by J. S. Morin
The guide handed him a slip of paper. “Read them these coordinates. Have them meet us there?”
“Ships aren’t allowed in the airspace over the preserve,” Esper said.
The guide shrugged. “Hey, air-traffic gives you a hard time, just apologize. Not like they want any trouble with a human ship. Human tourists are single-handedly funding the advance of their civilization. They won’t stop you unless they know you’re up to something.”
“If it’s so easy to get stuff off-world, why’d Keesha Bell make this sound like a big deal?” Carl asked.
The guide smiled. “Out’s not so bad. It’s getting it through ARGO space. You don’t want to get caught with this cargo.”
“Just what are we—” Esper’s question ended with a muffled, indistinct noise from behind Carl’s hand.
“We don’t wanna know. All I want is a location to deliver it to, and a partial payment up front.”
Carl took his hand from Esper’s mouth. She glared at him, but kept silent on the subject. He suspected he was in for a rash of shit—or at least some whining—when they got back on board Mobius.
Carl keyed his pocket comm and relayed the coordinates to Tanny. “How big are we talking?” she asked. “We need to get equipment ready to haul it in and stow it?”
Carl held out the comm to the tour guide, who chuckled. “Naw, it’s carry-on sized. No worries.”
They set down in a depression on the downwind side of a hill. Carl wanted to call it east, based on the sun, but he wasn’t sure which way Vi Tik Naa spun. The soil was soft when he stepped off the hover-cruiser, covered in sparse, dry grass that came up to his knees. A lone tree stood atop the hill, casting a long shadow across their ride.
Their guide dug with his hands, easily displacing the loose soil until he exposed a metal box. As the guide pulled it out and brushed most of the dirt away, Carl saw that it was covered in glyphs, and also sported a sophisticated digital lock. “Here’s your cargo.” It was no larger than a med kit and weighed maybe ten kilos by Carl’s guess.
“That’s it?” Esper asked.
“How about our money,” said Carl. “It’s a nice enough little box, but without a pile of hard-coin, it’s not leaving this rock.”
“Sure. Sure,” the guide assured him. He dug in the soil in the same spot but deeper and pulled out a small leather knapsack. It jingled. Carl foisted the box off on Esper and snatched their payment.
“Do I need to count it?” Carl asked.
The guide shrugged. “Your call, buddy. Fifty large, rest on delivery. But that’s not coming from me. Delivery instructions are in there, too.”
Fifty thousand was Money, with a capital M. It wasn’t Buy-Your-Own-Moon money, but it was certainly Stop-Worrying-About-Fuel-Costs-For-a-While money. Carl played down his excitement. He hefted the bag. “Feels about right. I know where you live.”
The Mobius arrived shortly thereafter, lowering the cargo bay door to let Esper and Carl aboard. Mriy and Roddy were waiting there, blaster pistols in hand, just in case.
“By the way,” Carl said to the tour guide from the cargo ramp. “I can tell you’re new at this. If I wasn’t such a nice guy, this would be the part where my crew dusts you and buries the body in the middle of nowhere in your safari preserve. Remote exchanges favor the guy with more guns. It’d be worth it just for the fifty, even if we left the cargo.”
“You’d piss away two hundred fifty and pass on the job?” the guide asked.
Carl clenched his jaw and told himself that two-hundred fifty was chump change to a rogue of his standing. Otherwise, he might have left his mouth agape. “Yeah, maybe. But I’m a nice guy, and you might have a future in this business if you smarten up.”
He turned and walked up the ramp. “Come on. We’ve got a delivery to make.”
# # #
If there was trouble with Vi Tik Naa’s traffic control, Tanny took care of it without telling anyone. Esper watched the planet recede through the glass canopy of the common room’s dome ceiling. When it faded from view she slumped onto the couch beside Roddy and Mort, who had just turned on the holovid and were flipping through the library of shows.
“What do you think is in it?” she asked. The box sat on the kitchen table, in easy view. Roddy had used the compressed air hose and scrubbed it with cleaning solvent, leaving the metal gleaming clean.
