by J. S. Morin
She wanted to give a heartfelt assurance that she wasn’t the sort of person who’d play a transgalactic practical joke on a respectable member of the Convocation. But nothing about her interaction with Ivanhoe suggested that he was the sort easily swayed by mere words or was the least bit interested in assurances.
“Understood,” was all she commed back.
She waited, watching the little rectangle of space on the datapad where their conversation was penned in by little digital walls. Five minutes passed with no further communication. Poking at the surrounding controls, she tried to make the datapad hide her involvement with Ivanhoe. Esper could have sworn she’d done that sort of thing before when she was a teenager. But she’d never really given the process much thought. The device had seemed so simple at the time, and now it might as well have been a minotaur’s labyrinth of little digital boxes and menus. At some point, she realized that she didn’t even know how to get back to the start screen to shut it off.
With a surreptitious glance around her room—as if anyone could possibly be watching—she pressed her hand to the datapad’s surface and lowered its mass. The screen panicked and went dark.
“Someone ought to write a book on working these things,” she muttered. But then she glanced over at the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts, concealed on her nightstand beneath a towel, and wondered if there might not be enough books on the Mobius already.
# # #
Yomin picked up the signal seconds after the Mobius exited astral space just outside orbital range of Zeevos. They had lain in wait, not dropping out until her calculated arrival for the thief’s ship. There it was, right on scanners. If this had been outlaw space, the Mobius would have opened fire as a prelude to parlay. At least, that’s what Yomin had expected them to do. Since parting ways with the Hatchet Job, it was entirely possible that the plan would have stayed the same whether they were in secure space or not.
“Our fake ID gonna pass muster?” Amy asked. Though she was careful to reword it each time, Yomin was getting sick of hearing that question over and over.
“Yes. Voice comms are even filtered through an overlay encryption to make you sound like Lieutenant Kwon. Figured she sounded official, and anyone who really digs will find a dead woman’s voice. Now transmit to ground control and get us down.”
Leaning against the cockpit door right beside her, Carl smirked. “Thought that was my line.”
“If you really want to help, go smooth it over with Mort,” Yomin said. There were times the wizard didn’t scare her—much. But hand-delivered I-told-you-sos weren’t on her list of lifespan-approved topics.
“We’re cleared,” Amy reported. “Our target looks like a light passenger cruiser. Titan registry. Ship’s name is Latrans. Matches one of the outbound ships from Pintara. It’ll be on the ground three minutes ahead of us.”
“How far can a guy get in three minutes?” Yomin mused. While on the surface, the question was rhetorical, she hoped someone would give her a real answer. In her ideal scenario, they’d have set down on Zeevos before the Latrans arrived. But Carl had worried about spooking their thief. What was he going to do, jump out the airlock prior to hitting atmo? But three minutes was enough to catch local ground transport, pick up an escort, or hand the case over to a waiting representative of Harmony Bay—if the thief wasn’t already working for them directly.
Carl shrugged. “Mid-sized cruiser like that? Doubt they even start disembarking passengers within three minutes of touchdown. Not everyone’s as light on their feet as us. Some ships have logs to record, safety checks, and some semblance of order and decorum.”
Amy snorted. “None of that sounds like us. I think the last time anyone around here used decorum was Vodka Night.”
“That was some swanky vodka we scrounged up. Teacups just seemed the way to go.”
The ship tore through the upper atmosphere, punched through clouds, and approached the commercially bloated city of Great Singapore. Amy brought them in at a vertigo-inducing clip. Yomin tried to tell herself that the ship’s gravity was keeping her safe, that the landscape rushing past the forward windows was nothing but a flatvid. It wasn’t working. There were reasons she went into the data warfare division and not flight school.
They touched down with a barely audible thud.
Carl headed for the common room, clapping his hands for attention. “All right, people. This is a free-carry world. So strap on your biggest, scariest-looking blasters and let’s go have a nice, friendly talk with our thief. Remember, don’t draw a weapon unless you mean to fire it. This place is rough, but it’s not lawless.”
