“But it’s interesting how they got their start,” d’Alencon said, his eyes boring into Dolph. “They were mercenaries in the human-Ek war, working to protect the very same planets that they now rape. There’s a fine line between protection and predation. Sometimes, those are just two sides of the same coin. What happened with the Travellers is they got ideological. When you start to think that the law interferes with your freedom, trouble ain’t far off. Throw massive firepower into the mix, and the problem is out of control.”
“I’ve always thought of the Travellers as more of a cult,” I said quietly.
“They’re that, too. A cult and a criminal organization. Both sides reinforce each other.” D’Alencon shook his head. “What were they doing when you encountered them? Anything unusual? Even if it don’t seem that significant to you, it might be a crucial piece of information for us.”
14
I blinked, hiding surprise and a certain amount of alarm. D’Alencon had just implied that the Travellers were up to something nefarious. More nefarious than usual? That was a pretty high bar.
“We didn’t see anything unusual,” I said, remembering two hundred children running around the Traveller ship. A bearded, scarred Traveller interrogating the kids from the knife stall. If that was normal, I was an Ek. “Nothing apart from the Travellers themselves, that is. And sadly, that ain’t very unusual at all.”
Beside me, Dolph wiped stray bits of sweaty hair out of his face, adding nothing.
“That’s too bad,” d’Alencon said. “For a man in your position, it pays to keep your eyes open.”
“How do you mean?”
D’Alencon shrugged. “You’ve been knocking around the Fringe for a while, Tiger. Ain’t that many people with your kind of experience. You know how things are supposed to be, and how they’re not. So when you head out there from now on, keep your eyes open. That’s all I’m saying.”
But that wasn’t all he was saying. I got the subtext, and confirmed, “If we see anything interesting, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
D’Alencon crushed my hand in his pudgy one. “Good man, Mike. We’ll file today’s incident in the Shit Happens folder.”
“See ya ‘round,” his officers echoed. They trooped away towards the cop car parked on the shady side of my hangar.
Dolph waited until they were out of earshot before saying, “Nice move, Tiger.”
“At least I didn’t insult their manhood, their earning power, and their intelligence inside of three minutes,” I said.
He shrugged. “They’re cops. If they get their panties in a twist over that, they’re in the wrong job.” He waved to the police car as it purred away. He was mad.
Not as mad as I was. I had basically just agreed to become an informant for the PdL PD, in exchange for their overlooking the whole ship kill in low orbit thing.
I sighed. “You know what, actually, it’ll be good to have better contacts within the force. We don’t have to actually tell them anything. And we’ll make Bones buy the beer.”
“I’d kill for a beer right now,” Dolph said. He glanced around the hangar. “Mother of God, this place is a mess.”
“Crap, they saw my calendar,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. The calendar hanging over the workbench, a gift from Lucy, featured the cuddly, sparkly aliens of Gemworld Families, her latest craze. I remembered that I didn’t have a present for her. “What am I going to give her?” I groaned.
Dolph shrugged. We walked back towards the St. Clare. The refugee kids peeked out from under the ship. They had hidden while the police were here.
“Poor kids,” I said. MF had delivered the results of his literacy tests to me earlier. “Get this: Jan, that’s the boy, and Leaf are functionally illiterate. They know nothing about anything outside of that refugee camp, except a few fairy tales from wherever all those people come from. Pippa can read and write and use a computer. But that’s it. Their lives aren’t gonna be easy here.”
“No shit,” Dolph said. “You better get them over to asylum processing before someone accuses us of people-trafficking. Good thing Bones didn’t see them.”
I sighed, giving up. He’d just have to stay mad. “Yeah, I’m going to take them over there now.”
“Who’s taking Kimmie to the morgue?”
“I am,” Martin shouted down from the crane operator’s seat. He was wearing a ball cap to protect his bald dome from the sun. “Get your scrawny ass up here and open the hold door.”
Dolph climbed the ladder. I went to talk to Irene.
