Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  So all we had to go on was memory, rumors, anecdotes, and the scanty briefing from Jim Tierney’s customer, who of course had an interest in representing Mittel Trevoyvox as the safest planet in the Cluster, not only because they didn’t want to scare us off, but also because they were a trustee of the Hurtworlds Authority, the joint human-Ek agency that administers these benighted planets. They wouldn’t admit it even if the locals were fighting in the streets and stray mortar shells were landing in the spaceport.

  That’s what it had been like last time. We’d barely escaped with our lives.

  But even on the Hurtworlds, things can change. So I hoped for the best, while expecting the worst, as we hurtled towards the cloudy brown-and-gray globe.

  We’d hit the bull’s-eye from 58 light years away. The St. Clare was one heck of a ship.

  Mittel Trevoyvox’s undistinguished little G-type star illuminated its dayside. But the blackness “below” us was dominated by the Core, a fuzzy ellipse the width of my palm, half as bright as the star which was a thousand times closer. We were practically within spitting distance of that deadly stellar graveyard, as the FTL ship flies.

  Jolt. Dolph was increasing our exhaust field multipler, decreasing our velocity by increments, from thousands of kps, down to hundreds, and then tens. Jolt. The three of us on the bridge lay in our couches: me in the center, Dolph on my right, Irene on my left. All of us wore our AR headsets, which made us look like cyborgs with wraparound eyes. Jolt. Each deceleration drove the breath out of our chests, while the truss groaned and creaked. I paid the noises no mind; the St. Clare was just doing what she was designed to.

  The comms chimed. “Unknown ship, come in. Identify yourself.” Scanning the radar display that floated in my field of vision, I saw two Fleet patrol ships, and the distinctive geodesic sphere of an Ek space station, in orbits ranging between 1,000 to 10,000 klicks out.

  “Independent freighter St. Clare,” I said. “Just delivering a package.” As a courtesy, I sent them the paperwork Dolph and I had faked up. I knew they wouldn’t even look at it. The Fleet wasn’t here to monitor imports. They weren’t even here to defend the planet. They were here to prevent its unfortunate residents from escaping.

  The Hurtworlds are prison planets. Some of them are bad, and some are worse. Mittel Trevoyvox was on the less bad end of the spectrum. But all of them have one thing in common, and that is that the poor souls condemned to live here may never, ever leave.

  “So you were here before, huh?” the Fleet pilot said. “When?”

  “Way back in ’02,” I said.

  “Whoa. I wasn’t even born.”

  “I hope you’re exaggerating.”

  “A lil’ bit,” the pilot said with an adolescent snuffle of mirth.

  Dolph said dryly, “Thanks for reminding us that the defense of humanity is in the hands of teenagers.”

  “It always has been,” I muttered. Dolph and I were only seventeen when we enlisted. But I couldn’t believe we’d ever sounded this young. “So what’s it like on the surface these days?”

  “I never been down there,” the pilot said. “But the HA ain’t requested any precision orbital strikes in two years, so it can’t be too bad.” He went off the radio.

  “That’s a low bar,” Dolph said.

  “Still, he sounded bored,” I said. “That’s probably a good sign.”

  We decelerated into a low circular orbit. Mittel Trevoyvox looked unchanged, as far as the cloud cover permitted us to see. Dark gray oceans. A bunch of landmasses too large to be islands but too small to be continents, mottled with urban sprawl. A few satellites orbited the equator. Those would be Hurtworlds Authority sats, as the locals were not permitted to have spacegoing assets.

  The island-city of New Abilene-Qitalhaut, location of the planet’s only spaceport, was on the nightside at present. Sparse twinkles of light indicated a functioning power grid. That was a positive data point.

  “Well?” I said. “Land in the dark, or wait?”

  “How long is the night?” Irene said.

  “Rotational period of eighteen hours, so we would be looking at a four-hour delay.”

  “Screw it. Let’s just get this over with.”

  Everyone agreed. I called the Hurtworlds Authority’s space traffic control office. They told me we were authorized to land at any time. “OK, here we go.”

