On a Pale Ship

by Jamie McFarlane

  "Who is this?" Marek answered only moments after she initiated the comm.

  "Why it's me, Trixie. What are you still doing up? " Katriona asked.

  Marek sighed loudly enough that she was able to pick it up even with the quasi-muted background noise. "Kat? We've been trying to find you for hours. You can't disappear like that. You have no idea how many people we have looking for you."

  "Why, Mar, I had no idea you cared so much," she said.

  "Stop playing, Katriona. A kill order was issued an hour ago."

  "Very unfriendly of you," she said. "Get it unordered or I'll crush the package and disappear permanently."

  "Don't," he shouted and then seemed to pull it together. "Don't," he said more quietly. "I'll get it called off."

  "I only received payment twelve hours ago. Why so jumpy?"

  He ignored her question. "You have three hours to meet me at Belsev Tether and turn over the package."

  "That's going to be a problem," she said. "I’m in the slums and my ID is burned."

  "Damn it."

  "How much of a problem could that be? Just come over and take delivery. A good citizen like yourself should have no trouble navigating the portals."

  "No. I'll fix it. Go to Portal-1 and use your real ID. I'll set it up with security," he said.

  "You must think I'm an idiot. If I burn my real ID, my life goes to shite."

  "Look, I'll have a guy meet you. They won't even scan you through. Just be there in the next hour."

  "Frak, Marek. This isn't how I do things. I'm careful. That's why I'm still alive," she said.

  "I've got another job. We're going this morning, that's why we need the package. I'll cut you in."

  "How much?"

  "Twenty upfront; forty on the backside."

  "Put that twenty into my account before I get to Portal-1 and I'll see you at 0430. Otherwise, I'm a ghost."

  "And have you skip? I don't think so," he said. "You show up at Belsev Tether, hand over the package and I'll give you forty thousand credits in chits on the spot. Twenty for the package, twenty upfront for the next job."

  Katriona considered the offer. If he was to be believed, he would hand her a bag full of untraceable chips all the size of the end of her pinky finger. Their untraceable nature was worth a lot more than the twenty thousand she'd spread between alias accounts. It wasn't uncommon for chits to sell for twice their face value in the slums.

  "I don't even know what the job is."

  "Same as yesterday. You break into an impossibly difficult location and switch packages. And really, does the job matter? With eighty thousand credits, you can buy citizenship for yourself."

  "More like a one-way trip off this blood-sucking rock."

  "Sure. That works too," he said. "Are you in?"

  "Shite," Katriona whispered, mostly to herself.

  "You're in?"

  "See you at 0430."

  "Don't stand me up, Kat," Marek warned. "We know about Irena and Sveta. I'd hate to see this splash on them."

  The blood in her veins turned to ice as she closed the comm and carefully pulled the earwig chip out, replacing it with her last good virtual alias. Everything was frakked up. If only he'd made immediate payment, she could have turned over the package and gone about her life. Her flight instincts were kicking into high gear. Twenty thousand was enough to get her passage to another city where she could start over. She'd lived with much less, but the fact was she couldn't abandon Sveta and Irena.

  On her HUD, she thumbed through a list of contacts, finally finding who she was looking for. The comm channel thrummed lightly as it attempted contact. Finally, after minutes that seemed like hours, a man answered.

  His voice was thick with sleep. "This better be good."

  "I need a ride into town," she said.

  "Who is this? Are you calling me from a bar? I'm not a damned cabbie. I'm hanging up."

  "It's Kat," she replied, using the only name the man knew her by. "I have credits. I need to get over the wall in the next two hours."

  "Not possible," he said. "I don't even know who's working the wall tonight."

  "Twenty-five hundred credits," she said, offering twice his normal rate. "And I'll need your best board."

  "This wouldn't have anything to do with a dead security forces guard at Hotel Nazim would it?" he asked. Katriona's heart sank. Someone had already discovered Diasev's body. "Five thousand, Kat."

