Zeta Hack: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 3)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Hmmm.” Z pushed her lips together in a hard line.

  “Anyways, let’s go,” the redhead said as she pointed down the stairs of the tube train station.

  We followed her out to the street and through the crowds of citizens. District E reminded me of the massive city on Trappist-1e. Too many neon lights, too many people, and too many dirty buildings stacked on top of each other. The air smelled of burnt charcoal, old rubber, and despair.

  The citizens were dressed similar to Z, Juliette, and I. They mostly wore jeans or leather pants with large jackets. The residents of District B put on a show when they went out, dressed fancy, and wore smiles on their faces. The people in this district all seemed in a hurry to get where they were going, and they gave each other suspicious glances when they walked past each other.

  “Shit, we got lucky docking in District B,” Z said after we’d walked for a few minutes through the thick crowd.

  “Somewhat. The control tower does a scan on each ship and then asks questions about trading. You said you were trading rhodium, so you were going to get routed to either A, B, or C.”

  “Everyone else gets pushed to the other districts?” I asked.

  “Yep. Alright, we are getting closer to Van Toreg’s bar.” Juliette nodded toward the end of the street. There was a neon sign there over a three-story building called Down, Down, Down, but the lights of the second sets of D’s were out, so that it read Down, own, own.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “They aren’t going to do the deal inside. The girls are being transported through District H. There will be a crew leaving the bar in the next hour or so, then they will walk toward the meeting point. We’ll follow, take pictures and video, then I’ll make an arrest when the moment is correct,” she explained.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “There’s a diner there with a window seat,” Z said as she pointed across the street. “We can sit inside and watch the front of the bar.”

  “Yep. Handsome and I will sit inside and watch the bar. You’ll go to the back, find a place to squat by some trash bins or something, and let us know if they leave that way.”

  “Uhhhh--” Z’s pretty face soured, but the other woman interrupted her.

  “You have the transponder I gave you?”

  “Yeah, but--”

  “Then get going. We’ll be across the street. Let us know when you are in position.”

  “I think we should stick together, or you shou--” I started to tell Juliette, but Z raised her hand.

  “It’s fine,” she growled at the redhead. “I’ll let you know when I’m in position.” The blonde hacker turned to walk toward the bar, and I watched her slip into the alley beside the three-story building. I didn’t like the idea of being separated from her, especially if she was going to be hiding in a dark alley, but we were probably going to be less than a hundred meters away from each other, and if she got into trouble I’d be there in a few seconds.

  “Buy me a cup of coffee?” Juliette said as soon as the Z disappeared into the alley.

  “You have all my money,” I replied.

  “Exactly,” the beautiful redhead gave me a shit-eating grin as she pulled my R-credit card out of her pocket.

  “Yeah. Whatever,” I said as I gave a last look toward Z’s alley. Then I followed Juliette into the diner.

  Chapter 10

  “I see a group of assholes leaving out the back of the bar.” Z’s voice came across our transponder twenty minutes after Juliette, and I ordered our coffee.

  “Follow them at a distance, we’ll move to join you,” I said as Juliette nodded at me. Then we got out of our booth and walked out onto the street.

  The redhead and I had verbally fenced while we drank our coffee. She’d asked me questions about how I got Persephone, how long I served in the military, and various other topics I didn’t care to talk about with her. In turn, I’d asked her about her pilot experience, old crew, and how she rose through the ranks of the Queen’s Hat security force.

  Neither of us truly answered each other’s questions, but the woman was clever, and had years of police interrogation work under her belt. Even though I didn’t think I gave her anything useful, I was sure she got something she wanted out of the conversation.

  “There,” Juliette said as five men walked out of an alley two corners down from the bar. They wore pinstripe suits and houndstooth flat caps. The men in the rear glanced around the street when they first walked out, but then they continued on their walk. Two of the men were carrying large leather duffle bags, and I guessed it was the payment for the girls who were going to be sold to them.

  “Z, we are on their tail,” I said into the transponder as we began to follow them.

  “Copy that,” the blonde hacker said. “I’m keeping to the alleys, but I can see them.” Her breath was coming out in gasps, and I guessed she was running to stay ahead of the men.

  This area of the district was already a shithole, but it only got worse the deeper we moved toward District H. There were still plenty of people around, but most of them looked to be gang members, hookers, or beggars. A few of the bolder gang members asked me if I wanted to sell my woman, but most of them could sense my attitude, and they left us alone.

  “How’s it looking, Z?” I asked after a pair of men started to follow us through the streets. They were scrawny gangsters who probably thought they could rob us and rape Juliette. I didn’t want to take the time to deal with them, so I opened my coat to show them the handle of my pistol, and the men quickly turned away.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Are you safe? There are a bunch of shitheads in the street. I don’t want you to--”’

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Look up the street a bit.”

  I glanced ahead of the group of men we were tailing and saw the blonde woman buying street food from a rickety noodle stand. The woman had her back turned to our quarry, but they all turned to look at her ass when she reached across the counter to pick up her bowl of food.

  “We are working, not eating,” Juliette hissed when we walked past the blonde hacker.

