Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9)

by James David Victor

  Trader Hogan was only a small man, barely over five feet, and clad in the goldish-red robes of the Traders’ Belt. He had the sort of head that made the thin and rakish-looking Eliard think of rats—but this would have to have been a bald one, save for the black nodules of implants across the trader’s cranium. Hogan was surrounded by four very large mercenaries, who all dwarfed the captain in his green duster and form-fitting encounter suit. They had the sort of shoulders that could play pro-SpinBall even before the heavy layers of exo-suit armor were added on top. They weren’t carrying guns, but instead, steel grey stunclubs that would certainly put a dent in Eliard’s already terrible day.

  Frack. The captain took a deep breath.

  Eliard—or ‘El’ to those that knew him—knew that he was making a bad choice. But when he thought about his career, the man thought that he had never made anything but bad choices. He pulled his duster coat closer around his shoulders, making sure that at least the gold pips on the high collar were visible.

  “I can’t pay, Hogan. You know my last run was unsuccessful,” Eliard said, managing a tight-lipped smile. Eliard wondered if he could make it back to the door behind him before Hogan’s goons got to him. He wondered if he could make it off the Trader Base of Charylla before Hogan had the ports shut down. Hogan was a big cheese in the Traders’ Belt. A senior member of the council, if only because he had blackmailed, bribed, or threatened every other councilor. The station of Charylla was his.

  The little man did not return the smile. “You want to repeat what you just said to me, El?”

  Double-frack. “Didn’t you hear? There are Armcore customs ships up and down the Delta Sector, I couldn’t get through. No one can.”

  Trader Hogan pursed his lips. A bad sign, Eliard thought. “So, you are telling me that the fearless Captain Eliard, on one of the fastest ships in this sector, couldn’t make it past some lazy Armcore officials, sipping their coffee and eating daze-cakes all shift?”

  No, what I am telling you is that I still have your loot stashed in one of my aft lockers, and I’m going to sell it myself! Eliard tried not to betray a flicker of emotion. He was through working all these terrible jobs for Hogan and getting paid next to nothing for it. Not even a cut off the top of the deal—and Hogan always gave him the furthest, most dangerous jobs.

  Maybe because he knows that the Mercury can do it, a sarcastic thought crept into Eliard’s head. Of course the Mercury could do it, just not for creeps like Hogan and his goons anymore.

  It was time that we started making some real money, Eliard had thought. Time that we strike out on our own…

  “Hm.” The little man reached up to very slowly and very carefully scratch at one of the nodes on his head. Rumor has it that he had quantum receivers in there, wired straight to the Coalition data-space, so that Hogan could read, in real-time, just what the galactic stock markets were doing, which was also why he was so fabulously wealthy.

  “Then the next thing that I have to ask is…where is the cargo that I entrusted to you?” Hogan glared at Eliard and there was a shift in the four guards around him, from ‘look threatening’ to ‘let’s paint the walls with this guy’s face.’ Hogan was like that, Eliard knew. He was famed throughout the Traders’ Belt of non-aligned asteroids and habitats for his means of ‘settling up’ with those who lied to, stole from, or cheated him. Usually, that meant a long walk out of a very short airlock—without your suit. Or else it could mean that you and your crew found yourselves in the fertilizer vats and pumped back into the synthetic food or sprayed across terraform projects as a fine particulate mist.

  Eliard felt the heavy iron of the bulkhead lock behind him. He stood in one of the many octagonal corridors that wormed its way through Charylla. On the other side of that bulkhead, it was a short sprint to the Charylla Markets—a chaos of neon and noise. Surely, he could lose them in there, right?

  “If you’re thinking about opening that door, I wouldn’t advise it,” Hogan said in clipped tones, as the nearest of the thugs—surprisingly quickly, Eliard thought—reached forward to prod him, hard, in the shoulder with the stunclub. Luckily it wasn’t turned on, but it still hurt.

  “Get off me!” Eliard batted it away, which only caused the guard to grin even wider, and raise the stunclub as if he were baiting a wild animal.

  “Where is my cargo, Captain?” Hogan repeated.

