Starcaster Complete Series Boxed Set

by J. N. Chaney

  “Okay, Narvez, let’s find out what you want me to see,” he muttered, keeping his focus fixed firmly on Duster Coat ahead.

  Damien considered pretty much all of FreeFare to be seedy. It was obviously a place deliberately intended to work outside the laws of—anyone, really. At best, it had a sort of rough, internal justice of its own. But establishments like the one into which Duster Coat had just disappeared, a moneychanger, were highly illegal even by the loosest standards of regulation among any of the major powers. None of them liked having their currencies traded off the regular markets and, worse, others making money off it. It was currency speculation, and the Allied Stars, along with everyone else, hated it. It was, in fact, probably one of the very few things about which humans and Nyctus agreed.

  Damien sidled up to the door of the moneychanger’s shop, leaned against the wall, and pretended to read something on a data pad. At least, it appeared to be a data-pad, but thanks to Captain Densmore, it was also a nifty piece of spy tech. It could be used to isolate a single conversation in a crowded place. Even someone whispering in the Hub Club, with its music at full bass power, wasn’t safe from the little device’s ability to eavesdrop.

  With the device in hand, Damien turned and entered the moneychanger’s shop.

  It was dimly lit, deliberately so, to allow patrons to remain relatively anonymous. A series of a half-dozen booths were lined along the wall opposite the door, and that was about it. Damien suspected there were all sorts of hidden, or at least discreet, security systems and features as well. His forehead itched at the idea that even now, a weapon might be trained on him.

  He entered an unoccupied booth and extracted a credit-tag, into which he’d already loaded currencies from every major player. That had been a bit of lucky prescience. He’d meant only to do it so that they had access to whatever currencies they needed, but it now gave him an excuse to come in and change some currency.

  And break Allied Stars law in the process. Sometimes, though, you had to bend the rules for the greater good. And if they happened to crack, or even break along the way, well, that was for the greater good, too. At least that’s what he told himself now and then.

  While a transaction processed, he pulled the data pad back out of his belt pouch. He’d set it to scan conversations underway, and he now read text excerpts from each one of them. The eavesdropper cycled from one discussion to the next in a continuous loop. There were five conversations currently underway—no, wait, make that four. One had ended, and one of the speakers, a Danzur, was hurrying out of the shop. Two of them immediately jumped out at him, because both mentioned the Nyctus. He set the device to focus on those two in particular. One of them seemed to involve Duster Coat, but he wasn’t sure.

  Damien was switching some more currency when one of the conversations ended. A few moments later, the other one did, too. He let the device scan the ones still underway, but it didn’t ping any of the keywords he’d set it to flag if they came up. On impulse, he cancelled his last money-change transaction, packed up the data-pad, and exited the booth—

  To almost collide with a pudgy man with piggish, glaring eyes. He’d been eating something spicy, Damien thought, judging from the stale, peppery cloud of breath that preceded him.

  “You,” the man said.

  Damien put on his best, most disarming smile. “That’s right, me.”

  “You done a bunch of changing, just back and forth between monies.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Why? Made no sense. Looks like you were just wasting time.”

  “Whether I was or not, you got a cut of each of those transactions, didn’t you?”

  “Well, uh, yeah.”

  “And I’m willing to bet I did more transactions, with bigger amounts, than your average customer, right?”

  “Uh. I guess.”

  “So you made more money off of me than you normally would from any other customer.” He sweetened his smile. “So what’s the problem here?”

  That left the man staring and blinking, like his brain had gotten stuck on the question and now spun it around and around in his mind. He obviously wanted to keep complaining, but what Damien had said was entirely true. So what could he complain about?

  Damien took advantage of his puzzled distraction to slip past the man and head for the exit. “Sorry, I have other places to be,” he said in passing.

  The man turned to watch him walk away. Damien waited for a shout, a sound of sudden pursuit.

