Mission Inadvisable

by J. S. Morin

  Mission Inadvisable

  Mission 13 of the Black Ocean Series

  J.S. Morin

  Mission Inadvisable

  Mission 13 of: Black Ocean

  Copyright © 2016 Magical Scrivener Press

  Carl Ramsey tipped his chair back and took a long swig of Mars-brewed ale. The drink seemed out of place among giant rhinoceros-like stuunji of New Garrelon—maybe vodka would have suited them better. But the Martian brew was the best the stuunji casino kept on tap, and Carl wasn’t keen on playing poker sober.

  “I raise,” Carl announced. He slid a stack of palm-sized coins forward without counting them. The zuukas weren’t real money anyway, so it hardly mattered the exact amount of his bet. Besides, play long enough, and he was bound to lose them all anyway.

  Stuunji after stuunji folded. Playing cards the size of placemats frisbeed into the discard pile from all around the table.

  Then again, Carl might just clean out these poor stuunji saps because none of them dared call his bluffs. It would have been tantamount to calling him a liar. He should have been offended. He should have been proud. There was a strange mix of professional pride and wanting to take credit for being a reckless, devil-may-care gambler warring inside him.

  But for now, Carl raked in chips and ordered another drink.

  Drinks were on the house.

  If Carl weren’t such a dedicated spacer, he could have seen himself settling down in a place like this. Aside from the smell. And the lack of human companionship. And the soul-crushing tedium.

  The first few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Money” thrummed from Carl’s pocket. Tugging out a datapad in the middle of a poker game could get you shot in some parts of the galaxy, but the assembly of stuunji gamblers paused respectfully as Carl checked to see who was calling him.

  Carl pushed back his chair. “Excuse me. I’ve gotta take this.”

  Sliding his placemats to the discard pile, Carl slipped through the press of two-and-a-half-meter bodies and into the alleyway behind the casino.

  “Yo, Ramsey here. Talk.”

  The anonymous voice on the other end of the comm came through a scrambler. “I hear you move cargo, no questions asked.”

  “Nah, I’m in the question-asking business these days,” Carl replied smoothly. “Just makes jobs run smoother. What am I hauling? Where do I pick it up? Who’m I delivering it to? How soon you need it there? And last but not least, why’s this going to be worth my while?”

  Carl counted on his fingers, thinking he might have missed a question there somewhere, but couldn’t pinpoint where.

  “Sorry, Ramsey. This is need-to-know. You’ve got a package to pick up on the 20th on Agos VI. Delivery instructions upon pickup. Standard half-and-half payment schedule. First payment of 150k will come from your contact.”

  Three hundred thousand? Carl could bite into a figure like that and enjoy the flavor. But he had to check one thing. “I’m going to assume you’re talking terras. Been hearing a lot of rebel currency jobs lately.”

  “This isn’t the EADZ, Ramsey. This job’s all ARGO.”

  Carl raised an eyebrow, though without a video feed from his datapad, his contact on the other end of the comm would never see it. Whoever this was, he was keeping plugged in. Then again, Carl hadn’t exactly kept his Bradbury heist quiet. He supposed it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when potential employers knew where he’d been operating. That broadcast had sounded like a good idea at the time…

  “What’s the cargo?” Carl asked. Now that the money was cleared up, all that was left was to hammer down the last few nails of this deal.

  “Sorry, Ramsey. Like I said. Need to know.”

  Carl cleared his throat. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I’m in the question-asking business. I’ve gotten saddled with sentient eggs, biotoxins, and weapons so hot that criminal syndicates wouldn’t take them off my hands. I’m through taking junk on my ship without knowing what I’m carrying. My crew is a bunch of pros. We don’t lose cargo. We don’t miss deliveries. We don’t get caught by ARGO, Phabian Investigative Services, or corporate security ships. You want that kind of protection for your cargo, I gotta know what’s in it.”

  “You practice that in a mirror, Ramsey?” the voice asked snidely.

  “No, I’m this good thinking on my feet. That’s part of the package deal.”

  “Fine. It’s a cultural heritage piece. Artwork. You’re pulling courier duty on the back end of an art heist.”