  She paused. Five thousand was ten times the going rate for a bribe. But she had just murdered the one contact she could confidently bribe and had no time to develop a new contact in the security forces.

  "Damn it, Mikael," she said. "I don't have five thousand."

  "I'm going back to bed. Good luck with the manhunt."

  "Wait. Four. I can do four," she said, allowing desperation into her voice.

  It was Mikael's turn to hesitate, but he finally responded. "Send the money."

  After terminating the call, Katriona sent the money he'd demanded and danced her way to the front of the night club, forcing a smile onto her face and her arms into the air. If the security forces were looking for her, she could not afford to stand out in the crowd.

  Within a minute a message containing unexpected coordinates arrived. She'd climbed over the wall on two separate occasions. Both times, Mikael had arranged for the security forces that patrolled the top of the wall to bring the sensors offline for just enough time for her to sneak across and descend to the opposite side. The location of both climbs had been within half a kilometer of each other. Mikael had explained that those sections of the wall had older sensor packages. He'd even joked that some of her payment was funneled to city contractors to make sure that remained the case.

  She was five kilometers from the coordinates he'd provided, a distance she could cover in thirty minutes and maintain a reasonable level of stealth on foot. It took her a few minutes to extract herself from the club and then she was off, carefully avoiding the blocks surrounding Hotel Nazim.

  As she closed on the location provided, the buildings changed from the retail environment of clubs, restaurants and hotels to nondescript industrials protected by steel fencing. A feeling of unease settled in her stomach as she realized the provided coordinates were two kilometers from the wall.

  The lights of an approaching vehicle on the vacant street caught her attention. She stopped running and knelt as the beams passed over her. She didn’t want to be highlighted against the fencing. One of the weaknesses in her cat-suit was that it had difficulty providing stealth against the open weave of the steel links. Light within the cockpit illuminated the man she knew as Mikael as he sped past her position and pulled in front of a two-story brick building.

  As quietly as she could manage, she stood and jogged the final hundred meters as he stepped from the vehicle, pulling a meter-long, flat board from the cargo hatch.

  "I can hear your breathing," he announced, turning around and thrusting a hoverboard at her. "It's the best I could do on no notice."

  Katriona accepted the board. It had inclined sections on each end and when she dropped it, the board hovered several centimeters above the ground. With practiced ease, she placed her left foot onto the board, pointed forward and pushed off with her right. The board sagged under her weight but recovered as she skimmed across the parking lot. Katriona sat into a curve, pushed the antigrav repulsers into the pavement, turned 180 degrees and sailed back to Mikael. With a quick kick on the back lip, she jumped off and caught the board, running to a stop.

  "It's soft, but it'll do," she said. "What are we doing here?"

  "I told you. You didn’t give me enough warning to get you over the wall," he said, walking toward the vacant building's front door.

  Katriona followed him, catching a sign etched into the stone mantle over the plain, weather-beaten steel doors. 'Public Works' the sign read.

  She knew it would do her no good to keep pushing the man for details. He had a reputation for smuggling people and m
aterial through the wall. What that had to do with a Public Works building she couldn't fathom.

  He pressed a card he pulled from his pocket into the security panel that sat beside the doors. At first it showed red, eliciting an angry expletive. A second scan also failed so he leaned against the door and initiated a comm.

  "Come open the door. My card isn't working," he said. Katriona waited while he nodded at the other half of a conversation she couldn't hear. "There won't be any trouble. I'm paying double tonight since there wasn't any notification."

  "Problems?" Katriona asked when he pushed away from the doors.

  "No more than usual," he said. "Was that you at Hotel Nazim?"

  "Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?" Katriona leaned forward menacingly.

  "That sort of thing brings a lot of heat. Better not be any splashback."

  "Don't worry. I'll keep your name out of my trouble. I always have."

  He nodded his head affirmatively. "It's the only reason we're talking."

