I took several steps into the smoky void. The muffled thumps of my footsteps, the groans and whimpers of wounded creatures, and the gentle crackle of unseen fires were my only real sensory inputs. The acrid tang in my nose and the gray haze before my eyes only served to heighten the sensory deprivation. Thump, thump, thump... it was all the same for a long time. I tried to strain my ears, tried to push them to hear something new, but I did not know what muscle to flex. Worry began to claw at the back of my brain.
Then... thump, thump, splat. I looked down. Smoke curled around my ankles but not enough to hide the puddle of pus I had stepped in. My boot was partially submerged in hammang guts. I was on the right track after all. I moved a little farther and came upon the twisted remnants of an exoskeleton. A few steps more and the doorway materialized out of the haze. The doors had been savagely damaged. They were blackened and twisted and hung halfway off their supports. I tightened my grip on my weapon and stepped inside.
It was much less smoky on the other side. I saw more couches, a large ornate desk near the far wall, and a startled hammang standing beside it.
“Wait a minute, Jobs!” Tran screamed. At that moment, its little-girl voice program sounded more pitiful than it did creepy.
I did not listen. I took aim and opened fire. Each of my rounds found one of its spindly legs, snapping them like twigs, severing some and leaving others still attached, but useless. Tran screamed incoherently as its exoskeleton crashed to the floor. It dropped its hookah and tried to drag itself away with its four remaining limbs. It was not having much success. Tran was pretty much immobilized. Still... I reloaded and fired four more shots, disabling the last of its limbs... just for shits and giggles.
Tran flopped like a dying spider as I walked toward it. Its useless limbs pawed at the floor, rocking its exoskeleton back and forth. It pulled on the hookah tube sticking out of its body every time it seesawed. The black sphere rolled around beside it. I holstered my gun and watched the revolting creature struggle, enjoying myself more than I probably should have.
After about a minute of that, I knelt beside it.
“Where’s the girl?” I said.
“That item is not here! I was just fucking with you before,” Tran said. Its little-girl voice whined like it was pleading to stay up past its bedtime.
I did not believe it and I was in no mood for a verbal sparring match. The gunfight and explosion had eaten up all my patience. I gripped the knob on the hookah and cranked it up to full blast. The sphere glowed red. Smoke surged up the tube and billowed out of the end lodged in Tran’s insides.
“What are you doing? Turn that off!” Tran whined.
“Where’s the girl?” I said.
The smoke pumped into Tran, churning up the pus inside it. Some of the smoke reached its membrane and seeped through its pores, slowly filling the air above it like morning fog rising off the ground. That rotten fruit smell filled my nose again, only it was much more pungent than before. I coughed, clearing my throat to keep from retching.
“Where’s the girl?” I said.
“We don’t have it! I swear! We never did!” Tran screamed.
The smoke continued to flow. Tran’s insides were churning and swirling like a localized hurricane. More smoke reached its membrane but its pores would only allow a small amount to escape. The smoke began to build up.
“Where’s the girl?” I said.
“Not here! Not anywhere! I checked our database after we talked... that item has never been traded on the spaceport pink market!” Tran sounded like a little girl getting her fingernails pulled out with plyers. I began to suspect that it might have been telling the truth.
Tran inflated like a balloon. Its useless limbs stopped flopping around and began jerking and spasming. The rotten fruit smell was overpowering and it was laced with a touch of carbon... as if the goo inside Tran was beginning to burn. Its normally saggy membrane expanded and grew taut. Pus and smoke oozed out of the seam where the hookah tube penetrated its skin. Small rips appeared in other places and pus and smoke seeped out of them as well. It was not enough. The pressure continued to build.
“For the love of God, Jobs! Turn it off!” Tran screeched. “I can get you a different one! I can get you ten! As many as you want... say the word and they’re yours! Just turn it off!”
A hammang was actually offering me free shit. It was definitely telling the truth. Innocent, little Penny McKellen had not been sold into pink work... not at Evelin’s Café or anywhere else in the spaceport. It was good news for her because it meant she was not being subjected to this nightmare existence. It was bad news for me because it meant that I was no closer to finishing this job than I had been when I first walked into the bar.
I turned the hookah off. Tran sighed in relief. Smoke and pus continued to waft out of its pores and wounds. It would be back to its bloated, flabby self in an hour or two.
“I’ve got one more question,” I said as I stood back up.
“Anything,” Tran said. The little-girl voice sounded out of breath... something I was unaware voice programs had in their repertoire.
“Is there a backdoor to this place? I’d rather not walk through that slaughterhouse I helped create,” I said.
“Behind my desk. Push on the wall. There’s a passage behind it that goes straight to the Promenade,” Tran said.
I began to move toward the desk, then a thought made me stop and turn back. The backdoor gave me a way to avoid being gunned down today but I would be in just as much danger if Evelin found out about my hand in this at a later date... and, as far as I knew, there was only one hammang left that could name me as the one who had started the shooting.
“Thanks for your help,” I said. I bent down and turned the knob on the hookah back up to full blast.
