Tyche's Deceit

by Richard Parry

“Do you want to know all the dirty secrets of this world?” she said.

  “Not especially,” he said again, but slower this time.

  “Sometimes we don’t get what we want,” she said, holstering her blaster in a smooth motion. Practiced, like she was used to shooting fools six times before breakfast. “They call me Amedea.”

  “Why’s that?” said Nate.

  “Because it’s my name,” said Amedea. “And I specialize in giving the Republic what they deserve.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GOT STUFF TO do. Don’t wait up.

  El looked at the message on her console, read it a second time, then a third. It was odd, not because Hope had sent a message. Hope was the kind of soul who preferred engines to people. But if people had to be involved, it would be through messages, or fogged by the haze of alcohol or something harder. No, messages from Hope were a staple of shipboard life on the Tyche. The odd part here was Hope had left the ship.

  She was wanted for — what was that term the Republic beaks used? Financial Obligation Avoidance. It was a charge that carried time, with labor. If Hope was snared in someone’s net, she’d go somewhere with chains on her wrists and a debt on her life that would last out her natural span. Fringe worlds out along the edge of Republic influence gave a little more leeway, letting you buy them off before they tossed you to the wolves. Here on Earth? Hope couldn’t put a foot out the airlock without covering her face. Since her rig had been destroyed out in the Absalom system, that was an easy option removed. Hope would need something to cover her eyes against retinal scanning, and her face for systems that could know who you were by how you held your mouth. Something to mask her voice too. Yeah, the rig would have been perfect, if it wasn’t space junk.

  El sighed, leaned forward in her acceleration couch, and stretched. Something in her back popped, then something followed in her shoulder. Too many hard Gs, El. You’ll give yourself a stroke if you’re not careful. She read Hope’s note one more time. “Hope Baedeker, what are you up to?”

  Sitting here wouldn’t answer the question. El pushed herself upright, snared her beer from the console, and walked back through the Tyche’s ready room. The usual things were absent — none of Kohl’s bad coffee, or Grace’s even worse coffee. No food smells, just a couple empty beer cans from El’s earlier efforts. Nate had said she should get some shore leave, and she would. Soon. Right now, she wanted to make sure her ship was okay. El wanted to spend a little time alone with the Tyche, because the ship had been through worse situations in the last week than she had in her entire service in the brief war between the Old Empire and the Republic.

  Rubbing her face, El sighed again. The beer was making her maudlin, but it also made her realize the Tyche didn’t need her. It’s not like she was an Engineer, and if the Engineer had left the ship, the only things El would test were the lights, showers, and toilets. She sniffed her ship suit: she could stand to test the showers a little more. El grabbed her empties from the bench in the small galley, tossed them in the recycler, and looked at her faint reflection in the door of the convection oven. Hair, a mess. Lines, all over her face. Sneer, firmly in place. Nothing there made her proud, and she wondered who this person was looking back at her. When she was a kid, she’d expected to grow up and see an adult staring back at her. Now that time was here — had been here for more years than she wanted to admit to at the birthday parties Nate insisted on — she wasn’t pleased with what she saw.

  Fuck it. El turned on her heel, heading back to the supply room. There’d be beer and, if she was right about Kohl’s special hiding place, something a lot stronger. Food that wasn’t good to eat, the stuff you ate when you weren’t hungry.

  Got stuff to do.

  What stuff did Hope have to do that would have put her out in the streets to get caught up in the Republic’s net?

  Don’t wait up.

  “Oh, damn. Hope, what are you up to?” El paused at the airlock between the ready room to the rest of the ship. “Elspeth, you need to get out more.” Kohl’s single malt could wait. A shower couldn’t.

  • • •

  Bright. The goddamn sky was bright. It was full of fire and the righteous fury of angels.

  If it feels like that when it’s raining, you’ll have a rough time when the clouds clear.

  El pushed her visor up her face, the tints cutting out some of the glare. You spend too much time on a ship, lights at a cool low burn, you lost the taste for real sun. Earth’s warm yellow sun was a balm to the soul. It was supposed to give your heart something to hold onto out in the hard black. Right now, it felt like the sky was judging El for her earlier mistakes in life. It wasn’t even trying to reach too far back. It wasn’t saying, El, you’re a coward who’ll run out on your friends, because that wasn’t true. Not anymore, or at least, not most of the time. When she had the sticks under her fingertips, El knew she could fight with the best of them. It was more … personal conflict she shied away from.