  Carl hmm’ed appreciatively. “I must be moving up in the galaxy. I’m getting calls for fancy thefts. I’ll pick up monocles for my crew, and we’ll fly there with our pinkie fingers extended.”

  “Can the crap, Ramsey. It’s a religious knickknack. Nothing blue-blood.”

  Carl cringed. He cast a baleful look at the casino back door. Just inside were a bunch of kindly—and rather heart-on-sleeve pious—rhinos. In that moment, all he could envision was the heartbreak they’d experience if someone defiled one of their temples.

  Before he lost out on the best-paying job they’d stumbled into since landing on New Garrelon, Carl reached into his mental bag of tricks. He tried to concoct a Carl Who Doesn’t Give a Shit About Religious Kooks. Unfortunately, the best he could slap together on short notice was a Carl Who Actually Kinda Cares But Wishes He Didn’t.

  That was too close a Carl to the original.

  Breathing in a deep, steady breath, Carl unmuted his datapad. “Think I’m gonna take a pass on this one. Best of luck cursing your family for ten generations. Mobius out.”

  “What? Since when did you turn into a religious—?”

  Carl hit “End Comm” on his datapad before the mystery employer could finish insulting him. Somehow it had never been his style to just let someone verbally abuse him from a trillion kilometers away.

  An odd tingle spread from the base of Carl’s spine. His soul wasn’t squeaky clean, but it had the fresh shine of an old ship that an ensign had been assigned to polish. There was that one spot the ensign would sit there rubbing at with a rag and cleaner until it shone like new. The entire ship could be rusted, moldy, or stained, but one fist-sized circle was—for the time being, at least—perfect.

  With the satisfied sigh of a saint on a Sunday, Carl headed back into the casino to rob the locals while getting drunk.

  # # #

  Amy dumped out her shopping bag on the bed. There was a tiny plastic button built into the bag’s handle, and when she held it down, a molecular chain reaction turned the bag into a puff of smoke.

  Coughing, Amy waved the fumes away, waiting for the air recirculators of the Mobius to suck up the particulate. She wished the novelty of the insta-recycling bags hadn’t tempted her to try the feature indoors.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said to herself.

  Stuunji jewelry was a study in scale. A necklace for a stuunji woman would weigh down any human not jack-wired with chemicals or cybernetics. But what a stuunji might consider a delicate wrist chain fit around a human neck just fine. By the same transposition, rings could work as bangles, and an anklet was about the right size for a belt.

  There was no place on a human woman for a stuunji horn-band.

  Amy’s haul for the day had been bought and paid for in stuunji zuukas, which made them essentially free. It was akin to paying a shopkeeper with starline frequent traveler points or those paper tickets from the old-timey arcades.

  Selecting a filigreed pinkie ring, Amy slipped it over her wrist and posed in the mirror. After a few poses, she rolled her eyes. “I look ridiculous.”

  Removing the accessory, Amy sorted her purchases and tucked them away in the bottom of her footlocker. One of these days, the Mobius would get off New Garrelon long enou
gh to do a little brokering. Stuunji handicrafts were getting popular in human space, ARGO or not, and because the stuunji weren’t officially trading with humans, that made anything from New Garrelon expensive.

  Amy held up the last piece for the day, a wood-and-seashell necklace, and spoke to it. “Someday you’re going to make some stupid, frivolous girl very happy for a few minutes. Let’s just hope she pays top terra before finding a mirror.” Then she tucked it away with the rest and closed the footlocker.

  Muffled voices sounded from the common room, and a familiar tone told Amy that it wasn’t just the holovid this time. Carl was back. Hopefully, he’d spent his shopping day productively as well.

  Amy made herself snort at the notion. She looked to the ceiling, addressing God. “Thanks for sending him back in one piece. That’s all I really need.”

  Moments later, the door to their shared quarters swung open, and Carl burst through, grinning. “Hey, how’s my girl? You have fun out on the town with Esper?”

  “Better than you did with Rai Kub, apparently,” Amy replied with a lopsided grin. “He was here already when I got back. You two have an argument or something?”

