Double Life

by S. Usher Evans

  "Will this be enough water? I can go out and start looking for firewood now—"

  "You know," Lyssa said, starting to realize with a terribly guilty feeling that she was going to have to leave him there. "I think the tree species we found earlier today—the one by that field—would make excellent firewood. I’m worried that the burning temperature of the wood in this forest won’t be hot enough…"

  She swallowed, hoping he would continue to believe every last lie she told him.

  "Oh, you know," Vel nodded, "I think you’re right. I’ll head out that way—will you be okay here by yourself?"

  "Yeah," Lyssa lied, guilt eating her alive. "I’m going to take a shower and start analysis. Just…take your time."

  "Right!" Vel grinned, looking like he was pleased they were finally getting along. "I'll be back in an hour or so!"

  Lyssa watched him jog out into the forest and tried to remind herself that she was already going to burn in Plegethon for much worse.

  ***

  "All right, Mr. Delmur," Razia said, cracking her knuckles. She was halfway past Leveman’s Vortex, finally to a point where she could get some serious work done on her new project.

  Razia analyzed Delmur’s picture for a moment. Middle-aged, and perhaps slightly neurotic with small eyes and big glasses. He wouldn’t be too difficult to take down—assuming he didn’t have a crew.

  She clicked on his known accomplices—usually a good indicator if the pirate had a crew or not. Happily, the first couple of names came up with pirates who hadn’t been heard from in years, which meant he probably didn't have a crew.

  "Let’s see about these aliases," Razia said, clicking on the button to expand the list. Her eyes slowly widened as the page of aliases kept getting longer and longer…

  And longer.

  And longer.

  And longer…she guessed at least five hundred aliases on the list.

  "Ooh boy." She swallowed, sitting back for a moment. Well, Dissident wasn’t going to make it easy.

  She brought up another window to log into the bank intranet. She typed in the first name—Luka Arular—just to see what would come up.

  The first thing she noticed was all his transactions were from fifteen years ago. Closing that window, she searched on the next alias:

  Again, all from over fifteen years ago. She tried another three aliases from the middle of the list and, still, same result. Sitting back, she chewed on her thumb, deep in thought. There were a lot of aliases there; it could absolutely be possible that she'd just happened to find the only five that were fifteen years old.

  On a whim, she searched all records across the UBU internet for any sign of Evet Delmur.

  Nothing, but she should've expected that.

  Switching back to the bank intranet and pirate web, she looked at the list of bounties and sighed unhappily. She supposed she would have to search every single one of them.

  After all, one of them had to be more recent, right?

  ***

  Six hours, five hundred thirty-four failed alias searches, and four cups of coffee later, one thing was certain:

  Razia was in serious trouble.

  Not one alias she'd come up with was more recent than fifteen years ago. And she'd even tried cross-checking the location of a few of them together. Nothing.

  It was like the guy had just up and disappeared.

  With nowhere else to turn, she found herself hurrying along the dusty streets of D-882. If anyone would know where Evet Delmur was, Harms would.

  She burst into his bar, red faced and sweaty. Because her day was going so well, the shuttle system had broken down again, and instead of waiting for another car, she'd run the whole seven miles to the bar.

  "Hey, Raz," Harms said, gesturing to the person seated in front of him, a rat-faced, black-haired man. "I’m kind of—"

  "Emergency," she panted out.

  Harms sighed. "Linro, I’ll call you later, okay?"

  "Fine," he grumbled, getting out of the booth and giving Razia a dirty look.

  "Thank you," she said, slumping down into his booth.

  "Here, have some water," Harms said, sliding his glass over to her. "Now where's the fire?"

  "Dissidentgavemebountycan’tfind," Razia sputtered out.

  "One more time?"

  "Dissident," Razia said, after she gulped down the water. "He gave me a bounty. A good one."

  "Dissident actually gave you someone worth looking for?" Harms said. "That’s amazing!"