  "That and four thousand credits."

  "Right. That too."

  The door swung open revealing a portly man in a security guard uniform carrying a flashlight in one hand and a cheap blaster pistol on his hip.

  "Hurry up," he whispered. "I don't want the recorders to be down too long."

  Mikael pressed a chit into the man's hand and walked past him into a long corridor that reeked of industrial cleanser.

  "This the package?" the man asked, giving Katriona a quick once-over.

  "Less you know, the better, Salvey," Mikael said.

  "I'm going to complete my rounds, real slow like," Salvey said. "When I get back to the office, I'm going to turn the surveillance recorders back on. You should be clear of the building in fifteen minutes."

  "Frak, Salvey, that's cutting it pretty close," Mikael argued.

  "Best get moving in that case."

  "Damn it. Let's go," Mikael said and bolted down the hallway at a dead run.

  Katriona threw the hoverboard to the floor and chased after it, jumping on after letting it build up a head of steam. Riding the hoverboard was a skill she'd picked up as a kid and had become second nature to her. It was actually through her love of the hoverboard that she'd met Mikael. A few years older and street smart, he'd tried to recruit her to work for him when she'd sold stolen boards to him as a teen. Not interested in employment, she'd turned him down, but they continued to bump into each other as their criminal careers developed.

  "What are we doing here?" She jumped from the board and ran off the inertia, stopping next to the heavy steel door he'd opened.

  "Only my A-list transports ever get to know about this one," he said. "Welcome to the big leagues."

  She followed him down a metal stairwell into a massive room filled with huge pipes. The sound of water running overhead caused her already soured stomach to flip flop. Katriona had a bad feeling about where this trip was going, but continued to follow Mikael to where several of the meter-sized pipes ran along the floor and into the wall.

  Mikael stopped and pulled a clear mask from the bag he held. "This will give you twenty minutes of air. You'll need less than half that."

  "You don't think I'm getting in there, do you?" Katriona looked at the pipe, specifically the large hatch in the top. Mikael had already started removing its fist-sized bolts with a wrench the size of her arm.

  "No time to be picky," he said, setting aside one of four nuts that held the hatch in place. "I'd put your pack on front and stow that pistol. You don't want to lose anything. I understand it’s a wild ride."

  "This is crazy."

  "The water is clean and I've never lost a client," he said.

  "How many have gone?"

  "Including you?"

  "Sure," she said, annoyed.

  "You'll make three."

  Having removed the final nut, he lifted the hatch with a prybar he'd brought. The water only came up about halfway, but it sped past quickly.

  "Where does this go?"

  "Yerbol River," he said. "We clean their waste and send back nothing but the purest water for our fair citizens. Poetic that they drink their own piss."

  "And your last two made it no problem?"

  "Nothing but clear sailing," he said. "You end up near city center."

  There was absolutely nothing in Katriona's being that told her it made sense to jump into an enclosed pipe. She wasn't ordinarily claustrophobic, but moving at speed through a blind, dark tunnel with limited air seemed a recipe for disaster.

  "Frak," she said. "I hope you haven't killed me."

  She pulled the mask over her head, adjusted her pack, cinching the straps tight across her back. Then she jumped onto the huge pipe and stared into the rushing water.

  "Short on time, Katriona," Mikael pushed.

  With the hoverboard stretched in front of her, she dove in. This turned out to be a huge mistake. The face mask twisted away on impact with the water, causing her to release the board as she frantically struggled to grab the mask. At the last moment, she snagged it just as she was slammed into a ninety-degree curve that sent her plunging down. Fighting against the fall, Katriona choked as she breathed in water, the mask useless in her outstretched hands.

  She fought against her fear and brought the mask up to her face, trying to hold it over her nose. Wracking coughs, however, made it impossible to hold in place. Like a nearly drowned rat, she scrabbled to break the surface of the water, panic setting in. With each attempted breath, she aspirated more water.

