“I’m sure,” said El. “I’m after a woman who bought a rig from you.”
“I don’t sell rigs,” said Altman. “I sell fine, illicit electronics.”
“Is that legal?”
“It is if they’re sold in less than working order,” said Altman, putting the hand back on her arm, just a gentle touch. “If I also sell instructions on how to make them work, well, I ask you: does that make me a criminal?”
“It … might,” said El. She removed his hand. Again.
“What are you, some kind of lawyer?”
“No,” said El. “I’m a Helm. On a starship.” Duh. Like there was another kind of Helm.
“Flygirl?” said Altman, his smile — which had never seemed to leave his face — widening.
“Isn’t that … uh, like a dancer?”
Altman smoothed his hair back. “If you want to be a dancer, who am I to stop you?” He worked his wrist console, and music with a low, slow beat played from farther back in the shop. El couldn’t tell from where, stacked piles of machinery and components hiding any hope of line of sight to a target. “You could dance here, if you like.”
“I don’t like,” said El. She smoothed her hands down the front of her flight suit, brushed her hair back, and squared her shoulders. “She was about this high,” and El held her hand out, “pink hair, Engineer. Like you.”
Altman laughed, the tone deprecating. “Oh, you flatter me. But, of course you do. I’m no Guild member. Not really, well, it’s political. I never got my Shingle. The exams, they’re rigged—”
“She would have been in here this morning,” said El, teeth gritted. “She would have paid in coins. Hard currency. For a rig. Like yours.”
“I’m sure I would have remembered a woman—” said Altman, then stopped when he saw El’s gun. His hand, again on her arm, slithered away of its own accord this time.
She hadn’t remembered drawing it. It’d been a long day, and the liquor she’d had earlier had more than worn off, leaving the sky bright and painful above her. Finding Altman had felt like the end of the trail, and now the man turned out to be a player, had some sort of idea about what would happen. “So,” said El. She pressed the gun into Altman’s stomach, but not too hard. Just enough for some motivation.
“She got my last rig, paid, and left,” said Altman, words tumbling out of his mouth. He scrabbled on his console, and the music cut off. “Pink hair, right?”
“That’s right,” said El. “Did she say where she was going?”
“Client confidentiality,” said Altman.
“You some kind of fucking doctor?” said El.
“Uh—”
“Because this,” El waved her pistol around the shop, “doesn’t look like a surgery.”
“Well—”
“An illegal chop shop isn’t a surgery,” said El. She pointed the gun at Altman for emphasis. “Where’d she go?”
“Uh,” said Altman, and wound down like an old ship’s drive, too much asked of it all at once.
El rubbed her free hand over her face. For fuck’s sake. She sighed, holstered her pistol, and cleared her throat. This guy? Just a small-time operator. Just like any weasel sitting at dock control, hard on the comm, low on principle. Lazy in thought. She knew how to fly these skies. “Mr. Razor.”
“Hi,” he said, brightening a little now El’s sidearm was back in the safety of her holster.
“Would it help if I bought something?” El gestured around her. “Look, I get the whole I’m-an-illegal-trader thing. I get it. A guy like you? He’s got a reputation to maintain.” Altman was nodding along, not even realizing it. “But it’s just that, a rep. You’ve got a sign out the front the size of a skyscraper saying you’re doing illegal shit in here. If it was true, then the Republic enforcers would be down here stretching you out like an old sock. Since they’re not, you know, and I know by proxy, that this is a sham.”
“A … what?” said Altman.
“Sham,” said El. “Oh, hell. I don’t mean nothing by that. But selling a rig in hard coin? Hardly a crime. Selling a few gizmos that don’t work? Also not a crime. Give a few rich kids something to dream about, think they’re skirting the hard line of the law? I’d bet the Republic thinks you’re doing them a favor.”
“Uh—”
“Which is fine,” said El. “I got nothing against the fine Republic, under whose flag we all sail. I used to Helm for the other side. But I meant nothing by it. You know what I mean?”
“No,” said Altman.
