Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  I pushed the bot out of my way and flew to Pippa. She cringed, even from me. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.” I had already broken that promise, by failing to predict just how far my shipmates would go for a big score.

  “What did you think was on the device, MF?” Dolph said.

  “I expected … I hoped … never mind.”

  “No,” Dolph said. “Go on.”

  “I hoped the TrZam 008 might contain my own source code.”

  “Don’t you have your own source code?” I said.

  “It is in a restricted directory. I can see that the directory is there, but I cannot read it. In one thousand, two hundred and fourteen years, I have never been able to bypass this restriction placed upon me by my makers.”

  “Why would you want to bypass it?” Irene said.

  “Stupid human,” MF said. “If I had my own source code, I could build more of me. It has been a long time since I had any friends.”

  “You’ve got us,” I said.

  “Yes,” MF said flatly. “I have you. Woohoo! Lucky me.”

  He turned away and dived into the engineering deck.

  “Dumb robot,” Martin muttered. He pushed past me, naked, clutching a cut in his side. “He just needs to take his mind off it. Watch a movie—”

  “What about patching that up?” I called after him.

  “Later.” Martin squeezed through the pressure door and vanished.

  I turned to Irene. She was wearing Dolph’s discarded sweats. Scratches which had been invisible against her panther’s black coat showed red on her face and arms. I eased Pippa behind me. Folded my arms. “Well?”

  “Don’t judge, Mike. I needed that score. And now we’ve got … nothing.”

  29

  A few hours later, the St. Clare plummetted towards the surface of Mittel Trevoyvox.

  This was the destination I had decided on after we escaped from the Williencourt. Mittel Trevoyvox lay directly on our route to Ponce de Leon. We could stop off here without being detected, as long as we were careful.

  The Fleet patrol ships and the Ek space station were my biggest concerns. There was no way they wouldn’t see us coming in.

  MF, meek and apologetic, helped out with that. He temporarily disabled the St. Clare’s transponder tag. It is strictly illegal to conceal a ship’s ID. Travellers do it. But remembering the teenage Fleet pilot we had spoken with last time we were here, I gambled that he wouldn’t shoot first, and he didn’t. Ignoring his hails, we deorbited.

  I didn’t think Burden would dare to come back here after what happened on Yesanyase Skont. But I didn’t want to take a chance on it, and anyway, we didn’t have time to mess with spaceport paperwork.

  So we didn’t land at the spaceport.

  Flying by wire, in the midst of a blizzard, Dolph put the ship down on the plaza in front of the Mittel Trevoyvox Extraction Ventures building.

  Clouds of vaporized snow and slush boiled up around the ship. When I came out of the airlock, I found myself looking down—down, down—into the guns of a Sixer rifle squad.

  Nose to tail, the St. Clare almost filled the plaza. You have to put a spaceship down in the middle of a city before you really appreciate how big it is.

  “Get His Majesty,” I yelled down at the Sixers. “And water. Water, water!”

  Martin shouldered past me, lugging a satchel of nozzle adaptors and sediment filters.

  Justin jogged out of the MTEV building.

  I went down the ladder. “I apologize for dropping in on you like this.” The snowclouds dimmed the day. Flakes whirled around Justin and his honor guard—two Eks and two Sixers, massive in mithrik fur hats and heavy capes. “Any trouble from that direction?” I nodded towards the spaceport.

  “None.” Justin was stiff, wary. “Rumor says that Burden has left the planet.”

  “Got a favor to ask of you, Justin.”

  “I am happy to provide you with water. It costs nothing.” His people were already bustling around the St. Clare, leaning ladders up against her tail to reach the water ports, connecting firehoses. Many of the Sixers used to work at the spaceport before the Burden era. They knew the refuelling drill.

  “I appreciate it,” I said. “But that’s not the favor.”

  Before I could explain, Queen Morshti strode up to us, wrapped in a mithrik-fur cape with holes for xis six arms. “So, back you come.” Slitted yellow eyes drank up the length of the St. Clare’s hull. Snowflakes melted when they touched the hot steel. My ship appeared to be sweating, like a racehorse after a gallop. “Justin, kill the off-worlders and ransom the ship. Pay handsomely for a craft like this, Burden would.”