  "Yeah, he did." Razia nodded, pulling out her mini-computer. "But I can’t…I can’t find anything on him."

  "Well, that’s not a reason to run in here like your hair is on fire," Harms chided her. "That was a paying customer too—"

  "He gave me three days—two now," she said. "And if I don’t find him, I’m out of the web."

  "Dissident always threatens to throw you out."

  "Yeah, but this time I think he’s serious," Razia said, trying to get him to understand. "I mean, he’s never given me a bounty this high before and he told me if I found him, he’d give me some serious bounties."

  "Wow," Harms said, looking impressed. "Who is it?"

  "Evet Delmur."

  "Wait a minute, Evet Delmur?" Harms blinked, as if he recognized the name. "Dissident wants you to bring in Evet Delmur?"

  "Yeah. What’s the problem?"

  "Nothing, except…" Harms looked as if he were trying to find the right words. "I mean, he’s sort of retired now. Nobody’s really seen him for at least fifteen years…"

  Razia’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head as her worst fears were realized. "What? Dissident gave me a dead bounty?"

  "He’s not dead, per se. Just not an active pirate, that’s all," Harms replied, less confidently than he had sounded before. "I mean, he’s still out there, somewhere."

  "So if nobody’s seen him, why is his bounty so high?"

  "Well, when he was active, he was incredibly paranoid. So much so that he’d never been caught. He had over two hundred aliases at one point," Harms said. "Then he had a heart attack from all the stress, and decided to retire…"

  "So Dissident gave me a retired, paranoid pirate?" Razia blinked, sitting back. "With a million aliases that haven’t been used in fifteen years. And you can’t tell me anything about him?"

  "I mean, I… Can’t you go back and ask Dissident for another bounty?"

  "I am so screwed," she whispered, dropping her head on the table. And worse still, she'd put herself in this position. If she hadn’t opened her big mouth…

  "Maybe not," Harms said, gently. "Look, I do know he got a job as a raw materials transporter near G-245 shortly after he retired. My guess is that he might still be doing that."

  Razia lifted her head from the table to look at him. "That’s it?"

  "That’s all I got." Harms shrugged.

  Razia saw something behind his eyes that made her think he had more. But she didn’t feel like pressing her luck—she had a planet she could use to narrow her search.

  "It’s enough." Razia nodded, reaching into her pocket to grab her C-card.

  "No, this one’s on the house," Harms shook his head. "I insist."

  "Thank you," she said, unsure if she would've been able to afford Harms’ high prices at this point. "I owe you one."

  ***

  G-245, it turned out, was an uninhabitable planet with an abundance of naturally occurring raw material. Enormous mining communities were established on the surface, drilling deep into the planet’s crust to extract some of the most sought-after ores. The mining communities shipped the materials to thousands of satellite hub stations, where transporters were waiting to ship the materials across the galaxy to refining stations and distributers.

  Razia sat on her bridge, absent-mindedly chewing her lip. Even from this far away, she could see thousands of satellite stations, and little ships puttering to and from them.

  It would probably take her months to hit every single one of them. />
  But she was down to less than two days, and she needed a miracle or to get very lucky.

  "Okay, Razia," she said, talking to herself. "What would Tauron do?"

  Her mind was blank.

  "Seriously," she said, closing her eyes and picturing Tauron in her mind. But the only thing she could come up with was him telling her to figure it out herself.

  She dropped her head to her dashboard. The cool steel felt good. But she still had no idea where to start.

  She heard a beeping, and for a brief moment worried that Vel, or even Dr. Pymus was calling. As luck would have it, it was neither of them.

  "So I heard from a little bird that you've got a hot bounty." Sage smiled and wiggled his eyebrows. "Find him yet?"

  "No," she snapped, not looking up at him.

  "Really? Aren’t you a damned good bounty hunter? Isn’t that what you told Relleck?"

  "I'm in no mood for this."

  "Oh, come on. I'm just playing. I actually called to see if you needed any help."

  "Why, because you don't think I can find him either?"