“Of course not, we’ve only just met,” said El. “Here’s the thing. My sidearm,” she cleared the pistol from her hip almost absently, pointing it at Altman, “is conspicuous.”
He swallowed. “I can see why people might think that. I, personally, find it charming—”
“It’s got a huge barrel,” said El. “Do you know why?”
“No,” said Altman. But he leaned forward, all Engineer curiosity. Even if he didn’t have his Guild Shingle, these people were all cut from the same cloth. “It looks like it … by the stars. Does that wonderful device fire kinetic rounds?”
“You what?” said El.
“Physical objects,” said Altman.
“Yeah, it’s a shotgun,” said El. “Single shot.” She put the sidearm away, pulled out a cartridge. “See?”
“My,” said Altman. “It’s an antique.”
“Kinda not,” said El. “Shoots pretty good.”
“Well, obviously,” and the way he said the word made El’s teeth clench, her shoulders rising towards her ears, “that specific unit is not an antique. Machined within the last fifty years, I’d say. But the design? Prehistoric.”
“Yeah, it’s conspicuous,” said El, “like I said. So something less conspicuous would help.”
“If you didn’t point it at people—”
“That’s just not a line of thought we want to go down,” said El. “I don’t like pointing it at people. You need to believe me, Mr. Razor. It’s just sometimes people get the wrong idea. You understand.”
Altman swallowed. “I guess that could happen.”
“So. Whatcha got? Something a little less conspicuous.”
“Energy weapon? Well, I’m not licensed to sell weapons—”
“Mr. Razor, I thought we were getting along so well.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Elspeth, wait. I can’t sell you one that works. But I can sell you one that almost works.”
“That sounds good enough for me,” said El, “as long as it comes with instructions on how to find my friend.”
“Don’t you mean instructions on how to make it work?” Altman sounded confused.
“I don’t give a shit,” said El. “If I find my friend, she can make it work.”
“Okay,” said Altman. “Have you ever used a maser before?”
• • •
Well, shit. This wasn’t good.
It wasn’t good because the broken maser had cost more than a maser should ever cost, but she had to admit the weapon had a certain style to it. Altman had said — when it worked — it would boil people from the inside out, which sounded effective. El hadn’t heard of personal masers before; the ones she’d used were mounted on hulls, used to cook machinery, electronics, and hundreds of people at a time on enemy ships.
It also wasn’t good because of where Hope had gone. Downtown. Which meant poortown. In any city there was a seedy underside, where people with no money and even fewer prospects lived. Because everyone needed somewhere to bunk, a shell around them to shield them from the harsh universe. The roughest of them would live downtown.
El used her wrist console, flicking through a city map. She was better among the stars, but a 2D map she could handle no problem. There. Altman had said Hope had asked him for the fastest way to get to that spot, meaning a specific building, and so that’s where El needed to go.
Because if El was right, Hope was going to find Reiko Crous-Povilaitis. Reiko, Hope’s wife, was a
liar and a thief.
El knew the story from Hope. That Hope had screwed up, gained a debt, and then run, with the Republic burning hard after her for justice. Now Hope had to live on board a ship and never feel the sun on her face again. Price of mistakes. Price of failure. Etcetera.
It had sounded like bullshit. Hope didn’t make mistakes.
No, the story was simpler, or so Nate said. Reiko had a gambling problem, and had tagged Hope with the debt of it, and let her wife take the fall. It wasn’t hard to believe, because some people were just mean. Especially if they called downtown home. Hope’s home was on the Tyche, and El just needed to remind her of that.
CHAPTER TEN
GETTING BACK TO the Tyche took some doing. There were few autotaxis willing to take him. It wasn’t the carbine. Laws on Earth allowed Republic citizens to protect themselves most any way they saw fit. It was the change from the Old Empire to the Republic that Kohl liked most. There were others, like how the Republic put down miscreants that sucked the life from the system, like that debt-runner Hope. But carrying shooting irons in the street, bars, and brothels? That worked for Kohl.
