The Hundred Worlds

by J. F. Holmes

  “This is the same brand we’ve ordered over a hundred times before. I can show you the paperwork. Why is this one an issue?”

  The customs inspector rubbed his nose and sniffed. The man was a living stereotype. Had he ever had lunch money growing up, or had it all been donated to people irritated with him?

  “Look, I know the last inspector would let just about anything through, but he got caught taking bribes. We just have to give it another pass with radiation and let it sit for a month before I can release it to you to make sure there are no life seeds.”

  Corwin took a calming breath. Arwen was asking him to do more and more around the shop, and since it was about the only way he had of paying rent, it wasn’t like he could refuse. He’d actually grown to enjoy it on a certain level. Unfortunately, things were getting very busy with Christmas coming up in a couple of months, and she’d asked him to go down to Customs to find out what was holding up their shipment.

  It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do, but in this case he wasn’t sure Arwen could do anything, either.

  “Look, in a month we’ll have run out of food for the birds, and the next shipment is supposed to arrive around then as well. Will you delay that? Because if you do that, we’ll have dead birds and upset customers.” Corwin was doing his best not to get frustrated, but had a tendency to talk down to people he got irritated with when he was frustrated.

  The customs inspector shook his head. “I’m sorry, but we have to do this. Can’t you just feed them something else?”

  Corwin considered arguing further and decided to set it aside for the moment. That, however, still left the question of the fish tank cleaner.

  “So what’s wrong with the fish tank cleaner?” He gestured toward the large sealed bottle of semitransparent liquid. It looked vaguely blue-tinted from what he could tell, which was a little odd, given that the last batch had been faintly amber, but now seemed like a bad time to bring that up. It was probably just a different type than he was used to working with, and he could still see the plastic seal from the manufacturer on it.

  “It’s a container of unknown biologicals. We have to keep it contained until we can run some testing on it.”

  Corwin rubbed his face and considered his options. Everything with this man was going in circles, and it seemed like he was being deliberately obtuse. He reminded Corwin strongly of someone in the academic advisement office he’d once met.

  “And how long will that take?”

  “One to two months, just like the birdseed. If you’d like, I can give you a receipt and you can get back to us, but right now we have a backlog until everything is recertified.”

  The marvels of bureaucracy meant that even if it had been certified back on Earth, they had to retest and certify every brand and item coming onto the colony at the colony end of things. It made absolutely no sense, but that was the government for you.

  “Okay. I’ll take that.” Corwin ran his fingers through his hair.

  “But next time this happens, I’d like some sort of warning. If we can’t keep enough on hand, animals will die.”

  The customs inspector rolled his eyes, thinking thoughts about stupid colonials as he went to get a hard copy receipt. And who the hell kept leaving statues all over the place? It had been over a month, and he still had no idea.

  ***

  Corwin unloaded the hand truck as quickly as he could. Arwen was hammered with customers, and probably needed help bagging the orders and giftwrapping. Apparently, a group of miners from out system had come in, rotating back through after taking leave on Earth. Every one of them seemed determined to purchase something for a sweetheart that lived on the mining colony with them, and apparently said mining colony had almost nothing to buy for said sweethearts. Half the shops on the station were as busy as the Fish Tank, and the other half were busier.

  Julian could take up some of the slack, but he’d just gotten back from school. There were days it was easy to forget he was only seventeen, even though he was embroiled in just as much intrigue as Corwin and Arwen were.

  Unloading the last case of cleaning supplies, Corwin folded up the hand truck and put it away as quickly as he could. Rushing down, he slowed only enough to snag a box of rabbit feed, which he knew they were out of, and practically flew down the stairs.

  He smiled at the customers as he shelved the rabbit feed and made his way to the front of the store, trying to move quickly enough to avoid any questions from the customers.

  “We’re out of fish tank cleaner.” Arwen looked at him between customers and raised her eyebrows.

  “Didn’t we order more?”

