by J. S. Morin
The beggar coughed. As he stepped into the moonlight, he was round-shouldered and unshaven, wrapped in a blanket that may or may not have had clothes beneath it. “Rodeo was a traveling show. Cut orbit last week. Opera’s got more security than a bank these days. Buddy, I don’t need much. Whatever you’ve got is fine.”
“Drum soles, tax man,” a familiar voice shouted from behind Carl. More than timber or tone, it was the unusual local slang that struck a chord. It was Clarence, the prick on the tram who wore the datalens.
The beggar froze, eyes wide. “No trouble, sir. I’m… I’ll… consider me gone.” He was gone before Carl could make up his mind to tag along and bet on the beggar knowing the city’s ins and outs well enough to get him back to the Mobius unharmed.
Carl turned slowly, careful not to provoke a violent reaction. Clarence was there, as well as Virgil and the guy with the braids whose name he hadn’t caught. “So, late night, fellas? You boys sure do work long hours.”
Clarence sneered. “Consider this our side job. Second helpings and whatnot. Looks like a different case from the one you had before.”
Options floated in Carl’s brain. He could deny it and try to convince Clarence that he hadn’t made his delivery. Long shot at best, especially since them being here meant Carl had probably been tailed. He could always just hand it over, get back to the Mobius, and come back with Mort. But that felt like a kid running to find a grownup when the school bully steals his lunch money; didn’t sit well with Carl, not to mention the fact that hardcoin terras could vaporize instantly in a city this size. That left Carl’s favorite option. “Fuck off, you little piss pots. I’ve got an open comm link, and my people are on their way here.”
“No, ya don’t.” Clarence tapped the controls of his datalens. “No signals coming or going, and another scan-proof case. What say you, Virgil? Sydney? How’s about we have ourselves a show-and-tell?”
Carl gritted his teeth. How dare they refute his lies with science. “It’s cursed.”
“Tried that one already,” Clarence replied, grabbing his crotch. “Had me checkin’ me own snorker and biscuits, but all’s right in the castle. How’s about another story, mate? Or maybe you just open that case before we feed it your teeth?”
Two point two million terras could buy a lot of replacement teeth, and it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d had them knocked out. Then again, the odds of him keeping the money after losing the fight were slim. Suddenly remembering a fourth option, Carl ran.
The streets were dark and slick with rain, but the tram station was only a few hundred meters away. He could make it. Much as Carl hated physical exercise of any sort, he hated getting his face smashed in even more. With Mriy along, those jerkoffs wouldn’t have crawled out of the shadows to bother him. With Tanny at his side, the three of them would have been lying in pain, nursing broken limbs. But alone, Carl’s best bet was a surprise sprint for the nearest mode of transport.
“Hey, get back here!” Pounding footsteps behind him signaled the start of pursuit. The suddenness of his flight had bought him perhaps an extra second.
His lungs burned instantly. He wasn’t cut out for this type of exertion. But the dogs at his heels kept his feet moving as he gasped for breath. He grabbed the post of a streetlight and swung around to quicken his way onto a side street.
“You’re makin’ it worse on yerself, mate!”
Carl’s pursuers were closing in, and he hadn’t gotten much of a head start in the first place. He needed a distraction. Yanking at a trash receptacle failed to knock it over—bolted to the sidewalk. He darted between parked delivery cruisers and felt a hand on his jacket. Flailing behind him with the case, Carl knocked one of the punks off stride.
The tram station was just in sight, and the cars waited with open doors.
A hundred meters to go, and Carl had to keep the three of them off his heels. How he’d get onto the tram without them boarding just behind was a problem to solve once he was aboard. For now, he needed to run. More running. No fancy tricks. Just had to keep his feet under him. Staggering. Still going. Tram waiting. Footsteps following. Just a few… more… meters.
The doors closed, and the tram pulled away from the station. “No!” Carl shouted, but it came out as a gasp.
A cane hit him in the back of the knee and Carl collapsed to the duracrete. He moaned, still short of breath, and rolled onto his back. The rain pattered gently on his face, the lukewarm droplets smelling of chemical pollutants.
