“You know what all this sounds like?” Joe asked.
“What’s that?”
“Like you aren’t very retired.”
“You’re a sheriff now, Joe, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.”
“Why would they bother smuggling it, I wonder?” Joe asked.
“Apparently, the item would set off sensors. There’s no way to move it undetected.”
“And why would it set off the sensors?”
“You’ve got me. Now the main issue we’ll have with selling an item like this is that we’ll have to go someplace the Chinese won’t find it. That limits our market. Plus, we’ve got to come up with one: a credible backstory on how we came into possession of it. And two: a credible backstory for the item itself.”
“Okay, but we can actually do this, right?”
“Joe, the piece is incredible. No lines or imperfections whatsoever. No weight. No nothing. It’s almost as if it doesn’t even exist. It’s going to make us absolutely, bloody rich.”
“So…” Joe said.
“So what?”
“So it’s a five star item?”
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day, Joe,” Alma said with a smile. Then, without warning, she broke her own rule. With her index finger she reached out and touched the artifact. The item began to glow once more.
With a twinkle of excitement in her eye, she pulled her finger back.
But the orb continued to glow. The light then turned off for a second, only to return once more. It turned off again, then on again. It was now pulsating in a steady beat, on and off, on and off, on and off.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Alma said.
“Why’s that?” Joe asked, the nerves rumbling through his voice, terrified that his five star item had been ruined.
“For one, this item now looks quite a bit like a bomb. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure it isn’t one.”
“Alma?”
“Yes, Joe?”
“That seems like a very specific thing to say,” Joe said.
She just sighed and crossed her arms, staring worriedly at the flashing artifact.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“The other rumor I heard was this artifact has great power.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. All I’ve heard is it could have tremendous value for the energy sector.”
Joe thought for a moment. “That’s good then.”
“How is that remotely good?” Alma asked.
“We could potentially sell it to an energy company,” Joe said.
“As long as it doesn’t blow up first, yes, I suppose we could do that. Now I think our only option is to take this thing to Halle.”
“Halle?” Joe asked.
“The AI,” Alma said, as if it was common knowledge what Halle was.
Joe just stared blankly back at her.
“I guess you’re too young to have learned about the Halle scandal in school,” Alma said. “Anyway, she can appraise the item by running it against all the information we have on the internets, and hopefully tell us what this thing is and what the bloody blinking light means.”
Joe nodded and stared at the artifact floating there. Past the blinking light, something else was flashing outside on the other side of the blinds. He reached over and took a peek. A ship was hovering there. Joe closed the blinds.
“Chinese I presume?” Alma asked.
“I hope not,” Joe said.
There was a bang at the front door.
“And those would be the shock troops, I imagine,” Alma said.
“Do you have anywhere we can hide?” Joe asked.
Alma looked to the trap door in the corner. “I do, but it’s a bit awkward.”
“We’ll have to live with awkward.”
Alma went over to the heavy wooden door and lifted it open by the rope handle.
“What is that for anyway?” Joe asked as he collected the orb into the box.
“It’s for sexy time with the neighbor downstairs,” Alma said as she descended the ladder to the apartment below.
“Oh my God,” Joe said as he followed.
“Booty calls you see.”
“Yes, I get it,” Joe snapped.
“A lot of nerve you have climbing down here,” the 60-something man in the brown woolen suit called out from his kitchen table. The apartment was designed in the style of the 2150’s and made Joe feel nostalgic for the old TV shows he used to watch. “I told you, I’m cutting you off.”
“Not now Bob,” Alma said, climbing off the ladder. “We’re in danger and by extension, so are you.”
“What have you dragged me into now?” the man asked.
“Nothing as of yet. They don’t know we’re here. But we need you to go upstairs, through the front door, of course, and make a big fuss. Ask them what’s going on, demand to see identification, search warrants, the whole works.”
“Do they have these things?” Bob asked quizzically.
“How the hell am I supposed to know that? But it will stall them, at least for a moment.”
“Okay,” Bob said, straightening his tie. “I’ve decided to forgive you.”
“Yes, well, that’s good and fine. Now go do your job and I might forgive you too.”
Bob’s eyebrows went up as he walked out the front door and up the stairs. Alma and Joe snuck out after him and went down one flight of stairs, to the elevator at the end of the hall. Joe pressed the button and waited nervously.
“That was pretty close,” he chuckled.
Alma nodded.
The elevator door dinged open and two Chinese men with crew cut hair and casual clothing came walking out. Joe stood frozen. They were obviously undercover, walking in the way that only military men would walk. They left the elevator, not recognizing Joe.
“That wasn’t the box, was it?” the one soldier asked the other in Chinese.
Joe yanked Alma into the elevator and pressed the ground floor button and held it there firmly. The doors closed immediately and the elevator descended in its emergency gear. That was a trick he had learned in his sheriff’s training course. If only Tammy could see him now.
With a grin, Joe glanced out the window only to see a group of soldiers waiting for them down in the alley below. He punched the emergency stop. The elevator opened to a shopping mall. Everyone in the whole city seemed to be out buying their Space Christmas gifts.