  “Armcore customs were on to me. I had to jettison it out by the Betel 9 transponder. Heaven knows who’s got it now.” Eliard had had his story ready of course. The Betel 9 transponder was just one of the many routine deep-space signaling devices that ships could use to navigate by, and that meant that a lot of traffic passed by. A bit of space flotsam out there could easily be picked up by a passing vessel or burned up in the passing warp signatures.

  “Had to jettison it,” Hogan repeated in a tone that could slice steel. This time, the other guards rolled their shoulders.

  “Well, normally in this kind of situation, Eliard, I would have you and your crew cleaning my boat without spacesuits, but then I would be down ten thousand credits.”

  That cargo was worth ten thousand? The captain of the Mercury Blade was shocked. It had been a small cargo box. Barely big enough to hold a pair of gloves. Oh, frack.

  “I can make it up next run,” Eliard said through gritted teeth, whilst on the inside, he was berating himself for trying to cheat the most powerful crook in the Belt. What had Hogan put in there, diamonds?

  “If I let you live, you mean,” Hogan said sourly. “I don’t think you could earn that much in a year, Eliard. How much is the Mercury Blade worth again?” Hogan gave him a quizzical look.

  Much more than that! “She’s not a part of this deal,” Eliard said quickly.

  “The deal? Deal?” The trader betrayed a momentary flash of anger. “And who are you to tell me what is and isn’t in the deal? This isn’t even a deal, you dimwit. This is recompense.” The thugs flexed their muscles and took a step forward.

  “Wait.” The trader held up a hand. “I can see the advantage of having you owe me, Captain Eliard. Here, then, is the ‘deal,’ as you so eloquently put it: you get me my ten thousand, or I take your boat.”

  Where am I going to come up with that kind of money? You just want the Mercury as your personal slave-galley. Eliard looked at the guards. Could he take them? He would rather give it a go than have to tell his crew they were going to lose their money and their ship and their home. That was the kind of thing that made a crew very angry indeed, and then made them think about words like ‘mutiny’ and ‘lynching.’

  I am so fracked. “I’ll get you your money, and then we’re clear.”

  “Really?” Hogan said.

  “Really. I promise. Ten thousand credits,” Eliard heard himself say.

  “I changed my mind.” Hogan smiled. “Twenty thousand, due in one Sol week.”

  One week! Eliard could have spat. That was an awful lot of money in a very short time, but he was being allowed to live, and to fly. He wondered if he could convince the rest of the crew to leave near Coalition space and never return to the Traders’ Belt.

  Unlikely.

  “You got a problem with that, El?” Hogan’s eyes were scouring his like a spider, waiting for a fly to land. “Because you know, I can just have my boys push you out of the nearest airlock and take your boat instead, if you’d prefer?”

  “No, a week sounds just about fine, Trader,” Eliard was forced to say.

  Now all I have to do is to find some well-paying work, very fast.

  “You owe how much?” Irie, the Mercury’s mechanic, looked at Eliard from between her long braids of dark hair. They stood at the side of one of Charylla’s many bars, where he had managed to track down the leather-clad engineer as she had been routinely acing everyone at darts.

  Irie Hanson was a marvel of the engineering world, or so Eliard thought, anyway. If only she didn’t know it at the same time, too, he had thought on many occasions. She was a little sho
rter than he was, with skin like burnt umber and a home-made set of goggles permanently slid halfway up her forehead. From her utility belts she could produce, almost at any given moment, an array of tools and spare parts from spanners to circuit boards. She was the reason that the Mercury was still flying after all of the misuse that Eliard put it through.

  “Twenty thousand credits. For Trader Hogan’s cargo,” Eliard said.

  “Wasn’t that the box that we were supposed to drop off at Kavon 3?” Irie squinted at him over the top of her bright green drink. They had been in space for a long time this run, and even the usually humanity-hating engineer had decided to venture into society for a change of faces.

  “Yeah, uh, about that…” Eliard shrugged, before a nervous grin spread slowly across his features. “It’s still sitting in one of the aft lockers.”

