by J. S. Morin
“I’m guessing that retirement for you would look a lot like con jobs but with nicer gear.”
“And better booze,” Carl agreed. “But in the meantime, raise the Mobius on the comm and tell the crew to get in position. Damn… sounds weird talking about my ship in the third person—er, vessel.”
# # #
Hatchet slouched in the pilot’s chair of the Mobius, staring out the forward windows. Outside, the flat gray astral stared back. The ship hummed with unfamiliar cadence. The seat fit strangely around his backside. Beside him, the copilot’s position remained vacant. Scarecrow wanted nothing to do with him since coming aboard, and Juggler had declined in favor of watching his kids. Vixen was up in the turret in case shit started blowing out the ventilation system.
“You just gonna stand there hovering?” Hatchet snapped without looking back.
“Carl asked me to keep an eye on you,” Esper replied from the cockpit doorway. “He didn’t say to keep you company.”
“Not like I can even drop back to realspace without your say-so. The hell kind of outlaws are you people, anyway? I get that Ramsey likes to keep his hands clean… less heat from ARGO security. I really do get it. But some jobs are just meant to be a little messy for a lot of money. You and your friends are going to get killed one of these days flappin’ lips at guys with blasters. One wrong step, someone gets his ticket punched for hell.”
“Maybe we’re trying to avoid booking that particular trip,” Esper said. “Out here, we can choose from a variety of disreputable jobs to make our living. It’s not exactly charitable work but as long as we don’t cause undue harm, redemption isn’t out of reach.”
Hatchet let out a long breath. “Like talking to a Bible with some of the commandments crossed out. Hard line on the killing, but stealing and false witness get a stamp of approval.” The former priestess was quiet a moment. “What’s the matter? Not expecting a guy in my line of work to know the good book?”
For a moment, he worried that he was talking to air. Twisting in his seat, he checked to see that Esper was still behind him or not. But there she stood, hands jammed into her sleeves like some actual wizard. The scowl was convincing though.
“I appreciate your attempt to frame your argument in familiar terms for me. But let me be a bit blunt here. You’re a sinner, Hiroshi Samuelson, a predator of life and not just property. Carl didn’t need to ask me to keep an eye on you. I’ve been watching you since I found out just what a despicable pirate you really are. My suggestion is that you take a good hard look in the mirror and consider following Carl’s example. He’s a poor role model in general, but it should be an attainable stepping stone even for someone so far gone as yourself. At least he tries. You don’t have to confess to me—Lord knows I’ve strayed far enough myself. But I’d strongly suggest finding some way to strike up a personal relationship with God.”
Esper leaned across and deposited a datapad on the seat beside Hatchet.
“What’s this?”
“Biographical data on the crew of the Sokol. Figured you might like to know a little about the people we’re not killing today. Look it over and think about all the people your callous murders would have impacted: the spouses, the children, the siblings, the cousins, the surviving parents, and even the grandparents in a couple cases.”
Hatchet picked up the datapad and flipped through a few entries. Punk. Thug. Boring. Old. Homely. Weakling. None of them appeared worth more than a quick glance. He tossed the datapad back. “Pass. I got better things to do than worry about a bunch of nobodies. And I got more important things to worry about than my soul. I don’t believe in that crap. You think Don Rucker worries about who he tramples to stay on top?”
To his surprise, Esper twitched a smile. “Believe it or not, Don Rucker’s a religious man. Not a good man, mind you, or even a pious one. But when my family moved to New Singapore, we attended the same church as the Rucker family.”
“Wait… you knew Tanny all along?”
Esper scoffed. “Of course not. Don Rucker and his family sat up front, right under the priest’s nose. My parents had a little money—you had to in that neighborhood—but we were beneath their notice. Point is, even a man like Rucker had a moral signpost in his life, no matter how dusty and blood-spattered it might have been. And now, think about the sort of man who lacks even that.” She raised her eyebrows in challenge, then spun on her heel and left.
Hatchet tried to go back to watching out the window again, letting his mind go as blank as the astral. But all he could think was that the flat gray was still deciding whether to go all black or all white.