“Dunno,” Roddy replied absently, his eyes focused on the holovid listings. “For the price and the size, I’d bet on some new narcotic the in-Tik discovered. You can always count on primitives to find some creative, low-tech shit to blast their brains out with.”
“Could be,” Mort said. He glanced over and gave the box a glare. “Glyphs are professional. Quite good. Can’t tell a thing about what’s inside because of them. I admit my bias, but someone with that sort of prowess is likely smuggling arcana. The in-Tik aren’t very scientific, but their magical reputation isn’t shabby. Convocation never had much dealing with them, but they’re believed to be of human-like magical potential.”
“Keep rubbing that in, peach-fuzz,” Roddy griped. Laaku were notoriously inept wizards.
Mort made a rude noise. “The lady asks my opinion. I give a reasoned, logical reply. You accuse me of species bias. If I wanted to malign you, I’d have referred to your lack of stature or your foul hygienic habits. If I really wanted to hit below the belt, I’d have pointed out that there isn’t much to hit below a laaku’s belt … but all I mentioned was that in-Tik are about as magical as humans, give or take.”
“How’s this?” Roddy asked, gesturing to a highlighted entry in the Mobius’s holovid collection. He ignored Mort’s goading with an air of long practice. Esper wondered how long it would be before she felt the same level of comfort around them.
“Too long,” Mort said. “Tanny’s going to have us far enough out to sneak into the astral soon. How about one of those kidsy adventure shorts?”
Roddy rolled his eyes. Tossing the remote to a startled Esper, who juggled it before grabbing hold, he slipped down from the couch. “Knock yourselves out. I’ll go find some work to do.”
Esper hadn’t browsed the ship’s library extensively. She’d mostly stuck to Tanny’s favorites; despite their outward differences, they seemed to share a taste in multimedia entertainment. Flipping through categorical selections, she found a small file cluster of children’s animated shorts. Knowing nothing about them, she picked the first one that struck her fancy and loaded it. The screen came up in two dimensions.
“Sorry,” she said to Mort. “I must have done something wrong. Let me—”
“No, leave it,” Mort said. “These are Carl’s—first-run historical theater clips. Harmless slapstick humor. He found some that have been remade as proper holovids, but they lose something. Typical overtechnologizing … have a seat.” He patted the couch beside him.
The shorts were slapstick, but she didn’t see the humor. And they were anything but harmless. There were no voices—probably lost in old-timey archival storage—but the plots (if you could call them that) involved an anthropomorphic mouse tormenting an equally humanized cat who wanted to eat him. The mouse’s brutal and scientifically dubious tricks and traps were graphically inhumane. “These were shown to children?”
Mort lifted his hands. “What can I say? It was a brutal era. They had to toughen up those little buggers for wars and plagues and whatnot. Earth wasn’t safe like it is now.”
“Still …”
After sitting uncomfortably through three episodes, amid Mort’s giggles and snickers, Tanny’s voice came over the comm. “Drop us in, Mort. Nothing crazy like last time.”
Mort reached over, and with a self-satisfied air, hit the off button on the remote.
“Time to get to work,” he said.
“Mind if I watch?”
“Depends why.”
Esper bit her lip. She hadn’t really given it much thought. “Curiosity?”
“Admirable reason. If you were just bored and
figured I was as good as a holovid, I’d have kicked you out. I had somewhat hoped that I cut a dashing figure and you wanted to see me in all my glory.”
“You’re wearing a sweatshirt with a grease stain by the collar and a hole in the front pocket. How much glory were you hoping for?”
“Vobis,” he replied with a nod and a spread hand, conceding the point.
“How about you just go ahead now?”
“Since we’re not going deep, apparently, I’ve got to show off a little. No staff, no chanting. Just little old me,” said Mort. He took up a position at the center of the common room, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.
The glyphs that lay dormant around the periphery of the room began to glow green. Esper watched through the domed ceiling as the stars faded away.
“Good enough,” Tanny said over the comm. “Leave us right here.”
Mort’s eyes snapped open. “Buggery.” The glyphs faded, but the stars stayed gone outside. “Waste of my time.”
“How’d you do that?”