She was sitting behind the ladder, almost under the ship, where you couldn’t see her very well. There was a reason for that—the same reason I had not taken her with me to speak to the police officers. She had a sketchy past. In between leaving the army and signing on with me, she’d worked with people I would cross the Cluster to avoid. All I knew about that part of her life was that I did not want to know any more about it. She swore the police had nothing on her, and that she would never go back to mixing in those circles, and I believed her. All the same, she preferred to stay out of sight, out of mind, where d’Alencon and his upstanding brothers in blue were concerned.
“Irene,” I said, “I need to get the kids over to processing. Can you do the post-flight with Dolph?”
She stood up, her eyes darkening. I felt sorry to have to ask it of her. Instead of going home to her family, she’d be spending the rest of the day rolling the ship into the hangar, depressurizing the LOX tanks, sleeping the AM ring, dumping the sewage, and so on and on. With Dolph, what’s more. They were not each other’s favorite people, although they were grown-ups and worked professionally together.
But all she said was, “Fine, I’ll do it, but I want tomorrow off.”
“You got it,” I said.
“I want tomorrow off, too,” Martin hollered.
“And I want to win the lottery,” I yelled back at him. I circled an arm in a go-ahead gesture. The crane arm snaked into the hold and emerged, gripping the body-bag that held what was left of Kimmie’s mortal shell.
In silence, we watched it descend to the tarmac. No drums and fifes. No folded flag. Kimmie had not died for humanity. She’d died because she had stepped in front of me. Standing there with the sun hammering on my head, and one hand awkwardly placed on my heart, I silently swore to God that I would stick to the straight and narrow from now on. I would not risk something like this happening ever again.
Martin stowed the crane and came down the ladder. Standing over Kimmie’s body, we double-checked the paperwork I had transferred to Martin’s phone. The rental van I had rung for arrived—utilitarian, with a freezer compartment. We loaded Kimmie in. Martin led the truck away on his motorbike.
A wave of tiredness washed over me. I fetched my truck out of the hangar and told the kids to get in the back.
*
It was a long drive to the passenger terminal, along the intraport roads marked out between the pads, between big ships and little, old ships and new, the 200-meter steel dunce-hats of Ek ships and the infinitely quirky variety of human-designed spacecraft. With my adrenaline at a low ebb, I put my feet up on the dash and dozed, letting the truck drive itself. I woke up with a start when the truck stopped in front of the immigration building.
We queued for two and a half hours in the Others channel, amidst a stunning cross-section of sapient life, ranging from sleek huspathids to insect-like aiora, from various worlds that did not issue ID compatible with human computer systems. The kids stared and stared and stared. Leaf’s eyes got as big as wishing wells. Pippa smacked the tail of Leaf’s t-shirt out of her mouth once, but then she pulled the younger girl close and cuddled her. Jan gave the aliens his jaundiced refugee-camp glare for a while, but then he too edged up to Pippa and leaned against her.
They were entwined like that when we finally reached the front of the line.
“Hi,” I said to the hatchet-faced gent behind the window. “These three minors are from Gvm Uye Sa
chttra. It’s my understanding that they can apply for asylum as refugees. If they need a sponsor, I’ll do it.”
I felt really awful about abandoning them at this point. They were so far out of their element, and so plainly terrified. They may have dreamed of coming to Ponce de Leon, but they had had no idea what it would be like. I pinged their asylum application forms to the clerk.
“All right,” he said.
I leaned on the counter, forcing him to actually look at me through his blast-proof, disease-proof glass wall. “I also would like to inquire about the possibility of Pippa—the oldest girl here—applying for immigrant status, based on her skills—”
Pippa interrupted me by tugging on my elbow. “Mike—” I’d finally gotten them to stop calling me mister— “we wanted to give you something.” She poked Jan.
The quiet, dark-haired boy took a doll out from under his shirt. It was 20 centimeters high, hand-sewn from what I recognized as the fabric of Pippa’s charity sweatshirt—and only now did I notice she wasn’t wearing it. With a head as big as its body, and cunning little flippers for hands and feet, it looked oddly familiar.
