“Sorry about that.”
“Yeah... you said that already,” Anton said. I could hear the frustration in his voice. He was in a mood today.
“You must have had more than a few calls this morning,” I said. “Two guys should be able to clean up a handful of bodies.”
“Nope. Just a few. I’m running a skeleton crew at the moment. We’ve had some turnover as of late. A couple of my deputies got burned over at Evelin’s last week. A few more quit after that,” Anton said. He turned to give me a hard stare. “And I’ve got more than two guys cleaning up your mess. You shitheads left a trail of bodies like fucking breadcrumbs from here to the docking concourse.”
“Hey. I was just protecting my own ass.”
“Uh-huh,” Anton said. He did not sound convinced. “How many of those dead bodies did you create?”
“Directly? None,” I said.
“How about indirectly?”
“I don’t know... two or three. I wasn’t keeping track. All I know for certain is that the spaceport kabebe population isn’t too happy with me at the moment.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Anton said, then he shook his head. “Actually... forget I asked. I don’t want to know.” He turned back toward the traffic moving in and out of the main gate. “I’m going to have a talk with Fairfax about how his green workers conduct themselves in public.”
“Do you think he’ll listen?” I said.
“Of course he’ll listen. He’s a pillar of the community. An orderly spaceport benefits him even more than it does me.”
“Good luck,” I said. “But that doesn’t sound like the Fairfax I know. He’s changed since we all came here.”
“You’re wrong. He’s in a different line of work but he’s basically the same guy. If you had owed him back then, he would have still tried to collect... he just didn’t have employees so he would have done it himself.”
Traffic moved smoothly through the gate. The mix of heavy vehicles and pedestrians that would have been chaotic, and probably bloody, anywhere else in the spaceport formed two slow and orderly processions, one in and one out, through the gargantuan airlock. I chocked it up to the presence of the sheriff. Anton had a reputation for not putting up with any bullshit. He dealt with disorder with a level of brutality that made him one of the most feared creatures on-planet. Situations that would normally be clusterfucks of activity tended to calm down a bit when he was around.
The adrenaline my brain had pumped into my system earlier had completely died away. The opioid withdrawals had regrouped and they were pissed that the adrenaline had tried to steal their thunder. My muscles were cramping and quivering at the same time, like they could not decide if they wanted to petrify or disintegrate. My skin felt like a million bugs were throwing a giant bug dance party underneath it. A severe drowsiness was hitting me in waves, drooping my eyelids down to slits in my face, then backing off, then drooping them again a few seconds later.
The nausea was the worst it had been all day. My stomach felt like a pressure cooker that was about to bust a gasket. As I stood there, watching the traffic, my gut heaved and sent up a mouthful of bile and stomach acid. I bent over and spewed the noxious fluid onto the floor between my feet.
“Aw... really? You come to my office just to puke on my doorstep, huh?” Anton said.
“Sorry,” I said. I wiped some putrid residue from my chin. “I’m not feeling too hot today.”
“No shit. How long’s it been since you fixed?”
“Too long. Money’s been tighter than usual lately.”
“You could avoid times like these if you specialized in something. Pick a color, do it well, develop a reputation, then get regular gigs and charge higher rates. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the galaxy can’t be wrong,” Anton said.
He was talking about the main reason people called me “Odd.” The vast majority of sentient creatures across the galaxy stuck to one type of work. Green work, blue work, gold work, brown work, red work, whatever... like Anton said, they picked a color and stuck with it. I did it all, as long as it paid. I worked in every color... except pink. People did not trust jacks-of-all-trades like me. Different colored work had different codes of conduct attached to them. Oftentimes, these codes conflicted with one another. It was impossible to honor these codes of conduct and specialize in two colors at once. There was always some conflict. My personal code of conduct avoided these conflicts. I had one simple rule: If I accepted a job, I finished it... no matter what.
“Somebody has to pick up the scraps,” I said. “Like the McKellen case. Thanks for sending that my way.”
“So you took the job? Yeah... I thought you might,” Anton said. “What are you charging?”
“Standard rate for white work, plus expenses. Times three if I bring the kid back alive.”
“So probably just the standard rate. No multiplier,” Anton said... he was as much a realist as I was.
“Probably. Do you know who the McKellens are? What they’re doing here?”
“They’re gold workers. They’ve got a small hardware store a few levels down the Big Staircase. They sell mining tools mostly. No heavy equipment. Just little stuff. The word is that they do fairly well. I wonder how long it’s going to be before somebody runs a hostile takeover on them.”
“Where’d they come from?” I said.
“I don’t fucking know,” Anton said. “Someplace civilized, with laws... basically someplace that in no way prepared them for this shithole.”
There was a commotion in the line of incoming traffic. A communal grumble of irritation sounded from the mass of creatures and vehicles, a few swears were uttered in a variety of languages, and then the line parted to allow a motorized cart to cut through. Two deputies with rifles strapped to their backs were in the front seat. The back of the cart was piled high with bloody chunks of meat that had once been sentient creatures. The irritation of the crowd did not rise to a violent level. Maybe it was the sight of the deputies or their weapons or their gory cargo that kept the population in check when they would have normally thrown a punch or two. Regardless of the reason, the cart made it through the line without incident and angled toward the Sheriff’s Office. The hole in the line closed behind them and the traffic resumed its methodical procession.