Mort scowled. “You could have done that, I’d wager. I hardly moved us.”
“No, I mean without the gibbledy-jabbering and the staff? I thought you needed those.”
Mort sighed and his expression relaxed. Esper knew it wasn’t her that he was miffed at. “Belief is a funny thing. It’s all an argument with the universe, convincing it to bend to your command. The more strongly you believe, the more potent an argument you can make. It’s not all literal, mind you, but believing that you can win plays a huge part in success. I might not like to admit it, but the words and the staff help. I feel more wizardy.”
“So the words don’t matter? You could just say anything?”
“Not anything,” Mort cautioned with a raised finger. “But the right thing. You taught children, so maybe you can relate. Imagine the children all had some half-cocked notion, nanobot-osis or phalangeopelia or whatever you want to make up. You want to convince them of …” Mort waved hands, searching for the word, “… electrons. Can you just tell them any old thing?”
“No, but I just can’t will them into believing in atomic theory, either,” Esper replied.
Mort scratched his chin. “Well, that’s where the analogy breaks down, I suppose. Point is, if you’re going to make the argument, you damn well better get it right. The universe isn’t a toy.”
Esper nodded, but remained silent. She didn’t have an argument to make against that.
Mort scowled once more. “Oh, fine. It is a toy, dammit. We should have gone deeper, just because we can.” And he stormed off to his room, muttering to himself.
# # #
“I don’t like it,” Tanny said as soon as she closed the shipwide comm. The view outside the cockpit windows had gone grey, and the astral depth meter read 0.98, very nearly a standard travel lane.
“What’s not to like?” Carl asked. “We’re not in a rush anymore. That time-lapse spell of Keesha’s did its job.”
“Mort could put us below even the crazy depths that black ops use,” Tanny replied. “We could sneak by half the ARGO fleet. Why dangle ourselves as bait? We’re limping along like … like …”
“Like anything but smugglers?” Carl ventured.
“Like bait.”
“Well, that’s the point.”
Tanny pinched the bridge of her nose. “We don’t need to get cleared by border security. They don’t even have a record of us leaving ARGO space. What do we gain by dangling our cargo under their noses?”
“Mort’s great and all,” Carl said. “But one of these runs, we’re going to get snagged on some bullshit experimental sensor net or just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we’re going to look really guilty. Won’t matter what we’ve got on board, they’ll take us in just for astral travel violations, and with Mobius in impound, they’ll find everything. How’d you like to end up back in the marines as a front-line grunt with a memory wipe?”
“They don’t do shit like that, Carl,” Tanny replied. “It’s just nutjobs spreading rumors.”
Carl paused. “Really? I’ve been giving those meat-brains too much slack, then. Either way, how good are we gonna get it when they figure out half the stuff we’ve done? I’ve run the math. I’m due about six hundred years hard labor, and I don’t think I’d want to live to finish a sentence like that. We let a few hapless clipboard carriers onto Mobius, let Mort play the aggrieved grav-jockey, and they put a check mark next to our ship ID … cleared for customs.”
“Why would they—”
“Because those guys live oatmeal lives with no cinnamon on top,” said Carl. “They’re bored stupid, and if they find something, that’s gonna make them happy. They’re not Planetary Security or Earth Interstellar Enhanced Investigative Org. Someone back home asks them what they did today, they can tell ‘em they helped some poor derelict freighter with a busted astral drive. That’s all any of them need. They’re not out to meet an arrest quota.”
Tanny sighed. “Why do I get the feeling you make this shit up as you go along? Did you even have a plan before we started arguing?”
“It’s really starting to come together,” Carl replied. “You’ve always been a great help with working out the kinks.”
“Yeah … figured as much.”
# # #
It was the UNV Gallivant that found them. Spluttering into ARGO space just outside of a standard astral depth set off alarms, and had a patrol ship on them in short order to investigate. There was not even a request for them to drop into real space. The captain of the Gallivant had his ship maneuver into the sub-standard 0.98 depth to meet the Mobius. Esper waited for someone to tell her what she should be doing.
