by J. S. Morin
Clarence still blocked the tram door as it opened at Graven North. A middle-aged couple waiting on the platform hesitated a moment before heading for another car. Seconds later, the door grated shut, and the tram lurched into motion.
Glancing around at his three unwelcome traveling companions, Carl slouched against the far wall from Clarence, standing in a designated luggage area marked in faded paint on the floor. “So, you guys just ride around this thing all day, or you got day jobs on the side? I can’t imagine this gig pays.”
The one with the twin braids cracked his neck. “Look at this bird. Asking like we waddle and quack. Me and my mates, we provide much needed security ‘round these parts. Without the likes of us, might be people don’t feel safe.”
Special Operative Courier Carl didn’t need to bite his tongue to resist the urge to snark back at that comment. It was beneath his notice. He got the message loud and clear: this was some gang’s territory, and these were local enforcers. Flavors varied from planet to planet, but the idea was the same. On Mars, they wore expensive suits but had the vocabulary of freight haulers. On Carousel, they wore police uniforms. Even Earth had them—they looked like Mort. The only place Carl had ever been that didn’t have gangs of one sort or another was Phabian. Clarence, Virgil, and whatshisname with the braids didn’t break the top 100 of guys who’d tried to bully Carl.
“Look at him,” Virgil said, pointing with his cane. “Gone all quiet-like and brooding. What’s he thinking in that head of his? Might be worth a look.” He slapped the shaft of the cane against his palm. “I know a guy who might get us a peep in that case. Startin’ to think I want to see what it’s got in it.”
The tram slowed as it approached Midtown Station. Carl wasn’t sure he had until Nova Station before things turned ugly. His destination was between Nova and Midtown, but it was sure as hell a shorter walk from Nova. Then again, short walks take a lot longer with broken legs, and getting there without the merchandise wasn’t even worth the trip.
“I know a guy, too,” Carl said, stalling for time. He didn’t make eye contact with any of the gang members and monitored the tram’s progress indicator in his peripheral vision. “Put a magic charm on this case that’ll rot the balls off any smartass who lays a hand on it.”
The tram jerked to a halt, and the door behind Clarence rumbled open. Carl let his feigned indifference drop and bolted for the door, using the case as a battering ram. Without time to weigh the likelihood of Carl’s claim, Clarence dislodged his datalens in his haste to get clear of the case’s testicle-rotting magic.
As Carl disappeared into the crowd at Midtown Station, he heard the gang regrouping to give chase. But pursuit didn’t last long. The element of surprise had given him a head start that allowed Carl to blend into the crowd. Two blocks later, he felt safe enough to reference a public map kiosk and get his bearings. The sooner he converted this stupid goo into nice, simple hardcoin, the better.
# # #
Esper pulled Jaxon up from the mat with a gloved hand. He nodded wordless thanks and doubled over, hands on knees, panting for breath. “That’s what you get for pulling your punches.”
“Sorry,” Jaxon replied between gasps. “Not being macho. Getting too old. Hit a girl in a heartbeat.” He winked up at her as he tried to snap his fingers. But between the sparring gloves and a coating of sweat, they just slipped. With one last heaving breath, he jerked upright and raised his gloves in a boxer’s stance.
With a chuckle, Esper shook her head. “No, I think you’re done.” Esper had rescued Jaxon from the couch in the common room, where he’d been staring at the post-holo selection screen of some action flick. Carl had brought him along as security officer, and then gone off on his own.
The mat squooshed under Jaxon’s bare feet as he hopped forward, hands still up bracketing his face. “Nah, I got another round in me.”
“And I’d have to carry you upstairs afterward. Go. Hit the showers. I’ll pack up down here.”
There was a tearing sound as Jaxon pulled open the FuzziGrip wrist straps that kept his gloves on. He dropped them to the floor as he staggered for the stairs. Esper started folding and rolling the mat to stow it. Jaxon called down from the catwalk. “Just don’t tell Rach I got my ass handed to me by a girl half my size. Don’t want her getting ideas.”
