by Jessie Kwak
“Zero more,” Manu says. “Somebody wouldn’t buy me any.”
“Please add hornet tags as a permanent item on Mr. Juric’s supply list,” Jaantzen says.
“Noted with fucking objections, boss,” Gia says.
Permanent item.
Oriol gives him a look, perfect eyebrow raised, and Manu almost says something to brush it off. But he doesn’t have anything to prove to Oriol.
Jaantzen’s watching him, and Manu gives the man a nod.
“Got it, boss,” he says.
17
Never Say ‘Ain’t Ever’
Beni’s handling skills seem to have recovered as quickly as he said they would, and within a few minutes they’re in a nondescript office complex in the bad part of the North Bulari industrial district. Manu feels his soul shriveling just being in this part of town, which during the day is full of indentured office workers and the humming of official business: trade, infrastructure, construction. He doesn’t understand what they do here, and he doesn’t care.
Cheap adobe walls make the street feel like a desert canyon, cut off the view to the businesses behind, differentiated only by the address numbers and occasional business name stenciled on the sheetmetal gates. The better-kept businesses have painted their section of the wall, stopping sharply at the property line as if to say, Unlike those guys, we take pride in our business.
The wall around the old-fashioned accordion gate that Jaantzen directs Beni to stop in front of is clearly owned by one of those guys, with paint scored back by sandstorms so badly that a lattice of cement blocks shows through the adobe in places. But when Jaantzen gets out to palm the lock, the gate sparks faintly as the invisible energy shield around the place shimmers to off.
A pack rat scurries out of the wall.
Inside is a short driveway and a soulless office building.
“We’re safe here,” Jaantzen calls, and Manu jumps out to help him secure the accordion gate once more. His scalp tingles as the energy field sizzles back on.
Gia seems to know the place — she directs Oriol and Jaxie to carry Toshiyo into the office building, orders Beni to come with them so he can lie down. No one barks orders at Manu, so he steps back to the van to start sorting through the chaos of gear this little adventure has produced.
“Mr. Juric, if you have a moment.”
Manu gingerly brushes shards of broken glass off his gear bag, which is mercifully sealed. “Yeah, boss.” The word comes out without him meaning it to.
Last time Manu was alone with Jaantzen, he was plotting how to get a knife between the man’s shoulder blades and get out alive. Now?
Manu’s not sure where they stand now.
“What is your estimation of me?” Jaantzen asks.
It’s not the question Manu was expecting. He frowns at the man. He’s studied him for weeks, spent plenty of time watching for weaknesses these past few days. His estimation has shifted, but he’s not sure when. Probably before he even made the decision not to kill him out on the balcony.
“You’re not what I expected,” he says. Jaantzen waits, watching him. “Kai, that’s more who I expected based on what I heard about you. You’ve got a reputation for being someone who hires disposable crew — who is disposable. Which I guess is why Coeur thought she could hang you out to dry.”
Manu’s thinking. He’s not sure how to say all this. “Where’d you find Toshiyo?” he asks instead.
Jaantzen’s expression darkens, a storm hovering over his brow. “By reputation,” he says. “I was looking to hire a permanent ops tech to handle security and surveillance, and word came about a tech genius at a mining corporation.”
“So you bought her indenture.”
Manu says it wrong, deliberate, and sees Jaantzen balk like the idea is distasteful.
“I paid off her indenture,” he says. “Then I hired Ms. Ravi on retainer to help me when I need it.”
“Retainer?” Manu asks, frowning. Most bosses in Bulari run their crew as indentures or pay them per job.
“I don’t work with anyone who can’t walk away, but I don’t want to scrounge for my team each time.”
Jaantzen’s watching him now, gaze steady and even.
Manu breaks first; he nods and shifts as though he’s scanning the compound. “And Gia? She’s a trip.”
“Gia and I have a long history,” Jaantzen says. “I don’t require her services often.”
“And Kai?”
