by Greco, J. I.
Loy arched an eyebrow and looked up to where thick black smoke poured out of the hole where the engine’s top had once been. Dag was up there, strategically spurting blasts of fire-suppressing foam at the dozen or so hotspots that still remained. “Well, what are we gonna do now?” she asked Cortez.
“Start our own civilization?” Igon asked, nuzzling up against Cortez’s calf. “You two will have to double-team me, but if that’s the price I have to pay to keep the species going–”
“Shut up,” Cortez and Loy said simultaneously. Cortez jerked her knee into Igon’s cylinder, sending him reeling back.
“Put out a distress call?” Loy suggested.
“We could,” Vei said, waddling up behind them. She idly scratched at the mold at the base of her neck. “But we’re between systems – the nearest GA radio relays are a light year behind us and three in front of us.”
“Just great,” Cortez said, shaking her head. “There goes the rendezvous. Two years of work setting this up… down the damn drain just like that.”
“You could try again,” Loy suggested.
“Klakraw won’t fall for the same trick twice. Nah, it’s over. –There any booze on this boat?”
Feh pulled himself out through the access hole and gestured for Vei to follow him. “Dag, you too,” he called as he waddled off towards the junk field.
“The bar that way?” Cortez asked.
“No bar,” Vei said. “No booze, sorry.”
“Then where are you going?” Loy asked.
Vei stopped, turned around. She shot Cortez and Loy a confused look. “To get the spare.”
“Spare what?” Cortez asked.
“Spare engine, of course,” Vei said.
“You’ve got a spare superluminal engine?” Loy asked.
Dag hopped down off the engine in front of Loy. “We’re scavengers. We’ve got spare everything.”
“Well, I guess hold on to something,” Vei said, twisting a knob in the floorboard of her nest-station to engage the replaced superluminal engine. A series of loud clanks echoed through the Exalted Refuse. “This could work… or we could all die. Never can be sure with spares. Salvaged that one from a luxury liner some fool ran aground on an asteroid while trying to impress his girlfriend.”
Igon threw his arms around Cortez’s legs. “If we’re going to die, at least I’ll die happy.”
Cortez pried him off and stepped up behind Vei’s nest-station. A final loud clunk shook the hold. On the holotank in the nest-station’s rim, space went white and the stars became black streaks.
“Well,” Feh said over the intercom, “we didn’t blow up.”
“Good work,” Cortez said. “What’s our ETA in Otulak?”
Vei twisted a control and consulted a screen. “This engine’s not quite as efficient as the old one. But it still should get us there in six hours.”
“Cutting it close,” Cortez said.
“Better than being stranded for the rest of our lives,” Loy said. She sat nearby on an overturned, lidless portable storage locker.
“Yeah.” Cortez leaned back against the edge of Vei’s nest-station and crossed her arms over her chest. Dag was staring at her, bulging eyes blinking. “What?”
“So, you’re really a cop?” the junior minority shareholder asked.
Cortez nodded. “Special Agent, to be technical.”
Loy huffed. “So she claims.”
“I thought we settled this,” Cortez said. “You’ve seen my credentials. And you’re alive, aren’t you? I even gave you your gun back. What more do I need to do?”
“You want me to believe you? You want me to trust you? Let me in on the plan. Let us all in.”
Igon marched up to Loy and pointed a claw at her. “You leave her alone. She doesn’t have to tell you anything.” He whipped around to ask Cortez, “Want I should kick her for you, honey?”
“Down, boy,” Cortez said. “She’s right. She should know. You all should know what you’re getting into. You ever hear of the warlord Klakraw?”
“You mean the Klakraw who heads a criminal network responsible for a good third of the racketeering, extortion, murder-for-hire, drug trafficking, grand theft, and counterfeit goods in the galaxy?” Loy asked. “No, never heard of him,” she added with a sardonic smirk.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Cortez said. “Real cagey number, he is, too. He refuses to stay in one system long enough for the cops to catch him, or his fellow warlords to ambush him. The plan is to flush him out long enough by offering him irresistible bait.”