  "Well, if you were having any luck finding him, I assume you'd have found him by now…" Sage glanced at some unseen point above the video call. "As you've got less than a day to bring him in."

  "Dammit," she said, burying her head in her hands. She'd completely lost track of time. The pressure in her chest was starting to build again as she turned over all of the consequences of not finding this bounty in time.

  "Have you slept?"

  "No."

  "You should probably do that at some point," he said. "You know you get cranky when you don't sleep."

  "Get sucked into Leveman’s Vortex."

  "Okay, okay. Just here to help. So what did Harms tell you about him?"

  "He's been hanging around G-245."

  "Now, see, that's not what he told you." Sage sighed. "You never listen, do you?"

  "Okay, what did he tell you then? And why was he even talking to you about me anyway?"

  "Harms said he was a transporter. And what do transporters do?"

  She gave him a mean look.

  "I'm serious," Sage said. "What do they do?"

  "Transport shit."

  He sighed again. "You know, if you're going to have this attitude..."

  She looked up at him again, expectantly.

  "Look, what kind of guy are you hunting?"

  "Old guy." Razia wasn't sure what he was getting at.

  "Not just old," Sage said, looking as if he was hinting at something.

  "Paranoid?"

  "What’s the other P word?"

  "Pirate?" Razia said, raising her eyebrow.

  "So you’ve got an old, paranoid pirate." Sage nodded. "Do you really think he went completely legitimate?"

  "I know he's not using his real name," Razia said. "Hence my problem."

  "God in Leveman’s Vortex." Sage rolled his eyes. "Okay, I’m gonna make this really simple for you. Most—if not all—transporters have gotten hijacked at one point or another by pirates. It’s just what makes the universe expand."

  "Yeah, and?"

  "Do you think a former pirate would get hijacked?" Sage said. "Do you think that maybe, just maybe, he’s got some deal worked out with the runners to keep pirates off his back?"

  Razia looked up at him, her mind turning. "Are there records of on-time percentages for transporters?"

  "Yeeeees." Sage nodded at her. "Now you’re getting it."

  "So if I were to find maybe the top hundred with their on-time percentages—cross-check to see which ones had filed insurance claims and see if any of them hadn’t."

  "You’re welcome."

  She snorted, willing the blush to stay off her face. "I would've figured it out eventually."

  "Yeah and by that time, you would've been coming to me, begging me to hire you on my crew," Sage said. "And, as funny as that would be for me, living with you isn't my favorite thing in the world."

  Razia, searching the transporters' on-time percentages, paused to give him a dirty look. "I am a fine roommate."

  "You are messy, and kind of mean," Sage shrugged.

  "You're just a baby, that’s all," she said, pulling up transaction records of the transporter with the highest on-time percentage.

  For a transporter, he didn’t have that many purchases—not for gas, not for food, not even for a room to sleep in at night. While some transporters slept on their ships, something wasn’t adding up.

  "You said I had chicken legs!" Sage barked at her.

  "You do!" Razia replied, plotting out his route on a star map. There were plenty of gaps—there was no way this guy could've made it from one gas fill-up to another without refueling somewhere.

  "Okay, yeah, when I was thirteen," Sage said, pouting. "But my legs are manly now!"

  "Yeah, manly," Razia said, calculating the probable time that the transporter needed to stop for fuel, and identifying any stations in the general vicinity based on the average rate of speed. Three stations and five transactions met her criteria.

  "Well, Annber said they were gorgeous," Sage muttered.

  "Who?" Razia said, snapping from her thoughts.

  "Girl I met at Eamon’s. I think she’s the one."

  "You say that about every girl you meet," Razia said, going back to her bounty. She tried the same tactic with another gap in transaction fueling—checking any stations in the area where he'd have to refuel based on his current route.

  And at the second refueling station, she saw an identical name.

  "Found him." Razia said.

  "No shit, you did not find him already."

  Razia simply ended the call and set a course for S-6642.