“Kai was from the old way of doing things. Someone I’d contracted with many times in the past, but never trusted. I need people I can trust, Mr. Juric.”
“Understood.”
“I can offer you a monthly retainer, plus overtime and a bonus for the more dangerous jobs. In exchange I would prefer you work solely for me.”
“Join your crew.” Manu tilts his head. “Your crew’s got a bad rap. That’s the other thing I know about you.”
“It does, and for understandable reasons.” Jaantzen clears his throat. “And I would like you to help me change that.”
Manu blinks, not sure at first if he’s heard correctly.
“Me?”
“I’ve been watching you. You read every person on this job like a book, and you played them just as well as you needed. I’d planned to kill you during our first conversation, yet by the end of it, I’d hired you.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I saw you bolster Toshiyo’s confidence when we needed her. You’ve defused Kai and Beni.” He gave a faint smile. “You’ve even made Gia laugh. You’re a decent fighter, but I can find a dozen of those on any street corner in any slum. What I need is someone who can help me build a team.”
Somewhere down the line, Manu’s already made the decision. He shrugs. “Course.”
“You’re not going to negotiate?”
“We can talk about money later.”
“Coeur will probably try to kill you if you work for me.”
“I’m already on her shit list. Probably got a better chance working with you than wandering out on my own.”
Jaantzen nods slowly. “What about the others?”
Manu knows who he means: Oriol, Beni, Jaxie. He takes them in order of easiness.
“Jaxie’s bad news on a good day,” he says. “I wouldn’t trust her to water my jadau plant while I was on vacation without sniffing around to find somebody who’d pay her more to let it die instead. But let her run back to Sylla with her cash and she’ll be too embarrassed at taking the pay to bring any fight back to you.
“Beni’ll do the job well, but he won’t put his life on the line for you. You knew that. The thing I’d watch if I were you is I get the sense he holds a grudge, and he’s not happy about what Gia did to him. And you, by extension.”
Manu feels bad saying it, knows it’s probably a death sentence. “Let me talk to him and be sure,” he adds. If he senses that Beni will be a threat to his new crew, he can take care of it himself.
Jaantzen nods slowly. “And Mr. Sina?”
Ah, now there’s a blind spot, if Manu’s not careful. “Oriol doesn’t seem interested in anybody else’s drama. He’s not curious, and he doesn’t talk if he doesn’t need to. The man’s a pro.”
“Would he make a good addition to my crew?”
“Oriol?” He’s the type of no-nonsense person with a put-together life that Manu has always been drawn to. It would be nice to keep working alongside him, but Manu has to be honest with Jaantzen — and himself. “Nah, boss. He plays for his own team. Keep his number, though.”
Jaantzen nods, and his gaze shifts past Manu’s shoulder. Manu turns to see that Oriol has come back out of the office building, is leaning lazy shoulders against the adobe wall.
“I presume you’ll have it,” Jaantzen says. He claps Manu on the shoulder. “I’m going to go see Toshiyo. Keep an eye out.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Manu watches him walk away, then crosses the driveway. “Hey, man.”
Oriol ti
lts his head to look at him, a faint smile on his lips. “Hope you asked for what you’re worth,” he says.
Manu shrugs. What he’s worth is a relative number. What Jaantzen’s worth to him is even more so. He’s not worried about cash. Besides, he doesn’t want to talk about it, not with Oriol. “What are your plans?” he asks. “You got your pay, did your job. On to the next adventure?”
“Gonna lie low,” he says.
Manu’s watching, wondering if he’s been put out of the picture now that he’s chosen sides. Now that he’s not so cool and smooth.
And as though he can read Manu’s mind, Oriol’s sardonic smile cracks briefly into the genuine thing. “I ain’t ever working with you again, man.”
“Never say ‘ain’t ever,’” Manu says, and Oriol just shakes his head. “And besides. You just said you don’t have plans to work for a minute, anyway. Not until this whole thing blows over.” He tests his luck, leans against the wall a couple inches from Oriol. “I heard you were planning a little vacation.”