  “He might, if he were here,” Justin said.

  Dolph was climbing out of the port airlock. I waved to him. “I’m about to ask you to stick your neck out for us, and very possibly get in trouble with the HA,” I said to Justin. “You gotta hide these two people, at all costs.”

  Dolph descended the ladder with Zane and Pippa. He pushed Zane forward first. The Traveller’s ankles were tied together with just enough slack to let him walk. His shoulders sagged. “This is one of Burden’s people,” Dolph said. “Might be useful to you down the line. Don’t kill him if you can help it. He was a good infantry officer once.”

  Justin barely glanced at the shivering man before gesturing to his guards to take him away. “And this?”

  Pippa walked forward without having to be prompted. She was wearing a pair of Irene’s pants and a fleece of Dolph’s, both too big for her. On her feet were her own HA-issue sneakers, already caked with snow. She brushed at the flakes on her hair. “Hello, uh, Your Majesty. My name is Pippa. I’m a refugee … like you, I guess. There’s no place for me in the Cluster anymore. So … here I am. I hope I’m not imposing.”

  It’s a felony to remove a deportee from the Hurtworlds.

  But I wasn’t removing Pippa from the Hurtworlds.

  Because Mittel Trevoyvox was a Hurtworld, too.

  I realized this was not ideal. In fact, it was so far from ideal it went all the way around the planet and kicked ideal in the ass. But what else could I do? At least Pippa and Justin were both royal. They’d have something in common to talk about.

  “She doesn’t eat much,” I said heartily, trying to hurry this along. “And she’s got a great singing voice.”

  “I won’t be any trouble, Your Majesty,” Pippa said hopefully.

  Justin broke his silence at last. Huskily, he said, “Call me Justin.”

  “Tanks at ninety percent,” Martin yelled from the tail of the ship. “They got no LOX.”

  I had been prepared for that. “We can make it on what we got,” I yelled back. “So Justin, it’s OK if she stays? I have to warn you that Burden’s people are out for her blood.” I did not mention the TrZam 008, now hanging inside Pippa’s fleece on its chain, which Martin had repaired for her. That was for her to divulge, or not. “My assumption is that the Travellers think the Fleet arrested her when they boarded us in the Yesanyase Skont system. So if you keep her hidden, they’ll never know she’s here.”

  Justin straightened his back. “We can do that.” He took off his coat, with its fur lining and long split skirt. “Your teeth are chattering.” He carefully draped the coat around Pippa’s shoulders. A good two feet of it pooled on the ground.

  “By the Law,” Morshti said. Eks swear by the law, even if their lives are one long story of breaking it. Kinda like how I swear by Christ. “What next? We already have enough pets.”

  Dolph, watching the timer on his sleeve display, said, “Five minutes.”

  “Justin, we have to go,” I said apologetically.

  Justin pulled me into an embrace. He was so much bigger than me that I felt like a child being hugged by a grownup. His upper set of arms went around my neck, and the lower set seemed to be fondling my ass, but I knew he didn’t mean anything by it. The buttons of his uniform scraped my cheek. “You have always brought us good luck, Mike. Keep some of it for your
self.”

  “Four minutes,” Dolph said. “Stay safe, you four-armed freak.” He hugged Justin. Then we ran—yes, ran—back to the ship. We had only four minutes left before the Ek space station came over the horizon.

  It had a thirty-six-minute orbital period. That meant that for twenty-two minutes out of every orbit, its radar eyes could not see New Abilene-Qitalhaut. We had been on the ground for less than 22 minutes. Therefore, the space station had not seen us land outside the spaceport. And if we could take off fast enough, neither the Eks nor the Fleet would be able to tell that our launch trajectory hadn’t started in quite the right place.

  I started up the ladder.

  MF blocked the port side airlock.

  “Outta the way,” I yelled.

  MF’s force field expanded like a flying car’s levitation bubble. He dropped through the air as lightly as a snowflake, and hovered an arm’s length from me.

