by Chris Fox
The main concourse of Station Echo Nine was packed with people. Spacers, shoppers, travelers, merchants, tourists, and the occasional security officer milled around in a turbulent flow of humanity mixed with occasional doses of xenos from other ARGO-aligned worlds. Finding two guys in that jumble was like finding molecules out in the deep vacuum between star systems. Tanny and Mriy wended their way through the crowds, intentionally fighting upstream of the traffic to see more faces than backs of heads. A human woman, even one built solidly as Tanny, didn’t part a crowd half so effectively as an azrin hunter. If more people had been familiar with Mriy’s rather obscure species, most of them would have chosen to walk elsewhere entirely.
“I wish Carl thought these things through even a little,” Tanny grumbled. “We don’t even have a good description of them.”
“They should smell like your kin’s blood,” Mriy reasoned, keeping her nose up and nostrils twitching with short, quick sniffs.
Tanny snorted. “Yeah, what’re the odds of you picking that out in this miasma of booze, sweat, and cheap plastic?”
The azrin shrugged in a gesture common to most sentient races. “Tell me a better plan, then.”
Tanny grunted and let the subject drop. In every direction she saw likely suspects. Dark hair. Dark jackets. One big; one small. Chip’s description fit too easily onto the rough-cut spacers and station dregs that milled around in the crowds. He hadn’t seen weapons on either of them, but he hadn’t seen the knife that stuck him even as his attacker ran off dripping his blood everywhere. She needed to think ahead of them, figure out where they would go next.
Mriy was no help beyond the lucky chance her nose might catch a whiff of Chip’s blood somewhere it didn’t belong. She was a hunter from one of the few sentient species who still preferred catching live prey. That would have been fine on a prairie in some idyllic nature-preserve planet, but Echo Nine was a steel-composite warren of technology, stuffed with fifty thousand sentient creatures, orbiting Alnilam, the middle star in Orion’s belt. She needed more than a keen nose to figure out where Chip’s attackers had disappeared.
To find them, Tanny was going to need to think like a station-side thug. She had been a marine once, and piloted a smuggling ship. Even the occasional heist job wasn’t a problem. But she had never been a street-level mugger or anything of the sort. “We need to get inside their heads,” she said to Mriy.
“A claw through the eye would work,” Mriy replied. “But I was just planning to break their necks.” Though her slouching posture and loose hanging fur disguised her size, Mriy was forty kilos heavier than Tanny, physiology packed with fast-twitch muscle fiber. Even with marine bio-conditioning and hormone regimens, she wasn’t a match for the azrin in a brawl—no human was. The Galactic Combat League wouldn’t even sanction a bout between a Class B race like an azrin and a Class C race like a human. The only Class A races were exoskeletal.
“No, I mean we need to think the way they think,” Tanny clarified. “We need to figure where they would go or do, or who they would talk to. You just left a guy in a back corridor with his guts spilling out. You took his gear. What do you do next?”
“I’d be hungry,” Mriy replied with a thoughtful scratch behind her ear. “That’s why they say never to kill what you won’t eat. But your kind don’t eat fresh kills, so I assume they might not want food after that. You need someone who thinks like crime-makers. The ones who prey on the weak for money, not food.”
“Uncle Earl,” Tanny breathed, stopping in her tracks.
Mriy stopped as well. “Your uncle has knowledge of—” The question ended mid-sentence as Tanny grabbed the azrin by the arm and yanked her into the entryway of a Noodle-O-Rama.
“No, that’s him over there,” Tanny whispered, counting on Mriy’s keen hearing in the noisy concourse. She put a hand on her blaster. “And that’s Jimmy with him. Shit, what’re they doing on this station?”
“Your kin are here?” Mriy said. “Why?”
“Well… my guess would be that Chip didn’t ask before he borrowed that gear he lost,” Tanny replied. “Change of plans. We have to stop them finding Chip.”
“I don’t need you tagging along,” Roddy said, not bothering to turn. When there was no response, he continued. “I can get by just fine on my own, you know. I know these kinda places, and I know how to aim a blaster better than that peach-fuzz fighter-jockey.”