Pippa said, “It’s Blobby from Gemworld Families. At least it’s meant to be.” She stuck out her lower lip. “You were saying how you didn’t have time to buy a present for your little girl, so we thought maybe you could give her this? We made it.”
I took the doll, but did not speak for a moment. I was deeply touched. I said, for want of something better to say, “You know Gemworld Families?”
Jan said, “We lived in a refugee camp, not under a freaking rock.” He shrugged, distancing himself from girly things such as sparkling aliens.
I smiled. Maybe they’d be OK.
Pippa smiled too, tremulously. She was still clutching her case of knives, the only “luggage” the kids had brought with them. I guessed those would be taken away from her in due course.
“Gotta ask you to step aside, sir,” the immigration clerk said. “Kids that way.”
I said, “Is that all? I mean, that’s it?”
“That’s it,” he confirmed. “Have a nice day.”
So I stepped aside, holding the handmade doll, and watched the kids trail away on the other side of the barrier. Pippa turned and looked back at me with a flash of desperation in her eyes. Then they vanished through a door marked Processing.
I shook myself and pushed back the way I’d come. I strode between humanoid and non-humanoid intelligent life-forms, and their equally various and weirdly scented luggage, while holo ads flashed and pulsated in every unoccupied bit of floorspace, but the sensory onslaught that had so shocked the kids was just wallpaper to me. This was my world … where bureaucrats treated little kids like numbers on a screen, and a dead girl went to her rest in a rented freezer van. Maybe civilization wasn’t so great, after all.
Or maybe I just needed a drink.
15
By the time we finished putting the ship to bed, Dolph, Irene, Martin, and I all needed a drink, despite—or because of—how tired we were. We claimed a corner booth in one of the bars lining the road on the boundary of the spaceport’s commercial cargo zone. These places cater to freighter crews, which is probably why they serve alcohol. It was a far cry from Snakey’s, our regular haunt in the city, but the bourbon was just about drinkable. I ordered a double on the rocks. Irene had a single. Dolph had a beer. Martin had something fizzy with edible flowers floating on it.
Country music thumped from the sound system. Drunk aliens knocked into the tables. Humans staggered around clutching the backs of booths for support, weak from long journeys in freefall. Cigarette smoke hazed the air. No one noticed the four Shifters in the corner. It’s good to be able to pass for normies. The bourbon loosened the knot of tension in my stomach. After a while I felt sufficiently revived to take my holobook out of my kitbag and place it on the table, wiping off chip crumbs and cigarette ash with my sleeve.
“Remember the footage that mysteriously vanished off the ship’s computer?” I said. “MF recovered it for me.”
Dolph made an uninterested “huh” noise. He was chain-smoking, a sign that he was still mad at me for the thing with d’Alencon.
But Irene sat bolt upright. “Really? I know I’m right. Let’s have a look at it.”
I turned the holobook away from the bar and played the footage in 2D on the screen, so that no one apart from ourselves would be able to see it. It was a tough watch. The St. Clare’s aft port camera had captured everything in high-definition detail, albeit without sound. Again, Rafael Ijiuto drove away. “Like he saw a ghost,” Martin commented. On the screen, I shrugged. Dolph Shifted back, and then I Shifted back. It was always unpleasant to see a Shift on video—it looked like a patch of the screen was malfunctioning. Back in human form, I grabbed Kimmie’s arm while the little kids climbed the ladder. We argued. Pippa looked on nervously. Kimmie’s head exploded. Boom.
I was dismayed by the ugly expression on my own face while I was talking to Kimmie. I really hadn’t wanted to take the kids, had I? I’d grudgingly been doing Kimmie a favor; that was all. It was awful to know that that was the last thing she had seen.
Irene narrowed her eyes. “Rewind,” she said.
“The whole thing?”
“No, just the last bit. And slow it down.”
Irene was sitting next to me. Dolph and Martin were on the other side of the table. As I played the footage again, at an excruciatingly slow speed, Dolph suddenly tensed and leaned towards the screen like an animal spotting prey.