Joe needed a decoy if they were going to make it out of there. And apparently, the Chinese were only looking for the box. He ran up to a couple admiring a pair of gloves they had just bought outside a nearby store.
“That sure is a nice bag you have there,” he said with a big old smile, pointing to a gray plastic shopping bag from Hess’s Department store. “Mind trading it for this box?”
“Oh, um... sure,” the woman said, flustered and a little too polite to turn down the bizarre request. She took the rest of her shopping from the gray bag and handed it over to Joe in exchange for the box.
“What is it?” the husband asked, skeptically.
“A toy box,” Alma said, without hesitation.
Joe took the pulsating orb from its container.
“And what is that?” the woman asked, astonished.
Joe looked back to Alma to come up with the answer.
“Oh, erm – a sex toy,” Alma said.
“Alright,” Joe said. He stuffed the orb into the bag. The blinking light only slightly less visible through the plastic. With a nod of thanks he scurried to a nearby escalator.
A few moments later, Chinese soldiers came charging up to the couple. Joe discreetly watched as the soldiers grabbed the box and looked inside. Upon seeing it empty, they barked as to it’s whereabouts and the man pointed to Joe and Alma on the escalator.
“I saw that working out a lot better in my head,” Joe said.
He pushed past the other shoppers, pulling Alma behind him. She ap
ologized profusely to each and every one of them.
When they reached the south entrance, he led Alma out to where the Crown Vik was parked. To Joe’s dismay, Tammy was nowhere to be seen.
“You’ve still got the Crown Vik, huh?” Alma asked.
“Unfortunately,” Joe said, searching the immediate area. Where the heck was the girl?
Tammy came running out towards Joe’s from a nearby sushi bar with a napkin tucked in her shirt.
“This place is really good,” she said, pointing back to the establishment. “You want to try it?”
“Get on the ship or I’m leaving you here,” Joe said, opening the door.
Tammy looked back at the restaurant, groaned and hopped aboard the ship. “I didn’t get to pay,” she said, tossing the fancy metal chopsticks on the table.
“You can send them a check in the mail,” Joe replied.
“Hello,” Tammy said, extending a hand to Alma.
“No time for pleasantries, Tammy,” Joe said, starting up the ship. “The Chinese are here.”
“What? How?”
“No idea,” he replied.
Alma shook Tammy’s hand discreetly.
High up above them, Joe spotted a dropship hovering in the sky, running a scan of the area.
“We’ll have to make it a straight shot to the highway,” Joe said. He turned to Tammy. “Did you get gas like I asked?”
“There’s something I need to tell you, Joe,” Tammy announced.
“What is it?” Joe took the controls of the ship and lifted off.
“This is the end of the line.”
“What are you talking about?”
Joe looked to Tammy, who stared back at him with a solemn face. What was this all about?
Past her, in the parking garage next door, a pair of undercover Chinese soldiers stood manning a propulsion rocket launcher. They had apparently received the memo that the Crown Vik didn’t have an electronic brain.
“They’re not extracting me,” Tammy said when she caught sight of the soldiers.
The propulsion rocket was fired and came screaming at the ship leaving a trail of smoke in it’s path.
Tammy ducked. The rocket exploded on the port side of the ship, knocking the vessel sideways, but the Crown Vik remained aloft.
Alma was in the seat behind Tammy, closing her eyes and clutching her chest.
Joe examined his display. No hull breach. Fortunately, the Crown Vik was built like a tank. He breathed a sigh of relief and ignited the advanced engines, but it seemed the faulty clutch had finally given out.
The soldiers in the parking garage loaded the launcher once more, this time with a much larger rocket.
“My planetary thrusters are broken,” Joe said. “But I think we can use a space gear from here.”
“Are you serious?” Tammy asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know how dangerous that is?”
“I do,” Joe answered.
He gunned it and the ship shot up out of the parking lot and up into the upper atmosphere. Joe was pressed firmly back into the seat as the ship rattled uncontrollably, going at a speed only meant for space travel, where there was no drag and nothing to hit. They flew through crossing traffic, narrowly dodging ships and tankers, until the blue sky of Falsterboo finally faded to black. They had made it to the stratosphere. To Joe’s chagrin, the thrusters burnt out. The ship reached the pinnacle of its launch and stayed weightless for a moment. Would they fall back down to the surface?
Fortunately, they remained floating, meaning they were now in orbit.
Joe shifted the Vik into second gear. It coughed and jerked forward towards the interstellar highway. Once they made it to the ring-shaped portal, black space turned white and the stars turned black.
“That’s how it’s done ladies and gentlemen,” Joe announced.
They traveled through subspace for about a second before the ship dropped out of warp and the white space turned black again. They were now about a thousand miles from Falsterboo.
“Stupid thing,” Joe said, pounding the dashboard. They went back into warp for a moment, only to fade out once more.
“Must have been that rocket,” Alma said.
