An Easy Job

by Carrie Vaughn

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  “This is an easy job,” Captain Ransom insists.

  I raise a brow. “Easy? Or simple.” I like to think that nothing is ever easy. Things can be simple, but not easy. Anything worth doing takes effort. Focus. Thought. Not easy.

  “Don’t start with me. It’s a simple job. Simple.”

  Yeah, because if it were easy, it wouldn’t be us needing to do it.

  Ransom is a hand width shorter than I am, but he seems taller, in his crisp blue jumpsuit that looks like a uniform despite having no insignia on it, just because of how well he wears it. His dark hair would be curly if he let it grow out. I’m the muscle, big and a little bit sloppy, next to him. We stand face to face outside Visigoth’s docking berth on Tre Ateyna, a commercial station well within Trade Guild territory. A safe harbor, almost home base, except we don’t really have a home base. From here, I can get anonymous transport to Balliard, another commercial station. Balliard is not within Trade Guild territory, and it will not be safe.

  “Just locate the shipping agent. Identify. Bring back the intel. No heroics.”

  “Who, me?” Ransom glares, and I smirk. You’d think after this long he’d know when I’m joking. “Yes, I know. ID the agent, rendezvous for pickup. Leave the network in place.” The agent is probably some bureaucrat, an accountant or inspector, generally harmless except for who they’re working with. I can spot them without letting on that I’m even looking. With the network still in place, we can follow the line back to the big fish and bring the whole smuggling ring down at once. This needs on-site recon; the data shows someone is rerouting the cargo. But the electronic blips don’t tell us who that is.

  “Good hunting, Graff.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder, which has become something of a ritual. Every time I leave the Visigoth, whether piloting my runner or working some station or ground-side mission like this, he takes hold of my shoulder and pushes me off. Like connecting some invisible, spiritual tether before sending me into the void. I remember every single time he’s done that, the pressure of it, his fingers across my scapula. The flush of emotion that goes with it. I can do this because Ransom knows I can.

  One of these times, he’ll do this and it will be the last time. I will either remember that one, too, or I will be dead.

  I sling my bag over my shoulder and walk away to take the lift to the next level, and lose myself in the crowd of commercial passengers preparing to scatter across this arm of the galaxy.

  * * *

  I’m lying to Captain Ransom all the time.

  Well, not lying, exactly. Just not telling him everything about me. He doesn’t need to know everything, it’s not relevant … Though I know he’d want to know. He thinks he knows almost everything about me. We’ve certainly known each other a long time, since our Academy days. So I may not be lying but I’m also not entirely telling the truth, and there ought to be a word for that in the middle somewhere. I’m eliding. Engaging in a specific caesura.

  I’m censoring.

  It doesn’t matter. He’ll never find out, and it’s not my secret to tell. My people have a philosophy; we’re a collective that values individual experience. Cultures are made up of experiences and accomplishments, so my people send out … experiencers. We go out and live lives and record everything. Not just the what and where. We have the endocrine systems to make it all mean something. What it feels like. That’s the important bit.

  We record. We pass on our recordings to each other when we meet, like relay runners. We don’t meet others very often—there aren’t that many of us—which makes the sharing all the more important. And if you cut us open, as much circuitry as blood will spill out, enough to cross a line into something other than human. Ransom wouldn’t understand. Most people wouldn’t. So we don’t tell what we are. We just want to be.

  Maybe that’s why I’m so determined not to disappoint Ransom, why I am so grateful for his friendship, for that hand on my shoulder pushing me off. Because I’m lying to him all the time.

  * * *

  I exit the IS Daisychain’s docking ramp along with the rest of the passengers, a mix of mechanics and fixers and merchants and colonists and everyone else who has a reason to be on Balliard, most of them just trying to get from point A to point B. And not a Trade Guild uniform in sight, which shows just how far out of the main routes this place is. I’m in nondescript gray coveralls with no badges or insignia, lots of pockets, a belt with the usual assortment of tethers and tools a freelance mechanic looking for work might carry. A few other gadgets only someone from a pirate hunter like the Visigoth would have. A bag over my shoulder. Hair a little scruffier than I usually like it. Blending right in, which means heading to a public terminal near a lift and looking for job listings, or pretending to. I don a studied boredom. Can’t look like I’m on the hunt for anything but work. I’m always lying.

  Balliard is a medium-sized station, big enough to get lost in, or to make sure a cargo-hold of smuggled goods gets lost. Small enough for one person to case, especially if the person is me, with my processor, artificial memory, wiring, and all the things Ransom doesn’t know about me. The station is a rotating drum, with docking berths and commercial interests at one end, living areas, food production and supporting industries at the other end. The docking berths are aggressively industrial, with cranes and tractors and pallets full of crates and canisters. The smell of fuel and lubricant. Noise. It all feels like being busy.