All right, all right, Kimmie. Whatever you want.
You’re the best—
BOOM.
“Oh no,” Dolph groaned. “No freaking way.”
“There,” Irene said, as blood sprayed over my face. “There!”
“What?” Martin said.
“One more time,” Irene said. Before she could reach for the holobook again, Dolph dragged it away. He rewound the footage to the exact moment of the shooting. Kimmie’s blood splattered as slowly as water falling in micro-gravity.
As Dolph froze it on a single frame, doubt hardened into grim certainty. I slouched lower on the hard bench and sank my face into my hands. “Go on and kill me,” I said.
“It wasn’t just you,” Irene said. “It was all of us.”
“I’m just a humble engineer, and I have no idea what y’all are talking about,” Martin said. “Enlighten me.”
I reached out and tapped the screen. “The secondary debris puff,” I said.
“Look at the hull, behind her,” Irene said. “It backstopped the bullet.”
“The secondary puff gives us another point for where the bullet was,” Dolph said. “First point being her head. Two points gives you a trajectory.”
“Yup,” I said. “And that trajectory doesn’t point to the Travellers’ ship. Not even close. The round was most likely fired from the thickets on the landward side of our pad.”
“Rounds,” Irene said. “There were two shots.”
“Smart ammo doesn’t need to travel in a straight line,” Martin pointed out.
“Except if they had smart ammo,” I ground out, “they wouldn’t have fucking missed, would they?”
There was a short silence.
“I knew it,” Irene said. “I knew it.”
“You were right,” I said. “I was wrong.”
“It doesn’t actually make any difference,” Dolph said.
“Oh yes, it does,” I said. The country music was plenty loud. Plucked strings, analog percussion, a hoarse human voice soaked in the anguish of Ponce de Leon’s early colonial period. I figured it was safe to speak, but I lowered my voice to a near whisper, anyway. “We had already killed a lot of them at that point. But If I had known they didn’t shoot Kimmie, I think I would’ve held off on destroying their other ship in orbit. We didn’t need to fire the damn railgun at them.” The explosion played out again in my mind’s eye. Pretty. “And if we hadn’t done that, Zane’s lot wouldn’t have c
ome after us for revenge.”
But was that really why they’d come after us? Stand by to be boarded … Again, I felt a nervous twinge, knowing it didn’t hang together. Even Jose-Maria d’Alencon had seen that.
“Then the Fleet wouldn’t have got involved,” I said, “and neither would the police. So. Yeah.”
“Ultimately, whether it was them or not, it’s the same damn crooks pulling the trigger,” Dolph said, doing a 180 degree about-face to defend me. I appreciated that he had my back, but it didn’t really help.
Martin picked one of the edible flowers out of his drink and placed it on his tongue, which was very long and red, even in human form. “I’m still not seeing it,” he said.
“How not?” I said grumpily.
He tapped the screen. “Look at that pink mist. It has to have been a .50 cal. Nothing else does that kind of damage.”
Dolph and Irene got into the weeds with him on calibers, distances, and bullet speeds. I did not join in the argument. It was beside the point. I drained my bourbon and stacked an ashtray on the empty glass. Another glass on top of that. A coaster. The menu gizmo to order more drinks. I topped the tower with the last of Martin’s edible flowers, and stared at it blearily. This is your life, Starrunner. A shaky tower waiting to fall.
“It could have been a large-caliber rifle at close range,” Irene was saying.
I sat up so suddenly that my tower toppled. A glass rolled off the table, and a yuriops trod on it. “Say that again.”
“It could have been a large-caliber rifle …”
“Like a dino gun.” All at once, it clicked. “Rafael Ijiuto.”
Three blank faces confronted me.
“He had a dino gun in his pickup.”
I reached for the holobook, clicked on the St. Clare’s footage, and frantically rewound to the moment when Ijiuto jumped into his pickup and drove off.
“Look,” I said to Irene, “you can actually see it sticking up behind the seats.”
Lethal Cargo Page 8
