On reaching the shore and just before entering the multi-story storage building that held her speeder, she caught a familiar voice saying, “I almost didn’t recognize you with your shorter hair. I think I preferred it long.”
She turned to her left to face the speaker, a ruggedly handsome man of average build and a mat of hair darker than her own. Recovering her poise, she said, “Now I have to assume your stalking me, Agent Vaughn. Are you going to use your lawman powers to search me?” She raised her hands above her head and clasped them together, tilting her hip in the process. “I promise not to sue.”
The agent turned away from her pose and looked down the pier, likely looking for her comrades. “That won’t be necessary, Miss Bell. I know you and your friends have just come back from a run, you won’t have anything incriminating just now.”
She placed her hands on her hips and said, “That’s too bad. You’re exactly my type, you know.” This was actually true. If she did not know him to be a devoted husband and father she would have attempted her best seduction technique of asking him to sleep with her; an ancient female request no straight or bi-curious man had ever refused. “If you’re not here to wrongly arrest us, then why are you here, Mr. Agent?”
“Just wanted to check if you or your crewmates wanted to turn themselves in. You have no idea how much easier my job would be if bad guys just came to their senses.”
“Has anyone ever taken your advice to just stop?”
“Not really. I’m apparently not a good enough persuader to convince someone by words alone. It normally takes a more aggressive argument. Still, I keep telling them that there’s only three reasons outlaws stop criminaling; they get caught and go away for a long time, a near death experience snaps them out of it, or they actually die. Seeing any of those things happen to anyone, particularly a bright woman like yourself, is not a feeling of pleasure for me.”
“Then you’re in the wrong business.”
He took a short stride nearer the waterline, taking in a sharp breath of dewy air as he said, “And going by what I’ve been told, neither is this Brandon Letcher. He doesn’t strike me as much of a spacer, much less a smuggler. No real experience in anything-”
“What experience does a mover need?” She began moving backward, closer to the storage building. “We’re just a little moving company, mister.” She spun around to end the conversation.
Not taking the hint, Agent Vaughn said, “Hey, you usually can’t help bantering a bit longer. You must not like talking about this Brandon fellow. I bet he’s not at all your type.”
She spun back around, asking with a tone of annoyance, “Why such a hard on about our little crew? Aren’t there real bad guys to go after? Gangsters? Pirates? Graffiti artists?”
To her surprise, Agent Vaughn attained a very serious continence, making her worry he was going to outright arrest her and have her experience more monotony in a cell for a few hours. Instead, the agent only continued to speak.
“I find smugglers to be the most insufferable of criminals. Their kind actually believes what they do isn’t as corrupt as the pirate or unprincipled mercenary. They think all they’re doing is harmlessly transporting some goods to a customer who paid for them. Then they go on their way, thinking their hands are as blood free as a moving company’s.”
Some movement on the piers caught his attention. Kalie saw it was Mr. Broussard heading toward them, carrying a large duffle bag. The head of Turkey could be seen above the zipper line.
“Ah, my rant is over, Miss Bell. Give Mr. Broussard my regards. Oh, and if anyone wants to take up my offer, you know how to reach me.” The law officer gave her a slight bow and strolled affably away.
As he was still too far to be heard without shouting, Mr. Broussard asked Kalie through the thought-comm, “Was he giving you trouble?”
“Nah, he was just welcoming us back.”
The mild dampener on Kalie’s mood was instantly forgotten when she opened her storage unit and turned on her speeder kept inside it by wirelessly connecting her cerebral tech to the vehicle, making the craft hover two feet off the ground. Her blue speeder was of the latest model, a thin four-seater known as the Songbird. As she glided out of her garage-sized compartment while the speeder’s roof slid open to go into its convertible mode, she understood why it was named so. The engine chirped a sweet song of dawn when she applied the accelerator to fly out the third story floor she was in. Most people climbed their speeders to higher altitudes to join one of the traffic lines meant for public travel, but she preferred to keep manual control and hug the ground—or, technically, the water, since speeders in this city were only allowed to use the water channels as their streets in the lower altitudes. She took an hour to let the misty wind reinvigorate her face before heading for her modest apartment to seek a shower, hearty food, a nap on her plush bed, and change into some fresh clothing for her gambling plans.
Going to the casino after a job was her way of unwinding after being crammed in with the same people for what was sometimes weeks, never really having been about wanting to harvest more credits. She was fairly low maintenance, so losing more money than was intended every now and then was no big deal for her, knowing it came with the territory. It was a place she discovered on her own—quite literally stumbling in one night—and usually went on her own. Wei tagged along a few times, but she found most of her other acquaintances were either too serious or not serious enough for her to consistently enjoy playing with the same people. In any case, it was normally about getting away from people in the first place.