They’d both come down to blow off steam and clear their heads. While everyone on board got why Jaxon was preoccupied—his friend and commanding officer was off somewhere without a bodyguard, when that’s what he’d been hired for. Esper’s problem was more personal and certainly not something she could open up about to anyone on board.
As she passed through the common room, she heard the shower running, barely audible over Roddy’s choice of laaku martial arts holos. Esper paused, determined that it was just Four Fists, No Fear for the umpteenth time, and kept on toward her quarters. She had already memorized all the moves from that one.
The door thumped shut behind her. It was just her and the book, alone together in the room. The Tome of Bleeding Thoughts lay there, to all appearances nothing more than an archaic form of literature. “Shut up,” she muttered at it. “You’re going home whether you like it or not.”
Searching her closet, Esper picked out a clean outfit and found a towel. She’d shower as soon as Jaxon was done. Shouldn’t be long. She could be alone with it for a few minutes without opening the cover.
Her thoughts wandered to her meeting with Ivanhoe. She was going to have to get it off the ship somehow without anyone noticing. It wasn’t as if anyone would know what she was doing, but Mort might put a few disparate clues together and puzzle something out. The less he knew about her plans, the better. Estrangement was never an easy thing to mediate; Esper knew that all too well. Mort returning to the Convocation would be as awkward as Esper returning to New Singapore. There was no way she was going to make the first move in contacting her family, and they’d shown no interest in tracking her down. But some tiny part of her wished that Samson had recognized her after piloting Mort back from the moon he’d killed. Esper hadn’t had the courage to approach in the brief window between his recovery and him leaving Ithaca with Don Rucker.
Maybe if she didn’t see it, Esper could bonk two birds with one stone. “This is for Mort’s own good, not yours,” she said to the book. With a suggestion that maybe it would be best if no one could see the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts, it faded from view. Of course, the fact that the lights blinked out as well ensured its invisibility.
“Hey,” Roddy shouted from the common room. “Keep your damn spells in your sleeves!”
Esper ducked down, wondering what to say in apology, when she heard Mort’s voice. “Don’t blame me every time your ship breaks down. Maybe when you fix it, consider watching your gymnastic punch monkeys at a volume below volcanic eruption.”
“That’s it. I’m deleting all your Merlin cartoons.”
Esper’s mouth opened to intervene. But as the wizard and mechanic shouted insults and threats though a different set of doors, she thought better of it. The lights flickered and returned to normal function. A few seconds later, the holo-projector blared to life, and the argument stopped. Some things were best left alone.
# # #
Footsore and hungry, Carl eventually arrived at the site of the exchange. Even at well past 9 p.m. local time, the factory hummed with activity. The Rah-Shin Robotics facility was fully automated—robots making robots. There was something apocalyptic in that whole arrangement as far as Carl was concerned, but for now he had more important things on his mind.
Beside the back loading dock, a human-sized door had a miniature datapad adhered to it with a dollop of putty. It pulled away with a gentle pop and turned on of its own accord, displaying a text message.
THIS DOOR HAS BEEN LOCKED OPEN. FOLLOW DOORS MARKED WITH THIS SYMBOL.
Below the text was a photographic image of a zigzag scratched into a steel panel. Seemed simple enough. Might have been a coincidence as far a
s any automated janitor-bots might think. Wouldn’t mean anything to someone who stumbled across it randomly, if a sentient brain wandered in.
Eager to be rid of the goo he’d lugged halfway across the colony, Carl pulled open the door without giving it even a cursory check for booby traps. If someone was going to all this trouble to lay a trail of breadcrumbs for him, he wasn’t going to just blow Carl up. If this contact of Yomin’s wanted to do that, it would have triggered as soon as Carl touched the datapad.
Once through the door, the muted hum of the factory turned into an omnipresent droning. The floors vibrated with it. The sound pushed on Carl’s eardrums until he discovered a pair of protective muffs and put them on. Breathing a sigh of relief, he ventured onward into the facility.