  But there was none, and he was able to simply walk out of the moneychanger’s shop and back into the cavernous gloom of the lower concourse.

  Damien released a relieved breath.

  He even felt a little smug. Maybe this spy thing wouldn’t be so bad after all. He seemed to have a knack for it, reinforced by years of diplomatic parrying and thrusting. He stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled quickly along, heading for the ramp back up to the main concourse above. In comparison to the bustle of activity up there, this part of FreeFare echoed with a desolate loneliness. Many of the shops and storefronts and kiosks down here were closed and locked down, and there were few other people around. A sudden thrill of apprehension shivered Damien, and he picked up his pace, hurrying past another sealed storefront. It wasn’t empty though, because he caught glimmers of light sneaking out through the chinks and gaps around doors and windows. There were voices, too, and one of them seemed to be in some sort of distress, pain or anger—or both.

  Damien walked faster, keeping his head down. It should only take a few minutes to reach the ramp, and he’d be able to ascend back into the bubbling stew of life and light and ruckus that was the main concourse.

  He’d just finished that thought and walked on another half-dozen paces or so, when someone stepped out of the shadows ahead of him. Damien saw a duster-coat, a hard gleam of eyes, and an even harder gleam of something metallic, a blade. He slammed to a stop, then spun to head the other way. He had no idea where to go, he just knew to get away. But a figure stood just a few paces behind him, blocking his way back.

  “What—?” was all he managed to say before a blade the size of a broadsword slammed into his back.

  Damien felt almost nothing.

  As soon as the point of his attacker’s blade struck his jacket, the material went as stiff and hard as alloy deck plate. The force of the hit, which should have driven the rest of the blade right through him and out his chest in a shower of gore, was instead instantly spread over the entire surface area of his back. A fearsome blow was suddenly rendered into a gentle nudge.

  A curse exploded from just behind Damien. He took advantage of the moment of confusion to sidestep and turn so he was facing both of his attackers, Duster Coat to his left, his accomplice to his right. He had no idea if there were any other attackers, and it didn’t really matter anyway, because he had nowhere to go. At best, he could run, but these men probably knew the nooks and crannies of FreeFare far better than he did and would quickly run him down. Acrid despair engulfed him. He’d been too casual, too cocky, even.

  And now, he was going to pay for it with his life.

  “I’ll give you my money,” he blurted out. “All of it! Just—”

  “We’re gonna take it anyway,” Duster Coat growled.

  “We’ll take whatever we want, everything,” his accomplice snapped.

  “Including that recording thing you’ve got. Especially want that,” Duster Coat added, raising his blade.

  Damien grimaced in disgust. His armored outfit, purchased from Ugeel, had saved his life once, but he couldn’t count on it again. All they had to do was strike at his exposed head, face, and neck. His neck. Wouldn’t that be a cosmic irony, if he died to a stab wound in the neck, the same way Narvez had?

  All of this flashed through his mind in a second, but it was a second too long, a second that let his attacker close in to strike. “Please!” he cried, meaning to offer to surrender, to do anything to stop these men from killing him, but it was pointle
ss, and now he was going to die.

  Duster Coat swung his blade at Damien’s face.

  Damien yelped and tried to duck, too slow.

  But the blow never connected. A figure had materialized behind Duster Coat, snagged his arm, and spun him aside. Damien’s savior twisted Duster Coat’s arm, sending the blade clattering to the deck, then hooked a foot behind his ankle and pushed, making Duster Coat topple back. The savior lunged and struck with his free hand, slamming a fist into Duster Coat’s throat. Duster Coat hit the deck with a heavy thunk and gasped, gurgling from the blow to his neck, but his attacker wasn’t done. He straightened, leapt over Duster Coat, lashing out with a foot as he did, and smashed it into Duster Coat’s face. He landed in a crouch and half-turned, ready to take on the second assailant, but that man was already down, taken out by another shadowy figure.

