by Joe Zieja
“Come up with something,” Holdt said. “We’re talking about the collapse of the free galaxy as we know it. I’m sure whatever you offer them can be scraped together.”
Rogers chewed the inside of his lip. He didn’t like negotiating with pirates if it wasn’t in good faith.
Wait a minute—negotiating in bad faith is precisely what he loved to do. He’d left the military to do it professionally. This high rank was doing very bad things to him.
“Fine,” Rogers said. “I’ll do it. But I want amnesty for me and my team if we have to do anything, uh, slightly illegal to get this to work.”
“That’s not in my power to grant,” Holdt said, “but again . . .” He pointed over his shoulder, out the window, as though the entire Jupiterian fleet was waiting outside to blow them all to pieces. “The galaxy is ending and all that. I think we’ll overlook some pirating.”
Something about all of this didn’t feel right. Maybe it was the ludicrous plan, maybe it was the fact that the galaxy was indeed ending as they knew it. But Rogers couldn’t stop thinking about Holdt, sitting there with a permanently grumpy look on his face next to a bottle of bad booze. They’d never really met before this, but there was something familiar . . .
Rogers realized, as his stomach dropped to the floor, that he was looking at a future version of himself. Holdt was much older, and much better at all the military stuff, but his attitude reminded Rogers of his own. He looked tired, burnt out. Like he hadn’t done a damn thing he’d wanted to do in about two decades. His rank wouldn’t allow him to. At some point, someone had saddled him with too much duty. Was this Rogers’ fate too? He was already only a few ranks away, and his nerves felt like they were operating at twice their natural capacity for anxiety.
“What’s your problem, Rogers?” Admiral Holdt said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Rogers wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t. Except, it was a future kind of ghost. The Ghost of Rogers’ Future, or something like that.
This thought pattern was getting too complicated, and Rogers had some pirating to do. He made his farewells, avoided getting anywhere close to the psychotic coffee machine, and led his small team out of the office. Deet, who was still standing behind Holdt’s desk, made a small whirring noise before ambling after them.
“Xan and I won’t be coming with you,” Keffoule said almost immediately when the door closed. “Meridan high command might not care about intergalactic law, but I am trying to work my way back into glory, not prison.”
Rogers shrugged, secretly cackling inside with glee. It seemed that he’d finally found something that would get Keffoule off his tail, despite the fact that she was now officially working . . . underneath . . . him. If he could spend the rest of his days pirating, Keffoule would never bother him again! He’d have to keep that in mind.
“When I retire, however,” Keffoule leered. “You and I can do all kinds of pirating.”
Rogers thought his skin was going to crawl off his body.
“Anyway,” Rogers said. “I’m surprised—you were very . . . diplomatic in there. I didn’t really think you could deal with anyone without kicking them in the face.”
Keffoule looked away from him. She appeared to be working words around in her mouth.
“I’ve been . . . trying to adapt,” she said quietly.
Rogers shrugged. “Alright. I’m just surprised you didn’t bring Quinn. She’s the politician.”
“She is otherwise occupied.”
Something about the way Keffoule said “otherwise occupied” made Rogers not want to ask about it any further. He was well aware that the two of them hated each other. For all he knew, Keffoule had locked her in a closet full of nails.
“Right. Tunger, I appreciate your almost complete silence.”
Tunger gave him a thumbs-up.
“And, Deet . . .” Rogers looked at his droid companion and noticed for the first time that something was hanging from the bottom of his torso. It looked really inappropriate, and after a moment Rogers realized what it was: Deet’s dongle.
“Hey,” Rogers continued, “your dongle is dangling.”
Deet looked down, made a squeaking noise, and reeled in his extension. It vanished back into his torso compartment with a loud metallic clap.
“Wait a minute,” Rogers said, forgetting whatever he had been about to tell Deet just a moment earlier. “Why is your dongle dangling? What were you doing with your damn dongle dangling down, Deet?”
Deet’s voice came through his mouthpiece, but it was full of static.