“Oh! I know this one!” Igon shouted. “The data we stole, right?”
Cortez patted him on the head. “The data we stole.”
“Which was?” Loy asked.
“The Galactic Authority Police’s main database,” Cortez said.
“What?” Loy asked, shocked. “What kind of plan is that? If that falls into the wrong hands–”
“Relax,” Cortez said. “It’s not the real one. A cleverly faked database was put in its place just before me and Igon broke in to the central computer hub at Berod. We stole the fake one.”
“Wait,” Igon asked, “we went to all that trouble – you blew me up – for a fake database?”
“Had to look convincing,” Cortez said with a shrug. “By the time he figures out the database is a fake, Klakraw will be in custody and his network headless.”
“We’re supposed to arrest him?” Loy asked. “Just like that? I’m just guessing here, but he’ll probably have us outgunned. We’re gonna need a bigger boat. A fleet of them.”
“Well, duh.” Cortez raised her robomechanical hand, wriggling her robotic fingers and pointing at them with her other hand. “The biggest fleet the GAP’s ever assembled is running silent outside the Otulak system waiting for my signal to come swooping in. –Assuming Klakraw’s still there where we get there.”
Dag looked up from stabbing at his crotch mold with an ice pick. “What’s so valuable about this database?”
Loy answered before Cortez could. “The real one contains everything the GAP knows. Personal information of officers and informants. Details on undercover operations. Over-ride codes for every police ship in the galaxy. Prison front door encryption keys. You name it, if it’s police-related, it’s in there.”
“Exactly the kind of stuff a warlord could exploit,” Cortez added. “Which is why Klakraw was more than happy to agree to come to Otulak to buy it from me. And if he does take the bait and show up... we’ve got him.”
“Wait…” Vei twisted around in her nest to face Cortez. “If you’re a cop, and the data is fake, and this is all one big sting operation... then, our deal – the cut you promised us – it was all a lie.”
“The tiniest bit,” Cortez said. “Wasn’t lying about the shell-rot cream, though. I’ll buy you as much as you need. I’ve got an expense account.”
Vei’s waddle fluttered with agitation. “But the percentage of the data sale... Is there even going to be a data sale?”
Cortez shook her head. “Not if everything goes according to plan. I just need to confirm Klakraw’s location and stick with him until the fleet can hone in on my signal. So, yeah... no sale, no cut.”
“Then why should we help you?” Feh asked over the intercom.
“There’s still the shell-rot cream,” Dag said.
“Quiet,” Vei told him. “We’re negotiating here.”
“Well don’t blow the cream,” Dag said, and went back to chipping at his mold.
Vei huffed. “Other than the cream, what’s in it for us?”
“I dunno,” Cortez said. “We could conveniently forget the fact you opened fire on a police ship, I guess.”
“Wait a minute, they attacked a DUPES ship – they have to pay for that,” Loy said. “You can’t offer them immunity.”
“Sorry, but I can. GAP trumps your little back-system police force jurisdiction any day.”
Loy sneered. “That must be nice.”
“It is,” Cortez said. Sh
e smiled at Vei. “So, yeah, I can get you immunity.”
“That’s a start,” Vei said. “But that still doesn’t pay the bills. We’ve all got families at home to take care of.”
“Well,” Cortez said, examining her fingernails, “there is the reward.”
“Reward?” Vei and Igon asked simultaneously.
“Klakraw’s one of the most wanted beings ever,” Cortez said. “The reward the Galactic Authority has put up for his capture and conviction is astronomical. And you three would get it.”
“All of it?” Vei asked.
“I can’t claim it,” Cortez said. “Neither can our young DUPES officer here. We’re both cops. So that means it’s all yours. You’ll come out of this with a lot more than a tiny cut.”
“Not so fast,” Igon said. “I could claim it.”
“No,” Cortez said, “you’ll be going to jail.”
“Jail?” Igon protested. “What for?”
“Breaking into a government stronghold and stealing a top secret database, for starters,” Cortez said.
“But it was a sting...” Igon said, his voice pitching up into a whine, “we stole fake data...”