  Damien blinked. It had all been, as far as his stunned senses could tell, one smooth, continuous flow of movement, lasting all of two seconds, maybe three.

  The mysterious figure that had taken down Duster Coat stepped in front of Damien, who had a sudden, terrifying thought. Had these two just taken out Duster Coat and his friend so they could have Damien for themselves?

  The figure pulled back a hood, revealing a face. A face he recognized.

  “You’re—Toff. From the Tiger Team,” Damien rasped.

  “That I am, sir. You okay?”

  “I—yeah. I think so.” Damien didn’t feel anything hurting, anyway. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Alys detached me and Merrill here to keep an eye on you until they got back to pick you up,” Toff said.

  “Alys,” Damien said, blank on the name until it struck him Toff meant Densmore. That’s right, these spec ops people tended only to use only first names, no ranks, while on an op. It was another layer of security, one of a seemingly endless series of them, like nesting dolls made of almost paranoid caution. It worked, though, because here they were, in the nick of time.

  Speaking of which—

  “Wait, have you guys been following me this whole time?” Damien asked.

  Merrill, a compact young woman from a high-g world with a seemingly perpetual smirk, nodded. “Pretty much. We try not to watch too close when you’re taking a leak and stuff like that, but yeah.”

  Toff glanced down at Duster Coat and his sidekick, both lying mostly still, wheezing wetly and occasionally groaning. “We’d best be off before someone else comes along.”

  “Yeah, more bad guys, or maybe the cops,” Merrill said.

  Toff grinned. “In a place like this, not much difference.”

  Damien fell into step with his saviors from Tiger Team Three. He saw they both wore charcoal-grey from head to toe, including the hoods they’d both pulled back. Some property of the smooth, tight-fitting fabric made Damien’s gaze just want to slide off it, not quite able to find a place to land and stick. They led him to a gap between two shops and retrieved a set of normal-looking, workaday clothing each, which they slipped over their remarkable camo. Even these ordinary clothes were special, essentially a one-piece outfit that could be put on or removed all at once, and in a second or two. Once they’d fastened them back into the place, Toff and Merrill looked like any of another few hundred nondescript people aboard FreeFare.

  Damien’s mouth, which had gone as dry as old leather in the face of apparently certain death, finally found some moisture again. “Why didn’t someone tell me you guys were here? Why didn’t you guys tell me?”

  Toff glanced in both directions of the little alley, then led the way toward the ramp to the main concourse. “Two reasons. One, when noobs know they have handlers watching over them, they tend to try to spy out those handlers. It becomes a distraction, and they lose situational awareness around themselves.”

  “Noobs?”

  “Sorry. Subjects new to this sort of shit are called noobs.” He gave Damien an apologetic smile. “And, due respect, but you’re a noob, Damien.”

  Damien waved a hand. “Am I ever.” It made sense, he supposed. If he had known he had benefactors out there watching over him, then he knew he’d have devoted at least some of his attention to spotting them. It wasn’t just a distraction, but it might compromise his handlers, too.

  Damien looked at Toff. “You said there were two reasons.”

  Toff grinned. “Yeah. Reason two is that look on a subject’s face when we pull their ass out of some terrible shit and they realize they’ve been rescued at the last possible second. I love that.”

  “Never gets old,” Merrill agreed.

  Damien couldn’t fault them for that, either. Although it did make him wonder about something.

  “Last possible second? That implies you engineer things to make it as dramatic as possible, even if it leaves us noobs hanging a bit longer.” He glanced at Toff sidelong. “Do you?”

  “Sorry, can’t say anything more. Our specific SOPs are classified,” Toff replied, but his grin didn’t fade. If anything, it only got wider.

  “Kinda dickish, if I may say so,” Damien said, returning the smile.

  Toff laughed, then gave a small bow. “You may.”