  At the terminal, I pretend to access data by the usual touchpad interface—which I don’t actually need. I’ve got the ability to access the station’s entire data system via my own processor, and I make that connection. I could shut down all of Balliard like this if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. Instead, I just study what ships are in, what ships are due in, and what cargo is flowing—none of the pirate ships we’ve been tracking, which I expected. I move on. The next level down will be hostels, shops, and offices. It will be quieter, and my target will likely be somewhere in that realm. That’s where I’ll start.

  First, the smell of roasting vegetables hits me, and I decide to look for something to eat, sit in the little food court tucked away, tables and chairs bolted to the floor and some tinny music piped in, in contrast to the noise I’d left uplevel. I can watch people come and go, listen to my instincts, whether this is a normal unregulated station or if I can feel the weirdness.

  Before I can decide on food, it hits, a charge in my nerves that has nothing to do with the mission or whether the station feels off. Proximity alert, another system like mine close enough to touch. Way out here, the buzz of home.

  I’m not expecting that. Scanning the crowd
, I immediately find him, the one like me, because he’s looking right back at me across the wide space of the market. Male-appearing, younger than me. Long impractical hair pulled back; shirt, jacket, and trousers looking nice and polished. Station issue; he works for Balliard in some capacity. I don’t have anyone else’s memory of him tucked away, so I don’t know who he is, which makes this all the more thrilling.

  Smiling, he approaches. He probably isn’t expecting to meet one of us way out here any more than I am.

  “Nice to see someone from home,” I say and offer my hand. I’m itching to touch to him, to trade data. It’s a compulsion. We’re steps on each other’s relay, to get our memories home.

  “Hey, how are you?” From the outside we look like two old friends greeting each other after a long separation.

  He takes my hand, there’s a sting as our circuits connect, and we see each other, all of us, our names, our histories, our memories … He is Perce and he’s been away from home for three years, working his way out to the frontier doing clerical jobs and—

  He’s the shipping agent who’s been moving smuggled goods through the station. My target.

  I squeeze his hand a little harder, like I’m going to yank him around and twist his arm. But I don’t, because he knows I’m with the Visigoth and I’m hunting him. He looks like he wants to run but he doesn’t. And I can’t let him because he’s now got all the Visigoth’s operational procedures in his memory. And I’ve got the smugglers’ entire outfit on Balliard pegged down, just like that.

  Easy.

  “Well, shit,” I say flatly.

  The meeting is no longer happy. An outside observer will wonder if one of us killed the other’s pet.

  “What do we do?” Perce hisses, because he hasn’t been out in the world for all that long, and he’s got no guideline for what to do in a situation like this. I’m not sure a situation like this has ever happened before.

  He doesn’t seem to believe he’s working for pirates. He’s seen everything I know and still doesn’t seem to understand why I’m hunting him. This isn’t even simple anymore.

  Grabbing the back of his neck, I pull him to me and plant my lips on his. Take a moment to enjoy the pure physical sensation, the warmth and weight of him pressing up to me. I do like kissing. He knows this.

  He tries to wrench away. “What’re you—”

  I whisper across his cheek, “We’re just a couple of guys who hit it off by the docks, and now you’re going to hold my hand and take me back to whatever closet passes as your quarters, where we’re going to have a very uncomfortable conversation.”

  He grabs my hand and goes. This gives me some time to think. Not a half an hour in and I already blew the mission. Ransom is going to love this. It’s not my fault, but I’ll never be able to explain that.

  One step at a time. I reach into a belt pouch and switch on one of my gadgets from the Visigoth, a jammer, so nothing around me can transmit comms. Both our internal comms go dark. He looks sharply at me—he can’t access the station system anymore. Neither can I, but first thing’s first.

  His quarters are one level down in an innocuous section of the station, clean but not fancy. This requires us taking the lift down and acting like everything is just fine, thanks. I keep my hand on his neck and can’t afford to worry about how it looks. But nobody stops us.

  In front of the door to his place, he reaches for the keypad, but I shoulder him out of the way and type in the door code myself because I know it and I can’t let him get near anything with a keypad and access to comms. He’ll warn his smuggling friends if he can.

  The door opens, I pull him in. Close the door, lock it, change the code. The place is one room, a typical low-rent station setup with a bunk on one end, a padded bench and table next to a kitchenette, a closet for a bathroom.

  When I turn back around, he has raised a food tray over my head. Okay, so that’s how this is going to go. He swings, intending to bat me upside the head, knock me over, and then who knows what. He’s not a fighter—he really is an accountant, just like I predicted. He’s never been in a fight in his life.

  He swings, I duck, sweep his legs at the same time I grab the tray from him. He cries out; I put my hand on his chest and shove him to the bench, where he shrinks back and stares at me with a kind of shaky resolve. He’s thinking, too. I have to figure this out before he does.