So as she stood vacantly staring at the spinning roulette wheel and hoping for red, she found her mind filled with the words of Agent Vaughn. His assertion that smugglers were as bad as bandits or heartless mercenaries did not necessarily trouble her, but it did ignite an awareness that she could not see herself as a smuggler for the rest of her days. She would still be considered in the prime of her life even if she were to live anther hundred years and she would look little different from her current phase, unless she opted for a different face at some point. She believed there was little chance she would elect to go for honest work any time soon, but what, then, did that entail? Would hearing a different calling lead her to professions she deemed filled with the truly rotten? She did not think so, but maybe one of her compatriots or an unseen circumstance would force her into a more vicious life.
There was no real way to know how she would react to her first killing, if it ever came to that. She had been in frays before, but they never amounted to anything more than brief shootouts as they ran to escape to their ship or scare away some competitors, nothing she truly considered life-threatening to ally or foe. Smugglers kept to the shadows as much as possible, and their small group was more effective in that goal than most. She knew Clay had killed some people before, but she never delved into detail about his military days when they chatted. She always assumed that if it came right down to it that she not only could kill someone in the heat of the moment, but handle the aftereffects, if any came at all from slaying what she imagined would be unsympathetic thugs. As the little white ball settled on black, she smiled when she realized attempting to decipher the future and guess her response to it was meaningless. Whatever happened, happened.
What ended up happening about an hour into her money-losing foray was receiving an unanticipated message from Clay in her inbox. She mentally opened the audio file and heard the voice inside her head give the succinct message of, “Connect to the party line. Job to talk about.”
Intrigued, Kalie ended her game of blackjack, closed her credit link to the casino, and walked to a bar at the edge of the ninety-five story balcony of the northeastern skytower, ordering a Bloody Mary before obliging to her captain’s request. On connecting, she noted everyone but Brandon was linked.
“What’s up, captains?” she asked.
“Our bank accounts, potentially,” replied Trista.
Kalie’s drink was placed beside her. She took ho
ld of it and faced out to see the lake brilliantly reflecting the afternoon light, suddenly recognizing she wanted to eat something that had been boiled.
“Not long after arriving,” began clarifying Clay, “I was contacted by an old army buddy of mine. He’s moved up in the military world and may or may not be taking advantage of services similar to our own for some extracurricular fun. That ambiguous enough, Eli?”
“Barely,” answered Mr. Broussard.
“Anyway, he has a moving job for us. It pays well, but besides being short notice, there’s also the fact that it’s at the end of the rainbow. Up for it?”
The colorfully described domain was their code phrase for a region of space commonly referred to as the Badlands. The average citizen often likened the vast, lawless expanse of space to the American Old West of four and a half centuries past, but less innocent people like Kalie knew better. That historical frontier at least held blameless civilians who needed rescuing by heroic cowboys, but the Badlands did not entertain the idea of accommodating the guiltless. The criminal province lied at the limits of charted space, freckled with mostly poorly mined worlds by desperate and misguided mining companies hoping to hit it big. The region quickly became the destination for felonious entrepreneurs to make clandestine deals that would be impossible anywhere else. The more resourceful syndicates eventually set up more enduring bases by using the abandoned mining facilities as their templates. It would take considerable military intervention to clear the entrenched and nimble antagonists, with most policymakers understanding that the costly endeavor would only succeed in forcing many felons to hide in more peaceful colony worlds. So in an unstated truce—disregarding the occasional disingenuous politician who advocated a cleansing—the area was largely left alone, so long as no one brought too much attention to themselves.
Clay did not deal in the Badlands, using the justified excuse that the Oracle was ill equipped to counter the normally heavily armed packs of cutthroat ships, but the crew also understood (except Brandon, thought Kalie) that they were small-time. No crewmember had the connections necessary to even partially assure their safe passage in the merciless province. And now here they were, at the brink of gaining that first link. It was a gateway to riskier and much more profitable undertakings, conceivably bloodier as well. In the end, however, what did it matter if going with the flow meant she was on a river dyed with the blood of crooks? And who said that was even inevitable? After all, the little white ball had landed on black.
“I say we funkin’ go for it,” Kalie replied after chugging the rest of her drink.
“That’s my girl,” said an admiring Wei. “That means Brandon and I are in, too.”
“Then that’s all of us!” said Trista.
“Rhino,” said Clay, “run diagnostics on the Oracle and make sure she’s ready to leave when we’re ready. Meet me at our usual rendezvous, Kalie.”
The “usual rendezvous” was another code phrase. The group had a list of various meeting places, and they would chose beforehand what “usual” designated, typically choosing these places only when they were securely aboard their craft and only when it was in the noiseless confines of space. The meeting at the rendezvous, which was just a small bridge for foot traffic near the captains’ apartment complex, lasted for half a second as the Songbird slowed down to allow Clay’s bulkier red speeder to accelerate ahead of her. She followed the vehicle to a storage facility at the border of the lake, strongly resembling the stowage building Kalie kept her speeder in. The trio flew their speeders into the twelfth story of the structure and drifted slowly until they found the storage unit marked L-158 in large, faded yellow numbers.