  Sitting in the scruffy room he’d rented for his stay aboard FreeFare, Damien felt a lot more secure knowing that Toff and Merrill were somewhere nearby. He wasn’t sure where, because he was still a noob and might inadvertently give them away, but it didn’t matter. They were out there somewhere nearby, keeping a careful watch over him. Guardian angels were nice, he thought. It was even better when those guardian angels were remorseless killing machines.

  He scanned through the transcripts of the two conversations he’d recorded. The first mentioned the Nyctus only in passing. Someone was complaining that a Nyctus trade deal had gone bad and urged someone else to switch their money into Danzur currency to deal with them instead. That was at least potentially interesting, though. Why had a trade deal with the Nyctus fallen through? Was it just an isolated, one-off thing? Or was there more to it than that?

  Maybe the second conversation would tell him more. As far as he knew, the two conversations had been completely separate from each other, so maybe this one would offer some sort of corroboration. It was tempting to think it might be full of revelations, but in Damien’s experience, that was almost never the case. Conversations were incremental things, each adding a new piece of information, slowly building up a picture over a period of time.

  At least, that’s how it tended to work in diplomatic circles. He didn’t think it would be much different here.

  He got just a few lines into the transcript and realized he was very, very wrong.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered. He read to the end, then started back at the beginning and read again.

  The conversation was between Duster Coat and someone else. Damien wasn’t sure who the other party was, but it didn’t really matter.

  So the squids lost again, Duster Coat had said. Lost another big battle.

  That’s, what, the third in two months? the other speaker replied.

  Something like that, yeah. They lost another one of those special ships, too. There’s a real shitshow going on about that.

  Holy shit, another one?

  Yup. That’s three of the damned things, now. And that’s where all our money is going, Duster groused.

  Damn it.

  I know, right? The squids are getting their asses kicked here. Starting to think we backed the wrong side.

  We can always switch, Duster offered.

  Gonna have to. At this rate, the squids are gonna be done in another six months. And by done, I mean freakin’ done.

  There was more, but it was some nitty-gritty stuff about the specifics of their financial dealings, and Damien didn’t care about that. Instead, he sat back in the creaky chair in his tiny room, tapped a finger on the cracked tabletop, and pondered what he’d just read.

  The Nyctus had suffered three major defeats in two months, in battles Damien knew nothing about. He suspected that
the ON didn’t know about them either. The squids were at war with someone else, and they were losing. It was probably the enigmatic and violent race known as the Bilau, but the speakers never said.

  More to the point, though, there seemed to be a lot of concern about three special ships. The Nyctus had lost them, although whether that meant lost as in destroyed, or lost as in captured, or even something else wasn’t clear.

  He considered finding Duster Coat and trying to pry more out of him somehow. He had no doubt that Toff and Merrill, behind their easygoing, almost charmingly casual attitudes, could extract information from someone if they really wanted to. But if Duster Coat was even still alive, he’d likely holed up somewhere in the massive expanse of FreeFare to recover, or he might have left altogether.

  Damien sat forward. He needed to get this information to the ON. That was going to have to wait until Thorn, Densmore, and the others got back, though, or until he could otherwise make contact with the ON.

  He nodded to himself, then copied the conversation transcripts onto a chip and slipped it out of the data pad. He’d give it to Toff as a backup. In the meantime, though, he’d carry on with his investigations aboard FreeFare to see what else he could find out.

  As he stood and headed for the door, Damien had to admit that staring down the barrel of death had certainly taken the fun out of doing this. On the other hand, though, he had his spiffy armor and two skilled, professional protectors watching out for him. He really had no excuse for holding back.

  Besides, he thought, glancing at the remembrance ring of silver and gold, he suspected that Narvez wouldn’t have given up and just hunkered down in her room.

  So he wouldn’t either.

  Damien stepped out of his seedy little room and headed back to work.

  8

  “The Ghosts is a damned good name for this place. Totally gives me the creeps,” Mol said.

  Thorn nodded. “I hear that.”