“Could be.”
“Need some company?”
Oriol smiles. “Could be.” Oriol’s gaze trails downwards as though considering, then his thumb hooks into Manu’s waistband, tugging him a fraction of an inch closer. His other hand reaches into Manu’s pocket to pull out his comm. Manu’s hip is on fire.
Oriol types his information into Manu’s comm, hands it back.
“Now you know how to get ahold of me.”
“I was born knowing how to get ahold a person,” Manu says with a lift of an eyebrow. “I’ll show you if you want.”
“You can’t come if you’re gonna make a joke out of everything,” Oriol says, then reddens. Manu starts to laugh. “Dammit, man. I already regret giving you my number.”
“I’ll make sure that regret’s short-lived,” Manu says. He pats the comm in his pocket. “When we go on vacation,” he adds.
Life’s about to get good.
Bonus Excerpt
STARFALL
A headstrong teenager. A world-weary crime lord. A dangerous prison break.
Starla Dusai is fifteen, deaf — and being held as an enemy combatant by the Indiran Alliance. Willem Jaantzen is a notorious crime lord about to end a fearsome vendetta — and most probably his life. When he learns his goddaughter has been captured by the Alliance, will he be able to save her? And her, him?
STARFALL is part of Jessie Kwak’s Durga System series, a fast-paced series of gangster sci-fi novellas set in a far-future world where humans may have left their home planet to populate the stars, but they haven’t managed to leave behind their vices. And that’s very good for business.
If you dig character driven action-adventure stories with a splash of pinstripe, sign up for my mailing list and get Starfall for free.
Starfall
CHAPTER 1
Gravity here is crushing.
Starla Dusai switches gingerly from side to back to sitting, the terrible mass of this planet making it hard to breathe, making her joints and bones ache, her heart race at the slightest movement.
Not that she has much opportunity to move.
The cell she’s in is about two paces wide and just long enough for the cot — which is not long enough for Starla. At fifteen, she’s already shot past her Indira-born parents by a full head, growth spurts set free by the low gravity of Silk Station.
She’s tried to sleep the last three nights with legs crooked up and spine curled forward, but the ache in her knees wakes her, the ache in whichever side is being rammed by this planet’s gravity through the thin mattress.
The ache in her heart of not knowing if anyone else is still alive.
Cot, sink, toilet. Harsh yellow overhead lights that call out sickly undertones in her pale-colored skin. The walls are featureless but for what looks like a speaker and a camera in the ceiling opposite the cot, where she can’t reach. Useless to her, anyway.
Food is dispensed automatically through a slot at what seems like regular times. The lights dim and rise. A cleaning bot scurries through every afternoon and then slips back into its pocket door. On the second day, Starla tried to catch it, but it shocked her so badly the muscles in her hands twitched for what felt like an hour. She lets it do its job in peace now.
The air smells sharp and scorched, like a recycler system gone over-hot and baking its seals. The temperature is uncomfortably warm.
It’s what she’s always imagined desert-hot New Sarjun would smell like.
Because she’s on New Sarjun.
She has to be.
She’s in an Alliance prison colony on New Sarjun.
There’s no place else she could possibly be.
At the end of the third day, guards.
A man and a woman, wearing the same uniform as the Alliance soldiers who’d transported her from Silk Station. They slip through the door, come at her with outstretched hands and careful quiet steps like they’re trying to corner a wild animal and they’re not sure it won’t bite. The man says something to his partner, his pudgy lips mashing the words into meaningless shapes.
They don’t bother trying to speak to her.
Starla pushes herself into the corner of the cot, feet digging into the mattress. She’s snarling as they pounce, drag her to her feet — she’s panting with the effort of moving on this stupid, stupid planet — and wrench her arms backwards into cuffs. They push her through the door. She’s barefoot.
Starla tries to stay calm, but for as badly as she has wanted to leave the cell over the last three days, now the metallic, vibrating hallways and branching corridors close in on her. She cranes her neck to see down the corridors they pass and is rewarded with a shove between the shoulder blades.