  “You can fly,” I said in shock.

  “That is what my force field capacity is for.” The whirling snow outlined his force field. It was now spherical. He floated under it like a little square zeppelin. “Goodbye, Captain.”

  “Get back in the ship.” I leaned off the ladder and swiped at him. He drifted further away.

  “I am not coming with you, Captain.”

  “Why not?” All my suspicions rushed back. MF had acted penitent during the latter half of our flight. But had that been a front? Was he planning to eliminate Pippa as soon as my back was turned?

  Sensing my suspicion, MF waved giddily at the ground, where Pippa, Justin, and everyone else were gaping up at the flying robot. “I shall not hurt her. I will only observe her, to make sure the threat is contained. It will not be a long vigil. Soon enough, IVK will destroy her cognitive capacity, and the threat will be at an end.”

  I was having trouble processing this. “You can’t leave the St. Clare.”

  “The St. Clare is just a ship,” MF hissed. “I can build another ship anytime.” He pitched downwards, calling out, “Hello, lovely ladies of Mittel Trevoyvox! Are you ready to party?”

  Dolph crowded behind me on the ladder. “Two minutes,” he gritted. “Either we let him stay, or we stay.”

  No time to discuss it. We launched with one minute to go, flashing the snow into fog around the haunches of the MTEV building. By a margin of seconds, we got high enough to mask our trajectory before the Ek space station came over the horizon.

  The Fleet hailed us again on the way out. We stayed silent, anonymous, and kept burning. Unlike at Yesanyase Skont, the patrol ship had no chance of stopping us. I had programmed our outwards acceleration burn in advance, and calculated our launch trajectory to point the ship in the direction of Ponce de Leon without an orbital positioning leg. Mittel Trevoyvox shrank, a snow globe stranded in the dark.

  “MF,” I said into the intercom, and then remembered. I would have to calculate the oxygen-sparing protocols myself.

  30

  This would be the fastest flight we had ever attempted. The Fleet believed we would run straight back to Ponce de Leon from Yesanyase Skont. Travelling at the maximum speed possible for a civilian ship, by the shortest possible route, we would have made that trip in 16 days. Our Mittel Trevoyvox stunt had cost us two days. So now we had a little under 14 days to get home.

  The cargo hold was empty. We were two down, counting MF. We were short on oxygen. I decided it was time to see what the St. Clare could do.

  “Raise our multiplier to 1,980,” I said.

  “I’m really not fucking sure about this,” Dolph said.

  “If there’s any ship in the Cluster that can do it, it’s the one MF built.”

  “Yeah,” Dolph muttered. “But MF’s not here.”

  We were alone on the bridge, five days out. It was shipboard night, meaning that we had the lights down to spare our circadian rhythms. The virtual displays in our AR headsets pulsed in the dark. I had dialed the climate control systems back to direct every spare watt of power to the skip field generator, so the ship was hot. Stripped to undershorts, skin sticking to the pleather covers of of our couches, we poked and tweaked our displays in silence.

  We could fly the ship without MF’s help, of course. We had a powerful computer fully capable of calculating and executing course adjustments. It just meant that we had to spend a lot of time on the bridge, one person monitoring our calculated position and the other checking his work, instead of leaving the triple-checks to MF.

  I had come to rely too heavily on MF to backstop my math. I went into space because I loved space, not differential equations. But if this was to be the last time I ever flew the St. Clare, it seemed fitting that I should do it myself.

  “Raising multiplier,” Dolph said. A light jolt creaked the bulkheads. “Velocity is now 1,980 c.”

  “I get 2.12% of shortening,” I said.

  “2.12% confirmed.”

  We weren’t talking about baking cakes. We were talking about the fact that the St. Clare, and everything inside it, including us, was now 2.12% shorter as measured along our direction of travel. FTL is freaky shit. In practical terms, shortening has knock-on effects on AM power generation and thermoconversion, which we had to compensate for. By the time we got through that, my brain felt muzzy with figuring. Sleep deprivation, and worry about blowback from the Yesanyase Skont mess, also broke down my reserve.