He would have expected that a fully automated plant would just be one huge room filled to the brim with machinery like a kids’ toy box. But this place had corridors and intersections, doors with security swipes, and glassteel windows that provided the occasional view into the bowels of the machine-driven manufacturing process. What the robots were doing was every bit as magical to Carl as Mort’s spells, cutting, welding, spinning, atomizing, and grinding. Half the time Carl couldn’t tell whether a moving piece of metal was worker or product.
At every door, he checked for the zigzag mark the datapad had shown him. He tried his hand on all of them, and the ones without the mark didn’t budge. The first one that did display the right markings opened easily, and Carl caught his breath as it led through a workspace bounded on both sides by walls of machinery busily at work. The horrific sounds of tortured metal being formed unwillingly into new shapes were dulled by the muffs, but didn’t diminish their menace. At a whim, those robots could reach out and cut Carl in two, burn him alive, or put a thousand holes through him before he could react. Or they could just keep on building whatever it was they were building and ignore him completely. It was the chance that bothered him most. Clutching the metallic case to his chest, Carl hurried through.
The far side had another door with the zigzag marking. The corridor beyond had doors at either end, one of which was also marked. As he followed the trail he’d been left, Carl passed through two more factory rooms, half a dozen more hallways, and a parts storage warehouse. Frustrated by the rats’ maze, he was weighing the options to find his way back the way he came when at last he reached his destination.
Scanners of every variety were scattered around the room labeled Quality Control. Carl only recognized a few, some of which he’d seen at the Gologlex Menagerie, and another that the race inspectors for Silde Slims had used to make sure Roddy’s maintenance work hadn’t included illegal modifications. It was lit with glowpanel overheads that weren’t all still functioning, giving an inspection station more shadows than was probably conducive to good quality assurance. The walls and floor were a uniform dingy white, spotted with mold and dusted with cobwebs.
The lone occupant prior to Carl’s arrival was wearing a brown hooded overcoat and black gloves. His face was obscured behind a metallic mask with generic human features sculpted across the surface. The eyes reflected pale yellow, suggesting some sort of built-in datalens.
“You my buyer?” Carl asked. It sounded like a stupid question, he knew, but it was even stupider handing over millions of terras in merchandise to a guy who was just in the wrong place at the right time.
“No, I’m just here to feed the robots. Are you the guy with my pizza delivery, or the one bringing my primordial amino acids from Hades Breath?” The buyer’s voice was modulated by the mask, stripping away any warmth in tone but not the sarcasm.
“If I’d known this was a social occasion, I’d have picked up pizzas and beer on the way. Sorry, all I’ve got is this weird liquid.” Somewhere along the trek through the facility, Special Operative Courier Carl had given way to the original model. He found it hard to be intimidated by some skinny laboratory dweeb who thought he could look smooth and scary hiding behind a mask and some datalenses. It was a kid’s Halloween outfit at best. At worst, it was just plain pathetic.
But nonetheless, the guy knew what he was buying, and a case not unlike his own lay on the inspection table in front of the masked buyer. If that contained his hardcoin terras, Carl was willing to put up with the theatrics. He set his case down opposite the buyer and popped it open. None of the high-sec locks and booby traps he’d bragged about to the tram gang existed. They’d been wonderful ideas, stuff straight out of a Maxwell Smart flatvid. But shit like that cost money—money he wouldn’t have until this transaction was complete. Until then, all the Mobius crew had done was put a tracker on it in case Carl lost the goods en route. They wouldn’t even tell him where they hid it so he couldn’t give the information away by accident.
The buyer pulled the case to his side of the table and swung it around. With a hand scanner, he gave the goo a once-over. Carl was just as glad, since just eyeballing the stuff it looked like it had come from a recycler spigot with a busted filter. But he waited patiently while the scanner worked.
From behind the mask, a noise like a scrambled harrumph issued forth, barely recognizable as human. “Seems legit. Finally, someone in the galaxy who’s trustworthy.” He pushed the unopened case across the table. “Go ahead and open it.”