“It’s been nice catching up, Solomon, but I’ve got to get to work,” Anton said.
“Wait. I need a favor,” I said.
“I already did you a favor today. I kept a grindle from killing you, remember?”
“Calm down. I just need to look at your files.”
“I can’t let you look at our files.”
“Since when?” I said. “Fine. Then I need you to look at your files for me.”
Anton sighed like I was asking him to donate bone marrow. It was an act. I knew he was going to help me. He just wanted me to know that I could be a pain in the ass sometimes.
“Come on,” Anton said. We waited for the cart to squeeze through the office doors and then we followed it inside.
The Sheriff’s Office was bleak and utilitarian. The walls were blank steel that had probably been shiny and silver once upon a time but were now the same dingy brown of everything else in the spaceport. We entered into a small foyer. Huge reinforced blast doors cut the foyer in two. The doors were ajar at the moment but they could be secured with the flick of a switch if shit hit the fan on the Promenade. Two heavy-duty remote-controlled energy cannons were mounted in the corners, covering the outer office doors. Needless to say, the Sheriff’s Office had never been taken by force.
The deputies drove their cart between the blast doors and then through a passage in the back of the outer office. That way led to the functional components of the Sheriff’s Office... holding cells, the armory, interrogation equipment, corpse recycling facilities, and similar stuff. Anton ignored the cart and angled toward a little workspace behind the blast doors. He sat behind a desk that was mostly filled with a plethora of surveillance
monitoring equipment. He ignored these displays as well and turned his attention to a computer screen that occupied a small area on the corner of his desk.
“What do you need?” Anton said.
“DNA check,” I said. There was no other chair so I just leaned against the desk, drawing an annoyed glance from the sheriff. I fished the holo-identifier out of my pocket, thumbing the power button as I did so. The cube glowed to life. A tiny Penny McKellen appeared hovering above it, complete with a tiny clump of red hair, very tiny freckles, and tiny green eyes filled with a colossal innocence. Innocent little, probably long-dead, Penny McKellen... I thought that I felt a twinge of unfamiliar emotion rumbling in my gut again, but it might have just been the dope sick.
I passed the holo-identifier over to Anton. He switched off the hologram and plugged the cube into a port on his computer.
“This is going to take a little while,” he said.
Tiny lights flickered within the identifier. The computer began to hum and click as it churned through its DNA database.
Collecting and recycling corpses was one of the sheriff’s main functions. It was mostly a sanitation issue. Killing was commonplace here. It was by far the most preferred method of conflict resolution employed in the spaceport. No laws meant no incentive to talk a problem out... not when blowing someone’s head off was so much easier. It also meant that there was rarely any attempt made to conceal the bodies. The vast majority of victims were simply left where they dropped. Piles of corpses left to rot all over the place would make the spaceport even more unhealthy than it was already... and that would be bad for business.
Anton and his deputies were very adept at corpse-collection. If someone died at the spaceport, they found them eventually. They collected and recycled them, but not before they got a DNA tag from each and every one. Sheriff Kabamas had an uncertain funding stream. His Spartan office and his archaic computer were proof of that. There were some aspects of his job where he spared no expense. One of these was weapons. Another was his DNA-tagging tech. The technology did not place a name or face on a set of remains, but it could pinpoint species, sex, age... even hair or quill or fur color. It was mainly used to keep an accurate count of the dead but it could also be used to confirm that someone was, in fact, dead, if a DNA sample from the victim was provided. Every corpse was tagged, no matter how little of the corpse was found. If they found a pile of grindle shit, they could get an accurate DNA tag on both the grindle that had taken the shit and the unfortunate creature that had become it. If Penny McKellen had died in the spaceport, her DNA would be in the database.
The computer churned through its memory. It made noises that no computer should make, sometimes groaning like it had a bad hangover and occasionally coughing like it was hacking up a hairball. Anton did not seem to notice. He tapped a few keys, eliciting a woofing noise like someone had just kicked his computer in its electronic balls, and then he turned away from the screen.
“What’s your next move if this comes up negative?” he said.
I did not have a response in firing position. A smartass remark, my usual refuge, began to take shape in my mind but it died abruptly when it occurred to me that I had not really considered that possibility. What if innocent, little Penny McKellen was not long-dead in the spaceport? What if she had somehow defied the odds? What if I actually had to do some real detective work on this job?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t really given it much thought.”
“You might want to give it a little,” Anton said. “I don’t remember recycling a prepubescent human female recently.”
“Ninety standard-days isn’t exactly recent.”
“True... but dead human children aren’t exactly common here.”
He was right. All the sentient creatures on-planet kept their respective spawn close. Most deaths were of full-grown adult creatures... except maybe for sagisi drones and they were a class unto themselves. When you added the preferential treatment that humans enjoyed into the equation, dead human children became even more uncommon than dead younglings from the other races.
“If she’s not dead in the spaceport that means she’s in some kind of captivity in the spaceport,” I said.