Roddy didn’t budge from the couch. Nor did he so much as pause the holovid he was watching—some documentary about fermented beverages. “Thanks for the civics lesson, peach fuzz, but I’m staying here.”
“What part of ‘strap on a blaster and let’s go’ sounded like it was voluntary? You own at least three blasters—that I know of.”
“That you know of…” Roddy echoed, not pulling his attention away from the holo-projector. “But someone’s gotta stay out of jail to post bail for you cowboys. Stealing back stolen goods as a public starport isn’t getting you on any lawman’s good side. Plus, you know, most of us are wanted criminals.”
Juggler drew his blaster, spun it by the trigger guard, and re-holstered it. “My record’s clean, far as I know. That’s how you can tell I’m still new at this.”
“Or good,” Yomin added with a grin. “I was running a nice little side business even when I was in the service. Just never made it onto my military record.” Sure, she was just patching through personal comms from far-flung territories, but they’d been on a comm-dark classified mission. Getting any word home, no matter how innocuous, had been worth good coin to homesick servicemen.
“Have you got a blaster as nice as this baby?” Juggler asked. He patted his weapon, an old Bronson model TG-6. It was sleek, menacing, and perhaps overly bulky. It oozed testosterone.
Yomin reached under the back of her jacket and drew her own blaster. It was a SlyTek Sidekick. “Mine might not punch holes in plasticized steel doors, but it goes through people just fine. Plus, it registers as a plasma torch on most civilian scanners.”
Truth be told, Yomin had never even pointed a loaded weapon at a living creature. She’d never been in a firefight, never hunted, and wasn’t all that good at the firing range back at Annapolis. On Ithaca, she’d worked on irrigation systems and basket weaving. The thought that this mission might call for her to not only draw her weapon on someone, but fire it, was causing a system crash in her guts.
Carl jabbed a finger at Esper. “Borrow a piece from someone. Mort’s got the I-can-be-menacing-in-a-ratty-old-sweatshirt game down cold, but you still don’t intimidate ten-year-old math students.”
“I don’t have to anymore.”
Mort folded his arms. “And I’m staying put.”
“Can I revise my refusal?” Roddy asked, shutting off the holo-projector.
“No time to be pissy, Mort.”
“There’s nothing here. From astral, who could tell? But now? When we’re supposedly within spitting distance of that case? I’d know if it were here, and it’s not.”
Carl held up his blaster pistol and flipped the safety. Yomin could have sworn he just activated it, instead of releasing the switch that would prevent accidental firing. She ran a quick scan with her datalens and noted that the weapon was still hot, even with the safety supposedly engaged. “Well, there’s something here that just landed with our tracker on it. I’m angling to find out what it is. If it’s a dirty, low-down, double-crossing thief, I’m either going to rob him, shoot him, or hire him.”
Everyone turned to look at Carl with puzzled expressions.
“What? This guy put one over on me, and I’m a suspicious bastard and a professional con man. Syndicate can always use more good people.”
Amy grabbed Carl’s blaster and jammed it back into its holster. “You gonna stand around all day
sucking the words out of the air or we gonna get going?”
They piled out of the Mobius in a mob. Carl took the lead, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets and a forward lean that suggested the pursuit of righteous justice. It was a strange galaxy where a criminal could act so aggrieved about a cargo he himself had stolen. And unlike the mystery thief in the mask, Carl and his minions had killed the previous owners. Sure, it might have been Hatchet’s influence at the time, but Carl was in command.
“Get us a heading,” Carl ordered.
Yomin stumbled as she hurried to Carl’s left hand, a step behind him. Bringing up a tactical overlay of the starport, she found the case just as the ping from the tracker updated. It had moved all of a few meters in the past five minutes. It was odd using a military tactical planner to find a lost suitcase, but scavenged tech was all she had access to these days. Of course, it wasn’t a complaint likely to garner her much sympathy in the tech community, being forced to work with military-grade equipment. Most of her data wrangler friends from back home would kill to get their hands on the stuff she used.