The lid popped with the push of a button, and Carl’s mouth began to water. Inside were row upon row of hardcoin terras stacked so tightly they wouldn’t rattle in transit. A clear plastic divider kept the ones on the top from falling out. The weight of that lid was decadent. Pulling one at random from the rows, Carl found a twenty-terra coin, its edges worn with commercial use. He plucked another from the stacks and discovered a thousand-terra denomination he’d rarely seen up close and personal. It was pristine, the sort of hardcoin that didn’t change hands over trivial matters like food and booze.
“It’s mostly higher denominations. Your minion said not to go all one type, but bugger me if I was going to lug around that much cash in small change. Count it if you like. I’m in an indulgent mood. Feels like I’ve been waiting ages for this stuff.”
“Much as I’d like to hang out and wait with you for the pizza guy, I’ve got places to be and people to pay. Pleasure doing business with you.”
Carl did a little mental math, trusting this mystery buyer only in the most superficial sense. There were easily more than 2,200 individual coins in the case, so a mixture with mostly thousand terra coins was reasonable to hit the agreed upon fee. Short of getting completely screwed, he was happy enough getting back to the Mobius with what he had.
“Very well, then. You can get out the same way you got in. I’m leaving by the far door, which will lock behind me. Don’t try to follow me or contact me; we won’t be meeting again. Good day, sir.”
The buyer’s gait was awkward and stiff as he carried the irksome primordial goo out the far exit of the lab. Certainly not the type who was used to hauling around his own gear. But since Carl was in full agreement on the two of them never meeting again, he didn’t put too much thought into the identity of the buyer. He could be a Harmony Bay agent, like Yomin suggested, or a freelancer on the lookout to drive an even harder bargain with one of the big transgalactic megacorps. Hell, he could be looking to use it in a recipe for some crazy alien folk medicine for all Carl cared.
As he exited the facility through the horrors of semi-obsolete modern technology, all Carl knew for certain was that he’d finally gotten paid.
# # #
There weren’t many times when having “too much money” made a lick of sense conceptually. But hauling it across desolate streets at night in a conspicuous metallic case was one of those times. Ten kilos of hardcoin terras yanked on Carl’s shoulder with the weight of all the debts he’d ever owed. Every glint from a window was a scanner. Every gap between buildings was a potential ambush. Even the traffic control signals were giving Carl unsettling looks.
It was raining by the time Carl had exited the factory. Foot traffic on the capital’s streets
had dwindled to almost nil. This was the time he should have hunkered down, pulled out a comm, and called for a little backup. Sure, weapons were banned in the city, but it wasn’t like Carl or any of his crew was exactly law-abiding. But holing up someplace was just dead time, and Carl wanted his payday within the hull of the Mobius as soon as sentiently possible. While there was a small possibility of losing all that cash to nefarious actors en route, the real risk was Carl finding a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend it on.
Roddy had plans for the money even before they left Pintara, Carl reminded himself. There was a life-support overhaul he wanted to perform now that Kubu wasn’t a constant drain on the ship’s resources. Plus he’d found a bargain on a new holo-projector. Whatever temptations lay in Carl’s path, he had to weigh them against fresher air and crisper holovids.
Something moved in Carl’s peripheral vision, and he reached for a blaster that he wasn’t carrying. “Keep it smooth,” he muttered. Looking jumpy was all the more dangerous when unarmed. “Why not just let everyone walk around armed? The civic maintenance dopes wouldn’t be afraid to do their fucking jobs.” Lights were out on nearly every street. Refuse cluttered the edges of the roadways. A noodle shop’s sign was half burnt out, inadvertently offering “odles” to passersby. Let a few mechanics and janitorial supervisors strap blasters at their hips and this place might clean up nice. Well, maybe not nice, but a step up from hell’s attic.
“Hey buddy, terras for a beer?” a voice called from the shadows of a specialty Martian grocery store. The sign in the door was dark, and one of the windows was patched with a steel plate instead of glass.
Carl stopped in his tracks and puzzled over the request. At first, he thought the guy was selling beers like a pushcart vendor. Then he realized the man was begging. “Thanks for not bullshitting me about what you’d spend my money on, but I’m broke. Go bother someone at an opera or a rodeo.” Carl was pretty sure he’d seen advert posters for a rodeo, and the sorts that went to those always seemed loaded.