  “That’s right. You’re working. I’m eating and working.”

  “That looks like the entrance to District H,” I said as the men approached a twenty meter high by thirty-meter long doorway. The metal was spray painted with enough graffiti to start a new language, and the seams of the metal were actually rusted.

  “Yep. That’s the place,” Juliette confirmed as the group of men made a right turn into an alley a few dozen meters before the painted door. “Let’s go.” The redhead glared at the blonde woman.

  “Hmmm,” Z huffed as she slurped another mouthful of noodles and then set the bowl down.

  I took the point position and walked toward the alley the five men turned into. I leaned out around the corner and didn’t see them in the narrow passageway. The alley did extend some fifteen meters before it made a left, so I figured the men had gone in that direction.

  I stepped into the alley and pulled one of my pistols out of its holster. Both of the women followed my example, and we snuck down the alleyway to the first turn. I motioned for them to stay put while I moved to the next corner, and then I peeked out.

  One of the suited men was standing at the entrance to an unmarked building. He was lighting a cigarette, and the roll up door behind him was half open. I guessed that the rest of the group had gone through the dark entrance into the building, but I couldn’t tell how far they might have moved inside.

  I turned to the two women and gestured that just one guard was waiting. Both of them frowned, and Juliette motioned for me to move away from the corner so she could look. She leaned out around the corner for half a moment, turned back to me, and then nodded.

  “What now?” Z’s mouth moved without her saying anything.

  Juliette holstered her pistols and gestured for us to do the same. She raised a finger and mouthed “Wait.”

  A few moments passed
, and then the redhead smacked me across the face.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped as I reached my hand up to my cheek. I hadn’t expected her to make the movement, and I was more surprised than hurt.

  “Get your fucking hands off us!” Juliette shrieked.

  “Hey! Who’s there?” I heard the man call out from around the corner.

  “Someone help! He’s trying to rape us!” the redhead shouted as she turned her head away from us so the goon could hear us easier.

  “What?” The man ran around the corner carrying an expandable baton.

  “This fucker? He doesn’t want to pay! Wants it for free! We told him no!”

  “Uhhh.” The man looked at me with confusion.

  “Well, do something? Kick his ass!” Juliette said to him as she pointed at me.

  “I don’t want to get involved--” he started to say, but then the redhead stepped toward him and delivered a surprisingly high kick right into his face.

  The man fell into the wall of the alley, and he let out a gasp of surprise. The woman had long legs and didn’t really even twist over sideways to connect her boot with his nose. As he stumbled back, she coiled her leg up to her chest, rotated her grounded foot against the alley floor, and hit him in the face again. The second kicked bounced the man’s head off the building wall, and it was evident that she’d knocked him out.

  “Wow,” Z said.

  “That’s right, Blondie. Don’t fuck with me,” Juliette said as she shot a sneer to my friend.

  I grabbed the man’s baton, collapsed it, and then put it in my coat pocket. Then I searched his pockets to find a few R-credit cards that I also took. The man did have a gun on him, but it was a small caliber six shot revolver that looked to be in ill repair. I still crammed it into one of my pockets and hoped I wouldn’t need to use the thing.

  “How long will he stay--”

  “A while. Let’s go into the building and hope they didn’t hear us,” I interrupted Z.

  “You first, big guy.” Juliette gestured to the corner of the alleyway, and I nodded before taking the point position again.

  No one had come out of the doorway to investigate the shouting, so I moved quickly to the roll up door and ducked inside. It took half a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but I didn’t see anyone near me. This appeared to be an abandoned machine shop, and the large interior of the building was filled with rusted machines that looked to have once pressed or folded sheets of metal. The space was unlit, but my superior eyes noticed a bit of a glow from the floor on the opposite side of the machine shop.

  “Over there. I think there is a light under the floor,” I said to Juliette and Z when they joined me.

  “I can’t see shit,” Z whispered.

  “Your eyes need to adjust,” Juliette hissed.

  “Really? Wow. I didn’t know that. Thank you for the fucking education.” Z’s voice was a mocking growl.

  “You’re welcome. Anytime you need an explanation on how the universe works, let me know, and I’ll give you an education.”

  “Enough,” I said. “I’ll go check out the floor. You both wait here.”

  I crept across the open space of the dark workshop until I stood over the spot where the glow came through the narrow edges of the floor tile. The spot was obviously a trap door, and I pressed my ear to the ground with the hope that I could hear voices on the other side. I didn’t hear anyone speaking, and it meant that the metal was either too thick, or our quarry had continued deeper into the passageways under the station.

  I clicked my tongue on the roof of my mouth twice, and the women came to my side.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered, “but I know they went down here. Let’s split up and try to find a way to open it.

  “I’m going to get a light,” Z said as she held up her transponder. One of the device’s ends lit up, and she turned around the room slowly. Juliette followed her example, and I slid my hands across the floor to see if there was a hidden mechanism that would open the hatch.

  “Hey,” Z whispered, and we both turned to her. “The handle on this machine isn’t rusted, or covered with dust.” The slender blonde woman rested her hand on the handle and then pulled it toward her.