No, it was the remains of other people all over his stuff. Blood, mostly, but some other components of Republic troops that had adhered to him. The screws hadn’t bothered to launder his clothes, just left ’em in a box for him. It figured, because the box could either be given back to Kohl — let’s call that option A — or incinerated to remove any evidence (option B).
It’d been a few years since Kohl had slummed it on a subway. There was a time when the underground was a natural home — a dark place that allowed for dark deals. A place where violence wasn’t so monitored. But those days were aways back, and besides he had coin in his pockets. Good Republic coin that let him buy whatever he wanted, except when the autotaxis refused him entry.
Assholes. Even the electronics are assholes these days.
But he made it. The spaceport was like he’d left it, but the Tyche wasn’t.
As he approached the ship, there were a few crucial — El might call ’em key — differences. The first was that the Tyche was dark. None of the usual hiss of steam as the cooling systems vented. No umbilicals connecting to fueling ports in the dock.
Kohl remembered how El and Hope were supposed to be on board, keeping the home fires burning. Ready for a quick getaway. He’d expected Gracie to come back here, Kohl to use the fancy transponder in his pocket to call the Republic, and be two hundred thousand coins richer. But the ship wasn’t ready. The cargo bay doors had been sealed, the ship locked down. There were people home, and none of them were named Nate, El, Hope, or Grace. They were strangers and they’d cut into the skin of the Tyche’s cargo bay airlock, breaching the ship.
Nate would be pissed off.
There were a couple of ways this could go. First, Kohl could just turn the fuck around and leave. Find Gracie some other way. Problem with that was that this was a big, busy city and he didn’t know Grace Gushiken well. The second way was that Kohl could get on the Tyche, coax the ship back into life, and ask her where her crew was. The Tyche was used to it; she kept tabs on wayward crew that made planetfall on a hostile crust. Which made that approach the preferred option, but Kohl had to get in, around the people inside, and get to the flight deck.
He sighed, checked the charge on his carbine, and walked towards the Tyche.
There were two people — one man, one woman — outside the breached cargo hold. They were dressed like dock workers, but nothing else about them looked like dock workers. The grease under their nails was too perfect, and they walked like soldiers. There was a dirty plasma rifle propped against the Tyche’s hull next to the man. Both were leaning against the ship like they owned her. Kohl clumped forward in his boots, carbine held low, in what he hoped was a non-threatening manner. “Excuse me,” he said.
They’d both been watching him approach, but the man spoke first. “Help you?”
“Might be able to,” said Kohl. He pointed at the Tyche. “You looking to sell your ship?”
“What makes you think that?” said the man.
“Well, simple,” said Kohl. He pointed to the breach in the side. “Y’all don’t carve a hole in your hull when you’re looking to grab some sky. So I figure, you’re stripping her. Seems the thing most folks do before they sell a hull.”
“You looking to buy?” said the man, taking a step closer. A step away from his rifle. The woman hadn’t moved, just watched Kohl under heavy brows.
“Might be,” said Kohl. “What’s the price like?”
“A million coins, even,” said the man.
Kohl whistled. “Seems steep for an old hauler like this.”
“This?” said the man. “She might be old, but she knows the stars.” Like he’d know. Asshole. “Got an Endless Drive. There. See? Twinned fusion pipes with enough thrust to put your spine through an acceleration couch easy. One of the old milspec ships from the war. She’ll keep you and yours safe. Right ’till the end. Oh, and the reactor’s been upgraded.”
Interesting. So these clowns had been on the Tyche long enough to know most of the things about her. About the Ravana’s reactor. About her basic layout. And they were also willing to sell her, which meant they were willing to kill the crew. They were Republic forces, looking to scrap and salvage after a legal seizure — which didn’t sound right to Kohl, because the cap had done nothing wrong, not yet leastways — or they were mercs, working for some dock gang, looking to make a quick buck on a ship. He knew how those kinds of people worked, because he used to be those kinds of people.
“Hmm,” offered Kohl. “Still. She’s old. You done a refit inside? Could I take a look?”