“Or she’s dead or alive somewhere else,” Anton said. “Outside the spaceport or off-planet entirely.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“I know... but it’s still a possibility.”
That was true. It was possible that Penny McKellen had left the spaceport but, like I said, highly unlikely. The spaceport was the only city on-planet. Every other shred of civilization was all mining villages and small outposts. If she had run away, there was nothing Outside for her to run away to. Plus, she would not have gotten far on foot. She would have needed to book transport of some kind. Leaving the spaceport would have taken more than a little bit of money if she had stayed on-planet... and a veritable fuckton of money if she had left the planet altogether.
The other possibility... the more likely possibility... was that she had been enslaved. Slavery was a booming industry in the galaxy. All races were involved, both as the slavers and the enslaved. If Penny McKellen was alive, she was probably performing some kind of function against her will. That would mean that she was still on-planet and most likely in the spaceport. As far as off-planet was concerned, this was not a source-planet for slaves. This was where creatures ended up, not where they started from. She could have been snatched and taken to a mining village. That was known to happen on occasion. It was rare, though. Villages obtained slaves by raiding other villages. Grabbing creatures at the spaceport and transporting them into the wilderness was a whole lot of unnecessary fuss when there was a much easier option available.
I found myself hoping that the kid was dead so I could save myself the effort it would take to track her ass down. Then I found myself feeling guilty for wishing harm upon innocent, little Penny McKellen. Then I found myself feeling amazed that I felt anything at all. This job had me all fucked up and I could not say why. I just chocked it up to the dope sick.
Anton tapped a few keys on his computer then removed the holo-identifier from its port. “I’ve got some bad news, old buddy,” he said. He held the cube out to me.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said.
“She’s not in my database. If something killed her, it didn’t happen in the spaceport.”
“Can you check the gate logs?” I said. “See if the scanners picked up anything resembling a human child going outbound?”
“You know... I have other shit to do than help you get high.”
The sound of a commotion suddenly erupted from outside the Sheriff’s Office, as if the universe had been eavesdropping on our conversation. It began as shouts, screams, roars, and cheeps in a variety of languages then quickly escalated into bangs and crashes. Then came the unmistakable sound of weapons fire.
“Shit,” Anton said. He ran out from behind his desk, scooped up his energy rifle, and headed past me. “Come back later. I’ll see what I can do,” he called over his shoulder.
He was out the door before I could respond. A moment later, two deputies with energy rifles of their own charged out of the back and followed him toward the commotion at the main gate. A barrage of loud quacking-farts joined the sounds of chaos as the sheriff and his deputies opened up with their rifles.
I put the disturbance out of my mind. Anton had his job to do and I had mine. I left the Sheriff’s Office, put my back to the sounds of combat, and joined the line of inbound traffic, heading deeper into the Promenade.
Chapter 5
The entrance to Evelin’s Café was a dark hole in the Promenade wall. It loomed before me like the gaping mouth of some atrocious ancient monster. Thick steel blast doors lay open, sandwiching the black pit. From afar, they looked like odd sideways teeth that were ready to chomp down on any victim foolish enough to venture between them. Upon closer inspection, it became apparent that the doors were in a state of severe disrepair
. They were battered and twisted and rusted well past decrepitude. It looked like they had not been utilized in centuries... which was exactly the case. Evelin’s Café never closed. The menace of the entryway was an illusion and an unnecessary one at that. Everyone knew that there was very real danger lurking beyond it.
A heap of corpses was just outside the entryway, off to the side, a few feet in front of one of the blast doors. The staff routinely carted the establishment’s unluckier patrons outside and left them piled here. The sheriff’s deputies came by once a day to pick up the bodies for tagging and recycling.
I stopped beside the corpses to steel my nerves for the heightened peril I was about to plunge into. My eyes moved across the bodies. There were six of them... three humans, a yandoc, a sagisi male, and a kabebe. They exhibited a tossed salad of kill shots... two blade wounds, two energy weapon burns, one caved-in skull, and the sagisi’s head was torn clean off. It appeared to be a slow day at Evelin’s... but I knew that could change in an instant. I pulled my revolver from its holster, made sure it was fully-loaded, and then moved past the corpses and into the darkness beyond the blast doors.
Walking through the entranceway was like stepping into another dimension, one comprised of smoke and shadow and populated by unseen deadly apparitions. My eyes adjusted to the dark, but not by much. I was in a narrow corridor that ran straight for a ways before curving off to the right. The place was packed with creatures but they were just shadows. I was surrounded by a mob of silhouettes. I could only make out details when I got right next to someone. Random creatures would gain definition... a human here, a yandoc there... then I would move away and they would reabsorb into the anonymous mob.
I felt like a ball of over-coiled springs. Tension had a death-hold on my muscles and hyperawareness permeated my senses. I moved through the mob, careful not to jostle anyone too hard. It was impossible to avoid coming into contact with the other patrons. There were too many bodies packed too close together and the visibility was too low. All I could do was minimize the impacts and hope none of the other patrons were irritable enough to open fire.
Odd Jobs Page 4