  No, the sun was judging her for too many beers before lunch. Plain and simple, the ball of fire was trying to sear away the clouds, so’s to better touch her ship-softened retinas.

  Despite her time in the shower, she could still smell said beer on herself. At least it’d get her a little personal space. El didn’t mind people so much, she was used to cramped quarters, cramped galleys, cramped toilets from her time in the Navy, but after a long stretch on a ship with just a handful of people, she could use a bit of time to acclimate to the busy nature of things.

  The docks were like docks the universe over. Ships facing the sky. Dock hands yelling at each other. Cargo lifters carrying things from place to place, some automated, a few manual. Ships blasting by overhead, streams of fusion fire pushing them towards the stars. El paused, taking it in. She had a few Republic coins in her pocket, her sidearm — because Earth wasn’t the safest place in the universe, despite the sun’s judgment of people on the crust — at her hip, and her visor over her face. No particular destination in mind. The big question for the fans at home was: where had Hope gone?

  El clicked her comm, the Tyche’s cargo bay closing under a groan of servos behind her. The ship was locking down, waiting for someone who cared about her to open her back up again. Until then, she’d stand quiet, alone, and vigilant. El watched the bay doors until they clanged shut, bolts sliding into place, lock seals firm. She pursed her lips at the scar in the hull that came from over the top and down to the back. It was patched with shiny new metal, but that scar was because El hadn’t been good enough on the sticks. Sure, there had been aliens after them, and she’d been trying to fly close to a Republic destroyer under full thrust, but all those things sounded like excuses. That scar was how close El had come to getting them all killed. The scar said she wasn’t as good as she thought she was. The Tyche’s face, a woman painted on the side of the ship, winked down at El.

  Time to pay back a little broken trust.

  She found her way across the ceramicrete to a group of dock workers. Greasy, rough, laughing a little too loud. Normally just her type of people. But they quietened as she drew closer, which wasn’t the expected reaction. The eyes swiveled her way — nothing too unusual about that — but then the eyes swiveled towards the Tyche. The Tyche had no cargo to unload, no business drawing attention from dock hands. Be cool, El. Be cool. “Hey,” she said.

  One of them, a woman trying to look like dock trash with her overalls and smudged skin, but who failed to hide the physique given to her by long hours of physical training, took a step forward. The hardness about her might have been military service, or police work, or rubbing shoulders with an underground enforcer squad. It wasn’t lifting crates. Her hands were too soft, her eyes too hard. “Hey yourself.”

  “Looking for a beer,” said El. “Just put boots down.”

  “Expensive beer or cheap beer?” said the woman.

  “I’m not proud,” said El.

  “You want to get yourself to The Merchant’s Daughter,” said the wom
an. “Cheap beer. Earth-made, too.”

  “Thanks,” said El. “Be seeing you.”

  “Sure,” said the woman, turning back to the other dock hands.

  Now here’s what we call ‘a pickle.’ Hope will have found a rough bar to get another rig from someone who won’t ask too many questions. Somewhere like The Merchant’s Daughter would be perfect, if the beer’s cheap enough for an easy crowd. Problem is, these assholes will try and tag and bag me when I get there. They might want to ask questions. They might want to find any one of the reprobates El crewed with. Kohl was an easy target, he’d killed too many of the wrong people to avoid notice. Nate admitted to a little smuggling, which meant quite a lot of smuggling. Grace Gushiken was an esper, the same type of person who’d caused the Old Empire to fall. The Republic wanted to burn them all out, get to the bottom of their coven, and even a faulty unit like Grace was on their shopping list. Hope was wanted for a debt she could never pay, given to her by a wife who cared too much about gambling and not enough about the people close to her.

  Hell. The only person on the Tyche who wasn’t at least a little dirty was El herself. For someone who hated danger, she wasn’t sure how surrounding herself with criminals had come to pass. Most of the time the people trying to kill the rest of the crew missed her, which was fine, but this time? It felt like this time, they were all in the wrong place at the wrong time. El would get killed, by the Republic, and if not them, one gang or another.