“Yeah,” Cortez said, “but you didn’t know that. –Now, there anything to eat on this boat?”
Six hours later, with a shudder and a creaking thunk, the Exalted Refuse popped out of superluminal space into the Otulak system, right in the middle of the flow of pirate ship traffic. Oncoming ships were forced to perform emergency maneuvers to swerve around her bulk.
Cortez leaned over the rim of Vei’s nest-station. “Open this channel, can you?” She tapped a sequence onto the underside of her robomechanical arm and raised her palm in front of Vei so the Halgorian could read the holographic projection of numbers.
“That’s a pretty narrow frequency,” Vei said, twisting controls to tune the radio.
Cortez shut off her palm projection. “And with any luck, Klakraw will be the only one listening to it.”
“Channel open,” Vei said. “There a message you want me to transmit?”
“No, just send a 1200 mega-hertz pulse for twenty-three seconds. If he’s listening, that’s what he’ll be listening for.”
“Transmitting.”
“All right everybody, let me do all the talking, right?” Cortez asked, then turned to look at Loy. “Ahem…”
“What?” Loy frowned. “I’m cool. You can do the talking. Right up until you do or say anything that confirms my suspicion you’re not really a cop.”
“Give it a rest, will you? But I didn’t mean that.” Cortez pointed a robomechanical finger at Loy’s head. “It’s going to be a video transmission.”
“So?” Loy asked.
“The badge.”
“Oh, yeah.” Blushing, Loy reached up and unpinned the DUPES shield from her pillbox cap, slipping it away in an inner jacket pocket.
“We’re being hailed on that same frequency,” Vei announced. “Putting it in the tank.”
Within the holotank in the rim of Vei’s nest-station, pixelated static swirled into a slowly coalescing image of a Fetori fish-slug swimming within a spherical environment-containment tank. The tank drew back from the camera, revealing itself to be a helmet cybernetically grafted onto the shoulders of a red-furred Tolakian gorilla in place of its original head. Six beady red eyes glowed from deep within the murky recesses of the head-tank. “Ah, Cortez,” an electronically-modulated buzz of a voice said.
Cortez gave a polite nod. “Klakraw.”
“I was beginning to think you would not be coming.” Klakraw’s gorilla fingertips made a pyramid in front of the voice modulator speaker grill set into his head-tank’s glass faceplate. “You of course brought me something?”
Cortez winked back at Loy. “When have I ever disappointed?”
TWELVE
Thirty minutes later, the Exalted Refuse was docked up snug against the belly of the Warlord Klakraw’s Battlerock, a massive battleship built within a hollowed-out heavy-metal asteroid, seventy times the scavenger ship’s size. The rocky surface of the Battlerock was a dense array of beam turrets, rocket launchers, defense system pods, and charred craters testifying to innumerable battles.
Klakraw was waiting for Cortez when she stepped out of the airlock into the Battlerock’s expansive receiving entryway. A tall, feathered Vilopian in a dark gray lab coat stood respectfully at Klakraw’s side, and an honor guard of twenty eyeless, vestigial-winged Jelustri Xenobat marines in scaled body armor stood at rigid attention behind him, double-barreled autorifles tight against their chests in salute.
The viscous liquid inside Klakraw’s environment head-tank rippled as he fluttered his tendril-fins in greeting. “Welcome aboard.”
“Oh, come here and give me a big hug, you little monster.” Cortez scooped the warlord into her arms and lifted him up for a enthusiastic bear-hug.
Arms stiff at his side, Klakraw didn’t struggle. “Put me down, you tree.”
“It’s been too long.” Cortez lowered the warlord to his bare gorilla feet. He barely came up to her waist. “That a new body?”
“No, just dyed the hair,” Klakraw said. “I got tired of purple.”
“Shame, I liked the purple.”
“Wasn’t intimidating enough–”
“Ahem,” Igon said, hopping out of the airlock. He trotted up to Klakraw, extending one claw. “George Igon Stewart 99931-Gamma, sir warlord sir, at your service. Gladys’ provisional betrothed.”