  ***

  She sat in the diner, staring at a cold cup of coffee, and glancing at the time on her mini-computer every few seconds. Outside the window was the blackness of space, and on the other side was a dock that was mostly empty, but that had been filled with transport ships off and on for the past few hours.

  Just to be sure of her hunch, she'd spent the entire trip over there mapping out three weeks’ worth of activities and uncovering three other aliases. When added together, it painted an exact picture of a transport route going to G-245 to S-6642, a recently settled planet that was still being built up.

  The diner where she was sitting was on all five aliases’ transaction records (at different times). Based on his total pattern and regular route timing, she could reasonably expect him to show up soon.

  She looked around the diner and sighed, wondering just when he would show up. There was a rather bored-looking cook behind the counter, reading a book, while the only waitress was smoking and doing a crossword puzzle.

  By the looks of the place, it didn't get much business.

  Her mini-computer buzzed and her heart leaped from her chest. One of the five transporter accounts had just paid for an hour's worth of parking and begun refueling.

  Any minute now.

  She readied herself for action—if he ran, or if he stayed to fight. Hard to tell how he'd react to being captured after all these years.

  The door opened. Razia took a deep breath and looked up, ready to meet her destiny.

  He was old.

  Really old.

  As in, she could probably break something if she tapped him.

  His back was hunched, and his hands shook as he put his C-card back in his pocket. His hair was combed over his spotted head, and his suspenders were keeping up loose-fitting pants. He pulled off his thick glasses to wipe them on his handkerchief, then placed them in his pocket.

  But it was definitely Evet Delmur.

  "Hey there, Fred," the waitress said, as he sidled into the seat. "The usual?"

  He nodded, and the waitress put a cup of coffee in front of him. "Darn kids these days, they—"

  He paused when he realized Razia was staring at him.

  Delmur let out a sigh and pushed himself off the stool. She watched, tense, as he sauntered ove
r to her table.

  "All right. What do you want?"

  "Excuse me?" she said, her own voice sounding weird.

  "You been pinging my accounts. Why?"

  "I've been... How did you know I was pinging your accounts?"

  "Honey, I own the transporter company. I'm not some two-bit pirate. I got alarms and alerts all over those search results."

  She narrowed her eyes at him. "I thought you were retired."

  "I am retired," he grunted. "So where's your boyfriend...I've got to set him straight."

  "What boyfriend?" Razia asked, confused.

  "The one who sent you in here to distract me while he came around back to capture me." He looked around. "I know this trick."

  She blinked at him, then slid out of the table, her temper flaring. "I am here to bring you in."

  "So now they’re sending little girls?" He chortled. "The runners have sunk to a new low."

  Razia’s face fell from a frown into a scowl. "Little girl?"

  "Oh," he said, blinking. "Are you...serious?"

  "Do you think I would've spent so much time on you if I wasn’t?" She was beside herself with fury, and wanted to haul his laughing ass in as soon as she possibly could to wipe that grin off his face.

  "Honey, I’m retired. You run along and find yourself some other low bounty to chase after."

  "No, Dissident said—"

  He began to laugh.

  "What's so funny?"

  "Now I get it!"

  "What?" Razia said, confused.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag. "When you see Dissident, send him my apologies for not getting this to him sooner."

  "What in Leveman’s is this?" Razia said.

  "Chocolates, from H-876. I fly by there on occasion and Dissident always has me bring him some of the finest. I’m sure that’s why he sent you to pick them up for him."

  He tossed the bag on the table, and she stared at it, dumbfounded.

  "I...I'm not...I mean..."

  "I know Dissident, and he'd rather die than let some woman in his web." Delmur laughed. "None of them runners like the idea. Just not natural."

  She swallowed, praying that she could keep shame and embarrassment off her face. It could've been a trick, but his words were true. She'd been too preoccupied with finally getting a decent bounty that she'd never questioned why. She should've known something was up—especially when Dissident began to barter with her.