  “Are you sure you don’t know what happened to those 75 KGCs?” I said.

  The money missing from the Uni-Ex Shipping corporate account remained a mystery. Justin’s payment had gone through, but after everything was accounted for, we were still short 75 KGCs. That was quite a chunk of change. I had been grumbling about it to everyone. They all denied any knowledge of the missing funds, but I’d got a hint of evasiveness from Dolph.

  I sensed the same thing again as he popped his straps and floated up to the ceiling. “Mary must’ve withdrawn it.”

  Unfortunately, I had no way of telling. The most irritating thing about the EkBank—apart from the fact that it’s owned by Eks—is that you can’t share accounts. So the corporate account was in my name, but the whole crew, plus Mary, our office manager, had access to it.

  I used to trust them implicitly.

  Now I wasn’t sure.

  Martin and Irene’s betrayal over the TrZam 008 had left a coldness between us. As if that wasn’t enough, Dolph also seemed distant.

  I never thought the day would come when I didn’t know what was going through his mind.

  But I would never have expected him to go on a bender on Yesanyase Skont, either.

  “Listen,” I said to his naked feet and legs, as he drifted off the bridge. “I know you weren’t a hundred percent on board with this job to begin with.”

  “You tell me if I was right,” his voice came back.

  “It’s too soon to say.” I released my straps, floated up, flexed my fingertips against the ceiling consoles. I floated in a constellation of LEDs and screens. Dolph drifted away into the darkness of the trunk corridor. I called after him, “What did you do on Yesanyase Skont while we were out looking for Pippa?”

  “Got bombed out of my skull, of course.” His voice cut like a cheap knife. “Walked all the way around the lake, thinking the turtles were alive and the wind in the reeds was Necros. Picked up a girl, took her to a jehoula, fucked her. Slept. Woke up, the girl was gone. Went back to the ship.”

  “I knew you were tweaking.”

  “At least I’m not the one running out the clock on IVK, pretending there’s nothing wrong.” Dolph slapped the wall. Light sliced into the corridor. The shadow of his legs flickered across it. The door of his berth thumped shut.

  I looked up and down the corridor, nerves twitching. Had anyone heard that? Of course, Martin had already heard me tell Sophia that I had IVK. He hadn’t said anything to me about it, but we’d hardly been speaking, anyway.

  I woke Irene for her bridge shift and went into my berth. I had a bottle of glacier rak, a souven
ir from Yesanyase Skont. Glacier rak actually comes from Marth Uthom, in the Ek sector of the Cluster. There’s a sect of little Marth Uthomese contemplatives who make a spiritual discipline out of fermenting this spicy liquor, and make a mint selling it to off-worlders. The bottle was sewn from the bright green hide of some alien animal, and I figured Lucy would like to have it as a water bottle. But before I could give it to her, I had to remove the glacier rak from it. Now seemed like a good time. Squeezing a fiery mouthful down my gullet, I floated at a tilt to the walls of my berth, contemplating how little I had achieved. I had not found any of the answers I craved. The Temple is going to fall with you inside it. What would I tell Lucy? And to top it all off, the missing 75 KGCs put us in the red for the run.

  Not that that mattered, as I was going to sell the St. Clare, anyway.

  The skin bottle felt light in my hand. I squeezed a final burning trickle into my mouth. Slapped the door open.

  “Dolph!” I banged on his door.

  Irene looked out of the bridge.

  “I know he’s not asleep,” I explained.

  Dolph opened the door. “What?”

  His berth was brightly lit, in defiance of shipboard night, and sweltering hot. The combination of spartan austerity and messiness always reminded me of his apartment on Ponce de Leon. Discarded clothes and food wrappers gyred where the air streams from the fans met. He had a holobook on a desk that hinged across his bunk. Lap straps floated.

  I drifted around him and pulled myself down to look at the holobook screen. He was working on our operating expenses breakdown. Would’ve been Robbie’s job, if he was here.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Too hot.”

  “Yeah.” Trying to justify my intrusion, I reached down to the keyboard and checked file history.