“You’re . . . breaking . . . up . . . I’m in a . . . tunnel,” Deet said.
“That’s not how that works,” Rogers said. They passed another pair of MPD personnel who looked as though their faces had been painted on by someone more boring than a New Neptunian. Why weren’t they showing any emotion?
“Deet, were you plugging into Holdt’s computer while we were all talking?”
“Yes,” Deet said, then flailed both of his arms in the air like he’d experienced some kind of critical motor processing error. “[EXPLETIVE]. That’s not what I meant to say.”
“I know you can’t really lie,” Rogers said. “So what the hell were you doing in there?”
He brought the group to a stop in the hallway, near where a Snaggardir’s vending machine was hurling candy bars at high speed across the room. Rogers felt like he should have noticed these things before. Were there any Snaggardir’s products in the 331st that were malfunctioning? Nobody had made any complaints yet.
“I was standing next to one of the most data-rich terminals in the Meridan fleet,” Deet said. “I couldn’t just let that amount of research go by untouched. You keep saying I’m being selfish, Rogers, but I found some things that could help us.”
“Oh really?” Rogers asked. “Like what?”
Deet was quiet for a moment. “I learned that Dr. Mattic started experimenting with robotics when he was four years old.”
Rogers scowled. “Yeah, Deet. Really useful. Thanks. Do me a favor and search the database for any pirate phone numbers, alright?”
“What do you need phone numbers for?” Keffoule asked, not hiding her disdain. “I thought all the pirates were your friends?”
“They were,” Rogers said. “But the last time I met them, I may have accidentally killed them all.”
The Seedy Underbelly
“Boy are you a sight for sore eyes,” Rogers said.
His eyes were actually sore. The high-pressure coffee spout had impacted him so strongly that he thought his brain was bruised. That didn’t mean, of course, that the expression wasn’t true in the traditional sense as well. The Viking had responded to his summons with reluctance, but she’d come nonetheless, and she’d left her uniform behind. Rogers didn’t think he’d ever seen her out of uniform, except that one time she was in a hospital gown recovering from a shoulder wound. The experience was not at all bad, despite the fact that she was dressed like an off-duty bouncer. Perhaps because of the fact that she was dressed like an off-duty bouncer.
“Well, I got my leave schedules worked out, and it was starting to get boring up there,” the Viking said. “Besides, I heard I might get to punch someone.”
“For once, I’m kind of hoping you don’t,” Rogers said.
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t like to see the Viking completely thrash a room full of pirates—he absolutely would—but more that he’d rather get this mission done with as soon as possible. With pirates, sometimes violence was the fastest solution, but in this case he was just hoping for a couple of friendly drinks. He still hadn’t really come up with what to offer them as payment for helping dismantle the Jupiterian blockade, and he was hoping that a couple of glasses of Scotch might loosen his bargaining muscles and the pirates’ inhibitions. That was, of course, assuming he could find any pirates.
Rogers had been sitting in the waiting room of the shuttle dock for over an hour, waiting for the Viking to arriv
e and trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do. Tunger, ever present, seemed to be content with relative silence, which was a relief, and Keffoule and Xan had gone to their planetside accommodations, still within the defense complex.
“Where’s Mailn?” the Viking asked, shifting her duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. “And where’s your idiot robot friend?”
“She took some time off,” Rogers said. “I haven’t heard from her since we touched down yesterday other than that she’d meet us here soon. Deet is with some folks in the science lab, getting his circuits analyzed or something like that. Apparently they think they might be able to get more information about Snaggardir’s by looking at his hardware and operating system.”
Despite his anxiousness to get to work—or at least get drinking—Rogers had mostly collapsed after the meeting the previous day. It made him feel exceptionally old. When he’d woken up, the Snaggardir’s brand blow-dryer in the bathroom was spouting small bursts of flame.
The Viking’s face told Rogers everything he needed to know about how good of an idea she thought it was to let Mailn roam around Prime alone. Rogers was about to say that she was a grown woman and could take care of herself when Mailn walked into the waiting room looking like she could absolutely not take care of herself.