  “Customs is holding it.”

  “For how long?” There was an edge of fear in her eyes.

  “One to two months.”

  “Crap.”

  Arwen put on a smile and turned back to helping customers. Corwin assisted her with bagging and other small tasks, and before too long, the line had shrunk down to nothing.

  Before they knew it, the shuttle had left with the colony’s visitors. There were a few regulars in the store, residents of the colony who had to do things like buy cat food, but after that, the store rapidly emptied.

  “So, to be clear, this is our special fish tank cleaner, not the regular stuff?”

  Corwin nodded. “Yes.” He did a quick check for customers and didn’t see any in the store. “I think the new customs inspector is trying to show off his position and flex his muscles of authority.”

  Fish tank cleaner had turned out to be the easiest way to smuggle in a key reagent for the genetic editor. Someone back on Earth would get bottles from the manufacturer, fill them with the reagent, and seal them, using the manufacturer’s own product seals. It even turned out to be chemically similar to the actual stuff – the fish tank cleaner they ordered was remarkably similar,, but not identical on a chemical basis, to the reagent that was being smuggled. There was only a very low chance of being found out, but that still left them with the problem of having a mob boss to satisfy and a colony to save.

  Arwen sat for a moment, thinking. Julian wandered by, whistling at a lorikeet that seemed to be whistling back in what sounded like a duet from a show tune. Arwen leaned against the counter, her baggy cargo pants looking almost comical on her small form as she leaned on her elbows, and dropped her forehead into her hands.

  A long moment passed and she looked up.

  “I guess it’s just time for plan B.”

  “Want to let me in on this?” Corwin had no idea there’d been a plan B, so this was probably something she’d come up with on the spur of the moment.

  “I can engineer a microbe that consumes the organic feedstock I supply and produces the reagent.”

  Corwin gave her a puzzled look. “Why didn’t we start out with this?”

  Arwen shook her head. “It was on my eventual to-do list, but there are two problems with it. Really three, but two really big ones. First is the quality control. It’s just not as good as commercial, and we’re more likely to run into problems with it, since I can’t do the quality control testing on each batch like they could with a larger operation.”

  Corwin shrugged in understanding. As he understood it, because of the equipment they were using, they already had a much higher chance of having something fail, either in the equipment or in the organism they were trying to create, and presumably having an editor that didn’t have the correct feedstock meant it would happen more often. There was already a built-in schedule for the occasional dead end, but getting it right was important, and getting it right the first time would be much better.

  “Second is the bigger one. It would take too long. I had between three and six months when this started; now I have less, and doing this would add an additional month plus the time for the organism to process everything, and I don’t know what I’m going to do if I want to speed that up.”

  An edge of stress had appeared in her voice. The last few months had been stressful for a number o
f reasons, with Corwin not being the smallest of them, and this time of year was always bad for a pet shop owner, but Arwen looked like she was ready to cry.

  “Third, the least important but not a small thing, is it’s inefficient. It takes a lot of feedstock from what we’ve got to be able to produce just a tiny bit of the reagent. That dramatically increases our chances of getting caught and slows down our operation by quite a bit.”

  Arwen looked up, staring at the ceiling, and closed her eyes as she gritted her teeth and inhaled. “Let’s get to it.”

  ***

  “So you’re telling me not only do you not have a product, but you managed to use up the last of your consumables – which I had smuggled in at great expense?”

  Ivan looked furious. Not actually furious, really – more very, very cold and utterly emotionless – but Corwin interpreted it as he was furious.

  Arwen stood next to Corwin’s side, hands on hips and glaring death at the mob boss from across his office.

  “We wouldn’t have needed to do this if you hadn’t gotten the last customs inspector jailed for taking bribes.”

  Ivan’s eyes smoothly transitioned from Corwin to Arwen, and his eyebrows slowly rose. Corwin swore he could hear a click as the eyebrows stopped at a heightened position.