Carl jogged into the common room from the cockpit as everyone was gathering to prepare for a nice friendly boarding. “This is your show, Mort.” The wizard stood with his staff in hand, ready to recount the harrowing tale of how their star drive was beyond his ability to repair, and how he had used manual wizardry to get them limping back to civilized space.
“Why do we have to use this tired old gimmick?” Mort asked. “Makes me look like a bargain-bin Oxford drop-out. I got my doctorate in wizardry, I’ll have you know! I’ve got a sheepskin made with real sheep skin to prove it.”
“This is for your benefit, you know,” Roddy said in an aside to Esper. “We’ve all heard this spiel before.”
“Cork it, techie,” Mort snapped. “No one’s asking you to put on an apron and claim you can’t bake the engines back into working order.”
“If people are after you personally, wouldn’t it be nice for them not to know you’re a big bad wizard?” Esper asked.
“My dear girl, there is a fine line indeed between demurring when occasion arises to display my might and debasing myself while astral-obsessed adept lectures me on proper maintenance of the Mobius,” said Mort. He frowned a moment as everyone looked on. “Imagine standing there while Tanny lectured you on fashion.”
“Hey!” Tanny and Esper exclaimed in unison, then looked to one another with a mutual understanding of a common object of annoyance.
“Besides, it’s not like the Convocation gets diddly-squat for information out of the navy,” said Mort.
“Oh?” Esper asked, looking to Carl.
Carl held up his hands. “I mustered out as a Lieutenant Commander, but anything doing with the Convocation was still above my pay grade. Even the whiny little bitches that kept the star drives going on the carrier ships were off limits. Didn’t answer to anyone but the captain and the XO.”
“Terms are cordial,” Mort said. “Navy gets terramancers delivered to barren worlds. Convocation sloughs off their dead weight into navy service. Nobody likes one another, though.”
Carl shrugged. “I gave the Tallyho Mort’s real name. Easier than making something up that would pass scrutiny. Not like the Convocation has a wanted list on the navy’s radar.”
“I’m … shocked,” Esper said. “You gave Mort up to the navy and just hoped they w
ouldn’t tell anyone?”
“Welcome to the real world, kid,” Tanny said. “Government isn’t this big, friendly blanket over everything. It’s just a shitload of underpaid quarter-day desk pilots and a billion loosely interconnected computer systems.”
Mriy growled something Esper couldn’t understand.
“That, too,” Carl said.
“What?” Esper asked. She turned to Mort. “I really need one of those translator charms.”
“She just said the government’s also got a military,” Tanny said. “So there’s that.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” said Mort. He took two long steps and thrust his staff into Esper’s hands. “I’m promoting Esper to ship’s wizard.”
Esper opened her mouth, but words eluded her. The common room grew suddenly warm, and the voices around her grew fuzzy. Everyone wobbled …
A moment later, Esper found herself sitting on the couch, Mort’s staff still clutched in one hand with a death-grip. Someone tugged at the staff, and she loosened her grasp. Carl took custody of the unwelcome symbol of her newfound cover identity.
“Mort was kidding around,” Carl said, crouching down to Esper’s eye level. “Weren’t you, Mort? He’s always a baby about this routine.”
“Sorry,” Mort muttered, snatching his staff back.
“Kid,” said Roddy, “You gotta learn to take a joke, or at least roll with it. Come on, we got company coming any minute.”
The crew dispersed to their respective stations. As Tanny passed by the flushed and flustered Esper, she leaned down and whispered. “Mort would’ve let you try. Don’t let them fool you.”
Esper found herself alone in the common room a moment later. The feel of the sinful wood in her hand still fresh in her memory. She absently wiped her hand on her trousers, telling herself she had done nothing wrong. Mort gambled with his soul’s health every time he plied his twisted profession. She had a duty to look out for him. But one question nagged at her.
Why did she regret letting go?
# # #
Roddy sat on the Mobius’s gravity stone as he watched Mort put on a show. The star-drive mechanic from the Gallivant was a pot-bellied jackass with a permanent squint to his eyes, but he knew his business. He had a tool belt dangling with half regular tools, half nonsensical wizard toys, and was jabbing and prodding the star-drive with a mix of both.