“You don’t look bad with a black eye,” Rogers said. “Do you need me to teach you how to duck?”
Mailn hit him in the face.
“Okay, okay!” Rogers said. “Jeez, you know that’s assaulting a superior officer, right?”
“Let’s not get carried away with ‘superior,’ ” Mailn said.
“What the hell happened to you?” the Viking asked. Her tone was sharp, but her face actually looked concerned.
“Nothing much that doesn’t always happen in Haverstown,” Mailn said, not meeting the Viking’s gaze. “It’s no big deal.”
The Viking didn’t look convinced about the bigness or smallness of the deal that was Mailn’s battered face. The sergeant’s clothes looked rumpled as well, with a small tear in one of her sleeves. Despite all of this, however, Mailn was clearly in good spirits. Her nonwounded eye was bright and alert, and she was grinning in a way that Rogers was very familiar with. It was the typical “I’m not entirely sure I remember all of last night but I know I liked it” grin.
“Well I’m glad you got some relaxation in,” Rogers said.
Mailn shrugged, still grinning. “So what are we doing now?”
“We’re going to go talk with pirates.”
Mailn’s grin was wiped away like a squashed bug off a windshield.
“Why?” she asked.
“Apparently we’re supposed to make mercenaries out of them,” Rogers said. He debriefed Mailn on the conversation he’d had with Holdt yesterday, and with every word the dark expression on Mailn’s face grew even more grave.
“The problem is,” Rogers concluded, “I have no idea how to find them or how to convince them to join up.”
Mailn was quiet for a moment.
“I think can help,” she said.
• • •
“Haverstown is already pretty rough,” Rogers said as they walked through the streets, getting jostled and elbowed by pretty much every person on the planet, “so I’m having a little trouble imaging that there’s a ‘seedy underbelly’ to this place. Everywhere is seedy.”
“It’s not a description,” Mailn said. “It’s a bar called the Seedy Underbelly.”
“Oh,” Rogers said.
He’d never heard of the place, which struck him as strange; he’d thought he knew Haverstown like the back of his hand. Then again, hundreds of drinking establishments were scattered all over the crowded urban jungle. Despite the fact that synthetic livers worked very nicely, Rogers understood the difference between having a good time and self-abuse.
Humanity probably thought it was pretty advanced by now; they’d conquered interstellar and intergalactic travel, blowing up an entire galaxy in its wake, and popping into space as easily as one would pop a flash-frozen meal into a microwave for dinner. Science had eradicated scores of diseases that had annihilated populations, the extinction of animal species had practically been halted completely, and dishwashers could get peanut butter completely off spoons. Yet, walking through Haverstown, one would have a hard time imagining that this detritus of mankind had ever managed to escape the gravity of a couch, never mind an entire planet.
“That’s cute,” the Viking said, using her elbow to point to someone urinating on a wall.
“It’s actually not as bad as it looks. People pissed on walls so often here that most of the walls are absorbent and feed directly into the sanitation system of the city.”
The Viking grunted as she bowled over a pair of shadowy-looking young men who appeared to consider confronting her for a moment before truly taking in her size. Rogers felt warm all of a sudden, and maybe a little jealous. Double-stepping, he moved so he was in front of the Viking, then awkwardly stopped to look at something nondescript. She bowled him over too.
“Watch where you’re going, metalhead,” she grumbled.
“Never,” Rogers whispered.
They turned a corner into an alley, Mailn leading the way, until they came to what appeared to be a dead end.
“Oh yeah,” Rogers said. “Nothing like three stone walls in an unlit alleyway to make you feel safe.”
In truth, there wasn’t much that could happen to them here. All of them were armed, and two of them actually knew how to use the weapons they carried underneath their coats. Rogers had actually disengaged the plasma core from his disruptor pistol; it was much safer for everyone involved if Rogers’ weapon was just a prop. Haverstown residents knew better than to harass government employees of any kind unless they were paying to be harassed, but those establishments were on the other side of the city.