  “So you are telling me this is my fault?” The coldness remained in his voice, and the fish swimming behind him in the wall-sized tank only seemed to enhance the effect.

  Corwin watched as genetically-enhanced Indian puffer fish the size of softballs swam behind Ivan’s head, and one of them started going after a cobalt blue freshwater lobster. Ivan had released the lobster into the fish tank at the back of his office at the start of the conversation. It had taken the puffer fish a moment to notice it was there, but already there were three of them circling it, getting bites in and cracking its armor. In a few seconds, the fight was over, and the beautiful lobster was dead, a snack for its erstwhile tank mates.

  It was probably an intimidation tactic, and it worked. Once he got out of this, Corwin had a distinct urge never to do business with organized crime again. Or government. Or, for that matter, to work in a customer service job during the holidays.

  Ivan sighed and scooted his chair back far enough to prop his feet on his desk. He interlaced his fingers and set them on his chest, twiddling his thumbs and looking thoughtful for a moment.

  “I have been reading a management book which talks about the philosophy of allowing your underlings to make mistakes and encouraging them instead of punishment.” His Russian accent and the circumstance made the phrase sound much more ominous than it would have out of context. “It is true that it is not your fault that the reagent was seized at customs, and will be bad by the time it gets to you without refrigeration.”

  Some sort of large red and black fish with a lot of shine on the scales was now picking a fight with a puffer fish. Corwin wasn’t sure whether this was intimidation and deliberate, or if he should tell Ivan that he needed to do something to get his pet to knock it off or they’d kill each other. Better to keep silent.

  Ivan sighed and moved his feet back onto the floor. “You have thirty days to correct the problem. If you do not have an acceptable solution within that time, I will reinstate the debt and resort to more harsh methods to collect on it. I had hoped to do something more civilized with you and turn you into a trading partner.”

  Arwen was trembling with rage. Corwin was glad he was getting out of this with all his limbs intact, and felt like they should figure out something to save their collective butts.

  Ivan gestured for them to leave.

  ***

  That night they had sushi for dinner. Imported food was the norm, and as long as you are willing to settle for flash-frozen fish instead of fresh, sushi was surprisingly cheap.

  Corwin sat down and opened the small plastic container of wasabi, setting it next to his chopsticks. It had become a ritual among them, and given how relatively often they ate out, it was a bonding experience.

  Corwin lifted the lid of the plastic tray of sushi and smiled in anticipation. He picked up his chopsticks and stared in anticipation.

  And froze.

  “We’re doing this wrong.”

  Julian looked up, looked down at his chopsticks, looked back up, and pursed his lips, while giving Corwin an irritated stare.

  “We’re approaching this from the wrong angle.” He set down his chopsticks and turned to Arwen. “Puffer fish.”

  Julian’s eyebrows rose and his fingers twitched as they held the chopsticks.

  Arwen gave him a blank stare for a moment, and then understanding dawned.

  “Tetrodotoxin. We just need to engineer it to produce wake-up instead. We do it as a two-part organism and have it feed on snails that feed on a special algae.” Corwin pointed to his sushi in unnecessary explanation.

  Julian rolled his eyes, shrugged, and dug into the sushi.

  “We design the algae to produce the amino acids we need for the colonists, and we take care of both the debt and the colony at once.”

  Arwen nodded. “Given how easy it is to breed puffer fish in bulk, he has an effectively unlimited supply he can just smuggle in to new markets as pet fish. By the time somebody catches him at it, it would be so widespread it wouldn’t matter. We can even throw a couple of switches in the genes to make them extra prolific.”

  Corwin smiled. “And if they need to, the colonists can even eat sushi. And Ivan will be funding all of it.”

  Dinner was extra sweet.

  ***

  Ivan stared at them or from across the table. “So you are telling me that I can simplify the problem and sell them as supplements – dried fish pills.”