# # #
Carl hated not being on the handshake team, but this was supposed to be a professional merc crew, hired by Harmony Bay. All of Hatchet’s crew had matching EV suits. They looked the part. Even if Carl had gone down to the cargo hold for the exchange, he’d have been the ugly duckling of the group in his patched and dated gear. Hardly the look of a captain. Better to sit in the cockpit, keeping on the comms.
Being the paranoid bastard that he was, Hatchet had rigged his ship with remote cameras. None of them kept a record—a basic insecurity feature when ARGO customs could pop up nearly anywhere—but they let Carl watch the transfer go down. The Sokol was visible out the open cargo bay door. Grixlit and July were on hand for the Crichton, watching as the courier ship opened its own cargo hold to astral space. Much as Carl hated doing business in the shallow astral, he hated even more that they had chosen a standard depth of just two astral units for the exchange. With the Mobius relying on depth to remain hidden, it was just as well to keep the Sokol in the kiddie pool.
As Carl watched two operatives from the Sokol making the zero-G float between vessels, it struck him as odd that the Hatchet Job was taking on cargo. It was like using a plasma rifle to start a campfire. Sure, it worked, but it wasn’t exactly the standard function of the vessel. One of the Sokol crew was carrying a silvery case the size of an overnight travel bag. He hoped that when that guy reached the gravity of the Hatchet Job, the weight of all those hardcoin terras wrenched his shoulder.
It was almost done. Two. Point. Five. MILLION. Terras. There almost wasn’t time left for anything to go wrong.
# # #
Rodek of Kethlet, bounty hunter. The very notion struck Roddy as ludicrous, but he owned a blaster and had—for the moment at least—his own ship with some pretty advanced hardware on board. If he could keep a straight face, he might be able to sell this.
Hades Breath was hell’s cesspit, and that might have been giving it too much credit. The whole surface needed a life support overhaul, heavy on the air filtration. It just went to prove that if there was an uninhabitable ball of sulfur and iron oxide somewhere in the galaxy, there was a group of humans willing to cross out the “unin” and put up houses. This was the species that was spreading across the Milky Way like a plague. A bunch of squatters, volunteer refugees, and stubborn idiots.
The brusque reply from the Mobius had come from roughly this area of space, and this was the most likely destination for Carl and the rest of them. Roddy had been tempted to follow up his message but thought better of it. Something hadn’t smelled right about the reply. Carl never would have written it. Amy couldn’t give a one-word reply if you asked her what day of the week it was. And somehow Roddy just couldn’t picture Esper replying “acknowledged” without asking how he was feeling or giving an update on the crew. That left the newcomers, and if one of them had sent the reply, he didn’t want to get into a conversation. Bad enough having Carl know Roddy might have fucked around in the engine room.
But finding the Mobius on his own was proving to be even more unpleasant than he imagined. The disputed sector was undeveloped, uncivilized, and downright unlovable. It was filled with dregs that had sloshed over the edge of ARGO space and that no one missed. Still, a bounty hunter couldn’t just wander the streets and absorb intel the way his lungs were absorbing sulfur dioxide. He needed a place to grease some pal
ms and come up with leads on where he could find a disreputable diplomatic shuttle and its even more disreputable crew.
Unfortunately, Roddy needed a bar.
That wasn’t to say Roddy needed a drink. He didn’t need a drink. He’d proved that to himself over the course of the last few weeks. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want one. First among the likely prospects was a drab establishment of corrugated steel construction with the name “Hell’s Watering Hole” painted onto the bare metal above the door. These locals were a morbid lot. Still, something about the place kept Roddy’s feet moving beneath him. Maybe it was the clientele he saw entering and exiting—an unpromising brew of bedraggled and armed. But more likely, it didn’t sound like the sort of place he wanted to potentially spend hours fishing for local gossip.
Harrigan’s. This place had an Earthy sound to it, something ancient and Celtic that suggested a dark ale might be the specialty of the house. The front had windows, and the name was etched into the glass. Inside, a warm synthetic wood called out to him, offering up one of the empty stools for him to occupy. It would have been rude to refuse so polite an invitation.