The two wrestle her through hallways, keying regularly through double-thickness glass doors to enter less secure — or more secure? Starla doesn’t know — areas of the prison. Into a dingy metal room, bigger than her cell, a single metal table bolted to the floor, a bench on one side, a chair on the other. They fold her kicking and struggling and panting onto the bench, uncuff her, and slam her hands into new restraints on the table before she even realizes she had a brief moment of freedom.
Job done. The two leave.
Starla twists, cranes her neck to see the door they left through, trying to learn anything she can about this new prison.
Brushed aluminum walls and a floor scuffed with shoe rubber — some of the marks scraping high up the wall as though someone had been testing the strength of it, or kicking out in anger. The walls are battered, with dents and dings that catch the harsh light and pool it into tiny craters. The room stinks of something acrid, a mix of cleaning solvent and welding fumes that seems to be cycling through the air vents.
Starla coughs.
She’s waiting only a moment before two women enter. One’s short, even for planetborn, with a blunt gray bob and glasses, wearing a plain purple dress suit. The other’s tall and thin, with a square jaw and thick black hair cut close to her scalp. She wears an Indiran Alliance uniform. They remind her of something, a split second of recognition that fades the more Starla tries to grasp at it.
The short woman wrinkles her nose and says something to the tall one, too fast for Starla to catch.
“Hi Starla,” the short woman says then, speaking and signing. “My name is Hali.” She spells it out, then makes her hand into an H and taps it against her left shoulder. “This is Lieutenant Mahr.” Mahr doesn’t get a name sign.
Starla lifts her chin a touch, but makes no show that she’s understood. The short woman, Hali, frowns at her.
“She’s a child,” Hali says to the Alliance woman, Mahr. She’s speaking more clearly now than when she first entered the room. Starla stares at her lips, greedy for information. “You can’t keep her like this. There are laws.”
The lieutenant shrugs. “Figure out what she knows,” she says — or, Starla thinks she says. The lieutenant’s lips barely move, her scowl permanently carved into her dry, angry mouth
.
Hali turns back to Starla, speaking and signing again. “Have they treated you well?”
Starla frowns. What is she supposed to answer to that? Everything’s fine, thanks for asking? The amenities could be a bit more posh, but they’re serviceable?
She raises a hand to sign something rude, but she’s cuffed to the table.
Her hand comes up short with a jerk.
“We can’t communicate if she’s restrained,” Hali says to Mahr.
If Mahr replies, Starla can’t tell. The lieutenant turns to knock on the door, looks like she shouts something through it, and one of the original guards returns with leg restraints, locking Starla to the crossbar of the bench before releasing her hands. “Thank you,” Hali tells him. He ignores her.
Hali sits in the chair across from Starla; Mahr leans against the wall with arms crossed, one hand resting on the stunner in her hip holster. Hali sees this and frowns. “She’s a child,” she says again. Mahr just raises an eyebrow.
Starla sits with hands folded. Trying to look like a child, whatever children look like on Indira. She’s heard her entire life, from newcomers to Silk Station, from people born on either planet — Indira or New Sarjun — that she and her asteroid-born cousins look years ahead of their age because of their height. On some, like Mona, it looks graceful. On Starla it just looks boyish and scrappy. One of the uncles told her that once. She thinks he meant it as a compliment.
A stab of panic pierces Starla’s heart.
She tries not to worry about her cousins. About Mona. About Auntie Faye. About her parents. She saw escape pods, shooting like torpedoes; she saw ships peeling away from docking bays and flashing out of view before the Alliance missiles tore through the station and set Starla’s home blazing bright as Durga herself.
1, 4, 9, 16, 25 . . .
Starla forces herself through multiplications to redirect her thoughts.
She’s missed something: Hali signing to her. Starla furrows her brow, and Hali repeats herself. “I’m here to decide what to do with you. Do you understand?”