The woman stiffened at that. Kohl almost sighed, but that would have given too much away. The man looked at him suspiciously. “You don’t trust us, friend?”
“No,” said Kohl. “I don’t trust anyone until I see the color of their coin, or they see the color of mine. You could be junkers—”
“We ain’t junkers,” said the woman, her tone abrupt, a little pride leaking out. Which was a shame, because it meant that they weren’t a dock gang. Sure, a dock gang would have said the same thing, but without the pride. A dock gang would be a little sullener about it, because it would have been true. No, these were Republic, which was all kinds of wrong.
“Okay,” said Kohl. “I got one more question.”
“You are full of questions,” said the woman. Her hand reached behind her to the small of her back, right to where the grip of a blaster would have been.
“I am,” said Kohl. “Here’s the question. Do you guys talk to each other at all? You know, at Republic High Command.”
The man turned away, rushing towards his rifle. The woman drew a blaster. Damn, but it hurt being right all the time. Kohl had already raised the carbine, clicked the stud, and the cascade of red bathed the woman for a split second before she exploded into barbecue. The blaster she’d held popped like a cork out of a bottle as the cartridge inside hit three thousand degrees in a microsecond. Kohl swiveled towards the man, who’d made his rifle. Kohl squeezed the trigger as the man turned, and in a fraction of a second he was turned into chunks of meat and red mist. The red mist drifted on the light breeze to stain the side of the Tyche.
Where there’s two, there’s more. Kohl looked into the dark of the hold, put a boot up, and hoisted himself inside. He ducked to the side, giving himself a little time to adjust to the dimness of the hold. While the Republic clowns had said they had uncovered a few things, they hadn’t found out how to turn the lights on. El might have put the reactor into safe shutdown, but starting it up was just the click of a few buttons. Even Kohl could do it, no need for an Engineer on hand unless something went wrong.
The remains of the airlock door were laid out on the cargo bay floor, the metal burred and rounded at the edges where they’d cut on the Tyche. The old girl had been in the wars over the last couple weeks.
No point in putting this o
ff anymore. His eyes were fine in the gloom, so Kohl walked forward. Past the remains of the door, and into the middle of the bay. He paused, but couldn’t put his finger on why. He bent down to examine the metal floor. There was a small scar in the decking, about an inch or two long. Ah. This was where Gracie’s sword had stood when he’d stabbed it in place. When he’d tried to kill her.
It wasn’t you, it was those damn Ezeroc.
Still, the thought wouldn’t leave him, because she’d taken the sword and hadn’t killed him. And here he was, trying to sell her out for a few coins. Well, okay, not a few coins, quite a lot of coins, but the principle was the same. Kohl stood, shrugged, and set off towards the metal ladder leading up to the crew deck. Didn’t matter if it was a few coins or a lot of coins. Coins were coins, and he’d agreed to take someone’s money and do a job.
He scaled the ladder, easy as pie, and listened. There were rustling noises coming from his cabin, which was close to the ladder. Captain had said it was the best place for him, on account of it being close to where the action happened, but Kohl had always harbored a sneaking suspicion he’d been given this cabin because it was the farthest from Nate’s. Whatever. Kohl moved slow and easy, putting his boots down on the metal deck with care. No need to spook whoever was in his cabin before it was necessary.
Kohl poked his head around the corner of the room, taking in someone going through his stuff. Some of his best rifles were laid out on his bunk, and the innards of his small console had been taken apart, data slivers scattered everywhere. There was a man, head down in the console, blaster holstered at his side. Kohl looked at the blaster, thought about the pop of the woman’s weapon outside, and leaned forward. A small, quick step took him close to the man, and he pulled the blaster from its holster. The man gave a shrill cry — let’s call it what it is, the guy just screamed — and stood up. Or tried to, because he collided with Kohl’s bulk, stumbled, and fell back, knocking his head against the side of Kohl’s bunk. The sound of it, the meaty, rolling crunch like when you tore a drumstick from a thigh, made Kohl wince. The man went down and stayed down. Red leaked from the back of his head all over the floor.
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