“Probably,” Mort agreed, his voice coming from above and behind the laaku, trailing in his footsteps.
“Just don’t be fouling any tech, okay?” Roddy asked. “Last thing I need is shady re-sale guys trying to roll me for thousands of terras in damaged stolen goods.”
“I promise you, if it gets to that point, I’ll handle things,” Mort assured him. “Besides, it might be fun.”
Roddy stopped in his tracks, taking a quick step to the side when he realized Mort might not react quickly enough not to trip over him. “No.”
“Oh, come on,” Mort said, grinning down at the laaku. “I’m just having a little fun with you.”
“Don’t you pull that harmless-old-man act on me, Mort,” Roddy replied, aiming an accusing finger Mort’s way. “I know you too well. You’ve been cooped up on the Mobius for so long; you figure you can’t do too much harm to a station this size though. If you want to go be Merlin, go find the arboretum or a nice empty cargo bay or something and leave me the hell out of it.”
“I didn’t do a thing while you argued with that infernal box,” Mort said.
“Auto-purchase kiosk seemed a safe place to start. But we’re going to need real live people to find this junk. Come on, there’s too many places on this station to sell off stolen tech for us to be standing around yapping.”
Mort swept a hand out in the direction they had been traveling. “Then lead on, ye mighty mechanic.”
Roddy met Mort’s smirking grin with an ill-tempered squint, but let the comment pass as he resumed his search. Mort got stir-crazier than most cooped up on a starship, and Echo Nine wasn’t the sort of place to alleviate it much. He could afford to cut the old codger some slack.
They tried CompCore Depot with no luck, and made the owner and his daughter suspicious with their questions. At Cybernode, the clerk denied that they bought secondhand. Jack & Sammy’s had a hyper-sensitive arcane detector that went off the second Mort stepped through the door, and they were escorted out at blaster-point. Spayr Partz seemed almost too obvious a place to dump a stolen computer rig, but the guy working there was a friendly sort and nearly managed to sell Roddy an upgrade to the Mobius’s holo-projector before Mort gently reminded him that they had other business.
“Pissin’ me off,” Roddy muttered. “What, did those nano-brains actually think they could use that rig?” He pushed his way through the entrance to Sector Core and stopped short. Mort stumbled into the laaku’s back and nearly fell over him. There were two men leaning over the counter, having a hushed conversation with the proprietor. One was about Carl’s size—nothing but average—the other a bruiser. Both had dark hair and wore dark jackets, matching Chip’s half-assed description of his assailants.
Roddy looked up and caught Mort’s eye, seeing a common understanding there that they might just have stumbled onto the men Tanny and Mriy had been sent to sniff out. The meeting at the counter ended abruptly. The two hagglers straightened and turned, putting their backs to the counter and pointedly not looking at Mort or Roddy.
“Can I help you boys?” the proprietor asked.
Roddy sauntered up to the counter, which was eye-level to him, even stretching. “Yeah, we’re looking for an A-tech computer core, something Martian-made. We’re in a bit of a rush, so I’m willing to make it worth your while if we can walk out of here in the next five with it.”
One of the dark-jacketed men was holding a bulky pack and shifted it so that it was out of view behind his lumbering friend. “If you’ll give me a minute to finish my business with these fine gentlemen,” the proprietor said,
“I think I can help you out.”
Roddy grinned, showing more teeth and gums than any human smile could contain. “I think maybe I might get a better deal going direct with these two,” he said, hooking a thumb at the one holding the pack.
“This ain’t a swap meet,” the proprietor snarled. “Maybe you two oughtta wait outside ‘til me and them is done.”
Mort pulled a small bag from his pocket and hefted it in his hand, producing a telltale rattle of hard-coin terras. “Yes, I think we might just do that. We’ll be outside, waiting to do business. Price, no object.” He gave the two men with the suspiciously bulky pack a wink and preceded Roddy out the door.
“How long you think it’ll take them to—” Roddy’s question was cut short by the door opening a second time and the two men exiting Sector Core.
With a jerk of his head, the smaller of the two men invited Mort and Roddy into a maintenance corridor around the side of the shop. The two of them exchanged a knowing glance and followed.