The next few hours became a blur. His initial read on the place was dead-on. It didn’t have Earth imports on hand, but Roddy had never been that picky about labels, and the imitation stuff was pretty good on its own merits. He had held firm to his sobriety for upward of five minutes. On the chance of offending a potential client, how could he refuse a little hospitality? No bounty hunter worth his blaster would turn down a free drink. At least, not any sort of bounty hunter that Roddy could ever imagine.
But he stumbled out the door in a stupor, accompanied by a man named Victor Kislev. “So what’s the deal?” Roddy asked him. “You some kind of a player on this rock? Who’s this Isadora we’re going to see?”
Victor gave Roddy a condescending smile. Roddy wasn’t so drunk he couldn’t tell human emotions apart. His ruddy cheeks and bristling mustache made Victor look like a cartoon drunk, and Roddy was an expert on barflies. “Until yesterday, she was boss’s sister. Today, she is boss. For laaku, you hold your liquor well but be best behaving in front of Miss Dragovic.”
“Sure, sure. No problem.” Roddy hopped into the waiting hover-cruiser as Victor held the door. He had expected it to take him to meet Isadora Dragovic. Instead, he found himself facing a woman in the opposite seat who dripped with self-confident power. She was young, maybe Carl’s age, which was short in the tooth for a crime boss, with void-black hair and the posture of a queen.
“I understand you are looking for a ship called the Mobius,” she said. She spoke with a hint of Old-Earth in her accent, but nothing so grating on the ears as the scum he’d been drinking with all afternoon. Offworld education for sure, maybe even in Sol somewhere.
Mindful of his drunkenness, Roddy attempted not to slouch in his seat. “Poet Fleet’s been looking for them. It’s open contract but don’t think about poaching that ship off of me. I’m more use to you as a bounty hunter than as cheap intel.”
Isadora raised an eyebrow. “Indeed? Well then, perhaps we might have work for you. You have references, perhaps?”
“Not in this line of work, ma’am. Open contract like the Poets is one thing, but I don’t blab about private jobs. I don’t keep records or trophies. I don’t spill war stories over a few beers. Every six months I get a neural cleansing and wipe the memory of them so I can’t tell you who I’ve worked for even if I wanted to. I’m not a half-now, half-later kind of guy. I deliver; you pay in full. You wanna talk about the people who didn’t pay my fee? Them I remember plenty about.” There were times when Roddy really appreciated the haphazard education he’d received in bullshitology by hanging around Carl all these years. He ought to print up a degree to hang on the wall of his quarters—if he still had quarters on the Mobius.
Isadora studied him a moment. Her piercing blue eyes, so pale they were nearly gray, locked onto Roddy’s with tractor beam force. “Very well. I have information on your ship, as well as another job for you to do. Twenty-seven hours ago, my brother was murdered. A ship called the Hatchet Job retrieved the assassins and stole my brother’s personal computer. Your quarry departed the system in their company after killing five of our self-defense fighters.” She must have been desperate to cough up so much intel without so much as a background check on Roddy. Maybe she was just releasing all the hounds she could find.
“You got a heading, plant a tracker, anything I can use to find them?” There was a lurch as the hover-cruiser lifted off and accelerated.
Isadora pursed her lips, possibly into a smile. Suddenly Roddy wasn’t quite so sure about his ability to read emotions in the human range. “That would be your second task. There is a ship; it left Hades Breath with a valuable cargo and is not returning communications.”
“You think the Mobius and Hatchet Job got to them?” Roddy asked. Who needed sobriety when the galaxy hit you over the head with the obvious?
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I think that with my brother’s death, the crew of the Sokol has decided they no longer require my organization. They are incorrect. You will return to me the cargo the Sokol carries, and transmit the coordinates of the ship, which we will send someone to retrieve. If the cargo has been taken by one of the other two ships, your task does not change. The cargo is of utmost importance. Is this understood?”