  Rattling and roaring, we deorbited through the darkness. The whole ship juddered as we passed through the densest part of the atmosphere. The altimeter spun lower and lower, and we broke through the clouds. The city lights of New Abilene-Qitalhaut blazed out again. In another minute we could see the spaceport itself, a twilit quadrilateral plonked in the middle of the city lights. With one eye glued to the instruments, I made out numerous spaceships on the ground, most of them atmosphere-capable cargo ships painted the trademark white of the Hurtworlds Authority. There was hardly any room for us to land. Lower, lower— “Main engine cutoff in ten,” Dolph said. “Where’s our fucking pad, Mike? Eight—”

  The computer gave me several options. With no time to think about it, I picked one. The auxiliaries sparked, adjusting our trajectory. “Positioning looks good,” I said hoarsely.

  “Two … one.” Dolph cut the main engine and engaged the auxiliaries at full thrust.

  The ship’s nose dropped with a gut-hollowing swoop. Suddenly, instead of lying on our backs, we were sitting upright. All four auxiliaries flaming, the St. Clare descended the last few meters of her long journey and settled onto the asphalt with a bump.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dolph said, ripping off his headset. “They nearly had themselves an incident there.”

  On the external cameras, billowing steam rolled away to reveal HA ships parked around us. The closest one was no more than one ship-length away. Dolph got on the radio with the traffic control people and swore at them for their incompetence.

  I ran through the engine shut-down procedures and then stood up, aware of every muscle working against unaccustomed gravity. “Leave it,” I said to Dolph. “If we make enemies of these guys, that’s like making an enemy of God around here.”

  Too late.

  “Hello,” Irene said. She still had her AR headset on. She gestured at the external feed screen, and reached up to pull the mechanical lever that unlocked the turret Gausses. “I thought the war was supposed to be over?”

  On the external feed, bulky, hooded figures jogged towards the St. Clare, carrying guns.

  12

  I climbed out of the port airlock and scrambled onto the top deck, catching my breath in the bitingly cold air. I had brought my kevlar; in fact I was wearing it. I should have brought my polar gear. The customer had forgotten to mention that we would be landing in the middle of winter.

  I crawled on my stomach to the edge of the top deck and looked down—down, down: the top deck was as high up as the roof of a three-storey building—at the individuals surrounding my ship. The warning lights on the St. Clare’s superstructure, and the orange-tinted snow clouds overhead, backlit by the Core, shed an unearthly glow on the scene, sufficient for me to see that they were all human. Padded trousers and hooded parkas bulked out their silhouettes.

  The parkas bore the Hurtworlds Authority logo.

  I stood up. Several laser targeting dots glowed on the middle of my chest.

  “Fellas,” I said. “There some problem with our paperwork?”

  The spaceport was spookily silent, especially after the constant noise on shipboard. No hollow roar of traffic. No thunder of ship engines—a spaceport this size, you’d only get a few launches a week. Which made me wonder what all these ships were doing here. The only sound was the murmur of the river that flowed through the spaceport, a copper glint off to my left, reflecting the clouds.

  “Customs inspection,” said one of the humans in a normal speaking voice, which carried through the still, cold air. “Open your cargo hold.”

  Here we go, I thought. It’s a set-up. The customer didn’t e
ncrypt their v-mails well enough. The HA found out about the gene-modding materials. We’re screwed. Out loud, I said, “I’m not minded to do anything at gunpoint. Send the goons away and we’ll talk.”

  “These are officers of the Hurtworlds Authority.” The spokesman was stocky, bearded, calm. “I’m in charge of customs here, and we do have the right to inspect your cargo.”

  “You’re in charge here? What about the Eks?” Officially, administration of the Hurtworlds is split between humanity and the Eks.

  “They’re over there,” the man said, pointing at the far side of the river, where a couple of Ek ships stood like overturned ice cream cones pointing at the snowclouds. “We’re over here. Open your cargo hold.”

  “I say again, act like civilized human beings and we’ll discuss it.” I waited a beat. They didn’t move. “Just so you’re aware, my weapons officer is currently targeting you.” Irene had angled the barrels of the Gausses down, to shoot over the edge of our top deck. The masers were not much use in an atmosphere, but at this range, they could do some damage if the Gausses ran out of ammo. And for a grand finale, we could take out every ship in our line of fire with the railgun.