  “What!?” The woman coughed her drink over the bar. “We now owe twenty thousand because you decided to double-cross…” She looked around quickly and turned her angry shout into a fierce hiss. “You decided to double-cross the most feared smuggler on this side of Andromeda!? Eliard! What in the blue were you thinking?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…That we could make some money, maybe?” he said. “Which we can, now. We can sell the cargo ourselves somewhere, make a profit maybe, do a few other little jobs while we’re at it, and return to pay off Hogan…”

  “Why don’t you just give it back?” she hissed at him. “No harm, no foul, right?”

  The captain winced. “I don’t think Hogan sees it quite like that. I told him I jettisoned it past the Betel 9.” The captain licked his lips nervously. “And uh, the original cargo is only worth ten K. Hogan added another ten because he’s a fan of my sparkling personality.”

  “Urgh.” Irie slammed her drink down on the counter and signaled for two more.

  “Thanks, I could do with a stiff drink after today…” Eliard started to say when they arrived.

  “Uh-huh, fly-boy. They’re not for you.” The woman downed one immediately, then picked up the other to sip more slowly. “I will not be buying you a drink for a looong time, Captain.” She scowled at him. “You know that we can’t sell whatever it is on Charylla, right? Hogan will only find out about it…”

  “We’ll get the money, I promise,” Eliard said, before wondering just how many promises he had made already today. It had been a water-tight plan. It shouldn’t have backfired like this.

  “You’d better get the money, you mean.” Irie finished her drink with another disgruntled shake of her head and reached for her patched leather jacket.

  “Hey. Where are you going?” the captain said. Is she walking out on me? On the Mercury? I need my engineer!

  “I’ve got a guy searching for parts in Level 9,” Irie flung over her shoulder. “I want to get those parts and get them stashed away before you do anything else stupid, and maybe get my home taken away from me!”

  Eliard watched her storm off into the crowd and groaned. Well, at least it hadn’t been our gunner that I ran into first.

  “Do you want to die!?” roared the very large, blue-skinned Duergar, with a broad, wedge-shaped head and tusks emerging from his lower jaw. He was the Mercury Blade’s gunner.

  Val Pathok was large even by Duergar standards. His shoulders were broad and thickly corded with visible muscle—Duergars, thanks to their greater body mass and double-layer of thickened skin, rarely wore much more than part-armor and trousers—and his long arms would reach down almost all the way to his knees, were they not currently grabbing the lapels of Captain Eliard’s green duster and shaking him violently.

  “Did you not hear me, human!” the Duergar roared again. El could clearly see the row of large, grinding fangs in the big mouth. “You gamble with all of our lives! You clearly want to die!”

  “Uh… I think the whole bar heard you?” Eliard managed.

  “Fool. Typical human.” The Duergar released him with a shove, causing Eliard to crash into the nearest table, much to the annoyance of the patrons there. When Eliard had finished apologizing and wiping spilled drinks from himself, he had to run after the Duergar making his way through the bar and out into the Charylla Markets beyond.

  “Hey, Val, wait up!”

  The markets were a dazzle of light and noise. Instantly, the captain was surrounded by the bustle of traders and smugglers, and even worse types, pushing and shoving as they fought their way to their preferred shop. There were neon-lit stalls selling every manner of street food imaginable, as well as booths that specialized in rare nuts and bolts and wire-mesh storefronts who specialized in guns and ammunition.

  There was a flash of light as a drone passed by overheard, blaring its advertising messages for some particular trader or another. Higher balconies of the market displayed more shops, and more consumers laughing, shouting, or haggling.

  “Val!” Eliard shouted again, struggling through the crowd to him. “I can explain!”

  The Duergar were not known for their forgiving nature, it had to be said. As one of the many up-lifted races, they had entered the arena of universal politics much earlier than the self-made humans had—only to find that they were the lowest of the heap, and expected to work as slaves for the ‘higher’ ancient life forms once known as the Valyien. Some claimed that this made them (rightly) distrustful of everyone.

  “You can explain, can you?” Val Pathok, one of the largest blue-skinned Duergar you might ever see, stopped and turned in the river of bustling traffic, which parted around him like a rock. He never had to worry about being offered space in a transport. The smaller humans just naturally moved away from him at the nearest opportunity.