As he struggled to keep his grip, the case was tugged free of Carl’s hand.
“Hmph. Not even locked.”
Hearing the pop of the release for the case, Carl mustered the energy to lift his head. “Mine. Galaxy owes me.”
Clarence burst out laughing. He pulled out a few coins and dropped the rest, case and all. A scattering of coins jumped and landed on the tram platform. “You been had, mate. Ain’t hardly enough for a night at the pub with what’s real in this box.”
“Huh?” Carl wasn’t processing. There were over two million terras in that case—enough to buy a whole pub, let alone a night of carousing.
Sydney kicked Carl in the ribs. “Open them ears, offworld. Someone passed cloners by you. Your hardcoin is hardly coin. Them’s pickled notes, wooden nickels, funny money. Am I gettin’ through to you?” He kicked Carl again more for punctuation than to cause injury. Carl had been kicked enough times to tell the difference.
“But…” Carl managed before being overcome by a cough.
“All yours, mate,” Clarence said, stepping aside with a shallow bow. “I’m keeping the pocket warmers, but the falsies is all yours. Don’t want anyone sniffing my DNA offa that rubbish. I got a reputation to maintain.”
Carl crawled on his hands and knees, gathering up the fallen coins and cramming them back in the case. These brain-fries were making a mistake, and Carl was still rich. Well, what remained in the case was still decent money split more than a hundred ways. He’d pay his syndicate with this stuff. It’d all work out…
“By the way, mate,” Clarence shouted. “Next tram’s in about twenty minutes. Cheers!”
# # #
A dripping wet Carl dragged himself into the Mobius with such a hangdog look that no one needed to ask how things had gone. Half an hour later, he sat on the couch in the common room in a pair of dry undershorts and a towel, still damp from a hot shower. The case lay open on the kitchen table, its phony terras taunting him.
Amy stood with her arms crossed at the head of Carl’s pack of interrogators. At least they let him clean up before grilling him. “So, done with the incomprehensible babbling and ready to tell us what really happened?”
“And we know the terras are counterfeit,” Yomin said, tapping her datalens. “I would have assumed someone in your line of work would think to check for that sort of thing.”
Roddy pressed something into Carl’s hand. Expecting a beer, Carl glanced down to find a steaming cup of coffee. With a sigh, he filled in the details of the story.
“…And he was in the bowels of the factory in some sort of lab. Totally covered, head to toe; couldn’t even see a millimeter of skin. Had his voice computer modulated to remove any chance of voice ID. I thought he was being paranoid, but now I’m thinking he was just covering his bases.”
Esper stood with her arms crossed. “I don’t get it. You limp in here, clutching your ribs. If this guy swindled you, why did he beat you up? I mean, why bother with the counterfeit terras at that point?”
“Maybe I should have mentioned the guys I met on the tram.”
Amy pinched the bridge of her nose. “You got followed and mugged? Oy vey. How’d we let you convince us to go alone?”
“‘My silver tongue is my best weapon.’ I believe that was the argument I used to let me go alone. Or some bullshit like that. You people aren’t the galaxy’s toughest marks, you know. No offense.” Since backhanded insults were the weapon of the day, Carl might as well fight on even terms. He�
��d had his fill of lying on the duracrete getting kicked for one day.
“And lemme guess…” Yomin said.
Carl hung his head. “Yeah, one of the guys had a datalens. They took the few low-number terras that were legit and left me the rest. I figure a case like that’s worth sixty or eighty terras, so the joke’s on them, I guess.”
Roddy popped open a beer as Carl sipped his coffee, evoking a twinge of jealousy. “So, we only got shorted two million, one hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and twenty or forty terras. I’ll chalk that up to rounding error and call this deal wrapped up.”
Mort picked up the case and dumped the contents on the table. Coins poured free, clattering a riot but ended up bouncing into a cityscape of neatly stacked towers. “Your mystery buyer has a sense of humor, by the way.” Scorched into the felt lining of the case—probably with a soldering iron, by the look of it—were the words caveat venditor. “For the uneducated present, that’s Latin for: ‘seller beware.’ This fellow not only counted on you not counting that king’s ransom on the spot, he left a nice note for when you eventually got around to it.”