“They keep the place secret,” Mailn said.
She walked up to what appeared to be a brick wall and put her finger into a notch. Distantly, Rogers thought he heard doorbell chimes, but the ambient noise of this back corner of Haverstown made it hard to distinguish anything below a full shout.
“I am intensely curious as to how you know all of these things,” Rogers said.
“There’s a sign right there on the wall, sir,” Tunger said, pointing at a sign near the corner of the alleyway that said PUSH HERE FOR ENTRANCE.
Rogers cleared his throat. “Yeah, okay, fine. It’s dark. Didn’t I tell you to go to lodging and take a break?”
“I could never do that, sir,” Tunger said. “I’ve always wanted the chance to meet pirates. I’ve been practicing my pirate accent so that I could spy—”
“Don’t,” Rogers warned. “I swear to god if you say ‘arrrr’ or anything like that I am going to gut you with a cutlass.”
The Viking let go a little bit of a bark that Rogers had come to recognize as a laugh.
A moment later, Rogers heard the distinct sound of stone moving against stone, and the wall simply opened up in front of them. It seemed kind of tacky and old-fashioned to have a hidden door in a wall, but there was also something strangely endearing about it, as though anything endearing could be said about pirates.
“You’re late,” someone said from the exposed dark corridor. Rogers peered down the opening and could see the faint glow of some lights in the distance, but nothing distinguishable popped out. In that glow, the silhouette of a striking figure stood with its hands on its hips. Clearly the person either wore some sort of elaborate hat or had a very misshapen head.
“You try coordinating with a couple of military officers,” Mailn said.
“Hey,” Rogers said.
“Hey,” the Viking said.
“Hey,” Rogers said again, “we said the same thing at the same time. I think that means we have to kiss—”
“I think it’s called a jinx,” Tunger said, “and one of you owes the other some kind of soft drink.”
Rogers clenched his teeth,
slowly turning his head to look at Tunger. “Oh. That’s. Right. Thank. You. For. Reminding. Me.”
“You’re welcome, sir!” Tunger said gleefully.
The voice had been distant, and a little husky, so Rogers hadn’t been sure it was a woman until she stood in front of them. Everything about her screamed rough-and-tough, down to the dual pistols hanging from her hips and the leather bandoliers of plasma cartridges crisscrossed over her chest. The hat in question was a wide-brimmed creation that didn’t quite fit any style Rogers could think of, but it had a twinge of old-world cowboy to it.
The dark face underneath the brim of the hat glanced over all of them with disinterest. Without proper lighting, Rogers couldn’t tell exactly what she looked like, but overall he could see sharp outlines around her jaw, cheeks, and nose.
“Cynthia here tells me you want to talk business. Why don’t you come inside?”
Without waiting for a response, the yet-unnamed woman turned around and walked into the darkness, leaving Rogers and company little choice but to follow or be left in the alleyway. Rogers was about to be all heroic and brave and lead the way, but then he decided not to do that. After a moment, the Viking stepped in first, and he followed her hulking form down the corridor.
“Okay, everyone,” Rogers whispered, though he wasn’t sure who could hear him or if he actually needed to whisper. “I’ve got this. Just follow my lead and—”
The corridor opened up into a place of wonder.
The Seedy Underbelly may have been the nicest bar Rogers had ever walked into. Well, “nice” perhaps wasn’t the correct word for it. It was more like . . . they had pulled several pages out of a housekeeping magazine and used them to come up with the most comfortable space imaginable. Floral-pattern couches, plush carpets, and soft, meditative music pervaded the room. Some sort of vanilla-bean candle must have been burning somewhere as well. Instantly he felt the urge to take off his shoes and put on some slippers, which was convenient because a rack of soft-looking slippers was positioned directly next to the door. A sign above it said, in curly writing, WE WILL TRADE YOU COMFY SLIPPERS FOR A CLEAN FLOOR. Obviously they were supposed to take off their shoes before entering.