“Gladys must be thrilled,” Klakraw said, ignoring Igon’s offered claw and leaning to look around the robot into the airlock as Loy stepped out. He craned his head-tank back and pressed his glowing eyes against his head-tank’s faceplate to take her all in. “Speaking of wives... who might this candidate for my ninth be?”
Loy swallowed and backed up.
“Watch it, Kla,” Cortez said. “She’s a cop.”
Loy shot Cortez an accusing glare.
“That so?” Klakraw said, nonplussed. “I would have guessed candy gram stripper.”
“Ex-cop,” Cortez said. “Gun for hire, now. Pretty good one.”
Loy relaxed and managed to smile down at the warlord. “Charmed. But don’t get any ideas. You couldn’t afford me.”
“I pay pretty well for firepower,” Klakraw said.
“Not what I was talking about.”
The liquid in his tank broiled and a sound like paper tearing spurted out of his voice modulator. “I like her.” He turned his faceplate up towards Cortez. “Now, where’s my database?”
“Where’s my money?” Cortez asked.
“You won’t mind my techs looking at it first, would you? You know, just to confirm I’m not paying for copies of old My Mother the Car episodes.”
“I thought you liked My Mother the Car?”
“Charlene…”
“Not just gonna take my word for it?”
“Would you take your word for it?”
Cortez smirked, tapped the underside of her robomechanical forearm. “Dag,” she said into her palm, “grab the core, bring it out.”
Klakraw turned to the Vilopian standing beside him. “Report the results as soon as you have them, Dr. Barranco.”
“Of course, sir.” The Vilopian nodded and ducked through the airlock.
“Dag, technician’s coming in to help,” Cortez said into her palm. “Full cooperation, understand?”
“No problem,” Dag replied through her hand’s tiny fingertip speaker.
Cortez tapped the radio off and looked around the receiving entryway. “So, which way’s dinner again?”
“My apologies.” Klakraw gestured at a doorway on the far end of the room. “Come on then, I think we can manage to get a decent meal together for you.”
The warlord spun and lunge-walked for the doorway on all fours. The Xenobat honor guard parted to let him through, then fell in to a rhythmic march behind him.
Igon rushed after the warlord, trotting up to his side. “Sir warlord sir
, I can’t say how much of an honor it is meeting you. And for the record, you can afford me…”
Cortez chuckled and shook her head. She glanced back at Loy. “You coming?”
“Little close to the bone there telling him I’m a cop,” Loy said.
Cortez pointed up at a camera cluster in the ceiling. She lowered her voice. “He probably ran a background check the second we stepped in the airlock. If we hadn’t mentioned the cop thing it would have set off a big red flag. We don’t need him more suspicious than he naturally is.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Loy said. “But what are we waiting for? He took the bait–he’s here. Close the trap already.”
“What’s the rush?” Cortez started for the doorway. “I’m starving.”
The deck under their chairs shuddered and a soft hum vibrated through Patrol Rocketship 8724’s mess hall.
“What was that?” Rikki asked, his head snapping left right up and down in a panic. Before they’d returned to their own ship, P’lau and his fellow Rolm pirates had placed Rikki’s and Hackenthrush’s chairs back-to-back and applied another wrapping of memory sheet around them, binding them and the chairs together. Only their heads and bare feet were free of the tacky, constricting material.
“That was a tractor beam locking on to us,” 8724 said. “We are being drawn towards a large ship with a silhouette and mass that appears to match a vessel my DUPES database identifies at the Battlerock, the flagship of the warlord Klakraw.”
Hackenthrush looked up at the ceiling. “That pirate bastard really did sell us.”
“It appears he was a Rolm of his word, yes.”
“Well, either way,” Hackenthrush said, relaxing back in the chair, an almost sublime glint in his eyes, “can’t let the ship fall into criminal hands.”
“We can’t?” Rikki asked.
Hackenthrush snorted. “You remember what the Rolm said, this warlord fellow he’s sold us to likes to torture cops. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’ll cry like a baby if I’m tortured. No way I’m gonna let myself be embarrassed like that. So there’s nothing left for it but to initiate self-destruct. Get on that, 8724.”