“How much is this worth to you?” the smaller man asked. He opened the flap of the pack and pulled out a slick-as-new external computer core. The white enamel paint didn’t have so much as a scuff on it.
“I imagine that if you set the pack down with that rig tucked safe inside, we just might forget we saw you,” Roddy said.
The two dark-jackets turned to one another with a slow-motion look. The smaller one unholstered a blaster pistol; the larger one drew a serrated knife that looked like it might have been more for show than anything, if it weren’t for what had happened to Chip. “How about you just leave that bag of terras and we let you leave with all your fingers.”
Roddy was armed. He had a blaster pistol not too different from the dark-jacketed thug’s. Roddy’s was a Stanwerks Mk V, and the one pointed at him looked like a VI, or maybe a VII that had seen a lot of wear in the two months since that model came out. Either way, Roddy wasn’t about to quick-draw the guy.
Mort pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger, scratching at the scruff of beard perpetually trying to take root on his face. “How about you two stab and shoot each other, and save me the trouble of turning your innards into outards,” he said, raising the stakes once more, as if they were engaged in a verbal contest.
Roddy waited, paying keen attention to the feel in the air. Mort swore there was a change when someone decided to alter the local laws of physics, but Roddy had never been able to pick up on it. “Let’s dust these jokers, Amos,” the short one said. But no blast of plasma came lancing from the pistol, nor did the serrated knife budge a millimeter from where it hung locked in the air. “What the—?”
“Roddy, what’s on the other side of that wall?” Mort asked casually.
“You’re not thinking of blasting a—”
“Just humor me,” Mort said. “You must know where we are in this techno-beehive.”
Roddy paused a moment, giving the matter some thought. He turned the blueprints over in his head. Some of the high-sec areas weren’t on the public layouts downloadable on the omni, but certain basic laws of geometry applied, regardless. “Nothing,” Roddy replied. “Pretty sure there’s nothing on the far side of that one but hard-vac and a trillion kilometers of nothing.”
“Take a deep breath, lads,” Mort advised. He muttered something unintelligible beneath his breath and gave a quick shoving motion with one hand. Before the look of horror finished forming in their eyes, an unseen force hurled them clear through the steel-composite outer wall of Orion Space Station Echo Nine. Not a trace of their passage showed on the station’s interior. Bereft of their owners, the blaster and knife hung suspended for a moment, then clattered to the floor.
“I still didn’t feel anything,” Roddy said as he scooped up the weapons and tucked them into Chip’s pack.
Mort tapped a finger to the side of his head. “Too much science in that skull of yours, clogging things up. Don’t beat yourself up over it, though. I’m terribly subtle.”
Elliot Lorstram’s suite was the nicest Carl could ever remember visiting on a space station, where “space” was the one thing they were always short of. The sprawling abode had a glass and polished wood decor—though the wood was probably synthetic—and there was enough real estate for a prize fight in the middle of his living room. A pair of laakus bustled around in dark suits; one answered the door when Carl arrived, and another busied himself in the kitchen fixing drinks. Through one wall of magically transparent glassteel, the distant blue sun of the planetless system glowed, casting light that wouldn’t reach Earth for 1340 years. Carl knew the number offhand because it was the sort of cheap marketing schlock that got tacked onto the station welcome signs and civic pride posters.
Lorstram sat in a deep-cushioned chair with his feet up on the arm of the one beside it. He had the look of a wealthy playboy, with the square-cut jaw and glistening slick hair, poured into a white suit with just enough wrinkles to look relaxed without looking sloppy. With the click of a remote, an atmospheric race broadcast from Earth went mute on his holovid. “Didn’t expect to be seeing you before 21:00,” he quipped.
Carl held out his hands in a disarming gesture. Despite a blaster sidearm strapped at his side, he knew better than to appear the least bit threatening. Lorstram was a money mover, and siphoned enough of his ill-gotten terras into top-notch security that Carl wasn’t about to test him. “Hey, Mr. Lorstram, I know you’re well connected around here, so I just wanted to be upfront. In case you hadn’t heard, a couple locals put our contract hacker in the med-bay needing replacement organs.”
