Dubious Heroes: a novel

by Nicholas Blue

  Cozi poured us two more shots from the flask on the table, and we downed them. On the far side of the room, someone bellowed “Ice melter!”, and a body went sailing through the air, to crumple against the wall. Bar fights are always interesting in low gee.

  “If we’re not stealing the ship, then why do we have to be so fucking sneaky about it?” he asked.

  “Because it’ll work a lot better if they don’t know it’s missing in the first place”, I said. Sound logic, any way you looked at it.

  “That’s because they’d consider it stolen“, Cozi said. “Besides, somebody’s bound to be keeping track of them.”

  “I just said that”, I said. “You’re right, someone does, and you’re lookin’ at him. I log those ships into and out of the graveyard, so I know what’s there, and I know how to get by the security we use. We just need to make sure TGS doesn’t know we were in the neighborhood, should any questions come up.”

  “Questions like Where’s our fucking ship, you mean”, Cozi said.

  “Yeah, something like that”.

  “So how do we get out there? Stick out our thumbs and hitchhike?”

  “Fuck if I know”, I said. “You’re supposed to be the smart one here. I didn’t drag my ass all the way to Jupiter to discuss why you have so much trouble getting laid.”

  “Women are intimidated by smart men”, Cozi said.

  “Sorry, but you’re not that smart. Try combing your hair. Bathing every now and then helps too.”

  “Nobody bathes out here”, he said.

  “The ones getting laid do.”

  “Piss off, Doon.” Eyes bugging.

  “Come on, Cozi, think. I’ve done the first part, and I have the last part covered, too. It’s the middle part we still have to figure out. People do things differently out here on the rocks. If you don’t know how, you probably know someone who does.”

  “Yeah, I play poker with a group of smugglers every Saturday night.” He rolled his eyes. “Fuck, man… I’m an engineer. You know as much about this sort of shit as I do. Probably more.”

  “Well, the two of us ought to be able to come up with something. Hell, I have the money. We just need to find someone to take us.”

  “By take us, you mean someone willing to smuggle us out of here and into there”, he said.

  “Hundreds of tons of cargo are being smuggled all over the place, every day”, I said. “I can’t imagine a couple of guys would be that big of a deal.”

  “So, what we need is a smuggler”, he said. He looked like he was wobbling in his chair. I grabbed the table and looked at him again. Nope, I was the wobbler.

  Drunk or not, though, I knew I had him. I’d always been able to talk him into pretty much anything, and I still could.

  “I just figured you’d have a better chance of knowing someone who knows someone than I would”, I said. “They’ve gotta be around here somewhere.”

  “Back in college, I promised myself not to let you get me into any more crazy shit. I think this qualifies.”

  “Oh, come on, Cozi. It’s just an adventure“, I said, pouring us a couple more shots. “Seriously, are you happy here, riding herd over a bunch of mining equipment and the idiots who are constantly fucking it up? If we can pull this off, you’ll have a spaceship to play with.”

  Cozi tossed back his shot, and then stared at the empty glass on the table. Sighing heavily, he looked up.

  “There’s a spacer bar at Northport. I used to hang out there with a couple of guys, when I first got here. They were transferred out, so I stopped going. I heard a rumor back then that the guy running the place was into some shady stuff. Maybe we should get to know him.”

  “You won’t regret this”, I said.

  “How many times have I heard that“, he said, and tried to pour us two more shots, but the flask was empty.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a flash of red hair and black clothing. I spun around so fast, I fell out of my chair, settling slowly to the floor. Cozi came around the table and helped me up, none too steady himself.

  “No more Bliss for you, buddy”, he said.

  Standing, I looked around. If my mysterious redhead had really been there, she’d melted into the crowd. Apparently, combining Jovian Bliss with two months of pent up fantasies was a potent mixture. I shook my head, trying to clear it.

  “I thought I saw someone”, I said, still wobbling a bit.

  “Let’s go back to my place”, Cozi said, still steadying me with one hand on my shoulder. “You can crash on my floor. If you gotta puke, do it before we get there.”