  Katriona slammed against the side of the pipe as once again it turned. The frothy water slowed, suddenly filling the tube to the top. She'd been in tough spots before and recognized the telltale signs of the kind of panic she couldn't give in to. Tamping down her fear, she pushed elbows out to cushion her body from any sudden turns and tipped her head forward, holding her breath even as her diaphragm spasmed.

  There was no relief when she finally pulled the mask over her face. Her body had taken over and she convulsed as it attempted to expel water from her lungs. The mask disappeared into the current. She gave herself over to the water as she slipped toward unconsciousness. Her body jerked as she was slammed into something hard. Rolling to the side, Katriona discovered she'd run into a wide grate of iron bars. The hoverboard had been trapped against it, the force of the water pinning it firmly in place.

  Rushing water pulled her legs through the open grate. She twisted, still retching, but somehow worked her body across the surface of the board. When her hips cleared the opening between the iron bars, she was sucked through, unable to pull the board free.

  And then everything became quiet. For a period that seemed timeless, Katriona was convinced she'd simply died. She was disavowed from this notion when her abused body forcefully ejected the small dinner she'd eaten earlier that night. It was ironic that she’d skillfully gotten herself out of hundreds of impossible situations, yet now, she didn’t even have the capacity to know which direction was up. She thought about Sveta and wondered how the young girl would survive without her help. The thought brought sadness to her fading, oxygen starved brain.

  An object clunked into her midsection and she automatically wrapped her arms around it. Hope buoyed in the form of her hoverboard. It must have been pushed free and followed her downstream. With all her remaining strength, Katriona held fast to the board as it zoomed to the surface. Elation filled her as she broke free from the watery grave. Without any instructions, the board leveled out, leaving her prone just centimeters above the river's surface. She leaned to the side slightly and directed the board over to the bank, where she crawled off and coughed the city's waters from her lungs.

  "You didn't show up at the Portal," Marek said. "I won't protect you. I don't know why you're playing these games."

  "I still have fifteen minutes," she said, "or are you backing out of our deal?"

  "You couldn't make it here if you wanted. I can't call them off." Marek’s eyes caught movement and
he saw a dark shape sliding through the early-morning light a hundred meters from his position.

  "That's not an answer," she said.

  "Is it true what they say about cats?" he asked.

  "That they don't like water?" she asked. "Yeah, that's definitely true."

  "No, that they have nine lives," he replied.

  "I'm not sure my number is quite that high yet. Do we still have a deal?"

  "If you can get me the package by 0430, we still have a deal."

  He wasn't surprised when the dark figure turned, swung in a graceful arc and glided across the lawn toward him.

  Katriona slowed and kicked the back of the board as she jumped off, catching it in her hand. "You said something about another job?"

  "Package first."

  "I've always hated this part," she said, first drawing her laser pistol, then pulling the thin box that held the lens from a hidden pocket on her waist. "It's where I get to find out if you're a dick."

  Chapter 8

  Baron Serikov

  System: Tipperary, Planet: Grünholz, City: Léger Nuage

  "If you do not submit to a vascular scan, your ID as Baron Roth Serikov of Samot will hold," Victor said.

  "Baron. That's great. I've always wanted to be a royal."

  "If you could restrain your glee for a moment, we'll get through this." Victor pulled out a box the size of a deck of cards and handed it to him. "Within are cigarettes made from the finest tobacco grown on Earth."

  Luc inspected the package and whistled. He'd confiscated more than his share of contraband, but had never seen an entire package of cigarettes from Earth. He estimated their black-market value to be a thousand credits.

  "What? No menthol?" he needled.

  "You are to share a cigarette from the left side of the package with Yakov Maximovich, the bar owner we spoke of this morning. If he smokes it, we will be able to track his movements and anything he touches for several days. There are only three cigarettes of this nature in the package. Make sure to give him the right one."