As Clay typed in the code he was given on the wall panel, Kalie asked Trista, “Do we know what we’re transporting?”
“It’s under a need-to-know basis, basically the matter of course for big time ops, but I’m guessing-”
“Not here, dear,” advised her husband.
Trista nodded and made the motion of zipping her lips shut.
A clicking noise originating from the inner lock of the slim metal doors informed them of Clay’s prosperous effort. He lifted the noisy door. They were surprised to find only two silver containers in the corner of the unit, each no bigger than a bin where obedient children placed their toys. On closer inspection, they observed the rectangular crates were fashioned from a highly durable yet supremely lightweight version of hyper-steel, an expensive material by its own right. When Clay and Trista attempted to lift one of the containers, they found it easy to carry, not needing to rent the usual lifter-bots nearby to load it onto the oversized trunk of Clay’s speeder. The trunk included a custom, inconspicuous scanner that combed for any signals that could come from a bug transplanted by law enforcement wanting to keep track of the contents. None were picked up. It was not unusual for them to transport a diminutive amount of cargo, given their status, but they did expect more from a job that required going into the heart of the Badlands. Whatever their story was, they would at least be easy to stash.
After a short ride to the Oracle, Kalie was told to aid Brandon in the ship inspection while Rhino placed their new cargo in their best smuggling compartments. One of the containers was able to fit neatly inside the Oracle’s prime secret spot, a hollow space directly under the jump-engine’s chamber. A small section of the lower chamber wall could be removed from the sealed core to reveal the container-sized pit, a pit that any sane technician would instruct them to permanently reseal or experience constant problems in jump-engine pressure. This converted storage room was indeed the main culprit behind the perpetual equipment blowouts. The sister package was cached and strapped inside a more roomy area above the living quarters, an area crisscrossed with a forest of pipes that would burn with white hot intensity when the Oracle’s conventional engines were active, helping to camouflage the secret storage cavity from thermal sensors.
Six hours after their arrival to Olmega, and as the planet’s short day was transitioning into night, the ship was cleared for their lengthy mission. Kalie had made sure to get to that askew propulsion engine. They took off when it was confirmed that their courtesy down payment had been downloaded into their accounts, which, in Kalie’s case, nearly equaled her total compensation from the last job. She decided to set this aside as her future gambling reserve when she returned. It made her all tingly just thinking about it. Both the internal and external tingling subsided when the Oracle exited the atmosphere and she saw the endless network of stars. She sighed. It was going to be a long trip.
It was not necessarily the distance of the Badlands themselves that would make the operation long, but the amount of time a jump-engine needed to cool down and recharge after each jump. The recharge time varied depending on the span of the jump, the time from the last jump, the quality of the engine, and other technical considerations. A short jump of a fraction of a light year, for example, would only require a brief cool down period of several minutes before another jump could be attempted, whereas a max jump extending dozens of light years could force a wait of fifteen or more hours before the next jump could be safely enacted. Having backup jump-engines cut wait times substantially, but the insane costs and mechanical liabilities that came with multiple jump-engines made such an option practical only for elite military ships and wealthy business transports.
Taking everything into account, Kalie figured she would not step foot in Olmega again in at least fifty-one Olmega days, or thirty-six Arcadian days, if she desired to use her Empire’s calendar to trick her brain into thinking in smaller numbers. What was undeniably the most common feature for any ship going any distance was a good speaker system, not only for issuing ship wide orders, but to fill the otherwise dull air with music. When enough crewmembers were in the mood, or had exhausted their other time wasting activities, the entire ship would become a club where heavy dancing, heavy drinking, heavily confusing conversations, and heavy sleeping afterward would waste a good chunk of a standard day, especially if one i
ncluded the period of time in recovery and cleanup.
The first couple of weeks (whether they were Olmega weeks, Arcadian weeks, or cat weeks mattered little to any of the crewmembers at this initial junction) went by smoothly enough. The trusty Oracle always submitted ways for Kalie to busy herself on something before she went completely brain dead, though she did occasionally slip into zombie territory, even swearing she woke up in the middle of a cordial conversation about ancient architectural design with Brandon once. Or was it twice? No, she was sure it was once and the other was a dream. Or was it the other way around?
In some odd way, Kalie actually did not mind being mind-numbingly bored every once in a while. There was an intensely peaceful feeling that overcame her when she forgot she was alive, feeling as if her vida had returned to the Gods’ Realm and was circulating unawares through the Ether in whatever form a soul shaped itself when it left the body. As was normally the case when she was in one of these incoherent states, it was one of the cats that ended her stupor. In this instance, as she was air drying her towel-wrapped body and loose hair, it was Nippers licking her still wet toes that roused her mental state. There was no damnation of Nippers this time. She lifted the feline onto her lap and cuddled the purring cat for several minutes, subconsciously thanking the pet for dragging back her soul. It was dangerous to forget for too long.
Generations (The Nimbus Collection Book 3) Page 8