  That sounded like a good idea, so I did.

  Nearly everything on Io was underground, much like on Luna. The moon was about two-thirds the size of Earth, the daylight side lit by the huge orb of Jupiter, which filled most of the sky. Io didn’t really have a dark side, although the illumination from the distant sun was marginal.

  Water and other chemicals were being strip-mined from the vast white expanse of the surface. As Cozi explained it, robotic miners collected tons of ice, which was then melted, using geothermal heat from inside the moon. The water was separated out from other equally useful chemicals, and then piped into special container ships, where it refroze, ready for transport to the thirsty billions, wherever they might be.

  Io was dotted with dozens of such mines, most with their own spaceports, though they were limited to handling outgoing heavy cargo. Any other cargo, and all passengers, had to use one of the two big government spaceports located at either pole. They were called, logically enough, Northport and Southport. They were also the closest thing Io had to organized settlements. As far as I could tell, they existed for no other purpose than whoever was in charge wanted it that way.

  Cozi’s camp was Mojo Mining Four, which was only an hour’s ride to Northport via surface crawler. Cozi had gotten one for us, and we were on our way to the port. We still had to wear suits; you never knew when something would break down, and leave you stuck in the frozen vacuum.

  Despite the size of Io, gravity was a little less than half a gee, which meant no sticky shoes, at least. Spacesuits, however, were common. I was not fond of relying on them. The temperature on the surface hovered around a hundred eighty below (Kelvin), but you didn’t notice it in the suit. They say that if you do feel the cold, you’re about to be dead. Fortunately, my suit was keeping me nice and warm. I fervently hoped it kept it up.

  We dumped the crawler in a surface garage above Northport, and dropped down into the town. We left our suits at a depot near the entrance, and walked around until I found a branch for one of the bigger banks. There, I purchased a number of anonymous credit chips, also called cash chips, in various amounts. Now, when it came time to pay someone, I could do so with cash chips, and the transaction couldn’t be traced back to me. Governments were not fond of cash chips, for all the obvious reasons, and a few that weren’t so obvious. Fortunately, any efforts to either ban or curtail their use had met with stiff resistance, even from the banks, which figured; they charged a 15% tariff whenever they sold them.

  Cozi was still in a bit of a funk, and had spent most of the trip sulking, which was okay by me. I was still nursing the worst hangover on Io, if not this part of the solar system, and my head hurt too much to carry on a conversation.

  The bar, a joint called Grogan’s, wasn’t due to open for a couple of hours, so we walked around looking at the town, such as it was. There were only two hotels at Northport, both with attached casinos. We avoided them like the plague. Casinos and hangovers do not mix.

  Finally, the doors to the bar opened. The guy running the place was not named Grogan. Instead, it was someone with the improbable name of Otter, which I gathered was some sort of terrestrial mammal, or so Cozi said. I wondered if an otter was some sort of rat, since that was what he resembled. We sat down at the bar.

  “Cozi?” Otter said, looking up from some arcane bar chore. “Haven’t seen you here for a while.
I thought you work dayshift.”

  “I’m on vacation”, he said. “Taking a few days off. This is my friend Doon, just in from Luna. Until I came out here, his chief purpose in life was to give me ulcers.”

  Otter stuck his hand across the bar, and we shook.

  “Pleased”, he said.

  “Likewise”, I said. “Don’t listen to Cozi. If it weren’t for me, he’d have died of boredom a long time ago. And still a virgin, too.”

  “Ouch”, Otter said.

  “Piss off, Doon”, Cozi said, scowling at me. With those eyebrows, he really was a champion scowler.

  “Beer?” Otter asked.

  “Sure”, I said. “Breakfast of champions.”

  “Drinking champions, maybe”, Cozi said, as Otter handed us two soft packs. I hate soft packs, but in low gee, or out on the rocks, that’s what you get.

  “And probably alcoholics”, I said, pulling the tab on the container. A sip straw popped out, and the pack grew cold in my hand.