  Carl waved away the notion. “Nah. He’s just not much of a drinker or a gambler.” He wobbled over and flopped down on the bed.

  “As a rule, neither are you,” Amy pointed out, flopping down beside him, then rolling onto her side.

  “Yeah, but I enjoy both,” Carl replied, wagging a finger. “Key difference. Big guy just wanted to browse the food carts, and I wanted to try out the casino. Both got what we wanted.”

  “Rai Kub wanted to spend the day with you.”

  Carl blew a long sigh. “Yeah. But this place is safe as a daycare ward. I didn’t need a nanny. I needed a wingman.”

  Amy sat up and looked out the window. “Well, Roddy’s got a right to perpetuate his own species. He can’t go out playing cards every—”

  “I meant you,” Carl said slyly, wrapping his arms around Amy from behind.

  Amy batted away Carl’s wandering hands. “Any prospects of getting us off this ball of hay?”

  Carl slumped back down. “Nope. But on the bright side, I did turn down a job.”

  “How’s that a bright side?” Amy asked, turning to study Carl for signs of the punch line she sensed coming. “Were they trying to charge us money to do a job?”

  Carl snickered. “Ah, the old Tom Sawyer con. Nah, nothing like that. It just wasn’t our style.”

  “You mean it was chump change,” Amy reasoned. There was something oddly wistful in Carl, bordering on the contemplative.

  “Nah. Money was great. Would have topped any real payday we’ve seen in ages.”

  Amy rubbed at her temples. “I give up. What’s the catch? Or are you just getting used to life on this farm world?”

  “Hey, I’m ready to blow this pasture first reason we get. But I’m not smuggling sacred artifacts off an occupied world.”

  For a second, Amy wasn’t sure what she’d just heard. “Say that again.”

  Carl propped himself up on an elbow. “I told the guy to go screw himself. Find someone else to pillage primitive cultures for him.”

  “And it was theoretically good money?” Amy asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “Three hundred large,” Carl said with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t taking it anyway.”

  Within seconds, Amy had tackled Carl, pinning him to the bed. Even in a haze of slight tipsiness, Carl caught on quick enough and let her pull his shirt up over his head. She let him work on the buttons for her pants while she worked free from her own top.

  One of the keys to positive reinforcement was immediate reward for good behavior.

  Plus, Amy was surprised to discover, she had a “thing” for good boys.

  # # #

  Rai Kub sat on a blanket beside the couch. The human-sized furniture wouldn’t have held his weight anyway. Tapping at the buttons for the little remote that controlled the holo-projector, he paused the ballet mid-pirouette.

  Such tiny creatures. Such grace and fluidity. It was as if the young humans were made of cotton fluff the way they floated.

  But not all humans were creatures of grace and dignity. Carl stumbled out of his quarters with his shirt untucked, barefoot, and carrying the faint whiff of mating. Everyone else was either inured to the scent or too polite to say anything about it—Rai Kub steadfastly clung to the latter faction.

  Amy followed Carl out, waiting a period she must have deemed decorous. “You guys are never going to guess what Carl did today?”

  From her slouching seat at the end of the couch, Yomin chimed in. “No need to guess.” She was clearly not among the polite ones.

  “I mean planetside,” Amy clarified. “That is, outdoors. I mean, I know we’re planetside. But I mean the planetside that isn’t aboard the ship.”

  Roddy and Shoni’s door opened. The laaku mechanic stuck his head out. “Can you put the ballet back on? That saccharine melody was workin’ in here.”

  Rai Kub kept his sigh soft and subtle. He didn’t want anyone to feel bad for him, but he envied the mated pairs on board. Carl and Amy, Roddy and Shoni… Rai Kub had even developed some interesting theories about Yomin and Archie that stretched the bounds of his cultural education.

  But the stuunji was alone. A colony of sixteen million of his people lay just the other side of the ship’s hull, and he had no prospects for love.

  Amy waved the laaku in. “Get in here. You’ll want to hear this.”

  “Kid,” Roddy said. “Right now, you’re seriously misinterpreting my priorities.”

  The door opened slightly wider, and Shoni squeezed out, wearing a bathrobe. “Oh, give it up, Rodek. You missed your orbital transfer window.”