Lorstram’s raised eyebrows told Carl that he hadn’t. It wasn’t surprising, since Chip was traveling under an alias. “Is this going to be a problem?” In the end, any sob story that went in the ears got blown out the exhaust. All any boss cared about was the payday.
Carl chuckled. “Of course not. I just wanted you to hear that from me, so you’re not sitting here as the clock blinks down to go-time, trying to decide which airlock to throw me out.”
“Do I need to remind you how much money is at stake here?” Lorstram asked, wagging a paternal finger Carl’s way as if he wasn’t only a few years older.
“Yeah, fifty grand,” Carl replied with a shrug.
Lorstram’s face twisted in a snarl. “I don’t care about your take; that data crystal is going to make me millions! You promised me you could get me that crystal and get it back to Sedwig’s courier before he knows it’s gone. If they find out the trade agreement has been leaked, the deal is off. I don’t want to be hearing about your sick friend. Get me the data on that crystal, or you’re finished.”
Carl stepped backwards toward the door. “Rest easy, big guy. We’ve got this…. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a job to do.”
The laaku butler opened the door for him and Carl backed out, still smiling reassuringly at Lorstram. The door slid closed behind him. “Prick,” he muttered. There were days when being an outlaw for hire just didn’t seem worth it. You worked for years to gain a reputation for efficiency and trustworthiness, and still got saddled working jobs for humanoid sewage processors like Lorstram.
With nothing else on his plate, Carl headed for the meet-up at the med-bay. Elements of various backup plans floated around in his head, trying to bump into one another and form a plan, but he flushed them away with a song that he had stuck in his head. Humming a bass riff and bobbing his head along to music no one else could hear, he attracted an odd look here or there on his way. There was simply no point in worrying over details of a plan when he didn’t know what he was up against yet.
Tanny and Mriy arrived at the med-bay to find Mort standing sentry outside with a corn dog and soda, doing an excellent job of not letting on that he was a wizard. While it was possible for him to enter a tech-heavy area without causing things to go haywire, it was better safe than sorry with those machines keeping Chip alive.
“Carl back yet?” Tanny asked.
“Yup,” Mort replied with his mouth full.
“He got here just before we did.”
“You tracked down Chip’s gear?”
Mort smiled. “And the brain-fries who attacked him. Did your job for you.”
“You disposed?” Mriy asked. She was always skeptical of Mort’s magic. Her people had limited experience with shamans, who were generally weak hunters.
Mort waggled a few fingers that could be spared corn-dog-gripping duties for a moment. “Sent them for a nice swim.”
“They ID you?”
“Who the hell knows?” Mort asked. “But they’re not telling anyone now, that’s for sure.”
Tanny patted a hand on his shoulder as she pushed past into the med-bay, and Mort replied with a muffled grunt. Inside the med-bay, a gaggle of doctors and nurses cowered in a corner. Holding them at bay was a pair of three-meters-long snakes that had twisted themselves around the orderly and the giant crow that perched atop his head to form a caduceus, the ancient sign of the medical order. It seemed that Mort had had a little fun with subduing meddlesome scientists so that the crew could use Chip’s med-bay room as a staging area.
“Those medics are going to ID us,” Tanny said as soon as the door shut behind her and Mriy.
“Not our most immediate problem,” Carl replied. In the bed, pinned beneath the organ cloner, Chip was fiddling with the computer core Mort and Roddy had retrieved. The casing was off, and Roddy was passing him tools. From what Tanny knew of computer cores, that was never a good sign.
“Oh shit,” Tanny muttered. “Mort….”
“Yeah,” said Roddy. “Didn’t think of it at the time, but maybe pulling the trigger on a blaster was a better idea than trans-whatcha-ma-fucking those two bastards through a solid steel bulkhead. Mort twisted this thing up good.”
Chip shook his head and handed the core to Roddy. “Non-starter,” he said, the stupid grin from the drugs in his system still plastered across his face. “Your wizard friend needs to learn how to handle himself around sensitive A-tech.”