  “And good customers”, Otter said. “Cheers.”

  We sipped our beers for a minute, while Otter wandered off to take care of other chores. Finished with whatever he’d been doing, he wandered back over.

  “So, you guys come in to see the big city, or just get kicked out of the bar at Mojo Four?” he asked.

  “We’ve got sort of a problem”, Cozi said. “Thought Northport might be the place we could fix it. We need to move something, preferably without having to do a lot of, um… paperwork. You get a lot of spacers in here, so I thought you might know someone we could talk to.

  He looked us over for a long moment, before saying anything. When he spoke, he didn’t look happy about it.

  “Look, I sorta know you, Cozi”, he said, “But not all that well.” He nodded toward me. “I don’t know this guy at all. You guys could be anybody, really.”

  I kept my mouth shut, as Cozi looked over at me.

  “You know I work for Mojo, and have for almost fifteen years. Doon is a manager at TGS on Luna, and has been there forever. We’re easy to check out; take you a couple minutes, tops. Doon is my friend, because I’ve known him most of my life, and while he’s a pain in my ass, I’d trust him with my life”, Cozi said. “I realize none of this means jack shit to you, but all we need is a name, Otter. We can make it worth your while.”

  He looked at us for a long moment.

  “Define worth my while”, he said.

  “We pay you for the beers, and leave a nice tip”, I said, “Say, a thousand bucks.”

  “Sounds like a good tip for one beer, but you guys had two.”

  “I can live with that”, I said, glancing at Cozi. “Put the beers on my credit chip.” I held out my wrist and he scanned it, punched something into the terminal, and said we were good. I took a cash chip from my pocket, and slid it across the bar to him. He ran the scanner over it, and then stuck it into his pocket.

  “Warehouse Five”, he said. “Ask for Juno, he’s the loadmaster there. This is not something I’d normally do. For the record, I don’t know shit about shit, and you didn’t get anyone’s name from me. If this comes back on me, I’m gonna come looking for the both of you. I used to be UPDF Marine. So, you okay with all that?”

  “We’re okay with all that”, I said, and Cozi nodded.

  “Now, how about a couple more beers?” he said, grinning. We politely declined. I couldn’t afford to be a regular customer, what with the tips.

  We left Grogan’s, and walked back to the suit depot. The warehouse compound was outside, and larger than the town beneath it. We suited up, and walked across the dirty ice, to the nearest entry to the compound. The warehouses contained all the cargo coming into and leaving the port, ostensibly so that local authorities could keep track of what was coming and going, but really so they could tax the bejesus out of it. Passengers went through similar scrutiny, but over at the passenger terminal.

  Surprisingly, security for the compound was of the human variety, which consisted of one guy in a patched spacesuit, wandering around the huge entryway, pointing a scanner at things as they came and went.

  He waved the scanner in our direction, and apparently didn’t get the answer he was looking for.

  “Hold up”, he said, over the suit radio, and motioned us over. A huge cargo handler rumbled by, the ground shaking under its mass. There was no cab on it; it was robotic, probably run by an AI.

  “Who’re you guys?” he asked. I told him my identification number and Cozi did the same. Quickly, he tapped the information into the industrial-looking Pod attached to the left arm of his suit.

  “TGS and Mojo, huh?” he said. “Where you headed?”

  “Warehouse Two”, I said, lying, for no particular reason other than that I could.

  “You’re logged in”, he said. “Be sure you log out with someone when you leave. And try not to get run over by any haulers. The AI and workers have a contest going to see who can flatten the most suits.” Turning, he walked away from us.

  We walked into the compound. The warehouses were monstrous, but clearly marked. It took us half an hour to reach Warehouse Five, giving the cargo haulers a wide berth as we made our way. I’d seen shuttles smaller than the big machines. And I wasn’t sure if he’d been kidding about the contest.

  “It’ll be on record that we’re here”, I said. “We just have to make sure they don’t know where we go when we leave here.”