“So,” Roddy said with a sigh. “We’re looking for a paranoid bio-chem poacher who owns a metallic mask with a voice modulator and speaks a little Latin. Hey Data-Girl, think you can sift the omni and narrow our search down to a few billion suspects?”
Esper rolled her eyes. “Leave Yomin alone. That money’s gone and so is that primitive puddle-water we were selling.”
Far from offended, Yomin smirked. “Well, it might not be gone gone. I planted a tracker in the case. Seems that maybe Mr. Mask isn’t the only one paranoid. I believe one of you told me that paranoid people lived longer in this line of work. Maybe they also don’t get ripped off as often.”
“And when that doesn’t work,” Mort said, arching an eyebrow at the data specialist. “Well, let’s just say I may have marked that case in a way that no science-wrangler will ever notice, whether this fellow is an adept himself or just a scientists’ lackey.”
Carl perked up, letting the towel drop from around his shoulders. The air inside the Mobius was chilly on his damp skin. “Great. So where is this guy? I’d love a little payback, not to mention taking back that goo, plus whatever money this joker’s got on him.” He took a swallow of coffee that burned its way down his throat. He pulled his towel tighter and shivered.
Mort stared off at a wall, his eyes unfocused. “Still on Pintara with us.”
“Great!” Esper said. “We’ll track him down and still get a little R-and-R on-world.”
Juggler gave a curt nod. “I’ll grab my blaster. Fuck local no-carry laws.”
“Can you narrow it down a little?” Roddy asked. “I mean, this isn’t exactly a deserted planet.”
“Keep your pitchforks and torches lit,” Mort grumbled. “I’m working on it. I’m not the only wizard on this world, but I’ll pinpoint it soon enough.”
“No need,” Yomin said, tapping away at the datalens controls by her temple. “The tracker is—make that was—at Fairfield Starport. It just left orbit.”
“Well, there’s some good news,” Amy said. “We can use the time-stamp to narrow it down to a ship with that departure time and head it off at its destination.”
Yomin swallowed. “Uh, maybe. You see, the tracker only transmits a signal every five minutes. Keeps battery use down and makes it harder for anyone to pick it up on a scan. I mean, the poor little guy’s the size of a grain of rice; there’s only so much a stealth transmitter can do.”
Amy nodded frantically, raising both her index fingers. “No, no. We can work with that. Find us a list of the departures from Fairfield in that five- minute window.”
Yomin tapped at her datalens again. Then the screen went dark and she took it off. “There were 75 ships. Like Roddy said, this place isn’t exactly Pluto. But give me half an hour and I can take the tracker’s updates and figure out a destination for whatever ship it’s on.”
“Half an hour?” Carl scoffed. “Wouldn’t two updates get you a line to extrapolate?”
Roddy cuffed him upside the head. “This is why we use computers for astral navigation: because ion-brains like you think it’s Euclidean space. It’ll take a minimum of four points to even project a likely course, and six is a nice, safe buffer to make sure she’s got the right course.”
Mort blinked and scowled at the crew. “You’re all overlooking the fact that the case probably hasn’t left Pintara.”
“What do you mean, ‘probably’?” Carl asked.
“Something’s blocking me from detecting it,” Mort admitted. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ll find the bloody thing. Just don’t let Miss Tech-In-The-Eye drag us off to the Milky Way’s back garden in the meantime.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence as Mort stood motionless, presumably deep in mystical communion. It ended when Roddy hit a button on the remote and the holo-projector blinked to life. “Well, let’s give Merlin the half hour it’ll take to for Yomin to find us a course. If he finds it planetside before then, we grab it. If it turns out it’s really in the astral somewhere, zipping off to a Harmony Bay buyer on another world, we get off our asses and get there first.”
Carl frowned. That sounded so damned reasonable and evenhanded that he could hardly imagine the words had come out of Roddy’s mouth. “Hey, buddy. You gone sober again on me?”