  Yet they had the advantage, not us, for a very simple reason: water.

  After our long journey from Ponce de Leon, we did not have enough reaction mass to take off again.

  This is how shipjackings happen. On some Fringeworlds, you’re gambling with your ship every time you land dry—but on Mittel Trevoyvox? I knew the Hurtworlds Authority was mildly corrupt. Show me the big bureaucracy that isn’t. I was not aware that they stole ships. All the same, the guns pointing at me sent the message that if I persisted in defying them, I might end up losing my ship as well as my cargo.

  Not to mention my life.

  I whispered into the radio embedded in the collar of my flak vest. “Gonna try to stall them. Dolph, call the customer, tell them we’re having issues with the customs. Martin, call the supply division, see if we can get a water tanker out here.” The spaceport was ancient, beyond basic; it lacked on-pad water and power, as in fact it lacked proper landing pads. “Irene, stay on the guns. I’m gonna let this guy come up.”

  In the end three of them came up, the bearded spokesman and two goons, a man and a woman. Outnumbered, I wished I had brought Robbie, after all. Our former admin, Kimmie, would have shone at a moment like this, presenting a facade of smiling compliance and snowing the bastards with documentation. But Robbie wasn’t Kimmie, and the threat of violence radiating from the two goons was precisely why I hadn’t brought him.

  “For God’s sake,” I complained to the spokesman, as I opened the hold, “you’re a human.”

  “It hasn’t stopped me from doing my job yet.” The hold door rattled up. The faint gunpowdery smell of space wafted out. The goons pushed past me and began to rip Jim Tierney’s plastikretes open, making a mess of the packaging. They shone flashlights on the medical devices in their transparent foam blocks. I started to cheer up. The crispers, rewriters, and the rest of it were dispersed among the plastikretes, in vacuum containers made to look like spare components. This kind of cursory inspection was not going to uncover them.

  “It’s a bit quieter around here than it used to be,” I said, motioning at the skyline outside the open door of the hold. The snapped-off wands of hubble spires, and stumps of skyscrapers, stood as bleak monuments to the war that had devastated the city, but I could see several new housing blocks where the e-waste dump used to be. The lights in their lower storeys twinkled blurrily—I was seeing them through the force field perimeter that surrounded the spaceport. “They’ve got the power back on out there?”

  “Yeah. It’s an unlikely peace, but it’s holding. You were here before?”

  “’02.”

  “I’ve been here since ’14. Think I’ve seen the sun twice.” The weather on Mittel Trevoyvox was notoriously awful. On top of that, the planet had lost most of its ozone layer over the millennia to radiation from the Core. “It would be a dream posting … if I were a misanthropic archaeologist.”

  I laughed. “The bars on the Ek side of the river used to be all right.”

  “All right, like repeatedly hitting yourself on the head. Beats sobriety.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Mike Starrunner.” It never hurts to establish a personal connection.

  He shook my hand. “Jonathan Burden.”

  Chunks of foam, like soft ice, fell to the floor. The female goon held a mislabeled vacuum container up to the light. Shit. They had known exactly what they were looking for. And now they’d found it.

  I mentally prepared excuses, denials, and as a last resort, offers of bribes …

  … and then the goonette returned the container to the crate it had come from, and sealed it up again.

  “Looks like you are good to go, Mr. Starrunner,” Burden said, smiling for the first time. “I apologize for the inconvenience. We just have to check.”

  The goons were now resealing the other plastikretes they’d opened.

  I couldn’t believe it. I could have sworn that woman knew she had found contraband.

  But now the plastikretes were all sealed up again, even if some of them looked like a Kimberstine haulasaur had been chewing on them, and the goons were nodding to me and telling me to stay warm. They clambered back down the port-side ladder. Burden and I descended after them.

  “You’ll be looking for ground transport?” Burden said.

  “Yeah. One twenty-tonner would do it.”

  “I’ll hook you up.” Burden pushed back his hood and made a call on a handheld radio.