  Corwin nodded. “You can even do this with several other fish in the future – one fish, two fish, redfish, bluefish – sell them as themed fish tanks and give them to your underlings. No special equipment needed to keep them alive, not like you would with a bacterial growth tank.”

  Ivan grinned. “I knew those management books would pay off.”

  _______________________

  Scott Bascom is a lifelong fan of Sci-Fi, though he has written many non fiction articles. This is his first foray into speculative fiction, and he is a regular contributor to the website Blue Collar Prepping.

  The Witch

  by T. Allen Diaz

  _________________

  Present Day

  Chapter 1

  Milo Farkus stood at the edge of Izadore Falls, watching the comet-like fireball of a ship swoop towards the ground, trailing a dark plume of angry, black smoke against a cobalt sky. The ship had kept a low trajectory in an effort to avoid sensors but a Xiang drone put an end to that. The cargo ship had logged no flight plan, at least not one that gave them business in the Kharris Sector, a Xiang-ordained no-fly zone. It was a vain effort. Freedom would always have stumbling blocks, but they couldn’t keep good men and women down for long.

  The cargo ship had carried vital weapons, but that wasn’t its main value. “Dammit!” Andrea Watusi said, watching the tiny skiff crash through the purple foliage with a handheld magnifier. The craft caught the trees and tumbled. A fireball brewed up, climbing into the Vorchan sky, the rumble arrived a moment later. “We needed those weapons.”

  Milo looked at her strong, ebony face. She was dressed in the same faded, ragged-looking purple sarape over pale orange blouse and purple cargo pants he and the rest of the crew wore. “It took a pretty shallow angle. Let’s check for survivors.”

  “I don’t know, Milo,” she said, wary eyes still on the crash site. “First, they change the rendezvous at the last minute, now they go down in a fiery mess. Might be we should just leave them be. Might be this op is compromised.”

  She made good points and Milo was the first to admit it didn’t look good, but…“Laser finder says it’s only four klicks out. It’ll take hours for the QRF to get here from Titus Plantation.” Titus Planation housed closest Xiang Corporate Security camp, but Mi
lo had arranged for a distraction to keep local forces busy, hoping to slow local response times.

  Andie stepped close and put a concerned hand on his arm. “No one survived that crash. We both know that. That smoke is a beacon to every patrol, every Xiang trooper in the sector. I say we leave it.” There was a tender, pleading quality to her voice. “We’re doing great things here. We don’t need outsiders to win this war.”

  “Not again, Andie.” Milo looked at her and saw some of the old stirrings from the heady days when they shared both a bed and vision of what they were doing reflected in her eyes. But that was eighteen long months ago. “Can’t you see? We’re outgrowing the tiny grassroots rebellion we used to be.”

  “We don’t have to. We have allies, right here. Allies we can join with and beat Xiang at their own game.”

  Though the other cells could be called ‘potential allies’, they were, in practice, rivals, competing for the same limited resources of people and materiel. “I will not call Daljeet Virk master.” He started walking and called over his shoulder: “We have time, but not time to waste. Let’s go!” The twelve person squad moved through the purple, orange, and red jungle with the speed of experience, guided by the residual fires and billowing smoke. They drew close and the acrid smell of burnt ship tickled their noses. The crash site looked bad: the once long, sleek hull was battered and bashed. Its conic nose had been ripped off, the aft third, too. Scorch marks scored the deep green, beam-absorbing dorsal surface, especially at the flared wings where the vertical turbines were installed. Fire had brewed from the engines and it was a minor miracle the entire ship wasn’t turned into composite confetti.

  “Pax?” He whispered across the jungle. Whispers were less dangerous than the squad radio when trying to be stealthy. A rose-faced girl with brown pigtails smiled out from under her broad-brimmed hat. He pointed up, and she drew a tube from her back. If someone flew in, they would get at least one of their ships. He pointed at two men to his left and another to his right and motioned to the wreckage. Andie and the rest of the squad would setup perimeter security.