a skyscraper here in Freeport, at least a hundred meters on a side and covered with advertising holos that offered the best food, the best liquor, the best drugs, the best ViR, the best sex dolls and the best hookers on the planet. It was called the Lucky Bastard and it was where Cowboy had suggested we look for Abuelo’s people.
“We should split up into groups of two,” I suggested, stepping out of the flow of traffic and wiping the rain from my face. It had died down but it was still drizzling, and I could feel it matting my hair. “Victor and Kurt,” I said, focusing on the brothers, “you guys go get a table, order some food. If there’s a human server,” likely in a place like this where spare parts for automated service ‘bots would be harder to come by than humans desperate for a job, “try to chat them up, find out what you can. Slip them a few bucks if you have to.” I’d given everyone a small supply of Tradenotes for spending money, tips and possible bribes.
“Sanders,” I said to him, “you and Taylor go try gambling. Lose a little if you have to, whatever gets the others talking.” He nodded, and Bobbi Taylor shot me a knowing look, realizing I was having her team up with him because he was cautious and she was not.
“Kane, you and Carmen hit the ViR rooms. If their firewalls aren’t too strong, maybe you” I looked to Kane, “can penetrate their central systems and dig up some data. Carmen, watch his back in case they twig to what he’s doing.”
I motioned to the main entrance, about twenty meters from us down the street and lit up like mid-day with a ring of lights. “Go on in. If you need to find me or Captain Yassa, we’ll be at the main bar. If we get separated, meet at the rally point no later than 0100 local.”
The six of them drifted into the place two at a time, each of the pairs pausing instinctively to put some space between one group and the next. I found myself nodding appreciatively. I hadn’t had a lot of time or a lot of choice picking this team, and it was nice to see they hadn’t forgotten everything they’d learned.
I offered Captain Yassa an arm and she regarded it doubtfully for a moment before she took it and we headed inside. I could feel her stiffness and hesitation, but she kept walking.
“Some paradise they got here,” she said quietly next to me, almost drowned out as we got closer to the music playing inside. She was keeping her voice even and calm despite the trepidation I knew she was feeling. “Constant storms, winds, electromagnetic interference, earthquakes, and background radiation enough to give you cancer in a few years if you didn’t get the prenatal nanite treatments…and most of these people didn’t.”
She looked at me sideways and snorted a laugh. “If I’d known this was how you treated a girl, I’d have snagged you up before that student on Demeter grabbed you first.”
I was trying to think up something clever to say in return, but then we stepped through the doorway and our conversation was swallowed up in light and noise.
Chapter Eight
A bass beat thumped somewhere in my chest, and the lights flashed red and blue to match it in a hypnotic combination that seemed to be designed to drawn you further into the Lucky Bastard, like the spasms of an alimentary canal. There was no cover charge, no line of bouncers, no weapons scanners; you just walked in and there was the dance floor, pulsing from below like the building itself was alive and the floor was its beating heart.
There were maybe a dozen couples out on the floor when we walked in, and no two of them seemed to be dancing in the same style or even to the same beat. They thrashed or weaved or spun in place, often with eyes closed, oblivious to what their partner was doing; I saw more than one drug patch and wondered if that was the explanation or if smugglers just made really bad dancers. And some of them were visibly armed, including the ones with the drug patches, which made getting by them nearly as nerve-wracking as the flight through the storm.
Yassa and I stepped together through the swirling, leaping, writhing mass of them, almost dancing ourselves as we dodged and zigzagged across the flashing, vibrating floor, her hand holding my bicep loosely, ready to cut loose if we needed to move faster or fight. It felt natural, like we’d practiced it a hundred times, and she actually seemed more relaxed now than she had before, as if the possibility of physical danger was a comfort.
Then we were through, walking suddenly on a real, hardwood floor that would have cost hundreds of thousands in Corporate scrip or Commonwealth dollars back on Earth or any of the major colonies, where the only wood allowed for furniture or building materials had to be cloned in a lab. I felt a twinge of envy along with a sense of horrified wrongness at the thought of cutting down a decades-old tree just to make flooring or a desk out of it. It seemed…selfish and short-sighted to me, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the way I’d been raised on Earth. I’d lived on Demeter long enough to know that attitudes were different about things like that in the colonies, and they would sure as hell be different still here in the Pirate Worlds.