Roddy reached out and waggled his beer under Carl’s nose. There was no doubt that it was the genuine article. Carl couldn’t even conceive of someone trying to make a non-alcoholic version of Earth’s Preferred. The unofficial motto of the brand was “get drunk, cheap.” Without the buzz, it was just rancid water that could have come from a clothes processor’s waste line for all anyone would care.
“How often is Mort wrong?” Esper said. “We should give him time.”
Juggler moved to stand by Esper. “I’m with her. All your old stories about Mort… I think we oughta trust he knows his shit.”
Amy shook her head. “Maybe. But we have two leads on this case. I say we go with whichever finds it quicker.”
“Right,” Yomin said. “Maybe Mort finds it in the next twenty-six minutes. He pulls that off and I’m game for checking out the local lead… before we head off and find the real case, which is on its way offworld.”
Mort shook free of her reverie with a harrumph. “Well, best of luck chasing ghosts through the astral without my help.”
“No, that sounds fair,” Esper said, crossing her arms. “If Mort won’t drop us, I’ll handle the astral bit. But I trust him to find the case his way before that comes up.” With that, she departed for her quarters and shut the door.
Amy headed back to the cockpit with a curt nod. Still fiddling with her datalens, Yomin retired to her room. With Roddy preoccupied with the opening scene of Letho and Jubok Versus the Defeatinator, Mort pulled Carl aside. “You’re making a grave error, trusting in science against a scientific hegemony. Harmony Bay could be fiddling with that thingamajig of Yomin’s.”
“Yeah, but Amy seems to be on board with the compromise, so—”
“You mean to tell me that after twenty years of rock-solid magical advice and aid, I’m being supplanted by the prospect of a happy pre-marital bed? Carl, I think your brain and your gonads need to have a serious talk about the value of two-million-terras worth of stolen goods versus the cost of a bouquet of flowers to patch things up with that girl when you take the right side in this argument.”
“Since when is compromise the wrong way to settle a dispute?”
“When the opposing viewpoint is a bunch of circuit-peddling nincompoops!”
“Ever consider that you’re not the only wizard in the galaxy? Maybe this guy had help. Do your thing, but you’ve only got twenty-something minutes left before I follow the only lead I’ve got.”
# # #
Esper ended up being the one to make the astral drop. Mort’s deadline had come and gone, and when Yomin claimed that their quar
ry was headed for Zeevos, the Mobius set off to arrive first. But that put Esper in a bind. Dropping the Mobius into astral precluded the chance of staying behind, and with Mort acting petulant, there was no way Carl was going to let him strong-arm the crew as their only source of interstellar travel.
The datapad’s blank screen stared up at her accusingly, even though it was her own reflection she saw in the glossy black surface. Awakening it from its digital slumber, Esper looked up Ivanhoe’s comm ID and began her message.
“Please accept my apology. Due to unforeseen circumstances, unable to remain on Pintara through August 9.”
She closed her eyes, clasped her hands in her lap, and waited. A few moments later, a merry chime alerted her that she’d received a reply.
“Revised rendezvous instructions?”
Esper let out a sigh, and muttered a silent prayer of thanks. Ivanhoe hadn’t backed out of meeting her. “En route to Zeevos. Arriving August 10.” She’d had to resist the temptation to sink the Mobius to a shallower than usual depth in the astral to prolong their trip. Arriving on the 12th or 13th would give Ivanhoe more time to revise his travel plans and be there shortly after the Mobius. But if there was one thing Esper had learned all too plainly, it was that her personal projects took a back seat to Carl getting his payment—or at least the original goods back.
The datapad chimed. “Agreed.”
Esper clenched a fist and wiggled her hips in a little victory dance as she sat on the edge of her bed. Whoever this Ivanhoe was, he was a good sport and obviously wanted to get the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts back under the Convocation’s watchful eye.
The datapad chimed again. “This had better not be a farce. I would take personal offense to the wasting of my invaluable time.”
OK, so maybe not a good sport. But at least he had the patience to weather an unexpected change in plans. It was hard to get a good feel for what the average Convocation member was like when her only acquaintances among them were a renegade, a hermit, and the bounty hunter who’d been undercover as Rhiannon’s beau.