“Crystal. Except for one thing: what’s this cargo I’m looking for? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t give a pile of dead lizards about your business. You can be smuggling sentients or engineered bioweapons for all I care. I just need to know that I’m grabbing the right box and I’m not damaging anything you’re keen on keeping intact.”
Isadora reached for a console concealed in the armrest of her seat. A holovid popped up in the center of the cabin. It showed a standard travel case, middle end of the market, nothing too fancy. It was stainless steel with a digitally secured closure but no lock. Innocuous was the best word for it. Either these disputed zone criminals were real smooth about their smuggling ops or they couldn’t afford decent hardware. Not that it mattered, but Roddy found himself taking the job seriously. Maybe somewhere inside him there was a tiny bounty hunter trying to break free—no, that was the three liters of dark ale he’d consumed.
“Inside the box are biological samples. We ship to the corporations. Standard deal. We give them the oddities of this planet; they keep their scientists and security forces out of our way. Everyone is happy. We don’t want to risk losing such a beneficial arrangement.” The image winked out, and Isadora handed Roddy a data crystal. “Backup copy of the navigational course for the Sokol, as well as their contact with the Harmony Bay corporation. Do what you must.”
It was lucky for Roddy that the hover-cruiser picked that moment to stop with a sudden jerk because the mention of Harmony Bay caused his brain to pull up short as well. He took the data crystal as the doors opened. They had stopped just outside the Mermaid. Roddy hopped down, flanked on both sides of the door by Isadora’s bodyguards. “I don’t do goodbyes. Either I’ll be back with your cargo, or you’ll never see me again. Depends whether this job gets me killed. Best of luck running your family business.”
Roddy offered a casual wave as he climbed the narrow boarding ramp to Amy’s ship. It was time to go find Carl and save him from the sabotage Roddy had worked. But first things first, Roddy headed straight for the washroom to take care of those three liters of ale that had gone right through him.
# # #
“Crichton, we’re picking up a vessel at depth 5.5. This was supposed to be a two-ship meet. Call off your bodyguard or the deal’s off.”
Carl shot upright in the pilot’s seat. Esper knew better than to keep the Mobius that shallow, and such a nice, round number—halfway between two standard depths—didn’t sound like a wizard-assisted drop. “Sokol, we’re a courier ship. I don’t have the kind of scanners to see that deep. Please verify. I am not expecting backup here.”
July was already b
usy at the scanners. She was shaking her head. “I don’t see anything, but you weren’t bullshitting her about us being blind. Who the hell is out there?”
Carl ran a hand over his face. “Dunno. But they might just cost us 2.5 million terras.”
# # #
This was it: the rendezvous point. Roddy had brought the Mermaid in on a lower astral depth than the Sokol should have been using, and he could just pick up the vessel on his astral scanners. He had to give Amy Charlton credit for putting some serious cash into legitimate A-tech onboard systems. This was the kind of ship that you just couldn’t put together with a wizard around. That would have been like juggling Fabergé eggs or displaying the original clay statue of Poritca zot Malgak in the playground of a childcare center.
Isadora Dragovic had provided a ship ID code and a few basic tidbits. The Mermaid’s scan of the Sokol revealed a more capable vessel than he’d been expecting. Far from a simple freighter, it was a tiny gunship with a crew of six and more firepower than the Mobius and Hatchet Job combined. The former he knew from memory; the latter was merely an observation from the same scanner package that showed him the Sokol. The two ships were practically docked, facing one another cargo bay to cargo bay. Whatever deal Carl had arranged, it was going down as he watched. The Mobius had to be around somewhere, probably as deep in the astral as Esper could drop them.
Roddy drummed the fingers of his left foot along the flight yoke. The day of travel to get here had been hell on him. Amy’s ship wasn’t set up to human/laaku interoperability standards. It was a custom fit job just for her. His back ached and his arm muscles were sore from excessive reaching. It was tempting to barge in on the job to claim whatever Carl and Hatchet were after plus the payout from Isadora. Carl could hardly refuse free money.