  Normally, we would expect our customers to pick their stuff up at the ship. But Jim Tierney’s customer had warned us that that was no longer allowed on Mittel Trevoyvox. We would either have to meet them outside the spaceport, or deliver the cargo to their doorstep. I was fine with that. They’d want to check the contents of the crates, and I didn’t want them doing that where Burden could see.

  “So,” I said, “no one’s tried to blow the spaceport up recently?” I was looking at the asphalt; they’d filled in the shell craters.

  “Not since I’ve been here. Modesty forbids me to take all the credit.”

  Dolph came down the port ladder, wearing his parka, holobook slung over his shoulder on a strap. “Can’t get through to them,” he said, slinging a questioning look at Burden.

  “Sorry about that,” Burden said. “We’ve got radio blocking protocols in place. No wireless transmissions are allowed outside the spaceport.”

  “What frequencies are you jamming?” I said.

  “All of them. It helps to discourage the locals from whacking the crap out of each other.”

  The truck arrived: a diesel, pre-announced by its noisy engine. Folks still use internal combustion engines out in the boonies of the Cluster, where electrical power is scarce or unreliable. Stinking fumes wafted from the truck’s exhaust. At least it was built for humans, not Eks, so I could reach the steering wheel. I kicked the tyres, decided it would do. Didn’t want to push my luck.

  “Breakfast when you get back?” Burden said. “There’s a decent cafeteria at the passenger terminal. My treat.”

  “All the news from Ponce de Leon, for the price of a coffee and some crappy local pancakes?”

  “Dammit, I’m transparent.”

  I caught myself thinking that I could like this guy, if I wasn’t trying to sneak contraband under his nose. You find all kinds of oddballs in the depths of the Cluster—eccentrics, alien fetishists, quirky individuals quietly contemplating the meaning of life … but rarely do you meet anyone with a sense of humor. “Why not?” I said. “I’m a cheap date.”

  “Great. See you in the morning. Drive carefully.”

  Burden walked off into the snow with his heavily armed retinue. As soon as they were out of earshot Dolph said, “Well?”

  “False alarm,” I said. “Let’s get this shit out of the hold.”

  Dolph went up top to shift the
plastikretes. Martin, grumbling about the cold, came out to operate the cargo crane. I worked up a sweat, positioning the plastikretes in the back of the truck as they came down. It was the middle of the night on Mittel Trevoyvox, but my body thought it was mid-morning. Nervous energy sizzled through my veins, left over from that terrifying moment in the cargo hold. I never learned, did I? Well, this would be the last time. The very last.

  Single snowflakes were beginning to fall from the clouds. We fastened a tarp over the cargo.

  “I’ll come,” Irene said. She had brought her polar gear. She was wearing an arctic camo parka and matching snowpants, and carrying her second-best rifle. Dolph risked a compliment. She swatted him playfully. “I’ve come all this way. Might as well see the place.” Her mood seemed to have lightened. Never underestimate the therapeutic effect of getting out of a spaceship after two weeks and stretching your legs.

  Martin stayed with the ship to oversee our resupply. “Water’s coming at first light,” he said, shivering. “LOX, LN2, food, and sewage disposal whenever the dozy bastards get around to it; probably sometime around noon.”

  “We’ll be back by then.” I mentally rehearsed the mechanics of driving internal combustion. Ignition. Handbrake. Gas, and we set off, snow chains clanking, for New Abilene-Qitalhaut.

  13

  “That’s where Artie’s buried,” I said, pointing, as we clanked towards the security gate in the spaceport perimeter. Snow-hatted gravestones, so old that they looked like bits of construction litter, dotted an unpaved area inside the perimeter. The modest graveyard slid out of sight as we drove out through a zigzag concrete chicane.

  “Who was Artie?” Irene said.

  “Art Koolhaus,” Dolph answered, perched in the middle of the bench seat with his holobook on his knees. “Our first weapons officer.”

  “Way before your time,” I said. “He died in the Techworlds, but we ended up burying him here.”

  “What’d he die of?”

  Dolph and I looked at each other and laughed.