  “I’m thinking we’re gonna end up getting screwed”, Cozi said.

  “Quit bitching”, I said. “It’ll either work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, we’ll either figure out something new, or go back to the crap we were doing before.”

  “I just worry”, he said, kicking at a chunk of ice.

  “What, you worry?” I said, and sighed heavily.

  Worrying is one of the things that makes Cozi a great engineer. A normal person might worry about those few things that were most likely to happen. Cozi would cover those, and then invent entire new categories of things to stress about. On the plus side, if you ever needed to know what could possibly go wrong, Cozi was the guy to have around.

  Cozi and I really had been friends since we were kids, both of us born and raised on Luna. As long as I’d known him, he’d been what I called a serial worrier. He agonized over every school project, every exam, and (especially) every date. This did not mean he was either fearful or hesitant, because he wasn’t. He’d dive right into whatever was going on, once the time came. He’d just carp about it before, during and after.

  Sometime during college, it finally occurred to him that all the complaining wasn’t a great way to win friends and influence people, nor could he keep counting on me to set him up with dates, indefinitely. So, he decided to change his behavior, and did exactly that. Oh, he still worried about every little nit-picking thing, but he got a lot better at keeping it to himself; a change that I (and everyone else around him) greatly appreciated.

  So, there we were, halfway across the solar system, strolling across the surface of a moon originally named by Galileo, and Cozi was worrying. Business as usual, I figured.

  Eventually, we completed our circumnavigation of Warehouse Five, and found an entrance. It was a big one, intended for the cargo haulers. We stood to one side as a hauler exited, carrying a load of plasteel crates. I looked around for a human being, but didn’t see anyone, just a cavernous warehouse full of stacked crates. The building had to be a quarter mile long and wide. There was no reason for anyone to be hanging around anyway, since most of the work was heaving lifting, and that was handled by the big robotic units. The people in charge would be holed up somewhere toasty, drinking coffee and keeping an occasional eye on things.

  I jumped when my suit radio emitted a loud beep, followed by an equally loud voice. Okay, scratch occasional; someone was watching.

  “You there. What are you doing in my warehouse?”

  I tried turning down my suit radio volume, to no avail. Neat tri
ck.

  “We’re looking for Juno”, I said, into the helmet radio. Cozi and I looked around, but still didn’t see anyone. Obviously, they had us on camera, but I didn’t see any of those, either.

  “Walk forward until I tell you to stop.” We did so, until we were over a hundred yards into the warehouse.

  “Okay, stop”, the voice said. We were in the middle of an intersection. I could feel a cargo hauler somewhere nearby, which was the only way to tell; no atmosphere meant there was nothing to carry the sound waves, ergo, no sound.

  “Now, turn left, and keep going until you reach the airlock door. Cycle through, and dump your suits. Someone will meet you there.”

  We followed the directions, until we came to a low habitat, butted up against one of the walls. Pushing the appropriate buttons, we cycled through into the airlock. A few moments later, and we were inside a small staging room, suit holders lining one wall. I backed up to an empty holder, and felt it engage and grasp my suit. I hit another button, and the suit popped open. I stepped out of it, into the chilly air of the room. I looked over and saw Cozi had done the same. Aside from the suits, the room was deserted and empty. One door led further into the structure, but wouldn’t open for us. Cozi was being quieter than normal, which meant he was probably worrying about something. He wasn’t alone; I was doing some worrying of my own.

  I resisted the urge to talk. The vid pickups weren’t hidden, and I figured they could hear us, too. After a few minutes, the door slid open, and a scruffy looking man in coveralls entered. Maybe that’s not a fair description of the guy, considering nearly everyone there, us included, wore coveralls, and scruffiness was definitely running rampant.

  “Come with me”, he said, so we did, following him through the door, which was actually an airlock. We cycled through, then exited. We began making our way along a maze of passages, finally coming to an elevator, which dropped us a few levels below the surface. We exited the elevator, took a few more passages, and ended up at what must have been our destination. The door slid open, and we entered what looked like a control room.