They putzed along, going in and out of warp. Joe checked the diagnostics to see what was wrong. This was incredibly dangerous, they could come out of warp literally anywhere. The middle of a star, or a settlement... or a black hole. Finally, Joe pulled it out of warp for good.
Nearby, a line of deep space starships traveled along from Falsterboo out into the cosmos. It was a caravan, the old fashioned way of traveling the stars. Nowadays, it was reserved for large tankers and poor people who couldn't afford the tolls on the interstellar highway.
“We’ll have to hop from sector to sector in the caravans, I guess,” Joe announced.
“Won’t they be monitoring them?” Tammy asked.
“As far as the Chinese know, we made it to the highway. And they’ll be looking for the toll for when we take an exit. This is actually perfect.”
“Won’t it take forever to go this way?” Tammy asked.
“That all depends on where we’re going,” Joe said, looking to Alma.
“We need to get to Halle,” she said.
“Where’s she located?” Joe asked.
“Technically, the Pillars of Creation, but you can speak to her from anywhere. You just have to know somebody who can get you an appointment.”
“Can’t you get us an appointment?” Joe asked.
“No, I cannot.”
“Well, who can?”
“I was intending on going through my friend Sally, but she lives in Ganges System...”
“Which isn’t really an option,” Joe said, bringing up his galaxy map. “Not at this speed anyway. Isn’t there anyone in this system?”
Alma was quiet for a moment. “We’ll be lucky if there’s anyone in this quadrant.”
“Okay, well, find us somebody close-by then.”
Alma took out her palm pilot.
“There’s a gap in that lane over there,” Tammy said.
“I know how to caravan, alright?” Joe said. “By the way, what the hell was that back there?”
“What do you mean?” Tammy asked.
“The whole, ‘They’re not extracting me’ thing?”
“People say a lot of things at the end of a gun, Joe.”
“Ha. That seems like an awfully random thing to say, don’t you think?”
“Well, it’s just… I had nothing to do with this whole situation. I’m an innocent bystander, don’t you think?”
Joe stared at the girl. “I think you informed them of our location.”
“Wha… Why would I even do that?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“I never contacted the Chinese, Joe, I swear to God.”
“What about that call you made to the outpost?”
Tammy’s face went red. “What are you talking about?”
Alma, meanwhile, was looking through her contacts. “Nope. Dead. Dead. Prison. Dead. Coma. Wow, this is depressing.”
“Don’t lie about it. It came up on my display upstairs,” Joe said.
Tammy shook her head and blew out through her nose. “I was only checking in. I never said where we were going.”
“What did I say about no calls?” Joe replied. “You almost got us killed.”
“I said, I never told them where we were going.”
“And I suppose you just didn’t notice the soldiers with the rocket launcher sitting in the building above you?”
“How was I supposed to notice that?”
“You want to be a cop don’t you, Tammy? Then you have to start noticing things like that. They probably don’t have this in the schoolbook they gave you back at the academy, so maybe write it down somewhere.”
Tammy glared at him.
“I mean it, write it down,” Joe said.
The girl felt at her pockets. “I l
eft my notebook at the restaurant...” she groaned. Finally, she took out the manual she had been praying to previously and turned to the back with a pen.
Joe was surprised she’d be willing to write on her old keepsake, but apparently becoming a cop was equally important to her. He cleared his throat and began. “Rule number one, don’t…. no wait…. Always look around your location before stopping and making yourself vulnerable. You got that?”
Tammy nodded.
“Rule number two. Don’t stop to eat when we might be in a rush.”
“I hadn’t eaten since that gross chili back at the diner.”
“Three: Don’t call that chili gross...”
“I found one,” Alma butted in. She was always saying Joe liked to make fights out of nothing and probably thought this was one of those occasions. Leaning up between him and Tammy, she scrolled through the holographic star map on the dashboard, highlighting a system on the display. “It’s nice and close and it looks like we’re already heading in the right direction.”
“Where?” Joe asked squinting at the map, trying to get his bearings.
“You’re not going to like it,” Alma said, with a half smile.
“Jesus,” Joe said when he realized where it was.
“Where is it?” Tammy asked.
“We’re not going there.” Joe said.
“Not going where?”
“That’s not an option,” Joe announced.
“Where?” Tammy shouted.
“Bolstra 5,” Alma said. “And it’s the only option.”
“What’s wrong with Bolstra 5?” Tammy asked. “I hear it’s nice.”
“It’s not the place,” Joe said. “It’s who’s there.”
“Oh,” Tammy said. “And who’s there?”
“My ex.”
“His ex with Halle access,” Alma said.
“Where’s the next option?” Joe asked.
“Two weeks away, in the opposite direction,” Alma said. “I don’t know how fast the Chinese can make a scan of this system, but I’m pretty sure it’s faster than two weeks. Cassandra is the only option.”
“Can’t we just sell it without talking to Halle?” Joe asked, looking back at his former boss. She had always been overly cautious, taking steps that were sometimes unnecessary.
The Star Collector Page 9