  “Yes!” Eliard caught up with him, enjoying the momentary eddy in the street that the large blue-skin made for a moment. “You see, it was a water-tight plan…”

  “I do see, El,” Val thundered. “I see only too well. You were stupid, and greedy—just like always—and you thought that you could gamble the lives of your crew for profit. So, you must have a death wish.”

  “I was doing it for us, Val! For the Mercury!” the captain pleaded with his gunner. Which was basically true, he thought. It was supposed to be their chance to start afresh. To stop being the heel on everyone else’s boot and start wearing the shoes for once!

  “Don’t be mad, Val. We need a good gunner like you,” Eliard said. “The best damn gunner in the galaxy.”

  “Flattery will not help you, Captain,” the blue-skinned monolith stated heavily, furrowing his heavy brows. For a dizzying moment, Eliard thought that the Duergar was going to hit him—it would be like getting hit by a building, he was sure, but then the heavy brows slowly unknit, and the gunner just sighed. “But you are my captain, and I took an oath.”

  Oh, thank the stars that the Duergar have that weird hang-up about honor, Eliard thought.

  “And besides which, where will Mister Nosbert live?” the giant creature grumbled.

  “Your cat?” Eliard thought of the white fluffy thing that seemed to do nothing but hiss and spit at him. You would rather risk your neck for your cat than me? he thought in alarm, before he said, “Of course, your cat. Precisely. Where is that beautiful animal going to live if you leave the Mercury? You know that Charylla is no place for a cat!”

  “Hmm,” Val agreed, fixing his austere glare on the tides of people around him. “Yes, you are right. This is no place for Mister Nosbert.”

  “Excuse me, gentleman? But it seems to me that you may be in a spot of bother?” It was just at that very moment that a third person joined their negotiation—a woman, with rich and luxuriant silks wrapped around her form, but around whose head stretched the many radials of a data-halo, and on her arms were the many nodules and nodes of not-so-discrete implants, some glowing faintly.

  Oh great, a Data Smith. Eliard rolled his eyes. In official Coalition space, they were a well-respected and commonplace member of society—able to mine the floating data sphere for information at request, and to offer their research, tr
anslation, and advice for a small fee.

  Out here in the Traders’ Belt, however, the Data Smiths took on a different role. As information smugglers, they could be asked for leads on profitable sales or the movements of Armcore patrols. People used them as a way of finding out about their rivals, or as means to impress their lovers, but as the quantum network out there was erratic to say the least, their information was often unreliable and sometimes several Sol months, if not years, out of date.

  “We don’t need your help, ma’am,” Eliard said.

  “You do, Captain El,” the woman said smoothly, inclining her gold and steel halo at him. “You’re not such a nobody as you think, Captain. Half of Charylla has already heard that you messed up with Trader Hogan.” The woman fluttered her hand over the forearm nodes of her other hand. Her eyes started to look far away, but she kept talking. “And desperate men need desperate opportunities, Captain El. Cross my palm with a hundred credits and I may have some data that you need to hear right now.”

  “Or you could be about to tell me what the weather was like on Jupiter last Tuesday.” Eliard rolled his eyes at Val beside him. “C’mon, big guy. We don’t need to listen to mumbling soothsayers…”

  “No. I want to hear.” Val’s clawed hand moved to his belt, where he produced a roll of gold-shining coins. “One hundred, madam.”

  “Thank you,” the Data Smith said graciously, her hands interrogating her controls and her eyes starting to glow an eerie blue. “You are in desperate times, with many men after you…” she began in her sing-song voice.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, right?” Eliard muttered.

  “…but there is great profit ahead of you, just around the corner,” she said dreamily. “A little piece of data came to my attention just recently, gentlemen. Of an archaeological survey very recently completed in the Tritho System, Epsilon Sector. On the moon of Tritho Prime, there has been discovered ruins. Vast ruins of an unknown origin, although all the evidence points to it being some sort of outpost of the Valyien, before their fall.”