The screams of a little girl followed me as I walked around the desk. The screaming reached a crescendo as I pushed the false wall open. I stepped into the passage just as I heard a loud wet popping sound from behind me. The screams cut off abruptly. I closed the false wall and headed back toward the Promenade.
Chapter 7
My investigation hit a wall. I could not find a trace of Penny McKellen anywhere. I scoured the spaceport, wracking my brain for places she might have been and checking them out, but I kept coming up with nothing.
After the death and sex possibilities had failed to yield results, slave labor was the only real option remaining in the spaceport. Like any other industry, there was a system to the slave labor trade. Suppliers sold to wholesalers who sold to retailers who sold to consumers. In the spaceport, that supply chain began at the docking concourse so that was where I began my search.
I hit up the suppliers. They were pirates, smugglers, raiders, and merchants that did milk-runs between corporate space and outlaw territories. They brought in shiploads of product from all manner of sources... captives from raids on ships or planets, refugees who took a wrong turn and ended up in bondage, Great Bank and corporate prisoners. It was easy for creatures to lose their freedom. Oftentimes, one misstep was all it took. Sometimes it took even less than that.
The product that came here was mostly human. There were always exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, grindles were too big, kabebes were too little, sagisi were too unpredictable, yandocs were too evasive, and hammangs were too goddamn useless. The nature of the work combined with the quality of the available security translated to humans being the preferred choice for slave labor on this planet. The pink market consumed most of the imports of the other races.
I called in some favors from this shithole’s sorry excuse for a port authority. I threw a few bucks around to get some ship captains to talk to me. I only had to be laughed at a handful of times before I came to two conclusions: these business-creatures brought slaves in, not out, and it was fucking absurd to hope that any of them would remember seeing one little human that was not even part of their own cargo. The suppliers were a dead end.
The wholesalers were
equally unhelpful. They bought from the suppliers, evaluated and categorized their inventories, and sold to the industry-specific retailers. They did not hunt their own merchandise. The raw product-acquisition side of the business was way more dangerous than the purely capitalist side. These fuckers were only interested in making money and snatching creatures off the Promenade was too much risk for not enough return. That would be bad business... plain and simple. Innocent, little Penny McKellen had not passed through wholesaler hands.
Time passed. I hunted for leads, called in favors, bribed and cajoled and threatened, hit dead end after dead end after dead end, and more time passed. The days began to pile up. I worked, ate, slept, shit, fixed, and worked some more. This supposedly quick and easy job was turning out to be neither one nor the other.
My investigation moved on to the retailers. There were many more of these guys than there were wholesalers. They tended to specialize, exclusively dealing product to specific industries. There were a shit-ton of different industries in the spaceport and a fuckton of retailers catering to each one. A shit-ton multiplied by a fuckton equaled a metric motherfuckton of retailers. I started on the Promenade, hitting up the retailers that dealt to heavy brown work operations. The obvious first stop was fuel refining. When I found no trace of innocent, little Penny McKellen there, I moved on to less prominent industries on the Promenade... mainly power generation and manufacturing operations. That turned out to be a dead end as well so I finally left the Promenade, venturing down the Big Staircase, into the labyrinth of tunnels and warrens that extended thousands of feet beneath the planet’s surface.
The industries below the Promenade that employed slave labor were numerous and varied. They ranged in size from massive to miniscule. Some utilized hundreds of slaves, some used only one or two, and most hit every wicket in between those extremes. The food production facilities were always buying. Hydroponic gardens were heavy consumers. Meat cloning plants required just as much labor but for drastically different work. Food preparation was another major customer. These joints were everywhere, catering to one species or another, and you could always find at least a handful of slaves working in their kitchens. There were slaves in every store and marketplace. There were slaves in every manufacturing plant and sweatshop. There were slaves in every sanitation operation, every waste reclamation facility, and every garbage recycling plant. On the lower levels, there were slaves in the gladiator pits and on the water well crews. Every industry utilized slave labor to help meet its bottom line and there were retailers servicing them all. I covered a lot of ground over the course of my investigation.
More and more days piled up. A week passed since I had got the job and I had nothing. My drugs began to run low. I had money for more but I did not want to return to Evelin’s Café so soon after the clusterfuck I had caused there. No hammang red worker had come looking for me. That was a good indication that Evelin was unaware of my involvement but I still did not want to tempt fate by going back too soon. So I lowered my doses to purely maintenance levels. I fixed with just enough to avoid getting dope sick. With luck, the spaceport would provide some other major incident to occupy Evelin’s attention by the time necessity forced me to return.
I dug through my whole bag of information-gathering tricks. I exploited a few good relationships that I already had. I established new relationships, extracted information, and moved on... with some brand new good relationships and some brand new bad ones. I shelled out a lot of money in bribes, inflating the shit out of the itemized expenses portion of the McKellens’ eventual bill. I threatened physical violence a bunch of times. I used physical violence a handful of times. I even broke into a few offices and hacked into a few computers. I hit up retailer after retailer after retailer and came up with nothing and nothing and nothing.