  Amy held out both hands. “Today… Carl turned down a job.”

  Roddy snorted. “What, did it require a trip to Ithaca?”

  “No,” Carl snapped.

  “Nope,” Amy replied with a grin. “We actually rejected good-paying work because Carl here took a moral stand against cultural plundering. We aren’t going to be smuggling a religious artifact off Agos VI.”

  Yomin’s nose wrinkled. “Who names these worlds?”

  “It’s a tesud name,” Shoni piped up in her professor’s voice. Rai Kub enjoyed when she used it because he always seemed to learn something new. “The locals called it something difficult to pronounce, so the explorers who discovered it tesudized the name. The natives are evolved otters.”

  Rai Kub brightened. “It’s an… an Earth-like?” he asked, remembering to use the human term. His own people’s term was cousin planet. The ARGO races always seemed to overestimate just how similar the worlds really were.

  “The point is,” Amy continued. “We got a job offer for a good chunk of money to do something pretty despicable to some inoffensive species. And we’re not going to do it.”

  Rai Kub scratched the side of his head. “That’s nice to know. But what became of the one who offered the job? Was he or she apprehended? Will you be testifying at his or her trial? I think seeing you on local holovid channels supporting the New Garrelon legal system would help weed the overgrown fields our peoples share.”

  Carl blinked and patted a hand in the air. “Ease off the main thrusters there, buddy. It was a comm. It came in anonymously. I don’t know the name of the broker or who his client is. This is a ghost job.”

  Stretching out on the couch, Yomin tapped at her datalens. “You know, Agos VI isn’t that far from here. How soon would we need to be there? I mean we’ve got a star-drive now. We can give Esper a sabbatical and just take care of a little business.”

  “No,” Rai Kub insisted, letting a hint of exasperation betray him. He calmed himself before continuing. “We don’t want to harm the people of Agos. But if this person of Carl’s wants to steal something, won’t he or she just find another spaceship captain?”

  “It’s a ‘he,’ so you can knock off with that business,” Carl said. “B
ut you’re right. The guy’s gonna hire some other schmuck to do his dirty work. It just won’t be us. So what are the odds they even pull the job off? Know what I mean?”

  Carl gave knowing looks to each of them in turn.

  Was that supposed to reassure Rai Kub? Were other ships less likely to succeed?

  “We should at least send a warning to Agos,” Rai Kub said. “Let them know a thief is coming.” When he looked around the common room for support, he found none. Where was Esper when he needed her? “Esper? Can you come help me argue this?”

  From her quarters, Esper called out. “Carl, just send the warning message. I’m trying to meditate.”

  “Fine,” Carl snapped. “You know, I was feeling a lot better about this whole business a minute ago.”

  Yomin snickered. “And a few minutes before that, you were feelin’ a whole lot better.”

  Carl headed for the cockpit but stopped and turned to look back at everyone before disappearing from sight. “Just so you know. Once, long ago, there was a saying: honor among thieves.”

  Roddy cackled. “That’s what you’re falling back on? That was bullshit the first time it got said, and it’s bullshit today. That’s the everyman’s view of thieves. Billy-Joe Speed-Limit sees a bunch of crooks and thinks they’re all brothers in arms. Cops round up the gang, and it turns into a stool pigeon contest as to who can chirp first and loudest.”

  “Fair point,” Carl acknowledged. “Only rat out the other guy when you’ve got something to gain by it. That does it. We’re keeping our yaps shut. This wasn’t our problem yesterday, and it’s not going to be our problem tomorrow. In fact, once this conversation comes to a close, we are officially out of the problem business.”

  “Until our next job,” Amy added.

  Rai Kub had a datapad of his very own. While everyone else was arguing, he made sure it was still there in his pocket. Maybe he could figure out on his own who to warn.

  # # #

  Something nagged at Roddy. It wasn’t annoyance at having a romantic evening ruined by crew bickering—that annoyance was right out in the open. It wasn’t that Carl blew off good money for a good cause, either. There was an unfinished feeling to the matter that left a sour aftertaste.