  There was a popping sound of levers releasing, and the door on the ground lifted up with a soft hydraulic hiss. Z did an over exaggerated fist pump in the air and then pointed at the redhead.

  “You want a cookie or something?” Juliette snickered.

  “I’ll settle for a ‘You’re pretty awesome, Z. I’ll never be a bitch to you again. Thanks for helping me save these girls.’”

  “I’d rather bake cookies,” Juliette said. Then she looked at me. “You first, handsome.”

  “Can you not call him that?” Z whispered as I carefully descended the stairs.

  “Why not? He is. Oh, I get it,” the redhead said with a snicker. “You got it for him.”

  “Do you want to save these girls or argue with Z?” I almost told the woman that I thought she was behaving very unprofessionally. She seemed a little too immature to be the captain of a police unit, but then I thought about the conversation between us in the hospital room. She probably had a strategy behind her efforts to bug Z.

  “You are right, let’s go.” Juliette nodded and then walked down the steps.

  There was a tiny wall lantern in the corridor, but our walk carried us out of its light and into near darkness. My eyes were sharp enough to see without much light, but I felt Juliette’s hand grab onto my arm.

  “How can you see?” she whispered.

  “Don’t worry about it. Z?” I asked as I turned to the blonde woman. I reached out to grab her hand, and I led the two women down the passage.

  “Turning left,” I whispered when we reached the end of the straight metal hallway. It was only two meters of so across, and two and a half meters tall, so each of the women held onto me while they also ran their fingers along the wall. The tunnel was all sorts of claustrophobic feeling, and I would have had to hunch over if I was in my tiger form.

  “This sucks,” Z said through ragged breaths. I could tell the darkness was getting to her. Or she probably wouldn’t have risked voicing an opinion for Juliette to mock. The redhead didn’t say anything to my friend’s words though, and I figured she must have agreed.

  I sure did.

  “I think I see light up ahead,” Juliette hissed after another few minutes of walking. It had gotten almost too dark for me to see, but the woman was right about the glow up ahead.

  “I hear voices. Be quiet,” I warned as we continued.

  There was another set of steps leading upward, and it opened into a large tunnel. There was a bit of light coming from the opening, but I doubted it would be enough for the women. I moved my head up to the lip of the opening and looked toward the distant light. The source was a hundred and fifty meters away in the center of the abandoned station street.

  The buildings on each side of me were crafted in the ancient Roman style, with lots of open entrances, columns, and stone surfaces. I could hear voices from the light source, but it looked like the men had only set down a single lantern, and their bodies cast long backlit shadows through the oppressive darkness of the abandoned city.

  “About a hundred and fifty meters that way,” I said once I’d crawled back down the steps, turned to the pair of women, and pointed toward the glow.

  “What is around us?” Juliette whispered.

  “City street. The buildings on either side have a lot of columns in the front that we can hide behind.”

  “Alright. You lead.”

  The women followed me out of the tunnel and across the street toward one of the buildings on our right. There were plenty of places to hide, and we easily found a spot about ten meters from the men gathered around the lantern. The four of them paced around the light nervously, and their movements caused the glow from the light source to dance down the street like flames.

  “They are late,” one o
f the men hissed. “I fucking hate this place.”

  “They are always late,” another one answered.

  “Hey, did you hear something?” a third one asked, and I held my breath.

  “What?” one of the men hissed.

  “Ahh. I’m just fucking with you girls. Ha!” The man said as he let out a long laugh.

  “That is Ian Van Toreg,” Juliette whispered to me. “I need him alive.”

  “Got it,” I replied.

  “Fucking prick,” one of the men said as he looked in our direction, but he looked away almost immediately without raising any alarm.

  Z, Juliette, and I were crouched behind a solid stone bench placed on the side of the street, and there was another alleyway behind us if we needed to fall back. The buildings, lamps, and other parts of this district looked in fine repair, and I wondered if Juliette had been right about the parliament keeping the district closed on purpose, so they could have an easier time transporting illegal goods through it.

  “I see a light. They are coming,” one of the men said as he pointed in the distance. I followed his finger and saw a distant glow down the street.

  There was a lot of light, and I pulled on Z and Juliette’s coat sleeves so that we could fall back into the alley a few meters behind us.

  The other group took a good five minutes to reach us, and I’d been correct in my guess. Ten men were wearing Victorian suits leading six girls wearing similar school uniforms. The girls were all handcuffed, joined together with a chain, and they each had ball gags in their mouths. The girls looked to be in their mid-teens, and their faces painted a picture of clear terror.

  “You’re late,” Van Toreg said.

  “So?” a man asked as he stepped toward the lantern Van Toreg had laid on the ground. Another man walked with him, and he glanced around the dark buildings with interest.

  “That’s Jared Wes on the left. He works for Huyan Kar. The guy on the right is Tyrell Durel. He works for Congressman Baccala.” Juliette pulled a square device out of her leather jacket, pressed a button to extend a lens from the center of it, and then pointed it at the group of men.