The girl was nowhere. I could find no trace of innocent, little, red-haired, green-eyed, freckle-faced Penny McKellen in the spaceport. No supplier or wholesaler or retailer could produce a bill of sale or show her on an inventory list or even recall having possession of a human child matching her description since the time of her disappearance. The rumor mill surrounding the industry was no help either. I got the same non-information from the vultures and opportunists that hung around the periphery of the business as I did from the industry professionals. I could not even find a reliable account of some slaver wannabee snatching her from the public. The girl was plain gone.
My investigation was about to turn two weeks old when I exhausted my last lead. I was certain that the kid was not in the spaceport and the idea that she had somehow gotten off-planet was a fucking absurdity. There was one option remaining... one humungous motherfucking option. I began to make preparations to go outside the spaceport, to search for innocent, little Penny McKellen in the wilderness on this lawless bumblefuck planet.
Chapter 8
I awoke on the couch in my office. My eyes slowly adjusted, the steel ceiling above me gradually coming into focus. I felt like liquefied shit. The subtle tentacles of oncoming dope sickness were probing at me, crawling over my skin, prodding at my guts, and pulling my eyelids down. I could have easily just given in and gone back to sleep but I fought my way toward consciousness instead. I had shit to do.
I groped around in the garbage beside the couch until I came up with my hypo-injector and vial of synthetic opioids. There were only five milliliters left in the vial, just enough for the day if I really stretched it out. I loaded two milliliters into the injector and fired it into my neck. The relief was instantaneous. The dope sick tentacles retreated like someone had screamed “calamari.” I was not high in the slightest. I only had enough drugs to keep me from going into withdrawal and that would have to do until I could resupply.
I climbed off the couch. My feet struck one of the piles of garbage decorating my office, creating a miniature crap-avalanche that cascaded down the little slope to merge with the rest of the shit on the floor. The place was as much of a mess as it ever was. I had not had any time to clean as of late. I figured that I would set aside some time to spruce the joint up a bit after this job was done. There certainly was not any time now. I had to get ready to go Outside. That meant arranging for a vehicle, basic supplies, and gear to protect myself from the hostile environment. That also meant going back to Evelin’s Café to see Mister Steven T. Jenkins again. I was almost positive that Evelin did not know about my involvement in the clusterfuck over there but the prospect of going back still set my nerves on edge. I had no choice, though. A bout of dope sickness in the wilderness would kill me just as effectively as an energy rifle.
I thought about bathing. It had been several days since the last time soap and water had been in close proximity with my body and I smelled kind of like I had been doing aerobic exercises on a trash heap. I decided against it, though. There was a lot to do. I had to get moving. Besides, I was already pretty much ready to go. I had slept in my clothes. I had not even taken off my trenchcoat before dropping my exhausted body on the couch the night before. My revolver was still in its holster beneath my arm. My holo-identifier was in my coat pocket, along with several handfuls of spare ammo. My hat was the only thing that was not where it was supposed to be. It had fallen off while I slept and now lay on the floor amidst the garbage by my feet. I scooped it up, plopped it on my head, and made for the door.
After a quick look through the peephole to make sure there were no grindle green workers or hammang red workers waiting for me, I stepped out of the door and merged into the crowd on the Promenade. It was early morning according to the artificial twenty-four standard-hour day that humanity imposed on the galaxy. The crowd was as congested as any other time of day. The lower levels of the spaceport went through daily cycles of activity, with peaks and lulls occurring on a regular schedule, but the Promenade never slept. It was always rush hour up here.
The gold marketplace by my office was my first destination. The various vendors there would have most of the shit I needed for my little expedition...
all except for the vehicle and the drugs. I was halfway there when a short whoop of a siren startled me out of my focus. I turned around.
A cart was idling a few feet behind me. Sheriff Kabamas was sitting behind the wheel.
“Hey Solomon,” he said.
“Hey Anton,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, no shit. I was kind of worried. I thought maybe something might have finally killed you.”
“Nope. I’m as healthy as ever.”
“That’s not saying much. Where’re you headed?”
“Gold marketplace,” I said, gesturing to the rampant capitalism taking place a hundred yards behind me. “How about you?”
“Back to the office. It’s been a slow morning.” He rapped his knuckles against the steering wheel. It was not wood... that shit was crazy expensive on-planet... but it was painted to look like it.
“Do you think you could drop me off at Evelin’s?” I said. I had covered a lot of ground over the past couple weeks. I thought it would be nice not to have to walk my happy ass all the way to the other side of the Promenade.
“Sure... but I can’t wait for you to run your errands down here,” he said.
I threw another glance at the gold marketplace, debating whether the one-stop-shopping available there was more important at the moment than resting my tired ass. I decided that it was not. And, of course, let’s not forget about my drugs. My drugs were always more important than everything else at every moment.
“My errands can wait,” I said. I climbed into the passenger seat and Anton hit the gas.
Anton drove at a leisurely pace. He managed to keep to a fairly straight route, occasionally weaving around a slow-moving vehicle or blasting out a whoop from the siren to clear pedestrians from his path. Most creatures got out of the way on their own. Nobody wanted to give the sheriff a reason to look at them twice.
Odd Jobs Page 7