  I know what he knew the moment we clasped hands. I don’t know what he’s thinking now. He’s got weapons—illegal weapons, even outside the Guild—stashed in a couple of different cupboards. I find them, remove and pocket the power cells.

  “Why didn’t you grab one of these?” I toss the guns on the table.

  “They’re for emergencies.”

  I give him a look. Oh really? “Then you do realize that the people you’re working for are dangerous.”

  “They’re not pirates, there’s been some misunderstanding—”

  He charges me. There’s no finesse to it—he’s going straight for the pocket with the jammer in it. He knows where it is like I know where his guns are. I duck away, but he hooks his hand in my belt and pulls. When I fall, I make sure to take him with me. My head hits the floor, and I wince, but the breath goes out of him. I keep going and roll to my feet.

  I gasp, “We need to talk—”

  “You have to let me go; you don’t understand what’s really happening here—”

  Except I do and he knows it. “Oh yeah? Then sit down and explain it to me.”

  “You already know what I’m going to say.” He scrambles for the door, clumsily. I grab the back of his collar, haul him back. He kicks out at my legs. In dodging I have to drop him. There’s not enough room in here for me to lay him out cleanly. And I don’t want to.

  “Dammit, sit down and talk.”

  He’s already on the floor. Rolling himself up to sitting, he leans against the wall, panting. I loom, cornering him. I already know the answers to all the usual questions: What are you doing here, how did you get roped into working with homicidal maniacs? What I don’t know is how we’re going to get out of this with our previous situations intact. It isn’t going to be possible. One of us is going to have to give up everything.

  His glance moves around the space, looking for something else he can use as a weapon. A box he can hit me over the head with. A knife he can put to my throat. His complexion has gone ashy. These memories we’re generating right now are awful.

  Adrenaline is tapering, and that goes into the file too, along with the feeling of staving off exhaustion. I say, “You can kill me, or try to kill me, and you’ll have that memory forever. So will anyone who gets your download. You can never go home again. Except we can’t never go home again. And then you’ll have to explain.”

  “You can’t kill me for the same reason.”

  “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  My breath settles. Think, think…“My preferences: First, call someone from home and have them drag you off and explain what you’ve gotten wrong.”

  “What have I gotten wrong? You’re insane—”

  I hold up a hand and he goes silent. “Second choice, I get you drunk, seduce you, call the Visigoth to come and take you into custody and blow your outfit wide open.”

  He stares. “You can’t seduce me.”

  “Well yes, I know that. It’s a joke.”

  Obviously, he doesn’t think it’s very funny. I grin anyway.

  “Third,” he says. “We both go home for arbitration. Neither of us gets out of this.”

  “Not happening. No. Not an option.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m right.” And I won’t abandon Ransom.

  “I won’t cooperate. I’ll communicate with my people.”

  “Your people are murderers.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “You know it is. Look at the data.”

  His expression screws up, almost lik
e he’s in pain. He’s resisting. He’s got all my data in his circuits and he won’t look at it. “All I have is your point of view of it. Those supplies they’re bringing in, they’re going to war refugees on Cancri Delta—”

  “That’s what they told you. Look at the data.”

  “It’s not data it’s memories, your memories—”

  “Look.”

  His gaze turns inward, how we do when accessing our processors, a new memory for him. An old one for me. An angry one. He’ll know I don’t get angry often, but he’ll feel it, that rush of adrenaline, the clenching in my hands, that energy that has to go somewhere, and so I’m here trying to make things right. Trying not to punch something. Namely him.

  Captain Ransom of the Visigoth hunts pirates. I’m his right hand, the one he sends out to scout the territory, to serve as bait. To strike first and clean up after. He doesn’t know why I’m good at the job and he doesn’t need to. But I’m the one who led the team of marines onto the TGS Speranza, after we’d recaptured it. We suspected there were hostages. We were being careful. But the pirates had already fled, the ship was adrift, we couldn’t find anyone. Until we got to the bridge.

  The bodies were lined up, the ten crew members all in a row. Brain-destroying energy blasts to the backs of their heads. They’d surrendered, they hadn’t fought, they’d been willing to give up their cargo. They’d been executed anyway. Dead before we got close. The pirates had killed them because it was convenient. Easier. I had a lot of detail. Blood pooling on the deck, the rictus of fear on some of their faces. Two of them had been holding hands, clinging to each other hard enough to crack joints, as if it would help. They’d known what was coming. I couldn’t smell the scorched flesh because I’d had my helmet on and faceplate down. But I knew that smell, and now so did Perce.

  Then Perce experiences the memory when I played back the bridge security footage that showed exactly what happened. I know he recognizes the face of the one pulling the trigger. Perce’s contact here on Balliard.