She pointed and raised her voice so the whole strike team could hear. “Looks like it’s over there. Those guys are offloading passenger luggage.”
Carl didn’t need to be told twice. Given the set of his jaw and the hand that strayed toward his blaster, she wondered if he’d even needed to be told once. It wouldn’t have surprised Yomin if he’d have grabbed the first baggage handler he saw by the collar and wrung the information out of him.
“You there,” Carl shouted as they approached. “Get away from that baggage.”
A hover-sled driver swung his vehicle around and tried to head in the other direction with offloaded gear from the Latrans. Juggler drew his weapon. “Park that barge, sparky. You boys’ve got something of ours.”
Carl and Amy began digging through the stacks and piles of various personal belongings as Juggler kept watch with his blaster. The baggage handlers kept up a steady verbal protest, but kept their hands in plain sight and made no sudden movements. In their matching royal blue uniforms and caps, they looked corporate, which meant they’d probably been trained on how to deal with gun-toting psychopaths who wanted their cargo.
“We’ve got manifests. All this cargo is accounted for,” the senior freight handler insisted. “If you can identify your stolen property, we can help—”
“Stow it,” Carl snapped.
In two minutes, eighteen seconds, Yomin would get another ping from the tracker. At this range, she’d be able to narrow it down within half a meter.
That was when the port authority arrived. Kudos to the locals for not allowing their starport landing pads to turn into the American Old West. Even though she was on the gun-toting side here, she was glad to see a pair of cooler heads intervening. Did that make her a bad outlaw?
The two of them were in a closed-top hover-cruiser with a strobing blue light on the roof. They wore all black, with a Great Singapore crest and rank insignia armbands. “Lower that weapon,” one of them barked as he hopped to the permacrete. He was middle aged, with salt-and-pepper hair that continued into long sideburns. By his armband, he was a sergeant. His partner wasn’t much younger, but the stun baton in his hand made him the more intimidating of the two. When Juggler complied, the sergeant’s shoulders relaxed. “Now what’s the problem here?”
Carl stepped to the fore. It wasn’t as if anyone had gone over plans for dealing with the authorities if they showed up. Yomin didn’t really even see everyone else move. But there Carl was, front and center by common agreement. It wasn’t even so much that he was captain, or head of the Ramsey Syndicate. Near as Yomin could tell, he was a figurehead in both capacities. It was more that no one else really wanted to be in the crosshairs of the law, and Carl relished it. “I got nothing against these hardworking boys here, but one of this ship’s passengers robbed me on Pintara. Call me paranoid if you want, but I had a long-range tracker on the case he took. Tracked the signal to this pile of luggage.”
“You have proof of this?” the sergeant asked.
“I’ve got the tracker code,” Carl replied. He nodded to Yomin. “Give him in the tracer ID.”
Yomin was pretty certain he meant the encryption code and frequency for the tracker, despite vomiting out the jargon like spoiled seafood. Despite her navy training screaming not to deliver classified codes to a civilian or to give their tracker encryption out to anyone, she complied, transmitting the data directly to the datapad the sergeant kept clipped to his belt. The sergeant jerked in surprised when the datapad buzzed and he cast Yomin a skeptical look when the data showed up; he hadn’t given her a comm ID to use. Let the P-tech starport cop sizzle his gray matter over that one a while.
But expediency prompted Yomin to snap the sergeant to attention. “Hop on that signal quick. Next ping is in eighteen seconds.”
Maybe the old sergeant was P-tech at heart, but well before the eighteen seconds were up, he was staring at the datapad, waiting for the signal. Yomin waited along with him.
When the signal came through, Yomin singled out the case. “There!”
Her heart quickened when she saw where the signal had originated. It wasn’t the case Carl had taken with him to the rendezvous. That one had been silver and the size of a mess hall tray and as thick as a datapad was tall. This one was a proper long-haul suitcase, over a meter long and upholstered in maroon leather. The port authority sergeant referenced his datapad to verify, then used a pocket tool to override the lock. Rummaging within, he tossed aside clothing and toiletries, presumably in search of the tracker or maybe a concealed compartment. Because nobody was stealing frumpy, oversized casual-wear that could have belonged to a bear, a tesud, or a human of unflattering size.