  El sniffed at the clean Earth air. At least the atmosphere wasn’t trying to kill her. Not yet.

  • • •

  Her heart was pounding.

  Could have been the booze in her system, sugars making her jittery. Since she’d said goodbye to her early thirties and stopped answering questions about whether she was late thirties or early forties, El couldn’t handle the booze like her younger self had. Her younger self would sling back enough rum to cripple an old man with gout, sleep it off, or just ignore her bunk and go on shift.

  Her older self? Not so much. She tilted her visored face at the gray cloud, glaring at the brighter area the sun hid behind. It glared right back.

  The booze was a convenient excuse, except for two things.

  First thing, she hadn’t had that much. She’d tossed four dead soldiers into the recycler. Or maybe it was five. Whatever, that was barely getting started when you were on shore leave.

  Second? She felt terror. Bubbling up from somewhere behind her rib cage, tapping her heart up those few notches, making her tense her shoulders. Tense, because after she’d walked away from the dock hands, she’d paused at a holo with guided maps of the city, showing places to eat, sleep, and fuck. Everything a spacer would need. Reflected in a piece of metal, she’d seen those dock hands coming after her.

  El had pushed her visor up on her nose again, put her feet to the ceramicrete, and walked with a purpose. She’d made it into a crowd, jostling people left and right, and without thinking about it, hit a taxi. She’d dropped coins into the slot, asked the automated system to take her to The Merchant’s Daughter, and leaned back. The car, tinted windows hiding her from view, had pulled away from the busy front of the spaceport, leaving the dock hands outside. They were definitely looking for her.

  What got her palms sweaty was the Republic air cars that landed out the front as she was leaving, black armored figures running inside. The dock hands had pointed, talked, and generally been helpful, which put those assholes in the Republic military or police camp. El didn’t have much against the Republic, but she didn’t have anything for it either. And military and police were much the same thing with the Republic these days.

  The taxi had spat her out alongside the front of a dingy spacer bar, no sign outside, just a cheap flickering holo with what was, if you were a thirteen-year-old heterosexual male, a sexy girl-next-door type dancing on the stage. No bouncer at the door, just a … let’s call it rustic door, complete with dents and rusty rivets, atop steps leading to an underground bar. The holo beckoned El inside. Far be it from her to argue with advice like that; she needed more beer in her system for what was coming. A lot more beer, or a lot less, and since she was half-way there already she would start with a top-up and see how that sat with her. She gave the glaring clouds another glance, rain flecking on her visor, and stepped inside.

  • • •

  The bartender was automated, which meant it wasn’t so much of a bartender as a collection of interfaces that took your coins and gave you something in return. That was, with a little luck, what you ordered. El scrolled through the list of drinks it knew how to make, rang up a French Connection, and watched as it rattled ice into a glass, a warm-colored liquid that could have been actual cognac following the cubes. El pushed her visor up on top of her head, because the bar’s interior was shrouded in a comfortable gloom. Warm, low lighting, like the owner knew the kinds of things likely to happen if given opportunity and a comfortable corner.

  “Hey,” said a voice at her elbow. El turned, taking in a man sporting impressive muscles, with faux tribal tattoos on just about every piece of visible skin, including his face. Could be nice if you were into that kind of thing. If you had the time to be interested.

  “Hey,” said El, voice guarded. “It’s, you know. Opportunistic.”

  “Y’all…” started the man, then looked at her drink, then back to her. “What?”

  “I just got here,” said El, snaring her drink from the autobar. “I mean, usually you’d let a girl take a sip of her drink before you fired those thrusters. Bit strong, you know?”

  “The drink?” said the man.

  El took a taste from her glass, winced. At least it wasn’t watered down, but she was sure some types of ship fuel would have a better aftertaste. “Yeah, but I meant you.”

  The man laughed, big chest shaking with it. “Yeah, okay. You a pilot?”

  “Sometimes,” said El. She leaned against the bar. “Sometimes I just drink. You?”