The wood floor began in a short hallway that led off to the right back to the Virtual Reality theaters and then out another exit, and on the left up a narrow stairwell. We stepped straight through it, into the bar. It was anachronistic and old-fashioned, not from a style choice like the pricey bars in Belial or back on Earth, but because here, everything was anachronistic. They didn’t hire human bartenders because it meant they could charge more for the drinks, they hired them because they couldn’t afford the maintenance and repair of the computer systems that would take orders and dispense them automatically. They didn’t use real glass because some corporate executive expected it, they used it because no one could afford to import transplas or build a factory that could make it, or maintain that factory. Glass was cheap and made from readily available silicon.
The bar was made from local wood as well, polished and gleaming in the low light that glowed from fixtures embedded in the walls, and the stools were padded with what could have been leather---from something, I knew they had cows here, and horses. The crowd here was more sedate than the one on the dance floor, lined and
weathered faces staring into their solitary drinks at the bar or groups of two or three sitting or standing at high-top tables, smoking cigars or pipes. The room was filled with a light haze of aromatic smoke that smelled vaguely of the narcotics that were blended with the tobacco.
“See anyone who looks like muscle?” Yassa asked me as we sat down at the bar, pulling the stools out with a squeaking of the plastic caps on the bottom of the legs on the wood floor.
“All of them,” I commented wryly, trying to look the other customers over without staring at them. “You and I included.”
“What can I get you?” The bartender almost startled me when he appeared in front of us. He was an older man and he looked old, with stringy, greying hair and an unhealthy pallor to his mottled and stained skin. He was dressed in plain, white coveralls and wore a net over his hair and a supremely indifferent look in his dark eyes.
“Shot of tequila,” I said, “if you have it.” In a place like Belial, or on Earth, my ‘link would already have been displaying the menu and drink list on my contact lens, but here I saw nothing.
“It’s locally made,” the man told me, pulling a bottle from under the bar and tipping it into a shot glass.
“That’s fine,” I told him. “Cap?” I asked Yassa.
I saw her eyes flickering behind the bartender, to the shelf below the rows of glass bottles. There he had jars of the cigars and electric pipes, but her eyes were on the small, locked cases beside them. Inside there would be the patches of Spindle and Kick and Zed and whatever else they might have.
“You want something stronger?” The bartender asked her, catching the tilt of her gaze.
I didn’t answer for her; instead, I waited, watching the tiny beads of sweat coalescing on her forehead.
“No,” she told him, finally, though it took her eyes a moment longer to move on from the drugs. “Give me a bottle of whatever lager you serve here.”
He set the open bottle in front of her and she took a long drink of it, seizing back control of her breathing as it coursed down her throat.
“That’s ten dollars,” the bartender told me. “We prefer Tradenotes.”
I pulled out two twenties and passed them over. His eyebrow shot up.
“Tell me something,” I said to him. “If you had a few people, veterans say…Marine veterans who’d seen combat, and they were looking for work, who would you suggest they talk to around here?”
The set of his eyes changed and he looked us both over for a second before he nodded slightly to himself.
“You should talk to Constantine.” He motioned towards the large, open doorway in the far wall. The restaurant part of the club was through there and I could just see the edges of a few of the tables. “He has a table reserved over on the far side of the dining room.”
I nodded to him, then slammed back the tequila shot. It burned on the way down and I felt a not-unpleasant tingle up and down my spine and a fire in my chest.
“Thanks.”
Yassa brought her bottle with her as we stepped away from the bar and made our way through the tables towards the dining room. We were just past the last group of tables when we heard the angry shouting ahead of us. I shared a look with Yassa and we picked up the pace, striding purposefully into the slightly brighter light of the restaurant.
It wasn’t packed, not nearly as crowded as the dance floor or the bar, but there were a few occupied tables, and all of them seemed to be staring at the confrontation at the far side of the room, just where the bartender had said we could find this guy Constantine.
I pegged the man yelling for a local, not a spacer. He wore utilitarian clothes, work clothes, not the expensive leathers or bright-colored flash freighter crews or smugglers wore dirtside; and he had the pale and slightly creepy tone to his skin people seemed to get here. He wasn’t armed, not that I could see, but he was a big man with a barrel chest and a grey-shot, bushy beard that fell over it.
As we got closer, I could make out what he was saying, though his English was distorted by an accent I’d never heard; it sounded vaguely European, maybe.
“Don’t hand me that bullshit about keeping up the town!” He was bellowing. “Taxes have gone up twice in just the last three months and you people still haven’t fixed the damage from the winter storms! You are pocketing that money, stealing from us!”
“You need to calm down, Seth.”