The sergeant concluded his search with the discovery of a pill bottle. “Is this yours?” he asked, handing the bottle to Carl. Yomin zoomed in with her datalens to read the label. She had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing. It was Everman 3000, a barely-legal pharmaceutical aphrodisiac.
Undeterred by the label—if he even noticed what it was—Carl tore open the lid and shook out the contents. The only thing that came out was the tracker. “There anything else in there? Maybe a couple specimen jars? This is corporate espionage we’re dealing with, officer. I’m under contract with Harmony Bay to deliver several harmless but scientifically invaluable xenological samples. I’m no scientist, but from what they tell me, it could be crucial to the current research into cognitive regeneration.”
The officer with the stun baton lowered his weapon. “My mum applied for one of their studies. Didn’t get in.”
But the sergeant shook his head. “Nothing like what you describe was in that suitcase.”
Esper cleared her throat and jerked her head toward the Mobius.
Carl blinked and took a dramatic sigh. “Sorry, boys. Looks like we’ve been had.”
The galaxy just didn’t work the way Yomin expected. Pull a blaster on someone on Earth, and you’d be doing five years in prison even if it wasn’t loaded. Go off half-cocked with a weapon onboard a navy ship and you’d be up on disciplinary proceedings. But on Zeevos, it was resolved with a few handshakes, a faux-heartfelt apology from Carl, and wishes of good luck in finding their stolen biological samples from the port authority officers. For all the grief his crew gave him, Carl had spun straw into gold or at least an arrest into a sympathetic pat on the back.
But back at the Mobius, things weren’t as congenial. Mort stood on the landing as the crew came in through the cargo bay. “Have we had a nice vacation? Everyone get their fill of waving blasters around at clueless patsies?”
“Yes,” Amy shouted up in reply. “I’m good for a trip with an actual thief at the end of it.”
“Not a bleeding one of you was paying attention except Esper. I was screaming my bloody mind hoarse trying to contact you telepathically.”
Yomin scowled. “We were two hundred meters away. You could have just shouted. Or even had Rod
dy use the comm.”
“Point is, I shouldn’t have had to. Now if you’ll float this heap above the sky for me, I’ll put us nice and deep and have us to Mirny in no time.”
Carl’s face lit. He bounded up the stairs toward Mort. “You found the case?” He hugged the wizard briefly but fiercely.
“No,” Mort said, disentangling himself. “Mirny is just such a pleasant, ammonia-breathing utopia that I wanted to hold a wild goose chase there.”
“I think he means ‘yes,’” Esper clarified.
Yomin rolled her eyes. What did she think of the rest of the crew? Did she think none of them had a grasp of sarcasm?
“Well, let’s ride. Amy, take the helm. Let’s see if we can get to this masked bandit before he realizes we’re onto him.”
Esper held up a finger as she approached Carl. Her voice lowered to a whisper, but Yomin’s datalens had an audio booster that she never used for eavesdropping. “Mind if I stay here a few days? Let me just grab a few personal items, and—”
“Sorry. No time. We can come back once this is wrapped up if you really need to.”
“But—”
But Carl was no longer listening. He was already in the common room. The rest of the thief-hunting posse filtered in behind him. Yomin sat in the cargo bay once they were all gone, watching as the ramp lifted. No one had said it, but the words had hung like a noose as Mort waited for them: this whole misadventure was her fault.
Roddy had gotten away with fouling the scam with the Sokol, but he was Carl’s best friend. Carl had lost the case in exchange for a bag of magic beans, but he was Carl. Yomin had already failed them once, not anticipating manual shield control at the swap station, but she didn’t have that sort of long-term credit built up with these people. She needed a win, and she needed it badly. So many of the refugees from the Odysseus liked their cozy little planetside jobs on Ithaca, but she couldn’t go back to life on that jungle hellhole. If this was going to be home, she needed to earn her keep.