  “Naw,” said the man. He reached out a hand. “Moses Schloss.”

  “Moses, huh?” El shook his hand. Firm. Warm. Not clammy at all. Nice. “El.”

  “Like the letter?”

  “Exactly like it.” El looked around the bar. A little early for an evening crowd, and it wasn’t the place that was going to attract a lunch rush. “You come here often?”

  “That’s supposed to be my line,” said Moses.

  “You can use it on me later,” said El. “Promise.”

  “I come here more than I don’t,” said Moses. “Why?”

  “I’m looking for someone,” said El. She caught his frown. “Hell, Moses. Don’t get all maudlin on me. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Friend, huh?” said Moses, hope returning.

  “Yeah,” said El. “You’d have struck out with her in about thirty-eight seconds, though. You’re playing for the wrong team.”

  “Ah!” said Moses. “I know who you’re talking about. Engineer?”

  “She is,” allowed El. “How’d you know?”

  “Grease,” said Moses. “Done my time inside a hull. Gets under your fingernails. Pink hair?”

  “That’s Hope,” said El.

  “Yeah, she came in here.” Moses frowned. “Left too.”

  “I figured,” said El. “She would have been after some parts.”

  Moses snapped his fingers. “Altman Razor.”

  El looked between Moses and the autobar. “That a drink?”

  “It’s a dude,” said Moses. “I mean, it might be a drink as well. But it’s a dude. Sells shit. Parts, machinery, other kinds of junk.”

  “Sounds like the right match.” El twirled her empty glass, curious about how it got so empty, so fast. “Hell, Moses. My glass is empty.”

  “They do that,” said Moses. “One of the annoying things about the universe.” He shifted his frame, biceps flexing. “I’d guess you could use a refill.”

  “I could,” said El. “What are you having?”

  “Fla
ming Jesus,” said Moses.

  She gave him a look, shrugged, and used the autobar’s console. Yep, there it is. More coins in the slot, and the machine hummed to itself. On a whim, she ordered one for herself. The autobar whirred, clicked twice, and ignited their drinks. She handed one to Moses. He took it with a nod, slapped his hand over the top to put it out, then took a hit. “Thanks.”

  “Least I could do,” said El. “Since you’ve been so helpful.” She slapped a hand over the top of her drink, taking a cautious sip. Tastes like rum. Earth assholes always got to give a simple drink a hard name. She eyed Moses’ biceps again. “So.”

  “So,” agreed Moses. He tossed her a grin. “You come here often?”

  “Not often enough,” said El, leaning closer to him. No harm seeing where this conversation went. She’d forgotten, right until that moment, how she’d come to be at this particular bar, and who had told her to come here.

  But she was reminded by the sound of boots. She whipped her head around. Black armored troops were clattering down the stairs into the bar, blasters held high. El’s mouth was open, drink half-way to her lips. Moses burst into action, screaming something that sounded like DIE MOTHERFUCKERS as he threw his glass at them, then pulled out a blaster — now where the hell had he been hiding that? — and firing at the Republic soldiers.

  El didn’t think, didn’t draw her own sidearm, she just dropped to the ground. Kohl? He’d be good at solving this kind of problem. Her? She needed to get the fuck out.

  Plasma erupted from around the bar as patrons returned fire at the Republic soldiers. Wood laminate and glass and burning alcohol rained down on El as she crawled on her elbows across the floor. She heard a scream, then another, then the whoomf as something caught fire. She spared a glance over her shoulder, saw Moses drawing a bead on a soldier, his blaster flashing blue-white fire. A moment later, Moses was gone, burning clods of what used to be a person raining down after the hail of return blaster fire from the Republic soldiers.

  El found a service door, pushing her shoulder against it. She had to get the fuck out of here, back up to daylight. She didn’t care how much the sun glared at her; at least it wasn’t trying to shoot her. She kept on her hands and knees as she made her way across what was, in a more prosperous time, a kitchen. It was now a storeroom for cheap alcohol. But there, at the back: another door. El got up, giving a glance behind her at the service door. The sound of blaster shots still came from out there, a lot of anger in the room yet to be spent. She tried to open the exterior door but found it locked. The lock was an old mechanical one, and she had no key.