The man who spoke wasn’t particularly imposing. His face was bland and rounded, his brown hair cut medium length with sideburns that grew down his cheeks to meet his mustache. He was about my height, I estimated roughly since he was still sitting, seemingly relaxed even under the onslaught. He might have had a few kilos on me, but not many; I’m not a small man and I’d been engineered from the genes up to have about as much strength and endurance as you can have and still be an un-augmented human, thanks to Mom. He wasn’t even dressed to intimidate. His clothes were well made, probably by hand but still well-tailored, but they were simple, earth-toned and fashionable, but not flashy. His only affectation was a black, leather glove on his right hand, which seemed an odd fashion statement.
But he had a gun holstered low on his left hip, strapped to his thigh to keep it secure, and there was something about the way he wore it that made me suspect he had military training. And there was something about the cool, expressionless control on his lean, unlined face that warned me he wasn’t someone you wanted to fuck with.
“Calm?” Seth blurted, waving his hands expressively. “I’ve been calm for months and all it’s got me is dead broke! I have no extra money to expand my business or repair the damage to our buildings because every dollar goes to you! We barely have enough to buy food!”
There were two large, dangerous looking people standing next to Constantine’s table, obviously bodyguards, but they weren’t taking part in the argument. The man and woman were dressed in light body armor strapped with chest holsters, and wore enhanced optics glasses probably linked to their weapons. I had the sense, watching them, that Constantine had told them to hold back; they were watching this Seth character, but weren’t in a defensive stance.
Seth, I figured grimly, hadn’t thought this through.
I paused maybe ten meters away from them, leaning back against an unoccupied table with Yassa beside me. The bodyguards shot us a glance that was a warning to stay away.
“Seth, things are difficult for everyone since the war ended.” Constantine’s voice was cool and level. “There’s been more attention from the Fleet, and the Commonwealth has even re-established the Patrol Service. We aren’t getting the income we used to. That’s why taxes are up, temporarily.”
“Temporarily my ass!” Seth exploded. “I’ve had enough of this two-faced bullshit! I want to talk to Abuelo! Why is he never in town anymore?”
“Abuelo has important business he’s taking care of,” Constantine’s tone grew even softer, and I had to strain to hear it. I had the sense that was a bad sign.
“Well you fucking well better tell him to get his ass back to town!” Seth was screaming now, his normally pale face turning beet red. “Or he’ll have to find someone else to repair everyone’s fabricators and food processing units because I’ll fucking burn my place to the ground before I pay you bloodsucking shits another dollar!”
There was no warning. One moment, Constantine was a still life painting, sitting in his chair relaxed and unmoving, and the next, his gloved right fist was punching straight through Seth’s chest. I jumped at the sudden motion, nearly falling into a crouch as I originally thought he was going for his gun. But then I saw the explosion of blood that stained that tailored jacket and splattered across the table.
Seth stood with a look of disbelief on his face, swaying like a pine in a storm for just a moment, and then Constantine’s hand ripped back out with something blood red clutched in the fingers and blood sprayed with the motion, some of it hitting the bodyguards. The man stood, expressionless, but the woman wiped a droplet off of her cheek ab
sently. The fabricator repair shop owner fell backwards, hitting the floor with a hollow thump and more blood and I heard a snarl coming from my lips as I reached for the gun holstered under my jacket.
“Don’t.” Brandy Yassa’s mouth was so close to my ear that I could feel her warm exhalation as she said the word so loudly and forcefully that it hurt. Her hand squeezed vicelike on my shoulder. “Remember the mission.”
I twisted my head around and nearly pushed her off of me before I saw the bodyguards looking our way again, their hands straying to their weapons. Constantine was still looking down at the heart in his hand…his obviously bionic hand, surely attached to a full cybernetic arm that had to go all the way into his shoulder and be attached to a reinforced spine for him to pull off that punch. He let the bloody lump of muscle drop to the wooden floor with a sickening plop, then shook the blood off of his glove, his expression still neutral.
Everything was interrupted by a scream, a wail of grief and fury and pain that echoed through the dining room so thoroughly that I wasn’t sure, at first, from which direction it was coming. Then a woman rushed across the room from the entrance to the bar and threw herself down over Seth’s body, convulsed with sobs.
She was young, younger than me, maybe still in her teens, her dark hair long and gathered into twin braids. She was dressed much like Seth, in work clothes that had seen better days, baggy and ill-fitting on her skinny, gangly form. She buried her face in Seth’s shoulder and sobbed, keened for him, and I could see that their looks were similar enough that she must be his daughter. When she looked up from her father’s body, his blood covered her and she seemed to welcome it, like it was evidence in a trial or perhaps the markings of a ritual sacrifice.
